Why are comments disabled on my channel? (THE REAL ANSWER)

we were walking down the street one evening here and up at about the six story of a building we could see in a brightly lit window a young woman with the telltale ring light on and her face was there right in the window like as if she were looking out the window speaking in this very animated over-the-top way and it was the ring light that gave away what was happening here you could see the silhouetted ring light and then her brightly lit face right there in the window she wasn't talking to herself she wasn't talking to passersby on the street or anything like that she was recording a youtube video this is a complete stranger in the night someone i know nothing about we see looking up from the sidewalk and he's like oh who do you suppose that person is what do you suppose they're recording a youtube video about right it could be anything it could be something wonderful it could be something uh meaningful and of course the odds are it's something totally meaningless and totally self-indulgent it could be a review of a new pair of shoes it could be a new uh new tube of toothpaste what have you you know i understand that most people in the audience they regard what i'm doing here as shallow by default just because of the the format the platform that it's on the frame that this picture is is set in i think a lot of people in the audience regard what i'm doing as something shallow and silly and a waste of my time and therefore it's incomprehensible to them that i would while indulging in this hobby and putting so much time in this hobby that i would close down the comment section saying that it's a waste of time so this is a seemingly shallow topic that i want to talk about in a reasonably profound way i want to talk about why i do youtube what the philosophy isn't doing youtube for me in 2022. and yeah i do want to answer the question of why the comments are are turned off and you know what that what that means to me now and what it would entail to have the comment section open and look guys it it does i mean it involves in a complex way the meaning of time you've only got so many years on this earth you've only got so many years to make a difference in this life to change the world right so wasting time not just in a sense of um being addicted to playing video games versus having other ambitions and so on but looking at your life over a five-year span over a ten-year span and so on and really thinking in a meaningful way about what it is you're committed to accomplishing in those 10 years what kind of person you you want to be what kind of risks you're going to take why you're on youtube but you know no offense guys what do you what are you alive for you know what is the meaning of life for you what is the meaning you're you're trying to get out of this life and then what are you willing to do you know to uh to make it happen and i know that kind of discourse coming from me um maybe it's shockingly disconcerting for an audience that is conditioned just by this platform just by the frame the picture is is put in right they're conditioned to expect a sort of phony devil may care attitude from youtubers right we're supposed to pretend that this is effortless we're supposed to pretend that it's not a sacrifice and it's not a sacrifice we're making in our lives for very particular perceived and possible outcomes right right away even if you have only a few hundred viewers it's a sacrifice you lose your privacy you become a public figure you have all the disadvantages of fame with none of the advantages you know it's it's a gambit and um [Music] everybody who does it everybody has thought through the best case scenario not everybody who's done it things through the worst case scenario and the range of mediocre possible outcomes that are in between now one aspect of why the comment section is closed it's on my mind today i just made a meaningful video talking about bitcoin talking about cryptocurrency talking about economics which i'm happy to talk to talk to you guys about more if people are interested in hearing my perspective for that we can do some spontaneous q a on on that side of the puzzle um and you know i got meaningful well-intentioned comments from the audience which is not always the case these were meaningful well-intentioned comments but each one would require me to write a short essay in a response and it's not enough for me to say that would be a waste of my time all right what i have to say to you further is i really care about the topic i really care about debunking and counteracting misinformation about the topic and i don't feel comfortable at all having those comments on my video even if they're well intentioned even if they're not trolling that they're not hateful i'm not comfortable having them there unanswered like if i don't take the time to answer it it's below my video and some of them are seemingly debunking what i'm saying so now i could give you examples from a whole range of things here that are to varying sense well-intentioned or not so well-intentioned if you make a video talking about circumstance and you have the comments open you're going to get muslim people writing in the comments that everything you're saying about circumcision is untrue they're perfectly happy with their circumcision your medical claims are false and they can debunk it or just google the name of some muslim scholar or another or some muslim medical doctor who will prove that this is all wrong do you care like on that issue do you want to have a video that's making a kind of atheist scientific argument about circumcision and god there were a lot more of them than there are you in the world on the internet you can have 500 comments from people who want to defend their religion in that way and hypothetically they could all be well intentioned like maybe none of them are trolling maybe none of them are being spirit maybe none of them are insulting you it's quite likely to make you mean spirited forward but setting that aside right do you care and i understand the audience is conditioned here it's just so many youtubers so many interviewers said oh you know i'm just having fun on camera and then the money and the fame is an accident that's not what motivated them all along you know they're just having fun on camera no they don't care about what people say about the size of their bum or their acne or whatever it is and then you know one after another these people they all have some moment where they the mask comes off or they break down weeping and they talk about how they have nightmares because of some anonymous comments in the comment section really this is a mass cultural phenomenon it's unbelievable and i'm just being real i don't know if that existed before if you go back did people who used to do news broadcasts on nbc have this kind of relation to their audience in the 1970s people used to make documentaries for pbs i mean i know they've got letters i know i've actually yeah i've heard some funny stories about the old days of rhetoric letter writing campaigns to hollywood where piles of letters would come in demanding some kind of change or people expressing that they're you know uh upset about this okay so i'm gonna give you two more examples really quickly we'll come back to the bitcoin and cryptocurrency example which you know think deserves to be discussed in a little bit of depth okay i have made numerous videos criticizing nazism both historical nazism the world war ii period etc and neo-nazism and criticizing particular people who are neo-nazis i have had the situation on the channel and i remember there was one video i left the comment section open on the video for i think about a year but if not it was many months there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments from neo-nazis white supremacists racist these these type of people right and i left that there for a long time so that people could see like this is the reality of what you deal with and i don't know some other website must have shared the link to that video and whatever and let me say the vast majority of the more mean spirit and i got comments and i got emails during that period for quite a long time of people writing in to let me know that i'm a jew as if i didn't know that you know to let me know what uh what a bad person i am because i'm jewish and this kind of thing um to to inform me of their racial superiority over me go ahead prove it you know you know i did i did get that kind of hate mail that does not concern or upset me in any way and this is why i'm setting up these examples here to make this kind of contrast now you know what would be the point in replying to comments like that right well the first example was of circumcision if you really care about changing people's minds about circumcision and if you even care about viewers who might click on that video and look at the comments first before they watch it or while they're listening to the first 30 seconds you care look there are all these comments here that claim they're debunking me that claim my opinion is ill-informed or unscientific or that i'm wrong or something we have a problem where it's it's not like people read a movie review and then go and watch the movie or something right they're hearing people denouncing your short film however you want to think of it while they're watching the film they're hearing hecklers interrupting your performance unknown to you right and so now you've got a challenge what are you gonna do are you gonna delete each of the comments that are contrary to your opinion are you gonna write an essay in response to each one and guys i have timed it i have that's something where you use a stopwatch how long it takes to really do to flee reply to these these kinds of comments even even when they're well intentioned even when people are actually curious or asking sincere questions even when your answer to some of those questions is oh that's a good question i already made a youtube video about that here's the link to the video it is time consuming right and in a sense also um when you're thinking about the next viewer to see the video this still unknown person is clicking on the video for the first time you are kind of fighting this uphill battle just to try to get that next viewer to see the video without being biased by the trolls and hate mail and and and what have you that's below it now again in some ways the the neonatal example is the easiest to deal with because anyone seeing that video is gonna okay this is a guy who's criticizing neo-nazis he's against nazis or what