Don't Make Excuses for People Who Make Excuses.

ladies and gentlemen i'm going to read
you an email and i'm going to tell you the context of this email and they're going to tell you why i'm reading this email and you know the kind of confrontation immortalized in this email and now share with you on youtube i understand that it's part of the reason why today i have so few friends from my time doing humanitarian work in laos and cambodia in the past i understand this is part of the reason why i have so few friends keep me coming today who i met in the hotels and hostels and guest houses of thailand sometimes when i was physically moving in between doing humanitarian work and research projects in uh laos in cambodia you know i understand that the side of my character i'm sharing with you right now it's part of the reason why i've had so few friends in the vegan movement well i have so few friends from my involvement in buddhist scholarship numerous other fields of endeavor but but you know that simplest test that simplest question we're all supposed to ask ourselves you know how would i feel if i were in your shoes how would i feel if our positions were reversed in conversations like this believe it or not i'm giving people exactly the kind of advice i wish i'd received myself i'm showing people the kind of honesty and the kind of concern that i wish others had shown for me earlier in my life or frankly still now i wrote an email to a guy youtuber here called veganfoot soldier he said to me that i've falsely accused him of not reading any books i'll go back and tell you what i actually said and uh i'm digging too deep into an impromptu unscripted almost entirely unedited video that he made so he's complaining that my response to his video is much too deep given that what he said was impromptu unscripted and i reply you realize that every single video you've seen on my channel in the last four years was impromptu unscripted and almost entirely unedited a huge number are completely inundated they're a single continuous take including of course innumerable hours of live streams when i speak unscripted i say things of real substance because i'm a person of real substance you aren't you're fatuous you're comfortable get uncomfortable do research hold yourself to a higher standard you know that phrase journalistic integrity have something better have intellectual integrity that is the end of the email and it's quite possible that's the last time i'm ever gonna hear from that guy or it's possible it's the last time i'll hear from him this year it's possible here from again a few years further on uh down the road now i had another conversation with someone today a vegan activist who has a a youtube channel and it was a much more lighthearted and collegial conversation than this and it's possible that woman i had that conversation with that she will be a friend of mine five years from now or 10 years it's possible that's going to flow along uh in a relatively soluble and cooperative way but speaking of cooperation i said to her because this particular youtuber has gotten involved in the political scene relatively recently compared to himself i said you know there was a time when there was a much more collegial and cooperative attitude here on youtube there was a time when people were just having so much fun coming on camera and sharing their lives that they felt as if if we all just kept on having fun on youtube together sooner or later we changed the world and inevitably here we are five years later that optimism has has disappeared from the movement but you know that's all i said in that in that comment there but if you think about it on the individual scale and your relationship to your own parents your own family and maybe people you've known since high school or something you know it may sound ridiculous to say that but that's exactly what you're doing on youtube right like you're able to turn to your own parents and say look it's not just that i'm vegan right i have all these colleagues i have all these friends i have all these fans i have all these supporters right and look look at what a great time we're all having the the very thing that has abnormalized you within your family the very thing that's made you feel like a reject maybe within a circle of friends you've known since high school or some other community group like this you know now instead it's a point of pride now instead it's something that's made you famous even if that fame is on the smallest scale of just having a few hundred or a few thousand fans on youtube on social media i mean i i feel the pathos in that as well as the egomania of people coming on and having a great time on youtube and then feeling as if maybe maybe finally my mom is gonna become vegan right it was different before when she saw me as the reject in the family the person showing up for thanksgiving dinner or christmas dinner or whatever kind of dinner you have in your culture kwanzaa you know it was different when i was uh showing up at some occasion i was the one person causing a problem for everyone else in the family and they regarded that negatively and maybe it was different when in the past your idea of veganism and what you were showing to your mom was you standing by the side of the road holding a protest slogan on a cardboard sign or maybe even getting yourself arrested or throwing cans of red paint on people wearing fur coats and again maybe you weren't doing that yourself maybe maybe your sister maybe it wasn't that your mom actually saw you know photographs of you doing these kind of produce but maybe those were the photographs she saw in the newspaper and when you said that you were vegan when you said that you cared about animal rights in her mind she thinks of you as one of those people with red paint one of those people it's almost and you're saying no no look at me now look at me coming on youtube or look