Politics. Who I Am, What I do. ❶ The Truth Crab Interview.

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we're live hey everybody i'm live here with uh mr ivan zard of ambala ciel from youtube um and we're here to talk about a variety of stuff let me just start by uh are we are you on check check check i'm happy to be here man and i'm happy you're still in the game it feels like all these years later i don't know if it's two years later two and a half years since we first talked but yeah it's i really i'm just happy to see her still in the game and happy to be here i'm happy you're in the game yeah it's been a while yeah you must know a lot of people who disappeared you must have known a lot of talented people who were on a microphone and a camera whatever three years ago and where are they now you never find out right yeah and some not so talented people too yeah but yeah we should so i want to um we're going to talk a little bit more about who you are and what you do uh but just to summarize it real quick for anybody who doesn't know you're sort of i would well i don't know if you have how you would just uh describe yourself but i would consider you among other things sort of an internet commentator with no particular specialty whether it's science or politics or history maybe not so much science but politics history internet drama anything that you find interesting here like from my perspective everything i do is politics and it has been like i'm not offended by that description but like to give you an example like when i talk about batman i'm talking about politics it's a very political video talking about the new batman movie so for me it's all politics but i don't distinguish high culture from low culture so for me talking about batman or talking about rap music or talking about some things going on within uh youtube whether that's anission or a jaclyn glenn or one of these people i take that seriously and in some ways i take that you know it's just as seriously or more seriously than for example some canadian politician who's gonna come and go and may not really change the world as much as the new batman movie or somebody like jacqueline glenn but yeah from my perspective it's all political interesting so okay um let me ask you this this is kind of a thing i've been thinking about lately which is we're going to jump into this we'll get back to talking more about your who you are and your career and stuff but since you brought this up uh and you identified yourself as a political commentator is that fair to say sure sure all right um i've been thinking about this lately like how much people are talking about politics obviously with the election coming up and everything that's going on but it's like it's a word that you hear so often but i don't know how often you hear it defined so from your perspective i imagine it's something kind of subjective and different people would probably define it differently but how do you define the word politics great great question great question i think that the question of ethics ethics is about how do i lead a good life and politics is about how do we lead a good life you know now normally with politics you're talking about at least a couple hundred people not just a few dozen but sure even at a small scale that's really what politics about how do we together live a good life and it may be a society of dozens it may be a society of thousands or maybe a society of millions yeah okay it's interesting so politics to you is connected to like ideals of what is a good life and how do we institute that amongst large groups of people i guess or the lack of ideals you know i identify as a nihilist i'm a very pragmatic and non-idealistic person but those questions are still really really pressing so yeah and indeed you know again i'm not being sarcastic when i say oh let's give you an example to stick with batman you know when i taught university classes in china i asked the students seriously you look at batman you look at spider-man do you think this is a story that parents should teach children do you think this is a story we should use in classrooms as teachers and you know not in a trivial way like let's let's really think about what this teaches children so yeah those are questions about how we together can live a good life or form a good society um you don't you don't have to believe in anything you don't have to be idealistic to really wonder about that and look around at trying to come up with new answers do you think that many people consider because i'll just think of going back to your definition of politics it seems reasonable to me i mean i'm still kind of grappling with what exactly i would define that as or what it means but i don't think i mean do you think the average person sees politics like that or or do you have an idea of what the typical perception is of that concept of politics yeah you know so we're talking mostly about white western english-speaking people here it'd be a different answer for japan or india or cambodia but i think if you're talking about white western english-speaking people they mostly inherit a political identity the same way they inherit a religious identity you know um why are you conservative why you remember the republican party or some of that very often though the real answer is that that's because their parents taught them to be that way or their grandparents thought to be that way and they put very little thought into what politics is or what they're rolling it ought to be uh now a really great question would be what percentage the population is an exception to that rule you know and i'll just mention also so like you know you could call what i do political entertainment you know you know like uh that might be insulting but i don't mind being insulted but you know if i'm making entertainment it's for those people also look i don't look down my nose with them i think there were a lot of people who've never really questioned who they are politically or what they're doing or what politics means to them they've just been carrying on doing what their parents and grandparents expected them to do and still you know there