90% of People Are Stupid and Malign.

as little as those interactions hurt me
because they didn't hurt me emotionally as little as those interactions hurt they changed my view of human nature like you get on the internet and even if you think you're cynical i mean i've been through a lot in my life i've been through cambodia i've been through laos i've been through hong kong hong kong's a rough town doing its way guys you know what i mean i've been through so much in my life and then you get on youtube and you have to face up to the awesome implacable spectacle of human stupidity as never before even even in my late 30s even in my early 40s all right i am still not prepared to deal with this level of stupidity i am still not prepared to deal with this level of mean-spiritedness you know the casual cruelty from people who have nothing to gain [Music] how did you learn about stupidity who taught you who taught you how stupid people are i don't think you learned it in a classroom i don't think you learned it in a church basement you know i don't think the pastor of your church sat down with you one day and said we're gonna do a very important sermon right now it's about stupidity it's about something you're gonna have to cope with your whole life how did you learn about malice how did you learn about the depths of human evil and just how cruel one person can be to another out of complete indifference and these are cumulative indifference and stupidity how did you learn about these things right i feel that i am part of the first generation who learned about them on the internet we all had to learn think ain't something new that just came out of nowhere right but most of you in the audience you grew up with one vision of human nature being presented to you by your parents being presented by teachers maybe being presented by a religious leader if you went to church or something like that you were given a certain view of human nature above all else by television you watched sesame street and you think this is how an adult behaves this is how a child behaves this is how an adult talks to a child you're given a model of normal human intelligence i have to say my sense of what a normal adult's level of intelligence was probably watching the nightly news like as a child when you're a small child do you think this person is reading a script like is that as a child it's how you respond to it you know i mean like when you get older as a child you start to analyze these things you know what i'm saying you start to uh relate to them in a more cynical way perhaps right you're given an image of a calm rational collected adult this may be a contrast to your own parents right on the nightly news they're talking about the atom bomb they're talking about nuclear explosions right that's not how my parents talk about the atom you know like for real but still you have an image of rational adulthood presented to you in this way and then at some point somehow you figure out this isn't humanity at all this isn't what my fellow human beings are like at all and today people discover that in the youtube comment section reddit facebook maybe on myspace right on on twitter [Laughter] you know we have these attitudes learned in childhood and you know you can tell me it's a little bit different from one family to the next it's a little bit different from one household an extra one schools isn't next but let's say your expectations in making youtube videos comes straight out of the classroom let's say your expectation is i prepare to present my book report to the class if you're a little kid this is my book report i read i think the first book report i ever wrote was the autobiography of barnum p.t barnum from the barnum and bailey circus if not it was the autobiography of bailey it was one of the two guys who founded this famous circus the barnum ability his autobiography and i and i always remember there was this kid in the class i don't know what was nothing he didn't believe i'd read the book it was just crazy and like i don't even know what was he yes seriously like do you believe i didn't write this report and he was asking all these weird questions like he's like well what does it say on page 10 yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i should i should find that guy i remember his first name i don't know his last name but i could figure it out i knew what school we were at and what year and it's not gonna find it look man you screwed up my book report all right but most of us most of the time right our expectation is okay i do this work gather this information i make this presentation i'm evaluated by the teacher maybe months later i get a book report you're aware on some level you're being judged right but uh you will never face the level of animosity cruelty just just uncharitable assumptions and judgments from the audience that you will face frankly in presenting the same book report here on youtube nobody teaches us formally to have charitable assumptions about other people nobody teaches us how to interview someone question someone or cross-examine someone in a way that's charitable english is not your first language charity has one meaning charitable has another i listened to an interview just a couple hours ago with one of the leaders of the black lives matter movement and the interviewer was asking in the most charitable way possible well look 90 million dollars have gone missing and can't be accounted for it was much more polite than that it's like well look your organization the headline number is 90 million dollars it's been reported you purchased four houses [Music] how much money did you personally make out of this right but you've got to ask those questions in a charitable way and you've got to take the answers seriously when they're given you you can't just dismiss them and keep on attacking the person or or what right or what what's the alternative right if people can't reason with you if you can't be reasonable if you can't reciprocate the level of