Daoism & Daniel: "Hiding in My Room" v. "Being Yourself".

we are going to talk about our old
friend daniel the youtuber known as hiding in my room and we're going to talk about dallas philosophy so if you have no idea who daniel is or why i'm talking about it if you have no interest whatsoever in the critique of the character knowing the internet as hiding in my room stick with the video anyway and what i have to say about daniel really is to lead us in a kind of investigation and reflection on the meaning of life how to lead a meaningful life what it means for us to be ourselves to do what is in keeping with our own nature um i think i'm gonna lead you through a series of questions about what he should do with his life on youtube and off youtube real life and life as an art form and his life as a creative artist that will be useful for you as a viewer in reflecting on your own life what you should do with your life even if again you have no idea who daniel is who is this mysterious figure hiding in my room now you may wonder in what way and to what extent is daoist philosophy still a part of my own life i'm not going to digress to talk about my own history as a philosopher and researcher who's learned many languages and studied many things including both bison and taoism both inside the university and outside the university both in the eastern world and the western world i've lived in asia for years i've known buddhist monks and spent time in buddhist monasteries and i've also spent time on the academic side not digressing into that i got an email recently with the provocative title steroid mazard my family name is mazar and they said eric in case you didn't okay so steroid massage so if your name were smith this would be like you getting an email that's titled steroid smith i received this email on september 12 2021. quote isil you talk a lot of smack about anabolic steroids and the users of these substances you dash dash a tall burly bald man self-proclaimed to be hung like a horse oozing confidence and sex appeal who can make love up to a dozen times on a good day ellipsis dot dot dot not every man is lucky enough to naturally have copious amounts of testosterone coursing through their veins period new paragraph there is a difference between use and abuse period cheers end of email some of you may not believe i actually say some of you might think i could have never made up this email right if you think there is no way i could i'd lack the imagination did you go someone wrote into me with this commentary this question this challenge okay now how do you think i replied i replied very directly taking a page out of daoist philosophy so those of you who have read some taoist philosophy in english translation whether that's the dao de jing or the chongza you will recognize the imagery and the pattern of thinking i display as follows so this is my reply to this anonymous viewer and as far as i know i've never interacted with this person before someone i as far as i know it was never quote the sparrow cannot be improved by stretching his legs longer thinking that he ought to be a crane nor can the crane be improved by hunching down shorter to imitate the sparrow an aggressive person should not seek out their self-improvement through sedatives like marijuana etc nor should a sedate person try to improve themselves through stimulants i think that each of us can be more than we are and i said again i think that each of us can be more than we are but this more is achieved by working with our nature not against it not medicating our nature as if it were a disability and living despite it this is a lesson that was difficult for me to learn also i was tempted at this point the email to really get further into that and i'm happy to get further but i will say again this is a lesson that was difficult for me to learn also and having learned it that lesson can remain difficult to live with i have the experience of having sex more than 12 times in a day i have also the experience of living in celibacy for many years at a time now we're gathered here today to talk about this cat and try to save his soul give him some better direction give her some some better advice in life okay now by the way i have never identified as being uh hung like a horse i'm vegan that would be speciesism okay i've i've i believe i have never compared myself to a horse in any manner or facet neither of my personality nor my physique i don't identify as horse-like anyway right right um [Laughter] so you know that that's his his inference or his his fantasy about me or or what have you but nevertheless i think everyone watching this video right now some people will be watching this video it's the first thing they've ever seen on my youtube channel they're here because they know who daniel is they know who hiding my words right away they're gonna pick up on a lot of differences between me and daniel and a lot of people would attribute those differences to testosterone now i think that's kind of part of the pseudoscience and astrology of our times there's a lot of these myths having a big jaw means you have high testosterone having being bald means you have high testosterone having big testicles means you have testosterone like seriously you know there's this whole range of things this whole range of characteristics that my speaking voice having a deep speaking voice having a certain kind of confidence that all these things relate to testosterone i really think this is a pseudoscientific delusion in our times that we basically made this into like an astrological sign that this is something like you know being a virgo being a taurus being a pisces you know that we've invented a character type and then we make inferences or claims about the supposed scientific and evolution evolutionary basis about this this character and then i think there are many things that are kind of misleading and bad and wrong about seeing the world that way we're not going to get to that great length here unless if you guys in the audience are interested you can ask me and i'll i'll talk more about it but you know you didn't know me when i was 16. you know i was involved in the theater i still am you know uh when i was involved in the theater i was surrounded by a lot of effeminate guys some were gay but some were straight men who took on the kind of mannerisms of that working in that milieu now what do i mean by that in the same way if you become a car salesman you may take on the mannerisms of a car salesman from the guys you work with and what that industry is like if you go into the army you may take on the mannerisms but let me tell you something if you're in the theater there are effeminate mannerisms there's a way of speaking there's a way of presenting yourself as sophisticated that you can you can take on it is not hard for me to imagine how i could have developed a totally different set of mannerisms and behaviors which have nothing to do with testosterone right and so i'm not going to digress this again unless people are addressed it'll tell more the kind of self-confidence i have something lacking in hiding in my room's youtube channel who is this person on and off camera okay it actually doesn't come from how much sex i have it doesn't come from how good i am in bed it doesn't come from my testosterone levels or my sperm count or my height or the width of my shoulders or the size of my jaw or my bald it's actually none of that my self-confidence comes from leading a meaningful life right it really is the deep self-confidence of knowing that i have a meaningful life and this may sound [ __ ] up but think it all the way through i'm confident that i could have a meaningful life if i'm put in prison for ten years okay that's how confident i am now there are guys who will [ __ ] you they'll say they're not afraid to go to prison or they're not afraid to die because they think they're the toughest guy in the prison i don't think that i don't think i'm the are you kidding me what what prison is this i completely assume i'm not remotely the toughest guy in the prison i don't think i'm the smartest guy in the prison depends on the person i could you know there are some prisons you know but there could be people smarter than me definitely bigger than me stronger than me harder working than me in the present there are all kinds of characters give me this prison okay but my confidence is that i can still be leading a meaningful life in that prison i'm still happy with my myself i'm still happy with who i am like i still feel like i'm a wonderful person if i'm in prison i get to wake up every day and be me and i'm so positively motivated i mean whatever book i'm reading i could be reading the same books in prison seriously that i still live that life and that's still rewarding and positive for me to wake up every day in prison that's the confidence i have right now even more likely i mean we none of us know if we're gonna end up in prison it could be unfortunate many ways if i have to work at mcdonald's we were talking my girlfriend and i about the youtuber daxflame if you don't know who daxflame is don't google it you'll be disappointed daxflame of course was very unhappy about working uh in an ice cream shop scooping ice cream and serving ice cream i could be happy working in an ice cream shop you know going to prison i'm living a meaningful life you know i i know in this pragmatic sense i know what the meaning of life is meaning i know how to live a meaningful life and that's the confidence i carry with me everywhere okay now look guys [Music] there's always somebody with a bigger dick than you okay objectively all right and there's always somebody who for this particular woman would be better in bed than you right that's not objective that's subjective different women like different things my girlfriend i'm melissa we're so compatible it's one of the reasons not jealous it's very different to it for me it's very difficult to imagine any other man being more compatible with her than i am and giving her more orgasms per hour than i do like we really are a match but that's subjective if you're going to have experience with a lot of women 10 women like listen listen your whole life you sleep with 10 women do you no matter how confident you are that you are objectively good in bed subjectively you're not going to be good for all those women there are women who are going to be into things whether you think of that as a fetish what it doesn't matter whether you know how everything there are women where what they enjoy about sex is not what you want to do with it there are women who like if you sleep with enough women no matter how good you are in bed there are women who are going to be disappointing you and they may just frown they may cry they may mock you and ridicule you right when i go into the bedroom with once i go to bed with with a woman as a complete stranger i have no sexuality it's the first time sleeping with him okay my confidence is not built on the fact that i'm great in bed right and like i am i am but i don't like peeing on people like i don't like you know there's all kinds of crazy stuff women are into that i'm not into right you know i mean like i can claim i'm great in bed objectively right if you sleep with enough women sooner or later you're going to get with this chick and she's into peeing she's into whatever she's into she's turned on by feet or whatever her thing is something she likes whether it's mainstream or obscure that you you don't fit you know whether that's physically psychologically in terms of technique right in terms of what you know sooner or later you're gonna get with the woman who laughs at you right or you're gonna kill the one who weeps or everyone it's bad one way or another okay so what does your self-confidence come from you see what i'm saying it can't be based on the fact that you're great in bed that you're great at sex right so now i've used this as an example because it's easy for people to relate to and there's a very clear element of fear all right but i could transfer this to totally non-sexual example briefly digress give you another one you'll see this this applies to everything like okay i am an incredibly talented language teacher i can teach you english i can teach you chinese i can teach you lotion i can teach you languages i don't know that much of like i could probably do a really good job of teaching you the basics of like korean ojibwe even though i only studied that for like two semesters or something like i only have this very rudimentary ability but i'm an incredibly talented language teacher melissa and i were talking to someone recently over skype and she was saying look isil you are so great at this i was basically teaching her english just in passing very casually well not as a job but you know she said look you really need to do this as your career or you need to do this on youtube like you're so great at teaching this is someone who could who could appreciate it right now i can sit here and say to you like objectively like as if it's an objectively real fact that i'm a great teacher specifically that i'm a great language teacher then i'm great at explaining linguistic concepts right but it's the same [ __ ] as i was just saying about sexuality because the reality is there's a kind of compatibility necessary between the teacher and the student and not every student can appreciate what it is i'm doing and i've worked with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of students so i know that one really briefly there was this one girl who came into my class this was in cambodia but i had i had almost the exact same thing happen with two girls uh in in yunnan and china there's one girl who came in in cambodia and i'm doing this you know like no offense but in some ways i mean i i didn't meet every teacher at school but i think i was the best teacher in that school in that university i was teaching university level i think it was the best language teacher english teacher in that university and you know you can tell i have this great theatrical style and i really reach out to the students i'm really making on kind of really talking with them and really doing the language work and i'm really prepared and i really understand what i'm teaching and i understand their language they were always shocked i could explain because i knew pali i knew the ancient liturgical language i knew how to explain english grammar using cambodian grammar because cambodian grammar is from pali they were shocked at that they were really impressive whoa you know and so no no other teacher could do that could go into it's kind of ancient cambodian to explain to a modern campaign so there's all this stuff i could do so well and there's this sulky little girl that she's a college student but she was a really small young looking university student she was sitting there and you know not looking at me and she's selling she doesn't like the class she's on the teacher you know i i forget what i said i said you were something like oh you know how did you like class day you know you you didn't participate much like you didn't know you should you know you shouldn't think because you know some of the students that are you know they're some of them are getting involved and getting the most she's sitting there soaking and she she holds up for me a crossword puzzle she said i did this crossword