Decoding the Gurus - Destiny: Right to Reply

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

Matt and Chris jump into the world of debates, dramas, and online personas with the ever-controversial streamer, Destiny (Steven Bonnell). We discuss our Decoding episode a little bit but mostly broader issues including the value of 'debate porn', edginess & Twitter bomb-throwing, reality TV orbiter drama, and the perils of hero worship and parasocial relationships.As you might anticipate, we also cover various 'hot-button' issues including Destiny's involvement in Israel-Palestine discourse, the ethics of engaging with extremists, and whether Destiny was genuinely arguing for the right to murder the DDoS kid. Finally, we wrap up with some discussion of media literacy, the challenges of navigating online discourse, and strategies for laypeople to better engage with research.LinksOur Decoding episode on DestinyDestiny's Gurometer EpisodeDestiny's Positions as summarised on his WikiDiscussion with a Lawyer about the DDoS kidJoin us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Hello and welcome to the code in the gurus the podcast for a psychologist and an anthropologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about i'm matt brown the co-host is chris cavanaugh and this is a special right to reply the episode isn't it chris Who have we got with us today? I thought you were going to get lost on the way there, but you made it. You made it at the end. We have with us one Stephen Bonnell, also known as Destiny,

who we recently covered and invoked the secret right to reply rights. And we have materialized. So thank you for coming on, Stephen, and staying up late, which was appreciated. Yeah, thanks for having me. Am I on? Am I in? You're on and you're in. You've arrived. So typically, the way this works, though, to be fair, it's only been invoked about three or four times because every time we cover people, they're not usually the type of people that respond well to being covered so but there technically is a format

where we allow people to raise any points of dispute or issues or anything we got wrong or or just questions or that kind of thing and afterwards, move on to discussion and questions that came up from the stuff that we covered or elsewhere. And in your case, we did get a lot of feedback. You may not know it, but you're quite a controversial figure online. People have opinions.

Crazy. Yeah, I've heard this recently. I'm curious, for the people that refuse to exercise their right of reply and i imagine there's people that obviously take issue with a lot of the coverage you give them what's their number one reason or what are the most common reasons you hear them say for why they don't want to come on and chat about it well the biggest reason they don't come on is is frankly because we're not important enough that would be the biggest reason

all right that's that's the most important factor the second one is that a lot of the people we cover identify anybody that is given even mild critical pushback as like bad faith actors so in that case if they do acknowledge it it is usually just to say that we are you know not worth their time or an example of the kind of people that people shouldn't listen to. So that tends to be the reaction. But there has been exceptions. Sam Harris has taken up his right to reply twice with varying degrees of success. And we had Chris Williamson, who you chatted with yeah that was more successful sam's like my final boss guy that i really want to chat with i'm like so like i'm more i would

be more excited to chat with him than joe rogan i really want to hopefully someday it'll happen but be careful what you wish for yeah you know i heard you on the stream talking about this issue when you're debating people about you know that you raise a question or ask people something and they monologue or they waffle on and on right yeah just saying that might be something to think about if you do end up talking to sam so yeah i'm sure you've talked to many people so that's that's something to bear behind okay but how about you steven we got the your feedback the reception was generally positive but maybe you got a few bones to pick or a few points of explanation to make or or criticisms of what we did i'm gonna be honest having somebody cover me and not call me a pedophile nazi for like

two hours is actually the bar is in hell so the coverage isn't that i'm actually incredibly grateful so um i feel like when um and i say all of this cautiously because for all i know if i dig deeper into your guys's stuff you're just as problematic as everybody else which uh maybe you get the uh impression when you dig into other people it's hard to get people to make serious considerations i feel of other people's ideas so for instance if somebody says like, oh my God, we need to kill these fucking people, blah, blah, blah. Somebody will say that and somebody will come away with that and be like, oh, he just wants to murder all people instead of like looking at, okay, well, when he says kill all landlords, like what's actually

going on here? You know, like the statement itself can be problematic, but there might be something underneath that we need to consider as well. And yeah, I just find when most people are considering stuff of mine, I've probably done, I don't know if it'd be an exaggeration to say I've probably done more broadcasted content than almost anybody in existence, uh, just by virtue of like how unique streaming is and the fact that I've been doing it for about as long as anybody has been. Um, it's easy to like clip 20 second statements and then have this insane caricature of me that you attack attack even if there might be stuff that is worthy to criticize like the actual criticism just ends up being insane i think yeah i i guess part of that too is that you you know you come from that uh gamer type background of

this internet subcultures and so on and you know you the way you choose to express yourself is pretty pretty uh colorful isn't it? Yeah. I mean, like, that's definitely a thing. One of the challenges of being a popular person on the internet is extracting valid criticism from demented online talk. like an insanely mean, hurtful, not true thing about you, even if that criticism seems like bullshit, it's coming from somewhere and it behooves you if you want to survive in this arena or at least adapt so that people can understand you better to figure out like where it comes from. I think that when people criticize me for, obviously I use colorful language where I can get

unhinged at times, I definitely admit that. However, like the same types of strategies I believe are used to character assassinate basically anybody. Right. So like on the other spectrum for me, you could compare me to say Biden. Biden doesn't generally make unhinged crazy statements. But my God, every single time I talk to a conservative about Biden, they're telling me about like, remember the speech that he gave in front of the all red background when he said that half of Americans were racist and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, well, if I look at the speech, he's like, he tries to qualify so much where he's like, not all Republicans are mega people. Not all Republicans deny the election, but that doesn't matter. They still like assassinate on like the one or two lines. So yeah, I definitely don't do myself any favors, but I don't know substantively or significantly if the criticism against me would change if I hadn't made certain statements. That was my feeling, but I could be wrong. I've got a question that relates to that. So like you say, you've been doing this a long time, right? So you know, the kind of statements I imagine that are going to be kept. I mean, like recently, you intentionally said things like about the Jewish shekels being

paid to you, right for your commentary so like in that case i get it because you're basically trolling for the lowest common denominator response to show that they're not even trying to do things in good faith right because you then immediately after will say it's a joke but in the case where like the clip that we played and we played the longer context of it where you were talking about the you know the situation in palestine and israel before the conflict and you made the the four world way line about at this stage i think we should just genocide the palestinians or not we but they should and then you went on to talk about the actual situation and say well honestly

there's no solution right and I get your point that it's obvious if you listen to the rest of it, that you're not calling for a genocide, right? But you saying that, or in general, layering in those hyperbolic or extreme statements, doesn't that make it easy for people to do and like you know it's going to happen so does it just not matter or why say them yeah i mean i if it's going to be something like that i try generally to avoid that i usually won't make something so blatant that um that was just a matter of being incredibly unlucky uh because this happened before the conflict like nobody was really actively talking about this this was on like a this is on like i think i was playing games on the stream and it was like, Wes was like, he's like

not a political person. He was just like asking me questions. Um, so I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm being a bit hyperbolic. Like it would be akin to, um, like if somebody were to ask me, like, do you think that OJ, uh, you know, do you think that OJ should have been convicted? And you know, I'm like, listen, the prosecutor, you know, they fucked up hard, you know, God bless OJ. Listen, he beat the system and you know, he's free. And if the American system fails and fuck it. And then like, imagine a month later, it comes out that 15, you know, different women's bodies were found in his backyard. And then people start playing that clip. And I was like, well, don't you think you probably shouldn't have said, you know, God bless OJ for being like, yeah, I guess I probably should have.

But like, Jesus, I didn't know that the context would change so significantly at the time, like post October 7th. I don't think I'm going to open up with that hyperbolic of a statement. Like, yeah, you know what? Fuck it. Why don't think i'm going to open up with that hyperbolic of a statement like yeah you know what fuck it one of us just fucking genocide the other because that's the only way this conflict is going to end obviously because the sensitivity around the topic and the attention is so much higher so yeah i mean like it'll it'll happen in general i do try to avoid like the ultra leading hyperbolic statements like that but um yeah that was just jesus yeah not a not good timing on that yeah there's a reason why it took like two months i think after the conflict began for people to even find that and dig that up and then start like spreading it like i just said it or something yeah yeah that makes sense oh also wait i also can

i just say one thing too not to say that and this is always like my biggest issue somebody could make the argument that hyperbolic rhetoric like that for a variety of reasons is damaging or uh or contributes to like a negative discourse, which is fair. I would argue against it, but that is an argument that can be made. My biggest issue with people is usually just that they're making arguments against these unhinged positions of like, oh, destiny wants all the Palestinians to be killed. It's like, that's obviously that's not, I don't think any person wants like every Palestinian to be killed, except for the most insanely unhinged people. But yeah, that my issue is usually just that

the criticisms are very poor in terms of what they're actually criticizing yeah so i guess the thing that i'm thinking about is i've seen you in a bunch of content talking about like wanting to provide a more reasonable alternative to like the you know a lot of popular leftist content can be pretty extreme right um and it's good for people especially in online and twitch and kick and rumble and all that to see just reasonable or more moderate points of view but but then there is the tendency that like when people go to your twitter account depending on when they go they might come across like you know the recent tweets directed that ludwig or at hassan with the n word and the the j.m reference so in that case it feels like

if you were trying to you know say okay take things down a notch that's the message that sometimes comes across in like your stream in the mainstream interviews. But then on Twitter, it feels like the gloves come off fairly quickly. And your Reddit community tends to notice that as well, right? You will see Fred saying, Oh, God. Stephen, why? Why now? Or this kind of thing. So I'm just curious, in that case, is it intentional? Or is it an impulse control thing? Or what do you? Yeah, I think there's, I think we have to disaggregate a few things here. So firstly, on the when I advocate for like reasonableness, or whatever, it's not necessarily like civility, although I think civility can be important to like, when I say reasonableness, what I mean is just like, I want people to have a thorough understanding of the

things they're talking about, like well-informed opinions and the ability to read an entire article for five minutes from start to finish rather than to eat a headline and then digest that and have your whole opinion develop from a 20-calorie tweet when I talk about that. Now, separate from that, when you ask me about Twitter, okay, no man's land, there are several different things that could be happening at any one point in time. There are certain tweets that are intentional and edgy. So like the JDM N-word tweet, I think that these things are important for me because

one, they adjust my audience expectations. I don't care much about like slurs. I don't think we should call people slurs and I don't defend it. And I don't call people slurs, but when people like pearl clutch over like a particular word or they pearl clutch over like a particular thing, especially in the defense of using slurs. So this was like in the cracker debate or whatever. Can you call white people? In that point, I will deploy a tactical slur as a joke, not like calling somebody the N word or whatever in a, in a pejorative way. Yeah. Because it adjusts my audience expectation. It keeps everybody like understanding, well, this is what he thinks about this. And if people don't like it, I can understand why. And then it also like triggers the fuck of the other people. Um, now that's separate from say,

when I was fighting with Ludwig, um, there were a couple issues there. One is, uh, I am human and I do make mistakes. There are probably times when I fight with people and I'm sure I could go through several of these where I go too far. Um, not even such that I'm being too mean, but that I'm violating principles that even I think I shouldn't be doing. These are things that are generally just a mistake. I shouldn't have said this, or I got way too heated or too upset. And then another issue that I have, this is on the strategic side, not the moral side, is because I let so much stuff slide all the time about me, because so many people are saying so many things, when I am boiling over and I become unhinged, it kind of seems like it comes from nowhere. So even in my own fan base, a lot

of people saw me fighting with Ludwig and then invoking cutie. And they're like, this is like so much just because he tweeted like a, you know, a meme at you, like why? And then one thing that I'm trying to do more now is I'm trying to lay out now that I've got like people clipping stuff. Like these are all the things that these people say about me. This is where the frustration comes from. It's so irritating that there's no accountability on their side. But then as soon as I say something now, like, not only are their communities trying to hold me to account, my own community is holding me account and that's driving me crazy. That doesn't justify me being unhinged, but I'm trying to do a better job at keeping track of what

other people are saying about me. So there is at least some kind of public accountability created there. But yeah, sorry, that was a lot. Yeah, because no that that makes sense and i i think in that recent case it might have also been particularly joined because you did a stream with dr k which was quite a reflective stream about how to i don't know better communicate or whatever dr k talks about but then the next day there was the interaction and like like you say, I think the context does matter. So I think from hearing your explanation that Ludwig and other people will make reference to your private life and past relationships or this kind of thing. And then when you respond in kind, people respond as if you suddenly went low for no reason. You mentioned his

girlfriend and talk about deep fakes allowing us all to enjoy, right? So that kind of thing. So it's the sense that people are doing the same thing to you and you're not allowed to respond in kind. Is that kind of? Yeah, it's two things going on. One is the difference in accountability. So I genuinely believe, and I would fight that for any creator within an order of magnitude of size of me, I think that I have the most moderated community on the internet, which if you listen to anybody else, they would say that I have the most unhinged community on the internet. But like, if you go through threads where I think I called Casey Tron, like a fat, I

said, I hate this lady. Okay. But like, I've said things about people that I don't like political opponents that i don't like that are probably crossing my values where i say things like we probably shouldn't tell people for their looks or stuff like this and when i say things like that like my own community will post up like hey we probably shouldn't be doing this or i don't know why destiny is saying this or did we change our mind on this um which is good right and i might even be ass mad at the time i'm even like fucking tab ban somebody because i'm like ass mad or whatever but like in retrospect like that good. Like those corrective mechanisms in my community are

valuable to me and I appreciate those. But on an emotional level, when I have a lot of accountability for my community and then I look into other communities and those communities have zero accountability for those people and they green light attacks that should be contrary to those communities. So for instance, they might talk a lot about how like, oh, well, we shouldn't make like, well, we need to defend all LGBT and sexuality. And this is so important and blah, blah, blah. But then like when I'm brought up, like spamming pictures of like some black girl getting railed, making cup jokes is all of a sudden like the funniest thing in the world.

