The Joe Rogan Experience - #2261 - Warren Smith
Episode Date: January 23, 2025Warren Smith is an educator and founder of the Secret Scholars on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/@SecretScholars Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/ROGAN and find out how you can get 4 months of ...ExpressVPN free! Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings! Download the DraftKings app today! Sign-up using dkng.co/rogan or through my promo code ROGAN. GAMBLING PROBLEM? CALL 1-800-GAMBLER, (800) 327-5050 or visit gamblinghelplinema.org (MA). Call 877-8-HOPENY/text HOPENY (467369) (NY). Please Gamble Responsibly. 888-789-7777/visit ccpg.org (CT) or visit www.mdgamblinghelp.org (MD).21+ and present in most states. (18+ DC/KY/NH/WY). Void in ONT/OR/NH. Eligibility restrictions apply. On behalf of Boot Hill Casino & Resort (KS). 1 per new customer. Min. $5 deposit. Min. $5 bet. Max. $200 issued as non-withdrawable Bonus Bets that expire in 7 days (168 hours). Stake removed from payout. Terms: dkng.co/dk-offer-terms. Ends 2/9/25 at 11:59 PM ET. Sponsored by DK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Joe Rogan podcast, checking out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Shrain by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
How are you?
Pleasure to meet you.
Thank you for having me.
My pleasure.
I wound up seeing you, as many people did, on those videos that you were making where
you were talking to students, you know,
just kind of like exploring critical thinking and asking students questions
and why they're upset about certain things and getting to the bottom. And I'm
like, wow, this guy's 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 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 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...
Sorry, I 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
It'll our name might get out there, which is their primary
You know concern I think and do you not want their name to get out there? I just know it doesn't feel right. Okay, I
No, it doesn't feel right. Okay. I am
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.
When I was a teacher, I was teaching multimedia,
like what we're doing now, working with cameras,
did a lot of 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 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.
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 pockets here.
I'll sit down and be on camera. You asked me whatever you want. Well, you know,
how have your thoughts on Harry Potter changed given JK Rowling's bigoted
opinions? And so that's where the video came from. So I don't,
I just want to be clear. I don't teach. I wasn't like,
we're going to sit down to learn in the moment
We do have conversations like that because when you are doing something like this with students
Well, what are you gonna talk about right kill two birds with one stone to be as effective as you can
And said a lot of students have questions like I had students asking what's the difference between?
Fascism socialism. What's the difference between a Democrat and a Republican? They don't know
They're genuinely curious and sometimes you can get another... I had one teacher that,
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,
not... I think Romania, I'm blanking but and so he had a very different political perspective.
And when you're in those debates, the kids were like locked in and you can tell.
Normally they're just making noise and then they're just quiet and their 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, okay, 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's 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.
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 of the other that 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 get these shouty sort of polarizing
arguments.
I've been playing with the idea of how we see
the world through stories.
I think that has a lot to do with it.
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 thinking for yourself to contend with the stories
that make up the world.
Because a lot of the stories are nonsense,
some are true.
And there's usually a middle ground.
And and my backgrounds in filmmaking,
I kind of fell into teaching.
And I spent time in L.A.
and made some movies and I teach at Emerson
a filmmaking course still where I went to grad school
and got my master's in film was 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 the great thinkers.
Movies will be the artifacts that people look back on for our time, you know, being museums
and things like that.
Sure.
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Yeah.
So no, I, 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 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 really just shows. If you really think about
it, 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 the 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 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
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 that they can 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.
Talking. 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.
Marlon Brando is probably the first example of someone
who sounds like a real person.
This is what I really expect a person to be
behaving like on the waterfront, under duress.
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.
Like Heath Ledger is my favorite actor of all time
and had a huge impact on me.
That's why I went into filmmaking.
And he, 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. They 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 who would have 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 it's politically incorrect,
Papa John CEO, right, with no context,
it's a larger issue.
But it's just fascinating how that correlates
beyond just film to...
It's true that most communication is non-verbal.
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 these videos when you initially did it
Did you have any idea of the impact that it was gonna have the I mean?
Did you did you think like oh, this is actually like really unique and interesting
I think people are gonna really enjoy this or did were you like really shocked
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, protests claiming Emerson was
racist, which is like, it's 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 did you 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 just being like guys I think Trump might win this. Yeah. We're not 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, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. But that, suddenly it's so difficult to articulate
what that does to someone like me, an average viewer,
like a genuine lover of this space.
So it's surreal to be here.
Because 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, I don't wanna 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 will want to think, the
big thing is we want to think that 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 thought 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. Right. This guy really doesn't know much more than like my
my dad or what's the difference, what makes you a professor, what qualifies you and often there's
just this, and that's what
going back to that core thesis if we see the world through stories
mmm professor means something yes politician means something these are
experts yeah they're not much different than us when you were in school so you
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 fun
We did in front of a live audience and then we updated the crowd whenever and then when marijuana became legal Burt Christchurch takes
A shirt off 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 it 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. Mm-hmm
You were so wrong. Yeah, how could you get something? Yeah, so wrong
Yeah, and it was just fascinating to watch
What's supposed to be the news, right?
So it's supposed 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
You know, there's 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 chief of the greatest army the
world has ever known. It's just for us as comedians we're like this is gonna 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. Yeah
But it was it was a real wake-up call for a lot of people that this system is not
Is not really as well managed as we'd like to believe it is
Yeah, you know, I'm just trying to go back to those days and think about it but
it was Emerson 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 gonna devote the four hours to talk about the problematic racism occurring at Emerson
so we're all sitting around and
But the white students were not allowed to speak we had to concede our space for four hours and actually like what?
