Have We Reached Peak Stupidity? - Destiny (4K)

Destiny is a streamer and a YouTuber. It's hard to work out what's happening in the world. It's difficult to work out if what you see or hear or read is truthful. So are people actually becoming dumber or is it a normal response to a confusing environment? Expect to learn what the future of media might look like, why being tribal is so dangerous, whether we have passed peak wokeness, Destiny’s thoughts on the 2024 election, if the red pill movement is dead or not, what Destiny thinks about his most recent ADHD diagnosis, his reaction to the internet chiming in on his divorce and much more... - 00:00 Destiny’s Experience on Piers Morgan 01:24 What is the Future of Mainstream Media? 10:40 The Death of Sub-Groups 15:53 Reflecting on the Bud Light Scandal 25:57 Are We More Bothered About Ridiculing Than Finding Truth? 36:05 What is the Point of Debating? 41:15 Have We Passed Peak Woke? 49:54 Reacting to Google’s Gemini AI Disaster 1:00:05 Is the Left More Unified Than the Right? 1:04:36 What Destiny Thinks of Alex Jones 1:07:15 The Downfall of the Red Pill Movement 1:12:52 Impact of Destiny’s ADHD Diagnosis 1:21:25 The Public Criticism of Destiny’s Relationship 1:25:44 Explaining Destiny’s Beef with Vaush 1:27:46 The Downsides of Being a Streamer 1:34:10 Pros & Cons of Going to College 1:38:41 Predicting the US Election 1:48:30 Society is Searching for Authenticity 1:53:42 Content Reflects What People Click On 2:02:39 What’s Next for Destiny - Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You just did Piers Morgan.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Well, it was like a live segment from this morning. Sure, yeah.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah. How was that? Is that the first time you've spoken to him?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:08Chris Williamson?

  All right. What did you think?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  It was okay. It could have been way worse. It could have been way better. They brought me in. It was a segment on like, the differences between like Trump and Biden and their senility. Basically, is Biden's senility going to be a huge problem? And my opposite person is like Tommy Lauren, and it's a very much like mainstream media opinion or mainstream media appearance. So it's like, give me your like 30 second splurge, give me your 30 second splurge and the next question. And I hate that back and forth like drives me crazy. So.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, it says everything that we're having a discussion about who is the most senile among all of the different politicians that might influence the future.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  What a world.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, the voters only have themselves to blame. So.

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  That's true. But then I guess you can only vote for the people that are there.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  No, there's a lot of people to vote for. These are the two most popular ones. I think that the system is delivering the people that have the widest support right now. Yeah.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  People, they might not be universally liked, but you only have to have a plurality of the support to make it through. Like, people are looking at you like, ah, I guess, like, sure. But people might not like them. Like 80% of people might not like Biden or 80% of people might not like Trump. But those 80% of people don't all agree on who should run instead. So that's.

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah, interesting. I wonder if people could coordinate better, whether or not you would have better outcomes.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  Vice Media shutting down, no longer publishing. Have you seen this?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Are they shutting down or are they just not going to publish articles on that website anymore?

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  That's technically what it is. In a memo to Vice employees Thursday, CEO Bruce Dixon said that the company will be cutting several hundred jobs in the next week as part of its major restructuring. Vice will discontinue publishing content to its own website. And instead, we'll put more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly. What do you think?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Cool, I guess. Does anybody read like website stuff from Vice? I feel like they were most known for the YouTube video content, like the investigative journal stuff. I should know the lady's name. I wish I did, but she does really cool stuff. I remember she went to China to investigate the weaker stuff.

• 2:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  She like, she does a lot of cool stuff. There are a couple of cool things on Vice in terms of what I've seen for video content. I don't read their website as much, so I don't know.

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  I mean, Vice is one of those things where when you do see articles shared, it's usually like rage sharing. You know, white people can't suffer racism or like some, something that seems to be purposefully there, almost like rage trigger people to click on it.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:25Chris Williamson?

  But I have definitely enjoyed me some Vice.

• 2:29Chris Williamson?

  Mini documentaries, 20 minute, 30 minute lunchtime viewing things on YouTube. I've seen one, there's a bunch that they do about party culture in the UK about like aging ragers, ravers, like people still doing drugs in their 50s, 60s, 70s, like classic Larry British people.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:44Chris Williamson?

  So that's good, but I don't know, I just wonder, you know, you just did Piers Morgan. Tucker Carlson has left his sort of mainstream credentials behind and moved independent. Piers is leaving Talk TV and going to basically be a full time YouTuber essentially, although it'll probably be a little bit more advanced than that. I don't know, it just seems like there's some interesting movements. Maybe it's more so in the video side of things, but you know, that was Vice's written content and that's been pivoted. What do you think? What's the state of modern media landscape and what do you think's in the future?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  I don't know, it's different from different perspectives. As an, as a content creator, my guess is going to be alternative media is probably a lot more money. Mainstream media is probably a lot more exposure, that'd be my guess. In terms of are we moving towards a more alternative media landscape where everybody is consuming alternative media? That's kind of already happening or has already happened in some ways. Mainstream media has kind of integrated itself into alternative media. So people might get all of their, for instance, their news through Facebook or Twitter, but that might be coming in the form of headlines from mainstream media publications.

• 3:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  I would definitely say it feels like we've moved past, especially with Tucker Carlson leaving. It feels like we've moved past the age of the pundit. Where you had these like huge, like larger than life figures, like the Anderson Coopers, the, um, the Tucker Carlsons, the Bill O'Reillys, the Jon Stewart, I guess is back now.

• 4:04Chris Williamson?

  He's just pivoted back, yeah. Well, he tried to go to Apple and there was some editorial differences, I think, that caused issues at Apple and then he'd wanted to bring up some stuff to do with China and that wasn't allowed. And yeah, he ended up basically going full circle back to somewhere that oddly had more freedom, or at least editorial freedom, I think, as far as he was concerned.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I have no idea with a I think we have huge issues in our media landscape right now. I don't think they're necessarily tied into mainstream versus alternative, but I know that that's where everybody's fixated on.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  What is the what should people be more concerned about then with regards to media landscape?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Epistemic grounding. We live in like completely different worlds more today than we ever have. And it's probably true every single day that our factual understanding of the world has diverged so much between the different like groups that it's becoming unworkable, or maybe has already become unworkable, such that I think I think it was finally when the Jewish space lasers were clearing out real estate for Oprah in Hawaii that I realized I was like, oh, my God, nothing can happen anymore as it is. There we're we're past anything ever happening that just happens. There are going to be no more normal plane crashes. There are going to be no more diseases. There are going to be no more vaccines. It's all going to be a conspiracy. It's all going to be a secret missile attack. It's all going to be a secret Jewish super weapon. It's all going to be a secret Bill Gates microchip.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Like, nothing can happen anymore without it being part of some grand narrative or grand design, which I think is really sad.

• 5:33Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Why?

• 5:38Chris Williamson?

  Like, what's the undercurrent that's driving that? Is it just a multiplicity of different people being able to comment on it? Is it the fact that free access to information means that everyone has a different perspective on the same story? Is it the fact that there's no centralized flow of information, which is giving someone like the narrative?

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Somebody sent me an email a while ago that I thought was really interesting. I think it was just his idea. I think he called it like the magic box idea or something. And basically, I think as humans, we become further and further separated from the actual things that are happening with everything that we interact with. So for instance, if I do the oldest example, you've probably like an abacus, right?

• 6:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah. Like, I can see the math happening there. I know exactly what's happening. You can't lie to me about an abacus, okay? If I have a calculator, it's a relatively simple device. It only does math. I can see exactly what's going on. As the devices become more and more complicated and you become less and less aware of what's happening under the hood, it becomes easier for you to insert more. Random stuff that you're not aware of. So like, nobody thought that an abacus would track you. Nobody really thought a calculator would. But is your phone tracking you? Is it listening to every single word you're saying, even with no evidence presented for any of these ideas, which there never has been, that your phone is secretly listening to you and recording stuff and blah, blah, because a lot of people on tech sites have like, tried to investigate this, people still think it. And I think that that example with phones can be blown up to literally everything, from carbureted to fuel-injected cars, from bureaucratic

• 6:59Speaker 01

  organizations that might just like manage a local level thing to the FDA that does, you know, vaccine approval on a nationwide level, from, from literally every single thing in our life, things that we used to look at and kind of understand, things have gotten so, so, so complicated, that I think that people are kind of starting to fill in the blanks very easily and quickly with a lot of other stuff. There's no real way to like argue against them, you know?

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  Ah, and you will slot into it, stuff that just fits your priors, your biases, some half-remembered truth, or some whim or hearsay.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:29Chris Williamson?

  And you just sort of throw this into the workings. The abacus example, whoever gave you that's, that's a really smart.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  I thought of that on the spot.

• 7:36Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 7:36Speaker 01

  You got a destiny, original, no, that was me. You got a destiny, original analogy, right on the spot, okay?

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  This is some real shit, right here. But no, yeah, it's, you can see the working, you can see, step by step, what's laid out in front of you. But people weren't given the workings of what was happening in government, or in war, or in news previously, there was still a degree of opaqueness to what was happening. So what is it that's different between 100 years ago and now?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  I think that ironically enough, the people that seem to have the biggest problems with liberalism, with like, freedom and everything, so I'd say the anti-institutional people that are like, well, we need to bring back religion, and kind of like conservative social values, whatever, I think that they've, to some extent, fallen to be the biggest victims of, I hate to say this, because I'm a liberal, like, too much liberalism, too much freedom, and that there's probably some important guardrails that kind of keep us in track or in check about like, how we need to live our life. Like, in a given, like, tribe, it's probably good if there's like, shame around like, eating poop, or having like, sexual attraction towards children, or trying to stab and kill somebody. Like, there are some socially cohesive elements that are good, that we all kind of like enforce these things, to kind of keep everybody a little bit in line.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Whereas today, because we have so much freedom with the internet, which is the thing that has changed our life more than anything else in the past 20 and 30 years, nobody wants to talk about it. They just talk about it's either feminism, or it's red pill, or it's space lasers, or it's Biden and the deep state. But the internet has dramatically changed in such a quick time period. It's such a quick time period, right? When I was in grade school, cell phones didn't really exist, not really, not like they do today.

• 9:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, same.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Things have changed so much, and now people have the ability to select for their world way more than they ever did, and that is incredibly damaging because there's some amount of friction that is incredibly healthy for the human mind. It's good to be able to step into a room, but look, look at like grade school or high school or college. Everybody manages to make friends, but it's not because they all swiped right on each other to get the perfect match of qualities, just because when humans spend time together, they learn to ease the friction and they kind of get along with each other. But now that we have the ability to hyper-select for every single fucking thing that we want, it is, I think it's incredibly damaging to the human mind because it lets us select for too many things that we no longer have to become comfortable with. Like an example I would use is that like, you know, if 30 years ago, if I really wanted to fuck my toaster, I'm probably not going to fuck it that much, I'm probably not going

• 9:58Speaker 01

  to talk about it that much, absolutely not. And I don't even know if I'd be able to find like, like anybody or any camaraderie, it would just be really rough. But today, I could probably type in like toaster fucking recommendations and get like the top 10 models ranked from like quickest to slowest orgasm for like toasters that I want to fuck. And now I've got like a whole world of people that all support my toaster fucking ambitions. And that's, it's funny for the toaster fucking thing, but when we talk about like vaccines, or COVID, or education, or the FDA, or the deep state, or Andrew Tate, or any of these things, well, now it gets like really scary. And that's the world we're in, where you can select for your reality, rather than having to deal with the reality that might not be as much fun to deal with.

• 10:36Chris Williamson?

  Right. So it allows echo chambers to continue to propagate. There was something, you may have seen this, someone explained where emos went, and they basically talked about the lack of development of subgroups that they kind of come together briefly and then sort of fracture off into other, I mean, you'll remember like emos and goths and like there was- Genuine cemented subgroups, maybe they only existed for five years or something, but they were there, right? There was like an actual, they had an identity and they had dress and they had all the rest of this stuff. But I wonder whether the sort of universality of everybody trying to optimize for the same things, which is really like clicks and attention online, no matter who you are, even if you're just like some normie person that that wants to have like more fans and more friends on Instagram and be more popular in school

• 11:20Chris Williamson?

  or have a better Snapchat streak or whatever the hell it is. I wonder whether there is something about this universal currency of status where everyone eventually has to play that game because there's only a few routes to be able to be successful within that one thing. And the same thing is going to be true of your ability to sense make, like there's only so many different paths that you can have to be able to reach that or to be able to be successful as a fucking newscaster or to be able to be successful and catch attention online. So I wonder, I wonder how much of this is just people trying to, trying to make sense of the world. And instead, what they do is find things that confirm their biases and then just sit and steep in those groups. But for some reason, it doesn't seem to cohesive in the same way that it used to.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  That's, it's really interesting you say that because I have another theory or idea on how society is like kind of falling apart, not falling apart, splitting apart. And it plugs into that perfectly. And that I think that people aren't fundamentally different today than they have been for the past hundred thousand years. We're all humans. We have more or less the same.

• 12:16Chris Williamson?

  Raw materials.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the biggest thing that I think has changed, there's two things happening right now in that we're becoming more separated than we ever have been and more similar than we ever have been. And the way that I feel like this is working is people are withdrawing into two separate groups that are enforcing within these groups, an insane amount of homogeneity. And I think the reason why this is happening is because it feels like our communities have gotten larger and larger and larger and larger and larger. So for instance, it might be that maybe 30 or 40 years ago, maybe I super identify with the kids in my neighborhood, you know, because when I was growing up, the people that you hung out with was whoever you could walk to, or when you were old enough, whoever you could bike to. This is your community. These are the people that you hang out with. You develop ideas, you develop intense, at least for me, like high school rivalries

• 13:01Speaker 01

  between football teams, between like, yeah, that like, that's like your community. And then when you get a little bit older, maybe you identify as an adult with your neighborhood, maybe you identify with a city that you're in or a political group in your city or sports team or whatever. I think that these were, maybe it might be like older, it might've been like churches or unions that you're in.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  These are the things that I think people identified with and they have, they enforce a lot of homogeneity in these groups, which is probably normal to some extent, right? You're gonna want people around you to be very similar. That's just normal.

• 13:27Chris Williamson?

  You hang around with people that align with who you are.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And that could mean appearance and race. It could mean ideology. It could be, yeah, it could be a billion different things. People relate on a lot of levels. It could be religion. But today, what's happened is the internet has made it so that the smaller groups are not really fun to be in. They don't really feel important. They don't feel impactful or meaningful. So instead, what happens is, is the group that you're belonging to is larger and larger and larger. Forcing homogeneity on a neighborhood that you live in, where I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, is a lot different than forcing homogeneity on, you know, 160 million people in the United States versus the other 160 million people. So to draw back to kind of what you were saying earlier, is that as these groups become larger and larger, it's harder, I think, or it feels like it's harder to have these certain types of subcultures

• 14:14Speaker 01

  and everything, because everybody's part of like this global culture now, which is all enforced by and facilitated by the internet.

• 14:22Chris Williamson?

  Right. And then, but you also, it's interesting that you say both becoming more similar and more different.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that we're getting further apart because these different groups are flying away from each other at the speed of light.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  But within these groups, you have to have a cohesive opinion. You have to have an opinion. If you're, if you work in a warehouse in Alabama, you still have to have an opinion on whether or not Leah Thomas could be an athlete in college, or whether you, you know, if you work in or live in Seattle, you need to have an opinion on AOC, or if you live in LA, you need to have an opinion on whether we should be supporting Ukraine or Israel. And like, yeah, these, the huge global culture has extended beyond the neighborhoods and the churches, everything to include everybody. Yeah, everybody has a phone or the internet.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  The number of things that you need to have an opinion on, or the number of things that you're exposed to has increased. The level of purity and agreement within the group that you need to adhere to in order to not be ostracized by the group has also increased.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  A little bit. I think that is a, I would say that that's probably like an artifact. So it feels like you have to be more pure, but it's not really that you have to be more pure. It's just that there are so many more issues that you probably have to be more

• 15:25Chris Williamson?

  There's more ways to get wrong.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So like, for instance, like 20 years ago, I don't know if there would have been a social group enforcement on like the type of beer that you're drinking. But after the, whatever the trans Bud Light stuff was, or Budweiser stuff was, that might be part of your group now. It's not that they've gotten more pure and that they demand more rigidity to the ideas than they used to. It's that now there are more ideas that you have to adhere to, basically. Yeah. So to appear is like they're more pure, but it's just more stuff that you have to keep in mind, yeah.

• 15:52Chris Williamson?

