Being Honest on Youtube, or: Why I Hate My Audience.

when i first came on youtube
there were a couple specific youtubers and specific youtube videos that inspired me one that i've mentioned of all my friends and all my colleagues my colleagues i mean other people trying to succeed on youtube is the channel candid mommy candid mommy i discovered her channel because she had just one or two videos that had vegan in the title or in the description somewhere she's not vegan turns out she had one big hit video where she was talking about her divorce where she was talking about her disappointment in her husband and her situation was that uh she and her husband had ordered this fitness program in the mail it's called p90x it's very very famous i know of it and you know as soon as they ordered this thing her husband was losing all this weight he got really leaning oh wow it's a miracle this is a really great fitness program he was a meth addict he had become a drug addict unbeknownst to her yeah and you know so the video it's partly about her marriage falling apart it's partly but obviously her worries about her kids and the divorce and her husband already had a new girlfriend slash wife had already left her for another woman and her shock and horror at realizing that this guy had a whole other life that he had kept hidden from her like right up until the moment when the marriage uh fell to pieces and you know that's the kind of thing how could you how is it possible how is it possibly married to someone and not notice that they're high on drugs all the time it's like well you know we'd ordered this new fitness program and he lost all this weight and you know um he was really into assembling model airplanes and model helicopters he was spending all this time he didn't sleep a lot he's up up with the airplane glue assembling says his really human story and she breaks down weeping on camera and she breaks down all the way and you know stuff like that i mean i know a lot of people look at youtube maybe from day one like maybe when they first get started or maybe you know when they come in at a later point and and what they want to do is is completely fake it's completely artificial we were just looking at that youtube channel uh edgy veg there's a youtube channel called edgy veg and there's nothing edgy about it and you know her format when she started the channel was this really phony detached cooking show where she sits there and talks to the camera and it's something you'd see on cable television you know from the minute i got involved with this game i wanted to keep it all the way real and you know i had a very clear you know very clear set of inspirations here on youtube people who are already doing that like i mentioned it was also very clear in my mind what i was rebelling against i didn't want to be like my university professors you know i didn't want to be like these phonies i'd been surrounded by in buddhist studies buddhist research and humanitarian work a lot of phonies a lot of real dishones there and uh you know when you think about the particular professors i had this guy i still have email with him so it's maybe kind of mean to shout him out with this but you know um professor leonard priestley i've said many times you know the guy was like a negative inspiration to me i got to know him you know as a student you know and he had he had ostensibly devoted his life to buddhist philosophy and you know talking about buddhism never traveled in asia you know never you know he spent his whole life just in canada just in toronto just in a library you know and i've said this before well i didn't want to end up like that i didn't want to end up as someone who only worked with buddhism on paper in books and on a chalkboard i wanted to go and see the poverty and the prostitution and the bomb craters left by the various wars and civil wars you know i wanted to be in touch with the reality of what was going on in 21st century asia and in my way also i wanted to be more in touch with what happened centuries ago actually seeing the stone remains you know stone inscriptions stone monuments uh this you know and actually going to the archives you know i want to have this much more authentic engagement both both ancient and modern i'll tell you something else about leonard priestley after his return retirement after he stopped being a full-time professor of of buddhism there was this little article he put on the internet that basically admitted that he was a uh he was a convert to islam he's a white western guy who got involved with a form of sufi islam that's called subwood it's a non-mainstream school islam there's this little article stating that this was actually the philosophy he believed so there's another layer of phoniness to it right like there's the phoniness of being a white guy who studies buddhism only from a library and never gets out there and never gets his hands dirty literally and figuratively you know what i mean never gets out in a rice field never learns what it's like to farm rice you know and and then there's the phoniness of representing buddhism i mean you know i don't know i don't know his journey that way but i assume he was kind of a white western spiritual seeker hippie who during one phase of his life was interested in buddhist philosophy but he ended up getting committed to actually a form of islam you know so that becomes phony that was phony in a way too and of course i'm rebelling against my own parents phoniness and so on you know when i saw and again there weren't a lot of examples when i saw something like um that one video from candid mommy i'll give a link in the description you know or i saw a few particular videos from the amazing atheist that seemed to be really honest maybe i'm wrong but they seemed i i obviously a lot of his videos are phony but there were a few videos that seemed to me really honest and showed me from my perspective showed me the stakes of the game we're playing you know like what you can win and what you can lose and how like this is a format where you know there's no script there's no plot there are no special effects but you know honesty you know we can be honest in a way on youtube no one ever could on cnn on hbo on the food and that that was what i wanted to do you know i want to do that about buddhism i want to do that about politics i want to do that about my own divorce my own failures in life you know like my own you know that was what that was what i want to do and if if you were to ask me you know what is my youtube channel about nobody asks anymore there was a there was a time when people asked that question i used to say during the first couple of years first two years or so the channel i said look my channel is not about veganism that's why it's not called veganism 101 or something you know what introduction to veganism you know my youtube channel is about my life you know and veganism is just one part of that you know buddhism is just one part of that someone goes to politics politics it's a big part of that but it's just it's just one part of that right what makes it so hard to be honest on the internet in 2021 is that there are these people who will punish you for it all right and i have taken the time to respond to the most the most mean-spirited critic i've ever had who's fandur okay now look let's let's be fair so i want to say this this is part of my own changing attitude towards this you know i don't regard these mentally mean-spirited people as a small minority of the population anymore sadly i think like 90 of people are at this level of mental dysfunction and i think 90 of people this is the way they use the internet and that's what makes it so hard to be honest the internet is that you can do a totally honest video sitting down with your girlfriend and we've done both we've done videos talking about how wonderful our relationship is and we've done videos talking about how hard our relationship is or probably and they're both honest and like like 10 of the audience can relate and can get it like i have some of my fans are middle-aged married people and there are people who write into you like oh man i really get what you're saying in that because they've been through some of that with their wife too or whatever they're like they haven't really there were good things about it but they're all so we've done videos being