Why I Hate Incels: the Politics of Self-Pity

there's an interesting moment in the manifesto of the unabomber if you don't know who the unabomber was and who the bomber is he's a former university professor who's now been in prison for many many years ah there's a moment in his own manifesto in which he reflects nobody would have paid attention to us nobody would have cared about our political perspective if we hadn't started killing people now the element of deception here is that throughout his manifesto throughout that phase of his career as a terrorist frankly um he pretended that he represented a large group of people or or some kind of organized political party or faction um his his early messages as a terrorist were always signed fc uh you might think that stands for football club but it stood for freedom club he represented himself as a club of people uh and he was one man entirely alone there was never even one other member or one other acolyte one other follower however so in one sense what he was writing to the authorities in these letters was intentionally deceptive and misleading but there's also something unusually honest in him saying that nobody would have ever cared about his manifesto no one would have cared about his philosophy nobody would have cared about his politics if he had not started killing people not just violence in a vague sense but specifically murdering people now when you look back at the last 20 years of what happened in the vegan movement and you look ahead to the next 20 years of the vegan movement it's remarkable that we as vegans aren't thought of that way right like it's amazing that nobody or nobody with a high enough public profile nobody notorious enough in the news in the press has taken that step that you've seen gary yourofsky hint at again and again that there's something inevitable uh to vegans actually taking up arms taking up guns holding people at gunpoint and demanding that uh they close down slaughterhouses or so and so on now of course i'm the last person to say that veganism has no history of terrorism whatsoever i've discussed many strange examples uh on my channel however you know it's fair to say that the in-cell movement in cells the whole political discourse around in cells would not exist if they had not started killing people right whereas veganism has not been tainted in this way it's not thought of in this way yet now those of you have been in the vegan movement for five years or ten years you might remember there was one news story that came out of france this is now closer to 10 years ago from memory i'd yeah it's nine years ago something like that there was one news story in france of parents who malnourished their own baby and social services got involved the parents were vegan now i remember responding to this on my blog before i even had a youtube channel and i pointed out that very few of the journalists commenting on this had even read the judge's decision which i read in french my french was not great but i could still i could still read and understand that in french and i remember quoting that and talking about it on my blog before i had a youtube channel so only nine years ago um that was one case of what i would presume would be one pair of very eccentric hippie parents who were malnourishing their child and the judge himself said a vegetarian diet is not on trial here really meaning a vegan diet is not on trial here the judge probably didn't know the difference the nutritional adequacy of a vegan diet is not each other this is just about two parents who happen to be incompetent irresponsible and and how we deal with that as a society how we deal with that as a legal system as a child care system you know so and so forth but i've got to tell you i mean for at least five years but probably it's more like 10 years that one case that went to court and what the press said about it it created a cloud over veganism not just in france but in america like to my knowledge around the world maybe it wasn't that influential in india or china i don't know but you know that this this one case and those aren't those aren't people who decide to become violent so when you look at a phenomena like the incel phenomena um to my knowledge there were really just two in cell killers know what maybe i can think of a third but anyway two there were two instances that were really covered in the press that really you know got tremendous attention publicly both in the united states of america of guys who publicly and directly identified as in-cell killers it's people killing for this movement killing for this ideology killing due to this kind of social analysis or or complaints you know it's based it's not based on a complaint that they personally as individuals can't get laid it's based on an analysis of our society and a claim that society has to change to suit them you know i mean it is in this sense a political movement it's not a religious movement you know it is a political movement even if it's a political movement we all despise um but it's a political movement whose prominence and political significance has entirely relied on the massacre now this is challenging we're thinking about many different angles for many different reasons uh so you know one of the most notorious was this guy who was obviously mentally [ __ ] in toronto the the one in california he also he was he was diagnosed as having autism so you know in case you don't know autism is a form of mental retardation so definitionally this person is is mentally [ __ ] uh the guy in toronto uh you can just watch the police interviewing him and you can come to your own conclusion of whether or not you would include him in your definition of mentally [ __ ] i am telling you i would and i just sorry if you if you're really doubting that you know i mean fair enough in a sense who gets to define who's mentally attack [ __ ] who doesn't well what if you had been in grade school with this guy what if you had what if he had been with you in grade six what if he had been with you in math class now i wasn't the best student to match myself in great sex you know but you know i mean what my teachers said to me again again many of them were furious with me was look you're too smart for this you're brilliant you're gifted you're one of the best students but i can't motivate you to care about math like you're sloppy and you don't care you're not you're not trying harder completely true i i didn't i didn't care about doing well in math in grade school but you know there were other kids the teachers didn't get angry with because i mean i was i was intelligent and i just didn't care i wasn't trying hard you know whatever you want to stay with me there were kids where the whole tone of discourse or the teacher was totally different like oh oh we got to bring in a specialist oh we got to help this kid oh this kid can't do math and it's on it's on a whole different level you know what this is actually mental retardation this is actually a learning disability or impairment and they don't the teachers don't anger those kids there's no point yelling at them and you know at least at my school they'd call in someone you know they were and they were different i have specific memories of this for my own childhood you may not remember your childhood that precisely but my point is if you look at these guys and even just look at film clips of them talking into the camera i said that police interrogation i think is very telling and then you imagine what if i had been in school with this guy in grade six you know well maybe he wouldn't have been in the same classroom as you would all or maybe you acknowledge this would be one of the quote-unquote special needs kids this is someone who who would need that kind of okay this is my point we're all living through this period of time of phony optimism about non-violence in politics right oh we're all so optimistic that we're gonna end global warming by having physically attractive young women in bikinis you know holding up a sign on a sidewalk this this is how history is made guys this is going to change the fate of nations this is going to change the political priorities in our leaders you know boris johnson is sitting there going damn that's a good-looking woman in a bikini holding up a sign i think i think i should make fur illegal this is what you think and all those good-looking women in bikinis who called for the end of the war in afghanistan and i'm using this broadly to indicate all the ridiculous things people do in the name of non-violence and street activism it isn't all good-looking women in bikinis but there's there's plenty of that to go around oh oh how effective was that after just 19 and a half years you know the women in bikinis had their way the non-violent street protesters the pedestal activism all this [ __ ] all this uh hand-wringing and heart bleeding all this oh gee after after 19 and a half years you ended the war in afghanistan and look how it ended and look what a better place the world is happening oh gee you got your way and you know look guys in case you don't know a uh long time viewer of the channel he may or may not be here now but um uh oliver uh who also has his own youtube channel oliver shields has his own youtube channel which i support i share links to periodically he said to me just in passing a few days ago he said oh you know how much has the philosophy of isolazard changed in six years you know and i don't know how he took it but i said to him from my perspective i was being warmed and i said look look dude you know like if anyone knows you know he could give an interview about how much my political philosophy has changed in six years because he's been watching the youtube channel for at least five years i know five or six years it's like dude you know you know all my views have changed well look i mean i was there um i'm forgetting if it was during the year 2001 or just at the beginning of 2002 but i marched in the anti-war protests at that time so again i just forgot you know it's september 11 2001 and then october november december i would guess it was just over the line into into 2002 but there were there were peace protests at that time non-violent peace protests that set records for many cities around the world it was the the largest piece the largest protest of any kind largest street protest largest political demonstration they'd ever had in the history of western world and i think those records still stand i mean like you know here we are more than 20 years later and there hasn't been a bigger protest there were people saying hey we don't want to invade afghanistan we don't want to invade iraq no i've changed i mean you know the man i am today i would have i would have signed up to join the army i sit though including my ignorance like the other problem is don't worry this is just a depression if you really understand how stupid george w bush was uh are you willing to be in an army under the command of george w bush that's a very difficult question and it probably wouldn't have been the american army i probably would have joined the french army or the british army i would have joined some other army uh and gone to fight where you don't distrust your leadership and by the way long story short i do blame george w bush the stupidity of george w bush and barack obama that's why those wars weren't there they did all right but here's my point consider consider the political efficacy of just two men of just two men who engaged in massacres and what they've done for the incredibly unpopular in cell movement the the political significance in our times of fiance movement consider the efficacy of uh the unabomber and as again with all humility he said look nobody would have ever taken an interest in his philosophy nobody would have ever taken interest in what he has to say politically if he hadn't started killing people okay so you look at that and then you look at the anti-war movement and look at any other example the there's a kind of pro-solar power movement you guys have probably seen it there are any number of kind of peaceful street protest based movements there's an anti-fur movement there's a pro vegan i don't feel it so much right now because the type of people who would engage in terrorism don't talk to me anymore they know i'm anti-terrorism like in this sense i'm anti-violence and i'm trying to extricate uh political movements like veganism like you know i want veganism to be a legitimate democratic movement in my opinion the same way the gay rights movement was now look i don't know can you gu maybe there were some gay rights terrorists like i legitimately do not remember anyone engaging in a massacre in the name of gay rights it would be understandable frankly like gay rights is it's still this day in muslim countries for example but in some christian status homosexuals is so bad like you could like i could understand gay people getting to that limit where they really want to engage in terrorism but you know i say again and again look if we're really going to accomplish something in veganism it has to be kind of democratically legitimate it has to be scientifically legitimate like there are different kinds of legitimacy that we really you know we really need to build up that basis and i also talk a lot about the life of a creative artist the way in which we have to do things that are really creative and really entertaining we have to make our own bambi we have to make our own animated movie that gets this message across to adults and children that parents and children watch a movie that makes the case there are a lot of things we have to do in my opinion and in terms of my argument you know and i you know even in countries that don't have democracy like if you talk about communist china or something to think the path of violence is the way to promote veganism within communist china i i i'm just being honest you it seems to be fundamentally stupid so i just say in terms of how i feel about this issue now for many years other vegans have known that i'm anti-terrorism and anti-violence i don't hear from those people anymore but when i first started the the youtube channel i did feel it because i did hear from those people and i felt like we were sitting on a powder keg i felt like we were sitting on a time bomb where it's like well the clock is ticking and sooner or later in the same way that one person shapes the public perception of incels that you have an in-cell killer that gets this into the headline so on in the same way like the clock is ticking and then there's going to be a vegan killer you know and then everyone's going to see vegans this way at least for five years maybe 10 years maybe 100 years you know where the meaning of veganism politically will be changed forever by the violent act of just one man uh now some of you remember there was a guy was it in hungary or was it in the ukraine there was one guy in eastern europe someone in the comments will remember there was one guy and he took people hostage on a bus so he didn't kill anyone but that was that was close and he demanded on the bus he demanded that the prime minister or president of that country make a statement in support of a veganism and then he let the hostages go on the bus so some of you will remember that i'm sorry i apologize i'm remembering that as if that were ukraine but maybe i just have ukraine on the brain uh because ukraine's in the news so much but somewhere in eastern europe that and it wasn't russia i don't i don't think in russia they would have tolerated that and you know the guy ended up in jail and that that was in the newspaper headlines briefly and that and then disappeared uh well you know what if the next time what if it's someone who does exactly what gary yourofsky encouraged vegans to do and i've played that clip a million times where he was talking about uh holding holding people so when the audience says sounds like chechnya wasn't judging um okay you know uh in cells are a movement nobody sympathizes with nobody thinks their perspective matters nobody thinks they have something positive to contribute to the reform of our society put it that way to political progress or the political transformation of our society in future not even one percent of the population would agree with themselves like if you tried to set out the incel manifesto and then poll people say how much do you do you agree with this and you know we live in a society where you know more than one percent of people agree with sharia law okay more than one percent of people agree with hardcore catholic and christian notions about what's you know there are a lot of unpopular philosophies that pull in more than one percent okay so again i think if you were honest with yourself if you set out a vegan manifesto that was really honest about the world vegans want to live in no more pet dogs no more pet cats no more hot dogs no more hamburgers right it's not just you know if you pull just on the issue of fur coats more than one percent of people say okay you know what we can do with it four coats how about leather basketball shoes you you want to go to new york city and pull people and say yeah we're going to make it illegal for you to ever wear or own nike air force ones again to ever wear leather basketball shoes leather high heels leather purses are if you actually spell out for people what a vegan society is gonna mean vegan legal reforms are gonna mean it's less than one percent right fewer than one percent of people would support those reforms so you see there's something there's something comparable here but this totally unpopular totally despicable political movement in cells and look let me just say a little bit more about despicable um there was a time when people responded to homosexuals with horror with revulsion and this was really even encouraged you know these people were regarded as disgusting you know and that they made your skin crawl just to talk just to have them on the news and so on and there was a process and look i mean i i do think that partly just reflects the culture we had on television and radio and movies before that now i i'd say this also still to this day it's very rare to see someone with a disability on on on camera at all and it's especially rare to see someone with a facially visible disability like if there's someone in a in a wheelchair they still look like a movie star from the waist up you know and this just comes up in different contexts conversation with my girlfriend and stuff you know people don't know what it's like to have a face-to-face conversation with someone whose face is really kind of ugly and malformed maybe they're twitching maybe they have other problems because they really grow up watching television where the ugly people like the actors who play the ugly role on television they're they're plain but they're fundamentally good-looking healthy people and you don't know what it's like to spend time around you know really um really hideous people i'm just saying like that's something you used to and you know if you actually get involved in humanitarian work if you get involved with caring for the sick and the downtrodden the poor if you actually i've described this before being in cambodia for me and for the first time having a conversation with someone whose face was caved in by a bomb who's got a seriously deformed face uh people who are you know horribly uh mangled by bullets and bombs and you know you get used to it and the good news is you really do i had a co-worker he had a deformed face uh just due to a type of birthmark it was just a birth abnormality and i got used to it quick i'm just telling you honestly maybe the third day i was at work he looked totally normal to me you know like the first day the first time you were like you're just not used to looking at someone's okay well look you know what we had to [ __ ] grow up as a society we had to really accept gay people as normal and you know there was a there's a little bit of push and pull on both sides there but you know yeah talking to an openly effeminate gay man a gay man who doesn't try to act straight and seeing that on tv listening them as a news broadcaster or whatever other seeing them interviewed on the news hearing and caring about the perspective of of gay people and having a kind of mature response to how these people talk and act and not demanding that they live up to our our expectations for what's normal so i i feel within my lifetime i'm in my mid-40s by the way i've seen that change in the western world where where gay people went from being pariahs to use a loaded term to really being accepted even by their critics like there's a level on which it's not cool anymore to be freaked out or disgusted by gay people and their appearance and their behavior you accept yeah you know and by the way i'm not claiming all gay men are effeminate i know there's all kinds of ways to be gay but you know yeah obviously you know the real conflict is with gay men who in their appearance or behavior are very obviously not straight or very obviously not behaving the way we would we would expect a straight person to so that's why i'm mentioning effeminate gay men specifically obviously with lesbians we could repeat this all this course you know some women you can't even tell that you can know a woman for years just mention she's a lesbian you can't tell but there are some women in the first day you meet them you you know you know same with vegans by the way you cannot know and there are some people from the first day you meet them you know they're vegan you know so i'm just saying this kind of revulsion this kind of judgment it's not it's not built into the equation it's not an automatic or default like there isn't a cause and effect relationship that exists uh like an equation in physics you know it's established and remains the same forever and ever um you know instead on the contrary uh how we react to these things yeah it's culturally conditioned but it also reflects a kind of moral commitment on our part right but yeah when you look in the faces of these incels right you feel a kind of revulsion like even on youtube it's not just that their ideology is despicable and revolting they are despicable and revolting these are exactly the people we want to ignore and don't want to listen to and sorry it's very rare writing anything down but i have a few points i want to go over here um lurking behind this you know to a massive extent uh some interesting comments coming in so i'll just disagree micah wright says welcome to the audience mike i don't remember being here before uh micah says in cell uh incels mostly result from inherent issues with with hookup cultures uh insults see dating as a game or a challenge to overcome rather than organic means by which to learn who someone is the issue with hookup culture is that it's inherently shallow um [Music] okay so i'm taking a totally different approach here like i'm not saying that what you've just said is is false or totally irrelevant or something but just notice the way i'm