Patreon Q&A Part 6 (Four Questions in 22 Minutes)

the Q&A is still not over um just got
back from the gym I'm gonna try to address four questions this time instead of just two I'm gonna try to do it relatively rapidly I warned you guys back when we had part one of the Q&A that there would be something like 999 installments in this one um we'll see how it goes when we get to 998 um first question is combining several people's questions into one I get asked about basically how I prune my social network some people give me compliments on this and some people complain because they find it offensive it's true on the one hand that I am constantly initiating new cooperative relationships with people on the Internet and that's a big part of politics is reaching out to people and saying hey let's make something positive happen together and the other hand people have seen me cut those joy shapes off where I say no this is past the point of diminishing returns nothing positive come from it so I'm not talking to this person anymore I'm no longer trying to initiate a cooperation or collaboration with them and now as soon as you get to the point of managing hundreds of online relationships let alone thousands you have to do that but I think it's also just something its intrinsic to politics itself and it's really part of having a businesslike attitude towards the world it's very sad to me when I see people of my generation who think of the world in terms of allies and enemies it's not really the case I mean whether it's business or politics is a question of who can I cooperate with and who can I not cooperate with and you know if there's someone I can't cooperate with that doesn't mean they're bad it doesn't mean they're evil it doesn't mean I hate them it doesn't mean we have a personal conflict of any kind it just means we can't cooperate I can't we can't make something positive happen together and that's it and that for me is the threshold of cutting them off and moving on and not wasting time so I mean one person wrote I think he's offended um you know he referred to my having quit a Facebook group was to think vegan skeptics or something he said oh well you know you said a bunch of people in the group didn't know what they were talking about then you quit the group AHA sounds like something I do um for one thing I mean you know this was true when I was involved with Buddhism this is true when I was involved with uh ecology you know Green Party politics when have you you know you look around you reach out to people in a positive way and say oh well you know who's here who's in the room is there anyone here I can build a positive relationship it it is there anyone here I can make something positive happen with in terms of cooperation or collaboration and if there isn't now you leave the room doesn't mean you leave angry it just means you've drawn that conclusion and you're gonna move on so you know I think that's strange and startling to some people but as I say I have actually gotten compliments on it from some people also people who've watched me online and have senior that works I I guess I won't name who but one of my fellow youtubers said to me you know in appreciation he said he realized now like you know at a certain point he said I realized now that you know you're not just constantly initiating this type of cooperation but you've also kind of mastered one to cut people off and he said that he needed to learn how to do that I think because he was still managing kind of unreasonable requests unreasonable demands on his time from all kinds of different people and he was still laboring to make himself understood in communicating with people who were not sincerely interested in understanding him and you know that's frustrating that's not real business that's not real politics that's not real anything and it's not an effective use of the Internet it's not even an effective use of a cocktail party you need to go face-to-face the cocktail party as I say it's a lower criteria not talking about friends and enemies not even type of friendship you know but you're definitely not talking about allies and enemies or what have you who could I work with who can I collaborate with who could I connect it with an who can I not uh so look I mean again if any of you guys want to be offended at any particular instance of that if some Facebook group I quit or what-have-you now you got to think about it from my perspective I joined a given Facebook group for a reason currently I'm really in China I'm not using Facebook at all by the way Facebook is not a very effective tool for meeting people making friends or allies but any any medium any forum any discussion group like that you know there's a limited number of people who are active in there you go in you see who they are do you have any common ground you can build on and if not keep it moving um I mean the good thing is you guys can hear the tone of my voice as I say this is something I've contacted thousands of people in total this way and you know there's a minority within a minority you can you can make something positive happen with and why do I have an interview you know there's a guy named violent vegan why do I have an interview with him on my channel because he he was willing and able to cooperate with me a lot of other people who I might like you know who I might want to even be friends with but who couldn't get their act together do that I'd be happy to talk to him again and be happy to record another Skype conversation with him and put it on my channel why because I can because he's somebody I can cooperate with I mean politically do I even know how