Q&A: Sex & Socialism (Pro-Sex, Anti-Socialism)

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if you're going to get into this bespoke filmmaking business if you are going to get into this live streaming keeping it real q a type business you have to be willing to recognize a good question when it comes from a bad person you have to be willing to recognize a good question when it is posed to you in bad terms shall we say when it is poorly phrased poorly enunciated you need to be able to respond to a question that's posed to you with bad motivations as if it were posed with good motivations or find within it the best possible motivation for you to respond to so i got a question i'm going to paraphrase this question i am not going to quote this i'm not going to read you word for word this question but i got a question demanding to know how it is why it is i feel entitled to the love of beautiful women why it is i feel entitled to the love of women plural apparently far more attractive than myself including the one woman singular that all of you have seen on my instagram melissa who's sitting off camera right here right now you know how is it why is it i feel in this sense entitled you know what it's a good question and it comes from a bad person with bad intentions and bad motivations and it was poorly phrased too and i think this person is frankly jealous that he cannot be with melissa instead of myself i think he might be jealous of a great many of the women in my life past present and future but melissa in particular i think there's a little bit of jealousy i think there's a little bit of envy i think there's also a lot of forcible misinterpretation of things i have said on my youtube channel in the past in order to in order to make me seem unreasonable in giving the advice i've given and offering the reflections i've i've offered but nevertheless okay keep it all the way real with you guys and i always like to start off at the deepest end of the swimming pool on these issues all right nobody is entitled to anybody's love and this is one of the really distinctive features of love that sets it apart from any other kind of emotion and any other kind of relationship between two human beings you can say i am entitled to your respect you can say i am entitled to be treated with a certain level of dignity you can say i'm entitled to your time in all kinds of different relationships and you may have to fight for that you know you might be talking to someone who's a surgeon and they say hey look you know i i've performed heart surgery 50 times this year so you've got to respond i'm entitled to your respect you may be talking to your professors and they may not want to deal with you and you have to say look i paid you 10 000 and this is your contract and these are your office hours and this is who i am i'm entitled to your time i'm entitled to your patience there are entitlements for pretty much every other relationship between human beings except love you can never be entitled to someone else's love not in the particular not in general not one person's love not a hundred people if not a thousand people never okay love is never earned and it's something you never have a title to that's the meaning of being entitled it's always undeserved it's always something above and beyond anything you could ever earn you could ever deserve that's love [Music] melissa's finding this quite moving it's interesting what you're thinking about it all right and this has this has a positive and negative so this this is a blade that cuts both ways okay you're not entitled to your parent's love no you're not you're entitled to respect prepare your delta dignity you're entitled to a certain level of support which is actually disputed in different countries legally how much your parents have to do for you if they hate you it's quite different from what kind of you can look into it it's an interesting area of the law people sometimes sue their parents and parents sometimes sue their children typical scenario you have a father who's very heterosexual cares about sports and military service he has a son who is gay and interested in the liberal arts let's say let's happen to one of my brothers i have one of my many brothers as gay he's a half brother he was adopted he was raised by apparently a macho architect who hated him all his life could never get along with him the guy was an architect he wasn't an army generalist he wasn't a football hero still he was still in the arts when you think about it might be all together but there are a lot of gay people working in architecture let's be honest here folks interior design and so on but nevertheless this gay half brother of mine he grew up with his father was some kind of macho architect and you know they just could not make that father-son relationship work man that's unusual sorry getting getting a uh getting a troll writing in chinese or a spam message i guess i'm not sure what they're going to try to sell i know i'm sorry nice nice distraction a nice distraction to have um look there's no way anyone is ever entitled to anyone's love and if you know enough people if you have enough experience you'll actually see people in the reverse situation there are lesbian couples who give birth to and raise a heterosexual child and find themselves estranged from their child there are gay men i have known this there are gay men who one way or another haven't raised a child despite being gay men and they feel like they can't relate to their child and there are parents who are conservative and right-wing and their kids become left-wing and their parents who are left-wing and their kids being served oh and let's just try that one example that's easy for all of you to relate to you could be a parent who is vegan and your kid eats meat and makes excuses for it you can be a parent who's a devote hindu and your kid becomes a muslim there are all these combinations and permutations even the love that exists between a parent and a child is something you can never be entitled to it's something you can never demand and it's something you could never even earn that's the greatest strategy of all there are so many people who spend years their lives or spend their whole lives trying to earn their parents approval trying to earn their parents live if only i do this then my father will like me then my father will approve me and guess what he's never going to love you he's never going to approve you you know why you are not the kind of guy he would have met up with and made friends with at a bar you just happen to be his biological offspring he doesn't like you like you know for men for millions of us we're just fundamentally incompatible with our parents where our parents will forever be less than our friends they will be more like an enemy than a friend our whole lives long they will never love us maybe we can have a business relationship with them maybe they can be our colleagues maybe they can just barely tolerate us maybe not even that right you're never entitled to someone else's love not even if they marry you right so we all we all know this scenario and oh come on if you're 17 you know what i'm you know what i'm talking about right you can take the vows you can write it down on a piece of paper but then then what happens oh oh now i see that you're a gambling addict this isn't the man i fell in love with this isn't who i thought you really were maybe he mentioned it once when you were dating and you ignored it you thought oh he mentioned oh you know back when he was a teenager he used to do a lot of gambling you know okay well that's in the past it's no big deal and then you've been married for five years and you find out he has a gambling addiction and when he said he was going away on the weekends on a business trip that wasn't a business trip he was going to las vegas or oh oh oh oh i guess i guess you don't love him i guess you found out who he really is all right and guess what people it's not always something as obvious as being a gambling addict or a drug addict right you could find out the smallest thing imaginable you could find out some fetal flaw about this person but it runs from the surface right down to the deepest crags of their soul and then you find you don't love them you despise them you loved who they thought pardon me you loved who you thought they were or you loved who they pretended to be who they presented themselves to be and now you find out in some facet in some flaw who they really are and guess what it doesn't matter if you own a contract it doesn't matter if you took a vault a vow in the church if you put your hand on a stack of bibles doesn't matter what the rituals doesn't matter if you got a gold ring doesn't matter if you have a literal rope and chain you have a you have a chain going to a ball and chain you know it doesn't matter if you have a tattoo saying you will love suzette forever there is no way you can make a commitment to love there is no way you can commit to love someone and there's no way they could ever commit to you that's not love that's duty duty is real obligation is real and men will fight and die for their duty and men will men will remain dutiful husbands especially in a culture that rewards that their whole life long but they won't love that [ __ ] there are men who are dutiful to someone there are women who are dutiful to their husband they they do their duty with just as much commitment as a soldier going into bell they don't love him you think this [ __ ] is rare okay love is precisely what you can never put in a contract it's what you can never promise doesn't matter if you call it a promise ring doesn't matter if you call it a promised tattoo right love is what can never be earned it can never be deserved it's what you can never be entitled to okay welcome guys if you have a minute hit the thumbs up hit the thumbs up this is a thursday night for some of you it's very very late at night more people hit the thumbs up or people could join this slightly surreal conversation i was going to answer just two questions one from email one from a supporter on patreon um obviously you could expand the range of questions right now it is a q a video if someone asks something interesting i'm happy to digress and regress shall we say oh so someone's coming in from new zealand alexa what's the time in auckland alexa volume 10. i'll have to ask again alexa what's the time in auckland oh great well at least it made melissa laugh okay it's great thanks for joining us if everyone in the new zealand time zone show with everyone in new zealand and australia it's a terrible time to uh alexa volume 10. [Laughter] okay alexa tell me a joke [Music] if you don't have any friends guys you can buy yourself a robot oh right i was sorry so here i am drinking from a bottle oh but this is september of 2020 oh ho ho who drinks from a bottle i do oh ho ho look when i oh ho ho yes plastic bottle salt solid steel mug with my own my own logo on it there you go the abalasiel season two logo um all right so look i i understand you know i am not answering this question in the spirit in which it is it is intended i've decided to address the more profound issue raised by but obviously the person asking this they were asking a way to jar me or jill me or insult me they think about this the way frankly an incel thinks about it so insult them is a subculture in cells look at relations between the sexes as something earned something bartered something you're entitled to they look at relationships and love and marriage as something that a man is entitled to because of his job because of his social status because of some morally redeeming qualities or virtues and then they complain that they are not getting the love or the relationship or the type of partner they feel they deserve on the basis of these criteria so that's thinking in terms of entitlement being a title being entitled to love um and what i'm saying here is to start off with a radical critique of that premise going down to its most profound roots and say no this is a very fundamental misunderstanding of love whatever love is love is not respect love is not duty love is something that can never be earned and i do not think in terms of being entitled to anyone's love ever all right now the purpose of this barbed question is to insinuate that i am someone so ugly that i should not feel entitled to the love of a beautiful man i should not feel the love of someone as beautiful as melissa or the frankly the numerous other beautiful women who throw themselves at me past present and future because it's still going on people um i do i do still get women interested in me to this day a lot of them are objectively very good looking so i think the part that would probably surprise you in the audience most is that the vast majority of the women who are interested in me shall we say romantically they've never watched my youtube channel they've never seen me on the internet they just respond to me in real life face to face or they get touched me and started talking to me that it's kind of surprising for me too so yes there are some women who see these videos you hear me talking about philosophy and politics and that's why they want me because that intellectual side but let's say in the last 20 years i guess the big surprise for me is that there are more women after me just on the basis of like immediate direct impressions you know um okay so this question or series of questions i've received about this think about how twisted the implications are like are you actually alleging that ugly people are entitled to love and be loved by other ugly people that beautiful people are entitled to love or be loved by other beautiful like there's a whole series of implicitly assumed entitlements and exclusions that really fundamentally do not make sense and the most fundamental misconception is this and this is what's common to the right-wing incels the right-wing mgtow people the right-wing red wing right-wing red pill people right and also a lot of radical feminists so something feminists have in common whether they're left-wing feminist not with right wing in cells