approaching this the way in which it's it's different i saw a youtube channel almost at random the other day i was searching for something and i ended up seeing this youtube channel and this guy is six foot four and he considers himself ugly he claims his analysis of his situation is that he is an in-cell oh sorry and i should clarify that it's not that he's an insult it's just that no women want him i'll say why not he can't get laid he can't get a girlfriend he can't have anyone he claims that it's because he has an ugly face and interestingly his cross the bear and one of the reasons he created his youtube channel was he was complaining that the incels all think that height is is the reason why they calculate like they say oh our society's prejudiced against short men short mankind he said well he's six foot four and he's saying no the reality is just that he has an ugly face and that's enough to ruin your life that uh oh get rid of this sponge so the sponge was kind of sticking out inside my head um so he was making the argument that no being tall isn't enough he's tall and he still has all these problems and the reason why i didn't call him an insult was hilariously this guy had a turning point in his life where he rejected in-cell ideology and he instead embraced quote-unquote black pill ideology and he he said look he really feels that that as a philosophy the in cells are wrong and that the reality is that he is just a guy who's too ugly to get laid now i could show you this guy's picture right now i chose you and it's he doesn't have an ugly face he does not it is 100 a self-justification and a delusion for him to think it's because he has an ugly face and i'm not claiming nobody is in that situation i saw a youtube channel really at random about a week ago and it's just very rare to see this it was a guy who had a hideously deformed face really like he one of his eyeballs was down where the middle of my cheekbone is his whole face he was just born that way it's not his fault and it was obvious i mean he'd had reconstructive surgery when he was a baby so obviously his face had been even worse and surgeons had tried to make it work but i mean that guy you know that guy had a had a horrifying face not his fault it's not ethical he was born with a really deformed face there are some people for whom you say well look you know it's it's your face your face is terrifying to people so obviously it's going to be really hard for you to have a relationship that that exists i'm saying this particular guy who is six foot four if you click on any of these videos say no the problem isn't that you're ugly it's not that you have an ugly face the problem is that you're stupid right and i see the whole incel discourse the whole thing as a cope for dealing with stupidity and even outright retardation that a lot of these people are mentally disabled and that's why women don't want them and that's why they can't speak in complete sentences the whole discourse about social skills is a cope right so i'll just digress on this briefly but i think this is useful and you know uh uh useful for michael wright or many people in the audience and you again micah i'm not saying like i'm not saying what you're saying i'm not um rejecting or even disagreeing with what you're saying i'm emphasizing the extent to which my my approach is different from yours but some aspects of the the problem would be elucidated by would be you know explained by uh the approach you're taking but i have a very different uh analytical approach um all right sorry i have a lot to say it's a question of what order i'm gonna say um self-pity and being self-pitying you know unfortunately in english these are really used as insults you denigrate someone or you dismiss what they have to say by reproaching them for being self-pitied i mean in in english if you say to someone you're just feeling sorry for yourself you know it totally dismisses what it means that what they're saying is of no reality there's no significance it shouldn't but it does that's our culture and that's our that's our language uh if you characterize anyone whether it's a politician or a celebrity or your own friend or relative if you say to them you are self-pity it dismisses them if they tell you about their problems and then you say what you've just said to me is self-pity it dismisses the substance of of what they say and i think self-pity there are really at least two very different concepts that are masked and misrepresented by our language by our by our cultural tradition you know what could be more important and what could be more meaningful in instigating personal and even political change than self-pity then sitting down and feeling sorry for yourself sitting down and reflecting on how terrible your situation is in life i would just point out somebody else feeling sorry for you can never can never be a substitute for that like i you know sorry my relationship with my mom is not that close but back when i was in university there's no way my mother feeling sorry for me can have the effect or significance of me sitting down and feeling sorry for myself like here i am in university the university is terrible the quality of education is terrible the other students i'm in class with are terrible my professors are terrible i have no hope for the future i have no plans for the future no possible career in front of me um like you know it was a really bleak really terrible time in my life uh my mom didn't feel sorry for me she didn't understand she wasn't capable of understanding and if i tried to talk about these things though which i i didn't do but once in a while she'd kind of start a conversation with me on her own terms it wasn't me richard she she talked to me about what going to university was like in the 1960s okay like you know and she's like oh well you know when i was in university and i was writing articles for the newspaper and i was doing this that she you know i have a youtube video on this channel of my mom talking about her time in university so in case if you want to hear her perspective about how wonderful her time in university was now i can tell you something else i know my mom real well she learned nothing while she was in university she she came out of university just as ignorant as she went in you know the the the level of erudition my mother had by the end of her university education it was zero so she might have had a lot of fun in uh in going to university in the 1960s everything was so different you know significant universe near society and what kind of job you could leave doing everything else and whether or not you can even get employed everything's different okay you know i just say this is a good example because who else could you have in your life who's gonna feel sorry for you now i wasn't the situation my mother never filtered me but like in theory you can imagine a parallel reality where my mother comes to me and says look i can see you really suffer i can see you're really down like there must be something really wrong with your situation at university and i feel bad about you and let's talk about what you're going to do about it what you can do to change it with my mother this never happened never and i hope i hope some of you have mothers who are that uh that involved in your in your in your life okay um so gonna continue here so we have a comment from a guy named named your brain uh don't remember you uh you know i i'm sorry but you know i don't know if you got the hint but you can't really come into my live stream and expect me to completely change the topic of the video so i mean i'm not i'm not offended but you know a lot of people are interested in a lot of different topics everyone laughed out loud once uh in the middle of a live stream on some totally different subject someone came in and said hey why don't you make any videos talking about cat ownership talking about owning cats as pets i think everyone in the arts is laughing they're like oh my god he's he's already made videos about that okay um you know uh you know i mean again i wasn't offended it was like guys we're talk i forgot we were talking we're talking about joe biden and the war in china or something we're doing with some totally different thing but you know yes someone here is laughing again saying haha i remember that live stream so again i'm not offended i'm not angry but you know the audience is welcome to contribute to the discussion and to to state opinions that are the opposite of mind that are on topic but if someone is talking about something that's that's that's totally unrelated i'm i'm probably just going to ignore it i mean there's there's really just no point so you know i've said many times you know sympathy is an analytical tool and i'd ask you to sympathize my position i don't know if you've ever been a broadcaster and if you've ever done a live stream but you know it's just ridiculous to come into a conversation and ask me to talk with something totally unrelated even if it is something that interested me i mean like i'm interested in uh the the politics and ethics of pet ownership and uh castrating cats and so on and so forth now you know uh john venus i have made videos about in the past and you can go and watch the videos i've made criticizing john venus uh leo venus his brother is really just not that interesting to me i've got to say but if you want to know what i think about that um maybe you'll find that entertaining and interesting and and maybe you won't but no i'm not gonna even if it is a topic that really interests me and you know by the way and something that's related to this i'm very interested in the critique of antidepressants and i recently had an offer to interview i'd assume by skype or something somewhere to do an interview with peter bregen one of the most famous doctors socrates there are other interests i have and someone could raise it here and said well someone could say well to what extent do you think the in-cell phenomenon is linked to or related to the fact like 20 of people are on mind-altering mood-altering drugs great question but i'm not gonna derail this video and get into critique of of antidepressants even though that does interest me i mean i might mention it like this briefly oh yeah there's oh yeah that's all the interesting point now i'm also very interested in the critique of marijuana which i think will get mentioned in this video i'm not gonna derail the conversation even if someone donates twenty dollars in the in the chat so okay let's just stop and and get into the critique of the politics of legalization of marijuana or something these are totally good questions so you know i ask you to sympathize and if you were in my position if you just imagine that you're in my position and you're you know the the audience is welcome to participate in the conversation but i am leading the conversation and you got to follow my lead if you want to participate given that we've paused to address methodology if you guys have a second hit the thumbs up uh it helps more people discover the video while it's broadcasting elsewhere people join the conversation while what's going on and then after the video was wrapped you know uh it'll help more people discover it when it's you know gathering dust on the internet for 100 years thereafter but we know of 37 people in there it would be great if we had 37 thumbs up uh and as they say it does it does actively promote the video uh to uh to a greater extent okay um when you think about the meaning of the term self-pity what it means to be self-pitying i think there are two very different ideas that are um misrepresented as one and the same in our language and cultural tradition because one element of being self-pitying with this is sitting down and really confronting and really reflecting on the extent to which you are sad and then engaging in an analysis of why you're sad and what you're gonna do about it and i'm just being real with you when i say i don't think anyone else can do that for you you know uh not even your mom not your best friend not your therapist i don't think there's anyone who can really help you with that um i do think probably many people can inaudib say to you in like one sentence like dude you're really you're really i can see you're really messed up like messed up by this or you're messed like someone can say to you in one sense man i can see you're really unhappy about your job someone could say to you in one sentence man i can see you're really unhappy about your marriage they can say that and that can lead you to reflect it can it can instigate this because you may be kidding yourself you may think you're happy with your job you think you're happy with your career you think you're happy with your marriage and that could even be the breaking point where you then sit down and engage in in self-pity and reflection but i don't think anyone else can feel sorry for you in that in that way but for many of us there's a shocking moment of discovery maybe because you you've made a whole series of compromises with your job like okay i guess i can tolerate this oh okay i guess it gets worse and worse and you're you're telling yourself it's okay very common in commitment relationships you have a boyfriend a girlfriend husband or wife and uh they are treating you worse and worse or something about how you relate to each other and the relationship is getting worse and worse but you compromise and you tell yourself you're okay with it you tell yourself everything's fine and actually you're miserable and you're cracking up and you you at some point have to stop and reflect on it now i think this also points to the importance of self-pity because if in this sense if you were more self-committing in this positive constructive analytical sense if you had been reflecting on what was wrong with your job what's wrong with your relationship and all those stages leading up to it right you wouldn't kind of reach that breaking point you know and probably you would have made different decisions along the way now obviously i don't think i have to go into this at depth everything i've just said is very true about the struggles of of incels now and it can lead to really hard admissions to oneself there are things you have to admit to yourself can be hard to admit hard to reflect on so i described at length this youtube channel from a guy who's six foot four and he thinks the reason why women won't talk to him why women won't date him why women won't fall in love with them or won't say them he thinks the reason is because his face is ugly and he's wrong i mean if you just watch the video dude you don't have an ugly face but just listening to him talk you're sitting there thinking something's really wrong with this guy now i don't i don't know him if i'd actually gone to school with him or you know if i'd been in the classroom with him i would have a better sense but like this guy i mean if he is not mentally [ __ ] you know maybe he's a drug addict some people have these really strange behaviors their ability to speak and make eye contact and just because of years of drug addiction can totally explain that maybe he's a video game addict a lot of these guys they've made themselves [ __ ] through years of smoking marijuana and playing video games i'm using marijuana intentionally of course you can also destroy your life with methamphetamine heroin cocaine you can use harder drugs and have worse of course but you know most people don't want to admit the extent to which it's marijuana i remember an interview with a uh i think he was a rapper who had formerly been a drug dealer and i remember he said that when he got involved in drug dealing he thought he was going to be with these dangerous exciting self-disciplined men of action like he had this idea of who his colleagues would be in organized crime and uh you know the reality was he found him he found himself sitting on a couch with a bunch of lazy guys who were playing nba jam for eight hours a day but the reality was these guys would sit in a house on a couch playing nba jam playing this video game again and again and then every so often someone knocks at the door and shows up and they hand over a plastic bag or whatever you know that was the reality that being a drug dealer wasn't exciting it wasn't uh what takes you to let them believe but my point is you know if you spend five years playing video games and smoking marijuana whether it's eight hours a day or four hours day it's with your spare time it changes who you are it has these effects even if you were not born mentally disabled to begin with these have you know cumulative effects and guys you know again so my point is not here to humble brag and it's not the outright brag either i think you all know like if i gain 20 pounds of body fat there will still be women who are into me and there still will be 10 years from now too just because i'm intelligent like reciprocally nobody wants to deal with what a huge advantage it is to just be intelligent and well spoken and let's keep it all the way real english is the only language i can do this in right i can criticize myself it can be a subject for another video i could have become fluent in any one of the other languages i studied it's a long list of languages but i'm not english is the only but at least i can speak my first language well and a lot of these people they can't and i'm just being real with you when you see their youtube channel or whatever you know i don't know why like i can't look at this guy's youtube channel and diagnose him and so the reason why you can't speak in complete sentences is this but the basic reality is english is your first language and you can't speak in complete sentences you can't communicate well in your own first language right what woman will be interested in that switch the genders around it's the same with women and men if you meet a woman you're like oh something something's really wrong with this woman you know um you know again i think you guys can tell i'm not dismissing the fact that some people do have an ugly face i'm not dismissing the fact that some people do have an unattractive body but i'm saying that this whole discourse is a massive cope for the extent to which people don't want to look in the mirror and recognize that they're stupid recognize that they're ignorant and recognize that their stupidity and ignorance is in large part a result of their laziness you know well you spent your whole [ __ ] life watching anime movies and playing video games and not developing yourself intellectually news flash [ __ ] oh nobody wants to eat lunch with you like you know before you can fall in love before you can have sex before you can build up a more meaningful relationship like there's a really low threshold are you an interesting enough person that people want to go for lunch with you okay and again it doesn't matter if i'm 10 years older and 20 pounds fatter than i am right now all kinds of women want to go to lunch with me including women who maybe like for the first time that day that's been my experience my whole life when i was 18 what one thing when i was 18 women thought i was 28 everyone thought i was way older than i was when i was doing it nobody thought i was 18. but i was already old looking at 18. but you know whether i was 28 or whether i'm 58 women are going to meet me and want to go up for lunch with me just because i'm an intellectually cultivated interesting person and plenty of those women like it's subjective plenty of them don't think i'm attractive some women think i'm attracted whether it's two percent of women or what i i have no delusions i'm on no ego trip that way but like uh i think i think we at least recognize that there's a problem with the way young women are raised in america and we don't recognize that it's a problem with young men i heard an interview i know i've mentioned this on youtube channel before but it was like six years ago i heard an interview with a woman who grew up in the czech republic under communism um so again czechoslovakia has changed really but she grew up as a czech uh under under communism and then uh she at one point somehow she escaped to the united states of america and she worked as a model and then got work as an actress you know and she said you know the difference is for her growing up everyone acknowledged she was a beautiful woman nobody ever told her that it was adequate for her to be a beautiful woman no one ever told this is all you need to get by in life like this is enough everyone told her look you're a beautiful woman you better sit down and hit the books and get a degree in chemistry i forget what she studied she said some boring like look you gotta work hard you've got to develop yourself intellectually academically you've got to be prepared to kind of shoulder your burden in society and have a good job whatever and she said the minute she got to america now admittedly when she was in america she was involved with modeling and acting she was involved in a certain subculture within america but as soon as she got to america she was in a culture where apparently every beautiful young woman was told this is it you just need to focus on you know your hair your makeup getting a bra that fits you right learning to walk in high heels a lot of women when they're growing up that's what they're told you're beautiful you've got to practice how to walk how to walk in a sexy way so you don't fall over in high heels no but nobody's born no one kind of walk in high heels that's an art form these women have to cultivate so nobody's born knowing how to do lipstick i mean these things are learned you know where they're they're told you know from a very early age again and again that your intellectual cultivation doesn't matter and i've met so many people including ugly people some people were born and raised like and it's never occurred to them that this could be or should be a priority in their lives now that side of our culture has in the past of our time gotten so toxic it's got it's become so reformative it's become such a source of shame and ridicule the bimbo ification of every good-looking young woman you know what i mean um that they're encouraged to become bimbos it's gotten so extreme that i do think now there's a little bit of a sense of the pendulum swinging to the other side or people are starting to mentate the possibility that really it's important to encourage young women beautiful or ugly but it's an extra problem with with women who are beautiful really they need encouragement to be dedicated self-disciplined develop themselves intellectually well i've got to tell you something you know like let's get into some specific subcultures did you grow up around hispanic people i did i did i remember oh sorry remember particular guys i went through went through school with i knew hispanic guys and all their family ever encouraged them to do was play football now so to be fair this is not the only subclasses like this i knew an irish guy and um you know the only choice in his family uh the only like option he