#1032 - Joshua Citarella - The Dark Subcultures of Online Politics

28:32running for office has not been very successful, and I'm pretty negative on that. Okay, so radical online communities or just online communities in general can shape policy. It's not just aesthetics. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. That is interesting. I knew about the Destiny thing. Destiny's been on the show a bunch. You mentioned the F word, or the N word, I guess, Nick Fuentes.

29:02It seems to me, I mean, Tucker Carlson did a breakdown with someone's son. Like, first off, had Nick on and then had a conversation. With someone's son? Explaining, yeah, fuck, I can't remember who it was. God damn it. Somebody's son came on, young guy, son of a politician-y type, cultural commentator person, to explain why Nick Fuentes is popular and has impact among young people or whatever. um if i was to think about what is sort of internet first meme adjacent yeah like radical shit posty subculture that appears to be in the ascendancy he would be the first person that i would think of um what have you come to he must be a pretty canonical example given sort of what you've been tracking over the last few years or yeah yeah i wrote uh i think it was in 2020 i measured some metrics of the top two streamers on right and left, which were at the time Hassan Piker and Nick Fuentes on their respective platforms and how many monthly active users Twitch versus, I forget if he was on Cozy or Odyssey or whatever one of these things he was, but as per proportionately for the monthly active users of that platform, Fuentes was outperforming even Piker at that point.

30:25And so that to me, on such a small platform that was able to get such an enormous number of proportionate views, that demonstrated like, oh, wow, there's a lot of influence in here. I think maybe important to backtrack a little bit of the history is that his particular rise as like the avatar of like the young far right also has to deal with what was on the right described as the optics debate, which was in the fallout of, we're going way back here, but the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where a lot of people were just plainly put off by the literal NSM, National Socialist movement, of people walking around with swastikas and shields.

31:06That is pretty grotesque to an American audience, and there's a tolerance for racism and stuff like that, but when you start to invoke pagan iconography and like European, like Americans are, we're fucking cowboys, you know, they get turned off by that. And so the optics debate, this kind of infraright dispute was about how do we further the far right political project, but not get trapped in the kind of campy LARPy aesthetics of like these guys dressing up as medieval knights with pagan iconography. It's giving me a little bit of the mirroring that some splinter factions of the less insane left seem to be looking at now in the wake of look at how much of an ongoing identity politics was Kamala is for they them Trump is for you was the most effective ad of the 2024 campaign we need to create some daylight in between ourselves and that I think that might be blowing with the wind a little bit more than a principle-based approach this seems to be some people that were sort of they had a bit of a revulsion response so like principle ethical issue with it.

32:13But also, if you look around and you go, anyone else find this okay? No, they don't seem to. You'll blow with the wind a little too. But I'm seeing a little, at least somewhat of a symmetry between those two situations. Yeah. I mean, any political group of, you know, small to large is going to have to police and moderate itself about like, all right, well, what are we putting out? Can anybody from this group say anything, right? Is there some form of hierarchy, discipline or moderation? Like, what do we as a group stand for? Can any single individual just say, okay, yeah, we're all about this now?

32:45I guess the primary difference that I would split hairs over here is that the far right group at that time is like small, it's probably in the hundreds to thousands, whereas the kind of woke in for left dispute now is like in the scale of millions, where a lot of people just in the general election, I think we're really turned off by some of that militant activist rhetoric that has been extremely damaging to the social democratic cause, particularly in the U.S. But the U.S. kind of exports this now, right? Like everybody has started talking like American college campuses, which is pretty wild.

33:19Okay, so you've got Charlottesville, fallout, splinter factions. How does that lead to what we're seeing currently with Nick Fontes? I mean, I think the Israel's genocide and Gaza has really just gassed up his social media presence, as it has done for a lot of dissident commenters all over the political spectrum. You also didn't have anyone, I think, step into the forefront that was openly antagonistic to the political establishment and the inheritor of the internet zeitgeist that had been kind of bubbling up since basically Gamergate in like 2013-ish, right? So you have like, at that point, good five years of people who have become politicized and are looking for an avatar.

34:07Yeah. And then it's just kind of like there's a hoovering effect, right, of people who are in a similar industry. And let's say you have like four competitors, media is going to name one person, opportunities are going to be given to one person. And there's a kind of like redundancy, you know, if they're around a similar size. And so one person kind of tends to win. And then And there's just this kind of like avalanche momentum that like, oh, that person continues to grow. So there were other competitors in that field. One of them is now addicted to opioids. I saw on Twitter the other day. So he's not important anymore.

34:42So I wouldn't name him. But there were other people that could have gotten him. I mean, we would have seen, had it have been only a few years earlier, you would have seen someone like Milo Yiannopoulos. Would have probably been that. But I guess his cancellation plus his. As long as their primary avatar is a gay man, that's probably what they need. Right, that's true. Who else? Again, all of this has been foreplay for me to get to the real point, which is if Nick is my, I'm like a brown belt normie, right? So I'm just about on the cusp of understanding what's happening in some sort of corners of the internet.

35:20But I'm speaking to somebody who sort of lives and breathes in the cobwebs. Yeah, yeah. Who are some of the most politically influential people on the internet that most normies wouldn't know about? Nick being an example of someone I think that's broken through way too much to be said most normies would not know about. Once you've been on Tucker Carlson and done 5 million plays, I think that you can class yourself pretty well. New York Times writes about him too. Yeah. So I'm interested in who, not necessarily the new Nick, But who are the guys and girls that are really politically influential online that most people wouldn't know about?

35:59Yeah, yeah. Okay. So a few things will kind of like work our way down as we talk about scale here. Let's go. Yeah. I would say Yarvin was a huge one, you know, blogging in like the 2010s. That was niche intellectual commentary, which now has a direct philosophical link to some aspect of the administration. who's to say whether they're following his advice or how much J.D. Vance takes this into his political program. But there's a kind of creeping influence from these things. I would say that a person who immediately comes to mind as being quietly influential is a Twitter account, Raw Egg Nationalist, actually.

36:39I think he's basically propagated a lot of memes that have been quietly influential and like kind of seeped through. You hear them bubble up a little bit on the podcast, podcasting circuit, but he himself is not so much of a media figure. He's kind of just a poster. Yeah, he comes to mind as an example. Like, I don't know what turning point in the internet occurred where I missed it, but Bronze Age pervert, raw egg nationalist, Alpaca Aurelius, although he's more based in the sort of health and fitness side of this. Yeah, the Anon, pseudo-Anon, like, sort of poster scenario. That's interesting that that's broken through.

37:23It was quietly influential for a long time. Yeah. But now you see, like, I mean, mainstream people are talking about seed oils. That is true. That is true indeed. You've kept on using the word meme. Are you talking about it in the Richard Dawkins sense? Or are you talking about it in the made it on Tumblr sense? Yeah, so this is like the slippage, right? It's like any academic conversation that you have about memes, it's like, are we talking about square JPEGs? Or are we talking about like a transmittable unit of information or patterns and stories that humans repeat? and I think you kind of have to resort to the Dawkins definition where one way of instantiating it is very transmittable JPEGs and PNGs and what have you but then there's also vertical videos.

