Advice to Young Men: Quitting Video Games, Being an Intellectual, etc.

quite a few different seemingly random
circumstances inspired me to record this video or put in my mind the notion to make such a video one of them being that youtube apparently at random uh suggested to me a response to my channel i think from a couple years ago from another small youtuber who was one of the chorus of young men who bitterly denounced me for suggesting that he ought to quit video games of seth medium in particular i mean that all of us would be better off would be living better lives with the if we really look seriously at how many hours and how many minutes we're spending on things like playing video games and if you've been to this channel before you know this is connected to my critique of my questioning of what is the meaning of life what it means to lead a meaningful life etc and i have definite answers but i think the most significant part of those discussions is that i lead my audience in reflecting on those questions on formulating those questions and applying them to their own lives even if you come to a completely different set of answers from mine just the process of asking yourself the question seriously is gonna lead to changes in your life it really is and whether it leads to completely quitting video games or resolving to only play video games for one or two hours a week or something i think any and every notion of a meaningful life is going to be incompatible with playing video games as a habit and numerous other habits and distractions as well the question of what you're being distracted from is indeed a good one and sailing to this conversation anyway seemingly at random while i was at the gym this evening youtube recommended this video to me and i just say if you do book reviews on youtube often not always often the best time to do a book review is when you're halfway through the book by the time you get to the end of the book do two videos even do three make multiple videos while you're reading the book and you'll you won't regret it because the things you were thinking about and worried about and wanting to talk about on camera when you were halfway through the book you won't have them in mind anymore when you get to the end of the book when you're when you're finished and if you record at the end of the book often you'll have an exasperated feeling anyway so i was listening to this video and i hit pause i don't even think i was halfway through so this is a similar kind of response he said something i think is as it sparks this video it's worth speaking to even if it's kind of completely inaccurate and unfair and wrong he characterizes my position as follows he says well you know isil mazzard claims that playing video games is a waste of time and what does he contrast to playing video games research now this is a misrepresentation of argument but i still think it's worth answering like i don't just simply say there are two paths in front of you in life one is video games and one is one is research i think that a meaningful life and the meaningful the meaning of life involves a lot of learning for us and learning involves research so research is part of the answer but this isn't some simple question where i say instead of video games do research that's the way he characterized my audience that's the way he characterizes my position in contrast to his own and fair enough then the next plank of his argument is to say well research could be more meaningful than playing video games but it could not be and his choice of example is fascinating to me he says let's say for example you are a white english-speaking american living in the united states of america and you do research on the history of the border conflict between china and india now i would assume this this video is not new i'd assume he mentioned that example because at that time i'd made videos talking about this i have made some videos time with the history involved and he goes on to say well this research would be totally meaningless to your life it would be not rewarding for you at all this is just mind-blowing to me and the problem is that this guy is so young he's so inexperienced that he has no idea what he's talking about he has no idea how meaningful and rewarding it would be for him especially because he is a white american who has no connection to the history of china and no connection to the history of india to do research about the history of the china india border conflict and he cannot imagine how so i don't know let's say he's 19 or 20 years old between age 20 and age 30 that research he might do in three months how it doesn't just become meaningful for a short time in his life but it remains meaningful and it comes up again and again and again between the age of 20 and the age of 30 between the age of 30 and the age of 40 his whole life long like this is my point i'm not faulting him saying that he's like incorrect or made a misjudgment of something saying that very often when you're talking to young people you're talking to people who have never done any research on any subject whatsoever and have then never lived with those findings lived with the outcomes of that research live with the results of that research it's such way they understand how it enriches everything in their life right now i'll give a quick uh contrast to this and i'll come back to the same example many angles from this and by the way welcome to everyone in the audience and i'm happy to chitchat with you guys reply to you guys also i know that many people who are my regular viewers today are people who think a lot about this and think about how they can lead a meaningful life and how they can grow intellectually ethically and and so on unfortunately i'm disappointed that incredibly few people on us actually want to make a difference in the world politically that's my disappointment my audience is not radical enough to sue me but i do have a lot of genuine intellectual dissonance in my audience and i appreciate i appreciate the help of that i have a lot of people have good intentions in that respect however when it comes to actually changing the world i don't yet have the warehouse of talent i might be might be hoping for uh in that respect okay um melissa and i had a conversation a few days ago with another young man and he is 25 yeah and he was saying to me and i can relate to his situation very well he's at a world famous university in germany and he was saying to me that he actually finds it embarrassing that when he's just standing around having conversations with people in germany his level of knowledge about history and politics the result of the research he's done over the last 10 years um it results in people just being kind of astonished at him and saying you know how do you know all this stuff why are you so elected and people saying things that are incredibly flattering and praising him now i point out this is a very particular situation so i was in the situation at the university of toronto supposedly the best university of canada i was in the situation at the university of cambridge the university of oxford i've been i've been on the campuses of elite universities i was not a student at cambridge i was just giving lectures these places i was chit chatting with people and so on um hobnobbing you might say but you know you're at a situation where everyone on that campus is at a certain level of every addition but they're aware of the level of every addition that's expected of them and they're aware that they don't have it and then they meet someone who really exceeds their expectations their expectations of other students maybe also there are expectations of the professors right and there's this real kind of wow fact wow you know and they it is pathetic but they just don't expect it they don't expect to meet again 25 is not young it's really not you know they don't expect to meet a 25 year old man who has a sophisticated nuanced perspective on the history of the vietnam war i'm just giving randoms has a sophisticated perspective on napoleon napoleon bonaparte and that period of french tribunalism whatever whatever these gonna be just someone who has really read and studied and learned things about a whole bunch of different chapters of political science and history and this particular guy he also knows a lot about the hard sciences which are not not the examples i'm using he's also very well educated for example about the theory of evolution and the history of sciences um connected to that so this is a guy who i mean you know i'm aware i've influenced him tremendously in the last five years uh to some extent he's living by his own philosophy and to some extent he's living by mine and to some extent there's an overlap between the two but he is one of the people who's really taken a sense of direction and motivation from this youtube channel and from conversations with me and so on i'm aware of this this is not an independent case study um and you know i've also been through a lot of those same kind of situations i've had people telling me i'm a genius and being amazed by me and stuff and i'm i'm a critic of put it this way that's a picture that's almost entirely produced by the frame you know what i mean people kind of start with this framing and then fill in the blanks like okay i understand you perceive me as a genius because like this is the situation this is the scenario that creates this expectation and this perception anyway it is what it is and you know like you you could look at even the same example 25 year old guy in a major university in in germany and you could say look you should expect everybody to be like this guy like everybody at this age on this campus you should be disappointed with all the other people and reviling them as idiots you should be insulting and upgrading the other students because all they do is spend their time playing video games going to nightclubs in germany by the way prostitution is legal so they have a very high rate of young men going to sleep with prostitutes while they're in university many many countries is illegal and they do it but really in german you have men and women but you know young young men and and women in in university living dissolute self-indulgent lives and making incredibly little intellectual process and just doing the study that's required to pass the test to get there to get their degree and so on now you know in the conversation then just a couple days ago you know i said many things to him but one of the things that emphasized to him again and again was you know sorry i should just finish that part of the answer he said that he feels that he's not a genius he feels that he's not extraordinarily intelligent he feels that he's not in intrinsically or innately superiorities of people he feels that what he knows and what he's able to say for himself is just the result of the work he did over the last 10 years that you do 10 years of reading and 10 years of research even if it's kind of at random oh i'm interested in napoleon i'm interested in the vietnam war even if you're just picking these these things up piece by piece and you start connecting the pieces and learning from them and he also i i forget to what extent this is the result of my youtube channel but he's also now done some reading from ancient greece and rome i forget to what extent i influenced him in that or he might have had that interest first or whatever but certainly my youtube channel encouraged him so you start reading some aristotle and some thucydides and and this kind of thing and putting these things together you know before you know it um you know it it adds up to much more than the sum of its parts you start making shrewd analytical judgments contrasting one thing to another one but he he said that he doesn't feel like he's a genius he just feels that this is the result of how he has been living his life for the last 10 years this is what i said yes but you cannot imagine how much more rewarding it is in the next 10 years that's what you have no idea about like these people you're talking about they can't imagine how they'd feel