Conflict: Taking Life Seriously… On Youtube.

this is coming to you live from the mazard family bedroom and as soon as we had the idea to uh just turn on the camera and start live streaming from bed melissa joked i guess this is the first time we've we've made youtube video in the bedroom and immediately i said oh no it's not and both of us could think of examples now the earliest one i can remember i said you remember the video that joe best was so offended by i don't even remember the topic there was a video we filmed both of us in bathrobes in white bathrobes in bed in a hotel room that was in beijing china hotel room in beijing i think that was the first bedroom video oh of course the whole golden age of my youtube channel in kunming my bed was in the background for half of those videos i did hundreds of videos i think of the bed so that was in a bedroom in front of a bed and whenever the whenever the bed sheets were wrinkled up i get comments from people like i can i can tell you've been putting work in and that bad like no like i've been i've been sleeping that's all i've been doing that bit but yeah actually um but quite a few different videos over the history of the channel when you made thousands of videos it's hard to remember them all and i remember oh no we did one game of thrones video a video talking about game of thrones uh with the both of us in bed so on and so forth anyway there's this really interesting comment remember the audience this is from a supporter on patreon who just uses the initials jmj now i only remember talking to this viewer within the last few weeks but this is evidently someone who's watched the channel for many years and this draws out i mean look part of what he's saying here is true and it's just interesting because it's true and then partly i think it's kind of misleading and wrong and that's worth talking about or reflecting on also but it's it's certainly a kind of stimulating and interesting observation that he's that he's offering in response to my um recent kind of one hour in-depth uh video which is titled megan phelps roper is wrong about everything now if you don't know who megan phelps roper is you'd have no idea what that video is about and also the title um it's kind of the opposite of clickbait it does tell you the topic of the video but it doesn't really give you a sense of how profound and in-depth the discussion is what that video gets into so i think um that video the video that he's responding to and then i'm going to respond to this comment from the audience um i think it is genuinely one of the most profound videos on the channel and also one of the videos of the most pragmatic value because it's talking about philosophy but it's time for philosophy in a way that's applied to your life and how you communicate with your own parents um how you communicate with your own friends your own brothers and sisters that kind of thing how you create conflicts how you manage conflicts once you've got them uh so on and so forth and you know if you if you care about politics if you care about taking life seriously as i'm saying here then you're going to be someone who has a lot of conflict you know so i'm going to read his comment i'm going to reply to it but i'm going to hint at what i'm really getting at in this video by just saying i don't think we get to choose as individuals whether or not we have conflicts in our life we get to choose if we're going to have meaningful conflicts or meaningless ones so jmj writes in as follows quote i watched this ted talk along with several of her interviews her points seemed to make sense so he's saying that the points made by megan phelps roper they seemed to make sense to him at the time you totally challenged her strategy and i need to re-watch your video to better grasp it what your video does for me is that it finally explains your years of conflict creating with other youtubers i remember you calling ryan from happy healthy vegan a piece of [ __ ] and it left me slightly horrified i thought to myself quote can't this guy just get along with others close quote so he's been watching the channel for years i don't know how many years ago that was five years ago uh i was enjoying your videos but such conflicts slash drama made me uncomfortable and left me hoping it would be the last conflict and that peace would ensue when all the vegan youtubers making collabs with each other would support and promote each other etc but then there would be conflicts with modvegan vegan gains and over the years numerous non-vegans as well now i can see it's a conscious strategy on your part to challenge people's beliefs to get them out of their comfort zone to perhaps make them change their minds by escalating a conflict it also shows you've got a strong personality and are used to confrontations i guess it's fair to say that wherever you go you find imperfections things to be improved and you try to change things by creating slash participating in a conflict you aren't the meek type of person to compromise and just pretend to get along so it's a lifetime of disagreement and conflict for you right now both melissa and i had a lot to say about this the moment i just read it out loud to her in bed as we were lying down and going to sleep and as described i decided to uh get the camera set up and uh and live stream this this commentary this reaction um the first thing i i disagree with here now again obviously part of what he's saying is right partly it's interesting for me because that was not on my mind at all when i was recording the earlier video i was not thinking about or reflecting on my experience in those kinds of conflicts with other vegan youtubers or with non-vegan youtubers at all um so it wasn't something i was implicitly thinking about or talking about and also of course it wasn't what i was explicitly uh presenting an argument about but i do think in broad brushstrokes he's right that this video in case you don't understand my modus operandi here if you don't understand what it is i'm doing how i engage with ideas how i engage political conflicts and how i how i confront other youtubers but also mainstream political leaders you know how i confront bernie sanders you know anyway just say it goes far beyond the way i address my commentary to my fellow vegans how i address kevin smith um and for the record i asked kevin smith if he would officiate at our wedding because he does officiate weddings i wrote to kevin smith and said look you're vegan we're vegan you're an atheist we're atheists you're a youtuber i'm a youtuber okay why don't you officiate at our wedding when we get married presumably in la i don't know if we'll be in los angeles or where we're gonna be but we're gonna get married somewhere uh you know okay we can have a catered vegan event melissa and i and kevin smith if you don't know who kevin smith is