was given was whether he was going to play soccer which they call football in europe whether he was going to play soccer or whether he was going to play rugby that was a big deal and he was completely expected to devote his life to either soccer or you know now there are a few other sports in ireland he could have been hurtling or something but you know um there are definitely white australians where as young men like this is it like the the point of school is to participate in sports teams and like oh well you weren't good enough to make the football team maybe you can do wrestling maybe you can just we're like that's all the parents are interested that's all they they call to me um you know i'm just gonna be honest the the few black friends i knew of the few black friends i had in toronto people they were black people who were in a state of rebellion against that you know what i mean they were in no way victims of that that cultural expectation but obviously i mean the high school i graduated from uh we had black students i mean being on the basketball team that was it there was nothing else there was playing basketball there was watching basketball on tv and there was playing video games related to basketball and that was it and nobody questioned it and there was no pressure on them and it was openly regarded that that what they did in their school courses was a kind of joke it was a kind of distraction none of them thought it was important for them to learn to speak french just give you an example they would laugh they'd laugh in your face say oh you think i'm going to speak french you think i'm ever going to use this the minute i finish high school no obviously no concept of learning algebra it's very hard to convince a young person that learning math is important none again it's not all black people in toronto i knew black people who were part of the kind of living in a state of revolt against that where they were like no they really wanted to be an intellectual they want to develop themselves i i personally have not known hispanic people of that character but obviously they exist they're out there hispanic people who reject that but you know my point is this is so ubiquitous that it's largely invisible to us and i think this guy this particular youtuber is six foot four uh again i don't know to what extent he might be born mentally disabled but even so mentally disabled people can do their most to develop themselves intellectually like if if you're autistic do you think being lazy and playing video games and watching anime movies is gonna help like if autism is your problem and you're just well maybe you can't develop yourself intellectually as much as some other person maybe both the amount you can develop and the way in which you can develop but both qualitatively and quantitatively it's different or it's limited but still you can do the utmost for you like you can be the best you can be intellectually and that's going to make a positive difference in every part of your life and it's going to lead to relationships with other people men women or whatever it's going to lead to relationships other people that are actually based on intellectual admiration for you respect for you rather than just carnal lust for your body i mean either you got that or you or you don't you know but you know as i say like i'm aware some women who approach me in life some women who try to try to initiate relationships with me sometimes it is carlos sometimes i am their type and it click and that's it and you can tell that's that's what's going on but there are also women throughout my life who've approached me again normally if they want to go for lunch with you you're like normally doesn't start with uh proposals of marriage but you know where they're interested in you they find interesting and and my assessment my belief is they don't think i'm attractive they're not they're not that carnally interested in me from the rest of me otherwise so i don't have to digress on this uh at any length but you know um uh okay so someone someone is saying fix the audio but what was it was it bad for five seconds or what not much i can do with this hand all right i'm gonna uh i'm gonna click this looks like using the right the right microphone i'm gonna click here you should have heard about four clicks there on the mic and if you didn't it's using the wrong microphone but anyway look guys all right sorry i mean it's probably just the internet that went out for a second probably someone in this building started playing uh started playing with him oh well it's too bad uh look guys sorry but i mean there's only there's only something to do so it said that you said crackling for minutes but a couple minutes is not that bad i mean sorry life isn't perfect but it's not like the whole it looks like most of the time you guys were uh you guys were following the phone in the car session great comment from chickpeas anime was a mistake [Laughter] interesting criticism from michael harvey in the audience michael harvey says eisel and the general vegan crowd really hate jordan peterson but he does a much better job at warning young men about becoming an incel and practicing stoicism cleaning your room i don't uh i don't think jordan peterson gives you a working model for how to live a more meaningful life i'm just being real and jordan peterson does not present you with a model for uh look sorry so i apologize i had no control over the sound nothing changed at this end so someone said it was bad for about eight minutes but i mean you want me to start the live stream again like i can and i you know i hope i can i can just you know i can cancel and start again uh but i'm you know i apologize but it's um so someone else says it's good nothing was bad good maybe when people are listening to it afterwards they're just gonna they're gonna increase the volume but i would just assume i mean look i apologize uh i i will make a note of it i mean basically the connection between my computer and the mic i can change but i'm using exactly the same connection that's worked more than a hundred times like more than a hundred broadcasts this this particular usb set up i'm using exactly the same setup but i do i do worry about that stuff and you know but normally what happens you're you're completely powerless so yeah but no i i do take that stuff seriously and i've bought how many microphones do you have in this apartment right now four or six four at least yeah yeah yeah but i just say we have a whole we have a whole collection of microphones i have spent a lot of time and money trying to get this stuff to work but i mean ultimately it's a miracle that this is technologically possible at all i always said that when i was in china like look it's amazing i can i can do this at all but you know so awesome to do so guys it's great to have 40 people going live i know a lot of youtube channels have a much larger audience that don't get as many people when they're live streaming i've seen somewhere lately both vegan and non-vegan so i do appreciate you being here if you have a second if you could hit the thumbs up button um i'd appreciate that partly just because it helps more people discover the discover the broadcast while it's happening and i'll help more people discover it later my lighting has gotten worse but that's okay um [Music] okay so i'm i'm happy to respond any of this stuff and i i do think it's i do think it's it's related other people are commenting on you know the stupidity of of jordan peterson okay but let's let's narrow this down so that it's more relevant to this conversation i've made if you don't know i've made videos that reach more than 10 000 people each criticizing jordan peterson and i'm it's very meaningful to me i mean if i die tomorrow the critique of jordan peterson is actually a significant thing i accomplished in my life and that i managed to reach that audience of energy reach his audience or say it's it's something i put some energy and effort into um but the claim have been advancing in the first 55 minutes of this video is that the obsession with your facial appearance and your bodily appearance is a cope in their terms in the slang terms used by the incels themselves i'm saying that's a cope right and instead what what people are coping with what they're distracting themselves from what they're rationalizing what they're making excuses for is their stupidity their ignorance their immaturity and again i want to say even the discourse about social skills that's also a cope right so whether or not women find me interesting and then after finding me interesting whether or not they find me attractive or they can think about themselves being in a relationship with me right that doesn't rely on self-confidence that doesn't rely on social skills uh now sorry i'll use an example i used in the past let's say you're really not a very self-confident person and you're not a very well-spoken person but you go into the theater and you start organizing and putting on a performance of shakespeare's hamlet you do all the organization you're the director and the producer you're not an actor let's say let's say you're you're kind of an awkward person you know you don't have great social skills all right and you involve people in this project in the past i i well whatever i can i can give more details as to why this would be an interesting or politically significant you know performance of of shakespeare well there are going to be some women involved in that whether they're in the audience or actors or the person does the lighting or doesn't make it there are going to be some people there and then huh you know this guy is kind of interesting this is someone i'd like to have lunch with you know i'm not guaranteeing you you're going gonna have an amazing sex life or you're gonna fall in love and get married and raise kids but you are doing something interesting you are being an interesting person and even if you're kind of awkward in your way of speaking you're not you don't have great social skills that you don't understand you're sitting around and talking to people about why you decided to mount this this performance of shakespeare what motivates you this your interpretation of shakespeare what what you how what you care about and which how you feel about this and so on now there are limits and by the way i don't think shakespeare is that meaningful it can't be anime it can't be cosplay it can't be video games uh no matter how erudite your opinion is about video games about the differences between the famicom disk system version of excitebike and the nes version of excitebike like you know i i can sit here and give you very sophisticated opinions about video games but you know some things don't matter but my point in choosing shakespeare is to say it doesn't have to be researching the cure for cancer it doesn't have to be the future of democracy in myanmar but i've quite intentionally used the democracy in myanmar as an example in my most recent video so let's just mention that briefly what if you did the research what if you really got involved with a humanitarian effort and a political effort you know to achieve democracy in in myanmar what if you you know what if you put years into that what if you started learning one of those languages does it matter if it's shan or you know standard burmese itself you know whether it's one of the minority languages in myanmar whatever you know that's interesting and you know i'm going to be real with you this is my experience i i'm not that good-looking i'm really not okay my experience is women who have never [ __ ] heard of myanmar before want to go to lunch with you like it's not just other women who are interested in researching the politics of myanmar and they dream like there will be women like huh this is a country i've never heard of before they know nothing about it they meet you under whatever circumstance they hear you talking in an intelligent way about the politics and history of myanmar you know and they're like hmm i'm interested he's interesting that's someone i want to go to lunch with whether or not you have sex with them or fall in love with them or whatever right you know there's something really significant here so this this is branching off from jordan peterson okay i think the commitment to care about the future of myanmar is actually an act of rebellion it's not conformist you're not just fitting into the shoes your parents set out for you to fill or your grandparents said for you to fill above and beyond and with no relation to a kind of conservative conformist conception of society right you have come up with this idea you have nothing to do with myanmar you're going to learn the language you're going to study history and politics and in your small way you're going to get involved you're going to contribute what you can contribute to that discourse it is actually a meaningful act of rebellion i think this is the difference from anime right like what's wrong with just watching anime on tv like really think about it what's wrong with just playing video games well i do think it's partly because well it's childish it's conformist you're embracing a form of entertainment that's just been set out for you now look i mean putting on william shakespeare i mean again i've talked about this in earlier videos let's say i feel it's a great example let's say you are a black teenager living in a chicago and you don't want to be part of the basketball scene and you don't want to be part of the drug dealing in king's scene and you don't want to be part of the hip-hop scene and you as a black teenager in chicago decide what you want to do is put on a performance of william shakespeare any of the plays could be hamlet whatever with an all-black cast and implicitly this is a way of reaching out to other young black people in your community and saying hey look i want to lead a more meaningful life who's with me now also there may be other subversive things there politically like maybe politically you make this into a commentary on donald trump or something like there are ways in which the performance of shakespeare can be politicized okay so it's an all black performance of hamlet i'll just point out this isn't just black you could be japanese and you're in japan you're born and raised in japan you do an old japanese performance of hamlet and it's a commentary you do it as a political commentary on things in japan it's very easy to politicize this and for this to have social significance all right i'm pointing out that there is a subtle sense in which this is rebellious in which it's challenging the status quo and trying to transform the society we're a part of and it's it's railing against the indifference of our society it's reeling against the phlegmatism of our society it's challenging the complacency of our society and that's what's different from anime and that's what's different from from playing video games you know um i think this is utterly lacking from jordan peterson's model of uh of a of a meaningful life you know now look so i've read jordan peterson's book we own his second book or what his second successful book which we've looked at a few pages of and it's unbelievably stupid and terrible but you know i'm familiar with jordan peterson's work i've criticized jordan peterson i can't sit here and tell you that all of his advice is bad i would compare him to a fitness instructor who just tells you to try really hard you know that advice alone if i if i do that i can start a website i can start taking my shirt off and i can start filming myself doing 200 push-ups and saying you can do 200 push-ups a day too which is true i think everyone in this audience can do 200 push-ups who who here has done 200 push-ups this month but you could you know you could men and women it's an attainable goal i can start the 200 push-ups a day website and 200 push-ups a day challenge and film myself and even if all i have to say is hey try really hard or hey you could try harder you know a huge percentage of people will benefit from that advice even if it's totally banal you know what i mean um so like on that level you know of course i can't say everything that jordan peterson says is wrong yeah people here are yeah wicked energy yeah i agree you know however we are setting that this is damning him with faint braids like we are setting the standards incredibly low and i think it's it's very meaningful to point out that the advice he's giving it it simply doesn't work for n cells i mean there is nothing there for young men to respond to and build on there isn't the model of a meaningful life and there certainly is a model of how to make progress as an intellectual and look again all right not everyone can make progress as an intellectual right some people are so severely mentally [ __ ] that this isn't open to them but when we're talking about people who are moderately mentally disabled right there is a question of doing the most you can do and the amount the extent to which you can improve your brain even if you're somewhat mentally disabled right is so much greater than the extent to which you can improve your face or you can improve your body that's really limited right now i'm here tempted to get in talking about uh kristen lee you know to branch off i'll i guess he'll come back to uh to kristen lee in a minute so i'm gonna treat this person as anonymous a fan of the channel wrote into me and he is mentally disabled and he described his situation and i will just say he is significantly mentally disabled he's not just slightly mentally disabled and he has some kind of social worker assigned to him some kind of caseworker talking about a situation and he said completely matter of factly that he was just not going to attempt to finish high school he was just going to get on with his life and i sent him back a passionate and clearly worded email saying no this is the wrong decision you're wrong and i said look if you go back to high school two years from now and you finish high school and if you go back to high school five years from now that will still be really meaningful for you in your life and i didn't like i didn't tell him his business i said look maybe you're right that this year you can't go back to high school and maybe not next year you know for all kinds of different reasons but every year you are going to get more mature you're going to get more self this one you're going to get more focused and maybe just two years from now you can go back to high school and you can complete it and that's going to be so significant in your life as opposed to and what he was talking himself into was just that he would accept basically living as a janitor for the rest of life that he was going to get a really low level of employment that he could get without going to high school again because he's aware of his mental disability now look this guy i don't know what his limits are but my point is this is me encouraging him i said more than that i've said more about the way in which the challenges of high school would actually be meaningful and important like you are going to learn things you don't think you're going to learn by going through this process in high school right okay so this guy i obviously it's just based on his own description himself i completely accept that he is really mentally disabled this is a significant mental disability i'm not trivializing it i'm not dismissing it i'm not being like some gym coach who says everybody can do 200 push-ups or everyone can bench press 400 pounds you can't some people aren't going to make it but like the point is he can make progress from where he is today to being a better person in the future he mean intellectually he may never be able to do the things i do and some of the things that are effortless for me maybe a lot of effort for him but i'm still encouraging him right i'm still encouraging him to do the utmost and this guy i've alluded to the six foot four guy and [ __ ] all these good-looking people who are on youtube like i'm sorry uh any any good-looking successful youtuber male or female you look back at the last five years their life and you look ahead of the next five years of their life you know uh if they just make the effort to cultivate themselves intellectually if they just make the effort like you know we're all born stupid we're all born ignorant but this is something you can change and it's something you can change that's going to have profoundly positive consequences for your whole life for every aspect of your life not just getting laid not just your sex life not just who you marry if you want to get married or settle and not everyone does but yeah including that you know your intellectual development is gonna is gonna pull that along with you now look um i already mentioned the particular incel i was talking about there was six foot four he doesn't have an ugly face he has he has a normal face he's a normal like his face is normal looking for a guy he has his eyes there's nothing wrong with it um you know kristen leo is one of my one of my uh adversaries here on youtube kristen leo is a youtuber i don't particularly like i i don't like her politically i don't like her intellectually i don't like her ethically she claims to be a vegan she buys and sells leather on her own website sorry just give an example what i mean when i say ethically there's a lot wrong with kristen leo her latest video consists of her admitting that she has gotten into plastic surgery now i say admitting because i have no reason to think that this is her first experience with this but she's already now doing botox so she is about 30 years old she yeah right she made some videos i think when she celebrated she went from 29 to 30 talking about the the cusp of the decade and her her birthday celebration um okay now look i i'm gonna be real with you for me personally subjectively kristen leo is ugly like to me she's not even playing i perceive her subjectively as an ugly person her experience in life is of everyone treating her as a beautiful person she has been involved in modeling she has been an airline hostess people used to say airline stewardess she is she's still to this day models on instagram and models these clothes and boots and shoes that she sells and resells she has this business but she takes a picture of herself in the clothes and there's no doubt a very large part of her youtube viewing audience is the result of her you know presenting herself sometimes in a bathing suit or been revealing a tire in these videos you know that her her physical appearance is part of that so she is someone in her own society in her own career she has been treated as beautiful she's regarded as a beautiful person you get to age 29 you get to age 30. and she isn't in cell i mean she doesn't identify with the incel philosophy but she has made a whole series of of videos bitterly recriminating on the fact that like there are no men really meaning there's no men for her that men don't want her and the men she could have she's not interested in i've been to