Matt and Chris jump into the world of debates, dramas, and online personas with the ever-controversial streamer, Destiny (Steven Bonnell). We discuss our Decoding episode a little bit but mostly broader issues including the value of 'debate porn', edginess & Twitter bomb-throwing, reality TV orbiter drama, and the perils of hero worship and parasocial relationships.As you might anticipate, we also cover various 'hot-button' issues including Destiny's involvement in Israel-Palestine discourse, the ethics of engaging with extremists, and whether Destiny was genuinely arguing for the right to murder the DDoS kid. Finally, we wrap up with some discussion of media literacy, the challenges of navigating online discourse, and strategies for laypeople to better engage with research.LinksOur Decoding episode on DestinyDestiny's Gurometer EpisodeDestiny's Positions as summarised on his WikiDiscussion with a Lawyer about the DDoS kidJoin us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus
Hello and welcome to The Code and the Gurus, the podcast where a psychologist and an anthropologist listens to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, the co-host is Chris Kavanagh and this is a special Right to Reply episode, isn't it Chris?
Who have we got with us today?
I thought you were going to get lost on the way there, but you made it at the end.
We have with us one Stephen Bonnell, also known as Destiny.
Who we recently covered and invoked the secret right to reply rights.
And we have materialized.
So thank you for coming on, Stephen, and staying up late, which was appreciated.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Am I on?
Am I in?
You're on and you're in.
You've arrived.
So typically the way this works, though, to be fair, it's only been invoked.
About three or four times because every time we cover people, they're not usually the type of people that respond well to being covered.
But there technically is a format where we allow people to be as any points of dispute or issues or anything we got wrong or just questions or that kind of thing.
And then afterwards, move on to discussion and questions that came up from the stuff that we covered or elsewhere.
And in your case, we did get a lot of feedback.
You may not know it, but you're quite a controversial figure.
People have opinions.
Crazy.
Yeah, I've heard this recently.
I'm curious, for the people that refuse to exercise their right of reply, and I imagine there's people that obviously take issue with a lot of the coverage you give them, what's their number one reason or what are the most common reasons you hear them say for why they don't want to come on and chat about it?
Well, the biggest reason they don't come on is frankly because we're not important enough.
That would be the biggest reason.
That's the most important factor.
The second one is that a lot of the people we cover identify anybody that has given even mild critical pushback as bad faith actors.
So in that case, if they do acknowledge it, it is usually just to say that we are...
You know, not worth their time or an example of the kind of people that people shouldn't listen to.
So that tends to be the reaction.
But there has been exceptions.
Sam Harris has taken up his right to reply twice with varying degrees of success.
And we had Chris Williamson, who you chatted with.
That was more successful.
Sam's like my final boss guy that I really want to chat with.
I would be more excited to chat with him than Joe Rogan.
I really want to.
Hopefully someday it'll happen.
Be careful what you wish for.
I heard you on the stream talking about this issue when you're debating people about that you raise a question or ask people something and they monologue or they waffle on and on.
Just saying...
That might be something to think about if you do end up talking to Sam.
So, yeah.
I'm sure you've talked to many people, so that's something to bear behind.
Okay.
But how about you, Stephen?
We got your feedback.
The reception was generally positive, but maybe you got a few bones to pick or a few points of explanation to make or criticisms of what we did.
I'm going to be honest.
Having somebody cover me and not call me a pedophile Nazi for like two hours is actually...
The bar is in hell, so...
If the coverage isn't that, I'm actually incredibly grateful.
I feel like when, and I say all of this cautiously, because for all I know, if I dig deeper into your guys' stuff, you're just as problematic as everybody else, which maybe you get the impression when you dig into other people.
It's hard to get people to make serious considerations, I feel, of other people's ideas.
So, for instance, if somebody says like, oh my god, we need to kill these fucking people, blah blah blah, somebody will say that, and...
Somebody will come away with that and be like, oh, he just wants to murder all people.
Instead of looking at, okay, well, when he says kill all landlords, what's actually going on here?
The statement itself can be problematic, but there might be something underneath it we need to consider as well.
And yeah, I just find when most people are considering stuff of mine, I've probably done, I don't know if it would be an exaggeration to say, I've probably done more broadcasted content than almost anybody in existence, just by virtue of how unique streaming is and the fact that I've been doing it for about as long as anybody has been.
It's easy to clip 20-second statements and then Have this insane caricature of me that you attack, even if there might be stuff that is worthy to criticize, like the actual criticism just ends up being insane, I think, yeah.
I guess part of that too is that you, you know, you come from that gamer type background of this internet subcultures and so on.
And, you know, the way you choose to express yourself is pretty, pretty colorful.
Yeah, I mean like that's definitely a thing.
One of the challenges of being a popular person on the internet is extracting valid criticism from demented online talk.
So if a bunch of people are saying like an insanely mean, hurtful, not true thing about you, even if that criticism seems like bullshit, it's coming from somewhere and it behooves you if you want to survive in this arena or at least adapt so that people can understand you better to figure out like where it comes from.
I think that when people criticize me for Obviously, I use colorful language where I can get unhinged at times.
I definitely admit that.
However, like, the same types of strategies, I believe, are used to character assassinate basically anybody, right?
So, like, on the other spectrum from me, you could compare me to, say, Biden.
Biden doesn't generally make unhinged crazy statements, but, my God, every single time I talk to a conservative about Biden, they're telling me about, like, remember the speech that he gave in front of the all-red background when he said that half of Americans were racist and blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, well...
If I look at the speech, he tries to qualify so much where he's like, not all Republicans are mega people.
Not all Republicans deny the election, but that doesn't matter.
They still assassinate on the one or two lines.
I definitely don't do myself any favors, but I don't know substantively or significantly if the criticism against me would change if I hadn't made certain statements.
That's just my feeling, but I could be wrong.
I've got a question that relates to that.
Like you say, you've been doing this a long time, right?
You know the kind of statements I imagine that are going to be clipped.
I mean, like recently you intentionally said things like about the Jewish shekels being paid to you, right, for your commentary.
So like in that case, I get it because you're basically trolling for the lowest common denominator response to show that they're not even trying to do things in good faith, right?
Because you then immediately after will say it's a joke.
But in the case where Like, the clip that we played, and we played the longer context of it, where you were talking about the, you know, the situation in Palestine and Israel before the conflict.
And you made the four-way line about, at this stage, I think we should just genocide the Palestinians.
Not we, but they should.
And then you went on to talk about the actual situation and say, well, honestly, there's no solution, right?
And I get your point that it's obvious, if you listen to the rest of it, that you're not calling for a genocide, right?
But you saying that, or in general, layering in those hyperbolic or extreme statements, doesn't that make it easy for people to do?
And you know it's going to happen.
So does it just not matter?
Or why say them?
Yeah, I mean, if it's going to be something like that, I try generally to avoid that.
I usually won't make something so blatant.
That was just a matter of being incredibly unlucky, because this happened before the conflict.
Like, nobody was really actively talking about this.
This was on, like, I think I was playing games on the stream, and it was like Wes, he's not a political person.
He was just asking me questions.
So I'm kind of like, yeah, I'm being a bit hyperbolic.
Like, it would be akin to...
Like, if somebody were to ask me, like, do you think that OJ, you know, do you think that OJ should have been convicted?
And, you know, I'm like, listen, the prosecutor, you know, they fucked up hard, you know, God bless OJ.
Listen, he beat the system, and, you know, he's free, and if the American system fails, then fuck it.
And then, like, imagine a month later, it comes out that 15, you know, different women's bodies were found in his backyard, and then people start playing that clip, and it's like, well, don't you think you probably shouldn't have said, you know, God bless OJ for beating the system?
It's like...
Yeah, I guess I probably should have.
But, like, Jesus, I didn't know that the context would change so significantly at the time.
Like, post-October 7th, I don't think I'm going to open up with that hyperbolic of a statement.
Like, yeah, you know what?
Why don't we just fucking genocide the other?
Because that's the only way this conflict is going to end.
Obviously, because the sensitivity around the topic and the attention is so much higher.
So, yeah.
I mean, like, it'll happen.
In general, I do try to avoid, like, the ultra-leading hyperbolic statements like that.
But, yeah, that was just...
Jesus, yeah.
Not good timing on that, yeah.
There's a reason why it took, like, two months, I think, after the conflict began for people to even find that and dig that up and then start, like, spreading it like I just said it or something, huh?
Yeah, that makes sense.
Oh, also, wait, can I just say one thing, too?
Not to say that, and this is always, like, my biggest issue, somebody could make the argument that hyperbolic rhetoric like that, for a variety of reasons, is damaging, or...
Or contributes to, like, a negative discourse, which is fair.
I would argue against it.
But that is an argument that can be made.
My biggest issue with people is usually just that they're making arguments against these unhinged positions of, like, oh, Destiny wants all the Palestinians to be killed.
It's like, that's, obviously, that's not, I don't think any person wants, like, every Palestinian to be killed, except for the most insanely unhinged people.
But, yeah, my issue is usually just that the criticisms are very poor in terms of what they're actually criticizing.
So I guess the thing that I'm thinking about is I've seen you in a bunch of content talking about wanting to provide a more reasonable alternative.
A lot of popular leftist content can be pretty extreme, right?
And it's good for people, especially online and Twitch and Kick and Rumble and all that, to see just reasonable or more moderate points of view.
But then there is the tendency...
That, like, when people go to your Twitter account, depending on when they go, they might come across, like, you know, the recent tweets directed at Ludwig or at Hassan with the N-word and the J-down reference.
So in that case, it feels like if you were trying to, you know, say, okay, take things...
Down a notch.
That's the message that sometimes comes across in your stream in the mainstream interviews.
But then on Twitter, it feels like the gloves come off fairly quickly.
And your Reddit community tends to notice that as well, right?
You will see Fred saying, oh, God.
Stephen, why?
Why now?
Or this kind of thing.
So I'm just curious, in that case, is it intentional?
Or is it an impulse control thing?
Or what do you...
Yeah, I think we have to disaggregate a few things here.
So, firstly, when I advocate for reasonableness or whatever, it's not necessarily civility, although I think civility...
Can be important too.
Like when I say reasonableness, what I mean is just like I want people to have a thorough understanding of the things they're talking about, like well-informed opinions, and the ability to read an entire article for five minutes from start to finish rather than to, you know, eat a headline and then digest that and have your whole opinion develop from,
you know, a 20-calorie tweet when I talk about that.
Now, separate from that...
When you ask me about Twitter, okay, no man's land, there are several different things that could be happening at any one point in time.
There are certain tweets that are intentional and edgy.
So like the JDM N-word tweet, I think that these things are...
Important for me is because one, they adjust my audience expectations.
I don't care much about like slurs.
I don't think we should call people slurs and I don't defend it and I don't call people slurs.
But when people like pearl clutch over like a particular word or they pearl clutch over like a particular thing, especially in the defense of using slurs.
So this was like in the cracker debate or whatever.
Can you call white people slurs?
In that point, I will deploy a tactical slur as a joke, not like calling somebody the N-word or whatever in a pejorative way.
Yeah, because it adjusts my audience expectations.
It keeps everybody, like, understanding, well, this is what he thinks about this.
And if people don't like it, I can understand why.
And then it also, like, triggers the fuck out of the other people.
Now, that's separate from, say, when I was fighting with Ludwig.
There were a couple issues there.
One is, I am human, and I do make mistakes.
There are probably times when I fight with people, and I'm sure I could go through several of these, where I go too far.
Not even such that I'm being too mean, but that I'm violating principles that even I think I shouldn't be doing.
Like, these are things that are generally just a mistake.
I shouldn't have said this, or I got way too heated or too upset.
And then another issue that I have, this is on the strategic side, not the moral side, is because I let so much stuff slide all the time about me, because so many people are saying so many things, when I am, like, boiling over and I become unhinged, it kind of seems like it comes from nowhere.
So even in my own fanbase, a lot of people saw me fighting with Ludwig and then invoking Cutie, and they're like, this is, like, so much just because he tweeted, like, you know, a meme at you.
Like, why?
And then one thing that I'm trying to do more now is I'm trying to lay out, now that I've got, like, people clipping stuff, like, these are all the things that these people say about me.
This is where the frustration comes from.
It's so irritating that there's no accountability on their side.
But then as soon as I say something, now, like, not only are their communities trying to hold me to account, my own community is holding me to account, and that's driving me crazy.
That doesn't justify me being unhinged, but I'm trying to do a better job at keeping track of what other people are saying about me so there is at least some kind of public accountability created there.
But, yeah.
Sorry, that was a lie.
No, that makes sense.
And I think in that recent case, it might have also been particularly joined because you did a stream with Dr. K, which was quite a reflective stream about how to, I don't know, better communicate or whatever Dr. K talks about.
But then the next day, there was the interaction.
And like you say, I think the context does matter.
So I think from hearing your explanation that Ludwig and other people will make reference to your private life and past relationships or this kind of thing.
And then when you respond in kind, people respond as if you suddenly went low for no reason.
You mentioned his girlfriend.
And talk about deepfakes allowing us all to enjoy, right?
So that kind of thing.
So it's the sense that people are doing the same thing to you and you're not allowed to.
Responding kind, is that kind of?
Yeah, it's two things going on.
One is the difference in accountability.
So I genuinely believe, and I would fight that for any creator within an order of magnitude or size of me, I think that I have the most moderated community on the internet, which if you listen to anybody else, they would say that I have the most unhinged community on the internet.
But if you go through threads where, I think I called KC Tron a fat, I've said, I hate this lady, but I've said things about people that I don't like, political opponents that I don't like, that are probably crossing my values.
Where I say things like, we probably shouldn't tell people for their looks or stuff like this.
And when I say things like that, my own community will post stuff like, hey, we probably shouldn't be doing this or I don't know why Destiny is saying this or did we change our mind on this?
