Steven Bonnell, aka Destiny, is a progressive political commentator and a live streamer on YouTube. Melina Goransson is a live streamer on Twitch. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
- True Classic Tees: https://trueclassictees.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off
- Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil
- MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lex to get 15% off
- Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex to get 25% off premium

EPISODE LINKS:
Destiny's YouTube: https://youtube.com/destiny
Destiny's Subreddit: https://reddit.com/r/Destiny
Destiny's Website: https://destiny.gg
Destiny's Instagram: https://instagram.com/destiny
Melina's Twitch: https://twitch.tv/melina
Melina's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melina.goransson
Melina's Twitter: https://twitter.com/melinagoranson

PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:06 - Politics and debates
19:28 - War in Ukraine
32:37 - Trans athletics
35:46 - AI
48:29 - Lowest point in Destiny's life
1:08:40 - Hate speech and language
1:45:02 - Misogyny
2:00:13 - Big government and institutions
2:39:57 - Hasan and Vaush
2:56:06 - Joe Biden
3:06:56 - Donald Trump
3:12:56 - Free speech
3:15:49 - Melina joins the conversation
3:19:03 - Melina and Destiny
3:29:34 - Open relationship
3:36:56 - Red pill community
3:47:10 - Sex body count
3:59:25 - Advice for young people

SOCIAL:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman
- Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman
- Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman
- Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman

If you have a democratic style of governance, you are entrusting people with 1 of the most awesome and radical of responsibilities.

And that's saying that you're going to pick the people that are gonna make some of the hardest decisions in all of human history.

If you're gonna trust people to vote correctly, you have to be able to trust them to have open and honest dialogue with each other.

Whether that's Nazis or KKK people or whoever talking, you have to believe that your people are going to be able to rise above and make the correct determinations when they hear these types of speeches.

And if you're so worried that somebody's gonna hear a certain political figure and they're going to be completely radicalized instantly, then what that tells me is that you don't have enough faith in humans for democracy to be a viable institution, which is fine.

You can be anti-democratic, but I don't think you can be pro-democracy and anti-free speech.

The following is a conversation with Steven Bunnell, also known online as Destiny.

He's a video game streamer and political commentator.

1 of the early pioneers of both live streaming in general and live streamed political debate and discourse.

Politically, he is a progressive, identifying as either left or far left, depending on your perspective.

There are many reasons I wanted to talk to Stephen.

First, I just talked to Ben Shapiro, and many people have told me that Stephen is the Ben Shapiro of the left in terms of political perspective and exceptional debate skills.

Second reason is he skillfully defends some nuanced non-standard views, at the same time being pro-establishment, pro-institutions, and pro-Biden, while also being pro-capitalism and pro-free speech.

Third reason is he has been there at the beginning and throughout the meteoric rise of the video game live streaming community.

In some mainstream circles, this community is not taken seriously, perhaps because of its demographic distribution skewing young, or perhaps because of the sometimes harsh style of communication.

But I think this community should be taken seriously and shown respect.

Millions of young minds tune into livestreams like Destiny's to question and to try to understand what is going on with the world, often exploring challenging, even controversial ideas.

The language is sometimes harsher and the humor sometimes meaner than I would prefer.

But I, Grandpa Lex, put on my rain boots and went into the beautiful chaotic muck of online discourse and have so far survived to tell the tale with a smile and even more love in my heart than before.

On top of all this, we were lucky to have Molina Gorinson, a popular streamer and world Traveler, join us at the end of the conversation.

You can check out her channel on twitch.tv slash Molina, and you can check out Stephen's channel on youtube.com slash Destiny.

To support it, Please check out our sponsors in the description.

I don't know if you watched me watching your yay interview.

I'm so curious, when you're navigating a conversation like that, how intentional is the thought process between like building rapport and pushing and giving a little and letting like-

It was very kind for you to review that conversation.

It meant a lot that you were complimentary in parts on the technical aspects of the conversation, but no, 0.

And I'm actually deliberately trying to avoid, I think you've called it debate brain, which is just another flavor of thinking about like the meta conversation, trying to optimize how should this conversation go?

Because I feel like the more you do that, the better you get at that, the less human connection you have.

Like the less genuinely you're actually sitting there in the moment and listening to the person, you're more like calculating what's the right thing to say versus like feeling what is that person feeling right now?

That's what I'm trying to do is like putting myself in their mind and thinking, what does the world look like to them?

Now, I'm also learning, especially because Rogan and others have been giving me shit for not pushing back, it's good sometimes to say, from a place of care for the other human being to say stop.

I don't think that represents who you are and what you really mean.

Or maybe if it does at that time represents who they are, I can see a better world if they grow into a different direction, try to point that direction out to them.

There's a really complicated dance between letting somebody share their full story versus letting somebody like essentially, I guess like proselytize your audience.