if they were in your shoes if they had done like if they're also 25 if they had done in the last 10 years what you've done they can't imagine that but like you can't imagine where i'm at you can't imagine how rewarding this research is the outcomes of this research and you never forget it it never leaves you you carry it with you for the rest of your life it is tremendously powerful tremendously meaningful way i'm gonna make a little bit of a digression here that's not it's not too much of a digression uh i did not play any video games today uh but if i did yesterday or the day before i played i played a video game uh for the original 8-bit uh famicom but so if i sat down and played that game again today i can shout out the famicom gameplay i remember i played again melissa was boiling water you were making soup or something in the kitchen and partly to amuse her and to pass like five minutes i started playing this 8-bit video game and it was it was so i played one level of that game so i don't even know if that was five minutes just being it could have been three minutes but one level of an 8-bit family game and i chit-chatted while i was doing it i was chit-chatting with melissa she was back here boiling water and stuff that's no big deal okay there is no way i could stretch that to just one hour of playing video games there are so many books in this apartment i really want to read now part of this all you guys can relate to even if you're watching this at 18 years old or 16 years old you know what it's like to have a book you want to read okay there are books in this apartment i really want to read that i've already read before okay and that's harder to relate to that when you get to 40 years old going back and reading aristotle again it's different now because of all the other research you've done all the other things you've learned all the other things that have been connected to it and like dude i think i could read aristotle's politics again today and i think i could read it again five years from now and uh sorry i'm not going to get into all the stuff i've been reading and you know why that's so meaningful and while that's so rewarding but like i'm not saying this to insult anyone i'm saying for real whether you are 18 years old 20 years old 30 years old or 4 years old depending on how much experience you have with with research with this means nonfiction this doesn't mean reading novels doesn't mean reading comic books sorry you know but like you really can't imagine the way in which it makes your life more rewarding and more meaningful every day the way it makes my life more meaningful while i am in the shower like not thinking about anything in particular the way it makes my life more meaningful rewarding when i'm sitting and looking out the window and the way in which i'm positively motivated like if i am going to play a video game for five minutes while i'm playing that video game for just those five minutes my mind is wondering and it's not wandering to like oh big breasted women or something it's not water dude it's not wandering to oh i wish i owned a fancy red sports car no like i am really thinking about research i want to do and reason and things connected to research i've done in the past there's a world of like material there you know of thoughts and ideas and passions and concerns that i actively want to expand and work on you know basically all the time um look there are only so many hours in the day when you're really alert when you when you're really focused but that's the greatest tragedy about something like video games video games are what you do you know you have to be alert and focused you don't play video games while you sleep it either reduces the number of hours you're sleeping or reduces the number of hours you're doing something else meaningful like like research and so on um okay great great comment uh from plant plant-based powered in the audience quote you're obsessed with talking about video games you know you want to play video games so i don't think this is a big uh i don't think this is a big digression uh here you know but um so i've said this in different contexts in different ways i can talk about in a kind of sad and demoralized way and i can talk about a kind of joyful way all right um video games cannot make me happy the way they made me happy as a small child now i have a daughter i haven't seen her for years but i mean okay i give two great examples with my daughter i remember my daughter just seeing a cat it's not worth telling the whole center she saw a cat through a window and you know the cat yawned so you know that my cat yawns it shows off its teeth and it might have been her first time ever seeing that like she was so little she was so young and she was just so delighted and so trans and so overwhelmed by this and she kicked her little feet and was smiling like she was so happy just to see a a cat or a kitten whatever it was and see it yawning you know and she's so overwhelmed by this okay i can never feel that way again there are all kinds of things that are overwhelming when you're a child and you know i do remember what it was like uh to play a sega master system game when i was child i remember also the sense of excitement in in opening one or purchasing one like the acquisition of the video game is something that's something separate okay there is just no way video games can ever do that for me anymore and if you regret that you know what are you really saying you you want to regress to a childlike level of simplicity is that really what you you want to do and if i could sell you a drug that would let you regress like when you're high on this drug when you're under the influence of this drug you're so simple-minded that you can enjoy playing video games that way again as a child or you can enjoy staring at a cat while it yawns the way a small child does you know i think for a very short period of time some really intense mind-altering drugs have that kind of that kind of effect on people you know they reduce you to a childlike state of of mental dysfunction it can't last long and you build up tolerance and bad things ensue would you want that would you want to regress to a childlike enjoyment but look you know sorry i don't think you're new to my channel plant-based power but i have made many many videos talking about video games i do not trivialize the impact they've had on my life and i do not trivialize the impact they've had on other people's lives i once did an interview with someone who was here on youtube and he said well you know why do you talk about video games this way as opposed to his example was adult coloring books other hobbies people have that take up time and it was cut very short that he immediately changed the type i said okay tell me do you know anyone who dropped out of university because they were addicted to adult coloring books and sort of right away yeah well let me let me shift uh let me shift the topic um anyway but look you know video games had a huge impact on my life i don't know anyone for whom coloring books or assembling puzzles out of puzzle pieces had a huge impact on their life of course videos of course some people get addicted to gambling like with a deck of cards you know but for my generation and for the generations younger than me video game addiction and video game playing are epidemic levels um so i'm just going to give a link to a video if you guys don't know my back catalog of this my whole point is not to trivialize this um that's the type that's a video titled quitting video games colon the problem is profound not just a waste of time and that it's taking it seriously so that's my whole approach um you know so look someone else in the audience says so again the point here is not that that video games are the only problem in the world they are in a tremendously important problem so someone else in the audience called uh revi says quote to be honest he's had the same issues with uh porn and he says ultimately comes down to use a ton of energy so just say this to really uh uh directly but to anyone else down just feels that way so you know i can't relate to that because i can't imagine watching pornography for two hours like two hours really like uh and i i believe i think there are real statistics in the internet to back this up i think for i like the vast majority of men if there's something that interests me that i'm gonna look up in terms of porn it's going to be five minutes it's gonna be a very short fleeting interest and you know um i mean i do watch the news i watch all kinds of things on the news and you guys know from my youtube channel i follow certain kinds of controversies within uh youtube news so to speak um you know that i that i analyze and comment on my youtube channel every so often it's mentioned that someone has started doing pornography like you know someone who is a youtuber or someone who sometimes not and i think oh okay i wonder what kind of thing they're doing and i and i look it up to give you an example never once have i felt fascinated and then watched their pornography for even one hour let alone two hours and with video games we're talking about 40 hours 30 we're talking about hundreds of hours going into this right most of the time it's just kind of like oh okay that's interesting and sometimes also like the news is misrepresenting it like the news says that this person is doing porn but you look it up and they're really just posing in a bikini like it's not really important and sometimes the news says somebody's doing porn you look at everything yeah that's hardcore porn like you know so sometimes it's just kind of you know and sometimes you locate and think wow that person is much less attractive than i thought they were you know and sometimes the opposite but no so i'm just saying rarely i understand where you're coming from but i think i'm in the majority where i'm just not susceptible to that being a significant loss of of time in my life uh and now you know by contrast you know my relationships with women uh all of them real real women not pornography real women you know the number of hours i pour into talking to caring for building a relationship with the women of my life the women i have sex with to people it's an enormous number of hours a huge amount of time and so breaking up with any of them like that side of my life the relationship side and the commitment side and the breakup side you know that's a huge huge investment of many many hours so again i'm not obviously i'm not making some kind of qualitative comparison here just a quantitative one so it doesn't make sense for me to offer that kind of um that kind of analysis of of of porn so railway says that yes he did have uh he did have the experience of porn being one hour to three hours a day for many years of his of his life okay so it's interesting here but there's got to be some other youtube channel that addresses that you know for me i can't i can't relate to that at all and the other thing i'd ask is i don't know were you listening to the news why you looked at like for me like even though i'm someone with a very high sex drive and i'm very interested in sex i'm interested in people i'm interested having meaningful relationships women like if i'm listening to a podcast about the history of napoleon while looking through porn or something you know that's that's kind of one thing but like they're sorry this obviously relates to my overall intellectual character but i i absolutely can't imagine it being interested in that so look you know hey a legitimate open open question do some people drop out of university because of porn i'm guessing in a country the size the united states there were a few like i don't know if there are five guys a year or something you know how many people ruin their university education because of porn addiction maybe one two three four finally i think there might be a couple however the reality with video games this is at epidemic levels of of millions and millions of people so that's why we talk so much with video games but i do also talk about love and romance i talk about all kinds of