The Daily - 'Rabbit Hole,' Episode 2: Looking Down

Episode Date: April 25, 2020

Note: This episode contains strong language. Today, we’re sharing Episode 2 of “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times audio series with the tech columnist Kevin Roose. In this episode, we hear from a young man named Caleb who was pulled into a vortex on YouTube: “The truth is down there, and you’ve got to go down and dig for it.” What was he watching on the platform? And why was it so transfixing? If you're tuning in to "Rabbit Hole" for the first time, start with the prologue. You can find more information about the podcast at nytimes.com/rabbithole.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. Today, Rabbit Hole. Episode 2. Hey there, it's us again. This is my brother Peter, mom and dad, and I'm Dasha. Today, we're going to be showing our friends the basics of the Internet, and we thought you might want to come along. It'll be cool. The internet gave us a whole world of exciting new possibilities.

So I guess this is a story of how it changed our lives. Maybe it will yours too. So why don't we try to see how far we can go back if we search history down there. How's it feel to pull back the curtain and show strangers this history? It's fucking embarrassing. It's really fucking embarrassing,

especially sitting next to you guys. You guys are from the New York Times. You're like, what the fuck were you watching this shit for, dog? I'll just be honest. I would not show you my YouTube history. So I asked Caleb to download his entire YouTube viewing history.

Like 12,000 videos spanning four years of his life. And like, you were excited. I was losing my mind. I'm glad we're doing this today. Have you seen anything that's strange? I'm an internet person, right? You understand?

I've heard so many stories about people falling down internet rabbit holes. Is that Uh-huh? Take on me? I fucking love that song. But I never actually was able to sort of forensically reconstruct someone's actual journey down an internet rabbit hole. Inch by inch.

And then I'll listen to a lot of like... The fires, the earthquake, the death. Alex Jones' Black Metal. You refuse to go along with this, and I've seen through all of your lies, Barack Obama, you wicked, wicked devil! That shit's actually pretty awesome. Kevin, looking at this, I can't help but feel like it's a little intrusive. Like we're going through someone's diary or something. Yeah, totally. Like he went through a period where he was, he was listening to a lot of frozen songs,

but also do you want to build a meth lab? Um, parodies like there's a frozen and breaking bad parody mashup called, do you want to build a meth lab? We'll make lots of money. Just you and me. We'll stack the cash up high.

But it's exactly because it's so private and unguarded and unfiltered that it's so valuable as a reporting tool. Yeah, let's just go all the scroll as far as you can and we'll start from the beginning. So what you're looking for in Caleb's watch history

are the clues for how he, over time, takes on more and more radical beliefs. Right. Okay, so we'll slow down. We'll go back to how it started. And to do that, we have to really put his watch history in time. The college students have a damn right to be depressed. Their society is unsustainable

because nobody's asking the fundamental questions about why the society is the way it is, why things are so bad. Because the YouTube history that Caleb was able to download and share with us, it starts in 2015, which is about a year after he got that job at Dairy Queen. And right away, one of the first things you notice

is that Stefan Molyneux... Why is it that men are the ones who have to be banished from social discourse? Why is it men who have to be driven into the basement? Caleb's all-time favorite YouTuber... If you can only have a voice by making other people shut up, you're not a feminist, you're a tyrant. The tone and focus of his videos.

Apparently the only way that feminists can give women a voice is saying shut up to every man on the planet. Has really sharpened in the wake of this weird and important internet event. Do you have feelings about Gamergate while it was happening? I didn't get too much into that, but I saw it as like, see, they're trying to take everything over. They just want to make everything politically correct. You know, all these SJWs, they're even trying to take our video games. An event called Gamergate. What is Gamergate? Paying attention to Gamergate? What is Gamergate? Gamergate. Gamergate. I don't even know what that is. Gamergate.

Gamergate. Gamergate. I don't even know what that is. Gamergate. So a few months before this watch history starts, back in 2014, there was a breakup between this gamer and his girlfriend, who was a video game developer. And she was sort of part of this movement of progressive game developers who really wanted to take the world of video games... Grab a whore and have a good time.

