Political Change: How Exactly? The Failure of #BLM, #Veganism, etc.

you get no countdown you get no
countdown at all when you do this just you guys know so the first five to ten seconds are almost guaranteed to be awkward so i want to come on and make a video about a topic i think i've talked about in many different videos but i maybe never made one video bringing all of the pieces together and maybe people in the audience will pop in and join me and give me some unexpected questions some some unexpected uh distraction from my own focused monologue on topic so talking about political change how to pursue it cultural change how to accomplish it right and there's a broad theoretical question here it gets very narrow and various very specific very quickly why because you know you can talk about the pursuit of political change when you are running a multi-million dollar organization a huge budget huge number of insurance and supporters right you talk about the pursuit of political change when you are a completely powerless isolated individual and you may not even have charisma on your side you may have no social media followers you may have nobody who follows you trust you uh in real life you may be despised within your own society people may be racist against you and your own society you may not have a station or level of respectability or whatever you know there may be myriad reasons why in your own society you are really genuinely a voiceless powerless person now you know think about voltaire so voltaire was handsome and witty and charming and born rich and how do you change the world he wrote books he wrote books and interestingly one of the most powerful things he did was making the sitting room of his mansion by today's standards it's not that big a house but at that time was considered a castle he had a salon he had a room where he accepted guests and to my knowledge every day i believe seven days a week he received guests and spoke to them face-to-face people would line up people would make a pilgrimage to go and speak to the great man and many of the most important things he accomplished politically just came from people coming to talk to him face to face with him making the time formally he had a secretary he would write down people's names okay you know voltaire receives guests a certain this is not conventional activism it's not conventional protest or radicalism voltaire really changed the world and all the conventional radicals and revolutionaries you're talking about almost all of them failed so there's something to learn from here now i like to start these discussions with examples that are very palpable they're very real life and real world so i'm going to talk about elitism briefly in a sense that all of you can understand and all of you can relate to elitism gets very abstract very quickly for most of us um elitism is not a philosophy right this is something very palpable it's a face-to-face reality in the same sense snobbery is not a philosophy right what is the philosophy of the snob go to your library ask for a book i need a book that will tell me how to be a snob i need to understand the essence and the philosophy of what it is to be a snub there is no such book there is no such section in the library there is no such department at the university you cannot get a major in snobbery and yet of course what many people do learn in university is precisely snobbery i think that's fair to say they learn they may learn nothing else of value except that'll be a stop um you can set up a gym that is only open to vegans that can be a form of activism it's just it's just elitism let's say you're in could be any city in the world we take as an example let's say you're in san francisco and you set up a very desirable high-end dining club that is only open to members and their guests so this is common for high intentions and to be a member you must be vegan all right and this is no you're not even open to every vegan you're only open to certain special people who are because this is outright elitism and there's there's word oh gee you know this is this fabulous restaurant this fabulous you know complex you know what you could have the restaurant you have the gym upstairs you can combine these ideas right let's just say let's just say you've got tables set out for people to dine at and there's a small stage where sometimes once in a while you have stand-up comedy events i'm saying stand-up comedy rather than a rock concert just because the type of investment type of seating involved is very different a dinner club a high-end dinner club can double as a venue for stand-up comedy maybe for a small jazz quartet or something too right you start doing these kind of gigs maybe on those nights you know when you have a and you book by the way i'm not talking about booking vegan comedians you book the biggest acts you can mainstream community you become a known destination as a high-end dinner club for stand-up comedy right and when people go there they go oh wow this is nice this is an exclusive club this is elitism oh do you know to be a member of this club you have to be vegan okay elitism and explicitly elite organizations of this kind have influenced the transformation of societies including the united states of america from its founding all right right after the american revolution was done there were immediately elitist snobbish organizations founded for the veterans of the revolution for members of the officers corps and there were actually political protests against them because people said we do not want to live through the creation of a new aristocracy and that was what they saw with these gentlemen's clubs so one of the most elite of these gentlemen's clubs so it was a gentleman's club only for people who had been officers in the revolution people been on the right side of the war so to speak and it would probably members of the right social class to begin with to be an officer rather than a normal member of the infantry or what have you you know they very successfully lobbied uh the government during the negotiations in philadelphia right the negotiations that would write the constitution they simply had dinner parties down the street and they wielded a lot of influence okay all right so this is this is elitism all right and what voltaire did also kind of elitism although it's a kind of elitism that uh you know anyone who's had a hit book could participate there's a kind of power here and it's not power lurking in the shadows why do i mention this why do i talk about these palpable attainable real world examples of what it is to influence people what it is to guide cultural and political change it's because you may think of this kind of elitism as a special privilege we have this word privilege you may think oh these are things that only the strongest among us you know these are tools these are weapons only the strongest among us can ever wield and you're wrong these are the weapons of the weak right voltaire you know from his uh from his castle you know what i mean voltaire inviting dinner guests to sit and hear him lecture and writing his books and writing his poems and writing his opinion pieces in the newspaper writing letters to the editor right this is not a position of power this is not a position of strength most of the fantasies about how to accomplish social and political change for both the left wing and the right wing the conservatives and the rednecks are really just as bad most of them are fantasies concerning mass organizations making use of violence that that's a privilege of a few how many people in the whole history of the world have ever been in a position to command an army you know to really to command you know huge numbers of followers to to move crowds in that way right to give commands and have them tear down the palace or tear down the parliament to enforce their will against the government now also whenever you read about the real history of real revolutions unlike the ideologies unlike the propaganda unlike what's said about revolutions after all the broken glass has been swept away most of what we call revolutions in reality we're more like a military coup d'etat because who are the people who are the people who have guns it's very easy well the people had an uprising to change the government almost every single time when you look into it actually the crucial question was about which units of the army broke away from their commanders and turned against the old government or started to support the new government actually what you're talking about are not hippies in the streets holding you know placards or something it's not the flower children playing the guitar and asking the government to change it comes down to nasty violent military struggle that's normally the reality of whatever this includes you know the french revolution's plural when and what happens step by step if you're not reading propaganda about it you're going to see that the crucial question at every stage has to do with the military so look if you're talking about theories of how to accomplish political change theories of how to accomplish cultural change well do you want to theorize about circumstances that don't apply to you in your life like do you want to start on a chalkboard drawing a great big circle and learning from all kinds of examples in the history of the world that don't apply to you or do you want to start like do you want to work from the particular circumstances you're in and then draw the circle outward you know okay so it seems like i have only this tiny range of options right now there's so little i can do to influence the world or accomplish or contribute to political and social change and now let's expand it a bit right look the haitian revolution the revolution that took place in haiti so this is an historical series of events that has fascinated me since about the year 2001. this is now 20 years i've known about and read about and done research on it i don't tell the whole story about how i first did research on it i did a research project on it back in about 2001. at that time it was an incredibly obscure uh topic in the history of the world since then several movies have made about it it's talked about on youtube several books have been published um so the haitian revolution has become less obscure there is no analysis i can give you for the haitian revolution that will have anything to do with what you can accomplish in the pursuit of a vegan future as people want to say and look i just gotta sketch veganism is only one political issue i care about i care about so many political issues i care about police reform i care about police brutality i care about justice i care about the working of the courts of law right and you know when you talk to the police and when you talk to lawyers and so on the main thing you hear again and again is we can't do anything about it we can't help you now i could give a bunch of examples here but including my experience with the other youtuber durianrider that i talked about lately you know he threatened to kill me and we had proof of that he threatened to have me beaten up he threatened real violence against me and i'm going through this with my lawyer and the first thing he says no no no but none of that none of that will stick in court you know the only charge we could go after him on was defamation which he was also guilty of remember the beginning of like what is this you know like yeah the defamation is bad but why is it that's the only crime he's guilty of here life is full of these things i i've it's been more than seven years for me to get divorced even the divorce system doesn't work i mean there's so many things anyone i'm sorry if you're a teenager watching this you don't know you get out you have some real experience in the real world and you see that the system is broken and this is not a problem just the united states of america this is not a problem just with canada i am going to make here the vague menacing insinuation that this is actually a global phenomenon this is part of the breakdown of a concept of social and cultural order that goes back to the roman empire and it really doesn't work anymore i i know this is a stretch but this is my field okay i would say that the same legal system that began in rome today doesn't work in america it doesn't work in england it doesn't work in italy