ContraPoints - H3 Podcast #228

welcome everybody to the h3 podcast i'm here today with youtuber contra points aka natalie thank you for joining us hi eva hi everyone thank you so much for having me on we were talking we originally had you scheduled to come on the day after the election but there was so much going on we decided to wait and let the dust settle a little bit yeah i would have been like comatose i don't think i i don't think it's such more than a couple hours that night i was just like glued to twitter for 16 straight hours uh it would have been it would have been bad i was the same way and i was uh were you losing your mind a little bit during that period and it wasn't 100 percent yeah it wasn't fully and i was obsessed with like twitter and the news and it was just it was really oh yeah it was a horrible week terrible like like there was just like 90 consecutive hours of like pacing in a bathrobe looking at twitter just like really bad bad times i gotta say that first night was was pretty when i went to bed i was not feeling very happy i didn't go to bed i thought i had to go to bed because i have a kid so i was like well yeah yeah i just got to take care of this little guy yeah that's good it's good to have um something else in life to like be responsible for because well i started getting house plants that's my the level of responsibility i'm comfortable with but um yeah that's that's i know i was i was i was i was losing it i mean i at first i was like having i was definitely having flashbacks to 2016 when you know everyone said i said hillary's gonna win hillary's gonna win hillary's gonna win and then that night well at 9 p.m or whatever like trump starts winning states and it looked like that was going to happen again this time even though we all knew like everyone said like oh there's gonna be a blue shift it's a red mirage like don't worry about it like he's gonna you know but somehow like i just i guess like four years of like political doom for me has kind of um trained me to expect the worst well i was really hoping because you know the polling was so dramatic was like 10 points here billion points there so when when florida fell to trump i was really hoping it would be like a swift knockout with the enormous lead he apparently had in the polls but trump like you know won florida big time and then i was like okay well it's gonna be a long night you know but [ __ ] well now that it's over how are you feeling over quote unquote um i'm feeling pretty good these days like i guess the first few weeks after well how many weeks has it been it's been one month i guess uh the first couple weeks i was like i don't think trump's gonna leave like i think um i think he's gonna find some way to i i didn't you know i i mean i guess it was paranoid a little bit but i feel like it was paranoia like sort of informed by well informed by the fact that the president was like i'm not leaving but that makes you kind of like that's not paranoia like that's just what's happening i guess the question is like does he have the actual power to to do what he obviously intends and wants to do um so i it appears that he does not but for a while i was like i could actually i can imagine a lot of scenarios where like if enough republicans kind of lined up behind him and i don't know he was somehow able to convince uh like like send different electors to the electoral college or something really obscure like that i don't it looks like that's probably not gonna happen but uh yeah i'm i'm calming down a bit about it yeah i'm i'm feeling the same way i'm feeling like for sure he's gonna leave but i'm more worried about like the he's just scorching earth you know what i mean on the way out and it's like people are it's just so [ __ ] up but you know it's kind of ironic is the republicans in georgia and this runoff that's so important are now losing faith in the election process and i'm starting to see a lot of them saying well i'm just not going to vote because my vote doesn't matter so if that's if that's the case then that would be the most poetic justice possible for his tantrum well it's also it's kind of true that like if you tell your base that the election's rigged like the votes are all lies like it's not like necessarily the best get out the vote messaging you know like it's not good campaign messaging to say the election's fake it is good it is good messaging to drum up violence though expedition which i'm which scares me a lot yeah exactly i mean it i think um there's so many people in this country who are kind of like close to the edge um you know especially if you look at like q and on and like i feel like a lot of people have been further sort of sent to extreme places by the pandemic the fact that they are like sort of not socially connected to other people and the kind of conspiracy theorizing has like no cis no checks on it at all and then you have like the president basically encouraging this saying the elections stolen and saying like you know we're gonna we're gonna basically uh you know we're gonna take victory by whatever means necessary and he hasn't said that in that those words but he's implied it and like who knows what trump means to say that by that but i can imagine you know several thousand people who are gonna hear that and think it's my patriotic duty to take up arms and like attack who knows what an election center i don't know government buildings like uh i can it just seems highly likely that there's gonna be violence that will come of this yeah i would agree but if you're so you i mean it sounds like you made a video saying you know about voting urging people on the left a lot of people on the left were are disinf or disenchanted let's say with like joe biden because he's too moderate well what's the point so you made a video urging them that it's important to vote for biden so what can you outline to me like if trump won in a second term what is it about that second term that would be so horrible to for you well i think if he had a second term it would sort of embolden him to be sort of even more uh sort of um embolden him to even further disregard democratic norms to be as you know even more authoritarian to be even more outlandish on twitter uh not i say outlandish as if that's really the problem it's not just being outlandish it's being like you know just sort of unhinged and cruel and um you know it would potentially put him in a place to to choose yet another supreme court nominee and i don't know i just there's a lot of like very dark implications that i see that that having um so uh i also you know it would also give him longer i don't believe trump believes in democracy i think he clearly does not um i think that he i don't know it would give him more time to basically you know lay the groundwork for the trump dynasty basically and i think that would be really really horrible for democracy in this country so uh of course we'll never really know um like the extent of the disaster that we just averted but i think that it's like a huge step back from the edge of a cliff basically um i'm not super enthusiastic about joe biden i don't really know anyone who is to be honest but i feel like at least this like hits the pause button on the slide into hell and like lets us kind of like regroup and think about what to do next well i saw this headline of like george bush bill clinton and obama all together pledging that when the vaccine becomes available they will all take it publicly to boost confidence like these are normal presidents like you may not agree with them but they definitely care about democracy in the country and yeah we can all find that common ground at least but i oh and like i i didn't even say anything about coronavirus like this this president who like basically i mean he basically has said that like wearing masks is for sissies like i'm not doing that like look at bojob and he looks like such a [ __ ] with his giant you know you know mask like like like in the middle of this pandemic that's like killing at this point what is it like 3 000 people a day like it is just like the worst leadership you can imagine in this situation i believe he said two days before he got coronavirus about look at joe bite he wears the biggest mask i've ever seen whatever that mask yeah so now they say i'm immune so um i love all the sworn affidavits rudy's sworn affidavits there's some great clips that just came out i think this morning i saw them and you know people whenever i talk to people about like who doubt the the finality of the election they always talk to all the evidence of voter fraud and specifically the sworn affidavits so ian do me a favor and pull up this clip here this is this is one of the people who testified with a sworn affidavit that rudy giuliani brought into court to testify so we can finally get a peek in like a lot of people think all indians look alike i think all chinese look alike so how would you tell if some child shows up you can be anybody and you can vote and if somebody with my name you can't even tell my name anybody can vote like compelling stuff so the argument is that votes could be fake because how can you tell chinese people apart is that the argument yeah ethnic groups look all look the same and she's like listen i don't blame you because i think all chinese people look the same it's just the way it is it's fine to be it's fine to not be able to tell people about i mean it's just yeah wow that is uh that sure is an argument yeah but what's great is that rudy giuliani was like i'm bringing this woman to court she's compelling this is this is going to convince them this is going to convince a judge right another one by the way he was cracking up next to her i don't know i don't know i don't know that that's necessarily good that the lawyer is his witness is that what you want your witness to do is to uh entertain the courtroom like everyone just [ __ ] rolling on the floor i don't know yeah but what am i what are we supposed to say like how do we have a conversation with people this to talk to the sworn affidavits but this is the content of the sworn affidavit so like what how do we how do you communicate to people that like are so fully convinced that the election was stolen which by the way last i checked which was you know a few weeks ago to be fair but like 88 of republicans think that the election was rigged 88 yeah i mean i'm someone who i think of myself as someone who's like likes to try to communicate with people i disagree with and i like to try to reach out to people who uh you know i think have a backwards point of view and try to understand where they're coming from but honestly with people who support trump in 2020 i've kind of gotten to a point where i feel like there's such a level of detachment from reality that i just cannot get through like because i don't think that the issue i guess is that when it comes to like election fraud i don't think they care about evidence like i don't think they really care um because if they did like they would be looking for some you know like like and you know you can debunk each new piece of evidence they bring forward only for it to be replaced overnight with a new thing and everyone forgets that the old one is debunked so it's like it's like this impossible task like this hydra that you're trying to kill of misinformation right where you said you know you okay oh there's there's this video of where it looks like you know and you debunk the video and you said that takes six hours of work on your part and then everyone immediately forgets that that was ever used as evidence that the election that there's election fraud because they move on to some new piece of evidence so it's like i don't know they believe it because trump says it or they believe it because believing it leads them to reach the conclusions they want to reach right which is that trump should stay and we should find a way to keep them right like it's not about what's true it's about like how can we build an argument for the conclusion that trump should be president despite losing an election how do we bridge the gap like i mean how do we what's the remedy i mean it's just it's i don't know you know last year with obama with hillary when hillary lost you know there's there's always been a friction and growing friction but now it's like like you said it's like different sets of reality i mean how do you bridge that i just don't i don't see how to overcome this maybe it's just something that over time kind of goes away like you know mccarthyism and there's there's been errors in in human history where [ __ ] just you know kind of disappears maybe when trump finally leaves it all kind of just fade away i do you think it will fade away or is it something that's not going to go away i wish i thought it would fade away but i don't um i'm i'm really worried about this country to be honest like i think um you know i think that things have always been you know it's easy to forget that that there's always been these tensions like i mean this country had a civil war what a hundred and uh you know 50 some 70 i guess 179 years ago and um it's kind of uh it kind of never stopped you know like that that some of these conflicts like never really resolved like especially conflicts about like what is america's relationship with race for example like that's kind of an open question it's never really been resolved and i think that um you know the tensions kind of builds these critical points and it sometimes eases a little bit but it's always there um but yeah i do worry that it's it's gotten to such a point of division that there's not really much communication across the aisle and it's like it's it's kind of hard to see a way out of this that doesn't involve violence in some way now i hope i because i really hate that um i don't know i'm i'm very averse to the idea of violence i know like on on political internet it's kind of become like fashionable lately to like fantasize happily about like the guillotine and revolutions and all this and it's like that's like such a bad thing to have to do though it's what i feel like people don't realize like if you have like if you have to solve political crisis in your country with like of civil war that's like the worst possible thing that can happen it'll ruin like decades of all of our lives and a bunch of people die like let's not do that but i don't know to me i think it's about it's about like reaching out not to like die hard trump supporters but like to like people who are kind of like not necessarily because most people i don't think are super involved in politics and you can kind of like like trump is doing things now that are very very like outside all norms that we've ever had for this country like like he basically is like you know out basically has decided to reject you know the norms that make democracy possible so i think that you can appeal to a lot of people by just being like look like this is not how things work in this country like we have always you know this country was founded by people who wanted to show europe that a democracy could work or public could work anyway and like that means peace a full transfer of power and if you are out here saying like oh we'll see if i leave if i lose the election i don't know about that i'll think about it you know what i mean like that's a pretty dangerous attack on like what is kind of the most basic principle of you know how this country is supposed to run not by a dynastic you know family not an arist not a king