Advice to Young WOMEN: Being an Intellectual, etc.

there isn't any one thing that's
different when you're talking about issues with men versus women but there are a whole lot of little things that add up to an enormous difference uh when you're talking about the psychological emotional intellectual development of men and women the path that leads toward the life of the mind and the path that leads so many people away from the life of the mind you know the decisions you've got to make that'll lead to leading a meaningful life versus a meaningless one or that can end up with your life frankly being in ruins because the stakes are very high i mean i'd say the light motif that comes up again and again when you're reflecting on the difference between being a woman and being a man in these situations is just i know it's an overused phrase but it is the bigotry of low expectations that it's so rare for people to say to women including their own parents including their own brothers and sisters like including their school teachers including their boss at work it's so rare to say to women man up it's so rare to say this is on you you got to reach a higher standard to really you know have this kind of imposition the expectation of excellence of a woman giving it 110 percent i mentioned this controversy to you a couple days ago mostly came up in passing and some some other conversation we had a controversy here in canada more than 10 years ago now where there was a woman running for parliament so she was a candidate in the federal parliamentary relations these are national elections now this controversy it partly involved people's changing attitudes towards the internet and privacy because a group of journalists had gone around and basically gathered together all of the evidence of people just having posted crap on facebook and twitter and it was mostly facebook but they'd aggregated together the data from these different candidates in different elections and they'd come up with some really embarrassing evidence of just how stupid they were so this woman she's not a kid she's not a teenager she's a fully grown woman she's university educated she's standing in elections at the highest level and she had made a series of mind-bogglingly stupid statements about the holocaust like when you're just looking at the statements or they're her pasting on her own facebook they're not anti-semitic they're not neo-nazi and she's a left-wing person by the way you're just looking at you like what like what are you saying about concentration camps like why it was just boggling and what she said in her defense so naturally this was only after you know the mainstream press caught on to this bizarre news story what she said was that she had never heard of the holocaust before that when she made those comments on facebook she she had no idea anything like this right right and and and people's attitudes you know before during her education during her upbringing during the vetting process of her becoming a candidate like how is it that all these other people around her can be aware of how ignorant a person she is and still put her into an elite leadership role in in politics i think it has everything to do with being a woman and those problems they get worse when you're a good-looking woman now i was saying something similar to you a couple days ago i put up a youtube video about izzy davis right now if you don't know who izzy davis is she's deleted her youtube channel she's deleted uh basically all of her social media to my to my knowledge but she used to be a famous person and she is a conventionally attractive blonde has a history of eating disorders blah blah blah has a history of pool dancing too to be fair so she's someone who got slim and fit enough she's been a gym a fitness instructor and a pole dancer and her university education dealt with chemistry biology nutritional science and at the end of that she's completed her university education at an elite university in the united states of america uh university of berkeley california right this is berkeley um anyway and you know what she's saying is so mind-bogglingly stupid it's showing a kind of fundamental illiteracy in the sciences and lack of familiarity with you know the real basics of chemistry biology nutrition of exactly her field exactly and again like i haven't met her professors i haven't been in the classroom with her but i've been in a lot of classrooms with a lot of people i've been in a lot of classrooms where the professor's attitude towards especially a good-looking white female is totally different from their attitude towards an ugly male a not especially if you're a tall black self-confident male the way the professor treats you like how for how many years did this woman just get kind of waved and nodded through her education yes yes yes that's good good for you dear like kind of pat on the head encouragement and nobody really challenging her nobody really holding her to a higher standard and like let's be honest about how it works education nobody kind of contradicting her stopping her and jumping down the throat saying no no why did you no you you the fact that you said this whether verbally or on your test this shows that you don't really know what you're talking about this shows there's something fundamental you know it can be quite nasty confronting people in a way that draws out their ignorance and draws out what it is they still need to learn or what they've gotten wrong or that really puts them in check and says look the fact that you managed to scrape through the last few exams you may have gotten a c minus but you may have gotten an a plus but you you really don't understand the fundamentals here you're not developing the competence in our culture and in every culture i'm familiar with we have this huge problem of women being held to lower standards and it has a cumulative effect like when you look at people in grade three grade four grade five grade six maybe the boys and girls aren't so different when you're getting up to high school and university age the subtle way in which women are treated different is very different and then we make this transition so don't worry i'm gonna let melissa take over the microphone here at the no [ __ ] let's say but then we make this transition where women the vast majority of women are in a situation where they have the option of letting men solve all their problems in life letting some man fall in love with you and provide you with a home and an income and shelter and everything else of letting some man you know you give up a lot in exchange but letting some man be in charge letting some man pay your bills and of course today it's very easy to visualize because of the internet but whether you become a stripper or uh you know you do cam whoring you do some kind of neutron internet that's a different way of suddenly having men and male sexual attention come into your life and solve all your problems for you now you don't think about career and earning money and education in the same way because men come to your life but i'm just being clear that can be one relationship with one man you can just get yourself one wealthy boyfriend or one wealthy husband he can't even be a poor guy he was a straight job and and works hard if you're a you know you'd be amazed how much money whether in england or the united states of america how much money you make as a plumber just a guy who's been to trade school become an electrician or become a plumber pipefitter like all kinds of like all kinds of jobs for men that don't require university education being uh being a coal miner working in a mine working we just kind of working as a longshoreman working at the docks is over a hundred thousand dollars a year yeah but anyway a man who has no education and no no elite position job he's earning more than a hundred thousand he has more than enough money to take some some woman and it's it's not just good-looking women i've known very homely frankly ugly women who are still in this position where you let some man you know solve all your problems for you and now you're not holding yourself those things you're not asking those questions okay so yeah so that's what we made a video already i mean most of you were you were a part of that we made a video talking about advice for young men yeah right on the other side of the camera yeah yeah no but i feel you were you were suddenly part of that and i thought we were going to talk more about sex in that video than we did it's all right it was already a long video we had a lot to say and this is a video by contrast that's talking about the same issues with with women yeah and i think we agree in like a subtle and pervasive way with women it's all on a higher level of difficulty precisely because other people are making it easier for you okay all right i feel like in that introduction there was a lot covered so we've been talking for about nine minutes and yeah uh really emotionally exhausting nine minutes on camera completely you know completely overwhelming stifling nine minutes there you go okay yeah so yeah of course i want you and foreign uh so yeah there were a lot of different issues discussed there but your perspective on women in education that there are lower standards i have talked to you quite a bit about this off camera like we we've discussed this in various contexts so it's not that i um 100 agree with you or that my experience shows the exact same thing or that i learned the exact same thing through my experience in education so i'm can you give me an example where like you from your experience when you were in class and you felt like there was a real direct difference between how a woman was treated so i i i went to more than one high school and more than one university but you know one of my high schools a very large percentage of the students were black so i would say minimum 30 percent of the students remember maybe in any given year it's 30 40 it would it was not 50 it was not uh half black was within canada that's very unusual most of canada black people are a small minority anyway so this high school any given year 30 40 people were black and yes true to the stereotype i think we had the best basketball team in the city it was i remember finding people in my own family uh who were white in case you didn't know um white people one van would say oh uh are you on the basketball team and did you try it for the basketball team and i was like right you're tall no no in my at my high school it was all black guys on the basketball team and stuff so within canada this is this is very unusual but yeah it was very striking to me i saw many examples of this how the teachers it's my last year of high school high school was five years not four years in canada at that time with a different system so this is the fifth year of high school this is kids who are university age by today's standards right and the way the teacher would speak to a female student was very different from a male student and i've got to say especially when it was a black female student okay so i'll give you an example there was a black uh student and she you know she fancied herself a bit of a radical like if if we were if this had happened in 2021 she would be a young black woman involved with black lives matter that that type of cause so the the black radical dissident causes of the day sure which at that time i mean at the time you know krs-1 was on the radio it wasn't such a popping time for black again you know anyway this is long enough ago that we're not talking about the black panthers we're not talking about blm either but anyway yeah but she was a young black woman who had some uh political pretensions and she gave a it was supposed so i think each of us were assigned to give a presentation on a different university major something you could major in in university and i think we were given them randomly it was something like that like kind of spun a wheel or something everybody got a different thing they had to research and talk about the this major or whatever and the one she was given was classics so if you don't know in english as a university major classics means greek and latin okay and she that's basically what it means to simplify it means studying ancient ancient greek latin and the associated literature and history and politics right and she gave this so this young black woman gave this completely surreal lecture where she was like talking about african culture and and growing up black and stuff and the meaning of the word classics and like classic rap songs oh really yeah but she knew it was supposed to be about college majors uh-huh okay it was like you know and you know that no you meant she was not the only person who in this way like fundamentally misunderstood the assignment which is like no that's like no do it again like you know which is what you basically need to be told and when other people's true demons they were told like no that's not the meaning of this word that's you know what i mean okay and i i remember it's it's an extreme example the whole response of the professor was like oh oh oh good for you oh you you poor dear well you know what you don't realize is that the word classic has more than it was this you know it was the perfect example of the bigotry of low expectations okay you know you're not willing to say to this person no do it again try harder give me more give me a second you know yeah it was just good for you i'm so happy you showed up here's your prize because you ran the race at all really yeah yeah yeah yeah and so this is a female teacher and a female student um i do know that you know part of the problem is just well a lot of young women break down crying yeah you know men do too of course but like where the teacher they may have experience with that they don't want to confront someone they don't want to confront a young one whether it's a male teacher or a female teacher just say no like you failed this is bad you have to step it up you have to be at a higher level you have to do this again you know what i mean um okay okay give you one more because it's really brief and it's really surreal um i think i think i didn't say this on youtube people think of this you there was a very good looking young woman she was really strikingly good looking in in my high school she was white and so this is a similar kind of assignment everyone was given everyone was given a different founder of a religion to do a report on somebody got the buddha somebody got jesus and she got muhammad and she did the whole presentation not knowing the difference between muhammad and muhammad ali i am not joking and and everyone like the other students that was also we had several black people we had several black people in the audience but like oh my gosh like and even i like i wasn't even no like but i remember i said it and like other people in class were like nodding and the teacher was like no they were like okay with me i was like no no muhammad ali and muhammad the prophet are two separate people it's like oh my god like everyone in class is like what like what is this you know and again you know again if if a male student or like a tall self-confident black male student i was a tall self-confident white student if you had had done this you could imagine like the teacher might lay into you did you what are you [ __ ] what the [ __ ] is wrong with are you completely screwed no no and the whole response from the teacher was like well you know it's confusing when two different people in history have the same name um like okay 100 pandering encouraging good for you you tried your best you get an a-min like okay so i know these are extreme but what i'm saying is like in a much more subtle way uh it's i see that going on all the time okay at all levels inclu including often enough in the workplace compared to kind of what kind of work sure yeah so i'm trying to think of good examples from my experience in high school but i can't come up with something as as blatant as that because those are those are pretty striking examples where there were lower expectations for women lower expectations for people who are non-white um right yeah and i agree with you that is a problem like we should we should have the same standards for the assignments that are given to different uh whatever gender and whatever race so right so look you know women's sport is less competitive than men's sport women's prison is less scary than men's prison women in the military are treated different from like it's everything you know like that's that's what's scary and like by the way i think the exceptions prove the rule i think the reason why there's so much whining about how hard it is to be in the fashion industry whether you're a fashion model or a designer is that that's like the one industry where it's only women and gay men like 99 percent of people are either women or gay men and where people are really brutal with each other the same way straight men are brutal with other straight men was like oh no you know like this purse isn't good enough like you know if you want this to be in the show you know what i mean or it's worth where it's on that level yeah all right so before we started recording this uh you gave a notice for about an hour yeah and i was just you know doing oh take it whatever direction you want to take it yeah i know i'm just setting the stage yeah yeah yeah um so i was getting some things some things done in the kitchen and uh beforehand and i just thought of something i would like to say um you see how badly made this cup is this this is the bigotry of low expectations look at how badly come on seriously i don't know who designed that but anyway um i'll bet you money it was a woman so i have a lot of things that i why okay i have a lot of things that i would like to talk about but just because you talked about um breaking down crying uh this this issue uh this is something that you mentioned in your video about men advice for young men too um and you know i think it's just worth telling because i myself was a young woman once uh i myself was 18 years old i myself was 19 years old and i will never get another chance to be 18 years old or 19. we're kind of celebrating melissa becoming middle aged i know you guys think she's a teenager but she's not and we're going i don't think anybody thinks i'm a teenager um anyway uh yeah so um i think it's worth telling this story even though it might be slightly embarrassing for me to recount and i hadn't thought about this at all beforehand so i was just i was just contrasting it so like i have some things written down but just you you bring out the breaking down crying so i had a job when i was in university it was um i think i was 20 years old when i had this job and my boss was a she uh was overweight uh and she was a black woman she had a lot of uh charisma you know she was she was just an interesting person to to spend time or spend time around like you know she was she was um uh she was a character and she didn't really live by the same standard uh these low expectations for women yeah i noticed that um so one example that happened is i didn't i didn't i wasn't aware