Destiny: Politics, Free Speech, Controversy, Sex, War, and Relationships | Lex Fridman Podcast #337

If you have a democratic style of governance, you are entrusting people with one of the most awesome and radical of responsibilities. And that's saying that you're going to pick the people that are going to make some of the hardest decisions in all of human history. If you're going to 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. And if you're so worried that somebody's going to 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.

The following is a conversation with Stephen Bunnell, also known online as Destiny. He's a video game streamer and political commentator, one of the early pioneers of both live streaming in general and live streamed political debate and discourse 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 Steven. First, I just talked to Ben Shapiro and many people have told me that Steven 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.

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 in to live streams like Destiny's to question and to try to understand what is going on with the world, often exploring challenging, even controversial ideas. 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 Melina Goranson, a popular streamer and world traveler, join us at the end of the conversation, you can check out her channel on Twitch TV. Molina. And you can check out Steven's channel on YouTube.com destiny. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Destiny.

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

Yeah, thank you so much for.

I'm so curious. When you're navigating a conversation like that, are you. How intentional is the thought process between, like, building rapport and pushing and giving? A little, like, zero.

Zero intention. I was watching. And thank you so much. It was very kind for you to review that conversation. It meant a lot that you were complimentary in parts on the technical aspects of the conversation. But no, zero. 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. What is that person feeling right now? What. 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. 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, represent who they are. I can see a better. A better world if they grow into a different direction and try to point that direction out to them.

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 a minute here. But yeah, I used to be. Four or five years ago, it was attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, whatever you said. 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 five or six wrong things and you're only going to call him out on two of them. And it's like, it's different styles of conversation. But yeah.

Do you do a lot of research beforehand too?

Depending on the conversation, yeah. So if we're going to 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' can prepare for. Just it truly depends on the conversation.

How much are you actually listening to the other person?

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. 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 when 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, my preferred style of conversation is like, I'm going to talk and the second I say something you disagree with, then let's iron it out. Right. I think in like syllogisms, like, okay, here's premise A, Good, okay, premise B. Okay, and then conclusion. And then as long as we're both deductively sound, we're not crazy, no psychosis, then we're going to 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 find function in that world. But it's frustrating for me sometimes.

Well, I've seen you've had a lot of excellent debates. One of them, I just recently, last Night Watch, is on systemic racism. And it's the first time I've seen you completely lose your shit.

Oh, shoot. Who was that against?

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. One, two, three. 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. And the point is you do this kind of nice layout that the whole point of behavioral economics, it says there's more to it than just the data. You have to give it context and do the rich, rigorous interpretation in the context of the full human story. And then there was like a dance back and forth. Sometimes use data, sometimes not. And you get getting really frustrated and shutting down. And so that felt like a failure mode. 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 sort of the Wittgenstein perspective is like, I think if you get stuck on any one thing, you're just not going to 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.

I think the true challenge is identifying what of those sticking points are important versus what is not important. It's like, if I'm having an argument with somebody about Jewish representation in media, it might be 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. And it's like, okay, 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. And that's why. And it's like, okay, well, hold on. Wait, wait. If you think this, we have to stop here, because this is going to 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 going to be informed by that belief.

You know, 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. And there's some things just. 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. People don't agree on those terms.

Begs the question. You mean raising the question? Yeah, I usually just want. If people say stuff, I just let it slide. Yeah, yeah, you can't. 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 over combative or over aggressive 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, 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. And like I said, I think you argue with passion sometimes with excessive amounts of passion, but almost.

That's a really polite way of saying that.

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

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 one. 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. Like, that was like my whole upbringing politically. I remember I was writing, I'd written like articles for the school journal, like in favor of defending the war in Iraq and, you know, 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, like, libertarian, esque high school phase of like, reading Ayn Rand of figuring out that like, oh my God, nothing in life matters except for class and money. That's actually the answer to everything. And, um, 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 of 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. 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. My upbringing is always just like if you're not, if you're not. 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 time. 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 4, 5, 6 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.

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?

Definitely the carpet cleaning.

Really?

Absolutely.

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

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.

Back in my day, we used to play.

They didn't all talk stuck. 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 vocabulary.

Actually say that. What games are we talking about? What? What do you mean? Just reading. You're talking about like rpg. Yeah.

Jrpg. So like Final Fantasy Games. Fantasy stars. Like all of these. Like any. Any RPG that would have been on the SNES, Sega, PlayStation. These are the things that I'm pause on that. Okay.

