Depression: There is No Cure. @Vegan Gains

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am i the only person who does not find depression a depressing topic of conversation i should find it quite uplifting to talk about depression and that's because you know i remember my father once uh met a surgeon at a cocktail party or something like this and uh my father asked him well what do you do what do you specialize in and he said cancer my father being a shallow and rather a stupid person said oh well that's depressing and the dark side back no it's not i get to save people's lives every day i get to change people's lives the better every day of course it's not depressing and the doctor said words to the effect that idiots always tell them it's depressing and it's like no it's not there are all kinds of areas of medicine that are really depressing and doing surgery on cancer is not one of them he gets the he gets to see people make progress make you approve everything i gotta say the same thing to you right now about depression all right i don't find it depressing because i actually think people can change and i think people's lives are improved just by having the conversation just by learning to look at these things and think about these things analytically right so like the surgery that's involved we're doing it right now all right in it in as much as there is a cure this is it okay now you know we have a funny situation right now this is september 16th uh 2021. two different fans of the channel who wrote in to tell me that they saw vegan gains uh did watch my videos and did make a reply unfortunately he didn't actually watch them from beginning to end he didn't actually listen to them uh in the old days we'd say he fast forwarded but it's not really fast forwarding he kind of clicked around with his mouse so he didn't actually get the argument of the video when he didn't have the patience to hear it and nevertheless you know the message got through to him on some level that there are some people who are willing to criticize the choices he's making and the rationale he's presenting in terms of depression and the the presumed you know cure for depression now the single most striking and stupid aspect of the case vegan gains is now making is how closely parallel it is to the excuses for eating meat offered by many of his fellow vegans who became ex-vegan how similar it is to the argument offered right now by someone like john venus notice that most of this video is not going to be a critique of vegans it's not going to be dealing with what i'm doing right now the criticisms argue most of it's going to be a positive discussion of what depression is and and what to do about it so on and so forth but you know um what richard says um in shoring up his defense of taking antidepressants is that he just felt bad he just felt so bad he felt he knew there was something wrong and he felt he tried everything to take care of it he felt he felt he tried everything you know we're going to come back to this of course there are a lot of things he didn't try he felt he'd done everything he could so then he turned to antidepressants as the only thing that could help him then what do you know based on equally certain a sense of feeling he felt that this drug helped him now in his live stream responding to this he indicates that he has seen some of the research about the fact that really these antidepressants have no positive effect or an incredibly trivial positive effect or that the positive effect can be completely attributed to the the placebo effect the drugs in this sense don't work they don't work in the same way that aspirin works they don't work in the same way that the treatment for diabetes works you know in terms of actually managing your insulin levels and thus managing diabetes not a cure for diabetes but you know it treats the symptoms that he is aware on some level and to some extent that this is [ __ ] in plain english right but he comes back to the same defense of his choices that john venus himself relies on right the narrative is his own desperation his certainty that there's something biologically wrong with him that he has a medically real problem with no evidence based on subjective feeling and then his certainty that the cure works again based on the same kind of subjective feeling well richard you're in good company and coincidentally you've been criticizing john venus at exactly the same time so if you don't know who john venus is he is a bodybuilder uh 31 years old now i believe and for some mysterious reason after years of bodybuilding and pushing his physical frame to its limits day after day week after week he started having joint pain what what a surprise what percentage of people who go into bodybuilding suffer from you know did you guys know any ballet dancers you know people in the ballet who complained about you there were a lot of lines or you know do you guys know anyone doing uh brazilian jiu jitsu that has ankle problems and knee problems there are some sports where certain chronic conditions are incredibly common because of the nature of the strain you're putting a body some people can cope with it some can okay so he's a bodybuilder who has joint pain and he reasons it through in precisely the same way that richard reasons through his depression i tried everything you know so he claims he tried everything well he didn't try quitting bodybuilding you know like you know if you know someone i've known a couple people like this people who are in things like ballet and modern dance and they have chronic pain conditions and what the doctor tells them is yeah you can stop doing ballet or you could stop doing modern dance you know guess what you know you've uh you you've in some ways specifically you've worn away the cartilage and these joints or something you've done some damage and guess what basically if you continue doing this you're going to continue getting this kind of chronic pain so you know he he convinces himself and you know by the way in john venice's case we don't know to what extent it's psychosomatic we don't know to what extent it's stress related he has other problems in his life he used to be wealthy now he's poor he used to be famous now he's a nobody uh he now has two kids he's responsible for raising two kids he's moved back into his parents house he's sleeping on their floor to what extent it's perception versus reality we already have a question but even if we take it that this is a physically real pain in his joints with a very obvious cause and that when he does take a break when he stops lifting weights mysteriously this is uh the pain disappears he has the same rationale vegan gains as he started eating meat meat dairy eggs he started eating non-vegan food and then he feels so much better all right now we've heard this if you follow veganism we've heard all kinds of vegans claim that eating meat solved their sleeping problems solve their sexual problems solve their stress disorder solve all kinds of self-evidently mental aberrations like things that are only subjectively real problems that are ultimately attitudinal not biological or physical and they feel completely certain that eating meat cured their depression richard in the same way you feel certain that taking this pill cured the depression and you know what when you sit down and talk to them about it and for some of you you'll never have this experience i have had this experience the next vegans so i'll just say i knew an ex-vegan i could say this doesn't really need to be proud but i knew an ex-vegan who had studied nutritional science and back when she promoted veganism she did talk about it in a very kind of scientific way in terms of exact wasn't that okay so tell me something on a molecule by molecule level what is the nutrition what is the what is the substance that you believe you're getting from meat and eggs now that you were not getting before from a combination of broccoli and beans and potatoes all the stuff that was in your vegan diet and you know in my experience talking to these people some of them are just completely insane but you know in my experience talking these people they will admit to you that there was nothing absent from their diet as a vegan that's now present in meat and eggs they will admit to you it doesn't make sense they can't provide a mechanistic scientifically valid explanation for why their joint pain was cured or why their psychological pain was true or why their digestive problems were cured and again to what extent these things are psychological realities versus biological realities you know why it was their sex life suddenly got better like seriously we had no joke claims about this claims about getting an erection and women having orgasms suddenly your sex life gets better because you started eating meat dairy and eggs yeah well that that could be psychosomatic that could be more you know a problem with your attitude it could be you know could be a lot of things rather than an actual biological reality of a nutritional deficiency and then conversely of course if it were a real nutritional deficiency if for example you have a zinc sorry a zinc deficient diet you can have a diet that's too low in zinc whether it's vegan or non-vegan but like if you actually have a deficiency you can cure it within veganism like oh well your problem is you're not getting enough zinc then you start getting more snakes so you cannot get john venus to reason through for you in a cause and effect way that his joint pain is caused by something absent in his diet as a vegan that is now being supplied that's present in his diet as a meat eater and that guy he's not an expert but he's done enough research he knows what a nutritionally adequate vegan diet is there's no way he can he can think it through there's no way he can he can reason through for you like even if you want to believe him you say look you have made a scientific discovery you have figured out that the cure for joint pain is eating the flesh of a dead cow so this is a major breakthrough all right now in the world how many millions of people eat beef every day and have joint pain how many bodybuilders eat beef and have chronic joint pain well john venus you have discovered something miraculous about the cause of joint pain and the cure for it that has never been known before and we are sincerely trying to figure out what it is so i want you to walk walk me through this let's figure out exactly what your diet was deficient in before and let's figure out what is the molecule what is the chemical the unique thing that is found in the flesh of a dead cow that you can't get in a vegan diet and then we could do an experiment once you figure out what it is like let's say it's something like zinc it's like oh well okay so you were zinc deficient now let's try giving you a vegan diet that's rich in zinc and see if that could like if it were something that could be specified or iterated right it would be in this sense falsifiable you'd be able to make scientific progress thinking about it think about it scientifically okay now look um again i want to talk about this in a kind of a more profound way all right i have no evidence at my end just watching richard's videos i have no evidence that his life has changed for the better since he started taking this pill i have none i have no reason to think that from an objective detached perspective he is less depressed now or more happy that he's improved in any way psychologically compared to compared to what he was before all right but he claims it he claims it so we can challenge him in the same way and say okay richard why don't you reason this through with me okay why don't you explain to me how scientifically this could make sense and we know his whole psychological history in as much as he's presented it on youtube okay so you are someone who suffered from brain injury you had cte right you had serious concussion and brain injury as a young man you're someone who's reported struggling with hallucinations right your whole life visual and auditory hallucinations you're also someone who has believed in one miracle cure after another thinking that it would cure your hallucinations cure your depression right that suddenly you have been cured okay in the past you attributed that to the vegan diet that veganism had solved your mental problems that formerly you'd been crazy and now you're not crazy thanks to veganism and then that didn't last right you were optimistic that veganism had changed your life forever and guess what it didn't work okay you had the same pattern played out again with taking quote-unquote magic mushrooms hallucinogenic mushrooms you thought you'd made this huge breakthrough you changed your attitude you changed your outlook you cured your psychological problems including depression and a certain kind of misanthropy that you used to call being a sociopath or being a psychopath you thought you had been cured when you