Alcohol & Caffeine: Unnatural Vegan is WRONG

hey what's up to me there's a really
interesting parallel between the set of questions we have to ask ourselves in becoming vegan if we're raised in a culture that basically glamorizes the consumption of meat or meat is not just something presented as healthy and necessary but it's also something that's served ceremonially you know like the turkey being eaten at Thanksgiving the special idea of an indulgence or family meeting you know an important dinner has roast served that it has roast beef or what have you as a vegan you have to question all of the cultural values assigned to the diet and to different symbols of health virility what have you in the culture were raised in and again I actually do think this is significantly different for someone who say grows up as a Catholic in Latin America the meat-eating cultures of South America as opposed to even I don't know a Catholic in France to use the examples that are not that far off I mean culturally I think the the packaging that you know meat-eating arrives in in Our Lives can be really different from one place to the next I definitely thought it was very different in France than it was in in Canada and so on and obviously I've experienced living in Asia various cultures and countries um to me you know the value of alcohol alcohol is something that socially binds people together alcohol as a very public form of enjoyment group fealty building and so on there's so much assigning the to alcohol the role it has in our lives alcohol maybe the way you meet members the opposite sex maybe the way you fall in love I mean in England you meet so many people who are really socially crippled without alcohol they're only capacity socialising to make friends really rests on really relies on being at the pub consuming alcohol and so on alcohol takes on a social significance far beyond its chemical significance and so I think similarly I say they're similar what I really mean to say is that the questioning of the importance of meat and dairy is parallel to questioning the importance and value of alcohol they are parallel that they do not intersect I completely accept that drinking alcohol is vegan I also completely accept the cocaine is vegan cocaine is from my perspective legitimately a vegan drug it's made of a plant now I think everyone watching this video will agree that that doesn't mean it's an ethically simple question of whether or not using cocaine is a good idea whether or not it's good idea for yourself for your brother your sister your father your son and your daughter and that really is the context in which we end up questioning these things most often loved ones and what have you um I do value the contribution that a natural vegan is making partly because I'm terrified by and revolted by the anti scientific attitudes that I've encountered amongst vegans especially vegans from Europe to be honest you're up in contrast to North America vegans who convince themselves that they don't need to use soap they don't eat you soap to wash their hands to wash their bodies to wash their clothing to wash their cutlery their plates and cups this is reversing one of the most fundamental advancements in human civilization and on what grounds on the idea well procedurally what many of these vegans have done the lesson they've taken from veganism is not what I've just been describing of questioning the cultural value of something in contrast to scientific and ethical considerations that's what I am encouraging people to do instead many of these vegans have basically thought that the lesson of veganism was all of these cultural values are a conspiracy created by medical professionals and corporations who are just trying to oppress you who are just trying to keep you down so therefore you're doing something rebellious and morally reteaming by refusing to use soap obviously there's a similar mentality behind the anti-vaccine movement however vaccines are probably an issue in your life less often than once a year soap is an issue in your life more often than once a day and when you really meet and talk to those people face-to-face it's a sad feeling of powerlessness you have because it would be so hard to disentangle them from the the set of counterproductive and genuinely anti-scientific not just pseudo-scientific anti scientific views they've adopted and that they've decided are meritorious because they've decided believing these things makes them good people makes them morally superior to someone who has not adopted these conspiracy theory views so with all this having been said and obviously I've repeatedly stated that I appreciate what a natural vegan does I think there's an interesting error she makes it's what I would call a categorical error I'll come back to to what that means when she addresses the use of drugs and alcohol the - I really remember her speaking about at length our caffeine and alcohol why do I say categorical error in the sciences even including the social sciences there is this concept of a category mistake that's not what I'm talking about that's a specific logical fallacy but how we categorize things how we define the outcomes we're looking for the variables were testing I suppose the variables we're ignoring can radically change the outcomes of our inquiries so if we're asking the question is caffeine