Please don't. I would have given a stud like you a free sample. Like how it depicted women and violence and bring it into the modern age. And she made these very non-traditional games. Like, in one of them, the enemy that your character is fighting is depression. And this game, it got a lot of positive press. Gaming journalists really liked it,

called it compelling and educational. Depression Quest is hands down one of the worst games I've ever played. But some gamers... It sucks! Really hated it. It really, really, really sucks. So the ex-boyfriend of this developer wrote this really long blog post in which he basically accused her of sleeping with a video game journalist

in exchange for positive coverage. And despite the fact that this gaming journalist had never actually reviewed this game, this blog post went viral. And voila, drama is made. It appears that she was involved in sexual activity in return for favorable review scores. And starts this huge controversy. The core issue is really, it's nepotism. Over whether the video game industry, which, you know, makes billions of dollars a year, has a huge impact on people's lives,

whether it's all plagued by corruption and nepotism and foul play. We have a right to question the integrity of the sites that we're reading. And then a bunch of angry gamers started this very intense campaign of harassment. What started as an online spat about the ethics of gaming journalism quickly escalated into a full-blown culture war. They used all these tactics that would only work on the internet.

And now the women calling for change in this multi-billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including death threats. Spamming memes and trying to get hashtags trending. Bomb, rape, and death threats from online harassers. Lots of fake accounts. Threats on Twitter even forced another game developer to leave her Boston area home after her address was made public.

It was really the first culture war where the internet itself became the primary weapon. Who controls the feminists? Who calls gamers terrorists? We do. And it became clear that the real thing that people were angry about wasn't ethics in gaming journalism or whatever. It was the fact that they thought this culture of video games,

this culture that for decades had been dominated by young men. We have characters in video games that are being attacked day in and day out just because of how they're dressed. Was now under attack. If you can't set your politics and your bullshit down before you come into our gaming shop, you ain't welcome there.

And the threat was coming from the media. Now the media is trying to reapply these negative stereotypes to us. So long as a mediocre game contains the correct progressive political positions, it's considered groundbreaking, innovative... And progressives, these people that they called social justice warriors. The term social justice warrior does not actually mean someone who's out for social justice. The term social justice warrior does not actually mean someone who's out for social justice. The SJWs, they want equality, but I don't think that they understand what true equality is. And it wasn't just video games.

Activists and feminazis are fucking ruining comic books. Feminism ruined Star Wars. Pretty soon, it spread to... Boy, oh boy, is PC culture really just... Everything. Ruining our whole world. That's what Gamergate is about. We're tired of this.

Saying that we're all white, we're all male, we're all straight, and so on and so forth. I saw it as like, see, they're trying to take everything over. They just want to make everything politically correct. You know, all these SJWs, they're even trying to take our video games. politically correct. You know, all these SJWs, they're even trying to take our video games. And it was on the other side of Gamergate that this new kind of political identity emerged. And this identity, like, it didn't really fit into a traditional left-right, Democrat-Republican spectrum. In this identity, you could be pro-gay marriage and pro-marijuana legalization. You can even support Medicare for all. But the core belief, like the central thing that animates

you, is this power struggle against these dying old media gatekeepers who just want to like tell people what to think and enforce this restrictive PC culture. You cannot make anyone else feel bad, and the way we're going to get you to never make anyone else feel bad is to put the SJW thumbscrews right up your urethra, right into your balls. And so the Stefan Molyneux that we see in Caleb's watch history post-Gamergate, he's really come to embody this new political identity. The media will praise people who are leftist and multiculturalist

and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they will attack other people who aren't that way. Especially with a series of videos... This is the truth about Karl Marx. There are sort of variations on the truth about... Martin Luther King, plagiarist. About historical figures, political leaders, but more often about this is the truth about Israel and Palestine. This is the truth about

slavery, controversial topics in the news, the truth about Michael Brown and the Ferguson right, the truth about immigration. This is the truth. This is the truth. The truth about the movie Frozen. The format of these videos is pretty much the same every time. He lays out first the kind of official explanation for something that happened in the news. CNN went with the headline, Michael Brown, teen shot by police days before college, continuing the gentle giant narrative. And then he sort of breaks it down and tells you, here's what really happened. So the video that we saw, and according to a police report, Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were performing a strong arm robbery with store staff and stealing a box of cigars on Saturday.

And he's saying basically, look, like, I'm no expert, but I can see that this official explanation is not right. Now, this gentle giant, Michael Brown, recorded a collection of rap tracks with friends and posted them. But I am going to give you the truth. Lyrics, I guess you could call them, go something like this. I just want a real bitch,

smoke dope, and kill shit. If we can, challenge the narrative and begin to think afresh. No bias, no spin, no fancy cameras, no makeup. In fact, I ran no makeup. Why? Because I actually do some research, right, before I create a video.