And it's like, okay, well, that feels really annoying. And then in their community, if anybody calls them out, they get downvoted out of existence and then banned. And it's like, okay, that dual accountability like fucks with my head a lot. and it's like okay that that dual accountability like fucks with my head a lot and then on the second the second part of that is um there's a concept called crazy making where uh especially for people that take videos of their significant others like having an outbreak where you can poke and poke and poke and poke and poke somebody so much and then when they break you like record it or you account for it in some way you tell people you're like man you were super unhinged and then

you act like you've done nothing and that also drives me crazy it's one of the reasons why i prefer fighting like i like the nazi communities because when they call me names or they go unhinged or crazy i expect it but if i go unhinged on them they're never coming back with like i can't believe that destiny said this or that about you know richard spencer or sargon of a card or nick fuentes or because they expect it whereas on the other side it's like oh my god you really said or did this and it's like yeah you have been saying like worse shit about me like hassan literally calls me divorcelli like 20 times per street what the fuck yeah yeah yeah i mean i think it's awesome i mean we're not the civility police um like we we're much less polite about most of

the characters we cover um when we don't like them it is important like civility some level of civility is important though like i shouldn't do that like these are human emotional responses that are not like i'm giving you reasons why it happens i'm not justifying them like if i was a better person i could be above that or i wouldn't like fall prey to that there's just a lot of public pressure but the civility part is important i don't mean some people use civility politics as a like an insult like oh you just want to be polite to everybody but like some base level of civility is probably necessary for us to communicate with each other so yeah just saying yeah civility porn is a term that we reference like civility is good but constantly talking about how incredible it is

that you're able to talk to someone who you largely agree with is yeah it comes up a lot in the content that we look at but but sorry matt you were going to say yeah i think the thing that interests us steven it's not it's not really a criticism it's just it's just an interesting thing which is that you do seem to have those multiple speeds like on one hand like you are it seems to us incredibly consistent in terms of your you know arguments and your stances on important sort of topics but you know you can be talking about a very serious topic and you know marshalling you know robust points in a in a very rigorous way in at one time and then listening to other content you're like litigating some personal

sort of relationship thing and people taking pictures of penises or whatever. And you sort of deploy the same, you take that with the same level of seriousness. And I get the impression you spend a lot of time on that kind of stuff as well. And again, it's not having to go. I'm just curious, like what's why? I don't know. I feel like growing up, I think something that i always valued was i think it's cool when individuals are less specialized and more less um more i don't

want to say more generalized but not necessarily like sliding into hardcore archetypes uh like i like the idea of a really nerdy guy that reads a lot but is also like a quarterback or i like the idea of you know like a hardcore rambo soldier who also like finger paints. Or I like the idea of people having like kind of, I don't want to say breaking molds, but I guess it's kind of like that. Yeah, just like having a collection of attributes. I value my intelligence. I like researching. I like debating. I have huge interest in politics. I'm also like, you know, a super sexualized person. I like to, you know, hook up and sleep around with people. I like to do drugs sometimes i think are super fun um i like cars i like guns um yeah i like video games there's just a lot of things that i what'd you say oh yeah um yeah

there's just like there's a lot of things that i enjoy and yeah i guess because my life is so open i end up sharing all of these things and yeah sometimes it's confusing because it seems like you wouldn't associate some of these things other people other people say that like well you shouldn't be so open about all these things. There are pros and cons to it. So is that part of the package? You're very upfront about, you run a business essentially, right? And you provide a product and you make money from it. And we commented on that and we found it quite refreshing because a lot of other people present themselves as something quite different. And, you know, part of it seems to be that, you know, people can engage with you on political topics

but can also engage and be a part of your, like, the real life, right? So those parasocial dynamics, which we experience too being podcasters are real and they're not always negative but like is that part of the appeal like how would you describe the the product that you offer your audience and how much of it is is is the is the drama and and the the personal beefs and things like that yeah i. I think when you come to my stream, I think there's a few things you're getting. One is uniqueness. So if you're listening to me give a take on something, this is my take on it, as opposed to there's a lot of progressive commentators where I could write the scripts for any take they're going to have. Like, oh, well, this came

out. America was on this side. They're probably going to be against it. Or for far right commentators, a political topic came out. Biden said this. Well, they're probably going to be against it. Or for far right commentators, you know, a political topic came out, Biden said this, well, they're probably going to say that they don't trust this or they don't believe this. If you come to my stream, I think you genuinely aren't, I don't want to say you don't know what I'm going to say, because that makes it sound like it's a random or chaotic, but rather, at least you know that I'm going to have my own unique individual interpretation of a particular thing. That's a big thing, the uniqueness. A second thing is I think the authenticity. I think I hope I come off as a pretty authentic person. Again, there's like leaked, like there's so much information about me online aside from even just all of the hours streamed. There's like people try to leak stuff

about me or talk about me behind the scenes or whatever. And I think every single thing that has ever been leaked or every single thing that's ever gone has usually gone to show that I'm more or less, if anything, I'm like even more softer generous in real life like sometimes like things i pay people will get leaked and be like i can't believe you paid you know five thousand dollars for music for this dnd thing or i can't believe he's paying this employee like x thousand a month or blah blah blah and yeah nothing like leaks that's like a surprise to anybody something that i said before about like you know tweeting a certain thing at hassan about jdams or whatever and for adjusting audience audience expectations,

is that on the map of where people think I am, if you're genuinely following my stuff, and like on the map of where I actually am, these are basically always overlapping. And I think evidence of this comes out whenever I get into big fights with people, like I never lose like huge fights that involve like leaking or character attacks, because like my character is basically who I am am like nothing is ever going to leak that surprises my fan base about like oh my god i can't believe he would do this or say that because it's like you you get what you see and you see what you get whereas when i like when i fight with other people sometimes stuff will leak or things will come out it's like wait what i can't believe he does this or he does that and then the evidence

for this is when you look at big fights that people get it online i don't think there's ever been a huge drama that i've been involved in where I've lost subscribers. It's never happened. Other people on the internet might get mad and attack me or get upset or whatever. But generally speaking, except for my big communism split, people usually know exactly where I'm at for everything. So yeah. I have a follow up with that, that whenever we were looking at your content and looking at the different aspects of it,

there were parts of it which mainly were the content dealing with orbiters, which Matt referenced having a dynamic a little bit like reality TV because there are big characters, there are people who have slept together, who are now feuding, who, you know, like might make up, might not. And I wonder, like, one thing is just, do you think that comparison is fair? And then the second thing about it is like coming from the background that we do, academia or like a more, you know, podcast, the arena area, the notion of like having intimate relationship with listeners or people in the orbit just, just seems like, I mean,

you know, my, my being the people that we are, it might be something to do with it as well. But I mean, in general, that, that boundary, right. That there's always like a parasocial imbalance when you are you know the kind of bigger content creator and the person around which others are orbiting so i i'm curious about that because in one in one respect whenever i see you on the stream of like lav and mr girl and all this this kind of like drama for me it would be absolutely exhausting to deal with that but for you it seems to be like another week and i i'm

just curious is that you know personality differences and different boundaries or how do you feel i realize there's about eight layered questions on there so wherever you want to go for the first question it was when you said is the comparison fair do you mean like comparing my stream to like reality tv or yeah yeah in terms of the orbiter dynamics not you know the db it's a not kind of thing yeah i mean i think it's somewhat fair i mean people watch reality tv because it's like the basest form of human drama right like you're seeing people that are doing things that in some ways are entirely relatable like having romantic you know quibbles or having um fights with people or you know disagreements over stuff or crushes on people whatever and then in other ways it's totally unrelatable like it's like people that are larger than life that are doing this you know so seeing

like kim kardashian navigate a relationship is there in some ways you totally relate and in other ways these are like aliens too so that's like yeah it's a big captivating thing to witness online so yeah i think the comparison is fair there now obviously there's like a there's a loading of uh reality tv that makes it seem like it's not intellectual content or it's worthless and when you talk about like the stuff i'm involved in dramatically there's a large element of truth to that i don't think your life is being enriched by you know watching mr. gremlin lav you know go back and forth for hours on stream but it's funny as fuck and not everything we do is for life enrichment. There are baser desires that we can fulfill. And I like to hop between those. I think it's fun. It gives me a variety of things

to do. Admittedly, I don't know if this is an advertisement for medication, but since I've started my Vance, I've had very little desire to participate in that. So for about seven months, my stream has been almost absent completely of any drama like that because I just don't have as much of an interest. Maybe that was like a thrill seeking aspect of like a dopamine starved brain. I'm not sure, but yeah, it was definitely entertaining and exciting. The intimate relationship thing with people in my field, that's a really interesting and challenging question to deal with. Um, to when you're, so here's an interesting thing. When you're a streamer, depending on the type of stream you are, your life kind of revolves around your work. So like I'm streaming for like, my goal is to stream

for eight hours a day. I'm doing emails and messages before and after I might be traveling for podcast appearances. And then I'm doing other stuff relating to upkeep of stream, whether that's management, employees, website, scheduling, travel, negotiating, like sponsorship, or like, there's just a million things like probably 14 hours a day. And anybody that's ever dated me will complain about this is like going into work related stuff. So when that's the case, the people that are available to you to date are basically two types of people. It's either fans or it's either colleagues. So you're in an interesting spot because I remember when I moved to California when I was 30. For a couple years on Tinder, I removed all of my social stuff because I just wanted to meet people that

didn't know everything about me. That was an interesting and fun experience. And for a while, it was fun to meet somebody and I get to like introduce myself to somebody again. I'm like, oh, this is interesting. But then there is like this wall that exists between us of like, I don't know how to explain to you that I'm a little bit irritated today because there's a guy online that tweeted about me being a pedophile and he got 20,000 likes and it's just really irritating. Like, there's no way to make an ordinary person understand that type of struggle. Or like, yeah, like listen, this might be crazy, but like just because we appeared in a picture together, there might be people that try to like send you DMs asking you really weird questions or hacking

your account because they're trying to get more information about me. Like just ignore that. Like most people can't handle that. So then you go to the other part and you're like, okay, well, now you have fans or you've got colleagues. Well, immediately people write off fans because that's like power dynamics and abuse and toxic and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So now you've got colleagues, but then colleagues, in my opinion, are actually more problematic because the power dynamic you have over a colleague is actually more severe than the power dynamic over a fan and I want to be abusive, like I can exploit the fact that this person really likes me. And that's about it, right? Which that can be really abused, by the way. But with a colleague, I could theoretically hold your career in my hand. And that's like so much more power. So where I'm at right now is I basically just like, okay, well, if you're like aware of my content, if you message me, if we chatted, that's basically the types of people that I'm talking to, or trying to date right now, because colleagues are that is a whole clusterfuck of shit. And people that are outside of this world completely, like have no understanding of how crazy it is and it's impossible to ask them

to step into that life as a romantic partner there's a i guess there's a you can always cut me off whenever i say something too if you want to stop me it's actually just percolating in my head about the the situation of streamers and their dating life. It's not something that I've considered in great detail, but covering your content did make me think about it more. And this is probably like a little bit tangential, but I think speaks to like a similar sort of issue. Because I would imagine there are very, very devoted fans that, you know, you could tell it would be a problem, right?

That there would be an unhealthy aspect that that, you know, you could tell it would be a problem, right? That there would be an unhealthy aspect that you, you know, could exploit from that, like one way relationship. But this is like slightly different, but your audience, I remember seeing somewhere, and it might've been in Mr. Groves document. So I'll keep your assessment of it for the credibility, but it was something about like that your audience has like significant proportion that is meal in early 20s demographic is that accurate i think so probably probably closer to like mid-ish 20s because i i've been streaming for a long time and i do politics at a skew a bit older but yeah i think probably yeah okay so the

the thing which i encountered which kind of surprised me and it relates to the the ddos kid which was obviously going to come up at the end so the you know we can't we can talk about the the ddos kid but but in particular here the so your community has as you said a reputation reputation, right, for being highly activated. And it is highly activated in the terms of like clipping and kind of, you know, whenever Ludwig mentioned some event from years ago, and people were able to find the clip from an old stream, right, that showed that he was misrepresenting events, right, with the throwing the cheese poofs or whatever they are. And that's, I think that's, that is true that there

is an activated element to it but i find that whenever we did the episode on you and on our subreddit and your subreddit people were discussing the episode and the ddos kid came up then some of the people that were talking about that they were essentially i i find it interesting because i interacted with them and was basically saying, okay, but like, I've heard all the arguments that Stephen made about the DDoS kid, right? But like,

but come on, come on, like you know, you can agree that he has these points that he can make, but like, you don't have to completely accept his reasoning. And the thing that surprised me was that there was a bunch of, yeah, yes, there are lots of people that are critical and, you know, have their own point of view, but there were some people who were

essentially repeating everything that you'd said using the exact same, you know, example to respond and to completely justify it. And stance i think you would agree right like whether or not yeah you you you agree with you it is still like quite an extreme stance right so like probably surprised yeah like for people that aren't aware of the ins and outs like this is related to the the moral legitimacy of potentially murdering someone for interfering with your income. And in this case, happens to be like a minor. I would use the word killing, not murdering.