really honest about how wonderful the relationship is we've done videos being really honest about how terrible the relationship is but there are these people out there and they're not a small minority i wish i could say it was a minority of the audience there are these stupid malevolent mean-spirited people who are going to go through and pick out a few seconds here and there and they're going to misinterpret and misunderstand them and they're they're motivated sorry but like there i said this to a friend of mine in a very different context recently a friend of mine was talking about another obsessive hater of this channel for a couple years um and i said well we were talking about this guy and i said well you don't realize uh this guy he's convinced that he's much more intelligent than i am so the friend of mine i'm talking to says well if he's convinced himself that he's more intelligent or that's hilarious because he totally misunderstands and misinterprets like the most simple concepts in your videos like that when this guy's attacking me his criticisms already showed that he can't really understand what his time which is very common what i said back to my friend was oh no no you don't that's the art of it that's the art of the thing because the more someone misunderstands me the more they can convince themselves that they understand what i'm saying better than i do and that therefore they're smarter than me and that that is like the kind of to be blunt in the parliament several times that is the kind of mind these people get into and they don't realize the extent to which they're they're deluding themselves and then they go on and start their own youtube channels and they try to delude others most of them are that's just but to be fair to fandar you know he's not the only one does anyone remember vegan eva veganeva is not vegan anymore uh does anyone remember nor vegan you know does anyone like there have been people who put in a lot of effort uh does anyone remember socrates my youtube career has been a lot more successful than hers that was another rival youtuber who put in a lot of work to trying to defame me and she got in touch with my ex-wife and she collaborated with mac's wife and tried to make these videos like whoa you know people who put in a lot of hours trying to make me look like a villain you know and i'm just telling you i'm just being real i laughed at all of it like the stuff from socrates none of that ever upset me i found it completely hilarious when i finally heard that stuff you know i know i know you don't respond to it the same way the same way i do and you know and and not everyone's cut out for it and you guys have heard me you've heard me give you know you've heard me reflect on that and i've sometimes advised people sometimes people have asked me to start their youtube channel i said no it's not for you because if you can't laugh at this stuff okay however sorry as much as i've laughed at that like i laughed at nor vegan and i laughed at sorcery i'm also honest about the stuff i'm not laughing at right where it's like no you know and where i'm getting in touch with people and saying hey take down the video a great example of that would be vegan foot soldier he's a that's a really mentally limited guy you know i don't know what i don't know what kind of learning disability that guy's been diagnosed i don't know what his problems are that's a really mentally limited guy and um you know i i said to him look man like you know what you're doing here is really evil it's really stupid and it's really wrong and he did he did take down the views another before you came into my life another guy like that would be uh uh joe vegan you know what he was saying things that were really false about me and were really criminal allegations and i had to really write to him and say look man like this breaks my heart and and i knew it was very influential what he said joe vegan uh the other joe joe best and stuff there were people i wrote reach out and say look you know me you can talk to me we've talked in the past and you're not you're making up lies about me on the internet and like exactly because they know me because people perceive us as people like well if they say it then people are going to assume it's true so no i've dealt with years and years of really kind of heartbreaking defamation and you just give me i wrote two i wrote to this guy jason fonger most of you will not remember that name his youtube channel was a total failure but i wrote to jason fong the other day and i was saying to him look man how do you think it was for me after living through years of this stuff to go and deal with people face to face in chiang mai where we've been repeatedly we've been there together you know what do you think it was like for me to go and deal with other vegan activists in toronto or any of these places so you know as much i'm saying i'm not lying to you there are innumerable cases where i just laughed at it i just smile i just thought it was a joke and it was it didn't hurt me at all there are other cases where i've really had to try to push respect and try to regulate try to say to people look you know this this is really bad evil wrong this really impacts my life negatively and like why aren't you thinking about why aren't you taking responsibility for it so do you want to jump in now because i mean you know kind of the main topic of the video like okay you can take it in any direction but yeah well i thought it was interesting what you said at the start about being honest on the internet and in the way that's why i think youtube is so valuable it's because you can be honest on the internet and i remember when i was first deciding whether or not i would be on your youtube channel i had some conversations with family members and basically they said it wasn't a good idea because of crazy people like this who will make your life miserable if you upload anything to the internet publicly right and sadly that in some ways has proven to be true but in others i think it's brought people into my life that wouldn't have otherwise and i see a lot of value in the act of coming on camera and sharing your real life and sharing your real face and your real voice yeah and most of the time the people that message you the people that harass you like this they don't show their real faces they don't share their real voices and we don't know anything about them all that we know is that they spend their lives looking at other people and um looking for their opportunity to condemn them yeah looking for their opportunity to take them down and um you know it's really sad because but you see in the dark ages a lot of that went on in christianity and catholicism and witch trials but like you know even in ancient greece and ancient rome like you see a lot of that side of humanity before the internet absolutely that's all right so i'm not you know cutting off but like this ain't something new it's not no of course and but the the difference is the anonymity of it you can make fake accounts you can you can pretend to be somebody else on the internet and it's usually you can make you can make fake accounts you can also make fake evidence which has happened to me yeah i always remember that just a different conversation i had today i was mentioning to someone look you know people have made up fake accounts to try to contact me like pretending to be someone else trying to get me to say something scandalous right people have also made up fake accounts impersonating me to contact others and create like that they've there have been fake isil mazard accounts saying thing like even though yeah just say and i'm not that famous but i'm famous enough to deal with that and i'm famous deal with this oh absolutely and that was quite foreign to me even though i knew that i should be prepared for it just having this series of realizations that you really can't trust people on the internet and you have to be guarded and uh more so than i had ever experienced prior to this and uh yeah it's a shame because in real life before you came on the internet people did say bad things about your mind or back that's part of what we're talking about people did but you didn't hear about me i didn't care you didn't know yeah yeah yeah but you know like your roommates in college they probably said a lot of bad things but i'm just