other things in life meaning meaningful and meaningless um so it's not no unfortunately it looks like that guy plant-based power i think he just thought he'd insult me and then uh and then leave the audience well it's too bad where'd you go man let's see i guess he can dish it out but he can't take it all right so look um i was making this point to this 25 year old friend of mine who's at a university in germany where you know for him it's good news for him this isn't like a caution or a reproach or an insult i'm saying well look you can't imagine how much better it gets you can't imagine how much more rewarding the life of the mind gets like you know you can't imagine how wonderful it is to wake up in the morning and be me and you know for him too i just say like 10 years from now the fruit the result of this level of you know one of those fundamental things is developing your own curiosity honing your sense of curiosity sharpening your sense of doubt you know having this kind of analytical doubting mind where you you doubt the things around you all the time you actually investigate them and do research and and come to conclusions you know so i'm saying to him positively you can't imagine how how much better this gets when you have another 10 years you know behind you um okay the shifting focus to this other young man i i don't know i think he's about 20 years old uh who was defending playing video games by suggesting that this kind of research doing research about the history of the border conflict between india and china would be totally meaningless and not rewarding for a white american unlike playing video games right in his case i have to say the same thing but it's with a bit more of a harsh tone of condemnation or what i have to say to him is you have no idea how rewarding it would be for you yes you to get off your ass get off the couch and really research the history of the china indian border conflict you don't know and you don't even have something else you've researched that you could compare it to and you are i mean you are really speaking as a fatuous blithering idiot if you even if you can even imagine that playing pac-man for 40 hours or playing world of warcraft for 40 hours could ever be as rewarding for you short term or long term as studying the example you chose not an example i chose if you really hit the books and study the history of the the china india border coffee now i want to say i do understand his sense of estrangement from it but he doesn't understand especially when you're young this video is advice for young men and some of it's already a lot of this is male centric this is not a gender equal video this is really done about young men not young women okay especially as a young man you don't know how important the issue of detachment is so yeah it may seem to you like india is a far off a strange place you don't really know any of the political leaders you don't have any kind of emotional attachment any kind of any kind of bias but as a young man especially you don't realize what an advantage that is so let's just take a this is a digression that is not in any way of digression this is a question that directly contributes to this conversation if i sit down and talk to a young man about uh mohandas gandhi this is the political leader often referred to as mahatma gandhi right mahatma gandhi mohandas gotti now most so if you talk to a 20 year old man a white american man he either knows nothing about gandhi or he has seen some short clips of a fictional movie about him on tv like maybe during a news segment is some kind of aesthetic awareness that this is a very skinny wise man wrapped in a robe like he has an image of gandhi that's not really connected to any kind of political knowledge but he's pretty detached but probably some preconception that this is some kind of holy man as even you know calling him mahatma indicates rather than using his actual first name hondas you know but if i'm talking to someone who's grown up in arkansas or grown up in detroit or anything else and you say to them oh yeah you know i know this is your perspective on gandhi and indian history you may have just gotten by passively watching american television or it's on this you've probably never even watched a movie that was about gandhi but you've seen some kind of images this way um you know uh he wasn't an expert in religion he didn't really know anything about hinduism buddhism or the philosophy of ancient india he didn't study languages like sanskrit really well he wore he wore a robe you know he kind of dressed that way yeah yeah at the very end of his life um do you know how his career actually began and how he became a powerful person uh politically no it was in africa really africa okay now here's my point if i'm talking to someone born and raised in india whether they are hindu buddhist muslim uh whether they are high caste or outcast like whether they're rich or poor across the social spectrum you are probably dealing with someone who begins with a deeply engrained bias they are really attached to one view of uh gandhi or another and it's very difficult to have this conversation now already okay no his career should be in in africa africa not india oh in africa he was a lawyer who became famous arguing that brown skinned people people of indian ancestry not black people not africans that people from india who were living in africa ought to have the right to fight in the british army alongside the white soldiers to fight for england not against england that that was how we got famous oh okay so curious you want to do some research want to challenge some freaking senate ceo you think you can tell me that where this leads to this lab at hole rabbit pardon me this rabbit hole if you go down this rabbit hole if you start doing this you think that's irrelevant to your life in kansas in arkansas in detroit in washington in the united states america i think if you do this research it's going to become meaningful and it's going to remain meaningful in your life and it's going to come up again and again and again it's going to be connected to things you read things you talk about and it does come up i when i was involved in vegan activism came up all the time and my critique of direct action everywhere they may go back to talking about uh gandhi but i criticized what they were saying about gandhi and they dropped it so it was a critique that reached wayne siong the leader of direct action never at that time since then the leadership has changed so they may go back to talking about ghani but i've actually impacted other vegans who was like look all you guys are claiming you know to be disciples of gandhi have you read even one book about gandhi well here are some facts you know so he came up it comes up in all kinds of things it enriches my understanding of volcanoes history but at its most basic fundamental simple level you're already learning there the way perceptions and assumptions in 21st century politics can be based on a kind of cartoon image of someone it's a skinny man wrapped in a robe so you have all these assumptions but what kind of education he has you know what his area of expertise is what things he can be trusted on you have assumptions about him being kind of aloof from politics right like as if he rises but well that's not gandhi right now so right away now you're you're you're thrust into a situation where you realize that the propaganda is radically incompatible with reality who gandhi was what he knew and what he didn't know start looking into his sex life there's another shock coming for you there guys he was not living in celibacy when he was wearing that robe let me tell you okay okay so but but if you do this research now some people can watch this they're 16 years old 18 years old 20 years old i'm telling you you do this research this is easier for you to visualize than if i talk about something abstract like the border between uh china and india because we're talking about a person but if you do the research about the border between china and india it also involves people it's don't be surprised they're going to be similar discoveries you know similar uh uh you know shocking uh recognitions and revelations that that come and go right but at this very simple level you learn to question the difference between appearances and reality assumptions and the results of real research you begin to cultivate a kind of detachment that you can and will apply to your own culture your own history your own political milieu i think i do not need to digress to add that you will never gain any of these things from video games you will never gain any of these things from going to a nightclub you will never gain any of these things from sleeping with prostitutes now i think there's also a real question what you do gain from sleeping with prostitutes actually i mean it's it's kind of there are complex questions to be to be asked there um it would be very strange to claim you learn nothing from sleeping with prostitutes you may learn a great deal that you can't learn from books and i have to concede that point but you know what we're talking about this is a book that used to be famous and is now uh forgotten about jfk got jfk on the back over there okay now especially if i'm talking to someone around 20 years old 18 19 20 21 okay you don't think you have an emotional attachment to jfk but you do all right to a much greater extent then you have assumptions built up about mohandas gandhi based on short little clips on the news little you know images in magazines and uh over-the-top claims made by political leaders indeed as mentioned even vegan political leaders invoke the name of gandhi well people do that with jfk a lot okay are you are you willing to hear are you willing to hear the other side of jfk are you willing to hear some shocking facts about who jfk was politically and personally you know that our work would show you the reality of who this guy was is as different from your assumptions as you know the image of gandhi as this pious celibate wise religious leader is that different are you willing are you really willing now it happens occasionally but a couple weeks ago i had someone writing in and asking basically how he can develop as an intellectual and it may seem like strange advice but i said well look and this guy had written to me at some length and he seemed stupid and crazy i'm just being but but but to be clear he seemed stupid and crazy but he also seemed like something someone who was highly motivated to really become an intellectual seemed like someone who really had passion and really wanted to grow intellectually so that's good but the stupid and crazy thing is a little bit a little bit dissuasive when you receive those kinds of messages and so some of you already know this but one of the things i encouraged him to do i said well look why don't you study the political history of haiti so the french revolution the haitian revolution and then the aftermath were basically the french try to snuff out the haitian revolution to simplify a little bit and i am not saying this because this is relevant to his life in the same way that we've been talking about india i was suggesting this and i said this explicitly right i said i think you should start by studying something you're totally detached from where you're you have no emotional attachment whatsoever no preconceptions what so we're really learning starting from zero right but with each and every one of these things right you're really learning something profoundly important about human nature and you you know you're also learning about the industry propaganda and real history you're learning all the ways people lie and deceive you know the way they deceive people at that time the way that we deceive each other in in the writing of history but like you know uh in this camera but like if you're only 20 years old you really haven't developed yourself intellectually right you won't be able to get very much out of this book it's about how jfk was a terrible person if you go when you study the history of haiti the history of the french revolution the