rationality and reasonableness there they're generously extending to you right then we revert to pretty fundamentally animal behavior then we revert to a situation where it is just going to be brute force that resolves the differences between us i think that's exactly what we need formal education on our generation now i just say i don't think i don't think the past was better than the present let's put it that way i don't think my grandfather's generation or my great-grandfather's generation consisted of angels i remember talking to an elderly buddhist monk and he told me that in his childhood nobody had ever considered putting a child on a diet weight loss and obesity among children didn't exist and he said they all ate garbage though incredibly they done an unhealthy diet in unlimited quantities the parents didn't try to limit and he said the reason was simple absolutely all of our forms of play and recreation pretty much involved physical violence you know like they were out wrestling in the dirt or you know with a stick and a and a rock and the dirt they were scrambling around all day and all night so i i forget how old that monk was i don't know if that was the 1940s or i'm sorry i'd have to think about when when it was he grew up right so this this is one element of generational change people at that time were racist people were rude people were ignorant people didn't fight a lot you know people were violent people had all kinds of terrible defects of character but it's also true that they had the experience of dealing with other human beings face to face and dealing with the consequences of what they've said and done it's like hey if you talk to me this way if you treat me this way there are going to be consequences and they're going to be consequences for the both of us one of the consequences one of the consequences may be i never trust you again one of the consequences may be i never talk to you again just invidious silence you've broken down the circulation okay but you know the other consequences as i said right at the start of this video each and every one of these social encounters changes our own understanding of human nature ultimately how we understand what it means to be human what it means to be alive it's a generalization based on just a certain number of case studies we have our parents what we think is normal we have our teachers we have our classmates we have what we see on tv right and then for my generation we get the jarring contrast to what we see of human nature on the internet um melissa made a video just yesterday it feels a long time ago you know talking about our relationship and the video has more than one thesis but the most interesting one is this by the way i wasn't involved in the the video i literally i wasn't in the apartment so i the way the video was edited it might sound like i was really involved because my voice is in there at the beginning but actually i had nothing to do with it i didn't script the video i didn't you know i mean i had nothing to do with the conceptualization or planning of this video in any way um one of the most interesting theses is that social media can be as real as you want it to be that youtube can be as real as you want it to be that we can come out here and share our real lives it can be completely fake it can't be complete fraud right but we have the option and you also have the option of creating narrative fiction don't get me wrong you know can you imagine how frustrating and discouraging it is for melissa and i to come on the internet again and again and keep it 100 honest keep it all the way real and have people insisting to us that what we're presenting is instead some kind of intentional deception or fraud and inventing in their own mind and then popularizing with others conspiracy theories that instead explain what's happening on stream as representing a totally different set of of motivations a totally different set of circumstances right and and of course going through your videos the fine-tooth comb to find little bits and pieces of information or evidence that will support that thesis no matter how ludicrous no matter how improbable right so some of you have been watching my channel for a long long time might remember this example but back in the day i did make a youtube video filmed inside of a walmart in china so walmart is a big box store they have groceries they have clothing they have garden gnomes you know it's a very miscellaneous sort of store i'm inside a walmart in china and for the amusement of my audience i'm filming myself reacting to some unbelievably disgusting food products that are sold in china that you could never find in that so one of the examples is duck necks these are the severed necks of ducks i assume there's a factory where they slaughter all these ducks and the neck is the least valuable part it's like people want to buy the other duck meat they just chop up the next throw it in a bag and they sell it like a bag of potato chips so you got a bag it's not refrigerated what are the chemicals added to these duck necks that you can have it sold at room temperature it's not in the fridge guys it's not they had they had duck necks i guess they're pickled that must be one of those this is pickled duck necks uh they had uh they had pigeon feet you know they had different kinds of claws and snouts and tails and animals and filming this you know most of my viewers are vegan you know just just and i had dead pan serious conspiracy theories people on the internet going through this video for evidence taking a little bits and pieces supposedly like contradictions like contradicting what i said or like little things you can notice in the background saying no clearly this was actually filmed in california clearly this guy's never studied chinese he never went to china at all this is all a cover story this is all a conspiracy theory so i'm optimistic that the next generation will be raised being warned by their parents about this like how can you communicate that to