puzzle like in class that day she says this is what we should do every class every day you should do crossword and then you should correct them and give that what a philosophy of education like this is this is your idea of what a good teacher is right this year so okay the point is i can sit here in front right like i'm an objectively good language teacher and i can sit here in front like i'm objectively good in bed and there's a sense in which it's true there's a sense in which we can say objectively what is and isn't a good english teacher what isn't is isn't being better right but i know what we're talking about as objectively real is actually inter-subjectively real okay bread does not taste good objectively bread tastes good for a human being who has a hungry stomach it's relative to how hungry you are as well as the subjective judgment of your mouth your mind your cultural background what is and isn't delicious bread bread can't be delicious in and of itself right so when i go into that situation why is it that i'm so confident simultaneously knowing that i'm great in bed and individual people will not be compatible with me and will will subjectively feel than about a bit i feel i'm a great teacher but specific students will not be compatible with my teaching style or does not appreciate it will not benefit from it and they will they will be mopey and they may be morose and they may even denounce me as a bad teacher or whatever right why is it because i'm going in not with the confidence that i'm going satisfy you and not with the confidence that you were gonna be compatible with me it's that i'm leading a meaningful life anyway and i don't need you [ __ ] like you've got nothing to add to my life there's nothing you can take away from it i'm happy if i go to jail i'm happy if i got to work at mcdonald's i'm happy scooping ice cream at an ice cream shop you know whatever like i'm happy alone you know like like i'm happy if i'm single if we're talking romantically i'm happy if i have no student you know what i mean like my confidence doesn't rely on other people in that you see no again we used a sexy example and a non-sexy example you can extend this to playing music art making there's a lot of stuff you can you can apply this to but you know obviously we're partly talking about someone's someone's love life here all right talking about talking about uh okay uh guys i'm seeing your your your questions come in i i just did this moment i don't want to digress but if you're talking about something on topic i'm uh i'm interested to see what you guys have to say okay so coming back to come back this this question from the audience that i already they already read out all right so this guy is writing into me and saying that i'm opposed to people taking steroids which i am start you know i'm a critic of the steroid culture i'm a critic of people getting into testosterone boosting drugs steroids performance drugs of various kinds and this guy is writing to me saying that basically it's unfair for me to say this because allegedly presumably supposedly i already have these advantages that i personally don't need testosterone booster i don't need steroids so who am i to judge who might complain and he closes by saying he says explicitly not every man is lucky enough to naturally have copious amounts of testosterone and then he goes on to say there's a difference between use and abuse right and he's saying that i'm in this privileged position where i don't need these drugs but other people do right so then think about the answer i'm getting back to think of what i've what i've just explained to you now i say back to him no the sparrow cannot be improved by stretching his legs longer thinking that he ought to be a crane nor can the crane be improved by hunching down shorter to imitate the sparrow an aggressive person should not seek out their self-improvement through sedatives like marijuana nor should a sedate person try to improve themselves through stimulants all right each of us can be more than we are but this more is achieved by working with our nature not against it not medicating our nature as if it were a disability and living despite it okay so i'll read through some of these uh comments now obviously i have more to say and uh if you guys don't already know title of the video uh you know we know what it is ultimately i'm coming back to here while we're having this philosophical discussion about taoism in my life and in your lives also i hope we got 21 people in the audience it would help me now 22. help me if you guys would hit thumbs up so that we have 22 thumbs up with 22 people and more people will join the crowd and more people will say interesting and uh possibly offensive things in my comment section to drive the the conversation uh further okay so here is nacho who asked the question quote isil would you really be happy working for hold on a sec would you really be happy working for a company that sells dairy products so you might as well dairy products meat products or or what have you anything like this so you know nacho i i think you're a relatively recent fan of the channel it's it's a turning point in my life you know but i gotta tell you i really had to think about would i be happy in the army or not you know would i be happy fighting maybe an unjust war or maybe fighting a war where i sympathize with the objectives but i feel it's being fought by unjust means so you know i am at a stage in my life where i can join the army and and fight fight for the american side in afghanistan or any of these examples the war i i signed up to fight in as there was the war against isis you know and we can engage in a critique of all kinds of things but you know that's that involves killing people and it may involve you personally getting shot or injured i mean in america's wars today it's very unlikely you'll die some american soldiers die but you know more likely that you'll you'll be injured and maimed you'll be impacted in that way um and i'm telling you i can be happy doing that i'm telling you i'm gonna be happy uh going to prison so yes you know i i am saying i can be happy doing something that says that's as odiously immoral and in various ways kind of exploitative um yeah no i am i am saying that and that's because of who i am now and what i carry with me and and implicitly something i'm saying because i mentioned this before in on my youtube channel someone said like that would not have been true of me at 18 years old or 16 years old it would have really shaken me to my core to be doing something immoral and challenging and you know to wake up and look at my own hands and look at the mirror and say is this who i really am and is this all i am is this who i am am i this killer am i this person who kills for the army am i this person who gets shouted at and follows orders i don't understand you know like the way your own your sense of self changes if you're 16 or 18 in the army or if you're 16 or 18 and working at mcdonald's or something some of these i i do think that really impacts i do and i've talked about the example also i've known a lot of women who worked as uh bartenders and waitresses and i think that some 16 18 21 and i think it really does impact but no for me now and and why because i didn't have that self-confidence that i didn't have that meaningful life you know so on and so forth you know yeah so joshua lay i see you're making an intelligent point but the wording is not is not so intelligent so joshua says quote then it would be an objective stance taken off of a trend of being a good teacher or a good lover with slight outliers so what joshua is saying is you can talk about being an objectively good teacher or objectively good in bed because by talking about a trend line or an average uh trend is not quite the same as an average calculating a trend line on the chart and then just dealing with outliers what if you're an elvis impersonator and you live in a country where nobody knows who elvis is okay so i'm actually taking a more radical nihilistic position than you josh i don't think how good a teacher you are can be arrived at through an average of wrong answers and i don't like i know that's gonna sound weird there's a sense in which how good a musician you are can't be arrived at through an average of wrong answers because how good an elvis impersonator you are can't be arrived at that way either there has to be some other criterion for what is a meaningful life and what does it really mean to be an elvis impersonator and as crazy as that may sound where you really understand the art form and you really understand what you're doing and you understand your own excellence in this even if you live somewhere where nobody else nobody else can appreciate how you've captured the warbling in elvis's voice you know when you know or what it is you're getting across emotionally or or intellectually in your art so i don't think you can come to uh a simple objective stand and guys again i'm seeing this for a reason this is not chalkboard philosophy i'm not saying this to get the theorem right on the chalkboard i'm saying this because some of you have ears to hear and you know this is meaningful in your own lives some of you are writing a book and nobody appreciates it you know not even your own wife or your own girlfriend you know some of you are working on some project it may be a business it may be a book it may be you know it may be music and you don't have anyone in your life who appreciates your own parents don't understand it and don't don't approve of it and you have to make these kinds of decisions they're high-stakes decisions even if there's no money involved they're decisions that affect you know so many years of your life in such a deep way you know and and i'm saying to you no you can't even if it is something as simple as being a teacher you're a teacher let's say you teach sign language and your students all hate you you know you this really may be your experience you have these [ __ ] students who don't appreciate what you're trying to do as a teacher of sign language you've got to start asking yourself really tough questions and you know maybe you're a bad teacher maybe you are maybe you're a bad elvis impersonator maybe you're a bad artist i'm not saying that's impossible i'm not but i'm pointing out just how deep and difficult this kind of this kind of evaluation is right like uh i got fan mail recently from a couple people saying that i am an excellent teacher of economics they really appreciate when i talk about the stock market or when i talk about economic and and political problems okay do you think it would be an easy vision for me to make like even on the basis of this fan mail because whatever a couple thousand people watch my videos and you for me to make that decision to devote my life to that area of study in that that area of teaching you know i feel obviously like the positive feedback can be misleading also right the point is you could have negative feedback you're trying to teach sign language none of these kids appreciate what you're doing you're trying to teach something whatever it is but you can also have positive feedback that's misleading so yeah um it's deeper and more difficult than that the the average of wrong answers is simply another wrong answer so it's it's hard oh all right so xyz media says so welcome to the crowd xyz but um i i don't recall you ever being in the the audience before it's a it's a name i remember so he writes in quote this may offend you but from what i've seen i believe you are so you got a grammatical error here you got a spelling error i don't know if english is your first language i believe you are using meaningfulness as a mask for some level of narcissism i want to see more videos of you openly criticizing yourself and your faults okay so fair but one there already are youtube videos on my channel doing that there are plenty of videos talking about my faults but what you will find also as you watch more of my videos is that it's normally in exactly these same videos that i'm talking about because whenever i talk about leading a meaningful life i talk about all the disadvantages of leading me for life i talk about the tremendous sorrow the tremendous suffering the tremendous disadvantages that come with it with the path i took myself i talk so much about regrets you can just search my channel for for the word regret okay but here's what i have to say to you xyz media okay how would you feel if you had grown up in papua new guinea you had no access to radio you had no access to television you grew up in a remote island in papua new guinea fishing with your father and grandfather climbing up and down trees and weaving baskets out of rattan okay and then you see a man who comes to your island and sets up a stage and starts impersonating elvis starts singing and dancing the songs of elvis presley you might think this is narcissism in your own cultural idiom you know you might think this is just this man's ego this man is a crazy narcissist to dress up in these strange clothes and have his hair in this strange way and sing this strange song it's all it is to you is strange but you're not actually measuring his narcissism you're just measuring the depths of your own shallow in comprehension you can't comprehend who he is or what he's doing or why it's meaningful or what's significant what sorry what its significance is what its emotional significance for the audience that does appreciate you know there's an audience that appreciates that has some emotional meaning these particular songs these memories of elvis and this this invitation and you can't appreciate the humility that's involved that it's actually not narcissism right because what he's doing is on the one hand for his audience and on the other hand it is for the memory of elvis presley that there's a there's a mark he's working towards right so i understand i understand what you're saying here right but all i get from this from your statement is your admission of your own ignorance now i'm going to give you i'm going to contextualize this i made videos talking about buddhist philosophy in the past whole bunch of them i don't know how many i don't know if there are 20 or 100 i've made a lot of videos tell them what philosophy other people including other youtubers like unnatural vegan they responded to that as if it was egomania not narcissism strictly as if like i'm on some ego trip right why because they have no comprehension whatsoever of what i'm doing what i'm talking about or what extreme humility is actually involved in what i'm doing what i'm doing for the audience like in this moment and talking about my life as a scholar of buddhism right it involves a lot of humility and even humiliation i mean that you know it really does saying look when i went to live in thailand laos and cambodia these were my misconceptions this is what i was ignorant about this is what i was trying to do when i learned it was impossible when i first got involved with buddhism and buddhist philosophy these were my youthful ignorant assumptions then i learned how wrong was there's a lot of humility there's a lot of humiliation they can't understand that they look at that and they see they look at that and they see egomaniac they look at that and they see boasting they're so dumb they're so ignorant and they're so fragile in their own sense