of my doing this but she noticed that i wasn't coming into work like i would come into work at the last second like i would walk in right when it was about to be 8 am yeah and her view on it was that i should be coming into into the office like 10 minutes early i should be like getting prepared and be ready for the day at like 9 00 am or sorry 8 am right and she one day i came into work and she took me aside and she just you know in a column way said you know come to my office i want to talk to you so this was a workplace situation where i was being called out for something that i had done wrong and uh i i could just feel like my heart rate going up and and i just i've always had this issue with authority with authority figures and somebody like trying to correct my behavior and stuff uh and i do think this is something that is particularly difficult for women to deal with maybe because they don't have as much experience with it because of this sure this different standards these different uh low expectations uh so yeah she just you know she didn't say it in a rude way or anything but she was she was explaining to me like you know you need to come into work earlier i've noticed this have you noticed that every day this week you've come in like right before 8 am rather than coming in like 10 minutes before and uh yeah i i started crying like it was just something that i couldn't help like i really didn't want to and it was just the two of you alone in her office yeah it was just me and her alum in her office and yeah so i i uh i regret that that's how i handle it at that stage you know 20 years old you're not you're not a kid um but still that was that was my level of maturity at that at that stage my ability to handle inter interpersonal conflicts workplace conflicts so yeah i would say that's a that's a big that was a big issue for me i'm not saying all women but i do think it's uh something that is something that we need to learn from i remember an anecdote like that from a guy it's not worth telling the whole story you guys know i've read a bit about the history of the cia he was a guy who worked more with the fbi than the cia but he did both and he complained that when they let women into the fbi and again i think women in some sense have always been involved in the cia but they started having women in higher positions yeah that he said there was this huge change where people would break down crying in meetings people would scream in meetings where he said like he was an old enough guy he remembered when it was yeah you remember when it was all men and when it was all white men because you know there was a time when there were no black people like it was openly racist yeah you know society and um you know look it's just interesting i think obviously i'm not saying i think we should have an all-male workplace i don't believe that but i remember him saying you can imagine in that kind of job whether it's the fbi or the ca there were probably a lot of meetings where there's you know there's somebody got shot in the head because of you or something you know like something really bad you made the wrong decision and now fred is dead you know i mean whatever you know people really break down we women so that's the end of this but the point was women were breaking down weeping in a way that guys weren't before okay and how the whole office yeah yeah yeah so i mean it depends what kind of work you're in right yeah but i just think too like looking back at that situation at that story where it's it's not even when i didn't have the threat of being fired or something it was just the the confrontation that i was not able to like to deal with um like that if it had been a young man a young white man or a young man with a different race you know like how would the expectations be different for them right and yeah that that is something that um i i just didn't think about at that time i was i was so like when you're young like you're so in your own your mind you're you're in your own you're selfish you know um you're not thinking of how you're going to be perceived by other people yeah i just mentioned i have told melissa this story before but i think it's never been told on on camera so my ex-girlfriend from a million years ago my my blonde ex-girlfriend she was going to university her major i think ended up just being english literature maybe i think she did combined women's studies english literature yeah but anyway that that kind of thing and you know she told me this anecdote because i was complaining about the way evaluation and grading is structured in universities where there's just no like if i pour out my heart and soul to research and write this paper and then it just disappears into the system and you get you get a number by email you find out what grade you got there's no meaningful learning from you know whatever yeah and um she gave me an example where she was in one of these big lecture theater classes there were like 400 students in the class with university of toronto we had huge classes there's one professor and hundreds of students in a big lecture theater and she just decided so in case you hadn't guessed she is a good-looking blonde and she's a cute blonde rather than like a threatening blonde you know but she's she was a that age she was a very attractive young woman and nobody said [ __ ] to her and nobody said tire stanza really you know and she decided to completely disregard the stated requirements for like the final essay for this course the essay that's worth like 50 year grade which is also normal at university of toronto and instead of you know everyone's typing on a computer and printing out an essay for so many pages instead she bought one big piece of like art paper so i know some kind of fancy you know colored paper and she got out her calligraphy pens and she used like colored pens and did like decoration stuff in the border and she wrote this like thought poem or some [ __ ] yeah like you know she did this like artistic response to like the book that they were assigned to read yeah yeah yeah with like pretty pictures and like four different colors of pens using chili so she's telling me this anecdote and again like she's telling under the heading of my saying how the evaluation system is is [ __ ] up with universities and she's like and she just heard nothing back she was like when she handed it to like the ta to hand there's like you know they made a funny expression and then she got whatever she got in a minus just like she gets a grade backwards completely disregarding these times and what i said to him without without missing a beat i didn't think about it i didn't like come back to her a week later at the moment seeing their listener tell this story where she describes this [ __ ] arts and crafts thing she did for like a 400 level english lit class at a universe university level and i said to her how do you think your professor would have spoken to you if you were a six foot tall black male she was devastated by this she had never thought about it and it's way beyond white privilege and it's way beyond female privilege or pretty girl privilege it's like your instructor in this course so totally [ __ ] trivializes you as a human being they hold you to such low standards that no one is taking you aside and saying look if you can't perform at this level like if you can't write an essay that meets these standards these specifications but then like dude you can't do this job like you know i mean the same what if you're talking about training someone to be a nurse trains them to be a doctor talking about izzy davis getting a degree in nutrition and chemistry and biology like someone isn't taking you aside and saying look like i don't care how many pretty colored pens you used or how creative you were something like i'm not here to gas you up kid you [ __ ] up like you're falling way short of the minimum standards you're not showing confidence yeah just look i'm sorry but if you were a tall scary looking black dude and again people i mean then and now people responded to me primarily as a tall scary looking dude people were scared of me in toronto not that i'm that scary it's that they're that shelter seriously people were afraid of uh growing up in toronto which is [ __ ] up but anyway um people found me really imposing and intimidating but you know if i if i'd done some [ __ ] like that the professor is going to say look like this is what like this is the kind of confidence i'm supposed to be training you to have yeah and if you're not developing that or if you're not moving up that's like do you want me to fail you like do you want to do the assignment again like what do you want me to do you've put me in a position as a professor like this what you know so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay you know uh yeah i mean these are these are these are the questions yeah anyway look i do have other i do have other examples but you know part of part of the significance of the standard i'm saying is my own girlfriend's response to it when i challenged her that way that was not the only challenge she had a lot of expectations about about society and politics and [ __ ] like she expected to walk into a room and be treated like a princess everywhere she went and especially at that age and looking the way she did i'm sorry she was a very attractive woman that's why i put up with her i'm sure she's a terrible girlfriend terrible relationship i regret it this is really the wrong i really i really regret it but anyway you know she but she was a very good looking uh young woman and it's like look what if you walk like whether we're talking about like city hall or talking to a stranger on the street or talking into a business like what if you were a tall black male yeah and you should hold yourself to that standard like you should be conducting yourself in a way where you would be respected if you were a tall black male like i'm earning my professor's respect or i'm i'm i'm pushing respect at city hall i'm whatever it is i'm doing you know i'm not leaning on this privilege and she had been she'd been totally unaware of it she'd been really sleepwalking through your life that way uh not thinking about the sense of which that shape right okay so yeah i'm not not trying to not picture not trying to be nitpicky i didn't know your ex-girlfriend of course yeah you know i'm going based off of your stories about her so but um she does not have her own youtube channel but yeah i i you know i i hazard i i just i want to i'm not trying to like protect her or something but like when you say that she was uh she was expecting everybody to treat her like a princess or something right like i don't even think a lot of people have that level of awareness agreed agreed it's not that they have the expectation it's just that's what they've experienced in their life and they haven't had someone saying no you should have the same expectations yeah you should have the same behavior or no one even saying step it up try harder right so um yes i do think that this is an issue and uh i don't know if this is something that is more of a problem for women or if it's more of a problem like it okay what i want to say is uh this wanting to uh this ideal of perfection right i don't know if if this is always the case with men and women but i really do feel like men are more okay with their being like errors and what they're being like straight up like like just making mistakes and learning from them i feel like men are like i don't know if it's their experience right from like having the process of older it's not biology no i know but like having older men like critique them older than saying like no you need to do better or something like saying you say women don't have that and therefore like they don't get used to that process of making mistakes and learning from those mistakes and like and and building up themselves that way 40 people in the audience guys take a second to hit thumbs up more people will join the live stream while it's going give you a thumbs up and then afterwards when this is a video more people will see the video so if you think this is a worthwhile discussion take a second hit thumbs up if you change your mind later you can undo the thumbs up and hit thumbs down but you know um yeah that'd be great um because yeah it's it's more interesting when you get more people in the audience and so on so yeah um yeah i was just going to say you you know this is something that i've had to get used to um and and actually be okay with making mistakes and accepting when when i'm i don't know certain things or um accepting that like actually reflecting on what i've been doing like there have been times in our relationship when you've been like you know yeah like you haven't been doing this or that like what's going on like you know step it up like you are not realizing that this is that this is happening you're not you're not holding yourself to any kind of standard at all yeah high or low you're not real think about right yeah yeah and um yeah well look i've broken down crying hundreds of times in this relationship because of that sure that exact situation i'm just like why are you calling me out on this like why can't you just give me a break or something but i know like that but it's not just you broke down crying in response to problems with baking school oh yeah you were basically breaking you know you've yeah you've you've had these stereotypical feminine trait of breaking down crying absolutely you know um yes in response to the difference but look i i don't believe this is a biological difference in men and women i think it's a issue of culture or an experience expectation stuff and one of the most telling demonstrations of this is to look at how effeminate gay men are treated so you can be in all kinds of situations including like when i was involved in the theater i've i've never been involved in the fashion industry but i think within university class classrooms if there is a guy but he really actively cultivates that persona he's a gay man and he talks in an effeminate way because some gay men are butch you know some don't have that person but effeminate gay men there's a similar thing that goes on where nobody's holding the standard nobody's taking them seriously and that can include even when they're doing things that are really wrong or abusive or something they're crossing a line it's like oh nobody takes it seriously why because he's an effeminate man and you're not you know you're not holding the account the way you would a straight man and maybe just fundamentally you don't perceive him as a threat the way he was dreaming you don't perceive what he's doing as consequential the same way so i'm just saying a lot of the same trivialization and i feel denigration and holding people low standards that happens with effeminate with you know out effeminate gay men also yeah i think you can see that in the workplace and you can see that in university and they and again breaking down weeping and everything else so i think that gives you an interesting mirror interesting point of comparison to sometimes ask how would this be different uh for an effeminate gay man and often it's shockingly the same with the kind of low expectations okay i'm going to try to switch topics here although i i says that sounds horrific i'm black and was always told to work harder than my peers because people in england wouldn't take me seriously or something uh my teachers were lovely though um so look i think you know for women generally those days are gone uh really margaret thatcher's generation was the generation where women were told if you want to be taken seriously you have to be harder than a man you have to be harder working but i do also just mean harder if to be tougher than a fan you know you have to really earn it you have to earn it more than any man there was a certain generation that went through that and you know i think we have to be honest too about the fact that the vast majority of women they can't really be encouraged to work hard whether academically or intellectual otherwise with the expectation that there is any good employment or reward coming for that effort like most of these things if you do it you have to be motivated just by wanting to cultivate your own mind or cultivate your own characters the vast majority of both men and women are not going to do a job any better than being a waitress you know waiter or waitress or what have you the vast majority of us go on to jobs to use jordan peterson's idiom to we go on to do jobs not careers you know um but you know do you want to be a waitress who's just a waitress or do you want to be a waitress who's you know really taken seriously as an intellectual in some field you know who's really you know i've you know really really developed herself you know this or that way now there are a lot of guys who take this seriously i mean i know it's like the buddha jokes whether it's in an army unit or working on an oil rig there's some you know there's some guy who's got his you know his books with him and stuff there's some guy who's saying he wants to be a screenwriter in hollywood or he has some dream or he's reading philosophy he's reading friedrich nietzsche or schopenhauer or something you know like you meet guys who have intellectual potent pretensions and aspirations and ambitions above and beyond the jobs they've got but ever so this is just a response to um this comment women who take the the attitude that they have to work harder because they're women or specifically they're black women like you won't be taken seriously unless you work 10 times harder i've got it so i feel that's really the margaret thatcher generation and that was a time when most women who went to education they only have like two paths open them it's like oh do you want to become a schoolteacher you want to become a nurse yeah and there were no other no other career paths open them for my generation women were told all career paths are open to you everything's open to you yes and everything is easy and you're equal without having to earn it you know what i mean you're you're equal i'm saying yes we are we are a slightly different generation but from my experience we have a 14-year age gap yeah so when i was in school definitely it was any career path would be open to women it doesn't matter and there was a lot of encouragement for women to be independent and you know within my own family like that i should focus on my career that i should figure out a way for my myself to be financially independent you know um so you know i i don't i don't know from from my experience you know i admit like i i might have some bias in this way given my just i don't know my background my race my gender and stuff you know that like i didn't feel that because i was a woman that i wouldn't be taken seriously right i felt like it was the same like if i was to become an engineer that that would i would be on this right but you see there's there's there's a there's a way to take positive motivation out of that which is like okay i've gotta try harder i better work and yeah you know i mean i i do think my