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?

Man, I really don't like Skyrim or Fallout.

You don't Love it.

Oh, really? No, not at all.

Why do you hate Skyrim?

Yeah, so I really like characters and like compelling stories and narratives 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. There are a lot of like, 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. That growth, that's kind of what you see in all of those 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 for the character.

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.

Yeah, I don't think one 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 changes together.

Oh, that's beautifully put then. Yeah, I. I just really love being able to leave the town. You go outside the town and you look outside its nature and the world of possibilities is before you. You do whatever the fuck you want. I mean, that immensity of just being lost in the world was really immersive for me. But yeah, you're right. Whatever attracts you about a world. So you were just starting to play video games. You go out, play video games, that's one of your lucky breaks.

There's just 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 typ. 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. 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. 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.

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

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

Yeah, 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? Does it matter?

I use a notepad.

Like, notepad Exe. Notepad.

Yep, Notepad Exe. Not the plus plus not.

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

No, I mean, like, it's going to 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. 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 seven or eight 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's going to do that, you should say, hold on, you just said these eight things. I'm going to respond to every single one. I've written them all down. And then you can go. If you want to go point by point, we can. But you just said all this and I wrote it down. So we're going to go.

So what are you actually writing down? Like, a couple 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. 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.

Political discourse is a kind of tree you're walking down. I got it. And you're like, taking.

Just 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.

What about doing research? It's just. Is there a system to your note taking? Because mentally, you seem to be one of the most organized people I've listened to. So is it in your mind or is there a system that's on paper.

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. I think they're boring by it. 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 and then I might have like seven tabs open and I'll read and I'll read and I'll read and I'll read a ton of stuff. Maybe for hour two, three, four 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. 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. It makes things make so much more sense. But yeah, once I, 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 in my mind and like, oh yeah, well this makes sense. Of course these people believe this. It's because of this. 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 like a topic that I'm doing specific research for. So like vaccine related stuff is a big one. The Ukrainian Russian conflict is a big one that I'll break out a note, I'll probably get like a Google Doc and I'll just start like writing like an outline of kind of the rough points of everything just to organize my thoughts around different topics.

Yeah, we're just going to go on a 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. So you did the Ukraine topic one 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 de. Escalating the war towards a peace agreement? And the opposite, if it does escalate towards something like the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, are they to blame? Are we to blame? 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 one 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. 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. 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, 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. 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 one 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. 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. 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. What is like the United States responsibility, I think we have a responsibility to ensure the relative, like freedom, prosperity and stability across Europe. 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, 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. 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 of 2014. The invasion on the borders is clearly a response to Ukraine winning that civil war in the southeast and the Donbas and Russia becoming more aggressive. I don't think that you can blame any of that on. On NATO expansion. There's no NATO countries that are threatening Russia or invading.

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?

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

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? That's a really tricky discussion for sure, 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. Because I think Mutually Assured destruction is partially a game of words. 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 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 one. How do you play the. How do you play the hand.

It reminds me of, I don't know if you've ever heard in 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 there are a whole bunch of these little biological mechanisms where creatures will develop socializing like tit for tat. If you do something bad to me, I'm going to do something bad for you. And then more complicated schemes will come out where it'll be like tit for tat. Where it's like, you can make one mistake and then I'm going to get you if you do a second one. Or it could be tit for tat, or they're going to be tit for tat, tat for tit. There's all these 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. We're not going to do a no fly zone. There's not going to be U.S. troops on the ground in Ukraine, but we are going to 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 that we could help. But that looming threat of some sort of tactical nuclear weapon, I think on the table right now is like, it's going to be the annihilation of Russian Sea forces and everything. But what happens if it continues to escalate? That's like a world that nobody wants to be in. Yeah.

So we talked about difficult conversations. And again, thank you so much for reviewing the Yay conversation. Let me ask you about Putin, 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? We can talk about that one or we could talk about somebody more well understood through history, like something like Stalin or Hitler, something like that, maybe that's an easier example to illustrate how to handle extremely difficult conversations.

