https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6FOMJ0vVXcA
In what ways have fellow intellectual dark web thinkers influenced your beliefs? Well I would say that, so for those of you who don’t know, probably most of you know there’s this term that God developed about five years ago, the intellectual dark web, and it referred to a bunch of people who often had been alienated from their institutions for one reason or another, and who started communicating with one another. Bret Weinstein and Heather Hague were part of that, and Bret’s brother Eric and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan, and most outstanding member in all likelihood, and Dave Rubin and Clay Lehmann who ran Quillette, and there’s a bunch of reprobates, and you know, and Douglas Murray was associated with that, and Sam Harris as well to some degree, and so there was actually quite a wide variety of beliefs among the people who ended up with that nomenclature. I think mostly what I learned from those people wasn’t so much anything on the idea front, although they were always interesting to talk to, it was more courage. I’ve met a lot of people in the last five years, like a lot, in total I’ve probably met half a million people, but I’ve had fairly detailed interactions with, I don’t know how many thousands of people, lots. Courage is pretty rare. It’s even rarer than I thought it was when I started all this. I kind of knew that because I’d studied political atrocity for a long time, and it’s pretty obvious that part of the way that societies deteriorate is that good people don’t say something when they should, and so I knew that kind of intellectually, but I really had no idea how difficult it was for people to say something when they should until it started to become difficult to say things, and then I saw how few people would. One of the things that does unite, maybe the only thing that unites all those people in that group is you push them around at your peril. What’s cool about that, I think, is that you can be someone who other people push around at their peril, because you might ask, well, how do you stop from getting pushed around? That’s a good question. Or even, can you stop being pushed around if you’re just an individual? And the answer is, yeah, you can. You can. And those people, watching them, you can learn how to do that because they’re very good at that, all of them, and you mess with them at your cost, and regardless of their political orientation. And so that’s been, oh yeah, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another one. She’s tough, man, that woman, tough. Douglas Murray, he’s a tough guy. Ben Shapiro, all these people. So that’s what I learned from them, is admiration for their courage. And look what’s happened to Rogan. It’s so interesting. I mean, Rogan was really something five years ago, even, but he’s like number one media force in, what, in the English-speaking world? Yeah, and you know, he pretty much did that on sheer force of character. And that’s something, man. Yeah, right, absolutely. It’s really something to see. So it’s been very heartening to see that.