it doesn't work in spain okay and it doesn't work in asian countries like japan and singapore that imitate our legal system our justice system you know i really am saying this is kind of a global phenomenon of this system not working anymore now you could get into a separate question of well when did it work that's a great question and maybe the answer is never i'm just i'm not going to get into it but i don't i don't have some kind of golden age thinking like oh back in the 1930s nobody had any problem yet nobody had any cameras and then i thought nobody had video cameras in their pocket to record what the police were doing to people in the 1930s i don't you know i don't engage in this kind of golden age uh thinking but we are living through the obsolescence of a justice system okay i care about that passionately and i'm deeply concerned about it all right and part of my interest in the black lives matter phenomenon blm was that this was giving us a kind of test case it was giving us a kind of opportunity to challenge and overturn the assumptions of that centuries-long tradition of how our society is ordered of how our society is governed right of what is justice of what is the role and responsibility of the police stone and so forth right like there were really basic fundamental questions raised by the death of a series of black men and women in the united states of america and by the way if you watch my channel i'm no fool i actually did research on these cases in many cases the mainstream media lied about what happened and the police actually did nothing wrong but still those cases raised these important questions stand by that even the cases where the police actually did nothing wrong but they were perceived to have done something wrong those those still raise these important questions so an extreme case that's been uh covered on my channel was althea brown right who claimed she had a fantasy or a delusion she had some kind of we assume it was out of insanity and not out of intentional lying but she reported the police that a group of white racists spray her with what's the term um lighter fluid spread her with some kind of barbecue ignition fluid and lit her on fire well what do you know every single thing about this story was a lie and it was proven there was videotape evidence there was physical evidence everything about this it was either a fantasy or paranoid but even a case like that where the police did nothing wrong and there were no white people who attacked her no none of it happened with videotape of evidence that every minute that she passed through every intersection on on our way and so it's complete fraud complete canard nevertheless you can look at this and say there's evidence here of how the system doesn't work now again i'm not trying to expand the scope of this video infinitely but you may or may not already know about me i feel likewise that the system of university education we have in the west which interestingly doesn't begin with the roman empire it begins with the dark ages our system of university education originates in monasteries in the catholic christian dark ages that is the origin and great centers of learning in the dark angels included toledo right so the the monastic universities of toledo and these were you know these were imitated elsewhere across europe and so so that in terms of where that tradition comes from but guess what it's been imitated everywhere the university system in communist china the university system in democratic capitalist japan the university system around a huge part of the world all of it to an appalling extent is a second-rate imitation of what's already a bad system whether you're looking at england or the united states so there were a lot of things there were a lot of big fundamental political questions on which i am a dissident in which i'm totally dissatisfied with what's going on in western democracy now i don't fit into any camp i don't fit into the left-wing camp i don't fit into the right-wing camp you know bernie sanders supporters think i'm right-wing i assume trump supporters think i'm left-wing you know what i mean there's no there's no simple solution for me right question is what do you do with your own life in the pursuit of political and cultural change now there is inspiration for this video is in part my ongoing clash of swords with the youtuber known as cranky vegan right i don't have to get into it personally with him because it's not a personal matter right but cranky vegan asked me repeatedly and it really wasn't clear to me this was a sincere question when he was first asking but he asked me repeatedly well what is your theory of social change what is your theory in the pursuit of political and cultural change and from my perspective what do you mean haven't i made 15 20 videos talking about that don't you already know what i have to say about that um so to me this is part of what made it kind of perplexing astounding and i asked one of my fans and i have i have made videos uh uh tell you about that um and he followed this up by saying and what are you doing in your own life in the pursuit of that whatever your theory may be of how to achieve uh political culture so i mean i i can start there rather than starting on the the grander sphere of how in history political change is accomplished but when we talk about me right inevitably we lower our standards we lower our expectations because we're talking about one man hi ron shout out to everyone in the audience shout out to ron sims shout out to freda shout out to nacho too obsidian um we're talking about one man with no budget with ten thousand subscribers on youtube with very limited power through limited right okay um many people are shocked when i say openly that black lives matter has been a failure that it's a negative example okay i am recording this on june 4th 2021 black lives matter was founded in the year 2013. we are talking about more than seven years what history have you studied whether it's the history of the haitian revolution or the american revolution or the french revolution whether it is the history of as i've said many many times the abolition of alcohol in the united states i think it was the 15th amendment sort of getting the number wrong the the amendment to the constitution that made alcohol illegal um any example the history of women getting the vote history of fascism communism the rise of democracy in different places around the world democracy as communism fell apart in eastern europe a great example is democracy in mongolia used to be a communist country they had a very rapid dramatic transition from communism to democracy like if you think that what black lives matter accomplished in seven years with millions of dollars in backing and millions of newspaper articles millions of tv stories millions of radio stories seen and heard and read by hundreds of millions of people it would not be an understanding to say billions of people right if you think that what they did with all that money and all that public interest and all that support in the last seven years if you think that is a success let me ask you what what is a failure what are your standards for a failure democracy in myanmar it's a failure right we can say it's 21. if you gave that money to the pro-democracy forces in myanmar do you think it would be a failure do you think nothing would change in seven years if we try to estimate or add up the budget and some of it's public some of it's not but just the corporate donations that were given to black lives matter and we take that and we hand it over to a burmese democratic radical front the people are going to fight and die to have elections and freedom of speech freedom of press and so on that the rights and liberties people take for granted in western europe if you hand that money over to pro democracy force in myanmar do you think nothing is going to change in seven years and most of these successful examples of dramatic change that happen without any of this kind of press coverage support donations so on and so forth whether we're talking about voltaire voltaire sitting there is enough he seems pretty small and powerless and penniless even compared to the phenomenon we're talking about with black lives matter or indeed if we're talking about the pro-democracy forces in mongolia that managed to change you know the history of their country managed to change the the fate of that whole part of the world and if you think that wasn't a hard struggle you may think of mongolia as being in the middle of nowhere it's not they were directly in between russia and china and both russia and china were using all their might to control the future and the political destiny of that country both russia and china to give a palpable example wanted to control the railway system within mongolia they still do they were deeply involved in life and business in mongolia to that extent there was an ongoing competition for russia and between russia and china for who could control the fate of mongolia the most that's basically been their political situation for the last 100 years or more roughly you know it's the story of mongolia in modern times is being a place equidistant in between uh russia and china so there were powerful forces working against their transition to democracy and there was also a sense of self-preservation and self-defense from the elites in that country who have been attached to the congress so let's again this is a contrast to blm it's a contrast to veganism it's a contrast to whatever example you want to use there were people still alive in mongolia that time who were responsible for massacres they were responsible for hunting down and killing people in the name of communism and they knew correctly accurately that if the transition to democracy happened they would be put in prison or they would be executed they knew one way or another there would be a trial or maybe people just killed in the streets there was a whole generation all the wealthiest all the most powerful people in that country had blood on their hands from what it took to create and sustain the communist government that they had and they knew if this falls this if this is replaced with democracy it was over for them that this would change their lives directly so they were fighting as hard as they could guess what guys i've i've written articles about this before didn't it didn't even take seven years it was almost instantaneous the transition to democracy okay wrote a new constitution mongolia changed its fate forever and and let me ask you let me ask you whether you were talking about pot-smoking hippies who support and sympathize with the veganism or you were talking about african americans dissatisfied with police brutality okay do you think mongolians really have any advantages in terms of level of education level of wealth level of organization like this is pre-internet guys like think about the resources they had at their disposal in mongolia as communism is falling apart and transitioning in russia and china to the north and south of them right they made a change because they wanted it all right they did what it took to change the fate of their country okay and they did not have the leaders of the pro-democracy forces in mongolia did not have then and don't have they never had the level even of journalism you know journalistic support coverage in the process you look at did the new york was the new york times following with wrapped interests the political transformation of mongolia they did not have the phenomena of financial support or public interest or anything else that black lives matter has had okay so look if you're talking about police brutality i care if you're talking about police reform fundamental reform to the justice system fundamental reform to how a country is governed and how people are arrested and how what police responsibilities are and how crimes are tried i i'm passionate about that and a passion for that to improve everyone's life not just black people's lives white people's lives and all kinds of people's lives are going to be improved if you fundamentally challenge and fundamentally reform the system how much positive progress towards that goal has black lives matter made in my opinion zero and if you think it is slightly more than zero because it can only be slightly more then you have to compare