Making Sense with Sam Harris - #381 — Delusions, Right and Left

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with “Destiny” (Steven Bonnell) about politics and public debate. They discuss how he approaches debate, “Trump derangement syndrome,” January 6th, why Trump’s norm violations don’t matter to many people, misadventures on the information landscape, social media and the problem of being too online, Islam and conflict in the Middle East, the difference between the far left and the far right, the lack of sane conservative policies to counterbalance the left, whether the pendulum is swinging back on the left, the ethics and politics of apology, private friendships and public disagreements, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.  

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the podcast,

and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. The tractor beam of politics is continuing to exert its pull on everything. I actually watched less of the Democratic National Convention than the Republican one, though I saw enough to be encouraged. I'm happy with Harris's apparent pivot to the center. Whether she can credibly maintain that under questioning by journalists

remains to be seen. I'm hopeful that she can. But I think the debates will probably matter a lot. At least they present the possibility of being decisive. I think a lot can happen there, for good or for ill. But one point I would make, this is a point I have made to some of my friends who will be voting for Trump. You might be surprised that I have friends who will be voting for Trump, but I actually have some close ones. The moves that are generally used to discount the crazier things he says he will do can be used even more plausibly to discount the crazy things that Kamala Harris has said. crazy things that Kamala Harris has said, right? I mean, if you can not take Trump literally, or even seriously, when he says that he's going to round up 20 million undocumented workers, that is, fruit pickers and restaurant workers and nannies and millions of people who are doing indispensable work in our economy, he's going to round them all up in, what, concentration camps, using the military, and deport them. Just linger over the details here for a moment and realize

that millions of these people, quite literally millions of these people, have children who are themselves American citizens, right? If you can discount this phantasmagorically unethical and counterproductive fantasy of a policy as just political pandering and pablum messaging to his fanatical base, And perhaps you can. Well, then why can't you discount Harris's ridiculous and obviously unworkable idea of imposing a wealth tax? Does anyone think she's going to do that? I don't. But it's interesting. The bar for political integrity and honesty moves as you move left of center. If she actually knows she can't do such a thing, it's absolutely outrageous for her to make such a campaign promise. But right of center, nobody cares. Everyone apparently takes what Trump claims he will do with a grain of salt.

Anyway, Vice President Harris will not be able to avoid hard questions forever. Certainly some will come up in the debate if she declines to hold a press conference or do long-form interviews before then. And I am reasonably hopeful that she will find the center of our politics and stake her claim there. More to come on politics and even in today's conversation. Today I'm speaking with Stephen Bunnell, otherwise known as Destiny. Stephen is a YouTuber and political streamer. His background is a little different from most of the people I've had on this podcast, but his commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online, where he stirs up controversy on both the right and the left. He grew up in a conservative Catholic household and now spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism and Trumpism in particular.

He's debated some of the same people I've debated on a variety of topics. particular. He's debated some of the same people I've debated on a variety of topics, and he's debated people who I wouldn't be inclined to talk to, people like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. One of the things we discussed today is how he thinks about engaging such a wide range of characters. We talk about allegations of Trump derangement syndrome, why Trump's norm violations don't matter to so many people, people's misadventures on the information landscape, social media and the problem of being too online, our differences of emphasis when thinking about conflict in the Middle East, the difference between the far left and the far right in American politics, the lack of sane

conservative policies to counterbalance the craziness of the left, whether the pendulum of sanity is swinging back on the left, the ethics and politics of giving public apologies, the maintenance of private friendships or their failure and public disagreements, and other topics. Anyway, it was a fun conversation. And now I bring you Stephen Bonnell. I am here with Stephen Bonnell. Stephen, thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having me, Sam. You were otherwise known as Destiny. Perhaps we should start there. Are you in the process of

retiring Destiny, or are you just bouncing between both names? My background when I first started streaming forever ago was in professional gaming for StarCraft 2. So I kind of went through the trouble of getting all the branding for Destiny, like the YouTube channel, the Instagram and everything else. So it feels very difficult to give up. Really, it's nice to just have that name. So I go by, people call me Steven in real life and you can find my stuff online as Destiny. So I'm okay with it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you've been very active in a part of online culture that I have had very little to do with. I mean, as you say, you got your start in gaming,

but then you have become quite prominent online debating people around mostly politics, but I think you've covered a wide range of topics. How did that start for you? My mom is from Cuba. She came over when she was six. So I grew up in a very conservative household and my parents have always had very strong conservative opinions. And then going through grade school and high school, I guess I have like the debater archetype. I don't know if that's genetic or just I got it from my mom environmentally. So I've always been kind of like an argumentative, disagreeable person who's been politically interested. When I first got into streaming video games in 20, I think like end of 2010, early 2011, the focus was video games, but we also spoke a lot about, you know, just