athens right a lot of guys in athens watch football a lot of guys in athens drink beer like i get it but obviously 99 of them are not vegan what percentage of people in athens are vegan if you want just those three requirements if you want a man who is vegan doesn't drink alcohol doesn't watch football on tv like we're not even setting a super high intellectual standing i'm not gonna ridicule her like you know i get it it's hard out here for a pimp that's an old that's a song i only was the 90s early 2000s remember that song of course what what what was the the name of the group they won an oscar for it or some [ __ ] it was on the center ground no no no as i recall they won an academy award for its its place on a soundtrack and it was one of the first rap albums to warn an academy award here's a song wow so that was the original i guess i thought it was 3-6 mafia we did it no big deal anyway it's hard out here you know like uh i get it so there are results that yeah so there's more than one that's it there was more than one version of the song that's why that is yeah yeah no that's that's what someone's wrapped something sort of thing anyway three six mafia put out a song called it's hard out here for a pamphlet that's the most important if there's one thing you learn from this video there's one thing you take away from this video it's obviously the most important thing this is why i like doing live streams honestly i like this kind of stuff that comes up it wouldn't be here if it were this kind of focused uh edited video so you look at this woman kristen leo and i've admitted for me subjectively she's ugly okay and you think okay you reach age 29 you're looking ahead to 30. now you're 30 what are you going to do where is it going to go from here and it does not occur to her to develop herself intellectually it does not occur to her that the type of men she wants because she doesn't want any man she doesn't want any mansion yet those men will have intellectual standards and intellectual expectations that exclude her or she's not living up to it that way all of her time and energy are going into her body the clothes she wears like her appearance in that sense how the outfit is put together her hair she puts a lot of time and energy into her into her hair her makeup and now as she gets older increasingly plastic surgery including botox injections you know so she just had some procedure done to her lips which makes her look like a woman who's had plastic surgery like from my perspective that doesn't make you more attractive makes you less attractive just because it tells me something about you about how vain you are and so on you know um now kristen leo is in some ways an ordinary example and she's in some ways an extraordinary example because this is someone who has earned her living for many years coming on youtube and talking about politics no i've said already to me subjectively kristin is ugly in some other universe where i was single or were melissa and i had never met like where i was totally single uh oh let let's let's crank it up let's say i've been single for years and some other kept a single for a long time if someone asked me because by the way kristen and i we were way less than six degrees of separation apart i've known people who've known kristen um they're not that many vegans on youtube what if a friend of mine said to me hey look you know kristin is down bad she's been single for years and she's complaining about it you're single what do you think about meeting up with kristen my answer would have nothing to do with her hair nothing to do with her clothes nothing to do with her face you know what i mean nothing you know the reality is that probably if kristen leo had tried to develop herself intellectually just in the past five years we don't have to go back 20 years just in the past five years if she had given it a hundred and ten percent she probably would be somebody i'd be interested in and what does it just means you want to have lunch with them you think wow this is an interesting person this is even this is a brilliant person this is an intelligent person you want to have lunch with them and if that person lacks self-confidence and if that person lacks social skills a woman who is attracted to a man who is interested in a man who finds a man interesting she will be emboldened by his lack of self-confidence that's like a good thing for her a woman who actually wants a man right even if she just wants him at st step one she wants to get lunch she will take advantage of his lack of self-confidence she will take advantage of his awkwardness and so she will put herself in a command position and she'll she'll make it happen you know she'll initiate the relationship and i don't even think i need to narrate that if you switch the genders that's true if a man wants a woman again like let's just say he wants to take her out to lunch he's interested in her and she has bad social skills right she lacks self-confidence right we all know what it means immediately to say that a man takes advantage of a woman's lack of self-confidence her low self-esteem right like for the person doing the pursuing your lack of self-esteem it it's almost an invitation it's not a it's not a it's not an obstacle to be to be overcome you know so just say these are these are all copes like in their that they just say cope you know meaning it's a coping mechanism like oh you're going to blame the fact that you have bad social skills you're going to blame this you're going to blame that and it's not any of that at all it really is the lack of uh of intellectual development so sorry coming back to you i do i have like four things written on the piece of paper here um really the big idea i wanted to get across in this video had to do with self-pity with feeling sorry for yourself so guys i'll take a moment to read your comments if you want to say something like now is a good time for you to write something i'll actually read it and respond to um but look you know i i don't begrudge kristen leo her feeling sorry for herself if anything that's like the most positive part of what's going on right like i think it's totally fine for christian leo to reach a breaking point where she sits down and feels really sad she feels really down bad she sits there and she has pity for herself she feels sorry for herself and she reflects on the fact that there is no one for her in the society there is no man for her she's never gonna have the love of her life as she'd imagined it ten years ago or five years ago whatever it was like i think that's that's really meaningful and i think it's really meaningful to engage in an analysis of why that is you know and my point here is the correct conclusion is not that her lips are too thin and she should get fillers or botox or injections or plastics or to make her lips thinner part of me to make her lips thicker you know i think that's insane i don't think that's the correct conclusion at all you know but the actual self-pity is not the problem like self-pity leads to self-analysis it leads to analysis of the society you're in the job you have the university you're at whatever it is like it can lead to political analysis analysis on a larger scale and also goes way beyond yourself and your problems and it can lead to really important conclusions about what's going to happen next you know and and the the the answer is not botox injections i think i mean christian leo is a really good example probably most of you in the audience are horrified that i've said to you that timmy she's ugly whatever i have my own subjective taste i'm completely owning that it's subjective right but if you think she's beautiful or you think she's playing you think she's good looking enough then what i've just said it's it's even more true because it's even more ridiculous why are you uh why are you engaging in quote-unquote looks maxing as the uh as the insults say and and look i'm sorry the whole thing with [ __ ] clothes and hair there is no heterosexual man in the world who says you know what you know what made me fall in love with this woman you know what made me first notice her what made me really interested in my my girlfriend or my wife it was that she wore these really hot shoes and they matched so well with the with the dress and the and the nylon socks never there is there is no heterosexual man who looks at a woman and thinks wow she knows how to pick earrings that match with the highlights and accents in her haircut i i want to have lunch with zero zero like not the shallow guys and not the zero now there are some gay men who work in the fashion industry and they respond that way like they're not interested in you they're like oh wow that's a woman who knows how to pick high heels and knows how to pick earrings that all match the colors and where that is like that exists there there are zero heterosexual men who care about your [ __ ] earrings there are zero heterosexual men who care about your designer shoes and on the contrary there are a lot of heterosexual men who see that as a red flag because it's like whoa this is a woman this is a woman who cares about wearing expensive designer shoes maybe she's going to expect me to buy her designer shoes like maybe there are a lot of things what your life is going to be like together if i move in with this woman is she going to have a separate closet for her designer like there are a lot of things there were heterosexual men are actually going to respond to it negatively but um you know visibly or invisibly every heterosexual man cares about how intelligent you are even the shallowest guys even the guys you swear they don't even the guys who will put their hand on a stack of bibles and swear to you that all they care about is that a woman has a nice ass i i guarantee i've spoken i know i've known those guys face to face guys who say they just care about a woman's body you get five minutes into the conversation they start telling you about all the other things because they know what it's like those guys they know what it's like to start a relationship with a woman just because she has a great ass just because they were attracted to her physically and then as soon as she moves into their apartment as soon as they're living together an apartment their whole life is horrible and terrible because of you know the intellectual aspects of what really makes a relationship work what really matters they have to they have to deal with that i know i'm sorry i could tell a ton of stories about this but i knew a guy and he um he was in a relationship with a woman she had been an aspiring olympic athlete so i i don't know i think she didn't get to the olympics but she had been training to be an olympic athlete so obviously she had a very impressive body i never saw her i never met her i just heard this guy's story about her and that's what he liked about her that's what he wanted for he uh he was very impressed with her with her body and um she she had physically beaten him up numerous times she had really seriously assaulted him and he described one time when she was trying to knock him unconscious when he you know like it was it was you know it was really that extreme what he'd been through with her and uh anyway i could i could tell a lot of details of that but that was a woman who who became you know physically abusive and she was proud of herself she thought it was like you know she she wasn't ashamed to beat up her boyfriend to beat the man who loved her she felt like this was a distinction and mark of honor that she know like and she's again she's in training for the olympics and she's gonna she can beat up her boyfriend you know um now look again that particular woman i don't have any reason to think she's like a psychologically dark character i just think she's an idiot i mean i think based it sounded like she was just a really childish person who would never develop themselves intellectually you know at all and uh you know i remember he told me the story so he told me the story about the most extreme physical abuse where she was trying to knock him unconscious like she she punched him in the face like more than 30 times on this occasion like it was really serious it really protracted you know beating and um he told me about the conversation he had with her afterwards too um where you know he said to her you know it's not profound he said that if he had punched her back just once he would be in jail now and he you know how serious the consequence would be and he said you know if he had if he had responded with violence she would be in the hospital and he would be in jail so you know how do you think you can you can do this so i mean he got beaten up but he didn't go to the hospital and she didn't go to jail you know uh this is this was really this is really serious but what i said to him after he told this story i said yeah but you didn't leave her right i was like how how long did the like after that day like i noticed in your story you don't say and then i kicked her out or then i left you you stayed with her why you don't what and for how long and you know he hung his head he was like yeah you're right you're right he talked about him but no he stayed with her he tried to make it work now look this is an extreme example but my point is sorry that guy he's the other big relationship the same guy the other relationship he told me about that made his life horrible was with a woman who was a stripper she was a professional stripper and again i'm not hating on him but all of these women in his lifetime he chose them just because of their physical attributes just because their body was attractive and apparently the stripper was a really good looking woman and he told me about how she made his life horrible too my point is like the shallowest guys who swear that's what they live by intellectual qualities matter to them also ethical qualities matter to them also um [Music] and and and you know obviously i don't know what that guy went on to do with the rest of his life but i'm guessing the next relationship he got into wasn't with a stripper and wasn't with an olympic athlete he was probably started looking for women who had some of the qualities that at least let him feel safe to fall asleep in his own bed in his own apartment kind of thing sorry but obviously i mean a really simple one is sobriety but yeah um [Music] frankly i think it's it's almost a fantasy to think that you can have a life that's just based on on physical attraction physical appearance it's people want to believe that all right guys i'm going to catch up with you with your comments now for a moment uh by the way sorry melissa if you want to joe i mean i mean it's a sad topic of conversation but it's hard for me to turn the list and say hey you wanna you wanna add i know it's it's sad but like fundamentally what i'm saying here is very hopeful and positive because i'm talking about the difference you can't make i'm talking about the way in which you can change and you can be a better person and you can live a better life and i think it's totally incompatible with what jordan peterson has to say it's totally compatible with what the in cells have to say you know but i mean you know there's a sense in which this is actually a positive and uplifting uh sort of message as depressing as it may be sure yeah i haven't made a youtube video about this but i've made instagram posts talking about how much your philosophy has changed my outlook on just your ability to change your intellect and improve on what you know you know become a more knowledgeable person that's something you really can change whereas you can't exactly change your bone structure you can't really do much to change like where fat deposits in your body you know all these things all these minor things that people obsess over and yeah you know i just thought it was funny that we happened to to listen to that video from chris and leo yesterday because i had in the morning walked around the city and seen these signs for lip filler botox and you know all these different things that people pay money for in order to feel better about themselves when i i can really see you know the truth and what you're saying it's it's not necessarily about your appearance it's really about your intellect it's about what you have to say and how you say it so yeah i mean i i just i don't really have anything yeah in disagreement to say uh well i i mean i guess it's also kind of interesting because you know i began this conversation by talking about political violence and this whole the whole political and social significance of the in-cell discourse wouldn't exist without massacres this has been created through murder you know uh murder as a public political act you know that galvanizes it one way and then the other you know force here is just these guys claim or the complaint that they either they can't get laid at all they can't have sex at all or specifically that they can't have loving relationships marriages you know a lot of the discourse is about that it's not just about sex it's about love it's about marriage and having children that is that is part of this course you have been living for the last five years in a situation where you have no problem getting laid you know you're in a loving relationship with someone who supports you and that's not a question i mean you don't have to study to get laid within this relationship or whatever you know that's not your issue at all but you know you really are in a position to to feel the transformation of how your whole life has gotten better and gotten more meaningful because of the work you've done intellectually and i'd say too like i think you could contrast that to how meaningless it was there was a time when we both worked on improving our ability to to bake to bake and cook you know to bake bread um that adds nothing to my life today like i you know like you know we can we can bake bread today but like you know what there are other my point being there are other things you've worked on um that are not totally meaningless i mean that baking bread more meaningful than watching anime you know uh you know you have also developed physically you've started before she met me she'd never lifted weights at the gym she's learned that i lift weights you know there are other things but like i the fact that those other things exist in your life like i think that even gives more of a perspective to like gives you more of a sense of scale to the enormity of how much the intellectual development matters you know yeah i i disagree if you want to disagree but yeah you know yeah absolutely i know it was just a response to one of the comments that you received but i am very interested in how the fact that so many people are taking medications for depression or for adhd how this could be playing a role in the in-cell movement and in even the role that they played in the massacres that have have been carried out by people within the in-cell movement um you know because getting together with you i also credit that in the beginning of my sobriety yeah right for me that has really the the distance the the time that i've had to reflect on it has really made it very apparent to me just how much smoking marijuana every day for years of my life really held me back and uh drinking alcohol really held me back too any time that i had on the weekends to you know cultivate myself intellectually i was spending just a complete waste of time yeah completely wasting my time playing video games watching yeah watching video games uh watching watching a lot of sitcoms and you watch just crap once again you know i appreciate what you said earlier i didn't watch anime but i understand your point about anime it's like you know these are the things that are laid out for you right because there's a sense of rebelliousness and right putting putting on almost any kind of meaningful life for example hamlet that's something that's really challenging the status quo i agree with you and i didn't have that creativity uh but i didn't have the depression i did have the sense of anxiety and feeling like where is the future here and um wanting a sense of direction so so i want to i want to branch off here but i think i think this can come back like you can you can continue saying exactly what you're saying you'll see so it's one of the few things i've written down on this paper i want to talk about is when you think about self-pity and the positive value of self-pity the positive importance of feeling sorry for yourself right i would contrast that to the effects of marijuana like from my perspective and and by the way i said this when i was 15. i said this when i was 16 i said this when i was 17. this came up with my circle of friends in high school i was talking about this then from the same perspective i'm talking about what i said back then is what is so dangerous about marijuana is that it allows you to think you're happy when you're not like the effects of marijuana of course compared to methamphetamine they're subtle compared to you know heroin they're so you know i understand like you can conceal like the effects of marijuana it's possible to keep your day job you know and people aren't uh suspicious of you the way cocaine makes them suspicious of you with the change in your behavior and so on but even then i feel like i could add a whole bunch of footnotes because it's often very obvious that someone spokes marijuana and they're people who very successfully career pardon me there are people who very successfully conceal hard drugs in their career and so actually there are a lot of exceptions to this generalization but nevertheless what i said already when i was a teenager and i had everyone i knew at high school was smoking marijuana was look the problem isn't the direct effect of the drug itself the problem is that you're not sitting down and reflecting on how unhappy you are like in the terms we're talking about here that it's concealing how sad you are that it's misdirecting you away from self-pity you know like if you're unhappy at school if you hate your teachers at school you interesting why and you gotta sit down and think about it i sent another tough love email to one of my one of my patreon supporters recently a guy who was still in high school and so this guy isn't mentally disabled or isn't to my knowledge it's a totally different guy guy was still in high school and he was saying to me dismissively how what his teachers are teaching them in high school is crap and what's in the books or crap and i really pushed back on him i said okay well here's what i think is the problem i think you're on an ego trip i think you know you feel like you're too good to do the work and do the studying and actually you need to do 110 of the work like they give you this history textbook you think it's crap you're probably right it's probably a bad history well why don't you do the [ __ ] research so you know what's wrong with it you don't just read it once and you don't drag your feet to the minimum you do 110 you read it twice and you go