Which is good, right?
And I might even be ass mad at the time.
I might even fucking tab ban somebody because I'm ass mad or whatever.
But in retrospect, that's good.
Those corrective mechanisms in my community are valuable to me and I appreciate those.
But on an emotional level...
When I have a lot of accountability for my community, and then I look into other communities, and those communities have zero accountability for those people, and they greenlight attacks that should be contrary to those communities.
So, for instance, they might talk a lot about how, like, oh, well, we shouldn't make, like, well, we need to defend all LGBT and sexuality, and this is so important, and blah, blah, blah.
But then, like, when I'm brought up, like, spamming pictures of, like, some black girl getting railed making cuck jokes is all of a sudden, like, the funniest thing in the world.
And it's like, okay, well, that feels really annoying.
And then in their community, if anybody calls them out, they get downvoted out of existence, and then...
And it's like, okay.
That dual accountability fucks with my head a lot.
And then the second part of that is there's a concept called crazy making where, especially for people that take videos of their significant others like having an outbreak, where you can poke and poke and poke and poke and poke somebody so much and then when they break, you record it or you account for it in some way.
You tell people about it and you're like, man, you were super unhinged.
And then you act like you've done nothing.
And that also drives me crazy.
It's one of the reasons why I prefer fighting.
I like the Nazi communities because when they call me names or they go unhinged, you're crazy.
Seriously, I expect it.
But if I go unhinged on them, they're never coming back with like, I can't believe that Destiny said this or that about, you know, Richard Spencer or Sargon McCart or Nick Fuentes or blah, blah, because they expect it.
Whereas on the other side, it's like, oh, my God, you really said or did this?
And it's like, yeah, you motherfuckers have been saying, like, worst shit about me.
Like, Hasan literally calls me DeForcelli like 20 times per stream.
What the fuck?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's awesome.
I mean, we're not the civility police.
We're much less polite about most of the characters we cover.
When we don't like them.
It is important.
Like, some level of civility is important, though.
Like, I shouldn't do that.
Like, these are human emotional responses that are not, like, I'm giving you reasons why it happens.
I'm not justifying them.
Like, if I was a better person, I could be above that, or I wouldn't, like, fall prey to that.
There's just a lot of public pressure.
But the civility part is important.
I mean, some people use civility politics as, like, an insult.
Like, oh, you just want to be polite to everybody.
But, like, some base level of civility is probably necessary for us to communicate with each other.
So, yeah.
Just saying that, yeah.
Civility porn is a...
The term that we reference.
Like, civility is good, but constantly talking about how incredible it is that you're able to talk to someone who you largely agree with.
Yeah, it comes up a lot in the content that we look at.
But sorry, Matt, you were going to say.
Yeah, I think the thing that interests us, Stephen, it's not really a criticism.
It's just an interesting thing, which is that you do seem to have those multiple speeds.
Like, on one hand, it seems to us incredibly consistent.
In terms of your, you know, arguments and your stances on important sort of topics.
But, you know, you can be talking about a very serious topic and, you know, marshalling, you know, robust points in a very rigorous way at one time.
And then listening to other content, you're like litigating.
Some personal sort of relationship thing and people taking pictures of penises or whatever.
And you sort of deploy the same, you take that with the same level of seriousness.
And I get the impression you spend a lot of time on that kind of stuff as well.
And again, it's not having a go.
I'm just curious.
Why?
I don't know.
I feel like growing up, I think something that I always valued was I think it's cool when individuals are less specialized and more less...
I don't want to say more generalized, but not necessarily sliding into hardcore archetypes.
Like, I like the idea of a really nerdy guy that reads a lot, but is also like a quarterback.
Or I like the idea of, you know, like a hardcore Rambo soldier who also like finger paints.
Or I like the idea of people having, like kind of, I don't want to say...
Breaking molds, but I guess it's kind of like that.
Yeah, just like having a collection of attributes.
I value my intelligence.
I like researching.
I like debating.
I have huge interest in politics.
I'm also like, you know, a super sexualized person.
I like to, you know, hook up and sleep around with people.
I like to do drugs sometimes.
I think they're super fun.
I like cars.
I like guns.
Yeah, I like video games.
There's just a lot of things that I...
What'd you say?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there's a lot of things that I enjoy.
And yeah, I guess because my life is so open, I end up sharing all of these things.
And yeah.
Sometimes it's confusing because it seems like you wouldn't associate some of these things with other people.
Other people say that like, well, you shouldn't be so open about all these things.
There are pros and cons to it.
But yeah, got it.
So is it like part of the sort of package?
Like you're very upfront about, you know, like you run a business essentially, right?
And you provide a product and you make money from it.
And when we commented on that, we found it quite refreshing because a lot of other people present themselves as something quite...
Quite different.
And, you know, part of it seems to be that, you know, people can engage with you on political topics but can also engage and be a part of your, like, the real life, right?
So those parasocial dynamics, which we experience too being podcasters, are real and they're not always negative.
But, like, is that part of the appeal?
Like, how would you describe the product that you offer your audience and how much of it is the drama?
And the personal beefs and things like that.
Yeah, I think when you come to my stream, I think there's a few things you're getting.
One is uniqueness.
So if you're listening to me give a take on something, this is my take on it.
As opposed to, there's a lot of progressive commentators where I could write the scripts for any take they're going to have.
You know, like, oh, well, this came out.
America was on this side.
They're probably going to be against it.
Or for far-right commentators, you know.
A political topic came out, Biden said this.
Well, they are probably going to say that.
They don't trust this or they don't believe this.
If you come to my stream, I think you genuinely aren't...
I don't want to say you don't know what I'm going to say because that makes it sound like it's random or chaotic, but rather at least you know that I'm going to have my own unique individual interpretation of a particular thing.
That's a big thing, the uniqueness.
A second thing is I think the authenticity.
I think I hope I come off as a pretty authentic person.
Again, there's like leaked...
There's so much information about me online, aside from even just all of the hours streamed.
There's, like, people try to leak stuff about me or talk about me behind the scenes or whatever.
And I think every single thing that has ever been leaked or every single thing that's ever gone has usually gone to show that I'm more or less, if anything, I'm, like, even more soft or generous in real life.
Like, sometimes, like, things I pay people will get leaked.
And people are like, I can't believe he paid, you know, $5,000 for music for this D&D thing.
Or I can't believe he's paying this employee, like, X,000 a month or blah, blah, blah.
And yeah, nothing like leaks that's like a surprise to anybody.
Something that I said before about like, you know, tweeting a certain thing at Hassan about JDAMs or whatever, and for adjusting audience expectations, is that on the map of where people think I am, if you're genuinely following my stuff, and like on the map of where I actually am, these are basically always overlapping.
And I think evidence of this comes out whenever I get into big fights with people, like I never lose like huge fights that involve like leaking or character attacks, because like my character is basically...
I don't think there's ever been a huge drama that I've been involved in where I've lost subscribers.
This has never happened.
Other people on the internet might get mad and attack me or get upset or whatever, but generally speaking, except for my big communism People usually know exactly where I'm at for everything.
I have a follow-up with that.
Whenever we were looking at your content and looking at the different aspects of it, there were parts of it which mainly were the content dealing with orbiters, which Matt referenced having a dynamic a little bit like reality TV because there are Big characters.
There are people who have slept together, who are now feuding, who might make up, might not.
And I wonder, one thing is just, do you think that comparison is fair?
And then the second thing about it is, coming from the background that we do, academia, or a more podcast, the arena area, the notion of having...
Intimate relationship with listeners or people in the orbit just seems like, I mean, being the people that we are, it might be something to do as well.
But I mean, in general, that boundary, right?
That there's always like a parasocial imbalance when you are the kind of bigger content creator and the person around which others are orbiting.
So I'm curious about...
That, because in one respect, whenever I see you on the stream of, like, Lav and Mr. Girl and all this kind of, like, drama, for me, it would be absolutely exhausting to deal with that.
But for you, it seems to be, like, another week.
And I'm just curious, is that, you know, personality differences and different boundaries?
Or how do you feel?
I realize there's about eight layered questions on there, so wherever you want to go.
For the first question, it was when you said, is the comparison fair?
Do you mean like comparing my stream to like reality TV or?
Yeah, in terms of the orbiter dynamics, not, you know, the debates and that kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's somewhat fair.
I mean, people watch reality TV because it's like the basest form of human drama, right?
Like you're seeing people that are doing things that in some ways are entirely relatable, like having romantic, you know.
Quibbles are having fights with people or you know disagreements over stuff or crushes on people whatever and then in other ways it's totally unrelatable like it's like people that are larger than life that are doing this you know so seeing like Kim Kardashian navigate a relationship is there in some ways you totally relate and in other ways these are like aliens too so that's like it's a big captivating thing to witness online So yeah,
I think the comparison is fair there.
Now, obviously, there's a loading of reality TV that makes it seem like it's not intellectual content or it's worthless.
And when you talk about the stuff I'm involved in dramatically, there's a large element of truth to that.
I don't think your life is being enriched by watching Mr. Gribble and Lav go back and forth for hours on stream.
But it's funny as fuck.
And not everything we do is for life enrichment.
There are baser desires that we can fulfill.
And I like to hop between those.
I think it's fun.
It gives me a variety of things to do.
Admittedly, I don't know if this is an advertisement for medication, but since I've started my...
Vyvanse, I've had very little desire to participate in that.
So for about seven months, my stream has been almost absent completely of any drama like that because I just don't have as much of an interest.
Maybe that was like a thrill-seeking aspect of like a dopamine-starved brain.
I'm not sure, but yeah, it was definitely entertaining and exciting.
The intimate relationship thing with people in my field, that's a really interesting and challenging question to deal with.
When you're, so here's an interesting thing.
When you're a streamer, depending on the type of stream you are, your life kind of revolves around your work.
So, like, I'm streaming for, like, my goal is to stream for eight hours a day.
I'm doing emails and messages before and after.
I might be traveling for podcast appearances.
And then I'm doing other stuff relating to upkeep of stream.
And anybody that's ever dated me will complain about this.
It's like going into work-related stuff.
So, when that's the case.
The people that are available to you to date are basically two types of people.
It's either fans or it's either colleagues.
So you're in an interesting spot because I remember when I moved to California when I was 30, for a couple years on Tinder, I removed all of my social stuff because I just wanted to meet people that didn't know everything about me.
That was an interesting and fun experience.
And for a while, it was fun to meet somebody and I get to like introduce myself to somebody again.
I'm like, oh, this is interesting.
But then there is like this wall that exists between us of like...
I don't know how to explain to you that I'm a little bit irritated today because there's a guy online that tweeted about me being a pedophile and he got 20,000 likes and it's just really irritating.
There's no way to make an ordinary person understand that type of struggle.
Or like, yeah, listen, this might be crazy, but just because we appeared in a picture together, there might be people that try to send you DMs asking you really weird questions or hacking your account because they're trying to get more information about me.
Just ignore that.
Most people can't handle that.
So then you go to the other part and you're like, okay, well, now you have fans or you've got...
Well, immediately people write off fans because that's like power dynamics and abuse and toxic and blah, blah, blah, whatever.
So now you've got colleagues, but then colleagues, in my opinion, are actually more problematic because the power dynamic you have over a colleague is actually more severe than the power dynamic over a fan, right?
If there's a fan and I want to be abusive, like I can...
Exploit the fact that this person really likes me.
And that's about it, right?
Which that can be really abused, by the way.
But with a colleague, I could theoretically hold your career in my hand.
And that's like so much more power.
So where I'm at right now is I basically just like, okay, well, if you're like aware of my content, if you messaged me, if you chatted, that's basically the types of people that I'm talking to, or trying to date right now, because colleagues are that is a whole clusterfuck of shit.
And people that are outside of this world completely, like have no understanding of how crazy it is.
And it's impossible to ask them to step into that life as a romantic partner.
There's a...
I guess there's a...
You can always cut me off whenever I say something, too.
No, no.
It's actually just percolating in my head about the situation of streamers and their dating life.
It's not something that I've considered in great detail.
But covering your content did make me think about it more.
And this is probably a little bit tangential, but I...
I think speaks to a similar sort of issue.
Because I would imagine there are very, very devoted fans that you could tell it would be a problem, that there would be an unhealthy aspect that you could exploit from that one-way relationship.
But this is slightly different.
But your audience, I remember seeing somewhere, and it might have been in...
Mr. Girl's document, so I'll take your assessment of it for the credibility.
But it was something about like that your audience has like significant proportion that is male in early 20s demographic.
Is that accurate?
I think so.
Probably closer to like mid-ish 20s because I've been streaming for a long time and I do politics at a skew a bit older.
But yeah, I think probably.
Yeah.
OK, so the the thing which I encountered, which.
Kind of surprised me, and it relates to the DDoS kit, which was obviously going to come up.
So, you know, we can talk about the DDoS kit, but in particular here, so your community has, as you said, a reputation for being highly activated.
And it is highly activated in terms of, like, clipping.
And kind of, you know, whenever Ludwig mentioned some event from years ago and people were able to find the clip from an old stream, right, that showed that he was misrepresenting events, right, with throwing the cheese poofs or whatever they are.
And I think that is true, that there is an activated element to it.
But I find that whenever we did the episode on you and on our subreddit and your subreddit, people were discussing the episode and the DDoS kid came up.
Then some of the people that were talking about that, they were essentially...
I find it interesting because I interacted with them and was basically saying, okay, but I've heard all the arguments that Stephen Smith made about the DDoS kid, right?
But come on.
You can agree that he has these points that he can make, but...
You don't have to completely accept his reasoning.
And the thing that surprised me was that there was a bunch...
Yes, there were lots of people that are critical and have their own point of view, but there were some people who were essentially repeating everything that you'd said using the exact same example to respond and to completely justify it.
