Beta Male Morality: the "Scandal" of Keemstar's 20 Year Old Girlfriend.

we have a big
profound long-term problem in our culture in that we can't talk about what is optimal as something quite separate from the question of what is good in the sense of morally good now we're confused about this for cultural reasons for religious reasons but even for linguistic reasons that we talk about good and bad in a way that's always like intentionally or unintentionally confusing what's advantageous with what's actually morally superior or morally inferior you know and when we talk about things being optimal then we start to raise a lot of really interesting amoral questions that otherwise get kind of suffocated by the morality discourse right optimal for whom optimal for what purpose to what ends you know it's it's really easy to say to someone be easy to say to my gorgeous 28 year old girlfriend that she would be better off dumping me to get with a 28 year old lawyer let's just say someone's the same age as herself she's 28 this theoretical lawyer is trying let's say let's say you even have a friend let's say you know a guy who is a 28 year old lawyer and you say to melissa you get in their instagram dance look let me introduce you to this particular guy i know who's a 28 year old lawyer and you say something like this is how we talk in our culture you say it would be better for you it would be better it would be good do you really mean morally good are you really presenting an ethical argument as to why people should be with someone the same age or are you saying it'd be better for her it'd be better for this guy and it'd be better you know for what ends for what outcomes now just digress being a lawyer is a miserable job despite what you may have seen on television despite what you may have seen on ally mcbeal seasons one through three it's a miserable boring job and most guys whatever spark of creativity whatever humanitarian instincts they had whatever impulse to make the world a better place they had before they went into law school by the time they finish law school it's gone here in canada after law school you go into a long internship that's called articling it's a little bit different from country to country and that absolutely beats you into being this kind of dreamless conformist now being in a relationship with a lawyer let's even say let's even say being the housewife of a lawyer because this lawyer is is making making enough money you know to keep you as as a woman is that is that good is that advantageous is that optimal right for whom and from what perspective now wouldn't there be another perspective i'm not saying there are only two there'll be another perspective out of hundreds or thousands in which you could say to a young woman you know what you really need to get as a young man who's got nothing and then whatever you two have in your lives you can get that together like you can start a business together you can scramble and work hard and go from poor to rich to get so whatever it is you have you've earned together and you understand that you appreciate together like maybe what's best would be a life that in that sense really is cooperative together maybe that's more important than a difference in age of of five years or ten years right i mean there are so many things that are more important than an age gap now again if you know particular people okay well what if your choice is between being with someone your own age who has a drug habit with a drug addiction let's just say it's a kind of mediocre drug addiction he's a guy who smokes weed five days a week and gets drunk two days a week and uses uh illicit party drugs like mdma a couple times a month these days a lot of people wouldn't even call that drug addiction i would okay so if you're a young woman you can be with a guy who lives that kind of lifestyle that's who he is today and you're rolling the dice if you get into a serious relationship this guy you're rolling the dice on what kind of guy he's going to be 10 years from now five years now but even even two years from now i have uh i have a female friend and she used to be with a guy who was a sports journalist and he drank a lot and smoked a lot and i think did a lot of soft drugs like like marijuana and you know that's cute for a couple years you can imagine a guy who's kind of gregarious uh self-confident and sociable affable guy watches a lot of sports and drinks and carries on oh oh yeah that doesn't age well holy after just a couple years doesn't age well oh okay so you found someone your own age and just just this one factor or you could be with a man who's 10 years older and is completely resolutely sober and hard-working all the time this is just one factor there are so many factors in choosing between people and the point is here even if you were to concede the point which none of us should concede if you were to concede the point that it is not optimal for you to be in a relationship with someone older than yourself why i mean we gotta question that why why is it not optimal but even if you were to concede the point that it's not optimal that doesn't in any way make an argument for it being immoral for it being wrong so the second big big point i want to talk about here and this is the reason why i have dragged in the concept of beta male even into the title of this video now it's a despicable concept beta male does absolutely no scientific validity it's even a sense in which it doesn't have any cultural validity what i see going on in the critique of keemstar keemstar is a 39 year old man 20 year old girlfriend what i see is the claim that it doesn't matter that she's over 18. you know it doesn't matter that she's a legal adult you know that she still has to be infantilized she still has to be treated as a child because of an inequality of power between the two of them now the implications of that are really interesting because what you're claiming implicitly or explicitly is that each and every one of us should either be in a relationship where the two parties can equally bully one another like everyone can equally impose their will another there's a parody in in power right or you mean to suggest that every man should be in a relationship in which he's dominated by the woman in which you really have in this sense a kind of beta male morality or your moral ideology is that men should never be the dominant partner in a relationship now i've talked about this in past videos from a different angle and a lot a lot of people today they only know about sexual morality via the internet via television via movies not from knowing real people in real life and their real experiences not from really living with and watching real relationships and how they come together and how they fall apart and what the advantages of disadvantages are and also you may know people face to face but they're never really honest with you you can know someone for for 10 years and every day they say oh yeah i'm happily married it's going great i'm happily married it's going great and then one day they tell you they're getting divorced and they hate that person and they're never going to talk to them and you never got a sense of what the what the progression was what the issues were that they told them toward them apart what the uh what the conflicts were um now you know if you know real people in real relationships you could have a seemingly dominant older man let's just say he's a lawyer stick with the same and he's out earning a lot of money as a lawyer all day and the reality is that his younger housewife dominates and controls and makes the decisions for everything else in his life everything and why partly because he doesn't have time and he doesn't have energy so you can meet you can meet these guys they have a they have again a seemingly younger seemingly submissive wife and if you ask them like oh gee that's funny you drive a range rover why did you choose to drive a ranger oh i didn't choose it my wife chose you know and oh gee you you went on you went on vacation to cabo san lucas that's i i wouldn't want to go why did you go there oh man no it's not me my my wife joe she chooses where we go on vacation and like yeah hey dude that's that's kind of a weird tie a tie with like these little fish why are you wearing that my wife chose the time like you can know dudes where every element of their lives and what they're eating for lunch today is chosen by their wives what is dominance right what are the decisions being made in the relationship again one of the reasons maybe he's he may tell you all of his time and energy is just going into making money then everything else in their lives like how they spend money how they live what they actually do short-term and long-term plans those are being made you know by his by his wife and that may include whether or not they have kids and when they have kids and where they're going to retire to and what like and what charities they're involved with or their political identity you can meet a lot of guys in that situation it's like yeah well i'm not i'm not really a conservative republican but my wife is and she get you know she takes me to these events really across the board there are guys who are not religious but their wife is you know all these all these things happen you know anyway so we got we got comments coming in i'm gonna pay attention to the comments when i can guys but you understand that priorities here first 10 minutes of the video uh i'm still on a roll okay so you know again these two issues overlap right like what is optimal i understand on a chalkboard it's really easy to claim well the optimal situation for a human relationship is that nobody dominates anyone else right that nobody no one person makes the decisions for another person you know just saying when i was younger i really i really felt that i mean i really felt like something as simple as buying airplane tickets or buying bus tickets or train tickets for the two of us as a couple i want to have this democracy i wanted to be able to sit there and like even though they're only two votes really talk this through and really involve one another in the decision okay what are we what are we going to do about this what are we deciding as a couple whereas a family even only has two people and i didn't have kids back then i have one kid now for my ex-wife that i never get to see but you know i i really i really did feel that way but for most people most of the time whether you call it dominance or you call it laziness or whether you call it having a kind of complementary set of asymmetrical roles one person is going to choose the airplane tickets for the both of them they're going to make that decision because they don't have time they don't have time to involve the other person and one person are there a couple there are couples where the woman buys the clothes for the man if there are couples with a man that's close to the woman you know you're making decisions for that other person you hope they like it and so on but where you are showing a lot of initiative where there is i mean in most relationships there are some areas where the woman dominates the man she's making the decisions showing the initiative and there are some you know fields within which the man you know dominates the woman so you know i think there is this implicit claim nobody is really thinking through that in relationships person should not dominate another and maybe you know what we're refusing to admit to ourselves is that all relationships involve dominion that in principle all of us are in turn you know like not consistently not in the same role every day each of us dominates and is is dominated within a relationship now i know this may sound odd but let's let's compare this even to our concept of democracy and what what is the is democracy the ideal that nobody gets dominated by anyone else no no we come together we make decisions for example you you vote on a referendum it's an example of direct democracy and all of us are in a sense dominated by behold into the results the outcome just say aristotle is one of the most explicit theorists on this and he does make the comparison to marriage interestingly you know um aristotle doesn't exactly believe in the gender gender equity but it's a topic for another video what is what his views on men and women and marriages are quite quite interesting actually i man his relationship anyway but the aristotle does say the relationship between a man and a woman is fundamentally political it is not like the relationship between master and slave