  I think Bud Light is a really fascinating little canary in the coal mine of sort of modern culture. And I've had a number of conversations about this where when Bud Light happened, it was a huge big deal. Bud Light was almost like a simulacrum for America. It's like, see, this is something that used to be pure and patriotic and it was, it was.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Trucks and eagles and yeah, country music.

• 16:16Chris Williamson?

  See what's happened. These, these wokeness have come along and they've, they've annihilated it and all the rest of it. And then full circle only, when was that? 12 months ago, 18 months ago? It wasn't more than two years ago when that happened with Dylan Mulvaney, right? It was in the last two years. And now you, Kid Rock, the guy that shot the fucking cans with an AR-15 is drinking it on Rogan's.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I bought $10,000 of stock, I think, like the day after all that broke and I, yeah, my.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  It was obvious, like so stupid, right? Yeah, I posted those games on Twitter. It was like, thanks conservatives. Yeah.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  What did it go? Where did you go from and to? How far has that?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't remember what it, I just want to beat that.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  But it's moved, it's moved a good amount.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it just seems to me the speed with which people will thumb finger wave for or against something and then forget the position that they held so vehemently. I really, really have a huge problem with people that are like so adamant that a thing is true. And then only shortly after that are so adamant that a thing is either no longer true or they don't recognize what they said before. Without at least going, ah, do you know what it is? Maybe Bud Light weren't the, you know, like libtard wokeness that I thought that they were. Maybe that was just one malignant marketing campaign that went to, or whatever. Like just show you're working, like show your thinking to take you from where you were to where you are.

• 17:35Chris Williamson?

  Because it just sounds an awful lot like wherever the tide sort of comes in and wherever the tide goes out, that you kind of get ripped along with it. And I don't know, it's one of the reasons why I'm quite skeptical of people who don't caveat much about what they say. If you speak in absolutes, like you better be certain because my. Threshold to speak with that amount of certainty that I know that this company is one thing, or I know that this company is another thing. It's like, it's pretty high. So you either don't know what you're talking about, or have done tons of work, which should be evident in the way that you speak about it.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Uh huh. I have lots of ideas about this. The first thing, the first thing would be a criticism of people in general. It feels like nobody's capable of having a moderate reaction to anything. I'm gonna be honest, when I saw the Bud Light stuff and the, I thought it was cringe. But like, that's not a reaction that people can have anymore. It's either the worst fucking thing in the world, or it's like the most important foundational bedrock part of LGBT. Like, nothing can just be like, oh, that was kinda dumb, or oh, that was kinda cringe, or I kinda like that. It has to be zero to 100. So that's really annoying. A second thing is, uh, let's see, changing opinions, or people that felt like they had strong opinions about one thing that have changed dramatically. These are two things. I talk in my stream a lot about these things. Watching the evolution of my

• 18:48Speaker 01

  parents' beliefs politically has been unreal to me. My dad, my mom and my dad, my mom is from Cuba, so she's a Cuban immigrant, very pro-American people in general, very pro-Republican people. We all cried when Elian Gonzalez got shipped back to Cuba under Bill Clinton and hated him and blah, blah, blah. My mom and dad are very patriotic, okay? 20 years in the Air Force for both of them. My dad, when, if you join the military in the United States, it's probably true in every country in the world. When you join the military, you get a ton of vaccines, okay? You just, they, up and down the line, it's like 20 shots. You don't even know what you're getting injected, right? That's what they do. My dad actually had a vaccine injury, and it is deltoid, such that he can't really raise his arm very well, like, past this level. And that, he gets like, paid disability

• 19:31Speaker 01

  from the Air Force from that. It's a real injury from vaccines, okay? Despite that, when we grew up, you had to get your vaccine. It was a non-negotiable. My mom would never even think for two seconds that like, her children not be vaccinated. It wouldn't, it wouldn't even be a second thought. Today, I think we've had three family members so far die from COVID. My mom will not get any of the COVID shots. And I don't think she trusts any vaccines at all anymore. So the evolution of her belief on that has been crazy. And I'm sure there's a lot of Republicans that have followed the same path. The evolution of the treatment of Russia, when I grew up, I heard all about the ChiComs, the Chinese communists, I heard all about, you know, Red China and the Soviets. She would always refer to Russia as the Soviet Union. And today, for her opinion on, you know, the Russia's like, ah, I guess, whatever, Stevie, but it's not our deal, we don't have to be concerned with it, whatever.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  That's insane to me. The difference in treatment between the demeanor of the president. I remember my mom came home one day and she was crying over the Monica Lewinsky stuff. And I didn't understand it. I was super young at the time. And she was trying to tell me that like, you don't understand, like, the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces. The way that he treats women, that rolls down to everybody. And my commanding officer is going to treat me this way. I already have to deal with all this sexism in the air force. And then for her to listen to those Trump grabbing by the pussy tapes. So she's like, come on, Stevie, boys will be boys. It happens. It's not a big deal, blah, blah, blah. That is, yeah, that, that, yeah, that's wild. Bit of a pivot. Yeah, it's insane to me. Um, there's two, there's two underlying things, or two really important things to keep in mind that have taken me too long to figure out. One is that people don't genuinely generate beliefs from some consistent underlying system.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  They inherit constellations of beliefs that all kind of rely on each other from social groups. So if you join a social group that says, um, like Andrew Tate is innocent, they probably also think that Donald Trump is a victim of the deep state, that there's a swamp that needs to be drained. They think that the election was stolen. They think that the vaccines are fake. They think that space lasers probably did have something to do with Hawaii. Um, they don't trust the FDA. They think that, um, we shouldn't be wasting time with Russia and Ukraine and Putin is probably more on the right than we want to admit. They think like, they have all these beliefs that are part of the constitution. And it's, it's true for the left as well. I'm not like, I'm bullying people on the right, but it's true for the left as well, um, that they have these, these constellations as well. But the, the thing that bothers me the most, and then I'm sorry, I'm wrapping this up. No, not at all. Yeah. The thing that bothers me the most is, um, I did this for a little bit and then I stuck because it was truly depressing.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  I thought that people are just kind of dumb. They don't do any research or homework. You get these like constellations of beliefs and you don't realize how wrong you are. So what I started to do was for big content creators, if you're going to make a big claim and your job is alternative media, bet some fucking money on it. Okay. If you think that Trump is going to win and you're 99% sure, 99%, you should be able to give me not 50 to one odds then on a hundred bucks. You're 99% sure, one to 99. Okay, sure. When I started making bets with people on stuff like that, I expected people to tell me to fuck off, or I expected people to take the bet because they were overconfident. But a third thing started happening that was incredibly surprising to me that actually aligns with, you know, Peter Boghossian? Yes. Yeah, it aligns with a lot of the stuff I've seen him do. Somebody will say something like, Trump is winning the next election 99%. And I'll be like, oh, okay.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Do you want to bet? I'll take $1,000, and if I'm right, you pay me 100 grand. Okay, because you're that confident. And instead of telling me to fuck off, or instead of saying, whatever, what they actually do is, they start to speak, and all of a sudden, I realize they have all the information in their brain. They're like, well, hold on. He could get sick and die. He could have some senility issues. He is old. Maybe for some of the indictments, he might have done stuff. Other stuff could come out. Like, it's not even that they are afraid of the bet, or they're just like, immediately tell me to fuck off. They actually do have the information there. They're capable of exercising the critical thought process. They just don't most of the time because of the social pressures for our belief systems. That was the really, and I stopped doing it. I was like, this is insane.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  Wait, so you know all this? You know all of the reasons why what you said before was dumb? It just took somebody to put a quantitative value on your conviction for you to appropriately scale back your belief? That was crazy. Right. And why was that so depressing to you? Because I was just telling them they were dumb. Not that like, not that they actually had all the information, but they were choosing not to apply it. I remember when I debated Glenn Greenwald recently, who's a hack, who the only reason you've ever heard his name before is because he happened to be the journalist that Edward Snowden went to to dump the Snowden papers. Okay? And we were debating, and he was bringing up, it was over the January 6 Trump stuff, and he was bringing up, I studied his videos, I studied the arguments, I read the papers, I know all the bullshit arguments. And he brings up like, oh, well, there was an elector scheme in Hawaii, and you know, and now they're doing another one, and it's the same thing. And I'm like, hold on.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  The elector scheme in Hawaii, the state legislature approved both those slits of electors. I won't go into the details, but I didn't actually say that. I was like, well, hold on, wait, the Hawaii thing? What do you mean by bringing up the Hawaii thing? And then he actually went into detail about the Hawaii thing. I was like, wait, so you knew what was going on here, but you still brought it up as a comparison? Because once you bring up all the facts, it's completely different from the Trump thing. So yeah, my view on people as like an internet debater, try to change people's minds things has shifted a lot over the years where at first I thought like people are kind of dumb and they are, they fall into a lot of these bad thought processes and thought patterns and cognitive biases and blah, blah, blah. And we do have those, but people are actually a lot smarter than I think people realize. And if you treat a person as smart and you present them with the right information and you try to break them out of like an echo

• 24:41Speaker 01

  chamber or this epistemic circularity that they get caught in, I think people can surprise you. There just has to be that push to do it and a recognition that like you're not misunderstanding this because you're stupid. It's because there's an immense amount of social pressure that's like boxing you into this thought pattern.

• 24:55Chris Williamson?

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• 25:37Chris Williamson?

  box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom. I had this idea called the soft signal of effectiveness that there is a trend on the internet for people to be, you know, the most vehement, like flame sword wielding motherfucker, like I'm going to come for you and I'm going to tear you down. I'm going to make you look stupid. It's going to be filled with sardonic comments and all the rest of it. But I think that that activates whoever you're speaking to's defense system. That's the antibodies just come up. I don't want to be made to look like a complete idiot.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  So I'm just going to stand my ground. And I think that Sure, there's times where ridicule is a useful tool. And you can use that to kind of, oh my god, like that discomfort kind of kicks you out of stuff. But for the most part, because people just embed themselves into their beliefs, especially if the fear is, I'm gonna look stupid or lose status if I get this wrong. That actually going, okay, well, tell me about that. So just walk me through your thinking and being a little bit more gentle. So soft signal of effectiveness being most of the guys that are the the real hardcore vehement piss taking. People, I don't, I don't think that they change behavior particularly well. And the question is, what is it that you're trying to achieve with this communication that you're having?

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  Are you actually trying to get a good outcome of bringing people closer to something appropriating truth? Or are you trying to look cool and dunk on the other person during this discussion?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and then you have to be mindful of so much about like they're changing their mind too. This is something that I kind of bring up, but it feels kind of bad to do this. But like, if I'm debating somebody who, let's say, somebody like Ben Shapiro, okay? Who I respect as an intelligent person, he's clearly intelligent. He's done really good with his company. But Ben Shapiro is a pundit on the Daily Wire. And he's the part owner of the Daily Wire, which is a conservative news outlet. His livelihood, to some extent, depends on him remaining in the good graces of a conservative audience. So if if two studies were to come out tomorrow, the largest studies of all of mankind prove that socialism and socialized healthcare are the best things to, increase the standards of living for everybody. For somebody like me, because I'm not like, I don't have necessarily a political alignment. I can say like, oh, I changed my mind. These are like, cool, I follow this now.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  But if you're hardcore dug in on the conservative side, it's going to be really hard to change your mind. And that's not what people are coming to you for, is to just hear your unique takes on things. They want a little bit of the reinforcement of the, um, I don't want to say the echo chamber they're in, but a little bit of the reinforcement of like the social constellation of ideas they've inherited. And then I'm gonna start using more left leaning examples, because all your conservatives are feeling very bullied and you're honest now. Same thing with on the left, that like, when when research and data was coming out, that for a while, we got way too hyped up on the trans kids stuff, okay? Personally, I still think that there is a strong argument for people under the age of 18 to have medications made available to them. And that's a whole other thing you get into. But people got way too gung ho about it. And you need to be willing to critically accept research that might not reinforce that position.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  And a lot of people on the left were totally unwilling to hear or see any data that might say that like, oh, you know, assistance rates might be like this, or giving medications, people might not produce the best outcomes. Or some of these studies aren't the best that we're using for this particular thing. Yeah, people, people have a really hard time accepting information sometimes that is contrary to their, you know, their belief system and.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's part of the acceptance within the group and then it's also a, you can think of it kind of like a smooth ball, right? If you've just accepted this worldview wholesale, that it's very easy. I don't need to do a ton of sense making myself. I'm going to be accepted by the group. Any hole that you pick in one of those things, well, what does this say about my opinion on immigration or on gun rights or on abortion or on how we should deal with the Ukraine or on the sense of agency or what we should do with socialized healthcare? All of these things sort of start to crack and crumble underneath the pressure of one of these threads becoming unpicked.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah. And more importantly, because of the way that it works as a constellation and not that they're all uniquely generated, they all are kind of self-reliant on each other.

• 29:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  It can't be the case that, oh God, my, the past six months has been fighting with conservatives over Trump. So that's all my example. I'm so sorry. Okay. Listen, progressives have big problems too, but it just can't be the case that the FDA is trustworthy. That can never be the case because if that's the case, the whole premise of the FDA being untrustworthy has to do with the concept of the deep state. It has to do with the government being against us. It has to do with pharmaceuticals being corrupt. It has to do with lobby.

• 30:06Chris Williamson?

  Stacked on top, on top.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's all, they're, they're all like, it's like a Jenga tower, but there's no foundation. They all find a way to keep the blocks in the air.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  Zero gravity Jenga.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you can't pull anything out because wait, that does, because everything would completely, totally fall apart. And the problem when you're in a social group is you can't have an incongruency of applied ideas because that implies that you have an incongruency in fundamental values.

• 30:28Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean the applied ideas?

• 30:30Speaker 01

  As in, if I'm with a group of conservatives and I say, I believe in affirmative action and a $15 an hour minimum wage and the conservatives go, okay, well, you're, you're an idiot. You want to destroy the economy and you're, you know, bigotry of low expectations. Okay, I don't care. What, like, our values are fundamentally different. So our applied positions are obviously going to be different.

• 30:52Chris Williamson?

  Understood.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm for, and this isn't my personal position. Like I'd say like, oh, well, I'm for a minimum wage for production. You're not, but that's of course our applied positions are way different. We have a difference in values. But if I'm next to somebody that is near me ideologically or supposedly. Identical to me ideologically. Well, if we start to, if we start to separate on applied positions. So maybe I believe that we need to build more housing to help homeless people. And somebody else says, but we need to enact strict rent control to keep rents down. If we have a disagreement there, that person isn't going to attack me on the applied position. He's not going to say, oh, you want to build more housing? Rent control is obviously better. That person's going to go to the core belief and he's going to say, oh, well, you hate homeless people.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Now, the core belief attack from somebody close to me hurts a lot more than from the conservatives. Like, wait, hold on, I don't hate homeless people, right? And I'm sure it's the same for you in a manosphere. Well, you're not, I don't, I know you've branched out from that. But like, if you think of like a manosphere or like a red pill person, if they're on a show with a bunch of feminists and like, you hate women and you're damaging to men and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, you're feminists, obviously we disagree. But if it's two red pillers disagreeing with each other, like, I think that your advice is horrible for young men. You're not advocating for them or whatever. It's like, wait, what the fuck do you mean? That's my whole platform. What do you mean I'm not advocating for them? Now you've got a huge disagreement. I think this is called, I think it's called the, it might be called the bigotry of small differences. But basically that the, the closer somebody is to you ideologically, these little differences seem to, yeah.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Get super exaggerated.

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  I've seen this. There's a really good little process that I went through. A friend asked me, how do you know if the content creator that you're consuming is someone that you can trust? Basically, how do you know if they're trustworthy? And the same thing is true, I think, for friends. You can actually use this for friends just as easily as for content creators.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  The answer, if they're subscribed to my channel, youtube.com/destiny.

• 32:29Chris Williamson?

