The Iced Coffee Hour - Meet The Leftist "Ben Shapiro" Destiny | Greed, Capitalism, Toxic Masculinity

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Use code ICEDCOFFEE for 10% off your first Unbound Merino purchase at https://shrsl.com/43uwv Start creating high-quality content easily with Streamyard: https://clickurl.ca/ICH-streamyard NEW: Join us at http://www.icedcoffeehour.club for premium content - Enjoy! Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan https://www.instagram.com/alex_nava_photography Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] GET YOUR FREE STOCK WORTH UP TO $1000 WITH OUR SPONSOR PUBLIC - USE CODE GRAHAM: http://www.public.com/graham TIMESTAMPS: Getting Banned From Twitch - 00:03:32 Ethics Of Gambling Streams - 00:08:56 Destiny's Political Philosophy - 00:13:13 Is Lobbying A Problem In The US - 00:18:14 Psychology In Politics - 00:21:07 Philosophies Over Time - 00:23:57 Financial Survivorship Bias - 00:28:37 Biggest Obstacles Growing Up - 00:33:16 Customers ARE THE WORST - 00:36:34 Upgrading To A Casino - 00:39:54 Transitioning To Streaming - 00:47:22 Destiny's Relationship Advice - 00:50:38 Controlling Emotions In An Argument - 00:53:51 Why Destiny Debates - 01:00:53 How Much Destiny Makes - 01:03:15 Taxes And Government Spending - 01:05:30 The Lex Fridman Interview - 01:09:53 Destiny's Open Relationship - 01:13:12 Controversial Guests - 01:23:57 Rogan vs Peter Hotez - 01:27:58 Hated By The Left AND Right? - 01:30:49 "What Is A Woman" Documentary - 01:37:53 Biggest Insecurity - 01:50:57 Biggest Threat To Humanity - 01:53:56 MY NEW COFFEE IS NOW FOR SALE: http://www.bankrollcoffee.com/ The Equipment used: https://tinyurl.com/y78py5g2 Audio Equipment Used In Podcast: Shure SM7B mics, cloud lifters, rodecaster pro audio interface The YouTube Creator Academy: Learn EXACTLY how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube, rank videos on the front page of searches, grow your following, and turn that into another income source: https://bit.ly/2STxofv $100 OFF WITH CODE 100OFF For Podcast Inquiries, please contact [e-mail] *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at autotrater.ca. Canada's car marketplace.

Today we're speaking with Stephen Bonnell, otherwise known online as Destiny. He's one of the most outspoken millennial political commentators, describes himself as a very big social Democrat and is in many ways the anti-Ben Shapiro. There are certain social programs that we should advocate for in the United States. We should have those social programs, and then we should tax people accordingly. Today we're getting a little controversial and breaking down the fundamental differences between the left and the right, discussing some of the biggest problems that are tearing apart America. And the events that caused him to become more liberal as he began making millions,

of dollars. As I went from being broke to making a lot of money, I started to realize like how totally faked and unfair life was. Over the past like 12 or 13 years, my views have slowly changed to being more left-leaning, basically. We're also going to be talking about greed, capitalism, relationships, and toxic masculinity on this episode of subscribe. That's my line, Jack. I always say on this episode of subscribe. Okay, the point is, guys, subscribe, like, comment. Thank you so much, but first, a word from our sponsor. Guys, we got to give a huge thank you to our sponsor, Unbound Marino. They sent us a bunch of shirts. And I gotta say, they're my favorite shirts I've ever had in my entire life.

I still don't think you've washed it, which is a bit of a concern. I have washed it once. I've had it for three weeks. But, Graham, it doesn't smell at all because it's 100% marino wool. I think you'd be shocked at just how soft it is. Yeah, they sent us a whole bunch of stuff, and I have to say, it is absolutely comfortable. I just wear it all the time because it feels like pajamas, but it doesn't look like pajamas. I've played pickleball in it, gone on walks, and even worn it to the gym,

and it still smells like it did when I first. put it on. That's because Marino wool is incredibly light, moisture wicking, and odor resistant. Not only is their clothing super practical, but it also looks really good. Unlike other performance clothing, Unbound Marino offers both exceptional quality and style. All of that makes Unbound Marino the perfect choice for traveling with, which I'll certainly be doing from every trip I take from here on out. So whether you're an avid traveler or a busy entrepreneur, Unbound Marino can help you pack less and embrace the freedom of a minimalist lifestyle. I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity, and you give me like three of these shirts, and I will be used to be.

set for life. I don't need anything else. So check out Unboundmarino.com. I think you're going to be super happy with their clothing. I know we are. So if you're interested and that helps out the podcast a lot, feel free to use the link down below in the description and use the code iced coffee for 10% off your first purchase. The link again down below. It also really does help support this podcast. It would mean so much. Thank you, Unbound Marino. And on to the episode. Hey guys, welcome back to the ice coffee hour. My name is Destiny. And we're going to be arguing about why hot chocolate is better than ice coffee for the next two hours. Jeez, it's so much better, though.

So welcome, Destiny, to the Ice Coffee Hour podcast. This is truly an honor I was put on to you by Lex Friedman. Oh, cool. You were on his show for over four hours. It was like one of the longest Lex Friedman episodes I think I've ever listened to in its entirety. It was incredible. I absolutely loved it.

And I feel like, I hope this isn't demeaning. You are kind of similar or comparable to the Ben Shapiro of the left. Have you heard that before? I prefer to think that Ben Shapiro's. Kind of like the destiny of the right. The destiny of the right. Sure. Both very intelligent, fast talking people and highly opinionated as well.

Sure. But I respect it. I absolutely respect it. And I'm excited to talk hopefully on some policies, some drama. You recently signed a kick deal, right? I did a three month one a while ago. I might be sending another one, but I'm... Is it absolutely...

Did it end? Yeah, it was just for three months, but I'm in the talks of sending another one, potentially. Oh, you are? Are you able to talk about that? I can talk about whatever I want to talk about it. Okay. And you also have a Rumble deal as well? Yeah, I do.

yes. And how's, why are you saying that going on? Dude, you got a lot of deals. Why are you signing with all these companies instead of Twitch or YouTube?

You got more deals than we have. Well, on Twitch on Perman-Ban for being transphobic, I think. That's why you got Perman-Ban. I guess so. I'm not sure they don't actually tell you. What did you say that was transphobic? Initially, I thought that there's a part

on the TOS is you can't like discriminate people from certain activities. And there was a lot of discussion the day before I think about stuff related to trans athletes and everything. So I thought maybe I got banned for that.

Then I've talked to a couple people that are like friends of the company or work in the company. And apparently I got banned for calling a bunch of people subhuman. Subhuman? Yeah, that's like my go-to because it's like a, it's not a slur, really? Who are you calling sub-human? The group of people I was fighting with, but I guess their interpretation was that I was saying that all trans people were subhuman.

So you're fighting with someone who is trans? Yeah. Okay. So you're telling that person, not all trans people, just that group of people. That person. The people I'm fighting to interpreting what you were trying to explain is what you think happened. Maybe. I'm not sure.

I mean, it might have been inaccurate. Maybe they think that calling groups of people like subhuman, like a group of people you're fighting with is not good. But I think it was pretty obvious. I mean, like, I've got a big trans community. I do a lot of trans issues on my stream. Obviously, I'm not transphobic. But when I was arguing with this group of people,

it was like, these extreme, like, activist types on YouTube are on Twitter, are all subhuman. Like, it's not worth engaging with them. I'm not going to bother. And I think when they heard that, their interpretation is like, well, that could be interpreted as him calling all trans people subhuman. So, yeah.

What was the ideology that these extreme trans people were purporting that you disagreed with or that you thought was subhuman? There is a, Oh my God, you're making me dig back about a year ago. I got involved in a weird personal fight with a creator who claimed that I brigaded their chat with my chat to harass them, but I didn't even know this person existed yet when that particular thing happened.

And then this was around a time when we had been arguing about a bunch of trans issues already. And I am, my position on trans stuff is, I believe that there is a fact of the matter about whether or not a person is trans. And I think that having dysphoria is an important part getting trans treatment and that kind of stands in contrast to right now there's something called the self-ID movement which is you trans if you say you're trans and i butt heads a lot with those people

and because of my position which they sometimes summarize as transmedicalism uh they call me transphobic essentially and how does twitch just go and misinterpret what you have to say and then cut off what would probably be your primary source of income do you think this is a problem with with twitch itself or maybe do you think if you could go back in time you would have rephrased what you had said um i'd probably rephrase it might just be that some Sometimes Twitch like slowly evolves their standards over time for what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. And it doesn't necessarily go by the TOS. So for instance, you're not supposed to use the words like,

rid or autistic. That's bad for Twitch, but nobody punishes for it. So everybody uses the terms of the platform. You don't get in trouble for it. But I think one day you might say it and they might decide to start banning for it. So sometimes when I rant that people subhumans, like a thing, they're just like, oh, this sub people, blah, blah, blah.

I don't never get into trouble for it in the past, but maybe now they've kind of updated internally that people aren't going to say that word anymore. And that's what I call it banned for. Maybe I'm not sure. That I don't have, like, any official. communication with them. So I'm like really guessing. So they didn't really tell you exactly what it was. You're kind of just assuming. No, it's the email that I got was for hateful conduct, but they don't, yeah, that's a very broad sweeping hateful conduct. I don't think they're ever going to give you a specific. I think that's no incentive to. Yeah, any social media platform, they have the right to terminate you at any point for

really any reason. You're on their platform at the end of the day. So if they make the decision, whether you agree or not. I mean, they're not going to tell you because you said this, because then it gives you something to disagree with, you know? So. But then what do you think of the Twitch platform in general. Are you bullish on it or do you think that these weird policies make it seem like it's not going to last very long, especially with all these other competitors, with all of this funding coming out and then buying up streamers? Yeah, very bearish. I think Twitch has a lot of problems related to like company bloat. Like that company grew to an insane size. I think they're having a lot of trouble figuring it internally what they want the culture of the

company to be. And there's a lot of different stuff that a lot of employees are working on that aren't really providing any value to users or to viewers at the end of the day. So yeah, I'm not too big on it, but I mean, who knows? It seems like a lot of people are leaving right now. I'm seeing a lot of kick deals. A lot of kick, a lot of rumble, yeah. What do you think it is about those platforms that differentiates from Twitch at this point? Is it purely because they're throwing money at creators?

Right now, it's purely the money. Okay. Yeah. The problem, the issue with trying to build competing platforms is a few issues. In my opinion, I think a lot of the talent acquisition is not being done in the best way, because the goal is to acquire talent, but you want their use to, to stay on the site. It's not enough to just buy a streamer

and then have them stream there and then hope that the users like stick around. Like you have to kind of build that organic viewer base so that people are drawn to the site naturally. That's a really, really difficult thing to do. I heard that a lot of the kick revenues

coming from stake and that when I went on kick, I saw that gambling was one of the top things that they were, I don't want to say directing people to, but when you go to the website on the top of the screen, you see like gambling and you see more people are watching that than just about anything else.

Yeah, which is probably why they're trying to acquire more talent to get other types of streamers in the site. Of course, because I could imagine they pay somebody, let's just say $10 million to stream on there for a year. How much more revenue are they going to get on the back end from stake, from people who go watch gambling streams think, oh, wow, you know, maybe I'm interested in this too.

Do it, lose, and then that goes back and pays for the creator. I think ultimately the goal is to make the site profitable. I don't know if it's only supposed to work as a funnel to stake and then for sake to give them kickbacks to run the site. I think that's the goal, but you should bring that Eddie guy in it. interview him. What do you think about the ethics of going on the site kick knowing that potentially some of the money could be used or it's funded by essentially gambling money? Yeah I saw pokey mains response to that which was really interesting about the ethical and the moral dilemma of are you

I saw his response to pokey mains thing. Her response is not interesting or I watch that none of these streamers care about gambling they just it's like platform wars and gambling is like the vector they used to like attack like other platforms like they're like why do they attack it is it like a moral grandstanding thing or do you think that they could be insecure about their viewership relative to that or do you think it's a true passion thing like they actually care about the people that it's absolutely not true passion thing i think that um there's a lot of weird kind of like games clicky games going on um so like you've got like factions of streamers you've got like train wrecks and exqc and on that they're on one team and then on another team you've got

like Hassan kind of like more mainstream twitch people like fight with each other like they're on opposing teams so sometimes they so with the xccc and train moving to one platform these guys might feel incentivized to kind of attack this because one, these guys are on a different team and these guys like fight a ton with each other. And then two, they're on Twitch and obviously they feel some loyalty to their platform. So they want to attack like a competing platform as well. What are your thoughts in the gambling aspect of is that I don't want to say ethically or morally right, but let's just say you have a younger demographic of audience 10 to 18 years old. Do you think subjecting them to gambling is a good thing to do or do you think it's not worth it?

It's a great thing to do. What was the phrasing of that question? Would you rather go broke at 13 or would you rather go broke at 30? 13-year-old can't take loans. They can't lose a house. They can't destroy their life. 30-year-old can. So it's good to learn that lesson of going broke at 13.

Well, I'm just saying because I think personal control is something that has to be factored in that. That, you know, it's out there and it's up to you to decide if that's right for you or not. I mean, yeah, for me personally, I don't like gambling much. Like, I don't think I would ever promote it unless I got paid an obscene amount of money to do it. just because it's not, like, in my opinion from everything I've seen, I'm pretty sure gambling addictions are like the worst addiction of like any addiction ever because like it doesn't threaten your health so you could do it for an infinite amount of time. There's tons of other ways to get money.

The tricks and things that are employed by casinos to make you keep pulling the lever, like mess with your mind a lot. So personally, I don't like gambling. In terms of like, would I support a platform that has like kickbacks from gambling, when you start to get into like ethical consumption questions, it gets very, very, very difficult once you get like one or two levels removed to figure out like where the responsibility lies. Because then you get into like, do I want to be on Twitch because Amazon had that one thing going with the workers in the warehouse and the tornado or the whatever. Or do I want to be on Rumble because they have like far right people on there that might, you know, advocate for violence against Jewish people.

Like do I want to be on this? Not to say that like these platforms are bad or even that this. I don't know on Rumble that happens. But like I'm just saying that when you start to get into like layers of responsibility removed in today's society, everything is so interconnected. It's really hard. I feel like you could attack anybody for anything ever. So if you really, really, really don't like gambling, and that's like a huge moral sticking point for you,

which it isn't for any of these streamers or pretend it is. But if that is a huge sticking point for you, then I'd say maybe stay away from kick. Like you probably wouldn't want to support the platform, maybe. But, yeah. But before we go into that, I do have an exciting message to share about our sponsor Streamyard. As I'm sure you guys can see, we have a pretty decent setup.

Unfortunately, things like this are incredibly expensive, but it does need to be. check out our sponsor's StreamYard. Streamyard is a live streaming software that lets you create high-quality content with just the click of a button. All you need is a camera and an internet connection, and you can begin streaming in minutes right from your computer. Plus, one of my favorite aspects of this is that you're able to stream multiple

social media platforms at the same time, like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. Streamyard also offers various analytics tools to help you measure the success of every single live stream you do across every single platform so you'll know which platform is driving the most amount of traffic. We absolutely love Streamyard over here. They also offer a free package so you can get started without any risk. It would mean so much. We genuinely love them and it would mean a lot if you guys just checked them out with the link down below in the description.