You know, it may not be the end of the world to do a little less foundation on the skin and a little bit more foundation in critical thinking. I was chasing truth, you know? I have this analogy in my head that I've thought of. I was like Indiana Jones with my, you know, explorer's hat on. And Steph, like, said, hey, look at this cave. Look, there's knowledge down there, right?

The truth is down there. You've got to go down and dig for it. So, looking through the early months of Caleb's watch history... And it was an uncomfortable truth, and I accepted that, and that's what made it even more compelling. You really see that Stefan Molyneux was the first step into the rabbit hole for him. And because Caleb would watch Stefan Molyneux

and then go on these long binges where he would just watch recommended video after recommended video, you can really see in detail where the algorithm is taking him next. Yeah, so that's what you do. You'll watch a video, and then the little sidebar comes up, and you're like, oh, let's go on a little binge here. So, for example, on Thursday, July 17th, at exactly 11.27 a.m.,

Caleb clicks on a music video for a song called California Sun by the Rivieras. Ladies and gentlemen, from the dark north of Canada, the white north. And then he clicks over to Joe Rogan. There's a lot of these ideas that you have said that are very controversial that we're going to give you an opportunity. Who is interviewing who else? No, and to be fair, I mean. Stefan Molyneux. One of your positions to get criticized or one of the other things that gets tossed at you is the term misogynist.

And for like three hours. If it means general hatred of all women, then I made a really bad choice of who to get married. Caleb's watching his favorite YouTubers talk about his favorite YouTube videos. You do a lot of these, the truth about people. They debate a little bit. A lot of these ideas, they're not,

these aren't essentially black and white issues. And when you state them as if they are black. As far as people who have issues with me or disagree with things that I say or have better reason and evidence. Fantastic. And then I can see that the very next video that he gets recommended. I've been looking forward to doing this podcast with you again for a while. Is another Joe Rogan interview with Stefan Molyneux. I feel quite a strong urgency that it's a race of us versus them.

The birth of the internet will be by far... And then again, like, he watches them talk for another three hours. Listen, I think we're out of time. I think we banged out three whole hours. Yeah, we just crushed through it. Yeah, we didn't talk about a lot of things that I wanted to talk about. Did that feel quick? And then you can see Caleb goes on this long music binge.

On a clear day. He logs off for a few hours, and when he comes back at 3.40 in the morning, he plays hours of classical music. The next day... Hi, everybody, Stefan Molyneux from... Saturday, July 18th Caleb wakes up and he goes on a big Stefan Molyneux binge And skipping ahead in his viewing history

past some more Stefan Molyneux and some musical interludes. I'm sorry to say that the most brazen untruths always come from the left. You can see that Caleb gets a recommendation for someone totally new. What the Gamergate movement did was prove that it is possible to beat the left. Milo Yiannopoulos, provocateur. did was prove that it is possible to beat the left. Milo Yiannopoulos, provocateur. It was the first time that ordinary people proved that you could beat the feminist wackos if you tried. Milo Yiannopoulos. He's this flamboyant British guy who has fully embraced. My safe word is women

can be funny. The role of internet troll. No, they can. I mean, I can't think of any examples, but. of internet troll. No, they can. I mean, I can't think of any examples, but... He was a major figure in Gamergate, and then he got hired by Steve Bannon at Breitbart. Everywhere in the world there is Islam. You will find women oppressed, homosexuals murdered, gang rape. Now, there's a unique... He's younger than Stefan Molyneux, and he's not just talking into his webcam. He's actually going out to college campuses and on talk shows and podcasts. We're in a situation now where students can go to university. They come out dumber than when they went in.

They are infantilized by safe space and trigger warning culture. And he sort of became Breitbart's first breakout star. It is a wonderfully emboldening moment in internet culture. And then after that, Caleb gets recommended this other new guy. These feminists are the absolute weakest among women. Named Steven Crowder. They can't handle content that might be upsetting. They need to be warned. They need to make up terms like microaggression. He's this comedian. He did a short stint at Fox News. And then he became huge on YouTube. Black Lives Matter listed their demands. Black-only cultural spaces.

In the name of equality, they're demanding segregation. Just for scale, he's got like 4.4 million subscribers, which is about twice as many as The New York Times. These women demand that you don't say anything that they don't like, and then demand that you foot the bill for their healthcare, for their college. He's got a lot in common with Steph and Milo. You are demanded to not only approve, tolerate, but praise them.

But what makes him different is that he's the first straight up conservative that has entered Caleb's YouTube diet. We've been told how great Barack Obama's been for national security because Osama bin Laden was killed. Steven Crowder is a constitutionalist conservative. We now have Syrian refugees wanting to come in. Several have been caught with fake passports trying to get in. I was listening to a lot of him.