And that stance, I think you would agree, right?
Like, whether or not you...
You agree with you.
It is still quite an extreme stance, right?
Probably, yeah.
For people that aren't aware of the ins and outs, this is related to the moral legitimacy of potentially murdering someone for interfering with your...
Income.
And in this case, happens to be like a minor.
I would use the word killing, not murdering.
It's a little bit less normatively loaded, but okay, sure.
Yeah.
But yeah.
So even in the realms of like moral philosophy version of it, it's still a relatively extreme take.
And the thing that kind of surprised me was that there were people that would like regurgitate.
Your take exactly, uncritically.
And I know I've heard you, I think you and other people, other streamers, talk about this dynamic about how that's not what you want to encourage, right?
And how when that is happening, when people are just repeating things critically, that that's a bad dynamic.
So the question is, one, about the extent to which you think that exists in the community.
And maybe two, are there ways that you discourage that?
Or do you think there's always going to be an element of the community which ends up repeating things uncritically?
Yeah, I think both parts of that second statement can be true.
There are ways that I try to discourage people from doing that, but I'll say, this is how we should think through this, or I'll try to keep both, depending on the issue we're going through, I'll try to present both sides of the argument.
Where, you know, it's like, well, listen, like, this is my feeling on this, but, like, you could also keep this in mind and we should think about this.
You know, today, I don't know when this episode airs, but today there was the ICC stuff that dropped where the prosecutor was making a request for a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu and Gallant and then the three Hamas leaders, where, like, when I start off by reading this, I'm like, listen, there's going to be a lot of people politically that,
you know, want a certain outcome from this, but we should see what the prosecutor says before we, like, dig through his background or anything like that.
We should, like, look at the actual words here in the statement and we should read this entire thing.
I try to have people at least keeping in mind the other side, or I try to stress the importance of being able to play devil's advocate, of being able to argue the other side.
So hopefully my community is better than most when it comes to representing both sides of an argument, because that's a value that I hold, and if they're going to copy from me, hopefully they copy that.
But at the same time, realistically, there are going to be people that just copy my opinions and uncritically parrot whatever I say.
Now I would argue that...
That's better because my opinions are better than other people's opinions, but I mean, they're opinions.
So hopefully everybody thinks that.
You should think you have the best opinions.
Otherwise, why would you have a not the best opinion?
You should change it to the best one.
So yeah, I mean, like in the case where people are copying, I was like, well, fuck it, at least they're copying what I would consider to be a more informed opinion.
But yeah, ideally, I would want people to be able to explore whatever applied things they're looking at.
Like, do I feel this way about healthcare or treating people as a bit of a good way?
And that that's running in concordance with whatever internal values or beliefs they have.
Since you mentioned the Israel thing, you know, that's been one of these hot-button issues that are controversial, obviously.
And, you know, you've been perceived as being like a staunch.
Defender, if not an apologist, for Israel.
So I realize you've just been talking about this.
I'm sorry I haven't seen what you've said, but maybe you could summarize it.
What do you say about it at the moment in light of this ICC development and stuff?
Do you have criticisms of Israel's conduct?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of criticisms.
I mean, outside the war, I think Israel has made a massive strategic blunder diplomatically and politically when it comes to negotiating a final settlement with the Palestinians.
I think that this idea that you can kick the can down the road forever and continue with this capsulized theory of bilateral peace agreements with neighboring Arab states and just ignore the Palestinians forever is absurd.
Things like, you know, 2008.
Things like 2014, you know, Cast Lead, Protective Edge, things like the Great March of Return in 2018, things like the October 7th attacks, like, it's going to continue to happen, shouldn't really be surprising.
Like, if you're going to continue to refuse to, you know, approach them with strong, you know, like, advocators for peace, like, they're going to continue to fight an attack.
Like, they're not going anywhere.
Like, that would be stupid to imagine that.
So, yeah, I think that Israel has made a massive...
Diplomatic wonder there, especially because Israel is existing under this delusion that there's some peace that can be negotiated with Palestinians that won't be painful.
And with every single new permit authorized for every new house, for every single expanded outpost that turns into a settlement, that turns into an additional Area C that wants to be annexed, like that...
Price is going to become increasingly painful because you can't just continue on like this.
The situation is untenable.
The status quo doesn't work.
So yeah, everything relating to the collective delusion that Israel has been under after '67 that they can hold on to the West Bank without penalty, it's absurd on so many different levels.
I understand it.
I know where it comes from.
Same way I would say the Palestinians have their delusions that aren't being held by the world.
But I understand where theirs come from as well.
But yeah, Israel is not beyond reproach for sure.
But I don't even get to explore those criticisms because most of the pro-Palestinians I argue with are unhinged and delusional.
And there aren't many pro-Palestinians.
I've argued with a few of them, but most of them are from Israel.
Simcha Rachman, I think, was a guy in the Knesset I argued with.
And then I've argued with a couple of big Zionists, pro-Zionist people.
Most of the people online today are super pro-Palestinian.
That was a point that I was curious about, because I saw some stuff in the lead-up to the debate with Norm Finkelstein, and I forget who the other guy was, on the Lex Friedman.
Oh, Norm Finkelstein and Juan Rabani.
Yes.
Yeah.
And Benny Morris was on your side, right?
Yeah.
So in the lead up to that, I heard you express what I would have viewed as positive anticipation.
Like, you know, you had some back and forth with Norm, but it sounded like you had hoped that there would be an exchange and that people would see that maybe in regards like with Benny Morris, that there was some areas of...
Disagreement, right?
And then, of course, what happened in that debate, it didn't end up because it was just insults and treating barbs and completely distinct historical accounts, right?
And I was curious about, in that case, so you seemed disappointed that it ended up like that.
And did you have a more positive image of Norm Finkelstein before the interaction?
Like, were you hoping that it would be...
More than that?
Or did you kind of anticipate that that was always going to be what it was?
The most embarrassing thing is, I'm pretty sure you can find me saying comments prior to that, that I was like, I think this has the potential to be like one of the best on YouTube conversations about this particular conflict for two reasons.
One is because Norm has such an extensive background as being pro-Palestinian.
And two, because Benny Morris is one of the most respected historians in the field.
And then Muin Rabbani has his background that he can contribute as a...
Palestinian, Palestinian advocate.
And then I've got like my, I'm pretty rhetorically effective and I can follow pretty sharply like logic and stuff.
And I've like done a little bit of reading compared to these guys, like so I can follow along at least.
And the fact, so that was one, it was the people involved, especially Norm and Benny.
And then two, the format, the idea that we could have rather than these fucking 20 minute, no, I'm sorry, not 20 minute, rather than these like two minute, you know, 20 second exchanges back and forth, we can have like a five to six.
Our sit down and really into detail hash out like the differences in the perceptions of historical fact between two sides with these figures was like that was like a legendary opportunity I thought to have an amazing conversation going back and forth between the histories of both of these people and yeah I didn't I didn't I couldn't imagine that it would have turned into such the shit show that it was that was unbelievably It was vindicating for me on a personal level.
I felt super happy on a personal level, just in terms of myself.
But in terms of what that conversation could have been in a wider respect, I think it was really embarrassing.
Yeah, I mean, it's just generally disappointing, isn't it?
Like yourself, I'm not an expert, but I've read histories of the region.
And I've read really good commentary from moderate Palestinians and moderate...
And the amazing thing about them is that they're very, very similar.
They're not on an entirely different page.
But especially when you look at the international discourse that's happening online, looking into the area like a fishbowl, it seems like it's happening on a much poorer level than even people who are actually there and experiencing it.
If you follow the facts given by both sides, the conclusions are so obvious, and the only possible outcome is the total elimination of one side because they're so unholy.
The pro-Palestinian myth of Jews were injected artificially into the Middle East in an area they didn't belong, and then perpetually supported by Brits and then Americans who wanted to see the racist destruction and subjugation of Arabs led to a racist hegemonic bulwark in the Middle East that called itself Israel that just attempted to torture.
You know, with the help of the West, all these Arabs around them until they forge their state over dead Palestinian children.
It's like, that's their side.
And then on the Israeli side, the idea that these were underdogs alone against the world, fighting against, like, you know, these barbaric Arabs that wanted to see nothing more than the eventual genocide of the entire state of Israel and Jews all over the world for absolutely no reason when Jews just wanted to live alongside in harmony with these Palestinians who,
you know, had no reason to not want them there.
Like, the myths on both sides are just so extreme.
Extremely divergent.
And then both people, at least online and in the real world to some extent, will argue over these.
And when your histories are so divergent, I mean, like, of course, the conclusions are going to be wildly divergent as well.
Is there an issue, Stephen, given that because this topic now is the current focus in politics, but also on online debates and this kind of thing, that one, that it can become a kind of content generating What is Nico and Nick Fuentes' position on the Israel-Palestine conflict?
It seems that getting into that feels distasteful in a way because they know nothing, right?
And then on the same point, as you've been involved with it and being perceived as more staunchly defending Israel, that...
It's bound to happen that you get more criticisms, more pushback from the Palestinian side, and that just by natural psychological tendencies, you will be more receptive to potential negative information about Palestinians.
The example I can think of is whenever there was somebody suggesting that...
Palestinians were getting shot for the optics, right?
Like, in order to make sympathy.
And that, I'm not saying it's impossible, but I am saying, like, our bar for believing that should be high, right?
Because the potential for being wrong would be assuming that people that are actually being shot, you know, like, it's kind of false flag with Alex Jones.
So I'm curious about those two things.
One, the potential for it to become a kind of debate porn.
And secondly, the polarization inherent in the topic.
Do you find yourself being pushed towards more polarized takes?
I mean, one of the big problems I have with my stuff is that I try to do functionally what a lot of people do aesthetically.
So there are things that I say that are so pointless to say because...
Everybody says them.
Like, if I were to discover my content in a vacuum, like, if I were to discover it online, like, not having any idea who I am, but I'm aware of, like, all the other content creators, like, I think I say so many things that are red flags for, you should never listen to this person.
Like, anybody that describes themselves as, like, non-partisan, or anybody that describes themselves as, like, oh, I'm truth-seeking, I try to be aware of my biases, I just follow the facts, or blah, blah, blah.
Like, these are usually your biggest indicators that somebody's going to be the most partisan biased hackfuck you've ever listened to in your entire fucking life.
As soon as they put, like, truth...
Or Veritas or rational or logical or whatever in any of the shit they do.
It's usually the least rational, least logical, most emotionally driven stuff you've ever heard in your entire life.
So, that's one thing I try to be aware of.
So, I mean, I'll say that, like, I try to be aware of biases that I have when I'm analyzing stuff.
And I try to apply, like, consistent lenses through how I view stuff.
And, like, I encourage people in my audience, because a lot of haters show up, and even my own fans that don't agree with me sometimes, like, ask questions about how I'm evaluating things.
In practice, this takes the forms of a lot of different type of critical thought, where when I say critical, I'm talking about like metacognitive processes where we're trying to like analyze our own thought.
So I might say something where, and I also try to be aware of these biases too, right?
Because it's not enough to just say I have none.
It's more to be like aware of them, right?
The UN publishes a statement and, you know, the UN says, well, today we actually feel really strongly that Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine.
Like I can't lie and say I don't have a bit of an emotional investment because where I've hedged my previous positions, where I'm a bit more in a...
It's tempting to dismiss it out of hand, right?
Okay, yeah, of course, the fucking UN says that.
But then I have to think of, like, I try to, like, plug in different actors when I'm thinking this to make sure that I'm not, like, mindfucking myself.
So I might say, well, what if the UN comes out and says something about, we believe that in Bukha, or we believe that in, I think it was Bukha, right?
Or in...
Oh my God, I forgot the name of so many of the Ukrainian cities where horrible atrocities have happened.
Mariupol, these other places.
Yeah, if the UN came out and made a statement about Putin, I would probably believe that immediately.
Well, now I have to ask myself, well, hold on.
Am I actually listening to the UN or am I accepting or rejecting what they're saying out of hand?
Just because of the people involved.
So I need to make sure that I'm holding myself.
Well, we need to do either one.
I need a really good reason for that.
Is there a reason to trust the UN for one party and not the other?
Which is dangerous.
You have to be really careful in that justification.
And then secondly, and this is really the easier thing to do if you've got the time, is okay, well, let's just like read through the material and see how we feel about the underlying material.
It's usually the best thing to do.
But yeah, I try to be aware of biases going into topics where it's like, okay, well, I really want them to say this and I'm really primed to hear this and I need to be aware of that because if I hear something that challenges I'm more likely to dismiss it on an emotional level rather than to actually critically consider it.
So yeah, the swapping in different actors for a thing is a really important way to kind of like check my thoughts to make sure that I'm being consistent or intellectually honest and not just biased towards a particular source or party.
Yeah.
Yeah, like you said, all of those things about being rational and a seeker of truth and above mere political...
It's super red flags.
And the kind of gurus or influencers that we really despise tend to do that.
And they also tend to be just totally...
Deplicitous in terms of their motivations, right?
So the presentation is that the motivations are the highest ones you can imagine.
They're looking to save Western civilization usually.
Always.
In some way, shape or form.
But then you look at what they're truly, really excited about and it's going viral.
It's getting clicks.
It's getting an audience with someone higher up the influencer pecking order than they are.
Constantine Kissen.
Springs to mind is a good example of something like this.
Sure.
So, but, you know, so my question is not about yourself this time.
It's just because, like, you've been in the biz for so many years, and from your vantage point, you would have perceived it's better than us.
And we've experienced it personally, just on our scale, and the kinds of approaches, and just to seeing how...
How people play this game, and it's a bit distasteful, to be honest.
On the other hand, like you said, you know, I saw a thing recently where you said, yeah, of course I'm interested in clicks.