of ego that all they can hear is this is the guy boasting that he used to live in cambodia this is a guy boasting that he's an expert about buddhist philosophy okay well [ __ ] you i did live in cambodia i am an expert in buddhist philosophy and if you weren't such a self-censored self-centered shallow ignorant person right you would realize that what i'm explaining to you is precisely the regrets i have in life the mistakes i've made that you're asking for me to criticize myself tell my fault and that's what i am doing and you're so ignorant you're so incapable of understanding what i'm what i'm saying that you're misperceiving that self-criticism as if it were boasting as if it were narcissism right and let me say this is what i have to share okay i went to cambodia with good intentions i went to laos with good intentions okay and i've come back with regrets and i'm saying to the audience don't make the same mistakes i made and if you stick with this video you're going to see a lot of what i say is don't make the mistakes of me and if you see that as narcissism what does that say about you all right how many people how many people in this crowd grew up going to church how many of you actually literally grew up with sermons it may be zero like maybe all of you grew up more or less more or less atheist or just in a family that was only nominally religious and didn't take your church compare what i'm doing now to any sermon you've ever heard in a church from a priest from a pastor in a synagogue from a rabbi from a muslim cleric all right if you really can't pick up on the extent to which i'm i'm criticizing myself right that just tells me something about you if you can't pick up on the extent to which i'm really regretting decisions i'm sharing with you those mistakes this is not what you hear from authority figures from men of faith you know it's not and i understand aesthetically it may resemble a sermon but there's a really deep difference here you know burn me so i'm just catching up with your comments today guys then i'll get back to uh what's up with the video i'd say sorry babe i know it's on your mind or not melissa's off camera when i'm saying babe i'm not addressing the audience uh babe i don't know but you know that friend you had from college who you know sent you a bunch of insane [Laughter] really kind of insane and insulting uh messages on on facebook that time you know people who knew you in the past i think what i just described now i think that i think that really is that same kind of thing i mean it's it's just totally failing to get totally feeling to understand the content of what i'm doing in these youtube videos and just responding to the container you know and like and what what is the container they're responding it's really it's really like the mental level of like a six-year-old like oh you think you're important because you have the self-confidence to make a video talking about the politics of bernie sanders or you know whatev whatever it is that's on my youtube channel at that time you know and it's like and they can just respond to that as if it's narcissism and they can't even watch the video and see hey this is someone who actually has the humility to take the time to read bernie sanders book and take notes and then talk to you in the audience kind of chapter about you like that's what i'm doing that is actually humility it's not egomania it's like well look this is my background i've studied politics for so many years i have a university degree in politics now i'm going to take the time to share with you my thoughts after reading this book there's a lot of humility in it you know and there's a lot of humiliation and opening yourself up to i'm just saying but they they're kind of just responding to that on the outside and they fear it as some kind of commanding yeah i don't want to do the conversation too much but my response to that is i think culturally at least where i grew up that humility is confused with veneration that you couldn't possibly criticize bernie sanders like that that isn't yeah right that doesn't relate to humility right people will say like well if you're a humble person you will look up to other people and you know speak positively rather than speaking critically okay okay no i understand yeah i think it's better to be critical i think though it's what i'm saying is that that woman you knew in college you got touched through and those types of people i don't even think there's that much thought put into it um and no no but i would point out you know it doesn't matter so if i were doing movie reviews it doesn't matter if it's a positive movie review or a negative movie review the response is at this six-year-old level yes who do you think you are to make a movie review at all you must be an egomaniac you must be a narcissist and the reality is no like dude i do a lot of work i do this with very lo very little paid back to me for it so like no this is actually this kind of very humble labor compared to what you do in your job nine to five you know there's very little you know honor or dignity and understand that yeah yeah that's awesome so it's just disagreeing with you on that level is that like i don't even think it's about whether i'm praising bernie sanders or criticizing him you know it's just that you that you dare you know yeah and they wouldn't and that's you know you know a lot of complex feelings i've been through already come out of that okay so just catching up with your with your comments then we will get back to uh the hero of our story here okay so vanima is back in the audience venom can i just ask to um can i just ask you to rephrase your your question you're asking something about learning chinese but i don't know what you're asking so i don't mind it's off topic but whatever you have to say uh say it so vanima look i don't even want to digress in this venom i don't know how long you've been watching the the channel but i don't know why you would come here and ask me to um enable comments on the videos you're commenting to me right now you're not paying me one dollar and i'm not making one dime out of this and you know i'm taking the time to talk to you even though you have not taken the time to write your question in correct english frankly now you know i also know venom has mentioned that she is a very young person she could i don't know if you're 18 years old or what that's why i assume your comments are poorly written um you know but if you've looked at any one video on my channel for for more than last year it says in the description if you want to know why comments are disabled on my channel here is the answer in a relatively uplifting five minute video and then there's the link so you know what is it you can't deal with here you know um okay this is vanilla do you want to ask me now or no i'm i'm ready to move on but i don't see how anyone can participate in this conversation if it's not it's not the first time stumbling on my channel you don't know the answer to that question you don't know why it is okay this is this is the problem guys this makes me feel like not answer the questions all right vanna how many years experience do you have as a youtuber how many years experience do i have what do you what do you think you're gonna teach me like this is just a joke you know i'm so glad you came to my audience and think that you know better than me about something i've what have i made now three thousand youtube videos uh more than five million views in like seven eight years or something like you know i really just i really just have zero respect for someone like you know i don't show up at your workplace and tell you what to do okay i mean you know um i i i really just don't understand how you can enter into a conversation that that insincerely with that expectation you know um all right anyway and as i say you know you were complaining about this at a time when i'm i'm right now stopping what i want to do i'm taking the time out to speak to you one-on-one and you still have no respect for it so you know as 50 cent used to say uh respect your check so yeah james says he ain't got time for that anyway you know sorry it's just um it's it's one of those things like i've spoken so much and lately about the philosophy of being a youtuber and the ways in which this is rewarding the ways and this is related to hiding in my room so you guys don't know if you check his channel right now if you just look at the list of video titles he's talking about deleting his youtube channel so this is a good segue he's talking about giving up on youtube forever and he's talking about the ways in which youtube has destroyed his life so i have lately made many videos you know philosophizing about this and any idiot could see the extent to which youtube has destroyed my life any of you can glance around and say this comes with a really serious cost you know there were really really serious sacrifices and really serious disadvantages i've lately said this brings us back to hiding my room in a big way it's a lot like making the decision to appear in pornography if you're going to start making pornographic videos you get a lot of judgment you get a lot of abuse you get a lot of really negative harassment and distractions that come into your life and it's you know there are there's a lot of heartache there's a lot of disappointment there's there's a real cost um that comes with the decision to to be a youtuber you know um but you know above and beyond that i mean you know what i'm interested in doing what i'm willing to set aside time to do is to have really meaningful connections with real people who are using their real names and their real faces on the internet and taking real risks and who are motivated to do real things uh to paraphrase the rapper notorious big real people do real things so vanima i'm going to give you a contrast to yourself i had a guy write to me recently at length who was drafting a letter to present to a judge in what you could call a human rights court case in the united states of america now this guy he has good intentions and politically he's trying to make the world a better place but he does not have my educational background in politics he also hasn't obsessed over politics for decades of his life i mean most of my education is informal and so on and so forth and so this guy who i've spent a couple hours talking to and interacting with i took the time and i said okay look here's my feedback and how i think you should rewrite this letter of the judge and he he did thank me he really appreciated uh the feedback i gave although i i didn't have as much time as i might like i don't have so many hours i only have so many hours in the day but anyway and then he wrote back to me later and said that he had taken the revisions and presented the to the judge and that his statement of the judgment accepted and added to the record and it'll have its its little bit of political impact okay now why did i ever get on youtube why did i start talking about vegan politics or or any kind of politics i'm willing to take several hours to talk to a person like that and help a person that i don't think i've made one dollar out of that and maybe i'm wrong because i think he does pay i think he does support me on patreon for one dollar a month you know it's not and by the way i also get no fame it's a totally uh anonymous form of participating in politics you know i'm willing to take the time to help real people doing real things to improve their own lives to improve the lives of others you know that's the kind of generosity of spirit i've got and i come out here on camera and you know again and again and my generosity is basically never rewarded by people like you in the audience i mean it's it's really close to 100 negative experiences so you know for someone like you to come in the the audience and say oh well why don't you spend 10 hours a week moderating and replying to a youtube comment section you know what you may not know how many hours a week it is i do you know i have years and years of experience why don't you take time responding to basically sexual harassment from thousands of anonymous people and sometimes it's anti-semitic harassment i get that too sometimes it's political harassment from people who are neo-nazis from people who are communists sometimes it's just from people who are incredibly stupid vegans who you know intensely i've endured that for years you know and i'm still out here trying you know i said before that if you want to do this kind of thing this does relate to in a deep level relates to hiding my room you know this should have been the title of the videos you know if you want to do youtube you have to be willing to get your heart broken again and again and get up the next day and say okay now i'm going to do it again i'm going to have my heart broken again you know and my whole experience with vegan activism and political it's been heartbreaking it's been nothing but disappointment there's not one positive counter example it's been heartbreaking again and again and again and no offense but you people disappointed me yeah this is not daniel that let me down it is you people in the audience who let me down again and again including with my very very humble aspirations to do things like organizing a uh organizing a conference uh related to uh it was a specific issue in veganism this political movement and then collect the conference papers and publish it as a book there were very specific kind of intellectual activist things i i wanted to do um there were things i offered to do to help other people and when i needed help nobody helped me that's my experience okay but i'm still out here i'm still out here getting my heart broken i'm still here offering to help people you know and it's just you know it's just awful to have to face this again and again where people expect me to be pouring time into crap like moderating comment sessions and dealing with the same stupid hostile ill-intentioned questions again and again so it's going to be people asking the same questions about eating meat it's going to be people asking the same questions about me being a jew like really like a huge a huge percentage of all the measures i've ever gotten are anti-semitism guys i know you haven't you know it's going to be the same questions about something another mean-spirited youtuber made up about my relationship with my ex-wife or my daughter or my mom again and again and again okay that's what you're asking me to take the time to deal with um and to get nothing you know uh nothing in return you know ever so you know that's you know that's your asking when you ask that kind of thing um okay anyway look so what i do is not for everybody and also so vanima you know if you're watching you know you could say i gave you a chance because you know uh you and i've talked in the past i mean you've made some intelligent contributions guys in the past but you can see what a really depressing effect your comment has added me and how it's really derailed this live stream so you know um you know thanks for nothing i mean i really i really would have appreciated it if you could have said something positive or you know contributed to the conversation and spoken on topic instead of doing what you've done because it's you know it's derailed this into a really dark um you know really dark and depressing you know uh