Seven Years of Sexual Harassment on Youtube.

i don't know what it takes to get people
to change um one of the most powerful and most compelling and most common sources of change is that someone recognizes that they've done wrong what i find so terrifying about the current generation who've grown up playing video games is that when they engage in this behavior the casual cruelty of the internet there's no awareness whatsoever that they've done anything wrong so i was suggesting to you before someone like joe best someone like vegan foot soldier they would do these things and then when i'd talk to them because they're all people i communicated with at length in some cases for years they would really sincerely not perceive themselves as having done something wrong another great example is ask yourself ask i remember talking conflicts through with asia and he just didn't get it now how many hours have these people spent dealing with conflicts face to face with real people in their whole lives and how many hours have they spent on the internet in video game chat forums like chat that's built in the videos through all those digital forms of communication yes i do think the problem even if it doesn't originate in video games it doesn't originate in internet culture it's exacerbated by internet culture and it's creating a whole generation of people who have stereotypically autistic behaviors without actually having the medically real condition of autism it's cultivating a whole generation of people who are not just stupid and ignorant but self-righteously stupid and ignorant and who bring to these discussions and attitude that cannot be overcome with kindness which as i said for many years was really my inclination there's another youtuber who is known for almost nothing other than criticizing my channel or insulting my channel or def defaming me personally the channel is called fandar he has several separate channels one of them is nothing but 100 hate videos uh directed towards me you guys might not guess this but i can provide evidence for four years i made positive efforts intermittently to reach out to this guy and talk to him about his concerns and overcome i really made efforts again and again not constantly would have taken up all my time but intermittently to overcome his hostility with kindness you know and it failed it failed every time because he i think he is typical of of his generation and my generation also of our generation a very broadly defined generation the generation that's grown up since the invention of the internet he has no concept of kindness he has no concept of what it is to be charitable he has no concept of what it is to be reasonable especially not in the context of a of a confrontation or or of a conflict he genuinely doesn't know what i'm saying so you can say it's about vegan foot soldier i can say this about so many people i've interacted with or they did it like if you actually talk to them long enough they can't change it's not that they can't admit that they've done something wrong they genuinely cannot perceive themselves as having done something wrong so you know i write to this guy i say look i've shown you a lot of kindness i've shown you a lot of consideration i've taken a lot of my time to address your concerns even though many of them are unreasonable some of them are insane some of them are based on your own like delusions or hallucinations like you think i've said things i haven't said you made things up about me and you don't realize you made them up or misrepresentations or lies in a couple cases he took a lie someone else made and then he ran with it without even googling or whatever you know it's like okay so you have all this i was still against me but you know one of the things i said to him is you know look even if you think your harassment and defamation of me is justified which is not why have you been doing this to melissa for four years what did she do wrong all she did was fall in love with me and you've made her life hell and you know i may be tough but melissa's not that tough like you must know this hurts her more than it hurts me and you have engaged in this self-righteous you know vicious and vitriolic campaign to ruin our lives you know this guy he's not the first he made up the allegation out of thin air that i was a pedophile no evidence no google's no concern and he made a series of videos claiming and advancing this to my knowledge some of them were deleted by google i don't know exactly what happened the flagging system and to my knowledge now just after my talking in the last two days where i made this effort to be reasonable i've reasoned it through with him he's deleted the remaining copies of those videos wherever you re-uploaded them or what have you what i'm really trying to describe here is different from what's commonly called the conspiracy theory mentality these are individual people sitting at their keyboards fastening onto little snippets of information that will justify their own malice that will give them a pretext or an excuse to carry on a defamation and harassment campaign against you the example i'm going to give you now it's typical it's not extraordinary it's stupid to me it's mind-blowingly stupid but i've got to tell you what the internet has taught me is that the vast majority of our fellow human beings they think and feel and act this way and they use their minds in large part to justify totally irrational agendas and apprehensions in december of 2019 i mentioned in passing that esana o'neil is less attractive today than she was at the height of her fame when she was offered modeling contracts and made a lot of money by appearing in advertisements that this is an unremarkable thing to say and as it happens i was saying it in the midst of quite a meaningful video where i was talking about the meaning of life talking about the fact that whether you're a young lady or a young gentleman your looks are not going to last and you