See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Speaker 1

00:00

If you have a democratic style of governance, you are entrusting people with 1 of the most awesome and radical of responsibilities. And that's saying that you're going to pick the people that are gonna make some of the hardest decisions in all of human history. If you're gonna trust people to vote correctly, you have to be able to trust them to have open and honest dialogue with each other. Whether that's Nazis or KKK people or whoever talking, you have to believe that your people are going to be able to rise above and make the correct determinations when they hear these types of speeches.

Speaker 1

00:29

And if you're so worried that somebody's gonna hear a certain political figure and they're going to be completely radicalized instantly, then what that tells me is that you don't have enough faith in humans for democracy to be a viable institution, which is fine. You can be anti-democratic, but I don't think you can be pro-democracy and anti-free speech.

Speaker 2

00:47

The following is a conversation with Steven Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. He's a video game streamer and political commentator. 1 of the early pioneers of both live streaming in general and live streamed political debate and discourse.

Speaker 2

01:02

Politically, he is a progressive, identifying as either left or far left, depending on your perspective. There are many reasons I wanted to talk to Stephen. First, I just talked to Ben Shapiro, and many people have told me that Stephen is the Ben Shapiro of the left in terms of political perspective and exceptional debate skills. Second reason is he skillfully defends some nuanced non-standard views, at the same time being pro-establishment, pro-institutions, and pro-Biden, while also being pro-capitalism and pro-free speech.

Speaker 2

01:39

Third reason is he has been there at the beginning and throughout the meteoric rise of the video game live streaming community. In some mainstream circles, this community is not taken seriously, perhaps because of its demographic distribution skewing young, or perhaps because of the sometimes harsh style of communication. But I think this community should be taken seriously and shown respect. Millions of young minds tune into livestreams like Destiny's to question and to try to understand what is going on with the world, often exploring challenging, even controversial ideas.

Speaker 2

02:18

The language is sometimes harsher and the humor sometimes meaner than I would prefer. But I, Grandpa Lex, put on my rain boots and went into the beautiful chaotic muck of online discourse and have so far survived to tell the tale with a smile and even more love in my heart than before. On top of all this, we were lucky to have Molina Gorinson, a popular streamer and world Traveler, join us at the end of the conversation. You can check out her channel on twitch.tv slash Molina, and you can check out Stephen's channel on youtube.com slash Destiny.

Speaker 2

02:57

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Destiny.

Speaker 1

03:05

I don't know if you watched me watching your yay interview.

Speaker 3

03:09

Yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 1

03:10

I'm so curious, when you're navigating a conversation like that, how intentional is the thought process between like building rapport and pushing and giving a little and letting like-

Speaker 3

03:21

0, 0 intention. I was watching and thank you so much. It was very kind for you to review that conversation.

Speaker 3

03:26

It meant a lot that you were complimentary in parts on the technical aspects of the conversation, but no, 0. And I'm actually deliberately trying to avoid, I think you've called it debate brain, which is just another flavor of thinking about like the meta conversation, trying to optimize how should this conversation go? Because I feel like the more you do that, the better you get at that, the less human connection you have. Like the less genuinely you're actually sitting there in the moment and listening to the person, you're more like calculating what's the right thing to say versus like feeling what is that person feeling right now?

Speaker 3

04:08

What are they thinking? That's what I'm trying to do is like putting myself in their mind and thinking, what does the world look like to them? What does the world feel like to them? And so from that, I truly try to listen.

Speaker 3

04:20

Now, I'm also learning, especially because Rogan and others have been giving me shit for not pushing back, it's good sometimes to say, from a place of care for the other human being to say stop. What did you just say? I don't think that represents who you are and what you really mean. Or maybe if it does at that time represents who they are, I can see a better world if they grow into a different direction, try to point that direction out to them.

Speaker 1

04:52

There's a really complicated dance between letting somebody share their full story versus letting somebody like essentially, I guess like proselytize your audience. And it's like, okay, hold on, let's take him in here. But yeah, I used to be 4 or 5 years ago, it was attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, whatever you said.

