Ultra Instinct vs Ultra Ego: Eastern Philosophy Explained

[00:00:00]great news for beerus fans and fans of dbs the arrive hakai goodbye sure which i was only able to put out for a brief time is now back in the new geekdom 101 store beerus fans must pick this shirt up because it represents the badassery of beerus plus it comes in multiple sizes multiple styles and you can actually buy hats as well we have hats available right now in fact everything you could ever want is available right now in the new official geekdom 101 store which right now has several different designs up and i want you all to check it out i'll leave a link down below to the store and to the beers merchandise check it out thank you so much for buying a piece of clothing if you did recently and now let's get to the video recently i did a video called ultra ego vegeta explained and in that video i went into the road that vegeta took to achieve the power of a god of destruction and why that form was so fitting of the prince of all saiyans but on this video i want to have a discussion about the key differences between ultra instinct and ultra ego as far as the eastern philosophy martial arts perspective what was toriyama and toyotaro what are they really telling us here about the different philosophies behind goku and vegeta and how in some ways they mirror each other but in other ways they're very different when you look at these two forms they represent a much deeper aspect of dragon ball that a lot of fans just don't talk about and today i want to talk about it to give everybody a better appreciation of what they were going for so joining me on this video is actually the guy who helped co-write the ultra ego vegeta video as a researcher please welcome jordan what's up thank you for having me yeah yeah jordan of course has been a featured guest on the geekdom 101 manga review streams he's been around um he's got his own youtube channel um so i will leave a link down below for you to check it out what do you do on your youtube channel so i use my youtube channel to discuss different topics about dragon ball that interest me and i review the current events of dragon ball as much as i can in the future i'll be using it to keep people updated on my fan projects which include a manga and an animated series so if you're interested check it out and i'll definitely appreciate it fantastic so check that out for sure and of course if you're new here subscribe we talk about dragon ball on a much higher level than some folks are willing to admit it's a much deeper series and uh leave a like so that other dragon ball fans can see this because the youtube algorithm is not always kind um and uh i really work hard to produce content to make sure you guys are entertained and also a little bit of education so let's talk about this bro ultra instinct versus ultra ego yin and yang ultra instinct goku's path the path of the angels much more philosophical much more of a deep thinker much more about letting go and letting your body do its own thing the body instinctually moves the brain is turned off actually sun wukong a lot of this enjoying to the west and a lot of eastern martial arts is about turning off your brain a lot of meditation there's a lot of really really deep things that if people do their homework on eastern religion you come to learn about a lot of the philosophies that dragon ball has taken from that because toriyama's really into that stuff ultra ego is at the other side of it where it's not really about letting go it's actually about accepting oneself and accepting one's duties and to me it's really interesting as to how even this far into dragon ball even decades after the end of the original manga toriyama is still coming up with ways to have these characters not necessarily clash but have a clash of ideology that's really the overall theme of all of dragon ball and almost every arc is a clash of ideology yeah i know and i love it and it really gets deeper as the series progresses you know um it sometimes i mean there's it's not always perfect so tell us about some of the philosophical differences between ultra instinct and ultra ego when it comes to goku and vegeta's pathways in becoming better martial artists okay so the concept of yin and yang is mainly derived from a series of texts written by the father of taoism whose name is lao tzu or loud c there's a bunch of different ways to pronounce his name but uh much like journey list is the source material for dragon ball the dao de ching is the source material for journey to the west journey of the west took from the dao de ching in order to write its story yeah we're going back hundreds we're going back hundreds of years this is very old stuff yeah so basically the journey of the west uses the qing as a guide for the morals that the story is basically trying to portray and so there's a character and journey to the west that matches everything that akira toriyama does with vegeta as a character and his name is the six-eared macaque so some woo kong was a macaque that's what he was he was a monkey but there was another one like him who gained all his abilities and how he did that was when uh son wu kong met his master sub huti which interestingly enough toriyama took subhuti and he split him into two characters grandpa gohan and master roshi there's like aspects of each character that he split between those two characters so like for example subhuti is the one that gave song wukong his name and grandpa gohan is the one that named goku goku right and yeah and of course the the ancient martial arts um you know senen as they say is something we see time and time again from anime from from kung fu movies this is ingrained in eastern culture like the chinese and japanese this is literally hundreds of years it's no different than when you know in the west we have our own sort of folk tales this is what they are really into so if you grow up in that environment you're going to be familiar with all this it's just us in the west that might not know unless we look into it right and goku being raised uh where he is