 Okay, well H-Bomber Guy, okay, Harry. That's my name. Don't address me as mine, just tell me. I have to, I have to. It's the law because you've done an internet thing, which means I've got to address you by your internet moniker. That's what people younger than me tell me you have to do. Yeah, yeah, plus it doesn't help that sort of a lot of the work I do prior to this, I operate under a sort of persona where I've kind of invented a character who I play in my work who's distinct from who I am. I mean, who are you at the moment? My actual name is Harry Bruis. I'm streaming under that name because I guess it felt disingenuous to continue playing a persona when this stuff happened. But Harry Spomber Guy, the character is the person I play in a lot of the videos that I make where I'm sort of trying to, I like to bring people in on a joke. So if I play a character who's obviously flawed in their own way, it sort of draws people in and sort of, I think, helps make people feel involved in whatever's happening. So I really want to talk about that and how people create personas, particularly through streaming platforms, create a sense of community. Oh my God, that is ginormous. Sorry, yeah. Is that a character element or is that just the normal amount of water you drink? I heard once a very long time ago, you should always drink far more water than you think. And I think, oh, that'll make my complexion much nicer, my skin will be great. It just makes you need to go to the bathroom all the time. I mean, the bathroom when you called me to say this was ready to go. I mean, you could have like streamed, I think, whilst on the loo and it would have felt intimate, you know? Actually, the first thing I filmed for the new video is a Gillette razor in the toilet. I'm doing a piece about the response to the Gillette commercial. I'm not sure if you've... Yeah, I mean, so does that mean that you had to put your hand in your toilet to retrieve the razor? Yes, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to do it to re-enact the guy who took a picture of his razor in the toilet and then, you know, re-enact the seconds after where he realized he had to either actually flush his razor or take it out. There's one question that we ask of the guy, right? Which is like, was it worth it that you touch your own diluted feces or you ruin your plumbing? But then is it worth it for you to either ruin your plumbing or touch diluted excrement to send up the guy who also was faced with that choice or did you have, like, a litter picker to, like, be able to do it at a distance or chopsticks? That's a really good... No, no, I just put my hand in. No, no, I'm kicking myself about that. But it made for hilarious internet video content and I, of course, could plan ahead so I got to pre-scrub my toilet. Oh, that's useful. That's better than when I dropped my phone down the toilet, which... Oh, yeah, I recently threw my phone in the toilet for a different video. I've got a lot of use out of armoured shanks. I should get sponsored by them. That might be... I was going to say, ultimately, do you think the internet has been good for you? I mean, let's go back to your marathon Donkey Kong extravaganza. Like, how's your brain doing after that much Donkey Kong? It's hard returning back to reality. Sometimes when I shut my eyes, I briefly see a flash of a blue cartoon beaver taunting me. I don't think that'll ever go away. I felt like I would stop having nightmares about Donkey Kong if I could just beat the game, finally. It was like a form of immersion therapy. There's a website called speedruns.com.net. I forget which one. There's a speedrunning website that records the fastest everyone's beaten a lot of different games and a lot of different categories, different ways of beating them. And I thought, wouldn't it be great to beat the game so completely that I got on that list? And I did it in one sitting, so it can't be disputed. Everyone saw it. And then it's like I actually did it. I finally really finished this thing. But it can't go on the leaderboard because I technically used the wrong hardware. Which means that next year we have to do it again. We have to do it on the real hardware. Maybe this time I'll run the stream properly. The whole thing was a total mess. My friend Pio is their name. They started a server for other people to come in and to sort of arrange the calls and stuff. And a lot of people kind of dawned on people faster than me that my fun thing I was going to do for I expected about six people was becoming an event without me realizing it. I kind of turned off my brain so I wouldn't panic. I mean, I guess you have to get into a meditative state for that much Donkey Kong. But I mean, it became huge. It was a phenomenon. When you realize a lot of people are watching something and you're making ten times, or perhaps even more than that, the amount of money you ever expected to make, me and my friend Sean, who gave me the idea to do this, we did a charity thing last year at Halloween and we raised about 3,000 pounds for a special effect, which is a charity for disabled people. And I thought it's going to be about that big and I kind of prepared myself for the long haul of doing this for hours and hours with barely anyone watching. At least I'd have done it. And when it hit me that people actually were watching and people were donating, when we'd passed my first goal of $500 before I was done apologizing for starting late, part of me went, oh, this is more than I prepared. And then that bit went away and someone else started handling all the difficult jobs of actually getting guests in. I mean, so why do you think it became so huge? Like I was reading a bit of coverage about it, and what the author was arguing was that there's a certain power in fuck that guy in particular that the first motivation, which was obviously solidarity, particularly for like very vulnerable, trans teenagers, trans kids, but then also this element of like, you know what, there's so much internet nastiness around this