not an aristocrat but like by elections that's how we're supposed to choose power and if you reject elections and it's like you're kind of rejecting like what is the basis of america and i feel like that is something that most people in this country will ultimately kind of they will reject someone who uh attacks democracy in that way but there's plenty of people who won't and it's also it's it's definitely a scary situation yeah i feel like he found a way around it because he said he he's not he convinced people he's not attacking democracy he's just he just got it was a fraud they they're the ones attacking democracy but that's kind of like the propagandist playbook it's like you're not doing what i'm doing i'm not doing what i'm doing you're doing what i'm doing but and you have just yeah how do you fight a civil war though like how is that even logistically possible in the united states now like back then they had cannons and muskets and [ __ ] and like everything was kind of drawn out in a way was like north for south there was some kind of definable line but like how was a civil war even possibly be found in the united states without like total annihilation and like whoever's the sitting president the party how can anybody reasonably rise up like a bunch of dudes like with with some you know our home arsenals is not there's not going to be you know what i mean like versus the government it's it really just depends who's who's currently the president i think if it came to that level of violence yeah it's hard for me to say and again like you would really have to kind of ask someone who's like an expert on the military all i can give you are my like dark twisted fantasies like i don't know i guess i imagine like like the nightmare scenario is you've got like cavalcades of like trump suvs like roaring up i-95 waving guns and then just like i don't know antifa like roadside bombs going off and like like i don't know right why is that so easy to imagine like i i guess at some point obviously like the military would be called in there'd be tanks on the highways and like uh i don't know so so it's a kind of question of like where is the military's loyalty gonna lie um i actually think that especially with biden having one i don't think the military will defend a trump coup attempt like even if he is clean you think they would before i wasn't i didn't really think before i don't think so either um it was more a question of like oh is he going to be able to do it without like violence you know the question is like oh is he going to be able to persuade enough people to go along with this like the election as a fraud line um that he's able to kind of like overturn the results of the election that's more what i was worried about um but i can't imagine i don't know like without having like total war like i can still imagine a period of like frequent like skirmishes we could say yeah like we kind of had all year honestly like with with the clashes between protesters and riot police just with guns this time yeah with guns i mean there's already kind of guns there's kyle ridden house there's uh you know people driving cars and vans into crowds there's the police firing you know tear gas at pro like it's it's escalated pretty far already what is the deal with this kyle rettenhauer what am i missing about this dude he drove from out of state he murdered two protesters and now the m my pillow guys is bailing him out literally my pillow guys put up two million dollars bail for him but what i'm missing what how is this not clearly murder well it is clearly murder but i think people like i think the people who support him think that it's like justified murder because they see it as like i mean and again it sort of tracks some of trump's rhetoric right like if these democratic mayors won't keep their cities until under control then like we're gonna send in the the military and do it and i think the people who admire kyle rittenhouse they think of him as this like hero of like law and order who's like there to suppress the like unruly protests right because their whole this whole law and order line has been about like oh the real problem with this country is these these crazy leftist rioters these looters these you know we need we need to basically dominate them right that's what trump trump was saying he was he was doing like a palpatine tweets you know just tweeting like domination and power in all caps it was like coconuts so it was back in july like i was like this feels like you're so powerful yeah not good and like and i guess he was yeah he was giving off palpatine vibes for sure yeah especially with all the steroids first yeah and i think that people see rittenhouse as like you know the vigilante version of this it's kind of weird but it's like so nonsensical right because in the one hand you're saying oh law and order law and order that's what we care about is law and order but on the other hand you're saying oh it's great that vigilantes with guns are breaking the law by shooting people right if it's in the service of what their idea of law and order is right which is i mean like it's like what martin luther king said about like uh you know peace without justice like that's that's what they want they want uh they don't want justice they want a peace that's founded on people simply like keeping quiet do you what do you think the left is doing wrong because like you have what essentially is a bunch of rural working class people who are very who are probably for the most part very poor who are coming out in droves to support a guy who's has a apartment on the first floor of a manhattan penthouse that's literally plated in gold and probably shits in a gold toilet so how the [ __ ] is this guy able to become the working class hero and the left is unable to get any of these people's votes like what what what what is the left feeling so desperately at well i have a couple of thoughts about that one of them is that i think that a lot of trump's like a lot of you know for instance the counter protesters with guns that we're talking about these people are not the like poor working class like weapons are expensive like you don't form a militia like on a on a but you know apparently rittenhouse used his stimulus check to buy the weapon so this was the socialized weapons presence yeah yeah well yeah i think that um yeah that's a real puzzle though isn't it though like why do like white people who are not like upper class at all why do they see this like vegas like-esque like walking like gold toilet of a man like why do they see him as like some kind of work he doesn't care about that he doesn't know anything about them he wouldn't hang out with them you know it's like the dude spends all of his time on these ultra luxury golf golf courses like the dude wouldn't [ __ ] ever golf with you he doesn't care about you he never wants to hang out with you he [ __ ] never he's never known anybody like you like he's literally a big town ultra rich dude like right the heights of like new york elitist like rich father like yeah well i think i think that these i think these people know that like i think they're not dumb like they know that trump doesn't represent them and that trump doesn't really that that that trump on some level doesn't really care about them but i i think that for some of them anyway what it seems to be is it's it's almost like trolling they like trump because he pisses off the like the big media liberal types who who don't represent them and he pisses off what they see as the the establishment right i think that's true of some people on twitter right but like yeah i'm talking about like rural people that don't use twitter they just like if you drive through if you drive through you know cross country all these states in the in the middle that are read is just trump trump trump signs magga everywhere these people don't go on twitter like but they but they love trump and it's not about trump they're not trying to make libs cry they just love trump well i think um i think there is like still even with like the west you know pennsylvania type people like there is still this sense i mean this is like an old kind of a historic resentment in the us like along the east coast i know like the western part of all these states the carolinas virginia um pennsylvania like there's this like long-standing resentment of the east right all these states have capitals along the east and the east is seen as cosmopolitan as urban as elitist and as kind of almost like an oppressor right of their way of life it doesn't represent them and so i think uh i think it's kind of an enemy of my enemy situation where they know that trump isn't one of them but they do like even if you're not on twitter like trump pisses off the people on cnn for example and they like that right they kind of like that he's like a middle finger to like political correctness and to um this is how they see it of course right is he actually uh you know i don't know but i feel like that's just it's so obvious because like the democratic platform is a platform that would directly help them the republican platform is a platform that directly helps wealthier people so it's like everybody's voting against their own interests somehow yeah well i think um i think it's like a very dark mindset that leads to these people to vote for trump like i think on some level they're not expecting things to get better they and and it's almost a kind of nihilism that's set in it's like well you know at least we're gonna like you know let's just burn it down almost i think some people have that kind of attitude where um you know i think they think oh maybe the democrats will will help them with like health care and things but they know the democrats aren't going to bring back like coal jobs or manufacturing jobs and there's this sense i guess of like loss of like pride and loss of dignity loss of and loss of like obviously like financial stan standing as well um not wanting just like what they see as like sympathy handouts um you know socialism but wanting like i don't know this like america first rhetoric i guess appeals to them people want to feel like the winner people want to you know that i guess people a lot of these people will attribute like sending jobs to china for instance for like taking away the industries that used to thrive where they live i mean and to some extent that's true but a lot of it's also automation so it's you know it's not just that and but i think that's you know trump's you know china rhetoric kind of connects about that with in that way but you know you'd think four years later when manufacturing has not in fact returned and like you would think that they would start to get disillusioned with trump so i don't know it is kind of uh uh i mean someone really should do i'm sure people there's people who do this i should seek this out people who do like interviews go across the country and ask trump supporters like what are you doing yeah i mean they're well ask all guests no bricks is kind of doing a pretty good job of that he's the one who told me like dude he told me before the election like trump is definitely gonna win because i travel all around the country and everybody's maggot out so he was pretty confident that trump was gonna win one but but apparently he's got something coming out that should be really good that's pretty much exactly what you just said but i'm kind of i'm more curious i'm very curious about the you as a person if i can switch gears a little bit sure um where did you grow up where are you from i grew up in a suburb of washington dc northern virginia oh washington dc is your is your family in politics no they're not um although many people in dcr i knew like a lot when i was growing up you know i knew a lot of people who were like like children of like lobbyists or the nra for example which is in northern virginia um did that form you're like being and do you think being around politics like that formed your kind of world view as an adult well it was i think probably to some extent like it was definitely like very often discussed growing up like it's something that's on a lot of people's mind you know i was in middle school when 9 11 happened and a lot of i just remember the other kids crying in school because their parents worked at the pentagon and they just heard that flames flew into the pentagon like so it it is kind of like uh it is very much on people's minds there um but uh yeah i don't know to what extent that like necessarily influenced me now except that it it's made me sort of i remember thinking about politics as early as being a kid yeah what do your parents do for a living or or do they share your your politics as well uh well my my mom's a medical doctor and my dad's a college professor and they are they are both uh democrats um i would say that i'm i don't know i don't know actually i don't really talk politics for them so i don't want to speak for them but but i i feel like i may be a little bit a little bit to the left of them and the way that like you know it's it's most young people have an obligation i think to be a little more left to the of their parents right but uh but um yeah no it's not it's not like i was raised in like i don't come from a conservative family your your um your college days kind of interest me because you were going for a phd in philosophy right yeah that's right and then you just you bounced out existential boredom i think you described it as yeah yeah i really could not stand graduate school like i i don't know i i liked um well i guess when i was in high school i was i almost failed out of high school i was terrible student really um yeah well i when i was in high school i kind of all i cared about was music like i played you know of several instruments and i just wanted to play music all the time i was i had a hard adolescence i was very angsty and like i dealt with that by playing music so i actually tried to drop out of high school but you know my my parents and the school was kind of like no you're not doing that but they kind of like made a deal with me where they let me take like music classes in high school and and and so i managed to get a high school degree that way uh i spent two years at a music college berkeley college of music in boston as a piano student when i graduated high school then i switched you know sorry go ahead i didn't mean to interrupt you no no like ask ask this question now because i'm about to move on well i'm just wondering what was so tough about your high school that you were you know about to drop out of high school um i think i was just i was just very depressed as a teenager yeah uh i was just having a hard time with it and i dealt with that by kind of retreating into music i didn't want to think about anything else i didn't want i didn't want to take math classes i just wasn't having it were you like confused about your gender identity back in high school was that part of the depression or is it something else i think there's some of that i think that i it's hard exactly just to say how much is what in retrospect you know what i mean like how much is this like gender angst that everyone says gets worse in adolescence how much of it is um i don't know like clinical like depression which i was like treated for pretty extensively at the time um i yeah i had a lot of like psychiatry growing up um you know my parents being in uh my dad's a psychology professor my mom's a doctor so there was a lot of a lot of a lot of uh i mean i