You know what I mean?
I'm a content creator.
You know, clicks, you know, I need clicks.
So there's two parts to this.
Like, what's your take on this sort of new media internet ecosystem in terms of those unhealthy dynamics?
And the second one is, you know, how do you treat it like a business without, you know, doing it that way?
Selling your soul.
Yeah, I mean like...
Needing clicks isn't bad.
I mean, it's like going out on a date with a girl, right?
It's like, well, I really want to have sex with this girl.
So I can either, you know, like pay for dinner, be engaged in the conversation, make her feel like she's safe around me, you know, or I can slip, you know, like Rufinol or whatever into her drink.
And then when she's passed out, I could carry her off in my car, right?
Both of these are achieving the same end.
But obviously, there's like a very ethical way to go about it.
There's a highly unethical way to go about it.
I think when it comes to like getting clicks, I think this is actually fundamentally, this goes really deeply to my philosophy.
I think for a long time, the left made a big mistake in assuming that we're correct, so we don't have to package any of our stuff.
We're just right.
And the fact that we're right should be enough for people.
And it is absolutely not enough for people.
And for a long time, right-leaning content was just so much more human and entertaining than left-leaning content.
I don't know if you guys ever listen to talk radio in the United States, but man, if you flip between NPR...
And then you listen to, like, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck.
Like, these guys were passionate speakers.
They were funny.
They were angry.
They channeled emotion.
And then you go to, like, the most sterile, you know, like, laboratory speaking on, like, NPR.
And it's just like, ugh.
Like, it's just not entertaining at all.
You know, it's funny.
If you ask like who was the most influential left-leaning educator, you know, for millennials, it was probably Jon Stewart because he was funny and that's really important.
So, when I talk about needing to fight for cliques, I have to be entertaining.
And I hope I am entertaining.
I read stuff, we study a lot.
I don't believe you have to sacrifice the...
The informational part or the educational part for the entertainment.
I don't think that has to happen.
I think you can make it funny.
You just have to, like, make it human for people, you know?
People understand this intuitively when it comes to, like, classrooms, right?
Like, nobody would say that I had a really boring teacher, but I had this amazing teacher that got me so interested in a topic, and then say, yeah, but he was an amazing teacher because he misrepresented so much and just made it entertaining.
It was, no, he made, like, the facts interesting you because he was entertaining.
He was, like, so good at that.
And that's kind of what I try to do, so.
Yeah.
So like when I say like I need clicks, I can't like afford to just sit on stream for eight hours and just read a book out loud to my audience.
There's going to have to be other types of content that I interweave or other ways that I comment on it or argue with people over it that makes them like more drawn into it.
And then hopefully as part of that educational or entertainment process, they're also like becoming more informed on the facts as well.
So what's the most unethical ways you've seen out there in terms of what's the worst and most common things?
Streamer porn.
The most unethical, you mean like in terms of like getting a fan base or?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I guess the things that people do, perhaps mostly motivated by just wanting to get a lot of clicks and be popular.
Like, what does it incentivize them to do?
Well, yeah, so I guess in my world, the things that you're looking for are things like...
So there's a concept called audience capture, where if you've got a particular audience and wants to hear a particular thing, that's the thing that you're more likely to feed them.
And you're not doing that out of any principled obligation to a thing.
You're doing it because you know that there's a big reward there.
So people that co-sign others' opinions are people that form alliances with certain communities or people that carry water for certain people just because they know it'll get them clicks or people that this gets more into the sterile-like.
I don't know, prop logic or philosophy analysis, but people that engage in bad argumentation.
So when somebody's willing to make really strong claims with really high levels of conviction about things that they have no research about or no evidence of, but they know there's a big social reward for them, I think that these are probably some of the worst things driving online content today, depending on the circle you're in.
Do you know who Ryan Long is?
They do the boys cast.
It's Ryan Long and another guy.
I know them.
You know the guys that did the woke people are, like, far-right people?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, those girls.
Oh, yeah.
So the first time I went on their show, I think I was getting a lot of attention relating to the Rittenhouse stuff because I felt really strongly that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
And their audience loved me.
And they said I was like the most reasonable liberal anywhere.
They were really appreciative of like the perspective that I brought.
And they, you know, really just liked the fact that I was a reasonable liberal.
The last time I was on the show, I was highly critical of Donald Trump and they fucking hated me.
It was so much.
I don't know if you saw any comments.
Oh my God, it was like brutal.
That idea of one thing I could do, there are ways where when I talk to certain people, I could only show certain opinions.
I know that would garner me a whole bunch more clicks and respect and desirability from those communities.
And there are certain topics that I know I could stay away from that wouldn't get me in as much heat with different communities.
And when I see people making decisions like that, people are just molding themselves to the audience rather than trying to guide the audience to some better place.
And I don't like that.
I think that's incredibly damaging.
I think it's also incredibly damaging, even more so because they present themselves as doing something different, right?
Like, if Project Veritas was called Project Partisan, I'd have no problem with what they do, right?
Okay, yeah, you guys just, like, you push a certain political opinion, that's fine.
But it's annoying when all these fuckers, you know, try to operate under the aesthetic of truth and logic and reason, and it's like, okay, well, Jesus Christ, like, you haven't even read these indictments that you've talked about for three months, or you're supposed to be educated in this particular thing, you haven't even read this, like, paper that everybody's talking about, like, how do you have any information on this?
Like, clearly...
Your commitment to logic and reason aren't there.
You're just farming an audience for clicks and destroying the discourse while you're doing so.
I'm going to give you credit, Stephen, as well, that one thing that I find very annoying, especially in the context that we look at, is with someone like Jordan Peterson discussing with Sam Harris, there is the whole thing that you encountered with Jordan Peterson that you've talked about,
the constellation of right-wing global warming is...
The conspiracy concocted by the WEF and Trump was the voting machines.
Maybe they weren't tampered with, but all of it connects in together.
But you could have a conversation with Jordan Peterson where you veer away from those topics and you mainly talk about polarization and talk about the psychological issues with liberals, and it would go very smoothly.
And I've seen a lot of people do that, and I think to your credit that you often...
Are willing not to do that, as demonstrated recently with Jordan to good effect.
But even though he then regarded you as like, you know, too argumentative.
But there is this aspect that, so what you talked about in regards, you know, the left being more effective at making its content entertaining or rhetorically effective and engaging.
Isn't there the issue?
That if you optimize for that, that you create Hassan and BreadTube, where you just get a flip side, where there's a lot of rhetoric, a lot of strong personalities and demonizing outgroups.
And that can appeal in the same way and package your message effectively.
Whereas if you are, in a sense, advocating for something which is more moderate.
It's ultimately going to be more boring because you're not saying there's going to be a revolution.
You're not saying that there is a savior who's going to come and there will be a utopia and that you all get to be revolutionaries.
You're saying you get to make incremental changes for legislation over successive administrations.
Is that a sexy message or do you have to inject drama and stuff in order to make people pay attention to that?
Well, I mean, like, yeah, there's the personal aspect.
So, on presentation, you can be more entertaining, which I think is a big, that's, I mean, that's technically, that's where I cut my teeth, was being, like, the only guy on the left that would debate, you know, crazily with people on the right.
I'll call people names, we'll scream at each other, we'll roll it in the mud.
And traditionally online, like, lefty people or SJWs, we called them back then, before woke became popular, were just kind of like pussies.
They weren't willing to, like, get in the mud and fight with these people.
So, that's where I kind of got my initial burst of popularity from.
So, you can be, like...
Entertaining in terms of presentation.
When you talk about actual content, this is, I think, a really weak area of mine that I've been trying to improve a lot.
Especially, I had a conversation with an online content creator called JJ McCullough.
And he does, like, politics from Canada, basically.
But one thing that I've had a lot of trouble with is, I think because I'm such a...
The way that I approach life and the way that I look at things is incredibly discreetly and absent.
I'm just not a narrativized kind of person on a personal level.
If somebody asks me a question about a thing, I'm like, okay, well, what's the percentage of this?
That's just how my mind is working.
And in some ways, it's good.
In some ways, it's bad, especially when talking to other people.
But when I come online, I have my...
Intellectual demeanor is to just nitpick endlessly.
So if somebody gives me like, well, these are all the reasons why I like Donald Trump.
And it's like, oh, really?
Well, what can you say about his legislation?
Oh, jack shit.
Oh, he did deficit spending.
Oh, fuck you.
Oh, his foreign policy sucked.
You're retarded.
Like, I'll just say like, I'll go on these things.
And at the end of the day.
It can be good rhetorically in some ways in that, well, hopefully I make the other person look bad, or I make him look dumb, or his fans feel embarrassed that he couldn't respond to these things, et cetera, or whatever.
But also, something that's missing from a lot of what I argue, that I've been trying to add more, is you really do need a constructive argument for people to grapple with, for people to latch onto.
Andrew Tate and all of these guys became popular because they center this locus of control on you that makes you feel like you are your own person that can grab life by the horns.
Have a strong influence on your own destiny.
When I listen to people on the left, they tell me that white supremacist structure is being I can't take credit for a single thing that I do and all of my ancestors were imperialists and I'm an asshole.
When I listen to Andrew Tate, he's telling me that all these people are against me, the feminists and all these woke tards and the IMF and everybody else, but I have the ability to go to the gym and I can buy a sword and walk around my apartment and feel like I can fight the world and I'm able to join the man's club or whatever the fuck they have.
And like take it and sell crypto and do all this, right?
Those people are really empowering because they give you something to latch onto and they make it feel like you're moving towards something larger, transcendental.
I don't think you have to be presenting bullshit to do it.
I just need to do a better job at presenting that, which I've been trying to do more as I hone in on...
In my last debate, I try to point this out now a lot.
This country is so cool.
Well, maybe not you guys because you guys are not America, but for me, it's America.
I did a debate on Fresh and Fit where we're talking about Islam, should it be the best religion or some bullshit?
I don't want to point out that we've got...
I've got, like, a Sudanese immigrant.
I've got this guy from, I think, the Middle East.
I've got you, who I don't even know you're from.
And my mom is, like, a Cuban immigrant.
And, like, all of us are here having this conversation with no worry about the police, no worry about anything else.
You guys are making money in a capitalist realm.
All of this is happening in the USA, in the United States of America, not under some crazy totalitarian regime, not in a place where women can't vote, not in a place where there's a mandated whatever bullshit, but, like, with all the freedoms and liberal things that we can enjoy here.
That's like a weakness of mine.
I need to do a better job at being constructive and I've been trying to get better at that.
But I think you can do it without being sensational.
Yeah, I mean, one little part of what you said that rings true from a psychological point of view is that while it may be true that you're constrained by society, by context, by who knows what, but it's always a good idea to build self-efficacy because...
That is ultimately the thing you've got under control.
So I can see the appeal of people like Andrew Tate and a lot of the right-wing influencers who do that.
I mean, the one caveat with Tate, I guess, is that he also appeals to a certain sense of massacrism, I suppose, because he also tells his audience that they're pathetic, like unless they conform to some crazy standards that he's got.
A little bit.
I think it's really important.
I think it's really interesting when you consider these things.
I call this like cheerleading disguised as criticism.
Sometimes people have done a really good job at taking a criticism or what appears to be highly critical and making you feel like you're taking a criticism, but really they're just cheerleading you, right?
Like if I go up to a guy and I'm like, listen up, okay?
You fat sack of shit.
You need to get up.
You need to go to the gym.
You need to get better.
You need to better something.
Now, a person hearing that might like from the outside and then they might present it as like, well, no, look, like I'm being really, I'm pushing this guy really hard.
And it's like, well, kind of.
But, like, he knows this already, and you're telling him really what he wants to hear, right?
Like, being told, like, you can do it.
You can make something more of yourself.
You have the ability to change, like, the course.
You're like, that's a message that you like, you know?
What's not fun to hear is somebody telling you, like, hey, listen, you haven't talked to your mom and dad for four years because of a mistake you made.
You need to go and apologize to them.
That's a, like, when somebody's giving you things like what the Tates say, and it sounds critical, but your emotional response is this, like, visceral excitement, you should...
Pause for a second and be like, okay, wait, hold on.
What's the likelihood that every time somebody challenges me or expresses skepticism, it's making me feel better and better and better and better, right?
A really good critical thought should give you a level of discomfort for a bit where it's like, ah, like, do I really want to, like, confront this person and, like, express this particular thing?
Like, oh, do I really need to, like, say this?
Like, if that feeling is never happening, then nobody's actually challenging you in a meaningful way.
They're just, like, cheerleading you and calling it criticism, but it's not actually.
It's what you want to hear anyway.
From the content that we look at, we see that dynamic play out a lot.
But there's another aspect to it where, yes, it can be presented as the situation you're in now is kind of shit, but there is a path out that's being presented.
But there's also this aspect where...
The guru people that we cover, they engage in one or two ways, or they can do both of this.
And one is to like, big up their audience, talk about how they're, you know, the kind of people that care about injustices in the world.
They're people fighting back about the real issues in society and so on.
And then there's the kind of nagging side, which is most people don't understand this.
And, you know, you're all not going to get this.
But if you do, you're going to be on the first step to getting to the right space.
So there's this kind of negging aspect of you could be better if you just were able to put in the effort.
And that can sometimes also take the form, and this applies to your neck of the woods, that when you're telling your audience via the people that you discipline on streams, like, okay, you think better, fuck off, you then let people know what We saw,
like, Eric Weinstein do this with his audience, where he was getting criticism from people like us and other people.
And he went on his Discord and kind of said, you know, if you guys don't do a better job of policing the kind of criticism that is appearing in this Discord, I might have to pull back, you know, and just not interact as much.
And it felt like, oh, that's...
Because you could see the people were, you know, really invested.
In him, you know, taking part.
So, yeah, it's just there's a lot of ways to manipulate people like through combining negative and positive messaging.