could be something really meaningful they encounter on my channel and they you know i get email from some of those people and that that could be something really meaningful for both of us you know but yeah you could divide society into two classes of people those who've really come up with their own answers to those questions and those who've never thought about it they're just carrying on the same pattern handed down with their parents and grandparents all right i i kind of get the impression a lot of people think of politics is just kind of like powerful people arguing or something like that yeah um right right right well no but look i mean what if what if you live in communist china you know one of the reasons why most chinese people are incredibly ignorant of politics is that they're so far removed from it that they really that in communist china today i'm talking about 2020 not the past that definition would make a lot of sense and the most the greatest role you can play as a member of the public is to kind of follow those debates from around the edges and you know people like military generals might be quite important in chinese politics and find out what these people in the military saying and what other significant figures in the dictatorship are saying um you know i would say to a country like egypt how much of a role really can you have in in politics uh egypt was always teetering on the edge of uh between democracy and dictatorship there are countries where that definition would make a lot of sense and would have a lot of gravity i think all right let's take a little step back here let's talk about um your channel in general so you've got a youtube channel you've been doing for what yeah over five years you have over five years and we're coming up on five million views now i think it's 4.7 million views all right and from my understanding you specialize more in vegan specific stuff and then you've kind of more expanded and i see you doing a lot less vegan content these days yeah that is absolutely true uh the very beginning of my channel i assumed it was going to be an atheist channel so i i am an atheist in case people hadn't guessed and the name of the channel even refers to that about yell sort of sense of like tearing god down out of his heaven and that's what that means it means this is an over translation this is uh expanding a little bit but yeah so in french a ballet is like let's tear down the government let's turn on the state a ballet that's quite often used in political protests and a is used less often it would normally mean let's tear down the church let's tear down religion but it literally means let's tear down heaven let's tear heaven out of the sky so a very kind of ambitious um atheist political meaning so yeah the the channel started off with that and i had um i had just formally quit buddhism i'd been a scholar of buddhism for i like to say 10 years so i was interested in the critique of buddhism and the critique of religion and there was a lot of that popping on youtube at that time and i was really aware of the success of people like the amazing atheist people all the time insult me saying i'm not good-looking enough to be a youtuber and i say well you know i i was partly inspired by the amazing atheist i don't think you need to be that to be successful on youtube but yeah there was then a long period where when you and i first spoke um i was really trying to just make friends in veganism and where that i know it sounds very simple but making friends in the vegan movement was the main thing i was doing with my channel for a couple of years and that's now well and truly over so you see veganism comes up once in a while but um put it this way these days i wear veganism like a shirt but i don't wear it like a tattoo okay interesting so can you i i imagine it's a i know a little bit about your uh in your the goings-on with you in the vegan community a vague idea but just uh without going so without it's probably very complicated but without going too in-depth can you give us like a break a general summary of how you kind of decided to step away from that or what happened between you and the vegan community i know there's a lot of controversy but yeah well the controversy is fun to talk about i don't mind we can talk about that but the the i mean in terms of if you want to start at the end in terms of stepping away i really just felt there was a total lack of talent i mean as you said earlier there's some talented people some not so talented people um going through all that controversy i felt the positive part of it was that i met and spoke to kind of everyone in the vegan activist scene definitely everyone who speaks english and all those people know me even the people who pretend they don't know me they know me they know my work and that was a good thing about controversy was it it did connect me to all those people years and years went by something i used to say to people a lot five years ago was where do you want to be five years from now what are your goals what are you planning to do in the next five years and then what are we gonna do like together to get there and five years went past and all those people have accomplished nothing and they're not trying to accomplish anything um so no in terms of my stepping away from it i have formally said that i quit the vegan movement i still i still eat a vegan diet but i've said that i quit vegan activism which was a big turning point for me personally uh you know i i did literally shed some tears giving up on that um you know that was really deciding okay that chapter in my life is now over um but you know the the actual controversies some of them were very shallow and very silly some of them were very serious i've always wanted to be honest about the things that other vegans were being dishonest and evasive about it's like a real simple example that i think people in the audience can relate to i think most people who are not vegan right now a lot of vegans pretend that they don't kill rats that they never would kill a rat that they never would kill a cockroach and that was something right off the bat my youtube channel said