history of ancient greece the history of ancient rome the history of india kind of the debunking of mohandas gandhi as a political leader like you know and then and then you to it's going to be really meaningful for you and really rewarding for you right because wherever you do research what you're researching is human nature it's like you're in a canoe in the middle of a great lake and no matter where you put your panel down there's water and no matter which way you decide is forward one way or another you have to choose somewhere to put that paddle down and start moving water just going to take a moment to glance at the the comments okay so here's a great question from from micah wright uh so i'm welcome to the audience i don't remember you micah i think i would remember you just because your distinctive name micah asks quote how do you feel about studying scripture and building your understanding of something like the bible okay so this is advice for young men now i have a lot of experience dealing with this including with my own current uh girlfriend and amarata um melissa here you know directly reading the bible in english the vast majority of young people will not know what they're looking at they won't know how to analyze it they won't see what's wrong with it so we went through biblical passages melissa and i should have brief period of being interested in in educating herself this way and always in the bible and i would look at it and right away i'd say oh yeah but don't you recognize this is written by four different authors don't you see notice here there's a break and then it repeats and then like you notice these inconsistencies like there are there's a kind of uh historical and analytical focus i have on the on the bible of course it's the result of years of on again off again looking at bible scholarship like oh yeah but don't you notice here this this contradicts this and this is you know this is being misrepresented i'm picking up on all this stuff um the vast majority of people especially at say age 20 they can't do that with the bible and you know of course the use of language and the way it's translated is part of it but in in large part it's also just the nature of the text itself that it doesn't lend itself easily to that kind of analysis now again i think i can say with ancient greece and rome probably or ancient buddhism if you've built yourself up through the study of ancient texts and some other field you then might be able to come at the bible so look the but the easy middle path to recommend is reading one of the truly atheistic hard-hitting analysts and scholars of the bible like richard carrier so uh you can listen to some of his uh so richard carrier versus the historical jesus um i am not going to endorse any particular book of his but if you look up richard carrier you will see um he's devoted his life to this and he's someone i mean it's one of those things a lot of people they can't see the problems with the text but once you explain to them like once it's been seen it can't be unseen once you start to learn to really be more demanding in reading the text and why is it written this way you know why is it where you know to look at it that way then it becomes comprehensible to you so i just mentioned an example that was that was given by a christian preacher was actually the use of the word so sow in the bible and he was giving a lecture to college students think universe so these would be people 18 19 20 years old sauna and he stopped them he challenged them he read a very simple passage of the bible he said what does the word so mean here and none of them knew and none of them had questioned it so this is incredibly like elementary like you don't know what so sow means you know this is not we have a different noun in english we have sow so but like you know where where just your level of literacy is too limited to really take that on you know so the bible is i mean in some ways it's an unusually frustrating text for young people to read now you know look i'm giving advice for people i presume are stupider than myself we had a we had a comment here earlier which i assume was just meant as an insult saying that um quote i think you perceive yourself as a genius well look if i were making this video only addressing young men or a younger version of myself it would be totally different okay because i mean when i was a child i was able to read the bible and notice contradictions and problems in it that astonished my father and i was right i mean like well like years later i read scholarship that backed up like what i discovered was correct and i was just reading it and interrogating it in a genuinely skeptical and demanding way and i think on a very basic level looking at it as the work of human hands like look if this is written it's written intentionally and you know just comparing the four gospels like well this gospel says this and then you look at this other gospel and it has been intentionally changed to instead say that and my own father was very freaked out by that um but i was i was a child i'd have to remember i don't know if i was 11 years years old or what so i'm not saying this to insult you but i'm not giving advice to people like myself now we can get into the disadvantages i had as a young man too i didn't only have advantages but i have had to learn i mean i would love to think people have this stuff in common with me that they can read the bible at age 11 the way i did but i've learned it's not true i mean i've really seen it and i've seen that partly from helping others and talking to others you know now you know obviously i have this whole bizarre much more difficult to relate to experience with buddhist scholarship than the way people just did not see what the text was directly saying to you because they didn't want to see it as most people were middle-aged adults or elderly adults that was not talking to young people because there were no young people reading ancient buddhist texts so that's another kind of another kind of problem but you know uh i just say i'm being self-critical here this is not a humble brag but no i'm actually not giving advice to young men who would be my equals in this in this respect and look you know i mean and there are so many advantages and disadvantages that get that get rolled up into this um you know including just the quality of your eyesight you know i mean how well you can read you know you know it comes down to some kind of absurd absurdly simple uh things like this that differentiate one one person from another but you know when i was with one of my ex-girlfriends from the past i felt one of her disadvantages was just that she had incredibly low standards you know she didn't look at the bible and expect it to be brilliant and expect expected to be well written you know she didn't look at karl marx that way either when i read marx i i wonder if my mother still has the copy i read but when i read marx for the first time i was going through and circling everything wrong with it and i still stand by that decades later i was finding things wrong with marx and i was right there there were real problems in marx's desk avatar um but you know the point is when they're two very different books uh marxist desktops down in the bible but the point is i'm looking at this and this is supposed to be genius you know you know again sorry i can appeal to melissa she knows when i watch star wars i watch it that was like anything when i watch batman like i'm watching with these really high expectations and i'm looking at every word as being very intentionally placed in the text which you know it is that's the way to read the bible that's the way to read karl marx that's the way to watch star wars yeah oh yeah yeah but yeah even even this video now my choice of words is very deliberate and intentional i mean even though this is completely unedited i have no ability to change anything i've said still you know yeah i know i mean really understanding art and artifice and the relationship of the author to the page and the page to the reader and really that these things are so simple they rarely get get talked about but sure and then and then interrogating those texts with really high standards um that there are many advantages i had over other young men or young people but yeah i mean this is one that kind of cascades through many other aspects of the learning experience that when you talked about watching star wars for example yes many people like to get swept up into a story and that's what they enjoy about reading that's what they enjoy about watching movies right that is something that i see it's a different process going on yes when you were analyzing something yeah well i think the disturbing thing is to reflect on what does it really mean to be swept up so you know um so you're talking about the bible as an example here the bible is an emotionally moving text you can get swept up in reading the gospel you can read you can read all four gospels in one day it's not very long but you can read at least you can read one gospel all day it really doesn't do everyone okay what does it mean to be swept up in reading the gospel so like you know i can say this the first time i read the gospels i was emotionally had an emotional impact on me it did however i noted i mean the first time i read it i noticed the uh passage about the olive tree where jesus says if a tree doesn't bear fruit out of season you should just pray to god to destroy it and god will blight it and smite it from the face of the earth it's totally absurd it's totally ridiculous remember that and i can ask you do you remember that where jesus walks past a tree and he curses it for not bearing fruit out of season right and you can look at that right away and you can say the text does not make sense now the reason it doesn't make sense is it's because it's an allegory that is not translated the real meaning is not literal the whole the whole gospel is not something that literally happened none of it's intended to be recording of historical events but the problem is what the is wrong with you if you read that text and you didn't notice that like that's the problem is you you should be every single one of these things you should be catching on you should realize you know you should be really holding this every word has been placed there intentionally you can't look at that as if oh it's just happenstance it just so happened that on his way to the temple one day jesus passed a tree and he wished he could take some fruit from it but it was out of season so he cursed the tree and then they go to the temple and then we left the temple the tree was blighted because god had destroyed it like god had destroyed this because he prayed for it and jesus says yeah you should do that that's a really any time any time a tree pisses you off from being fruit not bearing fruit at us you should just have god blow it up for you or destroy it like well you know the reason why it doesn't make any sense is because it's just some that happen no so you know but this is my point you know no i could give examples from karl marx but another one that's that's was obvious to me on first reading was uh the misattribution of the the ten commandments and the story of moses and millions of people read the story of moses every year and they don't realize that the king james translation the the captions and the headings they are lying about the ten commandments but what are the ten commandments in that story maybe somewhat longer things up but i read it the first time i was like i noticed that immediately on first oh yeah but that's not the thing commandments that's several pages later why why is everyone quoting this is the thing comments clearly it's explicit in the text a different passage is telling you the ten commandments this is uh right anyway i don't believe that i don't believe that okay you know soon but my point is here i'm actually not giving advice to people like me i'm not giving advice for people who can be to that extent and auto diet act teach themselves totally and probably those people i mean well okay i would have