 All right. Hello, Benjamin. Thanks so much for joining me. How are you doing today? Good. How are you doing, Chris? I am fantastic. Excited to be chatting with you. So for those of my audience, because I usually just have authors on here. This is one of my phenomenal bonus episodes with interesting people. So for those who have yet to meet you, is that a book you've written? Yeah, I have like seven books in a pile over there. Nobody tells me anything. So I'll know. No, I keep them hidden. Really? Are they available? I have a sub stack that's eking them out one chapter at a time. Gotcha. Gotcha. So, OK, well, I guess I guess give me give me the back story. Who are you? What do you do? What do you write about? What do you talk about on your on your YouTube channel slash podcast? Yeah, well, there's two parts of my life. The first part, well, adult life. So 20s onward from probably around 18, 19 or 20. I pursued the life of a cafe barista, poet, author of novels and a preschool teacher. And then at about 36, I needed to take a break from the workforce and go into the white tower of academe seeking as I was accreditation. I wanted to be, you know, intellectual. So, you know, not just somebody who's intellectual and then, you know, worker. So I found a college in Olympia, Washington called the Evergreen State College, which is a very particular place. It has a very particular or at least it had a very particular model of education that was focused on independent learning, a lot of very self directed study. And the structure of the school was very immersive. And for people who really want to get deep into one thing or another. And I had already put in about two and a half million words, you know, down on paper, just like typing and typing and typing and retyping and retyping and retyping. So I thought that that would be spacious enough for me to focus and really dig deep. And so I, you know, took a break from work and I just spent all my time in the library and at different classes trying to pursue a particular brand of fiction that kept on breaking for me because I don't think it was supposed, I don't think you're supposed to write this way, but this is how I had to do it. And then while I was at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, I was being immersed, not inoculated, inoculated, but immersed in a particular strain of progressive ideology that went critical at the very end of my time at Evergreen and then proceeded to go critical across all of academia and all of media and many different, especially education and certain parts of the media. And we can also see this same virus or I guess not virus in a necessarily depends that that's a loaded term morally or valuation wise, but it is very infectious and it does create a very particular MO for whatever institution it takes over. So because of what, how things went viral at Evergreen and by viral, I mean the students protested for a week and they filmed it all on their cell phones and streamed that all to the internet and the ways in which they acted were totally beyond the pale and particular professor Brett Weinstein tried to reason with them that was on film and then he was being kind of suppressed or not just the students, but his colleagues and then the administration were not giving his side or this other side of the argument or the discourse any sort of platform or taking it seriously. So he went and he began to speak out about it on Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, etc. And that created a shockwave. Well, the student what the students did and how they how they acted and what they did by filming it created this very viral cringe compilation and on YouTube and but it was so salacious that it spilled over and it caught a lot of attention and it brought to light certain patterns of discourse or anti discourse that were boiling up in other places but particularly contained and kind of like a sauce. It was boiled down into the essence at Evergreen because of the way that Evergreen operates as this kind of magnifier of things. And so what I saw were a lot of people commenting on the footage and Brett Weinstein was speaking out but what I had been doing while I was at Evergreen while I wasn't working on my work was working in the media department and filming being on camera at all these different seminars and workshops and lectures and seeing that there's just this one strand of progressivism that we can probably call woke or whatever you want to call it there's a lot of different names for this thing. Critical theory depends on how popular or how theoretical you want to get with the naming conventions but it was always being presented as the truth and any sort of questioning or pushback was suppressed or called out or slandered and Brett Weinstein particularly was witch hunted more or less for just criticizing this and Brett Weinstein was very progressive very progressive individual very liberal or left individual. So the people were talking about the way the students were acting but nobody had seen how they were being taught and I had watched this with my own eyes and knew where the files were and did some FOIAs or FOIA is a federal thing public records requests got all that footage and then started to archive the entire thing the entire thing from probably 2014 up to 2017 which is when the explosion happened all those workshop seminars and then I compiled all that also I did a lot of my YouTube channel was just covering Evergreen for a while going through all the emails going through all these different facets of the story and trying to bring up as much nuance into this which is kind of what I was studying to do in literature to create this pinnopoly of different pieces of data or different kinds of narrative and then kind of make a symphony out of all these different kinds of stories or different kinds of information basically and so I spent a few years just covering that and then I compiled all the footage into a documentary like 24 episodes and a couple of epilogues to lay the whole thing out. Yeah so this is a conversation that keeps coming up like we talked about like I had John McWater on I talked with a lot of people from like FIRE I had Bonnie Carrigan Snyder on here talking about indoctrination 12 schools will get to the critical race theory stuff in a little bit but from what you're talking about with what happened at Evergreen you saw the students acting in a particular way right shutting down discourse but you saw this happening because of what the faculty was kind of presenting like if you could can you kind of give me your theory for that because I've been kind of hearing the narrative that you know it's these you know younger millennials slash Gen Z who's getting into this very woke ideology everything's racist, transphobic, misogynistic, sexist you know what I mean but it has to come from somewhere right so do you see the generation before that getting these ideas and now teaching it to the college age millennials or tell me how you kind of see that from a broader sense. Well there's millennial and there's kind of Gen Z too and it kind of matters it kind of doesn't the Evergreen protesters were probably 19 to 22 so more Gen Z more having no memory of pre-9-11 no memory of pre-Internet millennials have at least a little bit of memory pre-9-11, pre-Internet and those two things or at least America's response to 9-11 shaped a certain sort of fear based culture or security based culture and then the Internet is its own thing so when you say where's this coming from it's got to be coming from somewhere prior to these youngins but it's also being shifted and sifted through the Internet and you can see how the the Internet is impacting the consciousness, the group consciousness and the ideologies or the culture of these newer groups who are especially the teenagers who are going through processes of assembling their identity and testing things and being kind of what was it dysregulated emotionally because they're teenagers that plus the Internet is pretty intense that plus kind of late individualism or late liberalism that kind of has a individualist bent and caused I think on a cultural level a lot of older generation Gen X of which I am a part and then millennials to kind of and boomers to a certain extent but to kind of be individuals and kind of move around and not have a extensive family structure and very deep time regulated or time accrued relationship with a local community and so these Gen Xers you know they mate and then they have these kids that are even further removed from a richer cultural time based long form kind of relational local situation and so I think part of it is that these young folks are looking for people looking for mentors looking for community that's not necessarily being satisfied by these kind of atomized families and that is being given to them through Reddit through Tumblr and lesser extent to Twitter but Twitter you can see it kind of spill over into Twitter also 4chan and all these Internet things so the Internet is one major thing but with regards to the way that the the adults in the room so-called respond to the students specifically in Evergreen specifically if you just take Evergreen and it is kind of one of my theories is that Evergreen is the petri dish to show this ideology working out but the Internet is a big part of that because of the way that the actual protest was seated on Facebook and how the policing of communication and the sorting of people into villain and victim happened through the Internet but it also happened in person but there's that cohort and then there is this Evergreen very progressive they come on campus their orientation and I have all the footage of these orientations which got progressively more progressive as the time went on until they kind of went to the end of being progressive and they had to start rolling back because this whole kind of MO of we are going to liberate the oppressed and we're going to solve racism the first thing that the new president said 2015 and then everything that happens after 2015 is that racism great strides were made during the civil rights movement but racism is still alive and well and it is our job basically to end racism that is what we are here to do which sounds like a big project and right so it's a big project but also is the school and the academia particularly suited to doing that work which is activist work which is changing the world and you go back to this kind of Marx it's not cliche he has the saying that Marx saying that philosophers