saying they probably did in real life before the internet but yeah yeah absolutely so i wasn't prepared for the kind of yeah but you wouldn't see the bluntness of the you know the the direct uh hateful comments or just you know so i want something positive you want to see them more negative but do you too oh well yeah i mean like the positive that can come out of it is that it can connect you to people who are actually genuine and sincere and and they may be one in a million and maybe one thousand i was gonna say you got i think that's appian on your desk yes okay so we we read a lot of texts from ancient greece and rome uh so appian a-p-p-i-a-n if you haven't heard of him he's a very important author from ancient rome that most he's not that famous today he's unlike julius caesar saying his name isn't that famous so you know you're reading appian right now um as bad as this stuff is that we're talking about here it's so much easier to be motivated to read appian and you get so much more out of it if you can come on camera and talk about it and have five ten fifteen intelligent people involved in that discussion and you know for me doing this for years and years and years i got fan mail from someone who's a new fan for my i don't know the guy before but you know i had this guy writing to me and he's really well read in that kind of literature you talk about ancient athens more than h rom you know if you keep doing it for long enough whether it's 5 10 or 15 people you do start to build up an audience however small of people who have similar intellectual characteristics and ambitions and that can make your own reading your own learning your own research more rewarding so in that sense you know do i think it's worth it yes and it's only worth it if you're going to be really honest i know that may seem unrelated but it comes back to the the same the same fundamental point of this video like there is no point giving a kind of dishonest academic presentation on appian on thucydides on aristotle on julius caesar just regardless of what it is if you are going to put in the work don't come on youtube and try to dissimulate all the advantages and disadvantages of a cited peer-reviewed academic paper or a lecture given at a university that's everything we want to get away from right and instead you know like again that's and that's what i'm here to rebel against i don't want to be like professor leonard priestley i don't want to give lectures like him professor leonard i sat there and for a whole year listen to him give lectures on buddhist philosophy and he never once said like he never once said something as honest as when he was younger he really believed in this but now he sees it from another perspective let alone i mean i know realizes it's not going to be a course of him just talking autobiographically about how he feels about christianity islam but but still you know what i mean like and and that's exactly what makes youtube so valuable is that you can come out you can really say look you know when i first read this book i didn't really understand it and now whatever it is that you get to go through that struggle and the audience gets to go through with yeah and i i even for something that i feel that that dry like some that's not your divorce that isn't discovering your ex-husband as a drug addict you know what i mean yeah no i i definitely feel that way too and there are constraints in your professional life where you can't present what you are actually going through and on the internet on youtube you can and what i wanted to say in relation to that it might actually kind of be more okay in my experience it was not as easy for me to learn about historical subjects political subjects uh just from a professor giving a presentation giving a lecture like you say this a dry lecture when there's actually some personal right yeah right that this is what it means to me and presenting this information this is what it means to me this is why it matters now right or even this is why i asked this question in the first place that led me to read this book this is you know situating it in the present tense so that history becomes something that adds to the present and not just something that subtracts in the past yeah i said it better than i could but yeah that is that is really right that is really the uh right you know and i first experienced that with uh you know you teach me about historical periods that i didn't know much about and i just thought it was great because the way that you are talking about these different issues is uh right yeah it's actually related right well like on a human level right we are not talking about aristotle for aristotle's sake yes i'm not trying to help him out you know i mean like we're actually talking about it because of the way aristotle matters in my life and your life and you know in a weird sense the way it matters in understanding the life of bill clinton or jfk john kennedy you know i'm just saying like not necessarily just my life in your life but you know people historical figures and questions and problems relate to that actually these these things relate to politics in these times yes so yeah you know anyway what i say is this though you know this kind of honesty and then the price it comes with like you know like maybe maybe in a weird sense i have to thank people like nor vegan maybe i have to thank people like uh socrates and i have to thank people like fandar for really showing me how how mentally disabled i mean that and how mean-spirited the vast majority of people are because you live your life i've said this force i'm going to say really briefly but you live your life like even on a university campus where you know very stupid people may not be able to get into the university at all they're already barriers to entry but you live your life on university campus where all the time you are ignoring the stupid people and they're kind of avoiding you they may not be ignoring you but like you don't even realize that you're only talking to the most brilliant the most self-disciplined the most highly motivated people because the other people are kind of slinking away in the corner and they're not saying much they're they're you know so that this is true at cambridge university oxford university this is true at university of toronto or you know a third rate small university like you you may not realize but it's especially if you're a brilliant hard-working charismatic person yourself you're really only talking to and hearing from and you may not intentionally be avoiding the stupid people but you know that's that tends to be the way the way it works out so i'm just saying the sense in which i could thank these these people who have harassed me obsessively for years and put a lot of work into it is that it did really force me to face up to um just how just how stupid and malicious the vast majority of people are and of course it clicks i studied the history of cambodia right yeah so before i was talking about the witch trials so yeah but yeah you were recently you read a lot about the history of communist china you just read another book on that now uh you know but yes yes reading about the struggles struggle sessions and how they yeah yeah that period of history is full of just mean-spirited encouraging of this this this tendency in human nature to just attack people and and try to take something away from them because they have more than you you know like or just because you can or just because you can yeah exactly yeah right that's empowering in some ways but it's not because the kind of it's not you don't get anything out of that you get to watch someone die get to watch someone be destroyed yeah or even if they neither died or destroyed you get to see them you know interrogated in public you know and confessed and tortured and so on even if they have completely innocent of the crime exactly like in that sense the witch trials never ended you know the salem witch trials weren't some aberration in the history of human nature they were a moment that gives you a clear window on human nature and i think if you really study the history of the communist revolution in the soviet union the history of communism in cambodia you know in china and by the way china's not a small example like if you want to generalize about human nature you're talking about a billion