The Art of Quitting Video Games & Motivating Others to Quit.

this is not a live stream about quitting
video games so much as it is a live stream talking about giving advice on youtube that nobody wants to hear including coming on youtube and encouraging people to quit video games encouraging people to lead a more meaningful life and uh i've got an email from a fellow youtuber called valshimanov and that's the name of his youtube channel his name his name is youtube channel i've mentioned him before my channel i've shown clips before and i've given a link to his channel before you'll get a link uh in the description of this very video while this live stream is ongoing if you want to see who i'm talking about he has a rather fetching beard and he speaks english with a with a heavy accent well you sent me an email that i'm going to read out to you here in just a moment i think something most people aren't consciously aware of is that what the vast majority of successful people are doing on youtube is not preaching against something but preaching for something even if what it is they're preaching for is abominably shallow and crass and stupid um the most successful channels dealing with veganism are not the ones that tell you to be vegan they are instead channels that just show off hey here's a beautiful woman in a bikini and there's some implicit level on which this woman is getting it across or letting it be known that the way she maintains her figure the reason why she looks so good in a bikini is because she eats a vegan diet i as you can guess i do not approve of this kind of content i do not watch this kind of content myself and it's very easy to come on youtube thousands of people do this every year to see that kind of success story and then think oh me too i can also put on a bikini i can also put on this kind of performance and i will also have wealth fame money the adoration of the masses now the way i use youtube is very different from other people i'm very often searching for something quite specific that i want to use in a youtube video or just something i'm interested in in real life like lately i've searched within youtube for like los angeles harbor or like you know los angeles vegan restaurant near the harbor or something assumptive just search for something very specific within youtube and that will turn up in the search results examples of channels that in this way were pursuing mainstream success and that had all of the obvious physical and aesthetic features that would bring about this kind of mainstream success and that nevertheless completely failed so you know i could try to remember what it was i was searching for under under different headaches but uh just yesterday there was one channel and the the woman on camera was completely gorgeous blonde in the prime of her life and the only video she had that had any views at all was one of these try on haul videos where the thumbnail was showing her like 90 naked try on and you know yeah a small percentage of the viewers who click on that are interested in the clothes you're wearing i think you know these women they talk about the clothes they've been buying and a large percent of them are men who are interested looking at your your largely naked body i i don't know i don't know why anyone does this on youtube i mean is it people who are like at the office and like their their boss at work only lets their computer go to certain types of websites because if you want to look at naked women on the internet there are websites other than youtube they're devoted to that but it seems there's still a huge huge mark of this but it was a completely gorgeous young woman and um uh you know there were palm trees in the background sort of all the all the shallow things you associate with uh with the successful youtube channel and she has a boyfriend and the boyfriend has exactly the kind of beard that's in fashion in 2021 this sort of you know fashionable beautiful couple and i would assume they are consciously rather than unconsciously imitating the success of other youtube channels and other other instagram uh models or what have you and the videos on this channel had 11 views 22 views 50 views like video by video this was not even successful amongst you know your this person's own friend group uh because you know your friends and family and people you've known on facebook for 20 years or something those add up to quite a few views if you're kind of a normal person who's been on social media since the day you were born which in 2021 is is most people uh you know my my point here being that um the vast majority of successful youtube channels are not preaching sobriety are not preaching hard work are not preaching quitting video games right they're just showing you a beautiful person climbing a mountain or a beautiful person uh swimming in the ocean on vacation in the azores islands or whatever the example is they're showing you beautiful people doing beautiful things and then at some point there's a hook where they try to sell you their their lifestyle package they try to rope the audience into to imitating them right now there's a much smaller number of uh youtube channels that are instead giving an explicitly negative message and now that message takes many forms but it might be for example someone saying that hey they used to be an alcoholic don't be an alcoholic don't waste your life the same way they did someone coming on camera saying they used to be a drug addict someone coming on camera saying they used to be a video game addict or someone coming on camera and just saying hey they squandered positive opportunities in their life because of what it was they were doing once in a while i've seen hit videos which is someone just coming on talking about how he ruined his life by cheating on his girlfriend you know once in a while you see this where it's an explicitly negative message saying don't be like me and then there's the hook right then there's the hook is instead imitate my my positive uh lifestyle the number of successful examples of that the number of examples that find an audience is very small and again you can search for it i often do you can search within youtube for any particular topic like that you're going to find the vast majority of those or videos that only reach that person's own friends and family that reach this very very small uh you know audience so just say this is you know part of the overall insanity of social media is that even if the message you have to deliver is fundamentally negative if you are giving advice that nobody wants to hear most you are doing it by packaging it in a form or it seems like it's presenting you with something you do want to hear right i mean fundamentally outside of a religious context it's very very hard to gather an audience to keep an audience or to earn money out of commanding the attention of an audience by telling people that they things that they don't want to hear and i think all of us no matter what culture you're from you're influenced by the pulpit you're influenced by the religious format of preaching and by the way i used to be a scholar of buddhism i am not just talking about christian culture i'm not just talking about muslim culture or jewish culture growing up in a buddhist context you grew up in a place like thailand or something too you are familiar with preaching you were familiar with what it is to have people you know trying to trying to change your change your way of living yeah i remember i knew on i think i've told this story before five years ago or something i knew one very passionate but very stupid uh buddhist monk who spoke english with a with a thick accent and that's what he was saying oh you gotta change your way on living everything he said in english was grammatically wrong but it was very passionate it was very sincere and he would always remember he wouldn't tell people to stop eating meat he would say oh you cut meat you cannot cut meat you have to stop cutting me and i don't know if it was intentional i don't know if his mind is a buddhist monk it was the act of cutting meat that caused bad karma rather than eating meat but the his episode was to cut meat was an evil act as opposed to buying it or eating it you know oh no you gotta change your way of living you cut meat oh you drink alcohol [Laughter] now sorry just to close the loop on on that even in the buddhist context of men wearing buddhist robes allegedly living in celibacy allegedly eating only two meals per day you know they're different strictures and buddhism allegedly never wearing shoes it's very controversial in each buddhist country depending on which monastic order you sign up with the rules for when you can and cannot wear shoes are different but it's interesting it's not that interesting another one is actually whether or not you shave your eyebrows that's the difference between the different disorders do you just shave your head or do you shave your eyebrows also you'll notice these things the buddhist monks distinguish themselves you know so people who are in the know could tell oh i could i can tell you with the cm nikaya because you shave your eyebrows you can tell which which monastic word there was um once you get involved in buddhism you may be shocked and horrified at the extent to which it operates very much like youtube instagram social media i was shocked really shocked when i saw a particular poster in thailand for the first time which was a buddhist monk he was a very skinny old man in a robe and he was literally pouring out a bag full of gold coins and what it said in thai approximately was like basically like if you pray to me or if you worship me you will never lack money like you'll always have plenty of money this is just just you see this completely shamelessly in in buddhism in thailand just straight up if you donate money to the buddhist church you'll get rich like donate money to buddhist monks and magically the good karma will come back to you and and you'll get wealthy um you know remember a sermon that i heard it's not worth telling the whole story i wasn't in the temple but a lot of temples they have a microphone and loudspeakers and sermon was just like oh you know uh people say they're too busy to come to the temple and you know but if you you know if you come to the temple and you do meditation and you do prayer and you donate money to the to the temple you know good good things will happen to you you'll get money you'll get rich you'll find a new beautiful woman yeah this kind of promise of good karma bring good things into your life so yeah i mean down to and including getting laid like improve your sex life look better in a bikini through buddhist virtue you would be surprised and you might be appalled at the extent to which you know even in a buddhist monastic context things start to resemble the social media influencers method okay so just to say a little bit about val this guy valerie shimanov he is doing youtube videos in his second language you can imagine how much harder it would be for me to record youtube videos in chinese or in french or in german in any language in english but if you can put up with his accent he does have some interesting ideas here and there in these videos and he's giving a consistently negative message he talks about the ways in which his own past playing video games ruined his life and then he talks about positively why you have to quit video games you know the importance of quitting videos the mentality of the video game addict and how to overcome it to give you an example that i thought was really meaningful and i drew my girlfriend's attention to it and then i played it he had an observation in a recent video where he just said you know people who play video games tell themselves that they're building up their problem-solving skills you know that they're learning how to solve problems they're making themselves more intelligent or more effective people through through problem solving but in real life you don't have these kinds of predefined problems where there's a right and a wrong answer or there's one way out of the maze you know the type of problems you're facing in video games in a really profound way profound and not necessarily obvious way they're totally different from the way problem solving works in real life anyway he doesn't say a lot more about that he says this brief observation that um no the problem-solving skills you're practicing video games are radically