Decoding the Gurus - Supplementary Material 5: Spiritual UFOs, Alternative Theories of Evolution, and Atlantean Grievances

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

We watch in awe as the guru-sphere grapples with a host of 'alternative' theories:Bret promotes pseudoscience on Polio and alternative theories on evolutionThe Gurusphere collides with Tucker's takes on evolutionRogan and Tucker praise Alex Jones' prophetic abilitiesTucker's views on spiritual UFOsHasan endorses Lex Fridman as the most genuine centristContrasting Destiny and Hasan's transparencyWorld War 3 WarningsThe Great Archaeology Debate: Dibble vs. HancockGraham Hancock- A Grievance Mongering MasterclassIntentional MisrepresentationWhite Supremacy angers Great JoeThe Cass Review Controversy: A lesson in misinformationLinksThe Untold Story of Polio – Forrest Maready on DarkHorseJerry Coyne's old takedown of Bret's confused theories about evolutionBret's tweets defending TuckerJoe Rogan Experience #2138 - Tucker CarlsonJoe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint DibbleThe Iced Coffee Hour- Confronting Hasan Piker on Socialist Grift, Hypocrisy, and How “The Top 1%” Keeps You Poor!The Iced Coffee Hour- Destiny on Debating Ben Shapiro, Toxic Wokeism and Getting DivorcedA comparison of the reactions to Iran's missile launchesMore or Less (BBC)- 98%: Is misinformation being spread about a review of trans youth medicine?The Cass ReportSystematic Reviews from the Cass ReportThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1 hr 51 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's Supplemental Material with me, Christopher Kavanagh, Cognitive Anthropologist extraordinaire. With him, Social Psychologist extraordinaire, Matthew Brown. Not a social psychologist. extraordinaire matthew brown not a social psychologist oh you know don't you something you're kind of what are you cognitive psychologist just psychologist just psychologist i encompass the entire field okay well there we go so correction already on this episode matt is just a psychologist he has no specialty whatsoever i'm not really that interested in psychology there's there's a lot of people that have debunked a lot of psychological studies a lot of people who are skeptics and i'm on board with all

of it frankly i mean i'm i'm fine with that too i'm more open science than you, bitch. That's true, you are. Yeah, but I don't think, I'm still on board with the ideals of psychology and good psychological research. In general, I'm down with good social science research. That is where I put myself. But I'm skeptical about the way that you should be about all research. What I spend my days doing, teaching students how to assess studies for their quality, a topic that will come up later.

But we've got various things to get through, Matt, various things. And our Destiny episode came out, went out into the wild yonder, episode came out yeah went out into the wild yonder and it's now ping-ponging around streams and and subreddits as uh it inevitably would so yeah yeah reaction was as expected generally positive the negative feedback we got we might certainly expect it and we're okay with it we're okay that's all right you can't make everybody happy the daliban have not kidnapped any of our family members yet or or yeah geo-located our house or whatever they do but i i will also say that there is a post-decoding glow if you will about you know being immersed in a bunch of content that somebody produces and

you know thinking about okay the timelines and all this stuff and then we record the episode and we put it out and it gets the reaction that it does and you know now we move on and the gurusphere continues to rotate and i like that i it's a it's a good system we've developed there i think it's healthy i think it's healthy i mean we could have succumbed to the temptation of just focusing on the weinsteins and people that are closely related to them yeah weinstein watch because my goodness there is an infinite amount of quite amusing and interesting content there but it's not healthy i think to obsess over over individual characters you you take a look at them you see what there is to see and then you move on that's healthy yes like a shark yes like a shark and that was one

of the things that i wanted to mention though was a weinstein update because first of all Brett managed to sink to new lows by essentially engaging in a variation of polio vaccine denialism the focus on this one is that there's a person advocating an alternative origin for polio related to pesticides matt you know the modern world things are so very in line with brett so just as usual he's promoting absolute dross and anti-vax stuff but the other aspect is and we'll get into the the stimulus for this but brett in response to some comments by tucker started to make tweets about evolution now this is never a good idea for brett because he likes to tweet in a very obfuscatory obfuscatory is that a word yep that's correct yeah and obfuscate fucking hell he likes to be opaque in his tweets and when he tweets about evolution he does this too so he said I'm a biologist. It is my job to figure out what's wrong with our evolutionary