really should care about building yourself up intellectually and doing meaningful things with your life those things are still going to matter when you're 65. so it wasn't for no reason that i was commenting on her appearance in passing this guy fandar fastened onto the fact that i had said in passing that this woman is less attractive than she was in the past and he used that as justification to carry out a defamation campaign against me claiming that i must be a pedophile because in his mind logically the only way someone could have this observation the only reason i could have the only possible motivation i could have for making that statement in that context wasn't to illustrate the argument of the video it wasn't it wasn't part of a point i was clearly an explicit no no no this was proof positive of some hidden dark urge i have beneath the surface he's doing the same thing right now in ringing his hands trying to come up with crazy paradoxical conspiratorial explanations for how it is that i've come to the conclusion that jasmine gaines is really quite unattractive she's also quite overweight at the moment um may or may not matter depending on what angle you're criticizing vegan gains from because vegan gains has a long history of fat shaming other people on the internet he has a long history of denouncing women for being overweight on the internet specifically she hates her body she hates the way she looks and she's ashamed of herself for becoming so fat there's a reason why 99 of people find those who are overweight and obese unattractive it's because it's [ __ ] unhealthy we are biologically wired to seek out healthy people who are capable of producing viable offspring it's not possible for him to hear what i've got to say about vegan gains and jasmine gaines and s and o'neill and receive it in a fundamentally charitable way like hey this guy is making a point that's important to him he's offering some kind of criticism whether it's of the vegan movement or the culture of living in a culture where all that anyone cares about is your physical appearance and beauty and he's seen this in passing for that purpose no there must be some dark hidden ulterior motive even if he is struggling at this moment to come up with it there must be some way he can manufacture this into an attack on your character just because i have a great this is a great example of this so this is with fandar but it's closely parallel to what i dealt with with other vegan activists and so on and look sorry i haven't used the term vegan activist in this whole video right but that was the other thing it's like if we wanted to get rich we'd all be working in real estate if we wanted to get famous we'd all be working in hollywood guys i came on youtube to try to make the world a better place why is that nobody else has good intentions why is nobody else even charitable like you know i'm willing to reciprocate good attention why is nobody else even willing to be reasonable how can it be this hostile this terrible this conspiratorial you know uh so on and so forth um you know i've made videos talking about my divorce i've made videos talking about my agony in being separated from my daughter and lengthy legal process of trying to spend more time with my daughter and how the french court system okay so i got negative things to say about my ex-wife plenty of divorced people do it's not really that big a deal all right but this guy fandar he constructed a theory in his mind that i had some ulterior motives that i was part of some shadowy conspiracy to manipulate the outcome of my own court case because i'm such a terrible person because i made one video talking positively about what a wonderful person my ex-wife was and why i fell in love with her so i did something positive you guys can imagine what i mean see this is the thing i'm saying you guys can imagine i imagine a reasonable rational person who sees that and thinks well this guy has made he has no choice in a sense he's made a bunch of videos talking about how tough his situation is with his divorce and one court case after another and one lawyer after another and he wanted to take the time to make a separate video where he's not talking about in that stuff when instead he talks in a positive way about how we fell in love with this woman or what you mean or what are redeeming quotas or what the positive side to me the intentions involved are self evident what motivated me to make this video but in the same way that these idiots will watch a video of you filming yourself in a walmart in china and we'll interpret that as proof that you're secretly working for the cia and you've never been in china never gone to china at all and you don't really speak chinese people will take that as evidence of the exact opposite 180 degrees and and again my problem my problem is not that this person is insane pardon me my problem is not that this person is insane my problem is not this person is artistic the problem is not this person is ordinary i think this is ordinary i think this is the result of our video game culture so this is what i wrote defender i'm doing this from memory but i could read it to you verbatim you know what i mean i wrote back to him again see i'm showing him kindness when he has shown me none i'm showing him how reasonable i can be with the expectation that he will be reasonable in return that he will ask questions and provide answers in a way that's charitable and that's how you build up trust that's a human being's work and if you don't have that if i'm reasonable with someone and they can't be reasonable with me back then everyone has to resort to brute force we're all back to being animals because it's reasonableness it's reasoning that separates us from animals it separates us from just solving things through coercion of one kind or another right so you know okay i'm gonna take the time out and answer this unreasonable question as if it were reasonable you made no effort to