Nostalgia is an attempt to vindicate the stupidity of your youth with the stupidity of adulthood.

it could be complained that i have not had a lot of stability in my life and it could be celebrated that i've had a lot of spontaneity in my life i saw a youtube video yesterday almost at random almost you can probably imagine what i've clicked on in the last month that would have led youtube to recommend this video to me but i saw a youtube video from a white guy who had been living and teaching english in japan for many years and eventually he got fed up and quit and moved elsewhere but he was talking about what he disliked about life in japan he talked about the monotony he talked about the predictability of life he talked about the lack of imagination and spontaneity and ambition amongst the people and he really specified that he felt he was having exactly the same conversation with people again and again that he could predict exactly what people were going to say his life was that predictable was that monotonous and the people who surrounded him were all dreadful conformists with no imagination now you might say this gives a man something to rebel against in his life give you something give something to brace yourself against when exercising your own creativity your own spontaneity or finding your own your own ambitions and of course some people never do um you know the life i've led including even just in the last two years within the last five years within the last 10 years in the last 20 years right there's been no stability there's no stability in terms of my own day-to-day life what i'm doing right now there's been no stability in the expectation of what i'm gonna do in the next few years right the my plans for the future my career plans my plans even for what i'm doing on this youtube channel are subject to so much change like from day to day from week to week and so on uh you know i've been living a life that in subtle ways it's just totally different from the middle aged north american norm it's certainly very different from the the middle aged japanese norm i've never had that kind of a sense of dreadful monotony and regularity to rebel against now i made a video more than a year ago criticizing the concept of nostalgia and guys today this is an open q a we can actually talk about today whatever you want to talk about i don't say that like most of my videos most of my live streams i say look there's one topic this is all we're going to discuss so if you ask a perfectly good question an unrelated topic i'm not going to die but not today i'm really i'm really open this way uh i've criticized nostalgia from many different angles and many different aspects but it's been spread out over the years this huge channel it's something that's only come up a few times you know what i'd like to point out in opening this video is this i think for a lot of people the period of their childhood possibly the period of their teenage years that was the period in which they had spontaneity that was the period in which they had ambition or which they could have ambition they could be anything they wanted to be they could become a police officer they could become a fireman you know like there was this this possibility this was the period of their life in which what they were doing on any given day was not so dreadfully predictable and in which their idea of the future their idea of what they're doing next week next month next year next decade was not so dreadfully predictable and then they lost that right so the yearning for their youth the yearning again for some people maybe their teenage years for some people maybe when they were 11 years old what it is they fasten on to and have the sense of nostalgia or interestingly that also differs between people for some people it's as late as their university years i think that's actually relatively rare for people to yearn to want to go back to say age 20 or 21 or something but maybe maybe for for some it is right there's a lot of discussion of the consumerist aspects of nostalgia of wanting to own and touch and hold things again that you owned as a child so yeah and fair enough and we can talk about that today and we can talk about something totally different you know but what about the lost sense of your own potential the last sense that there was another person you could be or simply that there were many possibilities of the person you could become you know the sense that you uh in who you were and what you did were something malleable um something susceptible to improvement and even to improvisation that you were a spontaneous changing you know desiring a hearing character instead of being someone who at whatever age someone who had made your compromises who had made your commitments in life and for whom now nothing new and nothing different is possible you know now i guys as you can imagine i'm not uh glamorizing or glorifying this you know this this side of it is quite hard for me to sympathize with frankly uh i've said this before i try to be sex positive i try it's very hard to be sex positive in the 21st century it's very easy to be sex negative i remember a friend of mine we were good friends at the time but we now now haven't spoken for many years we were two people we were good friends for a short time like maybe for one year we were friends this me and this guy but you can guess from this story it's not a story he would tell anyone he had become an english teacher when he was quite a young man so you know being an esl teacher you can do it as soon as you finish your bachelor's degree and that was what he that was what he did he finished his ba and he went to teach english i don't know if he was 22 or something when this story happened he had just finished university and he didn't go to teach english in japan he went to italy it's easy to forget this but um you can be an exotic foreigner in italy too you can be a red-haired person or something in italy and you get a male or female you get a lot of attention you know yes you might be exotic if you went to japan but you were exotic even within italy so he was a kind of exotic young man uh in in italy and he described this middle-aged married woman who paid for him to come to her home and tutor her one-on-one in english and her at first subtle and later blatant attempts to seduce him into bed look okay [Laughter] we certainly live in a culture in which it's regarded as harmless for people to want to recapture their youth whether that's recapturing the spirit of their youth whether that's through consumer activity whether that's through going to the gym whether that's through a new diet you know diet exercise personal transformation new haircut new hair dye new uh red press-on nails new fingernails new you right and and note that newness what is newness associated with youth nostalgia a return to childhood a return to your teenage years why whatever being a new old man what i would have a new gray beard i want to have a new perspective on life that's mature and elderly and philosophically no no no don't be a new socrates don't be a new don't be a new aristotle or something no no the new you is a younger version of you right there can be no doubt that for both men and women in our century in our culture um one of the forms of nostalgia is going out and seducing and sleeping with a younger person right now again actually i think you could you could digress into a set of reflections and how this is different in the culture of japan than it is in the culture of say taiwan of communist china of western europe of north america and how also this is regarded and judged in each of these places and how i mean i've started with example of an older woman and a younger man i think it's actually regarded today it's it's about equally as negative for both genders i think so you think about a 50 year old woman with a 22 year old man let's just say that think about a 50 year old man and a 22 year old woman both you know regarded with the same kind of uh disdain just once i remember uh going out for lunch with my mother and so this is i i looked older than i was i'm i honestly don't know if i was 19 at the time but people probably people probably thought i was 25 but once i remember i met my mother for lunch and i was well dressed and the waiter he not only treated me as as as a man on a date throughout the thing he brought me the bill at the end i remember laughing about my mother said well you know you know mom you're not doing that bad you know if you're if you think you're youthful good luck that they think we're here as a couple and not as mother and son like you know this is the way the waiters and that that restaurant it must have happened often enough that there were women in their 50s with young men in their in their 20s or something you know to me it seemed preposterous but these things exist and they exist often enough that the waiter he was trying to be polite he was presenting me with the bill as if i was the one who was going to pay for the trusty look yes just against a couple you know it was i i didn't say a word a complaint to the waiter i just laughed about it with my mother so those things are regarded as ods they happen on a massive scale anyway collecting batman figurines as a as a as a middle-aged man it is regarded as odious right now look on youtube how many youtube channels does the guy have his collection of figurines in the background i'm saying batman of course it could be spider-man it could be dragon ball z it could be any anime crap you know of course you know um being a middle-aged man with a collection of full-size arcade cabinets these are video games on a big scale i can't count how many youtube channels the guys film with that in the background i used to have my books in the background and people ridiculed me for it and and by the way it wasn't a collection of books they were the books i was reading that week they were my current books i was really working on that week that month kind of thing you know i by the way i can go back to doing that again i don't i don't mind i'm not shy a lot of you guys know what i'm reading i got a request from the audience recently to let them know what i'm reading in advance so when i do book review videos people have the chance to respect which i can do i said also i said oh i could i could list what melissa's reading in advance if and when melissa is reading something different myself sometimes we're working the same book but anyway i digress there is there is stigma you know there is a social stigma there is uh the perception that this is something you should be ashamed of um these various forms of nostalgia however they are nevertheless massively popular you know social and cultural events in our time to say they're scarce or rare or unusual is ridiculous my point being the stigma exists it is not sufficient to deter or diminish the popularity of these things so you know look um what are people yearning for in any of these uh scenarios you know okay it's easy to say sex is just sex it's easy to say amassing material possessions is just amassing material possessions whether it's buying figurines or buying uh comic books or or what have you well you know i've got to tell you something in terms of my own toxic masculinity i don't think sex ever is just sex i think sex even for homosexual people even for transgender people even for hashtag child free people people who made up their mind they never want to have children i think sex really is about reproduction of the species i think sex really is about creating and sustaining the social bonds that make it possible to raise children so the point being it's not just to get someone pregnant and have a kid but to have the kind of relationship with a woman or with a number of women or with a woman and a gay man or a transgender person and a man and whatever your your clan or your community or your tribe is made up of because in historical time let alone evolutionary time it wasn't the case that one man and one woman raised the child together talking about at least four people working together closely to raise a child and i've seen those conditions where i was in uh where i was in southeast asia you know the mountains of northern laos uh the adjacent mountains of northeastern myanmar we had the last peoples really living in traditional uh travel conditions so i could list off others also northeastern cambodia there were few places like that where there still were people living to say traditional wasn't traditionally is an understatement you know they're really still living in kind of bronze age stone age conditions of the mountains you know it wasn't one man and one woman could not raise a child that way sorry just the actual manual labor of cooking and cleaning and gathering food and building and rebuilding your house constantly sorry just interestingly you know we think today in the modern world of building a building a house is something you do once in ancient times ancient materials or you're your house your house is biodegradable okay you're it's constant construction and work on your you know so yeah you need some kind of tribe level set of relationships with people you know i just say for me from my toxic masculinity perspective sex is never just sex so if you're talking about a 50 year old man pursuing a 20 year old woman what is it he wants what is it he's after in many many of these cases look i'm not gonna say this is a hundred percent of cases in some cases the man wants to have a baby and raise a child don't get me wrong this exists i'm not gonna say there are no 50 year old men looking to settle down and have a child with a 21 of course of course that he says but on a massive scale and a mass phenomenon and especially when we include phenomena like simping phenomena like only fans sugar baby sugar daddy relationships and by the way again japan has its own rich vocabulary for all of these relationships all these gray areas of surrounding prostitution and and thailand does also and china does also like each one of these cultures you're going to find a very different set of of just terms and categories for what these uh what these relationships are here's here's a hilarious comment from the audience so i thought this was scientifically debunked so random dude says quote at age 50 your sperm is as healthy as tiki sam's body so that is not to my knowledge friend dude that is not true that no a man especially if you're a man who doesn't smoke cigarettes doesn't drink alcohol eats a vegan diet etc that sadly men and women are are unequal in terms of uh reproductive years that there's basically a prejudice that men's the quality of men's sperm declines as they get older but this is uh scientifically this does not hold up anyway if you i mean i remember when i lived in france everyone thought i was like 15 years younger than i was because people the men aged so badly there the men aged the badly they all smoked cigarettes they all drank alcohol like you could make a list and sort of in the french diet you know what what yeah well you could see it i always remember walked past this one hamburger restaurant so this wasn't mcdonald's but it was a similar style of fast food restaurant these big signs up special this month a burger with pate de fuego i think what should we just call this fog this duck liver on a hamburger that's what these people are eating so i could go on and on about the french diet you know they feed veal to babies like the french aren't just non-vegan or anti-vegan they're this unbelievably unhealthy diet which includes by the way raw meat uncooked meat and the diet and then all the diseases go on anyway yeah i remember i remember just really people there perceiving me as like 15 years younger than i was i was like i don't think i'm very youthful looking but it's true a lot of the men have these kind of withered features and if you live the wrong lifestyle you know i get it oh by the way great so again i did say this live stream i'm actually happy to have you guys change the topic or change the direction and to do this as a q a but i do have some things to say as you probably i do have some opinions to share but um great question from the audience quote are you bisexual or gay so i'm gonna tell you something this is from someone called yzx i don't know if i have ever met anyone more heterosexual than myself i have absolutely zero capacity for bisexuality in me zero um i have never found another man attractive i've also never found them repulsive you know i'm not saying this i hate anybody but i've known guys and they're really like they don't want to be around other men when they're naked and stuff and i think that's because they feel both attraction and repulsion like they feel some maybe repressed bisexual aspect of their nature being being activated that way because for me a naked man it's like looking at a naked wooden table like it's just it's just a completely non-sexual object to me being around other men is just not i don't react to it in any way at all so yeah you know um [Music] look i i've i have had gay male friends i have had bisexual male friends i have had a number of female friends who were married to men who turned out to be gay and i've told some anecdotes about that on the youtube channel over the years it's kind of been a recurring thing and you know i talk a lot about the importance about not being uh not being repressed or not being in the closet if you're gay or bisexual and now it really has negative um uh negative implications for for yourself i mean it's it's very psychologically damaging you know for the individual person to repress and lie about their own sexuality and live a lie but it also has really negative implications for other people um so yeah i that is also an interesting topic to me so melissa i might have never told you this this might have come up a conversation like five years ago one of my girlfriends i'm not gonna say i'm not gonna give any indication which girlfriend is but one of my ex-girlfriends in the past her father had been gay uh and this is just twenty percent clear he was a man who had sex with men right up until the minute when he got her mother pregnant and to my knowledge it was an accidental unplanned pregnancy she was a gay man who tried and then he decided to kind of repackage and rebrand himself as as straight and try to live as a as a straight man and i got to see how that was going and how it was falling apart and one of his gay lovers from the past was still friends with them and there was this very interesting drama playing out uh i could tell all kinds of details but i do i do remember all the details of this but i remember that was one really instructive example i knew another family um i wasn't really friends with these people it's not worth i can't i also want to keep this anonymous uh but it was a fan where i knew the parents and they had a daughter my own age um other people wanted me to have a relationship with this daughter and it was just ridiculous we had nothing income there was no possibility of us having relationship whatever was one of those funny situations and i remember in that case even though the father of the family was a full-time psychiatrist i was his job as he'd been a repressed homosexual his whole life and during the time i knew him and i knew the family he was cracking he was breaking down right at that time it's a coincidence because i wasn't involved with their lives for very long and you know i i forget if they actually got divorced but they got separated certainly and he started getting drunk at gay bars all the time and i remember this is i mean it's part the guy has a phd and you know connie studied sigmund freud and all this stuff all his life but he couldn't admit to himself that he was gay he probably counseled other people he probably had other clients and things he talked to about homosexuality and so on over the years a lot but finally as really not even a middle-aged man as an old man he was admitting to himself he was he had been gay and i remember he um so i i don't know how long this went on for but he had this period where he refused to take phone calls from anyone unless he was at the gay bar i thought that was so telling as a crutch that like having having tried to insist that he was heterosexual for so many years now and you know like obviously you could hear noise in the background you know but like somehow this was like a statement like no if you want to call me if you want to talk to me i'll be at the bar i'll be at this like he'd be at this gay bar uh doing call like he wouldn't take a call from his own i forget if his parents were dead uh probably you know but he wouldn't take a call from relatives or unless he was yeah at the gate bar that was a really extreme woman i um one of my other girlfriends it was instead the mother who had been a lesbian all her life until this one unique relationship happened in that case i don't i don't think that pregnancy was accidental but she had been a lesbian she had kids with this one man and then when that broke up and they got divorced she went back to being a lesbian so yeah it happens and um you know i'm not i i really i have i have friends right now i've known a number of different women who were just my friends um who ended up married to men who were more gay than they thought they were more gay that the women were left so it's it's a huge phenomenon i mean male bisexuality and male homosexuality is a huge phenomenon and what percentage of men are outright gay or partly gay i think we'll never know it's a huge percentage and interestingly the percentage of women who are really lesbian i've looked at social science research on this it really does seem to be much smaller and there's no as far as we know this is just random or whatever there's no there's no particular uh reason for this that's known at this time it's possible in the future some reason we're going for it obviously in the past people used to theorize that when you were looking at these statistics stigma and repression you know the fact that people were in the closet that this was skewing the statistics but as time goes on now to give an example if you're looking at a society like the netherlands well do you really think homophobia in the netherlands is so intense that people are concealing you know in in this context of a social science survey or research project you know so obviously it's saudi arabia what percentage people saudi arabia are okay it's probably impossible to do the research possible now but when you're looking at really liberal western societies anyway sorry nice nice uh dead question there but yeah you know guys um i have very vivid dreams uh still to this day it's come there have been different periods of my life where it came and went which has been discussed in the channel if i just for whatever reason or periods of my life where i dream more or dreamless i have never once had a homoerotic dream in my life and it's just amazing because i dream so much and that some some of my dreams are are random and some of my some of my dreams do uh tell you something about my sexuality a lot of my dreams are intellectual in character i mean again another another topic talk about what it is i dream about what is i'm thinking about and talking about in my dreams um but you know yes you know my my dreams do reflect my my sexuality and have done so you know my whole life you know dreams also reflect your resentments and your fears i do not think your dreams present the best part for me i do not think your dreams reflect depict or indicate the best part of your character but they reflect something about you you know there's something shallow you can see about yourself in your in your dreams you know i always say it's like you know if you're worried about something like you're worried about being unemployed and you have dreams that reflect those worries and that shallow way your dreams reflect what's going on in your life but no i've i have never i've never had any inclination or or openness or capacity uh for bisexuality myself it is just utterly not in me and i've had to talk about that sometimes with with gay people because it's quite popular for gay people to reassure themselves by by saying that everyone is to some extent gay or bisexual so i'm saying it's never been an ugly or mean conversation like no you know in the same way that parents have to accept that their child may be 100 gay like they may be not bisexual like you know sometimes a son or daughter has to say their parents look it's it's not that they're open to swinging with everyone like look you need to know mom and dad they are just going to be 100 with the same gender forever well some of us i'm sorry but we're also 100 uh you know heterosexual and that has to be accepted so sometimes as soon as that comes up and we're interested i'll read the other comments that have popped up while i've been on this uh this peculiar depression so someone called rogem so i i've never seen the name rogem before so rogam i wonder if you're in sri lanka because the name given is rogam silva obviously it could be a portuguese name but that would be that looks more like a name from sri lanka to me so shout out shout out to my viewers in sri lanka um rogam says quote most men that i know are into pretty young women for them women at 40 years old are too old but for me i've been into 45 plus year old women since my teenage years so um look it's just a totally different topic uh in various times in my life including back when i was a scholar of buddhism i knew women in their 40s who were still really really good-looking and that has everything to do with the fact that they refuse to drink alcohol you know it has everything to do with the fact they didn't cigarettes didn't drink alcohol didn't do drugs and that they were vegetarian i mean that at that time i'm not thinking about women who are vegan but obviously being vegetarian or vegan is also a huge help and i would just say that the competitive dynamics of human sexuality they become more intense when you're talking about women in their 40s or men in their 40s um the number of women who are still attractive in their 40s is fewer and fewer and the number of women who are available who aren't already married or what have you uh becomes fewer and fewer so the inequalities that we grow accustomed to in our teenage years or in our early 20s um you might think that we'll all become more equal as the decades go on but on the contrary i think the inequalities get worse and the women i've known who were still attractive and even in their 30s frankly 30s or 40s you know and i think i think this is true in their 50s too but the women who still were attractive and who in any way indicated that they were single or available the kind of feeding frenzy and competition that's there is unbelievable and you know men are honest or dishonest about it in their own way after their own fashion but i think i think for men you can just say the same thing the vast majority of men are not attractive anymore at 45 years old and again alcohol has a lot to do with it drug use like alcohol marijuana cigarettes or even hard drugs also dietary choices but look you know sorry again one digression leads to another so a concept i put out in an earlier live stream was the idea of the cultural olympics cultural competition and the cultural lottery um how many men are attractive culturally or intellectually when they're 45 years old if you're 45 and you've been sitting on the