Faraday Speaks: Beyond Pipelines and Rabbit Holes | Doomscroll

0:00 they really just wanted to use me for their narrative and they didn't care what I had to say they really didn't what did he want you to say that I'm brainwashed by technology and I'm obsessed with like the internet and that I have no agency and I'm just going through pipelines and just like basically being flushed down a toilet right and I think that that's what they want what did you see on January 6th I don't care what any conservative says to me it's about burning it down the whole system the whole International System I know we're not allowed to say that now but there are neo-nazis in the Ukraine and they wear black Suns you know a couple years ago the researchers were all worried about them that they were going to start a white Jihad I remember welcome to Doom scroll I'm your host Joshua citarella my guest is Caleb Cain or Faraday speaks as he is known

0:47 online in 2019 Caleb was profiled in the New York Times in an article titled the making of a YouTube radical which is widely regarded as the case study for online radicalization in 2020 he was featured again in the popular New York Times Rabbit Hole podcast today he joins us to tell his side of the story a lot of people when they talk about this pipeline metaphor which that is all it is because it's not like we can zoom in and systematically study it as much as people try a lot of people talk about it as if it's an automatic process and in some ways it is you know in some ways there's a predictability to it you know one of the the biggest tagline that people put on the pipeline is it's the libertarian to alt rate pipeline mhm and

1:34 I would say that that is because the people that are Libertarians they're trying to solve a problem and they're moving towards it and predictably you move towards that you know ethn nationalist Solutions Civic nationalist Solutions I think that a lot of people that are pushing that Narrative of a pipeline they want it to be automatic it's almost how people that are harsh on crime they want to believe that oh you know they come into a single father household they go to a bad school and they're going to be a drug dealer but that's not necessarily the case so I think it's really just advantageous and a lot of people want to believe that there's an automatic process but that completely flattens out the person themselves what they're going through what they're

2:19 thinking why they're actually doing that process when I first started this you know this work about five six maybe even seven years years ago now um it was in 2018 2019 I wrote the book 2018 and then a researcher sent me your video I think 2019 a few months after yeah so I I I put my video out I'm pretty sure somewhere in 2019 at that time I was learning about this pipeline right I had learned about it a little bit prior to making the video that's why I kind of called it that for a while that made sense and I liked that because it gave you a structuralist approach it's like okay well if it's just this pipeline effect and it's like

3:05 just the series of arguments well then you could just debunk and and work on those arguments and maybe inoculate people to the arguments and then you know the pipeline's done so I reject the emphasis on it being an automatic process because again it just flattens out the person and you completely ignore all other variables even in this short response we've kind of moved between two definitions of this pipeline because one you're talking about predictability where someone who has libertarian beliefs is trying to solve the problems of a market economy where low price labor is coming in over the border and then they have to say well you know the nation state the thing that Libertarians fear the most actually we needed to set

3:50 up borders to balance this market economy balance the labor market so that's one person seeking out a solution using their own agency their you know intellect ual ability to try and solve a problem the other version is that you start watching some libertarian videos and then they're suggested to you and they're suggested to you again and they're suggested to you repeatedly over the course of a few months or years and whether you know you were seeking out a solution or whatever none of that is important you were just shaped by the suggestions of the stuff that you got this is the fuzzy area in that we're using this term pipeline to mean both of those things which are entirely different is there something convenient to tell about that kind of narrative

4:36 that people's beliefs are just shaped by recommendations in their Newsfeed the way that people talk about a pipeline narrative is they want to suck agency out of the room and then they say well it's just cuz they're getting anod with videos and I in my first video I talked about that I talked about how I was like I was mad I was mad that like you know you guys set up this content funnel and just just Drew people right in and there was a lot of you know I later I would go back and I'd learn about you know people going on forchan people going on all these social media sites and literally encrypting they messaging they do dog whistles you know I I learned a lot about how there were people that were being dishonest about their beliefs in order to radicalize people but if they came from another planet and were telling you some foreign

5:22 story You' never heard before that had no continuity to the world you're in it wouldn't make any sense no one would believe it just to give a a firm example of this you're talking about someone who might be of a uh paleoconservative political worldview going into like a Libertarian forum and then trying to recruit people from that pool is that what you're describing paleo conservative can do it but I was thinking more so like literal neo-nazis recruiting from libertarian message boards yes they did that on purpose and they've bragged about it but what I really push back on is this idea of it just being automatic and no agency first of all when I first got political in my life I was basically like an anarchist I didn't know what that meant but I just listened to dead Kennedy's you know I was also kind of liberal cuz I watched

6:07 John Stewart Michael Moore so I was already primed to want to look for solutions to things first person I found was Stephan maleno and you know that's that's the libertarian start uhhuh I know well if anybody tried to tell me that I didn't use my brain to figure out that if you've got a crisis at the border then that has to be solved somehow no there's a problem and I was trying to figure it out my issue is that I was only fed a certain narrative you know a false dichotomy but this this idea that I wasn't logically going to the next step and you see it in my my progression and I've seen it in the other people too that explain this to me you know you start out as that libertarian and then you think well I want a free and open Society okay well

6:52 how do I get a free and open Society well there's all these things that are holding it back well what's holding it back well there's no social cohesion and there's no border so there you know there's other people coming in there's cultures coming in that don't you know are not compatible and there's truth to that there's people that we wouldn't want as neighbors but I was going predictably based on my own logic of figuring it out and based on the only information that was presented to me you go from that to thinking okay so if we need social cohesion what causes the breakdown of social cohesion and then you have conservatives telling you oh well it's degeneracy it's IM morality okay so we have to solve that and then you start you keep going along this path and you keep seeing how what's not getting solved and the problems getting