incompatible with problem solving anyway i i paused the video and i said to melissa i said to my girlfriend here i said it's so true you know in real life your problem is like you're sitting on the couch with your boyfriend and you're unhappy and you don't know why you know you're waking up and going to your job and you hate your job and you don't know what the problem is and you don't know what to do about it like you you whatever you wake up and you you have a pile of books you haven't read or something like there's there's no particular problem with a particular solution in life you want to jump in yeah i was just going to say yesterday i was watching a walkthrough of an old nes game it was literally just like you have to follow the circle the right well you know i remember saying to my my old friends i had a friend named jamie smith he's now a university professor i've invited him to come on the channel and he never will he's the guy who knew me when i was a kid i've always thought that would be interesting i don't know if you guys would too i mean thumbs up if you think that would be interesting i think it would be interesting for me to be in a dialogue with like via skype presumably wouldn't be someone who knew me before all this [ __ ] i mean before i had a shaved head even you know what i mean before someone who knew what a scumbag i was before you know before i got in the path of righteousness in my ebook [Laughter] before i became fully enlightened as you can be too for 1999 before i started doing 200 push-ups a day buy my ebook learn how to do 200 push-ups today eat my diet do my push-up regimen anyway uh i remember talking to my my friend and uh my my ex-friend he was we were friends while we were kids this was uh after i had finished my ba but he hadn't finished his yet so toward the end of the university time period um and uh he said something positive about some video game he was addicted to at the time i told civilization four or so whatever some video game at that time it was some video he wasn't ashamed of playing that's why i suggested a civilization iv because it was one of those games as opposed to oh yeah pictures of women with big breasts bouncing up and down which is a lot of video games but i think it was something slightly more erudite that he didn't feel embarrassed saying he was addicted to and uh but anyway he mentioned a couple video games he'd been addicted to in recent years and i said at that time i was playing no video games at all video games were not a part of my life at all whereas today they have a small part of my life partly because i have a daughter blah blah and um i said to him you know this whole process of playing a video game it's just like a lion tamer holding up a hoop and saying jump through the hoop and then the next level they're holding the hoop a little higher or the whole little further away or now there are two hoops for you to jump through but this this issue of you know problem solving these predefined problems and what was interesting so this is for me this is not a very interesting observation like of course it's obvious a video game is created by a human being as a series of problem-solving challenges like a human being is in the position of a lion theme right what was interesting to me was that he was completely baffled about this he had never thought of using what what do you mean like he really was shocked to hear this this was totally alien to totally different from his his way of thinking about video games and about his own life you know but anyway the next phase of that argument the point i was raising with the question is you know but if you do this like you're engaged in a process of training but what is it that you are in the process of training yourself to do you know and and like you know there is a skill set it's just a completely useless skill set mario 64 uh zelda like whatever example we're gonna use like you know oh yeah you get really good at you know some of the puzzle games you get really good at matching up these [ __ ] puzzle pieces but it has it has no connection to anything you can ever use in real life it also doesn't have any connection to any redeeming moral intellectual qualities like moral quality intellectual qualities emotional qualities doesn't make you a better person in any of those ways no by the way i'm skeptical about about claims of what kind of exercises could but i mean you can imagine at least i mean if you're actually doing math problems you're getting better at math there's somebody but you're not doing math problems you know yeah right shout out to donkey kong math the only educational game on the nintendo entertainment system there was one other there were only two educational games on the nes donkey kong math and there's one in japanese involving popeye it's pretty much like popeye learns the alphabet but it's in japanese it's not nice you want to say this no i just how would this translate into your life like oh okay if you reach this stage if you if you get through this hoop then get like this is how you view life like it's it's just not right well and i think what what val is into is pointing out the ways you know the ways in which this actually has a corrosive effect in your life because that is that is the type of goal orientation you have that is the type of problem-solving mentality you have instead of the type of problem-solving uh you know mentality one ought to have which again like look so you know just to talk about my own life briefly we'll come back to val we'll come back to quitting videos talk back to as you say the fundamental topic of this video is not quitting video games but giving people advice they don't want to hear on youtube with video games being a great example you know um when i finished high school i just mentioned the high school i went to was bad i didn't go to a good high school um and everyone had built up my education supported me everyone had built up my expectations that the quality of education at university would be higher and i was just devastated when i got to university the university i went to was back i got to university and everything was worse so like you know you're in high school you're like okay this is the quality of education i'm getting this is terrible but everyone's telling me just put up with it just tolerate it because just in a couple years you're gonna get to university and then this is gonna be wonderful then it gets university and it's abominably terrible like i can really see the ways in which university education in this particular circumstance that it's worse than what i had in high school you know what's the problem what's the solution like you are just sitting there on your couch in my case i was sitting on the floor i didn't have a couch those are my years of not having any furniture when i just sit on the floor and sleep on the floor but i'm sitting on the floor thinking what the hell am i supposed to do now you know so that's mostly thinking about the professors and the courses and and also my own future like what am i going to do with the rest of my life because it's not a short-term problem that's incredibly long-term implications now look everyone also assured me that when i went to university there'd be lots of brilliant intelligent people unlike my high school and by the way there were some brilliant people in my high school like amongst the students there were because high school was a random sample of the population right and and some of the brilliant people in high school were poor and some of them didn't finish high school you know some of them were you know strong characters who didn't want to submit to authority and who you know defied the teachers and you know but i met all kinds of brilliant strong-willed people in high school and now i get to university and everyone is stupider and everyone is shallower like what's the problem what am i going to do so sorry melissa i think the the example you're using was it's that old nes game uh a tropic oh god the tropical island game and the sequel is called revenge of zoda star tropics star tropics shout out to star tropics anyway and like the nature of star trek is okay you walk into a room there is a closed door you could either go this way or like you know this completely predefined puzzle with the beginning of the limited solution and it's presented to you it's self evident to you this is the problem this is the room you're in this is the door you need to go through right in real life there is no door there is no objective there is you know you are just sitting there like wow everyone lied to me you know including my parents and my parents went through university not even in the 1960s i think the 19 like sorry there's a big gap between my my mother's younger than my father but anyway they went back they went to university in a different world like you know to what extent they were intentionally lying to me to what extent it was rose-colored glasses about their childhood and to what extent it just reflected what universities were like in the 1940s this is a this is just different you know oh it just just doesn't apply so you know here i am sitting there is no you know the level doesn't start the level doesn't end there is no door there is no puzzle there is no solution this is your life what are you gonna do homeboy and look and i just i just want to say i mean i i think i have alluded this before i had several years when i was in university when i was in the ba where i was overtly suicidal where it was that bad where it's like you know i don't know what i'm going to do with the rest of my life with this crushing disappointment and the burden on me of trying to do something about it i'm you know i'm not saying this was some minor trivial thing i'm laughing about it now i wasn't laughing then and nobody helped me and nobody made it better i went and talked to a psychiatrist i was a psychiatrist on the campus didn't have [ __ ] to say he had no way to help me there's nothing i've said before there is no professional help it's like yeah guess what i don't have a psychological problem i have a real life problem i don't have an emotional problem this is a real [ __ ] problem bro and you know again you're you know it's just it's just radically radically compatible with the world view that's brought on by by playing video games if you play those games when you're a child you'll remember the order in which you're supposed to so when you're a child you have this opportunity to learn the steps or like problem solving skills that you can apply to your real life but instead a lot of children are learning it through this you're memorizing this stuff in video games it stays there forever yeah well when you read about ancient cultures too um you know it may seem surprising or difficult to believe all these children in china memorized these classical texts you know all these children in india memorized the whole text of the vedas within buddhism they they memorized this poetry from buddhism stuff yeah you can memorize literature the same way by the way we still memorize songs many people growing up you memorize all the lyrics to a whole series of pop songs but yeah you will you are memorizing things in video games that are at best useless to you but at worst you know actually harmful okay just gonna turn to the comments in the audience for a second yeah so close says i don't know where close is that close says quote in my country people shame you if you play video games and you're an adult man good i mean i just mentioned you know like you know we we believe i'm saying we just meaning melissa and i i'm not speaking for a larger movement i really do believe in progress through shame i think a lot of forms of social progress and personal progress come through shame and you know frankly when you talk to people in positions of authority uh someone like university professor very often shame is the only lever you have to use in them you can say them look aren't you ashamed you know are you ashamed this is oh shout out to common sense skeptic there's a there's a guy who's addicted to video games comments common sense skeptic what up tell me what is the last video game you played skeptic you know i'm getting that vibe from you that you did some kind of boring math or engineering degree and you know i mean either when you went through university you were addicted to video games or it was cocaine that's the vibe i'm getting for you uh there's a famous um a