It's a little bit less normatively loaded, but okay, sure. Yeah. But yeah. So even in the realms of moral philosophy version of it, it's still a relatively extreme take. philosophy version of it it's still a relatively extreme take and the thing that kind of surprised me was that there were people that would like regurgitate your take exactly uncritically and i i know i've heard you i think you and other people other streamers talk about this dynamic about how that's not what you want to encourage right right? And how when that is happening, when people are just repeating things critically, that that's a bad dynamic. So the question is one

about like the extent to which you think that exists in the community, and maybe two, are there ways that you discourage that? Or do you think, you know, that's just, there's always going to be an element of the community which you know ends up repeating things like uncritically yeah i think both parts of that second statement can be true that like um i there are ways that i try to discourage people from doing that but um like i'll say like you know this is how we should think through this or i'll try to keep like both depending on the issue we're going through i'll try to present both sides of the argument where you know it's like well listen like this is my this, but like, you could also keep this in mind, and we should think about this. You know, today, I don't know when this episode airs,

but today there was the ICC stuff that dropped where the prosecutor was making a request for a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu and Gallant, and then the three Hamas leaders, where like, when I start off by reading this, I'm like, listen, there's going to be a lot of people politically that, you know, want a certain outcome from this, but we should see what the prosecutor says before we like dig through his background or anything like that. I'm like, listen, there's going to be a lot of people politically that, you know, want a certain outcome from this, but we should see what the prosecutor says before we like dig through his background or not like that. We should like look at the actual words here in the statement and we should read this entire thing. So I try to have people at least like keeping in mind the other side, or I try to stress the importance of being able to play devil's

advocate of being able to argue the other side. So hopefully my community is better than most when it comes to representing both sides of an argument, because that's a value that I hold. And if they're going to copy from me, hopefully they copy that. But at the same time, like realistically, there are going to be people that just copy my opinions and uncritically, you know, parrot whatever I say. Now, I would argue that that's better, because my opinions are better than other people's opinions. But I mean, their opinion. So hopefully everybody thinks that you should think you have the best opinions. Otherwise, why would you have a not the best opinion, you should change it to the best one. So yeah, I i mean like in the case where people are copying i was like well fuck it at least

they're copying what i would consider to be a more informed opinion but yeah ideally i would want people to be able to explore their explore whatever applied things they're looking at like do i feel this way about health care or treating people it's better to go away and that that's running with in concordance with whatever internal values or beliefs they have. Since you mentioned the Israel thing, that's been one of these hot button issues that is controversial, obviously. And you've been perceived as being like a staunch defender,

if not an apologist for Israel. So I realize you've just been talking about this. I'm sorry, I haven't seen what you've said, but maybe you could summarize. What do you say about it at the moment in light of this ICC development and stuff? Do you have criticisms of Israel's conduct? Yeah, there's a lot of criticisms. I mean, outside the war, I think Israel has made a massive strategic blunder diplomatically and politically when it comes to negotiating a final settlement with the Palestinians. I think that this idea that you can kick the can down the road forever and continue with this capsulized theory of bilateral peace agreements with neighboring Arab states and just ignore the Palestinians

forever is absurd. Things like, you know, 2008, things like 2014, you know, Kasselette, Protective Edge, things like the Great March Return in 2018, things like the October 7th attacks, like it's going to continue to happen. Shouldn't really be surprising. Like if you're going to continue to refuse to, you know, approach them with strong, you know, like advocators for peace, like they're going to continue to fight an attack, like they're not going anywhere. Like that would be stupid to imagine that. So yeah, I think that Israel has made a massive diplomatic blunder there, especially because Israel is existing under this delusion that there's some peace that can be negotiated with Palestinians that won't be painful. And with every single new permit authorized for every new house, for every single expanded outpost

that turns into a settlement, that turns into an additional area C that wants to be annexed, that price is going to become increasingly painful because you can't just continue on like this. The situation is untenable. The status quo doesn't work. So yeah, everything relating to the collective delusion that Israel has been under after 67, that they can hold on to the West Bank without penalty is, it's absurd on so many different levels. I understand it. I know where it comes from, you know, same way I would say the Palestinians have their delusions that aren't being held by the world, but I understand where theirs come from as well. But yeah, Israel is not beyond reproach for sure. But I don't even get to explore those criticisms

because most of the pro-Palestinians I argue with are unhinged and delusional. And there aren't many pro-Zionists that I, I've argued with a few of them, but like one was like, most of them are from Israel. Like Simcha Rachman, I think was a guy in the Knesset I argued with. And then I've argued with a couple big Zionist,

pro-Zionist people, but most of the people online today are like super pro-Palestinian. That was a point that I was curious about because I saw some stuff in the lead up to the debate with Norm Finkelstein, and I forget who the other guy was, on the Lex Friedman. Oh, Norm Finkelstein and Mouane Roubani.

Mouane Roubani? Yes, yeah. And Benny Morris was on your side, right? Now, so in the lead up to that, I heard you express what I would have viewed as positive anticipation. Like, you know, you had some back and forth with Norm, but it sounded like you had hoped

that there would be an exchange and that people would see that maybe in regards like with Benny Morris, that there was be an exchange and that people would see that maybe in regards like with Benny Morris, that there was some areas of disagreement, right? And then of course, what happened in that debate, it didn't end up because a lot, it was just, you know, insults and treating barbs and completely distinct historical accounts, right? And I was curious about in that case, so you seem disappointed that it ended up like that. And did you have a more positive image of Norm Finkelstein before the interaction?

Like, were you hoping that it would be more than that? Or did you kind of anticipate that that was always going to be what it was? The most embarrassing thing is I'm pretty sure you can find me saying comments prior to that, that I was like, I think this has the potential to be like one of the best on YouTube conversations about this particular conflict for two reasons. One is because Norm has such an extensive background as being pro-Palestinian. And two, because Benny Morris is one of the most respected historians in the field. And then Muin Rabbani has his background that he can contribute as a Palestinian, Palestinian advocate.

And then I've got like my, I'm pretty rhetorically effective and I can follow pretty sharply like logic and stuff. And I've like done a little bit of reading compared to these guys, like, so I can follow along at least. And the fact, so that was one, it was the people involved, especially Norm and Benny. And then two, the format, the idea that we could have rather than these fucking 20 minute, no, I'm sorry, not 20 minute, rather than these like two minute, you know, 20 second exchanges back and forth, we can have like a five to six hour sit down and really into detail hash out like the differences in the perceptions of historical fact between two

sides with these figures was like, that was like a legendary opportunity, I thought, to have an amazing conversation going back and forth between the histories of both of these people and yeah i didn't i didn't i couldn't imagine that it would have turned into such the shit show that it was that was unbelievably excruciatingly humiliating it was vindicating for me on a personal level i felt like super happy on a personal level um just in terms of myself but um in terms of like what that conversation could have been in a wider respect i think it was like really embarrassing yeah yeah i mean it's just generally disappointing isn't it i'm like i've like like yourself you know i'm not an expert but i've i've read histories of the region and and i've read

like really good commentary from moderate palestinians and moderate israelis and the amazing thing about them is that they're is that they're very very similar like they're not on an entirely different page but when you especially when you look at the the international discourse that's happening online looking into the area like a fishbowl it seems like it's happening on a much poorer level than even people who are actually there and experiencing it. If you follow the facts given by both sides, like the conclusions are so obvious and the only possible outcome is the total elimination of one side because they're so unholy that the pro-Palestinian myth of Jews were injected artificially into the Middle East in an

area they didn't belong and then perpetually supported by Brits and then Americans who wanted to see the racist destruction and subjugation of Arabs led to a, you know, a racist, hegemonic bulwark in the Middle East that called itself Israel that just attempted to torture, you know, with the help of the West, all these Arabs around them until they forged their state over dead Palestinian children. It was like, that's their side. And then on the Israeli side, the idea that these were underdogs alone against the world uh fighting against like uh you know these barbaric arabs that wanted to see nothing more than the eventual genocide of the entire state of israel and jews all over the world for absolutely no reason when jews would just want to live alongside in harmony with these palestinians who you know had no reason to not

want them there like like but the myths on both sides are just so extremely divergent. And then both people, at least online and in the real world, to some extent, will argue over these. And when your histories are so divergent, I mean, like, of course, the conclusions are going to be wildly divergent as well. Like, yeah. Is there, is there an issue, Stephen, given that because this topic now is the current focus in politics, but also on online debates and this kind of thing, that one that it can become a kind of content generating topic, right? Like, what is Nico and Nick Fuentes' position on the Israel-Palestine conflict? It seems that getting into that feels distasteful in a way because they know nothing, right? And then on the same point, as you've been involved with it and being perceived

as more staunchly defending Israel, that it's bound to happen that you get more criticisms, more pushback from the Palestinianestinian side and that in just by natural psychological tendencies you will be more receptive to potential negative information about palestinians or uh if there's like the the example i can think of is whenever there was somebody suggesting that palestinians were getting shot for the optics right like in in in order to make sympathy and that i'm not saying it's impossible but i am saying like our bar for believing that should be high right because the the potential for being wrong would be assuming that people that are actually being shot you know like it's kind of false flag with Alex Jones.

So I'm curious about those two things. One, the potential for it to become a kind of debate porn topic. And secondly, yeah, the polarization inherent in the topic. Do you find yourself being pushed towards more polarized takes? I mean, it's one of the big problems I have with my stuff is that I try to do functionally what a lot of people do aesthetically. So there are things that I say that are so pointless to say

because everybody says them. Like if I were to discover my content in a vacuum, like if I were to discover it online, like not having any idea who I am, but I'm aware of like all the other content creators. Like I think I say so many things that are red flags for you should never listen to this person. Like anybody that describes themselves as like nonpartisan or anybody that describes themselves like, oh, I'm truth seeking. I try to be aware of my biases. I just follow the facts

or blah, blah, blah. Like these are usually your biggest indicators that somebody is going to be the most partisan biased hack fuck you've ever listened to in your entire fucking life. As soon as they put like truth or veritas or rational or logical or whatever in any of the shit they do it's usually the least rational least logical most emotionally driven stuff you've ever in your entire life so that's one thing i try to be aware of so i mean i mean i'll say that like i try to be aware of biases that i have when i'm analyzing stuff and i try to apply like consistent lenses through how i view stuff and like i encourage people in my audience because a lot of haters show up and even my own fans that don't agree with me sometimes like ask questions about how

I'm evaluating things. So in practice, this takes the forms of a lot of different type of critical thought, where when I say critical, I'm talking about like, like metacognitive processes where we're trying to like analyze our own thought. So I might say something where, and I also try to be aware of these biases, too, right? Because it's not enough to just say I have none, it's more to be like aware of them, right? The UN publishes a statement and, you know, the UN says, well, today we actually feel really strongly that Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine. Like I can't lie and say, I don't have a bit of an emotional investment because where I've hedged my previous positions, where I'm a bit more in alignment with Israel, it's tempting to

dismiss it out of hand, right? Okay. Yeah, of course the fucking UN says that. But then I have to think of like, I try to like plug in different actors when I'm thinking this to make sure that I'm not like mindfucking myself. So I might say, well, what if the UN comes out and says something about, we believe that in Bukha, or we believe that in, I think it was Bukha, right? Or in, oh my God, I forgot the name of so many of the Ukrainian cities where horrible atrocities have happened. Mariupol, these other places. Yeah. If the UN came out and made a statement about Putin, I would probably believe that immediately. Well, now I have to ask myself, well, hold on. Am I actually listening to the UN or am I accepting or rejecting what they're saying

out of hand just because of the people involved? So I need to make sure that I'm holding myself. Well, we need to do either one. I need a really good reason for that. Is there a reason to trust the UN for one party and not the other, which is dangerous? You have to be really careful in that justification. And then secondly, and this is really the easier thing to do if you've got the time, is okay, well, let's just like read through the material and see how we feel about the underlying material. It's usually the best thing to do. But yeah, I try to be aware of biases going into topics where it's like, okay, well, I really want them to say this, and I'm really primed to hear this, and I need to be aware of that, because if I hear something that challenges it, I'm more

likely to dismiss it on an emotional level rather than to actually critically consider it so yeah the swapping in different actors for a thing um is a really important way to kind of like check my thoughts to make sure that i'm being consistent or intellectually honest and not just biased towards a particular source or party yeah yeah like you said all of those things about being rational and a seeker of truth and above you know mere political passions and so on it's super red flags and um that the kind of gurus or influences that we really despise tend to do that and they they also tend to be just totally uh duplicitous in terms of their motivations right so that the presentation is is that the motivations are the highest ones you can imagine. They're looking to save Western civilization, usually.

