Fake intellectuals; fake revolutionaries; fake vegans.

good afternoon i have a few different things on my mind as i start this live stream nice to see you all here this one was announced in advance and i have a little bit of a crowd just as i hit the hit the record button um as per usual if you guys want to share the link do it with people who would actually be interested in joining the conversation you might know some people you know people you've known for years on facebook you might know people on twitter or tumblr or whatever platform you use but um you know i don't uh i don't encourage you to spam uh random reddit forums with my videos but if you know someone uh who'd actually be interested in joining the conversation it might be might be worthwhile let them know uh this is going on a few different things in my mind this has been the week in which the protests in glasgow scotland uh arose and fell and um i made a series of videos really warning people about what extinction rebellion were planning and promising to do and of course they accomplished nothing of the sort um it's also a week in which following brief commentary uh arose in my my patreon forum so one uh patreon asked the question in response to a recent video of mine this really begs the question as to as to why so many intellectuals live such lonely miserable existences that often end in suicide or death by alcoholism so this is not me speaking this is one of my supporters on patreon speaking uh continue the quotation i'd say that developing the life of the mind comes with the risk of attracting people that will take the most intimate parts of you colon intellectual property now i think he's very poorly expressing a good or interesting point there when we say someone takes your intellectual property normally you mean something like they you you wrote a song and they stole the song from you or something you created a cartoon character and they made their own comic book or movie on your cartoon character i do not think that's that's what this person meant here years ago i can remember talking about how people cope with being judged and judging others and the relentless shallowness of our society in so many ways but whenever i made those videos i would point out by contrast or in close parallel that being judged based on your intelligence or being judged based on the quality of your writing and so on and so forth being judged on your your intellectual merit can can be even more heartbreaking um so you know it's one thing to talk about being rejected because you're not thin enough or not handsome enough or not tall enough or something you know okay that may sting it may hurt your feelings but it's kind of shallow and limited but being judged for your intellectual properties shall we say um that can be much more much much more hard to cope with anyway so we have a few different replies to this uh within my patreon group but one of them from a guy named joel who's had a few messages back and forth military and a joel seems to be a very young man i don't know i'm guessing he's 17 or 18 years old some of them anyway joel says quote i think you're just talking about people who are gullible from my perspective these aren't intellectuals now this is the interesting thing to me the moment i've laid eyes on this question or comment remember with the audience that's the first thing i thought is that the people you're talking about are not intellectuals this is one of the reasons i want to do this live stream now you know on what basis so i've already read you it's a very brief statement he says well this begs the question of why so many intellectuals live lonely miserable existence to end in suicide or death by alcoholism i don't regard people who drink alcohol as intellectuals like i know that may sound ridiculous to many of you but if you know what i mean by an intellectual it totally excludes people drinking alcohol now i'll give you another example that comes closer to my heart you guys may know i have some admiration for the books written by george rr martin all right so george r martin most famously wrote a book called game of thrones that was made into a tv show he's been an author of many things over many years oh so frida freda's one step ahead frida just says or the ones that watch football yeah well you get a really strong sense that george rr martin is not an intellectual not by my standards at least from the fact that he has a lifelong football watching habit if you go to his blog um you will find that every second or third entry on his blog he's talking about what happened in this week's game what happened in one football game or another he's poured a huge number of hours into watching football his entire life now i also don't know how much or how little alcohol george r martin consumes i just i just don't know um but you know i did i listened to many of his books and short stories as uh audiobooks as work on tape that was back when i was lifting weights in uh couldn't make china i was at the gym for long hours and i was i was listening to his work well something else that is really striking is how little progress he's made intellectually he had just a few themes a few things he was concerned about a few issues he was thinking about in the 1970s and then in the 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s there's there's very little progress now again i'm not even saying this is um something that intellectuals strive or strive to accomplish i think if you're an intellectual and you're living a life of the mind and you're not an alcoholic you're not getting drunk three days a week you're not watching football three days a week it's just inevitable that even if you have no redeeming qualities whatsoever you're making progress and you really have different concerns and different interests in life you know i'm i'm saying to you completely seriously if george rr martin lived like an intellectual there's no way his his works from the 1970s would have so much in common with things he's written in the 1990s or 2000s he would have again without making any particular effort without wanting to change you know uh you'd change now look i have a great guinea pig here in the room with me right now but i mean i myself i'm a guinea pig with this it's amazing to me how much i've changed in the last four years how much i've learned how much i mean you know i can ask melissa about that like you know i mean any of the books you've been reading in the last four years i i mean you have not picked up a single book with the thought this is going to make me a better person or this is going to make me a different person none of this is read with a sort of self-help motivation or in you're not seeking out some kind of personal transformation but you know you've changed you you learn new things like in sir i've said this before on the channel you might have heard me say this before but think about the meaning of the word perspective you know the difference between seeing something that's close up to you as enormous and understanding its true size its true significance in perspective seeing things in perspective i mean even if you don't want to change you know you you change there's an example on the front page of the new york times the sunday so yesterday's copy of the new york times the front page story is about the us military improperly uh dropping a bomb that killed 50 to 70 civilians civilians apparently this is in the war against isis in syria okay they drop so like i'm not doubting the basic premise of this story there's a drone strike something was wrong or stupid or misguided about this drone strike it's not known it's not known who pulled the trigger or who decided to carry this drum strike and they killed 50 to 70 civilians in isis territory if i had read that story when i was 16 years old right i would not see it in perspective you know that's not like a simple judgment of right or wrong but you know oh yeah you know what like you know villages get burned down women and children get massacred in war and you know you can gain a sense of perspective by reading about the history of the napoleonic wars just recently i've been reading a lot about the american revolutionary war which many people today are strangely ignorant of you know all these all these celebrations of american independence what actually happened in that war what was happening political time you know you gain perspective you know i just say like things great and small in my life like that really make me make me aware of these things and you know i i just say i don't think that is moral relativism i don't think it's going from being a morally judgmental person to being a non-judgmental person or anything of the other kind but um you know sort of any given topic how do you think about democracy and how do you think about war how do you think about peace these things they when you're really learning when you're really engaged in life the mind when you're really engaged in research of any kind for any purpose you know you you gain perspective um i was sorry this is just this is way off topic but just to give an example where i've become more judgmental not less you know because some of you will have heard that example like okay well back when you were 17 you were naive and you would have thought this was a terrible crime against humanity to drop a bomb that kills 50 to 70 people and now you've you've loosened up because you've gotten used to uh the stakes of war kind of thing okay well look you know what the more i know about gambling the more judgmental i am i have no tolerance for it i have no you know does you say it doesn't mean i'm more accepting again like the more i know about drug addiction the less tolerant i am you know the more i really you know believe in very very harsh forms of coercion to eliminate and punish you know drug addiction the more i know even about prescription drugs prescription drug addiction and you know mind-altering drugs that are sold as antidepressants and so forth so-called psychiatric medicines most of which have been debunked and proven to have really terrible side effects and either absolutely no benefit or an incredibly trivial benefit relative to these these side effects you know so just say it's not the case that as you grow when you gain perspective that everything recedes toward the horizon everything seems smaller and seems less important some things may seem more important some things you may be more judgmental of but anyway it's just fine i've so just say this is not the only uh concern in my mind it's not the only the only thing on my plate um i have this conversation i'm going to return to here on my patreon i have the fact that in the last week we've seen the rise and fall of extinction rebellion and their grand ploy to change the history of the world uh at glasgow when you know what what is to be done about um you know global warming uh came to the fore it was briefly within the british isles they didn't have to fly away and imagine if imagine if that conference had taken place in vietnam you know imagine that had been hanoi or ho chi minh city like what would they have been able to do and they would be in a much less comfortable prison for a much longer time you know okay well conveniently this was in glasgow scotland so right in their homeland right in their crosshairs and we got to see just how little was accomplished by their their form of so-called uh peaceful protests so we've we've just lived through that you know and i'd say to something else that's on my mind now more than ever related to both of these former so this is the third category both the two categories i've just mentioned it's just the reality of the fake vegans among us the fake vegans who lead the movement the fake vegans who make money off of the movement the fake vegans who are very often the most prominent people whether it's on youtube or in in terms of the organization of the movement um you guys sorry some of you may have already seen this some of you will not i just posted to my blog this image it's it's very simply a quotation from george mambio george promo one of the most powerful and influential people of the last century to be the press it's ridiculous i mean you know who has been more powerful and influential if you look at the whole century i mean you know george w bush was only in power for eight years but george mavio has had this uh bully pulpit of his for a much much longer time and it's not over yet so if you guys haven't seen this quotation before you can uh you can click on the link i've just put in the in the comment section um so the the title of this article is quote i've converted to veganism to reduce my impact on the living world close quote now he said he chose to use the term converted to veganism he didn't say you know i've been trying to cut down on my meat consent you know i've been trying to adopt a more moderate you know no he says converted to veganism he doesn't even say he's trying to adjust his diet to be more vegan no it's an ideological phrasing quote i have converted to veganism close quote and now i've just given you in this illustration jumping ahead to what from myself is the crucial paragraph of this article because there is a lot of meandering [ __ ] about the relationship of ecology to veganism if you read the thing as a whole [Laughter] quote since then i have cut almost all animal products from my diet period i'm not religious about it period now already there close quote over there if you're not religious about it maybe you shouldn't have used the phrasing i've converted to vegan so i'll continue here quote if i'm at a friend's house i might revert to vegetarianism if i'm away from home i will take a drop of milk in my tea about once a fortnight i have an egg for my breath [Music] [Laughter] sorry close question this isn't the end of the quote believe it or not oh well gee it doesn't sound like you've converted to veganism no it sounds like you eat milk and eggs and meat as this goes on whenever it's convenient for you oh and i'm sorry so so about once every two weeks you have an egg for breakfast so do you go to the grocery store and buy one egg so you go to the butcher and say yes i like to buy one egg or do you buy 12 eggs in a case that sit in your fridge all the time i don't believe you homeboy i think your household is buying and consuming a dozen eggs a week because eggs don't last very long i don't think you buy one egg once every two weeks and if you did you would still not be vegan it's just ridiculous oh sorry just uh continue here um so quote about once a fortnight i have an egg for my breakfast comma perhaps once a month a fish i catch about once a month he eats a fish that he catches and kills himself uh continuing the quotation or a herring or some anchovies and now he he he adds in parentheses if you eat fish take them from the bottom of the food chain close parentheses period yes that obviously is the moral that vegans would insist on here yes um you know as if it's it's fine to eat animals as long as they're closer to the bottom of the food chain that would be a very different philosophy wouldn't it may be an interesting one but no that's that's not veganism i continue the quotation here quote perhaps three or four times