out and get other history like i was talking him through in effect this is how to be an intellectual when you're still a high school kid that's what it is it's at a much lower level than being an intellectual in your 30s but still look instead of sitting there petulantly and be like i'm not going to do the work i'm too cool to do the work i'm too cool for my professors i'm too smart to read this history textbook no you're not if you were actually too smart you'd read the history textbook and you do the research and you'd have all the footnotes so you know exactly in what way this history textbook is dishonest so that you understand exactly the lies your history teacher is telling you and you can even prove it you can even stand up yourself i don't recommend standing up in the classroom but you can start a youtube channel and you can get on youtube and explain hey like let's say it's texas here in the state of texas this is what the textbook says this is what my teacher said and here's the ways in which it's wrong now you're now you're an intellectual now you're starting to develop as an intellectual not feeling like you're you're you're too good for it so forth right all right so sorry that digression even still add marijuana to the equation right you've got a sulky sullen kid who feels they're too smart for their teacher who feels they're too good to do the reading too good to deal with the textbook right and now they're getting stoned four days a week now they're smoking marijuana [Music] the word complacency isn't isn't powerful enough to get at what i'm saying here like if you think of this as a fork in the road like either you feel sorry for yourself either you engage in self-pity where you feel sad you recognize that you're sad and you really reflect on it like you really you know really analyze why am i sad why am i unhappy with high school with my career with my girlfriend with all the things that make you unhappy maybe it is maybe some of it's political you live in a society where you hate the political establishment whatever it is when you really engage in self-pity productively or here's another fork in the road you get stoned and play nba jam you smoke marijuana and sit on the couch whether it's video games or watching a tv show like south park whatever and you sit there and laugh and smile in this inebriated state this is the sense in which i think marijuana is so dangerous and again for me i think it has everything to do with self-pity with the recognition of how sad you are and then engaging in a kind of productive analysis to move forward all right and i didn't even mention of course the other reason why you're you may be sad is because you don't have a boyfriend or girlfriend you don't have a husband and wife you can't i probably don't need to do it but and people do cope with that in those ways too so babe take away everyone but you know if you if you have more to say specifically on the marijuana issue and that you know marijuana yeah i definitely do but i won't do it i won't speak out i do think it's most people don't know everything about my life uh you are one of the few people in this world who i've really shared like yeah so many things about my life and you she knows everything about my life also okay it's not like i'm mysterious you know i recognize that uh you know i'm talking to you here but i i'm also talking to the audience that um doesn't really know all the ways in which i felt hopeless in college too so i really relate to what you were talking about with nobody can feel the self-pity for you yes that's right i didn't even have that because maybe the roles are just different with with females versus males it's just like you know there was a lot of coddling that went on and when i talked about how how help helpless and hopeless i felt oh you're doing fine yeah yeah you're right for women it's worse oh you'll do great sweetie you're doing fun yeah i just i'm filling in the blank culturally i know exactly oh just study really hard and and you know you'll pass your classes and uh okay what about when i did it yeah um that was such a blow to my confidence uh such a blow to my self-esteem when i when i wasn't doing well in school and it was partly because i was starting to rely on marijuana to cope with some really awful things that happened in my life you know and it's like just marijuana i agree with you it allows you to be complacent allows you to be happy uh momentarily i mean it's right not the effects don't it's not permanent so i have to do it every day right so some people can do multiple times today yes exactly but you're not confronting the causes for your own happiness yeah you know so i just yes you know exactly what i'm talking about i just say you know the negative effects that it had on my you know i just can't believe now in the position that i it's hard for sometimes i it's easy for me to lose sight of this but the state that i'm in now i i feel bad about the times of the day that i'm just not alone you know i'm not quick i'm not hurt and there are times that you know i i just screw up on something some paperwork or something i don't know yeah you're in a scattered cinema yeah because i for whatever reason i'm just not not with it at that moment like that to me just those those periods of the day where i feel tired or lethargic like i want to do everything i can to avoid that i cannot believe for years of my life like i was inducing that in order to sedate myself and feel you know try to feel better about this one that was really not the right way to go right about it so yeah i know this is only partly related to this in-cell phenomenon um but yeah i think it's a i'm just being i think it's a perfect parallel like in your case it wasn't related to getting laid but in every other aspect it's the same thing like that's that's my feeling about it yeah and not consult you but i think you could imagine if you had been fat and ugly then it would have it would have been exactly the same i mean you yeah you commented on uh how some of some of the just focusing on your body focusing on your appearance is a is a cope yeah this vocabulary uh yes i really do think to to distract from just lack of cultivation as someone's stupidity someone's ignorance uh someone's inability to even express themselves in their first language that's a really good point yeah you know uh we spend so much time well as a society in our culture we spend so much time watching television and consuming things we don't really spend enough time cultivating our ability to to speak well i think this is a problem um so you know this this aspect of it um i really think that's that's that's crucial and adding drugs to it adding marijuana to it you think that improved my speech no it put me in a state where i didn't have to speak and i was just right you know yeah so i just said you're you're constantly sedated yeah yeah um so look there's a comment from the audience here and you know i'm not i'm not here to ridicule you and and make you feel bad about yourself but i do just want to say in reading this comment i think you're a terrible person i could reflect on why this comment makes me think you're a terrible person but it's it's possible you don't know how old any of these people it's possible you're just a very young person who has no real world experience and it could be both you could be both young and a terrible person so here's the comments from someone in the audience called someone potato quote being a lifelong student means nothing if you do nothing with it i know a lot of unemployed or underemployed intellectuals who are not impacting their communities in any sort of meaningful way close quote okay so again it's just there's no this comment makes me think you're a terrible person all right in the army you can have 10 guys doing exactly the same job um let's narrow it down let's say it's the french foreign legion and i know because i looked at joining the french royal agent i know what their daily routine is so every day they're doing exactly the same exercises jogging jumping hurdles uh shooting targets i have a certain physical training routine sometimes it involves things like digging ditches getting into foxholes stuff you know okay so you know if you have 10 guys and every day they literally do exactly the same job exactly okay but one of them is developing himself intellectually one of them in his spare time is really reading about politics and history and say they're learning a language becoming fluent in a foreign language you know you think that doesn't matter you think and let's say the other nine guys let's say each one of them is different one of them in his spare time when he's not doing this job near me he's just watching sports on tv one of them is just playing video games let's say one of them is an alcoholic maybe one of them is a drug addict uh maybe one of them is just into soap operas maybe one of them is a whoremonger like he just sleeps around he goes to nightclubs and like that's his whole life is pursuing uh women and prostitutes that he can hook up with the neglect you know they have different interests out of these 10 guys let's say there's just one who's intellectual what does that look like after five years if you just show up at the army camp and see them for one day oh well they all they all shoot a rifle just as well they all run the obstacle course just as well that's what i mean when i say running hurdles they have these military obstacles but it's it is a lot like running around you know they're jumping over hurdles and climbing walls oh yeah all ten men are the same after just five years okay life is long wear that when they're 65 where are they at after more than 40 years really no um it's not just the military i chose that because that's a job where everyone is doing exactly the same thing you can have 10 people who work in real estate you can have 10 people who i mean any conceivable job where you're basically doing the same thing you know and and you're quote unquote underemployed as you put it the point being really this doesn't have to do with underemployment or over employment does it you can be a surgeon most surgeons are not intellectuals you can be a successful architect you can have a high status job where nobody would call you underemployed that's irrelevant that's immaterial because your employment has nothing to do with your intellectual development and as you say that's even true for me here on youtube i started a research project this is now years ago uh but not that many years ago two or three years ago where i decided i had to learn the history of the the english civil war no there's no pressure on me to do that for my audience no way is part of my success on youtube you know to deal with my own ignorance or from my own intellectual development it's like well this is a chapter of history i haven't put the work in on i am still now like literally like today learning more about the american revolution and that research is linked to the history of english civil war by the way in a dynamic way so one helped to set up the other i don't need to to finish my book i don't need to for this youtube channel any of you could say we could list off 10 different things i could do to get more views on youtube i can hire a model in a bikini i can do a bunch of comedy videos that involve a woman in a bikini or something all kinds of things i can do to be more successful as an entertainer as a filmmaker as as a youtuber right so i mean even for me like my intellectual development isn't really related to my job even for an architect it's not really your job but obviously as a soldier in the military what you're expected to live up to as an intellectual standard is very low they need to be sharp they need to be alert when you get out there with a machine gun but you know um no that one guy in 10 who's developing himself intellectually it really matters and with the passage of just a couple of years you see the difference it it makes and you know whether or not he may never be promoted in the military the military doesn't need that many guys uh in intelligence you know they don't need you know he could just keep on firing the machine gun for the french foreign legion for his whole career it totally happens you know whatever your job is it in 99 you know what i only want to say it's nine percent i'm going to say 100 of the time your intellectual development isn't really related to your job even if you're a painter like picasso your commitment to leading a meaningful life or being a lifelong student and developing yourself as intellectual really has nothing to do with your success as a as a painter you know so you know what it really matters and it really has tremendous effects now the other thing i'd say here i mean um it makes me think you're a bad person so partly i i think you're a bad person because the way in which you've linked this to earning money which it doesn't just have nothing to deal with it it's kind of antithetical retirement here but the other thing is this statement you've made not impacting their communities in any sort of meaningful way who who is beholden to their community nobody like guys you don't hear that side of my nihilism all that often you think i owe the city of toronto anything you think i have a moral obligation to be involved in or care about the politics of the city of toronto i don't each one of us we choose the burden we're going to take on in life now i did go to city hall in toronto i did get involved in municipal politics i did a long story i can talk about that and i learned from that experience you know that was educational in a way university never can be university education political science very different from actually doing the politics being literally being in the same room as the mayor and actually getting up at the microphone and giving a deposition and so on you know there's a way in which i i can learn that but i made the decision that i was gonna go to cambodia and get involved in cambodian politics right it's it's totally your choice ex nilo all right you are not beholden to any community you are not beholden to any nation you are not beholden to any religion right the choice is yours and this is part of the liberating empowering message of nihilism right the fact that your parents are muslim doesn't mean you have to be muslim you also don't have to be an anti-muslim like you don't have to become an atheist who is engaged in the critique of islam or trying to convert people from islamic you can be born muslim and decide to go to cambodia and be involved in cambodian politics that have nothing to do with islam one way or the other you can be born muslim let's say you're born in syria and you can move to toronto and you can get deeply involved in the politics of toronto or chicago or los angeles like it's on you but being an intellectual has nothing to do with earning money out of your intellectual development it has nothing to do with the question of whether or not you get a promotion in the military because you're an intellectual and normally they do note those guys like oh yeah there's the here's the one guy in a thousand who's reading books in his spare time and they will note it down on the record and they'll mention it to the guys in the intel core and intelligence or in the sigiant uh core signals signals intelligence or they'll note it down for the language we're like oh yeah we do have a guy who reads books you know maybe you'd be interested in in him for some other kind of training or assignment it does it does happen sometimes but also they don't need a whole lot of guys they need a lot of guys who can fire a machine gun they don't need that many guys working in intelligence um the point is your intellectual development doesn't have to do with earning money you're not beholden to earn money and you're not there's no reason to assume you can monetize that and also there is absolutely no sense in which you're beholden to your community or any community and if you don't like the community you're born into choose a new one and start your own even like literally you can go to an abandoned ghost town and buy a house for five thousand dollars there's you can get everything you can literally start your own community um in the physical tangible sense you know i i i they're probably i can move into a town in uh in utah with my five biggest fans we can start a community life would be hard you know no so i mean it can be a community that doesn't exist or you can you can you can choose myanmar you know it's it's all on you in that sense and again so look i won't go into this in any in any length or anything we started this talking about incels right are you [ __ ] kidding me that your intellectual development doesn't matter in this sense if you have a bunch of guys who are currently in the u.s marine corps who all go to a bar together so this happens i give you a very very specific example uh there is a u.s marine corps base that's a short drive outside of los angeles uh not worth getting into the details and every so often a whole bunch of those guys so these are the young strong physically fit guys us marine corps they go into los angeles to try to get laid to go to a nightclub or go to some other place like this where they can meet women because their life on the base is very limited okay now we started this sell discourse let's just say you are a woman uh they could go to the dance club at disneyland you know i mean it may not be a you know maybe a wholesome place like this not some den of sin like let's say they go to disneyland together you think it doesn't matter the difference between the soldier who is just a video game addict who in his spare time on his bunk bed is playing a portable video game system and the soldier who on his spare time on his bunk bed is really developing himself intellectually that makes such a difference to women even the women who've never really thought about it like women who don't aren't aware they're looking for an intellectual man they meet this guy and he's sharp and he's interesting and he's profound and here's this other guy who does exactly the same job and earns the same amount of money in this case they're in the same physical condition let's say they're all doing the same training at the marine corps base and this guy is dumb and out of it and all he spends his time doing is playing video games and watching anime like sorry this isn't the only sense in which it's meaningful but this video is addressed in large part to the the in-cell phenomena of course it matters and how how abominably shallow do you think people are my claim is even the people who identify as shallow even the people who go to disneyland we're saying things rather than like there are dance uh you know there are dance clubs and things within disneyland there are there are kind of middle-aged and and more teenaged you know trash in the disneyland i think people do hook up at disneyland anyway you know even people who tell themselves they're only looking for someone with a great body it even matters to them you know and the vast majority of men in the vast majority of women they don't they wouldn't they wouldn't say they're just looking for someone with a great body so no it matters on that level and then it matters even more in terms of all the other friendships and all the other connections you you have in your life and look you know um sorry it matters in prison and of course it matters within the prison of the of the vegan movement you know who who is friends with me who's trying to be friends with me and who's trying to be friends with kristin leo who is trying to be friends with this beg you know if all you are is a body that's it's all you've presented yourself as it's all you've tried to develop that's that's all you've got to offer you know and that's how you relate to people you know you think again of course this has an impact on your love life your romantic life or whatever but in every other part of your life it's huge too and then you know what if you want to have some impact on some community whether that's toronto city hall or the civil war in myanmar you know well what then what can tess beg really do what can kristin leo really do what can you do and now ask yourself who are you going to be five years from now like the positive message i'm giving you is even if you are literally test bag even if test bag is watching this right now or you are someone who has been living a life similar to test bag for the last five years think about the person you could be five years from now you could be someone whose opinion matters uh in the civil war in myanmar or at city hall in the city you live in or in a different city hall somewhere else in the world you've never been to in a language you don't even speak yet you know i mean guys i've talked a lot about um uh moving to los angeles uh what if instead i moved to guatemala just to give you an example so today i speak zero spanish zero and you guys are going to see me practicing the spanish language zero i do i do not know the spanish verb for to have or the spanish verb for to be like french i'm at a certain level german i'm at a certain level like there are many other ones where spanish is zero do you guys think i would be incapable of making my political opinion matter in guatemala five years from now starting today from zero uh melissa what we're talking about el salvador politics in el salvador you don't think and again it doesn't even matter like i could start here like i don't have to move to el salvador first i could spend the next two years getting deeper and deeper into salvadorian politics here at my desk in canada get fluent in spanish or get as good at spanish as i can do and then i can move to el salvador and try to roll heavy you think just me as one intellectual no friends no contact no movement nothing behind me you think you think it wouldn't create ripples i i already did that in vienchen laos i mean i've done that in different kind of you know i know i had some political impact on on the fate of the tiny nation of laos and the capital city vance you know like you can show up i also remember there was one polish guy i talked to about that about his own political the political consequences of what he'd stood up for both he and i were really interested in ecology um so it was interesting uh interesting to compare notes on that no you you think one person one intellectual can't make a difference in in el salvador el salvador guatemala and i'm pointing out i have no advantage i don't even speak spanish today probably mostly in the audience speak more spanish than i do i'm at zero right um but what if you're test vague if test bed moves to el salvador she can't do [ __ ] except take a [ __ ] photograph of her ass on the beach in front of a sunset that is the [ __ ] upper limit of what test egg can do and in the next five years it's not going to be so cute she's getting older we all are where is she gonna be five years now where's she gonna be ten years from now if you are kristen leo kristen i [ __ ] defy you go