have you and you can tell that from the title of the video and then here are these people in the comments section insulting and denouncing him for being a jew or what have you one would hope you know the the viewer is still receptive in this way well you know one that's going to be easy for most you to relate to what if you do a video talking about the carnivore diet okay i'm vegan in case you didn't know and you're debunking health claims about people eating 100 meat diet you may be debunking the anti-vegan claims made by carnivores you will get comments in the comment section from people claiming that vegan diet ruined their life and a 100 meat diet miraculously healed them and guys there were more of them than there are of us there are far more of the pro-meat people there are far more of the people who are just daydreamers willing to believe whatever fad diet is being promoted by joe rogan whatever is being promoted by jordan peterson whatever they read in the last issue of cosmopolitan magazine or timex and whatever some celebrity has made popular this week or this month they're also just more people who hate vegans people care about veganism or the ethics or ecology of vegan diet right you can lose your whole life answering those comments one at a time and i already got to kind of really think about this deeply when i had a blog before the youtube channel i had a blog prior to starting this youtube channel was called vegan mind tricks when you really sit there and recognize wow they outnumber us like a million to one on the internet and like if you want to do this and it was it was somewhat amusing to kind of field hate mail coming in from these people and it was different because again unlike the comment section on youtube it's not the case that people are seeing what you've written with the heckling from the audience kind of informing them first or interrupting your your performance you know what i mean it's not quite the same situation but you can add up seriously the number of hours a day on any of these things and again the fundamental question is do you care now i've already i've already alluded to this it's it's pretty easy to just dehumanize neo-nazis and dehumanize anyone in the audience who sympathizes with people who are racist white supremacist you know it's it's easy to do that i've argued in many videos you shouldn't do that like if you're whatever you're doing news history politics news commentary if you're in this kind of field i think you actually have to have to have the kind of detachment to um to take these things seriously even if they're french ideologies and really plunge into the critique of them in a thorough going way and to treat them seriously even if uh you know even if it is impossible uh to take them seriously we have a great question from the audience so i said in the description of this video if there are enough intelligent questions this will become a q a if not it will be a monologue great question ants quote how much ass do you get compared to tkyosam [Laughter] see this is what i miss out on i do i do q and a uh live here under the comment i think the chat open during my live streams but imagine imagine i could be spending the hours of my day answering questions like this from the audience well the answer to that the answer to that question is we don't know because tko sam is never honest about about how much affection he gets from women so we'd be comparing something known to something unknown but you'll find i'm very honest about my love life and about my sex life in a way that that tko sam is not okay so i made a video talking about cryptocurrency talking about economics in relation to bitcoin and in relation to social media influencers my fellow youtubers and even my fellow vegan youtubers giving advice that could really ruin people's lives i care i really care about that issue and again so this is these are each each example is very different right i mean sadly if you're getting messages from people who've already been members of the muslim faith for 40 years they're very unlikely to change their minds and you have to ask yourself do you want to spend your time answering these comments well i got several people commenting me saying that they were absolutely certain that what i was complaining about so for example the actions of james aspie the actions of brian turner these are just particular examples of social media influencers um but anyway we could also talk about jake paul logan paul we've talked about all kinds of social media influencers who've become involved in the cryptocurrency phenomenon in the last few years they were absolutely certain that what i was describing was already illegal under sec regulations now it's not worth explaining why i know this but melissa and i have done quite a bit of reading about sec regulations in the last few years and the finra exams and what are the other ones the kafta organic finra cfa right okay so finra and cfa and sec and stuff and how how the licensing for these professions works and what the legal implications are and i'm sitting there and you know i've really got three options i can just delete this person's particular comment and they may notice and they may feel insulted and they say oh well you you shut me down just because i disagree with you i can close the whole comment section people are going to feel about it however they feel or i can sit here and write an essay saying no that's not what the sec regulations say that's not how american law works that's not how freedom of speech in america works that's not like you know get into the paradigm so i think of those comments the comments that said that i think one i deleted and this show i'm sorry part of the problem is i care i care enough that i do not want something that is factually false and misleading like that i don't want to be on the internet but i don't want to be on my own youtube channel and don't want to be there apparently contradicting my video and showing that i don't know what i'm talking about when i do right so this has happened in all kinds of different topics on my on my channel including like marxism with the history of i'm an anti-marxist by the way but when i'm doing critique of karl marx and there are people who are pro marxists to show up and the comment may begin with the words this guy doesn't know what he's talking about this guy hasn't read karl marx and it says something mark said and like okay do you want me to write an essay back no i really have read karl marx i know a lot about the history of marxism and a lot about the history of communism and here's what you don't know like do you want to counteract that get out your stopwatch and we can't just think about a waste of time short term you have to think about it long term over five years over over ten years so and so forth where are you going to be five years from now this is how you spend your time answering again we're not even talking about trolls we're not talking about people with bad intentions or people just ridiculing you who may be sincerely misguided and they're misleading other people right there in your in your comment section now again look a lot of you in the audience with any of these examples you may just say oh whatever who cares who cares if some guy says your video is wrong because he pretends he understands the sec regulations better than you do sorry i don't think i finished my anecdote what i was going to say was i think of the first three people maybe the first four people who left a comment to that effect i deleted one of them because it was just too late at night for me to deal with it and then the next three i said the same thing i said you are one google search away from finding the answer that question from finding that you're wrong finding that you're incorrect and saying that about about government regulations for financial aid at least one of those guys wrote back to me and again i don't think he has any bad intentions with a long statement saying no this is the sec regulation section 267 and it says this and he's wrong it's completely wrong so what should i record another youtube video talking this right this is what you're gonna do am i gonna write an essay am i gonna fight this out in the comment section on my own youtube channel and guys this is a substantive sincere discussion of a matter of fact that guy had no bad intentions i don't think any of those people had bad intentions and there's a sense in which i don't want to delete their comments right there's a sense in which i'd like to encourage them to actually do some research and develop a sophisticated point of view of this and give you another example where it was all just really shallow um badly motivated uh caddy comments but you guys remember i i'm an atheist and i actually talk about the importance of not celebrating christmas not celebrating easter like not carrying on with these christian traditions but taking the time to innovate and create something meaningful for your children or grandchildren that's different from the christian traditions that have come before it would not be surprising if i got hate mail from christians if i got hate mail from muslims and jews oh no of course not it's other atheists who are attacking me it's other atheists who are saying the cattiest and most mean-spirited thing imaginable in response to that so again that's very different like what is there to win and what is there to lose i did take some time replying to some of the other atheists on that issue partly because quite a few of them had their own youtube channels and some of them have been youtubing for years and i remember saying them like look you've just said this incredibly mean and insulting thing about me like here's the scenario i am a father pretending i am a father preparing to spend christmas with my daughter like that that was stated i think in the first couple of minutes the video was says look i am a parent i have a child like and at that time when i made that video we were packing our bags and you know like we were figuring out how to make a gingerbread house like we were figuring out how to do some holiday activities guys i am not going to keep perpetuating this cycle of inculcating religious beliefs i don't believe in this is really meaningful to me i'm here to talk to you about the challenge of trying to do something better for my own daughter but i took the time to reply to several of these atheists and say look man like this is how mean-spirited you are to me like this is how cruel and vicious you are to be when that's that's the scenario like there are all kinds of occasions on