generation was already after that was over and when just i don't think anyone was trying i grew up with uh it's the kurt cobain generation it's the nirvana general oh generally the whole culture was into nobody working hard nobody having any aspirations nobody giving 110 you know what i mean so yeah but including women so so that that influenced men too but yeah yeah yeah the era of try harder and prove your worth that was that was out of style okay i have a great thing that just came to mind so i was thinking of changing the topic but speaking of margaret thatcher this is just in relation to this topic of female politicians of being taken seriously just the other day we were watching the news do you remember this there was a news story from a well-known politician who was running for president at one point do you remember her she has been involved with conflicts because of her nationality her race her race so uh elizabeth warren oh yeah she i thought you're going to talk about camel harris no elizabeth warren was being interviewed and she was being interviewed about her newest children's story that she had put up oh oh the bigotry of low expectations you're right i think it's a real that oh the the expectations applied to elizabeth warren that is a great example that as opposed to how tough they would be interviewing a man or interviewing a black man or something who had a similar record whoa you're right just the type of the kind of conversation that she was having about her book uh it was all good for you yes yes yes yes just that would not be the kind of i i want to find specific examples but just talking about like uh how much she loved meeting people's dogs when she was on the campaign trail and like this kind of yes really yeah yeah like what is this conversation about um yeah there's a sort of there's a sort of mutual trivialization going on like for the interviewer like i'm trivializing you you're trivializing me we're trivializing this political context yes and like there's no sense of like dude you just lived through 20 years of failure in afghanistan it's on you what the [ __ ] dude you just lived through 20 years of us not solving the problem with global warming and so you're like no let alone dude you lied about your ethnicity and portrayed yourself as an indigenous american for decades and like yeah yeah which is really really messed up no no no sense of confrontation or keeping a nun yeah yeah yeah this is you know anyway you made up complete [ __ ] against bernie sanders you know that was really where she derailed her campaign you know you went up yeah no so yeah yeah i do think it really is the case now that women can get in politics and they can be taken seriously if they behave in a serious way and they actually try to make changes in the world and i'm glad that i'm living like of all the times to be born in the history of human civilization like now is the best time in terms of women actually being able to have representation in government and run for office you know it's a wonderful thing and i i i do despise that i do despise that like female politicians like okay it is true that uh the president can be filmed reading a children's story to uh an audience of school children or something but like the conversation is never about it's never this this ah anyway uh yeah yeah so yeah this is kind of leading to a topic that i want to say let's be clear so in english we say talking down to someone but it's not really talking down to women it's assuming that you don't have to challenge them but you don't have to raise a standard that there's nothing for them to live up to you know it's different the low expectations thing is different from talking down to someone yeah that's that's all i'd say yeah but that's profound and it goes on for women it starts in childhood yeah you know i mean oh good for you and they are just not being talked to now look you know um just just keeping it real you know so look i've known different girls who've been through this from different different perspectives but you know i've known girls who were okay let's start with the male example and also the females there are boys who say they want to be a basketball player and people say to them straight up you are never going to be a basketball player you're five foot two you know and whatever if they say they want to play football right away they're told well you're not big enough to be a linebacker but you can be a tight end or something like they're told what position they can play they want to play baseball it's like well look you don't have what it takes to play this position but you can be shortstop like you know just their physical characteristics you know whether or not they're big enough tall enough strong enough and and then getting into their reflexes what they can and can't do and what i see across the board with women are there exceptions hey there are four billion exceptions in this world you know sure there are exceptions you know what i see with women is women being told again and again you can do anything you want to do you're wonderful even to the point of absurdity of telling women they can do sports they can't do that telling women that they can be a supermodel when they they're just not tall enough they can't be a runway model they're not the right size and shape you know what i mean really like you see that with the the beauty discourse yes that is one other topic that i thought of talking about just this this reality that uh men get comfortable with at a young or maybe they're maybe they still have issues with it but like men have to get comfortable at a young age with being shorter than other men yes with having a build that will never look like other men like right but look sorry but i just want because i was setting up just a transition to the intellectual side of it yeah i remember reading a [ __ ] master's degree thesis if it wasn't a master's view thesis it was a phd thesis written by a woman a female student at university of toronto and i was just saying to my colleagues like if you or i had written this like don't you think we would have been laughed out of the room and like quite possibly we wouldn't have been given directions to rewrite it to start again because normally you don't just fail with graduate state within their patients don't you think we'd be giving this back say look you've got to go back to the drawing board you've got every word where like you you know but my point is i think this does carry on that's that's what i've seen including at cambridge and oxford including at elite universities university of toronto is supposed to be elite where people are just this good for you you tried your best attitude and not saying like no like either you understood what this said in sanskrit or you didn't either you did the work or you didn't either this is at a standard of excellence where it's real scholarship or it's not you know and again that obviously that that applies to women in politics uh like your example elizabeth warren and so on and so forth you know is anyone holding elizabeth warren to the same standards they would hold bernie sanders too frankly you know yeah anyone else on the on the talk yeah yeah sorry take away everyone but yeah i'm just i'm just saying the physical thing matters the physical thing but i am just talking about it as prefiguring and being easier to see example of what goes on intellectually yes so okay maybe the physical thing is the topic that we can get to later on but it is something that i was thinking now yeah okay well just that what i was saying earlier is that i do feel like at a younger age maybe it's because of this team sports thing that that men get comfortable with the fact that oh well maybe i will never succeed in basketball because i'm i'm just not tall enough you know to actually compete on the basketball court you have to be a certain height whereas women are i think deeply uncomfortable with their bodies and we hear this all the time in the mainstream media uh because of these differences and build and the differences and uh where you know just things like where things deposit in your body like just just the shape of your body and things like yes i i do think that uh this this is a difference between uh men and women and and what they have to uh accept about themselves um okay yes so there's something here that overlaps with you're saying okay so junebug says yeah men will say anything to sleep with a woman uh look so you know yeah women do live with flattery they do live with seduction but i think you're missing the point junebug because there's a question about um what men will say just to avoid dealing with [ __ ] from women what women will say just to avoid dealing with [ __ ] women in the workplace in the school do you see what i'm saying like so coming back to even the examples we already used before so i have this school teacher and there's this very beautiful very stupid girl who's just done this presentation where she is unaware that muhammad ali the boxer in the 20th century is not the same person as muhammad the prophet a thousand years ago like what do you want to do do you want this girl like i think on someone this is a woman it's a female teacher it's a female teacher that class like a part of what she's doing is just i don't want this girl to break down crying i just don't want to deal with it like i just don't want to deal with it you know what i mean so again like the team sport situation yeah you know like dudes may be [ __ ] up by it too like being told look uh you know you're never gonna be a heavyweight look at the size of your fist if you're gonna do boxing you're gonna be a featherweight like you're just never gonna be big enough sorry people use fist measurements for that as a as a yardstick you know what i mean whatever it is you tell the guy look you can never your hand your hand isn't big enough to ever be in the nba i don't remember that you don't have what it takes to do this sport or whatever you know and we do we do say to men you don't have what it takes intellectually to do this which could be terrible it could be a horrible thing to say to somebody yeah but there's a lot of kind of man-up stuff that goes on with that like look and there's a lot and there's a lot of saying the boy too hey prove me wrong oh you think you can do it okay go [ __ ] don't you show me why don't you show me you can take a baseball and throw it 99 miles an hour or why don't you show me you can take this book and teach yourself sanskrit like okay oh you want to prove me wrong because i'm saying you can't do it like there's more of that combative challenging thing my point is i don't think this is flattering women because people want to seduce them or sleep with them it's different from flattery it's just people who are like i'm going to conserve my energy i don't want to deal with this i don't want this girl to break down crying and that that kind of thing yeah i think that's a lot okay i think that's a lot of what's going on on the surface going in okay sure um sorry i did think of saying something just in relation to what you were talking about there you go i do feel like men at least have more of this influence of locker room like that that a coach that a coach will push them to do push-ups you know like that women um don't really have that same uh it is statistically it is statistically the case that women after a certain age will stop team sports in high school so like whereas uh it generally the boys will continue doing sports in high school uh the number of women the number of girls who continue doing sports in high school it decreases um and so i think uh girls don't have as much exposure to this this kind of locker room discussion of like you know prepping before a game or something you know um right i'm not saying that that's like the most um that's the best for building up your confidence or that's the best for building up your ability to uh push yourself and like try it fail and try again and stuff but like there there at least is that kind of element to the experience of being a boy in america and just just taking responsibility for your own [ __ ] i mean outside of sports whether that's taking responsibility for planning a trip or taking responsibility for violence in the streets yeah or what have you so i'm sorry probably five years ago or something i told the san antonio but once i was in thailand with my girlfriend as a white canadian girlfriend this is not an asian woman or something and there was this particular alleyway in bangkok thailand at that time i just mentioned how dangerous bangkok is changes from third time to next but this particular alley in the middle of it there was a restaurant and they literally had all times like two guys with machine guns in the front entrance it's like the back end runs to this restaurant the alleyway enters the desert at all times you know as this is a dark dangerous looking alleyway and i just know that i remember i said to my girlfriend in this context she was like oh no we can go up this alleyway and get a thing it's it's pitch black it's night and i remember saying to her do you think that these guys have machine guns for no reason like the guys at that restaurant back there like do you think this is not a dangerous alleyway in bangkok like and i said it to her if we get mugged if we get jumped now who's going to have to deal with it i'm going to have to deal with it i'm going to be the one fighting not you you know this particular vote it's not true of all girlfriends maybe some of you guys are watching this and you have a girlfriend who's actually going to throw down who's actually going to throw fists in in that alleyway situation so look i'm going to have to deal with it all right and then the reality is i'm going to have to console you and make you feel better afterwards right like even though i'm gonna be physically beaten to [ __ ] and we will have both lost our wallets or whatever i'm gonna have to make you feel better even though it's gonna be your fault like why are you making me good really [ __ ] up and all this [ __ ] it's just like she's never the [ __ ] oh no i'd be fine like you know and by the way i've been through a situation the third where i had to stand up for her physically where i had to you know none of them actually got to to fist before i where i had to go after somebody at night uh in an alley where you know there was there was a physical threat of violence or whatever and as a man it's something normal it's something you have to prepare for and i was thinking of this because you know i'm not involved with team sports i never have been involved with team sports i've said this all the time why do i do 200 push-ups a day on my knuckles it's so i can get thrown down a staircase you know i mean it's so i can deal with the the constant threat of physical violence that you deal with as a man including even walking on the streets here you know you do vancouver is worse i mean i felt it more in vancouver whatever you know different situations are worse but there are just so many drug addicts on the street here and [ __ ] and that's it i'm not training for any sport but you know i'm pointing out again that particular girlfriend maybe she was a particularly bad example but i think she's a pretty normal example it's like well she's living her life like there were no consequences for this [ __ ] and men are living their lives in a way like look bro it's on you like all of this is on you and and by the way i think that there's going to be because i really try to involve my girlfriends and wives sorry when i'm married in making the decisions and making the preparations but that can involve also like hey who's buying the airplane tickets like any if you make the wrong choice you know so many women that go through their whole [ __ ] life and they think their only role is to whine like oh i don't like the hotel or whatever like you no seriously sir oh seriously and it's like no no i'm laughing i know because i know women from my past you know i just i i can remember a time early in this relationship but oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's like and you've got to say the word wait but you got to say to the woman look if you you could have booked the hotel you could have done the you could have chosen those you know like you could you could be taking a command i was laughing because i that was the influence that i had from my own mother and my own yeah every every woman that i knew yes that was right it's just assumed the man does the planning role in the command rule in the lead role and then the woman's rule is to whine and complain about it yeah it's like no no dude like you well and it sucks too like no like you can be in charge you can be in charge and i want you to be in charge like 50 of the time i'd love that love i did it 60 of the time you solve all my problems you booked the hotel you booked the airplane tickets you got it organized you make it now and you know you take responsibility for the consequences when things go right yeah i know it's way better when you do have involvement with that when it is partly i mean yes the responsibility is there but like when you are actually involved with planning for a trip then like you know from the other side like oh right this is how i was acting when like i was being entertained or like i was being taken somewhere uh i totally took it for granted and stuff so yeah i i do think that's that's that's a legit problem to talk about so one thing that i wanted to say well i would say i think just to close it up i think you can see given all those reflections i think really you know team sports and athletics they fit into their their little subcategory within a much broader problem yeah with the corrosive influence of gender roles that you just said it's no i don't think team sports are like the primary paradigm that creates these other phenomena i think we've talked about a much broader phenomenon here and then team team sports are just one yeah um right so okay one thing that i wanted to discuss branching off of the elizabeth warren interview uh that i do think that this is a time when women can become just as politically active as men and should be i mean that's it's our responsibility and it's half of the population that can that can make a huge difference um and uh so one thing that i wanted to talk about in this is i remember in family conversations like at family gatherings typically when i was younger it was the old men that were talking about politics that were talking about world events that were talking about uh downtown detroit like the issues and the collapse of the car industry the the automobile industry in detroit uh and i remember when i was younger and women would take you aside and say let's have girl talk oh my gosh how did you know have i talked to you about this i don't know i remember that happened once in front of me we were with a muslim family we were talking to you you remember that muslim all the guys are talking about politics she was just looking at your face you're really into it yeah she likes she likes that's why she likes being with me she likes talking about