at me on instagram having so much fun and having all these followers having this this popularity right you see it's not it's not just egomania right there's also a kind of pathos there in the full sense of the term there is a pathetic grandeur to it you know um people who have a lot of friends make a lot of excuses i don't have a lot of friends i don't make a lot of excuses for the people in my life and if our positions were reversed i want them to treat me the same way myself i don't want other people to make excuses for me i don't want them to reinforce my bad habits or conceal my ignorance or my bad decisions you know it may hurt it may sting it may it may just inconvenience you slightly to have someone point out that you're talking about something you haven't really read a single book about that you really don't know what you're talking about whether they point that out to you through the most genteel socratic method imaginable or through the most abrupt and intimate approach the type of reproach only a close friend can get away with right your friends can put you in check your friends can call you into question your friends can urge you to stop and reflect and question yourself you know i expect and i hope for my friends to treat me exactly the same way i treat them and if they did i would value it so much all right i don't have a lot of friends because i don't make excuses for people all right and i live my own life in a very uncompromising way where i don't make excuses for myself i've known this guy vegan foot soldier for many years and i'd given up speaking to him many years ago but you know i'm writing a book this book began in the year 2020 when there were race riots in the streets of america burning down whole city blocks looting and pillaging you know in the united states of america and the book is now being finished in the year 2021 the book reflects a lot of research i've done some of it honestly some of it more than 20 years ago but some of it recently some of it just for the book some of it just in the months writing the book you know and inexorably and inevitably the book deals with america's unique politics of the double divide between european colonists and the indigenous people and then between the european colonists and the descendants of african slaves so you know i was astonished to hear this british guy vegans the foot soldier make a youtube video in which he so crudely and so recklessly stumbled through the history of the segregation and desegregation of schools in the united states of america when he talked about affirmative action it's uniquely american idiom what does affirmative action mean if you're japanese or you know from any other culture he dealt with what could be simply called the long tail of the abolition of slavery in the united states america because when americans abolished slavery they didn't pass a law saying that the bank has to give a loan to black people and white people equally they didn't pass a law saying that a suburban property development corporation has to be willing to sell or rent a house to black people white people equally when they abolish slavery all they did was transfer the slave economy to a share cropping economy and leave all of the fundamental questions of how people would live together unanswered they didn't answer the question of how black people would get education they didn't ask the question of how black people would become doctors and dentists and whether or not white people would have the right to refuse a black doctor just because he was black or whether or not a school would be able to refuse a black medical student because it was black and vice versa whether or not black people are going to be able to exclude whites whether or not you continue to pursue having two separate but unequal societies or whether you would actually pursue integration of those societies desegregation okay so it's it's see history that means a lot to me honestly because of how it relates to other chapters of history you know i'm not american it's not it's not my history it's not but i have literally sat down with well-intentioned cambodian and laotian people who thought that whites were the indigenous population of australia and who were asking me how the black people got there all right i have had to explain our history in the sense of the british empire the british empire includes canada the united states australia new zealand i have had to explain our history of slavery and genocide to laotian people cambodian people thai people chinese people i've had those conversations with chinese also and you know what i've come back to canada and i've had to discuss it with canadians who are often even worse off than the lotions and cambodians in their ignorance the people of southeast asia even though they were often so ignorant of geography that they literally thought the world wrapped around in such a way that australia was adjacent to england like playing the game pac-man you can go off the screen on one end and pop on the other thought like oh yeah it's a real quick trip between australia and england right that's why white people were the indigenous population of australia people at that level of ignorance at least they didn't have the false sense of certainty that white canadians had and frankly that white people from england had in looking back at this history of slavery and genocide you know because most of these people whether they're english canadian or are white americans the main thing they live with is the moral certainty that they did nothing wrong and they have nothing to apologize for that is the primary fact that's the primary conviction and all the other facts are made to fit into place relative to it i remember i had a white australian guy and i was very rare i was staying at his apartment my whole life i know how many times i'm just you know it's incredibly rare that i had a friend invite me