Speaker 1

05:08

And now I'm leaning way more towards the like, okay, well, tell me how you feel about everything and then we'll go from there. So a lot of people like my new approach. Some older fans will watch and they're like, why are you letting this guy just ramble on? You know he said like 5 or 6 wrong things and you're only gonna call him out on 2 of them.

Speaker 1

05:21

And it's like, it's just different styles of conversation. But yeah.

Speaker 3

05:24

Do you do a lot of research beforehand too?

Speaker 1

05:26

Depending on the conversation, yeah. So if we're gonna talk like vaccines and stuff, yeah, that's a ton of reading and stuff that I never thought I'd know going into it. If it's a more personal, like political philosophy conversation, there's not as much you can prepare for, just it truly depends on the conversation.

Speaker 3

05:39

How much are you actually listening to the other person?

Speaker 1

05:41

I'm always listening, you have to listen. Because as soon as you stop listening, the quality of everything falls apart. The connection disappears, the quality of the conversation disappears.

Speaker 1

05:48

But my natural inclination is to just be way more aggressive than normal, so I have to constantly remind myself, I guess you would call it a meta conversation, where you're like, okay, he's probably saying this because of that, or we'll let him go here and then we'll stop later. But yeah, because my preferred style of conversation is like, I'm gonna talk and the second I say something you disagree with, then let's iron it out, right? I got like, I think I'm like syllogisms, like, okay, here's premise A, good, okay, premise B, okay. And then conclusion.

Speaker 1

06:15

And then as long as we're both deductively sound, we're not crazy, no psychosis, then we're gonna agree on everything. Whereas other people like to, most people think in stories, like narratives, like a whole, there's a whole like narrative and the individual facts don't matter as much because they'll pick and choose what they want. And it's really hard because everybody thinks narrative so I have to function in that world, but it's frustrating for me sometimes.

Speaker 3

06:34

Well, I've seen, you've had a lot of excellent debates. 1 of them I just recently, last night, watched is on systemic racism, and it's the first time I've seen you completely lose your shit. Oh, shoot,

Speaker 1

06:46

who was that against?

Speaker 3

06:47

I'm not sure exactly, but you were just very frustrated, sorry, not lose your shit, but you were frustrated constantly because of the thing, let's lay out 123, and every time you try to lay it out, it would falter. I think it had to do with sort of, can you use data to make an argument, or do you need to use a study that does an interpretation of that data? And then there's like this tension between, I think this is a behavioral economist that you were talking to, the point is you do this kind of nice layout that the whole point of behavioral economics is says there's more to it than just the data.

Speaker 3

07:19

You have to give a context and do the rich, rigorous interpretation in the context of the full human story. And then there was the dance back and forth. Sometimes you use data, sometimes not, and you're getting really frustrated and shutting down. And so that felt like a failure mode.

Speaker 3

07:34

I've seen Sam Harris have similar sticking points. Like if we can't agree on the terminology, we can't go on. To me, I feel like, the Wittgenstein perspective is like, I think if you get stuck on any 1 thing, you're just not gonna make progress. You have to, part of the conversation has to be about doing a good dance together versus being dogmatically stuck on the path to truth.

Speaker 1

08:05

I think the true challenge is identifying what of those sticking points are important versus what is not important. So Like if I'm having an argument with somebody about like Jewish representation in media, they might, it might be like a big conversation and they might say a couple things. Like I think Jewish people, you know, they tend to help their own or whatever.

Speaker 1

08:25

And I'm saying,

Speaker 3

08:26

yeah, okay.

Speaker 1

08:26

But like for the purpose of the conversation, we can keep moving. But if they casually drop like, you know, yeah. And I think that's why the Holocaust numbers are blown up from like 100,000 to 6 million.

Speaker 1

08:34

And that's when I was like, okay, well, hold on, wait, wait. If you think this, we have to stop here because this is gonna be, it's not just a language game in this part. If you really believe this fact, then the whole rest of the conversation is gonna be informed by that belief, you know?

Speaker 3

08:46

And it has to be something that doesn't bother you personally. You have to step outside your own ego. So Holocaust denial is somebody that would bother a lot of people.