is a reference to uh sun wukong being sealed into five phases mountain which the intentions of that was to teach him manners and as you know in dragon ball minus whenever goku is discovered by grandpa gohan grandpa gohan specifically tells him that he's going to teach him manners and he also teaches him martial arts so there's there's tons of references to journey to the west like that and the story but when it comes to vegeta uh vegeta is based on a character that's actually meant to be the evil twin of son mukong himself and the way he's introduced to the story is when some wu kong is talking to sabhiti he overhears the conversation between the two because what's special about this character is that he can hear everything in the universe right so he overhears what this character is teaching him and instead of having a master to guide him to to master all these things he does it all by himself and this character is actually supposed to be a representation of some wukong pre-character development so before some wukong is character is developed as a character by uh being taught by subhuti and being sealed in five phases mountain um he's a egotistical he's an instinctual creature but he's also very in uh egotistical and he has a lot of issues well this character is like if son wukong never learned his lesson at all and when he's introduced later on in the story so like for example vegeta he's introduced to the story because he ease drops on a conversation between raditz and goku right and he ends up using that to try and achieve immortality well this character he he's dropped some some wukong's conversation specifically to learn the secret of immortality so there's your first you know there's your first parallel between the two and then another thing is he trains and and you know masters all the secrets that he overhears in this conversation on his own and this character also believes himself to be the true monkey king which is exactly like vegeta yeah it's not identical because toriyama borrowed ideas from several different uh stories to make vegeta but there's a lot there you know and and how does this relate to ultra ego though on ultra instinct uh i'm getting to that so so uh this character also wanted to make the journey to the west on his own right so this character actually represents some wukong's ego which he conquered by the end of the story by the end of the story when he finds enlightenment he's a completely changed being some wukong when he goes on the journey of the west the the reason he goes on the journey west with other people is to learn the value of people much like goku and dragon ball and by the end of the journey he is completely compassionate towards everyone so this character is based on vegeta and the ego just like you know in dragon ball and some wukong uh goku's character is base is basically based on sun wukong after he's already been completely developed as a character and learned universal compassion and universal compassion could even be compared to abraham maslow's hierarchy of needs when you become self-actualized there's i've talked about that also on uh videos from the other channel that i've done um world of geek them about this kind of stuff like it's that i love talking about the philosophy because a lot of it i feel like people could use it in real life to really help themselves and learn about themselves as they kind of apply some of this stuff you know yeah well the daodejing when the book was written it was actually written as a criticism of war crazed chinese royalty the whole reason that the book was written was because lao tzu the guy that wrote the book was tired of seeing this same cycle happen over and over again or you know comes up with a set of ideas that the people rally behind him and then by the time he dethrones the previous king you know he's become a tyrant because he's pushing his ways on other people and that's something that lao tzu noticed so like he wanted to criticize that and so goku because he is completely void because everything he does is based on instinct and he's not fighting based on an idea of justice or anything like that he naturally leads the universe in a better direction because that is according to the daodejing how you are supposed to be a leader and how are you how you were supposed to it basically fixes the problem that the chinese royalty was having at the time so that's how toriyama cleverly took from that goku is pure of heart in the same way that it's stated in the doubt ching someone is pure of heart so like when you think of like goku's pure heart just think of like a like a little kid or like an animal you know like he's just like yeah he's very innocent i did a whole video on this years ago about goku's pure heart explain when i went into explicit detail about that vegeta on the other hand not so much pure of heart so because goku is pure of heart he naturally makes the best decisions without trying because he's not capable of evil thought and that's what separates goku from vegeta the intentions for this but when goku was younger roshi taught him a set of principles known as budo and if you actually go and look up what budo means it actually literally means war or marshall right and it's like martial in chinese right it means it's taoist martial arts and what that teaches is you don't become the strongest by trying to defeat other people you become strongest by trying to defeat your own ego the opposite of vegeta in a way exactly so that's what roshi has been teaching uh goku ever since he was a kid which is a reference to what sabriti taught uh sun wukong and journey to the west and you can see this multiple times in the series goku like he makes a decision that seems questionable but it actually ends up creating a situation that makes the universe a better place so like for example whenever he gave piccolo a sensu the first time in the original dragon ball without that decision ultimately he would have died to raditz he wouldn't have had piccolo there to help him uh same thing with vegeta if it wasn't for him sparing vegeta ultimately