take these mushrooms you have a pattern of doing this again and again and again and now you're taking a prescription antidepressant and you are attributing to it a miraculous transformation that is no more scientifically believable than john venus claiming that he's cured his joint pain through eating meat okay it's not we can't put together the etiology here there is no plausible etiology you know what there is another plausible explanation richard and the plausible explanation is that there is no cure for what's wrong with you you are the same man now that you were before you became vegan then you thought veganism had more actually transformed you you're the same man now that you were before you took hallucinogenic mushrooms you're the same guy struggling with the same problems and there have been different times in your life when what changed was your attitude was when you got more motivated or less motivated when you were more or less self-pity what changed were your feelings okay and your your feelings matter okay i'm not saying that to dismiss or denigrate them there are people who when they were vegan had a terrible sex life they had trouble sleeping they had trouble with their digestion okay and then they switch to eating a diet that includes meat and eggs and all of these problems are miraculously solved that's real okay that's real that's their real experience richard and you would be the first person to attack them and shut them down and denigrate them and and dismiss their excuses okay it's not hard for me to understand sympathetically and analytically how someone's whole life could get better coinciding with quitting the vegan movement walking away from the vegan movement you know one of the reasons why your sex life might have got better is because you're having sex with other people now that you're having sex with people who you know eat meat and drink alcohol and stuff whereas before you were with a puritanical bunch of like there are a lot of things i can relate to there and i can understand why your digestion got better because you stopped eating beans from uh mexican restaurants you know like there there are all kinds of facts and factors and that that you know i can sympathize with it and understand why that's subjectively real for people who quit veganism and go back to eating meat but it's not scientifically real all right that's just your subjective experience that's just in the realm of of your feelings and at the end of the day we all have to make tough decisions about what is the right thing to do um [Music] all right i'm gonna i'm happy to reply to your questions people in the audience oh sir most people in the audience if we can get 24 thumbs up it'll help more people join the conversation if other people have intelligent things to say um obviously i really only want to talk about things that are on topic so if you don't ask me about buddhist philosophy unless it's relevant sometimes i get totally wrong but if you guys want to see something on topic and that's on my level i'm happy to have you guys participate and again if you guys hit the thumbs up it'll hold more people participate as the live streams to run go on listen yeah so i just wanted to say that says that he has tried everything including positive thinking and i just want to point out how that is different than what you're talking about yes this an attitudinal difference another way to say it is also your temperament your temper right it's not necessarily just thinking positively uh and i want to get more of your perspective on that okay i have a lot that's what this video is all about okay so look you know one of richard's problems and for many of you the audience is gonna be a problem and for melissa before she fell in love with me it was a problem for her too is that you don't have people who love you and you can provide a detached analytical perspective on your life so you know i i i could i could give all kinds of examples of this uh from this relationship you don't have somebody in your life who knows you and loves you and cares about you but is actually detached enough to tell you when you're wrong [Laughter] tell you when you're not good at something like you're look you're not talented at this this is not something you're great you know tell it and really inform you know the the decision that you're making no only wrong there's a there's certainly a role for positive encouragement in life but you can also you can have a little bit too much great you know there's sometimes where you need someone to discourage you in life and really you know ask you tough questions okay um you ever had a friend who was muslim and this friend of yours who's muslim says the same things richard is saying so if you guys haven't heard his live stream most of you can probably just imagine this because you know his character they say to you that they're depressed and they don't know why and they've tried everything so they're going to start using this drug they say the same thing richard's been saying they say oh well my life is so wonderful and they tell you the things they do they pray five times a day they have a great life they have a really good relationship with their uh their temple with the uh with the ulama with the religious community at their temple and uh i don't know they get along with well with their parents and they they earn money at their their job and stuff and you know um they keep insisting you that they have a totally happy life and they've tried everything and there's just no reason for them to be unhappy they can't understand why they're depressed so therefore they have to turn to this mind-altering drug to solve their problem that therefore must be biologically real now i've already hinted at this but let's just make it really clear okay that is just as fallacious and inference as john venus assuming that his joint pain is caused by the lack of meat in his diet okay i i'm willing to assume it's real like it could be psychosomatic it could be that he just has joint pain for psychological reasons i mentioned a bunch of stress left but if he is feeling joint pain you know like oh well i notice you bench press 300 pounds like well bench pressing 300 pounds could cause joint pain and you know what a lot of bodybuilders go through this back when you were 21 you could bench press 300 pounds and not have dripping and now you're 31 [ __ ] welcome to my world you know what i mean it's no i'm i'm in my 40s now i know the difference i know what it's like to lift weights at 21 at 31 at 41. it's not the same and there you go okay okay you are making a leap of inference and saying i've got this joint pain i've i've tried everything i've tried everything therefore it must be a biologically real condition and therefore there's this cause-and-effect relationship in john venus case it's because he doesn't have meat in his diet because he has a vegan diet and now he's going to fill that in right vegan gains is going through the same sequence of fallacious steps in his reason right and it's very telling he believes in it he believes in every so he doesn't question it he doesn't have any ironical detachment about it okay now um i am actually thinking of a particular muslim guy i knew when i when i give this example and you may not have had this experience with a friend but you may have had a friend and you can never really know you can never be certain but it's like dude i've known you for about a year now and i'm pretty sure that you're gay that's the feeling i have about you and when we talk about women or your sex life or when i see the way you uh look at pictures in a magazine the way you look at pictures of men versus pictures of women as you flip their magazine when i'm around you partly it's mannerisms partly it's behavior part specific conversations if you haven't actually had sex with someone yourself you don't really know if they're straight or gay and by the way even then a lot of people are surprised you can be married to someone and find out later that they're gay when you thought i've known people who've been through that i have i've known people but you know what you might have a friend and from your detached perspective you can say look dude my perspective on you is that you're gay that you're a repressed homosexual and you're never really gonna be happy like the reason why you're depressed is that you're trying to live as a heterosexual person and it's making you miserable and no matter how much you tell me you have a great job a great relation with your family and that you love your religion and your religion is the most positive thing in your life i'm telling you from my detached outside perspective that actually your religion is the reason you're depressed that you are not going to be happy unless you challenge and overturn this religion and put it out of your life you know and that that may be the most obvious thing in the world from from my perspective from the outside looking in right and he will not see it that way at all he is saying i've tried everything did you try converting the buddhism did you try rejecting islam and joining a different religion by the way i'm also a critic of buddhism there's a lot wrong with buddhism but you can imagine what a transformation that would be in someone's life right to go from one religion to another totally different religion in that way you know and and you know to go from a religion that requires you to live in celibacy until marriage to a religion that allows you a lot of scope for sexual freedom you know that's that's a big difference a religion that's homophobic to a religion that's basically homo encouraging or homo embracing or whatever it's kind of pro you know go on vacation in thailand and you'll see what i'm talking about thailand is a terrible buddhist country in case enough these are big changes that they aren't even considering to them it's unthinkable to them it's in the range of the impossible right and to me it's the most obvious thing in the world you say you've tried everything and from my perspective you ain't tried jack [ __ ] you haven't even taken the first step you're not even asking the first questions about why it is that you're you're quote unquote depressed we have a problem as human beings this is one of the oldest problems in philosophy naturally when thinking we gather ideas into categories we can you can say we gather experiences into ideas and then we gather ideas into categories and we start to regard the categories as more real than the things they describe and they're not and the category is just a way of thinking it's just like a shorthand it's just like a nickname to gather a bunch of different things together right depression is not real i can prove it to you just using these three examples okay vegan gains can say that he's depressed john venus can say that he's depressed this muslim guy who's a repressed homosexual and is really piously going he's studying the philosophy of islam and everything too he's not just a passive muslim he's really deeply involved in the religion he can say he's depressed all right these are different examples gathered into one category they do not have the same medically real condition and there is absolutely no way that all three of them can cure or treat this so-called condition by taking the same pill john venus moved back into his parents house he's sleeping on the floor he has two kids he has a wife his wife doesn't work his wife doesn't have a job he used to be famous now he's a nobody he used to be rich he said a lot of money coming in maybe racism exaggeration whatever he was he used to be part of an ecological and political movement called veganism that was so meaningful to him and so rewarding and he probably had people sending a message on instagram every day saying that he's beautiful and he's an inspiration and he's saving the planet he's been also probably getting messages from people who wanted to have sex with him probably just a wild wild speculation on my part maybe everyone respected his marriage and nobody tried to have sex i don't know okay and now people regard him as a crank people regard him as crazy and stupid you know they know what he has to say about space aliens and spirituality and stuff right they regard him as a loser and he's not vegan anymore and he's still handsome right okay why why do you think he's depressed what do you like he's got everything he's got what do you mean you know he's tried everything oh it might must be it must be the meat in his diet it must be you know it must be vegan it must be the diet right it can't be the kids of course there's a [ __ ] dude you know it's your life and your attitude towards it your problems including the ones that you have never perceived as problems yourself the vast majority of muslim people have never looked at their own religion and thought it was a problem they may think it's the most wonderful thing in their lives christian people jewish people many religions like this