a year on special occasions i will eat farmed meat colon partly out of greed partly because i don't want to be even more of a specter at the feast than i am already close quote so again he said he converted to veganism in reality he eats meat whenever it is convenient for him like oh how much more often could you possibly eat meat given your conviction that you're saving the planet this is supposedly an ecological vegan you don't have the conviction you don't want to be a specter so like let's just say i don't know which i don't know which uh you know event he's alluding to which which religious occasion or what have you he's living here but he says he doesn't want to be a specter at the event oh okay so you don't want to um you don't want to slightly inconvenience your father-in-law is that what it is you go over to your father-in-law's house to celebrate whatever god forsaken holiday you you celebrate right oh well you know what you could do like even here in victoria there's a there's a vegan restaurant it's not great it's really not but you know there's a vegan chinese restaurant here if you've if you've really been watching my youtube channel for a long time you've seen my review of that chinese restaurant for you know what you know okay i never they don't recognize me when i go to that restaurant so i guess they don't they don't watch my youtube channel they don't know how to review them oh okay well if i got to go eat with my father-in-law then i don't want to impose on him to make vegan food i can go to that chinese restaurant i can get take out vegan food and i can bring that to the dinner to the event you know i can i can bring my own food why because it matters like i'm sorry but like you know now look you know in terms of how i feel about this this is what i think about this there are the conclusions i can't do [Music] why is it that the very people who have gotten rich and famous out of veganism and out of ecology more broadly are the people who lack you know the level of commitment the level of self-discipline to actually live the lifestyle you know sorry who who has made more money out of veganism than george monbio who has gotten more fame veganism than the george mobile you know and in his case it's veganism and ecology you know what i'm saying it's not it's not just just one thing and it's the whole his whole act even in that one article and in youtube videos he's uploaded this month and so on it's very much about how veganism and ecology are are linked to one another okay so as a simple matter of principles a simple matter of self-discipline and look guys you know especially in the current context there's now november of 2021 nothing else is veganism like this is going to sound weird george mumbio he's kind of an old ugly guy how old is george monbio i could i could have asked my robot friend here uh so he's 58 okay he's 58 years old he's not the best looking guy imagine if he had written the same article saying that he absolutely never sleeps with prostitutes and let's say the title isn't that he's decided to never sleep with prostitutes it could even be he's converted to anti-prostitutism or he's converted to catholicism maybe a poor choice but so he's made an ideological commitment that he's never going to sleep with prostitutes uh but he does maybe three or four times a year you know but he says but you know about three or four times a year he does you know okay it's kind of weird it's kind of [ __ ] up i would have more sympathy for that than what he's saying here and i'd be able to look at that and be like well you know this is an ugly older guy who's you know down on his luck or something you know whatever this is attitude this you know he's he's written this article honestly saying that he's morally opposed to prostitution but he nevertheless is a client or engages in it three or four times a year like i know he's gonna say word but like there's a there's a kind of nobility in that there's a kind of just the vulnerability of being willing to say hey this is something morally wrong and i'm going to admit that i do it i'm going to write about it honestly there's there's a weird kind of nobility in that you know of saying like look this is something i disapprove of and i do anyway well you know my point here is now now again sorry you know my point here is not that i would applaud him for sleeping with prostitutes nothing else is veganism you know i mean nothing else has this moral significance for the question of who you are what kind of person you want to be obviously for the animals themselves that are born and raised in captivity and tortured to death for your momentary delectation the nutritional value is nil or it's negative you know et cetera et cetera you guys know that the whole side of it but especially george pardon me george mumbio is the most famous ecologist of his generation he is the most famous and the most powerful and he did nothing to earn it he was just selected to be the science writer for this incredibly powerful newspaper uniquely powerful newspaper um in england and then ever since then he sat on his throne and that is what he continues to do and he's he's appeared numerous times on the youtube channel of extinction rebellion and he has apparently participated in a protest and been arrested at least once for extinction now so you're willing to you're allegedly willing to go to jail for your convictions allegedly you know this is also a kind of weird pantomime farce um none of these people really believe they're gonna do hard time you know in jail they all assume that you know the uh the system supports them and so on and so forth but someone this cannot even maintain uh can cannot simply be 100 but it cannot actually be vegan cannot live up to the headline of his own article quote i've converted to veganism to reduce my impact on the living world now look um sorry i'm coming back to column one and column two here talking about what it means to be an intellectual and so on if you guys have a second hit the hit the thumbs up button it's great i have 30 people in the audience and i do appreciate that i've looked at some other much more famous youtubers live streams and they actually do not get as many people on the island as i do or some of them they have they have an audience a thousand times larger than mine but they only have twice as many people in the audience as i do with this kind of thing so i do appreciate people people showing up and again you know of a sense of what this conversation is about and if you want to go and send an invitation to some friendy or is it something you think might actually benefit from from joining in you know the other side of it is this um aaron janus went crazy burnt out still vegan so far as i know lives 100 vegan lifestyle hundreds of you know she has she has a self-discipline to maintain a vegan diet but nothing else you know james aspie went crazy burnt out still has the self this one to maintain a vegan diet doesn't have the self-discipline to do anything else it's bizarre now some of you may vaguely recall the legend of james aspie's only fans check it out today it's gone he's deleted it i mean he went off the deep end he deleted a large part of his social media presence and he stopped uploading youtube he stopped doing uh much of anything now yeah i mean you know how what does it take out of you to maintain and only fans check his patreon people are still paying him money on patreon uh he has not updated or posted to patreon since 2018. when i go to the front page of my patreon not logged in as myself when i go in as a as a stranger it tells me that i upload more than 10 times a week that i post something to patreon and believe it i'm posting all kinds of stuff including some videos that aren't posted publicly but also just graphics images commentary uh text i'm posting all kinds of things you used to do podcasts but anyway whatever podcast podcast wrote a stop this is this is 2001 and i post uh post icons thanks to my to my patreon i talk to my my followers so that one dollar that one dollar a month you know okay so again these are some of the people who've made the most money out of the movement and i'm i'm drawing attention to two types they're the people who have gotten all this money and fame of the movement and they don't even have the self-discipline to be vegan and there are people who got the money and fame out of the movement but that seems to be all the self-discipline they've got and otherwise they've cracked up and falled apart and you can say they went crazy or to some extent they always were crazy you know maybe we'll maybe we'll never know right like maybe we'll never know just how crazy they were aside from these other these other factors babe can you turn that lamp off oh yes thanks um you know so look i don't have to keep giving examples of this okay henia mania again of all the people there was a time when i said openly she was not only the most successful vegan activist of that era but one of the most successful of all time who's ever done it just but with the amount of money and fame she got from making very very little effort on her part the rewards she got were immense now again to my knowledge she still is on a vegan diet but she's lost the self-discipline and direction to do anything else with her life so you know [Applause] you know another very strange one some some of you will remember and some of you won't a bite-sized vegan she had so much support so much it's just money pouring and look um what i'm about to say has nothing to do with jealousy like many of my viewers are also vegan activists some of you guys may feel jealous when you look at some of these people and kind of so what i don't it's a feeling i mean it is what it is some of you may look at a bite-sized vegan emily and you may think wow if you had had that kind of support if you had that kind of public interest here's what you would have done with it some of you may look at aaron janus and think wow if you'd ever had that kind of public interest public support if you'd ever had this here's what you would have done with it james asby you know it's ridiculous [Laughter] what talent did that guy ever have you know it's ridiculous but you know starting with the mainstream media and a few individual people like freely there was this conspiracy to make him into a celebrity and a massively reward the very small efforts he made some of you may look at that and and feel jealous and think that you would have done something so much more meaningful or impactful or you you were just still there you'd do a better job if you were uh adventitiously put into james asking position if you'd had you know but the point i want to make here has nothing to do with jealousy and has nothing to do with those subjective feelings or those aspirations to make better use of the opportunities or resources that exist with people my point is instead emphasize that those resources are incredibly finite and the fact that one person has them means that nobody else has them so the fact that dr greger has a sinking budget of over one million dollars a year in donations coming in so i've made videos in the past talking about the actual numbers i'm not going to make a new video now and going through his budget again you can get the budget you can get the numbers you can look at how much is a huge amount of money okay there is somebody else who is not getting that million dollars and i can point to the audience right now and say it's you the millions of dollars plural that go into peta people with the ethical treatment of animals it doesn't matter if you feel jealous about it or you feel positive it really doesn't matter how you feel the fact that that money is given to peta the fact that opportunity is created there for them at that time this unique way means that it doesn't exist for you and you and you there's some other possibility that's be there's another door that's being closed that this door can be can be open now i'm just going to put that in human scale with with a few other remarks you know when i was involved in buddhist studies i really recognized this because i knew about buddhist studies globally so this is research and academic teaching related buddhism which is supposedly something very different from the religion of buddhism in reality they are inextricably intertwined [Music] you know you could look at the whole island of great britain and there would only be so many seats so many chairs for professors in buddhism and then you could look at all of europe and then you could look at all of the world like including hong kong and thailand and sri lanka it's like globally there are only so many positions there are only so many seats and the fact that this seat like one particular example the fact that it was given to this crackpot to this idiot to this numbskull who's going to squander the opportunity that has unbelievable implications for the whole field like chair by chair seat by seat and when you look around the world and you know those guys live a long time they don't retire they don't give up the seat and pass it on to someone else after four years and there are no elections and there are no explanations for why one guy got that opportunity and not another the seats you hear nothing from so i'll say further some of those seats some of those professorships there's a big scandal you know something that gets into so there's one i talked about in a recent youtube video one of these guys he was a professor of buddhism in denmark and he became a neo-nazi and got involved in holocaust denial and i was told by an eyewitness he also had nazi tattoos on his body and he was asked to resign after he resigned he was not replaced by a better man they completely shut down the department like the seat cease to exist this is another thing that happens so that got into the newspapers that got talked about oh there's a professor of buddhism was a bit of a crazy nazi you know um so when you say some of these people are extenders okay so that people hear about and that they might be able to mentate that this is a waste this is a loss of opportunity there's a finite amount of opportunity out there and some of it was squandered by this guy what's harder to see is that there are all these chairs all these positions all these opportunities each one equating to a million dollars or something large amounts of money involved with with high level academia you know and the ones you hear nothing back from like oh yeah yeah i haven't really heard anything about buddhist studies at the university of toronto for a few years whatever it's just something that there has been no controversy there has been no scandal but there also haven't been any great accomplishments right there hasn't been you know it's nothing has been done positively with uh with that opportunity okay that is actually the greater tragedy and like if you care about buddhism as a religion that completely condemns and ruins the the future of buddhism that's the death of your religion if you care about academia it condemns and ruins the future of the university or of the discipline and by the way you could repeat this what i've just said about buddhist studies you could say that's also about a field like say anthropology you know anthropology