started taking adderall when i was like eight years old like like that kind of that kind of a childhood you know i see you know does having does having doctors and and psych your dad's a psychiatrist or a or like a therapist he's an academic he's an academic psychologist but like but both my parents i think they kind of felt like a little bit qualified to like have like mental health judgments about their kids yeah what does that what do you think about that growing up with parents who feel like they they can have this kind of they they feel like they can you know diagnose you to some extent is that is that well that was very much my experience uh and some of the things i think they got right some things i think they got wrong um like i was kind of well they got right as the like the depression stuff like that that was real but i think i was like misdiagnosed as like ocd um well and if you go back and like look at a lot of the things they were complaining about they were calling me ocd rituals they were like oh because so i was i was a boy at the time uh um just in case people didn't pick that up uh you know at the time that this like i just be like oh like he spends too long with his hair like he spends too long like there's too much grooming there's too much concern for like all this kind of stuff and it's like i don't know with this i feel like that would not be seen as a psychiatric symptom if i had been born a girl you know no so i yeah yeah i feel like it was though even even if you were a boy it seems like a stretch it was it was too much there was too much there was it was a little bit too much psychiatry going on for sure you know i i have a member of my family who's younger who has also prescribed adderall at a young age like similar years and i always felt like i i personally was never comfortable with it and i saw how she behaved when she was on it and always maybe like i've taken adderall i mean it's not it's by no means of a negligible drug i mean you could get up on that drug i mean i take it now sometimes but it's it's it's it is speed like yeah no it keeps you up it kind of [ __ ] you up you're wired as [ __ ] like it's it's it's more than coffee like it's uh oh it's yeah it's like kind of wild to me that i was taking this one as eight so i yeah i mean looking back what's your opinion on that because like i said it's just i can't imagine to me it seems like a hard drug like it's not even a song yeah yeah well i don't want to blame my parents too much because i think that they like their heart was in the right place they thought they were doing the right thing but i do think i was over diagnosed and over medicated as a kid and as a teenager yes that's a tough situation you know it's funny because you you when you look at these kinds of movies like garden garden state was it yeah and his dad are i forget the exact details but there's kind of a trope about the parent who's the psychiatrist or therapist or whatever always diagnosing their kids and giving them drugs and [ __ ] them up in that way yeah i think that the movies like that like tend to probably go to a little too far in the other direction as in terms of being like psychiatry is bad like throw your pills away you don't need them like that because obviously that was kind of the stuff wasn't that like the ending of garden state or garden state yeah like i feel like that's like two that's taking things too far like because obviously like these drugs i don't know it does help a lot of people but i do think that especially with kids like it's a little bit wild i don't know are kids supposed to like our children like naturally i don't know i feel like that genetically we're not made to like sit in a room still for nine hours and not move and not mess with our hair and not you know what i mean like that's so that's not a medical problem that's just a kind of social expectation that we thrust on eight-year-olds that we then try to fix them with drugs and it's like i i totally agree i mean looking back i don't know how i made it through those years like waking up at five in the morning getting on a bus doing like these are things today that i would rather die than do on a regular basis pretty much oh yeah no i think like the amount of hustle that takes to be a kid to wake your ass up that early spend a whole [ __ ] day sitting in a desk come home do homework probably not getting enough sleep too you know it's it's it's brutal the regimen that they could take so yeah i think like school used to say it was like 7 20. school starts at 7 20. like that's when i was in high school like it's so early yeah i think i can count on one hand like the amount of times in my adult life that i've gotten up for something at 7 20. like exactly part of that said i've organized my life so that i don't have to but me too i feel like my whole my whole um trajectory in into adulthood was the simple objective of never having to wake up to an alarm clock ever again yeah i definitely had that like i used to have like nightmares that i would end up with an office job i feel like that motivated me in a lot of ways like to to you know i tried to try all this stuff before finding something that actually worked as an alternative to that but but yeah i just really didn't want that for myself and so i basically my 20s was a series of attempts to to not have to wake up before 10 a.m so what other what other jobs did you attempt well i guess when i i mentioned going to music school um i dropped out after two years because i like at the time i just felt i came to feel that i just didn't have what it takes to be a professional musician in retrospect i quit way too soon because i think at the time i was thinking like i was like yeah i'm okay at piano but there's like 14 year olds who are way better than me so [ __ ] it i'm out like but in retrospect i was like 20 years old like shut up baby is what i want to say like looking back like you can do like you from 20 you can do almost anything with your life um but i i was i don't know i also was getting curious about other things like at the time i was starting to watch youtube back then um and i watched like all these like um like atheist youtubers oh yeah i remember that well yeah i'm sure i'm sure a lot of us remember like i'm talking 2009 and um there was a name for the click it was like the uh youtube atheist movement like youtube skeptics skeptics yeah skeptics yeah so i used to watch that kind of content and i guess honestly that played some role in like getting me interested in philosophy i was like oh like uh you know i i i guess i got sort of interested in that and i was like oh maybe i should actually go to maybe i should actually go back to school and like go to like a school and like you know learn about that instead of doing this music thing so i kind of went to community college for a year i uh i worked as an assistant in a neuroscience lab and i went to um then i transferred and i uh to georgetown where i got um i got my undergraduate double major in philosophy and psychology i worked really hard at that because i think i was trying to like compensate for the fact that i was so bad at being a student in high school like i was like no i'm going to show that like i so i had like i graduated like georgetown like like i don't know 4.5 i'm sorry like 3.5 or 3.6 or something gp like like i was getting like straight a's some semesters i was i was such a little try hard um i think i felt like i had something to prove yeah so at what point i know you like you transitioned kind of or what age where you were a little bit later yeah like 20's or something i mean i transitioned basically on youtube like i started when i was 28. um so i wanna um i i personally don't i don't think i know any trans people personally so i want to ask you questions about this but part of me is like i'm afraid to talk to you about it in a way because i'm afraid of saying the wrong thing and then getting cancelled on twitter okay well i'm not gonna i won't i won't cancel you i i won't cancel you on twitter but i'm being but i'm you're afraid that other people will yeah yeah but i'm you know i've i'll yeah but you do know what i mean like i feel like people maybe are afraid to even talk about the issue because it's so it's so sensitive and it's kind of like a new issue socially too if i can even say that well it's not a new issue but it's people's awareness of it on a large scale is kind of new yeah um i mean like there's i guess there's been times in history when people have become aware of it again like in the 50s there's a trans woman called christine jorgensen who i guess transitioned and and like had all these surgeries and i think denmark and like she was in all like the american newspapers and like it became sort of a famous thing but uh yeah it's a kind of i guess it's that it's definitely at a new level like where it's in terms of people's awareness of this um and part of that's that traditionally like what trans people do basically is try not to be seen basically um there's always this sense that like if you actually want to transition and live a life in a new gender like you need to like you need to change your name you need to move cities you need to cut all ties you need to not tell anyone that you're transgender basically um and i feel like what's happened in the last couple decades is is we've kind of decided that that's actually a kind of like very repressed existence and like we should be able to be open about who we are and we should be able to talk openly about these experiences so you have um you know a lot of more trans people sort of who are willing to do that um which of course comes at a cost to us because a lot of people are not like very sympathetic to trans people right so if people know that you're trans like they're going to be an [ __ ] about it so that's you know that's that's the trade-off you're being honest but now you have you know now you have to deal with the consequences of that honesty yeah it seems it seems like a very shameful thing like you described before like you have to move to a new city and all this yeah and um does it do you feel did you feel when you started to become well let me step back like when did you first start becoming like confused about your gender let's say or i don't even know confused is the right word it's a difficult thing to describe i mean i had um i had feelings about sort of gender i guess mismatch i guess we could say sense like childhood i guess it became more of a thing in adolescence where i i don't know i i so i i mean i was i was attracted to women when i was um a boy but i guess which is unlike some trans women who live as gay men first but i guess i would say i never wanted to be a man to a woman and i have this kind of uh you know i can remember sort of rep i think there's something inherently kind of feminine about me i remember sort of training my voice to sound more masculine to sound more like to be able to be able basically to um not be like noticeably like feminine as a boy um which sometimes i i was doing more successfully than other times um i guess i didn't really have um tran like i didn't sort of know what being trans was until my 20s i think i sort of sort of vaguely was aware of it but it wasn't it was it's not an attractive thing it's what it seems like to me because you know when you see it in media you see like we're talking about the early 2000s like it's not you know it's like you know brian vomiting on family guy or whatever like it's not like you don't see that on tv and you're like oh i want to be that like i want to be that i want to be that like dead sex worker in svu that's my future like how you thought about it it's hard to identify with that so i don't i don't know i didn't know what was wrong with me like i i guess in my twenties um you know i used to like cross-dress in bars and like like like i was doing like like these these things that i sort of didn't really have a great explanation about why i was doing that but the thing is so like you you're attracted to females so when you cross dressed into a bar you weren't looking to pick up guys you were just wanting to feel the experience of being a female yes and i guess i did like i i guess i did sort of i don't know people would sort of pay attention to me as a joke i guess like men would buy me drinks and things i would sort of enjoy this i uh it's hard for me to think back on this stuff because it's like you kind of just like i kind of just like repress this stuff now because i just like don't want to think about it but i you know why you find it embarrassing or yeah i find it in you i find it like shameful i guess um and i i guess i kind of struggle with that a lot like um i because it's it's cringe like yeah it's cringe to have yourself like not figured yourself out to such an extent that you're like you're doing things that are sort of baby steps in the direction of like what's eventually going to be your social identity but in this really like awkward way but can you forgive yourself for doing that in the in in the fact that you were kind of just desperately trying to figure out what you were going to go through i mean it doesn't seem cringy it seems like someone who's trying to you know figure out their identity one way or the other who doesn't know what's going on i think that would be the psychologically healthy way to do it yes yeah yeah i don't i don't find that embarrassing i if if anything if i can i i think it's incredibly brave to do that i would be scared to do something like that well i used to i used to i used to just be like black out drunk when i was dead that's that's another thing but even still it's like to have the courage to go do that and to try to express yourself like that is is scary i mean it's terrifying yeah it was scary uh and and it was scary to me um i i kind of um would it would go through these stages of like being more brave about it and then being a coward like i um i know for there was a while in my mid-20s when i was basically like i was presenting as this kind of like gender [ __ ] like i don't know i don't know how to just i guess we call it genderqueer now but basically i was like i was like only shopping in the women's section for for one year and like you know i wasn't being perceived as a woman i wasn't identifying as a woman i was still using a male name but like my nails were painted i was wearing jewelry and like i was kind of okay with that for a while um but i just kind of the the like again it's like there's this like shame and i was like no no this is crazy like i i was also very judgmental of other um like gender non-conforming people i guess that's another like so something that's true i think for a lot of lgbt people is that like a lot of us go through a stage where not only do we want to pass as normal but we also kind of participate ourselves in the homophobia or the transphobia and bigotry like and this is not this is like another i'm not i'm definitely not proud of this but like i used to i was like grossed out by other people like me you know what i mean and there's a sense of like no i'm not i'm not gonna to give in to this i wouldn't call it a degeneracy i i mean i wouldn't have said that explicitly but i felt it you know when you say people like me you mean like people who were fully transitioned or people who are like kind of cross-dressing people who are gender non-conforming and like everybody in that broad category i would say especially people who are sort of assigned male but who are presenting