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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller. Welcome back to the Bulwark YouTube page. I am here with Destiny. The streamer Destiny, otherwise known as Stephen. He is streaming while we are doing this. This is a very meta deal on this YouTube video. Okay. I'm taping a video with him. While I'm taping, he's streaming it on his stream. And you know, so this is the new world. This is the world I'm trying to navigate. This is the world I'm in.
- [00:27]
B
You're supposed to be doing this more, aren't you? Didn't you start.
- [00:29]
A
I was supposed to be doing this more. I'm trying to stream more. I took a. People are. I have had some. Where's Tim? On the streaming. How do. Do you have a life? I guess this is. Well, hold on before I ask that question. For those of us on the Bulwark YouTube feed, for the normies, people who don't exist in Twitch World, we just give them like a one minute. Who are you? Like, what's your. Like, Set yourself on the political spectrum somewhere. You know, just give people, you know, a starting point, man.
- [00:56]
B
It really depends on where you're at. For an ordinary American political audience, I would describe myself as like a center left to far left establishment Democrat supporting type who does politics online in the YouTube space. I'll say that.
- [01:15]
A
And your backstory, you began doing this how?
- [01:17]
B
When I was 20, I was the first person on the planet to do streaming full time as a profession. I played video games semi professionally and then professionally a game called Starcraft 2. And then around 2016, I got into politics full time, kind of. Yeah. Like, the commentary shifted from just playing games to doing more political commentary. Yeah.
- [01:39]
A
And so then people are just kind of. People are just like monitoring you all day long. Like, you're just hanging out, you're just talking about what's happening on your computer. You're playing games, you're just vibing out. That's the. That's the gist.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah.
- [01:52]
A
So I guess that's my question. How do you have a life? Like, I wanted to stream more. I started blocking out some time for myself to do so in the evenings. But, you know, I also have a day job. I got to do a podcast for people. I got to go on Ms. Now I gotta go have drinks with my boys. I got a parent, my child, I gotta coach the basketball team. Like, what am I gonna do? Like, but you, you're just like, you're just in your room. You're live your life. Is your room or or what's happening.
- [02:18]
B
Okay, well, that's a very negative way to load it, but yeah. No, yeah. I mean, my life.
- [02:23]
A
Look, JVL's life is his room. He never leaves his house. People have different kind of vibes. Maybe JVL should be the streamer of the Bulwark.
- [02:30]
B
Well, listen, JVL is my spirit animal on your platform.
- [02:33]
A
Okay, okay. That sounds surprising.
- [02:35]
B
God bless him. Yeah. I mean, I grew up playing a ton of computer games and everything, so I was in that generation where your parents would scream at you to get off the computer and go watch TV or something because I was spending too much time playing games. So I. So it's already kind of in my, I guess, blood to do that and then the evolution from that to do it. Online political commentary. I'm sure, as you guys know, there's an endless amount of stuff to talk about. Always. It's easy to stream that every day and get caught up in that.
- [02:59]
A
Yeah. All right, man. Well, we're just going to vibe out on different politics stuff. What prompted this conversation? You hosted me on your stream a couple months ago now, which I appreciate, and I'm trying to learn the mores and ways of the streaming world. Secondly, though, you sent me the following DM on x dot com. We are not reading it off. Yeah. We're not texts. We're not text friends yet. We're still. Our relationship is still X.com DM level. It said this. Your interview with that Jason guy actually radicalized me into an extreme communist faster than anything I've ever seen in my entire life. Holy fuck. So a great DM to receive. Also relevant because, like, part of your brand as a center left Normie Dem streamer, like, you fight with the communists a lot. You have a lot of beef with communists. So I thought it was kind of meaningful that something I did gave you some sympathy to your streaming counterparties. And I'm wondering. I would like to hear you expand on it a little bit.
- [04:00]
B
Okay. So firstly, when you talk about the Overton window or the political philosophies that are popular in America, it really varies based on what part of the Internet you're on or what part of American politics you're on. I'm sure you've noticed this, that if you talk to Republicans, they would say that Obama is a communist.
