July 14, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
02:01:32
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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No promises. | |
| Bye. | ||
| All right, people, we are live on the YouTube and the Facebook, and joining me today is a sex educator, a YouTuber, and apparently a very controversial person. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| Laci Green, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to this because you are just a bedlam of controversy these days. | ||
| Oh, no, I didn't mean to! | ||
| It's the nature of the work. | ||
| Often people don't mean to. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's true. | |
| And somehow they get thrown into it. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| But even when I, you know, you had an interesting evolution, which we're going to talk about. | ||
| But just any time I see anything now of yours on Twitter, there's like all this love, all this hate, all this confusion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're going to talk about all that. | ||
| Okay, I'm ready for therapy, Dave. | ||
| I really need it right now. | ||
| It's been a rough few months. | ||
| I just need to unpack all this shit. | ||
| And for the record, you did say to me before we started that nothing is off the record. | ||
| We're just gonna talk it out. | ||
| Alright, so for the people who have no idea who you are, for the non-sort-of-YouTube crowd, who the hell is Laci Green and how did you get here into that chair? | ||
| Yeah, uh, well I'm a sex educator, so, you know, the basic story is I grew up Mormon. | ||
| My family is... was, it's less so now, but was very religious. | ||
| And I grew up in a very religious, insulated community, and as a teenager I had a lot of problems around sexuality stuff, with sexual identity stuff, and safer sex, not getting pregnant, you know, making good decisions, trying to be... I was trying to be safe and healthy, and there were no adults in my life that I could ask about this stuff, and I carried around a lot of sexual shame and guilt. | ||
| About who I am. | ||
| And so, you know, this was around the time that YouTube started becoming a thing. | ||
| 2005, 2006. | ||
| So in 2007 I hopped on YouTube and just sort of started ranting to my camera about Mormonism and about, you know, how messed up I think it is. | ||
| And that sort of grew a following and that evolved when I went to Berkeley to get my degree. | ||
| I started focusing more on Helping teenagers like myself who are in these really insulated environments, had no one else to go to, who are hopping online trying to find people and information, you know, to deliver that information to them, to be a friend to them, and build a community around that. | ||
| That was sort of this retreat from these very, you know, oppressive religious environments. | ||
| In retrospect, does that seem like a crazy time for you that you had all these feelings and it's one thing to have those feelings and share it with your friend or share it with, you know, a therapist or whatever it is, but you jumped on YouTube of all places at the nascent time of YouTube. | ||
| It is sort of serendipitous, I suppose. | ||
| It was kind of a, it was a crazy time in my life, but it was also when I look back on it, it's like, wow, that was really cool. | ||
| You know, I just sort of was using what was available to me, and I really like what I've built. | ||
| You know, I've been able to build a library of over 300 videos that explore all kinds of facets of sexuality, and met young adults all over the world, and really have this amazing experience connecting with other people, and in doing so, really healing from a lot of the stuff that had hurt me. | ||
| when I was younger. | ||
| So I spent a good couple hours over the last week catching up on a lot of your stuff from the early stuff to the stuff just from the last week or so. | ||
| How'd that go? | ||
| There's an interesting, it's sort of like a rollercoaster, but there's something, your comfort level when talking about the sex stuff. | ||
| Because even though I think because of the internet people are much better about talking about this stuff in general, there's still a lot of awkwardness talking about sex stuff. | ||
| I think I can't be. | ||
| And you talk about, you know, just everything from butt sex to... give me something else. | ||
| Vaginas, lots of vaginas, STDs, chlamydia, herpes, I mean all the things that come up for people in their lives privately. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you started doing these videos, how long was it before your family found out what you were doing? | ||
| It's weird, we've had very few actual conversations about it to this day. | ||
| They knew I was making videos. | ||
| They knew something was happening because back when YouTube did spotlighted creators, | ||
| one of my videos was spotlighted. | ||
| Do you happen to remember which one it was? | ||
| Oh, God, I'm embarrassed that I can't remember this because it's such a critical juncture for me | ||
| in my YouTube journey. It's the good old days. | ||
| It's the good old days, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but I want to say it was about when people would say, no homo. | ||
| It was like a silly little rant about, no homo! | ||
| You know how silly it was that people had to say they were not gay in talking about any sexuality stuff. | ||
| Anyways, YouTube featured this thing and it blew up and it got over a million views and that was the first time I actually started making some money on YouTube. | ||
| I was 18, I was taking out loans for college and I was like, I can pay for college! | ||
| I can pay for this year of college with this video! | ||
| And that was a pretty big deal. | ||
| That's when my parents were like... | ||
| Wait, literally you could pay for a year of college with one video? | ||
| Am I allowed to say how much I made? | ||
| Is there like a rule again? | ||
| Well, whatever. | ||
| I don't have a rule. | ||
| It was community college, so it wasn't that expensive. | ||
| But even so, that's incredible. | ||
| Yeah, I was really excited because I was working two jobs. | ||
| I was babysitting and nannying and I was working as a waitress and, you know, this was a really exciting thing for me to just have my creative thing. | ||
| I, you know, vomited all over the internet to help me get through school. | ||
| And, you know, YouTube did help me get through school. | ||
| It helped me pay for Berkeley. | ||
| It helped me pay for all my education and accreditation stuff. | ||
| What were you studying at the time? | ||
| Well, when I was in community college, I was trying to figure out what to study. | ||
| I was originally on track to study chemistry, and when I got into Berkeley, I was into their chemistry program. | ||
| But then I switched gears a little bit and went more toward the law, because I wanted to work with sexual assault survivors. | ||
| Yeah, so then, okay, then the channel starts taking off. | ||
| Yes, the channel starts taking off. | ||
| How quickly did you realize, like, oh, this is gonna be my life? | ||
| Uh, I still haven't really realized that. | ||
| I don't know, I'm just doing this. | ||
| It doesn't feel like a thing that I set out to do. | ||
| It's just like a thing that I'm doing. | ||
| It's what I believe in, it's what I want to talk about, it's what I care about. | ||
| That's the bottom line for me. | ||
| Yeah, so we're gonna talk about some of the controversies and some of the stuff that's happened in the last couple months, but do you, oh yeah, we're gonna talk about it. | ||
| But do you remember the first time that you got sort of pushback against one of your videos? | ||
| Like the first time you realized that the mob was out there? | ||
| Oh yeah, from the very beginning. | ||
| Because I was talking about religion, and you know, this is sort of my journey from Mormonism to atheism in the beginning, and I was, Really angry about religion. | ||
| I was very unapologetic. | ||
| I said some kind of problematic stuff, you know? | ||
| I stand by it, though. | ||
| You know, I stand by how I feel about it. | ||
| And if people get offended, that's fine. | ||
| But, you know, that's how I feel. | ||
| And, um, yeah. | ||
| I got pushback from the religious community first. | ||
| And always. | ||
| Because the sex ed stuff isn't exactly... | ||
| You know, friendly to a lot of religious stuff. | ||
| And then I started getting pushed back when I started talking about the intersection of sex and being a woman and sort of my experience being a bisexual woman and like the ways that I have experienced sexuality. | ||
| And that sort of led me to the feminist stuff. | ||
| And that was a much bigger backlash, I would say, against the feminist stuff. | ||
| Right, so that's sort of where I became aware of you. | ||
| You were kind of in it with the feminist stuff that sort of then got looped into a lot of the stuff that I talk about about the modern left. | ||
| Yes, it became more political in a sense, talking about the feminist stuff. | ||
| And I had no idea I was wading into that. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask you. | ||
| Did you have any sense that it was becoming, that even though you were just talking about sort of a sliver of this through feminism, that it really did represent this whole other political thing? | ||
| I mean, I was talking about, like, being empowered in the bedroom. | ||
| You know, like, feeling okay, if you're a woman and you want to have sex or whatever, the key is that it needs to be safe and consensual. | ||
| Slut-shaming is bullshit. | ||
| You know, you shouldn't be telling women who they can sleep with, how many people, whatever. | ||
| You know, the bottom line for me in helping young women It's helping them understand that their body belongs to them and no one else. | ||
| And then there's the government, and there's all these people, their peers, you know, there's their parents, there's religion, there's all these people, these forces, telling everyone. | ||
| But for me, as a young woman, you know, that lens was how I experienced it, telling me how to experience sexuality. | ||
| And I was like, no! | ||
|
unidentified
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Uh-uh. | |
| Like, that's not how I see it. | ||
| That's not empowering. | ||
| You know, you're basically trying to control my body and control what I do and how I feel. | ||
| When it has nothing to do with anybody, you know? | ||
| And that's where my feminism started. | ||
| Where do you think that comes from within you? | ||
| Because when I watched the old videos, even to the new ones, even though you've had an evolution, you always struck me in all these videos as you know what you think. | ||
| So even if that line of thinking has changed, you just always struck me as confident, this is what I think, this is who I am. | ||
| And even in the early, it didn't strike me as particularly judgmental either, which is what I think a lot of the people who now fight against feminists think they're all so judgmental. | ||
| But your early stuff didn't hugely strike me that way. | ||
| No, it was never meant to be judgmental. | ||
| And you know, if anything that I've said has come off judgmental, it's because I feel like I've been judged. | ||
| You know, it's sort of this, like, retaliatory thing. | ||
| You've been judged? | ||
| Are you kidding me? | ||
| Really? | ||
| I know, it's a shocker. | ||
| There's a lot of judgment that happens when you're someone who talks openly about sexuality. | ||
| stuff and it talks openly about religion or anything that's sort of controversial and | ||
| taboo and I was tired of being told not to talk about it. | ||
| So you know when I look at my older videos the tone of some of it is like the tone of | ||
| an angry young person and I think a lot of people have a right to be angry about some | ||
| of this stuff so it is what it is. | ||
| I don't want to go too far into the Mormon thing, but I do want to do it a little bit because one of the things that I find interesting, and I've had several Mormons on the show including Glenn Beck, one thing I find interesting about Mormonism is it's the one that you're always allowed to make fun of. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| It's one thing for you as a Mormon to do it, right? | ||
| Because everyone's allowed to make fun of their own religion, so Jews obviously make fun of Judaism, Christians can make fun of Christianity, etc, etc. | ||
| But it seems like Mormonism everyone's allowed to, and not only is everyone allowed to, it's celebrated. | ||
| So the Book of Mormon is the biggest hit on Broadway. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| When I'm pretty sure there's, you know, possibly other books that if they were to do a thing about on Broadway it wouldn't be taken so well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So to me, that almost shows a strength in Mormonism, that the Mormon community has sort of allowed that. | ||
| Do you think maybe I'm misinterpreting that a little bit? | ||
| A strength in that they're like, oh, we'll let people make fun of us? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I think there is something interesting about Mormonism in that, you know, it's not a proselytizing religion, even though that's kind of their reputation. | ||
| Their whole thing, at least how they talk about it is. | ||
| That's interesting, because I thought it was. | ||
| I mean, in New York City, I used to see those guys with the Latter Day Saint thing on all the time, walking down the street, talking to people. | ||
| It is. | ||
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unidentified
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It is. | |
| They have the missionaries, but their whole thing is you let people have their faith, right? | ||
| And so we believe we have the one true faith, but if other people don't see that or believe that theirs is the one true faith or whatever, the idea is you don't impose it on other people. | ||
| And so maybe that's where that comes from, but I also think it's acceptable to make fun of it just because it's like such a new religion, you know, so it's not had all this old history and Mormons are still trying to establish their place in the Yeah, so when you started doing these videos and your family's Mormon and I got what you said, they sort of weren't aware. | ||
| Has there ever been any full pushback? | ||
| Has anyone ever called you and been like, that's the one that's too far? | ||
| About my videos? | ||
| I don't think they actually watch the videos. | ||
| And they know, I think they know if they gave me shit that I wouldn't care. | ||
| It would just cause problems. | ||
| It's not gonna stop me. | ||
| So that's part of why we haven't really talked about it at all. | ||
| I'm not sure if any of my family's seen any of my videos. | ||
| My mom told me a couple years ago that she watched one. | ||
| And that's all I remember of that. | ||
| Yeah, without going too deep into the psychology, like where does that kind of put your relationship with your family? | ||
| Because you're doing something that's so personal to you. | ||
| Yeah, it's put a little strain on things. | ||
| Yeah, I would say. | ||
| But we have, I mean, I've been doing it for 10 years now. | ||
| So there's been an evolution there. | ||
| And I, you know, I've grown up and I've, you know, grown into this a little bit more of a like, I don't really care what anyone else does or thinks, including my own parents. | ||
| You know, I used to be mad at them. | ||
| I'm not really mad at them anymore, and I think that makes it easier to have a relationship, and we connect over things that aren't religion, because, you know, I'm an adult now, so we have a more adult-parent relationship, which I think is easier than the kid-parent relationship sometimes. | ||
| Yeah, and that's sort of how things are supposed to evolve, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly, and that's how it did, and that's, you know, things are fine and great now, but there's a little bit of, you know, some pain in the past. | ||
| Yeah, so all right, so about four months ago or so, four months ago, you started dropping hints | ||
| that there was maybe gonna be a little change in the type of things you were talking about | ||
| or that you were having your own evolution. | ||
| Or I heard grumblings of it from people that we know, although this is the first time we've met in person, | ||
| but we know a lot of the same people. | ||
| And I heard some rumors that maybe Lacey's coming around on some of this stuff that you're always talking about, | ||
| Dave, and all that. | ||
| So tell me sort of what was the moment where you started realizing that some of the things | ||
| that you thought were not what you thought anymore? | ||
| So I think this is a common misconception about this whole situation, | ||
| is that I didn't think these things before. | ||
| I did. | ||
| I thought all these things before. | ||
| All of the things that I have said and will continue to say that are going to piss some people off are things that have always been in my brain. | ||
| And if you look at my old videos, this is what I was saying in the first video I posted, if you look at my old videos where I'm talking about religion and stuff, It's always been there, right? | ||