in like an ambiguous way like i can remember being in chicago where i was kind of being like i don't i don't even know i mean at the time i would probably just call myself like a full-time cross-dresser which sounds like in retrospect i have to like shake my head this like a full-time crossdresser are you listening to yourself like but like but like but like i remember seeing like seeing like a trans woman on the like the l in chicago the train and just being like nope like i can that's i can't handle this i can't be that i don't want to look like that you thought was so like that you hated so much what was it that you saw i saw um i guess it was a person who i saw sort of a freak basically like a deviant abnormal someone possibly delusional does this person think they look like a woman well they don't i can tell that everyone can tell that i don't want to be this delusional crazy person it was it was the issue of can you pass as a woman for real it's kind of holding a mirror up to yourself and your deepest fears about if you could actually pass well i think yeah i think you just kind of you just kind of nailed it because i think that that there's a lot of different reasons why people cross-dress in my case it was because of this gender dysphoria that i didn't have like i wasn't quite being honest with yet because the truth is that i wanted to pass and i've and i've always kind of that's always been something i kind of cared about and i was kind of like but i didn't think that i could at the time i didn't i didn't have the the skills to um and so when i saw other you know either trans women or you know however they were defined i guess probably trans who didn't pass i kind of saw like oh that's me like that's what i look like that's and it's wrong i don't want to be that um which i think is probably one reason why like once i actually started my medical transition i like i did kind of prioritize being able to pass as female because it's you know i guess this is kind of this is an ugly thing like i don't endorse this at all like like we absolutely as a society like need to be kinder to people who are presenting ambiguously but i guess i myself internalized that to the point that i was like horrified by the idea that i would be presenting as like a man in a dress for example it's such a hard thing to do though because like like i said it's it takes so much courage to first go out into the world like that because you know there's so much attention on you so many people judging you and then you something so painful inside of you has to be pushing you to do that so it's kind of like you're getting [ __ ] internally and externally um i always hear about people who are dealing with gender dysphoria is gender dysphoria like a good way to say it because i i don't know if trans people use that or because i've heard people who like are against trans who think like you shouldn't be trans use that term to just dismiss it as like oh it's just a mental illness but wow yeah it's still kind of like a medical term gender dysphoria which just describes like basically like distress at being in some way feeling like you're not the right gen either you're living in the wrong gender role your body is wrong like uh you know it can take a lot of different forms um i think that uh this is like it's an accepted notion in the trans community that this is a thing that exists um there's like a lot of debate about like oh do you need dysphoria to be trans uh that gets really complicated i i i won't go into that but like i think that for me like yeah there was this always this like this sense of kind of like existential almost like wrongness about the way i was living and this longing i guess to get out of it and overcome it but at the same time it took me a long time to understand that that was something i could actually do um and i guess what eventually really helped me was youtube and seeing other people do it made it more like real because it kind of seems like magic when you don't know how to how trans people transition right it's interesting it's hard to imagine doing it yourself until you see like someone do it so i guess the thing about gender dysphoria that i was getting to is like i guess people who suffer or i don't know if you say suffer but who have gender dysphoria tend to be having high higher suicide rates more depression more anxiety is that true as far as you know that's true right yes it is it's true that trans people have um very high rates of suicide attempted suicide depression and i think that's mix a mix of things like one is that uh the condition of being trans for a lot of people is itself quite um you know it's complicated and painful but a lot of it is that like the society that we live in like really piles on top of that a lot of unnecessary hate and discomfort and difficulty and shame and that is a i think a huge contributing factor also i think so too because i think if you look back at homosexual when homosexuality was kind of characterized as some kind of deviant mental illness i mean it was considered a mental illness not that long ago yeah until the 70s yeah and so i think if you look back you probably see similarly high suicide rates and depression and anxiety amongst them you know that's what you would yeah so it is a societal thing because every society is meant meant to make you feel like what you're doing and what you're feeling is is wrong and and and then well even more than that in my opinion is it's instilling you and you a feeling of wanting to fight yourself which is always kind of like the most damaging thing one can do to themselves yeah it's that that's and i think that really accounts for a lot of the um the kind of the the the depression and shame and suicidality is that you come to basically be an accomplice of your owner pressure oppressors right in terms of beating yourself up and that's like something that's that's definitely been a consistent thing in my life so now that you've kind of how how many years into your transition are you medically three and a half okay um so i've been i've been i'm doing this full time for three and a half years i'm curious you considered it magic so now that i'm kind of on the other side of doing this medically for three years like what kind of medicine do you take and how what was the process like in in the you know onset or well first of all was there anything that made you decide like okay i'm just gonna do this well i think that i i i started this youtube channel in 2016. and like the persona i decided you know what i'm just doing this this channel in drag basically because i had reached a point where i was like i was like kind of like a [ __ ] moment in my life where i was like well like not i'm i'm 27 or 20 years old nothing i've done so far has succeeded like at this point why hide this part of myself you know like what do i have to lose basically was the thought so uh you know but youtube gave me a um i mean it really did give me a way to get more and more like comfortable sort of feeling out my femme self like because i i guess initially i would kind of play it off almost as a joke um that's unless it's in a way you kind of it's uh evade sort of the worst of the danger of it like oh this is you know or like a part of the persona part of the character yeah yeah but then i i kind of realized that like i'm using this persona to be myself and once i realized that i i guess it i couldn't sort of imagine going back again and i had i guess before i came out as like a trans woman i came out as a gender queer so that basically that meant i was like not a man not a woman i don't know what i am basically i mean okay i shouldn't say that because some people some people who identify as genderqueer that that they do know who they are that's who they are they've spent years figuring it out and they're comfortable with that they're comfortable existing in this kind in this non-binary gender space um in my case i wasn't really comfortable with that that was a stepping stone on the way to figuring out that i just wanted to transition you know um and and i think it also uh helped out i kind of met a lot of trans people through on because like trans people could kind of tell that i was like what's called an egg that's a like in the term for the trans community it means like a trans person hasn't hatched yet like a trans person who's like going through a lot of the like dysphoria or gender non-conformity or the kinds of precursors that are sometimes a transition but who hasn't like yet realized this thing about themselves um a lot of trans people because you could see that in me and and so i i sort of became friends with some of these people and i learned about their stories i learned how they did it um how they transitioned and and that's kind of how i was able to find out what to do basically and so what did you do did you go to like a doc like is there a special specialty doctor that you start seeing well what i did initially is i started taking black market hormones so i started ordering um i guess it's called the gray market because basically you're ordering overseas prescription hormones um so it's just two things that you start taking if you're mtf male to female one is a testosterone like an anti-androgen so it blocks the testosterone it lower it lowers your blood level of testosterone down to like a biological female level um and then the other thing you take is estrogen which raises your estrogen levels to a biological female level is there is there any danger in lowering you like you're you're born a man i don't know the biology but i know like in in men adult men whose testosterone goes super low it can cause like medical complications do you experience stuff like that well it is important you have to have some kind of sex hormones in your body or it is dangerous so you need either test um testosterone or estrogen so if you have estrogen that kind of fixes some of the problems that happen if you just have very low testosterone like um for instance like i know i don't know it's been a while since i learned about the specifics of this but it's like bad for your bones to like not have any sex hormones or not have high enough levels um it's pretty like there's like some side effects of doing um you know testosterone blockers especially but it's for me it's really there's really been no significant complications like it changes it changes more than your body though like it changes your moods it changes your sex drive like it changes all kinds of things um gender is not just a social like it is a social construct but the biological sex is a real thing and when you change your hormones it changes a lot of stuff with that that's really fascinating yeah so you're taking the the blocker the and you're taking the estrogen are these injections how do you take this i just take them as a pill some people do injection injections seem scary especially if you're getting [ __ ] from like that's what i think too is that injections i'm afraid of needles so i'm like well i'll just do pills if you uh yeah i didn't know you could do pills go pets yeah yeah and so how what did you first start feeling like when you're i'm really curious about you said that you're having different moods and sexual drives and all this i'm really curious about the differences in the that you started to feel well when you lower your testosterone i mean it does what you'd expect like it makes they lower your sex drive um for sure um and it's it i would um you know a lot of people report conflicting things some people say that they feel more emotional that they cry more when you have estrogen also you might be slower to anger i mean it's kind of like the opposite of what like steroids would do where you're like raising your testosterone and roid rage or whatever um i guess physically um it it sort of your skin gets smoother um and kind of itch it really changes the texture of your skin it changes the texture of your hair especially your body hair you have like less body hair that starts to go away uh you start growing breasts um and it kind of redistributes the fat on your body so like whereas men tend to kind of like accumulate more body fat around the gut like women will accumulate more of it like in the hips for example so you sort of notice these changes in the shape of your body that's that's amazing did it were you what did you feel when you first started knowing this stuff noticing this stuff did it feel like i mean it's pretty magic yeah it is incredible i mean it's like it's almost kind of annoying to be around someone who's in that early part of transition because it's all they want to talk about it's definitely all i wanted to talk about like it's it's those first few months when you're on hormones it's like oh my god it's it's it does feel like a miracle like it's it's hard to believe that that it's happening but um i guess i've gotten so you i've i've kind of gotten so used to it now that it's like lost that sense of magic but definitely yeah when i started it it seemed like magic and so now you you have to continue to take these i'm assuming right yes yes so i um i i have to continue to take uh these basically for the rest of my life um both of them and until i get um with with what we now usually just call bottom surgery which used to be called like having a sex change but basically if you don't have i mean to get really anatomical about it like if you do not have male gonads your body is not producing testosterone uh so you have you don't have to take the testosterone blocker anymore so is that kind of do you have that goal for yourself to get that surgery i do yeah and just fyi i don't ask trans people about that i don't care but uh a lot of trans people don't want to talk to talk about like what surgeries they want to get oh okay i don't care so don't worry about it i apologize that's the i guess that was my fear of going to this conversation is that i don't know what well i'd rather i'd rather you not i'd rather you talk through this without feeling like you can't ask questions because i feel like especially when you're doing a podcast like it's valuable to educate people i i am super interested i i have no like i have no firsthand account of any of this stuff and i yeah and my my intentions are like i uh i truly am extremely curious and nice and super empathetic with your journey so i hope i'm not offending anyone no you no you're not nothing to me but i'm kid so so you so your intention if you give me permission to ask this question is to do you remove do you remove everything or just the go now so bottom surgery has gotten very sophisticated for male to female transitions i mean what they can do is they can basically create a surgically constructed um vagina in labia and [ __ ] so wow um yeah it's very it's gotten very sophisticated i mean they've been doing this like i guess they first started doing these surgeries in like the 1930s and back then it was yeah that's when the first one was 1930s it was very crude back then um but you know it's been almost 100 years that the surgeons have been doing this now so it's gotten very fancy like there's there's there's versions of it now that are done with the robots um and you know it's uh you know different surgeons have like different methods but a lot of the people's results now are very good like you can they're sexually functional you can have orgasms like um so it's it's not you know some people think oh it's just a wound you're just creating a hole or like no no it's not that it's much it's