etc that is that you are thinking about love in terms of justice and injustice you are presuming that for a beautiful woman to fall in love with an ugly man would be an injustice and you're wrong you are presuming that for a handsome man to fall in love with an ugly woman would be an injustice and you're wrong you're bringing a set of categories that fundamentally have to do with entitlement and that fundamentally have to do with resentment you're bringing a set of irrelevant categories to the subject of love and you are imposing it onto that subject and you're forcing it to fit and if it won't fit you throw tantrums because then you feel that the world is an unjust place that doesn't make sense and the problem isn't with the world the problem is with you the problem is with your categories with your analysis you're taking a world that makes perfectly good sense and you're turning it into nonsense you're taking a world that in this respect is actually perfectly just because it's neither just nor unjust and you're turning it into a caricature of the most evil injustice because you're taking a radically irrelevant set of moral criteria and forcing them to fit on that world oh you thought this was going to be shallow you thought what you thought when i talk about penis size it's not shallow guys okay it's all deep around here okay so really brief but meaningful comment from from wildstyle um wildstyle says quote love is blind close quote no it's not no it's not um i was telling an anecdote to melissa this morning how i could tell this antidote from several different angles for several different reasons uh this was back when i was working at starbucks so i was a kid working at starbucks it was already tall women thought i was handsome um and this woman comes in and you know what is with people people have a certain level of esp for sexuality like you can tell well if you're experienced you can tell if someone's gay you can tell if someone has a crush and you can tell they're two people you can tell one of them has a question the other but this tall striking woman who's a little bit older than me comes into uh starbucks and everyone can tell right away that she has some history with me and she gets all nervous and flustered and she starts smoking cigarettes like to deal with her nerves like in a nervous way and you know she just i'm just working at starbucks she has this interaction with me like across the counter and it was funny because i mean i hadn't really interacted with the other male guys at the starbucks in this in this way before but they had seen me flirting well okay they had seen female customers trying to flirt with me and trying to get me they had seen women trying to get at me and i wasn't aware that they were jealous i didn't feel like we were in a we were in a competition but um somebody else on the staff i i don't know if it was a girl or a guy like they went inside when they like brought her drink to her or something they asked like oh you know are you are you friends with this guy like you know you guys know each other and i forget if she just she afraid if she said that i was her ex-boyfriend but she said something to that effect which wasn't true there had been some connection between us you know she said so yeah yeah like i know she said she had a history with me or she said something like that and you could just see the way she was jane smoking stuff and all the guys so as soon as she goes out the door and somehow this is spread through telephone or whatever you know all the guys on staff me through all these guys here they start hooting and hollering at me like oh man we know you got you know we know you got with all these good-looking women but you know god damn man like they start giving me all these like compliments that are really you know jealous and they start making all these lewd comments too like these guys had a deep vocabulary about how hot this woman is about to try this one and to me like it's just it's so alien for one thing the jealousy is alien the competition is the alien like what do you what do you think and the thing is you could see in those moments why i've i'm not interested in this one i've never been interested in this one it's true we had some kind of connection she smoked cigarettes like she's a chainsaw you could also tell something about her ethical character and her and her nervousness or something you know you say love is blind no it's not but if you calibrate these things like do you want to be with someone who's you know better looking but who's a chain smoker like you know would you rather be with someone who's less good-looking but has never smoked a cigarette in their life this is this is the reality of the world we live in how attractive someone is is just one factor it's not that love is blind it's not and you know you you could be with someone so hideously ugly that it's really a problem for you and you could be with someone who you find so gorgeous and so attractive that you rationalize it and talk yourself into accepting them even though they smoke cigarettes or there's something else you really just like you think well this guy is gorgeous maybe i can make it work maybe i can help him quit smoking right you know no the point isn't that love is blind the point is that your appearance is just one factor you know among among many which again in cells can't deal with now i mean likewise i noticed this specific type of jealousy what this um what this question is is on about like um why didn't you apply this to intelligence rather than appearance right have i ever had one person right into me saying that melissa is too smart to be with no serious question is anyone has anyone questioned this relationship in terms of intelligence like do you think it doesn't matter you know like what do you what do you talk about when you wake up next to this person in the morning you think that doesn't matter like even the shallowest people i've ever known it matters to all of them it matters to all them so much even if they even if they have a fantasy that they can just fall in love with people or have romantic relations or have sex with people where appearance won't matter or something right you kind of like can't sorry they have a fantasy that intelligence will matter they can just pursue someone because they're attractive or beautiful inevitably you have to confess yourself know what really matters to me how intelligent this person is you know say of course it matters of course not so no i would never say that that love is blind right but of course what i say again and again and again is that you know appearances do not matter nearly as much as all these other considerations tangible and and intangible so and we have people in the audience saying she is smart right most of you guys can judge for yourself and so there's enough there are enough youtube videos and you can judge what kind of person she is intellectually morally another you can you can judge by all means come and judge my point is isn't it funny that someone going after me this way someone says why would you try to suggest that my girlfriend is too beautiful to be with me that i don't deserve her that i'm not entitled to her right why wouldn't it be some other characteristic like why would it be an intellectual characteristic an ethical characteristic an emotional characteristic right you weren't seeing she's too kind you know melissa really laughed at that you don't say she's too kind i'm not entitled to her because she's too kind you're not saying she's too smart you're not saying she's too you know i'm sorry there are a lot of redeeming qualities you know someone could have right so yeah this is obviously a case where the question you know tells us um tells us a great deal about the question and obviously for me the most profound and also the most pragmatic part of this discussion is try to get past the concept of entitlement so bam sword is still you're still you're butting waterproof yeah sorry so a lot of love for melissa in here brandon williams says melissa is on the level yeah he's looking for and women yeah no any any lesbians or bisexual women trying to steal melissa from yeah i don't think that's happened yet that i know of we've had we've had guys i mean who can blame them [Music] right so brendon williams also says in in he's sharing my critique of both the feminists and the in cells and mgtow people he says quote purely transactional mindset that's right and i think that um i think that's what's terrifying to them i think exactly what they're trying to do is on the one hand take human sexuality and a base it a base it to the level of being nothing a tran nothing but a transaction and then at the same time they're trying to kind of glorify it and moralize about it these are two completely contradictory self-defeating impulses obviously um so that they can grandstand and talk about entitlements and talk about justice and injustice and talk about the way that the world ought to be as opposed to talking about the way that the world is okay and the way that the world is is this all right people discover that they have the capability to love someone else all right and they may discover it in a completely unexpected way you know they discover that they can love someone and then they have to think about whether or not they should okay and it's not something you can ever earn it's not something you can ever deserve it's not something you can ever be entitled to and conversely it's never something you can be dis-entitled to it's never something you can lack you know the credentials for it's never something that someone else can tell you you don't deserve now this guy thinks he's a left-wing politically correct feminist the guy who's criticizing me oh yeah so you think i'm ugly huh i get a lot of female attention still to this day still at 42 years old still busy writing my book okay i i get a lot of female attention when i'm alone i'm real the vast majority of the time i'm holding melissa's hand i get the judgment and i get attention with melissa back when i was married to my ex-wife women came at me when i was holding her hand and introducing to people or to people i i i remember me and myself used to laugh about this i would say these women are coming at me and i'm not telling them you're my sister i'm not telling them you're just a friend i'm like oh yeah have you met my wife it's the first thing i'm saying to everyone it's just like i i didn't it's like oh yeah this this is some girl yeah i don't know no like you know women are still gonna be so you know you know you regardless of whether or not you subjectively find me ugly i've gotta tell you that's not my that's not my struggling life but if you wanna talk this way in terms of entitlement and then distance of lacking entitlement lacking and then you want to talk about justice and injustice what would you say to me if i were in a wheelchair would you really have the nerve to say to a man in a wheelchair that he doesn't deserve the love of a woman who's walking around on two legs how dare you all right isn't it funny how now it becomes obvious which side injustice is on here right now if you talk to any woman who is married to a man in a wheelchair she's a close friend of yours and she's honest of course she's going to admit there are inconveniences i mean of course i've known couples you know there are people who have a special house made for someone with a wheelchair where like the level of the windows is different and the toilet is different it's a lot of money it's a lot of times whenever and still it's going to pitch you up there are times when you're going to get out of bed and say to your husband oh look could you go grab that thing for me i'm going to russia gotta do this and he says she will look i can't because it's like just getting out of bed is way harder like getting out of bed and getting dressed like if you don't help him for him to get out of bed and get dressed and to help you it's gonna take him way more time than a man who has two working and you think oh oh right you know you can kind of forget the person you're with is disabled i i knew a couple in thailand where um so i've probably mentioned this before the woman was profoundly disabled in a wheelchair but she she wasn't it wasn't like she could walk with crutches she was completely disabled from the waist down and she had to phone her husband for help every single time she went to the bathroom i say phone it tells you something about the culture her husband was a smoker i think he was a chain smoker but he smoked cigarettes a lot so if they were at home if she was like washing the dishes in the sink or something she would phone her husband and her husband would be outside smoking and her husband would come in and lift her off the wheelchair and physically put her on the toilet every single time she went to the bathroom okay so it's not a minor sorry it's not a minor inconvenience the decision is going to change the rest of your life forever there are women who fall in love with blind men there are women who fall in love with a man in a wheelchair and who the hell are you to question who deserves who who are you to question how someone would be entitled to another person's love do you see how sick and twisted this is now for you to come at me for you to come at anyone and say that man is too ugly to deserve or to be entitled to that woman or vice versa that woman is too ugly to deserve or be entitled that man none of us deserve love none of us are entitled to love love is precisely what you give other people what you do for other people what you feel for other people and what you are for other people above and beyond what they deserve above and beyond what they're entitled to what they're entitled to is respect and duty not love never love [Music] are you done yeah you want to chime in no i'm still livestreaming you want to do it yeah stand up come up close to the body i don't i don't say no i'm just going to read some questions here a series of events happened that made him undesirable as he tells it but i just thought that was interesting to hear you say that with your