no i'm going to be honest about this i'm vegan i kill rats even if i have the delusion that i don't kill rats my landlord kills rats when i go to the hospital there are no rats at the hospital because the hospital is employing you know a pest control company and they kill the rats at the hospital i buy groceries and the groceries are produced at a farm that kills rats no our society's built on killing rats we're going to keep on killing rats let's really be honest about this and let me know we can philosophize about it we can talk about it um you want to we can shed a tear about it or something yeah oh yeah oh yeah and they came and they came after me right so those people all hate me no and there are people and they keep rats in their apartment as pets and they let you know that rats are just as intelligent as a three-year-old human child and they love rats and if only i kept a pet rat i would understand and oh yeah there were people who like break into laboratories and steal the rats that scientists are doing experiments on and liberate and then keep yeah yeah yeah there were rat people let's put it that way yeah yeah yeah they're hardcore man one woman wrote to me she's a middle-aged woman now and um you know she wrote to me and i i googled her and i was scrolling through her past social media presence i said hey look i appreciate that you're now a fan of my channel but i can see just a couple years ago you were you were one of those rat and she joked around but you know it's tragic it's true like i appreciate that i'm not going to say rats don't have feelings but we kill rats and uh 10 years from now 50 years from now 100 years now we're still going to be killing rats so let's let's not lie to ourselves yeah yeah i mean i don't i try not to kill like spiders and stuff i don't think it's it's crazy to not want to kill a rat but i but it's interesting that of all the things you could spend time doing activism for the rats but yeah yeah yep all right so okay so wait we're still talking about the so what happened with the vegan community uh okay well i mean you know i went through a series of of controversies but as i said i i saw that as more positive than negative the one that you know had the biggest impact financially was the controversy with durianrider that ended up in court so if people don't know at that time durianrider's girlfriend freely was getting about 12 million views a month on youtube so she was that was a big youtube channel and i don't know if maybe durianrider was doing 2 million or 4 million a month like he was big but he was very much in her shadow and the controversy was attached to both of those so i had a major vegan youtuber who made up the allegation that i was a pedophile out of thin air he specifically made up the allegation that he had spoken to underage girls directly who had provided him with evidence of this that he was going to take the police he was going to have a gang of people beat me up and drag me to the police and if you want to know what's the basis for this conflict he was a vegan youtuber who made exaggerated health claims about the benefits of the vegan diet and this included but was not limited to his claim to have cured crohn's disease so that was one that was really harsh with him like you know okay if you want to make vague statements that the vegan diet help you lose weight or something i'm not going to go after you but no crohn's disease is a really serious disease and i was just saying no this is something dangerous and bad and evil and wrong to mislead people suffering with this disease that we can cure it through eating more bananas that's not true and everybody knows somebody who's got crohn's disease by the way i mean it's yeah so anyway well just so you know you can't cure it with bananas so okay so so you so yeah so that's so that's one example sorry go ahead yeah well did he was it like a direct retaliation to that or had you built up sort of you criticized him multiple times and then he started like looking for dirt that was really the turning point no i mean i would say that really directly did yeah create the the conflict and you know he's also someone who was trying to make his living out of giving that kind of diet and health advice so it's not you know i mean i can kind of understand it from his perspective unfortunately it's an insane and evil perspective but i can understand perspective i just want to give him credit where it's due today 2020 five years later he has apologized to me he offered to delete all the videos and all the blog posts that were denouncing me and calling me a pedophile he has yeah so that's five years later he did the right thing um sorry maybe it was four and a half years later when that started but many years later he did at a turning point so that stuff is gone from his channel unfortunately the damage is done uh for my career and my life in many ways the flip side of that is as i said before these controversies they put me in touch with really all of the leading vegan activists and vegan youtubers um so i i got to find out what i was missing in terms of the movement so yeah there was a very briefly there was a fundraiser people donated i think six thousand five hundred us dollars so that i could have a lawyer and take him to court we went to court uh defamation uh lawsuit or whatever you want to say criminal charges for defamation so yeah you were he was the defamation charges were against him for what yes yes yeah yeah because he he defamed me claiming that i was a pedophile among other things he made he made up a lot of other lies and no i mean you used a good term before you said so did he get angry and go digging for dirt like i wish i wish he'd done any digging it was it's all just fantasy and the stuff he was saying about me a lot of it like it doesn't make sense geographically you know and the last time i talked about i've talked to him about it was just a couple days ago i think like three days ago i talked to him about this and he seemed to genuinely have no memory of what he'd said i could provide him with screenshots and so on but my impression of durianrider is that he is a genuinely mentally disabled