much more sophisticated than that the results they look pretty uh natural and and they're they're pretty functional so you sign yeah your intention is to do that are what is are you what are you waiting for i guess is my um well basically i have done i had on like facial surgery a year ago a year and a half ago and that was kind of my my first priority because well i'm a youtuber so you know but i think that that surgery was tough and it's kind of maybe like i need a break before i do more surgery in what way like just painful and it's painful difficult and like kind of terrifying like going into a major surgery is scary like the night before because this is the first time i've had a major surgery so the night before i was like you know it kind of set in like oh god like tomorrow they're gonna like cut into my face and saw my bones down it's like that's like in the abstract you're like okay let's do that but then when you think about it happening to your skull you're like oh it makes you if you almost feel faint just thinking i'm also just squeamish like i'm a little baby about this kind of stuff so well and i would imagine that the the other surgery we just talked about would probably be even a scarier prospect uh yeah it's it's a major major surgery so you know yeah it takes like a month to to recover um you know people you're on your feet in a couple weeks um but um yeah and the other thing is the wait lists for these things can actually be quite long so oh the waitlist really yeah yeah so a lot of research there's probably not a lot of doctors that specialize in that is that the issue yeah it's a very specialty thing i mean it used to be the case that a lot of girls would go to thailand to get it done because there are these oh it's common there there's a lot of yeah yeah yeah yeah there's a kind of um i guess a culture of of sort of trans women there and a lot of doctors who cater to it and so some of the you know for a long time like the thai surgeons were actually the best um so you would go there to get it was doctor sue porn was his name was there's just one guy doing it yeah there's one guy doing it just hundreds or thousands of trans women have been through this one guy um but a lot of american surgeons have have gotten quite good in the last decade so what what kind of surgery did you have in your face if i can ask that i'm kind of curious this was an issue you to help because we talked briefly about like your wanting to pass as a female was this basically to make you look more female the facial surgery yes so facial surgery is like it's a con it's kind of a controversial thing right and that's true even if you're not trans like if you have suppose you're a woman and you have like a very angular nose and you get a rhinoplasty to make it more like straight or there's definitely people who have negative feelings about that because there's people who say like oh well you're just trying to replicate this like eurocentric beauty standard like and you know this kind of thing right so there's definitely like a transversion of this where people say like no like the goal of being trans should not be to look the same as a cis woman um but you know it's ultimately i think it's a personal choice right some um it's for me that there's a lot of reasons why i wanted to to have the facial i can tell you i can tell you exactly what they did they kind of um sort of shaved down my brow bone so that uh if you look at like a lot of like people in profile you'll notice that on average men tend to have a more prominent like stronger brow um and they also kind of narrowed my jaw a little bit i used to have like a more kind of square chin it's now pointy um they did what's called a trachea shave where basically you it's like a little i have a little scar here where they like basically like um make your adam's apple smaller so it looks more like a a cis woman's throat um and uh so that's what i did and basically it's it's kind it makes it sort of easier for me to read to people as female so i used to feel like when i left the house i felt like i couldn't leave the house without a full face of makeup you know like because i was so anxious about like oh god how are people going to perceive me are they going to see me as a woman am i going to get clocked am i going to get yelled at if i go to the bathroom you know there's all these kinds of anxieties that you have about you know it's not just vanity like some people think maybe there's a little bit of vanity but like there's it's not just vanity right like like it's like a lot of trans people have safety concerns and if you're able to be less detectable like it's it can make your life you feel more yourself beside that yeah just you feel like more yourself i totally understand that yeah and then there's and also that of course yeah so yeah to me to me this was something that i'm very happy i did it i have no regrets um you had all that done in one session and one second that sounds absolutely brutal it's terrible oh my goodness was your face all bandaged and everything was yeah like full head of bandages exactly god and like how do you even file down the forehead because like you must have had a huge i don't know how they do that well i don't want to get too like gross out about it but they basically i mean surgery is it's amazing like what they can do basically they they do an incision behind your head oh and they go under they kind of peel your forehead down it's like it's it's scary but like they're they're good at it and so like basically i used to have a like um you know there was kind of like a almost like a bald spot here where the incision was across the top of my head that's gone now because the hair was grown over it so you can't even notice that there's no scars it's very it's like the result is very like you can't tell that surgery happened wow that yeah that's that sounds well all that at one time how long did it take you to recover um i would say it was about 10 days of recovery and then the swelling that lasted another month right like uh but uh yeah it's it's it's it's not as bad as you might think although it's the first three days that are really horrible so now that you're kind of on the other side of uh not entirely i guess there's still more to go but like you've come a long way right from from those first days so how are you feeling now about being a female and and like you talk about you're depressed before and all this like has it helped a lot of the do you feel better like just yeah i would say that it's it's helped exactly one area of my life it's helped the gender problem that was kind of a defining thing for for my whole adult life up until this um it really has helped but i won't say i'm not going to say that oh it solves all your problems like no it doesn't solve all your problems like if if anyone's going into transition because it's going to solve all your problems or give you a new identity it doesn't do that it doesn't do that at all in fact it adds a lot of new problems in a lot of ways um you know i guess i'm in a weird situation because i've kind of transitioned very much i mean on youtube basically so it's been very much in the public eye um and so with that comes a lot of scrutiny a lot of judgment a lot of responsibility when it comes to other trans people see you like not just as an individual person but like they see you as doing the work of kind of representing them to the public and so if you do something they don't like if you say something they don't like and they feel you're kind of you're kind of [ __ ] them because you're misrepresenting them so that's a tough situation to be in because it's like you know i can't just be myself um and you know i i kind of i kind of found a way to find a new like closet to get into when i transitioned because when i did once i transitioned i started dating men because i i sort of i don't know there there's this anxiety that i had about like you know oh i have to show the world that i'm really a woman and like that means trying to be like it's almost you almost like you leave like one gender prison and you kind of move into a different one that's what happened to me anyway where now i'm kind of like i feel this obligation to be like a gender conforming woman in every respect which included dating men so i did that for for a couple years before realizing like um i mean actually like the people i'm usually attracted to are are the other trans women um it's a form of it's a form of gayness that straight people haven't even found out about yet so so you're not attracted to like uh sit like cis females you're you're mostly attracted to trans females like yourself well i'm actually i'm actually trying to say i'm attracted to both but i just i'm mostly interested in dating trans women because uh i don't know this might change later in my life but at the moment there's kind of a lot of reasons why i find it just easier to date trans women like we have this kind of shared understanding of this like background and this journey uh like there's a lot of stuff that you have to explain to a partner who isn't trans that you kind of just don't with someone who's trans so to me i i don't know i like i like being with trans women because i just i just find it sort of very relaxing i guess in a way that i would sort of yeah and there's also a kind of like i don't know and in some ways i would always worry if i was with um if i was with a cis woman i'd i was kind of worried that about being like oh like the more like male part i mean i know that's like not like a healthy worry but like it's it's it's just like a subtle psychological thing that it's like uh it's it's kind of nice to to to not worry about that to not worry that about the difference between my body and the body of my partner so when you first transition you you felt compelled to date men just because you like it's just it goes to show how complicated it can be there's all these things and especially the social pressure because i think a lot of people would say oh okay so you're trans female but you're attracted to female they might be like you know that that sounds ridiculous like wow yeah i think a lot of people think that is ridiculous um i think that in that sense that it's ridiculous i think probably caused me to not transition sooner in some ways because it's it's it does seem like i guess it seems to people like the point of transitioning is to be attractive to men but it's not like uh you know if if you're if you want to attract men and you're born male uh there's a lot of men who are into men and you can attract them so people who transition it's it's not just about who you want to attract it's like rarely really about who you want to attract it's about like who you are like how you want to experience the world and like like who you are as a person what kind of body do you feel at home and what kind of um you know social world you have to perform although i just say social world's sort of different from gender it's not i'm not talking about gender stereotypes because obviously like i'm not a stereotypical woman in a lot of ways um stereotypical women don't date women for instance right right um but yeah i think i think to me it wasn't just the shame of it that led me to date men i sort of uh i guess there was i made a whole video about this called shame on my channel where i talk about like my experience dating men and and like other things i genuinely liked about it like i i think i'm someone who has like a sexuality that's at least a little bit fluid to the point where uh like i don't know i guess i call myself like a gay trans woman a trans one who's attracted to women but i would say that like i'm not the most like the most um i'm not the least bisexual person i guess you can put it that way like like i haven't enjoyed like sexual experiences men even enjoy dating men um it's just that i feel like that's kind of like not really the right um i'm trying to think of people are gonna be mad at me because i'm like misrepresenting lesbianism or something but um i just wish i could identify as nothing sometimes so i could just not represent anybody it's so complicated your life is so complicated i mean it's like yeah you're cl this is the part that's that's so challenging for me and like someone who's just honestly trying to understand it and i can only imagine in your in your case it's like you're someone who's honestly trying to you know convey who they are and how they feel and yet there's the people are can be so judgmental maybe it's just because the position you're in is so sensitive so i don't i don't want to judge them for being judgmental but like i know that people have gotten mad at you for things that you've said about being trans and it's like you know you like you said you're escaping one cage you're entering another one i just it makes it hard to have conversations when we're all on eggshells i feel like and i don't know if you agree or maybe i'm just being overly yeah no maybe it's easier for me to say yes i'm on the outside looking at you know um i think to some extent that's true it is very very difficult to talk about these things in public in this day and age um in and you're right there's a lot of judgment coming from a lot of directions like there's a lot of people who would want to tell there's a lot of people who are very confident that they know who and what i am despite the fact that they've thought about this for 10 seconds and i've thought about this for 20 years right you know what i mean like a lot of people say well well if you're transplanting well you're just you're just a gay man and deny on and then i say well i'm going to charge a woman and so they say well you're just a straight man in denial and it's like well but i'm not though like it's it's it's why would you go through everything you've done yeah if you're just a man in denial that's just silly like i don't know why people have such a hard time i think people just haven't thought it through that well like and it's it's it's i guess when you hear about it in the abstract it's kind of hard to like it's hard to imagine like like i think you hear oh some people have surgery to change their gender and you think what like having surgeries doesn't make you a different gender like you know like which is true actually it's having surgeries doesn't make you a different gender um to understand like where trans people are coming from like this is this it's um you know you don't want to i hate to say like corny things like it's about your soul but it kind of is at the end of the day like it's about how you experience the world how you experience your body how you experience relationships with other people it's not easy to translate that into some simple explanation right of like oh here's what being trans is just just accept it i guess my hope is that i kind of describe my experiences to people and they will kind of they'll be they'll they'll find something that they'll be able to empathize with with what i've experienced and and hopefully understand it a little better um because yeah i hope that that makes them sort of less eager to tell them like oh no i'm they've got me figured out they know what i really am right although it is possible through people like you talking so openly about it that something so complicated and hard to put into words can just become maybe um some shared common knowledge i think maybe i hope and like you know i don't know how long it takes but you say when you say i'm a trans lesbian or however you refer