Speaker 3

08:56

And there's some things, just observing you, I feel like when you get really good at conversation, you can become a stickler to, you might have your favorite terms that really bothers you if people don't agree on those terms.

Speaker 1

09:10

It begs the question. You mean raising the question. Yeah, I usually just want, if people say stuff, I just let it slide, yeah?

Speaker 1

09:16

Yeah. Because if you fight, when you're having a conversation with somebody and you're talking to their audience at the same time, because that's really what's happening, you never want to come off as overcombative or overaggressive because it puts people in like, there's like a trigger in your brain, and this is true of relationships, of friendships, of persuasive rhetoric or whatever, there's a trigger in the brain. And as soon as that defensive trigger gets like flipped on, everything is over. You've lost the ability to persuade because everything becomes a fight at that point, yeah.

Speaker 3

09:39

Well, I wanted to talk to you because I heard somewhere that you were referred to as the Ben Shapiro of the left. And since I'm talking with Ben as well, I wanted to sort of complete spiritually this platonic political philosophy puzzle in my head. You are a progressive, but a progressive with many nonstandard progressive views, and you had a heck of a fascinating journey through all of that.

Speaker 3

10:03

And like I said, I think you argue with passion sometimes, with excessive amounts of passion. But almost- That's

Speaker 1

10:09

a really polite way of saying that.

Speaker 3

10:11

Almost always with good faith and with rigor, with seriousness. I asked on your subreddit, which is an excellent subreddit, shout out to the Destiny subreddit, so much, at least for that particular post. What I really loved is when I asked for questions for you, they were like, holy shit, there's adults in there, let's all behave.

Speaker 3

10:31

Nobody say incest. I was like, what? What's going on here? But actually the questions that rose to the top were really good.

Speaker 3

10:39

So somebody said that Destiny was, speaking of your journey, was a conservative in his early teens, then he became a libertarian, then he became a left-wing social justice warrior, then he flirted with socialism, and now he is a social democrat liberal. I've also heard you refer to yourself as a far-left person. So to the degree there's truth to that journey, Can you take me through your evolution through the landscape of political ideologies that you went through?

Speaker 1

11:08

So my dad comes from Kentucky and my mom is a Cuban immigrant. Cubans are notorious for being very conservative in the United States for historical reasons and for other reasons, but my upbringing was a very Republican 1. I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, on the radio Billy Cunningham, I think Sean Hannity a little bit later on, that was my whole upbringing politically.

Speaker 1

11:36

I remember I was writing, I'd written articles for the school journal in favor of defending the war in Iraq and defending Bush from all the criticism, et cetera. So that was my upbringing. I think once I hit high school, college, I had my edgy, libertarian-esque high school phase of reading Ayn Rand, of figuring out that, oh my God, nothing in life matters except for class and money. That's actually the answer to everything.

Speaker 1

12:01

And I got to college, I became a Ron Paul fan, very big Ron Paul fan. And then from there, I kind of work, do life, life happens. At the kind of the lowest point in my life in terms of where I'm working financially, everything is like kind of in ruin in my life. There's a whole bunch of dumb stuff that's happened.

Speaker 1

12:18

Probably my most conservative point, I don't know what it is about like being poor and thinking like you can work your way out of it, you can do whatever. It's just my upbringing is always just like, if you're not having financial success, just work, work, work, work, work. And then I got into streaming, very, very lucky break. Everything just lined up at the right time.

Speaker 1

12:33

And then as I've progressed through streaming, I would say through the years, I've gradually fallen more and more to the left, especially once my kid turned 456 years old. And I started to see like how much different his life was just because of the financial opportunities that I was able to provide for him through no merit of his own. And that started to radically change how I viewed the world in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3

12:52

So actually let's like linger on that low point. You worked at McDonald's, you worked at a casino, you did carpet cleaning. What was the lowest point?

Speaker 1

13:03

Definitely the carpet cleaning.

Speaker 3

13:05

Really? Absolutely. Why was it the lowest point? That's when you were just flirting with starting streaming?

Speaker 1

13:11

My whole life has been a series of lucky breaks, really, truly. I grew up playing a lot of video games, but back in my day, our day, you had to read. There was a lot of text on the screen.