medical doctor who gives advice about psychology and he's a very harsh critic of drugs like prozac his name is peter bregen so he's famous for basically telling people look solve your problems in real life with your emotions don't take prozac don't take this that's generally his his approach that's that's what he's famous for and uh he has an anecdote i'm sure he's told it at many different lectures that he once gave a lecture like this and he was giving a comparison between getting addicted to psychiatric medication solving problems and getting addicted to cocaine you know so you could imagine somewhat amusing anecdote and then the lecture ends and he said a man stood up from the audience and this was a very erudite audience where pretty much everyone had a phd everyone was either a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist or some kind of researcher at university and a man got up the audience furious at him walked up to him as he came down from the podium and he said how dare you say that about cocaine if it weren't for cocaine i would have never worked my way through graduate school and he turned around and walked out serious this guy was like saying like he would have never finished medical school without cooking now why do i tell this this now uh to be fair i don't hear anyone speaking that positively about video games like i know and that guy was not joking and i can imagine a friend of a friend i won't say who this is i have a female friend who slept with the lead singer of a famous band a famous music group and um that guy talked to her openly about the fact that like one of their albums it was a hit album they made it would have never been recorded without cocaine said the way that cocaine brought everyone together and got them focused i mean it's a stimulant drug you know that in terms of that you said that album wouldn't and then i think it was their last album or their last successful album and then the band fell apart so you know no i'm i'm against cocaine don't don't do cocaine say no to drugs in case you haven't seen my other videos i'm not but i would just mention i don't know anything that positive that comes out of video games like the sense in which there's something positive to be said about taking coffee taking adderall taking stimulants or whatever i've never even seen i've never i don't think anyone would even say as a joke that they wouldn't have finished medical school or they wouldn't have finished graduate school or something uh without without playing video games because it's such a negative drain on your life anyway so common sense skeptic says he personally worked through jobs to get through school well he said he had he had three jobs you see so that's the kind of [ __ ] you are you're one of those resentful blue-collar hard-working [ __ ] you're one of those i earned this [ __ ] and you will you will never be the kind of cool relaxed aristocrat that i am who can just openly say my parents paid for [ __ ] okay [ __ ] [ __ ] you and you're through [ __ ] you just just stay on topic uh you know my parents when i was a kid were poor they were flat broke when i was a kid and that relates to the fact that my father had nine kids so he got so many women pregnant whatever but it doesn't just it also relates to the fact that my parents had been communists subject for another video but my parents were not moderate communists they were extremists so even other communists considered them crazy they were really pro-mass murderer type extremist communists so naturally during that time of their life they did not earn a lot of money my dad had a bunch of kids and he had a bunch of cult-like beliefs this is a pretty reliable um formula for poverty anyway then i guess like right at the end of my time in high school no no be honest i was gonna say they started getting money in my last year of high school really they didn't have money to spend until i was in university i was in university for years and years felt like a long time and it was a long time that i was at university they started having money to spend while i was in a ba and again see there's another cause of poverty all my brothers and sisters are older than me so they were paying for my older sister's tuition and at least one of my older brothers at the time maybe two was also going to university so they were paying a lot of money that way so they only started having money to burn while i was a university student and still they had all these all these impositions on them but then beyond that there's your parents own attitude like however much or however little money your parents have are they willing to spend it to support you and when i started university my parents had the worst [ __ ] attitude which was of no you should go and work 40 hours a week at starbucks and i did that in my first year university and it almost ruined my whole education and ruined my whole life so i was working at starbucks and some days you have to wake up at 5 30 in the morning to do the opening shift and some days you have to work until past midnight to do the closing shift and it made it completely impossible to learn anything at a university completely impossible and my parents did not give a [ __ ] so i had the experience for one year i think something like that a year and three months some of that of working at starbucks while being university student and i was living at home with my parents i didn't have an apartment i wasn't paying rent or something and i wasn't living in university uh in residence wasn't living in a dorm and you know at some point i just had to turn to my parents and say look this is this is ridiculous like you know there there is no point in me going to university at all i just had to rebel against them and that was a source of conflict and hatred and resentment between me and my parents for like 20 years like sorry at least 15 years later you know i could figure out how many years it was i remember this is before my father i remember my mother still attacking me for this that i had somehow betrayed the family or let them down by quitting my job at starbucks instead of dropping out of university to just work at starbucks full-time like that was how [ __ ] up and demented my parents were about like the value of education versus the value of a minimum wage job what's supposedly a part-time job but it takes over your whole life so anyway yeah and um in that same period as i mentioned my parents started having money to burn so you know my mom bought a fur coat literally my father bought a new car like there were all these signs they started going on vacation to exotic places and stuff it's like dude if you have money for a fur coat and a car it does not make sense for me to ruin my education really ruin the rest of my life by dropping out of university to work for a minimum wage at a coffee shop so it was a big it was a big call but i saw i saw both sides of that but yes whether you are at cambridge university or oxford or the university of toronto um there is a certain kind of [ __ ] character that's formed by these guys who worked three part-time jobs well while putting themselves through school so yeah whether that's better or worse than being a video game addict or a cocaine addict is definitely an interesting topic for discussion uh common sense skeptics says when the we came out they had a series of games called rock band and we bought the full kit melissa will you get the the balance board for me we we have a nintendo wii and the only game we ever use it for is we fit so a couple days ago the gym was too full i i'm we fit is all right man it's like oh there's some quality hardware you know yeah we have uh wii fit if you want to do push-ups with a computer counting the number of push-ups you're doing so we we do own a wii and i've carried it all around the world for my for my daughter so my daughter used to play kirby with me on that wii and we have the balance board i don't know if we'll still be able to own this we may have to throw this stuff in the garbage next time we move apartments but anyway he says on the wii there was a game called rock band and we bought the full kit drums keyboards guitar and it carried five people at a time so that's i never i never heard of that so obviously that's some kind of simulated you know instrument game you know rhythm game or whatever so they go well showed it to the nintendo wii and uh they played the instance in time but then uh well that's it so he was saying there is some uh educational value but obviously they were already trained musicians uh playing the playing the games together okay so i'm going to read now and respond to this email from val there's a link to val in the description of el shimanov dear eisel hello exclamation point thank you for commenting on one of my videos i just sent him a comment saying hey i'm glad to see you're uploading videos again he paused for some months or a better part of the year i think yeah i quote i truly respect your dedication to the work you do on your channel and your consistency with your project you raise a lot of complicated issues that few people have the courage to bring up i've also noticed more streams and longer content on your channel and that is great i also thank you for the stream of subscribers maybe 50 to 75 people that started following my channel after you posted a video with a link to my channel a year ago when i just started right so as mentioned you can follow the link in this channel too uh quote i would also like to share with you one of my thoughts which bothers my mind after spending some time studying the video game addiction issue i found that it is almost useless to confront gamers with the idea that negatively viewing video games no matter how okay so again english is a second language it's a little bit confusing it is almost useless to confront gamers with a negative view of video games no matter how logical and obvious the arguments against video games are most gamers are simply not mature enough to understand the importance of other values in life so i'm going to pause here so you see this is both the strength and the weakness of the bikini youtuber right so what i do inexorably appeals to a small audience because i'm out here saying hey this is what it is to lead a meaningful life who's with me again and again again i have my own very definite sense of what it means to lead a meaningful life i have a very definite sense of what it means to be a man right and some people respond to that positively i think it's noteworthy that a lot of the people who respond to apostles come out of a patriarchal religious background so they're people who are today atheists but were born and raised hindu they're people who are today atheists but they were born and raised muslim or eastern orthodox christian or something i'm aware of this you know i used to use this hashtag bronze age values there is an overt mcchismo to my videos to what i'm saying about life there there is a you know in in the parliaments of our times there is this man up aspect to what i do where i'm saying be a real man and that applies to you know things like reading books and caring about your education how you develop intellectually yeah it you know relates to questions of ethics and politics and so on too and you know by contrast what i do uh it's extremely unappealing too and quite rebarbative to uh the stereotypical left wing in 2021 the vast majority of left-wing people back when i was making videos talking about bernie sanders they pick up on it and there are people who think i'm right-wing or think i'm conservative just because of the mckiswan you know i get that kind of response where people can just tell aesthetically somehow um you know this is incompatible with the alexandria ocasio-cortez supporting left of the 21st century now hashtag spoilers if you don't know politically i have a lot more in common with bernie sanders than i have in common with donald trump if you actually watch my videos that becomes that becomes obvious um you know where i am on exactly on the left to right spectrum now is is hard to say but you know very fundamentally i do care about government caring i care about government helping the poor i care about government being by the poor and for the poor and of the poor and one of the deepest and most important differences between left and right is just in this sense classism the extent to which the right wing and the conservatives are activists for of the aristocratic