Supplementary Material 5: Spiritual UFOs, Alternative Theories of Evolution, and Atlantean Grievances
We watch in awe as the guru-sphere grapples with a host of 'alternative' theories:Bret promotes pseudoscience on Polio and alternative theories on evolutionThe Gurusphere collides with Tucker's takes on evolutionRogan and Tucker praise Alex Jones' prophetic abilitiesTucker's views on spiritual UFOsHasan endorses Lex Fridman as the most genuine centristContrasting Destiny and Hasan's transparencyWorld War 3 WarningsThe Great Archaeology Debate: Dibble vs. HancockGraham Hancock- A Grievance Mongering MasterclassIntentional MisrepresentationWhite Supremacy angers Great JoeThe Cass Review Controversy: A lesson in misinformationLinksThe Untold Story of Polio – Forrest Maready on DarkHorseJerry Coyne's old takedown of Bret's confused theories about evolutionBret's tweets defending TuckerJoe Rogan Experience #2138 - Tucker CarlsonJoe Rogan Experience #2136 - Graham Hancock & Flint DibbleThe Iced Coffee Hour- Confronting Hasan Piker on Socialist Grift, Hypocrisy, and How “The Top 1%” Keeps You Poor!The Iced Coffee Hour- Destiny on Debating Ben Shapiro, Toxic Wokeism and Getting DivorcedA comparison of the reactions to Iran's missile launchesMore or Less (BBC)- 98%: Is misinformation being spread about a review of trans youth medicine?The Cass ReportSystematic Reviews from the Cass ReportThe full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1 hr 51 mins).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Guru's supplemental material.
With me, Christopher Kavanagh, cognitive anthropologist extraordinaire.
With him, social psychologist extraordinaire, Matthew Brown.
Not a social psychologist.
Oh, you're not.
Aren't you something?
You're kind of, what are you, cognitive psychologist?
No.
Just psychologist?
Just psychologist.
I encompass the entire.
Okay.
Well, there we go.
So, correction already on this episode.
Matt is just a psychologist.
He has no specialty whatsoever.
I refuse to.
I'm not really that interested in psychology.
There's a lot of people that have debunked a lot of psychological studies, a lot of people who are skeptics, and I'm on board with all of it, frankly.
I mean, I'm fine with that, too.
I'm more open-sense than you.
Bitch.
That's true, you are.
Yeah, but I don't think...
I'm still on board with the ideals of psychology and good psychological research.
In general, I'm down with good social science research.
That is where I put myself.
But I'm skeptical, Matt, the way that you should be about all research.
What I spend my days doing, teaching students how to assess studies for their quality, a topic that will come up later.
But we've got various things to get through, Matt.
Various things.
And our Destiny episode came out, went out into the wild yonder, and is now ping-ponging around streams and subreddits as it inevitably would.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Reaction was, as expected, generally positive.
The negative feedback we got, we might certainly expect it.
And we're okay with it.
We're okay with that.
That's all right.
You can't make everybody happy.
The Dalavan have not kidnapped any of our family members yet or geo-located our house or whatever they do.
But I will also say that there is a post-decoding glow, if you will, about, you know, Being immersed in a bunch of content that somebody produces and, you know, thinking about,
okay, the timelines and all this stuff.
And then we record the episode and we put it out and it gets the reaction that it does.
And, you know, now we move on and the Guru Sphere continues to rotate.
And I like that.
It's a good system we've developed there.
I think it's healthy.
I think it's healthy.
I mean, we could have succumbed to the temptation of just focusing on The Weinsteins and people that are closely related to them.
Weinstein Watch.
Because, my goodness, there is an infinite amount of quite amusing and interesting content there.
But it's not healthy, I think, to obsess over individual characters.
You take a look at them, you see what there is to see, and then you move on.
That's healthy.
Yes.
Like a shark.
Yes.
Like a shark, Chris.
And that was one of the things that I wanted to mention, though, was a Weinstein.
Because, first of all, Brett managed to sink to new lows by essentially engaging in a variation of polio vaccine denialism.
The focus on this one is that there's a person advocating an alternative origin for...
Polio related to pesticides, Matt, you know, the modern world things are so very in line with Brett.
