In this episode of the Daily Wire Plus podcast, I talk to American Twitch streamer, debater, and political commentator Stephen "Destiny" Bunnell. We talk about how he became a voice on the left and right, the dangers of political ideology, and the role of video games in shaping our understanding of the world, as well as how they affect our perception of reality and our ability to make sense of it. This episode is sponsored by Dailywire Plus, a new service from Dr. Jordan B. Peterson's new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering, please know you are not alone. There s hope, and there s a path to feeling better. Go to DailywirePlus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety. Let s take the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Let s Reach Out to Dr. P. Peterson on Depression & Anxious: A Path to Feeling Better. - Let s Talk About Depression and Anxious? by Jordan Peterson on Dailywire PLUS, go to DailyWireplus.org/Depression and Anxiety by clicking here to get the first episode of Depression + Anxious by clicking HERE to get a FREE gift from Jordan Peterson's newest series on his new book, and let him know what you can do to help you feel better. by becoming a supporter of his new project, The Dark Side of the Conversation, by clicking Here to receive $5, $10, $15, $20, $25, and $50, and more! Thank you, Jordan Peterson, and much more. You re not alone! by Dr. I m listening to the podcast, and I m talking about Depression + Anxiety + Anxiety + Depression + Depression & Depression, and Anxiety, by I m helping me feel better, I m Helping Me Reach Out, I can help you get a brighter Future you deserve a brighter future, and so I can be a better place to feel better? by , I m looking forward to helping you find a better life.
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00:00:57.420Hello, everyone. I'm here today talking to Stephen Bunnell, known professionally and online as Destiny.
00:01:11.220He's an American streamer, debater, and political commentator.
00:01:15.280He really came to my attention, I would say, as a consequence of the discussion he had with Ben Shapiro and Lex Friedman,
00:01:22.080and I decided to talk to him, not least because it's not that easy to bring people who are identified,
00:01:29.100at least to some degree, with the political beliefs on the left into a studio where I can actually have a conversation with them.
00:01:35.680I've tried that more often than you might think, and it happens now and then, but not very often.
00:01:39.980So today we talk a lot about, well, the differences between the left and the right,
00:01:45.720and the dangers of political ideology per se, and the use of power as opposed to invitation,
00:01:50.920and all sorts of other heated, often heated and contentious issues.
00:01:58.360And so you're welcome to join us, and I was happy to have the opportunity to do this.
00:02:03.920So I guess we might as well start by letting the people who don't know who you are get to know who you are with a little bit more precision.
00:02:13.220So why have you become known, and how has that developed?
00:05:31.820And why do you think that shift happened for you, like, in terms of your interest?
00:05:36.640I think I've always been interested in a lot of things.
00:05:38.860Like, I grew up with a very strong political bend.
00:05:41.100And it was conservative until I got into my streaming years.
00:05:44.140Probably five or six years of streaming.
00:05:45.560I slowly kind of started to shift to the left.
00:05:48.720I would say that, I guess, in around 2016, when I saw all of the conversations going on with the election and with all the issues being talked about,
00:05:58.460I felt like the conversations were very low quality.
00:06:01.080And in my naivety, I thought that maybe I could come in and boost the quality, at least in, like, my little corner of the internet to have better conversations about what was going on.
00:06:09.080And so, that was my, basically, my injection point into all of that was, yeah, fighting about those political issues and then arguing with people about them, doing research and reading and all of that, yeah.
00:06:18.800And so, did you do that by video to begin with as well?
00:06:32.760Without getting too much into, like, the business or streaming side of things, basically, actually, this probably carries over to, basically, to all media, I would imagine, is you've got people that will watch you for special events.
00:06:43.920So, maybe you're, like, a commentator of the Super Bowl or maybe you're hosting, like, a really huge event.
00:06:48.540Then you've got people who will watch you every time you're participating in your area of expertise.
00:06:52.840So, for me, that's, like, a particular game I might be playing.
00:06:55.900It might be when you're on, like, a particular show or something that people watch you for.