like pop culture, philosophy, science, politics, whatever. And then in 2016, I picked it up as a much more significant part of what I did online. And you and I debated at least a few of the same people. I've debated Jordan Peterson several times. You did that at least once. I think you've also spoken to Ben Shapiro. I'm not sure how we've overlapped with other people, but I think you've spoken to people who I would avoid. I'm wondering how you make these decisions. I saw that you spoke to Nick Fuentes, who's I think an avowed white supremacist, if not actual Nazi. Recently, you spoke to Candace Owens. Is there anyone you regret engaging? I'll take that in two parts. So for the first one, one of my strengths is that I'm

willing to talk to almost anybody. So it gives me very big reach into a lot of different types of communities because I'm willing to go into different shows and I can have a good time with a large variety of people and different types of characters, but I can still provide pushback against a large variety of different types of characters. So it's kind of a balancing act of how aggressive do I want to be versus how long do I want my legs to be? How far do I want my reach, I guess, to extend into other communities? The only times I'm disappointed or I regret engaging with people is if I feel like the other person got more out of it than I feel like I did. So for instance, if I were to platform a very small, very radical person and then not give adequate pushback. And I feel like he bested

me in a conversation that I could have been more prepared for. Or if I'm, yeah, like, I just, I don't, I want to, I don't want to promote bad ideas and like bring them to everybody's attention and then, you know, have a bad showing against it. But if there's like, you know, really popular talking points and a lot of people believe the thing, I think it's worth discussing and I'll have those people on to fight with them. Yeah. And then the second part was if I regret, yeah, over the past year, I regretted everything. Um, God, let's talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a constant balancing act between, yeah. Like I said, like how, how gentle do I want to be versus how aggressive do I want to be? I would say, uh, around the last year I'd been making a more, I go back and forth between these very empathetic

approaches to debate versus like these very aggressive approaches. And so the past year I've been more empathetic and I've gotten conversations with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. And I worry sometimes that I play this role in like, oh, well, look, I debated destiny and we got along and it was fine. And it's like, well, we kind of debated, but I was being very, very, very gentle because I'm trying not to make you so mad that you'll never talk to me again or that you won't have the conversation. So then when I look back at the role I played in that, and then I see now when I take more aggressive positions on things that I feel strongly about, they're like, well, I can't talk to Destiny. That guy's crazy. Candace Owens wouldn't let me in her space a week ago because she said I was a sexual deviant while she was speaking with

Andrew Tate and Dan Blitzerian. I'm like, what? So now I'm like, okay. You're in good company or you're worse than that good company. Yeah. I mean, I watched part of your conversation with Candace, and I mean, now perhaps she has transformed into her current monstrous shape since you debated her. I haven't really followed her timeline very closely. This is one of the consequences of having gotten off social media. There are things I don't follow, which seem very big online, I'm sure. But Candace Owens becoming a proper

anti-Semite was something I think I had on my bingo card some years ago. And so I was unsurprised, but I'm not quite sure when she fully pulled the mask off, if it was ever properly on. You don't think the semi-friendly, even somewhat adversarial conversation with her just has the net effect of kind of laundering her reputation with your audience and doing more harm than good? With my audience, absolutely not. With the other audiences, that's what is so hard to determine. Like I said, I don't like the idea that Candice can say like, oh, well, you know, I had a debate with Destiny or I had a conversation with Steven. And it's like, not really. That was a very gentle, you watch the conversation. I think at around 10 minutes, I realized that even then I'm pushing back too much and she's about to like, yeah, rage out and leave. And I'm like, okay, well, we got to be more gentle. So that irritates me. My audience is never becoming just because I put out so much content. I stream so much. I put out so many videos and I have so many conversations. They're not going to hear somebody like that and instantly be captivated and become whatever neo-Nazi blexit combo of weird stuff she is now. But for audiences in the middle, it's, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's good to provide

some pushback. Like it legitimizes me in that I't know. It's hard to say. It's good to provide some pushback. Like, it legitimizes me in that I can talk to a lot of different people. It legitimizes me in the eyes of her audience. Like, oh, well, this, you know, Steven's a reasonable guy that you can have conversations with. But then it also plays kind of a dirty role that everybody's been complicit in over the past several years of like making some of these ideas seem a lot more reasonable and sane than they actually are. And I've spent the past few months or the past month or so after the assassination attempt, yeah, saying, okay, hold on, no, let's back up. A lot of this stuff is insane. And I think we need to go back to calling this insane. Is there anyone whose name I would recognize who you've decided

not to talk to because you just viewed them as too dishonest or unethical? I'll still talk to anybody, but the conversations are just going to be a lot more aggressive. I'm not going to have a conversation with Jordan Peterson while he just kind of like meanders through the point that 20% excess deaths in Europe are all caused by the vaccine. That's not going to happen next time. Like, okay, well, we're going to sit here, we're going to fixate on this point now. Or when I ask Ben Shapiro, like, don't you guys think you grade Trump on a curve? And he's like, yeah, you know, we do. I'm like, okay, well, that can't stand, right? Yeah, I just won't let those things flow by anymore. Yeah. So what have you regretted in the last year? What has been the controversy or the chaos?