sort of anti-trans backlash that being able to say fuck that guy in particular felt good. Yeah, I think it was one of those things where Graham Lennon is almost a cipher. He's awful, but he's also just, he's almost, he doesn't exist, he's this empty vessel upon which we can use to talk about a much wider and deeper problem. Graham doesn't even think he's transphobic, because you know, he's got at least two trans friends. So obviously there's no problem there. But his... Like kind of saying I'm not misogynist, my wife's a woman. Yeah, my wife's a woman. Basically that, so me, when I say, you know, when I say fuck you Graham, I don't literally just mean it, although I do. I'm also saying, hey, this thing is bad and it's okay to say it is. I think really I gave everyone who already did feel that way an excuse to say it. I think sometimes people feel like they need a reminder that it's okay, if that makes sense. So what do you make of the anti-trans backlash? Because one of the things that I find quite confusing is other than the specifics of the GRRA, is that a lot of the sort of legal safeguards and rights for trans people have been secured years ago. So the discussion over toilets and changing rooms has already years out of date. And it seems to be that now, particularly I think with the editorial line that The Times has taken, the editorial that was published by The Guardian, and then this sort of online coterie of famous for doing other things and they're now prominent transphobes. Why do you think that's come together at this time? I think what's happened essentially is people who are, let's not say right-wing, are regressive, or it's a bit of a, it's the same thing twice there really, but are always trying to find a new way to articulate their bad ideas. We've reached a point now where it's, you're not allowed to say that stuff about gay people. You're not allowed to say, would you let a gay man in a bathroom with your child? You're not allowed to say that anymore. So they have to find someone else to target with those beliefs. A lot of people on the stream had a lot of trans guests on said this is a wedge issue to try and separate the LGBT community and a lot of people who really want to feel like they're being the good feminists will get on board behind convincing sounding arguments that they're coming into the bathroom with your kids. And so that gets people riled up and it doesn't really matter what the truth is or respect these things go out of the window and it becomes I'm being the best feminist by trying to defund a charity that helps children. Effectively, it's a trick by people who are even worse than Graham to get Graham on their side and it's worked. And there was a very funny moment where Graham said something very rude and aggressive to one of the guests on my stream and they replied to him on Twitter with hi Piers Morgan, I love your work. And that was Lindsay Ellis, who's an awesome YouTuber who kind of helped set all this up, along with a lot of other people who I'm going to insist on listening. Yeah, no, name drop, name drop away. And that kind of highlights the point of this, which is trans issues by way of being kind of the next thing after sort of homophobia or racism are a way of bringing back in all of these arguments and finding a new audience in the form of people who think that they're being progressive by doing it. But it's not working. You know, Graham has kind of accidentally done amazing promotion for this issue by being so obviously wrong, so inarticulate and so angry that it becomes incredibly obvious where the truth is. So I do genuinely want to say thanks, Graham, for helping get attention on this issue. You also made a bit of a name for yourself through debunking. You sort of measured response format for taking a claim and investigating it and taking something that's absurd and then plumbing it to the very depths of its absurdity. And one of the things that has been coming up again and again with mermaids has been this sort of conspiratorial, this is what they're really doing. You know, they're trying to force children into taking puberty blockers, hormonal therapy, surgery before they can make informed decisions about their bodies. So do you have a debunking for that stuff? Well, this is one of the things that makes my job very hard is you have to figure out when the evidence is the point, when you have to debunk it and then people will go, oh, I was wrong. And when that's not the point and the point is they want to believe they're right and no matter how much you argue the evidence, it doesn't matter. That was never really the point. You see that a lot with, for example, with Graham. You can see a lot of geneticists or biologists or psychologists contacting Graham to say, actually, puberty isn't reversible, but if you block puberty and then you change your mind, you can go through it again afterwards. You just stop taking the puberty blockers. It's fine. It's how the body works. He will ignore that, never respond to it until he finds another doctor with the worst credentials who says, I don't think so. I've got a degree in economics and I think, you know, or Robert Webber reckons, but he will step over all of these people, this pool of knowledgeable people correcting him to say, look at this trans person who called me a turf. That's a slur. Look at this person with a beard coming to get me because that's the only way to message being this wrong. So to actually say, let's get into the weeds of the evidence is missing the point. However, or I looked into it obviously before I decided to come out in support of a charity, almost all of the things they bring up are just very clearly doing, digging to sort of position this charity which basically provides support to children and their families. It's literally just advice for parents who don't know any of this stuff when their kid starts talking to them about it. They're just looking at any event and possibly go, look at this horrible thing they did. There was a judge who really overstepped the mark in their ruling and the comments they made. So they can go, well, look, here's a judge saying what we want them to say when that's just someone else reckoning. It's nothing to do with the truth or the biology of it all. And having known people who knew they were trans from a very young age, there being more of a discussion and more availability of this information so that people can actually think about this stuff is tremendously useful. But if you think trans people are fake and it's all imaginary, then this strikes you as children being tricked into thinking they're trans when they're actually not. But the truth is actually the complete opposite. People are now more free than ever to discover the truth about themselves because we're finally talking about it. Trans people have been around for a very long time, but they've not been very visible and it's happening now and people are perceiving it as suddenly there's all these trans people. No, they were always there and a lot of them didn't even really know it. Yeah. I mean, one of the really beautiful things about the stream and what I was able to do and I didn't think that I would call Donkey Kong beautiful but Donkey Kong is beautiful was that it sort of was full of these surprises of who turns out to be an ally because it seems to me that when you exist on the internet you're always just like, oh, no. They're a transphobe and it's always just the sort of unpleasant like, oh, okay. And it always seems to be people that were involved in comedies like 20 years ago. I don't know why that sort of an incubator of transphobia, but then it's like AOC voice of Donkey Kong himself got the guy behind Doom coming out and coming out for trans liberation, for trans rights. Did you realise that was the scale of support that was out there on this issue? That was the thing that when we I actually started to cry at one point when I realised how wrong I'd been. I'd assumed, oh, maybe a couple of people would retweet it, but no one really cares that much. I'd been prepared for a very depressing and very long evening and at some point it hit me that I'd been completely off the mark and there were so many people who'd basically been waiting for an excuse for charity and do good for people, and a lot of people had thought about this and cared, and that really I did almost break down at one point. But I hadn't expected any of it, but it's really wonderful knowing we also had Josh Sawyer came on, we had people who worked on Guitar Hero and Rock Band come on to say we exist where here, it's not just allies there are people who are trans in the industry all over the place and they've always been there, and that's been really it's been nice knowing that there are so many people who actually do care. Because we tend to think of gamer culture as something which is broadly aligned with the alt-right and I'm actually, I'm like the most technophobic person on the planet like I'm like an auntie who's like having to navigate a phone, like the whole thing, terrifying and one of the things that I find in particular quite terrifying is YouTube. I've always been trying to make more of a presence on YouTube and it's where I go if I feel I need to reduce my self-esteem by like 30% by reading like 100 comments on how I need to shave my moustache but you've been a part of and not just yourself but you know lots of the names that you've been dropping I've been part of trying to engineer like a bit of an insurgency I mean how do you go about doing that what's the value of gaming and doing that what's the value of streaming and doing that I think sometimes people need to realise that games are never just about games we find games interesting because they reflect our lives and they reflect real issues and there are chances for us to think about things in new ways I didn't get into any of this to be political or change culture I got into this to talk about stuff that I happen to enjoy and it turns out that if you take an even slightly gestalt approach to a topic and say well this also deals with this this is what a game has to say about dialectics or here is here's what a piece of media has to say about society you reach a point where suddenly you're getting people to think about a topic in a way they hadn't before I think the right exists very strongly on YouTube partially because they're incredibly well funded the Koch brothers have given millions of dollars to a lot of people to ensure that they have a very established presence pushing for freer markets and worse healthcare it's kind of strange what do we like, white supremacy we like forcing trans people out of public life but also we like people having the freedom to smoke themselves into lung cancer and then not have the healthcare to deal with it that's the sort of array of political positions it's a very interesting kind of freedom and you see it revealed when my go to example right now is when Jerry Seinfeld told I think it was Seinfeld, it might be Jerry Springer told a joke at a university campus and no one laughed and it wasn't a very funny joke it wasn't anything to do with political correctness I forget what it was, it was like some it was what's the deal with airplane food 2.0 no one laughed and you could see on his face oh am I not funny, no it's them and from then on he was very anti-political correctness and the lesson there is that when they say oh we should be free to tell whatever jokes we want, they actually are what they want is this new freedom, the freedom to be laughed at and told you're funny even when you're not which is a very bizarre freedom they don't realise it's actually a little bit secretly fascist I mean it's not freedom right, it's power yeah you want the freedom to always win that's the mindset that millionaires get into they think that freedom is being infringed upon if you can't pay someone to knock their own teeth out or if you can't crush unions or something like that but but there's a whole band of people who aren't millionaires I mean I don't think