Speaker 3

13:22

Back in my day, we used to play-

Speaker 1

13:24

They didn't all talk

Speaker 3

13:24

to you.

Speaker 1

13:25

Yeah, because nowadays everything's voice acted, but back then you had to read a lot. I was a really good reader and a really good vocabularist.

Speaker 3

13:30

Yeah, I've heard you actually say that. What games are we talking about? What do you mean just reading?

Speaker 3

13:34

You talking about like RPGs?

Speaker 1

13:36

Yeah, JRPGs, so like Final Fantasy games, Fantasy Stars, like all of these, like any RPG that would have been on the SNES, Sega, PlayStation, these are the things

Speaker 3

13:43

that I'm- Let's pause on that.

Speaker 1

13:44

Okay.

Speaker 3

13:45

I just talked to Todd Howard, who's of the Elder Scrolls fame and the Fallout fame and beyond. What's your thoughts on Elder Scrolls? Why is Skyrim the greatest RPG of all time?

Speaker 1

13:59

Man, I really don't like Skyrim or Fallout. You don't love it? Oh, really?

Speaker 1

14:03

No, not at all.

Speaker 3

14:04

Why do you hate Skyrim?

Speaker 1

14:05

Yeah, so I really like characters and like compelling stories and narrators around those characters. And I like to see them kind of like grow and change, kind of like a movie or a story. So in your like Final fantasy games, you've got characters.

Speaker 1

14:17

There are a lot of like classical tropes of like, a character starts off kind of like edgy, angsty, all on their own, they develop relationships, friendships, they realize that the life is more about themselves and they do that. And I like that growth. That's kind of what you see in all of those old role-playing games. I didn't like the open world ones as much because your main character is just like a blank slate, never talks, it's for you to like project onto, but there's not the same like linear narrative of like growth

Speaker 3

14:41

for the character. Oh, that's fascinating. There's an actual story arc to the character that's more crafted in a beautiful way by the designers of the game.

Speaker 3

14:48

Yeah.

Speaker 1

14:48

I don't think 1 is better or worse. I tend towards like, I want to hear a compelling story around like a set of characters that like grow and change as the game goes on.

Speaker 3

14:54

Oh, that's beautifully put then. Yeah. I just really loved being able to leave the town.

Speaker 3

15:00

You go outside the town and you look outside its nature and the world of possibilities is before you. You can do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, that immensity of just being lost in the world is really immersive for me. But yeah, you're right.

Speaker 3

15:12

Whatever attracts you about a world. So you were just starting to play video games. You grew up playing video games, that's 1 of your lucky breaks. There's just

Speaker 1

15:22

like a lot of random skills you pick up depending on the type of game you play. I played a lot of text-based games on the computer, so I was a very fast typer, I'm still a very fast typer. Read a lot, learned weird kind of math stuff for some of the calculations, some of the games.

Speaker 1

15:36

I think I'm pretty good at getting information, figuring stuff out, learning patterns, all of that. And then that plus the reading and everything with the games meant that I don't want to say I excelled in school because my grades were pretty bad, but I was in like all honors, all AP classes or whatever. A lot of dual enrollment, a lot of AP credit going into college. So I did pretty well in school, probably better than I should have, but it was because I had the game stuff that was like really powering a lot of my brain there while I was trying to sleep through class.

Speaker 3

16:02

So you're able to soak in information, integrate it, quickly take notes.

Speaker 1

16:06

Generally I think I'm pretty good at that, yeah.

Speaker 3

16:08

You do this a lot when you stream, you're typing stuff. Is there a system in that note taking? And what do you use for note taking?

Speaker 1

16:16

Does it matter? I use a notepad. Like notepad.exe notepad?

Speaker 1

16:20

Yep, notepad.exe, not the plus plus, not.

Speaker 3

16:23

Is there genius to the madness behind that or you just don't give a shit?

Speaker 1

16:27

No, I mean like, it's gonna depend on the style of conversation. If I'm with somebody that is very meticulously organized their thoughts and they're a, find a better word here for rambler. You can edit that in, better word for rambler.