gohan and krillin would have died on namek so even though these decisions seem inherently selfish on the surface because he's doing it out of a pure heart and based on instinct it ends up causing the best possible scenario in the future and making the universe a better place as a result yeah it's like causality cause and effect we talked about that in another video i did a lot of this stuff that we've talked about here that you talked about i've discussed in various videos throughout the years but we have a lot of new subscribers who you all got to go back and check out dragon ball in-depth i talked about a lot of this in other videos they had video about causality which didn't get that many views because i don't think people understood the importance of cause and effect in dragon ball things happen for a reason and that's how it is in real life too but it's interesting how when things happen in dragon ball that might seem bad they actually turn good and that a lot of that is is fascinating a fascinating outlook on life when you really think about it yeah because he's incapable of evil thoughts so as a result you just got to think about it this way so like in taoism you are rewarded for uh basically being an instinctual being for basically just making all of your decisions based on instinct and not based on an idea of what's right and wrong so that's the reason that goku is constantly rewarded for making all these decisions based on his biology that's also the reason that they're kind of trying to shoehorn bardock being compassionate into saying biology because they want goku to be an example of what he they want him to be an example of that aspect of saying biology being purified just like they want vegeta to be an uh you know an example of the other aspect of saying uh biology to be purified like they're both an example of like what the sands had the potential to be but purified and heightened to like its greatest potential fantastic yeah no and that's an ultra ego and ultra instinct are basically their greatest potential i mean that the two forms are different because one is is much more about the external mind and one's much more internal and i always found that to be really interesting when they were first coming up with this on the surface it just appears to be like well it's the beerus method well it's the whis method but there's a lot more to it when it comes to how these methods mirror goku vegeta and i do wonder if when toriyama was first coming up with beerus and whis knowing toriyama's history i don't think he had this planned all the way back then but the fact that he was able to kind of make it all fit is pretty genius when you think about it i'm not going to sit here and say toriyama as a writer is on the same level he was in the 80s and 90s he's just not but the fact that he was able to actually make this work to where it makes sense is kind of interesting yeah the way he goes about basically taking uh vegeta's character themes and purify him through the idea of a god of destruction is really fascinating to me and like uh super dragon ball heroes actually did an episode you i don't know if you remember but they did an episode where vegeta got that dark aura form you know yeah they do they do a really good job explaining uh what ultra ego is essentially going to do for vegeta even though that has nothing to do with ultra ego it basically points out where vegeta's mindset is so in there's a clip in super dragon ball heroes where turtles is influenced by cumber to think that evil is the true nature of the saiyans right and we all know that you know vegeta has been ruthless in the past but whenever he's posed with this question he disagrees with pearls surprisingly enough and he actually gets really upset that turtles suggests that evil is their true nature and he ends up it shows a flashback of whenever vegeta was giving his speech about goku where he was talking about how goku is superior because he allows his opponents to live which ultimately leads to him getting stronger so basically like the point of the exchange is that cumber was the first saiyan to ever corrupt the saiyan race with his ways that's kind of his theme he makes other saiyans evil by corrupting them and influencing them right and goku goku is the exact opposite he influences he purifies people you know like he purifies people's nature and so uh they did a really good job hammering this point home because vegeta even says himself that it's wrong that evil is the true nature of the saiyans the true nature of the sands is to keep fighting right is to keep growing stronger and to strive for more strength more than anything they have very different philosophies like i mentioned the alter ego vegeta video see it's not really it's nature versus nurture because he was raised on earth his perspective on things and he had different training than vegeta did with roshi karin kami sama kai osama later on his perspective is totally different than vegeta's and i think part of vegeta's character growth is him accepting the fact that his way is not the only way but at the same time when we get to dragon ball super he realizes that goku's way might not be the right way for him but what he does is he actually takes what goku is what he sees from goku and he makes his own version of it that's what he's doing with ultra ego right like i was telling you before when goku makes a decision based on his instincts based on his need to grow stronger and his you know whenever whenever he's not making it based on a set of ideas he always ends up getting the best result and vegeta in the past he's always made all of his decisions based on his ego right and that's the reason that it might look like he's a hero like in the short term but actually in reality all the decisions he ends up making they end up biting him in the ass because the series is basically trying to tell you that the decisions he's making are inherently wrong you're not supposed to be making decisions based on your ego or your ideas but vegeta with ultra ego now has the opportunity to fight solely based