they say what do you mean going to church every sunday that's the best thing in my calendar it's so uplifting it's so wonderful and to say that person no that's why you're depressed you're depressed because you're a [ __ ] cult member and this is ridiculous and the stuff you believed in when you were like six years old you can't believe it anymore and you're repressing that like you don't want to admit to yourself that you don't believe in santa claus anymore and it's it's tearing you apart you know what i mean no look sorry i mean there are there are a lot of examples um so i i knew okay i'll anonymize this i knew someone a woman who was religious as a child and a teenager now she's not now she's an atheist and guess what all the decisions she made that shaped the rest of her life were made back when she was a teenager right where she went to school what she majored in what his career was what supported me what her career was who she got married to who she had kids with no no she's stuck with those consequences for the rest of her life and she bitterly hates her own parents for having put her in this position and she bitterly came to hate her own husband and she she's to some extent has talked about bitterly hating her own kids because she didn't want this life she figured out too late this isn't who she is this isn't what she wants to do she quit the religion she had to force her husband to quit the relationship she basically divorced him and said look if you want to get back together with me you have to change your whole life you have to quit the religion and everything else too and there are other things she can't change she can't go back to college she can't go back to university she can't start a new career right okay okay oh wow that sounds like depression that sounds like an example that fits into this category and now my way of perceiving the world is that categories are more real than the things they describe than the things that groups so oh i know just the cure for you oh yeah yeah gee that's too bad huh grew up in a religion and you can't believe in that religion anymore and now you're stuck with this husband and these kids and this career path you didn't want you you really want to do something totally different in your career and you can't huh take this pill it worked for richard it worked for vegan gains therefore it must have a cause and effect efficacy that's going to cure all these other people's problems doesn't matter oh you're you're homosexual oh you hate your wife like whatever oh no you know the problem isn't you the problem isn't your attitude the problem isn't what are you going to do about it the problem isn't that you need to get out and solve your problems the problem is in your life oh no no no no no no no no no you've already tried everything else remember how crucial that is to richard's reasoning here he had tried everything else just like john venus right he tried everything else his his his life is wonderful just like the person who's still going to church or still going to the mosque in islam the true believer oh my life is there's nothing wrong with it there's nothing i could change there's nothing i could do differently all right and for a detached outside perspective like if you're if you know this guy the particular guy i'm thinking of like it would be the most shocking thing in the world to say to him well you know you could quit your religion and start sucking dick all right it's the other thing about an outside perspective right maybe you're wrong right like maybe i think this guy is gay and maybe he goes and tries it and he's like oh it turns out he's just a really effeminate straight guy you know what i mean like that that exists like my perspective my advice may be wrong you know what i mean right he doesn't perceive his religion as a problem it's built into the presuppositions of his life in a way where he's never going to challenge it he's never going to question it john venus doesn't question the real cause of his joint pain right he doesn't question really all the the sources of his psychological anguish and suffering and misery in his life we could go on about the psychology of pardon me the psychology of john venus at great length right there are two fallacious steps there one is i've tried everything nothing worked untrue and then the second step is therefore therefore i have a biologically real condition called depression okay so guys i'm i'm self-critical i've i've been through things in my life 35 people you've been here for half an hour and you haven't hit the thumbs up button what the hell is the matter with you come on hit the thumbs up button more people can join us and join this conversation you know um i'm divorced i used to be married to someone or i could totally say i was depressed because of the woman i was married to i was really married to the wrong person and it was horrible and she made my life hell every day okay now i don't like to use i don't like to use 21st century watchwords and i don't like to make allegations against my ex-wife and i think that that's clear enough frankly okay waking up in the same apartment with that woman and sleeping in the same apartment with that one was absolutely terrible and for me worked for her great relationship for her not for me all right and um you know if i had gone to a psychiatrist at that time of course they'd give me antidepressants they'd give me anything i asked for right if you go and you talk about how unhappy you are and how everything's unraveled in your life and you can't do anything you want anymore and how miserable you are with your relationship of course of course and you know i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that those antidepressants they will not even make you as happy as cigarettes alcohol cocaine you know there are drugs you can take um you know i hear drugs like um you know the drugs they give for uh attention deficit disorder uh those kind of steroids also taking testosterone you know but people say that if you start doing these steroids you know to get this big boost in energy you can shoot someone up with performance enhancing drugs guess what you still got a bad marriage you know what i mean you're still unhappy and rushed and you can say you've tried everything well you didn't try getting divorced like you know sorry you know what i mean what if what if you can never be happy in this marriage and you can list off the reasons or not you know what i mean it really doesn't matter now just just tell me something is this rare what i'm talking about to you whatever country you're living in you can look up the divorce rate it's probably more than 50 a few countries in the world that's down at 40 or 30 pretty much every 60 is more likely do you think it's you think it's really unusual to be so unhappy with your marriage that you're depressed what really for the man or the woman sometimes both sometimes both people are miserable because it's not it's not uncommon it's not uncommon at all okay you know so other i'm just saying this to talk about some problems in my life and i want to say this also because i said before most people don't have someone who loves them and cares about them but can provide an attached outside perspective right and then beyond that even if you do have that person they can be wrong someone might think you're gay and you're not gay well the reason why you're unhappy is that you're a repressed homosexual and they're they're mistaken that could be right but they could be mistaken that might be their their perspective on it i think everyone who knew us as a couple back when i was married me and my wife they thought we were this tremendously inspiring couple we were both very hard-working intellectuals and that's how they saw us they thought this was this amazing relationship between two amazing people in terms of what we were doing with our lives and they're right i'm like there's a sense in which that's a correct outsider's perspective and anyone at that time they might have said that my marriage was the best thing in my life or they might have presumed that i don't know if they said it to my face i said well you know there's things you don't know you know you don't you don't know what was like for me to be married to her you know what what my what my life was like waking up in that apartment every day and how how she treated me and you know obviously for me now looking back i could say i should have gotten out of that marriage you know much earlier the point is this whatever is wrong with that marriage cannot be cured by taking this pill okay whatever is wrong with john venus's wrists and elbows and neck with neck pain cannot be cured by eating steak by eating dead cow flesh it can't be there's no plausible mechanism there right and when you gather together this diverse category of human experiences of misery the things that make us unhappy the things that make us depressed right they don't belong in one category together even in the same way that many different bodybuilders experiencing joint pain belong in one category together we're talking about completely different people with completely different experiences and completely different perspectives so really quick some of you guys so again hit the thumbs up you stingy bastards if you change your mind later you think it's a bad video you can undo the thumbs up okay you can you can you can unclick thumbs up or you can change the thumbs down but come on we need more we need more thumbs up in here some more people could join us uh could join this conversation so look guys i've studied many different languages in my life okay um and studying a language especially a really hard language like chinese or japanese you need to have a ton of positive motivation all right it would have been easy for someone who met me when i was studying chinese and i think actually several professors who saw me at that time i had this kind of conversation with them i don't remember talking to students like my fellow students this way someone could perceive me studying chinese and say wow this is so wonderful for you you must be so happy this is like the greatest positive opportunity your lifetime and i see you're working so hard at chinese and this must be so rewarding for you you must be so happy about it and i would be able to say back no this is unbelievably depressing like this is like this is like a really dark period in my life now this person again viewing it from the outside they could say oh well the other the person sitting in the desk next to you they're doing the same work on chinese and maybe they're just totally happy yeah i'm learning i'm learning how to write chinese you know you're doing the same work in the same book and the same class and you're telling me that for you it's depressing but for the person sitting next to you it's a happy or uplifting or wonderful thing why is that now some people will go through the same thought process richard goes through vegan is going to be like oh well it must be that there's something biologically wrong with you you have a because you have nothing to be said about you have a wonderful apartment you're enrolled in a new university degree you're studying this language this is so rewarding and you're good at it you're like the smartest kid in the class not really a kid because i was in my 30s at the time but you know like okay everyone thinks you're a genius you're really good at this you know this must be this must be so wonderful and if you don't if you don't feel happy with your quote unquote objectively good life right also i just had enough money for food and everything i wasn't starving i had a youtube channel a lot of positive things and i'm like oh oh well then it must be you have to take this pill the same pill that works for people who've gone through divorce or some some totally different reason same people the same pill that's given to people who are grossly overweight the same pill that's given to people who are grossly underweight some people are unhappy and starve themselves some people get unhappy and ovary doesn't matter same pill same pill for all all experiences of human misery okay well you know guess what homeboy we could now sit here and have a one hour conversation about exactly why it was so depressing to be studying chinese at that time of my life you know guess what it's not what i wanted to be doing with my life i was really cornered into it right and there were problems with the university and the particular university professors and the struggle there was a lot wrong in this situation there were a lot of reasons for me to be anxious and worried about the future and unhappy and for me to resent and regret studying chinese anyway now look the particular professor went crazy professor teaching chinese and i had to drop chinese i had to stop taking her class then i started studying japanese okay again the person sitting next to me i remember one guy who was very happy in that