class and the left wing at least pretends to engage in advocacy for the poor and downtrodden disadvantage so there are many fundamental ways in which i am left of center if not left-wing um but my point is this you know if you are a beautiful woman wearing a bikini and you are making videos that implicitly or explicitly say hey you can be a beautiful woman in a bikini like me if you live my lifestyle buy my ebook pay for my training course eat my diet emulate me right there's a positive message there that very often doesn't have to be you know explicitly stated even even someone like kell even a test bag of course obviously but who i think i'm thinking of the girl who went crazy and deleted her youtube channel s and o'neill essen o'neill great example you know essen o'neill shows you how she exercises shows you her diet her youtube channel is deleted now she became massively wealthy and famous this way right where the positive message and and the youtuber being a role model it's there really very powerfully and then that becomes a kind of packaging for what's ultimately a very negative message because the negative message is hey you yeah you most of what you're doing in your life is bad and even wrong like hey you you should be ashamed of yourself well like that's that's there too right but it's it's packaged in the appealing bikini body message you know so now what i'm doing is not a bikini body message and i literally do get email asking me about my diet and exercise regimen all right i now do uh over 200 push-ups a day and i weigh over 220 pounds and i do push-ups with my my feet elevated so for a man who is in his mid-40s i am in okay shape and by the way i try to spend too much time at the gym i don't want to spend three hours a day at the gym there are all these things i have other priorities like reading this stack of books here i'm learning languages and studying politics and being a filmmaker and being an author writing a book there's all this stuff the life of the mind imposes on my time in a huge way but in a short amount of time i want to get a lot of exercise at the gym so believe it or not even on that level there are people who relate to me that way there are people who are in their mid 40s and they're in much worse physical shape than i am the guy who was writing i think he's still in his 20s the guy who wrote me this long series of requests asking about exactly what i eat in my diet um so i just say they're not all they're not all older guys i get younger guys trading i do not get young women in bikinis right for this advice um but you know there are there are men who respond to it that way the point is here uh what i am offering positively is profoundly out of step with their times that's why i used to say you know bronze age values i'm presenting a bronze age vision of of masculinity you know and um a very very small percentage of people are going to relate to when i'm what i'm offering positively that way now you know who should we compare this to look at the total degenerates uh who have been so you know successful on uh on youtube look at vaush look at uh hassan abby uh who's the other one thinking of oh god oh yeah the guy he just used the name destiny several people using the name destiny um all these guys play video games right so you know i mean in terms of a masculine role model i mean you look at vaush and you you think people want to be like vaush you know it's just you really you want to grow up to be like this guy like whether you're a younger person or you're an older guy trying to turn your life around you want to be like vaush really you know hassan hassan pike or hassan abby it's recently been drawn attention to or discovered that he sleeps with prostitutes he admitted sleeping with prostitutes and paying to go to a brothel and this kind of thing and that does fit into his political philosophy he's a left-winger who believes that sex work is work so on and so forth a guy like destiny the guy is and by the way all these people play video games all these people live a life of just reckless pointless self-indulgence i mean sorry hassan abby he is a multi-millionaire he can sit there and do a video game live stream from a left-wing perspective complaining about how migrant workers have a hard time well you aren't actually going out and even interviewing the migrant workers like just as a journalist you can just go talk to them about their lives but you could also help them because you are literally a multi-millionaire at this point you've gotten rich by sharing your moral opinions of the world you have the opportunity to make a difference in this and there's just no no positive motivation so yeah i wasn't even getting into that but right sam walsh writes in oh welcome back sam sam's a regular viewer uh sam says quote destiny takes drugs too he mistakenly took a drug that he thought was mdma but it turned out to be meth or something similar yes so i mean the role of drugs alcohol video games self-indulgence the way these guys live their uh sex lives and let me just say i judge everybody this way i judge my own father this way like dude the decisions you made about your sex life they matter they still count my father got a fully paid scholarship he was poor by the way as a kid as my as a kid my father was poor came from a single parent family his mother's job was literally in a steel factory in a shitty steel manufacturing town in canada like he was poor and uh he as he tells the story his father uh abandoned them i think i think my grandfather had a different perspective on that but regardless uh you know my father got a fully paid scholarship to get a phd studying hindu philosophy studying hinduism at the harvard school of world religion he never stopped eating meat how can you be serious about hinduism without being at least some kind of vegetarian i judge you okay like sorry bro my dad's dead now yeah i judge you you know i mean my father got all these different women pregnant he wasn't positively involved in any of his children's lives he wasn't possibly involved in my life you know i judge you bro you know these things go napoleon bonaparte you know i judge him including by his sex life it tells you a lot about who somebody is as a man so yeah the um yeah all these people i'm just saying these these are examples of people who started off in the same place i did like not even not that many years ago i think i mean three years ago i think vaush wasn't famous yet like it's the last three years or so he's moved up i can remember when hassan was a nobody that's maybe more like five years ago but all these guys they just came on the internet and talked about politics and talked about their feelings talk about their lives those guys i don't think you've seen a single book review out of them like sorry i am making the effort i am reading by several books right now i am all the time reading and then making youtube videos where i'm doing book reviews and i'm writing a book i'm actively growing as a person someone like hassan abby just sits back passively and talks about what happens to be on the news this week different kind of thing but um you know okay my point is why did they grow their audience in this way i think it is precisely because people look at them and they see a model of manhood and a model of adulthood that they can aspire to emulate now just give the example if you don't might as well type if you don't know who freely is you might assume the audience for freely is men who masturbate looking at pictures of her in a bikini men who are turned on by looking at her nearly nude it's not the audience for freely is women who look at her as a model of what they can aspire to be that's partly that's just her body there are women who watch this and they want to emulate her diet and exercise and have a similar kind of body partly it's also the spirituality the politics the lifestyle you know freely you know her currently her organic farming regimen right her gardening regimen uh frk fully raw christina you know i'm not gonna say zero percent of christina's audience is men who masturbate watching these videos but she's got a lot of competition for that market there are a lot of places you can go on the internet to masturbate you know um you know no in the bulk of her audience is people who look up to her as a lifestyle model as something to be emulated you know now again sir i've already said this is true of my own audience it's a small audience but it's a passion of people i get all kinds of emails from people saying how i help them turn their lives around i am a father figure to several hundred people or a couple thousand people and i've been an influence in their lives in that way for a lot of people i'm the stern demanding uncompromising father figure that points his finger at you and says no that's not good enough the excuses you're making don't make sense you know man up and they get out of it whatever they they get out of it you know so i'm aware this this critique applies to me also but i'm saying what i represent positively the model of a meaningful life i represent and i give voice to right there's an incredibly tiny audience who can appreciate that and respond to that possibly as opposed to a bikini youtuber as opposed to someone like vaush hassan or destiny right as opposed to someone who's just living a drugged up self-indulgent dissipated degenerate life right so this is one of the ways in which you have to criticize your own position especially if the message you have to deliver is fundamentally negative you know especially if the message you have to deliver is you know what you're doing is not good enough you know you have to quit video games you have to stop making excuses you have to stop doing childish things in your life so on and so forth you have to have some kind of higher or more positive aspiration um and obviously sorry so i'm responding here to an email from val part of val's problem is that of course he doesn't represent anything positive that way i mean you may think you know he mentions i think he has four children now you know as a wife and kids you know so he can try to represent himself as like a positive role model just in that he has a job and a family that's a very different kind of youtubing right so you'd have to look up a youtube channel like family fizz you know you really want to do that you really want to show youtube videos like hey this is me with my wife and kids and we're so we're so happy again sorry in each of these categories the vast majority of people fail the vast majority of people who try to be a family youtuber like family fizz this is me with my kids going to disneyland the vast majority never get 500 regular viewers the vast majority of people who try to be like freely or fully pardon me or fully raw christina or test bag the vast majority fail never get 500 viewers even if they're gorgeous even if they're incredibly sexy and appealing in other ways they're they're incredibly athletic the vast majority felt the vast majority of former olympic athletes male and female who start a youtube channel never get 500 uh of views and let me be clear the vast majority of people who try to be vouch the vast viewer people who try to be hassan abby the vast droid people who try to miss the vast majority of them fail right now there are more meaningful questions asked there like do you want to succeed do you want to live this life is this who you want to be and if you do this what kind of person are you going to be five years from now like there's a lot more to say about that there are a lot of reasons to not imitate the bikini youtubers or vaush or what have you um apart from the question of success or failure but at this moment we're talking which is reaching an audience and changing the world in this specific way of getting across a fundamentally negative message of telling people that the life they're leading right now is meaningless and what they're doing is bad and evil and wrong which is a huge part of the message i have to deliver to the world so guys if you haven't seen that look i could stop now and read this read this email out but i had a guy right into me if you follow me on patreon if you support the channel on patreon for one dollar a month you will have already seen this but i had a guy right into me um saying that he regularly uses the addictive drug ketamine and that he's uh he's writing a book now about this drug out so there's the link to it sorry i just says i didn't