much we haven't come not really you know what I don't know him that well I don't know his political views that well I don't think of him in terms of an enemy or an ally um but he's someone I can cooperate with so I will and that's that's as I say I used this phrase all the time that's me going around with an open heart and open mind and trying to make the best of connections with my fellow human beings but sure it's also a very low criterion if I if I can't cooperate with you the threshold is pretty low as soon as it's clear I can't have positive cooperation with you and it's over and there's there's just no point in my spending one minute writing you an email because I could be writing that email to a lot of other people who would value my time and it would sincerely like to communicate with me cooperate with me or organize political action so alright I think this is not the order I'd planned alright Madalena writes in a you guys already know my Madalena by her first name at this point she is asking about my studying method so I assume she means for for a language primarily not for history and politics and she talks about her own struggles with studying at the computer and so on look the truth is the methods I used the study were very different for each of the languages that I have studied and this point that list of languages is frightening Li long and it's been different because my goals have been different because the languages themselves have been different and because the nature of my motivation has been different and one of the things that I've said openly here even now in China is that I don't want to learn Chinese it's both true past tense and present tense I didn't want to learn Chinese and I still don't I am I am doing it anyway but my motivation for Chinese is completely different from my motivation for a language like Polly Polly is an ancient dead language mostly associated with Buddhism and it comes from India in terms of geography it's not an East Asian language it's a South Asian language you know with lotion probably for a full year in Laos the first whole year I was really ambivalent about whether or not I wanted to learn Lao at all whether or not I should be learning Lao whether or not studying that language was a waste of my time and I was studying Pali and what have you now why was that I was really thinking maybe I should switch to Burmese language of Myanmar maybe I should switch to Cambodian you know it was the feeling that Cambodia's history and culture and politics were deep and huge whereas Laos was sort of small and crowded and uh you know not as many centuries to work on you know and obviously the temptation of Myanmar at that time Myanmar still had a civil war going on and the prospects for humanitarian work connected Myanmar or in some ways very appealing so for a whole year I was I was studying Lao was speaking it at the market I was buying mangos using that language but I was not highly focused and committed on Lao when I was in bivolo but whether or not that was the right language should be learning and then you know I was dragged into a police station by corrupt policemen who tried to extort money out of me and speaking Lao as best I could I handled that threat I was talk to them I remember that day when I got home and I won by the way I didn't pay a dime and I really outsmarted them it'd be very difficult to tell the story but what I did was very clever and the police themselves were delighted at it when they figured out how I beaten them sort of beating them at their own game they were laughing and smiling I said oh wow okay you know you really pulled this off and they invited me to kind of get involved with them in a different scam very peculiar story anyway hey man lotion police officers nicest nicest bunch of guys who ever tried to extort money out of me um but that that did end in my favor but obviously in terms of the language that was a huge challenge it was said I remember I got home from that I looked at the books on my table and I thought look either I'm all the way in or all the way out because the type of danger I had to manage their political danger and this kind of thing I couldn't anymore be sort of halfway committed to studying the language either it was Laos now either committed that country in that language or I pack up and leave now like you know whether it's Cambodia or Myanmar you know I couldn't I couldn't remain indecisive and so from that day forward then all my study methods changed and my whole emphasis changed I switch to studying Lao so this I mean obviously this is not the answer you want to hear currently I am in the classroom with the teacher face to face speaking and studying and practicing Chinese for four hours a day five days a week that's a huge burden the amount of studying I've been doing outside of class has been very little mostly due to illness I was very sick for quite a long time I'm not sure right now I'm gonna switch it up again I'm aware with all the languages I've studied them aware of my own strengths and weaknesses in some ways I have a natural advantage with a written language and so then you have the question are you gonna force yourself to work against your strengths in working on spoken language or you're gonna take advantage of your strengths and plunge deeper into the written language etc etc I guess the one the one thing I'd say is that in the approach to studying languages the mistake most people make is of searching for simplicity they want to simplify the study itself and simplify the information they're studying and simplicity is your enemy with languages the way the brain works is that we remember