Kyla Turner: How Social Media Bots Are Destroying Political Reality | DSH #1634

Speaker 1 Almost all of history and data shows that, like, some of the most successful revolutions and protests are peaceful. Like, look at the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

Speaker 1 Protests are effective, and they're an important part of the American democracy. Like, there's a reason that China doesn't allow protests.
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's an authoritarian regime.

Speaker 1 Whereas America does, and that's really important.

Speaker 1 And if you start seeing protests getting shut down violently when they're peaceful, that is a threat to democracy because the people have to be able to give their voice when they are dissatisfied with their electorates not doing what they've been elected to do.

Speaker 1 do when you see the liberal being principled and denouncing violence you should praise that person you should like lift them up you tear them down all you want is a worse world you just want your anger

Speaker 1 okay guys not so erudite aka kyla turner here today fresh off a debate at unlv right yeah yeah i wasn't debating i was just like trolling around trying to debate but yeah it was uf not many people stood up to you yeah unfortunately i had a lot of like old people i was holding a sign saying like trump has ruined the economy.

Speaker 1 And there'd be like old people like finger waving at me because they wouldn't talk to me.

Speaker 2 Wow. So you and L V, liberal campus guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, apparently. I didn't know.

Speaker 2 I live here and I didn't know though.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Apparently he's very blue.

Speaker 2 That is surprising. Yeah.
So you really think he's affecting the economy negatively though? Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're in like an AI bubble with like stocks. So everyone's like, well, the stocks are really good.
And it's like, okay, well, talk to any economist. The stock market is.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you know, because you do crypto and stuff like that, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I will say for crypto, he's been good.

Speaker 1 Sort of, but the inside trading has been a little gross.

Speaker 2 That might be there.

Speaker 1 Like the Baron Trump stuff, not good.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I wasn't a fan of the Trump coin.

Speaker 2 Yeah. There's some other stuff.
I'm not too.

Speaker 1 Did you hear about the Baron Trump stuff that happened recently? Which one was up? He made some sort of China announcement related to Bitcoin.

Speaker 1 And 30 minutes before he made that announcement, Baron Trump dropped like 30 million of his Bitcoin. And then after the announcement, it skyrocketed and he re-bought or something like that.

Speaker 1 Oh, that was. Some sort of exchange happened where he went from 30 million to 190 million.

Speaker 1 I can't remember if the stock dropped and he sold and then re-bought when it was low or something, or if it was the inverse.

Speaker 1 But there is like, I think this is now like the fourth incident of some crypto bro close to Trump making an exchange on crypto right before a major announcement that vastly impacts crypto.

Speaker 2 That's nuts. Yeah.
So I did see that wallet on Twitter. I did not know that was Baron.
So they confirmed that it was Barron. Yes.

Speaker 1 Baron's had come out. There's been a few guys that have come out.

Speaker 1 So don't quote me on like which one you're maybe talking about, but I know that Baron did a 30 million to 190 million exchange in like the past week.

Speaker 2 Holy crap, the kid's in college, right? Yeah. He's making 150 million like that.

Speaker 1 I think his whole family in total has grossed in this presidency already. Trump's over a billion now.
I think he's grossed almost 530 million.

Speaker 1 I think that most of the family has increased in several million, ranging from like a vanka up to like almost 900 million to like Trump going in the direction of like billions now.

Speaker 2 That is nuts. Because when you're president, you're supposed to drop all your businesses, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Look, corruption is not new to the government when it comes to money, but it is just an unprecedented level, right? Like, insider trading has always been a problem.

Speaker 1 Like, everyone knows Nancy Pelosi sucks. Everyone has known this for a long time.

Speaker 2 It's on both sides, right?

Speaker 1 It is, but now we're seeing it in, like, we've never seen a president utilizing, like, tweets and executive action with insider trading to like benefit his own team. Like, that's unprecedented.

Speaker 1 That's, like, pretty crazy. Where you're just like, okay, like, now we're just doing like blatant corruption out in the open now, I suppose.
No, that is not.

Speaker 2 They pardoned CZ today. I don't know if you saw that.

Speaker 1 I didn't.

Speaker 2 No, I didn't offline. He was the CEO of Binance, which is a big crypto exchange.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 What was he in jail for?

Speaker 2 Fraud? Some crypto fraud or some shit.

Speaker 1 It's always the fraud.

Speaker 2 I will say he's pardoned a lot of people in the crypto space.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm not surprised, right? He wants to be, especially

Speaker 1 if you're fucking over crypto bros all the time. You also need to do things to make them like you.
So pardoning crypto bros

Speaker 1 guys is a good way to do it.

Speaker 2 I almost went to the crypto ball when he was getting inaugurated.

Speaker 1 Oh, really? Yeah.

Speaker 2 It would have been an interesting. That's when he launched the coin, I think, the Trump coin around that time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that Trump coin is

Speaker 1 good.

Speaker 2 Crazy times, Ryan. But yeah, so crypto's up, but I mean, real estate's weird right now.
AI is definitely a bubble, I think. Huge bubble.

Speaker 1 Stocks are, I don't know, in and out. Yeah, I was talking to, I don't know,

Speaker 1 I won't say his name, but a guy who does a lot of advising on policy in California for AI specifically. And I was asking him, like, where we think the bubble's going to go.

Speaker 1 And he's like, well, right now, nobody's figured out how to monetize AI. Like, we're not really monetizing AI.
Yeah, they're all losing money. Significant way.

Speaker 1 We're just blitz scaling and hoping a job, something emerges, maybe AGI, something like that.

Speaker 1 But like right now, it's like a race to hell and like everyone's blasting money and the entire market around it is just like crazy levels of like hype and speculation, which is just like

Speaker 1 terrifying to me. Honestly, terrifying.
Like me and my husband have traded like a little bit.

Speaker 1 We almost always just like precious metals.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, we basically just like have pulled out almost entirely because it's so volatile. I just, I don't trust it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, it's spooky. So, you're just holding cash right now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, we're holding on like to a bit of silver futures and stuff in like a couple of mining companies, but just because if things do crash for the American economy, obviously, silver and gold will pop off.

Speaker 2 Those seem to be doing well, silver and gold.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Well, when the economy is volatile as fuck, precious metals become more valuable.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Have you been to any no-Kings protests yet?

Speaker 1 I have been to one, but just to interview.

Speaker 1 I'm not like particularly participating. I'm just like, I'm an E2 visa immigrant, so

Speaker 1 I want to be pretty mindful of how I'm don't want to push it too hard.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I drove by I just got married in Jersey on Friday.

Speaker 1 Oh, congrats.

Speaker 2 Thanks. And I drove past one and it was actually pretty packed.
I was surprised.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they seem to be huge. Everyone that I know that went was saying that like it was like crazy, crazy packed.

Speaker 1 Like San Diego and stuff was like super busy and like really really peaceful and dispersed quickly when like they were told to disperse and which is really good.

Speaker 1 I'm really I feel like the left has been bad at protests in the past like six years. So it's really good.

Speaker 1 Like the No Kings has been like such a huge eye-opener to like how much the people who are running and leading the protests can really set the tone for what the protests look like, right?

Speaker 1 And the fact that like if certain protests turn into riots, sometimes that's out of the control of the people organizing it because like the energy is just so negative.

Speaker 1 But a lot of times that is in their control. And seeing how well the No Kings, like, yes, they've done vandalism to police cars.

Speaker 1 I actually don't have an issue with vandalizing like government stuff when you're protesting the government. Like that, that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 It's when like private businesses get affected that I think is really, really bad.

Speaker 1 And seeing like almost no damage from that, I'm sure that there are going to be pot cases of bad individuals and whatnot, but by and large, the movement has been really peaceful.

Speaker 1 Them utilizing like memes of like the frog and dancing and stuff to like really emphasize like we're doing a peaceful protest has been really cool. It's been really inspiring.

Speaker 1 I'm a big like peaceful protest kind of person.

Speaker 2 I'm about it. I'd hate to see it like the George Floyd protests or the BLM ones.
Those got out of hand, right? I think we could both agree on that.

Speaker 1 I fought with leftists lots. I like probably one of my most common debate topics with leftists because I'm,

Speaker 1 for those who are not like politically familiar, there's camps in every political faction. So there's like the leftists who are going to be more socialist-y, communisty.

Speaker 1 And then there's like liberals who are like boring and don't go to parties and stuff like that and do all the policy making.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I spend a lot of time fighting with leftists about specifically violence because they believe that fundamentally like violence is like the necessary behavior of the oppressed. And it's like

Speaker 1 almost all of history and data shows that

Speaker 1 some of the most successful revolutions and protests are peaceful. Look at the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.
Do you know much about the Orange Republic? I don't know about that one. It's super cool.

Speaker 1 It's basically

Speaker 1 TLDR it, Russia was trying to spearhead a candidate that they liked, and they

Speaker 1 tried to kill. They poisoned and did a bunch of crazy shit to the kind of populist,

Speaker 1 non-Russian-affiliated candidate,

Speaker 1 including barring him from access to any social media.

Speaker 1 So he started this orange revolution where he would tour with one of the popular bands to all their tour stops, and the band would bring him out at the beginning, he'd do a rally, and then they'd do music.

Speaker 1 And they had an exclusively peaceful revolution when the election tried to get stolen, and there was no violence ever.

Speaker 1 They just like turned out in massive numbers and wouldn't go away from the capital until like a recount was done. The vote was certified.
The Russian stooge did not win.

Speaker 2 Oh, so the recount overturned it.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah, it was amazing.
And it was this really good example of, like, if you watch, there's this really good documentary on YouTube about it, but

Speaker 1 a lot of the protesters would go out of their way to like befriend the police and be like, you're our guys. Like, I know you have to work for them because they pay your salaries, but you're one of us.

Speaker 1 Like, you're the working people.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was just an incredible example of like peaceful revolution and how it can work. And the studies show, like, if 3.5% of the population show up peacefully, change happens, like, necessarily.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Holy crap.
Yeah. I did not know that.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I honestly thought most protests just didn't work, honestly.

Speaker 1 They do. They work all the time, especially locally in small ways, right? And sometimes they work for bad reasons, like defunding the police is not good.
That didn't end up well. Yeah, it didn't.

Speaker 1 But the protest worked. It's just a terrible policy, right?

Speaker 1 And so it shows like protests are effective and they're an important part of the American democracy. Like there's a reason that China doesn't allow protests.
Oh, I didn't know that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's an authoritarian regime, whereas America does, and that's really important.

Speaker 1 And if you start seeing protests getting shut down violently when they're peaceful, that is a threat to democracy because the people have to be able to give their voice when they are dissatisfied with their electorates not doing what they've been elected to do.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you see China as the next big threat? I've had a few guests come on recently talking about China.

Speaker 1 Huge, huge threat. Absolutely.
Yeah. Xi Jinping is just, he's a different beast.