which people get to exercise that kind of catty vicious side of their character on the internet i don't know frankly open up the newspaper you can leap through the newspaper and ask yourself what do i have to be outraged about today find something that you think is a moral obscenity and just make a youtube video denouncing it and it's like and you you and you and you these different atheist youtubers you you decided it was me you decided it was a parent talking about writing new poetry to recite with his daughter creating a new illustrated storybook for his daughter because i don't want to celebrate jesus christ i don't want to celebrate santa claus i also don't really want to celebrate mickey mouse like i don't like mickey mouse or donald i know it's not religion it's just garbage it's just crap like i don't feel that the culture handed down to me by my ancestors is good enough you know is it for me to inculcate this into the next generation you know educate the next generation in this raise them with these assumptions so anyway you know you can take the time to do that okay how many of those other atheists these are people who are hypothetically committed to a movement to change the world right hypothetically these people are radicals they're rebels right these people are supposedly the leaders of the revolution in reality they're not right what do you think my success rate was what percentage those people sent me back any kind of message that was even grudgingly respectful or like treated me with a bare minimum of dignity that you would extend to uh the bank teller or you know the person who bags your groceries you know zero you know the reality is i'm an atheist youtuber making pro-atheist content and i'm treated just as badly by my fellow atheists you know as i am by neo-nazis right now you guys you guys can draw your own conclusions about this would it be reasonable for me to say this is now 2022 the vast majority of other vegans and vegan youtubers right they treat me about as badly as the neo-nazis they treat me about as badly as the communists they treat me but as badly as the people have criticized there's no there's no mutual respect or esprit de corps or cooperation right there's no real decorum there you know you can feel free to disagree you can take it i mean making videos about veganism for such a long time but guys i've been making content about atheism for such a long time i've been making content about parenting and about the children's storybooks i've written for how many years i think i'm up to about eight years on youtube at this point so these are all you know areas i've really contributed to a great deal bitcoin relatively recently i think my first video about bitcoin was about one year and one month ago this has been some of the time from dad haven't built up a huge a huge audience for that um guys i do see your your comments as they come in um okay so it's a reasonable comment here but you'll see i'm gonna give a seemingly irrelevant answer so generation x says quote i think you were giving commenters too much credit if you let people comment there will be more engagement with your videos they'll be more shared and he says there will always be idiots okay so i i really disagree and i also think that what you're saying is kind of spurious to the the big point i'm making in this video i'm not angry at you or something i'm just saying i do disagree and i am someone with eight years of experience with this and over six million views at this point now i ask you this if you make the decision to share the link to a particular video with a particular person what is that decision based on it's never based on the the comments in the comment section i don't believe that maybe one person out of a million if you happen to see a video today i do it often enough there's a video about a particular topic for me it's like oh here's someone who really did the research on this historical issue my judgment is never based on the quality of the comments in the conversation i never say oh hey you should check out this video this guy took a really long time to answer comments in the comment section never it's never based on what the youtuber himself writes in the comment section it's never based on on the reply so you know you share the link to a particular video with a particular person because it's compelling to you it's about some topic that really matters to that person really matters to you there's some reason there's some particular reason we do that and guys there's very little of that activity happening now in 2022 in many ways just the public enthusiasm for youtube has cooled off and the type of websites where people used to share those links i just say it's it's now much harder for new videos to pardon me it's much harder for new channels to become successful precisely because that type of sharing activity has has died down compared to say the heady days of uh of 2014. so uh i think this is a good uh question by the way uh so john ortiz asks so who checks if you're correct so look i this is the other thing it may be a good use of my time to go out and do the research and write an essay in response to a question from the audience so the specific example i've been using here repeatedly as there's a comment about bitcoin about cryptocurrency and someone says oh these are the sec regulations or they have these are this is the legal framework we already have this is what's already illegal and illegal okay there is a kind of argument that it's it's good for the good of my soul so to speak for me to go out do the research and write an essay in response to that question right the problem is over a five-year period of time and that is a completely thankless task that's literally more of a waste of my time than making a new youtube video just answering that one question in text form as a written composition will take more time than making a youtube video right and what i'm asking here is not just short term not just what happens to one day of your life or one week of your life or one month of your life when you take the time to do this i'm asking over five years and over 10 years you know after that time has gone what have you got left i knew another youtuber i just i'll leave her unnamed for the sake of it and she was on vacation with her family in south america i believe this is in colombia and she said that was the first time it struck her just how many hours she was spending viciously attacking people on twitter and in youtube comment sections so i'd seen her too i'd seen her viciously attacking me in youtube conversations so i know she was somebody who put a lot of work into it she was someone who got vicious and just just spent a lot of time now i think the reason for this was that the the billing system they had in columbia at that time i'm sure all these technologies will change in just a few years but at that time it was quite expensive for her to access her mobile phone network and use the internet via her phone so sort of something where every hour was being measured that she that she had connectivity that she was online and she decided to quit youtube entirely she i think she quit youtube quit twitter she just had a quick social media said look this has become like maybe this was supposed to be a part-time hobby and it's become a full-time job she was spending so much time passionately denouncing these people she had a husband she had kids at that time she didn't have a job she had just been raising her kids and things she was planning to go back into the workforce and she just had to recognize how much how much time was there so look and now again guys i think marxism is another really great example i did for several years make myself available to talk to communists a couple of times i talked to people who were nazis or neo-nazis you know to talk to people with really different points of view for myself right and it's it takes time i mean you do that out of generosity of spirit not like i don't gain anything i really it doesn't do me any good to talk to a communist or talk to a neo-nazi to try to deprogram them try to challenge their self-righteous ignorance and overturn their assumptions but i can do that right so you could be getting comments about economics from a marxist point of view the example i'm using here about bitcoin it's not mean spirit at all it's not like targeting communists or neo-nazis it's just somebody who's wrong somebody means completely means well but they're really wrong and it would really be a huge chunk of your time to talk about so i wanna i wanna zoom out a bit as i say it's one thing to say now look i had to think about that today what is my list of things to get done today and i made the decision with that particular video i thought wow this really shows even when you're having no problems with anti-semitism you're having no problems with kind of harassment or trolling even when you're having none of the problems the internet is infamous for we don't have people people denouncing you for your sex life on the basis of a rumor that was made up by socrates on the internet 10 years ago the rumor that's still on reddit that never had any basis in reality and where if you just click through the link that's in that text you'll see it was uh you know nonsense all along like you know a rumor made up by freely or durianrider you know like it's it's not that stuff you're dealing with that even when you're dealing with people who have good intentions and in a sense good questions you can't justify taking the time to answer them to have an open comment section okay i have to think about that in terms of what i'm going to get accomplished today i have to think about in terms of what i'm going to accomplish this week and this month let me ask you something what happened to the amazing atheist what happened to the whole vitality of the political movement that he was once voluntarily or involuntarily a leader of i mean this sincerely i'm not being snide you know there was a period of time when a certain number of hit books were published clustered together you know one time a certain number of lecture tours were embarked upon by high profile world famous atheists and simultaneously on youtube the amazing atheist emerged jacqueline glenn emerged a generation of commentators whom you could indeed call b-list celebrities whereas the people who had best-selling books on the new york times bestseller list people who had hit books or hit movies there were a couple documentary movies remember religious how many years ago was that uh hit movie by that tv talk show host uh so there were sorry uh