people you know huge number of people involved in this no i mean this shows you that the witch trials you know never ended and it is true if you come here on youtube and you're honest this way you are putting yourself forward to deal with that crowd to deal with that unspeakably stupid and malevolent majority and again they have this motivation to misunderstand you to misinterpret you yes and i've seen that like so no matter how clearly worded my videos were no matter how much like i explained like this is the analysis this is why i'm making the point this is my conclusion where it's like no no no i found one sentence in there i can i can use against you so that that brings us to like the topic of this video okay and you know you say i i do have a human heart you know like i do actually sympathize even with these people who who hate me and this guy fandor i've never written to him for years positively encouraging him i can go back and i can show you a screenshot of me saying like look man if you want to like you want to be successful on youtube you've got to think about having journalistic integrity you can't just make things up and slander people and defame people like you got to start answering to some of the same standards that you would have to ask you if you were writing an article in a newspaper like i have it hasn't been all carrot and it hasn't been all stick it's been a mixture of carrot and stick but no there there really have been times when i tried to motivate him positively and i've been friendly and encouraging towards him in that to to the extent that i can give these you know had carried on a you know defamation of slander campaign against you know for for years including harassment of my girlfriend for no reason but i mean all of it it's what he has done to me i have never done to any other youtuber and there are people on youtube i hate there are people i have hard feelings against but i would never do to them publicly or privately what this guy fandar has done to me both publicly and privately but the origin of this and you know at the moment it happened i could already imagine at that time some idiot in the audience whether it be vegan foot soldier or whether it be you know nor vegan or one of these obsessive you know crazy stupid people i could already imagine the music against me was simply that melissa told a story about a former college roommate that was which was her college colleague yeah yeah okay someone you knew at college who had sent you some nasty mean-spirited messages and you know melissa is not the greatest storyteller you've now had four years of practice but when i first met you you know you like your ability to like stand in front of an audience and tell a story was it a very rudimentary oh yeah no i had no experience with that process i i was never a storytelling storytelling type of person the only performance that i knew how to do was uh studying a piece of music playing it over and over and over again and then performing for an audience that's much different right just kind of improvised my head and telling you a story about something that happened in my life i just i rarely did it and if i did it was just with a personal friend it was right it was performing right at the beginning of this relationship too i really trained melissa in how to teach english as a second language when you stand there as a teacher and that involves but that involves storytelling it involves taught me how to teach and you're saying i didn't have any experience with that you started at level zero and you know what i was like no no this is you know this is how you stand up people might underestimate the extent of which i just i spent a lot of time indoors i you know i i played video games i was just kind of uh i don't know i guess it's normal now for people to stay in and not have that much socialization as a really early in their early 20s late teens i remember too you know what a funny example remember when we did vegan activism on the street in vancouver yes and how you responded how you for you and it was such a different experience because you know sure yeah well you know that was going up and talking to complete strangers yeah isaac's a gregarious person he's he's open and he likes introducing himself to other people and stuff like that but you've come a long way but you've developed a lot in four years i mean it's not like i was completely anti-social i did you know you know it's just generally yeah okay if we're talking about storytelling we're talking about speaking new camera you have worked on that a lot in four years in effect okay but you were telling this story which i admit it's not the most fascinating story no it's not i'm amazed that this has continued to be part of your conversation here right but uh but i'm right but i'm not amazed because this is exactly what stupid malevolent mean spirited people in the audience latch onto they don't care so we can talk for three hours about global warming have i gotten one email have i gotten one positive email in response to the three hour discussion global warming no and this fandar is he writing to me saying hey that was really interesting what you said about global warming it made me change the way i think no is he writing to me saying he's thinking about a vegan diet or activism wow you know you raised him in poor no no no so you say you say you're surprised i'm not surprised like this is what youtube taught me to know this is the majority of people the majority of people will listen to your three-hour lecture on global warming and they'll be like oh there was there was one minute where he said something about his sex life in there people watch too much tv people watch too many movies just like they are not connected to reality i swear like this is just ridiculous like how yeah how much are they interested in reality like the point of the story the point of sharing these things like right you know that's what we're trying to get across it's not that well you're trying to help people too yeah i mean like all this stuff is ultimately yeah has positive motivations yeah so why don't you say what was the context for you telling the story anyway because i asked you a question right yes i this is from memory maybe it's not perfect but i do remember you asking me basically at one point did you realize that people were malevolent people were mean-spirited right and so in relation to being on the internet like right like at what point did you realize this was how your relationship with the audience was going to be yeah right something and then you told this story about a woman you knew i mean she's a woman now but you guys were teenagers obviously but a woman you knew when you were both teenagers at university yes who sent you a bunch of nasty messages right and i knew i knew when it happened i mean it doesn't matter and again the whole point of the discussion the whole point of the video is well-intentioned i knew people were gonna get after me and you know well and they're gonna ignore all the positive constructive and helpful things that are said but you know melissa basically just didn't do the best job of telling that story and it was a story i already knew because we'd already talked about it and it had a big impact when i received the messages and talked to him about it you know and then later on it came up in conversation because it upset me at the time it and then later on what thinking back on it thinking about how that friendship had basically ended because of that like yeah but you should have tried to do this see so like when i when we made the videos we made videos talking about how wonderful this relationship is good things about it we've made videos talking about how terrible the relationship is the bad things about it and they're all honest it's all true it's all real none of them i mean you know none of them are misleading life is not black and white and all of them are intended to help people you know what i mean like they are and like again maybe 10 of the audience responds to that and like yo man like that that video that was really something because they do i do hear that back like the stuff about our relationship i do oh yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and by the way i hear that from people at all levels of sexual experience so you were we had one longtime viewer of the channel