Nihilist Booktube (A Political History Livestream)

the context for the series of
broadcasts and a lot of the reading i've been doing myself over the last year has been that i am preparing to publish my first uh book for grown-ups ever so yeah the last time i even wrote a book that was intended for grown-ups it really was a political manifesto uh before i left for asia around say 2001 in toronto i actually wrote some uh rollicking has melissa have you read that stuff i don't think you have i wrote a book called uh lay claim to the wilderness etc maybe lay claim to the wild etc so this kind of ecological radical dissident philosophy and partly influenced by max turner partly influenced by my study of first nations politics some themes that would go on for years to come it was kind of not not rooted in buddhism i felt like would be the last thing i'd write that had nothing to do with buddhist philosophy there might have been some little stylistic uh you know bits and pieces in there what's but what i've been reading but i knew already i was going to start devoting a lot of time to asian languages philosophy what have you and i wrote some political manifestos back at that time full of sweeping generalizations and bold resolutions and what young a young man's folly one might say anyway in the last couple of years i did write children's stories but to write a a book intended for adults i know we've written innumerable articles i've written a couple articles in chinese even in the last couple of years so short length non-fiction i've written a good deal of but to write a book intended for other adult readers and particularly people like you in the audience right now my uh my youtube audience i'm sure the vast majority of people would read it at least in the first five years of being published would be people who know me or get to know me through youtube so one type of book i have been reading well one a lot of the reading i've been doing has been research related to that forthcoming book and then another type of reading that i'm i'm kind of dreading is this sort of thing the essential guide to getting your book published a book about how to publish a book yeah um but maybe a necessary evil so guys um i'm happy to answer questions from the audience i can answer some of the questions that people sent in through patreon also i mean i can answer questions and interact the audience in various ways is one of the advantages during this live but unusually normally i broadcast i mean 99 of my videos there is absolutely zero preparation for i get that question all the time is this scripted is this reversed and the answer is no um but i did just write down the titles of a bunch of books i've been reading and a bunch of topics i can cover in this live stream in future i could also write down things that have been in the news this week political events which i may have read articles about but haven't done a book book length reading or research about if i want to talk about them but obviously also you know there's this question of whether or not uh you know the audience wants to wants to compute everything so i just got a question from junebug is it pre-recorded lol what what are you guys used to are you used to youtubers and broadcasters who just have absolutely nothing to say i've seen this and they sit there in silence watching and waiting for something for the audience to reply there are there are live streamers that do that no i come on the mic when i've got something to say i've got something to talk about all right if you're gonna say something intelligent or interesting then you know okay i'll read it out i'll reply to it you can join in the conversation but yeah there is a standard for you to live up to here jude bug i mean what do you think you think i'm thrilled just to you know someone says hi what am i gonna do okay yeah hi hi to you too high wicked energy i'm not not bad it's not unoffended but sure i got a lot to say i gotta talk about and by the way guys um there's an interesting question from ron simmons uh not all of the books that i have to talk about can actually hold up and show on camera i do have a ton of them here but it is true some of the books i've been reading they exist only as a pdf or they exist on my mobile phone this sort of thing okay so ron simmons asks when did you start studying nihilism as a whole so one reason to talk about this today i don't think this is on my list of topics is that this is the week in may of 2021 when i finally posted this peculiar article about nihilism and the philosophy of max sterner so that's something i wrote in that was published published i posted the internet today not today this week a couple days ago in 2021 so i know some of my viewers and patreon subscribers they've been talking and thinking more about maxter than ever the reason for that happening is that i think about three of my patreon subscribers are reading sterner right now they weren't really asking me for help with it or anything they just mentioned to me a different problem uh two different people actually wrote into me complaining about the translation of max english i was like oh wow this is right this is right in my wheelhouse you want to talk about the difficulty of translating max turner's philosophy uh into english so um and then we have another interesting contrasting question here some of the audience says are we talking about moral nihilism so maybe answer that first and then come back to your question uh ron if i can call you ron so uh my own school of nihilistic thought is called historical nihilism and the easiest way to explain or understand whatever somebody means by nihilism is to explain what it is you're negating so you know um japanese anarchism is best understood in terms of what was the social system they were rebelling against to define it positively uh someone asked tonight like what kind of society they want um for the most part the japanese anarchists were people who were willing to fight and die and kill to get rid of the emperor of japan that's who they were and beyond that you may or may not know this one of their strongest influences was max sterner the philosophy of max turner was translated into japanese so from its its outset japanese anarchism was had much more to do with nihilism than anarchism does today uh in the modern west in english speaking west to the uh the french speaking west to the spanish speaking west where sterner has been a pretty minor voice i think he is much more famous and influential now in 2021 than at any earlier point in history so just to give you guys some of you don't even know what max turner is i understand some of you don't know what nihilism is totally understandable but you know um the fact that there are pages on reddit and facebook full of max turner memes and twitter and discord and the fact that there are these young people who play video games and and they know and get max turner jokes and that max jr has become meaningful and sailing it as a critique of what's going on in the mainstream left as a critique of what's going on amongst anarchists it's become known as a critique of atheism even like well atheism doesn't go far enough here's something more more edgy more extreme that's beyond just sort of a so-called new atheism as a movement um i saw some memes when i posted the link to my my new article my new article written in 2006 about philosophy of x turner you know i saw some memes that i could immediately relate to it these were young people who were sick and tired of the so-called and caps the anarcho-capitalists and they were using sterner to attack and ridicule what was going on in our co-capitalism now this is a digression but i think a useful one to say if you want to know what people mean by nihilism and why it matters um for the most part you can arrive at a working pragmatic understanding by talking about what it is that's being negated what it is that's being opposed and again this is meaningful even in far-off exotic cultural and political contexts uh like japan and indeed it's interesting to ask what does nihilism mean in japan what does anarchism mean in japan what does the philosophy of max sterner mean in japan japan might seem like a reasonably familiar cultural context but it's not now for those of you who study arabic or modern politics of the arab world how do any of those things translate into modern arabic very interesting question and we're not really talking about translation we're talking about the way in which people will pick and choose the cultural influences the cultural references that are that are meaningful for them and so on so the short answer to one of those one of those questions was um are we talking about moral nihilism and i guess the answer is no we're talking about something a lot more profound a lot more political a lot more broad than moral nihilism per se so one of the reasons why i use the term historical nihilism is to differentiate what i do with nihilism and why it matters to me from say cosmological nihilism um from other meanings and uses the word to differentiate from russian nihilism um you know there are there are different people taking the word nihilist and using it in different ways but yeah it is it is easiest to get to the point by talking about what it is you you want to negate and certainly you know my my forthcoming book it was just i was writing the book this morning and last night i'm still actively working on the book it's not like an abandoned manuscript or something um my new book no more manifestos that will give you a very thorough sense of everything it is i want to negotiate um you know why it is i am a dissident intellectual in canada why it is that i'm in some ways even you could say a kind of frustrated revolutionary in this context while you know identifying as nihilus while i don't believe in i don't sympathize with any of the cultural cross currents that use and popularize the idea of revolution that offer you a sort of ready-made lego kit for how to assemble your own revolution so in case you hadn't guessed it or you didn't know this yeah i completely laugh at you know marxism and communism and so on all the easy answers provided by the old uh ideologies and that in itself by the way is a is a very good reason to identify with nihilism or to get an interest in the ideology of max turner if your position is that there isn't a tradition you're a part of and you find yourself largely uh critic of and you know uh reviling uh these these established traditions and ideas that are around you you know be at the catholic church or you know communism or what have you if you're an outsider if you're if you're someone who has a you know um stands in a situation of confronting the indifference of of your contemporaries in those ideologies that will bring you over a bit by bit to the nihilist diet and might make you a little bit with uh a little bit interested in in philosophy of maximum sorry so it looks like we have some more uh interesting questions oh right but look on the meaning of the word historical nihilism itself i think it's significant to note communism is very much a cult based on the belief in history in taking historical events and turning them into a kind of religion that you must believe in historical inevitability marx's analysis of what happened in the past and then the projections of what are going to happen in the future yeah and even still today in china in many ways the chinese communist party has become very cynical and detached about communism itself and marxism but they still insist that it's crucial in order to be part of 21st century china that you believe in history you believe in the meaningfulness and purpose of history the history isn't meaningless or pointless or aimless right like this is this is part of the emphasis given by contemporary communism in china and the the chinese communist party they openly use that term to describe their enemies that what they are fighting against is historical nihilism now again this in the context of israel or germany this would evoke a different sense of the meaning of history here i mean where i'm living right now is built on genocide very literally the city i'm living the particular land i'm happening is built on genocide um but you know with china they've been through this tremendous suffering in the 20th century and yes there's the whole ideology of communism and marxism and the power mongering and corruption the communist party but if you set that aside there's a certain subjective emotional reality to human beings just saying no this can't have been for nothing you have to believe in it you have to believe there's a purpose you have to believe you have to believe in history you know you have to believe it all makes sense and you have to believe it's all for the best and in this way communism is remarkably like catholicism it's the law of the catholic faith when you talk to true believing catholics why did you persecute these witches why did you go through all these terrible things why do you have all these meaningful those pardon me meaningful wars meaningful and meaningless wars why these internacion wars fratricidal is a brother against brother for the sake of this church and now you look back and it doesn't make sense and you know a lot of what what they have to believe in is that god's will is being exhibited in history the history makes sense that it's meaningful that it's for a purpose that's for some greater good like it's so that we could all learn this that catholics tend to believe in history and live with history actually in a way that's shockingly similar to modern communism so in saying historical nihilism and i'm supposedly some kind of budding sinologist study the chinese language of chinese politics is part of what i do with my life maybe a small part but an important part now we assume in the next 10 years in the future um this is saying yeah i am one of these people my philosophy is the diametric opposite of the communist party um i'm you know i'm about embracing the meaninglessness and arbitrariness of of history history doesn't make sense it doesn't have a direction it doesn't have a teleology or a telos if we want to get into the jargon academics series you know uh now also just say when you meet historians who don't identify as marxists and don't identify as catholics you often do have to break down that same kind of same kind of ossified belief you know um why did richard nixon support the khmer rouge in cambodia something many people don't know shockingly immoral decision by the nixon administration and then it wasn't just the americans the british and the west germans and all the american allies came in and helped to you know support this genocidal third world regime you know someone who has that attitude even if they're a detached historian they're not a marxist or they're not a catholic they're gonna write that history and they're gonna struggle with that history and with what it means today and with with meaning in their own lives with that first assumption this this must be for some greater good this must be for some better purpose so that's also you know part of what i'm attacking you know let's let's really deal with the arbitrariness of history and politics let's deal with the arbitrariness and senselessness of violence and so on you know and in our own lives a lot of these things don't make sense i'm not going to try to make make sense of them so it's my position of profound opposition yes to christianity and judaism and islam i'm totally opposed to those religions in my circle that's not terribly uh you know it's not terribly controversial but globally it is that's still a huge ongoing struggle your position on religion if i even moved to texas or something it is i mean there are parts of the united states where that struggle of atheism against uh religion is still ongoing but this is a much deeper much broader struggle where you know the beliefs i reject are not just the beliefs of christianity or islam i reject the beliefs communism is based on i i reject the beliefs that any kind of putative or actual political ideology is based on i'm really in a thorough systematic way into believing nothing and then learning from history on that basis from that that kind of radical and profound skepticism learning from history in a very different way um all right so we have a lot of comments i don't know i don't know how