write a lengthy introduction to what that link shows you if you click on that link you'll see that this guy wrote me this letter and i write back to him very aggressively calling him a crackhead and telling him to get his life together and stop making excuses this is this is a level of stern rebuke and reproach that he would never get from a christian preacher i doubt he would get this from a muslim imam i doubt he would get this from a buddhist monk or a or a hindu leader now and after he gets uh okay look i'll read this up so i'm just saying this is this is delivering a message this is telling people something they do not want to hear he justifies his own drug use and justifies other people taking this addictive hallucinogenic drug by saying that they are fundamentally unhappy uh with their lives but changing their lives is more difficult than just just getting on the drug you know this is to summarize his message and i write back to him and say [ __ ] period i wasn't happy with my life period i moved to laos i learned the lotion language i learned a whole hell of a lot more than that what kind of condition was i in five years later in what way did i benefit grow or change from that challenge take a look at yourself adam you've got a drug habit you've got brain damage and you've got the excuses you made for it where are you going to be five years from now dead you're going to be a brain damaged dried up pathetic shell of a man just five years from now like all the other prescriptions psych med junkies and what condition could you be in today if you'd made a very different decision four years ago and you'd moved to laos learned la ocean did humanitarian work did some kind of research etc what kind of man would you be today that man will never exist it's already game over for you period you're trapped in a living death and you don't even know it yet period so again just to buzz your your christian preacher is never going to say this to you your buddhist monkeys never your parents are never gonna say this to you your brother your girlfriend your wife not even your ex-wife after you break up we'll say this to you we'll say to you you are going to die if you keep using this drug and you are already trapped in a living death and you have already squandered or lost your opportunity to live a meaningful life and become a better person all right that is real talk he isn't paying me doing this for free but you know this is really giving people advice they don't want to hear this is telling somebody something they don't hear this guy doesn't just use this drug he's currently writing and publishing a book encouraging other people to use this drug to solve their psychological problems right okay it is already game over for you period you're trapped in a living death and you don't even know it yet and by the way i do not regard moving to laos as a positive example it's a terrible idea and a negative example but it's still better than what you've signed up for so you guys can click on the link and read the whole correspondence because it goes several several messages long but i just point out after the next message he sends to me which is a defensive message naturally enough what i say back is this me replying to him again i say prove me wrong crackhead you want to lead a meaningful life you want to make the world a better place it starts with sobriety it starts with self-discipline by all means prove me wrong take that manuscript for a pro book you wrote and burn it turn your back on all the excuses in the pages of that book and turn your back on all the excuses you lived by but were too ashamed to set down in writing quitting the drug will be easier than quitting the excuses you've made for it prove me wrong tough guy so i'm just reading that to make it clear it is obvious in a sense that you know i am trying to help him like i'm not just calling you a crackhead for no reason and not just saying you're already dead i'm saying hey oh oh oh you disagree okay great then get motivated get sober start doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do um [Music] so anyway again you can click on the link if you want to see because he writes back again and i reply again right and i'm keeping it all the way real but look you know okay you want to do what i do you want to give people advice they don't want to hear you can make so much money and have so much fame and wealth if you just give people advice that they do want to hear if you tell people what they already want to hear if you tell people what they're already doing is great and wonderful right if you're just encouraging them encouraging them in their bad habits right you can make all kinds of money you can have all kinds of wealth and fame and success right if you just come up with that the great the great left-wing message of the 21st century you do you do your own thing be yourself be happy do whatever makes you happy oh good for you you go girl you know if you come out with that [ __ ] okay now you're telling people things they do want to hear when you're really keeping it real with people this way you know think about it think well think about what your own expectations are why should anyone put up with that why should anyone pay me for me to tell them they're a [ __ ] crackhead who's ruined their life why would you pay me for that why even the the exercise stuff like you know look i can set up a website i can start doing coaching like if you want this level of honesty and coaching they want to pay me a hundred dollars to have me coach them doing push-ups basically i'm just going to tell you you're a lazy piece of [ __ ] like well if there's no art to it there's no science to it you have to you have to do it right you just have to actually [ __ ] do it admit there's a little bit of advice you can give people about you know i'm sorry melissa no i melissa couldn't lift five pounds we got together i've given melissa her whole gym and exercise yeah i remember i remember you couldn't do an arm curl with five pounds and now yesterday you did 20 push-ups but when melissa and i got together she could not do one push-up she had no she had no upper body strength or lower body strength she wasn't amazingly poor and she'd never exercise in her life and i showed her how to use weights and i showed you this stuff so i have a little bit of experience training someone uh to have you know fundamental core strength now now she can go from 20 push-ups to 200 push-ups she can catch up with me although with each push-up she's raising a lot less weight than i am because i weigh a hell of a lot but anyway look like you know i can't expect people to pay me for exercise advice or diet advice when what i have to say is you're a terrible person you know who is go and again we have a cultural expectation because our religions christianity judaism islam hinduism like buddhism a lot of them are based on a patriarchal figure a you know a priest a buddhist monk whatever standing there and telling you that what you're doing is bad and evil and wrong that you're a terrible person that you're not living up to the standards and people pay them they get money and fame and respect right it's it's a remarkable incongruous thing so it's somewhat natural to have that bleed over into our expectations for for social media so let me give you a great example we have 41 people in the audience right now and only 18 of you have hit thumbs up so the rest of you are sitting there just fuming the rest of you so why didn't more of you hit thumbs up maybe now we have 42 people maybe it's because you really don't appreciate me telling you what a lazy piece of [ __ ] you maybe if you are watching vosh maybe if you were watching destiny maybe if you were watching freely the banana girl or fully rock christina telling you that you were a wonderful person hi guys thanks for tuning in i'm so glad you joined me today you know you guys light up my life it makes me so happy to sit here and talk to you [ __ ] losers who i would never meet up with for coffee in real life not even if you paid me hit that share like and subscribe button like no you know i'm i'm keeping it real i'm going to give it to you raw you know there was a uh there was a joke religion called the church of subgenius so it was partly a satire of other religions and it partly was a real religion unto itself and uh they they created this uh meme which is i don't practice what i preach because i'm not the kind of person i preach to [Laughter] there's a whole lot of that going on in social media so look so none of you guys want to give this want to give this video a thumbs up which would help other people discover it during the live stream if you have 40 people in the audience and all 40 hit thumbs up youtube circulates it more and then you get more people doing it but do i really care i mean it is what it is i i again this relates back to the main point of this video how many i'm not deluded how many people do you think want to tune in and hear me saying oh you've got a drug drug habit it's your fault you know oh gee you can't do 200 push-ups you're lazy it's your fault like i'm saying on every single topic you can't get your diet together oh gee you're celibate you can't have positive relationships with women or with the opposite sex or whatever you're into with the same sex oh gee you've got sexual guess whose fault it is guess who i'm gonna like guess what kind of positive encouragement you're gonna get from me right like a so much of what i do under so many different headings is telling people what they don't wanna hear so much of what i do in politics is telling people what they don't want to hear oh gee oh oh gee you you lost the war in afghanistan oh but you know what matters is that you tried your best what the [ __ ] think about how demented our coverage of the afghan war is uh i i you know i showed up thucydides all the time but i was reading uh deodorance the other day he's another historian of this period in ancient greece and rome he does ancient greece he does ancient rome he does more than just that ancient mediterranean europe and you know the level of detail with which he is talking about every year of a 25-year long war the war between athens and sparta year by year season by season month by month and then they had this battle and then this happened and this happened in international diplomacy right and you see the level of involvement people in athens had democratically that they are going week after week to debate this in their connects in their equivalent to the parliament because they have direct democracy they're directly involved in debating who should we appoint as the military general who should be the commander for the navy they're really involved in the war step by step month by month for 25 years what do you think i'm going to say to americans none of you can name a single [ __ ] battle from the afghan war you're a 20-year war 19 years to be fair 19 years of war none of you were involved in any way none of you learned the language look at the great universities of the united states oh yes uh uh today washington dc new york and los angeles are all great centers for excellence in afghan and central asian studies these have become the major foci of learning the languages history and culture of afghanistan and central asia no like you know the reasons for the failure are written all over the face of the american public look at the [ __ ] cross section of the american mind why do you think you guys lost the war in afghanistan like well let's really get into a meditation what a bunch of [ __ ] losers you are that in 20 years with over you know with hundreds of millions of dollars per year budget over a hundred years with a seemingly infinite budget you couldn't conquer an enemy you couldn't really win an enemy that had nothing but handguns and they had no navy they're landlocked they had no air force right you couldn't take that down bottomless budget a huge technological advantage you have a much larger population and at the start of the war you had the support of all of western europe you had this part of basically every almost every civilized country in the world was supporting america's war effort back in 2001 2002 and you squandered that support also it wasn't america yeah my point is what i have to say even about something like the war in afghanistan is unbelievably unpopular nobody wants to hear it conservatives don't want to hear it the left foot doesn't hear it the senator