So just as usual, he's promoting absolute dross and anti-vax stuff.
But the other aspect is, and we'll get into the stimulus for this, but Brett, in response to some comments by Tucker, started to make tweets about evolution.
Now, this is never a good idea for Brett because he likes to tweet in a very obfuscatory...
Obfuscatory?
Is that a word?
Yep, that's correct.
Yeah.
And obfuscatory...
Fucking hell.
He likes to be opaque in his tweets.
And when he tweets about evolution, he does this too.
So he said...
I'm a biologist.
It is my job to figure out what's wrong with our evolutionary framework.
Darwin understood this and highlighted all the things that worried him about his own hypothesis.
His work has survived and is now a proper, if incomplete, theory of biological diversity.
Darwinists have become so defensive in response to creationism that most can't now respond to high-quality challenges.
They focus instead on minutiae and ignore major paradoxes.
Insistences that Darwinism is settled has derailed serious attempts to repair and complete the model.
Mmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is his obfuscatory style.
I noticed this with all of his tweets when he's got a hot take.
On one of these issues, he frames it in such a way that it is very unclear what he's saying.
The only thing that's clear is that he knows an awful lot about evolution and whatever you think you know about it is wrong.
Yeah, it's impossible to engage with because it's like dealing with a cloud of mist.
Yeah, and when he does get to it, it's essentially arguing his silly...
Intelligent design like lineage theory stuff or his pseudoscience around telomeres or whatever like it's all linked into his conspiratorial narratives or his very very poorly fleshed out alternative evolutionary theories which are not based on like empirical research or theoretical papers just based on breath thinking About it and deciding that the normal processes of evolution,
which have been updated quite a bit since Darwin published on the origin of species, are not sufficient.
So we need explorer modes, which is one of his other alternative evolutionary perspectives.
And they all amount to injecting a theological, overriding, metaphysical substrate to evolution through which there's kind of a will.
Of evolution.
And Brett tries to deny that that's what he's implying, but that is what he's implying as we've seen time and time again when we've actually looked at his statements about evolution.
Yeah, but even if his bespoke theory was quite reasonable, I think your first point is the most important one is that it has come from him sitting in an armchair and freewheeling.
And him deciding that this is the correct way to do it.
But he knows enough of the lingo, enough of the language, and is obfuscatory enough to be able to sort of allude to or hint at all of these deep understandings that you don't understand when there's just nothing behind it at all.
But it's effective.
It's effective for people.
It is effective.
But one interesting thing is that...
It's created a little bit of division in the guru sphere because what started this all off is Tucker Carlson and his comments on evolution on Joe Rogan.
So let me just play this because it's an illustration of Tucker Carlson, his worldview, and also the general standard of thought that you hear on Joe Rogan.
So this is what Tucker said.
If evolution is real, And if there is this constant...
I don't know.
But it's visible.
Like, you can measure it in certain animals.
You can measure adaptation.
Yeah.
But there's no evidence that evolution...
In fact, I think we've kind of given up on the idea of evolution.
The theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is, like, kind of not true.
In what sense?
Well, in the most basic sense, the idea that, you know, all life emerged from a single cell organism over time, and there would be a fossil record of that, and there's not.
There's not a fossil record of transitionary species, like species that are adapting to its environment.
There's tons of record of adaptation, and you see it in your own life.
I mean, I have a lot of dogs.
I see adaptation in dogs, you know, through the litter to litter.
But, no, there's no evidence at all that, none, zero, that, you know, people...
You know, evolved seamlessly from a single-cell amoeba.
No, there's not.
There's no chain in the fossil record of that at all.
And that's why you don't actually hear people, you hear them make reference to evolution, because the theory of adaptation is clearly, obviously, true.
But Darwin's theories, totally, that's why it's still a theory almost 200 years later, you know.
No, we have not found that at all.
And I can't even guess, I mean, I have my own theories on it, but they're not proven.
What are your theories?
God created people, you know, distinctly, and animals.
I mean, I think that's like, I think what every person on earth thought until the mid-19th century, actually.
So there you go.
That's a blast from the past.