Why was that what was was the reason given for that Because it was the moral right thing to do, because we, they said to me, I remember he
said, I said, what can I, I did say what, I was like, what can I do about this?
I would genuinely, I genuinely believed everything.
I was kind of, 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's, 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 can't you gotta turn in the work or you're gonna fail the class. And my first teaching gig occurred shortly after that in the 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.
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 when I was saying. Don't forget to be compassionate because that student is black 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.
Why was it articulated that it was so difficult for her uniquely difficult as a black student
Abra cadabra, yeah, it's just like micro. That's the thing about yeah about these claims
So is there is no concrete evidence. It's things like microaggressions. Someone made a reference about fried chicken that was
like microaggressions. Someone made a reference about fried chicken that was... I've heard that one. That happened to my mom as a professor. Runs a study abroad
program. She said, we're really excited. This place is um, they have really...
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. So, 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 I?
To this day. It's one of those things. It's 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 it loves delicious food loves a good fried chicken
Have you tried gusses in town is that the is that the where you get the slabs of meat? No, no
That's Terry Blacks, but Gus's fried chicken is in Austin
Fantastic, so the best fried chicken you're ever gonna have in your life
But if you brought that up to a black friend, they might like
What the fuck you trying to say like I'm not trying to foods good good food
Like let's go eat good food and keep that analogy in your mind about like the boats floating on the surface
Hmm, 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 rice unless you want it to be so 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 gonna start seeing what you believe to be true.
You're gonna start finding hints of it.
Right.
And it's true as well for 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 gonna see those lessons when they occur in life and it's going to be a help, be a
guiding star for you. It can be wielded in both ways. It's like the
response that I got about JK Rowling. It was the ContraPoints YouTuber, everyone
was like, you gotta counter ContraPoint, she's the one who's taking down JK Rowling.
The argument essentially is, I'm so done arguing,
I'm not even gonna debate this.
If anyone who believes in transphobia
can see that JK 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 in 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. If you want to have a discussion, we can't. You don't
see it, well we're done. Well, 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 This is why this is transphobic. This is why this is sexist.
Like 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,
and I found Jordan Peterson, I was like,
yeah, this guy, look at look at this is really interesting and
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
Is she but it was often a formation of that pattern?
I just can't do this with you Warren right blah blah blah
And 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. It'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 predicted
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 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
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 now. It got real weird if people would counter and see Joe be
But like you're you're you're taking the extreme you're claiming that trans people walking around with erections that it allows
For that capacity it allows for that to occur. Mm-hmm. I went after all this craziness occurred
Capacity it allows for that to occur. Mm-hmm. I went 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 we got fine
They were deeply
Concerned about what I was doing and right you're talking to too many people from the right
I
Sat down with destiny for six hours, but it's never enough.
It's, 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 is 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
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
Ostracization 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'm done talking to you like this is clean 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 the logical fallacies
You don't have to control 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 a way that's
also not logical. And so they dig their heels in on their ideology.
The left digs their heels in.
And you know, you have things like people say,
people on the left don't get it.
People on the left, it's like, no,
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. Exactly.
And I really don't like it because of me.
Like, I don't fit in there. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. I've been
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slash audio. 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 and she'll never deviate from that
My parents are the same right exactly the same there. I'd rather be homeless blue no matter who right there just locked in
Yeah, yeah, yes, you know the it's
I'm just I don't I
Dread the quote. I don't dread the question of are you a Republican or different?
It's like who cares it doesn't I'm not a part of you need I'm just gonna be yeah call it as I see it
Follow the logic. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to be on a team. Right doesn't make sense at all
even for someone like me like, you know who?
Yeah, I went to the inauguration, you know, I was
Bizarre, but I don't consider myself a Republican. I don't consider myself a Democrat either
I consider myself an American
I just 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 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 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 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 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. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think there is a power in truth
It can be felt like you're saying and that's the under beneath the boats
Yeah surface that which we can't articulate we can't explain how we know these,
how we can sense that off someone
when they're bullshitting.
You can feel it.
So as a teacher, you really learn that reality
if you're gonna be effective.
First thing I would say on the first day to my students
is by law, by ethical bounds,
there are gonna be some things I can't tell you,
confidentiality, whatever, but I will never never I promise I will never tell you something. I know to be untrue
mmm, they try and embody that through all 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
That wasn't an art. No, I'm talking about the ones where like the kids get kicked out of high school. Oh
Yeah, there's like gangs drugs, you know, mmm. Yeah
Yeah
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 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.
I was watching this left wing podcast where they were discussing being gaslit about the
problems with violence and 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
under-reported 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.
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.
Just don't have that mind.
So he broke it down, like, 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.
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.
And we should say he's a black gentleman.
So he says the colleagues told him, don't publish this, warning, you'll ruin 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. But if anyone who comes in my office,
0.5, 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, 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 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
It's 40% across whatever color the driver is. Mm-hmm. That means we've done
Correct. We've done it right if it was
60% white drivers were recovering conscious. We should be pulling over his arguments. We should be pulling 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 going to judge each case based on a merit, regardless of, because 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.
OK, but you turned down more black people than white.
OK, so according to your logic, for 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 you 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 like looking at it through the lens of what are we trying to achieve and seeing
if that achievement is even, then there's nothing like, 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.
It's trying to boil that down as simple as I can.
And so that was problematic for a lot of people. They did 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, like the default rate?