to sleep at their apartments incredibly rare but it might be the only time i've slept in somebody else's apartment you know i'm not not getting childhood or something you know as an adult and that guy is not a friend of mine today we now haven't talked to many years we were friends then and now we have been friends for many many years maybe i was maybe i was a little too honest memory was a white australian and in talking about this issue of indigenous people and genocide and slavery i remember he said well you know what my perspective is on it i look at it this way there was a war and we won he was a very wealthy australian i know i'm not doing his accent justice but he was actually from the social class in australia who have an accent much closer to english than australia forgive the poor accent work on this channel i should definitely hire an intern to be my accent coach that would really improve the quality of the broadcast and i had the same conversation i had with him that i had with my boss at a particular job who was german he was 100 years old so he was connected i mean his mother had been a nazi he grew up in the shadow and the aftermath of world war ii you know i had this completely parallel conversation with this white australian guy to what i am with this white german guy i said at the end of world war ii we won what did we do to the germans why did you treat the indigenous people of australia so much worse than the nazis when i had that conversation with my boss let's say it was approximately 100 years old exactly the same thing but i was saying why do you think we didn't commit genocide against you and when you really get into it what all these people believe is that the victims of history deserved it that they deserve to be victims that whoever lost the war that whoever god conquered deserve to be conquered that's their that's their worldview you know um and you can draw that out through socratic dialogue anyway foot soldier made this video you've already heard his excuse that it was supposedly a very light-hearted spontaneous video that he did in an unscripted way unlike my videos right as as if i wouldn't know a thing or two about doing unscripted spontaneous unedited videos about important political topics and you know what really got to me to hear this white british guy and he's very wealthy he is he basically identifies as a millionaire he talks about his own financial status to hear him running roughshod over those facts and you know in our culture we had a broken concept of humility we had christian humility christian humility makes no sense and i'm completely happy to discard it and move on christian humility is of no interest to me but we need to replace christian humility with a much more dynamic much more profound much more meaningful notion of humility there's a kind of humility that leads someone to pause before making a pronouncement about a subject they've never read a book about that they've never even read a wikipedia article about that they have to maybe go and do some fact checking and reflecting about you know it's a different kind of humility i feel that that's holding yourself to a higher standard that's holding yourself to a standard of intellectual accountability credibility you know when you turn on the news you expect the person sitting in front of the camera to have made the effort to at least fact check to at least reflect on to at least consult a wikipedia article to have done some level of reading and background checking and research before making their pronouncements before presenting you with their conclusions and the broadcasters you see on television may fail to live up to this expectation but i'm saying hold yourself to even higher expectations that kind of humility that's what i'm really interested in so i wrote to this guy after watching this video vegan foot soldier title of the email is what was the last book you actually read on any of these topics have you ever read a single book dealing with america's history of segregated education do you have any idea what the so-called libertarian and interco-capitalist talking points you're paraphrasing really mean think about how much or how little respect you'd have for another youtube channel that weighed in on similarly tremendous political issues without doing any reading without doing any research whatsoever you have the time you have the money you can do better why is my video about the central park five better than the videos by the young turks and a thousand other youtube channels because i did the reading i actually read the police reports etc i can say the same thing about my video on althea bernstein nobody else read the actual police reports i'll just pause to note those are both examples of youtube videos that are shadow banned on my channel so when i search within my channel for the name althea bernstein i can't get the link to that video um they were important interesting videos i made that reflected hours of real research not days not weeks you know some number of hours maybe about two days worth of work on each of those videos two days each i continue this isn't about wit or charm or good intentions it's about actively doing the research and then presenting an informed opinion there is a book you can buy it on amazon there's a there's a 160 page book on the political history of modern syria by david w lesch do you have what it takes to read a 160 page book and then make a youtube video in response to it really think about what a reasonable standard that is to live up to if you want to make a video presenting your so-called conclusion on racial segregation and integration in the united states of america a solid 160 pages of reading might be a good start especially considering that you have never lived with that political history and cultural context i.e you are much more alien to the united states of america than i am to cambodia even if you're