And what's particularly interesting about this piece of Caleb's YouTube history is that we don't just have his viewing history, we also have his search history. And we can see right here that after he gets recommended Steven Crowder videos. The dean of Yale or president of Yale, they told him his job was to create a safe space for people. His job wasn't to educate. He then goes looking for more of them and he goes on all of these other side binges that start with Steven Crowder,

which is how he meets another new character. Senor Gavin McInnes. Thank you for being on the show, sir. Gavin McInnes. Hello! Good morning! I am here to make the case for Western chauvinism. I saw Gavin on Steven Crowder's podcast,

and so I'd type in Gavin's name, and I'd start watching his content. I started this gang called the Proud Boys. We have chapters all over the world. Gavin is really a singular character in all this. He was one of the co-founders of Vice magazine back in the day and helped pioneer this, like, hipster aesthetic. He has a big beard and wears skinny jeans. Like,

he looks like someone you would like run into at the food co-op. You go to these, you know, pro-black cop rallies and they're screaming with Soviet signs. And like Steph and Milo and Stephen Crowder, he considers himself edgy. They make up all this fake science and then they come storming at you and they say, white male patriarchy is raping women. White men are the reason there's sexism. But he takes things a lot further than other people that Caleb has been watching, especially black men raped white woman. Now, I don't want to make it about race, but if you want to go there, we can go there. And the numbers ain't pretty, lady. Then throughout the next part of his watch history, you can see that one name really starts dominating basically everything else. Lauren Southern. Reporters like Rachel Maddow and publications like the Huffington Post and Heat Street

have become a laughingstock among the right and left for their ignorance on how the internet and its culture works. So Lauren Southern, she's this 25-year-old Canadian libertarian who in 2015 ran for parliament and she lost, but in the process she built a pretty big YouTube channel, which in some ways made her more powerful than if she had gotten elected to parliament. Hello, it's Lauren Southern here with Rebel, and I just got in a huge confrontation with the slut walk,

which we are following right now. When I first saw Lauren, she was at the slut walks. All right, let's go follow the walk. She was beautiful. She was around my age. You are attacking our cameraman. Her big breakout moment was when she interrupted these slut walks, these sexual assault protests that were happening all over North America. She held a sign that said, we are not living in a rape culture in the West.

She would go up to feminists and try to debate them. Rapists don't get high fives. We don't have the government funding rapists. She's basically doing the same sort of gonzo activism that Michael Moore was doing 10 years earlier, but she's doing it on the other side of the culture war. There's a group of women that were here, and they're wishing to withdraw consent to use the footage that you had I guess gotten so you can't just withdraw consent the next like

well that's interesting why is that interesting no no no tell me tell me like a rally for like consent and like they're saying no and you're saying that like okay so if someone gives consent the night before and then they have no no listen if they have sex with a man and they give consent to him, then the next day decide, oh, I regret it. I'm going to report him for being a rapist, even though I gave him consent. You're saying that's okay? Out of all the YouTubers that Caleb has watched, Lauren Southern, she's really the most like him. She's young. She dropped out of college.

She is a fan of the same YouTubers that he is. young. She dropped out of college. She is a fan of the same YouTubers that he is. And she really kind of brings all these ideas together in these dramatic real world confrontations. I was like, who's this? And I was like, wow, she's out there owning the libs and giving them facts and logic. OK. If you want to know what my sign means, my sign means that this is not a rape culture because rapists go to prison here, Go to Africa and you will see a real rape culture. And at this point, like, Caleb says that this all feels like the same edgy punk rock stuff he was into in high school.

It's just that what is punk rock has changed. There was this counterculture element to it. We are the new counterculture. I don't understand why the right, why white males have to tiptoe around. We are the punk rock kids, right? And everyone else gets to just yell, what do we want?

Dead cops. Everyone's racist. We're the ones pushing back against the status quo of like this elite, you know, globalist, like liberal society. I don't know if the mainstream media knows just how many people are following in the wake and disassembling what they're building because they just keep doing it. I have really good news for you.

I just heard that the press is stuck on their airplane. They can't get here. I love it. And that's what Trump was. Trump was that figure that was going to come in and reverse it all. They called us and said, could you wait? I said, absolutely not. Let's get going, right?