doesn't hear i'm giving you advice you don't want to hear under every [ __ ] heading unlike vaush unlike destiny unlike bernie sanders unlike alexandria cortez or something right like whether like no matter what example we we look to you see it was like now there's a sense in which these things are related i mean i think that what i have to say about video games what i have to say about alcohol what i have to say about drugs what i have to say about sex i think it is related you know in a deep way to why it is that my message about politics is so unpopular because we live in a world where most people wanna they wanna be asleep while they're walking around on two feet they wanna they wanna live in a dream and my message is all the time no wake up face up to reality you know what i'm saying uh uh okay so oh now here's okay now we have to digress to answer this question raphael asks i wonder if this is a hebrew name um probably an abbreviated hearing so raphael asks 200 push-ups in how many sets if i may ask so i think about doing a video about this all the time i may do at some point but so sometimes i'm doing 30 push-ups someone's doing 20 push-ups uh and i'm gonna tell you why under certain circumstances it's it's just ten push-ups so when you're doing 200 i'm doing this with my feet way the hell elevated but so these are my feet and these are my hands so my body's at a slant but between every set i'm changing the elevation of my feet up and down and i also change the grip so as soon as you're doing with your your hands like this as soon as your hands are lower down relative to your your torso and then sometimes i do with hammer grips on a bench so your hands are really close together where you're pushing up and that's very different and the other point is you're doing it to exhaustion so if you're doing sets of 30 uh you know you know the point is if at the beginning you're doing sets of 30 later you're doing a different hand grip and you're more exhausted you're doing 20 and 10 and stuff so yeah all right so that is my that is my digression on uh on doing 200 plus push-ups is that i'm mixing it up and by the way that's why you get so much exercise out of push-ups if you just do push-ups in the same posture whether that's with your feet elevated or your feet on the ground you're not getting that much exercise but when you're changing the angle a lot and you're changing your grip then you you really get a hell of a workout of doing push-ups and you know my gym most gyms don't have a bench press on multiple angles you just bench press at one angle so that's a big uh that's a big you know so look here's another comment noel says shout out to noel for this comment now i do get comments like this that are well intentioned sometimes noel says isil could increase his fan base on youtube by 500 times easily if he just decided to sell out a bit then it gives me a smiley face i don't believe it noel i'm just being real with you i don't believe it it's it's i you know i can take a compliment you know thank you but you know think it's very hard i mean look even the videos i did it's a great example actually i think about it do you guys remember i did some videos about the tv show the mandalorian so this is a sequel to star wars right even what i have to say about the mandalorian is in the same way like profoundly unpopular and it's telling people things they don't want to hear and uh i i remember this about the last video i met the mandalorian the last video i made about the tv show the middleware and i remember this about the last video i made or one of them about uh game of thrones a song by far i think it was the last video another thing though okay i remember getting a kind of fan mail message from the audience saying hey like i saw your video on the mandalorian but i didn't want to watch it because i know your critique is going to point out things that are wrong with the show and then once i see them i can't unsee them and i can't enjoy the show like someone writing and saying i know that you're right but i don't want to hear it like i want to imagine the show is better than it is and i remember the last video i did about game of thrones song about sorry if it's not the last the second last or something but you know um yeah i remember someone writing in it was the video i did which was like look here are really logical problems that's right it was about the books it was both the errors and the things that are wrong in the books the books the tv show was based on and i remember a couple people writing and saying dude like you're right but i don't want to hear it i don't want i don't even want to listen someone right someone who listened to five minutes of the video and stopped and was like dude like i see i see you know your stuff you know what right but i don't so even litter records if you say if you say i could sell out i have viewers in my audience still to this day who discovered my channel because the videos i made about a song of ice and fire game of thrones there's no doubt that did expand my audience but even then you know i kind of can't sell out i'm uh you know i i i i'm not it's not really going to increase size pockets so there you go so uh basugi i assume this is a korean name bei silgi yeah well it's been a long time i did study korean way back in the day but it's been a long time since i've studied korean so i can't attempt to pronounce this anyway uh besogi says and it's been long times of being to korea too i have fond memories of being in korea uh quote yes isil could sell out and get views but his mess his message is the antithesis to what people believe like he said most people want to be in an illusion close quote um and the other thing is the people who are promoting the illusion on the other side it's a crowded market you know it really is like there there's a there are already a lot of people doing that and the vast majority of people who uh who try you know fail so no i'm i'm just i'm just very skeptical about that um but look there are areas so let me just make this clear before i gotta return to val's email message there are areas in which i unironically and positively have a message to share with the world that's not uh harsh or cynical or approachable and i think that writing children's stories book storybooks is an example that i want to write and publish storybooks for children that have a positive message for children and that i think parents will recognize as a positive message a lot of the same stuff i'm saying here well so look here's okay this is deep okay disclaimer okay i'm warning you okay you've got a trigger warning trigger warning this is deep the same people who watch a degenerate youtuber like destiny watch you degenerate youtube were like vouch and who think i want to live this guy's lifestyle i want to be like this guy you know the same people who watch hassan abby and approve of hassan abby going to sleep with prostitutes and what those people if they are raising a child they don't want their child to turn out that way even if they're fine with turning out that way themselves right that's the bizarre paradox which is that if you write a children's story book that's encouraging children to be hard-working and sober right let's just keep it at that encouraging children to be more intellectual more erudite right to care less about the pleasures of the senses to care less about self-indulgence right if you write children's story books with that message all kinds of parents will pick up that story but go oh wow this is great for my kid this is great for my niece or nephew right this is a good message for kids but if you as an adult talk to other adults that way they'll say this is a terrible message for me i don't i for me myself no i want to live a life of total self-indulgence i want to be a degenerate like they don't want to hear that they don't want to apply themselves if you just say to someone like look you know you can lead a better life you can lead a more meaningful life you can stop you know making excuses you know etc you know uh people get defensive and people get offensive people say how dare you say that to me but if it's in a children's story book they respond to possibly because they think it's a good message for their own kids now that's not the only example i totally think i could make a spy movie you know you can call it a james bond movie i don't mean the actual character dreams but make an entertaining spy thriller that reflects my understanding of american politics probably also my understanding of chinese politics and soviet russian politics whatever whatever period it's said you know that reflects the fact that i have all these decades of knowledge about politics frankly i know there's gonna sound word i could write a spy thriller that's set in ancient greece that said in ancient rome you could have a spy movie that's set in the peloponnesian war you know with al qaeda's and his skullduggery and the persian empire and athens and sparta but any case whether you're talking about a 21st century or uh 2000 years ago you know i could make a movie that's entertaining for people and that has this kind of moral and this kind of message and people will respond to that possibly and they do people go and watch corny movies that tell them positive things in this sense that tell them to be a better person and they respond to that positively whereas you know again so a great example can contrast me to tana marcho you know i i understand why people respond so positively to tenemos that's what they want to be they want to be a lazy self-indulgent drug addicted person they want to be a vain shallow person who just lives a life of sex and drugs i'm sorry but when you think about the word degenerate if tana mongeau's current lifestyle is not degenerate what is you know people want that for themselves and a lot of people they work a job five days a week then one day a week they live like tana mongeau and then one day a week they're hungover and recovering from it so they can go back to their job on monday but that's a mass phenomenon not very many people live like tana martial seven days a week but a lot of people they are working for the weekend they live like a total degenerate one day a week maybe two days a week and then they have to clean up and get back to work and 10 years go by and that's their whole [ __ ] life and they haven't they haven't met any there haven't been any progress anyway i could tell a whole bunch of stories now but people i know like that people people who were not drug addicts people who didn't ever go to rehab or something but they were you know they were quote unquote moderate drug users moderate alcohol drinkers but that's it 10 years go by and they've been at a complete standstill just working a nine-to-five job and this kind of uh this kind of degenerate self-indulgence but anyway look sir my point was here you know directly people are never going to respond to me in my life positively the way they respond to tanima show nor the way they respond to tess begg we're showing a test bag a lot in this video she's already burnt out and quit youtube she doesn't upload anymore but she made a lot of money back when she did you know i i understand that and i accept that but i think it's interesting that when you just clothe it in narrative fiction whether that's a children's story book or a spy movie or an action movie i could do a kung fu movie too you know sorry by the way i mean writing directing producing i'm not going to be the kung fu star myself maybe i'd have a role as a uh maybe i'd make a cameo appearance in the background of my kung fu movie you know but you know i know so much about buddhist uh philosophy and so on i could do a kung fu movie in that kind of setting east meets west uh setting what was that the movie that had jackie chan and an african-american actor rush hour rush hour yeah yeah yeah yeah the next next rush hour movie written by eisel mizzard i could totally do an east meets west kung fu movie that has a lot of these philosophical points and then people would accept it but exactly what people don't want to hear is what i had in that i'm just giving you the link again it's like exactly what i the kind of disruptive honesty that you see if you click on that link that's what people don't want to hear they don't want to cope with they want the kind of soft encouraging approach of tana mongeau uh or what have you you know they they don't want to deal with this kind of disruptive