Not a Game: Veganism in Practice. PART TWO: The Tofu Goddess.

not a game not a game not a game you're
talking about practice not the game we're talking about I a man 3,000 pounds Mexican with the trailers in town I was getting money needed i'm getting money now yeah i just find out like like I don't I on it I understand why people make the jokes and whatnot if it's a defense mechanism or they're just jerks at on like I don't really know I don't really think that much about it when people give me a hard time but I just I just feel like st. and I'm like you realize that you're making fun of the reason why like I'm alive right now you know what I mean like you're making fun of my life's purpose right now you're making fun of like the most important value that I hold but obviously I can't say that because that's just next-level right there just kind of taking a jab at me and I can't just like get philosophical and tell them I'll just keep revealing things about my about myself but like that's that's what it feels like sometimes I'm like listen man like this is my life's purpose and you're making fun of it right now you know I'm not even allowed to talk about it too much because then I'm living up to that stereotype we're all there i found the vegan and the vegans talking about veganism again it's like yeah yeah i want to talk about it because this is my life now why would i not not a game not again not again i was just gonna say i find that you know my Christian background I think it really did stunts my it's gonna sound so cliche my vegan journey I feel like I would have gone vegan so much sooner because like you know there'd be people in this church and you know they're lovely and whatnot but you know it just they just did not care about animals right right they're just like I just thought I'd say yeah I don't care about animals and you know I've always been like a natural animal lover as a small girl and whatnot so even i found that a bit shocking that they would say that that I was like oh you know I apparently we're not supposed to care about animals now interesting so it like I am grateful I learned a lot about my own self and you know there's good lessons in the Bible like humility and loving people and whatnot so I do appreciate that but in other ways it it really did like I said stunt my vegan journey so I don't guy for me too I mean that's kind of a big topic but you know my own upbringing I really had a great respect for tradition and traditionalism which is obviously not Christian in my case that included like First Nations you know due to a sense but you know I had this sense that engine my parents did not teach me this that you know the way our grandparents and our ancestors lived was something very important and that people in our time by contrast were really decadent and lazy and the you know the the real life that's suitable for human beings was something that disappeared centuries ago this is just a child that's a childish attitude of mine it's not a philosophical attitude I'm proud of that's not even a teenage attitude but you know so for me that really did as you said slow down you know Mike regression towards veganism just um you no respect for something like like leather gloves you know I know that may sound ridiculous but if you've seen how leather gloves were made in medieval Europe and this kind of struggle human beings had for centuries to protect themselves against the cold it may sound meaningless and it is meaningless but it that wasn't meaningless to me you know so that sense of wanting to value tradition even without religion being attached to it that definitely slowed down my progression towards you know first vegetarianism and then and then veganism I didn't want to think that thousands of years of our culture and civilization once culture not even my culture all culture like Chinese culture like the whole world's culture I didn't want to think that that had all been an error and [ __ ] would all be you know discarded now I wanted to have more more traditional values or more traditional approach to life but we talking about practice man what are we talking about practice I see people here on YouTube in the West relating veganism to a lot of I don't know I don't know how do i phrase it I guess a lot of pseudoscience quite frankly and just a lot of like I guess like a hippie stuff so I find that so counterproductive you know we're trying to get people okay so we're trying to get people now on board it's too meet right like this is the answer and whatnot but meanwhile this whole time for all these years we've had these vegans being anti GMO anti-anything kind of remotely unnatural and now they're changing their tune and they're trying to get everyone on board with this completely unnatural super meat but you've been contributing to this climate of like anti anything unnatural so right it's it's just like well great like now you've convinced all these people that anything unnatural is bad and thira if this were to work theoretically the super me well who's gonna who's following you is gonna actually going to want to eat it after you've been telling them after all this time that a natural stuff is bad I think though the thing to remember is they're not the same people right I mean what you've just eluded the contrasting the people who are kind of the hippies who are anti science aunty you know and have this very entrenched notion of doing what's natural the so-called crunchy mom stereotype the people who refuse to let their babies be vaccinated etc those people still exist i think they haven't changed you know it's just that