| But what happened was being in this environment where I'm suddenly very, very hyper-aware of making sure that the first priority is the people in my audience, the first priority is making sure that they have a support, you know, support and information about sexuality stuff and that it's empowering, I sort of got I don't know, like, moved into this sphere of people who I am not necessarily politically aligned with. | ||
| Like, I am, but I'm also not. | ||
| You know, like, I don't adhere to this super, super lefty stuff, and I never have. | ||
| I am a liberal, but like, I don't know. | ||
| I feel like there was this... Oh, a liberal who doesn't fall into all that lefty stuff? | ||
| Well, that's the thing, right? | ||
| It's heresy, and I felt a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure from around the world, from people to sort of maintain this peace and calm and just sort of go along with it. | ||
| And I did as long as I could, you know, with the politics, with the gender politics stuff. | ||
| That's really what I got swept into, is by being like a sex-positive feminist. | ||
| Right, and I want to unpack a lot of that stuff, because I'm even watching what's going on on Twitter now with people that you've been debating or talking to, and there's so many of the words that go over people's heads, I think, and confuse people. | ||
| Oh my god, it's a mess. | ||
| It's such a mess. | ||
| I also think make a certain amount of people tune out, which is something I want to discuss with you also. | ||
| But alright, so even if you had had some of these feelings, you took some time off, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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I did. | |
| I took some time off because I was preparing to do my doctorate and figure out my grad degree, but also I was really depressed. | ||
| Like, really, really depressed. | ||
| And was that purely a function of realizing... | ||
| No, I've always dealt with depression really, really intensely. | ||
| And it's always made doing YouTube hard. | ||
| Because the YouTube stuff, it's a chaotic, crazy world, as you're familiar with. | ||
| And for someone who's really struggling with the basics of getting through the day, it's not necessarily something that they can handle. | ||
| And it certainly wasn't something that I could handle. | ||
| But I got treated. | ||
| Wow. | ||
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unidentified
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Really? | |
| Wow. | ||
| So that was through a psychiatrist? | ||
| and with a treatment that actually works. | ||
| I've been put on every antidepressant in the book. | ||
| And none of it helped. | ||
| In fact, a lot of it made me feel really suicidal. | ||
| And I finally found a doctor in LA that really looked into what was going on | ||
| and figured out what the problem was and fixed it, literally overnight. | ||
| And that was when I was like, okay, I feel ready to talk about this now. | ||
| I feel like I can handle it. | ||
| Wow, so that was through a psychiatrist. | ||
| So through something that you were prescribed. | ||
| Just an MD, just through a doctor. | ||
| but but through but it was a medication that you were prescribed | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't want to go too far into it because I'm sure nobody cares, but it isn't actually a medication. | ||
| I found out that I have a genetic mutation which causes my body to process folate differently. | ||
| And to produce prolate differently, I should say. | ||
| So it was about fixing, she basically looked at all the chemical cycles that make your brain be happy, and filled in the blanks of the things that I was missing to make those chemical reactions happen. | ||
| So now I take a handful of pills every day, and I am so happy and fine, and I feel like myself again. | ||
| It's like magic. | ||
| Wait, but it's not a medication? | ||
| So you're taking supplements or something? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, I don't take any prescription medications for it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty amazing. | ||
| Where do you fall on that? | ||
| I wasn't planning on asking this, but where do you fall on that whole thing in general? | ||
| Because I think it is related to so many of the issues that you talk about. | ||
| With medication? | ||
| Yeah, with medication in general. | ||
| I think it can work for people. | ||
| It did not work for me. | ||
| You know, it made my life a living hell. | ||
| And the fact that doctors think that's the only way to treat mental health issues... | ||
| Especially something like depression where there are, it's very complex. | ||
| There's so many causes. | ||
| Now we know more about, might be your gut bacteria and all these things that contribute to it. | ||
| I think doctors today are overworked, don't care, and just throw whatever pill they can at you. | ||
| And that's what happened to me for 10 years. | ||
| You mean a psychiatrist with a stapler that says Zoloft on it? | ||
| You think there might be some kind of conflict of interest there? | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| I mean, I have a lot of things to say about that. | ||
| It's honestly, like what I went through is, Yeah. | ||
| Nobody who's dealing with mental health issues should have to navigate that, and yet we do. | ||
| And then we wonder why we have such a problem with all these people acting out and behaving in terrible ways. | ||
| It's because people aren't getting treated. | ||
| They're just being thrown one pill or another, and it's like, well, you just need to sit tight for the next five years until we find the magic pill. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And sometimes there isn't one. | ||
| Then you turn that commercial on and there's a cloud following that woman | ||
| and then she needs some other pill to be on top of that. | ||
| Then her legs can't move. | ||
| Then she has, then they can move too much. | ||
| Then she's pooping and it's a lot. | ||
| You just need a pill for everything. | ||
| I mean, look, like allopathic medicine has a place in a modern society. | ||
| It's great, it's good, science, yay! | ||
| But let's not pretend like that's all there is to the picture. | ||
| It's an overreach of capitalism into the doctor's room. | ||
| That was essentially what happened to me, just being sold one pill after another when that wasn't what I needed. | ||
| Were you doing talk therapy while you were doing that? | ||
| Yeah, I've always done talk therapy. | ||
| But look, if it's an imbalance in your body, if it is coming from a physical imbalance, which sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, Yeah. | ||
| Talking about it doesn't fix it. | ||
| It can help you cope, but it doesn't really, I mean, I feel like there's magic in the body at this point. | ||
| Like it really was like a switch flipped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that was, you know, looping back around, that was kind of where I started to feel more comfortable | ||
| handling the inevitable backlash. | ||
| I knew this would happen. | ||
| I knew things would go crazy. | ||
| I knew it would be hard and people who trusted me and who, you know, had supported me would not understand right away. | ||
| And hopefully they will understand as time goes on. | ||
| And I knew I had to be able to deal with that emotionally in a healthy way. | ||
| And I finally got to that place. | ||
| Yeah, so that's incredible. | ||
| So you really did the personal work. | ||
| Yes, I had to do the personal work. | ||
| To prepare yourself for what was to come, which I think... You have to. | ||
| Yeah, but I think so many people, especially online people, we sort of go from like one crisis to the next one, or one news cycle to the next thing, or... You could have done a really great spit take right there. | ||
|
unidentified
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That would have been... I'm gonna keep it classy today. | |
| But so, you do a little... You do? | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| That's really incredible, though, that you actually made a point of being like, I'm gonna kind of fix my life to go forward in this next thing. | ||
| Yeah, because it was literally killing me. | ||
| The depression and then all the pressure from all the political environment, all the pressure I was under as a YouTube feminist now somehow managed to become the face of feminism on YouTube. | ||
| And I was like, how did this happen? | ||
| I can't handle this, I'm a mess. | ||
| I am a mess and I gotta sort this out. | ||
| Otherwise I gotta quit YouTube. | ||
| And that's when I started telling myself, I'm quitting, I'm done. | ||
| I can't do this, I can't handle it. | ||
| I have way too much going on up here, I'm out. | ||
| But then I got fixed and I was like, I'm back. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I really love that because I think it's so important for all of us. | ||
| Like whether you have depression or whatever you have in your life, | ||
| like fixing that thing, which is a work in progress always. | ||
| And we all, myself included, are always trying to improve and sometimes you fail yourself and whatever. | ||
| But that to move forward and do something that's real, which I think is what you're doing now, | ||
| like taking care of that, I just think, I think it's great. | ||
| We call that self-care in feminism, by the way. | ||
| When you see this self-care word thrown around, that's what it means. | ||
| Take care of yourself first, then do life. | ||
| Oh, I thought that was some sort of vibrator thing. | ||
| Self-care. | ||
| I mean, that could be part of it, too. | ||
| Many vibrators have been involved in the self-care process. | ||
| Yes, yes, and by the way, I'm not letting you escape out of talking about some more sexual stuff, but let's keep going for a second. | ||
| My favorite topic, I'm down. | ||
| So just to show the way you've evolved, the night of the election, I think, when you were still sort of, I guess, on the other side of this, so to speak, you tweeted something about the evil white men of America. | ||
| Do you remember sort of what the tweet was? | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| How could I forget that? | ||
| It reminds me every day. | ||
| I don't remember what I said. | ||
| I said something like, fuck white America or something. | ||
| And I stand by that. | ||
| Okay, so I think that, I don't even know that I was following you at the time, but I knew who you were, but I saw that tweet. | ||
| It went super viral. | ||
| And I retweeted it, and I'm sure I wrote some snarky thing. | ||
| It deserves snark. | ||
| It was like a stupid tweet, but the sentiment behind it, I still feel like we have a racism problem in America. | ||
| Okay, so first off, as long as we're both sitting here, can we agree to put whatever I said in that tweet? | ||
| Yeah, I've forgiven everyone for their sins at this point, and in return I expect some forgiveness for mine. | ||
| I'm still repenting, but I hope we can all get there so that we can move on and have good conversations. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and a little bit after that, I think I did publicly invite you on the show, and things got lost in the shuffle and all that, and you were going through your own thing and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| There's a lot, yeah. | ||
| But I think it's interesting, because even for myself, it's like, here I saw someone say something that I obviously disagreed with, but that need to always attack everybody. | ||
| Yeah, well, it was high tensions time. | ||
| Was it that night? | ||
| You think that night was high tensions? | ||
| I mean, a little bit. | ||
| It was all right. | ||
| That night was tough for a lot of people. | ||
| So when you saw the reaction to that type of tweet, now I fight against those types of theories. | ||
| I'm not saying we don't have races in America. | ||
| Of course we do. | ||
| We're always gonna have bigotry. | ||
| We're always gonna have prejudice. | ||
| Some people are just never gonna like gay people. | ||
| Some people are never gonna like Muslims or Jews or any of those things. | ||
| Counterpoint that. | ||
| We could lower the amount of... Oh, absolutely! | ||
| It can always be lowered. | ||
| There might always be this low level, but I feel like people are like, we're always going to have this problem, therefore we shouldn't talk about it or address it because we can't get rid of it. | ||
| And I would agree that to some extent, it will never be completely gone. | ||
| But we can do better. | ||
| Absolutely, look, as a talk guy, I'm all for talking it up. | ||
| Okay, I appreciate that. | ||
| Yeah, I don't mean that, look, yes, and you're right, maybe we can get it to just be whatever its lowest number could be. | ||
| Yes, let's lower it. | ||
| Let's lower it as much as possible. | ||
| But when you saw the reaction to that type of tweet, because I do see a lot of the people that are in this new space you're in, they hate the way now sort of white people are being, like it's just so easy and boring to attack white people. | ||
| It is, and it's stupid. | ||
| And it, you know, there is a time and a place for that sort of analysis, but it isn't the time and the place that it's often used online, I think, including that tweet. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was the wrong way of expressing my sentiments, but look, I was angry and, to be honest, I was pretty drunk that night. | ||
| So, what can you do? | ||
| I'm glad you said that though because it's so funny like anyone that's a public person like we're all flawed characters. | ||
| We all get drunk sometimes or might smoke weed. | ||
| And open up Twitter when we shouldn't. | ||
| Right, and all of those things and like at any moment you could just unleash the gates of hell on yourself. | ||
| And that's exactly what happened. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| and without even realizing it, I don't even remember tweeting that. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's just. | ||
| You know, it's funny too. | ||
| Don't drink, kids. | ||
| That's the moral of this story. | ||
| Is that the moral? | ||
| There's a lot of booze behind you, by the way. | ||
| Or don't drink and tweet. | ||
| Let's put it that way. | ||
| Keep the tweeter closed. | ||
| You should put that on a shirt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's funny because in my old days, when I was on that portion of the left | ||
| or when I saw things through that lens or I was a progressive or whatever it was, | ||
| there are tweets of mine saying that same kind of thing about old white men. | ||
| And I haven't deleted them, and people will occasionally grab one of something I said five years ago and go, ah, you see, Rubin, we gotcha. | ||
| And I'm like, no, you didn't get me. | ||
| You're actually showing that I've evolved, which is what I've said consistently. | ||
| But they wanna get ya, right? | ||
| Like, more than a year ago, you cannot reasonably assume that I think the same exact thing, or would say or, you know, discuss it the same exact way. | ||
| But doesn't that make you a flip-flopper, Lacy Jane? | ||
| No, it makes you an evolving, open-minded, learning, growing human being, and that's something we should encourage! | ||
| You know, not like, look at you! | ||
| You changed! | ||
| You grew and learned things! | ||
| You terrible person! | ||
| and it's just like, I mean, it's nonsense. | ||
| Isn't that funny that so much of that comes from the so-called tolerant people? | ||
| Like, I mean, that's the thick of what you're dealing with. | ||
| But wait, before, all right, so before we fully get there, so you do this work internally for yourself, | ||
| which is obviously incredible. | ||
| You take some time off, which I'm sure cost you money to do because your videos make money. | ||
| So like you really did something important for you. | ||
| Were you privately discussing with friends Because I was tipped off by one person who doesn't need to be named right now. | ||
| Who? | ||
| Who's the traitor? | ||
| I will tell you after, but you'll have no problem with it because it was done the way it's supposed to be done. | ||
| Which is? | ||
| It was basically just like, keep an eye on her. | ||
| Like, keep an eye on someone that's kind of in an interesting spot right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's it. | |
| It was nothing bad whatsoever. | ||
| I made that sound much more shady. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of paranoia after all my friends posted things about me during this. | ||
| Posted personal information about me. | ||
| Yeah, you've been doxxed. | ||
| Yeah, it's just been crazy. | ||
| It's kind of changed my life in the sense that I'm like, who can I really talk to about these things that I'm not ready to just go full out public with yet? | ||
| I'm still a human and I need to process these things. | ||
| Yeah, your question was about... Well, basically, so you do the work for yourself, you take the time off, it costs you money, like you actually did what you had to do for yourself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now get me to that first video that you did. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| So I've been talking to people for a long time. | ||
| And anybody who's a good friend of mine knows that I've always thought this stuff is bullshit for a long time. | ||
| I've been to them and have had a lot of really bizarre experiences in feminist spaces that | ||