a child like i'm sure so i have a daughter i don't know when i'm next gonna get this here how do you sit down with a child and explain to them no matter how reasonable you are on the internet other people are going to interpret what you do in an unreasonable way and so let's let's be real here it's not just on the internet it's on the internet that we see it and we hear about it and i could now digress into stories about people making up gospel about me and people having whole fantasies about my sex life and my personal people i knew in real life before i was on the internet it can happen in real life that people who know each other face to face there's no internet involved that they are inventing fables about other people and i can't say it's insanity it's just it's an aspect of human nature that we weren't warned about by our parents that we didn't learn about on tv that we weren't told about by our school teachers or or church pastors no matter how reasonable you are on youtube you can never expect the people in your audience to reciprocate that reasonableness to be reasonable back you can never earn their respect you can no matter how rational you are in expressing your own views or criticizing and disagreeing with the views of others you could never expect people to be rational back it's such a thankless task it's such a horrible asymmetrical thankless that's to do that again and again and then get treated and return that same way again that asymmetrical way again again and no matter how honest you are so no matter how honest i am no matter how honest melissa is people will literally write into you claiming that your whole life is a lie that your whole life is a fraud that everything you said in that video was a smoke screen and like because so either because someone else manipulated you into it or because you are manipulating someone else that there is some ulterior motive now we used to have in our culture like a concept of journalistic ethics it's dead it's gone i don't miss it i don't lament it it's over okay journalism r.i.p it's over you know but like can you imagine the way that interview would have gone there's a journalist interviewing one of the leaders of black lives matter right if he had read the comments off of twitter like live while doing this interview so it's like oh okay so look you know people are concerned about where the money went you seem to have bought at least one lavish house some people said you bought four or five houses i don't know what's true and being reported there people say it's a 90 million budget nobody can account for what what happened to the money you know what's your explanation and then she starts to give her her explanation interestingly or not her the start of her explanations say that she has never received a salary from the black lives matter organization you know it's like okay um so here's what they say on twitter oh you're just saying that to cover up the fact that you got money from other sources like you know the way people behave on the internet and it probably is how they think in real life it probably like off the internet i'm not saying people are more segacious it probably is what's going on in their minds anyway you know that people will just say no and then they will concoct another more obscure more improbable like more impossible to support theory you know to justify their agenda to justify their negative assumptions about you anyway yeah so sorry it's a funny comment so someone says plot twist walmart in china has all products made in the usa well that's that's part of why that was so funny to me was that they were trying to prove like oh no like there's this product in the background and you can only get that in america that couldn't be in a thing in china so sir i don't i don't want to redo my own jokes on this but like what do you really think so what do you think if this was filmed in america do you think i got a step ladder and changed all the signs in walmart to have chinese texts like and then fill myself like what like like management work with me hey i want to do a short film in this walmart do you want to just go around and change all the science to me chinese oh yeah and i ordered a bunch of made in unique made in china products that you don't have here i'm going to put them on the shelf and then fill myself right you know so by the way the the the bizarre footnote to that story is indeed that those rumors and those theories a lot of them were linked to like the theories from more than five years ago now that i was secretly working for the cia like everything's a cover story everything's a conspiracy that i'm secretly working to destroy veganism from within you know all this all this stuff um uh this theory that i don't really know chinese that i never really studied chinese um that this is all a false cover story that was actually revived by the incredibly stupid uh youtuber vegan foot soldier all right now so look guys i'm 42 years old i am still unprepared to deal with this level of stupidity i'm still getting used to it you know what i mean now i don't know about you guys i feel like none of us are used to i was talking about this with most yesterday i think none of us are used to it and none of us were prepared for it because our parents didn't teach us this our school teachers didn't teach us this even television didn't teach us this television and probably your parents and probably your church pastor and probably your school teachers they all give you this vision that the world is full of rational highly effective well-intentioned people and you're not ready to deal with the morass of humanity that's totally irrational totally mean-spirited has no generosity has no fish and is willing to concoct the craziest theory about you imaginable and dis disregard all the evidence you have disregard everything you've said and voice that and and tell other people potentially thousands of other people or millions other people on the internet you know when they have nothing to gain