but there isn't a lot of money coming in each seat each professorship really matters for the future of anthropology not just for the future of your own students you know but for for everyone else as well so look you know um i had a conflict here i believe this is right on topic i had a conflict here with a guy named uh jordan riker and i made several videos talking about it now it's not merely symbolic or conceptual to say so we're now at about eight years all right it's not it's like seven and a half years okay we'll say seven years in a second i can say that in the last seven years he excluded me from every possible vegan forum every possible vegan activist organization i could have been involved with here in the city of victoria and in the adjacent city of vancouver now that includes just like having me removed from a facebook group i'm not allowed to join the facebook group i'm not allowed to attend the event the event is kept secret from me even though i signed the piece of paper creating the organization that hosted the event like like the degree of kind of backstabbing and skullduggery and so on where he was smiling to my face at one point he was he's not anymore you know um you know this is one guy who was the self-appointed hitler of veganism in victoria british columbia canada that's what he is he's a petty tyrant he's a little hitler okay now in this case it's not just symbolic or it's not just an economic argument in the same sense that look one million dollars being given to wayne syong and one million dollars being given to peta and one million dollars being given to uh dr greger how many millions of dollars do you think we've got here guys like you think there's infinite opportunity for a movement as unpopular as ours okay there is a real sense in which that hurts me and hurts all of you in the audience because i'm not i'm not here to gas you up i see we got lydia in the audience i see we got frida in the audience okay lydia you are smarter than dr greger right you like all the people i know in this audience you're all smarter than dr greger you're all smarter than durianrider you're all smarter than freelee you're all smarter than jordan reichert you know you're all really you guys all have the potential to make more of an important difference for the future of this movement and thus for the future of of planet earth then aaron janus oh oh that's really beautiful who who in this audience put your hands up if you genuinely think you're stupider than james aspie put your hands up in the audience tell me who you are if you think you're so stupid that the best way you can make a difference in the world and for the future of veganism is to give your money to james aspie and let him talk for you let him do just like well look you know like look when i go to the hospital i don't tell the doctors how to do the job i don't tell the surgeon how to do open chest surgery by the same token you know i've just got to trust james aspie i'm just going to say look man you're the dude you're the dude with a scalpel in your hand it's on you you're like you know does anyone feel that way does anyone feel they're so dumb they just have to hand over their money to james aspie and and leave him in charge of the movement or let him speak for you let him speak on your behalf let him actually craft i don't believe it like i don't believe i have a single viewer today and whatever over time this video may get a thousand views or whatever it gets i don't believe any of you really think you're you're that stupid um with someone like jordan reichert it's much more direct because he's actually preventing me from attending vegan events preventing me from speaking preventing me from even being a member of the facebook group and look the fact that uh aaron janus got that money and not you right you probably weren't asking probably because we're not doing fundraising you weren't competing okay it matters in this more indirect sense right in this city how many talented hard-working brilliant vegans do you think we've got okay so in victoria canada i think i'm the most famous vegan in this city i don't i can't even i don't have a lot of competition who's the guy across the street levi oh yeah yeah okay across the street from me there's a guy named levi he's got his own youtube she's terrible i don't want to show them it's a terrible youtube channel there's one other vegan youtuber i know of in this town yeah i'm right he's sick he's on the vegan spectrum but anyway guys there's not a lot of competition here then you know am i the most talented most brilliant most hardworking potential leader for veganism in victoria in victoria and vancouver in western canada like if we include toronto and montreal maybe i've got some competition but there's not a lot in the whole country in the whole of canada how many talented ambitious people are there you can work with in veganism well guess what because of this one [ __ ] jordan reichert because of one self-appointed petty tyrant little hitler right the other vegans who were here in victoria they never met me they never got the chance to work with me and the irony is i'm not a little tyrant i wouldn't have tried to lead and control them in that way i probably just engaged them in discussions and would have contributed in that way i probably would have played a more socratic role frankly rather than being this this kind of uh this kind of leader but you know what whatever they could have accomplished in real life or on the internet like politically philosophically in terms of publications whatever kinds of events right there's no comparison between in in seven years what they could have done with me compared to what they would have done without me the most recent video that jordan reichert uploaded had 17 views one seven 17 news if you know anything about how youtube works especially with a long format video 17 views is zero it doesn't rep it doesn't indicate that there are actually 17 people interested in your work um it doesn't mean you have 17 actually interesting viewers and that guy has had institutional support from absolutely everybody he's had organized political party support he's had donations he's had all this money and effort by them stuff i've never had in any stage of my career you know okay i did do a fundraiser once for a court case with durianrider not not the same thing i'm not supported by a political party in canada i'm not supported by their activists not supported by groups like direct action everywhere and uh what's it called the save movement and all these things he's connected to and supported by all of these other all these other institutions and guess what he's a [ __ ] idiot everything he has to say is boring and his ideas about in his approach to vegan activism is completely counterproductive and stupid and wrong and to quote my favorite rapper 50 cent you've been hustling a long time and you ain't got nothing you know it's just seven years i know he's been doing it for 15 years now he's been in this game a long time but like dude i see what you've accomplished in the last seven years and it is [ __ ] nothing you know so sorry this is my point sometimes we're talking about this more indirect form of competition where it's like look there's only so much oxygen there's only so much money there are only so many seats in the universities and so on and so forth and sometimes you're talking about really direct competition where one person is is snuffing out another so for me this is the same uh this is the same problem i opened the video talking about for me these are three different columns of talking about exact same problem which is whether or not any of these people are real are real intellectuals um i've got a comment from the audience here quote i'm afraid of going to a vegan meetup and getting disappointed yeah and you know i think there are really kind of only two uh two attitudes you can you can take towards that i think you decide to go to the meetup and and get disappointed you know because it's worth it because there's something important you know for you to learn in being disappointed you know um [Laughter] you know what i'm wrong there's only one possibility that's it there is you know um the value of knowing has to be kind of greater than than not knowing and i think that's i think that's all i can say about that but yeah if you go you're going to be disappointed if you go to the vegan events you're going to know exactly what kind of loser you've got to work with and if you don't go you're never going to know it's going to be a matter of speculation right now look i mean sorry to bring that back to buddhist studies my experience with buddhism really briefly um if i had just started out with the attitude that all the people in this field are idiots and not worth talking to that would be one thing but going out and meeting those people with an open heart and open mind again and again and again and reading their work and learning about their background and learning what's going on in the field that puts me in a very very different position where it's like okay i really know what i'm missing i know who these people are i know what's possible and what's impossible and in buddhist studies and with time i really learned how the whole university system works now it's it's heartbreaking because it was all bad news but you know jesus give you an example margaret cohn i had email with margaret cohen before i met her face to face um if i hadn't met her face to face nobody could have convinced me how insane and how stupid margaret cohen is you know what i mean like nobody doesn't matter if someone had told me i would have never you know what i mean i never could have believed it so margaret cohen's a career academic connected to uh uh buddhist studies you know i could go on and on it's a different story in each case they're not all insane you know in the same way and it wasn't always something i figured out based on meeting the face to face i remember one professor he's now a professor of buddhism at king's college london a very prestigious position and you know when i met him face to face i could tell he really did not know his stuff a lot of things having to do with the actual texts what the additions are and the differences are between them um like how the how you do buddhist studies 101 basically that stuff any anyway anyone with a phd should know that any frankly anyone with a ba should know that but whatever um so he was strangely ignorant to me but later i looked around at um an obscure publication in england i used to read all the buddhist studies locations and i found articles and comments from him showing what a culti what a true believer he was in buddhism before he learned to cover it up and present himself in a more academically respectable way okay so you're saying different people are crazy in different ways uh when i you know and then you find out nothing's possible that you can't work with anybody and you know i quit the buddhist studies field basically because i didn't like the company it's like well i don't want to work with any of these people and i'm not going to do this at all if i have to work completely alone there was a time when i came back from china to canada and i had a list of people i was expecting to work with when i got to canada and i even bought gifts for some of them and i wanted to believe the best about all these people that included aaron janus you know included a bunch of vegan activists i knew and you know you have the attitude of hey you got lemons make lemonade maybe there's some things wrong with aaron janus but you know let's let's try to do something positive for the animals for the future of planet earth for all these reasons for all these lofty reasons that motivate us to be involved in vegan activism in the in the first place okay like you know and aaron had written to us at that time she said directly to us that she wanted to do uh collab videos with both me and melissa that she thought of collab video she wanted before for youtube with my with my girlfriend melissa um anyway yeah i i came back and i had a list of people i was expecting to meet and and do something with you know for for the movement and not a single one of them ever met me and not a single one of them ever ever did anything and basically all of those people have have gone insane um or they were insane all along and now it just shows a little bit more blatantly i mean like with someone like richard with vegan gains can anyone say he went crazy or is it just that he was crazy all along and he had different ways of uh coping with it or or concealing it um all right so i am seeing your your questions in the audience as they as they come in um you know look i gotta say being wrong is something that happens to people but if you're an intellectual you learn from those mistakes because being intellectual is about learning all the time you know uh someone like jordan reichert he's not intellectual he's also an idiot but let's you know someone like jordan reichert at an early stage he got committed to opposing horse-drawn carriages as his main form of vegan activists now from the first time i met him i was setting up these reasons why this is like the absolute worst and weakest approach to vegan activism horse drawing as you know there can make a list of uh i don't know what do you want to base your campaign around in terms of being active including that he was going he was trying to get elected the government's going for mass support some that's popular with the masses talk about an issue that matters to to a lot of people you know the horses that draw the carriages here are treated better than pet dogs and pet cats and he's not anti-pet he's not against domestication of pets you know who among other things have their testicles chopped off and so on and so forth you know okay so you have a horse that lives on a field and then for a couple hours a day it pulls a carriage you know and you're saying this is terrible animal abuse oh you know you're making yourself look ridiculous you may be making veganism look ridiculous too to a certain extent what we know meanwhile you know here we're even killing whales and stuff and we're killing all kinds of large large animals but you know look you know regardless let's say hypothetically seven years ago he decided to make horse-drawn carriages the center of his political campaign for veganism and what if it worked what if it was a great success what if my analysis was wrong what if you know he really struck a nerve with the public and everyone supported this campaign oh god the other thing he was committed to was sabotaging the traps for a deer so you have periodically a deer problem there are too many deer downtown in the middle of the city and they block traffic oh so he's morally opposed to trapping the deal every everyone else who lives in the city vegan or not they're aware having deer in traffic is this this big problem they got to cope with one way or the other just like you're picking the most marginal most unpopular issues possible wait what if i were wrong what if he tapped this huge groundswell of public support and interest has swept him to a position of political power and it was a great success well of course it failed