Thank you so much. Oh, don't forget the message. I know you mentioned it. It's free. It can be free. They can try it out for free. For no money. Or no money.

Check it out in the description. Zero money. Thank you so much, Streamyard. And back to the podcast. How would you describe your own political philosophy? My own political philosophy. So I kind of have like these very fundamental moral positions. And then from there, I try to just build.

out like what are the policy positions I think that would make the world the best for the most men of people. So right now I tend to be like I'm very liberal with a capital L. So no socialism, fascism, whatever. I'm very liberal with a capital. I very much appreciate like rights to private property, free speech and all of that. Very much a capitalist. I think that that form of economic organization is a really good job at allocating money to different sectors, very efficiently. Very big on like social democracy. I think that the government should be involved in kind of like funneling and channeling a lot of the desires of society. So providing incentives for green energy so that capital markets can invest appropriately. Yeah, I'm pretty open socially. Like,

I'm cool with LGBT people and all that. Um, very big on free speech. Like, I think that platforms are probably a little bit too heavy handed right now and banning and censoring people for ideas they don't want to discuss. Uh, yeah, they're kind of, yeah. What are these fundamental moral positions that you have, like some of the main biggest ones or most, most important ones that you hold closest to you that you develop these political ideologies from? At the very, very, very, very, very, very fundamental level. Like, I perceive myself as a person that has some set of preferences or desires. I perceive that everybody else is about, like, 99% matched on those. We all basically want the same thing. And then from there, I try to, like, build out, like, what are

the things and agreements that I can make with other people to make sure that all of us are kind of, like, working together in a way that keeps everybody as happy and healthy and functional as possible. So everything kind of builds out from there. Kind of utilitarian? I mean, you could argue that, sure. Where do you think you got those beliefs from? I think when I was, like, 16, 17, I used to be really Catholic growing up. And I, I kind of lost my religion through high school, just through whatever normal growing process asking questions, not getting satisfactory answers. And in the process of kind of losing that religious foundation for life, I kind of had to think of what other foundation I could find.

I read a lot of Ayn Rand, and I realized after like a year of that, that I really liked it. And then at the end, I was like, well, maybe I just liked this because I read the first author after becoming an atheist. And this is just who I happen to like. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to put that aside. And I'm really going to think for myself, like, what do I think is important in life what do I think is important for other people and I try to figure out kind of like these fundamental principles and then any political position rather than inheriting it from like some political group or my family or my country whatever I try to think the best of like what do I think is like a good universal rule for society to make people happy and healthy have you

always been a really deep thinker like that I might say as a deep thinker but I mean yeah I mean I'm kind of a geek and nerd I guess yeah but you seem kind of like like a skeptic to certain things like if you hear some sort of information like the einran thing like you kind of supported it but You begged the question to yourself, like, well, do I really support this? Like you said, because it's the first book that you read after becoming atheist or whatever. What in you do you think causes you to be so critical or open mind that I would say to those things? Question your own ideology, questioning the other things that people tell you. Is it something that maybe a value your parents instilled in you when your child?

Or is it just maybe the way you biological are? I'm going to be honest. I got really lucky. I took an AP psychology class in high school. And that class, like half the class is just learning about how much your brain lies to you about things. like the different biases you have, the different ways you search for information, the different ways you remember selectively certain things. And that class combined with me becoming an atheist and then engaging with other people that were still very religious. So I saw that like I can't really trust my own brain 100%.

And I see other people can have very strong convictions about things that I think they're totally dumb on. They're completely wrong on. So in my mind, I kind of, I try to have this like underlying sense of not paranoia or self-doubt. But like for every, I try to have like good. mechanisms in place to make sure that I'm not like getting lost down some dumb shit I guess so like here's like a couple of like things that I try to keep in mind when I'm arguing for a certain debate or arguing a certain position I always know the arguments on the other side in their best most powerful

steel man form so often there's one of debating people I usually know usually is their side of the argument better than them because I spent so much time going back and forth on it because I think if you don't understand the opposing argument then your argument could have a lot of flaws or you could be by you could be missing something that you're not aware of that's one thing a A second thing is, even if I've got a lot of conviction about a certain thing, I'll always ask myself, like, if I feel like I've got a lot of conviction or find a lot of people, I'll sometimes I'll tell me like, what would it take to change my mind on a certain position? And if I don't have an answer to that immediately, then I'll realize, like, I'm probably, my conviction here is too strong if I can't even think of something that would change my mind. Yeah, but there's like, yeah, there's like a lot of things like that.

I just kind of try to audit my brain a lot, especially now being like an online content creator. It's the easiest way to get lost in like an echo chamber of bullshit where you discredit every outside voice and you just like, circle jerk with your own people and you would never consider anything different. How often do you change your beliefs? I mean, hopefully not too often. Otherwise, I wouldn't have any. I mean, like, it really depends on the thing. Like, over time, like, I've evolved and changed in some beliefs.

Sometimes I'll get posed a really good question or argument and it'll cause a pretty dramatic shift on something. But, I mean, my beliefs are, like, fair, my fundamental beliefs have been relatively stable, probably for about 15 years. But how those play out in the abstract have changed pretty significantly for a few things. So, like, for instance, like, probably the biggest thing, you're probably the biggest thing that I've, two huge things I've changed on is, one, I used to be, like, my single issue for voting was Citizens United. I thought that lobbying and corporate, or lobbying

and, like, finance of elections was, like, the most important issue in the United States. I had a lot of arguments with a conservative friend over Citizens United and post that case. Oh, and then I actually read what the court case, which is about, which apparently nobody does. After reading about the court case, and then after thinking about it, I realize this is a really, really, really, really difficult question. And I actually don't think lobbying has anywhere near the impact on policies in the U.S. that most people think it does. So, like, that's something I dramatically changed my mind on. So I assumed that lobbying does have a big impact.

What have you found in your end? I just don't think it does, almost. I think that if you, I would... How do you prove that? If you want to... Well, there's a lot of studies where people try to, like, what they'll do is they'll measure, like, what are the desires? Are rich people, middle class people, poor people,

and then they'll try to figure out, like, who gets their way most of the time, when there's, like, political disagreements. I think that when... I think that when you're looking at... When you're looking at how effective is lobbying or does lobbying have a big impact on policy? The question that got posed to me that was really interesting was, can you think of any major policy position that the majority of the American people agree on that for some reason can't get past? Because that would be good evidence of like lobbying, attacking the will of the American people or something.

And I'm going to think of a single example of that. There are a couple issues where it seems like that's the case. But when you dig into the polling data, it's a lot more complicated than you think. Like the answer I always give is like if you poll people and like, Do you think the government should provide health care to all of its citizens? The answer to that is 75%. So it's like overwhelmingly like, well, we should have single payer health care, right? But then when you ask a question, should the American government outlaw private insurance and be the sole provider of insurance, support drops to that for like 25%.

It's like a 50 point difference. And it's like, oh, okay. So sometimes people say like, oh, all the American people want this thing. But when you actually like get into more specific questions, there's actually a lot of disagreement on what the American people are like. I think that if lobbying is effective anywhere, lobbying is the most effective on kind of like, more fringe issues that don't have a lot of attention. That's where you can make the most effort. So like if tractors want to lobby to like make themselves narrower

so that corporations can make more money selling parts or something, you might be able to lobby effectively there because most Americans don't care about it. So like influencing politicians and donating in certain ways might be able to get you some ground there. The latest one that I saw was about car dealerships that went together and lobbied for less oversight of the loans that they issue that allows them to issue more than the car's MSRP to consumers

at higher interest rates. So, you know, like when you go and get a credit card or a mortgage, a lot of oversight on that. But you go get an auto loan very little. And that was something they lobbied for. Sure. But then you have to ask yourself, when they lobbied for it, is that something that most Americans would be okay with or not okay with? Because my guess is Americans going, no, are you guys do finance here? Am I allowed to say Americans are financially so stupid?

We know that. So, like, my guess is most Americans would actually probably be in favor of that, right? Yeah, that's true. That's interesting. Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon.

How are some of the cognitive biases that you've learned about in that AP class? I'm really curious. I've always been fascinated by that. Oh, man, there's so many of them. What stands out to you the most? One is there's something called Dunning Kruger, where basically the idea is that people at really low levels of aptitude dramatically overestimate their competence,

and people at higher levels of aptitude probably underestimate their confidence. my favorite way to see this play out in real life is if you ask somebody, I don't know this case, but from my life, if you ask somebody like, hey, somebody brings up like Spanish.

Do you speak Spanish? And somebody's like, yeah, actually, I speak like a, I speak a pretty decent amount. 99% of the time somebody gives an answer like that

is they took like, up to Spanish three in high school and they're like Donde L Bibliotech or whatever. But I know a lot of people like, my mom is a good example. If I ask my mom, like mom,

how good is your Spanish? She'd be like, oh, it's like, it's okay. My mom is a fluent Spanish speaker. She just doesn't know some technical terms, whatever, but she'll say, oh, it's okay. That, like, on foreign language, when you ask people, I notice that a lot, that if I ask somebody, do you speak a language, if they're really, if they're conversational fluent, they'll be like, you know, I'm okay. Because they realize, like, how much they don't know.

That shows up in everything. Usually people have, there's like a curve for measuring this, a theoretical curve or whatever. And there's like the little bump in the beginning is called Mount Bullshed. That's where you learn a little bit about a topic. And because you've learned a little, you dramatically overestimate how much you actually know. And then as you learn more and more, you're like, oh, okay, maybe it's a lot more complicated than I initially. thought. Some people call that Dunning Kruger. That's one example. I think it's something called a fundamental attribution bias, which is where when you see there's a group of people

that you like and they do something that's maybe not good. You've got a lot of good reasons why they did it. If you see a group of people that's not good, they don't get any of that consideration. So classic examples, like I'm speeding to work. I got to cut somebody or whatever. I have to get to work. I'm driving safe. I'm doing everything I can, right? But if you're driving and you're kind of chilling if somebody cuts you off, it's like, what a, how dangerous or blah, blah, blah. Oh, a really good example of this. I think, oh, God, I should have this study memorized.

But I think there was a study where Republicans were asked to judge whether or not welfare was, like, okay or not. And I think if you put, like, a white person on the cover versus a black person, if they saw the white person, they were more likely to say, like, oh, this guy's probably down in his luck. Like, he needs a little bit of help, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I think that's called fundamental misattribution bias. There's a whole bunch of cognitive biases in terms of, like, searching for information. is the classic confirmation bias. Of course.

So I go to search for information, 10 things pop up. I only see the things that agree with me and I don't look at anything else. Yeah, there's so many different things. If you're like research, yeah. I always find it interesting that two people could have the exact same experience

but interpret it entirely differently. The same experience, same time. They're right next to each other. Two totally opposite opinions on that. Yeah. That's frustrating, but yeah, it happens, yeah. So let's talk about your philosophy development over time and how it's changed.

Because I know that you've said on podcast before that you had a moment where you were a self-proclaimed red pill, red pill person? Not red pill, maybe libertarian. Libertarian, was it? Yeah.

Oh, okay. When I first started streaming a long, long time ago, I grew, so first of all, I grew up like, ride or die Republican. My parents are still writer-die-Republicans.

All through high school, I was a writer-die-republican. And then when I got to working, I was still kind of like pretty conservative. And then right before I got into streaming, I was probably my most conservative. And then I started streaming. And as I went from being broke

to making a lot, of money, I started to realize like how totally an unfair life was prior to making a lot of money. So over time, over the past like 12 or 13 years, my views have slowly changed to being more left-leaning, basically. So it caused you making more money to realize how bad it was when you didn't have money. It's usually the opposite, right? Usually from what I've seen, it's like the more money you make, the more conservative you tend to get.

I mean, I can understand from a policy position because people don't want to like pay taxes maybe, but yeah. So what made you while you're making money to realize that maybe these beliefs, that I held are not for me. I don't agree with them. What specifically... Well, like, so this is something I believe. I firmly believe that conservatives and liberals,

everybody in the planet has like the same fundamental values and like their first order kind of thoughts are all identical. So they want people to be able to be successful. Most people want people to pursue some sort of career and be successful. Conservatives think that the answer to that is leave people alone, no government intervention, make sure the family is healthy, make sure people have enough encouragement in their own lives to pursue what they want and give people the freedom to explore that and they should be able to figure that on their own because it's America, anybody can do anything.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to say some people have some systemic inequities, is the where the election is now, or inequalities that they can't overcome. So the government needs to step in and kind of like give them a push to help them keep up with other people essentially. But both of these like things, I think stem from the same place where conservatives think this is the best way to be happy and healthy. Liberals think this is the best way to be happy and healthy. Yeah, that's the difference between the two. Wait, what was your initial question? My question was when you started making money, what changed your belief? Like, why did you make money change that?

From one to the other. Yeah, like, what did you realize in that process? I think that as I, so I probably started with that conservative position, but then as I made more money, I started to realize that, like, with a little bit of help, like, for certain people, things can go way differently, and it would probably benefit literally everybody in society to have that little bit of extra help there. So, for instance, when I think of, like, college or college achievement, in my mind, a kid who can go to college and do well in college,

nothing financially should ever stop that person. They just shouldn't be possible. If you have the ability to succeed, we need to provide those people with all the tools to succeed. You can argue on a moral ethical level. You can argue on economics level because they're going to be a higher taxpayer, contributor to the country, financially, GDP and all that.

That would just be like a really good thing to do. In my conservative days, I would probably think like, well, if you're willing to put in the work, get the grades, get the scholarships, you can do it. But then as I get older, I see like, well, sometimes life is bullshit. Sometimes stuff happens. And another thing I noticed was wealthy families' children have a lot of benefits that not wealthy family or poor children don't have, that in a way work-like subsidies that just come from like mom and dad instead of from the government.

So like, for instance, something I noticed growing up, but when you're poor, you have a very, very, very small tolerance for mistakes. I give you, like, if I, like, I lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and I drove between Omaha and Council Bluffs all the time and anybody that's ever been on I-80 going east to west or west to east is potholes all the time. if I pop a tire or God forbid break a wheel, I'm like financially for like three months. It's like over. It's the worst thing in the world. So the tolerance for mistakes is really low. Whereas today I could total my car and go buy another one of the dealership like tonight. Like it doesn't matter.

So the amount of mistakes that I can make are way different. And normally when you think of from I would critique the conservative perspective, they would say, well, you should be able to pick yourself up and do what you need to do and figure your life out. And if you fuck up, that's your fault. And it's like, I agree if you fuck up, it's your fault. But if you're poor, you can fuck up so many fewer times than the people that are wealthy. You've got such a safety net for mom and dad.