they are willing to harm you when they have nothing to gain just because they enjoy harming you and the saddest part of all is i don't think they're even aware that they enjoy it you know so stick with the example for one second okay guys i do see your i do see your um your questions come in when you look at a guy like vegan foot soldier you know is he aware of his own malice like does he actually think through consciously that it makes him happy to drag my name to the mud that he feels better about himself by going out and publicly claiming that i've never studied chinese like one of the questions i asked him is have you tried googling my name plus the word chinese like so there's quite a lot of evidence out there and again you get into a situation like oh well that could be fake yeah it could be like the the level of effort it would take for me to have faked my involvement with the study of the chinese language would be so much more than actually studying the chinese language you know what i mean like yeah like you know again if you just if you just did a google search i'm making the assertion here i i don't think these people are extraordinary the reason why this is so important to talk about is that this is the new normal this is now ordinary and maybe 200 years ago maybe this was normal you just didn't see the evidence of it because it wasn't in writing on the internet you know i have read i have read ancient literature and i've read medieval literature and i've read renaissance literature you know what probably you could put together some evidence about malicious gossip and false persecution and prosecution of people and so probably there was some of this stuff going on in human nature 200 years ago people were put on trial for being a witch on the basis of a ridiculous story made up about their sex life and it was the equivalent of reddit and facebook you know it was the equivalent of of youtube comments sections and uh defamatory youtube videos and the things the things we have to deal with but it's not it's not recorded in the same way even even in my late 30s even in my early 40s all right i am still not prepared to deal with this level of stupidity i am still not prepared to deal with this level of mean-spiritedness you know the casual cruelty from people who have nothing to gain by destroying my reputation or defaming me making criminal allegations against me or what have you you know and and you know they're willing to do it just for the process i was just talking to people at the university about this i try to overcome hostility with kindness i try again and again and again so you know again this is kind of season one isil i'm going to talk about from here i'm not like this anymore i'm not i've changed you know there was a professor at the university uh here in victoria he's now retired and you know this guy i'll just say this he did terrible unspeakable things to me that will negatively impact me for the rest of my life he used his authority to harm me precisely when he should have used his authority to help me and when he was really contractually required to use his authority to help me so i'm leaving it a little bit vague but you know i'm in a situation university where i need help and on the chain of command he's supposed to be the guy who helps me and instead [Music] he pulls out some real jiggery pokery so at that time i'd never met that professor face to face we'd never talked and i tell other professors because there were several professors who really were my friends i tell them look this is the situation i'm in i don't know this guy this other professor he's doing all this stuff against like you know where she goes and all the other professors told me two paraphrase this guy's completely insane this guy's completely he was he was an elderly professor as mentioned he's now these other professors they they blackened this guy's character and they had specific stories and specific examples so if i were an easily impressionable person this is kind of like the internet right this is kind of like youtube even though it's face to face right you know oh this let me tell you some of these professors that worked with this guy for years oh that guy he's really trouble and i had different ways to kind of i had different ways to escalate this conflict and you know what i decided to do i said you know what i'm going to take all of this i'm going to set it aside and i'm going to conquer this guy with kindness never spoke to him never met him face to face we kept trying to have a meeting and it was gonna be like a mediated meeting and it's like he's like okay well we're gonna have a meeting i'm gonna bring my lawyers and i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do that and if you say anything that's not in this list of things to talk about my lawyers are going to shut you down and threaten you with this and that concept like it was really seriously hostile um i did not find that intimidating because my first university degree is in political science i'm not that easy to push around but this is really dark and any normal 19 year old college kid would be totally traumatized by this forever you know i said you know what so you know my experience with this professor's negative i go talk to other professors they all tell me really bad things but you know what i'm gonna set all that aside i'm gonna go to the library and take out every book this guy ever wrote or every article he ever wrote and so on i'm gonna read his stuff i'm going to get to know him positively that way i'm going to enroll in his class i'm going to be the best student in this class and i'm not going to mention this conflict i'm just going to go and be handsome and brilliant and charming and i'm going to overcome with kindness i went to his class maybe not the first day but by like the second or third day he was so appreciative that i was there and he told me he told me on several occasions that it meant so much to him to have someone in the class who really was reading the