yes bill maher so bill maher had he had hit books and hit movies and of course the infamous sam harris had a number of hit books and someone attacking religions on okay and by the way also all of that i think you could uh you could say somewhat nebulously it was linked to september 11th 2001 and public reaction after it's number 11 testimony so in terms of the overall political context certainly sam harris and his rise to fame had everything to do with that so there was a questioning of islam the questioning of christianity and you know there was a time when you know you could if you strike while the iron was hot it could change the world and people like the amazing atheist were able to attract huge amounts of donations with incredibly vague promises they were going to do something with the money and what i'm saying to you is i believe the amazing atheist did nothing with the money now today i'm just being honest with you many years ago i remember you could still find websites that had collected together lists by the way i see some more good questions coming in i'll answer them in a second you could see websites that collect together lists of all the e-begging the amazing atheists had done i remember there was one youtube channel that made a video about it and the youtube channel is now deleted it's unfortunate because i wish someone had kept a copy of that one video i wasn't riveting but it was just this guy talking through example by example then the amazing atheist asked for money for this then he asked for that and most of these projects just didn't happen most of them were just vapor but the ones that kind of sort of did happen it was a lot like the intellivision amico you know it was kind of like well you know it just barely happened the money was taken and this project it never got rolling or very very little came out of it there were very little show in terms of in terms of outcomes by the way to give you one example at one point the amazing atheist said he was so unhappy about censorship on youtube he was going to start his own video hosting website to compete with youtube to have a video sharing platform he never really defined he i believe he said it was going to be for him and his friends for him and like my people to have videos on i forget if he but he didn't define it strictly as being an atheist uh youtube competitor or what exactly the sense of mission was but he did have a certain degree of showmanship in coming on camera and making this sales pitch and say look freedom of speech is being stifled here on youtube we can't say what we want to say anymore we can't you know because we need to have we we need to have a less censored video platform and a lot of people lined up and donated a lot of money and in the end there was absolutely nothing to show for it nothing and he never made a youtube video answering it either the question of where did the money go why did the money all disappear he did once in a live q and a session uh basically during a live stream um there were other people participating it wasn't him alone he addressed it i remember him saying hey look somebody edit this part out and make a youtube video out of it so people can find it when they ask that question he was that lazy that he never even made a video really dealing with and talking through item by item where where the money met went and would have been accomplished with it okay it's a quick parallel we all lived through this this is now the year 2022. can anyone remember the year 2020 can anyone remember the political events of just the last two years can anyone remember thousands of radicals and anarchists marching in the streets thousands of communists demanding you know police reform demanding changes to you know the system of policing the united states america and and now today where's where is that interest and you know in many cases we also have to ask in terms of the public enthusiasm that caused where did the money go you know more than 90 million dollars were donated to one one organization called black lives matter the total amount of money given to black lives matter type organizations over many years it will be much much more than 90 million dollars obviously it's more than 100 billion dollars that would be an incredibly conservative amount where is the change what what do we have to show for where are the where are the outcomes right now i'm just gonna ask you really it's very very debatable you compare these two examples like atheism and police reform which one is the bigger example i mean i know if if you live through 2020 especially if you were in portland oregon or something you might feel like police reform is the bigger story or the more urgent or just more tremendous in scale it's not atheism is global you know the quality of police services in the united states of america is limited united states america some of these questions are you know perhaps global in their implications and you know as as many people lined up to to argue in response to that movement in response to the so-called defund the police movement within the united states of america there are many places where the quality of police services are exemplary so it's not even a universal problem within the united states you have this whole discourse frankly of course it is in large part a discourse of excuse making like let me make it clear i don't really sympathize with either side in that debate if you want to know what my position is you have to buy my book i wrote a whole book about it my book is called no more manifestos so that should be out the next couple of weeks um yeah talk about questions of are you wasting your time when you've got a manuscript to finish i i could put 12 hours a day into that manuscript and spending just two or three hours a day answering uh youtube comments that would that would cut into it uh considerably um okay my point is this i heard another youtuber say recently and i showed it at this youtuber just lately so i believe her name is sarah woods sarah wood i'll get the name here i will get the correct name so i made a video recently showing how this woman youtube channel she is an african-american woman who um researches yes susan woods susan woods who researches corruption and inefficiency within the black lives matter movement she is asking the tough questions again and again and again including the question of you know where did the money go uh so and so forth about about black lives matter so one thing she said in passing she didn't say this particularly passionately she didn't say this with any great intensity or theatricality but she said very simply she's now an older woman i guess she's in her mid-50s she said an opportunity like this will not come again in her lifetime i i would ask will it happen again in the next 100 years so the woman has already lived a long life and she said very simply there will never be another time when all the white people are marching in the street with us and saying our problems matter our concerns matter there will never be another time when people in paris france are marching because of black american politics and when people were donating money to this cause it wasn't just rich white people of course it wasn't just black people either but people from paris and germany and i think japan maybe i'm wrong about that i i don't know the japanese perspective on blm to be honest but you know people around the world were really animated were really motivated were really sympathetic and where there was a consensus for maybe just two short years that something has to change that things have to get better and we have to start taking some risks like we have to we have to as people like to say change the system right that we need something differentiate she said very simply now i don't want to pull words in your mouth but i'm paraphrasing you know nothing like this had ever happened during her life and nothing like this is gonna happen again during her life or during any human lifetime like within the span of a century this was a unique opportunity to make some kind of change and to see that that opportunity was squandered would be an understatement i mean the single biggest foundation involved here the black lives matter global foundation approximately you know the one um led by patrice cullers that that specific blm organization certainly they received more than 90 million dollars the number 90 million comes from one report at one point in time that would have received donations before that and in the years after that so we don't know in excess of 90 million dollars was placed in the hands of this organization with no questions asked right to say that that opportunity has been squandered would be an understatement there are really serious questions to be asked there and frankly i i do not expect there to to be any answers i i just have no reason to think in the next five years or the next i don't think we'll ever know what happened to the money there's no reason to expect any accountability or outcomes from that and the question is will we we in the audience right now you people watching this video are we going to draw some new conclusions are we going to learn some lessons in this are we going to take on new directions in politics new forms of organization new forms of innovation that's what i just wrote a whole book about so i have two books out this year 2022 one is called veganism future of an illusion very provocative very entertaining book and it's only about 100 pages long 100 pages 120 pages it's a quick read no more manifestos is a much longer much heavier book and by the way it's going to be published both in english and in spanish we have a few people here who speak spanish as their first language both of my books are being translated into spanish and we'll see if i maybe i can become fluent in spanish myself reading my own work in in parallel oh yeah so frida says yes doesn't it so some of you you'll can uh it will certainly be good if if your english is is mediocre you'd be able to read both and and compare them you know um anyway good we have some more more questions coming back to bitcoin here's one of the leap level tips to this video but not uh not the core topic here so i had another question from generation x and this is a good question and it really is part of what i wanted to address in this video excuse me picking up on something implicit here he asked simply may i ask what the goal of this channel is look i'd point out this channel's name tells you something about its secret origins right what were my assumptions when i created this youtube channel in the first