they were really the early adopters of veganism in this period and then over the 10 years after that you get different types of people joining in so I think that's the contrast I think that chorus you know a lot of those people were former members of Hindu cults sorry i'm not i'm not anti-hindu but they don't just being blunt about it and that's why you know within the raw food movement i don't know if you've seen the specific claim that if you practice the raw food diet your sex drive will dry up and disappear you'll lose your desires for worldly things including sex to me that's a very interesting contrast to i mean as you know many other vegans including pettah people for the ethical dream analyst they had some really crass as a painful condition that occurs when boyfriends go vegan and can suddenly bring it like a tantric pornstar for Jessica it's too late now you're back keep you feeling better they're making having more sexual desire I'm an aspect of it now I think probably both of those claims are a bit pseudo-scientific you know if you already have totally normal normal positive sexual function I don't know how much improvement you're going to get there making claims based on you know if you're a heart patient if you have high cholesterol levels blah blah blah blah but anyway that that contrast to me indicates that the people who came out of a yoga background out of some kind of westernized Hindu background they were bringing into veganism these spiritual beliefs that by having a pure diet you are purifying yourself spiritually as well as physically and that things like your desire for money and sex would would disappear because you're eating watermelon every day or whatever you know but I just say those those people are still there and you know they stopped coming to my channel a long time ago I'm comfortable with that you know that's that's what happens on youtube at first you get kind of random viewers and random hate mail and then with time no you know is you'll you'll go through it too and then with time you know people figure out who you are and what you're about and so those people keep coming back and they tell their friends and you start getting people you know you find your audience your audience finds you that kind of thing happens but I don't think Venus has changed I just think it's I just think it's got more diverse yeah well I mean that's a good thing I suppose more diversity I want we want everyone to go vegan I'm just thinking of like popular youtubers like happy healthy vegan dad's making couple like they promote like a very very much so would like natural organic kind of lifestyle so I you know they actually just put a video happy healthy vegan I didn't watch it about I should have but they put on a video about their feelings on like lab a meat and if they support it but I suspect that they do right I didn't even watch the videos I can't say I should have um but if they were to support it after all this time seeing how their anti-science like I don't know could they really what yeah I mean look you know the thing is uh I spend most of my time giving morality lectures on YouTube which is you know i'm a member of a small percentage the population to test that but you know my views a morality although they may seem very trenchant I do genuinely appreciate that that different people are capable of different things different people of different things to to offer so I myself have never slept with a prostitute I have actually done research on prostitution Southeast Asia several different stages in my life you know its political science social research however you know I've mentioned this somewhere on the internet before you know among the incidents that really shocked me and changed my perception that was meeting a man who had a bullet wound in the middle of his face from the the Cambodian wars to put it that way and for him you know his only contact with the opposite sex was you know going to brothels now in that culture well I'll say specifically about lausanne northern Thailand some disabilities that we consider relatively minor you know when we have a disability called having a harelip you know where a person of the permanent scar there from a reconstructive surgery when there are infinite sits a fairly common a disability in both east and west in that culture if you're born with that no basically no woman will ever touch you aside from a prostitute it'sit's regardless as hideous you know with that culture we have at least the guy you like in Phoenix I think is his name one of our famous actors he's considered handsome and he has this he has this disability he has a harelip so I just mentioned some some things that are considered ugly or hideous what have you so I haven't lived in that culture for a while um I became more tolerant of prostitution when I met people frankly of both genders where you realized within that society that's death the only love in their lives that and you know again I'm not them they're not me I may disapprove but you know that I have a real sort of tolerance for that you know whether it's lab-grown meat or many of these other things the fact that I don't do it you know doesn't mean that I think it should be illegal doesn't mean I think nobody should do it you know a lot of that stuff is gross to me I mean ultimately what you're talking about with with prostitute if we talk about consenting adults we're not talking about child prostitution on talking about anything to to insidious you know ultimately my moral objection to it is kind of based in the fact that I think it's gross and some of the stuff we