make this and it's just throwing in my face that somehow there's some terrible dark motive or agenda behind this i say no you know what i made that video because i'm a nice guy if there were nothing positive to say about my ex-wife i never would have married her conversely if there were nothing negative to say about my ex-wife i never would have divorced her life is complicated you know i can make a video just telling you positive things about buddhism and you guys might not know this there is a video like that on my channel there's a video as i recall it's about an hour long that was just talking about my positive experiences as a scholar of buddhism and the ways in which that was a wonderful time in my life and i have made many many videos talking about telling you about warning you about the ways in which buddhism is a terrible religion you know particular scams particular sources of corruption particular sources of danger but also talking about the philosophy talking about talking about the history talking about the political reality of buddhism right so look guys if there were nothing positive to say about buddhism i wouldn't have devoted years of my life to searching it you know what i mean i wouldn't have studied these languages i wouldn't have moved to these countries right and if there were nothing negative to say about buddhism right so now to me again the most fundamental problem here is stupidity all right i cannot imagine being stupid enough that i watch those two videos or watch five videos even and say oh well in this video you say that everything about buddhism is bad and evil and wrong but then in this other video you said good things about buddhism so why did you do that i've got a theory i've got an explanation it's secretly because this because you're motivated by that for this completely unsubstantiated set of reasons i have i have one video where i talk about what i like about star wars and i have several videos talking about how terrible star wars is it's not a contradiction there are some good things about star wars and there are some bad things about star wars like i can say honestly there's even a sense in which i could see like the first star wars movie is a little bit of an inspiration to me it's not a major inspiration but you know sure okay you look at that you think okay maybe i can do something creative in filmmaking or in writing a book or in fiction that changes the world in that way the way the first star wars movie did you know i i cannot imagine being so stupid that you look at somebody's youtube video where he has youtube videos and like a lot of them were just sad it's me sitting there saying look you know this is the reality of my situation with my daughter and my divorce and my lawyers and this is it then the other hand they make a video saying you know look you know i don't want you guys in the audience to only have a negative impression of my ex-wife i don't want you to only have an impression that that time in my life like the years that we were together was was terrible there were good things about it also if there were no good things about it like either i would have never married her would have never you know fallen in love with her or i would have left her much sooner it doesn't take that much of a charitable attitude this is the meaning of charitable english it doesn't mean you assume i'm an angel doesn't mean you assume unwonderful you have a charitable attitude in looking at that evidence and turning that way okay so you guys get the point i took the time to write back to this guy positively when he's he has carried on a harassment and defamation campaign against me on the internet for years okay he has claimed that i was a pedophile he has said worse things but he has made up all of these you know unforgivable lies all this definition also harassment and he sent messages to my girlfriend he's repeating it's not worth summarizing the level of insult harassment defamation and threats too we also had threats that's why we went to the police i was like well okay this crosses the line into harassment legally because he's making threats against me right so you know you know can we can we end these years of harassment by going to the police there's an educational experience you'll learn you'll learn how that part of the legal process works uh in canada you know what i mean how do you think how do you think you reacted to this like fundamentally warm and generous and giving thing of saying like no look you know like there's no conspiracy i also explained a little bit more about the legal circumstances like no there's no way that youtube video could have impacted my legal situation at that time at that time it was interesting you guys didn't even know i had legally been declared dead in france i was missing in action and the actual legal legal paperwork basically they interpreted my situation as if i had committed suicide i had disappeared with a trace and was like presumed dead as if i committed suicide right yeah you know what if the courts in france were willing to consider youtube videos as evidence they could have just put my name into google and seen that i was uploading youtube videos once every couple of days and that i was alive and well it was like no no the youtube video all of them collectively with everything no that was not me trying to manipulate the court system no there wasn't a conspiracy no it wasn't else no that was me being a nice guy he responds to that by writing back and saying oh well i can quote a youtube video where you say that you're not a nice guy [Music] i cannot imagine being that stupid nobody told me nobody wore me my parents didn't warn me the church didn't warn me my school teachers didn't warn me nobody warned me that there were people so stupid that i get to look at that like well you made one video saying that you know your ex-wife is a bad person but you made another video saying she's gonna pursue my speech some of the messages