Am I Trying to Ruin Your Life? @TkyoSam @Vegan Gains etc.

i'd like to begin this live stream by inviting you to ask yourself a hypothetical question that's not too terribly hypothetical what if you decided that from now on starting tomorrow every single email you send you will read aloud and discuss in a youtube video if you send an email to your mom you send an email to your ex-boyfriend ex-girlfriend whatever it is you have email about work you're gonna take the time to sit down narrate it read it out loud to a camera and you know while you're doing that in the youtube video you can add some commentary you can add some reflections on what you were thinking on your mind why you sent this email what will be the impact on your life i think for one thing most of you would probably send fewer email messages you would probably really think through whether or not what you had to say was meaningful enough to put pen to paper so to speak is this meaningful enough to waste this other person's time with is it meaningful enough to waste my time with to impose on an audience even if only a few people in your audience see it how about facebook messages how about instagram messages right one of the most common comments i get is of people complaining that i take things too seriously this is one of those simple ideas in our culture that people are very reluctant to unpack and examine and take seriously what do you mean what do you mean i take things too too seriously what's what's the counter posed virtue you're presuming that i'd be a better person i'd live a better life the world would be a better place if i didn't take things seriously what's the opposite of taking things seriously if you were going to narrate publicly on youtube each and every email you sent everyone you would take that email correspondence more seriously now i do live my life in a way where frankly i think i could make a youtube video about every single email i send to people what i write to people is really meaningful it really matters i really am writing with very serious intent i have a viewer who's in his last year of high school and he's been writing to me about advice about various things including just his struggles to quit video games his struggles to kind of improve himself intellectually find meaning and purpose and motivational life just just down-to-earth struggles his frustration with his teachers and his classmates in high school let me tell you something i could make a youtube video where i'm just reading out my replies to this guy in his last year in high school every single piece of advice i've given him i could read here for an audience and you know somebody might appreciate it somebody might be able to make use of it this is part of the puzzle of the internet in the 21st century i see people giving writing advice on the internet how to be a better writer how to write a better book can you imagine anything more deeply personal unique and specific than to criticize someone's writing and tell them how to be a better writer how could that possibly be you know commodified mass manufactured and distributed you know on on youtube or on any other platform how can you make a podcast out of that so it's useful for 100 people a thousand people or a million people you can't right there's a deeply personal deeply specific thing but then the flip side of that culturally is that how people perceive what i'm doing here on youtube right there's this very strange discomfort and you know i really do understand it when people look at what i'm doing in criticizing others offering advice to others and they say well man you take life way too serious i can't believe you're taking it this this seriously you know what is it i'm taking seriously i'm taking seriously individual people ruining their own lives i mean from my perspective when i'm talking to an individual like tiki or sam when i'm talking to an individual like vegan gains i am trying to save their life and i have no hope whatsoever that i'm going to help them i have no delusion that i could improve their life or influence them positively in any way whatsoever another great example of this in a youtube video that reached a pretty large audience on my channel the advice i gave to nicotto avocado made a couple videos reflecting on the situation he's in the background he comes from and it may sound ridiculous but if you go back and dig guys he knows me he knows this youtube channel from whatever it is seven years ago eight years ago now uh we're not such strangers we're not even six degrees of separation apart you know there are ways in which nicato and i are linked i have no delusion whatsoever that nicoto avocado personally can can benefit from my critique from my advice right but somebody in the audience can and it may not be someone who is as obese or as delusional as nick gutto of kato it may be someone who's not even 10 percent as damaged and messed up as they got avocado i mean the discussions i have on my channel about the importance of quitting drugs quitting alcohol quitting video games living a really sober highly motivated meaningful life a lot of the fan mail i get it's from people who already are living that way right but uh [Laughter] uh it would be too much to say they're tempted uh to go back to drugs to go back to alcohol to go back to video games they live a life where their own brother their own sister their own work colleagues everyone is always pressuring them to instead live this more mindless more self-indulgent life they have to live kind of constantly prepared to fend off other people who want them to drink alcohol who want them to smoke marijuana i want them to play video games we want them to live this more more mindless life and there's this sense in which watching the videos helps them rehearse the arguments they need to have again and again again it lets them be better prepared uh more eloquent better spoken when dealing with that conflict so they kind of watch this to reinforce the commitment they already have to reinforce their sense of commitment to doing the right thing because the right thing to do and to practice uh going through the process of explaining that to a hostile hostile family members hostile friends hostile colleagues so you know this is how i live and this is why and frankly there's no need for you to waste your time trying to trying to change my mind so yeah um i'm not doing this for myself you know i'm not and i'm also not doing it for or sam i'm not doing it for vegan gains in the case of nicado avocado i certainly don't have the the delusion that i could help him but you know yes uh engaging in this kind of critique it does help somebody now i've had to explain this to other youtubers who were literally weeping on camera or breaking down sobbing and weeping on camera asking me to delete the videos i've made and where i have to sit here and say no you know i am not moved by your personal heartbreak i'm not moved by your sorrow i'm not moved that this hurts your feelings you know this is something really important and really meaningful and this needs to be on the internet for everyone who can benefit from it everyone can see it and sorry i mean it's extraordinary for people to get on skype and break down weeping in front of my eyes on camera live more commonly i'll get a snide email or something from a person indicating how much it's hurt them how much it's hurt their feelings how they've broken down frankly i'd say um the response from tko sam in particular and the response from vegan gains in particular it's kind of a mix of the two types um i've i've heard tequila sam speaking in his live streams about how much this critique has impacted him emotionally how much this has hurt him from his perspective how much it's harmed him right um [Music] well there's a very interesting parallel between the situation tiki or sam is in right now and my pretense as stated that i'm making these videos i'm engaging in this performance art as if i were trying to save his life there's parallel between that and the situation of a young man named laoshu 55 000. if you don't know who lawsuit 55000 was you can search within my own youtube channel you can see my videos about it um he is now deceased there were crazy conspiracy theories on the internet about what had killed him uh how and why he'd uh he'd come to his his final end the truth is he died of the number one most common cause of death in the united states america the most common cause of dementia many other chronic health conditions and problems he died because of cholesterol he died because of atherosclerosis right and then the knock-on effects for your brain your body your heart circulation of blood right he died frankly because he ate a non-vegan diet now it's interesting to know that when he died this he was a popular youtuber about shoot 55 000. if you've never heard of him it's fine but he was he'd have a large audience there were all these people in his audience creating crazy conspiracy theories by claiming oh no it couldn't have been a heart attack it couldn't have been cholesterol could have been atherosclerosis because quote he was vegetarian close quote a very interesting example of kind of mass hypnosis these people convince themselves that he'd been a vegetarian all along there were some youtube videos of him eating a particular meal in a vegetarian restaurant where he went to a vegetarian restaurant he never was vegetarian he never said he was vegetarian and on the contrary if you just listen to the videos in which he was talking about his own health problems because he'd been hospitalized repeatedly before you know i've just just note a lot of people they have a heart attack and drop dead without getting a warning right he'd had mornings he'd been hospitalized a couple times but if you'd watch those videos which he was talking about his heart problems it was very obvious that he was someone he was completely non-vegetarian he was eating deep fried chicken from fast food restaurants the nature of his diet he was slim he was a good looking slender attractive guy in case you think he was eating fried chicken uh you know and uh and was hundreds of pounds overweight like to give sam no not at all okay well after laoshu fifty five thousand died tkyo-san made a couple videos weeping on camera talking about how they've been friends how he know him and how how sad he was to have his his friend die and to know that he'd never speak to his friend again okay tell me something sam did you do everything you could to save his life here's another way to put it did you do anything at all to save his life did you lift one finger to save his life no sorry melissa and i my girlfriend melissa's off off camera here you know melissa and i we've both had friends colleagues family members who've had serious health problems caused by a non-vegan diet and i normally talk about veganism in terms of ethics in terms of ecology in terms of doing the right thing because the right thing to do but in the context of this video we're just talking about the shockingly shallow health side of the equation the health consequences for living this way and guys look if we were talking about drugs and alcohol which we will just a moment we're going to get into drugs and alcohol i think the single most important reason to be sober to refuse to drink alcohol has nothing to do with your health right like the health reasons are relatively shallow they're relatively but now but sometimes we get the point we got to talk just about health you know again out the refusal to drink alcohol it comes down to doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do comes down to the value of your mental clarity of your acumen your sharpness and then what you're going to do with that um you know as opposed to living in a mindless and adult and distracted state under the effects of alcohol under the effects of marijuana so on and so forth but sure sometimes in some contexts we have to just talk about the health side of the art well you know what sam you were in a position to save laoshu's life you were you could have given him the one piece of advice that would have saved his life and that was blindingly obvious after his earlier hospitalizations or like it's good advice even if he'd never been hospitalized but he got that warning right so you knew what his problem was you knew what the cost costs were you knew we were gambling with life and death and you had a period of several years in which you could have said to him passionately what you need to do is not lower the cholesterol in your diet you need to eliminate cholesterol from diet you need to start eating a zero cholesterol diet today zero cholesterol zero alcohol zero cigarettes etc you know and it's not just the difference between life and death it's not just that in bloodshed for a thousand cases that's it i mean in some ways he's lucky because you can be hospitalized with mental and physical problems for years you can be unbelievable sorrow and suffering and bankrupt your whole family the united states of america the cost of medical care is tremendous he could have been he could have ended in a much worse way for him than it did at least he had a sudden uh death you know so for some people some of the time it's going to be the difference between life and death but for the rest of us most of us most of the time right it's the difference between a life worth living and a life that's not worth living now i've already indicated um [Music] by the way some some interesting comments coming in i'm seeing your comments come in and i'm happy to reply to them um just kind of on a roll here so but i will thanks and if you have a second hit the thumbs up button and by all means if you want to comment sooner or later i'm happy to have you guys uh join the discussion now look uh tko sam looks like he's gonna be dead within the next five years right laoshu 55 000 didn't outwardly on the surface level he didn't look like he was about the time next five years if you knew his medical history if you knew about those earlier hospitalizations if you looked at his blood work as we now say if you looked at a blood sample and his cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis it probably were science but at first glance if you just looked at a photo of him on instagram right he doesn't look like he's going to die in the next five years okay henia mania my fellow youtuber okay do you think henya is gonna be alive five years now i don't i don't okay and i made videos trying to help her and trying to address the problems i mean she's slender she's not you know it's nothing it's nothing that obvious right has a lot to do with drugs that story okay now a really extreme example it's already in the title of this video but it's worth thinking about how about richard how about vegan gains you know obviously if you just look at a photograph he puts on instagram i believe he's been banned from instagram so it's hypothetical but you just look at a still image of the guy you think oh he's not so badly off he's doing well for himself you know whatever he's an amateur bodybuilder you know he's doing good yeah you know outright death is one possibility it's possible all these people they just won't be alive five years from now right but it's also possible they will be