healthy we can answer that question entirely in terms of does it increase your risk of cancer does it increase your risk of mortality you know average age of mortality and epidemiological studies we could ask this question in terms of a long series of check marks without including the question of does it disrupt your sleep now obviously I mean it almost seems laughable compared to the seriousness of cancer to be talking about the quality of your sleep but actually it's a tremendously important question you know caffeine its effects on the brain its effects in your life as a whole even if you're going to approve of the recreational use of this drug by saying well the effects on the heart are trivial the effects on cancer are relatively trivial the effects on your liver your kidneys your lungs I still have serious questions about caffeine in terms of here's the really slippery stuff the effects on your emotions the effects on your mood your ability to get a good night's sleep your ability to really be highly proficient and mentally alert without developing dependency on it and what you go through emotionally when you withdraw from the drug now I'm not saying this to be a fear monger about caffeine I think the truth about caffeine is that its effects are subtle enough that people can ignore them people can be unaware of them for years until some particular event suddenly brings them into focus suddenly makes them reconsider what a role caffeine has one of the common remarks in American culture is why do why do we always fight on holidays you know whether it's couples or a whole family why is it that people get into squabbles and conflicts when they're suddenly removed from the routine of the home let's say stereotypically to drive a camper van on a vacation or something like this I think in many many cases people underestimate the extent to which interrupting their caffeine use because they're used to in tied into their their daily job their school routine that actually they do get into fights with their with their loved ones in part because they're going through a caffeine withdrawal and they don't even know what that is they're not even sensitive enough to feel it and so on now okay I've got sort of three examples here I want to very briefly go over but I've just given an example of how caffeine may have really meaningful problems that are unrelated to very real issues such as carcinogenic effects and what have you under alcohol we have the really tremendously important question of brain damage that is different from caffeine caffeine you can look at it sharp can look at a diagram showing you the effects caffeine has on your brain because caffeine does impact your brain chemistry and you can decide for yourself if this is a modification to your brain chemistry that you think you're willing to toy with in exchange for the benefits you think you get from caffeine I think almost nobody who just sits down and goes through the flowchart of what are the effects of caffeine in the brain would feel yeah I'm comfortable with it the nature of the brain itself on how we rely on our brain chemistry I think you know again obviously I think it's quite possible to be well scientifically formed about caffeine and you try to minimize it rather than eliminate it to try to have low and moderate use of caffeine but to really be aware this is something negative in your life this is something you got to watch out for it's a conclusion anyone can come to you'll understand that however I do it's a case where the facts speak for itself and unlike looking at a chart of the effects on your liver or your kidneys I don't know anyone who really wants to voluntarily compromise their normal brain function that's a really tough call to make now I can say the same for alcohol but with alcohol we have the added very real question of brain damage we do know and we can measure brain damage caused by alcohol and more controversially we can directly measure brain damage caused by marijuana use that something most people do not want to believe the invention of the MRI scan magnetic resonance imaging made it possible as never before to precisely measure and visualize brain damage to specific lobes of the brain measuring the specific amount of nerve damage of tissue loss in the brain caused by alcohol use now there were estimates of this before MRI technology became widely used and by the way it wasn't really the invention of MRI it was as the technology became cheaper and cheaper and more widely spread which was delayed interestingly by a series of court cases to try to determine who had the right to to profit from the technology so actually I think it was delayed by about ten years the progress of science in that area which is a real shame but anyway MRI wasn't it at a court for a while to see who owned the copyright it's scary to admit to yourself that every time you drink alcohol you are causing brain damage to yourself and you should be scared I noticed that we seem to have an easier time ethically thinking about these things when they impact others it doesn't seem to be difficult to convince people that they should drink zero alcohol during pregnancy because drinking alcohol during pregnancy every dose every drink even one beer even more that's one every drink causes brain damage to the unborn baby it seems to be much more difficult to convince