to el salvador what the [ __ ] can you do right and obviously el salvador like politically it's in a tough situation but you know it's not as dangerous as libya it's not as dangerous as syria it's not as dangerous as myanmar it's not as dangerous as cambodia you know really your life is not going to be in danger in el salvador guatemala the way it would be actually egypt you want to get involved in egyptian politics high risk um you can this can be the end of your life easily easily you can end up martyred if you want to [ __ ] around with egyptian politics no question anyway sorry i'm just saying i don't trivialize this but you know the problem is that kristen leo hasn't developed herself intellectually in any respect in the last five years and that's why she can't do that pardon me in the next five years right or if she can't prove me wrong hit the books kristen and maybe you can do that like maybe you know maybe starting out with test bag or kristen leal give it 110 and yes when you do that if you do that anything meaningful any anything interesting in your life people will want to go to lunch with you you know women will find you interesting if you're a man men will find you interesting if you're if you're a woman i obviously i can't promise you you're going to have an amazing sex life and maybe you won't maybe have other problem but you know that is the fundamental basis that's the start and in my opinion that's the whole incel movement is coping with you know um and obviously like their fantasy is that there's a beautiful woman out there who is going to appreciate them while they sit on the couch playing video games and watching anime while making no effort to be a better person or no effort to make the world a place that's what they want they want a woman who's going to love them just the way they are and women love men they don't love children they don't love an adult man who still lives like a child that's not what any woman is looking for they're not they're not looking for a man who is still doing anime and cosplay and video games anyway sorry like obviously all these things you you can get away with having a little bit of video games in your life or a little bit of anime in your life i don't think i have to digress to do that not you know it's not that every woman is looking for a uh intellectual superman who's totally totally devoted to that but um you know obviously uh the the social political context we're in is not one in which i have to have to make that argument i have to make the moderate argument for moderate self-indulgence the problem is we're drowning in self-indulgence and you know people would rather engage in murder they'd rather engage in terrorism in the name of this uh this doomed political movement than you know deal with with these real problems personally or scaling it up and politically or otherwise you know what i'm saying um so i just want to say again so guys i am going to read more your comments this is a good time to comment and i will actually read what you say you know um uh the unabomber he published books just within the last couple of years so i'm sorry i forget to what extent they were published in 2021 or 2020 but he published several books just recently and people are reading them people are talking about them and i considered i did some research i considered reading those books in order to criticize them here on on youtube in terms of something that's that's going on um so that's a whole political movement built on murder now you know the unabomber he was an incel and actually his political and personal history has everything to do with in seldom before the term existed the major crisis in his life what drove him to live alone in the woods and what drove him to become a terrorist and drove him to reject teaching at a university campus was his inability to get laid now i know what i'm about to say sounds unbelievable you can google it you can this is very easy to back up with innumerable published sources uh you may not know this but the unibomber was a heterosexual who spoke to medical doctors about undergoing transgender surgery and this shows how really you know really mentally disabled the guy was his reasoning was that he was this heterosexual man who couldn't get laid so therefore if they could uh surgically transform him into a woman he would have an easier time he'd be able to get late like he'd be able to gratify his instincts as a heterosexual man by undergoing plastic surgery that would that would make him a woman and then he'd have sex with men right like sorry that you know if you like you know and like the level of misconception here so like you're going to take a heterosexual man who's lonely and as an incel you're going to give him uh silicone breast implants right like that's what we're talking about you know and then he's going to have sex with a man like there are so many things wrong with this but he actually went in and did the interviews you know you there's a process of of interviewing with doctors before you can set up an appointment and undergo that kind of transgender surgery and at that time this is many decades ago so i forget when this was that you can imagine that screening process was more demanding than we had to talk to a psychiatrist an established look or are you really the right candidate for this surgery i do hear things that today so many of the doctors are so uh encouraging that people are just rapidly waved through um you know or you know encouraged to get transgender surgery right away without this kind of psychological scrutiny anyway this was actually crucial to his breakdown to his deciding that the whole university was evil that the whole academic establishment was evil and that the whole of society as he defined it was evil and to go into seclusion and go into rebellion however we have his diaries as evereco he wrote them in code he wrote encrypted diaries and this yearning his in-cell rage against society it didn't stop it didn't end like he kept writing in his diary how much it would mean to him just to have a woman to hold his hand like even if he had a relationship that wasn't sexual if there was a woman who could love him and this is just very psychological telling once when he was a little kid an older woman told him just flattery has given to told him that he was he was very handsome that he was extraordinarily uh good looking and he clung to this he clung to this compliment his whole life and he thought of himself as extraordinarily good looking and wrote about himself destroyed not good looking and he again he was it's exactly like the in-cell philosophy and someone thought he was blaming society that he even though he was this extraordinarily good-looking man couldn't find a woman and couldn't get laid and didn't have any romantic options and this is because of the conspiratorial evil nature of our society which i did not digress into but it's the same same kind of strange world-hating uh delusion that incels sink into uh which is to say is different from self-pity it's different from sitting down and analyzing why am i so sad and really dealing with that right world building fantasy delusionary fantasy paranoid you know fantasies you know and you know uh he talked to very few people but then he had one conversation with one woman whom he somehow befriended and he asked her about this so this is just one conversation one old woman was nice to him when he was a little kid and said oh you know you're really handsome you're you know some people say that to kids it doesn't mean anything you know some people just say encouraging things they tell they tell little girls they're pretty until little boys are handsome and it doesn't mean anything but he'd clung to this this notion he was extremely awesome and then he had one conversation with one woman and this is out when he's already a middle-aged man living in a cabin in the woods he's already run away from the university and run away from social media and he talked a woman and she was just very perplexed about what he said about himself and she told him apparently her word when she told them that he was run of the mill like you know he wasn't ugly you know what do you mean you're a run-of-the-mill looking guy and this had a huge devastating impact on him he had clung to this notion that he was extraordinarily handsome and was really entitled to the adoration of women you know and again he's so screwed up that he actually signed up for plastic surgery to transform himself into a woman even though he was in no way homosexual and i'm saying he was in no way even a transgender person he wasn't into cross-dressing it was just this delusion of that he could get laid this way um [Music] i'm sorry for some of you if you've never heard this stuff before i realize how bizarre it sounds but trust me you can you can google it it's just the truth um this was the uh the the political and psychological and sexual experience that created this terrorist the unabomber he really is kind of the original incel uh terrorist um uh so you know his his rejection of society his notion of his own superiority and entitlement and i just add as a significant footnote we do not know if he was autistic or sorry is because he's still alive he's still writing books and he may now he may in the next 10 years be more uh politically um uh influential i i don't know obviously i think his political philosophy is incredibly stupid but not everyone sees it that way um you know he was enraged by the sound of lawn mowers on other people's property and that's very typical for autistic people i have one friend who is autistic i don't have a lot of friends who are autistic and i've just mentioned i have several fans of the channel like they're not my friends but they write to me they talk to me who are autistic and very often those are really the criteria that give it away the inability to cope with the feeling of your shirt collar uh what's called ambient uh sensitivity to things the inability to cope with certain kinds of noises those tend to be so look i do not know to what extent was the unabomber just an incredibly stupid person and to what extent did he actually have a condition like autism like an actual form of mental retardation uh you know i could tell other other other details here uh related to his his very strange uh sort of sort of stupidity um but yeah i ask you you know um when you look at the messaging uh about ecology today when you look at the messaging about global warming today when you look at the messaging about veganism today and i have been actively warning against this for like eight years you know when you are delivering these messages uh you know yes to young people but also the middle age and older people when you are telling people this is the end of the world and this is the this is this crisis you have to make a difference in it there have already been science fiction movies made about this the army of 12 monkeys movie terrible movie don't see it i only saw a few minutes of it but that was a mainstream movie starring bruce willis i was a bruce willis action science fiction movie there have already been science fiction movies made about this that the ecological the same ecological hysteria that the una bomber fastened onto was to say really it's this kind of in-cell rage that's motivating his downward spiral it's my analysis but there's a lot of evidence to back it up his own sexual crisis of identity and his sense of intellectual superiority and his sense of moral spirit and even his sense he thought he was an incredibly handsome person you know his sense of superiority with his he was entitled these things and couldn't get them and this fueled it um you tell me aren't we sitting on a powder keg aren't we sitting on a time bomb isn't it just a matter of time until someone does for veganism what these few maniacs did for the in-cell movement right where that becomes the face of the the definitive political significance of what incel means you know like obviously it's easy to imagine if those killings hadn't happened if those massacres hadn't happened you could have a totally different discourse about in cells that had never been in the newspaper headlines right well isn't it just a matter of time now whether it's someone responding to the instigation of roger hallam at extinction rebellion i have many videos criticizing my job or someone responding to the instigation of gary yourofsky or you know numerous other uh radical voices is and look you know like in a sense this already happened with the unabomber it's just that the unabomber wasn't vegan like we're lucky the unabomber was an insane ecologist but he killed an eight rabbits he spent all his [ __ ] time chopping up rabbits it's horrible i think also deer once in a while but as i understand his diet was mostly rabbit you know so he lives in the woods in this horrible cabin spattered with blood where he slaughters wild animals he was one of those crazy guys well you know it's not even something new what already happened with the vegan movement what already happened with the incel movement what already happened with the unabomber it's very easy to predict that sooner or later somewhere in the world there's going to be just one crazy guy if not 10 who takes away the narrative from us forever where we don't get to define what veganism is and what it should be anymore because just one massacre just one act of violence has drawn the lines in the sand for us all babe if you want to talk about so i'm going to now read the comments but i just say for me these are really genuinely the same issue but i know i mean we've covered a lot of ground but hey this is a bellas yell you know i wanted to respond to this discussion about the uniform that in his thought process about not being able to get laid uh he he decided to discuss with a certain transgender surgery but also psychiatrists just mentioned psychology yeah yeah yeah so yeah there's a lot to do with psychiatrists it's so illogical if the pool of people interested in being with you as a heterosexual man uh was as small as it was right why would it be a larger pool of people who are interested in you being a transgender woman right okay so this is a level of no no i just wanna i'm not claiming it makes sense go on yeah right yeah or lack of thought process just emotional thinking on its part because he's he's lonely right we have a saying in english the grass is greener on the other side of the hill but go on yeah yeah yeah um so i just wanted to say that this is just a level of selfishness too that uh i remember an old video of yours where you were discussing um this this concept of being somebody's uh in the transgender uh community where you expect the other person in the relationship to to have that desire for somebody who is transgender sorry if you're not enough much sense but like you know um when you're in a relationship with somebody you can't be thinking totally selfishly about your desires you have to be thinking does the other person desire this so in this in the unibomber's case okay who is going to be in a in a situation where they're desiring this person and what do you bring to them what do you bring into their life and and it's it's this very self-centered thinking that i see also in other videos that i've seen of insults that are talking about you know feeling so lonely or like you mentioned you know i wish i just had somebody to hold my hand well okay um you know can you instead think of what you can bring to somebody else and isn't that more meaningful than just somebody holding your hand and it's more childish to think well i just need somebody right with me to not be alone you know and that that is not attractive i agree with you in that in that sense that women are attracted to men and women are not attracted to children yeah men not boys kind of thing yeah yeah yeah um so in a sense so i know this is not yeah not on the point that you were just ending with about um you know eventually something will happen in the vegan community some some vegan will will incite some violence you know like that that is that is concerning to me too and uh i agree we are at the stage where you said recently it's molten lava it's not yes right now yeah i don't know it's a liquid metal as opposed to solid steel still a good still a good image molten lava as opposed to solid stone it works just as well yeah it's still malleable right right yeah um and we have to the people who are trying to think 100 years in advance like you you know people are thinking well what is the future of life on planet earth ecologically uh what is the future of life on planet term in terms of animal suffering the people that we want to have their voices heard we want that to be we want veganism to be viewed as a rational movement something that you know something that can really make a difference in the world rather than um this this type of impetus to massacre you know like this is what's going to make something important that's terrible you know it's that's that's the wrong way to go about this and it's also in the sense it's it's childish it's it's ridiculous to think that this is going to it in the same way that you know protesting with signs on the street and yelling is also childish to think like well if i'm if i scream loud enough or if i you know chant loud enough with with my group of friends then something will change then then the government the governor will change his mind right and make some you know but so i want to stick on that just to be fair to the other side and i'm sure you felt this during your childhood if you grew up part of the problem is that we're constantly being shown on television examples to the contrary even if they're one in a million or they're one in a billion you know what i mean now um [Music] i can way back when i was a small child like this is a really small child you know you look at tv and it seems like people play the guitar and become famous oh and wealthy all the time right okay i was you know i was a pretty cynical kid i didn't believe in that phone but it's completely understandable just given the way uh whether it's newspapers or television or radio the way in which they are selecting out that one person in a million and showing the showing you that kind of extraordinary success again and again and again um you might think that just anyone could be an olympic athlete also growing up so you might think anyone can be okay but but in the same way um whether you're talking about violent political protest or non-violent right that you're seeing the counter examples again and again very often with uh false causality assigned to them so you know you will have a headline that says vietnam war ends and you'll literally have a photograph of attractive women in bikinis with you know flowers painted on their body like you know uh sexy teenagers protesting in streets when vietnam war ends this completely false cause and effect relationship is presented to you again in newspapers and on on even we saw a news item this morning you know like this totally false sense of how politics works is between you and also that it's the one exception it's the one case out of a thousand it's the one case out of a million now i'm not going to get into a lengthy deep critique of the media this way there were news broadcasts about the pro-democracy protests in hong kong saying hey it's working it's working it's working and then you don't get news broadcast saying it's failing it's failing it's failing right like just chronologically even if you were optimistic for the first few days of those protests in hong kong after a certain point you should have been reporting on and examining the extent which is failing myanmar is it just over one year ago it hasn't gone off that long the current protest in some ways the history of myanmar goes back thousands of years but the current phase of the pro-democracy movement in myanmar um you know again i this is all fresh in my memory you got this news reporting saying it's working it's working it's working and then just really briefly you get this it's not it's not really working you know you don't get an in-depth interest analysis of of the failure so no no you know this isn't exactly the same as talking about the way in which musicians become celebrities right they're not they're not the same but i'm pointing out there's a similar kind of misperception of reality that from childhood forward seems natural now maya culpa in this video i have mentioned the example of just two people in the incel movement who engaged in massacres and they've changed the whole western world they've had a huge impact there's no way to understate or overstate that these were two acts of violence i would just say massacre you know transformed political discourse including i mean so it was mentioned jordan peterson and people like jordan peterson they've been talking about it in cameron saying conservatives left-wing people feminists what what's been going on in feminism has certainly been galvanized and transplants is a huge huge impact so i mean that also is is cherry-picking how many massacres have happened in bolivia how many massacres happened in colombia how many massacres have happened in cambodia one cambodian in the audience showed it to like anne of you know there's no there's no such impact i mean whatever even myanmar how many people are being snuffed out in myanmar how many people being killed in communist china you can have massacres like there's like this also this is like only looking at uh the tiny minority of musicians or actors or that have a huge impact sometimes with very little effort since you can talk about a song that was recorded live so actually you know a great example and this is this is kind of ridiculous but there was one stand-up comedian who made one joke about bill cosby and it wasn't even a funny joke he just stood there on stage saying look it's crazy that bill cosby got away with rape if you guys don't remember there's just one moment and that clip got picked up it wasn't the first time he'd said it part of his routine for quite a while it was really i mean it wasn't even really a joke it was really in the middle of a stand-up comedy routine pointing the finger at bill cosby and saying this is ridiculous it's had tremendous consequences at least within american politics i think bill cosby doesn't matter as much in europe as he does in america so you know it does he doesn't matter as much in cambodia that's for sure but the the the the criminalization of bill cosby put it that way you know it's had tremendous knock on consoles and it still is so to my knowledge i haven't watched it there's a new documentary film series that's coming out right now saying i believe the title is uh we have to talk about bill cosby but i haven't i haven't seen it i'm not going to make time to see it but yeah this is some tremendous uh importance the death of george floyd well a lot of people get killed by the cops a lot of people die in strange circumstances like this is my point is that it's it's very easy uh to convince