Yeah, for sure.
None of it is necessarily bad.
It's just the application of all of these things is so important.
It's why when I debate people, I like always try to push for examples and I always try to give examples myself because you can get people that can lay out a lot of theory next to each other and be in complete harmony.
Where it's like, I think that we need to stop the indoctrination of children.
I think that children should be able to grow up free and happy and healthy.
I think that parents need to be able to protect their children to do what's right.
And then one guy will be like, that's why 14-year-olds should be able to take hormones.
And the other guy will say, that's why we need state-mandated religion.
Everything will line up.
And then when you hit the applied part, for an example, it's like, wait a second, what?
You realize that the theory is so vacuous or abstract.
That you could truly insert any value there.
This is why I don't like to say...
I hope I don't hit on things you guys have said before.
I'm not trying to be mean or anything.
But, like, people will ask me, people will say things like, "Oh, like..."
How do you keep yourself free from bias?
That's a really interesting question.
And when somebody asks somebody that and I hear the answer, I immediately know if they're full of shit or not.
Because the number one bullshit answer that people give is go, oh, well, I read a wide variety of media sources.
So what the fuck what?
That doesn't mean anything.
You read a wide variety of media.
You can read a ton of shit and still be a biased dipshit.
Like, what do you mean?
There are a ton of, like, mental safeguards that you can have.
Like, can you argue both sides of an issue incredibly convincingly, right?
Such that you should be able to argue anybody that agrees with you.
Or disagrees with you and put a convincing argument on the other side.
Or if somebody were to ask you the question of what would it take to convince you otherwise of this position?
Do you have an answer for that?
Or are you like, well, I don't know.
I don't think I can be.
And I've had people tell me that.
I don't think anything could convince me otherwise.
What the fuck?
You know, are you well read into a topic such that you could explain it at a decent level?
Like if you say, I think Trump made America better.
You're like, oh, well, how?
This happened.
I don't know.
I just did a debate with Gorka.
And I had to cut him off like two or three times where I was like, how did Trump make America better?
And he's like, well, the economy did better.
I'm like, no, no, no.
What did he do?
Well, I'm getting there.
And unemployment is like, what did he do?
And he's like, well, what do you mean?
I'm like, well, if I stand next to a tree and the tree grows, I can't take credit for the tree growing.
It just happened while I was there.
And the inability to, like, critically engage with questions like that, where it's like, okay, well, what are you doing to actually engage in critical thought, I think is usually a big indicator that that's not happening.
So, yeah.
Putting examples down for applied stuff rather than just laying out a bunch of bullshit theory is really important.
Otherwise, yeah, I don't want to be standing next to some dude and we're agreeing on all these abstract points.
But then when I look in practice, I see that we're on worlds apart of things.
I'm like, well, no, hold on, fuck this.
I don't agree with you when you say that.
Wait, clearly something is disconnected here.
Yeah.
Just before we leave, this topic of some of these characters like Tate, it's a bit of a delicate question for you, I think, perhaps, because you've got this great track record, I think, in terms of debating with some pretty extreme and dark characters.
Nick Fuentes, I think Laura Southern, is that right?
But at the same time, there's also been a fair bit of content where, I don't know how to put it exactly, but...
There's some level of camaraderie, or we're like, at least friend, if not friends, friendly, yeah.
Yes, that's essentially it.
And perhaps there's an issue there, I guess, in terms of, like, I get that one shouldn't pretend that they're some sort of inhuman monster.
They are human beings as well.
But there can be a subtext there, right, which is saying, oh, you know, like, I disagree very much with his views, but, you know, I really respect his work ethic in doing this, and it was great to do this thing with them or whatever.
And there can be a subtext where they're kind of okay, right, and legitimizing them.
Yeah, I think this goes back to the, um, there's so much to dig into.
Like, I've been, like, exploring this.
I've been writing a lot of thoughts down on this.
Relating to aesthetic and function.
Um, I think a lot of the criticisms that I get are people that think I do things as an aesthetic rather than functionally.
And I don't blame them because it usually, 99% of the time, it is the case.
When I, so...
When I started getting into political debate in 2016, my style was very brutal.
Like the goal of me was to make your political idol look like an uninformed buffoon.
And then that's how I would pull people over to my side.
They would email me and they'd go like, man, like I really like this guy.
And then I saw him like flounder so hard in this debate and I felt kind of dumb.
So I started watching blah, blah, blah.
That was like my initial stuff.
Since then, I think definitely like 2019.
2018, 2019 onwards, I'm trying to take more of like an empathetic approach because I think if I can get into somebody's world a little bit more and then argue from their perspective, I think I have a better job like pulling people over.
And that involves getting substantially closer to some figures than most people would otherwise.
Whether or not I get too close to some people or I humanize some people too much.
I mean, like, there's good arguments on both sides of that.
Like, you know, should you, you know, debating Nick in person may be okay, but like going to dinner with him, is that okay?
Or, you know, like debating this person, is that okay?
But like, you know, giving her tips or moderating a debate on her side, is that okay?
I think there's like good, I think there's like a really rich, like, like a ton of stuff to dig through there that you could argue on both sides.
I think that the conversation, though, is usually poisoned.
By the fact that the vast majority of people that stand next to somebody and say like, oh, well, I might not agree with everybody who says, but I think I can still be like friends with him.
Usually when somebody says that, they are full of fucking shit and they will co-sign 99% of that fucking person's opinions.
I have almost never in my fucking life have I heard somebody say, listen, like we disagree on a lot, but we can still be friends.
Really?
Well, what the fuck do you disagree on?
Like, show us.
I never see that ever.
So when I say it to somebody, I can understand, at least on an emotional level, where you're like, sure, you disagree with him.
And like, you guys are like eating dinner.
Yeah, what disagreements?
And they might not know, like, okay, well, like, I've done, like, 50 million fucking debates where we're screaming at this guy, blah, blah, blah.
Like, I'm sympathetic, empathetic even, towards the emotional feeling there, yeah.
Because, yeah, it usually is bullshit.
Yeah, I think there's the issue that, like, as you say, this is something that everybody says, or a lot of people say, and it disguises an actual ideological overlap that's huge.
But there's...
Also the issue, specifically in your case, like, I mean, recently I heard how much you annoyed Nick Fuentes and Sneeko by coming into the Twitter space, right?
And basically shitting in their party.
And that was very enjoyable, right?
And I thought the way that you interrupted their back-slapping session was effective and could possibly only be done.
By someone who was taking the kind of tone that you did, where, you know, you weren't a pushover, but you were effective at like laying, like kind of responding in the way that they would talk over people and that kind of thing.
And I think that as a result, they were very annoyed about you being on the space, right?
And you won't see that with pretty much any other left-leaning streamer that I can think of offhand.
Maybe there are that I'm just not aware of.
But the other part and the part that Matt, I think, is raising is that when I see people presenting it as if you and Nick are great friends, that's obviously not true.
There's obviously like an ideological vibe and you can see it just if you listen to you discussing things.
But then when you hear you and Nick interacting about things like content creation, right?
And talking about his community and how, you know, he's got a political movement, which is...
He's taking steps or Lauren Sovereign is making documentaries.
She's got a good work ethic and that kind of thing.
And that does then end up like feeling like, well, but Nick Fuentes at heart is an anti-Semitic pro-theocracy ethno-nationalist, right?
So like people are correct when they're like his community building and stuff is to build a community which deserves disdain because it's a hateful community.
And I guess in that respect, you know, like you say, there's perfectly good arguments on both sides about the way to respond to that.
But do you see much effect when you engage in those?
Because there's going to be the effect that, like, it's content generating, it generates drama, and, you know, it gets attention in that respect.
But do you see much effect from groupers completely leaving that ideology?
And becoming more moderate, or is that too much to hope for when that is occurring?
Because I'm sure there's isolated examples, but I mean, generally speaking, is it more on the side of generating content entertainment and less ideological shifting, or where would you put the balance?
Well, it's really hard as a political person to ever draw a distinction between the two because you can always make the argument that the stuff that gets me more views and is more entertaining will get me more eyes and is more politically effective, right?
Like, activism is theoretically more powerful the more people are looking at whatever you're doing.
So, that's a careful trap I have to not fall into because there are a lot of things I could do to maximize viewership and then I can, like, post-talk, not even post-talk, I could prospectively justify by saying, like, well, listen, like, I know this is going to be, like...
Kind of a sellout thing here to my values, but it's going to get so many eyes on me and I can convert these people later on, blah, blah, blah.
So it is possible to bullshit yourself that way.
I would say that when I'm looking at doing things with other people, there are two things going on.
One is...
I don't know if I'm changing my mind on this because I get attacked by so many people.
It's pissing me off.
But like...
I try to give people credit where credit is due, regardless.
Because, like, Hasan is a workhorse.
He works at Fox 10. He's really good at networking.
And I try to give people credit where credit is due so that when my criticisms come across to people that are more familiar with my stuff, it gives me a lot of credibility.
Like, one of the reasons why I can step into those spaces with Tate and Sneeko and have that Twitter call where I eviscerate these guys is because...
There are so many criticisms that you cannot make of me.
Like, you can't say I'm scared of being in these spaces.
I've been on shows with all these people.
You can't say that I run from challenging conversations.
Tate runs for me.
He's blocking me on Twitter.
You can't say that I'm not capable of hanging in these types of communities.
Like, I will be in here and deal with it as much as any of these guys can, right?
The credibility building and the fact that I'm willing to give people props where they have it, I think, makes it so that when I do make my criticisms, they stick a lot harder to people that are undecided in these communities and to people on the other side.
It allows me to, when I do convert people, I'll give people props when they deserve them, and I'll attack them when they deserve them.
So if you're coming over to me, it's because you've heard a comprehensive criticism of a person, not just one thing that stuck well.
And then I think it allows me to penetrate into some communities better, although it's hard to see it sometimes because people will still shout at me with the same things, because people are willing to give me that credibility.
I don't come across as some outsider, some woke scold who's coming in to fight with those communities.
But the credibility thing is really hard to measure because, I mean, personally, I could just justify all sorts of horrible behavior.
Like some people, because you could listen to me, like I just gave that thing on, I just said, well, here's the theory, but the application would be way different.
Somebody could be listening and say, well, hold on, Destiny, you just said you hated which people do that.
Now you just gave the theory of building credibility.
But what about, when you say build credibility, that could be giving credit or criticism to a single person, but it could also be, like, saying the N-word on Twitter to gain credibility.
Like, where does that start or stop, right?
It's really hard in my mind to balance all this out because there are competing interests on both sides where it's like, well, what is too much?
And, like, what am I doing that's just self-aggrandizing under the guise of, like, political effectiveness versus, like, what's actually politically effective but also benefits me at the same time, and I'm not trying to play too much into that.
Like, yeah, it's difficult to balance all of that out.
So I'm, like, public about it.
I talk about a lot of it because it's really challenging.
I'm not doing this behind the scenes or secretly in some fucking...
Like, these are issues that I wrestle with on stream, in writing, on Twitter, like, you know, almost every day, depending on what arc we're in, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I appreciate that.
I think ultimately people have got to make their own mind up because everyone can, anyone can say that they've got these motivations, they've got these intentions.
I mean, you know, we've got our own set of things that we proclaim, whether or not...
One should be believed.
I mean, I guess you just have to make your own mind up.
That is, people listening.
The one thing where we are on the same page is, like, we will always hand it to the characters we cover.
Yeah, even when we really, really don't like them.
Just on principle, because I think it destroys credibility to pretend that they can't.
Do anything good when they clearly have got at least this one or two things right and if you want your other ones to land then you need to do that.
Yeah.
You also open yourself up to very scary attacks to where cognitive dissonance only works insofar as when you're cognitively dissonant, you can change your mind about a thing to be more aligned with reality, or you can change the way you perceive reality or change the reality in front of you.
And oftentimes, the reason why we can change how we perceive reality is because you're not usually tested on a lot of the social things that people try to lie to you about.
But the further that gets away from the truth...
The more of a mindfuck it's going to be when somebody's confronted with it.
So, like, for my case, like, if you've listened to things about me on the internet, I'm a racist, pedophile, Nazi Wikipedia reader who's, like, you know, scream slurs all the time and is an idiot, right?
And the caricature of me that's built up is such that...
If I'm ever put in front of an audience and given the opportunity to, like, have a debate or a well-reasoned discussion, there are a lot of people that I will pull immediately that will email me and they'll be like, holy shit, I saw, like, a full thing of you for the first time and it was completely not what I was expecting.
It was like, well, yeah.
But the issue there is there's a gambit that's being played on the other side where it's like, well, if I demonize this person enough, hopefully nobody checks his stuff out.
But holy shit, if they ever look at it, they're going to see that the reality versus the expectation are wildly divergent.
And it's a risky game to play sometimes, but it depends on how well you can perpetuate the exclusion of that particular figure again.
On that kind of subject, so you mentioned a couple of controversial takes and whatnot that are often sided with you.
We raised the DDoS kid earlier, the N-word usage, right?
And I think one point is that your positions to us when we were looking through the things were clear.
You tried to emphasize this point that you are trying to make your position Understandable, whether or not you agree with it, but it's upfront and there.
And that is the case that both Matt and I felt when looking at your content.
But on that regard, it also felt like there are times where you may have taken a stance and are now like, that is my stance and I will defend it until the end of time.
And the example, the DDoS kid is a good one.
Because I saw your conversation with the lawyer, I think Pisco Liddy?
Pisco, yeah.
Yeah, and I'm not desiring to rehash all the arguments, but I'm more interested in whether your defense there is genuine or more like a kind of stubborn enjoyment of arguing a particular position.
Because you could still argue for your reaction and kind of emotional response, right?
And say, yeah, but I wasn't obviously intending to kill the kid, right?
