Podcast Insights on Politics and Society

welcome to the making sense podcast this is Sam Harris just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation in order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast you'll need to subscribe at samh harris.org there you'll also find our scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one we don't run ads on the podast podc and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy what we're doing here please consider becoming one welcome to the making sense podcast this is Sam Harris the tractor beam of politics is continuing to exert its pull on everything I uh actually watched less of the Democratic National Convention than the Republican one though I saw enough to be encouraged I'm happy with Harris's apparent pivot to the center whether she can credibly maintain that under questioning by journalists remains to be seen I'm hopeful that she can but uh I think the debates will probably matter a lot at least they present the possibility of being decisive I think a lot can happen there for good or for ill but one point I would make this is a point I have made to some of my friends who will be voting for Trump you you might be surprised that I have friends who will be voting for Trump but I actually have some close ones the moves that are generally used to Discount the crazier things he says he will do can be used even more plausibly to Discount the crazy things that kamla Harris has said right I if you can not take Trump literally or even seriously when he says that he's going to round up 20 million undocumented workers that is fruit Pickers and restaurant workers and nannies and millions of people who are doing indispensable work in our economy uh he's going to round them all up in what concentration camps using the military and Deport them just linger over the details here for a moment and realize that millions of these people quite literally millions of these people have children who are themselves American citizens right if you can discount this uh fantasmagorical unethical and counterproductive fantasy of a policy as just political pandering and and pablum messaging to his fanatical base and perhaps you can well then why can't you discount Harris's ridiculous and obviously unworkable idea of imposing a wealth tax does anyone think she's going to do that I don't but it's interesting the bar for political integrity and honesty moves As you move left of center if she actually knows she can't do such a thing it's absolutely outrageous for her to make such a campaign promise but right of Center nobody cares everyone apparently takes what Trump claims he will do with a grain of salt anyway vice president Harris will not be able to avoid hard questions forever certainly some will come up in the debate if she declines to hold a press conference or do long form interviews before then and I'm reasonably hopeful that she will find the center of our politics and stake her claim there more to come on politics and even in today's conversation today I'm speaking with Steven bonell otherwise known as Destiny Steven is a YouTuber and political streamer his background is a little different from most of the people I've had on this podcast but his commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online where he stir up controversy on both the right and the left he grew up in a conservative Catholic household and now spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism and trumpism in particular he's debated some of the same people I've debated on a variety of topics and he's debated people who I wouldn't be inclined to talk to people like Candace Owens and Nick FES one of the things we discussed today is how he thinks about engaging such a wide range of characters we talk about allegations of trump derangement syndrome why Trump's Norm violations don't matter to so many people people's Misadventures on the information landscape social media and the problem of being to online are differences of emphasis when thinking about conflict in the Middle East the difference between the far left and the far right in American politics the lack of sane conservative policies to counterbalance the craziness of the left whether the pendulum of Sanity is swinging back on the left the ethics and politics of giving public apologies the maintenance of private friendships or their failure and public disagreements and other topics anyway it was a fun conversation and now I bring you Steven panell I am here with Steven bonell step thanks for joining me hey thanks for having me Sam uh you were otherwise known as Destiny perhaps we should start there are you are you in the process of retiring Destiny or are you are you just bouncing between both names my background when I first started streaming forever ago was in professional gaming for Starcraft 2 so I kind of went through the trouble of getting all the branding for Destiny like the YouTube channel the Instagram and everything else so it feels very difficult to give up it's really it's nice to just have that name so I go by people call me Stephen in real life and you can find my stuff online as Destiny so I'm okay with it yeah yeah well so you've been very active in a in a part of online culture that I have had very little to do with I mean you as you say you got your starting gaming but then you have um become quite prominent online debating people around um mostly politics but I think you've covered a wide range of topics how did that start for you um my mom is from Cuba she came over when she was six so I grew up in a very conservative household and my parents have always had very strong conservative opinions and then going through grade school and high school I I guess I have like the debater archetype I don't know if that's genetic or just I got it from my mom environmentally so I've always been kind of like a argumentative disagreeable person who's been politically interested when I first got into streaming video games in 20 I think like end of 2010 early 2011 we the focus was video games but we also spoke a lot about you know just like pop culture philosophy science politics whatever and then in 2016 I picked it up as a much more significant part of what I did online and you and I debated at least a few of the same people I've debated Jordan Peterson several times you did that at least once I think uh you've also spoken to Ben Shapiro I'm not sure how we've overlapped with other people but um I think you've spoken to people who I would avoid I'm wondering how you make these decisions I saw that you spoke to Nick Fuentes who's um I think an AOW white supremacist if not actual Nazi recently he spoke to Candace Owens is there anyone regret engaging um I'll take that in uh two parts so for the first one one of my strengths is that I'm willing to talk to almost anybody so it gives me very big reach into a lot of different types of communities because I'm willing to go on different shows and I can have a good time with a large variety of people and different types of characters but I can still provide push back against a large variety of different types of characters so it's kind of a it's a balancing act of how aggressive do I want to be versus how long do I want my legs to be you know how far do I want my reach I guess to extend into other communities the only times I'm disappointed or I regret engaging with people is if I feel like the other person got more out of it than I feel like I did so for instance if I were to platform a very small very radical person and then not give adequate push back and I feel like he bested me in a conversation that I could have been more prepared for or if I'm yeah like I just I don't I want to I don't want to promote bad ideas and like bring them to everybody's attention and then you know have a bad showing against it but if there's like you know really popular talking points and a lot of people believe a thing I think it's worth discussing and I'll have those people on to fight with them yeah and then the second part was if I regret yeah over the past year I regretted everything um god let's talk about that yeah yeah it's it's a constant Balancing Act between yeah like I said like how how gentle do I want to be versus how aggressive do I want to be I would say uh around the last year I'd been making a more I go back and forth between these very empathetic approaches to debate versus like these very aggressive approaches and so the past year I've been more empathetic and I've gotten conversations with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens and I I worry sometimes that I play this role in like oh well look I debated Destiny and we got along and it was fine and it's like well we kind of debated but I was being very very very gentle because I'm trying not to make you so mad that you'll never talk to me again or that you won't have the conversation so when I look back at the role I played in that and then I see now when I take more aggressive positions on things that I feel strongly about they're like well I can't talk to Destiny that guy's crazy Candace Owens wouldn't let me in her space a week ago because she said I was a sexual deviant while she was speaking with um with Andrew Tate and Dan Blitzer I'm like what so now I'm like you're in good company or you're you're worse than that good company yeah I mean you I watched part of your conversation with Candace and um I mean now perhaps she has transformed into her current monstrous shape since you debated her I I haven't really followed her timeline very closely this is one of the consequences of having gotten off social media there's there are things I don't follow which seem I they seem very big online I'm sure but you know Candace Owens becoming a proper anti-semite was um something I think I had on my bingo card some years ago and um you know so I was unsurprised but I'm not quite sure when she she fully pulled the mask off if it was ever properly on you don't think the semifriendly even somewhat adversarial conversation with her just has the net effect of kind of laundering her reputation with your audience and and doing more harm than good with my audience absolutely not with the other audiences that's what is so hard to determine like I said I don't like the idea that cace can say like oh well you know I had a debate with Destiny or I had a conversation with Stephen and it's like not really I like that was a very gentle do you watch the conversation I think in around 10 minutes I realize that even then I'm pushing back too much and she's about to like yeah rage out and leave and I'm like okay well we got to be more gentle so that irritates me my audience is never becoming just because I I put out so much content I stream so much I put out so many videos and I've many conversations they're not going to hear somebody like that and instantly be captivated and become whenever Neo-Nazi uhit combo of weird stuff she is now but for for audiences in the middle it's yeah I don't know it's hard to say it's good to provide some push back like it legitimizes me in that I can talk to a lot of different people it legitimizes me in the eyes of her audience like oh well this you know Steven's a reasonable guy that you can have conversations with but then it also plays kind of a dirty role that everybody's been complicit in over the past several years of like making some of these ideas seem a lot more reasonable and insane than they actually are and I've spent the past few months or the past month or so after the assassination attempt yeah saying okay hold on no let's back up this is a lot of this stuff is insane and I think we need to go back to calling this insane is there anyone whose name I would recognize who you've decided not to talk to because you just viewed them as too dishonest or unethical I'll still talk to anybody but the conversations are just going to be a lot more aggressive I'm not going to have a conversation with Jordan Peterson while he just kind of like ERS through the point that 20% excess deaths in Europe are all caused by the vaccine that's not going to happen next time like okay well we're going to sit here we're going to fix it on this point now or when I asked Ben Shapiro like don't you guys think you grade Trump on a curve and he's like yeah you know we do I'm like okay well that well that can't stand right yeah I just won't let those things flow by anywhere yeah so what have you regretted in the last year what what has been the U the controversy or the the chaos for some reason I never understood that like the media's I always hear the media's leftwing dominated media is dominated