- [04:18]
A
Sure.
- [04:19]
B
Or, you know, they. I mean, they've been saying this for decades for every single Democrat, that we're all communists or socialists or whatever. And then if you go online, there are a lot of people in Very far left spaces where when they say a leftist or somebody from the left, capital L left, they mean a socialist or a communist. So you can't, like center left Democrats, they wouldn't consider to be leftists or whatever. Okay, so to. Okay, so just clarifying that terminology on the very, very far left. Okay, so like people who consider themselves socialists and communists, there are these, like stock critiques that they make of all of the liberal society. So of all the ordinary political factions that exist in the United States or Europe or whatever else. And that Jason guy was the living embodiment of the worst caricatures of what it means to be a capitalist. And I just couldn't believe that somebody was unironically rattling them off one after another after another after another after another. I have fought with so many people who say this, they'll be like, cut a liberal and a fascist bleeds like liberals always defend fascism or whatever. And it's like, historically that's not really true. Right. It was the liberals that, you know, that technically went to Europe and beat the fascists and everything else with the help of Soviet Union. Everything.
- [05:28]
A
Small liberalism is anti fascist in its core. Yeah, yeah.
- [05:32]
B
But to hear this guy look you in the eye digitally and to say, well, you know, we really prefer when there's a revolving door of corrupt oligarchical power that we can just go in and make deals with, that's the kind of stuff that you would have to, like, torture me to admit, because I feel like I would be like, somebody's going to eat my body. I'm going to be cannibalized. If I'm in a society where, especially right now, where there's so much like civil unrest, deserved or not, about, you know, wealth disparity, income gaps and everything else, to have this guy just openly saying, well, you don't really understand, Tim, let me explain why all of us love the corrupt authoritarian structure so much. And then you rightfully pointed out, even though you can never use a counterfactual hypothetical because they'll lie and own it. You rightfully pointed out, if Kamala or if Biden or if anybody else had this type of revolving door structure, it would be the end of the universe for these guys. They would be crying all day about how corrupt and evil and terrible the administration is. And yeah, I, I just. It was answer after answer after answer where this guy was just sending me for how insane this. The JVL said it best when he said, what? Strap him to a Falcon whatever rocket and just launch him into the sun,
- [06:38]
A
like, strap him to a Falcon Heavy. I appreciate that. I like that. That's what I was going for. I want people to see the unadulterated ID of these guys. That's part of the reason why I have Jason on. Say what you want about Jason. He's telling you what he really thinks. He's not bullshitting. Otherwise nobody would talk like this. I just want to play for people who didn't punish themselves with it, which is some folks. I noticed our YouTube numbers were down on the Jason from All in podcast interview. I want to just play maybe just the oligarch clip that you're referencing where he was talking about being pro oligarch, essentially. Let's take a listen to that one.
- [07:12]
C
If you start a war and you do a supply chain shock with energy, you essentially take the Trump 2.0 agenda and you torch it.
- [07:23]
A
Correct.
- [07:24]
C
Which is what's happened.
- [07:25]
A
But why haven't more people come around on that? And again, I would think that Chamath, for example, I know you don't like to speak for your guys, but in theory, if you had a VC and you brought a CEO in and they're like, hey, man, you invest in me right now, you get behind me, we're going to have 6% growth this year. And then six months later, they, like, stuck their dick in the fax machine and like, screwed everything up, and now they're at 2% growth with maybe negative, with maybe going down. Yeah. You'd be like, okay, well, turns out we need a new. We need some new leadership. I'm calling the board here. I have some concerns. So why isn't that happening? Why aren't people like, we're calling the board.
- [08:03]
C
Very simple. Very simple.
- [08:04]
A
Yeah.
- [08:05]
C
Trump demands complete fidelity. I'm not speaking about Chamathia or anybody specific, but we all know in order to be in the Trump circle, you have to have complete, utter fidelity to him. He's a genius.
- [08:20]
A
So it's North Korea.
- [08:21]
B
We're in North Korea, basically, I think.