ex and with me yeah yeah yeah yeah while you're with me you know um yeah it's uh i don't know if it's like something that is like desirable to see that you're somebody that's in a happy relationship like it shows that you're that you're desirable right yeah it's never gonna make sense guys like it's okay this is the other thing i want to talk about all right in human experience there are things that are rational there are things that are irrational but there are also things that are pre-rational so come back to this moment you probably didn't notice this we went into a salad shop last night okay no okay i was exhausted it's not worth it but like like like my face did not look good i was really tired um it does it is ultimately actually because of working out at the gym i had a really big worry and 220 push-ups did a lot of work at the gym and then you don't really sleep that well then i for various reasons i was exhausted i didn't nap that day so um i also didn't have any caffeine anyway i'm at this salad shop and i'm haggard and i'm wearing the mask so how much of my [ __ ] face can you see okay and there and i'm with them with melissa right and melissa is paying attention to me i know you weren't well i wasn't going to point it out oh hey look that chick's trying to get with me that chick's got it and there was a girl this is old school to me this is old school for a way to show your somebody you're interested in there was this girl she was she was looking at me she was like she was doing it directly but she had a friend and then she brought the friend over and she was like talk to the like she's like she's talking to the friend and being like look at that i'm i'm 42 guys yeah okay so come on i mean what you're saying because i know like you know i was not in the mood i was and i was pissed off at the guy was like look what's really vegan on this man and none of it's really vegan he said [ __ ] we're leaving you know but i'm just saying all right um okay so look guys you know i understand the yearning to want the whole world to be rational but that's fundamentally childish it's childish and evil it leads to evil it's evil in itself and it leads to evil okay you want you want the whole world to be rational and you get older and you get more sophisticated and you learn to appreciate things that are irrational in this world all right and there's this third category of the pre-rational things that are pre-rational are things that you apprehend and respond to so rapidly that reason later catches up with them okay so the classic example from buddhist philosophy is that you walk into a dark warehouse and you see a coiled rope and on a deep instinctual level you react to it as if it were a poisonous snake now i have lived in parts of the world that have poisonous snakes and where it is quite likely if you walk into a dark room a cellar a warehouse that there will be snakes there like it's not a ridiculous thing and i've lived in parts of the world where they still use rope to tie things up like these days it's mostly uh masking tape like most different i think if you go to an amazon warehouse nothing has rope anymore you know what i mean so you got to live in a culture where this makes sense but bro if you ever experience this you'll be in a situation where you are seeing it with your eyes and your rational mind is like catching up and there's a level on which you see the rope but for a split second you feel like it's a snake but pre-rational that reflects millions of years of evolution now conversely i remember riding a bicycle by the side of a mountain in northern laos so this is a highway in laos which means it's a narrow like one lane a paved road okay and the third world cup meeting of highway is different so there's a narrow uh single lane and there's one one truck goes by every 15 minutes right this is uh remote poverty-stricken nonetheless and i stopped to look up close at this snake and it was this is a very interesting evolved behavior it was hanging like a fish hook it was hanging like an upside down question mark right by the side of the road in the clip yeah yeah it's interesting i don't have something good to demonstrate with you if you imagine uh if you imagine an old-fashioned umbrella and you hold it upside down so that and this snake was so beautiful with such a piercing uh shade of green and i think this is true a lot of snakes and the snake in particular they live very short life spans so they've sort of come straight out of the egg they have this very vibrant you know quality to them that i don't know a lot of long-lived mammals don't have they live for a short time and they're the colors are very bright while they live and so and i was completely fearless i was in no way i didn't feel afraid at all and i just really got up like i got up within millimeters this i was really examining and appreciating this snake you know for its beauty and also wondering about the the evolved behavior here why would it hang like that okay i later found out um this is the deadliest snake in laos and the reason it's hanging like that is that it's one of the only snakes that when it gets hungry will hang like that so it can cry to try to tag can try to poison like a passing a deer like a large mammal to kill it like the vast majority of snakes won't do that like they eat tiny mice or something like it's hope it's actually out of desperation this is what i was told like oh no no that's like one of the only snakes they'll actually kill even actually whether or not it's deadly they'll poison you and the poison will be like unbelievably painful so this is my point i'm looking at this thing rationally right but reason is neither wrong nor right it's just reason it's reasoning you can reason yourself into a terrible marriage all right and you can you know what i mean you can reason your way into a marriage and you can reason your way out of a marriage you can reason your way in you can reason your way into a divorce right you can reason your way into an early grave you can have a completely rational response to a real snake that is false and will get you killed and you can have an irrational pre-rational automatic response to a coiled rope that's completely harmless right is it correct or incorrect okay so guys i am seeing the comments as they come in [Music] for me quote your video on laoshu made me think not just about the ambitions of various polyglots on youtube but even my own i appreciate your candor thank you i hope you're still here as soon as people leave these comments and then disappear um i was just giving advice to another youtuber one hour ago very short time ago i don't know if she'll take it i mean i don't know if she'll she'll be happy to hear it or not but i was talking to a youtuber and saying look see there's a digression from the top of this video but the response this question i think it's meaningful enough to say saying look you know you have to think about youtube as filmmaking you have to think about filmmaking as work and then you have to think about what you're doing in your own real life as something quite separate uh if you take it any other way down that path you know uh madness lies and you know so i used an example which at first may seem like it doesn't mean much to you guys but think about it in my life in your life you'll start to realize how deep it is i said look it has been difficult for me and i am still struggling with the difference between reading a book in order to review it on youtube in order to talk about it on youtube in order to make a video about it on youtube and making a youtube video about whatever book i happen to be reading so i have the dust jacket out of this one but i might as well might as well shout out andy no here sorry here there's the book and the dust jacket is coming off yeah this is unmasked by andy now okay so we're going to come back to this issue there it is there it is without the let's check out um yeah nice yeah um okay so it doesn't seem like a big deal to you well okay what if you are a restaurant review channel what if you're a food review channel okay did you really want to eat in that restaurant or did you just go to eat in that restaurant so that you can make a youtube video about it okay is this actually the cuisine you want to cook is this the recipe book you want to write or did you research this and make this recipe how about political activism did you really make that trip to washington dc because you want to be there you want to do or you think or is it because you have a youtube channel and you know you can make a video so it has this tremendous corrupting influence on your life now your question is about laoshu and language learning and it with an example like that it's the deepest of all like are you learning chinese or are you a filmmaker or are you pulling off a bunch of stunts related to language learning just so you can make youtube videos about them what you know what is the horse and what is the carriage here right so those are tough questions and i'm by the way i'm not here saying there's like one answer to all of them you know but um yes the whole polyglot phenomenon on youtube the whole language education as entertainment phenomenon and language education for profit and language education to launch your career as a sex symbol on social media like there's a lot of that you know um the sexy female language teacher on social media phenomenon there's a lot of that going on to some extent in the past i remember with men i remember with handsome white men living in japan teaching you how to learn japanese [Music] so it has happened with male sex symbols also yeah but i think the most fundamental questions of all have to do with recognizing you know youtube is filmmaking filmmaking is work work is not life or it's not the whole of your life and then really thinking about the relationship between those things because the number of hours you put into learning a language compared to the number of hours you'd spend going to eat at a restaurant just to make a video about it you know this is this is tough this is tough to deal with hi chris thanks for joining the crowd if you have a minute chris hit the thumbs up button and more people can uh join us in this um this horrifying conversation okay so look guys um coming back to question number one here you know uh nobody is entitled to anyone's love and as soon as we're talking about entitlement and love in the same sentence frankly i think we've profoundly misapprehended what love is and even on a mechanistic level how how love works um in the same sense that you can be terrified at least for a moment of a snake that you know for a fact is not poisonous in any way if you're surprised to discover a snake in your own basement or in your own living room and even though you rationally know like you may live in a part of canada where there are no poisonous snakes you know or it may just be like even if you live in australia where some snakes are poisonous you recognize the species you recognize the pattern you know this particular snake is of no harm to anyone you can still react to it in a pre-rational way with terror and a very profound terror that is shaped and created by by evolution right and on the other hand you may have no reaction at all when seeing a real snake has in my hand and again you can have the same reaction also to a piece of rope it could be a piece of rope but it's dark and you're distracted you just know oh by the way piece of rope started hanging down also your alarm you react to it as if it were a snake okay um a lot of what's going on especially with our face-to-face interactions with sexuality is neither rational nor irrational but pre-rational okay and okay look okay okay and you can never know what aspects of your sexual experience are rational irrational or professional you can't know it not even a reflecting effort so i'm going to give you guys a great example okay there is a vegan restaurant here this is this is about one year ago now maybe a year and a half ago this is not that long ago there's a vegan restaurant here where you've got to line up like it's the prison cafeteria and i don't like this place and i went in to buy pre-packed uh seitan or tofu one of those you know i was just buying something to cook at home so i go in and there is this woman i would i would guess she's about 30. she's not you know like a lot of women here she's wearing completely skin tight revealing attire and i can tell from the minute i walk in she is really attracted to me and during this first encounter i never look at her directly you know like i'm looking at the tofu i kind of see her out of the side am i like you get in line you move around to the other side of her line as long as you move around each other and by the way she's really looking at me like she's wanting me to look back at her you know i mean she's she's looking straight at me and i'm not looking at her and i'm looking and i'm looking at the money and i'm doing things and i've got to tell you so like that on that encounter like yeah there's a sense in which is really it's like looking at a rope and seeing a snake like i didn't really have a clear sense of even what she looked like i've got to tell you i could feel how attracted she was to me and i felt attracted to her okay now all right so there's a there's a sequel i met her again spoilers okay i know she's in a vegan restaurant to what extent this attraction i felt towards someone someone's calling me all right this attraction i felt towards someone i couldn't even really see clearly right you could say well that's totally irrational that's totally instinctual some people would even try to argue oh maybe it was your sense of smell like you know like something like it's not even seeing them or it's their aura or something it's their magnetism people will try to come up with these are rationalizations right okay but what i was feeling how much of that is this is a vegan restaurant this is a vegan woman and there are other things you can tell about her like in terms of her social class like there were a lot of cues about who someone is obviously her level of physical