by the left and I hear that and I look online and I see kind of the crazy left and then I look at like CNN and msbc and I'm like okay maybe they are but somehow even in leftwing spaces the conservatives have such a good Reign on controlling the discourse and I'm so upset that I allowed myself to be kind of brainwashed by the Trump derangement syndrome insult where I'm like okay I got to be really fair I got to be really careful when I cover Trump because I don't want to sound deranged I don't want to sound unhinged and you know and I'm sitting here trying to think like okay well when Trump said this absolutely crazy thing you know when January 6th happened like it was just this and that and that and then meanwhile the conservatives are like so here's the 57th picture of Hunter Biden's dick that we're showing in Congress and We Know by the way that him and Joe Biden you know unilaterally dictated World policy to get rid of this prosecutor in barisma and it's like oh my God the uneven playing field the assassination attempt I think completely broke me when I saw how indignant conservatives are like you guys are calling us Nazis and look what happens and then I'm like replaying in my mind all the Paul Pelosi comments and I'm like no this is insane I'm sorry you guys completely bought the farm on this this is crazy what do you attribute this skewing to I mean let's take the case of a an intelligent person who is not allergic to Trump in the way that we are I mean how it's I mean I happen to know some of these people I even have a few good friends who you know I would consider I mean this is this is something I say to their face I I consider them lwi information voters I mean they're simply not disposed to pay attention into all of the thousands of Norm violations and other indiscretions that Trump is trailing right so they're they have a little bit in their head they have a lot of um what I would consider misinformation from the right that more or less exonerates Trump on on all counts the phrase the Russia collusion hoax does an inordinate amount of work in their brains and they've essentially just averted their eyes from the whole problem and they come away with a feeling that more or less all of the you know the kind of reaction that you and I have had to Trump is totally overblown I mean it is you know it is Trump derangement syndrome it it's just we don't like the guy's personality and we couldn't get over that but when you look at policies he's super normal and not even especially conservative and you know much of his criticism of the powers that be and the and the the the way things were done in Washington for as long as anyone can remember many many of the criticisms are valid there is a kind of deep State sclerosis that needs to be reamed out they don't spend much time thinking about the actual ideologues in his orbit you know people like Steve Bannon and what he might say on his dumb podcast and they just see a very clear trade-off between Trump who is calling on obvious like wokeism and the moral Panic on the left that has racialized everything and made it seem like trans baths is the greatest um human rights concern of our time Etc and they're truly allergic to all the stuff that's happened on the left and so they're they're willing to support Trump warts and all how would you perform psychic surgery on this person there so first we have to be really clear are we talking about the audience or are we talking about like the larger content creators I call them content creators you might call them pundits or commentators yeah I guess any anything you would want to say to or about such a person so as to have have an effect upon anyone in the audience like him or her I think there are several really large things at play I think one of the larger there yeah there there are several large topics I play one of the larger ones that is hard to talk about is um I had a viewer that emailed me this with this idea and I I love this idea and I stole it he calls it magic boxes that if you were to go back into the past and you were to hold an abacus okay it's very obvious what the function of an You Can't Hide any conspiracies inside of it there are no secret cameras there is no government listening device nobody's stealing your it's just you just see what it is and you operate it you know as you do uh nowadays with a phone you don't really know everything that's going on inside of the phone so if somebody would to say something like I think my phone is always recording me well to even begin to have that conversation it's like okay well do we understand you know how Telemetry Works how data is sent what kind of connection is needed what kind of permissions are needed like the difference between the operating system versus an application like there's so much you have to go through that in life today we basically operate so many of these magical boxes where on the operating level on the user level things are so abstracted away from what's actually happening that it's allowed people to insert so much craziness that can't be easily fact checked by anything and I find that this is especially true when you look at the the my obsession lately has been I'm trying to compile like a convincing argument relating to the January 6 stuff so this is where my brain is kind of of existing but you might look at something like Donald Trump making a phone call to the not to raffensberger but below him and an election fraud investigator in Georgia if you have the prerequisite background to understand Civics and the role of the president and a campaign and the role of a state election investigator all of that just that phone call in and of itself is so unfathomably inappropriate it is such a horrible call but in order to even begin to understand why you have to explain so much and I'll be honest even I didn't really understand like when you say that like well there's electors and you know the people don't elect the president the electors I don't even really know what that meant until like two years ago and most people just yeah I don't even well I know this because polling did it most people don't even know three branches of government right so how can you even begin to explain you know the type of egregious Norm violations that are happening when people don't know the Norms the systems that have the norm people just don't have the understanding to even be able to Grapple with you know why would it be bad for this guy to make a phone call but that people immediately understand like cutting children's penises off to make them trans or whatever other crazy you know like farle conspiracy stuff the conservatives like to obsess over like that's immediately understandable so yeah that's that's one huge thing that you have to get over is you just need like a decent Foundation of knowledge to even understand why some of the things are Norm breaking yeah let's focus on January 6 what would you say to someone who thinks that January 6 was basically a nonevent i me it certainly wasn't an Insurrection it was a a you know there was some sort of misbehavior on one side of the building and on the other side of the building you know courtesy of Tucker Carlson and others we have you know we have footage of the cops just letting people in and so was it violent yeah I guess if you look at the some of the footage it was super violent but some of the people don't even look at that footage and they just see the people getting LED in and then wandering around and what seemed to be kind of a low stress environment right and so that seems strange and then they rumors that there were you know FBI plants in the crowd and maybe this whole thing was a kind of false flag thing that well I heard a rumor that Pelosi didn't get enough cops there when she could have etc etc so and Trump did say from the Das you know that you should all be peaceful in some form and so they all of this just this impressionistic tour of you know half truths gives people a sense that all right whatever happened over there it was ugly and I I wouldn't voted for it but it's not really it's it wasn't really Trump's responsibility and it was just a mob that that misbehaved and American democracy wasn't at stake how would you untangle that I mean it's kind of going back to what you said about it sounds so bad to say but like low information voters for stuff like this I think like two or three weeks ago I did a little focus group because I've compiled so much information about this and I got six pretty decently big YouTubers together and I like went through like seven hours of information and I asked them like hey what's the most surprising thing to you or what didn't you know or what do you care about or what don't you care about and um for a lot of it it was just like so much information that people don't know so one of the things that I was told after talking to these people so long is one thing they said is I didn't realize the timelines at the capital so for instance people will say Donald Trump tweeted stay peaceful and that should be good right but when you actually look at everything that was happening in the day of and the context and it's was like oh that tweet was sent like 20 minutes after the capital been broken into like an hour and a half after the capital grounds had been penetrated when you start to see the Tweets in context of like an actual timeline stuff takes on a far more Insidious shape than when you just say oh well you know he tweeted out be peaceful you know who knows at what time or what part of the day having more facts I I think and contextualizing things in a more appropriate way nobody knew anything about the elector plot uh you know like the seven fake slates of electors and none of this is like conspiratorial like all the information is out there all the you can see the f sles that they all signed with their signatures there's a YouTube video of them trying to go to the capital in Michigan to enter the plot inside to have Clark replace Rosen when Rosen and Don were arguing with Trump about sending out a fake letter to the states about voter fraud that was a really big one a lot of people will say this this the stupidest thing I've ever people say like we don't know if Trump knew he was lying about voter fraud how could you ever prove what's in somebody's mind and I like well let me introduce you to the entire criminal justice system in the United States because in order to convict own crimes you have to know what the men's Ray is that's the most important part of conv on a crime but for Trump there are so many examples of somebody say hey by the way this isn't true and then like Days Later Trump will say the exact same claim over and over and over and over and over again he does this like so many times and having that clearly laid out where people can say you know what I think Trump actually just was lying and I think he knew the whole time but it's a big information dump and you have to find a way to present the information in like a compelling and an interesting and like an emotional way and then how close we were oh there's two other things how close we were on the six to everything failing if Pence had flipped if there was more violence like there are a couple of things Pence is the big part that didn't flip that could have that's one thing and then the um the second thing was um I didn't realize this until I was really lat to my research oh my God the best video that you could ever watch on January 6th is Infowars if you really want to know the day of what people felt like and what was going on when they watch that it's so funny cuz when conservatives talk about it now they memory hole it right oh there just some people wandering around who cares watching the conservative coverage and the tweets the day of I saw you know like Ashley babbett might be the first victim of the second revolution uh there was that Meme video of the woman who got uh sprayed with mace or whatever and she's like what we're storming the capital dude it's a revolution you know constantly referring to the riers as Patriots saying that they've taken the capital we've overtaken it we've got it we've captured this back you know for the people it's so obvious what everybody's saying what's going on and then as soon as babbit gets shot the National Guard shows up the rhetoric starts to change a bit bit there are so many funny quotes there's even like quotes from some of these guys on um I think Owen Sher might have been one where people are saying things like these are patriots this isn't BM or antifa you could tell these are Patriots and then like the next day it was all antifa we