For some reason, I never understood that, like the media is, I always hear the media is left wing dominated. The media is dominated by the left. And I hear that and I look online and I see kind of the crazy left. And then I look at like CNN and MSNBC and I'm like, oh, okay, maybe they are. But somehow, even in left-wing spaces, the conservatives have such a good reign on controlling the discourse. And I'm so upset that I allowed myself to be kind of brainwashed by the Trump derangement syndrome insult where I'm like, okay, I got to be really fair. I got to be really careful when I cover Trump because I don't want to sound deranged. I don't want to sound unhinged. And, you know, and I'm sitting here trying to think like, okay, well, when Trump said this

absolutely crazy thing, you know, when January 6th happens, like it was just this and that and that. And then meanwhile, the conservatives are like, so here's the 57th picture of Hunter Biden's dick that we're showing in Congress. And we know, by the way, that him and Joe Biden, you know, unilaterally dictated world policy to get rid of this prosecutor in Burisma. And it's like, oh, my God, the uneven playing field, the assassination attempt, I think, completely broke me. When I saw how indignant conservatives are, like, you guys are calling us Nazis and look

what happens. And then I'm like replaying in my mind all the Paul Pelosi comments. And I'm like, no, this is insane. I'm sorry. You guys completely bought the farm on this. This is crazy. What do you attribute this skewing to? I mean, let's take the case of an intelligent person who is not allergic to Trump in the way that we are.

I mean, I happen to know some of these people. I even have a few good friends who, you know, I would consider, I mean, this is something I say to their face. I mean, I consider them low information voters. I mean, they're simply not disposed to pay attention to all of the thousands of norm violations and other indiscretions that Trump is trailing, right? So they have a little bit in their head. They have a lot of what I would consider misinformation from the right that more or less exonerates Trump on all counts. The phrase, the Russia collusion hoax, does an inordinate amount of work in their brains. And they've essentially just averted their eyes from the whole problem. And they come away with a feeling that

more or less all of the, you know, the kind of reaction that you and I have had to Trump is totally overblown. I mean, it is, you know, it is Trump derangement syndrome. It is just, we don't like the guy's personality, and we couldn't get over that. But when you look at policies, he's super normal and not even especially conservative. And, you know, much of his criticism of the powers that be and the way things were done in Washington for as long as anyone can remember. Many of those criticisms are valid. There is a kind of deep state sclerosis that needs to be reamed out. They don't spend much time thinking about the actual ideologues in his orbit,

you know, people like Steve Bannon and what he might say on his dumb podcast. And they just see a very clear trade-off between Trump, who is calling bullshit on obvious bullshit, like wokeism, and the moral panic on the left that has racialized everything and made it seem like trans bathrooms is the greatest human rights concern of our time, etc. And they're truly allergic to all the stuff that's happened on the left. And so they're willing to support Trump, warts and all. How would you perform psychic surgery on this person? So first, we have to be really clear. Are we talking about the audience or are we talking about the larger content creators? I call them content creators. You might call them pundits or commentators. I guess anything you would want to say to or about such a person so as to have an effect upon

anyone in the audience like him or her. I think there are several really large things at play. I think one of the larger, yeah, there are several large topics at play. One of the larger ones that is hard to talk about is I had a viewer that emailed me this with this idea, and I love this idea, and I stole it. He calls it magic boxes, that if you were to go back into the past and you were to hold an abacus, okay, it's very obvious what the function of an abacus is, and you can't hide any conspiracies inside of it. There are no secret cameras. There is no government listening device. Nobody's stealing your data. You just see what it is and you operate it as you do. Nowadays with a phone, you don't really know everything that's going on inside of the phone.

So if somebody were to say something like, I think my phone is always recording me. Well, to even begin to have that conversation, it's like, okay, well, do we understand how telemetry works, how data is sent, what kind of connection is needed, what kind of permissions are needed, the difference between the operating system versus an application? There's so much you have to go through that in life today, we basically operate so many of these magical boxes where on the operating level, on the user level, things are so abstracted away from what's actually happening that it's allowed people to insert so much craziness that can't be easily fact-checked by anything. And I find that this is especially

true when you look at, my obsession lately has been, I'm trying to compile like a convincing argument relating to the January 6th stuff. So this is where my brain is kind of existing. But you might look at something like Donald Trump making a phone call to the, not to Raffensperger, but below him, an election fraud investigator in Georgia. If you have the prerequisite background to understand civics and the role of the president in a campaign and the role of a state election investigator, all of that, just that phone call in and of itself is so unfathomably inappropriate. It is such a horrible call.