| were just a lot to process. | ||
| My friends, they have been really supportive and like, yeah, this is weird. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Can you give me a really solid example of that? | ||
| Well, like in the video, I talked about how people have tried to physically intimidate | ||
| me in person. | ||
| People who are feminists, who I agree with on stuff. | ||
| You know, maybe not 100%, but like 90 maybe, I don't know. | ||
| And people who try to gang up on me, who threaten to rape me, who threaten to, you know, I had this group of people at a, it was like a group of trans activists folks who threatened to punch me in the face when I was in a parking lot. | ||
| And I'm just like, oh. | ||
| That's my brain, what? | ||
| I like can't, what is, why? | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| Yeah, even though from everything I've seen of yours, I've never seen even the slightest amount of transphobia. | ||
| I support, I am all here for people So what was it that they were upset with you about? | ||
| I do not give a shit, I support them, I think society treats trans people like shit, | ||
| you know, and I'm in that fight with them and always have been. | ||
| I've advocated, you know, at the state and federal government level for trans rights | ||
| and, you know, taught trans-inclusive sex ed the entire time, I mean, it's just, it's weird. | ||
| So that, those types of things that have happened. | ||
| So what was it that they were upset with you about? | ||
| Like in that specific instance? | ||
| In that specific instance, they, and people continue to talk about a video | ||
| that I made in the earlier days of YouTube where I made a video to Chris Crocker. | ||
| Do you know who that is? | ||
| Yeah, I interviewed him on my old radio show. | ||
| So I'm a big fan of Chris. | ||
| And always had been, like back in the Leave Brittany Alone days or whatever. | ||
| Because I just think he's such a character. | ||
| He was one of the first sort of... | ||
| He was made by the internet and also the first great victim of the internet, in a way. | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| His story is super fascinating, but he's also sort of this, like, gender-bending, you know, sexuality, just sort of a fluid, interesting person around that stuff, and I found that empowering, you know? | ||
| And so I was a really big fan, and I made this fan video to him, and at the time, Chris had called himself a T-word. | ||
| That's how he referred to himself. | ||
| And so I used that word in the video. | ||
| In a fan video, you know? | ||
| Wait, the T word, so he called himself trans? | ||
| Oh wait, am I not, did I just miss something? | ||
| People are gonna yell at me if I say it! | ||
| Oh god, something just really went over my head there. | ||
| Tranny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Tranny. | ||
| Well you're just quoting something that someone said to you. | ||
| I know, but people get really mad. | ||
| Whisper it a little louder in case. | ||
| They're gonna try to slit my throat. | ||
| Just whisper it a little louder. | ||
| I'll say it. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'll take the heat on this one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You called Chris tranny because that's the word he was using about himself. | ||
| I said he's my favorite. | ||
| Okay, so you said that Chris was your favorite tranny, a word that he was using to describe himself. | ||
| It's so silly. | ||
| I feel so silly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so dumb. | |
| And for that, you feel the need to whisper. | ||
| I know, but look, I have been violently threatened. | ||
| You have to understand, like, I have been violently threatened many times over this, so. | ||
| So what were they angry, so did they, I mean, I know so much of this is why it's so about feelings and not about facts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you get these, they're angry at you because you've now used this word, | ||
| even though you've shown, this is sort of like Bill Maher using the N-word, | ||
| even though no one in their right mind would think he's a racist. | ||
| And having to pay the price for that. | ||
| Yeah, it's more about the word. | ||
| Like it's all about the language, you know? | ||
| And I was 17, you know? | ||
| And I regret it, but at the same time, it's like, oh my God, how many times | ||
| do I have to be sacrificed at the altar for this? | ||
| And yeah, I've had a lot of experiences like that, just moving through the feminist world | ||
| and just being shown no mercy. | ||
| Nobody ever wants to assume that you are just a person who means well, you know? | ||
| You always mean the worst. | ||
| It's always that you're a bigot, you know? | ||
| You are just a racist. | ||
| You are just a transphobe. | ||
| That's who you are, and we hate you for it. | ||
| And that's kind of been my experience moving through this world, even though my whole thing is like, I don't think people should hate people because of Their skin color or their sex or their gender identity or whatever. | ||
| So there's just a lot of dissonance. | ||
| And it's put me in a really weird place. | ||
| So even though you said a couple times that you always sort of had these feelings, was there ever a moment for you that you really were in it like that? | ||
| Like, did you ever, because it becomes, you can almost become drunk with power in a way when these people are going, you know, when they're backing you. | ||
| I know, but they never backed me, and I've never thought that behavior was okay. | ||
| You know, if I've ever said anything that came off that way, it was purely accidental, or being pressured to talk about it that way, because otherwise I would be, you know, on the firing line. | ||
| But I've never, I've never condoned the SJW stuff. | ||
| And I've never, even though I've said and done a few things that are regrettable, you know, I don't feel that on the whole my work embodies any of that. | ||
| I think it is very different than that. | ||
| And I'm very opposed to it. | ||
| I think it's really toxic and destructive and very hypocritical. | ||
| So you do this video, you start saying some of this stuff. | ||
| More than anything else, the takeaway from the video is, I want to talk to people. | ||
| That's literally all the video says. | ||
| I want to talk to people because I think things have gotten a little out of control in the feminist sphere. | ||
| It's super pro-censorship. | ||
| Like, overtly. | ||
| Like, we are going to campaign to get you censored. | ||
| You know, and I actually had a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, this is actually, I'm still processing it, a good friend of mine who, you know, is campaigning, after I came out with this stuff, a good feminist friend of mine, we had planned to go travel together, and we've been, we've traveled a lot together already, who decided to, who wanted to make a petition, you know, to shut my channel down, or I don't even remember exactly what it was, but I was just like, what the hell? | ||
| This is someone I'm pretty good friends with. | ||
| It's very overtly, we don't, the goal is to silence. | ||
| No other opinions should be heard because it's oppressive. | ||
| I'm oppressive now. | ||
| So even though you intellectually knew that that thing existed, Were you shocked when it became that personal? | ||
| Because I had the exact same thing, even though for me it wasn't talking about feminism, but when I started talking about what I saw wrong with the left and the speech stuff and the authoritarianism, I lost a ton of friends. | ||
| coworkers of mine stopped talking to me, but friends, I mean, people, some people | ||
| that were invited to my wedding. | ||
| That's, yeah. | ||
| That's really messed up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Same for me. | ||
| So when you would have those conversations, so I'll just give you one anecdotal thing for myself | ||
| and maybe you have one for you, is there was one person who I was incredibly close to, | ||
| incredibly close to, and they started telling me privately on text | ||
| that what a bigot I am and blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And I kept saying, can you show me evidence of anything that I've said is bigoted? | ||
| You know me really well. | ||
| You've been to my house a thousand times for dinner. | ||
| We've gone through personal stuff and cried together and all of this stuff. | ||
| And I couldn't get one example of anything. | ||
| It's just, no, no, you're a bigot, you're a bigot, you're a bigot. | ||
| So when your friend then starts doing this protest against you, I mean. | ||
| It's not just friend, friends. | ||
| Yeah, so were you able to make headway with any of them or did it all just like melt at the same time? | ||
| I've lost a lot of friends. | ||
| And the reason I'm asking you this so specifically is because, and I'm sure you do too, but I get a ton of email about this, that from my audience, when they start talking about this stuff or they share clips or whatever, that suddenly friends are blocking them or de-friending them and all that stuff. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| What has this world come to? | ||
| Priorities misplaced. | ||
| You can't even have friendship anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, for me, I have lost a lot of friends. | ||
| people who I have let into my home, who I've made dinner for many times, | ||
| who, again, we've had the moments, we've laughed, we've cried, | ||
| who turned on me in a heartbeat the moment I said that I was against censorship, | ||
| which is very strange. | ||
| And it's been really hard because these are, it's been like, well, I feel kind of lost now. | ||
| My community has turned on me in a sense, and it's been hard for my community to begin with. | ||
| Like what I said before, I sort of, just by proximity and sort of being nudged | ||
| in this direction, have met all these people And a lot of those relationships I felt like were kind of fake to begin with. | ||
| Like you always feel like you're being judged. | ||
| That's kind of what I feel like hanging out with people who are super, super SJW feminist types. | ||
| It's like you can't relax. | ||
| You can't tell a joke. | ||
| You're like worried that everyone's going to be offended all the time. | ||
| It's just like a very, ugh. | ||
| Can we just calm down? | ||
| You're just on that hairpin of like, I might say something wrong accidentally, and then it's all over. | ||
| That's not a fun way to have a friendship. | ||
| No, and it's so easy to say something wrong. | ||
| It's such a bizarre, arbitrary high bar, and it's not a good precedent for friendships and relationships, and I never liked it. | ||
| I never felt connected to those people. | ||
| There was maybe only one Or two people that I really felt like we had a connection who turned on me publicly. | ||
| But then, like, all these people that are internet friends of mine, who I've never met in person or anything, but who, you know, we share each other's work, we talk online, whatever, also turned on me. | ||
| So it's been sort of this ripple effect as people just sort of, you know, cast me out of the club, and that's been very revealing, you know? | ||
| If this is what gets you thrown out, then fuck you, throw me out. | ||
| I don't give a shit. | ||
| It's so interesting, because just getting to know you in this half hour or whatever, it's like you did this once already in life. | ||
| You did this when you were 16 or 17. | ||
| Bingo! | ||
| It's just a replay for me. | ||
| It's literally the same exact thing. | ||
| It's like you have this community that is organized around moral principles, And you feel really repressed and shamed and restricted whenever you commit a thought crime, and you have to confess, and you have to apologize when you make a mistake, but your apology is never really good enough. | ||
| You always are, deep down, an original sinner. | ||
| And you have to be cast out. | ||
| You're gonna be excommunicated if you make too many mistakes. | ||
| It's the same exact thing as being Mormon. | ||
| So many of them hate religion, but they'll give you original sin, which is a whole other thing. | ||
| It's these moral systems. | ||
| They all work the same way. | ||
| Right, whether they're religious or secular. | ||
| Right, and that's a big question that I'm trying to figure out. | ||
| How do we create moral systems for humans without devolving into this trash? | ||
| How do we encourage people to be good people? | ||
| All this, because it seems to come with the territory, in my experience. | ||
| Yeah, so okay, so you lost friends, your audience had all sorts of issues dealing with New Lacey, all of this stuff, but so let's get away from the bad for a second. | ||
| Let's talk about the new community that you've been welcomed into. | ||
| Because now you're in the community that on the online side of it, the YouTube side of it, it's mostly the people that I love, like this great community. | ||
| And I saw you were at VidCon with a lot of these people. | ||
| Yeah, and had a great time. | ||
| And got to suddenly meet people that were your enemies in a certain respect. | ||
| I never saw them as my enemies, only the ones that made really terrible videos about me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which wasn't most of them. | ||
| So let's talk about one person in particular, because I think something really beautiful happened, which is Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad. | ||
| I had him here live the day that he went to VidCon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah? | |
| I had to watch that. | ||
| I think maybe you met him that night, perhaps. | ||
| And I had known that he had done some videos about you, and I said something to him Off camera about something like, oh, are you gonna see Lacey? | ||
| I guess she probably doesn't like you. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| And he said to me, I kid you not, he was like, I don't know why she wouldn't like me. | ||
| It's not personal. | ||
| And he really meant it. | ||
| I didn't sense he was like. | ||
| It is personal. | ||
| Okay, so I'm not trying to start shit because I'm really not. | ||
| But you guys then met. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And something kind of good came out of it. | ||
| Well, I went into it prepared to forgive him, even though I would say, you know, Carl has been the root of a lot of the pain from the anti side for me. | ||
| Not just because he goes around claiming things like I lied about being sexually assaulted. | ||
| You know, that really, that's a really shitty thing to do. | ||
| But also because when I was getting bomb and shooting threats at the schools that I was visiting, we had like traced where some of these people were coming from and they were big fans of Carl. | ||
| So, you know, there was just sort of this proximal connection to him as well, with a lot of online harassment and the real world threats that I was getting were mostly coming from his little corner of the internet. | ||
| You know, I have had a lot of trouble with Carl's stuff, with the way that he's talked about me, with the way that he has portrayed me to people, you know, sort of lying about things, distorting things I've said. | ||
| But my, in my mind, like, there's a context, you know, I think that I don't know. | ||
| I'm still making sense of it, but I don't, I don't want to hold on to any of that, you know? | ||
| And I know that people have been telling me, like Chris had been telling me, even when this all started, I was like, I'm absolutely not forgiving Carl. | ||
| Like, I just can't. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| But after talking to people and, you know, I actually talked to Carl first online. | ||
| I reached out and I was terrified and I did it and it was fine. | ||
| So this is before VidCon? | ||
| This is before, yeah. | ||
| This is after the first video, but before VidCon and I just told myself, you know what, I gotta move past this. | ||
| Like, I'm sure there's a lot of junk and all this kind of garbage that has contextualized these experiences and I just want to move on from it. | ||
| And that's why I decided to forgive him. | ||
| And I want to talk to him. | ||
| I want to talk to him about the things that he has criticized, the ideas. | ||
| For me, it's not the criticizing ideas. | ||
| Criticize my ideas all day long. | ||
| Let's talk about it. | ||
| But don't make it personal. | ||
| Don't make it about me being sexually violated. | ||
| That's not okay. | ||
| That's crossing a line. | ||
| And that's what I had to forgive, was the crossing the line. | ||
| And you know, I've forgiven people for much worse in my life. | ||
| Yeah, so you guys met. | ||
| So you met. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think it's important because everyone's fighting with everyone all day, especially online. | ||
| Non-stop. | ||
| People are just tearing each other apart. | ||
| We've both now given examples how this also leaks into real life friendships and all that. | ||
| So you finally get face to face. | ||
| Now here's a guy who, I really like him. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
| And I like a lot of his work. | ||
| I honestly can't say that I ever watched one of his videos about you. | ||
| I truly have no recollection of that. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But a lot of the stuff that he talks about that I care about, about classical liberalism and all that, we're fully on board. | ||