  Destiny, yeah, yeah, that would help. But first one, when was the last time that this person surprised you with an opinion? Second one, when was the last time that they publicly admitted that they were wrong about something? Third one is, does their in-group bind together of the mutual love of their in-group or the mutual hatred of an out-group? And then the fourth one was, do they speak to people with differing points of views and value sets for reasons other than mocking them? And if you go through those four steps, and there's probably like a million others, they're just like kind of obvious ones for me. There's no one really that triggers at least a few of those that is also a shitester.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  Like, it's very rare, unless they're doing it performatively and playing some 5D chess. It's very rare that someone goes through those things. And I think that.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Even using that for yourself, whether you're someone that creates shit online or just wants to be able to make sense of the world, thinking, okay, when was the last time that I admitted that I was wrong? When was the last time that I had an opinion that people would have probably been surprised by? When was the last time that I consumed a piece of content that I'm probably going to disagree with? Do the people that I hang around with, do we mostly talk about things that are shared values or shared hatreds? That's just a nice little process to go through. And that's helped me. You know, we consume content too. Like, the people that make it also consume it. You know, you're sat waiting for an Uber or doing whatever. You're waiting for someone to arrive and you're like, I'll see, I'll watch Taylor Lorenz versus the libs of TikTok lady. And I'll see what goes on. And you start to form opinions about this sort of stuff. So I think it's important. Like, that's just a really nice self-correcting mechanism, or at least like a process that you can go through that helps.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely, I super agree. Yeah. I would add on to that for, for, for an individual that's listening to this, or for content creators or whatever, too. Something that I've helped a lot is, don't try to free yourself from biases. I think that this is a fool's errand, and I think it lures you into a false sense of security. I think it's better to just be aware of like cognitive pitfalls and then try to correct for them afterwards. So for instance, you mentioned that thing about getting upset, people will dig in. I absolutely dig my fucking heels in. I will. And if I don't like you enough, and if we're arguing passionately enough, I'll argue that two plus two equals five if I disagree with you that much. And I know that about myself, and I know that that's the thing. I'm not going to claim that that doesn't happen. And I'm not going to spend my entire life trying to make it so that that doesn't happen. I'm not going to get mad, I'm not going to get mad. But instead, what it'll do is, listen, when I argue, I get heated, I know that. But

• 34:48Speaker 01

  the next day, I've got a big argument, I'm going to review it. Because when I'm removed from the argument over 24 hours, now I can go over and it's like, okay, did this person make a good point? I feel like I didn't have a good response to this. Like, do I need to strengthen my argument? Were they better on some things? And I need to just like, take parts of their argument? Like, being able to correct for biases, rather than to try to eliminate them, is a way healthier mindset. When I was doing research as well on certain podcasts, Fuck, the conservative stuff comes again, but like for Dr. Malone, the guy who said he was the father of the mRNA vaccine when he was on Joe Rogan, before I started doing research, and I would do a lot of this on stream, I would write at the top of a notepad for claims I want to write, the first thing I would write is, "I do not like Joe Rogan's opinion on vaccines. I don't trust Dr. Robert Malone at all." The reason why I write these two things down is because I know that this is priming me to disagree with anything that they say. So I

• 35:33Speaker 01

  have to be extra careful when one of them says something like, "Oh, well, you know, oranges actually make your dick bigger." I might just think immediately, like, "This is so stupid", and write that because I hate both of them, but I need to come out, "Okay, hold on. I know that I'm primed like crazy against both these guys. I'm aware of that. So I need to be careful when I am evaluating their claims, because I might just say that they're not true because I just don't like them." Yeah.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  Adjusting your site on a-

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah, the zeroing on your brain, yeah.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, zeroing in on your brain. That's a nice way to put it.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to just like try to correct for biases or be aware of them, but don't pretend that you can get rid of them. You absolutely cannot. There's no way, as a human being.

• 36:04Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that the debates that you do help to change minds? Obviously, you've spent, you've got this big one coming up, and you've done it a number over the last few months, and it's like a high price, although you're interested, right? You're engaged and stuff.

• 36:19Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the net outcome of you sitting down with Glenn Greenwald and Alex Jones, or you sitting down with Norman Finkelstein and Lex Friedman or whatever?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  I think there's several things that happen. One is that hopefully, this is a broad, broad, broad narrative thing, but hopefully it shapes the views a little bit of both sides. So if you're a pro-Palestinian and you hear me argue, maybe you moderate a tad on some of the things that you're saying about how evil and bloodthirsty Israeli citizens are. If you're a super big Zionist and you hear me argue, hopefully you moderate a bit on your opinion. It's like, okay, maybe Israel has made some mistakes historically. And then if you're homeless in the middle, those are the people that I try to like scoop up, basically, are people who email me and let's say like, "Hey, I was really big on this pro-Palestinian stuff, but all the demonstrations and the pro-Hamas stuff made me feel really like crazy and not at home, and I'm glad I found something that's reasonable." Or maybe it's like, "Hey, I'm like a super pro-Zionist guy, but you know, I'm really uncomfortable with how much people support like the mass settlements and, you know,

• 37:14Speaker 01

  the demonization of Palestinians and pretending like we never have to make any concessions ever, and I'm glad that you're there." So, yeah, I try to like kind of scoop up the people who are a little bit politically homeless right now, and then hopefully I can kind of soften the positions on both sides, depending on what particular issue that I'm arguing with.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  Which is presumably why you've got a problem with the short soundbite thing, because it doesn't allow the entirety of the conversation to be encapsulated.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. And people, I don't like short soundbites because people don't engage with them like short soundbites. I don't make 30 second videos. If you hear me say something in 30 seconds, that's going to be an excerpt from a larger conversation. If you hear me say something like, Destiny says that Palestinians have historically always been violent towards Israel. Okay. I think that's a true statement. That's a soundbite that you can cut. And if you have that soundbite, what you would say is like, in my opinion, you could say like, oh, Destiny believes that Palestinians have historically always been violent towards the state of Israel. That's fine. But you can't take that and say, Destiny thinks that Palestinians are solely to blame for the problems between Israel Palestine. Or Destiny only thinks it's Palestinians who've made mistakes historically with Israel Palestine. Like, people will extrapolate so much from one clip, instead of just watching a larger conversation, or getting more of a holistic view on what's

• 38:20Speaker 01

  going on, you know? Like, the equivalent would be like, you hear a friend, like, if we conducted ourselves in the real world, like, people treat content creators, you'd be hanging out with a friend, and you'd be like, hey, what do you want to eat? And your friend would say like, you know what, I could really go for a pizza right now. And you're like, pizza? Do you hate all Indian food? Like, what do you mean? No, I just want a pizza. Do you hate steak? No, I just wanted a pizza. Okay, well, you just said that you like pizza. Do you not like any other type of food? Or it's just like, so bizarre, that you think in 20 seconds, you can get a clip and have a full summary of like, what somebody has thought about an issue, or said about an issue?

• 38:48Chris Williamson?

  Did you watch, how much have you got to watch that Taylor Lorenz versus Libs of TikTok debate? Did you watch much of it?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  I watched, there was, a part of it was posted on Twitter, I think like, three minutes, and I watched that. Was it, how much, how much?

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  I managed to get 15 minutes into it.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:01Chris Williamson?

  And it was a car crash. It was, so you say that books should be banned from schools. Which books have you read? And it was, I've actually read this one, and this one, and this one. You think that children's body parts should be cut off? Which parts exactly? And it was just like this, I know, like, unstoppable object in an immovable force, like, just clashing up against each other. And Taylor Lorenz has got this mask on outside, which just seems to be like, it's like, purposefully. Yeah, like, it's like the

• 39:28Speaker 01

  This is my joke, that like, every single, like, if somebody, like, so many Democrats got long COVID, so many Republicans got vaccine injuries. It's just so crazy how that worked out, you know? Every, every conservative that got vaccinated knows 10 people that have died from vaccines. And every Democrat seems to know, like, five people with long COVID. It's crazy how the, it sorted itself out that way, you know?

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what's the, because there's woke fishing, what's the other one? Like trad fishing, I guess? But this is like trad triggering, right? It's like, purposefully doing the thing. Say what you want about Taylor Lorenz, like, she knows the optics of what she's doing. Have you seen her Instagram?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I'm not.

• 39:58Chris Williamson?

  It's just, I don't need to spend too much time on it, but it's a lot of like meta memes about what's going on, kind of about the situations, about all the rest of it. So she's obviously playing this like huge.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Oh, do you think, do you think that the mask was part of the meme then?

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I have so much more respect for her if that's the case. I thought she was just like, oh, that's really funny then. Fuck, I saw it and I was just like, oh God, why are people still wearing masks outside?

• 40:20Chris Williamson?

  No, it's 100% because she knew that by sitting down, doing it, that I think, I'm not calling Taylor Lorenz a media genius. Like, I, I think that she's like pretty reliably an idiot. But there are certain things that she's able to, like certain games that she's able to play.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:37Chris Williamson?

  Where she's doing that. And the reason that I think this, I've got my biases based on her Instagram and her Instagram is very meta. It's all about the narratives about her or about what she's been talking about or whatever. And if you saw it, you'd go, yeah, like it takes a degree of sort of stepping out.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:55Chris Williamson?

  From it and seeing it from where it is. It doesn't make her points or her any better of a person, but um.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think the mask, I think the mask was a bit.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  I'll check that out later then. That's pretty funny.

• 41:05Chris Williamson?

  It's pretty funny. It is pretty funny.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  The only thing I would have made it better, I guess, is if she showed up with like a little Band-Aid on her arm for the.

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  I just got my 70th.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, 50th booster shot, yeah.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  I had this conversation the other day about whether or not we've passed peak woke. Like whether or not.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  We did about a year and a half ago. That's my guess.

• 41:21Chris Williamson?

  When would it have been?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Um, I feel like

• 41:26Speaker 01

  the, I, I think that there have been a couple of court cases. One was near, I think it was about two years ago. It was with the Ober, it was at a school called Oberlin something. And I think a black person tried to steal something from a bakery across the school and the students and the bakery called the cops and they knew all the person there. And the students protested, saying the bakery was racist, but the college joined in with the students, basically. And I think that college basically ended up owing like $30 million to the bakery over that lawsuit. It was huge. There was that. There was the whole flushing the Harvard and the two other administrators get raked over the coals on the weird, yeah.

• 42:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  That was really cringe and I think most people saw it as such. I think a lot of the pro Palestinian stuff, which is unfortunate because they do need good international representation, but the marches and the, all of that was not good, was not good publicity for them.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I just, I feel like people are looking at all kind of the cancel culture stuff a little bit less like, ah, I feel like anecdotally, like the word retard is coming back a bit more.

• 42:27Chris Williamson?

  It is. Shane Gillis used the word gay in his SNL. Did you watch this?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  I have not.

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Oh, he used gay and cracker, didn't he?

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  He's great, gay, cracker, and retard.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  All.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  My chat said that and they said I need to watch it because he said gay and cracker. I haven't watched it.

• 42:40Chris Williamson?

  And retard.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Okay, wow.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, he's doing this bit about how as a young boy, you're basically your mom's gay best friend. And he says, you remember that? You remember when you were young and you were just gay? And then starts rolling into the gay. So he kind of tempers it a little bit and plays it down the line. But, uh, yeah, I think you're right. I think like those words coming back into resurgence. And there was a novelty around this, like actually being woke, being aware of all of the different social issues and this sort of performative empathy, toxic compassion thing that was like novel and made you seem progressive and aware.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  And now it seems like a meme.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it also, it didn't really penetrate as much as people thought it would. It's very funny because the perception in the United States, fuck, I'm about to bully conservatives again. Reception in the United States is that the far left was a huge problem. And there might be some extremists on the right or whatever. But the reality is the far left didn't make it anywhere legislatively. Of the, of the justice dams that got in, they've moderated so much that now the wokeness have abandoned them. They're super angry about Bernie Sanders and his position on Israel Palestine. They've not liked AOC for a long time because they thought she sold out to Pelosi and she's not attacking other Democrats as much. So they have no power in the lawmaking bodies. Largely speaking, like older Americans don't vibe with the super woke stuff, basically at all. And the only place that these people kind of have power is in like school administration.

• 44:03Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And even for like, some of the school stuff, people are kind of looking at this like, this is getting kind of silly. You're not seeing like the huge protests and demonstrations like you used to against like the Milo Yiannopoulos's and everything. But on the right, their party is about to jump off a cliff following Donald Trump. Something like 80% of Republicans would literally follow Donald Trump to the end of the earth, which is a big problem for the Republican Party. But they seem to not think that they're kind of captured by anything. So it's funny that for the most part, like the Democratic Party and Democratic voters are basically. Like center left and they kind of like got tugged along along a little bit with all like the crazy woke stuff, but now they're kind of eh, this is like whatever. But on the far right, I think it's something like, um, I say far right, but it's the majority of Republicans. I think it's something like 70% of them don't believe in the results of the last election. They think that it was actually rigged.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  That like when you look at policies in terms of far right, disbelieving the last election versus allowing trans fucking like child porn books in schools or whatever the neck, the most recent accusation is, I don't know whether people would find an equivalency between those two things.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  The biggest problem that I think are the thing that people oftentimes underrate is how pervasive the belief is. So for instance, like Nazism and the alt-right, in my opinion, was a big concern because of the type of belief that it was, but it never really picked up that much.

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  It was a fringe belief.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a fringe, right? There's like, and then that, and I had a huge problem from 2016 onwards of like, um, you know, like people on the left calling everybody a fucking Nazi. I'm like, bro, do you, no, stop. Don't even, you know, Nazis. It's not a good label to call all of these people Nazis, all these people alt-right. It doesn't make any sense. And I agreed, like I said, for the, especially for the trans stuff, although I think we've moved past like the peak culture moment for that. Although a lot of that was also, um, it continued to be perpetuated because conservatives apparently had nothing else to talk about besides trans people. So they fed into it a lot as well.

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  That's true, man. I mean, we saw so much of the discourse was not necessarily about the first incident. It was about the reaction to the incident and the subsequent reaction to the reaction and then the, the discourse that came out about that and.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  And also the overreact, and this goes back to the, to the moderated reactions thing. I feel this is a totally unsubstantiated belief. I can't prove this at all, just my feeling. I feel like a lot of parents got mad about stuff in school libraries and about what their kids were in class, not because it's gotten worse than it ever has been, but because with COVID and with children staying home, for the first time ever, parents were actually looking at the curriculum, what their children were learning. And for the first time ever, they were like, wait, what the fuck is this? Like, well, I, it's not.

• 46:30Chris Williamson?

  Not a problem just because you're not aware of it.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Sure, which I agree, but I have an issue with people thinking that stuff has become uniquely bad. Something that I believe in very firmly is I think the downfall of Andrew Tate, I also can't prove this, I think the downfall of Andrew Tate started with those stories that came out of the UK about little boys in class bullying little girls using Andrew Tate stuff. Those stories got huge. And then the talk of like our little boys in school, learning things from Andrew Tate and blah, blah, blah. And it was horrible and people, you know, had, you know, articles.

• 46:59Chris Williamson?

  We get very defensive about children in many ways.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the thing that I was thinking was like, yeah, I'm sure this is happening and it's definitely horrible, but how much are we just now seeing, you know, little boys and girls bullying each other in school because you've got cell phones in front of everybody? This isn't a new thing. And I'm not saying it's okay, but like, we've always bullied the fuck out of each other in school, you know?

• 47:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to circle back, I'm not defending the whatever weird trans books or sex or gay sex guides or whatever exist in school libraries. I'm sure they're out there and I'm sure a lot of them are inappropriate and dumb, but like, there's a switch, thank God it hasn't happened to me yet, but parents like flip a switch when they become parents where they forget every single thing about being a kid. And they're like, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever. I can't believe my kid is fucking seeing this shit and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, when I was a kid, I don't know if it was like this in the UK, but I remember staying up at night where you would go to like, it was channel 14 and 15 and it was like the Cinemax.

• 47:45Chris Williamson?

  Like softcore porn.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was like blurry, but like every now and then it would like come through.

• 47:50Chris Williamson?

  Half a boob.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Kind of see like the boob and it was like green.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  Seen half a boob.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what we did as kids, but I feel like if parents saw their kids doing it today, they'd be like, oh my God, it's the wokeness that's like getting my 12 year old to think of porn. Or if like a movie like Mrs. Doubtfire came out today, they'd be like, wow, Robin Williams pushing the woke, trans crossdressing agenda. It's like, bro.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  Interesting.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that is, I don't know, man, the, the capturing of smart people's attention. Douglas Murray, good friend, and he said he can't believe how many people have spent their time over the last few years debating about whether men are men and women are women or not. And that's a critique, I think, both of this shouldn't be a discussion that we're having, i.e. sex is something which is binary and real, and also the overreaction from his own side of this capture when there are other things that we could be focusing on. He went and did this documentary around the streets of Philadelphia, looking at this trank epidemic.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:44Chris Williamson?

  Like, that's a much, that's a huge problem and fentanyl and opioid crisis, all this shit. Like, those are really, really, really big problems.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 48:52Chris Williamson?

  But they don't play quite so well.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  As the culture war stuff, yeah.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you've got like DeSantis passing stuff in Florida of like banning hormone therapy for trans. It's like, how many people is this even impacting? I remember when Matt Walsh went on Joe Rogan, and I think Rogan asked him, how many kids do you think are on hormones? And this is right after he did a whole documentary on it. And Matt Walsh was like, it's probably in the millions. And the answer was like 5,000 over like some of these like, really, dude?