fitness just the fact that he's wearing the skin tight revealing attire you know what i mean um so i saw that woman again i don't even know it was a month later but maybe three weeks later or something i went back same thing i went back to buy some basic supplies i wasn't i wasn't going for a meal i wasn't going for fun and you know naturally you know people live in patterns she was probably there for the same reason we probably was the same time of day too for all i know you know i don't i don't remember like that you know and i go in and it's just the angle like i come in a different angle i see here it's different and she has disgusting tattoos she has tattoos which i didn't see last time she has tattoos that make me think she's a scumbag and she's an idiot and she's like part of the drug culture you know and her style of hair which i didn't see at all the first time a lot of things about her appearance seeing her now more clearly right away make me think this is someone who uses marijuana this is someone who uses ecstasy if someone uses lsd this is someone who's part of a whole hippie yoga mat hard drug culture and i'm sorry i'm not saying i'm not judging all tattoos i'm judging the specific tattoos this woman has and what they tell you about her character and her culture right this is not you can have a tattoo that's just a circle you know you haven't it could be anything you have a tattoo that says i read aristotle okay those are not the tattoos yet right you don't have a tattoo that says a lot about you but the tattoos this woman had and where they are in her bodybuilding right away whoa and of course and that's i might recognize her i know i'm 100 certain it's the same woman before and right away i think wow i can't believe i found this woman attractive like i can't believe i felt and again i didn't really see her and on the other hand being all the way there was like oh well i can see why she was after me i feel i feel too good for her just be real with you you know this is i wouldn't i wouldn't take this woman out to lunch and i'm not interested at all you know like right away it's like oh you're not i'm you know again i don't okay but with either one of those experiences you can force an interpretation onto it that's a hundred percent rational right like a a super irrational reading is okay you went to a vegan restaurant you assumed this person was vegan maybe you assume they even recognize you from your youtube channel and you have a lot in common you assumptions about them politically ethically you have all these positive assumptions just because you're meaning a vegan restaurant there's a rational explanation of why you felt something positive for this person right or just hey you want to assume the best about them you don't know anything about them you're not really looking at them you know um and there's also this totally pre-rational reading like no like these are evolved animal instincts you're reacting to something other person and then the second meeting where i basically reject her or feel like this is someone i would never even want to talk to pardon me you can look at that also and insist on a completely rational interpretation like oh well you saw her tattoos you analyzed it this how i've got to tell you that's not how i experienced it anymore i didn't feel i feel like that was my rational mind catching up afterwards i feel like seeing her the second time my reaction was just as immediate and instinctual i just was not attracted to her at all that was how i felt it immediately and then afterwards it takes a few seconds like oh and look at those tattoos oh and think about oh okay i guess she's that kind of person you know that stuff you know it takes a few seconds for your your mind to catch up with that you know okay look so guys all kinds of great all kinds of great uh comments and questions here so uh pitter-patter says confidence is a huge factor for both men and women uh quote i think that's why isil is so highly sought after lol okay how can they even tell i'm confident like in these situations a lot of my encounters with a lot of my interaction how how can they even tell you know i just say in a lot of these things i think instead we're dealing with this and like i can't sit here and say you're wrong you know what i mean but i think i think what you're trying to do it's totally understandable is that you're trying to take something that's fundamentally irrational and primarily this kind of pre-rational thing and you're trying to foist rational thinking onto it you're trying to force it to fit into a rational mode of analysis okay guys so for me on that issue that's a wrap i'm happy to sit here for a minute melissa if you want to throw something in but you know i made i made my point i had the profoundest part of the argument first for me the deep end of the swimming pool has to do with overcoming any kind of thinking that's involved with entitlement again guys feel free to ask questions now ask questions down forever hold your peace um you know and then in terms of looking at the world what i think is a false and misleading way in terms of justice and injustice what you have to understand is that we are relating to one another neither rationally nor irrationally but pre-rationally so even if you talk to a woman who is committed to be married to a man in a wheelchair all right and i've already spoken i've already talked this through with you there are a lot of disadvantages there are a lot of inconveniences to being with the manager there are a lot of inconveniences if you're married to someone who's blind okay like if you ask them well wouldn't it be easier for you to be with someone yeah that'd be easier but this isn't about easy this is about love okay this isn't about doing what's easy this is what they're what what's convenient right and he said then well what if you could have exactly the same guy you're in love with him but he's not confined of course they choose that of course of course it's preferable and i'm sure the guy would prefer it too he'd prefer not to be confined to a wheelchair he'd prefer to be able to stand up and use the toilet with a lot less difficulty sure of course even if there's nothing else to do of course right but um we're not making ques pardon me we're not making these decisions in a rational way it's not a question of what's best it's not a question of what's optimal it's not a question of being with the most attractive person you can be with or the most wealthy person you can do with it's not a question of choosing the person who is most deserving or most entitled right this is the person you can love you have to decide is this or is this or not the person i should love you know and then uh you know consequences fall from there and you know the consequences can be tremendously serious because you fall in love with someone who's addicted to gambling or addicted alcohol or addicted to video games or we may disappoint you in 10 000 other ways ethically or intellectually besides people you have fallen in love with people you've decided to trust can disappoint you in so many ways that the inconvenience of helping someone who is in a wheelchair that was blind with some other physical disability those inconveniences seem incredibly trivial when you compare them to the kind of betrayal you would have to endure if you fall in love with a man who is addicted to gambling or addicted to drugs or or who betrays you or cheats on you or stabs you in the back in 10 000 different ways so no you know um but we really experience attraction between people in a way that is that is not rational and then the rational mind races to catch up with it afterwards so i mean if in any of these scenarios women i've actually had whole relationships with or women where i had very brief encounters if you were to ask why why is this woman attracted you and this person has the questions of course asking a much more loaded poisonous they say why why do you feel entitled to this person being being attracted to you or being like you're asking the wrong question there is no why any answer you can offer to that question why is going to be a rationalization catching up afterwards and you the person asks this question you are rationalizing things in terms of entitlement in a way that i think is fundamentally misleading bad and evil and wrong so a little bit more commentary peter patter says quote i can't think that's the only contributing factor but you also mentioned about speaking out in university classes and having women come up and talk to you afterwards right uh right intelligence i mean sorry i've had so many videos talking about intelligence and human sexuality that i just haven't talked about that at such length here but of course and another question hapless jack says quote you're tall clearly strong it makes sense ladies look like you you speak clearly and concisely no nonsense no [ __ ] i think it's your overall vibe right okay but to what extent is that rational and to what extent is that pre-rational when women meet me they don't know that i'm sober i so i i don't think of maybe the last time i drank alcohol was 21 but like really i quit drinking it like my drinking days were like 16 17. like really drinking was already over for me at 19. i can't say i drank zero alcohol when i was 19 years old right but i've basically been sober for my whole adult life right but they meet me they have these kinds of impressions you're talking about right like oh this is how the guy speaks in class this or this other guy speaks to me or whatever you know they meet me and there's something they respond to right and i have that characteristic because i'm sober all the time even i mean my overall intellect guys i have all these brothers none of my brothers can come on camera talking right now you know if i'd spent 20 years getting drunk three nights a week do you think i'd be on this level you know what i mean okay so yeah i have all these characteristics but they're responding to that in a split second you know what i mean they were there and maybe they make up explanations in their own mind afterwards for why they uh for why they're like me right but um i i don't even the factors you're listing off here these are rationalizations that come that come afterward and when they meet me they don't know i'm confident they don't know i'm well spoken they don't know i'm sober they don't know i'm trustworthy they may learn those things in time there are all kinds of redeeming qualities i have that that agree from a rational perspective you can say attracts women or makes women more interested in me once they're attracted to me blah blah blah but no in that moment with those encounters when you when you meet people that the truth is they don't know why and i don't know why either and i'll never know why and any explanation i can offer will be susceptible to the same kind of withering analysis mostly have it to what extent are you are you foisting a rationalization onto something that is fundamentally uh pre-rational and for that reason it can never be judged as just or unjust all right i remember i made a blog post about this there was a woman she to me she was very good-looking uh a very good-looking very short woman who became a lawyer someone can google this and figure out the case i commented on it's a very good looking very short woman high level of educational attainment and and career and i saw one youtube video she seemed smart she seemed very intelligent she's brilliant even let's say in the youtube video right and she got sexually involved with lamar odom this [ __ ] drug addict basketball player and that was in the period of lamar odom's life when he'd been i think he'd been kicked off of his basketball team he'd been married to a member of the kim kardashian family and then his marriage broke and he was really a drug addict he was like he was really in the most pathetic sense right anyone going to say what do you like about this guy what's wrong with you anybody can say quote unquote he doesn't deserve you right okay all all of us can imagine come on sorry maybe if you're 16 you can't imagine i can imagine exactly what she found attractive and in this interview she was being cross-examined and it was like have you seen him using cocaine no no it wasn't even cooking smoking crack crack cooking inside your own house have you seen this yourself and the answer was basically yes she because she was a trained lawyer she was giving these she was using this very peculiar wording so she couldn't be held legally accountable um which was also interesting here and showed that she was really sharp she knew how to answer a question like that without getting herself uh hooked for for a crime or something you know what i mean so yes some of the artists which deal with he'll grow several times to my knowledge but anyway he had a really serious drug one but yeah there was one in particular that got into the guard of the newspapers but no he was a serious drug addict so why would this woman fall in love with this guy he was living in her home in her apartment or condo or whatever she had why would she continue to tolerate him when she knows he's a dreaded she sees him using hard drugs in her own home it could ruin her legal career it could ruin her whole life and you love that man and he's ugly it's lamar odom come on he's got a face that could stop a clock [ __ ] he's hideous he's a [ __ ] watching any interview with them what do you what do you think they talk about the morning they roll out of bed and like let's talk about politics and the upcoming california primary let's not no you know what i mean the guy's the worst stereotype of a of a dumb job i i wasn't born yesterday kids i can imagine what she sees and i can imagine even what she loves about him and i can imagine she brought i could imagine that that relationship brought a lot of things into her life that would be totally absent if she were with a cerebral man whom she met in law school the kind of guys wearing a suit and tie who went through law school and did paperwork all day with all the poetry and their soul of a career bureaucrat you know what