class he was an idiot an incredibly stupid guy he was studying oh you know i like japanese cartoons i like japanese comic books this is great i always wanted to study japanese here i am studying japanese there are people who are complete [ __ ] idiots who are totally happy in that class studying japanese okay of course i'm miserable of course i'm depressed this is an incredibly dark difficult time in my life and the reason is not a biologically real difference between me and the students sitting in the desk next to me right it's a difference in attitude it's a difference in my appreciation and interpretation of the situation and it's real i can't just adopt his attitude so i can't as a i don't know how old it was then let's say it was 35 whatever i was 35 38 you know as a 38 year old man who has a divorce and a child and has specific career goals and who moved here and enrolled in this university to study one language and i have a background i used to study cambodian and lotion these are my concerns this is what i'm trying to do i cannot adopt the attitude of an idiot who is an engineering manger right he's doing electrical engineering and he's going to get himself a job working in a calculator factory in japan it was something like that he was going to work in a in an electronics factory in japan and he's just so happy he studies electrical engineering and this is like the most intellectually stimulating thing in his life because the other stuff he studies is so boring this is great studying japanese well it's not great for me all right it's it's for me it's part of the greatest tragedy of my adult life like i'm in a situation at this same university and you can't find the explanation by looking at the desk or looking at the textbook or even just in a simple sense looking at the professor maybe the professor's that bad maybe walk into the classroom take one look at the professor teaching this class like i understand why you're depressed oh oh you got to sit at that desk with that book and that professor i understand why you're depressed maybe maybe it's that obvious but my point is a detached outsider may not be able to see why your situation is depressing for you all right and this gets back to the root of the self-perceived problem and the self-perceived cure for the situation that vegan gains is in he says in defending his drug habit again and again that he's so happy that he can earn a living just by playing video games okay richard do you think i would be happy with that life do you think i would be happy if we traded places and i was living in your apartment with your video game system and your wife i would want to kill myself i would rather die than live the life that you claim makes you happy and the reality is within that same classroom whether it's two people sitting at two different desks studying japanese right or you can have two different people who are studying to be a dentist and one of them is really happy they really want to be a dentist and the person at the desk sitting next to them is like oh i was forced into this by my parents really they wanted to be a stand-up comedian really they wanted to be an artist or something and they're being forced to study they're doing the same work and in some sense they even have the same motivation like they have to be motivated enough to study and get the results or something you know what i mean and guess what for one of them it's incredibly depressing right and for one of them they're completely happy they could be living the same life in the same apartment they could be sleeping with the same woman too two different people studying uh studying dentistry in a swinging polyamorous three-way relationship you know what i mean you could you could make their lives strictly comparable in so many different ways and what one of them experiences as pleasure the other experiences as pain what one of them experiences as tremendously uplifting and positive the other you know the other is driven to the depths of despair by great to have 50 people in the audience are now going to turn and read your comments comment if you want to and again if you have a moment hit the thumbs up button it'll help more people uh join our audience and they can participate to whatever extent in this conversation uh great comment from uh alatera make more videos about language learning it's very unlikely it's a lot of work and uh unfortunately i just don't have a big enough audience for it um but we'll see i talked about that a couple days ago with my girlfriend melissa we could we could get into certain kinds of low effort things so we could live stream ourselves practicing the language or studying the language we could make updates talking about new words i learned this week we could do some kinds of language learning uh videos but if you don't if simply if you don't have a large enough audience you're not making enough money it's just to work alone you know i don't have a fluent chinese speaker with me or something um it's a lot of work for very very little reward and also by the way i get a lot of fan mail i can actually read that fan mail to you guys because it's quite interesting and in relation to the title the subject of this video you know obviously it's not the biggest impact i have on people's lives you know the impact we're gonna have right now with this conversation with talking about depression and motivation and how to live a life that's that's the biggest impact i make and then of course talking about politics history uh life of the mind knowing stuff too oh yeah ethics we talk about ethics sometimes talk about being a good person sometimes it's part of this conversation too yeah so ron sims long time viewer of the channel says quote i was on antidepressants on and off for a few years after going to a therapist that was anti-farm anti-drug and keeping it real with him uh sorry so after he met this this therapist he realized that he was the cause of his own unhappy life and he flushed him on the toilet so ron i'm going to say this both ways though right this this doesn't this isn't monovalent it's ambivalent or bivalent it goes both ways there are people who don't take responsibility for the extent to which they're making themselves miserable and again they may not even perceive it they don't perceive islam as the problem in their life they may think islam is the greatest thing in their life they don't perceive christianity is the problem in their life they may receive the greatest thing they don't perceive heterosexuality as the problem in their life they think oh it's great i got married to this good christian girl and we have sex once a month it's great but really they're oppressed homosexual or whatever their situation is you know they don't see it as the problem so one one type of problem is where you're not recognizing the problems in your life you're not recognizing the sense with your response from them but the opposite happens too and that's part of richard's story right which is that there are people who do get their lives together who do get motivated who do take on a more positive attitude or have more ambition right they start living a better life but they they attribute it to the drug they think that it's the drug that made the difference so same thing with uh john venus right so it's not just that john venus convinced himself that veganism was causing his problem right he also convinced himself that eating meat cures his problem now obviously the reality is at least twice he completely stopped lifting weights he had a recovery period and then after that he didn't have this intense joint pain anymore right you know this may be partly psychological but i've got to tell you i've experienced lifting weights i'm never going to be on that level i don't want i don't want to ever bench press 300 pounds ever you know and go to my grave and i never bench pressed 300 pounds or if i have i did it without paying attention back when i was in conveying it's possible because i used to slap on more weight and not always count it uh but i think i went up to 270 you're saying i forget but i don't think i have to get 300. but anyway you know um but my point is i have enough experience with lifting weights to know if you have had an injury and then you give yourself some time off to heal and you recover from the injury and you go back to the gym you don't do the same things that injured you before you modify the way you work out okay i most unless you're a complete idiot and this guy devotes his life to working out i am 100 certain that this guy did an analysis of what exercises he's doing and in what order like how much he warms up for them and that he changed the way he's working out to avoid joint pain there's no doubt in my mind right but and i believe him when he says now after twice stopping for many months having a period of recovery whereas tissue damage got the heal right and now he finds he's able to work out again without joint well there's another explanation for this right one the actual recovery matter and then two you started doing something different you started doing something better but you're not giving yourself credit for that you think it's eating a dead cow that solve your problem okay people do this with psychological medication all the time okay now i just say this is beyond the placebo effect this is into what i like to call the graven idol effect so right now i'm trying to do 200 push-ups a day i don't care if it's every second day like i don't have to do every day 200 push-ups terms how much time i got but i want 200 push-ups to do my regular thing and by the way i have my feet elevated way the hell up so it's a lot harder than normal push-ups it's a lot a bigger percentage of your body weight and i changed the elevation so that's actually a pretty significant workout itself 200 push-ups where you move the feet up and down and i'm in my mid 40s now people okay i'm an old man so that's what i want to do what if i told you you know i was really mopey i was really distracted with other things i had these other problems and i wasn't doing the 200 push-ups that i wanted to do and then i went to the hardware store and i bought a wooden log and i bought bought a paring knife started i whittled the log down into an image of the god hanuman and started worshiping this idol every morning before i went to the gym i'd wake up i'd focus my mind to get all pumped up and i started participating in this religious ceremony worshiping a block of wood that i've carved into an idol and then you know what it's amazing what progress i made in terms of weightlifting in terms of doing 200 pushups a day it's not because of the graven idol you have the cause and effect the wrong way around there are people who finally get motivated to quit smoking quit drinking alcohol improve their relationship with their wife or their parents change their career they get motivated to get their act together and change their lives and it's no coincidence at the same time they start talking to a therapist and the therapist refers them to a psychiatrist and they start taking these drugs and then they're able to say to you since i started taking this drug my whole life improved everything got better you got better you made it better it wasn't the block of wood it wasn't the graven idol okay it wasn't the pill you're giving credit to the pill for changing your life when you changed your life and it started with you changing your attitude and you getting positively motivated all right and dude it would be the same if instead of a block of wood that's graven into an idol if instead it's a negative it's not a it's not a worshipful sentiment it's not a positive loving emotion like you you love this god or whatever people love jesus you know what if you bought a doll and you make it into a voodoo doll and you're doing some ritual that's based on hatred it's based on revenge okay i hate the the doll doesn't do anything for you okay the doll doesn't cure your depression the doll doesn't provide you with motivation what have you okay it's you so it's you positively and negatively and now the other thing i don't think i have to repeat this also a lot of your problems are not you a lot of your problems are just the real world they're not you and they're also not a biologically real chemical imbalance in your brain that can be cured by a pill right like oh you're going to a university it's a really bad university it's not you right you're in a marriage that's a really bad marriage well at most that's 50 of you you know it's not it's not all you your parents maybe your father is an alcoholic really simple well it's not you that's your father your father's an alcoholic and he's making your life miserable so whether it's your job your school whatever you know there of course there can be all kinds of things that are that are not you but they're also not going to be cured by taking a pill not even if it's something as as powerful as cocaine cocaine totally