this guy sent to melissa appeared as screenshots in melissa's videos and this guy is writing back to me and he really sincerely cannot perceive himself as having done anything wrong he is unable to discern what he he's asking me questions i've now known this guy for four years okay you might think this is an act and i've known all this i've known asked yourself for so many years i've seen vegan foot soldier for so many years these are all people i have years of dialogue with and he really actually cannot perceive himself as being cruel i think in large part because he has no counterposing notion of what it is to be kind no counterposing notion of generosity of spirit of what it is to have charitable assumptions about someone whether you're engaged in dialogue with them or whether you're evaluating their youtube videos so there's a totally reasonable uh comment here it could apply to several people verplex says i'm pretty sure that guy isn't mentally sound my concern is that he might be more normal than we want to admit to ourselves right so this guy constructs all kinds of theories in his own mind so he constructed there and again all that anyone seems to need to reinforce their delusions is will some people say on the internet oh well i'm not the only person saying it you know like okay so you know i've been together with melissa for four and a half years roughly okay melissa has made statements that she loves me that she's so happy with me that this relationship is the best thing that ever happened to in her life again and again and again on youtube on instagram you know you've seen us joking around and talking about it like if you actually watch my videos i don't want to add up how many hours in total right so there's some sense in which you've you know there's a lot of evidence of what this relationship is and how it's gone right the good and the bad of it all right and this is the problem fandaar isn't the only one he's not the only one and actually now that i think about it also vegan foot soldier did this right there are people who are willing to go through that with a fine-tooth comb and try to find one moment where there's a quote-unquote red flag and they will then construct an elaborate theory that all of this evidence no matter how honest we are no matter how generous no matter how forthcoming no matter how reasonable that all of this is a fraud that this is an elaborate fraud concealing what's really going on and that there are ulterior motives involved you know no evidence and they get themselves set into a uh a self-justifying cyclical mentality it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to say to you i regret taking the time to talk to these people i don't you know like if i hadn't taken the time to talk to these people i wouldn't believe it was real like it does not seem humanly possible to me to be this stupid you know what i mean it does not seem humanly possible to me to be so mean-spirited and have such negative motivations and to be unaware of them and to be unaware of the extent to which those motivations are warping your view of reality you know what i mean but obviously this is how the majority of human beings live their lives the majority of the time creative renewal says i'm sorry but i see these takedown crews against creators on almost every uh niche in the platform so creative renewal thanks for thanks for the comment um [Music] so my question is what happens next i don't disagree with you so what happens next you know like so where are we all going to be 10 years from now 20 years you know how is this going to change us as individuals and you scale it up how is it going to change the culture because i'm telling you it changed me i didn't think i was naive i didn't think i was jejune i used to hang out with illiterate rice farmers in cambodia and laos and thailand you know what i mean i've hung out with people at a very low level of formal education i never thought they were this stupid you know i would never say that you become wise through gambling i would never say that you become more intelligent through drinking beer with a bunch of 60 year old men i would never say that but you know the other thing that's so striking to me about the new generation coming up the next generation the current generation even people my own age even they have had so little experience of human nature face to face like they've had so little experience of what real couples go through like in their own lives like they've had very limited experience in terms of their sex life a lot of them just in reality they've had very few partners they can't talk the way i do but they also don't have trusting relationships with like close friends who told them about what going through their divorce was like they haven't seen people going through they don't talk to people again talking to people in their 60s is the best way to do it people who've really lived through a lot of stuff they don't have a sense of what authentic human nature and experience is like and that's why it's so easy for them to slip into this kind of conspiratorial mindset about the simplest thing imaginable whether it's going to walmart or talking a girlfriend talking about how much she loves her boyfriend like melissa is saying how much she loves me like oh this must all be a smoke screen no you know like you know or a guy who makes a video saying hey you know what my ex-wife actually in a lot of ways she was a wonderful human being she had i want to take some time out to say positive things about my side of the relationship and it is in because they have so little of that face-to-face experience with human nature and again i'm not in favor of gambling i'm not in favor of drinking beer i'm not in favor of going to prison but you know i think people who spent a lot of time doing any of those things gambling drinking going to prison their experience with human nature in that sense would prepare them much more to deal with and to