38:14It's basically any transmittable narrative and as silly as that may sound, that is basically the way after having done many extensive interviews of young people who are politicized but then also adults, It's like we basically just carry these stories that either a professor told us or our dad told us or like we're some amalgamation of all of these little tidbits of narrative that we piece together into an ideological view of the world. So, yeah, the study of memes looks really silly because the Internet is hilarious and silly. But it is actually this kind of deep investigation into like how humans piece together a worldview.

38:54We do that. We do that through narratives. Because if you're ever crunching enormous amounts of data to look at the economy or look at these big abstract patterns, it doesn't really make sense until you tell a short story about it. This is how it's coming to contact with reality. It's almost a layer of abstraction because you need to exclude, this is going to get very silly and granular for a second, but there's a general arc you can draw through the data. right purely quantitative data is going to be spread over this grid and then there's outliers that to draw a coherent synopsis or executive summary of you have to exclude certain data points and so it's um yeah maybe less information but makes it more digestible that's interesting how much of this is shit posting versus being like actually earnest you know pose law keeps on getting more and more poey yeah yeah how much is shit posting i think well i think it changed because one of the things that drew me in many years ago was that this was very hilarious and people didn't mean it and then now you see this kind of negative polarization and doubling down where a lot of people have kind of irony poisoned themselves in one direction or another What's that?

40:16Irony poisoning is when you float something that is a joke and then you say, this is not what I really believe, but I'm posting it to like piss off the libs or something like that. And then a few years later, you kind of like work your way up to it and you're like, actually, yeah, this is what I believe. Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance. But most people have no idea where those are or what to do if something's off.

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41:54That's not the same that's true when trying to learn Italian or something. Like you suck at Italian now and you will get better at Italian in six months time. You don't briefly become you in six months time when learning Italian to then revert back to how shit you were yesterday plus 1%. And this is kind of like an equivalent of that, which is I'm going to project out this thing, which isn't where I am now, or maybe it's like leaky. I guess we're not fully transparent to ourselves. And then you end up arriving at that destination in future, either through fluke or predestination. I don't know.

42:31You know, I talked to Dr. Mike on an episode a few months back, and we something kind of slipped out in the podcast and it was a joke but it has kind of stuck with me so that you can't redistribute the gains and that it is one of the only the only experiences in your life where you can put in work and gain the full benefit of it to yourself i mean if you're maybe you're a small business owner like you can feel that all the time but most people are not in that position and so it is like one of the rare experiences of putting in hard work and then getting all of the benefits and that is kind of this you know self uh you know restoring mechanism that keeps you coming back the one-to-one relationship of input versus reward is something that is is real important i played a sport for my entire teenage years i was obsessed with the game of cricket i played at a very high level and it took me until i was probably 25 to make the link that if i practice more and more diligently and more frequently i get better outcomes i just hadn't made that link i practice was just something that i did for fun and i was like working on stuff or whatever but i hadn't made the oh units of effort in equals units of output out like isn't that great like wouldn't that be lovely um okay so shitposting versus is being honest you mentioned that some people test the uh parentheses of uh the overton window uh and that presumably is like if you're pushing that is that really where your opinion lies or are you just playing with words and images to see what sort of a reaction occurs so how do you work out whether or not somebody is being earnest and how do you work out what this is going to form itself into over time?

44:25So there's a few different strategies at play here. And I've interviewed some people who are progressive, liberal in every walk of life, in their job, in their marriage, and how they move through the world. And then they run this anonymous, repulsive shitposting account that says all sorts of things that they don't even believe, but they know it upsets people. And so that thing exists. These are not fringe cases. It's kind of common occurrence. And there's some kind of psychological venting mechanism at work there. I think most of those people don't believe these things. Or they at least keep it quarantined in a certain way that it doesn't impact their political activity.

45:09The other part of this is that in a media environment or in a political environment that is constrained or gatekept in some way, irony is a great way of kind of testing the fences for changes that kind of need to happen, right? So there's a lot of political growth. I think this is one of the reasons why comedy has kind of been exempt from a lot of the speech policing that was so prevalent among liberal circles for a while. Because it was one of the only safe places, ironically, it's a safe space, in which you could discuss these things, you could transgress, you could break the rules, right? So, like, that is basically a social function of art, is to, like, break society's rules to transgress and then to find out why they were there in the first place and the rules that we should do away with.

46:00But I think the kind of final thing to throw in here is that the media environment that we have now is that people can put out certain opinions that they may or may not believe and entertain different non-overlapping conversations. conversations so it can get really really messy where um you know i'll post something that's you know ridiculous and conspiratorial and um someone will mention like oh this is terrible how could you post such a thing i'd be like yeah yeah i only meant it as a joke and then you send me a dm and you're like no bro i'm on the same page and i'm like yeah me too oh and so there's this kind of weird split that people can have with their politics in like kind of secret uh chambers of conversation and eventually those things can slowly come out so yeah that that ability to like test things spurs the transformation i mean man pose lore is very fucking poey now uh how do you know that young people always blow off steam right whether it was when we were going to school and somebody just writing something reprehensible yeah you know scoring it with a compass on the underside of the desk or something like that is this markedly different Is there like more meaning behind this?

47:13I don't want to say that your entire body of work is you looking at compass etchings on the underside of a desk. It's not dissimilar. A good amount of it will be. And you're sort of trawling through this stuff, looking for what this is an important indication of what's going to come next. Yeah. And just trying to work out, okay, well, how do you decipher between those two? Yeah, I mean, at risk of being crude, to a lot of this early internet activity is people drawing dicks and Sharpie in the school bathroom. And a lot of the arguments that I would have with mainstream journalists at the early years, they would take something as being like, this is definitive proof that this young person holds reprehensible views about subject X, Y, or Z.

47:57And I would have to tell them, this kid is 15, they're drawing dicks and Sharpie in the school bathroom. Let him. Yeah, I think the other thing, that is kind of difficult to deal with now is that tracing those early inklings of when a political transformation was going to happen, the ones that were important to point out and to talk about and to study, basically the people who were institutional gatekeepers had their own intellectual biases that they would not look at those things. And so if you were looking at the work of a young person, the work. I mean, like the memes that they produce. Excuse me.

48:36I come from the art world, so I'm talking about the oeuvre of this 15-year-old shitposter. But if you look at the insights that they were trying to relay, and that included saying like, the liberal democratic model is over, people who worked in mainstream journalistic institutions would be like, that's not important. Clearly, this is, you know, the establishment consensus, and those things are beyond the pale. So they had like, all the alarms raised around things that were insignificant, and were unable to pay attention to the things that were really important at that time. That's fascinating.

49:06What are then the ideologies that are in ascendancy that aren't neo-anarcho-capitalist monochistic, like fucking paganism or whatever it is? What are the ones I mentioned who are some of the people that are maybe sort of in the ascendancy? What are some of the ideas that you think are going to be important over the next few years? I mean, I think we're in a period of productive growth on the left right now where a lot of the militant activist rhetoric has been popularly rejected. And so whatever kind of rise there is of this new social democratic movement is organizing itself in a way that I think is broadly appealing to a lot of people.

49:54And it needs to win their votes in a democratic society. the thing that I'm interested in and I think is less commonly discussed is that in the heyday of the social democratic period let's say you know post-war up until the mid-70s kind of the golden age of liberalism right like people were a lot more comfortable then as compared to the you know declining material status of gen x millennials and now z there weren't things like the internet or crypto or, you know, iterations of stateless capital and a kind of transgressing of borders where the economy is now global, international and immaterial.