trapped in a life that's not worth living and a life that they can no longer escape from they can no longer extricate themselves from right because the damage has been done it's so bad they're so so far gone and so forth right so [Laughter] point is this sam right there was a time when you could have saved laoshu's life and you didn't okay now there's more than one reason why right it's very hard for you to tell someone else to drink alcohol when you're still getting drunk every weekend yourself sorry what did i say fact-checking department of directors all right it's very hard to put yourself in the position of counseling someone else to completely quit drinking alcohol to be a complete t-total alert when you yourself are still drinking alcohol every week right it's very hard for someone like tkyo sam to counsel someone else and say look you've got to take your health seriously you have atherosclerosis you have heart disease and you're already having consequences because by the way the blood circulates in your brain the blood vessels in your brain are much more fine and delicate than the blood vessels in your heart you're already having serious consequences for your cognitive health your ability to use your brain you're this is really really serious you have to get on a zero cholesterol diet which by the way means a vegan diet there are only two cholesterol-free diets one is vegan and you could be a vegan who drinks honey because honey i believe has no that's it it's the only non-vegan cholesterol so you know you basically need to adopt a vegan well it's obviously very hard for tko sam to preach that when he doesn't practice what he preaches right when he's he's not in a position that's that's one aspect the other aspect is sam you never tried to save his life because you didn't care and these two aspects are linked it's really [ __ ] hard to admit to yourself that you don't care if your best friend lives or dies and it's even harder to look in the [ __ ] mirror and admit yourself that you don't care if you die you don't care if you're killing yourself you don't care about your own life or death you don't care about the consequences for yourself let alone someone else let alone your your best friend all these people um talk about vegan gains in specific again i could talk about henya mania again okay richard speaking gains his first name if you had a son would you want him to be living the way you're living right now the excuses you're making for your own drug habit would you accept that from your own son or your own daughter if you were responsible for a child this excuse is good enough for you is it good enough for someone else someone else hypothetically you you care about right hennya again it's very hypothetical not none of these people are ever gonna have kids um henya if you had a daughter would you accept these excuses how would you what would your judgment of your own daughter be how would you judge her if she were living the way you're living now the whole thing the the drugs and just the lifestyle is it put together as one one sum total you know um why is it that these excuses are good enough for you but they wouldn't be good enough for someone else they're not good enough for someone you you care about right now obviously if tko sam had a son who was living the same way tequila did of course he would be ashamed of course he would be but he's not ashamed of himself um i'm gonna read to you an email think about how your own life would be different if you if you read every email you ever got email a sent to someone that i perceive as a drug addict but he doesn't perceive himself this way so i'm just going to use his first name his first name is adam but he is a public figure he's published books he has a website and when he wrote to me he was just coming out with his next book about ketamine so ketamine if you don't know it can be in a hospital setting in an emergency medicine setting a legitimate painkilling drug used so that people can go into surgery however it's also used as a street drug it's also used as a recreational drug it's used as a kind of hallucinogen kind of hallucinogenic experience and it's now being marketed as a therapeutic recreational drug it's obviously something i don't sympathize with and don't believe it okay but to be blunt we are talking about people using ketamine in order to get high in order to experience a hallucinogenic state a certain kind of change in their mood and perception of the world we're not talking about its use as a painkiller for surgery anyway he writes to me i'm not going to read his whole email but he writes to me and he opens the first sentence of his email is that he has been taking ketamine for four years so from my perspective he's been a drug addict for four years and if you guys haven't looked into it i know ketamine is not on the top of the uh rotation on the news these days ketamine is not talked about the same way cocaine and fentanyl and so on are talked about it's a serious drug it's a serious drug addiction it is okay and it brings with it all the tell-tale signs of drug addiction including developing tolerance where you need higher and higher doses to get the same height it's a real drug it's a real form of of drug addiction anyway he says adam's first email to me he says that he does agree with the criticism of ketamine i've presented in my my videos that ketamine is not a drug that actually helps depression that actually helps solve psychological problems however he says quote the cause of most people's depression is the environment and they can't easily change this close quote so he he basically says that he thinks people have real problems in real life that they're depressed about but it's fundamentally easier to just start using this drug every day you know it's easier to get high than to actually solve your problems in life and as mentioned he's he's publishing a book which is basically encouraging people to be a drug addict like him you know so this is my reply i have a couple emails done but they're pretty they're pretty brief and they're they're pretty blunt say to him [ __ ] i wasn't happy with my life i moved to laos i learned the lotion language i learned a whole hell of a lot more than that what kind of condition was i in five years later in what way did i benefit grow or change from that challenge take a look at yourself adam you've got a drug habit you've got brain damage and you've got the excuses you've made for it where are you going to be five years from now dead you're going to be a brain damaged dried up pathetic shell of a man just five years from now like all the other prescription psych-mad junkies and what condition could you be in today if you'd made a very different decision four years ago and if you'd moved to laos learned lotion did humanitarian work did some kind of research etc what kind of man would you be today that man will never exist it's already game over for you you're trapped in a living death and you don't even know it yet and by the way i do not regard moving to laos as a positive example it's a terrible idea and a negative example but it's still better than what you've signed up for so i'll give you guys the same link that i included at the end of that email so i gave him a link to this uh article on my own blog and i just say uh i'm being sincere in that final part i'm not holding myself up as a standard of excellence saying hey look at what a great person i am because i went to laos and did humanitarian work and studied history and languages and research i am saying it was stupid it was a failure in some ways it ruined my life like in some ways it was a disaster like in some ways this is a really negative example of how to cope with your problems go and do humanitarian research and learn a new language right in some ways it really is and if you click and read that article i mean you don't have to do it now you could you can read it later you'll see i'm not fronting on that i really am self-critical and you know i really am very open in talking about that as a failure in my life not as a success i'm not you know presenting success as failure failure success i'm not misrepresenting strength as weakness or weakness of strength but nevertheless you know if you're really unhappy with your life and you say you know you know you say something's got to change and you feel as he says that you can't actually change your environment i'm saying no you can change your environment if you want to you can move to saudi arabia deal with a whole different set of problems you won't be tempted by alcohol living in saudi arabia if you want to you can move to malaysia or indonesia if you want to right now you can go to ukraine and sign up and join the army and fight the war you can really make a difference in your life and a lot of those decisions talk about changing your environment once you're in ukraine fighting that war a lot of your decisions are being made for you right so you know these really are options i mean i'm not being snide i'm not being shallow about it and you know drug addiction drug use self-indulgence it's an understatement to say it's the easy way out i mean i think the emphasis i want to put on it here is not that it's the easy way out but that it is the way out it is death it is going to be the end of your life and it's going to be the end of your capacity to lead a meaningful life this is going to bring you to a state where you are locked in a kind of living death if not just literally dead it's the way out easy or not and look sorry just to reiterate even though i regard what i did in laos in cambodia as a failure and it's very sad like it's it's a personal tragedy for me not a personal triumph okay okay okay what did that set me up to do with the rest of my life once the tragedy's over right you lived through that tragedy right and now here i am now and i get to be this i get to be the person i am today right what if i'd spent five years as a drug addict what if i would spend five years as an alcoholic binge eater like tko sam right okay what what then what do i do with the rest of my life after that right like either i'm just gonna die or it as i say it sets you up for this kind of living death this unbelievably you know hard to endure uh excuse for a life so his his response is telling and a lot of people in the comment section not not you wonderful people right now we have 42 people but now 44 people if you have a second hit the thumbs up it'll help more people join the conversation that's great not your little people but i do get this kind of defensive offensive comment so you're gonna hear back right now people just try to attack me you'll see he gets into just insulting me as if that's gonna solve the problem like the worst thing you can say i've had people respond to this kind of thing by saying like yeah well you got divorced from your first wife or something like your your first marriage yeah yeah you're still a drug addict i mean chico sam could do that yo sam could resp i could totally see that he could respond to my criticisms of him on youtube by then making a video like denouncing my relationship with mac's wife like put together a hatchet job on that several people have already done that on youtube like trying to make it out that my divorce or my first wife was some terrible terrible thing you know people have tried to create gossip out of things in my life where there's really no basis for any gossip but you know like if you did that like yeah okay but at best that's irrelevant now at worst it really reveals something even darker about you like this it's not just irrelevant but you know like we haven't solved any of your problems we haven't addressed you haven't addressed or overturned any of my criticisms or warnings by in this way you know denouncing me so on and so forth um okay so just really briefly to aggressor dequan who's had a lot of good comments on the channel lately dec one just says in fairness to sam i don't think he is an alcoholic his addiction is food i completely disagree okay i completely disagree decline so uh dec one how many days a week does sam use caffeine seven seven days a week it's every single day of the week he's taking massive doses of caffeine massive right how many days a week does he drink alcohol can you even estimate it it's constantly being referred to right like any given live stream you pop in for this thing alcohol's a huge part of his life and it's a huge part of his relationship with women it's a huge part of his relationship with his own ego it's part of self-image it's a huge part of his relationship with food and it's a huge part of why he lacks the self-discipline to get any of the outcomes he wants in life so you know um i i just completely utterly disagree with that now look how you define alcoholism may be very different for me i i don't i drink absolutely zero alcohol i've drank basically since university i've had zero alcohol but since my second or third year of university you know since i was a very young man i've had absolutely your alcohol there are people who only drink on the weekends like so let's say it's two days a week and they really are alcoholics they're sober five days a week and they're drunk two days a week but that is what their whole life revolves around now if you don't know sam only works one day a week okay and he is getting drunk in my opinion multiple days per week based on what he says in his own videos that's uh this is someone in the audience asks has sam seen your videos yes and he's responded both in writing and in live streams so there's quite a lot of evidence of the of the impacts on him by the way sorry so amy's if you weren't here at the beginning of the of the video um i have already said like i sympathize with the extent to which this really is emotionally devastating for people including emotionally devastating for sam but that has nothing to do with my sense of mission and purpose in making these these videos so i know i know it's hurt him i know we've seen the videos i know he's heard the message and i know it's i know it's it's harrowing and devastating from and many people have demonstrated me i'm gonna be real with you i feel i've seen vegan gains and he's not a very emotional guy but richard vegans i think i've seen the negative emotional impact my videos have had on him i think it really hurts him uh what i have to say about him and you know in as much as he's capable of feeling anything of being hurt i think this is something that's that's really very painful for him to hear and to deal with and a large part of my critique of them does have to do with drugs again you know um so look a really brief question but i'll respond to it me says uh i apologize for touching this but why does sam try so hard to be funny constantly does he not realize that he's not funny what's going on with that so look again these types of behaviors i think they have everything to do with alcohol you know for him i have that clip of him sitting and talking to two quote unquote hostesses two bar girls two women who do this kind of entertainment bar that's very much his world is going to a bar sitting on a bar stool trying to get positive attention from people both men and women with these kinds of short quips in both english and japanese and that's what his