I've seen a lot of poorer people have more motivation to succeed because they didn't have those things growing up. And so they don't take them for granted. They don't just ignore them. For them, it's like something to aspire to. Whereas, because I went to both a public and a private school, and I've seen a huge difference between them. A lot of the private school kids, most of them did well, but quite a few of them had everything handed to them and just no motivation whatsoever. Whereas the public school kids, a lot of them, ended up in really interesting careers

because they really, they would push themselves. Isn't there a saying that like wealth stops third generation? Third generation, most of the time, some percentage. It's just gone. Maybe. I mean, I don't think that's true at all. No way. I would fight to the death on that.

I went to a private school and I went to a public college and my was blown the way. When I saw the difference in educational outcomes between kids in college and kids of the public, When I went to high school, my freshman book was called College Algebra, and I thought it was just called it to make us feel smarter, whatever. And then when I actually got to college, and I realized people didn't take algebra until they were in college that blew my mind. I'm sure there are, oh, here's another cognitive bias.

There's something called survivorship bias to where, yeah, if you see like a thousand people in a shitty area, the only ones you're going to see after some time are the people that made it out. And then it's tempting to say, well, I know a lot of people from really bad backgrounds that made it out really well. So maybe everybody can do that. And it's like, well, those are probably the exceptions to the rule rather than the rule itself. Like a really good example. I can even think of this in my own family. I am pretty frugal with my money.

I drive a $40,000 car. All of the expenses that I have are generally related to like just where I live. Like I've got like a, I think $5,000 a month apartment. And then other than that, I like, and then travel for work. I don't like spend any money anything. I have sweatpants. I got my own merch on. I just, I don't buy a lot of shit.

I just don't. So I save all my money. The reason why I do that is because when I grew up in my family, I'm sure you guys have heard of lifestyle creep that's like a way of life for my whole family make some money get some more debt make more money more liabilities make more money everybody in my family does that

and I think everybody picked up financial habits to my parents I saw what everybody else was doing and I was like I'm going to do the exact opposite because this sounds horrible so you could look at me and go oh well look see because your parents are so kind of like financially bad you became really financially good so like maybe that was good for you and I was like maybe

but the rest of my like six siblings are financially horrible. So I'm probably the exception there rather than the role. How much of that do you think just comes down to the person though? That that's just who they are. They tend to gravitate towards that. You naturally gravitate towards saving. That's just to you in a nutshell versus your environment. I mean, it's the reality is

is there's probably like a really complicated confluence of environmental factors that kind of shape you as you grow up along with some biological ones and who's to say like what is the thing or not that pushed you in one direction. Like maybe because I played a lot of RPGs growing up and I saved all of my potions for like the final boss. Maybe that's why I don't spend my money. Like, I don't know, maybe.

It's funny. I was the same way. Yeah. I was the same way too. I saved everything. I had this one app on my phone. It's like this car racing game. I have millions of coins on there and I've not spent any.

Yeah. So I mean, who knows why anybody turns out the way they do it? It's hard to say. But like I could think there's like 50 million potential reasons why, yeah. I've noticed like one of the most destructive things that you can do to a kid is to give them everything. And then they feel totally. entitled and then they don't feel like they have to work for certain things.

Don't you feel like that in a sense could be replicated by a government that potentially gives out too many handouts towards people? Or do you think that it's completely different thing? Because you were mentioning the education system, which I think is also different than like food stamps even, I'm sure like that would make sense as well because obviously people need to eat and everything. But in other ways of like some sort of social security. I mean like there's with everything in life, there's a balance, right?

I think the goal for when you're parent a kid is you're not looking to give them all the answers. You're looking to give them all the tools and all the opportunities. So a kid should still be challenged in education and challenged in life, but you want to make sure they have the appropriate tools to deal with those challenges. There's, I mean, like, this probably applies to every single thing in life, right? Like if you're a normal human and you're not writing up, it's not like if you go to the gym twice a day, seven days a week, That's going to make you even stronger, right? That's, you're probably going to get injured.

You're not going to make any gains. You're not going to, like, that's going to be horrible, right? So you have to balance out, like, the working out with the recovery. And I think for life, a lot of that is like kind of the same. Like some level of like tension, some level of adversity is really healthy for you because you develop a tenacity to deal with other problems later in life. You don't want to remove all adversity from children, which I think a lot of people today try to do, which is really bad. So some adversity is good, but it can't be never-ending adversity in and, and, and, and,

Like I think they're called aces in psychology adverse childhood experiences Based on like the amount of like traumatic experience you've had a child you can like make so many predictions on bad Physiological Outcomes cardiovascular disease lifespan All sorts of things based on trauma and dirt as a child so yeah, there's just a there's a balance to be struck You can give somebody everything but they should have the tools to deal with like anything that could come up Your adversities I think I just I lucked out in a lot of things but it was not the best I guess I don't know.

That's a very broad question where you want to go. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen Tiguan. Its sleek exterior makes a first impression you can't ignore. Step inside to find available full leather seats and wood accents. Under the hood, the available 201 turbocharged horsepower engine gives it a fun to drive edge. The refined Tiguan, you deserve more style.

Visit vw.ca to learn more. SUVW German engineered for all Growing up, what do you think your biggest obstacles were? Growing up, my mom did,

she did a home daycare so my mom was very much involved in raising like 12 other kids because it was a 24-7 daycare that she ran all the time. My dad was working on other stuff. He worked full-time and then did, have you ever heard of Amway?

Yes. Is that the MLM? Yeah, Amway, New Vision, a lot of these like MLM things. So I was kind of like left to my own devices Up until I think around like 12 or 13 Our life was like pretty decent

I didn't realize like how much debt my parents had and everything But like we lived like a really solid middle class life It was pretty cool But I think when I turned I think when I was 12 or 13 There was an issue that came up where one of the kids in the basement One of the boys I think he was like seven years old

Like tried to pull the pants down of like some five year old girl Some dumb kids who dumb shit My mom talked to the boys' parents. And when the boys' parents heard this, they pulled the kid out of daycare and they reported my mom to CPS. And so child protective services came out and they did a big investigation. And my parents don't do any wrong or dumb stuff like that. So they were clear. Everything was fine.

But my mom was like so stressed out by that event because CPS is like when your parent is the scariest thing in the world to have in your house that she decided to completely quit the daycare business because she didn't want to risk. anything like that ever happening, like losing her children to some crazy parent or whatever. When we quit that, we made no money. So all of our income went away. We had this very awkward dance of like being outside in the car, repo man jumping in and like taking the keys. Utilities getting shut off all the time. So not knowing if there was like water, electricity. Eventually our first house got foreclosed, defaulted on the mortgage, got foreclosed, moved to another house, rented that for a while,

I think I kicked out of that. My mom and sister moved to Florida. Me and my dad moved to another house. We got rented that for a little bit. Got kicked out of that. And then I eventually ended up living with my grandma and like a senior citizen apartment complex for my last two years of high school.

And then through high school, I worked, my senior year I worked as a McDonald's and then freshman to senior year I worked as a, it's called work study where you could do like janitorial work after school for two and a half hours to help pay for your education, basically. So, yeah, that's a little bit of it, I guess. So seeing your family lose the house, Do you think that also helped you save in the sense that, like, you never know what's going to happen.

If you don't spend too much, you're going to have something to fall back on. I didn't understand. I didn't know anything about finance at the time. I had no idea. The way that my parents described it was like, they were, oh, my God, we were only, like, a few payments away from owning the house. That's what they said. And I was like, wow, they got completely scammed by the bank. But now that I'm older, I haven't asked about it.

My guess is they probably were drawing down on the equity of the house a lot through helix or some other type of, like, loan against the house or something. so yeah but um for eventually um i mean i mean by the time i got older and i saw like how they spent money and everything yeah i definitely was like when i make money like to me money is just freedom that's all it is it's the freedom to either not work what to travel or to be comfortable or whatever and not have to worry about ever paying a bill that's like the most stressful thing in the world is when you're balancing you know having to decide which bill to pay the end of the month is the worst feeling in the world yeah when you were working as the jan or janitorial thing uh it's That was all throughout high school and you stopped at senior year?

Yeah, it was a work study program with my high school. So you worked at the high school for... So then after that college? My senior year of high school, I was in McDonald's for a little bit. I was very, very, very patient. I don't know why I'm very good at dealing with like adverse people. I'm just whatever reason. And I had a very challenged customer come in and just give me a whole bunch of stupid shit.

Let's talk about it. What happened? Honestly, I don't. Customers are just horrible. I've always had a dream of like going back and getting a job at McDonald's like now and just waiting for the right guy to fuck my day up. Yeah and I'm just going to absolutely fucking unload on him and then like walk out in like a rented Ferrari or some shit

and just drive away and just fucking trash this guys. I hate customers. But anyway, what is it about customers though? Maybe is it just their impatient? Because they have no respect for any person ever. But do you think that's a confirmation bias though? No, people are in time. Well, no, no.

Well, no. To be fair, most. Most customers aren't like this. When you work in a service shop, it only takes one guy to really fuck your day up. And the level of like entitlement that people have and like the disgust that they treat service workers with,

like you're a fucking slave. God, I remember my senior year in high school, I'm taking so much math, okay? And this guy at my cash register is telling his kid, if a cash register is not working, okay? If it's not working, you can't process a sale, okay?

It's a whole point of sale system that tracks immature and everything. It's not 19, 20, fucking four, where the thing just does the math for you. So I tell the guy in front of me, it's a dad and his kid. I'm like, hold on, my register's down. I can't do it. And the dad's like, oh, well, the change is like 72 cents. And it's like, I'm dual enrolled taking like Calc 3Divirator.

I don't need you to do fucking basic math for me. And the dad goes to his kid and he's like, this is why you need to study hard in school. You don't want to wind up not knowing anything like this guy. I'm like, are you fucking serious? That's just like one of like a million examples, okay? And I'm like, oh, God. What do you say to that? Do you pretend like you do it?

Nothing. I just fucking do my shit and whatever. But anyway, there was a customer who was, like, screaming because it's, like, egg McMuffin, wasn't coming out soon enough. Oh, here's another thing customers do. Customer will walk into a fucking restaurant, okay? And a customer would be like, I want an extra well done steak, extra well done. And then they go and they sit at a table.

And then someone else come in like, oh, I want like a salad. And they'll sit down. The salad will come out in, like, a minute. And the extra well done steak guy will come up and he'll be like, where's my steak? That person was here after me. Why did they get their food before? I was like, are you actually serious? You know, like, time works?

But I think at McDonald's. I think it was something like that. Like a guy ordered like a breakfast that was like four or five items. Somebody came in after them, ordered something. And they just wanted like a McMuffin. It was like a McMuffin. It was something really quicker. I made grotto or something. And they got it.

And then the guy came up and he started screaming like, oh, you guys do this. You deprioritize my order, blah, blah, blah. I eventually got that guy's food. I just, whatever, I don't care. And then the next lady line was a supervisor at a restaurant and a casino. And she was like, oh, you dealt with that really well. You should come work at the casino. So I put an application there.

I moved jobs to a casino that paid way better. My pay got bumped from, I think back then I was thinking, I want to say it was 5.15 an hour was a minimum wage. Maybe it was 5.25 an hour. So I went from that job to making 15 an hour at this casino, which was bank. I'm basically rich at this point. How old were you at the time? It must have been 18 or 19.

I end up going to college for, I want to go to college for music. My casino job I was really, really, really good at. I'm very extroverted. I'm very social. I knew all the workers there. I knew all the customers. And I like to be like, if I'm doing a particular thing, I like to be really good at it.

So I could do everything front of house really well. I could do everything back of house really well. I could cook. I could do prep work. I could do everything. I was a really good worker. But I don't know if you figure this out at all about me. I have a problem with authority.

In my mind, if I'm really good at my job and I'm doing everything really well, I should have a lot of leeway to do things in an effective manner. And I would bump heads with my management on a lot of things, on a lot of stupid things. Like one issue that I remember came up was, if you're with Excel, right? Okay. Excel is a very powerful. program. It's not just for fucking writing notes in a spreadsheet. You can do a lot with Excel.

One thing that we would do is every single day, whoever was supervising for, it was either swing or graveyard, I think, depending on what was going on, you would get from the accounting department, your cash register variances every day. And what people would do is about an hour shift, a supervisor would go back and they would take all the variances, they would put them into a spreadsheet, then they would take all of the variance, all of the cash register reports, and then they would take out a calculator, and they would add and subtract every single thing every day

to measure up like where the variances are to see people are missing money from their registers. This took about an hour every day. At one point, as I was getting these things, I noticed that when accounting sends these things, it's always in the exact same format. And like when an employee leaves or rejoins, they even leave like an empty space.

And I'm like, oh, well, if it always comes in the exact same format, you could probably just make a spreadsheet and then just like do like the little math operations program it in. So I figured out that like, okay, if you make these like little formulas, it took me all of like 20 minutes. It's not very complicated. Copy past this thing, and then you can calculate the variances in about two seconds. You just copy paste them in. And so I'm thinking like, oh, cool.

I just saved every supervisor like an hour per shift. And I talked to my manager about this. I got in trouble for it. And she was like, we can't use Excel because sometimes it makes mistakes. And then everything will get like messed up. Like don't divert from the process. I was like, what? So there were a bunch of little issues like that.

I remember on one issue when I was working at graveyard shift, First of, graveyard is where all happiness and norms go to die. Just everything is horrible. Another casino. Yes. Probably everything in real life ever. But my graveyard shifts were very challenging because, one, they gave me employees that sometimes they could barely speak English.

I had this Sudanese guy named Tut who didn't know what a cheeseburger was. I worked at a diner, okay? So I'm like teaching this guy to read while working the register, okay? And I have very few employees already. It's just a fucking nightmare of a scenario. But I remember one day, Pam comes in morning. shift that's my manager and I've got there's a big like soda machine and there's a bunch of fruit flies underneath it and she's like Stephen why the fruit flies under the soda machine the grave shift you guys

should clean it up and I was like listen I tell swing shift that they need to leave this place a little bit cleaner for me because you're giving me one employee overnight I there's I don't have the time we don't have the manpower to do this and she's like oh well why didn't you talk me about this and I said I talked to all the swing shift to supervise about it and she's like if you're not getting the answer that you need to do your job effectively then you need to email and see see the person above the person that you're having an issue with. And I was like, okay, that's good advice. Several months later, as I'm running these promotions at the casino,

I'm getting more and more swamped for my grave shift. I'm running into issues where eventually in the morning, a VP of like food and beverage walks by the restaurant. There's a bunch of unclean tables. And then I get an email from Pam saying, hey, just so you know VP Food and Breivage was by, wasn't happy to stay at the restaurant. And by this point, I'm leaving a lot out,

but like I'm getting so swamped and fucked at this job. It's like unreal. They're having me cut like my last cook at like 3 or 4 a.m. So I'm doing front of house and all the cooking and everything on my own. They're expecting this place to look good by wanting. She was like impossible. So I email her and then I see, see the head of food and beverage above her. And I'm like, hey, if you want these jobs done, I need more employees, blah, blah, blah.