yourself that violent protest will work whether you're looking at the unibomber or the in-cell movement it's very easy to justify your mind and it's also easy to convince yourself that sexy standing on the sidewalk in a bikini holding a banner protest work it's like i think for my audience i've made so many videos talking about this you already know why it's ludicrous to think that way and even if you sympathize with the protest i just had film footage on my channel whatever it was couple days ago i had film footage these people standing and holding a sign saying we want democracy in myanmar is that how they created democracy in ancient athens is that how it happened ancient rome is that what it's really you know i mean i'm sorry you can read machiavelli mackey village discourses it's chilling the way he talks about huge numbers of people dying and machiavelli is telling you straight up you want to have a democratic republic you want to have a semi-democratic republic because for the most part many people are saying about a mixed democracy a hybrid republic that's not purely it's not as democratic as athens was you know but it has aspects that aren't you want that machiavelli tells you straight up you have to be willing to kill and die in large numbers and not just in one civil war but again and again that's the lesson he took from ancient rome you know what i mean like you know it's it's chilling oh and sorry if this is too abstract for you you want democracy in cuba you want democracy in syria you know really you want democracy in libya you you want democracy in cambodia it's not going to be holding a sign this is not how it happens so yeah you know i'm i'm just fleshing that out a little bit um yes it's preposterous i mean what is more preposterous the idea that you're going to bring about the ecological transformation of society through terrorism or the idea that you're going to bring about a kind of transformation in gender politics it's a good way to summarize what the end cells are on about through through terrorism but in the same way that we're conditioned to regard successful movie stars successful musicians like the the one in a million is me the the hollow type the extraordinary exception is made into the standard and the norm the exceptions to the rules in politics the one in a million is made the norm and then also as i say the cause and effect relationship is totally misrepresented and glamorized again and again so that's that's sadly the framework we're working with then you know i said i'll be say more if you're gonna say i mean you know i realized i was partly responding to what you were saying and partly taking a different direction yeah yeah that's great you know i just i'm just aware you know the impact of seeing those examples on television and even the responsibility that journalists have in covering these events and um you know how many people work in congress that never get featured in the news or if they do the changes that they've made are relatively minor um and they don't become famous whereas the internal killer just uh just to give an example think about how sobering that is think about how many people have become say the mayor of san francisco and they've never had the political impact of these violent yeah you can pick any example but like if like right now for you if you want to become the mayor of san francisco like 20 years from now if you have a 20-year plan to become the mayor of san francisco or almost any city or town you know that's really a tough road to get on but but then they have to stand there and say oh well i've had less of a political importance then yeah that these terrible people who engaged in terrorism yeah exactly yeah just a couple days ago it was because i uh i happen to see that one of the mayors of flint had passed away so he wasn't the current mayor but um just i had never heard of him before to be honest with you even though i grew up so close to flint uh michigan you know it's just in this way you know i i want people to recognize within uh the media like what what we choose to talk about you know that making these people out to be more important than they are also it influences the rest of the history of the world um in a way that like you said in colombia there have been massacres in in this span of time that we've been dealing with mass shootings in america you know um but that hasn't been making the headlines it hasn't been making um history in the way that uh yeah these insults have so hey no look i agree with you so i'm just managing the comment section while you're while you're talking um i used the example of uh extinction rebellion who have not yet engaged in bloodshed shall we say that have not yet engaged in a massacre i i've warned again and again if you just listen to the lectures they're giving and roger hallam is going to university campuses and saying to some teenagers some teenagers are stupid and some are mentally [ __ ] like we've been talking about this to what extent some of these people are mentally disabled and who engage in acts of violence this way you know well some people are stupid and some people extreme and if you look at what he's telling people he's really talking them into uh frankly terrorism that's my analysis of what he's saying sorry i have film clips of him where he's making the comparison to september 11th and i say look think about what he's saying think about how that's going to sound like maybe a really intelligent person has a sophisticated perspective on it like oh okay and in some ways this is like september 11th and in some ways it's not well not everyone's that abstract and sophisticated like some people are going to hear this this segment of what he's saying about september 11 they're going to think that's what they should do they should do something really violent like this you know um you know i've raised the anyway i've raised the concern that there are hard-working honest people who became the mayor of a small town and they say well why doesn't my opinion about ecology matter and his does you know now there are other comparisons elon musk elon musk is an imbecile why is it that what elon musk says matters so much more than a congressman than a senator than a parliamentary you know a backbench parliamentary uh official parliamentarian elected member problem whatever you know why is it elon musk's opinion and some some activist some activist who blocks the streets or perhaps an activist who engages in terrorism or the unibombers why is it their opinion matters more certainly than the vast majority of people who engage in our semi-democratic systems and and you know work their way up to work throughout the top that way now you know part of the answer is exactly because our systems are only semi-democratic i think there are very good reasons why people don't respect their congressman people don't care what they what the senate has to say they don't and they care about what elon musk has to say they care about what kim kardashian is saying it's not for no reason if you were closer to the athenian ideal i think you would have a kind of democracy where people are really involved and where its people the people who are like kim kardashian in your life are the demagogues at the panics like you know i mean also politics in athens was shallow in some ways i mean every single every single chapter in plutarch's lives it always talks about how handsome these guys were you know like we were reading the life of alcabiatis but any of the political leaders in athens it mattered they were handsome it mattered that they were also just mentioning like politics is not all not overcome that we have our power that we have the ability to express our voice we don't do it yeah that's right look that's right and that's why people are in cells and that's why they're you know they don't think you're crazy terrorists like the universe yes so but what you were talking about uh long ago now uh you were saying that oh gosh there's just there's just so much to cover here but i just say you know um you can go to your local zoning meeting yes to the town hall but people are not doing that and most of the people that are there are old overweight yes just daughtering old people that just don't want things to change they just are afraid of change in their society um they probably have old racist ideas about just the community what they what they want in their community you know this is a major issue and the the level that we do have democracy right um in the united states in canada in europe you know how many people are really attending these meetings how many people really care and um i just want to say i i understand what you were saying earlier too that like um you choose your own burden like you know the burden that you carry like right you don't feel beholden to be a politician in toronto just because you grew up in toronto you know uh you have taken on these political uh ideologies that that matter way more to you than right and what matters is what matters to me that ultimately it's my decision whether it's going to be cambodia or el salvador or whatever but it could be toronto and it could be chicago yeah yeah but if you attend those small meetings right now you do actually have the ability to make make waves you know you can you can really get your voice heard so look i i agree and i've had the experience but i would say even more this is kind of similar to the incel thing even if you fail you're going to learn something from that failure and you're going to gain a perspective that matters right so let's say it's detroit and you start getting involved in local politics in detroit and you decide these people are all idiots i don't want anything do these people this political process is uh let's whether it's that it's corrupt or it's just it's not really democratic or like you know you have you have that experience you have your analysis of it you see what's wrong with it even if it's a total failure at every step of the way right for one thing now you know that and you can't read that in a university textbook on political science like even university level study of politics they don't teach you that they don't you know like nowhere in the world so you know okay now you've had that experience and now you know so you get pissed off you again this has to do a lot with self-pity you feel sorry for yourself and now you've got to start making some decisions along the lines of what next so what next you know maybe you just move to another city maybe move to a small town maybe you live in a cabin in the woods maybe you find a different way maybe you become a creative artist you become a filmmaker maybe you say you know what i'm going to become a documentary filmmaker and i'm going to show how [ __ ] up city hall is i'm going to show a corrupt or democratic process i'm going to show it's not a democrat at all doesn't even have to be uh documentary film you can do drama you can make you know fiction or it's a fictional narrative showing the way elections really work in america and the way that negotiations at city hall really work and you know where it's it's this kind of thing you can respond to this in all kinds of different ways so like you're talking about a situation where failing is worth doing the frustration is worth having and then the analysis of the reflection on that that failure right it's going to lead to something it's going to us on positive yeah and you know sorry so there's some intelligent uh comments here but when somebody says here uh so uh dangerous kitty says um uh isil's argument assumes that even the biggest geek in the world can get some woman somewhere to to marry them um and then i think he or she is adding i guess for herself a quote and if incels could accept that they'll never get margo roby that can at least get somebody yeah anyway uh margot robe is an interesting example i i margo wrote me can't get me i'm just being real with you i would not [ __ ] margaret roby she's below my standards i would be rejecting her you know real talk um you know for all if you haven't watched the other two hours of this video you know watch the rest of it and i'll you know you'll you'll get why but like you know i know like it's i know you're picking the example the guys have to give up the delusion they can get with margot roby but i'm in a position where marco ruby can't can't get with me okay but like you know um if you are going to city hall and getting frustrated and failing and analyzing why and then you're starting some new project whether it's a creative project or whether you say you know what i'm going to learn spanish el salvador i'm going to learn cambodia i'm going to take on other things i can struggle with we've given all these examples or you decide you know what city hall is corrupt and hopeless and there's no democracy so i'm gonna get involved with feeding the homeless like it could be you're gonna do some kind of uh charity project that builds you up that way like there are so many different ways to respond positively to the lack of democracy he said i'm saying like i'm just saying this because melissa was saying well if you do get involved in democracy you can still make some difference and my answer is maybe and maybe but my point is even if that's not your experience even if your experience is that you can't make a difference and then you engage in analysis of why that leads thing positive but so kitty this person's using the name kitty that's the sense in which i think you can win right in your personal life in your romantic life also by developing yourself intellectually in response to you know those those challenges uh again and again and again and you know all of these things involve other people who are engaged in the same meaningful struggle you're engaged in like doing humanitarian work i'm just using disease to visualize even if you're just literally feeding the homeless you set up that kind of humanitarian foundation you're gonna meet people who find you interesting and they want to have lunch with you and i'm not saying you do this intentionally as a way to meet members down to sex but i think you can imagine even if you have lunch with a an elderly couple like it's a married couple and they're also doing this kind of humanitarian work and you're an interesting intelligent person you're just intellectual doing this political act and this charitable act they're probably saying you know what we have a granddaughter we you know they may not say it to you they try to introduce your their granddaughter and things it brings people into your life who actually respect you intellectually who actually respect you ethically um you know and you want to be a part of your life in a in a meaningful way you know and i'm glad by the way i see that sullen potato was not too offended by my my uh my thoroughgoing response to his his or her comments earlier we're left to guess the gender of of selling potato another interesting comment from selling potato quote imagine if these highly intellectual people committed to improving this aspect of themselves instead of choosing in instead of choosing not to because it's difficult they could contribute so much more to their communities you can see i mean this is someone who says a totally different set of values for me a totally different perspective on the world so selling potato i notice you say that i'm beholden to my community or we're beholden to our communities why not my grandparents why not my parents why not my ancestors that would be more of a traditional chinese view of the world like you should study confucius you should develop yourself intellectually so that you can do honor to the ghosts of your deceased ancestors so because like you're beholden to your parents and your grandparents why don't you work hard and develop yourself intellectually so you can contribute to your own parents right now we don't think that way but i'm taking the next step and saying look i have no obligation to my parents i have no obligation to my grandparents i have no obligation to the city of toronto or the city of chicago right like my and this doesn't mean i live a life without obligations i recognize that the obligations i have are the obligations i choose and those obligations can change and the good news is that taking on those obligations will change me also right now the other thing i find fault with here is selling potato where again your view of the world is just incompatible with mine it's very different you notice this comment begins by saying imagine if these highly intellectual people did x you know did this or that nobody intrinsically is a highly intellectual person right it's a con sorry melissa five years ago i mean she was talking about it herself earlier who was melissa five years ago who was melissa ten years ago right you build this up brick by brick who i am today is the result of a process broke by work and by the way there are aspects of my intellectual development i neglected i was talking to melissa yesterday about to what extent should we spend some time on math because i i used to have jobs where i did math all day every day and you do you build it up you build it think quickly well you know now for many many years i've neglected my ability in math it's not some great tragedy in my life but you know you have to recognize this and there are ways in which intellectually i've let myself uh degenerate there are ways in which i've pressed forward it can't it can't be everything i never learned to play a musical instrument i never learned to drive a car there are ways in which i just never developed skills and so on and so forth you know but like you know um [Music] you know i i'm rejecting this idea that you're born an intellectual that this is part of your character um whether fixed by birth or by the social class regards by anything else i am radically optimistic that kristen leo and tess begg and ali hardesty uh all of these people could be intellectuals they could become intellectuals in just five years if they wanted to right if they gave it 110 you know and i mean again obviously i can use male examples too and they're even more saddening and a lot of them are guys i've communicated with and i've spoken to directly but you know who would james aspie be today if just five years ago you know he'd started watching this youtube channel i know james asked you've seen this youtube channel i don't have to get into why but i'm less than six degrees of separation from these people what if he had taken seriously the message of this youtube channel and started leading an intellectual life james aspy's life to my knowledge now it consists of lifting weights it consists of smoking marijuana i believe he identifies as someone who smokes marijuana every day but if not nearly so he's a heavy regular marijuana smoker and intellectually he is just completely degenerated he's gotten stupider and stupider as he's gotten older um he's more and more ignorant he's more and more pathetic intellectually physically he still looks good with his shirt off he can still poke that's exactly what he does he stands on the beach in his in his underwear or in his bathing suit he poses he's kept the other way i don't know for how long and i don't know if he uses steroids and other performance skills i don't know if he uses testosterone booster you know that's the most common one now is so-called trt uh testosterone boosting therapy too you know but it really is the same thing as steroids gear is gear people and boosting your testosterone to superhuman levels it is uh it is what's known it's what's thought of as steroids even though on a chemical level it's a different type of chemical from steroids um i don't know if he does that i don't know if he'll keep doing that you know like i i i don't know that physical side of it but you know james aspie is a terrifying example of what it's like to grow old when you embrace the unexamined life when you embrace this unintellectual anti-intellectual life that is just not worth living and so just to give him credit james aspie is reaching out for a more meaningful life he is trying in his way to be a political leader an intellectual that's what makes it so tragic he's trying to be a leader for the vegan movement he's trying to convince he has his own political and ecological aspirations and he even tried as a disgust at length he tried to be a kind of financial and economic leader you know he's tried to do other things but you know the the desire and the yearning is there the attempt and the motivation is is there um but instead someone asked the audience why do you keep mentioning el salvador why don't you pick up a pick up a newspaper okay why don't you get up to date with the news from el salvador there's a lot going on politically el salvador it's a really interesting place right now okay what do you mean what could be more what could be more important for us to talk about than else elsewhere all these all these examples matter to me i care i care about political future about salvatore i care about the political future of cambodia like it doesn't it doesn't mean nothing to me guys um all right just catching up with your comments and then i think we're going to call it a wrap if you guys have a second hit the thumbs up as i say it helps people discover the video uh when it when it goes into uh goes into cold storage here on youtube yeah so we get some more comments from potato saying that he he agrees with a lot of what i'm saying which is great i happen to hear it yeah so uh selling potato makes an interesting point one of selling potatoes points has been to say that i didn't live a solipsistic life as an intellectual that i did things that mattered like going to cambodia going to cambodia to do research and humanitarian work so i disappoint i mean and i think that's part of our discussion about what the difference is between watching anime and doing something meaningful no matter how low we set the the requirement for something meaningful because shakespeare shakespeare isn't that much more meaningful than anime but it is shakespeare isn't that much more meaningful than playing video games but it is it's over this this threshold um so i do think you can reflect further on the precise way in which my studying the cambodian language and caring about cambodian politics and going to cambodia the way the ways in which it's more meaningful than the things most in-cells are doing with their time and most most married men are doing most married men don't complain about not getting laid but they spend all their time watching sports on television or maybe they watch anime too they're married men who play video games and watch anime most people are wasting time this is this is true however um selling potato i've said this in other videos this isn't the first time i'm saying this uh you know but my life in cambodia was a failure like everything i wanted to do everything i aspired to everything i tried to do in cambodia failed uh now there's a very positive element to that i was just describing you go to city hall you