Jubilee Must Be Stopped

I was feeling so in my echo chamber until I watched an hour and 17 minutes of It's Being That a Choice.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

Today, we've assembled a cast of five homosexuals and five people who think that all homosexuals should be stoned to death on live television.

Can they find middle ground?

Tune in in to find out.

Do you think that was good?

I like how even and melodic your voice was for that.

That's really how they talked.

They're really like the apple of online magazine YouTube channels.

You know, they speak with this sort of calming monotone, like they just want to bring the volume down, you know?

Totally.

We just want to bring the volume down, which is why we found the most insane conspiracy theorists on Reddit to come and argue why the earth is flat.

Should homosexuals be allowed to live or should they be allowed to be stoned to death on live television?

The truth, surely, is somewhere in the middle.

And if there's one thing we accomplished on today's episode, we will be finding the middle ground.

I hate this.

I hate this.

Okay.

Today we are going to be talking about the Jubilee YouTube channel.

It's a YouTube channel with over 9 million subscribers currently.

It's a media company.

It's

a headache.

And if you aren't familiar with the Jubilee YouTube channel, A, you're about to find out what it is.

And B, you probably already know what it is because you've probably seen clips of the ever more ridiculous debates that they host for, you know, viral outrage content come up on your Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or TikTok feeds.

You'll never meet a Republican that uses pronouns.

It's just a fact.

It's only everybody uses pronouns.

Some people choose to invite you to.

Okay, well, my pronouns now for the rest of the time are pretty princess.

That's not a pronoun.

And I'll step out and say, I'm sure everybody here has said something racist in their life.

That doesn't make you a racist.

It's kind of like if you weigh 400 pounds and you eat celery, you're not skinny.

I think that infringing upon women's right to bodily autonomy, bodily integrity, all because they want to preserve the life of a non-sentient person.

Did your mom thought that about you?

She was about to, like, she thought that you were just some cells?

My mom, when I was wearing, I mean, it doesn't care what she thought, I was that.

So you were just a bunch of cells.

So that's what you're just believing.

Unfortunately, some people have emotional stuff that happened, traumatic stuff that's happened, so you can't discount and just say, oh, because they're fat.

Woo-hoo, man.

Like,

there's way worse stuff going out in the world.

This is people saying, oh my God, I'm sad.

I'm going to eat some ice cream.

It's like, no, dude, it's like, you're fat.

You made that decision.

You live in the best country ever.

If you live in a civilized first-world country where you have electricity, internet power, et cetera, you deserve to be bullied.

It's ridiculous to me that we have all these fat people running around.

Meanwhile, people are being bombed in Gaza.

It's ridiculous.

I am going to be hopefully making the case for why it is time for juke.

What is it time for?

Jubilee to die.

Is that what you're about to say?

I've had it.

To help us do that, I have asked my friend, Big Joel.

You might recognize him from his YouTube channel, Big Joel.

or perhaps his second YouTube channel, Little Joel.

He is an excellent content creator, a great political thinker, a great tweeter.

And I'm so excited that he is here today.

Welcome to the show, Big Joel.

Hi.

Are you, I'm ready to fucking let's

I should have I should have had some sort of thing rare in a go, but I really didn't.

In fairness, we we both did spend the last 36 hours watching as much Jubilee content as we could so that we could be as ready to have this conversation as possible.

So we're both working on like semi-functioning brains right now.

So please, please forgive the gaffes.

I'm excited.

You know, I've been enjoying watching Jubilee videos.

And there's something about them that there's something oddly addictive about it.

These days, less so because all their videos are endless, they're like an hour and a half long.

And they get their people to go on these just endless tirades where they say the same things over and over again.

But, you know,

I'm a both sides lover.

It was a labor of love for me.

It was a labor of love for me to

watch three credited scientists debate three self-identified free thinkers about the shape of the earth.

Okay, before we get in too far, you might be a little bit confused.

So let me explain a little bit of background for what Jubilee is and why we are here today.

Jubilee is a media company and content farm that has been rapidly growing in popularity lately and

over the last several years.

It's known primarily for, like I mentioned, its YouTube channel with over 9 million subscribers currently.

The slogan of Jubilee is provoke understanding and create human connection.

Jubilee is known for its often viral debate style content, where it sometimes casts sort of online political celebrities like the right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk or, you know, random college students to debate those right-wing celebrities.

Jubilee has an ongoing series called Middle Ground, where they cast a group of people from one side of a contentious debate to, you know, quote-unquote debate people from the other side of that contentious debate, like feminists versus male rights activists, scientists versus anti-vaxxers.

What are some other?

I'll read you some YouTube titles.

Men's rights activists versus feminists.

Is toxic masculinity real?

Flat earthers versus scientists.

Can we trust science?

Can 25 liberal college students outsmart one conservative?

Can one woke teen survive 25 conservatives?

He doesn't, spoiler alert, he dies.

He died in that video.

He was over after that.

The 25 conservatives ate him.

Six straight men versus one secret gay man.

Who is the gay man?

Think the gay man is me.

Can Trump supporters and immigrants see eye to eye?

And perhaps my personal favorite, can you stop being gay?

LGBTQ people versus former LGBTQ people.

Like I mentioned, if you haven't ever watched any of these videos, all of which, by the way, have millions upon millions upon millions of views, if you've never watched them of your own volition, you have almost definitely been served bite-sized clips of them to your social media feeds, where they often go viral and spark very angry comment sections.

I think Jubilee is rage bait at best, and I think it's dangerous at worst.

And that's a thesis we are going to spend the rest of this episode unpacking.

I thought, could we start by saying, like, what do we like about Jubilee?

Because on this podcast, I try to give everyone grace.

You were so kind, Matt.

Lazy, how kind and sweet you are.

I can't believe it sometimes.

I don't know.

I think that there's things to appreciate about Jubilee's middle ground.

Okay, so there's this one video that they made called like, can pro-life women and pro-choice men find a middle ground, right?

And on one hand, like, are we platforming pro-life opinions?

Yeah, of course, of course, we are doing that.

But on the other hand, this is a conversation, a debate that we have a national stake in, right?

We have a, we're forced to debate this question constantly.

It's something we're all very worried about.

And I don't know if inevitably I could just come to the conclusion, get rid of this kind of forum, get rid of this kind of conversation that interacts with people that I don't like and disagree with.

I also would say, as another pro to them, that the people who enter these conversations as the normal guy presence in the room, I think they tend to be smart enough.

You know, I don't think I'm smarter than any of them.

I don't think that I'd be able to conjure better points than they do and disagreement.

Much of the time I'm having a thought and they express it.

It's not like it's a totally stacked deck, although there are, there's a sense in which the deck is stacked, I'd say.

Yeah, I think what Jubilee would claim, and we're actually going to be reading some of their mission statements, but I think that what Jubilee would claim is that their goal is to get us out of our online political echo chambers, right?

And I think that's a noble goal.

I don't know if I agree that it's a noble goal, but like, no, I don't know.

I mean, really?

Everyone's so anti-echo chamber.

I'm a centrist on the Echo Chambers.

We're exposed to the craziest shit all day, every day now.

Has it made our politics better?

Has it depolarized our country?

Has Twitter being overtaken by Nazis made us more clever or thoughtful or open-minded people?

No, it's ruined us.

It's ruined our brains.

I don't I'm I'm a I'm a centrist on the echo chamber.

I think the debate is important, but like this constant like you need to open your mind thing, like, I don't know, maybe, maybe we do, maybe we don't.

Do you think we can find middle ground on echo chambers?

Yeah,

I try.

Pro-echo chamber versus anti-echo chamber, the middle ground coming next week.

Julie, it's just echo chamber sounds really bad, but like community is another word you might have for echo chamber, right?

A space where people who are like-minded communicate with each other and where certain ideas are broadly accepted is another way of defining echo chamber, right?

So it's it's it's difficult, it's nuanced, I'd say.

That's fair.

Sorry, I don't need to debate you right now on no, we can debate.

We can debate.

In the spirit of talking about Jubilee, we can debate.

But I think to your point, like I'm not, you know, people are going to come to this, to this episode of my podcast and say, well, you're just against hearing opinions from people who don't agree with you.

You can't hear from someone who is, you know, anti-choice.

You can't hear from someone who, whatever, who has opposing views.

And that's not my problem with Jubilee.