- [08:23]
A
Which it doesn't feel like, again, like a capitalist system. It doesn't feel like a capitalist system. Yeah, well, I can't critique the president.
- [08:32]
C
Capitalist slash. You know, if you told a bunch of business leaders this could become oligarchic, they'd say, yeah. They would be like, sign me up. Oh, yeah, sounds great.
- [08:42]
A
And this is oligarchy.
- [08:43]
B
Sounds pretty great.
- [08:44]
A
And this is why we're fucked. J. Cal, for a short period of time. Can we agree for a second? That's why we're fucked.
- [08:48]
B
I don't know if you've ever heard, there's a name for this concept that somebody introduced me to a month ago. And sometimes when I get these concepts introduced to me, I see them everywhere. And I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but when people talk about Republicans in American discourse, there is a very passive, infantilizing tone used. Like the things they do inevitably flow from the circumstances that they're a part of. Right. Well, Trump had to do this. The Democrats did this. Well, what do you expect us to do? Somebody said a mean thing. But Democrats are consistently treated like they have ultra agency and that they need to be above it all. It's like this adult child approach to politics. If you want to invoke, you know, like, I think, I think you even did it. I think it was in this interview with Jason, when you ask people why was there so much inflation in Biden's four years of presidency, Covid vanishes from people's minds. They don't know anything about COVID And in order to jog the memory, have you ever seen the super romance movie the Notebook or whatever?
- [09:45]
A
Right. I've not seen the Notebook.
- [09:49]
B
He jogs the memories with the whole story. If you want to jog conservative memories of COVID the only way you can ever bring that memory to the forefront of their mind is, is to start asking why things got so messed up in the fourth year of Trump's first term. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, Covid, Covid, the economy of COVID Covid, Covid. Yeah, but then for Biden, you know, he owns the Ukraine, Russian war, he owns all the inflation after the, you know, supply chain screw ups and everything else after Covid. And it's, it's very, very, very annoying to me. Yeah, but, but he talks, he talks here like you're rightfully point out, if you had a guy who made all the mistakes that Trump made, you wouldn't say, we're going to ignore the mistakes and just say, you know, whatever. A guy, you know, shoving his dick in the, in the fax machine. Whereas for these guys, when they talk about Trump, like, well, if he makes a mistake, it's kind of like it's a goof. You know, he just, he goofed a little bit on the tariffs and he goofed on Iran. And then it's also this very confident assertion. All these Silicon Valley people do this because they think they've solved politics, because they read Anthem from Ayn Rand or something. Right? I don't know. Or Listen to Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin talk.
- [10:43]
A
One time he mentioned Jason in the Post interview. You know, people are dunking on him on social media. And he replied. And he basically says, like, all I was saying is the same thing that Curtis Yarvin has been saying. Oh, my God, People, oligarchy. I was just observing that trend, and I'm just like, okay, so how can
- [11:00]
B
they say with the utmost of confidence, like, Kamala would have gone to war in Iran.
- [11:05]
A
For the people who did not watch Jason, I will summarize what happened. Me, you're upset about the Iran war. So don't you have any regrets about not going with Kamala since she would not have done this? Him. Kamala definitely would have gone into the Iran war. Me? How do you know him? Well, because the same people are in charge and they tell everybody what to do in Israel and something, something. And Kamala definitely would have done it. Neocons and Hillary Clinton. Me, I had Kamala's foreign policy advisor on the podcast. I said, would you have gone to war with Iran? He said, absolutely not. Why don't you believe that? Well, he would have said that. Kamala definitely would have done it. Kamala was stupid. Kamala dumb. Kamala would have done Iran. That's basically what happened.