that's not what happened of course he failed and failed and failed and failed um despite getting interviewed on the mate by the mainstream press despite getting a certain level of notoriety and support from these vegan organizations which again i have never had i have never had the save movement or anyone else supporting what i'm doing i've never had a political party behind me i've never had donations behind me as i've said for any of this stuff i'm just not an idiot but you know all of the support i have is due to my being not an idiot which i appreciate you know uh okay well if you're an intellectual any kind of intellectual if you're a real intellectual is it even gonna be one year or two years that you're committed to those tactics before you're really reflecting on it analyzing it learning from the experience and you're doing something else like an intellectual in his position even if they had made that mistake of committing to two of the most unpopular counterproductive things to possibly protest they committed to horse-drawn carriages and sabotaging deer traps for a deer that have come into the downtown part of the city and you can imagine here the deer tear apart people's garbage and they tear apart people's lawns and they run in traffic so the public generally is much less sympathetic the non-vegan public is not terribly sympathetic on the deer issue they're a nuisance they they want to get rid of and they're quite ready to kill them or shoot them or have the city authorities do so you know um you know don't you think you can learn from that don't you think you can adapt now i said right at the start of this video even though i personally have some level of appreciation for the writing of georgia r martin it's the same thing right if george rr martin were a real intellectual and you were not watching sports on tv you were not watching american pro football and we're not drinking alcohol it's just not possible that he's stuck on the same sort of narrow selection of themes and the same theses about those themes from the 1970s through to the 2020s it's not possible you know intellectuals are people who learn and that includes you know uh learning from your own mistakes now in a weird subtle way i think this applies to james aspy i think it applies to all these other people i think it applies to george monbio oh yeah the other the other big name went crazy and disappeared how about gary yourofsky you know one aspect of being an intellectual is that you don't make the same mistakes again and again even if whether you made the decision as a young person or a middle-aged person at some point you committed to one mode of activism one approach to politics whatever it is and then you know lydia is asking if this is pre-recorded lydia i showed you oh just a few minutes ago what do you mean i think i haven't i'm not seeing the not seeing the comments as they come in [Laughter] all right so i'm going to return to this um this comment i had on on patreon now so joel writes in saying quote i think you're just talking about people who are gullible from my perspective these aren't intellectuals again that's the part of this comment i really relate to and then his next example he goes on to is jordan peterson and he says look people call jordan peterson an intellectual but look at what he says about nazi ideology now i don't need to go into this at great depth and i don't even think that's the best example within jordan peterson's extant works okay you know if you're an intellectual you challenge your own assumptions you challenge other people's assumptions you learn you do research you change you adopt new attitudes and perspectives what jordan peterson has to say about nazism and adolf hitler is in very large part based on one book called hitler's table talk now that book at one time was a bestseller in english it's still a huge number of copies but today it's largely forgotten it's not really a famous book today the way it once was i do not think you will see it for sale uh in an airport waiting room but there was a time when it was it was that big a hit it was it was a big hit book okay that book has been completely debunked it has been proven to be an intentionally written fraud an intentionally created fraud okay and a fraud created with very specific uh political objectives by the by the creators of the hoax right it's that's now an established fact does jordan peterson's perspective on the nazis change no there's no there's no change there's no progress there's no new perspective there's no new approach you know does his perspective on any other related issue christianity uh democracy you know these things are all tied up his idea of kind of hierarchy in society all these things are tied up to what he has to say it's really incoherent [ __ ] he has to say about the nazis you know when you know okay i'm not saying this to you in a moral sense what i'm saying to you you have to change i'm not saying you would have to make an effort to change if you are an intellectual you will change it will be effortless you're changing all the time like what i think about ancient athens in the last four years has changed back when i was with my ex-wife whatever more than 10 years ago i thought i already knew everything i had to know about ancient athens i wasn't on an ego trip about it but i was like no no you know i've done a certain amount of reading and i just don't have any reason to do any more reading of that i was working on buddhism and all these other things working on the kree and the ojibwe all kinds of things that nerves me that time i was married to an anthropologist reading anthropology and you know as always caring about politics and history there were all kinds of things i wanted to read i didn't think i was going to return to the study of ancient rome and ancient athens well guess what i changed you know i've and i've partly i've discovered books i didn't even know existed and so on and so forth and i read those books and i see the problems and the books that already read and i gained a new perspective and i've changed now you know the point is my view about everything has changed like even even just within the last five years my views about the history of the united states of america the writing the american constitution has changed my views about historical figures like benjamin franklin i mean all kinds of stuff but you're not that one which i never thought i'd take an interest in i never thought my research would would would bend that way or something you know and you know i've changed and i'm changing all the time i'm doing research all the time and i'm learning all the time and yes i'm i'm challenging your assumptions all the time like i try to reach out to my audience and challenge what you guys think or what what you uh assume but uh you know i'm challenging myself all the time also and again without making any particular effort i'm going to change now tell me something jordan peterson from his own perspective was hospitalized and nearly died because of the addictive properties of prescription psychiatric medication because these medications that he had trusted all his life and he had recommended other people use all his life and i've seen youtube videos of him saying that it's not just my imagination you know he discovered abruptly and unexpectedly that these drugs one are addictive that they have really serious withdrawal problems and two they have incredibly serious negative side effects and from his own perspective he almost died he was hospitalized and there's a whole saga surrounding what happened and how he managed to just barely recover his health and or his sanity okay so here's the problem jordan peterson hasn't changed even if you compare his first book written before the hospitalization to his second book he hasn't changed there is one endnote it's not even a photo there's an endnote in the second book that mentions in about two sentences that it turns out these drugs have terrible negative side effects and are addictive and he hadn't realized that before he hasn't changed now his specialization his area of expertise is not the history of germany during world war ii you know he's not a devoted researcher of 20th century german fascism or something that just happens to be a fascination he's had for many years of his life and is a big part of his is philosophy so in discovering that the main book that's the source of his knowledge and his attitude is analysis of that discovering that that book is a hoax is a fraud that should lead you to change his career is in the field of the science of the mind psychology whatever you want to call it okay so when you discover that that has been debunked everything should change um the sense in which he's not an intellectual or the proof positive what really matters here it's not have you read this particular book or have you read these 10 books or have you read 100 books or are you reading new books all the time there's a really weird sense in which someone could theoretically be illiterate and be a real intellectual they'd have to listen to a lot of books on tape that have to rely a lot on you know conversations i'm saying here that the real most important sign of being an intellectual like the litmus test the evidence you have someone is intellectual is that they can change that they profoundly change and i think they're changing all the time without without making any particular effort to do so now i got to tell you something look at durian riders youtube channel he ain't changed look at freelee's youtube channel he ain't changed look at me you know i'm sorry to say it but even somebody like the leader of pcrm uh what's his name dr uh dr bernard right yeah dr bernard the head of pcrm he ain't neil bernard yeah yeah barnard yeah okay sorry uh dr neil barnard you know he ain't he's incapable of of change you know in this in this way you know so this is you know i just say this is really significant i mean this is this is a significant telling sign about who is and who is not intellectual and what the what the consequences are so you know i say this on a on a large scale and on a small scale now look i've followed sorry i've mentioned before uh george monvio i actually checked with my blog history when was the last time i mentioned george monbiot on my blog and it was 2014. so i have a post here on my blog from 2014 called george monvio a lifetime uh of excuses for eating meat um lydia is saying that she regrets that isil never comes to her live streams uh lydia i didn't even know you you had live streams or a youtube channel or anything like that i mean if you want to send me an email if you want to talk to me on patreon you can but come on i don't know any i don't know anything about you aside from what you tell me and you don't tell me much so you know come on uh you know in a sense i've known you for five years or something but come on i only know a series of single sentence comments that you made um okay so back in 2014 i wrote quote the most remarkable thing about george monbio's saga of alternating between veganism and embracing meat-eating is that he has gotten paid to publish his opinion at every stage what he has to say isn't any better than the type of diaristic writing that now floods the internet for free and really it isn't any better informed either quote so now i'm quoting ambio while researching my book feral i also came to see extensive livestock rearing as a lot less benign than i or my colleague had assumed the damage done to biodiversity water catchments and carbon stores by sheep and cattle grazing in places unsuitable for arable farming is out of all proportion to the amount of meat produced wasteful and destructive as feeding grain to livestock is ranching appears to be even worse close quote when i continue quoting my article so in other words after many years of research countless articles written on the subject and several published books he has come to admit to himself a set of facts so obvious that they are consistently discussed even in united nations agency reports that actively support the expansion of the meat industry i then have a series of bar charts showing the unbelievably horrible ecological consequences of the production and eating of meat quote these basic facts are so clear even from a simple visualization of how animals are fed etc that for the most part people can only fail to understand them because they actively prefer to disregard them and while i can sympathize with that self-deceptive tendency i.e we are all we were all young once it is surreal to see someone who became a self-professed expert after more than a decade of advocacy authorship etc limping along with this kind of recognition of the most basic assumptions so long afterward and for such shallow reasons as reflecting that al gore is now vegan um close quote and i end by just saying you can lead a horse to water but you can't make a drink you know um reflecting on that way so now look uh that was written in 2014 but you can see the same issue here coming in he has gotten paid for this he has become rich and famous and he continues to be here we are in 2021 and he's still one of the most influential people in the world now you know nobody else gets hired for that position nobody else gets to be the science writer at the guardian that's that's a one once in a lifetime opportunity that he was given for no particular reason nobody else is going to have that particular again it's more like a professor's seat or what have you um you know there is nobody else who's gonna have that that opportunity it can't be shared uh it can't be shared it can only be squandered sadly and george monbio is now an example of someone who's squandered it but you know my light motif here that i'm coming back to again and again is um how is it possible for this guy in 10 years from 2004 to 2014. again he's researching and writing books i mean he's not just watching sports on tv i mean maybe he does with his spare time also i don't know that much about his his private life you know how is it possible over 10 years for you to deal with these facts and these questions again and again and and you don't change and now we can look at the gap between 2014 and 2021 and say you know that that he hasn't changed so i'm just reading the rest of this comment from patreon yeah so this is something else i discussed with melissa recently so uh joel writes he says you know um people worship these figures like jordan peterson who are not real intellectuals and even when he can prove that what jordan peterson is saying is wrong or faulty or misleading um you know people will just try to come up with the most generous interpretation possible so they can keep on supporting jordan peterson quote you see the problem is that a lot of people in this generation are very gullible and claim that they do research when they don't it's not only 17 year olds it's also 40 year olds and beyond people never talk about the poverty of the mind but at least this youtube channel of balocio is um and he then says himself that he he wants to have a rich mind and not a poor mind and he says he's going to share the particular video with his friends because he hopes they can benefit from it if they if they pay attention to it um you know