so far had sought to understand the world our job is to change the world so Evergreen became explicitly an activist college and you see that with the American Psychological Association you see that happening with many municipal governments you see that happening across Coca Cola a lot of these corporations are saying our job is no longer to teach it's to create a good society so what happened at Evergreen was that the organization shifted toward being change agents specifically with race and then they introduced a bunch of critical race theory or they began to practice critical race theory and I have footage of these increasingly sanctimonious more and more church like events where it would be garbed in data and power points and they show this data and even they're showing you this data that Evergreen is doing better than most every other place in America at least with regards to serving the Latino and Latina community and serving students of color of all varieties but while those charts are up there they're saying that the time is now we have to be better we have to change and then you have all these professors saying that Evergreen is as racist as any institution in the west historically and when we teach people to prize meritocracy we're actually causing oppression and when we teach that all lives matter we're saying that black lives don't matter and the way that they're speaking becomes more and more sanctimonious and that happens with the race thing there's one quote where this person says that our job is when a black person speaks we listen and we believe a black person like they all think the same you know there's none of that like we just assume that the black people are hurting and so what happens there's a selection process on which black person is being listened to as the one who inhabits this liberatory oppressed person gaining victory over those who have victimized them which would be the entire institution so ironically you have this institution ending over backwards and dismantling its original mandate to be an institution of education specifically to solve the problem of race being accused by the students of being the most racist place in America in the world ever that also happened with regards to the gender vector where this pronoun thing started happening and everybody had to be and it's not just you have to declare your pronouns there's no discussion about that what does it mean that you declare your pronouns what are we actually doing when we start doing that what are we doing to the language what are we doing to our brains and then what are we doing forcefully top down with our society and then our interpersonal relationships no question about it this is just the thing to do and then while we're doing it no joking this is really serious like this is life or death people will kill themselves if you don't call them this word that they've ascribed to themselves and it's just and it got tighter and more and more intense and then the students started to figure out how to game that and when they gamed it they would interrupt these meetings and I have footage of like protest after protest after protest and the administration would just let them do it they're acting this out so there's no pushback at all yeah yeah yeah that's that conversation about where the adults in the world you know what I mean and I think that's kind of the issue that you know where people aren't talking about enough is that there's not enough pushback we're taking things of face value and you're just kind of letting especially this younger generation just come up and just kind of steam roll right and I'm a father and like I have to push back on my own son and be like hey this is you know maybe we should talk about this or you're seeing this in the incorrect way but you know I want to I want to touch on that kind of catastrophizing right like we've seen it with you know the Dave Chappelle recent protests and everything like that and everything kind of turns into this just extreme emergency right people are dying or like you mentioned like we don't say it correctly people are going to kill themselves and listen like I'm a recovering drug addict most of my life has been you know well in recovery at least since getting sober in 2012 has been like mental health you know advocacy and you know I talk a lot about suicide and overdoses and stuff things that are killing people but I know if I push that to the extreme and I inflate the numbers or inflate the problem I'm crying wolf you know what I mean I have to look at the real data see what's happening and that's kind of what I saw with the Dave Chappelle debate I was like wait so are we to believe that there's like a genocide happening that you know I don't know about but anyways anyways here's a question that I have for you in regards to like the critical race theory or I even asked guests about this when we're talking about what's happening in schools and college campuses do you see this happening on both sides of the equation like the catastrophizing right like yesterday for example I was listening to someone commenting about the critical race theory who's on the side of we need to get this out of schools right but I'm like are you kind of catastrophizing this they're like think about the children are children are going to think that they are these white devils like is it really that bad so I'm curious if everybody from all parts of these debates are catastrophizing to an extent what do you think well the catastrophizing is a certain it's a it's game theory it's a certain pattern of behavior in order to produce a result and we are in the age of being overstimulated again we go to the internet and how we get our news is that there's so much information presented to us that our brain actually sorts it according to threat level and that's an evolutionary principle if you've ever gone out to your lawn and jumped because you thought you saw a snake and it's just a hose and you feel embarrassed like it's better to be embarrassed in a fool than to actually get bit and with regards to the internet collapsing space and time and then overloading us with information we pay attention to threat when we pay our attention to a threat it magnifies the threat because more people are paying attention to the threat and then our apparatus is of sifting or the gatekeepers or whatever the apparatus of sifting that is outside of us is responding to what we pay attention to because of the model of the internet is to keep the eyes engaged keep in people engaged and to foster engagement the most engagement is going to be the lowest part of your brain which would be the fight, flight or F-U-C-K and what is the internet filled with it's filled with pornography of all these different sorts it's filled with pornography with regards to threat levels on all these things and then with straight up classic anyways that's a whole other conversation but when people catastrophize they get attention and so they bring attention to a thing it over time does that actually serve the well the thing is the catastrophizing it deflates after it's seen that the threat isn't as big as it's made out to be but at least it gets attention there keeps attention there and then you can start to herd people into some sort of activity showing up to school board meetings if you are showing that a Virginia school or where I think it was a Virginia school was in the library it has some depictions of homosexual activity like with in a comic book in the school libraries that's like you see this stuff is being available to kids the question is well they can get it anywhere but do we want it in schools no we don't want it in schools you can cherry pick or not pick or whatever you can see that this stuff that is implementing critical race theory it's not critical race theory itself but it's acting out critical race theory by describing basically the entire system of the U.S. as a sorting mechanism between the oppressor and the oppressor the victim and the victor and it's gone through by dividing people by race and then assigning these characteristics to those characteristics if you are dark of skin then you must be constantly aggressed upon micro and macroly you know which is really religious when you get into implicit bias which is that which is your soul and then systemic racism that which is God you have this stuff that's bigger than the human or lower than the human stuff that you can't really control and if you start to build a framework like that it gets religious but you talk to McWhorter so I'm sure you guys dove into that just with catastrophizing that's a method of getting attention and then siphoning not siphoning but channeling that attention into action so it's a useful tool but like you were saying with regards to drug advocacy and a lot of this advocacy it actually doesn't help the people that it's supposed to help especially a lot of the racial stuff could be broken down into class so I just interviewed a Native American woman and she was saying Native Americans they're less than 1% of the population but we're constantly trotted out to get things done we're a symbol and so we are like people are changing our language and changing the names of football teams while our communities are dying from alcoholism and drug and then you go and she went into the all cops or bastards or the BLM riots the indigenous were brought into that when they could actually use good policing they actually need that there are women there's a lot of domestic violence there's a lot of drug use they could use reform in that but defunding the police would absolutely hurt them so you know so when we get to that level of politicking a lot of that catastrophizing has a lot of unintended consequences other than the fact that it rewards those who do it yeah yeah that's I've had some guests on recently like Bacha on go Sargon about her book talking about woke media then I had the vet when we're swimming on talking about his book woke ink and and yeah like I see the woke conversations the cultural war issues taking away from the real problems like these class issues these people who need you know they need social workers they need therapist yeah they need services and stuff like that but if we're just like so with the CRT thing I want to ask you because since since you touched on evolutionary psychology and that's that's my shit I love talking about it right so when it comes to CRT here's what I'm trying to understand like my son's 12 so the other day the other like a couple weeks I went to