And it's like, okay, hold on, let's take him in here.

But yeah, I used to be 4 or 5 years ago, it was attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, whatever you said.

And now I'm leaning way more towards the like, okay, well, tell me how you feel about everything and then we'll go from there.

Some older fans will watch and they're like, why are you letting this guy just ramble on?

You know he said like 5 or 6 wrong things and you're only gonna call him out on 2 of them.

And it's like, it's just different styles of conversation.

Do you do a lot of research beforehand too?

So if we're gonna talk like vaccines and stuff, yeah, that's a ton of reading and stuff that I never thought I'd know going into it.

If it's a more personal, like political philosophy conversation, there's not as much you can prepare for, just it truly depends on the conversation.

How much are you actually listening to the other person?

I'm always listening, you have to listen.

Because as soon as you stop listening, the quality of everything falls apart.

The connection disappears, the quality of the conversation disappears.

But my natural inclination is to just be way more aggressive than normal, so I have to constantly remind myself, I guess you would call it a meta conversation, where you're like, okay, he's probably saying this because of that, or we'll let him go here and then we'll stop later.

But yeah, because my preferred style of conversation is like, I'm gonna talk and the second I say something you disagree with, then let's iron it out, right?

I got like, I think I'm like syllogisms, like, okay, here's premise A, good, okay, premise B, okay.

And then as long as we're both deductively sound, we're not crazy, no psychosis, then we're gonna agree on everything.

Whereas other people like to, most people think in stories, like narratives, like a whole, there's a whole like narrative and the individual facts don't matter as much because they'll pick and choose what they want.

And it's really hard because everybody thinks narrative so I have to function in that world, but it's frustrating for me sometimes.

Well, I've seen, you've had a lot of excellent debates.

1 of them I just recently, last night, watched is on systemic racism, and it's the first time I've seen you completely lose your shit.

I'm not sure exactly, but you were just very frustrated, sorry, not lose your shit, but you were frustrated constantly because of the thing, let's lay out 123, and every time you try to lay it out, it would falter.

I think it had to do with sort of, can you use data to make an argument, or do you need to use a study that does an interpretation of that data?

And then there's like this tension between, I think this is a behavioral economist that you were talking to, the point is you do this kind of nice layout that the whole point of behavioral economics is says there's more to it than just the data.

You have to give a context and do the rich, rigorous interpretation in the context of the full human story.

And then there was the dance back and forth.

Sometimes you use data, sometimes not, and you're getting really frustrated and shutting down.

I've seen Sam Harris have similar sticking points.

Like if we can't agree on the terminology, we can't go on.

To me, I feel like, the Wittgenstein perspective is like, I think if you get stuck on any 1 thing, you're just not gonna make progress.

You have to, part of the conversation has to be about doing a good dance together versus being dogmatically stuck on the path to truth.

I think the true challenge is identifying what of those sticking points are important versus what is not important.

So Like if I'm having an argument with somebody about like Jewish representation in media, they might, it might be like a big conversation and they might say a couple things.

Like I think Jewish people, you know, they tend to help their own or whatever.

But like for the purpose of the conversation, we can keep moving.

But if they casually drop like, you know, yeah.

And I think that's why the Holocaust numbers are blown up from like 100,000 to 6 million.

And that's when I was like, okay, well, hold on, wait, wait.

If you think this, we have to stop here because this is gonna be, it's not just a language game in this part.

If you really believe this fact, then the whole rest of the conversation is gonna be informed by that belief, you know?

And it has to be something that doesn't bother you personally.

So Holocaust denial is somebody that would bother a lot of people.

And there's some things, just observing you, I feel like when you get really good at conversation, you can become a stickler to, you might have your favorite terms that really bothers you if people don't agree on those terms.

Yeah, I usually just want, if people say stuff, I just let it slide, yeah?

Because if you fight, when you're having a conversation with somebody and you're talking to their audience at the same time, because that's really what's happening, you never want to come off as overcombative or overaggressive because it puts people in like, there's like a trigger in your brain, and this is true of relationships, of friendships, of persuasive rhetoric or whatever, there's a trigger in the brain.

And as soon as that defensive trigger gets like flipped on, everything is over.

You've lost the ability to persuade because everything becomes a fight at that point, yeah.

Well, I wanted to talk to you because I heard somewhere that you were referred to as the Ben Shapiro of the left.

And since I'm talking with Ben as well, I wanted to sort of complete spiritually this platonic political philosophy puzzle in my head.

You are a progressive, but a progressive with many nonstandard progressive views, and you had a heck of a fascinating journey through all of that.

And like I said, I think you argue with passion sometimes, with excessive amounts of passion.

Almost always with good faith and with rigor, with seriousness.