50:35So it's a lot more difficult and weird to build those economic models in a world that is completely scattered and patchworked and kind of crisscrossed around the globe. Yeah, so I see basically, there's a rise of a few different factions, but the meeting of a few of them is this kind of, you know, network state exitarian impulse on the right and where that meets with the kind of rides of a renewed social democratic state. And I basically think that that is the meaningful conflict of our time right now. That's interesting. People love to talk about how the left got lost. What's your perspective on that?

51:17I've asked people this question of like, when did it get lost, right? Was it, because they'll give you different answers too. And actually where they pick the answer is important. I think it got somewhat lost in 1968 where we had incredibly privileged boomers who did a summer job and then bought a home and basically, you know, retired at age 35. Yeah. And then really, I think what started to happen in the universities in the 90s is that there was this kind of turn away from the class conflict, from questions of trade unionism, from wages and all of the material concerns that had constituted discourse on the left towards this identity politics stuff, which is, you know, definitionally marginal, but then also was coded in this elite academic rhetoric that was basically used to scare off people who hadn't spent a quarter of their lives in fancy universities.

52:18So the rebuilding work is quite significant, what needs to happen. It's probably a generational project. I don't think it resolves itself overnight because it didn't get that way overnight. But we basically have a lot of intellectual baggage to bring the most popular, in an electoral sense, the most popular policies in the world, to meet any electoral coalition that could enact them, right? So how you get from one to the other is a long time of discipline, organization. I think when at least most normal people consider sort of radicalization, they think about far right, people that are armed, Charlottesville almost certainly would come up as one of those examples and then there was almost a um chicken and egg like you did x so we're going to do y calling out of look at antifa look at black block look at sort of the way that people behave through blm riots protests etc uh given that you've done your deep dives just how sort of dark does the left go i think we have a pretty good it's one of you know jordan Peterson's famous questions, which is we understand when the right has gone too far.

53:38Sort of easy for us to define that. We have kind of some canonical examples of that. What have you learned about sort of the darker, more extreme sides of the left, just beyond like boys and girls locker rooms and stuff like that? Yeah, I mean, I often get a question like this about the right. And I think people think of me as being like researcher for right-wing pipelines and stuff like this. But the most extensive thing that I wrote was about people on the left getting radicalized into what I think are really bad ideas and kind of rejecting general humanist values. And so the eco-extremism, I think, is probably the most likely end point for people who have not only concluded that there's no possibility for utopia revolution reform basically any chance to improve the world you're standing in it all these types of things but that also we've been on this slow trajectory since the rise of agriculture since the industrial revolution that we need to like do away with organized society whatsoever they bring on these kind of anti-natalist politics this kind of um the supremacy of earth, the planet, and nature over human beings.

54:55There was a kind of dispute in the early era of neoliberalism with Malthus, who hypothesized that there would be an overgrowth of the peasantry and the proletariats and all of the underlings who were not the ruling class of society. And he genuinely argued that we were going to run out of food and people would starve to death. and so there's a kind of rise of neo-Malthusian politics where people see the kind of scarcity and the limited carbon budget and so on and so forth and they, similar to Malthus in like the 1700s, say well the solution is to get rid of a lot of people. Right, okay, so sort of anti-natalist approach to this.

55:39Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Kind of political nihilism. So at least one of the more extreme sides of this has to do with the environment. It has to do with the future of the world from an environmental perspective. For any young person, I think that's a very serious consideration. And those used to be politics that were impossible to discuss on the right. But now environmentalism on the right is a rising current. Is that right? Is it correct? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a kind of rising understanding that the influx of climate refugees is going to be one of the main thing that like American nationalists or European nationalists are going to be dealing with.

56:31Right, okay. We're interested in climate as soon as climate comes into contact with immigration. Exactly, exactly. Right, that's interesting. Isn't it funny how, I don't think that I would have predicted, again, I'm completely an idiot in most of this stuff, but how horseshoe-y the horseshoe has got over the last few years. anti-big pharma vaccines stuff like that I think that was a surprise for people that was one of the first ones that I noticed the Middle East conflict you guys could not be further apart and yet you're right next to each other somehow you guys are not you have nothing to agree on except for the thing that you both find to be the most important thing in the world it's just it's real interesting to me the this is now it's really pretty instances.

57:19There goes no wow to use as under posture... there goes no say sure, but these are there many steps here... you got to their pointy and then you follow modular nature, perhaps, of people's beliefs. got this thing and it sort of slots in here and I arrived at it from one direction and you arrived at it from a completely other direction but I do find that very interesting so having done so many of these interviews with young people who are looking at let's just say counter narratives right like things from the left right up down sideways all over they will be genuinely sympathetic to a lot of explanations, so long as they are not at the establishment center.

57:55And I think that's very hard for people. What does that mean? As long as you are not part of the general bipartisan consensus, the neoliberal hegemony, for lack of a better term, how most people have thought about politics who are in, you know, government or positions of the ruling elite. If you're giving them a counter narrative from either the right or the left, a lot of people will listen to both and they'll find points of truth. I think a great example of this is Breaking Points, the news show. I love Crystal. Crystal and Sager are fantastic. And them having a crossover audience should not exist.

58:33And yet it does. And it's not just a niche slice of the pie. This is a top 10 politics podcast. So the degree to which most people in a democratic society are open to these explanations from either right or left is, I think, not insubstantial. And basically, the problem that we've been troubleshooting is that our political mechanisms, the people who are in office, have been able to insulate themselves from the democratic will. And then you get these surprising election results where somebody who is, you know, we just had Mamdani elected in New York City, and I was slicing through the numbers, and this enormous shift of young men towards Trump in 2024, Momdani has a plus 40 margin with men 18 to 29.

59:19So there is a non-insignificant portion of the population that voted for Trump in 2024 and Momdani in 2025. Wow. Those people exist. That's so crazy. And so they're open. They're open to a lot of ideas. Thread the needle of that Venn diagram for me. Anybody who represents the Clinton consensus, let's say, the establishment status quo, those people cannot be trusted because they have overseen 40 years of downward mobility for Americans. And I'm open to anybody who tells me they're going to change it. So anti-establishmentarianism over specifically right or left. in other news you've probably heard me talk about element before and that's because i am frankly dependent on it uh and it's how i've started my day every single morning this is the best tasting hydration drink on the market you might think why do i need to be more hydrated because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water it's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids each grab and go stick pack is a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium it's got no sugar coloring artificial ingredients or any other junk.

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1:00:57Plus they offer free shipping in the US. Right now you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Right. That's so interesting. Again, like the horseshoe, dude, like how the fuck, and that's one person, right? That's one guy jumping from one side of the horseshoe to the other. Um, well, so a lot of people in my corner, of the political spectrum would say that that's a problem and we need to get the right-wing media stuff out of their media diet, out of their news feed and whatever.

1:01:34And I've made the very unpopular argument for like almost a decade now that actually this represents an opportunity to build the coalition that will win the policies that you want, right? Because it allows you to absorb more people than just already kind of agree with you but might not quite agree with you. You actually get to take from the other side. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. How do we get a single payer, you know, national health service in the United States? Are we going to do that with a minority of votes of people who are all ideologically on the same very narrow page? No, we're going to need an overwhelmingly broad coalition.