And I didn't realize it at the time, but I basically marked myself for deletion at that point. No. Yeah. So past that, there's a thing we call in corporate called papering somebody out the door. I didn't like, I wasn't like aware of it at the time that this even happened to me because I'm such a good employee. So I'm getting fired. That over time, I start getting written up for every single little thing. And I don't think much about it because whatever.

Like I come into work, like, I'd only miss one day of work in like three years. But all of a sudden I started getting written up if I'm in like two minutes late. Like big write-ups too. I'm like, okay. And then one day, there's a complicated scenario with a girl that might get fired or not. I end up getting fired because I tell a girl that she's going to get fired if she comes in late. And I don't have the authority to fire employees. It was like a really convoluted stupid thing.

Yeah. And that just, yeah. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Why does it want you out? I still don't get that. What was the reason? Because you went above somebody else? Because I think because I made my manager look.

bad because I emailed the guy above her and then she didn't like that at all yeah and I think I was I just I didn't understand like corporate politics and I was an idiot I didn't play it correctly at all that whole era of my life is really bad because me and my girlfriend at the time at we bought a house when I like a year earlier and now I didn't have money to pay for the house when you were working at the casino yeah because I was making a lot of money but after getting fired from the casino I started to fall behind on the mortgage sort of fall behind on other bills um it was kind of like stuck in like a hopeless because I'm not going back to school. I'm stuck in a really shitty job. I'm not making enough money for the lifestyle that I had because my pay went from at the casino I'm getting

2215 hour for overtime and now for carpet cleaning I'm working like 13 day stretches because I get like every other Sunday off and I'm my take home pay is like $2,000 a month. So I'm getting like completely fucking obliterated. Were you like in the red then every single month? It started to hit that point yeah. And what did your girlfriend think of the time where you got fired from your job and you're just kind of hanging out at home playing StarCraft do while you have bills and mortgages and stuff like that? Well, she was working at the time, so she didn't know as much. But when she was, it's not like I was not working and playing StarCraft.

Like, I would only play in the times between jobs. Because the issue was for Carpac Clinic, like, if I'm really lucky, you might get like an eight-hour job. And an eight-hour job, you're getting paid $16 an hour. So however much that ends up being, 80 and 40, whatever. I'm working that, and then I go home. 147. I work that job, go home, and then I've got like a whole evening to play games, right?

If I, if I'm lucky, I've got like a good eight-hour job, I make like a lot of money, I do that. But if I'm, but if I've got like a lot of jobs scouted throughout the day, then I might be like working, like on the call basically for like 12 to 16 hours, but I'm only making like 30 or $40. Depending on the shit. So like playing Stargraft in between was the only thing I could do or just sit around at the office doing nothing. And then I'm assuming this was the last job that you had, the carpet cleaning before you got into streaming full time. Yeah. And that was like, did it take off? Immediately, how is the progression of your streaming career?

I think it probably took about six months before people were like, oh, you can solicit like PayPal donations and stuff. And I started to do that after a few, after like six or seven months. I think it was in December or November of 2010. It's where I got like my first payout from, I originally streamed a live stream, then you streamed, then a website called Justin TV. And I think they started a partner program for some of the streamers.

And I was one of the first people in it, if not the first person, I'm not sure. But they, I got up a paycheck for like $203 or something for like ad revenue. For a month? Yeah. But when I got that $203, I looked back and I just did a quick calculation like how many hours do I stream? And then how many hours do I do carpet cleaning? And it's like, if I streamed, the dollar per hour I made streaming was about the same as my dollar per hour of carpet cleaning. And I was like, fuck carpet clean.

I was going to stay on and play video games and stream because I'll make about the same money. So fuck it. And then from there, everything started to increase quite a bit. Yeah. And what changes were you making to grow on Justin TV at the time? Were there certain like metas and different things that you could do? There was no. The streaming didn't really exist yet. The reason why I was able to start early on was because there was a really high technological hurdle because the software was incredibly complicated. And streaming was very new. So there weren't even very many people doing it. There were no forums to help with anything. But I was willing to dump a lot of time into figuring out how to make all the stuff work. But like the hardware at the time was not the greatest. I think I was using an E616. 750 like duo core chip. The software was horrible. We used flash media live encoder, Camtasia Studio and a bunch of other things

that your virtual audio cables to get shit to work. And then the data was insane. I think you were limited to like 300 to 500 kilobits per second for like a stream. So it was very, very, very, very hard to get everything working. How many concurrent viewers would you have at the time? I probably started with like 5, 6, 7. And then I grew it to like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and yeah.

And when you were at 30, 40, 50 is when it actually made sense to be doing that full time. Yeah, but I was just because I was just making so little money, carbon cleaning, yeah. And were you just playing video games at the time, or were you talking about maybe different philosophies and ideas that you have, or was it purely just like game play? It was just video games. People watched me because I was really good of trash talk.

My background before streaming was a lot of trash talk and a lot of video game playing. Like the whole reason I think why I even got turned on to stream because I had a friend recommend it to me. He's like, oh, some people do this. and me and a couple other friends would set up like Tekken or Mario Kart outside the one of the classrooms at high school and we would be like playing and screaming at each other and talking shit or whatever and he was like that was like a funny experience like having other people watch that would probably be funny too so that's basically what got me into it oh wow and then when did it start taking off to the point where it actually started changing your own personal philosophies and ideas on policy to turn you more liberal probably like three four five years three four five years I think it was once once once my son started to grow and I saw how affected his life was by my finances. That's when I think I started to change my view on things a lot. So like the first year I did streaming full time. I think I managed to make $100,000, but I didn't know anything about it full time. Yeah, but I didn't know anything about like taxes or whatever. So I wasn't paying any taxes. So my second year I had to deal with that, which was kind of brutal. But I also the situation I had with my girlfriend at the time, our relationship was very, very, very, very, very bad. So like she would live in my house. She got pregnant as we. We were breaking up.

Well, I say she got pregnant. I got her pregnant. We got pregnant. And then it's not like she did on our own. She did it. Yeah. She did. She showed up one day.

She was living at the house. I was like bouncing between all these other apartments because we couldn't live together without fighting physically with each other. So I'm like bouncing around all these apartments with these weird people I'm trying to live with while I'm also trying to stream at the same time. So and then we moved to Poland for three months to do because I was in like some gaming house or whatever. But after I got home, I'd say probably like in 2014.

My life started to get a little bit more stable. I started to make more solid, reliable money without having to move around so much. She got like a place to stay. And then when I started to make financial decisions based on my kid, right? So like which school district do I wanted to be and, you know, what opportunities I wanted to have. Then I started to see things a lot differently in terms of like how people's lives are affected by the finance of their parents. That's probably what changed you the most. And what did you and your girlfriend at the time argue with or what was the reason why you guys were arguing?

Was it like fundamental differences or was it just like petty random things where? maybe your, I don't know, you guys just weren't compatible. There's no chemistry. Depending on how deep you want to go into relationship dynamics. We would love to. Sure. We love talking about relationships. Yeah.

I think there's like two primary methods of settling disputes that people have. One is a group of people that are very conflict avoidant. One is a group of people that are very like aggressive pursuer to resolve conflict. I'm very much like an avoidant kind of person or like if I'm, if we're like in a triggered like things are bad, I just need like 12 hours to cool off and don't talk to me and let me just like go somewhere. And for whatever reason, every single person has been a very much like a pursuer kind of person. Like we've got conflict. We need to resolve this right fucking now. So usually with her, the issue would be, I don't even, we would fight over

that. It would just be really dumb shit. And then I'd want to be left alone. And then she'd want to resolve it now. And then that would escalate and escalate until I would try to like leave the house or we would end up like fighting with each other over something basically. How do you solve that? Like how do you make that dynamic work? Well, now that I'm older, the dynamic probably would have involved better communication from me and her about our issues. Yeah, setting more realistic boundaries around resolving conflict. Maybe if you explain that concept to her, that also would have been good.

No, that doesn't help. You don't think, like, or you say, I'm a conflict-in-in-a-voin-person, like, I just need 12 hours, and it doesn't matter. That wouldn't- It's like a conflict, it's like a pursuer person explaining me, well, I need to resolve this right now. Like, so, for instance, my, my, the current relationship with my wife, she's very much, like, if she's got conflict with me, she needs to resolve it right now, and I'm very much, like, an avoided person.

So one of us is, like, always losing when it comes to, to resolving conflict, right? Like, if we get into a fight over something, more often than that is because I've done something stupid. So we'll go and she'll want to resolve the issue. Can you bring up an actual example or is that too intrusive? No, I don't want to bring up to it. It's usually, it's like, it usually just like me.

I don't blame you. It's fine. It usually be hiding or lying about something. Something really stupid that I shouldn't be doing. But like, what will happen is, or not always also, she fucks up too, okay? Don't. No, but like we'll have, we'll have like an issue with something.

And if we go to resolve the kind of like, but one of the two things could happen. Either one, it has to resolve right now. So she's going to like lean into me and she's like, I need to resolve this. We need to talk about blah, blah, blah. And then that'll escalate to me being like,

okay, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, fuck you, you're stupid. Get out of here. Go back to Sweden. And then we'll fight like that. And it's just not good. And eventually maybe we'll resolve and it's whatever.

So that would be like, if she pushes too hard. If I get my way, then what'll happen is is we'll have a conflict and then I'll get 12 hours to cool off. And at the end of the 12 hours, I'll be like, oh, yeah, I was probably dumb. It's fine.

But at the end of the 12 was for her, she's thinking, like, the whole time, like he's going to break up with me, like it's over, like he hates me, like it's over, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's like, it's very hard to strike a balance there because it's either I get super triggered when we fight or she's, like, left, like, feeling, like,

super panicky and triggered for, like, 12 hours while I'm, like, chilling out. So it's really, really hard for different people. Like, obviously, all you can do is communicate. We've got, like, little strategies that we try to employ, like, even if you hate somebody at the moment, like, tell them you love them, so that we're like still chill on things,

like things like that to let us know where we're okay. But yeah, it's a lot of work to resolve that. But I don't think it like 20. I don't know if I would have been able to or if my partner at the time would have been able to because we're young and stupid. And would you consider yourself a pretty emotional person?

Like compared to other people, probably not as much. But I mean, yeah, we're all emotional in something. Yeah. Because it seems like if you're getting a new argument with someone, like it seems to me like you have a very rational, logical brain, that you'd be able to see that maybe if I say, F you know,

this type of stuff, it's not going to lead towards the direction I want this conversation going. The problem is that like ration and logic are like tools that can be emotionally aimed at like anything that you want. So like if I'm fighting with somebody, like I can be like very logical and rational, but it might be like in a really emotionally destructive way because I'm like emotionally dysregulated, right? Like I like if I get into a fight with a partner, like I might list like, well here's like seven good reasons why this relationship should end and you should get the fuck out of my face right now and everyone will be like logically consistent and like logical. But like on an emotion level like I'm being a fucking moron and what I should be saying is like let's like

think of like a couple ways we can like fix this problem so a lot of people have this like dichotomy of like you can either be logical or you can be emotional but like I view things is kind of like a building block like foundationally you've got like a very foundational like emotional vibe feeling whatever's going on down here and then your logic and reason comes unfortunately after that if you're emotionally disparate this took me a long time this took me like 30 years of my life to figure out because like I consider myself like a logic lord so it took me a long time to figure this out but you are incredibly a slave to your emotional state.

And if you don't realize that, then you're fucking yourself up in so many different ways. But yeah. I read somewhere that when you get in an argument, parts of your brain actually shut down that make it almost impossible for you to hear the other side

or reason logically. It might be. Yeah. I mean, depending on... It takes time afterwards for your brain to like start functioning properly again after something like that. Yeah, probably, yeah.

Depending, I mean, I know this like from arguing with people, depending on how you attack an argument, you can turn a person's ability to hear you completely off right away. Or you can do it in a way so you can get them to be really receptive to what you have to say. It just depends on how you approach it, yeah.

But it's a very challenging. Have you learned what the strategies are and how to implement them or no? Yeah, for sure. It just depends on the person and it depends on, yeah, there's a lot of different things. Are there any strategies that you could share? It's usually pretty specific to like a particular debate.

But like attacking, there are just, there are so many things. Yeah, there are so many different things. So like, let's say that we're arguing about like, let's say that we're arguing about like, like housing, right? And we want to argue about rent control versus like public housing versus like zoning, new housing or whatever.

If I'm really trying to pull somebody over to my side, there's a lot of things I need to keep in mind. One, reminding the other person, we have like a common goal, like, hey, we want to like have as many people as possible, right? Like, let's not lose sight of that. Whoever's right or wrong in the conversation, we have a shared goal at least. That would be one thing. A second thing is like, don't ever attack the person, attack the problem.

That's like relationship advice too, right? So never like, you're fucking, you're so stupid. Why do you think this? But more like, like, um, you're, you're so stupid. But more like showing empathy, like, I understand why you might think this might be a good idea, but have you considered this? Having grace when you're correct about things is very important.

Never like, look at this study, it shows how completely fucking wrong you are. Like, what are you thinking? But more like, Yeah, you bring one thing up to Graham. Yeah, you bring one thing up to Graham. Well, I actually found 12 sources that behind it. Yeah, I immediately go to my phone and find sources.

Yeah, phrasing things that gives the other person, like agency or empowers them is really good. Like, I understand what you think that, but you should check out like this stuff. maybe it'll change your mind on something like this is something that I just found recently right you're kind of like humbling yourself and giving them the opportunity be like oh okay yeah maybe it would right so it almost feels like it's coming from them instead of like coming from you um yeah fuck there's like it's super depends on the topic but there's so many different like little strategies like

this that you can employ um providing people a soft landing pad kind of goes with grace if you change your mind on something i'm not going to like hold it over you or judge you for it like it'll be like oh cool like oh like okay yeah you're right about this particular thing and it's like yeah like i saw your point you understand but you know maybe I think this is a little bit better rather than like okay you're right it's like yeah of course I'm right you fucking moron like you blah blah blah yeah there's really with relationships and debate and probably with like business partners and employees and employees and everything too there's just like a lot of strategies like that to be like you have to be very empathetic very soft very graceful very humble and you give the other person as much kind

of like space to like grow and think and develop as possible without being too aggressive because the problem is is there's a lot of like psychological trips in the brain As soon as somebody perceives that they're being attacked, they're no longer having a conversation. Now they're defending themselves, right? Because if I come at you and I'm like, you have this position on like abortion or something and it's so wrong and so fucking stupid, in your mind, you're not thinking like, okay, he disagrees my position. Let's hash it out. In your mind, you're like, he thinks I'm a fucking idiot.