my son I was hearing these conversations about CRT in schools I looked at my son so I'm half black my son's a quarter black so I look white he looks whiter than I do right I looked at him I'm like hey have you ever in school have they ever taught you that just you're bad for being white and you looked at me like I was just insane he's like what are you talking about right so this so I commonly ask people like how big of a problem is it how many schools are doing it you know but I do understand like hey we need to stop it before it grows like you talked about with evergreen that could spider out but anyways going into evolutionary psychology I've had psychologists on talking about group identity you see it with polar polarization right I identify as a conservative here are our values here what we stand for I identify as a liberal I identify as a progressive we sort ourselves into these groups so right evolutionarily we see people who look different and our brain just automatically does stuff right it says oh you look different than me why is that right now to the extent I don't know that's the debatable part but I guess my question is your your buddy James Lindsay showed us she you know this being handed out you know the kids or whatever and I looked at that I looked at the paper I don't know if you saw his tweet but it said like you know talking about identities and which group and everything I looked at it really carefully I said is there anything harmful is there anything in here that I was like this can make a kid feel bad about who they are I didn't necessarily see it so the question is do you think that this shouldn't be taught at all because my concern is we're afraid to even have these conversations almost like saying don't talk about sexual education don't talk about boys and girls don't talk about don't talk about how babies should we completely eliminate it eliminate it or you you work with preschoolers like is there a way to talk with kids about this in a realistic non you're worse than another race type way yeah um there has to be it's the human experience that I mean if we just go back to the bedrock of Western culture it would be Judeo Christian culture and then Greek culture kind of combining and there's a lot of other ring there they're othering the Canaanites you know they're making these Philistines out to be huge monsters we have to kill them you know like you know yeah you see permutations of that going on to this day so how do we manage if if we aren't able to discuss tribalism discuss the history of how tribalism has created race and perpetuated race or our notions of race then how do we actually untangle it and what is the line between having those conversations and then saying well we need to solve this such as Ibram Kendi has written that we have to solve past discrimination with present discrimination and future future discrimination with present discrimination which is just this manikin just endless cycle of serpent eating its own tail so can we talk about these things without and transcend them can we have a transcendent relationship to the blood that courses through history you know and all that violence and all the all the outcomes of let's just say with African descendant of slaves to what degree has being a slave affected a family over generations and then Jim Crow how are all these things affected and in the wake of the evergreen protests I started doing these videos and somebody who I had not yet really pissed off that I respected he came up to me and he said well there's this redlining stuff and there's the way that the black people have treated you know and I'm like okay there's that and then there's all this footage of people being told when they can pee and people being told that white people need to do this and get black people water and black people you know attacking you know like the the optics of the activism has completely ruined just optically it's gotten out of hand and why is that gotten out of hand so if we're going to have those conversations we're going to have to actually have the conversation about the conversation which is what the conversation is with regards to sexuality with regards to sex that is now being infiltrated by this gender ideology that is not based on biology it's based on ideology and that comes from critical theory too comes from a permutation of critical theory called queer theory and the way that that's promulgated is that gender is your soul and your body doesn't matter because we can just change your body to fit your soul right and that's what you have now and and a lot of this stuff with regards to race and with regards to gender is happening really intensely in higher education and then really intensely in education higher higher institutions right institutions of education so it's being taught to the teachers and then the teachers are going into the schools and to a greater or lesser extent the teachers have to learn this stuff and because of the ideological nature of it it sorts people into can you go through this gender stuff if not then you're a bigot you need to go can you go through these different trainings if not you're a bigot you need to go so it sorts people even if they're not teaching it they were either putting up with it and pantomining it or they actually kind of believe it and go along with it and so that'll start to seep in so I don't think that if we want to revitalize and reform our education system we have to get to nuts and bolts and say okay reading writing an arithmetic or something like that we need to go back we are trying to teach you skills not behavior yet and once we ensure that you are at great reading level then we can start to introduce these really complex conversations about oppression and victimhood and how to solve that right but I spoke with a teacher at a high school in Chicago and the building their high school is falling apart they have blackouts on electricity they're spending tens of thousands of dollars on these diversity equity inclusion seminars not fixing the building and then also what that has the effect of is that all the problems which are not just in the physical building but in the education and the kids are not getting taught all of that can be waved away and say whiteness oppression it's the system it's the system it's the system so nobody has to actually fix the system that isn't working because the system is already broken and we need to break it even further so we have to get back to brass and ensure that kids are getting skills first and foremost and then we can introduce really complex conversations because if they don't have the skills to read and write and think through these things then what they're going to be doing is dumbing those ideas down of history of oppression and of oppressor and they won't be able to even do anything other than just go full aggression with it they will and what happened is that the common ability of discourse of having higher reason was all brought down to the lowest common denominator of you are the enemy if you don't get on board with changing the world and changing evergreen by having a stupid protest right? Yeah, yeah no I I love what you said about just we need to have conversations about the conversation so if I'm understanding what you're saying right like you know race these conversations about like I don't see them going away anytime soon but if I'm understanding you correctly like there is a conversation to be had but it's a matter of when like is it after they learn the basics of hey I could do math I could read and stuff like that and how to implement them in a mature way just for example I've had people on here like Dan Golden he wrote a book the price of admission about the screwed up college admission systems and how money plays a big role like I could donate a $10 million building I'm probably getting in right and I have a 12 year old son and that's something I have to think about I have to tell him right like you know it's my choice but I've decided to tell him like hey this college admission system can be rigged against you but that's not a reason to give up and not try right so you know I don't think Have you ever thought of using your YouTube cloud to muscle your way him into Yale? I don't know I'm sitting at 100,000 subscribers I don't know if that's enough like maybe if I get to James Charles numbers or Logan Paul or something but like when it comes to race like is that there a conversation there to be had like hey one day you might meet some racist ass person and here's how you deal with it like because it seems like parents are afraid to talk to their kids about race right they don't want teachers talking about it so if parents aren't talking about it who the hell is going to talk to kids about just some realities and the harshness of life do we need to get them each a mentor and say hey here's what can happen and you know like I don't know what you think the solution is because they are real things you know. Well within the critical race theory framework not necessarily the theory itself but the framework in which it is implemented at least in Evergreen and you can see this in the indoctrination or the orientation sessions is that the individual discrete acts of racism are they don't they don't matter anymore it doesn't matter if you don't act racist as a white person you are complicit in racism for not fighting against the racist structures right so it's not about even dealing with difficult situations on an interpersonal level all interpersonal activity is projected onto this historical sociological framework and so everybody's ego is inflated to and they talk about this I am a black body you are a white body and then they just play pinball or pool and bash against each other and so there's problems within the ideology that need to be very finely sussed out and that's not going to happen on these CRT as bad GOP good democrats good GOP racist levels of the federal consciousness even the state consciousness is not capable of having the conversations to really say okay how do you deal with the effects of historical racism and the structures that have sorted people into you know based on race or based on any of these markers probably the most important would be class and why that's not being talked about is because race insulates the elite from having to actually do that which you probably talked about several times so it's really difficult to have those conversations and what we need to do is create content that has those conversations and model that because