I remember the great evolution creationist debates when that was an exciting and hot thing online.
Tucker Carlson basically towing the line from 20 or 30 years ago, pretty straightforwardly, right?
Yeah, very old school creationism and absolutely brain dead.
There's massive amounts of evidence, fossil evidence, also genetic molecular evidence.
We just, there's so many like, you know, intersecting lines of evidence that his statement that we don't have any, it's just absolute, absolute bullshit.
Absolute bollocks, yeah.
Like, yeah, I mean, you know, like he's hitting some of those great.
I say great, but well-known, stupid creationist talking points.
Oh, there's gaps in the fossil record.
It's just a theory, as implying that a theory is just like a guess, you know.
And, you know, really dumb stuff.
But one thing I haven't heard before is there's like a theory of adaptation, and that's very distinct from the theory of evolution.
Oh, I've heard that.
That's micro and macro evolution.
Oh, that's what he's referring to.
That's what he's referring to.
So, like, dogs can become different species, but, like, a dog cannot become a beaver, right?
That's the way they usually freeze it.
Yeah, yeah.
So, that was that bit, and also the point about there's no evidence of single-cell evolution up to humans.
Because single cells don't fossilize.
Six billion years is a long time, unfortunately.
So there is gaps, so to speak.
Of course there is.
There can't help but be gaps, right?
When you're talking about six billion years ago.
What's going to fossilize when you don't have freaking skeletons?
And even then, we do actually have imprints of soft-bodied creatures as well.
But you're not going to have the evidence of microscopic Life back, you know, over millions of years.
We don't need to litigate it.
There's no one listening who's stupid enough to give credence to these sorts of arguments.
I'm sure.
If there is, sorry to be mean, use this as an instigation to go read some books on evolution because new, it keeps updating all the time.
Like, they keep finding new evidence and it's an absolutely fascinating story, especially for me, the early, you know, when they keep finding, as you say, these sort of...
Pseudophossils, I suppose, like actual traces of, you know, not single-celled organisms, but just some of the very early multicellular organisms in the Permian, is it?
Anyway, fascinating.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, I mean, it's stupid old-school creationism, but also you hear Joe Rogan, his kind of reaction, which is not, like, he didn't endorse everything that Tucker was saying.
But he does kind of, you know, like Tucker says, well, evolution, I'm pretty sure, you know, is that real?
And Joe's like, I don't know.
Like, he's just a very credulous soul.
And then the point about it just being...
A theory, right?
Evolution just being a theory.
A very, very common talking point which misunderstands the scientific use of the word theory.
This is stuff that is known, stuff that is very common and easily rebutted.
But it just goes to show what an absolute...
There's two options.
Tucker is Ehler pandering, right?
Saying things which he knows to be false in order to pander to an audience or some conservative Christian ideology.
Or he's an absolute moron.
It's one of the two.
Both are shit.
It could well be a mixture of both.
And the funny thing for me is that I have heard sensible people, relatively sensible people, before tell me, whenever Tucker was doing this anti-woke monologues, that actually, you know, Tucker is quite an insightful guy.
Like, yeah, there's stuff that he gets wrong, but actually he's quite smart.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
And at the time, I also said that in response to those claims, but like, since he's come out of the Fox ecosystem, the amazing thing is that it's been revealed that Fox was actually restraining his idiocy, right?
Like, he's become...
More conspiratorial, more endorsing of idiotic conspiracies like, you know, the gay prostitute who claims they've slept with Obama, aliens, just like every brand of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory,
Tucker is in on them.
And whether it's marketing or personal belief, it doesn't matter.
Like, he's immoral.
He is a moron, or a liar, or both, as you say.
And it is illustrative that Brett feels compelled to defend Tucker.
He can't endorse the creationism because he thinks of himself as an evolutionary biologist.
As Bart Statz put it, his superpower is claiming evolutionary insights, right?
So he can't dismiss evolution.
But in a very Brett style, he doesn't blame Tucker.
He blames Tucker's skepticism of evolution.
On the academy, on the evolutionary biologists who have destroyed people's trust in institutions and so on.