united with it by a common language and the last sentence that email is you are choosing to be stupid it's a choice that you're making again and again and again something comes up every so often frankly just in conversations with my girlfriend there's there's been this thing lately coronavirus face to face i've had that many conversations anyone else in the last year year and a half but you know this kind of discourse i engage with other people it doesn't come from a place of hopelessness it doesn't come from a sense of resignation or frustration with people's stupidity it's very much on the basis of hope and optimism why would i bother saying this to someone it's because i think they can do better even the phrasing of that last sentence like you're choosing to be stupid this is a choice that you're making again and again i'm not saying that you are stupid in the same sense that a rock is either black or gray or marble oh like it's not something immutable and unchanging on this earth right you choose to live the way stupid people live so you think the way stupid people think and you act the way stupid people act and you talk the way stupid people talk and the process becomes the product after so many years guess what now you are a stupid person in effect but yeah i have a relentless sense of optimism that people can change that people can improve and the people who can't people who are you know so mentally disabled that they can't and i've mentioned this a million times i have one half brother who is so mentally disabled he can't say a single word in any language he can't speak english he can't speak any secondly i've studied many languages you probably know this about me well guess what somebody who shares a whole lot of my dna can't even say can't even say a single sentence in the alignment's whole life is that severely mentally [ __ ] there are people who are so mentally disabled that they can't improve right but then you know i would never send someone like that this kind of email i'd never reach out to them this way okay there are probably some people watching this video now who used to be my friends and aren't anymore not that many of you maybe five maybe ten but you know what i can think of a few people i i remember a certain filmmaker a certain vegan filmmaker who was close friends with me on and off over the years kind of close friends for one period then we didn't talk for a while then we started talking in a few years there he stopped talking to me because i i put a really honest review of his movie on youtube it's full of what i think of as really useful in constructive criticism and i don't know he might not be able to imagine that i would really value a friend of mine offering a critique offering an analysis offering a review of my movie you know in the same way i think it's possible there will be a few people watching this video now who were friends of mine in the past and stopped talking to me or blocked me or whatever because there's some kind of really honest interchange of this i'm telling you you may not be able to perceive it as such you may not have the detachment what have you but this is me reaching out to you positively and if you think about the wording i used here it's possible to respond positively also if you have the humility to do it right the oh the title of the email what was the last book you actually read on this topic you can have a constructive conversation about that like you know maybe there is an answer maybe the person oh you know what i just finished reading this one book and i guess maybe it influenced me a lot and that's why i said the things in the video oh you know what's your perspective on that do you think i was leaning too far with you could have a productive conversation if you had read a book you could also have a productive conversation if you could be honest about it you really haven't read anything about it you could have the humility to say you know what you're right you know what i guess really what i'm saying here really just does reflect something i'd i'd vaguely heard other people talking about the internet what what is the source you know whatever it is when you reflect on it where is this where is this coming from right you could reply by actually having a constructive and friendly conversation and you could reply if you had it in you if you had the humility to say you know what this is really harsh but you're right i did not do 160 pages of reading before making youtube doing this and guys you know um [Music] i've ordered a 160 page book about the political history of syria in the mail there's a reason why i haven't been making youtube videos talking about the politics of syria [Laughter] what was the video i did one video about the politics of chile in south america that was so many hours of research that video you know if i put my name on it if i sign my name to it you know there's something to back it up and i make mistakes and sometimes i'm wrong but i learn from my mistakes because they're mistakes being made in a process of active research of sincere open-minded learning right here's the reply from vegan foot soldier it was sent to me just seven hours ago you are unhinged and you are also wrong admittedly strong opening i don't feel there was anything unhinged in my email but not only do you falsely accuse me of having not read any books on relevant topics you are digging too deep into an impromptu unscripted almost entirely unedited video that i made whilst running through a forest lol shall i do that we're talking about genocide we're talking about slavery we're talking about things that really matter to people of substance foot soldier all right glad you had a little laugh all right for some of us this is political history we really live with we really live with the consequences of this history of slavery and genocide every day and some of us know just how little we can do to make