politics and history and this kind of stuff really real stuff and this woman she's a muslim woman wearing the head scarf he explodes like oh let's have girls oh i hate it when they talk about i hate it when the boys are talking about serious boy things let's do whoa okay you remember that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i think we talked about that time you were like i hate that that's what happened within my own family was people you know yeah so i wanted to understand what they were talking about because to me it was like getting at all these really important issues wouldn't it sound different like hey you know you and i are [ __ ] let's have [ __ ] talk let's just you know let me just take let's have some let's just [ __ ] time okay let's just lower our intellectual standards all right that is really how i feel about it i i agree with you they're all good at all the way real there are things that women have to deal with that men don't and i do appreciate i would appreciate having a woman to talk about like certain things like menstrual cycles and you know all this that i didn't have that influence when i was a kid like no no woman talk to me about understanding my menstrual cycle understanding fertility and like you know pregnancy and all this stuff like i just didn't get that input so yes that's the kind of like woman talk or girl talk that i would actually like be interested in talking about other women with um but the the general pattern of that was okay so the men are talking about uh race you know they're talking about uh black people in detroit and this this issue between uh white people and black people like what how what is what are the origins of this like historically what's the present situation and what are we gonna do about in the future like how can we how can we solve this issue like yes that mattered to me a great deal when i was growing up i i wanted to know why and i wanted to understand like when we turned on the tv news why is it that the racism of your time about so much yeah yeah i know that was that was a huge part of growing up in detroit obama time too right now yes yes right oh yeah oh yeah i got to hear my racist grandfather talking about the you know the the black house yeah that was what he said because no longer the white house yeah so um legit you know um that really mattered to me and i i was quite angry about it i was quite um passionate about this because you know my education in school was was anti-racist and was uh you know in favor of equality for everybody and i got to see like just the older generation but your point is here women were not dealing with it women were not even present in the discussion women were trivialized they were okay so if they were the contribution was just like so paltry compared to the contribution that men were making to the conversation yeah and um you know this this really mattered to me and i felt like i just wasn't getting the right inputs with like seeing women who who were able to talk about these issues and who had even read a book about this issue yeah the men in my family didn't read books at all like they didn't talk about uh they didn't they didn't read about these things they didn't study them they just were talking out of their ass basically but at least they were talking about they listened to talk radio i think i think that's the i think while driving their trucks they were listening to that absolutely true yeah so yes uh that was my experience when i was growing up and i i uh you know really wanted to understand and but uh at a certain stage i just thought like well um you know it's not not about not taking seriously it's just that i don't know what to say and i can't speak for myself and yeah this kind of helplessness and if i do speak you know i sound ignorant i sound stupid yeah and i'm not i'm not which which is gonna happen yeah like let's just be clear like in case you guys think i was born wise i wasn't you know like you're wrong and you're wrong and you're wrong and then you look back and learn from your mistakes and then you start being right like i'm just saying for me as a teenager or in my 20s i was wrong about a lot of things i said a lot of things that today i would you know regret or today i would disagree with or something that is also part of growing up is that you know so it's not uh you know the the path mentioned men do you know snub each other and denigrate each other and prove each other wrong you know again you don't learn by making mistakes you learned by having your mistakes pointed out to you oh yeah i heard men yelling at each other frequently about like you know when they were talking about these issues and afterwards they would always you know it's not like they were angry at each other afterwards like and i remember a couple of times my father would would talk to me afterwards and just say like you know uh it's all in good fun or something like that yes we're all just talking but like uh no i i i didn't get that from women's discussions women's discussions like focused around like okay so what's little johnny doing like let's talk about his so there was there was one big family dinner i went to with you and your extended family and it played out exactly that way i was part of this big rambunctious confrontational political discussion that covered several you know topics and i would not say i was the center of attention but i was one of the most you know charismatic voices there were three three or four guys all kind of contending with each other and everyone else is the women were watching silently no woman spoke during that conversation and then when women did speak because i did stand around with the women when they were talking and much much more uh solemn voices uh they were talking there was a girl who had a new boyfriend and the boyfriend already had a kid from a former yeah yeah yeah so but yeah of course but the point is to be blunt women were talking about dick yeah to be blunt i guess that's true in a word they were talking about their own sex lives and the sex lives of the younger women were there what was going that was what we were talking about and then to some extent who's getting married yeah having a baby to some extent trivial things like new cars or things too yeah that was it was really our job yeah and you know the men's conversation which again entertained people to some extent was really yeah right so look you know i think that we've done a good job here of adam breeding the culture on on the whole yeah you know the other big thing that's changed is you know now women play video games just like men okay yeah women play video games women become psychiatric uh drug addicts women are dealing with all these other distractions it's equality in all these other ways today right yeah yeah well no equal access to placing no but right but for women it's even worse because there are lower standards of lifetime i think if women get into playstation it doesn't matter what video games you know whatever kind of video games nobody's going to say to them bruh man up like bro you got like you know what i mean like with men there might not be that many people but no i mean like i think it's this whole bigotry of low expectations thing right oh good for you oh you're taking some time oh good you do live streaming video games oh like where just the expectation is there the expectation is there is nothing more serious you could be doing or should be doing you know with your time and with men yeah people do i shouldn't i read the biography of a guy who committed suicide that's why they wrote his biography or the power of this guy who killed himself and uh he went from being addicted to those video games like call of duty to actually join the army and that was part of his process of people saying to him look you're wasting your life playing this video game if this is what you like why don't you actually get out and start doing some arms training and stuff and he did and then he commits suicide this is a long story yeah that that's why they're possible but i'm just saying there are people who will say to a man look you ought to take yourself more seriously you ought to take life more seriously actions have consequences and so i'm saying yeah i'm agreeing with you women have all the same temptations and distractions but then they're the lower expectations you know okay i i think that is true um look i i don't know how much it's it's different from the different genders though with this situation because of course you're more likely to have friends if you are a young man who plays video games because many other young men play video games and they want friends who also play video games but women women it's even more no because they have men trying to sleep with them yeah like through the no no no no no no everybody wants to be their friend they're a female voice on the voice chat no no no no and there are men sending the money and trying to buy their underwear and all this no we're going but no i think you're wrong there the amount of attention female gamers get it's actually live streaming so i was gonna say here too you know um frida says uh she doesn't know many women who play video games this includes iphone ipad like it's not just console gaming and yeah the sims right that's right funny i've read the sims for so many hours as a child it is so embarrassing anyway yeah that's one of those we never talk about never comes up yes and uh but my point is this goes beyond console gaming into all kinds of other gaming thumbs up if you've been uh if you've been a former addict of the sims give the video a thumbs up guys more people will join the conversation more people see it once it's once it's a video just helps us reach an audience who might be interested in some of the stuff but anyway there are real statistics on this guys it's true that women do not play the same video games as men to generalize when you're looking at the population of millions of people around the world but yeah uh games like animal crossing they have a pretty precise statistical knowledge of for how many hours women are logged in for how many hours they're playing for games like candy crush on mobile phones for like so many different games there are games that women actually prefer that they play more that they play for more hours than that yeah and you know as i recall even the gambling games even uh uh you know uh even you know card games like poker and so on you know that's uh that that stuff they do there is actually a mass audience okay yeah i i believe you on that um yeah so i am glad that when i was in when i was in college i think there's there there was the the beginnings of this streaming culture of women playing video games however i didn't play games like that so i wasn't exposed to that um i did play video games in college and i deeply regret it uh and if i could say you know relating to the title of this this video quitting video games and being an intellectual as a woman like yeah i do regret that i will never get a chance to be 19 years old again and at this great university where right i think i think it's one of one of the best universities that i could have attended at that at that age and at that stage in my life like i had the opportunity to do independent research on my own actually get serious about my life and take myself seriously and i didn't and you could have learned latin and you could have learned greek and you could have learned economics and you learned nothing you learned how to play the sims yeah what i would want to say to you and mario galaxy she played mario galaxy one hundred percent during universities and mario galaxy too go on yeah that's true so yeah what i would want to say to young women is like there will be people who will try to write you off or just say like stop taking yourself so seriously like let's just let's just relax and have fun like no you should take yourself seriously and if you aren't going to take yourself seriously now why would it be easier when you're 25 when you're 30 years old to then become a more intellectual person to to care more and to read more books um this doesn't get easier as as you get older like it's something that you should start building when you're that age rather than playing dude and let me just say again you know being an intellectual has nothing to do with how you earn your money you can be a stripper and be an intellectual well it's not easy but you know you can be a waitress and be an intellectual you can be an army officer and be an intellectual like it really doesn't have to do with how you earn your money and for the vast majority of people globally and within the united states of america there is no way to earn your living using your brain you know just give you you could work at a garage repairing cars you repair cars for a living but you're also like you know just say that's that's also really underrated and it's certainly for women it's even more underrated there's no sense you know there's no sense of be a man there's no sense of man up there's no sense of you know yeah yeah yeah um so yeah oliver says people will lower their expectations for young men though for cooking extremely badly for example gender roles are real so this is something i was thinking about earlier this week because uh you remember at one point in time we were training to become bakers we were indeed yeah and uh you pointed out to me you reminded me which is it's great to have somebody it's great to be in a relationship with somebody who who holds you accountable like reminds you of things that you've done because uh yeah it's easy to just let yourself off the hook and having somebody who holds you to higher standards uh he reminded me that at that time uh just the difficulty of being encouraging to me to to read to uh build myself up intellectually and what i was doing at the time was frittering my time away uh baking bread uh making homemade soy milk like trying to be a zero waste homemaker type of person and i i do think that a lot of the exposure to older women uh on the internet at the time was was influencing me that like there are these kind of paradigms or paragons of femininity that i see online like women who have children who manage to cook whole food plant-based diet for all their children they manage to grow their own food and live this kind of lifestyle this zero waste lifestyle this uh vacationing in hawaii lifestyle you know um that definitely had an influence on me and i i really thought that i was building myself into this person that you know a real woman like being a real woman you have to have all these things down where where you're able to be responsible for taking care of children while maintaining a beautiful physique while maintaining uh your kitchen and all these and all these different things that um you know at some points i've i have felt resentful about that that like men don't have that same kind of expectation put on them that same kind of expectation for their role so yeah um i would be curious to hear like what you think about that what do you think about um the the kind of on social media what women are exposed to for so long i disagree i think the point you're making i disagree with oliver's point entirely okay in our culture still to this day when you say chef they think ma'am being serious about cuisine and i'm sorry i can i can even say this about you and i can say this about other women who are involved in that college program there was this attitude including the guy who was the ceo of the college the guy who was the head it's like okay if you're a man you're serious about being a chef you're serious about being a baker if you're a career baker the the gender role is that you're a man and you're quite a domineering uh details oriented man you're a man who's you know really you know like being an architect or something you're a man with a steel trap mind and you're expected to be a bit of an [ __ ] that's the role of being the chef you're the head chef for this bakery you're in charge that's a male gender role right you're a baker you're a pastry chef yeah james is gemini right okay but like look and the point was the attitude and i mean i think even melissa was was kind of a uh you know victim of this to my understanding you know we just talked about it to say coming to this like as opposed to women like oh you know you're just learning to bake for fun you're just learning like you know this is part of the enjoyment of life that's part of the relaxation like you you even saw that that's really true yeah experience yes we want to learn how to make like right on a massive scale we want to talk about industrial scale how to turn a profit how to right how to do this on time on a schedule and it's like oh no no just you know this is the you know this is your grandma with your grandkids going we don't want to make one pie we don't want to make one tart we want to make 100 vegan tarts this is not about grandma doing something nice on the weekend or something so i'm sorry but my point is to say a direct response to to oliver no even in cuisine standards are lower for women even in cuisine even in that professional setting of being a chef being a baker what i saw was instead the gender roles were like men are the guys who take it stairs and women can't even be expected to lift a 10 pound sack of flour can't be expected to know the differences between the different kinds of weeds that's right yeah women can't be expected to have this steel trap mind approach so even there i saw it so sorry the bigotry of low expectation thing i just want to say i've seen that everywhere including cuisine including baking including cooking as a professional or getting involved with that at the at the college level okay so you may you made a difference rescue point do you remember what it was so i was curious what you had to say about the kind of male like the differences between um female role models like yes there is this idea that like we should look up to hillary clinton as a female role model yeah but yeah if you are thinking of just like social media if you're thinking of youtube the kind of the kind of person that's okay so i'm gonna tell you i'm gonna tell you what it's it's really brief but it's really deep okay the difference is today women have a nearly infinite variety of choices because of the internet because of social media and as a result things have gotten worse now what do i mean so back in the 1950s and 1960s in canada there was like one female role model on cbc television and she was you can imagine she was an intelligent well put together woman who did the kind of news commentary show and did interviews okay and i know it's sick to say but of course it was an incredibly wholesome influence on the women of canada it was like look this is the kind of adult you can be you know what i mean and that's it you didn't have a choice there were maybe four tv stations and if you change to the bbc if you watch british television because in canada at that time there was a lot of you know cultural connections to their cultural connections to england you had a similarly kind of phony presentation of a highly intellectual professional