And I'm not planning to argue that we should create a society where people can go and kill kids who are like...
I think we could conceive of creating laws where this would be justified self-defense and stuff.
But that's the part I can't tell how much of that is Just like a stubborn personality, you know, that wants to argue a position you've taken out, a little bit trolling, or you really sincerely believe that, you know, that is completely justified.
And, yeah.
Yeah, I think it's hard to extract the general principle from the particular arrangement because it is so inhuman or unrelatable.
Like, okay, well, you're a streamer, especially because people might think that, like, okay, well, 12 years ago, you're a multimillionaire streamer living a luxurious lifestyle, blah, blah, blah.
Like, my life situation was a lot different back then.
I think I was into my second year.
Maybe, of streaming?
I'd have to go and check when the particular DDoS stuff was.
I think it was my second year of streaming, so the income was not super ironed out.
I was not anywhere near an ultra-wealthy person.
I had a newborn child with a girlfriend that I had a lot of issues with.
I had to maintain two separate residences at all times because we could live.
There was a lot of stress related to that about moving around and streaming all the time, and then I've got a dude that's basically nuking my income for fun the entire time.
So that was the context.
Now, that doesn't necessarily make okay or make not okay the general principle, but just the backdrop is a bit different.
For a millionaire having financial issues is very, very, very low, which I'm aware of.
I don't usually talk about, I mean, I don't have financial issues, but I wouldn't talk about that like that because it's like so disconnected.
People can't even imagine you like having the audacity to complain about that.
The issue when it comes to defensive stuff like that is I feel like the whatever rule that you craft, I feel like you on the extremes, I think you run into very crazy stuff on both sides and it's very hard to figure out where your limiting principles should be.
I think that when you look at the DDoS stuff, It seems like the general rule I'm crafting is that, like, if somebody is taking steps to destroy your income and the police are unwilling to engage, then should you be able to enact, you know, physical violence against this person up to, you know,
extermination, up to killing, up to murder or killing this person, right?
I think...
That sounds pretty unhinged on its own.
And then we could start crafting a whole bunch of examples where it's even more potentially unhinged.
What if you're a bird watcher every day and a guy, you know, drives by with a certain car that's causing birds not to park on trees outside your house and you can't make money more?
Can you kill this person when they drive by?
Like, we can think of a lot of scenarios where it's like, okay, well, hold on.
What could your limiting principle here possibly be?
You know, you don't have a first member protected right to the fucking internet.
What if instead, what if it was a lazy worker that was fucking with your connection because he just didn't do his job well?
Can you go and kill the lazy?
Like, there's a ton of ways you can test that.
And I understand that.
Like, absolutely.
But, here's the but, I think that socially speaking, okay, there are people from San Francisco that are pumping their fist in the air, okay?
Socially speaking, I think that in some places we've gone too far in the other way where it's like, well, property is never worth life.
And you see in some of these cities where it's like you shouldn't be able to kill shoplifters or attack shoplifters or whatever, and now you've got like these mass retail thefts or you've got people who just walk through stores taking everything and walk out because it's never worth it to attack a human or we're stealing things or, you know, more...
More, like, pressingly, you have, like, the whole BLM protest riot stuff where, okay, sure, there might be hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of damage caused in certain neighborhoods, but they're protesting where they cause.
You don't have a right to defend your property.
It's never worth it to kill a person for property, et cetera, et cetera.
And in my mind, I feel like that's a bit...
Of playing out, like, the other end of what that looks like.
And I feel like we have seen that.
I acknowledge that my position definitely comes across as, like, pretty extreme when you start to get to the, like, limits of it.
I definitely acknowledge that.
I do think that there are people that would agree with my position, not in the extreme, that, like, we can easily think of a million examples of, like, well, let's say that you're a sole earner and you've got, like, a sick wife and you can't go to work because a guy decides that he wants to set up shop on your driveway and he's not going to let you out.
Eventually, people are like, well, fuck it.
You should be able to run him over.
This is insane.
You don't want your family to suffer, right?
I think that both sides of that get really weird.
When you talk about self-defense or a person's right to infringe on you and like...
Non-material ways where they're not, like, actually attacking you.
I think it looks really unhinged on both sides.
So, my opinions are genuine, but I do acknowledge that, like, it can look crazy on my end.
And, like, anytime self-defense comes up, Pisco's in my chat, you know, like, saying, like, oh, here he is.
Destiny's about to give his unhinged fucking fucking takes on this bullshit.
And anytime we're watching videos of shoplifting, I'm like, here it is.
This is the world that Pisco wants, where this old lady's gonna get robbed and she can't do anything because she's not strong enough to wrestle under the ground so she can't shoot him in Pisco's right.
Yeah, it's a rough issue, but I understand why people think that...
My takes are a little bit wacky, but I'm not advocating for the murder of everybody.
That's a tough one, okay?
Well, Chris, I think you got your answer.
That was a good answer.
Yeah, no, I mean, I get it.
I'm not going to litigate it.
We're going to end it.
But I mean, I get the argument, which is that I think the crux of it, though, is that you make recourse to the authorities and they...
Do not do what they ought to do, right?
So, you know, I mean, one of the rules of civilization is that the state has a monopoly on violence.
Yeah, and there's not even, the state can't do anything.
There are laws for this.
So, like, what right do you have to go out and enact vigilante justice when the guy's not even breaking the law, right?
And what possible doors are you opening up for anybody to kill somebody because they're doing, what about somebody who's contributing to spiritual decay by kissing their boyfriend as a guy and doing gay stuff?
Like, should you be able to kill this?
Like, yeah, I understand it.
Yeah, for sure.
It's a fun philosophical question.
I'm just glad you didn't have to kill the kid.
You should invite him on for the podcast.
It would be interesting to see how he thinks.
Maybe he's very grateful.
I guess all of the points that you raised are basically what I would have anticipated.
But the one which just seems surprising to me is that a simple step back to You know, what you said there, right, is all raising the different perspectives you can take and how there could be reasonable objections and there are issues,
you know, if you try to apply this rule and stuff.
But what you didn't say is like, yeah, and I, you know, I realized that I reacted.
Emotionally in that case.
I talked about the potential, you know, how we could go to the house of the kid and the father and that kind of thing.
But that was just blowing off steam, right?
And I'm...
I don't know.
I don't know if the role of the principal there should be.
Yeah, I don't have that feeling.
Fuck those guys.
Okay, listen, I don't know, man.
But yeah, fuck, yeah.
I mean, I do realize I was emotional at the time, for sure.
But yeah, even so, drawing out the principle, I'm not sure.
It's a rough one.
I'm very sympathetic towards arguments on the other side of that, yeah.
When we came across it, when we were looking at content, it was like, you know, people sent us messages saying, have you seen the content where Destiny justifies killing the kid?
And you're like, what?
And then there actually is, like, significant debates about it.
So it just, given all the other issues, it sometimes surprised me that you were willing to continue to, like, because that was talked about, like, a year ago.
I find this dream of you debating that, right?
And like you said, it's been, you know, 10 or 11 years.
And actually, now that this has come into my head, I wanted to remember to mention that.
I did have this...
Question for you.
And I guess it comes across as complimentary, but in another sense, it's not.
So you have, as we've established, a high tolerance for drama, a high tolerance for conflict.
And I like that, the willingness to debate with people and kind of argue your point of view, even when potentially socially uncomfortable.
But the other aspect is like...
You go hard sometimes in a way.
I'm thinking of antagonizing Islamists, which you did for a couple of months, right?
You had yourself as Minecraft Steve, like, attacking...
That's a good-ass tweet.
I know what you're talking about.
The Kaaba or whatever, yeah.
Yeah, but the thing is, from my perspective, right, people who antagonize Islamists in writing or online, that often becomes a big part of their life.
Then their security concerns for the rest of their life or in talks, they're constantly messaging about, you know, the concerns they have about dealing with Islamic extremists who, you know, like Salman Rushdie or whatever, obviously a higher profile.
In that respect, you do have enough Feuds, grievances, community.
You just recently had left this streamer potentially suggesting that it would be good if somebody were- There were like four of them that made kind of these suggestions, yeah.
All of them specifically not banned on Twitch and recommended by Hassan on a recent Wired interview, uncritically by, yeah.
Yeah, so they bleeped out that the direct incitement to kill you, but the if X to Y was very clear.
And so this is the best, I'm curious though, like, So you have, you're a person, right?
You appear in public.
You are bound to, as your profile increases and all that, have security concerns and whatnot.
But so are you not, like, why are you not concerned about the fact that Islamists do attack people for presenting the prophet in unflattering ways or that kind of thing?
Like, why add to your list of concerns by Deliberately antagonizing them.
And how is it that you can do that for a couple of months and then move on without it seeming to follow you along?
I just find that sort of surprising that you are able to move on from that kind of thing.
When you say able, you mean like because I'm personally able to or because those communities allow me to?
Well, both.
Because why are you not constantly having to...
Sort out security arrangements after antagonizing Islamist extremists online.
I live in the United States, so our Muslims here are super cool.
We don't have the same kind that kill people in Paris or whatever else.
So that's one thing, is that people in the US are generally a bit more chill.
But you're traveling.
I do, yeah.
Well, listen, I didn't go to any...
No, I'm just kidding.
I don't know.
Some of it might just be unwarranted arrogance because it hasn't happened yet.
Maybe there'll be an event where I'm like, holy shit, I need to be super careful.
But I mean, I try to be relatively safe in the areas that I go.
Like in some areas, I may or may not have security.
I mean, I don't want to get public too much.
So just to be clear, I'm not trying to say, like, detail your security.
No, yeah, I understand.
No, I mean, I do try to be somewhat mindful of things.
But I also think that...
Man, hold on.
I always try to think of clips that are going to be played after I get assassinated.
So this is going to be one that's going to be played after I get killed.
People online talk a lot of shit, and they make a lot out of nothing, where they'll try to, like, people will go online and victimize themselves, like, oh, I got all these threats, and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, bro, people will say dumb shit online all the fucking time.
These people are going to fucking kill you.
Like, I've met people in real life that'll come to me and be like, oh, shit, Destiny?
And I'll be like, oh, are you about to stab me?
They're like, no, I told you I wanted to kill you on fucking Twitter.
Like, I posted that picture of you, like, getting beheaded, but like, bro, what's up?
And then, like, talking to me, it's like, yeah.
So it feels like people, I don't know if it's, like, the age group, or if it's, like, the circles that I'm in In real life, everybody's been fairly chill so far.
I don't know if that's a result of my demeanor and my penetration to some spaces and the credibility that I've bought by participating in these spaces.
I don't know if it's because I just haven't ran into the right person yet.
I don't know if it's because I don't make these criticisms central to who I am.
There's a lot of people I like, a lot of people I have problems with, and I very easily move from thing to thing.
I don't have to get stuck in the Sam Harris hole of hating Islam for the rest of my life or get stuck in the Jordan Peterson C16 hole or get stuck in the Brett Weinstein vaccine hole or get stuck in the...
It feels like I described these as brain break moments where somebody hates something so much that now something breaks and the rest of their life is on that one issue.
There are so many things in life that are interesting to talk about.
So yeah, I have no problem moving on to the next thing.
I got, I don't like,
I don't uniquely hate Muslims or uniquely hate Islam.
I just think it's really funny that there's a lot of red pill people that simp for it without having ever opened a Quran in their life.
I think it's really funny how triggered they get online.
Did you guys ever see anything about the Hindu stuff?
The Hindu...
I had a Muslim guy...
Yeah, I had a Muslim guy that challenged me because some Muslims would come online and they would challenge me.
They'd be like, well, you never shit on Jews.
You never shit on all these other people, blah, blah, blah.
You only do it on Muslims because it's safe.
And I'm like, well, no, I shit on other people, but it's harder to make them as mad because most of them don't give a fuck about their weird religious shit.
So, like, I don't know if this is a thing, but I've had a lot of Muslims tell me, like, well...
You know, Jewish rabbi, sometimes they bite the foreskin off the penis, you know, for children.
And it's like, okay.
So, like, I'll, like, try that as a joke.
I'll make fun of a, like, Jewish rabbi.
And they're like, yeah, that's weird.
I'm like, okay, well, this doesn't matter.
One of the funniest moments is I had a guy say, you don't understand how radical Hindus are online.
They say wild shit.
I've never heard that before, but fine, sure.
I found a picture of a crazy baby with seven arms or whatever, and then I tweeted out.
I was like, Hindus see this new child and think it's their god or some shit.
I thought it was an AI-generated image.
The number one most liked comment was a Hindu guy that responded, and his response was, I felt so bad.
His response was, I understand if you're American or something and you have issues with our religion, but it's really not okay to throw a poor child under the bus when you're making fun of us.
And that was like the most unblooded feeling.
Oh, God.
I didn't even know it was a real picture.
And I felt horrible.
And I was like, okay, well, that's their response.
And then meanwhile, I've got like 32 new death comments from like Muslims today because they were mad that I, you know, brought up my e-share or such.
I just thought it was funny.
I've heard Hindu nationalists can go pretty hard if you get their attention.
So maybe that, but in that case, that does sound like a moment.
It's also funny as a quick thing.
It's funny because like all of these red pill guys say that they're so brave and they blah blah blah and it's like okay well like go fight with Muslims online.
It's funny that you guys are so brave but you happen to fall into literally the most trendy popular religion right now.
Like isn't that convenient?
Yeah I guess probably one kind of argument that people would raise is you don't have the single issue but you do have Hassan.
Yeah, in terms of, you know, like a figure of enduring here.
But it's mutual.
It's obviously...
Yeah, listen, would you watch Batman if he didn't have the Joker?
Everybody needs their reoccurring antagonist, right?
So that's our center narrative building going on there.
Yeah, I can see that happening.