object to is vegan some of it is a hard moral black-and-white issue but some of it were actually objecting to you in that same way we're into a kind of gray area running this is kind of gross there's another company doing lab-grown milk but you know its actual cow milk it's not soy milk but it's made in a vat in a lab yeah yeah one of my one of my viewers alerted me to that so it's it's the it's similar to the lab-grown meat phenomenon we're in a sense it is milk and it's just as unhealthy for you as X real Calvo but no no cows are harm because you know they're whatever their cells created in a lab and combined sure so it must be kind of ridiculous because you're adding all the unhealthy stuff how much fat do we add to this mix you know what got a weird why not why not make it healthier but anyway that's so that's also coming along but you know this stuff I may find it disgusting I might never do it that's what i said in my two-minute video the fact that I wouldn't do it doesn't mean nobody should do it and it you know ultimately again okay contrast Thailand to Saudi Arabia where would you rather go on vacation Thailand or Saudi Arabia now when I go to Thailand I am NOT going there for prostitution literally millions of men are however I want to be part of a culture that has a certain kind of freedom of speech freedom of gender equality including freedom of sexuality but I want to be in a certain kind of deeply democratic deeply liberal culture that Thailand represents and prostitution like it or not is part of that and I do not want to be in a culture that is you know an authoritarian moralizing culture I believe in Saudi Arabia there's almost zero prostitution maybe someones gonna write into me and say no if you know the right brothels to go to maybe the opposite but you know obviously it's much more it's much more secret in a culture like that and you know again vegans obviously have whether we're talking in the next ten years in the next 200 years what type of political ideology do you want to represent I do not want to represent the Saudi Arabia vegan uh so you know I don't know what who's going to represent the the Athens of veganism or the Thailand of veganism these are these are still open questions but for sure there is there is a real I call it the Catholicism tendency and veganism there's a tendency to make this into this kind of very strict moral moral straitjacket the quest for purity whether it comes out of that already alluded to kind of Hindu background or whether it comes out of a purely political tendency or what have you so that's interesting I mean if you want true freedom you do have to allow first you could you could almost see prostitution as like a good thing in that sense I suppose like great like people are allowed to express themselves yeah why not so so far lighting again us well as as with smoking too if you admit that something's a problem that doesn't mean you want the police to kick down people's doors and throw them in prison solve it so like when I was in Thailand this is a distant memory but as i recall i read an economic estimate that put of Thailand's cash economy I'll say why I specify cash my of Thailand's cash economy they had prostitution and related services as fourteen percent of the economy so at what point do you admit that it's a problem like when I say I think we need to tolerate prostitution to some extent ah do I mean ten percent do I mean for a what present at what at what point is a problem it is it is a problem it's deeply problematic to me when I was in northern Laos a small city in northern loss but it's still a city or talent but you know they have electricity they have roads they have concrete buildings you know it's not a it's not a village it's it's a small city I was in a small city there and again I did real research on prostitution etc so no knew about this kind of stuff and they had basically a program going on there where the local wealthy men would actively recruit virgin girls from inside the local high school you know this is a unique form of prostitution so they would pay one girl to be a recruiter to recruit girls to sell their their virginity to these you know well i don't know i know you call them businessmen or a probably some of them are army generals and probably the local the local elite now I find that deeply disturbing in many many ways although i believe it's it's legal or me know the girl the girls in that case i do not think we're underage God knows in Laos I knew of a plenty of stuff you know related child child prostitution underage prostitution and so on um at what point is it a problem and then when you acknowledge it's a problem what what you do about it so a lot of our discourse I have said this on youtube before a lot of our discourse in the Western world is kind of hyper defensive about that first phase of admitting it's a problem because the assumption is you're immediately going to go to some kind of fish istic and again Catholicism frankly Catholic reaction of saying oh if we admit it's a problem that means we have to stamp it out of existence entirely and I don't I don't think that's the solution but yes does Thailand have a problem with prostitution it does um wood tile and be a better country if prostitution were only five percent of the cash on me instead fourteen percent I think it would be I think that would be much better they were sir but just to include the footnote the issue with the cash economy is that in a country like Thailand a lot of the economy does happen without cash trading hands so you know like a farm that gives its lentils to a factory to