Yeah, and this actually leads to the point that I wanted to make, that the heterodox sphere, such as it is, there are divisions in it, and there are people with varying degrees of scientific or alleged scientific principles, right?
And Jeffrey Miller.
Was tweeting out, true or false, conservatives who don't understand evolution by natural selection are an embarrassment to conservatism, right?
So I kind of dig at Tucker.
In response to this, Scott Adams responded, science doesn't believe in natural selection.
That part of the theory was replaced years ago.
So, interesting news, right, for evolutionary biologists there.
Natural selection, that's been completely refuted.
And you can imagine that he's going to be talking about, he'll invoke something that he's vaguely heard about, horizontal gene transfer, epigenetics, like, they all do this.
And this is where the role for someone like Brett plays is very useful.
To these cretins, because by obfuscating and making it sound like it's also complicated and we just don't know and we're completely revising what we thought about it, it just creates this great big ambiguous vacuum for people to insert whatever random beliefs that they want to.
And that's the role that Brett plays in that ecosystem.
There's one more example of that interaction that I wanted to mention.
You know Colin Wright?
He's become like fixated on...
Trans issues and gender stuff.
He retweeted Brett and said, can you provide a link to what you believe is the highest quality challenge to Darwinism?
That also outlines some of the major paradoxes you were alluding to.
I've asked for this before and have been left empty handed.
I'm not trying to troll you.
I'm genuinely very curious.
So this is a heterodox person that it's harder for Brett to ignore.
And he responds.
I'm not challenging Darwinism.
To my way of thinking, I believe in it more coherently than our colleagues who defend the current version as if it wasn't crude.
To be perfectly blunt, I think Darwin had it right because he didn't have the tools to be specific about the molecular dynamics.
That forced him to work at the phenomenological level, and he got it mostly right in a manner that I believe will prove to be timeless.
The central dogma is blinding us to the larger Darwinian truth.
So it is what you said, you know, Brett smokescreen, and it's him wanting to say that the specific mechanisms, because he's talking about, like, processes of, like, protein evolution, which he doesn't think apply to.
But Colin Wright's response...
There are very interesting beginnings of thoughts here, but again, I would really love it if you fleshed them out in as much rigorous detail as possible so that I and others can see the supposed icebergs you're alluding to beneath those interesting tips.
So it's just this thing where the guru, like, yes, Colin Wright is kind of challenging and hinting that he's skeptical about Brett's claims and that Brett hasn't published anything about it, but they also have to say, well, this is a fascinating...
idea that you've put forward.
There is a lot of intriguing things there, so I'd love to see more.
It just illustrates the amount of pseudoscience that flops around and that they occasionally bump into how okay that various other gurus are with pseudoscience and when it's their particular Brand of science that they are a bit more defensive about.
They're kind of like, oh, wait, are you guys all actually, like, crying?
Yeah, but, you know, the guru sphere politeness prevails in many respects.
So it was just an interesting bunch of guru spheres colliding in the night.
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting.
What Brett cannot do is point Colin Wright to...
Some literature, some actual hard writing that actually spells out these supposed fundamental challenges because there isn't any.
There's just Brett's armchair thoughts.
But for some reason, everybody treats them, not everyone, but people at Colin feel obliged to treat them seriously.
Well, that is what it is.
But Chris, Tucker said a lot of other crazy things.
He did.
With Joe.
Yeah, yeah.
But as you mentioned, Matt, there are other things in Joe Rogan and Tucker's conversation which highlight their general credulous nature and some of the biases that we've talked about.
So one just quick clip.
I've said before that Joe Rogan intentionally sought to rehabilitate Alex Jones's profile to restore his credibility.
In the eyes of his audience after the Sandy Hook events.
And here he is explaining that to Tucker again.
And when you hear Alex Jones talk, you may not agree with everything he says.
I don't know that I do.
But you definitely understand why they told you you couldn't listen to Alex Jones.
Well, that's one of the reasons why I had him as one of the first guests when I came over to Spotify.
Love that.
I was like, let's go.
What did they say?
Well, a lot of people weren't happy.
We lost sponsors.
It was an issue.
But I think it did the job, you know?
Yeah, he may not agree with everything that Alex says.
Yeah, yeah, well, they say that, Matt.