don't bother googling it it's not important but you know i i joked to melissa i was like well it's possible he'll get back in touch with us to officiate the winning because he does like to officiate weddings and as mentioned he's vegan and vegan but it's also possible he remembers my videos criticizing him because kevin smith does google his own name i think he watches every single youtube video every single podcast about him and it's been shown he he makes fun of himself he seems to read every twitter comment like really obscure you know criticism he seems to seek out and respond and he even does mine in the comments section on his own channel on youtube like yeah yeah yeah so i was like well it's possible that my harsh honest criticism of uh of kevin smith will [Laughter] he might refuse to officiate our wedding and who knows maybe worse maybe he'll gate crash our wedding maybe he'll actually try to sabotage our i don't know um he doesn't seem like the vengeful type but anyway yeah so um you know some of you might be expecting me to just agree with this and again partly i think oh wow what an interesting kind of observation to take this analysis i did was talking about you know conflicts with your parents with your brothers with your sisters with your coworkers with friends with people you care about maybe with your university professors and talking about the way in which politics on the most intimate scale of those direct personal relationships how it does and doesn't relate to the grandiose scale of the fate of nations shall we say that was really what was on my mind the video to look at that and then say oh you can use this as an analysis of what's been happening in the last five years the last eight years on the abella seal youtube channel now this is the first thing i react to kind of negatively where i say oh no this is this is off base so you don't you don't quite get it obviously this guy is the best of intentions i'm not describing better than you said but he's partly right he's probably wrong where he says quote i guess it's fair to say that wherever you go you find imperfections comma things to be improved and you try to change things by creating or participating in a conflict period now that makes me think of somebody who works in architecture or interior decor you know kind of walking around looking at the brick work looking at the ceiling looking at the you know looking at the paintings of well you know this could be improved well you know uh the drapes don't really match the carpet no pun intended you know i feel like to be to be walking around finding fault with uh the furniture you know this this table it just doesn't go with this is the image that comes to my mind when i think of uh somebody who finds imperfections everywhere and by the way i mean it was partly his job but my father was a little bit like that my father could walk around a museum and he could notice the problems with the lighting you know very technical things the lighting is not correct um you know okay so you know this is a certain kind of personality that's not who i am at all like neither on camera nor off camera and it's certainly not what i do as a creative artist as a filmmaker as a youtuber as a broadcaster as a kind of radio talk show host you know i mean my role resembles each of these things to to some extent um when i see a self-professed science channel like a natural vegan someone who identifies as doing a science education show as being an advocate for science and rationality i see a science youtuber promoting the notion that you can and should take antidepressants during pregnancy this is someone who in the past made youtube videos talking about the health effects of uh nutrasweet and splenda artificial sweeteners this is someone who apparently allegedly or ostensibly did the research and then presents you with the hard-hitting facts about the science behind nutrition organic farming and different kinds of uh sugar substitutes that's that's how she identifies that so she presents now anyone in this audience could throw in an avalanche of sarcastic comments well yeah that's that's a small percentage of what she does who she really isn't she's really about if that's that is ostensibly it's not actually who she is on youtube and she's saying it's fine for one thing she's saying it's fine to take antidepressants period then she's saying it's fine to take antidepressants during pregnancy that's not an imperfection i'm finding i'm not walking around a palace and finding cracks in the cement and saying that the the drapes don't match the carpet or the style of the furniture doesn't match the pool something no okay there's a really clear fissure here between right and wrong good and evil and in her own idiom because she's a consequentialist this has consequences this is gonna harm people this is going to make the world a worse place and it's going to directly impact people's lives right this is not you know now now again sorry i'm not offended by it but when he describes me as a person who is creating conflict or participating in conflict and that it's a life of uh disagreement you know for me of finding finding fault so did i create that conflict and i'm saying no like sincerely like i'm really asking the question you know how do you describe my role in that you know i'm telling the truth and it's not trivial and i'm not finding fault and it's not an imperfection and i'm not even saying you can improve she can't you know there's no possibility of her trying to group i'm trying to save people's lives and i'm really trying to challenge the ethical compromises that define the culture and society and the epoch that i live in and i'm saying to people again again don't compromise don't lie to yourself don't lie to others don't don't live a lie there's a price and you know yeah sure in the most extreme cases the price is the difference between life and death but more often it's going to be a loss of your personal integrity right it's going to be a life without integrity being contrasted to a life that does have integrity now you know this is not the only example there are myriad throughout the whole uh history of the of the youtube channel um a conflict that i created you can put it this way is that there was at the time a well-known and successful fitness youtuber a guy who talked about weight loss and muscle again he was a male bodybuilder and the vast majority of people who watched this channel had no idea about his connection to neo-nazi ideology had no idea about his connection to racism and far-right ideology and he was friends with based on what was told both by him and by richard he was friends with vegan gaines aka richard despite the fact that he was an overt racist white supremacist in this way and i put together the videos that demolish his reputation and i think it's fair to say they they ended