couch watching sportscenter for the last 35 years or something you're 45 and you watch the super bowl every year you're 45 and you you know god i remember seeing a documentary on the news this is just a documentary segment on the news about middle-aged men who still collected uh soccer stickers so you may know about baseball cards right it's like baseball cards but these are stickers you place into books the same thing but they're stickers you place in the book and who every year buy the sticker album and then buy these packs of stickers and you try to collect them all they have every player on every team and stick around through these guys in their voice i'd say you know what whatever i'm sure i'm sure plenty of those guys found women who love them or women who tolerate them but yeah when you when you add the intellectual and cultural aspects then yeah you get more and more competition focused around a smaller and smaller number of nubile partners and i say nubile being very well aware of the bizarre etymology of that word and how strange the the meanings are because you can still be a desirable uh partner at but you know i know anyway these are the these what can i say the wages of sin to use an old and worn out phrase uh quote gay people have children all the time often they would tell their partners in advance they only need a short-term relationship for the purpose of conceiving a baby it's normal in the u.s so random dude in terms of an argument about rights like i don't disagree with the gay people have the right to have children this way but if you say it happens all the time i have background in political science i have a background looking at social science statistics it's it's rare like if you actually start to look at the statistics how many gay people so are we talking about gay men to give you an example i read an interview a long interview with a man and he was the first gay man in the history of the netherlands to ever adopt a child and he knew so obviously this this is from several years ago he knew how many gay men ever because the netherlands had good statistics for this he knew the exact number of gay men who had ever adopted a child the number of gay men who had ever been a single father through one of these other relationships like having a woman bury your child and then you become the sole parent or whatever you know and it sorry he so when he did the interview he seemed to know these numbers of something it was incredibly few people you know so it's easy to say that and you know again if making an argument about about rights like legal rights and privileges it may be important to say look gay men have the right to adopt a child or gay men have the right to enter into these things and i understand that but um what percentage of the population actually does it and look guys um melissa and i read a lot of literature from ancient athens and ancient rome the level of buggery in ancient athens the level of uh flagrantly open homosexuality and pederasty and really scandalous gay sex in athens it's unbelievable it seemed like it seems like the majority of men in ancient athens were gay not not the minority but the majority and then you have a question well is this are these cultural factors is this just exaggerated in the literature is it the case that the kind of person who wrote philosophy that those guys were majority gay the type of people who wrote for the theater also because a lot of we have our playable maybe the majority of people in the theater were gay but not the majority of people in society you know is it really possible that such a huge percentage of people in ancient athens were gay but uh if you want to ask questions how many people in ancient athens were gay but were adopting and raising children or something you know where's the evidence for that now again i'm not saying zero did but to depict that as a normal widespread common phenomenon it's not it's not criticism but i mean if you look into it for any of these societies how common is it really for gay partners to raise kids i totally understand why for for you know uh political reasons you insist on it being normal and natural and being a right you're entitled to but it remains a very very marginal phenomenon and just being real with you i think if you start going to gay clubs and gay events or gay political conferences that's a good example how many of the gay people at a political conference you know where gabriel how many of them are actively raising children and how many of them ever will um it's not zero but yeah this is a this is quite a marginal phenomenon so uh someone who knows statistics for germany says that lgbt in germany is 7.4 and it is one of the most uh liberal societies with the highest percentages so uh this is a regular viewer do you want to give me a kiss comments so he or she uh prophesies that that probably the natural rate of homosexuality would not be more than 10 so this is the thing so to me this is fascinating if it's not fascinating to you i apologize what's interesting about measuring homosexuality is that you have to do full life cycle analysis right so frankly uh someone like amber heard is a good example um immediately before she married johnny depp she was in a relationship with a woman she was in a lesbian relationship gay relationship whatever you wanna you wanna say if you just conduct social science research as a snapshot in one moment in time you will record a certain number of teenage girls who say they are lesbian because they're currently in a lesbian relationship we saw a vegan channel right that was reflecting this remember there was this woman uh she was british and she she made a video basically apologizing to her audience because she had made so many videos talking about being a lesbian over years and then at the end she discovered or admitted to herself that she wasn't a lesbian at all that she was really heterosexual when she's in a heterosexual issue and she doesn't she doesn't just mean that she's bisexual and happens to like this guy especially she really had to break down and recognize that she had been lying to herself she told herself she was loving she came on youtube and talked about being a lesbian for years and then she discovered uh she was straight now i earlier in this video if you weren't here i was talking about examples of gay men who get married to women and after many years admit to themselves that they're really gay they were professional sexually so obviously it can happen both ways but the point is if you really want to talk about de facto heterosexuality homosexuality and bisexuality you have to have interviews with people where you're retrospectively looking back at their track record over 10 20 30 years of their life i mean ideally you'd just interview people when they're 60 or 65 or something 60 70 80 when they're toward the end of their life and then talk about who the partners were they had during their their sexually active years no offense i mean whatever presumably they've settled down in their 80s or whatever when you do this and you will then get a very different picture especially of bisexuality if what you're trying to measure is the rate of of bisexuality but um the idea that during high school you figure out if you're gay or straight and then you stick with the viewers your life it's understandable why people presume that's something you can easily ascertain through through a poll um human sexuality does not work that way now i say this um i have the toxic masculinity privilege let's say this sitting here i i'm a completely heterosexual person with absolutely no ambiguity and i never had any ambiguity and so you know i'm not saying nobody knows in their teenage years and obviously i knew people who figured they were gay during their teenage years too so you know whether you figure out that you're gay or straight some people do but significant numbers of people do not you know oh great question why are you against downhill skiing so the full the question in full reads quote why are you against downhill skiing you've mentioned it a few times do you dislike gravity in general so do you give me lucas following up with my comment about collecting uh soccer stickers so in europe these football stickers equivalent to baseball cards quote typically the soccer sticker hype comes around with every world cup that's right but there's always another i mean because there's money made in this so there's the world cup and then there's the this cup and the that cup i mean you know there's always another cup you're right the world cup is maybe the most famous but there's the euro cup and that there's always another cup so they could sell you more more stickers anyway so he says typically the soccer sticker hype comes around with every world cup and women usually accept it because you can't escape it every year uh but because of the adults the stickers are too expensive for kids to collect now so the children have been priced out of the market because there's so many middle-aged men who want to buy up and collect the stickers so i know you say you say that women accept it i don't know if women do accept this okay i don't think women accept any of this stuff i don't think women accept their husbands collecting video games or collecting uh figurines or uh uh arcade machines i don't think they do i don't think women really accept their husbands um buying and modifying old cars and all this crap i don't think i don't think women that do accept men watching sports all the time and things i think the vast majority of women judge their husbands and boyfriends with their arms folded you know i think that a lot of women look down their nose with contempt at their husbands and boyfriends and this may justify a lot of different behavior on the the wife's side right it can lead to different kinds of revenge within a relationship okay so where was i before i digress [Laughter] talking about nostalgia and the the various frankly dangerous and harmful ways in which people try to recapture their youth and then i started talking about the sexual aspect of this in which people are you know so middle-aged people or old and elderly people are pursuing the company of and pursuing sexual relationships with younger people not because they want to settle down and have kids with them or frankly you we can talk about that probably not because they want to uh really have a relationship with them like okay like put it this way a lot of 50 year old men are not really interested in hearing an 18 year old's perspective on politics like men who are pursuing dramatically younger women they're probably not interested apart from the question of having kids together they're probably not really interested in an intellectual relationship or you know hearing that woman's perspective on the world so and so forth and again all this is true of gay couples also there are 50 year old gay men who are having sex with 18 year old gay men it's kind of a big deal it's certainly age gap relationships within uh gay men it's a big deal now it was a big deal in ancient athens too this is a controversy that isn't isn't about to go away um but you know there's probably no openness there intellectually politically ethically to seeing the world from that perspective or hearing that person's perspective uh on the world and what i'm suggesting is that actually this has something in common with the same yearning that's present in trying to buy old video games again trying to reconnect with uh one's youth in that sense that part of what people yearn for especially people trapped in repetitive jobs people who've made terrible compromises partly just for economic reasons in their life people who have in this sense settle down and become conformists is that they want to get back in touch with the creativity and non-conformism of their youth the malleable person who was full of possibility and potential they used to be as a child as a teenager or or what have you and that one way to reach out and touch this is to buy yourself a new famicom buy itself a video game console yes this this brings back it evokes um that flexibility and spontaneity and sense of potential and sense that i can be anyone i could do anything i can become a fireman i can become a soldier i could do something else in my life i can be a better person i can still learn i can still change but yeah i do think there are also older people who seek out sexually the company of younger people because they want to evoke those same feelings and stuff that they want to have that sense of potential again that sense of optimism again um that sense that they personally can change they can they can learn and they've lost that in their lives so i'm saying there's something kind of dark and tragic there um so you know i am as always saying sex is not just sex i'm also saying that nostalgia is not just nostalgia um the title of this video is that nostalgia is an attempt to vindicate the stupidity of your childhood with the stupidity of adulthood and i think maybe that's the necessary next step in the analysis i've already presented if you're unhappy with the compromises you've made if you're unhappy with the life of conformism the repetition and someone that you've bought into as an adult probably the most comforting thought you can think probably the most comforting belief you can convince yourself of is that if you could do it all over again you would make the same choices today you see you would vindicate the stupidity of your youth with the stupidity of your adulthood so you know even with something as simple as video games and again we can talk about sexuality we can talk about formal education career choices and these kinds of things too but even with something as simple as video games it's one thing for me to look back on hours spent playing video games and think what a terrible waste what a loss for my productivity for my imagination for the person i could be or or become and to just mourn that as you know very simply i made the wrong choice and i may also regret that i had no better alternative or something it might not be as simple as saying you know i made the wrong wrong choice i should have made a different choice it may also be regretting that my parents didn't provide me with a better choice or whatever you know this was this was the best i could do given my ignorance to my situation at the time and so on uh but you know it's one thing to just look back at that without right regret and it's quite another thing to look back as i think the majority of people do and say no that was the greatest happiness their youth if they could do it all over again they'd make the same choice if they could go back in time knowing all the things they know now they would still uh get a d minus in english lit because they stayed up all night playing that video game let's say civilization you remember the civilization games there's a game that keeps you up all night you know i would still fail that test i would still neglect my education in some cases also it's the friends you didn't have it's the activities you didn't do you know that you you really didn't make any friends because you just stayed at home and played video games that you would still make those same choices again um again this is a kind of nostalgia in the sense i'm talking about it in this way that looking back in your youth that you made you made the right choices um that again from the perspective of your adult stupidity from what you know now in terms of your current level of ignorance or awareness that going back to the ignorance of your youth that you you decide you rationalize you insist now that you would or should make the same choices again now this can be extended to human sexuality and other things and it starts to get really scary does anyone here regret the person they lost their virginity with you may regret sleeping with the person you lost your virginity with because they were older than you like you may have been someone who had in your 20s lost your virginity with someone in their 50s you might have been in one of those situations had a youtube video about that not too long ago actually anyway that that kind of uh scenario uh you could be someone who lost your virginity with someone the same age as yourself you were 16 and they were 16 what have you but you nevertheless now looking back have a lot of regret um now you can have regret for all kinds of reasons you can have regret because you look back and you say this person was a bad influence on you you have a register you look back and say this person was stupid and lazy and wouldn't your whole life be better if you instead at that age you'd been in a relationship with someone who was sober and hard-working and had some sense of clarity of purpose and ambition someone who had a positive impact on you and maybe your education and your intellectual development so on and so forth of course it can also be regret it because now you know sexually you know what is your type you know what you're attracted to and what you're interested in again remember the opposite sex remember the same sex and you now look back and say oh looking back i was ignorant then i didn't know what i was doing and you may feel that this person took advantage of you you may not you may feel like you were just bumbling around you were incompetent like you don't blame the other person you don't feel that you were seduced you don't feel you were taken advantage of but you still have regret all right well many people not all many people in the same way that i've just described looking back and justifying the stupidity of your childhood with the stupidity of adulthood looking back and saying no you know the happiest i could have possibly been was owning and playing these video games and isn't it appealing to now buy the same video games now as an adult you can collect the same video games you can vindicate the stupidity of your youth by appreciating these things as an adult again right that's what's built into that when you buy and own these things again as a middle-aged man you are declaring and you're demonstrating to yourself that yes there really was something great about super mario 64 and you are vindicating the fact that you used to run home after school and not care about your homework and not care about eating dinner and not care about talking to your parents and you didn't attend your best friend's birthday party you didn't go to johnny's birthday party because you just wanted to stay home and play mario 64. you know it's one video game or another you go a lot of you know what i'm talking about oh yeah that's right there was a birthday party i didn't go to i didn't go to my grandfather's funeral because i just wanted to stay at home and play that video game a lot of time there was some game even it was short term it was just the first few months you won't buy your 64 or something for a lot of people like shift from one addiction to another you had some intense period where you didn't care about your friends you didn't know what your family you literally didn't care about the food you ate you just wanted to sit the carpet and play this video game well you know what a lot of people sexual infatuation is even more powerful than that it's even more overwhelming and indeed when you look back now you might realize you were sexually infatuated with someone who knowing yourself as you do now having the self knowledge you know they're not even attractive to you you know when the sex was terrible the sex was lousy and then again you get into the intellectual components you get the ethical components intellectually this relationship was bad for you morally this relationship was bad for you right so isn't there a powerful form of nostalgia isn't there a powerful form of self-justification isn't there a kind of vindication of the stupidity of your youth by proving to yourself that this is still what you appreciate this is still what you want this is still what makes you happy now as a better informed adult this is the tragic loop i see a huge percentage of people trapped in i'm going to answer your questions again if you guys want to make a question or comment or reply that should apply to now is a good time if you want to hit the thumbs up button that was a good time we've had over 40 people in here but none of you want to hit the thumbs up button only 16 thumbs up if you do thumbs up it'll help people find the video later i can help people find it and join the conversation right now you know in terms of how how uh youtube works um you know doubt and intelligence are two different things however don't produces intelligence right living with doubt self-doubt but you know doubting what your teachers told you doubting what your parents told you doting political authorities in your own society doubt and investigation is what makes you wise is what makes it was over time it produces intelligence most people who are intelligence are doubting personalities you know most people who are highly intelligent people who are brilliant or what have you and it's a great mistake to think that confidence produces intelligence or that self-confidence and intelligence are the same thing on a particular topic i may seem very self-confident you've talked to me about buddhism i'm very self-confident talking about first nations politics or something i seem very stupid it's because i already did the work talk to me about sexuality and prostitution in thailand something i've researched and published papers on and stuff by the way it's not not my own interest i've never slept with a prostitute but you know like okay this is something i know about because i've done the research and it's very easy to think oh confidence is what's associated with intelligence or self-confidence is what produces and i'm saying to you no it's really letting yourself doubt letting yourself doubt what you think you know letting yourself doubt the wisdom of the decisions you already have made and i understand how hard it is for people to live with that kind of regret when doubt leads to regret knowing what i know now i shouldn't have been playing that video game at all or i shouldn't have fallen in love with that person or i shouldn't have had these kind of sexual lives of the people who could be productive intellectuals in our study of the people who could be intellectual dissidents of the people who could be or who actually are writers artists musicians journalists i think a huge percentage of them live their lives in terms of this nostalgic loop of self-justification self-indication and yes the nostalgia may be as simple as buying uh video game console okay for a lot of guys it's going to a bar and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and flirting with younger women even if they never get laid once it's going to a music venue and smoking cigarettes and drinking beer and behaving again as if they were a high school student the way they used to go to a live music venue and hang around when they were that age there is a an element of nostalgia here even if you know they're not going back to listen to the same band like it's not that they're going back to see the backstreet boys again it's not some specific band they listen to as a teenager right that they're playing the same role they're acting out the same script they're insisting when they were a teenager this is what made them happy this is what still makes them happy now when you were a teenager playing this video game made you happy and you try to vindicate it you try to appreciate it now from an adult perspective which is probably impossible from an adult perspective mario 64 is the stupidest [ __ ] thing you can do with your time any of these video games are right and from an adult perspective hanging around at a bar hanging around in a live music or a life concert video it's the stupidest thing you can do the job going to coachella going to a live music festival and look as i remember when you're really a teenager right going to an event of that kind is accompanied by fear by danger i was a i was a big dude already i you know i was i was large compared to other teenagers just hide and wait you know i'm not a skinny tall guy i'm not i wasn't like one of those tall guys who's spindly or looks weak i was just generally uh tall and not not uh weak looking you know what i mean so for me the danger was less than it was for people i could talk about the weapons i carried in those days too i went prepared i really was i was prepared to defend myself going to those things uh but yeah oh i mean i was gonna say nobody ever [ __ ] with me or nobody ever stepped to me i guess i mean i the only i can remember a situation where someone tried to start a fight with a friend of mine at a at an event like at a social music event like this and then i stood up you know and said look if you're kicking his ass you're kicking my ass i can't remember one person stepping to me directly but i was prepared anyway i was just going to say you know this we're talking about being like 15 16 here guys like i was you know i was young and ignorant and stupid right well you say uh for a lot of people maybe maybe for you you're a teenager maybe it's not going to a bar or nightclub or live music video maybe it's going to a strip club right okay my point is like let's say let's say you were a stereotypical presbyterian presbyterian-american you're an american given a christian upbringing the first time you go to a strip club there's all this fear there's fear of sin there's fear of divine punishment divine retribution there's fear of what your grandmother would think of you what if someone finds out there's also like direct fear of violence fear of drugs fear of crime like this fear of this being a kind of den of sin den of iniquity you're going to into a strip club right you know my point is whether it's going to a punk rock show a rap show oh god really sorry what is more menacing going to a live rap music event or going to a strip club you know sorry it can be really awful going to live rap events it's horrible nobody dances right nobody nobody enjoys themselves you go to [ __ ] rapping and all the dudes are trying to act tough they're trying to act like they're about to have a phys if everyone acts like you're not enjoying yourself listening to the rap music this is a typical look i'm obviously in my day maybe today everyone's smiling and bouncing up and down in a rap club i don't know but let me tell you back in my day everyone was trying to have their hat as low as possible on their head and you know grimace and and frown for the whole time you're at this rap everyone act like you're on the edge of having a fistfight it was just ridiculous anyway my point is yeah when you did that as a teenager it was interesting because it was terrifying you were weak and ignorant and stupid right and i mentioned this example before but i can remember the first time i played the bonus level on sonic the hedgehog 2. it has the simulated three-dimensional effect sonic the hedgehog 2 for sega genesis i was already old enough that i realized this is like the last time i'm gonna feel this way and it was we're just for a few minutes you're just enraptured by what you see on the screen it's just overwhelming to you it's just so unexpected and mind-boggling to see these blinking lights on the screen it's a totally child-like element and i was aware i was playing sonic 2. we could figure out how old that was probably 1990 1991 sonic 2 or something like that maybe 1990. but