Speaker 1

16:38

Somebody that talks a lot and a lot. I'll start like taking notes, bullet points, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, because there's a style of conversation where I say 7 or 8 different things and then when you go to respond to everything I said, I cut you off immediately and we argue that point. But if somebody is gonna do that, you're just like, hold on, you just said these 8 things, I'm gonna respond to every single 1, I've written them all down and then you can go, if you wanna go point by point, we can, but you just said all this and I wrote it down, so now we're gonna go.

Speaker 3

17:01

So what are you actually writing down, like a couple

Speaker 1

17:03

of words per point they left? Honestly, like, there are very few unique conversations in politics. Like a lot of them are kind of retreading old ground.

Speaker 1

17:10

So if we're having a debate on abortion, somebody might say like, oh, well I believe this thing about viability, and I believe this thing about, you know, when they're a fetus versus a human and I'll just write down like those points so that when I go to respond, I kind of have like a, like note cards, like a guiding thing there to keep me centered on my response.

Speaker 3

17:25

Political discourse is a kind of tree you're walking down and I got it and you're like taking- Just

Speaker 1

17:29

to keep my focus guided, so I'm not like running off on a weird tangent or responding to something I didn't say or something.

Speaker 3

17:34

What about like doing research? It's just, is there a system to your note taking? Because mentally you seem to be 1 of the most organized people I've listened to.

Speaker 3

17:43

So is it in your mind or is there a system that's on paper?

Speaker 1

17:47

A little of both. I feel like the human mind is a beautiful thing if you have interest in an area. So what I'll tell people is, let's say there's a totally new topic that I'm researching, I don't know anything, and I'll do a couple of these on stream.

Speaker 1

18:00

I think they're boring, but people watch it. I might open a Wikipedia article and I'll read and I hit something I don't know. And then I open the next Wikipedia article and I'll read it. And then I might have like 7 tabs open and I'll read and I'll read and I'll read.

Speaker 1

18:10

And I'll read a ton of stuff, maybe for hour 234 hours of stuff. And then by the end, you know, someone in chat will ask me like, do you even remember like this particular thing? And I'll say, not really, no, not too much. But what happens is, as long as you've seen it once, what will happen is like the next day, the day after we'll read something else and be like, oh, I remember that thing from this thing.

Speaker 1

18:28

I remember like vaguely that. And then if you see it like a third time, you're like, oh, this makes sense because especially when it comes to, oh, here's like a little trick on stuff. If you're ever reading any news and there's a place that pops up, always look at it on a map because so much of history is like on a map. It's so important to like know the geography.

Speaker 1

18:45

It makes things make so much more sense. But yeah, once I start to see stuff over and over again, just because I've like read it a few times, stuff will start to kind of connect to my mind. And like, oh yeah, well, this makes sense. Of course, these people believe this because of this.

Speaker 1

18:57

Or of course, like this happened here. It's because, you know, that happened there. So yeah, it's a lot of that. If there's a topic that I'm doing specific research for, so like vaccine-related stuff is a big 1, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is a big 1, that I'll break out a note, I'll probably get a Google Doc, and I'll just start writing an outline of kind of the rough points of everything, just to organize my thoughts around different topics, yeah.

Speaker 3

19:18

We're just gonna go on tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent. We'll return to the low point of your life at some point. Always returning from the philosophy to the psychology.

Speaker 3

19:26

So you did the Ukraine topic. 1 question is, what role does US play in this war? Could they have done something to avoid the war? Did they have a role to play in forcing Vladimir Putin's hand, Do they have a role to play in deescalating the war towards a peace agreement and the opposite?

Speaker 3

19:52

If it does escalate towards something like the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, are they to blame, are we to blame?

Speaker 1

20:01

Oh man, somebody sent me an email a while ago with great words. There's a specific way to navigate a conversation where you can kind of like contribute to a negative event, but you're not really the 1 responsible for it. Like the classic example is a woman goes out late at night, gets a little bit too drunk, and then something happens.