I think ultimately ultimately people yearn for nuance right they yearn for questions and jokes and laughter and all the stuff that's outside of outrage culture agreement disagreement basic opinionation that's happening on the internet so with regards to schools the structure of the schools is failing on several different vectors ideologically we need to strip the ideology out and just say no ideology until we figure out what school is for and that's what it needs to be about and then we can rebuild but at this point it's all a mess it's just a huge mess and so yeah it is so let's jump because something I've been dying to ask you about because I see this often like there's a I don't know it seems like there's a real personality then there's like a twitter persona right so I'm hoping for example you're good buddies with like James Lindsay one of my favorite books and I had Peter Burgosian to talk about how to have difficult or impossible conversations I read that book after I got canceled on YouTube and I was losing my mind so were you canceled by the structure or by the commenters by the commentary actually the drama channels if you ever want to dive into that it's a long draw out story yeah I'm surprised you didn't just google the rewire so my channel doesn't even pop up first you'll see all the videos with millions of views telling me that I'm a terrible person have you done a video on that oh yeah I took a break to make sure I stayed sober and it was some crazy shit but yeah so I read the book from James and Peter and I was like cool it got me into epistemology and saying hey why do you think what you think and stuff like that but anyways love that book I'll follow Peter and James on twitter Peter is about 4 or 5 on twitter out of what? out of 10 right and then you have James he's at like a 15 right but James in conversation and James on twitter two different people you like before this and I'm getting caught up on your stuff like you are you come across as a very like curious interested person like you like when I watch you have conversations I'm like this dude is fucking curious right but on twitter that is a different person right so how how does that how does that work like I'm curious because I actually talked to somebody the other day and they were saying like yeah like twitter is my avatar that's not really bad stuff I'm like I guess you know so like I'm like now it's my opportunity to ask somebody a little bit more about that so how do you see that from I guess like a moral perspective right like do you feel like you're ever fanning the flames because you know okay like that's where I'm curious because you seem like you're a good guy to be but I'm like seems like it trolls a little on twitter so how does that okay how does shit posting work into the righteous cause of nuance there we go it's well there are ethical matters to consider but first and foremost there's two levels to it before you even get to the moral aspect or the ethical aspect there's the game theory of it and then there's the discourse level of it right so the game theory is about what is able to be communicated through 240 characters and how the game of twitter actually operates by by distilling information into these chunks and so there's two levels of game when I'm doing twitter and one is a literary game and the other one's a political game so the literal the political game is to make a statement or to react to something that's going on and what's going on usually is on again and I disparage this constantly it's going on the federal level or it's going on the state level or it's going on an ideological level and intrapersonal or super personal level and so to take those concepts up there and then to to kind of take them down and throw them back at it and to kind of like it's like this huge snowball fight with a lot of different words like the word the five armies from the hobbit but everybody's just throwing these snowballs right and you don't know which persons on which team or if they're playing one team in order to position another team later on down the road to get another kind of thing to happen and with regards to federal level politics with with regards to reacting to the reaction to the trump which is what I'm doing I'm reacting to reactions more than I'm reacting to the action mostly because the action itself let's say an event happens one six happens right one six is one six happens after 2020 so in 2020 what happens is that two billion dollars of insurance claims are filed with regards to these political actions that happen with regards to a certain sort of event that's politically charged and then that is reacted to very distinctly by let's say MSNBC that are playing defense for these people playing defense for BLM because it suits their purposes kind of ideologically because it kind of seems like this is the righteous cause but also suits their purposes of getting trump out by making trump basically the cause of all these things and while I think that they're kind of complicit too so there's this weird kind of game that's happening on a media level with regards to that one six happens January six happens and that entire 2020 can be completely forgotten and these five six hours at this one spot that's very symbolically potent spot can now go forth and be used so in the wake of one six all I'm thinking about is not one six because we don't know what happened at one sex just as like we don't know what happened at Evergreen until somebody spends four years going through all the footage and trying to put it down like I did with Evergreen so I already know I was trying to at Evergreen that all the reactions to the event are going to be sifted through people's wavelength or bandwidth to be able to make sense of the event and so the real one six happens after one six the real one six the one six that everybody's talking about isn't the one six that happened there with all these people doing this really chaotic action who what when where why not everybody's doing the same thing it's a complex event but Washington Post says okay this is what this means Dan Rather says this is what this means CNN says this is what this means and Fox is like we can't do this we can't do much with this right because we don't know how to figure out what this means because it's basically our side and they're playing this ideological game but the catastrophizing with regards to one six that the that one six represents a threat to our democracy is not even debatable it's not even debatable it is a threat to our democracy it's a super important super purportant event and everything that happened in 2020 was for racial justice right it's all for a righteous cause so what I react when I react to one six is the reaction to this one six that people have made up in their minds they have this narrative that they're promoting Dan Rather said something about I'm not over one six and everything that happened after one six until we solve everything that happened well what are you talking about like some nut jobs like went in there and did a pany rate on the government I mean it's an important symbolic thing and it's not good but is it the most serious thing that's ever happened and what about all those riots what about everything in 2020 there's so much cognitive dissonance so when I pick up and I throw I'm trying to twist that narrative and because of the way that I do it I can't be bipartisan with this stuff because I'm in a very progressive place in my surroundings and I've seen the end of progressivism at Evergreen and then I'm watching the west coast go along that and implement that and everything so I'm kind of pushing I'm pushing in one way I'm pushing in one direction which makes me kind of biased in my content over time you're saying I will just by the basic mechanism of agreement and disagreement which is how most people sort their content I will gain more attention from those who I agree with and my responsibility if I want to be flexible is to then start to play with them and to upset them and it helps to have more than one topic to position yourself in so if you think that I'm all Republican I'm like I'm not it's just I converge with basically what the Republicans are doing with this one kind of inflection point and then I'm on these other fronts too so with regards to Twitter you have to look at the Twitter persona as something that happens over time and as a supplement not as a what's the what's the word awesome word play I can't remember it. Twitter's a supplement not a substitution for my entire body of work my interviews on YouTube and then my commentary on YouTube about Twitter and from the networking that I do on Twitter that's how I get my interviewees is that I'm like who's making interesting sense who's making interesting sense and then you know and then I pull them out of the networking process which you know then sometimes I connect with people I'm like listen I'm shit posting right now because I thought of a cool word play which is the literary side of what I'm doing so what I really want to do is this nuance stuff but I have to play this game and know that I'm doing it tongue in tongue and cheek because all this is a sentence this is it's an MMO RPG made of sentences that's what it is it's a literary endeavour so there's that whole literary side of what I'm doing yeah let me let me tell you that that like I hope all listeners made as much sense of that as I did because I've been thinking about that so much lately kind of what you said because you know I you know I'm my podcast I just started it in May it's it's gotten pretty big I've gotten some notable guests and everything like that you know yeah and I try ignore me I try to have these like nuance conversations from people all over the spectrum I have people talking about you know just violence against women but also people talking about you know the trans debates and the racial debates all these but anyways what I've noticed is the extreme the trolling or whatever that's what gets attention right so like you said like the subs you know that's the supplement do this thing to the substance and I've been debating on it so maybe maybe you can give me some moral ethical device because that's where I get that's where I get fucked up Benjamin I'm like is it is it ethical of me to kind of do these more extreme views extreme opinions that I know will get more attention because I think I also have fear because that's what led to my downfall on YouTube shitposted well I knew well I did click I was the I have a background