i mean this this kind of guy and then you know here's this i forget what he's a seven foot tall basketball player he's he's incredibly tall um he's ugly but he's cute you know okay come on guys i wasn't born i can imagine there were a lot of things that made that but so again you notice the difference earlier on whatever an hour ago there was this comment from wildstyle wildstell said love is blind i'm not saying love is blind i'm saying that love is pre-rational and then the rational mind catches up with it and rationalizes it and thus it's not susceptible to analysis in terms of justice and injustice you can't say it's an injustice for this woman to fall in love with this man this lawyer and a fallen drug addicted basketball player and we it's profoundly misleading and wrong to talk about in terms of entitlement so i have a question related to this title hit it up just speak loud so they can hear you good yeah right that's the next question yeah you're going do you it well you want to say something no i was just curious if you've already in a way addressed the socialism of you know that we're all entitled to certain things we're entitled to healthcare education can you can you grab the book on ancient greek comedy it might be on your desk yeah yeah yeah so so melissa is asking about the overlap between the two topics we're we're talking about here today guys um so has a comedy um dealing with a utopian or dystopian scenario in which people quite literally socialize the d so melissa and i we are fans of a youtube channel we utterly despise and hate this youtube channel uh kristen leo and she uses this catchphrase socialize the d okay you don't know what d stands for i can't help you um so there is a comedy in here about a utopian plan whereby the women of athens take over the panics one day so this part of the plot is worth including in the summary a bunch of women disguise themselves as men and go into their system of direct democracy it's not a parliament it's the pinnex but it's their system of voting and they put forward this proposal to communalize access to sex to socialize the deed now i'm gonna forget the numbers off hand but the most fundamental question is well if you do this if you basically force uh you know beautiful people to have sex with ugly people well you know like this is going to result in a huge number of ugly people trying to have sex with all these beautiful people and the people people are going to run away or resent it like it's not going to work beautifully we're going to flee from a city where they're coerced into having sex with enormous numbers of ugly people just because this is your this is your socialist utopian fantasy for how for how life ought to be will be more just or what have you got to try adding a little bit more light in here guys actually babe when you have a stick why don't you turn on that light back there right here thanks um great thanks that's better um anyway so they come up with a mathematical formula and it's something like for every one young beautiful person you have sex with you have to have sex with seven old or fat or ugly people like there's a ratio you're committed to to so to socialize the d right so it's it's not quite uh equality and uh it ends with i mean it's a comedy but it ends with a horrendous scene of gangs of old ugly women going around and demanding sex with these young beautiful men that it's the men that are being chased down and forced to have sex with old fat and ugly women that they don't want to make love to and the young men are saying no no no i just want to sleep with this beautiful young woman who's you know my my girlfriend or son i know they're drag they're the old old women are dragging away the the handsome young man to have to have sex with them so that was a utopian comedy or that was showing that utopia is really dystopia about in this sense um socializing socializing the d the um communalization of is that was that the door no it was just someone next to me all right somebody going fast all right sorry it's been a long time had someone actually enter uh stage left that do you remember that happened when i was in kunming a couple times had people come in the door when i was last year do you remember that yeah anyway [Laughter] so yeah we have a question here about brave new world yeah yeah yeah i think it's a terrible book i think brave new world is garbage but yeah it's a very influential science fiction book uh offering a very different view of how uh sexuality could be liberated in the future you know we have a complaint here that i assume is directed towards melissa that your video about hitomi was rude dear sir how dare you how dare you suggest that our well-intentioned and profound critique of miss hitomi mochizuki was in any way rude or improper i i say okay so there's a great question from the audience before we move on to the second even more profound question and why this is titled sex association sorry briefly that digression was about um the extent to which sex and socialism are one on the same question because there have been utopian ideals about socializing the d including some very stupid left-wing youtube channels today who talk about this ideal um we have a very profound question quote eisel do you consider yourself more attractive than vegan gains wife jasmine so guys i could repeat here exactly the same thing i've said again and again and again all right we can talk about subjective beauty and we can talk about objective beauty okay um subjective beauty is many things to many people you can love someone because they're kind to you you can love someone because they're interesting you can love someone because they've brought so many positive wonderful things in your life even though they're ugly and they may not look ugly to you like you may they may be beautiful in your eyes and i use the example before of a painting a particular painting they have value to you a particular photograph may have value even though to other people it's ugly there's a subjective and personal sense in which one person is is beautiful despite all these things and again people do fall in love with hideously deformed people what happens all the time it's reality so one thing is the subjective standard but then we can talk about what is in most real world situations the objective standard of beauty which is in fact an inter-subjective standard of beauty okay so look guys i've given you a lot of antidotes i know a lot of you have joined more recently you may not have been here since the start of the live stream uh by the way feel free to share this link to anyone on reddit or facebook who would be completely scandalized and horrified by this in-depth discussion of human sexuality sure with reddit r slash bread tube they'd especially appreciate what i'm calling this video okay and look guys my best girl melissa if she got a job at starbucks there would be other guys at starbucks trying to get at her and they would be competing over her okay also life is in some ways unfair for women so melissa today is 28 years old 10 years from now that might not be the case like i don't know what she'll at 38 maybe not at 48 maybe not at 58 you know stuff but for melissa 20 years old there's absolutely no doubt if melissa starts working at starbucks again let's just say nobody knows like let's just say she has no youtube channel and no instagram nobody knows anything about her there will be male co-workers trying to get her and competing over and there will be male customers trying to get at her and so subjective and inter-subjective so again there's a painting that i really like and i really value it but i go to an art auction or let's say an art show it's better if it's not an auction we go to an art show in paris where paintings are put up and nobody else wants to buy it and nobody else is impressed that nobody else thinks it's beautiful okay this happens so you're not going to say objectively the the painting is worthless well look you like this painting nobody else is interested okay now guys i've got to tell you something vegan gaines may sincerely love jasmine it may be that subjectively to him she's the most beautiful woman in the world if jasmine goes to work at a starbucks it is not going to be for her what it would be for melissa all right it's just not they're not going to be on the same level in terms of that intersubjective standard of beauty not in this culture you know not in not in canada and we're all in canada not here or not now okay no now there are a lot of reasons for that partly it's her appearance partly it's her attitude partly it's her speaking voice partly it's what we call charisma you know she is a dumpy self-loathing video game addict she's a horrible attitude horrible oh william i must have said my age wrong sorry william says happy birthday sorry william i i didn't just get a year older if i if i said i'll delete the comment because it's an error of thanks but it's not my birthday if i screwed up i'm sorry so once in a while i do make errors here guys anyway thanks anyway james thanks everybody william thanks anyway um okay we were just talking about these other factors too we're talking about the role of what could be simply summarized as charisma right when i'm talking about why are all these women after me okay if you want one word charisma the melissa actually does have some charisma and you can see it in these few videos and like no no i mean okay we're comparing you to jasmine jasmine has negative charisma right she's a self-identified misanthrope you know she's masculine where she ought to be feminine she has a you know she has a dark cloud overhead all the time right so no i do think if you're making that comparison of course melissa is unholding of course appearance is part of it but also these other factors you know matter so if you're asking me that question you know sure i've got an answer and and you know there's a subjective answer and there's in this intersubjective sense there's an object to mass so guys why do we have to be why do we have to be uptight about it why do we have to pretend this is a problem for anyone why can't we just be real about it you know and uh god here on youtube you see it all the time i mean sorry someone was complaining about our critique of hitomi mojito does anyone doubt that her youtube career is based on her appearance does anyone doubt it's based on her inter-subjective level of attraction you know it is what it is and um again people are uncomfortable with for the same reason printing i'm sorry my words now people are uncomfortable with it for the same reason that they try to that we discussed before that they try to voice concepts of justice and injustice under human attraction and love they feel that it is unjust for people to be unequally attractive and in fact it is neither just nor unjust anything you want to say babe that's nothing but anything you want to say jumping in on us socialize the d yeah i mean there's a certain amount of entitlement that comes through in some of these comments yes that they feel entitled to love from somebody else i think that's part of it and this sense of justice or injustice and love is um yeah it's hard to be mature about that when you're not yeah you're not able to think it through but once you do well look sorry this may seem off topic but it's but it's on topic so one of my grandmothers was jewish i'm half jewish and she joined a golf club never played golf why because she grew up with anti-semitism and up to a certain point in her life all the golf clubs in canada excluded jews they were whites only golf clubs they openly said that they didn't allow jewish members and then it was a big accomplishment for her she was proud she was gonna go out and join this golf club and pay all this money i you probably if you read between the lines i think this is completely pointless and ridiculous this is my this is my opinion but that was her experience in life right it's hard to be cynical about an institution that you have been excluded from with prejudice for a lot of people love is an institution that they feel they have been excluded from with pressures it's very hard for them to have equanimity or detachment or see it for what it is i mean i can remember saying to people who are either less sexually experienced than me or who were actually virgins i've known a couple people who remained virgins so they were like 25 or whatever they've remained virgins late in the life do i know anyone who got to 30. i forget i've known some people who stayed virgins late into life and i remember saying that look what you don't understand is that for people like me having sex is like washing my hands i do it multiple times a day every day like if this is just part of the drum beat of life by the way if i miss a day it's for a reason oh no oh no no oh no i should say that every day unless [Laughter] that's the truth all right all right sorry you know if you've had if you've had a fight if you've had a conflict with your boyfriend or girlfriend if you're mad at each other or something if there's some if there's some reason but yeah it's like look you can romanticize this you can build it up in your mind you can resent this you can have all this stuff right well you know if you know someone who's jewish who grew up in an anti-semitic society if you know someone who's black they grew up in a phobic society towards them an oppressive racist society towards black people they may have all kinds of ideas about how great it would be to be able to play tennis or play golf in this exclusive club or this exclusive resort they may build it up in their minds it's very hard to have detachment and equanimity about an institution that is that has prejudicially excluded you and people who are stuck being virgins or people who've only had a few dysfunctional failed relationships they never really experienced love and long-term meaningful high commitment relationship like people who for whom these things haven't worked out they are gonna look up at that golf club they're gonna look up at that tennis club you know they're gonna look at that elite institution and feel like