who was a virgin you know and he didn't have any experience but he you know he was one of the people who really felt that he was oh yeah he would write to me saying look man this is really telling me what it's like to be in this kind of relationship you know and there are people who appreciate it but 90 of the audience is not trying to learn something from the video 90 of the audience is looking for their opportunity to hurt you to hurt the person behind the camera and even if they just do that by taking one sentence you've said and posting it on a gossip forum you know when guru gossip.com whatever you know these these different uh kiwi farms or what have you you know look just think about the mental processes i've found something i've found a piece of ammunition i found a piece of evidence that i can use to make myself feel morally superior to the people on camera and that's what they're doing again and again and again and the people who've made youtube videos against me and the people who've sent me email like part of what i'm writing back to them say can't you see can't you examine your own motivations here like it's so transparent what you're doing and you're like you may not believe me but i mean one of the most vicious videos ever recorded on my channel is my criticism of jacqueline glenn about religion yeah so i'm ethnically jewish and jacqueline glenn has in effect converted to judaism had a jewish wedding as a jewish child with a jewish name she has not admitted whether or not she circumcised her child and jacqueline glenn became rich and famous by being an atheist activist and i'm saying hey here you are doing prayers in hebrew at your wedding you know and it is a very passionate it's a very passionate video and you know someone could look at one sentence of that quoted out of context and think i'm mean spirited and think i'm trying to hurt her and i'm not like you know like the reality is i make a video like that for really sincere purposes i'm really trying to make the world a better place i'm really trying to help people i don't think i'm going to help jacqueline clinton now you give 100 other examples my criticism of vegan gains you know people have written to me saying it changed their life you know like i'm like when i made videos saying to vegan gains look you're an adult you have to stop playing video games you have to get serious about real problems childish things start living a more meaningful life yeah i know richard isn't going to take that advice but other people do other people hear it and think about it and they realize they have a lot in common with vegan gains and that some of this discussion applies to them and they change their lives you know what i mean so like even if you just look at that you think i'm just being vicious and hurting someone i promise you and again you can go back and watch the videos and you know i do i don't realize a lot of people not understand i'm not just trying to hurt people yeah but the majority of my audience is trying to hurt me that's the lesson i get from people like fan darfur okay and all they want to do is take you down a peg and that's all and like that's why i'm sorry guys we can look up the numbers now but a couple thousand people have seen me talking about global warming and i said during that recording not one of you is going to send me an email not one of you in this audience and i was right not one of you did you know and what are the emails i've got i've gotten more about my sex life more about my supposedly abusive relationship with melissa after we did a series of videos where like in one of those videos she did completely on her own where she's speaking in her own voice saying how a wonderful relationship is right yeah and like again even though it's not in that i remember you were like you need to dumb this down like you know yeah that's true you need to make sure it's more obvious to your audience because you were going to have meet people laughing to something right it's not it's and i'm talking about the positive that you've brought into my life like right yeah you know like but like you've got to think about it like a police deposition or something like this is what this is going to be used against what i was going to say it's one thing to like hurt somebody's ego to say something that would really hurt your ego right versus saying something that is like mean-spirited and just hurtful like making fun of somebody for their something they can't change you know like you are not coming online and making fun of somebody for their deformities like you know that's that's really horrible and evil and even something that like you know you realize that they just can't control like it's what you believe they can change you know like changes they can implement in their life uh or just like discussing this person can help other people's lives discussing their situation because inevitably it will apply to other people's lives so discussing vegan gains you know a lot of people live their lives playing video games into their 20s and 30s and they don't realize that this has a detrimental effect on their development and you know what they're doing with their time like that is worth talking about in a way that like you know it's not just attacking vegan gains that's not the point of the conversation that's not the point of looking at it and people feel attacked and that's okay right and if it hurts if you feel upset get upset be really hard to take like and i've had so much hate mail on that stuff it's so much happening for people defending video games right it's like okay go ahead get and you know some of those people they're gonna reconsider five years from now but you aren't doing anything just to damage their lives you're not you know ruining their lives or making their lives miserable like like this person who writes to you all like every day you make a video more than 100 fake accounts to harass me on instagram on youtube right via gmail yeah on any on any platform sharing this i mean it takes courage right so i i don't think we have to digress in that a major way but like you were just saying that hypothetically this these videos i make could could help the people i'm criticizing we just talked about claire michelle yes what if claire michelle had watched that video i made five years ago and taken it seriously of course of course it could have changed your life sorry because we went back and watched it again i hadn't i hadn't watched it oh yeah it's a great it's professors but i'm just saying like these these videos a lot of how about the videos i've made about henya henia mania yeah i'm not just flattering you like yeah of any of them like my views sure like in things that i wouldn't have been able to like philosophize about or discuss right like it really does help me understand and if we can't if we can psychology and yeah just of all these decisions that like you know if your philosophy if your philosophy doesn't have consequences what is it worth okay philosophy should have consequences there should be stakes there should be risks and you know what so like again someone i've criticized really harshly henia mania my fellow veganists done videos criticizing her really harshly you can look back now what's happened last five years in her life and you can say wow her life would be different her life would better if she had just watched and listened to and take it seriously these criticisms from from about sale you know i sorry but now now what if i were wrong i'd be so happy if i were wrong like imagine if we were sitting here in some parallel universe where she lived her life her way and it turned out wonderfully and then i was making a video saying wow you know what when i look back at the criticism i offered over the last several years i was completely wrong i'd be so happy to be wrong you know what i mean yes but you know but my point is there's risk for me and there are consequences you know what i mean there are consequences real people and you know kenya is one person but they're going to be a lot of people in that audience who realize hey their life it's a little bit like kenya your life is a little bit like vegan gains you know or what have you sure but anyway so look i just say you know these are the consequences of really being honest on the internet and you know melissa started telling this story that i