7:38 worse and worse and worse so you go from being this like libertarian to being the Civic nationalist because now you want the wall with like hostile border guards and I never quite got to the ethn Nationalist part but I was sympathetic to those narratives right like it made sense to me that's one thing I don't think people want to accept is that these make sense and without another counter example another way a third way to go there's no there's no way to see yourself out of it the same thing with somebody on the left I think that you start out with certain moral prescriptions in your head and a certain attitude and personality but it is not insane to see how someone will just drift down that path it's it's just logic it's almost like math we could

8:24 imagine there's uh large pools of libertarian communities I think in the context the us at least you know this is how I grew up I'm a little bit older than you are but for most people being a Libertarian is like the third option right there's Democrats there's Republicans and especially if you were anti-war you know libertarianism is like that's the other thing that's like the one other thing so a lot of people who just had criticism of the of the status quo kind of fell into that unaligned uh libertarian camp and then all the free market stuff kind of comes after that just comes after that's the largest pool if you are looking to recruit political dissidents people who are unhappy with the status quo you go to the Libertarians because that's the easiest affiliation and so when we start to talk

9:11 about these funnel diagrams we start to begin with a large pool and then progressively narrow things down right that funnel analogy is a very sophisticated thing it doesn't come just from advertising click-through rates on YouTube that analogy comes from counterterrorism it comes from the global war on terror where we tried to create predictive models for young men who were approximately around the same age as some of the Lone Wolf white nationalist Terror that happened so frequently in the last few years but were doing Jihadi Terror at that same time and they created literally diagrams of tacid supporter active supporter and then at the bottom this person is a real

9:56 risk for violence in the real world how did you because you mentioned that in your video how did you I didn't know that those terms existed before I I got like a serious education I read the studies these things are based off of where did you encounter this phrase how did you even know that existed it's part of my uh process of consuming content online I was I was trying to think what can I do for a career and I was like well I didn't go to school and I don't have technical knowledge and I got interested in marketing it was honestly through people like Ty Lopez I'm I'll just shame myself it was through people like Ty Lopez and I just kept studying marketing and eventually I got I mean there's literally there was a guy who had a thing called clickfunnels and you would build funnels and I don't know why it

10:42 clicked with me I just sat there one day and I was like it's like a funnel it's a marketing funnel and the thing about a marketing funnel is you make an assumption that they are going to go to that place in fact you're sending them there it's the whole point right and it's funny that you bring up cve because a whole bunch of the people that were chasing around jihadis in the desert from their desk as soon as that died down and the white nationalist thing cropped up they all just moved from one dust to the next and applied all the same things my question is if the whole point of a marketing funnel is to direct someone to the bottom what the hell do you think

11:28 you're doing when you apply it to something that you don't want someone to do and I've seen them in person their attitudes they have well I wouldn't even call it hatred because I think you have to know someone to actually hate them but they have contempt and disgust you know these left-wing liberal and a lot of them honestly are antifa types which no shame on whatever you're into but they have a contempt and a disgust and a fear for these people and I would see so many times I'm like you can't just treat them like they're monsters and robots and they're going to you know goep themselves to Fascism if you guys would talk to them if you would like change your methods if

12:13 you would but they will do everything they can to just keep doing what they're doing they're setting them up unconsciously to just go right down to the bottom I will be the first to concede that many institutions that exist today their function is not to solve the problem but to preserve it such to guarantee their own continued existence into the future where conceivably you could have an institution that was tasked with combating white supremacy on the internet if they eliminated it the funding for the institution would then disappear as a result there would be no more need for them the class interests of those Elite professional positions is directly in conflict with accomplishing their goals I'll be the first to concede that what I've always thought was the

13:00 solution for this which you you have mentioned many times in the past which is why I took your work seriously and I appreciate your perspective is because this very analogy of the funnel of the marketing of ideology of pipelines in general it also necessarily suggests that belief systems are in motion that people can be persuaded through different means they can be convinced of something else and counter messaging to those people who are in root towards the worst ideologies and our potential risks for violence that this in itself should be the most Urgent Response to the to this problem do you feel like these young men who you know went down the rabbit hole so to speak did they mostly have agency or

13:46 were they just a discardable example of somebody who got impression shaped by by their recommendations I think it's layered I think of it like maturity and growing up and some sometimes I think on a societal level we are still in our terrible twos a lot of people in our society today are coddled in the west and pretty much everybody and they're suffering from narcissism and I don't mean that clinically what I mean is they have a limited scope of their self-awareness and their perspective of the world and if you just put them in a black box where they're only being fed certain arguments then yes those are the arguments they're going to learn so

14:31 they're not allowing agencies to step in the room and then you talk about counter messaging I spent time with like this very core group called cve countering violent extremism I was in with the click right and they're all leftwing and liberal and it's funny they'll try to work with right-winger sometimes it just Flames out but they're counter messaging there's a couple points first point is don't debate Nazis okay I'm kind of giving you the very vulgar manifestations of this stuff I'm familiar it really does Ripple up yeah yeah you know you might be some you know sophisticated you went to Harvard and you're working on the media literacy program you say well that's a nonsense term yeah but it ripples up you have the same attitude you just wouldn't put it that way I mean I would even agree in the context of a a university that a lot of these debates that Neo-Nazi groups