anyway sorry sonic 1 is 89 so sonic 2 is i think 1990. i think that was what it was google it tell me that i'm wrong but you know i remember you know feeling overwhelmed by that but being old enough and cynical enough to realize like this isn't going to go on in my life this is a childlike reaction to a spectacle they're just seeing something on screen and feeling so overwhelmed by it i can't ever have that again already when i was 13 years old or 14 years old you couldn't have that anymore you're not stupid enough right well guess what the things that made it compelling and terrifying and sexy to go to a live music event when you were a teenager you know look let's be real not my experience but the things that made it terrifying and exciting to cheat on your boyfriend that made it terrifying and exciting or to cheat on your girlfriend cheat on your husband or wife when you were young and stupid and ignorant that's also not going to be exciting or addressed anymore you're too smart for that you've got you can't do it anymore you can't be overwhelmed that way and i just say sorry it's actually a good it's a good comparison i hadn't thought this before but if i think about that feeling the first time i saw the bonus level on sonic the hedgehog 2. just wow i just can't believe what i'm looking at here again it's blinking lights it's it's a visual illusion really it's like looking at a puzzle but it's moving and it's glowing in front of you you know it's all it's all it is okay you know what if i think back long enough and i guess i can remember meeting a beautiful woman and having that same just like wow you know like wow this chick is so gorgeous but i mean i was never stupid enough to really objectify them i'd always because i remember being an early teenager this way i come around i'm thinking of a particular uh i mean she was saying jabba she was 18 and i was 18 or whatever you know uh you meet an amazingly gorgeous woman but right away as soon as you start talking to them because i did i talked to the i didn't i didn't just look at them from afar or something like you realize the sorrow and agony and ambition and uncertainty that they live with like you realize the tragedy and the struggle that is their life and like the question isn't is this person good looking or like do i want to look at them is this like a poster or a painting yeah like a painting you just look at a beautiful painting right it's like this is this person's sorrow this is their struggle do i want to be a part of it like that's how i feel when i'm talking to beautiful women and 99.9 percent of the time the answer is is no i remember just remember one particular girl i talked to this this wasn't one of my girlfriends one of the girls i slept but this isn't someone even kissed but remember i met her she was just unbelievably beautiful and it was just surprising to me at that time see i was more naive than i was now that she was really attracted to me i just wasn't expecting it you know you're a kid you don't understand how these things work like you don't realize how attractive someone else is has nothing to do with how attractive they find you an ugly person can be attracted to you or beautiful like it's just there's no cause of it you know you were a kid and you still think there are like levels to this game or something like oh you think someone that beautiful would never be attracted to me so this this girl and again this is not one of my ex-girlfriends isn't someone i ever kissed or did you said this one conversation and she was absolutely gorgeous and i started talking to her and you know my style was i would just talk to a woman the same way i talked to a man i just just talked to her like a like a friend i wasn't trying to seduce her or something and you know her family were new immigrants to canada her parents didn't really speak english you know like right away you start here with me she's she's beautiful this is her life story this is what she's worried about um i think she'd already finished high school it's like i was still in high school you know uh you know what job she's gonna go into and what she's you know obviously toronto rent was very high now it's impossibly high so at that time when we were finishing high school people were worried about renting their first apartment today that's just impossible in toronto i don't think anyone even i don't think anyone rents an apartment the day they finish high school in toronto anymore i think that's something in the past you know unless you're unless you're very wealthy you know but you know like by the way i'm not blaming her or something this is this is natural this is real life you talk to someone who's just finished high school this is their worry this is their sorrow this is the raggedy and i said but like this is a whole human being and you're meeting them at one moment in their life like i'm not stupid enough to sexually objectify someone or be fascinated by them the way as i say as children were certainly fascinated by by video games and certainly also by the way as as a child as a teenager you can be fascinated by a poster of a beautiful woman or beautiful man you can be fascinated by watching a tv show with a beautiful woman of a movie when then it's much easier to dehumanize them right an idol on the stage right that's not someone who has to have this kind of complexity in the sense of their struggle and are you getting involved with their sorrow and their suffering and what have you in life you know so yeah um in trying to vindicate the stupidity of your own youth right you are in a sense making yourself more stupid right now you're making yourself more stupid in trying to appreciate and enjoy childish things in a childish way and in trying to appreciate and enjoy teenage things in a teenage way or you know if we even go a little bit later 21 year old things in a in a 21 year old way instead of pardon me instead of letting yourself go through that doubt doubt and self-doubt examination and really admit to yourself if i knew then what i know now i wouldn't have made any of the same choices and you know the things that you thought were pleasant and enjoyable admitting to yourself that they're not pleasant or enjoyable at all you know that admitting to yourself that you were wrong about fundamentally what is good in life what is good about relationships with the opposite sex being frankly an easy example um but you know there is no way as a child or a teenager i could have known how to educate myself and how to compensate for what was bad and evil and wrong in my own school education so i haven't mentioned this to melissa before i had quite a nasty correspondence with someone on instagram i forget it was yesterday the day before yesterday i haven't been getting a lot of sleep lately maybe the day before yesterday so someone on instagram and this person isn't a friend of mine but you know i'm connected to people who are not really friends of mine someone on instagram posted a a public statement about how important it is that we as white people i'm being included as white here for the purposes of this conversation whether or not i count as a white person as another investigation that we as white people take the time to read about first nations history american indian history yeah so whatever mohawk cree ojibwe inuits this is what you're this is what we're talking about right now i had absolutely no bad intentions but i took a screenshot of this statement and wrote in saying hey look you know like i appreciate you have these good intentions and just said you know i studied this stuff myself and i recommended some of the books we have on the shelf right now i said look if you're going to follow through with it if you're going to do this reading you know actually one of the things i said well i think it's really important that you don't read books that are too boring or too depressing about this because you'll you'll get discouraged like you know if you read books some of these books they're really boring some of them are really depressing and the actual statement it suggested uh reading a certain government report on uh basically human rights and history of our indigenous people which i know it's very boring and very dishonest it's bad it's bad factory it's also you know it'll be it'll be boring as well as misinforming you you know um so that was all i was running in to say and you can imagine you know all people are on the internet people make this kind of statement they have absolutely no intention of reading even a single book they just want to be applauded by other people on instagram or other people on facebook oh yeah good for you like good sentiment or whatever so actually this person sent me a bunch of nasty messages back and i uh i i did actually reply i took the time said look i want one of the things i said is look this right back to my phrasing before you know i said look i was born and raised in canada my girlfriend was born and raised in detroit so if you don't know that's almost canada that's right in the border between uh canada united states i said look i think all of us every single one of us if you have a heart and a brain you are [ __ ] up by the history of slavery by the history of genocide and by a dim awareness that whatever you were taught about this in high school was a lie like you know and a lot of them maybe kind of namby pamby well intentionalized like depending what generation you are where you grew up what school you went to the lies they may not be hideous obvious lies like you know holocaust denial and this kind of thing right they may be kind of convenient comfortable reassuring lies you know they may be optimistic multicultural um anti-racist lies but like you have grown up with an awareness of your own ignorance with an awareness of this enormous shadow cast over your life and then there's this question of what do we do right now so i was saying this complete stranger on instagram look the reason i'm writing you is look i like i know i messed up with this i know my girlfriend is messed up with this i think most of us are i would i saw you make this statement we should all be better read and less we should all take the time to get well informal history i would say oh great you know if you want to do that that's something i did with several years of my life i put years of my life into getting better informed about that obviously there's more i could learn i'm not the world's greatest expert but compared to most other white people compared to 98.5 percent white people let's be honest compared to 99.9 percent white people i'm a lot better informed on this this the history the politics of the languages you know all this all this other stuff so if you want to do that great here are some here are some books um okay isn't it so much easier to reassure yourself that you made the right choice that you did the best you could you know isn't it hard to live with that doubt whether or not you're going to do something about it right whether or not you're going to act on it positively right isn't it you know isn't it hard to live with that gnawing doubt one there's something here i'm ignorant of right two i know i was lied to and like how i cope with that because we all had to write essays about it i know people went to summer camp about this stuff like they went to like genocide summer camp in effect you know i mean you went to museums you went on a maybe did you ever do this melissa were they take you on a tour of an historic fort like a place where the battles were fought between white people and indians white people want indians well there's white people but there's a lot of that you know the same way so in america it's it's even more common to go to a civil war recreation of a fight yeah or something like this but you know an actual uh anyway just one of the look a battlefield say or uh you know where there used to be a fortification and those the genocidal battles or thought where that history was decided you know like it's really hard to live with the awareness i could have gone to the library i could have done my own reading i could have challenged the teacher i could have challenged the textbook the text was written and i didn't i played sonic the hedgehog i played mario 64. and to some extent i bought into the lie and i participated and to some extent i still am like i'm still caught up in it and i still don't know what to do in dealing with that that history of of genocide so i'm just i'm just laying out here the alternative to nostalgia is to live with this terrible self-doubt this doubt directed towards the authority figures in your life your parents your teachers your priests your rabbis your university professors your textbooks the authors of the textbook this terrible doubt and then to actually go out and challenge that and challenge your own ignorance and to live with with real depth of regret in terms of the choices you made as a child as a teenager maybe even also in in university you want you want to come up here yeah yeah i could yeah yeah i could definitely respond to some of the topics that you've discussed so far i'm not sure how long you've been recording now one hour yeah so something that i was thinking of in response to living with self-doubt so thumbs up for melissa coming on camera by the way yeah thanks so early on in this discussion i'm pretty sure it's this discussion we've been talking beforehand this morning so some things i'm not sure that we discussed in person or discussed in your video yes so you were talking about living with instability in your life whereas you know contrasting this with what a lot of people's experiences in america where they live wake up and go to the same job every day right and then in a sense they have a rebellious attitude towards this they want to repel they want to right break out of what they feel is which and they may rebel by doing something as unimaginative as cheating on their wife and they may rebel by buying classic video games so just to be clear they may rebel by joining a communist revolutionary group or becoming an anarchist but that's a pretty small pretty small percentage of people go and they may rebel by hanging out at bars and listening to punk rock music so yes we're just saying we're using rebellion in this broadest sense rebelling against the monotheists going in yes so i was reminded of a conversation that i had with my father a few years ago now where i was discussing basically the questioning that i had about my career at the time and what i was going to do in the future where we would live you know basically in the whole five years that we've been together we've gone through a series of uh hopes and dreams that have fallen apart and you know plans for moving somewhere that have fallen apart or you know that we've not necessarily fallen apart but we've picked them apart you know we've we've really gone through all of the worrying beforehand that's something that you've always said you know like think about all the worst case scenarios beforehand uh before you make a decision before you decide on something and even still you know you might encounter things that you didn't expect of course um and his response was like you know if you are so worrying and doubting all the time how are you ever going to make progress and he said that i'm frozen that i can't make a decision because no it's exactly through worrying and donating but i'm going to make progress that's the road to progress you know put things into action um and see how see how things happen so yeah because you know it's one of the few conversations i've i've had that where somebody's actually right you know questioning me and putting me on game that way with this kind of attitude that i've picked up where you know there's there's the first stage where uh you know when you're first learning to be more doubting of what you've done in the past and reflecting on it and actually being honest with yourself like oh i do regret this or i do regret that i wish i wouldn't have done this or wouldn't have done that you know i was i was remembering the things that you said about going to shows as a teenager you know just right the fear and definitely i remember that going to a few shows in my teenage years where you know you're living with in this this yeah gripped by the fear of uh being and for one of my experiences was a metal show yeah you know um it's just i i had one female friend i remember she told me about being groped at shows too you know she's saying men grabbing her bomb and stuff yeah well this this is like just seeing people actually like hitting each other seeing the crowd having like injuries and bleeding on their face and stuff yep right you know like that and thinking that's cool yeah no i i was just cool man wow but there were people who were there not not despite the danger but because of it because they wanna they wanna be the guy who has blood coming from his face after about yeah that's right yeah just the screaming to the kind of like yes yes uh animalistics noises going on yeah um you know just thinking i wouldn't want to do that at all and i can't imagine being 29 years old and wanting to relive that and go through that again and at a certain point this is not interesting anymore that's exactly when people do it too i think women at 29 are going to coachella more like it's like oh i'm going to turn 30. like how many 29 women 29 year old women are going to music festivals and doing these like they're doubling down while they're still in their 20s to try to do as much teenage crap as possible yeah i just said and i think there are 29 women who are trying to sleep around with as many men as possible i think some of those women have gotten in touch with me you know who you i for sure i for sure think i think there are women who are 29 and they're trying to sleep with as many handsome youtubers as possible or something but and they imagine they're going to settle down and get married and have a kid you know soon soon thereafter or something yeah like wow but no there's a lot i think just say 29 especially for women but ferment for men too i think maybe there's even more of this this kind of toxic nostalgia shall we say yeah yeah anyway yeah i've been reflecting on it a bit more recently too and and when i was listening to you just how this has been maybe some of the unknown the fear of the unknown or um just the haven't haven't having gone through like the emotional uh intelligence progress that i have like just becoming a i don't know able to cope with life you know these these kind of things that are necessary as you mature as you get older um just just being able to handle yourself and being able to handle what life throws at you um yeah at a certain point like i've become really i don't know if cynical is too has too many negative connotations but yes i i know what you're saying where i couldn't possibly enjoy going to a metal show and i couldn't find it interesting because uh you know i've reached the point where that's not interesting to me and i'm reminded of this um video that i saw recently from a youtuber who was talking about her experience of now that she's had a baby she's really excited to go to places that beforehand before they had a baby she had just lost interest she's like i don't really want to go to uh this uh yeah this event because it's it's all like i've done it before you know like she lived her 20s that's she did a lot of drinking she did a lot of she went to a lot of just shows and uh events and you know she lived a pretty pretty wild lifestyle and uh perhaps dissolute is a better one yes yeah absolutely but now that she's uh at a baby she's thinking oh you know i can't wait to go to this just uh the green greenhouse or something that's in her in her town right you know like where you can show you show the it's just more exciting now that you have a child to show the world and you know this is what is making it interesting rather than anything that's intellectually you know interesting to her it's it's really the experience of introducing this to another human being yeah that that's making the experience enjoyable um [Music] yeah just just yeah reflecting on on that too like um i think some people just want to feel something again they want to feel that uncertainty that fear and and put themselves back in the mindset of before they became cynical before they've been through heartbreak been through you know devastation in their lives and come back through it yeah well right and and so let me ask this um you guys don't know this about me this isn't anything particularly profound but you know very often when i'm watching the news with melissa there's some humanitarian disaster in the world it could be war it could be an earthquake it could be whatever and you know i start saying to her like oh we should go like we should think about going and living there for a number of years and you know sometimes it's just an opportunity for melissa and i to kind of learn more about the place i mean recently what we we watched a documentary with the history of um uh sorry the the 51st state in america what's it called it's um are we talking about hawaii no no no that's the 50th day oh puerto rico puerto rico yeah yeah puerto rico which has this uh that i call it favorite city because it's it's unofficially it's not quite but you know there was a news item of puerto rico but we we talked about like oh you know we could move to puerto rico and you know and we talked about the history and politics and we watched a youtube video about it we read some stuff just out of a wikipedia article in that case but you know uh sometimes also melissa is actually quite worried i remember what i started reading and telling you about the history of nepal i was saying look we could we could live in nepal we could go live there for 10 years something permanently yeah you're like [ __ ] you're actually going to do it aren't you because she knows you know i'm capable of the same way i moved to cambodia at one point in my life i actually can up stakes and go start new life in nepal or start new life and i mean puerto rico is easier than nepal and starts you know start studying the language and the politics and it can be rewarding for me you know so my point is not to be a tourist my point is to actually be involved in the politics and the history as unfolds you know to really be intellectually engaged ethically committed you know trying to make the world a better place really living living a meaningful life in these places i'm not i'm not talking about tourism i'm not even talking about visiting i'm not you know and obviously the fact that they're disasters means there's a potential to humanitarian work of some kind to make some kind of altruistic uh difference that way you know i just say when you're talking about things being exciting terrifying challenging for you once you're an adult once you're minimized right that would be the kind of challenge oh absolutely yeah no but but my point is nobody does that in our culture incredibly few people even even think in those terms like that's the point is it's it's middle-aged men want to cheat on their wives or want to hang around in a bar or want to go to a nightclub you have the quote unquote excitement of their youth again and indeed as i've already explained i see the same impulse they want to buy a video game system or these these other things and probably this extends to some extent to buying a sports car or something too might might not be a perfect example um why it is you know middle-aged men want to buy a sportswear to have quote-unquote excitement what is exciting about a sports car but like what would really be exciting in this way what would really create that sense of doubt and fear would be to move to africa you know and to really do it all the way to really learn their language and learn their politics and take their history and their politics and make it your history and your politics like not not to just remain an expat with a shallow level of engagement but to really commit to um and really you sorry let's just say it's uganda i'm just picking up an example we could pick any country in africa but we can't say a whole continent you know but where you you pick a particular town in uganda and you really care about the future of that of that town you care about the future of that country you care about the future that that talent so on and so forth and you and you commit to it um you know and again obviously it doesn't have to be africa um it could be cambodia we could use any any number of examples here you know i just point out those kinds of things things that are really challenging in a really meaningful way things that challenge your sense of who you are and force you to change and adapt that's you know that's a totally different story but that what percentage of people even think that through you know yeah sorry yeah we'll just say i mean just going back to that idea about stability and instability yeah i think yes although there is an element where people want to rebel against the stability the conformity uh you know this this man was talking about they want to rebel but not too much yeah right they don't want to go all the way with it uh that is a bit sad to me to reflect on because um right from my position right now i i do i am more of that same camp where i'm thinking okay you know this is an opportunity for me to go somewhere and do something and but you could make a difference even you considering joining the army was like that yes you know but like that's really a change that's really gonna happen it's not it's not a vacation you know this is a life-altering change and you've got to worry about it and think it through yes right but i mean that and but i can imagine someone also joining the army for kind of rebellious reasons like that oh i want to change my life you know sign up for them well you're still the same [ __ ] now you got a uniform yes you're still the same person you bring all your problems with you but i would say too and you know i've known about this kind of situation but it's also in a lot of literature and what have you but the man who cheats on his wife with a younger woman because he wants to rebel against the status quo just a little bit but then it ends up ruining his marriage causing a divorce and let's say the younger woman gets pregnant and now he's got to get married to her and raise that kid well all he wanted was to supplement the life he already had like he only wanted a distraction or a dalliance right he wanted to keep the same wife and kids he already had and he wanted to have this as a minor form of entertainment on the side or something or as indeed nostalgia in the sense we're talking about this video if you just joined us i explained what i mean about nostalgia in this context when i have this nest out to relive his youth by cheating on his wife with a younger woman he didn't really want to rebel all the way he didn't want to actually divorce his wife change his whole life start again with it with a new wife or girlfriend but that's what it led to yeah because you don't want it to actually be in that position where you are remaking yourself you are starting from scratch again right which you're remembering as this wonderful optimistic time period where you had so much so many different opportunities so many different ways that you could go so many different paths you could walk down but when you actually are forced with that reality of of starting from scratch