My problem with Jubilee is not that they platform people I disagree with.

Sometimes I have problems with who they platform, and we'll get into that too.

But I think if their goal was to earnestly break open echo chambers, earnestly foster human connection as is their slogan, then the content would look extraordinarily different.

People don't respect sex workers because it's easy to take your clothes off.

That's why they don't respect them.

It's also easy to open your clothes.

People respect things that are hard.

And sex work, OnlyFans, that's not hard.

And so part of my thesis today is that Jubilee is, I think, self-aware about the fact that they are not creating the type of content that aligns at all with what they claim to be about.

I'd say that if there's one critique I have for Jubilee, to boil it down to one sentence, it would be they're not breaking over open echo chambers primarily.

What they're really doing is inventing, opening the echo chamber.

You know, there isn't a lot of Americans who are flat earthers.

That's not a real kind of person that you meet in your day-to-day life.

You don't meet flat earthers at the coffee shop?

You know, a lot of them?

Well, you know, I have friends who are flat earthers because I think it's important to surround myself with people who disagree with me.

You know, it's a fake conversation.

It doesn't actually exist.

And so they're not, you know, getting people out of their rote bullshit.

They're exposing the freaks to the normal guys.

That's what their actual

spectacle is.

It's not primarily about conversation, about issues that bear down on people's lives and about which reasonable minds sometimes differ.

Although they do have that, a lot of the time it's just, you know, random, vaguely reactionary feeling spectacle.

I love how this is our answer to my prompt, which was, can we start by saying something we like about you?

Okay, I will say that as, you know, a content creator, I understand that part of making content is capturing people's attention.

I think the people who run the Jubilee YouTube channel have found a gold mine as far as being able to capture people's attention, being able to get people emotionally involved in your content.

I think they are very, very good content creators.

I think it's ultimately for the worse,

but I think that they have had some really creative ways to rage bait people, essentially.

And look, just as one final pro to them, is that, you know, we can laugh.

We can look at a conversation between, you know, former LGBTQIA people versus current gay people.

We can laugh at that idea.

We can laugh at the fact that they're platforming conversion therapy advocates, although they would say they're not conversion therapy advocates.

That's a different matter, I suppose.

But at the end of the day, there are going to be gay religious teenagers watching that Jubilee video, and they're going to be processing the

ideas from Christians who are gay and who have their faith and who don't believe that they're going to hell for it.

And it's going to make a gay teenager's life better.

It will do that in certain cases.

And it's not a conversation that it's for me to have.

I don't think gay people are going to hell.

I don't believe in all that.

But it's a conversation that some people really do take seriously.

So it speaks to somebody.

It helps somebody.

You know, it's not all bad, I don't think.

Okay, that was

like a really specific pro

about like one of their 7,000 videos.

Yes, that's true.

Well, you know, abortion, you know, they get a 45-year-old guy to say, you have a right to abortion.

You know, maybe that'll make a woman feel safer.

I don't fucking know.

I would like to give a little bit of background on the history of Jubilee.

Would you mind?

I wouldn't, no.

So Jubilee is the brainchild of Jason Lee, who is a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business, prestigious business school.

He's a business guy.

After he graduated, he was a business consultant, making, as he tells it, six figures by the time he was 21.

And in 2010, he launches the Jubilee Project, as it was then known, as a nonprofit and a YouTube channel.

The first video that he makes, which is still the first video on Jubilee's YouTube channel.

It only has like 40,000 views now, was basically just a little like vlog he made of him going to

the Union Square subway stop in New York City and singing, you know, the way that people sing in public places for

money, so that he could raise money for the victims of the Haiti earthquake.

In that video,

he raises $85.01 and two Euros, which I think is is like really sweet.

That's cute.

Yeah.

He seems, you know, like just like very happy to be like finding a creative way to make content out of doing charity work.

It, you know, it's a sweet, short video.

It bears no resemblance at all to anything on that channel now.

But

yeah, for the first couple of years, really, all of the videos were just like various charity spotlights and, you know, they got really low traffic.

Mr.

Beast type guy.

Mr.

Beast.

I mean, Mr.

Beast type guy.

Sure.

Jason eventually realized that he has no business plan.

He had like quit his job to make this work and he's not making any money.

Eventually, he shuts down the non-profit Jubilee project and relaunches it in 2017 as Jubilee, a for-profit company that at that point he had raised $650,000 in funding for.

He raised $650,000 for a YouTube channel?

Yeah.

Who's investing in one?

I don't know.

What does that mean?

Yeah.

Who's going to invest half a million dollars in my YouTube channel?

That's crazy.

It is crazy.

And so immediately the, you know, the charity stuff stops.

And what emerges is a series of videos that he's doing at this point, seven years ago, called Both Sides.

That's the name of the series.

And the videos are things like married couple secretly share both sides of a love story where they're both both sitting at a table talking to each other, hooked up to microphones, essentially just having an intimate conversation about their relationship, but on camera.

And he does this with a lot of couples.

He does this with best friends.

And it's innocuous.

You know, it's like kind of sweet human interest type content.

It's kind of a look into people's interior worlds and relationships.

It's a feel-good thing, which of course, Jubilee still claims it's about making feel-good content, but this was kind of the last time the content was ever feel-good.

The first middle ground video was called Atheists and Christians Debate Truth and Belief.

That video gets 6 million views.

This is capitalism, baby.

If you find the thing that makes you more money, you're off to the races with it.

And so we were off to the races, meaning the race to the bottom of what Jubilee would become.

I think it's kind of, you know, like, it's a funnel that we all go down in our lives.

You know, we start off just wanting to make people happy, and then we find out that people actually want to be made to be miserable and angry, and that that's what they'd rather engage with, and then we spend our lives just getting people angrier and angrier and make ourselves wealthier and wealthier, and then we all die.

That's the situation I guess a lot of content creators find themselves in.

You know, Jubilee's by no means alone in this regard.

This sort of content, this sort of buzzfeed, like, do you know your wife's darkest secret type content?

It had its place, but it was, it's super dated now.

Nobody watches videos like that.

Nobody cares.

You need to have an angry man in somewhere in the room that everybody hates.

Otherwise, you know, what are you going to do?

And even if, sorry to be going off here, but even if you go on, like, even these more human interest pieces, like, you know, a dating show, it still has like a lot of tension and mean guys.

There's a lot of judgment going on.

You know, you're not going to find content as much that's just feel-good, you know, children react to Titanic type videos.

It's not as common anymore.

This is capitalism though, right?

It's like he

started as like a sweet charity YouTube channel.

And look, I'm not saying you have to do that forever.

Like my podcast isn't for charity.

My podcast is my job too.

But, you know, I guess you just

follow the money wherever it leads you.

And when it leads you to a place of like total rage and platforming nonsense and legitimizing nonsense, oftentimes dangerous nonsense, like, okay, that's where we'll go.

I agree.

And I think that as we'll no doubt get into, I think the greatest sin of Jubilee, or one of the greatest sins of Jubilee, is that it continues to present itself as this kind of neutral, friendly platform where they're just bringing on people who have some beliefs, not sort of acknowledging the fact that they are part of an online ecosystem that exists to platform and expose other people to reactionaries who are themselves famous and who themselves want to spread their message.

They didn't go on the street to find MRAs, they found MRA influencers to go in a room and act and do the thing that they do.

They're part of the job of celebrities, right?

It's part of the grind of having divergent beliefs is going hopefully on Jubilee, which seems like a problem.

It seems weird.

MRA being

not the thing that's in the vaccine, but men's rights activists.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Yes.

For normal people who don't know this stuff.

Speaking of aspiring to go on Jubilee, I should give a disclaimer now that I was once invited to go on Jubilee.

It's true.

So I actually like went back into the email that I got from my manager who reached out to me to say, Jubilee is casting and they wanted to see if you would be in their video to play the role of

in quotations, male feminist.

in the video male feminist versus male anti-feminist, which is a video that ended up coming out without me me because I said no.

The only thing that I could think that justifies being a feminist today is you must just want to get late.

There's no reason to believe in all of these crazy things that seek to strip you of your masculinity, perpetuate these terrible ideas that men are evil and all these things.

That has to be the reason.

Why?

Why didn't you get on there?

Why didn't you embrace the grindset?

What are you doing?

You're the huge right now.

You want to be talking to me?

Well, I know.

Had I gone on Jubilee, I might have raised $600,000 for this podcast at this point.

Exactly.

Fuck me.

But no, I mean, I honestly, though, I was like totally confounded when I got this email because the thing that I thought then, which is still what I think now, even though now I understand that this is the basic premise for their casting and how their channel works, is like, what qualifications do I have to go on this YouTube channel in front of millions of people and argue about feminism?

Of course, I am a male who identifies as a feminist, but I'm not a scholar.

I don't have, I don't have like, I haven't written books on this.

And I was like, I'm, I'm most definitely going to say something that is unpolished.

And I don't want to upset people.

And I don't want to do a disservice to feminism by fucking it up.

And then I watched these videos in preparation for this episode and every time they come up on my feed over the last few years.

And I realized, because this was in 2022 that they invited me.

And I realized that like, oh, no one that they cast has any sort of qualifications to talk about anything.

That's not true.

Sometimes the scientists do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, sometimes, but like, for the most part, they're just like, who can we rile up?

No, I kind of think it's like, it's, it's two problems at once.

I think that it'd be a good show to have somebody like you go on and debate a guy who's a piece of shit, who's just sort of walking around like, no, you're not a scholar, but do you need to be a scholar to affirm women's rights?

Like, do you need to be that?

Probably not, you know?

And I think that you could have a good, crude crude conversation that exposes humans to other humans.

I think the problem comes in when it's not quite random people who have no stake in it, but they're not scholars either.

They're just random fucking people who want to make a name for themselves on the internet.

It's not this sort of everyman conversation, which I think could have some value to somebody, you know?

Yeah, that's fair.

No, that's totally fair.

I was just like, I'm going to say something wrong and get totally roasted for this.

And I'm glad I didn't do it.

Well, maybe you've turned me around on this issue.

Maybe I should email them back two years later and be like, Jubilee, I'm ready.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to give a huge thanks to Incogni for sponsoring today's episode.

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That is incogni.com slash fruity with the code fruity now let's get back to the show

what are we doing talking about jubilee when we could just watch jubilee i i have pulled some selects i i started by pulling a video that came out nine days ago called men's rights activists versus feminists uh this is an hour and 34 minutes long

Why?

But I picked this one to start with because I think it's it's really the kind of feminist versus anti-feminist is at this point like a sub-genre within the Jubilee universe.

They know that this specific debate gets so many views, which is why they've done it over and over and over and over and over again.

So I pulled actually just a list of these to read.

We have men's rights activists versus feminists, which is the one that we're going to play a little bit of.

Does feminism include trans women, female feminists versus anti-feminists?

Do women really have it harder?

Male feminist versus anti-feminists?

White feminists versus POC anti-feminists?

That's a really weird premise.

Can feminists and non-feminists agree on gender equality?

Men's rights versus feminists.

Is toxic masculinity real?

Are men falling behind male feminist versus female anti-feminists?

And five feminists versus one secret anti-feminist?

Oh no.

What is she?

What is she doing here?

But they really find

and impossibly more painful ways to explore the same quote-unquote debate.

I feel like these days, this sort of battle between feminism and men's rights activism is like most of the internet's engagement with feminism as a concept.

So, there's a lot of writing on this.

There's a lot of conversation about it.

Yeah, yeah, well, and all of these videos get millions and millions, and sometimes tens of millions of views.

So, they've found a way to milk this continuously, which is the only reason they continue to do it and everything that they do on their channel.

But the specific one that I pulled, men's rights activists versus feminists.

Men should have access to their children.

It's 50% their DNA.

They should get 50% custody off the bat.

Because you mentioned that earlier, and correct me if I'm wrong, you were saying that men are not encouraged to speak about their feelings.

I would say largely, that's true, yeah.

Yet you're bringing them down in your conversation.

You're saying that being sexist towards a man is not as big of a deal as being towards a woman.

I mean, there's more laws in the U.S.

that are disfavor to men than women.

Why is that?

Like which laws?

Like the inconsequential draft?

No.

Since I have been a kid, it has been common in the media to refer to men as trash, to say that men are the problem, men are terrible, etc., etc., to the point that on national TV, a guy got his chopped off and they were laughing about it.

And nobody said anything and nobody cared.

And if the reverse happened, I don't think it would be the same outrage.

I mean, this video is deranged, but one of the things that is really striking about it is that on the anti-feminist side, first of all, they diversity cast a lot.

So they're like, we need to have a woman who is on the anti-feminist side.

And the person who they cast in that position is Hannah Pearl Davis, known mononymously online as sometimes Pearl.

Who is Pearl?

She's kind of like this Nazi for hire type person.

Like she kind of just goes to events and speaks strikingly vapidly about subjects, as you can see in that video.

But she doesn't, she just kind of sticks to like five or six stock lines.

She recently, not recently, but like a year ago, sang a song about

the Jewish question and how she's starting to question the role of Adolf Hitler in the history of humanity, which I thought was, you know, pretty, pretty bad.

But do you remember that song, Matt?

Do you remember the remember the Just Asking Questions song?

Oh, I remember it well.

It was Hannah Pearl Davis uploaded a video to YouTube, which has since been taken down.

And it's, she's playing the guitar and singing an original song called Why Can't We Talk About the Jews?

And they got her on Jubilee to argue the anti-feminist position.

And, and this goes to my point, do not acknowledge that she is a fucking neo-Nazi in the video.

Nobody talks about it.

Nobody cares.

It's so weird to me.

I did watch all hour and a half of this debate, debate.

And I did watch it in two times speed because I had a lot to get through yesterday.

And

her asking the Jewish question does not come up.

But it's just like this is

we're going to get into like the glorification of centrism that is at the heart of this YouTube channel and also how they construct like what exactly the middle ground is in these debates that they frame.

But the thing is, like I watched this whole video and in it, the people on the feminist side have what at this point are extremely like broadly popular opinions about like the basic tenets of modern feminism, like you know, the wage gap and like women are disproportionately affected by gender-based violence.

These things that are like widely studied, well documented.

And they turn these like facts, like, is the wage gap real?

And are women more likely to be targeted by gender-based violence?

These are facts.

And they use them as prompts to say, is the wage gap real?

Step forward if you think it's true, and then step forward on this side if you think it's not true.

And it's like, what?

This is not a debate.

This is not a debate.

And then they have the feminists in this particular video arguing, like I said, broadly, like popular and accepted positions.

And then on the anti-feminist side, they find these extraordinarily fringe cast members.

And this is kind of representative of what they do in all of these videos.

They go on like neonazi.com and find user, I have questions about the Jews one, two, three, and send them an email being like, will you come on Jubilee?

And it's fucking Hannah Pearl Davis.

Like, why one year after someone creates a fucking ukulele song on YouTube about can I, why can't we talk about the Jews?

Why are you casting them?

Yeah, and it's, it's particularly strange in this, you know, debate because

the entire idea of like finding a middle ground, you know, it usually presupposes the internal consistency of both sides of the debate.

But the problem that we face with the MRAs is that men's rights activism is not an internally consistent ideology, right?

And what I mean by that is there's this one point where I watched this video.

At one point, they asked the people, like, do you think that men have equal rights?

And H.

Pearl Davis comes out and says, no, because they lose in divorce courts more often than women do.

Men are biased against.

Now, that's a very complicated question and it doesn't seem entirely true, but leaving that aside for a second, the feminists process this information and and respond to her like, well, you want more masculine men.

You want women to stay at home and for men to be in the workforce.

And so it's only reasonable then that we'd expect bias against men in the divorce court situation.

And Pearl Davis has literally no response to this whatsoever.

She just stares vacantly back and repeats her party line because it's not just a matter of we have to find a middle ground between two ideas.

We have to actually tease out what these people believe, which is impossible when they're dumb as shit reactionaries.

Like, they don't have consistent beliefs.

So, what do we, what is the debate about?

What's the conversation?

It's so weird.

It's so odd.

It's just pulling up that is being fat a choice?

Because that's the next one that I had.

It's a great one.

Ah!

Is being fat a choice?

Okay, the next one that I had listed down.

This is another hit from Jubilee.

Is being fat a choice fit men versus fat men?

Middle ground.

Important question of our day.

This has 8 million views.

Good.

So we have six people in Is Being Fat a Choice Fit Men versus Fat Men.

Three of them are visibly muscular men.

Three of them are fat men.

And they basically argue about whether being fat is morally wrong, basically.

Yes, whether being fat is morally wrong.

And again, it's like, it's easy when you talk about any of these videos.

And we've started to do a little of this and I'm like avoiding it myself, but it's very easy to start getting into how you feel about the content of what people are saying.

Yes.

It's so easy to get sucked into like, I can't believe H.

Pearl Davis said in her video that people don't, quote, people don't respect sex workers because sex work is easy.

Like that, that's a refrain that she repeats like 17 times that video that sex work is easy, which is just like a completely unbelievable claim.

But like, it's so hard not to get sucked into the exact thing Jubilee wants you to get sucked into, which is the ridiculous shit that people are spewing on their enormous YouTube channel.

But like, I'm trying to stay focused here on the form.

Yes.

Who did they cast?

What are they positioning as debatable points?

That to me is what's interesting.

Don't they cast the fresh and fit guy?

Yeah, so that's what I wanted to point out with this one.

Can you explain?

Fresh and fit podcast is something I see on Twitter where they bring on Instagram women and insult them for being sluts, right?

That's what they do on that podcast, basically.

Yeah, it's Fresh and Fit.

It's like this extraordinarily misogynistic, right-wing, disgusting, like Andrew Tate adjacent.

Yeah.

They have one of the co-hosts of Fresh and Fit on as the jacked in the

jacked men section.

And the whole time, like his opening statement at the one-minute mark of this video is.

Well, it's unacceptable to be fat.

Okay,

that's a great start.

It is unacceptable to be fat.

What's the middle ground when you're talking to someone like that?

And they cast him knowing that he's going to stay stuff like that.

At a minute 42, he says, being fat is unacceptable because you control every single morsel of food that goes into your mouth.

It shows a lack of discipline.

It shows a lack of character.

It shows a lack of temperance.

And when you're fat, it's an outward manifestation of your inadequacies.

At two minutes 45 seconds, he says, You're fat.

You made that decision.

You live in the best country ever.

If you live in a civilized first world country where you have electricity, internet power, et cetera, you deserve to be bullied.

It's ridiculous to me that we have all these fat people running around.

Meanwhile, people are being bombed in Gaza.

I found that when him is bringing, invoking Gaza like that to be one of the most deranged, like, where does he even get this from?

Like, where does he pull these talking points from?

Can you just invoke ongoing atrocities and like use them as justification for anything you ever want to say?

It's so strange.

Yeah, I mean, it's completely fucking unbelievable.

But again, it's like Jubilee casts this person knowing that this is exactly the type of stuff they're going to say on the Jubilee channel because it's what they say in their own content.

I mean, presumably they reached out to me because they wanted me to say the kinds of things that I say online to a lot of people, which, you know, are typically in favor of like human rights and being kind to other people.

But they cast him because they want him to say that as he says at three minutes, 30 seconds of this video.

We need to bring shaming back in so many other regards besides obesity we need to do it with sluts we need to shame to shame fat people we need to shame everybody it's also so weird because the entire structure of the episode presupposes that there's an innate conflict between fit people and fat people, which is not

true.

It's not like a real conflict that needs to exist.

These aren't two categories of people doomed to hate each other.

And in fact, when you watch that video, it's just fat people defending themselves against baseless attacks against their characters.

The fat people aren't mad at the fit people.

What does this even mean?

You and I were talking yesterday when we were watching these videos about how, like, these are invented conflicts.

Yeah.

When the middle ground started, right, that first video, atheists versus Christians, that as a debate format with those two sides, like I can understand,

right?

Because those are two beliefs that are in conflict philosophically, theologically with one another.

But now they're like milking this format for

years and years.

And it's they're they're coming up with these arguments that aren't arguments.

No, they're reifying the positions that they're pretending to debate about, right?

They're they're inventing the category of the pro-fat hater.

Most people in society, if you ask them, do you hate fat people?

Even if they do hate fat people, which is a lot of people, don't aren't like militant anti-fat people.

That's not a kind of person that exists.

It's a fictional identity that exists in order to get eyeballs on the screen.

There's no such thing.

Right.

So in this video, again, like the construction of the middle ground, we're saying the middle is somewhere between like these normal fat guys who are just like, I'm fat and I want to exist in the world.

And then these, these other men who are like, you're an ugly amoral piece of shit who doesn't deserve kindness or human happiness.

And we're supposed to think that the middle is something in between.

that the acceptable place to like stake out your opinion is something in between these stupid no it's that fat people should fucking exist.

And like,

what are we doing here?

Do they find a middle ground in that one?

Do they get there?

Do they ever come to any kind of conclusion in these episodes?

No.

That's the funniest thing.

All of these episodes are, how long is this one?

This is being fat a choice is one hour and 17 minutes long.

Yeah.

And I watched all of it.

It's interesting because the on the on the fit guy group, I remember that video and I remember there was like one of the guys who was like, I harm my body with a lot of steroids and like this is a very difficult thing for me and I can't do that anymore.

And like, you know, a person like that, he could be reasoned with.

You could talk to him constructively about the concept of fat phobia.

The problem is, is that they, they need to have one evil Satan type guy to enable the conversation to be interesting.

Because the reality of the situation is that talking about fat phobia for an hour and 17 minutes, I could kind of pass on it, if I'm being honest.

Like, I don't know.

I think I kind of get the idea after 10 minutes.

And it's like, is this breaking echo channel?

What have I learned?

What's what's their stated goal?

Fostering human connection.

Have we fostered human connection by subjecting these three men to like the most vitriolic and disgusting fat phobia for an hour and 17 minutes?

No, and they didn't sign up for this.

They didn't sign up for it.

They signed up to be in a debate about

the position of fatphobia in culture.

They didn't sign up to be personally assaulted, like verbally assaulted by a man who just genuinely hates them and wishes they were dead.

Like that's a different category of conversation.

I remember there was a TikTok where one of the guys who was in that conversation was really upset about it and had trouble with it.

I could probably find it for you.

It's interesting.

It's sad.

Hey, friends, you may have noticed that I was on Jubilee's most recent episode of The Middle Ground, Fit Men versus Fat Men.

When I was invited on the show and they said we want you to be on Jacked vs.

Fat, that was the original title.

I remember my first question was, I was unaware the two sides had any problems with one another.

But I was excited to have a thoughtful and meaningful conversation where two sides can learn from one another and share in empathy and respect and learn and grow and disagree civilly.

However, I was completely unaware that a certain individual had been invited to be a part of this episode.

The cast was unaware of who else was in the cast until the moment we had filmed, and I know myself and several others would have refused to have taken part having known that he was there.

But we tried to keep it professional, keep the the conversation going, and not get too sidetracked into his hateful, misogynistic, transphobic, homophobic ideology.

I think it is shameful of the producers of Jubilee to have invited this man on and platformed him for the world to see to spout such hate.

I want to shout out to the other seven guys on the panel.

Everyone came there respectfully with open hearts, and a beautiful chance was ruined by a platform rage-baiting baiting their fans.

I want to read some of the prompts that they use in this video to like agree or disagree about.

One of them is, I have felt disgusted looking at a fat body.

That's when they debate.

The question is so hurtful.

Like, it's such a mean thing to say as a question.

Like, the next one is, agree or disagree, jacked men are more attractive than fat men.

The next one is, the body positivity movement is problematic.

A lot of times,

what Jubilee posits as like debatable, kind of neutral points are just like right-wing talking points.

Yeah, and like the problem with a question, like, is the body-positive movement problematic, is the answer is: A, yes, every movement is problematic, right?

There's no like, it's not easy to find a movement that has nobody weird saying anything in it.

And what this means is that it's an open-ended question, not on the merit of the issue of whether we should be positive about our bodies, but a sort of referendum on our definition of the word body positive movement, which is a phrase that could mean anything you can imagine, right?

It's just, it doesn't mean anything.

At around eight minutes, the fresh and fit guy is basically just yelling at the fat people, being like, if you were, you know, a more morally righteous person, you would lose weight and you wouldn't be fat.

And then one of the men on the fat side says, I don't think anyone's debating that weight loss is impossible here.

I think the question is, why do you hate fat people?

And that is the question.

That is the question.

Why do these men hate fat people?

But that's not how Jubilee has arranged, you know, to be the question.

No, is it appropriate to hate fat people would be the name of the video.

But that's a framing that is inherently critical of the wrong position.

Whereas the name of the video that's given is so, I don't know if I want to say it's value neutral or slightly weighed against fat people.

Like, is being fat a choice?

Is itself a question that doesn't really mean that much?

Is what we mean by that question, do we have a choice over what food we eat?

Because the answer is, I guess, I guess we do.

Of course, being fat just generically is not a choice, it's a question that implicitly judges fat people, I'd say.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, that's what gets clicks, and that's what Jubilee is about: getting clicks and fostering human connection.

Of course, thank God for them.

You feel brave.

I was feeling so in my echo chamber until I watched an hour and 17 minutes of is being fat a choice.

Why are they so long, Matt?

What are they doing?

Why are they so long?

Because you can insert more dynamic advertisements in the middle of longer YouTube videos.

You know this.

You're a YouTuber.

Come on.

That's true.

I don't insert dynamic advertisements in the middle of my VD videos.

I don't either because they don't let me because I curse too much.

The next video that I marked down was, Do women really have it harder, male feminist versus anti-feminist?

This is another, you know, feminism one.

But the reason that I put this down is because, once again, the statements that Jubilee posits as the like, which side of this do you stand on are just so asinine.

One of them is women should be encouraged to be financially independent of men.

The answer is yes.

Yes, people should have financial autonomy.

Like, are we in the fucking 1970s?

At 28 minutes, they say, this fucking blew my mind.

The debatable statement.

Women are fit to be president.

And then one of them makes this argument that like women are too emotional to be to be president.

Did they find middle ground on that?

Did they decide at the end if women, if their periods were too intense?

Yeah, the middle ground is that women can be vice president.

Okay, good.

Yeah, yeah, we found it.

At 33 minutes.

The gender pay gap is real.

Again, like what?

This isn't a debate.

Oh my god, can you take the mic?

Because I'm

getting out of control.

No, they like to ask empirical questions.

I remember they like to ask questions about facts and then have both sides inexplicably decide different stuff on it.

They asked at one point in their homeschooling video, which is one of my favorites, are children safer in homeschool or in public school?

And everybody disagreed, but the reality is that we know that kids are more put in danger by having parents that they don't get to have any escape from, having no support system outside of their homes.

That's a proven thing that harms them a lot like this is a fact about the world like what does the debate even look like and i think that they ask these kinds of questions because they conjure up a lot of feelings without like any ability to like for one person to rebut another right so one person says this is the information on the subject the other person says i have negative feelings about that i want to continue being a reactionary even though that's true and so you can sort of bypass thinking about a subject if you ask an obvious enough fact-based question are there any other specific videos for now that you want to let's see if i have any if i have anything i have the white feminist video it's white feminist women versus anti-feminist poc women which is already one of the weirdest

like why

what are you talking about they like to find like the three of them that exist and uh be mad about it but They spend the whole time like the people of color women.

The women of color.

The women of color.

Thank you.

um they spend the whole time being like it's bad that white feminists don't do enough advocacy which i suppose is a valid reason to criticize white feminists but not necessarily a very good reason to criticize feminism it's a good gotcha but it doesn't mean very much but then one of the women who's like this devout muslim is like i believe in submitting to my husband i believe uh fundamentally the opposite of what feminists believe i think men should have power in society and women should submit to them and be in the home and it it really clarifies the extent to which, like, the debate is so often a smokescreen for just completely unchangeable core beliefs that people have.

You know, they're trying to, you know, get people out on whether they're a good enough feminist or how valid their feminism really is.

But secretly, the whole conversation is, I don't think that women are equal to men.

That's the real heart of the conversation.

And it's not something they're really prying into.

They're not like going deep into these conversations.

Totally.

And listen, debate content online as a whole, I always say this, but it's not for the people involved doing the debating.

It's for an audience.

You know, Charlie Kirk and the woke college student probably aren't changing each other's minds, but in theory, debate content is supposed to force the viewer to ask questions about their own belief and consider all sides.

But the thing is, this doesn't do that.

It's entirely, again, rage baiting.

And it's also just like they claim that they want to break down echo chambers and get us to talk to each other and get us to question our beliefs.

But every conversation, and every comment section, and every viral tweet I've ever seen around a Jubilee clip is just people hardening their own positions and taking the side of the person they already agree with.

No, it's profoundly unmoderated.

They don't leave space really.

There's very often like

a man on the bad side who's significantly angrier than everybody else, and he just sops up every ounce of attention in the room and leaves like zero space to have like a constructive dialogue between people who are at least sometimes on Jubilee trying to be kind to each other, genuinely trying to see things the other person's way.

And there are better and worse episodes, of course.

Have you seen the gay one, the conversion therapy one?

The current LGBT versus ex-LGBT?

Yes.

Have you seen that?

Of course.

It's a classic.

There's a guy.

I watch it once a morning.

There's an intersex woman on there, and he's like, you're not a woman.

You're a man.

Fuck off.

Like, he's so mean.

He's so mean.

What is this?

There's kind of like, yeah, to your point, there's usually someone who's just there to be outrageous.

Yeah, who's just trying to get internet points.

And it usually ruins the whole thing, and it usually garners millions of views.

I'd like to take a quick break from the show to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Blue Land, who, along with my supporters over on Patreon, make it possible for me to spend 12 hours a day going down right-wing online rabbit holes, which you know what?

When I put it that way, maybe we should all stop enabling this behavior.

Maybe we need to stop.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you to Blueland for sponsoring this show.

And now let's get back to it.

I kind of mentioned this, but I want to read Jubilee's mission statement because I know that they know that what they claim to be doing is not what they are doing.

So on their website, which I went to, Jason Lee wrote a little letter.

And in it, he said, Sometimes it feels like the world is becoming more divided, chaotic, and cluttered.

But if I've learned anything in my time growing Jubilee, it's this.

We are all inextricably linked and want to live for something deeper.

Living for empathy and human good is a resilient vision and one that is worthy of pursuit.

Sincerely, Jason Lee.

And then at the bottom of the website, it says, Jubilee Media, it's a digital media company that pushes boundaries, tackles taboos, and breaks the rules.

We believe discomfort and conflict are pivotal forces in creating human connection.

In short, we are not afraid to go there.

Very peculiar.

Whatever.

It's so interesting because, like, if you really wanted anti-feminists and feminists to connect, you'd probably, you know, make them play Monopoly or something.

You wouldn't make them debate if women are okay.

That's not the way to get people to connect.

It's fundamentally against the spirit of connection.

I mean, it just sounds like they wrote those mission statements, not at all considering what their actual product is.

Like I read those and I'm like, oh yeah, that's nice.

We should foster empathy.

We should, you know, not be so divided, yada, yada, yada.

Like, I'm sure, whatever.

And then they're like, we're going to create the most divisive, you know, most sympathetic towards bigotry, legitimizing, you know, anti-science views.

We're just going to put it all out there and then cover it in a blanket of flowery language around human connection and building empathy.

And it's it's total bullshit all the way through.

Yes, I agreed.

There's this huge problem with like enlightened centrist types where it's actually really easy to say, like, hey guys, let's turn the volume down.

You don't actually hate this kind of person.

Come on, guys.

You can be friends with people you disagree with.

The problem is that actually doing that, turning the volume down, isn't something that anyone's fundamentally interested in doing.

And it's also something that's really hard to do.

So, as admirable as a goal as it might be, it's not, who cares about doing it?

Nobody on the internet's turning the volume down.

If you want the volume turned down, talk to people.

Well, it's also just not their goal.

Right, no, it's what they say is their goal, but it's so clearly not.

And I went, you know, I searched for evidence, Lady Gaga.

I went looking for proof to, I was like, I know that they know that this is not what they're doing.

I went to their Instagram and just, you know, over the last few weeks,

you, the listener, have probably caught wind of some of this, but they did these two mega, mega viral videos.

One was Charlie Kirk versus 25 woke students, and one was one woke student versus 25 Charlie Kirks.

Various clips from these videos have gone extraordinarily viral, and they posted something in reference to these videos on their Instagram that Big Joel, I would like to send you and have you describe, if that's okay.

Oh, okay.

So, there's four people of different ages and walks of life, seemingly quite angry with each other.

They don't look all too pleased.

Charlie Kirk, in particular, looks concerned.

Do you want me to read the text beside it?

Just the caption.

Choose your fighter.

Yep.

Choose your fighter.

Yeah, okay.

That was kind of all I needed.

I like how they all have different personalities and are kinds of guys now.

They're building new

kinds of archetypes of our new political millennia.

Right.

It's good.

They kind of abstract from their YouTube videos of real real human beings arguing with one another, like characters that you can identify with.

Who do you choose?

I did watch this video, and I choose Naima.

I like her nose piercing.

Yeah, yeah, she did great.

She roasted and toasted Charlie Kirk.

Was she the one who said his smile was weird?

Because I saw that viral clip and I thought that was pretty funny.

Yeah, she did say that.

What does fetus mean?

A fetus is in utero.

What does fetus mean in Latin?

What the f?

I'm sorry.

It means little human being.

His smile is very creepy.

Okay.

Smiling is creepy.

No, your smile specifically.

Got it.

But let's go back to.

We're losing track here.

That's good.

Good for her.

But I saw this Instagram and I saw that they've made the caption choose your fighter from their own video.

And I was like, okay.

Fine.

You guys know what you're doing.

You're not building empathy.

You're not building bridges.

This is an Akumbaya moment.

I mean, you could have just looked at the name of the video.

Can one woke teen survive an onslaught of MAGA soldiers?

That's not a coming together moment.

That's about being mean.

And also the entire structure of that type of video is like whenever somebody is about to say something they maybe shouldn't have, they all raise their hands and send in a new MAGA guy to be angry.

You know, it's all about distractions.

It's all about trying to keep people on their toes.

I mean, it's very much like an extrapolation of, I don't know if you're familiar with the online debate scene at all, but it's very much like destiny, right?

I'm not familiar with the online debate scene.

I try not to be, but in spirit, share your insights.

Well, you know, I think even Destiny, who's probably the biggest online debater right now, would happily admit that what he's doing is not bringing, coming together with all manner of bigot and freak.

I think what he's doing is putting on a show, and he does a reasonable job of it.

I think that it's all about getting people out on points and like pointing out hypocrisies, a lot of it.

It's about catching people off guard, presenting studies they're not familiar with.

These things can be fine.

I'm not here to, you know, shit on anybody's entertainment.

That's fine.

But at the same time, you know, what it's certainly not doing is bringing us closer together.

You know,

I don't think there's a plausible argument for that.

Yeah, for sure.

And I've had people who listen to this podcast ask me before over emails and DMs,

why

don't you have people with opposing viewpoints as your guests?

Why don't you do debate style content?

And I don't do that because to your point, like debate is a sport.

It's difficult.

Not only is it difficult, but it's a spectacle and it's a sport and it's not about human connection.

It's about one-upping.

It's about knowing how to dodge and dive and duck dip, whatever they say and dodge ball.

And like, I am not interested in doing that.

I think what you said earlier was really spot on, which is that the way to foster human connection with people you disagree with is to sit down and talk to them but it is probably not to sit down and talk to them in front of studio lights and a camera sure and you know being correct might help in a debate i often think that the people with the normal guy position come off better than the people with the freak positions i i think on average they seem like more normal well-adjusted people and i think they argue their positions probably more persuasively so i think it's i think it's fair to say that you know being correct being normal has its benefits that's not to say, though, that debate, it tests on skills that are certainly not being correct or the more moral party.

No, and also people don't speak in front of lights and cameras and microphones the way that they would at a kitchen table.

No, having the confidence of the fresh and fit guy is not something that comes to people naturally at all.

Right.

And maybe it makes for a good YouTube video, but like I have disagreements with people that I love all the time, especially like within my family.

And we sit down and talk about it.

And like those conversations in which we actually dig into our beliefs and attempt to understand each other look very different than any kind of debate content that you see online because we're not performing for an audience.

We're not trying to like one up in a way that basically in practice always just comes out being mean.

And that's like a lot of these videos.

I categorize Jubilee videos into

two kinds of bad content.

One of them is normalizing bigotry and the other is legitimizing straight up miss or disinformation.

The normalizing bigotry stuff is, you know, we've already talked about a good amount of that, like, you know, laundering these anti-feminist, you know, women are too emotional to be to be president, anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ, anti-fat bigotry through the lens of, well, that's just an opinion and all opinions are equally valid.

The legitimizing straight up miss and disinformation and like conspiracy theories all through this frame of like, well, it's just a point of view, so let's hear it out.

And all points of view are equal.

I think everything we've already been discussing about their content is represents why it's like dangerous and bad.

But this is just kind of like another level of like, this is this is fucking crazy.

And like we're calling into question science, just a list of their videos that really get into like this anti-science realm.

Some of those include: should everyone, these are middle ground videos, should everyone get the COVID-19 vaccine?

Pro-vax versus anti-vax?

Flat earthers versus scientists?

Can we trust science?

Do miracle healings exist?

Doctors versus holistic healers?

Pro-vaccine versus anti-vaccine?

Should your kids get vaccinated?

Climate change activists versus skeptics.

Could they see eye to eye?

Could they?

I love you digesting all of these titles as like normal, normal things to make YouTube videos about?

I want to empathize with the concept of Jubilee for a second and say we're in difficult times right now for having serious conversations about things because, you know, we can sit, you know, in our normal urbanite world and say nobody should talk about whether or not vaccines are good or bad.

But like a lot of Americans are vaccine hesitant, right?

For that reason, I think it makes sense to have content directed at these people, perhaps to feature them in some way.

I'm not against in spirit debating or talking to people who believe things that are blatantly anti-scientific.

A problem I have is that people who believe things for fundamentally anti-scientific reasons do not have debate points and arguments to make on behalf of those beliefs.

The person who is vaccine hesitant is simply not vaccine hesitant because of the state of the science.

That is simply not the psychological motivation for being worried about the COVID-19 vaccine.

So, what is the conversation about?

Like, we're presenting this as a middle ground, but we're taking people so on what they say and not actually interpreting where they're coming from or why that it seems like we're not actually going to learn anything from it.

And I do agree that if you're going to do that, you're normalizing horrible beliefs.

Well, I watch them.

I mean, it's not about science.

It's

first of all, all of these videos are are like, as with the sort of more like socio-political based ones, the science ones are just like, we found three scientists and we found three people who identify as truth seekers.

Like, maybe they all have equally valid points.

I'm Spencer Marks, one of the senior members of the CFI Investigations Group, Science Advocate.

I am Marina Yeri.

I'm a theoretical physicist.

And I'm with the University of Irwine.

I'm Shelley Lewis.

I'm a graduate of West Point, critical thinker, and jumped out of the airplanes.

My name is Dan Glattman.

I work as Dan the Waterman in the drinking water filtration industry and I'm a truth seeker.

You know, the truth-seeking, self-identifying critical thinker side, they don't have science, but

they are, of course, always doing their research.

You know, and they'll say some like weird study or finding that the scientists are like, what?

What are you talking about?

And they'll take that as some small victory that they stumped the scientists for a minute.

Right, because they said something like absolutely batshit.

But you're right.

We need to,

I mentioned this book, I think, in my last episode, but Doppelganger by Naomi Klein is a really interesting book where she's trying to empathetically understand how people, so many people in the last several years have gone down these anti-science conspiratorial rabbit holes, especially with the starting point for so many of them being the COVID vaccine conspiracies.

But the way that we seek to understand this issue of kind of conspiratorial thinking is not by making these videos where we platform the scientists and the conspiracy theorists as having equally credible positions.

That's, I mean, my biggest thing with all the science videos is like, it's, it's false equivalents all the way down.

It's so ineffectual, too.

You know, nobody's going to watch the video and stop being, and maybe they are.

Maybe someone's going to watch the video and stop liking vaccines.

I have a hard time accepting this person.

To me, it feels so

built to seem like it has meaning that it just doesn't have, you know, because the problem with all these videos is that they're just not that persuasive.

They're not that persuasive to either point.

Sometimes the scientists are able to give the impression that they just are, just know much more than the other people.

And I'm sure maybe that could convince somebody.

But the truth is, is that for most of these anti-science people, the fundamental thing they reject is not some particular scientific premise or another, but the very concept of expertise, right?

They're against the position that people who know more should have more importance in conversations about the subject.

You can't convince that away.

That's a gut belief, I think.

Absolutely.

And it feels like on the part of Jubilee that in making these videos and by casting these anti-science people as having equal footing on these topics with, you know, physicians and other types of doctors and researchers and scientists, it's like Jubilee is inherently taking their side

by legitimizing it.

It's taking the idea that somebody can be an anti-vaxxer in the way somebody is a pro-vaxxer.

But pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine,

while they look like the opposite of each other, they're really not.

Pro-vaccine is like a belief that just comes about because you're like paying attention to what scientists say.

Anti-vaccine is a belief that emerges from like getting way, way too obsessed in an an online rabbit hole and destroying your life because of it.

They're not the same.

They're genetically different beliefs.

They did like a provax versus anti-vax video before COVID.

And then once COVID happened and the vaccine started coming out, I'm sure Jason Lee was like, let's fucking go.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh,

he was like, we got some content on our hands.

And so they did, they did Provax versus Anti-Vax COVID edition.

But you know, at this point, hundreds of thousands of people have died from COVID.

And this is like a really active health issue.

I mean, you know, vaccines kind of always are.

But I want to play you the first 45 seconds of that video where Jason Lee himself sits down on camera and he's like, I'm going to give you a little disclaimer.

Did you watch this one?

No, no.

I'm excited, though.

I don't know why.

Hey, guys.

I know that we're doing both sides today, but actually, I just wanted to let you know that

one of the sides causes people to die.

So, consider that.

It's literally that.

It's literally that.

Hey, y'all, before we start this video, we just want to acknowledge that this is obviously a very sensitive topic, especially coming out of what's been an incredibly difficult year battling the coronavirus pandemic.

But as vaccines are starting to roll out, this is also a very real and current conversation that we're seeing happen within our communities and all around the country.

So, our goal with this video was to just earnestly portray various perspectives that we were hearing and

not necessarily that we condone these perspectives, but to understand why people are feeling the way they might be.

As always, please seek out experts as you're making your own decisions.

And above all else, we want to encourage you to see each other's humanity and feel more empathy.

It's so interesting.

In a way, it sort of undermines the entire project of Jubilee, right?

If he feels the need to come out and give a disclaimer because people are literally dying from believing this, then why isn't he doing it when poor fat people are being brought on to be humiliated and bullied?

And

why isn't he disclaiming how conversion therapy doesn't work and how it's brutally cruel to treat gay people like this?

You know, it's so sad that he feels the need to do it on this subject because he knows what he's doing.

He knows that what he's really doing is exposing people to horrible ideas.

That's sad.

It reminds me of the meme that's like, you know, I can excuse the racism, but I draw the line at animal cruelty.

He's like, I can excuse the racism and the flat earthers and the misogyny and the transphobia and the homophobia and the anti-fat stuff, but I do draw the line at vaccines.

Anyway, enjoy the video that we made where we platformed both of them as equals.

It's even more cowardly than that.

He doesn't say you should get the vaccine.

He says, just so you know, we don't endorse whatever.

Like, what are you talking about?

Yeah.

And he doesn't even say which side he doesn't endorse.

Maybe he doesn't inside.

Maybe he doesn't endorse the pro-vaccine people.

Not great.

I'm not into it.

I'm not into it.

And then, no, my favorite part, though, is he finishes, as always, our goal is to see each other's humanity and feel more empathy.

I think it's like, it's like a Dolores Umbridge thing with him where he's like, forces himself to write in a notebook like 60 times a night.

Our goal is to

see each other's humanity and feel more empathy.

Our goal is to see each other's humanity and feel more empathy.

Like he doesn't believe it.

Nobody believes it.

This YouTube channel doesn't believe it.

And he's just like creating the most absurd, dangerous, ridiculous, maniacal, bigoted content ever.

And then being like, as always,

our goal is to see each other's humanity and feel more empathy.

So I imagine that if I talk to any of these people, they probably agree with me about most things.

They'd probably just be generic liberals, right?

That's the true belief of behind the Jubilee channel, you'd think, right or do you think that do you think that they're more balanced and actually actively reactionary i can tell you that i think the content leans right just by legitimizing all of this stuff i don't know about the people i think it seems like the the guy who runs this channel has just i don't know based on that 45 seconds it sounds like he could be like a liberal guy but he's clearly like divorced himself and and the ethics of what he's doing from the outcome like the tangible outcome of this content.

That's true.

I wonder if he drinks the Kool-Aid or if he thinks he's actually doing a public service with this kind of work.

I don't know.

What do you think?

Maybe.

I mean, look, there's things you can point to as successes of Jubilees that you could probably use to justify the project.

People are being made to engage politically, and sometimes that might be a valuable resource.

Maybe, you know, maybe it's better to think about abortion more rather than less, and Jubilee enables people to do that, right?

That's one argument in their favor.

I'm not confident, though, that they could possibly look at like material that so obviously is primarily about humiliating people, or at least partially about humiliating people.

I don't think it's primarily, and say, oh, this is going to help fat people.

This is actually going to make the world a more accepting, fat-friendly place, knowing full well that this guy, this, you know, fresh and fit guy is getting a two minutes to put on Twitter and get 3,300,000 likes because he owned a fat guy, right?

And everyone can call him based and you know, gas each other up.

That's not, you can't possibly believe that that's a benefit to society or that it's turning the volume down.

So they must be aware.

Yeah, I have no idea how you, how you manufacture content like that and then like go to bed thinking that you've like fostered human connection.

I've been joking about that the whole time, but it like actually disappoints me.

And like,

yeah, I don't know.

It makes me sad

and angry.

As I don't know, I don't know if

you've been able to tell.

Okay, I want to play.

You watch ContraPoints.

I do.

We all watch ContraPoints.

We love ContraPoints.

You've done podcasts with her, yeah?

Yeah, she's a friend of the show.

Natalie plays all sorts of characters in her videos.

And she has a recurring one called Jackie Jackson, who is sort of a parody of a centrist podcast host.

And I want to play a tiny clip from one of Natalie's videos where she's acting as Jackie Jackson because I think that it is Jubilee personified.

Hi, I'm Jackie Jackson.

You're listening to the Freedom Pod, where it doesn't matter what you say, it only matters that you say.

We don't discriminate here between what is true or false or even downright dangerous.

That's none of my business.

It's none of America's business.

The important thing is that you never stop talking, because that's what freedom is all about.

I mean, at the beginning of this conversation, I said a centrist on echo chambers, right?

I'm not totally against the idea of communities where people generally share beliefs.

I think that's how humanity has structured itself for a very, very long time to mixed outcomes, right?

I don't know.

I guess what I wanted to say is, like, yeah, man, talking doesn't

actually help everything all the time.

Like, just having a conversation, it's not what you, it's not inherently a good thing, right?

Conversations have to be productive to be productive.

They're not just inherently good for people, I think.

You know, look at anorexia, right?

Think about, or school shooters.

Think about the impact that spreading ideas has on people, especially young people.

It seems like it can be deeply corrosive, right?

I was, I was wondering how, I was wondering what the through line from anorexia to school shooters was going to be, but I see what you're saying.

I see what you're saying.

This is where we have to talk about Jubilee's glorification of centrism and Jubilee's artificial construction of the middle ground because centrist beliefs are beliefs that exist between what we're defining as the endpoints of the more radical beliefs on either side.

And so when Jubilee says that the radical belief on the left side is, you know, fat people shouldn't have to lose weight and become thin to lead healthy and happy lives and be accepted and loved in society like a human being.

And the opposite side of that is like fat people are disgusting, horrible people who do not deserve happiness unless they lose weight and perform that weight loss for me.

If you're telling me that like the middle ground must exist somewhere between these two positions and that both have good points to make,

it's just a dishonest debate.

There's no middle ground there.

It's a debate that exists to get people toward a position that doesn't exist, right?

There is no such thing as the centrist on fat phobia.

You know, even on bigger issues like, say, abortion, you know, it's either you fundamentally want women to have access to abortions or you don't.

There is no, there's a lot of people who would characterize themselves as centrists regarding abortion, but they all have to make a binary choice.

There's no, there's no where in between to go.

There is no middle ground, right?

I also just think, I mean, Jubilee does this.

I might actually put like a chart of like the Jubilee Overton window on the screen, the Overton window being at any point, the range of acceptable beliefs in a society.

Jubilee creates the Overton window where they decide what the acceptable endpoints of what beliefs you can have.