man he has said in court under oath that he has brain damage and he's talked about that on youtube from a bicycle accident he had some kind of serious brain damage from a you know concussion to his head and you know he may have had other mental problems before that and again i could just say he's talked a lot about his own mental health history and learning disability history and so on but that as crazy as it sounds he seemed to be sincere and not really remembering what he said and most of the stuff he made up against me was in a word crazy but i got to see how crazy all the vegans were because they all jumped on they all wanted to believe it and you know that's obviously that's a very disappointing cross-section of the movement when you see all those people lining up to denounce you and make up stories about you um you know i mean anyone if if you were you know if you were part of buddhism which i used to be and you had that experience you'd then look at your fellow buddhists a little bit differently well you know i had to learn to look at my fellow vegans a little bit differently too so so was it a series of controversies and how this was all handled that kind of soured your like is that kind of what happened was you you i'm gonna be i'm gonna be a hundred percent honest with you i'm gonna be 100 honestly the answer is no that's a totally reasonable perspective you know i am a very very positive highly motivated person who's happy to do my own thing even if i think kind of everyone else is an idiot or everyone else is against me so i know like i might be hard for other people if they don't know me personally i appreciate that but no there was one controversy after another whether it was durianrider unnatural vegan nina and miranda the vegan cheetah charles marrow there was this long series what need him read his dad i'm forgetting his name now jeff jeff nelson all this crap yeah there was this crazy series of controversies one more ridiculous the next but through all of it i was happy i was upbeat i was smiling i was laughing about it like people insult me on the internet and i i it like it only it's when it's wind in my sails like honestly i feel totally positive about it what broke me was the lack of talent so two real quick examples i wrote a children's story book storybook's been translated into six languages tons of people loved this story book wanted to get an illustrator for the storybook could never find a vegan illustrator who wasn't completely insane and useless we dealt with some people who were insane and let me down and you know i tried to have a conference where you get together a bunch of people and they present papers at a conference and then we'd gather the papers and publish them as a book and grow the lack of talent at that time i had money in the bank to do that in vancouver i was going to do it and um you know the lack of talent uh made my teeth whiter so there were things like that that to me it was just like well look guys i've been doing this for five years and i don't have one other person i can work with or collab on like not even collab on a youtube video you know so i thought it's time to it's time to end the experiment you know when you if you if you say to yourself that something's an experiment you have to accept that the outcome is unknown like if you say okay i'm going to do this as an experiment i'm going to try flying my flag for vegan activism and say hey let's get organized let's do this let's go go who's with me it's okay i'm going to do that for five years but then you have to admit okay well this was the outcome after five years you know um i'm all alone and there's like nobody i even respect or want to work with or something so yeah that was what that was yeah that makes sense i kind of experienced a similar thing on younow quite frankly oh yeah because i imagine i would have stayed there longer if there was more peers or a sense of like i mean there's a couple i don't want to discount there was a few people of course that i clicked with but i mean if there was like a strong tightly knit community of talented people i'm sure that would have kept me there way longer but there wasn't yeah and you know i think you know something i used to say to people now like five years ago was look if you think my videos suck you know uh leave me in your shadow eclipse me like do better like you know get on the mic and you know show me how it's done because i would be so happy to have somebody look up to you know like having people that are better than you people you admire um you know that's that's really that's really great too so yeah yeah no no i i feel you you know whatever your art form is and the only thing i'd add is you know for me it became an art form when i started doing youtube i didn't really see it that way i used to say i know you can probably remember me saying this for a million years ago you say no for me this is just like sitting down in a coffee shop and talking to a friend uh and you know it did become an art form became a major creative thing in my life and that's that's still what it is which is which is still possible you've noticed an evolution in the last couple of years in particular like you you do i mean i remember when i first saw your channel it was pretty much just like uh you know one long interrupted yeah whatever you had in your mind but now you're editing and you're including uh you're citing what's it called sources and quotes and there's a there's a lot going on and there's uh yeah interesting so can you let's talk about that just for a minute i think a lot of people in here maybe i mean i know vegan called quest has a few people in here who are familiar with your channel to a degree but um what's your process like we've already kind of just given the basic summary you're making these kind of political commentary videos but like how does like a video start and end like i imagine you see or read something and then that kind of gets an idea going and then how do you get from there to uh i think nobody but my girlfriend would really believe how spontaneous it is that it's like it's so spontaneous it's crazy and that's like that's the sense