Speaker 1

20:18

And it's like, while there might have been steps she could have taken to mitigate the risk, it's not her fault of what happened because the responsibility rests on the agent making the choice, right? There's a chooser at some point that is choosing to do wrong or evil. I don't believe in any of the arguments that say the United States has contributed to Russia's position on Ukraine or the actions that they've taken on Ukraine. There are several arguments that some people, some even political scholars, are putting out there to say that the United States is to blame, but I find them completely unconvincing.

Speaker 1

20:50

I think that when you ask the question of like, what is the United States role or what has our role been? I think it's really important for us. I don't think we even agree as a country on what our role should be, which I think is a hard 1, because you've got this kind of, there's this growing populist movement in the United States. It might be the far left and the far right.

Speaker 1

21:05

And I think populists tend to have this kind of isolationist view of the world, where the United States should just be our own thing. We shouldn't be telling anybody what to do. We shouldn't be the world police. And then kind of more in these like center, left, center, right positions.

Speaker 1

21:17

And then across a lot of Europe, you've got, well, okay, the United States is kind of like the big kid on the block. Like we're looking to them for guidance and leadership on situations like what's going on in Ukraine. So insofar as The original question is like, what is the United States responsibility? I think we have a responsibility to ensure the relative freedom, prosperity, and stability across Europe.

Speaker 1

21:39

I think that defending Ukraine's sovereignty and right to their borders is a part of that. And I don't believe that prior to the invasion in 2022, I don't think the United States was contributing to Russia invading that country. I know there are arguments given that like the expansion of NATO, you know, has something that's been threatening to Russia, but the Baltics joined and Russia didn't do anything about it. The invasion to Crimea was very clearly a response to the revolution in 2014.

Speaker 1

22:04

The invasion on the borders is clearly a response to Ukraine winning that civil war in the Southeast and the Donbass and Russia becoming more aggressive. I don't think that you can blame any of that on NATO expansion. There's no NATO countries that are threatening Russia or invading Russia.

Speaker 3

22:18

Do you think there is a nuclear threat? Do you think about this? Do you worry about this, that there is a threat of a tactical nuclear weapon being dropped?

Speaker 1

22:27

I think that possibility exists either way. And I think the responsibility for that is on Russia Because it just can't be the case that if you have nukes, you're allowed to invade countries and take their land. Because if anything, I think that that down the road also increases the potential for nuclear problems in the future, right?

Speaker 1

22:42

Because at that point, either every single country has to acquire their own nuclear weapons, because if you don't, Russia's gonna mess with you. Or every single country has to join NATO, and now what, we're back at square 0, ground 0, square 1, where people are like, oh, well look, all these countries joining NATO is aggressive towards Russia. Like, what are you gonna do?

Speaker 3

22:57

Yeah, you've mentioned that there's a complicated calculus going on with the countries that have nuclear weapons. And what's our responsibility? Are you allowed to do anything you want to countries that don't have nuclear weapons?

Speaker 3

23:13

That's a really tricky discussion. Because what is US supposed to do if Russia drops a tactical nuclear weapon? There's a set of options, none of which are good. And it's such a tricky moment right now because the things that Biden and other public figures say, I feel like has a significant impact on the way this game turns out.

Speaker 3

23:38

Because I think mutually assured destruction is partially a game of words. Now, I mean, I believe in the power of conversation, of leaders talking to each other. I feel like you have to have a balance between threat and compromise, and like empathy for the needs, the geopolitical, the economic needs of a nation, but also sort of respect and represent your own interests. So it's a tricky 1, like how do you play the hand?

Speaker 1

24:15

It reminds me of, I don't know if you've ever heard in like evolutionary psych or evolutionary biology, there are things called tit for tat strategies. It kind of reminds me of that where it's like, if like there are a whole bunch of these little biological mechanisms where creatures will develop like socializing, like tit for tat. If you do something bad to me, I'm gonna do something bad for you.

Speaker 1

24:30

And then more complicated schemes will come out where it'll be like tit, tit for tat, where it's like you can make 1 mistake and then I'm going to get you if you do a second 1. Or it could be tit, tit, tit for tat, or there could be tit for tat, tat for tit. There's like all these like back and forths where creatures kind of optimize themselves. And Yeah, I think something the United States did really well in terms of that kind of conversational strategy and I approved of this in the beginning was Biden was very clear about setting out like the exact level of US involvement for the war.