benefited from the advice but i'm just saying i'm actually giving advice for people with the assumption that they don't have the advantages you know i had and look there's danger involved okay there is dude we got a great company vegan gains is streaming video games right now we're missing okay guys all right we have 33 people in the audience if you want to leave and go watch richard play video games right now vegan games so if this conversation is less useful go watch vegan gains please play a simulation of shooting people in the head you know again again um anyway i'm sorry i've i've lost i've lost the train of thought i had uh before that uh delightful distraction oh right this is what i was gonna say there is a risk okay uh let's say you're talking about a 16 year old and i mean 16 year olds are rational right but they're easily swayed they're easily overwhelmed they're easily brainwashed if you hand a 16 year old a copy of the quran what's going to happen what if you hand 10 000 16 year olds copy the ground and i remember even within judaism you know when i was growing up you saw this happening in toronto you know some percentage of teenagers who were part of secular modern jewish families would commit to like hyper orthodox super fundamentalist judaism because they were being handed these sacred texts like they listen to their parents to some extent but at some point they decide hey this book knows better than you mom and dad and they become fundamentalists they become extremists people can read the quran and it ruins their lives tons of examples people can read the gospel and everyone thought even if it's just for five years or ten years right you get swept up in it what does it mean to be swept up in it right um and karl marx is the ultimate example i mean it's unbelievable to me how many people let the reading of karl marx ruin their lives and i mean dash capital at its core is a completely dry and boring thesis about economics um which is it's 101 it's high school level economics but still that destroys people's lives so again i'm i'm not really able to give advice to you here like if you're a young man watching this with which the assumption that you're the same kind of young man i was because i read all this stuff with these very high standards the very strong sense of my own will and motivation with a very strong sense that i was the equal to karl marx that i was the equal to the men who had written the bible you know karl marx is an author i am an author this is a book you know that's it there's nothing else you know what i mean there's no magic there and you know it says the buddhist monks who wrote ancient buddhist scriptures they were men um i believe a few women it's a good question were any women actually involved in writing the pali canon maybe uh probably it was all written down by men but anyway there were a few female voices recorded in the pelican there are a few speak spoken parts or women there's a predominantly male uh profession um you know but just really seeing it in that radically egalitarian way um the equality of authors you know as opposed to you know regarding this as a hallowed and unquestionable uh authority you know and by the way you know if you read karl marx a lot of it very directly and emote in an emotionally transparent way reflects what was going on in his life so if you guys haven't read marks you don't know this that's probably the best part of his writing is that you get a sense of what's going on in his life as a struggling intellectual and author and you know he's he's messing around trying to be a labor union organizer but he can't really do it and stuff you know i mean you get a sense of when you know with this period he's living in france and then he's living in uh england and so on i'm sorry i forget if he actually lived differently he spoke french fluently but he moved from germany to england yeah you just get that very human human sense but anyway likewise you know uh you know talk about mohandas gandhi or something he was a guy he became a lawyer he went into politics looking at that fundamentally human and egalitarian way is a is a big shift in perspective but i have to give advice for people and i know there's danger here and a lot of people can't do what i did and a lot of people if they took the same risks that i did their lives would be we have some people here who support the assassination of jfk i'm not entirely surprised well i hope i live long enough to see how the perception of jfk changes just i'm just responding to some miscellaneous comments here about it uh but you know obviously there was this one film made by oliver stone that um you know changed the way the whole world you know saw this and you know uh anyway but i hope i live long enough to see oliver stone's influence evaporate because that film was its own kind of mythology so anyway mateo uh thanks me and donates ten dollars thanks mateo this will be the the most profitable day for my channel in the whole month my channel generates a few dollars a day but hey it's it's better than playing video games it's better than going skiing it's better than a whole lot of other things uh i don't know how much you get into this sat12 asks quote what if you designed a philosophy video game um okay sorry i i kind of feel it would be a whole different video to get into the educational potential of video games what i'll say is this um it's interesting to talk about hypothetically how educational video games could be but it's really more important to talk about the total lack of educational value in the reality of what video games actually are you know now beyond that um [Music] you know i know most people are very uncomfortable talking about this stuff but the sexuality that's displayed in video games um just the depiction of women in skin type you know attire in a game like the street fighter series of games this is a powerful erotic effect on young men and you know we can go back to my generation talk about street fighter ii we can talk about um uh bare-knuckle also known as streets of rage like you know we're really the number of pixels is so few like this is an erotic drawing that's made up of just a few points of light on a screen and you can look at games like street fighter v now my point is not that these are the most sexually salacious games they're not these are precisely the games that parents think are are harmless well you know this is erotic imagery that young men are looking at again and again and again you're seeing over many hours and you're seeing the same animations repeated thousands of of times um and you know i do have this very accurate memory going back into my childhood i can remember very fleeting erotic images that i saw you know as a boy that really had a big had a big impact on me so you know um [Music] do you want to talk about some of the hypothetical or do you want to talk about science actual you know is it possible to design a video game that would help you learn a foreign language yes nobody's ever done it and nobody's doing it and it may sound like a preposterous claim but for for decades i've tried to find video games that would help me practice language and you know aside from the crudest type of memorization card game i've bought some i think i have one still on the hard drive of this computer they have paid money for this kind of search and i searched for many different languages to see who was doing software and i've spoken to software developers and i've spoken to people in universities and so like to say like there's a real total failure to produce educational videos oh we own we own the only language education games for the nintendo 3ds 2ds ds library incredibly few and i went through all of them you know there's there's like french tutor and chinese tutor so you know okay there's a kind of footnote here if you want to talk about the educational potential of video games but let's not let that footnote distract from the the reality of what video games are in our lives um it just isn't the justification for for somebody else so we had some more questions asking to talk further about karl marx guys we did do videos on that in the past or i did sorry i say we because melissa was kind of involved spiritually you might say uh with those videos but i remember i made a video talking about marks and um i got a playlist so that's uh that solves that problem okay there you go you guys can sort it out yeah the one about uh napoleon iii that's a really good one uh yeah you guys gonna have to go through and figure it out uh the french revolution not hegel created marxism yeah i think all that's pretty slow you've got a couple hours there anyway more than one hour of me talking about karl marx so as always i have to um i have to invoke youtubers privilege here and and show you that i've already made videos covering some of these topics so i have a lot of comments coming here i'm just trying to catch up before i uh return to the uh thread of what i'm saying and i appreciate your comments guys but obviously i can't respond to all of it not all of it is directly science uh okay so here's a question from javier javier asks quote do you think there is any value to understanding the chemistry of the brain while playing video games or any dopamine-related activities so as to be aware of what is happening so have you i'm gonna try to relate this to the overarching topic of the video but i think it's a genuinely interesting subject in itself um so i have a couple different books here oh you guys remember i did a review of this uh who did and who didn't kill martin luther king jr okay here's a book about jfk and here's a book about uh the milai massacre okay milan massacre a famous event in the history of vietnam okay so uh let's say i have you and your twin brother sit down and read these two books with some kind of advanced mri brain scanning activity i direct it at your head wait wait it doesn't matter if it's mri there are many different ways to scan brain activity okay what's the conclusion we're going to come to about which book you should read and how how would we possibly come to that conclusion on the basis of the analysis of how much dopamine activity is in your brain or how much his activity is in various lobes of your brain all right so the two levels of analysis are incompatible right now obviously i'm not saying that they're scanning activity in the brain is a completely irrelevant or completely useless form of research but you know there are still a few publications on paper i don't i don't see them for sale anywhere anymore but there are some publications that are just book reviews you know where the whole magazine is just reviews of new books coming up again i haven't seen them for sale for decades but the i've looked into it some of those still exist um what if you and i start a new magazine have you where we just review books based on the dopamine levels and brain scans of the person well they're written you could publish that you say okay oh here's this new book on the milai massacre and here are the chart readings you know chapter oh so chapter six you know his dopamine levels we're not going to be able to come to any conclusion about how rewarding this is or how well written it is or something like we can't draw the conclusions we want to draw about this topic through brain scans now again i'm just going to briefly expand on this to apply it to the top of this video talking about giving advice to young men about how to be an intellectual how to be a better person how to lead a meaningful life how to set yourself up to be in a in a position to be a better person when you get to be 30 40 50. uh 60 70. because i believe i'm not just interested in how good you look on instagram next month or six months from now let's really think about you know 100-year you know uh uh time frame here you know let's really think about how you're gonna live your life how are you gonna live and die you know the long-term value of what you're doing with your brain what you're what you're doing with your life you know um if we look at all the different activities in terms of dopamine levels in