changes your attitude and motivation you know also kills you side effects include death you know so i'm reading your comments thanks for writing thumbs up guys i do appreciate that um talk about placebo effect even if it's just placebo effect i appreciate you guys uh hitting thumbs up oh so that's interesting erasmus used to be a student of psychology in university rasmus writes in and says quote i've always been super skeptical of antidepressants and the chemical imbalance theory that's one of the reasons he quit studying psychology so that's something we talk about here is whether or not it'll be worthwhile as activists to get into that field but it would be very depressing to go through the formal education process where you're being taught again and again that antidepressants uh cure everybody's problems um only to go on to be some kind of uh critic trying to change the world trying to help people that way so jimbo smithers asks about thomas zazz so thomas zazz is famous for having the the hardest name to spell in the history of the world yeah i got to tell you something i basically hate thomas says um you know i think he's an idiot he's deceased now he was an idiot and you know he was right about a lot of things he was also wrong about a lot of things and you know um you can hear his philosophy of libertarianism slash anarcho-capitalism what he has to say about freedom and politics and so on you can hear what he says about other drugs like what he has to say about heroin and cocaine recreational uh addictive drugs and you know i think it's reasonable to come to the conclusion that thomas zazz was a complete idiot but he published really popular influential books that in dramatic fashion argued against um the psychiatric establishment and there's so much wrong with the psychiatric establishment that even an imbecile like thomas says can can make a big positive difference in the world by pointing the finger and criticizing it yeah so that that is what i have to say about thomas and you know obviously by the way guys when bad people do good things i'm happy for them you know i think you could say that about john venus like john venus is a terrible person but for a few years he was doing something positive in the world he was promoting the vegan diet not anymore but i mean you can now see intellectually ethically emotionally he's a terrible person but you know if terrible people can do something good i'm happy for them so you know i do not regard thomas as a good person or a good scientist or a good author but obviously in as much as he actually did something good i'm i'm happy for him yeah so tcat is raising an issue and it's significant that it hasn't been mentioned already it's not 55 minutes into the video tcat says quote three common side effects of antidepressants weight gain sexual dysfunction and nausea so in many of my videos i just have on screen as text very briefly the list of the the side effects so you know look scientifically either you regard these antidepressants as having absolutely zero positive effect and a really significant negative effect and it's important to say it's not just side effect there's a negative direct effect apart from side effects right or you know when some scientists argue this and i get it i've seen that or you argue that it has this incredibly small benefit incredibly small positive effect but really serious negative side effects and you then hold those in the balance i think it's important just to point out my argument is not based on side effects and it's not based on this kind of calculus of balancing the positive against the negative that's not how i see it now i had a girlfriend many many years ago and you know i first met her when we were in high school together and we kissed and so on when we were in high school but we didn't didn't have sex we were both virgins at that time and then we didn't talk for a bunch of years and then later we got together and we had a real relationship it's a lot more than kissing going on now this girlfriend of mine was a feminist and when she was in high school i can tell you feminism was a much more negative part of her life than islam is a negative part of the lives of the majority of muslims far worse okay far worse obviously i'm not making the claim that all feminists are in this ways victims of feminist ideology okay but this girlfriend of mine and you can imagine this is her relationship with me was a huge part of her life and her intellectual development given all those years that i was a part of her life and i'm a big influence on everyone in my life i'm a big influence on my male friends and i'm completely heterosexual and they aren't in love with me you know what i mean okay so i came into her life at one stage in high school and for her at that time feminism was this all-encompassing worldview of hating men and blaming men and seeing everything wrong with the world as being the fault of men obviously she had started thinking about this in a childlike way she was carrying on with it developing it as a you know as a teenager and to give an illustration of how deep this was you know her perspective on christianity at the time she wasn't an atheist no no she thought christianity was good but the problem was patriarchy the problem was everything men did within it she thought there was this like matrifocal woman-centered version of christianity that was a wonderful religion she was into like a feminist regeneration of christianity you know that's that's really [ __ ] crazy okay and like this was her perspective on everything in the world like it's one thing to say oh blame men like no like this is like more crazy than anti-semitism and blaming all the problem in the world on jewish people it really was this was really an incredibly you know violent vindictive ideology she'd bought into and that that was how she lived that was how she talked that was how she perceived the world she saw men as her enemies in this really authentically crazy way now um when she came back into my life she had completely discarded that world view and that ideology and she told me i only know this from which she had a period in between where she was in the transition where she was actually turned on by a lot of kinky sex stuff that was like directly the opposite of feminism was like denigrating toward women like you know she wasn't like that when i was with her does not does not take a degree in psychology to interpret this this would be like someone who was a pro you know a catholic and then they have a period where they're really turned on by sacrilege or dressing up like a nun or something you know what i mean and desecrating the church and what's what's sacred and holy what had been said or so she you know kind of the pendulum swung out the other way and then you know um so you know if i had been talking to her back when she was in high school so whatever let's say 16 17 i think we were still 18 in high school in canada at that time because the where our system worked uh i think americans leave high school before that you know four years versus five years for for high school it's a big difference um you know she wasn't happy of course she wasn't happy because also she was at heart a very conventional heterosexual woman who wanted to get married and have kids the reality of who she was and what she wanted was as starkly different from the feminist and lesbian ideology she'd signed up for it was as starkly different as being a repressed homosexual who's a devout muslim it's totally different it was irreconcilable right and she even tried she tried being a lesbian because it was cool it was part of her religion well she didn't really have what it took to be a lesbian you know um but she she tried um there's no way you could have talked to her when she was a crazy mixed up 16 year old and said look the reason why you're depressed the reason why you're unhappy is because of this political ideology you're a part of and it's ruining your life if she had gone to talk to a psychiatrist at 16 because she wasn't happy i don't tell you everything but you can imagine she was a very unhappy uh 16 year old if she had gone to talk to a psychiatrist there is no way any psychiatrist would have talked to this 16 year old girl and said well look the problem is feminism like the problem is you're politically never i don't think they would even ask about that they probably would have asked like how's your relationship with your mother how's your relationship with your father that would have probably asked very conventional therapeutic questions however you want to put it right so this is again the point about what a detached outsider's perspective is but but sorry if she had gone to see a psychiatrist they would say oh you have a wonderful life oh and you've already tried everything to make it better oh you should take this pill obviously you have major depressive disorder right like there isn't any problem with what you believe there isn't any problem with your attitude there isn't any problem with the decisions you make she made decisions we all do as teenagers you make decisions that shape your long-term future forever as a teenager they have terrible long-term knock-on effects right in terms of career and everything else you know and you're making the wrong decisions because of this this crank ideology right they would have given her a pill and that pill can't cure her any more than it can cure you or me or anyone else in this audience right it can't reconcile it can't you know it can't reconcile you with your faith regardless of whether that faith is a conventional religion or you know so that's that's the level of discourse and critique and analysis i'm engaging in here so from my perspective it seems almost irrelevant to talk about side effects but i do have videos talking about that and the side effects are terrifying and if you take even the most common antidepressants you are rolling the dice you are risking your life it is totally possible you will get a condition like acatesia i have videos talking about that it is totally possible you will be physically disabled for the rest of your life and you will never come back it is quite possible this will be a life-altering life-ruining decision that you've made to [ __ ] around with antidepressants and you know what statistically it is also more likely that they will just do nothing for you that you will have no perceived benefit and no perceived side effects even though we know as a fact it is causing you brain damage that every single day you take the drug it is causing permanent irreparable brain damage that you never get but you may not be able to perceive it so all of those are tragic all but i'm trying to get at the most the most fundamental parts of the equation the most fundamental uh the most fundamental question leading to the most fundamental answer and you know why most people make the wrong choices because they don't have any of this vocabulary they've never talked it through with anyone they don't have anyone who would sit down and talk to them for one hour the way i've been doing this live stream for one hour and talk about their situation let alone provide them with a whole bunch of other you know comparative examples okay so the comment from lazy baby chicken who i haven't heard of before welcome to the crowd lazy lazy baby chicken says quote i am just glad that vegan gains experience has improved even if it may be largely placebo do you feel that way about eating meat do you feel that way about getting on a 100 meat diet i don't i don't feel happy for people who quit eating vegetables entirely eat a 100 meat diet say they have amazing weight loss and muscle gain and they feel so much better and their whole life hasn't proven they get on the internet and preach about it because they feel better right of course it's a placebo of course it's a plus are you [ __ ] kidding me 100 meat diet will literally kill you you'll die of scurvy i mean it's deadly it's such a bad diet right but all of a sudden you've got a lot of fat and a lot of salt and zero fiber in your diet you feel different and all these middle aged people they think it's a second youth they found the you know what's it called the fountain of youth that they go wow and you know whether or not they're using steroids or what have you they they i'm not i'm not happy for you you're taking up you're getting the placebo effect i'm not happy for you at all all right some people are awake and some people are asleep okay now vegan gains has defined his role on the internet as doing scientific research to educate people right that's supposed to be the core of who he is and what he does and he has mysteriously not done the research on this now you can tell me when was the last time he did do research you may not have noticed but in his live stream just before saying that he had tried everything and thus he had tried taking antidepressants right he said he even tried taking mushrooms