Well, I can't lose the debate on this topic because if I am, I'm conceding that I am a fucking idiot. So now you're not fighting for the idea. You're fighting for your life at this point, okay? You can't be stupid. you're not dumb, you don't see yourself that way. So the debate becomes less about that particular position and more about you trying to salvage your integrity or maintain it. And trying to get them to figure it out for themselves

rather than injecting your own ideology into that space that you're hopefully creating by showing grace. Ideally, yeah. So be careful because in some of my debates, you can see me do this really well in other debates. I'm not doing this well at all. It just depends on the interlocutor. But these are things I try to keep in mind

when having these conversations. How do you learn how to do all this? Did you take a debate class? Like, how did you get so good? I mean, a lot of it you just learn. A lot of it is, no, you don't just learn it. A lot of it is, like, very deliberate. Like, if I have a conversation with somebody and I'll go back after and I'm trying to think

of like, I'll try to think of like, how can it come off better in this conversation? Like, I was talking with a friend earlier. I just had a really challenging abortion debate like two days ago. And in that debate, both of my opponents were, I don't want to say bad faith, but they're like cutting me off at every single answer I'm getting. And I realized like 30 minutes into the debate that like, okay, we've moved past logic. I need to figure out on a meta level. Like how am I going to manage this conversation?

Because right now it's a shit show. And from that point, there's just a ton of different strategies that you can employ. I'll try one and then I'll think back. So like I think in that one I started to get like a little bit snarky. I started to be like a little bit like playful slash assholeish or whatever. But I might look back and I might say like, okay, well, maybe if I would have like taken the high road and I'd have been super calm the whole time and chill, maybe I would have come off better. But in other debates, there are times where I've been very chill, very cordial, even when

the other person is being aggressive, and I've gone back and I've reviewed that, and I've like, you know, when I look at how I performed at that debate, when I was like, very high, roadie, I very much was a cordial person. I actually look really weak here, because the other person's laying into me and laying out their whole philosophy. I'm barely getting in any words, and I'm not, like, defending myself at all, so I just end up looking weak. In other debates, there have been times where I'm very aggressive, and then I come back, and I'm like, you know, if I would have just chilled here and given this guy more time to make mistakes and look stupid, I would have come off way better to the audience. So,

there's a there's a big balancing game it's a very complicated dance study basically yeah yeah it's deliberate that's what i'm saying it's deliberate it doesn't just like happen naturally it's like reviewing debates reviewing conversations and then varying like your approach to see like how do i think an audience receives me how do i perceive me and then reading a lot of feedback youtube comment subreddit posts four chan posts other youtube posts streamer chats like things on twitter to see like how people feel about a particular conversation why is this so important to you um why place this much time on debates and getting your thoughts across because i'm really good at it so if anybody's going to do it, it's got to be me.

Sure. No, I mean, I super enjoyed. It's really fun for me. It's like a very, it's like when you go to debate somebody, there's like seven different huge skills, like conversational, like intellectual, like research and prep, your demeanor. There's like so many different things to go into it. It's such a complicated back and forth. I do think I'm pretty good at it.

I think people recognize that. I do feel strongly about the ideas that I have and I'd like to convince more people to think in them. I make a lot of money doing it, so it's like a fun career path. And it enables and unlocks me to do so many, like, really fun things in my life. Like, if I wasn't doing streaming, I would still be on Reddit or Twitter, like, arguing with people and, like, shit talking. And, like, that's just the kind of person.

I was, like, really fun for me. Yeah. And just to finish up this chronological story of your entire life that brought you up to this table today, you were streaming. You became very successful. Justin TV turned into Twitch TV. You were doing Twitch for a while. Can you talk about your income overtime?

My income overtime was, I think I made, like, a decent amount of money. I think in my, like, first, fuck. my first like five to 10 years, I was probably making like low six figures, 100 to 200K a year maybe. So very stable. Yeah, pretty, yeah,

very stable. How are you not growing if you were continually going on Twitch? Was there a community just like subbing in and out? There are some things that like came out and then dropped off. Like in the very, very, very beginning days of Justin TV, like the ad revenue was insane. I think off of like three or four thousand viewers,

I could like make $8,000 a month in ad revenue, which at the time was like really big and really good. And then like that completely like fell off the map. Then subscribers were introduced to Twitch eventually. I made my own website to manage my own subscribers, so I started to make more money there. Yeah, it probably grew a bit over time. I don't know 100%.

It probably went from like 100K to like 300K. It probably was growing steadily. But I didn't have like any explosive growth. My growth has always been like pretty stable the whole time. And then my biggest most recent explosion, explosive growth in income has 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 have 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. Yeah. So what percentages or numbers is like YouTube versus Twitch? Or sorry, not Twitch versus Twitch versus like the kick deal versus rumble and all that stuff. So my website is where I have my own sobs and people can donate through there.

And I think on that I make about 250,000 a year, I think is what I made last year. I think around Twitter. And is that like an email thing? No, it's just you go to destiny. com, Gigi, and then you can subscribe there. You can donate there. It runs as its own completely side like chat and it goes to something 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. YouTube ad revenue is really good. I probably make around like anywhere from 40,000 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 my YouTube editor who's definitely overpaid August no I'm just kidding 45% of that's a lot yeah I do yeah all of your channels uh yeah he

gets a lot of money no when did you when did you agree to that deal a long time ago before it was making um much I mean it's like 100k a month basically the it's um yeah he does really well but um the basically the way that I saw it when I initially did it was no idea is When I initially did it, my idea was basically that I want him to be as invested in the channel growth that I am and I don't want to do anything. I don't manage anything from my YouTube. He does every thumbnail, every video, nothing. I never look at it ever. I get a check every basically month.

And it's completely satisfactory. 100%. Yeah. If I went back in time, I probably would have started at a lower rate probably. But like, I'm okay with him making a lot of money. He's made me a ton of money. He's made me like really successful. Like I'm cool that he can share in that success.

That's really awesome. Does he have a bunch of editors now? He might be hiring out other people. It's his job. his money, whatever he can do with it. So, yeah. Interesting. Okay.

And then you all, of course, you have the rumble and the kick deal. Does your editor get a cut of those deals as well? Fuck, no. He gets paid enough, okay? Don't give him any ideas. Cut that part out. That's funny. Okay, cool.

So your philosophy developed over time when you had your kids. And then obviously, when you started making more money, you saw how much of an impact that makes on a child's life. Interesting. So my guess is then you think you should probably pay more in tax or what do you believe in? This is my view on taxation. Okay.

Fuck it. No, I'm just kidding. I did leave California for a reason. No. Well, yeah. But there are certain social programs that we should advocate for in the United States

and we should have those social programs and then we should tax people accordingly. That's my view of it. So some people are like very moral and like we should pay more taxes and we should pay less taxes. Like I'm not here to punish anybody with taxes.

I don't care about that. I just, whatever social programs we have, we should fund. I'm okay paying taxes. I'm okay with a progressive tax system. Like I definitely I pay all my taxes.

But yeah, I'm never one, like, when somebody's like, should we pay more or less? I'm like, we should have the social programs we need and then we should fund them. So right now, like the rate of taxation for wealthy people is probably a little bit low. But my biggest complaint living in California was the state taxes here are really, really, really, really, really high. I think the highest in every other place except for like New York City. Yep. And I don't know where that money goes. Nobody does.

It goes to a rail system that was never built. Oh, the billion dollar rail to nowhere or whatever. Yep. Oh, and the lamps. Did you guys see the lamps? What was that? Nobody else has seen the lamps. I felt crazy.

It was like San Francisco or San Jose or L.A. or somebody. There was like $10,000 lamp installations on the street. And no one knows what they did. YouTube videos are like, this $2 million public bathroom was built in the room. And it's like a tiny little like normal public bathroom. Yeah, someone did an investigation of how this thing cost $2 million when the market value that should have been about $80,000. And they went in and they investigated and they interviewed people. who were involved that everyone was silent.

And it seems as a lot of money went to permits, developers, contracts, random things, and overpaying. So if someone gets a budget of a million dollars, they'll spend all million dollars saying, well, this concrete is 10 times more because, you know, this is what the budget is. So it seems like a lot of money wasted on that.

It's very strange because America's like the freest, most capitalist country and blah, blah, blah on earth, but we have so much like bureaucratic red tape on like construction and everything. It's like insane. We have to spend all of your money. budget if you want to get it back.

Well, it really upset me was that downtown Los Angeles they wanted to build a homeless shelter there and I forget, I don't know this specific. Isn't LA like how I've already

homeless shelter? Sorry. So they wanted to build a new one downtown Los Angeles and so someone investigated this that they had signed a lease and they've been paying

for like six years now $50,000 a month for a warehouse. They have not even started construction on it yet. They had not built it yet and apparently it had a foundation issue and they couldn't do anything

with it. Yeah, the issue But they kept paying it for years And so what it came down to was that The person who signed this Did a deal with their friend And they had a business connection To spend all the money in a lease

So that their colleague could get all the money for that Without providing anything in return Nice It's still going Well, so Usually for a lot of stuff like that What'll happen is it's like you rent something You discover there's a problem

Then you have to contact an inspector Then you have to wait for the inspector to come out And he gives the okay Then like the city comes out And then they okay it And then step one of whatever thing happens. And then another inspector comes out. And it's like, it's just such a nightmare.

But yeah, that's my big problem with L.A. is that like, the thing that really fucked my head up was anytime I travel to Europe, there are so many social services and everything available that seem to run pretty well. Like, they're not perfect. They've got their problems. But like public transit in all of Europe is fucking awesome. And then I come back to America and I'm paying, like, now I live in Florida. My tax situation is cool.

But when I live in California, I've got huge cost of living. I've got huge taxes. and a massive state tax, like, I want to say my effective tax rate, like two, like, I want to say like two or three years ago, my effect tax was like 42% or something. And I'm like,

I'm like, I'm like, I've seen routinely more than 50%. Yeah, I'm like paying like European levels of taxes here. Like, this is fucking wild. Like, why,

why, how am I paying? Like, I'm supposed to be making fun of people in Europe for paying this level of taxation. Yeah, so, yeah, that's my issue. I'll gladly pay a lot of taxes. I just want to, like,

get something for it, I guess. Like, if there's like a functional public transit in LA, maybe I'd feel differently. What's crazy with California, the short-term capital gains tax rate is something about 53%. Really? Yeah. Short-term capital gains.

Because your tax is ordinary income. Yeah. And then you have to pay state tax on top of that. And if you make over a million dollars a year, there's another 3.8 net investment tax that gets paid on top of that. Oh, so when you say short-term capital gains, you're just talking about the net added to the state on the federal. At the top income bracket. I understand. Okay.

So it's hefty. Can we talk about that Lex Friedman interview you did? Sure. How was that? Like did he just reach out via DM or something like that? Because I'm a huge Lex Friedman fan. And that, like I said, before we started rolling. You should have worn your suit today.

I should have worn my suit. Yeah, that was the first time I was actually exposed to you. And it was also, I think it might have been back to back or very close to when he posted one of the Ben Shapiro, which I also really enjoyed. I watched both yours and Ben's and I thought they were both really incredible, great perspectives. Can you talk about, like, did he just DM you? Did he email you? I had some crazy stuff going on on my stream for a while. And I think he started to show up in my stream chat after finding me through.

He was watching you. Yeah, after finding me through another streamer. Yeah, that was very, because we'll be, like, talking on chat about, like, is it moral to have, like, incestuous relations with twin brothers? And then, like, Lex Friedman will, like, donate, like, 10 bucks. I don't know what I walked into. And I'm like, just leave. So you know it was Lex, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, because he watches a lot of streams sometimes, I guess, like, he spends time doing things, yeah. Interesting. So then he just, he was a fan of you. He started the end of the other. He originally, he was a fan of another streamer that was, like, a mutual friend of ours, kind of. And then he found me through that streamer. And then he started watching me, and then he invited me out eventually, yeah. And how was that?

Was it just a real experience? Yeah, it was cool. He seems like a really, I'll almost say naive is like maybe a negative way. But for the most of a way, he's like a really genuinely friendly, fun guy who just like wants the best for everybody, you know? So like naive in the best way, I guess, yeah. Interesting. So I remember there was one thing that really stuck out to me from this interview is you quoted your mom and she said something like, Stevie, don't be so open. Mind that your brain falls out.

And then Lex immediately like slam the band hammer down. He was like, I could not disagree with that anymore. Could you explain what exactly that means and why you believe it? So, oh God, there's like a Socrates quote. I'm living in quotes right now where it's like it takes the mind of an intelligent man to entertain an idea without accepting it or something. So something that I work really hard on in life is I like to be able to look at a lot of different perspectives without losing myself.

And it seems like people typically go one of two ways. Either you're very open to everything, but then basically you repeat whatever the last thing was told to you. So like I would have a critique with Joe Rogan that I feel like you kind of does this where anybody that comes on he's kind of like oh okay i see this is kind of cool and it doesn't really challenge as much or you have people that are dogmatic and can't hear any other idea like everything else is stupid wrong dumb and i'm not going to like even entertain the idea um something i hope i can do or that i like to be able to do is i have an open enough mind that i'll entertain other

people's ideas i'll try to understand other people's perspectives but i very firmly have like my own beliefs and thoughts that i believe in and i'm not going to change my mind just because like this thing sounds interesting i guess so um don't ever have your mind so open that your brain falls out just means don't let the last person that talked your ear off like convinced you of like every single new thing that they decided to say basically what do you think about core principles and then allowing your core principles to be changed do you think that that's a good idea or do you think that those corporate core principles that you identify with are some of the most uh i would say distinctive features of who you are yeah core principles are distinctive and really important the only thing they

should change core features is if if your life is constantly on like a bad trajectory or there's some incongruence with where you want to be and where you are and that seems to be getting messed up over and over and over again, then it might be time to go back and reconsider some core principles. But yeah, that's going to be super individualized to the person on the event. But yeah, but I would say anytime you're having a lot of issues over and over and over and over again and nothing seems to be working or changing, then it might be time to like go back to the drawing board and refigue like, okay, like something is wrong fundamentally. Like I need to figure out like what's going on.

And can we talk about your relationship? Sure. Are you cool with that? So Graham, I don't know if you know this, but he's in a open relationship, right? With your wife. So you guys are able to see other people. how did you come to that conclusion? Okay.

My last relationship I cheated. You cheated? Yeah. Not really that surprising. I'm sorry. Why? Because I'm horny and fucking dumb and it's whatever. What I realized after that relationship was like,

I am just never going to date again because I'm too cumber brained and I can't. The idea of like being with one person for the rest of the rest, I just can't. I can't ever do it. It's never going to work. It's never going to happen. And rather than subject somebody else to the horrors of dating me and being cheated on, I mean, I'm just going to do my own thing on my own, fuck it. So for a while, I did that.

And eventually, Molina, my wife, she reached out to me via Instagram, and we kind of started floating a little bit. And I was going through some weird stuff in California. And then I had, like, a job opportunity pop up with, like, a sponsor camera system. And I was like, oh, she's in New Zealand. I've got a few friends in New Zealand. I'm going to go to New Zealand, hang out with her for a bit, talk to other people. And when I went down to New Zealand, she has a lifestyle where she's, like, polyamorous.

And then she describes this to me. And I never even considered it before. And I'm like, okay, this sounds kind of cool. And then eventually we start talking when we start dating. And from the outset, basically, we've had that style of relationship because I guess she was involved in it before. And then once I found out about it, this is like a dream for me because ideally it means that I can like work on my stuff, do my shit. And my partner doesn't see me as like their sole source of like entertainment or whatever they need because they have the opportunity to go to other things. And then if I want to, I can go to other things.