things we access information and we learn information through associations between things so the more complex associations you have the better you're able to both learn retain and use that information memorizing one fact in isolation is much less useful to you than having complex network of thoughts ideas in fact the connect to that so plunging into the complexity of language and meaning rather than trying to simplify things like most people the first stage is okay here's a complex part of language I'm gonna simplify it and write it down and exclude most information so that it's easier for me to learn that's almost the opposite of what you want to do and even with something like you know the Chinese characters I break them down in my analysis so there's more and more information to learn so that I learned the components that make up the character multiple meanings a whole history etymological information about the word etc and it's range of meaning so even though you're remembering more you're memorizing more you're also learning a complex cluster of ideas instead of having an isolated factoid information that's harder for you do to actually work with okay ultra I may be mispronouncing your name oh sure I asked the question what do you think about studying psychology and university I'm really interested in it but my parents are very skeptical about its usefulness and my future employment now a shrah I do not know what country you're living in and you know obviously I don't know your exact age the single greatest piece of advice I can give you is to meet the people face the face who actually have the jobs in that sector and to get them in a situation where they can really be honest with you that's not easy it's in some cultures it's more difficult like in British culture to sit down with someone who's you know a psych major who's gone on to do some kind of work after being a psych major and to get them to really talk about the way in which their job sucks the way in which their life is difficult in British culture that's very difficult to do I'd say it's easier in American culture from one culture to another you can compare different cultures under what caught in what circumstances can you sit down and really get an honest statement from someone about their career about their work challenges in their life I knew several people who were psych majors in Victoria BC one guy was completely miserable he worked with drug addicts formerly homeless drug addicts psychological counseling for them and he you know obviously it devastated his whole life long term he would just say things like there was a zero percent recovery rate he was talking these people but he felt nothing he was doing helped them and nothing positive came out of it whatsoever the type of counseling or guidance he was giving them that this was kind of a terrible force now not everyone feels that way Jill I'm sure you could talk to someone who done a similar job and you felt they were really making a very meaningful difference in the world when I was taking the tests the aptitude test to join the army the guy who literally sat next to me writing the tests he was a psych major in a psych background and he had been doing exactly the same work I just described for several years there's two different guys and so I talked with him a little bit and obviously the reason why he was joining the army was that he also felt that his life and talents have been totally wasted as a psych major and again he mostly dealt with drug addicts and what have you now different strokes for different folks for me personally how would I have done in that line of work would my set of humanitarian instincts and research interests have found that rewarding I don't know but again talking to people who have actually walked that path that's the crucial step and also I mean it's funny because you both have to know how to not disregard advice when you hear it how to take seriously the hints and what they're telling you but on the other hand some people are gonna just give you propaganda so you need to know when to disregard information also when people just tell you oh it's wonderful mm-hmm you know when you can get honest intelligence out of people really knowing how to carry that around in your pocket and to be aware okay that's his that's his perspective based on his experience working with drug addicts but you know what about the other perspectives the other types of research or other types of applied psychology who else can I talk to you but anyway this is true of every field even including Buddhist philosophy by the way I talked to tons of people in that field and got a whole range of their impressions and most of them were miserable and just like the two psychologists most of them are completely miserable that field um and you know again some of some of the advice I took very seriously some of that I disregarded and I later regretted that I disregarded and some of it I disregarded I was completely right to disregard it because they were the people gave me the advice were insane or were eccentric so it was just terrible advice so yeah that's my approach to all all fields and all disciplines only problem being when you're walking into a field which is where there is nobody else who does what you did we use them really original then things get scary alright Miranda rights so this question is very salient to a lot of discussions have had on the channel lately and and here on patreon Miranda rights I guess I'll quote the whole thing Miranda starts by thanking me for my approach to the the wild talking about wild animals not domesticated animals and then in the