it better because we've tried you're rich you're idle why don't you learn cree why don't you learn ojibwe why don't you do humanitarian work in cambodia why don't you actually get out and prove the worth of your philosophy to address the problems african-americans have today and having access to education to stick with this narrow exam i think there's an answer to that question photo i think the answer is really built into the fact that you think this is a laughing matter do you think there's a sign for you to chortle if you cannot understand that then there is no hope for you fyi in terms of capitalism i've read miese rothbard friedman emma friedman hop hayek hazlitt and sowell mostly primary but also secondary literature this is a long paragraph this is a long paragraph from someone who is not ashamed to cite friedman father and son marie rothbard and hop spelled h-o-p-p-e yeah i i correctly interpreted the problem with his implicitly racist rant when i said that what he was presenting were libertarian and anarcho-capitalist talking points i asked do you have any idea what the so-called libertarian and enter capitalist talking points are paraphrasing really mean i still don't know if he realizes what they really mean but what he's indicating here is that he has been precisely reading the kind of racist right-wing libertarian critique of the american history of education meaning the critique of affirmative action integration busing as it was called attempts to get black people equal access to education in a tremendously unequal social context in terms of discrimination slavery and american history etc i'm a fan of soel having just finished wealth poverty and politics and international perspective which is part of a continuum of his writings along with race and economics and black rednecks and white liberals yeah if you don't know who sowell is he is the darling of people who are not afraid to boast that they read marie rothbard that's that's who that's whose soul is i think it's thomas sowell sorry i might be getting his first name wrong yeah another interesting read recently was d friedman's legal systems very different from ours which is also tangentially related to the video i made maybe also enlightenment now by pinker stephen finger see stephen pinker contributor to the so-called race and iq debate yes i'm seeing i'm seeing the rich tapestry of the intellectual sources you're working from there and i notice you're not actually answering the questions that i put to you and i understand they're challenging i understand you may even find those questions insulting but if you'd answered them if you'd actually talked about what it is he's read conversation could go differently should i keep should i keep reading this list of books he's boasting of i guess i've got to i'm in faire's fair on social contract theory i've read hobbs locke and rousseau mostly through secondary literature meaning he hasn't actually read hobbslock or russo he's read what murray rothbard says about hobbs roblox and rousseau whitefront most mostly through secondary literature yeah have you read buddhist philosophy well i've read secondary literature well then you haven't read buddhist philosophy okay i use a combination of hobsian and hoppy in grounding unironically shouting out harp again h-o-p-p-e ah no shame in his game in terms of meta ethics and normative epic can't believe i can't believe oh jesus chris 2021 what kind of dining establishment does he sit around at eating vegan caviar and swelling champagne and hanging around with people who in this way flagrantly cite hobbes hop and oh and emmanuel kant as the basis of their philosophy i use a combination of in terms of meta ethics and normative ethics i'm a neo-cantian instrumentalist and i've read extensive secondary literature on kant i should say kant let's use the british pronunciation here expanding that out i operate within a weak and shiny and framework i have read the pi as well as aesthetic psychology and religious belief and a good amount of secondary literature on wittgenstein and that's just reeling off a bunch of books and thinkers i feel relate to that video okay so do you feel any of these books are about the black american experience do you think wittgenstein's aesthetics are about the black american experience are you aware that immanuel kant not only was racist but basically invented a new type of racism that was incredibly influential for the british empire look at kant's writing on so-called anthropology and so on i'm sorry yes well yes you're being asked about the american history of desegregation right you're telling me you've read kant and wittgenstein and hop and murray rothbard and friedman father was hmm [Applause] i asked you do you realize what the real meaning is behind these right-wing libertarian talking points you're spouting out about education in a form of action here maybe maybe he realizes how close he's coming to the american white supremacist tradition and maybe he doesn't maybe he has no idea what toys he's kind of playing with here we're gonna type i'm not sure what gives you the impression that i haven't read any books i've generally read at least one book a month for the last 10 years this is not as much as some people and it's maybe not as much as you but that's more than zero you say you're not sure what gives me the impression that you haven't read any books but that's exactly what i told you right i told you exactly what it is that when watching that video makes me feel shocked that you're coming in and making a statement something you've never read 160 pages all right and i know i know you might not care i know it's not your history of slavery and genocide and racism and the failure of the education system to the same extent that it's my history i know i know you have i know but when i'm talking about those same issues whether it is in cambodia or whether it is in india some