I asked on your subreddit, which is an excellent subreddit, shout out to the Destiny subreddit, so much, at least for that particular post.

What I really loved is when I asked for questions for you, they were like, holy shit, there's adults in there, let's all behave.

But actually the questions that rose to the top were really good.

So somebody said that Destiny was, speaking of your journey, was a conservative in his early teens, then he became a libertarian, then he became a left-wing social justice warrior, then he flirted with socialism, and now he is a social democrat liberal.

I've also heard you refer to yourself as a far-left person.

So to the degree there's truth to that journey, Can you take me through your evolution through the landscape of political ideologies that you went through?

So my dad comes from Kentucky and my mom is a Cuban immigrant.

Cubans are notorious for being very conservative in the United States for historical reasons and for other reasons, but my upbringing was a very Republican 1.

I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, on the radio Billy Cunningham, I think Sean Hannity a little bit later on, that was my whole upbringing politically.

I remember I was writing, I'd written articles for the school journal in favor of defending the war in Iraq and defending Bush from all the criticism, et cetera.

I think once I hit high school, college, I had my edgy, libertarian-esque high school phase of reading Ayn Rand, of figuring out that, oh my God, nothing in life matters except for class and money.

That's actually the answer to everything.

And I got to college, I became a Ron Paul fan, very big Ron Paul fan.

And then from there, I kind of work, do life, life happens.

At the kind of the lowest point in my life in terms of where I'm working financially, everything is like kind of in ruin in my life.

There's a whole bunch of dumb stuff that's happened.

Probably my most conservative point, I don't know what it is about like being poor and thinking like you can work your way out of it, you can do whatever.

It's just my upbringing is always just like, if you're not having financial success, just work, work, work, work, work.

And then I got into streaming, very, very lucky break.

Everything just lined up at the right time.

And then as I've progressed through streaming, I would say through the years, I've gradually fallen more and more to the left, especially once my kid turned 456 years old.

And I started to see like how much different his life was just because of the financial opportunities that I was able to provide for him through no merit of his own.

And that started to radically change how I viewed the world in a lot of ways.

So actually let's like linger on that low point.

You worked at McDonald's, you worked at a casino, you did carpet cleaning.

That's when you were just flirting with starting streaming?

My whole life has been a series of lucky breaks, really, truly.

I grew up playing a lot of video games, but back in my day, our day, you had to read.

Yeah, because nowadays everything's voice acted, but back then you had to read a lot.

I was a really good reader and a really good vocabularist.

Yeah, JRPGs, so like Final Fantasy games, Fantasy Stars, like all of these, like any RPG that would have been on the SNES, Sega, PlayStation, these are the things

I just talked to Todd Howard, who's of the Elder Scrolls fame and the Fallout fame and beyond.

Why is Skyrim the greatest RPG of all time?

Man, I really don't like Skyrim or Fallout.

Yeah, so I really like characters and like compelling stories and narrators around those characters.

And I like to see them kind of like grow and change, kind of like a movie or a story.

So in your like Final fantasy games, you've got characters.

There are a lot of like classical tropes of like, a character starts off kind of like edgy, angsty, all on their own, they develop relationships, friendships, they realize that the life is more about themselves and they do that.

That's kind of what you see in all of those old role-playing games.

I didn't like the open world ones as much because your main character is just like a blank slate, never talks, it's for you to like project onto, but there's not the same like linear narrative of like growth

There's an actual story arc to the character that's more crafted in a beautiful way by the designers of the game.

I tend towards like, I want to hear a compelling story around like a set of characters that like grow and change as the game goes on.

I just really loved being able to leave the town.

You go outside the town and you look outside its nature and the world of possibilities is before you.

I mean, that immensity of just being lost in the world is really immersive for me.

So you were just starting to play video games.

You grew up playing video games, that's 1 of your lucky breaks.

like a lot of random skills you pick up depending on the type of game you play.

I played a lot of text-based games on the computer, so I was a very fast typer, I'm still a very fast typer.

Read a lot, learned weird kind of math stuff for some of the calculations, some of the games.

I think I'm pretty good at getting information, figuring stuff out, learning patterns, all of that.

And then that plus the reading and everything with the games meant that I don't want to say I excelled in school because my grades were pretty bad, but I was in like all honors, all AP classes or whatever.

A lot of dual enrollment, a lot of AP credit going into college.

So I did pretty well in school, probably better than I should have, but it was because I had the game stuff that was like really powering a lot of my brain there while I was trying to sleep through class.

So you're able to soak in information, integrate it, quickly take notes.

Generally I think I'm pretty good at that, yeah.

You do this a lot when you stream, you're typing stuff.

Yep, notepad.exe, not the plus plus, not.

Is there genius to the madness behind that or you just don't give a shit?