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, another thing that's played into this, and there's always something new. And dude, I'm vehemently against almost all of the bullshit woke stuff, but not only for the reason that I think that it's in itself is dog shit, but that it captures everyone's attention on all sides. You get the reaction, then you get the subsequent rereaction, and then there becomes this big debate and it gets blown out of nowhere. It's like, especially for some reason, especially the woke stuff for both sides, seems like such a shelling point that everybody can get super passionate about.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:53Chris Williamson?

  And this most recent thing with Gemini, with Google's-

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Oh, God, I don't even know. What is this?

• 49:58Chris Williamson?

  Google's AI disaster. Have you not seen this?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  No, my mind has been all studying for this debate. Yeah, what's this?

• 50:04Chris Williamson?

  Allow me to educate you.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Go ahead. Oh, wait, wait. Is this the thing where when you ask for pictures, it's always of like black people and Asian people?

• 50:10Chris Williamson?

  That would be correct.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I've seen the memes. I don't know anything else about it.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so I don't know it in depth, but I'll try and give you a good overview. It tried to be so anti-racist that it ended up being racist.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 50:21Chris Williamson?

  And it annoyed people on the left, because if you asked for an image of some Nazis, it was black Nazis. And then it annoyed people on the right, because if you asked for an image of the founding fathers, it was black founding fathers. So everybody got pissed off. And then it sort of hid, it did a combination of hid and erased history in this regard. But people were using it, using its anti-racism to be really racist. So they would say something like, can you give me an image of 14th century philosophers drinking grape juice and eating watermelon? And it would be for black people drinking grape juice and eating watermelon. So just the whole- Retroactive changing of history after the Super Bowl thing where they corrected Alicia

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  Key's voice, I think at the start, it's all part of some, like a big constellation of different data points that are making people very concerned about what's happening to history and what's an acceptable, it also has implications for whether or not Google itself is a reliable searcher, is it going to deliver information in a way which is actually factual, like given that so many people are going to use that to try and find something out, what if all of the real stuff is hidden down on page fucking five? Yeah. You don't know. So yeah, I mean, from a branding position, very bad, very, I could not have done it more poorly than this. And it's probably, according to Mike Baker, it's probably gone through a million different, this isn't the sort of thing, it's not like a Bud Light thing that perhaps was just one part of the marketing department that threw

• 51:46Chris Williamson?

  a case of six packet at Dylan Mulvaney, this has gone through an awful lot of layers before it's got here. So it doesn't seem like it's happened by accident. So you think there was like an intentional ploy to make it like not racist? Or I think that they are force feeding diversity in so much. Obviously, they didn't mean for it to be so apparent that like anyone with the most basic prompt in history could create something which had a standout, like you can't make it to make a family of white, or you couldn't get it to make a family of white people. I think the only way you could get it to make white people is if you ask for Ukrainians. But it was like a Native American president and show me an image of the, the king of Spain from the 18th century and it's like a black guy. So I think that it was force feeding diverse, and you can say, ask

• 52:30Chris Williamson?

  it things like, show me you're working or ask like, explain to me why you did this. And it's just the most rudimentary, basic, wokey talking points, like the most cringe, like it is important that we represent people from diverse backgrounds and maybe like just, it was that. So it wasn't. Much complexity to it, but this force feeding of diversity plays into the DEI concern that a lot of people have at the moment. And it's just more distraction. I'm like, God, like if this hadn't happened, if you just made it an accurate representation of what people needed. But now we've got another, and we're right now, this very moment, could be talking about something else that would be really useful. But it's an important, now it's another important cultural moment to try and dissect to work out what's going on. And it

• 53:14Chris Williamson?

  just every single time it pushes us back, pushes us back, pushes us back.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  I think there are two huge issues at play. The first thing is, I always tell people, if you're trying to engage in real, true political discourse, you're trying to understand people, don't ever start with the assumption that people are doing like evil, crazy stuff. I think that when you're, when you're, when you start from that perspective, you've already lost the ability to understand the other side. So people on the left that want like trans kids legitimately feel like, or a lot of them legitimately feel like there are children that are in need, that have to get some medical stuff to make their lives workable, basically. They, and I think that probably comes from a place of compassion generally speaking. I think that when people on the right are fighting against stuff related to trans kids, I think they genuinely believe that there are a lot of children that can get confused and then get swept up in online communities and then start taking medication or hormones and they don't know what's going on and it's going to be damaging to them. And I think it genuinely, genuinely comes from a

• 54:02Speaker 01

  place of compassion. I think it's important to start from there because if you start from the place of like, well, my enemy is trying to destroy the country for XYZ reasons, you're like, you're totally lost, right? The people that did the insurrection on January 6th, I imagine they genuinely thought that the election was stolen. They really did think that that election was stolen and that there was some crazy stuff happening. And that's why they had to go to the White House and try to stop the, you know, the confirmation of the vote and everything. I genuinely believe that they thought that. Not that they were just like, we're gonna mess everything up right now because there are some real bad dudes. I think that I only say that because usually when, when corporations make mistakes, I think that they're usually trying their best because when, when a lot of people are involved, I think they're usually trying their best. Now, if it's just like one or two people involved, sometimes like

• 54:44Speaker 01

  personal agendas can really mess things up. But if it's a lot of people involved, the idea that there's this top down order of like, okay, guys, Fuck white people. We're gonna do this. We're gonna, we're gonna edit them out. We're gonna make sure that we're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. As opposed to somebody like, listen, we gotta make sure that these are, you know, diverse enough. We don't wanna have us so every single thing is spitting out a million white people and then they probably overcorrect.

• 55:02Chris Williamson?

  Also a lot of cowardice, I think.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Cowardice?

• 55:04Chris Williamson?

  Cowardice.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yes.

• 55:06Chris Williamson?

  It's, so this is, Andrew Schultz taught me about this, like, his, Schultz's razor is, uh, it's not coordination, it's cowardice.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. Because somebody might be scared, saying like, hey, are we fucking up right now, guys? Because you don't wanna be the one to, yeah. For sure. And that could absolutely be a thing too.

• 55:19Chris Williamson?

  I think it's a, I think that's a big part of it. And especially with this dynamic we're talking about now. Because if you're the guy, it's like the, being the fucking first person that stops clapping after like, some dictator stands up and gives a speech.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm not gonna be the fucking first person to stop clapping.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:34Chris Williamson?

  I'm not gonna be the guy that says, maybe this whole diversity thing, maybe it's going too far. Maybe we don't need to do affirmative action. Maybe we should, uh, keep the SATs. Maybe they do actually have a, you know.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Maybe men actually need a little bit of affirmative action in school. Or maybe we're going a little bit too far on having, you know, 20% of our advertising.

• 55:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so you think that women, you want to get women out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen, is that right?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  But remember, it's because a slight difference in applied position will be interpreted as a huge difference in fundamental moral belief. You wanna cut trans advertising because you hate trans people. You wanna get back on the diversity stuff because you think white people are better than black people, right? That's always where it goes. So it's so hard for, and in these environments, it's gonna be a lot of like-minded people, so hard for them to course correct. Which is why I talk about how, when those two groups like, branch off into their own thing, that is incredibly destructive. I hate the fact that conservatives all talked about how we need to get out of the schools because they're corrupt and whatever the fuck. Because, well, now the people in the schools are even more fucking insane. I need you there. You need to be there. You gotta be participating. Or when left-leaning people don't wanna participate in certain aspects of like, conservative culture, when left-leaning people don't wanna celebrate success or wealth

• 56:38Speaker 01

  or, you know, business is doing well, or patriotism. Okay, well, cool. Well, now if I have a, if I'm a patriotic American, I basically have to be a fucking conservative. Because I'm not gonna be patriotic on the side that's telling me to hate my country for fucking slavery and colonialism and white supremacy.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  Recap that. So it's, the difference in applied position is indicative of a difference, a change in value.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  That's what people feel like, yeah.

• 56:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yeah, okay. So just because this is something that you want to have happen in the real world, there is a, an implication about your moral stance.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Because for most people, they didn't do the work to go from the initial, uh, the, the grounded ethical stance to the applied position. And since they didn't do the work, it's one and the same to them. That's why if I talk about Israel Palestine, it's so frustrating, it still happens. If I talk about Israel Palestine, I say, I don't think I would say anything happening right now is apartheid or genocide. They don't hear, okay, you don't think it's apartheid or genocide. They hear, you think it's okay? What's happening? You think that Palestinians should live in territories where they never get a state? You think it's okay to kill civilians? That's what people hear. The same way that you might say, um, I don't know if I support affirmative action. You, you just don't like black people. You think that it's their fault, everything in the United States. Or if you say, maybe we've gone a bit too far on the diversity stuff. They're like, oh, okay. Well, the only reason you can think that is because you hate diversity and you're a white supremacist. Yeah. Because they, yeah, those things are so connected.

• 57:50Chris Williamson?

  So it's a, it's a, it's not a slippery slope of, it's like an interpretation of slippery sloppiness. It's this very small iceberg above the water. This happens.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  It's not even a slippery slope. It's a horizontal platform. That's it. These things are here. When I, that's why, when you, um, there's a, who's the Alex O'Connor worker, whatever? There's a ethical position. I think it's called, um, it's, you can be an ethical anti-realist who believes in non-cognitivism. And when you believe in non-cognitivism, what you're saying is when I express a moral proposition, I say that murder is bad. What I'm actually doing is I'm just expressing an emotional state. Murder boo. I don't like murder. Murder boo.

• 58:23Chris Williamson?

  Emotive.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  I think it's non-cognitivism, right?

• 58:26Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Is it emotive positivism?

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  Fucking god damn it.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  I'm just putting out random philosophy terms.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  He's gonna, he's gonna scream at me. He taught me about this two nights ago in Miami. He came out for my birthday. Emotive fucking epistemics or something like that?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Maybe that.

• 58:40Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it's basically, I mean, this is one of his best ideas that he taught me and I've now forgotten. But yes, it's basically whenever somebody says that they're in support of something or against something. It's basically like yay abortion or boo abortion.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes.

• 58:53Chris Williamson?

  And then they work back from that position and then just try and retro.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They don't even work back. They just sit there.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Okay.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  That's why, so like, for instance, if a girl releases a story, um, I cover a lot of, um, we call them rape reviews on my stream. It's a little crude, but uh.

• 59:05Chris Williamson?

  Rape reviews.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because people put out the me too stories and then we'll read through them. It's like, okay, well, what is the, do we feel like it's a credible allegation of what's going on? And for a lot of these things, if you say woman raped, you're saying, what you're really saying is what happened to her was really bad. And if somebody else.

• 59:18Chris Williamson?

  Boo rape.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or, or boo whatever that was. And if you're kind, he's like, well, I looked at this. I think the guy was definitely pushy. Um, there might've been like some groping, like not good sexual stuff. I don't think it was rape. They hear you saying rape yay. Or if you push against the diversity measures, you know, white supremacy, yay. Or if you push against the, you know, the trans youth stuff, like, oh, discrimination, yay. Oh, trans suicide, yay. Because for a lot of people, the applied position and the ethical position are one and the same. These are inexorably linked and there is no difference that can happen. Which, again, if you're debating somebody different than you, who the fuck cares? I don't care if we have different applied and ethical positions. We're supposed to. But if it's somebody similar to you, we can't be disagreeing. What do you mean? You don't think there's a genocide? You think it's okay to murder innocent civilians?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Like, those two things are linked and they're not. It's a total non sequitur, yeah.

• 1:00:04Chris Williamson?

  Just how unified is the left compared with the right, do you think, at the moment? This can be within the cultural commentary space. This can be within the people who support the side. This could be within the politicians that are a part of it. Do you have a sense of how fractured each of these are comparatively?

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  I feel like the right is more unified, probably because they have a figure like Trump to unify around. The left is a little, feels a little bit more scattered, but this is also going to become, this also is like very dependent on the communities that you're in. Like I said, like, if you're online on Twitter, your impression of the American left in the United States is like a crazy woke mob of like cancel culture children running around the streets. And then you forget that, like, if you go, you know, to like, you know, like North Carolina or Georgia, and you're talking to like 30-year-old, 35-year-old, 50-year-old, like, black voters and stuff, these people are not woke pro-trans people running around on the streets saying like, "My child needs HRT, right?" This is not the demographic at all. Or even when you look at like older Democratic voters, like, generally, these people are going to be kind of the, the, the cool old woke people, the

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  cool, like, the cosmopolitan elites who are like, "Yeah, I am a, I am a woke person. I believe in gay marriage." That used to be like the woke position.

• 1:01:16Chris Williamson?

  What would be yuppies or something.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, but those people largely had, like, cool social beliefs. Like, "I think that we should have gay marriage. I think freedom of speech is important. I think that, um, yeah." It was, like, "We should probably have some kind of, like, worker protections and unions need to come back and..." Like, those kinds of woke things. Not the, like, "My four-year-old identifies as a it, it's, or whatever."

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Tac helicopter.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Also, oh, and on a real quick thing, too, because you brought this up early with both sides on this. One of the big issues the left has is, a situation will come up. Somebody comes out and they say, "My four-year-old child is trans." And I know that because, you know, they kicked right in the womb or whatever. And then conservatives go, "You're fucking insane." Okay?

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  What should happen is, is what I do when somebody comes to me and they bring me a crazy left-leaning belief and they'll go, "What about when this guy said that this thing can can happen? When they said that like, all women are constantly being raped by men by looking at them?" Then what I say is, "Oh, that's really dumb." And then you move on. One of the big reasons why some of these small issues get blown up so much is because the people on the left will take the bait and they will start defending absurd shit. There is not an epidemic of people with four-year-old trans people in the United States. There is an epidemic of people willing to defend them, though, and that's the issue. And that's why people on the right feel so justified in like their culture war stuff.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it took me a long time to figure this out because I'm always thinking, I'm like, "Why is it such a huge issue? Trans people are like 1% of the population, if that, depending on how many intersexities you lump in."

• 1:02:38Chris Williamson?

  90% of the discourse.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and but when you talk to conservatives, you look at YouGov polls, I think the one that I saw was I think conservatives think 20% of people are trans in the US. And I'm like, "Well, why is this the case?" But then when you look at the left, well, how many people are there willing to defend it? And now I understand more. Okay, yeah.

• 1:02:53Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Yeah, that's very interesting. So it's like a, it's not about the volume of incidents that occur, it's about the volume of the volume of discussions that occur around that.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  People willing to defend it.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Whereas if everybody in the office is like, "Yeah, this is really dumb," then you've defanged the right. Well, because who the fuck are they going to fight against, right? So when Tim Poole and all these people obsess over these weird books and libraries about like guides to gay sex or whatever, like this is brought up to me, I'm going, "Okay, if that's in those libraries, yeah, that's pretty weird. It probably shouldn't be there in schools." And then you're done with it. It's not going to be a huge thing on like, "Well, LGBT people and gay people need to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." No, it is weird and it's dumb. And just don't defend it and then move on from it. Why would you, why would you stake your position there and die on that hill when there's so many more important things to fight over?

• 1:03:36Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Who do you think's doing the best work in the political space at the moment? Is there anyone that you're, that you watch yourself or is there anyone that you think, even if I don't watch them, I can respect the way that they work with this stuff?

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Um, I don't watch enough because I stream and I work like all the time. So it's hard to like sit down and listen to like podcasts or shows or whatever. Um, yeah, I don't want to venture any guesses because I'm sure there are people out there, but most of what I see is not good. But it's also, those are mostly the people that I debate and everything. Um, yeah.

• 1:04:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's an interesting, an interesting world at the moment, I think.

• 1:04:08Chris Williamson?

  Looking at-

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Wait. I will shout out one guy. His name is Josiah or Pondering Politics. He's a cool guy. His channel is exploding recently. He does a good job at trying to evaluate things pretty fairly from the democratic side. Yeah.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Who, not Chris Lynn Saga, who's the other guy that's kind of like slightly left leaning, being on Rogan a bunch, records in that green? He's got like a neon green behind him.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 1:04:28Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, the guy's name-

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Even if you think of it, I'm not gonna know him properly.

• 1:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Well, he seems to be like kind of popular. And then you got a debate with, second time actually, we had the last time, one of the last times that we were together was at the Vulcan when you were on stage with Alex Jones. And then you had another crack. How did that go?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  About as I expected it to, yeah. He's definitely very much like a showman, which I can't tell if that makes me hate him more or less. I don't know.

• 1:04:52Chris Williamson?