woman on camera and of course it's fake she's reading a script and this isn't who she really is or something i mean you had a very small number of female role models that were chosen for you you know 1950s or 1960s that way you know today instead what you have is the relative infinity of youtube the relative infinity of facebook the internet generally yeah and people are allowed to seek out and select the role models they prefer for example on instagram and there you see instead this snowballing effect where women who are vain justify their vanity by picking role models who are vain women who want to be for example women who want to be a marijuana smoking hippie with dreadlocks who dabbles in hindu mysticism they're going to select women on youtube on instagram oh i love her they're picking role models they're picking examples for emulation that are exaggerating their own fundamentally self-destructive self-indulgent and stupid tendencies okay so that is what i see on on a massive scale you know now it's very different it's very difficult to challenge a woman by saying hey why don't you go on instagram and you only select accounts of women who are the type of person you want to be right even with books you and i were joking we had one book written by a female we have a huge bookshelf i could wheel it over we've seen it in the background recently melissa made a video we have a lot of books now in this right it's huge by my standards most of my life i've been poor and moved from one apartment next and never owned books this is the most these are the most books i've owned in one apartment one time in my life but we have a lot of books in this department now by my standards because i never had the luxury of living one place and building a book collection but you know we had like one book by a female author and i joked with melissa i said hey what if we organize our library on two shelves we have all the books by male authors on one shelf and all the books by female authors like do we even have two books by a female and the one book by a female author the point is like if as a woman you challenge yourself to look up to intellectual role models on instagram what have you got right nothing and it's very hard to i'm not saying there's nobody but like should you oh why don't you go follow jacqueline glenn i mean what remember i remember where jaclyn glenn was five years ago eight years ago there probably were some young women the oh jacqueline glenn she's a strong educated woman she's studying to be a medical doctor she's in med school she's an atheist she talks about the theory of evolution okay we'll look at her today today she has fake tits she sells sign photographs of herself in a bikini she advertises dildos she does youtube videos look at the camera talking about the dildo gave her an orgasm that's announced that's really going to be a family youtuber because she just had a baby who the [ __ ] knows yeah right you know you know what whatever degeneracy she goes on to next but you know my point is like if you were someone looking for a female intellectual idol on instagram on youtube but even at the library even taking books off the shelf at the library even published authors and women with phds right it's really slim it's really glam grim but the point is the woman doing the selecting the woman looking on instagram the woman the person who's in the audience right what would motivate them to do that as opposed to just hey i'm gonna look for youtubers that make me feel bad about my own bad habits that reinforce my vices like i'm vain i'm gonna look for a youtube channel that makes me feel better about my vanity you know whatever you're a [ __ ] so you subscribe to sex positive channels that are taking back the word [ __ ] and encouraging you to go out and sleep with a hundred guys a year that exists you know there were men who do this also by the way it's just that's not the topic of this video really and i have made videos i have made a lot of videos criticizing men's sexuality and the way men justify i really have but anyway no but there are women who do that on the opposite extreme there are women who are christian conservatives who only want everyone to have sex with one guy and want to be part of this christian marriage and they seek out those youtube channels but like the point is what you see in that self-affirming cycle uh it it makes the question as you posed it almost irrelevant that's how that's how role models die okay that people get to choose their role you take a [ __ ] look at the choices you might recall how i introduced that was that you had reminded me that i was frittering my time away at that time uh by making homemade soy milk and trying to do more base my life around more zero waste habits and so on so yes i think that's a good observation that now that we have this freedom we can choose to basically reinforce our own beliefs by whom we follow uh yes i i do think at that time i was it's not like i i look up looked up to anybody as an idol but i did probably i probably was seeking out that content rather than looking for sure i wasn't looking for the social media presence of female authors or you know i wasn't really paying attention much to female politicians at that time so yeah i do think that's that's true but um just kind of the in your face quality of a lot of those those youtube channels where it's just like this is motherhood or like this is what it means to be a real woman or something like even if they don't directly say that it's like oh you have to know how to you know deal with cloth diapers you have to you know like know all this stuff like in advance or whatever like like this is the kind of thing that in the vegan movement at least like that's that's kind of how i felt like yeah you should be fair that you also were drawn to a lot of anti-natalist content that was absolutely yeah yeah right now yeah i know what i'm just saying that's another example where you had a tendency and you were looking for something true absolutely yeah so anyway um but yeah the point is here also video game addicts can just seek out youtube channels that reinforce their life as a video game addict and makes that seem normal yes whatever it is you're into you get into self-justification um whether people are thought of as role models or not yes okay so getting onto this idea of like female authorship versus male authorship and um you know okay one thing is is of course somebody who is a female author somebody who has a phd somebody who is spending their time researching they probably are not going to make a youtube channel talking about their research i mean it might exist like you know it's very very looked into it very much um but um yes i do think that this is still a problem at least with what we've been reading lately that most of the topics that i've been interested in many of the the most important books are written by men still have been written by men and this is something that could be could be changed like this is the generation where like women should be taking themselves seriously and if it's not going to be you then who is it going to be um and when i was younger when i was in college like i just didn't think of myself that way i didn't think that i was i i could have that kind of authorship that kind of authority so so look though i mean this is really bring it back to the very fundamental topic this video is about i have done a lot of research lately that related to books i was trying to buy from ancient greece and ancient rome so this was you know is this translation better than that translation but you know i'm on amazon buying some of these books and and some of them deciding not to buy um you know you can get this stuff on the internet for free if you want if you're okay with a certain type of text reading a certain different format but i was looking up youtube videos about these particular greek and roman authors and sometimes there's nothing sometimes there's never been a single youtube video about that author about that book about that topic which is interesting to see but you know when there were videos made by women the intellectual standard they were holding themselves to was so much lower so there's a video about livy so this is l-i-v-y uh ancient roman historian and there was a woman she'd done two different videos talking about a particular it was just the penguin edition some mainstream edition of of livy and you know her whole manner of speaking and the levels hi guys well i got this version of the book and let me tell you i mean like you know there's i'm i'm really talking about substance here not just style it's possible to say something really substantive in that sing-song style but no she talked like a bimbo she seemed like a bimbo she acted like a bimbo and i've got to tell you the the the content was at dumb bimbo level and just being real that particular woman i think she could do better but you know i don't know her you know if she tried if she had that concept you know what i mean and when i saw other people's videos there was one guy he was a kind of middle-aged not very attractive white guy who did a video on the same thing and he was instead looking at it in terms of the nitty-gritty of the different publishers and the different editions and stuff and the whole tone is different you know what i mean the standard he's and he might not even be aware of it he doesn't sit down in front of the camera and say to himself okay now i've got to say something really intelligent like you know i don't think he's working himself up or something or he's probably not watching the video afterwards and wondering does this live up to my standards like it's something you embody after a certain point where you live your whole life answering to a higher standard and yeah look um i'm sorry but aoc alexandria ocasio-cortez you know what i'm talking about uh if somebody's watching this video 10 years from now when the initials aoc have become meaningless right you know i'm gonna be the queen of america what the [ __ ] aoc is such a [ __ ] she's so stupid and she's not even trying and like you you know you wonder what couldn't you do better you know she has her little crying fits she feels so sad feels her if you know she's sitting there writing on twitter if you want to know why i broke down crying the other day in the middle of that vote on israel and palestine this is why this is the reason because i've been bullied all the time because of my position as your like dude dude man up dude hold yourself to a higher dude [ __ ] your tears [ __ ] your emotions masculinity what do you think we what do you think we elected you for are you supposed to be a leader or a follower or a [ __ ] self-pitying you know slobbering mess like what the [ __ ] is this you know selfie is sobbing a mess i should say um sobbing and slobbering are two different things yes but you know um you know in her whole little breakdown of how she thought she was going to die on january 6th it was full of us my point is like i don't think aoc is born so different from me i don't think this is a biological difference but there's this profoundly corrosive corrupting effect you know of of these lower expectations right and then these people that live their whole lives they've never thought about like well what am i really capable of what's the higher standard i could be aspiring to what should i be trying to live up to you know okay and yeah i think that i think yeah this might relate to something that you've said it wasn't in the last video that the last live stream about advice to young men and quitting video games um but it was a video that you recorded recently or a live stream you were talking about the role of duty and honor and sometimes you talk about bronze age values recently um yes i do think that this is um lacking today i think in both for both genders i don't think it's really that much different uh for men and women um so i've heard what you've had to say about bronze age values for men um about how men will will die for duty will die for honor um what does that mean for women what would you say that yeah it would mean for women and you could say for aoc in this example if she's a politician if if she's been elected what is her duty and what does it mean to be an honorable person okay okay so i'm giving you my 100 real answer okay when my father talked about communism so my father was a communist extremist he wasn't a moderate he was an extremist he's thinking about history he's thinking about what he would have done in different historical situations with the assumption that his life would be on the line he's thinking about getting killed risking his life he's thinking about killing other people he's thinking about living the rest of his life with blood on his hands from those events when my mother is talking about the same [ __ ] history because my mother was also a communist nutcase during my childhood during my teenage years when i was growing up right my mother is thinking like oh men would take care of that oh other people would fight and die and kill and be killed and that doesn't have to do with me she's thinking she gets to sit here on her throne knitting while other people fight and die on a really deep level there's a refusal to take responsibility or refuse to see oneself as equal and to see oneself as equally implicated you know like it's blood on your hands too like you're also part of the war effort you know one way or another like if you're a woman and you're a nurse in the war like i understand you're not pulling the trigger but you're there you're part you're a woman you're cooking food in a tent for the army like you know you can explore in the army in a million ways like you know i understand a very small number of women have a combat role but you know they're women who are helicopter today they're women to do all kinds of things but if you know go back 50 years there were very few roles for women in the military but still of really seeing yourself not as a passenger in politics not as a passenger in history but as being in the driver's seat you know i'm just saying this is a contrast with my father and my mother have i personally ever known any exception to the rule have i known any woman who reads about history thinks about history talks about history feels about history you know the way my father did the way i do the way most men who take these things seriously do no never and just give you a funny example this is this is a pretty funny harmless example um my ex-wife went to a phd conference some kind of academic conference or colloquium and i think everyone there had a phd in anthropology or they were a student in the process of getting their phd is a pretty elite kind of events these are all supposedly highlighted people maybe a few people were there from sociology some other department this is an illegal and so i'm sorry i'm probably garbling this story to some extent this is not super accurate it's a really it's a really short story and uh you know someone does a presentation that involves or mentions uh female circumcision widespread throughout the muslim world and there's a good-looking white woman in the audience then the presentation ends and it's question time so this is like phd level q a and she stands up and she said well i think we should fly over there and bomb those people and force them to stop doing wow and like this is low and a lot of these fields they're like majority female i think the majority of people this event are female and one is just presented or female and it's like well if they won't stop doing this like the army force and the whole way of talking about it like i'm just saying no i'm not a lot of men are stupid a lot like 90 percent okay most men are stupid this is not about difference intelligence it's very different if a man sits there and says look i feel that this issue is so serious that i would be willing to join the army i would be willing to put my life on the line for five years for 10 years and go out news and you know what i feel that if my own son were to go out and fight for this and kill people for this and maybe die for this or come back injured for this i think that would be worth fighting it's not just a difference in tone of voice right there's a difference between a fundamentally passive view of the world like well you know the boys should go and take care of this issue like you should go solve this for me you should go solve this problem i'm gonna sit here and pass judgment about what's right and what's wrong and then other people are gonna sell the problem like no and i'm sorry but for me in a more subtle way this came up again and again with the 2020 discussions about police reform oh right so like you know you had it was there were a lot of women in the discussion including a lot of black women african-american women yeah yeah and like you know okay you are making this statement about how social workers instead of the police should reply to 9-1-1 calls okay and again those people should do that okay all right it's very different if you say you're putting yourself in the driver's seat as someone who might do that job someone's experiencing them and say look somebody says look i know what it's like to show up at someone's apartment at two o'clock in the morning and they're going crazy and you're not sure if you're gonna get shot or stabbed like i know what it's like to be the police in that position like you're a police officer you get a domestic violence call and there's a man and a woman and there's at least maybe they're holding a knife you don't know if there's a knife and a gun involved you're coming into this apartment and they're they're maybe they're both high on drugs or they're drunk this okay domestic violence you've got to come in and break it up right and and guess what i know that if you send in a psychiatrist or you send in a social worker they are going to be it's going to be just as hard for them or harder and they're going to have a gun and we're going to see like to really talk it through and to really say hey you know what the police are doing a hard job and i can imagine how hard it would be for me too and to say hey i'm willing to do that job too i'm willing to sign up and spend five or ten years of my life putting my neck on the line and you know it's not just some social worker who do a better job i think i could do a better job and i recognize i recognize how hard that is to walk into the room and there were two people trying to beat each other up and i have to i have to break them yeah i have to shut this down without putting my own life in danger and without shooting and killing one of them like you see what i'm saying seeing history in the driver's seat seeing that way so sorry i know this it may seem like a small thing but i think this is one of the deepest and most pervasive differences you know between between men and women seen in aggregate seen on a scale of millions of people okay are there exceptions i'm sure there are i'm sure there are some women who think i've never met one just including all these women i knew with pgs i have never met one who thinks about politics in the present tense this