hallucinogenic mushrooms even because he claimed there's scientific research proving that these hallucinogenic mushrooms can cure depression i've seen the scientific research richard i've i've done research on this okay i mean the extent to which this is self-deception cannot be exaggerated this is just as ridiculous as a christian telling you that prayer cures cancer okay cancer sometimes does go into remission and cancer sometimes goes into spontaneous remission okay whoever you are you know i'm not happy for you i'm not happy for you because you have the placebo effect if you were praying and then your cancer went into remission okay no telling people that prayer cured your cancer or that a specific saint in the catholic church cured your cancer because you prayed to them it's bad and evil and wrong okay if you're a middle-aged person and you're tired of being kind of pot bellied and out of shape and you decide to change your life you're gonna exercise more you're gonna have a second youth you're gonna get motivated you're gonna start cheating on your wife again you're gonna have a better sex life or something you know this is what's going on with a lot of these guys the fact that you started eating a carnivore diet or uh what they call the stone age diet the caveman diet one of these the fact you started doing one of these meat heavy diets okay that's not the cause of the improvement you've experienced it's not and i'm not happy for you to go around attributing the change in your life which you know again you may have changed a lot of things you may have started counting calories so you lose weight you may have started going to the gym you may have started cheating on your wife etc etc are there all these things you've changed you also just changed your attitude you decided you wanted to make a change in your life like that in itself you decided you want to make a big dramatic change that's much more important than the fact that you're now eating meat three times a day you're eating steak through most days you signed up on this so-called caveman diet you decided you wanted to be a caveman you know you got this idea in your head you know these things these are like no i'm not gonna come out here and um you know encourage people to ruin their lives by trying to imitate you know these idols on the internet who are reporting the placebo effect as if it were a medically real scientifically real benefit whether that's from diet or drug that is bad and evil and wrong you know and guys just notice i'm a vegan but i am not even claiming you can't improve your life while you switch to 100 meat diet people do it all the time okay and really like the evidence is real okay but guess what people have a mid-life crisis and they start doing cocaine they start doing cocaine and going to nightclubs and i don't endorse that either okay i'm here to tell you what's right and what's wrong okay if you want to change your life say the same thing about converting to islam you can totally change your life around because you had a mid-life crisis and you converted to islam and among other things you quit drinking alcohol when you converted islam is totally against drinking alcohol because you didn't know i can totally see how someone can come on and give a testimony about how they were depressed and their life was miserable and then they converted to this new religion and everything got better guess what islam is still bad and evil and wrong okay so no i'm not out here saying i'm happy for anyone who feels they've improved their life or feels that they're doing better because of the the placebo effect i think that's a tremendously dangerous thing um in all these areas including politics including feminism you know something as seemingly harmless as feminism does indeed ruin people's lives right let's sorry i am reading your comments it's coming guys um but let's also question another thing the first the first sentence from lazy baby chicken quote i am just glad that vegan gains experience has improved what's improved what has improved okay i'm just being real with you i think when he started eating a vegan diet nothing improved he claimed he was miraculously secured he'd solved all his psychological problems by switching to a vegan diet he no longer had depression he no longer had hallucinations he never had all these psychological problems oh and then guess what a few months later he admitted it didn't work he had this period of time where he said that taking hallucinogenic mushrooms had totally cured him and totally changed his life it totally solved his psychological problem okay it's not true this is someone who lies about his health outcomes mental health outcomes and physical health outcomes again and again and again he lied about having a vasectomy right he did have a vasectomy he lied about what the actual outcomes were he had terrible side effects he had terrible debilitating pain and awful side effects and he's permanently scarred by it he's a very visible scar now for the rest of his life it really had a tremendously negative impact on his life for at least one year but i think it was more like two years or three years he had all these terrible side effects but there's still videos on the internet where he's saying it's the most wonderful thing everyone should sign up to do it so look uh guys okay i feel like so this will be kind of a a brief digression but um it's not that much of a digression you'll see it's it's right on topic um i got fan mail from a member of the audience i'm going to read it to you okay so a viewer uh wrote in i'm going to leave this viewer anonymous for obvious reasons he says quote dear mr mazzart i've been watching your channel for years i too have questioned your motives at times i thought i had thought you enjoyed condemning people for their weaknesses but now i think that was unfair when you described your struggles and setbacks and being on youtube in taoism and daniel so that's a great video by the way it's a couple days ago but there's a video called that was him and daniel i think it's one of the best videos on my channel anyway so the fan says when you describe your struggles and setbacks uh induced by being on youtube in taoism and daniel it finally struck home that you were a real person i.e not just a face on the internet who has real and positive motivations why else would you endure these years of abuse period life on the internet has made me cynical period my judgment was unjust so i can i can write more of this but at this point one of the things i want to kind of encourage you to to think about is this um you know why am i criticizing richard why are we talking about this what are my motivations right and what are his motivations okay i think that people who don't have good motivations to help others have a great deal of difficulty in recognizing it when other people demonstrate it right um i talked a lot this is maybe two years ago i talked a lot about humanitarian work and saying to richard directly you should do humanitarian work you should actually get out and help people okay now some people could misinterpret that the same way this this fan says that in the past houston is interpreted you can misinterpret that as just being oh this guy is mazzard he is just showing that he's morally superior to vegan gains to richard that he's just looking down his nose and saying oh you're not morally pure like me because i do humanitarian work and you don't or you should be more you can misinterpret it that way right but again if you actually go back and watch those videos or you just listen to me say it now no i'm actually making this recommendation for richard's benefit i'm really saying you can be a better person you can be happier in your own life you can have a more meaningful life you will benefit by doing this humanitarian work even if the people you went out to try to help let's say you go to the border of syria now with the syrian civil war even if they don't benefit or even if you have an incredibly tiny you know positive effect on the world like you managed to feed a couple starving people you know but that's about it and you know this is years of your life that go into it okay so like okay it's easy to misread it and i know because richard wrote to me at that time i didn't he probably talked about in a live stream and i didn't hear it but i know he wrote to me richard responded that a hundred percent negatively as if it's just me trying to pwn him as if it's me just trying to insult him or snub him or something and he wrote back to me all angry he wrote back to me talking about the size of my penis natural source of envy in his case talking about saying oh well you think you're morally superior to me no i well i don't see you going and helping uh you know people refugees in syria or something right okay you know it may be hard for you to understand from the outside right but i mean that suggestion really sincerely really positively now i have other experiences in life right i spent many many years in a university and at different universities so because of my ex-wife i spent a lot of time at cambridge university england and oxford there's a bus that links them i have never said and i never would say to richard you know richard what you really need to turn your life around is to go and study at cambridge university england it would be great for you it would really because i don't believe that okay i think richard could i think richard would be more depressed i think his life would be worse if he kind of got his paperwork together and got his money together and went and enrolled to study any of the subjects i'm familiar with at cambridge university england that's that's sincere okay i know obviously any of you in the audience could say well look currently the guy just spends his time doing hardcore porn and playing video games on the internet come on isn't it an improvement for him to go to cambridge university england totally reasonable perspective it probably has people's life saying that look why don't you take your money and your fame and go to cambridge university england why don't you go to some university start studying something start learning something start okay i'm telling you in terms of my experience in life and my knowledge of richard as a person i can't say that that would be insincere for me to say hey dude this is the cure for your depression this is how you can live a more meaningful life okay but what i can say about richard and from my perspective this guy does not even have like a high school level education i'm not claiming he didn't go to high school i'm claiming he didn't really learn what you're supposed to have learned while you were in high school this guy is a very very low level of education i can say to you sincerely okay richard this is the kind of guy you are these are the advantages and disadvantages you have in life i'm saying for you sincerely you can turn your life around if right now you roll up your sleeves and start getting involved in humanitarian work if you really seriously and selflessly start helping other people including other people who hate you and who will never thank you for it okay like including people where you you help them and in return they swear at you and spit at you even that experience like i really believe richard that you can improve your life and let's say it you can never be depressed again you can really profoundly change your life forever you can have a series of meaningful experiences and you can learn and you can grow as a person by getting out and doing humanitarian work and learning a new language and studying a new culture and struggling struggling to respect people and struggling to have them respect you and immersing yourself in in real life and real political problems as they unfold and living at this much higher level of of engagement all right vegan gains says he had to take this pill because he tried everything and nothing worked well richard you didn't try that richard you say you're so proud that you can just sit and play video games to earn a living and you know if i was doing that i would want to kill myself okay you're living a life that's not fit for a human being and you think you're so goddamn happy doing it the same way a repressed homosexual who's a devout muslim thinks that his religion makes him happy when in fact his religion is making him israel the same way my ex-girlfriend who was a crazy feminist extremist thought feminism was the most powerful positive thing in her life she thought it was the greatest thing and that was what was making her depressed it was what was ruining her life but she thought it was the best thing in her life richard you say you've tried everything okay but you never tried quitting video games you never tried doing humanitarian work you never even tried setting yourself a schedule to read two books a month and come on youtube and do book reviews like you never challenge yourself to grow intellectually to set