In this episode, Matt and Chris dive deep into the world of online streamers, focusing on the pioneering and controversial figure Steven Bonell II, better known as Destiny (AKA Mr Borelli). As seasoned explorers of sense-making jungles, Petersonian crystalline structures, and mind-bending labyrinths in Weinstein World, they thought they were prepared for anything. However, the drama-infused degeneracy of the streamer swamps proves to offer some new challenges.Having previously dipped their toes in these waters by riding with Hasan on his joyous Houthi pirate ship (ignoring the screams of the imprisoned crew below decks), Matt and Chris now strip down to their decoding essentials and plunge head-first into streamer drama-infested waters as they search for the fabled true Destiny.Destiny is a popular live streamer and well-known debater with a long and colourful online history. He is also known for regularly generating controversy. With a literal mountain of content to sift through, there was no way to cover it all. Instead, Matt and Chris apply their usual decoding methods to sample a selection of Destiny's content, seeking to identify any underlying connective tissue and determine if he fits the secular guru mould.In so doing, they cover a wide range of topics, including:Destiny's background and rise to prominence in the streaming worldHow much of his brain precisely is devoted to wrangling conservatives?What's it like to live with almost no private/public boundaries?What are the ethics of debating neo-Nazis?The nature of the Destiny's online communityWhether murder is a justified response to DDOS attacks?Whether they succeed or fail in their decoding will be for the listeners to judge, but one thing is certain: if this is your first exposure to the streaming world, you are in for a bit of a ride.LinksThe Institute of Art and Ideas: Destiny and the new world of Internet politics | Steven Bonnell full interviewEnd of the Leftist Arc? - Destiny Addresses the Recent DramaIced Coffee Hour: Destiny on Debating Ben Shapiro, Toxic Wokeism and Getting DivorcedHelpful Reddit thread with a bunch of relevant videos and summariesDocumentary on Destiny Lore by Dingo: The Steven "Destiny" Bonnell II IcebergDestiny's Positions page on his dedicated WikiDestiny's ManifestosMrGirl's anti-Destiny 'Report'
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, a psychologist from Australia.
With me is Chris Kavanagh, the anthropologist from Japan, formerly Belfast.
G'day Chris, we've got a big decoding coming up today, don't we?
A white whale.
A white whale.
We have...
So many white whales that they're becoming relatively common these days.
Many fish from the sea.
Is that what you're saying?
Many fish.
We just need to dangle our little hook in there and up they come.
Yeah, there are people that it feels like we should have covered earlier and Destiny might fit in that category.
But there's a lot of people, Matt.
That's the thing.
There's a lot of people in this world.
There's a lot of people.
Many people.
Some of the best people are.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you know, just to remind people, for those perhaps Destiny fans that are tuning in for the first time, remember, on Decoding the Gurus, we decode online, public figures, intellectuals,
influencers, people with a big public profile.
Just because you're covered on Decoding the Gurus doesn't mean that you're evil.
It's not a flat category of bad people.
We've covered Carl Sagan.
We certainly call him a secular guru.
We've covered Sean Carroll.
He was good.
We love Sean Carroll.
He scored zero on the Garometer.
You love Sean Carroll.
I like him.
I do.
Yeah.
So it remains to be seen.
But look, there's so much to talk about with Destiny.
And Destiny is a streamer, Chris.
He is a streamer.
Many people in our audience are boomers like me and don't really understand what's the deal with streaming?
Who are they?
What do they do?
Streamers.
America deserved 9-11, dude.
Fuck it.
I'm saying it.
Academics.
Can they make a comment about canceling culture?
Streamers.
Yeah, please explain this to me so I can tell you how fucking stupid you are.
Academics.
And when I'm talking about that anagogic in and out of the imaginal augmentation of our ontological depth perception, that's what I mean by imaginal faithfulness.
Enlightening stuff.
You'll provide some interesting lessons for us today.
Decoding the gurus, streamers, and academic season.
This is going to be really interesting.
Yeah, well, one thing, Matt, just to say, you might be optimistic that a significant amount of Destiny's audience will listen to a podcast.
I know some amount of them will, but I feel that without the visual that it's not so appealing.
But in any case...
No one's playing a computer game at the moment, so that will confuse them.
Yeah, yeah, that's it.
Although, well, even there's things to be said there, Matt.
Destiny has discovered Adderall and is less prone to using computer games now to stimulate himself on his streams.
But there we go.
So, yeah, for those who are unaware of this entire phenomenon of streamers or just, like, vaguely familiar with it, so it's what it sounds like.
People who stream content, and obviously that has become more common and easier to do as internet speeds and whatnot have increased, but Destiny was doing it a long time ago.
He was one of the first streamers, and he streamed originally on a platform called JustinTV, which is now Twitch streaming.
And at that time, he was streaming a game called StarCraft 2. And so basically what these are, are people streaming their video while there's like a little chat box and people can comment and interact.
But it's now not just video games.
There are channels which are just dedicated to politics, to commentating on news.
There are channels where...
People are streaming IRL in real life, where they go out to locations and interact with people.
Or people are doing variety streams.
There's all sorts of hot tub streamers, people in bikinis streaming.
There's all different types of things.
But what tends to mark them out, I think, from the stuff that maybe more...
Mainstream or older, more mainstream people would consume is that streamers tend to stream for significant portions of time, multiple hours, you know, and they interact with the chat as they're doing other stuff.
So it's kind of a multitasking achievement in a way because like they're playing the game, they're reading streams and reacting to it and...
Now, increasingly, other people will call in and they'll have a discussion with them.
But Destiny was doing the gaming side of that and then moved into politics, political commentary, often while playing video games.
So if you watched many of his streams, you will see that he is, depends on the venue and how serious he is, but in any case, he is often streaming.
Yeah, it's kind of content for the ADHD generation.
And he also deserves credit for not just being a pioneer in streaming video game content, but also in politics streaming.
He was, I think, if not the person responsible for creating that space, at least a very...
Significant figure in its emergence.
So now there are many political streamers.
We covered one of them recently, Hassan.
But Destiny was a pioneer in that area.
Now I think you told me that Hassan Paiker as well as Vosh both got their start.
They started off as fans or something interacting with Destiny's audience.
Yeah, Vosh came out of Destiny's audience and Hassan Paiker was...
In his audience, but Hasan Piker came up from the Young Turks.
So he started out in the Young Turks because his uncle is Cenk Uygur, right?
But as he branched out from the Young Turks, he got involved with Destiny's community and was doing collaborations and whatnot and appearing on Destiny's stream.
So he had a profile before...
He was in Destiny's community.
But yes, there was a lot of overlap.
They were on the same team in various debates.
They were discussing issues.
So yeah, there's a lot of big-name left-wing political streamers that have emerged from Destiny's community or had significant contact with it.
That might be the way to put it.
Yeah, so Hassan and Destiny, very different political views and certainly not fans of each other at the moment.
Nevertheless, they are similar in the sense that they are these political streamers, I guess primarily these days, commentators.
They play computer games, yes, sometimes, but they also talk to...
Politics, have debates, and commentators on basically everything.
So I guess that's what puts them into our remit.
That's why they're in our ballpark, Chris.
Well, I think we can see how much of the guru dynamics apply, but streamers and influencers are probably the leading front in parasocial.
Dynamics and manipulation might be a bad way to put it, but there's a lot of audience interaction.
There's a lot of blurring of boundaries that isn't there in traditional media as much.
I think there are reasons that you could see.
You know, the kind of dynamics that we see with secular gurus at play in that arena.
And you definitely do see people, like, voicing opinions across a whole bunch of different topics and offering hot takes and that.
So, you know, I think that it depends on the character, but there are people with extreme positions.
There are people who have no political takes, right?
They're just there to offer, you know, entertainment.
And there are people with their own weirdo, bespoke...
And there's a lot of weirdos that are involved with Destiny or orbiting around Destiny.
Weirdos might sound disparaging, but I'm sorry.
I've been consuming a lot of Destiny's content and there are a lot of unhinged strange people that he interacts with.
And when I say that might sound disparaging, but I mean people who have released supposedly artistic videos of them masturbating.
Under their own volition to the internet.
And, you know, just a lot of talk about people threatening suicide or have they advocated for pedophilia.
You know, we played the clip about Vosh and his horse-cocked lollycon fetish or whatever.
But the point is, that's actually relatively mild by most of the standards, so as we'll see.
So there's just a lot of...
A lot of unhinged degeneracy going on.
And including, you know...
No judgment.
No judgment, Chris.
No judgment.
But it is unhinged degeneracy.
No judgment.
But there's Nazis and shit planned, as we'll see.
And it's just, it's, yeah, a lot of it is, to my mind, needlessly dramatic and, you know, just attention-seeking or, like, you know, 20-somethings.
Talking about the political philosophies which they developed last week and like, I don't care.
Well, we'll get into the clips in a moment, I guess, but just final thoughts from me about just the general context of this sphere streamer.
Sphere is one, I guess there are those different angles to it.
Like one, it's just like mild entertainment.
Someone's playing a computer game and just talking as they do it.
On the other hand, you've got all of the political commentary, social commentary, debating issues that is going on.
So that's another angle.
But like you say, at the same time, there is those blurring of boundaries between the community and the people broadcasting.
And there's a lot of interactions, a lot of...
The personal life overlaps a fair bit.
And I don't know if it's fair to say, would you agree that I had the feeling that that aspect of it is a little bit like reality TV, but for the next generation, it is a bit like the dramas that go on on Love Island or something.
It can be.
There's a lot of drama.
There's a lot of...
There's a lot of people having sex with various people that they're making content with or falling out and bridges being burned.
There's a specific nomenclature with Destiny about the bridges burning or bridges being mended.
Feuding with different people and stuff.
But it's not just Destiny that does this.
It's kind of the whole streamer.
Ecosystem, yeah.
And I think it's partly because of the nature of the content means that one thing which people like to do is reaction videos, you know, like playing someone else's content and commenting on that.
And I think by the nature...
That's what we do, Chris.
Yeah, well, we do about the video, so it doesn't...
That's the thing, you know.
There's a difference to it, one, when you do it every day.
And two, audio podcasts are in a different category of things.
But there's podcast drama as well.
The Daily Wire is currently having drama with Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro.
So this happens in Pundit World, but just as we'll see, the drama is of a slightly different timbre whenever it's in streamer land.
And one thing I'll also say...
I've listened to an insane amount of content for this episode.
Like, I often listen to a lot of content for the people that we cover, but with Destiny...
I've listened to a lot.
Maybe even by his...
You went above and beyond this time, Chris.
I did.
It could have been over 100 hours of stuff that I've listened to, but in any case, the outcome of that is one thing I'm very acutely aware of is that Destiny, you know, a bit like everyone, but in his case, perhaps more extreme than others.
He has different...
Presentations, depending on the venue that he's in and the audience that he's speaking to.
And he's quite open about this.
We'll see that he makes this clear himself.
But it means that if you took some of his content from a mainstream interview, because he's increasingly being interviewed by Piers Morgan or appeared with Ben Shapiro or kind of high profile.
Or whatever, like the mainstream media.
He's often on his best behavior, and he comes across extremely reasonable, doesn't use edgy terms or whatever, and kind of presents in a particular way.
When he's on the stream, again, it's different, and it depends who he's talking to.
If he's talking friendly with someone, he'll be different if he's interacting with the stream.
If he is debating...
On, you know, like a panel with Alex Jones or with red-pilled people.
Yeah, it's different as well.
So the reason I mention this is that the content that we select could give quite different perspectives.
Like if we only took some of his recent interviews from mainstream media and we are going to cover a bunch of the stuff there, you would get a different perspective than if we covered...
His streaming content with like a red pill, Nick Fuentes' character, or, you know, some drama stream about him debating with various orbiters.
So that means that in order to properly contextualize him, it feels that we need to cover...
A broad spectrum of stuff.
So on the show, we are often focusing on a single piece of content or two pieces of content.
And that is what we are doing today.
We're taking a piece of content which was focused more towards the streaming audience and then a piece of content which was focused towards a more mainstream audience.
But I also have a bunch of other clips which will provide contextual information.
And I think it's important.
To go through them, because it, like, any single one, I think, could give, like, a misleading presentation on its own.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
It's multifaceted, produced a huge amount of content, so it presents a bit of a challenge for our usual methodology.
So, yeah, I mean, this will work, but, yeah, just to remind people that...
What we try not to do is to go digging and cherry-picking and finding the worst things that someone has said and just relying on that.
And likewise, going in the other direction, just finding good stuff.
In general, with someone like Jordan Peterson, say, or Eric Weinstein, you can pick...
A random piece of content, and it will be pretty representative of who they are.
I think this could be somewhat true of Destiny, but like you said, he's a multifaceted character.
He's been doing this for a long time, produced untold hours of content, and the content is very different depending on the context.
So we're going to try to be fair about it.
Yeah, but like with Hassan Pecker, there's a couple of clips which are infamous and that are part of the reason that, you know, there's controversy or whatever.
And the most recent one, I'll just play here.
This is Destiny talking about Gaza, and this is from before the October 7th attacks.
So this is on one of the, you know, stream things that people are playing games, or Destiny at least is playing the game, or somebody is.
I don't know.
Anyway, listen to this.
Honestly, I'm pro-genocide.
It sounds really shitty, but I think that Israel should just drop its fucking borders about where it is now, and basically, Palestinians can go live in another place.
That's really shitty, but that's about where I'm at.
You just think that Palestine should just pack up and Native American the fuck out of there?
The problem is that it seems like there is a hugely general hostility to Jewish people across, really, the entire world, definitely the Middle East.
So the problem is that as you weaken Israel's ability for Jewish people to live there, it seems like there is a...
Because there's a lot of different organizations across the Middle East that are highly invested in the destruction of Israel.
So that's a really rough thing, too.
So it seems like if Israel is forced to make concessions to Palestinians, it threatens Jewish people's ability to have a homeland.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, I don't know.
It's really shit.
Truthfully, the answer is there's no good answer.
It's hard.
Yeah, it's hard.
It's really, really complicated.
complicated situation.
It seems like appeasing either end basically means like kind of the destruction of the other end.
If you give Jewish people what they want, Palestinians are essentially permanently cocked out of what they feel is their right for homeland.
And if you give Palestinians what they want, then probably a lot
Hmm.
So, you know, saying that you're pro-genocide, never a good look, never a good look.
And people have focused on this clip because Destiny has since gone on to become quite active in debating and discussing the conflict in Gaza.
But to me, this clip illustrates the tendency towards edgy comments because the subsequent discussion, like...
Is relatively not so extreme, right?
He's saying that these are two incompatible solutions and there would be issues.
But it doesn't undo that you just said, like, I'm pro-genocide.
That's the reason that this clip got kind of shared around everyone.
And a lot of Destiny fans were saying, well, this is out of context.
But the point is, find me the clip of you or I or various other people saying we're pro-genocide, right?
You won't find that because, yeah, we're not going to say it.
Yeah, it's part of the issue, though, Chris, that we don't record 12 hours a day, day in, day out, free associating.
Like, for instance, I watched different content from Destiny, just random Destiny content.
One thing I watched recently was him interviewing another influencer-type guy.
His name's Ryan McBeth.
He's okay.
He's kind of like a mid-tier.
Like, military guy comments on military things.
And he actually gets a bit drunk during that interview and doesn't acquit himself that well.
Obviously, other stuff from humor is better.
But in that interview, Destiny, he basically does the...
He's like an NBC anchor, basically.
He's asking reasonably good questions.
You don't hear anything controversial in the hours that he talks to this guy.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Well, yeah, and I'll just highlight...
A clip which is kind of contradicting of the image that he's purely an apologist for the IDF.
So recently there was an attack where the IDF blew up some EAD convoy.
I can't remember the organization exactly.
But anyway, it was a humanitarian convoy and it was targeted by the IDF.
And the IDF gave an explanation for it.
And Destiny has been very strongly...
Pro-Israel throughout the conflict, but he covered the statement, and here's a clip of him talking about that.
That idea of like, oh, it's a chaotic environment, coming from F-16s or whatever, or whatever the planes they fly to bombs, this was not like a, like, the hostage situation, where the three hostages were shot, that was a chaotic moment.
And I can, I...
I'm way more sympathetic towards that in that moment.
For this?
Targeted airstrike?
For people that you had intel on ahead of time?
On a pre-approved humanitarian aid route?
Shooting convoy vehicles?
No.
That excuse doesn't work there.
That doesn't cut it.
Do you think a Hamas member...
Do you think that they thought a Hamas member was on board?
Again, even if a Hamas member was on board...
That can't be the calculation.
We're going to go ahead and blow up three humanitarian aid vehicles with six, I need to get the number right, six or nine foreign nationals on it because the Hamas members are on board.
That can't be the calculation.
It's too much.
Even if there was a Hamas member on board, the entire world, probably even Israel, is not accepting, the population won't accept that proportionality.
That's unhinged.
You can't do that.
Unless it's literally like King Hamas himself.
There's no way you can do that.
That's insane.
Yeah, so there he's sounding, if you didn't know anything about destiny, then you could well assume that the person speaking there was very much a critic of Israel, perhaps even pro-Palestinian.
Yeah, I think that's an interesting distinction.
I mean, we've spoken to people recently, Chris, who are very much pro-Israel on this issue.
Oh, Sam Harris.
I was being delicate.
You were being arched.
But, you know, not even referring to Sam Harris in particular, but just looking at the discourse, it does seem like a lot of people are firmly in one camp or firmly in the other camp.
And one thing you see almost ubiquitously is that they will minimize or make excuses for...
Or change the topic or whatever on anything that sort of makes the one side look bad.
So I think perhaps one thing with Destiny is that he seems to dive in and is quite happy to punch in both directions.
Yeah, although I think people would argue that he does engage in some apologetics for Israeli actions.
It all depends on how you judge what is actually going on there and how much you trust statements from different sources.
But on that same stream, Matt, we heard Hassan interacting with his audience and getting annoyed with them whenever they were challenging his position.
This does sound a little bit similar at points to when Destiny gets annoyed with his audience.