country some distant culture we talk about unbelievable atrocities in the history of china here we talk about listening yeah you know what i have a commitment to a certain level of intellectual integrity i care i try to take those people suffering and those people's tragedy and make it my own and speak from you know frankly our shared humanity okay i talk about mass murder in russia with more sensitivity than you talk about it in the united states of america you know if you are such a powerhouse on economics and ethics why don't you debate me on the topic i'm guessing you won't because you would rather send me stupid emails telling me to never we should lean into the british accent stupid i'm guessing you won't because you would rather send me stupid email stupid emails telling me to never talk to you again and then making 60 minute rants about me from the safety of your censored channel stupid stupid emails he asks why don't you debate me on the topic question mark all right let's let's pretend we're dealing with someone who's you know an intelligent person acting in good faith you know why i wouldn't debate you on the topic because you haven't read 160 pages about it okay you know what's a great topic for debate native american universities did you know that did you know that in america they still have a segregated education system for first nations people indigenous people native american people google it right now they got they got separate universities did you know that are they the best universities in the world have you ever been offered a scholarship to go to one of them no they're some of the worst universities in the world they're some of the worst universities united states america native american high schools native american universities i'm canadian it's easier for me to talk about canada canada's separate education system for our indigenous people how do you think that's gone foot soldier how do you think that relates to our history of slavery and genocide you know one of the reasons to talk about native americans that way is that jurisdictionally it's so much more clear-cut than the experience of african-americans black americans you know with black americans it's a different story in every state and every town the reality of what we now call uh redlining redlining is a very convenient term it was great when it was i remember before this term was used there was one documentary i think on pbs uh no it was the the radio station the left npr there was a documentary on npr uh in america and that promoted this term it's been totally obscure enough for redlining and for it's the incredibly complex and conflict phenomenon of how black people were denied access to housing education and everything else in the long decades between the formal end of slavery and the formal inauguration of of equality and yeah you know we just had the first city in the united states of america pay reparations basically today because this week was just a couple days ago yeah so there's one city in illinois and at the municipal level they did the research and they decided to pay reparations just for the racist and oppressive actions that the city government had done between 1921 and 1971 their boats maybe 1968 some of that from memory but they had they'd done repressive and terrible things to their to the african-americans there and a scholar put together the list of all the all the things that today would be considered unconstitutional immoral and evil that the city government had done to its own black people and they put together a package and said okay we're going to commit to reparations but you know with canada the way we treated our indigenous people was orchestrated at a federal level that's broadly speaking through the united states also so it's easier to generalize about as one education system or one policy or one strategy even you know but yeah um [Music] you know it's heartbreaking research to do and it's heartbreaking to live with the knowledge that no debate on youtube is going to make even the slightest difference i referred to before the fact that in the recent past you know um there was this optimism amongst vegan activists that if we could all just come on camera and have fun or go to the beach and films ourselves film ourselves running around the beach that just the ebullient joy of the activists sharing their lives on youtube you know that this was going to change the world um [Music] here in canada our indigenous people just tore down the statue of queen victoria tore down the statue of captain cook you know there's no hope there's no optimism tore down the statue of uh in front of that university in toronto ryerson old man ryerson his statue was torn down and they started referring to it as university x instead of referring to it as ryerson university attelo can be renamed you know there's no hope there's no hope for a better future you know and um the cultural devastation of our native people of our people of color of the descendants of african slaves you know it has entailed the destruction of our culture too their poverty is our poverty the fact that there is no such thing as canadian culture or even a canadian cuisine or a canadian restaurant in the same way that there is such a thing as a mexican restaurant even reflects the extent to which the british empire traded in genocide and of course the genocide was far more destructive for the indigenous people than it was for the colonizers but in a significant measure it has been destructive for us also and that is why you can drive from coast to coast in this vast country and see nothing but one walmart after another one 711 after another you know um the political failure the institutional failure the educational failure and just the the the ins the intellectual and cultural poverty of our lives as the colonizing white people in canada united states you know compared to compared to living in poland