it's fundamentally one of political equality but you know um one of the one of the great standards aristotle says down is that the way that we have equality in a democracy is through rotation that today you may be the mayor but tomorrow i may be the mayor that today you may be the judge in this court case and i'm in the jury but tomorrow i may be the judge you may be the defendant someone else is the truth that each of the positions in government will rotate that they're not uh perpetual so unlike a monarchy unlike an aristocracy it's not the case that one person is born to be king or one person is uh born to a class of rulers notice the rule but that the principle of rotation itself is how we how we have uh have equality and it's certainly very easy to imagine when you look at it that way that there could be a kind of dynamic equality between a man who's 39 and a woman who's 20 that there are some things in the relationship where she is in charge where she is showing initiative where she is even dominating uh the man where she's asserting her will and she is getting her way maybe not every day maybe today she gets her play at tomorrow the the fan does you know uh uh so on and so forth okay i'll take a moment here to glance at the uh uh glance the comments uh atlanta richard says i bet melissa reads the comments first but why does she not comment as well and melissa's attention is completely endorsed the the performance as the following do you want to say something what i'm watching yeah no she sees it live bro so no sorry um okay nacho uh who is aka not chat nacho is actually a female contributor here says the only relationships that have ever worked for her have been with men significantly older than herself um okay but look okay i really want to say this this is the main point of this video if you think something is not optimal and if you can even theorize hypothetically something else would be optimal right that doesn't have anything to do with distinctions of of good and evil you know you'll just never you'll never come to that conclusion you'll never you'll never be able to make an inference about the goodness or badness of this relationship or the goodness or badness of this particular man just because he's older than you right now you know sorry for any of us no matter what age you are um if someone is 10 years older than you are they therefore a bad person is your relationship with them therefore a bad relationship are they you know what is the moral influence from that even if you concede that it would be optimal to instead be with someone exactly the same age now i think nobody wants to reason that through because they'll realize just how weak the argument is for it being optimal to be with some of this image so let's let's be all the way real here so i'm now 42 years old if someone said to me seriously that they thought it would be optimal for me to be with someone the same age as myself my answer would be no you're confusing what's optimal with what's easy okay it would be easier it would be lazier for me to be with someone the same age as myself you know what maybe that's true across the board like maybe that's true with you know for the younger partner as well as for the older part like maybe it's easier to be in a relationship with someone who grew up watching the same tv shows as you who watched the same tv shows on nickelodeon the same season of sesame street who saw seinfeld same thing who went to the same rock concerts like maybe there is something easier even if it's just a product of the cultural familiarity of being with someone exactly the same as yourself instead of having that that age gap you know maybe it would be easier for me to be with someone who could relate to me because they've been through the same sorts of experiences over the same the same number of years but i'm not willing to concede that that is optimal for either party or that that's morally best you know like what if there's something really wonderful and really positive about me taking the time and making the effort to share with melissa who's more than 10 years younger than me to share with her my experience and my education and what i have to offer right like what if there's something that's positive for her and what if there's also something that's positive for me now when i say something that's positive for me a lot of you in the audience haven't studied math since you were 14 years old i i'm like sorry i don't know maybe you stopped at 18. but a lot of us we learned math at a very early age then we didn't really think about it for years what if someone offered you as a job say look and i'm assuming math isn't your fascination i'll say hey you know what why don't you brush up on your math and tutor my cousin like they've got a cousin we want you to go through wow okay you would have to kind of learn in math again in teaching it to someone else all right even if there were nothing else positive in this relationship for me and there is there's all kinds of positive things but even if there were nothing else positive the fact that i have to explain whatever it is i have to explain that i have to share what it is i have to share with someone who is uh a younger outsider and that way someone who's alien to my worldview someone who doesn't have my background someone who certainly didn't study any of the same things myself in in high school university someone someone who is also the product of of a different time i mean you know we joke about it a lot but it's true there really are differences between us you know generationally that way okay that process of teaching for me is also a process of learning and of course it's partly relearning things i've known it's partly challenging things i've known right and then also there are things where i realize and reflect how much my own understanding has changed say versus 20 years ago or 15 years ago or something you know so i just give an example i mean you know okay so melissa has now read karl marx i am not a marxist i'm an anti-marxist melissa read a lot about um the history of communist china while we're together too i am not a communist i'm an anti-communist it's not it's not why i wear a red shirt guys um you know uh uh you know the the point being even if i learned nothing came said even if i learned nothing by teaching her about that stuff and by going through the process with her while she's reading those things i i would still benefit enormously from being with her as as she's learning that stuff so you know would it be easier for me to be with a woman who's 40 years old and who already like myself read karl marx when she was a teenager who already like myself read about chinese communism decades ago and is maybe half forgotten about okay that'd be easier but that would just be kind of affirming my own fatuous certainty in those things now you guys know if you watch channel melissa also while she's with me has read a very large number of books from ancient greece and rome uh more greece than rome you know ancient athens philosophers like aristotle and so on well obviously going through that with her and you know she has questions for me and i have to explain things and stuff the way in which that challenges me the way in which i'm gonna learn even if i'm learning nothing new in reality i learned a ton of news in the last four years i've learned so much new stuff really but even if you just see that as a process of me recapitulating what i already know and share with others i benefit from that tremendously now let's add a significant footnote here do you think there is a 40 year old woman who has already read aristotle and who is not already married with kids i mean like the assumption that that alternative even exists for me is absurd right like if the idea that there is such a woman i could be with right uh the idea that it would be morally imperative for me to reject this younger woman so that i could be with an older woman who again is is hypothetically optimal for me right but what does optimal really mean does it really indicate something about morality or does it just indicate something about laziness i'm just going to return to the guy in the title this video for a moment okay so keemstar he's 39 years old he is a successful internet personality he does news commentary i suppose you could say right you can make a case his life would be easier and in some sense it would be optimal if he could find and fall in love with a 39 year old woman who is also a professional news commentator who is also a highly successful you know you could imagine okay he could be in a power couple with someone his own age his own kind of experience no kind of background right but that's not actually a moral imperative that's actually not an ethical argument and you're actually not even making a claim about something being optimal like who is that advantageous for advantageous for who in what way as opposed to in being in a relationship with somebody that's starkly unequal and it may indeed benefit the the younger person far more than it benefits him so i'm going to get back to reading your uh comments and questions guys feel free to hit the thumbs up button so more people can discover this scandalous conversation feel free to ask more questions that i can that i can answer i'm i'm happy to do so but look you know um i had a friend in laos i was close friends with this guy um so i maybe we were friends for just one year but it was a very close friendship and he was 50 years old the time he went from being 50 to being 51 and he was engaged to be married to a shockingly younger woman so let's say she was 20. i forget this now something to mention about this younger woman she had already been married and divorced so she was 20 but i think she got married the first time at 16. so somehow she got married at 16 and divorced at 18 already so you know um she was she was not an innocent in this in this game she was not innocent specifically in the game of marrying older men and of this guy's circle of friends i was the only one who said sorry i was almost don't do it don't marry her it's bad it's a bad choice you're bad it's it's uh it's it's a bad catch now remember one of his other friends taking me aside and um this other friend was actually kind of furious with me he was like how can you say this how could you say this back and and the reason why he was furious was that he was presuming my argument was kind of like this thing we're talking about today it was kind of like outrage against keemstar for being with a younger woman and i said so i've got to give this guy a fake name now what am i going to do fake name you want a suggestion no john john okay um you know and i remember so this this guy was talking to i said no my argument is not that it's bad for the younger woman i'm actually arguing that this relationship is bad for john you know and i said look how do you describe john at this stage in his life john he was basically someone who could have been a lawyer and decided not to be a lawyer he wanted to have a more creative life and at that time he was an aspiring novelist and working very hard on his first novel okay so 50 years old aspiring novelist right i said he is choosing to be engaged to they didn't get married they did end up canceling um i could tell that story too anyway he is choosing to be engaged to a 20 year old woman who can't read period she's literally illiterate that's a phrase you know you're talking about sharing your life with someone who is never going to appreciate what it is you're doing as an artist as a writer you know however you want to put it someone who's going to be profoundly alienated for you and unable to relate that way now i did not i know okay just being real i was less this is many years ago i was living in vienna so i forgot i'm here so 15 years ago now you know i didn't make the simplistic argument like oh he could be with someone his own age and he probably can't be any woman worth having who's already 50 years old she's already married with kids and unavailable or if she doesn't want kids she's still unavailable if they're women who don't want kids but at age 50 they're spoken for they're off the market but the point is you know look uh even if he was going to be with a woman who say 25 or something we could pick some some age someone who's half his age he's 50 and he's listening he could be with someone who has a degree in english literature you know he could be with someone who has some interest in writing the life of the mind so it can be someone who shares with him these aspirations even if they