yourself people actually know what that means and don't try to say tell you who you are well i agree that's my also my hope and i think that youtube is kind of fabulous for that kind of thing exactly because it well there's a lot of talk about parasocial relationships between creators and their fans which means like when your people are fans of a youtuber well you kind of feel like you know them on some level like i mean i've experienced as much of myself as a viewer of youtube like a creator if i watch a lot of someone's videos i kind of it's because it's almost delusion that they're your friend you know you feel like you know them because you know so much about them um and obviously that can lead to these problems where people feel like like entitled to tell you what to do with your life because they feel like you know your friends or whatever but the positive side of it as i see it is you know most people like you said like probably don't know a trans person they don't they're not friends with a trans person but if they follow your youtube channel they watch your videos for you know 20 hours or whatever over that time like people sort of that parasocial thing actually kind of can work because it helps people better understand the experiences that they might never have access to otherwise right yeah especially so like intimately as you can with such detail as you can talk about it on youtube right and that i think gives people kind of portal into our world that i hope leads people to be a little bit more understanding i think you have done an incredible momentous job of normalizing being trans i mean you have this huge presence on youtube you're extremely popular you talk about all these broad i mean i have a hard time thinking of many other people have done so much good for normalizing what what it means to be trans as you have well i hope um yeah i guess i tend not to think about it because it's like well maybe you understand because you're also like an influencer like if you think about your influence it's hard to function yeah what i mean like like when if you make a video and you know that like okay a million people are gonna watch this video well a million people that's like like madison square garden seats what 20 000 if it's full so that's like five consecutive madison square gardens like do i have anything that i feel comfortable saying to that crowd like oh god no right if you can't think about it or you'll go crazy but uh yeah i know i guess i feel some i do i do hope that i've you know used use my my podium base here like to for something good and i do have to remind myself sometimes that it doesn't it does matter it's not just it does it really does i i from my point of view i i think you know it does but but again you can't think about your influence you're totally right for me i i always ignore it but maybe it's just me trying to pay you a compliment or something i don't know well i'll take the compliment thank you when you when this maybe is in the weeds but i'm i know that there's like do you feel like trans people are sometimes fetishized and like pornography or popular media and then when you're in the dating world let's say you're dating guys do you ever wonder like is this guy into me as a person or is he like fetishizing me is that a thought that comes to your mind is that a problem in the trans world yeah this is a major issue i would say um i think you know a lot of men probably first really encountered the concept of a trans woman in porn like because it's it's a very popular category it comes up you know like and a lot of times that's not the greatest introduction because it does present trans women in a very like fetishized way right and that can even like go into uh like the language that's used like i'm going to say bad words now so twitter just ignore this part but like you know it's like it's the categories like [ __ ] porn she-male porn right which i think cause i think like if this is how you go around the world thinking about trans women females [ __ ] like it's kind of it's like it's a little bit of a dehumanizing perspective and a lot of trans women will be irritated uh well more than irritated like like you know if they get the sense that you just want to date them out of some experiment of oh i'm curious to be uh with a chick with a dick right like that's not um you know what is a trans woman going to get out of that she's what just giving you an experience like no because trans women want what everyone else wants we want to be valued for ourselves we want to be loved we want to be uh you know we want to have relationships we don't just want to be someone's like exotic sex tourism for a night [Music] the fact that it's so popular on in porn sites what do you think about that like is that good is that bad like what does that mean that that it's turned into this this porn category uh it means a lot of men are liars it means well they're not liars i shouldn't that's too judgmental but i would say there's a lot more men who are attracted to trans women and trans women's bodies than are publicly open about that fact um i would say that you know we talk about the shame of being trans there's also some there's also shame attached to being attracted to trans people um and a lot of people find themselves attracted to trans people and then they don't kind of know what to make of that because in their heads like oh like suppose you're a man and you're think of yourself and you're heterosexual and you know but you find yourself attracted to this woman who has a penis and then for a lot of men that causes them to have this kind of crisis where they're like oh god is this gay i'm like okay who am i what is anything like like uh i guess i encourage people to like relax a little a little bit like the the fact of the matter is that like sexuality is very complicated most of us are a little more fluid than we like to think and also i would say that you know if you're worried is it is it gay the quote well no it's not gay is the short answer i would say because what it means to be a gay man is to be a man who's attracted to men because you were attracted to a woman with a penis does that mean now suddenly you want to have sex with men like no it doesn't mean that it means that you're attracted to a woman and that woman had a penis like you're answering the time old question of the internet here today oh yes well i have a video on the subject called r traps gay oh oh you do i haven't seen that our trap i don't know and i i don't know the answer is no uh the answer is the short answer is no yeah the video is an hour long if you want the long answer and i made that video i made that video when i was you know dating men so i it was something that was kind of on my mind and i had had these experiences did these men who were dating you ever have these kind of conflicts of identity of identity like am i gay am i straight what's going on um yes i i definitely have had have had men um it sends them into this like deep philosophical spiral uh sometimes or i've also had like i don't know you have a lot of experiences that are interesting like i don't know i had um like some men will think like oh i'm attracted to you but like i don't i'm not attracted to penises so i'm not interacting with that at all and and i and a couple of times i said okay to that because i don't know i guess i have no self-respect whatever but like i uh i don't know but but then they would kind of get interested as they became interested in me but people like there's a kind of complicated thing about sexual attraction where people think that like sexual attraction is to body parts right so what it means to be uh you know what it means to be attracted to women is oh i love vaginas right or something like that well and what i mean and what it means to be intimate i love dick okay a lot of times that's probably true but sometimes um you know sexual attraction is not so like atomistic it's not so like zoomed in on one little fetishized body part and like if you're a i think people often are surprised when they first find themselves attracted to a trans person because um you know you always think like penis man vagina woman well most people have not really encountered the body of someone who has like breasts for example and a penis and i guess um you know initially i guess that's just make make people uncomfortable because they don't their sort of brain doesn't know how to process this right including the part of their brain that is involved in sexual attraction like uh like well maybe i'm attracted to parts of this person but other parts i don't know and like and then and then like so i think this is where some of the the this is where the deep philosophical introspection comes in right as people try to understand what it means that they're attracted to something that they didn't think that they would be attracted to i wonder what it says about us that it's just it's such a big deal anyway it's like okay this person has a penis and you find yours that you're that you're attracted to this person which includes their penis like why does that have to be an it like such a ground like why do what does it keep you know what i mean it's like okay who cares like what's the big [ __ ] interest when you break it down like that it's kind of crazy right that people like like like who cares exactly like it really doesn't matter and it shouldn't be such a big deal i guess what the reason it seems to matter to people is that people get yeah and people get very invested in their identity and their identity includes like a sexuality if you go through life thinking that you're a straight man like to have something that that maybe makes you um sort of that sort of shakes your certainty on that can be it's not just about like oh i was attracted to this person one it's like who am i right that's why that's why it does that yeah but i wonder if it also underlies some some notion that we as society society still hold be like gay bad or trans bad and so it's like oh no i like there's something bad about me now that i like this person which includes their penis yeah i think that um yeah i think that there's definitely there's definitely still stigma on homosexuality like and that's especially true i think if you're like a masculine man who is in you know operating in heterosexual spaces like there's there's real stigma to to you know even like being a bisexual man like i've heard from from by men who i know that like there's a women who will just like a lot of women actually who will just straight up refuse to date them simply because they've been with guys or because they have some attraction to men also so i think that for a lot of people there's sort of there's there's social pressure and there's sort of an incentive to be more black and white rather than shades of gray when the reality often is more shades of gray right so let me ask you this then because you you seems like you're dating life so far has been a lot about like you're a female but you also have a penis so what happens when you get the surgery and you like fully transition to female how does that affect your dating life do you think well i think that um you know some trans women i know find that it actually leads to a decrease in people who are interested because so many of the people who are interested are interested in this like i said was talking about this like exotic chick with a dick experience well most trans women don't particularly mind that drop off and partners because they're not really interested in being this fetish object right so for some trans women i think it comes as like a liberation like it's like well now at least i know that anyone who's interested in me is interested in me for the right reasons um and i think that um you know [Music] it's it's valid for people to have different attractions like i understand that like there's there's going to be people who only want like who who are willing to be with a trans woman but only if she has a vagina um right only if she's post-op um so you know that kind of changes if if you you can date those people after you post up obviously and then there's people who people who are only after this like girl with a penis experience then they won't want to date you anymore so uh you know that's something that trans people consider but i think for the most part like this is not really like why we're having the surgery or not it's it's about us you know it's about our bodies and what we want and how we've you know how what we have to do to feel comfortable it's not about like oh i'm doing this to make other people attracted to me so uh there's so much to think about i mean it's it's it's a lot for for for you guys going through that it is a lot yeah it takes up a lot of life just figuring it all out well what is it like um you're a progressive is that the right title i think probably i i like that title yeah yeah you're progressive you're trans on a platform where conservative politics seems to be like the predominant force and so i'm just curious what's your experience like on youtube uh are people do you find a lot of hostile forces do you find a lot of supportive forces i mean both i'm sure but kind of curious on your experience well when i started it was 2016 and back then it was even more true that it was a conservative platform like i guess uh this was the era of sjw cringe compilations purple-haired feminists 76 genders like this whole moment in youtube internet history um yeah i guess that that kind of stuff was kind of initially kind of what motivated me to start making youtube videos is that i saw that there was this kind of political commentary on on community not necessarily a community but like a market i guess for this kind of content getting just doing huge numbers millions of views about people dunking on like 17 year old like feminists or whatever um i was just like okay there's like an opening here for someone to come in and like walk the shot uh block the shot exactly yeah so i i guess that's kind of what i what i sort of set out to do at the beginning is like um you know i wanted to kind of introduce a more nuanced discussion of this and like i guess i i had been you know in academia a graduate grad student so i had been around the campus activists like i knew how annoying they could be and so i guess on some level i i understood like i could have like a visceral sympathy with the people who are anti-social justice warrior because it's like yeah a lot of social justice warrior behavior is very annoying and very off-putting and i get why people don't like it but i i guess what i saw was that in response to this like annoying preachy uh you know kind of behavior was that people were just like shutting down any interest in progressive causes and things were going like speeding into the right wing very fast and you know it it was something i was sort of personally invested in because a lot of this was you know the trans people were kind of scapegoated through a lot of this as like these crazy snowflakes and you know i kind of knew that i was part of that group so i there was always kind of this this incentive i guess personal uh involvement where i kind of wanted to make myself understood by more people than just the people who were already like vocal activists you know i wanted to be understood but better by normal people by like a general youtube audience like i don't know if that's normal but but you know that that's sort of what i uh envisioned for the beginning so you know as