1:02:08A lot of those people now are Trump voters or Marjorie Taylor Greene voters, you know, they're ready to just no longer. Yeah. But they're ready to dissent from the status quo. And they need to be won over. They need to be persuaded. Yeah, and not lambasted or shamed into sort of changing their beliefs because they're insufficiently pure or well-educated or understanding of this particular thing. Like people, it's much easy to just align the incentives. And I think if you have someone like Mamdani that comes in and says, looks like you're being screwed over. I felt screwed over. He speaks to me because that was exactly what Trump said.

1:02:48Just again, the two people arrive, it's a much better example than my fucking vaccine one. Two people arriving at very similar sort of sounding rhetoric from the complete opposite sides of the spectrum. So I guess if you were to think about like the mean president would be Trump, right? I saw a video the other day. I saw a screen recording. It was on Sam Harris' show. Of the White House. The White House website tracking the development of the West Wing or something. And in it is Clinton getting a blowjob and Hunter Biden doing crack. On the official White House website. Oh yeah, they do. They have all these elaborate graphically designed things as well.

1:03:35We got to know. I mean, at the end of this administration, like who is the, you know, department of posting over there, right? Because they have to be employing graphic designers. I'd love to employ that person to point them in a different direction. Yeah. I mean, they're posting a lot of material. It's hyper literate in all of the aesthetics. Like they made these kind of, you know, snappy videos and shit like that. So there's somebody over there who's a very talented poster. Trump himself is maybe one of the greatest posters of all time. I think the power of that is actually very underestimated.

1:04:06Well, that was the reason that I said it, that you have somebody who is maybe the meme president. Has the internet leet speak being shown by the guy that has the most power, has that legitimized or galvanized the communities that you guys are seeing? more? I have to assume it would do. The last few years has lent a lot of credibility and importance to these things that were maybe casually toyed with before, often dismissed. I'm trying to think if there are people who are now organizing themselves with that in mind. There have been targeted meme campaigns a few years ago, like something called a baking kit, for example, which is a zip file that gives you transparent PNGs that you can drag and drop into different meme formats.

1:05:05Andrew Yang was an example of this where you'd get a discord of like 100 to 1000 people and be like, all right, today we're making memes about X topic, and then they flood the internet with it. Those things exist. I wouldn't be surprised if they're happening now. But I think, you know, if the actual government is doing it, the seat of power. Yeah, it's a little bit different. So we have this meeting between Mamdani and Trump. And I think a lot of politics feels like kayfabe, right? It's this playing of the game, the pretending of the pantomime as the real. But for a moment, we saw kind of maybe because Trump was in a good mood and that did seem a little disarming that day, like, you know, not taking things so personally.

1:05:54we saw kind of the real push the kayfabe to one side. It's okay, you can call me a fascist, I can call you a communist, it doesn't matter. But to do that, they will go back to within the space of a week saying that each other is the biggest threat to democracy or the future of America. But at the time, they're almost able to break the fourth wall and call out what the meta is that sits above it all. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I just thought that was so interesting to see the game break briefly before our eyes. And then you do know that within the space of two weeks, it's going to be, he's the biggest threat.

1:06:37Yeah, I couldn't really wrap my head around. Maybe you've got a theory about this, but I was like, I expected some kind of like, you know, big clash and sparks. Zelensky style. Yeah, yeah. And then they did the exact opposite. There's got to be some brilliant art of the deal strategy or just fucking up people's expectations. I don't know. There must be a name for this, but do not attribute to pre-planned genius that which can be explained by a good night's sleep. I woke up on the right side of the bed that day. I was feeling pre-regulated. This thing happened, and I just thought, you know what?

1:07:15It's okay. And that's on both sides, and it becomes recursive as well. You've been in the room. Well, I learned this wonderful idea a couple of weeks ago called vagal authority. Vagal? Vagal authority. Like the nerve. Vagus nerve. Okay. So vagal authority describes in any room that somebody walked into or any interaction that somebody's having, one person's nervous system is dictating the rats. So you walk into a room, you're calm, somebody else gets angry. Do you get angry too? Do you follow their authority, their vagal authority, or does your calmness seep into them? The wonderful idea that you have so much spare regulation in your system that other people can almost borrow it from you.

1:07:59That you're able to, and this isn't always good, right? You have so much spare anger in your system that you can encourage people to be angry. You have so much spare excitement or agitation in your system, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't know which direction the authority was coming from in the sort of Mamdani-Trump interaction. I'm not saying that this is Trump, you know, like dictating the nervous system of the room. But it was interesting. And I just get the sense that maybe the guys were both, oh, you know, what's the fucking point of shouting and hooting and hollering? And also, you don't look silly.

1:08:33You don't look petty. There will be a lot of gamesmanship in there. Yeah. Yeah. But a good bit of it. Yeah. I think Crystal said that he likes a winner. Oh, that's a great point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got to respect him, man. Got first place. Yeah. I mean, it was what somebody write it as. They were just two guys. I don't know whether they're from the Bronx, but wherever they're from, like they're just two guys from New York just shooting the shit. I didn't think of that, but yeah, yeah. There's two guys from New York just shooting the shit. I mean, it seems like there's a big crossover that happens to like both of them.

1:09:05So yeah, I think there's a lot of potential in there. I've heard you say that young people are highly ideological and politically ineffective sometimes. sometimes uh that sounds like something i would say yeah greta regularly in the news would she be an example of somebody highly ideological and politically uh at least attention grabbing you know i i didn't follow her so it was a comparison that was made very early on because i wrote about all these kids that were super concerned about climate change and she came out right around the same time oh wow she was like it was like the fucking hunger games yeah eco people and she she won well she was basically if you were talking about this topic she was the pop culture association of a young person you know climate activist um i think she has gotten uh much more like properly politicized where i think you know a few years ago like amber lee frost uh previous guest in the podcast um she makes this great point in her book that we often look to young people for political solutions.

1:10:14And if you would approach that in any other context, like in a job environment, in a university, it's like, wait, these are the people who know the least. Why are we putting the people who have the least experience in charge of the most important job in the world? What a wonderful idea. And so, yeah, I don't hold it against her that the early stuff was like a little bit silly and activist-y, But she does seem to be, to her clear material detriment, very committed to the causes she's involved in now. So she's kind of won me over. She did dye the rivers of Venice green this week. I'm not sure you saw that.

1:10:50I didn't see that yet. Yeah. Why are they green? To protest Europe's lack of removal of carbon-based fuels, fossil fuels. so she was in Venice and poured you would love it it was performance art they had these people I mean it probably looks pretty good yeah well that looked good and then there were all of these people dressed like geishas they represent something I don't know what is this like a Extinction Rebellion production type thing correct yeah there was music and they were sort of walking and doing this yeah putting their hands back and forth doing that and they were all they were draped they had the white faces the masks and stuff she wasn't one of those she was on the sideline She wasn't trusted to be one of the performers.

1:11:37But yeah, they dumped 10 rivers around Italy. Wow. Venice being the sort of real pinnacle example. Why isn't it like red with blood? Why is it green? I don't know. It was apparently eco-friendly, but they got a 48-hour ban and$170 fine. $170. That's very affordable. I do it every day. It's a cost of doing business. Do you know what I mean? I should say I'm a little, I haven't seen this particular example, but I'm pretty negative on climate activists like doing these stones and destroying artworks. The roads. Well, I imagine that that must be soup over a Van Gogh. Huge controversy in the art world.