framework. Darwin understood this and highlighted all the things that worried him about his own hypothesis. His work has survived and there's now a proper, if incomplete, theory of biological diversity. Darwinists have become so defensive in response to creationism that most can't now respond to high quality challenges they focus instead on minutiae and ignore major paradoxes insistences that darwinism is settled has derailed serious attempts to repair and complete the model yeah yeah that is his obfuscatory style i noticed this with all of his tweets when he's got a hot take on one of these issues he frames it in such a way that it is very unclear there's what he's saying i mean the only thing that's clear is that he knows an awful lot about evolution and uh

whatever you think you know about it is wrong. Yeah. It's impossible to engage with because it's like dealing with a cloud of mist. Yeah. And like when he does get to it, you know, it's essentially arguing his silly intelligent design like lineage theory stuff or his pseudoscience around telomeres or whatever. or his pseudoscience around telomeres or whatever like it's all linked into his conspiratorial narratives or his very very poorly fleshed out alternative evolutionary theories which are not based on like empirical research or theoretical papers just based on breath thinking about it and deciding that the normal processes of evolution, which have been updated quite a bit since Darwin published on the origin of species, are not sufficient.

So we need explorer modes, which is one of his other alternative evolutionary perspectives. And they all amount to injecting a theological, overriding, metaphysical substrate to evolution through which there's kind of a will of evolution and brett tries to deny that that's what he's implying but that is what he's implying as we've seen time and time again when we've actually looked at his statements about evolution yeah but even if his bespoke theory was quite reasonable i think your first point is the most important one is that it has come from him sitting in an armchair and freewheeling and uh and him deciding that this is the correct way to do it so um and but he knows enough of the lingo enough of the language and is obfuscatory enough to be able to sort of allude to or hint at all of these deep understandings that that you don't understand

when there's just nothing behind it at all but it's effective it's effective for people that you know it is effective um but one interesting thing is that it's created a little bit of a division in the guru sphere because what started this all off is tucker carlson and his comments on evolution on joe rogan so let me just play this because it's an illustration of tucker carlson you know his worldview and also the general standard of thought that you hear on Joe Rogan. So this is what Tucker said. If evolution is real and if there is this constant, I don't know, but it's visible. Like you can measure it in certain animals. You can measure adaptation.

Yeah. But there's no evidence that evolution. In fact, I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution is articulated by Darwin. It's like kind of not true. In what sense? Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that, you know,

all life emerged from a single cell organism and over time, and there would be a fossil record of that and there's not. There's not a fossil record of transitionary species, like species that are adapting to its environment. There's tons of record of adaptation and you see it in your own life i mean i have a lot of dogs i see adaptation

and dogs you know through the sure um litter to litter but no there's no evidence at all that none zero that you know people you know evolve seamlessly from a single cell amoeba no there's not there's not there's no chain in the fossil record of that at all and that's why you don't actually hear people you appear to make reference to evolution because the theory of adaptation is clearly obviously true but darwin's theories totally that's why it's still a theory almost 200 years later you know um no we have not found that at all and And I can't even guess. I mean, I have my own theories on it, but they're not proven. What are your theories?

God created people, you know, distinctly and animals. I mean, I think that's like, I think what every person on earth thought until the mid 19th century, actually. So there you go. That's a blast from the past. I remember the, uh remember the uh the great evolution creationist debates when that was an exciting and hot thing online now tucker carlson basically towing the line from 20 or 30 years ago pretty straightforwardly right yeah very old

school creationism and absolutely brain dead to those massive amounts of evidence fossil evidence uh also genetic molecular evidence we just there's so many like you know intersecting lines of evidence that his statement that we don't have any it's it's just absolute absolute bullshit like absolute bullshit like but yeah i mean and you know like he's hitting some of those great, I say great, but well-known stupid creationist talking points. Oh, there's gaps in the fossil record. It's just a theory as implying that a theory is just like a guess, you know, and, you know, really dumb stuff. But one thing I haven't heard before is, oh,

there's like a theory of adaptation, and that's very distinct from a theory of evolution. Oh, I've heard that. That's micro and macro evolution. Oh, that's what micro and macro evolution oh that's what he's referring to that's what he's referring to so like dogs can become different species but like a dog cannot become a beaver right that's the way they usually freeze it yeah so yeah that's that that was that bit and also the point about there's no evidence of single cell evolution up the humans because single cells don't fossilize yeah you know six billion years is a long time unfortunately so there is you know gaps so to speak of course there is they can't help but be