Always. In some way, shape, or form. But then you look at what they're truly, really excited about, and it's going viral. It's getting clicks. It's getting an audience with someone higher up the influencer pecking order than they are. Constantine Kissin springs to mind is a good example someone like this sure um so but you know so my question is not about about yourself this time it's just because like you've been in the biz for so many years and from your vantage point

you would have perceived it's better than us and we've experienced it personally just on our scale and the kind of approaches and just just seeing how how people play this game and it's a bit distasteful to be honest on the other hand like you said you know i saw a thing recently where you said yeah of course i'm interested in clicks you know what i mean i'm a content creator you know clicks like you know i need clicks so so there's two parts to this like what's your take on this sort of new media internet ecosystem in terms of those unhealthy dynamics? And the second one is, you know, how do you treat it like a business without, I don't know, doing it that way? Selling your soul. Yeah.

I mean, like, needing clicks isn't bad. I mean, it's like going out on a date with a girl, right? It's like, well, I really want to have sex with this girl. mean it's like it's like going out on a date with a girl right it's like well i really want to have sex with this girl um so i can either you know like pay for dinner be engaged in the conversation uh make her feel like she's safe around me uh you know or i can slip you know like rufinol or whatever into her drink and then when she's passed out i could carry her off in my car right both of these are achieving the same end but obviously there's like a very ethical way to go about it there's a highly unethical way to go about it i think when it comes to like getting clicks i think

this is actually uh fundamentally this goes really deeply to my philosophy. I think for a long time, the left made a big mistake and assuming that we're correct. So we don't have to package any of our stuff. We're just right. And the fact that we're right should be enough for people. And it is absolutely not enough for people. And for a long time, right leaning content was just so much more human and entertaining than left leaning content. I don't know if you guys ever listened to talk radio in the United States, but man, if you slip between like, or flip between like NPR, and then you listen to like Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, like these guys were passionate speakers. They were funny. They were angry. They channeled emotion. And then you go to like the most sterile, you know, like laboratory speaking on like NPR. And it's just like,

like, it's just not entertaining at all. You know, it's funny on like NPR. And it's just like, oh, like, it's just not entertaining at all. You know, it's funny if you ask like, who was the most influential left leaning educator, you know, for millennials, it was probably Jon Stewart, because he was funny. And that's really important. So when I talk about like needing to fight for clicks, I have to make my stuff like I have to be entertaining, like, and I hope I am entertaining. Like I read stuff, we study a lot, I try not to say I try to never say I don't believe you have to sacrifice the, the informational part or the educational part for the entertainment. I don't think that has to happen. I think you can make it funny. You just have to like make it human for people, you know, people understand this intuitively when it comes

to like classrooms, right? Like nobody would say that I had a really boring teacher, but I had this amazing teacher that got me so interested in a topic and then say, yeah, but he was an amazing teacher because he misrepresented so much and just made it entertaining. It was no, he made like the facts interesting you because he was entertaining. He was like so good at that. And that's kind of what I try to do. So yeah. So like when I say like I need clicks, I can't like afford to just sit on stream for eight hours and just read a book out loud to my audience. There's going to have to be other types of content that I interweave or other ways that I comment on it or argue with people over it that makes them like more drawn into it and then hopefully as part of that educational or

entertainment process they're also like becoming more informed on the facts as well so what's what's the most unethical ways you've seen out there in terms of what's what's the worst and most common things the um two more point the most unethical you mean like in terms of like getting a fan base or. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I guess that the things that people do perhaps mostly motivated by just wanting to get a lot of clicks and be, be popular. Like, like what does it incentivize them to do? Well, yeah. So I guess in my world, the things that you're looking for are things like, um, so like there's a concept called audience capture, where if you've got a particular audience and wants to hear a particular thing, that's the thing that you're more likely to feed

them. And you're not doing that out of any principled obligation to a thing. You're doing it because you know that there's a big reward there. So people that co-sign others' opinions or people that form alliances with certain communities or people that carry water for certain people just because they know it'll get them clicks or people that this gets more into the sterile like like i don't know prop logic or philosophy analysis but like people that engage in like bad argumentation so when somebody's willing to make really strong claims with really high levels of conviction about things that they have no research about or no evidence of but they know there's a big social reward for them like i think that these

are probably some of the worst things driving online content today um depending on the circle you're in i'll um do you know who uh ryan long is and they do the the boys cast it's ryan long and another guy do you like them but you know you know the guys that did the woke people are like far right people that little oh yeah yeah those girls there yeah okay so the first time i on their show, I think I was getting a lot of attention relating to the Rittenhouse stuff because I felt really strongly that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense and their audience loved me. And they said I was like the most reasonable liberal anywhere. They were really appreciative of like the perspective that I brought and they, you know, really just liked the fact that I was a reasonable liberal. The last time I was on the show, I was highly critical of Donald Trump and they fucking hated me.

It was so much. I don't know. Yeah. Are you with me? I don't have any comments. Oh my God. It was like brutal. But like that idea of like one thing I could do, there are ways where when I talk to certain

people, I could only show certain opinions. I know that would garner me a whole bunch more like clicks and respect and desirability from those communities. And there are certain topics that I know I could stay away from that wouldn't get me in as much heat with different communities. And when I see people making decisions like that, people are just molding themselves to the audience rather than trying to guide the audience to some better place. And I don't like that. I think that's incredibly damaging. I think it's also incredibly damaging even more so because they present themselves as doing

something different, right? Like if Project Veritas was called was called project partisan i'd have no problem what they do right okay yeah you guys just like you push a certain political opinion that's fine but it's annoying when all these fuckers you know try to operate under the aesthetic of truth and logic and reason and it's like okay well jesus christ like you haven't even read these indictments you've talked about for three months or you're supposed to be educated in this particular thing you don't even you haven't even read this like paper that everybody's talking about like what how how you how do you have any information on this like clearly your commitment to logic and reason aren't there you're just like farming an audience for clicks and destroying the discourse while

you're doing so i'm gonna give you credit steven as well that one thing that i find very annoying especially in the context that we look at is like uh with someone like jordan peterson discussing with sam harris you know there is the whole thing that you encountered with Jordan Peterson that you've talked about, you know, the constellation of right wing global warming is a conspiracy concocted by the WEF to, and Trump was, you know, the voting machines, maybe they weren't tampered with, but there was a, you know, all of it connects in together. But you could have a conversation with jordan peterson where you veer away from those topics and you mainly talk about polarization and talk about you know the

psychological issues with liberals and it would go very smoothly right and i've seen a lot of people do that and i think to your credit that you often are willing not to do that as as demonstrated recently with jordan to good effect but even though he then regarded you as like you know yeah too argumentative but the there is this aspect that so what you talked about in regards you know the left being more effective at making its content entertaining or rhetorically effective and engaging. Isn't there the issue that if you optimize for that, that you create Hassan and BreadTube, where you just get a flip side, where there's a lot of rhetoric, a lot of strong personalities and demonizing outgroups, and that can appeal in the same way and package a message effectively. Whereas if you are, in a sense, advocating for something which is more moderate,

it's ultimately going to be more boring because you're not saying there's going to be a revolution. You're not saying that there is a savior who's going to come and there'll be a utopia and that you all get to be revolutionaries. You're saying you get to make incremental changes for like legislation over successive administrations. Is that a sexy message or do you have to inject, you know, drama and stuff in order to make people pay attention to that? Well, I mean, yeah, there's the personal aspect.

So on presentation, you can be more entertaining, which I think is a big... I mean, technically, that's where I cut my teeth was being the only guy on the left that would debate crazily with people on the right. I'll call people names. We'll scream at each other. We'll roll in the mud. And traditionally online, lefty people or SJWs, we called them back then before woke became popular, were just kind of like pussies.

They weren't willing to like get in the mud and fight with these people. So that's where I kind of got my initial burst of popularity from. So you can be like entertaining in terms of presentation. When you talk about actual content, this is a, I think, a really weak area of mine that I've been trying to improve a lot. Especially I had a conversation with an online content creator called JJ Mikolov. And he does like politics politics from canada basically but one thing that i've had a lot of trouble with is i think because i'm such um the way that i approach life and the way that i look at things is is incredibly discreetly and absent i like i'm just not like a narrativized kind of person like on a personal level like if somebody asks me a question about a thing like

i'm like okay well what's like the percentage of this or like what it's like that's just how my mind is like working. And in some ways it's good. In some ways it's bad. Uh, especially when talking to other people. But, um, when I come online, I have, uh, my, my intellectual demeanor is to just nitpick endlessly. So if somebody gives me like, well, these are all the reasons why I like Donald Trump. And it's like, oh, really? Well, what can you say about his legislation? Oh, jack shit. Oh, he did deficit spending. Oh, fuck you. Oh, his foreign policy sucked. You're retarded. Like, I'll just say like, I'll go on these things. And at the end of the day,

it can be good rhetorically in some ways in that, well, hopefully I make the other person look bad or I make him look dumb or his fans feel like embarrassed that he couldn't respond to these things, et cetera, whatever. But also something that's missing from a lot of what I argue that I've been trying to add more is you really do need a constructive argument for people to grapple with, for people to like latch onto. Like Andrew tate and all of these guys became popular because they center this locus of control on you that makes you feel like you are your own person that can you know grab life by the horns and like have a strong influence on your own destiny you know like oh like uh when i listen to people on the left they tell me that white supremacist structure

is being i can't take credit for a single thing that i do and uh you know all of my of my ancestors were imperialists, and I'm, you know, an asshole. But when I listen to Andrew Tate, he's telling me that, you know, all these people are against me, the feminists and all these woke tards, and, you know, the IMF and everybody else, but I have the ability to go to the gym, and I can buy a sword and walk around my apartment and feel like I can fight the world. And I'm able to, you know, join the man's club or whatever the fuck they have, and like take it and sell crypto into all this, right? Those people are really empowering because they give you something to latch onto

and they make it feel like you're moving towards something larger, transcendental. And that's a, yeah. I don't think you have to be presenting bullshit to do it. I just need to do a better job at presenting that, which I've been trying to do more as I hone in on. In my last debate, I try to point this out now a lot. This country is so cool.

America, well, maybe not to you guys because you guys are not America, but but for me it's all right like yeah that's all right yeah like i did a debate on fresh and fit where we're talking about like is islam like should it be the best religion or some bullshit and i'm like i don't want to point out that we've got like a sudanese immigrant i've got this guy from uh i think the middle east i've got you who i don't even know you're from and my mom's like a cuban immigrant and like all of us are here having this conversation with no worry about the police, no worry about anything else.

You guys are making money in a capitalist environment. All of this is happening in the USA, in the United States of America, not under some crazy totalitarian regime, not in a place where women can't vote, not in a place where there's a mandated whatever bullshit, but like with all the freedoms and liberal things that we can enjoy here. So that's that. That's like a weakness of mine. I need to do a better job at being constructive. And I've been trying to get better at that.

But I think you can do it without being sensational. Yeah, I mean, one little part of what you said that rings true from a psychological point of view is that while it may be true that you're constrained by society, by context, by who knows what, but it's always a good idea to build self-efficacy because that is ultimately the thing you've got under control. So I can see the appeal of people like Andrew Tate and a lot of the right-wing influencers who do that. I mean, the one caveat with Tate, I guess, is that he also appeals to a certain sense of masochism, I suppose, because he also tells his audience that

they're pathetic, like unless they conform to some crazy standards that he's got. A little bit. I think it's really important. I think it's really interesting when you consider these things. I call this like cheerleading disguised as criticism. Sometimes people have done a really good job at taking a criticism or what appears to be highly critical and making you feel like you're taking a criticism, but really they're just cheerleading you, right? like listen up okay you fat sack of shit you need to get up you need to go to the gym you need to get better you need to better something to do this now a person hearing that might like from the outside and then they might present it as like well no look like i'm being really i'm pushing this guy really hard and it's like well kind of but like he knows this already and you're telling him really what he wants to hear right like being told like you can do it you can make something more of yourself you have the ability to change like the course. You're like, that's a message that you like, you know, what's not fun to hear is somebody telling you like, Hey, listen, you haven't talked to your mom and dad for four years

because of a mistake you made. You need to go and apologize to them. That's like when somebody's giving you things like what the tapes say, and it sounds critical, but your emotional response is this like visceral excitement. You should pause for a second like okay wait hold on what's the likelihood that every time somebody challenges me or expresses skepticism it's making me feel better and better and better and better right a really good critical thought should give you a level of discomfort for a bit where it's like ah like do i really want to like confront this person and like express this particular thing like oh do i really need to like say this like if that feeling is never happening then nobody's actually challenging you in a meaningful way they're just like cheerleading you and calling

it criticism but it's not actually it's what you want to hear anyway from the content that we look at we see that dynamic play out a lot but there's a there's another aspect to it where yes it can be presented as the situation you're in now is like kind of shit but you know there is a path out right like that's being presented but there's also this aspect where the guru people that we cover they engage one or two ways or they can do both of this and one is to like big up their audience talk about how they're you know the kind of people that care about injustices in the world they're people fighting back about the real issues in society and so on. And then there's the kind of nagging side, which is most people don't understand this. And, you know, you're all not going to get this.