| And as I said, I like him and I had drinks with him that night and everything else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so you finally meet him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's very different when you're snarking at someone through a YouTube video versus when you actually are looking them in the eye. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Can you just tell me what that felt like for you? | ||
| It was sort of a surreal moment because all of the antis, the skeptics or critics or whatever you want to call them, had come up to L.A. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I call them generally decent people. | |
| I mean, I think there's a lot of people out there. | ||
| I'm referring to the specific genre of content online, right? | ||
| Like all these people who make this type of videos online had come up and were going out for a night, you know, in LA. | ||
| And so I joined them and I just sort of ran into Carl on a street corner as we were moving our party elsewhere. | ||
| And that was the first time that I had met him. | ||
| And we just sort of stared at each other. | ||
| And he held out his hand to shake hands, and I was like, wait, you're not going to give me a hug after all this shit you put me through? | ||
| I think you owe me a hug. | ||
| And he hugged me. | ||
| He's a really big guy. | ||
| I'm kind of a shorty. | ||
| He's just like this big teddy bear. | ||
| He hugged me, and he just sort of leans down to my ear and says, I'm really sorry. | ||
| I had no idea what I was doing. | ||
| I regret it. | ||
| And, you know, we can spar out our differences, but I had no idea the pain that I had caused you. | ||
| And that, to me, was just, like, earth-shattering, because I had dealt with so much shit, you know? | ||
| And to be there, and to be on the street corner, you know, just being hugged by this person who I had been terrified of, and to realize, okay, it's not so scary. | ||
| He's a perfectly fine person, and everything's gonna be okay. | ||
| Was really... I will never forget that moment for the rest of my life. | ||
| Yeah, and then you shot, I think, two videos on it, right? | ||
| You put up two... I just shot, like, some little Twitter videos, because we took a picture, and when he posted it online, people lost their minds. | ||
| And I was like, ah, here we go. | ||
| Like, I can't even have this one precious moment to heal from some of my own shit, you know? | ||
| The internet has to weigh in and give their opinion on how I should deal with how I've been harassed. | ||
| You think you have some right to tell the internet how you feel about what's happening to you? | ||
| It's just crazy because in this community, in the leftist stuff, the whole idea is we let people handle their problems however they like. | ||
| There's no right way to deal with being harassed or whatever. | ||
| That's a feminist mantra. | ||
| You do you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Should be the feminist mantra. | ||
| That's my feminist mantra. | ||
| You do your thing, I'll be here for you. | ||
| You know, just don't hurt people. | ||
| But no, for me to deal with what I had dealt with in my life and then to forgive him, other people, I think what happened, other people took that as, oh well now I have to. | ||
| Give up my grudge, or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have to forgive him for... Which is great, actually, if you can challenge people, right? | |
| Fine, but that's not my idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My goal isn't to be like, okay, everybody hug! | |
| I want to, because that's what feels good and right to me. | ||
| Forgiveness. | ||
| And that's what the video is about. | ||
| Forgiveness, for me, is how I move through my life. | ||
| Because people make mistakes. | ||
| People learn and grow. | ||
| They do and say stupid shit all the time. | ||
| Myself included. | ||
| Pretty much non-stop. | ||
| So if people can't forgive me, How can I ever forgive myself for one thing? | ||
| But also, how can we move through this world? | ||
| How? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| And that's why I did it, and a big part of why I did it. | ||
| And other people see it differently and that's fine, but I don't think it's any of their business. | ||
| It really has nothing to do with anybody else but me and Carl. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So on the broader side of that, were you shocked how much love and support you got from these people? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So on the positive side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I have made so many new friends that are just really cool, really smart, interesting people. | ||
| You know, we don't necessarily agree 100%. | ||
| I'd say like a lot of us, we agree maybe like 70% as opposed to 90. | ||
| I'm perfectly okay with that. | ||
| I don't even care if we agree 0%. | ||
| Well, we have to have some very basic agreements, I would say. | ||
| But, you know, it's so much—my world has changed, not just, like, healing from the depression stuff, but—and healing from, like, letting go of my pain around this stuff, but also now realizing that there is a place that I can be happy, people that I really enjoy, that are hilarious, and laughing more than I, like, ever have. | ||
| Like in the last five years. | ||
| They're so funny. | ||
| I just, I'm so happy with these, with this community. | ||
| It really is a beautiful community. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| And it's like, it's like rating out, radiating out of you. | ||
| I can tell. | ||
| Let's talk about one of those people in particular. | ||
| Because you mentioned Chris before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You are now dating Chris Ragon of the internet. | ||
| And Chris, he's in the other room right now, so this makes it a little awkward, I suppose. | ||
| It's a bit awkward. | ||
| But I love what Chris does. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| He's incredibly talented and funny and smart. | ||
| He gets it politically, I think, from at least the way I think getting it has value and all that stuff. | ||
| Chris and I agree on most things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How is it dating another YouTuber? | ||
| You're public people dating. | ||
| People want to know things about you. | ||
| I know, that's kind of weird. | ||
| It's sort of silly and fun. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It adds a different dimension to this relationship that I don't have with others, that I haven't had in the past. | ||
| Because I haven't really ever... Well, I dated one YouTuber when I was a teenager, but... | ||
| It was not nearly as public as this has been, but it's really fun. | ||
| I really enjoy it. | ||
| I love being able to share this digital sphere together. | ||
| I feel like that's something that adds a lot of value to my life and to our relationship. | ||
| We have our own thing, but then we can also have this fun, public-facing relationship too. | ||
| I don't know, it's just fun. | ||
| Yeah, all right, cool. | ||
| All right, so I want to talk to you about a couple sex things and then we're going to do an hour of Q&A. | ||
| We already have like a gajillion questions. | ||
| So I've tried to do all the broad stuff with you here because I wanted people to really understand your story. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And then I'm going to let the audience do like the specific things. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But a couple things on sex because I watch so many of your videos and you are a sexpert of some sort. | ||
| Within reason. | ||
| So that's why I wanted to ask it that way. | ||
| I want, for you personally, as someone that talks about all these things | ||
| and how to pleasure a man, how to pleasure a woman, you know, different body parts | ||
| and what people like and all that stuff, do you feel undue pressure when you're having sex? | ||
| Because I thought that a couple of times in your videos, like, man, this girl knows everything about sex. | ||
| No, that's not true. | ||
| I can get around pretty well, I would say. | ||
| But I'm like, the thing is, people assume, oh god, she must be like a total freak or something. | ||
| And like, sometimes. | ||
| But for the most part, it's like, yeah, you gotta live. | ||
| You know, I feel comfortable with my sexuality. | ||
| And I know, like, the mechanics. | ||
| I know, I'm like a textbook person. | ||
| You know, there's a difference between the textbook and the real life experiences. | ||
| The textbook helps me navigate the real life experiences, but I'm just a normal person, you know, just like everyone else. | ||
| Not to get too TMI, but with people I've been with in the past, there is sort of this weight on the relationship that's like, oh, you teach sex ed to millions of people. | ||
| Right, like, what are you gonna bust out tonight? | ||
| You know, like, okay, okay, we did that last night. | ||
| You have to have this endless book of magic tricks. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I mean, it's just normal stuff. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know, I've never sat in on someone else's bedroom, but I would say that Pretty normal sexual whatever. | ||
| I'm just comfortable talking about it. | ||
| Alright, let's talk about gender and gender identity and how many genders there are and all this stuff. | ||
| So we're going to do that for let's say 10 minutes or so and then we'll jump into the Q&A. | ||
| But the reason I want to talk about it is because first off I think a ton of it is hugely confusing. | ||
| I think a certain amount of people are making it intentionally confusing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know! | |
| I don't know what is going on with that. | ||
| And when I've seen even, it's actually, it's not one of the issues that I am that interested in. | ||
| I want people to be respected and feel validated and all those things, | ||
| but it's not like one of my like key issues. | ||
| So when I've seen some of the fights that go on and some of the conversations that go on, | ||
| even that you're having on Twitter or wherever, my general feeling is when people get so in the weeds | ||
| about how you should refer to this person, you have to say this about this person or watch it. | ||
| I think it's tuning more people out to the legitimate issues | ||
| than making people care about them. | ||
| Because I feel it for myself. | ||
| I see so much fighting about it that I'm like... | ||
| Why would I even want to touch this? | ||
| It's so confusing. | ||
| It's inaccessible. | ||
| I want to respect trans people. | ||
| I want to respect everybody. | ||
| It's basic. | ||
| This stuff is not that complicated. | ||
| When you get into the philosophical elements of, like, what is gender? | ||
| What are all the elements of gender? | ||
| If you really want to go deep, yes, it's complicated. | ||
| But the problem is that the discourse has forced everyone to go deep in order to just be a basically educated, decent human being. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And for me and my sex ed, it's always been about, here's the basic stuff. | ||
| Like, we don't need to get too crazy, alright? | ||
| Here's what you need to know, if you have any questions. | ||
| Okay, so what are the things you need to know? | ||
| Gender. | ||
| About the gender stuff? | ||
| Yeah, like let's just do some gender 101 stuff. | ||
| Some people think of man and woman differently. | ||
| You know, people think of man and woman differently. | ||
| And they relate to their sex differently. | ||
| Trans people think of their sex very differently than you and I as cisgender. | ||
| That's the term for people who don't have any sort of sex disconnect. | ||
| You can be a cisgendered heterosexual or bisexual woman. | ||
| You can be a cisgendered gay man. | ||
| Meaning that you're just, you believe that you are of the... You're comfortable calling yourself a man. | ||
| You have a penis, you're a man, the end. | ||
| Some people don't feel that way. | ||
| Have a penis, am a man. | ||
| Some people have a penis and they're a woman. | ||
| Some people have a vagina and they're a man. | ||
| And that's just how they experience it. | ||
| And that's the way it is. | ||
| So respect it, the end. | ||
| It doesn't need to be like this big. | ||
| But for the people that don't understand that, so how can someone have a vagina and be a man? | ||
| Well, with trans folks, specifically, I'll talk about gender dysphoria, because I think that's actually one of the defining elements here that is easiest to understand. | ||
| Gender dysphoria, sex dysphoria, is where people are in their own body, and they are experiencing their genitals, and they feel, I don't have this, so I'm just sort of quoting from what people have told me, right? | ||
| Don't get mad at me, Internet. | ||
| They feel deep discomfort with their genitals, and this is a real thing. | ||
| It is a mental health issue that people struggle with, and it needs to be treated by a psychologist, and possibly by a psychiatrist, and that is just a condition that some people have. | ||
| And so, the treatment in that circumstance is for someone to transition their sex, to feel more comfortable in their own body, Right, to feel like their gender and the world around them matches how they see themselves. | ||
| And they can transition their body. | ||
| That's the medical transition. | ||
| They can transition socially, which is where they're like, OK, I'm going to call myself a man or a woman now, right? | ||
| And I'm going to change my name. | ||
| And then there's the legal transition, where you change your driver's license, all these things, right? | ||
| So there are different ways to help people move through the world in a way that's more comfortable for them. | ||
| And, you know, a lot of people get all freaked out about it, and I think the whole, like, you need to sleep with people who have genitals different than what you prefer, it flames that paranoia. | ||
| It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's fine until, you know, you told me who I need to sleep with. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, wait, let's pause on that, because I want people to understand that. | ||
| So there is this sort of contingent of people who think that even if you're okay with trans people, That you should still be okay with sleeping with someone who doesn't have the genitals you like, otherwise that in and of itself shows some sort of bigotry. | ||
| Did I get that right? | ||
| That is correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is right. | ||
| And that's, you're exactly right. | ||
| That's where the average person that wants to be a good, inclusive person, and that's where they start going. | ||
| Because now it's not about the other person. | ||
| Now it's about me. | ||
| And not only is it about what you're telling me to do, it's about what you're saying about who I am. | ||
| That I am a bad person for having different sexual preferences. | ||
| And this comes back to the shame. | ||
| It comes back to the sexual shame. | ||
| And I'm like, the whole goal in the gender and sex positive movements is that we don't shame people. | ||
| We don't make people feel bad. | ||
| Even if their preferences are problematic. | ||
| There are some applications of that, like the more extreme stuff, like the pedophilia and the bestiality, which are different contexts. | ||
| But even, you know, stuff that is like, oh, you know, you are transphobic, or you are, you know, a little bit sexist or whatever, like that kind of stuff, The solution isn't to shame them. | ||
| The solution isn't to make them feel like their sexual preferences are bad. | ||
| Because sexual preferences aren't something you just choose in your head. | ||
| You know, they're a way you feel. | ||
| And people feel like that's sort of outside of their control, and it is. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So telling them you need to control this, otherwise you're a bad person, when we're talking about safe and consensual sex, is an incredibly problematic message to send to people. | ||
| For me, as a sex educator, who wants people to feel comfortable and okay? | ||
| What do you think about just the suffix phobia? | ||
| Everything now is a phobia. | ||
| And I think that it's done a major disservice. | ||
| I don't think every person, even right now in 2017, as I tell you this as a married gay man, I don't think that every person in America, a Christian conservative who lives in the middle of the country, that isn't okay with gay marriage yet, and maybe never will be, I don't think that inherently makes them What do you think a better word would be? | ||
| I would like to show them that gay people are like everyone else. | ||
| I wish that they would be a little more open-minded or something, but this word phobia or transphobia | ||
| that you fear them, I feel like it's not the right word. | ||
| It's actually creating more craziness around it. | ||
| What do you think a better word would be if you have one? | ||
| I don't know, well, I prefer no word. | ||
| I'd prefer an explanation of their ideas. | ||
| And this is where we all get lost in labels and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| But I think when you put the phobia thing on it, I think it just pushes those people the other way. | ||