things have grown like there is a big leftist community on youtube now i mean i've got like one like a million subscribers more than a million subscribers now so a lot of the feedback i see is now very positive but when i started that was definitely not the case like i got like the first few videos i think i uploaded on this channel got mostly downvoted oh really yeah is that discouraging did you ever feel like quitting um actually no because i felt like to to me i saw it as a challenge to find out how to how to get these people you know what i mean how to get these people on my side like and so i guess even though i was being attacked i was like all right like what can you know i don't know i've always kind of wanted to be an entertainer right like i mentioned my past as a musician on youtube i want to be an entertainer too and part of that part of being an entertainer is winning over an audience right like you have to kind of get people not just speak to people but also get them to want to listen and so i found you know by trying to make my videos more entertaining uh and by using kind of theatrics and other things like that i could sort of make a video that was very inviting um so sort of easy easier to get into and you know uh not not so like here's what you believe here's the list of the 10 things that are bigoted about what you're doing you know what i mean like like that i didn't want to do that kind of content because it seems like it just drove people away interesting i mean what do you what do you think about there's people like let's say do you think youtube's a good place to to engage with i mean you have these huge like tim poop and shapiro the quartering who pees in his own basement i don't know if you know about that oh you don't okay that's fine but um you i i don't know what it is they have like these daily shows right that they they command these huge audiences but what really interested me is when you made this jordan peterson video who is like you know this godfather of kind of conservatism in a way and if you go over to like the jordan peterson subreddit you can see that the people there are really reasonable or like they're actually really receptive to your video i thought that was really interesting yeah i got interested in jordan peterson well initially i got interested in jordan peterson because he kind of rose to fame as someone who was speaking out against the pronoun thing yeah and for what so i kind of resented him at first because everyone was asking me all the time why are you taking away our free speech why are you trying to send people to jail for using the wrong pronoun well of course we're not trying to do that no one has ever gone to jail for using the wrong pronoun in canada so it was all fear-mongering but i guess i i i decided i don't know why don't i start listening to this guy's podcast so i started listening to jordan peterson's podcast and i actually thought that it was very interesting um like i don't know i just i just found him like an interesting person and i sort of i guess i felt like i was sort of getting why a lot of people liked him right um and that he well he's he's and i i can see to a certain kind of person he's like it could be a dazzling speaker he's educated very educated and he has all these examples and he uh seems to be offering like life advice as well as politics and a lot of the life advice is kind of you know self-help motivational stuff so it's the combination of that with like his attacking the uh you know the sort of activism that irritates a lot of people so this was a recipe for success um but i guess i fundamentally disagreed with a lot of what he was saying about well certainly about the pronoun thing but also about um he was he was kind of very alarmist about what his phrase was like post-modern neo-marxism which is what he that means yeah no one knows what it means well he said we had him on our show a few times and he always he would say all the time cultural marxism and i still don't know what i don't know what that means i just gl it just glazes over me well when you ask like when you look at the examples that he uses of like post-modern neo-marxism or cultural marxism it's all kind of the same thing like he's talking about like this strange like imaginary union of like hr departments that like have like diversity quotas and hiring plus you know leftist academics plus um it just seems to be like all the basically some like conglomerate of all the institutional forces that have anything progressive about about them um and you know i guess it's like a tip it goes along with a lot of like anti-like affirmative action arguments as you argue that this is some kind this is the new racism right this is into some kind of authoritarian project that's gonna like uh i don't know throw you in pronoun jail and and make you go to diversity training or whatever um i guess my confusion was like his alarm about that never really amounted to anything i saw in reality so i was always like he's talking about like some some force is coming to sweep us all away the new fascism and i the disconnect for me was just like i had a hard time taking that seriously because it just didn't see anything like that in the world that i was living in yeah he compared um like trans activists to stalin because he's you know he said that others say there's the same authoritarian principle and it's like well first of all wanting people to call you by your pronouns is like very much not the same as like wanting to take control of a state where you like dictate the economy and like i mean like it's just like not stalinism it's it's this is like a ridiculous exaggeration right and also it's especially ridiculous because trans activists like at the end of the day don't really have any power um like uh i guess you know people look at these little cases of like oh like someone got fired for saying something transphobic you know what i mean and they're like well this is it 1984 is an orwell's nightmare like but it's like that that's just not that's not what authoritarianism is like that's not that is not like having like it's just a fringe group looking for some acknowledgement i didn't yeah i mean so like the thing about the law that he became famous for the pronoun thing i've had trouble getting the whole thing straight but from what i understand there was never really an was there ever an intention in canada to hold people criminally liable for using the wrong pronoun well like what originally was the law no i mean all that law does is bill c-16 i think is what was called is all it does is adds transgender people to the list of people who are protected under like canadian human rights oh um like a hate crime yeah so basically that like yeah jews people minorities yeah yeah and indigenous canadians right and like the the the argument that jordan peterson made was like oh this could be used to like force people to use a certain pronoun or something you know is this fair that anyone can say they're trans hey that wasn't what he that wasn't what it was about it was about just like fear that like oh we're going to be coerced into using people's problems it's going to be justified with this law which they're going to say right but it's total speculation that amounted to nothing yeah it was kind of amazing how much built off that one story well he's back what do you think about he's back he's been on quite a journey it sounds like you're somewhat of a fan of his or at least you followed his career i did i wouldn't say that i'm a fan but i did more of an anti-fan but yeah yeah i thought his career not a fan well you say you listen to this podcast and you know you like what i like for you know when i when i had them on we didn't talk about politics we talked about philosophy and kind of the self-help stuff and it was great but um but he's back he had a tough time man i don't know if you've been following him yeah the benzo addiction that's a very difficult thing benzo meat diet and meat that i i cannot make heads or tails of the meat diet that seems like madness to me that's all meat diet apparently he's still on it i mean i think the very fact of what he went through may negate all the benefits they may be saying about the meat diet how does he poop how do you poop if you only eat meat i do wonder what is i you must be like super constipated i would think thank you zach like i don't know i feel like a fiber can someone look that up what's the bowel movements of all meat diet look like i mean i don't want to see a picture i'm just curious about the description of it bring it up yeah yeah what are your thoughts on someone like joe rogan i'm just kind of curious like he he's very popular obviously on youtube he's leaving youtube but he has such a huge influence on young men yeah i think that that that he is kind of like the biggest of these kind of youtube voices it's basically taught me his talk radio for millennials right like it's it's the sort of position that like rush limbaugh had you know joe rogan is not rush limba i think that his way positions himself as more of a um he's more of a like guide to the various guests like he's a little bit more neutral but i guess the problem i i an objection i have with jojo rogan is that he'll have these like very right-wing people on um you know especially it's actually especially awful with the trans issue like he'll just have ben shapiro on to just like talk about why trans people are delusional perverts or whatever and it's like he doesn't really challenge that very hard right and so in effect it's like endorsing that message to his audience yeah that's a challenge i mean yeah as a as a host like him it's really challenging it's like do you not have these people on or does he has an obligation to be more prepared for the arguments they're going to come up so that he doesn't put that out as an endorsement yeah it's um well it's this is this difficult decision right like like who do you have on as a guest like on your show and like i to to me i don't know i don't i don't have any principled objection to like having ben shapiro on as like a podcast guest but i feel that people who have have a responsibility i guess i don't know like like i feel if i were if i had a show that i had guests on and i had to guest on who was saying like a bunch of racist things like i would feel like i had some responsibility to be like uh whoa like i don't agree with that that seems kind of racist you know you know what i mean like like early like maybe not say that but like at least like challenge them on it whereas if i just let them go and i'm like that's an interesting opinion you know what i mean it kind of legitimizes and normalizes what they're saying which is not amazing um that said do i think it's like evil like no i don't use evil but i think that it's like kind of an irresponsible use of at least it's frustrating to me as a trans person yeah just to like because it's just too easy to imagine when you say oh god like you know 10 million people are watching this like it's just making the world harder for trans people it's like it's like setting us back it's making it's like steepening the slope that we have to climb to get anything done you know or just to live our lives even so when you when you're whipping up antipathy to like an already marginalized community on your show it just makes lives the lives of of you know people who are out here harder and it's hard not to have like some negative feelings about that yeah yeah that's understandable for sure um guys do we have any updates on yeah and funny enough uh since we're on the topic of joe rogan i guess uh i found an article where he had tried it and reported on uh and it's actually the opposite what i thought um apparently it gave him explosive diarrhea gross uh which he described like unlike anything he had ever experienced before not good and said it was only a matter of time until he shuts his pants doesn't that mean he's not digesting his food yeah i mean that doesn't sound very healthy so like no nutritionist like would ever recommend that you only eat meat like i don't understand how this is seriously something that people are entertaining so okay so jordan apparently he started his his daughter was like you've got to try this all meat time yeah it's everything and at first he's like okay i like meat and veggies but then he cut out the veggies and he's like it's cured my depression i've lost 50 pounds but you know he went to get like treated in russia for a day i mean like something went wrong with the diet it just sounds like snake oil to me like it sounds like a miracle for sure like [ __ ] diet for sure i mean all meat diet like what is the is there like a theory behind it dan that it's like some like that because usually with these diets it's like we're living like cavemen used to live how our bodies meant to be but i don't see it right there at least some logic to that um yeah i don't i i don't i i've never really understood what the argument for it is i don't think we ever just got down with me and they robbed me too dude like raw me that's i feel like humans invented cooking for a reason right and like like i don't know civilization has thrived with the humans cooking it seems strange to give that up also we have like molars like teeth in the back for plants yeah that are probably there for reason like i don't know we're not carnivores like like cats are carnivores right like they can only digest meat but that's like humans are not that so it's i feel like people always have to take everything to to the extreme it's like we've done everything else now let's just eat meat like all these diet fats are like this is all that's left let's just do big massive dumps because it's also like like jordan peterson is someone who's so like so like his arguments often come from like evolutionary biology like the whole lobster thing it's like well there's a hierarchies of among lobsters like we should have the hierarchies too like well but then but primitive humans didn't only eat meat so why should like it just i don't know it doesn't make any sense it just it doesn't add up to me yeah well there you go i think people these guys these people who do these crazy diets they're just like trying these extreme things and i think people kind of like people this one's i think we see humans like naturally we want to regulate our diet in some way like most cultures have some kind of dietary code and then people who don't have one like make them up like keto or vegan or like i don't know people like the rituals the ritual yeah of having some kind of like i wish i had a ritual yeah i could use a little bit of structure in my life it's total chaos over here yeah um it's like it's like order out of chaos but that seems like the wrong that seems like an approach that like all me i don't think that just imagine jordan peterson having explosive diarrhea if he would please they call them dumps i'm picturing it it's crystal clear like like just not even fully digested meat just blasting out of his ass just animal blood it's just god well on that note natalie i think we've said it all yeah that's i don't i don't know the universe has come to its conclusion yeah jordan i thank you first of all contra points on youtube was amazing we're all fans and i thank you for talking so openly with me i feel like i learned a lot and i really appreciated our conversation and just thanks for everything you do and really appreciate it very welcome thank you so much for having me on [Music] [Music]