But if you do, you're going to be, you know, on the first step to getting to the right space. So there's like this kind of nagging aspect of, you know, you could be better if you just were able to put in the effort. And that can sometimes also take the form, and this applies to your neck of the woods, that when you're telling your audience, you know, via the people that you discipline on streams, like, okay, you think better, fuck off, you then let people know what behavior will be rewarded and not and we saw like Eric Weinstein do this with his audience where he was getting criticism from

people like us and other people. And he went on his discord and kind of said, you know, if you guys don't do a better job of policing the kind of criticism that is appearing in this discord, I might have to pull back, you know, and just not interact as much. And it felt like, oh, that's because you could see the people were, you know, really invested in him, you know, taking part. So yeah, it's just, there's a lot of ways to manipulate people like through combining negative and positive messaging. Yeah, for sure. None of it is necessarily bad.

It's just the application of all of these things is so important. It's why when I debate people, I like always try to push for examples. And I always try to give examples myself because you can get people that can lay out a lot of theory next to each other and be in complete harmony where it's like i think that um we need to stop the indoctrination of children i think that children should be able to grow up free and happy and healthy i think that parents need to be able to protect their children to do what's right and then one guy will be like that's why 14 year olds should be able to take hormones and the other guy will say that's why we need like state mandated religion like like everything will line up and then when you hit the applied part, for example, it's like, wait a second, what? You realize that the theory is so vacuous

or abstract, that you could truly insert any value there. This is why I don't like to say, I don't I hope I don't hit on things you guys have said before. I don't not trying to be mean or anything. But like, people will ask me people say things like, Oh, like, how do you keep yourself free from bias? That's a really interesting question. And when somebody asks somebody that I hear the answer, I immediately know if they're full of shit or not. Because the number one bullshit answer that people give is go, oh, well, I read a wide variety of media sources. So what the fuck, what? That doesn't mean any that you read a wide variety. You can read a ton of shit and still be a biased dipshit. Like, what do you mean? There are a ton of like mental safeguards that you can

have. Like, can you argue both sides of an issue incredibly convincingly, right? Such that you should be able to argue anybody that agrees with you and put it or disagrees with you and put a convincing argument on the other side. Or if somebody were to ask you the question of what would it take to convince you otherwise of this position? Do you have an answer for that? Or are you like, well, I don't know. I don't think I can be. And I've had people tell me that I don't think anything could convince me otherwise. What the fuck? You know, are you well read into a topic such that you could explain it at a decent level? Like if you say, I think Trump made America better. Oh, well, how this happened? I don't know. I just did a debate with Gorka. And I had to cut him off in like two or three times,

where I was like, did Trump how did Trump make America better? And he's like, well, the economy did better. I'm like, no, no, no. What did he do? As well, I'm getting there. And unemployment is like, what did he do? And he's like, well, what do you mean? I'm like, well, if I stand next to a tree and the tree grows, I can't take credit for the tree growing just happened while I was there. And the inability to like critically engaged with questions like that, where it's like, okay, well, what are you doing to actually engage in critical thought, I think is usually a big indicator that that's not happening. So yeah, putting examples down for applied stuff, rather than just laying out a bunch of bullshit theory is really important.

Otherwise, yeah, I don't want to be standing next to some dude, and we're ending up we're agreeing on all these abstract points. But then when I look dude and we're ending up we're agreeing on all these abstract points but then when i look in practice i see that we're like on worlds apart of things i'm like well no hold on fuck this i don't agree with you when you say that wait clearly something is like disconnected here yeah yeah uh just before we leave um this topic of some of these characters like tate um it's a bit of a delicate question for you i think perhaps because um you've got this great track record i think in terms of debating with some pretty extreme and dark characters nick fuentes i think laura southern is that right um um but you know at the same time there's also been like a fair bit of content where you know you've you i don't know how to put it exactly but

there's some level of camaraderie or at least, if not friends, friendly? Yeah. Yes, that's essentially it. And perhaps there's an issue there, I guess, in terms of... I get that one shouldn't pretend that they're some sort of inhuman monster. They are human beings as well. But there can be a subtext there, right? Which is saying, oh, I disagree very much with his views,

but I really respect his work ethic in doing this was, it was great to do this thing with them or whatever. And there can be a subtext where they're kind of okay. Right. And legitimizing them. Yeah. I think this goes back to the, um, there's so much to dig into. Like I've, I've been like exploring this. I've been writing a lot of thoughts on, on this relating to aesthetic and function. Um, I think a lot of the criticisms that I get are people that think I do things as an aesthetic rather than functionally. And I don't blame them because it usually 99% of the time, it is the case when I, so when I started getting into political debate in 2016, my style was very brutal. Like the goal of me was to make your political idol look like an uninformed buffoon.

And then that's how I would pull people over to my side. They would email me and they'd go like, man, like, I really like this guy. And then I saw him like flounder so hard in this debate. And I felt kind of dumb. So I started watching blah, blah, blah. That was like my initial stuff. Since then, I think definitely like 2019, 2018, 2019 onwards, I'm trying to take more of like an empathetic approach, because I think if I can get into somebody's world a little bit more, and then argue from their perspective, I think I have a better job like pulling people over. And that involves getting substantially closer to some figures than most people would otherwise. Whether or not I get too close to some people, or I humanize some people too much. I mean, like, there's good arguments on both sides of that,

like, you know, should you, you know, debating Nick in person, maybe okay, but like going to dinner with him? Is that okay? Or, you know, like debating this person, is that okay? But like, you know, giving her tips or moderating a debate on her side, is that okay? I think there's like good, I think there's like a really rich, like, like a ton of stuff to dig through there that you could argue on both sides. I think that the conversation though, is usually poisoned by the fact that the vast majority of people that stand next to somebody and say like, oh, well, I might not agree with everybody who says, but I think I can still be like friends with him. Usually when somebody says that they are full of fucking shit and they will co-sign

99% of that fucking person's opinions. I have almost never in my fucking life have I heard somebody say, listen, like we disagree on a lot, but we can still be friends. Really? Well, what the fuck do you disagree on? Like show us. I never see that ever. So when I say it to somebody, I can understand at least on an emotional level where you're like sure you disagree with him and like you guys are like eating dinner yeah what disagreements do you have and they might not know like okay well like i've done like 50 million fucking debates where we're screaming at this guy blah blah blah like i'm sympathetic empathetic even towards the emotional feeling there yeah because yeah it usually is it

usually is bullshit yeah i i think there's the issue that like as you say this is something that everybody says oh yeah or a lot of people say and it disguises an actual ideological overlap that's huge yeah um but there's also the issue specifically in your case like i mean recently i heard how much you annoyed nick fuentes and Sneeko by coming into the Twitter space, right? And basically shitting in their party. And that was very enjoyable, right? And I thought the way that you interrupted their back slapping session was effective and could possibly only be done by someone who was taking the kind of tone that you did where, you know, you weren't a pushover, but you were effective at like laying, like kind of responding in the way that they would talk over

people and that kind of thing. And I think that as a result, they were very annoyed about you being on the space, right? And you won't see that with pretty much any other left leaning streamer that I can think of offhand. Maybe there are that I'm just not aware of. But the other part and the part that Matt, I think, is raising is that when I see people presenting it as if you and Nick are great friends, that's obviously not true. There's obviously like an ideological divide and you can see it just if you listen to you discussing things. But then when you hear you and Nick interacting about things like content creation, right? And talking

about his community and how, you know, he's got a political movement, which is he's taking steps, or Lauren Sovereign is making documentaries, she's got a good work ethic, and that kind of thing. And that does then end up, like, feeling like, well, but Nick Frentes at

heart is an anti-Semitic profeocracy ethno-nationalist right so like people are correct when they're like his community building and stuff is to build a community which deserves disdain because it's a it's a hateful community and i i guess in that respect you know like you say there's perfectly good arguments on both sides about the way to respond to that. But do you see much effect when you engage in those? Because there's going to be the effect that it's content generating, it generates drama, and it gets attention in that respect. But do you see much effect from Groypers completely leaving that ideology and becoming more moderate? Or is that too much

to hope for when that is occurring? Because I'm sure there's isolated examples, but I mean, generally speaking, is it more on the side of generating content entertainment and less ideological shifting? Or where would you put the balance? Well, it's really hard as a political person to ever draw a distinction between the two because you can always make the argument that the stuff that gets me more views and is more entertaining will get me more eyes and is more politically effective, right? Like activism is theoretically more powerful, the more people are looking at whatever you're doing. So that's a careful trap I have to not fall into

because there are a lot of things I could do to maximize viewership. And then I can like post, not even post-talk, I could prospectively justify by saying like, well, listen, like, I know this is going to be like kind of a sellout thing here to my values, but it's going to get so many eyes on me and I can convert these people later on, blah, blah, blah. So it is possible to bullshit yourself that way. I would say that when I'm looking at doing things with other people, there are two things going on. One is, I don't know if I'm changing my mind or if I get attacked by so many people, it's pissing me off. But like, I try to give people credit where credit is due regardless. Because like, Hasan is a workhorse. He works a fuck ton. He's really good at networking. And I try to give

people credit where credit is due so that when my criticisms come across to people that are more familiar with my stuff, it gives me a lot of credibility. Like one of the reasons why I can step into that, those spaces with Tate and Sneeko and have that Twitter call where I eviscerate these guys is because there are so many criticisms that you cannot make of me. Like you can't say I'm scared of being in these spaces. I've been on shows with all these people. You can't say that I run from challenging conversations. Tate runs for me. He's blocked me on Twitter. You can't say that I'm not capable of hanging in these types of communities. Like I will be in here and deal with it as much as any of these guys can. The credibility building and the fact that I'm willing to give people props where they have it,

I think makes it so that when I do make my criticisms, they stick a lot harder to people that are undecidedly in these, that are undecided and in these communities and to people on the other side. It allows me to, when I do convert people, they stick a lot harder because they didn't just hear like one good argument i said or one convincing thing there's like a whole host of like i'll give people props when they deserve them and i'll attack them when they deserve them so if you're coming over to me it's because you've heard like a comprehensive criticism of a person not just one thing that stuck well and then i think it allows me to penetrate into some communities

better although it's hard to see it sometimes because people will still show me with the same things because people are willing to give me that credibility. I don't come across as like some outsider, some woke scold who's coming in to fight with those communities. Yeah. Yeah. But the credibility thing is hard. It's really hard to measure because I mean, personally, I could just justify all sorts of horrible behavior.

Like some people, because you could listen to me, like I just gave that thing on. I just said, well, here's the theory, but the application would be way different. Somebody could be listening and say, well, hold on, Destiny, you just said you hate it, we'll do that. Now you just gave the theory of building credibility. But what about when you say build credibility, that could be giving credit or criticism to a single person, but it could also be like saying the N word on Twitter to gain credibility. Like where does that start or stop? Right. It's really hard in my mind to balance all this out because there are competing interests on both sides where it's like, well, what is too much? much and like what am i doing that's just self-aggrandizing under the

guise of like political effectiveness versus like what's actually politically effective but also benefits me at the same time and i'm not trying to play too much into that like yeah it's difficult to balance all of that out so i'm like public about it i talk about a lot of it because it's really challenging i'm not doing this behind the scenes or secretly in some fucking room like these are issues that i wrestle with on stream in writing on twitter like you know almost every day depending on what arc we're in yeah yeah yeah no i i appreciate that i think ultimately people have got to make their own mind up because everyone can anyone can say that they've got these motivations i've got these intentions i mean you know we've got our own set of things that we proclaim whether or not

one should be believed i mean i guess you just have to make your own mind up that is people listening um the one thing where we are on the same page is like um we will always hand it to the characters we cover yeah even when we really really don't like them just on principle because i think it destroys credibility to pretend that they can't do anything good when they clearly have got at least this one or two things right. And if you want your other ones to land, then you need to do that. Yeah. You also open yourself up to very scary attacks to where cognitive dissonance only works insofar as when you're cognitively dissonant, you can change your mind about a thing to be

more in line with reality, or you can change the way you perceive reality or change the reality in front of you. And oftentimes the reason why we can change how we perceive reality is because you're not usually tested on a lot of the social things that people try to lie to you about. But the further that gets away from the truth, the more of a mindfuck it's going to be when somebody is confronted with it. So like for my case, like, if you've listened to things about me on the internet, I'm a racist, pedophile, Nazi Wikipedia reader who's like, you know, scream slurs all the time and is an idiot, right? And the caricature of me that's built up is such that if I'm ever put in front of an audience and given the opportunity to like have a debate or well-reasoned discussion, there are a lot of people that I will pull immediately that will email me and they'll be like, holy shit, I saw like a full thing of you for the first time and it was completely not what i was expecting it was like well yeah but the issue there is there's a gambit that's being played on the other side where it's like well if i demonize this person enough hopefully nobody checks this stuff out but holy shit if they ever look at it they're going to see that the reality and the

the reality versus the expectation are wildly divergent and it's a risky game to play sometimes but depends on how well you can perpetuate the the exclusion of that that particular figure again on that kind of subject so you mentioned a couple of like, you know, controversial takes and whatnot that are often cited with you. We raised the DDoS kid earlier, the N-word usage, right? And I think one point is that