You know, strategic disclaimers are useful things.
Let's hear a little bit more about their opinions about Alex, regardless of...
What he said that's incorrect, clearly the Sandy Hook thing was incorrect.
You know, Alex, I know Alex personally, so I know what he was going through.
And, you know, everybody wants to talk about mental health and they want to praise people for being honest about their mental health issues and support them on their mental health journey to wellness.
Alex has gone through some real issues and one of the reasons why he's gone through some issues is because that guy is uncovering real shit that's terrifying every fucking day and he was drinking out of control and you know, he's just fucking constantly stressed, freaking out and when you see so many lies and so much propaganda and so many psyops that are being done on people You start seeing them where they don't exist,
and that's what he did.
Well, and he's also channeling some stuff.
You can't call 9-11 in detail because you're super informed.
Before the fact.
He called it.
He literally called it in the summer of 2001.
He said, planes will fly into the World Trade Centers, and they will blame a man called Osama bin Laden.
We know that he said that because he said it on tape multiple times.
And then he said, call the White House and tell them this.
So you get there, right, that Joe will always hand weave the sandy hook, as that was Alex's mystique, you know, like he did get that one wrong.
But, but, but, Matt, it's only because of how...
Right he is on so many things and how much damage his understanding about real psyops and real conspiracies has been to him.
In a way, he's kind of a martyr, sacrificing his mental health to dig out all these truths.
And Joe, on this occasion and many others, points out that sure, Alex gets things wrong, but he gets so many things right, Matt.
He predicted 9-11.
He's got insights that normal people don't have, and just to hammer that home.
I've asked him about it.
How did you do that at length?
He had dinner in my barn recently.
We were talking about this.
How did you do that?
I don't know.
It just came to me.
And that's real.
That is real.
The supernatural is real.
And I don't know why it's so hard for the modern mind, I guess, because it's a materialist mind, to accept that.
And that's not a new phenomenon.
It's happened throughout history.
There are people called prophets, and there are people who were prophets who weren't called prophets, but there are people who have information or parts of information, bits of information, visions of information come to them, and then they relay it.
It's not from them.
They received it.
This is like one of the oldest phenomena in human history.
So those people tend to be...
A little crazy, a little imbalanced, a little different from everybody else.
Do you know what I mean?
They live on locusts and honey in the wilderness.
I mean, that's just like, they're not like everybody else.
And that's clearly part of what, I'm not saying that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God.
It's not.
But that was prophetic.
Right.
So Alex Jones doesn't just have some interesting ideas.
He's not just right about a lot of things.
He's literally, in the non-metaphorical sense, A prophet who can see things, like see the future.
Which is what Alex claims, right?
Is it?
And he didn't, by the way, he talked about a terrorist attack and Bin Laden being involved.
He didn't predict, you know, the Twin Towers, the planes and all that kind of thing.
It's just revisionist history.
Alex does it as well.
And he's predicted thousands and thousands of other things that did not.
But even in the case where he did correctly mention Bin Laden, it was not like nobody was aware that Bin Laden is a threat.
He'd been involved in attacks previously.
So, yeah, just to say that even on that, it's wrong.
But there, Tucker and Joe goes on to endorse this as well, that Alex is really a kind of...
You know, he's got these extrasensory sources for his insights that he provides, which again, Matt, just transparent bullshit.
Like, listen to an episode of Knowledge Fight and you will see that Alex Jones has no special powers of insight.
He simply reads headlines, regurgitates whatever conspiracy theory he's come across and promotes.
Hard right, populist, racist worldview.
Like a conspiracy-laden militia worldview.
So it's quite clear.
Tucker's a fool.
Rogan is a fool as well.
But that's not the end, Matt.
That's not the end.
Last Tucker clip for today.
Well, right.
I mean, the prophet Ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter, Wheels in the Sky.
Yeah, that's a crazy one.
Boy, when you read that.
Well, it is crazy.
If you read it, it's like, oh, wow.
A wheel within a wheel.
And not just, you know, the Hebrew scriptures.
Like, it's all over every...
The Vedic texts.
Of course.
So, these are spiritual phenomenon.