in marketing and shit like that too so I was like I know I know the type of thumbnails and titles that are going to get attention but a lot of people only look at that and they'll say who you are based on titles and thumbnails and not the content right so I think part of it's a fear right if I do that again if I do what I know what works that can fucking just backfire right but then there's also that ethical part right like because there's got to be part of you there's got to be a little part of you where you're like am I stirring the pot too much am I am I am I getting people rowdy with trying to use this supplemental or MMO type game theory to meet my own ends you know what I mean like how how do you balance that but you are like as somebody who I can see you're trying to you're living for a larger purpose you're being very utilitarian like I'll do this shit over here to hopefully drive people to my youtube channel where I'm having nuanced important conversations yeah so how do you balance all that in so far as I use twitter it is a sentence publishing machine for me they call it micro blogging and I do aphorisms I do puns and then I do political stuff what do you think it's the most attention political so I mean people only see that but I'm doing all those other things and usually I don't publish something or I don't post something unless I'm doing some sort of clever wordplay like I have to be just making people think about what I'm saying right by interrupting them and that's why I haven't published any of my actual books because every sentence is like like I'm doing something awkward at first but you're like oh he's making me think through how language operates making me think through how narrative operates or how poetry operates so there's all these things where I'm doing a lot of meta in that so on there's that creative side you're just playing around and you should be playing around with a lot of things and expressing yourself in a lot of different directions people are going to pay attention to a certain sort of content and they're either going to put you in a box for that and then be confused when you violate what they thought of you or they'll completely ignore it because they need you for their own purposes they need to say Benjamin Boyce is this thing and I've done a lot of work within the gender debate and have aligned with the causes of a certain ideological group and they have a certain sort of way of thinking and they have a certain sort of telos or what they want to do save women or do something about saving women from men or the feminist community is multifaceted and created with a lot of different moving parts and a lot of different independent people it also has a lot of people who are there for trauma and who are expressing trauma and it has a lot of people who don't understand how humor operates just like the joke just like many jokes say so while I produce content specifically within the gender debate or with regards to what it is to be a woman and how a man and women operate and everything about gender not just the trans stuff everything about gender I do a lot of that stuff because it's fascinating to me I know that I'm creating content that's serving that community I'm platforming voices I'm introducing them to new people and I'm lending my platform to people who are unheard or who lower down the totem pole and I'm giving them more views so I'm actually helping them on my terms so I'm not an ally which is a corrupted term ally used to mean we have a we're working together now ally means you're basically my support and that's not how I do it so with regards to feminism and anti-feminism I'm bulking at the anti-feminists just as much as I'm playing around bulking at the feminists and specifically ideologically motivated people who want content that they agree with that supports them that doesn't challenge them because they don't have time to be challenged they're fighting this great fight so I do a lot of content that turns off or causes anti-feminists to get really riled up and like why is this woman why are you not challenging her you know she's a misandrist and they go in the comments and they rail and then I do content that the feminists are like Benjamin you're terrible ally and what happens is that the internet sorts for these people who want to be expressive and the expression actually algorithmically props up my boosts the content so like the actual content was just the discussion that has more content than just what they're reacting to which would be a joke or a thumbnail even I titled one thing irrational feminism which was a play on the content of that episode which was with Erica Bakiloki who's a Catholic author who goes through and she shows the entire progress of feminism from the rational enlightenment up to the present day and so it's talking about the rational origin blah blah blah people are like feminism is irrational feminist you know like the anti-feminists who are just thinking in that fight mode and then I did a interview the other day and this is I hope this is relevant to what you're asking I'm just talking about my material because it's a method of logical choices that I'm making and I did an interview another day with a woman who is really fighting really hard against gender ideology because it's manifesting these ideas that are completely illogical and then translating them through medicine into a physical reality that has a bunch of negative consequences and she's a brilliant woman and she's kind of, she's a lesbian I don't know if that, it doesn't really matter but she kind of she's playing to the radical feminist group the radfems are like this is the content that we want created by a woman for women against these creepy men or whatever and I did an interview with her and we're joking the whole time we're joking and joking and joking and talking about the matriarchy killing men you know so that's why women live longer because men have all the power in the world but at least women live longer because they kill the men by feeding them bacon wrapped in butter or whatever and the way that I cut that was that there's a, was that I took the very end of our conversation and I put it at the beginning and I was referencing jokes that we were making that you don't understand that why I'm making those jokes until the very end of the episode and I got a lot of flack for those jokes from these people like why are you are you, why are you making fun of terfs, why are you making fun of the matriarchy and they're like oh we established a rapport so you get the hook but the hook isn't the hook is to draw them in but so you have there's three parts of this whole content creation game you have to capture attention maintain attention and then modify attention at the end right another metaphor is that you have to be interesting but you have to take that interest like a bank, like the bank and then you hand it back they have something more so it has to have like Twitter is really good because of the way that attention operates on that level is like you make a zinger, you make a spice or something like that or you do a bunch of posts about a spicy thing to variate on the theme and and then you and then you have other forms of content that you are balancing that out so I've made things I don't like lying like being wrong so I only retract things I retract three types of things one is when I'm misinformed one is when I'm when it appears that I don't know the whole story and so I'm making something up and so I guess a version of lying but unintentionally excited don't try to intentionally lie which is different than manipulation I guess but I don't try to lie lie and then one is when I say something that's a joke the context is terrible like I make a joke about something and then some big event happens so everybody's reading my tweet in reference to this thing that I wasn't thinking about at all because it didn't happen yet so there's that and it really depends on what kind of person you want and to what degree you want people that are flexible and they're thinking to be able to say okay he's shit posting right now and either enjoy or don't enjoy his humor he also does all this other stuff too so I keep abreast of his content and he entertains me or at least tries to entertain me while I'm waiting for him to produce another episode right so you have to keep in the people's back of people's minds as a fellow content creator I definitely understand what you're talking about especially with you know hooking them in keeping their attention and then what's the larger thing but real quick Ben I'm going to we're coming up on an hour and I have like one or more one or two more questions I have two hours before I have to leave I mean I'll need to pee in about an hour okay yeah if you like I'm hoping like the longest episodes I've done are like an hour and a half or so but yeah you're a great dude I love talking with you so yeah let me okay cool we'll play it by ear a little bit I want to talk about just live as a tick tock I want to talk a second I'll give you a little bit just about the experience on YouTube because I can relate a lot with what you're talking about but I fucked the game up so I'll explain that a little bit and we can talk about that a little bit okay all right cool so here let me put a note so I know where to edit this all right you ready to jump back into it sure sure sure all right cool so so when it comes to the hook maintaining attention and then having that kind of larger message right so let me tell you let me tell you I screwed up on YouTube well I think I screwed up right so as you know yeah I think he I think he probably didn't but go on as you know on YouTube there's a large like commentary community there's drama channels where they talk about other YouTubers and everything like that so basically as somebody I was working at a drug and alcohol rehab costs like 30 grand to go there if you didn't have insurance it was a nice rehab here in Vegas right so I was like hey why don't I do like you know I was I was teaching people about recovery and everything and mental health I was like why don't I just do a YouTube channel wasn't getting any views right and I wanted to help people I wanted to get as many views as possible so I can help more people and if it brought in some income that was cool like eventually when I got laid off it was at the height of my YouTube career and I was making a full-time wage so it was awesome but anyways the the hack I found was kind of what you did I was able to look