his career i've heard that back from many different people from many different quarters and richard continued to support him and continue to promote him even after he was outed in this way now you know again sir this is not something you know if any of you haven't seen those videos you can go back and watch them but i mean you know the details are not so relevant this is not something small this is not subtle there's not finding a crack or or fissure you know it's it's you know what what can i say you know all i had to do was use quotations of this guy put them together in a video people requested that i he then deleted all these videos from his own channels plural and actually got requests to put it up unedited to have them speaking or without any edits and i did that among the people who request that was richard vegan gains he said that you know obviously the other side so the other guy was like oh no no like isil misrepresented me by using like little clips of the condos i know i didn't so i remember even richard wanted to see the whole thing uh unedited and so on not that there was just one video in questions guys many many videos and um his girlfriend fiance of the time she was also involved in this far-right racist ideology so you know when i made videos really tackling those people really confronting those those people and exposing them for what they were i can't i can't describe this as you know finding imperfections neither with people nor with politics or ideas these are major serious you know political challenges of our time and now not everybody can do what i do they have to ask question if not you then who you know if if i'm not going to do it and with any of these i'm sorry was there someone else who was going to take on a natural beacon on the issue of antidepressants and brain damage being caused by antibodies was there someone else who was going to take on jacqueline glenn and mike the vegan about the issue of marijuana and brain damage being caused by marijuana and the scientific evidence that i i know mike the vegan saw my critique because i heard back from him i know jacqueline glenn heard my critique because i heard back from her right so i know that critique reached those people and reached thousands of other people in the audience this is not finding a minor imperfection so another example be the ayahuasca um fad you know i have a very hard anti-drug position and all these issues and i really went after and seriously criticized people who were glorifying and promoting the use of ayahuasca so i'm not walking around some beautiful palace finding fault with the the the decorations right here's the other thing this this is going to sound simple but it's deep um it's shallow and it's deep at the same damn time as i used to say you know if your brother is a drunk if your brother is descending further and further into alcoholism for the sake of iron let's presume you're both adults you only see him every so often you see him at thanksgiving and [Laughter] you see him on certain kinds of holidays and occasions once every couple of months you know you're gonna be encouraging to your brother you're gonna be tolerant to your brother are you gonna take the attitude that if your brother just keeps on drinking if he keeps on going further down this spiral it doesn't hurt you it doesn't it doesn't hurt me doesn't ruin my life why should i even be rude why should i ruffle any feathers why should i interrupt why should i stand up or get out of line right if he if he drinks himself to death if he ruins his life if he squanders his intellectual potential uh being a drunk you know okay it's very easy to say it doesn't hurt me if you get drunk if you're an alcoholic and you know what it's much harder to say it does hurt me as the old song lyric goes when things go wrong go wrong with you don't you know it hurts me too it's so much harder and it's so much realer to say to your brother can't you see it's hurting me can't you see it's chewing me up inside can't you see how terrible i feel because you are an alcoholic because you're drinking this way because you're ruining your life now it's not going to ruin my life you know your brain damage is not my brain damage your diarrhea is not my diarrhea your vomiting is not my vomiting and your death is not my death of course you know um but you know to say to someone you know it breaks my heart to see you squandering your intellectual potential this way it breaks my heart to see you taking everything good about this life and throwing it away and flushing it on the toilet for the sake of a jug of whiskey or you know whatever his poison may be now well you know what kind of person takes option a and what kind of person takes option b a lot of us grow up with this false ideology of tolerance that what you ought to do in relation to all these human vices is is tolerate them oh we can all get along and your your brother can go gambling every weekend and and drink whiskey every wednesday or whatever drinks vodka on mondays and whiskey on wednesdays or you know whatever you know your brother can be a drunk and an alcoholic and that you should just ignore it and smooth things over and get along with him and be kind and encouraging to everyone everyone should tolerate everyone else's vices and together we can all go to hell in a hand basket you know like society can go to hell with nobody taking responsibility for anyone else nobody caring about the consequences of anyone else's actions you know like as if i'm just gonna paint my own side of the fence and it doesn't matter if my brother is ruining the other side of the fence well it's the same fence and my brother screws up the paint job i'm gonna have to do it again you know i'm sorry but it's the it's the most i was in the world but i mean the judgment is ultimately on what kind of person i'm going to be i don't get to choose what kind of person my brother is going to be now i think the type of person who embraces that fundamentally libertarian fundamentally interco-capitalist view of the world that you should just let people drink themselves to death let people become drug addicts i mean really that's bedrock for both libertarianism and integral capitalism they want to decriminalize heroin cocaine everything and let let everybody kill themselves you know that it just it shouldn't matter to you anyway okay well that that's one type of person and i'm telling you that's not me you know i care and in a sense i care because i don't think i'm that special you know what i mean i got a lot of brothers okay one of my brothers is so severely mentally [ __ ] that he's never spoken a word in any language he never learned to speak english you never learned his beginning language i've studied a few languages all right you know so i do have one brother severely uh mentally disabled but you know if you're looking around at my