oh oh you guys are having so much fun it's so great in there inside that institution i can't get into when you're going to resent it and you're going to think about entitlement you're going to think about justice and injustice and you're going to think what is it about me or my appearance or how it was born that keeps me out of that club but you're wrong right right right that's why that's why it's in the title no i know and it's it's like you want socialism instead of socialize the d you want to socialize the golf club you want to have a socialist golf club i look i can end the video there we don't have to get into other topics of socialism no it's true i mean they are related with this idea of of justice and justice yeah by the way there's a question here uh jasmine is live streaming right now so plant-based the guy who made this comment the last time i looked at her channel she was doing a nine hour continuous live stream playing video games you know nine hours if her i don't know if she gets up and goes to the bathroom ah friend of mine okay it's a lot of good questions here guys so look i can throw away my plan for this video i'm happy to just talk to you guys about whatever i'm trying to talk about whatever melissa melissa if you've got more questions like totally you know what i mean i don't have to force any direction or conclusion in this video so nacho asks and it's been revealed that nacho is female not nacho identifies as female nacho asks quote isil i've heard you complain many times about people in general not being honest with others and with themselves how are you not in mist and throw up yourself okay you know what the truth is nacho um i love people and i love life and i can remember actually uh a fight i had with melissa about this once where melissa said to me she was being insulting to her she didn't intentionally insulting way she said oh well you know you you're you're a misanthrope and you don't like i was like who are you talking at that point i forget we've been together for one year or something i was like you know me better than that like i'm that you know who are you talking about right now that's not true of me at all you know i remember a rap lyric it's a nothing rap lyric from a nothing song it's not a great song but remember a rap lyric that just says you know my life is so [ __ ] up and i love it you know and i've thought about that and i felt that way a different stage in my life really guys i've been in a situation where i have nothing but a backpack members of the communist party and the government of laos have just literally told me they're going to kill me the only money i have in the world is in a bank account inside laos i've got to get back in i'm homeless i'm jobless everything i own is in this one backpack i literally i don't have a bank account i don't have a credit card you know and it's like and man i'm so [ __ ] happy you know i'm so happy like really i was smiling ear to ear that whole time i've told you guys uh stories about this [ __ ] before and um you know i remember i was laughing at my boss or my former boss he's like well look this is the situation the government's threatened to kill you you're getting kicked out of the country you've lost your job like this is the situation and i was smiling and laughing and he said well you're laughing now i said no no no no no i'm going to be laughing about this for the rest of my life meet up with me when i'm 65. if you think i'm going to be old and bitter you're i'm still going to be laughing you know no i love my life and i love your life also and you know there are some people who struggle to just not hate others and i'm i'm at the opposite extreme i'm someone who has to struggle to to not love others too much you know what i mean because my natural incarnation of tendency i love other people i love humanity you know really and i don't love them despite their complexity or despite their hypocrisy i love them because of it you know what i mean like i i love the struggle you know what i mean i love what they're i love what they're going through i love the tragedy as well as the triumph but you know what i'll be honest i love tragedy more than drive you know most of my interests in life have focused on what's tragic i don't i don't research success stories i research disasters i mean for real so melissa read that great article i wrote about uh you know i've written articles about mass starvation and revolutions that went horribly wrong and utopias that rhetorically wrong and terrible almost all of my research interests in life have been like the darkest aspects of human nature including genocide including you know um no but you know i i really love people and i really love you know human nature now look guys this is reciprocal anything you love anything you appreciate anything you you approve of you know um it's gonna be reciprocal with something else you despise and i've always pointed out to people when they talk about loving one culture more than another if someone says they love chinese culture well that means you don't really like indian culture you know like there's some other culture you dislike you making judgments about culture it's going to be reciprocal and look guys for me the most horrifying image is drone footage of a herd of thousands of penguins on antarctica awking and waddling from side to side through the foot milling around in circles the socialization and herd behavior of penguins right it's horrifying and what do these penguins do they leap into the freezing cold ocean and kill whatever they can set their beaks on they kill one fish after another just so they can get up out of that ocean and not starve for another day and waddle around in a circle with the other penguins squawking mindlessly right human life robbed of its intelligence human life robbed of its ability to reflect to analyze to philosophize to appreciate to think politically even you know is horrifying to me you know what is animal in human nature in this sense the mindless life of the herd you can see it in penguins you could see it another another you know mindless relatively mindless animals that's horrifying to me and i this is a big difference between me and a lot of vegans a lot of vegans glorify you know wild animals they glorify the life they glorify pet dogs and cats you know when i look at a dog when i look at a cat when i look at penguins in the herd this way for me this is the most vivid thing because they're really what they're they're the way that they're squawking it doesn't have the quality of a bird in the forest giving it a specific call with a specific meaning some of the more intelligent birds come much closer to us that way sorry it's been proven i could get into this and prove that some birds like ravens are actually remarkably intelligent they're not as smart as you and i but you know they can't appreciate this live stream right now but they do have some language they have some ability to communicate a particular threat a particular opportunity they have ability to communicate hey there's food here they have ability to communicate some of these things um you know no but i i you know as much as i love the life of the mind and that's why i love my own life and why i love your life and like there's really a sense in which i can say i love you like and i love sharing my life with other people and i love other people who are my fans coming to my life and sharing their life with me i'm gonna be real with you even when i don't like them really there are people i don't like and i still love them for sharing their struggle with me you know what i mean like i still love that they're going through it and they're we're going through it together in a sense you know i i love all that right but it's all based on the life of the mind it's all based on the intellect and the intellect that separates us from animals and that conqueror distinguishes us from animals and makes animals in some ways our diametric opposite you know what i mean and instead and whether it's the life of the life of the penguin or the life of the polar bear it's horrifying sir a polar bear gets up every day to kill something and doesn't even know what prowling around you may not know this before progress but it's so cold that you know dead meat doesn't rot a polar bear at all times is wearing a necklace of little frozen crumbs of dead animals of the corpses of its prey you know it clings there clings to the fur and it's so cold you know it doesn't rot or drop away and they stink the unspeakable stench of a polar bear in the wild you know to get up and mindlessly kill and never know why and never know what any of it means and never know and never question why you exist you know um it's horrifying you know i love the life of the mind and i totally despise a life you know without a mind so you know um yeah i'm very much the opposite of a misanthrope and frankly even in my most cynical videos most of which are humorous when i'm joking in a kind of um when i'm joking in a provocative way you know actually i think you can see my love of humanity and love of life you know shines through that great question fully raw christina is still a virgin ride great question do you do you play rainbow six [Laughter] natasha says oh you know me natasha says quote i get the impression isil embraces suffering as a learning experience well right i do but i can't embrace it for other people right there are other people who would go through the same suffering i've been through or less and they're just traumatized by it they're just destroyed by it for them it's not a learning experience like the same thing could be a learning experience for me and not for other people so yeah i can't learn for you i can't suffer for you i can't suffer with you even you know what i mean but yes for me that is exactly true and i i really fashioned that philosophy before i ever got involved with buddhism in some ways it's also the opposite of what i might say you know [Applause] [Music] okay guys so we have a complaint from someone that youtube keeps censoring his question well why don't you find a way to rephrase it in a way that won't be censored what am i supposed to tell you find a way to state it that doesn't involve curse words okay all right guys so i'm happy talking motivation i think i'll really briefly roll on to the other question that i had and then call this tonight because it is it is about socialism um so look i had a question following up um i i have a couple of new viewers by the way from india and sri lanka i'm happy to have them there have been times in my channel when i considered you know really intentionally trying to quote the court the uh the larger audience that was offered by by india and dealing with some of the political questions over there and i think it is interesting that people who have a hindu or buddhist cultural background they often relate to me positively even though i mean nihilistic atheists even though a very harsh critic of both hinduism and buddhism because they see in me some of those same ethical qualities of uprightness and steadfastness and some of those puritanical moral qualities that they value in their own in their auditions so i'm happy however it's also true that the questions i've gotten lately from my new viewers or my new fans from india or sri lanka they're phrased they're phrased in a way that actually makes it difficult for me to understand what they're getting at so one of those questions i um i answered earlier was concerning the the wealth of nations why is it or how is it that there's this astounding inequality and wealth between different countries and of course india itself was very much the main question on the table now i made an earlier video attempting to answer why i attempted to talk through uh some of those things at different levels from different angles or or what have you but i got a further reply saying no no no that really didn't answer my question at all and fair enough but i calls them like i see them like i again the way some of these people use the english language or what it is they're insinuating or how they frame their argument it might be a little a little strange to me but this person was really wanting me to get into the question of why and how japan for example had achieved this kind of wealth let's say california also what were the sacrifices or what were the strategic decisions that made it possible to achieve extraordinary even opulent wealth in some places not others given that you know broadly speaking especially with these large parts of the earth's earth's surface you have the same kind of natural resources involved like you know if you're talking about africa as a whole and kind of india and pakistan as a whole like sort of the subcontinent talking about yeah well japan is actually the worst off in terms of natural resources we're not comparing uh the arctic circle we're not comparing greenland to africa but you know well it's not oh you can grow rice anywhere you know you can farm chocolate anywhere it's hot enough okay bad example you know the point is we're not looking at a situation where there's some simple material factor you can point to and say oh well you could only grow cotton in one of these places and cotton is the secret to wealth or oil that drilling oil is the secret to wealth or something so this person is really wanting me to talk more specifically about about this kind of wealth inequality so now again i do think that um oh well too bad it's too bad that people can't participate in these in these discussions um [Music] okay so this comes back to the same kind of resentment that is often either implicitly or explicitly at the basis of complaints against capitalism complaints about inequality complaints about injustice such as we talked about earlier in this video and very often people haven't examined what their assumptions are of what justice would be right so whenever you narrow it down to talk about any one particular industry it's soon revealed just how absurd these assumptions are whether they're proposed by people who are self-consciously socialist or not there are all kinds of