in which i'm good at it once i sat down in a starbucks i was in a starbucks and my girlfriend was here at home at the apartment and i was like jenna marbles she's feeding her dogs dead cow meat as dog food and that she says she's vegan she's buying dead animals all the time [Music] oh yeah no and it was and while i was sitting there in the starbucks i made the whole video and the couple of sources i didn't have i didn't need i was emailing my girlfriend like hey can you find this can you find that i asked my girlfriend can you find the particular brand of dog food jenna mar and she did she found it so i don't know i don't know if that was half an hour or we could have been a whole hour sitting that stuff a lot of work did go into that video and i got this music and i got the visuals and i put it together and you know and yeah and i got like 500 or a thousand thumbs down from jenna marbles fans i don't know we should check how many thumbs down that that has now but you know no and it was it was totally totally spontaneous and unplanned that's that's something within veganism but all kinds of other stuff i do um it is extremely spontaneous even talking about like politics of cambodia politics of ancient greece and politics of ancient rome if there's one thing i've really learned is that if i if i don't do it in that spontaneous way even if the factual content is the same it will not be the same for me in terms of its mood or spirit if i go back and watch it again even if there's something something comes up like a friend of mine is dying of cancer so it's like i have an idea for a video and then i can't make it for five days you know there's some delay like that when you come back five days later it's i'm never going to make that video i made i would i'm never going to be able to make the video i would have made if i'd done that five days before in terms of what's going on in my mind all the time i could step out of the shower something i thought of when i was in the shower and that's the video and i gotta make it now because if i don't i won't capture that spirit you know and i i haven't haven't been real angry lately my youtube channel is is consistently more popular when i'm angry uh people like the video that also relates to the amazing atheist thing i would give i would give that as advice for someone starting a youtube channel even if you can come on the mic hot you can come on the mic angry um that does reach a bigger audience for whatever reason but you know that anger is maybe an easier emotion to to understand you know if you're angry about something then you know make the video while you're angry don't do it later don't pretend to be angry you know but when you're feeling that way when you're feeling yeah yeah put it together so yeah even even the most dry intellectual videos um i did a couple in the history of science the videos i made talking about sir isaac newton they were completely spontaneous like that too so yeah um and i i think nobody would believe how spontaneous and unplanned all that stuff is okay so you just you have the idea you record it and then anything else that's seen in the video you're doing that after that's like post-production for you you're not like planning things out elaborately in advance or anything okay even if there is planning it all happens at the same time like it's all thrown together yeah like yeah i i think that shows yeah pretty much but i think that's what one of the things i like about channel okay so let's talk a little bit because so this the jenna marbles video clearly was controversially presentation was i want to talk a little bit about your sort of bluntness because you're very uh you know you're i consider you a very thoughtful person you do you think about a lot of issues you do a lot of reading and research and what have you but in terms of uh concern for let's say offending your audience you seem to have none and i wonder what your sort of perspective is on that in this day and age with the seemingly uh major emphasis on political correctness and all this kind of stuff you used to be willing to kind of say things that you you also seem very aware that these things you say are potentially going to offend people or that they're controversial and i i don't get the impression that you care um i don't have like i guess a specific question but i wonder if you could kind of talk about that a better word well i i i'd only disagree with your wording um because no i mean it's an energy point like i understand i agree with the fundamental point you're making but i do care i'm actually a very caring person and that's also why those videos are made in the way that they are so whatever the issue is like racism against first nations people or the black lives matter movement like even if these videos are offensive and they are to some people even my videos talking about learning chinese and the history and politics of china believe me those videos would be offensive to some people you you know you're not a member of the chinese communist party but about a billion people are they'd find what i have to say about chinese people as offensive or blunt or you know inconsiderate about my audience's feelings as those things may be i just made videos talking about judaism and anti-semitism i'm ethnically jewish myself i'm completely aware my channel can be deleted for those videos like those are offensive enough in really talking about what's wrong with judaism i know i know this is going to hurt people's feelings you know and i've had i had a couple of uh orthodox jews who were fans of my channel and i know because they used to write to me trying to convert me they were like hey come on join orthodox judaism because they know i'm genetically genetically jewish whatever that means um i do care a lot of it comes from a place of caring and it goes to a place of caring and that's one of the reasons i reach out to and talk to my audience is that i really care i care about them and i care about the issues however everything else you're saying is completely true that it is very offensive it hurts people and for better and worse it changes people's lives if you're asking why