brothers and sisters you know how much difference in intellectual potential is there between us like genetically or something like in terms of how we were how we were born well i can tell you something all they might as well be [ __ ] compared to me now because of how they live their lives because of the consequences of the the decisions they've made right they're all older than me talking about guys 15 years old had a lot more years to develop themselves you know okay you know now look it's not my decision to make you know it's i don't have to live with the consequence i don't right the decision i can make is just whether or not i care the decision i'm gonna make is of my own attitude and i'm saying yeah you're a better person if you can reach out to your brother and say you know it hurts me so much to see you drinking this way and you know what i don't feel like a bad person when i reach out to a natural vegan and say it hurts me so much to see you embracing pseudoscience this way it hurts me so much you're a you're a science broadcaster or science education youtuber and you have in the past researched things and debunked things and taken risks you know like you know taking an edgy position on organic farming and about uh artificial sweeteners and it really hurts me to see you doing the wrong thing and the worst part of all is one i know you're giving yourself brain damage two i know you're giving your unborn child brain damage now the child's born she's taking these drugs during pregnancy doing harm to the fetus doing harm to the embryo whatever i say you know and three i know with an audience the size of our audience this has consequences there are going to be other women who embrace these excuses you're propounding at least as certainly as promoting cigarettes marijuana drugs or alcohol to say look it hurts me too you know i'm affected i care you know you know so so so what is that are you gonna say that's a more compassionate person a more conservative you know look what you can characterize this you know in in different ways but i can't characterize it as someone who's walking around finding imperfections you know i don't i don't think that's i don't think that's what i'm doing and either a deep or or a shallow level here now look um when i reached out to aaron janus when i reached out to vegan gains richard and when i criticized them all right um and you know jacqueline glenn she's an example this too part of what i'm saying to these people is you have an amazing opportunity and you're squandering it you know um i think i've said that in those exact terms publicly and privately to all three of those people you know you know and you don't know how long it's gonna last i mean maybe for aaron it's already over maybe for richard it's already over now too but for some number of years you had this amazing opportunity and yeah sure it's an opportunity to get a certain message out to an audience it's an opportunity as a as a creative artist but of course it's also an opportunity to become a better person instead of a worse one right now you can say i'm creating conflict or i'm escalating conflict from my perspective in all these cases i'm acting with real concern and let's let's be real to my knowledge all three of those people they were really emotionally hurt by what i did and richard can do this tough guy act um i think it's fair to say that both richard and his wife they were really hurt by the by the critique i directed against and whatever i mean frankly i mean you know this is this is certainly non-falsifiable because richard he pretends to be this tough guy if he comes out and says on camera uh know that i i it didn't hurt him anyway i'm sorry i wouldn't i wouldn't believe him and you know whatever i've i have i have the the evidence i have before my eyes in terms of how they how they reacted to it inasmuch as richard is capable of feeling pain you know i think it did i think it really did hurt right but i am asking a really important question that has really important consequences to him and frankly it's very close to being disappointed that your brother has become an alcoholic or your brother has become a gambler it's like look richard you really could have done something great with this i'll just mention to me like one example that i know i talked about with richard directly back today it's like well you know richard part of what you like to do is read these scientific publications i can remember him even reading uh autopsies you know kind of medical reports on particulars part of what you like to do is analyze these statistics i i have some university education that he doesn't but you know you don't really have the background or education in this you could take this interest you could develop it i suggested different kinds of university courses he could take whatever but you know he could build on that interest in the health sciences social sciences pardon me social science statistics you could take that you could move forward with it you know now i'm being real with you sure in some small part that's about how you inform the audience how you change the world the future of the vegan movement but for richard 99 of it if like from my perspective and why i'm saying that dan is about five years from now what kind of man are you going to be who are you going to become right when i'm talking to richard about not playing video games which is something back when we were friends i talked to him about now of course i've said it publicly and so on you know [Laughter] that's zero percent about the audience i don't want to be i don't care like it's not like he has to present an image of of moral purity for his audience it's a hundred percent about what kind of person you're going to be five years from now and let me ask you straight up in any of those three cases what if five years ago jacqueline glennon had followed my advice what if five years ago aaron janus had followed my advice what if five years ago vegan gains had followed my voice these would all be really really different people and are really profound and meaningful and important way so you know this stuff it really is sincerely motivated and it's not just trying to make the world a better place and it's not trying to score points it's not trying to create a conflict in a demonstrative way for the audience a lot of it is really about actually trying to make that particular person yeah give them the opportunity to question the decisions they've made the compromises they've made and uh and to become a better person to start making the right decisions start making different decisions and yeah you know so now the the side of the equation that jmj is correct about this writer this remember the audience writing it what he's writing about is it's certainly true that i do appreciate that you need a kind of jarring distantiation [Laughter] that