live streams consist of and he makes a remarkable amount of money out of doing that in his livestream so he is getting positive reinforcement that way and obviously if you hang out with a bunch of losers at a bar you're meeting other people who are there for that same reason they're there to get drunk and exchange this kind of very shallow meaningless uh uh you know banter so anyway yeah it's a self-reinforcing uh set of behaviors okay so i got this reply from adam uh just considering this email correspondence which is not long but it's deep and i think it's relevant to the sovereignty of this video in many ways adam writes back and says dead in five years question mark let's put a ten thousand dollar bet on that all have a lawyer draft the documents if you're ready to stand behind that oh what's that an excuse what makes you think you've done more than me burned out youtuber with hardly any views nobody needs to move to laos to have a good life you've hinted why that's why you've dumped your girlfriend many times because she wasn't living up to your standards you sound like a miserable person adam that's the end of his message so you can see the there were typos and grammatical errors in the in the email probably because he was very upset when he wrote that and of course it's completely ridiculous for him to offer to make a bet uh as to whether he will be dead or alive in the next five years and it's intentionally unintentionally mistaking the purpose of of my of my message and obviously i'm not saying that he needs to move to laos to have a good life i think i've already reflect on this enough so you know let me just point out this is the kind of response you typically get if you guys want to see it i mean i could send you the link right now again it's not very interesting vegan gains has responded to my very well reasoned well-measured video talking about his current antidepressant use i do not think it's an exaggeration to say antidepressant addiction because you build up tolerance and you go through withdrawal when you quit it is an addiction to a prescription medication vegan gains uh did a live stream responding to that video and you can see just how defensive he is sorry i don't have a better word for it defensive and offensive you can see him trying to hurt me trying to attack me he clicks around with the mouse when i'm in mid-sentence to make it seem as if what i'm saying is incoherent if you watch my video it's completely coherent and he says oh well what he's saying doesn't make any sense um even within the earlier part of the video where there are slides on screen there there's text on screen making an argument then later i'm speaking he's clicking around trying to make that incoherent and he's he's really hurt he's really on he really can't cope with someone saying to him something as simple as one of the things he struggles to deal with is where i say to him directly he's misrepresenting his situation he he uses the passive voice to say that when he first used the drug it caused headaches but then later the headaches went away no headaches don't go away you developed tolerance to the drug and by the way he felt the drug wasn't working and he doubled his dose he increased his dosage and so on there are all these things that are completely typical for developing tolerance to a mind-altering drug and he can't cope with it he's sitting there and he's you know all he can do is in this same way insult me uh he he uses the r word as people now says all he can do is is sit there and and then sell me this is the kind of response you get from the person you're directly criticizing and i tell you for real like in terms of my motivation in terms of what i'm doing this and the way i'm which i'm doing i am doing this performance as if i'm trying to save richard's life trying to save life again it's trying to turn his life around i put on this performance as if i'm trying to save tko sam trying to save his life not trying to ruin his life right the reality is i know nobody can help richard nobody can help sam nobody can help henia mania frankly even some people who are further from outright death um jacqueline glenn there's no way i can help jaclyn none but there are other people in the audience if it's a few hundred or a few thousand people there are other people who are really going to benefit from this exercise of me behaving as if you you want to see them great but she asked can you help johnny depp yeah great question all right so my next reply to adam goes his fault so say he has just responded by basically attacking and insulting me and offering offering a 10 000 bet yeah my replug was his fault prove me wrong crackhead you want to lead a meaningful life you want to make the world a better place it starts with sobriety it starts with self-discipline by all means prove me wrong take that manuscript for a pro-drug book you've written and burn it turn your back on all the excuses in the pages of that book and turn your back on all the excuses you live by but were too ashamed to set down in writing quitting the drug will be easier than quitting the excuses you've made for it prove me wrong tough guy prove me wrong now i wish i could say i had any optimism about adam here who's been a drug addict for four years solid and his you know as i say writing a book to justify it that shows how committed he is to this form of drug addiction i wish i could say any optimism about tico sam richard anya any of these examples none i don't think and there's there's from my perspective there's absolutely zero chance any of these people will turn around their lives i'll show you guys this response i had just to an anonymous person in the comment section and this is a very stupid person but whatever stupid people matter too um uh it's still a person even though he's a stupid person well can i tell you but i had a comment uh to my most recent youtube video it was just insulting me and saying that all i'm doing is virtue signaling and pretending to be morally superior uh to the rest of us to the rest of us mere mortals as he as he puts in and i write back and i say you know how you feel when you meet a former high school classmate who is now a fentanyl addict living on the street that's how i feel about you and that's how i feel about tico sam too i'm telling you with absolutely no false humility that i actually am morally superior to you and that you're inferior neither by any accident of birth nor due to circumstances beyond your control but because of the choices you've made and choices you're still making every day and just like your hypothetical high school classmate who is now a drug addict i have no reason whatsoever to think you'll ever improve you made bad decisions because you're a bad person you are the cumulative consequences of your own actions and to some extent your decisions revealed who you were all along now it's really just the image of seeing a former classmate as a drug addict on the street that i really want to invoke here if you see that you see someone who's that far gone into drug addiction is there a zero percent chance they'll completely quit the drug and get so it's not zero it's not you know and there are there are institutions that track those statistics i've mentioned this many times in general for many years but i knew a guy here in canada he worked at one of those um special rehabilitation clinics and when i asked him what was his success rate he well i laughed he didn't laugh he sat there sadly it said zero so i forget afraid of he said he'd been doing the job for 15 years or what but he'd been doing the job for many many years and his rate of success was zero they did not have a single example of a drug addict who would become sober and remain sober you know the point being some of them were sober for a couple of months or a couple of weeks but they had a 100 rate of these people returning to drug addiction and i was laughing because i was saying well isn't that slightly depressing to do that kind of humanitarian work like you know uh when i was doing humanitarian work in cambodia and laos and these places you don't we don't have a hundred percent failure rate like you know any of the humanitarian projects even the most unsuccessful ones like i was involved with humanitarian work uh dealing with starvation and agriculture people making enough food you had a really significant failure rate you did you do these projects at the beginning people are starving at the end they're still starving like for real like you you know sorry you know it's uh we're not all angels in the humanitarian industry but like it's not a hundred percent failure rate like you know when you when you're in a form of humanitarian work where there are starving people and you hand them sacks of rice so they have food to eat that is not going to have a 100 failure rate so you know no i'm not here saying as an absolute rule nobody recovers nobody gets better i'm saying when you meet that high school classmate someone you knew someone you knew well enough and you see them you go oh this is who you turned out to be this is how you ended up and you know them you know this guy you know derek you're like that's it there is no com derek you know whatever you can talk to him if you want to you can buy him a sandwich you know what i mean but you know there is you know there's no point there's no point pretending derek is ever going to change or derek is ever going to come back and these concepts of like virtue signaling and moral superiority they're irrelevant you actually are morally superior it doesn't matter you can you can be very kind and helpful and uh considerate you can be uh you can take whatever kind of attitude you want to take you could be harsh and castigating and reproachable to derek right you can be kind and considerate and cognitive there you can be encouraging and flattering here it's all on the basis of your moral superiority right there's no question of virtue signaling it's just a question of virtue you have the virtue you have what it takes to get to life and derek doesn't that's this this situation you're in so just say this image of meeting a former high school classmate and seeing that they're now a hopeless drug addict and you have no hope for them what are you going to do and what are you going to say and how you can talk about it something you can do is come on youtube and make a youtube video about it that will benefit other people you can come on youtube and say hey you know what i met this guy derek today and i was shocked to see i remember man he was when he was 16 17 years old and i see the man he is today and here's where it's at that could help somebody but you know there is no helping derek and there's certainly no point in pretending that you're not morally superior to derek there's no point pretending you're equal or that you're you're so excessively humble that you just can't see any advantage you have over derrick no you have what it takes you have the self-discipline and positive motivation and so on you have something derek lacks and that he's never gonna have if he had it before he's never gonna have it again but maybe when you reflect on him even you know the man he was news teacher maybe you can now see looking back he never he never had it there was always something there's always something missing there you guys you can imagine a lot of people in tokyo have gotten in touch with me uh since i started making this series about uh tko sam certainly people who've known richard for years have talked to me not like this week but over the years that i've been criticizing him on on youtube but within the last few weeks people have talked to me you've known tko sam for 10 years people have talked to me have known tj sam for more than 10 years some people talk to me have known him for five years or two years but people have been talking to me who've known him and you can imagine a lot of those people at first they maybe wanted to have the attitude like oh he can turn it around he can get better he can stop drinking alcohol he can lose weight he can all this this kind of thing right oh he can get his act together every day and then at some point for each of them right they realize no he's just a terrible person inside and out this isn't the equivalent of getting the measles and then overcoming you can be a wonderful person and you catch an illness like the measles it's not your fault it has nothing to do with you whether it's a couple weeks or a couple months then you're back to being your yourself back to being the good person you were before you had measles maybe you're a terrible person while you have measles some reason you're kind of crabby or whatever you know no you know it's not the case that there's some good person that tko sam used to be and that he can go back to being after he recovers from this fleeting illness there isn't some kind of inner purity perfect soul inside richard inside vegan gains that he can get back in touch with or that he can revert to being if only he can overcome his his drug addiction his various obsessions with uh been i was gonna say binge eating is close enough are you guys he has his own dietary disorders what shall we say uh his own uh food obsessions about weight loss and body image and weight gain and these things you know no there there isn't some better person they can revert to being this is who you are this is all you are you are the sum of these bad decisions you've made there's nothing else you know there's no there isn't another person there to be saved from the person you've become there is only the person you've become and that would be true of derek your high school classmate doing fentanyl on the streets i'm going to take a minute now to catch up with your comments guys i appreciate your comments we have 47 people in the audience if we could have 47 thumbs up that'll help people find this video when it's finished publishing youtube but also help people join the conversation right now if you think i make any money out of this that's also an interesting topic i could read to you right now how much money i've made from each of the tko sam videos i'm sorry i'll just it would just take a second but if you think any of this behavior on my part is motivated by money or fame you're wrong okay i was never trying to get rich or get famous by criticizing richard vegan gaines i was trying to save his life knowing it won't work with total detachment aware that it's not going to work and i was uh you know making these videos about tko sam completely aware that it that it worked but i was motivated by trying to save this person's life then you hope there's someone else in the audience who really will be saved or will be helped by and let me just say something else something these people have in common uh tko sam and richard i'd say henya mania i could put a lot of other names in this list too but let's just say vegan gains and tko sam okay i was friendly and positive and encouraging toward them for years before i made youtube videos criticizing them like in both cases it's probably about five years guys like you sam has also mentioned this on his channel he said that he used to have private messages to me and he made videos replying to me like i made a video for him he made a video talking back to me and we