But in order to even begin to understand why, you have to explain so much. And I'll be honest, even I didn't really understand. Like when you say that, like, well, there's electors and, you know, the people don't elect the president, the electors, I don't even really know what that meant until like two years ago. And most people just, yeah, I don't even, well, I know this because polling did it. Most people don't even know three branches of government, right? So how can you even begin to explain, you know, the type of egregious norm violations that are happening when people don't know the norms, the systems that have the norm, people just don't under have the understanding to even be able to grapple with, you know, why would it be bad for

this guy to make a phone call, but that people immediately understand like cutting children's penises off to make them trans or whatever other crazy, you know, like far left conspiracy stuff the conservatives like to obsess over. Like that's immediately understandable. So yeah, that's one huge thing that you have to get over is you just need like a decent foundation of knowledge to even understand why some of the things are norm breaking. to someone who thinks that January 6th was basically a non-event. I mean, it certainly wasn't an insurrection. It was a, you know, there was some sort of misbehavior on one side of the building and on the other side of the building, you know, courtesy of Tucker Carlson and others, we have, you know, we have footage of the cops just letting people in. And so was it violent? I guess if you look at some of the footage, it was super violent, but some of the people don't even look at that footage and they just see the people getting let in and then wandering around in what seemed to be a kind of a low stress environment,

right? And so that seems strange. And then there are rumors that there were FBI plants in the crowd and maybe this whole thing was a kind of false flag thing that I heard a rumor that Pelosi didn't get enough cops there when she could have, et cetera, et cetera. And Trump did say from the dais that you should all be peaceful in some form. And so all of this just this impressionistic tour of half-truths gives people a sense that whatever happened over there, it was ugly, and I wouldn't have voted for it, but it's not really, it wasn't really Trump's responsibility, and it was just a mob that misbehaved, and American democracy wasn't at stake. How would you untangle that? I mean, it's kind of going back to what you said about, it sounds so bad to say, but like low information voters. For stuff like this, I think like two or three weeks ago, I did a little focus group because I've compiled so much information

about this. And I got six pretty decently big YouTubers together. And I like went through like seven hours of information and asked them like, hey, what's the most surprising thing to you? Or what didn't you know? Or what do you care about? Or what don't you care about? And for a lot of it, it was just like so much information that people don't know. So one of the things that I was told after talking to these people so long is one thing they said is, I didn't realize the timelines at the Capitol. So for instance, people will say, Donald Trump tweeted, stay peaceful, and that should be good, right? But when you actually look at everything that was happening in the day of and the context, and it's like, oh, that tweet was sent like 20 minutes after the Capitol been broken into, like an hour and a half after the Capitol grounds had been penetrated.

When you start to see the tweets in context of like an actual timeline, stuff takes on a far more insidious shape than when you just say, oh, well, you know, he tweeted up, be peaceful. And, you know, who knows at what time or what part of the day. Having more facts, I think, and contextualizing things in a more appropriate way. Nobody knew anything about the elector plot, you know, like the seven fake slates of electors. And none of this is like conspiratorial, like all the information is out there. You can see the fake slates that they all signed with their signatures. There's a YouTube video of them trying to go to the Capitol in Michigan to enter. The plot inside to have Clark replace Rosen, when Rosen and Donahue are arguing with

Trump about sending out a fake letter to the states about voter fraud, that was a really big one. A lot of people will say this, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard about. People say like, we don't know if Trump knew he was lying about voter fraud. How could you ever prove what's in somebody's mind? And it's like, well, let me introduce you to the entire criminal justice system of the United States, because in order to convict on crimes, you have to know what the mens rea is. That's the most important part of convicting on a crime. But for Trump, there are so many examples of somebody saying, hey, by the way, this isn't true. And then like two days later, Trump will say the exact same claim over and over and over and over and over again. He does this

like so many times. And having that clearly laid out where people can say, you know what? I think Trump actually just was lying. And I think he knew the whole time. But it's a big information dump. And you have to find a way to present the information in like a compelling and an interesting and like an emotional way. And then how close we were. Oh, there's two other things. How close we were on the six to everything failing.

If Pence had flipped, if there was more violence, like there are a couple of things. Pence is the big part that didn't flip that could have. That's one thing. And then the second thing was, I didn't realize this until I was really late into my research. Oh my God. The best video that you could ever watch on January 6th is InfoWars. If you really want to know the day of what people felt like and what was going on when they watched that, it's so funny because when conservatives talk about it now, they memory hole it, right? Oh, it's just some people wandering

around. Who cares? Watching the conservative coverage and the tweets the day of, I saw, you know, like Ashley Babbitt might be the first victim of the second revolution. There was that meme video of the woman who got sprayed with mace or whatever. And she's like, we're a storm in the Capitol, dude. It's a revolution. You know, constantly referring to the rioters as patriots, saying that they've taken the Capitol. We've overtaken it. We've got it. We've captured this back, you know, for the people. It's so obvious what everybody's saying and what's going on. And then as soon as Babbitt gets shot, the National Guard shows up. The rhetoric starts to change a bit. There are so many funny quotes. There's even like quotes from some of these guys on, I think Owen Schroer might have been one, where people