process it into something else so there are parts of the economy still that are not not included in that one hundred percent yeah so anyway right but with with cigarettes with veganism to come back to the point or come back to our common ground theme um you know at what point do you admit that you know industrialized production of meat in Canada is a problem and then once you admit it's a problem what do you do even I I don't suggest that you know we should have the equivalent of the I don't know SS or something have some army go around and and just immediately kick down all of the all the slaughterhouses as appointed videos we wouldn't know what to do with the cows what do you do set them free set them free on the plains of Saskatchewan have a million cows you know it's it's it's not clear what kind of transition we're talking about but that first step of just admitting this is bad this is something where you know you know again I don't want alcohol to be illegal I never drink alcohol I drink absolute zero I don't want cigarettes to be illegal but I want us all to engage in democratically and openly some kind of long-term plan about how do we reduce this how do we contain this yeah yeah we better [ __ ] at it just seems like do you just I don't you ever just get so discouraged just looking at the landscape as it is now I me listen we talking about practice I watched that and I'll i totally agree like the way it's betrayed veganism is gonna make you so happy and whatnot and it's like how could this make you happy seeing this carnage every time you go into the grocery store how is that a source of happiness you know I get a sense of satisfaction knowing that I'm not contributing to that and I'm going to do everything I can to prevent that but happiness absolutely not absolutely not and I don't know I did briefly breakdown weeping in that video did you catch it it's I actually do wipe it to your away from my eye but ya know if you go back the part where I described seeing chicken feed I actually start weeping on camera and I kind of had a choice it was like okay I'm either gonna stifle this or I'm gonna actually like weep openly on camera and I you know I choked back the tears but that's a good so I think I'm at an average of like weeping on camera once a month now mission but uh but no you know Dom Bauer was one of the first guys to really talk about that but that's that's how I choose to my channel again I appreciate that about your channel the video you made talking about this guy on Facebook who you know posted the the cow hard and so on I really value a certain kind of emotional reality even when your life is kind of fake even when your life is full of weird or surreal or fake fake things I you know I really value that again the the kind of vulnerability you bring it's sometimes in parts of the videos we are not saying much you know it's just obvious you know it's emotion you know like their parts the video we're just like this was man this is messed up you know but but you know that there's there's a real real emotion to it and for me like so I'll just say a little more about the the chicken feed you know like seeing it seeing the corpses of animals and sometimes even seeing ground beef when I when I first got here you know I went into so many different restaurants to see if they had just one thing that was vegan it's not worth explaining but it's because of the way Chinese food is made like they could just have buns that are vegan they could just have something like that like an isolated item not something cooked in a pot that I could buy so I really went into a lot of meat meat making restaurants when I first arrived here looking for any options in the neighborhood and but I remember I I almost wept actually one restaurant well it's just draw it just brought up so many emotions and memories and all these other things any literally looking at a small bowl of ground beef yeah yeah in some ways it's crazy but it's the sense in which is not crazy I could break down for you what I was already thinking about before I walked into the restaurant and the way seeing that bowl of ground beef it just Illustrated for me things I already care about and what happy but you know okay be honest with you the thing with the chicken feet of the ground beef or anything else it's the same as seeing human skulls now you probably haven't seen this no offense but like in Cambodia in other places you can go and see a pile of human skulls I if you come to Thailand I can take you there I can you can become a you know a death tourist that's what people say about you can go and see miles even skills in Europe you know from the the Holocaust or World War two you can see a pile of human remains I remember one that made a lot of people weep was a pile of children's shoes you know children executed by the Nazis where they threw the shoes in a pile after they killed the the children it's just a pile of shoes and people break down crying you know it's not the shoes yeah it's not the skull but even the skulls the human skulls are meaningless if you don't know about the history or care about it if you don't have something else yeah if there's not something else going on in your mind but in the same way you know seeing the chicken feed or even seeing the human attitudes towards them you know the people picking them up you know checking the quality you know in this kind of because that's that's what people doing from you know um you know there's a lot to it so yeah that's all right so it says yeah try try to reprogram what's up ahhhh but for me that's that's yeah yeah yeah wait if you