So listen, this is from the same stream.
We shouldn't want the war to stop.
You should want the...
You should want the elimination of Hamas.
If you want anything less than Hamas being removed as the administrator to the Gazan region, you are a pedophile who is jerking off to dying Palestinians because you think it supports whatever perverted political narrative that you have for hating America.
That's literally it.
There is no other rational basis.
Or you're anti-Semitic and you hate Jews, I guess.
Maybe you're crazy Muslim or whatever.
or super anti-Semitic and you, for some other reason, you can be a Christian, you can be a Nazi, I guess, right?
That's the only, there's no other option there.
If you support Hamas remaining as the administrator here, it's because you are dropping fat loads of thick cum, okay, all over your fucking carpet at night, watching Palestinians die.
But it gives you something to tweet about every night.
That is cool.
We might.
Referred to as loaded rhetoric.
In this case, it's very loaded.
I think also that clip highlights that that's not the kind of commentary that you're going to hear from Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or whatever.
They're not going to be talking about people spunking fat loads on their carpet over dead infants.
Destiny doesn't mind engaging in that Really heeded dismissal if he feels like it's justified.
So like in that case, he's basically arguing there's no principled position that can lead to supporting Hamas remaining in power.
And then essentially characterizing anybody that would argue that as being a pedophile, somebody that has to be some of their dead children or whatever.
But it's for a rhetorical effect.
But like, yeah, that is illustrative of like, Interacting with the audience in a very harsh way and characterizing positions which differ as completely amoral.
I don't think that's steel manning the counter position.
Yeah, I mean, I guess you're talking about Hamas, the organization, perhaps as opposed to...
Well, sure.
Look, I can do a better job.
I'm no fan of Hamas, right?
But I can see that people could argue.
That removing Hamas will lead to a political vacuum, which will actually just empower more extremists and lead to worse outcomes for Israel.
And that didn't require me jacking off to dead children or being an anti-American ideologue.
So that's what I mean.
You can take him as simply arguing against the worst version of the kind of tanky left, which is who I think he's aimed at.
But the rhetoric is...
Very strong.
The rhetoric is colorful.
I mean, I sound like I'm making excuses here, but I used to play a game called Subspace back in the day.
It was one of the very first multiplayer games where you could actually type and text other players and there would be maybe 100, 200 people playing.
And the culture in that game...
In terms of the absolutely disgusting language that everybody uses, I think we'll mainly play.
And in fact, I found myself and my brother too, we would just find ourselves participating in it in the same kind of thing.
Like it was all ironic and tongue in cheek and, you know, all that stuff.
But at some point I just stopped and went, hang on, probably the people I'm playing with are like 14 years old or something.
What am I doing?
But I guess my point is that internet subcultures have...
Yeah, yeah.
Edgy lingo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And being edgy is a component of it.
It is absolutely the case.
But there's a point, like, Destiny's not going to drop that kind of language on his interview with Jordan Peterson.
But on the stream, he will.
And just one more clip about kind of chastising the audience, the highlight streamer dynamics.
The difference is that we aren't providing military support to Hamas.
Yes, you are, you f***ing...
What are you talking about?
The Gaza Strip gets more humanitarian aid than any other region of the f***ing world per capita.
What do you mean you're providing support for them?
How do you think the leaders get f***ing rich by reselling a whole bunch of s*** that goes into the f***ing country?
Why do you think these people are in Qatar in $20,000 private plane jets in $1,000 night routes?
What do you mean we're not providing any money to Hamas?
You're f***ing retarded.
Just because only certain types of supplies go in there doesn't mean you're not funding the military that's doing what they're doing.
How do you think they have the money to build all the tunnels?
How do you think they have the money to get all the f***ing...
Guns, what are you talking about?
Like, Jesus.
I said military support.
I'm going to permaban you so that you've got all the time in the world.
I want you to go online and Google fungibility of money.
Go look it up.
Be a smarter person for it.
I'll see you in five years.
Good luck.
Yeah, so I think the reason you're playing these clips is not so much about the topic at hand.
But rather to illustrate, I guess, the dynamic that at least sometimes exists.
The point is not to say that's the normal interaction.
It isn't.
But just like the Simo Hassan is not always going off on a huge rant at his audience.
Like, you're all fucking fascists, right?
Like, that doesn't happen all the time.
But this kind of thing does happen.
And there again, I understand the frustration because, like, what Destiny...
What's talking about on that stream was he's arguing against people essentially presenting Israel as they would intentionally want to blow up aid trucks, knowing that they're aid trucks because they're, you know, like an evil government that just wants Palestinian people to starve and die.
So, like, they don't even care that it's an aid truck.
And he's saying that's a stupid position because it's counterproductive in so many ways, even if they wanted that.
Targeting air trucks is going to get them just in trouble from international community, as you saw what happened in the backlash to that.
So he's reacting to that, but in so doing, it felt to me like the person commenting there was trying to say, right, but the West is supporting...
Yeah, I think.
you know, various things.
So like, I think the person commenting has a more valid argument than Destiny presents it as.
And then he kind of like, it is engaging in rhetoric about to be like, look how rich the people are.
So you don't think they're getting any money.
And it's like, well, that's not the exact argument, right?
Surely the argument is that we militarily support Israel directly.
So we're more culpable.
The US, this is.
That's right.
This is why Israel has F-35.
Yeah, no, I take your point.
The point that the person in the audience was making was almost certainly A more reasonable one than the one that Destiny demolished.
Yeah.
And, you know, there was a five-year ban, right?
This is one of the things that can happen, right?
Because, you know, a little chat box or whatever is going, and then you say, right, I'm kicking you out.
Off you go.
And you do that to one person.
You can get annoyed or whatever.
But you are conditioning your audience about what will happen.
And, like, that's part of the dynamics that end up in these communities.
And I think Destiny is.
Very tolerant in a lot of ways of pushback, but essentially gets intolerant about certain subjects eventually, right?
Like, gets fed up and is like, I want anybody that will meet this kind of stupid argument out of the community, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Do you think this can happen, Chris?
This is a genuine question.
We talk about cultish dynamics and the somewhat unhealthy social dynamics that can happen between gurus and their audience, but...
I can also see how that kind of behavior on the part of Destiny, one could fall into it easily.
You know, it's the sixth hour of your stream.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
You're scanning hundreds of text messages and you lose your shit and it becomes a habit.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely a kind of component and it's necessary even in some respect if you become a popular streamer because otherwise, you know, you're just going to be dealing...
With hassle constantly.
So you have to have moderators.
You have to have ground roofs and red lines and all that kind of thing.
And I think in the same way that a lot of people start out on Twitter or other social media being like, I'm never going to ban anyone.
I'm not going to mute anyone.
I'm going to be very nice.
And then after a number of years, people are just like, right, block for minor infractions, right?
Because they're just fed up.
Or if their audience gets bigger, they just...
Negative comment, right?
Gone.
And I don't mean to say that Destiny is unique in this.
I do think it's a component of streamer platforms when you're big, but just maybe all social media platforms where you're engaging with your audience.
But, you know, we create examples of Hassan, you know, chastising his audience, so it only feels fair to show that it's not like Destiny.
Never does that.
Even if you think he's justified, in some case.
So, there's that.
I don't know what position that would it actually give in terms of, like, where Destiny's politics lie.
But I...
There is a famous clip of him.
And this is also...
I feel a little bit unfair, so I apologize that these clips are coming at the start.
But this is a famous clip of Destiny.
Complaining about how he needs to modulate himself when dealing with right-wing conservative people that are in his audience, right?
So it's the same thing about the audience dynamics, but going in a different direction.
So this is like a kind of famous clip.
I don't know the original stream it's from, but listen to this.
Destiny, you have all the talking points but none of the substance.
Trump is the physical manifestation of the Republicans' frustration with the left.
But go ahead and set up another Democrat to deplatform people even further so that an even worse Republican can come out of the ashes to fight against the left retard.
Here is my problem, not racy, okay?
I have an ungodly amount of patience, okay?
I have an ungodly amount of patience.
What you don't see is that every single fucking day on my stream, 10% of my brain has to go towards being an intelligent and smart individual that is equipping himself with facts and data to have intelligent and reasonable conversations about topics.
And 90% of my brain goes towards trying to understand how you all became such triggered remedial fucking snowflakes so that I can navigate a conversation gently enough with you to not set your fucking brain off so that you're incapable of hearing what anybody else has to say.
That's what I spend most of my time on.
That's what I spend most of my time thinking about.
You understand?
It's like hurting a fucking group of kindergartners and trying to figure out what I can say to you so that it doesn't set you the fuck off.
Because what I really want to say, when we talk about things like,
This is what I have to say.
I understand.
Fauci and the CDC, they did get some things wrong.
And it's really bullshit that some of the media, they have a bias.
And I totally understand why you can have a mistrust in government when they act in the ways that they do, when they act kind of smug, when a lot of the politicians and the media seem to be on the same page.
I understand the frustration there.
And then when you've got other figures, like Joe Rogan, who are willing to platform voices that are unpopular, platform voices that don't get voiced as much, opinions that don't get voiced as much.
When you hear these people talk, you have this inclination to trust them a little bit more.
I don't believe any of that!
I hate that.
I hate that.
I hate doing that every fucking day I come on stream.
What I really want to say is, oh, you think that these are good drugs?
Let's look at the studies.
Oh, you're fucking retarded.
That's it.
You don't have RCTs.
You don't have prospective RCTs to support ivermectin androxychloroquine.
You're a fucking martin.
You know who you are?
You're so triggered by a 92-year-old fucking limp dick Fauci going up on TV talking that you're about to eat any fucking pill that a fucking meathead like Joe Rogan will tell you to eat.
That's what I really want to say to you.
But I can't say that.
I have to communicate to you like you're a triggered fucking five-year-old.
You know how frustrating that is?
Every fucking day I come on stream and I talk to you, I have to figure out what is the nicest fucking way I can communicate to you so your brain will function at the 10% capacity it's capable of just to understand the fucking things that I'm telling you?
It is so fucking frustrating.
Holy shit.
I understand why Trump is popular.
It's because you're triggered.
Admit it, but you won't even admit that.
The reality is that you're fucking triggered, that a couple people on TV get a few things wrong sometimes, and that some other smug dipshit progressives who are smug and who are dipshits act like smug dipshits, that you want to go as far off in the other direction as possible.
And then I have to find a way to rope you back in.
Like, I'm a fucking...
Rope free to go.
Fuck, I hate it.
I hate having to...
It is so irritating that I have to spend so much of my brain to be a gentle, remedial rancher that I've got to go out into the fields and I've got to figure the gentlest way out to talk to you.
Otherwise, you're going to get so triggered, you're going to vote for a man that wants to torch U.S. democracy.
Okay?
Jesus fucking Christ.
Okay.
Back to rhetorical mode.
Back to effective mode.
I have to say, I really enjoyed that.
I don't get so much sympathy for him, because I think that really illustrates a lot of what he is trying to engage in and doing, but also the genuine frustration, right?
I mean, he didn't let slip.
He intentionally expressed that, but everything he said there, I have huge sympathy for him.
And he's right in everything, right?
But it also speaks to the fact that he finds it extremely frustrating that he has to be so careful around right-wing people in order not to, you know, make them scurry away.
So, yeah, that's...
Yeah, that was very enjoyable.
A good demonstration of his rhetorical skills, apart from being, I think, totally right in being frustrated about that particular thing.
Just remind me never to debate.
Destiny.
Not that that's ever going to happen in this world.
Yeah.
I mean, he uses, you know, there as well, you hear him say retard and stuff like that, right, as well.
But again, I think that's just part of that whole culture there that, you know, you're just using edgy language to me.
But it's not.
And even in the case here, I don't feel like this is like Red Scare, where with Red Scare, I feel that they are constantly smirking to themselves that they're saying retard or whatever.
But like with Destiny, it feels more like, no, that's just the way he communicates and whenever he's talking to me.
And for good or bad, you can regard that as like, but he is not intending it as like, I think it's not as...
Performative.
It's more a genuine component of gamer-streamer culture, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And a genuine expression of emotion that he was talking to there.
Well, look, he's definitely...
I'm going to call it right now.
We're early in.
It's early days.
But he's definitely a lot smarter, frankly, than Red Scare or Hassan for that matter.
Oh, yeah.
Or other people of this generation that we've covered.
I think even Destiny's most transient critics would have to concede that.
Well, just, I will say though, Matt, like Destiny is 45. So, you know, it's pretty much not that far off.
That's a whippersnapper, Chris.
He's only five years younger than me, but fine, put him in the younger generation.
You've got an old soul, Chris.
Yeah, I played StarCraft 2, alright?
I just wasn't as good.
Yeah, so let me play another clip then.
Maybe let's go out of edgy stuff just for a bit.
We'll get back to it.
Don't worry.
We'll get back to it.
But I'm going to let Destiny give a little description of his origin story.
And this is him in an Institute of Ideas interview that he was giving, talking about where he comes from.
So you used to stream games on Twitch, and more recently, well, over the past few years, you went more into the arena of political commentary.
Can you tell us what initiated this shift?
I'd been playing games on Justin TV, which would become Twitch TV, I think around 2013, from anywhere from I think around 2010, 2011, up to 2016.
When the Trump stuff started to kick off, I saw all the conversations happening and I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring and start having political debates.
I'd always been kind of like an argumentative debate type person and I'd always had a peripheral interest in politics, but then with the Trump stuff, obviously everybody started to feel very political online.
Yeah, it's all natural to get involved.
Mm-hmm.
So that tone of voice, by the way, you could hear it slightly different, right?
Like a different energy in this interview.
Very different energy.
This is a Destiny on Express behavior.
Fat load to come dropping all over the place.
And similarly...
Whenever they're talking about, you know, pelvic streaming talks about this.
I don't think we've ever had a setup on the planet where you've got a profit incentive on a worldwide thing that encourages people to only consume one type of content.
Like, I think if you go back like even 15, 20 years ago before the internet was as big, you still had to be somewhat grounded because you had neighbors, you had your local community, you see people at church, you see people at the union, you see people at school.
But now you can have whatever insane opinion you have, you can go online and probably find a community of like 5,000 people that have it, regardless of how insane your opinion is.
And I think that kind of thing is relatively unhealthy.
So, you know, concerns about polarization and when it comes to whether his gaming skills may have contributed to like his...
Do you think there's a certain set of skills or set of characteristics that being successful in one of those communities makes you successful in the other?
Probably not.
I think that the overlap is more likely that if you draw a Venn diagram of people interested in playing video games and then a Venn diagram of online early political pundits, there's probably a lot of overlap because of the demographics.
It skews pretty young, it skews fairly wealthy, it skews fairly white.
So when you have all these things together, you're going to get a lot of overlap between people that are in both fields, I think.
I'm of the opinion that most of the people that came from gaming had pretty bad political takes.
When you're involved in a thing that's peripheral to politics, then your entire political view ends up being informed by one issue.
So for a lot of people that came from the gaming space, it was basically SJW and being anti-SJW, and that was their entire worldview.
So you get a lot of people coming out of the gaming space that were pro-Trump, just because they didn't like feminism, I guess.
And by didn't like feminism, I mean they didn't like being told not to say slurs or not to be bigoted or whatever by the evil, woke SJW people.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's him.
A little bit, you know, outlining the streamer culture and the SJW anti-SJW thing, but actually saying he's not so sure that the kind of characteristics that make somebody a good, you know, streamer of games or game player actually carry over into political debates.
And he said a similar thing when Jordan Peterson asked him, like, do you treat...
Debates like a game.
Is that part of your motivation?
And he sort of said, no, he doesn't think so.
But I actually do think there is a gamified element to the way that he approaches debate.
But in any case, all of the comments that he says about gaming culture and the relatively superficial political takes and whatnot, that all rings true there, right?
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think it'd be interesting to hear what he himself...
I don't know what you'd call it, an entertainer or a commentator or whatever.
He thinks of it as a job, a job that pays quite well.
And, yeah, I mean, I think he does have an extraordinary ability to marshal those facts, like do that sort of...
Perhaps not super deep, but certainly very broad, marshalling all of those facts and arguments and then remembering them and then being able to go to a debate, say, with a Jordan Peterson and be fully and totally prepped.
Yeah, I mean, just before we leave that colourful language stuff, I don't think people should...
It's coming back, Matt.
It's not gone, so don't worry, but continue on.
Well, I could save my comment for then, but I think some people could think, well, someone who talks like that, you can't really take them seriously, right?
They're not a serious commentator.
But I was just reminded of, you know, we talked about Martin Luther recently.
Someone who is...
Oh, you're going to compare destiny to Martin Luther?
Go ahead.
Well, we compared Jordan Peterson to Martin Luther, so I think we can compare destiny.
Okay.
You know, like, by the stanza of the time, he spoke the same way sometimes.
Yes, he could do the very careful theological philosophical arguments, but he also called the Pope and the clergy farting asses, and he talked about resisting the devil with a fart and chase him away, and...
It's a lot of scatological language there, which to us sounds quaint, but was appealing, I think, to...
The medieval...
I like this thing.
Guillemers as the theological clergy of the Reformation.
The same retard and whatnot.
But the point is that someone like Martin Luther had different coded language as well, right?
He could go...
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And I mean, I think you can, these clips I'm playing now are from this Institute of Ideas, or I forget the specific name for it.
But anyway, that interview they did.
And you can hear a more measured, mainstream, appropriate tone, right?
And when asked about, you know, his debate tendencies and this kind of thing, he said this.
But back then, I would say it was willing to put in some effort to research, willing to have, like, sharp rhetorical skills, willing to be pretty edgy, and then inhabiting, like, a left-leaning political ideology.
those characteristics again besides me were pretty rare so I think there was a lot of hunger and thirst for it on the internet to see kind of like that group people come up to fight against all of the kind of like the right-wing edgy people.
Okay so again you know like this that's him positioning themselves in a way in the kind of counterpoint space willing to
Fight fire with fire against the alt-right people.
And also, you know, a bit edgy and that kind of thing.
And the fact he mentions there that he did research which put him into a different category, which we'll get into and I think is also true.
But here's him actually from the other piece of content that we're looking at, which is from his kind of manifesto, why I'm not a leftist.
announcement where he the main part of that video is him litigating in excruciating detail a debate that he was in with a bunch of other leftist people right so
So, the reason why I wanted to go over this is because this was like one of the big podcasts that now I'm getting attacked for by a lot of different people, but also because I noticed that there's a lot of revisionist history.
That surrounds what happened on this podcast.
So, you know, I spent about seven hours last night asking my audience for clips, going through clips myself.
I said, okay, well, you know what?
Maybe I am full of shit.
I rewatched probably about two hours of the debate myself to make sure that I had a coming in fresh.
I have a fair characterization of what happened here.
And, yeah, you know, let's check it out, okay?
And he breaks down all of the rhetorical techniques that they engaged in and how they misrepresented and how their positions are incoherent or whatever.
It's a three and a half hour video, right?
One thing that's going to be a trend for this debate is he's going to bring up a whole bunch of studies, but he's not going to talk much about them.
You know what that's called?
Don't say it.
Don't spoil it for your chat.
There's a specific name for this, okay?
You might have seen it in a lot of threads accusing me of doing it.
But we'll get to that.
We'll get to that right here.
The gish gallop is a technique used during debating that focuses on overwhelming an opponent with as many arguments as possible without regard for accuracy or strength of the arguments.
Now, could I do that to people?
Maybe.
One of the things that I say before every single debate I have, and you can go back and listen to any of them, okay, is, hey, I talk a lot.
And sometimes I even talk over people if I'm getting like real excited.
If I ever say anything you disagree with, stop me immediately and we'll go over it.
But at the beginning of it, he lays out his kind of political position such as he understands it, right?
So this is him talking to a streamer audience in about a similar sort of topic that we just heard him talking about with a mainstream audience.
And I think there are clear parallels here in what he's saying.
And this ties back into the fundamental reason why I got into politics.
So as a reminder, the only reason why I got into political fields is because I feel like people weren't having conversations that were reflective of reality.
That's the only reason why I got into politics.
I'll repeat stuff I've said in the past.
I didn't get into politics because I wanted to help minorities or because I care so much about LGBT issues or because I'm trying to save the planet from fucking climate change or because I think I'm the white savior of whatever black people, African people, whatever.
I got into politics because I thought that people had conversations that weren't reflective of reality.
As a result of my analysis of certain problems, I've come into positions that are incredibly pro-LGBT, incredibly pro-minority, and not just when I'm around them, but when I'm not around them, that have put me into incredibly pro-welfare positions economically.
These are the positions that I've wound up at because these are the positions that I've thought myself into.
Tying that back into what I just said, why I got into politics was because I wanted conversations to be a reflective reality.
I noticed that a lot of the criticisms that I get for the way that I behave are not reflective of reality.
And this is incredibly difficult for me to sort through while I'm also trying to deal with thousands of comments of negative criticism, both from my community and without my community.
So there, right, he's talking about misrepresentation, but one thing that I admire here, in a way, is that he's not presenting himself as being, like, fundamentally motivated by super altruistic principles, you know,
he doesn't want to save the world.
No, his motivation was that he felt that people weren't representing political positions, honestly, and that frustrated him.
So he wanted to engage in that and try and be more direct and more honest or whatever.
And I will say that I think that is true.
Like, we'll go in to look at some of the other stuff that he says, but I think nobody's going to be consistent all the time.
And you can also take issues with the Particular positions that Destiny is choosing to try and be consistent on or to outline clearly.
But in that expressed desire there to be clear and to lay out positions clearly and be honest, I think he is somebody that strives to do that, including when he's talking in different audiences.
He's not lying in the different things.
He's just modulating.
His message, depending on who he's speaking to.
Yeah, well, particularly the style of the message.
Yeah, I mean, I think it is interesting that he casts himself not as being motivated as being on a moral crusade, but rather being motivated by frustration.
That the people aren't thinking clearly about the facts, at least in his minds.
And, you know, that is different from...
Most of the other influences we look at, like if you look at Hassan, he definitely positions himself, it's moral grandstanding, I suppose.
If you look at Jordan Peterson, he positions himself as being on a moral crusade.
You could try to shoehorn Destiny's motivations as being, you know, a moral crusade in favour of fact-based and coherent argumentation, but, you know, that's a pretty dry moral crusade if it is one.
Yeah, so let's hear a little bit about him reflecting on the debate bro topic for the two different audiences, right?
So this is him on the more mainstream outlet kind of talking.
I can understand platforms saying no racial slurs or something.
That's fair.
But when we start axing off entire parts of the ideological spectrum that we're not allowed to talk about, whether it's COVID or vaccinations or election denial or whatever, it does really bad things, I think, to the discourse.
It makes the people on the right feel unheard, which they should feel heard, even if I don't agree with them.
It makes people on the left dumber, because now they don't have any Yeah, I mean,
that's a pretty cogent.
In favour of platforming and free speech, you know, having those discussions, I think.
I mean, he has been criticised for giving legitimacy to neo-Nazis, say.
We'll get into that.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
There's clips that speak to that.
And, yes, but I think you heard, though, the echo of him, you know, what he was just complaining about, that he has to...
Say all this stuff in order to get right-wing people to feel heard, right?
But that's what he was exactly doing there.
And this is him then, a slightly different thing, but like him talking about the accusation that he's a debate pro.
And this is him talking to his streaming audience.
So the reason why I made this post was because I have to go through a great deal of effort after I engage with certain people to make sure, hey, like...
Am I full of shit?
Maybe I am just totally fucking getting high off my own fucking shit right now.
I might be totally wrong on this.
A lot of people are saying that I engage in dirty debate tactics, that I'm a huge piece of shit, that I scream over people.
Fuck, maybe I am.
Fuck it.
And usually when I start to get these ideas, because I don't think I'm some exceptional genius that can walk into a crowd of 10 million people and just be right, I don't think that of me at all.
I think I'm...
Probably somewhat above average intelligence, but I don't think I'm fucking Einstein or whatever.
I think I'm just a reasonably intelligent person.
I can read pretty well.
It's about what I have going for me.
I've got a lot of Wikipedia articles under my belt, okay?
So, when I run into situations like this, sometimes it's good for me to take a step back and go through the evidence.
Well, okay.
People say that...
So, a couple of examples.
Sometimes I ask my community for this.
People say that I talk over people, that I talk too much.
That's really interesting.
When I had people go back and look at my debate with Nicholas Fuentes, he spoke for twice as much as I did.
Literally two hours to one hour.
When I had people go over my debate with Michael Brooks, I think he spoke for like 35 minutes to like my 15. It was insane.
When I had people go over my debates with, there was one other, but oftentimes at the end of my debates, I'll have my audience go through like, hey, can you go and check?
Can somebody go and actually map this out?
Did I really speak?
Because I don't feel like I did.
I feel like I have a pretty good vision of myself from the outside.
So, I mean, I have to have the caveat that I've only listened to 0.001% of Destiny's total content, but I have listened to two debates.
One was with Norman Finkelstein and some other people.
That was about...
Gaza.
Gaza and Israel, yeah.
And there was another one that was...
About the use of the N-word, which is probably another thing we'll talk about.
Yeah, well, I have to say that, I mean, like in both those bits of content, Justin is telling the truth.
Like, you know, he was the person that was attempting to speak, at least relatively speaking, compared to the people he was dealing with.
He was acquitting himself well in terms of being a good faith discussion, however you want to describe it.
Yeah, he's trying to...
He's not trying to hide from them, even where they involve him clarifying that he doesn't think dropping a nuke that will kill 2 million Palestinians or whatever is not necessarily genocidal.
He wants to argue that because he wants to say that there can be things which are bad which are not genocidal because there are specific characteristics, but that is him trying to clarify His position.
You can still disagree with it.
You can regard that as a very bad stance to hold.
But he is trying to be clear about what his position is when he's doing that.
And I do feel that a lot of the people that he engages with, that a lot of the frustration comes when he is trying to get them to say what their actual position is.
And they do not...
Return the favour, right?
So to speak.
So, yeah.
And maybe these are clips that are relevant here.
So, from that stream, the one where he litigated, like, a large part of it is litigating his argument that people should be able to use the N-word in private, which seems an insane political position, like a hill to die on for someone,
especially with liberal sensitivities.
But I think that speaks to the point that, like, If he thinks that that is the correct argument, he's going to die on that hill as many times as necessary to argue why he thinks it's coherent.
So let's play a couple of clips about him highlighting this desire he has to represent his politics accurately and what his politics are about.
My political beliefs are what they are and I consistently present them through every single part of my life.
I will say them on stream.
I will say them to friends.
I will say them on a stage full of black people who might even be police officers, full of an audience of black people that are conservatives that hate me.
I have lost business relationships.
I have lost friends or acquaintances.
I've cut off family members.
I've lost fans.
I've gained friends, gained fans, gained business acquaintances.
All of this has been a big shift as I've grown and evolved with my political beliefs over time.
All of my money comes from advertising on Twitch, and then subscriptions, and then revenue that I make through merchandising sales, and then the individual sponsorships that I sell along the way.
I'm not paid by any major media organization.
The Young Turks, Washington Post, none of these people give me money.
I don't take donations for political purposes from anybody.
The views that I express on stream are my views through and through.
They always have been, and they always will be.
that will never change because I don't care to change them for anything else.
Yeah, I'll just have to say that this commentary of himself gels with the
Information that I've got about him and the impression that I've got, which is that, well, first of all, he's very upfront about it's a business model he's got.
But also, as we talked about at the beginning, the streamer brand is one in which you seem to break down Any distinctions between your personal life and your private opinions and your public-facing commentary,
right?
For good and ill, perhaps.
But what that means is that in practical terms, when you are just talking for hours and hours on end every day, the brand is authenticity, right?
Like him or loathe him.
You know, the brand is the character, whether it's Hasan or Destiny.
And he does seem to be serious about his attempt to be whatever, to be consistently himself, I guess, in all of these different contexts.
Yes.
Yeah.
So I'll take a slight pause, Matt.
We'll continue back to Destiny.
You know, owning his beliefs and being sincere or not.
But I feel a sidetrack might be useful at this point to just illustrate to people who are, you know, wondering, like, what exactly do you mean in terms of personal and political and whatnot all getting intermingled?
So this is from a stream Destiny did after getting divorced from his wife.
And he's now...
Commenting on her contacting him about some money or something, right?
Like the stream is an hour and a half going over the various issues that he has with the way that his wife has acted or whatnot.
And this is Melina, a 20-year-old at the time they got married, fellow streamer or Instagram person.
Anyway, let's just hear a little bit of that.
Does the therapist know about that trait, talking shit to other people and Mel?
Yeah, of course.
It was one of the huge things that would come up over and over and over again.
But she always had, like, an excuse for everything.
I'm just trying to think of, like, where I want to...
Because there's just, like, one or two quick things I wanted to run over.
And then I might, like, I'll probably do a more comprehensive thing.
Why do you think that she isn't going to leak or talk shit?
Melina will not leak or talk shit about any of this because she knows that everything about this makes her look like a...
Satanic demon.
She knows that.
She's threatened it a million times.
Like, I'm going to start leaking everything.
Oh, yeah, let's go.
Okay, if you really want to, holy f**k.
Because my reputation is already zero in regards to our relationship.
Everybody thinks I'm a horrible f**k piece of shit.
We want to start leaking shit.
We can do it.
She knows that she looks horrible, though.
Yeah.
So, wait, man.
Let me just play the second clip for that, and then I'll allow you to comment.
So that's one thing.
And then here's a little bit more of that.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
The only things that I want to do, though, is I want to make sure that, like, I don't want to be thought of as a liar.
That irritates me.
I don't like the idea that the impression is that, like, I'm an abusive person.
And I want to give, like, a very broad accounting of, like, things that have happened because I don't like the impressions that exist of me, like, relating to a lot of this stuff.
But what I have to, like, be careful about is I don't want it to be, like, I hate Melina, which I do, by the way.
F*** that bitch.
She has everything that's coming to her.
Thank God.
But I don't want it to be like, because I hate her, now we're leaking six hours of our private life to make her look bad.
That's not my goal.
And that's not even for her.
It reflects poorly on me, and it's not like the character that...
I don't think it's becoming of high character.
I don't know that becoming of high character discussing...
You know, your marriage counseling therapist sessions and referring to your ex-wife as an effing satanic bitch or whatever.
I don't know.
I think that ship is sealed by taking the high grind at that point.
But this is what I was referring to about that authenticity.
And it's not like just a simple compliment.
It's maybe not even a compliment at all because the brand, someone like Destiny, is living their life.
Out in the open, so to speak.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of filter and no boundaries.
You and I don't often talk about our wives, for instance, on this podcast.
No!
And I think this is the bit that will sort of bend Normie's brains a bit, which is that this is part of the appeal, I think.
This is part of the draw that Destiny presents himself, I think.
Quite genuinely, as someone who lays it all out there, the audience is invited to get involved and to be a part of this as well, warts and all.
And, yeah, it's just a very different thing than what most of us are used to.
We'll return to the absolute...
Dissolution of boundaries in Destiny's content and community in a bit.
But let's go back after that little sojourn into personal matters to Destiny staking out his kind of philosophy and stuff again.
And just to mention there, I do think there's a through line because the frustration that Destiny mentioned was...
Being misrepresented, right?
Like feeling that he isn't being accurately portrayed by Melina or the discourse.
That's why he needs to set the record straight, right?
And I think that does fit with his kind of position about politics.
It's like he doesn't seem to care so much as long as people accurately represent what he's saying.
Like he seems to get most annoyed by people misrepresenting.
What he's trying to argue for or say.
So anyway, returning to the more philosophical side of Destiny.
I noticed that a lot of people seem to get off on accusing me of grifting.
And something that's very frustrating to me is that when I talk to people...
I find that I spend half the conversation trying to figure out what is it that you actually even believe.
People have a really hard time owning difficult positions.
They won't bite the bullet on the logical conclusions of some crazy position they might hold.
For instance, when I ask Hassan if a woman getting raped in an alleyway is within her right to call the cops, Hassan, instead of giving a straight answer, will instead pussy out like a coward and say, well, I wouldn't call the cops, instead of actually owning that position and saying, well, sometimes maybe you do need to call the cops.
When I ask people about whether or not they own a position related to...
We'll go into more of this later on.
But basically, I notice that a lot of people have a lot of trouble owning all of the extensions of whatever political system they believe in.
I don't.
I'll own every opinion I have, whether it's related to the fucking incest discussions we've had, whether it's related to foreign policy, whatever.
I'll own every position that I have, whether it's the abolishment of capitalism or liberal values or whatever.
Yeah.
You might not like what I say.
I think there are valid challenges to a lot of what I say.
I don't think I'm correct on everything.
My views have continued to evolve over time.
I wouldn't expect that process to stop.
I'm sure there's positions that I hold today that I probably won't hold five years from now.
I would hope so.
I would hope I continue to grow and change.
All I ever do is present to you what I believe at any given point in time, and what you're getting is basically like always a work in progress.
Authenticity.
As you say.
Yeah.
Reasonable philosophical destiny is quite appealing to me.
Like, I think what he's saying there is true, and he's pointing to something real, obviously.
You know, when people have a rhetorical position or a political position, they'll often refuse to engage with the consequences, like, logical consequences of that position.
So he was referring there to defund the police.
It's always wrong to call the police even if there's a crime going on, that kind of thing.
And he says...
I think he's right in saying that a lot of people who would hold that position, for example, will refuse to talk or grapple with the logical consequences of that.
One thing I'll say for Destiny is that whether his positions are good or bad, I don't think he would do that.
I don't think he would obfuscate and sidestep it and change the topic.
I think if you said, hey, explain to me why you think it's okay to do a genocide on the Palestinians or ethnic cleansing.
Explain that to me.
I don't think he's going to avoid the question.
No, and here's a clip speaking to that.
With relation to the Trihex stuff, I know that there is no world.
Where a person as white as me has an argument with somebody that is almost crying about whether or not they can or cannot use the N-word, that's never going to turn out well for me.
I know that.
I know that in the public eye, no one is ever coming out saying, like, yeah, Disney crushed him in that.
That's never going to happen.
But I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that because part of what I sell as part of my brand, and I sell this in a business sense, as in you watch me and subscribe to me, and I sell this in a personal sense, as in if you're going to have a romantic, a sexual, a friend relationship, a video game relationship with me, authenticity is a really big selling point of my character.
You, hopefully, should never, ever, ever have to guess what I'm thinking, ever.
You don't, like...
I don't know what Destiny would think about that.
I don't know what Steven would want about this.
You never have to guess.
I'll tell you.
If you think that you're really hot and that I'm just faking an enjoyment for sushi to get in bed with you, it's not gonna happen.
I fucking hate sushi.
It's never gonna happen and I'm not gonna fake that.
I'm true as fuck.
Steak boys for life.
I eat shit that comes from the ground, not from the fucking sea.
Fuck that shit out of here.
Or, if you're a black person, And you talk to me, and you say, Destiny, what do you feel about the N-word?
Destiny, how do you feel about reparations?
Destiny, why do you think black people have the problems in the U.S.?
The answer that I give you is going to be the same as I give anybody, any time, on any platform, and in any environment.
It's always going to be the same.
Nothing I do is performative.
I'm feeling maybe slightly overstating things because he does give different answers depending on the audience and how much the people can handle and that.
But I think the sentiment is correct, which is like he does say what he thinks and he tries to make it consistent across different contexts.
He doesn't...
Tried to obfuscate his positions.
That much all seems true.
Even if the position is, you should use the N-word, you should be free to use the N-word in private with other people that are not racist.
That is his position on that, by the way.
Just out of interest, because I heard the debate about it, but I didn't hear the...
I couldn't get any sense out of it, mainly because the people he was talking to were so terrible.
What is his position?
Is it like a kid who's listening to NWA, who's singing along to the lyrics?
Yeah, his position is, in one sense, the context matters, right?
That, like, if you're using the N-word in the context of reciting the songs, the rap song, that matters, right?
It's not the same as saying it as a slur.
But the second point, the more controversial one, is that he wants to argue...
It's fine to use privately with other people, not just the N-word, but any Knicks or whatever, where people know that you are not a racist, so you're using it as an edgy joke, right?
But his position also is you shouldn't do that in public because it can encourage, you know, like he understands audience dynamics and normalizing bigotry and that kind of thing.
So he's saying, but in private.
Like, amongst friends who know that you're not racist, it should be okay to use the N-word, you know, even if you're white, if you don't mean it in a racist sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean...
You and I are not from the United States, so this is not the cultural touchstone or third rail here.
It didn't come up much in Belfast.
No.
Although people did say it in rap songs or whatnot.
But, you know, I mean, transferring that to the context that I know about, I mean, I do agree that we shouldn't treat words like magical talismans with superpowers.
Like some heuristics around not using certain words are certainly good.
But, you know, I can, like, I follow an account called EatWog, right?
And it's an Australian of Greek or Italian descent.
And, you know, Wag food is great.
You know what I mean?
Like, that word has lost...
What's a Wag?
Oh, it's a slur.
It's a derogatory term for, say, a Greek or a Lebanese or an Italian person.
Oh, right.
I was thinking Gollywog.
So I was like, God damn that.
Yeah.
I can't remember doing it, but I'm sure I would have, might have used that word in a similar...
In a similar context, in a friendly joshing, where everyone involved knows that there is no sting in it.
And it is just sort of absurd.
Like, it's just absurd at the moment to be racist towards Greeks or Italians, say, in Australia these days.
And similarly with my brother, who happens to be gay, you know, he and I have used the phrase, oh, that's so gay, talking about something between ourselves, knowing exactly what we mean.
Yeah.
His position is also, Matt, that there was a guy called Trihex that he did a podcast with a black guy.
And Trihex had a discussion with Destiny where he got very upset with him over this position.
And I think they ended up, I don't know when they stopped doing the podcast or whatever, but in any case, you know, the relationship was materially damaged by the stance that he took on this.
But Destiny...
In some sense, he's a lot more extreme than I think a lot of people would be because other people might just be like, you know, it's not that big of a deal.
I don't want to hurt my friend and I don't want to be known as the N-word guy.
But Destiny is like, no, this point matters.
And he's annoyed because he heard Trihex in another conversation give his justification, right?
And he's like, well, that's inconsistent.
So you're saying that if you use the N-word with a hard R, there's no context here.
It's automatically bad.
And you critique me in point for asking for context there.
However, the intention of how that word is used can give you more than just a binary good or bad judgment over the usage of the N-word with a hard R. Now we have Zerka saying hard R is always dehumanizing.
And Trihex, this is just a few weeks ago, says that contextually.
Like Mitch, using it?
When is it the right contest?
Let him finish.
Let him finish, John.
For example, was he using it with a hard R to be edgy humorous and not a direct negative connotation tone?
Or was he using it to assault someone?
There is no humor in that word.
It's dehumanizing.
What are you talking about?
Here we literally have my argument platformed verbatim.
That contextually, even a hard R with a white person Might not be dehumanizing, like Zerka is saying.
And he also is annoyed that Hassan will agree with him in some other conversation that there are circumstances where it's okay, and then when he's in the presence of...
You know, black people that he'll say something different.
I'm sorry, what does Hasan say when it's just me?
When it's whitey to whitey?
When it's cracka to cracka, okay?
When it's fucking pale friend to pale friend.
When it's two people that can walk into a room with a single flashlight and light the whole motherfucking place up.
Whether it's from my pale skin or the growing baldness on his fucking head, okay?
What does Hasan say at this point?
But if someone else is doing it in the privacy of their own conversation with another person, there are specific contexts in which you could probably say the N-word.
Cool.
Cool!
Now, this is poorly clipped because he gives more context in the first, like, ten seconds back, but it actually is all context that helps me.
Hassan unironically makes my private public language argument.
Now, I don't know why he's not brave enough to make it in front of black people.
Maybe he feels like black people are too stupid or emotionally immature to handle this position.
Maybe he's scared.
Maybe he's worried that his audience will think it looks bad.
Maybe he's more concerned with optics than with principles.
I don't know.
It's not really for me to say.
I'll use Hasan as an example.
I'm not going to talk to a black person like Trihex and say, hey, the N-word, it's always bad, brother.
Brothers for life, dude.
ESL, man.
I'm Turkish, dog.
Yeah, I totally get you, man.
The N-word is horrible.
I'm not going to go into a podcast with other upset black people and then perform, you know, like a circus animal for them and go like, yeah, you guys are right, man.
I know why you guys are triggered.
Like, amen, guys.
Like, the N-word is always wrong.
It's dehumanizing, right, guys?
But then when I'm in a one-on-one conversation with a white person later, like me, Yeah, dude, like, we can say the N-word sometimes.
Like, it's cool.
As long as it's, like, appropriate, like, and the joke is really funny.
Like, yeah, it's cool.
I'm never gonna do that shit.
Whatever I say, I'll say it to every single motherfucker that I talk to.
Full stop.
You never have to guess where I stand on any issue, okay?
Yeah, so, I mean, the topic at hand, like, the contentious issue is, frankly, a stupid one, right?
Is South Park-style bad language okay sometimes, right?
You know, who cares?
Americans care.
Americans care about this a lot.
They do.
Sorry.
Sorry, Americans.
But, I mean, I think it speaks to his motivations and his character.
Like, he is aggressively upset about people just saying things because it sounds good.
It's going to make people happy in this situation.
And he's completely fine with people thinking he's an arsehole or a degenerate.
Or whatever.
And that's what...
But he hates that he hates people misrepresenting him, like you said, or thinking he's saying something which he isn't.
Yes, yes.
And he's very clear about this.
Like, just...
Do I want to change how people reacted?
Am I happy that some people were upset?
Do I care to change myself enough to make some people not upset?
Am I invested in any particular thing?
Do I enjoy the freedom I have to be very bombastic and very aggressive and abrasive?
Is that worth the trade-off where I lose some friends, I lose some sponsorships, some people are turned off by my messaging because I'm too aggressive?
These are all things that I'm weighing at the end of the day.
and big situations like this, give me a really good chance to, it's a lot of data, right?
I can step back and I can think about a lot of different
Should I have been kinder in public?
Should I have been more argumentative?
Should I have been less argumentative?
Should I have reached out privately?
Should I have avoided this forum altogether?
Maybe these aren't the right places to discuss things.
There's a multitude of different dimensions that I can look at to see.
How could I have approached this thing differently?
What would the different results have been?
Is it good, is it bad, or whatever?
And I apply this to a lot of the different things that have happened over the past few days.
So, okay.
So, I go through...
Understanding that all of that exists in my mind.
So this is a pretty personal view that I have of the world.
I'm going through a very personal way that I evaluate and audit my own behavior to make sure that I'm bringing it in line with how other people see me.
I like to think that I have a very, very, very good idea of how other people see me.
I like to think that I understand why people like me, why people fucking hate me.
Parts of the personalities that I...
Part of my personality people enjoy.
Part of my personality people fucking hate.
And I think for the most part, I think I have a pretty good grasp on most of that.
Like, sometimes it seems like I get a lot of feedback that's negative.
And I do.
Generally, I'm aware that it's coming.
And generally, I just don't care.
I like the final, you know, he goes through quite a lot.
He's clear.
You know, I do have all these thoughts.
I do reflect on things.
And actually, he outlines like a quite detailed, you know, reflective process.
But his conclusion at the end is like, I do think about all that.
And then I decide that I don't care in most cases.
It's refreshing.
It's such an interesting character.
Yeah.
I think we're building up the picture of what makes Destiny tick and also what is his appeal to his audience.
And one thing I don't think we have made, we've hinted at a few times, but how would you describe his political location, Chris?
He's a mid-moderate liberal left-wing progressive, but not on the bleeding edge of it.
Yeah, he's a liberal person that leans progressive but is definitely not a leftist.
And I do think I can play two clips that basically illustrate where he is politically.
Like, here's him talking a bit about Biden.
I mean, legislatively, I think in the first year or two, I think people would have said that Biden accomplished more than anybody thought he'd ever be able to do.
So, legislative, the administration is very strong.
I would argue that foreign policy-wise, I think it's fairly strong.
Some people were unhappy that the Afghanistan pullout wasn't as nice as it could have gone, but at least we're out.
And I'll give a major props to that.
Trump said he would get us out.
He pushed it off until the next election.
So, I mean, at least we're out of Afghanistan.
And I think the United States has done a really good job at taking leadership on the Ukraine issue with Russia.
But then, that's contentious among people on the very far left and a lot of people on the right.
Also, there were early day successes as well.
I think we buoyed the economy pretty well for COVID.
He got the 100 million vaccinations in half the time he said he would.
Maybe that's not 100% to Biden's credit.
In terms of leadership, I think that he has the demeanor of a president, which is nice to not have to look at Twitter to see what my fucking leader is saying every day in the world stage.
Foreign policy-wise, he has a respectable foreign policy.
He's not doing crazy stuff all the time.
No photo ops with insane people.
Yeah, in terms of cons, I mean, the age is going to be a big one.
I mean, you watch him talking about Bosnia 20, 30 years ago, and you compare that to today.
He definitely is slowing down a bit.
Sometimes I wonder if he's a little bit...
I kind of wonder, I look at Biden, in my opinion, I feel like Biden is pretty hard to hate because he's not that polarizing, but he's also really hard to get behind because he's not that exciting, whereas Obama was a person that the Republicans love to hate and the Democrats love to love.
Biden is just kind of there.
I think he does a good job, but in kind of a boring way, so people don't care as much.
Yeah, I think that's a good clip to play because you can basically locate an American on the political spectrum by finding out what they think of Biden.
If they hate Biden, they could be hard left or on the right.
But if they think Biden is basically fine but aren't terribly excited about him, then, yep, that's where you are on the spectrum.
Yeah, and we do have some clips that highlight the difference from leftists, so I'll play one of them.
The political...
The distribution of people in the United States right now is very strange.
If you go online, progressives basically run everything.
But in the real world, progressives are a minority of the Democratic voting bloc.
Yeah.
And they have almost no political power.
But they seem to be very active culturally and in, like, schools and everything.
The progressives kind of, like, have the reins on all the social issues, but I feel like they're running farther and farther away from where people are at organically in the conversation.
Like, if you talk to a progressive, they would tell you that, like, the debate today needs to be whether or not, like, a four-year-old can be considered trans.
And in the United States, I don't even know if the normal voter has completely bought into anybody being trans yet.
Like, my guess is probably 30 to 40% of Americans don't even believe that transness is, like, a...
I feel like...
Daily Wire talking about Lita Thomas or some trans issue or some culture worse thing related to trans stuff or another book in the school.
Yeah. Um, I feel like, I mean,
More specifically, I guess I feel like progressives, when they go to argue about a lot of these niche social issues, there's very little understanding, very little compassion, very little empathy.
If they run into somebody that disagrees with them, they basically immediately write them off as a racist, a bigot, a sexist, a fascist.
And they don't really have the ability to even engage in that conversation.
I think that's not an unreasonable comment on the American political scene at the moment.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say he's not a fan.
So, you know, like if you identify Destiny as a progressive, you have to take into consideration that this is his stance on the general progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Well, sorry, I'll just interject there.
I thought his main point there was that the, I guess, hyper-progressive issues, That the edge of the Progressive Party in the United States likes to talk about is also something that the right-wing and MAGA likes to endlessly go on about.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I think he's talking about more of a pragmatic risk you have.
Yeah, I don't think he's agreeing with all the criticisms that he raises there, but I think he does hold a whole bunch of progressive things.
I just mean that, like...
If you describe Destin as a progressive, you have to at least describe him as a hypercritical progressive because he's essentially saying most progressives are counterproductive for the politics that they want to instantiate.
Okay, so you're using progressive to describe not all Biden voters.
No, no, no, no, no.
Liberals.
I'm using liberals like I'm distinguishing liberals and progressives.
And I think he is, too.
I think that culturally, the progressives have put the Democratic Party in a really weird spot.
Like, for instance, in...
In 2022, we did really good in the elections.
I think a lot of it had to do with abortion and Trump's bad leadership.
But earlier than that, the BLM riots and the push for socialism and the all cops are bastards rhetoric from the progressives, even though they're a minority of the party, really hurt a lot of mainstream Democrats in their elections.
Yeah, so politically, you know, he's like mainstream Democrat in the U.S., liberal, but with some more progressive takes.
No love for the progressive, and certainly not for the communist, tanky, bleeding edge of the left.
It's not a fan.
Yeah, I think the correct description is that while the center of his political opinions is center-left, noctose, boring, pretty standard, much like ours, but he's very much a heterodox.
On various issues, you know, like we heard about Israel and Palestine.
Yeah.
Yeah, so there, Matt, you know, we've been highlighting some of the mainstream political positions that he holds and where does he fit, you know, in the landscape or whatnot.
Let's go back into the world of streaming, the controversies and stuff that generate there.
So one particular piece of juicy Destiny lore might be that he, Had plotted on his stream to kill a child that was interfering with his ability to stream by doing DDoS,
denial of service attacks, right?
Like, hacker shit.
And this was in the early days of streaming when you could do this through, I think, getting access to someone's IP address, and it interfered with Destiny's ability to earn money, right?
And it's fair to say he took this badly.
He ended up, you know, like finding out details about the kid that was responsible or kids and like, you know, contacting them, feeling that the family were not responsive enough and threatening them in various different ways.
And to be fair, he also contacted, I believe, the FBI and various law enforcement to try and get them to stop.
But so this became well known because...
He talked about, like, wanting to kill them, the boy and his father, at least, and kind of plotting about how he would go about doing that.
And now, that might get kind of shunted off to edgy Nebraska Steve when he's in his 20s or whatever, like, you know, being an edgelord.
But in line with all the stuff that we've just been talking about, people have asked Destiny more recently.
How serious he was about that and how justified he thinks it is to plot out, to kill a hacker child who is interfering with your stream.
and I've got two clips from him engaging with someone about that one lawyer and he told me that for lawsuits like this because all of it is uncharted territory that one it would cost me tens of thousands of dollars because you'd need tons
of expert witnesses to come in and explain things like TCP IP stacks to the fucking jury to even begin to talk about a DDoS thing and that two the likelihood of it even succeeding is going to rely almost completely on how tech savvy the judge is and if people even understand what's going on and that like proving damage is
So now if your question is, In that situation where the law is murky, where it's expensive, in that case, and when the police don't seem to be doing it because it's like uncharted waters or whatever, is the right solution to kill someone?
Do we want to live in a society where that's set up that way?
The answer is no.
Should that be murder if you had killed them?
Okay, what about beating the shit out of them?
Attacking them?
I don't think that the law would cover that either.
Okay, then tell me what it should be.
Tell me what you should do.
What you should do is you should advocate for new prosecutors and new laws and new protections.
That's what we do in this society.
This is the gayest possible fucking response.
Now let me ask you questions.
No, wait, you didn't even answer!
Okay, yeah.
So, again, the kind of tone you might take it.
So there he did kind of imply, well, what if I...
Beat the crap out of them instead.
And the guy would say, no, you can't do that.
But...
A bit more from that conversation.
I want to restate then.
Your solution is that I should have advocated to Congress that they change the laws while I lose my job for 5x plus years for them to figure out what to do.
I would recommend that you get self-help.
I would recommend that you start a lawsuit.
I would recommend you do exactly what you did, which is to find new ways to protect yourself.
Which is what I did do, yeah.
Okay, yeah, perfect.
I wouldn't recommend, and anyone who would recommend that you kill someone...
Would be wrong.
Look at how much worse your life would have been if you had done that.
If you're just looking at the particular case that you have.
I mean, it depends on whether or not I figured out how to...
It is the case that your life would have been ruined if you did that.
Well, I don't know.
If the alternative would have been that there was no solution for these types of attacks and people could infinitely grab your IP from a whole bunch of things, my life would have been ruined either way.
I don't know which one would have been worse.
I'm not sure.
You're not sure what would be worse to be...
Well, it depends on if you get caught or not, right?
Isn't that the whole point of fucking killing somebody is if you get caught?
Alright, did I answer all your questions?
Can I ask you some questions?
Yeah.
Okay.
If someone had done what you said that you were, whatever, that situation, should they have gone to jail?
No, I don't.
And they were caught?
No.
Hmm.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah, so let's just recap really briefly.
Tell me if I've got this straight.
So, this young troll hacker kid.
Yeah.
Doing distributed denial of service attacks back in the day, back when that was a serious problem.
There wasn't an easy solution.
Destiny attempted to resolve it by, you know, contacting the kid and saying, please stop or whatever.
Contacting his parents, yeah.
Contacting his parents, you know, saying, hey, your kid is a hacker.
Going to the police and even the FBI who...
I think you said just weren't interested because they found out...
They didn't really understand, didn't take it seriously.
Yes.
Yeah.
So Destiny's position is a legal case, a civil legal action against the kid or his family would be impractical, poor chance of success, etc.
Yeah.
Time-consuming.
Time-consuming, yep.
Therefore, a beating or a murder is the right thing to do.
Yeah.
Potentially without punishment, because the other person asked him, you know, if you were caught doing that, do you think the person should be punished?
And in other parts of the conversation, he is saying, you know, well, if someone was threatening your livelihood and you weren't able to provide for your family, they were coming every day and stopping you feeding your family, wouldn't you be justified in taking, you know, action?
And I kind of feel still fundamentally missing the point that, no, you cannot.
You cannot.
Murder from people, even when they're behaving extremely unreasonably and damaging your ability to earn a livelihood.
Like, murder...
No, it's not like...
If they are threatening your life in terms of they are attacking you, then there are some occasions where that's justified.
But Destiny seems to be advocating that...
But it was really annoying and costing him a lot of money, and therefore, what's he supposed to do?
Yeah, but the point is that he is upfront arguing for that, right?
I mean, so this is the interesting thing, apart from the extremely edgy aspects of his point of view there, is that he said this years ago.
Many years ago, like back in the early days.
And it would have been entirely possible to say, hey, I was really upset at the time.
I was extremely emotional.
Exactly, yeah.
My entire livelihood was being threatened.
I was blowing off some steam.
I don't think that.
But no, he will die on that hill, yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
So he's like, well, and to be clear, he didn't kill the boy, right?
Good, good, good.
Good to hear that.
He apparently, I don't know how much this is true, but I did hear it in one of the various Destiny lore videos I watched, that he made a website detailing the various technical steps he made to immunize himself from this kind of attack, and it became a standard that many other streamers followed to avoid this.
So he actually did a public good in some respect, as opposed to a murder.
But it's the fact that he feels a murder morally and logically.
We're to be justified.
And he's prepared to explain in the past couple of years that that is still the case.
That's a reasonable position to hold.
Now, he's wrong, Matt.
I mean, you can agree with him if you want, but I think a large amount of people would see the problems inherent in that argument.
But the fact that he is making that in public is...
Quite remarkable to me.
Yeah, it's remarkable.
I'm not going to debate him about it, but I'll just say that I also think it's wrong.
There's no circumstances.
As we speak to him, I am going to reuse this.
I just want to understand the process a bit more.
But the thing is, Chris, I think if you asked him, he would be exactly the same as in that other interview where he would steamroll you with a bunch of very logical, very coherent...
I don't think I can out-debate Destiny, but I don't know that this logic is going to hold very firm on this position.
I think this is one of these tasks that they give you at debate school about defend this position, which is almost...
Indefensible, right?
So that would be an interesting challenge.
But a similar thing, Matt, just to mention this, I feel this is a little bit similar.
It's kind of getting into the edgy tendency, but also to express your opinion directly.
So there's a stupid red-pilled podcast called Fresh and Fit.
It's Manosphere, you know, high-quality meal, alpha man shit.
It's stupid misogynistic, like Andrew Tate.
...level crap.
And one of them is currently going through a controversy because he had sex with an Instagram influencer woman and she is now claiming that she is pregnant with his child and wants him to materially support,
right?
So it's kind of, it's all the things that those...
Idiots spend their time warning about that there's these gold diggers that are trying to get your money and whatever and you need to avoid these traps.
But setting that part of the dynamics aside, the woman in question was on some other stream discussing her situation.
And Destiny jumped in.
Destiny's position is he is sort of condemning of the fresh and fit guy, but he wants to also condemn her.
For going and getting pregnant from an influencer and then she hasn't had the kid yet but has a plan that that person needs to pay child support and all this.
So he wants to say that that is immoral as well.
And I'm just going to play the clip of him talking to the woman in question and showing that, again, he likes to very clearly state his position regardless of norms of decency or, you know, like, let's just hear what he has to say.
Who are you?
How do you have the rights to talk about this?
Like, talking about a man...
Because I'm apparently, because I'm older than you, I've got more life experience than you, I'm the only one that...
Are you older than me, so you have more rights?
No, apparently I've got...
I'm just curious, it seems like you have, like, all of this...
I don't want to talk to you right now.
Okay, so, Daisy...
I don't want to talk to you.
Let me, um...
Okay, Dusty's gonna take a break for a little bit.
I am, Iroh.
I'll take out.
This woman is a f***ing piece of trash, though.
She's ruining this kid's life because she wants to milk this guy for money.
You're actually subhuman filth.
Just letting you know that.
Good luck.
Bye.
You can say whatever you want.
I am.
God'll judge you.
You can say whatever you want.
Yes.
I feel he's expressing himself with directness, fairly misogynistic language or whatever, but he basically just wants to say, you're a terrible...
Person for this as well.
But that's what I mean.
I feel that if you ask Destiny about that opinion, about him saying that to her, he'd probably say, you know, maybe I shouldn't have said God will judge you or whatever.
But he would be like, but I think she is in the wrong and that's what I was wanting to express.
And yeah, so that tendency has not gone away, right?
Like, this is...
This is very recently.
I think that's from like a week or two ago.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So how would you characterize it then, Chris?
It's a combination of this internet, this very crude internet culture norms in terms of just how people talk.
And he also doesn't care personally about the moors and mores of...
Being a little bit delicate, being a bit careful around a sensitive topic, he just wades right in.
So I find some of this a little bit confusing initially because I could see Destiny in these streams or mainstream appearances where he's being very careful and whatnot, and then I would come across a drama stream event where he's on stream with...
Various 20-year-old orbiters, and they're just having the most Indian conversation.
And I was kind of like, why do this?
But I think the explanation is he enjoys it.
Like, he does enjoy getting down in the muck and rolling around.
And, like, I'll give some examples from this, but there's a whole host of Destiny orbiters.
And they sometimes are friends.
They sometimes are enemies.
As we mentioned earlier, there are videos that are titled like Bridge is Burning or Bridge Burned, right?
Essentially for when he's going to cut them off and stop appearing with them or that kind of thing.
And there's figures in his orbit that are relatively reasonable or they're just streamers or, you know, they have some political takes or whatever.
And there are also extremely unhinged, often very young people, With a host of issues.
A host of issues.
Various self-diagnosed bipolar disorder or mental issues.
Various extreme political takes or whatever.
And let me just highlight the dynamics of that place.
So Destiny joins in a call where various people had gathered to discuss him and their problems with him.
You become Destiny, who's dealt with this for over ten years.
Ten years, he gets constant, constant, constant hate.
Can you imagine what that does to a person?
Most people aren't built for that.
Yeah, and Destiny talks about, he's like, oh, it doesn't affect me.
It doesn't affect me.
Of course it does.
You have to pretend it doesn't, otherwise it'll encourage the malicious people to do it more.
You have to, like, be that.
I don't.
Like, maybe that's true, yes, that people, like, care less if you care less, but I don't think that it requires deep sadness to do this for a long period of time.
Okay, maybe not deep sadness, but even maybe avoidance.
Like, the fact that, I mean, I think that part of why he wants to make villains is so that he is not the villain, right?
You, like, you shift.
He's, like, very constantly shifty so that he is, like...
You know, the Superman of the story, so he's the hero of the story or the victim of the story.
This is just part of, like, the types of engagements.
We're talking about debates that, like, the type of content we're doing is, like, where we are, like, getting into it, yelling at each other, cussing at each other, like, going after each other personally, like, it is just, like, essential to the type of content.
Absolutely, yes, but Tom, it is very different.
It is very, so, like...
Right.
He wasn't, like, invited.
He just jumped in and the host let him in because good content for them.
And this is him talking to a woman called Katnip.
You can go off what I actually said in the video, but, like, why further spread the narrative that I'm, like, some kind of a gold digger or something?
I said, I fly home and arrive tomorrow night.
You said, what time?
I said, 10.30.
You said, can my squad come?
Are you down to hang?
We have to go to the airport at like 4 a.m.
But we'd be down if you had the time.
And I said, okay, hey-o.
We can meet at a restaurant called Big Pink on Miami Beach at like 11.30 if you guys want.
And then you said, my friend said, if you pay, we can.
And then you sent me a bikini pic of all three of you.
Which was her idea.
Yes.
If you think that I miscommunicated any of our messages, I don't think I did, but those are our chat logs.
There you go.
But then later, I heard you mention something about it on stream, and then I said, hey, yo, was that about me?
And then I clarified that it was her who suggested that, and then you said, you're fine.
Am I fine or am I not fine about that?
Well, no, I thought it was incredibly fine.
Are you holding it against me?
Yeah, of course.
No shit.
Why?
That's a big grudge to hold.
It was super presumptive and kind of cringe.
I mean, I don't like hate you.
Hey, I also had second thoughts and honestly, I was people-pleasing in that moment.
I'm like, I guess if that's what she thinks is like, okay.
Okay, so Chris, help me understand.
This is an example of a pretty typical thing that Destiny and his group does, which is like litigating in microscopic detail a...
Interactions and dramas.
Yeah, and in this case, it's not just an online one.
There was the potential for them to meet up at some location and the cabinet, I think, I hope I'm not misrepresenting the correct name here, but she suggested meeting up somewhere with Destiny with her friend and then suggested that they would come if he paid for dinner and sent him a bikini picture,
which he found cringe.
And then, you know, they ended up talking about this on the...
Right, and then he talked about that incident on stream, and then she...
She talked about it, and then he released the thing or whatever.
And just to highlight again, it goes more than that.
So there's other people on the call, as you can hear, like various people.
But here's another example from the same call.
You can travel, you can do anything you want to do if you have money.
You can have sex with every BPD woman you've ever met.
Exactly.
Let's fucking go.
Speaking of which, just to clarify, no, me and Destiny did not fuck.
We never even met because Destiny didn't want to pay for dinner.
So you're saying it costs a dinner?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
My bad.
We never even got to meet.
No.
I think I at least got a water bottle.
Oh my god.
Doesn't take much.
That's why I was so hurt by the lie, because I even offered, you know, to take him out for coffee.
I said after I was a famous corn star, I was going to make it rain on him and Melina.
And then he went out of his way to mischaracterize me as just the gold digger, man.
Are you actually a famous corn star?
I don't know who you are.
Not like big, but I've been doing it.
What's a corn star?
Chris?
Pornstar, I think it's Pornstar.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, it does come up in the transcript as Pornstar.
Oh, they probably edited it for the YouTube.
Oh, I see.
Yeah.
And so that's the precursor to Destiny, I think, joining, right?
They're talking about all this.
But you hear another person who I believe is Lav, another Destiny Orbiter, mentioning that when she slept with Destiny, At least she got a bottle of water, right?
So, this is one person who was potentially going to meet up with Destiny and sent Bikini pictures another person who has slept with him previously, talking on another person's stream about something he said to his community which annoyed them.
Jesus Christ.
So this seems to be the darker side of the living your life in public and the darker side of the ultra-authenticity, which is everybody gets treated the same, right?
Could be Jordan Peterson, could be a pregnant Chinese influencer who's talking to him.
It could be a fan who's...
BPD.
There's a great deal of permeability.
There is no reluctance to get involved personally, sexually with one's audience.
And it has an aspect to it which reminds me of like reality TV.
The Love Island and terrible shows like that, which is also entertainment.
And just like with Love Island, I mean, people volunteer to go on these things and to sort of play around with the boundaries of doing stuff because they want to become famous, because they want to get the media airtime.
It's kind of an act.
It's kind of a drama put on for show, but it's also real to some degree.
Am I understanding it approximately correctly, Chris?
Yeah, but it's, you know, like you heard with the Melina stuff, it's pretty direct at times.
Like, this is a different stream with one of the people involved in this discussion, Lav, talking to Destiny, right?
And listen to this.
Any kind of thing, though?
Like, making fun of people for sexually related things?
Wouldn't that be horrible?
I'm glad that we have people like Lav in here to understand that, you know, we should never do things like that, right?
So you shouldn't have showed me your...
You didn't want me to laugh at it.
I know you'd run around talking to everybody because you were so proud about the fact that we, you know, kind of hung out with each other, so that was cute.
Yeah, well, you were really proud to call me mid-Jewish pussy, so I had to set the record straight.
You know, I just knew that it would bother the f*** out of you to hit you in the only area in your life you actually have accomplished anything in, which is, like, looking decent.
But, you know.
I can't imagine how good it makes you feel.
Someone with that weird of a d*** to talk about the way that I look.
So I'll let you have it.
Never had any problems with it.
Never had any problems working it, but you know.
You're the one over here with all the trauma.
You're the one over here.
I've never steamed my d*** before, but apparently you've posted guides on steaming pussies, so congratulations.
It works.
It made my period regular.
It was a yoni steam, yeah.
So, that's a different vibe from the, you know.
Yeah, different vibe as well.
Like, uh, just...
One, I don't know.
Maybe some people don't consider this an Ian.
It's just an element of life.
It's just people having sexual relationships and whatnot.
But is it really something that...
Well, I might jump in here, Chris, because if it came to light that Jordan Peterson was sleeping with a large number of women in his audience...
Orbiters.
Yeah, then fans.
Then that would be...
Big news.
If Joe Rogan was, that would be...
It would be something that I'd...
I'm not one of these people that make a big deal out of power dynamics and things like that, but the fact is that Destiny is kind of like the Joe Rogan of streamers.
He's the king of the hill.
He's an important guy.
Purely for pragmatic purposes, a lot of wannabe influencers, wannabe internet personalities are drawn to him for those reasons.
So there are those dynamics that are going on, and it doesn't mean that these people are victims and that he's necessarily a predator, but I think there are problems with these permeable boundaries, and there are rules for...
Professors, for instance, in terms of not sleeping with students or graduate students or even junior colleagues.
And those rules are there for a good reason.
Yeah, well, but also, I mean, there is the issue about the dynamics.
And I think, you know, Destiny is someone openly polyamorous.
And, you know, all of the people involved here are...
Adults are allowed to do whatever they want and it's a bit like it's always sunny in Philadelphia.
It feels like listening to this where people have done bad things but they've done it to each other.
There's one infamous episode where Destiny was sharing nude photos of some girl that he was sleeping with but I think she was a streamer.
I don't really remember the thing but the point is she found out because Some of the people that he was sharing her nude photos with let her know that they'd seen them or whatever.
And she had access to his Twitter account and she had dick pics.
So she went on to his Twitter account and posted his dick pic to his Twitter audience.
And then they debated about the ethics of who was, you know, wrong.
And Destiny was like, I share Destiny a select group of, you know, close friends.
And whereas you put it to my 50,000 followers.
And you're just like, who's in?
I mean, Destiny is not in the right, but also...
The other person is not the right.
Like I say, it's a bit like it's always sunny in Philadelphia where I'm like, these are all people doing bad things.
And it's just, like, it's such a dramatic thing that they're dealing with.
And I get people like different things.
For some people, they like these, you know, complicated, messy relationships, like all this stuff.
So, you know, whatever's your bag, do your thing.
But the thing is, this isn't done just...
In the privacy, you know, behind the scenes or whatever.
But that's also part of, yeah, it's live, it's all public.
But yeah, isn't that part of his or their philosophy or the culture, which is, yeah.
Yeah, it is.
But it means that all the people end up characters in this drama and the audience is aware of who slept with who and end up litigating it on stream.
To just give an example of what this ends up sounding like.
I remember being like, wow, that was the best head I've ever got.
And somehow you internalized that as making that about my other partners, which is crazy.
That's like what you say after good head.
Based on who you're, you know, talking to at any particular point in time.
But, you know.
Do you still think I sexually abused you or have you moved on from that part too?
Um, hard to say.
I don't really think about it that much anymore.
Fuck.
I thought I left a stronger impression.
Hold down.
No.
No, just the fear of phimosis, really.
Not anything else.
Is that why your name is phimoid now?
Yeah, you've really...
Whoa, maybe it's like...
Yeah, it remained dormant in my psyche.
I hope you get that figured out, by the way.
No, I'm good.
Everything works fine over here, you know?
Yeah, well, it's hard to clean it, I bet.
No, actually, it's pretty easy to clean.
You just pull the thing back when you're not hard, and, you know, you wash away.
But thanks for the tip.
Uncut?
Do I need to use butric acid, too?
All right.
I've heard enough.
I've heard enough.
I get the...
You get it, man.
So is that much like a soap opera?
It's a bit different.
You know, I guess maybe I'm not watching modern soap operas where I'm sure the storylines have got more extreme and whatnot.
No, I don't think it's a soap opera.
I think it's like a reality TV, like Love Island, but it's R-rated.
R-rated, yeah.
It's Gonzo Love Island, right?
But the point you made, Matt, which I think is an important one, and I'll get off these clips after, but it does overlap and end up with there being debates about is this to do with getting access to audiences and who is taking advantage of who?
All this stuff.
And there are various, you know, accusations about who's been a stalker, who's been revealing too much private information and so on.
And very often also to say, many of these conversations involve people talking about self-harm, talking about feeling suicidal and that.
And they're all dramatic people.
So it is what it is.
You know, I think...
Talking about mental illness and something is just stuff that is a lot more common amongst younger people and amongst, like, a progressive liberal set.
But there are people in the community or figures, various streamers, that have, you know, committed suicide or overdosed in drugs and stuff.
So, like, I do think very serious consequences can come about.
And, yeah, so just this clip, this is Destiny and that person Lav trying to litigate.
The exact timeline of when they're sexting or when things are happening in comparison to when Lav appears on stream with Destiny and gets a bump in subscribers.
Okay, but what I'm saying is, we didn't have, there was, you present this as though you're coming on to, this is just the impression.
Wait, I'm not presenting anything.
Okay, I'm sorry.
It is being presented, I'm using the passive voice now, it's being presented as though you are coming on to my stream into the combat zone, crying in private because of how traumatic it is, and then I'm sexting you at the same time.
But there's like at least a month or two, I think you just said two months of distance between us having any type of sexual relationship and the crazy combat sport starting No, any sort of sexual relationship.
Steven, you just said in October, we were still flirting.
We had never had the conversation like, let's not do this.
Our last in-person meetup, we had done something sexual together.
There was no door that was closed.
We were still absolutely flirty with each other, and I think we both were open to sexual experiences in the future, right?
Neither of us had a negative sexual experience with each other, so it's not like there was some moment...
In which it was, like, not expected anymore.
So, yes, I still think that we had an open-door policy for our sexual relationship.
Okay, I'm going to repeat the same question, because what you just did was so, like...
And also...
Hold on, wait, wait, wait, you just said a whole bunch of things.
Okay.
So, the thing is, in that point about consistency, right, he is approaching this topic a little bit like he does debates on Israel or Gaza or the N-word, right, where he's like, well, hold on, let's get the timeline.
It's true, right?
You say that I did this, but, you know, it's like, but what they're discussing is, and I guess that's the point, Ajime, that there is no, there's no, like, separation.
There's no, there's no boundary, there's no separation.
Yeah, like you said, it's the same, it's the same approach is taken if you're talking about the N-word or you're debating Jordan Peterson or you're talking about Gaza or whether or not you should.
It's right to murder a child hacker, right?
Teenage, you'd probably say, maybe he was a teenager.
A young person.
But yeah, it's all approached in exactly the same way.
So the impression I get is that Destiny is always on the same speed.
He approaches all of these things with exactly the same energy.
Yeah, well, okay.
A slight contrast to that.
So I completely agree with you that there is that issue.
And just, I think for the people listening to us, you do have to realize this is a different world, right?
Because you're never going to have the situation of Matt and me having a conversation with the various orbiters that we've...
I ended up having sex with and litigating, you know, like who washes their penis appropriately on stream.
It's not going to happen.
But with Destiny, he's going to be on Piers Morgan debating with Ben Shapiro.
And you won't have that with them either because that would be a huge controversy if Jordan Peterson was on stream.
Talking about, like, his ability to give head.
So there is a difference here, and that's, like, a side point to what I wanted to mention, but you said about him being consistent, right?
And here's the one thing I want to say, is that, like we talked about him modulating in terms of, you know, the way that he interacts with people.
So I think this is both an illustration of this and an illustration of the dynamics we're talking about in regards to there being no boundaries.
I mean, there are boundaries, right?
Like, there are things that he will kick people for or he doesn't.
But in comparison to a normal person, there are no boundaries.
And he did an interview with a journalist, Ryan Grimm, from The Intercept, who essentially takes a very strong pro-Palestinian stance, but also has been very critical around claims about rape on October 7th.
I'm no fan of Ryan Grimm, also a big advocate of the lab leak, incidentally.
But regardless, I'm not going to litigate all the things they had in their conversation.
Just, he went on Destiny's stream, they had a debate, right?
And then Ryan Grimm gets off the call.
Now, in a normal environment, that would be the stream ends, right?
The content is finished.
But Destiny then talks to his audience about...
The interview, right?
So here's him talking about Brian Grimm.
I feel like you should have pushed him to make a really solid claim about the conspiracy he obviously believes.
It's too easy for someone to turtle up and just be infinitely skeptical.
Yeah, I tried to do that in the beginning.
I actually thought about that before the conversation.
I feel like I have like a very...
I truly...
What's happening is I'm treating these people with kid gloves.
This is the reason why I said I don't like...
Everybody in my separate is like, oh, he's not going to go mainstream.
He's not going to go mainstream.
And then I'd always say, I don't really like the mainstream stuff as much.
The reason why is because when I'm having debates with Tonka Saw or Andy Warsky or Brittany Venti or even Lauren Southern or even Max and F***v, right?
By the end of this convo, we can really get into what we're talking about.
Like, oh, you're a f***er.
Do you believe this?
Do you believe that?
It seems screaming.
It seems crazy.
And people will say, like, oh, this is just debate pedophilia, debate perpetuity.
But in a way, I feel like it's more honest and I feel like it's a little bit more telling than some of the mainstream stuff where, like, when I'm chatting with these people, I have to be so careful because he was already getting, like, pretty triggered.
Okay, yeah.
So, have the debate, you have the discussion, then afterwards you do a bit of a post-mortem with your audience.
Yeah, but also that fact where he's like, people in his audience are talking about him going mainstream and it's going to chill his edge.
But he's like, no, I'm not going to do that because I don't like how constrained I have to be in dealing with mainstream people.
Because with the online streamers, it can be chaotic.
We can be screaming.
We can argue and whatnot.
But when it's a mainstream journalist, I have to...
Think about, like, how much pushback they'll take before they flip out, or this kind of thing, and he talks a little bit more about this.
Like, as soon as in the beginning, where he's like, as a journalist, and I'm trying really hard, I was like, are you trying to little bro me, dude?
Like, what do you mean, as a journalist?
Like, as a journalist, let me tell you about 82 in Lebanon, okay?
Let me tell you about, like, what do you know about 82 besides Twitter headline?
What do you mean?
Let me tell you about the...
He had no idea why the Phalanges were so mad about the PLO and everything.
He had no idea about the assassination of the Christian president and all this shit.
He didn't know any of this shit.
But he's trying to cite Twitter headlines at me!
Don't quote the old text at me, okay?
I was there when the wiki was written, alright?
But anyway, I can already tell that he's on the verge of breaking as I'm asking questions.
And if this was an old-school blood sports debate, right?
If it was an old-school blood sports debate, then we could have that conversation where I could just scream at him.
Like, tell me what you think happened.
Do you think the Jews...
Do you think the Jews are trying to, you know, yeah, concoct propaganda, invent mass rapes, like blah blah blah?
But if I break somebody too much like that, then yeah, it's over.
I mean, I can understand where he's coming from, where he could feel that those edgy online-type debates are more authentic, even if you're arguing with an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi or something.
Yeah.
But the argument that he dismissed, isn't it kind of true that it is kind of a bit porny?
Like it is a bit voyeuristic.
It does give a thrill to hear people say terrible things and then to shout at them and so on.
Like isn't that somewhat true?
Isn't that part of the appeal?
Yeah, I think so.
We haven't talked about it yet, but maybe now is a good time.
One of the criticisms that he often gets is around his interaction with Red Pilled or Nick Fuentes, who's essentially a neo-Nazi.
Debating with him.
And now, let me see if I can show you how Destiny justifies that, okay?
So, well, one thing, first of all, is that I do think he does a good job of outlining why that sort of shit appeals to people.
Alright, so he explains it like this.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a...
I think we've made really good strides in society bolstering a lot of different types of minorities, so be it women or people of color or LGBT people, but it always feels like on the backs of all those movements, we always have to make sure everybody knows how much we hate white people or we want to kick down on men or whatever.
And I think that when you do this for year after year after year, over a decade, you get this kind of growing sentiment of young white guys.
Or even young men in general who just kind of feel left out or they feel like they don't have figures to look up to or they feel like they're constantly being told they're not good, they're toxic, etc, etc, all the time.
And when that happens, you get this hunger from that group of people to find figures to look towards.
Jordan Peterson filled that role originally and now it's like all these red pill spaces and Andrew Tate that are kind of exploding and filling that new void.
And what's the best way you find of disarming a lot of their arguments?
I mean, it really depends on the person.
I mean, none of our arguments are based on very good data, so if somebody wants to sit down and actually go through studies, that could be a good way to do it.
There's more to say on that, but I think he is right there about a lot of the dynamics that he's talking about in regards to why Jordan Peterson, why Andrew Tia appeal.
I think we've talked about this as well, Matt.
He contrasts this to the message that the left...
I think what people really need to see on that side is...
People want to be happy and enjoy life, and sometimes on the left, it's really fucking hard to do that, right?
So if I look on the right, and I see Andrew Tate, like, what's Andrew Tate telling me?
He's telling me, buy a sword, be the master of your own destiny, go get, you know, work, get Bugattis, get bitches, get do all this stuff.
It's like, okay, well, if I go to the left, what are they telling me?
It's like, well, you need to feel bad because you're white, and you're systemically oppressing everybody, and capitalism is evil, and you're privileged, and everything you do is just because of your mom and dad.
It's like, okay, well, fuck me, right?
I feel like the left comes down on you so hard.
It makes you feel like shit for everything in society.
You know, like, oh, those shoes, those are made by a slave shop.
Or, oh, that food that you bought, the person is a victim of capitalism and they probably don't have a pension.
And then on the right, you get all these people that feel really empowering and they drive you further and further.
So, I feel like on the left, oftentimes, I feel like my important role is to show that, hey, I'm here.
I've got a lot of really progressive beliefs, but I'm a happy person.
I live a fun life.
I make money.
I don't think that any of this is evil.
And, yeah, having more figures like that, I think, would be really important to show that you're not demonizing success.
And that you can be a left-leaning person and be aware of all these kind of social issues that affect us without being fucking miserable all the time and feeling like you're, you know, an evil person.
Yeah, so Winnie's in this mode.
He's very appealing to someone like me.
I think he's speaking to something real there.
And he's talking about if you want to win hearts and minds, then, you know, it's sad but true.
But you have these people like Donald Trump or Andrew Tate, and they're horrible people.
They're a bad influence on society, but they are sending the message which is, you're fine, everything's okay, be a winner, do whatever you want.
And you may not like it, but that's an appealing message to people as opposed to feeling bad about things.
So, you know, when he talks about how he's positioning himself, I don't really have any criticisms there, Chris.
No, and again, so I'll get to the Nick Fuentes stuff, right?
Yeah.
In terms of how he frames it.
So this is him talking to a mainstream journalist about why he interacts with people like this.
And actually, this journalist that he's speaking to is a bit of a Dave Rubin, Lex Friedman type.
But in any case, they ask this question.
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 contending with them and disagreeing with them and maybe raising really good points that go against what 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 while being as empathetic or understanding as possible.
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-LGBT, you can have like blue hair, be in 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 cancel 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.
Well, he does sound a little bit, I mean, sometimes.
Sometimes.
Well, yeah, but yes, he does.
But he's, you know, here, he's kind of casting it that, like, especially in comparison to the people that he's talking about.
You know, also the very fact that he's able to roll with them in a way, like, you know, appear with Andrew Tate or whatever and kind of...
Punchback and whatnot, that this gives an impression of, like, not the scolding left, but as, like, you know, a kind of, yeah, the left is edgy and it's just saying stop being a dick to women and stop giving rich people extra money and all that kind of thing,
right?
Yeah, like edgy alt-leftism, not deep platforming and not out of the academy.
Exactly, and he's making that exact argument.
To some extent, when I'm platforming other people, that's a thing that I'm keeping in mind.
There's a lot of those communities that I've interacted with who I'm the first positive representation of a left-leaning person they've ever seen.
That's one thing.
The second thing is, if I am platforming somebody like that, I'm trying to make sure that everybody understands where I'm at.
I'm not just having the person on to laugh and giggle and play games.
Generally, with Fuentes, there 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 more tools to deal with that type of stuff in the future.
Yeah, I give some credit to that point of view, because one of the things I learned on Twitter in...
The interesting thing about Twitter is you bump into random people all over the world, and I've bumped into my fair share of right-wing Americans, or internationally, people that are very, very right-wing.
And they generally stumbled across me just because I'd made a funny joke or something like that, and then they said something that was funny.
There was no mention of politics.
And then a little bit later, so they already decided they liked me, and I thought they were fine too.
And then they find out that I'm not a conservative.
My political opinions are, in their mind, associated with this stereotype they've got of the bleeding-edge progressives.
And I can tell that they're a little bit fascinated by me because I seem like a...
You know, a normal person.
And that in itself surprised me.
There is truth to that, which is that in large segments of the United States and elsewhere, people are operating on kind of crazy stereotypes of each other because...
That's the impression they get from the news, I guess.
So I think they're, like, I just want to give him credit.
I think there is validity to his argument there, which is going on those, you know, talking to Dave Rubin or whoever, right?
You know, just being even just a little bit funny, right?
That is a helpful thing to do.
Now, here's the counter argument.
So, like, let me just play a clip of him talking to Nick Fuentes.
Okay?
This isn't even one of those, like, super debate things.
This is, like, him on his stream talking to Fuentes.
Like, if you're trying to build a big tent conservative movement, you're kind of fucking yourself by, at the outset, saying that women can't make real contributions to your political movement.
Don't you think that's, like, kind of fucking you?
Like, why would you put yourself in that world?
Yeah, you know, I've heard that from people on my side.
People are like, you're excluding 50% of the people in the country from your little movement.
But here's the thing, Destiny, is that if we say that women can't do politics, then women not being in our politics is not a huge loss.
You know what I'm saying?
This kind of gets to the point of, I don't believe in democracy.
I don't believe in, let's get half the people, or even a plurality, or lots of the people.
If we get a smaller percentage of really good, a really solid demographic cohort, that...
be better than if we have more people.
That could be better than having simply more people.
It's what kinds of people do you have?
Like for example--
We have a lot of tech guys.
A lot of tech guys are very right-wing.
I don't really want to get into that because that's a whole different conversation.
There's a lot of crypto tech people that are very right-wing.
A lot of young, white, savant, autistic types.
Some of them obviously very left-wing, but some of them very right-wing.
Those are high-impact frags.
You can say that, but look at the type of movement you're building at the end of the day.
One, you're going to have a hard time winning votes if it comes to that point because now you've written off There, I just want to highlight that,
like, they're sitting, you know, like, the way that Destiny presents it is kind of like, you know, look, I'm going to engage with these people, their ideas exist or whatever.
But, like, the reality is, you're sitting down with someone who's...
Waffling on about the Jews, like, you know, controlling 70% or is it 50%?
You guys told me you used to blame the Jews on 70% of your problems and now it's 30% to 50%.
So you seem like you've changed a little bit, Nick.
And maybe, who knows, maybe in two years, maybe the Jews will only be 20% at fault for the issues in society, okay?
It's a wild world out there, who knows?
In some circumstances, it's just a whole bunch of people talking like racist, misogynistic shit.
And it's like the assholes of the internet.
And what you talked about, About the spectacle.
Sure, Destiny's there to argue the left-wing case.
And maybe a couple of people are being picked up.
But really, they're getting a sensational event.
Lefty person enters to debate three red-pilled guys.
It's not this high-minded thing.
It's content.
It's drama.
And it's like making content with the worst fucking people on the internet, you know?
I'm telling you, you only focus on World War II because you're programmed to.
Dude, you'll never talk about Stalin like that.
Why?
Who do you think you're talking to?
And it also proves the point.
If you're saying Hitler's the worst person of all time, but you're looking at all the other leaders that have caused genocide on other minorities, you don't see them as evil people, but Hitler is the most evil one because he's the genocide of the Jewish people.
Bro, you can't say you don't see them as evil people.
What is that insane dichotomy?
Of course I think they're evil.
So why is Hitler the worst?
Because they led an unprecedented systematic elimination on who?
On Jewish people, on Soviet people, on the Romani people, on Polish people, on gay people.
Do people criticize him because of all the others?
What group did Hitler genocide that people are really afraid about?
Why do they say that Hitler's the worst of all time?
The two biggest ones are Jewish people and Soviet people.
That's why Russia to this day defines itself as anti-Nazi.
Does anybody care about the Hitler genocide on Soviets?
Nobody talks about that.
That's all of Russia's foreign policy.
Why do you think he's talking about going to Ukraine?
You're lying.
You're lying right now.
You and I covered Hassan Piker saying Hitler wasn't bad for invading Poland.
He was bad for killing Jews.
And you covered that and you changed your position.
Read the live chat more.
Is that your notes?
That looks like a live chat.
That's Adam22 texting you.
He's reading the live chat for more answers.
Adam22, stop texting you.
I want to reply.
Yeah. Like.
No, I understand.
I can't square that circle of the platform or not to platform.
I don't have a nice pat answer to that.
Yeah, I mean, it isn't always the best thing to do, especially if you're very famous, to be spending time recording content with a white supremacist like Nick Fuentes.
Yeah, and like, you know, Nick Fuentes is a, what's even a way to describe him?
Like he's, you know, he wants a Catholic, totalitarian state, ethno-nation state, white supremacist.
He's somebody that Alex Jones thinks goes too far in his right wing, FNN nationalists.
He was making jokes about the Holocaust and how many died.
I don't know.
That's a good question.
Certainly, uh...
Oh, no, no.
It doesn't really sound correct to me.
Wait a second.
It takes one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and you have 15 ovens, probably in four different kitchens, right?
Doing 24 hours a day every day for five years.
How long would it take you to make six million?
Hmm, I don't know.
It certainly wouldn't be five years, right?
The math doesn't seem to add up there.
The math doesn't quite seem to add up there.
I don't think you'd result in six million, maybe 200,000 to 300,000 cookies.
And I think the Red Cookie Association said something like that.
Probably 200,000 to 300,000 cookies baked.
Probably.
And in addition, you know, in this hypothetical, I imagine that if you took aerial photographs over the kitchens, you would need to see certain smokestacks to release the smoke from baking the cookies.
And the smokestacks would project certain shadows, but I guess they're not visible in the aerial photographs taken over the kitchens.
Like, he's pure, edgy, Right-wing neo-Nazi shit.
But when Destiny interacts with him, so Destiny will say when he's talking about it that he's not there just having fun time with Nick.
He's pushing him and he's arguing and he's kind of exposing his audience to counter-arguments.
But listen to these kind of interactions which are from him discussing things with Nick.
And I think this is why he gets accused of being Polly.
He's talking about Lauren Sovereign with Nick Frances here.
I don't think she's talking about anybody relevant now.
I read it in the reverse.
Like, she weeded herself out as untrustworthy.
I guess, like, because when I think of, because people always ask me, why do I talk to people like you or people like Lauren?
People ask me this all the time.
It's one of the biggest criticisms I get.
And my response is that I respect you, too, because both of you are working on building real political projects.
You've got your whole movement.
You've got a website.
You do AFPAC.
I respect that.
Even if I think your views are batshit and insane, I respect the work you put in.
But I would say the same with Lauren, too.
Like, she did documentaries on topics when people are barely willing to Well, say what you like about Nazism,
Chris.
At least it's an ethos.
Yeah, like, it's just because he's talking about, you know, content, which is absolutely the most BS, sensationalized, polemical bullshit.
I respect the hustle.
I feel like that's not misrepresenting to say that he does do that.
He does call them out on their racist and ethno-nationalist beliefs and all that kind of thing.
But there is an element of it where it's an elder content creator talking to a younger content creator.
An example of that dynamic.
You know, like, she was, you said she's not as much of a Nazi as she was before.
I wouldn't characterize it quite that way, but you remember, I mean, years ago, she was in the fucking Mediterranean torpedoing boats of refugees.
I'm exaggerating, obviously.
Yeah, and five years ago, I was on film saying shit like, I think we could kill conservatives and be morally justified.
Nick, I know you don't believe this, but part of getting older is you kind of mellow out a little bit, and you're still young, you're 23, but I bet when you're 26, you're gonna look back and be like, you know what, maybe this shit was a little bit too extreme, you know, and Again, like I said, maybe the Jewish thing comes down to 20%, maybe up to 25%, but that's not a grifter thing.
That's literally every single human being you talk to.
If you ask any 30-year-old, do you think you were a little bit crazy about some ideas when you were 25?
Yeah, maybe, right?
Everybody had a phase where they obsessed over Ayn Rand.
A lot of kids today are having phases where they obsessed over Marxism and non-binary, but you fucking grow out of it.
You get a little bit older.
You mellow out of it.
Your temperament changes.
That's a natural part of aging.
It doesn't mean you're grifting, and it doesn't mean your core political beliefs have changed.
Yeah, I just realized that Nick Frentos was born in 1998.
These are just kids.
He's a toddler.
But it doesn't matter.
Like, he's a neo-Nazi fucking toddler.
Oh, yeah.
I guess the theme that I'm detecting is that Destiny treats everybody the same.
Like, he's less as likely to have a sexual or romantic relationship with a fan.
As opposed to someone he met outside of work.
He's just as likely to talk to Nick Fuentes and treat him a certain way as talk to Jordan Peterson or to talk to anyone left.
Everybody gets the same treatment.
And I guess that's the philosophy.
His philosophy is that he is a certain way and he has these certain ethos or certain beliefs and he applies it absolutely equivalently across all domains of...
Yeah, and I feel like if we talk to him about all of this, you know, we kind of raise these issues, he would maybe concede some parts, but, like, I think he would stand by his positions,
right?
And in some respect, we are just saying, right, well, we have a different set of standards that we think are better.
So we are expressing...
Our position.
And Destiny doesn't have to agree with it.
He can live his life out in the open with no boundaries.
He can hang around friendly with neo-Nazis.
He's not a neo-Nazi.
I think that anybody that is mistaking him for endorsing that point of view, he's not.
And he is not somebody that doesn't care about any political views or that kind of thing.
It's not like that either.
So in many respects, I feel like He is saying, these are my positions.
This is what I'm going to do.
And I'm going to defend it.
And I'm going to continue doing that.
And other people can disagree.
Other people can criticize me.
But that's my judgment on stuff.
And I respect that.
I genuinely do respect.
Because he's not pretending to be something he isn't.
A lot of his orbiters and whatnot, they're all constantly psychoanalyzing about why he's doing anything.
I don't find him particularly puzzling.
In many respects, I see him as very similar to me in certain respects, psychologically, in terms of becoming very hyper-fixated on topics, enjoying debating things and going into...
Listen to arguments that he doesn't like and like kind of litigating things.
Like all of this stuff I recognize in myself, in my own personality.
And when he describes how annoyed he is by people kind of not being consistent or misrepresenting what they're saying, I feel that same frustration.
But I don't share any of the characteristics which are the kind of...
Enjoyment of dealing with interpersonal streamer drama stuff or making edgy takes or that kind of thing.
It's just to say that I don't think there's a big enigma at the heart of Destiny's content.
I think it's pretty much what it says on the tin.
It is what it seems to be.
If it seems like he's living his life out in public, then that's what's going on.
If it seems like he's having these very extreme kinds of conversations, whether it's about something that would normally be extremely personal or whether it's talking to Nick Fuentes or whatever, then that's what it is.
This is the content.
What strikes me most is how at sea I am, I guess, in this subculture.
Like, I think it is.
I think there is a generational thing, even if he's not that much younger than you.
But this is a culture of people that have grown up with the internet, that have grown up sort of post-Gruyper, post-everything, post-irony, everything.
And now there is a great, I want to say flattening, I suppose.
Like, he'll engage with everyone in the same way.
He'll engage with Nick Fuentes and the arguments he brings to the table in the same way he'll engage with Ben Shapiro or a bipolar woman who's an influencer who he's slept with, right?
I see him engaging with everyone in exactly the same way and doing it publicly.
To be clear, you mean like his kind of approach is similar, but he does match the energy to a large extent.
So like if somebody is, you know, more relaxed and not going personal and keeping things, you know, at a kind of high level debate style thing, he does that, right?
Automatically slip into, you know, debate role, the worst excess of it.
So, like, in that respect, I feel he does modulate what he does.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, no, I didn't mean to imply that.
Yes, he's certainly got very different styles that he could bring to bear, depending on whether he's doing a mainstream interview or it's a stream or he's having a debate.
But I guess it's that...
It's that ethos which is engage with everything, you know, sleep with everybody, talk to everyone and do it all publicly and stream it and then get everyone to talk about what we think of it.
He's talked about that being protective in a way because like there's nothing he needs to really fear because he makes everything open, right?
So like there's not going to be the Hooperman style expose because it's all...
There.
Already on his streams with him talking to people about it.
But one other point that I would make about the ecosystems and the generational divide, I am sure many people in our audience will be like, what the fuck is all this?
What the fuck is this?
But also...
My mum listens to this, Chris, so I don't know what she's going to think of it.
Yeah, but it's good to know this exists and also because Destiny is becoming...
More mainstream, right?
He's cropping up in Piers Morgan, debating with Ben Shapiro, having a debate with Alex Jones.
I'm not saying he's mainstream Alex Jones, but, you know, that debate got attention.
And I think that one aspect that's notable is his online community.
We would be remiss not to mention this, Matt, because it's infamous, right?
So his community is sometimes referred to as the Dalaban, right?
DGG.
And he has a very active and large subreddit.
And to give an example, when we posted on our Patreon that we are going to do Destiny next, within ours, that was screenshotted and on his subreddit with quite a few comments, at least by our standards, right?
And that typically doesn't happen.
So that's like an activated fan base, right?
And they're infamous online because people regard them as very, well...
Like, maybe...
Like a swarm of bees.
If you kick the ghostly hive, they will swarm you.
Right, and maybe people would say, like, hyperautistic bees, or, you know, like, anyway, very online bees, right?
And I don't doubt at all that they have the ability to abuse people or make people's lives a misery.
However, I will say, from my observation of that community...
It is very much like they're not randomly going on campaigns against random people.
They basically end up feuding or criticizing people that they think are misrepresenting Destiny or are attacking him or doing things.
Destiny will point out that people go online.
We played some clips of all these people talking.
about Destiny in the stream, and there's many others that we could play of people, you know, just completely crapping on him, talking about what a terrible person he is, what an abusive person he is, and all that is.
And then if he responds, they will immediately say, he set his community upon me, right?
Because I'm a smaller content creator, and so he makes a point, they can say what they want, he can't say anything back, and...
If, like, Hassan criticizes him and he says something stupid and people, you know, he highlights something Hassan says, Hassan will say, Destiny's obsessed with me.
But they equally are mentioning him or they're feuding with him.
And I do feel that there's a little bit where I don't, like, I'm not worried about the Destiny community coming after us.
Because even if they don't agree with our take, I feel like they will be fine that we have, You know, attempted to present them accurately.
And they might take issue with various things or whatever.
But I think they do end up, you know, targeting people that are in the drama streams that are doing all the feuds and stuff.
But if you're not a part of that ecosystem and you're, you know, you're not going to be feeding drama content or sparring with Destiny on Twitter or that kind of thing.
I don't think they really care that much, right?
That's what I would say.
I do think it's a big community.
It can breed or target people.
But from what I've observed of them, it is very much part of that ecosystem where all the big creators have their communities.
Destinies was one of the first, and it's one of the biggest.
In a way, it's kind of inevitable.
And when we've made a couple of videos or a couple of content that's critical of Hassan, we just get tons of response from Hassan fans, right?
Yeah, that's fine.
It's inevitable.
It's inevitable in a way.
Yeah.
I mean, one little thing that you mentioned to me, Chris, that I don't want to not mention is you mentioned a little episode that he mentioned offhandedly about He's paying his YouTube editor.
What was the deal with that?
Yeah, yeah.
So, like, on a recent interview with the Ice Coffee, he was talking about, you know, his YouTube channel or whatever, and he...
So my website is where I have my own subs and people can donate through there.
I think on that I make about $250,000 a year, I think is what I made last year.
Is that like an email thing?
No, it's just you go to destiny.gg and then you can subscribe there, you can donate there.
It runs as its own completely side chat and ecosystem or whatever.
Oh, so you stream on there as well?
No, it's just an embed from YouTube or Twitch.
Oh, okay.
Well, not Twitch, but yeah.
YouTube ad revenue is really good.
I probably run anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 a month off of that.
And then I've got two other channels that make around $20,000 to $30,000.
I pay like 45% of all that ad revenue goes to my YouTube editor, who's definitely overpaid, August.
No, I'm just kidding.
45% of that?
That's a lot.
Yeah, I do, yeah.
Wait, all of your channels?
Yeah, he gets a lot of money.
No.
When did you agree to that deal?
A long time ago.
Before it was making much?
I mean, it's like 100k a month.
Basically, it's...
Yeah, he does really well.
But basically, the way that I saw it when I initially did it was...
No ideas, Jack.
When I initially did it, my idea was basically that I want him to be as invested in the channel growth as I am, and I don't want to do anything.
I don't manage anything on 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 I'm okay with him making a lot of money.
He's made me a ton of money.
He's made me really successful.
And he mentioned that he...
I think he said he pays the editor 45% or so of the income, right?
Which works out at like 30,000 or something.
So again, an indication of how much money.
30,000 a month, did you say?
Right, right.
So that's, you know, over that for his editor.
We're talking huge amounts of money here.
Well, I think he said that he mentioned it kind of ruefully, that he set up this deal.
He didn't think the YouTube channel would necessarily make a huge amount of money.
It ended up making a lot more money.
Yeah, I mean, he was talking about people being, you know, compensated fairly and how he thinks it's important, but he did express, you know, it is a lot of money that he's given, but whatever.
But the point was, he did not present it as it's an illustration of his fundamental political morals being expressed in his output or whatever.
And if this was a figure like Hassan, It would absolutely be something that he was shining from the rooftops.
This is a wonderful example of him doing a workers' cooperative and look how generous he is, etc.
No, he presented it just as a bit of a mistake.
Not a mistake, but he made a deal.
Yeah, he's doing something good.
He's doing something good and he believes in spreading the wealth.
Yeah, it's a lot of money to be giving to someone.
So yeah, I'm sure his editor is happy.
And I'm sure at the same time that there are other relationships that people feel that they weren't fairly compensated or whatever.
So we're not endorsing Destiny as like, yes, he's a great boss.
But the point is, he didn't use that as a component of his moral stature.
Yeah, like to say, right, that's my, you know, I'm a liberal person and so I do it like this.
It was more just, yeah, that was something that happened.
So I think that is a distinction worth noting.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, to sum up my impressions, Chris, I'm a very confused boomer at the moment.
Like on one hand, I just don't agree with Justin's philosophy in terms of, Living your entire life in the public, making everything part of the show.
And I do think that a lot of those debates and a lot of those litigations of drama is entertainment.
And it's, you know, you could...
I guess anything that people find entertaining is fine in a way, but in the same way that I don't like Love Island, I don't like that stuff.
I think there are concerns about having sexual relationships with your...
Orbiters?
Orbiters?
Yeah.
And they just are.
And I know it's a different world where everyone's polyamorous and everyone's online and so on.
But that's that.
But, you know, I think what I'll say in favor of Destiny is that as far as I can tell, he's completely consistent.
In that he does seem to act and behave in line with his lights, such as they are.
And if you put aside all of the drama and you put aside the, you know, speaking loosely, shall we say, which I have a fair bit of tolerance for because I appreciate if you've been streaming for whatever,
15 years, you're doing it for 10 hours a day, there will be stuff, right?
Yeah.
Certainly I've found myself getting a bit loose at the end of two or three hours of recording and we go, okay, that's enough.
You've never...
Yes, you have, but there are levels.
There are levels.
But I was going to say, if you put the drama and the scandal type stuff aside and you just look at the more substantive...
Political points or commentary that he's doing, because he is a professional pundit, then he does a pretty good job of that.
Just on a purely intellectual level, most of it is pretty reasonable.
Not to say it's perfect, not to say I endorse it, but compared to most of the gurus we look at, he's of higher quality.
He's certainly so much smarter than someone like Hasan Paikha or the Red Scare people or other people that at least mentally are put in the same ecosystem.
So in the end, Chris, I don't know what to think.
It's just been an interesting journey to get to know someone that's living in a different world in a very
Yeah, well, before I get to my wrap-up, I'll...
I'll just play a couple of final clips.
We've had quite a few, but there's a few more to finish off with.
And most of these are actually a little bit more positively tinged.
So maybe, you know, a positive note to end on.
One.
I think is slamming academics.
I'm here for both.
Let's hear what he has to say about people like us.
When I have to argue against a lot of these people, I've spent a lot of time reading research, reading studies, spending time on Wikipedia, figuring out I've learned so much shit because it's not my area of expertise.
And all this research that I'm doing, every time a new conspiracy theory comes out, I have to do more reading and more research to get a handle on immunology.
I wish that people in the academic world spent a little bit more time on public outreach because I don't think that the job should be left to people like me to do it.
I, my, 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 goddamn, 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-researched and then have him just,
like, practice a little bit in terms of debate or conversation?
I've seen the Hotes guy talk before, and I don't think he would be the...
Good choice for that RFK debate.
He seems pretty knowledgeable, but he doesn't handle himself very well in 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, right?
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 frustrating to me.
So you think the debate should happen?
I think the debate should happen, but you need to find academics who are warm.
What do you think of that, Chris?
Well, he was talking about Joe Rogan and the Peter Hotez debate about vaccines.
And I do agree with him.
First of all, he's making clear his limitations and that he recognizes them, that he's not an expert in these topics.
He does do research.
And I would also make this point that relative to streamers and many of the people he's debating with...
He completely wipes the floor with them in terms of research because he just does basic research.
Then he checks up sources and he writes out points and that kind of thing.
And it sounds really basic, but it's actually rare in that arena.
So he is correct that he's good at debating and that academics, by and large, including people that are much better versed, aren't good at that.
So he is right.
Like, it would be good if more academics trained a little bit in how to debate or how to present things and, you know, were willing to do so.
But the bit where I slightly disagree is he says, you know, what's the point if you're just in a classroom, you know, teaching people about things?
Like, what difference does that make?
And the answer is, well, that is the reason that you have doctors and, like, most academics are not.
Like, what they're actually doing is...
Teaching the fucking subject that they've mastered.
Yeah, that's right.
I saw a similar comment, which was that, oh, you know, the Academy should start valuing, like, book sales instead of just valuing, oh, you've done an academic publication that was maybe read by a handful of people.
And on the surface, that seems to make sense, right?
You know, a book that's influenced a million people is far more important than some niche academic thing that's hit 10 or 20 people.
That's the nature of specialized expertise.
Sometimes when you're researching something like mRNA vaccines, then actually your empirical work just needs to be read by the 10 or 20 other people that are working on that specific area.
And in the end, what you're looking to do is to generate knowledge that's going to inform some technology or indeed train specialists in a very particular area.
You're not trying to educate.
The entire world about the nuances of exactly how this thing works.
That's not to say that isn't an important role, and I think it is important for anti-conspiracy, anti-anti-vax people like Destiny, who is like a Swiss army knife.
Like you said, he does far more research than your typical...
Online personality.
But, you know, it can still only be superficial in a way because you're a jack of all trades.
You're debating a different topic every week or two.
But, you know, I think there's room for both.
And if people like Destiny or anyone in his position can simply access...
Yeah, and I'm more concerned about academics who,
what Destiny talks about there, like maxing up their social media or presentation competencies, it's basically you run the risk of generating a Huberman.
Yeah, or Jordan Peterson, right?
Yeah, so be careful what you wish for.
But, you know, on the other hand, Debunk the Funk, Dan Wilson, very good communicator, great knowledge.
So, you know, there's plenty of people that adopt this role, but Destiny is right that, like, there are not so many people that can do what he does, especially engaging with People that are very, very rhetorical.
And he mentioned there that his skills are in rhetoric and argumentation and debate.
Yeah, yeah.
He's very upfront about what he's good at and what his limitations are, and I do like that.
He doesn't like to be dismissed as a debate bro and accused of just doing rhetoric because he points out that people are often that they don't explain what that means and they kind of you know they just reference that he reads Wikipedia or whatever as if like that means that he has no knowledge of about topics but In most cases,
like going to Wikipedia first as a reference for a topic, it is a good jumping off point and it is a place that gives you like resources.
And if you only read a Wikipedia article, yes, that would be a problem.
But as a starting point, it's perfectly reasonable.
And look, and I do sort of agree with his more fundamental point, which is that academics generally, scientists, whoever, we need to make a little bit of space in our lives for that Making an effective conduit between specialized,
evidence-based scientific knowledge and the general public.
You don't necessarily have to be a master debater, as they say.
You don't need to be good at public speaking or giving catchy slogans and stuff, but you can be part of the conduit.
And unfortunately, academia doesn't reward academics for doing that most of the time.
So, you know, it's fundamentally right.
Yeah, yeah.
And so another clip, Matt, of him talking a little bit about his process.
He was talking about his views can't change.
He's mainly about trying to develop a process for critically evaluating sources and locating information.
And I agree with that.
That's all good.
But he talks a little bit about ways that he might challenge his views or try to pressure test them.
So, this process might include, can I find views that I had on this six months ago when I was in a less emotionally charged state?
Would I still agree with those views?
Or was it different then?
Maybe I'm letting my emotional state dictate how I feel now.
How would I feel if somebody posited this argument on the right?
Somebody that is a political opponent of mine were to try to posit this argument.
Would I still agree with it?
I might think...
I might try to think, like, what would it take to convince me out of said position?
Like, what are some arguments that would be good arguments and encountered in mine?
Oftentimes what I'll do is I actually take out a little notepad and I'll start, like, jotting down, like, this is what I believe about this, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'll write all the arguments, I'll write the counter-arguments, I'll try to write the counter-counter-arguments, and then I'll go back and forth until I feel like I've reasonably, like, weeded out, like, my position.
Like, I understand not only the arguments for, but the arguments against to a great degree.
So I spent a lot of time auditing my own thought process.
Whenever I go through like big ordeals like this, I usually take a step back and I try to think like, okay, well, what just happened?
Why did it happen?
Why did the communities react the way they did?
What can I do to change that if I do want to change that?
That, Matt, that sounds like a much more reflective person than like a Brett Weinstein.
Remember Brett Weinstein talking about how he checks himself?
Maybe he says he asks Heller.
And Eric.
A little less so Eric.
Or he speaks to his anti-vax friends.
Or he checks whether or not everyone else disagrees with him, which is proof that he's right.
Right.
And definitely, as we've seen, he's not somebody that is willing to give up unpopular positions just because they're unpopular.
They're a bad look or a bad hill to die.
So he will take unpopular positions, but what he is describing here, It is an academic-style process of considering counterpositions and trying to think about what would be your position if the facts changed on this or that.
Yes, it's good debating tactics in general to know, but it is good epistemic.
I don't think anything there is disingenuous.
That's what I was going to say.
If I heard one of our other gurus say stuff like that, I would perhaps suspect that this is stuff that they're saying as a self-presentation thing to make them sound good.
Everything we know about Destiny seems to be that whatever his faults are, he does seem to be Entirely authentic in everything that he's saying and doing.
Disagree, as I might, with his methods, with his choices, and certainly some of his opinions.
He doesn't seem to be someone who just says stuff because it sounds good.
Yeah, and so just to say as well, Matt, we can contrast this exactly.
Remember the clip that we always play of Eric and Brett saying, if everybody's telling you...
You're wrong.
That's how you know you're over the target and you're right.
And that feels great.
That feels like you're doing something right.
Weirdly enough, they're being authentic too, I think.
Well, they are.
They are being authentic.
But compare that to this sentiment.
Let's talk about this real quick.
So my position on who can achieve what, I think genuinely that most people in society can become 99th percentile at any given thing if they put their mind and attention to it.
That you could take the dumbest person off the street, throw them into a studio for an hour a day, and in one year they'll be a pretty good piano player.
Like a surprisingly good piano player.
That people can reach a surprising level of competency in any given ability, in any given field, within reason.
Obviously a quadriplegic isn't going to be a 100% I generally extend this view to myself.
I don't think that I am exceptionally intelligent.
I don't think I was gifted or born with some kind of manager brain or some master high IQ.
I think that I just have a pretty good set of tools for evaluating what beliefs are good, what beliefs are bad, and then I try to adhere to that.
Anytime I step into an area where a whole bunch of people are telling me that I'm wrong about something, and I insist that I'm right about something, one thing that I have to accept, if I want to be intellectually honest, is...
Good chance that you're incorrect rather than you're correct and all of those other people are incorrect.
So when I'm in an area where I have multiple communities saying, hey, Destiny, you're really fucking wrong about something, there's a huge process that I have to go through, a pretty big introspective process I have to go through to figure out, well, hold on, am I being full of shit right now?
I mean, it's normal, what he's describing there.
It's just a normal human reaction.
But the point I want to contrast that with is the normal...
Reaction that we hear expressed by the guru figures that we cover.
And as we've talked about, Destiny still strikes side positions which are unpopular or that put him in a different position than a lot of people.
But the point is, when he's doing that, I think he genuinely is putting time and effort into it.
Yeah, I think he's being genuine also in what might sound like being self-effacing.
Saying that, you know, I don't think I'm so brilliant.
I don't think I'm whatever.
Like, I think how he views himself is true, which is that he's someone who's done essentially a very specialized job for many, many years, and he's worked at it just like anyone, you know, who specializes in something, works in something, and he's done his,
what is it, 10,000 hours?
What's the number of hours you're supposed to do to get good at something?
And he thinks he is good at it, rightly so.
He is.
Good at debating and so on.
And it's because he's worked at it, not because he's some polymath or some galaxy brain.
Yeah.
This is one thing that I would say that a lot of the people that criticize Destiny's performance and like a debate with Jordan Peterson or whatever, they vastly overestimate how they would perform in the same situation.
Like Destiny performed very well in his recent debate with Jordan.
Peterson and Ben Shapiro and other figures.
I do feel that there's a lot of backseat driving from people who imagine that they would have the response for every point and that they would hold someone's foot to the fire.
It just wouldn't work.
Especially with figures like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro because they would just steamroll as well.
I think people overestimate.
How much they could do what Destiny does better than him?
I don't think most people could.
I don't think I could.
Do better than him in most debating circumstances.
You would only do better than me.
That's all.
Yeah, so I think that's just something to say, right?
I don't think he'd be as good as doing statistical analysis.
So it's all relevant.
All relative.
But unfortunately, I'm not as good as that as you.
So last two clips, Matt.
Last two clips.
And again, just the contrast.
With another figure that we covered.
You remember Constantine saying that poor people don't give a crap about the environment?
They're just caring about how to live.
There are certain social issues that will drive every strata of society.
What do you think that is?
Well, I mean, stuff related to children is going to be a really big one.
Stuff related to abortion is a massive one in the United States.
LGBT issues can be a big one, but...
Yeah, this is a mistake that I don't think they make the same mistakes anymore, but political pundits or political pollsters and politicians used to make the mistake that like, oh, poor people just care about meat and potatoes issues.
They don't care about social issues, but that's absolutely not true.
Sometimes poor people care about social issues more than wealthier people because they've got...
I would argue, actually, just on that topic even, for Brexit, I feel like Brexit was largely driven by social issues, especially immigration, I think.
Even though some people try to talk around and say it was financial or say it was economic, it doesn't feel that way.
I don't think so.
When I look at the rhetoric and I look at the sentiment that was driving Brexit actually happening.
That's true.
That's true enough.
Yes, it's true.
And, you know, like, he's applying it to Brexit, but you could apply it to global warming, and it just shows, like, how fucking shallow Constantine's analysis is.
A bit of a random attack on Constantine or Jordan Peterson, but that's fine, why not?
And the last one as well, to illustrate, That he isn't just, you know, like an edge lawyer.
I mean, we heard him talk about Biden.
We heard him talk about a whole bunch of things.
But, like, here's him...
Talking about sex differences and gender and those kind of issues, right?
You know, a hot-button topic, but...
I think it's important to recognize differences between men and women.
They're real.
They exist, obviously.
And there's different ways that men and women function in society.
But I think that sometimes we make the mistake in society of we'll look at men and women where they are and we'll assume that they could only ever be there because of our biological differences.
And then we ignore the massive social drivers that we have that push us deeper into those fields.
So, like, in my opinion, In a totally equitable world, totally equal, everybody has the same opportunity, same upbringing, blah, blah, blah.
I think even in that world, you'd still see men and women choosing differently based on the profession, but you're not going to see like 90% of men and 10% of women in some areas.
It's going to be like 55, 45, or maybe a little bit larger, maybe a little bit smaller depending on the area.
But I feel like sometimes we make this mistake of like, well, women have always done this, so they'll never want to do this in the future.
And I think that, at least in the United States, keep in mind when I speak, I'm always speaking U.S. socialism, so it might be a slightly different other than the world.
But the United States, I think, access to the workplace and access to birth control has, like, fundamentally altered women's relationship with society in ways that I don't think anybody would have ever believed.
Yeah.
Yeah, he threads the needle there, I think most people would have to admit.
That balances the, you know, the biological and cultural arguments there pretty well.
And this is in response to what is kind of like a gotcha question.
I think he was asked, how do you define a woman?
What's a woman?
And he gives an answer like that, which, you know, it's a good one.
He answers it better than I think I could if I was put on that spot.
Yeah, and also the very last point there where he said, you know, this is in reference to the US.
Keep in mind, I'm always talking.
In relation to the US context, right?
That's him when the thing that so many of the gurus don't, whereas he, I mean, I'm not saying he always is this careful, but it speaks to his desire to, you know, contextualize what he's claiming.
Yeah, like that's an important caveat, right?
And it's something that wouldn't occur to most opinionators on that topic.
No, I mean, I think what it demonstrates is like we've heard Destiny being loose.
And we've heard him being careful, right?
And I think the takeaway is that he contains multitudes.
You know, he can do a lot of different things.
And he can operate at a very effective level.
He can also operate at different levels.
Yeah.
So, you know, that's where I think...
I'll end it with the clips.
Oh, maybe one very, very final one, which is just, I think, a true sentiment about, you know, maybe the rationalists would do well to hit this point.
I expect communities to be irrational about the way that they evaluate what I say, because I don't expect communities to be logic-driven, ultra-rational things.
It's just not how groups of people work.
Not necessarily to its detriment.
Sometimes it's good.
You know, we don't...
When we're making decisions as a group or as a family or as a relationship, not everybody wants to sit down with fucking Wikipedia Andy and pull out a spreadsheet and map out the best arguments for why should we raise our kid this way or why should we do this right?
I totally understand that not everybody functions like that.
That's fine.
Totally get it.
One of the problems that I run into, though...
So, just talking about the general...
People are not rational beings, so it's understandable that he'll push people's buttons and whatnot.
And anyway, he's going to go on and outline his thing.
But I just thought, he is modeling correctly people's psychology, right?
And he's not viewing that everybody is like him.
He kind of recognizes he's an outlier.
And that's relevant.
And just to reiterate, the being themes for me with Destiny, Are that he is what he says.
He is an edgy Twitch streamer, but I don't think he is a bad faith debater or that he is misrepresenting his positions.
I think he can adjust his message according to the audience, and he's quite different when he's talking to a stream versus when he's talking to a mainstream.
But there's an admirable level of openness about that, along with all the weird and, I would say, kind of shitty dynamics that go around the parasocial influencer-streamer culture and the toxic,
bipolar, everybody having sex with each other and drama.
That infects that space.
He is in there in all of that.
But he's a pioneer in so many different respects.
He was a pioneer with streaming games.
He was a pioneer with politics content online.
And now he's a little bit of an elder statesman, as strange as it might seem, in those domains.
Yeah, I find him one of the most interesting people to cover because of all the different complexities in his content.
And I do see some parallels in his psychology and the psychology of someone like me or other people that fixate on critically evaluating stuff.
So, yeah, I'm mixed.
And it doesn't mean that you can't be critical of him for, you know, the Nick Fuentes stuff or the going to kill a young child for interrupting his show.
He's a young child now, Chris, before you just...
We're a teenager.
Yeah, I don't know what age he was.
I think he was 11. Anyway, whatever.
The fact that that, you know, is a thing.
And so, yeah, this was an interesting episode.
I'm glad we've looked into streamer culture because I...
Understand it better now.
And I'm...
I have consumed a lot of Destiny content.
Probably more content for Destiny than anyone else we've ever covered.
With the exceptions of people who, you know, I've known all their stuff for...
I'm sure people will point out that we missed tons of stuff and we got various things wrong, but that's the way it is.
There's too much stuff in Destiny's case.
Well, Chris, thank you on behalf of everybody for going through all those hours and giving us this glimpse into not just Destiny, but I think streamer culture generally.
The last thing I'll say about him is that of all of the gurus that we've covered, I don't think I've ever really struggled.
To make a diagnosis at the end too much, you know?
But in the case of Destiny, it is too...
The culture in which he inhabits is so foreign to me and the moors and mores there.
And the fact that he is so multifaceted, I think, means that all I can do is just say that was interesting.
Yeah, it'll be interesting if we end up talking to him in some venue, which we may do.
Well, don't debate with him.
Don't even try, Chris.
Yeah, we'll see if he exercises his right to reply, but that is what it is.
So there'll be people that won't like this map because they'll think we're too nice to Destiny.
There'll be people that will think we're too harsh.
There'll be people that will think...
Well, that was weird.
And as Destiny would say, tough.
Live with it.
That's what we did.
We did what we did.
We are what we are.
And we said what we said.
So that's the way it is.
And for the Daliban, just don't frigging target our families or destroy our lives.
We tried to be balanced and accurate in our criticism.
So, you know, please.
Don't, like, destroy everything.
Yep, yep.
Okay, well, that's a good note to leave things on.
Thanks, Chris.
Thanks, everybody.
You can't go yet, Matt.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you can very, very soon, but you can not go right.
I do have to go very soon, yes.
Because we have one last final thing to do, Matt.
I stopped you from exiting, Matt, because, you know, We have to say thank you to people.
We normally review reviews.
It's been a long episode.
I don't think we need to do that.
I'll just mention that.
You remember our old friend Disappointed2million1, the Sam Harris column man?
Yeah.
They've updated the review again.
This is becoming a relationship now.
Yeah, just like, for example, I'll give some.
I don't want to keep giving them credit, but good work on Huberman.
Completely agree in a useful analysis.
I know your paywall jingle sounds much like Sam Harris' intro.
A bit lukewarm on your Yuval segment.
He is a storyteller.
Nothing blah, blah, blah.
That's not what the review thing is for.
He's supposed to do it once.
But in any case, there's that.
And then somebody else said the one other one, a four-star review.
And they wrote nuclear, Matt, nuclear.
It's pronounced nuclear, not nuclear.
They sound the same to me, but they're the same picture.
Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear, nuclear.
What do I say?
Nuclear.
You said.
Nuclear.
Yeah, see, you added a killer.
It's a thing George Bush did, but we've been doing this before.
Different people in different countries pronounce things differently.
Respect my...
Cultural distinctiveness, damn you.
Get with the program.
Get with the program.
And it's the Matrix that just hasn't caught on yet.
It will.
That's right.
And for the rest of you, get on to the reviews.
And just in case the Daliban or Sam Harris fans or whoever, Hassanites, whatever they're called, they're all going to get there and try to brigade us.
So you guys need to go there.
You've got to defend us, people.
We're relying on you.
Yeah, we can mobilize the great Cody Deguru's massive online community.
But yeah, that would be good.
Leave us reviews if you want.
But Matt, we do have Patreon supporters.
People who are kind fans and they give up their hard-earned And earnings.
And I think about them and their hard-earned earnings a lot, especially at the three-hour mark of Destiny Decoding.
That's right.
And I remember, why am I here?
Why am I doing this?
Can I just leave?
Can I just walk away?
And then I go, no.
That's not why you do it, Mark.
It's not why you do it.
It's not about the financial rewards.
It's for the love of the guru decoding.
But nonetheless, you have to thank those.
You have to thank those that are willing to support us.
In our suffering.
They didn't listen to 100 hours of Destiny's content.
I'm not saying that's an insult.
I'm just saying it's the truth.
It's just the truth.
But various people did.
So, Matt, we are going to find conspiracy hypothesizers first.
There we will find Michael Baldock, Lev Lewis, Shane 26 plus 6 equals 1. Dave Magson, Heath Lancaster, Hello Tony, Steak Fries, Andrew McDonough,
Joe McDougall, Vutter Vermein, Kefu, Mario, Einer Borgersian, Iritomiwa Ekesola, Some Guy,
Infinite Goth, who makes good trading cards about Northern Ireland.
Anne-Marie Petternen, Dylan, Ben Scholfing, Chase Bell, Dada de Bergoglia, Gabe, Tyler Porter, Shur Shilvelsevig, Yuri
and John Roman and Mike.
That's all the ones I'll thank.
And apologies to...
Everyone who had a foreign or unusual name who had it massacred by Chris just then.
Even Mario.
Mario.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
God.
There was no conference, Matt.
No one was there.
Eric was not the only one.
It's all in his imagination.
Honestly, hearing Joe Rogan talk about...
Fauci and just how credulous, what a credulous buffoon he is.
Like, oh, you hear these stories, how he's trying to destroy the country from within.
Yeah, why do you hear them, Joe?
Yeah, why do you hear those stories?
It just made me think about the difference between that and someone like Destiny, who, whatever his faults are, approaches...
If somebody told him a story about Fauci trying to destroy the country from within, or a similar story, he would approach it with a critical...
And do some basic fact-checking, and that's what Joe Rogan would never do in a million years.
I did hear him on some stream.
Somebody was suggesting a conspiracy theory about Palestinians intentionally getting shot to increase sympathy, and he was somewhat gullible.
Oh, that's a shame.
I take it back.
No compliment.
Yeah, so he might not always, but he's at least a lot more.
I think it's a lot more selective than the general applied thing.
So there we go.
I'm just saying, Matt.
Level 2. Revolutionary geniuses.
The ones that get access to decoded academia and can hear our review of Immune by Philip Detmar.
They include Jonathan Burkhart, Nicholas Williams, Dr. Thomas Jacoby, Dubstone, Senior
Desh Cahajite, David Forrester, Odd
Stefan Inge Adel Bjornjørgen, Emma Cora, Ali B, Karen
How would you pronounce B?
Oh, umlet.
C-K-M-A-N-N.
I don't know.
I've never wrapped my head around umlets.
Buckman.
Buckman.
Egyptian Genie.
Theo Donald.
Eric Stein.
Not Eric Weinstein.
Eric Stein.
Wish Dragon.
And John Martin.
That's our revolutionary geniuses.
Thank you, everyone.
Mid-tier.
This is good.
You know, you could bump it up.
You could bump it up for the benefit, the wonderful benefit of having a live stream with us once a month.
You know, that's so desirable, isn't it?
Isn't that what you want?
Yeah, I don't know.
But anyway, we thank you where you are.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
It could also not not be wrong.
Did he ever think of that, Chris?
Did he ever think of that?
Could not be not wrong.
Right.
And last Matt, Galaxy Brain Gurus, Mindbender, Matt Ruana, Trees, like the things that grow in the ground,
and Abfulan, Abfulan, Analadagam Valesia.
And A-I-H-M.
So those are all Galaxy Green Gurus.
Thank you guys.
See you at the live stream.
We tried to warn people.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
And very last, Matt, very last thing to say.
Two people I haven't shouted out, I've forgotten.
They've been waiting a long time, and that would be Lily and Joe Rommel.
I'll give them a shout-out.
So if I've missed you, if you feel that you haven't been shouted out, just hit me up on the Patreon or whatever, and you get a shout-out like this.
So thank you both.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's it.
Special thank you to you both.
Definitely hassle Chris if you have not got the shoutouts that you...
That's the way to do it.
And we're done, Matt.
Go!
I was about to say something crude.
But I feel like your mother has been subjected to enough.