okay there are things i like about western civilization there are things i like about france and germany and england even that i cannot find in japan and i cannot find in iran or iraq there are things about you know western christendom even to put it that way you know the traditionally christian western european civilization that i personally happen to like and i'm an atheist in case you didn't know i'm a nihilistic atheist however i think it's really important to you know face up to uh the unique disadvantages of our culture and it is a culture that's been shaped by christianity to an unbelievable extent why do people pretend to have read books they haven't read you know my honest answer to you is that's because our whole culture is built on the bible it's built on people pretending that they have read and understood the bible when they haven't he could give hundreds of examples of this but i i've even heard stories from people who used to be christians and became atheists talking about approaching a priest or a pastor or would this be a protestant church father with a very simple question about what a passage of the bible means and of the religious leader becoming furious and even violent and you know kind of slapping the person and kicking the church kind of how dare you ask this and how dare you you know impugn by authority because the reality was they were they were covering up for the fact they really didn't know the text very well and they didn't understand it like even if they had kind of seen it before you know you can point out these incredibly simple things i used the example recently of jesus destroying a tree because it didn't bear fruit out of season what an incredibly stupid moral to teach children oh if you're angry at a tree because you want to eat apricots you know whatever the fruit is you want to eat apples and this there's no apples on the tree because it's the middle of winter because the fruit is out of season well you should just go ahead and destroy the tree that's what it says in the new testament now i i know and anyone who's really done the research knows there was a very particular allegorical meaning to this the vast majority of christians don't know that the vast majority of priests don't know that the vast majority of church pastors don't know that and so on and so forth this the if they're being honest they have to say oh the text doesn't make any sense or oh i know i guess i never paid attention like because in some sense they've read it and sometimes they've looked it over their eyes have made contact with the piece of paper but like we have a whole civilization and this whole culture built on to a massive extent to a really deep extent not reading and and pretending you've read things uh that that you've read so you know melissa and i were talking about this a couple of days ago and um you know she was talking about skepticism and when you tell people something they don't know what they're unfamiliar with babe why don't you grab the jfk book it's right behind you the the assassination science book you know the attitudes you get in this culture when you mention circumstances surrounding the death of john kennedy former president of the united states um okay i'll just just to give you one some of you know this but some of you don't know this so uh the magic bullet theory the completely impossible theory supported by the government involves at its most basic level that when john kennedy was shot he was shot from behind and from a shooter who was far above him from above and behind from the sixth floor window of the texas school book depository an obscure phrase that's become famous at least for several generations in english the texas school book the poster imagine if they called it something else uh imagine if they just called it a warehouse but no it was a school book depository um okay well you've got a problem even if you want to believe that because the first bullet that hits jfk for which we have innumerable eyewitnesses and we also have videotape evidence sorry film film evidence from the superior film the first bullet put a hole in the windshield in front of jfk and then entered his throat which you can see on filming he clutches his throat again there were people around him everyone saw this so that's the first bullet it's not the last bullet that strikes them i'm not going to go through all the bullets here okay so bullet goes through the windshield you can see the bullet hole in the windshield on the film and then it enters his throat basically dead center of his throat we have the corpse we have the x-rays of the corpse okay that bullet must have been fired from in front of the car and it couldn't have been fired from six stories up in a school book depository or any other kind of building it's it's completely impossible and now if you want to make up another story to rationalize it which many people do many people try to claim that oh when he clutches his throat like this on the video that's the bullet exiting not entering yes well there's a very obvious problem with that which is that if the bullet had entered at the back of his neck and exited through the front it would have destroyed his spine and the spine and the neck are completely intact in the corpse and in the x-ray after he's dead no this is not the only absurdity or impossibility among the things would be completely ridiculous you didn't have to imagine this bullet descending from the sixth floor exiting and then going through the windshield of the car there's so much wrong with this ridiculous okay but for that one fact this this is not the only thing there's one thing oh okay so here in the realm of completely rational discourse this is not a religious question okay so we're dealing with you know we're dealing with the extent to which we're talking about a government cover-up but conspiracy you know okay you know one of the ways people respond to this that both melissa and i have seen and it's so close to what you deal with in veganism so one of the ways people respond to this again and again is oh but if that were true somebody would have told me if that were true i would already know about it that's it's impossible that that's true because that sounds really important and someone like me would already know something you know this really weird sense of egotism now talk to melissa about how do i how do i deal with this i've dealt with this in the world realm of pure politics i've dealt with this you know uh in application of things like the history of cambodia history of thailand history vietnam history of china things that fewer people really read about know about and you know one of the reasons i'm so practicing this was i had to deal with this within my own family all the time i had to confront my father all the time and say look barry have you ever read one book about this topic have you read one article about this topic you have to challenge other people to really be honest about how it is they know the things that they think they know what is the basis for this certainty you have you seem to be so certain that you want to shut me down and insult me and denigrate me and dismiss me for which is going to happen if you talk about the assassination of jfk it's going to happen people are going to have that kind of reaction okay so tell me tell me how do you know what it is that you think you know this is what it is to be an intellectual when you're an intellectual you are constantly feeling out the limits of your knowledge you're constantly feeling for and challenging the basis of your assumption of any given assumption the basis for your assumption the basis plural for your assumptions you know and that's why you're always learning like it is possible to read books that just reinforce your delusions trust me it's possible that's what you see in the world look at these people who were just uh protesting with extinction rebellion in england they have they have a formally organized communist party there uh protesting with them they don't see any problem they they will not allow vegans to protest with them they don't want to be associated with veganism but they'll be associated with quote unquote revolutionary communists okay it is totally possible for people to remain narrowly committed to what is they believe and only read things that reinforce it even when within that book they see something they can't really understand from the challenges their beliefs which happens with the bible all the time whatever it is you want to believe about oh well did you notice that god has a wife what do you mean what no i've read the whole bible from cover to cover no you haven't you didn't notice the part where god had a wife it's kind of kind of significant you know like there were there were some big problems there was some big inconsistencies within the bible about who god is and oh and did you notice that god has more than one name do you notice that sometimes he's yahweh but sometimes he's this other completely different god no like oh i guess you haven't really read the bible like did you notice that this was you know composed from different pieces of what formerly was a polytheistic religion like you know dude another one most christians oh but do you notice the parts that are in support of human sacrifice well what do you mean christians don't support human sacrifice the bible doesn't support human rights yes it does and when i was uh this is very memorable to me but the the one time i talked to henia via skype or equivalent haniel was trying to tell me that um uh the jewish religion that like orthodox judaism supports veganism i said what do you think it's obligatory to sacrifice animals and and eat there most people use term corbin and you know she was shocked and i think on some level she knew this and like you know i had to kind of confront her with it a bit more like on some level like oh right it's not a brief thing in the bible like how could you have read the bible and not know that it requires animal sacrifice like what bible were you i'm just saying there are a lot of things i do like and appreciate about western society about western civilization but we have this way of not reading books we have this way of not seeing the evidence that's right in front of our face and it's really really deep in our culture it's how we relate to the bible it's how we relate to the american constitution you know it infuriates me to hear debates with the constitution which are by the way i'm not some kind of uncritical supporter of the american institution i'm a critic of the constitution i can see its advantages i can see its disadvantages do you want to debate with me what the constitution says about the right to own guns the right to bear arms like this is not a debate like you know the text is completely unambiguous you know uh this way of only we have this deeply ingrained culture of seeing what you want to see disregarding everything to the contrary and then being tremendously morally self-righteous about it and i'm just saying being an intellectual it's not just the accumulation of the number of books you've read so i'm going to read your comments here but there's some people are mentioning examples of marxists whether you're talking about a communist or a buddhist you can meet people who have read 100 books but they're not intellectuals you know because if you were an intellectual you would have noticed these things you would have questioned these things you would have you know you would have in effect become a cr critic of communism you would become a critic of buddhism and you would you would really know and understand all of these all these inconsistencies and so on so just say um look okay we're going to talk about this on a larger scale longer time what if there is some law of physics that at any given time only one percent of the population can be intellectuals there's like a maximum limit for how many intellectuals it's one percent some of you probably feel this way for me this is hypothetical what if whether we're talking about iran or thailand or cambodia or canada or denmark everywhere in the world for some reason there's a maximum limit where only one percent of people can be intellectuals don't you think there's still a really big difference between living in thailand living in iran living in canada living in denmark like the role of intellectuals in our society the status of intellectual or society like what it means to be intellectual how anyone has any consequence if if only one percent of people are going to be intellectuals should james aspie be leading the vegan movement should any of these people should henia and you should should freely like you know we still have a problem here guys like even if that's not flexible even if we can't hope to pump it up from one percent to three percent of the population who are intellectuals the status of those intellectuals in society the status of those intellectuals on social media the status of those intellectuals within a small scale example like like the vegan movement right still really matters it's still going to make a huge tremendous difference and we all know it everyone here knows veganism is anti-intellectual are you [ __ ] kidding me veganism is this anti-intellectual it's okay i'm gonna say for real veganism is more anti-intellectual than hip-hop music it's possible to be an intellectual in hip-hop and rap music it's possible to be appreciated for that it's possible to boast about it too veganism is completely deeply dyed in the wool anti-intellectual right now look it's not my problem but you know catholicism is anti-intellectual buddhism is anti-intellectual like really all of these things you know like what is the status of intellectuals in any of these movements and are they intellectual movements do you say and this is a question that comes down to says big stale and small scale like small scale would be something like the vegan movement and you can think about it as an individual i got a piece of fan mail recently i believe the guy said he was 17 years old 17 year old guy and relatively recently he discovered my channel and he said he was watching all the videos that are in season two so he's seen now many many many of my videos and you know i can take a compliment but here's the problem he said i have never seen any other youtube channel like about a sale i don't know of any other youtube channels i agree i don't think there are any others i don't think there are intellectuals on youtube i don't you know can i can i plumb the depths of my memory to try to find a counter example i don't know any i'm going to say for years i don't know any intellectuals in the vegan movement who's going to interview me who's going to look at and look at who actually has i've reached out to and collaborate with all kinds of people and you know again being a medical doctor doesn't make you an intellectual trust me having a phd does not make you intellectual this is not about formal educational damage nor nor informal right so i'm just saying there is actually a really big problem here you know if this is it like you know and again i nobody can have an omniscient knowledge of every single youtube channel or anything like this but i so i own a copy of the new york times from this