your positions to us when we were looking for the things were clear. You know, you tried to emphasize this point that you are trying to make your position understandable. Whether or not you agree with it, but it's upfront and there. And that is the case that both Matt and I felt when looking at your content. But on that regard, it also felt like there are times where you may have taken a stance and are now like that that is my stance and i will defend it until the end of time right and i'm the example the ddos kid is a good one

because i i saw your conversation with the lawyer i think pisco liddy he's got his yeah and i'm not desiring to rehash all the arguments, but I'm more interested in like, whether your defense there is genuine or more like a kind of stubborn enjoyment of arguing a particular position. Cause you could still argue for your reaction and kind of emotional response. Right. And say, yeah, but I wasn't obviously intending to kill the kid, right? And I'm not planning to argue that we should create a society where people can go and kill kids who are like doing things like that. But you actually have taken the stronger stance of like, no, I think we could conceive of like creating laws

where this would be justified self-defense and stuff. But I don't, that's the part I can't tell how much of that is just like a stubborn personality, you know, that wants to argue a position you've taken out a little bit trolling, or you really sincerely believe that, you know, that is completely justified. And yeah. Yeah. I think it's hard to extract the general

principle from the particular arrangement because it is so inhuman or unrelatable like okay well you're a streamer especially because people might think that like okay well 12 years ago you're a multi-millionaire streamer living a luxurious lifestyle blah blah blah like my life situation was a lot different back then i think i was into my second year maybe of streaming um i'd have to go and check when the particular data stuff was i think it was my second year streaming So like the income was not super ironed out. Like I, there was no, I was not anywhere near like an ultra wealthy person. Like I had a newborn child with a girlfriend that I had a lot of issues with. I had to maintain two separate residences at all times because we could live, like there was a lot of stress related to that about moving around and

streaming all the time. And then I've got to do this basically nuking my income for fun the entire time. So that like, that was the context. Now that doesn't necessarily make okay or make not okay, the general principle, but just like the backdrop is a bit different. Like if somebody like the sympathy for a millionaire having financial issues is very, very, very low, which I'm aware of, I don't usually talk about, I mean, I don't have financial issues, but I wouldn't talk about that like that, because it's like so disconnected, people can't even imagine you like having the audacity to complain about that. And the issue when it comes to defensive stuff like that is, the audacity to complain about that. The issue when it comes to defensive stuff like that is,

I feel like the whatever rule that you craft, I feel like you on the extremes, I think you run into very crazy stuff on both sides. And it's very hard to figure out where your limiting principles should be. I think that when you look at the DDoS stuff, it seems like the general rule I'm crafting is that like, if somebody is taking steps to destroy your income, and the police are unwilling to engage, then should you be able to enact, you know, physical violence against this person up to, you know, extermination, up to killing, up to murder, or killing this person, right? I think that sounds pretty unhinged on its own. And then we could start crafting a whole bunch of examples where it's even more potentially unhinged. What if you're a bird watcher every day, and a guy, you know, drives by with a certain car that's causing birds not to park on trees outside your house and you can't make money more? Can you kill this person when

they drive by? Like, we can think of a lot of scenarios where it's like, okay, well, hold on, what could your limiting principle here possibly be? You know, you don't have a first member protected right to the fucking internet. What if instead, what if it was a lazy worker that was fucking with your connection because he just didn't do his job well can you go and kill the lazy right there's a ton of ways you can test that and i understand that like absolutely but here's the but i think that i think that socially speaking okay there are people from san francisco that are pumping their fist there okay socially speaking i think that's in some places we've gone too far on the other way where it's like well property is never worth life and you see in some of these cities where it's

like you shouldn't be able to kill shoplifters or attack shoplifters or whatever. And now you've got like these mass retail thefts, or you've got people just walk through stores, taking everything and walk out because it's never worth it to attack a human or we're stealing things. Or, you know, more, more, more like pressingly, you had like the whole BLM protest riot stuff where, okay, sure, there might be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of damage caused in certain neighborhoods, but they're protesting a worthy cause. You don't have a right to defend your property. It's never worth it to kill a person for property, et cetera, et cetera. And in my mind, I feel like that's a bit of playing out

like the other end of what that looks like. And I feel like we have seen that. I acknowledge that my position definitely comes across as like pretty extreme. When you start to get to the like limits of it, I definitely acknowledge that. I do think that there are people that would agree with my position, not in the extreme that like, um, we can easily think of a million examples of like, well, let's say that you're a sole earner and you've got like a sick wife and you can't go to work because the guy decides that he wants to set up shop on your driveway and he's not going to let you out. Eventually people are like, well, fuck it. You should go to run them over. This is insane. You don't want your family to suffer. Right. But like, yeah, I think that both sides of that get really weird when you talk about like self-defense

or a person's right to infringe on you in like non-material ways where they're not like actually attacking you i think it looks really unhinged on both sides so my opinions are genuine but i do acknowledge that like it can look crazy on my end and like anytime self-defense comes up peace goes in my chat you know like saying like oh here he is destiny but he was unhinged fucking fucking takes on this bullshit and anytime we're watching videos of shoplifting I'm like here it is this is the world that Peaceco wants where this old lady's gonna get robbed and she can't do anything because she's not strong

enough to wrestle under the ground so she can't shoot him and Peaceco's right yeah that's it's a rough issue but I understand why people think that my takes are a little bit wacky but I'm not like advocating for the murder of everybody ever it's like that's a that's a tough one okay oh yeah well Chris I think you got your answer that was a good answer um yeah yeah no i mean i get it i i think i'm not going to litigate it we're going to end it but i mean i get the argument

which is that i think the crux of it though is is that you make recourse to um the authorities and they do not do what they ought to do right so you know i mean one of the rules of civilization is that the state has a monopoly on violence right yeah and there's not even the state can't do anything there are laws for this so like what right do you have to go out and enact vigilante justice when the guy's not even breaking the law right and what what possible doors are you opening up for anybody to kill somebody because they're doing what about somebody who's contributing to spiritual decay by kissing their boyfriend as a guy and doing gay stuff like should you be able to kill this but like yeah i understand it yeah it's it's a yeah for sure it's a fun philosophical question um i'm just glad i'm glad you didn't have to kill

the kid glad the kid is still you should you should do invite him home you know for the podcast just like it would be interesting to see how he thinks about maybe he's very grateful but yeah like because i guess all of the points that you raised are are completely basically what i would have anticipated but it's the one which just seems surprising to me is that a simple step back to you know the what you said there right is all raising the different perspectives you can take and how there could be reasonable objections and there are issues you know if you try to apply this rule and stuff but what you didn't say is like yeah and i you know i realized that i reacted emotionally in that case and like i talked about the potential

you know how we could go the the house of the kid and the father and that kind of thing but that was that was just blowing off steam right and i'm i don't know i don't know the i don't know the role of the principal there should be i yeah i don't have that feeling it's just an emotional rap fuck those guys okay listen i don't know man but yeah fuck yeah um yeah i mean i do realize i was emotional at the time for sure but uh like yeah even so like drawing out the principle i'm not sure it's a rough one i totally i'm very sympathetic towards arguments on the other side though yeah and when when i when we came across it when we were looking at content it was like you know people sent us messages saying have you seen the content where just destiny justifies killing the kid and you're like what and then there actually is like significant debates about it so it just given all the other

issues it's surprised it sometimes surprised me that you were willing to continue to like because that's that was talked about like a year ago i find the stream of you debating that right and like you said it's been a you know 10 or 11 years and actually now that this has come into my head i i wanted to remember to mention that i did have this question for you and i i guess it comes across as complimentary but a but in another sense it's not so you're oh boy you have like as we've established a high tolerance for for drama a high tolerance for conflict and i i like that the willingness to debate with people and kind of argue your point of view even when potentially socially uncomfortable but the the other aspect is like you go hard sometimes in a way i'm thinking of antagonizing islamists which

you did for a couple of months right you had yourself as minecraft steve like attacking i know what you're talking about the cab or whatever yeah yeah but the thing is from my perspective right people who antagonize islamists in writing or online that often becomes a big part of their life then their security concerns for the rest of their life or in talks they are constantly messaging about you know the concerns they have about dealing with islamic extremists who you know like saman rushdie or whatever obviously a higher profile in that respect you do have enough views grievances community you just recently had left this streamer potentially suggesting that it would be good if somebody were like four of them that made kind of these

suggestions yeah all of them specifically not banned on twitch and recommended by hassan on a recent wired interview uncritically by yeah yeah so they bleeped out that the direct incitement to kill you, but the if X to Y was very clear. And so this is the bit I'm curious, though. Like, so you have, you're a person, right? You appear in public. You are bound to, as your profile increases and all that, have security concerns and whatnot.

But so are you not, like, why are you not concerned about the fact that Islamists do attack people for presenting the prophet in unflattering ways or that kind of thing? Like, why add to your list of concerns by deliberately antagonizing them? And how is it that you can do that for a couple of months and then move on without it seeming to follow you along? I just find that sort of surprising that you are able to move on from that kind of thing. When you say able, you mean because I'm personally able to or because those communities allow me to? You mean like because I'm personally able to or because those communities allow me to?

Well, both, because why are you not constantly having to sort out security arrangements after antagonizing Islamist extremists online? I live in the United States, so our Muslims here are super cool. We don't have the same kind that kill people in Paris or whatever else. So that's one thing is that people in the US are generally a bit more chill. But you travel. I do. Well, listen, I didn't go to any uh no i'm just kidding um i don't know i some of them might just be like um unwarranted like arrogance because it hasn't happened yet maybe there'll be an event where i'm like holy shit i need to be like super careful but i mean like i i mean i try to be relatively safe in the areas that i go like in some areas i may or may not have security um i mean i don't make that public too much i'm not so just to be clear like i'm not trying to say like detail your security no yeah i understand yeah no i mean i i try to try to i do try to be somewhat

mindful of things but i also think that um um man hold on i always try to think of like clips that are gonna be played after i get assassinated so this is gonna be one that's gonna be played after i get killed people online talk a lot of shit and they make a lot out of nothing where they'll try to like people will go online and victimize and so it's like I got all these threats and blah blah it's like people say dumb shit online all the fucking time these people are gonna fucking kill you like I've met people in real life that'll come to me like oh shit destiny are you about to stab me like no I told you I wanted to kill you on fucking twitter like I posted that picture of you like getting beheaded but like bro what's up and they're like talking it's like yeah it

feels like people i don't know if it's like the age group or if it's like the circles that i'm in like people say wild shit online but it feels like in real life everybody's been like fairly chill so far i don't know if that's a result of like my demeanor and my penetration to some spaces and like the credibility that i've bought by like participating these spaces i don't know if it's because i just haven't ran into the right person yet i don't know if it's because i don't make these criticisms like central to who i am like there's a lot of people i like a lot of people i have problems with and i very easily move from thing to thing like i don't have to like you know get stuck in the sam harris hole of like hating islam for the rest of my life or get stuck in the jordan peterson c16 hole or get

stuck in the brett weinstein uh vaccine hole or get stuck and like you're like it feels like i described this as like brain break moments where somebody like hates something so much that now like something breaks and the rest of their life is on that one issue. There are so many things in life that are interesting to talk about. So yeah, I have no problem

like moving on to the next thing. Like I don't uniquely hate Muslims or uniquely hate Islam. I just think it's really funny that there's a lot of red pill people that simp for it without having ever opened a Quran in their life. And I think it's really funny how triggered they get online.

Did you guys ever see anything about the Hindu stuff? The Hindu? I had a Muslim guy. Yeah, I had a Muslim guy that challenged me because some Muslims would come online and they would challenge me. They'd be like, well, you never shit on Jews. You never shit on all these other people, blah, blah, blah. You only do it on Muslims because it's safe. shit on jews you never shit on all these other people blah blah you only do it on muslims because it's safe and i'm like well no i should not other people but it's harder to make them as mad because

most of them don't give a fuck about their weird religious shit so like i don't i don't know this is a thing but like i've had a lot of muslims tell me like well you know jewish rabbi sometimes they bite the foreskin off the penis you know for children and it's like okay so like i'll like try that as a joke i'll make fun of a like jewish friend and they're like yeah that's weird i'm like okay well this doesn't matter one of the funniest moments i had a guy say you don't understand how radical hindus are online like they say naturalists yeah they say wild shit and i'm like i've never heard that before but fine sure so i found a picture of like a crazy baby with like seven arms or whatever and then i tweeted out i was like hindus see this new child and think

it's their god or some shit like something there's something i during like i thought it was an ai generated image and the number one most like comment was a hindu guy that responded and his response was i felt so bad his response was i understand if you're american or something and you have issues of their religion but it's really not okay to throw a poor child on the bus when you're making fun of us and i was like oh god i didn't even know it was a real picture and i felt horrible and i was like okay well that's their response and then meanwhile i got like 32 new death comments from like muslims today because they were mad that i you know brought up my esha or something i just thought

it was funny i've i've heard hindu nationalists can go pretty hard uh if you get their attention so maybe that but but in that case that does sound like a moment of regret so yeah that's it i mean it's also funny as a quick thing it's funny because like all of these red pill guys say that they're so brave and they blah blah blah and it's like okay well like go fight with muslims online it's funny that you guys are so brave but you happen to fall into literally the most trendy popular religion right now like isn't that convenient yeah sorry god yeah i guess probably one kind of argument that people would raise is you don't have the single

issue but you do have hassan like yeah in terms of you know like a figure of enduring here but it's it's mutual it's obviously yeah listen would you watch batman if he didn't have the joker everybody needs their reoccurring okay antagonist all right so that's our center narrative building going on there yeah i can see that happening and uh there was one other thing that i wanted to mention so one of the criticisms that you get most frequently relates to you know reading wikipedia or or just uh reading headlines or whatever the case well you don't really get the reading headlines it's mainly the wikipedia thing right other people kept reading the headlines thing and i am aware from consuming your content and from the research that we did that that is unfair um in terms of the research you do but i think it is fair and you've acknowledged this whenever you were talking about

chastising academics for the bad job they often do in the topics you're interested in that there is an aspect where you have to cram in a whole bunch of material and you're in a sense like taking in a big range of material and and learning it but your engagement will be more obviously more superficial than somebody whose whole career has been on topic now it may be that the people whose whole career in that topic have become so ideological that they are also very superficial in their arguments. But just in principle, it is the case that your engagement will be more superficial.