people that they should not drink alcohol because every drink causes brain damage to you the person decided to drink it now again to me what's interesting here is that alcohol is wrapped up in all these cultural values and those are very hard for people to question it may be that you've grown up and the happiest times of your life are all associated with alcohol and you have to look at the simple grim reality of alcohol causing brain damage and get to reiterate my earlier points this is totally unrelated to the checklist of does it cause cancer what are the impacts on my liver what are the impacts on my blood circulation cancer is deadly serious but another sense brain damage even very minor brain damage he's also serious now I quit drinking alcohol at a very young age I basically what tricky alcohol when it became legal for me in Canada as a teenager but I for instance I know that I have brain damage caused by using anti malarial drugs drugs that prevent you from getting malaria I didn't use them very long I didn't use very much but yes it is a very strange thing to live your life and know that at a specific point you took a drug even a legitimate pharmaceutical medical drug that is a real medical benefit and it caused you brain damage and change the way you think and feel forever in the case of marijuana and alcohol you're talking about brain damage which is not associated with any legitimate medical benefit so my advice to anyone would be to get familiar with those facts and to make the choice not to drink less alcohol but to drink absolutely zero alcohol for those reasons now the third and final category I want to address here is time even if you examine all the categories I've mentioned from cancer to how well you sleep at night to the effects on your mood your relationships your social life some of these are not easily scientifically quantifiable and you decide caffeine is okay and alcohol is okay there's still a question of time many people who know me including my professors friends enemies many people who know me consider me a highly intelligent and brilliant person but one of the things I say to them is you know I'm only intelligent for a few hours per day I have a lot of hours that I spend doing my laundry cleaning my bathtub cooking food putting bananas in a blender cleaning the blender afterwards I have hours when I'm asleep but when I'm not really mentally alert because I just woke up and so on I mostly make these videos when I'm completely exhausted and having trouble getting hard work done that's why I look exhausted because I am exhausted in so many of these videos the number of hours a day when I'm really mentally focused alert and capable of doing analytical work creative work etc is not that great and I think when you talk to serious creative people serious intellectuals so on I think most of them can reflect this is true for them also the amount of time you lose by drinking alcohol by being hungover the next day by having a lower quality of sleep during the night because you drank alcohol in the evening before even moderate alcohol consumption and yeah that has been scientifically study sleep science is a whole province of research and which is fascinating by the way but yes using caffeine during the day using alcohol during the day it takes up hours of the day and impairs your sleep it has an impact on your intelligence what you can do with your I was next day I think this question of time is so fundamental that I would in this under this category I would compare cigarettes are II I was gonna say cigarettes but caffeine and alcohol I would compare them even to video games with video games we're absolutely sure they don't cause cancer they don't cause brain damage they don't have any of the negative physiological effects of caffeine or alcohol they don't have any chemical effect in your brain whereas both caffeine and alcohol do very different chemical effect alcohol definitely does cause brain damage but the number of hours you lose in terms of the struggle to lead a meaningful life to use your brain in a meaningful way I think that's so serious a question for you to ask yourself for you to look in the mirror and think about in terms of the time you have did you something creative and meaningful whatever that is whatever that is I think that's such a tremendously serious question ask that for that reason alone I think a natural vegan is dead wrong in encouraging vegans to use caffeine and/or alcohol I mean I would ask you how meaningless is your life for you to waste all your potential as a human being to the use of these drugs that are mild and moderate drugs compared to cocaine and from my perspective like this is true of marijuana also what makes them so problematic is not that they're intense when people use cocaine they know they're high on cocaine when cocaine is destroying someone's life having advice they know it's having those impacts it's highly visible subjectively people feel it their friends and relatives all see it in a sense drugs like marijuana alcohol and caffeine they're more dangerous because they're so close to invisible both culturally and subjectively people really may not perceive the problem at all for years or decades and only later looking back or maybe maybe never do they reconsider what are the impacts and what are the lost opportunities quit playing pacman