middle of her comment she says quote but that being said it seems like if people start to think of farmed animals as having pet qualities they may be more likely to stop eating meat and other byproducts or that seems to be something that is working at least do you think we should continue these arguments about how caring and loving animals can be as they seem to reach people in remote emotional levels a close quote so she's asking you about this a business of presenting farm animals as equivalent to pet so arguing that a pig can be just as loving as a dog a piglet can be just as cute as a puppy etc etc so look I think the real question here is ultimately of harm and risk threats of violence within veganism there's a real harm there's real risk it really discredit us as vegans as you know I've dealt with this lately but I talked about it in the relatively distant past they may have used other examples when you look at the history of communism communists spent a great deal of time using violence against themselves communists killing their fellow communists horrifying that part of the history is truly I mean it's truly horrifying when you look at a an armed movement like the IRA the Irish independence movement the openly violent part they're Irish Benjamin again they spent a lot of their time killing their own people killing and persecuting their fellow members their RA and anyone who lived through that struggle and in living memory in recent decades a lot of them when they talk about it their main fear in life the fear they had to go to sleep with every night was not so much the fear of their enemy it was their fear of being killed or persecuted by their their friends by other people in the same movement of themselves so there are a lot of other examples of that so the tendency towards violence within veganism which you can see even on YouTube and you can see it on the people who threatened to beat me up threatened to kill me threatened to have me arrested you can see it in my own life but you can also see it in you know my critique of Gary Yourofsky my critique of other violent and pseudo violent movements in veganism there's danger there's risk there's an issue of being discredited there's real harm to the vegan movement as a whole now this by contrast you know it's safe to play with I don't think it harms veganism in that way even if it's kind of wrong or kind of dumb and it's also not I mean it's it's it's kind of a fiction that's not incompatible with the truth you can do both right you can talk about how cute a piglet is and at the same time you could say in the very next sentence you can talk about how wild boars live in the wild you know how what would the qualities of ferocity independence you know defiance dignity that this has is a wild animal you can do both something can be cute and at the same time have the dignity of being a real well I think it's really worth talking about that that wild boars eat meat and they eat large mammals and wild boars do try to kill human beings that you know in nature they're not our friends they're our enemies they literally prey on us when they have a chance in the woods and again I've actually had email from people writing in to me saying yea they know what that's like they know what it's like to be stalked by or attacked by a wild boar in the woods but still they can be cute I mean a baby lion can be cute and we can also recognize look in the in the wild lions are not our friends so in that sense even though you know I've come down in a logical way I've got a sort of very strong position on this this is a situation where you can to some extent play with this you can mix fiction in fact to some extent and there's not going to be real harm or risk that comes out of it however having said this I know I've said similar things recently we need to be very clear with ourselves and others when there is harm when there is risk when we're discrediting ourselves and when we're ultimately putting ourselves in peril as vegans and we're putting veganism as a social movement in peril and very clearly violence and defamation and pseudoscience give three examples pseudoscience like claim that eating garlic garlic contains a neurotoxin you know violence defamation pseudoscience there's real risk there's real harm these are things that really discredit us and these are things where we cannot have any compromise we can't have any mix of fact and fiction but look if you want to say that a piglet can be cute and loving just like a puppy okay you can do that also but obviously given the context of 2016 I've had to come down on YouTube and say very clearly the other side of the story that's been forgotten and how dogs behave in the wild is something human beings want to forget how pigs wild boars behave in the wilds and we want to forget and ultimately you know the cutesy poo discourse yeah it could open some doors it could make some people listen to reason who otherwise wouldn't have listened to reason however it is not rational itself once the door is open once they listen to reason then you have to be prepared to provide something truly rational truly reasonable truly convincing and that's not gonna be cuteness alone that's not gonna win the struggle for a vegan future thanks for listening to me guys this is not the first part not the last part of the Q&A I don't know how many more I'm gonna do but I hope you guys appreciate it I appreciate your questions I appreciate every person on patreon I appreciate every dollar I'm getting and I hope we are really building a crossroads a network of like-minded people that can accomplish something really positive in the future