Speaker 1 He's very obsessed. If you look into a lot of his writings, he grew up in the Cultural Revolution in like a small

Speaker 1 farm, essentially, and grew up reading like

Speaker 1 Mao writings. He's very dedicated to this idea of recovering China from the Great Embarrassment where they lost a bunch of land.

Speaker 1 It actually puts them at great odds with Russia eventually, because Russia has some of the land that they feel is theirs. It's why they're obsessed with the South China Sea.

Speaker 1 It's why they want Taiwan. And China has shown a willingness to overstep sovereignty of other countries time and time again.

Speaker 1 I I don't think their human rights standards are great for their own people.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 they are also

Speaker 1 before Xi Jinping, I believe his name is Dong, he was really brilliant at welcoming in capitalism while maintaining the communist hold on the government policy. And this is where you saw an explosion.

Speaker 1 of economic success in China. And because they have so many people that they don't have super high standard working rates for, they can sell and make and manufacture things cheaper than anyone else.

Speaker 1 And they've cornered the market on multiple things, pharmaceuticals, like most things. Like what haven't they cornered the market on? Like, I guess like

Speaker 1 semiconductors, but they want to with Taiwan.

Speaker 1 China is a huge threat. They are ahead in AI.
Most intelligence officers that I talk to say that like...

Speaker 1 We are ahead of them in cyber defense because of talent and money alone. They are like advancing on us technologically because they have way less barriers and regulations than we do.

Speaker 1 And so it creates this weird tenuousness where we're fighting against a regime that doesn't uphold any of the Western liberal democratic values of the sanctity of the person.

Speaker 1 And we're losing.

Speaker 1 We're not losing yet. Our economy is still really strong, but it's really important that we are economically ahead of China.

Speaker 1 Like it's it's it's paramount, which is why when people are like poo-pooing the tariffs, I'm just like,

Speaker 1 don't poo-poo the tariff. This is not just like Trump bad.
This is like

Speaker 1 if America falls behind in GDP, that affects our military, our trading, that affects our currency being valuable. Like the fiat of America is not just military progress, which it is.

Speaker 1 It's also the cultural currency,

Speaker 1 which is really, really important.

Speaker 1 And I think people really underestimate how essential it is that we have, I think we're still about 10 trillion more per year than China and what that gap does for us.

Speaker 1 Because they have a lot of loopholes that they can take that we can't because we treat our individuals with like dignity. Right.

Speaker 1 And we don't invade sovereignty, at least in the outright work that they do, I should say. We use other countries to do that.
Yeah, we do soft power.

Speaker 1 We do soft power stuff, whereas they do a lot of hard power stuff, which everyone's like, oh, it's the same thing. It's not the same thing.
Both are not good, but it's not the same thing.

Speaker 1 And we shouldn't pretend. Like somebody stabbing you in the chest with a knife is not the same thing as them trying to get you fired from your job, even though both behaviors suck.
Right.

Speaker 1 And we shouldn't pretend like they're the same thing. I agree.
I agree.

Speaker 2 Wilson, you actually see some value in the tariffs.

Speaker 1 No, not. You don't.
No.

Speaker 2 So you don't think we should be tariffing China?

Speaker 1 I don't think we should be. I don't think we should be dumpstering our economy generally.

Speaker 1 There could be talks about specific, like, so tariffs can be really useful in like a really kind of like sophisticated way. There is benefits to tariffs because they're a tool.
They're like anything.

Speaker 1 Carte blanche global tariffs is not good. There's not like there's no real need to be tariffing Canada right now.
We're not losing in our relationships with Canada.

Speaker 1 We're only gaining in our relationships with Canada. Bailing out Argentina for $40 billion, who then liquidates their soybeans to China, decimating our soybean egg.
That's not good policy.

Speaker 1 That's really bad policy, actually.

Speaker 1 And so I see a lot of really weird tariffing of like, we're going to tariff Vietnam and then Vietnam opens a Trump golf course and now we're going to actually tariff them way less.

Speaker 1 Like that's that's not savvy economic policy. That's not the like micro needle blade of going, okay, well, you know, Europe has really fine wines.

Speaker 1 We're gonna, you know, we had the tariff on Europe liquor for a long time to help our liquor be sustainable because their liquor is so established, they've had it for so long, they've got cultural and historical rapport that people love, European brands of whiskey and stuff, and it really helped our developers get a space, a niche into the market.

Speaker 1 Just tariffing the world is not sound economic policy. There's no purpose to this, and we're not even seeing it bringing manufacturing back in a sustainable way.

Speaker 1 In fact, we just liquidated a battery facility that Hyende was trying to build because they did some like CD backend stuff with H-1Bs. And so it's like,

Speaker 1 I don't know what we're doing economically. I don't know how any of these trade deals are good deals when they just are losing America money.

Speaker 1 And leaning on the AI bubble and the stock markets being like, see, it's good. It's like, okay, well, all the markers of an unhealthy economy are growing.
Unemployment is increasing.

Speaker 1 Our GDP is slowing. It is stagnating.
Jerome Powell, who's Trump's guy, has been open about this.

Speaker 1 It's not doing well.

Speaker 1 And everyone says, well, tariffs, short-term pain for long-term gain. We could have a little bit of stagflation for, you know, short-term deflationary for long-term inflation.

Speaker 1 Maybe.

Speaker 1 But that's presuming manufacturing comes back. Why would we presume that it will come back in a global market with India and China competing? Like, why would we assume these things?

Speaker 1 It might just make it more expensive for the American consumer.

Speaker 1 And it seems like it is. Obviously, it could be wrong.
Future economics is a

Speaker 1 putting a hand on a crystal ball. No one ever knows.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 But seeing unemployment, seeing individual working-class paying power decreasing, seeing wage stagnation continuing, seeing housing markets not getting improved for people, and seeing the GDP slowing in growth is all signs of like an unhealthy economy.

Speaker 1 Which is very concerning to me in right now, the AI bubble against China.

Speaker 1 It's just inexcusable at a foreign policy level.

Speaker 2 Do you think we're heading towards a recession if it keeps up?

Speaker 1 Who knows? Every economist has been saying we're heading towards a recession for like 10 years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I've been hearing it since Biden, since Obama.

Speaker 1 Yeah, who knows? Possibly, yeah. If it pops, it could be really awful, but also maybe it'll never pop again after 2008.
Like, this is the problem with like modern

Speaker 1 monetary theory. It's like

Speaker 1 I sell hopes, dreams, and wishes. Can you keep the vibes up? You can keep the vibes up.
Maybe not. Yeah.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 How's it been on Twitter, man? That's probably one of the most toxic platforms I've ever been on.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I know you're on there often.
I am.

Speaker 1 It's unfortunately one of my faster-growing platforms, and I just like shitpost on it. It's like not my...

Speaker 1 I probably should think more about what I put on Twitter, but

Speaker 1 Twitter's very concerning.

Speaker 1 I can basically at this point predict which tweets will go viral. Really? And they're almost always partisan hack tweets, right? Which like I agree with the left on lots of things.

Speaker 1 So some of my tweets are going to be partisan hacky and some of them are going to be more nuanced and in the middle. Nuanced ones don't don't do well.

Speaker 1 Like don't do more than like 250 characters on Twitter. You're you're cooked.

Speaker 1 Unless you're like an established, like Mehdi Hassan can kind of get away with that, like a really established speaker.

Speaker 1 It's very concerning, and we don't know how much of it is bots.

Speaker 2 Elon said he tried removing them all, but it doesn't look like he got far with that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't believe him.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Every single platform says they're trying to remove. Even Twitch does this, right? Or trying to remove bots.
And you're like, no, you're not. Yeah, that was a big scandal I saw.
It was huge.

Speaker 1 And also, they removed like 13%

Speaker 1 viewers, which was like less than half of the bots that has been speculated from like multiple third parties that exist on Twitch. And it's like, Twitch is just streamers paying for view bots.

Speaker 1 How much worse is it on Twitter where Russia and China are using it as like an misinformation and

Speaker 1 democracy destroying fuel?

Speaker 1 We have no idea. We do know that Russian bots farms have been found.
We know that Chinese bot farms have been found. They probably are military assets at this point.

Speaker 1 And it is destroying our democracy because democracy dies when the two parties can't communicate. Like there has to be the tension of the two sides.

Speaker 1 The left and right are essential to a democracy, but they have to be able to talk and they have to live in the same reality. And we're increasingly not living in the same reality, which is terrifying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the bots are out of hand. When I see Tucker post a podcast on Twitter and it gets 25 million views, I'm like, there's no way.

Speaker 1 There is no way. There is literally.
It doesn't make sense, right? No, no, it makes no sense. And you see, like, have you been seeing all the like griper tweets popping off recently?

Speaker 2 Fuentes is on a, they call it a, what, historical run?

Speaker 1 He really is. That's what they're calling it.
Yes. And it's, you know, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 Nick Fuentes, I think, is like doing this weird like moderation thing where he's trying to be like, I'm actually just like for the people.

Speaker 1 He's toned it down. He has.
He has a lot.

Speaker 1 I think he realizes to reach the mainstream you you have to tone it down a little bit yeah i also wonder if he's like gotten to this point where he like realizes he's like surrounded by like idiots and he's like i don't like it here um because i think you have to be like pretty dumb to have like some of the like classic like old school arian white supremacy obsessions like it's just like On every single metric, white people literally not superior to any of the things that you care.

Speaker 1 Why are we doing this? Like, what are we even talking about right now? Yeah.

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Speaker 1 But yeah, seeing how much they've been popping off, like 16,000 likes, I'm just like,

Speaker 1 I know, I know that most of those are bots because the bots are in my comments. I'm having to constantly block them.

Speaker 1 Like every person with a name and 17 numbers after it's probably not a person, but they sound real. They engage with you like they're real.
They're really sophisticated.

Speaker 1 And that's terrifying because my poor boomer dad will like watch videos of like crocodiles walking up to people's doorsteps and think it's real. And it's like so clearly AI.

Speaker 1 So if he can't even tell obvious AI, how is he ever going to be able to tell what's a bot? And how do we know which of these views or these likes, the Charlie Kirk assassination?

Speaker 1 Okay, there was really gross responses to it on the left.

Speaker 1 The problem is that I was tracking it like right after it happened because I was notified of it happening within minutes of it occurring because I knew people on the ground.

Speaker 1 And the initial reaction was the left and the right really pulling together. I mean like, this is bad.
Free speech matters.

Speaker 1 Assassinations of this, like, this is not the answer ever. And then about six hours after he was

Speaker 1 assassinated, I started seeing these like massive accounts saying like insane shit, like mocking him and stuff like that. And I was like, where is this from?

Speaker 1 And to be fair, some of them were real people who are pieces of shit that the left does have to address and go, have we welcomed these people into our circles? And if we have, why are they here?