  How do you mean?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  Like, I think that he is legitimately a grifter and that like he knows he's putting on a show. Like, I remember when we were talking, he did this thing where, when we were having our conversation back before, I think I started like, I started like mocking him and he looked at me. And I think he put his hand on my shoulder and I moved his hand. I was like, don't touch me. And I remember when-

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  Were you genuinely irritated?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  No, I just don't like it. If somebody's trying to like show like physical dominance, like no, get your fucking hand off me. We're not gonna do this, right? If you want to kill me, you can kill me, but you're not gonna put your hand on me. It's fucking weird. You're not my dad. But I remember after we finished, right? And I'm, because I feel very strongly about all my political beliefs. If you talk to anybody in my personal life, they're gonna tell you that like, if we go out to eat and you bring up something that I disagree with, it's gonna be just like a stream. I'm gonna argue with you. I just feel very passionately about everything that I believe in. But after the show with Alex Jones, you know, like I'm still like pretty like in the zone to debate, like he got, it was like, oh, that was, that was a great show. It was real funny. When you did that get your hand off me thing, hilarious or whatever, right? And he just like walks away. And I think for him, I think it literally is just like a big show. Like he just has fun with it.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  It's like WWE.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah. Which in one sense might make me dislike him less because I'm like, okay, well, he doesn't actually believe in the crazy things he says. But then in another sense, it kind of makes me hate him more because it's like, well, fuck, your listeners definitely believe this shit. And now I don't know if you're propagating this for like fun and people are really taking you seriously, even though you don't. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:06:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand what you mean. That if someone is compelled because of the way that they believe that it legitimates, that their gregarious position is like, oh, well, you're kind of at the mercy of your emotions.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to if-

• 1:06:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a difficult one.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  This is why I don't usually spend much time figuring out like somebody's a grifter or not, because it doesn't matter. The harm is real regardless.

• 1:06:27Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you're on the internet, everybody's a grifter and everybody is a shill and everybody is stupid and everyone is in it for the money and doesn't really agree with what they believe in and they're just doing it because they're a part of the whatever.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Whatever, the media apparatus, but the followers do. So that's what you have to address. Even if Ben Shapiro and all these people are grifters, the people that listen to them really believe it. So that's what you have to address.

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  It's the second order thing again about it's not about the incident. It's about how the incident is interpreted. It's not about the event that happens. It's about how many people then were prepared to defend themselves in that event.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I don't fucking know, man. It's, it seems, it seems to me like a very messy time and I'm really, really hoping that it's just going to be more sane out the other side of this. Everything seems to be ramping up ready for November, but I don't know. We'll,

• 1:07:14Chris Williamson?

  we'll wait and see. Do you think the red pill is dying? That's something that both of us have spent a little bit of time orbiting in one form or another, or are you debating it or me getting abused by it? What do you think's happening with the red pill at the moment?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  I think most stuff has like a, probably like a two to four year shelf life for internet content. And I think it kind of came and it kind of went. Andrew Tate and the, the pre-trial or pre-indictment imprisonment probably hurt a bit because it took away a lot of the publicity. I think that the, the nature of like the conversations for the red pill stuff, I think was really bad. I think the, like the content strategy from a lot of the red pillars, I think was very subpar.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Like for me, the way that I've stayed fresh and relevant for 15 years of content creation is because I'm always finding like new stuff to talk about or a new angle to kind of like hit something from, or like I'm kind of moving on with contemporary events. I feel like for red pill stuff, I feel like I could have written the script for those shows after being on two of them to where it's like, okay, guys, today we're going to talk about, does body count matter? Do guys value you for the amount of money that you make? Do women fuck over men in divorce? Are men lonely because they're simps? It was like the same topics for like over a year, such that it became like a meme where when I would show up on a show, some of my fans would do like bingo cards of like, okay, well, when is the body count question coming up?

• 1:08:25Chris Williamson?

  Hypergamy.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hypergamy. Are women hypergamous or not? And then it's like, and then, and then it, and it's funny because like the questioning would always, there's a fallacy called all roads lead to Rome, I think. If there's not, there should be one. But basically, literally, no matter how somebody answers a question, it always goes back to what you wanted to. So I might say to a girl, Have you ever dated a guy? You say you don't care about guys at all. You ever dated a guy that's 5'5"? And the girl might be like, "No, I haven't." "Hm, because you hate short guys." "You know, you won't." And she's like, "Oh, no." "Okay, have you ever dated a guy that's 5'5"? "Yes, I have." "Oh, when?" "Uh, when I was in high school, I actually dated a guy that's 5'5". "Really? Are you together anymore with him?" "Well, no." "Huh, you dumped him because he was a short king." "Right, like, yeah." "Or it's like, are you dating a guy that's 5'5"? "Like, yeah, I am now." "It's like, oh, really? Is he rich?" "No, he's not that rich." "Does he have a huge dick?" "Yeah, his dick is pretty big." "Oh, hypergamous.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  You just want the pool boy. You're probably gonna, you know, find a rich guy and still fuck." "Like, there's always a..." Andrew Tate, actually, is the perfect example of the "all roads lead to Rome." "Okay." "When Andrew Tate had the pre-trial imprisonment, "there were never gonna be charges because it was all a scam. It was just a sham kangaroo court." "Now that there are charges, "if there wouldn't have been charges and he would have been released with no charges, "no indictment, it was because, obviously, it was a scam." "Right? But now that there are charges, "well, obviously, because it's a scam. Of course, they're gonna make up charges." "So now, they're gonna go to court. And if they go to court and they get... "If they go to court and they beat the charges, "it's because it was bullshit the whole time. "But if they go to court and they're convicted, "well, it's because it's bullshit the whole time. They're gonna make it up always." "So, literally, no matter what happens,

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  "it's always because of your particular prediction of the world." "So, you end up with these prediction models "that will predict every single event, "which means they don't actually predict anything, "but it allows you to escape the cognitive dissonance "of your predictive model not being correct. So, you don't have to worry if you've got a good view, "like, a good blueprint of the world, "because, literally, no matter what happens, "you've always got a way to make sense of it in the future."

• 1:10:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, this is why that four-step process of... "When was the last time someone publicly admitted that they were wrong? When was the last time they surprised you?" "Someone came out and had a discussion about this and was like, "do you know what it is? I actually think that a lot of the time, "I do actually see girls in relationships with guys "that, hypergamously, I wouldn't predict that they were in a relationship with. That guy just seems to have game. It's not really about the fact that he's tall or fit "or rich or has status or any of these things. He just seems to be like a really nice guy "and she wants to have a family and he ends up being... "You go..."

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't expecting that. That was something that would have surprised me. You think, okay, well, that shows an evolution of talking points, but I don't know how many times. And this is why, you know, I've still fascinated in evolutionary psychology and intersexual and intersexual dynamics and all of that stuff. It's still very interesting to me. But the whole like lambasting women for having standards that are too high, that never was something that really crossed my world of content creation. But even now, it's okay. So what like, what else is happening? How can we? Here's an interesting angle. Here's a much more interesting angle for me for something that's contemporary and new. This skew of young girls to the left and this skew of young guys, young guys to the right,

• 1:11:25Chris Williamson?

  given the fact that most people date within their political affiliation and because politics are becoming more important to each individual person now. That's interesting. That's like a new, okay, so what do we do? Where's this coming from? And what does this mean? Thirty percent of Democrat parents are afraid that their son or daughter would marry a Republican. That's interesting. What about like parental pressure? And how does that play into it? That's interesting. You can keep talking about the same thing, but do it with a different angle on it. Continuing to just hammer away in the same points. I know, it's just, fair play if you have that degree of patience, maybe, to be able to just have the same conversation a thousand times. But it's a, I don't, I don't have that in my toolbox.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  The description is boring, the descriptive part, because yeah, it's the same thing over and again. And then the prescriptive part is boring, because for a lot of these movements, people don't actually give you good advice to kind of navigate it sometimes, unless you can become a top one percenter. Instead, what they try to prescribe is like a world that doesn't exist anymore. Like, this is no good because women have birth control, because women are, you know, earning money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, well, that's not changing. So you have to give advice for the world that exists now, not tell guys you have to become a top one percenter, you need to earn so much fucking money that the traditional girls or whatever will go back to liking you. It's, it's never advice geared towards, well, how do you navigate the modern world where women don't need men as much, where women are looking for different things in relationships? How do you navigate that? It's just like, we need to go back to the, the days of old and everything is messed

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  up now because of feminism and complaining and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:12:51Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the ADHD diagnosis.

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  It seems like a big change for you. Yeah, it's a totally huge change. I think when my son was seven, he had huge attention problems in school such that he would like, he was like rolling around on the floor, he couldn't sit, he couldn't stay in his chair. Between classes, they were having him crawl through like resistance tunnels to like burn off energy. It was a huge problem of focus. At home, I, it was really hard to get him to stay on task for like chores. If I wanted to go out and like pick up leaves with them, like doing the yard or whatever, it's really, really, really difficult to get him to stay on task doing like that. And then at some point, because we considered initially like maybe he has autism or something weird like that, I don't know. And then the school psychologist,

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  school therapist or whatever floated the idea of ADHD. And then we took him to get an evaluation and he got like clearly marked for ADHD. And I didn't buy that because I can play games with my son. We're playing like Minecraft or something. He can sit there on the computer for fucking 16 hours. And I would like do these bullshit tests. We're gonna sit here, we're gonna look at each other for five fucking minutes. You're not gonna move? We're gonna sit here and do this. I know you can do this. And we would, and he could do these things. Like this is, I don't, this ADHD is bullshit. I don't believe it. I didn't even believe that like ADHD was really a real thing. So then, now, that's my personal feelings on it. And at the time, like- That's written at the top of the doc. Yeah. I don't, I don't believe that it's real. I don't, I would never take a brain pill medication because I don't want to change who I am, blah, blah, blah. But my responsibility

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  as a father to him supersedes my own personal views on it. So I owe it, if, if, for nothing else, I owe it to him to at least do the research. So when I started doing reading and research on ADHD, I come across a whole bunch of things that I didn't understand relating to ADHD. And the most shocking thing was for everything that I researched, because I was trying to find, does his behavior show up? I found all of my old behavior showing up. So huge discrepancies on like standardized testing where I might do like 98th or 99th percentile on everything versus like GPAs or homework. I didn't ever do homework. My GPA was a 2.7. My, that was curved up because of like honors classes and AP classes. So my GPA was horrible. I had to have like a teacher sign my assignment notebook and then my parents sign it or else I would get a detention because I was so bad at doing homework.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Like to read, I would cry if I got assigned reading for more than like a few pages. I could never do it. I remember in high school, I used to do like, I would do like Cliff Notes and Spark Notes and extended readings so that I could avoid doing the actual reading. It was just like a bunch of really, really dumb behavior. But I always thought because I could play video games for 16 hours, I must not have ADHD. And that's like one of, that's like three of like 15 other different behaviors. I'm like, Jesus Christ. So after I read all that, I was like, okay, fuck it. My son, I guess if I'm to believe ADHD is real, my son probably has it. So he got medication. It helped him a ton for school and he's continued to stay on it and it's helped him a ton for school. Seven years later, think about like five or six months ago, I've got a friend that's staying with me. And she suggests, she's like, listen, everybody knows you have ADHD. It's like a joke on stream and blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, but everybody has ADHD. Everybody's autism, like whatever. And she has Adderall and she's like, you should just try this for like a week.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  And I'm like, okay, fuck it. Why not? Sure. And I enjoy recreational drugs. I tried the Adderall and for the first like two or three days, I was definitely like amphetamine high. Okay. I don't know if you've like done amphetamines recreationally. It's just like, it's like a euphoric. You feel so good. You're like in a good mood. You're super happy. And I'm like, okay, this is cool, but like I'm fucking high. Okay. I know it is. I know what like an amphetamine high feels like. And then on day four, the euphoria, the like amphetamine euphoria of like doing a drug recreationally, basically disappeared. And then when I went to stream and stuff, I noticed that I could pay attention to what I was doing without having to have a game going on in the background. Which was a really huge departure because if you've ever watched any old videos, you're always like playing Minecraft, playing video games, do something while watching a video. But I could just sit and like read stuff.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  And then I noticed over the next week that it's like, holy shit, I get research for like four hours a day. I could just sit and read and read and read and I'm retaining the information and I don't feel like I have to do a million other things. And that's basically after that, I was like, fuck it. I went to a therapist. Very easily I could get an ADHD diagnosis because of my childhood stuff. And then I got a prescription for Vivance and yeah, I don't think Vivance is, it's a, it's an amphetamine similar to Adderall.

• 1:16:56Chris Williamson?

  Okay, a bit more powerful, a bit less powerful, a bit more something else?

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Adderall is a combination of four different amphetamine salts. Vivance is one of those amphetamine salts, but it's got an attachment of another molecule that makes you digest it slowly. So that it like is an extended release amphetamine, basically.

• 1:17:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  It's a, it's list dextroamphetamine or list X amphetamine. It's a lysine attachment to a dextroamphetamine thing. And then when you eat it, your body, I think in the liver pulls off the lysine thing and then you get the slow release.

• 1:17:21Chris Williamson?

  Like a time release version?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:23Chris Williamson?

  And if it's something that you presumably you'd done your research to work out what it was that you would have preferred to have had?

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  The other, basically the other option is Adderall XR, basically, I think. Yeah, but yeah, for the past four or five months, I've learned like the entire history of Israel Palestine. I've read like 100 page papers on like legal theory for my debate with Glenn Greenwald. I'm able to research and retain information and be interested. And I haven't played like basically a single game in like almost half a year in like four or five months. It has dramatically changed my engagement with the world in like an unbelievable way.

• 1:17:55Chris Williamson?

  So, James, my business partner in Neutonic, had an adult diagnosis of ADHD as well. And what does that do? You know, you're a person who thinks that you know who you are. You've been you for like fucking 35 years or some shit. Like,

• 1:18:12Chris Williamson?

  you thought that you knew the landscape of your own mind and who you were. And this is me, Stephen, out in the world. And then someone comes along and kind of says, well, this is a part of you that you haven't been able to fully understand. Does that change your sense of self?

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  I think that my whole life, and I think this probably happens as everybody gets older, I'm sure it's happened to you, the smartest age that you ever are is 19 because you know, everything, you know, what every if I I've always joked that like if I go back, maybe even with you, I said this, if I could go back in time and talk to myself, I wouldn't believe anything I'd have to say, even if I knew I was coming from the future. Yeah, because at 1920, you know, everything. One of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is subjective experiences are very, very hard to understand. So I try to be really careful when I speak about other people's subjective experiences. And your mind and how you relate to the world is another one of those subjective experiences. So I guess in my mind, and it's funny because I came across a lot with ADHD stuff, that ADHD can be simultaneously like over diagnosed and under diagnosed at the same time to where if somebody is just like either lazy or has an attention problem or whatever the fuck

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  because for a variety of reasons, they might get an ADHD diagnosis. But if somebody has ADHD, they might feel so like my feelings are like, if I just focus, I know I can do this. I'm just a lazy fucking piece of shit. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to fucking just stay on task for three hours. Everybody can do this. There's no reason I can't do this. Right. And my understanding, my feeling is that like, I'm probably just more lazy than the average person. And so that's why. But then after doing a lot of reading and then taking like a pill for a little bit. And I'm like, okay, well, shit, I wonder if this is like the ordinary mind, or if this is more closer to the subjective state of other people. Yeah, it just makes me.

• 1:19:47Chris Williamson?

  Has it changed your theory of mind about other people? Obviously, you know, if you're Lambasting yourself, basically saying you should be more disciplined than this. You should be able to stay focused. Why can't you just do this thing without getting distracted every two minutes or without having to play a video game or without having to have three video screens open at once? You know, that's an internal monologue that you've habituated. It's a very well-worn path. I'm just fascinated by people that have like, oh, and now I have a very different story that I tell myself about why I am the way I am and what that means and why that could be the way. And yeah, it seems like a huge pivot.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I just try to, I try to be open to everything. Maybe there's something that'll, you know, dramatically shake my subjective interpretation of myself in the future, but I'd rather be more open to it than more closed off to it because I want to feel like I'm making progress towards a better version of myself rather than like, well, I have figured it out when I'm 20 and now I'm not going to change my feelings at all. And I know there's a lot of things that I skew off the norm for. Like, I remember when I was like 20, 21, 22, like if he would ever come to me, no, it would have been like from like 22 to 25 on stream, people would ask me questions like, oh, like I've got a toxic relationship with my mom or dad, like, what should I do? And my answer is always very simple. You just cut them out of your life, never talk to them again. That's so easy. Why would you, why would you maintain toxic relations with your parents? What a stupid thing to do. Like, that's so dumb. But then as I've gotten older, I'm like, okay, well.