- [11:43]
B
That's just unbelievable to me. I don't know. Like, it's so dumb, the political analysis from these guys. It, like, stops and starts on Elon's Twitter feed and that's it. I don't have words to describe it. You have to feel the frustration, I guess, right? You guys, you've been in media and everything, I think, like, longer than I have, doing real political commentary and everything else. And then you talk to these guys who. The understanding of everything is just. It's not even surface level. It's like meme level of understanding of everything. Like, oh, well, maybe. Maybe the tariffing the entire world at arbitrary rates that we completely and totally invented based on a dumb formula, you know, of our trade deficits with a country. Maybe that was like a small goof from Trump. I remember before Trump got elected, the idea in economic circles that we would put like a 5 or 10% tariff on the entire world. That was, like, unthinkable. That was just like. It's like not even a real. There's no way that that would happen. And the Liberation Day tariffs were just. And that's. It's thing after thing after thing.
- [12:37]
A
Yeah, I mean, so this takes us back to the original kind of point which I wanted to hash out. With you because this is kind of a challenge for both of us. I think there are two places where people ask me a lot as being a former Republican, like, what did you change your mind on after Trump? Like, why did you. Why have you become such a passionate lib? Are you just a hack and a grifter who goes along with everything the gems want now? And I'm like, no, not really. Like, there's some things I've changed on, some things I haven't. I still think there's a lot of waste in government. I still like capitalism for the most part. The two things that have happened really don't have a ton of to do with Trump, actually. Where my views are evolving and where I feel like you have to hand it to the leftist. The leftist types. The first is the more I hear from an experience and meet the richest people in the world, the less impressed I am by them and the more I feel like that I had a misunderstanding. Like, the frame in my mind of the up from your bootstraps capitalist person who worked very hard and created a widget and earned their money and the government shouldn't take it from them. Like, that exists and that person, you know, shouldn't be derided. But, like, a lot of these people just fucking fell back last words into money. And, like, they're the fourth person at PayPal. And, you know, say what you want about Peter Schiel, but at least he had a good idea. And, like, this was just his fucking racist buddy from the Stanford magazine. And now he has ungodly wealth because he had, you know, fucking RSUs at the beginning of the company. Right? Like, these people are. These should receive punitive taxation. They're horrible. And we should find ways to redistribute money from these people to other folks who are working hard and trying to get by. That's one way I've changed my mind. And the other way is related to kind of Middle east wars, which we'll get to in a second. So I'm just curious how you kind of, like, process how you're processing this. Like, you gotta hate to hand it to the leftists that you fight with over capitalism. But on the other hand, these guys make it very hard.
- [14:40]
B
I mean, yeah, sometimes it feels like politics is one side is over exaggerating the other side so much that the other side starts to gain power. And then once they get power, they become the caricatures that the other side was over exaggerating about. And then we just kind of go back and forth on this but, you know, to your point, I feel like our elite, even our elite tech class, I feel like they used to look a little bit different.
- [15:00]
A
Like, literally, Bezos looks different. I mean, he's had a new face.
- [15:02]
B
True.
- [15:03]
A
He has a new face now, you know.
- [15:04]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, like, Bezos on Lex Friedman or, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, like, these guys. Say what you want about them and the unimaginable amount of wealth they have. Like, these guys built businesses. They really did. And I feel like these people are just of a different quality of person than these guys who are. You know, they get good exits from companies, and then they manage to throw themselves onto the board of every other company, and they have enough money to throw around that if they can get one or two more good exits, all of a sudden they're billionaires on paper, and now their opinions are supposed to mean something. And it's the equivalent to me, like, in the finance world, where you get people who made money off of fucking crypto, and now they're investment wizards because they happen to, you know, buy the right corner, scam the right audience, and it's like, please, just stop. Oh, my God.
- [15:44]
A
And so how do. How do you think about that now when it comes to, like, policy and how the Democrats should talk about this? Right? Because I think that, like, there's a moment right now that's happening on the left, across the left, where people feel like, okay, well, the thing for Democrats to do now to win back the masses is to talk about how terrible billionaires are. And a billionaire should be illegal, and we hate billionaires. We should go after the elites and we should name the enemy. You know, this kind of messaging, you see this a lot, and that's not my natural state, but the billionaires are making it very hard on themselves. And I guess this was kind of what I was talking to Jason about. I was like, you realize that these. There will be a backlash, and the next group that comes into power is going to use these oligarchic, authoritarian powers that Trump has gain for himself, and they're going to use them to go after you. Like, you're going to be the target of the next administration. And it's going to be hard for me to get upset about that. And at some level, I feel like that probably needs to happen to rebalance things. I'm not saying I want communism, but, like, at some level, I'm going to want people to use the tools at their disposal within the rule of law to go after these fuckers. I'm Wondering if that's kind of where you're landing on this or are you. Are you reluctant to go that far?