Speaker 1

24:57

We're not going to do a no-fly zone. There's not going to be US troops on the ground in Ukraine, but we are gonna send a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of arms and a whole bunch of intel to them. And I thought he did a good job at laying out like the limitation of the US involvement while opening as much as we could in the ways we could help. But the, yeah, that looming threat of some sort of tactical nuclear weapon, I think on the table right now is like, it's gonna be the annihilation of like Russian sea forces and everything, but you know, what happens if it continues to escalate?

Speaker 1

25:22

That's like a world that nobody wants to be in, yeah.

Speaker 3

25:26

So we talked about difficult conversations. And again, thank you so much for reviewing the yay conversation. Let me ask you about Putin.

Speaker 3

25:36

Speaking of difficult conversations. So if you sit down, if I sit down with somebody like Vladimir Putin or Vladimir Zelensky, what's the right way to have that conversation? Oh man. We can talk about that 1, or we could talk about somebody more well understood through history, like Stalin or Hitler, something like that.

Speaker 3

25:57

Maybe that's an easier example to illustrate how to handle extremely difficult conversations.

Speaker 1

26:03

Yeah, I mean, I can handle really difficult conversations between like 2 people, leaders of countries though, there's so much that you are representing in that conversation. I guess the thing that would be interesting to me would be like, what is Vladimir Putin's interest? Like what is the genuine interest that he has in the conflict?

Speaker 1

26:23

Because I think finding out like what is your buy-in or what is your like what is the driving force keeping you here is probably the most important thing. I think For Zelensky, I think it's quite a bit more simpler because he's on the defense, so he's defending his country and his people. For Putin, I've heard all sorts of things. Dugin has his writings on the East versus the West, the collapse of the West in the face of all of the liberalism and the weird LGBT stuff that they criticize.

Speaker 1

26:47

You've got the desire to like return to this like former Soviet Union-esque thing. You've got Putin's quotes that collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster, you know, of 20th century. And I guess figuring out like, what is Putin after? I'm not actually sure.

Speaker 1

27:00

I don't know the answer to that question, I know a lot of people write about it, but yeah.

Speaker 3

27:03

Well, there's a lot of answers to that question, there's a lot of answers that he can give to that question, so say I sit down with him for 3 hours and talk about it. I think, this is a really interesting distinction, because you do do difficult conversations in the space of ideas. But also in your stream, you have, I mean, there's a bunch of drama going on, there's the human psychology's laid out in its full richness before you.

Speaker 3

27:27

So to me, with leaders, I think a part of the conversation has to be about the human psychology. Not like a meta conversation, but really understand what they feel, what they fear, who they are as a human being. Like as a family man, as a person proud of their country, as a person with an ego, as a person who's been affected, if not corrupted by powers, all of us can be and likely are. So all of that, that gives context to then the answers about what do you want in this war?

Speaker 3

28:04

Because the answers about what you want in this war will be political answers. It's like a game that's being played, again, with words. And politicians are incredibly good at playing that game. I think the deeper truth comes from understanding the human being from which those words come.

Speaker 3

28:22

And I think that's what you do. I don't know if you do those kinds of conversations where-

Speaker 1

28:26

Never talked to any country leaders, so.

Speaker 3

28:28

No, not a country leader, but say a controversial figure or somebody that represents a certain idea, don't just talk in the space of ideas or challenge the ideas, but understand who is this person, how did you come to those ideas?

Speaker 1

28:41

Oh yeah, when I've had, there've been a couple of very controversial right-leaning figures. So the 2, obviously the mainstreamers from either Lauren Southern and Nick Fuentes. And those types of conversations initially aren't very political at all.

Speaker 1

28:55

Yeah, it's more like, obviously we believe in very, very, very different things, but like beliefs don't happen accidentally. So how did you get to where you are? Those are way more personal conversations, that's true.

Speaker 3

29:05

Is there things you regret about those conversations where you failed? Is there things you're proud of where you succeeded?