think his writing is lousy frankly if they don't support that like no like there are really serious questions here about about uh common ground so you know um now what what actually happened uh was quite interesting he dumped his fiancee and started sleeping with a young woman the same age who was employed by his fiancee's mother as a cleaner as like a house cleaner as a like a lowly domestic servant this is in a third world country this is in house now i remember i met i met her too and um she was gorgeous she was a really good-looking young woman the one who was uh i forgot she could have been 21-22 she wasn't a teenager but you know and again in that culture it's actually past the age of getting married he was a really good-looking one but they they all perceived her as ugly like within that culture because she was poor and because she had dark brown skin this isn't uh this is really colorism more than racism but in that culture this perception like oh you have you have dark skin you're poor you do a lot of hard work outside remember but you know i remember the first time that woman so this woman who'd been the the house cleaner came over and and chatted with me i was that time i could speak lotion pretty well times would change i could revive it i remember she just she just seemed really sharp just seemed really smart i think she was someone who never drank alcohol you know it makes a big difference and actually let me tell you a lot of alcoholics there you know we chat a little bit she she just had a nice smile and a nice laugh you know we i made some jokes and you could tell she was smart and i remember i just looked at david like [Laughter] and just in the look you know he he completely broke down he laughed for like eight minutes or something i mean you just gotta be a student i figured i was like i i'd uh i caught the switcheroo in action before it happened i was like oh oh [Laughter] anyway um [Music] yeah so my my criticism um however well intention didn't save his soul but yeah you know okay so all right we got more we have more questions to come to but it was just just an example in real life how you deal with these things and again you know the fact that something is not optimal you know like this is not the best possible scenario for you doesn't mean that it's that it's immoral bad evil and wrong and it also doesn't mean that you have a better alternative so you know i just said melissa and i we've had a wonderful life together these past four years we really have i just i just want to say like in terms even if you just look at this youtube channel we've lived in china we've flown to greece like you know we've kind of flown around the world we lived in taiwan melissa started studying chinese she's currently learning chinese i'm about to probably today i'm going to start studying chinese again i've had a break from studying chinese because i'm writing a book i'm an aspiring writer myself i guess age 42. you know we've had a lot going on but you know we've been around the world we've lived in wonderful conditions you know we've had this very productive very intellectually vital life not so great in terms of youtube views i would have been better off falling in love with jacqueline glenn in terms of the number of youth but you know i don't i don't measure the success or wonderful my life is in terms of my success on youtube but you know no it hasn't it hasn't we haven't been a power couple in terms of uh uh achieving success on youtube but you know in many many ways this has been a wonderful relationship for both of us have had a wonderful life together uh for for four years oh yeah also france germany whatever even where we've been within canada in the united states in a lot of ways despite despite tremendous hurdles like we went to we went to college together and we had to drop out of that college because they hated us because we were vegan that's the whole drama it's ridiculous there have been in this you know there have been kind of very difficult circumstances um to struggle against but like you know it would be very easy for someone on the outside to look at that situation at any point in the last four years to look at that situation say oh well this guy he doesn't have a job he doesn't have a career therefore it would be better what do we mean by better optimal advantageous more you know do you mean more it would be better for you to dump him and find a guy who has a job who has a career isn't that an easy thing to say you know whether you're talking about an age gap difference or might isn't it but maybe what you're actually saying is immoral maybe it's actually evil right maybe what you're actually saying is whatever it is that makes this guy special whatever it is that makes your life together with him wonderful whatever it is that makes this intellectually rewarding and educational and you know taking you around the world that china and greece and everything else maybe all of that counts for nothing you should dump him to get with some anonymous imaginary hypothetical stranger because of this nitpick i'm offering you because of this criticism or this fault i've found people have tremendous faults and and you have to stay in relations with them anyway i mean whether that's business relationships or friendships people can have really serious you know moral failings and an age gap it's actually not a moral failing it's actually not my fault that i'm born in a different year from my girlfriend that's not so chosen if you're an alcoholic it's your fault if you're a gambling addict it's your fault you know frankly if you're just lazy and don't read books it's your you know like there are things that are that are your fault but you know all kinds of people they're in a relationship and they they wish their husband was reading about politics or philosophy instead of watching soccer on tv they wish their husband was motivated intellectually or as a political activist to make the world a better place instead of watching football instead of watching ice hockey on tv but you know they make the decision look this is my man even if he watches ice hockey on tv even if he has these faults and there are some good things about the relationship presumably and you're going to you're going to work with that you're going to work with what possibly you have in common you know um so these are the these are the commitments you make and to to what extent to what extent you know are we all just victims of a trick of language you know whereby in our language and our culture we conflate what is good in a moral sense with what's good in the sense of things being being optimal and even when we talk about things being optimal do we just mean that it's convenient do we just mean that we get to be lazy rather than doing the hard work because a lot of a lot of relationships they can be good but they're they're not easy they're going to entail a lot of a lot of hard work okay all right i got a question from atl richard i legit do not understand so uh i can only answer questions i understand so this this is off topic but maybe right on topic so melora comments that lawyers always need to get sessions with dominatrixes they must need to feel pain to feel alive um you know i i think a lot of people men and women although men and women cope with this differently they live lives in which there is no adventure in which there is no risk and what they want to pay for in the little bit of spare time their job leaves them maybe their job and kids and their family responsibilities the little bit of free time they have left by those responsibilities what they want to pay for is the illusion of doing something risky of doing something adventurous and you wouldn't you see that in the phenomenon of bdsm paying someone to whip you or cause you pain or beat you up you see that in adventure sports things like parachuting or what have you but i even saw that in terms of people going on vacation in cambodia and laos back when those places still were considered dangerous today i don't know maybe laos is now so safe you know there's nothing like that but you know i remember one young man saying to me that you know he was sick of life in the united states because it was just too safe he wanted to be somewhere where he could really risk his life and he managed to do that he raised his life doing incredibly stupid things in southeast asia you know but you know that that idea that you can buy heroism you know and on a really deep level what a lot of men and women i think women cope with it in a different way what a lot of men are lacking is the opportunity to be a hero which relates again to the sense of morality and moral superiority now i just mentioned i have certainly known women who again whether their job is in a cubicle or whatever they have some boring job they have a boring safe marriage and home life they have all those responsibilities and when they want to feel danger when they want to feel like they're taking a risk one of the ways they can do it is of course going to a bar and having sex with strangers or sleeping with their husband men do that too british british men especially that's very british to me that that particular type of of cheating italian men and french men have a totally different way of cheating it's true it's true i'm sorry but it's true when french men cheat on their wives they have a whole parallel like they have all parallel life with the other woman you know but when british men cheat it's about alcohol and the pub and strangers you know different things culturally these these these stereotypes this real reason obviously obviously they're exceptions but you know uh um my point is sexuality itself can offer this kind of false sense of risk adventure and heroism i think heroism is maybe the saddest and sickest part of all people talk about sex as if it's a conquest as if it's an accomplishment as if you've done something great and you know what what have you really done you know you've you've found someone who's who's who's willing to love you or try you know it's no no heroics there there's no uh there's no real risk either you know [Music] all right that's a great question although i feel it's another video so atlanta richard says lol isil gave me the advice that i should dominate my budding relationship with a lady because she was not vegan uh for some democratic couples would work though uh okay so this is poorly poor grammar addiction i know i know the kind of situation you're talking about and i can imagine whatever email we had we had back back and forth you know so this comes back to what i said now at the beginning of this video uh maybe instead of um [Music] maybe instead of regarding relationships as being optimally egalitarian maybe we can admit to ourselves that in all relationships each partner dominates the other in turns from time to time for one subject rather than another so if you're in a relationship where one person is a vegan they feel very passionately about their diet their ethics morality in this province and the other person is just indifferent to this issue like there's no reason to assume a vegan is dating someone who is a pro-meat activist that there's someone who actually feels it's morally positive to kill and eat animals they're probably someone who grew up with default assumptions about the diet and life you know they don't care passionate about one or another it is natural to assume that in that relationship the vegan is going to dominate the non-vegan in that part of their life now you guys may not know this i used to be single it happens i know what i know it's amazing to think that we was ever any time in my life known as but you know you know i had the the possibility or the probability or the option of being in relationships with women who were way more physically fit than i was women who really go to the gym and really care about that really put in a lot of work now i i wouldn't say i'm totally indifferent to my own physical fitness it's not that high priority so for the last like six months writing my book has been a way higher priority than going to the gym and i've actually been talking about that with my girlfriend like look as soon as i finish the book i'm going to spend more time at the gym but they they really did compete for time and priority in life so if i'm writing a book the gym doesn't matter as much that's that's the way i'm living right and you know there are certain standards i hold myself to in terms of fitness but you know if i had instead of starting this relationship with melissa if i had gotten with one of her