are saying things like, these are patriots. This isn't BLM or Antifa. You could tell these are patriots. And then the next day, it was all Antifa. We don't know who any of these people were. It's like, yeah. Yeah. I think the simplest cut at this for me, and I'm always surprised that it doesn't work on everybody, and there's endless examples of it not working. I mean, it hasn't worked on half the country, but it really can come out in a very short paragraph, which is just that what we had was a sitting president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. I mean, months in advance of the election, and this was back in March or so, I think that the question was first put to him, and he clearly declined to abide by the results

of an election unless he won that election. And while the election was being run, he was clearly preparing the ground to call it fraudulent. And he then lied endlessly about having had the election stolen from him. I mean, the irony is that he's in the process of attempting to steal an election while claiming that it has been stolen from him. And in the end, we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power, right? So like that, just that single desecration of the foundational norm of our democracy, I mean, it seems to me that we don't have the laws that we actually should have in place to punish a president who does this, right? To have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer of power and then do what he can to ensure that we don't have one, it seems to me that jail should await such a person, and we don't actually have the laws to accomplish that.

I mean, I fully disagree on that last point. We had Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was very clearly meant to prevent a person like this, at the very least, from holding future office. Right. And we do have criminal charges against him, but the Supreme Court is protecting him from those. It's incredible. I mean, the fact that that, you know, having that in the 14th Amendment is as ineffectual as it is in practice. In any case, so it just, why do you think so many people, you know, fully half the nation, one can, I guess, discount all the people who really aren't informed about this, but there are all too many people who know exactly what I just alleged to be true, which is that he

didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and we didn't have one. Why doesn't that matter, do you think? Well, for some people, this is why I'm saying there's different issues that affect different players or people in different ways, and they all have different motivations for why they believe what they do. So for the average voter or listener, I would say a lot of these people don't have all the information, and they are susceptible to all the ordinary follies of man that me and I imagine you, everybody is susceptible to. We hear things we want to hear, we tend to seek information, we want to find, affirm our biases and all this. This is just kind of what everybody is falling prey to, to some extent and to some level in your life. For the content creators, there are far more

interesting questions to ask there, but it depends on the person. It depends on the issue. One thing I would say when it comes to foreign stuff that I've been asking questions about, but it's hard to dig into it. I really wonder how much foreign pushing there is on some figures to just have positions that wholesale align with Russian foreign policy, just completely 100%. You're 100% aligned. You couldn't be a better spokesperson when talking about... It's the same talking points for the Ukrainian war. They're sending men off to die. There's no reason for this. Everybody in the East... It was a civil war the whole time, and Ukrainian biolabs, and Nazis, and now they're starting war in Russia with an invasion. It's like the exact same talking points coming from Western people.

I'm like, why? That's the thing I wonder. A second thing is, unfortunately, if you brand yourself as a person of a certain political persuasion, you kind of have to stick with it. Like, could you imagine, you know, talking to Ben Shapiro, could you imagine if Ben came out and was like, you know what? I kind of don't like Donald Trump, if for no other reason, just because morally he's an atrocious human being. He was sort of there in the beginning. I mean, I haven't really followed what Ben has done of late, but in the beginning, he was someone who would make the right concessions to basic sanity and ethics around Trump. I mean, he was obviously much more concerned about what was happening on the left, but he thought January 6th was- An insurrection, he said the day after. of a sort that we would agree with. But I don't know why he's not essentially a Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney. There are obviously Republicans who have discovered the line past which they would

not be dragged, and they agree with us about Trump. So I don't understand what's happened to people who are kind of splitting the baby there. I mean, I guess it's audience capture on some level, or it would be the ruination of their business. I mean, seeing the breakup between Ben and Candace was somewhat instructive insofar as I did see it. I mean, I think I missed 95% of it again, because I'm not online, but I saw enough to know, you know, what Ben has been getting from his audience and just how much, so much of his audience doesn't love the Jews. Yeah. I mean, what do you think is happening there? Is it just economics? Yeah. It's just, it's like you said, like, well, in the beginning, it seems like they're on board

with being more critical, but then as time goes on and the party coalesces around Trump and Trump is absolutely a cult of personality and he engenders like cultish, you know, obsession and adoration, there is no room for disagreement. So one, on a numbers level, that's just factual, like Donald Trump enjoys very wide and very deep support from conservative voters. So the media is going to reflect that as well. You can see this in the Dominion lawsuit versus Fox, by the way, that the deposition, the exhibits that they had in their pretrial stuff was fascinating. There are so many slides of people at Fox News saying, this is a lie. We know this is a lie, but my God, we're losing 30% of our viewership

to Newsmax and OAN. So I guess we're going to have to tell the lie to keep our viewers. It's so clear. They won that case. Well, they didn't win it. Fox settled right before trial because they knew they were going to lose that case. One of the largest settlements, I believe, in corporate history for public settlements for defamation. And yeah, you see that. And also, that's not an accident. It's not just a result of numbers. It's also incredibly intentional by Donald Trump. He always reminds people. He did it the day of, his speech on the ellipsis on January 6th. He says, I helped these people get elected. Not going to do it anymore. I helped these people win their elections, and they don't remember that. When he was talking to Raffensperger, he said,