okay and i i know the polish take it for granted i know they do because i meet those people and talk to them after they migrate to canada and they say that they'd always imagine they'd have a better life in canada and then they get to canada they can't believe how bleak and hopeless it is they can't believe that only now they realize what they had going for them in poland that they thought was a hell hole you know i grew up around immigrants from italy from oh korea korea is a great example people have moved from south korea to canada and only only after they get there after years they start to realize whoa you know they move from a place south korea where the indigenous people are korean and they were moving to a place where the indigenous people were exterminated and what have you got here not even a second-rate imitation of european culture you know painted over the tombstones of our native people and sure it would be it would be a long more complex statement to say how you know the slavery of of africans fits into that process it can't be that can't be quite so easily reduced to uh you know a set of symbols on a chalkboard all right but you know it's completely asymmetrical it's completely unequal it's completely horrifying but sure our devastation of them has devastated us as well our brutalization of them it's left us with an empire that's not worth fighting for it's left us with the constitution nobody believes in it's left us with the laws that nobody wants to uphold there is nobody in canada who feels proud of the statue of queen victoria that was just torn down you know um and you know i know the other side of it too in the same way that i can say i've talked to italian immigrants who are expecting life in canada i've spoken to immigrants from india pakistan so much the world who are expecting a better life for canada and were horrified when they when they didn't find it the bitterest irony of all is to talk to our own indigenous people who lived in terrible conditions within this country and they always assumed their lives would be so much better if only they could move to toronto if only they could study at the university of toronto with the wealthy white people and then they get there and they realize what an abysmally low level of education all the wealthy white people have like they grew up in deprived circumstances imagining that you know our culture in the affluent city was so much better off than theirs and that our level of education our level of enlightenment and guess what they went from one depressing dead end alcoholic culture to another guess what you know you moved to toronto and you're also surrounded by you know depressed alcoholics who have no culture and no sense of of ambition and motivation and aspiration for a better life you know you are staring at the mirror image of your own destroyed indigenous culture these are the people who destroyed it and you start to figure out the extent to which the the defects of the two cultures and once really briefly i want to get back to this but you know um several times i spoke to first nations people who complained to me that their own community was full of alcoholics meaning reservation or otherwise one of these talents that's 90 native people and um what i would say back to them with socratic method was tell me tell me about the nearest white town you know so down whatever down the highway is the next white people settlement and all the problems they were complaining about in their own community i said when you go to that white majority town or 100 white town just down the street tell me do you see do you see the same problems you know i always give the example i don't know if they still do this but in the past in canada we had a blue container that would have the bottles going out for recycling i said you know and that did you ever walk down the street looking at the recycling bins set out and you see the extent to which all these houses are full of alcoholics you know you see all the empty bottles going to be recycled i know today today that might not be the case because they might return the bottles to get 25 cents i guess that's something that might be a dated cultural reference but you know um to a remarkable extent even though it's completely asymmetrical but you know when you talk to the native people who manage to make it in the city you know whether that's toronto or montreal or vancouver people who got off the res and move into the city and then they're horrified in the same way that the people from india are horrified when they come here and the people from italy and even the people from poland are horrified right you know but of course there's a difference because if you decided to give up polish culture to assimilate into english-speaking canadian culture you know there still is this place called poland where the language and culture continue okay there is no place on this earth you can go back to to see cree culture intact to see ojibwe culture intact you know so when you make that choice when you assimilate you know um you've lost the last shred of that culture which is now being lost to the whole world okay so read again my my final message to vegan facilitator you realize i'm saying this after quoting back his excuse that i'm supposedly digging too deeply into what was an impromptu unscripted almost entirely edited video you realize that every single video you've seen on my channel the last four years was impromptu unscripted and almost entirely inedited a huge number are completely unedited there are a single continuous take including of course innumerable hours of livestream when i speak unscripted i say things a real substance because i am a person of real substance you aren't you're fatuous you're comfortable get uncomfortable do research hold yourself to a higher standard you know that phrase journalistic integrity have something better have intellectual integrity