Let's get going, New Hampshire. There's lots of things I hated about the Republicans, but you had to vote for Trump. There's lots of things I hated about the Republicans, but you had to vote for Trump. So, Kevin, it feels like just in this first year of Caleb's watch history, he's come quite a long way from the guy who was excited about Barack Obama or who wanted to study environmental science in college. Right. And it feels to me like it's happening really quickly.

Yeah. But all of the stuff that Caleb is going through and experiencing, it all lines up with these changes that are happening at YouTube the very same year. All right. All right, so, Kevin, what is happening back at YouTube during this year that Caleb is meeting all these new people? So throughout 2014 and 2015, YouTube is growing an insane amount. And a lot of that is because of this AI that Guillaume helped build. Guillaume, our French friend. Oui.

Got a billion users. It's seeing accelerating usage growth. More of the same. More of the same. But around 2015, after Guillaume was gone, YouTube realized that in order to keep growing, it had to do

a version of a thing that he had been talking about. It couldn't just keep showing people more and more videos about the things that they were interested in. It had to show them new videos on new subjects, new topics featuring new people. It had to actually expand their tastes, including things they didn't even know they'd want. So, YouTube calls in Google Brain. It's the best AI PhDs in the world. They're publishing the most papers. They're winning the most awards. Like this is the A-team of AI. And they come in and their job is to re-engineer the recommendations algorithm around this new AI technique called a deep neural network, which is this AI technique that is supposed to mimic the way the human

brain processes information. And basically what you do is you give it a whole bunch of data, in this case like billions and billions of data points about what people are watching on YouTube. And you instruct the AI to go out and find patterns and connections in that data, including stuff that no human would ever think to make, connections and patterns that no human could ever find. And then you use those connections to recommend paths for people that can draw them into new subject areas, that can get them interested in new things, that can make them watch not just one more video or two more videos, but like 500 new videos. That's really what feminism is. And if you look at Caleb's watch history,

that's when he starts getting introduced to all these new characters. It only leads to death and suffering. I get the idea of trying to show that women are real people too, yada yada yada. And then when he gets a new job in 2016. And then when I got a new job in 2016. Packing boxes in a warehouse. His YouTube watch time skyrockets even more. There is a war at the moment between the West and Islam. Women are not an oppressed class in the West. There is no...

You know, we were told, well, just obey these moral commandments. Now, I would prefer a political party preserving Western identity. He's actually spending all day, from sunup to sundown, online. The people in the bad cultures want to get to the good cultures. Well, not even sundown, because I've listened to it in my sleep. It's your third world, and it is your first world. It is your consciousness. Put the phone right next to my head, and it would just be running YouTube all night

Thank you guys so much for watching and thank you so much to my amazing patreon supporters who make it so that I'm able to Talk about these scary bigoted and I did feel very connected with these people Thank you so much for your patience and time and care and attention as always. This is all supported by you Yes, you not no. No Time and care and attention, as always, this is all supported by you. Yes, you. Not, no, no, not the guy standing behind you. No, no. I was like, you know, if only Lauren knew who I was, we'd be friends. If Steph knew who I was, we'd be friends.

It's just that I'm disconnected from these people because I'm stuck in West Virginia. If you look through Caleb's viewing history and add it all up, he watched about 4,000 videos in 2016, which is double the number he had the previous year. And around this time, YouTube's overall viewing time was ratcheting up so much that in 2016, they reached this milestone of a billion hours a day being watched on YouTube. When you get an oversupply of lies, you get a demand for truth. I mean, it just raises the demand.

And I think that the alternative media, as it's called, bringing sort of recent evidence to the public. Just to put it in perspective, a billion hours is equal to 114,000 years. That is insane. So every day on YouTube, people collectively around the world are getting up and watching 114,000 years worth of videos. That's wild. We could have colonized Mars by now. That's so wild. We could have colonized Mars by now. That's not what we're here to do.

My only source of information was YouTube. This is no longer like a site where you go to watch a video. It's the soundtrack to people's life. I was only listening to Steph, Lauren Southern, Gavin McInnes. I was not taking my news from anywhere else. And these alternative media figures, these people that Caleb has been following and watching,

they're becoming bigger than a lot of the mainstream media organizations that they're criticizing. I built this show from nothing to, you know, coming up to 300 million views and downloads. I started back in 2006 on YouTube. Back then, edgy atheism and liberalism dominated all of YouTube. It's amazing how things have changed. Google is a calculator. It's just an algorithm. And the algorithm shows truth.