already know because we live together 24 7. neither one of us has had a job for years we have so many hours we know everything going on in each other's lives i know exactly how good her digestion is on any given day you know i know you know the details hey you know i know whether or not you've been to the gym or like you know but you know anything that's upset you i hear about you know what i mean i heard a lot about that about that conversation event so you told this story and i think it's exactly because of the same framework we talked about so she just she mentioned briefly that like when even when she made the video talking about how wonderful this relationship is and i was like no no no like you can't be vague you can't like if you're gonna do this like you have to you have to think about the lowest common denominator you ever think about people who don't get it like you can't there was there was some sarcasm like in your first we just said something as if it was self-evident that you meant the opposite that's part of the definition of sarcasm language like you say something oh that's just great and your meaning is that it's terrible it's like no like you can't say no you have to actually say what you mean because there are people who will quote you saying that's just great and treat it as if you're saying that's great like it's that up right but anyway in that same way when we did that live stream you started to tell this story basically about you know your horrible friend or friend of me from from college and you you you got nervous like you kind of censored yourself yeah because i don't like uh being spare me the detail you got nervous for completely obvious reasons okay great right and then i was in the position where i knew for the audience this story didn't make any sense you know so i then filled in the blanks and i said if you watch it i say to her in a friendly way i said you really undersold that story you know you kind of told the story halfway and then i start filling in some of the blanks which she agrees with okay so you know um this is what i'm dealing with then following up on that i get harassment so i don't know it's been a month or two months but i've got an email about this constantly from this guy fandar and he made videos i think really significantly defaming the two of us i mean i think it's significant to claim i think it's a significant form of defamation and slander to say that someone's an abusive boyfriend or girlfriend i think it's significant defamation slander to say that someone is gaslighting their boyfriend or girlfriend and i've said to him look by your own standards you try to hold me to these moral standards right you should all yourself those moral standards so you should delete the video because you know this is not true okay um so for one thing uh he asks me he says oh well if what you're saying is you know like what i'm saying is true now which is completely consistent with what both melissa and i said during that live stream why don't i send him the screenshots of the messages of what i just said so this is no no no apart from being ridiculous this is the problem is that there are no stakes there are no consequences like if i complied with this kind of unreasonable demand for the audience what do i get so if you guys have been watching the channel long enough there was a time when all these people made up the story that my court case in thailand was fake and they're like well nobody's seen the receipts everyone would see the receipts i showed i showed the literal receipt the legal documents to everyone who asked what did i get like just saying what's the conflict you think those people then turned around and were nice and respectful and positive towards me when they know like for one thing a lot of them just kept lying they kept claiming the court case was faced with faker that they'd never seen proof that i paid the lawyer that actually hired a law firm or that the case was actually like you know and the other but the particular people do you think i ever earned one person's respect or got one positive response i'm taking time to say oh yeah sure like hey this is the law firm this is i can show you the proof i reached out to so many people that way during that time right but this guy in particular this is after a four year long hate and defamation campaign that's still ongoing you know it would be it's ridiculous it is ridiculous when to ask but if i do this what do you think he's going to do back for me and a lot of you guys don't know this but it was in response to this same guy now about four years ago maybe three and a half years ago he was demanding to see the private messages i'd had with a natural vegan you know which is again it's completely ridiculous but i was sitting there in my apartment we were in southern taiwan at that time we're gaussian i was like you know what this guy is crazy and stupid but you know if he's really that interesting because he was wearing anything he was really interested well maybe there's an audience for it you know and i went back and read the messages i'd completely forgotten them and i was a really nice guy in those messages i was really nice to it i was like wow i was really nice there i was i was assuming i was a bit of a jerk but no i was really surprised and i took the screenshots and i made a youtube video so i did that for him i did that in response to messages from this same guy what'd it get me i mean how many yeah does he then respond does he then respond but saying wow okay now i really appreciate that you're a reasonable and honest person no i've now had years and years of hatred and defamation and just harassment from this guy just you know needless insults and harassment from somebody on trial yeah right right right right but i mean okay it's not a trial in the sense that there's never a verdict and again if i clear my name for this if i show you these messages right the trial never ends and again it doesn't matter i do a three hour video look so we've done more than three hours talking about our wonderful early issues you've heard melissa talking about it doesn't matter you're still trying to frame me for gaslighting and abusing and controlling manipulating my girlfriend right and his evidence for this his current evidence i've mentioned in the past some examples of like the ludicrous evidence he used he tried to frame me tried to claim that i was a pedophile by taking one sentence out of context and if you just hear the sentence immediately before and after it it's completely clear that's not what i'm saying this guy has gone all the way with public defamation of me that would put you in jail okay in canada this would be several years in prison just that one example of you trying to frame me for being a pedophile so like sorry even if you just hear the one sentence you actually tell it's not i mean one sentence but if you hear the whole paragraph then it's it's even clearer what it was i was saying by the way that's a video all you guys have seen that's from back when i was uh you know it was the durianrider conflict but it was just a sentence where i was saying look the fundamental issue here isn't whether someone is 16 year old 16 years old or 18 years old there's a more fundamental problem which is blah blah blah like i'm talking about the philosophical roots of the thing like you know what what are we really dealing with these kind of age it's very clear that i'm in the middle of making a moral argument against pedophilia or just just barely you know that it's not being just over the line that matters here's what really matters blah blah blah so you know that that's the point of that more like okay so that's who i'm dealing with here asking me to say oh well you know if if what you're saying is true why don't you send me screenshots oh yeah and so and by the way he's admitted he's wrong about that he's admitted he was wrong but a whole bunch of things he tried to frame me he took some things durianrider said that durianrider has admitted were lies and that he's retracted and deleted from his own channel he put together a video defeaming and denouncing me with those clips from durianrider and and i wrote to him and said look don't you realize even durianrider has admitted this is a lie you again journalistic integrity he got in touch with durianrider and dear martyr said i was a great