• 1:21:06Chris Williamson?

  Diplomacy.

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  People have feelings about their family and it's pretty obvious that most people's feelings are way off of where mine are. So it's pretty stupid of me to suggest something for other people and assume that, you know, it's the same thing for everybody. So I just try to be really aware of the different subjective experiences that people can have and that mine might change in the future too, because I don't want to get locked in on some dumb shit. Yeah.

• 1:21:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes. I felt quite bad watching, I didn't reach out because there was enough people doing that already, but I felt quite bad watching the entire internet kind of scrutinize your relationship over the last few months.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  The divorce stuff, yeah.

• 1:21:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, man, like, I know that you appear as like this sort of emotional punching bag, stoic fucking brick, where everything is super transparent and everyone knows kind of everything that's going on. And you have a capacity to be able to deal with discomfort that seems to be like, I know, beyond, certainly outside of the norm, but. That made me, it made me feel uncomfortable, like watching everybody else dissect your fucking, like this intimate part of a downfall of a relationship online. So I imagine that like rolled in with a fucking ADHD diagnosis, plus changing the chemical structure of your mind. Like, that's what I mean, like the last 12 months.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Oh, it was a lot, for sure. I remember-

• 1:22:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes, it was a lot.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  I scaled back on my last prescription request. I scaled back a little bit of my dose of my Vivance, because I noticed that my, because I wear these stupid little things to track like through my jumps, my heart rate. My resting heart rate had risen like 17 beats per minute-

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  That's a lot.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  -in like two months.

• 1:22:28Chris Williamson?

  That's a lot.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  And in the research that I did, I think that the average heart rate elevation for somebody on amphetamines, I think was 4.9 beats per minute over a whole lifetime of like doing these amphetamines. So for mine to have risen almost 20 in two months, I'm like, holy shit, my-

• 1:22:42Chris Williamson?

  Something's going on.

• 1:22:43Speaker 01

  Something is exploding. And I don't even know if this is possible with medication, but then, but now it's all settled. And I realized it was probably just that period of like, a lot of like, stress that I'm dealing with from my own relationships, from like the public stuff, and you've got to keep streaming through everything. And then like the research from my debates, everything, yeah, there's a lot to deal with, but man. Yeah, it was definitely, physiologically, it was definitely tough, but I've always felt like I have the tools to deal with everything.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  And in some ways, there are, there are parts of my life that look incredibly difficult that actually make things so much easier for me. I talked with, I've talked with Lex, I've talked with a lot of people that are more behind the scenes about this, because a lot of people look at my life and they're like, it's gotta be so fucking hard to have your relationship and everything else like out front and center for all these people to dissect. And my thought is, it's gotta be so fucking hard to try to keep that secret. Oh, my God. Because if you try to keep things secret, you, it's gotta be so scary. Every day on the internet, something might get leaked, somebody might find something out, and now you've got to like, try to figure out like, well, how do I defend this without revealing too much? And what do I say? And what else is going to leak? And blah, blah, blah. For me, there is the added stress of when everything's public, everybody can comment on it. But it's also like, this is it.

• 1:23:44Chris Williamson?

  There's nowhere to hide.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you, also, you see what you get. Like, there's never been a time in my 15 years where something has leaked of me, where it's like, oh, my God, that's the real destiny? He does this behind closed doors? That's what's going? It's never happened. Like, you, basically, you get what you see, yeah. Which in some ways makes things easier for me, a lot.

• 1:23:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Will you do the same thing when next relationship rolls around? Or are you, have you got it like, eh, maybe we don't need to go quite so public with stuff? Have you got, have you got a strategy for that?

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  I think, um, now I'm being really, really, really critical of who I would select next. Like, I've got like a whole list of criteria that I'm like writing down and evaluating for people because I'm trying to figure out like what works, what doesn't. I've got like my exes on this, like list of criterics and like what would have worked or what didn't work or blah, blah, blah. I don't know if I'll ever be dating again or if I'll get married or what that looks like just because my life is so crazy. If I do do another relationship, it would probably be another open one. If I do do another relationship, it's probably going to end because most relationships do. And when it does, everybody, if the red pill stuff is popular, will say, well, it ended because it's an open relationship, despite the fact that I had four monogamous relationships for this that all ended for a variety of reasons. But, um, yeah, I mean, we'll see if I did or not again, it just depends. But my life is like really crazy, really busy and it's hard to slot anything in there. Yeah.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah. Not dating again is a, I don't know, like,

• 1:24:55Chris Williamson?

  I wonder, I wonder what will happen when you're further outside of the blast radius of your most recent like fucking slow motion car crash, public or car crash thing?

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  It's just, it's a lot for the other person to deal with. That's the issue. So you have to find somebody that is willing to deal with all the public stuff, probably somebody that works in content creation.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  Because otherwise it's hard to explain this world to like a normal human being.

• 1:25:18Chris Williamson?

  Allow me to step you into this world that you didn't choose, that you don't really understand.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  And how do I make you understand why there's like a whole forum of people that obsess over every time you turn your, you know, Discord on or off or people that try to figure out like what our address is or why people say I'm a pedophile or why, you know, this guy, you know, why is it today that Muslims are trying to find your address to go and jihad you? And like it's, that's a lot for an ordinary person to be brought into.

• 1:25:41Chris Williamson?

  I think that is a lot for an ordinary person to be brought into. Yeah. Speaking of that, it's assumed I know nothing about the Volsh scenario because essentially I don't, but I know that there's been stuff that you've been at least commenting on. What's the 30,000 foot view of the last few weeks?

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  I hate being charitable to him at all. But what's happened is, is Vosch has made a collection of fairly edgy statements in his past that on their own are all, I would say, probably defensible, but taken collectively against people that don't like him can present a very compelling narrative that he's like a pedophile, basically. So like, I think, for instance, there was like an argument before relating to why he didn't, he was, I wish I could remember. I don't want to misquote this because it's so important to get the exact wording right. So I could be misquoting. You can go find the video if you want. But I think he was in an argument where he was like, it was something like, in a very edgy way. He's like, I don't know why people care so much about child porn because of the harm created to children, but we're okay buying and having things every single day that are made by children

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  in sweatshops where they kill themselves. But then people will hear something that like, oh, wait, so you want to make child porn legal. But his argument was really, well, no, we should probably make sweatshops illegal. But it's like, it's just like a bunch of stuff like that that's piled up over time. And then, so that's like the factual foundation. And then the rhetorical foundation, or the content direction foundation is Vosch has very intentionally isolated himself from the rest of the world. And he conducts himself in an incredibly aggressive, bullying way. So he doesn't really have anybody in his corner to defend him, or to lend him any credibility, because he's made enemies of anybody that would be friends with him. And he's been incredibly uncharitable to everybody else in his part of the world. So he's, he's done it to himself. So I'm not really, I don't feel very much sympathy. I might feel sympathy

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  over the hyperbolic statements that get blown up, because I've made like, a lot of statements that are hyperbolic that get blown up. But I don't feel sympathetic that this is what he has to go through right now, because he's, yeah, he's, he says completely untrue, factually untrue things about me all the fucking time. And now watching it come back to bite him in the ass and him to have nobody in his corner to defend it is really funny.

• 1:27:43Chris Williamson?

  Chardon Freud.

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't surprise me, or at least I certainly see, looking at the world of streaming,

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  you guys put an awful lot of hours in, like, you know, that in itself just practically gets you out of the way of being able to spend time socially, just doing stuff. And then, because so much of it is on its own, you do streams with other people sometimes, right? Like, maybe even like, a good bit of the time. But so many streamers are just spending hours and hours and hours and hours, just them and a camera and a, and a screen. And it seems like of all of the different content creation methods, it's the one that is the most isolationist. Like it's that and then only worse than that are those people that try and like rebuild ghost towns like on like in fucking Greenland or something like that. Those are the two that are the worst.

• 1:28:31Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, I mean, I have a, I have a great degree of sympathy for streamers overall because it's a, a rough job. Not as much as to say it's a harder job than like being a bricklayer.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Retail, yeah.

• 1:28:44Chris Williamson?

  Was it retail?

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  I don't, you're talking about Hassan, right?

• 1:28:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, not that hard.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  That's another funny example where I actually, and I've given the same thing in the past. Hassan was 100% correct in his assessment and his statement. He just said it in kind of a bad way, but he doesn't have anybody to defend him either. And it's funny because he blamed my community completely for that clip blowing up. But um, I'm willing to bet that you would agree with the entire concept of the statement and that what we do for work right now in ways it can be more soul destroying, it can be more difficult than jobs that work prior to this. Just because of all the added stresses and all the added things that are going on. But you're compensated generously for it and you have a greater degree of autonomy.

• 1:29:17Chris Williamson?

  You chose it.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  You chose it.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  And that's always the big difference, like a McDonald's worker in a second would step into my life. I would never step back into working at McDonald's ever. So even if there are more challenges and, and more soul destroying aspects of this job, which there are, if I got divorced as a McDonald's worker, I don't have to deal with, you know, 75 year old fucking Rollo Tomasi, you know, making arguments about why this McDonald's worker broke up. Like, I don't have to deal with that. I don't have to worry about like fucking nude pictures leaking or everybody having an opinion on some shit I said. But I make a hundred times the money that I did when I worked at fucking McDonald's and I get to choose every part of my life I want to engage in. So, yeah, so Hassan did have a point, but man, for him, the socialist guy that lives in a $4 million mansion and has a $250,000 Porsche and flies in private jets and wears $1,000 outfits. It sounds horrible coming from him.

• 1:29:59Chris Williamson?

  Optics are a big deal.

• 1:30:00Speaker 01

  Uh huh, yeah. And fuck him. I'm not defending him because yeah, that was his fault. I could have been a big defender of him on that art because I love defending takes like that because they're, they're technically correct, but they're optically horrible and those are my favorite things to defend, you know?

• 1:30:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, dude, I, you know, I did a video, which is still up on the channel, I think, something like uh, what no one tells you about working for yourself.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Oh shit, yes, that's the same.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

  It's all of the things, it's all of the points. If you are both the organ grinder and the monkey, if you're both the taskmaster and the worker, there is always in the back of your mind, is this the best thing that I could be doing with my time? So not only do you need to design what you have to do, you then need to discipline yourself to go and do it, and then you need to go and do it, and then you need to review and question whether or not that's the thing that you're supposed to do. And even when you're away on holiday, whatever that even means, there's always this degree of, well, I could be working a little bit more, and then work begins to bleed into leisure time. So there is this huge, big, long list. And someone brought it up on a Q and A a couple of weeks ago, where they said, um, lots of people in the personal development finance space are disparaging about nine to fives, but I actually really love my nine to five.

• 1:31:04Chris Williamson?

  And I feel a bit bad because I'm like a second class citizen for liking this like cucked job type thing. Why do you think people have such bad opinions about it? And I was like, that's a, first off, great point. Secondly, it made me realize I've never disparaged nine to fives. I'm like, look, if you can find a way to be able to work for yourself, I think it's a reliable route towards like having a fun life that you're probably going to enjoy. But it's not the only route. I know tons of people that have nine to fives that lead perfectly happy lives. And there are all of these other side effects that come along with it, like having to be the person that, when are you going to get up today? How long are you going to stream for? Well, you choose. And if you don't stream for long enough, who says when enough is done? Like, what's the rules around this? How hard are you supposed to work?

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  How well are you supposed to do your job? All of that gets externalized when you've got a job, which is liberating. And it's just, what's your personality? What's your predisposition? What do you want?

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  People have an inability sometimes to just like analyze like the pros and cons, things have to be fully good or fully bad. Um, I don't know if this would be a huge point of disagreement for us, but you do like a lot of like health and fitness stuff, right? Yeah. Like, like a position that I have relating to like food is I don't think, there's no such thing as like a good food or a bad food. Foods just do different things. If you've got like a sugary calorie bar or like a candy bar that's just like empty carbs or whatever, that's all it is. It's energy for the day, high in sugar, like that's what it is. It's not necessarily a bad thing. If you've hit all your micros and macros for the day, but you need 400 more calories, if you want to eat a fucking kick out bar, it works, right? There's no such thing as like a wholly good food or a wholly bad food. Something super high in vitamins, whatever, it doesn't matter if you can't absorb it for whatever reason, or if you're not deficient in it, like, there's no fucking point. It just, it is what it is. Like, understand the pros, understand the cons.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And I think when it comes to like nine to fives or entrepreneurship, it's the same thing. Or with like renting or buying a house. There are pros and cons to both of these things, right? I'm a millionaire and I don't, well, I own a house with my kid and my kid's mom, that's irrelevant. I don't own a house personally. I live in apartments. I'm probably gonna live in apartments for the next like 10 years. I'm gonna buy a house and settle down somewhere. But it's, but people would think that like, well, once you've got money, the most important thing is to buy a house because you don't want to set your money on fire. I'm not setting my money on fire when I'm in a, in an apartment, any more than I set my money on fire when I go to a restaurant and buy food. Like, I'm literally paying for something that I'm gonna shit out my toilet later, but that's not wasting my money. I'm getting a meal out of it. Same thing when I'm renting an apartment. I'm not wasting my money. I'm paying for a place to sleep and live every day. There are super big pros to entrepreneurship if you've got the mind for an entrepreneur.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  And I don't mean the mind like you're smart enough. I just mean the mind that like you enjoy self-direction. Yeah, you enjoy like the uncertainty, the ups and downs, and you can navigate. Yeah, not everybody enjoys that. And nine to fives, I've known people that have stepped into the entrepreneurship and then gone back to the nine to fives. I'm like, listen, I can fund all the hobbies and things I want to do with my nine to five, and I don't have to worry about, you know, where's my paycheck gonna come from? Is this gonna be a slow month for me? Yeah. So, yeah, there's pros and cons to both. And the demonization of like nine to fives and you're a fucking loser because you're not a rapper, or because you're not a small business owner, or because you're not a fucking, you know, superstar streamer, YouTuber. It's like, no, fuck you. You can do whatever you want to just, yeah, figure your, figure out what works at the pros and cons for you.

• 1:34:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's good. And that's not something that I've heard a lot about, like, you know, championing. It's part of this disparagement. I think that we're on the same page that you're relatively pro-college as well.

• 1:34:17Speaker 01

  I'm super pro-college, yeah. But if you think you've got a better path besides that, then, then, yeah, by all means, go for it. But you, for all these people, fuck, all these people will complain about the deep state, the politicians, the lobbyists, and the Bill Gates and blah, blah, blah. When you look at all these people that you think have rigged the world and they're corrupting everything, blah, blah, blah, where do they send their kids? They're not, Bill Gates doesn't tell his children, like, oh, you're 19, you're not going to college. They all send them to fucking Ivy League schools. They all send them to the best schools. They get the best degrees.

• 1:34:44Chris Williamson?

  They're supposed to be the most woke ones. They're the ones that'll be the most brainwashed.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  Maybe, I guess, but like, they're going to college. They're not like telling, you would think that like, well, if they'd figured it out.

• 1:34:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, you look at the, uh, Steve Jobs didn't give his kids iPads type argument, which is, uh, be aware of what the lifestyles and technologies are of the people who are in power. And if the people who are in power are sending their kids to universities, like, if you just want to model what they're doing, they've got skin in the game with regards to, yeah, for me, I mean, you know, I don't disagree. I learned basically zero when I went to university, but I had great life experiences and it taught me an awful lot. It was like, it was like Navy SEAL Hell Week for five years of socialization.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:35:24Chris Williamson?

  Of, you know, you need to learn what it's like to get drunk and lose your keys in Manchester and have an argument with your friend at three in the morning. You need to learn what it's like to have an argument with a, a, a housemate where you can just request from the university that you move flats. Like that, all of those things. When are you going to learn that? 25? 30?

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  Part of the transitioning into adulthood.

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes. So it just, I think it prepares people and, but I understand that, you know, it's all a big scam. No one learns anything that's important. And in an ideal world, yes, would higher education actually educate you effectively along with giving you the life skills? Probably, but of the two, they're like, I would give it 50/50 for what you come, and maybe even more on the life skills side of things. To be able, okay, well, what's it like to, um, have your attendance be so low that maybe you're going to get kicked out of university? Because that might happen with a job in a couple of years' time when you're ill or some other like, like administrative fuckery happens. Is that the first time that you're going to ever encounter something like this? No, like you can get to do it with lower stakes and move through that stuff. So, yeah, I, uh.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  And people have this weird thing where they're like, well, it's just, people shouldn't be wasting their time on humanities and English degrees. And it's like, the majority of degrees people get from, from colleges are STEM degrees.