right you know for this man yeah but you know incredibly few people let's say you have a repetitive job that's well paying enough let's say you're a bank teller i've only ever known one person who was a bank teller i didn't know where that well we had a couple conversations you know a job we were paid well but it's exactly the same thing every day right you know you you still could do anything with your life if you have the stability and income of being a bank teller you could be studying to become a medical doctor you could become a surgeon you could be studying and preparing anything is possible like really if you are a middle-aged bank teller you have more options and more opportunities than you had as a teenager in high school yeah any job you want to be an architect well being a bank teller first is a great basis to burden you want to be a stand-up comedian you want to be a musician you want to be a youtuber well you've got this steady boring job as a bank teller it's the same everyday you could be doing that right but most of these people they only want to rebel a little bit so they're a bank teller and they may really feel consumed by that they feel consumed partly with the awareness that they could have been an architect or they could have been a comedian that could have been a musician or something there's something they wanted to do where they could have been a police officer right like it could be something as simple as that but they don't they don't actually want to quit their job and do it they don't want to take the risk so what are they going to do they're going to cheat on their husband or they're going to cheat on their wife they're going to go sleep with a 18 year old or 22 year old they're going to go have an affair they're going to do something that's rebellious but it's only a little bit rebellious and there's this nostalgic reliving of that feeling of potential of youth that you could be someone else you could learn you become something else right but they don't actually they don't actually want to rebel but look i just want to poke this in it may seem different but tragically it's it's related to the same drugs drugs can be like that for so many people the pattern i described of the man who only wants to rebel against his wife and his the and the monotony of his job a little bit by cheating a little bit well guess what now you're cheating all the way guess what it went further than you thought it would the consequences were not what you expect them to be you know there are middle-aged people who start using cocaine and they think it's only going to be something they do once or twice a month they think it's only going to be you know and for them it may be we're living there getting back to their teenage years or what they did in university they're going to go to a certain kind of music event and do cocaine or again it could be we could put in any drug here but you know they're going to go and just use this drug a little bit and have this little bit of rebellion and this little bit of nostalgia and this little bit of dissimulated youthfulness in their life right a second childhood a renewed second set of teenage years oh well guess what you thought you were only going to rebel a little bit and now you're rebelling all the way now you've lost your job now your wife has left you like you know because you're using cocaine or whatever it is now you're hanging out with pimps and prostitutes and drug dealers now everything has changed in both qualitative and quantitative ways that you didn't you didn't yeah and ultimately you have to question like have they not gone through the process of just thinking am i too old for this you know at what point you know when i think about that in relation to cheating on wives and husbands you know at a certain point i just are you ever too old to really feel that infatuation when you talk you know you said you can think back to when you were young right you know you saw a beautiful woman you just it's overwhelming wow very beautiful person yeah um but then you know even at that stage when you talk to them you know you start to realize who they are with all their sorrows with all the struggles that they've been through and do i want that in my life do i do i want to take on their sorrows their struggles yeah um at a certain point and that is what you have to realize without any uh relationship with with a romantic partner that that's what you're that's the responsibility that you're taking on and i i just i appreciate and live with this same kind of doubt about this aspect of it that yeah and if you're if you're sober and honest that doubt will be productive it'll lead to you living a different life and a better life i mean if you're not sober and you're not honest with yourself you're not honest with us it won't you can live a lie or whatever you know so i want to respond to some of the the uh questions the audience okay you know what i say yeah i think you can stay okay so you know um when i say stay it's as opposed to sitting in a different chair by the way guys so i just want to say so here's a guy iowa shout out to iowa says quote cocaine and mister says you better be a higher higher earner so iowa i don't know how old you are i'm not saying this insult but like you could be 18 you could be 68 you know you just you just don't know but you don't know poor people do all this stuff too like you may think like maybe your experience life or maybe you're young and you're inexperienced bro rice farmers in cambodia do all this [ __ ] like seriously cattle herders in africa people in third world countries in third world conditions urban poor people in the ghetto everything we've discussed here bro poor people do it too rich people are more often discussed in the newspapers rich people are more often depicted in movies doing this just for no reason like hollywood movies are they tend to focus on people with with lavish lifestyles rather than people but no every single thing we've talked about in this video including cocaine and cheating on your wife bro you know poor people do it too and i would just say likewise there's a kind of distorting myopia brought into this by the hollywood and and even by youtube like by now decentralized social media you know if you think it's only beautiful people who do this ugly people do it too fat people do it too like it's it's not the case like if you're a woman and you marry a fat guy because you think he's not going to cheat on you think again like if you marry a fat guy you think well he's fat but he's hard-working and honest and sober like he won't ever become a druid fat people become drug addicts too and like you know fat people certainly we're talking about nostalgia in other ways fat people start amassing video game collections and you know all this stuff you know there is no this does nothing to do with how attractive you are how wealthy you are so on and so forth so i'm just going to respond to you this might seem like a um uh this might seem like a shallow comment but yeah so iowa the same guy says that he's watched some of tko sam's videos and and this guy says iowa says that he feels that like 50 of the white men living in tokyo or like this it's just that tico sam is the guy who's made a video so if you don't know tico samus don't worry about it it's just it's just an example um so look i do think nostalgia and the perpetuation of childishness has a special significance in the study of japan you know like even the university level like formal like japanology whatever you want to say you know japonology as opposed to sinology however you want to put it you know um it does and the perpetuation of teenage attitudes in your teenage years because professional childhood is one thing perpetual high school dumb is is another uh it really does so i'm going to give you a couple of really quick contrasts have you ever sat down in a classroom with a bunch of people white people i'm sorry it doesn't really matter if you're to quote michael jackson doesn't matter if you're black or white but i mean people who are born and raised in america or people who are born and raised in western europe regardless of the color of their skin but so if you sat down with americans and europeans see it now i have to include australians how am i going to make up this camera have you sat down in a classroom of americans and europeans who have devoted their life to the study of tibet tibetan as a language dependent politics and tibetan history they're so different from the people who study japan they are so different and you guys know i don't like tibetan buddhism i do not glorify tibetan buddhism i do not support tibetan nationalism i don't you know i'm not sympathetic to that cause okay no if you if you think this is too kind of high and verified an example talking about people who are like studying in university one thing it's not anyone can enroll in those classes like literally if any any university that has a department with professors of tibetology professors teaching tibetan tibetan anyone can go and enroll so it's not really illegal anyone who can afford it can go um white people who choose to become english teachers in tibet they're very much the same character but people who just prepare and they start studying tibetan as a language and they go to live and work in tibet as an english secular energy they are totally different from the people who choose to go into japanese as a language and move totally now this isn't the only contrast we could offer i could go through a whole bunch of countries for the world but i think tibet is a it's an instructive one right away right and by the way some of those people who go to tibet some of them do get married to a tibetan woman or a tibetan man like i've met those people too i've known some of those people uh you know some of them do like some of them their sex life is is part of it or whatever um you know the relationship of the foreign observer to japan it's kind of uniquely imbued with this toxic nostalgia now why i'm guys i'm here to be honest with you i think there are two factors that are extraordinary nobody grows up watching tibetan cartoons nobody when i was in the classroom with people learning japanese and when you're on youtube looking guys like tko sam you are very often looking at white people or black people or hispanic people western people european and american people who grew up watching japanese cartoons playing japanese video games reading japanese comic books that doesn't exist with tibet [ __ ] i'm not saying this to insult anyone do you know any white people who grew up reading african comic books watching african movies african cartoons playing african video games i've never met a single white person and i've met white people who grew up in africa literally i meant white people were born and raised in africa they didn't watch african tv they watched white people tv whatever i said you know they watched european and american tv growing up they grew up in africa watching the dukes of hazzard watching california movies made in los angeles california i mean this this kind of thing so this is extraordinary you're like anywhere else in the world you can compare it to if you're uh again nobody grew up watching cambodian cartoons right i you know at one point in my life i was studying cambodia's language i chose both in terms of humanitarian work and and research right okay so do you want to say that yeah i couldn't i'm not going to figure out i've even had to think about this with chinese cartoons just right in language study because i was looking for right and that may come in the future we're recording this near 2022. it is possible in the future people will grow up with chinese cartoons chinese video games chinese but but currently it's not currently there aren't any people my age who grew up with with chinese culture that way because of communism and other factors right not not compared to japanese yeah no i was watching a video from a youtuber who lives who lives in china and she was going to a coffee shop in beijing in beijing they have this there's there's a coffee shop that has a bunch of uh paraphernalia or uh toys from the 1950s basically it's old-school old-school toys and you know this is interesting to tourists because they just didn't have any although many people in america grow up playing with toys that are made in china uh they they don't have any uh actual like they aren't playing with toys that are played with in china you know like yes yeah so there's this disconnect between yes these cultures so yeah right no i'm sorry so just to flesh that out the point is you can live in america and own a barbie doll that says made in china and so i don't know that's still true when i was a kid it said it on her foot so if you turn it upside it said in tiny letters on barbie's foot made in china um i don't know if that's still true today or not you can play with a gi joe a soldier a toy soldier that's made in china however it's designed in the united states of america it is uh barbie is culturally american it's not chinese influence japanese influence is not like that people are playing with japanese toys even if the japanese toys are also made in china they may not be made in japan but it is it's a it's a japanese narrative it's a japanese story and this is a very powerful thing now a question i asked just in a written comment on the internet yesterday is how comfortable are you with saudi arabia entering that competition we all seem to have thoughtlessly just embraced japanese influence in raising our children our children are going to grow up with japanese fables and a lot of deep japanese cultural influence well guess what saudi arabia's got money and influence too they just bought up a japanese video game company the neo geo company it's called snk the company but they're famous video game consoles neo geo it's now owned by the saudis how comfortable you with your kids watching cartoons playing video games reading comic books that are controlled and by a saudi corporation or made to reflect saudi taste and this is i mean this is part of the reality of multiculturalism there will be there will start to be anime made in africa if there isn't already by the way there will start to be cultural products competing for the attention of children made in south america made in africa made in cambodia made in saudi arabia but for people who are alive today in 2022 there is a unique overweening powerful significance to japan that is not like anywhere else and i just mentioned for the sake of completeness there were black people in new york city especially who grew up with hong kong movies hong kong action movies in the 1980s 1970s yeah 1970s and 1980s both um that's true but at that time hong kong was very different from china it was very different politically and culturally and those action movies they were they were made with the hope of reaching a western audience in a certain way that's very different and you could you could probably talk about it and that's over now that culture is now dead but you can talk about i mean the famous rap group wu-tang wu-tang clan the reason why it's called wu-tang clan is the reason why they use their name and the names of many of their particular songs yeah they were influenced by hong kong action movies right but this is not really chinese culture at that time you really have to talk about that as hong kong culture and it seems like that's over and done with i think it's fair to say it's interesting contrast hong kong had more cultural influence in new york city in the 1970s than it has today like today it's less of today japan today today there are black kids growing up in new york who watch dragon ball z and play the video game and use the collectible cards like pokemon stuff like this you know like there's this huge influence in the childhood of black people in new york city again white people and hispanic people also it's just the examples of black people from japan but is there that influence anymore from hong kong no not at all in my opinion that's not just that's actually decreased in terms of communist china the answer is no or not yet you know communist china doesn't have anything comparable to pokemon uh in our lives and i've for a lot of children i've had a few people admitted to me a few like i feel embarrassed but pokemon's a huge part of some people's some people's lives so this is one element and now i'm not going to repeat everything i said in the first hour of this video but this brings with it the potential for toxic nostalgia to an unbelievable extent and what i see is people going on again and again um trying to vindicate the stupidity of their youth with the stupidity of adulthood but look here's another difference and you know some people are uncomfortable talking about this you know what the difference is between japan and tibet what percentage of the mouse clicks on pornhub are to watch japanese pornography and what percentage are to watch tibetan pornography like does tibetan pornography even exist does cambodian pornography even exist and look in the future it probably will like i i know like on the internet everything exists or something you can find if you search for it now you can find examples of tibetan women in pornography i'm not saying there's zero on the internet but this is a dominant influence in the lives of many americans growing up many western europeans remember japanese porn both anime porn like erotic anime erotic manga erotic movies of this kind but also just with just actresses on film real whatever real life pornography not animated this is a huge influence on young people growing up and the difference between women and men is that the men admit it if you think women don't watch pornography and aren't influenced by pornography they are there are white women who learn japanese and move to japan and for them the main the main pornography they watched growing up was japanese pornography i can remember talking about this with people this was in laos specifically i'd never i just as it happened i never talked about this anyone in thailand or cambodia but specifically in laos i remember talking about the fact that look you are growing up you know you're developing and all the pornography you watch is american like don't you think this has political and ethical and psychological occasions like your whole concept of beauty and this is laos specifically you are living in a country that was bombed and destroyed by the american army like the main thing in your history you're dealing with is this country was carpet bombed by america there are land mines everywhere still from the american war there were unexploded uh ordinance bomb fragments so the the big tragedy of your country is getting militarily destroyed by america and you all watch american porn like starting as teenagers or whatever we're starting with children all of you on your mobile phones have american porn and american standard of beauty american notions of romance and kissing and and sex and everything this is your this is your ideal you know and uh you know in we can ask the same thing about white people black people spending people in the western world who are growing up with japanese pornography japanese sexuality japanese ideas about sex and romance being this dominant influence in their lives when they're teenagers when they're young adults and in some cases a lot of people do start watching pornography as children and yeah eve but even the ideas of of beauty of what is a good looking woman or what is a good-looking man being really shaped by japan's number one export japanese pornography so guys when you sit down in a university classroom with people men and women have chosen to study japan these are two huge factors that involve this kind of toxic nostalgia right this is why they want to move to japan this is why they want to learn japanese this is a huge factor in their lives their development when you sit down with people who are studying tibet doesn't exist when you sit down with people who are studying cambodia uganda any country in africa right it does and maybe in the future it will maybe in the future like just 10 years from now hardcore pornography made in africa like there are lots of good-looking women and men in africa they're not running out of good-looking people but maybe like the filmmaking industry the point maybe that's going to become the number one download on pornhub but you can get the statistics right now for how many of the search terms and how many of the clicks are for japanese porn it's a huge dominant influence in the western world the dominant influence in china within asia too today like for my generation for people who are alive today talking about the last 10 years the last 20 years whatever japan has been in this status both in you know video games manga anime children's gym all the stuff cartoons but also uh hardcore pornography they have had a unique status in the world that has that has these kinds of really crazy knock-on influences for everyone's lives long term yeah it was yeah no i i guess that's part of why the concept of a weeaboo is insulting you know or it just inherently is kind of embarrassing to describe that way that there's some sexual element to your interest in japan so that there's a sexual element or right right no that there's a sexual element to it or that there's a childish element to it or or both yes right i mean because even the if you aren't interested in japanese porn if you are interested in japanese video games many of the japanese video games uh are erotic you know and a lot of the anime is erotic even if it's not yes oh yes pornographic it is you know that is right and look and just to be fair that would be true if we were if we were having this conversation in 1965 many detective movies made in america were erotic many detective comic books like it was it's about a detective solving a murder mystery but actually there's a lot of sexuality and sexy women and like you know so we're not being unfair the japanese but yes a lot a lot of the manga a lot of the anime even if it is not explicitly erotic in the same sense it has a lot of erotic content i i when i was learning japanese i was there was i tried to look at different cartoons where i could actually practice the language not a great method frankly but you know i remember one and it was aimed at children and the main character the male protagonist was a child it was a small child in school but they always had these sexy adult female characters standing around him and like even like literally so like the camera there's a cartoon it'd be on this guy he's like knee-high but there's a woman in a skin tight short skirt standing behind like all the time he's interacting with these sexy adult female characters there's there's a lot of erotic on and joking about sexuality and there would be there'd be adult male characters who'd be trying to seduce the female characters there was a lot of erotic messaging and a lot of information about romance and adult sexual built into a a japanese cartoon that was for children you know the reason i was watching i was literally sitting there trying to practice now she didn't last long in my life but you're doing language exercises but yes these things they can be laden with erotic messaging and moral messaging and ethical messaging yeah and we we currently don't get that from saudi arabia we don't get cartoons and children or video games we don't get no nobody grows up playing saudi video games we don't get that from uganda or anywhere in africa i don't know anyone who grew up with south american culture that way the extent to which it's even possible to grow up with that kind of cultural influence from germany or france or russia do you know anyone who grew up watching a lot of russian movies you know what i mean so yeah this has been up to this point uh a unique part of the the japanese phenomenon and then yeah what happens as you as you go on in life so in terms of this pattern of of um so yeah oliver says that's true of french best band designer uh and so on yeah but only within france that's all i'm saying so it's quite similar oliver what you say is quite true there are people who grew up in france like that and there are people who grew up in spain i know that the the french erotic comic books and so on they do get translated into spanish there's a little bit of cultural uh bleeding over the border there whatever a little bit but trust me nobody is growing up in new york city or california influenced by french erotic comic books nobody nobody's growing up in uh australia influenced by french erotic comic books whereas japanese is erotic cartoons comic books it's a huge influence in all those places that's all yeah but no but that is true within france french culture has that influence and within germany german culture has that influence you know no doubt but what basically we're talking about exporting to two other cultures yeah so look in terms of this this cycle of self-justification and of vindicating your stupidity from one period of your life with the stupidity of another you know then what i see i mean i see it in many of my fellow youtubers and so on is exactly this insistence that video games can still make you happy that the anime can still make you happy that the movie the comic book um and certain kinds of risk-taking sexual activity can still make you happy of wanting to cling to that wanting to vindicate the bad decisions you made in the past by basically making the same bad decisions again but with the delectation of an adult person or of a middle-aged person or of an older person you know um instead of with the fear and trepidation and ignorance of youth because as i said there was a time if you can remember back far enough there was a time when this was terrifying most men if they have if they're honest with you most men will be able to tell you a story about the fear and trembling they felt the first time they bought a pornographic magazine today the internet has changed that but just to walk up to the counter and take the magazine and walk up to the front what are they what are they going to say to me what's going to happen you know i mean most men that's a that's a passage in life well guess what you can still buy a porn mag today you can go and buy one as a middle-aged person as a foreigner you can't feel afraid anymore the thrill is gone right and again you can go hang around a bar or you can go to a punk rock show or a rap show you go to a musical event the fear is gone you know and again i'm not saying it was meaningful before and it's meaningless now it was meaningless before it's meaningless now but you have to actively engage in this kind of toxic nostalgia to try to convince yourself this is something you appreciate so yeah yeah for sure you wanna okay so i'm just catching up with your comment guys if you have anything intelligent to say say anything you want to contribute to the conversation um now is a good time to do it you know it's funny too because um very often in talking about how to overcome your own ignorance how to overcome your own stupidity how to be a less shallow childish person very often even i recommend the people that they go out and live in another culture or learn another language challenge themselves so you meet people who are very sheltered you meet people live their whole life in detroit and have never been anywhere other than detroit i once heard an interview i think this was just on the