had we had messages going back and forth i remember twitter being the main place we dm'd each other but maybe maybe some other thing maybe like email or something too i forget if there were some other some other platforms those messages but we talked back and forth and i was positively encouraging him you know throughout so i'll just tell you so i haven't clicked in all of them just to take down the load but so uh one of my tko sam videos i was paid three dollars and 43 cents the other one is three dollars and 57 cents right none of this is motivated by money guys none of it is all right it is this sense of really trying to help others and even though i know the particular person i'm criticizing can't be helped this is my point though there was an earlier period when i was talking to them directly and there was some level of trust mutual trust mutual respect mutual friendship when i was hoping what i was saying to them could help them you know a great example is um i remember uh i remember when richard vegan gains when he got caught buying deer meat to feed to his dog you know ridiculous guy was just the most ridiculous thing so he's a vegan and he's a vegan activist and he's buying game he's buying deer carcasses to chop up this meat and feed it to his pet dog and the the ownership of the pet dog is immoral to begin with it was this whole crazy saga and i believe he's deleted all the videos from that he's deleted all the traces as with so many other things in his life you know he covers these things up afterwards and he lies about them he really actively lies on the internet richard anyway i remember he talked to me about it and i remember my being so careful in what i said to him not because i knew i mean he acts tough but he's a really fragile guy i knew how emotionally fragile he was and i was really being very careful and saying to him well richard i think you made the wrong choices and each one of those decisions might have made sense viewed in isolation but then you make a series of bad decisions and they you know they're combined and you look back at them in retrospect and you know it's obvious to you you've done something really bad and evil and wrong but i remember saying that to him so carefully you know that was a private conversation about that about that issue but you know um as little as it may help richard or uh ving gangs sorry richard or tikiyosam any of these examples the littles may help henia mania as little as it may help jacqueline glenn another good example right as little as it may help them uh for me to denounce them in this very dramatic and honest fashion because it's both it's dramatic but it's also honest what i do on youtube you know it would help them even less to walk on eggshells to be delicate and mincing and measure your words and to try to avoid uh hurting their feelings you know and the message i'm trying to get across is to say to jacqueline glenn what you are doing going wrong i know she's not going to hear it she may literally hear right she's not going to listen to it she's not going to take an advice somebody in the audience will someone is going to reflect on the decisions they've made now if someone is going to sit there and think wow i don't actually believe in god why would i circumcise my own newborn son this is really messed up that you're you're carrying on religious traditions you don't believe them that have really serious consequences for other people's individuals for the future of your country for the future of planet earth so on and so forth so i am going to look at the the comments now babe if you want to if you want to comment yourself you can jump into that yeah sure yeah sure babe is melissa in case you didn't know yeah hi good so something that struck me in the live stream was your discussion of how drugs are the way out yeah so one thing that came to mind was a person came to mind that i knew in high school i was friends with a girl in high school and i was also friends with her cousin and they were very close in age so i eventually was roommates with this girl that i knew in high school and uh one time her cousin came over so i'd known her cousin in high school and he was a nice person i i wasn't that close with them but i got to see just his transformation in just a few years so from when i knew him in high school maybe when i was 16 to when i was living on campus at university when i was 19. uh he got more involved in drugs and i remember my friend just expressing to me how disappointed she was in her cousin and how she felt really helpless to change the situation because she could see him falling deeper and deeper into drug addiction and where i grew up heroin addiction was starting to become a real issue and uh so he had been using heroin and i just really didn't see myself at all like that i was in the same kind of position as him because i didn't ever use hard drugs and in the culture that i was raised in cannabis was really seen as a soft drug and at the time i was using cannabis and i i really still thought that we were on different levels you know like he was really a drug addict but i wasn't and you know it is sad for me to reflect on what you said there about you know drugs being the way out and um you know me not recognizing that me wanting to like create this kind of gulf between me and people who are using more serious drugs um unfortunately he uh he overdosed and and died a couple years after i saw him and now i have to reflect on just it's it's true what you say you know that you didn't care like i didn't care enough to to talk to him about it to say you know say anything say you're ruining your life and you're living a living death where whether you're able to accept that or realize that and there's been multiple overdoses from from people from my high school that i knew that um you know it's just i've had that experience where i've had to reflect that i didn't care and i wasn't even you know connected to them enough to feel like i had any kind of responsibility to to change their lives to save their lives and yeah no i just that that was something that crossed my mind and um you know uh now it's been five years that i've been sober and um five years ago that i stopped taking antidepressants i understand it's controversial to say you know yes addicted to antidepressants but it's it's a mind-altering medication it's a mind-altering drug and well i think i think you should take it seriously i think all these examples uh what one of the things they have in common is that there are forms of addiction people do not perceive as addiction like sorry we had a sincere comment from that i know this guy's well intentioned he's not you know not saying this with any bad intentions but someone's saying that they don't think tko sam's problem is alcohol of course it is of course it is and like the other contradictions in his life would become unbearable and unsustainable if he didn't have the alcohol right like just think if he had to live with constant lucidity and clarity if he had no alcohol in his life how everything else would be different every conversation with a friend what he does every weekend what he does in his spare time like you know what i mean all these things how he feels about himself how he thinks about himself and yes indeed his binge eating it is very powerfully linked alcohol he gets drunk now also one of the things he likes to lie about is his use of nicotine cigarettes once he drinks alcohol then he allows himself to indulge in unlimited amounts of nicotine food so on and so forth so it's in terms of the cycle of his binge eating that alone it is an addictive behavior both in relation to food and alcohol but what i was drawing attention to here is this um it's possible for people to not perceive tico sam as a as an addict at all right like because it's not heroin and it's not cocaine right and it's possible for people to perceive prescription drugs as not an addiction at all but it is an addiction to to a mind-altering drug that's right and it it and you know to me it's even more worrying to see the extent to which people are now willing to perceive marijuana hashish whatever form of cannabis they're willing to perceive marijuana as not an addiction to a mind-altering drug it is nothing else that's what it is it's it's a sedative it's a sedative addiction you know being addicted to sleeping bills is different from being addicted to stimulants you can be addicted to both simultaneously by the way but it is still a drug addiction as a mind-altering mood-altering drug addiction uh period and yeah you know it's look i understand that something like methamphetamine the effects are so extreme that i understand why people would then not perceive anything else as a real addiction compared to methamphetamine right like oh yeah like this is so dramatic it's so extreme but guess what alcohol just alcohol is a really serious final three drug it's a really serious addiction and yes you know ssri antidepressants that if you go through the checklist of what is an addictive drug in that same video from vegan gains the video where he's talking about is his antidepressant news he talks about the extreme panic he's in if he has to go one day without these drugs if for some reason he can't get the medication or he you know he goes on a trip or moves or if he doesn't have that constant supply of pills that he goes into a total crisis of withdrawal or whatever you want to want to say the only one this look you can go through the checklist what is addictive behavior what is drug addiction what is dependency okay you have increasing tolerance you know you can go through the check you have all you have all the check marks you know the fact the fact that it's not methamphetamine the fact that it's not cocaine you know that doesn't mean it's not serious let's point this out also it doesn't mean it won't kill you it doesn't mean it won't ruin your life again objectively how much cholesterol did laoshu 5500 eat versus how much cholesterol does stick yo sammy right like the other question is is your ability to cope with the damage which is just genetic it's just unfair right like i think it is impossible that laoshu ate more cholesterol than tokyo sam but laoshu's dead right it was enough to kill him right how much alcohol you can tolerate like how well you cope with alcohol it's genetic and it's totally unfair so guys i'm irish i'm a mixture of scottish irish eastern european jewish like i've got you know i actually think i'm born with very good uh alcohol i drink zero alcohol i don't lean on it you know what i mean um anyway you know uh yeah different people are are born with a different capacity to endure the damage the damage is real in either case and guess what you might not be so lucky and your luck might run out like the fact that marijuana is a softer drug than methamphetamine doesn't mean you can cope with it it doesn't mean it won't ruin your life and it won't ruin your character you know and the fact that someone else can cope with occasional use of alcohol doesn't mean tko sam can doesn't mean he can't doesn't mean it doesn't mean you can't you know so you want to say that well the other thing that was was really striking to me that goes against what i've seen online is the the general trend is that we all deserve love we all deserve respect basically just for who we are and your philosophy on this is is really that you are just the combination of all the decisions that you've made and when i think of the difference between me and my friend who died of heroin overdose you know what is what is the difference it it feels a bit uh unnatural for me to say i had the virtue to live to not just live a living death until i died you know right be waiting to die and and also you know just just this not feeling ashamed of your life like in a sense i would feel ashamed of myself and and eventually you know i did feel ashamed and i mean even at the time i wasn't uh you know when i did use cannabis it was like i wasn't flaunting it i wasn't proud of it so yeah i guess i just want to say briefly you know before you made the change before you made the decision to quit marijuana entirely and quit antidepressants entirely you first had to be unhappy and you had to recognize that you were unhappy and you had to think about why you weren't happy yeah but just point out that state it could be a few minutes it could be a few days but it could be a few hours or a few weeks that unhappiness is part of the problem part of the process and even for my example of me moving to moving to laos and learning lunch during your life right well they're first there's a recognition yes no i mean i i just so let's let's not denigrate that misery let's not denigrate that unhappiness if what i'm saying makes tko sam unhappy which it does we've seen it we know we know it's hurt his feelings if what i say makes richard unhappy and hurts his feelings what i say makes henya mania unhappy what i say makes aaron janis unhappy all these are examples we know i know it hurt and yeah what i had to say about her too well guess what that unhappiness that sorrow that's actually a prerequisite for you to make those decisions to lead up to that yeah no i think that's so important too and the really what what he thinks says um okay the sorry uh let me just be more specific the email correspondence that you had with the man who was writing spoke about that i mean which haven't finished it but going on yeah okay good sport uh you know that is actually quite evil his suggestion is because you can't change your lifestyle because right now everybody has their own life and what what all of you using components so you're saying this in a modern way so that really is what people call dumerism so the assumption is you're unhappy because your life is bad but you can't change that therefore you're going to do whether that's drugs or whatever else you know and look you can even scale this up your political situation is bad you live in saudi arabia or you even live in california you're like oh well you know i have no control i have no way to change my political circumstances no way to change the society yes you do right but as soon as you accept that first premise i can't change my own life or on a larger scale i can't change lives millions of you know therefore almost any evil imaginable can be justified with that therefore whether it's cocaine or or otherwise okay but therefore a life of self-indulgence no no i agree with you completely and that's thank you for being clear with that i i totally appreciate the you know i'm not trying to be modeled about it really the main point that i'm trying to make is uh i can see you know even though you're talking about different people i can see how what you said applies to even my my uh disappointment with my life what was making me so depressed when i was 17 18 19 if i had instead of using cannabis instead of you know right drinking alcohol it wasn't it wasn't if you'd been motivated to do it do something have some ambition make some balls change right city hall you know right changing the world in some way oh sure and like my examining an adult and like my example of laos so like my example of laos even if it had been a really pathetic political cause you get got involved with yeah uh black lives matter or