many of these are substantive um it's good to see this stuff is boring all right so someone called exc.exe says with greece you said the country had nothing to offer you with all due respect what the heck do you think greece and its uh current state could offer uh well my expectations were low so what's being alluded to here is that my girlfriend melissa and i went to greece and we were really considering living there uh permanently what what do we need them to provide we didn't even expect them to write us with a library and a library card guys if we were we were not looking for much i think my feeling is that i had a lot to offer greece i mean sir i don't know you know when i moved to cambodia when i moved to laos you know i was i was going to bring my light to their darkness what can i tell you i was i was there to light up athens i was not expecting athens to light up my life i'm being real with you you can you can call this egomania but i mean let's let's say wherever it is i'm moving um if i move to los angeles if i move to uh haifa israel if i move to athens greece i'm bringing my meaningful life with me there my project my sense of purpose what it is i'm working on and i'm of course i have to be worried if someone else is going to get in my way so it's going to make it impossible for me to live my life or something but no um i wasn't expecting the greek people to kind of really do anything for me i wasn't expecting the greek government to do anything you know what i mean i wasn't you know i so i look it just seems like the question it's a totally totally reasonable question um but anyway he says greece in its current state uh greece is a first world country with third world problems and it's not bad depending on what you want in life could be a great place for you to move there could be people in the audience right now for whom uh moving to grace greece and community to live in greece would be a would be a good choice uh but no i you know i expected very very little from grace so that's i think that's the answer to that um [Music] all right so there's a question here do i sympathize with all variations of nihilism uh look you know have you ever heard of a conference of nihilists have you heard of a publication a magazine like i don't really think there are a lot of offshoots of nihilism i don't think there's a lot going on um it's interesting that people know max sterner's name at all it's interesting that there's that the word um is going through a bit of a revival of interest on the internet like a positive use of nihilism not just as an insult but let's not let's not get ourselves here guys if you've been watching the channel for a long time you've heard me criticize utilitarianism in this way because people talk about utilitarianism as if it's this powerful world movement like comparable to communism communism exists those guys have meetings and they have armies and they have millions of dollars at their disposal and i mean you know communism is influencing the world's history in my opinion for worse rather than better but you know it's like look guys utilitarianism it's never even been a significant factor in protests against the vietnam war or something it's it didn't ever add up to anything as a movement so let's be honest with ourselves you know nihilism is uh it doesn't exist as a movement and i don't even think there are hit authors i mean i don't think i think there are novelists or anything today um that are that are making that are successful with the word or concept analysis so let's not let's not overrate it but you know i have to describe my own philosophies somehow and indeed the playlist on my channel dealing with this from memory is called something like uh historical nihilism my own philosophy so you know um if i have to describe myself one way or another uh it's it's a useful term and category for me this is a pause while i'm reading your comments from the audience so interesting question from a longtime viewer and commenter here uh nacho asks is it true that nihilism goes through two stages the thinking state and a deeper more complete form of nihilism based on feeling like an emotional reality analysis so look you know um to give you an example when i was a very young man still a teenager i'd lived in academia i'd been on university campuses people you know really train you to believe in and be excited about abstract ideas presented by plato uh abstract ideas presented by hegel hegel the most boring philosopher the professors are trying to get you excited about the accomplishments of emmanuel kant which is utterly boring and insignificant and really laughable the intellectual legacy of mayo and yes there were people around me including my own parents who tried to you know create this aura of anticipation excitement around uh karl marx so there will be a tremendous emotional impact when you reach the point in your life where you're willing to look at all those things and realize this is just this is all but this is all really nonsense um and you know you also may start to understand analytically the motivations those people had to lie to you or to lie to themselves but it's a lot like santa claus you know some parents are just trying to make their child believe in santa claus because i think it'll make the child happier some parents are really so insane that they believe in santa claus themselves but you know regardless you have this culture of of encouraging people to believe in things that are unreal and there are only two ways that story can end either you are really so intellectually deficient that you go on believing in santa claus forever you know you become a cult member goes around preaching you know the belief in santa claus or you have this break from belief now you may make that break and you may just question santa claus you may just question the particular thing being believed in the particular creed or you may take the further step of questioning belief itself or it's not just why do we believe in santa claus but why do we believe period why do people think it's virtuous and good to be a believer so yeah i think for most thinking and feeling people that is going to be uh you know an emotionally moving experience i know one woman she used to be a youtuber who was a true believing member of the mormon church she wasn't just a passive mormon she actually did the pilgrimages and paid the tithes she was deeply passionately involved in the mormon church and she was raising her children in it and her husband was married to the church and she completely 110 lost faith in that i would have been happy to have her on the channel talk about that she is not comfortable doing so you know that's a very clear palpable break with belief right um there are a number of further steps you can take uh and obviously i mean if you actually look we could do social science reaching this we can we can apply for a grant and do social science research on the emotional personal and professional consequences of breaking from your beliefs some people just become alcoholics some people just you know immerse themselves in the pleasures of the senses i've met i've never been to an atheist conference myself then this is a uniquely american experience right this is not italian culture italy isn't intensely this is not spanish culture in america and to a lesser extent in australia there's a parallel for you in australian culture there are these conferences where people who are now atheists come and they're preening like peacocks they're so proud of themselves that they figured something out that an eight-year-old could have figured out you know that god isn't real and a lot of them not all but a lot of them are now suddenly trying to cheat on their wives and do all the drugs they never did and sleep with prostitutes and they're they're you know they're now trying to lead this uh self-destructive self-indulgent lifestyle that is one that is one way to respond uh part of my own response you know which is it's partly intellectual and partly uh emotional is to put huge emphasis on creativity you know when you've come to the conclusion that there is nothing to be believed in well what next what now it's up to you it's all on you once you've come to the conclusion that all authority is mere authorship you no longer respect or revere emmanuel kant or nietzsche another name that came out there you no longer respect her of your hegel or plato you just realized these were other guys who sat down to write a book well what about your book you know what about you you know you are suddenly now on the same level as plato which you are by the way i mean in this audience none of you you know there's nothing plato new that you guys in my audience now don't know you can write a book just as important as anything plato ever wrote and you can write something that's more important to you and it's more important to people who sympathize with you people who have some fellow feeling with you in a 19th century uh sense of word you know so part of my response um you know i'm not an artist in an obvious sense of the term i could describe what i do as theater or filmmaking just barely but you know part of my response is to really be a creative person and that whatever i know whatever i'm going to learn you know it's that it's all up to me because there's nothing to be believed in so yeah um [Music] i'm sure if we if we did the research if we get this social science grant some percentage of people are going to respond to nihilism by becoming recklessly self-indulgent um and some people are gonna respond to it as i did by seeing by seeing life as a whole much more as a creative challenge so let me put you this way if you really believe in ideas then you may see your life as researching these ideas and trying to be good enough for those ideas trying to live up to those ideas right and i think a lot of us you know even if it's not something as obvious as christianity or mormonism even if it's ideas that come from plato a lot of us up to a certain age that is how we lived our life you know you might even have an idea of what it is to be an athlete you know like to be an envy like it might be something that's not an idea in a philosophical sense or to be a soldier to be a man to be a good man to be a man in an ideologically loaded sense and you have this idea and you're trying to live up to it you're in service to it so as long as you you do that the role of creativity in your life is merely ancillary it's merely entertainment right and i mean even if you spend your life i'm you know you know in a very intellectually rigorous way as long as you're chasing after other people's ideas and you're walking in other people's footsteps your research is is your research is not seen in this creative way and then instead if you have this shift to nihilism then it's like okay so this is all my blank canvas this is all my chalkboard it's all up to me and i've only got so many years to live so what am i going to do with this research well i'm not doing this for anyone else if i'm reading plato i'm not reading plato for plato i'm reading it for me if i'm reading about the american revolution i'm not reading it for the revolutionaries i am not reading this you know to to uh to honor the founding fathers the united states of america i'm not researching the constitution to do justice to the family politicians i'm not trying to live up to an idea and ideal sit down with him i'm doing something that is in my own way creative in my own way destructive destiny with my life in the future so the role for me it seems the role creativity um suddenly takes so much much greater significance and i can say that honestly i mean i was an intellectual before i got involved with nihilism coming back to the original question but when i was an intellectual before i really became a nihilist you can say uh creativity had a much smaller role i didn't you know my research wasn't creative in that sense it wasn't this sense of you know play-doh a tree i'm gonna chop down and use as firewood like all of this stuff this is all raw material for me this is just my kindling but i mean this this last six months is a great example i mean all of it this is all firewood guys like really i mean these books i'm going through i am chopping this up and uses very directly in writing and rewriting and expanding my own books that's a very clear example of that you can imagine if you were something like a filmmaker to the way you might read books of history or politics say okay or even books about sexuality let's say you're a filmmaker and you want to have a character who's gay and you're you're heterosexual you know what you're saying it's not it's not everything is going to be philosophical or explicitly political maybe you read some autobiographies from a gay man and a gay perspective and you you know you're thinking about how you're going to show this in your film so i just say the the relationship between research and creativity uh i think that that really that really changed okay um we get some related questions here that i've already covered thoughts on libidinal materialism i think we've covered that um right so edgy intellect comments that nihilism also rejects knowledge and on that basis rejects uh not moral values it's the most radical form of skepticism so i would i would differ with your wording there obviously this could be a one hour long uh philosophical discussion but you know um you know it's not that the difference between beautiful and ugly is something that can't be known that's ridiculous right it's something that can't be objectively real and proven right and for example what i find beautiful and what my gay male friend finds beautiful it's not the same but the problem there is not of knowledge right it's not of epistemology right it's of desire so really when we're talking about nihilism it it's a radical recognition of subjectivity it's not a radical skepticism it's not an attack on epistemology right so what would you do so it's an attack on belief yes and there is discussion about what you can know but i think this that leads to a different set of conclusions but obviously it's not what you're saying is somehow far wrong it's not like you go terribly [Laughter] this is not like incorrectly operating a chainsaw i mean if you include if you incorrectly operate a chainsaw you're going to lose an arm or a leg or some fingers but you know uh if you if you incorrectly operate the philosophy of nihilism i don't think it's gonna take you too far too uh terribly wrong in the too terribly far in the wrong direction i don't think it's gonna be a problem so i'm stumbling on my words because i'm reading while i'm speaking which i uh i don't normally do all right i got okay a request to make a goodreads account listing recommended reading material that is something i'm never going to do and there is at least one youtube video on my channel that is called recommended reading is hard to do some of this it's why i don't do recommended reading so when people support me on patreon i can advertise my people who pay one dollar a month to support the youtube channel on patreon when they ask for recommended reading uh for books specifically relevant to their situation i take that duty quite seriously but i do not believe in this culture of just recommending a book uh in general for all people and that's probably because guys sorry another big topic on my youtube channel napoleon's younger brother how many hours did i spend reading that book it was really a lot of work right now i can say a bunch of positive things about it i would never come on the internet here and say oh oh you guys should also read this book it's really great are you are you kidding me i mean you know this is a this is really a huge decision and a huge commitment for a very pr for one person out of a million it's worth taking the time to read that that book and probably i'm not that one person probably was the wrong book uh for me to read you know so no um i'm very much against this culture i would just point out by contrast um who recommends clothing this way i'm not here saying all you guys should buy this shirt you know what i mean i think different people have to wear different shirts you know let's get on a shirt it's five minutes how how long is it to put on a shirt or take it off or if you're not happy with it throw it in the garbage new deal we're just talking