Speaker 1 And do they have any say on our policy? Because they should not. But also massive accounts with just like names and numbers behind it.

Speaker 1 And I also don't know of the large accounts that are real people that popped off Mocking Kirk's assassination, how many of the likes on that post are from bots?

Speaker 1 How much of the Aryan stuff that I'm seeing that's awful, it's horrifying, like talking about like lynching black people, how many of the likes there are real? I have no idea.

Speaker 1 There's not even a way to tell, which is terrifying to think about, because then you think 16,000 people agree with lynching black people and it's like, maybe it's 30. Maybe it's just like 30 weirdos.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And everyone else looked at that and they're like, that's weird.
We don't agree with that. But then it got popular.

Speaker 1 How many people are lemmings and they see 300,000 likes on a Charlie Kirk post and they weren't sure how to feel about it, but because they see that this idea is edgy and popular, now that's their idea, you know?

Speaker 1 And so it's like, we have all these different ways that the bots are going to be affecting the psyche. And it's just like, it is.
clearly aimed at driving us further apart.

Speaker 1 Like it's just obvious that that's the case.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what the people behind it probably want, right?

Speaker 1 Of course. Yeah.
I mean, Goebbels said democracy dies on misinformation. Like, this is a playing book from the KGB.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, it is nuts.
Who knows?

Speaker 2 I hope they figure something out, but they're so sophisticated. It's going to be hard to just do a mass ban on bots, I feel like, because they're going to add profile pictures and bios and all that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, probably. Like you said, they're doing comments now, which is crazy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just going to be like a constant race to keep up. But to be clear, I don't think the platforms are even invested in racing to keep up because I think they can sell the views to advertisers.

Speaker 1 Like, look, we have like 35 billion.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it probably helps them, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it does, right?

Speaker 1 And the advertisers aren't sophisticated enough to understand like the difference between a view and a click-through rate, which you should be selling your click-through rate, not your views, right?

Speaker 1 Because it's the click-through that makes the purchase. Yeah.
But I don't think advertisers know this yet. So maybe when they catch on, then we'll finally see a bigger push to get rid of bots.

Speaker 1 Fingers crossed. That would be good.

Speaker 2 I was surprised when the Twitch hit piece came out because I knew there was bots on like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, but to live stream bots, that's next level for me.

Speaker 1 Ah,

Speaker 1 not surprised would we actually you are surprised no wow no not really because that means they're faking the live comments too then yep so they're just like i need to see what these bot farms look like i'm curious yeah yeah and like who's where do you buy them and i i my understanding is there are like different levels of sophistication too like some bot farms will only give you views and they don't comment yeah so that's a big way you can tell with like cheaper botting

Speaker 1 with a streamer is like they've got like 400 viewers and like two people in the chat and you're like something's not right here it just shows to me though like if you got some money money you can artificially create a celebrity overnight yep if you got the right person funding you and that probably happens in the political space for sure all the time probably all over the place right like the hawk to a girl that wasn't real right like that that was a plan right she was like up and down that was one of my uh toughest interviews ever oh really yeah she was very closed off oh yeah she want to tell you better bot farms no she don't want to tell me

Speaker 2 um so you see that as like a big issue right now what else do you see as a as a major issue going on right now

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think media literacy and like radicalization is probably the biggest issue facing us. And then after that would be like

Speaker 1 wealth discrepancy. I think like the wealth gap, wage stagnation is like

Speaker 1 the thing behind the anger that is fueling so much of this. Like people are angry and people should be angry.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 wages have stagnated while GDP and net profits of almost all major companies have increased. There's no excuse for that.
There isn't a world.

Speaker 1 Like, I now have, like, have you ever heard the leftists like billionaires shouldn't exist and they're morally evil?

Speaker 1 My rule is actually, if you own a company with more than 40 staff and your staff's wages have stagnated while your actual profit, company profits have grown or your executives' income has grown, you're a piece of shit.

Speaker 1 I don't think that you're evil and should die, but everyone around you should look at you and be like, ooh, you're kind of a bad person. There is no excuse for your employees' wages to be stagnating.

Speaker 1 There's no excuse, especially if you're increasing your profits. If your company's dying, fair enough, okay, you know, it is what it is.

Speaker 1 But if you are increasing your profits, if your execs are getting bonuses, you need to increase your, there's no excuse.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I think people, this is very much like, this isn't a political issue. This is like an us versus like

Speaker 1 the crony capitalism at the top, like the form of capitalism that's formed where it's like, it's actually cool to take advantage of other people and step on them as long as you've got a big wallet.

Speaker 1 And it's like, actually, you're a piece of shit and nobody should respect you. It's not good, actually.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think if we don't get more serious about like wealth division, and right now the only people like that talk about it has been like communists for like ever.

Speaker 1 So they've like poisoned the well on any of this type of conversation. And like liberals don't want to touch it because like

Speaker 1 that's like the one area where we're like, okay, the communists are like kind of crazy. And also liberals are oftentimes the really rich people that we're talking about as well.
Right.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of people in the establishment on either side don't want to talk about it because fundamentally it's them that we're talking about.

Speaker 1 But there's just no excuse. There's no excuse for wage stagnation if your industry is growing and if your company is growing.

Speaker 2 There's no excuse. I hate to be negative, but with AI booming, I only see it getting worse.
Yeah, probably. I mean, I know people at Google that work there, they're reporting to AI now.

Speaker 2 Like all their bosses got fired. They report to an AI.
And that's going to be the future, I think.

Speaker 1 Yep. And the issue is that if

Speaker 1 this is the thing, this is probably my most radical position. You as a CEO should be afraid to fuck over all of America that much.
You should be.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying that you should be put to death, but you should be like,

Speaker 1 the people are going to hate me. And at some point when the wealth divide is large enough, we see this historically.
Every time the wealth divide gets like this, there is uprisings.

Speaker 1 No, I'm not for them. I want peaceful resolutions every single time.

Speaker 1 But like that is the direction we're going if the wealth divide increases because people can be happy and sad with all sorts of different incomes. We've seen that through all of history.

Speaker 1 The thing that makes people crazy is the disparity that they can perceive. We can see even with like PTSD.

Speaker 1 PTSD is more common to occur in individuals who are experiencing something that they can recognize as disparate from everyone else.

Speaker 1 So the kid who gets like beaten in a village where everyone beats their kids is actually less prone to PTSD.

Speaker 1 He's probably more prone to anger and beating his future children, but he's way less prone to PTSD than the kid who's surrounded by peers who none of their peers get beaten by their parents because they recognize that there is a difference here.

Speaker 1 And our brains really care about that like a lot. And that's what drives people to be pissed off.
The fact that people can't buy homes or can't afford to have kids is absurd.

Speaker 1 It's absurd and people are going to get angry because if you give them nothing to live for, then they're going, then they have nothing to lose.

Speaker 2 I know a lot of people that want to have kids, but they can't afford it. Yeah.
They can barely afford rent right now. It's really sad.
That's why we have a population issue right now, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Like incentivize having kids.
Yeah. We can't.

Speaker 2 You think they should offer some money or something? Like China did that, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, they did.

Speaker 1 I don't know. It's tough, right? Because you don't want to just pay people for babies.
Because I want kids in good homes with good parents, not people who want paychecks, right?

Speaker 1 And that can be an issue with the foster care system is it's oftentimes a paycheck for bad parents.

Speaker 1 That being said, there's lots of amazing foster care parents too. I don't know the solution.

Speaker 1 I do think that making it more affordable to have children and also creating a culture where it is easier to have children within, right?

Speaker 1 Like if you think about today's culture, a lot of people will cite, for example, when they live back here versus if they move to Israel, Israel has a very pro-children culture.

Speaker 1 Everyone there, they're popping up babies like crazy. So the idea that it's tied to just like industrialization doesn't seem totally true.
At least Israel has really challenged that.

Speaker 1 I think their birth rate is over two, I'm pretty sure. It might be into the threes.
Don't quote me, but it's way higher than anywhere else. That's like first world Western liberal democracy.

Speaker 1 And so it's like, okay, they can do that. What's going on there that we can replicate? Because Canada has free healthcare.
So it's not just healthcare.

Speaker 1 I can go to, I'm Canadian, I can go home and have a child and it'll be free.

Speaker 2 They won't charge you 20K like they do here.

Speaker 1 They won't charge me $45,000 to have a baby.

Speaker 1 But in Canada, we still see a shrinking population. So like, what's going on there? There's something within the culture that doesn't like children, that doesn't want us to have children.

Speaker 1 And I think there's a lot lot to unpack there.

Speaker 1 And for every single person who is biased towards the left or the right, being like, oh, it's the patriarchy or, oh, it's feminism, you're just like missing the mark.

Speaker 1 Like, we have to find a more sophisticated answer here because it's not, if you think the answer is simple, somebody would have solved it already.

Speaker 2 It's multiple things, right?

Speaker 1 It's got to be. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I know when you debated Andrew Wilson, he was saying it was feminism was a big reason, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm sure he was.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you've been on the whatever show a few times, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I get along really well, Brian. Yeah, you like him? Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's cool that you could have conversations with people like that, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's really important. It's really, really important to talk to them.
I think they have bad opinions and are assholes sometimes, a lot of the times.

Speaker 1 But you have to be able to talk to one another.

Speaker 2 Well, he actually got your YouTube unbanned. I saw that a few weeks ago, so shout out to Andrew for that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a very principled thing to do, right? That we've had a pretty fractious relationship.

Speaker 1 And it like definitely, I will say from both sides, like neither of us have been perfect characters of how

Speaker 1 good Christians should treat one another

Speaker 1 and yet when I got banned he's very against cancel culture yeah he just like stepped in it wasn't just Andrew Wilson just to be clear there was many people but I felt that it was really important to thank him because it was such a such a principled position to take and I think it's really important that we see particularly like in my social sphere right he's like the opposition yeah I think it's really important that we see people of our opposition being principled I think it's really important that we praise our opposition when they do the things that we want to see.

Speaker 1 And that should go both ways. When you see the liberal being principled and denouncing violence, you should praise that person.
You should like lift them up.

Speaker 1 If you tear them down, all you want is a worse world. You just want your anger.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 And like, cool, but like, go to therapy. Don't like, get off the internet, you know?

Speaker 1 So yeah, I think that was really... Cool of him.
And there was a lot of people.

Speaker 1 Tim Poole reposted it for me, but also like a number of my leftist friends, like I had socialists and communists reposting it. Everyone united.

Speaker 1 Kind of like everyone united by the unbanned, not so so very tight train, I guess.

Speaker 2 Well, I think everyone got fed up with cancel culture during its peak, right? Yes.

Speaker 1 It was out of hand. Yes.