dead end where now i'm supposed to gather up my sense of energy and motivation and return to topic this video okay now maybe it's a good segue anyway okay because what i wanted to talk about today was this guy daniel and his decision to give up on youtube and what makes it an interesting example so we have just alluded to actually a lot of the stuff daniel has had to endure so yeah i've just been talking about the extent of which i have to deal with constant abuse from the audience or what have you and in different times it's more sometimes it's more anti-semitism and sometimes it's more uh crazy communists or or what have you and sometimes it's more crazy raw for terry and vegans there is no doubt that daniel is a guy who has to endure a great deal of abuse from his audience also so i alluded to the fact that people send me hate mail about my divorce from my ex-wife that's a good comparison i am sure daniel gets much more intense much more ridiculous and abusive hate mail about his divorce from his ex-wife his ex-wife was with him on youtube today she does in fact have her own youtube channel and on another person's youtube channel she uploaded interviews talking about how horrible their marriage was so there was a lot of gossip around that there so dude i can relate in effect i went through my own divorce on youtube although my ex-wife never started her own youtube channel she was probably tempted at some point but i have had divorce drama and i've had that kind of maelstrom of of innuendo against me on on the internet before um i understand how he has now come to a point where he looks back at his life he feels that youtube has ruined it and that he would be a better person if he just deleted youtube entirely from his life or what he's currently proposing as a middle path that he deletes all of his past videos that made him successful and made him popular and instead takes on a kind of phony and almost anonymous identity on youtube of making a kind of clean respectable pablum content sort of neutral more professional and respectable uh content okay so look guys sorry you can see i'm trying to speak on topic i just don't know why i mean what's the point of uh what's the point of you know trying to derail the conversation this way so you know i'd appreciate it if you're gonna participate in conversation try to speak on my level try to speak on topic try to contribute the video in a positive way otherwise i just i just don't see the point of having the audience participate at all um yeah and here's someone from the audience agreeing with me says i get the whole comments are turned off well anyway sorry i made a different video talking about this but it's true you know there's there's more than one approach to youtube one approach you get after youtube is have the comments open and really put in the time every day to reach out to people and thank them and encourage them and gossip with them and i can remember i mean i've tried all this stuff but let's put it this way if you are the kind of person who while you are working out at the gym wants to pause between every exercise and check your comment section and go through and delete things and reply to things you want to have this kind of constant chatter with you know strangers who uh you know strangers who know nothing about you and care nothing about you and so yeah this for a certain kind of personality if that's what you want in your life you can go ahead and do it and of course there are people who hire hire staff to pretend to be them and farm their their conversation this way but anyway certainly certainly i mean it's you know you wouldn't have a conversation with people in a cafe this way you wouldn't talk to strangers on the street or in a coffee shop this way so you know i do expect people in my audience to step up to that same level and talk to me the same way you would in a coffee shop and i i do expect people in the coffee shop to speak on topic and on the same level not to just raise something totally just sam and it's within that same that same uh remit you know oh great question who is hiding who is hiding in the room so good good question um yeah and sam says so this is on topic i wonder if daniel will actually stick to it anissian repeatedly promises to delete his channel and quit youtube and that doesn't fall through with his own proclamation right okay i do think it's a little bit deeper and a little bit more interesting what's going on with hiding in my room this way uh as follows so the point is this who is this guy daniel who is hiding in my room he doesn't sing he doesn't dance he doesn't even really tell jokes right his act is honesty the one thing he's got going for him the one thing he really does that brings in crowds and entertains people makes his channel unique and distinctive and always has is a kind of confrontational honesty um often it seems like a sort of just totally uninhibited uh childlike honesty where it hasn't even occurred to him to conceal the things that everyone else would conceal it hasn't occurred to him to be indirect rather than direct about things he has a bluntness and honesty in dealing with his own life which is the entire basis of his fame and it's everything his audience appreciates about it now do i find that honesty shocking do i find it offensive yes but it's meaningful because it's not an act he's not a stand-up comic he's not pretending to be honest with things it's his real life and he's he's really honest about it i mean he used to make videos i think all of them are now deleted from his channel he used to make videos talking about his own psychology and cheating on his wife and why he doesn't feel bad about cheating on his wife and including sleeping with prostitutes when he was joining his wife and those videos they are 100 the honest perspective of a man who chooses to live that way and like in a sense it's priceless who else would say this stuff who else would share it with you like i think most men who live that way and who feel the way he feels they would never tell their best friend they said they would never tell their closest friends and they definitely would never tell their own parents they definitely would never tell their own wife like this is how they feel about it this is how they rationalize it in their own mind this is you know this is how they they assume other men feel and so on um you get his whole weltens you get his whole world view you get his pragmatic philosophy and you get to feel that you get to see through his eyes and to some extent the audience does benefit it does have some educational lag as you get to learn from his mistakes you also get to see his agony so look you know uh his work on the stock market it's actually an interesting example that confirms this so when he first started making videos about the stock market i kind of had to wince and grit my teeth i really disliked his early videos because but he was making them very honestly and sincerely he was in a period of totally reckless optimism he was going to become a millionaire by trading stocks on the stock market but just a few months later he starts to figure out that he doesn't really understand how the stock market works that his strategy that he thought was it was a can't fail strategy it was a certain to succeed strategy that no actually you know not only does he recognize the extent to which he was wrong but many of the people he idealized and followed as stock market gurus that their advice was bad and that was wrong he starts to understand how the style bar works oh so again now already just by sheer dent of his honesty he's doing something really valuable and really meaningful with youtube and you couldn't pay for that like you could not pay someone to i mean can most people even with their closest friend at a bar like a man who sits down with closing drinking beer would never reflect on his own high hopes and aspirations when he first got involved in the stock market and then how he was disillusioned how he ended up losing all of the money he gained and what his motivations were and this is exactly the dude who does that this is the one guy in a million who has this again in some ways very childlike lack of inhibition and in some ways i think it's a kind of adult commitment to really being rigorously honest dangerously honest in talking about his love life his marriage his divorce uh so on and so forth but down to and including uh this fantasy he had that he would stop doing youtube entirely because he would just be such a huge success on the stock market and then the reflections where he has the honesty to put up how much money he's lost so now by contrast there's a youtube channel i really intensely hate you know um called uh brian turner invests you know and he is exactly dishonest in all the ways hiding my room is honest if you follow me on patreon you'll see i've actually posted some charts where it's like well he predicted this stock would at least triple in value and instead it's now at 50 percent of its value when he made that prediction like look look and there's no reflection he just hypes these things and promotes himself and presents himself as an expert and then you don't get the doubt and self-examination and self-analysis right okay so you guys can tell even though this is somebody i kind of morally disapprove of in various ways i wouldn't make the same choices uh he makes in his life this quality of searing honesty right that is his act right that's not just one aspect that's the whole value of what he did on youtube and what he had to contribute so it's equally disturbing to hear him say that he wants to delete his youtube channel and give up on it it is equally disturbing for him to threaten that and it's as it is for him to threaten that he's just now going to become another phony shallow pablum youtube channel he said he's going to do like yeah travel videos like oh i climbed the mountain in japan i went to the hot springs tour of osaka or something you know he's going to give a walking tour of some some neighborhood in osaka so that is very different i'll come back and look at the conversation you guys that is very different from someone like an isean whose strength was in doing narrative scripted fictional comedy videos or you know singing and dancing videos or what have you you know right so joshua lay says quote i completely so by the way i think this is an intelligent comment so i'm responding joshua lay who i don't know by the way welcome to the crowd josh i don't remember your name uh i think i would and when josh really says quote i completely understand why you wouldn't want to open up to those kinds of people in the comments but it helps those of us who wish to do mental battle in the comment section and challenge opposition and then says but i get it right um you know josh i i just say this honestly i think a lot of people are bringing on to the internet attitudes that they cultivated sitting at the dinner table with their own parents you know and what i have to say to you is fighting is not learning and fighting is not teaching so i get what you're talking about here and i've never been a host to that in my own youtube channel i've never hosted that when i had a discord uh which i don't anymore i've never posted that i think that a lot of people learn to fight with their parents that's the main that's the main way they learn to talk they see their parents fighting and they fight with their parents and there is this assumption built into the dinner table conversation that at the end of the conversation you're going to hit a reset button in a sense everything is forgiven and forgotten and tomorrow you come back to the same dinner table and you do the same thing over again and nothing's changed there's no progress nobody learns anything and this is parallel maybe to the american culture of the situation comedy the sitcom on tv right there's some conflict sometimes within a family there's a group of friends you know there's a certain number of regular cast members and then at the end of the episode you press reset you can watch the episodes in any order there's no plot development nobody learns nobody changes now obviously i can't say every family is like this a lot of families are like this okay so every time i sat down to dinner with my father he was the crazy communist and i was the rebellious son who couldn't accept my father's religion who couldn't support communism you know i'm basically a pro-democracy anti-communism kind of person if you if you don't know me you know and for a lot of people their situation is their father is a conservative christian and every time they sit down to dinner their father plays the role of the conservative christian and they play the role of the younger more left-wing atheist freethinkers and they do it at the dinner table again and again and again and people come onto the internet and engage in these comment sections uh and they're fighting but they're not learning and i've got to tell you something it may it's the most familiar thing to you or to millions of people if not you to millions of people this is the most familiar thing because that's what they grew up with in their own household but it's completely fake it's completely unreal all right you know what real life is real life is you have a conversation with somebody that's five minutes long and it changes your life forever you change that day you change that minute you know i mean it's about everything i mean it's about youtube i mean it's about cheating on your wife i mean this about ethical decisions you know um uh i remember a woman telling the story on youtube of how she became a vegan and so she already had a degree in nutritional science one of those she was a nutritionist one of those universities related to nutrition and diet and she had a conversation with uh a woman it was the first time she'd ever heard about veganism but she already knew nutritional science and she says oh you know i'm sorry i see you you don't eat meat like what situation and this woman just said a few sentences about veganism she said oh well actually i'm vegan and she explains what a vegan diet is and um she then said to the the first woman the one with the great nutritionist said oh are you are you vegan also and she said i never heard the word before but i am now she had already committed to veganism listening to like one paragraph of texas one that's real life homie like you know it can be about things big and small i once met and talked to a guy i could tell the whole story but there's no point i met a talking guy who had really lived in cuba it's actually there's more than one guy it could be think you have here i've known a few different people who lived in communist cuba but there's one in particular one one conversation i'm i'm thinking of and it changed the way i saw and felt about cuba forever you know you meet someone who's been there and lived with that regime lived with that that political system and i didn't have to think about it i didn't fight i don't sit down at the table or go into the comment section you know defending cuba or something no but you know it's like i went into that i thought i already had a good sense basically from reading university textbooks i think i hadn't read or thought about cuba at all since i was in university i'd read a certain kind of very dry political science analysis of cuba and then you meet someone