way police military in the presence nor historically who look back and think by the way but i have met the opposite i have met effeminate gay men who have attitudes whether you know what it's just a choice i guess i have met a feminist gay men who have a kind of dismissive passive attitude towards history that way okay other people should conquer afghanistan other people should get rid of the taliban and there's no real there's none of that real thought and commitment yeah okay yeah that's that's i think i mean i think now i think that's the difference between you now versus you five years ago i think yeah yeah yeah yeah but like when you yeah even if it's a war that has nothing to do with you reading the war and thinking about that thing about the council you're starting to personalize it so i have more ownership yeah before i met you i'd started taking on more of this like personal responsibility in terms of like living more ethical lifestyle like i embraced veganism like and uh right around the time that i met you i i embraced sobriety you know like i took on these these different aspects of like what i did with my own time but i it is true like it has taken me quite some time and and i still do struggle with like feeling like i have authority like i have some kind of say in what happens in the world around me you know but if if if not by this age like at what stage am i going to feel that way am i going to build up the knowledge and capabilities of like being able to influence going to a town hall meeting like going to city hall and and presenting on these issues you know like at some point you have to step it up and you have to if you really care about these issues you know and i don't want to be just screaming at people on the street and protests about veganism you know i don't want to let you let people you don't want to sound as dumb as aoc for you too when you listen to aoc making some of these things like you know that's true yeah i don't want to feel dumb when i see myself on youtube or whatever on twitter that's true yeah yeah yeah but yeah i'm just giving it a real world comparison yeah yeah i know that's true um if i if i ever do get the chance to be in a leadership role um you know i yeah that that is oh okay so this this could relate to one thing as well that i wanted to discuss um we've seen a bunch of mothers giving their political opinion lately you know you don't want to sound like an idiot like that yes yes mothers giving their opinion about what books should be taught to their children in school yes this is the kind of thing that has been in the news a lot lately so uh something that i thought about more um since i started my relationship with you so it's been close to five years and um because i had this experience with uh um being involved with your daughter when when we were able to see your daughter you know um it really got me thinking that the responsibilities that that come with having a child some you know for for everybody like everybody's responsibility when they have a child is to to teach their children um and we it's it's very obvious to me when i think about it in in the in the home like with parents and children that that is part of your responsibility like your children is your children are going to ask you a lot of questions and you have to be able to respond you have to be able to answer um and and if if you don't then you're setting your child up to be ignorant um but uh it's it's not as easy to see it outside of that context i think for a lot of people when they have to think of themselves as political entities or like people uh who could be interviewed on the news or something you know about a certain issue um or if the you know people who make youtube videos they know like this pressure to to feel like they're saying something worthwhile something that that can make a difference um and actually educating people that that has really shifted throughout throughout my years of knowing you um and and growing into somebody that like feels like they would be able to answer a question so um you know something that's simple uh something that's come up in conversation with with you um when you were a child you remember asking uh you remember that your mother asked you about the tides how the tides were yes um so this is this kind of role reversal where you would think that the mother would be teaching the son about how the tides work um but then isil as well was in this position from a young age of like teaching his own parents you know yeah um so so this is this is this kind of backwards thing where like you know once you start considering like taking on this role of being a mother or like taking on this role of like having some kind of authority in the world um mothering other people in some other sense yeah uh you know what do you really know and like all the years that you should have been preparing for your for if you've been playing video games if you've been uh making homemade soy milk or something like in some ways like that's just gonna set you up for failure set you up for being a dumb person so so look too so there there was a woman and you will see melissa is not disturbed by my image of this there was a woman who basically tried to steal me away from you and you were this relationship was never in any in any uh danger that way and it wasn't clear when she started talking to me probably wasn't clear to her either that's what she was she was after she started talking to me and you know whatever i didn't know that was what was up and said she also might not have known does that but a couple months later she revealed she said look that what she wants is for me to dump melissa and get together with this other woman instead and she is a conventionally good-looking blonde and she just can't imagine how i how i look at this because you know for her for her as a woman you know and i was trying to be friends with she's someone i'd known you know on and off for a couple years someone i you know she's vegan and i can say some positive things about her but sir you're asking the question of like once you become a parent once you become a mother what do you have to teach somebody like what do you have to offer like for this woman like the way she lived her life i would not say she's an alcoholic or anything like that but it's that working for the weekend lifestyle she's going out and drinking alcohol and partying she's living a really shallow meaningless life that revolves around in my opinion fancy shoes and going out with friends and drinking and partying and she was someone who had had sex or one night stands with an alarming number of complete strangers both living this kind of club opening lifestyle remember those ages ago we talked about this yeah you know but like now you know i did not say this to her and she can't imagine seeing it this way her perspective on life is that she's a good-looking woman and practically every guy absolutely wants to get with her the moment she opens the door a crack i mean remember i i told you about this too because this is at the stage wasn't clear like is she trying to seduce me or what i remember one of the things she said to me is she said look you know the fact that i'm talking to you at all means a lot you know it means something yeah yeah yeah she kind of then it's like a couple months after that it's like yeah like you know what you know um you know i had effectively friends on her but my point is this like it had not occurred to her she had never thought like from my perspective from the perspective of a guy like me like she is bringing nothing to this relationship she is not she has absolutely no intellectual substance now i don't i can't you know i can't say too much about this but uh during the time that i was talking to her there were really remarkable political events unfolding that i was talking to melissa about and any of you were my personal friends i was talking to these so i'm it was 2020. you know i'll just say but there were these big political events happening in 2020 and i was getting inspired to write my book i think i hadn't started writing the book yet but i'm reading about this politics and i'm talking about listen about any other friends i had at that time talking to them about what's going on politically yeah and when i try to talk to her when i try to talk to this good looking blonde there is there is nothing there is no i might as well be talking to a wall right so that's what i mean like we're not talking about the intellectual stance you're being being incredibly high but you know my fundamental point is just like she was someone who i mean it had not occurred to her you know what i mean like oh if you want this kind of man if you want this kind of life and indeed you know if you want to move on to being a good parent you know if you want to be a good woman like no like your intellectual development your intellectual substance and your political acumen those that all really matters and i do think she's an example of someone who lived the life of being a good looking blonde in america where these things are at a real premium and just you know just never held herself to any higher standard never yeah yeah that's yeah and you guys already know i did i did mention the way that ended was me saying to her look you know it's not it's i basically look the situation is not like i'm with melissa therefore i can't be with you i said to her really clearly um there is no parallel universe where you and i would become a couple like if i weren't with melissa if i were single like you have to understand this is you know you you would not be it's and it's for this reason so yeah you know now look um i'm not going to make the claim that men are by contrast omniscient or something but of course you know the vast majority of men get that the vast majority of men understand that women women do not want to be with a stupid man they do not want to be with a fool you know that you know the vast majority of women there's you know there's a very obvious pressure on you you were talking about the role of a mother talk about the role of being a father that women do expect whether it's articulated or not they expect you to be a man of substance a man you know so i'm that that's there and um yeah in my whole life i think i've only ever talked to one man who didn't get that but i mean with the exception of some really mentally disabled people i think all men know that there is this pressure on them all the time and then how they deal with it and what they do with it that's another story because for sure some escape into a life of drug addiction and video games like some of them try to evade it or whatever but yeah that there was this this big experience and what do you want to say more with that i mean no i i uh i think i covered what i wanted to say about that yeah um but yeah okay let me just say this i don't think any man would need you to explain to him why he's being rejected if he's rejected for not being smart enough not being substantive enough not being intellectual enough like it's not gonna be like what you know this is this never and you know that was a situation with a woman where like like despite the fact that she's watched my youtube videos for years whatever it's like it hasn't occurred to her that what i'm about is the life of the mind and like say just giving this out as advice for everyone you know if you have really great sex with somebody still i'm taking a walk with melissa the other day and it's like look what makes this walk pleasant it's not the smoothness of the sidewalk it's not the color of the sky it's not the sight of the ocean it's taking a walk with you it's taking a walk with someone who's worth talking to it's taking a walk with someone you intellectually respect someone with something intelligent to say back to you like you know having a you're going to walk with someone you have you're attracted you have great sex with like true in the absence of the life of the mind it's really nothing more yeah no okay yeah i guess i could say more just but that you know i think i think we've sure did a good job of talking about that um yeah i i guess um you got conclusions no the conclusion is it's hopeless well no it kind of relates to something else that i wanted to say um yeah i do i do find that funny that she said it means a lot that i'm talking to you yes i told you about that at the time too yeah i guess i had forgotten that but yeah um you know what what she had a boyfriend at that time oh really yeah [ __ ] that was the other thing she had a boy i had a girlfriend she had a boyfriend and you're telling me it means alone what do you think that you have to offer though like when when you are talking with people you know um yeah i i don't have very uh inflated ideas about about what i what i have to offer in a conversation or what i have to offer other people um but yeah i know that is that is funny to me um okay you you look you say that but in a specific context it's not true so i'll give you a specific context we both decided not to study here at the university of victoria right long story short we were considering we both went up to the university campus no if you were sitting and talking to those kids you're talking to a typical let's say 19 year old doesn't matter if they're male or female and like you may not think you know a lot about the politics of china or the politics of japan or whatever has come up the politics of hong kong for example currently unfolding but you do and when you be sitting down in that context with those kids having those conversations be like no no that's not what the situation's like in hong kong at all you know xinjiang you know western china like no no look so i mean i it's kind of easy for you to say that that you don't feel you have sunday now another example is vegan activism if you're sitting down with other frankly it doesn't matter if they're 19 or 39 you could be sitting down with other people who are super gung-ho about being an activism but they don't know what you know and you're like look it's not like that like i know something i have something to share so it's fine for you to say that but i really think ian praxis in any kind of social context you sit down in that's really not true that you are aware of what you have to contribute and the ways in which you can really help other people whether or not you do because you can just sit there silently you can just sit there listening to people who are talking about vegan activism right how they're gonna volunteer for dxd you can just sit there talking and listening to people talk about xinjiang or the myanmar or rohingya muslims you sit there just like yeah like you said but but you are not unaware even if you're silent but even if you're silent you know you know that you have something that's all i'm saying go on yeah but it would be it would take effort to to try to prove somebody or you know try to convince somebody that what they're saying is ignorant or they they just aren't aware of certain things yeah and uh also you don't want to make people break down crying okay like right this kind of um you know social so this is also this is also gender coded massively right you saw me sit down with the university professors this is not a student it's a professor yeah he said a bunch of crass [ __ ] about xinjiang and i basically said i didn't want to change talking conversation i said look we're not going to get in touch with xinjiang but look i can tell you've never read one book on this subject you don't know what you're talking about you're repeating stuff you read in the new york times you don't [ __ ] you don't know the first book in the entire right and that was a conversation that was very much man-to-man you know it really was and you know i wasn't being mean-spirited i wasn't trying to be denigrating him but you know he's a university professor i am a student and that was a real challenge as an authority and you got to see how we dealt with it that was neither the first nor the last challenges they were like throughout that whole conversation there were a whole bunch of points where i was basically telling them look you're talking out of your hat you don't know what the [ __ ] you're talking about and i do i know a lot about that and you know you see how that goes yeah now i think most you've seen me demonstrate it i think most women in our culture but in every culture i'm familiar with they don't know i have a conversation with that oh yeah and uh whether that's fear-based or fragility-based or what you know like and you could try you've seen me do it what i mean um you could try and both sides might not know how to handle it like if you talk to a woman that way you know how is she going to respond if you talk to a man that way how's he going you know and that that's running up against exactly this whole culture of holding women to lower standards and for real if you had said to that same professor the same things i said i don't think he would have fought back the way he did with me not really yeah sure i'm not i'm not saying he's a bad guy i'm just saying without being caught i think probably the response you go oh good for you oh good for you dear there would have been more oh so you've read some books about santiago's you know like good for you all that's great good to hear good to hear you're you know i think you you really get more of this kind of thing you know yeah and not like look bro i just you know i just showed the emperor has no clothes and the emperor is you yeah you know you're you know you're ignorant and a liar frankly and i've just shown it you know that i'm not just saying with the one incident that happened again and again in that conversation my professor just said okay so the last time that we talked about this or that you had a podcast or you had a live stream that you were talking about like advice for young men you mentioned that you didn't get into topics of sexuality um i would say we've succeeded again in this in this live stream with not really discussing um as i've i've seen the audience the chat has has kind of veered off into some topics about sexuality and relationships and so on so i don't know do you feel like we've we've reached a point but look maybe dude or do you think that we should go on other topics because i'm open-minded look maybe that's got to be a separate a separate live stream where we just talk about the sexy stuff for for both genders yeah but you know it is supposed to be about the life of the mind and being an intellectual yes and i mean i think the very basic point that's been alluded to again and again without getting into it in greater depth is just you know okay this is an obstacle to the life of the mind and it's an obstacle for women in a way that it isn't for men go on okay but i will say one thing that i could say here is uh you know in relation to your romantic life your your love life and your sex life it really does matter who you get involved with of course and yes from personal experience like take it from me like it's it's really important to be with somebody that's that's going to continue to learn so you know i don't trivialize this at all if