1:12:21I mean, you take climate as a very serious issue, but like these are public goods, right? Like we should not celebrate people. And obviously it's behind glass. It's not damaged and whatever. but like we should not celebrate people destroying something that is like held in the public's trust and is available to people. Like this is something that we all have a shared history. Even the sacredness of it, right? Regardless of whether or not there's real damage done. There is an essence of this thing. It's like spitting in the face of public treasure. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, there were people who came down on different sides of that.

1:12:55I was one of the more outspoken. This should not be tolerated and definitely not encouraged. yeah i look i i had this conversation uh with rogan and i said i think i understand why do you ever see the movie don't look up leonardo dicaprio yeah there's a meteor correct is that well remembered um it was a little bit of a forgettable film but you you got some of it you got the big bit things come into words uh you can use that as a stand-in for any any existential risk or looming crisis that you want media is coming toward other educated scientist people say this is a big deal uh the media makes light of it makes jokes of it they're not paying sufficient attention they're not treating it with the appropriate level of scrutiny and and care that that it needs and and you know drama and uh what happens over time there's a scene halfway two thirds of the way through the movie where they're on a news story at a news station and they're sort of trying to explain how big of a deal this is and the newscasters are just sort of making more jokes about it it's pop culture reference after half meme ironic speech shit post after and then one of the characters just like starts screaming on tv i remember this yeah and goes, you need to listen.

1:14:21You're not listening. Just completely breaks the frame, right? They're playing in improv. You would say that they punked the game. So you're not, you're no longer playing tennis. You hit the ball in the air or you whack it out of the stands or whatever. And they break the whole frame of the thing. I understand why people behave like that. And if you really, really care about an issue, if you believe in an issue a lot and people aren't listening, you talk more loudly. And they're still not listening. So you talk more loudly and it just keeps on going. It keeps on going. The problem with this is that, as you said before, it's very important to understand that we need to get people to move cognitively one step at a time.

1:15:01I'm going to sort of track you through this understanding as opposed to taking you from zero to ten. Because if I do that, you don't have all of the requisite steps in between to be able to understand how I got there. And if I do that, you're probably going to dig your heels in more. Very few people get scoffed, patronized, or mocked into changing their mind. In fact, if anything, that causes them to dig their heels in. And I saw this with Richard Reeves, who was sat there. And American Institute of Boys and Men, I think he's wonderful. Very policy wonky, you know, like publicly acceptable face of boys and men.

1:15:39Yeah. And I realized that a lot of the guys that talk about men's issues online feel like they're not being listened to, so they dial up the volume and the vociferousness of the way that they speak. And they might be doing it in a slightly different way, but it's the exact same dynamic that causes Greta to dye the rivers of Venice green. People aren't listening to me. I must speak louder. people still aren't listening to me i'm going to speak even louder still and um the problem is that if you start shouting and ranting and raving you look like a lunatic to a lot of people and it turns lots of them off so i think that the if you really care about changing minds even though it's less sexy and even though you need to do some regulation yourself because you're like there's a fucking asteroid you need to listen you're not listening it is in your interests to remember how behavior change and belief change happens, which is one step at a time.

1:16:44It's rarely a sky's opening. And I saw at that moment, the earth was going to, it's not, you take people along one step at a time. And I think that throwing soup over a Van Gogh or gluing yourself to the M25 or pouring green dye into the rivers of Venice, I think that those things do the opposite. I think that they're taking you taking somebody from one to 10, as opposed to just keep on working away, because you have to assume if the argument is fundamentally compelling, if you get somebody from zero to one or two, the pipeline of their belief will continue, the momentum, the inertia will get them to roll downhill in any case.

1:17:20And yeah, I just, if you want to change minds, that's not the way to go about it, I think. This is maybe what you brought up before about young people being politically ineffective is that I think a lot of the politics that people have now are basically adapted from the university and from elite media positions where in those halls, you can pretty effectively shame someone and kind of force them to shift their rhetoric or beliefs because you have like a total monopoly on where they're employed and they spend their time and all things like that. But when you try to take that outside of the university setting, people are like, oh, I'm just going to leave.

1:18:03Like, this is not for me. And so if you join some political organization and all they can tell you is like, well, no airplanes, no hamburgers, we're going to take stuff away from people. And you're like, I'm already going to work every day and trying to just make ends meet. I don't want to have less stuff. This is actually not for me. That doesn't work anymore. And so they voluntarily just exit those types of movements. And so I think we're basically right now grasping for like, what is an actual lever of power in society? And going back to some of these early foundational questions, I think power is, well, one, it's at the voting booth, but two, it's in the workplace.

1:18:44And we have not had a lot of power in the workplace in the United States for basically as long as I've been alive, the past 40 years of 1980 up until 2020, 24, this neoliberal block. So yeah, I mean, I shouldn't, you shouldn't be surprised that like these kind of activist performance art stunts are not politically effective. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Rhonda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s. They reduce, hello, omega-3s. There they are. They reduce brain function. No, they don't. They support brain function. Maybe I should take more. They support brain function, reduce inflammation, improve heart health, and are backed by hundreds of studies.

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1:19:50So you can buy it and try it for 29 days. And if you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally. Right now you can get 35 % off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. You did, speaking of other pipelines, I suppose, sort of the man problem, the stuff that Richard Reeves talks about. I've spoken about a good bit too.

1:20:27What has been your perspective on the state of young men at the moment, especially if you're paying a little bit of attention to the left? We often talk about the left's problem with masculinity, with men, why they're so ineffectual at talking to and galvanizing men to be able to be seen. I certainly think that there's some pretty strong evidence that there are big blind spots um uh not even blind spots that purposeful uh sort of omissions um right because if we were to desilize this particular group it would look like we're taking it away from some more deserving group what have you learned what are you seeing what's the cutting edge of sort of how boys and men are doing on the internet at the moment yeah yeah there's a lot of uh there's a lot of talk about this right of like the the problem for like men on the left um and you know i think whatever we have today that constitutes today's left, take it or leave it.

1:21:22I don't think that thing has room for men. I don't think it has room for much of anybody. It's a few people in kind of their academic or media positions desperately clawing on to eroding power. I like to call them mangoes, media, academics, and NGOs, elite sectors of society. But the left that I see that is scalable and has won historically the demands of the left is more similar to what existed in the 1970s, which was robust trade union organizations, people on their shop floor. And we had a historic high union density of 31 % in the US. Right now, it's 11. You know, you look at the divergent wages and productivity like it happens right around the 1970s around the neoliberal turn.

1:22:09and yeah it's no surprise why there hasn't the left so to speak this kind of niche clique of academics has not been able to invite in the people that they necessarily need to win over and this was just such incredibly an uphill battle for the last few years but I was writing and interviewing these people and you know I talked to people from all across the political spectrum all different backgrounds but there are a lot of young men in there and I would hear just because I participate in these elite circles, endless kind of casual misandry and these people's political needs are not important and it's their turn to take a back seat.