00:06:59.960And then the fundamental fan, like, the best fan that you're converting to the lowest and most loyal viewer, I guess, is somebody that's watching you basically no matter what you're doing.
00:07:08.940And these are the people that will follow you from area to area.
00:07:11.040And I think because of the way I did gaming and I talked about a lot of other stuff, whether it was politics, science, current events, whatever, I had a lot of loyal fans that kind of followed me wherever I went.
00:07:19.480So, quite a few of them stuck with Star Trek.
00:08:01.420So, you have quite a substantial reach.
00:08:03.640And so, you said that initially you were more conservative-leaning, but that changed—okay.
00:08:10.860What did it mean that you were more conservative-leaning, and how did that—how and why did that change?
00:08:15.620When I said I was conservative-leaning and I was writing articles for my school newspaper defending George Bush and the Iraq War, I was, like, very much like—I think it's, like, an insult now when people say, like, neocon.
00:08:27.540But I was, like, very much like a conservative, a Bush-era conservative, so supported big business, supported traditional—all of the conservative, I guess, like, foreign policy, you know, hawkish foreign policy, for whatever that meant as, like, a 14, 15-year-old.
00:08:42.300There was the whole Elian Gonzalez incident that was very big for Cuban Americans, where there was a Cuban boy that tried to come to the United States with several other people and his mother, and their raft, I guess, crashed or something happened.
00:08:54.360I think his mom died, and some other people died, and there was a huge debate on whether or not to send him back to Cuba, and Clinton ended up sending him back to Cuba, and I know that my mom was super irritated and all that, to say the least.
00:09:05.140And then once I hit college, I think I supported Ron Paul in 2000—would have been 2008.
00:09:10.680I was a big Ron Paul libertarian guy in high school when I went from—I went to a Catholic Jesuit high school, and I kind of became atheist in that process.
00:09:19.060I started reading Ayn Rand, so I was very, very, very, very, very conservative.
00:09:24.360But on the libertarian end, it sounds like.
00:09:35.260Initially it was, like, Christian conservative, and then it became, like, libertarian conservative.
00:09:38.180Without—my life kind of took, like, a wacky path, and then as I started working, I kind of had to drop out of school, I was working, and then I got into streaming.
00:09:48.140And once I started streaming—I had a son—basically around the first year I started streaming—as I started to go through life, and I went from kind of being in this, like, working poor position to making a lot of money, especially through the lens of my child.
00:10:01.840I saw how different life was when I had more money versus less, and I guess, like, the differences between what was available to me and then my child, as I made more money, while I was really wealthy versus not as wealthy, it kind of started to change the way that I—
00:10:17.840So you got more attuned to the consequences of inequality?
00:10:20.840Basically, I would say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:10:23.840Okay, and so that—okay, how did that lead you to develop more sympathy for left-leaning ideas, particularly?
00:10:31.840I guess my core beliefs have never really changed, but I think the way that those become applied kind of change.
00:10:39.840So much the same way that you might think that everybody deserves a shot to go to school and have an education, that might be, like, a core belief where, as a libertarian or conservative, I might think that as long as a school is available, everybody's got the opportunity to go and study.
00:10:54.840But maybe now as, like, a liberal or progressive or whatever you'd call me, I might say, okay, well, we need to make sure that there is enough, you know, maybe, like, food in the household or household or some kind of funding program to make sure the kid can actually go to school and study, basically.
00:11:06.840So, like, the core drive is the same, but I think the applied principle ends up changing a bit based on what you think—
00:11:13.840Right, so is your concern essentially something like the observation that if people are bereft enough of substance, let's say, that it's difficult for them to take advantage of equal opportunities even if they are presented to them, let's say?
00:11:33.840And you have some belief, and correct me if I'm wrong, you have some belief that there is room for state intervention at the level of basic provision to make those opportunities more manifest.
00:11:51.580How—okay, so let's start talking more broadly then on the political side.
00:11:56.580So, how would you characterize the difference, in your opinion, between the left and the conservative political viewpoints?
00:12:06.580Oof, on a very, very, very broad level, if there's some—I would say if there's some, like, good world that we're all aiming for, I think people on the left seem to think that a collection of taxes from a large population that goes into a government that's able to precisely kind of dole out where that tax money goes, you're basically able to take the problems of society.
00:12:35.580You're able to scrape off, hopefully, not super significant amount of money from people that are—that can afford to give a lot of money.
00:12:42.380And then through government programs and redistribution, you target that—that—those taxes, essentially, to people that kind of need whatever bare minimum to take advantage of opportunities in society, yeah.
00:12:52.620And then for—on the conservative end, I guess a conservative would generally think that, why would the government take my money?
00:12:59.580I think from a community point of view, through churches, through community action, through families, we can better allocate our own dollars to our own friends and family to help them and give them the things that they need so that they can better participate in a thriving society, basically.
00:13:10.620Okay, so one of the things that I've always found a mystery—I mean, I think there's an equal mystery on the left and on the right in this regard—is that the more conservative types tend to be very skeptical of big government.
00:13:24.360And the leftist types tend to be more skeptical of big corporations, right?
00:13:31.500Well, you—okay, so following through the logic that you just laid out, you made the suggestion that one of the things that characterizes people on the left is the belief that government can act as an agent of—can and should act as an agent of distribution.
00:13:46.000Okay, okay, a potential problem for that is the gigantism of the government that does that.
00:13:51.540Now, the conservatives are skeptical of that gigantism, and likewise, the liberals, the progressives in particular—we'll call them progressives—are skeptical of the reach of gigantic corporations.
00:14:04.660And I've always seen a commonality in those two, in that both of them are skeptical of gigantism, and so one of the things that I'm concerned about, generally speaking, with regard to the potential for the rise of tyranny is the emergence of giants.
00:14:21.560And one potential problem with the view that the government can and should act as an agent of redistribution is that there is an incentive put in place—two kinds of incentives.
00:14:33.820Number one, a major league incentive towards gigantism and tyranny.
00:14:38.080And number two, an incentive for psychopaths who use compassion to justify their grip on power to take money and to claim that they're doing good.
00:14:48.000And I see that happening everywhere now in the name of—particularly in the name of compassion.
00:14:53.500And it's one of the things that's made me very skeptical, in particular, about the left, and at least about the progressive edge of the left.
00:15:01.520So I'm curious about what you think about those two.
00:15:04.340First of all, it's a paradox to me that the conservatives and the leftists face off each other with regard to their concern about different forms of gigantism and don't seem to notice that the thing that unites them is some antipathy.
00:15:19.020This is especially true for the libertarians, some antipathy towards gigantic structures per se.
00:15:25.080And so then I would say, with regards to your antithesis between liberalism and conservatives, the conservatives are pointing to the fact that there are intermediary forms of distribution that can be utilized to solve the social problems that you're describing that don't bring with them the associated problem of gigantism.
00:15:43.860And, like, this is a—it's been shocking to me to watch the left, especially in the last six years, ally itself, for example, with pharmaceutical companies, which was something I'd never saw—never thought I would see in my lifetime.
00:15:58.140I mean, for decades, the only gigantic corporations the left was more skeptical of than the fossil fuel companies were the pharmaceutical companies.
00:16:10.080And that all seemed to vanish overnight around the COVID time.
00:16:24.840I would say that the current political landscape we have, I think, is less—I understand the concept of conservatives supporting corporations and liberals supporting, like, large government.
00:16:35.040I think today the divide we're starting to see more and more is more of, like, a populist, anti-populist rise or even, like, an institutional or anti-institutional rise.
00:16:43.880So, for instance, I think conservatives today in the United States are largely characterized with—I would say with populism in that they're supporting, like, certain figures, namely right now Donald Trump, who they think alone can kind of, like, lead them against the corrupt institutions, be them corporate or government.
00:16:59.860I feel like most conservatives today are not as trustful of big corporations as they were back in, like, the Bush era where we would, you know, conservatives would champion, you know, big corporations.
00:17:18.580I mean, that brings us into the issue, too, of whether the left-right divide is actually a reasonable way of construing the current political landscape at all, and I'm not sure it is, but—
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00:19:03.060Right now, it kind of is, but only because so many conservatives are following Trump.
00:19:10.400So, like, your populist, anti-populist thing kind of maps on kind of cleanly to the left and right.
00:19:15.500It doesn't work with progressives, though, or the far left, because they're also anti-large everything.
00:19:20.480So, in a surprising way, on very, very far left people, you might find them having a bit more in common with kind of like a MAGA Trump supporter than like a center left liberal.
00:19:29.800So, for instance, like both of these groups of people on the very far left will be very dovish on foreign policy, probably a little bit more isolationist.
00:19:36.360They're not a big fan of like a ton of immigration or a ton of trade with other countries.
00:19:40.600They might think that there's a lot of institutional capture of both government and corporations.
00:19:44.920So, both all of the MAGA supporters and the far, far left might think that corporations don't have our best interest at heart and the government is corrupt and captured by mobbius.
00:19:53.080Like, yeah, you'll see a lot of overlap there.
00:20:02.120I think that people are largely guided by whatever is kind of satisfying them or making them feel good at the time.
00:20:07.920I think that's a really important thing to understand because people's beliefs will seem to change at random.
00:20:12.760If you're trying to imagine that a belief is coming from some underlying principle or is governed by some internal, you know, like moral or reasonable code or whatever, I think generally there are large social groups and people kind of follow them along from thing to thing, which is why you end up in strange worlds sometimes where, you know, like the position on vaccines and being an anti-vaxxer might have been seen as something, you know, 10 years ago as kind of like a hippie leftist.
00:20:37.380And now maybe it's more like a conservative or it's associated more with like MAGA Trump supporters or whatever.
00:20:42.760I think as a result of how the social groups move around.
00:20:46.060When it comes to the, you mentioned this like gigantism thing.
00:20:49.660That's another thing where I'm not sure if people actually care about gigantism or if they're using it as a proxy for other things that they don't like.
00:21:01.340Because like I could imagine somebody saying that like they don't trust like a large government.
00:21:06.240They think there's too much, you know, prone to tyranny or something like that, but also be supportive of an institution like the Catholic Church, which is literally, you know, one guy who is a direct line to God.
00:21:28.320Sure, but I'm saying like even if you had a local government, like a local, like if you had a state government or a tribe, usually they've got some form of enacting punishment.
00:21:34.320It'll be sometimes more brutal, but they can throw you in jail.
00:21:37.280Conscription hasn't existed in the U.S. since the Vietnam War.
00:23:55.080And that's been especially demonstrated in the radical decrease in rates of poverty since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
00:24:02.160Because we've lifted more people out of poverty in the last four decades than we had in the entire course of human history up to that date.
00:24:08.520And that's not least because the statist interventionist types who argued for a radical state-sponsored redistribution lost the Cold War.
00:24:32.040So, well, so that's an argument, let's say, on the side of free exchange.
00:24:37.720But it's also an argument, a two-fold argument, pointing out how we ameliorate absolute poverty, which should be a concern for leftists, but doesn't seem to be anymore, by the way.
00:24:47.380And also an argument for the maintenance of a necessary inequality.
00:24:52.640Like, I'm not sure that inequality can be decreased beyond a certain degree without that decrease causing other serious problems.
00:25:00.100And we can talk about that, but it's a complicated problem.
00:25:04.260For one point of clarification, when you say leftist, what do you mean by that?
00:25:08.000Well, I was going with your definition.
00:25:11.280Like, essentially, the core idea being something like the central problem being one of relative inequality and distribution of resources, and the central solution to that being something like state-sponsored economic intervention.
00:25:28.000I mean, there's other ways we could define left and right, and we can do that.
00:25:31.520But I'll stick with the one that you brought forward to begin with.