I was such a schmuck for helping this Kent loser, Kemp, get elected. What a loser I was for doing that. And he, you know, he did it in Georgia. He didn't want to campaign or help those people because Raffensperger and Kemp wouldn't play ball with helping him steal the election in Georgia. Trump does this very intentionally. He wouldn't go on Fox News. Man, after they called Arizona, he was so mad, and he stopped calling into their shows, and he was, you know, retweeting and reposting OAN more. So if you don't play ball with him, he will try to destroy you by not working with you anymore and by constantly degrading you. And that the followers and the fans, you know, they pick up on that and they act accordingly. So it's hard when you've got a business like, man, am I going

to cover Trump honestly and have my entire business go bankrupt because no conservative is going to watch me and nobody on the left, no offense, is turning into Ben Shapiro in the Daily Wire or do you play ball? But doesn't it still strike you as fundamentally astonishing that Trump has been able to succeed the way he has? That there was that kind of audience that was willing to become a cult of personality around such a, on some levels, just such an unimpressive person. I mean, he is just so obviously a fraud, right? I mean, he really is a game show host who pretended to be a great businessman. And he's a Mark Burnett confection, right? And I mean, it's not that he has no talents. I mean, he's entertaining,

right? He can be funny, but I mean, he's just, he's barely competent at that, really. I mean, it's not like you have an entertainer of the talent of somebody like Jamie Foxx deciding to be a demagogue, right? I mean, he's just basically entertaining. And I do think that the fact that so many people find him funny counts for an enormous amount of his political success. I mean, just whatever happens at a debate, to be able to say, you know, only Rosie O'Donnell or whatever his other laugh lines were, that just guarantees your victory at that stage in the primary, given the nature of our politics. But it does, I mean, I've always thought of him as a kind of evil Chauncey Gardner, and I think this probably

undersells his gifts such as they are. But I've just thought of him as somebody who, for whatever reason, he found himself in a political and social context in America in the early 21st century where our appetite for junk food for the mind had just reached its peak. And we're a reality TV culture. We're a social media culture. We care about fame, perhaps more than anything. And you drop this shameless narcissist into this context, and he manages to function by a different reputational physics. I mean, he manages to seem more authentic than anyone else just by being a shameless con man. In my imagination, the reasons for his success have much more to do with the environment than with the person, but perhaps I'm selling him short. No, I mean, I agree. Trump is, there is no level of media criticism that was too harsh on how clueless he is around some things. I watched

him doing something. He was talking to the United Nations and somebody asked him about, I think it was the UN, I think it was a UN thing. And somebody asked him about Western liberalism. Have you seen this clip? They ask him about, what do you think about people saying that this, we might be seeing the fall of Western style liberalism. And he starts going off on like LA and San Francisco. And I'm thinking in my mind, oh my God, he doesn't even know what Western, he doesn't know what that means. He doesn't know what liberalism is. He just heard Western liberalism and he's thinking like West Coast liberals. And this guy, this is like a world politics.

But I mean, this was true in spaces where you would think it would have really mattered. I mean, early on when he was trying to prove that he was a good Christian and the evangelicals were just coming around to support him. And he was asked, you know, point blank, what are your favorite books of the Bible? And it was just absolutely obvious that he couldn't name a single book of the Bible, right? And yet that all passed, even for evangelicals. I mean, I was actually at a conference around the time

and I ran into Ralph Reed and I said, Ralph, you know, what the fuck? You know, this guy couldn't actually name a book in the Bible. It wasn't that he didn't, I think his line was something like, oh, I wouldn't want to say it because I wouldn't want to offend anybody, right? Like they're all so good and everyone has their favorite. And I just said, Ralph, you know that he was lying. You know that he's the least Christian person you guys have ever gotten behind. And the dodge was, as you might expect, well, you know that he was lying. You know that he's the least Christian person you guys have ever gotten behind. And the dodge was, as you might expect, well, you know, I'm not going to say

it was in another person's heart and it's not for me to judge, it's for God to judge and blah, blah, blah. But you would think somehow that would have sunk another candidate in Christian eyes and on every other front. I mean, just the word salad he produces where he contradicts himself pointlessly, and it all works because nobody cares. But the mystery is, why does nobody care? I think one thing that helps a lot is that we have this horrible and wonderful thing called the internet. A lot of people start with a very bad, I would say the vast majority of people on the planet have bad epistemic practice, which is fine. I mean, who cares? Generally, most people, it doesn't matter. How do you evaluate what's true or not true? What's your theory of truth or what is it? Like, no one cares. You don't need