gaps right when you're talking about six billion years ago what's going to fossilize when you don't have freaking skeletons right like you know and even then we do actually have imprints of you know soft-bodied creatures as well but like you're not going to have the evidence of microscopic life back you know over millions of years we don't need to litigate it there's no one listening who's stupid enough to give credence to these sorts of arguments i'm sure if there is sorry to be mean use this as an instigation to go read some books on uh evolution because new it keeps updating all the time like they keep finding new evidence and it's an absolutely fascinating story um especially for me the the early you know that when they keep finding as you say these sort of pseudofossils I suppose like actual traces of you know not single-celled organisms but just some of

the very early multicellular organisms in the Permian is it anyway fascinating yeah yeah so I mean it's stupid old-school creationism but also you hear Joee rogan his kind of reaction which is not like he didn't endorse everything that tucker was saying but he does kind of you know like tucker says well evolution i'm pretty sure you know is that real and joe's like i don't know like he's he's just a very credulous soul and then the point about it just being a theory by evolution just being a theory a very very common talking point which misunderstands the scientific use of the word theory this is stuff that is known stuff that is very common and easily rebutted but it just goes to show what an absolute there's two options tucker is either pandering right saying things which he

knows to be false in order to pander to an audience or some the conservative christian ideology or he he's an absolute moron it's one of the two both are shit it could well be a mixture of both and the funny thing for me is that I have heard sensible people, relatively sensible people, before tell me, whenever Tucker was doing his anti-woke monologues, that actually, you know, Tucker is quite an insightful guy. Like, yeah, there's stuff that he gets wrong, but actually he's quite smart. And like, I don't think so. I don't think so. And at the time, I also said that in response to those claims but like since he's come out of the fox ecosystem the amazing thing is that it's been revealed that

fox was actually restraining his idiocy right like he's become more conspiratorial more endorsing of idiotic conspiracies like you know the gay prostitute who claims they've slept with Obama, aliens, just like every brand of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory, Tucker is in on them. And whether it's marketing or personal belief, it doesn't matter. Like, he's a moron. He is a moron, or a liar, or both, as you say. And it is illustrative that brett feels compelled to

defend tucker he can't endorse the creationism because he thinks of himself as an evolutionary biologist as bad stats put it his superpower is claiming evolutionary insights right so he can't dismiss evolution but in a very brett style he doesn't blame Tucker. He blames Tucker's skepticism of evolution on the academy, on the evolutionary biologists who have destroyed people's trust in institutions and so on. Yeah, and this actually leads to the point that I wanted to make, that the heterodox sphere, such as it is, there are divisions in it, and there are people with varying degrees of scientific or

alleged scientific principles, right? And Jeffrey Miller was tweeting out, true or false, conservatives who don't understand evolution by natural selection are an embarrassment to conservatism, right? So I kind of dig that, Tucker. In response to this, Scott Adams responded, science doesn't believe in natural selection that part of the theory was replaced years ago so interesting news for evolutionary biologists their natural selection that's been completely refuted and you can imagine that he's going to be talking about he'll invoke something that he's vaguely heard about horizontal gene transfer epigenetics like they all do this and this is and this is where the role that someone like brett plays is

very useful to these cretins because by obfuscating and making it sound like it's also complicated and we just don't know and we're completely revising what we thought about it it it just creates this great big ambiguous vacuum for people to insert whatever random beliefs that they want to and that's that's the role that brett plays in that ecosystem there's one more example of that interaction that i wanted to mention you know colin right he's become like fixated on trans issues and gender stuff. He retweeted Brett and said, can you provide a link to what you believe is the highest quality challenge to Darwinism that also outlines some of the major paradoxes you were alluding to? I've asked for this before and it'd be left empty handed. I'm not trying to troll you. I'm genuinely very curious. So this is a heterodox

person that it's harder for Brett to ignore. And he responds, I'm not challenging Darwinism. To my way of thinking, I believe in it more coherently than our colleagues who defend the current version as if it wasn't crude. To be perfectly blunt, I think Darwin had it right because he didn't have the tools to be specific about the molecular dynamics. That forced him to work at the phenomenological level, and he got it mostly right in a manner that I believe will prove to be timeless. The central dogma is blinding us to the larger Darwinian truth. So that's, it is what you said, you know, Brett's smokescreen, and it's him wanting to say that the specific mechanisms, because he's talking about like

processes of like protein evolution, which he doesn't think apply to. But Colin Wright's response, there are very interesting beginnings of thoughts here. But again, I would really love it if you flesh them out in as much rigorous detail as possible so that I and others can see the supposed icebergs you're alluding to beneath those interesting tips so it's just this thing where the guru like yes columbine is kind of challenging and hinting that he's skeptical about brett's claims and the brett hasn't published anything about it but they also have to say well this is a you know a fascinating idea that you've put forward it's there is a lot of intriguing things there so i'd love to see more and i've just i fucking hit it matt the guru is just yeah you know it just

illustrates the amount of pseudoscience that flops around and that they occasionally bump into how okay that various other gurus are with pseudoscience and when it's their particular brand of science that they are a bit more defensive about they're kind of like oh wait are you guys all actually like cranks you know they're uh yeah but you know the guru the guru sphere politeness prevails in many respects so it was just an interesting bunch of guru spheres colliding in the night yeah yeah it is interesting what brett cannot do is point colin right to some literature some actual hard writing that actually spells out these supposed fundamental challenges because there isn't any. There's just Brett's armchair thoughts.

But for some reason, everybody treats them, not everyone, but people like Colin feel obliged to treat them seriously. Well, that is what it is. But Chris, Tucker said a lot of other crazy things with Joe. Yeah, yeah. But as you mentioned, Matt, there are other things in Joe Rogan and Tucker's conversation which highlight their general credulous nature and some of the biases that we've talked about. So one just quick clip.

I've said before that Joe Rogan intentionally sought to rehabilitate Alex Jones's profile to restore his credibility in the eyes of his audience after the Sandy Hook events. And here he is explaining that to Tucker again. And when you hear Alex Jones talk, you may not agree with everything he says. I don't know that I do. But you definitely understand why they told you you couldn't listen to Alex Jones. Well, that's one of the reasons why I had him as one of the first guests when I came over to Spotify. Love that. I was like, let's go. What did they say? Well, a lot of people weren't happy.

We lost sponsors. It was an issue. But I think it did the job, you job you know yeah he may not agree with everything that alex says yeah yeah well they say that matt you know strategic disclaimers are useful things let's hear a little bit more about their opinions about alex regardless of what he said that's incorrect clearly the sandy Hook thing was incorrect. You know, Alex, I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through. And, you know, everybody wants to talk about mental health, and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness.

Alex has gone through some real issues. journey to wellness. Alex has gone through some real issues. And one of the reasons why he's gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that's terrifying every fucking day. And he was drinking out of control. And, you know, he's just fucking constantly stressed, freaking out. And when you see so many lies and so much propaganda and and so many psyops that are being done on people You start seeing them where they don't exist and that's what he did. Well, and he's also Channeling some stuff There's you can't call 9-11 in Detail because you're super informed before the fact he called it. Yeah, he literally called it in the summer of 2001 he

said planes will fly into the world trade centers and they will blame a man called osama bin laden we know that he said that because he said it on tape yeah multiple times and then he said call the white house and tell them this now so you get there right that joe will always hand weave the sandy hook as that was Alex's mistake. You know, like he did get that one wrong. But, but, but, Matt, it's only because of how right he is on so many things and like how much damage his understanding about real psyops and real conspiracies has been to him. Like, in a way, he's kind of a martyr sacrificing his mental health they you know dig out all these truth and joe on this occasion and many others points out that

sure alex gets you know things wrong but he gets so many things right matt you know he predicted 9-11 he he's got insights that normal people don't have and just to hammer that home i've asked him about it how did you do that at lengthy at dinner in my barn recently we're talking about this how'd you do that i don't know it just came to me and that's real that is real the supernatural is real and i don't know why it's so hard for for the modern mind guess because it's a materialist mind to accept that but what you and that's not a new phenomenon it's happened throughout history there are people called prophets and there are people who were prophets who weren't called prophets but there are people

who have information or parts of information bits of information visions of information come to them and then they relay it it's not from them they received it this is like the you know one of the oldest phenomenon in human in human history so those people tend to be a little crazy a little unbalanced a little different from everybody else do you know what i mean they live on locusts and honey in the in the wilderness i mean that's just like that's they're not like everybody else and that's clearly part of what i I'm not saying that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God. It's not. But that was prophetic.

Right. So, Alex Jones doesn't just have some interesting ideas. He's not just right about a lot of things. He's literally, in the non-metaphorical sense, a prophet who can see things like see the future which is what alex seems right and and he didn't by the way he talked about a terrorist attack and bin laden being involved he didn't predict you know the twin towers the planes and all that kind of thing it's just revisionist history alex does it as well and he's predicted thousands and thousands of other things that did not occur but he even in the case where

he did correctly mention bin laden it was not like nobody was aware that bin laden is a threat right he'd been involved in attacks previously so yeah just to say that even on that it's wrong but there tucker and joe goes on to endorse this as well that alex is really a kind of you know he's got these extrasensory sources for his insights that he provides which again matt just transparent bullshit like listen to a episode of knowledge fight and you will see that alex jones has no special powers of insight he simply reads headlines regurgitates whatever conspiracy theory he's come across and promotes a hard right populist racist worldview right like a conspiracy-laden militia worldview so so it's quite clear tucker's a fool rogan is a fool as well but that's not the end matt that's

not the end last tucker clip for today well right i mean the prophet ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter wheels in the sky yeah that's a crazy one boy when you well it is crazy if you if you read it it's like oh wow you know and so and not just you know the hebrew scriptures like it's all over every vedic texts of course so these are spiritual phenomenon there's no evidence they're from another planet i mean i think that's the op that's the lie that they're from Mars. Look, space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right? Both for military, for defense reasons, but also because, like, it'd be nice to know when asteroids are coming. And there's no evidence, has never been any evidence that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet. There's no evidence of that at all.

these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet. There's no evidence of that at all. So they're from here and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are. And it's pretty clear to me that their spiritual entities, whatever that means, are supernatural. And which is to say, supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature. And they don't behave according to the laws of science as measured by people, you know. And they've been here for a long time. And there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground. So, like, with that fact set, what do you conclude?

so like with that fact set what do you conclude supernatural entities one of the other things i i heard tucker saying and i thought he was referring to aliens but given what he just said there maybe not but. But he was talking about how the Manhattan Project was a scythe, that they haven't really figured out how to split the atom themselves. It seemed to be saying that it was alien technology and the Manhattan Project was a cover story. But maybe he was referring to demonic spirits who gave the Americans the technology for the bomb.

I have no doubt that the U.S. government has technology that we don't know the details of. That makes sense. Sure. But, like, where did it come from? Right. I'm not even sure. This is a separate question, but related. I'm not even sure we really know where nuclear technology came from, actually.

Really? Yes. Like the Manhattan Project? Yeah. really know where nuclear technology came from um actually when you really yes like the manhattan project yeah like we know the manhattan and we know something about the manhattan project but like where exactly did that you know came from germany german scientists were working on okay um the one part yeah it's a separate conversation but the one person i know who's really pushed others writing a book on it um he's a trustworthy person or a friend of mine I know you know him um said to me actually I spent a year working on this and I one of the closer I got to like okay but what's the genesis like where that where did this what was the what was the Isaac Newton apple on the head oh gravity's real moment for fission not clear weird I don't know the answer but But here's the point. Clearly, government has technology that we don't we're not read in on. Right. Of course. But so that doesn't answer the question. Why have people seen these objects in the skies for thousands of years? Right. Confirmed. And what are they?

And what are they? And maybe they're from another planet. My only point is there's no evidence of that. There's a huge amount, a massive corpus of evidence that they're seen by people in our atmosphere, you know, on Earth looking up or in a submarine looking out. And what is that? And by the way, to your point, like, we can't see them coming into our atmosphere because they don't want to be seen. Well, then why do they want to be seen by people on Earth? Like, if the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is, why do they make themselves visible in the first place?

Yeah, it's, who knows? Who knows, right? Like, in general, there's so little point to digging in deep to the lore that these people develop because it's half-baked repeated nonsense from some stupid source that they've dug out so i mean there is utility to it to look at the genealogy of these ideas right because you can usually trace them back to very conspiratorial sources often quite anti-semitic sources is one of the other thing that crops up in this kind of material a lot but it's just illustrative that tuckers into interdimensional spiritual explanations for ufos evolution is just a theory alex jones is a prophet like

how much more do you need to be discredited and yet tucker is someone that people like brett weinstein joe rogan and elon musk have repeatedly promoted as a very valuable insightful person doing, you know, really important work, looking critically at things. Like you said, there are people who we know who are smart, who are well-educated, and who will give amazing credit to people like Tucker Carlson simply because they are saying things that they like to hear. And down the end of the spectrum, I've been surprised at the amount of credit

that people like to give someone like Hasan Piker who is equally obviously an idiot. And it just goes to show how much we're governed by the stuff that we want to hear. Well, okay. on hassan to his credit i will say i don't think he's going to be endorsing ancient i actually i don't know maybe he's okay with ancient aliens and stuff but like i he's not going to fall to the depths that tucker has about evolution right so his idc is of a different caliber he's slightly higher than dr carson

isn't he um no i mean come on give me what we've just heard from dougar carson i'm putting them on the same level sorry why are you putting hasan on that level though oh and what you think i'm being mean to hassan uh i mean he's not at that level he's not alex jones level of no i'm saying tucker calson level tucker carson but tucker carson is alex jones level to me well okay speaking of hassan let's let's buy a couple of clips and see whether people agree so hassan look especially in the week of the destiny episode one thing that came up is people saying you were more charitable to destiny than you were to hassan because there's a lot more depth to hassan's content if you look around and i will just say that i've looked at all our hasan content, right? Because when people tell me that there's much better stuff,

he's done very good things out there. Look at this and look at that. I do go and look. And I'm not agreeing that that episode with the hoofy parrot. Yes, he doesn't always interview people, but the level of insights that he brought there, I think are relatively in line but the level of insights that he brought there, I think are relatively in line with the level of insights that I've seen across Hassan's other content. Yes, he can be

more serious and whatnot and talking about relevant issues, but yeah, I'm sorry. I just don't see the same level of depth there at all. And just to point out, for example, we often talk about how Lex Friedman is a transparently biased figure, someone that, yes, presents himself as a, you know, a centrist above the fray, just out there for love, but who, when you look at his content critically, yes, he is not as polemically partisan as various figures, but his biases are transparent. He spent his Thanksgiving with the Trumps. You know, he's constantly talking about the sources that he's getting things from. He heard from Ben Shapiro and Michael Malice gave him this. And he he's very very upset about Fauci and all the terrible things Fauci has done to science RFK Jr on the other hand you know an important and

sincere man like Lex's biases are clear and yes he does interview people from like different political persuasions but that doesn't mean that he doesn't have transparent biases. Now, I say all this just to provide the context for when Hassan was being interviewed on this show that I was listening to, and he was asked about centrists, so-called centrists, and listen to what he said. Tim Poole, who portrays himself as a centrist or a liberal, I don't think he's a liberal or a centrist at all. I think he's a right-winger, and he just hides that he is a centrist. I liberal i don't think he's a liberal or a centrist at all i think he's a right winger and he just like hides that he is a centrist i don't even know if he still says he's a centrist or a liberal but don lemon said he was a centrist i think don lemon is a centrist don lemon is you know who's a real centrist lex friedman i think yes i agree with that 100 i think

see okay good faith i think lex friedman uh is but he's not on the right people on the right he's not on the right no he's i would say he's in the middle yeah no i think he's in the middle like i think joe rogan used to be kind of like that but i think joe rogan has developed his own personal political opinions over the course of the years especially when it comes to certain issues like he's very right wing and then sometimes he'll be like weirdly left wing on others but overall like lex fredman is like down the middle. I agree. I think he is like the one guy that I truly believe is a real centrist. Lex, we love you so much. Lex is one guy I will glaze till the end of my days. I love you, Lex.

Lex, if you're watching this, thank you for being yourself. Didn't comment on one of our episodes. He did comment on our episode with Destiny. That was right. Great conversation, guys. That's the iced coffee are which are interviewers in the vein of trigonometry maybe not as you know openly partisan but essentially the same which is why they love lex so much and why they all agree what a you know an unbiased

the only pure soul out there and just to point out i'm saying hassan identifies lex as the one guy that is straight down the middle that doesn't have biases they love lex they love lex matt which just goes to show that hassan is credulous or he doesn't pay attention which is another possibility but to me lex's stick is transparent yeah i think like recognizes like and the thing that both gotten common is the moral grandstanding they do it in different ways lex does it via his philosophy of universal love but he absolutely has the highest motivations that you could possibly imagine while being basically a businessman interested in self presentation and in my opinion hassan Piker is exactly the same.