01:43:15.360And so within the confines of a marriage, because we might as well make it concrete,
01:43:19.840there are going to be times when disagreements result in bursts of emotion. And those bursts
01:43:24.240of emotion don't necessarily have to have an instrumental quality, right? It's when the emotion is
01:43:29.840used manipulatively to gain an advantage that's short-term for the person. And then maybe that's at the expense of the other person, or even at the expense of the person who benefits future self, then it starts to tilt into the manipulative-
01:43:44.320And there's a tetrad of traits. So narcissism,
01:43:53.760Narcissism is the desire for unearned social status. That's what you'd gain, for example, if you were
01:43:57.280gossiping and elevating your social status. Machiavellianism, narcissism,
01:44:01.760narcissism, psychopathy, that's predatory parasitism, and those culminate in sadism.
01:44:06.160And that cloud of negative emotion that's released
01:44:09.760in the aftermath of disagreement can be
01:44:13.760tilted in the direction of those traits. And that's when it becomes malevolent. And that's when the problem of force starts to become paramount. Because I think that your fundamental presupposition was both Hobbesian and ill-formed.
01:44:29.200I do not believe that the basis for the civilized polity is force. Now, you're saying that, you know, you can't abjure the use of force entirely. And I would say, unfortunately, that's true.
01:44:39.280But if the policy isn't invitational, if I can't make a case that's powerful enough for you to go there voluntarily, then the policy is flawed. Now, it may be that we have some cases where we can't do better than a flawed policy because we're not smart enough. And maybe the incarceration of criminals with a long-term history of violent offenses is a good example of that. We don't know how to invite those people to play.
01:45:09.280They have a history, generally from the time they're very young children, from the age of two, of not being able to play well with others. And it's a very, very intractable problem.
01:45:20.280There's no evidence in the social science literature at all that hyper-aggressive boys by the age of four can ever be socialized in the course of their life.
01:45:30.280The penological evidence suggests that if you have multiple offenders, your best bet is to keep them in prison until they're 30. And the reason for that is it might be delayed maturation, you know, biologically speaking.
01:45:43.340But most criminals start to burn out at around 27. So it spikes. It's a big spike when puberty hits. And then stability among the hyper-aggressive types.
01:45:54.900So actually what happens is the aggressives at four tend to be aggressive their whole life, and then they decline after 27.
01:46:00.700The normal boys are not aggressive. They spike at puberty and go back down to baseline, right?
01:46:06.900And so you don't really rehabilitate people in prison for obvious reasons. I mean, look at the bloody places.
01:46:12.540There are great schools for crime in large, but if you keep them there until they're old enough, they tend to mature out of that,
01:46:20.460except the worst of them tend to mature out of that predatory, short-term-oriented lifestyle.
01:47:47.740A tit-for—a tit—so there are different types of tit-for-tat systems, right?
01:47:50.740You've got tit-tit-for-tat, you've got tit-for-tat-tat, you've got—there's all sorts of types of systems where maybe you'll let somebody make a mistake one or two times, but you can't have a tit-tit-tit-tit-tit system because then somebody can come in and take advantage of it.
01:47:59.740Yes, which is the problem with the compassionate left, by the way.
01:48:03.740To some extent, sure, it can be. Or a problem with the right that's far too forgiving of Donald Trump.
01:48:07.740But I would say that that tat part, the—you can call it justice. I think justice is a perspective, a force, right?
01:48:14.740Where some people might consider a force to be just the cop that arrests the murderer, and other people might consider that force, that tat, to actually be injustice because the murderer was responding to environmental conditions, blah, blah, blah, or was—
01:48:25.740Yeah, that's a stupid theory, that responding to environmental conditions theory.
01:48:32.740Well, I mean, because essentially that's Rittenhouse's case. Self-defense is responding with violence.
01:48:36.740So if you assume that there's a causal pathway from early childhood abuse to criminality, let's say, which is the test case for environmental determination of the proclivity for the exploitation of others—
01:48:50.740—then it spreads near exponentially in populations. That isn't what happens. So here's the data.