It should be okay. But why get married? You're married to her? Yeah. Why get married in that sort of situation? Because she's Swedish. So, no, because I want to live with it. Yeah, yeah.

Because without getting married, you can only seem like three months out of the year. Got it. Okay. How does it, I don't get how it works. I don't get how. This, how fundamental do you want the conversation to be? How does it, could you explain that? No, I don't get how either side could not get jealous, possessive,

wanting that person all to themselves. It seems so foreign to me that she, could be off doing something and I'm here, my mind could just not process it as would, like, I can't do anything, you know? Sure. To me, I just, I couldn't. I think there's probably some, I think there's some, like, natural level of jealousy that exists for literally every single type of interaction.

Like, even in monogamous relationships, somebody might get jealous if they're significant others, like, has a close friend of the opposite sex or, like, is saying good things about somebody else like that that you view yourself as a competition to. that if they do things with friends, that you wanted to be including, like, there's a lot of, like, places in life

where jealousy and stuff can pop up. Obviously, your partner getting railed is probably one of the more prone to jealous environments that can happen. I guess the way that I view it is, there are certain things in life

that I really want to be able to do and being able to, like, hook up with other people and it's, like, really fun for me. But I also feel, like, very secure in who I am and what I offer and what I can offer to other people.

And I don't think that my partner hooking up with other person is going to make them not like me because I'm an awesome person. So if they want to go and explore stuff like that, as long as I have the opportunity to as well. And like, we know we both love each other. For me, it's just not the big of a deal.

Does it ever concern you that you could potentially not be that way for the rest of your life? And you've said this as the foundation of your relationship with her? This is going to sound very brutal, but the, um, it's going to be the most, um, Chicago school of economics answer I ever give. Uh, if at any point in time, I'm not like a good enough partner for my person, the last thing I would want is some monogamous bound, like keeping them, like locked to me. Like, that's how I view it, basically. So if my partner ends up running into somebody

and they treat her better, they make her happier, she has more fun with them and all that. And she's like, listen, like, I think I'm going to leave her this person. I mean, fuck, you probably should. You would be very matter of fact about it. Yeah, I mean, like, at that point, core principles, at that point, I would have to evaluate. Like, okay, here's my wife.

I love her a lot. She's met another person who provides all these things that I don't provide. So then at that point, I have to make a decision. Do I want to change myself enough to provide those things? Or do I like what I provide and what I can get? And then I go find somebody that's more like synergistic with that, basically. Would you prefer if she be monogical?

Like all things to consider just at the situation's exactly the same. You could still do whatever you want, but she's monogamous would you prefer that? No, why? So, okay, I'm bringing with a lot of norms here. I'm sorry. Ever since I was in high school, I have a very aggressive personality. I really like strong characters. I really like strong character in women like my first wife like was very much like we would argue and fight all the time for fun, but like we very much like I need people to like call me out of my bullet. I really like I need people to like call me out of my bullet. I. shit. It's like be like stirred and everything. Um, if I have like a partnership with another person, like a wife or a girlfriend or whatever, like in my eyes, it has to be somewhat equal. Like, if I was out sleeping with people and my wife for whatever reason didn't want to or never did or she was monogamous, like I would view that as her not having any self-respect because she,

I'm basically getting a really big ask from her for like some sexual loyalty and then she's letting me go out and do whatever I want. And at that, I'm like, why would you ever agree to that unless I've got like so much leverage over you or you're like so much beneath me? that I have the ability to do that. Like, that's how I view it. I understand everybody I view it, that's how I view it. What if it wasn't sexual loyalty,

but it was more so, she just didn't have any desire for anyone other than you. Oh, I mean, if she didn't want to, then I wouldn't care. But it doesn't make a difference someone to me. But if she didn't want to,

I'd probably would give it. The only thing that logistically, that probably wouldn't work out, though, because if I'm out, like, hooking up with other people and seeing other people, and she's just like at home, it's like, what the fuck is happening?

Like, my husband should be hanging out with me, and he's like out, you know, hang out with random chicks like, fuck me, you know? So how do you draw those boundaries? Do you just say, hey, we have open discourse over who you're with, who I'm with, and of course we have this time that we reserve for each other? It's very difficult, and we're still kind of working that out for a variety of reasons, but the idealized form of our relationship is usually we both have other people that we like to see,

and if we're traveling. Consistent people? Ideally, not always, but ideally sometimes. But basically, if somebody's going to go hook up with somebody or travel to see somebody, then the other person is doing it at the same time. That's like the ideal, so that everybody kind of has something to do at the same time. So you're like, hey, honey, I'll be back at a few hours. You're going there. You're going back in 20 minutes.

Well, I think we usually, the goal would be to, like, plan things out, like, in advance, kind of. So, like, if she's going to travel to, like, New York to go do a Photoshop and she's got, like, a friend up there or whatever, then I know that, like, a month in advance, maybe I'll plan to, like, hook up with somebody in Miami while I'm there, something like that, right? That's, I don't, I can't wrap my point. Okay. So, as a person who has only been monogamous and plans to only be monogamous, monogamous, for the rest of my life, just based off of who I know I am.

When I look at a relationship like this, I cannot help but feel, and I'm not being judgmental towards you in any capacity. All the best comments start off with that. Go ahead. No disrespect. That there seems to be less love in a relationship that is like that. Can you dismantle that argument with facts and logic?

Not at all. There's a lot of these things are very emotionally driven. I understand the argument that like, if we're in love with each other, you should only have eyes for me. and we only, you know, make love with each other because that's a special thing in a relationship. I understand that argument. If I were to try to attack that as brutally as I could on the other end, and if I were to come at it from like, I'm Polly and I don't understand some monogamous people.

What I would probably say is that like for me, if my wife and I lost our genitalia, we would still have the exact same amount of love for each other. I don't define the love that I have for people or especially my wife by the fact that we have sex or some sexual exclusivity has no bearing whatsoever on my feeling for her. Like there are reasons why I love her. There are reasons why I like to spend time with her and do things with her and travel with her and all these things. And these things exist wholly independently from the sexual component. But sex is important in love. Yeah, for sure. Because I know that.

But it's not like, it's not, here's the thing. Right now I can fuck any person that I can fuck. But the special moments that I share with, like, friends or my wife are moments I can only share with her. I have a lot of sex, a lot of people, but I can't have the same type of time that I spend by my wife with any other person. That's just not possible. So, like, that's the thing for me that defines the relationship. There's a lot of people that I've had sexual experiences with. There's not a lot of people that I've had like really loving, vulnerable,

caring, kind, nurturing moments with. How do you feel like your relationship affects your son seeing this? Man, I don't know. He's going to be, he's going to be all sorts of fucked up when he gets old enough. The policy that I have with my kid is a policy that I've always had for myself. I am very, very, very open and very honest about basically everything. Like, even when he's six, if he asks me a question for like, how does a car work?

Like, I'll try to describe everything I can. I never want to say like, oh, like, you'll know when you're older, oh, I just want to blah, blah, blah. I try to keep things age appropriate. But, like, because I've been, like, so open for so long, I think that generally, like, because me and his mom are split, he's got his household with his mom, and he's got his whole family, his mom's side, his grandma, grandpa, and everything over there.

And then he's got me, and then he's got me, and then I fly into town or when he comes to Miami, he visits me, and then he knows that, like, he knows we're married, he knows my girlfriend, and that we hang out. But because we've been split the entire time, I don't think he had to undergo that schism of, like, why aren't mom and dad together anymore? And I don't understand why there's all these other people and blah, blah, blah, blah. that's just kind of like what he's always known as the norm.

And for all the faults that me and Rachel, his mom had in our relationship, she does an amazing job being a mom and working with me in terms of like working with my son. Like we don't have like a formal custody agreement. We have a lot of conversations about like if he's having certain problems that are related to like boy things, like she'll talk to me and she'll talk to me and she'll talk to me and she's like, hey, can you have this conversation with him about like viewing this on the computer, talking to people this way or blah, blah, blah. So she does a really good job at like keeping me in the loop and that I do a good job at communicating with her about that.

so yeah. Does she disagree with your choices now in terms of having an open marriage? Worrying about like, hey, I don't believe in this from my son. No, but we've never had that conversation. I imagine he'll just choose. I don't think that we'll try to force. I guess I've never had that conversation with her before I don't think she cares She thinks I'm a little crazy I think she's a little crazy But like we live our lifestyles

But like I don't know if I I would never like in part on my son Like hey listen You want to grow up and be a high value man And juggle five women But I'm not gonna say anything like that Like I figure he'll discover and explore that on someone But he's also like 12

So I feel like that's about the age right You decide if you're polyamorous I don't know When you're figuring yourself out And you know Listen if you're a 12 year old guy And you can manage multiple relationships And what is that fucking six seventh grade

Go for it okay But you know for it okay But No, I imagine there's like other stuff he's got going on developmentally that he's probably not fixated on, you know, joining the Mormon church and being polygamous or something yet. Sure. But, yeah, I mean, I imagine when the conversations come up in the future, we'll just talk about it. And what about when you meet somebody else? Are you just up front and say, hey, I have an open marriage?

Or if they reach out to you, they already know the situation? I try, um, I try at this stage in my left to be, I try to be up front with everybody as possible. Because when you start, like, um, lying about certain things or obfuscating things or masking things, then shit can get very, very, very complicated very quickly. So, yeah, like, Malina's not like my Instagram. We, like, talk publicly about each other. It's not like, no, there's no secret there that we're married or anything. So I try to be, like, pretty open about all that. Graham and I contend over who we have on the podcast quite often.

And I know that you've at some point collaborated with Nick Fuentes, who's a very controversial person. Now, I want to know what your stance is on bringing certain people onto your platform and giving them exposure, albeit you're, you know, contending with them and disagreeing with them and maybe raising really good points that go against with them. they're saying, what do you think about giving them, I would say, another, like a microphone? It's a very, very, very challenging balancing act, but I'll tend to hear out most people with kind of like that open mind philosophy, like come in, talk to me, and then I'm going to try to tell you why I think you're wrong what being as empathetic or understanding as possible. The something unique that I provide that I think is really important to some of these alternative

communities is I'm like the only person that is progressive that like isn't fucking unhinged. And I think it's really good sometimes to show people like, hey, you can be pro-LGB. you can have like blue hair being like weird relationships or whatever but i can be like a funny cool charismatic like we can have fun and chill and i can be like understanding of you and not be like super judgmental or try to canceling it and be horrible for a lot of people i think that seeing somebody like that on my side is really important because representation for progressives is absolutely fucking dog shit right now on the internet so to some extent when i'm platforming other people that's a thing that i'm keeping in mind um there's a lot of those communities that i've interacted with who

i'm like the first positive representation of like a left-leaning person they've ever seen that's one thing my second thing is if I am platforming something, buddy like that, I'm trying to make sure that everybody understands where I'm at. Like, I'm not just having the person on to, like, laugh and giggle and, like, play games. Like, generally, like with fun says,

it was a lot of debating, a lot of arguing over different points. So hopefully, one, I can demonstrate to his audience that there are at least some arguments on the other side. And then, two, my audience can see the arguments I'm having and then they've got, like, more tools to, like, deal with that type of stuff in the future. One thing I don't agree with is I don't like bearing your head in the sand

and pretending that some people aren't saying certain things. You should be able to deal with a lot of, lot of those arguments without being like, oh my God, my whole audience suddenly turned into Nazis, because I think we've gone down that road so far that, and I think platforms are finally starting to reverse course. We got to this ridiculous world where, like, half the country is believing in things that you can't talk about on any social media platform, can't talk about vaccine skepticism, can't talk about election being stolen, can't talk about, like, COVID-19 theories or whatever. I personally, I think these things are harmful ideas. I think they're bad, but

If half the country believes in them, how are we not having conversations about them? How is nobody allowed to talk about it? I think the problem is the algorithm, where once you get on one of those topics, the algorithm is so good that it just recommends more and more and more and more and they pile on top of each other, and then you get more and more and more extreme because those are what's getting clicks. That's what's keeping people on the platforms. It's kind of easy to chop it off right there. Yeah, but I mean, the chopping of the sword should be on the side of the people arguing against it, right?

Like if people are getting lost down like certain algorithms, it happens on the left and the right where people get lost down certain algorithms, people on the left. left need to do a better job at providing better arguments in like a more entertaining way. Because I feel like people on the left are so like dogmatic and then they're so like condescending in their approach where it's like you either believe me or you're an immoral bigot and that's all I'm going to say to you. And then on the right like all of their figures are like highly entertaining, right? The tates are very entertaining. Alex Jones is very entertaining. Like you've got like all these figures that and I think they spread harmful ideas

but like fuck I'm not going to lie and say they're not funny as how well they're doing it. They're not like super entertaining. And then on our side we just have like a bunch of like people that are basically like condescending and patronizing to you and it's like fuck like it's just not a good look well that's a great point yeah the way the foundational view that i have is essentially is that like we've like done like one of the most dangerous things in all of human history is we've said that like the most educated man in all of society has the exact same vote as like a homeless dude both of their opinions count for one vote in one election and if we're going to give citizens the ability to go down and equal to every other citizen decide to vote on a leader that they want if we're going to

and trust the power into the people to run, essentially choose like our elected officials, how you not have not trust them to talk about like COVID-19? That's insane to me. Yeah, I don't disagree with you. So what are your thoughts then on the Rogan and, is it Peter Hotez? Yeah. Debate, what do you think about that? I don't know if you have you heard about that, Graham?

I'm not familiar. So Rogan had on RFK Jr. Yes. Recently. And he was bringing up skepticism towards the vaccine and vaccine mandates and stuff like that. And then Peter Hotez skepticism. Right, skepticism or denying or whatever maybe, yeah.

Peter Hote, I'm not super familiar with the story. Peter Hotez goes and he tweets him basically saying like, oh, like why are you spreading all this? I don't know. I think it saw some of that on. Misinformation or disinformation or whatever. Yeah. And then Rogan said, I would love to facilitate a debate between you two.

And then Rogan said, I'll donate $100,000 if I can facilitate this debate on my podcast. And then Hotez said, oh, Rogan, that's what you spend on a weekend hunting with your boys. Like, I know with the Spotify deal with this. you have a bunch of money, so 50 million is the dollar amount that I'm willing to actually agree to, which is absurd. And then basically everyone's now pitching in. So you have like Twitter accounts that are like verified checkmark people like, I don't know, maybe they're not even that credible.

I think it was Mark Cuban who threw in like $100,000 or something. No, Mark Cuban is like, Rogan, why would you have a platform? You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, why would you ever platform? Mark Cuban came out with a good-ass message. Yeah, he was like mad at Joe Rogan. Hell yeah. And of course, RFK Jr., because he's like very pro-vaccine mandate and stuff like that.