place all right what what was the point of this youtube channel and what was going on on youtube generally right it's really fair to say my youtube channel was in significant part a response to and an imitation of what the amazing atheist was already doing it was very specifically a response to what was going on in atheism on youtube and what seemed to be the beginnings of a somewhat intellectual atheist movement now there are a lot of things i can contribute to that no offense i have a higher level of education in politics than anyone else i know of with an atheist youtube channel like so there may be some i don't know about but if you compare me to jacqueline glenn if you compare me to the amazing atheists so on and so forth well okay my field of study my formal training and career was in politics political science political philosophy all of the above whatever you want to say mud and blood real world politics i know a lot about politics i know a lot about history so there's something i can bring to it there already the other reality is he didn't know i was a scholar of buddhism for about 10 years and there was nobody there was nobody dealing with buddhism on youtube there's nobody engaged in an atheist critique of buddhism and i was willing to step up and and do that so my assumptions in getting involved with youtube in the first place had everything to do with that atheist movement so i'm still answering your question uh generation x that's not the end of the answer yet you know um but i wanna i wanna remind you of the question i i raised before myself okay the people who donated money to the amazing atheist what were they expecting they were expecting him to do something they were expecting some kind of outcome they were expecting him to change the world or at least to get up off his ass and really try right they were expecting to see something you know you can ask the same question about people who donated to black lives matter they probably didn't have very precise expectations people donated millions of dollars to black lives matter what what outcomes did they want to see what were their expectations it's you could interview people about this i think a great many of the donors say well i just wanted to do something positive i wanted to see something come of it i wanted to make they might say i wanted to see that there was some kind of change some kind of change totally well-intentioned you know i'm not faulting them for that but they probably didn't have any precise or particular expectations well the truth is there was a period of time when something really great could have been made out of the raw material of the atheist movement here on youtube there really was and that time was coming to an end just when i got onto youtube look i think i joined this platform when the opportunity was ending or over to be an atheist on youtube to talk about ideas and the politics of atheism to engage in the in the critique of of religion and so on and i could now in a completely self-centered self-pitying way let you know how disappointed i am with all the people who didn't cooperate with me and didn't collaborate with me and didn't encourage me all the people who treated me like crap um when a little bit of civility would have gone a long way and you know a lot of these other podcasts and youtube channels i see what they're doing they're scraping the bottom of the barrel to have someone to interview about buddhism and i'm able to write and say look i actually learned to read and write pali i actually lived in cambodia and laos and thailand and actually even i wasn't living there like when i was living in england i was reading about the anthropology and politics and history of this part of the world some with really a lot of deep knowledge and experience including the type of shallow anecdotes i mean i've deep diving experience i also have shallow knowledge and experience the type of anecdotes that really make an interview a podcast or a or a youtube video worthwhile and not a single one of those channels was ever willing to talk to me also i offered to travel after you go to those events and meet up and face-to-face so guys i am not saying this for no reason this is an answer to a question but it's a question i did want to i did want to get to here and it relates even to the the topic of the title of this video you know why i don't uh have the youtube comment section right okay i was vegan before the youtube channel began i did not plan for this youtube channel to be primarily about veganism i still try to argue to people that it is neither exclusively nor primarily about veganism right but for several years we could talk through a sort of parallel phenomena i would say melissa and i were just talking about this before the video i would say this came to a crescendo and say 2014 there was a period of time when there was this tremendous potential this tremendous hope there were these raw materials for something really positive to be made out of the vegan movement and then i i got to see that come to an end and i was warning people too while it happened i was like look guys this is not going to last there's this period where it has a certain kind of novelty where there's a certain kind of interest and yes if we're really being honest as with black lives matter as with the amazing atheist and atheist activism with vegan activism too there were millions of dollars involved ultimately there was money coming from donors there was support for the ambitions of people and sometimes that support is very non-specific they just are giving money to a youtube channel or organization they donate this money with very vague hope i hope you do something hopefully something positive come but some good will come and what actually happened with their money my answer is nothing i mean i feel that all of the money given to the amazing atheist was wasted it might as well have been flushed down the toilet but i'm equally ruthless and looking at my fellow vegans well don't give me goodness i'm atheist he's atheist there's a sense in which we're on the same team here guys right with the same kind of change in the world want to accomplish right like i'm okay but i feel every penny that's been donated to the amazing atheist has been flushed down the toilet has been wasted and if you add it up just over the last 10 years his career is more than 10 years it's a whole lot of pennies guys there's a whole lot of potential that's been squandered there okay what about all the money that's been donated to a natural vegan you know what what about all the money that's been donated to any of the the idols of the vegan movement how about the vegan prince timothy sheef tim sheef how about all the money and support he got guys like we could go through a list of incredibly embarrassing examples of people who took the money and then went back to eating meat they didn't even remain vegan or whatever you know but the money and fame and time and attention it also would be squandered and i was in the uncomfortable position of warning people in advance i was talking about it in advance as it happened look guys we have a brief period of time right now you know this is like molten iron when the iron is hot you can make a difference and then later on the iron is going to cool down no matter how hard you hit it you can't change its shape this video is partly inspired by a short comment i read in a book called 13 clocks and give you guys the link to that book it's a peculiar name for a peculiar book i'm reading this book very slowly and very thoroughly so any of you can laugh at me when i finally tell you i've finished this book let me tell you this is a book about the history of the united states of america in say the 15 years leading up to um the american revolution and um this is not the thesis it's especially famous for it to work but it's full of observations about the history of american politics that reflect the fact that the author did an enormous amount of reading from year to year frankly on a kind of picayune scale so one of his claims to fame is that he read every newspaper published in the united states of america for every day they weren't published daily at that time so that's why it was possible but every newspaper published um for so many years leading up to the american revolution and for all the years during the american revolution leading up to uh writing of the constitution and so on so he had a real sense of how political interests changed from one year to the next i'm now in my mid 40s so it's very easy for me to relate to this and if i've been reading this as a younger man i would have been shocked and horrified uh i wouldn't have been able to accept this but he says that the interest in abolishing slavery hit a peak in 1773 and then it was already disappearing in the year 1774 and was forgotten in 1775 and he backs this up with evidence so if i were reading this at age 23 i'd be saying what do you mean this is so totally fundamental for american politics how can people only care about an issue for about a year and a half and then lose interest and move on to another political issue this is insane this is crazy and by the way you look at the lives of any of the particular people the so-called founding fathers it's true within their lives also it's like oh yeah for about one year he really cared a lot about slavery and then he didn't care about it just his priorities change you know now at age 43 i can look at this sort of thing and say people are like that you know that's what people are like people care about something so intensely for a short time i forget all about it you know what i mean even slavery even enthusiastic united states of america you know this brief time this is intense public interest and there's the possibility that things will change and then that moment is lost you know and the potential trickles away fizzles out the fire burns down all right now you tell me this is the year 2022 what was possible in the year 2020 what's possible today all right i could tell you something collecting more than 90 million dollars an institution that basically no legitimacy whatsoever it didn't even have the normal kind of structure of board of directors and a constitution and wasn't promising to accomplish anything so with the vaguest mandate imaginable the black lives matter foundation could get 90 million dollars in one year without even promising what they're going to do with the money you have no idea and again if you've actually read her work patrice culler's loathsome character there are various things that are politically horrifying about