on his instincts not goku's instincts because they have different instincts but vegeta because he is using his innermost instincts to make his decisions he now has the opportunity to be an equal to goku because he's not going to suffer for his decisions like he has in the past once he completely masters alter ego because he's not making his decisions based on any idea of right or wrong or justice or anything like that he is simply just giving in to his instincts and giving into the fight and and fighting so like if you notice beerus is above his own actions like beerus does not have to pay for anything that he does and that's really what they're trying to accomplish for vegeta they're trying to make it they're basically justifying and making what vegeta has thought was correct his whole life they're making it correct you know like goku has tried to tell vegeta multiple times you know what the way you do things is wrong yeah actually some some feel that that's character regression um and it's really not it's actually more character advancement because what's happening is vegeta's coming to terms with who he is that's really what it is and and that by no means necessarily means that killing innocent people is right because that's not the point here that's not what this is about it's about the philosophy of how you carry yourself in life and how you feel about yourself it's not about murdering people vegeta has already you know advanced enough to know that killing people for fun is not fun for him anymore but killing the enemy that threatened those that hurt him and being ruthless about that that's the right way to go at least exactly well think about this makes the mortal level fall think about what frieza did when he was running around working on the universe the blue level ultimately fell because the only people that he allowed to live were and not just but weak you know what i mean so vegeta he prides his strength and his idea of getting stronger over everything else so vegeta he used to have an idea that everyone who was weak deserved to die but that's not the case anymore like he believes that only certain people who are evil who are also weak deserve to die like he's it's more so about like if he's going to run into an enemy he's going to judge them and if he can and if they aren't if they don't have a fighter spirit if they don't if they don't have this idea of like getting stronger and like you know conquering themselves he's going to look down on that and he's going to erase them like he like it's really if you think about it like the the ideas that vegeta holds dear could actually lead to the entire universe becoming better as a result because if he's stern on all these people that he meets and he expects them to have a fighter spirit and develop themselves ultimately that'll lead to the entire universe developing themselves similar to how goku has been doing it this whole time but it's vegeta doing it in his own way like like in the like in the one of the dragon ball super chapters uh vegeta even says i'm going to give you a dose of my tough love and if you look in the past he's bettered people through that method himself so like beerus whenever he met goku in battle of gods he he actually pushed goku to new heights and that was the first time that goku had like experienced someone who could push him that way in a really long time and what's really ironic about it is he was the opposite of goku in every way he was completely merciless he didn't care about anyone and yet he still managed to push goku to new heights goku has managed to push everybody in new heights because he has compassion for people and because he allows people to grow but beerus under the threat of destruction causes people to you know rise above the occasion and and become stronger so like vegeta he does the exact same he does the exact same thing with cobb it's two different methods of achieving a similar situ a conclusion yeah it's it's two different methods of but with the same result so like kaaba versus vegeta is a great example of that vegeta was disgusted whenever kaaba didn't have his same pride but by the end of that fight he ended up pushing kaaba to become a super saiyan because that's how much potential vegeta has as a destroyer so he he is so good in fact that he accidentally pushed granola to break his limits he didn't mean to do that but because he's so good at pushing people to to better themselves he ended up doing it anyway so that's kind of the series giving us a hint as to what vegeta's character is going to be as in the future he's going to kind of be goku's equal in a way together based on two different methods they both have the potential to better the universe through their methods and we're not gonna talk about which form is stronger because that's a different video i feel this is more so about like the philosophies and the pathways they've taken because you're going to have people debating which form is stronger because there are even though the angels are obviously at a higher tier than the gods of destruction we've seen that people are going to say well that doesn't necessarily mean that goku is an angel because he's not and vegeta is not a god but they're tapping it's more about mentality than actual like you know who's stronger we'll save that for another video i was just wanting to make that point yeah so uh in the moral arc there's basically like this good cop bad cop scene where like vegeta's like about to wipe out moro and goku like has mercy on him that's a really good way of basically looking at basically the character themes that they're really trying to play on for goku and vegeta like it really highlights the future of each character if you like really think about it like they've already played on goku's ability to better the multiverse a lot so there's a lot of room for them for them to give vegeta you know room to do the same thing in the future for example like xeno he noticed that hit you know got stronger as a result of his running with goku and who ended up having that infect that effect on the entire