at the drama community they were talking about these YouTubers right and I was like if I framed it kind of like drama but I lure them in I do do a little bait right they come in thinking that I'm just another drama channel but then I start talking about mental health my own personal experience and you know evidence-based therapies and everything and people loved it my channel within the first year I hit a hundred thousands of subscribers it was like it was working right but then people started having this weird ethical debate and calling me a fake therapist and everything you know there's not a single video of me saying I'm a therapist you know and there's some weird gray areas but but yeah but yeah so I was doing that but I think where I went wrong I started responding I started defending myself I started I started playing into it right and I think that's what made me look back okay you know so so how how do you because I'm sure there are misconceptions about you from people who for example the episode you talked about like people needed to really consume the larger part of the content to really see what you were doing right or if somebody only knows you on twitter they have an idea of who Benjamin voice is but me I went through like hours of your content over the weekend and like this seems like a decent guy right so I took that time are you you keep on like making me out to be some sort of warty troll on twitter am I really coming across that way kind of okay so let me okay that's good to know hopped on actually right before we hopped on let me pull up your thing what was it what did you say on twitter wait here let me let me read the quote for you and you can tell me how it comes across gonna teach my toddler Dem strategy to hear her cry quote way cyst when she doesn't get what she wants way cyst way cyst well okay that's a part of the if you look at the elite Democrats are saying right now the only like over and over and over again the only way that they can make sense of what happened in Virginia yesterday is it's gotta be the racists it's gotta be the racist it's gotta be those damn white women those damn white women and CRT is made up those damn white women like wait wait wait hold on hold on so it's all the white women's fault that's what that's what it does you know so and you know I don't like being partisan so yeah I did the damn thing because they're just I'm sorry but at the same time it's a good joke because you just have this visual way cyst because if that's the if that's the level of analysis you're doing on why you're losing you're gonna lose more you're gonna lose more and more and more and humor should wake people up though it doesn't necessarily get read as that reds yeah it gets read as violence as we know to yeah yeah so so yeah to my larger point like I like if I say I had no idea who you were and I just came across this sweet if like this was my first introduction I'd be like this mother right but then I go to your YouTube channel I hear your conversations I see these two different you know two different people it's very stochastic you don't know who's gonna be reading it at any given time and you don't know where they're gonna be at their day or in their life for what mood they're gonna be and how they translate it and you and they don't know where you are you again are you three beers deep in a Friday night or are you like five five beers deep Sunday morning hung over you know like where are you in your life when you're thinking this stuff and that's all it's context decontextualized the whole thing scrubs so you just get one chunk and so you play the longer game with regards to what you're saying about apologies yeah that that's the thing how do you say how do you say how do you correct people you're reading me wrong how do you have that sincere conversation when somebody is misreading you the that's a big question that I had to figure out and I think I figured it out that I only I it's my pen tweet my it's my pen tweet which is a joke it's a joke but it's being a sincere and silly at the same time and that's the thing like you have to read it as me being sincere and silly at the same time because that's what I'm doing I don't do anything like a portmanteau or an entendre right but that's just how that's my literary thing and I can't escape that writing not prompt but restraint so with regards to people being offended by me I say something and they're offended by me to what degree does their offense owe to them and what to what degree does their offense owe to me to what degree are my words violence and promoting violence and participating in a system of oppression such as patriarchy, racism, etc and to what degree are they reading that that way and to what degree are they then using that right so I do a tweet that offends a certain group and then they're like oh look at what he did look at what this did and I went through with the radical feminist community and not all of them but a certain very radically charged feminist community I did a series of very offensive tweets and they started off by me using the wrong word I used the word rationality to describe men and emotionality to describe women and I was talking about intelligence and I was talking about the way in which they benefit each other it's just two different ways of making sense but that was read within the feminist doctrine as women are irrational which is bad but men are being emotional they don't care about that but you know it's playing into that thing and then I noticed that I would get huge pushback for using these little trigger words and the trigger words were being taken out of the context that I didn't even know that they're trigger words and I'm like okay so they're triggered by this do I need to unflip the trigger do I need to apologize that first time I tried to explain myself and they didn't care the first time I offended that group I tried to explain myself and they just because the swarm came down and they were all in intact mode so I would make an apology to a single person that I cared about and that I respected and then they would use that and blow it out like so you can't apologize to a crowd a crowd is not rational well no there's a word player well a crowd is not hurt I don't offend a crowd I offend an individual and either you read me or not we have a relationship so I can be in a personal relationship and I can be vulnerable to you and I can be rational with you I can't be irrational to an angry crowd and anything that I would say will already be read through their anger and their rage and will be more ammunition to sling at me and when all they're doing is acting out this thing that they just act out over and over and over again and then I realize that I'll offend them and about three days it'll be done like they only have an attention span and they're all collected to be offended so it's just like this swarm that's buzzing around these different things to be offended by and it just so happened that my tweet came out on a very boring part of their news cycle right so there's that level so if I apologize I only apologize to people I care about I only apologize on my terms I don't argue in comment fields I'll maybe do one back and forth but I don't go back and forth and back and forth like one it takes a lot of effort to come up with a creative way to say something that's obvious which is my problem is that I have to be original or have to be complex so I can't just go on that back and forth and back and forth thing two it's a waste of time three I'm not changing anybody's mind because they're already in battle mode so Twitter's battle mode and I just throw the things out and I get reactions but this is the real stuff or this is closer to the real stuff I think we'll save the internet and save America which is this stuff and the Twitter stuff is important but it's just a word game yeah yeah I've been really surprised at because you know I was I've written, I've self-published a few books and stuff but when I blew up on YouTube my content was sticking to like 10 minutes because I'm like people's attention fans are short but when I finally you know what I read so many books I'm going to interview authors and stuff and people are looking for the kind of long form nuanced conversations which you don't get on Twitter which you don't so what I've been trying to do to adjust my strategy if I feel like someone is hurt offended whatever I'm like bring it over to email talk to me over there because I also have to worry about like how you're trying to you know appear to your group and everything like that it's all performance yeah yeah exactly so finally I think you know this kind of ties into what made me want to bring you on was your video about Libs of TikTok right so help me understand because I think this touches on a few things we've been talking about right like poking fun or talking about you know the crazy progressives and things like that right so Libs of TikTok for those who don't know go look it up on Twitter they find the worst of the worst of TikTok people you know I made a comment the other day I think I think the left does this to Democrats too you'll find a Trump supporter who says the most ridiculous and saying things and I'm like you are finding the worst of the worst I don't know how much of this is like the larger whole right but anyways can you break down what why do you think Libs of TikTok is not helpful but jokes or whatever that you might be doing or James might be doing is for a larger purpose you know what I mean there's different levels of analysis for that and of course I'm going to sound like a hypocrite because I do one thing and I'm criticizing something that I do I'm criticizing something that I participate in and I'm criticizing that which gave me a platform to begin with which was the retarded antics of social justice drunk warriors right and they what you see with TikTok which is what I try to battle against once I started getting into the game of evergreen it was to expand the story it was to expand on those 30 second clips of a professor going completely apeshit on her colleagues to expand that to contextualize and always playing a game of a broader thing so what Libs of TikTok is doing is perfect twitter it's perfect marketing it's brilliant stuff find the worst of the worst the most cloying annoying viscerally reactive stuff that you just like you're just your whole body just you're watching this person like doing crazy things and I specified in the video there's different things that are going on