| And I know, look, I think every gay person knows this, when you come out to people, even your friends that maybe were a little weird about gay people or whatever, that's how you change them. | ||
| Yeah, they simmer down usually. | ||
| Not by screaming at them. | ||
| Not always. | ||
| And some people are going to do what people did to you when you came out in this new sort of thinking. | ||
| They're going to abandon you. | ||
| It's just how it is. | ||
| Yeah, I would agree with you. | ||
| I don't necessarily agree that it's not a fear. | ||
| Because I think a lot of these things stem from fear. | ||
| A lot of our Like a tribalist sort of fear, I think is what some of it comes down to. | ||
| The problem for me is calling you a homophobe or a transphobe or using this as a shaming device instead of a device to help people understand how their perception has been shaped. | ||
| So, you know, if I'm dealing with a guy who's, you know, talking to me in a pretty sexist way, which happens, you know, he's like staring at my boobs, he's like, you know, treating me in this way that I'm like a piece of meat that he's gonna try to like round up and take home, you know, and it's like, oh my god, give me a break, right? | ||
| I'm not gonna be like, well, you're a sexist. | ||
| Even though I'm like, this is sexist, right? | ||
| That's not going to help him understand why this approach that he's taking to talking to me at this bar is not working, right? | ||
| I'm going to say, well, right now I feel like my experience of this situation right now is this, this, and this. | ||
| And this is why I don't think it's a good thing. | ||
| If I was going to sit down and explain that to him at a bar, I wouldn't. | ||
| Right, at a bar, generally he's not going to stick around for that kind of thing. | ||
| But if it's like a guy friend of mine, right, and he's behaving in this way that's like, you know, kind of putting women off or being disrespectful, I'm going to explain why it's disrespectful and, you know, have a conversation about it and hopefully try to understand where he's coming from so that, you know, we can have a good productive exchange to sort of chill out that behavior, if indeed that is a problematic behavior, right, and he can dispute my claim that it's sexist or whatever. | ||
| But that to me is the approach. | ||
| You know, the approach is not to name call. | ||
| And these terms, sexist, racist, homophobic, these have meanings, right? | ||
| And they have a place, they have a time, but I think they should be applied more to systems, like referring to systems stuff. | ||
| Like this law that says gay people can't get married is homophobic, or whatever. | ||
| As opposed to this individual person is uncomfortable about blah blah blah and they are homophobic. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Right, or this person likes the genitals of the opposite sex because that's what he's attracted to, but somehow he's a transphobic. | ||
| But that's not even transphobic, in my opinion. | ||
| See, then there's like the usage of the words where it's not even... Right. | ||
| Yeah, well, I don't see how that's transphobic. | ||
| Well, like, yeah, when people say, oh, you need to sleep with someone who has genitals that are different than you prefer, and if you don't, you're transphobic, I would say that's not transphobic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I would say that's actually... And in fact, you're homophobic. | |
| Zing! | ||
| You see what you did there? | ||
| You see what you did there? | ||
| Gotta play the game! | ||
| I can use the game against them. | ||
| Well, isn't that the interesting thing? | ||
| It's very easy to use their own games against them. | ||
| You know, I try not to use any of my identity stuff in that way. | ||
| Yeah, I try not to either. | ||
| But every now and again, because their stuff is so sort of base level, you can use it against them pretty effectively, I think. | ||
| Even though it's not the pawn that I prefer to play in, or the game that I want to play in. | ||
| All right, so one other thing, and then we'll take a quick break, and then we'll do the Q&A. | ||
| As you're talking about this, I'm curious, I don't know that I've seen you do anything on the men's rights stuff, but do you think, or first off, have you done anything really on the? | ||
| Not on the men's rights movement, per se, but I have done stuff about men's rights, particularly around sexuality stuff, like male sexual assault and circumcision are the two issues that I've tackled, because that's in my sex ed sphere. | ||
| not necessarily the stuff that is more broadly men's rights. | ||
| So on the broader side though, do you think, like a lot of this does, I see, I get emails from people | ||
| that it's usually from straight men, just saying that all of this stuff | ||
| is pushing them the other way. | ||
| Yeah, I think people are understandably alienated. | ||
| If I'm alienated, like, come on. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| That's not a good sign. | ||
| If I'm being alienated by this stuff, we got a problem. | ||
| Because I'm not very easily alienated by these types of things. | ||
| Did we hit all the major points in this first hour? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| We still got another hour and it's gonna be a little faster and there's gonna be a lot of very pointed questions. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Did we hit all the broad stuff? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Feel good? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I feel good. | |
| You want a 30 second break? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We're gonna take a 30 second break and then we're gonna be taking questions on Patreon. | ||
| We've got like a hundred sitting there already. | ||
| We're also gonna be doing the super chat thing. | ||
| I think you guys know how to do that right here on the YouTube chat. | ||
| And we'll try to maybe jump in on a couple of questions on Facebook and all that good stuff. | ||
| So give us like a minute or two and we'll see if Lacey wants to do a shot or something in between. | ||
| You're so kind! | ||
| All right, we'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| and of | ||
| death and | ||
| the You. | ||
| Mm. | ||
| All right, guys, we are back. | ||
| We're live on YouTube and on Facebook. | ||
| The questions are rolling in already. | ||
| So we're doing the Super Chat thing on YouTube, if you're on there, and we're doing Patreon questions. | ||
| Over here, we got a zillion good ones for ya. | ||
| Let's start with this Super Chat first. | ||
| Have you ever read 1984, and do you relate with your recent stress related to what's going on? | ||
| I read 1984 in high school. | ||
| I read it around 84. | ||
| Oh, did you? | ||
| That's OG. | ||
| No, I don't really remember it very well, so... | ||
| So I think the basic thrust of it being, like, do you relate to just sort of the Orwellian, like, thought police and just that whole concept? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, to some degree, yes. | ||
| The thought policing for sure. | ||
| I think that there's too much, like, telling people what to think and shaming them for thinking things instead of sort of, if you think what someone says or does or thinks is wrong, You should talk about that and not just, I don't know, come bring the band hammer down. | ||
| You shouldn't just destroy people relentlessly. | ||
| All right, fair enough. | ||
| All right, Patreon. | ||
| What did you think of Dave Rubin before you reached across the aisle? | ||
| I've always been, you know, well, I only discovered yourself like a few months ago, but I've always enjoyed it. | ||
| Like, I don't think that you do anything that's particular. | ||
| You mean I'm not an alt-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, gay-hating, these people are all idiots? | ||
| I mean, you're sort of in the same boat as me, you know? | ||
| It's just the... Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's why your adventure, and when you started coming out, so to speak, I was like, I've got to talk to her, because I was like... Because the thing that you're going through now, that I've been through, and it never stops, really. | ||
| Like, there's no moment where you're like, oh, it's over, and now we're clean and clear. | ||
| But so many people are going through this in their own lives. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That are not public people or whatever it is that we are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| But they're like slandering you very publicly is the problem. | ||
| Anyways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Super chat. | ||
| Please ask Lacey about whether she thinks prescribing children puberty blocking drugs that will affect them for the rest of their lives is a good idea. | ||
| I don't necessarily want to like state my stance on this right now just because I have very complicated thoughts about it. | ||
| I will say I am critical of that practice. | ||
| Critical of giving them those drugs? | ||
| Of giving kids puberty blockers, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Quick super chat. | ||
| What do you recommend to help fix the current state of online discourse and make it more civil? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think we've done all right for an hour here. | |
| We have done all right. | ||
| We cursed at each other relentlessly during the break. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| We got it all out of our system first. | ||
| That's why we could do this. | ||
| No, I think one of the main things that people need to do is really, everyone, even people who think they're committed to the dialogue, need to really be checking themselves to make sure they're actually behaving in ways that promote dialogue and be open-minded. | ||
| I mean, that's really what it comes down to. | ||
| You can have your own opinions and you can be very passionate about them too, but you can also respect that there are other opinions A person might have an opposite opinion and be very | ||
| passionate about that as well. | ||
| We should try to understand that. | ||
| I think a commitment to listening, a commitment to questioning our own beliefs, a commitment | ||
| to hearing other people's perspectives and really deeply considering them, and also making | ||
| sure you fully understand your own opinions as well, all of those things would promote | ||
| dialogue. | ||
| And get rid of the personal attacks. | ||
| I don't like that shit. | ||
| It's just like, why? | ||
| All it does is make people mad. | ||
| I'm going to have my guys cut that one minute, and those are going to be Laci's rules for fixing the universe! | ||
| We've sort of discussed this one a little bit, but Patreon, why do there have to be two sides? | ||
| What about the center? | ||
| So I've been talking about this new center thing for a while, and I think it has a really wide net, and sometimes you're going to get caught with some people that you strongly disagree on some things, but I think if we can get the basics of people that want to live in a logical, decent, tolerant society, then we've got a pretty good center. | ||
| Yeah, I think, you know, the center is big. | ||
| You know, people sometimes think of the center as like this, these wishy-washy people who just don't know what they think. | ||
| But to me, you know, the center is people who are not ideologues. | ||
| They're people who are willing to change their mind about things and don't necessarily see things in black and white. | ||
| And I think that's a good thing. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you on that. | ||
| Lacey, will you do an appearance at my hometown of Coxon Hole, Honduras? | ||
| I hope I'm pronouncing that right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is that a troll? | |
| I think you just got trolled! | ||
| Maybe it's a real place, who knows? | ||
| Cox in Hole? | ||
| That's my fault. | ||
| Cox in Hole? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll take a blank out. | |
| Cox in Hole. | ||
| I mean there's a place called Lake Titicaca, so you never know. | ||
| Right, well I think that's... | ||
| No, Lord, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, that's literally, I just got Moe Sislacked from The Simpsons. | ||
| Is there an alcoholic here? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| How has your work impacted your dating life? | ||
| Are you guys intimidated? | ||
| Thrilled? | ||
| What are the costs and benefits of being outspoken on the subjects that you deal with? | ||
| That's kind of two different questions there. | ||
| But let's just focus on the dating part. | ||
| How it's affected my dating life? | ||
| Well, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, where people come in with all these assumptions about you | ||
| being this freak in the sheet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, I think it's also made it difficult because, well, in LA, | ||
| there's a lot of people who are just trying to climb a social ladder, | ||
| and they will use their dating life to do that. | ||
| So there's all this, like, weird fakeness that you have to deal with as a YouTuber. | ||
| But the sex ed stuff, I would say, for the most part, besides this, I think a lot of, you know, | ||
| the people that I've dated all have told me they had anxiety at the beginning because of this. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Like literally everyone I've ever dated, including Chris. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| So people come in potentially with no anxiety, start dating lazy, anxiety. | ||
| Well, just like I had a little bit of anxiety about dating a sex educator, which is fine, but I think it becomes pretty clear right away that there's no need to be freaked out. | ||
| When they get to your bedroom, do they immediately look at the night table and ask, what is in there? | ||
| I show them! | ||
| I'm like, let's dig it out! | ||
| Like, what am I getting myself involved in? | ||
| There's a lot of stuff in there. | ||
| It's fun! | ||
| I don't know if you have a big chest or I guess a night table. | ||
| Oh, several! | ||
| Probably not enough. | ||
| This is interesting, from Super Chat. | ||
| Have you seen any similarities in the tribalist left versus the tribalist religious community, in this case talking about Mormons? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And that's what I was saying about the moral systems stuff. | ||
| I think that anytime there is sort of this community that is organized around values, morality, there is the possibility, not always, it's not to say we shouldn't organize around our values, we should, but it lends itself to the possibility of becoming sort of zealous. | ||
| And the question for me is how to keep that in check. | ||
| The tribalism, not so much, I would say, in terms of the moralizing stuff. | ||
| Like I don't know that religion is, my experience of religion was tribalist necessarily. | ||
| Would you be willing, this is super chat, would you be willing to talk to feminists | ||
| like Christina Hoff Summers who critique third wave feminism? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And hope to. | ||
| I talked to a feminist who has a lot of things to say about third wave feminism yesterday on my channel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, okay, great. | ||
| Well, if you ever want to do that, not that you need me for it, but I'd love to facilitate that conversation. | ||
| Oh, that could be fun. | ||
| I'll just tee it up and you can sit right there and she'll sit here. | ||
| I adore Christina. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| From Patreon, do you think traditional political distinctions even make sense anymore? | ||
| How would you define yourself and who did you vote for in 2016 and why? | ||
| So they're asking a lot there. | ||
| You said you're liberal before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which I think you mean in sort of the way that I describe liberalism. | ||
| Which is? | ||
| Classical liberal and you believe in the individual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or what does liberalism mean to you? | ||
| I get really confused about all the terms because people use them differently. | ||
| So when it gets into the people who know a lot about poli-sci, I'm like, I'm not really sure what the right word is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And you've got enough going on with words. | ||
| Yeah, there's enough words and stuff. | ||
| There's enough ways for people to distort what I'm saying or thinking without wading into that. | ||
| All right, so without getting caught in the words, if you were to describe yourself politically, where would you sort of fall in that? | ||
| Well, I'm definitely like a left, I'd say I'm like a leftist, libertarian-leaning, pro-tax libertarian-ish. | ||
| I think businesses should be regulated, and I think that individual freedoms should be very, very highly protected. | ||
| First Amendment, very, very, very important. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure how to really capture all my political thoughts without going into each issue and how I see it. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's funny the way you describe that, because people always say, well, how could you be a left libertarian? | ||