15:18 are trying to reiterate are actually they're just they are settled for for decades upon decades if not hundreds of years so I would generally agree with that policy where I would differ is that there are people who have been EX existing in Neo-Nazi adjacent communities for a long time who unless they hear a challenge to that argument are going to believe those things for the rest of their lives so it does actually in some very specific instances it becomes incredibly important to debate them which various content creators we've talked about this in the past some people did that to great success in years previous and it was absolutely necessary but the idea that you know we need to have people uh speak about race science or something like that at a university setting is probably uh I think not urgent in in 2024 that's a good point all a lot of these debates

16:03 are just utter garbage they're not debates they're just two people hitting their points back and forth and a lot of the people that I credited for helping me like see my way out of that only thing they did was present information because I've seen you know I don't care I'll say names you can edit it if you want Destiny is a big example Destiny doesn't teach you to have agency cuz the whole time when you really catch on to it here's the study this is what it says and that's just what it is I'm sorry but I just don't think we're all that I don't think that we really know what the hell we're talking about especially when you get into these sociological things where you can't replicate any of it can't replicate it so how do you know how can you be putting these studies up

16:49 like they're the Ten Commandments if you can't even replicate them I don't even want to say it's a religion cuz I like religion it's a Dogma people have a Dogma about their world and they think that their side has like settled it and figured it out a lot of times it's not about having a public debate a lot of times if they would just set up things where and and I'm not saying it works immediately I'm not even saying it necessarily works at all but you have to try to have a conversation with people and one thing I've seen is people will come in and want to talk to you and debate you I had a Discord server and these like we'd have neo-nazis come in we'd have paleo conservatives all sorts of right-wingers come in they don't really want to have a conversation but if you allow them to speak and you start

17:34 to ask them questions and kind of unpack it it builds trust you have to build trust first I had one really good conversation with someone where I just kept asking them because I I knew the the pipeline I knew like the the thought process and I just kept asking them so what do you think about this oh so you're saying that if we don't have a border wall then people can come in you know and it could overflow the country with some negative culture or disease you keep asking them the questions you keep asking and asking and asking they don't know what the hell they're talking about and they'll realize it halfway through huh and unless they're unless they're a real unless their narcissism is actually clinical or they're a sociopath and they just don't really care they will start to pick up that

18:20 they don't know what they're talking about and they will reach a limit and it will be like a little worm in their head that they can't get out yeah it will cause cognitive dissonance but when you just hit people with a wall and you don't let them speak at all and you don't interrogate them at all there's no cognitive dissonance can ever be born just going to go back into the box that's a good point because I've interviewed a lot of people from different political World Views left right up down sideways all over the political spectrum and uh sometimes when they are tasked with becoming a spokesperson for their movement they kind of have all of these radical posts and edgy memes and statements to make online that are around the edges but if they're asked to kind of like sit down and go line by line of what the program

19:05 is it's difficult for a lot of people journalists certainly fall into that the blue check journalist on Twitter very prestigious job a lot of visibility a lot of influence they tend to tell Society stories with a particular type of view how do you feel that your story was told in the media you're talking about the priest class and and I'll say this about the rightwing too right it was just advantageous they didn't they just didn't see me which sucks personally you know that hurts but I just picked up after a while they really just wanted to use me for their narrative and they didn't care what I had to say they really didn't they pay

19:53 lip service to so much you know I could sit down with any of these researchers and say well you know there's a crisis young men you know they're angry and you know what happens when young men get angry and they ain't got nothing to do and they'll say oh yeah you know it's a class issue and it's a social issue and you know they need Community spaces they'll say all that but then once you're on the battlefield that just goes out the window and again I'm not saying there's a solution I don't think we have a solution I know enough to know that I don't know anything my frustration is there's no effort or energy or in incentive whatsoever to do something different H be like if you worked at a factory and it just the product didn't work and the boss told you well you can't change the product it has to be made this way we've got too much running on this thing that

20:39 infuriates me you said they didn't see you what did they miss on the personal end it seemed like they really didn't care about me and this is especially true of journalists researchers all throw a bone cuz most of them are actually pretty empathetic I don't think they're bad people the journalists are are sharks and I don't like them and I don't like to talk to them and I've sat with them and explained to them what is going on and aside from some journalists that I've spoke to in New Zealand they're like robots they'll just go right back to their script I did a follow-up podcast with Kevin Rose said I don't think he ever released it because I think it broke his narrative we're on the podcast and he's like so it's been a couple years and you're running this Discord server and you told me that you know YouTube is where the Battleground

21:25 is so you know Caleb don't you kind of think that it seems like you've just went back into the pipeline just in a different direction and again what is he doing there cuz I'm in his Direction so what do you so what's the fuss he needs to make it about no agency it's an automatic process right so that he can continue to play fortnite and not deal with the world because there's nothing wrong with society that people are seeking out political Solutions on the internet oh there's something wrong with Society it's just all those nasty right- ringers who are all racist and all sexist and all evil there nothing to do with liberal democracy being entirely dysfunctional and the markets falling apart in the institution you know you know what's sad about that racism and sexism are big issues but in most cases they're subtle most of us are racist and sexist look at yourself and ask yourself really really ask yourself are you not

22:13 racist really really let me drop you off somewhere you know let's see how you act they don't want to interrogate it they don't want to be honest with themselves and so what is they have to pretend that it's some other people that they can just go eliminate it's really no different than how we dealt with things for all of history but now we're at a point where we can't fight no more and Kevin Roose he asked me you know aren't you just going the other direction I told him no actually I think that I'm probably going in a direction where I think that this technology stuff is just ruining us and I think people need to get offline and they need to get back into their communities he kept reiterating and trying to get me to say what he wanted me to say what did he want you to say that I'm brainwashed by technology and