aside childish things to stop playing with dolls to stop playing with action figures to stop playing with video games and start to take on some truly adult responsibilities challenges aspirations ambitions and then to get the kind of gratification that comes not just with success but failure okay when you're pursuing those ambitions you're someone who hasn't grown because you never took on those higher ambitions it's completely obvious to any detached outsider why you're miserable and it's not obvious to you because you're too close to it i do see your questions and comments as they come in people um [Music] okay i'll digress on this just a moment so someone in the audience called eliza says quote reducing regular alcohol consumption has had a huge impact in helping her feel less depressed over the last year close quote okay so just to come back to it very very briefly richard claims that he's read scientific research about the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms now i can tell richard if you read it you didn't understand it like you don't it's possible there's a lot of [ __ ] peer-reviewed studies about about all these drugs and they're written by people who are highly motivated to lie or to present their research in the most flattering way um imaginable okay what what actually is the effect of alcohol on the brain in the scientific use of the term it's called a depressant okay it's a depressant for both the brain and the central nervous the whole nervous system not even your fingers and toes has a depressant effect on your neurons and axons through your whole body including your brain what actually is the effect of these hallucinogenic mushrooms on serotonin richard seeing as you believe in fundamental theory behind ssris and snri drugs you know it's the same theory it's the monoamine reuptake inhibitor theory which is the same how how could both of these theories be true how could it be true that you believe in the scientific research pointing to the specific effect that those hallucinogenic mushrooms have on serotonin and you also believe in this theory about ssris and snr um but you guys know most people do not think these things through this way they don't reason them through at all and i think richard has been honest in stating the emotional reasoning he did he said oh well i've tried everything and nothing works and he convinces himself out of desperation to try this thing that on some level he's aware doesn't work he's evidently seen enough enough research uh showing that just babe do you want to jump in so melissa's been reading about this quite a lot lately i mean you could say something totally at this point because he's like totally out of left field but i mean you've done a lot of reading about one thing i could say is it's a dangerous decision to start taking antidepressants the book that i've been reading research shows that it makes you more prone to depression in the future if you stop taking the antidepressant you're more likely to become depressed and start the antidepressant again and then it gets to a point quickly where psychiatrists tell you to not stop taking them to never discontinue to continue taking them forever and that's what is concerning that it's becoming something that people do forever a forever broken that every day you're taking and what other a permanent disability you might say yeah okay like psychological substance substance that you take um would you be okay with every day that having an impact on your brain yeah would you be okay with taking magic mushrooms every day um hey guys i just got uh i just got good news in the mail i got research funding for this project i've had mine for a while um i didn't tell you about this but i filled out the application i sent it into the canadian government and uh i'm gonna do a research project on the effects of psychoactive substance it's going great we've got cooperation from the american military and what they're going to do is they're going to take a bunch of new recruits and they're going to divide them into two groups and these recruits they're all the same age and they're pair match same height same ethnicity we've got two groups of men who've just come into the army just gone through basic training and 50 percent of them are going to be put in a base where they drink caffeine every day every day first thing in the morning they have a cup of coffee and then they're free to drink as much or as little caffeine throughout the rest of the day as they want to so minimum one cup of coffee and then the other group of recruits absolutely zero caffeine and zero alcohol zero mindless drugs no other confounding variables whatsoever while they're on this base and we're gonna see who gets better results we're gonna study in depth the performance indicators for these men and here's the best part of all we're not just doing this on an army base where they're training them to be snipers or pilots we're doing this with the defense language institute so these guys are doing some physical training they're learning to run up and down stairs and climb a hill and shoot a gun but they're also learning a foreign language so a lot of them are studying arabic i can understand why in terms of current american wars and what have you you know but they're learning like so we're going to be able to study in detail who learns a language faster who's in better shape physically oh we're going to survey a whole range of indicators we're going to examine who would do better if you had two groups of soldiers one group of whom are drinking coffee first thing in the morning every day and the other has zero caffeine wouldn't that be fascinating doesn't that sound really rewarding and interesting because you know we're all familiar with caffeine as a drug we all know it has some advantages and disadvantages and we think about our own lives which would really be better for me if i'd signed up for the army in some ways right i'd have an advantage whether it's working out at the gym or studying language of the textbook at my wand caffeine but in some ways there's really an advantage i mean like how well you sleep you know and then how that affects other things gee i really i really don't know oh sorry i meant magic mushrooms i meant we're going to have one army unit who every single day gets high on magic mushrooms and is hallucinating and another army unit which is sober which one you think is going to have better outcomes or better results all you [ __ ] kidding me there's no question all right caffeine has some positive benefits right and there are also negative side effects all right caffeine is a drug that we tolerate in our society for this reason and and i'm i think the negative side effects are serious they get me i do okay if you actually believe that ssri antidepressant drugs have a benefit a real benefit or if you believe that snri antidepressant drugs have a real benefit or wellbutrin or xanax and xanax is not a ssri but i'm just saying any of these other classifications of drugs benzodiazepines haldol any of these psycheds okay if you believe there's a real benefit that means that you believe that if we do this experiment with two groups of soldiers going into the military and one group is taking haldol every day or one group is taking prozac every day every single day they're starting their day with a dose of this mind-altering drug that you think they would perform better they would perform better than the soldiers that are clean and sober okay nobody believes that with all this excuse making and all these digressions and distractions from the really important questions of how to be happy how to lead a meaningful life we're kind of circumambulating the big issue of what is it you really believe the positive effects of this drug are what what is it you think you're going to benefit because i'm willing to admit caffeine has positive benefits i would be willing to admit adderall has positive benefits right if you have two groups of soldiers and one of them is getting high on adderall every day and the other is clean and sober i'm not sure who would learn more chinese in six months who would learn more arabic in six months i'm not sure who would do better in terms of physical conditioning weight lifting right some of those stimulant drugs they have benefits there are also really serious negative side effects right but i can admit that i can say there are trade-offs here and if we do that research i'm not sure what we're going to find i would assume by the way if you're really doing it in depth you're going to find that certain types of personalities perform better with caffeine certain types of personalities maybe excel when given adderall and others do terribly that there will be some people like look this adderall is driving me crazy like they can't cope with it the effects at all there's some people who respond really negatively even to caffeine even though most people use caffeine intersect there's some people from the effects are too negative or the effect on their sleep is too negative the effect on their emotions is too negative they can't handle uh taking caffeine at all okay but nobody believes that if you split up these two groups of super soldiers and you put one of them on antidepressants that they are going to be better soldiers that they are somehow going to outperform their competition and looking at your own life nobody really believes that this is giving you a benefit where if you could split those two pads that you really would have performed better in this sense nobody believes to put it this way that antidepressants are a performance enhancing drug and isn't that the greatest irony of all that richard vegan gaines someone who became famous by researching and criticizing the minutia of performance-enhancing drugs that really work okay make no mistake anavar works okay steroids work all right don't do them i'm morally opposed to it i think they should be illegal okay they work this guy built his reputation on supposedly presenting a scientifically enlightened perspective on performance enhancing drugs and now he's addicted to a drug that is in no way performance enhancing and guys the excuses you make are much harder to quit than the drug itself i'm gonna keep reading this fan mail um so if you weren't here i'm continuing to read a letter from an appreciative member of the audience and he says quote you're one of the only people i know of who can offer a sincere and unique perspective on almost any social or political issue for example this is a funny example but it's an interesting one for example your take on the purpose of museums that they offer a unique chance to challenge dominant regional narratives as in detroit was shocking to me all my life had it seemed natural normal and inevitable that museums were recreational cheerleading centers with a veneer of science that they were merely celebratory to challenge something so fundamental has made me take the functions of my society less for granted i do not know where else i might have learned this similarly your take that shyness can be an expression of shame has prompted me to rethink my occasionally debilitating shyness and deep sense of shame at being someone with normal thoughts and wants so he's recognizing the extent of which his own desires are normal and are not this special character trait called shyness this also relates to depression to what extent you have normal desires and normal problems normal disappointments okay i continue the quote quote it i it did feel like your advice was more directed at trolls than the ordinary shy people though those who are well-meaning but reticent this advice has been uncomfortable but valuable you know what i keep saying you guys get uncomfortable oh this of course he said so his final paragraph he says your honesty sincerity and level of research make your channel by some margin the most unique channel that i watch on youtube while i do not watch as much as i used to i admire your ability to offer something uniquely distinctly you it takes courage and i am grateful for your efforts okay so i want to go back to the very first paragraph right and what he said there briefly um he said uh he's watched the channel for years and he has questioned my motives at times because he had thought that i enjoy condemning people for their weaknesses right now i'm just being wrong with you so we have 48 people in the audience now hit thumbs up if you have a second uh helps more people discover the video okay if this is the only time you've heard me talk in your life this is the first video you've ever seen does anyone think that i am enjoying condemning richard for his weaknesses that i'm enjoying condemning being answered do you think that's what's going on for me psychologically or internally there have been other people who come up i'm not enjoying condemning john venus i'm not enjoying condemning nina miranda right so using this guy for whatever reason he was interpreting my videos