honesty okay just glance at your comments before i go back to this guys melissa if you want to jump in there's a chance yeah so common sense skeptic says quote movies are tricky to sell if you figure that out share how you did it written three and they're still shocked okay okay okay common sense i am a fan of your youtube channel i am i am but come on bro come on anyone anyone who looks at your youtube channel anyone who even hears the the interview i had with you nobody would think you are that dude who can sit down in a pitch meeting in hollywood and sell your script and i'm just keeping it real with you uh common sense catholic so i've been into comedy since i was a teenager you know and i may go back to now doing stand-up comedy doing live stand-up cards i cannot imagine you getting on stage and rocking the microphone i can't imagine you doing the pitch meeting i can't imagine you doing stand-up i i just can't see you in that role now look you have all kinds of advantages over me i mean you know i i don't do physics calculations you know there are all kinds of ways in which i never developed my mind and you know i tried there was a time when i was a younger man when i was interested in in physics and so on there are other paths i could have gone in life but bro it does not surprise me in the least that you have failed to make it as as a screenplay right and look the ultimate thing is bro so i'm saying this to common sense skeptic but this goes to everyone in the audience if you want to succeed you have to enjoy failure you have to enjoy failing again and again and again it's a great comparison you can say that with stand-up comedy and you can say that with writing directing and producing movies right oh you want to have a successful movie how about you do 10 failures first that's how it works right so oh gee you wrote three scripts okay why don't you move to la go on a website like model mayhem get some non-union actors get some models to play the parts get out there film it put it together maybe achieve the same uh level of professionalism as the troma pictures or you know a crappy youtube channel like angry video game nerd you know do some really low budget you know filmmaking how about you do that five or ten times and then succeed and you know if you want to do stand-up comedy if you want to audition as an actor i've said this years ago on my channel i'm talking about this five years ago okay i hope you enjoy getting on stage and telling a joke and nobody laughs you gotta have that experience ten times you know you've gotta you've gotta get up on stage and fail and you've gotta learn from the failure or accept it or grow from it you've gotta embrace that you know and you've got to audition for parts again and again again even if you're an ugly middle-aged man there are a lot of movie roles for ugly middle-aged men you've got to go and do that again again so you've got to love the process and you've got to love failure so no look it's great having common sense kept in the audience i'm happy to have them here and i do i believe i've watched pretty much every single video on his channel which adds up to a lot of hours i'm still waiting for the plot twist i'm waiting for the plot twist where he admits that he's wrong and that actually elon musk's solar energy project is wonderful and it's going to be a great success there may be you don't know what's going to happen next in this story you know or maybe the plot twist is that elon musk goes to jail [Laughter] but uh anyway no i i do i do uh enjoy his youtube channel although i watch it skeptically but yeah you know um uh it's uh look i mean the great thing about living in in the time we're living in now is i'm writing a book right now and it's it's whatever it's 95 finished um you know i'm writing this book and there already is a built-in audience for it there are already people who know what to expect and you want to read what i have to say because they know me through youtube that's something that didn't exist 500 years ago or 200 years ago that's really the wonderful thing but it's so so sorry my point is here the relationship between my personality and the reading audience the fact that people have some sense of sympathy for me and some sense of interest in me that's what sells the book right and i don't know maybe 300 people read the book maybe 500 people read the book maybe 1 000 people read the book i used to work in publishing i used to work in non-fiction publishing we had all kinds of great books never sold 100 copies never sold 500 copies like in 10 years they don't sell five of cups so it may sound like a small number but if you really have that connection people but i think in that same way that's social media made everything else more like hollywood the reality is if you are pitching a script you have a one paragraph description of what that script is like hey here's my idea for a movie and for the most part you actually are selling your own personality right you're not really selling the script you're not really selling the book right it's that people are interested in you and people care about you so they're they're interested in in what you they're interested in the spy movie you're going to write like oh okay so look you know so you can imagine when you're pitching the script you are picturing your personality okay so you're a guy who used to be a scholar of buddhism you lived in thailand laos and cambodia and now you've written this action movie and and you have a background in political science and whatever and you're this youtuber okay and now you've written this action movie that has buddhist themes it deals with how the cia really works in the real world the kind of debunking of popular misconceptions with us yeah okay this is what you're bringing together so that's what you're selling you know that's your song in a pitch in the same way that people read my book because they've seen my youtube videos and they have some sympathy for me or some curiosity in me they're willing to hear my hear my uh perspective um in that same way you know most most of uh making movies even on the level of motivating your own actors right you got to go and pitch to someone you're hiring someone on model mayhem for 300 dollars so you're paying next to nothing for someone to come make your movie you it really is your personality that people are buying into okay um questions about where people can buy the book the book is not available yet i assume i am just going to dump it on amazon it will be purchased from amazon.com that is my assumption at this time and i'm talking to someone there's a husband and wife couple who tell me they're going to translate it into spanish so the interests know how quickly they work i think it'd be really amusing to have it published in spanish and english bilingual right off the bat but if not maybe the spanish version will be published separately so you guys know i have a long a long history with translating my videos into other languages and reaching a huge audience that way too let me tell you think about how many people watch my videos that are in russian i do have a couple videos in russian let alone a german etc all right um okay so we're continuing with valve's email here uh most gamers are simply not mature enough to understand the importance of other values in life their mindset works via a simple system of coordinates such as pursuing immediate pleasure and avoiding immediate punishment it comes back to things we talked about an hour ago here and they are just not ready to accept any other concepts or values at their current psychological age so they just say something irrational confirming their bias protecting video games since it is their main value and shut down this leaves me with two choices one to continue to tell people the explicit truth in which my negativity toward video games can hardly be ignored in this case my audience would be mainly mature parents or gamers who are already prepared to quit playing video games by their life circumstances which is a tiny minority or two to stop explicitly being negative to stop explicitly studying warnings against video games and to use a more subtle approach like focusing uh pardon me like focusing on helping gamers to solve their life problems which are of course caused by playing video games and then when solving these problems maybe the viewers in the audience maybe these video game players will take actions that help them to recognize and overcome their addiction he says quote i believe that the second approach can lead to significantly better results in the first one and will help people that would have never even thought about quitting video games before so close quote um but what you're saying here is that dishonesty is better than honesty right you know why did i quit buddhism i didn't want to be part of a religion that was based on a lie and this is relevant to what comes up in this in this email in the next and final paragraph okay what if you said the same thing to me but you said well the really effective way to get people to quit playing video games is to have them convert to islam to believe that there is this god watching over them all the time right now even if in some sense that's true it's a terrible truth and morally i'm not willing to do it and you know what are any of us worth what's the point of any of this if what we're going to do is live a lie or convince other people to live life like either you believe that cutting off part of your penis to satisfy the god that muhammad communicated with uh through the angel gabriel like you know like either you believe that is true or you don't i do think it is good and helpful to lead people into that illusory way of of life or you don't right so so i'm saying this this very concept of what would be more effective may be misleading or maybe counterproductive and let's bring this back even to uh let's bring this back even the tanama show how did tana mongeau become famous in the first place how did she connect with an audience it was through honesty it was to keeping it real i can remember tana mongeau just sitting and talking about working in a clothing store when she was a teenager and i'm sorry i forget if it was hot topic or forever 21 but it was some normal clothing store in a shopping mall and she became the manager of this store you know she got some kind of promotion as opposed to just being a sales girl and her sitting there and talking about folding sweaters and what this job was like and that was really real that was really honest and i mean she she came out as a as a storyteller and that's what people connected to do you think tana mongeau would have been more successful if she came on youtube and was living a lie was presenting something fundamentally dishonest something fundamentally untrue now you can think of something that's that's radically ridiculously untrue like uh like islam like the muslim faith like praying or like circumcision or something that's one kind of falsehood right but there were other kinds of falsehoods too like what you're what you're suggesting yeah you know now sorry you guys are going to see in one second here why i'm raising this a lot of people convert to buddhism on the basis of false promises and misrepresentations about buddhism people lie about what the religion is people lie about the history of their religion you know so and so forth um people lie about meditation people lie about what meditation is and what the benefits of meditation can be right but people who are attracted to that they're not attracted to buddhism they're attracted to the lie and a lot of times they get quite committed they'll pay for a package vacation they'll pay for a meditation retreat they'll get involved with buddhism up to some extent and then they they figure it out oh okay this is what was advertised and that this is the reality of what the religion is i would assume sid is also about mormonism scientology a lot of religions you know ancient and modern um why do you think you would make progress this way by living a lie by portraying a lie by fundamentally being dishonest with the audience i think especially when you're talking about youtube like honesty is the only currency we've got the only thing we can you know the only thing of value here on youtube is honesty earnestness you know the the immediacy of sharing in someone else's life through the glowing screen that is what tana mongeau had going uh in her favor and that's