want to imitate my YouTube success hey you know the real successful person imitate obviously is vegan cheetah or something it's not me but depends depends do you want to youtube and would you want to come back you want to talk about wrote down so don't forget you want to talk about bc but if you want to talk about youtube if you want to talk about success on youtube if you want to have anything else we can do it you know what everyone's up man ah what was i even gonna say back then well I just just give you yeah give you a break on whether the last time I talked to cheetah cuz you know we do talk I mentioned you he I think he watches all your videos but he watches you regularly but I said to him we were talking about another female youtuber who we both think is his garbage and we boat and and I said to him I said look you know you compare this girl to tofu goddess tofu goddess actually something to say you know it's like you know apart from the fact that she's good looking you know like YouTube is about talking if you have nothing to say you can't go very far in this business yeah doesn't really mean oh nothing else really matters you could be ugly and nvm be graded you look at some you know the amazing atheist he's pretty hideous um he remains one of the absolutely most successful people he always has been and I nobody I think nobody thinks he's handsome no you know no offense um you know so I just say it doesn't really matter that much how you look especially not long term it may be why people first click on your channel but you know I just say but cheetah cheetah course agree he was like oh ya know like tofu goddess you know he has time to say so I just say you know long-term there's only reason for optimism there I you know again I don't don't know if you need the compliment but it's everyone else's has noticed what you're doing and it will be I mean it'll be two years before you have any following that's just normal on YouTube nothing happens overnight but still if you do put in the time and stick with it I think you know these are there are really meaningful rewards that come into your life through it yeah I mean I initially came on to YouTube just just because like I do have a lot of vegans in my own personal life here in London Ontario but I just wanted more perspective I suppose I'm very much so a people person I love talking to other people I love hearing contrast in perspectives even if I don't necessarily agree with them uh so YouTube it just seemed like a really great medium for that and also I was seeing a lot of youtubers who quite frankly I consider quite stupid on me on the vegan seen explain my stupid so it's like you know I I feel like I could contribute something cuz at this point I'd never heard of your channel I had never even seen any of the more reasonable YouTube channels like they were all a lot smaller I don't know they seem shy gotten a lot more popular lately so I was just seeing a lack of that and like you know my first videos like I didn't really have a direction but right you know I'm talking about very simple concepts because I didn't see anyone talking about these I was like okay I have to you know the building blocks right this is a these are some very simple basic concepts and then my plan was to build from there but then from there i discovered your channel and other channels and i was relieved to see how other people we're just talking about something other than eating bananas quite frankly other than eating Karber carbohydrates like there's so much more to it than that and i found that frustrating but like i said i found your channel brothers so yeah you know what you say like you know the couple people who knew me from youtube and then met me face-to-face one of the things they're surprised about with me and i made so basically just telling you this so that you know something about me but it's also something about youtube you know you may or may not find useful in your own life but like when i met with people James something I say about myself is true is like a lot of people on YouTube are trying to appear more intelligent than they are and I'm actually the opposite I'm if not that I'm trying to dumb down my content but I really try to bring something very emotionally raw and if anything I kind of feature the stupidest side of my character it's really not the life of the mind that I'm bringing this and I do because I do have a life of the mind in terms of whatever philosophy politics languages history whatever but that's that's not what i want to share on youtube you know and a lot of people so a lot of people trying to appear more intelligent they are but also a lot of people are trying to appear more ethical than they are and i'm really at a time of my life where I'm actually trying to be less I'm a when I was younger I was a very kind of puritanical moralizing person which like you can see the benefit of that on my youtube channel because I'm very used to talking about morality and very used to talking about ethical philosophy but also just moral problems in practice um but yeah I was talking to another vegan about this words like you know I actually don't want to be pure I want to be involved in the real world in real-world problems and I really recognize that involves getting your hands dirty and making difficult compromises like the whole thing with me talking to scientists who actually torture animals you know it's like well yeah I can be pure I can say I refuse to talk to you or you know I was talking once you are who are vegan or semi vegan yes they're people were really interesting name rights and but