most people are not really going to stop and reconsider their drinking habit without a fairly jarring distantiation where suddenly something happens where they stop and look in the mirror or reconsider you know i've known so many people who drink alcohol and if they're ever challenged on it in any kind they'll just say oh well i drink half as much as my boss at work oh you think i drink a lot you should see my brother toby he drinks more than they just have these relativistic justifications of well i know someone else oh you think i gamble a lot oh the other guy is down there so i know guys who gamble twice as much you know i mean it's so easy for people to relativize these things and and justify them and oh well if if you think i'm wasting my life by playing video games uh on the internet all the time and live streaming myself playing video games you know and then they justify it by comparing to someone else who's wasting their life even more and you know you know yes i do think that there's this very deep gulf in the world between people who are taking life seriously and people who never have and just to get someone to stop and reconsider how would i be living my life now if i took it seriously so digress you're still really brief and good about this i remember i once heard about a distant cousin of mine now i'm being i don't even know if i'm related to this guy by blood someone who's called a cousin of mine but we're either barely related or or not at all it's just some kind of family connection through something but disney i've never met the guy i've never talked to and you know um he attempted suicide he threw himself out a window and ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life so he survived falling out of a window but he was in a in a wheelchair throughout his life that's the story as it was told to me i said i never i never met the guy and i just really thought about you know if i were in a wheelchair you know what would i do with the rest of my life and you guys know video games are part of my childhood part of my teenage years too and it's just so clear it's like well on the one hand you can sink into self-pity and you can be an alcoholic in a wheelchair you know you know you can you can drink you can play video games you can feel sorry for yourself or you know you can just be completely resolute and self-disciplined and realize that the life of the mind that what really matters in politics and philosophy and all these things you know that's still there for you the real work is there to be done on this and i sat there and thought about that for a few minutes and then of course i looked at the life i was living like here and now the life i was living at that time and i realized how much worse the life i was living was compared to how i imagined myself living if i had an accident i was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life it's like wow i'm not living up to the standards i would have for myself for being a good person or being adequate if i were disabled and confined to a wheelchair like you know and you know you start you know you have to be self-critical you have to think well why am i so lazy or why am i well what what even you have to think what are the excuses i'm making for myself that i didn't even realize i was making you know um i talked to someone recently i'm not going to say this is i talked to someone recently who who had a um a near-death experience he was hospitalized and almost died and i talked about some similar experiences had in my own life and talked about the difference between how you feel about it now other people know i feel about it because other people see you in a hospital bed and they attribute things to it and maybe maybe you don't feel that way about it but the other people i feel you know um you know for most people who drink alcohol the problem is invisible they can't perceive the problem to them it's a non-problem for most people who eat meat and drink milk and eat yogurt it's a non-problem they think veganism is the problem they don't see they don't see um their own diet or their own ethical choices and their consequences you know as as the problem so i mean certainly funny if you're willing to get involved in vegan politics you are presumably already committed to getting involved with the the politics of confronting people in a jarring and distantiating way about their own ethical choices and specifically about ethical choices that they are blind to the significance of that they are self-selectingly blind that they they choose to be ignorant at the consequences so now you know vegan politics on one it's only one of many political irons i have the fire it's only one of many political you know interests i have um [Music] you know but i mean it's a very interesting sort of challenge here that jmj presents to me but what i feel like saying in reply is why doesn't everyone else live this way why doesn't everyone else live the way i do why aren't you reaching out to your brother and and saying you know it hurts me so much to see you squandering your intellectual potential this way all right and why doesn't everyone who knows richard knows vegan gains reach out to him and say it's basically the same thing it hurts me so much to see you squandering your intellectual potential this way yeah now you've got money now you've got fame i mean it doesn't have to worry about paying his rent so so on you know and this is what you're doing with your life you should have greater ambitions and again i'm being honest for me you know i can't say he he he must have ambitions to lead the vegan movement or he must have ambitions to to politically make a difference in canada and you guys might not have noticed this i never say on my channel that you you and you in the audience you must have political ambitions to make cambodia a better place or myanmar a better place or kazakhstan or kurdistan i talk about politics from all around the world i'm not gonna say you know i didn't say to richard look richard you have to go to syria and help refugees in the syrian civil war i don't say that right i mean i do think on a bedrock level on an inescapable level your commitment really has to be to this idea of who you are going to be who are you going to be five years from now who are you going to be 10 years from now 20 years from now when you're 65 years old when you're 75 years old now i'm gonna make the recklessly optimistic statement that once you're thinking that way once you're really committed to being to that that better person you could be that's when it starts to become thinkable maybe you should care more about syria maybe you should care more about myanmar maybe you should care more about cambodia or kazakhstan or kyrgyzstan or you know maybe your your ambitions to make the world a better place it starts to go far beyond your own alcoholic