that to the harm done the harm is very real okay the damage done is very real and there's this strange game going on especially amongst vegan activists of imagining that any time you get your name into the newspapers anytime you get press coverage that it's a good and wonderful thing that it's built in the future of the movement that it's a great success and it may be a success for your fundraising and they don't even care if the press coverage is negative if the press coverage is saying what these vegan activists are doing is bad and evil and wrong they don't even care what they're doing is building up more public resentment more hostility more skepticism if they're undermining their own credibility if they're destroying their constituency and the potential for actually accomplishing real change um it's in that sense that people imagine black lives matter is a success all right because the culture of clout chasing the culture of fame whoring has become so prevalent the instagramification of life has become so profoundly influential that people think people imagine that no matter what you're doing as long as it's getting you more clicks on facebook as long as it's getting you more hearts on instagram as long as it's getting you more likes more attention they don't even care if it's good attention or bad attention that if you are getting newspaper headlines if you are getting notoriety or fame then you're making progress and you're not newspaper headlines are not fame newspaper headlines are not progress okay change is change change is what happened in mongolia after communism fell and replaced the communist government with a new constitution and a new government change is what happened in france in 1789 when they started with a blank sheet of paper and started writing a completely new legal code that code wasn't finished by the way until napoleon was in power it took a long time to actually write a whole new legal code but they wrote a new constitution they took away the powers of the church they took away the powers the aristocracy they fundamentally changed everything and guess what seven years is a long time in the history of the french revolution in the history of the american religion the history of the mongolian revolution seven years is enough it's been long enough for us to judge i started this video by saying i was going to talk about my theory of political change my theory of culture change and how it applies to you as the individual positively because it's not that useful to draw a huge circle where we're talking about the revolution in haiti and we can draw conclusions about that but it has no relevance to your life and your situation as an individual now part of cranky vegan's complaint against me is that he says that most of what i hear surprised me most of what he hears from me most of what he hears me talk about it's posed in the form of a critique where i'm saying what's wrong and what doesn't work as opposed to positively what my model for change is all right i've got to tell you something it's for a reason guys it's not accidental i think that's the main thing that's going to interest you you know as individuals yes i think it's the main way i have even to reach up to him i'm trying to relate to a guy when i talk to cranky vegan i'm i'm trying to relate to a guy who's still endorsing disruption i've made so many videos criticizing cross-examining this concept of disruption of the pursuit of cultural change political change social change through disruption and saying it just doesn't work now i'm not going to recapitulate that here but this for those who already know my other videos this will you know remind you what i would say about that if you believe that this kind of disruption gets results then you must believe that the anti-abortion activists are the most effective activists in the history of the united states of america you must believe that the anti-abortion movement has been tremendously successful and of course they must always be more successful than veganism because they have a much larger constituency they have much larger financial support they have much more people who are interested there they have millions of people who are passionately religiously committed to the anti-abortion cause and guess what it doesn't work it's a total failure why by what metric i've put this chart up on screen before just look at the number of abortions there's a lot of latin words in here the number of abortions per capita per annum okay so these are latin terms meaning how many abortions are people choosing to get per person per year brief pause we're now more than 30 minutes into the live stream we have 26 people in the audience and only 15 thumbs up i understand if you're sitting on the fence if you're not sure whether or not this video needs a thumbs up or thumbs down i understand but i'm just saying it would be better for the video it would be better for us to reach more people while i'm live streaming right now it will reach a larger audience if more people hit the thumbs up if we got 26 people in the audience and all 26 of you give a thumbs up it does actually help me i know this video there was no advanced warning i just hit record and went so i know the the audience consists of people who just happen to be online or happen to be washing the dishes and want to listen in the background i didn't post this on my instagram i didn't post this on patreon i didn't post this anywhere i just hit play and let's go there was no advance point on youtube thank you guys a whole bunch of people just hit the thumbs up i know you don't remember it so that's why i'm reminding you but as spontaneous as this may be i think you will agree it'd be great if more people would join the audience it'll be great if after this is supposed to also be great if you can reach a larger audience these are very meaningful questions for a small number of people that's what a lot of my content is like you know uh it's it's deeply meaningful to a narrow audience as opposed to being only a little bit interestingly a little bit meaningful to a mass audience that's the kind of content i create uh generally speaking on my youtube channel where were we um all right so when i'm speaking to someone like cranky vegan you know i'm hearing him passionately propound this model of disruption and i'm able to say back look disruption in the specific model of disruption you are endorsing right now let's be clear what does disruption mean it definitely does include things like blocking a road so that no traffic can pass on the road that is disruption it's a form of disruption he has endorsed recently okay it definitely does include things like disrupting a restaurant or a grocery store right so i endorse none of this he endorses all of it and we could go through a whole bunch more examples so you know what disruption now one challenge to this is ethically and philosophically oh well okay how would you feel if it were muslim fundamentalists using the same tactics what if it's muslim fundamentalists shutting down the road and stopping all traffic stopping all economic activities in both ways he justified this or praised it lately when it was used to very temporarily shut down some mcdonald's restaurants in england that they didn't have enough meat because vegan activists shut off some roads which is how the meat was transported to these mcdonald's restaurants he's a big fan of this he endorses this okay oh okay what if it's not somebody who's on your side do you think this is a civil right muslim fundamentalists should have because muslim fundamentals they would they would be very interested in doing this they might be interested in showing that they object to the government being at war in afghanistan and they want to shut down all kinds of businesses that are there's can have a pro-muslim anti-war movement of this kind so is this a tactic that's acceptable for everyone or only political movements you you sympathize with right your enemies can use this and they can use it against you how much easier is it for the pro meat people to shut down all the vegan restaurants this way i really think about this guys i used to have before i had a youtube channel i had a vegan blog and any time the pro meet people started attacking my blog wow the number of people i know some of you may not know what i mean by pro-me people the people who wanted to actively attack and denounce vegans and defend and promote eating beef basically always seemed to be beef they weren't enthusiastic about not chicken or fish or something but anyway those people they would outnumber the vegans ten thousand to one you'd get all this like activism from the pro media guess what they can shut down your vegan restaurant it's way easier for them to shut down a vegan restaurant they outnumber you they have money they have the money they have the numbers they have the passion they have conviction there are more people who hate veganism than who support it and they're also willing to block roads they're also going to engage in disruption now you know there's an infamous youtube channel spherage and he has actually done vegan-style disruptions of vegan restaurants he's done pro-meat protests in vegan restaurants and it's horrible and it's just awful what it's like for the people in the room it's horrible well guess what when vegans do that to me it's horrible do you approve this no um i think it's natural whether i'm reaching out to an anonymous audience in general not that you lovely people are anonymous frida ronald whatever you know whether i'm speaking to an artist's channel or i'm reaching out to one specific person like cranky vegan i think it's natural that the segway to talking positively about what kind of methods i think work what we should do in the pursuit of change right it is natural that we are going to get there through a critique of what doesn't work okay so i've already said giving millions of dollars to black lives matter doesn't work it's ended in failure giving millions of dollars to peta people for the ethical treatment of animals over many decades doesn't work it's ended in failure and i can talk about the metric in just a moment right i have criticized specific groups on this channel that you may not have heard of they're not as famous as peta but that have a multi-million dollar per annum budget right so give an example i think i only made one youtube videos out of them pro veg international proved international is headed by a horrible person named tobias leonard tobias leonard if you want to talk about vegans who are more hated by other vegans than i am tobias leonard is one of the most hated vegans in the world so he is one of the spokespeople for um pro veg international proved international more than one million dollars a year sorry i've forgotten the exact figure but i think they're into the multiple millions per annum um when you are looking at a multi-million dollar institution over many years and looking what they have accomplished or what they haven't accomplished and what the outcomes are that is something very different from looking at me or you as an individual you know who is powerless and perhaps voiceless the only voice i have is to reach my 10 000 subscribers or what have you what you can do what standards we're going to do to evaluate that so i think it's natural i think it's natural that we make the segway from this kind of critique now when i ask cranky begin about this and i think when i ask the audience too when i ask does this look like a good use of 3.5 million dollars some particular organization so by the way whether we're talking about direct action everywhere multi-million dollar per annum organization by the way why do i keep saying this latin term per annum because the point is not they had three three million dollars once right or one million once the point is you're getting a million dollars year after year after year after year you keep having more than a million dollars a year coming in in income so that each year you can be spending this money and have more money coming in it's a lot of money you know it's a lot of a lot of throughput you're if you show it's a sinking budget of a million dollars that's very different from like if your grandfather dies and leaves you one million dollars but it's only gonna happen once he's not gonna die again next year he's like okay i got this one