So anyways, this whole debate happening, everyone's trying to raise funding to have this debate. What do you think about that? This is a very big frustration that I have. When I have to argue against a lot of these people, I have spent a lot of time reading research, reading studies, spending time on Wikipedia, figuring out, like, I have to learn so much shit because it's not my area of expertise, right? And all this research that I'm doing, like, all this, every time, like, a new conspiracy

theory comes out, like, I have to, like, do more reading and more research to get, like, a handle on, like, immunology viruses, like, all this shit. I wish that people in the academic world spent a little bit more time on public outreach because I don't think that like the job should be left to people like me to do it. All of my ability and bonuses and stats in life are on this kind of like rhetorical and argumentative side and I'm pretty smart so I can do the research too. But God damn, like rather than me who's really good at debate trying to research my way up there, why not take a guy that's really, really well research and then have him just like

practice a little bit in terms of debate or conversation. I've seen the hotelist guy talk before and I don't think he would be the a good choice for that R of K debate. He seems pretty knowledgeable, but he doesn't handle himself very well on conversations. So I wish that more academics would practice that outreach. Because at the end of the day, if whatever you're studying in academia, you know, dies on the walls of your classroom, what's the point of anything you're doing? You might believe all of this and can prove all of it, but nobody in society does.

What value do you have to anybody? Yeah, that's very frustrated to me. So you think the debate should happen? I think the debate should happen, but you need to find academics who are warm. You think it shouldn't be hotels. I don't, based on, I've only seen a little. I'm watching like 30 minutes more arguing. Based on a little bit I've seen,

he doesn't seem like the kind of guy that can aggressively handle himself in a competition situation. A lot of the times when you debate conservatives, I've noticed that you debate them very aggressively. Do you think that it would work in your favor if the end goal is to actually convert conservatives to having more liberal perspective

would be to debate more compassionately, like you said, how, you know, if you slander someone or you morally grants in on them or you call them a bigot, that's not the best way of converting people towards your ideology. Do you think if you went into it with more compassion,

that it would actually yield better results? Yeah, I think so. It's funny that you ask me that question because the research must have been on relatively older videos because my recent approach has been like very, very, very compassionate. Usually the pushback I get from my audience or other people's and I'm way too nice to conservatives. Like a lot of people call me like a Nazi or a fascist or whatever just because I'm, I like try to be pretty empathetic on understanding when I'm arguing with conservatives. And I tend to do a pretty good job at that.

But my relationship with people on the left is so adversarial that like a lot of people like, oh, you have no charity people on the left. You're so nice to conservatives and blah, blah, blah. Why do people on the left hate you? there's something called the big oh another bias that cognitive bias something called the bigotry of small differences if you're arguing with somebody that is ideologically very different than you, there's not much they can say to actually like hurt or upset you. Like if I'm talking to a conservative and they say like, oh, like you support the gay agenda and you're blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, okay, maybe. But if I'm disagreeing with a person in the left, their insults are like, oh, you're racist, you're homophobic, you're bigoted, and it's like, no.

You feel a lot more strongly attacked by insults that are coming from people that are more ideologically similar to you because there's, you don't see yourself as the insults that are. Whereas like for a conservative, I can understand a conservative saying that like, oh, you're like a cuck, SJW, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, to you, I probably am. But like when a person allowed is saying, like, you're a horrible racist person that is like filled with hatred, it's like, I'm absolutely not. So I think for people that are more ideologically similar to you, you're more likely to fight with them.

I think this comes to conservatives and people on the left. And what was it that helped you pivot from being more aggressive towards your adversaries to a more compassionate? I think just strategy analysis over time. Like when I, in 2016, when I started debating, my whole kind of like schick was that I was like the aggressive leftist debater. that like no other person left was willing to do that. But just like over time as I talk to people,

as I communicate with people as I learn and understand more about people, I start to realize that like if I change somebody's mind, to change somebody's mind, I have to understand where they're coming from. Otherwise, it's basically like, I can come into your audience and I can just basically shit on you and attack you so hard that like some members of the audience think you did so bad that they kind of want to like abandon you.

Or I can step in and be like, listen, I know you're coming from. Like, let's talk about this or this. And that seems to be a more effective strategy overall to getting people. Do you feel like your blue hair helps or hurts you? that's a really hard one. I like to have a, I like to have a wide scope in terms of like what I present as and what I'm capable of.

So in some ways it hurts me because it puts me immediately on kind of like a back foot because like, oh, you're a blue haired, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then like it's also funny to come on and be the blue haired guy, but like the other people are the ones like screaming and losing their mind. And I'm like trying to be like rational, reasonable, whatever. So there's like a, there's a big like dissonance when somebody sees me and they're like, oh, this guy's probably going to come up and scream about how we're all racist or whatever. But then, like, I'll come on and make edgy jokes and, like, be chill or whatever. And so I think it helps a little bit, yeah. I feel like a lot of people on the right could completely just ignore you. dismiss you, yeah.

Because they see, like, the beard or whatever. They see just the destiny, like your own merch on your chest. And then you have a beard. The beard. You know Jesus had a beard, right? All right. Can we cut that? The beard?

I guess we could. The beard is fine. Okay. Okay. The blue hair. The blue hair, maybe, like, you know, the beard is grimmed pretty well. Okay. I'm not, I'm going to give up on this one.

I'm gonna accept them piercing. No, that's good. Yeah, go ahead. But you know what I mean? Like, yeah, no, I understand.

If you presented yourself in a very professional way, right, rather than what a lot of people view the liberals as, do you think that it could help convert also more people from the right? And it's also something different.

It differentiates you. I feel like from just the stereotype that a lot of the conservative see. And then that would be enough of a shocker to hopefully give them some space in their brain where you can help them fill that with something. There's like a, yeah,

there's a very delicate, balancing act between like how much do I want to I don't want to say compromise like how much do I want to change my a demeanor about me to appeal to somebody else versus what ground do I want to fight over and that's just like a subjective feeling like every time um like I can either say like I'm going to dress in a suit and tie be very professional go talk to you um because I don't even want to try to convince you about appearance or anything or I can say actually appearance is one of the grounds that I do want to fight on I do want to convince you of that I should be able to talk to you you should be able to hear me and as long as I'm making good arguments and I'm having fun

and everybody's like being chill or whatever, even though I look a certain way, it shouldn't be a bother to you. And hopefully that like moves you a bit, like it moves the needle a bit on like the appearance thing. But at the end of the day, just comes down to ultimate like, what do you want to fight over, you know? See, I feel like your appearance helps you with personal branding and online marketing. It absolutely does for that. Because now so many people are like, oh my God, you're the blue-haired guy on TikTok. Yeah. Exactly.

I've seen some of your interviews on whatever stands out. Yeah. The blue hair. But I feel like when debating with certain people, they might dismiss you. a little bit too quickly because of that. Maybe. Yeah. Why do you go on whatever?

I'm really good at going into other environments and like synergizing really well with, especially in hostile environments. So I like going on whatever because their audience is like primed to hate me. But I can still go on, have a good time, get a whole new audience to view me in a positive light. And then I like win fans in favor. And it's a usually fun time. Why do they hate you? Because we're ideologically completely different.

Like I hate almost every single thing red pill people stand for. And they all tend to be like more like conservative. rid of her anti-establishment and views, so I'm like the exact opposite to. What are the biggest things you guys clash on, though? Well, the last time I was there two days ago was a debate on abortion, so that was a, but it was just me versus another set of people. Other times, so like red pill stuff, basically everything. My view of like red pill is basically like red pillers hate women and then they try to tell you

all the ways you could fuck them over and that's like the entirety of like the red pill ideology. That's what it feels like to me. That's not like the best steel mad version of it, but that's not how they frame it. Huh? That's not how they frame it is through. No, of course not. The way that they frame it is through.

Working on yourself. Yeah. It's male empowerment to put yourself in an area where you have so much success and power that you're able to attract and achieve whatever you want with whatever woman you want, essentially. So what is your advice for a young, single guy out there? If he wants to improve himself, he wants to get better at dating. Oh, it's such a complicated question. This is like, it's going to be, this advice is going to be so broad.

It's worthless. But like, my advice is you need to find warm spaces where you can have friendships and conversations with women. That is the most important thing you can do. If you have no women in your life at all, and you're going to start trying to pick one up on, like, Tinder or pick one up publicly, you don't even know how to talk to a woman. Like, start with warm spaces where you can make friends with women, learn how to talk and not be fucking scared or afraid or whatever. And then, like, even you meet women through women and you meet women in spaces with women. Like from there, you can kind of start to build out, you know, like, yeah, I guess like you're eventually hopefully to get to dating or whatever.

You can talk about, like, other things. People are, like, talk about, like, money and looks and all that shit. But I mean, like, there's plenty of guys that fuck that look really bad and don't have any money Because they just like they put effort into it and they try to do it and there's plenty of guys with money that look really good That fuck way less than people think so Yeah What do you think of what is a woman? I thought it was a really well done film I was very convincing and I watched the whole thing? Yeah, and what did you think about Elon Musk? Pending it as a tweet saying every parent should watch this

This screen is the most cringe person in the fucking universe You don't think that every parent should watch it no Why not? What would you think? What would you? did you disagree with of the documentary what is it one the well i disagree with the whole point of the film obviously um i think that the funny thing is that i think that in a very roundabout way if you engage with it like intellectually the film makes a really good point but i think it makes the point in the opposite way that it thinks it does but i think if you just like watch it normally you're going to come away thinking like oh obviously a woman is like an adult human female wife like matt walsh's

wife says in the end or whatever. Without getting all this cringe, like, theory of language stuff, on a very, very, very basic level, language is very, very, very complicated. The way that we use words is very complicated. I've argued with a friend for like two days about what the word base means, okay? Language is very, very, very complicated.

The way that I view language is typically, when you say one word, as soon as you say that word, there's a bunch of peripheral things that kind of, like, light up next to that word. And you can kind of, like, move through these peripheral things, but to define a word exactly is very challenging. So like, for example, we can take something very, very, very basic, like a chair. When I say chair, a whole bunch of things come to mind immediately.

Maybe the color brown, maybe wood, maybe four legs, maybe a back. There's a whole bunch of things. But if I try to say like exactly what is a chair, any and all of these things could theoretically be up for debate, right? Like is a beanbag chair a chair a chair? Is a chair with three legs a chair obviously? What about a chair with no back? What's it between a chair and a table? like that becomes, like for instance, if I say chair and I say table,

there's a lot of the same concepts that led up, right? So broadly speaking, that's how we view language, I think. And that's not a basic concept. So when a conservative walks in and like, what is a woman? Like there's like some concrete definitive answer. Gender is very, very, very complicated. And I think that the best answer on the show was actually given by Jordan Peterson.

Because when Matt Walsh asked him, what is a woman, Jordan Peterson's answer is relatively insightful. Like, I think he eventually, he ends up, he says things like, well, maybe you'd have a better chance looking at temperament than like genitals

or temperament rather than gender. And I think at the very end, he says, I don't even know if he knows as insightful as it was when he said it. I think he said, if you want to know what a woman is,

why don't you go out and marry one and find out or something, which is actually how we do explore language. You go out into the world, you associate concerts with things and that's how it goes. So in that sense, sorry,

this is a big ramble. Like, the film is interesting and that like Jordan Peterson does actually give way more nuanced responses than I would have thought But Matt Walsh just like nods his head and then at the end his wife gives like the best answer.

But I just, I hate the topic because it brushes over so many really complicated aspects of how language and ontology and categories are used and constructed and how they exist just to try to like own trans people, which I think is really dumb. I think you can be like pro or against trans people, but like at the very least like treat like language with the due respect it has. Yeah, that was a yeah. It's a good answer. Yeah, I actually think it makes a lot of sense. What do you think about Jordan Peterson? Jordan Peterson is very smart and insightful when he talks about psychology And he's very fucking stupid when he talks about anything besides psychology

So when he's talking about like politics history Social problems I just like it's the worst thing ever When he talks about psychology I think he's generally pretty insightful But he doesn't seem to do that as much anymore He seems like he's on the politics side He roots a lot of his political beliefs in psychology Maybe Like he relates everything back to psychology

Yeah he tries to but like it's hard to stretch Yeah I don't know listening to talk about like the, geez, like he's even against, like, I think like adults doing like trans surgery. Didn't he come out against, um, Elliot Page, I think. Yeah. Like he's an adult. Right. Yeah, I don't know.

Jordan Peterson Apollies is very sad. It's like listening to Elon Musk talk about anything besides like, I guess like aeronautics or startups or business or whatever. Like when Elon Musk wants to talk about like AI and politics and shit and it's like, I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about. I don't know why you think you should be talking about this, but, you know. But do you have any concerns about what Matt Walsh was bringing up in the documentary of like how we're, making it, like putting it in public school systems, the books that are being shown to children that are kind of not promoting, but kind of like, I mean, in a sense, showing them something that maybe like most parents wouldn't want their child to be seeing at a public school.

I think it's a really complicated question. I think you need a lot of data to figure it out. I think that trans stuff needs to be handled very delicately in a research medical setting and in a social setting. And I don't think either side wants to handle it very delicately right now. Like the left is like way too overbearing with how they push it. and they seem to refuse the acknowledgement that any amount of people

could just be like non-binary or whatever because they're friends are which is probably the case, especially in college. And then people on the right are like, I don't even know if they think trans people exist anymore or they just want to ban it completely or at least for all children.

I think, I hate giving us like this, like both sides see to come together in the middle. It's not so much that. It's like what people, the problem is like politically, especially on LGBT stuff, people always define themselves as like the reaction to the other side.

It's like on the left, a long time, like, conservatives, like, we didn't want gay marriage, you know, like, stop all this shit or whatever. And so conservatives were very anti-LGBT everything. And then progressive start to win a little bit. It's like, okay, well, you guys are anti-everything. We're going to be, like, pushing this as hard as possible. And so, like, now, you know, like, even kids should have exes or transcriminal. And then conservatives have like, okay, well, now nobody should have. Like, this is horrible with a corrupted society. You know, Michael Knowles, like, transgenderism is a new religion that needs to go away. And, like, everybody's just, like,

triggering the fuck out of each other and not actually trying to figure out, like, what is, like, the most data-driven, acceptable answer that we should have? Can we accurately identify a kid as who's trans? If we can, we should probably give a medication for it. If we can't, we should probably wait until they're a little bit older. That should be like a pretty simple question. But why do you think that the people are so fed up with, or not fed up, but like focused on the action of debate and being right versus actually trying to solve the problem? Do you think that these people think that what they're doing is right?

Or do you think that they're doing is right? So you think that they think they're acting in good faith? Yeah, but the problem is generally people are, people fight from ideological platforms and the individual policy. issues are just like vectors for them to spread their ideology like that's literally it but they identify with like a whole thing so they can never change any of those individual opinions like for instance somebody tells me that he's an Andrew Tate fan I also know that 99% likely he's anti-vax 99% likely he thinks that the prior election was stolen 99% likely he thinks that like bill gates in the world economic foreman claus Schwab are trying to control shit probably doesn't think

climate change anthropomorphic climate change is real probably supports Donald Trump like I know all these beliefs on a person I can't change their mind on any of those beliefs because they're bought into an entire system that mandates strict adherence to every single one of those things. And to be fair, it's similar on the left too with like a collection of beliefs as well. But like, so when any particular issue comes up, like I need to find out like if I talk to somebody for instance and I'm like, oh, like I think that like I think we should mandate vaccines for children in school. Like for a person that's really roped into that echo chamber to that epistemic bubble, that statement that I just made, that's an attack on their entire ideology. everything is tied to everything else. There is no way that they can change their mind in one thing

because it's like a ball of yarn. If you unravel even a little bit of it, it'll all come apart completely because everything relies on everything else. The vaccine has to be corrupt because Fauci and the FD.A. are absolutely bought off because the entire establishment is completely rigged

and that's why the election was absolutely stolen for Donald Trump. And that's why the world economic form and all the people that hate them publicly and on the world stage are all against them because they all bonded, all of it is like tied together. And if one thing comes undone, then everything falls apart. So.