22:59 I'm obsessed with like the internet and that uh I have no agency and I'm just going through pipelines and just like basically being flushed down a toilet right and I think that that's what they want they just want to flush him down a toilet he wanted you to read the New York Times yeah I always thought when I saw that piece and I talked about this in private with a lot of people but they drive to go and visit you they go through de-industrialized to Appalachia they don't notice that the bridges are falling apart there's no opportunity people are oding on fentel and they think like oh yeah it was some bad algorithmic recommendations that got this guy into politics there's no other wideopen very visible crisis in Liberal Democratic Society that needs to be addressed must be this algorithm got to get him to log off YouTube and read the New York Times again for a long time I

23:45 wanted to say that there was something like socioeconomic going on right there was a materialist condition and that's true that's a part of it but that doesn't explain it all cuz I grew up in those places and guess what not everybody that grows up in a rough Place turns into what you think they're going to turn into okay um so I mean that's a part of it and that I would just say I hate using buzzword but we live in some sort of Neo feudalism I mean the very fact that I can sit here and say priest class for the journalist and the researchers and that fits I sometimes think of it as we haven't involved social Technologies and I don't like to get all conspiratorial and blame it all on people that are up in high Towers CU I actually think you know it's it's the people's fault too it's the average person's fault it's everybody's fault cuz we're all cowards and we just put up with this and we just

24:31 look the other way and it makes sense that people do that cuz what else are you supposed to do I see a lot of people don't have boundaries which is a problem of codependent narcissism and I see a lot of people don't want to take responsibility for anything they want to Buck the responsibility off to somebody else I think that's just bad for the soul I think people just feel like everything's out of their control and you know that worked for a long time you know at risk of sounding vulgar when we were living living under slavery and feudalism it kind of worked because the King was responsible for you A lot of people don't like to admit that but the King was actually responsible for his people today you don't even see the king Jeff Bezos isn't a king he's a lord he didn't run anything the the guys that

25:18 would actually be considered Kings I don't even you don't even you can't even look their names up well you're not you're not talking about Biden or no Trump or president politicians are priest class but that kingship at the top of the pyramid they're invisible and they have no responsibility for their subjects that they rule over now I don't want any more feudalism I want to move past that because I think we're we're getting past that they're running a system an archaic system that doesn't even work for the material conditions so I don't think it's just that material conditions are bad I think that material conditions are not aligned with like what's actually happening do you know anyone whose life has improved in under Biden for example do you know anyone who experienced upward mobility in the last

26:05 few years who maybe thinks of these things differently they have a more optimistic view has anybody's life improved under Biden I'd say no I I don't think anybody's life got better under Trump or or Biden I think maybe someone got richer maybe someone got an advantage somewhere but I don't think anybody's life got better cuz I also think that your life is better cuz the hole is better and I think the hole's just the whole of society just gotten worse I found out about you because I saw your video when you put it out how did you find out about me I don't I don't know exactly how I found about you I think it must have been Instagram or something but I I found your aesthetic stuff that you're doing where you were taking all the different ideologies little niche ideologies sort of making these like I

26:52 don't know if you were making them but you were posting like maps of like techno foban futurism and and all this stuff I just found it really interesting and then I think what I like the most is just that you were trying something different I mean I've never once thought like oh man Josh got figured out he knows what's going on I've never felt that way but I just I do think you've got an analysis but mostly I just see he was trying something new and not cutting down an alternative that could work just because it's it micro aggresses your ideology from from journalists and researchers they're all hyped on using these models and diagrams and I actually I still use them I think they're useful now I can't argue with them about

27:38 because I don't know enough about policy anyway but one thing I could argue with them on because I've felt it and I'd seen it is they don't want to talk to these people they don't want to they they don't even want to put themselves in their perspective I mean I I posted a meme once that says uh you know I'm G to lar extremist ideologies to better understand them it was the you know Anakin Skywalker Meme and I had this leftist antifa guy come on and he was like well you know I'm Jewish so I don't have the privilege of doing that blah blah blah come on what come on the on the thread on the I posted on Twitter he came on the thread he said you know I'm I'm a Jewish leftist so I don't have the privilege and I hate that man because like what now I'm supposed to sit here and like what attack your Judaism and like tell you that what am I supposed to

28:25 say to that you know you just shutting down the conversation it's kind of like you're saying no no they don't want to give anybody the room to even try anything and it's insane to me cuz like you're saying that the world's going to burn and fascism is coming right around the corner at the next election they say that every election well what's it even matter what's it going to hurt if I try something unorthodox you know they just are not interested in going off their script and they want to flatten it out remove agency and that's what I hated the most about how people I keep asking me that question you know what did I hate about how they handle my story they treat me like I was stupid and have no agency it's just I'm a dumb dumb you know I got worms in my brain and I can't think through problems I'm just and the right says it to me too they say oh you just follow algorithms it's so demeaning nobody works that way everybody has

29:13 agency everybody but they don't want to admit that and I know why it's because if I went to war with you I don't want to think that there's a way to make peace I just want to fight you in the trenches did they think of you as an enemy I think they were constantly looking at me waiting for me to regress right especially you come into these like leftist circles there was a time where if you came out on Twitter and said I left the right there' be all these like they call themselves forers and they're basically like neo-nazis that were like in street gangs so right there those people have no connection to what's going on now they have a they have a minor connection to it they don't know what it's not the same thing they'll pull you in it's like you're getting inducted into a cult they love bomb you and I know they don't see it this way I know they have sympathetic