million dollars gotta make last no these are these are multi-million dollar per annum organizations right but if i say to cranky vegan or if i say to any of you now okay here's an example and they have 3.5 million a year does are they getting 3.5 million dollars worth of results of outcomes of change is this making the change politically whenever i talk they say no they say no they know there's nothing to show for or like what there is to show it's so trivial as i said earlier with black lives matter all right either you're going to come to the conclusion this is a total failure this is that zero positive outcomes or you're gonna say okay it's slightly more than zero there's a very modest positive outcome but then just do the math just add up how many millions of dollars how many millions of people right and in a sense how many millions of hours of effort or work by those millions of people for this very very modest positive outcome and as i said with black lives matter we also have to question with these vegan organizations okay so if you've got a little bar there for the positive outcomes how big how big is the bar for the negative outcomes because they do damage too they do harm like what what little they're accomplishing positively has to be seen in a context of very real harm so if you guys didn't know like you know black lives matter burned down several city blocks they did engage in looting people were killed most of the people killed were other black people at the protests i'm not saying zero white people go but i read in detail really horrifying accounts i thought boy on my channel there was a woman she was driving her kid i think she was driving her kid back from a birthday party at a friend's house something completely mundane and sabrina she's black her kid's black there are these protesters by the wendy's who are blocking the road and not letting anyone pass so again this actually comes back to the same they were standing there with guns saying that they would block anyone they prevent any traffic from passing that intersection so do you believe this is a moral form of protest i don't this woman comes up and she's got her kid in the back seat i figure she has one kid or two in the backseat sorry some details i'm forgetting but anyway and and she melts off this guy and says hey look why are you blocking the road i've got to drive she was either driving home or driving a kid in the friends but i think he was driving home i got to drive my kid i'm doing whatever you know black lives matter fine but why why are you screwing up my life this way okay and they shot a bunch of bullets at the car and people died okay this is the kind of thing that came up there was damage done there was harm done tremendous harm that'll last forever and you know burning down cities burning down shop there's real damage there's real damage done by vegan activism and i'm saying the benefits or the positive accomplishments it's either unreal it's either ac it's either zero or it's very close to zero very modest very minor so okay just say this is the framing this is the context within which we have to talk about the pursuit of political change then which we have to talk about the pursuit of cultural change it's a context within which there are no easy answers but we can establish the easy questions we can say look dr greger on youtube multi-million per annum budget direct action everywhere multi-million per annum budget anonymous for the voiceless multi-million annum multi-million dollar brand and budget peta it's only go download and look at the numbers for peta now how much money they get and how much money this number here it's mind-blowing multi-million dollar prime budget and guess what none of it works none of it and there's a very simple metric trick in the same way that i've discussed in depth and past the metric for how many abortions people get per year ultimately what all this protestings about all this so-called disruption is about is a personal choice it comes down to you you and you and you and you as a million points a light a million individuals you have to make the decision to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do it's like sobriety you have to be committed i'm not gonna smoke cigarettes i'm not gonna drink alcohol i'm not gonna do drugs it's on me it doesn't matter what political movement you signed up to doesn't matter who you vote for ultimately it's your personal responsibility like sobriety to say i'm gonna walk this line i'm gonna take on this burden because it's the right thing to do i'm gonna refuse to eat meat okay asking a woman to refuse to get an abortion when she has an accidental pregnancy has an unbelievable sacrifice and you can google it right now or you can look it up on youtube and there are thousands of women who are proud and they're going to boast you that they did the right thing either because they believe in jesus they believe that both there are thousands and thousands of women who will say this but holy [ __ ] to raise the child of a man you don't love of a man you don't like of a man you might have had a one-night stand with of a man you might not even remember having sex with you might have gotten drunk and had a one-night stand and you don't really know that guy and now you're pregnant and you want this woman on a matter of principle that you're preaching whether they're christian or not in the states most of them are christian but there are some people who are secular and anti-abortion vegan gains number one youtube psychopath vegan gains is an atheist but he's morally opposed to abortion so you know there are people who who are committed to that perspective you are asking this woman to spend the next 20 years raising the child of a man she doesn't love or doesn't like or a pregnancy that was just unwanted that was in the wrong time in her life you know it's she just isn't settled down doesn't have enough home doesn't have a job or a home isn't set up and i'm like you want her to make that commitment and live with the consequences for your principles in the parlance of our times that is a big ask that is asking a lot of someone right but it comes down to a personal choice and personal responsibility so when you look at the chart that shows how many abortions people are actually getting per capita per annum that that is the measure of the failure of the anti-abortion movement that is the measure of the failure of their tactics the same tactics being used by vegan activists and when you look at the chart that shows how many pounds of meat everyone is eating per year there are two charts you can look them both up right now how many pounds of meat are being produced per capita per annum how many pounds of meat are being consumed per capita prime you look at those you look at those lines and you can see that all of the tactics used by peta by direct action everywhere by anonymous for the voiceless by dr greger absolutely all of them have failed now let me ask you honestly this is something for you guys to ask yourself i've already said i got love for police reform like i got love i got love for the fundamental questions that are being raised by black closure i just disagree with the organization i disagree with marxism i disagree with communism i agree with the answers they're posing but like police kill people in the united states of america it raises questions and i'm so jazzed i'm so positive i'm so ready for people to finally question what is written in that constitution and ask can't we do better people the finer look at the court system and why it is you have to bankrupt yourself to have a lawyer to plead your case why it is oh you better save up all your money and go into debt so you don't die because rich people get away with crimes and poor people there's so much outrageously wrong about the constitution about the court system about the police about the prisons about every stage of the justice system i'm not an apologist for any of it right but black lives matter is a [ __ ] movement and it's a failure and let me ask you if you give them another seven years and another 100 million dollars do you think it'll be a success do you think that's what's been lacking the anti-abortion movement if they keep using the same methods the same tactics if you give them another seven years and another one hundred million dollars do you think it'll suddenly be a success do you think that's what they've been lacking peta dxe doctor where all the multi-million dollar vegan organization all the things they're doing but whatever we'll just stay with paddock this is one example vegan activism if you give them another seven years and another 100 million dollars do you think then it'll be a success do you think all that that's all they've been waiting for that's all that's been lacking then i'm going to turn to the comment section uh briefly here yeah brendan williams comments one of the blm leaders used millions to buy a house for herself and then step down what a joke well brendan one of the other questions is stepping down from what so my first video ever about blm there is a playlist i can give you guys go to the playlist section of my channel and search for it there is a playlist of all the videos i've done about black lives matter but one of the first videos was criticizing their constitution and talking about the importance of having a constitutional defendant now i'm just saying honestly my more recent videos about black lives matter are better than my earlier videos they are just have improved with time i do think my current critique of blm is more meaningful than the initial regime but at that stage there was at least one website with a constitution that defined the movement and then they very quickly stepped back from that they deleted that constitution they never wrote another one and who is in charge and who's leading them and what are they trying to do what are they trying to uh what are they trying to accomplish you know um [Music] yeah so i just say to say that she stepped down when was she ever a leader these were very self-seeking people who were selling t-shirts with their brand name i've criticized that in general there's all this money involved and all this branding involved and going around and giving interviews and promoting your book you know book tours whatever the three women who were the founders but when you say she stepped down from my perspective she stepped down long ago back when they deleted that back when they deleted that constitution because at least that stage when they had a constitution there was some notion that okay this is what the movement supports this is what it doesn't like these tactics not these ones you know their position on use of violence or non-violence and protest there was some definition and when they gave that up i feel like after that it's it's really just been it's really just been a joke um okay so someone in the audience uh cut lou sorry i have a heart i have a name that's hard to pronounce too but anyway cutlew in the audience he's saying you're right atheism must be a creative ideology and we are losing you know do you preach to people about atheism like you do about uh veganism what is your rhetorical approach on the on the topic so great great question and i mean you know i think the short answer is yes you know um but when you say preach i i talk to people one-on-one in a way which is which is meaningful for them and yeah i idea so it's it's very bespoke it's not that i have a generalized approach that's the same for everyone but i'd also say i think atheism is another great comparison here so sorry i gave what i use abortion and the anti-abortion movements you know use these different parallels but two more to throw in well what about cigarette smoking and what about atheism right now again these may seem very different but what i said at the beginning of that long rant i was like well look this ultimate comes down to a person which comes down to me it comes down to you come down you're coming i've got to do this for myself well you got to quit smoking so you know do you think disruption is going to make people quit smoking like this great yeah great example so yeah we have a huge number of drug addicts on the street here we live in the pacific northwest do you think you could get out and protest on the streets the same way the vegans do stereotypical vegans like direct