this for most of your life. But I think one of the big issues that we have is because so many things fundamentally, you have to know a thing to know if it will serve your end or if it will be bad for you. So for instance, if I'm on a balcony with somebody and I say I can fly, and that person's like, really? And then I jump and I fall and I die. It's very immediately obvious. Okay, well, that's a really bad idea. I'm not going to believe that guy. You can't really selectively pick and choose the things you want to believe when you're grounded, when there aren't magic boxes around you, when you're just in the world. But nowadays with the internet, it is so easy to handcraft whatever narrative you want. And even when you don't think it's that big of a deal, it is a big deal. People get mad at me sometimes when I'm kind of like, I'll pedantically correct

lies. And people are like, why? Who cares? It's not that big of a deal. I'm like, okay, well, if you tell 10 little lies, it makes it really easy to sell a big lie. And people have this bad assumption for humans that our brains are designed as these like, ontologically, we have like these epistemically grounded truth-seeking machines that are just trying to figure out what's true at any point in time. And people have no idea how much subjectivity, how much normativity is involved in all of the truth-seeking that we do. So then when you go onto the internet, you're thinking, okay, well, I'm a true brain.

I'll get all my media. We'll see what's going on. You don't realize that you were engaged in basically drug abuse. You're finding stuff that just makes you feel good, regardless of the detriment it has to your epistemic, your psychological, your emotional well-being. I don't. I think these are all really big deals. Donald Trump, the assassination attempt after the guy missed and Donald Trump's ear got shot, Donald Trump came up immediately and he gave that, let's fight, you know, the power. Yeah, let's go. It was not immediate. It was like a minute long. There's like a thing of him like looking for his shoes, like watch the full clip. And people will be like, well, what? So you don't think he was brave? Well, he might've been brave. You want to say that? Fine. But why lie about him coming up immediately? And I had a guy challenge me on

this and he went over my thing. He was like, Jesse's lying. Let's look at this video. And the guy shows an edited video. And I'm like, bro, my video is like two minutes long. Your video is like a minute, 47 seconds. And it ends a full minute after mine. Like you're clearly watching an edited thing. If the truth is good enough, why do you have to exaggerate? So I think people don't realize how easy it is to selectively like edit and clip things and how insanely crazy you can sell a particular factoid, something so far from the truth, just based on the collection of clips or things that you've gathered to show somebody. Yeah. Well, I think we've both been the subject of clips that have been widely misperceived.

Do you ever worry that you are too online? Perhaps that is a category that doesn't even exist for you, but i wonder about just what your engagement with social media in particular but i guess just all your time spent online i wonder what that feels like and what and if there's um any course correction in your life that you've thought about because i just have to say i mean every time i say it it's now painfully boring but the the astonishment and even embarrassment associated with it is undiminished. I mean, when I deleted my Twitter account, my life changed radically and in ways that I guess I could have anticipated, but it was like just

getting off a drug, right? It was just like I had just managed to completely fuck myself over in how I was engaging with this. I mean, it was this illusion. I mean, in part, it was worse than an illusion. It was a half-truth, right? So it's very hard to debunk a half-truth because you're on in areas of the world I care about. And to some degree, that's true, obviously. I mean, Twitter's X has been the best place for that when there's breaking news. But what you're also getting is this funhouse mirror in which even people you know are appearing increasingly grotesque, and you have become one of the grotesques, at least for them. I mean, you can't even quite control how you're appearing for them despite you have control over what you put out. And the clippification of everything and the reaction or non-reaction or

what gets read into your silence and just all of that, it becomes, it's just an insane psychological experiment that we've all been enrolled in. And I don't think it's going well. And I don't think it's going well at scale for culture. And it certainly wasn't going well for me personally. So I'm just wondering how you think about this in your own life. And I guess just how you think about social media as a cultural phenomenon at this point. Yeah. So narrowly speaking, just for me on a personal level, as animated as I am and as much as I do care about these issues, when I'm tweeting, I'm tweeting. And when I'm being unhinged online, I'm being unhinged online. But I don't take that with me to sleep. I always tell people, especially young people, if I'm talking at colleges or

for whatever, when I get invited to do speeches to students, if your engagement with politics is making you miserable, you have to stop. If you're legitimately like, if you want to get a little bit wound up while you're there, that's fine. But if you find that for hours afterwards, you're just like left with this disgusting, horrible feeling, or it's like having a significant impact on other parts of your life, emotionally, psychologically, then yeah, you have to disengage because you can't, I mean, like it's, in a way, it's kind of like that. Don't set yourself on fire to keep others around you warm. If you're destroying yourself, even if you think you're going to do good or something by contributing online, you're not going to be able to by, by destroying yourself so much. So on a personal level, I do enjoy my life. I like fighting with

people on Twitter. I like arguing with people. That's just the kind of person I grew up as. That's fun for me. But if I found that it was like, God, this is making me miserable, then I would just, I don't, I just don't engage with stuff that would make me feel that way. I also have a very, very compelling reason to. On a, on a broader sense. Just, just to drill down on that. So you don't find, or you don't suspect that it's giving you a distorted sense of humanity. I felt that the world was more populated with psychopaths than it in fact is.