scrutinize what it is we're looking at you know here on youtube so yeah creative renewal says so melissa also said this is critic renewal says exactly it's so sad it could be such an amazing tool for us all i feel that and like even if it's just doing book reviews creative renewal even if it's just you coming on and talking about something you learned this week because you read a book it's so wonderful and we never answered yeah you know even if it's just well look whether it's sharing your own suffering and sorrow like talking about your divorce that's so wonderful or it's coming on to share a book report it's so great to be able to share your your life with other people in this way and it's so sad that we're all being intimidated out of doing it by small numbers of of crazy people again i can't even say that it's not small numbers it's the vast majority of people who grew up playing video games and the realest thing they know is like twitter and instagram they think oh yeah this is a video game and then this is instagram and twitter this is real life you know they they haven't been through those those real situations and let's face it guys a lot of jobs today because the workplace is also highly mechanized the computers they may have a normal job they go to but at their job they sit at a computer you know like this even if you work in a factory you're at a factory but you're a computer terminal you mostly work with a machine and like the extent to which the workplace no longer involves in-depth trusting uh human interactions right so it goes way be the this way the mechanization of our society the computerization of our society it goes far beyond the the living room couch it goes far beyond the the mirror playing on video games what these people are used to is communicating on reddit or communicating on facebook they're just used to saying the cruelest thing they can they don't even perceive it as cruel anymore and they're not used to face-to-face relationships with with real people would you say that to your boss at starbucks will you say that to your boss at the office like where do you think this relationship is gonna go if you treat people that way there's no way to make progress there's no way to uh there's no way to get someone else to be reasonable in return there's no way to get the person to recognize that they're in the wrong and that they don't change because they can't perceive themselves as having done anything wrong so yeah i'm making a pretty grandiose claim here that the internet has actually really fundamentally changed our sense of right and wrong i hadn't thought of that this video but you know i guess that's true in a very simple sense if that's what you're used to is that kind of dialogue really a sort of staccato monologue of the youtube comment section or whatever it is on the internet um whether it's 4chan or otherwise and 4chan is a good example or what have you um when you perceive that as normal that's going to profoundly shape or distort your your perception of of right and wrong question i i really think it is not overstating the problem to say that people have lost touch with the most important aspect of their humanity all right so i've said this before but i said this maybe five years ago on the channel okay i don't care who you treat your friends how do you treat your worst enemies how do you treat the people you disagree with you know if you really think i've done something wrong because of what i said about the vegan movement or because of what i said about nina and iran or something okay how do you treat me all right because i know my own standards of integrity i've criticized a natural vegan i have never called a natural vegan a pedophile i have never said anything dishonest or i have never violated my own sense of personal integrity about a natural vegan in any way whatsoever neither joking nor deadpan serious i stand by every word of it guess what that's a conflict about a really really serious issue okay unnatural vegan uses uh mind-altering drugs that cause brain damage she continued using mind-altering drugs that cause brain damage during her pregnancy it harms her it also harms the unborn infant and you know what i think she knows it i mean just her tone of voice in the video where she admitted that you know kind of and i'm continuing to use this medication it's just my feeling i'd already made videos talking about that and blah blah okay that's big issue to me okay that's that's something worth fighting over in in a sense that's that's really worth you know disputing you know how do you treat your your closest friends most these people have no friends i mean this is a this is one problem but you know how do you treat your enemies how do you treat the people you disagree with how do you treat the people you know you despise um i think that's something our school teachers didn't ever can you remember ever going to school and hearing anything about that can you remember your parents talking about that i can't even remember tv shows or certainly the church doesn't doesn't deal with it you know so on and so forth creative renewal says it's really upsetting when i see how people squander this tool and abuse creators trust when they do open up it's a mob mentality well right so fandor is writing to me now yesterday and today in the context of melissa having made a video spontaneously and sincerely that partly responds to fandaar partly responds to a bunch of other people where she's really saying that she's committed to keeping it real and that what we said in the earlier videos about our relationship it's really real guys you know what i mean what we say now is really real also you know and then someone like him responds that i know just i've just seen it by just digging in deeper to that conspiratorial blaming mentality it's not possible for them to have generosity of spirit because they have no concept of generosity of spirit it's not possible for them to be charitable you