sunday i could bet you money i don't think there's a single article in the new york times written by an intellectual in this issue i'm not saying the whole history of the newspaper i'm sure once in a while there's some once in a while they have a book review written by somebody who's a real intellectual once in a while somewhere there's an op-ed column but someone who's really actually i you know what i hope but like seriously i've been through several copies of this where we go through every page and look at everything in the in the newspaper okay i don't i don't need the prop but all right melissa's handing me the newspaper i do actually have a copy of the new york times here in case you don't believe me i got it for free one story didn't pay for it and we're not even gonna read one percent of it but anyway uh you know uh yeah it's really a much deeper much more serious problem that there aren't 10 other youtube channels like mine that there aren't a hundred other youtube channels uh like mine and the pages of the new york times whether you're talking about elite level discourse or local discourse the pages new york times are not crowded with intellectuals we have a local newspaper here called the victoria times colonist so wherever you live if you live in detroit it's the detroit free press like today local newspapers are very humble there's not a lot of money in them you know what even if you live near a university look at the [ __ ] university newspaper there is nothing intellectual about university publications of universities there is nothing you you sure you did work yours oh yeah oh okay okay you know i was i was involved with the university newspaper well anyway nothing's wrong it's funny we never talk about it or it doesn't come out much okay anyway you know you can go through pick up your local university newspaper or look at a small local newspaper you go through every page is there a single article here written by an intellectual is this in any way trying to be intellectual and it's not you know so yeah what was the title of this video so we're living through an epoch of fake intellectuals yes the title is fake intellectuals fake revolutionaries fake vegans okay so guys i can answer your question i can wrap it up i mean i think the part i've said the least about but many of you will know how i feel about it already i've said the least about the fake revolutionaries but i i made a series of videos really like a trilogy of videos here that i really recommend you guys watch don't miss them um where i'm talking about what's been going on with um ancient rebellion what's been going on with the most high um [Music] you know anti-climate change uh ecological activist group and it's incredibly worrying but it's even more bizarre now because here we are two weeks two and a half weeks later and you know they made these so that that's the trilogy of videos if you guys don't already know them they they made these bombastic promises of you know frankly revolutionary promises and we we've all gotten the seniors to just how false those were yeah it would be a very different thing to be living through a period of time where we had fake intellectuals but real revolutionaries or perhaps real intellectuals but fake revolutionaries but all three are really fake right now in uh 2021 you know um fake intellectuals fake revolutionaries and fake vegans okay so baby if you want to say something you can jump in but i'm going to look at the comments from the audience but you count you you also can comment so uh like anne says this could be a cambodian name uh like an and if it's not i'd pronounce it their way it could be leuch anyway uh like anne says um why is there so much pseudo-intellectualism nowadays i mean i think there were two sides to that one aspect is just that there are so few real intellectuals that it creates some kind of reward for being a fake intellectual and the other is that nobody wants to be the jerk nobody wants to be the [ __ ] who debunks a pseudo-intellectual and it's so easy to do it's so easy to prove that these people don't know what they're talking about like just in this very simple haven't done the reading and so on and they're not really committed to the things they they pretend they are but you know okay let's be real people spend far less time having face-to-face interactions with other human beings now maybe than any other point in history you know people are primarily now pseudo intellectuals like on instagram you know um and it's a very different thing even to meet someone in a coffee shop and really sit there face to face and slug it out so we told this story before we've told it recently one of the videos they talking about buddhism i sat down in a coffee shop in chiang mai thailand it was a vegan activist meeting some of those people knew who i was and the particular guy we're talking about didn't because i'm a little bit famous especially in chiang mai especially amongst vegans um you know i sat down with this guy and he was so used to frankly being a pseudo-intellectual being a pseudo expert about buddhism and about their relationship between buddhism and veganism well guess who just entered the room like guess who you're sitting at a [ __ ] coffee shop table with like i am in a position to hand this guy his ass on this issue i mean you know i i and look there's a question here i'm i do i know more than any other person who speaks english on this topic well there are some other people who know about this stuff but they won't be honest with you like there are some buddhist monks in robes who are experts but they're not so like of all the people you meet in the whole planet there are incredibly few who know this stuff who've done their research and who will really talk to you about it in an honest way um yeah and again like in a sense i don't even blame the buddhist monks like if that's who you are and that's what you're committed to you can't really expect those guys to engage in an honest open-ended critique of their religion that way and you know and to really explain why it is that the vast majority of buddhists do eat meat and always have uh going back to the era when the the ancient writings were actually written you know when the ancient scriptures were written um now okay i mean melissa was there i didn't break this guy down i didn't make him cry i wasn't an [ __ ] like i was a little bit kind of ironical but i also thought he would be more willing to actually talk about it with me and learn from me um i was hoping he'd be more of an intellectual but no it was just like pressing play on a tape recorder he was just doing this routine and he was not willing to ask himself how he knows the things he thinks he knows where this these assumptions come from where the certainty comes from you know so you know why is there so much pseudo intellectuals nowadays because there are rewards for being a pseudo-intellectual and there are seemingly no punishments there are no real negative consequences so let's mention that check um claire michelle you know so and again how this is face-to-face is different than it would be like if people were actually sitting in a coffee shop so claire michelle who i've criticized in my youtube channel for years occasionally less than once a year i think you know claire michelle she says these ridiculous things about religion ridiculous things about politics ridiculous things but economics even and ridiculous things about our own life and diet and spirituality she posts those things on instagram who is going to shoot her down who is going to this is a really old-fashioned face bust her chops do you remember when people used to say that going back in the 1920s seriously who is really gonna say look you don't know what you're talking about you know this could be anything it can even be about nutrition there are people who like to make certain statements about nutrition and diet and someone say look how how do you know these things that you think you know where is this coming from you know you get into a very different very different conversation uh and instead i mean you can go to her instagram uh sorry claire michelle yeah right plentiful soul is her thing you know all you're gonna see is people giving her the thumbs up embracing her applauding her i don't even know if one in a hundred comments are gonna be are gonna be negative and when they are negative they don't accomplish anything when they're negative someone says you're an airhead someone says you're an airhead or you're a hippie or something it doesn't it doesn't really get into doesn't really get into the issues now look you know again i have experience really sitting down with communists and trying to deprogram them really saying no like i understand this is what you believe about history but that's wrong that's a lie and asking questions and bringing it together you know trying to make people aware of the extent to which they are living a lie they're they're committed to a whole a whole series of lies um but but that's incredibly rare and i mean for any of you in the audience if you reflect on your own life about something you were wrong about in the past again maybe some of you used to be communists maybe some of you used to be christians some who used to be mormons used to be something else these besides believing and think about it who cared enough and who took the time and who thought it was virtuous and worthwhile to sit down with you and try to deprogram you and try to confront you with your own pseudo-intellectuals you know um so yeah i'm just sorry i know it's a it's a short comment um asking why is there so much pseudo-intellectuals nowadays but that that's my that's my real answer now look think about the period of time we're living through um was george bush an intellectual no was barack obama an intellectual no he still isn't in his retirement he isn't was bill clinton an intellectual no and he still isn't you know you know he's bernie sanders an intellectual my honest answer is no alexandria ocasio-cortez is not an intellectual and she can't even pretend she's not even a pseudo-intellectual you know what i mean is alexandria because your court as an intellectual like you know think about and then think about the rewards for being a pseudo-intellectual as opposed to the risks and what and what comes with it you know now look you guys just wouldn't know the names i could go through the list of professors at my university here like i could sit here with the list say is this person intellectual no is this like my university professors one by one for those in the audience maybe you haven't been university if you make a list of your high school teachers the gym teacher the math teacher the english teacher mr mcgregor like you know the school principal was he an intellectual no was she an intellectual no like i think for you also it's going to be no no no and maybe there's one exception maybe there's one you remember oh no no that guy was an intellectual maybe there was maybe you met one you know but whether it's your university professors or it's your high school teachers you know some of them might be pseudo intellectuals to the same extent as bill clinton you know what i mean they might be on that intellectual level but yeah you know the the these are the people we live our lives uh surrounded by and and guys it's very easy for people to be on an ego trip just because they're smarter than their own high school teachers i mean so many people that's their standard of adequacy and then normally it's not even that they're smarter than their school teachers just they're more cynical um they spend their whole lives feeling they're superior it's a huge huge problem in amongst atheists um you know anti-religion activists they feel they're smarter than their their high school principal and smarter than their town uh priest and they spend their whole lives on an ego trip as a pseudo intellectual so yeah sam is saying sam's a longtime viewer that he he still catches himself saying oh my god and when he says bless you too so i don't sam i don't i have a number of catchphrases but in real life i like to say by the dead gods that's one of my characters so i've uh i've i have a number but you guys by odin's beard i intentionally have uh non-christian and atheistic kind of curse words and you guys didn't know me but i used to curse in pally i used to curse in the ancient language of buddhist scripture i had a whole different vocabulary so i've been through several rounds of training myself to not say uh oh my god um to have an exclamation like that when you stub your toe or when you when you drop something yeah just those momentary courses yeah by the dead gods is a good one i've got to say i got that idea from comic books growing up as a kid because a lot of the fanciful um villains you know they have some very they'd have some distinctive curse words that reflect their ideology partly because swearing wasn't allowed comic books you know um i remember the russian villains would say great lenin's ghost you know it's their equivalent to uh oh my god that's good yeah so anyway sam says so obviously some of this is reach writing stuff we've just been talking about nothing wrong with that but sam says so many self-professed socialists and communists haven't even read marx london etc they follow others that distort that information they certainly haven't studied the historical reality either but i think you'll find as life goes on sam even when you meet the people who have they read it in that biblical way i've been discussing where they even if they've looked at the page they don't really see what's there they um yeah it's a very strange way of not reading um what's right in front of your eyes not taking seriously the intent of the author and i think very consciously or sorry very much intentionally imposing your fantasy on the imposing what you want it to be uh onto the book and look uh sir this comes back to again i posted to patreon um this comes back to the leader of extinction rebellion i'm sorry so what was it roger hallam roger hallam roger hallam is also a crazy christian among his defects and when you hear this guy talk about the bible it is 100 personal wish fulfillment it's 100 him telling you what he wants the bible to be and represent and not dealing with uh what it actually says so i post so often to patreon i have to scroll down quite a ways here um yeah david both got it but anyway i posted a patreon a link to a video where you get to hear him for about an hour uh going on and on about his his frankly insane uh religious views so that's the guy you've got that's now the most prominent ecological activist on planet earth our our fate the future of global warming and having an alternative supposedly in his hands um and as i say there's someone else who could have that opportunity and doesn't because he's taking up that seat there's only so much uh oxygen to go around and only so many millions of dollars it's not just money it's time too it's only so much time for the volunteers everyone else involved to be uh to be doing this so yeah it's a real shame and nobody checked his credentials nobody cared to question him and find out how solid his interpretation of the bible was before they took this this plunge so