as if they're presented in this mean-spirited way and i got into saying look to some extent someone like richard himself he can't recognize my good intentions when i'm demonstrating them like richard when i'm talking to you about humanitarian work when i'm talking about the importance of reading and of really challenging yourself to read things you're not already you're not already a self-appointed expert in where you're you're out of your own comfort zone getting uncomfortable and and learning new things and growing the stuff i'm talking about richard that's that's not me being cruel to you that's not me enjoying snubbing you or being mean to you of course it's hard for me to see because that's what he does what he does is he enjoys snubbing people he enjoys being mean to people he enjoys being cruel to people insulting and denigrating to people i mean okay that's not what's going on here that's not what i enjoy i'm i'm i'm yes i'm partly sincerely trying to help you obviously that's incredibly unlikely to work the reality is i'm sincerely trying to help people in the audience who may have some of the same problems you have and even this piece of fan mail and even comments from the audience during this lesson it does help people so i am helping people and i'm a motivated people i'm just going to react to the phrasing of that okay he says i thought you enjoyed condemning people for their weaknesses doesn't that describe richard perfectly like richard what makes you happy you you really seem to be happy when you're condemning people for their weaknesses you don't seem to be happy when you're helping anyone else ever you don't have a charitable bone in your body you know what i mean well i'll ask you this question and i'll close the video you know this is not an easy easy question for people to answer okay what is it that makes you happy when are you happy when can you say doing this makes me happy and can it change you guys didn't know me during the years of my life but there was absolutely a big chunk of my life where my answer to the question of what makes you happy would be research i absolutely thought of the happiest thing in my life not necessarily the most meaningful or the most important as research you know and um even in that context like cambridge england and oxford england you know you met all these people they were behaving like models and actresses in hollywood or something they're behaving like this is a popularity contest and this is about who's sleeping with who and who's getting nepotism they were behaving like no talent models and actors people who weren't trying to get ahead on their the merit of their work there was all this skullduggery at cambridge and oxford really and you know i'm meeting people in time with look look bro i'm i'm about this research like this like what are you what are you here for like this is like really like what the [ __ ] is wrong with you like i so there's a huge gap and you felt it every day alienating you from other people that way it's like what and i gotta say um it was really weird specifically in cambodia when i was in phnom penh cambodia so you guys know i've lived in many countries in many different situations but it was most striking when i went to events in phnom penh cambodia and there are these other people who were doing charity work they were attached to humanitarian work charity work and there were other people attached to research specifically research foundations or search positions for search jobs uh i also saw this in in vientiane the capital city of laos i've seen this place but it was really really striking in cambodia and it's like bruh you're here to [ __ ] [ __ ] like literally that's what they're here for there were people who were in it for the money and there were people who were in it for the sex and like sometimes the sex is as as simple as prostitution sometimes it's more complicated oh jesus could i ever tell stories holy [ __ ] there were people who were in it for the ego trip like oh there are all these perverse you know motives and it's like like bruh like i'm here for the research and i'm here to actually help people and these kinds of conversations come again and again be like dude like if i were motivated by my sex life why would i be in cambodia like what the [ __ ] is wrong with you like this just makes no sense to me like what like you know you like you're running an orphanage for your sex life and dude that is not a [ __ ] exaggeration it gets dark okay you you there are catholic foundations and there are protests there are people doing humanitarian work with dark ones but even when it's the foundations that are like handing out sacks of rice to starving people that are doing you know starvation related food security food insecurity or stuff like like dude this is what you're about this is what motivates you like i'm here for this research and i'm actually here to make the world a better place which concludes the research does understand right like like these are my motives and like even even the money thing like we're sitting here you want to talk to me about money like i could be working in real estate i could be working in real estate in toronto canada at that time one of the hottest fastest growing real estate markets and i i knew one guy who worked the stock market in toronto but i could be playing the stock market in toronto under six different headaches i can be flipping tech stocks during the tech moon like you you're you're about money um okay what is it you enjoy doing okay so i'm telling you for i don't know what it was 10 years of my life let's just say 10 years to make it a round number okay there's 10 years my life where i could describe this that this is what i enjoyed this is what made me happy this is what my life was kind of most centrally about and then the bizarre contrast i had to other people it's like i can't i can't believe you're here in this same place in the same time in the same line of work with me and your motivations are so totally alien from mine right but it changed okay it can change and i would even go further and say it must change you won't stay the same you keep growing even if you don't try even if you don't want to even if you want to stay the same okay what was meaningful to you at 16 it's not going to be the same at 26 and it's not going to be the same at 36 and it's not going to be the same at 46. most people completely assume that they stop changing after they finish university or so maybe maybe 22 maybe 25 or something like oh and now i'm just gonna be the same person forever wrong the [ __ ] you thought was meaningful the [ __ ] you enjoyed at 25 you can't enjoy anymore at 35 that goes for your job that goes for your intellectual life the life of your mind guess what bad news might go for your marriage you don't enjoy [ __ ] the same person anymore you don't enjoy making excuses for that person anymore you don't enjoy helping them and being involved in their life anymore you thought they were profound before now you think they're [ __ ] shallow they used to make you happy you know they make you miserable it's it's tragic a lot of people get married at 25 and get the force to 35. okay it's it's tragic a lot of people commit to being a dentist they think they're going to be so [ __ ] happy for the rest of their life being a dentist and it's positive and they help people and they make a lot of money and guess what after you've been doing it for 10 years you're 35 and you'd rather [ __ ] chew your arm off to get out of this bear trap you'll do anything to get out of dentistry you've got to change or and you didn't want to change but you changed what you enjoy right what makes you happy changed okay research doesn't mean to me what it used to anymore okay humanitarian work doesn't mean what he's doing charity work doesn't mean anyone used to writing books publishing doesn't mean to me what he used to do more going to university studying writing essays for some old man who grades them doesn't mean to me what he used to anymore okay i didn't choose that i didn't choose to change i changed and i'm 100 confident the person i am today is a better person than what i was 10 years ago and 20 years ago richard you can't be so certain okay richard you're a worse person now than you were 10 years ago here's the [ __ ] hook richard you think playing with dolls can make you happy you think playing with action figures can make you happy you think reading comic books can make you happy i was a kid once too okay i read comic books when i was a child i played with wooden blocks when i was a child okay and wooden blocks just can't be for me what they once were okay and there are guys who worked so hard to play baseball at like an elite level and richard used to do that with hockey right and then you get to a certain age a certain stage in life and baseball can't be for you what it once was the wooden blocks can't be for you the playing with dolls or action figures reading comic books it can't be for you what it once was you can't be that stupid anymore not even if you want to be okay richard playing video games can't be for you what it once was if it ever made you happy it's before i knew you and i look maybe when you were 16 maybe when you were 14 maybe when you were 12 there was some point in your life at which playing video games made you happy okay and it's over and the tragedy is you don't know it yet and you've convinced yourself you have a medical condition a medical condition that's never existed that there's no scientific proof for there's no test for you've convinced yourself that there's something biologically wrong with you the same way that someone who has diabetes someone who's a diabetic has something biological with them and it can be cured with a pill and you think you've tried everything but you've tried nothing you haven't quit video games you haven't done humanitarian work you haven't even started reading [ __ ] books you haven't started educating yourself you didn't decide to go back to school you didn't decide to get a profession or a career you didn't you didn't even try [ __ ] a different woman richard okay he didn't even try cheating on your wife all right and um he says from an attached outsider's perspective you can keep telling yourself you have a happy marriage okay if i were in that marriage i'd want to kill myself richard and there are a whole lot of people in the audience whether or not they're confident enough being honest with your face there are a whole lot of people can look at your life and say if i were living your life i'd want to kill myself every aspect of it including your body dysmorphia obsession obsessively working out and trying to be super thin and then trying to be super heavy and all this stuff dude that looks like a [ __ ] miserable life every aspect of it but including the fact that you are still clinging to things from your childhood that once made you happy and you don't even realize that they can't do that for you anymore okay what about this richard what if it's not just video games and it's not just action figures and it's not just comic books and it's not just pornography do you have any idea what an impact pornography had me when i was 13. wow well what what effect do you think it has me today [Music] the difference for me between seeing a woman with her clothes on and her clothes off is like nothing today okay when you are a 13 year old male whoa like dude you're endorphins but you such a threat it's so exciting to see pornography okay something like that also happens with video games right with a lot of these things like maybe when you were 13 or maybe when you were 11 or something maybe you have to go earlier with that video there was a time when this was thrilling this was amazing the time when pornography is amazing that's over for you richard pornography is never going to be for you what it was video games never going to be for you what it was action figure comic books what about this thing i just quoted from this fan mail okay what about condemning people for their weaknesses what about being mean to people bullying people intimidating people hurting people what if five years ago that made you happy and now it can't anymore not even if you want it to what if there's no pill on any doctor's shelf anywhere that can help you enjoy the things that made you happy just five years ago because you've changed what do you want to do richard do you want to go crawling black to your blankie you want to play with wooden blocks and the little comfort blanket you had as a child you want to go back to playing ice hockey huh you want to go on being a trash talking bodybuilder forever you want to play call of duty modern warfare till you're 50 never grow up never take on new responsibilities new challenges new horizons huh or do you want to recognize the extent to which you've changed stop looking backwards start looking forward and embrace the extent to which now you've got to change even more