And you can see in his viewing history after the election, like late 2016, early 2017. You thought I was going to lose. Wrong. You thought Hillary was going to win. Wrong. early 2017. That's when the tone of the videos that Caleb is watching stops feeling to him like a culture war, and it starts feeling like an actual war. Angry demonstrators taking turns beating a papier-mâché likeness of Trump with a bat. I would watch SJW, you know, social justice warrior cringe compilations and all this stuff.

Take your privilege somewhere else, please. Do not be a spectator in the most important battle in history. And Caleb started to notice around this time that he wasn't the same person that he was in high school. And now I'm calling myself a civic nationalist. He is changing. It's not just for America. It's not just for Britain. It's for the

identity of the West. It's under attack from radical Islam, from cultural Marxists. And I noticed that we all were progressively becoming more and more right-wing. Now, when he sees a video of Richard Spencer, an open white nationalist. For us as Europeans, it is only normal again when we are great again. Hail Trump.

Hail our people. Hail victory. He actually feels like they have something in common. I remember even Richard Spencer going to the hotel in D.C. To be white is to be a striver. And, you know, doing the Hail Trump and doing the Zeke Heil. We don't exploit other groups. They need us and not the other way around.

I remember defending him. I thought, look, it's his right to do that. And it's his free speech. And that's not a Nazi salute. It's a Roman salute. And, and I remember saying things like, you know, if they want white nationalism, if they want their own little corner of the country, and they all voluntarily move there and do that, that's fine. Immigrants come to this country and do that all the time. There's a Chinatown, there's any, you know, all these things. So it was like, I saw it as like, well,

that's their freedom to do so. And like, there's some distance between the Richard Spencer white nationalist movement and like Caleb's favorite YouTubers. You know, Stefan Molyneux is not having Richard Spencer like on his channel. But I think that white identity and white nationalism is a little misleading. I think it's more accurate to say that the alt-right cares about Western supremacy rather than white supremacy. A lot of them are starting to affiliate themselves. I do think that the right overall is going to be changing to a movement that is going more alt-right, actually. With this group that Richard Spencer played a key role in starting.

So it started with this guy, Richard Spencer. Boop. He came out with the name alt-right, alternative right. And I like this guy. I like debating him. The alt-right. What's the alt-right or alternative right? Some members hold distinctive positions on sex roles, trade and free markets, and foreign

policy. But they all agree on one thing. Equality is a dangerous myth. Over time in his YouTube history, you see that Caleb gets recommended videos by this guy named Jared Taylor. For some reason, Jared Taylor got into my algorithm. When it comes to race, I was certainly just as ignorant as you. And Jared Taylor, he's a little different than the other people that Caleb's been watching. It was with great reluctance that I said goodbye to all of these happy fantasies about how we're all essentially replaceable and everyone is the same. He's older, he wears like suits and has a master's degree. Jared Taylor, for some reason, he was soft-spoken, well-mannered, presentable looking.

He's not a YouTuber. The science of heredity tells us that some people will always be above average, some people will be below. He was a professional racist before Caleb was born. And his big project has been to kind of make racism respectable by dressing it up in all this quasi-scientific language. And so, when Caleb sees him, he's talking about something called... Race realism. Race realism. Race realism.

You know, the differences in IQ among the races and saying that that explained, you know, why black people are in poverty and why Asians are doing so well in the country. These are biological facts. They're not sociological constructs. I thought, well, look at it. You can see it in reality. But what he does have in common with the other YouTubers that Caleb is watching. So much vital data on these questions is essentially kept underground. Is that he frames his views as a kind of secret knowledge. We evolve from nature. And that once you see the logic behind it.

And this is how things are. You see that it's the truth. This is the natural world. And this is, you know, black people grew up in Africa and white people grew up in Europe. And this is just how it is. And all this stuff that I never, ever believed before. And then at some point, Caleb says, he started to do more than just watch YouTube videos. I would have arguments with people. And I would try to convince people on things like race realism and mass immigration. The thing I want to talk about today is the Great Replacement.

I'd talk to people that I saw as intelligent, and I'd say, you need to have more kids. The funny thing is that if white people really cared about the world, they would very much wish to preserve white culture. You know, intelligent people are dying out. I'm sure you're aware of what is called the Great Replacement. The fact that in every Western country, the proportion of whites drops every year. Do you really think that the European people and

culture are replaceable within a generation with no consequences? Did you read the New Zealand shooters manifesto? I read about the first 15 pages and it was exactly what I believed. Not the violence but the great replacement. That's what I called it. All those things. That's how I saw the world. That was what I believed. Yes. So, um, when, when did you feel your views shifting again? So, um...