your brain in terms of what makes you happy or what makes you mentally active i'm sure you could come to a conclusion based on brain scale based on brain scan evidence young men need to be engaged in downhill skiing uh uh you know uh parachuting you know skydiving uh uh on uh coral deep sea spear fishing uh i remember i i didn't meet this guy i met a guy who met a guy who had gone shark wrestling i'd never heard of that before so it's where you you dive you're wearing dive equipment and you actually wrestle a shark in the yeah so this is something people pay money to do i i can imagine that would be very exciting i think i think it's not vegan um i've never heard about vegans protesting against shark wrestling um you know okay you know but but like the the judgments we're going to make can never be on that level now so javier so now i've spoke with this more broadly and talked about over a 10-year period or 20-year period what conclusions come to now let's let's talk about it very very narrowly um you know what is the significance in your life if for 10 years the main form of entertainment let's say for 10 years three hours a day you watch someone getting shot in the head again and again and again so i'm talking about first person shooter games but there are people who play those games like call of duty you know this this type of game which is really simulating you holding a gun and shooting someone in the head again and again and again and you know within one hour like you tell me how many shootings take place in these games you know and that is the main form of entertainment that is your literature that is the poetry of your life that is the shakespeare of your life is sitting and playing a game like call of duty or rainbow six you know for ten years it doesn't matter what brain chart you show me about dopamine activity in the brain like i'm completely conceding the point you could have a test subject who lives that way for 10 years they play video games this way and you can do the brain scans i know once a month you take brain scans and you show look this doesn't do any brain damage doesn't do any harm he has totally healthy brain function dopamine levels are good i i completely conceived that you know i think that's i have no claim that video games cause brain damage right in plain english the claim is the video games make you into an like that's the claim you know and and no matter how good a person you are after living your life that way for 10 years and you show me an example i mean i think most those guys are they're terrible people but if you show me an example someone who's a wonderful person despite playing video games this way for 10 years three hours a day every day for 10 years let's say which is not common sadly you know um think about how much better a person they could have been if instead for three hours a day they were reading books like this one non-fiction books challenging themselves learning and then let's say they were even coming on the internet like this and talking to wonderful people like you about these books and what they've been learning let's just add a social dimension to it or something you know we're never going to you know we're never going to come to any of those conclusions through brain scans you know so i i really very fundamentally think that the brain scan approach to video games is going down the wrong path it's the wrong kind of analysis it's the wrong kind of critique now babe do you want to hand me your book on uh antidepressants i'll just hold it up for something there you go okay um right here on this we have a lot of desks this relationship is rich in desks not so rich in beds we have three beds i don't know how many deaths we have and we have a lot of death space um [Music] okay i'm gonna challenge myself i'm gonna challenge you by just saying you know the critique of antidepressants the critique of prescription mind-altering drugs to what extent are we even going down the wrong path and trying to criticize those in terms of brain chemistry and brain damage because you see everyone ignores it everyone justifies it right so like even if you have brain scans that show that video games cause some kind of damage something like compared to cocaine it's never going to be that significant well we have brain scans showing that the harm cocaine does nobody quit cocaine nobody says oh well having examined the evidence having examined the mri evidence of how much damage they're going to quit okay but even these these drugs are much less entertaining than cocaine i mean you know ritalin okay maybe not ritalin people tell me ritalin's pretty close to cocaine but anyway you know cyprexa well you will butcher and clone a pen you know whatever any of these uh or the whole body of ssri drugs like prozac people okay i have never heard of a prostitute you know performing sex acts in order to have money so she can buy prozac you know it's it's not gratifying in the same way cocaine is but you know my point is if we can't get people to quit cocaine or prozac on the basis of that kind of hard evidence what is the point gonna be of engaging with with video games that way um and look you know with that kind of question and that kind of answer i hope i'm wrong wouldn't it be wouldn't it be so great if i were wrong wouldn't it be so wonderful if people just look at the charts look at the facts and say oh that's it gee we should all quit taking ssris we should hope you know and and by the way uh sorry so let's bring this back to another major theme in this video do you think you could convince someone to be an atheist do you think you could convince someone to quit prayer through brain scans through showing a scan of the brain this is what happens in your brain while you're engaged in prayer i don't i don't think you could i don't think anyone's going to jump on that i don't think that's going to change the world and you know there have been so many brain scans done about related to buddhist meditation you know and of course people interpret this in this ridiculous way to to try to justify and vindicate um buddhist meditation as a as a panacea you know so on and so forth um this is a rare case where people are really talking amongst themselves in the audience it's fine it just gives me a lot to read through when i try to catch up with you one person comments dopamine book reviews is a nice sales pitch okay babe do you want to jump into anything i'm going to take questions in the audience but you know [Laughter] um so look i i did intend this to be a short video and i'm happy to to wrap it up with this at this point um all right you know a big part of the role you have to play as an older and more experienced person is to tell younger inexperienced people about what it is they can't imagine and you know in some cases you're telling them look like if you join the army it's going to be worse than you can possibly imagine in this this and this way like you can't imagine how bad it's going to be because your only experience is going to high school well it's here are the ways in which it's worse than high school you haven't thought about this you know since that but sometimes you're telling young people younger people or more inexperienced people these things are going to be better in a way you can't possibly imagine now i have been saying through this whole video and it's the topic of the video that this is addressed this is advice addressed to young men you know what the tragedy is i give the same advice to people who are 50 years old you know you can be 50 years old and still at that first step of intellectual development and the odds are the reason why you got to age 50 and never went through that other intellectual development is because you have been playing video games you have been smoking marijuana you have been drinking beer you have been watching sports on television whether that be basketball or football or baseball you know you've been alive for 50 years you've been doing something but you haven't been learning you haven't been challenging yourself you haven't been you haven't been growing in this way um so the advice i'd give to a young man of 20 is in many ways shockingly similar to a man of 50 but it's harder for him to accept it's harder for him to reckon with it's harder for him to take seriously it's harder for him to look at what he's done with his life and there's a kind of sunk cost fallacy there well you put all this time into football can you admit to yourself that football was what's going on you put all this time into playing video games can you admit to yourself this was a waste of time there's something excuse me and again my my friend have been referring to the 25 year old in germany whether or not it's jealousy there are some people who are going to look at him and meet him and talk to him and feel like oh this is the person i could be this is what i could be doing with my life this is the kind of result of research and the life of the mind that i could have and instead whether whether they've been going to night clubs or sleeping with prostitutes or playing video games whatever they've been doing it's not the life of the mind there are many alternatives lifeline maybe they're doing downhill skiing i mean you know could be anything you know but they haven't been cultivating themselves and pressing forward in this in this kind of uh meaningful studious way so this same encounter and this same kind of uh uh confrontation between the examined life and the unexamined life um it can happen at any age at any stage of life and you know it's of course with great sadness if you have this reckoning at age 50 that you realize how many years you've got left how much of your own intellectual potential you have squandered and then you face the challenge of what can you do now how far can you go what what progress can you make and you know do you have the humility because let me tell you something i mean i was already an old man when i started learning chinese i started on page one chapter one with chinese worship like you know doing the abcs of chinese as an as an old man do you have the humility to start all over again i'm someone it's it's both a strength and a weakness but obviously in many ways i can appreciate the strength i've been forced to start again on page one chapter one of several totally different fields of study totally different areas of expertise and totally different languages again and again again and a lot of guys at age 50 they would rather just keep on playing video games or keep on watching sports or remain within the one field in which they feel some sense of self-confidence and power you know whatever that is like they're a veteran they're a vet they know how to cut the balls off a dog they feel like an expert when they're a vet they don't feel like taking off the jacket and recognizing that they're probably balefully ignorant of everything else you know politics history uh languages what have you you know that actually they're an embarrassingly ignorant unsophisticated person under every other possible heading except how to chop the balls off of somebody's pet cocker spaniel you know so um [Music] you know what that haven't been said if you're talking to a 50 year old vet they do still have some part of their life they can feel confident about they have some area where they are accomplished so that may make them more willing to face up to embrace encounter challenge the unknown to take on you know whether it's the history of india the history of vietnam the history of china or you know the history within the united states of america that may be very disturbing to them re-examining who jfk really was what are some it may be that the sense of strength and power they have in one area of expertise and maybe they've done some research you know within being a vet or something you know that that will enable them to do it and when you're talking to someone who's only 20 years old again really it's like 18 all the way up like 23 frankly when you're talking to younger people who don't have this kind of experience if they haven't been extremely exceptional self-confident