guy which is interesting to hear that's interesting here that's during writer's current perspective on me so this is what we're dealing with and that's okay so you know um he quotes me here so i'm i'm now quoting myself this is in his reply but he quotes what i said to him in the email before i said quote think about what you're saying about her you're claiming that she has no idea what she's talking about herself and that she must be the victim of some man's manipulation etc you call yourself a feminist but you do not regard women as having real agency as having their own intelligence and making their own decisions now i do think sincerely that's part of this guy's problem that's part of why he's in this bizarre white knight mentality all the time and he acts like he's trying to save melissa like melissa should be grateful to him when melissa hates this guy it's incredibly hurtful to melissa what he's been saying all right why don't you read this baby i'm joking okay so this is this is fandor writing okay this is him writing okay it was you who talked about how melissa's friend is such a terrible person not melissa you told your girlfriend on camera that her friend was somehow trying to hurt her it would be another thing if melissa herself started saying that her friend is a a terrible person a piece of etc then i would indeed take her for her word but she didn't it was you who spewed those ideas to her while she just listened to your perspective possibly reluctantly just just this is the level of social retardation you're dealing with and it never goes away it never ends this is someone writing to me he's never been married he's never had a girlfriend like we have a relationship where we do the dishes together every day yeah so like i can start telling a story and melissa can finish it right and melissa can start telling a story and i already know the story and i can participate in telling it yes that's what you were seeing on camera so seeing as there are people in the audience who are so stupid and so malicious so malign they have such bad intentions that they they have fastened on to the fact that there was one sentence of a genuinely spontaneous unscripted live stream like we were just talking where you started telling your story basically about how awful this person was and you kind of stopped short and i said to you you know you're really underselling it and then i was filling in the eyes okay melissa so do you just do you feel that i was gaslighting you that's in that video how do you who do you think's gaslighting you me or fandar so as i understand it gaslighting is yeah making you question your own reality it's making someone believe that they're insane it's like convincing someone that like you aren't lying that they're insane that's what gaslighting is yeah it's a very serious charge ridiculous to say that any that in the middle of telling this trivial story in the meaning of this anecdote go on yeah yeah the like i said the question that is posed to me is when did you discover that your audience your relationship with the audience was going to be consist of the solution yeah yeah like bad intentioned people like people who have bad intentions and i thought of this just off the top of my head i had no planning i didn't think about it beforehand started telling the story true i'm not a great storyteller i i'm trying to improve that's why that's why i'm on the internet that's why i make youtube videos is i i want to be better this way but even even if i were wrong even if that's not the way melissa would tell the story like even if she told the story her way and then i had a different perspective or like i felt that your friend was really nervous you're allowed to say that i'm sorry i'm sorry for you but like no i'm not gaslighting you're right i'm not gaslighting her i'm not manipulating her i'm not being an abusive boyfriend like like so you and i both read the same thing right no you're wrong sure you could disagree he wasn't a but it's like okay i'm i'm more polite about it i don't know why why am i more polite right nobody is no stakes she was a to me like that person she was bad to me okay yes if you want me to be really honest if you if you and i read well and that's what this video is about it's about the price of honesty yeah like the reality of youtube is if you're not going to be 110 honest don't tell the story right that's that's true that is the moral of story but right and i knew i knew when you held back i was like oh the audience is going to react to that because the audience is stupid the audience is and maligned that's the reality we are telling stories to mentally disabled people that's what this youtube channel is that's what the whole internet is this is the bloopers you have to be prepared for the lowest common denominator people have very little intelligence you know and very very dark motivation but you know the point is you and i both read those same messages from your friend and i saw how much they upset you well i don't want to overset it i don't want to overstate it but you know it had an impact on you oh yeah that's that's why you were telling the story at all so if my perspective was your friend was really mean to you and let's just say theoretically maybe your perspective is she wasn't that mean to you in case it's not her name casey didn't catch it not my perspective yeah it's just i was trying to be polite but being a little bit polite and invasive and telling the story but you know and you you know you got to keep it real with the audience or else the story isn't worth not all right but even if we had different perspectives on that that doesn't mean i'm an abusive boyfriend that doesn't mean i'm a controlling boyfriend that doesn't mean i'm gaslighting my boyfriend that doesn't mean you have the legal right to say that on youtube or elsewhere but i also want to say like even if you did say that like what are you you're indicating that i can't think for myself that's right just because isil tells me like on a deep level says that uh the messages from this that she was trying to hurt me yeah right like that's so horrible for isil to to suggest that to me that that somebody like he's looking out for for me he sees that i'm upset he realizes you know once he i tell him what the conversation was like that she was she was trying to hurt me and i was like yeah you're right like yeah you know there's she wasn't being accidentally mean to you that that's all like maybe it you know it doesn't it's not worth digressing into like the details like maybe she herself was emotionally in a bad state i could make excuses for why her behavior but this is about the phenomenon of the youtube audience watches a three-hour video we say so much during that same video you talk about and you demonstrate what a wonderful relationship this is like there are videos even the video we did yesterday we did a video together just talking about claire michelle if you watch you can tell what kind of relationship we have yeah even from this like you can tell oh no no i'm going to take this one sentence i'm going to forcibly misunderstand it or misinterpret it and misrepresent it and then i'm going to publicly denounce you and i'm gonna say and claim that melissa should get out of this relationship right exactly and it's like it's not just that he's making videos like this he's messaging you too all the time and and it just doesn't let up so um you know it's it continues and so i'll continue okay so why don't you eat the rest of this even where did i stop here okay so you then i wouldn't take her it would be another thing if melissa herself started saying that her is terrible that her friend is a bit so they're not friends anymore in case you didn't know they were friends years ago and then this you mean if you actually heard the story anyway then i would indeed take her for her word but she didn't it was you who spewed those ideas to her while she just listened to your perspective possibly reluctantly like okay it's bad for you to talk about your ideas it's bad uh but that's this is the point is these are people in the audience they're seriously there are people in your audience who are 30 year old virgins 40 year old virgins like that's such a misinterpretation of what actually happened during those moments of the live stream right yeah i love this sentence actually this was all