spending a lot of hours of focused attention reading a book and so in the same way that i'm very skeptical about people playing video games for so many hours i'm very skeptical about about reading books i'm not in favor of reading for the sake of reading and i'm not in favor of drinking alcohol for the sake of drinking alcohol melissa could you open the window if it's too terribly noisy we'll we'll close it but i think uh i think we've got to risk it with this dominate all right another sorry another interesting question i could uh go on about she asks why did these philosophers get promoted just like the entertainment industry just like the movie business there actually are interesting stories about uh you know um about how particular books got promoted and how they became famous or successful within uh nonfiction too okay another it's another great question somebody asks did you finish how to win friends and influence people so that is a book that i am planning to read in a chinese and english parallel i may read it in chinese english and french parallel so it's partly as a language learning effort and i think that could spin off a number of youtube videos sometime a terrible book how to watch friends and know those people maybe i'll make some youtube videos joking about it or laughing about i mean all like i don't actually endorse the philosophy of this book or anything like that but yeah um certainly as a language exercise uh interesting uh interesting crossroads in the history of planet earth the fact that that book exists that it means so much too much people someone here says and in spanish too so that's look that's part of why this book is significant it has been translated into every language imaginable so yeah and someone said here damn you can learn a lot from reading in both chinese english that's right it's a book that has a lot of vocabulary about motivating people like in english what we call modal verbs about judging people's mood a lot of nuanced language about human behavior and also it's a lot about politics not in a deep sense but if you haven't read the book how do i friends and influence people like every couple pages there's a stupid anecdote about the present united states of america all the time it's like and then president abraham lincoln was getting ready for the biggest battle of the civil war and he turned to his secretary and he said and that's how we learned the lesson that you have to be kind to people in order to get them to do what you want to do even on a battlefield but there are a lot of it is about relations between masters and servants relation relations between politicians and the people following them commanders and their men there's so there's quite a bit of uh political vocabulary that gets pregnant too well somebody's laughing i think i think you read it in spanish hey freda so i think you know you know what i'm talking about okay so we opened this video with me just holding up that one type of book i've been reading last year was about publishing a book and that a lot of the other reading i've been doing has been linked to my own book no more manifestos which is presumably forthcoming we don't know how much or how little time i'm going to end up devoting to the process of getting it published even self-publishing on amazon is a somewhat time-consuming commitment to meg but sure even if it's with a small independent publisher in canada i guess it would be nice to have it emerge into the world as a real book as opposed to something that is frankly not a real book now talking about creativity and nihilism you know something else i've been reading that you guys might not realize i've been spending time doing is i've purchased a bunch of books about being a filmmaker and these vary between bad and terrible it's going to hold up some of these books do not take my holding the book up as an endorsement all right so this is obviously a textbook used in film schools so to speak there's any you got a lot of paper uh for your dollar here this is 882 pages including the index and the endnotes or what have you the filmmakers handbook so if you want more exercise you want to carry something in your backpack as you run up and down stairs that's the one to get it's certainly one i can praise the most it's it's not uh it's not fluff it's not nonsense this is an absolutely terrible book that has positive reviews all over the internet i wonder if the author uh kelly schwartz has successfully carried out some kind of conspiracy to give this book positive press i i got the refund on this book normally if you return a book to amazon they ask you to send it back in the mail in this case they said just keep it we'll refund money i asked for a refund for that one straight up and oh where is it now there's another book that was actually recommended to me by a filmmaker oh i don't have any on this which is also terrible there was another really terrible book about how to write a screen their book that was actually recommended to me by a filmmaker oh i don't have any on this which is also terrible there's another really terrible book about how to write a screenplay i guess i guess given that i'm saying it's a terrible book it doesn't matter whether i whether or not i hold it up oh that's not around all right uh but actually uh ally to breezy you guys have been watching for five years well remember ali tabrizi but vegan youtuber ali tabrizi who has now become a somewhat successful filmmaker he had his first film finally come out on netflix and he and i do talk and i have known each other for all these years and he does uh he does yeah so sorry someone said the screenwriter's handbook yes that's the book i could have melissa run around and find it but it's not worth it you don't need to see the cover right so i it was a screenwriter's handbook uh that was maybe this is ali tabrizi and then maybe that's you is that you ally uh um ali tabrizi used to be a vegan youtuber he was very successful as a vegan youtuber but he took about five years to make a maybe four year no five years before yeah yeah yeah it's like f yeah honestly another thing about it it might be six years anyway it was a long time he but he took something like five years to make a uh a documentary that's now on netflix which is called was it fish spirity sees um he made c-spiricy which i've i've posted a relatively negative uh film review of on my channel anyway um ali tabrizi's interesting guy i'm not gonna say anything secret about him or disclose anything from our secret conversations everything i'm going to say about him you could know just by reading interviews with them or putting his name into google or looking around the internet but you know he is a guy who never went to film school and he has no university education whatsoever so he has no higher level education so i was interested in his perspective on going to film school and being a filmmaker i was tempted to commit to going to film school like immediately like starting just this september i thought about that seriously with kind of the worst case scenario being i could take what i learned in film school and apply it to improving the youtube channel that can be applied to this book also right like i could read this book or the most useful sections of this book and i could just apply this to improving my youtube videos still time consuming and this would still be many hours of work relative to the hours of putting into chatting with you lovely people now you know um yeah so i think that question's a few minutes behind frida asks is that the guy who made the netflix documentary exactly but yeah this is another type of boring book i wouldn't really do a book review video on but reflects a lot of the questions i've been asking myself about my um one of the things i mean contrasting youtube to formal filmmaking and the question of how can i ever earn a living this kind of thing in filmmaking or otherwise i think you know at age 42 and i'm 42 now in case you guys didn't know you know most young people go into film with the jejune assumption that other people are going to solve their problems for them that somebody is going to make them a star that somebody is going to give them an opportunity and when i look at filmmaking i look at that being a life in which i'm very much alone in which nobody's gonna help me with anything in which i'm gonna have to do everything for myself which you know in some ways can be positive right now i'm writing a book and that's a very lonely profession uh if i became a painter painting pictures is a very lonesome you know occupation too uh but filmmaking is a social art form and if you're going into it as a middle-aged man or an old man if that's the transition you're looking to make part of the challenge is that awareness like well i'm going in alone nobody's going to help me nobody's going to make it easy for me i do have a very strong aesthetic sensibility that i would bring to filmmaking i'm a strong sense of direction and purpose that you know could you know uh could serve me well in filmmaking and the vast majority of people whether they're on the writing side screenwriting you know writing for the film industry or filmmaking they lack those qualities that i've got that i can pour into youtube i can form writing books i can pour into writing non-fiction essays for university um [Music] so yeah i do think i have some skills and qualities that are rare and in demand in hollywood or in filmmaking broadly speaking but you know to go into a social art form like that to go in alone and you know to say it's one thing as a writer or as a painter to say i'm going to be the best i'm going to do it alone it's one thing to be a bodybuilder bodybuilding is a sport you can do alone right it's just you and the weights and the steroids you know what i mean but if you're talking about a team sport you rely on other people no matter how hard you work you can't win in a team sport if other people let you down and it's very scary to rely on something that's unreliable it's very disappointing to rely on someone who's unreliable so to put yourself into that situation and then work with other people who are not talented and focused and determined and motivated the way you are and to know that your success or failure is going to rely on all those other people that's even you're starting with the team who make the film after the film is finished the other people you rely on to promote it and i should get get it into even one film festival you know um this is very scary indeed so that's a big difference between making youtube videos and uh making films oh and i guess i should i guess i should shout out this book i could probably find the page and read it this is a terrible book i got the refund don't buy this book but there were a couple sentences in here about the money side of the game about how much money you can and can't make in filmmaking and the first thing i'm so part of the argument is and you'll see this in other books too you'll see this on the internet oh well um it's still kind of sort of impos it's still it's still kind of sort of possible to make money out of um amazon amazon has this streaming service it competes with youtube whatever and uh and then sort of a few paragraphs later it's like oh no it's not anymore oh yeah that only lasted for a couple of years tragically when you look at the numbers um it really does seem like there's more money in youtube than in conventional filmmaking and there is very very little money in youtube so it's part of the you know process of the internet transforming culture and then culture transforming itself through the mirror of the internet it has never become it's part of me in the history of the world it has never been easier to make a film and share it with others it has never been easier to write a book and share with others however the financial incentive for you to publish your book or for someone else to publish and promote your book that has largely disappeared that has evaporated you're getting book publishing operating on a non-profit basis and it seems that for most filmmakers too the money has really disappeared from the game so and of course one of the differences is you know minimum you need to spend forty thousand dollars making a film even if the small cheap independent film to play in film festivals and i do not need forty thousand dollars to make youtube videos so yeah um this i think this gives you a comprehensive explanation of why i purchased these books and again there are a couple others around i don't i don't have here why i was thinking about going to film school but why this is also largely disappeared as a priority for my own reading list now you know i've also set out have adam braided the factors that would make me optimistic what if i knew about a film school that was really great and where tuition was at a reasonable price my okay i can go to this film school and i can really learn what i want to know and i can maybe meet other talented people i can work with what if i knew just five people in this audience right now who were gonna get into film filmmaking with me you know what i mean i you know i mean you could have a circle of people you could know just one incredibly attractive person and think this is going to be the next maryland monroe or this could be this is going to be the next johnny depp there's a guy who got by on the shape of his face and okay you and me kid i'm going to make you a star there could be just one other person you work with where you feel they have the star quality actually greg's gonna be a comedian what if you knew one person who was really funny you think okay i can i can make the film around this person or there's this one you know i can handle i can't have the lighting and sound but you know i i don't i don't need to rely on anyone else other than this one talented person well when you got nothing when you got nothing but yourself and when you have no faith in the educational establishment when you're looking when you're looking at these film school programs at any price even if you pretend money doesn't matter and you think i would be wasting years of my life for nothing which by the way is what all the professors tell me right which is probably what all the filmmakers i talked to tell me is film school is a total waste your time money and then even the professors i talk to they're like oh no no just learn it on youtube so youtube is apparently the alpha and omega of everything in our in our culture on the 21st century this is indeed uh very disappointing uh perspective to have to have to adopt all right guys so look uh it's fine i'm just turning to the audience every so often oh oh there's a there's a simple but deep question are you going to make another video on xinjiang in the future i will have you know i have had clips on xinjiang sitting in my editing software unused for at least a full year recently i reminded melissa of just how long ago it was that we ordered the stack of books okay let's let's flex the books babe why don't you run around and get say the three or four major books we got on xinjiang oh i could i could stack this pile up real high if we had the books on xinjiang so we started this xinjiang research project for a number of reasons part of what we're planning to do yeah i know i don't know some of them are in the other room it's going to take no rush babe no rush um part of what we're trying to do with the research project which is going to be obvious even in the titles of these books that hold them up was to reframe the history of xinjiang in central asia if you like to present xinjiang as the place where china meets central asia and to understand what's happening now in xinjiang better in the political context of both the history of china and the history of central asia which nobody does so um each of these books certainly has advantages and disadvantages i'm not an uncritical fan of any of them this is inside central asia but a guy named dilip hiro so again central asia you know normally people say china is east asia well the most densely popular populated part of china is east asia right i mean but yeah china includes a significant part of central asia um so you know china also comes up to the border of southeast asia that's where i used to live china has a border with laos and myanmar and they're very much involved with life in thailand they don't have a border with thailand