auto-didactic intellectuals with most young people um you're talking to someone who has no sense of power no sense of strength no sense of expertise anywhere and that's why you know they break down crying a lot i mean there's a lot of real suffering and sorrow um in these intellectual encounters you know there are people who obviously feel like they already know uh karl marx and they're let's say a 20 year old who already feels very confident that they're a marxist that they're a socialist you know etc and then you reveal to them that they don't know anything about marx a great example is what i said before about gandhi they're people who feel very strongly they know who gandhi was they know what his philosophy was and for example they might be a young person who's interested in yoga and they eat a vegan diet and they're an activist and they're interested in animal rights and and global warming this is their combined set of interests and then you tell them some things that completely challenge completely ruin the image of mohandas gandhi that had their minds and and there's a kind of collapse you know someone the 50 year old vet i keep saying vet i don't mean veteran i mean a veterinary scientist a veterinary doctor but you know the 50 year old vet he may at least have a source of confidence that he can retreat to he may feel more more able to challenge and change and discard you know old assumptions and when you are talking to younger people very often you will see them completely emotionally collapse even when it's something that isn't it isn't their religion like they aren't hindu they don't worship mohammed's gandhi they don't regard him as their own religious leader but they're it's so it's such an unexpected challenge for them to recognize that everything they know was wrong even in an area like that which their ego wasn't directly connected to uh that they break down crying that they crumble that it's a it's a life-changing shattering thing to recognize their own ignorance and realize how much work they have to do whether you're talking about marxism you're talking about the bible you're talking mohanuskani and i've i've certainly seen that i've i've seen that um i could tell various specific stories but even people who were at the end of their phds people who had a phd or they were in the last year of their phd studies where i say something that really totally challenges their assumptions and worldview and i'm not just being provocative i really do know what i'm talking about and they have to realize the extent to which they are in fact a beginner in the very field they thought themselves to be experts you wanna say something good it's a great time we were in thailand together that's a good example go on yeah [Music] yeah yeah there was an older gentleman who was talking about buddhism he had no idea that an expert of buddhism some of you might know this guy he was a very big muscular uh white guy i would not say he was a bodybuilder i don't know what sport he did but he had a lot of muscle on him he was a very physically imposing guy um he couldn't do gardening for all i know he could build up your arms like he didn't look like a bodybuilder he was a big imposing white guy living in chiang mai he's a vegan activist and he's married to a thai woman yeah yeah do you want to say more one yeah it's just interesting for me to reflect on that that's one where you saw it that's right yeah yeah he didn't break down the crime no and and he was about 50 he was more than 50 years old he was at that point where i think that he could handle himself when somebody confronted him in a situation like this whereas right probably younger men okay i feel that he uh i feel he uh so here's an off topic william mcgeeham says gandhi had a great name that's why people revered him and he showed some emojis joking you're wrong william you're wrong in india the name gandhi means green grocer means grocery store manager it's a common name yeah it's not in case you know george washington washing ton think about what that name becomes familiar and you forget oh he his ancestors would wash clothes for a living but no gandhi he did not get a heck cuz he had a catchy name unlike me i get it i get ahead of the basis of mine if you if you google isil mazard i'm the only guy with search results my name were john smith i'd be at a great disadvantage um yeah you know i feel so this encounter that happened in thailand this was this guy and we'll set the stage a little bit it was something like a monthly meeting of vegan activists and these were white english-speaking vegan activists there were thai active there were different different types of vegan activists but these were white western uh people living in thailand who are involved in this kind of activism so melissa and i show up and one of the strange things about the guy was he didn't know who i was other people did it was revealed they didn't make a big deal of it but the the younger people there they all knew who i was um i'm famous within that sphere but this this white guy he was completely accustomed to being the big imposing important presence and de facto leader of these meetings i have no objection to that but he was very very accustomed to um uh repeating the same kind of catchphrases um the same kind of uh thought terminating cliches about buddhism and how buddhism you know supported veganism and then he was sitting there you know with someone like me in the room and then what i recall is i came close to our modern ideal of uh socratic method which is not the actually historically true historic uh cigarette but it's not what the real socrates was historically but the way we think of scrimmage or you know i was just i would just said a few words i mean if you were really paying attention to my posture and tone of voice you could tell i knew a lot more than i was right but but how do you know that yeah but have you have you actually read the ancient text you're according to you know where that comes from like really kind of short questions like this and i feel that he basically responded by kind of shutting down um like you know so shutting down means differently but but he he didn't make eye contact he kind of looked away and was kind of looking down and he was like well yeah that's a good point and kind of pressing like he was kind of repeatedly and i was i was looking forward and i'm completely no no let's you know i understand why you say that but you know buddhism is based on written ancient texts so do you know what it is you're have you actually read that do you know what you're going you know like anyway buddhism is a very strange religion that way because the vast majority of buddhists have never read the equivalent to the bible they don't know the text you know and uh oh yeah right but if and you know you make another grandiose claim about buddhism here but if that were true then this would also be true right have you noticed this do you know do you know what language those texts were written you know and i mean eventually i mean he really was not willing to have the conversation he was like yeah i was a scholar of pali do you know what pally is that's the language yeah i've written i've written an article about that do you remember and uh you know maybe i'm wrong i often perceive other people as being larger than there i remember him being bigger than me just physically um but if i'm wrong it's just because i'm i'm often generous in actually estimating other people's size we were all sitting down not standing up but he he seemed to take up more space at the at the table than myself uh it could also just be that i was sitting in a more humble kind of posture because indeed i wasn't i wasn't a i wasn't the host or something i wasn't i wasn't in charge of the meeting but it seemed as if i was the smaller presence uh physically but yeah um you know what i said it was not just challenging his authority it was really undermining his assumptions about what he knew and what he thought he knew yeah and how you would know it and it was really demonstrating to him look you you're talking about this as if you're you're preaching sort of familiar set of tenets and conclusions about veganism and buddhism buddhism and animal rights and he obviously had given exactly the same lecture again and again and again to both thai people and white people he was saying that he said well this is what i tell other activists he was he was indicating this is something he said again again and i was indicating to him no you are still at step one you are actually you're a false beginner but you were actually just so yeah that was that kind of situation right as i recall it was a kind of pet talk about how to spread veganism he he was talking about what he tells the activists he worked with and to his credit he you know he had married a thai woman and he spoke some thai so it included anecdotes about how he tries to motivate those people anyway this is um this is uh yeah you might think that he would have nothing to gain from studying some other unrelated good point no but that's exactly what he lacks right okay like look you know um in german we have these weird terms like uh fremdog's effect you know in english if you say estrangement it has a negative connotation if you say detachment nobody knows what you mean including the buddhist concept of detachment but you know that guy i mean what surprised me was that neither during the meeting nor after he was not capable of learning from me like he was not even capable of making an economy and talking to me saying oh that's interest i'd like to hear more or i'd like to read your article because i told him i've written an article on exactly that topic the history of vegetarianism within buddhism the fact that the buddha was not vegetarian the buddha did eat meat etc you know i'm sorry his whole world view was totally false he knew nothing about this but he was not able to learn from me he wasn't even able to like express curiosity no that's right he was incapable of curiosity he was incapable of open-mindedness you know so on and so forth you know now whether you talk about that in terms of detachment or not i do think you know the type of curiosity the type of detachment you can build that up exactly by doing research on things you are estranged from you know like if you researched the history of the china-india border conflict if you had been through that process of debunking mahatma gandhi you had been through the process of debunking jfk like there can be a constellation of various mutually isolated unrelated research processes where you get familiar with what it's like to be wrong yourself like oh wow i feed it this way now i realized i'm totally wrong i realize now how this assumption you know led to this set of assumptions and even though the first assumption was was half true you know what that led to was a you know totally false like you you've gotten used to criticizing yourself you know kind of overcoming your own misconceptions and you've gotten used to overcoming others like you know melissa's been doing a research project on the history of central asia but even if you look at the research you did about the history of greece or something like you may not realize how biased and wrong the first book you read on that topic was until you've read the third of the fourth book you know oh now i realize the first book i read it was totally misleading me i mean socrates is a great example most people are burdened with this totally false notion of who socrates was and why he matters uh historically i could say the same about aristotle frankly you know mostly there's a kind of mythology and people don't even realize that what they know is a myth and they may have heard it from high school teachers they may have heard at university and then at what point does that crack and you realize oh wow like the first book i read about this or might have just been a chapter of a book it might be one paragraph in a book might have been one paragraph in your high school history book now i realized that that misled me and by the way for me personally something like the french revolution