Speaker 2 Everyone was getting just destroyed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Which is good to see right-wing cancel culture and a lot of right-wing pundits being like, actually, no.
There's been a lot of right-wing cancel culture that people have been really enjoying.

Speaker 1 Jimmy Kimmel. Yeah, Jimmy Kimmel.
But there's a lot of pundits on the right that came out against that as well, which is good. That's a principled position.

Speaker 1 Whether you don't like Candace Owens, she came out against the Jimmy Kimmel cancel culture. She saw that.
Which is good. That's what we want to see.

Speaker 2 For me, I purely saw it from a business point of view. So his numbers were allegedly down.
I've never verified this, but like his viewership was down from what I saw.

Speaker 2 And that's the point of view I saw it from. For me, it wasn't a right versus left thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, people keep saying that, but then when I look at his YouTube channel, he's got insane numbers. His YouTube after the cancel got a lot, right?

Speaker 1 It did, but even before the cancel, if you look back at his older videos, they do. Pretty well.
Oh, really? Yeah, they're like decently successful. Like, yeah, his mainstream cable stuff is down.

Speaker 2 Well, that's down across all cables.

Speaker 1 Isn't it down everywhere? Like, Like, I don't know if he was notably down. And also, it's like

Speaker 1 it would be crazy if they've been wanting to get rid of him forever and then just cancel culture, like, gave them the excuse. I'm like, you're also a chip peg.
That's a bad reason.

Speaker 1 Just fire them for their numbers long before you get social pressure to do so. That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Well, there's a shift now. I feel like the podcasters and the alternative media just have more impact than the television shows.
Seems like it, yeah.

Speaker 1 Right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's what it really seems like.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which is terrifying.

Speaker 2 You think it's bad or good?

Speaker 1 I think it's a dual-edged sword. Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, I think there's some good things and there's some really bad things about it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I still think

Speaker 2 money will get involved and people will be compromised in alternative media, too.

Speaker 1 Oh, the problem in alt media is that you can get compromised by more than just money. You can get compromised by clout really, really easy.
Whereas I think that's a little bit harder.

Speaker 1 I think there is still that incentive in mainstream media, but it's way harder because there's way less seats to fill. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're going to be more incentivized by climbing the corporate ladder and making more money.

Speaker 1 And your side winning, I suppose. Whereas like in the alt media space, you can be incentivized by clout,

Speaker 1 which can go in so many directions. You can get famous by just blatantly lying about people that you hate.
Right. And there's money for that.
YouTube will monetize you for that.

Speaker 2 That gets the most views right now, honestly.

Speaker 1 It does. It does.
And so,

Speaker 1 you know, as much as we hate mainstream media, you can look at it and you go, there were checks and balances here. There was a lot of problems with mainstream media.

Speaker 1 I have my gripes with mainstream media as well. But there actually were checks and balances the institution had that we don't have in the alt media space.

Speaker 1 And like we're just now starting to see like why that tradition of checks and balances was erected.

Speaker 1 You know, we're so quick to just throw out tradition the moment that it like becomes a problem because we're like, I don't understand why we have this. So let's get rid of it.

Speaker 1 It's like, well, that's probably not the right approach. There's probably a reason that it emerged.
It might not be useful anymore. It might be the right time to

Speaker 1 question tradition, but distrust the obvious.

Speaker 1 distrust what you feel like is the obvious answer because why would you assume you're smarter than thousands of years of human development? Yeah.

Speaker 2 How did you feel about Trump going after a lot of the media companies? I believe he settled with YouTube. He sued a couple of the major news outlets.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that is spooky. And he won.
I know. I know he did.
It's very concerning.

Speaker 1 There's this tension, right? If the media... was deranged about Trump and unfair to him, there is a certain level where maybe you should get to sue.

Speaker 1 But then it's like, should Biden be able to sue Fox News? They definitely lie and say awful shit about him.

Speaker 1 Maybe, but probably not. But most importantly, like, what I care about is like the sanctity of democracy.

Speaker 1 Like, it's the best thing we've come up with thus far, to give the most human rights to the most people. It's not perfect, and there's a lot of work to be done.

Speaker 1 But, like, what are the things, okay, what did Putin and Xi Jinping do first when they got their oligarchs together and kind of erased democracy?

Speaker 1 Media is like one of the first things, and peaceful protests is the second, right?

Speaker 1 You punish peaceful protesters, you call them terrorists, and you make sure you can lock them up and charge them, and that all of society will give you a thumbs up for it.

Speaker 1 And you destroy media and you make sure that media is loyal to you and then you find incentive structures so that the only media that exists only spouts good and nice things about you.

Speaker 1 And that's horrifying because that is not your job as a president. The president should have more,

Speaker 1 A, checks and balances, but B,

Speaker 1 decorum. He should love the sanctity of democracy too much to ever put himself before it.

Speaker 1 And I feel like what we have is somebody who, whether you agree with some of his lawsuits or not, I think fundamentally what we see with the Kimmel thing and the FCC board pressuring Kimmel, you can look at FIRE, which is a bipartisan free speech analysis group.

Speaker 1 The amount of free speech infringement under Trump already, I think it's like double or almost triple what it was for all of Biden's four years. What? Yes.

Speaker 2 I haven't heard of that. FIRE?

Speaker 1 FIRE. It's a great organization.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it's a cool organization because Republicans and liberals like it. Well,

Speaker 1 have a respect for it. It's kind of like ground news.
Like everyone's like, oh, come on, I'll fuck with them, you know?

Speaker 2 No, I really need to put some time into that because I felt like under Biden, there was a lot of censorship.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there was a lot of, the issue is like Biden wasn't censoring people. There was a left cultural climate that didn't like conservative feeling opinions.

Speaker 1 Even if the conservative peelings were like not even conservative, they were just like... culturally conservative.

Speaker 2 Well, the vaccine one, the election fraud,

Speaker 2 J6, you talked about any of that. You were getting shadow banned or whatever.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and that that was somewhat true also under Trump with the vaccine stuff. I think, in general, like nobody knew what to do with the vaccine stuff.

Speaker 2 Like, COVID is just like a I mean, he got the fourth shot or whatever a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if you saw that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm not. I'm not surprised.
Well, vaccines work. I don't know what to tell you.

Speaker 2 No, I was just surprised because RFK is his, you know, his hire. So

Speaker 1 I thought RFK would talk him out of it. Yeah, I think Trump is smart enough to realize that RFK should probably not be trusted when he talks about vaccines.
He's got a bit of a bone to pick.

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1 It's very concerning to see increasing censorship and to see the side that feels like they were wrongly persecuted.

Speaker 1 The right, whether the left agrees or not, the right definitely feels like they were wrongly persecuted.

Speaker 1 They make it a big thing about free speech for them to just turn around and be like, yeah, it's actually cool.

Speaker 1 It's like, it's not cool to basically put out a new Pentagon requirement for news media outlets to be there that even Fox News walked out on because it's so unprecedented and controlling.

Speaker 1 It's like, that's not okay. It's not okay in such an extreme way.
It's not okay that like PBS just gets stripped because you don't like their politics. I'm sorry, like PBS is just like respected.

Speaker 1 You might not like it personally. That's totally fine.
But imagine if Biden stripped like Fox News of its funding. That's insane.
You don't get to do these things.

Speaker 1 And you don't get to do these things because you work for the people. And the media outlet is there, not always perfectly.
It's definitely not a perfect system.

Speaker 1 But its job is to be able to give you eyes into things that you would otherwise not see as the people. That's what it's for, whether it does it well or not,

Speaker 1 destroying the principles of what allows the sanctity of that thing to occur is fundamentally anti-American.

Speaker 1 Fundamentally. And I don't think people are taking that seriously enough.
The left is certainly taking it seriously, but the issue is like, for anyone who's not part of the left,

Speaker 1 it's like the boy who's cried wolf, right? They're just like, oh yeah, classic liberals screaming about Trump again. And it's like, well, what if they're right this time? What if now they're right?

Speaker 1 And I guess like I'm saying like, I used to roll my eyes a lot.

Speaker 2 I'm liberal, but I've also like had my issues with it they're not wrong right now there is issues there are big issues and we should be concerned about it yeah yeah my media credentials did not get approved for the white house if you're watching this guys please accept me next time i'd love to be there tim pool was there dom lucray was there i wonder how they pick those people oh no i'm sure they go uh who yes mails me the most income well tim i know you've had some run-ins with tim what do you do you think he's pretty objective overall i know he leans to the right but as a as a host moderator do you feel like he's pretty in the middle

Speaker 2 Or do you think he has a bias?

Speaker 1 I think he's got an obvious bias. The issue is that I can't tell if his bias is actually right-leaning politics or content-brain.
I actually can't decide.

Speaker 1 The amount of times that that man has posted that we're on the brink of civil war alone, which I know is like a meme, but it's like

Speaker 1 that's a crazy thing to post. It is.
It's actually crazy because it's kind of inciting. Like you're basically telling people, like, careful, arm up.
They're coming for you. It's like,

Speaker 1 why are we posting this over and over? So I'm not sure. I feel like he's obviously biased towards the right right now.
I think he's just open now that he's conservative.

Speaker 1 I don't like people who perform as though they're a centrist

Speaker 1 when in reality, they are former liberals who've been burned by liberal culture, which to be clear, liberal culture is very toxic. Very.
They're assholes, okay? I get it. They've canceled me.

Speaker 1 But.

Speaker 1 Mean,

Speaker 1 I shouldn't say mean, bad actors of a side or of a tribe don't get to steal me of my principles.

Speaker 1 And that is my concern with Tim is that his reason for shifting right feels a lot less based in my principles have changed over time and a lot more in, look how disgusting these left people are.

Speaker 1 And it's like,

Speaker 1 I just don't resonate with this. Like, my principles are my principles because I've thought and fought hard for them and they mean everything to me.
And nobody gets to steal them from me.

Speaker 1 I'm a liberal, not because I like love Biden and Democrats and everything blue. I'm a liberal because I believe in it.
I believe in strong institutions. I believe in a social safety network.

Speaker 1 I believe in free speech and free association. And I think these are fundamental to a good world.
And nobody, no matter how nasty, I've been canceled by tankies.

Speaker 1 I've been doxed and swatted by mostly the left.

Speaker 1 They will never rob me of my title, ever. And so when people move as a result of like nastiness,

Speaker 1 I get it if you're just like a normie. I don't get it when you're a political pundit.
Your ethics should be deeper than that.

Speaker 1 And if it's not, why were you ever talking talking about this in the first place? Like, what were you actually talking about? Because

Speaker 1 clearly it wasn't that deep for you. You've failed the basics of the Socratic method at that point.
Right.

Speaker 2 What is the Socratic method?

Speaker 1 Socratic method is like, it's just like a method of interrogating

Speaker 2 your

Speaker 1 philosophy.