something i'm a pretty harsh critical black person even if it had been a kind of stupid failure of a political movement still you would have had positive growth through that in a way that the drugs yes in contrast to the drug the main thing that i want to say the parallel and that struck me is that that person that i was six years later um you know i can't get back that person was before or the opportunity that i had to to become another person if i would have uh instead of you know accepting this oh i can't change my life or i can't like no you really can i didn't have to you know continue university if i was unhappy with my university i could have you know like you said it could have traveled somewhere and you know live somewhere you know humanitarian work yeah there were there were hundreds of different options that i could that i just didn't even you know contemplate and yeah and look you know i just want to say it's very so good but you know um i am serious when i'm saying it's not just your own life you can change right like uh look at alexandria ocasio-cortez what's special about her so she's changed the lives of millions of others by the way i despise aoc i'm not a fan of hers but my point is look at aoc's life what do you think makes her so special i always forget this guy's name the filmmaker from flint michigan look at michael moore what makes michael more special he's changed millions of people's lives right like yeah you can change your own life you can also change other people's lives maybe a few dozen people's lives i just wrote a book i already know it's changed people's lives a few days after publishing it will it change a hundred people's lives will change a thousand people i have no reason to think i'll change a million people's lives but sure you can change other people's lives not just your own you know i just want to mention this briefly to you here so several complex ideas were were touched on by by melissa um in her contribution this discussion you know i had a short quotation from another youtube channel recently i was talking about video games and the guy said if your excuse for playing video games is that elon musk plays video games well so what and what he said was you are not him like you are not an incredibly accomplished person like elon musk so therefore you have to take seriously your own education your own ambition your own self-discipline every hour of your life matters maybe in a way that elon musk doesn't like once you become a multi-millionaire or something again okay so my perspective is actually much darker than that okay so elon musk does play video games and i've had i've had clips of him here on youtube proving that he he spends a huge amount of time please do not just an hour here or there i can't say he's a video game addict i just don't know that but i've seen him listing off the names of video games that he's played from beginning to end where he's completed the game he says that and you can look up how many hours that takes so it's like okay so the minimum number of hours you played that game 40 hours 80 hours 60 hours you can start putting it together this is a guy who spent a large percentage of of the hours in which he's awake and alert as an adult playing video games okay i think there's a better person elon musk could be today if he didn't play video games with that time i think it matters even for me it matters for you it matters for me it matters to everyone but like when you look back at the last five years of elon musk's life obviously we look back at the last 50 years sorry i don't know hold this last 30 years whatever but if you look back at just a period of time it's easier to visualize like five years you think what if he had smoked zero marijuana what if he had drank zero alcohol what if he had played zero video games he would be a better person today and i don't know what he would have done with that time maybe he would have read a book you know i i you know maybe he would have learned something maybe you know like whatever but even if he had just sat there feeling unhappy with his own life and thinking about his own ambitions he and he obviously has tremendous power and wealth he could have made a bigger difference in the world in many different ways so it's in that sense that i'm inviting people whether you're tico sam or vegan gains or whoever else to really reflect on this stuff you know because i you know none of the excuses make sense to me not even on that on that level that you're sort of so successful or what have you uh you know all right so we've got a lot of a lot of contributions here shout out to peaches fernandez so it's your first time i think commenting on the channel i'd remember that name if you'd if you'd been here before so look uh a couple of interesting comments here people saying that sam tico sam does have some redeeming qualities of course he does you know so you just point out that he did manage to learn japanese that he someone points out that he managed to learn to play guitar i've never seen him play guitar enough it's debatable he's good at japanese and therefore he has some self-discipline some work ethic he's also been a kindergarten teacher so on and so forth look we could list off the positive qualities richard has vegan gains has or um yeah or elon musk or jaclyn glenn or or anyone else right your friend from high school derek the point isn't that he never had any positive qualities right point is you know there's just just one fetal flaw just one mistake just one bad decision can ruin your life just one bad decision can end your life right that's what we're dealing with so you know he may have he may have other radium inequalities he may be a good person in some other way right but exactly what we're addressing here is is the way in which you bad person to be to be blunt and that's sufficient to ruin his life and to ruin many other people's lives as well you know yes so peach's comments i take it peaches has watched quite a few hours of sam's content because this is true uh peaches says quote sam needs to be the center of the universe he's extremely jealous of others whom he perceives are better than he is um that's why he's made this long series of videos denouncing criticizing others and then there's certainly an irony in that he's now so uncomfortable about and so defensive about my criticism of hit and my criticism of him is really well intentioned as i've already described exactly my intentions his criticism of many other people is not well-intentioned um and it is as he states himself it's part of his own quest to to become rich and famous he stated his intentions very clearly again and again and again um you know we've made many videos on this channel you know me and my girlfriend together talking about jealousy jealousy is many things it's not i mean it's really a very complex cultural concept um but i do think one element of jealousy is just distraction it gives you a distraction from yourself gives you a distraction from who you really are from what's what's wrong with you and what it is you need to accomplish and i mean that like partly on a kind of shout level you could have a lot of homework to do like you have to write an essay and exercising this part of your mind of kind of a malicious fantasies about others jealous fixations it is a type of daydreaming it's a type of distraction even just from something as simple as as needing to write an essay for school or something like that um so you know for sam why is he so jealous um i would say that's that's a significant part of the problem we have several people insisting that uh um sam is actually quite poor in speaking japanese well so i have studied japanese i'm aware of what a hard language it is um i think a lot of the praise for sam this was also the case with daniel uh the youtuber known as hiding in my room a lot of the praise is because in his first year or first two years or so he learned japanese so rapidly but to my knowledge he started learning japanese at age 18 from his account so already when you're looking at videos when he's 21 he said quite a few years studying japanese but anyway there was at least the illusion that when he was say 21 that he all of a sudden had learned japanese to a high level but you know 14 years later 15 years later right now it's not so impressive anymore so i just say that the expectations for what level you should be at uh keep going up and up um i i think you can tell i'm not um i'm not insulting him on this on this score but you know exactly what he's done with his life and his his time and energy he hasn't been developing himself to higher and higher levels of japanese but no anyway i wouldn't say his japanese is terrible but now people are evaluating him as a 36 year old man who started learning this language when he was 18. so the standards he's evaluated by are now incredibly high and unforgiving whereas sure when he was 21 people were impressed that he could he could say anything at all in this language so i think that's a common pattern and by the way if you're a middle-aged person as i am guess what no matter how well i speak spanish nobody's going to be impressed when you're in your 40s it's like why aren't you completely fluent in spanish i've only been studying spanish for two weeks well you know nobody doesn't matter so the standards are helped you get higher and higher as you as you get older generally so dec one says and i know deck one's joking right here oh but tko sam said that balocial was trying to get views out of this yeah so look i do not use this this concept of projecting psychological projection very often i think it's a really hacky overused phrase in the 21st century and it's just used very sloppily but in the narrowest sense of the term the most the strictest definition of psychological projection sam does a lot of psychological projection and certainly his denunciation of me a lot of it really sounds like an indictment against himself so yeah i would have to uh agree with that and the put it this way the motivations he ascribes to me are exactly the motivations that he openly flagrantly states are his own motivations but they're not mine you know it's just you know i remember him denouncing me so this is a couple days ago or a couple weeks ago now but it's not that long ago i remember him denouncing me saying that the point of my videos was just to brag that i'm the one having all the sex and that he doesn't have any sex a lot of your videos sound like that sam i've got to say like that sounds like a description of your act not mine but look uh i i can make a separate short video just saying this but sam if you're watching i want to say straight to your face how many women have you slept with this year calendar year 2022 okay i think the answer is zero i think during the year 2022 the real honest answer is zero that you have been living in celibacy that you are an incel i know you hate being called that term i know you've seen videos of you lashing out at others because i dare to say that now i want to ask 2021 what's the real number sam you're so full of boasting and your boasts are partly based on lies and partly based on exaggerations and they're partly just based on you telling stories about things that happened 14 years ago as if they happened the day before yesterday that you once met this girl and blah blah blah but yeah that was more than 10 years ago and when you were more than 100 pounds thinner you know and and dude trust me i'm skeptical even those stories those stories about things that happened more than 10 years ago i'm skeptical as hell about what sam claims about his sex life but sam why don't we get some real honesty from you with no ambiguity about what your sex life has been like in the last one year in the last two years in the last five years the reality is sam that you are a failure by your own standards you're also a failure by mine that's why i'm talking about this you're you're a terrible person by my standards but you're a failure even by your own standards and that's what you've got to be dealing with you know so yeah the extent to which he lies about himself and lies to himself uh that's ultimately why these videos are are being created um so there's a great quote comment here from uh from dequan dekwan says quote the messed up part is i actually don't hate sam i just wish he was a better person because he has moments of clarity and brilliant observations peaches says quote i don't hate sam either but he's proven himself to be everything that could be wrong with a person all rolled into one and regardless of who tries to reach him it just ends with him denouncing that person and calling them a troll he can't take any any posters yeah okay close close girl from from peaches um look how do you feel when you see your former high school classmate on the sidewalk as a fentanyl addict as a meth addict as a cocaine addict when you see that someone you used to know maybe someone used to like or be friends with is now just a hopeless drug addict okay you probably don't hate them right hatred is just probably not the feeling is there you you also certainly don't feel jealous or envious toward them and it is completely hilarious that that sam's claim about me in particular and about you people like you in the audience decline and peaches his claim is that we're jealous of him his claim is that we're doing this out of envy that this is the most pathetic psychological projection of them all so a little bit more discussion here about the extent to which alcohol is the problem as opposed to alcohol merely being a minor part of the problem so look what i have to say about alcohol it's it's very similar to what i have to say about video games so guys i i know alcohol i grew up with alcohol i quit but it's not a strange drug to me it's not hard for me to understand the effects of alcohol okay um how many hours of the day are you really awake alert focused and intellectually productive for if you have a martini with lunch if you have one cocktail with lunch how many hours the day are you really awake and alert for and for most of us you know it's not just one martini we're talking about no but that's drinking at lunch that's one of the most depressing ways to drink alcohol because you feel it like you you feel like if you don't drink any more that evening you feel the effects of the alcohol you feel your body fighting against it and you feel your mind clearing like it's not quite a hangover but you feel your mind struggle to get back to normal function as it recovers it's really depressing what most people like is to drink at night and to drink and drink and drink until they pass out so they don't have to go through that sobering up process being awakened alert they want to just roll on until they crash right okay so that's one day where you have one drink with lunch and then think about your total intellectual productivity during the day okay what if it's just one night a week where you stay up until four in the morning drinking and carousing you know it's a huge impact in your life there's the number of hours you lose that day that night there's the number of hours you lose the next day and the day after that so no i'm sorry i just don't buy this i don't think you can go out drinking the way sam does look i'm being