one is like professionals or adults like fully fledged adults they're just being crazy and indoctrinating and being proud of their indoctrination and being proud of being in a position of power enforcing this stuff on children and then you have the 1718 19 year olds that are immersed in this ideology that is irrational is antirational specifically with gender which is just is crazy stuff and they're still trying to find their identity and there's probably a lot of loneliness going on in there there's probably some mental health issues not necessarily disorders but just issues of people groping for not just status but using status to solve their problems right so there's the the tiktok game is still about status but especially with the underdeveloped children or young people or young adults they're using status to try to solve another problem that's at a deeper level and so what we're seeing when we see these videos is that there's a disturbed person caught up in a disturbing ideology and then incentivizing by a completely insane social media structure and none of that is being talked about what's being talked about is look at how crazy the lips are look at how crazy the lips are and that's fine and so far as we're talking about the ideology that's disabled and we're critiquing the higher order system that incentivizes that behavior being social media but the fact that there's a human being there if we if we lose connection with the human being and that's why I try not I do I don't I try not to make personal attacks I and I try not to are you with the person and when I'm in an argument on Twitter what I see a lot of people doing is attacking me personally and accusing me and impugning all these motivations on me based on a clever sentence that I wrote whether or not it was really clever I tried right but they're doing all this you stuff and you are doing this and you are doing this and you are doing this and I'm like well you don't know any of that so I'm not going to are you with you on that I will bring it back to questions clarifications and not attack I'm not going to attack you because I'm attacking an idea or I'm attacking a reaction to an idea or I'm attacking somebody with a lot of power like Dan Rather who says he's a journalist and a storyteller I'm saying well which are you more of in this instance are you the journalist or the storyteller and how much of our journalism is storytelling and not journalism anymore with regards to that stuff so with I forgot the question the thing is is that with Libs of Tik Tok there's no analysis there it gets shared over and over and over again by everybody I'm connected to and so we're again like I said in the video we are conditioning ourselves to have a very narrow response to negative stimulus and what is and that's a problem on a group level because as Jonathan Haidt says morality binds and blind so what we're going to do is say the bad guys look at how bad they are right and like we were talking about with critical race theory we can cherry pick or not pick whatever it is all these different instances of egregious teaching and stuff but does that really solve the issue at play which is what do we do about race in America how do we have all these conversations about what education should be and should do and how do we strain ideology or to what extent do we want ideology and what kind of ideology do we want in our schools all those questions are are put out of the way on us all agreeing that they're the bad guys all agreeing that this is toxic and then ourselves being so righteous and you know in our moral indignation of this stuff that we then start to not be able to criticize ourselves right yeah so you know I'm open to criticism I you know but it has to be in the format where I know that the other person is not going to use me for their own gains other than them becoming better than me at Twitter yeah yeah and I think you touched on something important there where we you know especially like I think what you know what we're talking about lives a take five maybe it's a it's a couple things it's attacking the person rather than the idea and where it came from right and that's just a big no no right like you're talking about people come for you personally and give you all these characteristics or talk about your morality or your and nobody knows that nobody can tell you what you believe in stuff but then also there's the punching down aspect right when you take a fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen year old kid and say here is there to talk here's the dumb shit they're saying people are naturally going to attack that person talk about how dumb they are how on a form they are or whatever and there's nowhere else to really go so do you see that kind of being the issue somebody said that we need to bring back bullying or something like bullet bullying has always been there in high school like seventeen year old isn't shouldn't just like not be regulated by their social environment I'm like okay well one are you seventeen are you in high school how does thousands upon thousands of adults attacking a teenager at all commiserate with the bullying that happens in high school right and not that bullying is totally you know whatever that regulatory process of bullying manifest beneficially there's got to be some sort of benefit to that with regards to and a lot of detriment to but that's how kids kind of regulate each other especially the crazy ones but that doesn't work on the internet the internet is completely different thing so yeah if you're the bully you know the punching punching down thing is really weird because that itself is weaponized what like what we saw with chappelle like oh no there there's a genocide don't ever make fun of these people you know like okay you get whatever you want and we will never question you ever again is that the answer no and with regards to there's the problem like there is a point to ridicule there's a point to pointing out somebody who's errant and wrong and on the other side of the gender thing I hosted a man who opened up really wide about some really bad places that he was in that you know like just some bad stuff that he like really depressed state of like on the edge like really on the edge and he totally opened up and because it was about male sexuality the radfems took that and then like completely tore him apart like this very vulnerable man was then used as an icon for this war against trans ideology right and it's like all the young men could have benefited from seeing the end result of compulsive sexual behavior it's like if I had somebody who was just just barely got out of killing themselves on heroin right and and we had a really deep conversation about that and somebody who's like from mad you know mothers against drugs just like look at this freaking heroin addict and it's like no no no no no no heroines not good I'm not apologizing for heroin but this is we need to see that and there's so many lessons to be learned from that so you know I produce stuff that that offends them right that offends the radfems and you know I use offensive language and I joke about things which they take as me denigrating them and attacking them where they're vulnerable I never do that to an individual I never do that to an individual I only do that to the ideology or people who are completely possessed by the ideology who are just talking point time kick point time kick point time kick point time kick point monomous with the ideology but they're not being vulnerable they're just acting out a screw yeah yeah that's uh yeah I tweeted about it earlier I had an episode while back with the moral philosopher Kurt Gray him and you mentioned Jonathan him and those two disagree on some this more philosophy so great anyways anyways I had him on to talk about the more philosophy of Kansas is either good one or the bad one in this debate depends on who you're talking to Jonathan height his book opened up my eyes to these political conversations and having more empathy and understanding where people are from, how they were raised, what they value. So, but I understand Kurt Gray's, you might enjoy that, but so there's a lot of nuances and stuff, like I see what you're saying, but, you know, but when I had Kurt on, cause I was trying to understand when I got canceled, right? Because the argument against me was, you're not a licensed professional, you're talking about mental health and addiction, right? Through, you know, and I was like, I'm sharing my personal experience, I'm sharing what psychologists say, I'm sharing what the research says, right? And they took it to a level of you are killing people, right? And I'm like, whoa, let's dial that back. But in the world of cancel culture, like you're talking about this young man who opened up about his most vulnerable stuff. No, he was a middle-aged man. Yeah. When they feel that they have the moral high ground, anything goes, just all bets are off. They, you know, people are threatening to rape and kill my mom. Like she was actually getting messages, right? And I'm just like, how can you morally justify this? Right? Like you feel so- In the name of morality, that's the great thing. That's what just- That's the great thing. That's what I really started getting into all these books and trying to understand. I'm like, how do people do this? And that's what I dislike about culture wars and everything, because once you feel that you have the moral high ground, anything goes. Like you saw with the Dave Chappelle protest, right? They physically attacked that guy and broke his stick and, you know, and everything. And it's just like, how are you justifying this? Like you're- Repent, motherfucker. Repent, motherfucker. They were shouting that at him. It was like, what is this? Yeah. The inverted, what, the one Baptist Westboro, like it's like trans Westboro. It's like the weirdest thing. And I've just been fascinated with human behavior. I'm like, how do we do this? How do we, how do we release that point of dissonance where we can justify these things? Like, I'm trying to save lives, therefore I can threaten yours. Like that, that blows my mind. But, you know, like, go ahead. The thing is, is that we, I think, again, this is the problem with Libs of TikTok. This is the problem with, with internet culture is that we're acculturated to give those people a bigger footprint in our understanding of the world because we overestimate threats. Evolutionary, that's the wise thing to do. But what happened at Evergreen, all those