people who really feel morally that india ought to be just as wealthy as japan or they should both be equally mediocre they should be made level so that japan is maybe japan is less wealthy and india is wealthier so that the extremes of wealth and poverty you know are eliminated okay so here's the problem the problem is time can you imagine a world in which hollywood california did not have any competitive advantage in the film industry but in which each and every city in india each and every city in europe each and every city in china each and every city in africa had an equal apportionment of the film industry talk about socialize the d you want to talk about socializing the film industry this is an interesting example to think through because if we said this about gold mining or the oil industry right away it would seem impossible to say well gold isn't located everywhere right okay all right okay i'm gonna tell you this you may not know this you may not have researched this there was only one competitive advantage that hollywood california ever had in the history of the film ministry one of the reasons i know this it was something i was interested in many many years ago i read the autobiography of charlie chaplin it was very striking to me that he described what uh hollywood was like when the streets were empty when there were paved streets and street lamps and empty blocks after after block when the city had just sort of the plan had been drawn on a grid of the map and it'd be yet to fill in with fill in with buildings the film industry was there you know he started in the black and white silent filmmaker he started in england and then went to hollywood he was part of the kind of pioneering generation and everyone knew and he described beverly hills being literally hills like there was a time when it was just there were just hills there there were no houses there were no shops like he was there when that but everyone knew everyone knew how enormous this film industry was going to be and that's where it was going to be so i i looked into the economics of that it's just something that interested me back at the time it still interests me now in some ways okay at that time it was one advantage hollywood california had and that was sunlight the quality of the actual film in the cameras was much worse in charlie chaplin's heyday of course during his life all these things improved that was silent film the silent black winkle they needed incredibly intense light and you guys may not know this they also used incredibly intense makeup where like the contrast between black and white on people's faces was also like often it would look ridiculous in real life but that's what would turn up well on uh on camera song there's this really stark uh extreme contrast of makeup and so on and you needed really bright light with no clouds and of course no rain that was the only advantage hollywood california had why is it that people in china still watch movies made in hollywood today what is the advantage what is it that cannot be distributed equally around the world and then secondly this is really the more subtle because these things exist in time right why is it you can't just go to an empty valley in india where today there are nothing but hills and start building new roads and start putting up lamp posts and start building sound stage and say hey guys this is the start of a whole new film industry it can never happen twice right it can never happen again there was one opportunity at one time and in one place right and even though people in china don't speak english they really don't they're watching those films either dubbed in chinese or subtitle chase it's a huge it's a huge disadvantage right you still can't reproduce the competitive advantages that hollywood has in china they're trying they will try right now this pattern broadly speaking is what happens again and again in all industries and not just uh cultural industries as we say not just openly and obviously creative industries i mean in a sense all industries are created i spoke to an expert it's not worth telling the whole story and he claimed that the crucial factor that kept um fashion and design rooted in milan was the number of craftsmen and small industrial shops making molds making these high books i was gonna say high tech they're not really high tech making these crucial elements that the design industry needs the manufacturing industry needs at a really high quality there are guys who do certain kinds of sculpting and certain kinds of technical jobs there's a cluster of skilled people in milan some of them attached more to the fashion industry some industrial design but he's saying milan has these advantages and it's true they've held on what was the advantage milan had 500 years ago or something it's not just the fashion industry do all these things in mind why can't we just do that again in india why can't we even within china i lived through really the birth and death of this kind of optimism you guys may or may not know this story but when the communist government of china decided to basically revive capitalism capitalism under communist tyranny basically right when they decided to do that um the place with the most spectacular economic growth and overall transformation was shanghai and everybody saw it of course a lot of chinese people visited but it was on tv it was in magazines and everyone in china has been told this is the future shanghai happened once and everyone in china was planning for and getting ready for it everyone was building roads that led nowhere like literally it's like i just described building roads through the hills of beverly hills where there's nothing there but hills roads through green grass fields and so on there was this optimism because people thought oh now that this happened in shanghai next it's going to happen in 10 more cities and 100 more cities there's going to be shanghai everywhere there's going to be the shanghai effication of all of china and it never happened because what happened in shanghai could only happen once even in an economy as enormous as china even an economy with as much growth as china right for all of those industries it could only happen once okay you want to you want to talk about exceptions there are some industries where it happened twice there were two places on planet earth where they make racing bicycles bicycles that are good enough to be used in races one is italy the other is taiwan do you want to be the third place do you want to risk you want to try to do in india you want to compete with italy and taiwan really good luck by the way i'm not saying your business will fail i'm not saying you'll be failing i'm saying you will fail to reproduce hollywood you'll fail to reproduce shanghai you'll fail to be the the greatest center for this industry in the world but totally you you could have some success and many do i mean all of those businesses it's not that it's not that there's zero filmmaking on the rest of planet earth right now the clustering effect that happens in economics film is a great example of all right why does hollywood matter hollywood is where the casting takes place hollywood is where the auditioning takes place hollywood is where the investment is arranged in advance for projects that haven't been made yet there is no gold mine there is no oil rig there's nothing physically linking it to that place and to my knowledge something like 20 years after the film industry started the reliance on sunlight was already over it was real like there's just this early period where they really needed very bright sunlight partly because the quality of the film was so bad having sunlight is still nice but very rapidly the quality of uh the film and lighting and all kinds of things soon enough it was certainly possible to have the film industry based in connecticut but connecticut could never be what hollywood already was because hollywood already existed success in one place completely snuffs out the possibility of success in others now this is not completely alien to left-wing discourse melissa read some karl marx lately so the concept that marxists adapt and discuss and propound to deal with this is the concept of super profits so marx doesn't know much about economics he really doesn't but one of the notions he popularized is that in various industries you go through what normal economics would call a sunrise and sunset phase in the industry but that there's this initial period of the opportunity for super profits you're making amazing profits when something is brand new so i would say a textbook example of this although it may be misleading in some ways was the boom in boxed cereal in the united states so uh cheerios corn pops uh frosted flakes this kind of thing right now as ever called the the original one was uh corn flakes and grape nuts a lot of you guys they don't know graveyards but that was one of the originals right and i'm sorry i forget that there was one town in the united states there's a famous thing same way there was a gold rush there was a serial rush there was this boom there was this brief period but this is one town and they were paying people these really high wages to come and work in the in the cereal industry there and so on so this is this is basically the marxist stereotype that there's a brief period when something is a new invention a new discovery a new horizon opens up you have a brief period where there's it's super profitable you know and then that then that closes up now i i basically think marx is dumb and i think that even his analysis of this one issue is dumb but it's significant to know here because this is the sense in which socialists and eleven people are aware of this or grudgingly admit it right whether we're talking about um the fashion industry or the textile industry like mass production textile or the difference between well design takes place in some one place and manufacturing takes place in another or you know the difference between car factories in detroit in the glory days of detroit and you know a later period when this has been ground down to people being paid minimum wage and no longer there's no longer the kind of optimism you know attachment socialists have a vocabulary for dealing with these things that's derivative of marx in this way okay but the truth is it's not that making a movie was more profitable when charlie chaplin was alive it's not that making a movie reached a larger audience when charlie chaplin was alive right think about when charlotte chaplin had a hit film what percentage of the population of planet earth saw that film and today when you have a real hit film what percentage i mean even within europe even within america africa china the whole world right the number of people watching and consuming movies and paying for it and the revenue generated but it's not the case that that early period of opportunity is more profitable not by definition anyway it could be now look even with this thing with boxed cereal well if they charged a hundred dollars for a box of cereal nobody would buy it that would be super profitable right like okay the early days of box cereal when they could charge a really high price no the whole reason why people were excited about it it was cheap it had to compete with bread if bread is cheaper than cereal nobody's going to eat bread you know sorry nobody's getting cereal they're going to buy bread but no no so the product is cheap right so again mark says analysis it's profoundly misleading right but the power that exists in that early period is is precisely to initiate the clustering effect right so you have one town that produces boxed cereal so what do you get there you get a clustering now you start to build railroad tracks that bring in the right kind of wheat in bulk and dump it into a silo and put it into a processor in a huge scale billions of tons per year or whatever that vast amounts and then you have a big machine that drives it and threshes it and processes it and bakes it extrudes it and so on okay so you have all this machinery you have all and you have certain kinds of skilled engineers and laborers that are all brought together in one place what is it they have in milan that's so special ultimately it's the people ultimately it's the clustering of skilled people people who can make the right kind of plastic mold the right type of um you know tool and die machining who can do everything you need to make a high-end whether it's a designer purse that has little metal elements in it or designer clothing or um designer computers tell me whatever is designer shoes those there's a clustering of small businesses providing these skilled services that are all in one place at one time what is it that hollywood has the actual camera equipment it's all made in china now if you want to buy good luck buying a camera that is not made in china you know i mean some of them they have components made in germany they have components i admit there's some high-end stuff that's not mentioned but i'm just saying generally computer technology and certainly cheap cameras all this stuff is mentioned it's not made in california but it's not like the advantage oval that's where the cameras are made oh you can't get a camera anywhere else are you kidding me there's a clustering effect oh well you know they have the right casting agents they have the right auditions they have the right lawyers to have the right investment people you know they have a group of skilled people coming together in one place at one time right and actually when you take it apart piece by piece even when you look at the sound stage even you look at the actual physical enclosed space to shoot the filament there's nothing special there there's nothing special at all right so this is the horrifying terrifying sense in which the socialist dream of equality between japan and india can never be realized it's the same sense in which the film industry can never be redistributed from hollywood to topeka kansas it can never be reallocated evenly across the united states of america right and the clusters where innovation and design and these