Sargon of Akkad or Karl of Swindon whatever we're calling him is a millionaire, it's just these sort of these guys who are temporarily embarrassed millionaire obviously working their way up but on top of that when you have a lot of media out there that's run by people with a specific agenda or mindset then you're going to get that mindset replicating itself even in the people who don't benefit at all from that system I've met a lot of people who benefit from marginal tax rates worried that if they somehow one day make a lot of or worry about the estate tax whether they're worried that if they at some point own a house which they never will because they're millennials they're worried that if they die that the kids the theoretical kids might have to pay taxes on it and that's because people have invested in making sure that's what you're worried about and not your rights I think the power of YouTube is that you can't control it it is in a way free so eventually ideas do develop and you get people like contrapoints or like Sean or philosophy tube and to have or three arrows over in Germany or to a much lesser extent me you're going this stuff is obviously wrong and we can actually point it out and then because the truth does you know can't actually be escaped no matter how much you pay or how hard you put your fingers in your ears Graham it starts to develop and I think the recent growth hasn't been us doing anything particularly clever I'm not clever at all I played Donkey Kong for hours that's literally all I did what's happening is all the people who were always there are going oh wait hang on I can think a bit more about this and that's all it really takes I think I think there's just something about the combination of like the simplicity of what you did just play Donkey Kong for ages and it's got this tie I think for loads of us because of nostalgia like I remember playing it with my cousins it's also kind of non-threatening like I don't think you could have done it with GoldenEye or maybe next time you could do it with GoldenEye I was thinking what do I stream tonight because tonight's one of the nights I normally stream I could just play Counter-Strike and just hang out but that's actually sort of not a fun game to watch people play I'm very lucky that Donkey Kong is a child-friendly game it's very quiet it was a fun fact Donkey Kong originally had guns in it and they replaced them with fruit because they thought that would be sort of more on-brand and I think that kind of attitude the kind of let's build an environment that is still stuff still happens it's still violent but it's safe it's fruit I think that's the kind of attitude I wanted to endeavor in it where it's theoretically a spiteful stream let's get Graham but what it really is is let's talk about these issues in a way and help some people it was really about mermaids it was never really about Graham What's the response of Graham been? The response has been to paraphrase this isn't an exact quote I am completely off my rocker please give more money to mermaids he just said it in a very bizarre way by just screaming at everyone who came out in support of trans people it doesn't help but feel very sorry for his imaginary assistant Yes, I feel incredibly sorry like part of me in my head is thinking of the strategy the optics of the situation part of me wants to genuinely say stop tweeting Graham if you genuinely want to stop if you don't want to make this any worse stop advertising for us that's all you have to do but he seems dedicated to helping by making a complete ass of himself and you know thanks but I don't think that's what you wanted so like what you're saying is essentially like Graham Linehan sleeper agent in turf twitter comrade Graham There's this great television show which I think he might have heard of called Father Ted and there's an episode called The Passion of St. Tibulus that's about the fathers they come out and they protest against a film that's playing that's apparently very controversial and their protest makes it the most popular film to ever play in that theatre and he seems to have forgotten the plot of his story where you know he's the one doing it like it's this perfect storm of like this is a script the clever man Graham Linehan used to be would have written now if there was any sense left but I think when you get this committed to a cause even when it turns out you're wrong you have to keep going Graham is now locked in but we can get all of his fans all the people who actually are open minded it's been very very fun going to twitter and checking his follow account and watching it go down watching his people go I can't stand this anymore I followed you because I liked black books or the IT crowd but at this point it's not worth it that's been very very fun to watch the thing that got highlighted the sort of perhaps the most fun moment of the stream for me it wasn't asking a sitting congresswoman how to be how to turn on the factory in Donkey Kong it was when someone mentioned a GoFundMe page that they were funding for a wheelchair and when they looked back about 10 minutes later they made past the goal I realised that there are so many people out there for whom what is a very small amount of money could radically change their life there's a hashtag on twitter right now it's trans crowdfund and it's people saying hey this much money would make a tremendous difference it would help me get to a safe place or get out of bad situations and that's the main thing I want to bring up is the work has to continue and I don't think it will stop I think people have begun to wake up to just how much good they can do and that's really excellent thank you so much for joining us today it's been a really fun interview to conduct thank you so much for having me on it's really lovely of you to approach me to do this and you've been really great thank you next time can you do 57 hours of Donkey Kong for Navarra someone has to try to destroy you first Graham can you try to destroy Navarra media next