The thing is, they artificially skew what they're calling the middle ground way to the right, because what they define as the liberal endpoint is usually a very commonly held mainstream position.

Like that's a really good point.

Like fat people are fine, or people should be able to have abortions, or the earth is round, or vaccines are are good.

Like these are all extremely popular positions.

And then on the right side, they have extremely fringe positions from people who are like, fat people are not, like, fat people must lose weight to deserve love, or the earth is flat, or transfit this and that.

And by deciding that the middle is somewhere between those two points, which it's not, the middle is always very, very close or entirely at.

what they're calling the left, they're artificially constructing a right-wing middle ground.

It's a difficult thing because that's also what culture is, though.

There isn't as much fringe position on the left.

People who lean left generally have more normal beliefs than people who lean right.

And there's a way deeper, crazy rabbit hole to go down if you're going toward the right, right?

There's no bottom to how crazy extremist conservative beliefs can get.

Many conservatives advocate, not that many, but a lot of conservatives advocate for an ethno-state, want there to be absolutely no access to abortion, think that fat people should be, you know, banished, think that trans people should be taken away from public spaces, right?

Whereas, what is the liberal belief that is extreme?

So, is Jubilee doing culture or is it reflecting it?

I actually don't know.

I guess I'd say they're magnifying currently existing political trends.

Damn.

Maybe we all have to like look inwards and find the Jubilee inside of us all.

Yeah, the little middle ground.

Yeah.

Maybe my problem is really with America, where like the far right is QAnon and the far left is healthcare.

That is the problem that Jubilee faces as a format, right?

I saw this trans debate between, you know, should kids receive trans healthcare?

And the people on the yes, they should side were like, of course, it should be, you know, gay kept.

I mean, you know, parents should go through some hoops, kids should go through various therapist appointments.

I'm just saying that this has been proven to be a beneficial treatment for a lot of minors, and so we should allow it in particular cases.

That's not an extreme leftist belief.

That's That's not the craziest you could go, but it is the farthest left that actual human beings think.

Nobody actually thinks anything much crazier than that.

Right.

Whereas on the right, it's trans people should not exist.

Yes.

And in society and in Jubilee videos, to your point, which I guess are reflecting the unfortunate right-wing shift that we've had in America the last couple of years on a number of issues, they're saying that the morally neutral place is to be somewhere in the center when it's like, no, if one group of people says, I want rights, and another group of people says, you cannot have rights, it is not morally or ethically or politically neutral to say that everybody has good points and to say that we should listen to everybody equally and to say that the answer is in the middle.

Like, that's my problem.

And

it just, so much of Jubilee is just laundering far-right positions and telling you that, like, well, where you really should land is basically like the center right.

You mentioned that there's a lot of like morally righteous posturing that centrists do.

Can you explain that?

Because I think that's like very true of Jubilee in general.

Okay, so who's like the quintessential centrist?

I would say, like, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt.

You know, they always enter conversations with the presumption that they've thought through the issue and they're serious people and people on the other sides are not serious people.

And if they were, they would arrive at this reasonable position that they've come to,

even though, you know, it's sort of a rejection of politics, right?

That's what centrism is about.

It's about pretending that politics don't exist and that you don't have to take sides.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, Centris, we've all heard Centris.

I'm not left or right.

I weigh all sides and come to my own conclusion, or I'm politically homeless.

That's another one, politically homeless, which is like literally every time someone says they're politically homeless, I have never seen that happen where they are not just right-wing.

To your point, I mean, they often think of themselves as like having ascended the political spectrum of like, well, I don't get get sucked into one side or the other.

When in the reality, like these people are just pawns, in my opinion, for the status quo.

They don't stand for anything.

I just think that Jubilee basically just takes the position of the enlightened centrists.

Yes, I agree.

The problem with it is that I think that centrism oftentimes pretends to not have a guiding ideology or principles or a moral perspective.

You know, we're just in the free marketplace of ideas.

It's a value-neutral space, and the cream will inevitably rise to the top the problem is is that the machinery is not value neutral jubilee does believe certain things the fact checkers are you know inform they do have fact checkers and they do inform the audience when people say stupid idiotic things that are patently false or affirm things that are true they they come up with the two sides of the debates that they're trying to find middle grounds on there is no value neutral way of doing this right

so at the end of the day they're just like me they're just like you they're just politically advocating for things and doing kind of a weird job of it.

That's all they are.

They're not like fundamentally different from you and I.

You know, they just sort of pretend.

The last note that I had, which evidently you don't agree with, but like I wrote that, you know, Echo Chambers Online, like we can have a meaningful conversation about you're already like looking at me skeptically.

No, it's not that.

It's like, of course, you know, look, look, I understand the anti-echo chamber position.

I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be belligerent here.

Yeah, it makes sense.

It all, it all comes, we still haven't found the middle ground on echo chambers.

But what I wrote was just that echo chambers online, more so the thing that I'm interested in is criticizing the way that companies like Facebook profit from pushing people into very extreme political positions, profit from, you know, creating these bubbles of misinformation that people go down and, you know, these crazy anti-science rabbit holes and like how those ultimately just serve to create profit for people at the top of tech company.

like i think that's interesting at the end of the day an echo chamber is what it does right if an echo chamber is creating q anon devotees then it's a problem that it's an echo chamber because the people are getting deranged while experiencing it it's just like it's just like with everything else there's no value neutral word for echo chamber it's all about whether or not it leads to outcomes that have these poor boomers going crazy or not and i think it's unfortunate when the big crazy boomers go crazy yeah right and and you could also i mean to your point echo chambers and communities could be synonymous.

I mean, you could say that some echo chambers online have helped trans kids feel like they're not alone.

As a closeted gay kid, 13 years old in New Jersey, I've sought out gay online echo chambers that were affirming spaces to feel good about myself.

So I see your point.

We found some middle ground.

That's what it's all about.

It's what it's all about.

But again, it's like, if we're going to criticize the forming and, you know, the online radicalization of people, which I do think we should, then fine.

But like this careless rage bait content masquerading as a bridge to create empathy and human connection is not the solution.

I don't want to leave Jubilee lovers feeling like they can't, you know, love, hate watching Jubilee.

Look, if that's your thing, that's your thing.

But I, I am proposing, I just think that we should be tuning out of this YouTube channel.

I think it is making people more divided and not in a way that benefits anybody.

I think it's good to talk to people, but talk to people.

Don't set up your Twitch live stream and don't go on Instagram live.

And like, I just talk to people without doing this like performative one-upping bullshit.

Like,

we can talk to each other without milking it for content as I talk to someone for content.

Look, there's way worse things in the world than Jubilee.

You know, if you're worried about platforming people, Elon Musk bought a website, made all the Nazis pay money to have all their replies go to the top of every single thing.

And then they all just talk about killing the Jews, you know?

Like, Jubilee looks pretty good by comparison.

It could be a little bit worse.

The internet's gone to some pretty bad lows.

So I don't know.

I don't begrudge anyone for enjoying the channel personally, but it's not good for you.

But I don't think most people think it is.

You know, I think most people, I don't think most people are watching a Jubilee video going like, oh, I should take some notes.

Oh, what did the person who hates fat people say?

Oh, that's going to expand my horizons.

Like, it's pure gladiatorial bullshit.

There's nothing to it.

It's just fun.

Look at that, Big Joel.

We found the middle ground on the middle ground.

It's really beautiful.

Thank you so much for allowing me that fat W.

Can the fat W find the middle ground with the anti-fat W?

Tune in next time to find out.

Big Joel, thank you so much for being here today.

And thank you so much for over the last like day and a half, just going down an absolute fucking rabbit hole with me.

It really did take,

yesterday was a Jubilee day for me.

I enjoyed it.

I can't lie to you.

I didn't.

Where can people find more of you?

YouTube.

Nice.

Go for it.

They know.

The people know.

They'll get more of me if they want to.

You know what?

Period.

Thank you so much for joining today's episode.

I hope that maybe if you have been harboring feelings about maybe why you're uncomfortable with this, with the booming popularity of this YouTube channel, perhaps we gave you some language

and ideas to affirm those reasons.

Maybe you're just going to go binge-watch Jubilee after this.

And in conclusion, should we stone gay people to death on live television?

I don't know, but isn't it great that we talked about it?

And until next time,

and until next time, stay fruity.

I like that that's your name of your podcast.