radio it's possible it was via youtube it was by the internet but once you're an interview with an inuit guy a guy who was born and raised in the far far north in the arctic circle so they cover a lot of territory they knew it but he was really from the far north even relative to other anyway and his life was so terrible growing up and the big turning point in his life was when he met a black guy and this black guy got a job up there i forgot what the job was it was gold mining or what they're only a few jobs that take you up to the architect like that um he was a black guy from chicago or something maybe he was from detroit frankly i forgot but he's a black american guy and he really took the time to sit down and say that you know life isn't like this everywhere like you should really go you know i know that sounds ridiculous but you grew up in a place where there were no trees like you've never seen trees you know like you know you really should get familiar with how different life is and you know in that guy's case he'd grown up seeing a lot of alcoholism not a lot of fresh vegetables too i'd imagine meat and alcohol dominating life so you know it's it's maybe a little bit too easy to suggest to people you know kind of go out and see the world and it'll solve what's wrong with you i think japan is even more disturbing to talk about because when you when you deal with white people who've become japanophiles um again they don't have to be white you could be hispanic and grow up in new york city it could be black whatever we're talking about western people as we say western europe north america and so on and they've latched on to japan in this way what's interesting is that they don't have any of the advantages that come from challenging your own preconceptions getting out and and dealing with and struggling with the alienness of a foreign culture so and so forth they don't have any of those benefits and maybe that's because they only are retrenching something something child maybe it's because the extent to which japan already is their culture and they have nothing you know they've already assimilated uh certain kinds of childish and self-indulgent attitudes from japanese anime movies and so on and so forth i mean you know the other thing is again see i'm saying this is easy for me to say meaning it's not a great thing for me to say it might be easy for me to say to someone oh you know go and do humanitarian work in cambodia it's like go challenge your brigance like get out of detroit really see a different culture different set of political problems by the way this comes up a lot sorry just to put a human face on this it comes up a lot with racism i've talked to people including racist people who are obsessed with the difference between white people and black people within the united states within detroit or within uh um atlanta georgia you know atlanta in the united states america you know they're obsessed with the differences between black people and white people within the united states and they're so similar like there's no you know they literally they read the same bible they speak the same language like black people and white people in the united states are so similar and you're all messed up about this kind of racist and racial politics narrative of the woodland level and i say to them like i'm being sincere like look have you ever considered moving to cambodia and really learning about the racism of thai people against cambodians of cambodian people against vietnamese people and then within those categories there's racism within cambodia they're not one ethnicity the racism of different groups against each other in cambodia you know again i can say obviously the racism within laos the racism of the the hmong hmong the hamong most people say but the racism of the hmong against the oceans the races and lotions against the hmong like you have all these different units like and you know when you're talking about cambodia thailand vietnam laos and and subcultures these people have spoken different languages continuously for a thousand years they have different religions different literature different values they're really like they're really deep really irreconcilable differences really different systems of ethics like what one group considers evil and other considers good or permissible like there's really profound mutual hostility and misunderstanding and alienation and and it's not the difference between black and white and it's not as simple as saying well this group used to be enslaved by that group it's in some cases it's everyone used to be enslaving everyone you know like so is that the history like well they all used to enslave each other you know they had all these wars or whatever like you know it's it's easy to say people criticize myself it might be a little bit too easy to say look maybe you could think about this in a different way if you just went to a foreign country studied a foreign language really engaged with a foreign set of ethical and political challenges but what you see with white people learning japanese and white people it's totally absent you see that there's no benefit at all they get involved with things japanese and i think it's just this cycle of self-justification uh toxic nostalgia vindicating the stupidity of their own youth with the stupidity of adulthood they're people who grew up feeling that sonic the hedgehog was the best thing ever and now they're living in the homeland of sonic the hedgehog they grew up feeling like japanese pornography was the best thing ever and now they're living in the homeland of of japanese pornography and that's certain kinds of ideas about sex and romance and what have you and a lot of it in japanese culture is centered around high school girls i mean i can't even say the japanese culture is obsessed with college girls sadly a lot of it is focused on high school girls and you know now they're in the homeland of sexually objectifying and obsessing over high school girls and short skirts and and all the rest of this you know so you know for them going to japan is like plunging deeper into the fatuous ignorance of their own youth into the hyper self-indulgent you know perspective on life you know they they took over the so on and so forth instead of challenging them in the way that i've just described going to cambodia could really challenge the way you think about racism and the way you think about slavery and the way you think about genocide and the way you think about indigenous people all of those things can be really profoundly challenging so for the first time in a very long time someone donated five dollars in the chat thanks thanks very much guys there are many ways to donate money to support the channel and i i don't ask for it um the last time i did a fundraiser really with no questions asked my supporters donated two thousand dollars which i to say i appreciate it is another statement it's just wonderful to know people basically because i asked for two thousand dollars people gave me two thousand dollars that is amazing the other thing i'd say is if you guys want to spend one dollar and you really get something out of it you know i do have a patreon as you guys probably know but you know my book is about one dollar oh here i can give you guys the link to the book review that's a good one um i have your i think just three book reviews uh they're about a paragraph each um you know another way to support the channel and you're also buying something for yourself the book is about one us dollar it's i think it's exactly one euro in europe i think it's 99 cents in europe so it's about one euro in europe um uh as a kindle download and it's the cost of paper it'll cost you about five or six dollars to buy on paper so that i i know i'll just be honest so far i've made zero dollars out of the book it's very likely i will continue to make serious i think i will make no money of it that's not what it's about but you know if you want to show you support the channel i would very much appreciate if you took the time to read the book and have put out an open call for questions questions or comments or challenges to what's in the boiling you can disagree with what's in the book i'd like to make a youtube video responding to some intelligent um it could be a livestream so you know the concept of support is nebulous but if you want to click on that link i just gave you guys um again obviously i appreciate someone just donated five dollars i but the truth is i don't really need the five dollars what i need you to do is read the book and i need you to tell 10 of your friends what an amazing book it is and how they should read it and i have another book coming out just a few weeks from now the current book is only 100 pages long so this is partly building hype and interest before the next uh the next book oh great question have you read the orations by cicero so melissa do you want to grab it off your oh oh you asked me have you read the eurasian spice oh oh oh yeah what do you think of me what do you think do you think i'm sitting around playing mario 64 all day um so totally off topic but cicero was a terrible author and a terrible person um for most people you would be better off if you could get an intelligent book about cicero that has quotations from cicero you know rather than reading the primary source for most people um i read the whole of uh cicero's on the republic um so the title was translated in slightly different ways but it's called something like on the on the republic on the roman republic etc i've read that whole thing beginning to end wow it's badly written it's really badly written and i mean cicero's orations for most people would be very boring very difficult to read but are there are there certain paragraphs of what cicero said here and there that are important yes of course and it's important you know um evidence um politically and so on i i look i am not a latin scholar i could imagine doing that myself i could imagine um putting together a book my own quotations from cicero and and discussion of the politics of philosophy and so on i could imagine even doing that because so there are interesting things in there but boy as uh you gotta flip around that's the kind of book where reading it from cover to cover for most people you know if you're an exception i'm happy for you for most people hit thumbs up by the way guys it's great uh but you know i think there are three people in the audience right now i haven't hit thumbs up yet all right anyway so thanks for the donation but um if you've got the time and the money for one dollar that book is only 100 pages long most people tell me they found it very action-packed and they read it very rapidly they told me it was a page turner so regardless of how long it is that they read it quickly and a lot a lot of people i think the majority of people who sent me an email or a message about the book the majority said they want to read it a second time that's also interesting they said look i read the book but i feel before i could talk about it afterwards that's high praise so they found it compelling and moving but they had to go and read it now you feel that way too much [Laughter] oh if you want sure yeah yeah right so it took us a long time to get it but that's oh what you want to model this yeah i just want to say i mean this is it's it would be an understatement to say that this book is extremely meaningful to me i was involved with some of the editing of this book mostly just typos because you know isil's brilliant there were a few paragraphs that were important yes yes i mean it is an extremely important book in my opinion and it's one of the most important books written about veganism well okay so i'll just say the concept of an important book i'll say this you know there's this old quotation i i i tried it every once in a while that you know um so okay if you want the real quote you know mahatma gandhi said um there are some people so hungry that uh the only way god can appear to them is in the form of a loaf of bread um i admit you know look put it this way i would be fascinated to have a single person right into me and say that they felt that this book what it was talking about had no relevance to their life i haven't had that yet like every single person who's read this book because they know me and they know the channel they know what the books oh yeah i still resemble the portrait too try to match them try to match the pose it looks funny on screen having two versions of my face um like every single person who's read this book has so far has written to me saying wow this is so relevant to what's going on in my life and you know yes it's partly about politics um but you know even the pastors that are talking about marriage and romance and stuff i have people writing to me saying oh wow this stuff you said about marriage and romance this really hits home or this really is relevant to their life so you know i've had that kind of feedback about the psychology and what says the stuff in here about motivation and being an artist being a creative person and being an intellectual i have people writing and saying oh wow this is something really relevant to my life okay but i'd be interested to know like as i said you know hey bread only tastes delicious if you're hungry for it you know water tastes like nothing if you're not thirsty if you're there's enough maybe maybe there's someone for whom this isn't relevant and meaningful for your life that'd be interesting to hear too but yeah it's so far it's reaching the people for whom the message is really as melissa was saying like it's really meaningful for her life it's for the questions she's trying to answer oh absolutely yes i think it's meaningful for vegans and i am interested to hear even from people who are not vegan like just the influence that it might have on them because you know you know in effect this is really important for vegans to hear um right if you've been vegan for even one year i think you're familiar with all the frustration all the frustrations of trying to explain to another person why you're vegan and why this matters and you know i just right i just just the the uh the not the incomprehension of why people can't understand veganism right you know this is just the way that you talk about it but my perspective is even more broadly why people won't do the right thing just because the right thing to do even when they know it's the right thing yes like that's why i think it goes beyond veganism and i've talked to several people so some people got in touch with me from tokyo because the tico say i'm controversy but i said to them look i know you're not vegan based on this conversation i just had with you i think this would still be really meaningful for you because it's asking these questions about how do you motivate people to change how do you motivate people to do the right thing is the right thing to do like as an individual person and scaling it up a society of millions i think this is meaningful for you even if you're not interested in veganism again i'll be interested to hear if anyone proves me wrong but i can imagine people from a totally different political school of thought with a totally different set of political concerns yeah responding to it that way too yeah you want to say one masterpiece thanks very sincere yeah a lot of typos but no no you know i've i i never completely finished it but inside central asia more typos oh really yeah i used to work as a professional editor so it'd be nice to be nice to imagine the book had no typos but depending on when you bought it each new edition has fewer typos than before because the good thing about amazon i'm able to go and fix the typos anyway but there were there were a few tables in it reflecting the passion with which it was written okay so getting finally to this comment from joshua in the audience who donated five dollars um quote studying the history of genocide really gave me perspective on the world i answered questions on quora about it i used to edit wikipedia articles close quote well look you know so obviously i'm not saying this to condemn you but you know the problem with wikipedia the problem with quora is the absence of the first person you know first person singular and my mom asked me this about my writing actually my mom is quite impressed with the book i don't know how much she's read she's probably read five pages or 10 pages no offense but i don't think she's read a book but she my mom has read some of my current writing she's read one chapter maybe of no more manifestos maybe one half of one chapter by the way my mom has read and she's really struck by the style of writing too and she she was asking like where did you get this how did you develop this style of writing but it is in large part a rejection of academic writing is the origin of my my style of writing and you know look it's really important so you'll never get this in a peer-reviewed article you'll never get this in a wikipedia article and you'll never get this in quora or this kind of you know sanitized factual proportions it's really poor important to write in the first person you know when i first went to laos when i first set foot on the mekong river you know these were my misconceptions and this was the research i was doing and here's what i understand today and here's how i overcame those misconceptions no of course it's great to also have the other elements that you might find in academic articles it's great to present you know what what are your sources how you to prove your case to present your thesis or whatever but that first person element is so important and it's so utterly lacking you know from wikipedia and quora and peer-reviewed journal articles um you know even if you just include so we're talking about first nations genocide even if you just include look there was a time when i assumed this and when i saw it this way but then i read this book you know and again maybe and then i realized this book was wrong and i read these two other books whatever the the process was you know i think it's so important to include that first person singular autobiographical element and of course this is part of why i do youtube and part of why i do it in the way they do one of the first videos i made this is many many years ago i talked about the fact look i am not going to dissimulate an academic paper an academic essay you know this kind of person that's not what i want to do and you know i said look i'm here to give it to you raw i'm here to really keep it real this is when keeping it real goes right you know what i mean i and i'm here to really include my own ignorance my own bias my own passions not as an end in itself not as a form of self-indulgence or or ego exercise you know but i think that's exactly how we learn together you know we don't learn by making mistakes we learn by noticing them and nothing could be more precious than sharing with others you know the the mistakes you've made and how you notice them and how you address them which is very often the origin of those that that kind of research you know so i just say i mean i think nobody in my audience has read my own father's writing you know but my father also wrote and published books none of my father's books have a cover this good let me history of art and painting in canada debatable you could say that's one book that has a better cover than this the history of art and painting again by barry lord that's my dad my now deceased dad um you know if you go back to even his earliest writing like history the history of art painting in canada he is cheerleading for first nations he's cheerleading for american indians indigenous people it's cheerleading but it's completely hollow it's completely vapid you know it's it's really completely insincere and my father had already is pretty quite a young man he had been involved with first nations museums physiology archaeology but you know archaeology has connected to museums for the history and preservation of indigenous people um so you know it wasn't out of out of total ignorance but i knew him and you can look at what he did with his life and and what he what he valued it was completely insincere you know cheerleading for them and it's it's a would be a very different thing for me to present you know well look this is what my parents told me about genocide or indigenous people when i was growing up this is what my school teachers taught me and then this is the research i did and this is you know and these are the conclusions i came to and this is my attitude now and this is this is what i know and this is what i still need to know like that's also an element that's missing from wikipedia hey this is what i'm still ignorant about you know these things are often interdependent you know what you don't know informs what you do know and how you write about and talk about what you do now i'm sorry central asia is a great example of that by the way you know how to what extent can you engage in the cultural critique of china without being aware of politics history and culture of central asia like that's a real question and most people are totally ignorable and they're they're connected they're connected in every way like can we engage in the cultural and political critique of china while being ignorant of of uh central asia and i know it's well whether or not it's further away it's debatable you know india and china do have a land border they do abut one another they do connect by land we nevertheless think of india and china as being quite far away from each other um uh because of the shape of the countries involved and because of the distance between beijing and new delhi but not the distance between the the extremities country you know many many times i challenged scholars of buddhism and just chinese people chinese professors of politics of china politics and being like well yeah but you're completely ignorant of what was happening in india at the same time and just even if it's just comparative having that awareness and it's like look what you so i can remember one professor in particular i said this to uh you've met him he's the guy who met you know i remember saying to him yeah but what you're saying about the history of european imperialism in china makes no sense if we just compare it to what was going on history of imperialism in india like if you just include your ignorance about one is informing what you're saying about the other even if you you know something about the other so yeah that's that's a tremendously important part of writing and talking and learning and teaching about history about politics and about life a lot of we talked about in this video is just just life merely life as if life itself were of a lower of a lower priority okay hard-hitting questions from the audience someone asks quote what is your favorite ice cream no so guys i am not an ice cream person i'm really not it's not that i intensely hate ice cream but i have mentioned it several times even before i was vegan i was not an ice cream person uh now i am vegan so we did recently uh try a new vegan ice cream but really melissa is the ice cream person melissa do you want to do you want to keep it private or do you want to tell the public do you have an answer i don't ever ask you we've had flavor do you have if well maybe you don't have a favorite maybe it's not something you have one well yeah yeah it might not be it might not be something you can answer that sense like i usually just go for vanilla but i'm looking for specks of vanilla you know also that style the actual okay so you want you want the black flame vanilla yeah yeah yeah yeah so intense no but i will point out to you so we also have experience being in the south of france with italian ice cream oh right you see oh see now it gets complicated so yeah that and that stuff's vegan so when you had mango ice cream and that kind of stuff again with no no dairy in it yes so in that case because right so it's like a sorbet right yeah i guess i would have to say uh raspberry raspberry sorbet see see how hard it is anyway yes there you go deep deep question but you know the truth is i i am just really not a uh i am just really not an ice cream person so i'm not the person to ask that for that particular uh question oh wow so we have some well-read people in the audience random dude says quote i think john adams read it in the original language so random dude if you read no more manifestos my book that's coming out next there's quite a lot of critique of john adams and i'm sorry to tell you this but i think john adams was really lying about most of the stuff you read um was a really strange character i mean john adams was a really really crazy guy but the extent to which he and his whole generation were pretending to have knowledge of ancient greek and latin sources and did not really understand what they were reading is one thing and then the extent to which john adams in particular was really an insane malevolent person who was constructing a bizarre fiction about the history of politics in europe that's that's another john adams a really dark character once you get to know him um i'm currently reading this book called 13 clocks and it promises that later it's going to get into john adams a bit but he was so john adams and benjamin franklin they were really the most influential people writers authors generators of ideas and the years just leading up to uh the american revolution and of course that's partly due to luck um john adams published just the right book and just the right essays just the right time but he he was very influential that time nobody reads his writing today but i do not feel um i do not feel any guilt in saying that the writings of john adams about democracy are both evil and insane and why would i say guilt so by contrast you know the first draft of my book my book no more manifestos the first draft said some very negative things about governor morris so governor morris is another historical figure involved in writing the constitution he literally wrote the constitution it was his penmanship so he was involved with drafting the constitution and debating its content but also writing it um he had good handwriting uh governor morris in the first draft i was uh very harsh very i was condemning him and i do feel guilty about it and i'm the final draft it will be more understanding a more nuanced view of governor morris but my view of uh john adams is very very negative so sorry digression from the topic of this video talk about nostalgia in relation to the american constitution toxic nostalgia and the uh and the american constitution i appreciate uh appreciate the comment someone who knows who john adams is and knows his his claim uh uh too so someone said some negative comments about uh mohandas gandhi i have an incredibly negative view of honda's gandhi my long-term viewers know that so i'm not reproaching you for this but uh this viewer you're probably unaware of that in the past i've made videos with in-depth discussion and critique and frankly condemnation of gandhi um if you want to jump right to the chase there's a famous article harshly condemning gandhi that was published in commentary magazine so probably if you just search for those two things mohandas gandhi and commentary magazine put commentary magazine and quotation marks uh from from google you will get a very harsh condemnation of ghani which it's famous it's remained famous for for decades and it