they literally torture animals as part of their job they toured your animals death in a lab they exploit animals I want to talk to you I want to know about how that whole field works i want to know about the future i wanna know politically well how it's possibly pause the difference I don't want to be pure and that even extends to stuff like humanitarian work in Thailand or anywhere where it's like no no I i I'm interested in being involved so I just say that's that's a real difference between me and other people on YouTube and again like just a couple people like Jay Keynes when they met me they got that and commented on it they're like oh you're actually smarter than you seem to be on you see it's like no it's not even a compliment they're just like they figure out like again it's not it's not dumbing it down you know what I mean it's just like no I actually want to show you the side of me that like weeps because i miss my daughter which is not that intelligent and when I'm talking to my university professors that's not the side they see of me or if I'm at a business meeting or anything else right so you know I want to show you decided me that weeps over you know seeing chicken feet or whatever that's really actively when I'm what I'm bringing to it so you know thats I say that's you I think you know we make decisions and you can change your mind you can make a different decision what side of your character are you are you bringing to the internet cheetah went through a whole bunch of different periods I've seen him still recently just a couple months ago he did like a three-hour lecture on you ell on effective activism and research connected to to agriculture to getting up to farms and how dairy prospal dairy actually operates in his state I know people think he's a bimbo he's good-looking and you know you're joking around about stuff and he talks about he talks about what kind of bum he finds attractive in a woman and people get a pen but like I remember when he did that I was streaming it but I took a shower I did other things like I I was busy and at the end of it I was looked at my watch it was like he just did a three hour continuous monologue unlike you know really hard political science and ecology and how Agriculture's organized so that's also a side of his character and in the past he used to make some more pretentious videos showcasing that side of his character tell you know where he was trying to be more of a social justice warrior and now obviously he's kind of found his found his niche so you know you can change your mind you can make those decisions what have you but in some ways it's a luxury right the fact that my life is a disaster like in terms of having a job or whatever means that I can I can cry on YouTube and nobody seemed to be no but also look you know you know I'm six foot three durianrider says I'm six foot five but I'm not I'm six foot three he says from six but I'm six foot three and I'm 100 kilograms you know that's the other difference I this is a fair while ago major channel I always say it's harder for women the reality is if people give me [ __ ] about being vegan like at the workplace like if I was in an office and people watch my youtube channel and laugh at me about or make fun of me but because that that really happens and it'll happen to you if it hasn't happened already you know the reality is that just just the threat of violence just my size or whatever is is the only thing that keeps people in line it's it's pathetic but that's 2016 right like that's yes you're that that's it you know it so anyway but I've always said I really think it is worse it is worse for women whether it's the bullying from your own female relatives you know like relatives to expect you to also baste the turkey at Christmas to like help help out with the cooking that's real that real pressure you know or or if it's the [ __ ] at the office this other girl who hates you anyway for other reasons and then the fact that you're vegan is another reason for the hate you you know women women can be really nasty that way and here within my first few days of being here there was one guy an Australian guy I didn't know he looked like he was 50 but I'm 3750 isn't that much older than me and the first two times he took a poke at me about veganism that he insulted me I just said something funny bad whatever you know I remember the the third time he did it it was it was a little bit more insulting and I stood up you know this is in the dining hall here above my school and there at that time there were no young people there I [ __ ] was all middle-aged people or whatever you want to say and I'm oppressed it up and said to him look it you know you want to keep taking a poke at me because it's only a matter of time before I poke back and you know everybody in the room you everyone stops eating everyone goes silent what do you like this is 2016 and this is not the prison cafeteria you know I mean I'm like a 37 yo guys a 50 year old guy but that is still what it comes down I'd say this is life as a vegan for a 37 year old intellectual life has been devoted to languages history politics charity work I had a long period of my life where I literally wouldn't kill a cockroach like non-violence your eyes look and this is what my life is like I know I supposed to be there I know I supposed to lead by example I know that and I'm not I'm not shoving it inside you know like it don't mean anything I know it's important I do I honestly do but we talking about practice man what are we talking about practice not a game not a game not a game we talking about practice