but still all right um yeah so again this is probably i'm i'm not gonna hate on this book and i haven't read it myself but yeah a book probably both of us will have criticism of when we get the end of it but an important book on an important topic holy war in china muslim rebellion and state in chinese central asia here's the key phrase 1864 to 1877 by hodong kim yeah and here's a single topic book slavery and empire in central asia by jeff eden is there slavery in there and uh yeah china marches west so just just to mention one really uh important aspect of this book and i mean something important that comes out of understanding the history of xinjiang no matter even if you're working from wikipedia articles so you just want to read a little bit you know i think one of the biggest lies in the history of china um and these are lies told by europeans as well as by the chinese themselves was that the qing dynasty was china's moment of greatest weakness whereas really in many ways it was china's era of greatest strength now it's not for no reason at all that the qing dynasty is and by the way this is ching with a q right uh q-i-n-g uh ching um it's not for no reason at all that the qing is remembered as this period of uh of weakness but the story promoted by the communists also was that this is somehow a century or more in which china was limping along and weak and was beaten up by the europeans and then this leads ultimately to the rise of communism uh so on and so forth this is the failure of china as a uh as an imperial state and it wasn't it was china's period of greatest military strength and their period of greatest geographic expansion it was a very war-like bellicose dynasty that from a value-neutral perspective accomplished a great deal it massively strengthened china's position in the world now by contrast uh militarily and territorially um the song dynasty was very very weak but it's remembered very positively it's remembered as a golden age in china's history so some of these things are like that i mean you know i'm not i'm not hating on him it's not some conspiracy but it's definitely um definitely a misconception and you know if you want to know how did xinjiang become part of china long story short they were conquered during the qing dynasty so you know again the military strengths and weaknesses of the qing dynasty that came up in the research i did on yunnan laos vietnam came up in the research related to japan and their border in the northeast dealing with korea and russia and japan they had war in all directions all the time but it's really not the case that this was and it wasn't it wasn't china's period of greatest weakness um where they failed to confront or deal with the europeans and the whole i just say the whole notion that china was destroyed by european imperialism well guess what china is still inhabited by chinese people this is the first indication of how ridiculous this myth is you know what if you go to australia it's not inhabited by australians it's inhabited by europeans the indigenous people are now a tiny minority of the population of australia canada is not inhabited by indigenous canadians so on and so forth i mean if you want to know what it's like when european imperialism destroys a place throw a dart in the world map you know you're going to see a lot of examples um so no the the impact that european imperialism had on china is incredibly trivial compared to any other continent like south america how what was the impact of european imperialism on what's now chile or venezuela or brazil or africa you know china was one of the least affected by european imperials and across the world of course the impact was not zero by the way another fascinating case study if you guys who haven't uh looked at it you can you know uh you can compare the history of thailand thailand was never conquered by european power but of course their history was profoundly changed by the contact they had with europeans credit where credit is due so uh frieda comments in latin america we now speak spanish another native languages yes the native languages are not completely extinct in native america native americans it's a good it's a good verbal typo to make the indigenous languages are not completely extinct um in in south america but sure this is a very easy index of a very easy reflection of the extent to which that part of the world was you know totally transformed by a genocidal slave trading world empire or series of competing world empires sure and the history of china looks nothing like the history of brazil so let's let's give it a real i see people now using this word persistence more when talking about indigenous peoples yeah she's mentioning zapotec now who i thought mayan so yeah unfortunately though freda if you look the main use of those languages is all connected to catholicism so yeah they have an indigenous language it's pronounced you don't pronounce the l as something like that i'm out of practice but you know um with a language like that sadly most of the language speakers and language users they're people who are reading the bible in that language it's all tied up in the catholic church so even where the language persists and there's this use of persistence as a as an idiom uh the culture and religion is is gone and so on and so forth so they've been subordinated in another more profound way now again in china this didn't happen an interesting contrasting case study would be um south korea so if you look it up what percentage of south koreans are now christian i think it is about 50 let's let's do the fact check okay what percentage of south koreans are christian oh okay well this says 29 i don't know if i believe you it must be uh oh i see i see so it's like 50 of the people who have a religion at all are are christian but it's not 50 of the total population so that is very interesting 56 percent say they have no religion at all so that's interesting however of the people who say they do have a religion there are more christians than there are buddhists so that's that has to do with the way the pie chart breaks okay well there you go um interesting digression but now i was going to say the the prominence of christianity in south korea i think that is a very fundamental part of why south korea is so different from from china but yeah i think persistence is an interesting uh emerging concept now to what extent a language persists to what extent a religion and a culture uh persists in the the context of genocide so babe could you grab for me the book with genocide in its title we have a book here that i have not had time to read and i'm being honest to you i do not know when i will have uh time to read it so this is here's the core function of of booktube uh coming at you we did read and i made a review video more than a year ago about a book called the other slavery that i still um endorse this is surviving genocide by jeffrey osler so the title tells you a lot about it you know what i can stack up another book that i bought quite recently on top of this citation does not mean endorsement so just mention you know the other slavery is a book that's very strong dealing with the early period it's very strong in dealing with like christopher columbus and about one century after christopher columbus but it is relatively weak as you move forward century by century and decade by decade thereafter now surviving genocide begins basically with the american constitution so it does not do anything before the american revolution and so it is so its strength is in a totally different historical period now also very important to shaping our lives today so we made use of one chapter of this and looking at the genocide in michigan from michigan we don't know what extent our futures will bring us back to michigan um on the great lakes and so on so yeah for a lot of people this might be this might seem like the most important historical epoch that i've covered but for these people it wasn't the beginning of history the fact that this happened after the american employees i'm not criticizing the author unfairly but it really is an arbitrary and kind of false moment to choose to start your history of the uh indigenous genocide years before this to really give a full of the independence the united states of america accomplished and then some of these things were you know what happened and what the supreme court said about it and while the newspapers but i understand there's a certain kind of aesthetic and uh historical unity just dealing with that period by contrast uh here is a book with a very um provocative title the barbarous years subtitle the peopling of british north america yet another subtitle the conflict of civilizations 1600 to 1675. so that really relates directly what i just said about this other book um surviving genocide and by contrast the earlier period covered by uh the other slavery if you just search my channel for the other slavery you'll get the book of you i didn't in the past might that book review might only be on active research in a foreign opinion and not on about so but you'll figure it out you'll get a link from one channel or the other you'll see both versus video whatever so look i do not know if this book is really going to be honest enough about it but that's really a crucial period if you think about it 1600 to 1675. this is long before american independence had been dreamt of uh gage asks can we ask you questions yes yeah right now i'm answering a question a lot of what i'm saying is in response to what the audience wants to talk about so yeah if you have something intelligent to say yeah um so you know and unfortunately once in a while i do have to ban people which is too bad but you know comes with the territory i use that phrase a lot on my on my youtube channel lately um anyway yeah it's a so i just say this is kind of the right period to be asking those questions and the author bernard baylin he was already an award-winning historian in his youth and this is him as an old old man i i think the books he wrote in his youth are i think he's about 90 years old when he wrote this and i was wondering okay at 90 years old did he now have the honesty and focus in terms to really deal with this stuff honestly because it's it's hard it's hard to be honest about i wish i look forward to the day when this history will be written by chinese people what is the chinese perspective on this you know i mean what about a chinese author who's not like a communist you know mouthpiece or something you know what i mean like what about a chinese author who's really doing independent research doing that and from there you know you know from their detached perspective you know really looking at really evaluating you know the history of uh you know uh the history of what happened in america so uh look i got a question here uh from nick he likes the channel but will i enable the comment section so tell us a nip if you like the channel have you ever once looked at the description below a video because you might not know this every single video i upload and this has been the case for for many many months i don't know when i started doing this maybe not yet a year but every single video i've been uploading for many months includes in the description quote so right after i say support the channel by going to my patreon the very next thing it says is why are comments disabled on my youtube channel here's the answer in a relatively uplifting five minute video so i don't know i don't know nick i don't know if you do like the channel i have to tell you something i think you're lying i don't think you like my channel i don't think you watch my videos because if you watch my videos you would know i've answered this question i'm i'm happy to answer it again but you know uh what am i what am i going to say so yeah and sam has correctly been calling out that we we had we had one of my most dedicated uh trolls join the audience but what i wish for all of my trolls is that they grow up and uh they grow up and get jobs you know i think full-time employment will solve a lot what's wrong with them and you know a lot of people hate me that way you know i think having conflicts in the workplace having a conflict with your boss having conflict with your colleagues i think it will put in perspective for you whatever hatred it is you feel towards me how dare this guy on youtube criticize me or talk about politics well i dare i dare and you know the the often heartbreaking experience of the workplace well you know you know it'll help you appreciate me and it'll help you calibrate what it is i'm doing here with kind of mild and constructive criticism that i really do offer others i'll just say that briefly babe babe is my girlfriend sorry i'm not i'm not i'm not referring to any of you in the audience but you know um one of the factors in understanding my parents ego trip during my childhood too was that they were their own bosses right they ran their own company now there are some ways in which that's humbling or whatever but you can imagine how different it would have been for my parents they had a job like your dad you know i just mean a job where you work with other people and you know what i mean where you have to you have to cope with uh let me tell you something folks it comes with the territory [Laughter] if you if you want to get on youtube it comes with territory uh we have other people volunteering from the audience saying that saying quote i'm his babe no you're not i've never met you anyway um yeah i think it's interesting to reflect in terms of my parents lives in terms of my professors lives if you think about your school teachers your high school teachers university person that none of them dealt with that because there's a lot of rough and double there's a lot of you know i just say it changes your perspective these things that would change your perspective on uh some extremely provocative person uh here on youtube like myself and what it is what it is we're doing uh as creative artists and researchers and and intellectuals em all right babe you got a choice i'm less than anything you'd like me give you a vote oh oh okay all right so look all right well i'll come to that okay i have a lot i want to cover okay i'm going to do this in in order so there are some books that i've been reading just on my mobile phone so as heavy as this stack of books is uh there are other books that i've been reading as pdfs and i've been reading on a portable mobile device and one of them concerns the vietnam war so a gun a book that is called mcnamara's folly so if you don't know the name mcnamara that's one of those names that was ubiquitous for years and years everyone heard it on the news every night everyone was hit sick and tired of hearing about robert mcnamara right he was a major figure in american political politics who never said anything interesting or profound and when he retired he kind of you know people were eager to have him disappear from the lexicon of the public imagination um but mcnamara's morons is a slang term used for the practice in the american military of actively recruiting and forcing into service mentally disabled people so that is the sort of book that is fascinating even if it is badly written um the guy who wrote that book is not a genius there are weaknesses in the book i could point out to give an example it primarily deals with um you know mental incompetence mental retardation mental disability in the american army but it tries to in passing also cover the issue of recruiting criminals into the military people with criminal records and even offering people the trade-off where the judge says look we could send you to jail but instead you know how about we sign you up for a tour of duty in the military and now that's also a very interesting profound source of corrosion and corruption in the american military and it i mean it didn't just negatively impact the war effort in vietnam i think there's a real argument that it could be the reason why the americans lost the war in vietnam i'd have to get into some details there but yeah this was a crucial crucial factor in how the war went including i mean ultimately the reason why the americans lost the war was the public perception of it as immoral that's why they lost they didn't lose militarily they weren't defeated by superior forces or numbers nor by strength of opposition from the