crazy things that were happening was 2%, 3% at most of the student body was involved in that, but that becomes the definition of Evergreen. But once you get into the story, it's like, okay, the institutional administrative structure was behind this. And, you know, 20 teachers were behind this and everybody else was silent in supporting this, you know? But the oversized output of the activists that claim, one, they heightened everything up into life and death so that nobody can thank or question because it's life and death. And then two, they self-elect themselves as the representatives of these entire groups of people. So they're dehumanizing everybody that they're representing and saying, this is, we represent them. And then they're taking their behavior. And again, public eye sees that those people represent all those other people. So it's hugely ingest with regards to them. Something I was, you know, in my conversation with John McWhorter and some other people just talking about the woke stuff is here's what I would get offended is the infantilization that comes along with all of this, right? Like, don't say these things. It can drive somebody to suicide. Like, we're completely just neglecting like any kind of human resilience, right? Like, we're like, everybody is so sensitive that if anything is said, if anything, you know, any words, that's how words become harm, right? Like, you can't take this and you're such a fragile, just riddle baby that you will just off yourself. And like, as a father, like I would never want to teach my son that. I don't want to teach him that we have to bubble wrap this entire world to make sure that you are never heard, never have to question or, you know, and I think it also stops having conversations with people like saying, hey, like, if you are offended by something, why can't we just have like a conversation about it? But I think, you know, one of the bigger things is too as somebody who was an insane drug addict until I was 27 years old, my mental filter is fucked up, right? I can have somebody say something and it comes in as you are just talking down to me, you are calling me names, you know what I mean? And I think that's been completely eliminated from the equation is that, is it possible that you interpreted this thing wrong? You know what I mean? Like, do you ever see that when like you see somebody freaking out or anything like that? Like, maybe they interpreted something as something that it wasn't. Well, it's about emotional regulation and, you know, going through the process of being a public intellectual is really interesting because you're kind of a brand. And then what you're talking about, I've gone through that too, where I'm like, well, I need to apologize to this crowd. And so they're not treating you as a person, they're treating you as a persona. And then you try to bring your person, like, no, I'm a person, I'm a person. And then, and you're like, you're trying to upload this stuff into this cloud of these people that don't really care about you, they're just using you. And then, and then what do you have left over, you know, and then, and they're completely beholden to what everybody else thinks about you. So there's this process of building barriers around what I do and using as much of my personal, my personal wisdom, my personal growth and my personal caring and my soul, my spirit and all that stuff, putting as much of that into the internet, but still reserving this divide between the public and the private and the public and the private and the way that internet kind of like latches onto you, it's always in our face, it's always in our mind, it's really difficult to do that. And when people are really going there, especially through social media and really just flipping out or really like making a mountain out of a molehill to whatever degree, they're not really doing anything other than expressing and they're not regulating their expressions. And my time in preschool, which is around 15 years on and off of like dealing with two, three, four, five year olds, was like, okay, there's what, there's, let's say you're wounded, you scraped your knee and then there's your reaction to you being scraped and then there's the reaction to you being hurt and the, you know, like there's the nerves of pain going up to your brain, but then there's this emotion that's much bigger than that scrape. It's much bigger than that scrape. So the job for the teacher and so far as I can teach somebody at that level is to model like, no, you control your emotion so we can deal with the problem and your emotions are inflating the problem. So again, it's like if something happens 2000 miles away that somebody gets killed because of something that's racial or whatever, and then we bring that into ourselves and then we project ourselves, we heighten the threat that's way over there that we receive through all these mediums, virtual mediums, and then we bring that to us and then we're always in a state of harm and threat or we have a bunch of trauma in our lives and then we use these causes outside of us to work that out, but it doesn't actually end up working any of that out. It just constantly perpetuates that. It comes back to trying to recognize the human through the medium of all their expressions on Twitter and giving them leeway. If they're really offended, it's probably not because of me, it's probably because of a scrape that they got in real life and trying to say, okay, knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them and whatever, like knowing when to joke and knowing when not to joke. And the thing is, even if you know when to do that, people are coming from all these other places in time and state, so they're gonna take it out of context constantly. So it's really difficult unless you invest yourself as a human being over time where I go through all these different moods and you go through all these different moods and I'll recognize you when it's time or when I can be rational, I'll try to be rational. And when I'm joking, I'll try to do it in a way that isn't personally offensive to you, or doesn't denigrate your humanity. Well, I've never been personally offended by the truth, so. Well, yeah. Yeah, but here, so let me wrap this up with one last banger of a question because here's what I'm curious about. What is Benjamin Boyce's overall goal? Like with the content that you create, with the guests that you bring on, with the conversations that you're having, like what is your thing that you're trying to accomplish or is it for you or are you trying to open up your own mind through these conversations or are you trying to expose other people to conversations like what is your goal with the stuff that you're doing? Well, one, it's to be immortal. Upload enough of myself. Is that all right? It won't happen till after my life. I'll die and then I'll either be immortal or not but I'm trying to upload as much of myself into the cloud that the AI can represent me and actually variate my way of thinking through language and actually start to learn how to be witty and playful and then also personable too. So there's one way I'm trying to affect the AI and become a mortal part of that group brain which is immaterial, but I think that there's a reality inside of our life. I think there's a life inside of life. I think that there's a, no, I know and I feel that there's this reality that is filled with consequence and cause and effect but there's also this thing that we don't really have language for or all the language that we have for is encrusted with misinterpretation because we're trying to talk about something that is a higher order than our rational mind and our discursive mind but it's like this human spirit. This human spirit that connects us to the world and the world is always giving us gifts and lessons and pouring through us constantly and we get stuck and things come up and we lose sight of that and all of this culture war stuff is just like a canvas in order to explore the human spirit and try to like, try to uncover a little bit more of that in myself and if I can, you know, I don't know if I can do anything for anybody else. I really, on that level, the human spirit would, hopefully if I can be a channel for that, I wanna be the broadest channel possible but it's up to that spirit to do that work but I wanna be prepared to do that and I wanna provide a place for that and so I also really care about women and children and men and my brothers and sisters in the world. I just want to care for them and care, you know, not just by expressing care but giving them tools and modeling behavior that I think will help them care for themselves and each other, you know, and just kind of be good and also be clever and smart and a deck when I need to be, you know? Yeah. And just be a human, you know? Yeah, no, I think that, yeah, that's definitely one of the things that we have to include in there but yeah, I'll say this, like one thing that I love about your content is just the curiosity because I truly think that if we were more curious. Oh, she's my patron saint curiosity. Yeah. She is, she's my patron saint. It's working out, I love it but where can my people find you? Where can they find your literary prose on Twitter that you're doing and your YouTube channel and all that? Well, if you want to save yourself from my incredibly partisan and low grade thinking shitposting, then don't go to Benjamin A. Boyce on Twitter. Also, if you want to see me go beyond the sentence level way of making sense, you can find my literary endeavors but be warned, it takes work at aliastodream.substack.com and I'm sure the link will be done there in the description and my interviews. Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to change the name of this because I think that it's trademarked so I'm kind of screwed right now until I talk to a copyright lawyer or something like that but it's called calm versations or the voice of reason and that's on Spotify and Anchor and also my videos can be seen on Spotify now, lucky me. And yeah, I was allowed into that early program but also my YouTube channel is Benjamin A. Boyce and come along and bring your thoughts and play with me in the comments. Thank you so much, Chris. It was great to speak with you. I want to have you on my channel and then off this recording, I want to figure out how you get all these people who ignore me to not ignore you. Here we go. It'll be a mutually beneficial relationship. Yeah, man, thanks for coming on. We'll do this again. Cheers.