No, I mean like, it's gonna depend on the style of conversation.

If I'm with somebody that is very meticulously organized their thoughts and they're a, find a better word here for rambler.

You can edit that in, better word for rambler.

I'll start like taking notes, bullet points, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, because there's a style of conversation where I say 7 or 8 different things and then when you go to respond to everything I said, I cut you off immediately and we argue that point.

But if somebody is gonna do that, you're just like, hold on, you just said these 8 things, I'm gonna respond to every single 1, I've written them all down and then you can go, if you wanna go point by point, we can, but you just said all this and I wrote it down, so now we're gonna go.

So what are you actually writing down, like a couple

Honestly, like, there are very few unique conversations in politics.

Like a lot of them are kind of retreading old ground.

So if we're having a debate on abortion, somebody might say like, oh, well I believe this thing about viability, and I believe this thing about, you know, when they're a fetus versus a human and I'll just write down like those points so that when I go to respond, I kind of have like a, like note cards, like a guiding thing there to keep me centered on my response.

Political discourse is a kind of tree you're walking down and I got it and you're like taking- Just

to keep my focus guided, so I'm not like running off on a weird tangent or responding to something I didn't say or something.

It's just, is there a system to your note taking?

Because mentally you seem to be 1 of the most organized people I've listened to.

So is it in your mind or is there a system that's on paper?

I feel like the human mind is a beautiful thing if you have interest in an area.

So what I'll tell people is, let's say there's a totally new topic that I'm researching, I don't know anything, and I'll do a couple of these on stream.

I think they're boring, but people watch it.

I might open a Wikipedia article and I'll read and I hit something I don't know.

And then I open the next Wikipedia article and I'll read it.

And then I might have like 7 tabs open and I'll read and I'll read and I'll read.

And I'll read a ton of stuff, maybe for hour 234 hours of stuff.

And then by the end, you know, someone in chat will ask me like, do you even remember like this particular thing?

And I'll say, not really, no, not too much.

But what happens is, as long as you've seen it once, what will happen is like the next day, the day after we'll read something else and be like, oh, I remember that thing from this thing.

And then if you see it like a third time, you're like, oh, this makes sense because especially when it comes to, oh, here's like a little trick on stuff.

If you're ever reading any news and there's a place that pops up, always look at it on a map because so much of history is like on a map.

It's so important to like know the geography.

But yeah, once I start to see stuff over and over again, just because I've like read it a few times, stuff will start to kind of connect to my mind.

And like, oh yeah, well, this makes sense.

Of course, these people believe this because of this.

It's because, you know, that happened there.

If there's a topic that I'm doing specific research for, so like vaccine-related stuff is a big 1, the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is a big 1, that I'll break out a note, I'll probably get a Google Doc, and I'll just start writing an outline of kind of the rough points of everything, just to organize my thoughts around different topics, yeah.

We're just gonna go on tangent upon a tangent upon a tangent.

We'll return to the low point of your life at some point.

Always returning from the philosophy to the psychology.

1 question is, what role does US play in this war?

Could they have done something to avoid the war?

Did they have a role to play in forcing Vladimir Putin's hand, Do they have a role to play in deescalating the war towards a peace agreement and the opposite?

If it does escalate towards something like the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, are they to blame, are we to blame?

Oh man, somebody sent me an email a while ago with great words.

There's a specific way to navigate a conversation where you can kind of like contribute to a negative event, but you're not really the 1 responsible for it.

Like the classic example is a woman goes out late at night, gets a little bit too drunk, and then something happens.

And it's like, while there might have been steps she could have taken to mitigate the risk, it's not her fault of what happened because the responsibility rests on the agent making the choice, right?

There's a chooser at some point that is choosing to do wrong or evil.

I don't believe in any of the arguments that say the United States has contributed to Russia's position on Ukraine or the actions that they've taken on Ukraine.

There are several arguments that some people, some even political scholars, are putting out there to say that the United States is to blame, but I find them completely unconvincing.

I think that when you ask the question of like, what is the United States role or what has our role been?

I don't think we even agree as a country on what our role should be, which I think is a hard 1, because you've got this kind of, there's this growing populist movement in the United States.

It might be the far left and the far right.

And I think populists tend to have this kind of isolationist view of the world, where the United States should just be our own thing.

We shouldn't be telling anybody what to do.

And then kind of more in these like center, left, center, right positions.

And then across a lot of Europe, you've got, well, okay, the United States is kind of like the big kid on the block.

Like we're looking to them for guidance and leadership on situations like what's going on in Ukraine.

So insofar as The original question is like, what is the United States responsibility?

See all Lex Fridman transcripts on Youtube

Destiny: Politics, Free Speech, Controversy, Sex, War, and Relationships | Lex Fridman Podcast #337