| But I think you kind of hit it there, that you're for the maximum individual freedom, but you want some controls over corporations and... Yes, over business and... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I believe there should be business regulation, but not necessarily personal regulation. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| I've had a lot of libertarians on here who would disagree with you on that, but that's what it's all about. | ||
| I'm still figuring it out, and I don't know if that's the most articulate way of putting it. | ||
| And that's just the way they think. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| I mean, what I'm saying is, I could probably be convinced there's more to this story. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| From Patreon, your story sounds a whole lot like Cassie J's Saga 2. | ||
| Have you talked to Cassie or watched The Red Pill? | ||
| Are you familiar with that movie? | ||
| Yeah, I did watch it. | ||
| I haven't talked to Cassie, though. | ||
| And did it hit you? | ||
| I mean, that's actually why I asked you the men's rights question at the end. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| movie hit you, like, in any particular way? | ||
| No, I was already aware of all that stuff and already, like, in that camp, I think it's bullshit. | ||
| The feminists are shutting down men's rights conversations and protesting. | ||
| I mean, they can protest. | ||
| That's freedom of speech. | ||
| But shutting it down, like the fire alarms and all that kind of stuff, is not okay. | ||
| And I've always felt that men, you know, are not discussed enough in the conversation about abuse. | ||
| I don't know as much about the, like, court the legal side of things. | ||
| Like custody and that kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know as much about that. | ||
| It's a little removed from my world, but I'm still learning more about it. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, I thought it was a good documentary and I think that people should watch it, | ||
| even if they strongly disagree with what she's gonna say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From Super Chat, Lacey, based on your view on trans issues, | ||
| what do you think about parents pushing transgenderism onto their children, like in Canada, | ||
| with the genderless baby? | ||
| So did you see this story? | ||
| It was just in the last couple of days, I guess the parents aren't assigning a gender or something. | ||
| I didn't even read the article, it was just something that got. | ||
| I'm not familiar enough, yeah. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Lacey, do you plan on or do you want to speak to Jordan Peterson? | ||
| Yeah, people keep asking me that. | ||
| You absolutely should. | ||
| I'd be happy to help facilitate that one with me or without. | ||
| That would be fun. | ||
| I want to become more familiar with him and Christina's work first, and I've been buried lately. | ||
| So, for me, those conversations aren't going to happen immediately, but they will happen. | ||
| I like to know who I'm talking to first. | ||
| You mean you want to know a little something before you jump into the conversation? | ||
| I want to have a baseline understanding of their perspectives so they don't have to rehash the basics with me. | ||
| Laci, what's your opinion on the 1,482,937.5 pronouns being shoved down people's throats nowadays? | ||
| 3937.5 pronouns being shoved down people's throats nowadays. | ||
| I was like, where is this going? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm very impressed I could read so many numbers in one shot. | |
| With all the pronouns, I think that language is meant to be pragmatic. | ||
| It's meant to communicate, you know, a lot of information quickly. | ||
| So I take a more... I understand, for me, in a sex-ed classroom or in any of these contexts that I work with individuals and teenagers, I will use whatever words they want. | ||
| I don't care how silly anyone thinks it is. | ||
| I will defend it to the grave that when you're in an individual context where someone needs to feel respected, you know, I'll use whatever words you need. | ||
| All right, and don't get mad at me if I mess it up, right? | ||
| Because that's where it gets like, because I might mess it up! | ||
| But in terms of like, legally, I don't think that makes very much sense. | ||
| Yeah, which is a little bit of what Jordan Peterson is dealing with up in Canada, which is why I think you guys would have a great conversation. | ||
| Hey Lacey, this is Patreon, what are your thoughts on porn? | ||
| Healthy or harmful? | ||
| Somewhere in between. | ||
| Very context-dependent. | ||
| Very, very context-dependent. | ||
| I think that there are healthy ways to use porn. | ||
| There are healthy ways to incorporate it into a relationship if both people want to. | ||
| That needs to be like a mutual thing. | ||
| But I think there are unhealthy ways to use it. | ||
| I think some porn can be, you know, my main concern with porn is that I hear from 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds who are seeing hardcore pornography as their first experience with sex. | ||
| You know, that's the first sex ed they get. | ||
| That's not porn's fault, necessarily. | ||
| It's like a lot of things, and I think one of the biggest things is that we don't have, like, real conversations about sex with young people in this country to equip them to deal with things like porn, to deal with things like sexting, or, you know, even just basic relationship stuff. | ||
| So the porn sort of exacerbates a problem in the sex ed world that's already there. | ||
| And I'm anti-censorship, so I say make whatever porn you want. | ||
| Yeah, what about the access to it? | ||
| Like, I remember when I was 14 or something, like, to get access to a magazine or something was impossible. | ||
| You know, basically it was like the holy grail, versus now anyone can turn on their computer. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, right? | ||
| And within two seconds, yeah. | ||
| And kids, literal children, you know, eight and nine-year-olds. | ||
| I think there was, I can't remember the statistic, but an alarming number of nine-year-olds are finding hardcore pornography. | ||
| And yeah, I worry about that. | ||
| And then I've also talked to a lot of men who, because of the way that Well, we think. | ||
| This is sort of controversial science still, but, you know, we have this increasing threshold in the brain. | ||
| You know, are we sort of desensitizing ourselves to the more common sexual experiences that people have because of this highly stimulating, like, super, super stimulating imagery? | ||
| If you see super stimulating stuff all the time, does everything else sort of get moved? | ||
| You mean we can't do all that shit that we see in porn all the time? | ||
| We can't get into every one of those positions? | ||
| You can try! | ||
| You can try. | ||
| I'm not going to stop you. | ||
| I'm getting too old for all that. | ||
| Alright, here we go. | ||
| Oh, this is from Phil DeFranco. | ||
| How responsible do you think online creators are for what their audiences say or do to people that they talk about and why? | ||
| That's a great question that I think we all kind of deal with in our own way. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a big problem. | ||
| Um, I don't know. | ||
| I'm still trying to figure that out. | ||
| I think that, you know, creators do have some sort of an obligation to discourage it. | ||
| Like, if you see an angry mob forming because you're upset about something and you share that with the world, and then people, you know, the frothy mouths come out, it is time to say something. | ||
| Be like, yo, calm down. | ||
| Like, let's all bring it down a notch because you are the, you're sort of a leader in the community, right? | ||
| So if you see the community getting a little crazy, Maybe say something about it, but ultimately it's not my responsibility what people in my audience do. | ||
| It's not Carl's responsibility what people in his audience do. | ||
| And it wouldn't be fair for me to be like, this is your fault. | ||
| You can be as angry as you want online. | ||
| And that's the thing where I disagree with feminists. | ||
| It's like, well you need to tone down your rhetoric or you need to chill out because you're making people mad. | ||
| And it's like, well, you know, that's a slippery slope because a lot of things make people mad now. | ||
| I'm curious, when your channel was really growing, like I've noticed that my audience, especially on YouTube, when my channel was smaller, like the comments were a lot cleaner and on point and things like that, then we hit some threshold that I think most channels grow, most hit, where then it started getting bananas. | ||
| And if right now we were to look at the live chat, of course, it's completely insane. | ||
| And by the way, if everyone knows I'm a free speech, I'm as hooligan as they can all say whatever they want. | ||
| But do you happen to remember a moment when it went from like, | ||
| oh, these are my core people following me, to now like, there's something else going on here. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean, I think anytime I've caught the ire of the wider internet outside of my community, | ||
| it's become a little bit crazy. | ||
| And that's the other thing too, is like, even if people who watch you are doing crazy stuff, | ||
| necessarily people who are gonna listen to you, who are watching you after that. | ||
| You know, it's just like a big, it's a big mess. | ||
| So I think it's unfair for people to claim that this is your fault if people online do crazy stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I'm getting a couple comments in here cause I just mentioned Phil, | ||
| that you maybe called him alt-right once? | ||
| I've never called Phil alt-right. | ||
| Unless I was also very drunk and forgot that, too. | ||
| It's always a possibility. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I gotta stop the drug tweeting. | ||
| Okay, there you go. | ||
| This is the proof that I'm reading all this stuff live. | ||
| All right, let's jump back to Patreon. | ||
| Oh, I love this question. | ||
| Lacey, what do you think about the war on context and satire that's going on in our culture now? | ||
| It's no coincidence that you're laughing a lot more with your new friends. | ||
| I completely agree with that. | ||
| And one of the reasons that I've been so frustrated with the left is they've become so hysterical that they're not funny anymore. | ||
| Comics used to be thought of as... No laughing allowed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No laughing allowed. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| What does that mean, though? | ||
| Like, what's the real question there? | ||
| Like, I think the context is... Well, that I think that the... I guess that the hysteria and the war on words and political correctness has now made it so that people are afraid to laugh. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or that even if you're 100% for trans people, but you can still be afraid to make a joke that then, you know, they pin you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I think that that is a side effect of this problem. | ||
| That's actually a big side effect because people need to laugh. | ||
| People need to relax and have a good time. | ||
| And even if they say something that's like a little bit fucked up, stop acting like that's causing genocide. | ||
| You know, like it's not, we go from zero to a thousand, like so quick, and it's like, look, I agree that jokes, like something I've talked about a lot is rape jokes, right? | ||
| I agree that there's sort of this insidious thing that can underlie some jokes, like jokes that are like, ha ha, you got raped. | ||
| You know, for me, as someone who has experienced sexual violence, it makes me uncomfortable. | ||
| I don't think that people should not be able to say rape jokes, or that they can never be funny. | ||
| I just think, you know, one, don't expect everyone to laugh all the time. | ||
| But also, let's lighten up a little bit, because sometimes the comedy can be healing, you know? | ||
| That's the purpose of comedy. | ||
| I mean, that is literally the purpose of comedy. | ||
| Sex question from Super Chat. | ||
| What do you think of men who would identify as straight who are attracted to people who cross-dress? | ||
| So just to be clear for people, that's not transgender people. | ||
| Just wearing different clothes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's interesting that they worded people who cross-dress. | ||
| So that means he might be attracted to a man who's dressing like a woman or a woman who's dressing like a man. | ||
| What about it? | ||
| Cool. | ||
| I mean, get it. | ||
| Yeah, go get it, go get it. | ||
| Go to town. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hey Lacey, any tips on dealing with the closed-mindedness on campus? | ||
| I'd love to hear you and Dave come speak at my school together. | ||
| Let us know what school it is and maybe we can set that up. | ||
| You do some stuff at schools, right? | ||
| I've done a lot at schools. | ||
| That was my life for the last five years. | ||
| That's how I've paid my bills and stuff, which is why I need to find a job now. | ||
| Did you see a change in the five years? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| I'd say the campuses were, like, one of the main places that I started to see a lot of this stuff. | ||
| Campus and online. | ||
| Okay, online is the main place. | ||
| I should correct that. | ||
| But campuses, yes. | ||
| You know, there's a really high level of sensitivity and it made me really nervous to, like, say anything or do something wrong. | ||
| Some of these schools that I've walked into that have very, very ultra-left reputations have been terrifying and they've some of these students | ||
| have treated me like dog shit like absolutely and it's like wow i'm here like talking about | ||
| the things we both care about you know these students have attacked me just like crazy | ||
| stuff um i i am worried about that because academia is a place to question | ||
| It's a place to really be pressed, you know? | ||
| And to really be pushed on how you see things, to really learn how to think. | ||
| That's what college is about. | ||
| It's not about what you learn. | ||
| It's about learning how to critically evaluate information. | ||
| You learn how to do research, you learn how to argue with different ideas, you read different philosophers and things that are wild and out there. | ||
| And you learn how to think about, you know, evaluate what they're saying. | ||
| If we don't do that in academia anymore, if that's discouraged in some way because we can't hear a speaker because it might hurt some feelings, might be controversial, if that isn't happening anymore, what the hell is the point of going to college? | ||
| And I don't think this is a really widespread problem. | ||
| I think this is spreading, though. | ||
| There's the little seeds around. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's gone past the seed point at this point. | ||
| I might be a little bit like... I don't see it quite the same way as you. | ||
| Because my experience is that a lot of the schools that I go to don't care. | ||
| I'd say it's like an 80-20 split. | ||
| Most of the schools I've been to, it's fine, whatever. | ||
| But 20% are just like... | ||
| And maybe that's just the identity of the school, you know? | ||
| If you want to go to an ultra-conservative or ultra-liberal school, go right ahead. | ||
| Is it the best education for you? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But that's your decision. | ||
| And yet, in a bizarre twist, a school like Evergreen State, that's a lefty, lefty, lefty school, is now having all of these free speech problems and racial problems and all that. | ||
| He prepared for it to eat his soul. | ||
| Right, exactly, there you go. | ||
| I think you answered this, but it's very pointed here already. | ||
| Do you, this is super chat, do you regret the fuck white America Trump tweet? | ||
| Do you actually regret it? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I don't regret it. | ||
| I mean, I don't think anybody should regret things they say unless it causes violence. | ||
| And all I did was hurt feelings. | ||
| You drunkenly tweeted something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And in the words of the right, fuck your feelings! | |
| There you go. | ||
| Superchat, what is your opinion when non-black people use the n-word? | ||
| Um, I am, personally, I don't like it. | ||
| I don't tell people what to say. | ||
| If we're in a context where it's, like, inappropriate, I will say something, you know, because sometimes it's not appropriate. | ||
| I'm not a fan of the n-word, you know? | ||
| I just am not. | ||
| I don't think it's, like, a good, nice word. | ||
| But look, say whatever the fuck you want. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| I'm with you, sister. | ||
| Patreon, have you looked into the effect hormonal contraceptives have on the brain slash behavior? | ||
| I feel like it's something which isn't talked about enough and there aren't many studies on it either except in the field of evolutionary psychology. | ||
| This one's going a little above my pay grade. | ||