- [16:55]
B
I mean. Well, two different questions here. The. On the first part for how should the Democrats message? There was a reason I reached out to you that first time and I screamed to you for, you know, an hour. I rambled about that. The kind of like the media ecosystem. Yeah, I'm still a big believer in that. That the MAGA people and then the far left people, the socialists and the communists have figured out that media ecosystem thing and the lib left still haven't. Like, I'm still watching people like Mallory McMurro go on to. Is it Matt Bernstein? Was that the last name Orchard?
- [17:24]
A
Yeah, it's the. He's the guy people might know from social media. He's like gay. He's got the very long fingernails. Sure. Yeah.
- [17:30]
B
And it's like a very, very, very far left. And I'm still watching the center left libs kind of like onto these platforms and just get completely bodied by the most aggressively hostile interviews ever. And I don't mean that to imply that their performance was bad or that they're not doing a good job at representing themselves. I think they're doing as good as they can. I would say the same about Slacken on Breaking Points, but you're just, you're never really going to shine on a platform like that. Compare the interview that Matt did and he brought Emma in even for assistance, which is funny because she's brain dead as well. But when they were having that interview with Mallory McMorrow, compare that to the interview they did with El Said, and it's just like, it was the most unbelievable glaze fest ever. They're just like, oh, you're so perfect and awesome and I'm not going to ask you how to solve Israel, Palestine, because we all agree on everything. And it's just like, yeah, it's horrible. So the live messaging apparatus still needs to be figured out on the second thing when it comes to legal stuff. So I feel like there's this world where it seems like law can be anything or whatever, and then you kind of like learn a little bit more and you're like, okay, well, there's like a structure and a process and everything for how law works. And then you learn a little bit more and it's like, if you're willing to be creative, it seems like you could literally do anything you want. It just comes down to, you know, what are these kind of meta norms that you think we should all adhere to. Because if you don't believe in any kind of norms whatsoever, you know, like, there was Nothing illegal about McConnell robbing us of a Supreme Court justice. There was Nothing illegal about McConnell not convicting Trump in the Senate. They had the votes for that when Trump was on the way out, but he said that he didn't want to because it was a president who wasn't in office anymore. That's not real. Right. So, like, if you want to be legally creative, you can, you know, you have the slush fund that they kind of tried and then got rid of. You can really do anything. So I do think the Democrats need to be really aggressive in going after the past bad actors, because it just can't be. I don't think our system can survive people thinking that as soon as their guy is in power, they can do whatever they want when it's just on one side. It's just unbelievable to me.
- [19:22]
A
So what would your advice to Mallory be in that situation?
- [19:26]
B
I think you have to find friendly lib platforms to begin to create, like, the resonance of an idea before you, if you ever do, before you go out to aggressive platforms to fight on it. Because if I'm thinking of, like, what do the libs think about a thing? If you think about what liberals think about things, you're actually only two ideas are coming to mind. And it's whatever the Republicans tell you they think or it's whatever the far left tells you they think. Because there are no friendly live platforms to go on to get an idea out there without being butchered on whatever it is. Yeah, I don't know. Are you familiar with another streamer in MySpace called Hutch?
- [20:02]
A
I know Hutch. Yeah. I don't know. I did Hutch's show the other day.
- [20:05]
B
Okay, awesome. Okay.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah.
- [20:06]
B
Mallory did an interview with him. I thought it was a good interview.
- [20:08]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I think that there's this cliche of old cliche from political hands about how only Nixon could go to China. Are you familiar with this cliche? And it was something. It was basically the concept was that because Nixon had a reputation for being a conservative hard ass and, like a prick,