things happen where the high profit end of the spectrum happens you want to talk about financial investment and banking where does that happen can you redistribute that can you redistribute wall street can you just redistribute the district of london that's referred to as the city can you even redistribute the decision making for the people who are making money on the stock market out of china and india and africa and so on the investors who are bankrolling the gold mines and so on you know the clusters of skilled labor once you've established that pattern once you've established that competitive advantage in one place even if like hollywood california there's no advantage but the sunlight all right what is the advantage of wall street nothing not what what do you think what do you think the street itself somehow you know it's it's sm bench and yet once you've got that cluster there right it's not because of karl marx's theory of super profits right it's incredibly difficult to redistribute that or change the pattern and people will pay people will put up with unbelievable disadvantages think about how expensive it is to live in manhattan island or to commute to come into manhattan every island every day just to deal with wall street anyone could stand there and say hey look this would be better if we could do it in topeka kansas let's break up wall street or relocate western right there's a clustering effect that's the jeep and then that advantage i'm not going to say it lasts forever it lasts until something unbelievably cataclysmic happens something like world war ii something like a communist revolution you know so something something just completely destroys the fabric of the economy you've got and the supply chains that link these things that create these these clustering effects yeah i just wanted to share one example that i was reminded of what you were talking about so around the country in america there are casinos it's great great examples yep why is las vegas the center why did it become this yeah there was one period right it's a great example i didn't think of that go on yeah atlantic city failed okay so okay so melissa this is actually examination really i would not have thought of this because so melissa points out that today in 2021 there were casinos in every corner of the united states of america so like on the east coast you know every indian reservation has a casino i remember that in the desert too as you're driving there casinos everywhere there's a casino in detroit there's a casino in windsor windsor ontario like it's on both sides of the border i don't know why you bother but you know okay you know uh they're like wherever you live the united states of america it's a very short drive to get to the nearest state we have a casino in vancouver i think it's despicable but we do oh so now there are casinos everywhere so today there is no special competitive advantage held by las vegas nevada except that it still has this clustering effect right it still has this knock-on effect because they were the first place to do it they were the early adopter they created the pattern they created so that's a great example now let's get a little bit darker there are beautiful women everywhere there's prostitution in las vegas nevada they were the first to legalize prostitution there's no talent there that exists that's missing elsewhere it's not like there are more beautiful women in nevada than in california or anywhere else right oh and and frankly today of course i think if we're not being too naive you can find prostitution everywhere but las vegas is the world's premier destination for prostitution right so there's nothing special there's no advantage they have in terms of gambling you can play the same the same deck of cards you can play the same game with anywhere in the world there's no advantage that they have in terms of prostitution right and yet this is a worldwide leading destination for this and again it would be very hard to redistribute that people have tried a lot of money in it people are trying to redistribute the gambling it's true right to make it more evenly spread i'm sure there are a lot of places in india too that would like to like to share in these vices and make money end of them right but it's good now a short of a civil war or you know a revolution or some really calamitous event completely destroying las vegas even then probably if like if an earthquake destroyed probably they'd rebuild and everyone would still go you know they wouldn't go oh yeah we're going to show we still support las vegas after the earthquake destroyed it probably would keep he'll keep going on yeah and actually i think actually a really good comparison would be the caribbean i think there were a lot of islands in the caribbean that would love to have the gambling tourism and the prostitution so you know just even americans coming over but they're not able okay now look beautiful women all over the world thailand thailand's the world's destination for prostitution they did it first right they were the early adopters they they created they led the way for the 20th century and 21st century culture of global sex tourism of this kind of this model of prostitution obviously prosecution has always existed everywhere but in terms of being a destination for organized international prostitution right and again it'd be very hard for i know look you know i am going to assert that there are beautiful women all over the world but i just think it would be ridiculous to pretend that this is because there is any kind of scarce resource that exists in thailand that that doesn't exist in iran lots of beautiful women in iran but for some reason hey it's the same climate in malaysia beautiful beaches in malaysia for some reason it's not malaysia and so on it's it's thailand so yeah both gambling and prostitution those are actually really you know really uh telling examples however um look so so what's the point okay so look sorry they have done a bad job explaining this particular aspect um but look you know you have to add up cluster by cluster all of the things that japan was the first in and japan was the best in and where they are still the best in the world where they still have that cluster there right japan was the first country in asia to make steel boats not wooden boats steel hold boats a lot of things are connected to that right like including the modern sheet metal industry itself if you think about all the things you need coal you need factories you need a certain kind of social organization a certain kind of economy you need a stock market like think about all the things that had to be modernized for japan to have make its own steel start making its own steel steel-clad boats japan was the first country in asia to manufacture its own airplanes forget that you know what i mean they weren't they weren't the first country in the world no they didn't invent the airplane they didn't invent the ironclad boat or the steel clad boat you know no but they were the first in a huge part of the world and they became you know the leaders of asia and all those things and despite the absolutely ruinous period of the japanese empire in which they bankrupted themselves and massacred others so the period of japanese emma was bad for everyone including the japanese it really was but despite that that clustering effect is so strong it's so powerful that japan is still the leader in innumerable industries throughout asia you know i'll get cars airplanes boats you know what have you uh anyway sorry as you go through well video games who makes the best oh video games are a great example of that clustering effect so with video games it wasn't just one cluster video game is an early computer program technology i was talking to melissa about this a couple weeks ago but you know and i was explaining to her actually england played a really unique role in the history of computer programming video games included but video games computer technology and then but you know this whole range of early console technologies and a lot of it happened in england you know what what advantage does england have it's not like a gold mine there isn't a microchip mine where people go down and mine the microchips so england had an advantage no obviously it's cultural it's a clustering effect it's educational it's attitude there are all these things came together where england really had something important going at the dawn of the computer now how big was england's you know uh software or hardware sector how big is it today compared to silicon valley in california compared to japan of course it's small but there were a few different clusters around the world this way and everything i just said about hollywood we can repeat about silicon valley california everything i said about wall street i can repeat about silicon valley california i think you would find i mean i'm sorry i'm just going to be honest i don't know what the name of the neighborhood is in tokyo but i know if you look at the neighborhoods in tokyo where they have the cluster of software designers and so on where they have the software and hardware industries located the advantage that japan has most obviously emblematized by companies like sega nintendo snk but you know uh so many so many countries because so many part of me so many innovative companies in the history of uh computer technology software and hardware you know japan also had a tremendous question this way okay you want you want to take it away from them again it's not that you can't compete it's not that you can't succeed but i mean there is no filmmaker in india who can be so successful that he's going to cause the film industry to relocate from hollywood to india and even if you did even if that happened it wouldn't redistribute evenly around the world you're gonna have this kind of cluster so japan was the first in so many things even though they were devastated in world war ii and they were part by the way they weren't just devastated by losing world war ii they were also devastated by their period of winning it during the period where the empire was expanding that was also ruinous for them kind of a topic for another day but winning winning can be bad for you as well as losing just so you guys know in war and empire and politics um actually you could say this about afghanistan the americans kept winning and kept losing more money right they won at 10 billion a year and then they were losing at 100 billion dollars a year it's you know interesting very different example though as a general as a general principle um but when you look at it and you add it up sector by sector cluster by cluster what is the reality today the reality is that there are brilliant talented people in india who learn how to become computer programmers because they want to get rich and they apply for jobs in silicon valley california and they apply for jobs in japan and once in a while they apply for jobs in england you know it's a much smaller cluster that's what they look up to that's what they look forward to and even if they personally are tremendously successful they could be successful they go away to work in japan for a few years and then come back to india they may just stay in india and make a tremendously successful company within india this pattern is going to continue to perpetuate itself let's say so you're a software developer in india and you say okay well my company is really successful but you know what my biggest problem is whenever i get these talented young people and i give them a job they work here for a couple of years but the whole time they're working for me they're applying for jobs in silicon valley california and they're applying for jobs in tokyo japan and as soon as they get an offer from one of them they don't know if i can leave you two things there you might be you say i in india i can't offer to pay them enough money to stay here instead of going to california but you know what you're also going to find in these things you're going to find you're in a situation it's like even if i can pay them enough even if i can pay them more they'll still leave me because they want to be in silicon valley like if they're earning the same amount of money or slightly less they want to be where the action is they want to be at that cluster of creativity the same way that you can't pay someone enough money to stay in india if what they want is to be in los angeles if what they want to be as in california to be in the greatest center of creativity at the leading edge where the really important decisions are made for the greatest creative cluster in that industry in the history of the world okay so when you engage in not class analysis of economics but cluster analysis right you start to understand why it is and how it is that there can be a gold mine in laos laos is a poverty-stricken country in southeast asia just north of cambodia there can be a gold mine in laos and yet mysteriously most of the people who get rich from it are australian because it's an australian gold mining company it's a stock traded on the australian stock exchange right and you go and visit the mine it seems like all of the engineers all of the scientists they aren't local ocean people the security guard is lotion there are some people doing you know low level minimum wage jobs there but wow isn't that funny the first world countries whether it's japan or australia or europe the rich keep getting richer even when the gold being mined is lotion gold in that this inequality created by the clustering effect and you could say the japanese economy because they have no natural resources they have no natural advantages it's the sum of so many clusters of excellence of skilled people of unique services that are in one place and not another um that when you add this up it's a create pardon me it's a form of dynamic self-perpetuating inequality that gets worse and worse frankly forever and one of the reasons why that happens is that nobody neither left nor right neither socialist nor capitalist neither liberal nor conservative nobody has ever been trying to solve it [Music]