Yeah, I mean, I can handle really difficult conversations between two 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 what is Vladimir Putin's interest? What is the genuine interest that he has in the conflict. Because I think finding out what is your buy in or what is the driving force keeping you here is probably the most important thing, I think for Zelenskyy, I think it's important, it's quite a bit more simpler because he's on the defense. So it's defending his country and his people. For Putin, I've heard all sorts of things. Dugan 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. You've got the desire to return to this former Soviet Union esque thing. You've got Putin's quotes, that collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster of 20th century. And I guess figuring out what is Putin after? I'm not actually sure. I don't know the answer to that question. I know a lot of people write about it.

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 three 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. Human psychology is laid out in its full richness before you. 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 like 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? 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. And I think that's what you do. I don't know if you do those.

Kinds of conversations where never talked to any country leaders, 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?

Oh yeah, when I've had there have been a couple of very controversial riot leaning figures. So the two, obviously the mice are Lauren Southern and Nick Fuentes. And those types of conversations initially aren't very political at all. Yeah, it's more like, obviously we believe in very, very, very different things, but beliefs don't happen accidentally. So how did you get to where you are? Those are way more personal conversations. That's true, yeah.

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

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 going to 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. 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 going to 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 going to 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 six months.

So your goal is to de radicalize the audience of those folks.

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

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

That's always the hard one. When I am talking to other people, it's almost always me stepping as much inside their bubble as I can. I have to like live and breathe their worldview and be able to speak their worldview in order to like navigate their thoughts. Because. 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 want to see like study, study, study, fact, fact, fact. That's how my mind works for everything. That's 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. 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 facts. 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 going to be stepping into their world and I'm going to try to be working through that framework. Really good example might be we'll say like when it comes to trans issues for minors, okay, 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, like points more favorably. 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 mean think that's a really good argument because 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 That I can make progress with the way that they're kind of viewing the world because I'm talking in a language they understand.

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

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.

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 steal man 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.

Yeah.

And so if you can walk the tightrope of this conversation to try to steal man both sides, one of the.

Argumentative strategies I say is that, like, anytime you have a conversation, you should be able to argue both sides better than anybody else, you know. So for the, for the, my side, the genuine belief side, it feels like overwhelmingly all of the data is showing that trans, mostly trans women, even after, I think three years on some sort of like HRT or, you know, estrogen stuff, they're still maintaining these advantages from their male puberty over cisgender women. And if that is the case, if we are going to draw these distinctions around our sports between women and men, it feels unfair to have a category inside the women's sports that are maintaining advantages that are coming from a male puberty, regardless of the amount of time they've spent on hormone replacement therapy. So that would be my argument on that side.

So it's unfair from a performance enhancement aspect. So the same way we ban performance enhancing drugs that involve increasing of testosterone in that same way would be unfair?

Essentially, yeah.

So what's the case against.

Yeah, so the case in favor of them competing together is that realistically there's not going to be a trans sports category. Realistically, trans women aren't going to be competitive with CIS men because they've gone through these huge, you know, like, hormone changes by the medication they're taking. And that when we look at how sports are kind of done anyway, there's a whole bunch of biological differences between people within sports categories that are determining their placement in the professional world. So, for instance, somebody like me is probably never going to go far in the NBA because I'm not tall enough. I think the average height in the NBA.

Don't doubt yourself.

Don't doubt myself. Yeah. I want to say it's like six, six or something. They're huge people. Or, you know, you look at like, Michael Phelps is a classic example of a guy whose torso is like so long, his body is built for swimming. And I think there are some trans people that will look at that or somebody advocating for this position. They'll look at that and go, okay, realistically, the way that Michael Phelps body processes lactic acid, the shape physiologically of his body is going to put him in a level of competition that so many men are never going to reach just because of biology. How is it fair that you can have these biological outliers competing in these categories? But then when we come to, like, sports categories with trans and systems women, you're going to take trans women and say that they can't compete against women. Can't you also just say that they have some level of biological difference there? Like, is it really going to be that great of a difference than what Michael Phelps has versus the average swimmer or an NBA player has versus, like, the average height male?

Yeah. Do you think we're going to get into some tricky ethical territory as we start to be able to, through biology and genetics, modify the human body?

Absolutely. I feel like those things are coming sooner than we wanted them to. Oh, man. Dude, have you seen the AI art? Yes, that's.

Of course, I'm an AI person.

Oh, okay then. Yeah, yeah. That's always been, like, what's going to happen when robots can do art better than humans? LOL. Like, well, we'll see in 20 years and 20 years and 20 years. And now you have AI art winning competitions. And it's funny because robots are essentially.

There's a robot behind you.