Right. Like I, like I knew, cause I could see. I was seeing the worst of even people who I actually know, and I know they wouldn't be that bad if I were sitting across the table from them, but online and when pointed at their own audiences, it's like their ethical IQ got cut in half, and their basic decency just evaporated. And so I just felt like I was getting an inaccurate picture of just how unscrupulous most people are because they're functioning in an environment that is just turning normal people into psychopaths, but they're functionally psychopaths online, but offline, they would still be normal people if I was just engaging them in that space. So that's what I'm not sure about. So, yeah,

this is exactly what I was going to hit on, on the wider sense. I remember in like 2016, there was this, people used to say like, bro, like Twitter's not the real world. And I think they were kind of right for the most part. There was a lot of political discourse online, but people online were, as you said, you know, they're kind of crazy. I think that as time has gone on, I don't think that we've moved said, they're kind of crazy. I think that as time has gone on, I don't think that we've moved towards realizing that people online are crazy. I think that the online world has become like reverse integrated into our reality, right? I mean, one, that's just a natural physical consequence of being closer physically to the internet,

because now we all have a phone in our pockets that gets us onto the internet at every single point in time. Everything is connected and wired through the internet, news stations that talk to you on the radio or that you watch on TV or like, you know, oh, let's see what's going on showing the Twitter feeds and all the presidents and all the candidates and everybody is active on all of these social media things. So for all the craziness that exists online, it feels like we're moving more toward like online is becoming more reality driven in a very unfortunate way. Like everybody in the country is expected to have, you know, a 100% decided opinion on like Leah Thomas and,

and this, and the Iman, the Khalifa, whatever the boxer, the Olympic trans boxer, like everybody has to, if you work in a warehouse in Kansas, you need to have a strong opinion on whether or not the IBA was correct in,

in releasing the disqualification information for these two bodies. Like why, who cares about this? So I agree that it creates like this well it's like that uh oh man there's this really dumb horror comic or whatever in korean or japanese or something where there's like holes and walls that people put their bodies into and they come out like grotesquely disfigured on the other side that's what social media i think is is people look at it like well it's just an online thing but when you participate in it enough

it will change you every action you take is affecting your your ultimate character that is some way size shape or form and yeah if you partake in these psychopathic environments you act like it it will you know imprint itself on you in a reverse manner so i think that's what's happening unfortunately yeah but you don't feel like it's happening to you i mean you're not you're not worried that it's bending you in your ethics or in your engagement with people based on just how much time you're spending in that space. I mean, I try my best not to let it. Unfortunately, this is a part of the conversation where every single thing I say is a huge red flag because all of the things around like truth and objectivity

and centrality and all this are like aesthetics that people wear and then wield in the most bad faith manner possible. But I truly do, being politically independent, I really do try to, I have like little things that I do to keep in check like where my biases are and how I'm viewing people and am I being fair or not. And there are like questions I ask myself and ways that I approach my community where I'm like, how do I make sure I'm not getting super audience captured or I'm not having a super distorted view of this particular thing? It usually involves a lot of reading and research on topics. It usually involves like actual discrete methods. Like, can I argue both sides of an issue compellingly? If I were to ask myself a question, what would it take to change my mind from this? Can I give a quick answer or do I, am I actually like getting

ideologically captured? You know, would I be comfortable fighting with this particular person? Like there are questions I ask myself to try to keep steady the course there, but I'm a unique case in that because I'm so not politically part of a big group. I do support the Democrats a lot, but I'm not politically part of those communities. I have more independence there because if I give a take, I'm not going to have to all of a sudden disavow half my party or have a whole bunch of fights with people who thought they were my friend, who thought we were on the same page politically. Yeah, I think we're in more or less the same orbit politically, as far as I understand the types of views you've argued for. Perhaps you

know. I mean, what do you think we disagree about, if anything? What do we disagree about? Depends on how many. I think probably one of the big disagreements that people wanted me to fight on a lot, or my fans would bring this up, is the centrality of religion and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That was a big one. Yeah. Well, maybe let's fight about that. Let me have it. What am I wrong about on that front? I feel like when I hear you talk about it, I feel like Islam is a very big centerpiece to that conflict. I feel like if you look at the originations of the conflict, if you go, if you take the stretch of time from, say, like 1880 to 1967.

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