And there was one other thing that I wanted to mention.
So one of the criticisms that you get most frequently relates to, you know, reading Wikipedia or just...
Reading headlines or whatever.
Well, you don't really get to reading headlines.
It's mainly the Wikipedia thing, right?
Other people get to reading the headlines thing.
And I am aware from Consuming Your Content and from the research that we did that that is unfair in terms of the research you do.
But I think it is fair, and you've acknowledged this whenever you were talking about chastising academics for the bad job they often do in the topics you're interested in, that...
There is an aspect where you have to cram in a whole bunch of material and you're, in a sense, taking in a big range of material and learning it.
But your engagement will be more, obviously, more superficial than somebody whose whole career has been on a topic.
Now, it may be that the people whose whole career on that topic have become so ideological that they are also...
Very superficial in their arguments.
But just in principle, it is the case that your engagement will be more superficial.
And in that respect, is there an issue?
We have this concept that we talk about with discourse surfing.
When it came to the lab leak, for example, and I've heard you talk about this as well, that a lot of the punditry around it was like ping-ponging between Headlines, right?
This intelligence agency says today that this is more likely.
And then you would get a round of coverage with Nate Silver and various people changing their position.
And then you would get a critical article and you would have the vice versa.
And you had people talking about, you were never allowed to even discuss the lab leak in polite conversation when it was the endless conversation I endured for months and months on Twitter and all social media.
But in that respect...
As I've heard you've described, you're kind of, you know, roughly from consuming the discourse about 60-40 in fever of a natural origin being likely.
I know you haven't said this is a specialist subject, but Matt and I have spent some time in this and we did like a three and a half hour episode with a bunch of experts on it and I've spent time with it.
And we would say the scientific literature has not been ping-ponging like that and has been just very consistently Building up a consensus, which is now pretty strong for a natural origin, such that when they did a survey recently,
it was something like 85% of relevant virologists that, you know...
Oh, interesting.
I was familiar with the two...
I think there were two big papers that were published initially, maybe both in Nature, that looked at this, I think, months within the origin of the virus.
I wasn't aware of any other huge papers that had come out.
When I say 60-40, I might actually be hedging too much.
A lot of it comes from the fact that I think either one or some of our intelligence agencies switched their position on it.
And I'm like, okay, well, maybe there's something that I don't have access to.
But this is a good, that's a perfect illustration because there are two papers that a lot of people reference.
One is the Proximal Origins one.
And then the other one tends to be a letter that was written, I think, in The Lancet.
But in any case, like...
Arguing against demonizing Chinese colleagues, right?
It wasn't a research paper, but this is what's cited.
But there actually is a huge, really robust literature on the topic.
There's now probably hundreds of papers on the topic, but there's a whole bunch of evidential lines that are pointing in the same direction.
And for Matt and me, because we are academics and kind of interested in science-y topics and that kind of thing, following the research literature was not So difficult.
It's not our area of expertise, but we just understand about, you know, following the science literature on that topic.
But we saw the discourse all around it.
And I think the discourse still is, like, very much focused in a kind of 60, 40, 50, 50 range.
So my question isn't specifically that example.
That's just an illustration.
But how to avoid that occurring, you know, like in any...
Is it the case that basically you have to do a deep dive on it in every instance?
Or is there some way you can counteract the issue about the discourse being dominating?
Because when you talk to Jordan Peterson, you could see that the discourse had poisoned his mind about the climate change.
But you correctly summarized the literature because you had prepared it.
So that's the kind of thing I'm talking about, like how to...
It might only be for scientific issues.
I don't know if I have a great question there, but hopefully...
No, I understand.
One of the...
So there are a couple of things I think I'm uniquely suited to do.
One of these is...
I think...
Oh, no.
Actually, I wouldn't say I'm unique.
This is a practice thing.
I try to hedge an appropriate level of conviction around things that I talk about.
So even when we're talking here about the lab leak stuff, if somebody asks me that, I'm going to give you an appropriate...
Hopefully, like, percentage of my thoughts.
But I'm going to give you, like, a level of conviction on how much we're reading about it.
So somebody asked me about Lab Lake.
I think my response is usually basically what I just said here.
I'm, like, 60-40.
I think I came for the wet markers.
I think there were two papers on it, but I haven't, like, done, like, any deep dives into it.
And that's it.
Hopefully, when you hear me say that, hopefully people don't come away like, Destiny knows that it came from the wet markets.
You're fucking lying!
Or Destiny says it, blah, blah, blah.
Because I haven't done the reading into it.
I know that people expect you to have a really strong opinion on everything, but I can't.
I can't do that much reading.
So I try to have an appropriate level of conviction based on how much research I felt I've done is the first thing.
The second thing is that because I'm a content creator and I get paid absurd amounts of money to do content, I think that you have at least a minimum level of obligation to actually fucking read more than fucking Twitter headlines about the particular things that you talk about.
I don't know if I'm just gifted with my natural 180 IQ massive fucking brain, but it feels like if you're just willing to sit down and read through some pretty basic stuff, you can get a huge understanding on a lot of topics, at least very broadly, enough so that you can go through literature on things.
When people think of...
You guys said you're academics.
What are your academic backgrounds?
He's an anthropologist.
I'm a psychologist.
Hey!
Anthropologist, psychologist.
Oh, he's a cockpit.
Yeah, I'm a cognitive anthropologist and I teach in a psychology department.
These are important distinctions.
So you're like PhD, like defended theses, published, or like going through a lot of research or other kind of stuff?
It's very importantly, I'm a full professor.
He's an associate professor.
That is very important.
Okay, gotcha.
Okay.
Okay, cool.
Okay, that's great.
So you can call me out if I say this because I've said this a lot and I feel this pretty strongly but maybe I'm fucking full of shit, okay?
I think that the layman's impression...
Oh, also, fuck both of you, okay?
Because I think academics have fucked up a lot when it comes to public communication.
So now retards like me have to go online and try to argue these fucking...
What does antibody-dependent enhancement mean and why doesn't the vaccine...
Like, Jesus Christ, well, let me go over this new...
Not us.
This is not going to work.
We're part of the solution.
We will throw our colleagues...
I feel like I did an undergrad-level course on fucking immunology just having to keep up because every fucking day was a new conspiracy theory.
And it's like, okay, well, what does ADE mean?
Or, like, what is a...
What is the difference between an mRNA vaccine and an attenuated virus vaccine?
And none of the academics want to come out and say anything, so people like me have to give arguments against fucking Robert Malone or whatever.
We had to do it too.
Yeah, Jesus Christ.
But what I was going to say is, I feel like academic papers, it feels like when somebody says, oh, what do you think about minimum wage or vaccines?
And the thought is like, oh my god, well, what does the literature say?
And when people say the literature, I think layman's think, and I used to think this, there must be like thousands of papers published about all this stuff.
But I think the reality is, is that when you develop like a fluidity in certain academic disciplines, there's usually going to be a few really well-known authors that have published like really landmark papers.
And as long as you're like aware of some of the larger papers that have been published, or maybe some of the more respected, like large, like meta-analyses.
Or reviews that have come out by, like, these respected people, you can, like, pretty quickly, like, quicker than you would imagine, can develop, like, a handle on, like, okay, well, like, where's the general feeling on this, you know?
Like, if I'm looking at, like, minimum wage, I know that at some point people are going to reference people like Card or Borjas.
I know that if I'm doing, like, fucking Evo Psych, that fucking David Buss or whatever is going to come up.
I know that, like, they're, like, well-known names you see.
Again, and I say this so much, when people ask me, like, how do you stand for it?
Just, like, sit down and read.
There's no shortcut.
It's like asking, like, how do you get ripped?
There is no shortcut.
You just sit down and just read some shit.
If you're willing to, like, download a paper, and all you have to do is really read, like...
The abstract and the conclusion.
And you can skim through the methodology.
And as long as you're not doing fucking econ, you'll be able to understand most of it, right?
Maybe not some of the harder, like, statistics stuff.
You can get, like, a lot of information by reading a paper, which is one of the things I like to show on stream.
I'm just like, well, let's just read this paper.
Like, we can understand most of it.
It's not that difficult.
Yeah, you can develop, like, this kind of, like, working knowledge in the field.
So I have the issue of, like, my knowledge level is going to be surfacy, but, like, I can read and I've got, like, decent, like, comprehensive skills.
And I have a huge advantage in that I've got a huge audience of experts that I could theoretically pull from or people that I can reach out to and talk to.
And that's how I develop kind of like a working knowledge in a particular thing.
One of the reasons why I get so mad when people fight with me so much on stuff is, like, listen, you're so upset about, like, my takes about economics or philosophy or psychology or whatever the fuck.
Like, more often than that, I'm just appealing to whatever my understanding is of the current, like, literature consensus.
So, like, you're really mad at me, but I'm just, like, saying, like, this is what the FDA has, like, pushed on their website.
This is what Nature, Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine has published.
Like, fuck, like, if you don't like what I'm saying, like, I'm sorry, but, like, this is where it is right now.
Counter me with another paper, right?
And it can't be, like, a, you know, a retrospective sample size, you know, N equals four paper on why ivermectin is going to cure fucking the coronavirus.
Yeah, that's generally what I say.
As long as you're willing to read and be epistemically humble about the limits of your knowledge, I think you can do more than 99% of people, is my feeling.
There's some points I want to say, Matt.
You might have something you want to say as well.
I've seen you engage with academics and everyone in academia knows that there is the capability for academics to just reference citations and all the things they've read and use it in a kind of...
Mm-hmm.
reference a study that they know the other person hasn't know any of the details about.
And it's just purely like it's a kind of authority appeal.
And academics are just as prone to doing that bullshit, if not more so than, you know, people online.
And also just to say, I completely sign off on the point about just read like,
Literally, reading a paper puts you above 99% of people, even if you don't understand the statistics and stuff, if you just read it.
That is often a lot more than people will do.
So definitely do that.
But the one caveat that I think is important is you can learn a whole bunch of basic principles, like studies with bigger sizes, studies with controls are better, and so on and so forth.
But there are sometimes technical Issues in studies and in literature which make it hard for somebody with a layperson's understanding of a topic to properly grasp it.
And it means that somebody who is proficient in a topic, like say they know statistics well, they can absolutely present it as if the statistics completely undermine the safety of vaccines.
And you know that's bullshit.
But they're able to, you know, reference statistics and studies in a way that a normal person can't counter.
I'm acutely aware of this because of the guru space, that there's a whole bunch of them that will make these big long threads where they're referencing studies and they're showing graphs and they're kind of talking about ivermectin or this thing.
And it looks like science, right?
It looks like a critical evaluation.
And I think for a lot of people, the advice of...
You go to the literature and just check it, is potentially deceiving because if you lack some basic grounding, it can lend you the wrong way.
So that's the only caveat.
I still think it's important that people read.
I still think relying on headlines or science reporting is not the way to go.
But there is an issue about exactly what you said about epistemic humility.
Matt and I are not experts in genetics.
So when we look at the lab, Blake, We can see the general contours of the literature, but we cannot assess the quality of the genomic analysis because we've never done that.
We might be able to follow it, but we have to rely on building up an expert network that we can trust.
For sure.
Yeah, that was just things that were ping-ponging.
Yeah, I think on that, there's a couple things I'd say.
So first is...
If you're in that level of, like, political discourse, you're already really, like, into the weeds.
In that, like, I don't think...
It would be nice, actually, if this was the case.
I wish that more people would argue with bullshit graphs and numbers than just the empty platitudes.
But I feel like 90% of political discourse is, like, the empty platitude bullshit that you see on, you know, on Joe Rogan or from...
I guess from the gurus or whatever.
Or, you know, like, it's not going to be...
Yeah, it's not going to be like, here's my GWAS on how I understand that this is that.
It's going to be Jordan Peterson saying, like, 20% of excess deaths are caused by the vaccine in Europe, right?
Yeah, it's going to be stuff like that.
The two things that I would say...
And now I have to rely on my strength of philosophy and intuition.
And I would say these are two heuristics that I use to try to keep me safe from those things when I see those pop up.
And I'm using a heuristic here because it's a substitution of expertise.
I can't be expertise in everything.
Here are two things that I try to warn people against.
You can tell me if you agree if these are good or bad.
The first thing is, is you should be very, very, very careful when a layman is eager to disagree with the conclusion of a study.
Using the figures from the study.
And the reason why is because if somebody has gone through the effort of deciding which variables to control for, of collecting the data, of writing up the entire paper and publishing it, that generally the process of doing that, the methodology and everything, is more difficult than just drawing the conclusion.
So if you're getting somebody who's a layman who's very eager to point to one or two figures in the study and disagree with the conclusion, it's interesting that that autodidactor, it's interesting that that layman was confident enough in the data collection and principles that the researcher used.
To cite their own stuff, but then completely disagree with the conclusion.
Now, I'm not saying it's always wrong, that that'll never be the case, but that's one thing.
If you get a guy who's, like, very eager to disagree with all the conclusions of these researchers, but he's very comfortable citing all of their figures and their methodologies and everything to arrive at right before the conclusion, that's a red flag.
Not necessarily about a red flag.
And then the second thing is, I always stress, like, effect size.
That if somebody were to come out with a study tomorrow, and they were to say, actually...
A new study was published, decent sample size, you know, 800 people, perspective, RCT, whatever the fuck, okay?
And this shows that if you take ivermectin, you actually have on average about like a 12 to 24 hour earlier recovery from COVID.
I would look at it and I'd go, it's been studied so much, it's like, but okay, well, maybe, whatever, right?
Because if all the literature so far shows that nothing is happening and a new study comes out that shows, well, maybe something is happening a little bit, the effect size is believable.
That this might have been something that an earlier study hasn't caught.
But if there's a whole bunch of literature about a particular thing and somebody comes out with a new study and they're like, "We just did a new groundbreaking study on ivermectin.