action airport oh that's great how about you use anonymous for the voiceless tactics you have people standing wearing a mask silently holding a video screen to protest against crack cocaine you know but like do you think you can fight against opiate drug addiction or you know stimulant organization or methamphetamine addiction do you think you could get rid of drug addiction or cigarette smoking through disruption my answer is no but significantly my answer is no that won't work not even if you have just as much support as the anti-abortion movement which vegans will never have right and let's be honest blm will never have it either blm got a ton of support for a short time but like long term does blm have the kind of constituency money behind it that anti-abortion i mean these this is the big leagues this is in the millions and millions of dollars both of these but you know the ability to run ad campaigns and do high costs you know things like anti-abortions and people are religiously committed the anti-abortion is a movement but it fails so you know no disruption will not work you know in in ending cigarette smoking or ending cocaine addiction or ending fentanyl addiction fentanyl is the big opiate out here but you know now sorry so turning to your question uh you know what about atheism you know is that the way to accomplish atheism to create an atheist society in my opinion obviously not now nobody does it nobody has the balls right disrupt santa claus right are you going to show up at the shopping mall and disrupt santa claus and say no this is bad and evil and wrong stop teaching kids to believe in santa claus stop teaching everybody stop teaching kids to believe in jesus stop well no the biggest one circumcision yeah what are you going to do about circumcision right so guys we have some more people in the audience if you have a moment hit the thumbs up button if you can because it helps more people discover the video it helps you know during the during the live stream so if you've forgotten hit thumbs up do so if you change your mind later you can you can hit thumbs down instead you can actually undo a thumbs up uh it's allowed so you can you can change your mind better but it is it is good to get get more people in the audience and like one of you um but yeah so i don't i could easily make a separate video a whole series of separate videos about uh talking about 80s and people but guys i know so on camera i know i have a very passionate manner of speaking unlike in real life no in real life i'm very passionate too but but in a different way and you know when i've talked about atheism people you know face to face when you're dealing with people uh you know it is a much more caring and satovace uh communication i remember there was a young woman i she 24 maybe sorry i said young woman but how young do you mean and i remember she had been totally raised in a christian family and so on and she had recently converted to a different more fundamentalist christian group that was based on just reading and just doing what was in the bible now a lot of people haven't read the bible i have so i was able to you know confront her with how absurd that is i was able to say things so really something like oh okay you do animal sacrifice no that's in the bible you know like you know do you stone women do you engage in slavery and sex slavery so do you let your husband i don't she wasn't married i don't i remember her kind of sort of having a crushing on a crush on me that girl but maybe she was already married to i forget but it was the dynamic it was was a little bit flirty uh my my relation with that particular one you know okay you know so you know what about circumcision what about slavery what about animal sacrifice but even just dealing with animal sacrifice and to deal with that seriously and say no this this is what the religion's about no you don't get to decide you didn't write the bible okay don't tell me you believe in literal adherence to the bible and practicing everywhere which is what she told me that she'd converted from some more mainstream christian group to this fundamentalist group which is based on a rifle you know and you know another one of the things i talked to her about so again this is very bespoke this is meaningful to the particular person she had the delusion that christianity is the oldest religion in the world you know it's not you know and um you know and for someone like her white person born and raised in canada just to even get into talking about the history of the world like oh you know like have you heard of china have you heard of india have you heard of buddhism like this could have a deeply subversive you know motivating effect in these ways and you know it's look sorry this is just one anecdote about one conversation people uh so look that's that's reaching out to somebody one-on-one and you know taking these things seriously and showing that you care about them enough to offend them you know i care about you enough to hurt your feelings you know really talk to you about about what circumcision means even most people don't talk about it you know swept another carpet something let's really deal with this you know man the man or man the woman or a woman a woman or what whatever it may be me and we say in chinese face to face you know um okay but this brings us back to the top of this video right which is but how then do you pursue real cultural change how do you pursue real political change how do you scale it up when we're no longer talking about you know one-on-one interactions right okay so i'm now going to return to the question i got uh from cranky vegan in the first place which included the question or it concluded with the question he said to me i think in relatively powerful words he said well how do you in your own life how do you pursue this or how do you live this great question fortunately it takes more than an hour to answer and i said that to him at the time like well do you want me to record a monologue just for you do you want me to write a book length answer this question um but look guys oh someone in the audience says that he was raised in a younger young earth creationist conservative christian household so that is the most crazy form of authentically american christianity i mean whether or not it's as crazy as forms of virginia you can find in europe but that is that is very very distinctively american so those people they're obsessed with proving that darwin is a hoax and they're obsessed with this company yeah uh anyway and he he's uh moved on to philosophy after something and buddhism was helpful so that is also significant i agree so brendan i agree like even though so i'm not a buddhist and i don't preach buddhism i think it is very interesting how buddhism can challenge the presuppositions of both christians and muslims in a way that's useful and creates a gap for them to then kind of think of themselves in question and leads them to more more atheist or more scientific or more more human uh attitudes okay guys so look i would describe my life in relation to vegan activism in three periods and i'm going to start here with a period in the middle okay because the period in the middle was when i pursued a career as a baker so you know oh well how do you how are you an activist how do you pursue political social and cultural change all right and we're talking about me we're not talking about the leader of the haitian revolution we're not talking about what you would do in china in 1949 or something right we're just talking about me all right so i'm a middle-aged man i have a daughter whom i never get to see in france right i have my own situation in terms of university education and career and the need to earn money and relative poverty and what have you i've got different considerations right and this is the middle period this is my first grade it wasn't my first idea for vegan activism to go out and and we're going to be like okay i can take this on i can enroll in classes i can learn how to bake again there's a lot of personal lists i can wake up every morning at 4 00 a.m baking is an early morning activity and walk in the cold and i can bake this bread and make vegan croissants and make vegan birthday cakes and i can do this and this can be the cornerstone of my vegan activism right okay so if you guys don't know this already was it fifty thousand dollars to tuition it was something like that oh really oh wow it shows how my memory works yeah you're right you're right you're right you're right so i just asked most of how much was the tuition you know what i was probably remembering both of our tuitions added together or something okay and was that us dollars again it doesn't matter really but okay anyway so so we paid 12 000 canadian each to learn how to bake bread learn how to learn how to be bakers in general so that's 24 000 so it was a huge commitment it was a huge decision and i presumed it was going to change the rest of my life now you can watch the youtube videos you made about it long story short it didn't work out why because everyone hates vegans that's it they're basically much more powerfully than you could say there was prejudice against you as a black person in this university in in the year 2021 i'm aware just a few decades ago there was really intense predators you know today there may be there may be some mild racism and prejudices against you as a black person in the university of america totally get that however they will not just walk up to you and tell you we're kicking you out because you're black well guess what we got told we're being kicked out because we're vegan okay this is you know in the 21st century this was intense hatred and discomfort with the fact that we were vegan and they promised us we talked to them about it before the the guy in charge reassured us that would be fine for us as vegans and it turned out it wasn't fine okay but look this is just illustrating for those who don't have the background on that you know i had to come up with answers to the question of how am i going to be a vegan activist how am i going to pursue political association and that was what was possible for me and it's humbling humiliating work in a lot of ways and i literally wept over it i mean you know i remember weeping talking to melissa saying i put so many years into studying buddhist philosophy learning the pali language and by the way i didn't just learn pali i learned to read and write classical literary cina leaves read classical literary burmese thai laotian cambodian like there was so much language work so much erudition so i built myself up as a scholar of buddhism for years i did years working on korean and ojibwe as languages and political traditions i did all this work on language and philosophy under so many headings and i studied chinese i studied japanese like okay i've got all this depth of of expertise and i mean you know at one point i had to try to justify becoming a an intelligence officer in the military you know i applied to do intelligence work for the military and as as humbling as that is you're like well i would be taking my expertise about world politics world history and even some of these languages and i'd be applying it i'd be doing intelligence work for the canadian government for the canadian military and probably exactly my expertise with china cambodia thailand my mexican politics it would be used to some extent you gotta talk yourself into it because it's also pretty horrible to join the army and do do that kind of work anyway joining the army also didn't work out but my point is it was heartbreaking to make the decision to say okay i'm going to take all this education and all this area edition and by the way also like my past plans i was planning to open a publishing house shout out to my ex-wife if she's watching this but you know back when i was married to my first wife all the time we were talking about book publishing you know and different plans and schemes just to get into publishing and you know i mean i just say it was something i wasn't just a writer i was an editor and you know there were other ideas of my my scholarly life that was to come and what my life was going to be like when i was 60 years old right that's still something when we talk about studying chinese and how high a priority in my life learning chinese should be one of the things