brother who's just one alcoholic perhaps to be your brother maybe you care about about helping other people you know in other ways also so we'll come back to it's already in the title of this video you know the most fundamental light motif here is that there is this fissure there's this deep divider cleavage between people who take life seriously and people who don't and you know i mean so someone like richard is a very strange example someone like aaron janis first example when you talk about vegans and vegan activists and vegan personalities you're talking about people who found one thing in life they take really seriously james aspie james aspie he takes veganism really seriously everything else in life apparently doesn't you know well you know i take life seriously like this matters to me i can't say to you it makes no difference to me if you're an alcoholic i can't say i don't care just because that doesn't harm me it it does matter you know um you know when you take life seriously if you see young people lying about the history of communism and converting other people to communism and building a new communist movement whether it's in the united states of america or in taiwan or in europe or what have you and you're in a position you're a position like myself where you already have many years of research many years of reading many years of expertise including the experience of living in communist countries i have all kinds of i have all kinds of ability to debunk that you know um what would my attitude be what would it say about me if i lived my life just just being well i don't care like as if you know the only point is for us to tolerate each other as if it does me no harm and it's no concern of mine if you you and you should be communists or indeed if high-profile famous influential and powerful people on youtube and in the world should be dragging other people into a revival of of communist ideology of course i care about that of course i should i should oppose it and again let me just ask if not you then who i mean if i'm not going to speak out against communism if i'm not going to speak out against fascism if i'm not going to speak out on first nations politics you know i have this history linking me to the study of korean ojibwe indigenous people in canada first nations american indians if i'm not gonna do that i can even ask people to ask you are you are you gonna stand up or you just stick with your your neck on those issues now one of the examples here this may seem trivial but i think it it illustrates this this deepest divide you know which isn't attached to any particular issue it isn't attached to communism and it isn't attached to alcohol versus sobriety it isn't attached to misinformation about antidepressants versus the horrifying real science and so the example mentioned by jmj is happy healthy vegan right okay why did i confront happy healthy vegan in the way that i did sorry am i getting to know ryan yeah that's that's the channel name you know okay you know i have i had i think just one debate with a communist on my youtube channel if there have been a second or third that weren't that memorable i've talked to others online but you go of course it hurts me to hear someone to meet someone who's throwing their life away who's ruining their life for this religion this ideology that might as well be religion the set of political beliefs um [Music] you know but it's a it's specifically a political ideology that ruined my own father's life okay now whatever my father could have been he wasn't because of communism all right let's let's put it that way and i mean my father would never be able to be honest with you about any of this stuff there was a stage at which my father was an aspiring actor in a shakespearean festival okay there was a stage at which my father applied for and received a scholarship to study hinduism okay study hindu philosophy not communist philosophy not not marxism you know now there is not a lot good about my father he's a terrible person already in that period i could tell you terrible things about him terrible things he did that a terrible consequence a lot of bad things about my father but whatever positive potentially had to do good in the world it was snuffed out you could say by his being seduced by communism or his commitment to communism but really it is like a religious conversion for him and he tried to raise me as his son he tried to raise me in the same religion that he had become committed to himself what kind of person would i be if i just stumbled through life and tolerated in this sense other people becoming victims of this same ideology other people converting to this religion when i know the harm it does and i really know and understand you know the ideology itself i understand it from the inside and from the outside i understand it from many different angles but like i even understand emotionally what people find compelling about it you know not just the dry textbook facts of history or something a lot of different angles i have okay you know why wouldn't i be concerned why wouldn't i care even if you're not my brother you know even if you're a complete stranger on the internet now you know i can't care about everyone there are limits to how much you can care and that's a that's a subject for another video and again if not you if not you then who you know if you're taking life seriously you really care about the future of the vegan movement and you know and understand what i know about the future of the being movement isn't there a similar kind of motivation in intervening and confronting people when you see them doing the wrong thing and taking the wrong path in the vegan movement and when you know you even know they have good intentions you know you know they have good intentions but you know to some extent they're ruining their own lives to some extent they're ruining the movement and you want to there are many examples of that sure ryan from happy ltv can i mention here because it's partly applicable that case i think a great example is my confrontation with cranky vegan so if you guys don't know who cranky vegan is that guy i really had to say to him look you don't seem to hear the words that are coming out of your own mouth but this is what you're saying in these videos you know this is going to have consequences for people it's going to have constant individual it's going to have consequences for individual people and their individual lives going to jail and it's also going to have consequences for the movement and as a consequence for you like you know um but you know that's a very pure example where it's about the future of the movement and none of you may believe me but my conflict with nina miranda that is was legitimately about contesting the future of the vegan move and i know nina and miranda they think they only have good