Speaker 1 And I guess in the way that I'm trying to apply it here, it would be a decent level of internal and external critique on your moral principles to the point that you get down to your foundational beliefs and you know that you believe them because you've tested them against other things sufficiently, right?

Speaker 1 Like when I say I believe in something, I really, really mean it, which is why I also say, well, I'm like 75% on a lot of things because I have to do a lot more thinking.

Speaker 1 And it's very, it feels like principles and virtues, which the right likes to talk about a lot and the left does too, to be frank, is like a thing that we all like to like throw on as cute clothes and we don't actually want to live by it.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's a huge problem. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, respect for putting in the time to go through that process, because I'd say 99% of people don't.

Speaker 1 Probably not. Yeah.
I mean, I worked with,

Speaker 1 actually I worked with addicts for a long time. Oh, yeah.
And I would say like a really big part of recovery for people in addiction is kind of doing a Socratic method.

Speaker 1 It's therapy as well, because a lot of therapy is fundamentally getting down to the roots of like, who are you and what do you value? Right. And why do you value these things? And making a decision.

Speaker 1 Addiction, I always say like addicts have to do all of the like internal critique, Socratic method of themselves because do or die for them.

Speaker 1 If they don't, they relapse in a way that like other people don't. But I think it really inspired me to do it myself, even though I've not struggled with addiction myself.

Speaker 1 I think it's just really important that when you go to sleep, you can be either proud of yourself or you know what are the things you actually need to fix.

Speaker 2 You're living in your authenticity, right?

Speaker 1 Trying to. Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's a good feeling, I bet.

Speaker 1 It's not always pleasant.

Speaker 2 Well, if you're getting dox and swatted, yeah, that's probably not pleasant.

Speaker 1 It also, I think, instills within me like a

Speaker 1 what's the word? I think I doubt myself a lot. And I think a certain level of self-doubt is really healthy.
Probably mine is maybe unhealthy. I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 I'm surprised. You seem very confident.

Speaker 1 Thanks. You doubt yourself a lot.
I doubt myself a lot.

Speaker 2 Is that because of the noise on social media, you think?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 I think it's like childhood trauma stuff. I'm being frank.
Yeah, I grew up in fundamental Christian land.

Speaker 1 My parents are really wonderful, but just very broken people.

Speaker 1 So I just like had a lot of hard times in my childhood.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 yeah, I'm like obsessed, I think, with epistemic humility, probably to an unhealthy degree. I just like really want to be cautious about the confidence with which I say things.

Speaker 1 And there's so many smart people, and they could be right, and I could be wrong. And that's intimidating.

Speaker 1 And I'm in a space that's dominated by really confident people and really smart, confident people, and really dumb, confident people.

Speaker 1 But it's with all the noise,

Speaker 1 it's hard to do the work to distill it all down and go like, well, is this critique of me valid or not? Like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I have to go through it and be like, a lot of people say I'm condescending. Am I condescending? And I'm like, no, I'm really mean a lot of the times, though.

Speaker 1 And that might come across to some people as condescending. Because when I'm actually condescending, people think I'm being nice.
So

Speaker 1 that's weird.

Speaker 1 So it's just like a lot of doing the critiques of going like, what are people picking up on? Is it accurate? Is it an accurate assessment of a character flaw?

Speaker 1 And if it is a character flaw that I agree in, how do I go about changing that thing? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 That must be hard to be objective when someone's attacking you personally like that. So hats off to you.

Speaker 1 I've got an amazing husband, to be fair.

Speaker 1 It's not a solo project.

Speaker 2 So he helps out behind the scenes.

Speaker 1 He's probably like the wisest man. I know this is like everyone has to glaze their husband, but I don't even think I biased him this way.
He's like the wisest person I've ever met. He's incredible.

Speaker 2 Same, that's how I feel about my wife. I got to glaze her a little bit here, but yeah, she keeps me grounded 100%.
Yeah. Because it's easy to get lost in the solace in our space.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 2 Let our egos take over. Yes.
Super easy. Especially when, like, you're live streaming.
Like, I see those guys get destroyed mentally. Like Jack Doherty or whoever it is, like it just ruins them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
It's a crazy space.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because you're just constantly like feeding into the audience, right? Getting feedback non-stop.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Getting constant like approval or disapproval.
W's in chat.

Speaker 2 All right, what else we got here? Oh, Christian nationalism movement. That's obviously big on the right, right? That's true.
I don't know how leftists feel about it, but.

Speaker 1 Not good. They're not a fan of it.

Speaker 2 We don't like church and state going together. So you want it completely separate?

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I think it's bad for the religion and it's bad for the state.
I think it ruins Christianity and I think it ruins democracy.

Speaker 2 What specifically about it do you think doesn't mesh well, I guess?

Speaker 1 There seems to be something very

Speaker 1 unhealthy about politics. I think politics is the ultimate form.
It's like the ultimate final expression of philosophy, and that makes it really hard.

Speaker 1 And you can be a really bad person really easily in politics in a way that like you just the ethics that I've had to consider in like

Speaker 1 political tweeting versus like the ethics of like doing like therapy, it's actually crazy. Like, I'm like, I feel like therapy is easier.
Like, the ethics are pretty clear.

Speaker 1 Whereas in politics, it's like, okay, well, there are some people that you need to be really ruthless to and nasty and like bully out of the space because they're awful people, but also that can't be everyone.

Speaker 1 And how do you figure out who the person is? And yeah, it's just, it's hard. Politics is hard.
And I think

Speaker 1 the incentive of politics is fundamentally antithetical to what the purpose of faith and religion is.

Speaker 1 And so I think when the incentives get mixed together, it makes for a very powerful tool, which is religion, blended with an incentive structure focused on like accumulation of power.

Speaker 1 And that accumulation of power is not what religion is for. That's not like what Christ is.

Speaker 1 He like rejected power to the point that the Jews killed him, right? He like wouldn't make a political power on earth for the Jews, which is why they said he was a false messiah, right?

Speaker 1 And so, yeah, it's absurd to me to try to blend these two things.

Speaker 1 I think if you're a Christian who just like wants some of your virtues reflected in the democratically elected person, that's fine, whatever.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's the most informed, but that's fine. Like, you can vote however ways you want.

Speaker 1 If you want to make it like mandated that the people in power must be Christian, if you want to like mandate your religion onto other people, like Texas has done with the Ten Commandments being in school, that to me is like, that's not what this is for.

Speaker 1 Christ has never said,

Speaker 1 thou shalt bow and follow me, or I'll kill you, you know, or I'll put you in jail, or I'll fine you for not having, like, that's not Christ.

Speaker 1 At least it's not Christian religion. So I don't know why we're doing that.
Like, what are we doing right now? I think it's really bad for the religion.

Speaker 1 It's also bad for the state, but I care a lot more about my faith.

Speaker 2 Yeah, bringing it into the school setting is overkill in my eyes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's weird. Like, leave the kids alone.
Yeah, these are kids. Like, yeah, leave your ideology alone.
Like, both of us. Just leave them alone.
Just leave them alone.

Speaker 2 I will say, when I film that Turning Points events, I do feel a bit of an outlier because I'm not Christian. Yeah.

Speaker 1 like i'll be walking around i'll be like holy crap he really did start a big movement with that he did he really did yeah seeing how like for young men being christian is like the edgy countercultural cool thing to do is like very concerning and especially because the type of christianity that they're wearing feels very hateful and i'm like that's not like Have you like read the Gospels?

Speaker 1 Like Jesus was pretty fucking cool. Like he hung out with like lepers and like tax collectors and like whores.
Like what are we, what's going on right now? But yeah, it's very concerning to see.

Speaker 1 I just hate seeing like the thing I love most, which is like God and the faith, just getting like ruined by people over and over and over again.

Speaker 2 I wonder if

Speaker 2 it's more of a net positive, like having all these kids be atheists versus just Christian, though. Like, what do you think about that,

Speaker 2 if it's better for society?

Speaker 1 I think it's just, I don't know if there's a better, I think there's just different problems.

Speaker 1 I don't know if I'd say it's like objectively better one way or the other.

Speaker 1 There are definitely, I think if they're Christian fundamentalists, that's probably the worst. Fundamentalism is generally associated with like a lot of negative psychological.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's very hard on your mental health. It's not good for you.

Speaker 1 Whereas atheism is neutral on the mental health by and large, except for like there's higher levels of like nihilism, for example, which I think is like not good.

Speaker 1 And also when you have a really atheistic society, it's very hard to have like unifying moral foundations. Whereas if you have a religion, that's kind of unifying you all.

Speaker 1 Same moral system, right? So I think that that creates a lot of problems that we're seeing. I think also as well, religion is really useful in like making communities.

Speaker 1 And I think we're really seeing in like the atheist spaces, like there's just a dearth, there's, dearth is not the right word. There's just like a

Speaker 1 lack of community.

Speaker 2 100%. Yeah.
Wow, you've done your research on this.

Speaker 1 I'm probably not the expert. Just to be clear, I'm not the expert on this.
I just think about it a lot.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I watch religious debates like as a side hobby. I think they're really interesting.
Like Alex O'Connor, if you're not.

Speaker 1 I literally never watch religious debates. Oh, really? I hate them.
I hate all of them. I, yep, nope, don't.

Speaker 2 What don't you like about it? Do you think it challenges your beliefs too hard?

Speaker 1 No, it's these are all non-justifiable beliefs. Like, every belief system is non-justifiable at the foundational level.

Speaker 1 Like, I just feel like we're like fighting about whether angels are blue or pink. I'm just saying.
Yeah, you can't objectively prove anything. Don't care.

Speaker 1 Like, I have my reasons. If you want to ask me my reasons for it, I can give it.
I can give you some of my thinking behind it. I don't care to convince you.
I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 I can't. I can't.
It's like non-falsifiable. I have a non-falsifiable belief.
Okay. You don't need to believe me.
That's fine. Yes.
It's silly. Interesting.

Speaker 1 So are most, like, Agrippa's Trilemma says, like, all beliefs are non-justifiable. All beliefs.
All beliefs. Like, at a foundational level.

Speaker 1 You either fail through infinite regression, dogmatism, which is like Christianity.

Speaker 1 Infinite regression is more what atheists tend to fail, or you engage in circular reasoning, which both of them tend to do. Wow.
And so it's like all beliefs are non-justifiable.

Speaker 1 This is why like moral nihilists...

Speaker 1 They love Agrippa's Trilemma because they're like, see, nothing's justifiable. So nothing matters.
And I'm like, well, I don't think nothing matters.

Speaker 1 I just think like at the core of it, we basically have to go, I'm at some point assuming something.

Speaker 1 I'm starting at an assumption. And you, that should, I guess for me, that instills like this massive amount of humility being like, yeah, I'm assuming a spaghetti man in the sky.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's stupid and weird and silly. You're assuming infinite regression.
It's also stupid and silly to me. Like, you could, but.

Speaker 1 We all have to do something. Otherwise, we just do nihilism.
I think nihilism is the worst of all of these options.

Speaker 1 Because I think like the nihilistic solution is going, you just kind of have to pick something that means something to you. And it's like, my faith means something to me, like deeply.

Speaker 1 That's why that's my unjustifiable belief. If you think that your atheism believes something, that not believing in God is meaningful to you, that's why you've picked infinite regression.

Speaker 1 And that's okay. Like, that's totally fine.
I just don't care to convince you. I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 No religious debates for you. Got it.

Speaker 1 I'll do theology with other Christians. I love fighting with like Christian nationalists about their theology.

Speaker 1 But I won't, like, when atheists are like, I'm going to prove that you're stupid. I'm like, yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm doing dogmatism. Good job.
You're doing infinite regression. Yeah.
All right, done. And then they'll cope and be like, I'm not doing infinite regression.
It's like, yes, you are.

Speaker 1 You necessarily have to. You can't, if you say affinity isn't regressive, you're assuming infinity, which is not dogmatism.
And you're like, oh, but whatever.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is going to open up so many atheists that want to join my Discord and

Speaker 1 again, which, by the way,

Speaker 1 I don't want to. I won't talk to you.

Speaker 2 I'm curious what goes down in your Discord now. I didn't even know you had a Discord.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I got a big one. What's it about?

Speaker 1 It's like a politics debate-y conversational. So my goal of it when I made it was I really want people to like meet their best friends that they can meet in real life and have a community with.

Speaker 1 That's like fundamentally the goal. But also, because it's like I'm political and I debate and stuff, it's obviously oriented around like talking about ideas and philosophy.

Speaker 1 We have a book club together. Oh, nice.
Studying Aristotle and stuff like that. So, yeah, it's just like a hangout group.
It's pretty popular.

Speaker 2 That sounds very wholesome. I need to join there.

Speaker 1 We're mean. I just want to be clear.
We're very mean. Yeah, we're very mean.

Speaker 1 If you come in, we have like a golden rule that you can't be dumb, mean, and wrong all at the same time, over and over and over.

Speaker 1 And if you're all three of them, we're not going to ban you, but we are going to bully you like incessantly. Wow.
Ruthless. Yeah, we're pretty mean.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't believe in this idea that the best idea is the civil one.

Speaker 1 I hate when people are like, man, that guy did so much better than the debate. He didn't yell.
And you're like, that's not how ideas work.

Speaker 1 It's just crazy to me. I don't know, but I'm obsessed with the Greeks, right? Like, Greeks were passionate and they yelled and they got very fire.
Aristotle loves passion.

Speaker 1 Like, it's foundational to like what he talks about as a major major virtue. And so like our obsession with like just never being anything but polite, I think is so bad.
It's so stupid.

Speaker 1 It leads to this like stupid heuristic where people are like, oh, the best people are the civil ones.

Speaker 1 And you're like, the civil people will like steal your wife, become the father to your kids, and like take your dog. Okay.
Like civility doesn't mean anything. It's.

Speaker 1 It's a nice thing if it's actually reflective of a value of like non-violence. But like being mean, there are times to be mean to each other.

Speaker 1 It's just like the meanness should be, there's ethical ways to be mean to each other. There's ethical ways to do violence.
You just have to know what those things are, right?

Speaker 1 Like when I'm mean to people, I try not to like insult their looks unless their entire content is insulting people's looks. And then it's like, all right, well, that's what you get.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I like when people get fiery in debate settings because it shows to me they're passionate.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 Like the Jank Uger style.

Speaker 1 I like that. Yes, it's interesting.

Speaker 1 You can tell that they care about it. And then I want it followed up with good ideas, right? And I think a lot of people are like, unironically on the red pill, whatever debate.

Speaker 1 My strategy strategy is stay really calm because

Speaker 1 whoever yells first loses to the audience because the audience has like the debate literacy of like a toddler.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I don't like that. So like just people joining my Discord.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We're not just nice. We can be nice.
We're very loving, but we'll be mean to you if your ideas are dumbbeat and wrong all the time.

Speaker 2 Well, to win with that audience is impressive because it's a lot of guys. They're already supporting the host.
So you're already at a disadvantage, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's my favorite types of debates, though, is polling people who maybe others feel can't be reached.

Speaker 2 Who do you want to debate next? Anyone, you got a list or you kind of just go day by day?

Speaker 1 I'm debating peers, I think, next.

Speaker 1 I'm excited for that.

Speaker 1 What topic?

Speaker 2 Or can you announce that yet?

Speaker 1 I don't know if I can release it.

Speaker 1 But I'm excited for that. Who do I, who else? I would love to debate Emily from...
Emily Wilson?

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 I'll set that up for you. Oh, really?

Speaker 2 If you come to America Fest this year, we could do AdFest.

Speaker 1 I'll be at AdFest.

Speaker 2 You're not banned?

Speaker 1 No. No, I was.
Well, I did get banned, and then I just resigned up, and it was fine.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Because I know at SAS, there was a big ban going on.

Speaker 1 Yes, there was. But literally, if you just went in and resigned up, it was fine.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Well, if you get in, I'll set it up for you. Yeah.

Speaker 1 No, I'd love to do that. I would love to debate Emily Wilson.

Speaker 1 I think she,

Speaker 1 I feel like behind the scenes, she knows that she doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about.

Speaker 2 I don't think, like, she's been on the show a lot. I think you would win that.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And she'll even admit, like, she's not known to be a debater.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's a nice cope.

Speaker 1 Maybe shut your mouth then, would be my say. Because again, I don't think debating is rhetoric, but it's also the test of good ideas, especially when two people be in good faith.

Speaker 1 My best debate, my favorite debate is actually with Andrew Wilson. Really? We made a pact beforehand that we're both can be good faith.
Okay. So we're not going to do any underhanded things.

Speaker 1 And anyone who debates a lot knows what bad faith is. And people act like this.
It's like really big bad word. People are bad faith in debates all the time.

Speaker 1 It's just when you are acting as though you were under the predilection of one thing and you're actually under another.

Speaker 1 So if I go in and I'm like, I'm open to my mind being changed and I'm not, that's like already starting a bad faith debate.

Speaker 1 And then there are tactics you can utilize that like show evidence, like intentionally misconstruing people's words or equivocating and swapping between the meanings of different words to make different types of arguments.

Speaker 2 I hate the definition debates.

Speaker 1 It gets so annoying. They're the worst.
And so me and Andrew, we agreed we're going to have a good faith debate.

Speaker 1 And it was like probably the funnest debate I've ever done because he's a really good debater. He's phenomenal.
Everyone who says he's like dumb and stupid, you are so wrong. You don't like his ideas.

Speaker 1 He's not dumb. He is a world-class debater.
That is unquestionably my favorite debate. Debating really good debaters who are super good faith are like, that are quick too.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, just like model, because he's pithy too, right? He's quick, so you can go back and forth and back and forth. The best, the best debates I've ever had.

Speaker 2 Would you ever debate someone pretty controversial, like Sneeko or Fuentes, someone like that?

Speaker 1 Sneeko, I think, so I've, I've done a humanizing actually, which is a show I do with Sneeko. I would debate Sneeko.

Speaker 1 I don't know how, like, I don't know if that would be, it would be like an Emily Wilson debate. I don't know if that would be like a super fair, just because I'm like, I do a lot of debate, right?

Speaker 1 But yeah, I've been willing to debate Sneeko. I'm pretty much willing to debate anyone.
Nick Fuentes, I need to think about a lot more.

Speaker 1 I'm not super versed on like JQ conspiracy theories, but I think that conspiracy theories are very like psychologically dangerous in a way that like almost nothing else is.

Speaker 1 And this is just coming from my psych background. Like I think when you look at people who are falling into conspiracy theories and their relation to

Speaker 1 there's this metric we can take called like it's it's essentially it's essentially gullibility which every single conspiracy theorist is gonna be so mad at me but it's essentially this measure of like how much you can be convinced by outside pressures so hypnotists have a really good system of figuring out who is the most impressionable essentially and that's what they use for hypnotism and you can actually test for this in psychology and in psychology we've actually used this to convince people for example to test between real dissociative identity disorder and confabulated

Speaker 1 and And if you take high-impression people and you convince them that they have DID, and then you have them do their symptoms, and then you measure their brain, their brain actually acts differently than people actually diagnosed with DID.

Speaker 1 So it goes, okay, DID is real. Okay, that's good evidence that there is something happening in the brain of genuinely DID people.

Speaker 1 But there's this whole other thing where you've now convinced a bunch of people. Now, to be fair, in the study, they do tell them it's all fake.
You don't have DID.

Speaker 1 Which I don't know if you could do that study that was done, I think, in like the late 90s.

Speaker 1 I don't know if the ethics would approve that anymore, convincing people that they have like a severe mental illness. The mind is powerful.

Speaker 2 So, if you tell someone certain stuff and they believe it, incredibly powerful, the body will start actually doing it, right?

Speaker 1 Yes, this is like what, um,

Speaker 1 oh, the words leaving me right now. Placebo is right, right? Placebo effect.
The main thing is, placebo effect will just go away in efficacy after typically about six months. Okay.

Speaker 1 Usually, although some people, some people are going to fight me in the cons about this. Um,

Speaker 1 yeah, conspiracy theories and its relationship to impressionability and also the whole spectrum of psychotic type behavior, they're all kind of directionally together.

Speaker 1 And I do think that there is, like, AI, I think, also has a really big risk with people who have maybe a sensitivity psychologically to being on the more like psychotic spectrum, which I know people don't want to hear.

Speaker 1 I'm using this in like really clinical words.

Speaker 1 Like psychotic is not an off or on thing.

Speaker 1 There are people that like, even people developing a psychotic episode, you can watch it gradually building up to the point where you go, this person has now cleaved from reality.

Speaker 1 And conspiracy theories often are in that direction. The problem is that sometimes they're right.
Like, right? Like, Alex Jones is right about the Epstein files. Like, it just was.

Speaker 1 The problem is, we remember the times that they're right. We don't remember all the time that they're wrong.
And conspiracy theories are built on falsifiable belief systems.

Speaker 1 There's always a justification for why you can't find the evidence.

Speaker 1 And so Nick Fuentes, I think, really taps into that type of audience. And so I'm very cautious about that in social media.
I think it's very dangerous

Speaker 1 in a way that like other types of misinfo or like just hateful rhetoric isn't. Because I think it's very psychologically damaging at like an N mass scale.

Speaker 2 It is a tricky spot because someone like you, you know, you believe in free speech, but you're seeing these conspiracies getting so many views online and affecting the minds of many people.

Speaker 2 So I guess.

Speaker 1 That's a really great question. Like what do you do about that?

Speaker 1 I don't know the answer.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because if you censor them, it's going to make it worse, I think.

Speaker 1 Yep. It did, right? Like we saw that with the studies.
You like banned all of the more radical right people. They went to Gab.

Speaker 1 They echo echo chambered and got way more crazy and then twitter bought uh elon musk bought twitter and then they went back on twitter and now they're way worse than they ever were and people were like people believe these things and it's like bro a lot of people yeah a lot of people yeah the 9-11 one jfk vaccines there's so many that are like mainstream now it's uh yep yep and like uh you know the government definitely doesn't help a lot of times it's a tough it's tough you know how much truth can people handle um

Speaker 1 you know if you look at like the jfk stuff right if you actually look into it okay well they did seal weird files because they did know the killer and they tried to hide it, but they didn't hide it because they like hired him.

Speaker 1 They hired it because it's a failure of the CIA. Yeah.
And that's embarrassing.

Speaker 1 And it's like, okay, but because you did that and then it later got released and we found that out, it doesn't matter that we know that now.

Speaker 1 Now there's just a full-blown conspiracy. Nobody wants to be like, oh, yeah, they hid it just because it was embarrassing for their company.

Speaker 1 That's like, you know, that's where the conspiracy comes out of.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, oh, now we're stuck with this JFK conspiracy forever, which again, people are going to be fighting in the comments about.

Speaker 2 I feel like now it's going to be Charlie Kirk conspiracies for the rest of our lives.

Speaker 1 I know, I know.

Speaker 2 That's like the modern day JFK.

Speaker 1 I feel so bad for Erica Kirk in that way. Like, just imagine having her children, like, being raised and like people whispering in her kids' ears, like, massage.

Speaker 1 You know, like, it's just like, that's so unfair.

Speaker 2 Well, Candace said recently, I don't know if you saw this, she's blaming the Trump administration now.

Speaker 1 She's like, you didn't defend me on the cron stuff, so now it's your fault. That's crazy.
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she went from Israel to Trump to, yeah, I don't know. Every video is different, you know.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I can't track what's going on.

Speaker 1 Sometimes I'm like, maybe pregnancy does make women crazy. I don't know.
I'm not really sure what to make of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the Macron stuff was nuts. I think they just settled according to our other producer, Kyla.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, she needs to be careful because one lawsuit, you end up with Alex Jones. You're bankrupt, right? Yep.

Speaker 1 Yep. Maybe don't lie about people when you know that you're lying.
Maybe stop doing that.

Speaker 2 What else we got? Newsom versus Trump. I mean, I know where you side on that, I guess.

Speaker 1 Nothing crazy there, right? Yeah, yeah, I support Newsom over Trump, obviously. I think, like, Trump is like basically the worst thing to American politics.

Speaker 1 I don't love all of Newsom's policies. I've been decently critical of Newsome in the past.
It just feels like we're in this place where I'm like...

Speaker 1 You know, he's willing. He's kind of moderating.
He's doing like the mod lib thing, which as a moderate lib, I love that.

Speaker 1 He's kind of embracing abundance policies. I really like abundance policies because it's doing what Elon Musk said he would get he was going to do, but like actually effectively.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm very for it. We'll see.
We need a strong leader. Like, I feel like we had Barack Obama, and then we just gave up on Bill Tinker.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Your past two candidates have not been impressive.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And unfortunately, like,

Speaker 1 I don't know if I'm ever going to love any single presidential candidate ever. Like, I'm never just going to be like 100% like, that person's perfect.
Like, it's a politician. It's a possible, yeah.

Speaker 1 And the incentive structures in politics necessarily require that you be a little bit grifty because you have to try to take the ape money yeah well that's yeah maybe but you should take all money you should take donor money because it to win an election it is mostly a dollar game yeah like nobody likes this billion dollars yep basically you need to raise who's gonna win your primaries probably the person who raises the most yeah unfortunately like whether you like it or not because it's a social media game now um and so yeah i mean i don't have an issue with apac at all i think the juke conspiracy is like really unhealthy and bad.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're definitely getting a lot of heat right now. But a large percentage of Congress is donated by AIPAC, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, along with like multiple other PACs.

Speaker 1 Like most Congress members have like some level of financial investment from most PACs, unless they're a type of Congressperson who explicitly says, I don't take money from PACs, which is very, very rare.

Speaker 1 Rare, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's hard to win without them.

Speaker 1 Very hard to win without them. You, like, grassroots donors will never fund a campaign ever.

Speaker 1 You just need to be popular enough. So, yeah, it's just, I don't know, until we get super PACs out of the game.
Yeah, this is just like the way it's going to be.

Speaker 2 You said you're from Canada? Yeah. Oh, so you can't even run if you wanted to.
No. Would you ever run for anything political or you like the commentary side better?

Speaker 1 I don't think you can be a fully honest person as a politician because

Speaker 1 your job is to represent the people, which means that if your voters change what they feel about something, even

Speaker 1 if you don't agree, you have to represent them. Which, like, the job requires some level of grifting, but the grifting should be to what the people want, not to what your leaders want, right?

Speaker 1 Like, that's that's the job of the politician is to move where the people go.

Speaker 1 You should have some of your ideas that get you authentically elected, and then after that, you must represent your constituents. That's your job.
Yeah. Like, your governor works for you.

Speaker 1 They should represent your ideas as best as possible. They won't represent all of your ideas because they have to represent like millions of people, but that's their job.

Speaker 1 I couldn't do it. I couldn't politics.
I hate political staffers with a burning passion. I've worked with them for the last year.
They're the worst. Literally like the worst.

Speaker 1 You're like, oh, I see why you didn't make it in corporate and you're here now.

Speaker 2 They play musical chairs too.

Speaker 1 It's terrible. Like they're all like, oh, yeah, I'd love to connect you with this person.
And then they email them and they'll never share the email of the person you're trying to get.

Speaker 1 So you're like, I literally don't have a, I don't even have like an address of how I could just talk to this person.

Speaker 2 A lot of gatekeeping.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm sure you're trying to interview these guys on your platform and you can't even get a hold of them, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. It's just constant gatekeeping.
It's funders. Funder gatekeeping is the biggest one, actually.

Speaker 2 That's a problem on the left.

Speaker 1 I've heard it's a problem everywhere. I've heard it.

Speaker 2 I think more so on the left, because if I wanted to get someone on the right that's in Congress, I've done it. It's not too difficult.
But if I want to get someone on the left, it's really hard.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is a nightmare. So maybe it is a uniquely left issue, which would be not good.
I've definitely heard some really weird stuff about MAGA from more MAGA influencers and stuff, but

Speaker 1 it's a nightmare. You should not be gatekeeping.

Speaker 1 But their job, like they maintain their job by gatekeeping their relevance.

Speaker 2 I've even heard like Pac-Man talk about this because he has one of the biggest platforms on on the left and he can't even get these people on.

Speaker 2 He's getting a million views of video. Why would you not go on there and share your ideas?

Speaker 1 Because if the staffer puts their neck out for you and the show does bad, you might get fired.

Speaker 1 And I don't know what the right is doing to maybe protect against that. Maybe just people are like less worried about getting fired.
I'm not quite sure, but that's a major issue for it.

Speaker 1 If you stick your neck out as a staffer, advocate for

Speaker 1 an interview, and the interview flops, that could be the end of your career. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, so just being purely objective, where would you rank Trump's second term so far based off what he said he was going to do before he got elected and right now?

Speaker 1 Based on what he, so he's doing what he said he was going to do, which a lot of people voted for him said he wouldn't. They said he would lie.

Speaker 1 The issue is what he said he was going to do was fucking awful. And he's doing it.
So

Speaker 1 K through F. F minus.
Really? Yeah, I think, I think.

Speaker 1 Firing staff who don't give you the results you want. Like the

Speaker 1 psychology that he has now of building like a sycophantic administration around him is terrifying. That he didn't have the first year.
Pence stood up to him. Right.
Right?

Speaker 1 Like, say what you want about Pence. That is a patriot.
That man loves his country. And he wouldn't even put the president over it.

Speaker 1 That is not, you know, Trump's gone out of his way to make sure that he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics Chief because employment was down.

Speaker 1 Unemployment was up, sorry.

Speaker 1 What's going on right now?

Speaker 1 What are you doing? Why are you you fighting this person for like factual reality? We're just not going to survey hunger anymore, so we don't have to know the effects of snap.

Speaker 2 Oh, I didn't know they did that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they removed the survey for like global national hunger. Wow.

Speaker 2 Is that a Doge thing or they just cut everyone?

Speaker 1 I'm not sure what hacked it specifically. I don't think it was Doge.
I think it was more recently, but like it's gone. They're just like...

Speaker 1 It's

Speaker 1 if you...

Speaker 1 I don't even know. There's so many attack factors on Trump, I don't know where to start.
And I'm not a Trump-deranged person.

Speaker 1 like i basically said that i don't think he was that bad in the first term and a lot of leftists are going to lose their at me for saying this i think that he was always kind of a bit of a man baby he was never a true politician and he said a lot of repugnant things but i think that he um

Speaker 1 radicalized a lot in the next four years.

Speaker 1 I think he's got a lot less to lose. He learned a lot from the game.
It is possible that he was always this way. He was just too stupid to make like sycophants around him.
That is possible.

Speaker 1 But regardless, his first term, it wasn't horrible, it wasn't great. The midterms were really effective at blocking him from doing a lot of stuff.
This term has been awful.

Speaker 1 He is damaging our relationships with our allies, which if you care about foreign policy, which you should, because at the end of the day, if we have a war, we need our government to protect us from getting stomped.

Speaker 1 Like, it really matters, and having allies really, really matters.

Speaker 1 I think his admiration for Xi Jinping and Putin and seeing that reflected, I think the firing of staff that disagree. Jerome Powell, his own pick, the goat, okay?

Speaker 1 I don't know how you feel about Jerome Powell. I love that man, okay? He's awesome.

Speaker 1 He's had some choices that I don't love, but he's a goat. I love Jerome Powell, and he's Trump's choice.

Speaker 1 And he got America out of the COVID recession and inflation better than any other country on the globe.

Speaker 1 A lot of people think that the economy is mostly the president. It's mostly the Fed chair, unless the president does executive actions on tariffs, right?

Speaker 1 Like the president can, in fact, impact the economy. It's usually the Fed chair.
Trump Howell is the reason that we came out so strongly under Biden, right? He did an amazing job.

Speaker 1 And now he's going like, we are seeing issues. We're not going to do this to interest.
We're not going to do this. And everyone's being like, oh, he's just like flipping on Trump.

Speaker 1 No, he's doing what he's always done, which is trying to make the economy stable in a volatile situation that Trump is increasingly making volatile and doing his best to report honestly.

Speaker 1 The economy is not doing great. It is getting harmed right now.
Like that's just a given. Whether you believe in tariffs or not, everyone knows that the tariffs are going to hurt initially.

Speaker 1 So why are you getting mad at Jerome Powell for reporting honestly on the things you said would happen? You said short-term pain for long-term gain.

Speaker 1 So why are you mad at Jerome Powell for reporting that there is inflation issues? Like what's going on right now? Like what are we actually talking about?

Speaker 1 So the fact that none of his first-term staff want to work with him. Wow.

Speaker 1 So Kamala Harris, when she ran, one of the biggest things that gave me pause about her was to find out that 98% of her staff have a turnover. And I was like, that's weird.

Speaker 2 Like, that is high, right?

Speaker 1 It's really high. And it's like, okay, why is that happening? But she's, to me, I was like, she's still a better alternative than Trump.
Trump has like, I think, a higher alternative.

Speaker 1 Like, none of his staff from before want to return. He has multiple generals that worked under him that have basically said that he was like destructive.

Speaker 1 Like, that he, that they didn't like him. The embassy general that talks to China would have to

Speaker 1 constantly go to China and apologize for Trump's behavior.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 You are,

Speaker 1 if you are a leader who none of your staff want to come back to, and now you only surround yourself with sycophantic staff who will say yes, they fired the CDC chair that RFK appointed because she wouldn't allow him to just fuck around with vaccines, like he promised the Senate he wouldn't.

Speaker 1 Hurt his pick. She had a backbone.
She's fired. She's gone.

Speaker 1 The governor general, who didn't want to go against Comey and said, there isn't a case here. We can't.
There's no evidence. Fired.

Speaker 1 Now there's a new person with no prosecutorial history being like, oh, there's so much evidence. Like, how do you know? Never done prosecution before.
Right?

Speaker 1 And we have this over and over and over and over and over again. And it's like, this is terrifying.

Speaker 1 You are, whether you love Trump or not and you think he's draining the swamp, he is building around him. He has the psychology of a man building exclusively yes men around him.

Speaker 1 And anyone who disagrees with him is the enemy and should be get kicked out. Well, who else does that? Putin.

Speaker 1 That's Putin. Xi Jinping.
And so it's like

Speaker 1 Biden had some of the most bipartisan bills under his election. And some would say it's way too late.
And I agree. I think it was too late, but at least he did it.

Speaker 1 At least he got there.

Speaker 1 Trump won't even begin to start negotiating with Democrats about healthcare to end the shutdown. He won't even begin to do it.
There's no interest.

Speaker 1 When it's like, I'm sorry, that's just how this has to work. You have to negotiate.
You have to negotiate in the shutdown.

Speaker 1 Trump said it himself, that when there is a shutdown, the president has to lead. He has to bring people together and make a negotiation happen.
He's the king of negotiators.

Speaker 1 He can't convince eight Democrats to side with him. What's going on exactly? It's crazy.
It's absurd.

Speaker 2 Second longest shutdown ever, right?

Speaker 2 Pretty crazy. I was at the airport the other day.
It was madness.

Speaker 2 Like, these workers are not getting paid. They're miserable.
They don't give a shit right now.

Speaker 1 I feel so bad for TV.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I feel pretty bad for them, honestly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, super bad. Every time I'm like, how you guys doing?

Speaker 1 I try to be like extra nice to be like, don't get me in trouble. And also like, you know, I'm sorry that your life sucks right now.
You might not be able to afford Christmas.

Speaker 2 Man, I wonder if they're going to do anything anytime soon, honestly.

Speaker 1 He's like threatening to fire federal employees. He's canceling federal projects, uniquely in blue states.
In fact, specifically targeting Schumer's state for federal projects, right?

Speaker 1 It's like, that's crazy. That's crazy behavior.
Like, that is just holding citizens hostage to get what you want.

Speaker 1 Why is our president doing this? Why are we ever going to be okay with this?

Speaker 1 And so it's tough because I feel like I can't, I don't think you can be politically literate and be moderate on this issue at this point. My husband's a conservative.
Is he? Yep. Respect to you.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 We debate and stuff all the time. This is part of why I probably have to debate all the time.

Speaker 1 I'm debating at home all the time. And he's like, even he's like, you can't be politically informed and not look at Trump and not be concerned if you're being politically honest.
Wow.

Speaker 1 Do you know any, if you value democracy, you can't do it. It's bad.
It's really, really bad. And the presidential immunity ruling was insane and terrifying.
And it should be concerning.

Speaker 1 And it should be concerning. If you're not worried about Trump, you should be worried about all the policies he's just enacted for the next guy.

Speaker 1 What if the next guy is a liberal who's way more willing to like punish his enemies? He now has way more avenues to do so.

Speaker 2 Yeah, even Fluent has just said if a liberal wins in 28, he's leaving the country.

Speaker 1 He's scared of what's going on.

Speaker 1 They have immunity. Of course.
Like, it's crazy that we're here where people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Trump.

Speaker 1 It's like all of the institutions he is eroding, all of the centralizing of power he is doing, if somebody else takes over, which to be fair, if we don't have another election, all of you should, that's, you know, there's a quote about that, I guess I'll say there is a quote about that that you should look into about the Second Amendment.

Speaker 1 But like, that's terrifying. If you wouldn't like it from the other side, you shouldn't be allowing it on your side.

Speaker 1 This is why I speak up against the left all the time and why the right has to speak up now. And if you're not, you are enabling the death of your democracy.
You're just participating in that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Trump felt like he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize. He said he ended seven wars.
Seven wars.

Speaker 2 What did you think about that?

Speaker 1 Just crazy. It's just crazy.
Okay, Jen. Whatever.
Yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 2 I didn't look into the seven wars, to be honest, but I don't know which ones he was talking about or referencing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a bunch of them is like some of them he has. Like he has been a part of like ending some wars, which has been good.

Speaker 1 You know, the peace deal is good.

Speaker 1 I hope that it lasts. It seems like Hamas is playing ball.
That's That's really good. Like, I'm happy about those sort of things.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you deserve it over the Venezuelan Democrat who's risking her entire life to bring democracy back to a authoritarian regime.

Speaker 1 I think she gets it. I don't know.
I think she gets it. It's kind of crazy.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you think the ceasefire is going to hold this time?

Speaker 2 It's hard to say, but.

Speaker 1 No. I don't.
I don't think so. I'm not confident that this is going to be the solution.

Speaker 1 I don't know what the solution is. We're so far in.
Without Netanyahu being forced to step down either, I actually, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It seems like that's the only option, right?

Speaker 1 Even when he does, it puts new bargaining chips on the table. But like the Palestinians want, have you ever been to Israel? I haven't.
Okay, I have.

Speaker 1 The areas that they want in like the West Bank, some of the areas that they want, you can see Jordan, you can almost see Lebanon, you can see Jerusalem, and you can see Tel Aviv, all from like this one point

Speaker 1 in the West Bank. So like the area, a lot of the areas that they want in the West Bank, Israel will never give them.
It'll never happen. It's too much of a military risk.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it's just, it's insane. It's just like, it's the worst possible outcome ever.
I don't know what the solution is.

Speaker 1 It would be good for Palestine to have a state, but I don't know how you have a state that's been warring with another state that's split in two across the state and ever have that be functional.

Speaker 1 The IDF has been very unfair in not letting them build and stuff like that. Like, Israel is, there's, there is, just to be clear, there's no good guy in this story.
It's certainly not Israel.

Speaker 1 It's also not Palestine though, right? It's definitely not Iran. It's definitely not most of the people who were enacting war on Israel for years and years and years and years and years.

Speaker 1 It's definitely not all the pogroms that led to the creation of Israel. Like what you look, when you look at this state,

Speaker 1 it's this state steeped in centuries and centuries and centuries of tragedy, like over and over and over again. And like what's the solution?

Speaker 1 Maybe if we had sent the Jews to Madagascar or somewhere in Mongolia, it would have been better.

Speaker 1 But probably not, because probably the people who live in Madagascar don't want to give up their land either. But also, the Israeli and Jewish desire for their own state is very well-founded.

Speaker 1 You cannot look at the history of the pogroms against the Jews and go, like,

Speaker 1 no, they should just keep trusting like the higher power to protect them. It's like, well, they keep not doing that.
And then World War II happened.

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 1 but, and also, that isn't a carte blanche to just buy land legally from Arab, uh, Arab and Turkish owners and then kick out all the Palestinians and be like, fuck you, figure it out.

Speaker 1 It's like, that's just a breeding ground for problems, right?

Speaker 1 You have all these serfs who now have no land that they've lived on for hundreds of years that they've never owned, just stuck in villages with nothing.

Speaker 1 That's just a breeding ground for problems, right? So, like, the whole beginning of this country was just like steeped in tragedy, all of these wars. So, I don't know like the answer.

Speaker 1 And there's no third, our answer would be a third party stepping in to actually regulate the borders for a long time, like 20 to like 20 years minimum. But no country is going to risk their soldiers.

Speaker 1 And there's going to be violence again. There is going to be violence again.

Speaker 1 Nobody wants to do it. Like no third party wants to step in.
France won't do it. Like nobody wants to do it.
So I just, I don't know. I don't know what the solution is.

Speaker 1 But killing kids and starving Palestinian people is definitely not the answer. That's insane.
That's actually insane behavior.

Speaker 1 Flattening all of Gaza because you don't want to risk any IDF soldiers for like extraction jobs, also insane. 90%, right? Exactly, right? It's like, and why is he doing that?

Speaker 1 Well, because he wants to get re-elected. And if he gets more Israeli soldiers killed, he'll never get re-elected.
And it's like, you shouldn't be here. Nobody wants you.
Get out of here.

Speaker 1 So I don't know. If Netanyahu's not gone, I don't know.
I don't know where we go.

Speaker 1 I don't even think peace is on the table until Netanyahu. Wow, because you're very, very critical of him.

Speaker 1 I think he's a terrible leader. I think that he has put himself over the country forever.

Speaker 1 I think he wants Israeli status quo and he will make deals with as many devils as he has to to maintain his ability to not lose power.

Speaker 1 And I think that that is, as a leader, you are a failure of a leader if you are that person. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Kyla, thanks for your time.

Speaker 2 Where can people find you next? What's next for you for the rest of this year?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm going to be on Jubilee twice, actually, in November. I don't know when the episodes come out.

Speaker 2 This will come out around November.

Speaker 1 Okay, cool. So you'll see me on Jubilee either right after this airs or right right after,

Speaker 1 or right before I should say.

Speaker 1 I'll be at Amfest and I'll just be trolling around doing more streams, hanging out with politicians and doing things.

Speaker 2 On Thursday, everywhere. Let's do it.
Check her out, guys. Thanks for watching.
See ya.

Speaker 2 Nice. I hope you guys are enjoying the show.
Please don't forget to like and subscribe. It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.
Thank you.