| I'm not sure exactly what they're referring to, but we already know that hormonal birth control isn't the healthiest, greatest thing for most people. | ||
| For some people, it treats medical conditions, and it does prevent pregnancy. | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| But, you know, there are always... These are medications. | ||
| You know, they're imperfect. | ||
| When they say hormonal, is that like the pill? | ||
| Well, there's the pill, and there's the patch, and there's the ring, and there's lots of different hormonal types. | ||
| Most are hormonal, actually. | ||
| You've only got the copper IUD is non-hormonal. | ||
| Condoms are non-hormonal. | ||
| Fertility awareness is non-hormonal. | ||
| Um, what do you think, Patreon again, what do you think about teaching of identities, sexual, gender, racial, in public classrooms before high school? | ||
| That's interesting, because a lot of the stuff that you talk about, it's kind of like, where is the moment where it's right to talk about it? | ||
| Wait, talking about identities? | ||
| What do you think about the teaching of identities, meaning teaching about sexual identity | ||
| or gender identity, et cetera, in public classrooms before high school? | ||
| So you're basically, I think, asking, when is it okay to really take a young person | ||
| and talk about this stuff that might confuse them? | ||
| Well, I guess sexual identity, gender identity. | ||
| I think that's a little more specific than just sex ed in general. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| Well, I would see that as couched within sex ed. | ||
| Like in sex ed, we talk about people who are gay and people who are trans, right? | ||
| I would say middle school is a good time, but the key is not to, one of the things that I've seen rightful panic happen on the more right side of, the politically right side of things, is like the imposition of, like suggesting to kids that you are this, Like, that's where I think the real fear comes from. | ||
| And good sex ed is not, it's not that at all. | ||
| It's just like, hey, some people are gay. | ||
| You know, they have dicks and they like dicks. | ||
| And some people are, you know, straight and they, you know, have penises and vaginas. | ||
| Yay. | ||
| And some people are trans. | ||
| This is just a thing. | ||
| So when you see someone who's holding hands with a man in public, don't freak out. | ||
| I have a great idea for a YouTube video that you have to do. | ||
| You need to do a video of something like, like the sex ed teacher who's over it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, just like who has said this shit so much that it's like, yes, some people have dicks and they are dicks and she likes vaginas, what do you want me to do? | ||
| Like, just over it, you know? | ||
| I feel like I've been over it since I was like 15. | ||
| Like, whatever! | ||
| Just let people live! | ||
| Just whatever. | ||
| But that, in a way, it's the kind of funny thing of what you do, because these issues, and there's always gonna be new young people that need to learn about these things. | ||
| You can only find X amount of new ways to say them and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| I mean, I'll just keep saying it. | ||
| A lot of what I say is just saying the same thing over and over and over again. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| That's part of educating. | ||
| This is super chat with the Rolling Stone UVA rape scandal. | ||
| Has your position on listen and believe changed with regards to the rape accusations? | ||
| So I suspect maybe you did a video that you were you you did believe it at first, which most people did. | ||
| That was, like, the crazy Rolling... I think I'm thinking of the right thing. | ||
| Like, there was the story that the Rolling Stone journal... I think there was, like, some journalistic ethics issues there. | ||
| They had, like, inserted some... I don't know if I'm remembering this right. | ||
| Well, I think that, if I'm not mistaken, the Rolling Stone one, I think, was Duke University, and it turned out not to have happened. | ||
| I think I'm looking different. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't remember. | |
| There's too many! | ||
| All right, so for the record, since we're a little unclear exactly, but has your position on listen and believe changed regards to rape accusations? | ||
| So let's just do it at the broader level. | ||
| I'd say generally not, but I will acknowledge that there is more nuance to these issues. | ||
| I just think it's really difficult to figure out how to navigate all of that. | ||
| But I do think in general, when someone comes forward about sexual assault, it's not my place to doubt, question, or probe them. | ||
| Be the arbiter of the truth. | ||
| As a crisis counselor, you know, someone who's worked in rape crisis counseling centers and these kinds of things, we listen and we believe what they're saying. | ||
| We do what we can to support them. | ||
| Of course, due process is very important. | ||
| Of course, you know, all these things that are in place to ensure the delivery of justice in our system should be there. | ||
| Yeah, and in a day and age of Twitter and everything else, that is a huge piece of this. | ||
| misuse of the system, and I think that it should be a punishable crime to lie about these things, | ||
| especially if you ruin someone's reputation. | ||
| Yeah, and in a day and age of Twitter and everything else, that is a huge piece of this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Even some of these kids that I don't think their intentions are that bad. | ||
| They accidentally say, oh, this guy did this. | ||
| You know, like, maybe I'm giving them I don't know, sometimes they go to the internet because they don't know where else to go. | ||
| It's really complicated, you know, it's really complicated stuff. | ||
| But of course these issues are always, you know, there's many, there's many things to consider and I try to do that the best I can without being an asshole to rape survivors, you know. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Superchat, do you think that the similar suicide rates for pre-op and post-op trans people indicate that perhaps such methods of therapy are not effective or beneficial? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| So I can't swear that the rates are true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What, you're not Google Dave? | ||
| I'm not Google here. | ||
| If that is true, I would say that suggests that maybe there does need to be better treatment. | ||
| Or, I don't know, that's complicated. | ||
| I'm not sure how I feel about that. | ||
| I need to think on it. | ||
| All right, fair enough. | ||
| Superchat, Lacey, I wanted to get your impression of the Huffington Post article about you written by Kelsey Ingram. | ||
| By the way, loved your BDSM sex ad vid. | ||
| So I don't know what the article's referring to. | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I have no, there's honestly been so many hit pieces about me at this point, calling me an outright Nazi, calling me a white supremacist, calling me a transphobe who hates black people. | ||
| Like every, every liberal, like every liberal hammer that could be nailed has been done. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| Isn't it funny how you become numb to that stuff? | ||
| Literally, the first thing I saw when I looked at my phone this morning was a good friend of mine who's been a guest on the show said, oh, this guy who we both know wrote a hit piece about you this morning, and he didn't link me to it, and I was like, whatever it is, I don't care. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, why would I care what some randos on the internet have to say about what I have to do? | ||
| Obviously, if you think that's true, you're not paying any attention to what I'm saying or doing at all, and in that case, you're not educated, you're ignorant, you're hate-mongering, and I don't care what you think. | ||
| She's on it. | ||
| Lacey, do you think it's immoral to lie about your biological sex to potential sexual partners if you're a post-op transsexual? | ||
| To lie about it? | ||
| So you're a post-op transsexual, meaning you've transitioned from, let's say, a man to a woman, and now you're the man, let's say it's a heterosexual relationship, the man now thinks that you were always, my language is not good, you were always a woman, or what would be the better way to say that? | ||
| Right, the man sees you as another man, maybe? | ||
| Oh wait, post-op? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They said post-op? | ||
| Post-op. | ||
| So are we talking about, like, genital reconstruction? | ||
| Well, I guess the thrust of it was that if you have fully transitioned and you meet someone, I guess the question really is, do you have to tell them? | ||
| Right, if you by all other measures present as a woman, or whatever. | ||
| I don't think the question is, do you have to tell them? | ||
| It's just like, what does good communication about our sexual histories look like, and about who we are, you know? | ||
| I don't think there should necessarily be a law, like, you need to tell me, you know? | ||
| Because, like, why? | ||
| I don't know that I see the real harm that that causes besides someone having Like, I don't know. | ||
| Being uncomfortable with it, I guess? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we should not, we should tell things, before you have sex with someone, you should tell them the things that may potentially make them uncomfortable. | ||
| That's sort of my policy. | ||
| And all people should be talking about stuff. | ||
| If you have had any STIs before, or, you know, maybe you're into something that's a little weird, don't just spring it on me! | ||
| Like, tell me first! | ||
| All those things should be talked about first. | ||
| And I think that if we create a world where it's more acceptable for trans people, it's more acceptable for them to move through the world and be seen as legitimate, valid human beings, it'll be easier to talk about. | ||
| Because you're not scared of someone violently attacking you. | ||
| Because they are transphobic. | ||
| And that's what transphobia is, right? | ||
| Is the violent attacks. | ||
| Because you feel like you have been threatened by their existence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you watch Transparent by any chance? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I just watched it over the last couple months. | ||
| I'm not caught up on it, by the way. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Then I don't want to say anything else. | ||
| But I think there's so much that when you, by the time you get to the end, you're going to be like, holy cow, it's so related to your story in a way. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because there's so much, because they do turn, they don't, it's not a SJW fest, which you, When I started watching it, I was like, oh, I'm going to end up hating this because they're going to be pushing all this stuff and all the language stuff. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| They actually make fun of a lot of the hysterics. | ||
| That's a good pitch to finish it up. | ||
| That's all I will say. | ||
| Got my Netflix outline. | ||
| Ah, my buddy ThatGuyT, he says, hi babes, do you believe that the hyper sexualization slash objectification of women in hip hop to be sex positive or sex negative? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... I think that's a difficult question. | |
| I think it sort of depends on... I think some women... | ||
| Kind of feel like that, like to feel sexy in those contexts or whatever. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| So I would say that's sex positive. | ||
| I think what's sex negative is if the only place for women in hip hop is to be a sexy background dancer. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like if we have all the hip hop and it's always like the dude at the center and then sexy ladies dancing around him, that's where, you know, the problem lies. | ||
| Because obviously not every single woman is going to want to be a backup dancer. | ||
| She might want to be the rapper too. | ||
| Have you changed your stance on the wage gap, given the overwhelming evidence pointing towards perfectly reasonable and non-sexist systemic or otherwise factors? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's a great place for you to talk to Christina Huff-Sommers. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Who really opened my eyes to that stuff. | ||
| She does probably the best work that I've seen on that. | ||
| Yeah, I've done more digging into it. | ||
| I still think, the research still shows a wage gap, but it does show that there is a much more complicated picture than the sort of 77 cents to a dollar Okay, this is super chat, this one seems to be going deep. | ||
| From a biological perspective, how to intersex conditions invalidate the sex binary classifications any more than trisomy 21 invalidates homo sapien classification, a disorder doesn't do that. | ||
| I have to be 100% honest, I'm not sure what... | ||
| I know what they're talking about. | ||
| Can you clean that up for me? | ||
| Yeah, so I think they're asking, they're saying intersex is not a third sex. | ||
| You know, you have sex, it's these two poles, you have male and female, and intersex doesn't say that there's not a sex binary any more than, I think, is it Down syndrome? | ||
| Any more than like different conditions say something about humans. | ||
| What was the end of that question? | ||
| Any more than trisomy 21 invalidates, quote, homo sapien classification. | ||
| Oh, maybe trisomy 21 is a different disorder. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But the point is, how does intersex say there's not a sex binary? | ||
| I'm not saying there isn't a sex binary. | ||
| I just think that even binaries are on spectrums. | ||
| It is a binary, but there's also, like, some in-between area, right? | ||
| Like, man and woman, or male and female, for instance, they are, most people fall into these categories. | ||
| But there are some people who are not squarely one or the other, that's just the reality of it. | ||
| So, while sex is generally a binary, there are exceptions to the rule. | ||
| And that doesn't mean that sex isn't generally a binary, it just means that there are exceptions to the rule. | ||
| There seems to be a theme here about tolerance and exceptions to rules and like, it's okay to- Life is more complicated than we like to think of it. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Patreon, how does Laci feel about all the research that shows a clear relationship between people who engage in promiscuous premarital sex and cohabitation are far more likely divorced as adults? | ||
| Is there no place in education for morality, particularly sex education? | ||
| Do you have no obligation to modify your advice if it's doing harm? | ||
| That's kind of interesting. | ||
| I don't know that that is the research. | ||
| And if it is, we have to contextualize that research. | ||
| People are getting divorced more now, period. | ||
| When women earned the right to initiate a divorce a few decades ago, divorces went way up. | ||
| There's all these things that affect that. | ||
| And I think people see marriage as less sacred than they may have before. | ||
| People are more willing to prioritize their happiness. | ||
| If they're not in a relationship with someone that they like, They get divorced. | ||
| And the people who cohabitate, in this instance, they've been together for a while, they may eventually realize that they're not, you know, the ones who cohabitate are probably more likely to split up if they're not happy. | ||
| They cohabitate first, they've already been together for a while. | ||
| It makes sense that they might have higher divorce rates. | ||
| It doesn't mean it's because they're morally failing, in my opinion. | ||
| I just think that's an overly simplistic way of thinking of it. | ||
| Whereas I would see it as, well, people are just doing what they want more. | ||
| And that's good. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| You got 15 more minutes in you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Alright, 15 more minutes. | ||
| We're going to bludgeon you with more questions and then we're going to do a rapid fire just for patrons after that real quick. | ||
| What is your opinion about the intersection between religion and feminism? | ||
| For example, the rise of Mormon feminists such as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Jonah Brooks, etc. | ||
| Would you talk to them? | ||
| Yes, I would talk to them. | ||
| I think religion needs feminism badly. | ||
| Religion is like, Abrahamic religion, I should specify. | ||
| Abrahamic religion is very patriarchal. | ||
| If we want to talk about a patriarchy, if feminists want to complain about a patriarchy, that is it. | ||
| That is literally it. | ||
| Women are not allowed to be leaders, know your place, can't talk to God, all this stuff. | ||
| So I would say, do it. | ||
| Bring the feminism to religion. | ||
| It really needs it. | ||
| Superchat, should we respect the identity of the trans-abled who identify as someone with less limbs and often seek to cripple themselves? | ||
| So I know that that sort of sounds crazy, but there is some movement. | ||
| Have you heard about this? | ||