70% of the people I turned down. Let's say
70% of
Blood 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 point five5 default rate and that's the end result. Right. Can you prove that I'm doing anything wrong?
Like there's not what adjustment logically should I make? Right. Should you
give loans to people that are more likely to default just because of their
ethnicity? That would be the only logical course of action in response to that.
Right. Which is the argument for equity right over equality
Equal yeah, essentially that would be a form of equity equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity, right?
Yeah, I've seen that argument that like 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 like the Appalachias, like 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 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
Ash like near Asheville Asheville. Yeah rough out there which people don't don't believe
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 saw racism there
This was in one of the videos. I was like sure 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 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 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're never gonna 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.
You know, they, 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 are, 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
like 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 vicious human nature. If you have a bad experience, then it's gonna
Goes back to how we see the world, but you're right. Yeah, we'll 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 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 a different kind of human being you're encountering.
There's 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 and you're
cooking meth, like you're in the backyard barbeque and you live in a tent in front of someone's house and you're cooking meth, you know, like you're in the backyard barbecue and you smell someone cooking meth in your
front yard, like that's a problem.
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 this and it's 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 with abusive parents who are drug addicts themselves and in and out
of jail and you've been psychologically scarred since you were a baby because they beat you
and you've encountered a lot of domestic violence, 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 if 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 or 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.
You're always 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 it 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. 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 or 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 what I was those are the kids
that I was working with. They didn't have majority of them did not have a parent
we would have open house and no one would come. They had no example, no money, and it's heartbreaking. But 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, because no one else is going to do it at the
end of the day. There is no 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 could 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
they 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 videos, 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 academic drawings that are not relevant
to the school. And I get that. But how do you then take that talent for drawing and show him that
this can be monetized? Right? 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 I can make but it's better than nothing
like trying to think outside the box and
He ended up getting kicked out for
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 in the field. You don't make me go on a field trip one day and he was like, um, he made an offhand passing comment. He's like, I don't want to go on the field.
You don't make me go on the field trick 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 when 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 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 kid won't respond to that and he didn't and then he gets kicked out. That was my problem as an artist
when when I was young I wanted to be a comic book illustrator that's what I wanted to do and all I
that's the only art that I was interested in. I read a lot of comic books and I was like really
into like Frank Frazetta and I was really into like 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,
cause 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.
There 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 there's 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 I 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 gonna be able to do that for a living.
You're gonna have to draw diaper commercials.
You're gonna have to do this.
You're gonna have to do things you don't wanna do.
Yeah, I hate that shit.
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 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've had multiple students the number one like profession
kids want to do now is be an influencer youtuber blah blah blah
So I get the apprehension when a kid's like I really want to do you to make a YouTube channeling
I want to do like what Joe Rogan is doing. Whatever. It's the but the school was kind of he can't make money on YouTube
That's like you should be fired for being incompetent.
Not just incompetent, but your 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, man, just because I was willing to put myself out there 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 like what the it doesn't necessarily have to be good, right?
There's content that's just it's you know
inflammatory and that people
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, can you believe this person's
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 a little Orwellian, right?
Like they demonetize people for talking
about specific things. That scares me. It should scare you, because a little Orwellian, right? Like, they demonetize people for talking about specific things.
And 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? Like if you're saying, it's crazy. You're saying accurate things
but these accurate things are 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 unfortunately, a lot of those laws still stand.
We had an instance where there was a video
that we put out during the pandemic
when we were only on Spotify.
So when we were only on Spotify, all of our videos, all of our episodes got 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.
We'll put it on YouTube, put it on Apple, put it on, 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 what did they, 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, when you were saying
that like there was a video that we were going to put up but it had a strike and you were
going to have to do like training. Remember that? That was already up there. That was
that. Right. That wasn't re-uploaded. That was from the past. Oh, it was? Yeah. We were
still putting clips up on that channel. Oh, was it a clip? That was the problem? Yeah,
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 I
There was no way around not doing the education fucking thing right?
There's the problem no way around it. Did you have to do?
Yeah, but here's the problem that clip was was accurate. The problem is the things that they
were saying were accurate.
Yeah, something changed in the news and they're 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 can 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 put food on the table
Yeah, do you do other platforms as well as YouTube?
I'm on X, but I'm not monetized. I've never made a dollar on X.
I'm not sure how to go about doing that.
I could look it up.
I should probably.
Yeah, I don't know how that works either.
I hear rumors about don't post one to one to X,
because YouTube wants exclusivity.
And if you're posting on X, your videos will perform less.
I don't know how much truth there is.
I'm so kind of.
There's probably something to that.
And I'm so dependent on YouTube that I'm
Here's an interesting statistic about YouTube
this shows you like this is probably one of the best examples of
Bias that you're ever gonna 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 one point two million? 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 time an hour never trending I heard about that
never trending I saw never trying 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 it? Yes on Call Her Daddy Trent? I don't know
That's a good question. It 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 than a million, I think. That's crazy.
I get a million for some random.
Should have gotten a million.
That's crazy.
But that doesn't make any sense.
I think it might be wrong about that.
Well, it wasn't extraordinary.
It wasn't interesting enough.
It's merit-based, essentially.
I was curious what it would say, how the trending page is
controlled.
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 think I don't believe this. Yeah, I don't believe that about this
Yeah, okay YouTube's trending page is controlled by an algorithm. It'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 lists 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 one point.
Don't you sell ads?
If I was YouTube, I'd be like, no, we want Joe Rogan's 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.
That specific one, I think they were worried
about something else.