who she is where she comes from the book she's published what is she has to say about communism for example the extent to which she is a marxist or a communist uh so on and so forth yeah so there are all these red flags literally about black lives matter as an organization okay i'll tell you what was possible in the year 2020 collecting 90 million dollars with nothing but a a promise a vague promise to try your best to make things better that's impossible now in 2022 the hope the optimism the credulity of 2020 is gone and you know what i think you can even really say the world has become more racist rather than less racist as a result which is in some ways long-term it's it's maybe the greatest tragedy of all you know and think about how the people of france now regard us us just being the people of the united states and canada think about how the people of japan regard us you know think about just what a sad joke american democracy has become in the eyes of the world how it's discredited so much about this this system of just the system of government you know sorry but from from soup to nuts as they say you know from from the from the most trivial and small things up to the most grandiose um [Music] abstractions um anyway the implications that way are really terrible in this same sense you know i think there was a time there was a time when something was really possible on youtube with atheism i think there was a time when something was really possible for the vegan movement maybe there have been a few other opportunities like that i haven't seen that i've been apart there have been other budding political movements you know certainly there was a time when it was possible to do what uh jimmy dore did what the young turks did and starting up a political commentary and analysis channel and i think that opportunity is gone also you know there's some of these opportunities have have come and gone so you know what is the purpose of this channel you know as we're going into the next season of about belacio well i can tell you it's something very different from what's been here before i've written this book veganism future of an illusion and that's really my final and definitive contribution to the vegan movement that sums up and brings together everything i've learned from say the last 10 years roughly it does not repeat anything that's already on this channel it really doesn't so if you've already watched the youtube videos on this channel you will not find this is a summary of or a reiteration what was already there it has a lot of very i mean it goes much further than anything on this channel it's very hard-hitting it's very honest um whether or not it would be censored on this youtube channel it goes all the way with certain arguments that have never appeared on this channel have never been on youtube that is really my final contribution to uh the vegan movement and with that i close that chapter of my of my life you know and as i've already alluded to the very first chapter of this channel had everything to do with atheism it had to do with my own background as a scholar of buddhism and what i had to contribute as someone who devoted years of his life to studying that philosophy those ancient texts that politics that history and also those languages you'll get to see on this channel just how much of my brain is still preoccupied or let's just say how much of a brain is still occupied by the study of pali loch and thai cambodian burmese synoles these these languages i suck years of my life into into learning so uh you'll i don't want to digress this video but you're going to see some some new youtube videos talking about that so you know what does the video what pardon me what does youtube become about for me what what is it about now what's it about next you know this youtube channel is going to become a reflection of the reading i am doing the research i'm doing it's going to become a so-called booktube channel where i talk about the books i've read and it's going to become a reflection of my own life as an author my own life as a creator outside of youtube which may be writing books primarily it may be writing scripts it may be trying to be a filmmaker trying to be a screenwriter and it may be something halfway in between like doing more stand-up comedy getting out doing those things but where i don't regard youtube as the art form i'm engaged in right my youtube channel becomes um [Music] sorry to use an economic term so the difference between a leading indicator and a lagging indicator it's more like a lagging indicator what i'm doing on youtube is lagging behind and reflecting the other research i'm doing the other reading i'm doing the other writing i'm doing and then the other work i'm doing as a creative artist but youtube itself is no longer really the primary platform i'm thinking of that i'm motivated to do work on as a creative artist now why okay this comes back to the title of this video why i'm making this video about answering or not answering questions from the audience it comes down to what difference can you make you know now um this is a huge contradiction in all of our lives right by the way thanks for taking the time to comment guys i see some of you are having some meaningful conversations amongst yourselves which is great no problem with that if you have a second hit thumbs up that will help more people find the video when it's how more people find the video period whether they see it today tomorrow or now so i'm happy we have about 30 people in the audience if you want to hit thumbs up so we have 30 thumbs up thanks it's a mitzvah what can i tell you um and by the way guys i said before i'm happy to talk a little bit more about bitcoin i can come back to talking about bitcoin if you're interested in hearing my perspective on that i don't mind okay um you probably have at least one relative who is an alcoholic think about your grandparents aunts uncles cousins if you go out far enough there's somebody who's either an alcoholic or a drug addict and i will just confess my definition of alcoholic may not be the same as yours you know i think if alcohol is ruining your intellectual life your emotional life or your your ethical life it's ruining who you are intellectually emotionally ethically you've got a problem you've got to quit drinking alcohol i drink absolutely zero so i might perceive someone as an alcoholic and you don't but with that having been said you probably know someone in your family or your co-workers all right if i say to you i'll say his name is john why don't you take john aside and really deal with this why don't you really sit down with john and say hey i'm trying to save your life it's very likely that you will say back the level pardon me it's very likely you will say back the reason why you never have done that and the reason why you never will do that is that it couldn't possibly make a difference is that nothing will change so there will be some conflict created in your life there will be some level of mutual distrust and acrimony but nothing positive is going to come out of it right well what is what is the point of my confronting and i've done this confronting communists face to face on the internet confronting nazis face to face the internet and by the way confronting a lot of misconceptions from well-intentioned moderate left-wing people i mean i've also taken on anarchists libertarians there have been all kinds of misconceptions taken on but i've also really criticized and attacked like misconceptions that are common amongst bernie sanders supporters kind of moderate leftists and you know i'm sorry there's someone here saying um they discovered my channel because of my criticism of marxism it was very valuable i'm good i'm thank you i'm glad to hear that and you know i have my own uh emotional reasons for dealing with this i've i grew up surrounded by left-wing people and being in the vegan movement for so many years surrounded by left-wing people i don't know when i was a buddhist did i know any right-wing people there are conservative buddhists i don't know if any of them ever broke right with me and so on right you know we we have the incentive to positively change the world right but then we have the disincentive of this awareness what difference can it possibly make what difference can i possibly make even when we're talking about just one person we're talking about your friend john let's say it's your cousin john okay i'm going to introduce a very simple variable what if john is 10 years younger than you and what if john is 10 years older than you right it's different but it's also exactly the same so i'm i'm 43 i could have a cousin who's 53 i could have a cousin who's 33 right the onus on me is it any is it any different you know right so great we have a couple people in the audience who know just what i'm talking about alexandra says quote most of the male side of my family is alcoholic i try to discuss it with them many a time but it's like talking to a brick wall and i have no idea how to approach anymore right okay so here's what i want to say to you alexander [Music] what if you were pewdiepie what if you were jacqueline glenn what if you were the amazing atheist if you had an audience the size of jacqueline glenn and you sit down with your alcoholic relative on camera and you record this all of a sudden there's a point all of a sudden there's this tremendous positive motivating factor that you can change the world just by talking about these problems right you know i'll give you another example i could give a whole series of parallel examples here all right i confronted two cops walking distance from my house let's put it that way about what was going on here with crime on my own block it was a really nasty face-to-face confrontation these cops tried to they tried to intimidate me and they failed there were a lot of really strange ironies in this face-off i had with these two cops um i i could go into detail here right the question being put to these cops is also fundamentally why don't they actually enforce the law so on and so forth you know um and the cops told me they told me there were excuses for exactly why they don't force the law interesting little moment in my life okay so really good question what's the point of doing this uh it's never happened again i mean since that time i can't say it's never happened in my life but since that one event let's say it's two years ago it's quite a long time ago now since that event about two years ago i haven't had other confrontations with the cops so what's what's the point of talking to the cops