who's actually lived with it you go whoa i don't know cute like whoa you know i i you know now how i feel about and think about has changed you know i realized the extent to which my university textbooks were actually kind of whitewashing the situation and how horrible it is so you know that's that's real life that's real learning and i just say you can learn things where nobody says a goddamn word to you you know you see something happen you see it in a farmer's field you see it for me it's a it's a great example but i mean anyway sorry i've witnessed some terrible things in my life you can see it out of the window of your car as you drive past you can see something and you learn and you change and that's it you know in one moment your life changes forever okay that's real life and what i'm saying to you is what people do in comment sections and what people do around the dinner table with their own their own family it's not real life and that's not learning you know it's fighting and so i have to say uh in my subtle way i'm really trying to oppose the phoniness of that kind of fighting and to inten instead i both demonstrate to you and i invite you to participate in a much realer and much deeper kind of of learning you know and by the way not to boast that's true about my videos about hiding in my room there's actually something to learn in those videos you know there's something really meaningful it's not just drama or gossip on the internet i'd say that's true about the videos i made about finishing you know i'm really trying to do something meaningful for myself and others you know and and that's not compatible with the culture of the the comment section and certainly in american and canadian culture i feel it's not compatible with the culture of the family which is where most of us learn to talk and uh most of us learn to fight you know okay we've got some agreement here about the the uh the sheer honesty of uh daniel hiding in my room yep ron sims is saying this is how most families including mine was so you know what i'm talking about everyone everyone goes back to the same role the next day i had one friend and one okay both of his parents were protestant but one of them had converted from catholicism to protestantism and still had some catholic elements of his thing and every night they fought like every night it was like you know uh the wife felt the husband couldn't be christian enough it never it never went away they never made progress you know she hated it he he still read the catholic version of the bible in english it's not the protestant verse and uh they can go to dinner tomorrow and have the same courses do you want to say this a bit i'm uh wondering where else we had some discussions yeah all right um okay i started this the discussion of taoist philosophy and how these questions are still meaningful in my life or how this kind of vocabulary is still meaningful my life the other part of the titleist video is talking about being yourself and i think everyone here will be very leery of our culture of just be yourself just do your own thing very often it's nothing more than excuse for laziness it may be an excuse for intellectual laziness it may be an excuse for a lack of curiosity a lack of taking risks a lack of being daring because you just have to be yourself it's to a large extent an excuse to only do things you already know how to do things you're already comfortable doing um not to expand intellectually in terms of experience not to push your limits not to try to be somebody other than you are somebody better than you are more than you are uh so on so on and so forth that's what what it what it all tends to come down to right but this taoist discourse that i've been quoting to you or paraphrasing to you and and discussing with you it gives us somewhat different inflection to that paradigm that gives us gives us a somewhat different angle on that hackneyed turn of phrase about being yourself you know there's a joke in shakespeare to thy own nature be true but in the intro to this video i'm raising the question up to what extent to what extent do we grow by working with our nature to what extent do we grow working despite our nature now there is nobody alive who has known me through the different chapters of my life i don't have any friends who knew me across these multiple chapters and since i became micro famous on youtube since i started a few thousand views i've reached out to a few of the people who knew me like in high school hoping they would just come on and do like a skype call with me do a live stream or do a conversation with me whether in real life or over skype or what have you i've been interested in talking to people who can see how much i've changed and we're you're not just hearing it from me that i've changed but you got someone else saying dude you've changed dude i knew you when you were 16 or i knew you were right i knew you and you're 22 or you know whatever it is um you know if there were anyone who knew me from one chapter of my life to the next to the next to the next you know i think they could really say look isil you are someone who tried for so many years to improve by working against your own nature rather than with it and that was very true of me so as with the beginning of the video i'm gonna give you one sexy example and one non-sexy example but you know the sexy example you guys have already guessed uh from from the start of the video but look you know um when i was still in high school basically every course i chose i chose intentionally to take the courses that i would be the worst at that i had no familiarity with where i would be out of my comfort zone that it wasn't what i was good at so i didn't do i meant whatever you think of my character i didn't take art courses what have you i took like the wood shop course i took these really boring hands-on course i was really trying to challenge myself to grow that way and this could only last for so many years but it's still when you're young it's a big part of your life i kept pushing myself to take these courses that i wasn't interested in that i had no experience with it's like oh well i've never used a saw in my life i've never worked with wood in a wood shop in my life i even came up with my girlfriend i took a course where you learned to do electrical wiring with a [ __ ] uh soldering iron my girlfriend was surprised that i know he's a soldering iron i do you know um there was always this sense of pushing myself to do what i was least capable of at the least uh you know experience with and indeed things that were you know you you can say you know contrary to my nature and it's very easy to look at the period of my life where i was involved in buddhism and to say this is the same thing on a on a much grander scale you know so that's that's the sexy part in brief i mean you know guys i wasn't training to be a buddhist monk for a significant amount of time i was living in celibacy and i was seriously thinking about living the whole rest of my life in celibacy which is a significant part of my human nature that i was looking to you know discard now i mean there are other things you can talk about discarding there i mean you know many of you today may think of me as to some extent somebody who's like a creative writer creative artist a creative intellectual in that sense and by the way a political intellectual right well if you're going into buddhism in that sense whether it's a buddhist monk or as some kind of lay religious leader and scholar you're giving up on politics you're giving up on your own creativity and creative arts you are embracing orthodoxy right and you know i was also embracing humanitarian work you know there there's more there's more to it than that it's not going to live in a cave but it is helping the homeless and all kinds of stuff and i'm saying um it is completely balefully true to say of me that for large parts of my life i was trying to grow i was trying to become a better person by working against my nature instead of working with it now this is an example that's neither sexy nor non-sexy uh this is recent history how long have i been divorced eight years something like that seven years split up with my wife okay so melissa says seven and a half years okay so about seven and a half years ago i split up with my ex-wife start a whole new chapter in my life again again nobody knows me from one chapter next there is nobody alive who can say isil i knew what you were like when you were in england i knew what you were like when you were living in france i know what you were like when you were living in taiwan and then i know what you were like when you started living in canada again on the west coast nobody there is no continuity of any friends or colleagues each period of my life i had friends i did they're different people with each period right what did i do when i split up with my ex-wife i said okay i'm gonna start a whole new chapter in my life i'm gonna really buckle down and i'm gonna really conform i'm gonna give up everything i care about everything i wanna study everything i wanna do with my career everything every the kind of person i want to be i'm going to start studying a completely new language chinese i'm going to start a completely new career in academia playing by their rules and like really submitting to and assimilating myself into a hierarchical system i totally despise right now in some ways i've got to tell you this is a much more radical self-abnegation than becoming a buddhist monk this is much more contrary to my nature now what do you mean by nature we're talking about it in an explicitly taoist sense here but i've talked about this many times you know no matter how humble or self-effacing i try to be i walk into a room at the university of victoria where we're talking about the politics and history of asia and it's not on every subject but it's on a lot of subjects the professor picks up on the fact that i know more than he does it's pretty much always a male professor in one case a female professor it's a male dominated profession you know and you get to see how different professors deal with that and some of them have a meltdown some of them they can't stand to have this challenge to their authority no matter how genuinely nice genuinely friendly genuinely helpful i am uh in these in these conversations you know so i could now tell a whole bunch of anecdotes really funny anecdotes about conflicts between me and my professors right but there is absolutely a sense in which even if it's more subtle than the issue of living in celibacy so you can be a scholar of buddhism or or but a smoke there's absolutely a sense in which someone who knew me my whole life since i was 14 or 16 or something could look at this and say you're doing it again you're still the same kid who enrolled in woodshop precisely because you don't like woodshop because you think you can grow you think you can become a better person you think you can challenge yourself in a useful way by doing something that's contrary to your nature and you're wrong what you've got to do is work with your nature right so you know look i've alluded to it in other videos talking about other context but obviously i've said when i was living in a place like thailand enormous numbers of women wanted to have sex with me and normally i'm just talking about the white women talking about like women from germany and germany and sweden and stuff women were there as tourists right and i was completely set on this ancient narrow path of virtue and i never had sex with any of them and there were thai women and everything else and of course there is an argument someone could make especially for somebody new me at 16 who said someone could say look you know you're a very loving person you're a very warm person and you're also an intellectual who really thrives on having people in your life to talk to that's one reason i talk to a camera you know you're not actually a bookish intellectual who can't deal with people face to face or someone somebody wants to have these warm cooperative collaborative relations people you should actually be sleeping with these people you should actually be getting people in your life and having meaningful relationships and maybe some of them whatever sleep with 50 people maybe five of them become your friends for the rest of your life or for the next five years they're totally there totally is a reading of how i live that time of my life we have to say look you were you were working against your own nature you were doing this all wrong right um so you know i just say look on different chapters of my life there's a different analysis there's a different you know reading for this but for me now i'm a mean old man i'm old and i'm wise and i'm detached okay when i just sit in the same room as these [ __ ] professors at university of victoria these people with phds when i sit in the same room with professors from cambridge university england and oxford university i was a different time in my life system it is so [ __ ] obvious that we are not on the same rank of the food chain okay and the idea that i would pay money for the opportunity to sit with them as opposed to them paying to sit and talk to me is just [ __ ] laughable and even if they haven't thought it through if they haven't like mentated it all the way through clearly right that's also what they're dealing with when they're sitting in that room with me so just you know look i could give a i could really give a hundred different examples from different times in my life but one of them that really struck me it's a useful example i went to a university in thailand so i have to give a little bit of a story here i was looking for university where i could get a phd but i was already really an expert in buddhism uh i went to this university in thailand and went alone and the university isn't a okay what is remote in thailand okay it was it was a long journey to get to this university even though it's not really remote but i had to take a train and go to this this campus suburban campus okay and then within the university they actually had two different departments of buddhism and they didn't get along they hated each other so typical typical for buddhism as a religion typical for thailand you can imagine that within christianity like there's the catholic department of the protestant department that hate each other but in this case anyway not worth telling the whole story as to why there are these two different so i'm walking around i can read tai to a limited extent i'm looking at the signs i'm like well i'm looking for the department of buddhism i'm looking for this professor and getting all these weird hostile things eventually i find the professor so sit down with them and start talking to the professor and we have this conversation and so again you guys may not know that much buddhism we're talking about teravata buddhism this is the so-called southern school of buddhism and of course right from the beginning of the conversation he's seen some of my work in my essays i think i probably had samples to my handwritten work too i used to do that with i'd put them down on the table i'd say look this is the level i'm at with the language in terms of my handwriting um so you could see right away i'm really serious about this and this is the level i'm at and we're sitting there and talking and