Speaker 1

29:12

For things that I'm proud of, I feel like I'm really good at attempting to understand people without judgment. That I think a lot of people feel like they can have conversations with me where they can share a lot, and I'm not gonna jump down their throat for them having a politically incorrect observation, or for them being judgmental of somebody else, or having like a feeling that's maybe not something they should have, something they're embarrassed about. So I think I do a really good job at that.

Speaker 1

29:34

And then by extension of that, I've gotten the ability to hear perspectives from so many different people that I think I can understand a lot of different perspectives. For failures of mine, I mean, it's always gonna be on stream, it'll be like, I didn't push back hard enough, or I didn't know like a certain fact for a conversation. These are usually the, they're gonna be on these like very technical grounds generally. I'm pretty happy with like the direction my conversations have gone recently, especially over like the past 6 months.

Speaker 1

30:00

So your

Speaker 3

30:01

goal is to de-radicalize the audience of those folks.

Speaker 1

30:06

So that used to be my goal. My goal was de-radicalization. Now I'm kind of hoping that that's just the byproduct.

Speaker 1

30:13

So the goal I think is to talk to somebody and to show they believe this because of these reasons. And if you want to change people's beliefs, we have to talk about the underlying reasons for why they think the things they think. It's not enough to just say like that belief is bad because it's like, well, they believe it for a whole bunch of things that are true and real to them at least. So you have to address all of the underlying things that they believe before you can change the overlying belief.

Speaker 1

30:35

So if I'm having a conversation with somebody, it'll be like, okay, why do you feel this about that, that, and that? Okay, I understand that. Maybe like a better way to solve that would be like this or that instead of this thing.

Speaker 3

30:45

So to what degree do you have to empathize with the person's worldview versus pushback?

Speaker 1

30:52

That's always the hard 1. When I'm talking to other people, it's almost always me stepping as much inside their bubble as I can. I have to live and breathe their worldview and be able to speak their worldview in order to navigate their thoughts.

Speaker 1

31:05

Because my worldview is, I'm not even using this as an insult, I don't know if I am a little bit autistic or something, but when I break apart things, I just wanna see study, study, study, fact, fact, fact. That's how my mind works for everything. That's just what I like to see. Like personal stories don't do much for me, narrators don't do much for me, just show me like the data and the studies or whatever.

Speaker 1

31:22

But for other people, I think most brains are more human than that and they tend to see things in more kind of like surreal pictures that are kind of painted and the brush strokes are way broader, and they don't care about the itty bitty tiny fact. So if I'm talking to somebody else and I'm trying to get into their head and I'm trying to change their mind on things, I'm gonna be stepping into their world and I'm gonna try to be working through that framework. Really good example might be, we'll say like when it comes to trans issues for minors, 16 or 17 year old needs to get on puberty blockers. The way that I want that debate to play out is, let's look at all the data, let's see what are the outcomes, let's see what are the processes for getting a medication, and then we'll evaluate all of that, and then we'll go in whatever points more favorably.

Speaker 1

32:04

But that's wholly unconvincing to most people, right? So as a parent, if I'm having that conversation with another parent, the easiest way for me to have that conversation is like, hey, we both have kids. Imagine how horrible it would be if we felt like our kids needed help and the government was trying to get between us and their doctor in that conversation. That might be how that talk plays out, which I think that's a really good argument.

Speaker 1

32:23

Cause I think there probably are times when the government should get in between it, but I'll have that conversation because now I'm in a world where they understand what I'm saying. I am resonating with the way that they feel about things, and then I can make progress with the way that they're kind of viewing the world because I'm talking in a language they understand.

Speaker 3

32:37

So on this particular topic of trans issues, is that the reason you were banned from Twitch?

Speaker 1

32:42

I'm not sure, I don't know. They just said hate speech, but I don't use like slurs or anything, so it's hard to know exactly.

Speaker 3

32:48

So I think you made the claim that trans women shouldn't compete with cis women in women's athletics. Can you make this case and can you steelman the case against it? I think in your community, there's a lot of trans folks who love you and there's a lot who hate you.