it's like that again and again like the first several books and articles i read about the french revolution i can now realize the way in which they were wrong in themselves and the way in which they misled me because it's partly me like i read that article and i take it in this direction you know but yeah no no no no i mean this issue of doing research with all kinds of unrelated things where you have detachment yeah and the way that then enables you when when maybe something you really care about you know and so it's really attached to your own identity you think you have a kind of uh uh expertise about veganism and about uh yeah the connection between vegetarianism and buddhism and vegan activism and you know the buddhist philosophers you feel very confident about this and then someone steps up and says hey you actually don't know what you're talking about you're you're completely wrong you know the way to prepare for that the way to have some some basis you know it's not even necessarily doing research on buddhism but it's having that kind of research background where you've really built up in this very particular sense some depth of character yeah um and no i think that's fair to say about that guy he was a guy who was very used to being in charge and very used to going unquestioned probably just because of his size and you know let's be real too i mean it depends what kind of movement you're leading with veganism also most people just don't question the people in charge they have good you're trying to save animals it's not the same as questioning does this guy really know how to operate a crane on a construction site you know like does this guy really know how to build a brick wall you really know what you're doing you know but you know when you're just trying to motivate people to help save the animals or something most people are not going to really do you know what do you really know what you're talking about right but as you know i have about a hundred or 500 videos doing what exactly what the heart is and very often the advice vegans give whether it's about nutrition or anything else nutrition or buddhism or anything else it is it is uh uh profoundly wrong yeah um you know associates we're talking a lot about detachment here we're talking about estrangement um you know it's so sad i mean i really can just use the simple word sad it's so sad to me that people will make the right decision for someone else but make the wrong decision for themself again and again and again people are inclined to be self-indulgent but they're not indulgent of others they're demanding of others and have high standards for others so you know um hey james i could pick anyone in the audience uh hey mateo i got i got news mateo um you know when your mother was pregnant with you before you were born there was an extra set of cells kept at the hospital there was an embryo identical to your own at the hospital as part of this fertility treatment clinic and they took that embryo and they implanted it in another woman so there's an identical twin to you there's a genetic duplicate of you but it was just born yesterday you got to come pick up the baby you have to raise your own clone you have to raise your own twin you have to be a parent to someone who is genetically identical to you who was born yesterday well you know the best way to raise this child is to have them smoke marijuana play video games watch sports on tv like what would you do for someone else what is the good life you would want other people to lead when you even have this little bit of detachment what is the life you want other people to be leading it's you know strangely the excuses you make for yourself don't come into it you're saying like oh well i want this child like normally the way people would respond to that challenge is i want this child to have all the advantages i didn't have like you know you look back at your own childhood you realize how many hours you lost playing video games and you realize well i want to provide this child with a much better education with a much better upbringing i want to give them everything i lacked in this presumably in this in this intellectual sense you presumably are not going to focus on making this child as as self-indulgent as as humanly possible or you know again we had the question about brain scans you're not going to try to give this child the highest dopamine levels possible you're going to try to enable them to lead a meaningful life and to have all the advantages of what you've learned you know through through your own life you know um [Music] you know and and you you can meet people and there are a lot of stupid people in the world there are a lot of malicious people you can meet people who would say no um they would instead encourage their child to play even more video games and they play themselves their clone their their identifical twin there are people who say oh no if they had this child they'd help them enjoy life even more by sitting them down on the couch and saying hey look i've already played these video games but now you get you get to use my same video geek like you get to get stuck into you know the same video games i enjoy but but you get to play to be more because when i grew up my mom would only let me play after i'd finish my homework but not you kid because i am you i'm the older version of you so i know how much you want to play these video games i'm going to do your homework for you when you come home from school you get to sit and play video games you get to dribble i'll do the homework don't worry about it because i know how much i was you once so i like okay so you you know you meet someone like that and then you know you can have a further degree of of estrangement we say okay what about a police officer what kind of person do you want to be the police officer making life into death decisions over you what about joe biden what about george w bush what kind of education what kind of preparation do you want those people that and you know the most terrifying thing in the world is to live in a society where the police are drug addicts whether those police are addicted to cocaine methamphetamine heroin you know video games sorry but it's true do you want a police officer do you want a governor do you want a dictator do you want a president do you want a prime minister uh who's living that unexamined life and if not who who do you want to have power over you sometimes the power of life and death making these terrible decisions oh well i want someone who's totally sober highly intellectual devoted to the life of the mind someone who has read aristotle and thucydides and someone who oh yeah we talk about this a lot learning the lessons of history how are you going to learn you know i i hate people on the left i hate left wingers this oh yeah i'm going to learn because i've seen an instagram meme about the milai massacre i've learned the lessons of history i know what went wrong in the vietnam war because i saw a meme about it on instagram or on facebook and i gave it the thumbs up i gave it the red heart you know no if you're going to learn the lessons of history you have to actually learn the lessons of history and that may include reading an article that criticizes this book and points out the ways in which it's wrong by the way it's not just reading one book or you might read this and then later you realize the ways in which this misled you or you know you maybe realize the way you the way in which your view of the world was wrong before you read this book and years later you might realize the way in which you were wrong you know at the time when you had read this book you know like going through this process of challenging yourself and growing oh that's the kind of person i'd want to be a police officer that's the kind of person i want to be the president or the prime minister well then what do you want to do with yourself because i hate to tell you this mateo but if you go to the hospital i lied to you there is no newborn baby for you to raise there is not a clone of you waiting at the hospital if you like you do not have a twin brother to raise you don't but you know what you've got is you you've got this life you've got this one person you can control and influence and you know there may be a small number of other people who love you enough or respect you enough that you could really influence them also right and then why not hold yourself to those high standards or higher you know i i saw you guys saw this on my channel too it's a really good video i hope more people see it but i have this video that has just a few brief clips of the police in miami miami florida um it's called believing in your dreams colon worse than islam so if you watch that they're just a few moments of the police uh in miami and i feel so much contempt for these police and they should i mean we need to change a lot about policing in the united states of america but you know the police are talking to this guy as if they're gangsters not as if he's a gangster as if they themselves the police are trying to sound tough and intimidating and uneducated they're trying to sound like their high school dropouts you know it's so inappropriate and i mean i know people normally present this in terms of racism it doesn't matter if the person you're talking to is black and it doesn't matter if they're white you know don't call him boy you know call him sir you know you know or mr stevenson or whatever his name is you know what i mean like don't call him boy don't ins you know it's so deeply inappropriate what they're doing and it's in a position in that particular clip where they do have their hands on their guns they are in the midst of using you know deadly force you know potentially deadly force you know to to arrest someone you know it's so deeply inappropriate so watch that i just watched a short clip of the police doing this in order to put together this video since there have been other times and i've watched large amounts of police footage and by the way i have seen footage of police being courteous and appropriate and hold themselves to a much higher standard of kind but like when i look at that i can't help but feel there is this higher standard i have to hold the police to right but how can i even feel that way how can i even talk that way if there isn't a higher standard still to which i hold myself right and that's that's what we're dealing with as a society on a massive scale and on an intimate scale is that people are indulgent of themselves they're self-indulgent but they're not indulgent of others they're demanding of others and they're not not demanding themselves why because fundamentally they regard other human beings in loco parentis they look at other people as if those other people are going to take care of them oh police officer you're the grown-up i'm the child take care of me oh doctor psychiatrist psychotherapist you know take care of me other people will do my thinking for me other people will be virtuous for me so i don't have to be virtuous myself and the adult perspective on the world is instead no no homie it's all on you nobody is going to be a grown up for you nobody's if you're growing up instead of you right like nobody's gonna act on your behalf nobody's gonna think on your behalf nobody's gonna solve global warming on your behalf it's you and if not you then who as soon as you start living that way as soon as you start thinking that way you know what you can play video games for five minutes you can play video games for five minutes let me tell you if it's been half an hour if it's just been 30 it's gnawing away at you bro it's no way because you have better things to do you have and this is not guilt this is not like catholic guilt where you imagine there's an angel judging you where there's a god judging no no no no no no no no you have an awareness of a direct feeling for your intellectual potential you know what you could be doing with your brain positively and productively right now you feel your potential and you don't need someone else to criticize you you know that you're squandering it you