get involved in democracy and you fail and fail and fail but something positive yeah i will say i my sense of optimism about that at that time when i made that comment that you know right you could be using our voices democratically right small right hall meetings is based on the fact that i didn't do it myself yes right right no and this is interesting it's instructed because the contrast is i say well if you do that you're probably going to fail but that can be really rewarding anyways it's different right right right you were involved in the green party yes i got involved in politics at several levels yeah out of having right no experience politically really in the real world but you have a lot more political experience right right but i would just mention melissa you've seen totally fit the woman there was the woman from saginaw michigan yeah yeah so carly hammond she's she's a youtuber and political person uh who responded to me once on facebook but only once you didn't want to talk it's cool you know whether you think of carly hammond in saginaw michigan what do you think of the young turks there are youtube channels that show you what it's like to try to participate in elections and try to participate at city hall or again elections and democracy at any level and it's nothing is the same as doing yourself feeling yourself but my point is i think almost all of them are failures all of them are showing you family so i'm just saying the way i talk about cambodia likewise i really talk about it as a failure but as a somewhat meaningful failure so i'm not i'm not being a cynic here i'm not being catty but like did i save one person's life in cambodia no you know what i mean like it's just not the case that i saved a human life now conversely it's possible to be like a um work in the medical field to be an emt or something work as a nurse or workers work on an ambulance and you did go to cambodia and save someone's life but it's really kind of meaningless and if you hadn't done it someone else would have been on the job that day like it really doesn't mean yeah you went to cambodia you saved this guy's life but if you hadn't been here someone else would have been driving the ambulance that day and who gives a [ __ ] and nothing really came like so the saving the life thing is is in some ways you know deceptive and in terms of outcomes no i don't want to get into the details yes the work i did in cambodia did have some impact on the world did have some real outcomes but even if it didn't even if we say look isil's research and humanitarian work and what he tried to do even if we say it failed to such an extent that it had zero impact in the world which it didn't i just don't want to get into cataloging my accomplishments and and what difference but there were there was some impact there was some difference in the world but my point is this is still good it's still meaningful it's still positive even if there are no positive consequences for society for community and that's why i refuse to talk about this stuff as being you being beholden to your community as an intellectual and i certainly don't think you're beholden to the consequences to the outcomes this way like it may sound surreal but like you can get involved with feeding starving people like one of the simplest forms of charity and you failed to feed even one starving person like you know your your whole charity your whole political movement is a failure i mean it's i know it's difficult to imagine something being a total failure that way but i've i've read about case studies i've really i've looked at case studies you have charities that accomplish none of their goals and still especially in the context of this conversation we're still talking about developing yourself intellectually leading a meaningful life i mean guess what you don't accomplish anything watching anime or playing video games so you know in a really weird sense i'm kind of i'm kind of focused on the worst case scenario and pointing out how how wonderful it is um and that and it's true i do think of my own experience it's not false humility i think of it as a as a as a failure and so on okay so dangerous kitty has made a series of of comments you know and again i sympathize but it's it's kind of important to emphasize the way in which i disagree with you so dangerous kitty says quote i might be able to agree with isil if you define intellectual development broadly to mean being as knowledgeable as a person of average intelligence can be in some important topic so again i don't think of intelligence as a static trait like height i can't be taller and i can't be shorter unless i have a horrific car accident you know what i mean like this after a certain age you're as tall as you're gonna be and that's it okay i just do not view intelligence that way um i view your intelligence as something you can develop something you can extend are there limits to this yes in many many videos i've mentioned i have one brother who was born mentally disabled and if i haven't said it before i'll say it now to my knowledge he was mentally disabled because his mother attempted suicide during the pregnancy so it's really tragic but as far as i know it's not genetic and sense of dna but his mother who is not my mother is a different woman um you know attempted suicide during the pregnancy and this this is exactly what my father told me and obviously it was one of the greatest tragedies in my father's life we we do not know to what extent my father's own psychological problems were a result of that experience by the way um to be honest i just don't give them that much credit and i already know i already know what a terrible person my father was before that like in the years before that so i don't treat my father as a victim of this at all but nevertheless um you know so i i i i look at when i look at my brothers collectively i can't say all of them are born with the same intellectual capacity i have put it that way however um so you know to continue dangerous kitty's comment quote james aspie couldn't do what you do isil nearly as well as you i mean it would be good if you read a book once in a while and didn't smoke weed but nevertheless okay but this is what i'm saying to you sincerely this is with no false humility and again i look at most of my brothers my brothers who were not born [ __ ] my brothers who were not you know their mother didn't attempt suicide during pregnancy you know i look at the other brothers of my family none of whom are intellectuals in any way you know i mean you don't know how far he could take it you don't know what a wonderful person he could be today intellectually if he had gotten on this path five years ago if he got in this path five years ago like you don't know and he doesn't know either now there is this youtuber there's nothing interesting about her so unfortunately if you look her up you're gonna be disappointed there's this youtuber called uh ally hardesty and she was put on uh legal prescription methamphetamines at a shockingly early age i'm sorry i forget how old she was but her parents took her to get assessed for uh attention deficit disorder and she was given these pills and basically she was told she was stupid she was always going to be stupid and she needed these pills to help her cope with being stupid she was given an excuse to not really study and not try hard and not develop herself intellectually and you know her being told that her being given that diagnosis probably had a more profound influence on her life than the drugs but the drugs have a big uh impact the drugs being mentioned here they are methamphetamines they're legal they're not illegal but it's the government and the healthcare system giving methamphetamines and you know among things you know they ruin your sleep so they do make you feel more jumpy and energetic during one part of the day but they ruin both the quality of your sleep and the quantity of your sleep they have quite a range of negative side effects now in her case i said this before she questioned methamphetamines whatever before she questioned her diagnosis with attention deficit disorder before she questioned the drugs and the really negative impact on her life back when she was positive about them and we was just making videos saying hey it's great everyone needs to be on these drugs and she was only saying pause things but i'll make it made her life better um you know my assessment of her was that she was a person of normal intelligence or to be honest even a little bit above average intelligence but she had been given an excuse to be a self self-indulgent lazy nitwit and to get on these drugs and get this drug habit going and as a result she dropped out of university that she was definitely intelligent enough to complete a university education and whatever you know and i'm just saying this honestly if james aspie did not live the lifestyle of james aspie in all these ways you don't know how far he could take it you don't know how intelligent he could be and i'm sorry there's no one i can bring on camera to tell you what an idiot i was when i was 18 years old you know i'm sorry i mean 16 is even better or something there were a lot of people there were people who thought i was [ __ ] there people thought you know you know people thought i was really stupid i was dumb once you know i was ignorant once you know i i had to work my way out of this you know you don't know positively what james aspie is capable of or what allied hardesty is is capable of and they don't know either you know so are there limits are some people just born so mentally [ __ ] say i have this one brother he's never spoken a word he's never spoken a sentence in any language you know his his mental capacity is zero he could never even go to primary school let alone university you know okay but with that footnote set aside um [Music] you know i don't buy it and i i i just you know i i don't believe that there is this innate inequality that separates me from my own brothers with the exception of the one who was born [ __ ] i don't believe there is this innate inequality that separates me from ali hardesty or or james aspie that's why i'm so tough on them you know that's why i'm so mean to them it's because i actually feel they can do what i do too and you know even if you say well you know it's a good way to play so he couldn't do what you do as well he couldn't do it nearly as well as you do but in some ways he would be better right like if other people lead the life of the mind and develop themselves intellectually they're gonna have some strengths just as i have some some weaknesses you know and look so again this this relates to what i think of as intelligence and what i think was intellectual development my areas of greatest intellectual weakness are the things that i find boring and where i cannot motivate myself i cannot compel myself to do the research now i'll give you an example that you guys will find interesting like in a sense i do too okay there are claims being made about the new solar power systems in south australia and elon musk is involved okay so there's a lot of false propaganda some of it coming from elon musk some of it coming from the government of government of australia how fictional are the claims about this amazing new solar technology breakthrough another person who was at the same level of intelligence as me or even a lower level of intelligence just almost aesthetically they might be able to throw themselves into researching all the details of that and they may you know like a certain kind of guy would have in his garage a bunch of solar panels and would you know like he wouldn't just be doing that the research should be tinkering with it and he'd be really wanting to understand like on an engineering level the technology even if his work had nothing to do with that and where he'd want to come on youtube and really talk about okay look people are saying elon musk made this breakthrough and here like get into crunching the numbers here's the amount of electricity being generated here's how much it cost go through the government budgets for this is it is it really what some newspaper headlines are saying now as you can guess i am suggesting to you that i'm very skeptical i don't really believe that south australia has made this this breakthrough that newspapers are claiming they have but i don't know and i'm not motivated you know to to do that research you know i'm not to me like in a sense interesting but in a sense it's it's boring right so now maybe james look so james aspie if he had developed himself intellectually for five years in this sense right he might be really motivated to to to put in that work and get those you see what i'm saying like even if you only think of that as an aesthetic difference between us people can be much less intelligent than me and kind of get better results and and better outcomes and there are going to be things they're better at right you know you know why have i neglected my ability in math i feel like in the last 20 years or something there's really been nothing meaningful in my life connected to math i'm sorry let's say 10 years you know i i i that's how i feel about it um and maybe i'm wrong like maybe i'd be a better person today if i'd made math a priority instead of learning the chinese language which may be totally useless to me like you know maybe i'm wrong that some of these other things i studied i shouldn't have been studying if i'd instead been doing math or electrical engineering and guys i have i'm on no ego trip here zero i don't think i'm superior to people who get into electrical engineering i don't it's different you know what i mean and there are things i understand that they don't understand and they're and vice versa you know there's some selective blindness on on both sides you see what i'm saying um and look you know uh again i have a fan of the channel uh oliver he has his own youtube channel he always likes to bring up um karl popper's concept of falsifiability i will be the first person to admit that what i have just said to you is not falsifiable there is no way we can test the scientific hypothesis that if james aspie lived my lifestyle he could be smarter than me put it out you know there's no way we can test the hypothesis that in a five-year period ali hardesty could be could be positively motivated to develop herself intellectually and um be as smart as me or like whatever however you're gonna calibrate this test there's no way we can test this or falsify it even if we go back to my hypothetical example from hours ago now of 10 different soldiers in the army and one of them is sincerely motivated to develop himself intellectually and the other nine are not i can't even test the hypothesis would the other nine be better soldiers if they were intellectually motivated like this guy we can't even do that you know so i i'm the first person to admit that what i'm saying here is dogmatic what i'm saying here is optimistic and as i say by mentioning my mentally [ __ ] brother um sometimes what i'm saying is going to be wrong sometimes and maybe the unabomber is a great example of that like maybe the unabomber he was just too stupid like maybe he was literally [ __ ] you know like maybe he's just too stupid to ever benefit from education life the mind reading books or anything else you know so sometimes i'm wrong but what i'm saying to you so passionately again and again is how many times will i be right in how many instances are we talking about someone who really could have benefited someone who could have transformed themselves someone who could have transformed a small political movement like veganism someone who could have changed the fate of nations whether that's a tiny country like el salvador whether it's a small town or a big city like it's the politics of chicago it's politics of that scale how many people could have changed the world positively through the creative arts you know because can the arts they magnify the impact you have in the world you're just one person and nobody cares about your opinion you can sit around and feel sorry for yourself because your potential your your um your ideas don't matter well your ideas matter if you make them matter and if you just paint if you just paint them in a picture you create a beautiful painting you create a work of art all of a sudden your ideas start to matter you make a song that's kind of patchy and all of a sudden your ideas start to matter you make a film whether it's a documentary film or a fictional thing you your ideas matter in as much as you you make them matter you know um [Music] you know we don't know about how many people i'm right how many of these people if they started leading a meaningful life if they started prioritizing their intellectual development they could change much much more than their sex lives they could change much much more than their own than their own personal happiness and i'm sorry but you know i can't um i can't help but repress my optimism i mean it's two sides of the same coin when i go to a university campus today what do i see i see people living the unexamined life i see people completely committed to short-term sensual self-indulgence nothing else the university campus is full of people who only care about drugs alcohol getting laid watching sports on tv they may be playing on the sports team themselves you have no idea how busy the gym is on university campus you have no idea the idea how under utilized the library is you know what i mean like for real i've spent a lot of time on university campuses and the extent to which today university students live like you know middle-aged cocaine addicts frankly like they're they're they're what middle-aged people used to be like in the 1980s you know but they're still young they're young but they have no idealism they have no higher aspirations they're living for short-term self-gratification and self-indulgence that's what you see on the university campuses and i look at the at the professors i mean it's the difference between the conductor and the orchestra pit all the same problems the students have the professors are the same you know it's i i can't say it's the blind leading the blind it's you know it's the same evil in the hearts and minds of the professors that you see in the students you know our university campuses are temples to self-indulgence you know they're not they're not a road map to the life of the mind they're not leading you on the way to developing yourself as an intellectual they only exist to encourage you to become more committed to um it's life of reckless self-indulgence right so like my pessimism about the institution my pessimism about the culture that is exactly the other side of the coin where i look at these people whether it's james aspie or ali hardesty or so many others and it's like look there is a better person you could be today if you'd made the same decisions i was making just five years ago like think about who you would be today intellectually ethically and emotionally who would you be today if five years ago you started living the way i live you know you can't think the way i think because you don't look the way i live you can't do what i do because you don't live the way i live and it's not overnight i mean five years is a good span of time and then still today now i look ahead to the next five years there is this better person you could become right if if you started living this life if you started challenging yourself in this way and i can't say that about weightlifting i can't say that about yoga and that's all that anyone [ __ ] says if only you started doing yoga if only you started doing weightlifting you could have a better shape ass you don't like that's it you could have a a more appealing body if if only you started doing yoga or you started working at the gym i can't say that to you i have to say to you 95 of people who work their ass off at the gym in the next five years are still going to be ugly five years from now it's they're going to be an incremental change in their appearance some of them are going to get worse some of them are going to get fatter a lot of people fail on their [ __ ] transformation journey or they get better looking but it just doesn't matter there's no meaningful change in their life intellectually ethically or emotionally or it doesn't even lead to them sleeping with a better caliber of person you put in all this [ __ ] work into the shape of your ass and what do you get out of it jack [ __ ] you know [ __ ] kristen leo starts getting botox injections in her face starts getting plastic surgery now you look like a plastic surgery hat you look older you look uglier you look shallower you look vayner it doesn't bring a better man into your life and to some extent frankly she has psychological problems doesn't overcome your immaturity your lack of intellectual development neither in terms of like economics and politics and that stuff nor in terms of your sexuality how you relate to men and what kind of relationship doesn't help you in those ways like you know my optimism that people can be leading a more meaningful life is completely co-evil with it's it's the other side of the coin with the assessment that the vast majority of people are leading meaningless lives that they're performing way below their their intellectual potential now some of you can't relate to what i'm saying some of you are going to say that you were on a university campus the other day and you felt you were surrounded by uh brilliant highly motivated people of all ages inspirational researchers and people who want to make the world a better place people are trying to develop their own myself me maybe that's your subjective experience whether accurate or delusional after visiting a university campus in your hometown think about egypt think about people who are born and raised in egypt today male and female this horrible repressive religion where actually a lot of your time and energy goes into the conflict between different ideas about what that religion should be sectarian divisions within islam right like a lot of your time and energy sexually repressive religion intellectually repressive religion and now you're walking around a university campus in egypt these people have a lot of intellectual potential right i've known muslims my whole life you know you can meet intellectual muslims and of course you think hey you could be leading a more meaningful life there's a better life than mine but in their case it's not lifting weights at the gym it's not yoga it's not alcohol it's not watching sports on tv probably could be could be watched but it's not the particular model of the self-indulgent life that dominates on an american university campus there's a very different meaningless life that dominates on an egyptian university campus right so i think all of you can relate to right away if you're walking on a university campus in egypt there's a lot of intellectual potential here that's going to ways there's a lot that's being that's being squandered