1:22:45And it's like, this is really going to bubble over. This is not good. They are actively, I'm literally interviewing them and watching them move. Like I've had relationships with these young men over the course of years. I've watched them drift further and further into these other political worldviews. And in some cases, they would try to join left-wing groups and be like, I want to organize in my workplace. I want to learn about this stuff. And they would just be met with like this kind of vicious activist rhetoric that was meant to basically scare them off from joining the meeting or the reading group or the organization, what have you.

1:23:18And so, yeah, against the odds socially, that was an unpopular opinion, but I think it was right. And then post 2024 election results, now that has been the thing that everyone is talking about, how to win these people over. But they haven't come up with a solution. They haven't come up with a solution because I think the 1970s, let's say, New Deal liberalism in the American model or social democratic organization in the European model, that is very antagonistic to the immense concentration of wealth that we have right now. So, yeah, there's few politicians outside of maybe the Sanders, Mumdani variety that are actually going to be able to build together that coalition.

1:24:02We also have, not to belabor this, but we have an economic problem of offshoring the types of jobs that men used to do and the types of jobs that were organizable, where you can organize your shop floor. You can't organize your Slack channel in the same way. You know, when people are remote and working from home and they're doing knowledge work, like moving numbers on an Excel spreadsheet or something, that's a lot more difficult than when people are unloading crates, for example. You know, so there's just types of work that can be organized and can lift the floor of wages and it can improve people's material well-being.

1:24:37And there's other types of jobs that just are not. And so I think there's, you know, you have to kind of approach these things in the long term and sequentially. Otherwise, yeah, I don't think that young men are going to kowtow towards a political coalition that puts their interests at the end of the priorities. How did trying to become hypermasculine go? You tried to do the physical first to right-wing pipeline. Tell me about that. I mean, in the world that I come from, where everyone's like an artist or an academic, the bell curve goes from like twink to skinny fat. So if you go to the gym at all, there's a marked difference.

1:25:24But yeah, I mean, generally the meme goes something like, you know, having left-wing political beliefs or orientation is a personal failure on your side where you haven't challenged yourself enough. And if you did lift these weights and eat this way and do whatever, then you would realize that you've been incorrect about, you know, whatever, a whole slew of different things. So I just did all that stuff. I still work out. I, you know, lift four times a week. I sunned my balls. I took the Infowars supplements. I did mewing. I just, I experimented one by one. I published this piece called Auto Experiment Hypermasculinity.

1:26:02And it's probably like five years ago now. But anytime I have a piece that appears in legacy media or do an appearance somewhere else, first question is like, so what was Sonny your balls like? Ah, I see. You've got to be careful what you make a name for, dude. I, well, it was very, it was very memorable, especially in the corners of my world where a lot of people were like totally blown away by that stuff and had not heard of it before. But I guess, you know, at, at the end of this, my political position was basically unchanged. I think the thing that I'm interested in now is the unique ways in which a social democratic organization of the economy having a national health service, for example, certain key industries, natural monopolies being nationalized, the ways in which those things are more competitive than the neoliberal economy.

1:26:51So that sounds a little bit abstract, but basically through going through this process of lifting all these weights, you're going to realize that you were wrong and that the redistribution of resources, that was because you were at the bottom of the hierarchy, which was your own personal failure. And so I think there's actually an argument now, which is a pretty narrow window to go through, but this is what I'm trying to focus on in a few key podcasts, is that the NHS, for example, is more competitive than the U.S. model as a percentage of what each individual in the society expends for their health care.

1:27:26Which is more competitive, meaning. Meaning that two to one in the United States, we outspend most of our European counterpoints that are a similar point of industrialization and development. Yeah, so how is redistribution of resources actually more competitive and cost-saving? I think that there's a strong argument to be made there. And it's basically going to be a necessity for doing social democracy again in the 21st century. Yeah, well, look, I understand the idea of agency, of internalizing your locus of control, is something that particularly speaks to young men that have an upward aim, right?

1:28:05I don't feel like life's very good. Every young person, especially a young guy that's got big dreams, doesn't. And if the first answer is, unlucky for you, dude, you have no control over that. Right. That doesn't seem very reassuring to me. That doesn't make me feel very good. Whereas if it's, well, depending on how hard and how thoroughly you pick your bootstraps up, you can go wherever you want. I understand why that would be a significantly more compelling narrative. I think that it makes sense that the other way around would be. Well, it was possible also, right? Like the other thing was off limits and that there was this general erosion of the welfare state, for lack of a better term.

1:28:54And so the only route that you had to improving your stake in the world was by bootstrapping. And so that was often good advice because that was the only possible advice that you could implement. But I think what is really interesting, and this was what I wrote in a project in 2020 where I interviewed 10 young people from the left, 10 from the right, kind of extensive ideological map. But they had shifted in their political orientation, their economic policies from libertarianism to populism. So when the right is saying that the market organization of society's resources is too asymmetrical, there's too much inequality, that's a pretty big sign that like something is going on.

1:29:39yeah so I I guess when you're doing this kind of work you're kind of searching for these weak signals that you think are going to be important having a little bit of foresight about what will you know in a few years from now be proportionally much much larger that was one of those I think really you know that's fascinating yeah you're like a you're like a like bleeding edge cultural qualitative Nate Silver you know what I mean like what's the most important trend we'll piece these things together in this very particular way and then out pops some prescientness. Did you ever hear of Normcore? No.

1:30:21It was a meme that spread like probably I mean many years ago now but like friends of mine were like trendcasters consultants for advertising for all sorts of trends like you know what genes are going to be popular what music is going to be popular And in my corner of like art and academia, we just kind of drifted into politics where now a lot of those people write about like what is the new mimetic trend that's rising, analyzing aesthetics and ideas and stuff like that. I saw cottagecore communism. Okay, nice. I saw that one. I also saw what else was interesting to me? Tradwife nationalism. Okay.

1:31:03A lot of these things seem to be like aesthetic movements first, as opposed to some underlying ethical or political movement. Yeah. Well, that is the question that's underlying a lot of this stuff of what is the role that aesthetics play in politics? And, you know, what is the substantive difference that, you know, two nearly identical policies might have with each other, two nearly identical candidates, but one who's like willing to be brash, right? Or one who like posts certain memes or Gavin Newsom, maybe as an example of this, where he's basically posing the like neoliberal slop that every other Democrat is proposing.

1:31:47posing, but he's doing it in an edgy way. And for some people, that's kind of enough. I don't think it's going to be enough. I came with a question for you, though, if you're open to it. I wanted to ask about your health, because that's something I've been following. And I had a similar experience when I was younger, that I had Lyme's disease undiagnosed for like six, seven years. And so I wanted to if uh how in your understanding has that experience of having to struggle more um impacted your worldview for politics um philosophy uh what has that experience been like great question um health stuff's up and down dude some weeks it's good some weeks it's bad and um um yeah it's strange to be in your 30s and to feel like your sort of better self is slipping through your fingers um it's so all of the cliches about health are so trite in the fucking well man wants a thousand things the sick man only wants one um but it is so front and center of your experience that if you are dealing with something especially something that affects your energy or your cognition or your mood like it's the window through which you experience the world it's like looking at the world through a dirty window and um it's it's fucking kicked me in the nuts uh it's given me a huge appreciation for good days it's made me an awful lot more empathetic to people um you know anybody that's in good health most of the time takes a degree of sort of self-righteous, self-development glow from their own health as if they authored it themselves.