Well, yeah, they were worried about it
promoting Donald Trump and winding 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 Roganan 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
We upload generally
Jamie you could speak to this we upload with a timer right like it's gonna upload
it's like at noon and 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, let's just release it now.
But it took a while to get up.
That was just 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
You want Elan's alone got like 65 million views and I got like 25 million views. It was just nuts.
It was like people wanted it. And it's this tri-sand 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 is gaming the reporting system like reporting something
like maybe that could be it like if you get enough people that report that a video is a problem
maybe that could throw it off. I don't know. You know I don't even 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 talk, I don't have like a direct channel where I talk to them.
I don't want one. I was just like, 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 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 see 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 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, that trans people
gonna be rounded up and fucking nets thrown on them and it was really wild.
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 like, No, he's not mentally compromised. He's not incoherent. He's
very coherent. He's got an amazing amount of energy. 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 the point about the California wildfires where he's discussing their their water
issues that it could all be fixed and then 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 develop better systems for water distribution,
sprinkler systems.
There's ways to do this.
And he talked about those ways on the podcast.
And it's eerily accurate when you see what happened to the Pacific palisades.
Yeah. Well, that clip of you predicting the whole thing.
Yeah, that was a.
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. LA has always been dry as fuck.
It's a desert.
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.
Adam Backer It's the 1961 Bell Air Fire. It's probably
the same time period.
Michael S. Knapp Could be. Could be.
Adam Backer So it's a windy, sound the same, brushfire
wind.
Michael S. Knapp 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 LA. Okay. It's just LA. It's not a climate change issue
Thousand acres burned 450 homes burned here's the aftermath
Yeah, that is a black and white one the one that I had was was color footage
Um, I know I have it just give me a second. I will find it documentaries called
Design for disaster that 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 the here
it is I found it 1960s it was in the canyon here it is also in a teacher
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 I because where I lived, I had been evacuated three times. I've been evacuated
in the early 2000s. so this is a give me some
volume on this so you can hear the way this guy talks. along canyon walls in three directions. Flames begin spreading at the rate of 13 acres per minute.
We've got a report of four people trapped on foot
between Chalon and Oscar Mayor.
We need help from the police department.
Send an ambulance to 2025 Sardella 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 and climate change. That is not,
it's 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 where you get these 100 mile... they're historic
they've always happened every year we get the Santa... 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
So why didn't they adapt? Like I lived in LA for two years. I'm on the volunteer fire department
in my town where I live now in 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
Yeah, it's possible and the problem with this past fire and there's here's another thing
It's a lot of weird pushback against that. It was arson caused. Hey, some of it was arson caused
Fact they arrested people. Okay, they arrested people for starting fires. They've arrested
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 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 LA 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 see 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 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
The san francisco los ang, 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, the exact same gas lighting, 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 what did 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's basically locked blue. And's water in that glass right there. But California's
basically locked blue. And the only thing that's going to change it is things like these
specific palisades fires, where people realize we have an 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'd probably be better off leaning in that direction if someone's gonna take a pragmatic
solution, a pragmatic
view of what these problems are and make meaningful change. Like you've got to figure out
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 just so in the box when the fire chief says we if we'd had a thousand
more trucks it wouldn't have quote tamped this down mm-hmm 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 and then logically a difference could be made there's one guy who put lawn sprinklers on his roof milk
orange juice I saw one guy and like it's 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 a hundred 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?
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% 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 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 gone?
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 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 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 gonna 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? No. 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 wastepits.
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 is that 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
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 all volunteering but the guys that you know
in their 50s 60s and just hacking all the time yeah and it's it's like a
sacrifice they make knowingly yeah it's the gear is never because you can't just
wash fire gear right you got to have it specially washed and so there's like the
the kitchen in 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
you but that doesn't happen. So it's just crazy. So they're fucking exhausted. Like,
you don't even want to shower. You just want to close your fucking eyes. You're 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? Some people talk about the
big campfire from a few years ago. The debt containment number
starts getting used as a big political tool and like it'll never end up being
like a hundred percent. I just kind of keep pushing the number around to talk about stuff and just know it'll never just eventually just goes away. What
do you mean? The 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, not just 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 guys the answers for
Right. That is a weird thing, right?
We want to put numbers on stuff like like today where like is it 65 or is it 68% contained like fucking what?
It's a fire fire 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?
Nat Pichard, PhD, MPH, PhD, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH,
MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH,
MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH,
MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH,
MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH,
MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH,
MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH, MPH night of the first and there was a small fire that started and some firemen went up to put it out they stayed to see if it was gonna 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 you're real weird if to start back up five days later but yeah
that doesn't really make sense that doesn't make it also it doesn't make
sense if you think about how windy it was and the fact that everything's dry
they're saying I can go into the roots which is I'm never that's where 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. Have you heard the book monkey wrench gang? No
Ecoterrorism these like 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. I went to this boarding school
He was really into it and that's where I learned about this book.
And 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 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.
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 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 wire files 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,
that was more about stealing than anything because 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 gonna be abandoned.
LA, 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 was 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 big firefighters from Oregon
Where do you get a fake fire truck? Yeah, he's like dedicated. He's like the Michael Jordan of fake fire
Yeah, he's like dedicated. He's like the Michael Jordan of fake fire. He's like a million bucks
He got a used one Would you see the did you see the thing in LA where they had the lot where they showed all of the?
Fire trucks that were out of service no hundreds. Oh, they're bringing a back-end 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 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.
It's just a fucking huge parking lot.