soviet union by the way the soviet position was kind of ambivalent ambivalent and ambiguous on this and china's position also by the way um so it wasn't it was neither the strength of opposition from vietnam nor china nor russia added on to uh vietnam the americans lost the vietnam war the americans gave up and quit when they did uh because of uh okay i'll stop i'll i will pause to delete more uh delete more or disruptive and stupid comments all right well i mean you know otherwise i'm just letting you guys know i am seeing i i am seeing uh these comments as they have and if anyone's saying anything intelligent i'm happy to interrupt the floor what i'm doing to address it so uh not show comments that this was lbj's idea of a psychological experiment um so it's not that it was a psychological experiment it's that it was a social experiment the theory was that this would result in the upliftment of the poor and the disadvantaged and the other undereducated and the mentally disabled that this would actually give them careers and a better prospect for the future so you're right it was an experiment but both the purpose and the delusion involved the type of optimism involved so and so forth it's not what you might first expect again this is why it's a book worth reading and by the way i think it's 9.99 on amazon so to get that if you're willing to read off your mobile phone which i was for this book it's not a lot of money and it's not a lot of time um all right i'm sorry with digressions i do kind of forget uh where was i left off right so i was just going to say in terms of the shortcomings of the offer author it is true this is a major reason why the americans lost the war it's a major reason why the sense of moral purpose the vietnam war was discredited why it ended the way that it did and why then american support for it stopped first publicly and then politically like first the common people and then you know uh in the senate and the congress ultimately and they canceled the war so that is that is how the war ended um it's also true this had tremendous uh long-term knock-on effects for uh the way military service itself is perceived in the united states of america so the author doesn't make a particularly powerful case for this he just says it very very briefly but he says that you know the vietnam war and this practice of recruiting in this way pressing people into service against their will and so on um it gave everyone in the population the sense that military service was for inferior people intellectually inferior people economically inferior people that is for people who couldn't get out of it that anyone who was wealthy enough to go to college wouldn't serve in the military that had a profound effect on american culture the concept of college deferment um the the idea that the military service was for low iq people for poverty certain people uh for people who couldn't you know one way or another have a good reason that they're doing something else with their lives like getting a ba in english literature or something you know that this profoundly changed attitude towards the military which i think is something that continues this day and is and is tremendously important however by that same token the recruitment of criminals is just as important as the recruitment of uh low iq mentally disabled people and that's an example for coming in this book he's very in a very brief and shallow way he tries to say oh yeah and then also there's this criminal element but that could be a whole book in itself or could have had several chapters that were really well researched and detailed uh in uh in dealing with that so yeah now i have a segue here to a book i haven't read yet and that is actually on my wish list for amazon so if you click on that link i've just posted um uh i i do i bought most of the books you see here there maybe there's one or two books here that were given to me as gifts by readers actually i could i could thank my readers for that um but there's a book there about the milai massacre uh so the mililani massacre is a massacre in in vietnam it was a passage in the in the vietnam war of tremendous historical significance because it really was this turning point in discrediting the vietnam war in the eyes of americans and i said that is how the americans lost they lost because they lost the sense of moral purpose that this was a war they could win and should win and that democracy was something worth fighting for in vietnam which is a very hard case to make it's very difficult to convince americans that they should be fighting for democracy in a place as remote as vietnam most americans don't want to fight for democracy in mexico they don't seem to give a damn about you know haiti uh the caribbean i mean places that are right next door to america they're remarkably cavalier about so to really make a case for there being a moral purpose the milan massacre was a crucial part of that sorry so the melamesca was a crucial part of discrediting the sense that this is a morally positive war that americans should win so something that is touched on briefly in this same book mcnamara's morons sorry it's actually called mcnamara's folly but anyway the term used though the book is mcnamara's morons i guess he wanted to have a less provocative title uh is that actually the the man most responsible for that massacre at the miele massacre he was himself an example of one of these low iq individuals he was to some extent a mentally disabled person he wasn't just stupid or cruel or angry or something so it it briefly quotes uh court records court evidence from the i guess they were inquiries they were both inquiries and a trial for that case so i'm not sure but he was quoting official documents where there were military experts and doctors coming forward and say this was a man who should not have been in in military service at all you know somebody wasn't qualified to be a soldier someone wasn't qualified to be in the army um that he was so mentally disabled and he was responsible for that massacre so in this way you have uh a not of very interesting issues not knot um you know they come together and that again you know i don't want to sound maudlin i don't want to sound overly dramatic but you know america what's the point democracy what's the point we are certainly now living in the shadow of the vietnam war in that the whole sense of what it means to be an american what it means to promote democracy in the third world in asia you know globally in africa and south america to really say yes we are certain it's not just better for us if you don't have a dictatorship it's better for you the people of vietnam should have the freedom to criticize their own government in newspaper articles they should have the freedom to elect government officials so and so forth you know these are these are not luxuries only for white people in europe to enjoy or white people in america enjoy this is selling for everyone and it's something worth killing and dying for i mean that ultimately there's a price in blood you want democracy in syria make it happen you know you want democracy in vietnam you know those basic questions and how they relate fundamentally to what it means to be an american in the 21st century and then it gets even worse when you talk about western europe what does it mean to be a german in the 21st century that's hard i don't deal with that in my channel i don't deal with german nationalist identity or german culture i know you're german but i don't i mean well i think it's hard figuring out how to be an american think about the situation germany is in and france and these other you know um you know european powers so yeah there were um there were a lot of really profound questions coming out of that and if you guys want me to read the next book in that series i'm sorry not that it's the series it was just linked in my own mind i've given you there the link to my amazon wish list and that book on the milai massacre i listened to a podcast it was i think more than an hour long it was an hour and 30 minutes long or something interviewing the author of that book at some length it's a short book i think maybe 250 pages really for academic nonfiction that is a very short book and he he really tried to put together in a neutral objectively accurate case the facts of exactly what happened he went through all the primary source documents i can't praise the book because i haven't read it but i can certainly say based on the uh based on the interview i heard with him he was sincere in his intentions at least in uh in trying to set that down for for the historical record so that we could know once and for all what really happened and why with the military so i'll say about that very briefly you know um it's very easy to oh someone in the audience said that's correct project 100 000 was the name of the program so yes michael vervata that was the name of the program known in slang as mcnamara's morons it involves much more than 100 000 people and part of the problem is that the recruitment of mentally deficient people went outside of project 100th house so you learn about that if you read this book so yeah there was this project but it influenced it was part of a total reform of how military recruitment worked that went way outside of just project 1000 but yeah project 1000 is a crucial part of the story but it's not the whole story so to give an example michael project 1000 doesn't explain what happened with the recruitment of criminals already talked about and yeah there was a lot uh you know there was a lot more you know so here's a really constructive comment from the audience look at my big bald head i'm so smart that's a great perhaps you should also say look at my stack of books it's also very impressive there are a lot of other parts of my body that are impressive only you could see them but alas this is youtube i have yet to start at only fans i think uh i think i think that's coming next people i'm just gonna who's gonna make production seeing ads seeing as we haven't uh we haven't come up with a career solution for me seeing as we've given up on film school maybe that is the reason to go to film school maybe the reason to go to film school in 2021 is so you could have a better quality only fans account so you can do some kind of uh shall we say adult filmmaking that's don't we all so anyway um this brings me to the next topic i asked melissa what you want me to hear me talk about she said uh michael jackson's doctor so does anyone remember the name conrad murray i think i could have started this but you're saying let me ask you something i'm asking can't what do you think when i say the name conrad murray conrad murray was one of those names that was briefly famous and then forgotten and i remember it because of a rap song it's a rap song you can't find the internet anymore if you dig through the archives of ooh god man this is this is in the archives my own memory uh there used to be a dj called dj white owl he is now deceased and he was very briefly vegan before he died so i take it he became vegan because he already had some kind of illness that was knocking at his door he would bring he died vegan though he got on a vegan diet and then dropped dead which is a common pattern you know already when you're diabetes and heart disease or blood pressure or so far people become vegan and it's too late um i've only answered some of these questions by the way i just don't want to interrupt myself make sense but people are saying plenty of intelligent things thanks sir thanks for being here and thanks for thanks for making the comments anyway yeah on dj white owls mixtape somewhere there is a rap song called conrad murray that makes his name easier for me to remember i had a very catchy chorus with his name in it conrad murray was the doctor everyone blamed for killing michael jackson and he wrote a book uh the title which is this is it i think if you just go to amazon and search for conrad murray you can get it i think you can buy that as a as a digital download for like 5.99 it's a very cheap book and i think he is pretty much doing it pro bono um i've read the first first so many pages of the book i got the free preview it's another example of digital downloads in the age of amazon i haven't i haven't paid the 9.99 or whatever it costs um to download the book but i think in the year 2021 this is a really meaningful story for reasons nobody talks about with michael jackson michael jackson's lawyer has been doing a series of interviews lately including with the notorious vlad tv here on youtube and the truth is that the life of michael jackson includes um a lot of malicious prosecution from the american government that the same types of questions we ask about the mistreatment of michael brown uh so give me give me some names of people who died sorry george floyd the terrible misconduct of you know oh well don't get me started i'm brianna taylor i have my own dissident opinion about being on television but the types of questions we're asking about the uh the justice system um you know when you look at michael jackson's life story in that frame and you see him as a guy who talked in a funny voice you know he blamed that on hormones those that were given to him as a child you know his parents kind of gave him hormones still he could keep on looking like a child or something like this um i i don't even know if that's true of course um there are a lot of things uh michael jackson says and you know i don't i don't know i don't know how to what extent he was himself insane but anyway he was a peculiar eccentric who talked in a funny voice and there was really malicious prosecution of him his whole life uh partly from the state and partly from you know people trying to get rich by blackening his name she's getting a huge issue now until now we're all on the internet you know if you if anyone who has a little bit of fame it's easy for someone to try to cancel you or try to claim that they're pregnant with your baby yeah which happened to michael jackson too and so on uh all the things that have now become kind of mainstream widespread social ills that way michael jackson was sort of a litmus days for a litmus test for he was a case study that showed you know these these problems now apparently what we have established in conrad murray's book are the sad facts about who and what michael jackson really was and this is certainly believable but the sad facts were that he was heterosexual that he was interested in adult women not children and that he was a drug addict and specifically this is very believable you've seen michael jackson speaking he was overwhelmed with uh anxiety and sleeplessness on stage for these things and that he part of his drug addiction or maybe the whole reason for his drug addiction was coping with those overwhelming sources of anxiety and this kind of thing so you know obviously this is a different picture of michael jackson that emerged from from speculation but it's compatible with for example what his lawyer is now saying about michael jackson that that's come out and so on and his his lawyer has been going around and really establishing the very powerful reasons why the specific claims of pedophilia against michael jackson that they that they were fraudulent that they were intentionally devised to make money by individual people going after michael jackson and also discrediting the the case made against him by the government things that were kind of obviously wrong with that now i do not like michael jackson i don't like his music i don't sympathize them as a person as a personality i don't sympathize with his lifestyle and to say he was eccentric is an understatement he was a very unsympathetic character i also am not fan i'm not a fan of drug addiction or drug addicts or i don't make excuses the guy lived a life that was in many ways dissolute and despicable you know don't get me wrong and you know but he was a father to these three children that everyone presumes he is in no way genetically related to they were either adopted or some other very strange arrangement was made with these children he pretended to be the biological father these these children was raising um there were a lot of things wrong with the guy but again my interest is kind of political and historical and again for the book i'm writing um no more manifestos i've been looking a lot at how the american justice system doesn't work and i actually think there are some interesting insights there to how how the american justice system doesn't work how the american medical system doesn't work i think and it's kind of like that question of the internet before the internet you know what i mean a lot of the problems that have been brought into everyone's lives through the internet um you know uh yeah we we see a kind of interesting rehearsal of those problems in miniature i think in the life of michael jackson so there you go there's a there's a there's a book recommendation uh you know you you might not expect me so someone in the audience said do you know michael jackson grew up as a jehovah's witness well i'll i'll give you another one do you know that he converted to islam so little known fact apparently forget which one but one of his brothers was a more sincere convert to islam and the nation of islam uh nation of islam is a very heterodox form of the muslim faith that exists in united states america and their membership is primarily african-americans primarily black uh but michael jackson's religious history is not what anyone wants to think it was so yeah look from my perspective he was crazy he was a terrible person okay i'm not like i say i'm not a fan i'm not here to make excuses for him um you know but yeah i mean in the post-donald trump era i think there are some interesting questions raised by this that nobody was asking when this you know uh news story was what was being covered newspapers so we have another another question here from the audience uh edgy intellect says doctors nowadays are giving antidepressants for pain killing it's encouraged by insurance companies antidepressants are in fact much more dangerous than opioids okay uh look what's the danger there's more than one type of danger from my perspective marijuana is a very dangerous drug it's not going to put you in peril of overdosing right it's not dangerous in that sense marijuana is also not particularly dangerous in terms of causing a car accident yeah i don't recommend driving when smoking marijuana but to my knowledge it's been scientifically establishment that drunk driving is far more dangerous than smoking marijuana and driving i remember a scientific study that claimed the main way people responded to driving on marijuana was driving too slowly again it's illegal don't do it i'm not endorsing it but what do you mean by danger you know what i'm afraid of is leading a meaningless life what i'm afraid of is losing contact with the meaning of life and i think you know i think marijuana is a tremendously dangerous drug and it ruins so many people's lives and marijuana ruins people's lives in such a way that they don't realize that they've they've uh ruined their lives they're they're blind to it themselves they're so close to it but they don't see what's right in front of their face what's changing their whole lives that way so i think there was a tremendously dangerous job are antidepressants a dangerous drug yes are opioids a dangerous drug yes opioids are the most dangerous if what you mean as the danger of sudden unexpected death and we we've literally seen several people die of opioid overdose here on the streets of victoria canada we've seen it with our own eyes we've seen the reality of that addiction um you know like let's let's get real here so edgy like i i'm completely morally opposed to the use of antidepressants i've made so many videos critical criticism if you guys don't know there's a playlist on my channel called anti-antidepressants i can give you guys the link it'll delay us here slightly if i go get the link um however do you think there are any prostitutes who are performing sex acts in order to get enough money to buy antidepressants do you think there are you know burglars breaking into people's houses to get enough money so they can buy antidepressants and do you think there are people just dropping dead from antidepressant overdoses no so the nature of the threat is very different there are opioid addicts who have become sex workers who are locked in a life of prostitution so that they can pay for their opioid addiction same with cocaine so on and so forth you know let's not pretend you know um i'm not gonna lie to you about any of this stuff don't don't like yourself but you know look on the level of just um uh rhetoric you know obviously i sympathize we we gotta care we have to be really worried about antidepressants and we have to be really worried about painkillers and marijuana too we have to be worried not only we shouldn't just remember this you should not just be afraid of death you should not just be afraid of dying you should be worried that one day you wake up and realize you've lived a life that is not worth living there is the link to my prolex playlist of uh you know um criticisms of uh the culture and medicine and science behind antidepressants all right i'm just scrolling through the uh scrolling through the comments this so i just say um edgy intellect says further just by the way just intelligent interesting comment just don't mind talk about any of this stuff um he says opiates are said to be more addictive because they cause euphoria there are objective and there are subjective elements to this guys uh i do not believe that the effects of cocaine are pleasant i don't think they can be called pleasure due to like uh sorry not really surgery but i've had injuries where i was in the hospital and i was given opiates i do not think the feeling is pleasure i don't think it's pleasant i don't think it's pleasure there's another youtuber he's a bodybuilder he had been an addict but he had also received opiates you know in this kind of medically regulated you know he'd had injuries where he was at the hospital and he describes it as this amazingly wonderful euphoric feeling that he could never you know uh he can never do without again or that like if he's injured and given this kind of drug then it brings back the memory of how much he loves this feeling and so so you know there are objectively real scientifically verifiable aspects of this and then there are totally subjective unreal imaginary aspects to it you know you could say the same about many factors in human life like human beauty who was the actress you were talking about who plays the the the actress in all the marvel movies scarlett johansson [Laughter] you know the whole world convinces itself that scarlett johansson is the most beautiful and fascinating character she's a terrible actress and she is not objectively a good-looking woman you know from my perspective that's a case where the emperor has no clothes and she doesn't have an interesting personality and she's not intelligent she doesn't have any questions to say you know in terms of interviews like there is nothing fascinating and nothing beautiful about scarlett johansson but you know we clothe her with our eyes it's way beyond beauty has been the eye of the beholder and you know i mean i've said this before in a very different uh context you know water does not taste delicious except when you're thirsty you know i mean food is not delicious except for a stomach that lacks it has stomach that yearns for it hungers for it you know what i mean if you're thirstier enough plain tap water is the most delicious taste so all these things they arise you know from desire now what is it that someone desires who wants to feel the way opiates make them feel you know whereas i don't and what i want to do is get work done you know and for me i mean one of the most appealing drugs i don't think it's pleasant i don't think it feels pleasurable but caffeine is appealing to me because the idea oh if i drink coffee i can get work done but for me actually the feeling of caffeine is is unpleasant it's not happiness or pleasure or euphoria or something um i could get into describing what that is but you know i want to lead a meaningful life i want to get work done so therefore you know wanting to drink coffee makes sense i remember one guy describing to me his first experience smoking opium i've spoken i've met quite a few people who smoked opium i used to live in thailand laos and cambodia you know there were white people who go out there to smoke opium as a part of their tourism experience you know and the main thing described to me is being paralyzed of you know not really being able to talk or do it you know you're in this numb state your face is numb who would want to feel that way now if you're gonna if you're gonna endure surgery of course that's a very different thing but who would who would perceive that as pleasure being reduced to this you know mentally and physically disabled state now you know um i met a girl and she was a physiotherapist she worked in rehabilitation rehabilitation of injured people so this is her field now that's not quite as tough as a nursing degree i think but it's a formal scientific scientifically trained feel but she's not like an emergency nurse and she got her leg torn out of the socket by an elephant she went elephant riding in thailand hashtag not vegan and uh elephants they have minds of their own you know um so she had that situation where her leg was torn out and twisted so that it was 180 degrees the wrong way around so you imagine your your leg where it fits into your bum getting you probably did that with a toy as a child i don't know how funny looking that was if you twist the leg around on an action figure so she got the leg torn out of the out of the socket and and inverted and she was in a small town a village in northeastern thailand for the night where there was no hospital and no you know um no doctor to help her and a traditional little old lady in the village came out with an opium pipe they had opium they had you know like free range garden not from a drug dealer just grow it in their own gardens there and you know gave her opium to smoke and she was in a completely blissful state she didn't feel the pain through the night she got through the night and then first thing in the morning they took her to a hospital in whatever the nearest city um when i met her she was walking she was hobbling but you know i mean she'd still it was a serious injury obviously but you know you can recover i don't know if she'll ever be in the olympics i don't know long term how serious the cartilage damage is or something but she was okay i mean she didn't lose her leg or something she didn't lose the ability to walk firmly and that was her field ironically she was an expert in exactly that field that kind of rehabilitation so she was teaching herself you know to walk again but i'm just saying you know um you know uh [Laughter] what is pleasure and what is pain what is you know what is sexually attractive what is beautiful what is appealing these things and by the way there was a comment here from the audience saying that from someone who finds that caffeine makes them sleep that is another scientifically documented thing so frida says caffeine doesn't uh purcha you know what i mean that you know caffeine for her is something and i i can relate to that too um one of the times i was on a zero caffeine diet i try in general to drink zero caffeine and then i make exceptions if i have a cold or i have jet lag or something but i aspire to lead a zero caffeine life but the calming and drowsy feelings of caffeine are also uh documented even though they are paradoxical and yeah um many drugs are like that there's more than one more than one element to them and we have to ask to what extent what we're experiencing is subjective and what's in something else so someone says that they love the aesthetic of jar drinking and someone else asks why are you drinking from a jar like what what is the point to this i do not feel that drinking from a jar has a point i do not feel that this is a thesis i am pursuing i don't i do not feel there is anything i am trying to prove by drinking from a job perfectly perfectly reasonable question i do not feel this shirt makes a statement but if i were sitting here bare chested that would make a statement that i don't want to make therefore i'm i'm wearing a shirt but no uh not not everything in my life has this uh this quality of being a prop to demonstrate my philosophy i guess this whole video without getting i guess we are repping some brands in the background we got we got uh an endorsement here from unico black beans and we got corn pops on the other side so there's a point to that let me tell you if you want to unravel unravel the riddles of my my daily life um yes so there's another question here about uh or comment about benzodiazepines yes um benzodiazepines are a tremendously dangerous drug i don't have a separate playlist for that on my channel but if you search for the word benzo and that's it yeah it's a very hard word to spell benzodiazepine um you will find i've made several videos talking about that and that is truly at epidemic proportions the there's an epidemic of illegal benzo use and there's also an epidemic of legal benzo use that is one of the defining social political medical crises of our times there's absolutely no uh no doubt about that so yeah uh chulu asks you describe yourself as having undertaken various research projects as part of your process of sophistication how do you select these projects oh god what a question okay i'm going to keep it all the way real with you uh ctulu you know i remember when i was with my blonde ex-girlfriend so i referred to her as such she's come up in various anecdotes of the channel so my blonde ex-girlfriend was someone who fell in love with me when we were both in high school and i think we kissed a few times in high school but we weren't really boyfriend and girlfriend or maybe we dated for two weeks or one week or something we weren't really involved in high school and then at the end of university um i we got seriously involved in a commitment relationship so she's someone from that period of my life who then transitioned over to the next period of my life she came with me to thailand and then laos so she was a significant part of my life i was a significant part of her life terrible person despicable human terrible person [Laughter] really and i i totally regret that i ever got into that relationship with her but she loved me and um at that time i felt that that counted for a lot uh she asked me a different question that got at the same answer and you know this question of how is it you select what you're doing whether it's like if you say philosophy or you say politics well what you're doing isil is specific it's got a point it's got there's some like these are these specific research projects you know they build up like different bricks in the wall but how do you choose to do this particular thing in philosophy or politics and at that time this is in my last year of university i said to her when you pass someone on the sidewalk and you see them running you have no reason to assume that they know what it is they're running toward and you have no reason to assume that they know what it is they're running away from all you know is that they have made the decision to run you know some of us are standing still i'm running i don't know if i'm going to cambodia i don't know if i'm going to become a buddhist monk i don't know you know i don't know at that time i don't know where i'm going or why but you know it's i'm not going to stay here it's not this this is not enough for me this is not good for me and i said to her further at that time so i mean again this isn't true with me now this changes at a certain point in my life and i think for many of you in the audience you can reflect on this change in your life too um you can only understand what i'm doing through negation you have to understand in terms of what it is i'm running away from you know what it is i'm refusing to do what it is i'm refusing to be a part of you know not this this is not good enough for me what it is i can't compromise with right this kind of thing so yeah in the canadian context of toronto in the year 2001 2002 right that made a lot of sense in my life like why are you reading this why are you working so hard on this particular philosophy or this particular language or what have you you know it was really through [Music] negation you know um it's really what i refuse to converse with the refuse to be a part of and there's there's a lot of negation you know my parents were communists well i figured i had to totally reject communism well you know my country was canada i reject genocide and the whole british empire tradition i reject so much about what canada is and i've got to figure what i'm doing so up to a certain point you know it's it's going to be what you're running away from not what you're what you're running towards and um you know i mean i think i think another time in my life to question that way would be after i divorced uh my first wife sorry i can't say divorced illegally after we got separated and began the process of legal divorce and she refused to divorce me and refused to receive the divorce documents for years and years but after i started the process of trying to divorce my wife when i was alone then again you have a period where there's all this activity a lot of which you can see on youtube there's some reflection of it on youtube you know i'm not i'm not uploading everything i'm reading in those years but you can see it and it's like okay i'm not going to be a scholar of buddhism i'm not going to do this like i know what i'm not going to do anymore i've given up on being a scholar buddhism i've given up on being a scholar of cree or being an activist for the korean ojibwe first nations indigenous people i know a lot of things that i'm not going to do but i don't know what i am going to do i don't know what's forward i don't know what the destination is but i'm running um it's clear to me what i got to move out and it's clear to me what i've got to work against you know so for a lot of us for long periods of our life and i started this by saying i'm now correcting myself so as i'm saying up to a certain point in your life it's like that and then then you have a sense of purpose and direction um after that point but i guess that's really not true i think that's probably something that can happen again and again in your life and maybe it's really important to have the self-discipline to to run to strive to try hard even when you don't have a direction and i don't just mean you're lacking a clear sensitivity when you're certain you don't have one you know you're not agnostic you're gnostic you know you know you don't have a way forward you know you don't have a way forward but you're still going to find a way you're still going to do something and you know what you've got to move away from you know what's going to be naked i guess now that i think about it that's something that could happen to you in your 20s 30s 40s 50s 60s you could find yourself in that situation and it's important they're committed to still be a real real intellectual you know yeah anyway long long but honest answer that question and then yeah the contrast is sometimes sure you have a definite definite sense of uh of uh what it is you're doing and why uh so stupid vegan asks was she your only blonde girlfriend this is debatable because the question is do you you call melissa blonde so you melissa you don't identify as blonde okay so melissa has a very peculiar intermediate color hair you call that brown okay well i mean i come from a jewish family your hair is not the same color of brown that we in our family called brown i will say i think i think uh melissa could be considered the dirtiest of dirty blondes is this sort of there no it's this very interesting intermediate color that's yeah um no i i like it it's my it's my sure it's my favorite you know oh it's you oh the first day we were together we talked about that yeah sure no i really did like your coloring and i felt that our coloring was actually not captured in photographs i saw our photographs we talked via skype before we met in person and then that person wow this is very interesting no i mean your eyes too are peculiar so what what eye color do you identify with i think my license is hazel okay because again i would describe your eyes as being like off blue like blue but not really blue so anyway i just said she has kind of i'm gonna have to sneeze guys commercial break while i sneeze talk amongst yourselves um so yeah it is certainly um uh it is certainly debatable uh whether or not uh she was my only blonde girlfriend present company uh included so now we've solicited a bunch of compliments about how beautiful melissa's hair is so that's good all right oh so this is telling so someone says in mexico in mexico melissa would be considered blonde oh so there you go um for whatever reason someone's asking what about blonde jews i guess there are some but i'm just saying i grew up in a jewish family where our concept of uh of what is brown hair was very different from what's this concept but i did not make the claim that there are no jewish people who are blind if you if you go to israel you will meet african jews you will meet people who are members of the jewish faith and jewish ethnos of quite a remarkable variety of people but yeah okay so look um i got a lot to say what i would talk about next uh so yeah i the light motif for this video we gotta wrap up sometime but you know for me this is the video where i was talking about books i had been reading that were bound up with this large-scale effort of writing and publishing my own book however i admit i could do several more live streams on that topic even just talking about the books that i had read in the past but for those of you who have stuck with me all this time i know a lot of my viewers listen to my stuff while they're doing the dishes or while they're uh on the stairmaster or exercising the gym or something um you know it's interesting to note that the books i read immediately before starting to write no more manifestos were voltaire's candide and voltaire's english letters so here the the title is given as philosophical letters it oh so it does actually say that philosophical letters or letters regarding the english nation this is commonly known as the english letters by voltaire and candide which are both kind of terrible books i can say a little bit more with them these are not books i'm going to recommend or or indoors or something um so was it before or after that i read cola duran's though i forget if those i thought it might have been after yeah right so that was this is also an interesting book i've written about this little bit on patreon from my patreon followers um interesting historically significant vote it's part and parcel now you know um okay voltaire is linked to so many things that have come up in the research this book in different ways but inspiration can be positive and negative i've got to tell you something i read voltaire's work and i really felt like this is trash i could write better this week like if i wrote a book in one week i could do better than this and why don't i like part of it really was this sense of the will to out do and the will to overcome i thought well i can do better than this now to give credit to voltaire voltaire is a positive inspiration in that he is an example of a man whose ideas really did change the world and they are not cerebral ideas these are mostly emotional ideas the main impact voltaire has on his audience is just that he really cares about this stuff he doesn't even know anything about this stuff you know so voltaire there's a very moving scene about slavery and it's specifically black slavery africans enslaved in south america he's he's somewhere like venezuela or columbia i think it's anyway he's somewhere in south america i forget if the geography is clear because he visits a kind of magical wonderland in south america it's eldorado type fantasy at one point in the story but anyway he encounters the the terrible brutality of slavery he talks about the unspeakable brutality of torture and rape and war in europe at that time and look it's terrible book it's really poorly written it's really poorly argued it has nothing going for it except there is this rambunctious passionate sense that he really cares by the way the conclusion is terrible at least the second half of the book is terrible like like at the beginning it seems like it's kind of organized as a point it just disintegrates into total aimlessness um there's a lot wrong with with voltaire's candide but i mean it's on i think it's on many people's reading lists or greatest intellectual confidence so i really followed up uh reading candide immediately by starting on the manuscript for no more manifestos which is in part a response to the political conditions that were unique to the year 2020 which includes authentic examples of police brutality and also inauthentic examples of police brutality people kind of making up stories about police jobs some of which have been covered on my youtube channel and then all these from my perspective really profound and fundamental questions about politics not just in the united states america but around the world come out of that now the book has grown in scope and depth and it's about much more than police brutality but that was the intellectual context so also as soon as i finished uh voltaire's candide when you're reading that book has this quality that many of you will know from music or movies um when someone has already become famous and they they know the audience sympathizes with them or supports them or will come you know what i mean like he he knows he can lean on your patience when he writes this he is already the great and famous voltaire the great and famous you know author and respected and esteemed and you know there's going to be some political and philosophical significance to it he's kind of established his name as a political dissident and a philosophical writer and he's famous so you know again um talk about any american comedian when they made their first movie or were doing their first standard when they really have to work hard to get your attention and get you to listen and convince you that they're going to tell you something worth listening to that's very different from their seventh movie when they're an established actor so the main reason i then turned to looking at the english letters was that this was voltaire's first book it was his first hit book it was how he made his name as an intellectual and a writer so okay given the poor quality of what voltaire did at his site how did this story begin and it's also a terrible book it's appallingly poorly written a lot of it is really stupid and really fatuous and i could digress into i mean the few things that kind of made it interesting in its own historical context so yeah i largely drew negative inspiration from voltaire but i mean you know credit where it's due voltaire was not just a political commentator he was not just a critic he was one of the most devastatingly effective political activists in the history of the world and his activism did not consist of standing on the sidewalk holding a sign right like it did not consist of protests you know what i mean like sorry i've made so many youtube videos talking about this the ideology of protesting what it means to be a distant intellectual how to change the world you know a candide sat in his mansion and he received guests he had a visitor's room he talked to people one-on-one face-to-face which is really very much similar to what i'm doing right now with this live stream to my knowledge she took a couple hours every day i don't know if it was a seven day a week schedule or five days schedule but he had guests people came to see him once he was a famous author and he influenced the world that way by meeting with people in groups and one-on-one whatever five people would come to visit the great author and he changed the world through his writing and he changed the world through complaining now again in some ways a positive example in some ways a negative one there's a very interesting dotted line between voltaire and jean-jacques rousseau with um boswell in the middle so this is the boswell who was famous today as the biographer of samuel johnson um but i just say if you look into it um you know one of the most politically consequential things voltaire did was that he lent his name and his fame to this young upstart writer boswell who had accomplished absolutely nothing in his life he had no fame he had no publications uh he was a young man who had so far done nothing but as well and he was trying to get famous and he went to voltaire and he went to jean-jacques rousseau he met them in person and he got their blessing and endorsement to go and visit the island of corsica that had then set up a rebel republic and this is one of the most momentous influential and consequential events in the history of the world and it's important because of what people said about it and what people wrote about it i think it is worth asking what if boswell had never visited corsica maybe it wouldn't have mattered i mean napoleon still would have been born and raised in corsica and would have lived in the political aftermath of that uh another interesting question what if napoleon's book on the history of corsica had been published and been hit um you know because it wasn't it disappeared to my to my knowledge it's not extinct at all today some people say there are a few chapters or a few pages of it that exist but it's basically unknown but napoleon also tried writing a book uh based on the political history of course to pursue his own fame well it could maybe that would have been the hit instead of boswell or something um but anyway the uh the relatively tiny nation state of of corsica they had their own attempt to revive uh ancient greco-roman concepts of democracy at that time which probably should be much less important than the history of democracy in venice for example but precisely because of the charisma of boswell in writing this bizarre book about it that i have also read very recently in in the research uh for writing my own book um and because of the fame led to the project by voltaire so you had these three names coming together and all three became incredibly famous names at this time boswell isn't famous yet you have voltaire and russo and boswell and then uh corsica and paulie is the leader of corsica and this really did change the world so something i've just been writing about um in the book is the importance of the idea that change is possible you know the political progress is possible so i shouldn't say progress progress is an ideology change is an objective fact you know this is not about optimism or pessimism right here where i'm living in canada everyone thinks they're happy here in victoria victoria british columbia capital canada they think they're living in the greatest country in the world and in the greatest city in the greatest country in the world there is no no one thinks they're oppressed no one wants to change the government nobody wants to write a new constitution there's no dissent you know people here have the illusion that they're happy but they also live with the much deeper hopelessness that nothing is possible there is no change this is the only life that's possible this is the only kind of political establishment that's possible for them um nothing can change so there's no point complaining about it do we have democracy in canada no not really no there's really no democracy at all what do you want to do about it well nothing's going to change so what's the point you know canadian constitution is terrible our canadian court system is terrible our police system is terrible oh well is it as bad as some other country you could name you know well the point is ultimately even if people are not pessimistic they may think of themselves as optimistic they'd be very happy with their lives they live with this deeper sense of resignation to the impossibility of political change i just mentioned this book specifically candide by voltaire this book is totally hopeless about the possibility of living in this in this book when he wrote this or were just judging this book as an idol unto itself judging it in isolation there was no possibility of anything better for europe his conclusion of the book depressingly is that you should just tend your own garden that you should literally should just raise vegetables in your own garden and put your time and energy and effort into that into things you can control on this small scale because the whole world is dominated by war torture rape this terrible slavery these terrible things that he's talking about and by the way you get also he really goes after the catholic church um catholics burning witches at the sta stake and that stuff catholics torturing and executing people um that's in there in a big way but his perspective is the whole world is terrible and in much this way and nothing's going to change there's nothing there's nothing you can do about you to make a change now of course one century later think think about how much the world had changed in one century after the publication of candida he was wrong everything can change you know what i mean but what happened with this and i do not use the word cooperation these people hated each other jean-jacques rousseau hated voltaire voltaire hated john jack russo and voltaire tried to destroy john jack russo really it was brutal what they did to each other um well i to my knowledge all the blame is on i don't even know if whosoever did anything back to voltaire and honesty i think it's all one way i think it's it's asymmetrical but what these three personalities managed to do in concert without cooperating uh voltaire rousseau and boswell was to really say to everyone in europe something else is possible something better is possible and most powerfully of all it's both brand new and it is ancient you know is this partly reaching back to ancient greece and rome and this is partly something new and different you know something you ain't never heard of before something you're not already bored of of hearing hyped up if you have any doubt about how much of an influence this had on the american revolution and in the history of america it's something that is in some ways connected to england but in some way separable right go to google maps right now and type in powly p-a-o-l-i and you tell me how many towns there are in the united named after pasquale paulie pauli p-a-o-l-i the revolutionary leader he was the generalissimo in charge of this new republic in corsica so yeah what could have been a trivial and quickly forgotten political event in the history of the world the emergence of this new republic on corsica certainly the way it was written about in english boswell wrote in english he didn't write in latin he didn't write in german things would be different if really the whole issue of germany would have been different what if there is a good question would have been three german intellectuals publishing in germany who did this you know but no um these things were they did influence germany also but not as powerfully as they influenced england in the united states this this really did change the whole world in the next 100 years so if you think you can't change the world by complaining about it you're wrong voltaire the ultimate the ultimate whiner you says briefly um something my ring has really made me intensely aware of you know um there are some myths about political history uh that people teach their children consciously and intentionally there are some lies about history that our school teachers tell us really intentionally in school there are some things that are silenced and we are aware that we're silencing them but there are some lies we're unaware of there's some things that happen you know and it's not clear whoever planned this who met yourself who first told this lie who decided we should lie this way and i think that one of the biggest lies of all in how the history of the united states of america is presented and then very much in the shadow of the american revolution how the history of england australia canada and keeping all the way real i think many western european countries their understanding of their own history and world history is in the same shadow maybe some of them to a slightly lesser extent maybe there's a little bit more freedom of thought in uh estonia but i doubt it you know most of the world history has been in the shadow of american history in this sense and when we're talking in this scale over over centuries overseas how we think about the last 500 years um i don't think people are aware of the extent to which they're lying and mythologizing and silencing when you know they presume and assert that democracy had completely died and disappeared from the world before it was revived in the united states of america now one counter argument is what i just talked about well what about corsica what about voltaire what about russo what about stuff from that era you can go back a few more centuries and say what about uh cola de rienzo right another interesting kind of lily pad in the history of despotism a little lily pad of republicanism or democracy more that was more republicanism than it was democracy but i mean among the among the strangest forms of bias we have in the history of the modern western world is the extent to which italy is now silenced and muted and forgotten you would think that italy just wasn't an important place at all after the fall of the roman empire like you would think after after some incredibly early period like julius caesar then we just don't hear anything about italy until world war ii i mean i would say this honestly um if a chinese person or a japanese person were to compare the way history is now taught and understood in america to reality i think it would be reasonable for them to surmise that we have a kind of racism against italians like italians are silenced and deleted from our history in a way that the germans are not you know what i mean uh the role of germany in the way western history has taught is really much more you know prussia and all that crap you know sorry well again russia sorry just two words that sounded like prussia is one story but russia is another we make a big deal out of the history of russia the history of russia is really quite trivial in its significance compared to the history of italy in past 2 000 years uh but past 500 years especially and it's it's very strange how kind of diminished and disparaged and forgotten italy is see i won't go into this video we could talk a bit more in future but you know it is not a minor or fringe view that the history of venice really matters you even feel that in shakespeare you know in shakespeare you always get this sense that italy is a really important place the history of genoa really matters the history of florence really matters machiavelli is much more important to the history of european democracy the history of american democracy history of british democracy and this whole book is all about that by the way this is okay it's not the only thing it's a huge book there's many many views on it um you know our understanding of what democracy is and where it comes from and you know look this is kind of like if the american constitution is a mountain people are trying to make that mountain look taller by removing the other mountains from the painting you know what i mean it's sort of like oh well if we if we delete all of the other then ongoing and continuous history of republicanism and democracy from europe then it seems like this sudden shocking great accomplishment that in boston you know they they started to write this constitution and of course that creates a totally incoherent you know totally false history of the world i think though i think without being aware that they're lying to their children i think parents lie to their children this way i think school teachers lie to their pupils i think it is very much presented as this sudden decisive disruption in the history of despotism that americans you know created democracy now sorry another way in which that's an enormous lie is just that it totally exaggerates the discontinuity between the united states america and england that the type of democracy they had the united states of america after the revolution is shockingly similar to what they had in exactly that period of time in england that to a very large extent the american constitution is just an imitation of what was at the time business as usual in england that is a reproduction of our carbon copy of the british system of government now it's not perfectly identical but they are shockingly similar so the idea that america again this is accomplished by very much disparaging and misrepresenting what political conditions were at angle in that time if you imagine that england was this terrible despotic tyranny that americans had to rebel against if you imagine england was this kingdom if you imagine england at that time was something like saudi arabia is now there was just one man whose word is law that oh yes this seems like this great impressive accomplishment that americans did this so yeah i would say that um in this last year and in this these last six months the research i've been doing and we're now holding up a huge stack here um in expanding and enriching and deepening my book no more manifestos it's it's made me reflect on and feel more about that you know um that big lie that american history is based on and look understandably that's not the lie most people are interested in in 2021 most people are arrested in the slavery and the status of blacks in america they're interested in genocide maybe the history of indigenous people disappearance of indigenous languages and culture a big one is women you know the extent to which the american constitution was a sexist you know the french revolution too this is a huge issue but the status of women the status of black people status indigenous people uh another it should be something like the status of freedom of speech definitely it's a history people have to go back and reimagine and understand again so i mean if you say like well the history that's told about the american constitution american revolution is a big lie those will be the things people are talking about but yeah um there really is a kind of unconscious racism i feel against italians and and let's say this i've just suggested to you that americans need to believe that england was this horrible dictatorship at the time that they were built against that's convenient for them that's not true now there's very little difference between conditions in america and conditions in england that them and after the american revolution conditions in the united states of america were dramatically worse than conditions in england like for that decade the first decade after american revolution was an interesting story they rebelled against taxes guess what after the revolution their taxes tripled depending on which state you went they either tripled or quadrupled you had more taxes and worse oppression and more rebellion and political conditions in america were worse than they were in england effort but you could say they need to believe or it's convenient for them to believe that england was this terrible tyranny at that time and by the way i hate the british empire i'm very critical of the british i'm not saying this is someone who's a who lionizes or glorifies the british empire but let's get real you know um england at that time was not a kingdom or despotism in the same way that even saudi arabia is today it's just that's just not true that's a myth and if you were walking around the streets of london and you were walking around the streets of boston how how palpable was the contrast between uh a monarchy with a parliament and a republic let's just stop getting ourselves but there's a similar need to believe in the darkness of italy in the dark ages right that oh yeah yeah italy and athens they really mattered at one time in the incredibly distant past but then after that reading is done after basically polybius you say polybius is kind of the conclusion that we have polybius and cicero and cato cato cato the younger you know we have we have a few names that creep in from from greece and rome and then there's this sense that we can and should ignore what happened in italy now look let's be real at this time the people of italy the level of education the quality of life was far superior to the united states of america i mean you know sorry let's let's come back another book that's already put on camera yes the barbarous years i agree in these years in this historical period we're talking about white americans white american farmers they were barbarians these were people who had the blood on their hands directly blood on their hands from genocide and slavery this is a tremendously violent tremendously barbaric situation i gotta tell you the the level of intellectual discourse amongst machiavelli and his contemporaries about democracy about government about freedom it's on another level guys you know what i mean but americans can't let this happen they can't let it be that italy is a model of excellence to aspire to they can't have a higher mountain in the painting that puts their own in perspective they can't have the humility you know what i mean so it's really sad it's you know it's it's the opposite of that old saying you know we're we're giants because we're standing on the shoulders of giants i'm sorry whatever we're you know like we're standing on the strollers of giants that we're not just giants unto ourselves we're standstills it's of actively wanting to deny and repress the memory of and delete from history you know what really were better and more important presidents you know now of course you know they're they're simultaneous and competing events rather than uh you know an earlier example machiavelli's long before the american revolution but of course there's a similar sort of question to be asked about the way in which americans disparage and disregard the french revolution right i mean i could talk about that for an hour but i mean in in some way in some ways italy is a deeper threat to the american ego uh than the french revolution and i would just note um that pattern or that agenda to try to make the american revolution a unique and outstanding accomplishment in history of the world that was already happening during the lifetime of the founding fathers totally dishonest misrepresentation of of of history um uh guvnor morris so his title is not governor there was an historical figure whose first name was governor governor morris was one of the authors of the american constitution he was a founding father participating in all that political history has unfolded and he was in france as the um ambassador of the united states of france during the most violent years of the french revolution the great terrorists and so forth and already at that stage as the history is unfolding you know there's this agenda of the americans and i'll mention the english did this also to say no no no no this thing the french are doing it's nothing like what we americans accomplish oh no no no no that what the americans had accomplished with something terribly refined and sophisticated and unique and remarkable in human history and oh no no these french they're they you know they have they have no understanding of democracy or republicanism they're just in fear they they don't get it at all they're not that was that agenda already existed at that time and maybe one of the most dramatic and extreme examples someone who already came up so i don't actually have his book on paper here i don't physically hear but i did i did read it just a few months ago um boswell boswell the biographer of johnson boswell who went to corsica you know uh boswell supported the american revolution but then viciously and childishly opposed the french revolution now in his case there's another important factor which is that he supported black slavery to a ridiculous exam he was pro he was in favor of the enslavement of black africans to a ridiculous extent but um boswell was a very influential example of an englishman who was enough of a whig enough of a progressive whatever you want to say to support the american revolution but then it was somehow necessary to his ego to try to construe the american revolution as something totally unique in the history of the world and that the french revolution just had nothing to do with it nothing come with it let alone you know what can we talk about florence venice the the various um city-states and micro-republics and democracies shout out to san marino uh still exists as a separate country by the way within within italy but it's separate family you know um yeah so i just say i think that's a kind of sickness within the american spirit and uh unlike other agendas in politics and propaganda i think it's a sickness that most of us are not yet aware of thank you guys for your time it's been wonderful streaming with you