what's the point of talking to the cops about the crime problem or about the police brutality problem or about you know the latest decisions made by city hall what if you're pewdiepie what if you're jacqueline glenn what if you're the amazing atheist right imagine how meaningful would be indeed during the year 2020 any one of those people could have gotten off their ass and just interviewed a cop they could have interviewed one police officer who knew about this stuff about their their perspective right and all of a sudden there's this tremendous potential just because it's on camera so this is something i have to manage guys let's say i have to manage in my own life i have this small audience uh it'd be normal for one of my videos to reach 1000 people okay so what do you guys think do you do you think i should get members of my family on camera and have confrontations about this stuff i've i've i have i have relatives who have drinking problems okay i'm not going to get to specify who they are i can do that i can make that content right do you think i should do you think i should film myself confronting the cops do you think i should film myself taking a stand on on any one of these issues now sorry the issue with marxism runs really deep how about the professors at the university of victoria i already alienated myself from those professors and made my life miserable and possibly sabotaged my own career or what have you by really standing up and being anti-marxist and anti-communist in a university that's partly dominated by communists it's not totally dominant but there's there are a lot of communists there are a lot of marxists around in academia and if you don't like it you can go to one of the crazy christian universities where instead i mean go to the mormon university where religious maniacs dominate the university so not all universities are left-wing but the right-wing ones are going to be really really scary right okay so look i i could recount to you from memory whole bunch of face-offs i have with professor we're face-to-face with professors i'm standing up for what i think truth and justice is or whatever you know okay what's the point what's going to change you know you can make an argument i did change the minds of a couple of unique individual people you can also make the argument i'm not getting into here in terms of virtue ethics i became a better person you know through having that experience through having that that practice and that's what most of you are going to have to come down to when you're thinking about your own alcoholic uncles and cousins or brothers and sisters whatever it is where you're in a situation we say okay i can't make you into a better person and i can't be a better person for you right but i can be a better person with you and you know part of me being a good person involves me letting you know me trying to intervene be trying to in this sense save your life and guys uh i'm not joking when i say this about marxism we have different people talking about the seriousness of marxism and so on this way you can say this also about racism and fascism and some other ideologies there is a sense when i sit down and talk to someone who's a true believing marxist i am trying to save their life you know i know it's very different from being addicted to alcohol it's very different from me addicted to cocaine or heroin but it is no joke marxism ruins people's lives communism ruins people's lives obviously joining a neo-nazi gang you know ruins people's lives right so look my point is most of you are making these decisions just on the basis of virtue ethics what kind of person am i going to be who am i going to become and me you know just being myself in this in this strange sense okay you know i have to make this effort i have to let you know that your alcoholism is bad and evil and wrong or your commitment to communism or your commitment to racism whatever it is it's bad anymore i have to step up i have to disrupt the tranquility of this family situation or this workplace situation or this university classroom situation you know what i mean i've got to take a risk even though you really have nothing to win except your own your own sense of dignity right so what's happened with this youtube channel be like in the transition from season one to season two right the transition that's happened here really is the end of any hope i had to change the world to this youtube channel right so the first concept of being a part of what was then although briefly great competitive gen x comments quote marxists are worse than cocaine i tried both problem with south america is marxism and cocaine often go hand in hand it's often it's the marxists who are making money at a cocaine deal like a coke whole marxist armies have been have been funded through cocaine trafficking anyway yeah i'll ask you this though if you had to have a roommate would you rather have a roommate who was marxist and sober or you know not a marxist but a cocaine addict unfortunately you know if a marxist is your roommate they could also be a cocaine addict but leaving leaving that possibility aside um anyway again thanks guys i am i am seeing your comments as they as they come in uh from the audience we have someone here mentioning you know hassan [ __ ] and destiny right so imagine how different life is for them once you have a large enough audience that even discussions about the most trivial of political issues in this sense start to have a have a start to have a point start to have real world uh outcomes so guys look i got on youtube in the first place with two big motivations one i was getting divorced i did not know when i was going to see my daughter again or how often i was going to see my daughter again so very often i'm giving the short version of the story that's the main thing i emphasize that's the only thing i mentioned still true still true today i now am divorced the question of how often i get to see my daughter remains very open this coronavirus thing has made international travel impossible and the french court system is what it is the best of times these are not the best designs so we don't know in the next several years how often i'm going to see my daughter if at all we don't know and i knew i mean i can the next airplane i get on could crash and this youtube channel will be the last remnant of the man i was it'll be the only one my daughter ever gets to know me there's a huge powerful motivating factor for making a youtube channel and doing all the things i do down to and including today this is this is one factor right but the second factor is as i've said recently i'm talking about writing books you know the potential to make a difference in the world i'd put all these years and all this hard work into language politics history and religion of southeast asia myanmar cambodia laos thailand sri lanka i knew all this stuff about tarabata buddhism and there was this flourishing atheist movement there was the potential for me to make a positive difference in the world and i said yeah i i saw that and it was obvious that was offering me immediately a way to make a difference in the world much more meaningful than say getting a phd a phd in religion which is what i would have had to do to be in that field many years of hard work and i know i have no illusions about what's at the end of that road once you've got the phd and look guys i mean i think that's true still today these kind of intellectually mediocre youtubers they really are the ones still making a difference in atheism not the people with with phds even though i utterly despise the current generation of atheist youtubers and they're accomplishing that okay so we saw that opportunity to make a difference the world come and we saw it go it was totally unexpected for me totally unexpected that veganism then proved to be the next big opportunity on youtube i didn't expect that at all so i'm being 100 real with you when i made the transition from taiwan to victoria canada i thought on my youtube channel i was going to be talking about chinese politics and learning the chinese language and i thought i would have other people on the channel collaborating me maybe maybe like uh the young turks maybe like jimmy dore you have two or three people sitting at a desk we would be talking about politics of china politics of asia and you know again maybe i talk a little bit about politics in thailand cambodia some of these other countries especially but china the number of white people who can really talk in depth and in a meaningful way about politics of china alone is almost zero and obviously i was someone who could make sophisticated comparative uh statements about how politics of china are connected to other countries in asia including india but southeast asia and then also europe north america so on and so forth and still this day i mean so what we have the new york times sitting here how many pages are about china how many pages are about asia in total if you leaf through the new york times there are a lot of things i can say that are bad about the new york times you know still to this day there's there's this tremendous scarcity so in both cases you could say that's me responding to a certain kind of scarcity i think i look at what's going on in atheism and say they have nobody who knows buddhism there's this atheist movement i can be a part of i look at what's going on in politics and at least we call commentary and analysis i say there's nobody who knows china i remember sending an email to the young turks saying that saying look i appreciate your show i see what you're doing you got this guy who knows turkey you got this they think that another guy that time who knew latin america you know i forget exactly who was on the show at that time you know i know you have these different people who are specialists and the guy who was a film expert in this so you have nobody who knows china you have no one who knows any part of asia on the show what you really need to start covering is at least america's ongoing kind of cold war with china which since then has gotten hotter and hotter but you know i remember going through and when i wrote this email i went through a list of all their youtube videos and i think it was all their podcasts i had as two lists for the number of times china was mentioned i think it was in a five-year period or a 10-year period and i told them an email said look you have only mentioned china like three times in five years you know in terms of the synopsis of every episode um i saw that as a positive expectation it's a positive opportunity um to