29:59 hearts and all that but once they get you in they're watching you and they're waiting for you to regress cuz oh man he was a Nazi once so I guess he's going to regress it's how conservatives see criminals you know oh man he was a drug dealer once he's going to do it again he's going to that recidivism rate 70% you know how that goes this is also part of what made your story and your experience so unique is that because you are so prominently featured through a lot media appearences really big megaphone for the story you then became a trophy for different groups who would actively try to recruit you because you then represented some type of ideological Victory you were kind of

30:46 assailed from all sides by all these different groups that were trying to in some cases just bully you and harass you in other cases recruit you try to get you to join their movement and um I Can Only Imagine that that is like extremely chaotic and and confusing especially in a period where you hadn't necessarily made up your own mind about big large political issues so why I didn't feel comfortable really making videos after a certain point I I'm still figuring this out I don't want to figure this out on here so you guys can come on and it does hurt and unless you're some total sociopath and you just can just walk right over those coals it hurts people coming in your comments calling you stupid calling you a robot and you're right that trophy thing I noticed

31:31 that from everybody on all sides I had Eric Striker coming in my DMs oh you oh you know you you need you know think about this and think about that I had all sorts of people and and yes the people in the left were doing it I had people you need to read all this Marxist literature and they do a freaking info dump like that and I'm like what's that going to do they're insane it's it's a cult hey read three volumes of capital it is it is just Cults and I can imagine that at one point everybody was you know chasing around some guy back in the ancient Greece and like oh man you got to come to my cult come on man have you thought about this that's all it is that trophy thing nobody ever really talks about your first first person ever talk

32:16 about that it Disturbed me it felt dark I saw that a lot for you I saw you go on different appearances for different media and all those people were very excited to get your endorsement because that that's the position that you were put in that you would Crown someone with you know there they have the you know empirically verifiable truth I've arrived at this realization through looking at all of the different internet communities of which that's one of the things we have in common that we do actually take in a lot of different information from a lot of different groups and you were uniquely tasked with that you could crown someone as having ideological truth which is the The Greatest Prize for an ideologue and I got to tell him man I think you're all insane I think

33:04 all of you are insane if you're insane enough to believe that the goal to a political problem is to bring everybody into the same cult first of all I don't want to live in that world and second of all there's temperament to this there there's people that are conservative by temperament I'm conservative by temperament in certain ways and I can't change that and it doesn't even affect what policies you choose it's just your temperament you can't flatten the world out like that it's not a freaking computer algorithm how do you engage with politics now so a lot of the stuff we get involved in is pseudo politics it's just ideology which I'm so very skeptical of that I don't think it's useless or that it's going to go away but I'm very skeptical of ideology I've pretty much either earnestly believed in every direction you can go on the political

33:49 Compass or I've simulated in my head in terms of like real politics I don't know I mean do you wake up and read the news morning do you scroll your timeline what's your engagement with like cuz I imagine at one point in your life like the news feed was very important stay on top of all these things latest developments and now I get the sense that you've kind of retreated from a lot of that that it feels like you know you get worked up you get burned for a lot of your time I think about it in terms of like the social technology aspect what's the human element of it like what's going on in that person's head that's making them choose those things and why do they think that that's the direction they need to go I don't watch the news I don't follow any of it I could tell you what I feel about it you know I think people should have a house I think people should have food I think

34:35 people should have work and if we're not going to work then we have to have some other way to deal with it I'm actually very flexible and all that stuff and that's another thing I've noticed that people hate I don't like when you're flexible on the policies Caleb you were kind of appointed as this de facto like thought leader for people who make sense of social media you are literally a consultant people ask for your expert on these things you later started a community and you opened up your doors and your time very generously to people who had gone through similar experiences you know they watch certain videos they read certain books they're thinking of the world through lens a and you know maybe it's helpful to step out look through lens B lens C and and so on what

35:20 was your experience like in that Community what kind of work were you doing what kind of people did you meet so in the cve world you know the researcher World they were basically wanting to bring me in and put me on a fast track through Academia which I felt uncomfortable with I was like I didn't come here to be an academic I thought I I went there because I was like okay we can work on the problem and I was still in my head about oh you know there's like there's like someone up the chain and they've got the resources and the influence and you need them to do something I wrote a script for them for a video once about the Baloo boys and they turned it into a scare story story H I felt that really offensive really offensive and I would just always ask them so what are we working on what are

36:06 we going to do well we got to get the grant we got to get the Grant I it's like well I've been here for a year and I don't know you know I don't know what they're doing now but it seemed like it was always research paper to get grant to get research paper to get Grant endless cycle I and I sometimes wonder if that's by Design not on their part but so that's what I was doing there and they were doing preventative preventative they called it pre prve or something like that so it's like you're really just out of solutions because now you're just saying oh well we did the prec cve and that didn't work so then we do the pre prec cve so what is uh pre pre counter look like I guess they started doing inoculation and it was what for people who don't know what inoculation is what do we mean by that use the metaphor of rology where this is a virus which I agree with in a in a certain sense you