Yeah, she's 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 had 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 like to get a fire truck even ordered. It takes about a year
mmm
I
Mean maybe that could work where there's very few fires and it's just essentially home fires fine
Yeah, but it rains where you are to yeah, California. It does not fucking rain for long stretches of time that I think
California had gone eight months without rain when these fires started. This is common
This is why this climate change its 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
You see it from that 1961 video you see it from when I was evacuated
Three times I was evacuated the house is 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 you there's nothing they can do exactly right wind yes
It's going this firefighter told me that when we were filming Fairfactor. He freaked me out
He said it's just gonna 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.
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 dollars 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. A 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 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
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 Tatchapie area like we're near Tahone Ranch. We're filming this thing at this ranch
where 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
like very binary categories. Like this is because the Republicans refuse 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?
I think Alex Jones posted it, but...
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 You know, I'll just sit in there and
You know, obviously they could use 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 hydrants. So the fire hydrants 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 what the problem was, and he offered a solution.
And to save the smelt, they didn't want to do the solution.
Well, this department with Elon, you can just imagine what Elon could do with the firetruck
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.
Cause they, they didn't, they had one guy they found with a,
an actual blow torch,
but they couldn't prove that he lit the fires
with the blow torch.
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 had been arrested eight times eight times this person in like, you know short amount of time
So it's like a real problem person and they were 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. Yeah, but
I try not to pay too much attention. I'll go crazy. Yeah, but
California is deep in the trance deep and I think the only thing that's gonna 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. 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, you know, women's rights, gay rights, the things that people are terrified of when
it comes to right wing, you know, when you think about like far-right fascist governments
that are going to like clamp down on people's rights, like 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, so like we have no desire to stop gay marriage,
we have no desire to, you know, 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 solved the
problem? Hey, look, we spent $24 billion and homelessness went up by a significant amount.
Tens of thousands of new homeless people while we spent $24 billion. 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 going to bring in someone who has some more progress.
Something that's going to progress the idea better.
Someone who's going to 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'reing, 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 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. Yeah.
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. 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.
You can cross the picket line, you're
going to be blacklisted, and you'd be ostracized,
and that has real consequences in LA,
because people don't realize what I always describe it
when I'm teaching that class on filmmaking,
Hollywood is the very definition of a rigged game.
Yes, it's a rigged game.
They can shut you out.
And so 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 watching those monsters ball candy, these small,
I think, independent movies that made you feel like they were
just made for you.
They weren't like Marvel or Disney, 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 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 till it does happen.
The Daily Wire is trying kind of with Pendragon Cycle.
What's that?
They're they were doing an Arthurian legend.
They're attempting Game of Thrones, which would be if it were to land could be massive.
It could be in my theory is it could be the tipping point because it's going non my
Understandings is non-union give angel studios and they're the kind of trying to compete
But we've never had an alternative to the Union model the traditional production model which drives that production costs
There's nothing stopping you from getting a camera going out there doing it except for the rigged game
Which says well, we're gonna block you. We won't distribute your movie. There's all these different parameters.
You're not sag sanctioned, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If Daily Wire could land the pin dragon cycle
and it were to be a solid enough story
on the equivalence of like 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 just so much Brett Cooper leaving the Daily Wire.
What's that story?
She was, she's no longer at the Daily Wire.
The comments section, you know Brett Cooper,
she created the comments section at Daily Wire.
The comment section is what it's called?
The comments section.
And it's got a-
Are you aware of this, Jamie?
A little bit.
A little bit, yeah, and then they hired someone else
to host this show. Yeah, I'll break it down.
Break it down for the- What happened? She developed, developed they hired her like we want you to start the yeah
We want you to start this YouTube channel for Gen Z. We want 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
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 comments 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.
OK, but pause this. I'm not hearing this.
So what 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 and her wedding like best friend was the producer Of the show would be like Jamie taking your place except obviously not you know, but that's what's happened
Yeah, and it's nosed-dived. 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 importance of that and it was eerie
nonverbal communication importance of that and it was eerie. She has started a YouTube channel that's already amassed half a million. She hasn't posted any
videos so there's a lot of loyalists to her but she grew this channel to over
four million people in the last three years as you were just hearing. She
starred in the pin dragon cycle. She used to act. What was the problem though?
We don't know. We don't there's speculation that she she it exploded the channel
So she it's likely for applying critical thinking to this
It's more than likely that she approached Jeremy boring daily wires 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 is what she was living on this farm with a commute. She's a little fresh here at that
Maybe it's she wanted to their 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
who 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, you lose, that's the problem, 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 like they make more than you and you make almost nothing
So that's very likely a possible and they throw as much shit against the wall as possible You can think of a record company. You know they might
They might fund a bunch of different artists. Pridot distribution
Yeah, and then only one or two of them take off
But those one or two of them are suit that's Prince and he's getting fucked and meanwhile is a giant superstar like Prince had to change
His name he was 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.
And that was how he could still perform.
He was 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 gonna connect myself to a channel and you know, I'm gonna 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,
and 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 or 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% of everything I'm me like this is the reason why this show was going on and I've got to pay these assholes
60% 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 got like 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 you know, Jerusalem's right, but I bet he got a better deal
First of all is Jordan Peterson. He's already famous, you know, and he like 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 context of of this thing, this kind of...
Yeah, so the Crowder thing was kind of weird because he recorded a conversation, a private
conversation that he had.
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're taking a chance.