what i had going in my favor and what what do i have to offer my audience really what's the value of this you know um if what i were doing were false or phony anyway which is one of the reasons why i find the kind of conspiracy theories about my life so hilarious and ridiculous you know um if this were insincere it would be nothing worth so you know i say again my old my old catchphrase you know honesty is the is the only currency we've we've got um all right here's a funny comment from the audience uh vassel kolarov said um quote i tried to convince my ex-marxist friend who is now a utilitarian to quit playing video games and go sober it was a waste of time unfortunately okay but what's interesting is you're telling me this is someone who already quit marxism right now okay we're talking about sobriety we're talking about quitting playing video games a couple years ago everyone was reflecting on the significance of the alt-right phenomenon in american politics and one of the most consistent patterns with the alt-right was that guys would convert to this ideology that would immediately start hitting the gym they would become sober they would quit video games they would quit so-called degenerate activities they'd become these highly motivated you know right wingers with a shorter sharper haircut they'd start dressing better they'd start wearing fancy suits and they'd start reading about and talking about ancient rome now like a lot of people observe this they're like oh well my son or my grandson you know he totally turned his life around like i noticed these changes in him but then i was really concerned because it's like he's kind of sort of becoming a neo-nazi he's getting involved with this crazy right-wing ideology and the interesting thing is too when those people lost faith in the alt-right when they lost faith in this right-wing fat ideology a lot of them went back to being schlumpy being out of shape they grow a beard they wear a lumberjack shirt they go back to playing video games they go back to doing drugs you know they go back to sleeping around there's an aspect of sexual morality in this so i just say you know and we're talking about honesty here i would not even be willing to talk about people converting to marxism or like you know becoming converted to a political ideology in order to quit video games or in order to quit alcohol and sorry so guys i haven't talked that much about veganism in this video but i was just saying to melissa yesterday we were having a totally different conversation i said look when you look at vegans you look at people who become vegan look at people who drop out of veganism um you can make the right decision for the wrong reasons but it never lasts like if you choose to become sober because you became some kind of fascist you became some kind of right-wing alt-righter right i'm saying that won't last there are people who become vegan for quote-unquote spiritual reasons they believe something supernatural you know and you can do that for a time but it doesn't last those are the people who go back to eating meat you can become vegan because you want to be sexually attractive you want to be hot you want to look good in a bikini it doesn't last when you do the right thing for the right reasons it lasts your your whole life long you know um and when you do the wrong thing surprise me when you do the right thing for the wrong reasons um i think it's it's tremendously fragile because it only lasts as long as your your commitment to these these these illusions these these self-deceptions you know it relies on you lying to yourself lying to others and living a lie and then sooner or later you know sooner or later that that illusion starts to crumble and then your whole sense of morality the ethos of the life you've been living crumbles along with it and again i've seen this within buddhism i've seen it within communism seen it within you know so-called secular worldviews like communism left-wing worldviews where people really want to live a lie that want to believe uh something that could never be true and then at some point you know at all it all falls apart and then you'll return to whatever it is you'll return to drinking alcohol playing video games sleeping with prostitutes whatever it is you manage to quit in the name of for the sake of this this higher cause this hallowed abstraction that you believe in and yeah i am saying in response to val's email no that's not the way forward the way forward has got to be a kind of radical disruptive honesty instead it's got to be something something authentic in earnest because on youtube that's all we've got um okay so now this is the final sentence or two of his email quote this second approach is successfully used by dr k on his healthy gamer gg youtube channel he never confronts uh video gamers he says that he still plays video games himself but all his content primes gamers to find better values in life than video games he then says he'd be grateful if i'd give my opinion on these choices he's mentioned okay dr k is the worst kind of hindu spiritual merchant and i have already made videos pointing this out if you watch his videos you can pick up on this if you join his discord server it's even more obvious but he is peddling the worst kind of um diluted hindu spirituality to a predominantly white western audience okay i do regard dr k as someone just as evil as a youtuber trying to convert people to scientology that's a good example it's a good parallel um what he is saying about meditation and yoga and the vedas and the yogi's and the upanishads okay it's not harmless it's much more dangerous than a christian preacher quoting the bible and the impacts this is going to have on people's lives are really really negative and really really significant so from my perspective like the best case scenario for what dr k is doing is that he reaches out to these people they may be young people or they may be older people who are at a very low level of intellectual sophistication they may be fully grown adults but who are dumb enough they have teenage enough attitudes that they're they're susceptible that he reaches out to these people and he draws them in with this web of lies to this combination of hindu orthodoxy and hippie spirituality right that in the same way that i just described someone signing up for buddhism not because they really understand what buddhism is but because of an intentional misrepresentation of buddhism they sign up for a fictional version of this religion this ideology and just like these neo-nazis and just like some of these communists for a short time they're highly motivated they're highly motivated to purify themselves so they can live up to the standards set by this abstract ideal they believe in right but sooner or later their belief in that ideal crumbles or they realize what an illusion that is or they just contrast two different versions of the illusion like oh well this is what dr k says about the upanishads and the vedas but now i've actually taken the time i've actually read the upanishads videos i've read some scholarly work and some essays explain oh oh this is the actual history of hinduism this has happened again and again and again a guy named uh rajneesh who later used the name osho osho you know um as a spiritual leader he created this crazy diluted like version of hinduism for westerners that among other things was pro-sexual freedom it encouraged you to to sleep around to some extent uh not recklessly by the way but compared to real hinduism in india it was certainly a very liberal sexual lifestyle that his his followers were entitled to to to commit to okay but at some point even the most devout believers in osho they actually go to india they see the reality of the caste system they see the reality of this tremendously repressive patriarchal religion they see the reality of the status of women in hinduism you know etcetera etcetera this happens again and again throughout so many different religious groups both both ancient both ancient and modern right all that you're doing is asking people to commit to what's fundamentally an unsustainable illusion you're asking them to do the right thing for the wrong reasons and so ultimately it it cannot last in the end what is discredited is your ideology what is discredited is the hallowed abstraction whatever people who believe in and you are discredited yourself sooner or later each and every one of these people has to figure out that dr k doesn't know what he's talking about when he quotes the vedas dr k doesn't know what he's talking about he talks about the yogis and yoga dr k doesn't know what he's talking about when he discusses the upanishads he also likes to talk about buddhist philosophy sometimes he doesn't really know anything about buddhism and you're gonna figure out that dr k doesn't really know what he's talking about when he's talking about quitting video games all right the hardest road to take is that narrow path of inviting people to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do right but that is the most durable path and now i've i've been on youtube long enough around eight years more than seven years okay i have been on youtube long enough that there were people who came to this channel and they heard about that ancient narrow path that they heard about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do and they really didn't hear it they're like [ __ ] this unsubscribe close youtube window they go away and five years later they remember it and they come back and they say to me you know what you were really on to something you're right like years have gone by they've believed in different illusions they've embraced different ideals they've tried different things but you know what the really simple uncomfortable fundamental truths you were talking about on your youtube channel yeah you know what and it may be five years later and maybe 10 years later and it may be 15 years later really dealing with doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do it is not going to bring you fame it is not going to bring you money it's not going to bring you tens of thousands of of youtube subscribers right but it's always going to be better than selling people an illusion than selling people a dream above and beyond talking about sobriety versus drug use sobriety versus alcohol you know above and beyond the difference between self-discipline and self-indulgence above and beyond something very specific like you know video game edition we are talking about the extent to which you want to live your life in a dream or the extent to which you really want to live your life awake as an adult dealing with reality there's way more public demand for the peddlers of dreams than the peddlers of reality even when it comes down to something as narrow as talking about sobriety you know talking about doing the right thing because they're into there are more people today who are making money telling you to quit drinking alcohol or quit doing drugs for the sake of your immortal soul so you can go to heaven after you die they're always going to outnumber the people who are talking about the real reasons to be sober and the real you know the real reasons by using alcohol or even by using antidepressants prescription medications and drugs why those are negative things in your life right the illusion the dream it's always gonna be you know more more popular than reality there's gonna be more money more fame more you know there's a bigger audience for that right but no of the two options you've presented me with here val i think there's only one that's that's viable right and why is that you can't really put yourself in the position of telling the audience to do the right thing just because the right thing to do if you aren't doing that yourself and as strange as it may seem i think that is the kind of authenticity someone like tana mongeau had on her channel when she first got started and that's you know that's what i've got going for me here on this youtube channel you know today and you know being honest is not the same thing as being right you know you can be wrong and you can be honest about it you can fail and you can be honest about it you can fail again and again and again um being honest doesn't mean you you know all the answers but um you know being honest means at least that you're going to sit down with your audience and really deal with the implication of these of these questions