intentions i mean still to this day they think they've done nothing wrong or they keep up the pretense you know but no i really had something important to say and i know it got to them because they responded to it and i know it got too close you know close was there from plant-based news i know what got to vegan cheetah also it was pointing the finger at those five people or something saying look you know you may not think you're doing something here um that's bad and evil and wrong but i'm gonna really explain to you what's going on in the movement and i'm sorry guys you can look back at the last eight years i wish i could sit here and tell you that i was wrong i wish i could sit here and tell you that my you know when you look back my critique of gary yourofsky my critique of gary francione my critique of nina miranda my critique of of any of these people you know i was really setting out the right warnings at the right time and in any of those cases even someone like gary yourofsky what if five years ago gary yourofsky had listened to and taken my advice how different would his life be how different would the whole vegan movement be james asked me what if five years ago he'd listen to my critique and you know any of these people down to including joey carbstrong or something like the advice i gave it was really needed it was really necessary it could really change the path these people were taking life and then the knock-on effects they've had for all the people they've they've influenced and the harm they've done in the movement and then again what the movement could have been you know but sure in the same way that i can say we'll never know the man my father could have become if he didn't become the victim of an evil ideology and to be fair if he didn't become himself an evil idiot because he did harm to others i mean he wasn't a passive victim he you know he was himself um he was himself one of the uh one of the people using this ideology to harm others let's put it that way you know well you can say the same thing about what happened within veganism in the last eight years yes that's simplifying a complicated story but it's a still a reasonable simplification so wouldn't you feel motivated to intervene and make that change if you could if you have that background and in terms of the conflict with ryan specifically with happy healthy vegan do you have any idea what depth of expertise and experience i have with buddhism it's a legitimate question like in terms of both how much i know and the scarcity of that knowledge the number of white people who speak english who have ever known more about buddhism than me in the in the history of the world like you're talking about teravata buddhism orthodox pali canon theravada buddhism i wish i could tell you there were just tons of people you could talk to about this stuff but one there were incredibly few people who did the work did the research and two most of them are insane and like not a little bit and say not slightly eccentric so you know i'm someone who actually has sane rational skeptical attitudes and who's done the research and studied the languages and lived in those countries now okay so if you have no again these are just parallels if you have my background and my understanding about antidepressant drugs what are you gonna do about it don't you feel there's an onus on you don't i feel pressure sorry i said don't i feel pressure but let me just tell you possibly i feel pressure to take what i know about antidepressant drugs and go out and change the world and go out and challenge the inertia and indifference and ignorance of the society and culture i'm living in i don't know what to do with that it's a burden on me that i live with i feel an onus on me i feel a burden on me because of what i know about communism to go out and debunk communism to go and challenge the evolving and expanding culture of communism in our times you know i feel motivated to go out and try to make the difference that i can make in some cases it's the difference that i alone can make in some cases the difference where there are a few other people in the world but apparently none of them are motivated like i don't have competition in these any of these fields of uh of human endeavor and sure you know um it's very strange for me to be sitting there and talking about buddhism with someone like ryan from happy healthy vegan and you know if you know what i know about buddhism and you take life seriously how do you feel when you see sam harris a leader in the atheist movement peddling and promoting buddhist meditation peddling and promoting specific forms of buddhism you know bad things about you know the dirt about i know things about buddhism not just generally but specifically you know the specific speakers sam harris is having in the specific lie as sam harris himself is telling or that he and his his guest doing the interview are telling i know the harm it does in the same way that i know the harm i know the danger of uh of communism and in the same way i think it's fair to say now looking back at last five years looking like back in the last eight years it's fair to say that i knew the harm of what was going on in the vegan movement of what was going wrong with veganism and of the tremendous positive opportunities that were squandered you know like tragically you know i thought i knew that tragically i was right so he says just gonna read this and wrap it up quote but then there would be conflicts with mod vegan vegan gains and over the years numerous non-vegans as well now i can see it as a conscious strategy on your part to challenge people's beliefs to get them out of their comfort zone perhaps to make them change their minds by escalating a conflict um i feel like there's a kind of objective reality to what he's saying there like it's objectively true from his perspective sitting on the audience and yet for me subjectively it's totally untrue i tried so hard to get along with richard vegan i tried so hard to get along with margaret modvegan you know do you think lying about cocaine and heroin and you know what's now the fentanyl drug addiction epidemic run out of control the specific lies she was telling about drugs and you know i know she was also committed to that kind of position on on antidepressants i mean it's not surprising if you're wanting to tell those lies in favor of cocaine you're going to tell them how much easier to tell them in favor of of antidepressants [Music] you know i tried so hard to work with these people not against them and of course aaron janus is an example i tried so hard to get along with aaron janice i tried so hard to get along with henia penumania i tried so hard to cooperate with people and to see the good in them and modvegan had sent me a long series of completely insane completely dishonest completely despicable statements in