Holy shit!
It completely gets rid of COVID.
If you contract the virus, you don't even develop the disease."
Well, that's a huge effect size.
How did every other researcher miss this if it's such a well-studded thing?
That effect size, it doesn't make sense that it would have that dramatic of an impact and everybody else that studied this has missed it.
So those are, like, two, like, heuristics that I use to, like, see if somebody's engaging in some, like, wacky bullshit.
Like, well, why haven't you published any literature of your own?
Why are you relying on their, all other things, except for their conclusion?
And, like, how are you coming up with an answer that everybody else has missed so far, worldwide?
Like, that seems really suspicious to me.
Those are two heuristics I use, yeah.
I don't know if you have any other suggestions for some, or if you think those are dog shit, or...
Yeah, yeah.
No, I have...
Well, I think your heuristics are good, both the ones you listed then and the ones you said before, and I think you are...
You know, you are proof that a reasonably capable layperson who is willing to do some work can get their head around a big issue.
It could be climate change, it could be vaccines, ivermectin, you name it.
You know, it requires some effort, requires...
Not being like a conspiracy theorist, like hunting for the answer that you want.
So the motivations are important.
Your heuristics are good.
There's probably a bunch of other more detailed ones.
You're right about the red flags, about that selective, like someone who goes through...
Someone who does not work in that area but is going through a particular study and finding these little minuscule red flags.
We've seen conspiracy theorists do this all the time, so that is absolutely a red flag, selectively citing certain figures.
I've got a broader bit of advice for you, which is that the most efficient way, I find, in getting my head around the answer to a question from a literature from which I'm not an expert in, of which there are.
An infinite number of them.
Which is that you can go an awful long way by, like, don't be focused on reading the primary literature, like that is the empirical, each individual empirical study.
If it's a big enough topic, there will generally be...
Good review articles, good summary articles, good meta-analysis articles.
Pay a little bit of attention to who the names are, where they're coming from.
You can get the vibe about whether or not, because there's an awful lot of crap published, obviously.
So you just have that ability to sift through the number of citations, Google Scholar, things like that.
There's a bunch of easy ways to identify the quality stuff.
And you can read the, like you talked about reading the...
The abstract and the conclusion or whatever.
That's good.
That's fine.
And you can skim, essentially.
Don't try to provide an independent critique on the methodology.
Trust the discipline to do that.
But what you can do is get a good sense of what the consensus is by relatively high-level scans.
Yeah, that's what I would do.
And also, you can also get really good responses by just reading response papers.
It's funny that, like, if you dive into certain topics, you can read a paper in a response, and I'll be arguing with somebody who's like, there are really good responses to some of the things I'm saying, but you, like, don't even know them.
Or, this is, like, an obvious red flag.
It's a stupid thing.
But, like, somebody will say something like, oh, I remember this was when Nature published a massive, I don't know if you call it a study or, like, a database analysis or whatever the fuck, but it was the 100 million traffic stops.
Are you familiar with this?
It was 100 million traffic stops to look and see if police were racially profiling drivers based on what time of day they pulled people over.
And I think this had some complicated math in it.
But I read through this whole thing.
And it's always funny when somebody does a thing where they're like, well, what about this thing?
Do they even consider that?
And it'll be the most obvious fucking thing in the world.
And I'm like, no, you know, all the people that went into peer reviewing, publishing, choosing, nobody thought of that.
And I remember one of the big pushbacks that I got from that for a person I was debating.
They were like, well, maybe black people just tend to work more at night.
Like, what about that?
And it's like, wow, that's a really good point.
Like, what an obvious fucking thing to bring up.
But the study was interesting in that what they did was the period of time that they measured was between daylight savings time to look for discrepancies between arrests because that would shift an hour difference of time, which shouldn't affect somebody's work schedule, but it did shift the amount of light outside because the hypothesis of the paper was that you were less likely to get racially profiled at night when you couldn't make differences between the races of the drivers or whatever.
So that was funny because it's such an obvious exception.
Like, what about this?
And I was like, okay, well, I I glimpse the methodology and obviously they take that into account.
More often than not, they will.
If you've ever, I call these like level one objections where you'll say something and people will be like, well, what about this thing?
And it's like, yeah, you don't think the person fucking thought about this?
Like, Jesus, yeah.
There's like a journal, for example, called Behavioral and Brilliant Sciences where they have the target article and then they have about like 15 responses and then the authors respond.
So like reading that is kind of getting a crash course in all the different opinions that people have on a specific topic.
One of the things I wanted to say, which shows an overlap in the kind of points you're making, is that when you're talking about clipchamping, where people take the worst thing you've said or take something in isolation and then focus on that and don't look at the rest of the context.
And with that proximal origin paper you mentioned, that's a short paper.
It's like five pages long.
There is one paragraph and in particular one line.
And that's all.
That is in the discourse about it.
Now, if you read the whole paper, they are actually encouraging people that like There could be more evidence that comes out that points more to a lab leak.
But this one sentence in line is used to present that they completely closed off the possibility.
And I'm always like, that paper is like five pages long.
If you read it, what you just exactly said, that it's clear that's not what they're arguing, that nobody can look at this topic anymore.
But you will see people reference that paper, but they'll only ever reference that one.
Paragraph.
And we spoke, you know, the authors on the podcast.
But when people look at, like, their Slack messages, it's very similar to the ClimateGate where they are talking like normal people, revising their opinions, sometimes saying, well, maybe this would be more likely or whatever.
But it's always one sentence taken out where it sounds nefarious.
And then, you know, like, but when you take it in totality, they're just drafting the paper.
Together.
And they put what they think in the paper.
So, like, I think you would have a lot of sympathy with those people that they put in a paper what they think.
And people are constantly saying, that's not what you actually think.
And they're like, we wrote it down.
Yeah.
That's also, that should, that's a, I almost said that.
There's a horrible, horrible, horrible, the worst words ever uttered, okay?
Common sense, okay?
But, like, this is a thing where somebody will bring to me a thing.
This was really common for the October 7th attacks.
Blumenthal and the Grey Zone started citing this.
Well, actually, a lot of civilians, the majority of civilians, were killed.
And the sourcing for this was a Haaretz article.
And my immediate thing was like, okay, there are some things where if you tell me them, I guess this is similar to the effect size argument.
There's a thing where you tell me, okay, hold on.
I know this isn't true.
Because if it was true, I would have heard about it, okay?
It's like somebody coming up to you and offering you a penis enlargement pill.
There is no penis enlargement pill, because if it was true, it would be on every fucking corner in America.
It's called Viagra.
I know that there is no penis enlargement pill.
It's not true.
And when I dug through this Haratz article, so I don't read Hebrew, I know fucking Bloomin' fuck doesn't read Hebrew, and you click the translate button, if you go down like...
12 paragraphs.
There's like one sentence in here where it talks about how some of the IDF was fighting in some of these, I think one of these or a couple of these kibbutzes for a couple days before they managed to clear out all the terrorists.
And they talked about the difficult decision of firing on side of home, not knowing if a person was in it, right?
And the immediate...
Common sense.
The immediate, like, can you parse media intelligently?
It's like, hold on.
You're citing this one sentence here to make this claim.
Don't you think that if the purpose of that sentence was to illustrate the majority of civilians were killed by the idea?
Wouldn't that be, like, the fucking headline?
Why would you bury the lead like that on a story?
Similar to your paper, where it's like, hold on.
They're making this extreme statement, closing off all of your stuff, and it's hidden on page four in, like, sentence seven of this paragraph.
Like, don't you think that would be, like, the opening or the conclusion if it was that big of a deal?
Like, why is not...
There's nobody else talking about this.
Like, bullshit.
Yeah, that should be one of those things where you immediately, like, mindcorrect, you're like, wait, hold on.
If this was the case, I feel like the world would look a lot different in terms of the presentation of this.
Yeah.
I think also the parallel that you're talking about is that there are plenty of articles that make And when you have a bit of media literacy, you can even see an article comes from a reasonable source.
It doesn't mean the conclusion or the evidence that they provide is correct.
And in the same way with journals, there are good journals, there are journals that are famous, and there are articles in them that are dog shit.
And you have to be able to assess the quality of research, but that's not so easy.
In the same way that assessing the quality of journalism, it's not one individual thing.
If you know that a journalist is very biased towards a certain conclusion, and they're citing sources, like for me, whenever people cite the gray zone, it's almost immediately a red flag that they lack at least a healthy degree of skepticism about the ideological bias that places can have.
So, yeah, there's like parallel things, I think, in academia that apply.
I mean, The Lancet was the journal that published the original Vaccines Cause Autism.
Andrew Whitefield.
Yeah.
That people's poor...
Oh my god.
These are some of my most trying times.
When I'm arguing with somebody over what's a good source or not, again, this is like a level zero conversation.
When I'm talking to somebody and I'm like, okay, well, okay, so you don't believe this?
Okay, well, let's go through this.
And I'll throw them an article and they'll be like, really?
CNN?
Fox News.
Like, no, you fucking moron.
They're quoting somebody from the government.
I'm just giving you the articles so you can see the quote.
Now, unless you think the article is misquoting the person or publishing the wrong quote, the source is not fucking CNN.
The source is the prime minister.
The source is the president.
The source is this.
We can find 20 different articles that source the same quote, or we can find a statement from the government itself.
But people will look at something like, oh, your source is...
Twitter?
No, Twitter doesn't publish news.
What do you mean?
Are your sources like...
It's like, no.
Oh, yeah.
People's lack of media literacy and just even understanding what a source is or what they're reading is incredibly frustrating.
Yeah.
Or I'll argue, I don't know, quickly, I'll argue, like, somebody will say, like, oh, I've got six studies, and they'll link me six different news articles that all link to the exact same stuff.
I'm like, oh, my God.
That also happens in academia, where they're, like, you know, shit, that, and equals shit.
I mean, there are layers of bullshit in academia, unfortunately.
I mean, you know, you were dissing them before, but you'd be missing the point, because we would throw them all under the bus, quick as look at you.
But, you know, and, like, you know, Some disciplines are better than others, right?
Don't trust psychology as much as you trust virology, right?
There's just natural distinctions there.
I mean, some areas of psychology are good, like my area is great, but take positive psychology, it's full of bullshit.
And so, yeah, you can't just count citations and you can't just, you know, there aren't simple heuristics, there is a vibe that comes from having that view.
Working knowledge in the field, yeah.
But look, Stephen, we've kept you over a lot of time.
But there was one very last thing that we have to address.
And we got a lot of feedback, a lot of your problematic stances and stuff and things that we need to bring up and need to address for you.
But this one, I think, is possibly the most important.
And it's your terrible, terrible takes on food.
As someone living in Japan, I just have to say that, yeah, I've seen some of your takes, and you need help.
The rest of it, you know...
Give me one you disagree with.
Give me one.
You don't eat things from the sea.
Oh, my God.
Listen, we crawled out of the sea to get away from that world, okay?
Why do you need to eat bugs?
We have cows, okay?
How many people can you feed with a crab?
Alright, what's a good...
I haven't heard any of these bad food tweets or opinions.
What's a good food then, Destiny?
What's a good food?
Steak.
That is a good food.
That's as easy as...
Most of my food takes are reasonable.
I just, like, I hyperbolize it a bit and it triggers the fuck out of people.
Like, I personally...
Like, I'll eat Mediterranean food, but I think it's actually kind of boring.
And I think it's funny when people, like, overhype things like hummus.
And it's like, it's...
Hummus is okay.
But I'm never, like...
Super excited for hummus.
Or like guacamole.
I'm never like, oh my god.
I'm in danger of agreeing with those two takes.
Yeah, because my takes are pretty reasonable.
Yeah, they are.
I will say, in defense of, because I have gone to now a lot of nice seafood places, whatever, I can eat seafood.
I can tolerate it, okay?
In defense of my anti-seafood take, I was born and raised and lived in Nebraska for 30 years.
Oh, no, no.
If you've ever had seafood that has, like, a fishy taste, the association is immediately fucking horrible.
And, yeah, I can't eat seafood, and I just wouldn't choose to do so because I just have such a negative association with it, but yeah.
This makes sense.
I thought you were pulling the political ID card because I'm from Belfast, which the food culture in Belfast is, you know, people talk about food deserts, but that is an entire country that is desertified.
But I was forced by university and encounters with other people to expand my repertoire.
So if I can do it, Stephen, anyone can.
But yeah, that's all right.
We'll let it slide.
Thank you, Destiny, for coming on and exercising your right to reply.
You didn't, unfortunately, dispute much in our take, but we have a good chat.
Anyway.
I think the final takeaway from everything is that like in terms of like just too much like I think that there are good criticism you can make of me like there are like there must be because I can look at anything I've done five years ago people are like oh why don't you write a book or get blah blah and it's like because I end up changing my mind on a lot of things so they are good things to disagree with me over and they're good arguments to be made against things I've said and I've changed my mind on things that I realize like oh this is a bad opinion I just I wish that the criticisms of me would be a little bit more on like what I'm actually like thinking or saying rather than like this unhinged straw man version of me where it's like destiny why don't you just not be pro genocide and
it's like okay well yeah thanks yeah that's it yeah I I do like that One of the presentations of you from the various orbiting community is that you're mysterious and that your positions are unclear and your motivations are unclear.
It's just impressive because it's like people have devoted a large amount of time to try and understand a particular person and have not grasped the most.
Obvious answer.
So, yeah, that's an interesting dynamic that you are a man of mystery for certain people online.
But keep it up!
We don't endorse all your takes.
We've tried to explain this to people.
We don't endorse child murder.
And when you become an anti-vax, child murdering, you know, genocide supporter, that is not signed off from us.
But we will say that we did enjoy...
Listening to your content a lot more than we did to many of the other people we've covered.