I sort of, 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 gonna 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
that because what they did was
Pretty extraordinary a lot of people would have caved and they did not cave
But to bring it that you see how that now is gonna they've already filmed pin dragon cycle this whole thing this Arthurian
So it's probably gonna impact. Well, I hope it's good
You know to the thing is like who's writing it? How good are the people that are writing it? How good is the story?
It's about the story. Yeah, it's it's all the story. It's all about how good is it? You know, because I was thinking about that on the airplane
Like the whole the logic of story, you know trying to connect all these dots and everything, but I think there is an inherent, there are patterns,
like I was talking about mathematics,
how I can't think about math, I need a visual.
I think when you're writing a movie,
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,
that's how I think about it,
there's this fabric of reality that stories tap into
that you're trying to connect to
and so you feel it when it clicks in
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 and but they're
discarding the very fabric of the reality of these stories that they can 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 part. 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 gonna quite get there but because I was watching Beautiful Mind on the
airplane which is I think my favorite movie I'm trying to think of one's
better it's just amazing movie yeah yeah that movie nailed it yeah that's why I'm
thinking so much about like well there's kind of a math to it, right? That's my point, 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 showed me 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. 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 shepherd tone, and
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 what he does with the shepard 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 in the top one
Is going down and it sounds to the human ear infinite
He took that which he's used in the batmobile the Batman's bike the music
He's used in all the prestige and most of his movies
If you listen to Dunkirk, you hear this sound
and it's just increasing tension
and 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 fricking story
as a shepherd tone to the point where at the very end
and you are in that fr the golden ratio so if 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 he seems uniquely uninfluenced by pop
culture too.
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 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 it's like you don't try and do it for an eye because we do it for the
thing you make the thing the best thing it can get which is what you want to see
that's how you judge how do you judge it how do you know if it's good or not
right yes because what I would want to say I'm gonna try and make it as good as
what I would want to see right yeah it 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.
Right. 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 everything
that's below the boat.
You know?
Yeah.
There's so much more when you have six seasons or something.
Yeah.
I heard you talking to Tarantino about that.
Yeah.
Well, he was talking, he 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 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 have not, 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,
she's gotta 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 gonna hire a freaking 18
You're gonna hire someone over 18 for labor laws for sure. So she's definitely how about to hire someone that's 18
19 like so then you can get around the labor. Okay, even 18 19. She looks at least she looks like she could be 17. Yeah
Yeah, that's her 27
Okay, you got it 27. That's all right. You nailed it beautiful lady, but looks like a lady
Yeah, looks like a beautiful woman. It does not look like a high school kid
Good point and so when you're seeing that it throws you off like immediately like what did what are you doing here?
Tisha this is nuts. Yeah Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, doesn't 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
So when he's got this dynamic or he's dealing this like wild
Rebellious teenage daughter. Yeah, and like hey bro
What's last time you saw her that might not be the same
person Billy Bob's hilarious though he's great he's fucking 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 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 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? get the solution with the solar, with the battery walls and the battery roof, could
that work?
I don't know.
It may work, but you're still dealing with some kind of pollution from brake dust.
You're dealing with, we actually pulled this up recently, we were 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 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 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
like 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.
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 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.
Wee, 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 more mass.
And when you're doing that, you're
generating more brake dust. And the you're doing that, you're
generating more brake dust.
And the only solution to that, we talked about it,
like carbon fiber brakes, which are expensive and mostly
in high performance cars, they have much less brake dust.
So you know when you clean your car,
and 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 have 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 exhausts, 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 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 from, 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 Tesla's. Crucially,
all cars produce those pollutants. That's true, not just electric versions. 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
particle 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 these done a study and it's showing this and 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.
What the solution might be is to make carbon fiber brakes standard.
It's carbon ceramic brakes standard that you need them them just like you need catalytic converters.
It would be more expensive though.
I never heard of that.
Yeah, so most brakes have steel rotors.
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. Yeah. I. 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 into landfill so you have these enormous
Fiberglass propellers that now have to be buried in the ground and Billy Bob goes on a good rant about the way
Yeah, they're not effective.
They're not good enough for what they do to the environment.
They kill whales.
That's the other thing.
Trump talked about that too.
That these things, when they set these things up near the ocean, the sound is fucking with
these whales.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
It's not good.
It's not the way to go.
Maybe solar's better, but if you have enormous areas of land
that are covered in solar panels, that looks gross too.
But if we could just have one designated area
in the center, take a state
and fucking make that state just a battery,
maybe that would work.
LA?
Yeah, maybe LA.
Maybe when LA burns to the ground,
they go, look, it's already toxic.
Let's just turn the power into a battery
How are they gonna 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 gonna lose all of our money
We're just gonna 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.
What are you guys doing over there?
This is horrible.
This is horrible.
And what solutions are on the table?
Well, 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.
She doesn't seem like she should make it through.
No.
What did you see?
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 know not good
That's not responding at all you look shell-shocked
It's and then smiling when she's on TV. We're gonna rebuild with a bunch of construction workers behind her
I didn't like look we're rebuilding just 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 come from? You're going
to give them the money for those homes. You're talking now about $300 billion worth of damage
and counting, right? Are you going to shell out $300 billion to give those people their
homes back? When someone has an $82 million home, are you going to give them that $82
million 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 waiting in line for fuel. They're waiting in line for pro propane fuel so they don't freeze to death
Yeah, that's crazy crazy. I was just down there over the holidays and saw my brother
And I we invested in a little the only thing I've ever invested
in like that little Airbnb,
but like super cheap and it's just gone.
Mm.
But soon I was down there looking at it.
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 in the particulate, that's a real issue.
That's a real issue. That'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 than all the other countries
combined.
I wouldn't 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 gonna 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 accede all developed nations 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 that you had a CIA
X CIA guy on he was talking about the 21 year plan for China that blew my mind
Because then when I was in graduate school it was like 80% of the other students were from
China and I'm not excited no one believes that either there was multiple
classes where I went I was the only non-China not just Americans non-Chinese
student there'd be 15 people in the class yeah 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 so you're like well and I tried to do a documentary on it Yeah, 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. So you're like and I tried to do a documentary on it
And then I was kind of your concert people didn't like that. All I was doing was asking questions
like how'd you end up coming straight from for this and it's a
societal there's a
Brutal, you know, what's the word the parents want to do it?'s a social aspect it's like it's viewed as a
Something that's 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 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 there's a lot of I mean, Peterson and you talked about this a lot,
the postmodernism, the effect of postmodernism,
the fact that there's an infinite variety of interpretations to stories.
But it's that doesn't mean that there's not
everything's not just a social construct and 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. 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 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, doesn't matter.
Martin May, Darrell Cooper.
Darrell Cooper, yeah.
I think people ask me sometimes after all this video stuff,
they're like, what would you recommend reading and studying
for critical thinking?
And I think Winston Churchill is the ultimate example
of critical thinking.
Because for real thinking, it's 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 gain so much insight.
One thing that my friend Chris DeStefano 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 II 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, wouldn't surprise me he was he did not like Stalin because with Roosevelt they they got
buddy buddy.
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 a Roosevelt was up for re-election couldn't travel over there to meet with him
because and this echoes to today exactly we what 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 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.
If you watch darkest hour, they do a good job of showing the
extremes are 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 and I was
researching for my thesis film.
Whoa. Yeah. And I was researching for my thesis film. Wow.
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 is 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 to spirituality.
When does living as though God existed save them in a way? So he negotiates with Conan 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 what the Harvard candle
It's named after Harvard. It's a remarkable story that it's so deep I could talk
You know what? I found out last night. My friend Kurt Metzger told me this
We were talking about the Elon gaff where he's like my heart goes out to you. 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 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 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
This is what I found out last night. That's also how they used to do the Pledge of Allegiance I 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 gonna be a screen grab of you
Grab this was funny
CNN during the the kovat 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 cuz I'm waving to the crowd and they take a freeze frame of it. I'm like welcome to the way is everybody
I'm 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. I was trying to find a different
different explanation of I have a picture of it. That's why I was just taking 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.
Yep.
So this is, you know, and then we realized, oh, we can't do that anymore.
That's how the Nazis do it.
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 have the the views of Hitler Pretty bizarre though
You know that yeah
Now you're not allowed to do that anymore. I know that
Well, it's like they're so funny because 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 where your arms up in the air now
You're a Nazi like oh my god
How about that that Hindu guy that kept his arm up in the air for like 60 years?
Never seen that we talked about him the other day who brought him up
You Jimmy Jamie brought him up. So this guy who has not put his arm down and like some insane amount his arm is like
Shriveled it's useless
devotion to Lord Shiva so his
To like to show his devotion he decided I'm gonna keep my arm up forever
And now his arms frozen in place and now he's like a really old man. That's what he looks like
Okay, how crazy is that?
He has a useless right arm now look at his fingers are all twisted up and fucked up his nails are all fucked up Now he's like a really old man. That's what he looks like. OK. 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, he decided to raise his right arm
90 degrees through 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
Make that connection. I was like why that guy's doing a Nazi sloop forever
That's how dedicated he is to be the Nazi connected he won't even put the hand down
He's all in all in forever until he dies. They're gonna have to get him in a super long coffin
How's he on handling this whole?
He probably like what that yeah, he was definitely what the fuck and he was happy that the ADL of all people
Defended him. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, well, it's obvious like anybody
But all these people on Twitter are just chiming in saying it's a clearly a Nazi salute. He's doing a Nazi salute
Yeah, no, no, so dumb. It's so dumb. It's not clear. 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 clearly showing he's a Nazi, you know
The Trumps in office and he's a Nazi and this is with 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.
And that's what this is.
Yes.
Power of story.
Yeah, the power of story.
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. Yeah, he's been high knit all these days until Trump got off
Yeah, yeah, yeah make a great movie yeah, he's been high knit all these days until Trump got an office. I think I great news. Let's go
Yeah, yeah, yeah, make a great movie. Yeah, it's
Well, it's 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
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 that's what I got out of it.
It's surreal.
I don't know.
I don't think about it.
I try not to.
Well, you shouldn't think about it.
Yeah, you can't think about it.
Yeah.
Well, then you get audience capture.
Right.
And you freeze too.
It's like Heath Ledger acting.'s like you can't you think about like oh hundred thousand 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 same kind of thing to make the kind of film 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 is it not just brilliant like amazing like unusual
Yeah, uniquely brilliant. He's got this mathematical mind. Mmm, 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 and yeah
I heard you talking to Tarantino or somebody about the lost
Eyes what?
Yeah, it was Roger Avery. 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 and in AI you could actually probably do Kubrick narrating it if you
wanted to you know you could get samples of his voice and he could narrate it
mm-hmm but that would you know you you'd also like you how would you know how you
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 the moon landing
conspiracies of all clink clung on to it because the the room number that's like
the haunted room is I think it's 237 is that the room whatever the number is is
the amount of miles
in 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 like all sorts of weird shit
that these people cling to that like,
weird sub-text. I love stuff like that.
Oh, it's fascinating.