There's no evidence they're from another planet.
I mean, I think that's the op, that's the lie, that they're from Mars.
Look, space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right?
Both for military, for defense reasons, but also because, like, it would be nice to know when asteroids are coming.
And there's no evidence, has never been any evidence, that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet.
There's no evidence of that at all.
So they're from here, and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are.
And it's pretty clear to me that they're spiritual entities, whatever that means, they're supernatural.
Which is to say, supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature.
They don't behave according to the laws of science as measured by people, you know?
And they've been here for a long time.
And there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground.
So, like, with that fact set, what do you conclude?
Supernatural entities.
Without a fact set.
One of the other things I heard Tucker saying, and I thought he was referring to aliens, but given what he just said there, maybe not, that he was talking about how the Manhattan Project was a style, that they haven't really figured out how to split the atom themselves.
It seemed to be saying that it was alien technology and the Manhattan Project was a cover story.
But maybe he was referring to demonic spirits.
Who gave the Americans the technology for the bomb?
I have no doubt that the US government has technology that we don't know the details of.
That makes sense.
Sure.
But, like, where did it come from?
Right.
I'm not even sure.
This is a separate question, but related.
I'm not sure we really know where nuclear technology came from, actually.
Really?
Yes.
Like the Manhattan Project?
Yeah.
We know something about the Manhattan Project, but where exactly did that...
It came from Germany.
German scientists were working on it.
Okay.
This is a separate conversation, but the one person I know who's really pushed others writing a book on it, who's a trustworthy person or a friend of mine.
I know you know him.
Said to me actually I spent a year working on this and I wanted the closer I got to like okay, but what's the genesis like word that where did this?
What was the what was the Isaac Newton apple on the head?
Oh gravity's real moment for fission Not clear weird.
I don't know the answer, but here's point clearly government has technology that we don't we're not read in on right of course but So, that doesn't answer the question, why have people seen these objects in the skies for thousands of years?
Right.
Confirmed, and what are they?
And maybe they're from another planet.
My only point is there's no evidence of that.
There's a huge amount, a massive corpus of evidence that they're seen by people in our atmosphere, you know, on Earth looking up or in a submarine looking out.
And what is that?
To your point, like, we can't see them coming into our atmosphere because they don't want to be seen.
Well, then why do they want to be seen by people on Earth?
Like, if the technology is that advanced, and clearly it is, why do they make themselves visible in the first place?
Yeah, it's...
Who knows?
Who knows?
Right?
Like, in general, there's so little point to...
Digging in deep to the lore that these people develop because it's half-baked, repeated nonsense from some stupid source that they've dug out.
So, I mean, there is utility to it to look at the genealogy of these ideas, right?
You can usually trace them back to very conspiratorial sources.
Often quite anti-Semitic sources is one of the other things that crops up in this kind of material a lot.
But it's just...
Illustrative that Tucker's into interdimensional spiritual explanations for UFOs.
Evolution is just a theory.
Alex Jones is a prophet.
Like, how much more do you need to be discredited?
And yet, Tucker is someone that people like Brett Weinstein, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk have repeatedly...
Promoted as a very valuable, insightful person doing, you know, really important work, looking critically at things.
Like you said, there are people who we know who are smart, who are very well-educated, and who will give amazing credit to people like Tucker Carlson simply because they are saying things that they like to hear.
And at the end of the spectrum, I've been surprised at the amount of credit that people like to give someone like Hasan Paikar, who is equally obviously an idiot.
And it just goes to show how much we're governed by the stuff that we want to hear.
Well, okay.
On Hasan, to his credit, I will say I don't think he's going to be endorsing.
Actually, I don't know.
Maybe he's okay with ancient aliens and stuff, but he's not going to fall to the depths that Tucker has about evolution, right?
So his ADC is of a different caliber.
He's slightly higher than Tucker Carlson, isn't he?
Come on.
Give me what we've just heard from Tucker Carlson.
I'm putting them on the same level.
Sorry.
Why are you putting Hassan on that level, though?
Oh, and what you think I'm being mean to Hassan.
I mean, he's not at that level.
He's not Alex Jones level of...