real with you [Music] how am i going to say this you know the greatest intellectuals in the history of the world the most accomplished writers the most accomplished scientists the the most accomplished leaders in war all right the vast majority of them drank alcohol it's very easy to grow up with the illusion that they weren't negatively affected by it at all yes they were and what you're not letting yourself imagine is how they could have accomplished so much more if they could have just stopped drinking when you add up the number of hours and the number of days and the number of years alcohol is a huge gap in their lives now you may be you may think of yourself as a mentally strong person you may think yourself as a mentally weak person as a susceptible person susceptible to addiction or having but i am really saying to you no matter how strong you are no matter how brilliant you are no matter how extraordinary your intelligence this is a huge huge negative impact on your life even if it is just that you had a couple of beers with lunch or if it's just one day a week that you're going out and drinking the whole night long i'm sorry i you know i i certainly don't buy it for sam you can see the effects of alcohol on salmon in every way including his ego including his relations with women including his binge eating including the loss of discipline and loss of focus right but like again even if it just comes down to books like well if you weren't playing video games maybe you'd read this this incredibly boring book you know a boring but historically important book you know um maybe you'd be reading maybe you'd be learning etc etc well with alcohol it goes a lot further than just that i mean the effects there's the direct effect like that the loss of time that you could have been reading you could have been learning but i think there are also much more complex emotional effects of uh dependence upon alcohol to to to make you happy so on and so forth so yeah and we have someone in the audience saying that he's he is sober partly thanks to these videos so again i won't repeat myself but i do think that's part of the effect of this a lot of the these discussions they reinforce the commitment people have people who are already committed to be sober already committed to not play video games that they become more committed and they kind of become more articulate in expressing why they're sober or why they don't play video games uh to others in their lives because you have to face off against that kind of pressure all the time okay i'm going to return to this correspondence i have with this guy named adam um he replied to me um my my last email ended with saying prove me wrong a tough guy proved me wrong and we've just digressed to say a great length there is no hope in my heart that tkyo sam will ever prove me wrong there's no hope in my heart that richard vegan gains will ever prove wrong there's no hope that henya henya mania will ever prove with all three of those people i literally think it is just a matter of time until i get that email telling me that they are dead i don't think it's gonna be that much time okay when that day comes i will come here on youtube and say i did everything i could to save them did you it's the same [ __ ] i have to say to tko sam in reference to laoshu 55 000 right laoshu died you didn't try to see them you didn't try to help i knew you were going to die i tried to save you you know it's not an exaggeration to say this in relation to richard or henya mania either this is life and death and then as i say one step further apart from just whether or not you're actually buried is the question of whether or not you're trapped in a kind of living death or if you know you have a life that's meaningful rewarding and worthwhile okay so adam wrote back to me and said quote zero conviction can't even take a simple bet i thought you were so sure tough guy ten thousand dollars let's go see he's again insisting on this ten thousand dollar i say back to him reread the first message i sent to you in this correspondence are you aware of the extent to which you missed the point are you aware of the extent to which you intentionally or unintentionally ignored the entire substance and thesis of the message to instead try to bully me with the offer of a wager that i'd never suggested nor entertained so i quote myself back quote take a look at yourself adam you've got a drug drug habit you've got brain damage and you've got the excuses you've made for it quote you're going to be a brain damaged dried up pathetic shell of a man just five years from now like all the other prescription psych mad junkies and what condition could you be in today if you'd made a very different decision instead four years ago and you'd moved to laos learned laosh and done humanitarian work did some kind of research etc what kind of man would you be today that man will never exist it's already game over for you you're trapped in a living death and you don't even know it yet close quote do you think the point of that message was to challenge you to a bet you're seeing only what you want to see you're ignoring what you want to ignore and you think you're winning uh i then have a quote sorry then i have a link to one of my blogs i'm guessing it's a blog that's just stating the same correspondence yeah it is i can give you that link too you might have someone your life for this email correspondence you might have someone in your life is a ketamine addict sadly do you want to be so i'm continuing here my email adam do you want to be the pied piper leading people even more pathetic than yourself into drug addiction do you want to encourage others to embrace the pseudo-scientific and pseudo-philosophical excuses you've made for yourself you've probably met enough of those people face to face to realize just what it limited intellectual and emotional capacity they've got you're aware of how eagerly they'll embrace any promise or any excuse made for what they construe as happiness now this is directly relevant to why i'm criticizing tko sam today and why i'm criticizing vegan gains today these people are for an audience of thousands they are doing exactly this they are playing the role of a pied piper leading people who are even more pathetic to themselves right and helping them to embrace as i say here any promise or any excuse made for the things they want to justify the things they construe is giving them happiness what is the significance of vegan gains for his audience he's showing you that you can own a whole bunch of action figures from dragon ball z and still be a cool guy like me you can you can own action figures and you can still read anime and manga and you can play video games for eight hours a day you can live this life that richard exemplifies right like that that's what he's championing that's what he's being a pied piper for right that's what people are responding to positively and sure some of them maybe also they want to um they want to combine that with the image of kind of toxic masculinity of weightlifting and bullying and aggression and and so on and so forth it looks right at the at the other end of the scale someone like jacqueline glenn she's also a pied piper for a very different particular lifestyle i'm just saying it's less it's less odious at first glance but you know she's representing something and people people room that makes them happy they want to latch onto that and those are the excuses they want jacqueline glenn endorsing um ayahuasca use jaclyn glenn endorsing antidepressant use so on and so forth it's a different bunch of drugs right she's a pied piper from movement and this is exactly what i see with the fan base tyco sam has right there are people who want to believe in the excuses made for this kind of lifestyle for this for this kind of uh happiness and as i've said before in videos it's fundamentally a childlike and childish happiness and none of these people are just willing to [ __ ] say the point of these comic books was to provide entertainment for children so they could develop basic literacy that's what these comic books exist for and then you were supposed to move on as a 30 year old man you were not supposed to be reading these comic books anymore now look i hate disney movies i hate pocahontas look up pocahontas on my channel you'll see but like the best rationalization or justification i can offer for garbage like the pocahontas movies by disney is that it's there to help children develop these first few steps of you know intellectual sophistication reading comprehension reading ability thinking about love and romance in this very simple way the point was not for you to collect pocahontas dolls when you were a 30 year old man the point was not for you to watch that same movie again and again again the point was not for you to keep reading those same comic books or watching those same cartoons into adulthood like you know whatever value this kind of pop culture crap has the value is not in picking it up and carrying it with you the value is in putting it down and you know seeking out and grasping onto something something better so yeah they're all cheerleaders for they're all playing the role of the pied piper for this kind of perpetual childishness endless childhood endless self-indulgence right never growing up that's and look guys how many youtubers are exceptions to that like this is a huge aspect of social media in every way even instagram you know permanent vacation permanent childhood perpetual self-indulgence forever and ever and there's no point and it never ends hey guys i bought a new purse hey guys i bought a new action figurine whatever it is they collect whatever is their mass you know and and there's no direction there's no purpose there's no meaning to it right it's just self-indulgence forever and ever and ever and then one day you die right and you know several of the people who've gotten in touch with me who are like former friends of tkyo sam because of sam all of them did okay sam if you're like but you know i believe my videos reached like all 30 people in tokyo who know sam and used to be his friends and now aren't his friends anymore and yeah sam i don't know if they told you or not the people who are currently your friends have gotten in touch with me too and that's that's not that many people you know um and i think without exception i think every single one of those people who god touched me they recognize that what i'm doing is like an attempt to help sam it's like an intervention whatever say but it can't possibly work like you know there's no way this is going to impact him positively he'll only respond in a you know in a childish and negative way and i forget for once i've lost my train of thought um some comments from the audience here yeah so peaches says sam will not change he has no rock bottom maybe none of us do you know i mean no i mean what what is what is rock bottom that things get so bad that you know you don't have to have your own positive ambition that something negative in your life can play the can can supply the role of what slang positive is supposed to be you know um you know i think in this sense rock bottom doesn't exist like you know you do you do the right thing for the right reason either you have a positive ambition a positive motivation uh to change or you don't and you're not going to get the the positive motivation from something negative you know you have to have a real aspiration to be a better to be a better person be a better man however you want to put it um yeah anyway sorry guys whether that was a digression or whether that it's in some ways the main point of the video you know i do feel that i'm out here really representing a meaningful life and the meaning of life i'm saying to people you can live a better life you could be a better person and here's how and here's what it entails and here are the implications and right sorry where i lost my train of thought was just i was saying that you know the people who know him right now in tokyo you know had been getting in touch with me and one of the things i end up saying to those people is look you're not fat but like ninety percent of what i have to say about tiki or sam applies to you like i don't know why you think i'd be your buddy or your friend or something like okay so you hate tkyo sam or you used to be his friend or whatever your situation is right you're not 400 pounds like you don't know those health problems but guess what from my perspective right you're you're basically just as terrible a person as tko sam and my criticism of him a huge percentage of it applies to you and they also are people who are engaged in you know as i'm putting in this video being a pied piper for leading followers who want those excuses who want to cling on to that that childlike and childish model of of happiness you know and yes sometimes it's something as obvious as drugs sometimes something is obvious it's alcohol and you know and sometimes it's not um sometimes it's hard to put your finger on exactly what the fantasy is that vegan gains is selling or that chico sam is selling uh so on and so forth but this is it's a huge percentage of i mean uh tennomo show think about the lifestyle tana mongeau is really in effect selling and think about the i was going to say young women but it's probably middle aged women now think about the middle aged women who are watching that and saying yes you go girl uh what great example is hitomi i mean you can absolutely see the type of woman who fastens on to itomimo suzuki and they think that's again really at this point it's probably not teenagers it's probably middle-aged women that's the kind of life they want to lead that's the kind of self-empowerment they're interested in but they're they're fascinating onto social media influencers who [Music] justify and and give the veneer of respectability to you know fundamentally childlike and childish self-indulgence going on forever right now permanent vacation perpetual self-indulgence endless pointless aimless childhood so to finish my my email to adam here i say you realize that many thousands of people if not millions will become passive victims of the process you're trying to benefit from as an author and that others will make thousands of dollars if not millions as gurus and therapists i don't want you to gamble i don't want you to place a bed i don't want you to risk your life i don't want you to lose your life i want you to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do period now i think the shallowness and stupidity of his answer to that is worth reading and i've made many videos talking about this probability is often a misleading concept right why should you eat a vegan diet the probability that you'll have a heart attack can't be the answer right like yeah it's you can talk about the odds of having a heart attack now the probability's improved okay if you eat a hamburger there is a 100 chance that a cow was born on a concrete floor and lived its whole life in a metal cage under a sheet iron roof in a concrete shed and then had its throat slit like the sorrow and suffering and misery and filth and ecological damage of that cow and its mother living their whole lives in that concrete shed okay it's not a matter of probability