change the world and then you know to my surprise what i ended up doing with my time here on youtube instead was buddhism was not buddhism was not uh chinese politics it was instead um uh the vegan movement so like guys another question this is another example so you say melissa's here off camera we have someone here talking about ssri antidepressants with all of these things i have to ask is am i going to let it take over my life look so i'm i'm not a member of the buddhist faith anymore i'm an ex-buddhist how much time do you want to put into it do you want to take over your life i have put a certain number of years into chinese as a language in chinese politics industry do you want that sake of your life the critique of antidepressants in ssris you have to make a decision do you want to let that take over your life and with all these things to what extent do you want uh youtube to take over your life so yeah um what i ended up doing was making this transition from atheism politics and languages of asia especially china to some extent japan and then what i ended up doing for several years was vegan politics and the question is what now what next and instead as we move ahead this is going to become of this channel where i talk about what it is i'm reading what it is i'm researching and what it is i'm trying to do as an author as a creative artist of my own initiative outside of youtube because youtube has ceased to be the place you know where i find opportunity right i'm going to be seeking out those opportunities outside of youtube and then there's just going to be a kind of reflection of that there's going to be a kind of archive for those thoughts and feelings uh here on my youtube channel okay so look why have i disabled comments on the youtube channel it's real easy to think about how much time you waste today writing or replying to comments in the comment section most people don't even want to do that they don't want to clock it they don't really want to think about how many hours go into instagram i'm sorry some of you it's not on youtube instagram facebook twitter wherever it is you're writing these comments reddit you ever clocked that i know melissa has had different times in her life where she doesn't do any of this where she has zero time wasted this way she's at her other times when she's feeling she's wasting time with this and she starts to chart it or record it how much time is going into this these kinds of comments okay if you think it's not significant today if you think it's not significant this week or this month i'm telling you it is all right point two once you have an audience even if it is just an audience of 1 000 viewers per video and by the way guys i've seen the statistics i do have new people every month it's not the same 1000 people not worth digressing into that but yeah you do have new people coming in every month and and seeing your your videos and you really care like the reason i'm making that video talking about bitcoin in the first place i really care i really want to overcome the misinformation and propaganda about bitcoin so how am i going to feel one be people completely sincere not trolls not no bad intentions people with bad intentions come from people whether they have good intentions and bad intentions come into my comment section and are you know sharing exactly the false views that i'm trying to overturn that i'm trying to debunk same thing happens with buddhism and buddhist meditation i make a video talking about how terrible what a scam buddhist meditation is you're gonna have people coming into your comment section saying no buddhist meditation is wonderful it changed their lives and that there's scientific proof of its benefit i made several youtube videos specifically saying this is a lie it is not true that there's scientific evidence that buddhist meditation benefits you or any form of meditation benefits you absolutely debunking that if the comments section were open every single comment would be people making excuses for justifying and supporting meditation whether buddhist meditation hindu meditation or so-called secular meditation which is just as self-contradictory as talking about secular prayer and i've seen that i've seen that when my videos are discussed on reddit or on other forums that's all you're looking at so one point is what do you do when you uh when you don't want to waste time what do you do when you really care when the outcomes really matter and then taking a step back looking at it on a larger scale what is going to happen with the next five years of your life okay i mean this sincerely i think one of the most important reasons why the amazing atheist accomplished nothing in the last 10 years is that he spent his time in comment sessions when you when you add it up i think one of the most important reasons why jacqueline glenn accomplished nothing so on you can go down the list of all the luminaries all the luminaries in atheism all the luminaries in veganism all the layman's luminaries and feminism you can look at feminism as a movement on youtube as another example right these movements that have come and gone these are people who didn't have any particular plan right they didn't have something they were trying to accomplish in the next five years they didn't have a particular ambition and when that opportunity was there when there really was the opportunity to make a difference in the world rather than having that kind of plan rather than having that kind of ambition and then accomplishing something whether it be in one year two years or five years it's not going to happen overnight right what did they do they did the same thing that no offense 90 percent of you probably do with your day they sit there on their phone bitching and complaining to random strangers picking fights with random strangers writing an essay length reply to a to comment from a from a random anonymous person the audience that will maybe be read by just one person just the person you're replying to but quite likely will be read by nobody at all okay it's not trivial it's not a minor part of like what i do on youtube or my life or your life if you are spending your life producing this kind of literature every day writing hate mail to strangers and i know your excuse you may say they started it it may be that every day you're responding to hate mail from strangers whether that's on twitter whether that's on instagram whether that's on reddit or whether it's here on youtube in a youtube comment section okay there is an alternative there is there's more than one alternative there's another way to live your life you can look back at what i did in season one on this youtube channel and you take that as a model i had a different answer back then but really briefly what i said was look i'm part of a political movement i'm an aspiring leader in the political movement i'm trying to change the world so i'm not going to waste time in the youtube comment section i'm going to reach out to people as individuals and talk to them on skype for an hour because it's better for me to talk to just one person in depth and get to know them and talk about their problems and have that connection to talk to one person for one hour instead of wasting the same one hour writing a bunch of caddy replies to anonymous people comment sections again whether twitter instagram or otherwise that's what i said then that was my answer in in season one right season one came to its calamitous conclusion and we're now in season two on a battlefield and i have a different methodology i have a different answer to the same fundamental question right and now i'm not reaching out to anyone i'm not making myself available for that one hour skype call i'm not the door is closed on that it really is i'm not available to people anymore and i no longer see myself as a member of or a leader of the vegan movement i've made the contribution that i could i've written this book and you know we'll see what we'll see what happens from there they say that chapter of my life is now really forever closed what i'm saying is look i'm living a meaningful life this is the life of the mind this is what i'm doing as an intellectual and i'm asking in the most open-minded way hey who's with me you know i'm reading books i'm not reading books for you i'm not reading books in order to make youtube videos about them i'm not reading books for the audience i have to have my own motivations to live my own life of active research in a formed opinion i've got to have my own initiative my own creative projects that have nothing to do with youtube and have nothing to do with this audience and sure as a kind of byproduct there's something here that i can share right and each of you has to come up with your own answer this way if you're honest with yourself this question why am i disabled comments at the youtube section all right it has implications for you too because there's some comment section somewhere you're wasting your time um harvesting what's the word pruning mining attending you know you are attending your own comment section whether it is um on twitter on instagram on facebook on whatever social media platform it is you may have or whether it is that you try to carry out these kinds of wars right here in my own comment section all right um when you die do you want us to print out sum total of all your correspondence on twitter and staple it to your gravestone do you want us to etch into your gravestone here was a great man he fought 7042 flame wars on twitter and he won 5027 of them here are the great and fine words here is the literature of caddy remarks and trolling and replies is that is that what you want to have to show for yourself when you die i i think that one of the worst misconceptions about social media is that it's free this is costing you all right i mean thank you for listening to me speak for an hour but this comes at a price for the creator and for the people in the audience there is something else you could be doing with that time there's something else you could be reading and there's something else you could be writing as well with the same amount of mental focus and energy that you're putting into writing these comments or replying to these comments whether you're writing long essays or whether you're just taking the time to focus your mind and write two short sentences that are as mean and emotionally devastating as possible to that other person there's another kind of literature you could be consuming and that you could be producing also if you could really just learn this lesson and turn the comment section off