writing related to the drug addiction issue hard drug issue what i want to say and i invited her to come on the podcast and have a discussion about it to say it was in good faith is an understatement i really wanted to assume the best about her i knew okay this is what she did her master's degree research on i wanted that to be a positive cooperative collaborative discussion like that really was my perspective so i'm just saying like you're saying this is an intentional strategy and i think like it's totally fair from someone for someone in the audience to sit there and you can watch that live stream i did with mod vegan you can sit there and watch that and you you could objectively say oh well this is isil intentionally escalating the conflict and so on and i've got to say for me living through the first person not at all not at all it's me i went into that really genuinely and even during that conversation i feel i'm de-escalating the confidence and i'm letting her get away with things there's flagrantly false and dishonest about you and you know and i'm from my perspective i've been trying to be kind and encouraging and and see the best in people and for so many years i was trying to build a movement while recognizing that each person was an eccentric with you know mutually irreconcilable values separating them from every other eccentric who had some uh potential to contribute something positive whether that was to the future of the vegan movement or the future of the atheist movement or the future of the democracy movement if i can think of myself as being now an activist for for direct democracy or for some kind of return to what it was that managed to get right in uh in ancient greece and realm which i do as i get older now i don't think of myself more and more as a as an activist in that sense i cannot say a classicist because that word has other meanings and connotations and denotations but yeah i'd be very interested in working with people um who share that kind of interest that kind of vision of the past and that kind of vision of the future um deepening and making making democracy meaningful i'm tempted to say making democracy great again but but no it really is it really is a vision of the future and not uh not about glorifying the past okay guys um he closes his comment by saying um you know it's a conscious strategy on my part and that therefore quote as i'm quoting him he says quote i guess it's fair to say that wherever you go you find imperfections you aren't sorry it shows that you have a strong character he says you aren't the meek type of person to compromise and pretend just to get along so therefore it's a lifetime of disagreement and conflict for you right well let me ask you in the audience this question if you were living in saudi arabia how much conflict would you have with the culture you happen to be living in you having to be situated for you happen to be born into if in a different life you were born in saudi arabia if in a different life you were born in istanbul turkey very interesting example right now because it's sort of teetering on the edge um it's not as bad as saudi arabia yet but it's gotten worse and worse within my lifetime you know or perhaps to be fair or perhaps yeah i mean sorry even that i had said to say because it was really bad in the past of my lifetime but anyway maybe we should just say it has become more and more obvious how terrible the situation in turkey is i'm more comfortable with that than actually saying it's gotten worse i think things really were bad before but we had reasons to kid ourselves about it we have reasons to have kind of false optimism okay so if you were living in turkey now and you spoke turkish fluently how are you going to live your life as a dissident and as a dissident intellectual what i have to say to you is that i'm not seeking out a life of conflict and i've just narrated for you i'm not even really seeking out a conflict with someone like a natural vegan you know i'm really not okay but i am more alienated from my own society and i am more alienated from the other members of the vegan movement you know i am more alienated from each of these social contacts certainly i am more alienated from the other youtubers who talk about atheism and call themselves activists for the atheist movement i am more alienated from jacqueline glenn from the amazing atheist right i am more alienated from my own culture than you would be from the culture of 21st century turkey so i have to in this way live my life in a perpetual state of conflict whether i bring that to others or others bring it to me i don't have a choice but the choice i do have is whether the conflict in my life is going to be meaningful or meaningless and i can look at a conflict like a conflict about the future of psychiatry the future of prescription drugs for depression you know and i can say yes this is a conflict worth having there's something to win and there's something to lose and i can commit my time and energy to it and i can care about the outcomes of that conflict whether it's with one person or with a thousand you know whether it's it's for one person's life it's to save one person's life and that's not an exaggeration and without getting into uh personal details of what people have known and the consequences you know whether or not it's to save just one person's life or it's to lead the audience through a kind of political exercise that's going to impact 100 people's lives a thousand people's lives ten thousand people's lives you know and so on i can say yes yes yes clearly this is a meaningful conflict i think it's harder to commit to the notion that just reaching out to your own brother and letting him know when things go wrong with you it hurts me too don't say it's none of my business don't say it doesn't harm me that i don't suffer when you get drunk and you go gambling all right it hurts me it hurts me more than you know it hurts me because i care to find the meaning in that and to commit to that as a meaningful conflict i think that is a test of character each of you have to examine in your own hearts whether or not you've got what it takes and when you've examined that maybe you can look again a little more charitably at the type of conflict i had with richard with vegan gains the type of conflict i had with mod vegan at the type of conflict i had with aaron janus and even if it hurt those people even if jacqueline glenn broke down weeping and responsibilities even if unnatural vegan felt betrayed and hurt and shed her tears over the criticism i brought to her channel okay it is fundamentally about that same spirit that same test of character um it's meaningful and it matters to me because i care and i care that you are squandering your intellectual potential and when you scale that up it means that we are squandering our political potential