i think it was a question is why why is that my format or why is that my aesthetic i would say it really has to do with the total sense of of rage or outrage i have toward canadian society and i'm really kind of screaming out my sorrow and bereavement at in the face of the indifference of canadian society just as i would say voltaire the author of voltaire was screaming out this way when he wrote candide about what he saw as just the unbelievable unbelievable evil that was thought to be good or normal in the society that he that he lived in now why do i say that i used to live in germany i used to live in cambodia i used to live in thailand i've lived in many different countries around the world probably probably if i had stayed in any of those countries probably if i'd stayed in south korea or japan i probably wouldn't be like this i probably wouldn't be living this way i wouldn't have this sense of of uh you know real real bereavement um and that it really is you know my status as a dissident in canada and let me just mention you know cops with me here i deal with cops face to face you can probably just guess from the tone of my voice i'm very good at dealing with cops who try to intimidate me or try to bully me i'm someone who has a background that lets me do very well in canadian society on that surface level so people might not suspect how extremely unhappy i am here i'm extremely happy i am with status quo but my point is again it's not that i have some kind of standards that are so high it's it's totally possible that if i just stayed in some other culture that i fit into a little bit better where i appreciate the politics and the society a little bit more i feel more positively about the society that i'm a part of that it wouldn't have that quality but yeah um i'm part so to stick with jenna marbles i'm partly pissed off at jenna marbles right when i'm pissed off at the whole society it's the society of walking your dog and feeding them cow meat and chopping up pigs to feed them to your dog and treating a dog like a toy taking a wolf and breeding it to the point where it more resembles a cat you know um you know there's so much about this that's wrong and then the jenna marbles is celebrated as a vegan as a vegan celebrity and a leader in the vegan movement so yeah but the deeper underlying discontentment with the society is really really fueling all that so we've got a lot of americans i think most of people in the audience and they don't generally know a whole lot about canada and um i'm just kind of and also this is from my own interest can you kind of explain you've mentioned some animal and vegan sort of issues in what you're just saying there i don't know is that the core reason for your sort of dissatisfaction with canadian society or others to if to an american who knows nothing about these issues that bother you can you kind of give us a little bit of a insight into what it is that sure well i mean for foreign americans specifically i think what i draw attention to is this you americans are very proud that you fought this revolution that you wrote this constitution and you had this civil war in canada we had none of those three things we never had the revolution never the constitution or nor the declaration of independence we never had the civil war and yet isn't it remarkable how similar conditions are in the two countries in every imaginable way yeah i thought about that a lot do you know why or any other theory on why that is yeah i'm writing a book about it right now i'm on chapter three of my book so yeah it's actually something i've been i've been meditating on a lot lately and and what i'm trying to point to is how misleading these political conceits are and they're i think in this case i mean what what have you just mentioned i think these are political beliefs that people acquire in childhood so they're very similar to religious beliefs people start believing in the uniqueness of america and the american constitution it's like well okay but if that's so unique why is it that canada is kind of 98 the same you know in terms of the real lived experience day to day like i don't know walking around seattle versus walking around vancouver it's walking around toronto versus walking around new york city um it's hard to spot the difference especially talking about the political difference what are the difference in in political conditions uh it's it's very very hard to to pin down so noah that would be kind of step one if i'm if i'm talking to an american and you know step two you know is probably to appeal to their their awareness well i come from a country that is built on genocide on absolute cultural genocide it's built on this british empire system and this system of overtly undemocratic parliaments that we call a democracy you know and i'm a product of an education system that i consider absolutely abysmally terrible myself so i'm in this position and then i'll give a third step it's only one sentence long you know one of the things i like to remind people of is you know i'm a canadian citizen my daughter is not i made the conscious intentional choice to refuse to allow my daughter to become a canadian citizen so i mean it's one thing if you say like just in kind of vague nebulous terms that you're unhappy with canada but know when i had the choice uh that was the decision i made is to put my foot down and say no i'm so you know these factors in canada are so real they're so important i would rather have my daughter growing up in france going into the french education system and being part of a country that isn't built on genocide and where they do have a very different uh history of of revolutions and civil wars you can always say so do you feel that canada is as a country is more um guilty of of this cultural genocide than america um i i think you can look at canada the united states of america and australia as imperfectly parallel cases um you don't want to get selected from that conversation quite a bit oh right sure yeah yeah yeah no sure i mean you know now in what ways is canada worse and what was this canada better i wrote a very short essay once pointing out how remarkably