| A movement of people that want to be trans-abled so that they've gone out of their way to do things to their bodies so that they've harmed themselves? | ||
| Have you heard about this at all? | ||
| No, that sounds really intense. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't doubt that it's a thing. | ||
| I know trans age is a thing, transracial is a thing now. | ||
| The trans question is really interesting, but I don't know about the transabled stuff. | ||
| All right, fair enough. | ||
| Superchat, how do we win the fight for the future of the left? | ||
| Will you support Bernie Sanders in rejecting identity politics? | ||
| It's interesting because I think he really traded in them, then after the election suddenly said, we need to stop doing that. | ||
| But that aside, what do you think about fixing the left? | ||
| Do you think, now that you've so seen what's going on, do you think that's a reclamation project that's real? | ||
| Does something new need to jump out of it? | ||
| The identity politics stuff? | ||
| Well, the left in general. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think it's something that can be fixed? | ||
| All these things that we seem wrong with it? | ||
| Or does something new have to come? | ||
| Or do people have to move more to the center? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel very lost in it. | ||
| I don't really know what can make liberalism liberal again. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| Let me know if you have answers, because I sure as hell don't. | ||
| Laci, what are your thoughts on Antifa slash Black Bloc and their behaviors after the inauguration and during events at universities in SoCal? | ||
| So these guys who dress like Cobra soldiers and they're burning shit and somehow they're the not fascists? | ||
| Yeah, I'm not a fan of Antifa. | ||
| It's not my, it's not my bag. | ||
| I think that anybody who uses violence is, you know, a problem. | ||
| Especially when it's violence because of just things that people think or say. | ||
| It's not violence that you're not retaliating to. | ||
| Antifa isn't retaliating to what Milo Yiannopoulos did. | ||
| They're retaliating to what he said. | ||
| And they're also retaliating by burning a third party thing. | ||
| Burning down Starbucks isn't hurting Milo. | ||
| You're actually helping Milo. | ||
| And also giving my alma mater a bad name, Berkeley. | ||
| It's the center of the free speech movement. | ||
| It has such a legacy and a history, and they've thrown the students under the bus, I would say. | ||
| What years were you at Berkeley? | ||
| I graduated in 2011. | ||
| Did you see the underpinnings of what's going on there now? | ||
| Berkeley has always had a strong history of protest. | ||
| You know, it's very much a part of student life. | ||
| If you have a problem or you want to talk about politics, we protest. | ||
| And it's beautiful. | ||
| It's like, you know, you get together on the weekend and you protest. | ||
| Whatever, you know. | ||
| But the problem, I think, now is that people are using Berkeley as a sort of site of their own political, like outside people are coming to Berkeley and are using it as a, I don't know, they're using it to their advantage. | ||
| When the students Students don't support that shit. | ||
| They don't want their university torn up anymore than anyone else does. | ||
| Nobody wants to be blocked off of the whole quad because some assholes caused a lot of graffiti and damage. | ||
| People did that when I was there, the Antifa people who live in Oakland, the city over. | ||
| They come over to Berkeley, they do the shit, and it always pissed the students off. | ||
| Nobody ever liked that stuff. | ||
| We're peaceful protesters at Berkeley. | ||
| Why didn't the university crack down more, in general? | ||
| On Antibes? | ||
| Yeah, when they come onto campus. | ||
| I mean, there's campus security. | ||
| Why do they allow them there? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Or even the police sites, sometimes you see these people burning things, cops standing right in front of them, and it's like, why aren't you guys doing something? | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Because I feel like the cops in Berkeley are pretty proactive, but they also are very lenient. | ||
| It's a fine line between proactive and lenient. | ||
| I mean, look at it this way. | ||
| Sometimes they'd see burning a flag or starting fires as free speech. | ||
| That is the Berkeley free speech. | ||
| It is very, very lenient. | ||
| And people see that as, oh, the cops aren't doing anything, the university isn't doing anything. | ||
| It's like, well, no, we just I'm trying to think of who... Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| starts to hurt people, that's where shit goes down. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| Do you think that, oh, this is good. | ||
| Do you think you'll make amends with any other YouTubers the way you did with Sargon? | ||
| I'm trying to think of who, yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| There are a few people that I'd still like to make amends with. | ||
| All right, I like that. | ||
| Um, it's... | ||
| There's been a few questions that sort of have basically said something to the effect of, is there anyone that you wouldn't talk to? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'll talk to anyone. | ||
| And see what happens? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I like it, all right. | ||
| One of the most insulting things to say to another guy is calling them gay. | ||
| Most men also refuse to watch gay porn. | ||
| Does that mean that there's an unconscious rejection to homosexuality that won't change? | ||
| That's interesting, because those are two very different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I feel like the first part of that question is talking about some homophobia, right? | ||
| Like, gay stuff is bad, don't do gay shit, right? | ||
| And then the other side of it, what was the second part of the question? | ||
| Well, about watching porn. | ||
| Most men also refuse to watch gay porn. | ||
| Right, and that's like, does everyone have homosexuality deep down within them? | ||
| And it's like, no. | ||
| Like, some people are gay, some people are straight. | ||
| That's why the transphobia in the bedroom stuff is so silly, because it's like, you're gay or you're straight or whatever, and there's a little fluidity there, and people sort of discover themselves as they age and have new experiences, but... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's like a deep-seated truth about homosexuality so much as it is a deep-seated truth about sexuality, period. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever done anything on sort of the way the gay community has changed? | ||
| Because I've seen a huge shift in the gay community just in the last, you know, I came out late in like my mid to late 20s. | ||
| I'm 41 now, and when the gay community, when I first was sort of going to gay bars and things, like, it was all about this, like, over-the-top political incorrectness, like, craziness, all the drag queens, all that stuff. | ||
| I never liked any of it. | ||
| I always thought, because I thought drag queens were basically bad comedians and I was doing stand-up, so, like, I never was into that, but, like, the political incorrectness and saying crazy shit and doing crazy shit. | ||
| That was encouraged. | ||
| It was encouraged, and now it's very much kind of fallen lockstep, believe what we believe politically. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| How interesting. | ||
| There was a horrific article written about six months ago, written in either The Advocate or one of those things, about how Peter Thiel is not really gay because he doesn't fall into our political beliefs, that it's somehow a political ideology. | ||
| How do these people not see their own hypocrisy? | ||
| You got your gay card revoked for being conservative. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Isn't that something? | ||
| But that's real. | ||
| I mean, that's really real. | ||
| I mean, I've been talking to some older trans people who are like in their 40s and 50s, and it's really interesting because, you know, the trans movement has evolved in a similar way, it sounds like, to the gay. | ||
| I mean, they're kind of side by side, where, you know, people have, their feeling is, people's feelings are hurt way too easily, it's too politically correct now, | ||
| it used to be about fucking the system, now you become the system, this whole thing. | ||
| Which is interesting, you know, and we always look back and romanticize things. | ||
| So those people in their 40s and 50s probably had to live through some pretty horrible shit, | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're like, life is good now, what are you complaining about? | ||
| Isn't that something? | ||
| It tells you about why, the arc of justice. | ||
| Oh, this is a good one because I get some shit on my stance for it and I have no idea what your thoughts are. | ||
| Do you think a bakery should be forced to bake a gay wedding cake for a same-sex wedding even if they believe it is against their religious beliefs? | ||
| So, I don't know how I feel about it exactly, but my initial, you know, I've thought about it a lot, and my initial thing is, why would you want to give money to people who are, like, don't recognize your union, you know, who are assholes? | ||
| Now, you know, just go to a different bakery. | ||
| But, like, we live in LA. | ||
| Like there's nine million bakeries, right? | ||
| So you have a lot of choices so you can vote with your dollars and your cents. | ||
| Where I get a little bit more confused or conflicted is maybe there's only one bakery in your whole town that makes wedding cakes. | ||
| And now because you're gay, you can't have a wedding cake. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, well I understand that line of thinking. | ||
| I don't agree with it because I know it sucks. | ||
| I've said this a thousand times. | ||
| I know it sucks. | ||
| But either go to the town over, Or order a cake on Amazon, or leave that town. | ||
| These are all hard choices. | ||
| I don't say these things with any degree of like, this is the way it should be, or any of that. | ||
| But I think forcing a private company to do something, which then extends the state power over a private business, I just personally wouldn't want that. | ||
| I know it sucks, it's not fun, people give me shit for it, but I just don't think We live in a different time. | ||
| This isn't 1940, where that may have been the only baker within 50 miles. | ||
| And even if you live in a remote place, Amazon does deliver everywhere. | ||
| And just more excuses for state power. | ||
| This is somewhere where I definitely veer a little more libertarian on that, but I understand the good intentions, by the way, of the people that don't agree with me on that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that's a fair point. | ||
| I'll have to think about that. | ||
| All right, we'll do this again and you can give me a fully thought out answer. | ||
| Superchat, given that we're a sexually dimorphic species, how likely do you think it is that the remaining achievement gap between men and women is biological? | ||
| Also, how many shots did you do over the break? | ||
| We didn't do any shots. | ||
| It's a little early in the day and I have two more shows right after this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I don't blame you. | ||
| I don't have very good experiences of being too loose-lipped with the internet. | ||
| You know, we'll do shots another time over dinner or something when it's not on camera. | ||
| We should, when you don't have a super busy day. | ||
| That would be great. | ||
| So the question was, given that we're a sexually dimorphic species, how likely do you think that the remaining achievement gap between men and women is actually biological? | ||
| And I know this can be pretty controversial to some people. | ||
| I am of the—the reason why I'm a feminist is I am of the opinion that, you know, while men and women do have differences—males and females, I should say—do have biological differences that can—that lend themselves to slightly different behavior, with testosterone being slightly more aggressive and, you know, the The oxytocin and the bonding with the baby being the more nurturing hormones, things like that. | ||
| I do think that there are a lot of things that are being, a lot of inequalities for men and women that are being caused by our social environment. | ||
| So I don't think we're there yet. | ||
| And the reason I believe that is because when you look at other countries, it's different. | ||
| Which to me says, this isn't just like, because biology is across the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So if we can observe a difference in a different culture, that means it's not biological. | ||
| That means that it is caused by the culture and the environment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alright. | |
| One more? | ||
| One more. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| One more and I think this sort of will encapsulate a lot of things we've been talking about. | ||
| This is from Patreon. | ||
| Why has third wave feminism turned into this devastating tsunami of unreason? | ||
| Why has it so successfully taken over the PC media discourse the way that it has and how do we fight the unreason and get back to sanity? | ||
| This is hurting young people especially. | ||
| We've sort of talked this out already, but just this whole thing, the way feminism relates to media, relates to online and everything, just give me your best antidote for that. | ||
| The best way to fix it? | ||
| Well, just for you personally, what is your best way of fighting it for someone else that's seeing that right now? | ||
| I think feminists and leftists need to reclaim their causes. | ||
| And you need to stand up to people who are trying to bastardize and distort what we're actually fighting for, who are using shame, censorship, anti-science, manipulation, bullying, all this kind of bullshit to push a political, a radical political agenda. | ||
| I think people who are not down with those kinds of politics need to step up and say something about it. | ||
| Even though it's scary, you might lose friends, you might, you know, have to make sure you're in a place to deal with it, just like my own story. | ||
| Make sure you can deal with it, but do it because Look what's happening! | ||
| This is not going to help liberalism. | ||
| This is not going to help feminists. | ||
| I don't care what they say. | ||
| I do not see this helping anyone. | ||
| All I see is alienation, people getting angry and hostile to things they actually do support. | ||
| All of the antis, every anti-feminist that I've talked to so far, agrees with me on this basic shit about social issues. | ||
| They agree on the, you know, the trans stuff. | ||
| They agree with me on gay rights. | ||
| They agree with me. | ||
| And that's not to say everyone will, but a lot of people, this is just to say, a lot of these outspoken figureheads are turning against this bullshit, and in the process, the real base causes what we're fighting for is being lost. | ||
| And that's why I felt like I had to say something. | ||
| Ultimately. | ||
| It's because, holy shit, all of these people who were all in this together are now fighting over things because of these crazies. | ||
| We gotta distance ourselves from that. | ||
| It's gotten too out of control. | ||
| For a lot of reasons, but... | ||
| I would, my advice is to say something, be polite, be respectful, be willing to question that you could be wrong, be willing to check your privilege, alright? | ||
| But at the end of the day, you know, stand up for what is good and right, and what will actually make this world a better place. | ||
| Well, that seems like a pretty perfect ending. | ||
| I thoroughly enjoyed these two hours. | ||
| This has been fun. | ||
| I'm glad we made it happen. | ||
| Yeah, well, me too. | ||
| And I knew that I was going to enjoy it, but I love seeing someone that the personal part of this matches up with the public part and someone that's on there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I appreciate that. | |
| That's on their own adventure too, that's what it's all about, and can show some vulnerability and want to figure out what the best way to go forward is. | ||
| We're gonna do five more minutes just for patrons. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And thank you so much. | ||
| You guys know where to find her on YouTube already, so that would be even silly for me to do any more pimping than that. | ||
| Thank you to Lacey. | ||
| And we are gonna be live. | ||
| I got a crazy date today. | ||
| We are gonna be live with Eric Weinstein, one of my good buddies and probably the smartest guy I know. | ||
| We're doing that at, I believe it's 1.30 p.m. | ||
| Pacific? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eastern. | |
| 1.30 p.m. | ||
| Pacific Eastern, 1.30 p.m. Eastern? | ||
| 1.30 Pacific, sorry, I got a craze. | ||
| 130 PM Pacific. | ||
| I'm live with Eric Weinstein right here. | ||
| I'm also interviewing economist Pia Mullaney later today, but that's gonna be up in a couple of weeks. | ||
| And thank you guys for watching this. |
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