it's very clear i'm at this very high level with with tariff out of buddhism and also he and i know some of the same professors so we're kind of talking about some of those people oh yeah you studied with this guy oh i know him you recommend you know we have we have some uh we're within six degrees of separation of each other some talk like that too and then there's this very interesting break in the conversation where he says okay look you know that's great so you've studied the southern school you studied terabyte of buddhism you studied this school philosophy and you're i recognized your experience and he says but i have to tell you um you know absolutely nothing about buddhism and you're a complete beginner to me uh your complete beginner compared to me he says uh because you haven't mastered the philosophy of nagarjuna and if you study with me you have to accept that you're starting all over again like with a blank sheet of paper obviously not his video that's my name because you're going to study the philosophy of nicaragua and he says just a few things about the philosophy of negotiations there's a different school of philosophy and buddhism and the things he said are are wrong they're they're beginners you know and so so he says this and then i just sing and i don't say it in a mean way at all i say oh no i studied the velocity of the guardian up for two years and i studied with this professor and this phd student who both read sanskrit fluently and they worked on the sanskrit and i you know read in english i was learning pali not sans right but they're closer and i start saying oh no what you just said about nagarjuna that's a common misconception based on this and i you know i can name in sanskrit during this i'm naming the works of nagarjuna and that i've read them and who i read them with and and i'm demonstrating that i'm on a higher level of knowledge i'm on higher level knowledge of this this thing he's he's claiming and he started trembling visibly and he stood up and uh i guess you could say he nodded his head but it was more like his head was kind of shaking and he walked away silently he was he was humiliated and and [ __ ] up and i never heard from again he never replied to an email again and um then i saw him i was in the same room with him once before and there was this other professor there not going to tell this whole story but there was another professor who was like glommed onto me and was like saying i'm a genius or i'm a great talent or something he was i could tell that whole story that's another interesting story but i remember this this first professor described the guy who tried to one-up me with the philosophy of the guardian i remember he just looked at the two of us and he stood there really like afraid and again just just walked away and the professor i was with he was like oh wow that's weird he's not he's not normally that afraid of me and i was like no it's it's me he's afraid so sorry um i'm sorry this is a long digression but i feel if i don't give some examples like that you guys might think this is delusional or something you might think that i this is just a feeling i have when i'm in the room with these professors but melissa has seen this recently we sat down and had a two-hour conversation with a professor who is more than 50 years old and has a phd and i sat and talked to him for two hours and it's not the fact that i'm i'm sorry so if this is me and this is him it's not that i'm struggling to come up to his level it's that i'm struggling to come down to his level i'm speaking down to him and i'm explaining things to him it's like i'm talking to a teenager and of course he's used to being in a classroom where he talks to teenagers i mean after the conversation i pointed out to us look there were so many points where i had to break something down and explain to him it's like he's my student and we were talking within his field of expertise not mine you know and he's making all kinds of he's making all kinds of errors that maybe a teenager shouldn't be embarrassed to make but that a grown man with a phd should be embarrassed to make he's making very elemental errors of of uh fact and and reasoning you know so anyway um yeah so this is this is a real real part of my life [Laughter] and by the way this comes back to the guy who said at the beginning that this stuff comes off as narcissism it's a lamentation bro it's sad what's this what i was gonna say you were fighting against your nature in some ways yes yeah i i think so you know um you know so let's let's talk about daniel you know what is in his nature what is you know what does he have to share with the world now i have never had sex with a prostitute never now i can boldly say i never have and i assume i never will life is full of surprises what can i tell you things might change okay and i'll tell you also i feel that that is not in my nature that's contrary to my nature okay this guy is completely shameless about sleeping with prostitutes and talking about it on the internet and by the way he also does talk about the ways in which it's kind of gross or kind of disturbing i have heard him talk about the like he doesn't just boast about it or something he talks about the ways in which it's kind of psychologically worrying or disturbing okay okay so dude you know you're talking about deleting all your past videos and going over to the squeaky clean version of youtube content you say you're gonna do a walking tour of osaka or whatever the attra attraction is in in japan dude you are the guy who can interview the prostitutes and make really honest videos talking about prostitution in japan and i never could like i can't do that right like in this respect in terms of this like brutally honest slightly humiliating side of human nature like dude and i'm telling you straight like dude i prostitutes are people too i do not dehumanize prostitutes at all i think they are normal people who chose to become a prostitute and then this brings on there are different consequences in their life i am not talking about dehumanizing or caricaturing prostitutes at all like i have a i have a somewhat feminist perspective on that right but like even if i tried to do that if i tried to do this those women would feel like i'm judging them and i would be in the position of saying to them what i just said to you i've never slept with a prostitute once i feel like it's contrary to my nature that would be unnatural or immoral for me that's how i feel again i'm not a member of a religion i don't believe it's a supernatural transcendental fact but i've been i've been surrounded by prostitution in countries like thailand and france there's plenty of prostitution in france you know i feel like this is something that for me would be evil let's be blunt right okay so i can't like there's really like a visceral sense in which i can't be the one to do that interview not even if i have the best of intentions not if i say to the person look i have a degree in political science on a social science research basis i want to interview you and and share this with youtube or share this with the world i want to tell the story of what life is like here for you okay but dude you can do that effortlessly and uh you can do that you can interview the women you've slept with you can build up trust with them by actually sleeping with them and you can do videos talking about that from the client's perspective and from the woman's perspective and from a political perspective right like the point is even if i look down on like some aspects or frankly all aspects of who this guy is and how he lives his life right i can still see that like as an artist and as a youtuber he has something really valuable to contribute and he can do that by working with his nature not against it not by abnegating and concealing and apologizing for who he is and how he feels but by pressing further on that same path of confrontational honesty that made him a success in the first place being honest about who he is being honest about what he wants being honest about what he's willing and unwilling to do to get it right but then moving beyond just a self-pitying self-examination to press out to examine the world around you tell other people's stories you know whether it's literally the prostitutes you sleep with or whatever tell other people's stories talk about their perspective don't just analyze yourself analyze the society you're a part of analyze your political surroundings even if that is totally just from the shallow perspective of a guy who cares about nothing but getting laid on tinder i think that's a window into society and politics also right what if it's a window into you know he's talked about also sleeping with uh single moms talk about divorce and the the plight of uh you know single mothers in japan i know it's a very i haven't read a little bit about that you know women who've been married and divorced and are raising a kid they're in this very tough position and it's very hard for them to find a new husband and their their social status and so on there are so many issues like like even put it this way issues that are really shallow that he could deal with in a rigorously honest way that is working with his nature not against it that that could be so valuable and he thinks he can be something more he thinks he can be someone more he thinks he can be a better person by abnegating by deleting his own nature and he's wrong he'll only be less like if he tries to give up being this honest libidinous uh what other polite latin word can i use epicurean character this overly honest libidous epicurean character you know you know it's not going to be by you know the crane trying to imitate the sparrow it's not going to be by the sparrow trying to imitate the crane you have to embrace your nature and not regard it as a limit to what you can be not regarded as a stereotype you have to live within you have to say these are the characteristics you can work with and then working with them see how you can grow are you going to say jump in so it would be one thing you know some people who have made the commitment to putting porn online of themselves yes that they would regret that yes retract it and say go on tour speaking tours saying that they regret going into porn it would be one thing if that was what he was doing but he's not ashamed of it so why didn't he just right right continue right right i agree so look so i mean in some ways that's the that's the saddest thing of all right okay so look again so so mango in the audience mangomange says quote but his nature is introverted no it's not okay this guy uploads hardcore porn of himself to only fans he's not introverted he's not shy he's not he's not he's lazy he's a video game addict you know what i'm saying a great question michael asks have you ever corresponded directly with hiding in my room with daniel i wrote to him before this video was posted to let him know that this video will be online and hopefully sooner or later he clicks on the link he might or might not be asleep right now in terms of the british time zone i have sent him a few messages on instagram that he has never replied to which is fine i'm sure he gets a lot of messages and i think he's only interested in messages that come from good looking women so you know i've chosen not to catfish him in this uh in this respect but no you know um yeah he is someone who already took the plunge he is someone who already uh uh you know who already committed to doing hardcore porn you know to sharing that with the world so i feel like what he thinks the path forward is is to try to delete and conceal and pretend to be ashamed of all the characteristics that make him distinctively him and again this is contrasted to being yourself yes yes preach if you want to be with somebody shouldn't you be with somebody that you can be honest with and if you aren't ashamed of it find somebody who's also not ashamed to do porn right not ashamed to be honest right so you're right so that's also it's a huge aspect of what i didn't mention at all in this video okay so what is i didn't say this what is motivating him to delete his youtube channel what is motivating him to try to conceal who he really is and start either start making completely phony youtube content or delete his web presence entirely his answer is that he is terrified of being alone that he what he really wants is a wife or girlfriend and it's interesting it's now singular he apparently doesn't want to have many sexual i don't know if i believe him i'm just saying i've heard him talk a lot about the fact that he felt he would never be happy with one sexual partner and if so be honest with yourself and be honest with your girlfriend or wife about that don't lie to yourself and don't lie to her if you are not a one-woman man if you are not a guy who's uh who's gonna be happy with just having sex with a woman the rest of your life don't don't lie about it now and tell the truth about it later tell the truth uh up front um so yeah the the so however i do think that what i said earlier is is at least as true and is maybe more true when i just talked about the extent to which he has suffered and still is suffering because you see that a lot he is suffering because people ridicule him about his ex-wife and his divorce there's a lot of harassment there's a lot of denunciation he feels like this has brought uh he this brought a lot of negative things in his life which it obviously has yeah james showed up late it's a hell of a video james you go back it's a roller coaster it has highs and lows it really does it really does it's a whole it's a whole hour and a half long movie no credits at the end no intro no outro just real talk okay but like instead of him having the confidence this comes back to what i said about a meaningful life before too even though we're talking about a pretty meaningless life oh someone wants me to talk about the canadian election good luck you don't pay me enough you don't pay me enough to denigrate myself that way henry you want me to talk about the canadian election [ __ ] you [Laughter] um all right so you know he's in this situation where he feels women reject him women won't date him uh these are women who are shy conflicted about their sexuality they're women who are afraid of appearing on youtube they're women who are understandably afraid of being with a man who does hardcore porn on only fans right okay so one option what he's presuming is the only option is for him to try to lie and obfuscate and abnegate and conceal who he really is but the other option is for him to press further right is to seek out personal growth that is in accordance with his nature and not contrary to it right like another option is for him to try to include in his life and spend time with precisely people who you know uh precisely people who accept uh his making hardcore pornography whether that's because they make hardcore pornography themselves or they may be you know they may be unconventional intellectuals like to give an example i'm sure in japan there probably are feminists who just out of a commitment to kind of feminist philosophy are sex positive and pro-pornography and and would be happy to be friends with someone like that would share their life with a guy who does hardcore porn and would regard it as something liberating and positive for him and for society just but