that's a matter of 100 certainty you know the harm you're doing right you have to be vegan for the right reasons right it can't be on a probabilistic business but notice what i'm saying here i don't want you to gamble i don't want you to bet ten thousand dollars on whether you're gonna live or die five years i don't want you to place a bet i don't want you to risk your life i don't want you to lose your life i want you to do the right thing because it's the right thing to do i'm saying that to him but i'm this whole person i think there's a zero percent chance he's gonna do the right thing i'm i'm saying this to him so that i can now share it with you because maybe there's someone in the audience here for whom this is useful as raw material as fuel maybe you are going to be the person to figure it out and do the right thing because the right thing to do maybe one person out of 5 000 who watches my videos about tiki or sam will sit there and realize wow i'm being really self-indulgent and childish and apart from the question of having a heart attack they've got to wake up and really become you know morally and uh politically a better person like maybe someone will respond to the deeper message those videos it's not going to be tko sam and you know no offense but like the other people in tokyo who got in touch with me tko sam's friends and friends and so on all those people from my perspective you're all scumbags too like the message is there for you and you write like these people writing to me and fronting like they're so superior to tico sam just because he's fat and they're thin well you're the same in every other [ __ ] way yeah you play the same video games you probably sleep with the same prostitutes you know i'm sorry but you are living the same lifestyle you're literally getting drunk at the same bar you're doing the same drugs this is you know it's these are english teachers in tokyo trying to get famous on youtube you have everything else in common with tkyo sam expect pardon me you have everything else in common with tko sam except his obesity except his being overweight so you know and those people are writing to me like like we're going to do a victory lap together like we're on the same team no we're not but you know maybe one of those people maybe someone not one of maybe someone is going to get the messages from those videos and be like whoa you know i've got to start asking myself some difficult questions and coming up with some new answers okay so here's adam's response to that that email um bully you question mark you're the one attacking me i tried to have a conversation with you and you go at homina i'm done with this conversation go stroke your ego somewhere else narcissist you don't know any languages you don't have any educational achievements and you try to make up for it by bullying other people to make yourself feel better and you have no friends which is probably the saddest thing of all that's the end of his has emailed me right now look guys if all of that were true like if these weren't lies if these were weren't insult how does that help you homie how does that how does that solve the problem we're talking about all right you're still a crackhead and from my perspective you only got a couple years to live and by the way so one thing is a couple years before you actually die how much time do you have in which you could still turn this around like if you're talking about someone who's a homeless drug addict on the street maybe there's a window at the beginning of the addiction where they can still stop it and recover you know and maybe maybe they're too far gone like at what point you just see it does it cease to be possible to recover you from the hole you're digging yourself in terms of drug addiction and as i said before the excuses are more difficult to quit than the thing itself and this is a guy who has all the excuses and he's publishing a book with those excuses he's really thought through the excuses and rationalizations for for being a drug addict right and just being real that's like chico sam too tiki sam has had 14 years on youtube to present all of these excuses like yeah well he might be fat but he can still seduce women so well he might you know his rationalization of his alcohol and his diet and his whole lifestyle all the aspects of it including killing animals which he has talked about with me and he has talked about his youtube channel he's talked about you know the the challenge that veganism poses them and he's admitted that he's watched many hours of videos uh from vegan leaders you know okay well you you sorted out all the excuses guess what especially as a middle-aged person at some point the excuses become harder to quit than the thing itself right so i write back if all these bad things you're saying about me are true you are still a drug addict you are still teetering on the edge of suicide or at least you claim that you're on the verge of committing suicide in order to justify your decision to get high to indulge in a hallucinogenic sedative again and again just a pause here you have to make those kinds of claims in order to justify getting the quote unquote therapy of ketamine treatment so like for four years he's been going back again and again and filling up the paperwork saying that yeah he's suffering from severe depression on the edge of suicide so that he can keep getting this drug trip that's supposedly going to save his life right and i'm alluding back to part of his first email that i didn't read to you guys so yeah so this is allegedly someone who's and you see the excuses become harder to quit than the thing itself you convince yourself that you have some kind of medically real condition called depression you know so on and so forth um [Music] okay if i had managed to fake studying the languages i've studied it would be so much more work than actually studying the languages like that's the other thing whatever people claim i've like lied about languages i've studied or essays i've written and published like research i've done it's like do you know how much work it would be to fake that like doing the actual research or learning the actual language doing things like it'll be so hard for me to fake having done these things why why fake it you know anyway if you've actually looked at the evidence anyway i said to him quote you're about to go pardon me you're about two google searches away from figuring out just how many languages i've studied just how much i've learned in how many different fields but it's all irrelevant if my life is a tragic failure that doesn't help you crackhead you are still a [ __ ] crackhead prove me wrong learn to speak chinese twice as well as i did in half as much time do it sober stop writing books encouraging others to become drug addicts like yourself recognize the extent to which your drug addiction didn't help you but hindered you in putting together the necessary basis to lead a meaningful life again i'm reading out his replies not despite how meaningless they are but because of how meaningless they are and again guys this came up in a recent video about tko sam i don't feel jealousy if this guy learned chinese faster than i did and better than i did look at his crap if he left me in his shadow if he eclipsed me i would be so happy for him you know if there was someone else i encouraged in any any field of endeavor through someone else i encourage to be an author or be a creative artist and then they're way more successful than me i would be so happy for them and maybe then there'd be something i could learn from them maybe there's someone to learn slang for me in the past i would be so happy i don't experience jealousy this way and jealousy is this very very strange uh kind of self sabotage but he writes back and says calling people crackheads question mark that's why no one loves you no one can stand you you're a horrible person and a liar you don't know anything about mental health and likely have a personality disorder yourself so just one pause guys if this were true right if if all this were true it was true that i was lying about the languages of studying the research you've done lying if all this is a fiction and if nobody loves me like one thing bro why are you telling me that but dude that doesn't help you right and again i think honestly if tko sam were to make a a video responsibility apparently is not going to do it would be at this level right it would be denouncing me he'd be saying yo well you haven't slept with as many women as i've slept with anyway you just want to be alpha because you're whatever and really you're a beta like it would be this level of dishing out hollow and meaningless insults it's like well you know like it's irrelevant to the topic it's irrelevant to the problem it doesn't help you anyway so he writes back further and says mommy and daddy supported you your whole life you've never been independent you're a child compared to me grow up now look guys i'm very honest about uh my failures in life as well as my successes you know but like again all this stuff if it's true like oh gee so you're saying like i've failed to get rich huh like i failed to get rich doing humanitarian work in cambodia really yeah i should be ashamed of myself i must be really sad gee gee i i failed to get rich doing vegan activism dude i would be ashamed of myself if i had gotten rich from vegan activism i would be ashamed of myself if i had gotten rich doing humanitarian work in cambodia right i'm not ashamed of myself because i didn't get rich doing things that were in no way motivated by money but like if you're corrupt if you're evil you can get rich hey you know um when i moved to saskatchewan if you don't know where saskatchewan is you don't want to central canada don't google it you don't want to know when i moved to saskatchewan was i trying to get rich like you can't say i failed to make money in saskatchewan when i moved to saskatchewan i enrolled as a full-time student of the korean ojibwe languages i got involved with the politics and languages of the indigenous people who frankly are on the brink of extinction you know their languages are close to disappearing for the world this is probably the last generation that has a chance to save those languages totally humanitarian altruistic thing do you think i look back at my life and regret should have gone into the oil industry should have gotten me a job in the oil patch pumping crude oil i could have those were the jobs there at that time either oil or potash those are the big industries i could have gotten a job as a crane operator out on those oil so in terms of things where you don't need a university degree you go get your crane operator's license and go start start helping out uh with a backhoe moving moving there are ways to make money in saskatchewan there are ways to get to get rich you think i and what regrets would i have in my life if i look back and that was what i did instead now you know imagine how different a person i'd be today if i'd if i'd worked in the in the oil industry or any of these other things but look man even if this were true like it's completely surreal even if i had the delusion that i should have gotten rich achieve financial independence whatever doing the things that i have done with my even if that were a source of regret for me it's not but hypothetically if that were something i i regret how does this help you right like this is just lashing out and this is this is most of what we see you know with human nature and this is why your friend derek is never going to get sober you know um so and so so you want to say something yeah yeah come all the way yeah i just want to say like um this is not to flatter isil but it is an aspect that i've seen again and again throughout my time knowing him and living with him and seeing him have these conflicts with people is i think one of the differences you know when i think about the person i was when i was 19 when i last saw a friend who died of an overdose i just want to you know i'm i'm a little bit upset at that person like thinking why didn't you say anything you know why did you just when you know he was sitting there on your couch languid and you know probably high on heroin you know like why didn't you try to say something right um you do and you get the results you know um and you had to deal with a lot of i mean frankly abuse you know from from the audience um from the people you are directly criticizing um and you know you've taken a lot because of that and and to me that shows strength and i guess a part of it too is you know you you go there anyway even if you don't think that there's going to be that positive result right whereas like you know i think what was stopping me in the past from having confrontations with people is because well this is his choice you know like right what am i going to say that's going to change his mind right so i want to nail down that point so it's a very dramatic example that you know someone who's actually strung out on heroin in front of you on the couch or something and most of these conversations we have they're let's put it this way even even if the person is using drugs you're having the conversation when they aren't high at that minute you know it's by facebook message or whatever or whatever face to face i do think a lot of people live their lives with this limiting belief with this limitation that there's no point having the conflict there's no point saying it there's no point telling the truth and shoving down the person's uh throat like you know saying in a way that's really gonna have an impact um because there's nothing to win right there's nothing to win by arguing by fighting by telling the truth by you know and again in this case we're talking about saving someone's life talking about life life and death so so it's remarkable it's remarkable that people live with that belief it is a non-factual belief it is a counterfactual belief it's it's a fictive belief but people really do what's the point in in fighting you know what's the point and by the way sorry so drug addiction is kind of an easy one there are people who have sexual molestation in their family history like sexual abuse sexually moral problems like that and they really live with that like what's the point of standing up and saying to this person or maybe saying to their mother or father look this is the reality of who this guy is and this is what he did to me or this is what he did to my sister or whatever the situation is what's the point of of telling the truth what's the point of you know of confronting people this way okay but i have an answer for that question all right what you get to control and what you get to decide is who you are going to be period i don't get to decide if that crackhead sobers up or not i don't get to decide if this guy quits using heroin or not i don't get to decide if this person is willing to become vegan literally to save their own life like even taking out the ethical aspects and the ecological aspects i don't get to decide that i get to decide whether or not i am going to be the type of person or i'm going to be the person who stands up and does the right thing because it's the right thing to do you know who takes that on who tells them or if i am going to be