that what is my life going to be like when i'm when i'm in my 60s you know how am i going to be living with this scholarship okay so it's not my lifestyle choices okay i'm gonna put all that aside and i'm gonna commit to waking up at four o'clock in the morning and mixing dough in the dough mixer doing what's really essentially factory labor most of there is some creativity involved when you design the product you know there is there is but day in and day out it is cleaning the machines most of your work is cleaning the machines afterwards combining the ingredients pulling the crank on the machine i mean it is factory labor plus a lot of cleaning because it's a factory that has to be at food grade levels of cleanliness and safety right you know that's what you're committing to do for the rest of your life why for veganism it's not for money right it was for for vegan activism to be to be part of our lives right and it didn't work out so i would say there were three periods for me and how i answered this question for how i'm going to pursue political assertion and there was a period before that which is maybe the more entertaining period on the channel where i was really reaching out to anyone and everyone positively now in political terms you could say i was trying to lead a mass movement but it was a very tiny mass movement and why so why do i say mass movement when you talk about a small number of people because pardon me apart in england they use the term a big tent movement they actually also use the term big tent church anyway the point is when you talk about a mass movement or a big tent movement the point is anyone can join anyone can sign up and i'm reaching out to people all the time and talking to them over skype i never owned the telephone in those years it was always skype but you know having voice calls and having emails and talking to people and saying i want you you know i'm recruiting i want you to join i want to do this what can we do together and all those conversations always ended with me asking them where do you want to be five years from now what do you want to have accomplished as well what do you want to have organized i don't think a single person had an answer to that question just people sue hundreds of people right and of course indirectly like through medium like through this kind of media like you know uh youtube videos it was millions of people right but in terms of direct face-to-face conversations like directly talking to people email and skype there's hundreds of people right and i'm saying yes let's get it organized yes let's do a conference yes let's do this let's just do this let's incorporate a new party let's incorporate a new lobby let's make something up let's you know i'm getting out there with this creative ideas and i'm saying who's with me right five years went by and none of those people accomplished anything none of them right most of them went back to eating meat they stopped being vegan all right shout out to jason posino holy [ __ ] shout out to bonnie rebecca shout out to everyone else right i mean what i found was okay two things some people if you're new here some people might say well your mistake was you were reaching out to social media influencers like people who have youtube channels or this kind of thing and and that i wasn't reaching out to the respectable academic people with phds or the kind of uh respectable career activists okay and you're wrong i reached out to everyone during those years and let me tell you something the so-called respectable people they were the worst they are the worst people in the movement the people on social media are the best i mean that 100 sincerely 100 just you know the sincerity and presence of mind and commitment and the risk of your own face and identity that's involved in coming here on camera and saying this is why i'm a vegan you know this is what i care about this is what i'm trying to accomplish that litmus test you might think that's a really low barrier to enter to jump but it's not and the people with phds would never get over that they're the worst people in this game they are the worst people in the vegan activist game and uh yeah i did i appreciate all those people and i talked to those people as much as i could and most of them were afraid to talk to me so shout out to casey taft and if you want to sign hilarious you can search this youtube channel for my my critique of the book of casey taft and then there is a video i think it's not quite as easy to find which is me responding to casey taft sending me hate mail you know this is a guy with a phd in a publishing house by the way who's published books and this publishes supposedly respectable erudite academic books that are complete horseshit on how vegan activism is supposed to work and i gave up completely i read the book and i gave a critique in analysis of what's wrong with this book this guy sent me the most teenaged hate mail imaginable i can't believe you would put them those people were really too okay so yeah there was an earlier period of time and i know it was more entertaining for the audience right because i would come on with this energy and even if i was angry it was uplifting angry energy because i was saying to people hey we can do better than this we can do better than freely we can do better than tyrion ryder we can do better than peta people with ethical treatments we can do better than direct action everywhere they're idiots but we're not idiots we don't have to be idiots we don't have to repeat repeat the mistakes of the past you know we're in this together let's do it there was that energy so the manifesto from that period of time was my video uh on community so i think there's even a playlist for that but if you don't know that video that period of this more positive mass movement energy on my channel where that was what i was trying to do is uh so on community and that video inspired people to translate into many many languages so here uh i don't even this is slovenia wow man there you go so they are one of the one of the least watched versions so there's the slovenian translation i speak in english but the subtitles in slovenian here we have the greek translation uh we've got a whole sequence here as they're they'll have pretty decent numbers of views too just just saying um well i'm getting all the obscure languages here danish danish translation okay so just say regardless of what so it's titled something like on community a manifesto you know and um you know that was that was the manifesto for that period of my youtube channel and again it had a lot of positive energy because it was recruiting anyone and everyone speaking of which guys sorry we have more people in the audience this is how it happens when people do thumbs up if you have a second hit the thumbs up button because it helps more people discover the video it makes the video visible rather than invisible as a positive effect i'm not just for the channel really as possible for this video right now it means youtube will notify more people that i'm live streaming and admittedly this is a completely spontaneous live stream nobody got advanced warning so i'm happy if you happen to be washing dishes you have to be at home at the time of livestreaming this it's wonderful to have an audience this large when you do something with absolutely no no preparation okay so i just say that there was this earlier period of optimism and of approaching this as a mass movement and what that proved to me again and again and again you know is that talent is scarce and you know guys you know not everyone's an idiot not everyone's a bad person i did get a lot of flattering email in that time and i remember people writing to me remember this phrasing coming up again again he said i remember people running to me and saying why won't you realize that the type of vegan leader you are describing is you and it's only you like there's nobody else to look through for leadership like why don't you stop criticizing other leaders of the vegan movement and why don't you take on this role because you're the only one who can do it so i no okay no it wasn't 100 people who said that to me maybe it was 10 people or 12 people you know what i mean but it was memorable to me that the same kind of phrasing came up repeatedly because people were they were responding to the fact that i had this positive uplifting thing of saying look let's let's make something happen guys and i was trying to make it happen democratically i wasn't trying to do it all my way like i was talking about saying okay guys let's have a conference well here's my idea for a conference what do you guys i was trying to get people to collaborate and work together and no um to say that talent is scarce is an understatement and one of my one of my videos and really the title just says it all was that i do not want to be a one-man movement so this is part of the breaking point oh yeah so this is really one of the one of the crucial videos to see and it's only 11 minutes long so that is short that is a concise uh summation i don't think it tells the whole story it's concise but incomplete probably but in 11 minutes you know it talks about the end of that period of optimism in retrospect right and i have made a video talking about this so this guy's i know most of you were not here at the beginning of this video but i began by talking about elitism kind of elitism versus populism they have a mass movement as opposed to a self-consciously elitist movement and i switched to having a view of the world where i said look we have to acknowledge the scarcity of talent first and foremost the scarcity of positively motivated and capable people as the primary problem you know first and foremost and we have to deal with that first so like even the recruiting is misguided right and you can tell even this video i'm not trying to recruit any people you know it's like guess what whether i like it or not i am one of incredibly few people who can do anything with or for the movement and i don't even know one other i don't have a group of five i don't have a group of ten i know of 20. so you did this recruitment phase for like five years right and i reached millions of viewers you know i'm just saying i reached a huge number of years it was very successful just considered as a social media phenomenon right and a lot of people were deeply influenced by and moved by videos that talked about i have talked about every aspect and every facet of the vegan movement and vegan politics philosophy and you know all kinds of really really specific issues about dog ownership and having uh carnivore pets and i mean all kinds and palm oil and deforestation and recycling and climate change a million issues from a million different angles have been talked about and guess what at the end of that process i'm all alone and i don't want to be a one-man movement and there's no way for me to move forward you know by running a bakery by baking bread so guess what i have no choice i've got to be voltaire the only way for me to make a difference is as a completely isolated creative individual which is what i am i can be a filmmaker i can be a stand-up comedian i can be a novelist i can write books right that is the only power i've got that is the only choice left open to me okay voltaire these really are the weapons of the weak and yet voltaire profoundly changed the world in the way that protesters carrying placards never would never could never will right and now i've said recently in other videos a very different context okay my failure is better than your success right so i don't mean you in the audience right but this kind of contrast i think it is worthwhile to point out that like the failure of this youtube channel is more meaningful is more important than the success of pro veg international multi-million dollar budget right i mean that seriously i think the failure of this channel is more important than many multi-million dollar success stories in veganism and i think it really has profoundly touched and profoundly influenced people's lives including people who hate my guts guess what guys aaron janus was profoundly influenced by this channel aaron janus is more famous than me she's more successful than me guess what my failure matters more success across the board right including durianrider including uh joey carbstrong including