01:48:57.740Most people who abuse their children were abused as children. But most people who are abused as children do not abuse their children. And the reason for that is because if you were abused, there's two lessons you can learn from that. One is identify with the abuser. The other is don't—
01:49:24.740What happens is the proclivity for violence is self—it dampens itself out as a consequence of intergenerational transmission. So the notion that privation is a pathway to criminality, that's not a well-founded formulation. And there are an infinite number of counter examples, and they're crucial.
01:49:44.740Some of the best people I know, and I mean that literally, are people who had childhood so absolutely abysmal that virtually anything they would have done in consequence could have been justified.
01:49:57.740You know, and they chose not to turn into the predators of others. And that was a choice, and often one that caused them to reevaluate themselves right down to the bottom of their soul.
01:50:09.740And so that casual association of relative poverty even with criminality—we know also, we know this too. You take a neighborhood where there's relative poverty, the young men get violent.
01:50:22.740But they don't get violent because they're all hurt and they're victims. They get violent because they use violence to seek social status.
01:50:29.740And so even in that situation, it's not, oh, the poor, poor. It's no wonder they're criminal because they need bread. It's like, sorry, buddy, that's not how it works. The hungry women feeding their children don't become criminals.
01:50:42.740The extraordinarily ambitious young men who feel it's unfair that their pathway to success become violent. And that's 100% well documented and generally by radically left-leaning scholars.
01:50:55.740Sure. I don't disagree with any of that. Wealth inequality in areas is a much better predictor of crime than poverty.
01:51:00.740Right, but it's a very specific form of crime. It's status-seeking crime by young men. Right? Well, but that shows you what the underlying motive is. It's not even redress of the economic inequality.
01:51:12.740It's actually the men striving to become sexually attractive by gaining position in the dominance hierarchy. There's nothing the least bit about it.
01:51:19.740I think you have to be really careful with that assessment, though, because you can say that it's not economically—it's not seeking economic—
01:51:26.740Why do you have to be careful? The biggest predictor of a male—
01:51:29.740Well, because we're assuming that people that commit crime in these types of circumstances are status-seeking and not trying to seek economic remedy.
01:51:38.740But it might be the case, for instance, that in economically prosperous areas, that the men there aren't actually seeking economic prosperity.
01:51:45.740They're also just trying to elevate status, but they do it through economic prosperity. It's potential, right?
01:51:49.740They do it with a longer-term vision in mind. Sure, they're trying to elevate. I wouldn't disagree with that in the least.
01:51:55.740But they do it with a much longer time horizon in mind. And we know this partly because there have been detailed studies of gang members, for example, in Chicago,
01:52:04.740who are trying to ratchet themselves up the economic ladder, but they do it with a short-term orientation.
01:52:09.740Most of them think they're going to be dead by their early 20s. Sure.
01:52:12.740So they're trying to maximize short-term gain.
01:52:15.740It has nothing to do with the redress of economic inequality, except in the most fundamental sense.
01:52:20.740And it is status-driven because they're looking for comparative status—
01:52:23.740Sure, I understand what you're saying. I don't think any human being has baked in a desire to seek economic prosperity.
01:52:29.740I think that that's like a third-order thing that we look for.
01:52:32.740And fundamentally, it's probably more like safety, security for ourselves, and then status-seeking for other things.
01:52:37.740I think that changes when you have children.
01:52:39.740Um, well, I mean the safety and security would extend to your children.
01:52:41.740Because your status is irrelevant, or starts to become irrelevant at that point.
01:52:44.740I mean, depending on how you view your status, right?
01:52:46.740You can't do that every time we have a discussion.
01:52:51.740Well, I'm just saying, for instance, one of the important things for my child is to be able to send my child to a good school.
01:52:55.740I need to have an elevated status, right? I need to be able to buy a house at the right school district, or I need to be able to pay the education.
01:53:00.740Right, but you're not telling me, I hope, that the driving factor behind your desire to care for your children is an elevation in your status.
01:53:09.740No, but I'm saying that the elevation of status might be what allows you to take care of children.
01:53:13.740So, for instance, one of the biggest predictors of getting married is already achieving—
01:53:44.740When you're the titter, it's just retribution.