don't know who any of these people were it's like yeah yeah I think the simplest cut at this for me and I'm always surprised that it doesn't work on everybody and there just endless examples of it not working I it hasn't worked on half the country but it really can come out in a very short paragraph which is just that what we had was a in president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power I mean months in advance of the election I this was back in in March or so I think that the question was first put to him and he clearly declined to abide by the results of an election unless he won that election and while the election was being run he was clearly preparing the ground to call it fraudulent and he then lied endlessly about having had the election stolen from him I mean the the irony is that he's in the process of attempting to steal an election while claiming that it has been stolen from him and in the end we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power right so like that just that single desecration of the the foundational Norm of our democracy I mean it seems to me that we don't have the laws that we actually should have in place to punish a president who does this right for to have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer power and then do what he can to ensure that we don't have one it's seems to me that you that jail should await such a person and we don't actually have the laws to accomplish that but you know I mean I fully disagree on that last point we had section three of the 14th Amendment which was very clearly meant to prevent a person like this at the very least from holding future office right we do have crial against but the Supreme Court is protecting him from those it's it's incredible the fact that that that you know have having that in the 14th Amendment is as ineffectual as it as it is in practice in any case so so it just why do you think so many people I mean you know fully half the nation one can I guess discount all the people who really aren't informed about this but there all too many people who know exactly what I just alleged you to be true uh which is that he didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and we didn't have one why doesn't that matter do you think well for some people this is why I'm saying there's different there's different um issues that affect different players or people in different ways and they all have different motivations for why they believe what they do so for the average voter or listener I would say a lot of these people just don't have all the information and they are susceptible to all the ordinary Foles of men um that me and I I imagine you everybody is successful to we hear things we want to hear we tend to seek information we want to you know find to affirm our biases and all this this is just kind of what everybody is is falling prey to to some extent and to some level in your life for the content creators there are far more interesting questions to ask there but it depends on the person it depends on the issue one thing I would say when it comes to foreign stuff that I've been asking questions about but it's hard to dig into it I really wonder how much foreign pushing there is on some figures to just have positions that wholesale align with like Russian foreign policy just like completely 100% you're 100% alignment you couldn't be a better spokesperson when talking about like it's it's the same talking points for for the Ukrainian War right oh they're sending men off to die uh you know there's no reason for this everybody in the East you know it was a Civil War the whole time and Ukrainian biolabs and Nazis and you know the United now they're they're starting war in in Russia with an inv it's like the exact same talking point it's coming from like Western people like why that's the thing I wonder a second thing is unfortunately if you brand yourself as a person of a certain political persuasion you kind of have to stick with it like could you imagine you know talking to Ben Shapiro could you imagine if Ben came out was like you know what I kind of don't like Donald Trump if for no other reason just because morally he's an atrocious human being he was sort of there in the beginning I mean that I you know I haven't really followed What Ben has done of late but in the beginning he was someone who would make the the right concessions to basic sanity and ethics around Trump I he would obviously he was obviously much more concerned about what was happening on the left but he thought January 6 was an Insurrection he said the day after just a shattering of of norms of A Sort that we would agree with but I don't know why he's not essentially a Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney or there obviously Republicans who have discovered their the line past which they're they would not be dragged and they agree with us about Trump so I don't I don't understand what's happened to people who are kind of splitting the baby there and I mean I guess it's you know audience capture on some level or they would be the ruination of of their business I mean seeing the breakup between Ben and Candace was somewhat instructive in so far as I did see it I mean I think I missed 95% of it again because I'm not online but I saw enough to to know you know what Ben has been getting from his audience and just how much uh so much of his audience doesn't love the Jews yeah I me what do you think is happening there is it just economics yeah it's just it's like you said like well in the beginning it seems like they're on board with being more critical but then as time goes on and the party coalesces around Trump and Trump is absolutely a cult of personality and he engenders like cultish you know Obsession and adoration there is no room for disagreement so one on a numbers level that's just factual like Donald Trump enjoys very wide and very deep support from conservative voters so the media is going to reflect that as well you can see this in the Dominion lawsuit versus Fox by the way that the deposition the exhibits that they had in their pre-trial stuff was fascinating there are so many slides of people at Fox News saying this is a lie we know this is a lie but my God we're losing you know 30% of our viewership to Newsmax and oan so I guess we're going to have to tell the lie to keep our viewers like it's so it's so clear like they won that case well they didn't win it Fox settled right before trial because they knew they were going to lose that case one of the largest settlements I believe in corporate history for public settlements for defamation and um yeah you see that and also that's not an accident it's not just a result of numbers it's also incredibly intentional by Donald Trump he always reminds people he did it the day of his speech on the ellip SE on January 6th you know he says I help these people get elected not going to do it anymore I help these people in their elections and they don't remember that when he was talking to raffensberger he said I was such a schmuck for helping this Kent loser Kemp get elected what a loser I was for doing that and and he you know he did it in Georgia he didn't want to campaign or help those people because raffensberger and Kemp wouldn't play ball with helping him steal the election in Georgia Trump does this very intent he wouldn't go on Fox News man after they called Arizona he was so mad and he stopped calling into their shows and he was you know retweeting and reposting o more so if you don't play ball with him he will try to destroy you by not working with you anymore and by constantly degrading you and the the followers and the fans you know they pick up on that and they act accordingly so it's hard when you got a business like man am I going to cover Trump honestly and have my entire business go bankrupt because no conservative going to watch me and nobody in the left no offense is turning into Ben Shapiro in the daily wire or do you play ball but doesn't it still strike you as fundamentally astonishing that Trump has been able to succeed the way he has that that there was that kind of audience that was willing to become a cult of personality around such a um on some level just such such an unimpressive person I mean he is just so obviously a fraud right I mean he really is a game show host who pretended to be a great businessman and he's a mark Brett confection right and I mean it's not that he has no talents I mean he's he's entertaining right he can be funny but I mean he's just he's barely competent at that really when you I mean it's not like you have an Entertainer of the talent of somebody like Jamie Fox deciding to be a demagogue right I mean it's just he's just basically entertaining uh and I I do think that the fact that so many people find himun money counts for an enormous amount of his political success I mean just whatever that happens at a debate to be able to say you know only Rosie odonnell or whatever other his other laugh lines were that's just guarantees your victory at that stage in the primary given the nature of our politics but it it does I mean I've always thought of him as a kind of evil Chanty Garder and I I think this probably undersells his gifts such as they are but I I've just thought of him as somebody who for whatever reason found himself in a political and social context in America in the uh you know early 21st century where our appetite for junk food for the Mind had just reached its peak and we're reality TV culture we're a social media culture we we care about Fame perhaps more than anything and you drop this Shameless narcissist into this context and he manages to function by a different reputational physics I mean he manages to seem more authentic than anyone else just by being a Shameless con man in my imagination the reasons for his success have much more to do with the environment than with the person but perhaps I'm selling him short no I mean I agree Trump is is there is no level of of media criticism that was um too harsh on how clueless he is around some things like I watched him doing something uh he was talking to the United Nation and somebody asked him about I think it was the UN I think it was the un thing and somebody asked him about Western liberalism have you seen this clip no they ask him about what do you think about people saying that this we might be seeing the fall of western style liberalism and he starts going off on like LA and San Francisco and I'm thinking in my mind oh my God he he doesn't even know what western he doesn't know what that mean he doesn't know what liberalism is he just heard Western liberalism and he thinks he thinking like West Coast liberals this guy this this was true in in spaces where you think it would have really mattered I mean when he you know early on when he was trying to prove that he was a good Christian and the the evangelicals were just coming around to support him and he was asked you know point blank what are your favorite books of the Bible and it was just absolutely obvious that he couldn't name a single book of the Bible right and and yet that all passed even for evangelicals I mean I was actually at a conference in around the time and I ran into Ralph Reed and I said Ralph you know what the you know this guy couldn't actually name a book in the Bible that it wasn't that he didn't I think I think his line was something like oh I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to say because I wouldn't want to offend anybody right like they're all so good and everyone has their favorite and I just said Ralph you you know that he was lying you know that he's the least Christian person you guys have ever gotten behind and the Dodge was as you might expect well you know I'm not going to say was in another person's heart and it's not for me to judge it's for God to judge and blah blah blah but you would think some somehow that would have sunk another candidate in Christian eyes and and on on every other front I mean just the the word salad he produces where he contradicts himself pointlessly and it it all works because nobody cares but the mystery is why does nobody care I think one thing that helps a lot is that um we have this horrible and wonderful thing called the internet a lot of people start with a very bad uh I would say the vast majority of people on the planet have bad epistemic ice which is fine I mean who cares generally most people it doesn't matter how do you evaluate what's true or not true what's your theory of Truth or what is it like no one cares you don't need this for most of your life but I think one of the big issues that we