No, I'm saying Tucker Carlson level.
Tucker Carlson, but Tucker Carlson is Alex Jones level to me.
Well, okay, speaking of Hassan, let's make a couple of clips and see whether people agree.
So Hassan, look, especially in the wake of the Destiny episode, One thing that came up is people saying you were more charitable to Destiny than you were to Hassan because there's a lot more depth to Hassan's content if you look around.
And I will just say that I've looked at all our Hassan content, right?
Because when people tell me that there's much better stuff, he's done very good things out there, look at this and look at that.
I do go and look and I'm not...
Agreeing that that episode with the hoofy parrot, yes, he doesn't always interview people, but the level of insights that he brought there, I think are relatively in line with the level of insights that I've seen across Hassan's other content.
Yes, he can be more serious and whatnot in talking about relevant issues, but yeah, I'm sorry.
I just don't see the same level of depth there at all.
Just to point out, for example, we often talk about how Lex Friedman is a transparently biased figure.
Someone that, yes, presents himself as a, you know, a centrist above the fray, just out there for love, but who, when you look at his content critically, yes, he is not as polemically partisan as various figures, but his biases are transparent.
He spent...
His Thanksgiving with the Trumps.
You know, he's constantly talking about the sources that he's getting things from.
He heard from Ben Shapiro and Michael Malice gave him this.
And he's very, very upset about Fauci and all the terrible things Fauci has done to science.
RFK Jr., on the other hand, you know, an important and sincere man.
Lex's biases are clear, and yes, he does interview people from different political persuasions, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't have transparent biases.
Now, I say all this just to provide the context for when Hassan was being interviewed on this show that I was listening to, and he was asked about centrists, or, you know, so-called centrists, and listen to what he said.
Tim Pool, who portrays himself as a centrist or a liberal.
I don't think he's a liberal or a centrist at all.
I think he's a right-winger.
And he just hides that he is a centrist.
I don't even know if he still says he's a centrist or a liberal.
Well, Don Lemon said he was a centrist.
I think Don Lemon is a centrist.
Don Lemon is...
You know who's a real centrist?
Lex Friedman.
Yes, I agree with that.
100%.
See?
Okay, good faith.
I think Lex Friedman...
But he's not on the right.
I have a few people on the right.
He's not on the right?
No, I would say he's in the middle.
No, I think he's in the middle.
I think Joe Rogan used to be kind of like that, but I think Joe Rogan has developed his own personal political opinions over the course of the years, especially when it comes to certain issues.
He's very right-wing, and then sometimes he'll be weirdly left-wing on others.
But overall, Lex Friedman is down the middle.
I agree.
I think he is the one guy that I...
Lex, we love you so much.
Lex is one guy I will glaze till the end of my days.
I love you, Lex.
Lex, if you're watching this, thank you for being yourself, man.
He didn't comment on one of our episodes.
He did comment on our episode with Destiny.
That was right.
Great conversation, guys.
That's an iced coffee hour, which are interviewers in the vein of trigonometry.
Maybe not as...
You know, openly partisan, but essentially the same, which is why they love Lex so much and why they all agree what a, you know, an unbiased, the only pure soul out there.
And just to point out, I'm saying Hassan identifies Lex as the one guy that is straight down the middle that doesn't have biases.
They love Lex.
They love Lex, Matt, which just goes to show that Hassan is...
Credulous.
Or he doesn't pay attention, which is another possibility.
But to me, Lex's stick is transparent.
Yeah, I think like recognizes like.
And the thing that both got in common is the moral grandstanding.
They do it in different ways.
Lex does it via his philosophy of universal love.
But he absolutely has the highest motivations that you could possibly imagine while being basically a businessman interested in self-presentation.
And in my opinion...
Hasan Piker is exactly the same.
He's got a different political framing for his moral grandstanding, but it's really a thin veneer for what he's about in the same way as Lex.
Now, let me give another example, which is from this interview with the Ice Coffee Hour that Hasan was on.
Destiny was also on with those guys recently, right?