similar even the treatment of indigenous people was in russia under joseph stalin and that was specifically the indigenous people who are way out east in siberia and who are both genetically and linguistically related to our native people in canada because that's that's the history of where they came from they look the same the dna has proved it and their languages are related and then you look at the forced assimilation residential schools slow motion genocide policies under joseph stella now again what does that tell you well depending on how you look at it you could say canada's policies were just as bad as joseph stalin or you could say joseph stalin's policies were so bad they're almost as bad as candidates you know so yeah i mean the the the compare comparisons are odious it's worthwhile and you can learn things from those uh those contrasts but one that always stuns me is i hear people claim that japan is built on genocide against its native peoples i've done the research i've done the history i said what are you talking about you know to me that's not comparable at all the history of the internal history of japan japanese massacred other people that were conquered japan japan conquered cambodia and laos and stuff they conquered thailand different story but you know um so no i mean the next question really is you know what are we doing the comparison form what are the conclusions we're trying to come to it is definitely true that both canada and the united states have a system of parliament you know in one country called parliament in one one country called congress but we both have a system of parliament that was designed to not represent the indigenous people from day one and it still doesn't represent them but obviously if if you were if you or i traveled back in time and we started conquering north america say okay well we'll set up a parliament and okay so this is new york state at a time when 90 of the people are indigenous and 10 are these colonial settlers what are you going to do you can have a parliament that only represents the white colonial settlers you're not going to give a seat you're not going to give a voice to the indigenous people when the when they're the majority you know and then step by step they're snuffed out they're kicked off their land and so on and so forth they're extinguished is actually the american legal term extinguishment is the term used in american law and um there's no interest in even having seats for them when they're only ten percent of the population like even when they're a tiny minority there's still there's still no place for them in your parliament your congress your your state senate so yeah in that sense uh they're very comparable histories in some ways a little bit better in some ways like wars here and there so you mentioned that you sort of don't yeah i guess you're not really um feeling like you like this is the society that you so i guess like okay let me just my question i guess in relation to the way you feel about canada and how you don't really like like you didn't want your daughter to be raised here you don't really like feel so great about the history and so forth is there and then obviously the current politics i imagine you've also got issues is there a country that you do feel like kind of more represents your ideals or where you think you belong more yeah sure i mean i can give you two examples and they're both very imperfect but of course i feel much more positive about switzerland for example um oh yeah sure no in terms of actually having a real democracy switzerland is a really positive example more of us should study and i've always pointed to my girlfriend just comes up in different contexts just even when the news the news is openly saying they'll just state as fact on the news that america is the wealthiest country in the world and has the greatest system of democracy in the world it's like america is not the richest country in the world but i notice you're choosing not to compare yourself to say luxembourg or switzerland there are countries in europe that are much wealthier than united states and also have a much better quality and depth of democracy but to give an example that's a little bit closer to a third world country but that's still tremendously appealing to me uh greece greece is a deeply messed up country you know teetering on the brink of bankruptcy so there isn't the wealth issue like switzerland or luxembourg what have you but they care about democracy they're the birthplace of democracy they're never mentioned in these discussions you know it's never mentioned like hey greece is a place that that really matters and um i just say i've been to greece i don't have illusions that the greek people are a bunch of philosophers they watch football and they drink beer and they eat meat a lot of lamb kebab you know i mean there's a lot of things i don't like i don't like the religion either i don't like the eastern orthodox christian religion or something there's a lot wrong with greece but sure um i'm not comparing the united states of america to some kind of ideal uh i feel that i'm comparing the united states america to very palpable real examples and i mean two more real real quick i think everyone acknowledges this japan and taiwan south korea is pretty positive as an example too but japan and taiwan are societies that reacted to being conquered by the united states of america by out doing them and in many many obvious ways both japan and taiwan are factually superior societies the united states of america quality of education crime rate quality of democracy you know the the quality of health care the health care system in japan or taiwan compared to the united states of america um so no and nobody okay i can't say nobody incredibly few people are willing to just reflect on this and say hey the position the united states of america and the world is not being the world's leader and then the position of canada falling along behind america is therefore kind of one step back from america yeah all right let's talk about cambodia for a minute i know you've got a pretty deep uh sort of history with that country and i've