on camera like that's as if incriminatingly right yes apparently incriminating our wonderful [Applause] melissa melissa cooked in the background yes you can tell what a wonderful relationship we have on camera but a small percentage of really stupid people with really bad motivations will take one sentence and misinterpret it and exaggerate it to try to create the illusion that you have a terrible abusive relationship and by the way if you care about this do you think there's nobody for you to help on planet earth have you watched the news this week about afghanistan if you are a feminist if you care about women what's going on in afghanistan right now if you want to be on white knight if you want to help people there are people in terrible situations there are people you can help there are people you can probably help in the city you're living in right now and there are people you can help on the other side of the world this isn't about helping anyone and that's what makes your videos so different from mine okay whether i'm talking about fandar or i'm talking about soy crates or i'm talking about nor vegan or i'm talking about a vegan foot soldier or vegan ava you are just trying to destroy people and you don't realize it because i do think the fundamental motivation is that you want to feel morally superior to others and you know what i'm not like that that's not how i live my life when i went to laos to hand out sacks of rice to starving people it wasn't so i could feel morally superior to them all right it's a topic for a separate view but you know there's this line from a rap song i'm gonna paraphrase it real people do real things okay real people do real things and those of us who do real things we're not out here trying to virtue signal and and try trying to construct a mythology that other people what what do you win if we're in a terrible relationship what do you win what do you win if you manage to convince 100 or 200 other incredibly stupid possibly mentally disabled people with bad intentions to also send us harassment and email because that's what you've done like you're you've managed to convince like five people that you're right and that's what nor vegan did that's what these other people in soyuz they managed to influence a small number of people to view everything we do with the most unchartable assumptions what have you accomplished okay you could buy an airplane ticket to pakistan you can go to the border between pakistan and afghanistan right now if you really are a feminist if you really want to help battered women do you want to help women who are in bad relationships they can't get out of yeah you can there are women who need your help in afghanistan and there are women who need your help in the city you're living in and melissa is someone who in her own words in a completely self-confident way has made it completely clear to you and to you specifically we've taken the time to talk to this one one-on-one for years she has made it clear that you don't need she does not need your help okay and you still are hung up on this white knight fantasy okay so yes this was all on camera finish this brilliant message yes let melissa decide whether or not her friend was trying to hurt her she doesn't need you telling her that she is supposed to be the one telling you that but she didn't she knows more about her friend than you do i'm now telling you the same thing that you are telling me let women make their own decisions and judgments about their lives yeah i'd say the same thing to him why don't you let melissa make our own decisions and judgment about her life that's right look if something happens to you and you talk to somebody you want to talk to them about it because you want to get their input like that that's a very fundamental thing about relationships about sharing experiences with people there are people that go through from traumatic experiences it's like as if melissa would have no interest in my opinion right yeah i value i trust you well you're interested you're interested yeah yeah of course okay yes sure i would like to know no no no i agree it's part of what he's not getting that like when you're saying this it's a conversation with me also it's a conversation but like we're talking about your feelings and your experience it's like that's right um there are a lot of people who only know video games she knows more about her friend sure yeah that's true i do know more about her than isil does but it's it's also interesting too to get somebody else's perspective that doesn't know the person because that will give you more of an objective viewpoint like the detached outside perspective i might want to excuse this shitty behavior from my friend or my former friend yeah i mean we weren't even that close but it's like still you know i knew you so maybe you're going through a rough time there were things that she said that indicated that she was going through a rough time so i said okay i don't want to repeat what we did in the original live stream because we talked about that but we talked about it like part of what came out of that that was meaningful in that same live stream was you talking about the fact that you had to start judging these things in a different way yes you know because i mean the part of it like my perspective and that is whoa this person is intentionally trying to hurt you yes and you talk we already talked about in the live stream and you talked about that that was actually something as an adult you had to reel like oh look i didn't think about it that way at all but that is what's going on this is someone who's taken time out of their day to send me malicious hate mail and that's what this is this is someone trying to hurt me you know whatever their motivations yeah yeah but that was that was doesn't like that's not subtext that's not subjects that was the test let me decide whether or not her friend was trying to hurt her like okay i've decided that is what she was trying to do and that's yeah yeah yeah so yeah good luck trying to justify a multi-year you know hate campaign against someone hate defamation so look guys um i don't want to give the message here that with youtube and with being honest about your personal life experience that you can't win okay you can win and you know the learning process that we go through here it's the ultimate thing to win the ultimate question is what kind of person do you want to be what kind of person you want to become and youtube is an incredibly powerful incredibly positive tool for becoming a better person even if it is something as simple as motivating you to do book reviews motivating you to like you know if you're studying chinese it's a lonely it's a lonely habit let me tell you the hours of what is it stuff well you know it's a lonesome adventure you know and instead to be able to come on and talk about your progress and talk to yourself whatever it is whether you're studying ancient greece or ancient rome or modern politics or you know the chinese language whatever it is it's this tremendously positive transformational tool and what you see on youtube again and again is the tragedy of human nature people are misusing this tool they're taking the medicine as poison you know they're they're they're you know they're ruining their own lives and they're trying to ruin the lives of others and i think the fundamental error that these people are making is that they want to feel like a better person they want to feel morally superior as opposed to actually being a better person as opposed to actually becoming a better person which which doesn't just come it doesn't just come from going to afghanistan or doing something heroic or daring you know it can come from reading books it can come from reflecting on exactly what we did during the livestream reflecting on mistakes you made in your life and thinking about it and think about how you want to do better next time i do a lot of that on my youtube channel there are all kinds of things you can do to become a better person and youtube can be this wonderful catalyst you know in so doing but yes part of my personal tragedy in life is that i didn't realize how blind i was to the stupidity and malevolence of human nature until people like this came into my life and made through their obsessive hatred of melissa and i you know made it impossible for me to ignore