several uh competitors at that time it's totally possible i could have been in a relationship with someone who was really passionate about and really putting a high priority on going to the gym and then she would have in that respect dominated me in my life that there would have been pressure on me even if just to go to the gym as often as she just to physically make the trip to the gym at the same time there would have been pressure on me to to have that in my life in the same way and why not like what's what's wrong with that like we can dominate each other and have a positive relationship that's good for each of us where each of us is holding the other higher standards now if i had been with one of those women we're talking about particular women here we're not generalizing i would have probably created a lot of pressure on them to read more books and know more about politics and talk and think in a much more erudite way than they ever had in the past you know that's that would have been pressure um going the other way in that in that respect and if they didn't want that they wouldn't you know they wouldn't want to be in a relationship with me i mean some women you know they actively want that uh stimulus to kind of be all they can be in that sector and vice versa it'd be totally sensible for a man to want to be with a woman who's really athletic because the man man thinks hey me too i can be more athlete so you know i just say i don't in this sense i don't see veganism as any kind of special issue that way i think it's a typical issue when we're talking about inequality and domination so let's come back to the title of the video here briefly the illusion is that keemstar's relationship with a 20 year old woman is immoral because they will be unequal in all things because the power dynamic the the power dynamic and quotation marks whatever that means right that it will mean that keemstar is exercising dominion over her in every process i just say anyone says that you don't know people you don't know relationships you don't know the extent to which the 20 year old woman can be in charge in nine areas at a 10. and certainly in terms of you know youtubing that's keemstar's area of greatest strength in terms of like the actual performance side of what is of course he would be dominant because this is his whole career it's his whole area of talent and it's what he's putting all his time and energy into but really every single other thing in his life the woman could be dominating him and he could be making the decisions partly because he doesn't have the time that he doesn't he doesn't make it his priority you don't know you don't know who's in charge in that relationship there's absolutely no reason for that there's no reason to assume it's some kind of slavery and again what are the implications are you really going to argue or are you really going to assume without arguing it that any relationship that has an inequality of a power dynamic is immoral that to me really does entail sort of beta male morality that every man that entails the tenet that every man ought to be a beta male you know so it looks we have a question a good question from do you want to give me lucas stop sexualizing my comment section so that's that's the person's name is do you want me that says out of curiosity would you consider doing in afghanistan last year you know i'd love to i want to make more videos talking about afghanistan i care about it a lot unfortunately i feel like my own audience doesn't care very much about it but yeah i'd love to talk about talk a bit more and i think about it all the time right now so yeah it's very much on my mind and on my heart frankly what's what's going on afghanistan um i have made videos about it in the past you can look up unsurprisingly um but yeah all right uh griff mccoy says ditching the beta dynamic helps my own relationship a ton but it is very hard being lazy and giving the girlfriend dominion feels good and she even likes it in the short term but not the long term so here's someone who has real world experience sorry i was going to say before you know when i was involved with buddhism there was this really weird division between people within like buddhist studies buddhist research buddhist scholarship whatever there were people who knew buddhism in real life they'd been to cambodia they'd been in the rice fields they'd been in the like they knew the anthropological reality of buddhism in cambodia doesn't matter if you use cambodia sri lanka myanmar whatever the example is they've lived with the reality in the field and there were all these people who only knew about it on reddit like they were reddit buddhists they were internet only but internet chat forum plus and you know you get into conversations people and sometimes only after a little while you figure out who they are oh you're one of these people who doesn't have real life experience yes so griff mccoy um you know i i totally relate to what you're saying and you know i have had relationships in the past look laziness is common to both genders there's nothing feminine about there's nothing the vast majority of people are lazy the vast majority of the time like even if you're hard working in one part of your life you're lazy in other parts of your life like this theoretical lawyer we keep talking about he's hard-working at his law office in the law firm but then he's lazy about everything else's life it's very it's very common they're only some parts of your life and like i'm hard-working intellectually but maybe i'm lazy with everything else you know like really i can i can criticize myself maybe there are other things i'm i'm lazy about just look at this kitchen no no seriously though seriously um uh within this year the amount of time we spend cooking it's it's dropped to almost zero because we both have other parts i mean melissa also has really is things she's devoted to doing with her time intellectually like melissa's now studying chinese chinese takes all the time you can put into it we used to bake from scratch i used to bake bread melissa baked uh cakes and other things from scratch and we stopped baking i am not complaining i'm totally happy but i used to make pasta i'd make red sauce like tomato sauce some scratches a lot of time you know making it and cleaning up i'm doing anything we used to make pancakes if any of you guys know me i would use to send out pictures on my social media the food i was cooking and stuff i don't do any of that anymore we do we do broccoli beans protein powder corn pops shout out to corn pops [Laughter] you know what i mean like um uh so you know that is an example of laziness where it's like look i want to put all my time and energy into what i'm doing uh productively but look you know so in terms of this comment from griff griff mccoy um yeah you know like i really i really feel you and the question the question can be i mean okay why does it feel good to be lazy you know it feels good partly because you're trusting the other person to make those decisions for you that's exactly the same for men and women right it's exactly the same for the older or younger person it feels good whether you're 10 years younger than another person you're 10 years old the other person to sit there and say okay you know what she's going to choose the airplane tickets for me you know what i mean or vice versa whatever this thing is i'm using airplane tickets because there were real consequences if they bought bad airplanes like what the hell did you do you know you picked the wrong airplane and you know um i mean i mentioned recently i was in i was in this relationship with a very good-looking blonde woman many years ago i referred to as my blonde ex-girlfriend for that reason so i only had one who was blonde and like you know you get to a point in the relationship where you just realize if this relationship is going to continue i have to be the dominant decisive person for everything forever i'm always going to have to buy the airplane tickets i'm always gonna have to examine everything and make whole decisions down to every every detail and that feels awful it feels terrible to feel like you can never trust the other person and yet in this sense that you can you can never be lazy so i think every relationship is going to have a push and pull this way oh and by the way my blonde ex-girlfriend she's older than i am it's not it's not an age gap relationship that's an intellectual gap relationship she's older than i am she was then and she still is now you know um so yeah you know um all right so hold on we got a lot of comments coming in junebug says there are red flags women need to watch out for when older men are interested in you okay junebug that's true but it's also true of younger men it's also true of men the same age right i'm sorry but like oh my god do you know how i mean look so juba i'm not saying this students told you have you tried dating 19 year old men like do you know how dangerous and screwed up it is to be in a relationship with 19 year old woman do you know how tumultuous how hard to control how you know what i mean do you know how rough it is to be in a relationship with a 19 year old man like what if you talk about a 30 year old woman with a 19 year old man you got your you got your work cut out for you you know what i mean and guys like i would i would not have been easy to date at 19 either like i know what i was like at 19. great in the sack i'm wait i'm way better in bed now i mean i'm sorry but that's also the reality is most most guys get better at sex as they get older uh anyway yeah and you know and that that's a factor too i mean whenever you're comparing whenever you're talking about age how important is age in the age gap compared to any other one factor whether that's emotional intellectual or even sexual would you rather be with someone the sage same age as yourself if the sex is terrible or someone with a 10-year age gap and that the sex is great and may not be the most important thing in life but my point is even just one factor like that will be more important than the age gap just like veganism just like uh politics or religion like oh someone might say to me hey hey eisel you can be with a woman who's the same age as you uh but she's catholic i mean like one factor like just one factor the age gap is going to be of trivial significance compared to just one factor like that in terms of the difference between people what brings them together and what what keeps them apart so yes so junebug look i i don't disagree with this um she says there are red flags women need to watch out for so i was looking today at the youtube channel of dax flame i'm just gonna put in his name in case you in case you don't know dax flame he's a youtuber terrible channel don't don't watch it um so tax flame is now 29 years old right what advice would you give to a woman if she says she's going to fall in love with she's gonna start a relationship with dax flame how would that advice be different if the woman were five years younger the same age or five years older how would it be different 10 years younger same age 10 years older like there were red flags with that guy i've it could be for any guy if you don't know what i'm talking about doesn't matter there are a lot of red flags there's a lot wrong with that dude right but you know the the significance of age regarding isolation right it's like before when i was talking about someone who's a drug addict or someone who's a gambler you know whatever it is well if someone's a drug addict and they're the same age as you oh you know i'm sorry the red flag is a red flag either way so yeah a reason reasonable point but in this sophisticated sense i i disagree with you okay all right so so okay here's another good question so dude i'm taking this question completely seriously i'm not going to insult you or dehumanize you most people would just insult you for saying this man goenka says quote wouldn't it be fair to say that it is easier for you to be in a relationship with a 20 year old due to her being less assertive as a function of rage close quote do you know the meaning of the word you think 20 year olds don't throw tantrums you think 20 year olds don't throw their shoes at you you think they don't throw plates at you you think 20 year olds don't have meltdowns you think 20 year olds don't scream at you you think 20 year olds don't kick you out and you have to sleep in a hotel for a night or they go out and sleep and stuff you think 20 year olds don't cheat on you to get revenge like you think 20 year olds