01:53:45.740No, no, no, I don't think that's true either.
01:53:47.740Look, if you read Crime and Punishment, for example, one of the things you see that emerges when Raskolnikov gets away with murder, and it's a brutal murder, and he gets away with it, it's completely clear, and he has a justification for it.
01:53:59.740And what happens as a consequence is that that disturbs his own relationship with himself so profoundly that he can't stand it, such that when a just punishment is finally meted out to him, it's a relief.
01:54:14.740And that is—like, there isn't anything more terrifying—this is why Crime and Punishment is such a great novel—there isn't anything more terrifying than breaking a moral rule that you thought you had the ability to break and finding out that you're somewhere now that you really don't want to be.
01:54:27.740And then that, you know, there's nothing worse in your own life than waiting for the other shoe to drop.
01:54:34.740If you've transgressed against a moral rule and now you're an outsider because of that, you live in no man's land, the fact that you have just retribution coming to you, that can be a precondition for your atonement and your integration back into society.
01:54:47.740But it's probably important to note that, depending on the system you exist in, those moral transgressions just aren't, right?
01:54:53.740So to take it back to—I'll use your leftist example—you might consider a threat of force for somebody to get a vaccine to be a highly immoral thing that might be a transgression against some fundamental moral thing.
01:55:04.740But a person on the left might think that they're actually satisfying their moral requirement to society by doing so.
01:55:08.740Much the same as a child soldier or—or not—I won't use child soldier—but maybe an older person that's committing intifada or some kind of Islamic terrorist thinks that they're fulfilling some moral calling as well.
01:55:17.740No doubt. No doubt that that's the case. That's why I was focusing in on the use of force is that I think it's a rule of—a good rule of thumb policy that if you have to implement your goddamn scheme with force, then there's something wrong with the way it's formulated.
01:55:31.740Does it bother that every religious— There's no reason we could have used a pure invitational strategy to distribute the vaccine.
01:55:37.740It would have been much more effective. And it was bad policy, rushed. We're in an emergency. We have to use force.
01:55:43.740It's like, no. No, you weren't. It wasn't the kind of emergency that justified force, not least because behavioral psychologists have known for decades that force is actually not a very effective motivator.
01:55:54.740It produces a vicious kickback. So, you know, one of the things—this is going to happen for sure, you know, is that the net deaths from people stopping using valid vaccines as a consequence of general skepticism about vaccination is going to cause, in my estimation, over any reasonable amount of time, far more deaths than COVID itself caused.
01:56:16.740You violate people's trust in the public health system at your great peril. And you do that by using force. And we did that.
01:56:23.740And so you can see already that there's hordes of people who are vaccine skeptic, this generalized skepticism that, to some degree, you were rightly decrying.
01:56:32.740It spreads like wildfire. And no wonder, because if you make me do something, I'm going to be a little skeptical of you for a long time.
01:56:39.740You know, this conversation, we're here voluntarily. Like, we're trying to hash things out, and in good faith, you know. But neither of us compelled the other to come here, and neither of us are compelled to continue.
01:56:50.740And so that makes it a fair game. And a fair game is something that everyone can be invited to. And I suppose that's something that's neither right nor left, you know, hopefully, right? Something we could conceivably agree on.
01:57:01.740And I also think that I don't have any illusions about the fact that there are people on the right who would use power to impose what they believe to be their core, their core, what, their core, the core, what would you say? Their core idol.
01:57:19.740Of course, the temptation to use force is rightly pointed to by the leftists who insist that power is the basis for everything.
01:57:29.740It isn't the basis for everything. That's wrong. It's really wrong. But it's a severe enough impediment to progress forward that we have to be very careful about it.
01:57:38.740So, look, we have to stop. I want to know if there's anything else you'd like to say before we stop, because unfortunately, we have to stop rather abruptly.
01:57:49.740I think, yeah, I feel like we got pretty far into this.
01:57:54.740What are you trying to accomplish? Let's stop with that. We found out a little bit about who you are.