1:33:42Sure. Which in many ways you do. You have an awful lot of impact over that. But then there's other stuff that comes along like, I didn't choose to get fucking Lyme disease, dude, neither did you. I didn't choose to be in a house that was filled with mold. I didn't choose to have the genetics that mean that that's something that I'm particularly susceptible to. Yeah. And it starts to get you to see the lives of other people, especially people that are going through unfortunate circumstances. I'm already, I'm pretty high on the empathy scale as it is, but this really sort of brought it into reality.

1:34:20It wasn't just an abstract idea. It was something that really sort of had grown corn. in terms of my sort of political opinions I still mercifully comedians have the I'm just a comedian thing I have the I'm just an idiot or I'm just a bro thing I wouldn't say it's influenced my politics massively it would influence some policy stuff I've always been especially coming from the UK has been the single biggest determining factor in terms of how I think about healthcare I think that it's fucking barbaric that every country doesn't have a nationalized health service. For me to, I remember I went to New Orleans 2019 and I was given this ghost tour from this lovely man and it was so fun and we finished up and he was telling me about how him and his girlfriend have both got cracked teeth or something and he was working, you know, like got a good bit of tips, working like a pretty good job and he has a day job.

1:35:16And he said, if you get hit by a bus, you better walk it off. And what he was highlighting is something I would learn like five years later, which is the number one reason for bankruptcy in America is medical. Yeah, right. I'm like, okay, so you get injured and you need to decide whether or not you get fixed. That seems insane. And for me, I'm very fortunate that I've got time and resources and friends that I can text to help me work out how to deal with complex environmental illness. But not many other people do. and that that really sort of highlighted to me well fucking hell like i'm in such a fortunate position that i've you know i clambered my way one half wrong at a time up to and even i have had my ass kicked by this thing yeah so it really uh really brought into land just how much more work needs to be done i think to to try and help people with regards to that in terms of my worldview trying to see small victories and small pleasures as big wins uh not being ashamed by the smallness of my life uh if i see a golden retriever and that's the best part of my day like that's worthwhile like that's cool it's pretty good yeah that's pretty good as opposed to like holding my happiness hostage until i play the main stage at glastonbury or i sell out a tour i get to sit down with joshua i get to do the hit four million subs like it's just trying to see and enjoy more beauty in every day i think um it's a touch with something approximating like mortality and you go oh fucking hell like i didn't stare into the abyss but i sort of peered over the top a couple of times and it wasn't very nice yeah well i mean i i'm sure you hear this all the time but you're performing at, I mean, the highest level in the world for what you do.

1:37:14So to hear that you were suffering so extensively was a great surprise to many of us. Still am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess it's those moments in which, and I felt like either side of this at different points, but one, wow, this suffering is so intense. There must be other people going through this all the time of which I was previously unaware, right? Because now I know how extreme it is. and then on the flip side it's well I'm performing this high and I'm suffering this much everyone else must really suck like those people because I'm pushing through all of this and so people get even more kind of ruthless about their belief system I've never even thought of that I've watched people come out on either side too that's a fascinating perspective no that's the first time I've ever thought about it I can see how you do it that I am able to keep doing the thing that I've been doing and I feel this shitty other people feel less shitty than me and can't do the thing that I can do therefore they're losers how interesting that was not a part for me almost exclusively just like an increase in softness and empathy people have different tolerances for these things and you don't know what somebody's experience is like and you get perilously close here to opening the door to a victim mindset, right?

1:38:42That some people have bigger stomachs. Some people have more ghrelin release. Some people don't like exercise. Some people need more sleep. Those people are going to be fatter. Those people are going to find it harder to lose weight. Yeah. Yeah. Fine. Does that mean that you have no control over your body weight? No. Does that mean that some people find it harder? Yes. And managing to work out how to balance those two things in the same way as this, which is like some people's tolerance for discomfort is just less or more than others. And in some ways we pedestalize the person that's more of an outlier on the side of a positive trait.

1:39:18Wow, look at how much pain that person can endure. Right, right. Why not? Wow, look at how little pain that person can endure. But it's not like majestic, right and i suppose that one of the reasons for this is that um you can fake sadness and negative emotions but you can't fake results so you can pretend to be in lots of pain but you can't pretend to be successful you can only be successful right it's a difference between what's referred to as a cheap and an expensive signal a reliable signal of authenticity and um i suppose that the typical things people are attracted to, resilience, overcoming obstacles, motivation, discipline, orderliness, conscientiousness, rah, rah, rah.

1:40:02And even empathy. It's very hard to fake empathy. And I think this is why when people like Ellen DeGeneres or whatever get called out as sort of being all nicey-nicey up front, but they're fucking Dolores Umbridge behind the scenes, people have an issue with that. And yeah, I can see how that might be the case. but for me uh no i have not used the fact that i haven't stopped going uh doing the thing that i do as an excuse to say that other people are being pussies do you think that okay so there's like an uneven distribution of how hard people have to try a certain thing right so that's true for careers.

1:40:47It's also true for fitness. And I can think of, I'm thinking of fitness primarily here, but like I have a friend who will, he'll always tell me that, oh, I'm on the lower end of the distribution. Like I can't put on that much mass. Like it's very hard for me to work out. And I think there's some intangible thing that just, maybe it's how he carries himself or something like that, that although people may look indistinguishable, when one person has to try harder there's some kind of air about it where it's like oh i know he's like he's really putting in the work and that is a very like impressive feature where someone else who has almost the identical physique but is not working very hard for it um they don't have that same intangible air about them well because all of us want the belief that with sufficient effort we too can overcome whatever our shortcomings are and what you're seeing with the guy that just you know I lift once a week dude you look great you're the genetic equivalent of a nepo baby

1:41:57yeah literally we don't like seeing people that have gotten something that we don't think that they earned and uh because largely what's the story that you take away from that there isn't really a story that you can take away from that the one that is encouraging to yourself and maybe this is maybe it would be different if it wasn't a meritocracy but that's the world that we live in right if your uh successes are yours to bear then what does that mean about your failures the two and if you see somebody who it seems sort of managed to climb up one of the ladders meanwhile you had to move one square at a time and everybody else did right right you have a bit of an ache around yeah yeah i mean i felt i felt like that at different times you know like growing up sick it was harder to do certain things and i was you know i was i was thinking about that in advance of this where like um there have been periods in my life where i have not worked very hard and i'm fucked off and it has not worked out very well but also there's been periods where i've and like super humanly productive.

1:43:05And so I wonder if that kind of just regular day-to-day struggle of having to push through more fatigue and more pain and, you know, brain damage and shit like this, if that somehow gave me the resolve to try harder later. Oh, wow, how interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like those athletes that run with parachutes behind them and then they take the parachute off and they can run faster. Right, yeah, yeah. It was all of that kind of struggle at the beginning. just getting you in good shape to perform when it really mattered. It's a wonderful way to alchemize something that's horrible into something that's beautiful.