includes discussion about his sex life and his totally insane religious views about which i mean views that were considered insane by other members of the hindu faith at that time yeah so yeah long story short gandhi was a bad guy and i have made other youtube videos talking about it it's come up certainly in vegan activism many times so a comment here about the youtube algorithm i do not believe in the youtube algorithm i mean there's a very real sense in which i do not believe it exists when you look at my youtube channel today the number of views i get on things largely reflects you know it's human behavior the level of human interest how many people actually click on something that is what you're looking at and you know um obviously in some ways that is humbling and humiliating and disappointing and what can i tell you it'd be it'd be nice to imagine i think people do live with this self-justifying view that there's a huge audience interested in their work and that audience isn't able to find their work because of the youtube algorithm i do not believe that at all i think that's a real self-justifying self-mystifying lie people live with uh anyway i just put a post on my on my patreon um to an old video i made about sam harris and i think they got about 4 000 views from memory so it's not that that uh fresh in my mind but you know me sitting on camera insulting sam harris criticizing his writing to some extent it's a it's an intelligent critique but it's also but it also contains me really cussing the guy out really saying this guy is an idiot yeah sorry so looks like it's a stupid video it's an intelligent video but it's also entertaining because i'm really i'm really being quite uh insulting and and cruel and stating just how stupid and wrong stan perez is well you know you could sit there and feel sorry for yourself and say oh this should have one million viewers or something and there's another view that's appreciative and say wow isn't it amazing that 4 000 people uh managed to manage to watch this video i made about sam harris when you are giving advice that nobody wants to hear nobody wants to hear sam harris is an idiot he has his fans you know you know how many thousand people do you think you could reach that and again i've got to compare myself to um uh i got to compare myself to my own university professors i don't think any of uh just be real with you think about all the people i've known with phds could they make a 15-minute monologue on a topic an intellectual topic a political topic and reach just 4 000 people so it's it's amazing and i can't blame any algorithm i don't think about these things and look if you think it's tough working with the so-called youtube algorithm if you think it's tough to reach 4 000 people with a hard-hitting disquieting intellectually challenging message on youtube how about reaching 4 000 people with a book how about a pamphlet how about the written word okay it's hard and for most people it's impossible and by the way it is a proven fact the way sam harris got famous was because of the wealth of his parents he had multi-millionaire parents and his parents were uniquely well connected in hollywood so they had hollywood agents and book agents and so on and they made him into a celebrity uh through very cynical means well if your parents are multi-millionaires with connections in hollywood or connections and the marketing and advertising and publishing world in new york that's another thing but the vast majority of people would never be able to write a book that reaches just 4 000 people that's that's really hard and i'm out here hustling it's great that 4 000 people watch that video it would really mean a lot more to me and really mean a lot more to you me more the audience and the readers if 4 000 people read the book i already published let alone the next the next one i'm about to publish um but that's hard so yeah it's easy to complain but guys if you even compare getting four thousand views on youtube to having four thousand listeners on a podcast whoa you ha podcasts they keep the numbers secret right good luck figure out how many listeners listen to a podcast that's that's really hard and then there is no algorithm right there is no interface like this for for podcasts a small number of podcasts are very successful of course and reach millions of years but the vast majority of people doing these podcasts they're reaching a tiny tiny tiny audience to get beyond your circle of friends and family with a podcast is really tough again unless your family are multi-millionaires or you're connected to the movie industry or the tv industry or or something like that or can pay for an advertising budget but look even by the way look at the struggle of ben shapiro's sister who is considered a beautiful woman in our times whether or not she is to your taster to my face she was considered an amazingly beautiful person so that's someone who was already famous already considered extremely attractive already had a huge audience because of her brother's fame and she really struggled she paid for a lot of advertising she struggled to get just a few thousand viewers on her channel where she talks about being a right-wing conservative orthodox jewish mother this is her you know her message so no it's it's not easy but as hard as it is on youtube you got to calibrate your expectations because guys okay what's easier i reached four thousand people with a message what if i got a phd and then i pay a ton of money to get a phd then pay a ton of money to present a paper at a conference it's so depressing you know you present a paper at a conference maybe there are two people in the audience who are interested in hearing the paper like maybe there are eight people in the audience but others are there because they have to be for the conference you know but seriously and i've talked to people with phds they know about that it's like they paid for an airplane ticket they paid a couple hundred dollars in conference fees they paid for a hotel room they put all this work into writing this paper they had to get a phd in the first place then you stand there at the podium you read this and nobody cares and nobody wants to hear it and maybe if you're lucky it gets peer reviewed and published in you know and then rots and a dead dead hole you dead end of the internet you know a lot of them don't even print on paper anymore you know so it's just it's a pdf somewhere on the internet that people have to pay hundreds of dollars to access if they're not at an institution they can't even get it through google right it's off limits and nobody ever sees their hard work it never reaches an audience so youtube is a lot better than that and there's no there's no algorithm involved with peer-reviewed uh peer-reviewed publications just one really brief answer about that i made a youtube video that reached several thousand people sorry i think definitely more than three thousand i forgot to reach five thousand so you know a little bit so let's say three thousand though uh to be conservative but i made a video that reached several thousand people and it included a link to a peer-reviewed paper which like i say as a pdf on the internet somewhere in this case it's unusual because it's a free journal so you don't have to be a member of the university library you don't have to pay 500 or 200 to access it it was free for anyone to and i get an downl of appreciation from the author of the the pdf the academic article and it was so sad that the the editor of the journal had sent him an email and this is forwarded to me saying hey well this is really great look at how many people clicked and downloaded the article and unlike our normal readers these clicks they're from all over the world like some of them are from brazil some of them from china i have viewers all over the world it's like 15 people one of five like 15 people had downloaded and for them this was exciting hey wow 15 people in a week read this article or at least download it maybe they didn't even read it they just clicked on it right like so yeah um you know this is in some ways similar to the discussion of nostalgia the algorithm is not an algorithm the algorithm is a self-justifying mentality uh people intelligent and you know maybe it's hard to accept only 4 000 people are interested in watching that video it's a great video it's a very entertaining video as well as an enter as well as uh intelligent and informative and important video it has a political point and a moral points i may feel it's a really great video but just accepting maybe there were only four thousand people in the world interested in this yeah yeah i will just say i've had to think about this too because you know on a personal level there's a certain amount of truth to the statement that like you know your influence on my life has has totally transformed how i see the world and i cannot imagine any other channel having had that influence on me um so in a in a sense i i think to myself being like how is this how is your channel not more successful but um you know then i i just i think of your your book as well you know i i don't want to keep raving about how important your book is and how much i really value the information but you know also just thinking about like you may not think that there are issues with the vegan movement you may not think that there are issues um you know you may feel that you are doing the best you can and and so on but like i just i i really appreciate that your videos are constantly pointing out what's wrong because it's it's because i live with you you know every day i am i am thinking you know i have this exposure to all these issues you know uh you know you talked about yeah when we listen to the news you know you think maybe we should just move there you know with the situation like let's go there you know i'm always living with this influence so i i don't want to forget that or take it for granted yeah you know but most people who know you they know you through your youtube channel yeah they don't live with you kind of they have a little bit of that information oh i mean like i i feel so lucky and fortunate to be always like inspired by you and and living with that influence but right like you know your book your channel like this is influencing people in a way and then you wish there were a million other people i do yes i really do because i am living with that too where i just think you know we don't have time to waste uh well look i just wanna your way of phrasing it here which is totally valid and true is to point it out in terms of critique of what's wrong and in terms of not having time to waste but the other thing i point out this is true even if there's conversations where i talk about us moving to nepal you know we're talking about some random things yeah uh moving to puerto rico and talking about it's a shout these are shallow examples there are deeper examples we talk about but you know that's actually not critique that's talking about aspirations and possibilities and being motivated to look to the horizon i think that's something people are lacking in their lives and that's something my youtube channel offers yes and the book offers and the the live streams and the podcasts yeah i would be interested to hear if like you know if you have a different opinion but like the criticisms that i have heard of of your content in general your youtube videos um you know some some of what i hear is that it's uh too negative but i like i have not been more inspired i know i know there's all this stuff done yeah i mean there is a lot of dumerism there is a lot on the internet where you can listen to something and feel totally discouraged or like also your own family in detroit like you'll speak people just don't think anything's possible anything's better is enough yes exactly yeah um you are constantly saying saying you know you should be dissatisfied with the status quo and what you are you're dissatisfied with your own mediocrity be disaster of the mediocrity of the society or the evil of the society you're living right yeah yeah and then you're in for something but you know that's also because that's what i would want as a viewer that's what i would have wanted as a younger man it's still what i want now is that looking to that further horizon looking to those positions yeah so you guys may not know this there is this well-known phrase in english it's an idiom in english uh politics is the art of the possible now i'm emphasizing that it's an idiom in english because if you look back at what the german was it has been creatively translated and reinterpreted from the original german uh statement but politics is the art of the possible okay possibility in the sense of what's possible is something we have to imagine and assert for ourselves right and even within the remit of this video right like okay why do people cheat on their wives and collect video games and stuff a lot of people have never thought through the possibility of leading a better life and like talking about stories people are still making comments about first nations people genocide you know and so i understand a lot of people have never thought about the possibility of knowing more than their school teachers knew knowing more than their university professors knew reading books and gaining a level of acumen and expertise gaining it themselves not relying on someone else you know let alone doing humanitarian work or doing something political to change the world like they they have just never even thought hey you know what i could take six months out of my life and and really focus on this and it could change the rest of my life like i'd have a project doesn't have to take 10 years i could work hard to learn the history of the korean gym or any other example and you know like oh and there could be another research project of that you know i i was raised with a lot of [ __ ] about the vietnam war what if i took six months to really research you know really challenge my understanding of vitamins just a random example whatever sin jam central asia all kinds of stuff myanmar whatever could be a whole series of things but like once you start getting into the active research informed opinion mentality you know and when you are challenging yourself i can do something about this i'm not powerless if i don't like the political history of haiti i can change it you know and at a cost at a price if you choose to get involved with the politics of haiti you're choosing not to be involved with the politics of detroit or japan or something else like you you can't be everywhere doing everything you can't learn every language you got to commit to one millia and one method then we start to get to the cost of that but like instead of being in a position of powerlessness and passivity to live with because again if politics is the art of the possible i know this isn't the meaning it's not the original german is special it's not what they mean so we're creatively reinterpreting the phrase like you know really the meaning of what was said was german is like in politics you do what you may do what you manage to do you know you do what you meant you get by with what's possible but i'm talking about you know mentating and visualizing and thinking about what is possible pressing into the realm of things unimaginable to you things you never thought about before oh oh i could you know i could move to cambodia i could learn the cambodian language hey this this isn't my problem i could make it my problem i was raised with these lies about genocide but i can you know i can do better whatever it is you know and instead people really live very often this this small shallow remit of familiar pleasures whether that's watching sports on tv or going skiing or watching anime or playing video games so i just say i i totally agree with what you said and you put the emphasis on the critique sure there's plenty of critique on this channel and on telling people not to waste their time and not to waste their lives but there's also a positive element there and of really really saying to you look there there is an endless horizon there you're not looking at like you have your you're looking down at your own feet and if you just look up for a minute and start thinking about the next five years is that oh i'm saying maybe you can't do it today but just think about a five year window what you can accomplish who you can be and where you can be living and the difference like yeah yeah i will relate it back to what i was talking about earlier with this this conversation with my father about doubt and how you know his perspective is that if you spend too much time doubting and worrying about things that this is just an inherently negative thing um but what i appreciate is just you know to me it was natural to worry to me it was natural to feel something that's wrong with the society that i was raised in and like you said earlier i mean yes i'm i'm [ __ ] up about the history of slavery and genocide in america rather than feeling calm and self-assured and confident yeah i know it's oh it's fine it's normal yeah there's plenty of that this is just how it is right don't question it don't think about it don't worry about it all right no i i worry i i can't yeah worry and grow wise but it's not necessarily that you have to be you know living in fear or you know that that uh you know that there's just no hope for the future that there can be something positive about doubt and living with doubt right right but look also i just want to give it a very powerful example this idea that confidence is a is better than so what if you just signed up and joined the army like you thought about it you researched it you worried about it okay you've made the decision to not join the army but like what it would be better to just just join the army without thinking like you know and again we could sit about any job we said about being a nurse too or something no worry about it might you think it all the way through i've known plenty of miserable nurses people who hated and regretted the decision i also knew people who studied nursing and then never did the job because they knew they hated it so much by the time they finished getting the nursing degree well you spent all these years of your life and all this money learning to become a nurse now you're never going to work as a nurse you know okay so yeah no do you do your worrying in advance so on and so forth yeah anyway but coming back to the initial point you know um instead of blaming the algorithm instead of doing that that kind of self-justification you know my point is i really accept that what i have to say is profoundly unpopular and it's only ever going to reach a small audience and you know when i calibrate what do you mean by a small audience it's enormous compared to the people i knew with phds i've already described that who had to pay to fly to a conference you know and i mean like literally even what i have to say about buddhism i'm reaching a larger audience of people who are really interested and really willing to listen than i could have ever reached by getting a phd in buddhism and presenting papers at those conferences because let me tell you then you're presenting a paper to an audience that is they're ideologically committed to not hearing what you have to say another interesting comparison would be communism you know like what you can and can't do getting a phd in academia and trying to talk about communism by the way i'm anti-common yeah because the people you're presenting the papers to they're committed on the other side of that or whatever yeah right and yeah what will reach more people you know an academic paper that you would write right which is inherently an anti-communist or the videos that you have made right you know but people who are willing to listen because i mean too i know i'm still ridiculous you can in theory have a book that's bought by a lot of people but they don't really read it they don't really it's not you know it's not really impacting people but you know have that there anyway um yeah so you know look both are hard it's hard to create content you know for an audience that's narrow but deep to recognize okay a small number of people are going to deeply appreciate this it's going to mean a lot to a small number of people it's also hard to make content for a huge audience but where it's incredibly shallow it doesn't really matter to any of them and if you die or you cease to exist they're going to turn to someone else for their popcorn if you're a popcorn vendor and you reach millions of people with popcorn well yeah but this has nothing to do with you if you die tomorrow someone else makes the popcorn who cares you know you are replaceable because the shallow shallowness of your of your content and i have known a couple people on youtube who are in that situation not any names where they're aware of the shallowness of what they do and they're somewhat self-loathing about it even though they reach a much larger much larger audience than i than outreach okay but thanks i understand the only other thing i'd say is you you do have to find fault with yourself in part because part of what you're saying this isn't everything you said but part of what you're saying is this is so meaningful to me therefore it should be meaningful to everyone else and that that's the kind of issue this book credit this is really let's say no no let's examine that assumption no what's meaningful to you what's meaningful you isn't meaningful to other people and let's really talk about that let's really deal with that let's deal with like that like not as a minor footnote but it's a major crisis in life that you have to face up to and look at so it's not just veganism veganism guess what cambodia is meaningful to me the political history of cambodia in a way that it never was meaningful to my own father it never was meaningful to any of my brothers or sisters you don't know my father had a lot of kids i have a lot of brothers and sisters like the same generation as me and the odds are the political history of cambodia will never matter to my daughter the way it used to be right like that's a safe bet right so you know the point is obviously you scale it up i've been sitting in a [ __ ] university classroom full of people who pretend they're interested in cambodia like i've been in situations like that and you face up to the depressing reality guess what cambodia doesn't matter to them by the way that speaker even though they've like signed up for some university before they're supposed to be there now look we could say this again about china ooh japan oh all these things it gets more depressing and we could say this about africa and all kinds of things but you know the point is it's not just veganism and it's not some minor footnote to your these this problem it's a major fundamental philosophical crisis you have to face up to in life and i get it like okay the point is this if a certain rapper on the internet is your favorite rapper if a certain guitarist is your favorite guitarist and you feel like gee why is it i'm the only person to appreciate like he only has a few dozen fans you know i understand that it brings a certain tension in your life like well gee i wish more people could appreciate this guy's guitar work i wish more people could appreciate you know uh you know appreciate his music whatever it is that that you feel you appreciate and other people don't appreciate you know um okay but i mean what melissa is saying is this philosophy these considerations on politics etc uh that this has been a really major positive life-changing thing for her and again for some people that's going to be look ancient athens ancient rome why isn't the study of democracy in ancient athens meaningful for you and you and you the way it is for me why isn't thucydides meaningful for you the way to speak well it isn't like you got to really deal with that you can't reproach or people or complain about it like there's something wrong with you because you aren't capable of appreciating how important and meaningful the study of democracy in ancient greece is well they can't and they won't you know it's not going to change and and guess what you are a minority within a minority within a minority and you will be forever whether we're talking about veganism caring about ethics ecology and politics in that way or caring about democracy whether it's history democracy the present future caring about the future of democracy in china myanmar cambodia caring about democracy even within the united states of america guess what you are in a tiny minority that is fundamentally defined by that slippery word care you're in a self-defining minority of people who care and when you care you challenge your own ignorance when you care you learn and you keep on learning when you care you struggle and strive to make a difference even when it seems hopeless and you can't make a difference it seems like you can't help first nations people it seems like you can't help the people of haiti he seems like you can't help people cambodia but you care so you learn and you keep learning you live and you keep living and you're not watching sports on tv or playing video games because you care and you again it's very easy to say as moses said i wish tens of thousands of people or i wish millions of people would also appreciate this book or also appreciate this youtube channel but it is not a minor thing to face up to how terrible i said no you know the vast majority of people are nev even if they listen to this message even if you play it over a loud speaker you know they uh as we say in american time they ain't trying to hear it like you can expose them to this they're never going to appreciate it they're never going to understand it it's never going to change their lives away to yours and i brought that up in the recent tequila sam video where i talked through look tko sam how much intellectual development would you have to go through so that you could appreciate and respond to thucydides you know philosophy and politics formation athens generally so that this book could be as meaningful for you as it was for me right because again it's not just that you're ignorant enough that the book is telling you something you want to hear or the book is telling something you need to hear no it's also that you're sophisticated enough you're already asking the questions you're already dealing with the doubts that this book partially addresses corresponds to you know all right guys good moment to put in any any questions or comments you have great question from the audience is this your girlfriend do you think i'm paying a model to come on camera i should i should i should pay a series of models off of model mayhem to come onto my live streams and spice things up right here now she's she's an independent book reviewer that would be interesting pay pay one of the booktubers uh i actually i think i wrote to two booktubers about that but i never found anyone on booktube doing uh nonfiction or doing politics but it would be cool even if i had to pay for it to pay another uh booktube channel to read and review the book universe i'd be interested if someone critiqued it or someone who didn't appreciate it on pinterest to hear that you know but someone who really read the book seriously in christmas i don't mean someone just in a shallow way you know glances of the first few pages in response that would be interesting