like it gets worse but like are you joking in terms of being assertive you know like i get i get the stereotype i get where you're coming from here like you are assuming that someone who's 20 is going to be more diffident more submissive than someone who's 30. that is a completely false assumption someone who's 20 is gonna have less self-control and less self-discipline and less experience than someone who's 30. and they are going to handle the same emotions in a more violent and more ultimately childish way than someone who's 30. so like you you talk about the same conflict it's like i don't know let's get a kind of mediocre normal relationship conflict like we were saving up this money for us to have a vacation together but instead you went and spent the money on on something else so this is kind of mediocre couple conflict how does a 20 year old handle that conflict how does a 30 year old handle that conflict so i'm i am not saying this to insult you uh man i'm going to i like i'm not i just i genuinely disagree with you right now if you don't really know people like if you don't really know what a relationship is like inside and out maybe you just see see let's say you have a dude who's 30 years old and his girlfriend is 20 and you just see them out eating dinner like you meet them at a rest your two couples together and you see well the 20 year old just kind of sits there quietly because she doesn't have much to say in the conversation you might be imputing or inferring from that that she is submissive in all things but you're you're dead wrong all right you're completely wrong now you're saying her being less assertive right she may be more ignorant about the things she's being assertive but it doesn't make you less assertive you know have you ever heard the sentence i want i want have you had someone screaming at you i want blank before have you had a 20 year old screaming at you i want fun really i'm sorry and you know the same conflict how a 30 year old would handle it like a 30 year old might also say to you look i want blank but the way they say it and the way the conflict is negotiated the way it's dealt with it's going to be different you know [Laughter] melissa is contributing a lot here just through eye contact and facial expressions she knows she knows what i'm talking um okay and and you know look guys i'm not saying i really sympathized any of this stuff um you know i think it still is worthwhile to talk about the way in which these things can be can be bad and evil and wrong i'm not i'm not cheerleading for for keemstar here i think that the moral condemnation of keemstar reveals a lot of things that are fundamentally bad and evil and wrong in our culture you know that's that's really my point here i came here with kind of two big points about that um and one is like look are we assuming that every relationship morally ought to be a beta male with a dominant female and i mean if so geez the competition for a good woman is intense just just to find a good woman it's intense but if if i wanted a woman who could dominate me intellectually think about how intense the competition for that is before i was married to a woman with a phd from cambridge university i wanted someone who was my equal or my superior if i could get it great i was just saying great let's if let's find someone who's better than me i'd be so happy to be in a relationship with someone who can look down on me as their intellectual inferior how how many women do you think they are of any age who in that sense like are you know are able to dominate me or able to look at me could i could i be with a woman who would read my essay about chinese politics let's say i'm writing an essay about chinese pokemon just like yeah well that's quaint like oh eisel you're a beginner like you know a woman who's so much further advanced just in chinese politics to give an example a woman who would read what i'm writing about aristotle and be so anxious yeah you know why though this is the kind of thing i used to write like 20 years ago like all right like you know you think this is an option you know you think you know in the whole world like you know how and it doesn't matter so i'm saying intellectually but you know like the the presumption the person so but if i could have that if i could and being real with you i mean there was one woman i i didn't like her voice that's why i lost interest she's possible she's watching this right now there was a woman who was a professor of philosophy and she was trying to get with me just a few months before i i got with melissa and so when a situation goes with me we're all adults here this is not teenage you know she was talking to me and you talk about in a respectful way hey this is your situation in life this is my situation why it wasn't wasn't some kind of crazy seduction or something you know what i mean um and you know anyway so i really i really didn't like her voice she was very good looking but i remember we talked we talked on skype just once and the voice the voice didn't do with me but like you know so let's just say this woman and i i don't i don't think she was really that that intellectually uh advanced but let's say for the sake of argument this woman who's a professor of philosophy um let's say she really is my superior intellectual and she can look down on me on some of these topics like aristotle okay are we really saying that that is morally superior to my being with a younger woman where i'm helping her make progress reading the same philosophy let's just say it's aristotle in all cases i'm with a woman who's more advanced than me and helping me with aristotle as opposed to i'm with a younger woman who's less advanced and i'm helping her learn aristotle why what's the moral difference it's the same relationship twice over right like you're the comparison there isn't a difference between good and evil and then beyond that if we're saying that one is optimal and the other is sub-optimal what what do we really mean right because actually it's the same imposition like if you're saying what it's kind of stifling me that i have to help someone who knows less about aristotle than i do well with the other woman it would be stifling her to help me so you know again i think it's a big big deep profound problem and i admit most people are not interested in aristotle not all my examples have been so have been so erudite but whether you're talking about aristotle you're talking about buying airplane tickets or having a screaming fight with one another uh over family finances you know what i mean there's this same question of superiority and inferiority inferiority dominance participation and the the democracy on a tiny scale that exists uh within a relationship um all right a lot of quality comments here guys thanks for thanks for contributing to the conversation all right so another one from men and goenka so he's obviously been told this by by his friends by personal friends menen gomenka says quote uh he says i think and it has been told to me by these men that it is easier to be in a relationship with someone way younger so why would that be different with the gender is reversed right again i i just i sincerely disagree with you okay i mean you know something as simple as asking your wife or girlfriend to do something for you if you are with someone who is older and experienced and they already know how to do it that's easier than someone where you have to teach them and coach them through it and help them and educate them at every step of the way to do it right i'm sorry but in terms of what's easier right no it's easier to be with someone who's already got all the training and all the life experience you know um you know sorry we made a trip to bangkok thailand once this is a no big deal low pressure you know thing okay so i'm older i'm more i've lived in bangkok i've worked in bangkok i've been there many times so when i go to bangkok with a younger girlfriend melissa i do everything for her and i'm explaining everything getting from the airport to downtown and the subway and the train says that i'm taking her to the museums i'm talking to her about the history and politics right it would be totally different if i were with a woman my same age at the same level of experience a woman who herself knows the way around bangkok airport and can do all that stuff for you that you can do it with you as an equal she can do it for you right uh you know but i'm sorry i think this is a real misconception you know what what do you mean by easier so no for the older party it's gonna be harder to be with a young person in every way including their ability to cope with stress so yeah this is nothing scandalous but there have been times when just the stress of dealing with things at an airport melissa is kind of freaked out and snapped at me and been really rude at an airport you know what i mean i we can all relate to that like i'm just saying i don't i don't i'm not like that myself that's just not how i cope with stress but i can totally sympathize that she's freaking out because she's kind of overwhelmed with dealing with these situations in airports these are sometimes airports and third world countries you know whatever you know there's different kinds of stress that goes into it you're dealing with the luggage and this weird bureaucracy or whatever you know um no an older person wouldn't freak out that way at the airport and melissa today wouldn't freak out that way she's had a couple more years of experience and so forth so no i i really don't i really don't agree with you what's meant by by easy right now reciprocally though i am helping her like i'm making it easier for her because i do have that age and experience i also have that detachment self-discipline and self-control so you know if if melissa had been dating me when i was 19 years old i couldn't do that with her you know what i mean like you know if sorry if we're both 19 years old uh hypothetically which is impossible obviously but when i was younger there was a time when i was struggling to cope with those things um and whether it's the airport or doing the dry cleaning or the financial stresses and savings or whatever you know or all the things that happen with pregnancy and raising a kid and dealing with hospitals and medical authorities and schools you know i'm sorry but but real life cooperating with someone when you have a kid in the school system or you have a kid and you got to deal with doctors no age and self-discipline and it really matters sure and so it's it's in no way easier to be with someone younger than yourself it's harder at every stage including it's harder just to deal with arguments and disagreements absolutely it is so so new crowd i do not remember you new baby if if you've been here before i think i remember the name huge baby says quote hope i'm not overstepping but i'm wondering if you'll ever go into repairing your relationship with melissa i remember you uploaded a video about breaking up and now she's uh uh awesome videos on your channel so thanks for that thanks for the compliment i'd love i'd like to you have some creative input into melissa's you guys can probably tell but yeah i am collaborating with her and making those videos and i i think i think i'm i'm i think i'm helping you improve with the quality of views at some point at some point i'm sure she'll do it this is actually a great example of this kind of age gap relationship thing i'm sure at some point you'll be able to do 100 solo but currently i do i do participate and are making your videos and i influence them in various ways for the better rather than worse so anyway so uh to continue this comment from niche baby a pretty big turnaround might be some life lessons in that story well i think that videos like this are about that i mean i i agree that's a big part of the story arc on this channel was just how tough just how difficult the relationship with melissa was for me not for you know no offense you know but it was very asymmetrical in this way i'm i'm talking about here you know obviously i'm not going to say absolutely everything this relationship was was easy for melissa but this was a relationship where i could provide a lot more and i could cope a lot more and where i could comfort her a lot more so again i'm not going to say anything scandalous here but there were many many times when melissa lost her temper and created a problem in the relationship and then even though she was the one who had created the problem i had to be the one who was calm and attached and helpful and solve the problem