have is because so many things fundamentally you have to know a thing to know if it will serve your end or if it will be bad for you so for instance if I'm on a balcony with somebody I say I can fly and that person is like really and then I jump and I fall and I die it's very immediately obvious okay well that's a really bad idea I'm not going to believe that guy you can't really selectively pick and choose the things you want to when you're grounded when there aren't magic boxes around you when you're just in the world but nowadays with the internet it is so easy to handcraft whatever narrative you want and even when you don't think it's that big of a deal it is a big deal people get mad at me sometimes when I'm kind of like a pedantically correct lies and people like why who cares it's not that big of a deal okay well if you tell 10 little lies it makes it really easy to sell a big lie and people have this bad assumption for humans that we our brains are designed as these like ontologically we have like these epistemically grounded truth seeking machines that are just trying to figure out what's true at any point in time and people have no idea how much subjectivity uh how much normativity is involved in all of the truth seeking that we do so then when you go on the internet you're thinking okay well I'm a I'm a true brain I'll get all my media we'll see what's going on you don't realize that you were engaged in basically drug abuse you're finding stuff that just makes you feel good regardless of the detriment it has to your epistemic your psychological your emotional well-being uh what like a really funny example of this I correct this every time people say this and people think it's a small deal but I don't I think these are all really big deals Donald Trump the the assassination attempt after the guy missed and Donald Trump's ear got shot Donald Trump came up immediately and he gave that let's fight you know the power yeah let's go it was not immediate it was like a minute long there's like a thing of him like looking for his shoes like watch the full clip and people will be like oh what so you don't think he was Brave well he might have been brave you want to say that fine but why lie about him coming up immediately and I had a guy challenge me on this and he went over my thing was like Jess's Li let's look at this video and the guy shows an edited video and I'm like bro my video is a like 2 minutes long your video is like a minute 47 seconds and it ends a full minute after mine like you're clearly watching an edited thing if the truth is good enough why do you have to exaggerate so I think people don't realize how easy it is to selectively like edit and clip things and how insanely crazy you can sell a particular factoid something so far from the truth just based on the collection of Clips or things that that you've gathered to show somebody yeah well I think we've both been the the subject of clips that been widely misperceived do you ever worry that you are too online perhaps that is a category that doesn't even exist for you but I I wonder about just what your engagement with social media in particular but I guess just all your time spent online I wonder what that feels like and what and if there's um any course correction in your life that you've thought about because I I just have to say I mean every time I say it it's now painfully boring but I the the astonishment and and even embarrassment associated with it is is unde I mean when I deleted my Twitter account my life changed radically and in ways that I I guess I could have anticipated but it was like just getting off a drug right it was just like I had just managed to completely myself over in how I was engaging with this I mean it was it was this illusion I mean in part it was worse than an illusion it was a Hal truth right so it's it's very hard to debunk a Hal truth because you're always you're always in touch with the half that's true but the sense was that I was just getting information you know in the most timely possible way about about what was going on in areas of the the world I care about and to some degree that's true obviously I Twitter is X has been the best place for that when there's breaking news but what you're also getting is this funhouse mirror in which even people you know are appearing increasingly grotesque and you know you have become one of the Gres at least for them I mean you you can't even quite control how you're appearing for them despite you know you have control over what you put out and the clip ification of everything and the reaction or non-reaction or the what gets read into your silence and just all of that it becomes it's just an insane psychological experiment that we've all been enrolled in and I don't think it's going well and I don't think it's going well at scale for culture and it certainly wasn't going well for me personally so I'm just wondering how you think about this in your own life and I guess just how you think about social media as a cultural phenomenon at this point yeah so so narrowly speaking just for me on a personal level as animated as I am and as much as I do care about these issues when I'm tweeting I'm tweeting and when I'm being unhinged online I'm being unhinged online but I don't take that with me to sleep uh I always tell people especially young people if I'm talking at like colleges or for whatever when I get invited to do speeches to students if your engagement with politics is making you miserable you have to stop if you're legitimately like if you want to get a little bit wound up while you're there that's fine but if you find that for hours afterwards you're just like left with this disgusting horrible feeling or it's like having a significant impact on other parts of your life emotionally psychologically then yeah it's you have to disengage because you can't I mean like it's it's in a way it's kind of like that uh don't set yourself on fire to to keep others around you warm if you're destroying yourself even if you think you're going to do good or something by contributing online you're not going to be able to by by destroying yourself so much so on a personal level I do enjoy my life I like fighting with people on Twitter like arguing with people that's just the kind of person I grew up as that's fun for me but if I found that it was like God this is making me miserable then I would just I don't I just don't engage with stuff that would make me feel that way unless I have a very very compelling reason to on a on a broader sense but just just to drill down on that so you don't find or you don't suspect that it's giving you a distorted sense of humanity I I felt that the world was more populated with Psychopaths than it in fact is right like I like I knew cuz I could see that I was seeing the worst of even people who I actually know and I know they wouldn't be that bad if I were sitting across the table from them but online and you know when pointed at their own audiences they had you know it's like their their ethical IQ got cut in half right and their basic decency just evaporated and so I just felt like I was getting a an inaccurate picture of just how unscrupulous most people are because they're they're functioning in a an environment that is just turning normal people into Psychopaths but they're you know functionally Psychopaths online but offline they would still be normal people if I was just engaging them in that space so that's what I'm not sure about so um yeah this is exactly I was going to hit on on the on the wider sense I remember in like 2016 there was this people used to say like bro like Twitter's not the real world and I think they were kind of right for the most part um there was a lot of political discourse online but people online were as you said you know they're kind of crazy I think that as time has gone on I don't think that we've moved towards realizing that people online are crazy I think that the online world has become like reverse integrated into our reality right I mean one that's just a natural physical consequence of being closer physically to the internet because now we all have a phone in our pockets that gets us onto the internet at every single point in time everything is connected and wired through the internet news stations that talk to you on the radio or that you watch on TV or like you know oh let's see what's going on showing the Twitter feeds and all the presidents and all the candidates and everybody is active on all of these social media things so for all the craziness that exists online it feels like we're moving more toward like online is becoming more reality driven in a very unfortunate way like everybody in the country is expected to have you know a 100% decided opinion on like Leah Thomas and and this and the Iman the khif whatever the boxer the Olympic trans boxer like everybody has to if you work in a warehouse in Kansas you need to have a strong opinion on whether or not the IBA was correct in in releasing the disqualification information for these two bers like why who cares about this so I agree that it creates like this well it it's like that uh oh man there's this really dumb horror comic or whatever in Korean or Japanese or something where there's like holes in walls that people put their bodies into and they come out like grotesquely disfigured on the other side that's what social media I think is is people look at it like well it's just an online thing but when you participate in it enough it will change you right every action you take is is is affecting your your ultimate character at some way size shape or form and yeah if you partake in these Psychopathic environments you act like it it will you know imprint itself on you in a reverse manner so I think that's what's happening unfortunately yeah but you don't feel like it's happening to you I mean you're not you're not worried that it's bending you in your ethics or in your engagement with people based on just how much time you're spending in that space I mean I try my best not to let it unfortunately this is a part of the conversation where every single thing I say is a huge red flag because all of the things around like truth and objectivity and centrality and all this are are like Aesthetics that people wear and then wield in the most bad faith manner possible but I truly do being politically independent um I really do try to um I I have like little things that I do to keep in check like where my biases are and how I'm viewing people and am I being fair or not and there are like questions I ask myself and ways that I approach my community where I'm like how do I make sure I'm not getting super audience captured or I'm not having a super distorted view of this particular thing it usually involves a lot of reading and research on topics it usually involves like actual discreet methods like can I argue both sides of an issue compellingly if I were to ask myself a question what would it take to change my mind from this can I give a quick answer or do I am I actually like getting ideologically captured uh you know would I be comfortable fighting with this particular like there are questions I ask myself to try to keep steady the course there but I'm a unique case in that because I'm so not politically part of a big group I do support the Democrats a lot but I'm not politically part of those communities I have more Independence there because if I give a take I'm not going to have to you know all of a sudden disavow half my party or have a whole bunch of fights with people who thought they were my friend who thought we were on the same page politically yeah I think we're in in more or less the same orbit politically as far as I understand the the types of views you've argued for perhaps you know what what do you think we disagree about if anything what do we disagree about depends on how I think probably one of the big disagreements that people wanted me to fight on a lot or that my fans would bring this up is the centrality of religion in the Israeli Palestinian conflict that was a big one yeah well maybe maybe let's uh let's fight about that let me have it what what's what am I wrong about on that front I feel like when I hear you talk about it I feel like uh Islam is a very big centerpiece to that conflict I feel like um if you look at the originations of the conflict if you go if you take the stretch of time from say like 1880 to 1967 if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at samh harris.org once you do you'll get access to all fulllength 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welcome to the making sense podcast