here too anyway great coming from the audience iowa says get a high-end game or chair that is the secret there's a very 2022 comment it didn't used to be like that people didn't use still be in gamer chairs back in 2016. it's now become so common this particular style of chair oh here's somebody says they're reading cicero in the original latin and uh oliver says salist is better than cicero so i would i would agree with that i do think status is more more interesting than cecile but in all those cases i think you get a very strong sense of the author's character uh coming through the writing i don't know i don't know if all roman literature is like that but i think everything i've read from rome was like that they were certainly not scared to speak in the first person and to have their own sense of character and morality and perspective uh come through in their in their mind so rogam silva asks um quote isil do you have any interest in the indigenous people of brazil like the tupi gorarni well yeah i did to some extent i mean look i don't know how much i want to talk about just just don't want to bore the audience but of course when i was in first nation studies indigenous studies this kind of thing there was work and there was reading i was doing mostly looking at parallels and contrasts so to what extent are those languages destroyed by christian missionaries to what extent are the indigenous languages of south america actually preserved by christian missionaries because both happened christianity destroys them but then they also translate you know the christian bible into indigenous languages and it becomes the language of the church and like you know and um comparison of the political struggles so you know there are different kind of indigenous movements in in all of south america central america south america and so on and which are the more successful which are the more which are failed and what have you uh so yeah i mean yes it's something i have read about something i have been interested in um you know have i ever considered you know moving to brazil permanently for that reason or moving to colombia or anywhere else at the moment no it didn't seem to me to make sense because there are so many people who are already fluent in spanish and to work on any of those languages or any of those political stories you first need to do spanish and then work with the indigenous language and also you know i hate christianity [Laughter] um that's you know for me and how i spend my time uh it would be very difficult to put myself into such an intensely christian context um most most christians hate me too so yeah i mean they're just different to bears there was like well somebody else should should do this uh but yeah it is interesting there are some indigenous languages indigenous peoples in south america who are not on the brink of total extinction whereas in north america all of them they either are extinct or they're on the brink of extinction in terms of their languages and culture and so on and that's that's dealing with but you know and it may be that in the future there's a real anti-christian discourse that grows out of that in in south america but not yet that's so dominated by christianity that for me personally that'd be very very depressing and hard to deal with and you know i have alternatives just to give a contrast you know i really seriously considered it several times my life specializing in mongolia in some ways mongolia is a horrible place to study you can see some scraps of that in the internet some of my writing about politics in mongolia um well mongolia is not dominated by christianity nor by islam this way so maybe more more rewarding for me um given given that i have a choice but yeah i mean it's you know and all of these places also i mean mongolia and the indigenous people of south america communism is also a huge issue communism and anti-communism and democracy and anti-democracy so yeah there are a lot of issues there that are interesting to me and and there's been reading i've done about it and so on and melissa and i for a long time were promoting this book well it's not anyway we did some book reviews related to that too i'll leave it at that because i've talked about enough in the past and it's enough right so one person in the audience says quote i admit i feel quite tempted by the prospect of doing humanitarian work in laos whenever you talk about it this could be a separate video i'll reply to that just one sec one second questions about why we like salast so much how can you ask me why i said i think as a joke to the same person but i've made the joke i think to to oliver that i want to get a hat that says m-a-r-s make america read salust again you know as this is my my slogan make america read salast how can you ask me what i like about salas oh most is getting sour stuff whatever it doesn't matter yeah it's a terrible cover there you go compared to this cover i look real handsome right here we have make make america read salas again that's one of my uh and what which one has a better cover guys i have a better cover than salas um anyway to say this to clouds um so i don't know if you have any experience with southeast asian languages or what have you well i have a lot of regrets in life but i'll say this about humanitarian work with laos humanitarian work with cambodia and humanitarian work with myanmar uh instead of being like jumping off a cliff you know like a sudden absolute commitment all three of those can be a kind of gradual relatively safe process of acclimatizing yourself because they have thailand in the middle so to give an example you can become fluent in laotian and you can become well informed about what's going on in lao politics without crossing the border into laos remaining in the adjacent part of northeastern thailand where an enormous number of lotion people live an enormous amount of people are back and forth across the border and let's say you have a job as a bank teller in america like a pretty steady job you can be doing that flying back and forth you don't have to tell anybody what you're doing you don't have to explain what you're doing you can be preparing to do humanitarian work you know this would also be drove archaeology or it could be some other kind of project you could be learning the language learning the politics um staying within the political limits of of thailand now again some people will accuse you of being a cia agent or a spy and that's some ways the life i'm describing it's kind of similar to espionage you're preparing and learning the language and learning the politics learning what's really going on and on both sides of the border the reality of what's going on a lot of it is secret a lot of it has certainly never been written down in english but even if you were searching the internet in thai or in lotion you're not gonna find written accounts of what's going on politically you know as it unfolds from what i was saying going to say for current history but you want to know what was going on in laos in the 1980s what are you going to read in english or in laosh really what's what's ever been published about laos in the 80s and that laos in the 1990s so a lot of it is de facto secret even if people are willing to talk about it verbally it's only accessible through verbal uh tradition you can say exactly the same thing i could repeat myself with cambodia exactly the same thing about uh myanmar you know and it's all you know and it's all a little bit dangerous that's also why i say people think you're a cia agent just learning the language learning the politics and and again you might also be interested in learning some of the legal details like how you're going to actually incorporate a charity and get a post office box and be able to receive mail and you know so there's paperwork too you want to be learning about you know how you're going to create some kind of foundation some post office boxing um so that you can receive donations or do whatever it is you want to do but with those countries you can do it over several years and you can spread out you cannot risk your life you cannot really take the risks i took i did i did risk my life i was in i was in very difficult circumstances while having a job in the united states you can make you can make that transition you know if you want to be involved in syria right now humanitarian work or whatever you want to call it it's not going to be gradual it's not going to be easy it's not going to be safe like that there isn't the equivalent of thailand adjacent to syria what there is is jordan right you know what do you know it's just as dangerous it's just as nice i mean sorry what's adjacent is turkey do you want to be out in the part of turkey that's on the syrian border right now that's that's probably even more dangerous you really get killed you know um like a lot of these areas there isn't a safe haven right next to it where you can work on the language and learn what's going on politically really learned the ropes over over several years i mean now right now i think all kinds of things are possible with with ukraine i wouldn't discourage you about ukraine but again you have to think carefully i mean can you put in a foot before you put in a whole leg or before you have both feet in and you have no home anywhere else this is this is your your whole life and look so i was gonna say i do have um regrets about this in different ways but you know one of them obviously is um just the ease of the language you know chinese is so hard the chinese language is so hard and i'm aware i could be totally fluent in lotion today to honesty i think i feel that way about burmese too burmese seems so easy now now that you've done chinese you know i did all these other languages too i did pali i did you know we worked on greek for a while hebrew you know um you know obviously any language is a lot of hard work just learning spanish is hard work just learning french it is i'm not minimizing that but proficiency in spoken lotion is attainable proficiency in spoken burmese is attainable and i mean you know advanced literacy reading and writing in those languages is so much more attainable than than chinese so obviously there's always a little bit of regret in me just like well you know like so i'm now 43 years old how well am i going to be able to read chinese when i'm 53 like i have doubts guys like i i really have doubts will i be able to read a newspaper in chinese when i'm when i'm 53 maybe you know like it's it's only maybe but with a language like laotian or a language like burmese it doesn't have to be maybe you can really once you start working on it you'll feel very certainly the um you know that you can attain advanced speaking ability and so on and so forth and then um yeah you know as i say getting general occasionally political civil states so yeah that's interesting i think that's the first person ever who said that to me that they're they're uh they're tempted by the thought of doing humanitarian work in laos um yeah it's a hell of a thing to look at someone else's tragedy and try to make it your own it's a hell of a thing to look at someone else's suffering and uh and try to make it your own you know and i think that is one part of the desire to make the world a better place but it's it's not the only part as soon as you get to laos and start helping these people you're gonna figure out that a large percentage of them as soon as you help them they just want to get drunk they just want to get drunk and eat meat and ruin the environment and live a totally reckless self-centered self-indulgent lifestyle they want they want to live like jake paul to be quite honest you know um you know you're gonna realize that a lot of the people you're helping are horrible people you know uh so on and so forth so you know your good intentions this this comes back to themes dealt with in this book i think it's dealt with no more manifestos too but it's really especially this book but you know the fact that i can have good intentions and i can help you but i can't have good intentions for you right and my helping you won't transfer my good intentions to you right you guys can visualize this easily enough if you're helping people who are alcoholics or helping people who are drug addicts but sure you get out and deal with that you know but it's also something much more sophisticated like democracy well maybe i'm helping laos maybe i'm helping myanmar because i want to help them have a democracy but you help these people and you figure out the people you're helping they don't want democracy at all i don't mean everyone by the imagine the particular people you're helping however many hundred thousand there you can be dealing with that certainly with china the vast majority of people in china will tell you straight to your face they don't want democracy so what are you helping them do if you're if you're helping china the chinese they may even be quite proud to tell you that they don't they don't want democracy so a lot of people don't want sobriety a lot of people don't want democracy so again you have you have good intentions um but you can't have good intentions for someone else and this is uh you know so these these uh these problems of motivation are dealt with here so another so alia read the book someone else just said uh she i presume is 20 years old and not sure what to do with her life and is also tempted to do humanitarian work in a different party so alia read the book it's one dollar as melissa was just saying before if you were here that it can it can change your whole life um but you know the question that puts people again again so ali has volunteer rangers he's 20 years old i would say to someone who's 40 years old or 50 years old also the ultimate question is not the outcomes you're going to achieve but what kind of person you want to be so if you do this for five years because you can't commit 100 years you can't commit 50 years okay who are you going to be after five years of doing this and sometimes with some kind of humanitarian work the answer is not good it's not going to make you a better person you're not going to learn anything you're not going to you're not going to benefit you know it's really just going to be a waste of your time and potential when you could have when you could have been reading a salast when you could have been reading cicero or something there could have been something better you were doing with those years and you know like really you know there's some forms of humanitarian work where you will not benefit in that way but you know if you can find humanitarian work or if you can create humanitarian workers that was what it was talking about was creating your own foundation getting your own donations doing your own thing where you are going to become a better person by helping others and through the struggle to make the world a better place then do it totally and i'll say this as cynical as i am about the humanitarian sector i could digress into a i could digress into a long critique of everything that's wrong with the humanitarian sector i'm much more cynical about university right so five years of humanitarian work versus five years in a university classroom as a student it's so easy for me to think that you're going to benefit much more from five years of humanitarian work for example in laos or cambodia and so on you know um it's so easy i can think of a million examples and it's so easy for me to think you will learn nothing and you'll become a worse person especially for those years from age 20 days 25 being being in a university classroom now you know um [Music] there are people who do humanitarian work and all they do is preach the bible and take orphans away from their parents and tell them how they're supposed to worship jesus there are lots of terrible examples of human terror and there were muslims doing all these things too spreading islam you know religious charity work so on and so forth and you know you might think there's no bad way to help a drug addict or to help an alcoholic yes there is you might think there's no bad way to run an orphanage yes there is there are a lot of horror stories you might think there's no bad way to run a farm an agricultural produ project to overcome starvation the horror stories are are there many more than the the the positive examples and mention so i wonder if i can find it here quickly enough but i made the video on my channel talking about somali mom so there's no reason why you're right now this is a cambodian name but if you search my channel for s-o-m-a-l-y i'll see if i get the link here that's a really instructive horror story about the way the charity sector works i mean it's partly an anecdote but a particular example um but it's it's you know partly this is only 11 minutes long it's a short but highly impactful video the way in which the sector is profoundly corrupt and profoundly evil there's the link if you look at the like s-o-m-a-l-y if you just search for that name within my channel um and the way in which humanitarian organizations will really fraudulently create the illusion of a problem and then fraudulently create the illusion that they're there's a solution and that if you pay them money they are the solution or they're offering the solution and the whole the whole thing is a fraud and people get hurt and nobody gets helped that is very real and that that happens even in agriculture it definitely happens in education like english language teaching education and the people being defrauded can can be the volunteers themselves can be the workers can be the english teachers themselves can be these people you know who is defrauded it's not always the donors who are being who are being defrauded so on and so forth um [Music] anyway uh sorry so one one question leads to another theo smith writes in and says quote he is 21 years old and thinking about studying stoicism what are your thoughts on this philosophy and what made you interested in dialysis so melissa i have a book on the shelf it may be with my spanish books about seneca do you think you can oh you're right that's why i don't have it okay so i can't show you the book i have a book that's on my phone um i guess i could fire up my phone um hopefully my phone doesn't start making it doesn't start making uh knowledge doesn't start making noise so look uh theo um stoicism regarded as a philosophy is complete horseshit there's no need to read it or study it if you're thinking of it in this sense as a discrete philosophy as a teaching as a book on the shelf however the politics of stoicism like the historical context what was going on who these people were politically what they were trying to accomplish now they feel that is worth reading that is worth understanding now this may seem like a strange comparison but i got to be honest with you guys if someone asked me about the lives of painters like let's say renaissance painters in europe i don't think the paintings are really worth looking at i don't in many cases some of those guys wrote autobiographies or wrote you know manifestos for the arts you know what they're doing as painters you know it's kind of similar like you know if you're looking at this as a philosophy in itself it's not that significant however very often um understanding the history understanding the politics understanding the struggle that artists was engaged in for example a struggle against the catholic church that this was a painter who in his way from a position of powerlessness was trying to challenge the ignorance of the society he lived in the power of the church that can be tremendously meaningful even though like the paintings they may just be naked women like a lot of those it's one sexy naked woman after another like it's just as dumb as playboy really um you know this is true of the renaissance it's true of many different periods of of art you know so i i'd make that that kind of comparison so i do have a book i'm reading now that is about seneca and the life of seneca who's a um uh stoic philosopher but reading about seneca is different than reading seneca if you're asking me what is the value of uh stoic philosophy as such my answer is zero it's nil it's null and void it's so it's of no uh no value at all um just get you the actual title of the book i have i haven't finished it but i have a positive so the title of the book is the greatest empire colon a life of a seneca and one of the few female authors who's been featured on the channel the author is emily wilson so is that the first female author we've covered on this channel covered positively yes so far i have a very positive impression of it uh we'll see you know um some of these questions are hilarious they don't know why it's hilarious uh ari asks quote if you could continue your studies at any university in the world what would your top three choices be what a great question not applicable not applicable not available there are zero there are zero positive options for me anywhere in the world and this has now been researched i don't know 43 this research for 20 years we had 20 years of research on this and sorry i've told this another before so i'm going to tell it really briefly i want so i've spoken to hundreds of university professors hundreds and hundreds it's not a low number of it might be over a thousand but hundreds of university professors have spoken to certainly over the years there was one university professor i spoke to he was actually rejecting a peer-reviewed article i'd submitted and it was rejected before it went to peer review and he wrote to me and said hey look i'm sorry the delay took so long but no we're not going to publish it but he said in effect like look it's a brilliant article it's a it's a good article i forget how flattering he was he said but we're not going to publish it for this stupid reason was this completely basically you said all we publish are the articles of people who are personal friends of ours friends we don't real like this isn't really peer reviewer it's not really based on that and i remember i wrote back to him and said well look i know how full of [ __ ] you are because the article was about cambodia you published this other article about cambodia and i know the guy who wrote it he doesn't know anything about cambodia he's never been to cambodia he's just a friend of yours so you published his article about cambodia you do publish articles about cambodia but you publish articles by completing the ramus when they're about cambodia you won't publish articles by someone who's actually devoted years their life to this and has lived there and studied the language and we're like this is the reality of your of your value you pretend this is pure review it's not it's just nepotism and by the way that wasn't the end of the conversation so credit then we kept dying but he knew i was right i mean it's rare or for someone but he was like yeah you know you're right they're not going to follow the article you know i forget i think that article eventually was published somewhere i did i did get it but anyway um anyway he he continued talking to me and the kind of the next thing he said was like well you know this university in london that he's at um london england you know it's a really bad university it's terrible in this way in that way you shouldn't come here to get a phd and and you know it's so much money you couldn't possibly and i wrote back i could get the email today but this is this is from memory i wrote back to my said don't talk to me about money don't say to me that it's about money are you [ __ ] kidding me no like we're talking about like 10 years of my life here right like let's not even pretend it's four years i've been a huge amount of time already put into this and still gonna be put into this nothing compares to sinking 10 years of your life into a project like the tuition fees here are immaterial and i said yeah in case you haven't guessed i wasn't born poor okay if there were a legitimate educational opportunity for me at your university or any university anywhere in the world i could ask my father to buy me a solid gold pen so i could sit down and write my phd thesis on a solid gold desk and it wouldn't make any [ __ ] difference in the world okay there is no amount of money that can buy me an education not at your university and not anywhere else and a gold pen and a cold desk won't help and the tuition went up like the problem is the university is bad the problem is you are bad you are a bad professor your publication is bad you're all like sorry but this is the context of the conversation we're talking about the profound way in which the whole system is corrupt the problem is the problem isn't cost the problem is you have no education to offer there is no positive opportunity there to be bought at any price you know again read my books if you want to hear more ranting about how terrible university education is the next book especially no more manifestos there's a really harsh condemnation of the university system is it as soon as this but hilariously and again i think this guy recognized that i was an unusually brilliant student or person or whatever he probably just appreciated the quality of the writing and this in this email christmas again he read one article he read this one so he knew something about what i was capable of in terms of research and writing and everything else so i i don't know how impressed he was with me but i take it he was impressed because he was continuing this conversation that was incredibly hostile and inimical to him was condemning him at his university but even though he had started this he had started by condemning his own university and saying was terrible as soon as they said this the next day we said he said oh well if your family has the money you should do it or if your parents can afford it oh you should sign up and look i'll talk to a professor we can get you in [Laughter] completely overturning what he had said himself before that it's a terrible universal place you shouldn't study and completely oversharing with that says oh you got the money oh we got a chalkboard we got an empty disk if you got the money like i could not have asked for a better indictment more of an you know unintentional parody of the reality of what higher education is so you asked me um you know what are my top three universities if there was even one i'd already be there you know i'd already be studying there i don't have one opportunity anywhere in the world and i've looked everywhere asia europe america canada okay admittedly i i didn't really look at africa like there were parts of the world i didn't investigate but a huge brother well including like poland including slovakia including small towns within canada including university of lethbridge like i looked under every stone i would say i don't know a single positive opportunity for myself i don't know a single puzzle of two females and guys in case you think it's just buddhist philosophy we're talking about or just anthropology or just politics you know melissa and i looked for a business school i was willing to get an mba i was going to get a master's in business i was wanting to study in that sense economics you know applied economics i was going to look at so many different possibilities and so many headaches and i you know it never occurred to me that the type of rot the type of corruption that i'd encountered in academia would be so widespread that it would include you know