all kinds of you know frankly [ __ ] for brains people you know they ain't got no brains well i got enough brains to share you know there's a role for being a creative intellectual in this movement and it's not my first choice and it's not my second choice but i have to look at the road ahead in terms of being a creative artist a creative author period because that's the only option i've got left [Laughter] okay i'm tempted to hit hit the stop button and uh and call it a wrap by the way thanks very much guys for the thumbs up that's a wonderful thumbs up account you know you've you've given me um but i only answered part of the original question so you know maybe there is a more theoretical thing if you guys have any questions i'm pausing i'm going to drink some water if you want to ask a question now's the time to ask it's your your last chance for this for this live stream just something you particularly wanted to go um theory of change talked a lot about the practice of change so let's talk about let's talk about the theory of change and we've talked a lot about narrowing down this very broad and nebulous sphere of change to the personal in particular of what change can i make in my circumstances culturally politically et cetera um ultimately the change we're talking about is legal period right ultimately there's going to be a law but there's going to be a rewriting of the constitution period that's the changing one now i'm saying this about veganism i would say the exact same thing about police brutality police about reforming the justice system because not just the police the police the courts the prisons okay that reform must be legal okay what happened when a group of board housewives led a grassroots democratic movement to change the american constitution to make alcohol illegal did it work the problem is they accomplished the legal change first and the cultural change was left to lag behind the culture change hasn't happened yet right now let me ask you another question this is maybe more challenging okay for the gay rights movement what if gay marriage gay rights gay equality in the workplace what if that had been accomplished legally in 1948 when america was intensely culturally homophobic right but you say well you know world war ii was over like people could have just learned the lesson from looking at the nazis right like well the nazis persecuted and punished people for being homosexual we don't want to be like the nazis like you know really it doesn't doesn't take a genius to look at what just happened in world war two with the nazis and say okay let's do the opposite let's actually give gay people civil rights right to get married like you know a law that makes it illegal to fire someone just because they're gay and this kind of people have the right to be open like okay you could also by the way be pro-gay just because you've read a lot of stuff from ancient greece in rome i just mentioned your classical literature is very pro-gay gets forgotten about to a fault i might say you know um even aristotle was kind of freaked out by that you know aristotle dealing with the level of homosexuality in athens as opposed to his hometown where i grew up in the north of greece it's like oh there's a gay thing it's really fashionable in athens so look there are different routes it was possible you could have had you know legislation to make homosexuality legal and normal that now obviously there's a sense in which we'd say it is good i think most people in this audience would say that prohibition is good like in principle oh gee making alcohol illegal okay so william mcgeegan says simply prohibition happened um okay prohibition happened but it failed right if you want to create a culture of sobriety if you want to create a culture that values doing the right thing because the right thing to do and that sees this as the right thing to do right that's a huge cultural challenge you have to pursue cultural change social change and the question is when does the legal change come in right do you want to have the legal change first and then wait for society to catch up with it or do you want to have the cultural change first and then for you as a relatively powerless individual even if you're a multi-millionaire i mean some of my fans are wealthy people and i mention some fans who write to me and say hey look if you need me to donate for a project you know let me know because they write in saying they're wealthy and they'll support something if i want to do it even if you are a wealthy person you are powerless when standing up against the culture of homophobia like what can you do even if you have millions of dollars what can i do to change the world when the whole institution everything in society is homophobic when everything in society is racist and you know if we're talking about 1948 everything is homophobic everything in society is racist what do you do you are powerless standing up against the society where everyone drinks alcohol and everyone in regards alcohol not just as fun and entertaining they even regarded it as healthy you know i mean they really didn't regard this as a health problem in the way that we do today so you can't make alcohol illegal at that stage right gay rights went through many phases and you know it is an imposition it was hard for people to cope with it's not easy wasn't easy for the catholic school board to have to employ openly gay people as equals you know i'm not i'm not saying it's easy and i've mentioned this example before but i do think it is a real turning point there was a comedy on american television called soap that's the title s-o-a-p soap there's a comedy on american television that was the first tv show to have an openly gay character an openly gay protagonist and they made a lot of jokes about it i mean you know he was the butt of jokes and sometimes he won and sometimes he lost injuries the point was not to ridicule or vilify homosexuals but at that time just having a gay character in a comedy on television making jokes about being gay and he's not in the closet or something it's not that he's not just an effeminate character or something and talking about homosexuality so there's this big turning point for the culture right of course you know there are there are differences right everybody knows somebody who died in a drunk driving accident everybody knows somebody who's an alcoholic everybody knows somebody who's gay even if they're not aware that they know somebody who's gay you might be kidding yourself about one of your co-workers or one of your professors or one of your uncles or your best friend even okay homosexual there are enough people around who are gay to bring this effort before depending on where you live everybody knows somebody who is black if we're going to talk about the progress the civil rights movement it is just not the case that everybody knows somebody who is vegan right it is not the case that people can perceive the uh the harm done you know by eating mead or they could receive the benefit to all society presented and offered by veganism they can't see the ecological argument they can't see the ethical argument right i mean again sorry talking about civil rights or black people it's very obvious you say hey look this whole society is going to be transformed radically as soon as we give equal rights to black people hey this whole society is going to be transformatively when we give equal rights to homosexual people that's obvious that's impossible to ignore veganism is very easy to ignore so you know that is the ultimate conclusion here is that we are at a stage where veganism is an invisible cause it is a despised cause and talent is incredibly scarce and the way forward as i described the start of this video ultimately is going to be and has to be elitism um so one of the turning points i went to a conference for vegans in toronto don't worry i'm only a few more minutes to say we're just wrapping up the video guys i'm seeing your comments come in you know um yes so somebody united says that he's 18 he or she is 18 and is seen as a nutcase for not during alcohol yeah i know that so when i when i stopped drinking when i when i completely stopped drinking and doing drugs of any kind i i you know i lost all my entire friend group i mean the entire network of people i'd known you know i was cut off from everything in canada and melissa is nodding her head and saying she had a similar experience yeah yeah so you know compulsory drinking oh yeah and family well yeah so melissa is just saying that she's seen as a free kid family events the level of ostracism for supporting sobriety so i'm just mentioning i'm just being blunt here in case it wasn't before i would support making alcohol illegal in theory right but the question if you make alcohol illegal in 2021 right it could be much more of a failure than it was the last time you made alcohol illegal right now you know again i'm not in a position to say morally oh well it sure is a good thing we delayed gay rights until people accepted it no it's terrible it was a terrible day in theory it would be wonderful to make veganism legally mandatory in 2021 but obviously that would result in a kind of level of subversion of the law a kind of uh you know de-institutionalization of a huge part of the economy the black market would become larger than the legal market you know um that would that would that would fail to an unbelievable extent so i mean i just say we're still whatever we're not yet on the 100th anniversary of prohibition but i will say this i will foretell the future when we come to the 100th anniversary of prohibition we will be no closer to having an alcohol-free society than we were before when we come to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the vegan society will be no close and that is in part because of things i've just talked about for more than an hour that we're using the wrong tactics uh so on and so forth yeah anyway we have lots of people talking about how memorable uh the tv show soap was i'm sure you can see it for for free on youtube now i don't know on youtube on netflix so i don't know if you want if you want to look up that show billy crystal played the gay character so an actor went on to be tremendous not not gay he's heterosexual but he was he was playing the the gay role yeah okay so this is the puzzle we're looking at and it has only three pieces right so we're talking about legal change cultural change and political change right and the question is now you know how do you get there now i want to say if you have 20 people who can work together 20 people who have good intentions like they're not just doing this because they want to get famous on instagram or youtube or something if you have 20 people you are in the most privileged category of vegans in the world right like just to have 20 people organized and well-intentioned that's amazing i don't know anyone who's got 20 people right talent is scarce you know and for each of those people when you're talking about talented hard-working people they're already busy they've already got jobs they've got careers they've got things to do they've got better things to do and contribute their time to your to your tier vegan movement right so then we get into a very different sort of question given the scarcity given the hopelessness at this point of any kind of political change any kind of legal change right that leaves cultural change right so get a good question here someone writes in uh constantia writes in so should we focus on trying to make change through the law organizing politically etc so the problem with your question constantia is that you assume there are people to organize what do you mean we should raise what we i've been doing this for seven years eight years now there is no we none i don't i don't know one vegan in the city of victoria i can meet for lunch i can organize anything with all right not one and this is the capital city of this province when i went to taiwan i tried through every method not just social media not just facebook i did everything i could to meet up and collaborate with vegan activists in taiwan and i spoke chinese i could speak read and write chinese so i could write to these vegan groups in chinese on facebook saying hey i'm a vegan activist this is my youtube channel i'm now living in taiwan i want to meet with vegan