you know what i mean it wasn't a situation where i could suffer or weep or something or i could i could endure these things and expect her to step up and solve the problem so you know it's like i had to be responsible even when i wasn't the one responsible when i shouldn't be responsible and again a lot of a lot of age gap relationships are going to be like that whether it's the man who's older or the woman's mother the only thing i can add is some people are incredibly immature at an older age you can also someone who has all the disadvantages of being older but but none of the um none of the advantages so i i just find this interesting mangoenka is continuing he says taking your example isn't it easier for you so isn't it easier for me in terms of what you have to do for your partner and what you gains out of the relationship to be with someone who's reading karl marx right now as compared to someone who is for example a female version of you wouldn't you have to sacrifice or work more for no it's completely the other way around no so again i i don't know so men and going i'll give you an example that that makes this real clear when i met melissa she spoke zero chinese she didn't know hello she didn't know i am she couldn't say one word in chinese she'd never read any choice i i had studied chinese for a couple of years however you want to measure that so i had to teach her chinese i remember i taught her how to say i am in chile we started with the absolute basic here's how to hold the pen here's what i i taught her the absolute simplest route yeah you know you know when you do wool you know like starting with the absolute simplest rudiments of chinese so i taught her the chinese language from level zero and the phonetic distinctions remember we used to go for long walks together and while we were walking i pointed a sign and pronounced the words okay now this is that thing you couldn't pronounce before and again it's easy to forget that now but this is the most important root of miss language now you get to take it for granted like the phonetic distinctions that real bedrock learning you know so you know language makes this very easy to relate to very easy to understand and it wouldn't matter if it were chinese or english or italian or some other language but in this case it happens to be chinese so if you say wouldn't it be easier to be with younger person no it would be easier for me to be with someone who has already studied chinese for 10 years of course of course that would be easier i wouldn't have to do any of that work and on the country they could help me you know now as i said at the beginning of this video there's a sense in which it helps me to to explain those things you know i get to kind of learn it again and go through that process but no in terms of easier you know no it's not easier the question i'm raising getting is how do we make moral judgments about this how do we make ethical judgments about it and how do we even make judgments about what's what's optimal you know but i've gone back and re-learned the basics of chinese in in teaching her but it's hard work just the number of hours is tremendous and by the way i mean i think that's a tremendously positive thing in melissa's life i think she's benefited from it at every stage including like when we were first starting four years ago it's very different what was going on at that time of relationship versus now in terms of learning languages and so on but yeah yeah yeah um all right sorry i have a lot of i have a lot of comments here and i am actually trying to read all of them so just give me one give me one second guys okay so junebug says i think this is an inevitable facet of the conversation junebug says still there were gray areas of the young adults and older adults uh you just need to keep an eye on the predatory ones groomers who target girls when they're under age like 17 dot dot dot thinking of anessian lol um okay this is my honest response to that you'll notice if you watch my videos over time there's a lot of vocabulary that i very intentionally avoid using that's because it's vague now vagueness is neither good nor evil but i think it has a really deleterious effect on us intellectually and morally when we rely on vague concepts what does predatory mean what does abuse or abusive mean now in some particular context we've added a lot of other words to the paragraph it may be clear what you mean but relying on these words alone i think actually leads people into i think it's a crucial part of the unexamined life being trapped in the loop of living in an example life and that's what i see going on with this language about power dynamic which is what i'm challenging in this video as a whole the idea that there's a power dynamic that in a self-explanatory way makes something good or evil okay instead of talking about what's predatory let me challenge you to think in terms of short-term versus long-term and in terms of what is self-centered and selfish as opposed to what is really about mutual benefit and benefiting others i think that's the kind of two criterion access that's what's really really important here now okay i don't most people you don't know who we're talking about when we say an scn he's become an incredibly obscure figure on the internet after being um after being famous for quite some time you know okay if you're in a relationship with someone who's 10 years younger than you let's say against someone who's 30 with someone who's who's 20. um [Music] are you getting involved in that relationship for reasons that are short term and self-serving are you getting in that relationship for reasons that are that are long-term and that really are explicitly thought in terms of benefiting the other person and benefiting the two of you together so whether you think that is mutually or both people in question i think that's what's really important and once you recognize those criteria then the question of the age gap suddenly becomes much less important because the same problems can exist between two people who are both 30 years old and they do you know there are people in their 30s who get into really exploitative unequal relationships where people just have a short-term uh short-term sexual exploitative attitude towards uh one another um [Music] now you know i'm just gonna press a little bit further when we're talking about people who are 30 40 50 we're mostly talking about married people we're mostly talking about people who are not single and we're mostly talking about them having extramarital affairs or some kind of swinging open relationship and you you are talking about but that can't be a man who is 30 having sex with a woman other than his wife but his interest in her and his interest in his engagement in that relationship is purely self-centered selfish self-serving and purely short-term right i think there's a really important sense in which that's evil right and the age gap doesn't really change it much one way or the other now some of you will know right away what i'm talking about some of you won't it is very possible for a young woman a woman of 20 to be in a relationship with an older man where she is the one who is self-serving self-centered selfish and is viewing this as a very short-term thing where it's an exploitative relationship and where she's the one who's who's doing the exploitation you know now stereotypically this is when it's a wealthy older man and the younger woman is basically taking his money away from him there's a lot of that that goes on and it happens differently in american culture and italian culture and in japanese culture but you know there are a lot of older men who are susceptible to that and there are some young women it's a very small percentage but there are some young women who in a very canny intentional way are in that in that sense exploiting uh the older man in their relationship and if anyone finds that hard to visualize guess what it happens in the gay community to a massive extent you can have young men who are hustlers who know exactly what it is they're they're selling so to speak who are pursuing and taking advantage of older gay men and the same kind of the same kind of thing so you know um short term versus long term really matters and i think it matters from day one you know if you're just flirting with someone in your instagram dms is this somebody you want to know for the rest of their lives like you know maybe you have sex for three months you know you have a short term like the actual love affair is brief but there's someone you remain friends with or someone you may concerned about there's someone who's life you're contributing to positively until you're 90 years old you know and that's what you like from the beginning you know this is someone i want to care about and like in that sense support for this lifestyle when you say support i don't mean financially but you know they're going to go on maybe and get married to someone else and if kids but you still want to support them and know them you still want to be part of their community in that positive way um that is a very fundamentally wholesome dynamic that's massively undervalued in our society as opposed to you know people using each other as a you know as a short-term solution to a short-term selfish problem you know so i i that that's that's my answer to that great question from michael harvey michael harvey says quote a 20 year old woman is more likely to set your clothes on fire and key your car because you didn't message back quickly enough facts years ago i made a video talking about teenagers and teenage behavior and i said i i think it was i think it was about an issue it was criticizing i said do you know any 16 year olds if you know a 16 year old girl look at how she treats her own best friend like two female 16 year olds a 16 year old girl and her 16 year old female best friend look at the unbelievable cruelty and barbarity of a 16 year old treats her own best friend or her friend's plural right and now compare that to a 26 year old a 36 year old a 46 year old how you treat your friends or your colleagues even when you have really deep divisions between you even when there really is something to to fight over you know and yeah just the violence of the emotions the lack of detachment the lack of self-discipline that you're dealing with it's it's a big it's a big issue but on the other hand you know how is anyone supposed to progress if they don't start taking on bigger responsibilities and grander ambitions you know so melissa has made a lot of progress since she started a relationship with me and she started to really take on more responsibility and more more ambitions and have further horizons in her life so she starts to develop into a better person more rapidly she would have had some personal growth you know foreign but it it really it really steps up your game and steps up the intensity you step up your own efforts and the rewards you're getting for those efforts are way uh look wow this is a great example i do a live stream talking about the war in afghanistan and nobody has anything to say i do a live stream talking about age gap relationships i get a lot of real quality really wonderful quality uh constantine so uh paprika says quote in my experience either party can exploit the other similar to what i was just saying she says quote a 20 year old can control and exploit a 40 year old just as much as a 40 year old can exploit a 20 year old close quote yes i do however think it's natural that people presume the opposite you know i can't fault people in the audience for assuming someone who's 40 will be older and wiser and more powerful but i completely agree with you often enough in life paradoxically it's it's the other way around there's no no doubt about that um [Music] you know getting older is not getting wiser but getting older is an opportunity to get one okay june bug says quote when you do this deep dive into it i can see the nuance but i don't imagine your average joe lusting after a an 18 year old having those same most thoughts okay so junebug um thanks by the way i can take the compliment thanks um okay look you know i think part of the problem here is the difference between looking at a photograph and looking into someone's eyes in real life and dealing with them a person to person okay uh there are 18 year olds and like again i think a good example are olympic athletes whether male or female like if you look at an 18 year old who's an olympic athlete male or female they have the body of a 25 year old like they're they are the