36:53 say well if we don't want people to get the virus then we have to inoculate them to it so tell them anti-racist messaging before they hear racist messaging so that it's in their head and that that does work I tell you where it doesn't work when the person just eats through the content and they experience things for themselves I've seen racists that were told all these brown people act this way and they all act this way and then I've seen them actually get out of their bubble and go hang out with the brown people and they were like yeah all the problems that I thought were problems those are still problems but I guess it's not that simple they're not all like that but that's what they were doing is inoculation and I hate to say it but what they were doing was just

37:39 garbage just garbage it was just like PBS Dei you know diversity training basically and nobody wants to hear that they're going to give Dei training to neo-nazis they were focused on getting it into schools getting it into basically the people that would not have been exposed which is ridiculous at this this point cuz 10-year-olds are exposed to it m I didn't know we had pre pre cve it seems like there's a lot of Consultants who are tasked with solving this problem of political extremism on the internet I've been in this space for a long time it seems like there's a lot more political extremists than there were a few years ago so are the people who are doing this countering pre cve preventative inoculation work they must

38:25 not be very successful at what they're doing I don't think they're successful and I think that that's why they keep rumaging for blank Solutions and that's why I'm worried about the future because again if you can't get crime controlled in a certain area of town eventually you're going to have to use the police cuz what else are you going to use and you say well that's mean or that's imperialist it doesn't matter what are you going to do are the police in this case you're talking about locking down social media under State control or you talking about sending the National Guard military police state well I don't know what it would take take to have you know a National Guard type situation that would require the people to start going around and doing stuff and from what I've seen I was at j6 it was pretty bad but it's not organized to that degree and honestly I think the feds do a pretty good job of

39:11 taking those guys down if you want to say that they're good at anything it's the work where they're infiltrating groups and taking them out I'm not worried about violence from neonaut it's in fact I'm worried about violence from normal people when things just get too out of control that's what I would be worried about but no mostly the the internet stuff they want it's I don't want to call it mind control but they want to censor you and that's really what it comes down to a censorship at the end of the day because they got no other tool when the preventative work doesn't work when the drad work doesn't work and I've seen researchers that the top drad organizations just get totally jaded and just quit the only organizations that are actually successful in that cve world are companies that do data collection and predictive analysis huh and guess what you use data colle and predictive

39:58 analysis for you use it for draconian authoritarian methods censorship and yeah I guess eventually if the people get too up at es National are these private companies the one I'm talking about in particular is private company yeah M what did you see on January 6th on January 6th I saw mostly stupidity mostly stupidity I did see violence I almost got stabbed and this is partially my fault well I was sticking my neck up you know I'm a loudmouth I saw these guys breaking into this fenced in area and there was like an electrical box in there and looking back I'm kind of honestly wondering if they were just trying to use the portapotty that was sitting there I started filming them and I was screaming at them and then I said a bunch of stuff I really shouldn't have said and then they came at me and that's

40:45 when it got real and so I had to like run and all the other people around they don't do nothing you know all the other conserves around they don't do nothing that's what I'm saying we're in a crisis of cowardice you know I eventually ran off and stood this copt and told him and he was just like he might have some other stuff to deal with that day he wasn't doing anything he was just kind of standing there he was just kind of standing there it was like frozen almost wow and then I went and stood over you know if you got the capital where they would have been going in on the on the front side I would have been over you know over here on like the left of that right so I just stood there and I will say I was standing by some conservatives you know MAA people and they were like this is a shame this is terrible that isn't what this movement's

41:30 about this movement is about love and peace and I kind of looked at him I'm like I you know what I used to believe this stuff this ain't about love and peace it's about burning it down and I don't care what any conservative says to me it's about burning it down that's the goal what is it American democracy the whole system the whole International System burn it down blowing up politics I I'm I'm not saying necessarily with bombs or something but destroy it sabotage that's why accelerationism is so tempting to all these people sabotage it make sure it don't function ever again and then that way you can actually build something from a new and that is how progress happens hate to say it folks but that is how progress happens but that's their prime directive there was a lot of conservatives there that

42:16 that's not what they're about and they were very ashamed describe these two different factions so there's people who are kind of on the sidelines that don't like what's happening when people uh break into the capital building for example what kind of things were they saying I'd say those people are actual Patriots they still believe in the system and they were just basically saying this is shameful this isn't how we do things you know I grew up around these types of people they still believe that democracy works and they think they're going to get somebody elected and they're going to change things then there were people that I don't know what their impression was but like they're walking towards the crowd with like kids and then I look over and there's like kids playing in the lawn and if it was just a protest cuz I'll be honest most of these protests you go to are not like this actually the MAA protest can be quite fun people are quite nice to you there I went to the trucker Convoy it

43:02 was like a carnival but at this one there was a whole bunch of I'm just to say proud boy types right because nobody had their colors on so I can't say what group they were affiliated with but these guys were in their predictable tactical gear but then I noticed that they had blunt objects and weapons there was even a guy with a pitchfork but I don't think he was violent um but the the other guys that were all conglomerated up there they had weapons I don't know what they were thinking showing up that day that is not something you typically see at these things even when they get a little hectic then there's the cosplayers like the guy with the Pitchfork and I saw the Predator come out and yeah that's kind of silly there was the people that like I said standing on the sidelines there

43:48 they were found it disturbing there were the people that just seemed like they were out of reality letting their kids play and and they walking their kids towards it not necessarily into the crowd but just like there's tear gas and stuff going off I'm not even talk like it's not a it's not a place to have them it's not a place to have your kids no it's not good God but then the other thing that I saw that like kind of does stir my fear that there could be violence from some of these people is um the cops roll up just incompetent because didn't know what the hell was going on and I see this like old heavy set cop and he's pulling SWAT gear out of his trunk and I'm just standing there watching I was so dazzled

44:34 I couldn't I wasn't even filming it and there's this like very like somebody that I would have grown up around like a redneck type right and he was just like UF and pigs you just wait you just wait you ain't got enough donuts for us you're lucky we didn't bring our guns next time we're coming back we're coming back you know it's crazy you didn't even see that on the news there I like that was actually kind of scary and cop just looks at me he's like shut the hell up then I saw someone walk by and they were like all right folks it's antifa antifa is the one that went in and then I get home and I watch the videos and the guys inside are just walking around like filming and carrying POS I'm like that's why I'm not like too like worried about some white nationalist Uprising unless totally conditions

45:20 changed and things got real bad and people got desperate and afraid because it just seemed like so stupid stupid and I don't like saying that cuz I grew up around these types of people I like these people but this stupidity I always think of that dazed and elderly woman who's just walking around very confused like she's wandering the halls of a nursing home or something like that do you see this as being a trend line that is increasing in the next uh 5 to 10 years you mentioned the trucker protests as well is this something that we should be expecting to see happen more frequently protesting more protests from conservatives more things that look like Civil Disobedience occupying the Public

46:05 Square it depends how this election goes if Trump gets in and they really do kind of lock things down which is seems what they want to do I would say that it's going to be the left that is going to start firing shots if they don't get in and it goes the other direction but it's it's not going to just be someone got the idea to go do it I mean even when you look at these Mass shooter guys it is a little microcosm they're in their little hyper real bubble but these are guys that have been pushed to the very corner of their life now I would say a lot of the things that they're experiencing have nothing to do with what they're criticizing not directly at least but they do the violence not because they're crazy it's because they just feel so pushed out and that's not to like spread sympathy or something it's just people aren't going to there's so much risk that comes with fighting

46:53 you know even a lot of these protests where people are fighting and people actually get hurt and people swinging bats and throwing bricks you see the hesitation in them you know you see the hesitation where at Berkeley they were wrestling between a uh a trash can well why didn't they just say you know F that dumpster and just go around and start sucker punching each other because they're both afraid and they don't want the consequences of that things will have to really break down you know I'm worried about people starving if anything in a bad situation I'm worried about the stock market plummeting 80% in one day that's when it's going to get violent and I don't but here's the thing the feds work so hard and are so effective at shutting down actual violence and everything's wiretapped

47:39 everything is so they know when someone's pushing to that point and they know those trend lines what I would be worried about is just total fracture you know maybe it would be we go to Taiwan and we get our asses kicked and then just you know in Europe they they're having issues with with their Refugee crisis you know things that are again like what you're worried about material things you know all this social stuff it doesn't lead to violence but when the when when the tracks break when you're starving it's different and then all that social conditioning that you've been doing on yourself now it's like okay well let's go what do you say to when people

48:25 describe you know Society before the internet was also very fragmented do you feel like there's a period of Precedence for this like what was it that held Society together before we had this you know mainstreaming effect of very few media options and and political views available to people like what were the forces that didn't pull apart Society in the way that they are now so I'm a 93 baby so it can only speculate based on what I've looked back and examine imagine we take the funnel and we flip it upside down and we turn it into a bottle and at the top there's a neck and then there's a cap on top I think back in I mean even the 60s actually things were more violent then directly more violent I mean there were bombings weekly During

49:10 certain periods political violence yeah political violence um Weather Underground I think that was largely fabricated in the sense that people wanted to do that because they were trying to push an issue right they were pushing if we get into a situation where conditions cause pressure to build up in that bottle it'll push everybody up to that bottleneck and then that's when it will explode I think the reason that you didn't have that before is because you didn't have that pressure and what would relieve that pressure is yeah everybody had very similar narratives they couldn't conglomerate online to either centralize or decentralize and also I know that things are never good for anybody in the 70s were a really bad time but to be honest

49:55 we're very sheltered and privileged in this country and we don't know even the poorest Among Us don't know how good we got it I mean if you're homeless you can walk down the street and Panhandle you cannot do that in in in certain parts of the world there's no one to Panhandle we don't live in favellas in New York there's poty but there's not poverty at the international scale that was a Bull workk against it you know it there was enough material condition and you can't just have like one class of people this what I think I you can't just have one class of people getting riled up and having you it's got to go up the chain you got to have the middle class start to be upset well we got there with the industrialization then you got to start getting the upper class what happens with this priest class no one wants to give them grants anymore because this is a waste of money you knowy you're already seeing it they're they're firing all the

50:41 journalists and doing all this stuff so when it climbs up the chain you're you're seeing it just watch that's that's your barometer right there and that pressure will build up and there won't be any there's nothing to vent it out you know you can't vent it out cuz you have a common narrative you can't can't vent it out because people just don't discuss politics and they don't tell you who they vote for and you can't vent it out because you have relative economic stability in history most of the time what happens is to send people off to war but ain't nobody going to want to go to war once they see those Taiwan videos of a drone coming over with fortunate Sun playing while your kids from Ohio are getting blown up by drones and eaten by dogs no one's going to want to go to that war these people are just going to Fester pressure is going to build up and I just think in the past that yeah you had relative economic stability and you had social

51:28 technologies that were able to vent this what portion of this building pressure is an internet problem it's like one of those magnetic stir hot plates that stirs and heats at the same time so it's it I don't want to blame the Internet it's just I'm actually grateful for it because without that we wouldn't I hate to say this folks but your society's never going to get better unless it gets bad it has to that's progress you know that's they they've known that for all of history we just forgot it cuz we thought we got to some little end of History convenience moment but that was only held up by hemony and we don't have that anymore what do you think comes after the end of History we're going to get new things you know it's a secret third thing and I don't mean like a

52:14 third position or or anything like that right I mean we're in like a cocoon stage now it's going to unfold like a butterfly we're going to have a golden age at the end of this the world's not going to end they're not going to launch the nukes we're not going to get a virus that wipes everybody out everybody on the planet's not going to starve it's going to get bad in certain places but it won't be bad in all places it's kind of like going back to the cult Example The Cult builds up so so so so big it's a pyramid scheme and eventually everybody realizes the emperor wears no clothes and that actually the guy at the top doesn't actually talk to God or he doesn't have all the sociology figured out he can't grift anymore and so the True Believers below him start to sell him out that's what happened during the French Revolution they all went out say okay you know what screw this King he screwed up the Harvest he screwed up

52:59 that uh let's get a printing press and let's go out and red pill everybody and who do they choose they choose the normies they'll cause a huge catastrophe it will be an apocalypse It Won't Be Mad Max people got to get this Terminator Mad Max AI is going to kill us get this out of your head but we will face those problems they will hit in certain places and then the people that survive will be the people that weren't stupid enough to run head first into the problem mm and the people that survive will be like well that was insane and they'll do something new it's like letting the normies into the Cults Temple and what do they do once they get into the temple because they have to bring more people in right it's a pyramid scheme once they get in they're going to sacralize it they're going to bring the animals in

53:45 there's going to be mess everywhere and then the Cults going to fall apart and then new Cults will form because I think Cults are a social technology that help that allow us to have conflict and polarization which creates growth but that's what's going to happen the normies are going to save us so all these people that are running around thinking oh I've got my ideology and man those normies they just don't see it right you know it's funny when you talk to normal people it's not even a class thing it's someone that's not like keyed in on this crap and can think and listen on their own I was watching a video of you know these guys go around and document the decline of Britain by interviewing people and looking at the dilapidated buildings and all that and they've got it worse than we do they've got it rough over there and he was talking to some random you know Street guy he's all rough criminal record and

54:32 he was just like you know I feel like in Britain I'm just second class citizen like they really don't care about me they're like well what do you think he's like well they just they care about these immigrants but he's like but you know it's like it's it's it's not like you know they should have help too you know it's not like we shouldn't help them but we should help ourselves first and and then we can sort of help them so I could tell that guy was not in the cult but if someone tried to indu him what they would do is they would come in they would split that narrative in half they'd say oh what' you say they need to put us first oh we can't help ourselves if we don't put ourselves first oh well then well then you know what that means right or you know it could be the other way they'd say oh you want to help the refugees oh blah blah blah so someone will come in and the wedge they'll put a wedge in and split the issue but the

55:17 average normal person is actually and and these guys I'll tell you they don't have the highest IQs they're not dumb but they're not gen Geniuses either they're kind of in the middle of that curve those people if they don't have the fear and they're just kind of looking at the issue they're very capable of sussing it out and I think that's what's going to happen those people will take over and think about think about all these buildings that sit empty think about all these businesses that sit empty and nobody even uses the productive value in them well there won't be any police to police it and there won't be no landlord to come collect rent and they'll just go in be like you know what that's a nice building I always wanted to start in a Department building anch I always wanted to start I it would be there would be a period of Anarchy and these Normy

56:03 anarchists will come in and just do the work because they wanted to do it all along but they just couldn't they didn't have any access CU there was some rent tier holding them back and then there was a bunch of people over here finagling with the economy trying to do some fobby and socialism to fix everything and when that all stuff goes away and it will because those people are going to put their necks on the line and when that happens they're going to get flopped off and I don't feel good about it I wish they would just stop this nonsense but dude this stuff is written in the Bible it's written in all the ancient text and ancient history that you could read it's talked about by pretty much every serious philosopher you've ever read they all tell you that things are going get real bad the people that stuck their necks out are going to get it taken off and then the meek will

56:49 inherit the earth that's just what's going to happen so I'm very positive about the future and I also think that we're in a time of acceler where things happen quicker I think this will happen within our lifetime I think by the time we're 60 we might get to see that golden age and it's going to be awesome because we got the technology we got the AI we got a lot of things that we could grow up from but we got to get the nut jobs out of the room they don't want that bottleneck to come off they want to like simmer that pressure back down somewhere and take over the pyramid scheme it won't work just physically not work you don't got to bring God into it there's probably some dialectical material explanation for it all but that's just how it works it's a pattern are you religious I wouldn't say I'm religious per se I mean I guess so

57:37 but I do think a lot a lot about it and I mostly what really got I mean I grew up with that right and there's a personal angle to it but the personal angle is very easy to ignore right oh you know the feelings you get from believing in God or whatever but what really got me is I was researching occultism and I was like wait all these diagrams are literally the same political diagrams I'm using to study Cults how' they figure that out and then I learned about Tey and I was like oh there's like a progression and a logic to this whole thing it's almost mathematical and then honestly if you just read the Bible and I understand like I I have religious trauma I grew up in like a fundamentalist Evangelical household I would never tell someone like you know oh you have to absorb all this there's a lot of it that I just

58:23 don't agree with pick up any ancient text open it up and actually just read it it's telling you what I'm telling you

…