activist groups i want to know what you guys are doing like i'd love to interview for the channel i want to get involved i want i never met one vegan activist the whole time i was in taiwan and i didn't just do it through facebook for example i went to restaurants i went to restaurants with a friend of mine who speaks chinese as the first language so you know i could speak chinese but obviously i'm not completely fluent like i'm very far from blue island but he was speaking chinese perfectly to them and explaining oh you know this guy's a vegan activist he has a youtube channel he's trying to meet these kind of people never met one we went to athens greece what did we meet one vegan activist one vegan person in athens not one we've traveled paris of randomly on the street we met one vegan activist in paris there was one vegan remember her chinese or vietnamese woman i forget what yeah there was one person who was like oh wow you're famous i know there's one person who like recognized me on the street and she basically never talked to his gamblers okay but you know like no and we were that was back in my recruitment phase that was i was saying oh great let's make something happen then let's do so let's really do something positive you know um everywhere i've gone and guys i gave advanced warning before we went to these places on youtube i remember making videos saying hey guys we're going to be in paris we're going to be in this city we're going to be in this city if there's anyone you know if there's anyone doing anything so i've been reaching out for years okay sorry not four years four years seven years eight years whatever it's been we're gonna be coming okay there is no other talent i am alone as i said in the title of that video why i quit veganism colin i don't want to be a one-man movement okay and i am it's just me all right i have no colleagues i have no contemporaries there is nobody i can invite to a conference there's nobody i can even do a skype call with okay and if you argue back what about joey carbstrong i've spoken to joey karps i know all these people to say i'm six degrees of separation as it grows i'm like one degree of separation two degrees of separation as well i've talked to or communicated with directly or indirectly all the leaders and everything going on in the vegan move including phoebe frampton and [ __ ] england and [ __ ] like including more obscure leaders in the vegan movement all right they know me okay uh uh gary francione knows me and knows my work i would be amazed if gary yourofsky doesn't shout it to detroit melissa's from detroit right uh who's that doctor in detroit uh joel kahn yeah yeah melissa benefits i've talked to him by email you know okay okay okay what do you mean should we get organized for legal change do you think we have the numbers that mothers against drunk driving have we don't it's taking it all the way back to my original video right do you think we have the numbers do you think we have the the support morally financially in terms of no no and again everybody knows someone who's died in a car accident everyone knows a tragedy connected to drunk driving that's the fundamental impetus behind mothers against drunk driving people you know you reach out and you you know you harness that discontent you harness that descent and say look let's get organized let's let's lobby government to have stricter laws against drunk driving and they did and they won and they changed the world mothers against drunk driving change every day when i took the bus to school there were posters up from mother's door driving campaigns against strong driving completely surrounded me growing up was a huge movement for for my generation yeah it's even even more surreal given that how many people know somebody who are who is affected by the diseases oh of course right so sorry just in case you guys can hear melissa was just saying that in the same sense that everyone knows somebody died in a car accident you can also make an argument that everybody knows somebody who died of an illness caused by eating meat eating dairy eating eggs which is true but they don't see it that way so it's invisible ultimately yeah it's ultimately it's irrelevant to the ethical argument because either you're motivated to do the right thing because either or you're not you just have a low cholesterol non-vegan diet or whatever and people do their own thing but look yeah but no i mean that's that's uh i mean look everyone everyone's everyone has seen an animal slaughter you can put it that way too but they don't care they don't uh they don't feel responsible so anyway there are some there are some uh questions suggesting particular people because i've alluded to a bunch of people like gary yourofsky gary francione you know name some people joey carpenter look guys turn around how do you think joey carves strong feels about me because i've i've talked to him enough i think joey carbstrong is afraid of me i think julie carve strong feels that i'm smarter than him he asked me for help on a couple issues you know where he said look he wrote in the guy i'm sorry if you've ever committed him his style of writing is very simplistic but he pretty much wanted to be saying hey you're smart you know about these things can you tell me what should i say about this issue that was pretty much way but to me um you know i think people like joey carbstrong and no we've spoken to aaron janus i'm saying we because melissa was there i know aaron janus pretty well at this point um people like joey carbstrong people like aaron janis they are aware that i know what i'm talking about in a way that nobody else in the movement does all right they're aware that i bring something to this in terms of expertise and acumen and perspective that's really valuable and really rare and they don't have it and they fear it right you know i think fear is the right word i don't think they hate me i'm sorry we talked to aaron a couple months ago i don't think aaron janus hates me i don't think joey carbstrong hates me i don't think you know really really i don't think paul beshear hates me to give another example he's a pretty awful guy but i know maybe he doesn't hate me more than hates other people you know no but there is fear and i just want to say this guys back when i had the um conflict with durianrider you will notice you may have noticed that um you know non-vegans were much more appreciative and positive towards me than vegans like there were all these kind of normal people because of the size of that conversation it was covered in some mainstream newspapers and [ __ ] you know there was this legal conflict and freelee's career had suddenly imploded it was freely there was some kind of mainstream uh recognition of this weird thing that happened in thailand uh so you know for a brief second it was hundreds of thousands of people rather than tens of thousands who were interested in what i was doing and saying like normal people had nothing to do with veganism look to this situation understood to me but you talk about the vegans vegan insiders vegans like joe best vegans like a vegan foot soldier these are the names of youtube channels you don't know vegans like joe vegan you know people who were close to people that direct email correspondence people who spoke to me on skype and [ __ ] like people would directly communicate with me you know and they could they could verify all the facts like if they wanted to see receipts if they want to see proof of things those people all immediately got committed to vilifying me trying to ostracize me trying to because they were afraid of me because i was the only type that you knew what he was talking about and it was the only guy in the movement asking a question so simple and so fundamental as what are you doing five years from now okay okay so what let's talk about the future of the vegan movement let's talk about me and you and let's talk about the next five years and let's come up with a plan and again for this huge phase in this channel i brought in all that positive energy and when it was clear that that was gonna come to nothing that i was totally alone phase two plan b was okay i'm gonna go back to school i'm gonna get a degree from college a baking college i'm gonna learn how to bake bread and i'm gonna open my own bakery because that's something i can do alone so that doesn't rely on anyone but me which would have been a horrible life for me a lot of ways by the way right and now phase three is okay that failed that proved to be impossible and now i've really got a ship it has been a shift and melissa i don't know if you you you pick up on it so let me say this now i've shifted phase three is shifting to thinking of myself as a creative artist thinking myself as a creative writer like voltaire and also like a stand-up comedian however much of her little comedy but it's voltaire also was partly a comedian just mentioned but thinking okay that's what i have to do whether it's as a filmmaker or as a youtuber whatever i do with it before i got with melissa i thought of myself as a researcher i thought of myself as someone who's committed to non-fiction you know and like this youtube thing was this sideshow but what i did was read one of the essays melissa read when she was falling in love with me was this hard-hitting research piece about a war that took place in 1920 involving china and japan and russia and the russian communists massacre everybody it's this very dramatic chapter of the world's history that was the kind of work i was doing it's like oh i'm i'm a researcher i'm a researcher and i just also i'm kind of you know getting involved in vegan activism and i saw myself as someone who had this you know at that time direct action everywhere was declaring the importance of social science research oh well i actually am a social science teacher i'm a researcher comes out of the social sciences you know i thought of myself as someone who did research all right but you have to do research with people you have to do research about people you have to do research for people and also research normally does depend on an institutional contact institutional support and it became very clear as the years went by that i would have absolutely none of that so i've had to make a very difficult transition from thinking of myself as a researcher to thinking of myself as a creative artist and however much or however little i'm going to accomplish now as a creative artist it is very clear in terms of my theory of change in terms of the forces that force me now to pursue cultural change i am going to make that difference working alone how can we have a culture of sobriety you know how can we have a culture in which people are positively motivated to refuse cocaine to refuse fentanyl to refuse marijuana to refuse alcohol right to refuse antidepressants i mean it's it's so great that the antidepressants don't work but what happens if one day they invent an antidepressant that does work that's going to be even more of an epidemic you know what i mean um how can you create a culture that really mo that really is motivated to be sober that really positively values sobriety right the easy answer everyone reaches for is the legal answer is legislation right what's last they put for oh make it illegal right the real question the real challenge the real struggle is cultural there right and once you achieve that cultural change the same way we first achieved a cultural change in how we view gay people right the attitudes towards homosexuality the homophobia had to change culturally and then you have a change legally that cements it that makes it obligatory like oh yeah it's not just that homophobia is bad it's also illegal okay so you know that's that's the way that change happened you need to look at in an artistic and creative way bringing about this kind of social change and our attitudes towards drugs or attitudes towards sobriety our attitudes towards the the meaning of life our attitudes towards what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman and how to choose the person you're gonna you're gonna marry you know what i mean um and you know i think if you are all alone if you don't have a multi-million dollar per year budget if you're not leading an army you have to look at doing that with the same utensils used all those centuries ago by a figure like voltaire