1:43:41What a great way to say, you didn't get me and I'm going to use you as fuel to make sure that I have an even better life afterward. I think that's what people hope for. That's why the story of the soldier that comes back and his friends have been blown up and there's an IED and he needs to do his rehab and then he wins the thing, he gets the girl, he does the whatever. That's why those stories are compelling because you see somebody who had it, lost it, and got it back. Fuck. What a romantic, enthralling narrative that is. I think it's great. But yeah, certainly getting kicked in the nuts a lot will either cause you to keel over or sometimes give you the resilience to be able to be kicked in the nuts in future.

1:44:28and um sometimes both right like that's certainly something else that i've learned that like there's been times where i've broken down there's been times where i've cried there's been time like lots lots and lots and lots of times i've just stared at the ceiling fan in my bedroom for like hours while i haven't been able to sleep while i've been worried about this thing happening yeah and uh like that's it's not romantic it's not cool it's not sexy there's no fucking rocky montage music playing in the background right it's just kind of the earning of the keep of health can be a little bit of a wiggly thing sometimes and the path isn't straight and uh yeah when you look back you don't see a massive amount of glory in this it wasn't you fighting off some fucking alien horde or a bunch of orcs or something right it was you dealing with your own internal doubt, your own sort of lack of self-belief, your own fears.

1:45:24And yeah, it makes for an interesting reframe, I think. Well, if you don't mind, this is not the job that I signed up for, you know, 20 years ago when I moved to New York, you know? And I have had to ask a lot of questions on the show of like literally the guests I'm talking to, but then also of myself of like, do I know enough to do this? Like I'm in a field that, you know, there's university researchers and shit like this, but like they're coming up with bad results. Like their studies don't make sense. Like, when do you accumulate enough confidence and wisdom to know that you're correct by, I guess, just having these like long form conversations, right?

1:46:21You're like, you kind of build up the stamina and confidence and, yeah, the faith and the strength of your answer to withstand different critiques. critiques. But maybe there's a connection here where of like the self-doubt and having to try really hard. Like I have just kind of uncovered these big open questions that are like unresolved. Well, I think there's a difference between being a person who comes up with answers and being a person who identifies questions. And you seem pretty good at doing both, but particularly good at the questions thing and I'm not too bad at the questions thing too.

1:47:04I've had some all right ideas about like the state of signaling behind body positivity movement and what happened when Ozempic came in, like mismatch function from fucking evolutionary psychology. These are not world-changing insights. But what I'm not bad at is saying, huh, there's like a membrane. This is what it feels like in a conversation sometimes to me and I wonder whether you've had this too. It's like running your hand across the top of a balloon and every so often there's a little divot in the balloon or there's a little hole or there's a little bit of grit you go huh what's that and it's usually the intersection of two or three or four different yeah yeah and you go hang on a second like um mom donnie and trump isn't that an interesting horseshoe just like the horseshoe that we just said that well what do we think about well kayfabe system you know like build these things together and then why right like it's not i don't think that it is necessarily and it is for lots of people lots of content creators online proselytize about their thing this is my position and i'm doing that um there's some stuff that i like hold really really strongly but for the most part i'm just like trying to ask good questions the i'm just asking questions excuse i'm aware is a difficult one but i think that that became a meme because people who said i'm just asking questions were asking questions with an agenda as opposed to just genuinely following their curiosity sure the problem is that you can't ever tell whether somebody is doing it with an ulterior motive or whether they're doing it in a genuine manner.

1:48:27Well, this is an unpopular opinion, but in my corner of the left and of politics, I think that those are necessary things to be interrogated basically, right? Just to give it a specific example here, if you were to talk about the potential earnings of young men in the labor market that are losing market share to young women, that would be off limits as a discussion. but then here I am, I'm just literally seeing the young men to which that applies. And then they're trying to get involved in left-wing movements and then they're being told that their needs are not possible to address. And so I think if we do not allow those conversations to happen, there's no way to build the coalition to get the stuff that I want.

1:49:10So I think the pathway actually runs through very unpleasantly for the way that the academic left has been organized basically for you know my adult lifetime um but we need to be able to discuss those things in an open forum or we're just simply going to lose the coalition that we need to build well there's a especially if i was to give advice to the left i think uh the purity spiral thing is just so self-defeating like to to bind your group together over the mutual scapegoating and shaving off of people who are insufficiently pure to be a part of it like is a it's a self-destructive like inherently self-destructive like you're you're reducing your coalition the way that you bind your coalition together is by reducing it right um which can only last until the one purest person left on planet earth utopia yeah yeah i don't i don't fully understand how that would work so the the purity thing because think about how many people do the why i left the left pivot right Lots of people that used to be on one side will go, can you name anybody that's done a why I left the right pivot?

1:50:19There was one guy a few years ago, but I don't think he was really that right-leaning. I think he was just like, if you scroll back far enough in YouTube, everybody was annoyed by like SJWs on Tumblr. So I don't think there's that many. I think again with that, it's just, it's not particularly welcoming. It doesn't seem very welcoming, right? Forget what the policies are, But it's like if you're unprepared to accept somebody who maybe has a fetid past or you would consider to be a fetid past, that would be a pretty bad idea. And yeah, look, I don't think at no point have I ever claimed, thankfully, to be an expert on really anything.

1:50:58but after you do a thousand conversations you end up being able to ask people questions that they maybe haven't thought of before because you're starting to draw together 20 similar conversations you've had in the past and you go huh isn't that interesting why is that the case or why is whatever the case and sometimes you end up asking something that you're like oh yeah this is this is one of the most important which also kind of means one of the most obvious questions that somebody needs to but maybe it's coming at it from a slightly different angle or whatever so yeah i mean a thousand is like it's unimaginable right now but that's um yeah i guess you to draw a kind of shitty crypto analogy here like how do you know that the answer is right um you just show proof of work yeah leading up to it um the other the other anecdote this made me think of is a friend of mine jreg was in this group chat over uh covid which was like pretty big uh at the beginning and then people started drifting towards like you know they're sharing a lot of shitposty memes or whatever.

1:51:53And then group chat's getting more and more right wing and it's getting more and more racist. And then they slowly started to like, people would just quit leaving it. And towards the end of it, it was just like three racist people in a group chat together. As they're like shedding everyone else for being a fucking subhuman. Wow. So there's ways in which people narrow down their splinter groups on the other side too. How funny. They're quite good at it too, of like what specific strand of English heritage or Scottish or whatever, Gaul. I'm sure that even I would be insufficiently pure. That's the, no one can meet it until it's just you left in the group chat, the racist group chat.

1:52:32I actually am, I am the Chris supremacist. That's correct. Yeah, I would be top of the tree. Joshua Siderell, ladies and gentlemen. Josh, I think you're fucking fantastic, dude. I love your work. I love your presentation. I think you're very, very well researched. And yeah, I adore your show. Where should people go? They're going to check out all of the things that you do. Yeah, I think the best place here on YouTube, Doomscroll Podcast. We're putting out episodes every week, every other week. I'm also on Substack and Patreon. Yeah, this has been fantastic. I'm just, I'm such an immense fan and it's the best looking podcast.

1:53:07And as someone who studied photography, I have a degree in this stuff. It really is extraordinary. I've got a seal of approval. The conversations you're having are worth being recorded in this quality. So I really, really admire that. And it's been a great pleasure. I appreciate you, man. Until next time. Thank you, Chris. Next time. Lemu, Lemu. And Doug. Here we have the Lemu, Lemu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us?

1:53:43Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at libertymutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts