Warren Smith
Guests: Warren Smith
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! questions and why they're upset about certain things and getting to the bottom. And I'm like, wow, this guy is like, he's young. He's obviously an academic, but super reasonable and like really level-headed. I'm like, we need more of this. This is really interesting. And then I found out you got fired for doing that. And I was like, if this isn't an encapsulation of all that is wrong with our current higher education system, then I don't know what is. Well, to be fair, I didn't get fired for that technically. I think I got fired for posting another one similar to it, but I think they were looking kind of, that whole thing was so bizarre for everyone. It was so big. I think there was, at the school where I teach, there's kind of one, this echo, sorry, I've got to get used to this, one person in control of everything that makes these decisions. And it was so nuts. I think they genuinely, like, we don't know what to do because if we fire him, our name might get out there, which is their primary concern, I think. Do you not want their name to get out there?
No, it doesn't feel right. Okay. I um it's not important yeah it's not no what's important is that what what it is is that this is a resistance to thinking I mean it's really what it is it's out there for sure it's a resistance to questioning why people have like certain like deeply ingrained thought processes that are a part of an ideology and I think what you were doing was really pretty brilliant it was awesome And I love the way you were handling it. It was like, you know, very calm and rational, just having discussions with students. And you kind of see like a lot of their flailing and trying to rationalize while they have these sort of incoherent beliefs. Yeah. And I don't teach critical thinking. I was when I was a teacher, I was teaching multimedia, like what we're doing now, working with cameras, did a lot of podcasting.
podcasting. I had this lab that I developed over four years with a bunch of Mac computers with Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, a 3D printer. So it was using technology to make art at a special education school with kids that had behavioral challenges and some, a variety, anything you could come up with, we had it there. It was like the last line of defense kind of for public schools that couldn't handle these kids, they would send them there. And so I would just use this tech to work with them in a therapeutic way, kind of. That was my goal, the way that would most benefit them. And so one day they asked me to do a, hey, can you do a newscast for the school? Like this week at the school, you know, there was this field trip, the soccer team did this, blah, blah, blah. Sure. And we want this kid to be on camera and like to do, he's really good at that. And he was getting really nervous on the day. And so I was like, let's just sit down. You've seen like Joe Rogan and stuff. Let's do like, just treat it like a five minute warmup podcast.
Here, I'll sit down and be on camera. You ask me whatever you want. Well, how have your thoughts on Harry Potter changed given J.K. Rowling's bigoted opinions? So that's where the video came from. So I just want to be clear. I don't teach. I wasn't like, we're going to sit down and learn in the moment. We do have conversations like that because when you are doing something like this with students, well, what are you going to talk about?
Kill two birds with one stone. Be as effective as you can. A lot of students have questions. I've had students ask me, what's the difference between fascism and socialism? What's the difference between a Democrat and a Republican? They don't know. And they're genuinely curious. And sometimes you can get another. I had one teacher, the music teacher I worked closely with. And he was like my best friend there. And he would be in the room often and we would have little debates.
And he was from Romania. Yeah. I think Romania. I'm blanking. And so he had a very different political perspective. And when you're in those debates, the kids are like locked in and you can tell. Normally they're just making noise and then they're just quiet and they're seats. They turn around and they're like watching it. There was an effect. Well, I think most kids are aware that you're being forced to think a certain way or at least to talk about things a certain way. And most people are – they don't like being told what to do.
People don't enjoy that. And when they feel like there's like a lot of social pressure to adhere to a very specific ideology, I think people don't like it. And so when you see debates where people have differing opinions and they have, you know, these sort of logical, objective ways of describing why they think about things a certain way, it gets people like, OK, was there another way to think? Like, is there, like, how's this guy doing this? Like, what does this mean? Like, why do we have to say, well, why, what is wrong with what J.K. Rowling said? And it's exciting to people. And the videos were exciting. And there was a tremendous amount of response to them. I know you're aware of that. I mean, there was so many comments and so many people were interested in them. They got very popular.
And then when I heard you were fired, I was like, oh, of course. It was too good. Because it gave me hope. I was like, more people should be doing this at schools. And, you know, it would help a lot because a lot of this is really sort of polarized positions that people are taking one side or the other. They just want to win and they dig their heels in and they don't exactly even know why they have this particular opinion that they're defending. They just know that they're supposed to. and so they just kind of bite down and dig in and you know and you get these shouty sort of polarizing arguments I've been playing with the idea of like how we see the world through stories I think that has a lot to do with it because people kind of labeled me as the critical thinking guy all of a sudden so I really started to think about it what is critical
thinking and the best I can articulate it's it's thinking for yourself to contend with the stories that make up the world because a lot of stories are nonsense some are true and there's usually a middle ground and my backgrounds in filmmaking i kind of fell into teaching and i spent time in la and made some movies and i teach at emerson a filmmaking course still where i went to grad school and got my master's and film is probably the wrong term now because it's all digital it's like visual media art but i think you can study movies today like scholars are now studying you know the great thinkers i think movies will be the artifacts that people look back on for our time you know be in museums and things like that sure we've all been there you're hung over thinking about all the dumb stuff you did last night and wondering if anybody remembers Unfortunately, someone does remember everything you do online, and they've got receipts. I'm talking about your internet provider and data brokers and every shady marketing company that gets their greedy hands on your private activity.
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And if you're watching on YouTube, you can get your four free months by scanning the QR code on screen or by clicking the link in the description. Yeah. No, we talk about it all the time that it's a great sort of postmark for culture. like if you go back and watch movies from the 50s and then the 60s and the 70s the 80s the 90s the 2000s and and then today you can see how different the narratives are how different the way the films are made the way people communicate the subjects that are covered the quality of the acting and filmmaking the quality of the cinematography and it's it really just shows Like if you really think about it, you know, human civilization and human history, like modern society is so recent. You know, the Industrial Revolution and giant cities and cars and transportation and all that. It's so recent. It's a couple hundred years maximum.
You know, you go from trains and horses to cars and cities and then you have Morse code to all of a sudden now you have digital communication that's instantaneous worldwide. I mean, it's a rapid change in humanity. And a lot of it is it's the artifact, as you said, is really our media. Like, what have we created? You know, we were talking the other day about the limitations of mainstream television and how mainstream television, you know, they're trying to kind of like adapt more towards what is going on on the Internet. But they're so hampered by their format, the censorship, the format, and the fact that they're sponsored by a bunch of different enormous corporations that they can't really critically talk about. So there's a bunch of things they could never actually say. So there's news that they can't cover. There's like significant health problems that have probably been a direct result of medication that they literally can't cover. Because they're being sponsored by these companies. So they're so hampered.
And if you go back and watch the early broadcast from 1945, people had like this way of communicating. It's changed. Right. It's not the way, like if you were having dinner with someone and they were saying, tell me, Warren, where did you grow up? You'd be like, oh, this is not a real person. This is bizarre. The transformation in acting is remarkable. Remarkable, right? Yeah. You go Marlon Brando. It's like Marlon Brando is probably like the first example of someone.
Yeah. Who's like, sounds like a real person. Like this is what I really expect a person to behaving like on the waterfront, like under duress. Like this is a real human being. Yeah, it became internalized. And now we're in this phase now where I think the best actors are doing both the external. Keith Ledger is my favorite actor of all time and had a huge impact on me. That's why I went into filmmaking. And think about his externality in The Joker and all his roles. He had this, I think the key to acting is about what is not said, what's unspoken. And it ties into everything about critical thinking.
It's the best metaphor I ever got from a directing professor. He drew on the board the ocean with a squiggly line. And they drew little boats on the surface and said, these are words. This is everything you need to know about directing actors. Everything beneath the surface is subtext, what's really important. So if you're an actor and I hand you a screenplay, anybody with given enough time can memorize those words. what really sets an actor apart is everything else. What's not said, what they do with the words, the intention behind the words. The words are just floating on the surface. They're just the tools that we're trying to use
to communicate the elusive intangible, the subtext, everything that's... And the best we can do are bumbling cells or formulate with these tools. So to treat words as the end-all be-all is so silly. You know, like people say the wrong thing now and you get politically incorrect. Papa John's CEO. Right. Right. With no context has gone up. It's a larger issue.
But it's just fascinating how that correlates beyond just film to, like, it's true that most communication is nonverbal. So the more time you spend studying, working with actors, studying movies, you start getting really tuned into body language. It has great utility. So it's pretty interesting. Yeah, no, it's very interesting. So when you were doing these videos, when you initially did it, did you have any idea of the impact that it was going to have? I mean, did you think like, wow, this is actually like really unique and interesting and I think people are going to really enjoy this? or were you like really shocked? I was shocked. Yeah, yeah. I had been playing with YouTube as a medium
since discovering Jordan Peterson in 2017 because I remember, maybe it was even earlier than that, because I arrived at graduate school in 2016, Boston, Emerson, and all hell breaks loose, Trump gets elected, and there seemed to be a huge pushback and I had never thought about these things before. And then being a grad student and seeing what I witnessed at school, like protests claiming Emerson was racist, which is like this is one of the most far left schools I've ever seen. Yeah, it's super far left.
Can you provide any evidence of that? It was just nuts. And did it come out of nowhere? Was it like right after the election? Like, what year did you first attend? 2016. 2016. So was this what time? So this is like September of 2016, August of 2016? Beginning of the academic year. So this is like when the elections are kind of heating up and people didn't think that Trump was going to win yet.
I remember because I vividly remember the day of the election because I was renting a house with three roommates and I was watching the election. I remember feeling like, guys, I think Trump might win this. Yeah. It's not even worth watching, you know, and they were walking around. time goes by i'm like guys like and then they started to what so no one saw that coming and i my big takeaway was how could so many experts get something so wrong and that caused me to question my presuppositions basically my view of the world and then that opens your mind to someone like jordan peterson and all these other great thinkers intellectual dark web you know but that it's suddenly it's so difficult to articulate what that does to someone like me an average of you are like a genuine lover of this space so it's surreal to be here because like it suddenly causes you to if you feel like everyone's moving in slow motion all of a sudden you feel like you're
waking up and it doesn't it's i don't want to talk about the matrix because it's so it's such a strange it's gotten all this momentum in a different but it's what it felt like it felt like you were suddenly like how what this is so much more interesting and complicated than i thought And there's no going back. Yeah, I think we'd like to adhere to certain narratives about the world. And we want to think, the big thing is we want to think that there's a central, there's some sort of competent control, some sort of competent leadership that exists. and that the structure of government and the structure of media is established, rock solid, and logical. And that these are the smartest people in the world. That's how they've risen to this position. And now they're there to provide this. You know, like if you have a knee injury, you want to go to an orthopedic surgeon because he is an expert in knee injuries. And he's going to tell you what's wrong with your knee and what can be done.
And, you know, that's a real expert. And we think of politicians and we think of the media as being real experts. Well, it turns out, no. It turns out not even a little bit. They're terrible at it. They're not just not good at it. They're really bad at it. They're really bad at it, and they lie a lot. Yeah, they're not much smarter than you or I. No. And then you realize that about your professors.
This guy really doesn't know much more than my dad. or what makes you a professor? What qualifies you? And often there's just this, and that's going back to that core thesis, if we see the world through stories, professor means something. Politician means something. These are experts, but they're not much different than us. When you were in school,
so at the beginning, everybody's thinking there's no way Trump can win. You know, these experts, I think on the day of the election, I think they had some crazy odds of Hillary winning. It was like in the 90%. And we watched it from the comedy store. We did a podcast from the comedy store called the end of the world podcast. And we, we did this like live stream while the election was going on. And we just kept bringing in different comedians. We had a whole, like, like a conference table and it was fine. We did in front of a live audience. And then we updated the crowd whenever, and then when marijuana became legal, Burt Kreischer takes his shirt off and runs around the stage. It was really funny. It was fun. It was a fun time. But
what was most fascinating was the podcast was over and then we all went to the bar. The comedy store has this like private bar in the back. And on the television, Jake Tapper was like, just like seriously bummed out talking about Trump winning all these different states. And then we watched a little bit of the Young Turks and Cenk Uygur was fucking freaking out. In the beginning, they were so cocky and so confident. And by the end, they were just fucking freaking out. They couldn't understand how everybody got it wrong. And I think for a lot of people, that was the end of trust in mainstream media. That was the first nail in the coffin. Those to be like, you guys didn't, you were so wrong. You were so wrong.
Yeah. How could you get something so wrong? Yeah. And it was just fascinating to watch what's supposed to be the news, right? So the news is supposed to be, at its best, an objective analysis of what's going on, giving you the facts. But they were so clearly upset. And there was a lot of editorializing on how bad this is and what this means to the world and what does this say about us that this guy who said grab him by the pussy is now the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the world has ever known. For us, as comedians, we're like, this is going to be fun. It was just like they opened up the door to the candy store and said, go crazy. Have fun. This is all free.
But it was a real wake-up call for a lot of people that this system is not really as well managed as we'd like to believe it is. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just trying to go back to those days and think about it. but it was at Emerson. It was, I remember, I was taking a class with the dean of the student body and it was a pedagogy class, the philosophy of teaching. And it was right in the midst of these protests. And it was the day of the protest.
And so, and there was like 10 people in the class. It's a four hour class. So they're like, we're going to devote to four hours to talk about the problematic racism occurring at Emerson. And we're all sitting around. But the white students were not allowed to speak. We had to concede our space for four hours. And I just remember like, what the fuck is going on here? Why was that? What was the reason given for that?
Because it was the moral right thing to do. Because they said to me, I remember he said, I said, what can I do about this? I genuinely believed everything. I was just starting to question things. I was like, what can I, I feel terrible speaking to the student who had just spoken. Like you genuinely feel every day you wake up and come to class, you feel oppressed. That sucks. What can I do? They didn't have a response because, and they just said, you can just listen. Just take your time to concede your space and listen.
So that was the reason given. Concede your space. And then why did they feel so threatened? Did they articulate that? There was a Facebook group that was designed to provide that evidence called Emerson, hashtag Emerson so racist or something. And it was a student, like a teacher said, no, you got to turn in the work or you're going to fail the class. And my first teaching gig occurred shortly after that. I remember this vividly, the teacher, I was going to be teaching the screenwriting course with undergraduates for the first time. and she's before the protest she said don't let them walk all over you they will try and take advantage like if they don't do their work just be fair honest give them the grade they deserve after the protest yeah warren you remember when i was saying that because she got called out on
the facebook page for some stupid i don't remember what it was quote yeah warren you remember what i was saying about that um don't i was wrong don't forget to be compassionate because that student is black and it and she reminded me of how difficult it is to be black at emerson and so i couldn't fail her i couldn't give her the grade that you know so that objectively she deserved yeah yeah um why was it why was it articulated that it was so difficult for her uniquely difficult as a black student? I'm trying to remember. I don't know. Honestly. Abracadabra. Yeah.
It's just like microaggressions. That's the thing about these claims, though, is there is no concrete evidence. It's things like microaggressions. Someone made a reference about fried chicken that was... I've heard that one. That happened to my mom, who's a professor, runs a study abroad program. She said, we're really...
This place is... They were in Italy doing a study abroad program. She's like, I know you guys have been missing American food, and this place has fried chicken, and it's really good here. And two of the students she was talking to at that table were black, and they claimed that that was racist. She was like, what? The fried chicken one is so crazy. Fried chicken and watermelon. Those are the two things that are associated with racism as far as foods, which are universally loved. Like, fried chicken is delicious. Watermelon is delicious. Like, how could that possibly be a negative that certain people like delicious food?
Like, to this day, it's one of those things. It's so bizarre. You could bring up all kinds of different delicious foods. But if you bring up fried chicken, which everybody eats, everybody who eats meat and loves delicious food, loves a good fried chicken. Have you tried Gus's in town? Is that where you get the slabs of meat? No, no, that's Terry Black's. But Gus's fried chicken is in Austin. Fantastic. Some of the best fried chicken you're ever going to have in your life. But if you brought that up to a black friend, they might like, what the fuck are you trying to say?
Like, I'm not trying to do it. Food's good. Good food. Let's go eat good food. And keep that analogy in your mind about like the boats floating on the surface. And they're just the tool. What's the intent? Right. There was no, if there's no intention there, you can't claim that's racist. Right. Unless you want it to be.
Right. And this goes back to like seeing the world through stories. If you believe a story is true, I'm oppressed. The world is active. There's systemic racism. There's active racism at my college. I'm a victim. You're going to start seeing what you believe to be true. You're going to start finding hints of it. Right. And it's true as well for like why it's important to have a moral code or I personally believe in a higher power.
But if you believe in objective truth, you're going to see those lessons when they occur in life. and it's going to help be a guiding star for you. Yeah. But it can be wielded in both ways. It's like the response that I got about J.K. Rowling. It was the ContraPoints YouTuber. Everyone was like, you've got to counter ContraPoints. She's the one who's taken down J.K. Rowling. And the argument essentially is, I'm so done arguing. I'm not even going to debate this. If anyone who believes in transphobia can see that J.K. Rowling is obviously transphobic,
that's it. It's the same thing. If you believe in that definition of transphobia, well, you can find it almost infinite places. Well, the problem with that kind of arguing is that it's a total cop-out. Like, if there is any sort of debate, and there clearly is when it comes to trans issues, if there's any sort of debate, you have to be able to discuss things. And as soon as you say, if you want to debate, we're done. If you want to have a discussion, we can't. You don't see it. Well, we're done with it. Well, you what you're essentially conceding is you don't have a logical ability to shut this down because if you did, you would just do it. You would have a rational conversation with that person and you would say clearly, look, this is why this is racist. This is why this is transphobic. This is why this is sexist. Whatever the whatever the argument is. And you would lay it out. And as soon as you say, if you don't believe that, then we're done talking. I can't even.
I can't even do this. That's what I started. My mom disagrees with me heavily on politics, which is okay. In the wake of, we were talking about 2016, I found Jordan Peterson. I was like, yeah, this guy, look at this. This is really interesting. If I had any kind of conversation with her about it, even to this day, it's often, I think she's getting better now that I've been making content. But it was often a formation of that pattern. I just can't do this with you, Warren. Blah, blah, blah. It's just neutralizing the debate because they can't have the debate.
Well, they can't have the debate because they're not equipped for it. That's all it is. They don't have any weapons, right? If you're going to go to battle, you have to have some sort of resources. There's nothing there. And when there's nothing there and you just say, I can't, instead of saying, like, is there a logical argument that there are men who are manipulating this in order to control women's spaces? And like it used to be that we protected women against men and protected particularly we protected women against predatory men. Right. Like perverts or sex offenders, for example. But somewhere along the line with this woke ideology, we completely eliminated the the even possibility that a man in a dress that wants to go into the woman's room could be a pervert. which to me was the most insane thing it's like you've just given a hall pass to the grossest members of society that we've always feared we've always feared people that would try to take
advantage of women and and and do so in a weird way where you claim to be one but you have a penis you're walking around with an erection in a locker room and anybody who calls it out is transphobic. Right. It got real weird. People would counter and say, Joe, but like you're taking the extreme. You're claiming that trans people are walking around with erections. It allows for that capacity. It allows for that to occur.
After all this craziness occurred with the video, viral video or whatever, I went back to North Carolina for the first time and my best friends, you know, who I've grown up with, and we just, I guess, fine. they were deeply concerned about what i was doing and right you're talking to too many people from the right and it's like i sat down with destiny for six hours but it's never enough it's in but they i laid out what you were saying and i was amazed that they couldn't follow that logic that what about the mother in the dressing room with a six-year-old does she have a right to decide if that six-year-old's exposed to male genitalia just to keep it as simple as that take out erections
and all that it's like is it fair to her and they just can't right it seems so clear it's but they're just scared they're scared of thinking logically because if you do you will be cast out of this group you'll be ostracized like there's this very specific rules and they're very much like a cult Like you have this very cult-like thinking and if you deviate from that at all You you run into the possibility of social Osterization and then that's what happens to a lot of people and they're scared of that So to defend against that possibly happening to them they attack things Like without any logic at all. They just like say you don't think you don't know I've done talking to you like this is good And that it's like a get-out-of-jail free pass and you could just get away from the conversation and you don't have to confront the logical fallacies.
You don't have to confront all the problems with what you're saying. And the only solution I've been able to find is to just push through. Yeah. And I say to them, like, Chris, like one day, I genuinely believe you'll look back and understand. Like one day. And I believe that. No, I believe that too. If it's done logically and you can have reasonable discussions, but even in the opposition to that right you have people on the right who adhere to a right-wing cult-like thinking right and you know they'll push back against it in in a way that's also
not logical and so they dig their heels in on their ideology and the left digs their heels and and you know you you have things like people say people on the left don't get it people on the left this like no there's a there's a giant spectrum of people on the left and a giant spectrum of people on the right i don't like any of those labels right i don't exactly and i really don't like it because of me like i don't fit in there exactly yeah exactly i've been playoffs we're talking about playoffs you bet we are get in on the action with draft king sports book an official sports betting partner of the nfl scoring touchdowns is key to winning the playoffs and you can score big by betting on them at draft kings the number one place to bet touchdowns ready to Place your bet. Try betting on something simple like a player to score six. Go to DraftKings Sportsbook app and make your pick.
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21 and over, age and eligibility varies by jurisdiction, void in Ontario. Bonus bets expire 168 hours after issuance. For additional terms and responsible gaming resources, see dkng.co.audio. If people want to box you in on that, and this goes back to seeing stories, which story do you fit into? Like my mom has a story of what a Democrat is. She can never think in a story of what a Republican is. She'll never deviate from that. My parents are the same. Right. Exactly the same. I would rather be homeless.
They're blue no matter who. They're just locked in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's, I'm just, I don't, I dread the, I don't dread the question of, are you a Republican or Democrat? It's like, who cares? It doesn't – I'm not a part of any – I'm just going to be – I'm going to call it as I see it. Follow the logic. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to be on a team. Right.
It doesn't make sense at all. Even for someone like me, like, you know, who – yeah, I went to the inauguration, you know. How was that? Bizarre. But I don't consider myself a Republican. I don't consider myself a Democrat either. I consider myself an American. I'm a human being. And there's a lot of things that the Democrats believe that I believe too. There's a lot of things that they say that I say that makes a lot of sense to me. And there's a lot of things that the Republicans say that makes a lot of sense to me too.
And the idea that I have to ignore things that make sense to me because it's coming from the wrong team is just stupid. And the idea – these are bad faith arguments where you have to have a conversation with someone and pretend that what they're saying is not logical because they're supposed to be your opponent. That to me is just dumb. It doesn't make any that doesn't benefit me at all. It doesn't benefit anybody listening at all. It's just stupid. It's a stupid way to think. It's it's so limiting and it's so bad for you cognitively. Because I think when you put up those blinders, like you ever talk to a person that's a liar, especially like when you're younger, you meet people that are liars and they lie all the time about all kinds of things. One of the things about liars is they can't really recognize how other people see their lies because they're living a lie. Like they're lying so often they don't realize the language of truth and honesty. And so when they're talking to people, they don't even realize that people know they're full of shit because they've lost their ability to sort of discern what natural conversations are about. where it's really it's not about you bullshitting me to try to get me to believe something that's not true it's about you just expressing yourself so they stop doing that they stop just genuinely
expressing themselves and then they just live with these blinders on and so everything exists and the only way they can find someone who will buy into their bullshit is if someone is like so bad at thinking and reasoning that they don't have the tools to discern when someone's full of shit. And this happens with ideologies. This happens with religion, and it clearly happens with politics. It's like you get locked into these blinders, and you're incapable of looking at any sort of positive aspects of someone who is on a team that you believe is the opposition. Yeah, I think there is a power in truth. It can be felt like you're saying, and that's the underneath the boats, beneath the surface, that which we can't articulate. We can't explain how we know these, how we can sense that on someone when they're bullshitting. you can feel it so as a teacher you really learn that reality if you're going to be effective first thing i would say on the first day to my students is by law by ethical bounds there are going to be some things i can't tell you confidentiality whatever but i will never i promise i will never tell you something i know to be untrue then you try and embody that through
behavior and that I saw that resonate because but there's a lot of teachers that you know but it's a strange environment that school a lot of weird stuff of course well it's a crazy well that wasn't an art no I'm talking about the ones where like the kids get kicked out of high school oh okay there oh yeah so there's like gangs drugs you know yeah yeah just interesting yeah it's I think we're entering a unique moment in history where a lot of those narratives are just dissolving and a lot of that very tribal thinking is being critically analyzed and it's found to be lacking and people are abandoning it left and right and you're you're seeing it you're seeing sort of the consequences of a lot of this ideology affecting people's day-to-day lives and that's causing people to abandon it you know i was watching these this left-wing podcasts um where they were discussing being gaslit about the problems with violence uh and uh crime rising in new york city and that you know you're being told that it's not but if you live day-to-day life you're like no this
is real like you guys have led in a bunch of venezuelan gang members and you have a sanctuary city and now it's kind of chaotic and you're seeing like the woman got lit on fire on the subway and like that kind of shit you're seeing this with with ever increasing frequency you're also seeing the way they lie about crime statistics because they'll tell you that crime is down but what they don't tell you is crime is severely underreported and that people are being released for even violent crimes very quickly which has direct consequences because then there's no incentive whatsoever to not commit crime if you're going to be right back out on the street Are you familiar with Roland Fryer? Yes. Have you had him? I have not, but I would.
It's really interesting. He's changed the way I view statistics. But in like a three-minute synopsis of it that goes to crime statistics, I can't think mathematically. And I think this applies to logic. I think visually. So if I have a metaphor, I can suddenly understand a mathematical concept. I just don't have that mind. So he broke it down. All right. After all that research that caused him to go into hiding, he's like, if you look at it through an economics perspective, let's say my job is to- Explain why he went into hiding.
He conducted a study, a deep dive into police statistics to see racial bias in policing. Right. The findings did not match the story that people wanted to be true at Harvard, which caused him to literally go under police protection, like a one-year-old he had at the time, for days. Now, I don't know the deep dive beyond that, but that's the— Right. Right. And we should say he's a black gentleman. Right. Yes. So he says the colleagues told him, don't publish this, warning, you'll ruin your career. Right.
For releasing findings that contradict popular left-wing narratives on policing. And he said, I'm going to do it anyways. Yeah. And then he came to the University of Austin and taught a class. It's on YouTube. And watching that class, to summarize it in a minute, look at it through economics. If my job is to approve or disprove loans, I've been able to get that down the best I can. I want to keep the default rate as low as possible, and I've achieved like a 0.5 default rate. Out of anyone who comes in my office, 0.5 after I've done my job defaults. All right, that's pretty good. Someone could come along later and analyze all that and say, wait a minute, you're turning down 60% black people, though, versus white people.
His point is you can't look at it through that lens. You have to look at it through what is the goal that's trying, what is the result we're trying to achieve? So in policing, it's to, his study showed that 40% of stops approximately, I think, if we use that as an example, 40% of stops recover contraband, which is pretty crazy, pretty good. Across demographics, which means it's being done correctly. People, this changes how you view so much. It's kind of difficult to understand at first glance. I'm trying to tell me if this makes sense. Okay. So it's 40% across whatever color the driver is. That means we've done correct. We've done it right.
If it was 60% white drivers were recovering, we should be pulling over his arguments. We should be pulling over more white drivers. But that's assuming they're pulling people over upon race. Let's go back to the default rate. you're just coming in after the fact and analyzing the results and looking at it through a racial lens i'm gonna i'm gonna judge each case based on a merit regardless of because i are you going to default or not and whatever i'm going to run my analysis whatever that is so anyone can come in after the fact and say but there's always going to be a discrepancy okay but you turn down more black people than white so they're okay so according to your logic for every white driver every black driver I pull over, every Latino, I have to pull over a white driver now, which affects policing itself, as opposed to what's our goal?
All the police are meeting that morning. Our job is to go out and recover contraband in this neighborhood. But for every black driver, you got to pull over a white. It's like, that's not how it works, right? So that kind of, that boggled my mind when I first heard it. I was looking at it through the lens of what are we trying to achieve and seeing if that achievement is even, then there's nothing off about it. If the contraband being recovered is 40%, regardless of the rate of which you're pulling those cars over, the success rate is the same, which means you're doing it right. I'm trying to boil that down as simple as I can. And so that was problematic for a lot of people. They didn't want to hear that. Because they're pulling over, let's just say 60% of the drivers are black, which is bias.
The question is, is it unwarranted bias? Because there's always going to be bias. Right. Is it unwarranted bias, meaning are more black people causing them to get pulled over? Like the default rate. 70% of the people I turned down, let's say, 70% of people that come in that office that were black got turned down. My rebuttal to that is that has nothing to do with it. My job is for the bank to get a 0.5 default rate, and that's the end result. Right. Can you prove that I'm doing anything wrong? What adjustment logically should I make?
should you give loans to people that are more likely to default just because of their ethnicity? Right. That would be the only logical course of action in response to that. Right. Which is the argument for equity over equality. Yeah, essentially that would be a form of equity, equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity. Right. Yeah, I've seen that argument that not everybody starts at the same spot, So you have to raise up people who've started a different spot, which is to me a band-aid on the real problem. The real problem is that we have crime infested areas that we've done nothing to fix. That's the real problem. The real problem is we have parts of our society that have been, you know, because of Jim Crow laws and red line laws. There's a long history of them being riddled with crime and gangs and it could be fixed. There's been no effort.
There's been no real national effort to take impoverished, gang-ridden, crime-ridden neighborhoods and rehabilitate them. The more you do that, if you did that, you would have less losers. If you have less losers, you have a better country. And that's including the Appalachias, areas of West Virginia that are filled with people that are addicted to pills and committing crime because they're drug addicts that are all poor white people, coal mining people, those folks. it's everybody it's it's just crime and poverty and crime and poverty causes people you you imitate your environment you imitate your atmosphere if you grow up in a crime-ridden gang-ridden neighborhood the chances of you getting involved in gang activities and crime are much higher than if you don't grow up in an environment like that yeah I'm from North Carolina mmm ash like near Asheville yeah rough out there which people don't don't believe the the Asheville mountains.
Beautiful. Right. No, it's like very high per capita crime rate. There's a meth capital right now where I live. And so if I agree with you, the thing is, if we look at it, I agree. If we look at it through a socioeconomic lens. So I had a professor,
one of my professors from Emerson, he's like, I solved racism. This was in one of the videos. I was like, sure, come over. Let's record, hit me with it. So the solution is we're going to have a tax for, so if you're,
if you can trace your ancestry, then you're going to, you don't have to pay taxes or some form of tax. Okay, but what about the white person in Appalachia who is in an equally bad socioeconomic position, but they don't get the tax or whatnot, the award, your solution? Well, their ancestors weren't oppressed. So I would be all for it if it was looking through a consistent, applied across all demographics equally, socioeconomically. You're never going to stop racism. You're never going to stop ignorant thinking.
I mean, unless there's some sort of groundbreaking human neural interface that completely changes our cognitive function and dissolves all boundaries. You're not going to stop people from – there's people that don't like people from other cities because they play sports against them. I hate people from Philly. There's always going to be people that discriminate against other people because there's always going to be ignorant people. So it's going to be – and it's easier to do that. It's easier to decide this person is my enemy. These people are on my side. It's easy to be tribal. It's like it's much simpler. Yeah. You don't have to think as much.
Anna Kasparian got sexually assaulted by a homeless person. So when she's walking down the street, she's probably going to recoil a bit maybe. And if she sees someone hope you know, it's there's a human psychological element She's gonna try probably not to do the business human nature if you have a bad experience and it's gonna Goes back to how we see the world, but you're right. Yeah, they will never be able to solve racism Well, that's the type of bias that like is kind of logical Like if you see a guy and he's covered his own shit and he's you know lighting Notebooks on fire that guy might be out of his fucking mind You should probably go around him And if you run into a bunch of them and they're camping out right in front of your house you you should You should act accordingly you shouldn't treat them the same the way you treat your neighbor who's just walking his dog
Waving to you. It's different kind of human being you're encountering You know there are certain people that you should be wary about and if you are Severely mentally ill and addicted to drugs and you live in a tent in front of someone's house You're cooking meth, you know like you're in the backyard barbecuing you smell someone cooking meth in your front yard Like that's a problem. Yes, that's a problem. And if you pretend it's not a problem because you know oh you have to be sensitive to people's socioeconomic needs and it's a housing crisis and it's a this and it's a that no no there's people that are really fucked up because being a person is hard it's difficult it's complicated and if you grow up uh you know with abusive parents who are drug addicts themselves and in and out of jail and you've been like psychologically scarred since you were a baby because they beat you and you've encountered a lot of domestic violence that you're going to be more fucked up than the average person. This is just the development cycle of you as an
entity, as a human being that is a product of your accumulated experiences, your genetics, your biology, your environment. There's just a lot of factors. And to pretend that those factors don't exist, and that if you do recognize them, that somehow or another you're racist, or you're sexist, or you're ableist, or you're this or you're that, you're the problem. No, The problem is we've got a bunch of people that are really fucked up, you know, and we have to figure out a way to have less people that are fucked up. Everybody's going to have a certain percentage. But is there something that can be done that would mitigate the number of people that are growing up really fucked up and becoming problems? Start at the root. Get to the root. What's the root? Crime infested, gang infested neighborhoods, abusive family life, abusive neighborhoods.
Like that's the root. It's the root of all of our problems. I think that's why Jordan Peterson tapped into this so much because the only solution is taking a personal responsibility. But even personal responsibility for a person that has no – there's no examples of someone taking personal responsibility. Everyone around you is doing something fucked up or most people around you are doing something fucked up. And there's nowhere you can turn where you can relate to someone who can give you tools and objective reasoning and an understanding of how you got to the situation and what are the steps you can take to get out of that. I encountered that every day at that school because that's where I was. Those are the kids that I was working with. They didn't have majority of did not have a parent. We would have open house and no one would come. They had no example, no money.
Right. and it's heartbreaking because, but what, so what do I do? All I can do is try and lead by example and maybe communicate because that's their best hope is trying and taking responsibility and cause no one else is going to do it at the end of the day. There, there is no alternative. Right. Except for having someone hopefully come along and provide that role model. Right. Or finding something that you can do that elevates you, finding something you can do that gives you a very clear example that hard work and dedication can lead to success. And then you can kind of get addicted to this positive feeling that you're getting from seeing yourself progress and get locked into that, and it can elevate you out of certain situations.
You see that happen with sports. You see that happen with art. You know, sports and art are probably the two best ways that people can escape impoverished childhoods and bad neighborhoods. The student who was, we're not supposed to have fairs, but was my favorite, he came from that kind of background, but he could draw like I've never seen. There you go, art. And so we got him a Krita drawing tablet, a digital drawing tablet, and he would just sit and draw all day. But here's the issue is, well, how do you, but he wouldn't go to any other classes. And we kind of, he liked, for some reason, he liked being in my classroom. so they would literally sit him in my room and he would stay there all day and then he would try and bring work from his other classes and get him to do the work from the other classes and but so through that pattern he and i you know we would talk about he got me into elden ring telling me like these video like he was he got me into the whole art style behind elden ring and dark souls
but what how do you foster then the school kind of comes along and they're like yeah but he's not doing um academic drawings that are not relevant to the school and i i get that but how do you then take that talent for drawing and show him that this can be monetized man like you could be up like yeah let's get you maybe freelancing i worked as a freelance videographer it's a it's a hustle but it's a way you're not gonna make but it's better than nothing like trying to think outside the box and he ended up getting kicked out for a stupid he didn't want to go on a field trip one day and he was like um he made a offhand passing comment he's like i don't want to go on the field trip don't make me go on the field trip or a trip i'll just bring a gun so i don't have to go to the field trip and it's like oh my god like and then and this goes back to the idea of telling the truth what got me is they they lied to him and told him because the teacher that he said it to you're compelled to like report it and everything and we run it up the chain i don't think he should
have been kicked out i know this kid though he's done that's why they're there because they stay they say stupid stuff right and we're the last line of defense he was graduating in two months oh god i don't know where he is now well it brings you back to like what is school supposed to be for it's supposed to be preparing you for independence out in the world and it's supposed to be preparing you to eventually have a career well there's real careers in art it's a viable pathway yeah and the idea that this guy is extremely talented and that's not accentuated he would he would draw these Japanese samurai sword fighting just beautiful and then I had the photo printer we would and but they were like well how's he gonna make a living drawing Japanese photos no I'm gonna get him to draw school product like logos for multimedia projects for the culinary program it does like this
This kid won't respond to that. And he didn't. And then he gets kicked out. That was my problem as an artist. When I was young, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator. That's what I wanted to do. And that's the only art that I was interested in. I read a lot of comic books. And I was really into Frank Frazetta. And I was really into Jack Kirby and all these different artists that would draw for comic books and fantasy novels and that kind of stuff. That's what I was interested in.
That was the only thing I was interested in. And my art teacher was an asshole. He was just, he was such an asshole. Shout out to my friend, John DeVore, because I'm still, I communicate online with a buddy of mine in high school, who was also in that art class, who was the most talented guy in the class. It was me, John and our friend, Kevin. And we were like the three most talented people. I was like third. It's like, John was number one, Kevin was number two, and then it was me but we were all like much more talented than everyone else and all we wanted to do was like comic book art and john was so good and he told me that that teacher gave him an f in his final year and uh right because he's just an asshole he just his he when he would never look at your art and say it was good he would look at your art and say you're not going to be able to do that for a living you're going to have to draw diaper commercials you're going to have to do this you're gonna have to do things you don't want to do it was just he was a bitter guy with
like a pot belly who looked depressed and he was a lot of teachers are yeah and they he didn't want you to have hope because he didn't have any hope and he didn't like teaching he wanted to be an artist and you know and he when he would draw you know like he would draw in the class we would do projects and his stuff was unexceptional just wasn't that good you know and it just they wanted you to fail i had a student i may have had multiple students the number one like profession kids want to do now is be an influencer youtuber blah blah so i get the apprehension when a kid's like i really want to do youtube make a youtube channeling i want to do like what joe rogan's doing whatever it's the but the school was kind of you can't make money on youtube it's like That's so dumb That's like you should be Fired for being incompetent
Not just incompetent but you're Counter to what's true Like you're saying things that are objectively Untrue you can't make money on YouTube That is You could pull up statistics instantaneously It's hard but you're never Gonna I got lucky Just because I was willing to put myself Out there and make a fool of myself But that's not why you got lucky.
You got lucky because you put out good content. It's a merit-based thing. It really is. It doesn't necessarily have to be good, right? There's content that's just inflammatory and that people gravitate to that because they like controversy. People like just people squabbling and yelling at each other like shitty content or someone who's saying awful things. So people believe this person is saying these awful things and they get a lot of attention for saying awful things. And so, you know, and then YouTube has ways to sort of manage that, which are, you know, a little Orwellian, right? Like they demonetize people for talking about specific things. That scares me. It should scare you because a lot of times they're demonetizing things that are absolutely accurate.
And that's where it gets really weird. Like this is what we faced during the COVID crisis. Like if you said that you think this disease came from a lab leak, you would get demonetized on YouTube. Well, that's proven to be true now. So, like, what happens? Does YouTube owe you money from all those videos that you put out that they should have monetized? I can't even think about it. It's crazy. You're saying accurate things, but these accurate things were being suppressed by our own federal government, which is really weird. We're in cahoots with these corporations that were making these medications. And so it got real fucking weird, like real weird.
and um unfortunately a lot of those laws still stand we had an instance where there was a video that we put out during the pandemic um when we were only on spotify so when we were only on spotify all of our videos all our episodes got released only on spotify but we banked them all to eventually you know just like we'd have them if we ever wanted to put them on up on youtube Well, then 2024, I signed this new deal. And in the new deal, what I want to do is put it everywhere. I was like, we'll be Spotify, but let's put it on. And Spotify wanted to do this as well. It was actually, they were very supportive of this. Put it everywhere. Well, put it on YouTube, put it on Apple.
But it's a Spotify exclusive, and we work out this deal that way. And just like, well, so when we take these videos that were available on Spotify, in order to put them on YouTube, even though they're factually correct, they have a strike against them because it's still adhering to their old laws that were applicable at the time that we made the video. So did they make adjustments? What did we wind up doing with that, Jamie? I don't know which case you're talking about. You know, where you were saying that there was a video that we were going to put up, but it had a strike and you were going to have to do training. Remember that?
That was already up there though That wasn't re-uploaded That was from the past Oh it was? We were still putting clips up on that channel Oh it was a clip that was the problem? Yeah I'm pretty sure Right but it was the full episode wasn't it? Right And then when we upload the full episode Then it applied to that right?
I just still had There was no way around not doing The education fucking thing Right There was the problem No way around it Did you have to do that? No I'm not doing shit and then they changed it. Yeah, but here's the problem. That clip was accurate.
The problem is the things that they were saying were accurate. Yeah, something changed in the news, and they were like, that's actually accurate now, but the system had already, there was no way to change it in the system. Yeah, it was always accurate. It's just the news started reporting it accurately. And because initially the government narrative was that it was incorrect. So we're in the situation where you're getting educated about something that's absolutely true and you have to sort of pretend that you did a bad thing It's scary for me because this is literally how I make a living. Yeah Food on the tables. Yeah. Do you do other platforms as well as YouTube? I'm on X, but I'm not monetized never made a dollar on X. I'm not sure how to go about doing that
I could look it up. I should probably but yeah I don't know how that works here rumors about don't post one-to-one to X because like YouTube wants exclusivity and if you're posting on x your videos will perform us on how much truth there is but i'm so kind of there's probably something to that and i'm so dependent on youtube that i'm like here's an interesting statistic about youtube um this shows you like this is probably one of the best examples of bias that you're ever going to see during the time where i released the podcast with Trump. It was getting, what was the most it was getting an hour? Was it 1.2 million? Sure, I think so. Maybe 1.2, 1.3, something like that. As much as 1.5 million, I think, at one point in time. An hour. Never trending. I heard about that.
Never trending. Yeah, I saw that. Never trending. What's trending then? Tell me what trending is. If something gets 50 million views in a couple of days, and that's not trending, what's trending? What do you call trending what does that mean then is are you curating your trending thing to call her on call her daddy trend I don't know it's a good question it well didn't get any views I mean what did Kamala Harris on call her daddy get like less than a million I think that's crazy yeah I get a million for some random that's crazy yeah but that doesn't make any sense oh I might be wrong about that well it wasn't extraordinary it wasn't interesting enough.
That's, you know, it's merit-based, essentially. I was curious what it would say, how the trending page is controlled. Yeah. I looked up on the screen, it says there's no humans that manually curate the page. Right, but obviously the algorithm... I don't believe this is what... Yeah, I don't believe that.
I'm pretty cynical about this response. Yeah, okay. YouTube's trending page is controlled by an algorithm that's trained by human engineers. There's no employees who manually curate the trending page. How the algorithm works. The algorithm considers many factors to determine which videos are trending, including view count, view velocity, and video age. The algorithm considers where views are coming from and how the video performs compared to other recent uploads from the same channel. The algorithm aims to create a list of trending content that's relevant and representative across the platform.
The algorithm refreshes every 15 minutes to stay current. Filters. The algorithm applies strict content filters to keep the trending list family-friendly. These filters ensure that videos don't contain excessive profanity. Well, that gets me out. Mature content, violence, or disparaging others in the community. Okay, so just that line alone. Disparaging others in the community. Yeah. It would be in YouTube's best interest, though. They need you.
Well, don't they like views? Yeah, that's my point. I was YouTube like no Thing up there. We need views. Well, not only that if you put it in trending you'll get more views So you get more advertising revenue on that specific one. I think they were worried about something else Well, yeah, they were worried about it promoting Donald Trump and why you end up being president because of that But then it got to a point where you couldn't find it So that was real weird Like if you googled trump rogan podcast you would not find that podcast at all you would find clips of people discussing it you would not find the actual podcast when i first saw it it was someone
reacting to it yeah live bizarre didn't you tweet like we had to release it at the same time on multiple platforms sorry for the glitch wasn't there there was a glitch because the way um we We upload generally – Jamie, you can speak to this. We upload with a timer, right? Like it's going to upload a certain time? Yeah, it usually is like at noon. This time we were doing it at night and, you know, they just didn't – for whatever reason it didn't go live. The platforms don't work the same. We just released it. We just said like let's just release it now. But it took a while to get up and to – it was just – that was just like an issue with just how the upload system works.
It's like it's more effective to upload on a timer apparently. But that had nothing to do with YouTube. That was just a thing about – and then when it was being suppressed, and I knew it was being suppressed, I talked to Spotify and talked to Elon and said, let's just put it on X. And so we put it on X as well. And then Elon put it on X. And it wound up getting across all platforms somewhere in the neighborhood of like 250 million views. Fucking insanity. but a lot of it was x like a lot of people on independent pages they just took it when it was a problem finding it and they just uploaded it to their own channel on x a lot of people did that and then you know i uploaded it elon elon's alone got like 65 million views and i got like 25 million views it was just nuts it's like people wanted it and it's the streisand effect as soon as
you try to suppress something i just i don't buy into the idea that there wasn't some sort of manipulation behind the scenes. It just doesn't make any sense. Whether it was rogue employees or whether it was someone who was gaming the reporting system, like reporting something, maybe that could be it. If you get enough people that report that a video is a problem, maybe that could throw it off. I don't know. I don't want to ask because I don't think I'm going to get an honest answer. You haven't asked? I kind of have, but I don't talk to them. You know, I don't I don't have like a direct channel where I talk to them. I don't want one Hmm. I was like Hmm, let me just put it, you know, like this is Like if there's a situation like that, I'll talk about that and that's my way of responding to that Like make sense to make it make sense to me. Like why why can't you find it?
Why can't you find a video that has 65 million views? Why can't you find that that doesn't make any sense? That is crazy. That's nuts. Like, what's wrong with your search system? And then eventually, because of me talking about it, it went back. And then you could find it. It's one of the best things. A lot of people are really grateful that you did that. Yeah, I, you know, I wanted to, like, we were clearly being manipulated. We were clearly being gaslit and being told that this guy's Hitler. Even though he was already the president for four years.
And he wasn't he didn't act like a dictator like we know what it's like when he's running things We had experienced it for four years and they were telling us that this was the end of civilization the trans people gonna be rounded up and fucking nets thrown on them and It it was really why the people weren't going to be safe. It was really wild. It was really wild and they Yeah, they just demonized and they gaslit people to the point where when you actually do have the guy in and talk to him and say, no, he's not mentally compromised. He's not incoherent. He's very coherent. He's got an amazing amount of energy. The guy sat here for three hours, and we could have done another three hours.
Easy. He can go on and on and on, and he's fine. And he had some really good points. First of all, the point about the California wildfires, where he's discussing their water issues, that it could all be fixed, and that he gave them a plan to fix it, and then they rejected it. And he's like, you could have all the fucking water you need. And you should be doing things to make sure that these fires don't happen again. There's ways to clean up the brush. There's ways to do this. There's ways to do that.
You stop the fuel. You know, you develop better systems for water distribution, sprinkler systems. Like, there's ways to do this. And he talked about those ways on the podcast. And it's like, you know, eerily accurate when you see what happened to the Pacific Palisades. Yeah. That clip of you predicting the whole thing. Yeah. See, here's the thing, this climate change narrative. This is a really goofy thing that people on the left are talking about. This is because of climate change.
This is climate change causes fire. L.A. has had essentially the same weather pattern since the 1800s, since they started noticing them. There's a great video. Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie. There's a great video of the Topanga fires. You might be able to find it before I can pull it up. The Topanga fires from 1961, I believe. There was a huge fire that raged through the Hollywood Hills pre-climate change, 1961. L.A. has always been dry as fuck. It's a desert. That's why the movie industry was developed.
That's why the movie industry is there. Because you could film outside and you don't ever have to worry about it raining on you. That's literally why they came there because it's the perfect climate. It's amazing. I was just there last weekend. The weather's incredible. But the city, because of their ridiculous policies, is just a fucking disaster. A dangerous, creepy, weird disaster of a city. It's a 1961 Bel Air fire, which is probably the same time period. Could be, could be. So it's a windy, sounds the same, brush fire, wind.
I mean, that's just what happens, man. So the situation that I encountered was from 2000. I was filming Fear Factor, so it had to be before 2007. So it was really before a lot of this. I mean, you know, you had the Inconvenient Truth documentary, but you didn't have the type of climate change discussions that you have today. So you think it was more? It's just L.A. Okay. It's just L.A. It's not a climate change issue. God, I've got to find this video.
15,000 acres burned, 450 homes burned. Here's the aftermath. Houses are digging through it. Yeah, that is a black and white one. The one that I had was color footage. I know. I have it. Just give me a second. I will find it. The documentary is called Design for Disaster. That's popping up.
This also says Bel Air. Here. I'm just going through my – Whitney Cummings sent it to me. So I'm going through my videos with her. I'll find it in a second. But the point is it's like when I experienced that, this was not when everybody was chiming in about climate change being – here it is. I found it. 1960s. It was in the canyon. Here it is. I'll send it to you, Jamie.
And it's one of those guys talking like this because that's how they talked in the news back then. So it's a 1961 documentary about the fires. And so when I was talking to this fireman, I think it was 2003, if I'm correct. I think it was 2003. And we were experiencing a fire, and he told me, because where I lived, I had been evacuated three times. I had been evacuated in the early 2000s. So give me some volume on this so you can hear the way this guy talks. Ground cover in the Western Hemisphere. The fire starting from its point of origin north of Mulholland on Stone Canyon. Spreads out along canyon walls in three directions. claims began spreading at the rate of 13 acres per minute.
We've got a report of four people trapped on foot between Shallon and Roskamera. We need help from the police department. And an ambulance at 2025 Stradala Road. How can a modern water system properly designed to meet emergency fire conditions fail to function? 484 times, fire proved its deadly efficiency by incinerating in a few roaring minutes what families had taken years to acquire. So that has always been a problem. So they had the same issue back then.
The 100% same issue. So this idea that these left-wing people, particularly media people, they want to use this binary thing. You know, this is what I saw. Trump said, drill, baby, drill, right after we're dealing with this climate change-fueled emergency in the Pacific Palisades. That is not climate change. It is the climate of Los Angeles. It's a fucking desert. They put a city in the fucking desert because they wanted to film movies there. And it's also windy in the winter because you get the Santa Ana winds, which is what just occurred. We get these 100 mile. They're historic. They've always happened. Every year we get the Santa Ana. There's fire season for a fucking reason.
There's Los Angeles has fire season where I used to live. It was fire season. And every time the winter would come and everything was dry. and all the vegetation was brown and the wind was whipping around, everybody would get nervous because you get, you know, there's a bunch of different reasons. The one big one from 2018, they found out that it was like some part that had failed that initially caused the fire that was a $1 part. The part cost $1. This $1 piece that they failed to replace caused the sparks that led to the initial fire That was the 2018 fire where you saw if you go down the 405 in Hollywood, like half of the side of the highway was completely engulfed in flames. It looked apocalyptic.
It was bananas driving on the highway and the whole left side of the highway is completely on fire. Giant hills of raging fires that they couldn't put out. It's always been like this. It's Los Angeles. It's Los Angeles. Why didn't they adapt? I lived in L.A. for two years. I'm on the volunteer fire department in my town where I live now, Massachusetts, and we don't have fire hydrants. That's so crazy. We're out by Concord, like near there. Yeah, I know where that is.
So there's no fire hydrants. And so we bring our own water. That's so crazy. But it's possible is my point. It's possible. And the problem with this past fire, and here's another thing that's a lot of weird pushback against, that it was arson caused. Hey, some of it was arson caused. Fact. They've arrested people. They arrested people for starting fires. They've arrested multiple people for starting fires. My friend Andrew Huberman filmed people starting fires. They were starting fires in the middle of this fire disaster. because it doesn't mean it's the cause of it. It means along the way there was a lot of arson. Like some people were saying that, you know, oh, there's this false narrative that was the homeless people.
Like, okay, whether they had a house or whether they didn't have a house, some people started fucking fires. There's video footage of the three fires that are started semi-simultaneously that are near the Palisades. And on one of the video footage, it's very clear that there's a human being. This is like from the sky where they're filming this. There's a human being that's near the fire. Most likely the cause of the fire was a person who either accidentally did this or did it on purpose, lit a fire. So the problem is not fucking climate change. The problem is L.A. is extremely vulnerable when it comes to fires and always has been. And they've done very little to mitigate this yearly disaster problem that they have.
that's the facts yeah that's the reality of it that's that's indisputable do you think gavin newsom's gonna is this gonna be the end of him or people gonna put up with it i would like to think that people would wise up i mean there's been a trend in california to vote in the opposite direction if you look at the map of 2020 versus the map of 2024 the counties that went red like a significant number. But the high population centers are in the trance. San Francisco, Los Angeles, very difficult to get those people to vote anything other than blue. And so if the people that are Democrat are giving them the exact same solutions, exact same gaslighting, and they keep buying it over and over again, and they still win elections, then there's no incentive for them to correct course. So this is why. California has been essentially blue since, except for the time where Arnold won, which is weird, right? Because he was kind of like a moderate Republican and also famous.
And that probably led to him winning. But other than that, since Reagan, he did something where he allowed people that came here. What was the issue that Reagan did? there was some sort of a voting issue where he allowed people from, I think it was people that emigrated here illegally from Mexico. There's coffee and water, whatever you'd like. There's water in that glass right there. But California is basically locked blue. And the only thing that's going to change it is things like these Pacific Palisades fires, where people realize we have incompetent government. And if we have competent government that is right wing, and as long as they don't infringe on civil rights and human rights and all the things that we're terrified of from right-wing extremists. As long as they don't do that, you'll probably be better off leaning in that direction. If someone's going to take a pragmatic solution, a pragmatic view of
what these problems are and make meaningful change. Like you've got to, you've got to figure out what, what is, first of all, what the fires, it's like this all could be prevented. What's causing the fire well all this brush they had record rainfall record rainfall means record growth so you have record growth of all these grasses and brush and all this stuff so it's all green and lush until la runs out of water because it stops raining for a long time and then everything turns brown and then it's a tender it's just fire tender it's just it's a tinder box when the fire chief says if we'd had a thousand more trucks it wouldn't have quote tamped this down But then we see an old man with a garden hose able to save his house. It's like, well, an individual was able to make a difference. Right. So then logically a difference could be made.
There was one guy who put lawn sprinklers on his roof. Milk, orange juice. I saw one guy. And so it's difficult to have those two narratives. They contradict each other. They do. But, I mean, the firefighters are saying once the fire is raging, even if they had 100 trucks, You're dealing with 100 mile an hour winds and you've got this enormous like who if someone did start these fires, if they were started by arson, the way they did it was very strategic because they essentially did it upwind. They did it like right where the wind was going to blow the fire into the city. Like if you started that fire at the outskirts of the city, it would just burn to an area that's not populated. They started it right where all the brush was, right where all the woods were, where the wind was at its back.
And then they started it in multiple areas so that it would come and spread out in this way that was like impossible to stop. So once it gets big, like to this day, like what is the fire? Yesterday I read that it was 60, I think it was 65% contained. This is like we're in weeks, right? It's crazy. Weeks into this. At one point in time, it was 0% contained. It was just burning through. And if you haven't seen, there's a great video. I'll send you this, Jamie, of an overhead view of what it looks like now. And it's 68 percent contained today. I'm going to send you this, Jamie, because it's a helicopter that is flying over the Palisades.
And you get to see like the extent of the devastation. devastation and until you see it like with your own eyes from the air it's hard to understand how big the destruction is how enormous the amount of land that was destroyed the amount of homes that were destroyed and not just destroyed here is like you could see this here i mean this is crazy this is absolutely crazy and the video is larger jamie if you could like shrink it a little so that that way you can see the top so there's there's words at the top that block off some of it but it goes on like way above that see that like this is an enormous piece of land covered with homes that's gone all that's not just gone but now poisoned so now not only are these homes burnt but everything that was in the homes, all the plastics, all the chemicals, all the batteries, Teslas, all these different electric cars, all the electronics, all the toxic chemicals that come from the building
materials, all that is now seeped into the ground and will eventually seep into the water. It's going to get into the water supply. It's probably going to get into the ocean. It's going to wash into the ocean. Yeah, I don't think people realize how toxic that stuff is. Not just that. It's in the air. So, you know, they can say the weather quality or the air quality is good in California based on how much smog there is. But what's in the fucking smog now? Because this is not just automobile smog. This is not just just dry dirt kicked up by the wind, which they've always had. Like the smog in Los Angeles existed before there were cars because there was always this problem with the way the valley is shaped. The valley just contains all this air in there and you would get dust pollution even back before there were fucking cars. Or if there was anybody that was burning coal or you had fireplaces or that kind of shit. You're getting all that smoke that was always contained in that area. It's just a bad place for air.
And so then on top of that, you've got all these homes that were burnt and all this toxic waste, all this burning plastic and burning chemicals. Now that's all in the air. And no one's discussing that. Like it has to be bad for you if you live near that. All those firemen that are breathing that shit in, that's going to have long-term health consequences for those guys. Yeah. Yeah. For all those people that are dealing with all that shit, all those people that are anywhere near it, your air is air of like, do you know the story of the toxic burn pits from Iraq in Afghanistan? So during the war, when troops were on a base overseas, they would take all their garbage and burn it. So they burned it in these waste pits. And so the wind would shift and blow through the camp. And all these people are breathing toxic air, extremely toxic. In fact, Biden's son died from a brain cancer that they connect to his exposure in the military to toxic burn pits.
There's a whole swarm of health consequences that veterans have faced because these toxic burn pits. So the dumbest fucking way to deal with garbage of all time, make the troops breathe it in as you burn it. It's the same kind of thing that's happening in LA. It's the same shit. You're breathing burnt garbage, burnt refuge, burnt buildings, burnt cars, burnt tires. All that stuff you're breathing in. I didn't realize how often, you don't think about firefighters, but they're exposed to that. All the time. The guys on the, it's all volunteer, but the guys that, you know, in their 50s, 60s, and you're just like hacking all the time. Yeah. And it's like a sacrifice they make knowingly.
Yeah. It's crazy. The gear is never, because you can't just wash fire gear. Right. You've got to have it specially washed. And so there's like the kitchen and the firehouse, right? And you can't bring the no gear allowed in the kitchen because it's, but, you know, you put it on, go home. You're supposed to shower every time, but that doesn't happen. So it's just crazy. Also, they're fucking exhausted. Like, you don't even want to shower.
You just want to close your fucking eyes. I can't imagine. You've been working 28 hours. You get a couple hours to sleep before you get back out there again. It's fucking insane. And still, 68% contained. Today. What's today's date? The 23rd? 22nd? I read some people talk about the big campfire from a few years ago.
That containment number starts getting used as a big political tool, and it'll never end up being 100%. It just kind of keep pushing the number around to talk about stuff. It just eventually just goes away. What do you mean? like the big number for the biggest fire, like they've contained 100% of a small fire. Like the biggest fire, it'll just, it'll always stay at a number that's below 100%. Well, if it's still up. No, it's like a political tool they're saying. Like the residents there just got sick of it.
They're like, this is now a political thing going back and forth. Like, tell us what it is. Right. Where is the fire if it's not contained kind of thing? Like it just becomes a thing that no one has answers for. Right. That is a weird thing, right? We want to put numbers on stuff. Like today, we're like, is it 65% is 68% contained. Like, what?
It's a fire. Fire's still up. There's still a fire right now. January 22nd, there's still fire in Los Angeles. It's been going on for weeks. When did it start? What was the date the fire started? I was reading through something on the New York Times. One possible thing, which doesn't sound right, but they're just going, it's possible. In that area, someone was lighting fireworks
on the night of the 1st, and there was a small fire that started, and some firemen went up to put it out, and they stayed to see if it was going to catch back up. And five days later, they're like, is that the same fire? Because it was in a really close to the same spot. It'd be real weird if it started back up five days later. Yeah, that doesn't really make sense. Also, it doesn't make sense if you think about how windy it was and the fact that everything's dry. They're saying it can go into the roots, which is why I'm just starting to hear that. Okay, maybe.
You can. Maybe, but five days later, it starts up again as a raging inferno? Perhaps. Perhaps, but there is also evidence that people lit fires. There's also people who got arrested for lighting fires. It wouldn't surprise me, man. Have you heard of the book Monkey Wrench Gang? No. Eco-terrorism, these friends living out of a van, they go around. And back, originally monkey wrenching was sabotaging for environmental reasons, big equipment to fight back against that kind of thing. Okay.
I had a friend back in high school, went to this boarding school, and he was really into it. And that's where I learned about this book. But it wouldn't surprise me if that kind of thinking carried over in someone. Because we saw a copycat, so there's definitely people out there that have a reason. Yeah. Well, there's disturbed individuals in our society. That's why we have school shooters, right? That's why we have a lot of things that people do that's horrible, that are horrible. And one of the things that people do is they start fires. You know, it's a known thing. And to pretend that it's not possible because it doesn't appeal to your narrative.
It doesn't fit with your narrative of the homeless thing. We just have to be compassionate because these are people and there's a housing shortage and it's just housing, housing, housing. No, you have open air drug markets and mentally ill people and fire. And it's possible that that's what's caused it. LA wildfires rekindle eco-terror arson suspect manhunt after fake firefighters arrested. Yeah, that's the thing. There were fake firefighters that were arrested and there was also fake cops. But I think that was, if I had to guess, it was more about stealing than anything because there was organized looting where they were breaking into homes in areas where there were people going to be abandoned. L.A., man, it's not my cup of tea, but it's tragic. One of those firefighters has a history of arson. That's why they're talking about this.
Oh, great. One of the firefighters? One of the fake firefighters. Oh, yeah. There you go. One of whom has a criminal history of arson. Gee, what's the odds? Well, he definitely didn't do it again. He learned his lesson, Jamie. A fake fire truck? A pair of fake firefighters from Oregon.
Where'd he get a fake fire truck? Yeah, he's like dedicated. He's like the Michael Jordan of fake firefighters. These are like a million bucks. He got a used one. Did you see the thing in L.A. where they had the lot where they showed all of the fire trucks that were out of service? No. Hundreds. Oh, they're bringing them back in service? No, no, no. They were broken down.
They hadn't bothered fixing them. So a journalist got to the lot and was filming from the outside. I think Schellenberger had it on his Twitter page. But a journalist got to this lot where these fire trucks were, where they were supposed to be repaired. There was hundreds that weren't repaired. Like just a fucking huge parking lot. Jeez. 75 Los Angeles fire trucks wait for repairs as wildfires rage while city spends $1.3 billion on the homeless. This is New York Post. I'd heard it was more than 75. This guy had a film of it and showed, and it looked like a shit ton of trucks that weren't fixed.
You should have fixed those. You would have had more trucks. The reason is going to be, well, we're backed up. It takes so long. To get a fire truck even ordered, it takes about a year. God. I mean, maybe that could work where there's very few fires and it's just essentially home fires. We're fine where we are. Yeah, but it rains where you are too. California, it does not fucking rain for long stretches of time. I think California had gone eight months without rain when these fires started. This is common. This is why this climate change, it's climate change. This is not a change in the climate. This is the climate of California. You see it from that 1961 video. You see it from when I was evacuated.
Three times I was evacuated. The houses in front of my old house burnt to the ground in 2018. Both of them. Like when you were talking about it in that clip that goes around, it's like there's nothing they can do. Exactly. It's the right wind. Yes. It's going. This firefighter told me that when we were filming Fear Factor. He freaked me out.
He said, it's just going to take the right wind. He goes, we just get lucky. So is there any preparation that could have? Yeah, you got to get rid of all the brush. Okay. Number one, you got to get rid of all the stuff that starts fire. That's possible to do. That's not impossible. That's not like putting a person on Venus. This is like something that could be done. Like if you have enough money for all that, you've spent $24 billion on the homeless crisis, didn't put a dent in it.
You could have fixed the brush. You could have fixed that reservoir that was empty. giant 11 million gallon reservoir of water completely dry you could have fixed that you could have saved homes maybe you wouldn't have saved all of them you could have saved a lot you could have saved people's lives and they didn't and it was incompetent and it was poor planning and it was you know they had a lot of ideas that weren't good they had a lot of uh things that they paid attention to and things they focused on that weren't important what was really important is preventing these kind of reoccurring disasters, continuously reoccurring disasters. I've seen a bunch of them. Like I said, I was evacuated multiple times, but I've seen multiple other fires that I wasn't evacuated from that were huge in all sorts of areas around LA. It's dry as fuck. One of the big ones that we experienced was, it was like we were out filming
in like out in the Tachapi area. Like we're near Tohono Ranch. We were filming this thing at this ranch. And we had to cut filming short. And when we were driving home, the entire right side of the highway for like almost an hour was on fire as I was driving home. So you're driving. Ash is falling from the sky like snow. And the whole time you're driving, it's apocalyptic. The whole right side of the highway is in flames.
I saw a clip of that. It was surreal. So this has always been a problem with LA. So these climate change kooks, these left-wing kooks that want to put everything into these very binary categories. This is because the Republicans refused to agree to climate change and call climate change as a hoax. This is a climate change. No, this is LA. This is the climate of LA. Is this the fire trucks? Alex Jones posted it. Oh, he probably posted it too. Quite a few people on Twitter posted it. But there was all these fire trucks that were in this lot. This isn't the video that I saw. I think multiple people posted them.
But they were all out of commission. They were all just sitting there. And, you know, obviously they could have used them. But that's only part of the problem. Part of the problem is planning correctly. Part of the problem is, you know, there wasn't enough water for the fire hydrogens. So the fire hydrogens went dry. The whole thing's nuts and when Trump talked about it on the podcast he was eerily accurate He was eerily accurate as to you know what the problem was and he offered a solution And in just to save the smelt they didn't want to do the solution Well this department with Elon like you can just imagine what Elon could do with like the fire truck problem
Yeah, but he can't do everything Well, you can't do everything with states right because states have states rights and they have you know like One of the things they they arrest this one guy for arson and they couldn't necessarily prove that he was an arsonist because they didn't they had one guy they found with a an actual blowtorch. They couldn't prove that he lit the fires with the blowtorch. But this guy had been arrested multiple times, including for vandalism and all sorts of other things. And I believe assault. And ICE wanted to deport him. but the california sanctuary state law the way it's set up they weren't allowed to deport this guy so they're just going to let him go he'd been arrested eight times this person in like you know a short amount of time so it's like a real problem person and they're like hey maybe this guy shouldn't be in the fucking country lighting things on fire and they're like no we have sanctuary
sanctuary still here i don't know i don't know what the latest is i try not to pay too much attention, I'll go crazy. But California is deep in the trance, deep. And I think the only thing that's going to snap people out of it is something like this, where they realize like, oh my God, these people are completely incompetent. It used to be the homeless situation was a little bit of a wake up call. This is like next level. This is like next level incompetence wake up call. And so I'm hoping that someone can come along that's a reasonable conservative person that can shift things in California, like appeal to people's concerns when it comes to social issues, women's rights, gay rights, the things that people are terrified of when it comes to right wing. When you think about like far right fascist governments that are going to clamp down on people's rights, what we're really worried about is disenfranchised people and marginalized
groups and people that are more maligned. Right. So if someone can just like appeal to that and say, like, we have no desire to stop gay marriage. We have no desire to limit women's reproductive rights. But what we do want to do is make a more fiscally sound city and have more conservative policies in terms of what are we spending our money on and what are the results? You can't just say, oh, we work for a homeless initiative. And so, oh, well, you got a blank check. Do whatever you want to do. It should be like, what have you done? How have you how have you solved the problem? Hey look we spent 24 billion dollars and homelessness went up By a significant amount tens of thousands of new homeless people while we spent 24 billion dollars This is not effective. So whatever you guys are doing you're shitty at it. So we don't want you doing it anymore We're gonna bring in someone who has some more
Progress some something is gonna progress the idea better. You know someone who's gonna fix this problem better Someone's got a more pragmatic solution. If they could do that, but they have to appeal to people that are deep blue. They're deep blue. They're blue no matter who. And the problem with California is very unique and more unique than New York in that California, the entire city, is established around the entertainment industry. And it's established around the dream. If you go to Los Angeles, you can make it. Well, in order to go to Los Angeles and make it, if you're an actor, you have to audition. And when you're auditioning, you're auditioning to people that almost universally have a very specific political ideology. You can't be a part of the group.
You can't be a part of the team if you're a right-wing Christian Republican and you're making films. That doesn't exist. You got like Mel Gibson and a few outliers. That's it. Clint Eastwood, a few outliers. For the most part, if you are an actor and you want to work in Hollywood, and by the way, Mel Gibson and all those guys will hire left-wing people. These people will not hire right-wing people. So you see everyone sort of morph their personality and morph their political ideology and their social ideology around what's going to get them picked. Because when you're an actor, you have to get picked. So if like you and I go for a part and there's a bunch of other people going for a part and we're all like similarly qualified in terms of like the look that this part is looking for, a lot of it is determined about whether they like you. And Hollywood runs off the blacklisting idea.
Oh, yeah. If you go against your union, that's how unions have power. Yes. If you cross the picket line, you're going to be blacklisted and you'd be ostracized and that has real consequences in L.A. because people don't realize what I always describe it when I'm teaching that class on filmmaking is Hollywood is the very definition of a rigged game. Yes, it's a rigged game. They can shut you out. And so that this is the underlying philosophy of the entire city. So even though there's only a certain amount of people that are actors in LA, there's a lot of people that wanted to be actors. And there's a lot of people that want to be famous. And so they get their fame from their small social media. They get like a little adrenaline and dopamine drip off of like social media likes. And like, maybe my TikTok can go viral. And then they get a little
fame from that. There's a bunch of fame seekers. All those people are locked into this cult-like thinking. So it's very difficult to get them out of that. It's the technology, I think is going to revolution we're on the precipice of this we were talking about heath ledger earlier what happened to those kind of independent movies that i remember being in high school before going into film school and like watching those monsters ball candy these small heath i think independent movies that made you feel like they were just made for you they weren't like marvel or right right and we don't see those anymore because everything's changing in the industry for multiple reasons the strikes had a lot to do with it i think it's it's a strange paradox where you have more of an ability to reach an audience than ever before but there's fewer like writing positions movies being made there's the shortage of there's this hiring shortage but cameras more accessible than ever you were talking about the potential for someone to come along i mean i think it's only a matter of time
until it does happen. The Daily Wire is trying kind of with Pendragon Cycle. What's that? They were doing an Arthurian legend, their attempted Game of Thrones, which would be, if it were to land, could be massive. In my theory is it could be the tipping point because it's going non, my understanding is it's non-union. You have Angel Studios
and they're kind of trying to compete, but we've never had an alternative to the union model, the traditional production model, which drives that production cost because there's nothing stopping you from getting a camera and going out there and doing it except for the rigged game which says, well, we're going to block you. We won't distribute your movie. There's all these different parameters. You're not SAG sanctioned, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If Daily Wire could land the Pendragon cycle
and it were to be a solid enough story on the equivalence of Game of Thrones, it could change so much. But there's the recent Brett Cooper stuff that's going on. It's just so much. Brett Cooper leaving the Daily Wire. What's that story? She's no longer at the Daily Wire, the comment section. You know Brett Cooper? She created the comment section at the Daily Wire. The comment section?
The comments section. Are you aware of this, Jamie? A little bit. A little bit, yeah, and then they hired someone else to host it. Yeah, I'll break it down. What happened? She developed, they hired her. Like, we want you to start this YouTube channel for Gen Z. We want it to feel like you're a streamer. Let's hear what she says. Let's rewind that shit.
Let's hear what she has to say. Just a little bit. Hey, guys. Some of you have heard the rumors online, and the rumors are mostly true. Today, December 10th, will be my last day hosting the comment section and working for The Daily Wire. It is not true that I am being forced out. It was my own choice to leave. And believe me, this is bittersweet. I have had the most unbelievable three years helping to craft the show, building this community, and telling stories and sharing the truth every day. Through the comment section, you all have made me braver, more articulate, more thoughtful, more hopeful than I could have ever imagined. And I'm grateful that we spent this time together.
And I'm grateful that The Daily Wire gave us a platform to grow this community. But at this point in my life, I am ready to take on a new direction, both personally and professionally. This means new challenges and new endeavors, which I will share with you soon. As for this show, the comment section will continue with The Daily Wire. My producer, Reagan, is taking over as host of The Comment Section, and I wish her and The Daily Wire all the best. We have had three great years, and I am proud of what we've accomplished together. Leaving the show and the platforms that we've built is hard, but I'm very excited for what's to come. Knowing that we have brought so many people together. Okay, pause this. I'm not hearing this. So what I'm not hearing is, like, what caused? No one knows exactly.
There's speculation because the girl who took the place was her best, her maid of honor in her wedding. Like, best friend was the producer of the show. It'd be like Jamie taking your place. Except obviously not, you know. But that's what's happened now. And it's nosedived. It's pulling like it used to pull, like, half a million views per video. It's pulling 40,000 now. And there was this theory that they had trained Reagan with – they hired an acting coach because her mannerisms were the exact same, hand movements, everything.
We were talking about nonverbal communication, the importance of that. And it was eerie. She has started a YouTube channel that's already amassed half a million. And she hasn't posted any videos. So there's a lot of loyalists to her. But she grew this channel to over 4 million people in the last three years, as you were just hearing. And she starred in the Pendragon cycle. She used to act. But what was the problem, though? We don't know. We don't know.
There's speculation that she – it exploded the channel. So it's likely, if we're applying critical thinking to this, it's more than likely that she approached Jeremy Boring at Daily Wire. He's like, look, guys, I'd like to be paid more than what I'm making because I'm pulling more views than anybody at the Daily Wire, possibly. She was living on this farm with a commute. She was a little frustrated with that. Maybe it's she wanted to – there's speculation she wanted to run her show kind of from her house. But no one knows exactly. There's NDAs and everything. So it's hard when someone is a part of a channel and then their show blows up and they realize like, oh, I could have done this on my own, which is the reality. The reality is like being a part of a channel. Like it doesn't really get you much, obviously, because the new show only has 40,000 views.
Right. True. True. But Jeremy Boring's response would be, yeah, but we throw the Daily Wires advertising money behind these people. We spend a lot in advertising. We lose a lot of money before we make any money. Yeah. But from what shows? not the shows that are successful. The shows that are successful are successful. Like that you lose, that's like the record business version of arithmetic.
You can't buy the elusive intangible. Yeah, the record business is notoriously horrible with that. So they have a model where when they sign an artist, the artist gets an advance, right? and then the advance, you're responsible for so much. You're responsible for advertising. They take into account a bunch of artists they spend money on that doesn't create money. So they have all this Hollywood math that they apply. Hollywood accounting. And at the end of it, they make more than you, and you make almost nothing. So that's very likely a possibility. And they throw as much shit against the wall as possible.
Think of a record company. You know they might they might fund a bunch of different artists pre-do distribution Yeah, and then only one or two of them take off but those one or two of them Hey for suit that's Prince and he's getting fucked And meanwhile is a giant superstar like Prince had to change his name He's like, okay. Well you own Prince you guys don't okay. I'm this now. I'm a fucking squiggly line That's what he did. So it was the artist formerly known as Prince You know and you know that like Prince for a while when he was in was it Warner Brothers? whoever he was in dispute with, he changed his name to a symbol. Huh. And that was how he could still perform.
He's like, yeah, you don't own this, bitch. And there's probably a non-compete clause. That's just why she hasn't posted anything yet. Crazy. It's, yeah. But, you know, that's what you get if you want the shortcut, right? The shortcut is being a part of a channel. You know, I'm going to connect myself to a channel, and, you know, I'm going to agree to give them X amount percentage of what I do. it's really not a smart way to do it today and it's not necessary because today all you have to do is have a camera and a backdrop and just start recording and organically if your content is good
your thing can grow and then it's yours it's all yours and then getting advertising is not hard if you're successful you get an agent you get an advertising agent they bring you me undies ads and all kinds of shit next thing you know you're making money you're making money off your channel And then your channel grows organically and then you don't have to deal with executives telling you what kind of guests you should have on or what topics you should avoid or what things you should accentuate. We would like you to talk about this today. Like all that stuff is, you know, and then as you get more and more famous from your work, you realize, no, the people like me, like this is the reason why this show is going on. And I've got to pay these assholes 60 percent of everything I'm making. And this is dumb. If I was on YouTube independently, I would be rich right now. I'd be making good money. I'd have a nice car.
And instead, I'm getting a salary. And my salary is not really representative of how much income I'm bringing into the company. I mean, you've got someone like Jordan Peterson who did partner with the same company. And maybe that allows him to do more traveling over what they do, like the Jerusalem series. Right. But I bet he got a better deal. First of all, it's Jordan Peterson. He's already famous. And they would throw money at him. You know, like there's that famous thing with Steven Crowder where Steven Crowder. Yeah.
People were using that in context of this thing, this kind of. Yeah. So and the Crowder thing was kind of weird because he recorded a conversation, a private conversation that he had. Yeah. But the whole thing behind it is like you're getting money to agree to be a part of a company. And the only reason why they would be willing to give you that money is if they're going to make money. Like they have to take it a chance. I went through a similar thing with Spotify, but Spotify was great. There was no issues at all. It was like, we think this show is really valuable. We're going to give you a lot of money to be exclusive on Spotify.
And just that's it. Pretty simple. No input at all in terms of like who I should have on or what I should talk about. Or, you know, there was nothing. It was there was a few hiccups during the COVID days where, you know, they were experiencing so many attacks. They were they were getting like strong pressure to try to remove the podcast. and they didn't buckle. They hung in there. Good for them. Yeah, good for them. I'm very loyal to them because of that
because what they did was pretty extraordinary. A lot of people would have caved and they did not cave. But to bring it, you see how that now is going to, they've already filmed Pendragon Cycle, this whole thing, this Arthurian. So it's probably going to impact. Well, I hope it's good. Me too. The thing is like, who's writing it?
How good are the people that are writing it? How good is the story? It's all about the story. Yeah, it's all about the story. It's all about how good is it. I was thinking about that on the airplane. The logic of story, trying to connect all these dots and everything. I think there is an inherent... There are patterns. I was talking about mathematics, how I can't think about... I need a visual.
um i think when you're writing a movie you can when it clicks into place you can feel it and they call it cracking the story and they hire writers to crack the story almost like it's a math problem so to me that indicates that there's like this fabric this is how i think about it there's this fabric of reality that stories tap into that you're trying to connect connect to and you can so you feel it when it clicks in. Yeah. And you're almost, when it is, when it does click and you have that hook, you're like, this is the reason to make why this movie is interesting. Right, right, right. Then you're almost making it for the sake of the story, not the audience. But the audience will come as a consequence.
Yeah. As opposed to today where people think they can make movies for the audience, like Disney, but they're discarding the very fabric of the reality of these stories and thinking, well, we can change Snow White. Right. And then that screws them up. Yeah, well, it's also people like really resistant to that now. They're getting so upset about it. They don't want you to force feed them some sort of activist version of a story. They just want stories. They want the thing where, you know, you're saying like you get it.
Like, oh, we found it. This is the hook. This is the meat of the story. This is the exciting. This is the thing that resonates with people. That's why it's so frustrating when you go to a movie and that never happens. You never get hooked in. Yeah, because you can take the same story and tell it different ways. Logically, there's one ideal way. You're never going to quite get there. Right.
Because I was watching Beautiful Mind on the airplane, which is, I think, my favorite movie. I'm trying to think of one that's better. It's just... Amazing movie. Yeah. Yeah. That movie nailed it. Yeah. They nailed it. Maybe that's why I'm thinking so much about math and everything. Well, there's kind of a math to it, right?
That's my point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then Dunkirk. All right. So this blew my mind. So the golden ratio can be found in music, movies, everything. Then someone should be on your arm. This is the golden ratio. One, wait, one to 1.6. Then from here, one, wait, sorry, one to 1.6 in your hand, one to 1.6, your finger to the knuckle, one to 1.6. Now, if you break down what Nolan did in Dunkirk, this is probably getting too nerdy and everything. He took three different storylines, did what he does with the Shepard tone, and air, land, and sea. Land is a, the story takes place over a week. Air, an hour, sea, a day. and then he does with what he does with the shepherd tone which is in batman and all of his movies it's an ascending tone like a barbershop spiral that is infinite where you it's the first sound is like crescendo and then it fades out and the middle one is consistent and the top one
is going down and it sounds to the human ear infinite he took that which he's used in the bat the batman's bike the music he's used and all the prestige in most of his movies if you listen to dunkirk you hear this sound and it's just increasing tension you don't even notice it almost it's because it never reaches a crescendo so you feel like something's off but you never quite get there he then takes that and structures the freaking story as a shepherd tone to the point where at the very end and you are in that freaking the golden ratio so this is the meat of the movie in that final hour of air, the three stories converge. There's a mathematical formula to why. It's not a coincidence. And that was what separates him.
So there's a math, math isn't the right word. He's uniquely uninfluenced by pop culture too. True. He's, I think he famously doesn't have email. He's one of those guys who doesn't have a phone, doesn't have email, and obviously incredibly brilliant person. so he's obviously aware of email he's aware of phones but i think he's probably one of those guys who goes you know what the more that's coming in that's influencing me is it's gonna fuck with my ability to have a vision a unique personal vision based on what i know resonates with people and what i know resonates with me and how to make a story that really works yeah
I think you're writing for yourself you should treat yourself like that's what I do with my YouTube stuff you don't try and do it for annoying you do it for the thing you make the thing the best thing it can be which is what you want to see how do you judge it how do you know if it's good or not it's because what I would want to see I'm going to try and make it as good as what I would want to see
right yeah it is it's a fascinating medium Right. Because now it's also being challenged by these shows that are essentially long movies like Ozark. Yeah. Ozark's a long movie. Yeah. And you can get so much on the Sopranos. You get so much more into depth with the characters and the interactions and and everything that's below the boat. You know. Yeah. There's so much more when you have six seasons. Yeah. I heard you talking to Tarantino about that. Yeah. Well, he was talking. He's disparagingly talked about Yellowstone being a soap opera. But he also talked about Homeland.
About Homeland was an exception to that because it was essentially this amazing moment at the end of the first season. Yeah. Where the show is like a – Homeland first season was incredible. And it is like a movie. It's really good. It's really well made. And at the end of it, you're like, wow, this is a fucking incredible piece of just artwork. Have you seen Taylor Sheridan's new show, Landman? I haven't. I watched one episode. I haven't seen it all yet.
It takes a bit to get into it, but he's doing something that no one else is doing. I was a little thrown off by the lady who's playing his daughter because she's clearly like 30 years old. And I'm like, how are you telling me she's 17? This is crazy. It gets worse with that. But that's crazy. Like, that girl looks like she's got to be 25 years old at least. Do you think? Well, let's find out. Yeah. No, I know she is.
We looked at it. From a producer's perspective, yeah, you're not going to hire a freaking 18. You're going to hire someone over 18 for labor laws for sure. Well, how about to hire someone that's 18? 19 So then you can get around the label Okay, even 18, 19 At least she looks like she could be 17 Yeah, that's her 27 Alright, you nailed it
Beautiful lady, but looks like a lady Looks like a beautiful woman Does not look like a high school kid Good point And so when you're seeing that, it throws you off Like, what are you doing here? Touche This is nuts. Yeah. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah.
I'm not saying she looks bad at all. She looks great. She looks, but she looks like a mature woman. She doesn't look like a young child. Yeah. So when he's got this dynamic where he's dealing this like wild, rebellious teenage daughter. Yeah. And like, hey, bro, she's lying. That's like, when's the last time you saw her? That might not be the same person. Billy Bob's hilarious though.
He's great. He's fucking phenomenal. He has some great rants about climate change in oil. He's a phenomenal actor. Well, that's the other thing about climate change. Like, listen, if you really think that it's oil is the problem of climate change. Well, you better change your whole fucking life. Everything in your goddamn. Is that what he says? Everything in your goddamn life is made with oil. Everything in your hair, everything in your car, everything in your phone, everything in your fucking life is made with oil. and you're reading the elon's elon's biography on the airplane but do you think he could he thinks he could get the solution with the solar with the battery walls and the battery roof could that work i don't know um it may may work but you're still dealing with some kind of pollution from brake dust you're dealing with uh we we actually pulled this up recently we're talking about, it was an enormous percent of more pollutants are released into the atmosphere because of electric cars than combustion engines because of brake dust. So electric cars.
The one thing good about electric cars is specifically Teslas. Teslas have regenerative braking. So when I drive my Tesla, oftentimes I don't even have to hit the brakes because I just let off the gas when I'm getting close to an intersection. I gently tap the brakes when I get close to the line where the red light is. But when you're driving normally, it's like one foot driving. The brakes work, but you don't have to use them. Because when you let off the brakes, or let off the gas rather, the car slows itself. And it slows, it doesn't coast. Like you can't just hit 60 miles an hour and then let your foot off the gas and it'll just kind of cruise along. It doesn't do that. It slows down considerably because it's regenerating electricity through this regenerative braking aspect of it. So that probably has less brake dust than other electric cars. But, you know, there's electric cars that you'll drive, like if you drive like the Porsche Taycan, it's an amazing electric car. It doesn't have that regenerative braking thing, or at least
maybe it's a setting, and, you know, the car that I was in didn't have it turned on. But when you let off the gas, it just coasts like a regular car. So those cars are much heavier than regular cars, much heavier. And there's a problem with guardrails because of that. So guardrails are designed for a car that's a specific weight. And, you know, most cars weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000, 5,000 pounds. But when you add batteries, so if you have a car that's filled with enormous amounts of batteries, that car is a lot heavier than a regular car. And some of those cars just go right through those guardrails we because there's just too much mass yeah so you have more brake dust that gets into the air because you have to slow down this much larger heavier vehicle or much much more mass and when you're doing that you're generating more brake dust and the only solution to that we talked about it like uh carbon fiber brakes which are expensive and mostly in high performance cars, they have much less brake dust. So like, you know,
when you clean your car and you, if you're washing your car, you go to the wheels, there's all that dust that's around the dark dust that's around the wheel that you have to clean. That's all brake dust. So that's getting into the air. So if you live in a place that is high traffic and like stop and go traffic, you get brake dust everywhere. I'm reading an article that kind of disagrees with that. And it explains why here in this third paragraph. Okay. So it says many of the claims about EVs causing air pollution reference figures from Emission and Analytics, a private company. Founder Nick Molden said that its measurements show that particulate emissions can be 1,850 times more than those from modern car exhaust, which have become cleaner because of regulations. But the headline finding needs some context. The tests have not been peer-reviewed by scientists and the industry disputes the findings. That doesn't mean anything. What they just said doesn't mean anything. Just because they haven't been peer-reviewed and that the
industry disputes it, that doesn't mean that it's not true. This was the third article I got to that said that there's less because of regenerative braking. Right. What we just talked about. But regenerative braking, again, I don't think is in all electric cars. I know it's standard on Teslas. Crucially, all cars produce those pollutants. That's true. Not just electric version. That's true.
But that's not true. What they're saying is not true either, because these heavier cars produce more. That's just what they're saying. Measuring tiny particulates is very difficult. There are relatively few comparative studies so far. That means there's still uncertainty over whether the extra weight of EV batteries will result in worse particulate pollution. But it makes sense. It's logical. So if they're showing this, if he's done a study and it's showing this in a study, this is a logical conclusion. Is that an electric Range Rover? Yeah, I don't even know that they existed.
Was that a new thing? I don't know. I never saw one before. There's a lot now. It says, calculate that EVs are 400 kilograms heavier on average because of the bulky batteries. Yeah. So just because it hasn't been peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's true. And the reason why they're saying this is because they're trying to put it into context. Like, yes, electric vehicles are generally better for the environment, particularly if you have regenerative braking, but there's also an added element. And what the solution might be is to make carbon fiber brakes standard. It's carbon ceramic brakes, standard that you need them, just like you need catalytic inverters.
It would be more expensive, though. I never heard of that. Yeah, so most brakes have steel rotors. You know, steel hits this carbon, and it just releases more brake dust. Or steel hits the pads, releases more brake dust. I've got a hybrid RAV4. I love it. Yeah, well, those are really good on gas. I mean, something that's good on gas is going to be better for sure. Something that's bad on gas is going to burn more. But the bottom line is there's problems with all technologies in terms of whether or not they go into a landfill.
Like this is a giant problem with windmills. Windmills aren't efficient. They're gross looking. They pollute the landscape in terms of the way it looks. You just see these fucking windmills everywhere. And those things have to go in a landfill. So you have these enormous fiberglass propellers that now have to be buried in the ground. Billy Bob goes on a good rant about the wind. Does he? I don't remember what it was. He rips them apart.
Yeah, they're not effective. They're not good enough for what they do to the environment. You know, they kill whales. That's the other thing. You know, Trump talked about that, too. That these things, when they set these things up, you know, near the ocean, like the sound is fucking with these whales. Oh, I didn't. Yeah. It's not good. It's not the way to go. Maybe solar's better.
But, you know, if you have, like, enormous areas of land that are covered in solar panels, that looks gross, too. Yeah. But if we could just have, like, one designated area in the center of the – like, take, you know, a state and fucking make that state just a battery, maybe that would work. Yeah, maybe L.A. Maybe when L.A. burns to the ground, they go, look, it's already toxic. Let's just turn the policies into a battery. How are they going to rebuild if it's like, yeah, there's nothing we can do if this happens again? Well, it's also the fire insurance problem that a lot of insurance companies pulled their fire coverage because they're like, look, nothing's being done to stop these fires. We know the fires are coming. We're going to lose all of our money. We're just going to pull out.
And they did that. And so now a lot of these people that lost their homes were not insured. So now they're really fucked. And then you got Gavin Newsom on TV talking about speculators come in, land speculators doing his little fucking dance. And they're like, what are you guys doing over there? This is horrible. This is horrible. and what solutions are on the table. I'll tell you, it's not as simple as don't drill for oil. You know, like, God damn it. I don't see the mayor making it through this.
She doesn't seem like she should make it through. Wasn't she like some sort of a radical communist activist when she was younger too? I don't know. Yeah. That clip of her in the airport, really? Yeah. You're not good. Not responding at all. You look shell shocked and then smiling when she's on TV. We're gonna rebuild with a bunch of construction workers behind her It's like look we're rebuilding She's smiling. We're gonna read we're gonna get to work like you're not gonna get to work
You're not gonna get to work. You're not gonna have these people are gonna have the money to rebuild Where's the money gonna come from you gonna give them the money for those homes? You're talking now about 300 billion dollars worth of damage and counting, right? You can you gonna shell out 300 billion dollars to give those people their homes back When someone has an 82 million dollar home are you gonna give them that 82 million dollars and rather than pay teachers more money in North Carolina In the middle of Appalachia you have people with cheaper homes than anywhere in LA. They're not getting right money back There's no, they're not they're not even getting attention anymore No, that's what's crazy in line for fuel. They're waiting in line for propane fuel so they don't freeze to death Yeah, that's crazy crazy. I was just down there over the holidays and saw So my brother and I, we invested in a little, the only thing I've ever invested in, like that little Airbnb, like super cheap and it's just gone. Yeah, well, everything's gone there.
It was a crazy disaster. But again, you could say that's climate change. But the problem with that statement is that the climate has never been static. There has never been a moment in human history where the climate was absolutely predictable to the degree every year. It's just not the case. climate varies it has always varied the real question should be how much of an impact are we having on it and how much of an impact are we having on pollution the pollution the particulate is that's a real issue it's a real issue and if other countries aren't addressing that I read something find out if this is true that China right now is responsible for more pollutants in the atmosphere more carbon in the atmosphere then all the other countries would in doubt it
at all. I wouldn't doubt that. They're like majority of the pollutants in the atmosphere are coming from there and they're not going to change. So you switching to an electric car or you stop using a gas stove or you, whatever you're doing, it's not going to have an impact if CO2 is entirely what's going on. And even if we got down to climate neutral, that doesn't stop global warming. It doesn't stop a shift in the change that has always gone up and down throughout recorded history. When we do ice samples, when they do core samples, and they go back 10, 15, 20,000, 50,000 years, there's always been enormous shifts in the temperature. Half of North America was covered in a mile-high sheet of ice up until 12,000 years ago. So miles in some places, more than a mile. So there's always been shifts in the climate. Long before there was any Industrial Revolution long before there was any gas-powered cars China emissions to seed all developed nations combined Combined yeah, and they're not gonna change
That's they're not gonna they're gonna shift that that's what they do long term. I think China's both poses the Greatest potential threat still I heard there was a you had a CIA CIA, ex-CIA guy on who was talking about the 21-year plan for China that blew my mind. Because when I was in graduate school, it was like 80% of the other students were from China. And I'm not, no one believes that. There was multiple classes where I went in. I was the only non-China, not just American student, non-Chinese student. And there'd be 15 people in the class. When I showed my thesis film, I went in and the whole auditorium was Chinese. And every other film that played that night was in Chinese. Wow.
So you're like, and I tried to do a documentary on it, and then I was kind of, there were consequences. People didn't like that. All I was doing was asking questions, like, how did you end up coming straight for this? And it's a societal, there's a, you know, what's the word? The parents want to do it. There's a social aspect. It's like, it's viewed as something that you want to do. And then there was the one child policy for a long time so they can afford to do it. But it's crazy. Yeah. it's we're we're in a very strange time of narratives and truth where
narratives to many people are more important than objective truth and that's never good for anybody it's never good for anybody to ignore the reality of what's going on no and I've there's a lot of Peterson and you talked about this a lot the in the post-modernism the effect of post-modernism the fact that There's an infinite variety of interpretations to stories. But that doesn't mean that there's not – everything's not just a social construct. It doesn't mean that there's not an ideal to strive for. Yeah. And the problem with people that talk about climate change is they never talk about China emissions. They talk about America. Trump wants to pull us out of the Paris Accord.
They want to do this. They want to do that. Look at what's going on in the world. Like you're not going to stop China from producing more CO2 and more emissions than all the other developed nations combined. And you're not even talking about it. If you really wanted to address the problem, it would be that. That's the problem. That's the biggest part of the problem. What's the biggest offender? It's China. And they don't talk about that at all because they don't want to be racist.
So it's like they just want to concentrate on people that, you know, live in America. Yeah. Yeah. and then criticizing the idea of drilling for oil. Well, you said at the beginning of this conversation, too, you were talking about the potential for both sides, and we are in a strange time as well where we're seeing things coming from both sides that are very strange. This rethinking of Winston Churchill and everything, there's just— What's the rethinking of Winston Churchill? When Tucker Carlson had on—I'm forgetting the name of the historian. It doesn't matter.
Marner May, Daryl Cooper. Daryl Cooper, yeah. I think people ask me sometimes after all this video stuff they're like what's the what would you recommend reading and studying for critical thinking and I think Winston Churchill is the ultimate example of critical thinking because real thinking is all about thinking for yourself for the long term when everyone around you is telling you that you're wrong when the stakes are at their highest is what he was dealing with and it's such a fascinating time World War II I just think there's so much you could just study that conflict and gained so much insight one thing that my friend Chris DiStefano brought up on the podcast that blew me away was operation unthinkable I haven't heard that one that was a proposal from Winston Churchill at the end of World War two to go to war with Russia that the Soviet Union was getting too big and powerful and they would take the Nazis that they had they'd take the German soldiers and then go invade Russia I haven't heard that it wouldn't surprise me he was he did not like stalin because with roosevelt they they got buddy buddy but there's some my whole thesis was on this the untold story of churchill's role with harvard harvard's role
the president of harvard meeting with churchill secretly when the blitz was going on and roosevelt was up for re-election couldn't travel over there to meet with him because and this echoes to today exactly we were talking about 98 of the public were against involvement in world war ii that's why they called it the european conflict it's not we it's not our fight and he knew it was inevitable and he couldn't be seen talking to churchill in that way because they were publicly they were like nope lend lease program we're not assisting like if you watch darkest hour they do a good job of showing the extrangers like we can send horses to pull the weapons across the border but we can't be seen so he sent the president of harvard of all places this is where the secret scholar society came from it's the story and i found it in the harvard archive when i was researching for my thesis film whoa yeah and i was blown away i was like how is no one and it taps into oppenheimer so james b conant that guy on the left that's the president
of harvard this is afterwards churchill comes for an honorary degree after everything's won everything conant on the left flies over there meets with him they make a secret deal they have all this research they have they're ready to do radar it's developed but they can't build it they're cut off from the world all of europe has fallen except england they stand alone their darkest hour and he is desperate he's just trying to hold out until america will join imagine being in that position everyone around you is saying we have got to surrender we have got to negotiate and he's like no he's like no only when the last of us are choking in their own blood he's like we have to fight to the death that's not logical but it's what saved them when does illogical behavior save you that's something that connects to the very fabric of reality that goes beyond what we can articulate it connects like spirituality when does like living as though god existed saved them in a way so he negotiates with conant and they bring that tech back develop a secret lab at
Harvard to build it all. That's where sonar came from. Napalm. There was a special, the Harvard candle named after Harvard. It's a remarkable story. It's so deep. I could talk about it. You know what I found out last night? My friend Kurt Metzger told me this. We were talking about the Elon gaffe where he's like, my heart goes out to you. Like, hey, don't do that though. That's the perfect example of when you see a story, you believe it's true if you believe he's um a nazi you're gonna see him do a silly hand gesture and see that as that well he's saying my heart goes out to you but that is how the nazis did it yeah yeah but this is the thing this is what i found out last night that's also how they used to do the pledge of allegiance oh really the pledge of allegiance used to be done like this until the nazis came along and then we switched it to this your hand over your heart so we cut out that part there's going to be a screen grab of you well there's already a screen grab this is what's
funny um cnn during the the covet times in particular whenever i get in trouble the photo they would use of me was me at the ufc weigh-ins so when i do the weigh-ins i announce the weigh-ins i say welcome to the weigh-ins everybody i'm waving to the crowd that's what they did so they would use this photo of me so to try to make it look like i was some sort of a nazi whatever because i'm waving to the crowd and they take a freeze frame of it i'm like welcome to the weigh-ins everybody i'm i put my hands out to the crowd i'm saying hi to everybody i'll show you this jamie you probably could find it if you look for it but i'm going to show you what it looked like in the old days when i'm looking i was trying to find a different different explanation of i have a picture of it that's i was just digging for better versions well yeah that's it that's how they did the pledge of allegiance oh interesting how crazy is that that's crazy that's in 1942 yeah so this is you know and then we realize oh we can't do that anymore that's how the nazis do
It's right around that time. Pledge of Allegiance would be your right hand up in the air. Interesting. How crazy is that? Well, we were just getting into World War II, so we didn't have the views of Hitler embodied in us. Pretty bizarre, though. It is. You know? Yeah. Now you're not allowed to do that anymore. I didn't know that.
It's so funny because of this, there's all these photos of AOC with her arm out like this and Michelle Obama. It's like everybody's a Nazi. It's so dumb. You can go look at anybody and find that. Yeah, if you move your arms at all. You try to catch a ball. You know, anything you're doing with your arms up in the air, now you're a Nazi. Like, oh, my God. How about that Hindu guy that kept his arm up in the air for like 60 years? I'm not familiar. You ever seen that?
We talked about him the other day. Who brought him up? I did. Jimmy brought him up. So there's this guy who has not put his arm down in like some insane amount. His arm is like shriveled. It's useless. Why? It's a devotion to Lord Shiva. So to show his devotion, he decided, I'm going to keep my arm up forever. And now his arm's frozen in place.
And now he's like a really old man. That's what he looks like. Okay. How crazy is that? That's crazy. He has a useless right arm now. Look at his fingers are all twisted up and fucked up. His nails are all fucked up. His right arm is essentially completely useless. It just stays like that. It doesn't move anymore.
Power of stories. Nuts. Yeah, 1973, decided to raise his right arm 90 degrees to the air. His fingers have withered to the palm of his hand. His knuckles are white with rot, and his nails have grown long and twisted. Well, he's a Nazi. Oh, I didn't make that connection. I was like, why are you... That guy's doing a Nazi salute forever. I didn't think about that. I didn't think about that.
That's how dedicated he is to being a Nazi. Just connected. He won't even put the hand down. He's all in. All in forever till he dies. They're gonna have to get him in a super long coffin How's Elon handling this whole? He probably like what the yeah, he was definitely what the fuck and he's happy that the ADL of all people Defended him. Yeah, that was good. Yeah. Well, it's obvious like anybody But but all these people on Twitter are just chiming in saying it's clearly a Nazi salute He's doing a Nazi salute yeah no no so dumb it's so dumb it's not clearly yeah it's great the whole
thing's crazy but that's a sign of the times and they couldn't help it they saw a thing and they're like this is that we're gonna run with it he's it clearly showing he's a Nazi you know the Trump's in office and he's a Nazi and this is what fascism is real folks here it is this my heart goes out to you it's just weird it's illogical and weird but it's a sign of this thing that is a real problem in today where people will pretend something is something other than what it is if it suits their narrative right and that's what this is yes the power story yeah the power story that is that really truly is a great example of the power of story because the story that everyone's afraid of is that this right-wing dictator has gotten into power and he's brought with him this billionaire oligarch who happens to be one of the richest men,
if not the richest person, on the planet Earth. And this guy is secretly a Nazi. And he's been hiding it all these days until Trump got in office. He'd make a great movie. Let's go! Yeah, yeah. He'd make a great movie. Yeah. It's... Well, it's fascinating.
But it also... what it does is it opens the door for people like yourself. It opens the door for reasonable, logical people who can talk about things in an objective, critical way and just like analyze, well, what is this? Why do we think this? What is the cause of this? And that's really how you got on the map by just being a voice of reason. And in a time where there's very little reason anybody that steps up that says you know and says something that makes people resonate it resonates with people to the point where like yes more of this guy more people like that like i like how this guy thinks i like how this guy talks and uh that's what i got out of it it's surreal i don't know i don't think about it i try not well you shouldn't think about it yeah you can't think yeah well then you get audience capture right right and you freeze too it's like he's like you're acting he's like you can't you think about like oh 100,000 people might see what I'm gonna
see then you just can't talk that's probably why Christopher Nolan doesn't have a phone you know same kind of thing to make the kind of films have you reached out to him no I haven't I don't even know if he does any interviews I don't know rarely I would love to have on though I'm a huge fan of his work I think he's brilliant yeah obviously he's not just brilliant like amazing like unusual Yeah. Uniquely brilliant. He's got this mathematical mind. And he approaches story in that way. So did Kubrick. There's... A lot of parallels there, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Kubrick in his spare time would do complex math. I wish. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So his films were all, like Kubrick's films all had like encoded things in there. Yeah, I heard you talking to Tarantino or somebody about the lost cut of Eyes Wide Shut. Eyes Wide Shut. Yeah, it was Roger Avery. Okay.
Roger Avery and Tarantino. And so Roger Avery was discussing how there was supposed to be a narrator through Eyes Wide Shut. And they changed that. And after he died, when Kubrick died, before they made a different cut of the film. And he firmly believes that it should be like recut and it should be done with a narrator. and in AI you could actually probably do Kubrick narrating if you wanted to you know you could get samples of his voice and he could narrate it um but that would you know you you would also like how would you know how he would cut it you'd kind of be fucking around but apparently there's many scenes that never made it into it that Kubrick wanted in and then in the final cut they changed yeah the shining is filled with them it's filled with like there's all the moon landing conspiracies have all clung on to it.
Because the room number, like the haunted room, I think it's 237. Is that the room? Whatever the number is, is the amount of miles and hundreds of thousands between Earth and the moon. The little boy, when he's in the hallway, is wearing the Apollo 11 t-shirt.
He's got a sweater that has the Apollo rocket on it. There's all sorts of weird shit that these people cling to. I love stuff like that. Oh, it's fascinating. There's a whole documentary on it, the subtext behind The Shining. Shining is a fucking incredible movie, which, by the way, which is really interesting, Stephen King didn't even like. He didn't like that movie, which is so crazy because it was different than his novel. So in his novel, the Jack Nicholson character, I forget the name. The Jack Nicholson character starts off normal and becomes crazier and crazier.
and what he didn't like is that Jack Nicholson is pretty on tilt right away and seems off from the very beginning and then just descent into madness accelerates very quickly. That's what I was talking about. There's different ways to tell that same story. You can feel it when it kind of clicks in, which is right. The audience doesn't lie. And then Stephen King did his own version of The Shining as a television miniseries. Did he? Yeah, but it wasn't.
It wasn't very good. It wasn't effective. There you go. There was something about it. It just didn't work the same way. That elusive, intangible thing that can't be bought, can't be replicated. Everyone's after it. Yeah. No one can articulate it. Yeah. What makes a good actor?
Why was Heath Ledger a good actor? Right. And that's another great example of why those boats are superfluous to everything else. Yeah. It's all about telling the story, right? And some people, what's going on? Kubrick's assistant says in an interview in 2013, like a year after the movie came out, that Kubrick would have agreed that 70% to 80% of that movie was pure gibberish. Because he wouldn't be doing stuff like that. Which movie?
I was watching it? Room 237, the one about the shining and all the hidden stuff behind it. But even 80% is too pure gibberish. What does that mean? That means 20% is legit? Just, I mean, he wouldn't, it's just that I hear he wouldn't tell an audience what to think or how to think. And if they came out thinking something different than him, that's fine. It's hard to say, though, because someone saying that, that is their personal assistant, they're not speaking for Kubrick. Stephen King said the same thing when he saw it. He said he had to turn it off because it was bullshit. Turn what off?
The movie. The Shining itself. No, no, no. Room 237. The documentary about The Shining. Right, but Stephen King also didn't like The Shining. You know, these are like people's personal opinions on things. It doesn't mean it's not true. And it's also like Kubrick in many of his films did have like hidden subtext and a lot. He was a fascinating guy. Like all like 2001.
2001 is a fascinating movie. You miss a lot of it when you have to like rewatch it over and over again to get what he was trying to say. Like what what was he doing in that film? Like what was he? There's many, many layers to his films that I, you know, he had his own way of doing it. He might not have done it mathematically with the score the way Christopher Nolan did, but there was something to it. Mathematically, I shouldn't even say that word, though, because it's just patterns. He's still using patterns. Mathematics is just a language that allows us to articulate a form of those patterns. That said, what Stephen King said and what Kubrick's assistant said also rings true because people try to find patterns in everything, even patterns that don't exist. Yeah, true.
They always try to find conspiracies that don't exist and patterns that don't exist. There's like a natural inclination that people have to like uncover secrets. Like what's the secret behind this? What is he really saying? Yeah. Yeah. What's he really doing? Yeah. Are you still going to make films? Are you more committed? Do you feel like this thing that you're doing, what is your secret scholar?
what is your youtube page secret scholar societies is the youtube channel why'd you decide to call it that that story i was telling you that was from yeah there was um right before the viral video i was working on a short film it's there's a little experimental i shouldn't call it a short film it was me with a camera and that music teacher in like a month we threw this thing together it's not a movie so people love to because it's like warren's last movie is like it's like dude it's Don't hold that to the standard of like the other ones you can hold to a standard of a movie. But that one was just an experimental like me by myself. I would love to keep doing that. Right now it's about putting food on the table and fighting for the algorithm, keeping the algorithm on my side. Right. Because you're unemployed.
Right. And there's potential to teach, but I'm making more doing what I'm doing. Yeah. And you're teaching by doing that too. You are. You can look at it, I guess. I do look at it that way because any kind of really intelligent discourse where you get to watch it and observe people talking about things. And you've done a lot of really good stuff where you're breaking down interviews and breaking down congressional testimonies and things like that. And the way people are reacting to things and how people are laying stuff out. All that stuff is very educational. And for young people in particular, maybe people that found you through those initial videos, then they'll be able to see how you sort of break down all of these interactions.
And they'll be able to sort of think that way themselves. Like, oh, why does a person say things that way? What are they trying to do? Why are they appealing to authority? Why is it important to recognize that this is a pattern to shut down criticism? and then why is it that this is not necessarily the truth? Yeah, the art of critical thinking. I was kind of thinking like Sherlock Holmes was my, as a kid, my favorite fictional character. And I think it appealed. He was really the first kind of superhero serial monthly episodes,
Strand Magazine. Sure. And he has no superpowers, just his mind, which makes us feel like I could do that if I could just see the world like him. He has nothing I don't have technically. And he does it. We're presented the same information. It's just what he does with that information. It makes you feel like you have a potential for that power within you. You just got to know how to unlock it. So that's kind of playing with like the art of that's why the slogan on the channel is the art of critical thinking. It was his was the science of deduction. but yeah it is an art too though because when someone does it really well it's kind of beautiful critical thinking when you watch like a conversation between two people and they break there's a there's an igniting of your your mind that is kind of beautiful it's artistic hopefully hopefully you can sometimes
get there you know I think I think you do get there you get there for sure you've gotten there with me I think there's a lot of people that do that and it's that that kind of critical thinking people they gravitate towards it because there's not a lot of it in the world and especially if you live in if you exist day-to-day in a corporate culture where you're sort of locked in to whatever ideology your company is and you're trying to make your way up the company ladder so there's like office politics and there's a you know certain sort of mentality and narrative that's been distributed through the company and you're connected to it, like you're very suppressed and your thinking is very boxed in and, you know, you're forced to put those blinders on that we talked about earlier. You have to put those on if you want to move in the company. If you want to exist, like if you're in an environment that
requires you to behave and think a certain way in order to succeed, well, you want to succeed. So what are the rules of this game I'm playing? Okay. You know, if you're playing poker, you have rules, right? If you're playing chess, you have rules and you can't succeed without following the rules. And that's the case in everything. But oftentimes in society, when you exist in a corporate environment or any kind of, especially an educational environment, right? If you exist in an academic environment, it was very clear rules. And if you do not follow those rules, you will not succeed. If you go against the people that are in charge, you're going to, like what happened to you? You're going to get fired. You're going to get removed. You have to follow the rules if you want to succeed. And people feel very suppressed by that because they know that these rules aren't necessarily just. They're not necessarily accurate. They're not objective. They're not reasonable. They're not logical. They're just the rules. People hate the rules
when they're just the rules. Especially students. Yeah. Especially young people, man. Yeah. And they can sniff that out so fast. And now there's examples of the rules being bullshit. Now, Because of your show and a bunch of your Jordan Peterson a bunch of different things that are available now for young people to consume They can realize like no these people that are making these rules are idiots. They're assholes and they might be intelligent They might have a good education They might have a lot of information that they can like spit out that makes them seem logical but they're not looking at things correctly they're they're captured by a narrative Yeah Reading Elon's books, like on the airplane, he had that algorithm. It's essentially, if there's a regulation, if there's a rule, figure out who's requiring that rule, question it.
I forget the other ones, but it's making it all more efficient. It all stems from just questioning everything. That's what's going to be really interesting about him becoming a part of the Department of Government Efficiency. Like, if he's going to apply that to the most inefficient. I bet he will. because he would, it says, right, it's like he would go around preaching this algorithm. And he genuinely believed it. And it makes logical sense. There's a logical flow to him and his decision making that's laid out in that biography. Yeah. But you're also going against a culture that has operated with impunity for so long and has grown exponentially. Like there's more government agencies than there have been years of the government, which is crazy.
That's crazy. They just keep making new government agencies. And the way to combat that? Make another one. Make another government agency that corrects all the government agencies' inefficiencies. Yeah. Whew. It's going to be, to me, the Department of Government Efficiency and then the Make America Healthy Again movement, those are the two most fascinating things that are going on simultaneously with the Trump administration. I'm so curious because there's so many hurdles with whatever Bobby Kennedy is going to have to jump through to make real change.
And you're seeing the response to that, like red dye number three getting pulled by the Biden administration. Like, hey, motherfuckers, you could have done that a long time ago. You knew that stuff shouldn't have been in food. It's not in food in Canada. You knew that shouldn't have been in food. You waited until right before Bobby Kennedy got in where you know he's going to make it outlawed. You know he's going to get rid of all that. And you see the resistance to it. You're seeing this resistance to fluoride being removed from the drinking water. Everybody's saying, oh, no, we need fluoride for teeth. Like, brush your fucking teeth, bitch.
Let's not put neurotoxic chemicals in everybody's water. The way I describe it, I said, it's like, people are dying of skin cancer. Let's put sunscreen in the apples. Like, no, no. Put sunscreen on, motherfucker. Or don't. It's probably bad for you, too. There's a lot of evidence that that's not good for you. that really like progressive sun exposure is the way to do it. And the real problem is that no one gets sun exposure and then you get too much all at once, and that's how you get sunburned.
Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what he does with education. Boy, good luck. We need. Yeah. That's one thing I miss. I do miss teaching. I miss being in the classroom like that with those kids. Well, I think you should definitely do more of that, but I'm really happy you're doing what you're doing. Thank you.
I appreciate that. Like I said, when I saw you, I was like, oh, is this young, intelligent guy super reasonable? I look younger than I am. How old are you? 37. Oh, you're still young. I'm 57. I'm old. I'm all allowed to call. You're just a kid.
I wish. But, you know, it's like it's an important service. It really is. And we need and there's more people like that now in the public eye than I think has ever been because of YouTube, especially in terms of the impact. Like, what's the most watched video that you have? Like, how many views does it have? A million. Okay. Just imagine a lecture that reaches a million people. When does that ever happen? Peter was talking about this Gutenberg revolution of YouTube.
And there's only one other professor. Okay, you've got like Eric Weinstein and all that. Okay, putting all of them aside. Sam Richardson, School of Communications. It's the only, and he's doing it. Every class is streamed live. And the university is cool with it. All the students are cool with it. There are 200 students in the auditorium. And they come up on stage and he's applying critical. He challenged them on the CEO of Papa John's concept where he got fired for saying the N-word with the context of that's not a good thing to say.
And it's really interesting to see. And his office hours, I got to join him for his office hours and was live streamed. That's just using this technology in such a remarkable way. There's so much potential for that in schools and education. But everyone's so afraid because they don't want to put themselves out there. That school was terrified that their name would get out there. They're so used to going through life without any ability for the public to see what's going on because no one would care. First of all, no one cares. And then suddenly there's the potential and it changes your world. And the question is, look, if you're that scared of transparency, you're probably doing something wrong. Right.
It's not just what you do, but how you do it. Right. Right. And you should never be scared of discussions. Yeah. Especially if you're an educational institution. You should never be scared of discussions. Like it's one of the most important things. Yes. This technology is incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it's nuts.
And it never existed before. And there's a lot of resistance because there's been gatekeepers to information that have existed for the longest time, and it made the distribution of propaganda much more easy. Much, much easier and much more effective. Yeah. And now that doesn't work anymore because these things like this is bigger than all those things. Why? Because it's not full of shit. It's that simple. Right.
Interesting conversations from people that aren't full of shit. Yeah. It turns out that's what people actually want. They've just been dumped on with nonsense for so long that people have got accustomed to thinking, no, that's what you're supposed to get. You're supposed to get a late night talk show host version of what's happening in politics. That's what you're supposed to get. You need people with integrity. So I would say thank you for having the integrity. How many people, when presented with Kamala Harris or Kamala Harris, to do that interview, to be like, no, we're going to do it for real. If we're going to do it, I'll do it. Yeah.
It's like there's just so many other people would have just compromised. I thought about it. I thought about, I'm sitting around like, how do I do it? Sure, that's just tough. I didn't know. There's a concept in jujitsu that the Gracies came up with about cooking someone. And the idea is like someone can spaz out in the beginning. They can be real strong and pull out of submissions. But eventually, I'm going to cook them. Eventually, I'm going to keep hitting my moves until I'm going to get to a dominant position. They're going to get tired.
And I'm going to cook them. And then I'm going to submit them. and you need time to do that if you had a if hoist gracie had a jujitsu match with a giant bodybuilder and the match was only 10 seconds long he might not be able to get the guy in 10 seconds he doesn't have enough time but if you give hoist gracie an hour that guy's gonna get cooked right and the thing about a conversation like with the kamala harris thing was like i genuinely just wanted to talk to her i thought i could like have a real conversation i've seen her be really funny this is like really funny video of her meeting her uh her uh mother-in-law and father-in-law for the first time and that the woman grabs her face she's oh look at you like doug emhoff's mom grabs her face do you beautiful like it was really funny like she's laughing hard but she's laughing like it's authentic it's a really fun see if you can find it it's very
funny. And I was like, that person's in there. And that person is dealing with incredible pressure of being in front of millions of people. They're all scrutinizing every word she says. And that pressure causes people to bumble their words and say things in cycles because they're trying to dismount. They don't know how to. Maybe they're not the best public speaker. Maybe they're not the most articulate at forming sentences, but they have good ideas. And you've got to get those people comfortable you got to find out what what what is in there and so my thought was like there was a few things they didn't want to talk about they initially didn't want to talk about internet censorship but then they changed their mind and did want to talk about it which i thought was interesting like they had maybe they had a solution they said if he throws this at you you're going to say this okay we got it okay let's talk about tell him we want to talk about internet censorship they didn't want to talk about the legalization of marijuana but that was probably because of
of a prosecutorial record. You know, she prosecuted a lot of people for marijuana crimes. So I was like, okay, we don't have to talk about those things. I'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. I don't care. I just want to get to you. And you give me three hours, I'll find out who you are. We could talk about nature. We could talk about the environment. We could talk about space. We could talk about, do you believe in reincarnation?
Like, I'll get to who you are. I want to get to who you are. I got to cook you. Why wouldn't she do that? Because she didn't want to get cooked. Because it's scary. Because you could fucking bumble it. You could fuck up. You know, or you could be Trump. Where he comes in, he doesn't give a fuck. There's no discussion whatsoever about topics.
He'll talk about anything. And just talk. And that guy would talk for three fucking hours. No problem at all. No problems. Didn't ask to edit it. They wanted to know whether they had editing control. They wanted to be able to edit things out. Like if she did Bumble, which is Trump's big lawsuit with CBS because of 60 Minutes, because they edited her answers that made her seem like she had a more intelligent answer, which is essentially election interference. In the debate? Yeah. No, an interview.
So there was a Kamala Harris interview and Trump sued. And there's a lawsuit that's still going on right now. It is CBS, correct? What were his ground? Because they changed her answer. So someone fucked up and released like a teaser of the conversation. And in the teaser, she was bumbling and fumbling to answer this question. And in the actual show on CBS, they had edited that and put in a completely different answer to something else as the answer to this question that seemed more logical and made more sense. It was much more succinct and short. And he was saying, like, you fucking idiots. It's like you did this. You released it on video on the Internet first, and then you had a different version on CBS.
Do you think people don't remember something that was just released like two days ago as like a preview to this thing? But in between the time that the video his this is Trump's argument in between the time the video was released on the Internet and the response that it got all the negativity and all the criticism that it got and all the backlash to how she responded to that question. They edited it and changed the response. And so he's suing. And he's got a point. He's got a real point because you shouldn't allow them to edit it and make it look like it was better than it really was. I mean, this is not just a conversation where someone fucked up about they made a flub and they said, oh, can you take that out? No, this is like a response to critical policy issues that are going to affect the entire country if you run into president. If you become president, do you know how to address a situation? Do you have a plan? Do you know what this problem is and do you have an actual solution?
And if you don't and if you're kind of bumbling around your words, people should be able to see that because that's one of the things that we're deciding this election on. So for someone like her that's had those kind of experiences where she said the wrong thing and said things like, God, I wish I had a chance to reconsider that. I would have said it differently because you just that thing that you say, even if it's under a high pressure situation, like an interview on CBS, that high pressure situation that caused you to fumble. Now people are going to say that is your opinion, period. This is your perspective, period, where meanwhile, if she had time to consider that question and come up with a logical answer and then like rehearse that logical answer and been ready, she might have done a much better job. so that's the fear of not having any power over editing because in a three-hour conversation you can't really prepare i think they did think they had a preparation the only thing that makes sense to me is why they would just change their tune on internet censorship that they wanted to talk about that they must have had some sort of logical reason why a certain amount of censorship is important because you want to protect against misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. And so this was something that Tim Walsh was saying openly when he was on the campaign trail,
is that free speech does not include hate speech, but it does. How do you define hate speech? Exactly. Exactly. Because your definition of hate speech might just be misgendering Caitlyn Jenner. That might be hate speech. So if you're talking about Bruce Jenner winning the decathlon, what are we saying? If you can't say Bruce Jenner, because if you want to look at the reality of this biological male who wins the Olympics as a male and then transitions to becoming a woman, if you're telling me that I can no longer discuss the fact that this was a biological male with a different name and it's hate speech, well, you've essentially put the handcuffs on reality. Church, the quote, my favorite Churchill quote, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others and i use that if anyone if anyone tries to get into the free speech debate i do think the approach that elon's using on x short of the law freedom
speech short of the law we already have that objective line yeah framework we know when it's crossed that's what the law is there for we don't need any other subjective interpretations yeah what is hate speech all what's happening in england it doesn't mean that there's not potential for someone to misuse it. Same way democracy is going to end in inequality in certain areas. You're going to have inequality no matter what we do because there's going to be in capitalism. Capitalism is the worst economic approach except every other one. There's problems to it. That's right. That's right. People love when they debate you, they point out these little flaws. Well, here's an anecdote of how hate speech was used. Here's a potential, of course, there's going to be potential flaws, but it doesn't mean you have a better alternative. What is your alternative solution? Exactly.
Exactly. Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed talking to you. I really enjoy what you're doing. I appreciate you. And thank you for being here. Tell everybody again, it's Secret Scholar Society. Yeah, Warren Smith-Secret Scholar Society. On YouTube. On YouTube. And that's the only thing you're using currently? I'm on X.
It's WTSmith17 for some reason. Secret Scholars is the handle on YouTube and on Patreon you have a Secret Scholars thing if you go to Patreon you can watch behind the scenes beautiful, perfect love Patreon, I love what they do thank you very much thank you for having me, I really appreciate it bye everybody
Thank you.