they themselves don't do porn they don't even watch porn so there are people there are people who whether philosophically or just from their own life experience are really are really accepting of that and instead he's trying to put himself in this box where you know he thinks he's trying to be more but he's really trying to be less he's you and i said this to each other when we watch this video he's trying to be a nobody you know and it's so ironic because if you look at this guy's career and i i know it because he was so honest about youtube dude every single woman who slept with you did so because you were a somebody not because you were a nobody and obviously whether it's for the sake of your love life or for your life as a creative artist or an intellectual or just as a man as a human being on earth obviously you need to press further with being a somebody and not trying to make yourself into this anonymized non-entity you know uh being a being a nobody but like you know even before he was on youtube before he had youtube fame right he went to japan in a very particular role as a half-white half-asian english teacher as in english as a second language teacher he showed up and he was he worked very hard as a student of the japanese language he learned to speak uh japanese as a you know as a foreigner so on and so forth you know so i know it may not be as obvious as being a famous youtuber and having women sleep with you but no you were already a somebody you arrived in japan with a mission and an identity and a story and you weren't like other guys like you realize for japanese women 99.9 of their options are japanese men and you were someone who was saying without saying a word just being yourself you were someone who was showing up saying that you're really different from other guys you're certainly a very unconventional man we've learned over the years of your uploading just how unconventional you are morally intellectually and otherwise you're not an average japanese guy you're not an average british guy you're a very unusual guy with your own you know your own character your own sense of mission so yeah james asked a great question james says did i miss the taoism part james the whole video is the taoism part you may not realize it but we are talking about taoist philosophy right now because we're talking about what it means to be yourself and do your own thing and act in accordance with your own nature uh you know this is a core element of dallas philosophy however translatable or or untranslatable it may be so baby do you have a comment of that i mean you know i can see something challenging once to jump in now then i'll ask you a question okay i think it's a fantasy that you can erase your past find somebody that wants a an anonymous guy like a nobody and that you'd find some sense of contentedness in this just like having a partner and being like you say a one-woman man that's that's what i have to say i think it's a fantasy and some people who are famous have this fantasy of being a nobody they want to just anonymize themselves again they want to know what it's like from the other side especially when they're famous brought them a lot of suffering too yeah which yes which i sympathize with as i said um you know so when melissa and i were first falling in love with each other you know she read an article i wrote and i said to her since she obviously she'd seen a lot of my youtube videos i said to her well look if you've read this article and that's the man you want to be with then we should really get together and make this happen because that's who i really am like you know that article shows you who i really am for me because you know if you're meeting someone over the internet it's there's a concern like is it really me you're interested in or is it some illusion or some delusion is it something you assume about me or imagine about me is some fantasy you have about me and after she read this article and she just gave me a very short comment okay well if that's the man you want to be with the man who wrote that article then you know buy the airplane ticket and come over let's let's figure out the airplane tickets because you know that's you know that's that's who i really am now okay so in case you don't know what the article is about it's about like the history of chinese politics and the war is war that took place between japan and russia and the history of communism it's it's not an autobiographical essay it's not me talking about my feelings or my childhood or something it's an essay dealing with the history and politics of asia um okay but like you know this dude back when he was making really honest youtube content he could say the same thing to any woman right and and that's what you should aspire to do again whether you're going to be alone whether you're going to have one monogamous partner or whether you're going to sleep with a whole bunch of different women which might include prostitutes it might include fans like you know groupies might include like you know it's not inconceivable that this guy could have a kind of multiple partner life and it might include some women who have a kind you know they they appreciate you for what you are but they don't really want to raise kids with you you know i mean women who have a kind of medium commitment long-term relationship with you where they're not they're not your wife but they're they're someone who's in your life and involved with your life positive way now okay here's the thing melissa is saying it's a fantasy to think that you can change and just become another person i know i'm good and it's a fantasy to say you can delete your past right okay but but you were saying it's a fantasy delete your past in order to be another person i think that's a fair uh summation of of what you said you know yeah uh because it is because it wasn't it wasn't deleting your password it was deleting your past in order to become the person okay so that's partly true but the other thing that's true is that who you are really does change whether you want to change or not right and i do actually sympathize with him wanting to delete old videos when he looks at those old videos and he sees they're really honest but they're honest about who i was that's who i was back then and this is who i am now i've changed so much i'm so different that i can relate to and again nobody's known me through multiple chapters but of course i've changed and even if i didn't want to change i've changed all right so i'm just saying i would not say to this dude look you should always live up to your old youtube videos where you were honest and you know and say to women hey if you've watched my old youtube videos and you you have a crush on that guy or you're interested in the guy on youtube video well that's who i really am so we should meet up and no i get that but what he should do is in his art in his authorship what he should aspire to do now what he should aspire to do today is to create videos where he can really say this is who i really am and if someone gets a crush on this guy in this video if someone relates to this someone wants to meet this guy they're just interested they're just curious they just think this is an interesting guy they may not fall in love with you right away you know where you can say in my art in my filmmaking in my essay writing book you are seeing who i really am in a really meaningful and profound way you know even if it's about something shallow where you're at that level of commitment you know what i mean so so if you if you like what you see and then you send me an email i can say well we really should meet up you know and that's the way for you to not be alone it's not through concealing who you are and then they only find out later you're this [ __ ] who sleeps with prostitutes no own it you know share who you are and right don't don't lie about it now and then tell the truth about it later right and what kind of woman is going to have a crush on somebody who says well i'm deleting all my passwords that make me look bad right in order to find a partner right that doesn't make sense to me right well it's a woman you're going to deceive yeah and a relationship based on deception yes but i think it's also your opinion of yourself is increasingly based on deception right that's it you're lying to yourself about about who you who you really are so sam walsh says sympathetic comment from sam sam says quote from what little i've seen of him you can see plenty of on my own channel i have a playlist of videos there's the hiding in my room playlist by the way you just search for himr on the playlist uh sam says quote from a little i've seen of him he's he's very sad and isolated but nevertheless is resistant to real change and instead opts for escapism through his youtube videos video games etc yes but you know uh correct um nacho said so babe can you just turn on that light for me let's just have a slight lighting change uh nacho says quote so do you regret doing these things in your own life that went against your own nature yeah thanks babe um seriously did you hear that question babe yeah so look nacho um the the the answer that question you have to think of as like two lines on a chart you know and you know the question is how much more could i have developed and progressed as a person in what ways could i be a better person today if i had worked with my nature instead of against it right that's that's really the question now the the thing is so if you haven't been watching this video from the start we are talking about a very taoist sense of nature and of one's own nature so obviously if you are a 10 year old kid and all you know is playing video games and watching movies and eating hot dogs like you know this is your life as a 10 year old right that's what you like to do and that's how you know how to enjoy your life many people they go from 10 years old to 20 years old at 20 years old they still say well look this is who i am i've just got to be myself i've just got to sit around in my pajamas and play video games and eat hot dogs and watch movies or whatever there are there are people who stay on that so that is not the sense in which we mean uh nature here but yeah i was someone who challenged my self to grow by doing things contrary to my own nature obviously including living and celibacy for long periods of time um and you know the question is how much more uh could i have developed you know by by by working with my nature instead of instead of against it so you know also i mean obviously this huge huge sense is what if i had really remained a creative artist consistently tomorrow in any in any medium or all what if i'd continued with creative writing but what it doesn't matter instead of trying again and again to force myself into various forms of really being a non-creative uh intellectual it's very contrary to my nature and you know again also trying in some ways to live a life that was non-political you know i mean you might think i'm trying to force myself into politics in a lot of ways i'm trying to force myself out of politics in each chapter of my life it's a different story it's different in toronto than it is in thailand you know but um sure you know so there are questions of where i could where i could be at uh today but as you get the sense i mean i'm i'm not saying it's all bad um you know obviously um [Music] you know i've had a wonderful life and i'm very happy with the person i am now uh but sure i mean it fundamentally it's completely tragic and ridiculous to have studied as many languages i've studied and to have you know to have dissipated what energy and talent and genius you have in life to have dissipated it into you know so many different fields and so much different experience now reciprocal with that is of course you know i meet people who've lived and worked i mean people are computer programmers and all they've ever done is sit and work on computer programming well you know um i know what it's like to stand in a field of sesame flowers in bloom i know what it's like to really be involved in farming in a third world tropical country and to really care about farming you know i'm not going to tell you that's who i am it's not it's not who i you know i mean it's not some part of my identity but you know i've had a lot of experiences like that that are every bit as far removed from you know you know my nature you know they're really challenging me really really strange challenging experiences and there's there's some sense in which i benefit from that and carry that carry that with me and i do think there's a sense in which other people can never replicate that through tourism like if you are a computer programmer and you go on vacation in laos and cambodia and you see the same field of sesame flowers in bloom or you go and see the same starving people and you hand them sacks of rice i wasn't frequent but i did literally do that i did literally hand out sacks of rice that a united nations logo on the sack to uh starving people you know if you do that as a vacation you will never know the agony and you will never experience it with the intensity and depth and intellectual intellectual and emotional involvement i had precisely because i was trying to do this for the rest of my life like i was trying to do this as a career i wasn't trying to learn enough ocean to get through my my vacation i was studying the lao language the assumptions i was going to speak this when i was 80 years old when i was an old man i was working so hard i was working on pally and buddhism and history and politics like you know the level of commitment and the level of engagement and what all those things meant to me the vividness of that that comes from the total commitment to it and by the way um really really short story really really funny story to me i met a vietnam war veteran i had many conversations with old these were old men at that time already they were old men with gray hair who had fought in the vietnam war and now they were coming back as tourists to travel around that that part of the world see see what had become of it since the the war ended anyway i had this long conversation with a vietnam war veteran and um interesting guy and he did something like intelligence work he talked to me a little bit he was not a normal soldier um i could pin down a little bit more precisely what kind of work he did was probably no point but he was not a he was not just in the pulling triggers business in the war we had this long conversation with different things in politics and history and then at the end of the conversation it was when we had paid the bill um he said to me no contacts the following he said you know what you have to do to make your life work out here he said pay the rent on an apartment or condominium or a whole house back in california back in the united states where you're from i'm actually canadian but he assumes that's california you know and make sure you know you've paid all the bills so the lights are running the air conditioning is running so there's a car in the drive so everything's everything's there so that the minute you get pissed off the minute you lose your patience with life out here in cambodia in laos you know these places that you could just get on an airplane go home and your bed is waiting for you your whole home is whatever all the conversation ready you can just