multiverse by the end of the tournament of power so like goku's uh method of bettering the universe has already been expanded on and used like a lot in the series and that in combination with what vegeta's intentions are as a character has the potential to push universe 7 to a new level of mortal level because if vegeta you know this whole good cop bad cop thing that i noticed in the morrow arc if they continue to use that method on most of the villains and the people that they face they have the potential as yin and yang together destruction and recreation because you gotta think about it like everyone has been recreated as a result of running it with goku vegeta piccolo that's what that's kind of goku's character themes he causes people to like build themselves up from scratch and recreate themselves and work on themselves and so if they work together as yin and yang goku and vegeta right now have the potential to basically create a more advanced and complex powerful universe than anything we've seen so far and i think that's the intentions of the characters going forward and you know a lot of people have issue with the aspects of goku and vegeta's character that i'm talking about goku having mercy and vegeta being merciless yeah people have criticized super a lot for that lately even back in the morning yeah but what i don't think people understand is that they're taking goku and vegeta and they are making them a perfect version of themselves that's that's like the overall intentions of the characters so like goku if he completely masters ultra instinct guess what he can be as merciful as he wants and he will still be standing there like a brick wall and there will be nothing anybody can do about it just like how you know he tried to be that way towards granola and then granola highlighted where he still had weaknesses if goku doesn't have those weaknesses anymore he can be himself and he can be a perfect version of himself who doesn't have to pay in any way for the decisions that he makes right and that's kind of the end goal for goku as a character but it's also the end goal for vegeta as a character which i think is more relevant because he seems to be punished more quickly and more in succession like when goku when he has to deal with issues it's just a test to see if he will maintain that aspect of his personality and that's that's what they teach in taoism like you're not going to be completely void of karma even if you are completely good because you constantly have to be tested to maintain that you know yeah so that's that's life as a whole and both of them approach it from a different perspective because of the way they were raised it's all about the way you're raised and your philosophy there yeah and because goku constantly because he keeps that attitude about him he's rewarded for it like that's the reason that by every arc everyone's smiling everyone's happy the earth's restored amirus is alive whatever you know like he he actually he accidentally ends up creating the best possible scenario because he's so pure of heart and because his decisions are based on that so yeah that's that's what's special about goku but vegeta right now what he's having to learn like you said in in your previous video vegeta believed that the legendary super saiyan was supposed to be merciless his dad taught him that his whole fam like his whole life uh even his ancestors believed from the time that they saw the legendary super saiyan that every single child that they had had to be raised to be this merciless creature in order for them to achieve that same power that they saw a thousand years ago so like the super saiyan itself is the is the reasoning vegeta is the way he is as much as his parents like the idea of the super saiyan because i mean you've seen it yourself when somebody becomes super saiyan especially broly they completely lose himself so it it would make a lot of sense for his ancestors to see that and then to mistake that for you know what it takes to actually become a super saiyan so vegeta is not completely wrong about that now because he's taking what he learned from his ancestors and what his ancestors tried to breed into him and he's actually using it to become a god of destruction like he everything that vegeta's entire life has been encapsulated around leads to this interaction with beerus beerus is the first person to tell vegeta that the way he does things is necessary it is right it's something that's needed and you know to to me personally i really like that direction for vegeta because i don't like the idea of vegeta's ego being completely unjustified his whole life and you know i mean i like the idea that like vegeta had some kind of justification for feeling the way he did not necessarily when it comes to like taking out good guys and stuff but just like being merciless in general like yeah it's not about like we talked about it's not about killing innocent people it's about his methods of of resolving problems you know that's basically how it is you know right vegeta has learned because of goku about compassion so his development so basically his development continues goku's development may have been goku's development may have been above vegeta's but vegeta's is still ongoing so let us know what you think in the comments down below about the taoist and and kind of the the the differences and similarities between ultra instinct and ultra ego and thank you so much jordan for that thorough thorough look at the differences between the philosophies of the two and why these forms matter in dragon ball super you know super's got a lot of issues but i said myself that i felt like dragon ball super and ultra instinct that ultra instinct was my favorite thing about super and it was and ultra ego is like right there i mean we haven't seen enough of it yet especially not animated but it's you know it it's apples and oranges but who doesn't like apples and oranges you know they're pretty similar but also different so thank you again for being here thanks everybody for listening and we'll catch you in the next one