most developed 18 year olds in the world they don't have a typical uh 18 year old body or something and i think i don't know if there's no minimum age in the olympics it used to be there were 16 year olds and things there were there were younger people i don't know that varies from support to sport now if you know once in a while there's someone who's really talented at their sport and they're at the olympics you know even even younger than 18 but if someone is an olympic athlete you can take a photograph of them you know at the olympics and just wow you know the their body and face and maybe also even the sense of uh ambition that's in their eyes or something that can look incredibly attractive but you know if you actually sit and talk to that person face to face for one hour they're young they're dumb they're ignorant they're probably on an ego trip that's really reverberative and all they know about is basketball you know whether it's a woman from the women's basketball team or a young man like you know this is going to be the kind of shallowest stupid person uh imaginable you know yes you know the problem is most people they think about 18 year olds as as instagram models whether instagram models or uh olympic athletes or or hollywood actresses or or what have you and you know the the image may be attractive but who they are when you talk to them is really quite another thing so i'm going to tell a story really briefly but this has always struck me in real life just actually talking to people who's actually relating to people there was a teenage girl who was taller than i am with her shoes on so i think her natural height was was six foot two i'm i'm six foot three in the morning uh the spine collapses as the day is on so depending when you bump into me i may look six foot two or six with three remember this girl i mean she wore heels that gave her some elevation so she'd be taller than me she was a teenage girl and she was brought in to my german class i was learning german as a language at that time uh because of this like work study program this in their school system do this kind of thing so she came in and at a distance like even if you're just three meters away from her she looked 25 years old she didn't look she didn't look like a teenager she looked like a fully grown adult absolutely and by the way because she was coming in to be an assistant teacher as far as she was wearing kind of conservative clothes that a that a 30 year old teacher would wear she was kind of frumpy outfit which is totally appropriate for being a teacher and yeah at a distance like down the hallway or even just like if you're sitting at the back of the classroom and she's in the front class you think she was 25 years old you might think she was 30 years old and always when she came over to correct uh the work i was doing in german i was sitting and talking with another person german now i may be getting the example wrong but it was something like that she came over to correct it and she just started rubbing out she started striking what i was saying and correcting it and me and the guy sitting at each other we were working on this journalism we're looking at like what what the hell is the matter with you and the the older professor so he was like 50 years old the guy who was the main professor he just just seen the expressions in her face he comes over and he's looking he's like why are you why are you rubbing that out that was that was correct that was really correct and what it was was i described i'd written in german about an airplane landing on pontoons on the water and she was like oh well no he must have made a mistake airplanes can't land on the water and i mean everything about her the look in her eyes and the way she's talking you know you realize this is a child in an adult's body you know what i mean like you know as soon as you're interacting with her as soon as you're talking to her um you know if anything you feel kind of pity for her you don't you know it's it's very different from looking at a perfectly foes pardon me it's very different from looking at a perfectly posed photograph on instagram or an image of an olympic athlete running over the line you know what you fall in love with isn't a photograph it's the whole person and what you get into bed with and have a relationship with isn't the photograph it's the whole person and that's again a reason to emphasize long-term relationships and not having just selfish motivations but motivations that really um consider the benefit of the other person so yeah i think those are really the ultimate uh limits for dealing with dealing with younger people um and i think younger people themselves would admit that if you just talk it through with them hypothetically if you ask them about their perspective and talk it through um you're dealing with the same yeah you know something i say all the time is you can't ask people to be more mature than they are you know you can't ask people to take responsibility for things they're not responsible for right so think about what it's like to be in a relationship with someone who can't take responsibility you can't be responsible even if they promise you that they will even if they want to you know like they they can't do it you know um it's a terrible thing whether you're talking about someone who's a drug addict and they're irresponsible for that reason or someone who's so young that they're not capable of taking responsibility for their actions their decisions in the way that an adult would okay uh raph daily says not related to the video but wondering wondering when we'll get to see you speak on a political topic in chinese like the rest of your videos wow we'll see man i've done it in the past but well we'll see um i'm going to be a full-time student of chinese just a few weeks from now we'll see how much i get back into chinese but it's not very rewarding for me to do that on the internet um yeah i don't know i i i could talk about it for half an hour now but i think there's no point great anyway great question thanks for taking time to write down wrath men says i really appreciate the earnest answers and the almost correct pronunciation of my hard to pronounce name so uh mana and i used to study pali sopali is a a language from india but it's an ancient language uh from india so i can i can pronounce words in pali i can pronounce words in sanskrit okay but i've never studied a modern language from india so wherever you're from uh it may be pronounced a little bit differently just catching up with your comments guys plenty of quality meaningful comments coming in that i i can't respond to all them so natasha says i think the key distinction is that you don't value what's easier for its own sake okay good good comment natasha but let me let me ask why and then answer it right because this comes up with people in my life reasons unrelated to sex right okay you know there are all kinds of things where i say to people why would it be easy i said is that what you want do you want to do the easiest thing do you want to take the easy way are you sure are you sure you want it to be easy are you sure hey like i say this to friends of mine all the time right why not take the easiest path why not right because the question is what kind of person am i what kind of person do i want to become i don't want it easy you know i want to take the harder path so i become the harder man uh chris giovannetti says i'm curious to know why you feel it's important to learn chinese i think i can just take one second now and uh get you the video on that i mean i think i think i have a perfect video melissa's in it too the two of us talking and title is something like the time to learn chinese is now so i think that is a good video to shout out sorry guys let's just take a break this will briefly delay this video i can't find it i can't find it there we go the time to learn chinese is right now and um you'll see it as a very memorable um very memorable thumbnail but yeah i i i have to invoke youtubers privilege here and not uh daryl and answer your question because i've already answered it in a dedicated video on topic and to me that's a very meaningful video i've shared it with friends of mine who responded by one of my friends he he dropped his major in university and he was talking about learning chinese instead i don't know if he'll do it i don't know if he'll actually switch but he decided to drop his major and do something else and he was talking to me saying he was going to drop his major and learn chinese so i know that video has impacted a lot of people um in a significant way in their lives okay so menenganka says totally good point quote moral judgments i think are irrelevant to these considerations about what is easier or optimal okay so i'm going to argue against myself here all right okay so we've been talking about what's good for me whoever me is me you keemstar anissian talk about what's good for me what is good for oneself we've been talking about what is good for the other person the person you're in love with who may be 10 years older than you and they may be 10 years younger than you okay but there's a third category here that we have not been explicitly mentioning at all hasn't gone this video that's what is good for society as a whole when you scale it up right that is the basis on which people impute moral significance ethical significance and moral judgments to this right what people will say is oh if everyone dated somebody 10 years old themselves society would collapse if you know if if all of the older men were dating younger women society would collapse or vice versa if it was all older women with younger men societal collapse they're they're scaling it up and they're proceeding from the assumption that whatever cannot be viable for everyone should be viable for no one this is a false cantianism so to speak this is a candy immorality this way of this way of thinking okay and here is the counter argument if everyone became a medical doctor society would collapse if everyone became a philosopher society would collapse if everyone became a political leader society would collapse if everyone became a filmmaker society collapsed and there was absolutely no moral argument there for whether or not i should become a filmmaker whether or not i should study philosophy whether or not i should become a medical doctor right you're correct if everyone did the same thing society would collapse but the ultimate conclusion of that is that everyone should not do the same thing it doesn't actually have that implication for any one particular thing right some people should become medical doctors some not others some people should be in relationships with a person 10 years older or 10 years younger not others all right so that's a totally self-defeating way of thinking of of taking this question and scaling it up for society as a whole and then drawing moral judgments that's a third category that we managed to get more than an hour of the way through this video without mentioning without it coming up at all but that's what's going on people's minds now i might say some people who know melissa in real life some people are going to leave completely unnamed and undescribed some people who know melissa think that way some people think it is morally wrong for me to be in relation with melissa even though we're more than four years deep into this and you can see the good and the bad of it the harm and the advantages and the disadvantages you can draw your own conclusions about this and how much it's benefited melissa certainly right and they still think this is morally wrong for me they still think this is morally wrong in principle because they claim if everyone did it it would be bad like it's not something i would also compare this to racism you know i mean there are people who are opposed to different ethnic groups having kids together because they say oh well if everyone did it you know what what would happen then and it's a really it's a false optic it's a it's the framing of the problem that's profoundly it makes the question not worth answering you know put it that way okay a question do i speak russian no i do not one of my grandfathers was fluent in russian and it died out in my family so you know my own mother did not learn uh russian from her father um i have considered learning russian at one point in my life in many ways a very unappealing language for me to study compared to the many many different languages i have said junebug says that he or she uh remembers seeing an afghan-related stream yes