So do you think that a big problem nowadays is that people identify with their perspectives or ideologies or belief systems? That they take that in as a part of their identity. And as soon as the, like it starts being attacked in any shape, form, like they just completely implode. Yeah. And the groups have gotten so big because of the internet too. Like my guess is going to be it's probably okay to have these ideological divisions and groups. If they're happening at like really small levels, that's probably okay. But when they start to encompass like hundreds of millions of people, then they become so.

broad and they encompass so many different ideas and beliefs that it becomes impossible to it's just not healthy for society at that stage i think that's really interesting makes sense so what are you i mean i guess i can figure out assume your your thoughts on andrew tate uh he's very funny i feel like i have a lot of fun chatting with him um to chat with him absolutely yeah um i also think he's a sex trafficker absolutely unless he's lied about the things that he said if everything he said is true on his youtube videos and everything, then, um, but then he's also said that what he said he was exaggerating and it's not true. Um, well, he said that after he's gotten, he's contradicted after he's

gotten investigated and everything. But like, he's laid out very specific instructions on how to traffic women, how to lure women in, how to cheat on their taxes, how to get them to work for you. Are they proven? No, no, no, no, sorry, proven to be, uh, like good methods of doing that. Yeah, he gives, he, it's like standard pimping 101. Like everything he says, like, very, very standard. Like, he even uses some of the terminology. Like, he'll talk about like, bringing a new woman, he'll bring in another woman that he's been fucking for a long time, his bottom bitch, he says these terms. He'll get that woman to convince the new woman to do like, kind of like sex work

without him actually saying anything so that those two will go off and he'll have his bottom bitch, convince her to get into the trap, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like he, using these terms, using these words, he's explains all of this. Yeah. And then he's even talked about like, oh, yeah, like, when I'm doing taxes with these women, I'm supposed to pay them. I think he says 50-50. I think he might say 50-50, but then he says, but he'll still like 20% on the taxes

because women are too stupid in these trades to do taxes. And sometimes if the woman says like, well, hold on, how much are I paying? He'll, like, print out some fake tax firms and give it to them. And they'll like, oh, okay, I trust you. And he'll, like, have him sign fake shit and do it. Like, he's talked in detail, all of that. Now, it could all just be fake and he's, like, lying and exaggerating it all. But if it is true, it's obviously sex trafficking.

But, yeah, but I'll rest it on a contingent. You have said quite a few things that were really interesting because I see all the people, or not all the people. I shouldn't generalize like that. But a vast majority of the people on the left are like, 100% he's guilty. I know he is. And if he doesn't go to jail, the system's rigged. but I did hear you say that hey, I'm not going to really comment until I wait for the actual verdict of the trial.

But what you just said is not what I expected you to say based off of what I had seen you say online. I think generally people jump to the conclusions way too much. Absolutely. If anything is off or they're automatically guilty. Otherwise, why would they even do this? I think you've got to wait. You've got to see until all the facts come out. I'm curious what you've seen in mind because I try really hard to qualify that.

I just watched it. Like I was eating lunch today. And I heard you say like, yeah, you know, I say what I always say. You got to wait for the verdict on the trial. Oh, okay. I thought you were saying I said the opposite. Okay, got you. No, no, no, no.

Yeah, the, but you just said that you thought he was 100% guilty. If what he says is true. Oh, but that's why the trial is important, right? Yeah, yeah. One, this is strategy that I tell people sometimes to help you change ideas is don't ever make an idea part of yourself, unless you know 100% to be true. Always qualify what you're saying so you can get away from something if it ends up being incorrect. So, for instance, on the Andrews-Dates stuff, I don't know 100%.

I'm honest about that. Now, if I were to stake a whole bunch on like, he's absolutely fucking guilty. I know it, blah, blah, blah. Well, if the court case, if the trial commences and either the prosecution doesn't have evidence or maybe the fact that maybe he didn't do any of that things, and then the trial ends,

well, now I'm in a really uncomfortable spot because I tied a lot of my stake, a lot of conviction on this idea. I didn't qualify it at all. And now I either have to come out and say, I was completely wrong, which undermines my character a lot, or what's more likely to happen

and it was like, oh, the trial was rigged, right? And this is what's going to happen with all the pro-tape people, or the anti-tate people, depending how the trial goes, right? No matter what happens, one side is going to say, oh, it was clearly fucking rigged, because they're so bought into the narrative that either all of the charges are fake and drummed up, or that he's 100% of trafficker who's raped like multiple women.

But if you qualify things, you're careful, so like I've said this over and over and over again, he should go to court, they should have the day in court. If what he said is true, he's definitely a trafficker, but maybe he exaggerated it. If they go to court and they find out, they play the videos, they do the research, And a lot of it was actually just exaggerated or jumped up

And they didn't actually do these things Then it's very easy for me to point back Like oh hey listen I said if they made it up Then it's obviously not true So yeah he's not a trafficker And I can get off of that very very easily So it saves me the ability of having strong conviction On ideas that I don't know about

And it saves my credibility and my character And my self-respect because I didn't like Have to like either backtrack Or just double down on somewhere like yeah I think that's super smart And I also think that it's a huge problem When people identify or they turn their belief system Into their identity yeah

Yeah it's just closes your mind entirely Yeah, because then like an attack, yeah, I'm a person that supports capitalism. I'm not like a capitalist. I am a capitalist. But like if you show me something better, I like capitalism because I think it does a lot of things really efficiently. But if you show me it doesn't, well, then fuck capitalism. You don't have personal attachment towards capitalism. But if you have the more personal attachment to your ideas, then when somebody attacks them, they're not attacking the ideas.

They're attacking your character. And that's not up, people don't realize your character is never up for debate. Nobody's going to come up to a debate and be like, okay, I might be a bad person who's really stupid. That's never going to happen. So if you've internalized these ideas so much, that means that. Anytime somebody attacks them, it's a personal attack, and now you're fighting for your life in a conversation because you don't want to be wrong or stupid,

which is bad. So what's your biggest insecurity? I don't have any insecurities. You don't have a single one. No. Yes, you do. You don't have a single insecurity. It's got to be something, man.

I don't know, man. I feel like insecurities are what, it kind of make us human in a sense. I'm inhuman. Man, I grew up, like, relentlessly independent. I mean, like, I've got a lot to, I can make, I had my dick pics league. I was streaming like two days later.

I mean, I'm a pretty secure person. There's nothing you're insecure about. So how have you been able to combat insecurity? Or was there a period of time in your life? Just because of the way that I grew up, like I've always been like highly internally driven. So if I'm doing something that's not good or that I don't like, I try to analyze and change it and I'll move from there.

But like the way that I view it is there's like a person that I want to be. There's an idealized version of myself. And I hope that I'm taking steps towards that all the time. And if I'm not, then I'm trying to change the path that I'm on. But I mean like in terms of insecurity, I guess if I do like really bad in the debate or something like that sucks, I would feel bad about that. But I'm probably scared of heights if I go skydiving that probably right. What's worrying you today?

What are you most worried about? What am I most worried about today? I don't know. I guess probably like managing my career going forward. I'm like at a very interesting crossroads where I'm trying to figure out like how much of like do I want to be like I don't know all the time like what my role needs. to be. That's like something I've thought about a lot. And I'm thinking about a lot over like the past week or whatever as I'm traveling down here is I don't know sometimes like figuring out like how to deal with people that are fighting with you online figuring out like what kind of engagement should I have

with people like how respectful, how disrespectful, how stonchly should I advocate for my ideals. Like should I be putting more time into like research for doing like intellectual debates? Should I be like trying to expand my audience more? Am I working too hard? Am I not working hard? I know there's like a lot of stuff like that in terms of like balancing career stuff. Probably I'm sure you guys. Well, yeah, from earlier today. Yeah, you guys have these things like Yeah. That's probably like the thing I'm, I don't know if I'd say I'm worried about it, but there's just like a lot of challenges that always come up relating to that kind of stuff. Where do you want to be in five years from now? I really want a fucking media company. I got all the shit to set up a fucking studio. I bought like all the cameras, all the equipment or whatever. I've got it like laid out. I just set it up and start it up and start it's like laid out and start it up and start like the podcast. I can kind of grow out from there. I feel like a media company to be the coolest in the world.

Like I hate talking about what everybody else is talking about. It's fun sometimes to like decide like this is what we're going to talk about today and then set like the discourse for stuff. So that would be like my dream. I think you'd have a crazy podcast. Maybe, yeah, hopefully, yeah. That would be really good? I'd love to see that. So for the media company, would you just like to be, like, a daily wire? I think the daily wire is the best template. It's really good.

They've got a lot of talent. They do a lot with them. They do. Yeah, they do, yeah. And it's a very concise, the way that they work together and everything. Yeah, good on Benny Boy and everybody. Yeah, they run a tight ship. So who would you like to have on?

Are there any other streamers that we might know that you would love to say, like, hey, we'd love for you to join this media company? I don't even know how we begin to pick talent. I feel like the way. I feel like the way that it would work is I'd probably start my show and then I would just kind of start looking at other people and see if anybody. But like the first thing I have to do is I've got to start my shit and then I'll probably go from there. Do it. I think it'd be fantastic.

What do you think is the biggest threat to humanity? Climate change. It's funny. That was my answer. That's the biggest threat to humanity. On a very broad sense, I think the splitting of us into these different epistemic worlds where we have totally different realities is like destroying our ability to communicate with each other. and I worry if that continues to happen and continues to accelerate outwards, that I don't know if it would be civil war or just like a total breakdown in government

because we can't pass any legislation. I think that that's probably the biggest threat right now. What is it? A nation divided against itself cannot stand. We have a really hard time working with each other right now. That's really, really, really bad. And I think that's probably the biggest problem facing us. When I look at the United States during COVID,

as soon as the United States got its shit together, In my opinion, I think one of the biggest success stories of like capitalism and American ingenuity, I know a lot of people get triggered, but I think it was the manufacturing of the MRANA viruses. It represented like the best of humanity, the best of globalism, the best of the world. It was Pfizer, an American international company working with biotech, German company that were researching for public research or private research, MRI vaccines for 30 years. Once we figured out, like, what was going in like eight months.

We had like a revolutionary vaccine rolled out. We distributed what Biden, I think, came in and wanted to do like. 100 million doses in 100 days or something and he did it in like 50 like everything was so amazing when america is like united on an issue we have the capability to like move heaven and earth like i think the united states working as one joint body trying to accomplish something can do anything but we're so fucking schizophrenic on all of our shit right now that we just can't come together and agree on on anything because every single issue is so politicized so yeah i think that's i think the divisions we have amongst ourselves are the biggest problem that we have

right now. It's a great answer. That's probably one of the best answers. Yeah, I agree with that. I'm kind of of the same type. I think it's just closed-mindedness in general. Sure. Because I used to say it was the media,

and then I thought it was closed-mindedness, and then you think, like, what causes closed-mindedness? You try to come to the root of it, but I think it's just being close-minded. I love that. What do you think is the meaning of life? Isn't it what I've been working with a lot? I think that there is some sense of fulfillment

to be found by, working together along other side, along other people, at the things that you're really good at. So everybody has like a particular set of like gifts and abilities. I think that we kind of owe it to ourselves and decided to pursue those as much as possible. And then while doing that, like maximize your existence like a social creature. So family, friends and all of that stuff. It's like very, very, very broad, but that might look differently for a lot of people. So say you're a person that's like a really high aptitude for medicine.

Like for you, like your fulfillment and meaning in life might be, you know, being the best doctor you can be, giving as much to society as you can getting that like high level of personal fulfillment because you're doing something for yourself you're doing something for other people hopefully you're going of a family stuff too you might be a musician that can make like really cool music you might be a streamer i guess it is really cool streaming or whatever but yeah i think that like searching for some like really broad sense of like fulfillment and then trying to balance it out with all sorts of like happiness right where fulfillment is like that really deep like i'm doing things that are above and beyond myself or society but also doing that things like keep me happy and like motivated or whatever

like finding a balance between that and then working social with everybody else is like on the broadest level I think probably the meaning of what you should be trying to do. And how fulfilled are you? Like if you were given a 1 to 10 scale, how's everything going for? Super lucky. I'm like at a 9.5 for fulfillment. Like I got to do like the coolest stuff like every single day in my life. Like I'm the most lucky fucking person in the world.

So yeah. As an influencer, how responsible are you for the actions of your viewers, beliefs of your viewers and your thoughts and your impact on your viewers? How much do you take this into consideration when going live slash voicing your opinion? I think you have a high level of responsibility. People might disagree on the level of responsibility you have, but at the very least, I wish that people would acknowledge that you have a big impact on your audience. If I go out and I say a certain thing for a long period of time, my audience is totally going

to start to believe that. And depending on the opinion, there are going to be certain obvious actions that stem from those beliefs. So if I go on stream every single day and I say, I hate kids, we need kill out kids, I hate children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If, like, you know, five years from now, people in my audience have to, like, abuse children or, like, attack children or whatever, like, it's pretty immediately downstream for the things that I'm saying. So I think that you like when parents used to say you are who you hang

around, right? Or garbage in garbage out. Ultimately, oh, I've also heard that like you are your five best friends, like the summation of their thoughts or whatever. If I'm talking to people for eight hours a day, if I'm speaking a lot, I'm doing a lot, the things that I'm saying, I know that slowly I'm going to change their mind over time and they're slowly going to believe me if they're going to start to think things I think. So actions are reasonably going to stem from those particular thoughts as well. So I would hope that the messages that I'm putting out are encouraging actions that I want people to take. And then, yeah, you ultimately, I think you're responsible for that. Now, there's some limitations there. If you've got like an audience of like 10 million and one guy

goes out and, you know, randomly shoots up a school and you're like a makeup streamer, like you're probably not responsible for that. But if I'm telling people over and over again, like the government's coming to take your guns, you know, you got to be ready to fight. We got to fight to keep our guns. We've got to fight for this. Like we can't like blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, some number of my audience you know like shoots up like a police department or like shoots up like a congress for a guy that's going to vote on like anti-gun legislation i mean like you're kind of like at the end of the day like a lot of those thoughts might be downstream for the thing that i'm saying so i try to be careful of that thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour really means a lot uh yeah it's just like a really

surreal experience to to meet you in real life cool it's been fun yeah i loved it thank you so much we'll link to all of your information down below in the description cool