There's a whole documentary on it the subtext behind the shining
The exciting 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 forget the name and the Jack Nick 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
and you can feel it when it kind of clicks in,
but which is right, the audience doesn't lie.
And then Stephen King did his own version of The Shining
as a television mini-series.
Did he?
Yeah, but 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 el. Yeah tangible 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 he thought you're a good actor? There's right
Yeah, and that's another great example of like why those boats are
Superfluous to to everything else.
Yeah, it's all about telling the story, right?
And some people...
What's going on?
Qubrick's assistant says in an interview in 2013, like a year after the movie came out,
that Qubrick 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
Room 237, the one about the shining and all the things behind it. Even 80% is too pure gibberish.
What does that mean? That means 20% is legit? I just, I mean, he wouldn't, let's just say here,
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 that 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 move you miss a lot of it when you 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 nothing
I didn't even say that word though because it's it's it's just
Patterns still using patterns.
Mathematics is just a language that allows us to articulate
the 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 and patterns 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 gonna make films. Are you more committed to like do you feel like this thing that you're doing?
What is your secret scholar?
What is your YouTube?
Secret scholar society is the YouTube channel.
Why did you decide to call it that?
That story I was telling you.
That was from, from that.
Yeah.
There was a, right before the viral video, I was working on a short film.
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, cause it's like, Warren's last movie is like, it's like,
dude, it's not, that's not, 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 being 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 yeah, there's potential to teach but I'm making
More doing what I'm doing. Yeah, and you're teaching by doing that too
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.
Right.
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 gotta know how to unlock it.
So that's kind of playing with the art of, that's why the slogan on the channel is the
art of critical thinking.
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 the there's a there's an igniting
of your your mind that is kind of beautiful it's artistic artistic. Hopefully, hopefully you can sometimes get
there. No, 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 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 into 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 exit
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 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.'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 gonna like
what happened to you, you're gonna get fired, you're gonna 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 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.
It makes them...
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 captured by a narrative.
Yeah, I 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. And 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. If he's going to apply that to the most inefficient...
I bet he will, because 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 in
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. It's going to be to me the the the Department of Government
Efficiency and then Make America Healthy Again movement those are the two most
fascinating things that are going on simultaneously with the Trump
administration because I'm so curious because there's so many hurdles with
whatever Bobby Kennedy is gonna 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 shit had 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, we need fluoride for teeth.
Brush your fucking teeth, bitch.
Let's not put neurotoxic chemicals in everybody's water.
The way I describe it, I said,
people with dinosaur skin cancer,
let's put sunscreen in the apples like no
No, that they put sunscreen on motherfucker
Or don't it's probably bad for you, too
There's a lot of evidence that that that's not good for you
They really like progressive sun exposure is the way to do it and the real problem is that would 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. You see what he does with education boy. Good luck. We need yeah and that's how you get sunburned. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what he does with education.
Boy, good luck.
We need, 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. Ah, you're still young. I look younger than I am. How old are you? 37.
You're still young.
I'm 57.
I'm old.
I'm allowed to call you're just a kid.
I wish.
But it's an important service.
It really is.
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 is it?
I have a million. Okay, just imagine a lecture
That reaches a million people when I was talking about this this
Gutenberg revolution of YouTube it has there's only one other professor.
OK, you've got like Eric Weinstein and all that.
OK, putting all of them aside, Sam Richardson,
School of Communications is 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.
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.
His office hours, I got to join him for his office hours, and it 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 like right. It's not just what you do, but how you do it
Right, and you should never be scared of discussions. Especially if you're an educational institution.
You should never be scared of discussions. Like it's one of the most important things.
Or innovation. 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 easier and much more effective.
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.
That's that simple.
Interesting conversations from people that aren't full of shit.
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 gonna do it for real.
If we're gonna 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 was sitting around'm sitting around like how do I do sure that's just tough. I didn't know
There's a there's a concept in jiu-jitsu
That the Gracies came up with about cooking someone and the idea is like someone can spaz out in the beginning
They could be real strong and pull out of submissions but eventually I'm gonna cook them eventually I'm gonna keep hitting my
moves till I'm gonna get to a dominant position they're gonna get tired and I'm
gonna cook them and then I'm gonna submit them and you need time to do that
if you had 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 Hoyes-Gracy 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 mother-in-law and and father-in-law for the first time and that the woman grabs her face
She's oh look at you. They're like Doug Emhoff's mom grabs her face
Do you be 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 and they don't know how to.
Maybe they're not the best public speaker, maybe not the most articulate at forming sentences,
but they have good ideas and you got to get those people comfortable.
You got to find out 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.
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 it. 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 her prosecutoral record. 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 you do that because you don'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 it 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, is essentially election 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
what because they changed her answer so So someone fucked up and released 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
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?
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 negative 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.
If this is, I mean, this is not just a conversation
where someone was set fucked up about,
they made a flub and they said, oh, can you take that out?
No, this is like a response to like critical policy issues
that are gonna 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 done the and it 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? Exactly, exactly, because your definition
of hate speech might just be misgendering Caitlyn Jenner. That might be hate speech,
you know? 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, you know, 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
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 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 scholars society. Yeah. Warren Smith dash secret scholars society
on YouTube. And that's the only thing you're using currently? I'm on X. It's WT Smith 17 for some reason
Secret scholars is the handle on YouTube and on
Patreon you have a secret scholars thing. Oh, that's like if you go to patreon you can watch behind the scenes
Oh beautiful perfect. You know love patreon. I love what they do
Thank you very much thank you very much
you