even even business school you know so on and so forth you know yes iowa x is shouting out arizona state i have heard the legends that the women are incredibly good looking at arizona state university but i i don't know if i believe it i don't know if it's actually reasonable to think that women would be better looking at one university than another i i perhaps perhaps merely arizona state university has a culture that causes the less attractive students to conceal themselves and the more attractive students to exhibit themselves that's believable to me but i don't know if i believe that arizona state university actually has more attractive women than any other university but maybe i'm wrong there are factors i i can't imagine involved here all right just uh glancing over um uh so look we have questions about nihilism but guys there's a whole playlist on nihilism we've had many long profound discussions about nihilism and again you can read both books i don't know which one which ones i mean look i'll be honest this is a short book i mean you know it doesn't announce itself as a philosophy of nihilism but it really is giving you the philosophy of what it means to be a distant intellectual to be someone who is um someone whose values profoundly challenge the values of the society they're born into whether that's because you're a nihilist or not someone who wants to change the world and then how to live with that how to you know uh how to move how to move forward from there so yeah there's a lot of practical analysis there but hey as i said neither of my books repeat what's found on my youtube channel no more manifestos is not a recapitulation of uh the videos on my youtube channel already here and noor is future of an illusion they're they're both genuinely original books the original material that way but there's a long playlist of videos um talking about uh nihilism oliver is in the crowd oliver can you name you don't have to give the link can you name a particular video i did on nihilism that you recommend especially it's from memory i know but so many yeah right now some of them are like artistic statements about nihilism rather than oh right nihilism colon the only philosophy you can really live by for an introduction you know that's a pretty good one i have another one called the definition of nihilism common political philosophy what about santa claus melissa says is it in the title okay yeah um i you know i talked about it with oliver not too long ago i do think that my early videos about nihilism are kind of too friendly they're they're making it a little bit too easy on you and you could complain my more recent ones are too abrasive that's possible too right it's possible i'm now going too hard at the paint on that but anyway uh you know um but it is true i don't think my my very first videos about nihilism are the best ones i think oh nihilism colon living as if santa claus isn't watching wow cheese deep cuts that's more than that's closer to five years ago so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yep okay guys so in wrapping up this video i'm just going to say uh we opened with a discussion of niala and not a discussion we open the discussion of nostalgia and what i've now termed you know toxic nostalgia and i do think that um part of the problem with nostalgia in perpetuating our own childishness or perpetuating our own teenagers you know our own immaturity with reference to more of a teenage phase of intellectual development is just the lack of awareness that there's something better on the horizon there's something better to struggle for there's something better to work towards and what is that something better i'm talking about it's not having more money it's not having a fancier car it's not a more expensive pair of shoes it's not sleeping with more beautiful women it's not i'm not that's not what i mean by a better life guys it's not living in a better apartment you know that there is actually a better person you can be there's a better person you can become over the horizon you can't see that version yet you can't imagine that person yet you you genuinely cannot imagine the better person you can become and you will become if only you try and if only you're willing to fail you know again and again and again and so you know the price of nostalgia the price of justifying the things you enjoyed when you were mature the price of you know the vindication of the stupidity of your youth with the stupidity of your adulthood is that you're not looking you know you're not looking to that further horizon you're not thinking about what's possible and then discovering possibilities that for you heretofore had been inconceivable unthought of by things you you things you didn't think were possible or impossible things you you never you never dreamt of you never you'd never conceived of you know um this is you know shutting off the yearning and restlessness that is absolutely part of the experience of youth that ironically enough nostalgic middle-aged people are trying to recapture they're trying to recapture that spirit that feeling that sense that they could have been a policeman they could have been a farmer that could have been anyone they could become somebody different they could do they could do something daring they could challenge themselves to do something they now find terrifying and become a different person as a result you know we use this term edgy today mostly in a in a sarcastic way in a caustic way you know an edgy teenager or somebody doing or saying something edgy well yeah when you're young enough and ignorant enough everything is edgy every trivial thing is edgy always remember this this is a nothing moment but it was so telling to me so we we used to spend time in the south of france because my daughter was connected to the southern france my ex-wife's family is connected to south of france and there were a lot of very rich people in the southern france there are poor people too but there are millionaires around and i remember was just walking past um it's in a very rich neighborhood it was a very expensive cafe and there were two girls i know 19 year old girls there are two female friends and it was just so telling you could absolutely read it on their face and you could also tell from their clothing and so on these were incredibly wealthy girls who had been raised in such a wealthy family and by the way there was a yacht harbor right there like probably their parents were on the yacht and they were just so excited to sit down in a cafe and talk with each other without parental supervision without you know some kind of caretaker you know or security guard so they're like oh wow you know like oh we get to order for ourselves you know what i mean and i get that i mean especially with wealthy people a lot of them have been you know put in this ultra conformist position where other people are taking care of them you know just the the level of risk involved in walking alone to a cafe to not have someone drive you there or not have someone order for you or something you know i get that when you're young enough and you're ignorant enough and you're sheltered enough right even that has a kind of thrill has a kind of excitement to it of pushing into the unknown right what nostalgia is ultimately is this attempt to keep yourself fettered to the ignorance of youth so that you can have the enjoyments of youth and you can't you know you can't cheating on your wife is never going to make you happy cheating on your boyfriend cheating on your husband it's not you know and i was gonna sound ridiculous but you can talk you can talk to people about this people who talk about the excitement of buying their first car it's very alien to me even if it was the worst car in the world it was your first car you were so excited you were so proud and it probably was scary too your first time driving on the highway your first time driving to a new place you never you didn't know where you were going and driving into the unknown you know well guess what you could never have that again either you know it's it's all kind it's all based on ignorance and fear and childishness and stupidity right you know you can't have that which you have to be looking at what you have to be aspiring towards you have to be motivated by is something over that horizon is a better person you can be is you know again look back at those experiences as stepping stones if you can maybe they were tragedies and heartbreaking like for real i get that hopefully to some extent they were stepping stones preparing you now to have different aspirations different ambitions you know ambitions that cannot possibly revolve around video games comic books cartoons pornography from my perspective i can't even be downhill skiing i'm sorry maybe downhill skiing was very thrilling for you when you were 14 years old maybe you know like about your first time being on skis like your first time driving a car it can't be about fancy cars you know i mean the meaningful life i'm sorry but it it definitionally leads you away from all of these meaningless things and all these challenge things and what it's leading you towards or what it is you're going to chase over that horizon definitionally also that's something you can't imagine yet what will make you happy what will be meaningful and rewarding for you as an adult it's different from what will be fascinating alluring uh to you as a child in many ways you know like i've already given examples here playing sonic the hedgehog too as a boy or just seeing a beautiful woman or what have you you know the way that these things can can thrill you okay so i've reflected on many different aspects of how you know happiness as an adult a meaningful life as an adult is different but i'm going to add just one more at the end of this video okay one of the differences about being an adult is responsibility as opposed to irresponsibility one of the differences as an adult is caring about consequences one of the differences as an adult is thinking long term thinking about where you're going to be what you're going to be doing and who you're going to be just five years from now and as soon as you start thinking that way the limited number of hours you have when you're really alert because we're all awake for the sake okay let's say we're awake for the same number of hours a day we're alive for the same number of hours a day you may sleep 12 hours you may sleep eight hours the number of hours you have per day in which you can really be productive and if you have a two-week vacation from work right the number of hours you can be productive during those two weeks that's that's limited too okay as soon as you are thinking in this more adult way of taking on responsibilities of having ambitions of being aware that there's this other person you're gonna be just five years from now and you're fashioning them you're forming them with the decisions you make today it becomes inconceivable to you and it becomes repugnant to you to go on living the way you did when you were a teenager it becomes inconceivable to you becomes repugnant to you to chain yourself to childish pleasures to wrap yourself in a kind of voluntary ignorance so you can go on enjoying childish pleasures and if you still actually own the comic books for either you still actually own the video games you're only going to feel a sense of revulsion and remorse towards them and looking at them and saying this is what my life used to consist of this was my happiness this was my joy this was what consumed me and yes yes y'all i think there are a lot of men i don't think it is talked about on youtube i think men don't talk about unju i think there were a lot of men who got to look back at the women they were sleeping with whether it was a monogamous girlfriend or whether they were cheating on one girlfriend to gina but let's say you know the women they had affairs with the women they pursued and the way in which those affairs utterly consumed them and then who they were and what they were left with afterwards you know there are going to be men who really they really need to regret that they really need to look back on the meaninglessness of that and start thinking about new directions and new meaning in their lives i think for middle-aged women it's just even more taboo middle-aged woman who cheats on her husband sleeping with a younger man and then she's left with these same kind of regrets or reflections even if she hates her husband by the way doesn't mean her husband's a good guy doesn't mean i like her husband i'm just saying you know no matter how horrible her husband is you know you live you live your life in the pursuit of these short-term self-centered selfish pleasures and now you're left with these these unanswered questions right certainly the erotic impulse that as i've described at length is also involved in this kind of toxic nostalgia it leads to the same regrets and the same demand for new horizons new mandate new mission new ambition and there's this new person there's this different person there's this other person that you are going to be um [Music] i think it's hard to visualize what we mean by responsibility when you're talking about the life of an artist talking about a creative artist talking about a youtuber talking about a writer you know take the time to think about it it'll get less vague right i write books okay how many more books i'm going to write i have some other books i'd like to write in my mind right now you know i'd like to publish children's story books too not just books for adults um i make youtube videos you may have noticed i'm not sure what creative arts i'm going to go into it seems like it's not going to be painting or drawing for now i've really considered that in the past there's creative work i i want to do you know what is the role of responsibility in being a creative artist and being a creative person it might be easy to talk about responsibility when we're talking about humanitarian work people are starving you want to take responsibility and give them food constant responsibility is very clear all right it takes a little bit more philosophizing to think about what it means to have a sense of responsibility as a painter as a poet as a writer as a youtuber right but it's very real and i think it's more real and it's more important in the way it changes and informs your life here and now like even if you're a dentist like you you don't have any creative art in your life understanding what responsibility means for the life of an artist or the life of a youtuber life of a writer has a lot to do with the life of an adult any adult and frankly what the meaning of life for you means on a day-to-day basis talked to so many different people on youtube over the years who have lived in thailand six months one year or two years sometimes people live there for five years and they knew nothing about the politics and history of thailand there was a revolution there was a coup d'etat they wrote a new constitution during the years they went out during exactly the time that they were living there every day and i know they were there like they were uploading to youtube or whatever there's proof you were in the country when these momentous political events happened and i know i've i've lived in thailand enough to know not only was that stuff on the tv news and the radio and the newspaper they were literally loudspeakers in thailand and listen i don't remember that we were there yeah so at different times there's different yeah but there can be literally loudspeakers blaring letting you know what's going on what yeah just say i found that interesting because i had been in china which is yeah that's right it's so much more subtle in china yeah in america people say like this this is this horrible dictatorship um but like actually being in thailand and hearing these government announcements on the loudspeaker right right right right right right right i wasn't expecting that yeah yeah yeah yeah um okay good good suggestion from oliver i'm just gonna give the the link to that i asked oliver what he'd recommend for a uh for a for a major video on on nihilism oh that's an old one okay well if you say so uh nihilism colon religious ideology versus political ideology give the give the link for that for what's worth um that's cool it's all over it's back um no let's go if i watched all these videos getting help maybe i'd agree with them maybe i maybe i wouldn't yeah that's true anyway it's funny political propaganda in china is much more subtle but yeah in thailand it's not that's like how did you disregard these political conditions how do you disregard these momentous changes in this juvenile that were happening while you were there and you know to some extent if you're a youtuber you are a creative artist even if your art is the monologue i hope you've been enjoying this three-hour work of art i've been creating here for you guys you know of course it matters of course it matters of course having a sense of responsibility if you are a painter living in thailand while the revolution is going on outside of your window what does being a responsible person mean i'm telling you this like for real the revolution never stops guys it's happening all the time no matter where you are if you'll just let yourself see it i knew a guy very interesting guy he had lived and worked in myanmar now i was considering living and working in myanmar i never did you know i lived in cambodia laos thailand but you know myanmar didn't so i was asking him questions and about the political context he lived in itself and he told me this story it was before he started work i think you have to understand the geometry of this just just slightly so um a lot of shops are like this this was a coffee shop that had a staircase leading up from the sidewalk just about half a floor so you know you're not on the second floor but you're above the sidewalk so there's the road there's the sidewalk and you have a little staircase going up to a little kind of patio where there are some tables and he was sitting there drinking coffee from a cup and saucer and thinking about what he was doing at work that day and a tank rolled down the street in front of him a full military tank you know it's a combat tank it's not a crowd control tank it's not a police tank it's a it's a combat tank and he just stopped i think without being aware of it he stopped drinking his coffee like he has the coffee up to his mouth like this or something and the tank turns and points the barrel of the gun straight at him you know and again because his table is a little bit raised off the the ground right i think you can imagine the height of the elevation of a tank and if the barrel this is a you know this is a bullet that would completely destroy the building he's sitting in front of it wouldn't just kill him and um you know he said obviously he couldn't see himself but he said you know the expression on his face was one of absolute terror like i think he was just transfixed with terror he didn't describe further what the expression his face was but he remained silent he didn't say anything or screaming he didn't get up and run away as as he told the story to me he didn't jump on the ground or i mean another way to respond is to get out of the way of the bullet or something and then the um the top of the tank opens up and it's this burmese teenager inside who's laughing his ass off and he was he found it so hilarious the expression on this guy's face and the bernie sanders don't worry about i was just joking like speaking in burmese obviously you know the guy is left but he's like he's laughing so hard like his sides are like can barely talk or like he's really you know totally a busting on laughing damn momentous political events are unfolding in front of you sometimes this is made as obvious as being held at gunpoint by a combat tank when you are minding your own business drinking a cup of coffee normally it is not i had one friend one fan of the channel who was in minneapolis during the riots there so there's now about two years ago right the death of george floyd the riots that ensued okay i was writing to her saying well look you know okay let me put it this way i was interested in buying an airplane ticket and going and staying in a hotel to be there and witness history as it unfolded now i can reflect now to what extent i do or don't regret that i i didn't have that experience obviously a once in a lifetime you know experience okay yeah events like that that's more like a tank rolling down the road you know what i mean okay something is happening here all right but you know beneath the veneer of the conformist monotony that dominates our adult lives all right the underlying problems and the the the voice that's screaming out for a solution the need for innovation it's there all the time all right if you're an artist of any kind if you're an intellectual of any kind whether you write whether you make youtube videos okay it means that your art is reflecting that silent scream it means that you see the revolution that is happening or you see the revolution that needs to happen all the time all right before the tanks roll on the street or even if the tanks never all rolled down the street that you are seeing and you are responding to the tensions the contradictions the evil in your society that may be just as easily ignored as the slaughterhouses that are slitting the throats of cows and pigs everywhere that may be just as easily ignored as the hospitals that are performing circumcisions making disabled people out of infants boys and girls that are having 60 of the nerve endings and their penises and vaginas cut off forever due to this barbaric religion we're saddled with all three of them are barbaric by the way christianity judaism islam i'm not making any excuses for any of them they're all carrying out circumcisions invisibly right now how many circumcisions happened in your country today and tomorrow okay there is a silent scream here that something has to change that somebody has to jilt us out of the darkness of the dark ages and light a lamp and lead the way ahead the horror that is 21st century democracy this utterly phony utterly corrupt system of democracy utterly phony utterly corrupt court and justice system we have oh isn't it easy to point the finger at myanmar oh you know in myanmar they don't have real democracy isn't it easy to point the finger at communist china or at cambodia today cambodia is not communist but it's some kind of crazy dictatorship you know post-communist just barely post-communist you know horrible dictatorship okay you know isn't it easy to point the finger at iran take a look at the society you're living in right now how democratic is it really how different are the institutions in your life compared to communist china if you live in china you'll be shocked at how similar life is there and it's similar they have no democracy at all we have practically none okay being in a university in china is very much the same as being in the university of the united states of america why is it that we have a communist university system or that they have a capitalist one neither neither of us have any [ __ ] new ideas since we came out of the dark ages right there's a crucial terrible need yes sure to change the police you know uh this is the specific issue with sure to perform the police to reform parliament to reform congress to reform the senate to reform elections to reform election funding to reform the media sure i was gonna say to reform the media to reform social media freedom of speech this is newly talked about with twitter melissa mentioned the supreme court yeah from my perspective the whole legal system including something like the supreme court the constitution law how that functions there are these you know terrible needs that you have to be sensitive to that you have to feel responsible for in your life as an intellectual in your in your life as an artist right and that kind of responsibility right it's not as easy to just identify it's not as easy to mentate to think through clearly as the kind of responsibility you have you say oh look there is an earthquake people are starving let's get some money and hand out food you know to starving people i'm making this video you know i really do feel that we live in a world that's starving for democracy what's what's happening in myanmar okay it [ __ ] me up all right we live in a world that is starving for democracy and it's not just myanmar it's not just hong kong and we live in a world of mediocre middle-aged conformists who are not willing to stand up and fight a revolution we're not willing to lift a finger we're not even willing to walk down the street to city hall for the sake of democracy in their own homeland okay and in the same way that being vegan involves a kind of commitment we say look i accept that not everybody has what it takes not everybody can be vegan but in a sense i'm going to be vegan for you i am going to stand up and do the right thing in place of all the people who should but can't and won't even if that's just because they're too stupid or too immoral or whatever it is okay okay okay some people can't be vegan but i can all right the role of a dissident intellectual and the role of a creative artist involves you stepping up you taking on that responsibility and that burden because maybe other people can't but if you can you must that's your responsibility and i'd like to think if you watch my youtube videos and you read my books once you see it it's something you can't unsee and then you also will feel this terrible sense of responsibility i do to make the world a better place i remember a black politician saying a black american politician saying that he always felt a connection to the jewish people in america and he told this whole long story about when he was a teenager um a particular elderly jewish shopkeeper who helped him and several particular jewish people who really helped him in america when america was very segregated and most white people were very mean to him and you knew these particular jewish people and jewish business people who really really helped him really encouraged him to get a university education and things too that he had these positive connections to jewish people and that he carried that the rest of his life as as an african-american and went on to do politics you know guys nobody from myanmar has ever done anything nice for me not even one conversation all right nobody from hong kong seriously i used to live in hong kong i have nothing good to say about the people of myanmar people hong kong i have nothing good to say about the people of cambodia either you know like i don't feel any kind of connection you know or or debt of gratitude there i don't and i know for most of you you don't either maybe a few of you do maybe a few of you you had a burmese landlord or you had a cambodian landlord it was really it's possible some of you do feel some connection because you've known some cambodian people right but i mean you know my point is this obligation you have it isn't just to your own homeland it isn't just to people you like it's the same obligation to the people you despise and to the people who despise you back this really is a question of the future of the planet it really is a question of the future of the world and that's the burden i live with and the fundamental question i'm asking on this channel again again is what about you