Channel: H3 Podcast

Views: 651,365

Rating: 4.6665983 out of 5

Keywords: h3 podcast, h3h3 podcast, the h3 podcast, the h3h3 podcast, h3h3productions, h3h3, h3, ethan klein, hila klein, ethan and hila, ethan & hila, ContraPoints, Contra Points, natalie wynn

Id: kdIPAsPzFRQ

Length: 113min 7sec (6787 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MoveOfTen]

This was awesome! Been a fan of both Contrapoints and h3h3 for a few years now and I love to see my YouTube worlds collide.

[u/syntheticgerbil]

Just a great episode. I hope she comes back with Hila and maybe you guys discuss less serious topics leading to a lighter tone since Natalie can be pretty funny and I can see how the humor would mesh.

[u/kingkobro]

I would definitely say that this is one of ethans best interviews

[u/NintendFuckYo]

I didn’t know who ContraPoints was, but she is an amazing person! the fact that she was able to talk to Ethan and help him understand more about transgenders and dating and so on on the subject of it all was probably my favorite part. Because it not only helped him understand more but people that watch H3H3 and have no idea on the subject she gave some very useful information!

[u/ayyb0ss69]

Yay!

Heard the constant repeating of “Contrapoints will be on next week” from Ethan to which I was like “who the fuck is Contrapoints?” so I had to go check her out and her content is fantastic.

As a straight dude in his early 20’s I will admit I did use to be very “i’m right wing, trans people aren’t actually the gender they identify as, two genders, blah blah blah im a fuckin’ idiot”, thankfully I realised about 3 years ago of how ignorant I was politically and that watching all of these right wing youtubers was really brainwashing me into these hard political stances that honestly now im not sure why I believed in the first place.

Granted, even being more progressive today I’ll admit that im rather “uneducated” I suppose, I support people who dont conform with their assigned at birth gender, I say identify as whatever, doesnt affect me and it doesnt hurt anyone so let people be who they want to be.

However trans culture has always had an air of mystery to me, I support it but I dont think ive really understood why someone would identify as trans and what that is like, but Contrapoints has really helped alleviate a lot of that for me with her videos, they’re really well written and informative and she goes into very deep detail about her and the trans community as a whole, so I applaud her for giving me that perspective.

Now im off to go listen to this podcast.

[u/LaPuissanceDuYaourt]

Hahaha, the "he's stealing it!" soundbyte at 4:46 caught her off guard a bit.

[u/Shipsnax]

Re: why do rural republicans “vote against their interests”? I’ve lived in rural states my entire life. ESPECIALLY in rust-belt states, a lot of the people “voting against their interests” do not want handouts even if they are taking them! They want to be able to support their families with the jobs that are either dying or have left the US (ie coal, manufacturing). Watch Trump rallies from 2016. He was speaking directly to these people, even if it was full of false promises.

If you can stomach the awful format of Cracked, this is a great read that expands more on this. Trump might be voted out, but Trumpism is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

edit: Ha, paused the pod after Ethan asked this question to write this comment only to press play and hear Natalie reply with basically the same answer.

[u/Emily1592]

This was a really insightful and enjoyable episode. Would love to see more like this. Very welcomed change of pace.

[u/lil_wizard]

I’ve been eagerly awaiting this every since they announced it! I never thought I’d see my two favourite youtubers together. I think they both did a great job and it was really enjoyable to watch.

It was really informative to hear Natalie break down some of the medical stuff about her transition- I feel like she talked about it in a way I haven’t ever heard on her channel. I imagine it’s not the most comfortable topic and I hope she didn’t feel pressured (I imagine they go over what topics they’ll talk about beforehand?) It was clearly Ethans first time approaching this subject in this format and I think he did his best and was as respectful as he could be.

Anyways loved it. People that are saying “too political” or whatever just need to turn off the show and watching something else for a night. Not everything needs to please you 100% of the time. Just come back in a couple days for another after dark episode or whatever’s next. There’s no need to be a whiney stick in the mud.

Also Natalie looked so beautiful... When did this turn into beautiful world?