just reading your comments guys i'm catching up here various intelligent comments but i don't know i don't know what the point is with me just kind of agreeing with myself so i mean one person says this is like anagon uh like ann says now in the era of information people have become lazy so they try to compensate by regurgitating ideas from others and just going to be real with you like um or lych um i i haven't even seen that look i i just i don't oh god we met this one guy who quoted nietzsche from memory uh melissa knows what i'm thinking of uh you know the bodybuilder guy oh yeah he would actually go around quoting nietzsche but like in my whole life people who even quote and regurgitate ideas from other people it's very rare i don't even see that like i don't see and again look at the university newspaper look at your local newspaper and you can even look at the new york times you can look at international newspapers i don't see people even trying to be intellectuals you know and again look i despise the philosophy of friedrich nietzsche i am not a fan of nietzsche and i have made youtube videos talking about that uh but obviously like it indicates when i met this bodybuilder and like right at the start you started quoting nietzsche like there really wasn't much context for it you know um okay you can tell this is a guy who's read these books and he's he's really trying to present himself as to some extent intellectual he's making that effort but i i don't even see that i don't see people uh even regurgitating the the ideas of others i have already forgotten his name but recently you and i were talking about a another pseudo-intellectual who is not vegan but has been known as a food expert and has claimed her name is that he wrote a book about psychedelics oh god yeah i don't remember that guy's name either yeah yeah yeah did you have a thing that is now being embraced that people who have done psychedelics are somehow intellectuals yeah anyway look it's sad you know i so i'm just i'm being a hundred percent honest you guys actually this comes back to the comment from patreon that i made this recording in response to you know i do not believe that the enjoyment of life and being an intellectual are mutually exclusive i don't think that one is an alternative to the other i don't think that you either choose to enjoy life or being intellectual i think intellectuals are the people who really enjoy life you know what i mean really i really believe that that's really what i am that's my lived experience that's what i embody and know and what have you and you know if you put it in any particular uh you know particular workplace you can see that easily enough so you know it's a bit of a stereotype in the army that in every unit there's one guy reading nietzsche there's one guy reading books of philosophy of some kind but it's often nietzsche you know um you know out of that army unit you know who's the happiest guy who's leading the most meaningful life like you all got to sleep in the same tent at night kind of thing you know you're all living in the same conditions you all eat the same meal out of a bag you know think of mres rations that come in a plastic bag but you know you're living the same lifestyle in so many ways you're marching up and down the same hill but one of you has brought a book with you one of you was leading the life of the mind a little bit in your spare time you know i do not view being intellectual as the opposite of hedonism you know as the opposite of of the enjoyment of life what we have right now on a massive scale is a kind of false hedonism you know and it's it's people getting rich and getting famous by encouraging others to use mind-altering drugs to get high and also body-altering drugs using stuff like steroids and psalms i'm talking about on my channel you know um it's people encouraging one another to quote unquote enjoy life and what they call the enjoyment of life is misery so i'll come back to this this comment uh from my patreon i don't believe that intellectuals are the people who are alcoholics and committing suicide i just don't believe it that's not my vision of intellectual at all i would not be surprised at all if i learned that right now uh george rr martin is suicidal he certainly has been at some point in the past he's talked you know a lot of his books have talked about being suicidal and lonely and depressed and they've talked some of them talked about hallucinogenic drug use and alcohol too i don't know to what extent those things are part of his past but he's he's written about them okay how much does george r martin weigh i mean you know he's he's grotesquely obese and has been for most of his life he sits there watching sports as this tremendously uh obese old man you know it's very easy to look at him and again you just look at him and look at his writing and say no this guy would be much happier you know as uh as as an intellectual you know i i just say i mean i totally understand all the comments that i read to you from patreon from from both sides they were you know genuinely well intentioned you know it's they were not they were not being overly uh harsh or contrary to relation to me nor in relation to to one another um but no you know what what i'm here to say is that is not being an intellectual and it's it's not you know every so often i hear that the super bowl is on you know i'm like i'm walking down the street and there's a poster or so like something obstructs my path to inform me that the super bowl is happening do you think i ever once regret that i've been reading this book you know whatever it is that i've been writing this book that i've been making youtube videos talking to you guys instead of watching this you ruled everything oh i missed the super bowl like the the pleasures that non-intellectuals become addicted to they are so paltry they are so despicable compared to what the life of the mind has to offer you and i really mean that now look guys every single one of you at some point has been to the dentist and been on painkillers you've had teeth removed or had some kind of operation where you were given painkillers and they may be exactly the same opiates that people on the street are addicted to as as drugs you know and like you know i'm telling you you know as an objective fact heroin is not pleasant opiates are not pleasant fentanyl is not pleasant using opium or fentanyl is not happiness it doesn't make you happy and at the other end of the drug spectrum using stimulants using cocaine using caffeine is not happiness it doesn't make you happy like there's a very fundamental you know misinterpretation of what happiness is whether we're talking about hallucinogenics like you know psychedelic hallucinations or you're talking about these these other kinds of of drugs you know so now you know this even extends to to alcohol of course you know so look i i know it's really easy to think that the life of the mind is the opposite of the uh the life of the body you know that somehow this is a sacrifice of of true happiness in order to you know in order to live the life of the mind but you don't know on a really deep level this whole conversation for me is presumed the exact opposite that's wrong and look as i say you've been to the dentist or any of you today going to think oh if only i could have that feeling again that i had when i was stumbling on my way out of the dentist's office that day if only i could recapture that feeling of being sedated and on painkillers when i left the dentist that day that that's something intoxicating and appealing to you now look as i say i'm not going to deny that there is a sense in which these things are pleasant you know but they are incredibly poultry pleasures compared to the life of the mind once you've got it compared to being a real intellectual and you get to a certain point where you don't even have to read anything more today like i could sit on a park bench watching the sunset and i have so much to think about you know in terms of the things i've read in the past and what it is i'm gonna write next what it is i'm working on what i'm doing as a creative artist you know even if that's thinking about my next youtube video it might not be you know but i am i'm writing a book right now whatever it is you're doing but like sitting on a park bench doing nothing sitting still with my thoughts is more valuable to me than the poultry pleasure you might get from becoming high on opioids it's more valuable to me than whatever pleasure there is in watching baseball watching football or so on and and we know that we know that because we've lived it and i know a lot of people they've never had the experience they've never even thought it through they've never thought about oh wow what if i develop my mind to such a point that i genuinely can't enjoy watching football anymore where i regard sitting in front of the tv watching football as a waste of my time compared to turning off the tv and sitting there on the couch and just looking at the blank tv screen like i'm not joking that's better for me that's more you know that's what it is to really enjoy your life that's what it is to be an intellectual the life of the mind you know you have with you always whether you're sitting on the couch or you're sitting in a in a prison cell now i'll just end this by saying look you know i asked you before when you look at a situation where everybody has the same job so everybody's working at starbucks together or everyone's in the army sleeping in the same tent marching up and down the same hill together so okay so who's the happiest guy in this army unit or who's the happiest guy working at this starbucks really it's going to be the one who has the life of the mind it's going to be the one who's an intellectual uh what even if they're a beginner or intellectual but if they're if there's somebody who's really an advanced intellectual you can be happy working at starbucks you could be happy you know uh working at mcdonald's or serving in the army because the life of the mind you already have with you you have a meaningful life and you bring it with you everywhere you go and you have the analytical capacity and detachment to apply to all things in your life great and small you know but you know the saddest thing of all is man you don't have to be talking about a prison cell look around any classroom at a university it's so [ __ ] sad and i've been in that situation so many times where i sit down you know in the small crowd in a university classroom by the way sometimes there are eight people you know a lot of time i got to know all eight of the other students in the class you know sometimes it's 20 people whatever i'm not talking about sitting down with hundreds of people i'm not generalizing about people i don't know i really got to know what the other things where i'm sitting down in the class and as the lecture starts or as the discussion with the professor starts because you know this discussion format where you sit in a circle and just go through everyone else in the class is radiating the sense of i shouldn't be here this isn't for me i don't really understand this i don't you know they're they're radiating you absolutely see it in their body language and when they're forced to speak in what they say and how they say they are radiating the sense of this isn't for me i'm i'm not in my domain i'm in the wrong place and i'm the one person in the room who's sitting there completely self-confident completely oh oh oh this is for me this is what i'm cut out for you know what i mean and i think you guys know i think you guys can can imagine a lot of the time i'm a lot more comfortable than the professor and a lot of the time i know more about the subject than the professor oh and god it can be something i have no prior familiarity with i have no prior education oh okay great and guys i can be the one behind the podium too just as easily i can get up with no preparation take over teaching the class so you know i just say like being on a university campus it's the most wince inducing it's the most painful because if you're in prison or if you're in an army unit there's no expectation that anyone should be an intellectual with anyone should pretend and when you're on the university campus you know exactly what the opportunity is that's been offered to these people and exactly how it is that they're they're squandering it i thought of his name michael pollan a professor right that's the kind of person that you're seeing on campus okay guys thanks dude again i got another one to say um [Music] you know when my ex-wife was going through her phd i remember she asked some of the people who had already completed their phds for for advice and most of them and sorry i should clarify a little bit this is very specific advice like how did you get a translator set up to do this and what form did that because my ex-wife's phd dealt with chinese and then an indigenous minority language than china and who did you speak to at this institute to get this done so this wasn't um life advice this wasn't advice about how to live a meaningful life right intellectual specific advice related to how to how to finish the phd and one of the most common answers she got from these people slight variations in wording was um nobody helped me so i'm not going to help you uh nobody helped me when i was in your position i had to figure all this stuff out for myself so you're you're just gonna have to figure it out for yourself also so she heard that a lot should learn from people and you know i don't know to what extent they were embittered or to what extent they just accepted their place in society that this is how the world works you know that now they're on top because they've finished their phd or they're a professor or whatever and you know that they embrace the system that for so many years took their money away but now is making them them wealthy it has now given this this position of power uh to them you know it's a choice i've said i know some of you guys may regard this as like something of no significance when i say it in passing in these videos but when i say things like look i grew up watching batman 2. i grew up watching sesame street too i grew up watching these terrible movies i didn't have positive role models my school teachers were not intellectuals my schools were terrible primary school and high school my university was terrible my university teachers were not intellectuals university professors you know and even on the level of pop culture um for my generation what were we supposed to look to as an example of being an intellectual i'm going to tell you right now kurt cobain and i think this comes back to exactly the wording of this comment i got on patreon where someone says oh well why are so many intellectuals lonely and miserable and either commit suicide or die because they're alcoholics you're not thinking about an intellectual you're thinking about kurt cobain who who was an intellectual in terms of what film and television and music uh you know and look let's let's just let's just be clear here it is neither more nor less ridiculous to say kurt cobain is an intellectual than it is to say elvis presley was an intellectual they are at the same level okay and how about uh the beatles you know we looked up remember the bet in for peace with the beatles jesus yeah yoko ono and the the jesus christ you know and that's true that's a different generation that's not my generation maybe for my parents generation they think you don't feel a little bit older than my parents to be young enough to be naive like that when that happened but anyway um you know i'm certain there were people who regarded john lennon and the beatles as intellectuals and uh you know kurt cobain was not an intellectual um jerry seinfeld is not an intellectual you know um i i mentioned this recently to uh to oliver oliver has his own youtube channel and he was shocked i said to him look when i was your age like i had no idea how to be an intellectual and i was going and watching like art cinema from france which was not intellectual but you know black and white films from france you know supposedly made by in four intellectuals they uh i've never remember one italian director also getting is getting his films out because this was supposedly the most intellectual stuff in the history of filmmaking and it's like gee how to be a self-pitying middle-aged white man who cheats on your wife and like you know it's just you know sorry it's it's as ridiculous as calling jerry seinfeld intellectuals this is ridiculous as calling i was president it's just not at all and um you know woody allen woody allen supposedly america's great intellectual filmmaker watch interiors by woody allen again so you know look i mean this relates back to also oh great great example from the audience george carlin wow no no that's deep so for me i never was a follower of georgetown but that's a good that's a great example from mx2 in the audience and i've known so many people who were formed were really shaped by that or that's what they think yeah rather than jerry seinfeld it's a better example that they think of george carlin and george carlin's interview on the tonight show like him the way he would give interviews they think that's you know that's what it is to be an intellectual and no in absolutely no sense george gardiner was not intellectual whatsoever that's just as ridiculous as imagining elvis presley you know being intellectual so yeah before i said part of our problem and why we have so many pseudo-intellectuals is the absence of any positive examples as as as any positive examples of intellectual enough another great one came in mother teresa people think that you know sorry not me but definitely there are catholics who look up to some figures like that as oh these are the intellectual leaders of the of the church uh you know and like today if you want to talk about the right wing uh what about what's his name ben shapiro you know those guys right wing but they've always there's always been someone like him there's always been a kind of right-wing radio talk show host who who pretends to know it all you know right sure right yeah for you'd have to be the right generation for some number of decades ago uh someone like rush limbaugh someone like ben shapiro right so sir before i was saying there's the absence of real intellectuals right but we're also growing up with really fake examples of what intellectual is or what they're supposed to be wow sorry a little water i didn't i didn't see this i just wasn't looking wow grace this this cut steve william shakespeare [ __ ] true it's so true bro no i mean shakespeare was not an intellectual and shakespeare's plays there is nothing intellectual about them nothing nothing you know i you know same thing with george rr martin i'm not going to say shakespeare was a bad writer oh george r.r martin is also a good writer don't get me wrong i mean if you you feel like a nice turn of phrase you know what i mean but that's that's not what we're talking about but no yeah read read shakespeare's sonnets if you want to know how much of intellectually was uh yeah no i mean william shakespeare he really was i mean he he was the you know um he was the the beatles of his day you know what can i tell you you know he was the you know yeah um [Music] so yeah most of us we come into this game with this real disadvantage at this real kind of deficit and you know it's a choice i'm not gonna be like those those uh you know phd supervisors and so on my my ex-wife was talking about these other phd students phd candidates who surrounded her at cambridge and oxford you know my attitude is not like well nobody helped me so i'm not going to help you you know no i i really think it can make a tremendous difference um if for some people in this audience and by the way i was talking with us the other day with a friend of mine is a university professor um so she she said she's a friend of mine's university professor and she she said oh well the young people who watch your channel she was suggesting they were maybe disillusioned followers of jordan peterson totally reasonable theory like oh these are like 17 year olds who figured out jordan peterson is full of [ __ ] that cohen johnson and one person said back to us look they're not all 17. there are guys who are 35 who write into me and say hey look only now after watching your youtube channel do i realize i need to quit playing video games you know what i mean like they realize the importance of quitting video games only now after watching youtube channel do i realize my own ignorance under headings x y and z and i have to hit the books and so many people wrote to me so many i can't estimate the number who wrote to me or someone got in touch with me and said hey look only now do i realize my whole approach to political activism is wrong that they approached to vegan activism or maybe in some cases anti-war activism you know peace activism ecological activism but it's mostly vegan activism where they realize whoa i now realize my approach to political activism is completely wrong i've been doing the wrong thing for 10 years so it's not i just say it's not just 17 year old boys it's not even predominantly uh young boys i think you can be a middle-aged man i think you could be 40 years old or you could be 50 years old and discover this youtube channel and go whoa there are guys who are in their 40s and 50s and they have spent their lives trying to live like you know kurt cobain there are you know there are people who've been really you know pursuing uh false idols you know for all these years and you know the good news is if you have breath in your lungs still you know it is not too late uh for you to change i'll say this too you know part of nihilism is that you do not believe in fate you do not believe in destiny and even if you're an atheist it's really easy to slip into that way of thinking you know okay i have so many brothers well whatever all of you in the audience have brother sisters you just think oh yeah that brother of mine he was always going to be an alcoholic that sister of mine was always going to be a drug addict and this one was always you know he never could have made it through college he was always going to be a college dropout it's really easy to look at things that way and if you're being honest with yourself and really examining your own life it's like no at this particular time i read this particular book for this particular reason and it changed if i had read a different book or if i just hadn't read that book you know i like i guess again the accuracy of my own memory you know i hold myself very accountable that way i'm aware that there wasn't any destiny there wasn't any fate to this i could have ended up just as brainless as my own older brothers you know i know these ideas came into my life in a in a very particular way um i saw a science fiction a tv interview so there's a tv show that interviewed science fiction uh writers and one of the mention in passing dante's inferno the guy just said something like oh yeah you know dante's inferno it's one of the most influential books in the history of western civilization and then he goes on to say this thing about his forthcoming science fiction novel and i wrote it down and i went to the library and i i got it out and i was either 11 years old or 12 years old my father would remember my father was proud of that for the rest of his life because he hadn't told me to read it he was like no you know he like my father would say like oh no you were always brilliant like he's literally said this to me he's like said like oh no i always knew you were brilliant you read dante's inferno when you were 11 years old i said yeah i didn't know anything i heard this mentioned on a television interview that was all i knew i didn't know anything about this book i didn't know anything and i went to the librarian and took it out now by the way dante's in front did not change my life forever if anything i can look back at that and i see the tragedy where it's like i didn't know what to read i didn't know how to educate myself i didn't know how to help myself and my father as you could tell was no help you know he was he was no help at all i remember my father was tremendously impressed um so the first book of dante's inferno i got out of the library and then he bought me for the next christmas that came up so a couple months later he or whatever it was maybe it was only a few weeks i totally forget but anyway some time later he then bought me volume two uh dante's purgatory but it was by a different uh translator and he i wasn't putting it on i was really not happy with it i was like oh you know i'm sorry but the quality of the translation it's really just not as good as the you know the other book writes or whatever here he has this 12 year old he just loved it for him it was an ego trap he felt like this was his own genetic superiority or something i didn't know anything you know i'm sorry i didn't do anything and that's that's why i read donnie's in front i read the whole trilogy you know and it didn't help me i was reading was the wrong thing i started another book something that was more helpful that i did read and again my father was tremendously impressed by and he didn't he didn't tell me about it i didn't learn about it from my father but you know i read oh babe do you want to grab your copy of uh plutarch so i just bought melissa a gift i bought melissa a copy of plutarch's lives it's a nice loeb edition of of plutarch um but you know i remember exactly the circumstances in which i was standing in a bookstore and i never heard of this book before i never heard that i didn't know anything and i stood there and pick it up and i'm reading the back cover and i'm flipping through it i think it was 1.99 like it was an incredibly cheap book and you know even then when i next talked to my father about it which is the next day or dare to claire i was like so you know i found this this this book and it's just titled lives you know pluto you know i didn't i didn't even know it was a famous i was like well it seems to be you know you know see it seems to be the basis for shakespeare's you know julius caesar and like you know like i i knew nothing about this stuff and it's you know it's just like sorry in in my case i'm not going to generalize i'm not going to say this is what all of you in the audience i've got to tell you in my case i feel the the the extent to which this was just luck this was just happenstance and i can also feel and i can regret and resent you know the unfortunate happenstance that i didn't have that i didn't have better luck that i read the wrong books that i had such a bad education and that nobody helped me and nobody got me that nobody told me how to be intellectual what i had to learn in any way you know and you know step by step step i made it out of you know the the ignorance that was i was born into uh but for me i mean the very accuracy of my memory and looking back in my life i think makes it impossible for me to be deluded into thinking there was any kind of destiny or fate or even any kind of redeeming quality on my part that that that set me apart from from other people i mean look you know what is the so what is the redeeming quality i heard about this book i knew nothing about dante's inferno that was it was just mentioned that it was one of the most important books in the history of the world and i wanted to know more like that's it that's the quality i had you know i saw a copy of plutarch's lives and i wanted to know more you know what i mean and i wasn't satisfied with mediocrity and uh sorry uh ultimately you know i mean these other people we've mentioned you know there's also the dissatisfaction you know shakespeare wasn't enough for me karl marx wasn't i thought that karl marx was shallow and dumb you know i mean so we can go through all these lists of kind of great great people but you know that i wasn't satisfied with um the band nirvana sir kurt cobain i wasn't satisfied with the supposed genius of kurt cobain the way like everyone else in my generation was so you know there was a fundamental sense of dissatisfaction that there had to be something better uh somewhere so yeah um yeah that's the end [Laughter] you know i i get it i think it's really easy to go through that that process and you know i went through it with so many different fields i went through with buddhism i went through with korean ojibwe i went through it with you know the ancient greek stuff i went through with you know with learning chinese as a language and with everything related to chinese language and chinese politics and went through with academia itself without universities work and it's really easy to come out of that with this embittered sense of nobody helped me so nobody's going to help you either but as you guys know i've come out of i've come out of the experience instead with this this commitment to the opposite when one one of the first really important articles i published about buddhism was dealing with on a technical level how to be a scholar of buddhism it was explaining to you the structure of the ancient texts and what they are and really ultimately what you should read and which versions of the text you have to compare and it openly stated it was presented as a lecture in cambodia to people growing up in cambodia who don't even have the advantages we have like growing up speaking english saying okay if you're born and raised in cambodia you want to be a scholar of buddhism you really know nothing what do you need to know you know so just say already at that stage i was really trying to help the next generation of scholars uh even within buddhism and i've been trying to help the next generation of vegan activists and ecological activists and and and intellectuals of every kind and you know i'm i'm willing to talk about my mistakes and say no you don't have to make the same mistakes i did and the great thing about youtube is even if i die tomorrow you know like there is this really meaningful sense in which this is here for you this is here for someone who's born 10 years from now or you know whether it's 10 years now or 100 years now or whatever there's this sense in which you know nobody has to make the same mistakes i did ever again and nobody has to grow up only with their choice between elvis presley and uh and woody allen for models of uh of what it means to be an intellectual mmm