in plain english a coward right it's a kind of cowardice like oh and again i'm just using these two examples but they're really we could give a lot of examples here like oh i'm not going to let this person know that their drug use is a problem or their alcohol use is a problem that kind of thing i'm just going to skate around it in silence or i'm not going to deal with and confront the fact this family has a history of rape of sexual abuse of of something like that that's that's really upsetting or deal with what you but again really there were many many many other uh instances and examples we could we could get into here you're going to be conflict avoiding rather than conflict escalating and you're going to live with the belief that there is no point in in telling the truth that there is no point in dealing with this so not to make everything about me but if you tuned in look every other kid in my family my father had nine kids okay they all know joseph stalin is bad and evil and wrong they all know stalinism is wrong they all know mao zedong is wrong none of them ever confronted my father about it nothing none of them ever confronted my mother about it both my father and my mother were communist extremists not moderate communists not reasonable communists and sorry but there are a lot of other examples i mean frankly uh what both of my parents had to say about israel and israeli politics like i'm just saying giving examples i'm lower intensity than being in a family that actively justifies mass murder of millions of people it's just as serious as growing up in a family where your parents are neo-nazis it's just as serious and in a sense in one sense it's more serious there's some ways in which it's less serious but one way in which communism is more of a problem in your family than neo-nazism or racism is that communism was on the news every [ __ ] night right nazism was and that season was in the past but like during my life the conflict between the united states and russia was ongoing today still the conflict in the united states and uh china is ongoing obviously vietnam cambodia there are other communists cuba so on right but like the reality is you're dealing with it every day as part of the ongoing still unfolding politics of the world in a way that nazism is more of like a footnote in the politics of the world at this point right now i'm you know saying this of course the war in ukraine at this moment so um you know there are different elements every other [ __ ] person in my family and all of them are older than me none of them are younger than me i was the youngest all the brothers and sisters all the cousins and aunts and uncles and and anyway are there other people like that other people were in a position like an aunt and uncle whether they're not their origins they all took the position like oh what's the point of making a fuss what's the point on the truth what's the point of having a comment about this i was the only person who said no there really is a point you know there really is something to win here and it doesn't my father went to his grave making excuses for joseph stalin being pro stalin and pro-mass murderer and pro-slavery don't want to get into it it's crazy you know what what's packaged in with that [ __ ] you know oh well guess what [ __ ] it says to any of my brothers or any of my sisters i get to be the person who stood up and did what was right that's not going to be and that is now partly it's just an end state like this is who i am as the end of a process of development but it's also in an ongoing process of development you know even sorry there are situations that are totally hopeless this doesn't happen that often there are in a few situations where i stand up and talk to the cops where i really have a conflict with the police and other authority fears of that and i have no sense that i'm going to break this policeman's heart and change them it's possible it's possible some of those conversations i have with the cops they later really went back and thought about it and reflected on it because it's probably very rare for someone to step to a police officer and say hey this is wrong this is right what's going on here man well that's what we all want everyone to do that's every time there's another disaster with police brutality why didn't someone stand up to the cops why didn't someone tell the cops what was wrong wrong what was right it takes real strength for most people it's terrifying this is a man with a gun and the ability to put you in a cage you know he can just make up some [ __ ] even if you've done nothing wrong put you in a cage for a couple days one with the results you can make your life really miserable this cop has power over you or do you have what it takes to step to that police officer and say hey this is wrong this is right and in effect escalate a conflict create a created conflict about it and again the the excuse people live with the limiting belief people live with is that there's nothing to be won there's no point you're never going to convince your own father not to be racist if you have a racist father you're never going to convince your own father not to be a communist if you have a communist like whatever it is you know you're not going to win the argument no no no no no it's not about winning the argument right it's about being the person who can make that argument it's about becoming the person who can do those things and that's what you become through through making that having that level of commitment having that level of risk then having the kind of self-discipline and emotional character that that comes with it and going through that again again and you get to live with that level of preparation all the time and if people say hurtful things happen to the internet it happens in real life too when i do have conflicts in real life i'm able to just laugh at and shrug off things that are really devastating and hurtful for other people because i've had that that preparation i've lived with this comes back to the first thing that's in the video i've lived with taking my life seriously in that way and even this ridiculous email correspondence shows it right like oh okay well i'm going to take this really seriously there's one human being's life to save maybe there's somebody in the audience what's going to save their life yeah exactly and you get to be that person that you can look back on your life yes i did that instead of being self-pitying about it oh i could have done this and i didn't you know that that sense of regret i mean that's something i heard when i was really young that i just didn't understand where yes like the regret of not doing something is worse than the regret of having done something and you know suffering the negative consequences because you know i've had i've been in these situations with you where you stood up to people in positions of authority and that i admire that but initially i was thinking what are you doing you know like you were put in jail right that was even for somebody uh even in a an airport you know these people are not the police but there's a sense in which i feel powerless and i am living in this you know position where i have to do whatever these people in authority are telling me to do and then you know realizing no there's another option you know if somebody is in effect mistreating you or you you know it could be someone else that may stream but they're doing their own thing yeah they're doing the wrong thing whether it's something that you know they are directly flouting the laws uh flouting what they're supposed to do the rules of their job or just being really rude and and you know you know there is an option where you can stand up to authority um and yes you might you know bear the brunt of insults you might have to um deal with some unpleasant conflict and you know but in effect you have to practice that uh you have to become a better person that way so look you know um i know a lot of these are very emotionally charged examples talking about your relationship with your own parents and uh drug addiction and nazism and communism and so but you know um this might seem like a this might seem like a very tame example by contrast but when you're living through it in the moment it's really difficult emotionally i stood up and confronted a whole series of professors this comes back to tko sam i stood up and confronted a whole bunch of professors at my university about the fact that the teaching of japanese was broken like the way they were teaching japanese it was a total disaster and like i could prove on paper nobody can succeed in this nobody can learn the language this way the way you're teaching it so just very briefly but one of the things they did they started with a course that was so many months long and then they cut it in half and they said we'll make it an intensive course we'll do it in half as much time and then they cut it in half again so you're down to a point where you could just say look this is the number of words per day you're expected to memorize there's no time here to pray like like it was already a bad course to begin with you you doubled it and we'll cut it in half and cut it in half or doubled and doubled the intensity like there were there were some ways in which it was like not just my opinion that this course doesn't work but like really demonstrably factual okay i believe from memory about six professors um privately person to person agreed with me they said look you've pointed out something really important here like you're you're right about this okay i think if i'm wrong and it was five professors and so like i'd have to take a minute and just remember each of them but i'm just saying they're not that many professors in the university there aren't that many professors involved with the teaching of japanese and the teaching of chinese right so you know there aren't that many people involved but whether it was four or five or six you know so but dude that was such a hard conflict to deal with face to face and in some ways it's ruined my life i like i didn't win in terms of my own self advancement right but sure there is a point you know part of the point is those six professors right they went on to design and change the curriculum for the teaching of chinese and japanese the next year and the next decade at that university and at other universities and what several professors said to me which i completely believe is before you stood up nobody was aware this problem existed nobody institution knew there was a problem at all like this was completely under swept under the carpet no one was aware that these courses were were crap well just be honest she was a really nice lady the one woman who taught my first japanese course she did know and i remember there was i remember i wish i'd kind of taken her advice she's japanese in her very kind of quiet way she was like look you should drop the course like it's terrible you know now of course i wish i'd taken her advice that would have been easier for me right okay so you know one effect is like even though i lost the battle right like you actually did create the basis for some kind of positive change in future this way sometimes especially with a totally authoritarian totally non-democratic institution like a university that's the best you can do is you can just make people aware of the problem right and i've had a huge impact on those professors lives none of them will forget me i'm sorry i've seen melissa's seen this too if you think i've had an impact on tko sam and you know you you hear back i hear back about it verbally from other professors and i've seen it on the internet i know the impact on those professors it left a mark okay on their life for real and probably no other student will ever do that for them in their life maybe maybe one or two will probably nobody else ever ever did that right guess what this is who i get to be this is who i get to become all right that conflict wasn't easy for me either but i quite literally became a better man through that conflict there's no exaggeration to say like people talk a lot about [ __ ] personal growth and [ __ ] right like what does personal growth mean what if personal growth means you stand up and do the right things that's the right thing to do and it totally destroys your academic career it destroys the possibility of you getting a master's degree and a phd but it was the right thing to do and now you don't have an mar phd but you get to be you get to be eizel-mizzard you know i get to be the man that i am you know i'm so happy i'm so happy to wake up every day and be me let me tell you and you know so look i just say these are more subtle examples than standing up to somebody who's a drug addict or an alcoholic or what have you but these are the kinds of conflicts we have in our life and you can't live with this belief that there's no point in having the conflict there's no point telling the truth that there's no point in dealing with it there is a point and the point is that you become the kind of person who can tell the truth even when it's inconvenient even when it's hard that you can deal with it that you can't overcome those things in other people and overcome them in yourself you know that's that's that's the most reliable positive outcome i can tell you about and maybe as with making this video as of making this series of videos about tko sam maybe there can be some other positive outcomes for other people you know um anyway the the correspondence with adam closes with my saying to him yeah you have nothing to learn from me whatsoever there is just no way that you could possibly take positive motivation or inspiration from this discussion nor from my youtube channel in general the only way you could respond to this is by insulting and denigrating me that's what a mature adult would do in your situation there was certainly no possibility that you could look back at what you've done with the last five years of your life and be filled with regret none in closing this video this is what i see when i look into the eyes of tkyo sam i see someone who is [Laughter] he's intelligent enough to regret what he's done in the last five years of his life now last 10 years last 15 years let's just stick with five years or a round number so to speak okay he is intelligent enough to be filled with regret when he looks back on his life and he won't let himself feel that regret he's making an effort constantly he's in this struggle to distract himself to justify to excuses so that he won't feel that regret so that he won't deal with that regret and what he can't imagine is how positive that feeling of regret could really be in his life right what he can't imagine is that feeling the regret i mean it's not going to be the end of your life right it's the first step towards making those positive changes it's beholding what you've done beholding what you've you've been doing the excuses you've been making with your life you look back on that then you turn around and you look ahead you're like well i've got another five years ahead of me right you can take that first step of giving up making the excuses right and then you can start to change not just the decisions that you make you can start to change the person who you really are