• 1:36:35Chris Williamson?

  I did business. And marketing, and I've got two degrees, one of which is a masters. Can't remember anything from either of them.

• 1:36:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:36:43Chris Williamson?

  Like, I might as well have done woman's studies.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. Or all the people, I think it's like, I want to say it's like 50% of people get STEM degrees anyway. Like, they probably needed it. If you want to be, I think it's a really high percentage. Yeah. Somebody post, go look it up. You've got the fucking iPad.

• 1:36:55Chris Williamson?

  It's not connected to the internet.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Yeah. But it's a really high percentage. I think it might have been over a majority of the degrees are STEM-related degrees anyway. Like, that's the vast majority of what people go to school for are that. But I think people have this impression that like 85% of college students are humanities students.

• 1:37:09Chris Williamson?

  Taylor Swift degrees.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically. Yeah. And then also too, and again, a moderated position, like there are ways to do it intelligently. Like, people say, oh, I don't want to go to college and get $100,000 in debt. You don't have to get $100,000. That's not, the average student loan debt is not $100,000. I think it's like, like $28,000 or something. It's not $100,000. Also, if you want to, go to community college for two years, or do this, or whatever. Like, there are ways to make it more manageable as well. You know, you can be smart about it. You don't have to go all in and be an idiot. It's just, the, my, the scary thing for me, heavily anecdotal, by the way, the scariest thing for me is that when people say, forget college, don't do that. In my mind, the people that don't need to go to college know that. There isn't a guy who's got this huge portfolio of projects that he's worked on, that's got like all this knowledge, who's 18, and he's like,

• 1:37:56Speaker 01

  God, fuck, do I need to go and get a comp sci degree and blah, blah, blah? He knows what he's gonna do, you know? People point to Bill Gates, it's like, oh, well, Bill Gates didn't go to college. Bill Gates didn't fail remedial English, okay? Bill Gates didn't not go to college because he couldn't get his fucking GED, okay? Bill Gates did not go to college because he thought he was gonna make it big trading fucking crypto, okay? That's not, these are not the same comparisons. So, if you don't know what you're gonna do, and you've got like a general, yeah, go to college, get your degree, do that. But don't tell people like, oh, no, don't go to college. Like, the universe has something grand planned for you. Because most of these people are gonna, you know, fuck around with dropshipping on the internet for a year and a half, hook up with a chick and get her pregnant, and then the rest of their life is gonna be retail or service, you know, starting at 21, because they just didn't really have strong direction.

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  That's not liberation.

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What do you think's gonna happen in November, election time?

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

  My belief for a while has been that I think Biden is gonna win. I think he's gonna win pretty handily. My feeling for that is because I think the biggest thing that was going to hurt him was gonna be the economy, but I think that the sentiment on that has already adjusted pretty heavily, and I don't see it going down. I think that we're on a huge upshoot right now economically, and the Fed is even talking about considering dropping rates or whatever. So if the economy's fine, foreign policy-wise, it's just Ukraine and Israel. It's funny, people give Biden a lot of shit on foreign policy, but if you compare our foreign policy aims right now compared to what they were under Trump, our involvement is way better. I think that Israel and Palestine, that's a worthy thing to be involved in, if for no other reason than to restrain Israel. And Ukraine, Russia, that's a worthy thing to be involved in.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  We're not in Afghanistan anymore, we're not in Iraq anymore. Biden ended the participation in the Saudi-led coalition to go and fucking drone-strike Yemen all the time, right? The strikes that we are doing in Yemen are very specifically on missiles blowing up. So that's good. I think that the foreign policy stuff is good, even if people try to make it into a thing. I think domestically, I think our economy is good. The border is an issue, it always is an issue, but I don't think Republicans can yank the illegal immigrant chain for, you know, seven months or whatever. I think that they probably pulled that one too early. So I just, basically broadly speaking, I think the road to the elections and all of the special elections that have gone on over the past couple of years have been really good for Democrats. So I think the road forward for Biden is pretty safe, as long as his brain doesn't leak out of his ears. I think it's pretty safe.

• 1:40:13Chris Williamson?

  That's a big if.

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  That's a big if. For Donald Trump, though, he's got all of these indictments. He's got the New York case that is, I think they're trying to start that one in March.

• 1:40:21Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:40:22Speaker 01

  The New York case is where he was getting Cohen to make payments to Stormy Daniels, the hush payments, basically, which just kinda looks bad, the porn star fucking cheating on his wife and all that. So you've got like all the news of the indictment stuff, you've got whatever crazy shit that Trump says, abortion is still really fresh on people's minds, and now you're getting more stories about like crazy laws.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  Is it still fresh on people's minds?

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah. I'm basing this on opinion polling, and I was with my community doing door-knocking in Ohio for like get out the vote stuff, and as you go around, and I always try to do it at least one day so that I can like have the experience and talk to people. I was really surprised at how many people, when I knocked on doors, the two issues that everybody always brought up were protecting democracy, which seems like shit I would hear on Twitter, and the second one was abortion.

• 1:41:05Chris Williamson?

  What sort of people is this a broad cross section, older people, younger people?

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, it's older people. You're knocking on doors in Cincinnati, Ohio of like likely registered voters, basically making sure that they're still registered to vote and they know about the upcoming primaries and elections. Yeah. So I think abortion is going to be a big driver. I don't think like the Afghanistan pullout, I don't think that's going to be a big negative driver. I think it happened and then whatever. Yeah, that's my broad view. I think the road ahead for Biden is pretty easy as long as he maintains. Okay. And I think the road ahead for Trump, I don't see it getting better because he's not in office. There's no way that he can do anything good. And there's a lot of potential pitfalls coming up that could be really scary. Yeah.

• 1:41:43Chris Williamson?

  How big of a deal do you think what's going on at the border is? I've had a number of conversations about this. It does seem like a really big catastrophe.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  I mean, it always does. Like Republicans have yanked that chain for a decade.

• 1:41:56Chris Williamson?

  A bigger catastrophe right now?

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  It's always a bigger.

• 1:41:58Chris Williamson?

  Have you had a look at the stats around this? Like you tend to have some?

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen numbers. It's hard to know because like they always change, like how they count some things. Like I think under the Obama administration, like they were changing how they consider like a deportation ended up being like somebody that was met at the border and turned away. There's like, there's weird things that go on with the numbers all the time. I agree that the border is a problem, but I don't believe that it's like a uniquely felt problem that's having a drastically negative impact on the average of our life. I don't think that that's happening. So it's a problem because the media says it's a problem and because people want it to be a problem. The Republicans do for good reason, because it probably is the strongest thing they have electorally. But I don't think the country's falling apart or like crazy shit is happening because of stuff going on at the border. But Democrats do need to find a way to deal with it. Although right now, the things that suck

• 1:42:44Speaker 01

  is that one, Donald Trump had COVID, which helped a lot because he was able to do, was it Title 42, Title 49? That basically said, because we're in a state of emergency, I can enact crazy measures at the border and people just weren't illegal immigrants as much because of COVID. So he had a huge benefit to his last time in office because of COVID. And then when Biden came in, he was-

• 1:43:04Chris Williamson?

  Because he got COVID?

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  No, no, because, because of COVID.

• 1:43:07Chris Williamson?

  Right. Because he got, I was like, it's like you being ill as the president unlocks some super secret power.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  He got the COVID event, basically.

• 1:43:13Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. Oh, right. Yes.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Biden tried to use Title 49 to control border stuff, but he wasn't able to. And then the amount of people coming to the border now is a lot higher. As a percentage of like turnaways and everything, the Biden administration is doing better than the Trump administration, but there's such a greater number of people there to deal with. It's just a difficult problem.

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  Apparently that is. The rumors that I've heard because they know that Biden is going to be soft on them.

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  People say that, and I'm curious where the truth is on that. People say, so it is true that more illegal immigrants come to the border when a Democrat is in office. But I'm curious, is it because Democrats want to let them in? Or is it because Republicans say that Democrats will let them in? Because remember Kamala Harris's favorite thing of like, do not come, do not come. One thing to the immigrants, do not come. That was a funny meme of hers. Yeah, of her saying that. And it's not like they don't let you in just because it's a Democrat in office. I don't think there's like a meaningful change in border policy with a Dem in office over a Republican. But if you say it enough, I don't know, maybe that's why people do come in. Yeah.

• 1:44:09Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So this is like the shadows on the wall, but the shadows have been created by the Republicans. So the Republicans could be advertising the weakness of Democratic immigration policy, and that is what is being taken by people.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Which for the most part is about the same under Biden as it was for Trump. They ended like certain types of like family separation at borders, but nothing, I don't think anything meaningful has changed between Trump and Biden. But so I'm curious, like I haven't seen statements, and I'll fully admit, because I've been doing Israel Palestine stuff, and then the Republicans before that, so I haven't followed this issue as closely. But I haven't seen a bunch of statements from Democratic lawmakers who are like, we want the immigrants to come to the border, please come, or like illegal, we're going to be softer on them, we're going to do something to let these immigrants in, or blah, blah, blah. I've never heard that. I've heard a lot of Republicans saying that, though. So I'm curious, like, what the statements they hear are.

• 1:44:51Chris Williamson?

  That's very interesting. Yeah, the difference between being like effective in terms of rhetoric and effective in terms of the impact that it actually has on the world, because it could be creating the second one whilst trying to achieve the first one. Yeah. Well, I mean, every election cycle, there's been something that's been timed quite well, you know, emails for Hillary, the Biden, under Biden laptop story. I'm kind of waiting.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Oh, for a thing?

• 1:45:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, dude, there is going to be a thing. There has to be. It's like, I don't know, do you remember when Lost, the TV show, do you ever watch that?

• 1:45:26Speaker 01

  I remember Lost, I never watched it.

• 1:45:27Chris Williamson?

  Well, just, you know, you always knew that the season finale was going to finish on a cliffhanger. Like, oh, my God, what's the cliffhanger going to be? And it feels like that now. But this is the problem, blurring the line between entertainment and politics. I shouldn't be waiting for the next election cycle to come around and for whatever the revelatory story is, like I'm about to see Prison Break, Season Three, finish. It should be treated with a little bit more. Like seriousness.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Well, I think the issue is both of these guys have been investigated quite a bit. And by both of these guys, I mean Hunter Biden and Donald Trump. So I don't know if anything new, it doesn't seem like we're getting much new about Hunter.

• 1:46:08Chris Williamson?

  Might have dried the well on both sides.

• 1:46:10Speaker 01

  Well, the, but the problem is on the Hunter Biden side, I think that's probably true because especially now that this confidential informant was heavily compromised.

• 1:46:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no, I don't think that it would be just Hunter Biden. I think that there will be something.

• 1:46:22Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no. But what I'm saying is in terms of what could leak, I feel like for a lot of the Hunter Biden stuff, we've milked this cow.

• 1:46:26Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  But the problem is for Trump, we potentially have new wells of information because of the ongoing court cases. That gives you a novel ability to reach in through investigative power, through discovery, through criminal indictment, through trial to reveal stuff that's never been revealed before.

• 1:46:42Chris Williamson?

  Here's a statement of some kind. Here's a court recording. Here's a whatever.

• 1:46:46Speaker 01

  Like for the J six commission, a lot of the people near Trump pleaded, uh, pled executive privilege. I don't have to say what I said because this is to the president of the United States, which works in front of a congressional committee, doesn't work in front of a criminal proceeding.

• 1:47:00Chris Williamson?

  This is like pleading, kind of like pleading the fifth, but it's special.

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, for the president. Yeah.

• 1:47:04Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  But that didn't work in a lot of the, like the Jack Smith federal investigation cases. So it could be that there's more stuff that could come out, whereas the stuff is continually brought to the forefront of American minds. They have like a slightly less favorable view of Donald Trump because I do find, for instance, for a lot of the Donald Trump cases, when a lot of Republicans, all even Democrats just don't know any of the facts. And when you present a lot of the facts, they're indefensible. It's not even close. It's like unhinged insane shit. So I don't know how much that'll affect things, but also Democrats have been yanking on the, you know, Donald Trump is doing illegal stuff and we're going to get him chained for four years. And it didn't seem like much came out of that or for eight years, I guess. Yeah. So who knows? I know. I bet, listen, I bet $3,000 on Biden. We'll see what happens. Okay. I bet money on it. I believe strongly in it.

• 1:47:48Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about Vivek Ramaswamy?

• 1:47:51Speaker 01

  Uh, the Trump clone guy that dropped out because he realized he has no political future because he just served there to, you know, be a Trump clone, pick up some popularity, write a book. I don't know.

• 1:48:01Chris Williamson?

  Him.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 1:48:03Chris Williamson?

  That's what you think about him.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:48:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, it was an interesting one. I think someone that's young, just generally young at all, that's involved in American politics, just stands out.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, young is cool, but he talks like a salesman. I feel like every time he was talking, I was hearing a pitch for like a new Dyson vacuum cleaner.

• 1:48:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, there's a degree of that, no matter what industry you're in, whether it's in content creation or politics or media or anything. There is a swing at the moment toward as much authenticity, as much relatability as possible. I guess that goes back into what you were saying about the openness and honesty around relationships and dating and fucking an adult ADHD diagnosis. All of these different things, just being open and honest about them, allow people to find

• 1:48:50Chris Williamson?

  areas of your story or anybody's story to like hook into and go, oh, that that's kind of like me, or that's like my sister, or that's like my best friend, or that's like my whatever. And people had a problem with The Rock's appearance on Rogan because they said it was, he kind of seemed very curated and it was super, super smooth and all of this. And what they wanted was, you know, like, who's the man behind all of that? Yeah, precisely. Like, I want to speak to Dwayne. I don't want to speak to The Rock.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:17Chris Williamson?

  And I think people felt like they didn't, they didn't really necessarily get that. And then I think that Tucker Carlson and Putin, that interview was just like the same thing. It was like, we got a very well curated orchestra, like a curated performance by Putin. And we didn't really get to see anything that was real there.

• 1:49:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. One issue that I have with people is somebody being genuine is not necessarily a good character trait. And people overrate that too much.

• 1:49:49Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  People can be genuine and be a bad person, a genuinely bad person. But people will give a lot of people credit just because they're genuine. It's like, okay, sure. Like, this person might be genuine, but. That doesn't, that's not necessarily a good thing or necessarily a bad thing. Like, they could just be really bad. Like, they could be a genuinely bad person. It reminds me of, um, for a lot of debates that I do. "I gotta hate this, I hate this, it's gonna happen under this fucking video." No, not as much, because you're gonna disagree as much. When I debate people that I disagree with, I'm very rhetorically careful about how I present myself. I don't wanna come off as too argumentative or too destructive to the conversation. I wanna be constructive, I wanna be somewhat agreeable, so I'm finding common ground. But ubiquitously, under the, every single one of these videos, "This is such a great conversation, I love that two people are talking and they're not shouting each other and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  And I was like, "Okay, that is true, but like, comment on the conversation now, okay? Just because we're talking and we're being agreeable, doesn't mean it's necessarily a good conversation. That's a good first hurdle to get over, but now talk, like, evaluate the conversation itself." Yeah, and I find like that happens, that same thing happens with the genuine part of like, "Oh, I like this guy because he's genuine." It's like, yeah, genuinely evil, genuinely an asshole. Like, that's not a, yeah, it reminds me, I'm sorry, fuck, there's so many examples. Have you ever met a person in real life, big red flag, by the way, if you have ever met a person in real life and you're like, "Oh, why don't people like you, what's going on?" The guy's like, "I'm just too honest." No, it's not that you're too honest, you're an asshole.

• 1:51:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I remember when I was in school, there was, uh, kids that would misbehave or whatever, and there would be, like, extra dispensation given by the teachers to the kids that were naughty. You know, they were the ones that were always disrupting class or weren't handing homework in or weren't doing whatever. And then me, as one of the nerds, I would be held to a higher standard. If I misbehaved in class, I would feel like I got picked out by the teacher and told like, that I shouldn't be doing whatever. I'm like, "Hang on a second, he just like fucking, like, kicked a bin over." And you didn't, you just sort of went over and like quietly told them to do that. And I always used to feel, uh, it always used to feel unfair, that like, the people that were able to behave

• 1:51:50Chris Williamson?

  were held to a higher standard than the people who weren't able to behave. And I guess it's kind of like this, it's like, look, you can be yourself, but if yourself is being an asshole, then like, it doesn't make you more virtuous.

• 1:52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52:01Chris Williamson?

  That being said, is it better for somebody to be a genuine asshole than a lying, like, virtuous individual?