this is Sam Harris just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation in order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast you'll need to subscribe at samh harris.org there you'll also find our scholarship program where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one we don't run ads on the podast podc and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers so if you enjoy what we're doing here please consider becoming one welcome to the making sense podcast this is Sam Harris the tractor beam of politics is continuing to exert its pull on everything I uh actually watched less of the Democratic National Convention than the Republican one though I saw enough to be encouraged I'm happy with Harris's apparent pivot to the center whether she can credibly maintain that under questioning by journalists remains to be seen I'm hopeful that she can but uh I think the debates will probably matter a lot at least they present the possibility of being decisive I think a lot can happen there for good or for ill but one point I would make this is a point I have made to some of my friends who will be voting for Trump you you might be surprised that I have friends who will be voting for Trump but I actually have some close ones the moves that are generally used to Discount the crazier things he says he will do can be used even more plausibly to Discount the crazy things that kamla Harris has said right I if you can not take Trump literally or even seriously when he says that he's going to round up 20 million undocumented workers that is fruit Pickers and restaurant workers and nannies and millions of people who are doing indispensable work in our economy uh he's going to round them all up in what concentration camps using the military and Deport them just linger over the details here for a moment and realize that millions of these people quite literally millions of these people have children who are themselves American citizens right if you can discount this uh fantasmagorical unethical and counterproductive fantasy of a policy as just political pandering and and pablum messaging to his fanatical base and perhaps you can well then why can't you discount Harris's ridiculous and obviously unworkable idea of imposing a wealth tax does anyone think she's going to do that I don't but it's interesting the bar for political integrity and honesty moves As you move left of center if she actually knows she can't do such a thing it's absolutely outrageous for her to make such a campaign promise but right of Center nobody cares everyone apparently takes what Trump claims he will do with a grain of salt anyway vice president Harris will not be able to avoid hard questions forever certainly some will come up in the debate if she declines to hold a press conference or do long form interviews before then and I'm reasonably hopeful that she will find the center of our politics and stake her claim there more to come on politics and even in today's conversation today I'm speaking with Steven bonell otherwise known as Destiny Steven is a YouTuber and political streamer his background is a little different from most of the people I've had on this podcast but his commentary on politics and culture has made him almost ubiquitous online where he stir up controversy on both the right and the left he grew up in a conservative Catholic household and now spends much of his time arguing against American conservatism and trumpism in particular he's debated some of the same people I've debated on a variety of topics and he's debated people who I wouldn't be inclined to talk to people like Candace Owens and Nick FES one of the things we discussed today is how he thinks about engaging such a wide range of characters we talk about allegations of trump derangement syndrome why Trump's Norm violations don't matter to so many people people's Misadventures on the information landscape social media and the problem of being to online are differences of emphasis when thinking about conflict in the Middle East the difference between the far left and the far right in American politics the lack of sane conservative policies to counterbalance the craziness of the left whether the pendulum of Sanity is swinging back on the left the ethics and politics of giving public apologies the maintenance of private friendships or their failure and public disagreements and other topics anyway it was a fun conversation and now I bring you Steven panell I am here with Steven bonell step thanks for joining me hey thanks for having me Sam uh you were otherwise known as Destiny perhaps we should start there are you are you in the process of retiring Destiny or are you are you just bouncing between both names my background when I first started streaming forever ago was in professional gaming for Starcraft 2 so I kind of went through the trouble of getting all the branding for Destiny like the YouTube channel the Instagram and everything else so it feels very difficult to give up it's really it's nice to just have that name so I go by people call me Stephen in real life and you can find my stuff online as Destiny so I'm okay with it yeah yeah well so you've been very active in a in a part of online culture that I have had very little to do with I mean you as you say you got your starting gaming but then you have um become quite prominent online debating people around um mostly politics but I think you've covered a wide range of topics how did that start for you um my mom is from Cuba she came over when she was six so I grew up in a very conservative household and my parents have always had very strong conservative opinions and then going through grade school and high school I I guess I have like the debater archetype I don't know if that's genetic or just I got it from my mom environmentally so I've always been kind of like a argumentative disagreeable person who's been politically interested when I first got into streaming video games in 20 I think like end of 2010 early 2011 we the focus was video games but we also spoke a lot about you know just like pop culture philosophy science politics whatever and then in 2016 I picked it up as a much more significant part of what I did online and you and I debated at least a few of the same people I've debated Jordan Peterson several times you did that at least once I think uh you've also spoken to Ben Shapiro I'm not sure how we've overlapped with other people but um I think you've spoken to people who I would avoid I'm wondering how you make these decisions I saw that you spoke to Nick Fuentes who's um I think an AOW white supremacist if not actual Nazi recently he spoke to Candace Owens is there anyone regret engaging um I'll take that in uh two parts so for the first one one of my strengths is that I'm willing to talk to almost anybody so it gives me very big reach into a lot of different types of communities because I'm willing to go on different shows and I can have a good time with a large variety of people and different types of characters but I can still provide push back against a large variety of different types of characters so it's kind of a it's a balancing act of how aggressive do I want to be versus how long do I want my legs to be you know how far do I want my reach I guess to extend into other communities the only times I'm disappointed or I regret engaging with people is if I feel like the other person got more out of it than I feel like I did so for instance if I were to platform a very small very radical person and then not give adequate push back and I feel like he bested me in a conversation that I could have been more prepared for or if I'm yeah like I just I don't I want to I don't want to promote bad ideas and like bring them to everybody's attention and then you know have a bad showing against it but if there's like you know really popular talking points and a lot of people believe a thing I think it's worth discussing and I'll have those people on to fight with them yeah and then the second part was if I regret yeah over the past year I regretted everything um god let's talk about that yeah yeah it's it's a constant Balancing Act between yeah like I said like how how gentle do I want to be versus how aggressive do I want to be I would say uh around the last year I'd been making a more I go back and forth between these very empathetic approaches to debate versus like these very aggressive approaches and so the past year I've been more empathetic and I've gotten conversations with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens and I I worry sometimes that I play this role in like oh well look I debated Destiny and we got along and it was fine and it's like well we kind of debated but I was being very very very gentle because I'm trying not to make you so mad that you'll never talk to me again or that you won't have the conversation so when I look back at the role I played in that and then I see now when I take more aggressive positions on things that I feel strongly about they're like well I can't talk to Destiny that guy's crazy Candace Owens wouldn't let me in her space a week ago because she said I was a sexual deviant while she was speaking with um with Andrew Tate and Dan Blitzer I'm like what so now I'm like you're in good company or you're you're worse than that good company yeah I mean you I watched part of your conversation with Candace and um I mean now perhaps she has transformed into her current monstrous shape since you debated her I I haven't really followed her timeline very closely this is one of the consequences of having gotten off social media there's there are things I don't follow which seem I they seem very big online I'm sure but you know Candace Owens becoming a proper anti-semite was um something I think I had on my bingo card some years ago and um you know so I was unsurprised but I'm not quite sure when she she fully pulled the mask off if it was ever properly on you don't think the semifriendly even somewhat adversarial conversation with her just has the net effect of kind of laundering her reputation with your audience and and doing more harm than good with my audience absolutely not with the other audiences that's what is so hard to determine like I said I don't like the idea that cace can say like oh well you know I had a debate with Destiny or I had a conversation with Stephen and it's like not really I like that was a very gentle do you watch the conversation I think in around 10 minutes I realize that even then I'm pushing back too much and she's about to like yeah rage out and leave and I'm like okay well we got to be more gentle so that irritates me my audience is never becoming just because I I put out so much content I stream so much I put out so many videos and I've many conversations they're not going to hear somebody like that and instantly be captivated and become whenever Neo-Nazi uhit combo of weird stuff she is now but for for audiences in the middle it's yeah I don't know it's hard to say it's good to provide some push back like it legitimizes me in that I can talk to a lot of different people it legitimizes me in the eyes of her audience like oh well this you know Steven's a reasonable guy that you can have conversations with but then it also plays kind of a dirty role that everybody's been complicit in over the past several years of like making some of these ideas seem a lot more reasonable and insane than they actually are and I've spent the past few months or the past month or so after the assassination attempt yeah saying okay hold on no let's back up this is a lot of this stuff is insane and I think we need to go back to calling this insane is there anyone whose name I would recognize who you've decided not to talk to because you just viewed them as too dishonest or unethical I'll still talk to anybody but the conversations are just going to be a lot more aggressive I'm not going to have a conversation with Jordan Peterson while he just kind of like ERS through the point that 20% excess deaths in Europe are all caused by the vaccine that's not going to happen next time like okay well we're going to sit here we're going to fix it on this point now or when I asked Ben Shapiro like don't you guys think you grade Trump on a curve and he's like yeah you know we do I'm like okay well that well that can't stand right yeah I just won't let those things flow by anywhere yeah so what have you regretted in the last year what what has been the U the controversy or the the chaos for some reason I never understood that like the media's I always hear the media's leftwing dominated media is dominated by the left and I hear that and I look online and I see kind of the crazy left and then I look at like CNN and msbc and I'm like okay maybe they are but somehow even in leftwing spaces the conservatives have such a good Reign on controlling the discourse and I'm so upset that I allowed myself to be kind of brainwashed by the Trump derangement syndrome insult where I'm like okay I got to be really fair I got to be really careful when I cover Trump because I don't want to sound deranged I don't want to sound unhinged and you know and I'm sitting here trying to think like okay well when Trump said this absolutely crazy thing you know when January 6th happened like it was just this and that and that and then meanwhile the conservatives are like so here's the 57th picture of Hunter Biden's dick that we're showing in Congress and We Know by the way that him and Joe Biden you know unilaterally dictated World policy to get rid of this prosecutor in barisma and it's like oh my God the uneven playing field the assassination attempt I think completely broke me when I saw how indignant conservatives are like you guys are calling us Nazis and look what happens and then I'm like replaying in my mind all the Paul Pelosi comments and I'm like no this is insane I'm sorry you guys completely bought the farm on this this is crazy what do you attribute this skewing to I mean let's take the case of a an intelligent person who is not allergic to Trump in the way that we are I mean how it's I mean I happen to know some of these people I even have a few good friends who you know I would consider I mean this is this is something I say to their face I I consider them lwi information voters I mean they're simply not disposed to pay attention into all of the thousands of Norm violations and other indiscretions that Trump is trailing right so they're they have a little bit in their head they have a lot of um what I would consider misinformation from the right that more or less exonerates Trump on on all counts the phrase the Russia collusion hoax does an inordinate amount of work in their brains and they've essentially just averted their eyes from the whole problem and they come away with a feeling that more or less all of the you know the kind of reaction that you and I have had to Trump is totally overblown I mean it is you know it is Trump derangement syndrome it it's just we don't like the guy's personality and we couldn't get over that but when you look at policies he's super normal and not even especially conservative and you know much of his criticism of the powers that be and the and the the the way things were done in Washington for as long as anyone can remember many many of the criticisms are valid there is a kind of deep State sclerosis that needs to be reamed out they don't spend much time thinking about the actual ideologues in his orbit you know people like Steve Bannon and what he might say on his dumb podcast and they just see a very clear trade-off between Trump who is calling  on obvious like wokeism and the moral Panic on the left that has racialized everything and made it seem like trans baths is the greatest um human rights concern of our time Etc and they're truly allergic to all the stuff that's happened on the left and so they're they're willing to support Trump warts and all how would you perform psychic surgery on this person there so first we have to be really clear are we talking about the audience or are we talking about like the larger content creators I call them content creators you might call them pundits or commentators yeah I guess any anything you would want to say to or about such a person so as to have have an effect upon anyone in the audience like him or her I think there are several really large things at play I think one of the larger there yeah there there are several large topics I play one of the larger ones that is hard to talk about is um I had a viewer that emailed me this with this idea and I I love this idea and I stole it he calls it magic boxes that if you were to go back into the past and you were to hold an abacus okay it's very obvious what the function of an You Can't Hide any conspiracies inside of it there are no secret cameras there is no government listening device nobody's stealing your it's just you just see what it is and you operate it you know as you do uh nowadays with a phone you don't really know everything that's going on inside of the phone so if somebody would to say something like I think my phone is always recording me well to even begin to have that conversation it's like okay well do we understand you know how Telemetry Works how data is sent what kind of connection is needed what kind of permissions are needed like the difference between the operating system versus an application like there's so much you have to go through that in life today we basically operate so many of these magical boxes where on the operating level on the user level things are so abstracted away from what's actually happening that it's allowed people to insert so much craziness that can't be easily fact checked by anything and I find that this is especially true when you look at the the my obsession lately has been I'm trying to compile like a convincing argument relating to the January 6 stuff so this is where my brain is kind of of existing but you might look at something like Donald Trump making a phone call to the not to raffensberger but below him and an election fraud investigator in Georgia if you have the prerequisite background to understand Civics and the role of the president and a campaign and the role of a state election investigator all of that just that phone call in and of itself is so unfathomably inappropriate it is such a horrible call but in order to even begin to understand why you have to explain so much and I'll be honest even I didn't really understand like when you say that like well there's electors and you know the people don't elect the president the electors I don't even really know what that meant until like two years ago and most people just yeah I don't even well I know this because polling did it most people don't even know three branches of government right so how can you even begin to explain you know the type of egregious Norm violations that are happening when people don't know the Norms the systems that have the norm people just don't have the understanding to even be able to Grapple with you know why would it be bad for this guy to make a phone call but that people immediately understand like cutting children's penises off to make them trans or whatever other crazy you know like farle conspiracy stuff the conservatives like to obsess over like that's immediately understandable so yeah that's that's one huge thing that you have to get over is you just need like a decent Foundation of knowledge to even understand why some of the things are Norm breaking yeah let's focus on January 6 what would you say to someone who thinks that January 6 was basically a nonevent i me it certainly wasn't an Insurrection it was a a you know there was some sort of misbehavior on one side of the building and on the other side of the building you know courtesy of Tucker Carlson and others we have you know we have footage of the cops just letting people in and so was it violent yeah I guess if you look at the some of the footage it was super violent but some of the people don't even look at that footage and they just see the people getting LED in and then wandering around and what seemed to be kind of a low stress environment right and so that seems strange and then they rumors that there were you know FBI plants in the crowd and maybe this whole thing was a kind of false flag thing that well I heard a rumor that Pelosi didn't get enough cops there when she could have etc etc so and Trump did say from the Das you know that you should all be peaceful in some form and so they all of this just this impressionistic tour of you know half truths gives people a sense that all right whatever happened over there it was ugly and I I wouldn't voted for it but it's not really it's it wasn't really Trump's responsibility and it was just a mob that that misbehaved and American democracy wasn't at stake how would you untangle that I mean it's kind of going back to what you said about it sounds so bad to say but like low information voters for stuff like this I think like two or three weeks ago I did a little focus group because I've compiled so much information about this and I got six pretty decently big YouTubers together and I like went through like seven hours of information and I asked them like hey what's the most surprising thing to you or what didn't you know or what do you care about or what don't you care about and um for a lot of it it was just like so much information that people don't know so one of the things that I was told after talking to these people so long is one thing they said is I didn't realize the timelines at the capital so for instance people will say Donald Trump tweeted stay peaceful and that should be good right but when you actually look at everything that was happening in the day of and the context and it's was like oh that tweet was sent like 20 minutes after the capital been broken into like an hour and a half after the capital grounds had been penetrated when you start to see the Tweets in context of like an actual timeline stuff takes on a far more Insidious shape than when you just say oh well you know he tweeted out be peaceful you know who knows at what time or what part of the day having more facts I I think and contextualizing things in a more appropriate way nobody knew anything about the elector plot uh you know like the seven fake slates of electors and none of this is like conspiratorial like all the information is out there all the you can see the f sles that they all signed with their signatures there's a YouTube video of them trying to go to the capital in Michigan to enter the plot inside to have Clark replace Rosen when Rosen and Don were arguing with Trump about sending out a fake letter to the states about voter fraud that was a really big one a lot of people will say this this the stupidest thing I've ever people say like we don't know if Trump knew he was lying about voter fraud how could you ever prove what's in somebody's mind and I like well let me introduce you to the entire criminal justice system in the United States because in order to convict own crimes you have to know what the men's Ray is that's the most important part of conv on a crime but for Trump there are so many examples of somebody say hey by the way this isn't true and then like Days Later Trump will say the exact same claim over and over and over and over and over again he does this like so many times and having that clearly laid out where people can say you know what I think Trump actually just was lying and I think he knew the whole time but it's a big information dump and you have to find a way to present the information in like a compelling and an interesting and like an emotional way and then how close we were oh there's two other things how close we were on the six to everything failing if Pence had flipped if there was more violence like there are a couple of things Pence is the big part that didn't flip that could have that's one thing and then the um the second thing was um I didn't realize this until I was really lat to my research oh my God the best video that you could ever watch on January 6th is Infowars if you really want to know the day of what people felt like and what was going on when they watch that it's so funny cuz when conservatives talk about it now they memory hole it right oh there just some people wandering around who cares watching the conservative coverage and the tweets the day of I saw you know like Ashley babbett might be the first victim of the second revolution uh there was that Meme video of the woman who got uh sprayed with mace or whatever and she's like what we're storming the capital dude it's a revolution you know constantly referring to the riers as Patriots saying that they've taken the capital we've overtaken it we've got it we've captured this back you know for the people it's so obvious what everybody's saying what's going on and then as soon as babbit gets shot the National Guard shows up the rhetoric starts to change a bit bit there are so many funny quotes there's even like quotes from some of these guys on um I think Owen Sher might have been one where people are saying things like these are patriots this isn't BM or antifa you could tell these are Patriots and then like the next day it was all antifa we don't know who any of these people were it's like yeah yeah I think the simplest cut at this for me and I'm always surprised that it doesn't work on everybody and there just endless examples of it not working I it hasn't worked on half the country but it really can come out in a very short paragraph which is just that what we had was a in president who would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power I mean months in advance of the election I this was back in in March or so I think that the question was first put to him and he clearly declined to abide by the results of an election unless he won that election and while the election was being run he was clearly preparing the ground to call it fraudulent and he then lied endlessly about having had the election stolen from him I mean the the irony is that he's in the process of attempting to steal an election while claiming that it has been stolen from him and in the end we didn't have a peaceful transfer of power right so like that just that single desecration of the the foundational Norm of our democracy I mean it seems to me that we don't have the laws that we actually should have in place to punish a president who does this right for to have a sitting president not commit to a peaceful transfer power and then do what he can to ensure that we don't have one it's seems to me that you that jail should await such a person and we don't actually have the laws to accomplish that but you know I mean I fully disagree on that last point we had section three of the 14th Amendment which was very clearly meant to prevent a person like this at the very least from holding future office right we do have crial against but the Supreme Court is protecting him from those it's it's incredible the fact that that that you know have having that in the 14th Amendment is as ineffectual as it as it is in practice in any case so so it just why do you think so many people I mean you know fully half the nation one can I guess discount all the people who really aren't informed about this but there all too many people who know exactly what I just alleged you to be true uh which is that he didn't commit to a peaceful transfer of power and we didn't have one why doesn't that matter do you think well for some people this is why I'm saying there's different there's different um issues that affect different players or people in different ways and they all have different motivations for why they believe what they do so for the average voter or listener I would say a lot of these people just don't have all the information and they are susceptible to all the ordinary Foles of men um that me and I I imagine you everybody is successful to we hear things we want to hear we tend to seek information we want to you know find to affirm our biases and all this this is just kind of what everybody is is falling prey to to some extent and to some level in your life for the content creators there are far more interesting questions to ask there but it depends on the person it depends on the issue one thing I would say when it comes to foreign stuff that I've been asking questions about but it's hard to dig into it I really wonder how much foreign pushing there is on some figures to just have positions that wholesale align with like Russian foreign policy just like completely 100% you're 100% alignment you couldn't be a better spokesperson when talking about like it's it's the same talking points for for the Ukrainian War right oh they're sending men off to die uh you know there's no reason for this everybody in the East you know it was a Civil War the whole time and Ukrainian biolabs and Nazis and you know the United now they're they're starting war in in Russia with an inv it's like the exact same talking point it's coming from like Western people like why that's the thing I wonder a second thing is unfortunately if you brand yourself as a person of a certain political persuasion you kind of have to stick with it like could you imagine you know talking to Ben Shapiro could you imagine if Ben came out was like you know what I kind of don't like Donald Trump if for no other reason just because morally he's an atrocious human being he was sort of there in the beginning I mean that I you know I haven't really followed What Ben has done of late but in the beginning he was someone who would make the the right concessions to basic sanity and ethics around Trump I he would obviously he was obviously much more concerned about what was happening on the left but he thought January 6 was an Insurrection he said the day after just a shattering of of norms of A Sort that we would agree with but I don't know why he's not essentially a Mitt Romney or Liz Cheney or there obviously Republicans who have discovered their the line past which they're they would not be dragged and they agree with us about Trump so I don't I don't understand what's happened to people who are kind of splitting the baby there and I mean I guess it's you know audience capture on some level or they would be the ruination of of their business I mean seeing the breakup between Ben and Candace was somewhat instructive in so far as I did see it I mean I think I missed 95% of it again because I'm not online but I saw enough to to know you know what Ben has been getting from his audience and just how much uh so much of his audience doesn't love the Jews yeah I me what do you think is happening there is it just economics yeah it's just it's like you said like well in the beginning it seems like they're on board with being more critical but then as time goes on and the party coalesces around Trump and Trump is absolutely a cult of personality and he engenders like cultish you know Obsession and adoration there is no room for disagreement so one on a numbers level that's just factual like Donald Trump enjoys very wide and very deep support from conservative voters so the media is going to reflect that as well you can see this in the Dominion lawsuit versus Fox by the way that the deposition the exhibits that they had in their pre-trial stuff was fascinating there are so many slides of people at Fox News saying this is a lie we know this is a lie but my God we're losing you know 30% of our viewership to Newsmax and oan so I guess we're going to have to tell the lie to keep our viewers like it's so it's so clear like they won that case well they didn't win it Fox settled right before trial because they knew they were going to lose that case one of the largest settlements I believe in corporate history for public settlements for defamation and um yeah you see that and also that's not an accident it's not just a result of numbers it's also incredibly intentional by Donald Trump he always reminds people he did it the day of his speech on the ellip SE on January 6th you know he says I help these people get elected not going to do it anymore I help these people in their elections and they don't remember that when he was talking to raffensberger he said I was such a schmuck for helping this Kent loser Kemp get elected what a loser I was for doing that and and he you know he did it in Georgia he didn't want to campaign or help those people because raffensberger and Kemp wouldn't play ball with helping him steal the election in Georgia Trump does this very intent he wouldn't go on Fox News man after they called Arizona he was so mad and he stopped calling into their shows and he was you know retweeting and reposting o more so if you don't play ball with him he will try to destroy you by not working with you anymore and by constantly degrading you and the the followers and the fans you know they pick up on that and they act accordingly so it's hard when you got a business like man am I going to cover Trump honestly and have my entire business go bankrupt because no conservative going to watch me and nobody in the left no offense is turning into Ben Shapiro in the daily wire or do you play ball but doesn't it still strike you as fundamentally astonishing that Trump has been able to succeed the way he has that that there was that kind of audience that was willing to become a cult of personality around such a um on some level just such such an unimpressive person I mean he is just so obviously a fraud right I mean he really is a game show host who pretended to be a great businessman and he's a mark Brett confection right and I mean it's not that he has no talents I mean he's he's entertaining right he can be funny but I mean he's just he's barely competent at that really when you I mean it's not like you have an Entertainer of the talent of somebody like Jamie Fox deciding to be a demagogue right I mean it's just he's just basically entertaining uh and I I do think that the fact that so many people find himun money counts for an enormous amount of his political success I mean just whatever that happens at a debate to be able to say you know only Rosie odonnell or whatever other his other laugh lines were that's just guarantees your victory at that stage in the primary given the nature of our politics but it it does I mean I've always thought of him as a kind of evil Chanty Garder and I I think this probably undersells his gifts such as they are but I I've just thought of him as somebody who for whatever reason found himself in a political and social context in America in the uh you know early 21st century where our appetite for junk food for the Mind had just reached its peak and we're reality TV culture we're a social media culture we we care about Fame perhaps more than anything and you drop this Shameless narcissist into this context and he manages to function by a different reputational physics I mean he manages to seem more authentic than anyone else just by being a Shameless con man in my imagination the reasons for his success have much more to do with the environment than with the person but perhaps I'm selling him short no I mean I agree Trump is is there is no level of of media criticism that was um too harsh on how clueless he is around some things like I watched him doing something uh he was talking to the United Nation and somebody asked him about I think it was the UN I think it was the un thing and somebody asked him about Western liberalism have you seen this clip no they ask him about what do you think about people saying that this we might be seeing the fall of western style liberalism and he starts going off on like LA and San Francisco and I'm thinking in my mind oh my God he he doesn't even know what western he doesn't know what that mean he doesn't know what liberalism is he just heard Western liberalism and he thinks he thinking like West Coast liberals this guy this this was true in in spaces where you think it would have really mattered I mean when he you know early on when he was trying to prove that he was a good Christian and the the evangelicals were just coming around to support him and he was asked you know point blank what are your favorite books of the Bible and it was just absolutely obvious that he couldn't name a single book of the Bible right and and yet that all passed even for evangelicals I mean I was actually at a conference in around the time and I ran into Ralph Reed and I said Ralph you know what the you know this guy couldn't actually name a book in the Bible that it wasn't that he didn't I think I think his line was something like oh I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to say because I wouldn't want to offend anybody right like they're all so good and everyone has their favorite and I just said Ralph you you know that he was lying you know that he's the least Christian person you guys have ever gotten behind and the Dodge was as you might expect well you know I'm not going to say was in another person's heart and it's not for me to judge it's for God to judge and blah blah blah but you would think some somehow that would have sunk another candidate in Christian eyes and and on on every other front I mean just the the word salad he produces where he contradicts himself pointlessly and it it all works because nobody cares but the mystery is why does nobody care I think one thing that helps a lot is that um we have this horrible and wonderful thing called the internet a lot of people start with a very bad uh I would say the vast majority of people on the planet have bad epistemic ice which is fine I mean who cares generally most people it doesn't matter how do you evaluate what's true or not true what's your theory of Truth or what is it like no one cares you don't need this for most of your life but I think one of the big issues that we have is because so many things fundamentally you have to know a thing to know if it will serve your end or if it will be bad for you so for instance if I'm on a balcony with somebody I say I can fly and that person is like really and then I jump and I fall and I die it's very immediately obvious okay well that's a really bad idea I'm not going to believe that guy you can't really selectively pick and choose the things you want to when you're grounded when there aren't magic boxes around you when you're just in the world but nowadays with the internet it is so easy to handcraft whatever narrative you want and even when you don't think it's that big of a deal it is a big deal people get mad at me sometimes when I'm kind of like a pedantically correct lies and people like why who cares it's not that big of a deal okay well if you tell 10 little lies it makes it really easy to sell a big lie and people have this bad assumption for humans that we our brains are designed as these like ontologically we have like these epistemically grounded truth seeking machines that are just trying to figure out what's true at any point in time and people have no idea how much subjectivity uh how much normativity is involved in all of the truth seeking that we do so then when you go on the internet you're thinking okay well I'm a I'm a true brain I'll get all my media we'll see what's going on you don't realize that you were engaged in basically drug abuse you're finding stuff that just makes you feel good regardless of the detriment it has to your epistemic your psychological your emotional well-being uh what like a really funny example of this I correct this every time people say this and people think it's a small deal but I don't I think these are all really big deals Donald Trump the the assassination attempt after the guy missed and Donald Trump's ear got shot Donald Trump came up immediately and he gave that let's fight you know the power yeah let's go it was not immediate it was like a minute long there's like a thing of him like looking for his shoes like watch the full clip and people will be like oh what so you don't think he was Brave well he might have been brave you want to say that fine but why lie about him coming up immediately and I had a guy challenge me on this and he went over my thing was like Jess's Li let's look at this video and the guy shows an edited video and I'm like bro my video is a like 2 minutes long your video is like a minute 47 seconds and it ends a full minute after mine like you're clearly watching an edited thing if the truth is good enough why do you have to exaggerate so I think people don't realize how easy it is to selectively like edit and clip things and how insanely crazy you can sell a particular factoid something so far from the truth just based on the collection of Clips or things that that you've gathered to show somebody yeah well I think we've both been the the subject of clips that been widely misperceived do you ever worry that you are too online perhaps that is a category that doesn't even exist for you but I I wonder about just what your engagement with social media in particular but I guess just all your time spent online I wonder what that feels like and what and if there's um any course correction in your life that you've thought about because I I just have to say I mean every time I say it it's now painfully boring but I the the astonishment and and even embarrassment associated with it is is unde I mean when I deleted my Twitter account my life changed radically and in ways that I I guess I could have anticipated but it was like just getting off a drug right it was just like I had just managed to completely myself over in how I was engaging with this I mean it was it was this illusion I mean in part it was worse than an illusion it was a Hal truth right so it's it's very hard to debunk a Hal truth because you're always you're always in touch with the half that's true but the sense was that I was just getting information you know in the most timely possible way about about what was going on in areas of the the world I care about and to some degree that's true obviously I Twitter is X has been the best place for that when there's breaking news but what you're also getting is this funhouse mirror in which even people you know are appearing increasingly grotesque and you know you have become one of the Gres at least for them I mean you you can't even quite control how you're appearing for them despite you know you have control over what you put out and the clip ification of everything and the reaction or non-reaction or the what gets read into your silence and just all of that it becomes it's just an insane psychological experiment that we've all been enrolled in and I don't think it's going well and I don't think it's going well at scale for culture and it certainly wasn't going well for me personally so I'm just wondering how you think about this in your own life and I guess just how you think about social media as a cultural phenomenon at this point yeah so so narrowly speaking just for me on a personal level as animated as I am and as much as I do care about these issues when I'm tweeting I'm tweeting and when I'm being unhinged online I'm being unhinged online but I don't take that with me to sleep uh I always tell people especially young people if I'm talking at like colleges or for whatever when I get invited to do speeches to students if your engagement with politics is making you miserable you have to stop if you're legitimately like if you want to get a little bit wound up while you're there that's fine but if you find that for hours afterwards you're just like left with this disgusting horrible feeling or it's like having a significant impact on other parts of your life emotionally psychologically then yeah it's you have to disengage because you can't I mean like it's it's in a way it's kind of like that uh don't set yourself on fire to to keep others around you warm if you're destroying yourself even if you think you're going to do good or something by contributing online you're not going to be able to by by destroying yourself so much so on a personal level I do enjoy my life I like fighting with people on Twitter like arguing with people that's just the kind of person I grew up as that's fun for me but if I found that it was like God this is making me miserable then I would just I don't I just don't engage with stuff that would make me feel that way unless I have a very very compelling reason to on a on a broader sense but just just to drill down on that so you don't find or you don't suspect that it's giving you a distorted sense of humanity I I felt that the world was more populated with Psychopaths than it in fact is right like I like I knew cuz I could see that I was seeing the worst of even people who I actually know and I know they wouldn't be that bad if I were sitting across the table from them but online and you know when pointed at their own audiences they had you know it's like their their ethical IQ got cut in half right and their basic decency just evaporated and so I just felt like I was getting a an inaccurate picture of just how unscrupulous most people are because they're they're functioning in a an environment that is just turning normal people into Psychopaths but they're you know functionally Psychopaths online but offline they would still be normal people if I was just engaging them in that space so that's what I'm not sure about so um yeah this is exactly I was going to hit on on the on the wider sense I remember in like 2016 there was this people used to say like bro like Twitter's not the real world and I think they were kind of right for the most part um there was a lot of political discourse online but people online were as you said you know they're kind of crazy I think that as time has gone on I don't think that we've moved towards realizing that people online are crazy I think that the online world has become like reverse integrated into our reality right I mean one that's just a natural physical consequence of being closer physically to the internet because now we all have a phone in our pockets that gets us onto the internet at every single point in time everything is connected and wired through the internet news stations that talk to you on the radio or that you watch on TV or like you know oh let's see what's going on showing the Twitter feeds and all the presidents and all the candidates and everybody is active on all of these social media things so for all the craziness that exists online it feels like we're moving more toward like online is becoming more reality driven in a very unfortunate way like everybody in the country is expected to have you know a 100% decided opinion on like Leah Thomas and and this and the Iman the khif whatever the boxer the Olympic trans boxer like everybody has to if you work in a warehouse in Kansas you need to have a strong opinion on whether or not the IBA was correct in in releasing the disqualification information for these two bers like why who cares about this so I agree that it creates like this well it it's like that uh oh man there's this really dumb horror comic or whatever in Korean or Japanese or something where there's like holes in walls that people put their bodies into and they come out like grotesquely disfigured on the other side that's what social media I think is is people look at it like well it's just an online thing but when you participate in it enough it will change you right every action you take is is is affecting your your ultimate character at some way size shape or form and yeah if you partake in these Psychopathic environments you act like it it will you know imprint itself on you in a reverse manner so I think that's what's happening unfortunately yeah but you don't feel like it's happening to you I mean you're not you're not worried that it's bending you in your ethics or in your engagement with people based on just how much time you're spending in that space I mean I try my best not to let it unfortunately this is a part of the conversation where every single thing I say is a huge red flag because all of the things around like truth and objectivity and centrality and all this are are like Aesthetics that people wear and then wield in the most bad faith manner possible but I truly do being politically independent um I really do try to um I I have like little things that I do to keep in check like where my biases are and how I'm viewing people and am I being fair or not and there are like questions I ask myself and ways that I approach my community where I'm like how do I make sure I'm not getting super audience captured or I'm not having a super distorted view of this particular thing it usually involves a lot of reading and research on topics it usually involves like actual discreet methods like can I argue both sides of an issue compellingly if I were to ask myself a question what would it take to change my mind from this can I give a quick answer or do I am I actually like getting ideologically captured uh you know would I be comfortable fighting with this particular like there are questions I ask myself to try to keep steady the course there but I'm a unique case in that because I'm so not politically part of a big group I do support the Democrats a lot but I'm not politically part of those communities I have more Independence there because if I give a take I'm not going to have to you know all of a sudden disavow half my party or have a whole bunch of fights with people who thought they were my friend who thought we were on the same page politically yeah I think we're in in more or less the same orbit politically as far as I understand the the types of views you've argued for perhaps you know what what do you think we disagree about if anything what do we disagree about depends on how I think probably one of the big disagreements that people wanted me to fight on a lot or that my fans would bring this up is the centrality of religion in the Israeli Palestinian conflict that was a big one yeah well maybe maybe let's uh let's fight about that let me have it what what's what am I wrong about on that front I feel like when I hear you talk about it I feel like uh Islam is a very big centerpiece to that conflict I feel like um if you look at the originations of the conflict if you go if you take the stretch of time from say like 1880 to 1967 if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at samh harris.org once you do you'll get access to all fulllength 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Transcript for:Podcast Insights on Politics and Society

Transcript for:
Podcast Insights on Politics and Society