He's got a different political framing for his moral grandstanding, but it's really a thin veneer for what he's about in the same way as Lex. Now, let me give another example, which is from this interview with the iced coffee art that Hassan was on. Destiny was also on with those guys recently right and i'm just going to give a contrast to show why it is that i think those two are are different and why we were more positive about destiny in the way that he presents certain things okay so destiny is asked about his revenue streams or his YouTube channel on that iced coffee

art because these are investment guys, property guys. So they're sometimes talking about this kind of thing, right? And a similar topic comes out with Hassan. But let's hear Destiny talking about this topic first. My growth has always been like pretty stable the whole time. And then my biggest, most recent explosive, explosive growth in income is front come from my YouTube channel, which was my greatest mistake of not starting that. Like I had a YouTube channel like 10 or 11 years ago that I think got to like 70 or 80,000 subs, which back then was like pretty good. And I abandoned that for like eight or nine years.

And then just like, I want to say like four years ago, maybe I started taking my YouTube more seriously again. I should've been doing that the whole time, but that's been like my most recent like big income bump are you comfortable to talk about numbers that you're currently doing right now or is that off the table yeah i guess if you want to sure sure yeah so youtube curious yeah so what percentages or numbers is is like youtube versus twitch or sorry not twitch versus twitch yeah versus like the kick deal versus rumble and all that stuff so my website is where i have my own subs and people can donate through there. I think on that I make about 250,000 a year. I think it's what I made last year.

I think around Twitter. Is that like an email thing or how are you? It's just, you go to destiny.gg and then you can subscribe there. You can donate there. It just, it runs as its own completely side, like chat and ecosystem or whatever. Oh, so you stream on there as well? No, it's just an embed from like YouTube or Twitch. Oh, okay.

Well, not Twitch, but yeah. Um, YouTube ad revenue is really good i probably run like anywhere from 40 to 60 000 a month off of that and then i've got like two other channels that make around like 20 to 30 000 a month i pay like 45 of all that ad revenue goes to my um my youtube editor who's definitely overpaid august uh no i'm just kidding um 45 that's a lot yeah yeah okay yeah so a couple of things about that one he's very open and transparent describes himself as running a business and uh is very very happy to talk specifically about the sources of revenue that he's got and and how much he's getting and also is uh yeah surprisingly generous towards

his his editor there right um and we covered that in the episode with him joking around about that and when the deal was made now hassan now this is slightly different matt because part of this interview they were addressing the potential contradiction between Hassan's politics and his lifestyle and income. So they end up talking a little bit about investment. And Hassan thinks it's very important that he's not investing his money. This is a distinguishing factor. But just listen to him discussing his income, what he does with it, this kind of thing in comparison. So making money and making more money than you need, making more money than you could possibly want, that is all a good thing. And you're saying a true socialist would argue that that is totally fine.

The main... How you make your money is important. Okay, sure. That's the fundamental difference that people don't understand. important okay that's that's the fundamental difference that people don't understand so i don't have investments i do have a i guess what is it a 401k or something i have that because like i want to make sure that you know i you can't work forever obviously i do want to have a safety net when I inevitably stop working one day. However, I don't have investments. Why?

I know. Everybody always. Yeah, because that seems silly to me to not want to invest. See, even with the SBI IRA, I was I still an over credit card, by the way. No, I think we talked about this. I know. I said you're going to get a credit card. I still don't have a credit card, by the way. No, I think we talked about this. I know. You said you're going to get a credit card. I still haven't got one.

Even with the SBIR, like, I was reluctant at first to get it. I didn't want to get it at all because I thought that it was, like, cheating, kind of, because, like, then I am technically accumulating capital. But, like, there needs to be an appropriate government substitute in normal circumstances, And there isn't one like there is no Social Security is basically nothing. And then beyond that, there is no pension structure in the field that I'm in. But even if there was a pension structure, it's nonexistent in most industries in general. So then it's like, well, I have no like I have no alternative, which is why I was I was forced to concede on that front. Like I have no alternative, which is why I was forced to concede on that front. But beyond that, I think I will go at it for as long as I can. And when I am no longer able to, then I'll figure it out.

But even the money that's just sitting in your bank account, I'm assuming, like it's probably more in alignment with your morals to be putting that in an index fund or something like that well i mean like i said i usually give it uh to like i will buy things for my family instead like so i don't have a lot of money sitting in my bank account that is fascinating this is like i mean we've never talked to anybody that that uh that does that i mean it's generous it's very generous so hassan doesn't have a credit card because it's against his principles he explains that he's kind of given and established a 401k or contributes to that because you know that's necessary given the system that he's in but the money that he earns he doesn't really you know he spends on some luxuries and stuff like that, and buys a house, but he gives it all away to family members.

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