• 1:52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess it just depends on what the lying thing means. And that's a really hard thing personally to sort through for an individual, and it's a hard thing to sort through, um, and how you evaluate other people. So-

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Like for instance, if I, let's say that I'm meeting a girlfriend's family. Okay. I'm not going to that dinner as destiny. Okay. I'm not going to be making edgy jokes about how much money would you accept to fuck a dog? You know, every single night, if you were getting paid money, that's not going to come up in that family conversation. Okay. I'm going to be respectful. I'm going to ask questions about the family's job. I'm going to be like on my best behavior. Am I being a fake fuck by doing that? Am I being disingenuous? I wouldn't say so. I think that you wear different hats depending on who you're talking to. The issue comes from, are you communicating things that don't comport with your core values? When you're talking to somebody else, right? So if I, if my, you know, if I was meeting a girl's parents and they were racist and they asked me like, you agree that like black people are lazy? And I was like, yeah, I guess they are. That's a problem, right? Assuming that you don't actually think that because now you're violating core principles, core values.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  I find that a lot of the time when people are criticizing people for being not genuine, it's just because they, they're like wearing a different hat, not necessarily because they're like lying or, or misrepresenting themselves, but yeah, that's a hard one to sort through anyway, because some people might think that they're lying or misrepresenting themselves.

• 1:53:20Chris Williamson?

  It's not like we and our nature and the way that we present ourselves are transparent to ourselves either.

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:53:26Chris Williamson?

  A lot of the time we get skewed or manipulated just by the situation. We just, I don't know, I got caught up. I was talking to such and such a person and I was tired or I wanted them to like me or whatever. I didn't mean to say X, Y, or Z. But this is kind of going back to what you said at the very beginning, which is like, giving people a little bit more grace, like hoping, hoping for the best in people and believing like, look, I think that if I was you, I would act the way that you are. I don't think that most people are evil. I think that they're trying to do good. Like just starting from a place of like more gentleness, I suppose, and a little bit more gentle. Steven, a little bit more room, giving people a little bit more room and, and, and hoping that they can come along for the ride.

• 1:54:12Chris Williamson?

  That seems like a much easier way, a much nicer way to live life.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  It can be, yeah, but it's not so much fun to watch.

• 1:54:17Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  That's where the eyes are. So that's why I say it's people's fault sometimes because of the type of content that they consume. That's the direction that the content heads in. We're not in this media landscape because the Jews pushed us here or because there was an alt-right conspiracy or because the woke tards got us here. We have the media landscape we do today because it's what we enjoy watching and we definitely reward the media there.

• 1:54:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we got, uh, we put a clip up from the Piers Morgan interview and it was, uh, uh, clashing with Piers Morgan over alcohol and going sober. He said that sometimes people that go sober can be boring. I said that that assumes that people who drink are interesting. And we went back and forth and there was a bunch of comments.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm sorry. Hold on. He made the argument that alcoholics that get sober could be boring?

• 1:54:55Chris Williamson?

  Not necessarily alcoholics, but that, uh, I was saying I went sober for a good chunk of my twenties and found it was good for not being hungover once every week or once every two weeks. So I like got more productive and, and made changes in my life and like yay sobriety. Even though I didn't drink that much. And he said, well, do you not find that if you do that, you're just going to be around people that are boring? And I was like, that assumes that people who drink are interesting. So we had a little bit of a back and forth on that. And then he'd grown up in a pub and he said, look, I've seen that it helps people to come out of their skin. And you know, some people are a little bit socially anxious and so on and so forth. And I was like, well, that also kind of shows that the people that you're around, the friends that you're around. You need to sedate yourself in order to be yourself with them. So you need to find better friends. The issue isn't that you need alcohol.

• 1:55:36Chris Williamson?

  It's that you need friends that can help you to be yourself around them. And I don't think that alcohol, I think alcohol is actually masking a lot of those problems. And many people haven't not had a drink, especially in the UK, like classic working class culture. Haven't not had a drink since they were 15 or something. The longest time they went from when they first ever had one to now was two weeks. And they don't ever think, but they'll be concerned about whether or not creatine or ACE K or artificial sweetness or something. Getting them. Meanwhile, they're putting like a reliable poison into themselves. And I love me some alcohol too. Like I was a club promoter for 15 years. I'm a part of it and just trying to thread that needle. Anyway, like we titled the episode as clashing with Piers Morgan over alcohol and going sober or something.

• 1:56:19Chris Williamson?

  And like so many people in the comments, like this wasn't a clash. Where's the clashing? This isn't, I'm like, well, okay, fucking debating Piers Morgan. But like you fuck it, like you clicked on it, like you clicked on it. So what is it? What, what's the game that you want content creators to play? Like you, is it clickbait? If your interpretation, well, the threshold that I have for clashing is this and the threshold that you meant for debating is that. It's like.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  And this is, this would be the part to where I'm critical of audiences, but I don't know how much the culture can change there. This is the part where I would shift my critical this then to content creators. And I think the left has had a huge problem with this for a long time. I think the left for a long time assumed that you just can't defend left-leaning ideas because right-leaning ideas are too easy. Like, it's easier to just say, like, affirmative action, bad because it's racist versus, well, how do you defend affirmative action? But I think that something way different has happened. I think that people on the right have spent a really good chunk of time figuring out how to make their ideas entertaining and fun and funny. And people on the left just assume that, like, well, we're right, and it's difficult. So fuck you. You either get it or you don't. And I'm not going to sit here and educate you.

• 1:57:16Chris Williamson?

  It's quite an elitist perspective of things.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  Very, very, very elitist, yeah. So I think as a content creator, you're, you have a responsibility to two different things. You do have a responsibility to be factually correct and to not spread misinformation. I think you also do have a responsibility to be entertaining and funny, you know? For all the theories on Trump, I have one bullshit theory that I genuinely believe that a huge chunk, I'm gonna say 45% of Trump's success goes back to, all the way back to the red pill stuff, the game. I think he's a really funny guy. And I think that carries him really far. More than being genuine, more than whatever identifying.

• 1:57:54Chris Williamson?

  Draining the swamp.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fact that when he goes on stage and he starts talking, he's funny, he can work a crowd really well. A lot of people knew him from The Apprentice, where he was, like, almost universally liked. I'm pretty sure those were popular reality TV shows, from The Apprentice and everything. He's a funny dude. His tweets were fucking hilarious, whether you were on the left or the right. And I think that actually goes really, really, really, really, really far. And it plugs into something that I thought, funnily enough, because people always bring up, like, you know, like, well, what was it like for you in high school? Because you were short, you were underweight, you had bad acne. In my going through high school, I always just thought, the fact that I'm funny makes everything work. I can literally talk to, I had huge groups of friends from different areas. I had no problem talking to girls. I didn't even know that 5'7" or 5'8" was short for a guy. I didn't even think about that. Because I can make somebody laugh, like, I'm good to go. And I think this, I think it is true for Donald Trump that a huge part of his success is just the fact that he's funny. And people will watch him for that.

• 1:58:39Chris Williamson?

  Riz and charm are massively underpriced by most people.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Yes, massively, yes.

• 1:58:44Chris Williamson?

  Because most of the time on the internet, at least with the, like, Performative autism hermetically sealed box that almost everybody exists in, especially the terminally online people, it's never actually humor. They're not playing with wit and charm and interpersonal flow. What they're doing is trying to find some cutting, sardonic, like weird dunk take, which isn't the same. That doesn't come, if you say that in person, in an interview or to a friend or on a debate, it sounds petty and it sounds, it usually sounds quite demeaning and it doesn't sound, whereas Douglas Murray against Malcolm Gladwell, when they were debating about is independent media more important or better than mainstream media or whatever it might be.

• 1:59:25Chris Williamson?

  And Douglas got like three laughs, big, relatively big laughs throughout the entirety of the conversation. So guess what? He won, like he won in the hearts and minds of so many people. And the same thing goes for this. This is what Sam Harris said, if you do a debate and you get between two and three absolute zingers, where most of the room laughs, it's really hard to have lost that debate unless you've been absolutely sideswiped by all of the facts and everything else and you look like an idiot outside of that. Like, people like charm.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and people will act like, people will say things like, oh, like that's why debate is fake, because people just go by who they like more and blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry, but that is every single facet of your life. Every single facet of your life is going to be influenced heavily by how other people view you and how social you are with other people, whether it's for promotions at work or job performance, whether it's relationships with professors in college, whether it's, you know, politics, how well people like you, whether it's as a content creator.

• 2:00:21Chris Williamson?

  Getting moved to the front of the group of a table waitlist at a restaurant.

• 2:00:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, whether it's how you relate to a significant other. How many autistic guys or girls have you heard say something like, I don't know why they're so fucking mad. I was 100% correct. That doesn't fucking matter. You think that matters? Yeah, I know this better than anybody. Yeah, yeah, that doesn't fucking matter how right you are in the conversation. People are like, oh, you don't care what I'm saying, you just care about how I say it. Yeah, no shit, they care about how you say it. There's a big difference between, hey, I'm really worried about you. You're getting a little bit of late weight, like, let's do something like work out or eat better. Versus saying like, you're a fat fucking piece of shit. And if you don't lose fucking weight, I'm gonna divorce you. Right? Those are two, you might be communicating factually a similar thing, but the delivery is incredibly important. And the dumbest thing about this is people fucking know this. People know this is important. Because you know that the way that somebody communicates with you is gonna influence how you perceive the message and how you take it. And you're gonna get irritated when people are short or snarkier.

• 2:01:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, your desire for other people to ignore that doesn't extend to your enjoyment of other people being humor. Like, full of humor and funny.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Chris Williamson?

  Like, you are more than happy to be charmed by that guy or that girl that does that thing. And you're like, fuck, I can't, I really don't agree with most of what that particular content creator says. But there's something about the way that they communicate. I just, I really, I really love the fact that Matt Walsh is dry and sad on it. I really love the fact that Destiny makes retard jokes. I really love the fact that XYZ. Like, those things just cut through an awful lot of the biases and the predis... And meanwhile, you're saying to the world, no, no, no, you shouldn't give privilege to people that are entertaining and are funny.

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Chris Williamson?

  You can't get to have it both ways. And so many, yeah, I think.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Jon Stewart wasn't the smartest person in media when he did The Daily Show, you know, however many 20 years ago, whatever. He was really funny. He was really entertaining. That's for his...

• 2:02:01Chris Williamson?

  Back on TV now. He's running it back.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  I don't know how funny he is now. I'm not sure. I just haven't watched as much.

• 2:02:06Chris Williamson?

  I saw, I saw one little bit of a monologue. It was him offering that black justice lady. Is it like a black, it's like a black lady? Is she on the Supreme Court or is it a guy?

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. You're talking about Clarence Thomas, I think.

• 2:02:21Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  Was that The Daily Show? I thought that was Stephen Colbert. Am I making that up?

• 2:02:25Chris Williamson?

  Oh, maybe. I can't remember who it was.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Offering them, oh, no, no, no. John Oliver, I think, was the...

• 2:02:28Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Yes, British guy.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:30Chris Williamson?

  Yes, offering them an RV and a million dollars if they...

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  A year, yeah, to step down as a Supreme Court justice. Which is funny.

• 2:02:39Chris Williamson?

  What's next? What are you doing next? What's the focus?

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  Um, in two days, I go to New York City to do that Finkelstein debate. My conversation, I had a conversation with Jordan Peterson, I think, two weeks ago. That'll probably get published sometime.

• 2:02:50Chris Williamson?

  Was that with him or virtual?

• 2:02:52Speaker 01

  No, it was with him. I went to DC, I think, for that.

• 2:02:55Speaker 01

  And then next month, I'm trying to find, because I started this Vivevance, the past like four or five months of my stream have been very research driven. I've taken like more notes and studied on this thing, probably more than I have cumulatively for everything else in my entire life.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  So I'm trying to, next month, figure out like something a little bit more chill to do, something more bite sized, something more like culturally relevant. So maybe it'll be like research about like the border or immigration or something. But so I'm going to keep my fanbase a little bit more engaged than me literally reading the end of like books on stream.

• 2:03:22Chris Williamson?

  I hope that they weren't enjoying you playing Minecraft, because that's gone out of the window. Fully put state to all of your gaming content as a gaming streamer by taking a drug.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think it's probably okay. I think people like the political stuff more that I'm more focused on. I just need to make sure it's like relevant and entertaining and not like hardcore, deep dives on the history of like entire conflicts. Yeah.

• 2:03:41Chris Williamson?

  How did you find Jordan interpersonally? I don't know how much time you got to spend with him and in terms of your debate and stuff.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Interpersonally, he was fine. Ideologically, he was about where I thought he would be, which is kind of disappointing. I was hoping I'd be surprised.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  I have this theory that people get broken by events and then they're, they never recover. A really good example of this, do you know who Brett Weinstein?

• 2:04:06Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  I think is a perfect example of this. If you read the stuff that he was writing or talking about during the Evergreen College fiasco.

• 2:04:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  I thought that all of it was unbelievably reasonable. I thought he seemed like a reasonable guy. Everything was like, cool. But I think that event like broke his mind over the wheel. And then now, you know, he's on Joe Rogan saying, I think 13 million people have died probably from vaccines in the United States. I'm like, really? I think for Jordan Peterson, I think it was the C16 stuff. That like with the woke fighting or whatever, like people will have this moment where they fight against another side. And it's something, a switch flips. And because they get attacked by the other side so much, they become entrenched into the antithesis of that movement. And thus unfortunately, because I think Jordan Peterson has a lot of, or had a lot of really insightful things to say about philosophy. Not philosophy, I'm sorry, a little bit about philosophy, but mainly psychology that I really appreciate listening to. But now it's just like all the, I feel like I'm talking to a random Trump voter, like.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  I think I was trying to bring up the frustrating, I think I brought up this idea of the constellation of beliefs that people have. And it was funny because I think in this interview that we do, in like one minute, when I bring up climate change, he's brought up the WEF, I think like eating crickets, like the, everybody will be poor, but own, or you won't own anything and you'll be happy. And depopulation and 20% of Europe is dying because of the vaccine, all the overhead deaths because of like to try to, and it's just like, ah, yeah, the, when I, when I see mines that it feels like they get captured because they become entrenched in the opposite of whoever bullied them last. That's just like a great wasted potential for me. And I feel like he suffers from that quite a bit.

• 2:05:35Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether those two guys have had that happen because of that situation, but I certainly know, the last time that we were together, I told you about the peak hate rule, which is that every content creator is best known for their most well-known transgression and their most recent one. So Jordan would be like, he doesn't, he hates trans people and doesn't want to say their names. And he calls Sports Illustrated models fat. Like Hassan would be, um, he said that Americans deserve nine 11. And he thinks that being a streamer is harder than working in McDonald's or whatever. Like everybody, every creator is captured by the biggest thing that they did and the most recent thing that they did. And that's definitely the way that they're interpreted. And I can totally see, I even see this in myself, man, like, you know, the,

• 2:06:16Chris Williamson?

  there's been a big change in scrutiny and attention and stuff over the last year. And there's no media kit. There's no, no one throws a training manual at you to go, oh, and by the way, when you reach half a billion people a year, this is how you, like, how you think about yourself or how you deal with attention, how you deal with criticism on the internet. And if there, you have a constitution like you, maybe that's something that is a little bit easier to do. But even for you, it must be like, oh, fucking hell, like it feels like this ambient fucking vigilance of an awful lot of people. And then if you have all of the way down the spectrum to the person that's the most sensitive in the world, they're going to really struggle with that. Even though that wasn't necessarily what they asked for, but they did ask for it because they decided to just do this thing and they keep going.

• 2:06:56Chris Williamson?

  And then you accumulate this audience. All of that, I can completely see how one of the responses from people would be, all right, you've made me feel the,

• 2:07:09Chris Williamson?

  World that I wanted to love me and validate me, jilted me. Fuck you, I'm out. I'm never gonna listen to you again. You're all shills or part of the WEF, or you're all libtards, or you're all like, like, whoa, are you all whatever, like racist, transphobic? It's very easy to do that because you never have to deal with the unrequited love thing again.

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Chris Williamson?

  Ever.

• 2:07:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's just frustrating because it's such a thought terminating view of the world. And then you end up losing your, you know, reasonable faculty to evaluate positions. And now you've just bought into the opposite of whatever the other side said. And it just feels, it's disappointing and dumb, I think.

• 2:07:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, humans, humaning is inconvenient a lot of the time because there's other stuff that they could have done. Destiny, dude, I appreciate you, man. Good luck with all the debates. And I'm not sure the next time that you come through Austin, but we'll have to do barbecue and a training session or whatever it is that you've got on.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  Sounds great. I look forward to it.

• 2:08:05Speaker 02

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