anything i mellow dramatize it i i exaggerate this news but look i knew a man he was a white guy and he lost his virginity with a prostitute in the philippines he flew to the philippines that was his first sexual experience of women and that was not the i don't know how many prostitutes to slept with but he slept with some number of prostitutes since then asian prostitutes that impacted and influenced the rest of his life on so many levels like there's no way to exaggerate the warping distorting effect that had on his intellectual development his emotional development his ethical development right yeah from his teenage years forward now so like now it's very easy to draw some advice from that my advice is don't sleep with [ __ ] you know um you know whatever especially if you're under 25 years old or something if you're a young man don't sleep with prostitutes i really think it'll do harm to you as a as as a young man being the client not talking about the prostitutes you know i really think this can this can affect you in ways you you yourself as a teenage teenage man can't understand that's my my advice on that okay so obviously for women that is not the problem i mean how many women lost their virginity by paying a male prostitute like it's going to be incredibly close to zero you know what i mean for how many women is their sexual development warped because they are the client they are the john as we say paying someone it's not it's yeah but for women yeah but for women instead you have this avalanche of male attention coming into your life right and you know i'm sorry but there was there was a comment above it's it's now many minutes ago of someone's saying that she does have women in her family who are medical doctors and surgeons but they only get positive feedback they will get appreciation from the family when they cook a seven course meal when they cook a big dinner that's what's rewarded well you know for the most part for women for many years their life starting at a shockingly young age and continuing you know but like you know certainly throughout their teenage years what women find is rewarded is a certain kind of sexually salacious activity you know so sure that that becomes this massive you know source of influence in women's life and in their intellectual development and you know i i think it's yeah it's a huge part of it and i you know i um for many years i wanted to like really separate my intellectual life from my sexual life like or you know thoughts about sexuality are inherently degenerate and like are not related to discussions about philosophy history like you know let's let's completely separate these issues but like i really think that sexuality is is a part of everybody's life everybody has a sexuality and and dealing with that discovering that and exploring that like um and and understanding yourself like that that is something that um it's not separate from from your intellectual life it's not separate from what you're what you're researching or what you're what you're reading about you know um but look i have never met a woman who openly said i don't have to read about politics and history and philosophy because i'm beautiful but i have met so many women who implicitly believe that and like it's not that hidden behind us like they're they will they will pretty they will they will say that to you yeah no no no and that's incredibly [ __ ] up no no no no no no but that's the culture we live that's the century we live in no like for real and nobody's gonna hold the higher standard and they never hold themselves to higher standard and no man is ever gonna say to them and nobody within their family is gonna say to them nobody gives a [ __ ] that you have big tits you know like whatever it is that makes them stand nobody gives a [ __ ] that you have a nice ass that ain't worth [ __ ] you know you have to hit the books you have to accomplish something you have to be somebody you have to make something out of yourself you know [ __ ] you you shallow vain imbecile you know what was it okay but if you have a dude who has that attitude you know there are good looking guys there are guys who get behind their looks yeah right absolutely but a man would feel ashamed to say that or exhibit attitude i mean he's at least going to keep up the illusion that he's a refined intellectual so it's maybe complete [ __ ] you know yeah you know i'm just saying my point is the obstructive nature of female vanity in our culture in our century in all the cultures i'm i'm familiar with that has this really amazing like whatever you say toxic effect corrosive effect on female intellectual development emotional development you know everything else or they haven't even considered now look we have a new book out there's a hit book out by um well okay look little water is laughing says lmao my ass is pretty um we just watched a video the other day from this girl and that's all she cares about this youtuber who was talking about having pretty face privilege and pretty ass privilege yeah she's like now she got a [ __ ] she got plastic surgery on her ass that bigger i said now when i go to the nightclub i'm that [ __ ] everyone pays like that's those are the [ __ ] horizons of her of her life you know a lot of intellectual development over the years zero hasn't read a book since high school my ass is not big that's her whole life compared to the music videos i watch so so no woman will ever say to you that their whole life consists of competing for male attention or competing with other women for who's the prettiest woman in the office or who's the prettiest woman in their in their classroom but like dude a lot of women live their whole lives by those rules you know that's what's going on for a lot of women all the time and has this massively mentally deadening effect you know and it doesn't it doesn't have to i mean it doesn't have to how many hours a day are you doing your hair and makeup yeah you know what i mean like it's just like if you want to be beautiful okay check done for some people it is effortless some people don't have to put any effort into being beautiful they're born with what it takes and now okay now what about actually developing yourself as an intellectual as an author or as a creative person as an analytical person however you want to think of it yeah one of my essays in college was about my choice not to wear makeup if i had really been more objective about my writing i could have you know there's a way to make that essay interesting but like man it's embarrassing to look back on that but you know like my perspective on it you've shown me some of your colleges right yeah yeah no my college writing and didn't i i got ideas straight a's in all of my english courses like nobody was told you do a higher standard yeah my professors i i thought it was a pretty good writer because all my professors gave me a's and no one's saying this would never be published i didn't even think that no no it was just like this is for this no nobody said yes you know nobody said you should compare yourself to the greatest authors in your field and try to be at that level no there's no way i could write like whole soy and i couldn't write well you can but that's what yeah certainly no no right no no i i thought of myself as yeah no no no way um so yeah that is just interesting to reflect on that um uh in that same class actually i had a fellow student who wrote her essay because this was a writing class and we were trying to talk about personal experiences so her essay was about her experience being a cam girl so somebody who was close to my age maybe she was a year older or something because i was i was young from a grade but you know somebody who had been through a lot more sexually than i had you know had put herself out there way more than i had you know like i would have never considered going into porn i would have never considered being a cannibal at that age at that stage in my life but like you know she had already developed this way like this this this mature way of thinking about her sexuality about about commodifying her sexuality making money it's true yeah her sexuality as her career yes yeah and it's somewhat destructive and you know she talked about um in response to my essay about makeup she talked about like for her like it's it's she was a makeup addict like she was always buying new makeup and stuff and at the time i was just like wow i mean like that's what you're spending your time on you're spending your time on like putting dildos inside of you on camera and putting makeup on your face like for this audience and stuff you know like that is and she's making money from that you know it's just i'm gonna mention though so there was a comedy called tropic thunder so if you guys you know when i was a kid i was involved in the theater if you spend time in the theater around actors like most of the male actors are also really good-looking guys and they're guys who are there because they're going nuts but a movie like trevor thunder is making fun of male actors but when you're around male actors every single one of them is a pretentious [ __ ] every every single one of them has a stack of books about like philosophy and politics and history and shittiest camera like they're reading nietzsche and talking about nietzsche like was to use a stereo whatever it is they're reading at the time but seriously they can be reading stuff from ancient greek greece too you know there are some jokes in tropic thunder about the about the ancient greeks there's a joke about uh aristophanes like yeah aristophanes it's so hot right now they're these shallow kind of male model like you know they're these good-looking guys really shallow but those guys still they are at least trying like that's what the jokes are about that movie they're still trying to front like they're intellectuals or they're actually trying to be intellectuals they're trying to develop you know when you talk to male male actors you know and i gotta tell you something you hang around female actors and the vast majority of them have this attitude we've been describing they have the attitude of i'm that [ __ ] like i was the prettiest girl in my high school everybody wanted to [ __ ] me you know like everyone makes exceptions for me i get to skip in line you know like whatever they really have the attitude that they're that's it they're a beautiful woman and that's all they ever need to be and that's all they're going to be they have no they feel no pressure on themselves to to pretend to be an intellectual or make any effort to develop that way so yeah that's that you say acting as a microcosm you maybe see that all displayed a little bit more openly you know now i would say also guys at the gym or something guys who are personal trainers you see girls who are female personal trainers female churches and that's it hey i'm high period and the men who are in that role are like well yeah i'm hot but i've studied nutrition i've done this i've done that i know all this technical sports medicine stuff like where you really see this where where men aren't living with the idea of i'm hot and that's all i need to be like that's for me that's the roof that's the limit of this guy you see women who are really limiting themselves because that's how they think of themselves and dude this applies to ugly women as well i cannot tell you how many women i've known who are really unattractive where everything we've just said applies well they just they don't work as actresses they don't work as trainers you know we don't even wanna you know you've grown up from us yeah yeah i'm fat so what plenty of guys want to get with me i'm still fine i'm still yeah absolutely there are women who are still on an ego trip they're fat and they're ugly but they still have men climbing over each other to compete for their attention and stuff and like yeah yeah um yeah i i suppose that is true um i guess it's just what i was thinking at that time uh or to start this is is that uh i do think that you can take a philosophical attitude about sexuality and about beauty and that's really actually something that i would encourage young women to get interested in and and to really live the exam in life in this way like for that that woman who wrote her essay about being a cam girl like at least she was talking about these experiences and in some ways she was more developed than me like sexually of course like i mean she had she had at least had these experiences and talked about these issues with other people uh that i hadn't and and like just in that way having conversations with other people um having these other experiences like you that is part of becoming an intellectual like uh and um being able to converse about about certain issues like rather than looking down your nose at somebody who might engage in those behaviors like um that isn't helpful and and i might have learned something from actually becoming a better like closer to her if i if i had gotten to know her more yes i knew i knew a woman also uh briefly who uh worked as a stripper when she was in college and um i i i again like i wish i would have made the effort to get to know her a little bit more because i might have just learned about that right that aspect of life um that aspect of human sexuality and and embracing like feminine sexuality like in ways that i was too uncomfortable to talk to talk about at that time so yeah and i do think that can be part of intellectual development um just getting to know people with different experiences and it can be kind of you know you might think but like look you're getting the fundamental implicit point of this whole video is don't let your sexuality be a limit to or an obstacle to your intellectual development yes your emotional development so that is the point yeah like you live in a body we all do yes you know yeah definitely yeah but it is but for the vast majority of people it is they never get over it they never deal with the building blocks of what it is to have a meaningful life or what it is just be a human being on planet earth they never get past it they never get over it i think middle age and old age are very miserable for those people that's all they learn how to do you know what what is old age going to be like for emily ratakowski you know emily ratakowski has just published her [ __ ] autobiography her political essay my body my body right and i'm sorry but emily radakowski her whole fate has been shaped by the the way her body looks and the way her face looks she also has a very striking face her facial features are very clearly delineated and everyone told her i forgot starting when she was 14 years old or something right people told her look you can have a career in my life right well guess what that that didn't mean you couldn't develop intellectually in 10 different ways that doesn't mean you couldn't have you know she'd be in a better position than alexandria ocasio-cortez who started a career as a waitress or whatever you know doesn't mean you couldn't have become a major political leader or a major author but she's a [ __ ] bimbo she's an idiot i'm sorry look at any live interview any unscripted interview she's done i don't care how many [ __ ] ghost writers she worked with in putting that book together if the book has a little bit of intelligence i don't care watch any interview with her she like everything that's wrong with america is wrong with emily radakowski she's a horrifying glimpse into the you know mainstream middle class american mind and she is a pretty girl who cares about shoes and clothes and that's it she like my point being the fact that you made your living out of your body didn't have to prevent you from developing intellectually right but it does for the vast majority of people it provides the pretext or the excuse for that and at the opposite extreme so like you know i was friends with this youtuber american unicorn she was a virgin until marriage and she let that ruin her life she was on the super trad con you know a conservative religious virgin telemanagement that [ __ ] up her life like your sexuality can screw up your life and like commodifying your sexuality in that sense can screw up your life in in more ways than one it can be that you're committed to being a virgin until marriage then you drop out of college get pregnant and raise kids the first person who has sex with you and that ruins your life instead you know so no i mean the the the relationships you have as i put it right at the very beginning of of the uh the video letting someone come into your life letting a man commit your life and solve all your problems yeah that's right i remember that's an incredible temptation even if there's no pornography involved there's no modeling involved there's no they're not being an actress you're just becoming a housewife or whatever you have you know where that's and again there's no reason for that to be all you are you could have all these ambitions you could do all these you'd be a housewife and you can still develop yourself and you know you can accomplish all kinds of great things that's true and the vast majority do not the vast majority let this be an obstacle let this be a limit to their to their learning and they shut down and they remain fundamentally childish stupid ignorant people all their lives yeah so to avoid that well i i did not live my life in an intellectual way when i was a young woman when i was 19 20 and 21. 