And in that respect, is there an issue with... We have this concept that we talk about with discourse surfing. Like when it came to the lab lake for example and i've heard you talk about this as well that a lot of the punditry around it was like ping-ponging between headlines right this intelligence agency says today that this is five percent you know like more likely and then you would get a round of coverage with nate silver and various people changing their position and then you would get a critical article and you would have the vice versa and you had people talking about you were never allowed to even discuss the lab leak and polite conversation when it was the endless conversation i endured for months and months on twitter and all social media but in that respect

as i've heard you've described you're kind kind of, you know, roughly from consuming the discourse about 60-40 in fever of a natural origin being likely. I know you haven't said this is a specialist subject, but Matt and I have spent some time in this and we did like a three and a half hour episode with a bunch of experts on it and I've spent time with it. And we would say the scientific literature has not been ping-ponging like that and has been just very consistently building up a

consensus which is now pretty strong for a natural origin such that when they did a survey recently it was something like 85 percent of relevant virologists that you know interesting is there ben i was familiar with the two i think there were two big papers that were published initially maybe both in nature that like looked at this like i think months within the origin of the virus i wasn't aware of like any other huge papers that had come out um why when i say 60 40 i might actually be hedging too much i'm only a lot of it comes from the fact that i think either one or some of our uh intelligence agencies switched their position on it and i'm like okay well maybe there's something

that i don't have access to maybe yeah but this is a good that's a perfect illustration because there are two papers that a lot of people reference one is the proximal origins one and then the other one tends to be a letter that was written i think in the Lancet, but in any case, like, arguing against demonizing Chinese colleagues, right? It wasn't a research paper, but this is what's cited. But there actually is a huge, really robust literature on the topic. There's now probably hundreds of papers on the topic, but there's a whole bunch of evidential lines that are pointing in the same direction. And for Matt and me, because we are academics and like kind of interested in science-y topics and that kind of

thing, following the research literature was not so difficult. It's not our area of expertise, but we just understand about, you know, following the science literature on that topic. But we saw the discourse all around it. And I think the discourse still is like very much focused in a kind of 60, 40, 50, 50 range. So my question isn't specifically that example, that's just an illustration. But how to avoid that occurring, you know, like in any topic, like, is it the case case that basically you have to do a deep dive on it in every instance or is there some way you can counteract the issue about the discourse being dominating because like when you talk to jordan peterson right you could see that

the discourse had poisoned his mind about the climate change but you correctly summarized the literature because you had prepared it. So that's, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about, like how to, uh, it might only be for scientific issues. I don't know if I have a great question there, but hopefully. No, I understand. Um, one of the, so there are a couple of things I think that I'm, I'm uniquely suited to do. One of these is, uh, I think, uh, Oh no, actually I wouldn't say I'm a suited to do. One of these is, I think, oh no, actually I wouldn't say I'm an EULA. This is a practice thing.

I try to hedge an appropriate level of conviction around things that I talk about. So like even when we're talking here about like the lab leak stuff, like if somebody asks me that, I'm going to give you an appropriate, hopefully like percentage of my thoughts, but then I'm going to give you like

a level of conviction on how much reading I've done. So somebody asked me about lab leak. I think my response is usually basically what I just said here I'm like 60 40 I think I came from the wet markers I think there were two papers on it but I haven't like done like any deep dives into it and that's it hopefully when you hear me say that hopefully people don't come away like destiny knows that it came from the wet markers you're fucking lying or destiny says it blah blah because I just I haven't done the reading into it like I

know that people expect you to have a really strong opinion on everything but like I can't I can't do that much reading so I try to have an appropriate level of conviction based on how much research I felt I've done is the first thing. The second thing is that because I'm a content creator, and I got paid absurd amounts of money to do content, I think that you have at least a minimum level of obligation to actually fucking read more than fucking Twitter headlines about the particular things that you talk about. And I don't know if I'm just gifted with my natural 180 IQ massive fucking brain. But it feels like if i'm just gifted with my natural 180 iq massive fucking brain but it feels like if you're just willing to sit down and like read through some pretty basic stuff

like you can get a huge understanding on a lot of topics at least very broadly enough so that you can go through literature on things like when people think of you guys see your academics what is your what are your academic backgrounds? He's an anthropologist from the psychologist. Anthropologist, psychologist. Yeah, I'm a cognitive anthropologist and I teach in a psychology department. These are important distinctions.

Okay, got it. So you're like PhD, like defended thesis is published, or like go through a lot of research. It's very importantly, I'm a full professor. He's an associate professor so that is very important okay okay okay okay cool okay that's great i'm just checking so you can call me out if i say this because i've said this a lot and i feel this pretty strongly but maybe i'm fucking full of shit okay i think that the layman's impression oh also fuck both of you okay because i think academics have fucked up a lot when it

comes to public communication so now retards like me have to go online and try to argue these fucking what does antibody dependent enhancement mean and why doesn't the vaccine like jesus christ well let me go over this this this is not gonna work we're part of the solution we will throw our colleagues i feel like an undergrad level course on fucking immunology just having to keep up because every fucking day was a new conspiracy theory and it's like okay well what does ade mean or like what what is a like what is between an mrna vaccine and like an a an attenuated virus vaccine and none of the academics want to come out and say anything so like people like me have to give arguments against fucking robert we had to do it too yeah okay yeah jesus christ um but what i was going to say is I feel like academic papers, it feels like when somebody says,

oh, what do you think about minimum wage or vaccines? And the thought is like, oh my God, well, what does the literature say? And when people say the literature, I think layman's think, and I used to think this, there must be like thousands of papers published about all this stuff. But I think the reality is, is that when you develop like a fluidity in certain academic disciplines, there's usually going to be a few really well-known authors that have published like really landmark papers. And as long as you're like aware of some of the larger papers that have been published, or maybe some of the more respected, like large, like meta analyses or reviews that have come out by like these respected people, you can like pretty quickly, like quicker than you would imagine, can develop like like a handle. Like, okay, well like where's the general feeling on this? You know, like if I'm looking at like minimum wage, I know that at some point people are going to reference people like card or for us. Uh, I know that if I'm doing like fucking Evo psych that fucking, uh, David Buss or whatever is going to come up. Uh, I know that like they're, yeah, they're, they're like well-known

names. You see as long again, and I say this so much when people ask me like, how do you stand for it? Just like sit down and read that there's no shortcut it's like asking like how do you get ripped there is no shortcut you just sit down and just read some shit if you're willing to like download a paper and all you have to do is really read like the abstract and the conclusion and you can skim through the methodology then as long as you're not doing fucking econ you'll be able to understand most of it right maybe not some of the harder like statistics stuff you can get like a lot of information by reading a paper which is one of the things i like to show on stream i was like well let's just read this paper like we can understand most of it, right? Maybe not some of the harder like statistics stuff, you can get like a lot of information by reading a paper, which is one of the things I like to show on stream. I was like, well, let's just read this paper, like we can understand most of it. It's not that difficult.

Yeah, you can develop like this kind of like working knowledge in the field. So I have the issue of like, my knowledge level is going to be surfacy, but like I can read and I've got like decent, like comprehensive skills. And I have a huge advantage in that I've got a huge audience of experts that I could theoretically pull from or people that I can reach out to and talk to. And that's how I develop kind of like a working knowledge in a particular thing. One of the reasons why I get so mad when people fight with me so much on stuff is like, listen, you're so upset about like my takes about economics or philosophy or psychology or whatever the fuck, like more from that, I'm just appealing to whatever, whatever my understanding is of the

current like literature consensus. So like, you're really mad at me, but i'm just like saying like this is what the fda has like pushed on their website this is what nature at lancet and the new england journal medicine is published like like if you don't like what i'm saying like i'm sorry but like this is where it is right now counter me with another paper right and it can't be like a you know a retrospective sample size you know n equals four paper on why ivermectin is gonna cure the coronavirus and like yeah that's that's generally what i say yeah just as long as you're willing to read and be like epistemically humble about the limits of your knowledge i think you can do more than 99 of people is my feeling yeah there's uh some points i want to say matt you might have something you want to say as well but so like i've seen you engage with

academics and everyone in academia knows that there is the capability for academics to just reference citations and all the things they've read and use it like in a kind of performative way. Like, you know, look at all these books behind me on the wall. I've read all of these or reference a study that they know the other person hasn't know any of the details about. And it's just purely like it's a kind of a 40 appeal and academics are just as prone to doing that budget if not more so than you know people online and also just to say i completely sign off on the point about just read like literally reading a paper puts you above 99 percent of people even if you don't understand the statistics and stuff, if you just read it, that is often a lot more than people will do. So definitely do that. But the one caveat that I

think is important is you can learn a whole bunch of basic principles like studies with bigger sizes, studies with controls are better, and so on and so forth. But there are sometimes technical issues in studies and in literature which make it hard for somebody with a layperson's understanding of a topic to properly grasp it. And it means that somebody who is proficient in a topic, like say they know statistics well, they can absolutely present it as if the statistics completely undermine the safety of vaccines. And you know that's bullshit, but they're able to, you know, reference statistics and studies in a way that a normal person can counter. I'm acutely aware of this because of the guru space, that there's a whole bunch of them that will make these big long threads where they're referencing studies and they're showing graphs and they're kind of talking about ivermectin or this thing. And it looks like science, right? It looks like a critical evaluation. And I think for a lot of people, the advice of, you know, you go to the literature and just check it is potentially deceiving because if you lack some basic grounding, it can lend you the wrong way. So that's the only caveat is like, I still think it's important that people read.

I still think relying on headlines or science reporting is you know not the way to go but there is an issue about exactly what you said about epistemic humility that with like matt and i are not experts in genetics so when we look at the lab leak we can see the general contours of the literature but we cannot assess the quality of the genomic analysis because we've never done that. Like, so we'd be, we might be able to follow it, but you know, we have to rely on like building up an expert network that we can trust. So yeah, that was just things that were ping ponging. Yeah. I think on that, um, there's a couple of things I'd say. So first is if you're in that level of like political discourse, you're already really like into the weeds in that. Like, I don't think

it would be nice actually, if this was the, I wish that more people would argue with bullshit graphs and numbers than just the empty platitudes. But I feel like 90% of political discourse is like the empty platitude bullshit that you see on, you know, on Joe Rogan or from, I guess, from the gurus or whatever. Um, or, you know, like it's, it's, it's not going to be, yeah, it's not gonna be like, here's my GWAS on like, how I understand that this is that but well, it's going to be Jordan Peterson saying like 20% of excess deaths are caused by the vaccine. Yeah, in Europe, right? Yeah, it's gonna be stuff like that. The two things that I would say, and now I have to rely on my strength of philosophy and intuition. And I would say these are two heuristics that I use to

try to keep me safe from those things when I see those pop up. And I'm using a heuristic here because it's a substitution of expertise. I can't be expertise in everything. Here are two things that I try to warn people against. You can tell me if you agree if these are good or bad. The first thing is, is you should be very, very, very careful when a layman is eager to disagree with the conclusion of a study using the figures from the study. And the reason why is because if somebody has gone through the effort of deciding which variables to control for, of collecting the data, of writing up the entire paper and publishing it, that generally the process of doing that, the methodology and everything, is more difficult than just drawing the conclusion. So if you're

getting somebody who's a layman, who's very eager to point to one or two figures in the study and disagree with the conclusion, it's interesting that that autodidactor, it's interesting that that layman was confident enough in the data collection and principles that the researcher used to cite their own stuff, but then completely disagree with the conclusion. Now, I'm not saying it's always wrong, that that'll never be the case. But that's one thing. If you get a guy who's like very eager to disagree with all the conclusions of these researchers, but he's very comfortable citing all of their figures and their methodologies and everything to arrive at right before the conclusion, that's a red flag, not necessarily about a red flag. And then the second thing is,