go back and at any moment you can do it and i think his point was you can do this repeatedly you could like then fly back again any time you know i remember sitting there and saying to him um everything i own in this world fits in one backpack you know i back in canada or like back in the united states i own nothing like there's no when i go out there there's nothing waiting for me and there's nobody waiting which was true i had no friends back in canada i was not on speaking terms with any of my relatives no family nobody's gonna meet me at the airport like like no no no my dude this this is the only life i have right so you know i went through those those experiences with this level of this level of absolute commitment absolute engagement you know and by the way i think you can feel this um you know right now with this youtube video that's how i do youtube also it's with this much higher level of commitment it's also why i get upset answering some of these questions to the audience this isn't an act this is who i really am or even if it is an act the act is who i am i mean i'm not i'm not sure those are those are separable you know people are some extent their actions and our act our actions become us and we become our actions you know um but you know that this is who i really am and i do this also with this very very high level of of engagement commitment so yeah i think that's probably a good place to stop because you know i think that does also state what i feel i have in common with anymore the kind of kinship i have with him is precisely that he he brings to it or in his best videos brought to it you know that that same over-the-top unbelievable level of of honesty where anyone could look at those videos and say wow you know that's that's who he really is so look you know um you can change you know you can and who you were does not define who you are or who you will be you really can fundamentally change and with this dude the most obvious example is you can quit video games today forever and who you are would change in ways you can't even imagine if you've it's another one you can quit coffee i have experience with this i've quit coffee many times i know he drinks coffee every day because he shows it on camera all the time you do not know how much you would change your character your behavior your intellectual and emotional you know kind of range you could quit video games you could quit coffee you know you can change you know however um you know it is his honesty that made him a somebody and of course when you're being honest about being a terrible person it's very hard to perceive honesty as a virtue but it is it is a virtue and i've already conceded this earlier in the video but i can say it again briefly and i can go further i think that he is capable of being honest about things and being a filmmaker making videos about things that i could never be honest about and that i could never make films of them you know what i mean um and i think that a lot of those topics they matter to a lot of people more than the things i'm passionate about the things i want to make films about the things i want to talk about honestly in in videos you know um but you know how so you can change you can but you know the art of learning and developing and personal growth is not to be less it's to be more and i said this before we'll say it again it has a different meaning for you now in this context you know if you're going to be a youtuber you've got to be willing to get your heart broken and come back again and again and again get your heart broken you get disappointed say okay you know that was bad and now i'm going to come on camera i'm going to do it again i and by the way i know you know like melissa's uh filmmaking it may seem relatively dry and academic i mean compared to my videos it doesn't have this kind of anguished personal quality but it's a it's a heartbreaking process for melissa also she puts a lot into these videos so she works for a huge number of hours on a draft that never gets uploaded on a version of a video and goes back and does it all over again back to the drawing board as they say you know there's there's a lot of anguish and a lot of suffering you know but your model of personal growth the way in which you're going to improve as a person it can't be through concealment right it can't be from concealing from others who you really are or what you desire which i'm right it can't be through self-abnegation it can't be through subtraction it can't be through being less right you have to find a way to grow that's in keeping with your nature not in a state of denial of it not acting against it right you have to find a way to grow and be more than you are be a better person than you are but where you're building on and growing out of you know the person that you were um okay i know exactly what i want to sit next let's just glance here comment question guys for a second if you guys want to say something i have a lot to say um i had a friend and uh he had been uh in and out of mental institutions in and out of uh insane asylums frankly and he had also been in and out of jail so he had both been institutionalized in terms of going to psychiatric institutions and prison and you can imagine a very strange view of sexual relations with women one of the love affairs that i think really shaped him in life he had a love affair inside one of the mental institutions with a woman his own age but who was there getting psychiatric treatment also and so on so whereas a lot of people their first sexual experiences are in university or something this is his he had a very different you know path of developing those those those perceptions and so on and you know um i remember so this is the kind of conference he was he was an intelligent guy but deeply troubled and really unfamiliar with a lot of the kind of unspoken rules and secret philosophy of love and relations in our culture and i said to him it's the simplest thing but it's really deep and it's really important i said to him you know what does it mean to you [Music] to want to be loved by a good woman what does good mean in that sentence so the whole vocabulary this was totally unfamiliar right i said look this is the reality of who you are and not every man is like this okay there are men who will take whatever they can get and will get whatever they can take not you you don't go to nightclubs you don't go to bars you don't want to sleep with any woman you can get you don't want to sleep with the most attractive when you get you don't want to sleep with prostitutes you don't want this you don't want that you know and you may not even have thought about that you might even thought about all the people you're rejecting all the time right you have a very fixed notion of what is morally good in a woman that you haven't even examined like he literally had never thought about it yet and those are the only women you pursue because it's only when you're with those women that you're going to feel good about yourself if you sleep with a prostitute you this particular guy not all men this particular if you pay a prostitute to have sex with you you feel like [ __ ] and this particular guy i could say i knew some of his prejudices if he slept with a girl he regarded as very stupid and unsophisticated who had uh well look let's just leave with that but i could i know this particular guy's prejudices but he if he slept with someone who was an uneducated bumpkin or something somewhat just no sophistication whom he somehow you know kind of talked into having sex with them or to both season you you would have contempt for yourself right you have a notion of of what's good and it's not just a judgment on these women it's it's a judgment on yourself as a judgment on who you want to be and how you want to be loved to validate that opinion of yourself the sense of who you of who you ought to be um now a lot of you in this audience thanks griff thanks taking time we had some people early in the in the live stream we didn't appreciate the discussion so it's nice to hear some people guys thanks chris um i think a lot of people in this audience you already know that like probably what i'm saying to you even if you've never talked about it with a friend or you've never looked in the mirror and said that probably a lot of you are like oh yeah you know i guess i've always known that maybe since you were 14 years old or something you're like you know what that's true the reason why i don't want to sleep with someone who i think is a scumbag is because i don't want to feel like i'm a scumbag and i don't want to feel like i'm a scumbag lover and i don't want to feel like only scumbags can appreciate me because of my scumbag-ness i like you know you want to be with someone who has redeeming qualities and recognizes redeeming qualities in yourself and there's a kind of you know validation and aspiration built into that loving relationship okay so i get it this guy has gotten to a point in his personal development intellectual emotional and ethical development where he looks back at who he was just a few years ago and he feels contempt for who that man is and he looks at the women who are willing to [ __ ] that guy with that reputation on the internet and he used to chase them he used to just he used to have no druthers he wanted to sleep with every groupie he could get every girl who looked at his youtube videos and saw he was famous and got in touch with him on instagram and was even when he was married he wanted to cheat on his wife with any halfway decent looking female who would meet up with them which in most cases those women who were responding to his fame but you know to give credit some of these women they may have liked what they saw in the video they might have really been responding to who he was and his honesty and you know you know and now he looks back at the man he was and he looks at the women he was with and he sees that the man he was was a scumbag and that the women he was with right they're only validating you know this ethical emotional and intellectual identity he used to have and it's not the end that he has now or it's not the idea he wants to have in the future he feels that he wants to be with precisely the kind of woman who would reject what they see on his youtube channel what they see in his youtube videos in the past and why does he want that it's not just to have sex right if it if it's just sex it could be a prostitute it could be a woman you mean the nightclub it could be anyone right it's not just sex it's because of who he is and the tension between who he was and who he wants to be so he wants a woman to validate you know his aspiration to be a better man and the problem is he's going about it exactly the wrong way he's going about it by deleting everything positive and distinctive about himself instead of building on it instead of working with his nature to be more to be better right instead instead of being a somebody you know he's trying to be a nobody he's trying to retreat into the shadows he's trying to be an inoffensive shy non-entity who has nothing positive to to author offer the world you know what what it's not like he's making up a story that he's not making up a false identity that he did that he's a medical doctor and did something wonderful with his life in these years right what he did accomplish was in some ways wonderful and in some ways terrible in some ways awful right and he's just trying to delete that so he can be this non-descript non-entity because if he he thinks if you can get back to this neutral zero point of anonymity of indistinctness you know of just being a man any man you know rather than a particular man with a particular character in particular accomplishments and a particular voice in particular advantages you know of a particular kind of creative artist right that that's the way that he can be loved by the kind of woman who will make him feel good about himself that will make him feel that he's a good person all right that is my reading ultimately of the tragedy of daniel of hiding my room and here's the saddest part of all he's probably going to do it and it's probably going to work okay if you see this video daniel i want you to visualize two paths that are branching out in front of you right one of them is you go back to japan and you embrace who you really are and you get out there and you sleep with prostitutes and you don't conceal who you are you say to them really honestly and openly that yeah you're also a sex worker you do hardcore porn on only fans and you say yeah you have a youtube channel where you talk about this life and you talk about your own life and you're really honest and that you were somewhat notorious you know on youtube for this or that in the past you could say whatever and you can talk to those prostitutes and talk and say yeah you know i want to do a video talking about the history of this neighborhood you know and probably like every neighborhood in japan probably was destroyed in world war ii and then it was rebuilt and you know a history of the local mafia crime families there that's probably that's the typical you know prostitution area in japan or something you know um there will be interests and you can talk to her about that and then once you've got some mutual trust you know you're like say you know what i'd like to make to make a youtube video and you probably don't want to show her face i want to make youtube video and we just show your hands and let's talk about your life let's not just make the analysis of me and you you know what bro like there's this path in front of you where and again i think ultimately it's political ultimately what's the point right the point isn't just self-indulgence the point is to really learn something about human nature and politics and how we can have a better society and future and you know there's a lot this will have to learn but there really is you're like i can see so much positive that comes out of that it's to humanize the sex workers and put a human face on these political issues and consequences and what are you putting human face on the yakuza put a human face on gangsters they're human beings too you know whatever whatever you're gonna do look you know there's one path in front of you where you really work with your nature right and then the other path is the one you've described yourself in your recent youtube videos which is that you go back to japan you delete your youtube videos either you delete the whole channel or you delete 90 of them you start using a different name you grow a beard like this is his plan is to grow a beard to look different you change your up here i know maybe you dye your hair blonde right you know you start using a different name different hairstyle different beard and you get a tinder profile where you're just some guy you're just nobody and then you expect some japanese woman who's also a nobody to love you because what you have in common is your own nothingness okay daniel i think if you've if you've seen this video you know what the right direction for you to take is okay and it's the direction that's ultimately creative rather than destructive because there is something destructive when you act against your own nature as sad and strange as this may sound you know you'll be killing someone daniel okay because you will be destroying the man who you truly are