And I'm just going to give a contrast to show why it is that I think those two are...
are different and why we were more positive about destiny and the way that he presents certain things okay so destiny is asked about his revenue streams or his youtube channel on that iced coffee hour because these are investment guys property guys so they're sometimes talking about this kind of thing right a similar topic comes out with Hassan but let's hear destiny Talking about this topic first.
My growth has always been, like, pretty stable the whole time.
And then my biggest, most recent explosion, explosive growth and income has come from my YouTube channel, which was my greatest mistake of not starting that, like...
I had a YouTube channel, like, 10 or 11 years ago that I think got to, like, 70 or 80,000 subs, which back then was, like, pretty good.
And I abandoned that for, like, eight or nine years.
And then just, like, I want to say, like, four years ago, maybe, I started taking my YouTube more seriously again.
I should have been doing that the whole time, but that's been, like, my...
Most recent, like, big income bump.
Are you comfortable to talk about numbers that you're currently doing right now?
Or is that off the table?
Yeah, I guess if you want to, sure.
Sure.
Yeah, so YouTube...
I'd be curious, yeah.
Yeah, so what percentages or numbers is, like, YouTube versus Twitch?
Or, sorry, not Twitch.
Versus, like, the kick deal versus Rumble and all that stuff.
So my website is where I have my own subs and people can donate through there.
I think on that I make about $250,000 a year, I think is what I made last year.
And 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 like YouTube or Twitch.
Oh, okay.
Well, not Twitch, but yeah.
YouTube ad revenue is really good.
Like, anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 a month off of that.
And then I've got, like, two other channels that make around, like, $20,000 to $30,000 a month.
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.
Okay.
So a couple of things about that.
One, he's very open and transparent, describes himself as running a business.
And is very, very happy to talk specifically about the sources of revenue that he's got and how much he's getting.
And also is surprisingly generous towards his editor there.
Right.
And we covered that in the episode with him joking around about that and when the deal was made.
Now, Hassan, now this is slightly different, Matt, because part of this interview, they were addressing the potential...
Contradiction between Hassan's politics and his lifestyle and income.
So they end up talking a little bit about investment and Hassan thinks it's very important that he's not investing his money.
This is a distinguishing factor.
But just listen to him discussing his income, what he does with it, this kind of thing in comparison.
So making money and making more money than you need, making more money than you could possibly want, that is all a good thing.
And you're saying a true socialist would argue that that is totally fine.
The main...
How you make your money is important.
Okay, sure.
That's the fundamental difference that people don't understand.
So, I don't have investments.
I do have a...
I guess, what is it, a 401k or a IRA or something?
I have that because, like, I want to make sure that, you know, you can't work forever, obviously.
I do want to have a safety net when I inevitably stop working one day.
However, I don't have investments.
Why?
I know, everybody always...
Yeah, because that seems silly to me to not want to invest.
See, even with the SB IRA, I still don't have a credit card, by the way.
No, I think we've talked about this.
You said you're going to get a credit card.
I still haven't got one.
Even with SBIR, I was reluctant at first to get it.
I didn't want to get it at all because I thought that it was cheating, kind of, because then I am technically accumulating capital.
But there needs to be an appropriate government substitute in normal circumstances, and there isn't one.
There is no...
Social Security is basically nothing.
And then beyond that, there is no pension structure in the field that I'm in.
But even if there was a pension structure, it's non-existent in most industries in general.
So then it's like, well, I have no alternative, which is why I was forced to concede on that front.
But beyond that, I think I will go at it for as long as I can.
And when I am no longer able to, then I'll figure it out.
But even the money that's just sitting in your bank account, I'm assuming, like, it's probably more in alignment with your morals to be putting that in an index fund or something like that.
Well, I mean, like I said, I usually give it to, like, I will buy things for my family instead, like, so I don't have a lot of money sitting in my bank account.
That is fascinating.
This is like, I mean, we've never talked to anybody that does that.
I mean, it's generous.
It's very generous.
Hasan doesn't have a credit card because it's against his principles.
He explains that he's kind of given and established a 401k or contributes to that because, you know, that's necessary given the system that he's in.
But the money that he earns, he doesn't really, you know, he spends on some luxuries and stuff like that and buys a house, but he gives it all away to...
Family members.
And remember, this is like destiny.
We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars.
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