books that were assigned these were small classes i know the other students were not reading the book and who really cared and he was really interested and who asked questions that were meaningful he was like you know so i was his best student in this sense no you know so there's more than a way to invalid to to evaluate a student i don't know if i got the highest mark in the class it's possible but you know i was his best student you know he appreciated lit up the class he appreciate having someone to talk to you and someone who did the reading and someone who cared he he was so warm and of course i did then go and have to meet with him in his office and he was crazy all right um i i really pitied him i was nice to him i was wrong but he was he was crazy that guy had problems all right and i always remember you know this i don't know he's old school he's again he's an elderly guy but you know whenever he said something really honest to me like when he took me aside to tell me so basically to apologize to me to tell me look that that in that conflict we had in the past that he had been wrong you know he did it in the parking lot what do you think i think there's a listening device or something you know like there's something i know some people are like that so like okay we'll go stand let's go stand in the parking lot so you know i did i did get a i did get a kind of apology or a mea culpa from him and i you know i overcame with kindness and i'm saying this because i recognize with all these people again and again that's what i'm always trying to do and i gotta stop i gotta change my way of living even before the example of vegan foot soldier there was vegan revolution there was joe vegan there was vegan you got to be old to remember vegan she was big channel back in the day man there were all these people where i was so kind to them i was so forthcoming i was so reasonable i was so rational i was so giving i was so wrong i had real generosity of spirit i spoke to them in a charitable way right and what what did they do back to me what are they showing back oh this is not even mentioning klaus from plant-based news [Music] i encounter these people and i'm really they're cruel to me that is not an understatement they are literally cruel to me and they engage in even defamation campaigns against me and even harassment campaigns against me but including vegan foot soldier including joe vegan all making up stories about you know my financial situation and who i really am and double really crazy over the top and stuff about my sex life too stuff of my personal life yes sorry both no it's true they're two different guys sorry joe vegan and joe best and part of the reason it's so confusing is that later joe best changed his name to joe vegan a vegan cheetah but you know vegan foot soldier like you know it's like okay i'm going to take the time and and i'm busy i'm busy right now i was busy when i was living in couldn't make china there are times in life and i'm really busy and like you send me a totally unreasonable attack on my character that is either based up based upon or backed up by what some people say on the internet and then no matter how reasonable i'm willing to be with you you're never going to be reasonable back to me and no matter how honest i am with you you were gonna discount what i'm saying as dishonest and concoct a theory as little as those interactions hurt me because they didn't hurt me emotionally as little as those interactions hurt me they changed my view of human nature like you get on the internet and even if you think you're cynical i mean i've been through a lot in my life i'd been through cambodia i'd been through laos i've been through hong kong hong kong's a rough town doing its way guys you know what i mean i've been through so much in my life and then you get on youtube and you have to face up to the awesome implacable spectacle of human stupidity as never before and you know look let's be real when i was going to the vegetable market in hong kong did i know how stupid the little old lady was who sold me the vegetables no maybe she's brilliant maybe she's highly intellectual and a highly ethical person you don't know maybe she's incredibly immoral incredibly stupid incredibly mean spirited person you don't know in the midst of the cacophony of the internet you know and i've got to tell you like case by case instance by instance person by person what you have to face up to is the way in which your own expectations have changed and guys i mean you can tell me you can tell me in the audience i don't think i'm the only one like one of the things i notice is when i first got on youtube you could send an email to people there used to be a messaging service within youtube where one youtuber could message each other they write back to you you know today whether it's on youtube email or instagram to max direct message all right you you either get no response at all or their response is like what is this about you know there's this really guarded response and you know it's not any one thing i think each and every one of these people has been through a similar sequence of defamatory events where you know they talked they were generous and open and warm and honest with somebody on the internet and then what did they get in return and when you have the experience of no matter how much kindness i show you you're never going to reciprocate with that basic effort to be reasonable you're never going to be charitable in your questions charitable doesn't mean you assume the best about me it doesn't mean you assume i'm an angel you know but let's really think about what being charitable means to question somebody with charitable assumptions or even to criticize them with charitable assumptions that's a virtue we didn't have to nail down before maybe because none of us were really being honest with ourselves about how dark uh human nature really is [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] no [Music] my [Music] [Applause] do [Music] you