i did i recently a few days ago i did a live stream on afghanistan and i may do another one in future we will see um okay get a thanks from chris for uh uh the link to the chinese language video oh good i hope i hope you get all the joy and the misery of that video because learning chinese is one hell of a lot of work it's a big decision to make oh wow this guy should get his own youtube channel so someone in the audience called ben says that he was 20 years old and his ex-girlfriend or ex-wife was 27. quote she never worked and i was the breadwinner i fell into the mgtw it's a subculture here on the internet um basically if it's not if it's not misogynistic what is i have to ask you it's a so-called pro-man occult that really is anti-woman and he says he fell into the mgtow cult and left her after four years he then later left mgtow as it serve its purpose i guess he says he thinks he was too young and too stupid wow so dude you gotta you gotta start your own youtube channel and talk about that um you know i want to ask something else and this this really is one of the most taboo topics of all is you know how old does someone have to be to handle marriage to handle raising children you know let alone to handle being in a relationship of the kind we're presuming in the western world where dating and messing around goes on for years before you're committed to uh marriage and raising children that that kind of relationship you know um many many years ago when i was single in in china what i found was that i met a lot of young women who were really mature for their age because they had started working in a convenience store at like age 15 or 16 like they'd just taken on some responsibilities that way running a shop talking to customers also in a totally non-sexualized workplace you know it's not like being a bartender or something where you flirt with people but like they had the experience of working in a small shop grocery store maybe even a restaurant or something their parents had this kind of business and at that time china had a one-child policy it wasn't traditional in chinese culture to involve your daughter this way it would normally be only the sun it's a really really bad culture that way before the one child policy there's a big change in the one child policy and you know they they learned how to take on responsibility they learned how to talk with people they learned how to think about the future and plan for the future and you know their parents had also probably explained to them like okay if you want to set up your own corner store you want to set up your own convenience store we can help you do it where you branch off and start like now you've learned how to run and manage the shop so when you finish university if you want you can do this but like you meet young women there who in this way were tremendously mature for their age now i know i mean it's a taboo topic you know it's taboo for two reasons one is that the suspicion is any man who talks about this is trying to justify a relationship with a much younger person that shouldn't be justified you know coming back to all these questions of morality right but the other is that this has implications for our own culture and how we infantilize people both men and women how we treat them as being trapped in a perpetual childhood until they're 24 or 25 years old right where people don't take on any responsibility until they finish their bachelor's degree until they finish their master's degree until some very very late stage and you know i just want to say i mean it's not it's not that i'm opposed to university as such in american culture in the 21st century university is like summer camp it's like summer camp with quaaludes university is not thought of as a tremendously serious time when you buckle down and read aristotle and do research that's going to shape what you do for the rest of your life university is not seen as a time when you work in an intense way to raise the level of your writing so that you can publish peer-reviewed articles or be publishing articles in magazines university is not seen as a crucible where you work as hard as you possibly can to develop into a mature you know intellectually impressive person where you go from being a teenager to being an adult in a positive sense you know university in the united states of america is seen as a succession of binge drinking nightclub visit parties by the way just look at elon musk how he represents his own time university and what he did in university but you know university is seen in the united states of america as a period of sexual self-indulgence reckless behavior and keeping yourself locked in this kind of very immature state of mind right up until you're 24 or something like that you know so i i just say i think i think they were really disturbing questions for us to ask ourselves when we deal with on that cultural scale like if we are really saying that people at age 20 or 21 are just not prepared to be in a serious relationship and i think i think there's a sincere argument the commitment okay but then let's say why you know let's really ask ourselves why and how is it that people make it to age 20 or 21 and they're totally emotionally unprepared and totally intellectually unprepared i think that the serious answer is that both are our formal education and the informal education that takes place inside the family and to some extent by the church by you know religious and other organizations that was not even the education we have from listening to music and watching movies keeps people locked into this kind of reckless infantilized self-indulgent self-destructive lifestyle until much much too late in life i mean i think you shouldn't you shouldn't go through a phase of life that way at all i mean i think i think uh sex is always deadly serious and pretending that there's such a thing as low consequence sex it's ridiculous it's pretending there's such a thing as a low consequence falling in love falling in love impacts you tremendously the rest of your life you know even if it fails you have a failed relationship you you you love and you've loved and lost you know so no i i think it's very serious business and um [Music] you know how how did i start i started with the example of young women in china who knew what it was to manage and run a corner store convenience store you know well how does that prepare you to be in a serious relationship obviously it does in some ways and not others right i mean obviously you know i mean in some ways might seem like the most laughable thing you know how how does that prepare you well it prepares you in a way that watching movies and playing video games and you know going to college fraternity parties and going to nightclubs and getting drunk the way that young people in america spend their time it really it really fails to prepare them for those challenges and taking on those kinds of responsibilities okay i have a question about nihilism there is a playlist for all the videos on nihilism so just go to the playlist section of my channel to find that i'm sorry not to cut you short but i don't think i need to play with that a lot of people don't even know there is a playlist actually click on playlists and then the the particular playlist is called historical nihilism calling my own philosophy i'm certain you'll find what you're asking about in there somewhere and it's in it's basically in chronological order thank the list of all the videos [Music] so james mickenpine says again that these kinds of comments that just come from people of real life experience as opposed to reading this on the internet james megan pine says that he's in his early 20s and that most of the women he talks to are at least 10 years older his ex was 15 years older and he's now involved with a woman who's 48 years old and he says this is a very true statement there are all kinds of imbalances in both directions right so you know even if you think it is optimal to have no power imbalance in a relationship right does that mean that any relationship with a power imbalance is immoral or bad or should be should be gotten rid of you should break up with someone or shut them down in the name of the pursuit of this ideal of what you think of as an optimal relationship in which those power balances don't exist or can we appreciate what's good about those power balances this guy james may combine if he if he really falls in love with this woman who's 48 years old maybe she really has a lot to teach him maybe she realized a lot that'll benefit him in life you know again maybe emotionally not intellectually maybe that'll be really positive for him um and maybe not but you know those those the kind of risks you take and um we all have to you know we all have to live with those kinds of power balances so here's here's a cross-cultural example i know all about someone in the audience writes in that his ex-girlfriend ran circles around him and she was thai she was an expert in this i'd say it was a lot of responsibility for me supporting her family as well i'm glad i did it but i think i got taken to the cleaners thai culture is is notorious for this this kind of uh situation so we got another reply from ben he says that he'd like to go vegan before starting a youtube channel but it'll work on it so okay great maybe we'll get another vegan on youtube uh talking about these kind of issues of uh sexual politics in practice okay guys great conversation thank you all for uh contributing i'm i'm gonna wrap it up what did i have to say in this video you know the most general philosophical point was about distinguishing what is optimal from what's moral or immoral what do we really mean when we say that something is good well as soon as we admit that we're talking about something being optimal rather than moral immoral then we get into the questions of good for whom and good for what good for what purpose good what for what reason people don't want to admit this themselves they want to moralize the discourse about relationships as if it were a self-evident evil to have an age gap of of 10 years now beyond that we had to say further that even if there is a disadvantage to having an age gap that has to be seen in the real world context of human beings overcoming and coping with the numerous paradoxical disadvantages of being in any particular relationship with any particular person and if you want to treat this as something that is a self-evident you know uh evil on planet earth if you want to treat it as as being self-evidently wrong for someone to choose to fall in love with someone who's 10 years old what about all of the other things that we're leaving off the table for consideration isn't it immoral isn't it wrong to fall in love with someone who is an alcoholic isn't it immoral isn't it wrong to fall in love with someone who is a gambler or a drug addict you know like if we start listing off the characteristics of human beings and things that they really have chosen things they really are responsible for right uh that would invalidate them as a potential partner then that list is going to be tremendously long and the reality is none of us chose the circumstances of our birth you didn't choose whether you were born black or white you didn't choose whether you were born young or old like i didn't choose to be born in one year as opposed to as opposed to 10 years later so you know i think the ultimate source of discomfort we have is dealing with the question of power inequality in relationships and admitting to ourselves that all relationships are going to be unequaled not just in one way not just because of a difference in age not just because of a difference in money but they're going to be unequal in myriad ways they're going to be some aspects of the relationship where one party dominates the other and and it's sometimes the relationship and then at other times the relationship when dealing with other uh aspects the relationship of dominion will be inverted each of us has to take responsibility in a relationship but we will tend to take responsibility in unequal ways and out of that inequality wonderful things can happen as we've been hearing from people in the audience people can learn a lot they can benefit a lot from being in a relationship with somebody who has different strengths and weaknesses to themselves and maybe we don't benefit at all if we are in a relationship with someone who is our absolute equal in every respect something that is going to be impossible to achieve or at least unlikely in the extreme thank you all for joining me