21 i can imagine an alternate universe where i would have really taken myself seriously and and stuck to the kind of high expectations that i had for like how i how i behaved like in high school when i was sober when i when i didn't surround myself with people who were doing drugs and so on like if i if i had just stuck to some of these kind of um good qualities of how i how i live my life um yeah i can imagine that i would have i would have read a lot more and i would have pushed myself more but also if if people would have held me to higher standards if my professors would have like you said like encouraged me to write at a level that i would feel comfortable publishing this like how many people are going to read this and and uh yeah if if you think of yourself as somebody who could become an author one day or something who could change the world in some way um you know your your your outlook on life your your perspective on yourself and your perspective on your role in the world will change a lot um so yeah that that is the advice that i would have for young women is to uh imagine that in the future you you you know part of what you said in in one of in your last uh live stream about advice for young men is like you can't part of your role as an older person is to tell young people what they can't imagine yeah and um so yeah i feel like although i'm i'm not as old as you like i do kind of feel like i'm at a some at a stage where i can say that like you can't imagine the kind of people that you'll know in 10 years you can't imagine the type of person that you'll be in 10 years or uh you can't imagine the regrets that you might have about how you're living your life right now um and and i mean that's part of the tragedy of life is that we don't know what we're going to regret but it's better to regret that you you tried your best to become a more intellectual person um it's better to regret that you you you didn't go out and party or something you know that you didn't uh waste your time when you're younger playing video games if you if you have regrets about your life when you're a youth that are related to that like oh i wish i would have wasted more time i wish i would have gone to more clubs or something like it's it's way better to be in a position where you actually learn something and uh you push yourself intellectually you know i think it's true probably something i overlook about myself was just the assumption that i was gonna be an author and i remember talking to other young people that went this was the era before youtube when you know i didn't assume i was making monologues so i was going to be writing but you know like once you have that view of what it is to be an adult that being an adult means being an author well it doesn't matter that much what your major is in university because whatever it is you're preparing to be an author right like you're preparing to write you're going to change the world through writing or share whatever you you have to share to speak for yourself you know as a writer you know um you know but i mean to give an example for a long time i considered going into law getting a law degree which is incredibly boring but if you're thinking about being a writer if you're like yeah but really i'm gonna write books that you know that's what really matters like however it doesn't matter if i work at 7-eleven or starbucks or work as a lawyer but i'm trying to cultivate myself to be an author that's ultimately what really matters yeah and then also you've been with me in person i consider going to business school and getting a degree in business but i'm not doing that instead of being an author like i'm still thinking of myself as a creative writer if someone is doing research someone who's learning and someone who's writing you know yes so i already had that idea like at 15 or 16 or something and then in an unseen way that guides all my development and yeah you know i think the tragedy is there are a lot of women who just regard themselves as a piece of ass there are a lot of women they don't think of themselves as an author it's never crossed their minds yeah exactly that their intellectual development right and and you know i think the flip side of that there are now there are some men some men think of themselves as a piece of ass but i would say what's much more common is that men think of themselves that way in terms of money where men reduce themselves to just how much money they are and how much they pay for things including paying for the attention of women where they've reduced themselves to being a kind of economic atom and economic cog in the system yeah you know as opposed to saying well no you can earn money lots of different ways you can work in real estate and be an intellectual you know as mentioned you can be a stripper and be an intellectual you can develop yourself as an author you can change the world and you change who you are too you grow and you you know yeah but yeah i know we're having this conversation after the death of the publishing industry so that model you know if you take the word author in its dictionary sense i can't say that anymore now you have to talk more broadly about being some kind of creative artist some kind of content creator you know uh but still but still i really do think that you know there are some comments maybe everybody's not smart enough somebody says some people just aren't very bright though drinking and partying may be all they can manage unless things okay so no i don't believe it for an instant going in yeah i think we all have something to offer and i when i was younger what i was told about being a professor is that it can be uh demanding because there's this idea of publish or perish like you have to publish um but i do think that this is something that is healthy for people to continue to challenge themselves as to to think of themselves as people who publish something who are who are trying to make something um throughout throughout their life i mean uh doing something with their time even if it's just on a small scale of like in your community if you're if you're making some effort to but look sorry i i just made a video the day before yesterday or something about tana mongeau the fact that all taniman joe can appreciate today is getting drunk and partying that does not mean that's all she's capable of appreciating vegan she used to care about veganism and like talk about it like that what i totally think i totally think she's someone of above average intelligence which is scary but it's the [ __ ] truth but you live that way long enough you lower your expectations yourself long enough and this seems like the only thing you can enjoy same with video game edition there are people who say oh well they're too stupid to enjoy anything but playing video games because that's all they know how to enjoy they don't know how to get the value out of you know research and writing all kinds of other humanitarian work or climbing a mountain or anything else you know but like they don't they don't know how to enjoy the life of the mind is really what i'm emphasizing here rather than climbing a mountain um you know but no i don't believe that about tana mongeau and i don't believe that about uh emily ratajkowski i don't think she's born dumb she's someone who made the wrong choices she chooses to be dumb and now this is who she is and this is all she can enjoy and she still could change in the next 10 years the next 20 years it'll take time and hard work you know what i mean and i'd encourage you to emily if you're watching this now you know but you you know it's not too late to take life seriously and really live with that you know with the sorrow and the joy that comes with the life of the mind and take that on but no i don't believe that for an instant you know and and my view of the world where i say like 90 percent of people are fundamentally stupid and malign fundamentally stupid enough bad intentions are malicious it's even more tragic when you understand that what i'm saying is that they choose this people choose to live this way the same way they choose to play video games the fact that you play video games like the only thing you can enjoy doing is playing video games you were not born this way you're not it's not because you're mentally disabled right and then you get into a cycle a self-justifying cycle of uh you know the meaningless a meaningless life you know yeah you want to say those to wrap it up babe i mean you know i think i think we've said it all yeah i think how would it be how to be a woman according to most of them um that's funny i hadn't thought of how to actually end this now to conclude this video i mean because it's something that i'm still learning about and i'm i'm still embracing you know as i get older like my my feminine like being being a woman what it means to be a woman and to it it was interesting to me to hear you say that you've you've never felt that any woman that you've known has has viewed history in the way that men have that they've actually like been taking on this role yeah um if they're going to have a view on the war on afghanistan kind of sympathizing actively put it that way yeah right um so yeah i don't think it's impossible for women to think of themselves as active participants in in history as it unfolds like i don't uh and there are plenty of women in history that we have to look up to um women that uh you know involved with auntie go on yeah sorry but if you if you're keeping it real the gentleman that's not true i'm talking about your own life who are the women in history you've looked up to you haven't had anything i mean you were saying that earlier it's just why say the opposite of the truth i mean you know okay it's true i i do i haven't you personally you don't you don't think this is hillary clinton or something like you know but i'm thinking about condoleezza rice you don't look up to her you know you don't i mean you haven't grown up with women whether now from the past i don't think you do just just keep me real i'm not faulting you i'm saying you know look i had to name my daughter and so when i was with my my ex-wife and she gets it was a planned pregnancy even wasn't an accidental person we planning to pray and give pride it's like okay we have a list of really great names for a boy that are historical figures right and then like for a girl it's like uh i guess it's just one like it was so hard to come up with it you know female intellectuals in history you look up to or think positive there aren't a lot like i'm we're just keeping it real here people and like you know i did i gave my daughter a name i'm proud of the name i gave her i'm happy with the name i gave her but i didn't have 10 other names i didn't have a list of really great names from great historical figures it's like okay i guess i could name her after this one historical figure now i've used up all my good female baby names you know and they were like they're all these different male names that's so we sort of just joke around today about good names for good news real boy and stuff yeah no i'm just saying you haven't lived up with with plenty you haven't grown up with plenty of female uh i guess positive you grew up with britney spears okay all right fine i guess but you know figures from history that i was told about you know somebody like rosa parks or somebody like harriet tubman like you know that was that was the kind of influence that i had when i was around yeah okay okay so let's see okay okay rosa parks was she an intellectual was she a great writer was she an inspiring leader no not harriet tubman saying no like it's just keep it real no you don't grow up with female role models look up to you don't you know or there are incredibly few yeah again maybe there are some interesting exceptions to the rule i mean you know look at this shelf of books you know who do we have of any of the authors of any of these books you know who do you have to look up to who's female there i think there's one book written by a woman on our bookshelf and it sucks i think my angela was a communist right at least at least a sympathizer anyway don't get into people's books you haven't read i mean if you haven't read it don't comment yeah um yeah so i but you know i just say no i mean rosa parks it's not an exception you know you know i'm sorry i mean mary curie is not an exception none of these people you know none of these people are tolstoy none of these people are mohandas gandhi and you know i'm a critic of gandhi but no none of these people are major intellectuals and creative right and you know people who you know change the world by living the life of the mind they're not you know now look my ex-girlfriend one of them um she wanted to be a painter and i remember her going through these different magazine articles she was actively looking for examples of successful female painters and so this is interesting this ends up being a kind of counter story she found this article and it was like the next generation of modern artists female modern artists in the 21st century and it was someone who had done like a survey mission who are the hot new female painters painters and sculptors uh in the arts today and then 10 years later did a retrospective saying where are they now and the article she wrote it's a female author was like completely condemning these women and saying well guess what it seems like the vast majority of women just don't care about anything except getting pregnant having kids and like the majority of the women who were in the exhibition 10 years ago they found a wealthy husband and got pregnant to have kids and they don't produce art anymore and they don't take it seriously and like here are the one or two exceptions and here's what they're doing it's like well and like the article concluded because basically none of them were doing important new art or even devoting their time to art anymore some of them were still doing it as a side project so well guess what i guess the reason why in our generation there aren't like major inspiring female intellectuals in painting is that there really aren't women who make this their priority and dedicate their lives to it the way men do men who say like no nothing like this is my art this is what matters this is what i'm giving 110. and i remember anyway just remember that was her situation she was someone again she'd been a feminist and she'd been involved in women's studies but she she had to admit she's like well all of the artists she looks up to or anyone just they're all men you know okay and another thing you know because i'm vegan it is also striking to me that like so few people in history generally but also we're vegan like i don't have a lot of positive vegan role models it's a female when you were doing ancient history of veganism stuff yeah it's all male authors and male 1 yeah that's true so yeah yeah i hope i hope this changes i mean it is one of the aspects when you do if you want to have kids i mean it does take up i was just challenging you about the casualness of saying and passing are there like are there like i feel i've been in a couple of the fields that are exceptions like buddhist philosophy buddhist studies there are some major females keep it real and no it's part of your problem like there weren't i mean who you going to look up to emily radekowski you're going to look up to uh christina aguilera christina aguilera who was on tv during your childhood that's your generation who the [ __ ] are you going to look up to you know and who right now there were women who would say look up to aoc alexandria cause of course she's a [ __ ] knitwit she's an idiot the women who are the leaders of black lives matter are idiots and they have published books and their books prove that they're idiots so you know like this is so here are your choices oh wow inspiring female intellectuals and authors there should be there should be tons of them you know what i'm saying but no but and by the way again i'm not saying there was zero the field i worked in when i was a scholar of buddhism there were important uh women in that field it's an unusual field that way you can be in fields that are that are dominated by women yeah but yeah it's it's scarce my point is no it is rare okay does having a family preclude women from doing meaningful intellectual work yes it shouldn't that's part of what you know it's not just me a lot of women are conflicted about this issue and yeah i i had a newborn baby in my arms and i was swinging her back and forth to put her to sleep and it was very muscular work with that particular baby and i was listening to thucydides history of the peloponnesian war on my headphones and i heard the whole of herodotus the histories as an audiobook you know actually i was actually reading through cities on paper listening to erotic as an audiobook i was developing intellectually and when the baby fell asleep and i put her in the crib i did bench press i did push ups i did upright row i was working out physically i was working intellectually and i was a full-time stay-at-home parent i was taking care of the baby i was cleaning everything at night i was cooking for my wife often my wife would be breastfeeding the baby and then i'd go and cook in the kitchen yeah you can be an intellectual raising a kid or you can take it as a [ __ ] excuse to have a meaningless self-indulgent life that's what most people do i mean most most for most men it's money for most men it's like well i earn money so that's it so now i have excuse i can turn my brain off i can have no other aspirations but yeah for a lot of women it's not for some women it is money but for a lot of women it's not even money you know okay isil i do appreciate you challenging me on that i it could be just the kind of influence that i had in school that oh yeah say it again and again no we all repeat this oh there are lots of positive female no like let's let's look sorry there's some other field where it's not about that's not about you know uh uh gender but you know like some people say oh well there are lots of positive atheist role models and i would say really like you know like look around who are the atheist leaders or something you know male and female there were other things where i would challenge like oh well you know let's let's really think about it you know what i mean yeah no i think that's good and that's that's important so we'll question that look everything that is a challenge is also an opportunity okay and look being born a six foot three scary looking dude is a challenge it has disadvantages and i could be self-pitying and talk about the ways in which it's [ __ ] up my life and yeah i've had to deal with police coming at me a certain kind of way i really have as a young man as a teenager i've had to deal with all kinds of hostility and being treated like [ __ ] by authority figures you know being a scary looking big white dude it's a challenge it's also an opportunity and i mean look i think the fundamental message coming out of this this video is if you're born female if you're living your life female you know look at those challenges and appreciate the extent to which there are opportunities being a parent is an opportunity yeah having a raising a child being a housewife is an opportunity being a stripper or being a camp girl is an opportunity but also you know going to university hitting the book studying challenging yourself to reach a level of excellence challenging yourself not to just be a passenger in history but to be in the driver's seat taking an active rather than a passive role you know holding yourself to standards where you know you know not everyone gets to be napoleon in this life you know one person in a billion gets to be napoleon but you know you get to be the napoleon of your field you get to be the protagonist of your life you know within your small life within the small sphere where you're going to influence things you are going to be the most important person you are going to have you know power and influence and consequence for the people the people around you you know so you know take seriously this is your one life this is your one opportunity whether you become a librarian or you become a stripper whether you're celibate until marriage or you you literally become a prostitute you know all the temptations all the advantages and all the opportunities presented by the body you happen to be born into you have to treat them as positive opportunities to live a meaningful life and not let them be an obstacle to the life of the mind not let them be an excuse for you to live a fundamentally self-indulgent life in which you dissipate the intellectual potential that every single one of you was born with even if you exercise that potential so little at this point that you don't know just how far you can take it you don't know yet what it is that you're capable