01:58:00.740I mean, you formulated your proclivity in terms of, to some degree, in terms of delight in argumentation or facility at it, which you certainly have.
01:58:12.740The danger in that, of course, is that you can be oriented to win arguments rather than to pursue the truth.
01:58:19.740And that's the danger of having that facility for argumentation.
01:58:32.740No, I feel like I think debate or argumentation is good because it forces two sides to make their ideas somewhat commensurate to the other.
01:58:40.740If two people are having a conversation, they have to be able to communicate said ideas to the other person.
01:58:44.740Otherwise, it's just a screaming match.
01:58:46.740And I think there is a good, for the sake of, like, just being bipartisan or having a collection of people in a certain area and having different people together, just that in and of itself without anything else happening, I think produces a good, at least for a democratic society.
01:59:00.740For instance, like, I would agree that school, maybe not faculty, but administrators, are very, very, very, very, very far left today.
01:59:09.740I don't have to talk to you about this, obviously.
01:59:11.740But I think part of the responsibility to that, I think, rests at the feet of conservatives who, instead of maintaining participation in the system, decide that they're going to throw their hands up and disengage.
01:59:27.740But I think that rather than accepting being forced out, or rather than encouraging other people to disengage, the engagement has to happen.
01:59:35.740It can't be a, I'm losing faith in the system, so all of us are going to go here and do our thing.
01:59:40.740It has to be like, no, we're going to be here in these conversations, whether you like it or not, because in a democracy, sometimes the guy you don't like wins.
01:59:45.740Sometimes the policy that you don't like is enforced.
01:59:47.740Sometimes a guy you don't like is somebody you have to share an office or a classroom with.
01:59:52.740And I'm worried that, like, the internet is driving people into these, like, very homogenous but very polar rice groups.
01:59:58.740The data on that, by the way, aren't clear.
02:00:00.740Like, whatever's driving polarization doesn't seem to be as tightly related to the creation of those internal bubbles as you might think.
02:00:08.740Like, I've looked at a number of studies that have investigated to see whether people are being driven into homogenized information bubbles.
02:00:16.740And it isn't obvious that that's the case directly, although the polarization that you're pointing to, that you're concerned about, that seems to be clearly happening.
02:00:25.740So, and why that is, well, that's a matter of, you know, intense speculation.
02:00:30.740I feel like the homogeneity, I feel like it's not so much, this is not research-based at all, just a total feeling.
02:00:38.740But the feelings that I have is it's not necessarily that homogeneity has increased.
02:00:42.740It's that homogeneity has increased as a byproduct of the bubbles becoming larger.
02:00:46.740So, for instance, it might be that I'm from Omaha, Nebraska.
02:00:49.740It's a town in, or city, really, in Nebraska, right?
02:00:52.740It might have been that 50 years ago, there are bubbles in living in Omaha, and there are different bubbles for living in Lincoln.
02:00:59.740And there might be bubbles in Toronto, or neighborhoods in Toronto, or there might be bubbles in Vancouver.
02:01:04.740But now, as the internet exists and things become more internationalized, these bubbles are, it's not just a bubble that exists in these cities.
02:01:11.740Now the bubbles have come together, and as a result of them coming together-
02:01:13.740Yeah, well, that's another gigantism problem.
02:01:16.740Or a globalization problem or a communication problem.
02:01:18.740But you run into this issue where somebody might be in a particular city or state and have a really strong opinion about what AOC says, but they don't know anything about their local political scene.
02:01:26.740And I think that that's an issue because the bubbles have gotten so large, and they're encompassing so many people now, and you're expected to have, like, a similar set of beliefs between all of these different people now that might live in totally different places.
02:01:37.740That's, I think, a big issue we're running into.
02:01:39.740Yeah, well, that could be—we'll close with this, I think—that might be one of the unintended consequences of hyperconnectivity, right?
02:01:47.740Is that we're driving levels of connectivity that get rigid and that we also can't tolerate.
02:02:24.740And talking can be very painful, because a conversation can kill one of your cherished beliefs, and you will suffer for that, although maybe it'll also help you.