I always stress like effect size, that if somebody were to come out with a study tomorrow, and they were to say, actually, a new study was published, decent sample size, you know, 800 people perspective, RCT, whatever the fuck, okay. And this shows that if you take ivermectin, you actually have on average about like a 12 to 24 hour earlier recovery from COVID. I would look at it and I go, it's been studied so much. It's like, but okay, well, maybe, whatever, right? Because if all the literature so far shows that nothing is happening and a new study comes out that shows, well, maybe something is happening a little bit, the effect size is believable, that this might've been something that an earlier study

hasn't caught. But if there's a whole bunch of literature about a particular thing, and somebody comes out with a new study, and they're like, we just did a new groundbreaking study on ivermectin, holy shit, it completely gets rid of COVID. If you contract the virus, you don't even develop the disease. Well, that's a huge effect size. How did every other researcher miss this, if it's such a well-studied thing? That effect doesn't it doesn't make sense that it would have that dramatic of an impact and everybody else that study this has missed it so those are like two like heuristics that i use to like see if somebody's engaging in some like wacky bullshit like well why haven't you published any literature of your own why are you relying on their all other things except for the conclusion

and like how are you coming up with an answer that everybody else has missed so far worldwide like that seems really suspicious to me those are two heuristics i use yeah i don't know if you have any other suggestions for some of you think those are dog shit or yeah yeah no i have well i think your heuristics and uh are good both the ones you listed there and the ones you said before and i think you are you know you are you are proof that a reasonably capable lay person who's willing to do some work can get their head around a big issue it could be climate change it could be vaccines ivermectin you name it you know it requires some effort requires not being like a conspiracy theorist like hunting for hunting for the answer that you want so the motivations are important

um your heuristics are good there's probably a bunch of other more detailed ones you're right about the red flags about that that's selective like like someone who goes through someone who is not does not work in that area but is going through a particular study and finding like these little minuscule red flags we've seen conspiracy theorists do this all the time so that is absolutely a red flag um selectively citing certain figures i've got a i've got a broader bit of advice for you which is that yeah you i mean the most efficient way i find in in getting my head around the answer to a question from a literature from which i'm not an expert in of which there are an infinite number of them which

is that you can go an awful long way by like don't be focused on reading the primary literature like that is the empirical each each individual empirical study. If it's a big enough topic, there will generally be good review articles, good summary articles, good meta-analysis articles. You know, pay a little bit of attention to who the names are, where they're coming from. Just, you know, you can get the vibe about whether or not, because there's an awful lot of crap published, obviously.

So you just have that ability to sift through. The number of citations, Google things like that though there's a bunch of easy ways to to identify the quality stuff and you can read the like you know you talked about reading the the abstract and the conclusion or whatever like that's good that's fine and and you can you can skim essentially don't try to provide an independent critique on the methodology trust the discipline to do that but what you can do is get a good sense of what the consensus is by relatively high level scans so um yeah that's what i would do you can also you can also get really good responses by just reading response papers it's funny that like if you dive into

certain topics you can read a paper in a response and i'll be arguing with somebody it's like there are really good responses to some of the things i'm saying but you like don't even know them or this is a this is like an obvious red flag it's a stupid thing but like somebody will say something like oh i remember this was when nature published a massive i don't know if you call it a study or like a database analysis whatever the fuck but it was it was the 100 million traffic stops are you familiar with this it was 100 million traffic stops to look and see if police were racially profiling drivers based on what time of day they pulled people over. And I think this had some complicated math in it, but I read through this whole thing. And it's always funny when

somebody does a thing where they're like, well, what about this thing? Do they even consider that? And it'll be the most obvious fucking thing in the world. And I'd be like, no, you know, all the people that went into peer reviewing, publishing, choosing, nobody thought of that. And I remember one of the big pushbacks that I got from that for a person I was debating, they were like, well, maybe black people just tend to work more at night. Like, what about that? And it's like, wow, that's a really good point. Like what an obvious fucking thing to bring up. But the study was interesting. And that what they did was the period of time that they measured was between daylight savings time to look for discrepancies between arrests, because that would shift an hour

difference of time, which shouldn't affect somebody's work schedule but it did shift the amount of light outside because the hypothesis of the paper was that you were less likely to get racially profiled at night when you couldn't make uh make differences between the races the drivers whatever so that was funny because it's such an obvious exception like what about this and it's like okay well i i glimpsed the methodology and obviously they take that into account more often than not they will if you've ever i call these like level one objections where you'll say something and people will be like, well, what about this thing? And it's like, yeah,

you don't think the person fucking thought about this? Like, Jesus, yeah. There's like a journal, for example, called Behavioral and Brain Sciences where they have the target article and then they have about like 15 responses and then the authors respond. So like reading that is kind of getting a crash course

in all the different opinions that people have on a specific topic. respond so like reading that is kind of getting a crash course and all the different opinions that people have on a specific topic but the one of the things i wanted to say which like shows an overlap in the kind of points you're making is that you know when you're talking about like clip chipping is that where people yeah where people take the worst thing you've said and or you know like take something in isolation and uh then focus on that and don't look at the rest of the context and with that proximal origin paper you mentioned that's a short paper it's like five pages long there is one paragraph and in particular one line

and that's all that is in the discourse about it now if you read the whole paper they are actually encouraging people that like there could be more evidence that comes out that points more arguing that nobody can look at this topic anymore but it you will see people reference that paper but they'll only ever reference that one paragraph from it and uh and we spoke the you know the offers on it on the podcast but when people look at like their slack messages it's it's very similar to the climate gate where they are talking like normal people revising their opinions, well, maybe this would be more likely or whatever. But it's always one sentence taken out where it sounds nefarious. And then, you know, like, but when you take it in totality, they're just drafting a paper together and they put what they think in the paper.

So, like, I think you would have a lot of sympathy with those people that they put in a paper what they think and people are constantly saying that's not what you actually think and they're like we wrote it down yeah that's also that should that's a i i almost said there's a horrible horrible horrible the worst words ever uttered okay common sense okay but like this is a thing where somebody will bring to me a thing this was really common for the october 7th attacks um blumenthal and the gray zone started citing this well actually a lot of civilians the majority of civilians were killed and the sourcing for this was a heretz article and my immediate thing was like okay there are some things where if you tell me them i guess this is similar to the effect size argument, but the thing where you tell them, okay, hold

on. I know this isn't true because if it was true, I would have heard about it. Okay. It's like, it's like a, it's like somebody coming up to you and offering you a penis enlargement bill. There is no penis enlargement bill because if it was true, it would be on every fucking corner in America. I know that there is no penis enlargement bill.

It's not true. And, and when I dug through this Heretz article, so I don't read Hebrew. I know fucking Blumenfuck doesn't read Hebrew. And you click the translate button. If you go down like 12 paragraphs, there's like one sentence in here where it talks about how some of the IDF was fighting in some of these, I think one of these or a couple of these kibbutzes for a couple of days before they managed to clear out all the terrorists. And they talked about the difficult decision of firing on site at home, not knowing if a person was in it, right? And the immediate common sense,

the immediate like, can you parse media intelligently is like, hold on. You're citing this one sentence here to make this claim. Don't you think that if the purpose of that sentence was to illustrate the majority of civilians were killed by the idea, wouldn't that be like the fucking headline? Why would you bury the lead like that on a story? Similar to your paper where it's like, hold on. they're making this extreme statement closing off all through yourself and it's hidden

on page four in like sentence seven of this paragraph like don't you think that would be like the opening or the conclusion if it was that big of a deal like why is nobody else talking about this like bullshit yeah that should be one of those things where you immediately like mind correct like wait hold on if this was the case i feel like the world would look a lot different in terms of the presentation of this yeah it's a i think the also the parallel that you're talking about is that there are plenty of articles that make claims right and when you have a bit of media literacy you can even see an article comes from a reasonable source it doesn't mean the conclusion or the evidence that they provide is is correct right like and in the same way with journals there are good journals there are journals that are famous and there are articles in them that

are that are dog shit and you you have to be able to assess the quality of research but that's not so easy in the same way that like assessing the quality of journalism it's not one individual thing right like if you know that a journalist is very biased towards a certain conclusion and they're citing sources like for me whenever people cite the gray zone it's almost immediately a red flag that they lack at least a healthy degree of skepticism about the ideological bias that places can have so yeah there's there's like parallel things i think in academia yeah i mean the lancet was the journal that published the original vaccines cause autism field yeah yeah um that people's people's poor oh my god these are some of my most trying times when i'm arguing with somebody over like what's

a good source or not again this is like a level zero conversation when i'm talking to somebody and i'm like okay well okay so you don't believe this happened? Okay, well, let's go through this. And I'll throw them an article and they'll be like, really? CNN? Fox News? Like, no, you fucking moron. They're quoting somebody from the government. I'm just giving the articles so you can see the quote. Now, unless you think the article is misquoting the person or publishing the wrong quote,

the source is not fucking CNN. The source is the prime minister. The source is the president. The source is this. We can find 20 different articles that source the same quote, or we can find a statement from the government itself. But people will look at something like, oh, your source is this we can find 20 different articles that source the same quote or we can find a statement from the government itself that's but people will look at something like oh your source is twitter no twitter doesn't publish news what do you mean or your source is like it's like no oh yeah people's lack of media literacy and just even understanding what a source

is or what they're reading is incredibly frustrating yeah or i'll argue i don't know quickly i'll argue like somebody's like oh i've got six studies and they'll link me six different news articles that all link to the exact same study i'm like my god that also happens in academia where they're like you know shit that end equals yeah i think that there are layers of bullshit in academia before unfortunately i mean you know you you were dissing them before but you but you missed the point because we would throw them all under the bus, quick as look at you. But, you know, and like, you know, some disciplines are better than others, right?

Don't trust psychology as much as you trust virology, right? There's just natural distinctions there. I mean, some areas of psychology are good, like my area is great, but, you know, take positive psychology, it's full of bullshit. And, you know, so, yeah, you can't just count citations and you can't just, you know, there aren it's full of bullshit and you know yeah so yeah you can't just count citations and you can't just you know there aren't simple heuristics there is a vibe that comes from having a that view yeah working knowledge in the field yeah yeah but look steven we've we've kept you over a lot of time but there there was one very last thing that we have to

address and it you know we got a lot of feedback a lot of your problematic stances and stuff and things that we we need to bring up and need to address for you but this one i think is possibly the most important and it's your terrible terrible takes on food all right i am cutting this short i am cutting this short like i i also want living in japan i just have to say that yeah that i i've seen some of your takes and you need help the rest of it you know give me one you disagree with give me one you don't eat things from the sea oh my god you're in japan so you would say that yeah listen we crawl out of the sea to get away from that world okay why do you need to eat bugs and we have cows okay how many people can you feed with a crab all right what's

a good what's a good i haven't heard any of these bad food tweets or opinions um what's a good food then destiny what's a good food steak that is a good food that's as easy as most of my food takes are reasonable i just like i hyperbolize it a bit and it triggers if i get people like i personally like i'll eat mediterranean food but i think it's actually kind of boring and i think it's funny when people like overhype things like hummus and it's like it's hummus is okay but i'm never like super excited for hummus or like uh or like guacamole like i'm never like oh my god it's like yeah so yeah you know i'm a teacher of agreeing with those two takes. Yeah, because my takes are pretty reasonable. Yeah, they are.

I will say in defense of, because I have gone to now a lot of nice seafood places, but I can eat seafood. I can tolerate it. Okay. In defense of my anti-seafood take, I was born and raised and lived in Nebraska for 30 years. Oh, no, no. If you've ever had seafood that has like a fishy taste, the association is immediately fucking horrible. And yeah, I can't eat seafood.

I just wouldn't choose to do so because I just have such a negative association with it. This makes sense. I thought you were pulling the political ID card because I'm from Belfast, which the food culture in Belfast is, you know, people talk about food deserts. But that is an entire country that is desertified. But I was forced by university and encounters with other people to expand my repertoire. So if I can do it, Stephen, anyone can. But yeah, that's all right. We'll let it slide.

Thank you, Destiny, for coming on and exercising your right to reply. You didn't, unfortunately, dispute much in our take, but we had a good chat. Anyway. I think the final takeaway from everything is that, like, in terms of, like, just pretty much, like, I think that there are good criticisms you can make of me. Like, there must be, because I can look at anything I've done five years ago. People are like, oh, why don't you write a book or blah, blah, blah. And it's like, because I end up changing my mind on a lot of things.

So, they are good things to disagree with me over, and they're good arguments to be made against things i've said and i've changed my mind on things that i realized like oh this is a bad opinion i just i wish that the criticisms of me would be a little bit more on like what i'm actually like thinking or saying rather than like this unhinged straw man version of me where it's like destiny why don't you just not be pro-genocide and it's like okay well yeah thanks yeah that's it yeah i i i do like that the one of the presentations of you from the various orbiting community is that you're mysterious and that your positions are unclear and your motivations okay and i i it's just impressive because it's

like people have devoted a large amount of their time to try and understand a particular person and have not grasped the most obvious answer. So, yeah, that's an interesting dynamic that you are a man of mystery for certain people online. But keep it up! Yeah, thanks a lot. We don't endorse all your

takes. We've tried to explain this to people. We don't. Don't endorse child murder. And when you become an anti-vax child murdering you know genocide supporter that is not signed off from us but we will say that we did enjoy listening to your content a lot more than we did to many of the other people that we've covered so that's cool yeah thanks a lot i appreciate it yeah all right well i'm gonna hit the going to hit the button. Hit the button.

Thanks, Destiny. That was enjoyable. That was good fun. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Thank you.