#2261 - Warren Smith
en
January 23, 2025
TLDR: Warren Smith is an educator and founder of Secret Scholars on YouTube.

In episode #2261 of the podcast, host Joe Rogan sits down with Warren Smith, an educator and the founder of Secret Scholars on YouTube. This engaging discussion reveals key insights about education, critical thinking, and the current state of societal narratives. Here’s a succinct summary highlighting the major topics from the episode.
Who is Warren Smith?
- Background: Warren Smith is an educator with experience teaching multimedia at a special education school. He created his YouTube channel Secret Scholars to promote critical thinking among students and the wider audience.
- Firing Incident: Smith recounts how he was fired from his teaching position after creating viral videos that encouraged open discussions among students about sensitive topics. This incident was viewed as a significant example of the challenges facing educators in today's ideological climate.
The Importance of Critical Thinking
- Resistance to Questioning: Smith emphasizes the current trend in education where questioning deeply ingrained ideologies is often discouraged. He argues that critical thinking is crucial for students to navigate complex social and political issues.
- Student Engagement: He discusses his method of fostering curiosity in students by encouraging them to ask questions about various topics, leading to genuine discussions rather than rote learning.
- Practical Applications: Smith shares how he used multimedia projects in the classroom to connect with students, demonstrating that technology can foster creativity and expression.
The Role of Media in Shaping Narratives
- Media Influence: The podcast delves into how media narratives can manipulate public perception and create polarized viewpoints. Both Rogan and Smith agree that understanding the underlying narratives is vital for critical discourse.
- Film as Reflection: Smith draws parallels between storytelling in film and real-life political narratives, stating that films serve as artifacts that can reveal societal truths over time. He expresses concern over the way films often reflect the dominant ideologies without challenging them.
The Shift in Public Discourse
- Polarization of Opinions: The episode highlights how individuals are often pressured to conform to specific ideological narratives, which can stifle open and honest dialogue.
- Left vs. Right Dynamics: The hosts discuss the extremes on both sides of the political spectrum, emphasizing the importance of nuanced discussions rather than binary thinking.
- Woke Culture and Its Challenges: Smith shares insights into how the rise of woke culture has created barriers to open discussion, especially in educational settings. He encourages listeners to break down these barriers to foster better understanding and critical thinking.
Tips for Effective Communication
- Art of Debate: The conversation encourages listeners to engage in healthy debates to explore differing perspectives. Smith highlights that effective communication often requires patience and an open mind.
- Recognizing Bias: Smith advises audiences to be aware of their biases and to question the narratives that surround them, both in media and in personal beliefs.
Closing Thoughts
- Hope for Change: Despite the challenges highlighted throughout the episode, Smith expresses hope that a new generation of thinkers will rise to challenge prevailing narratives and champion critical thinking.
- Call to Action: Rogan and Smith advocate for educators and individuals to resist ideological pressure and prioritize the teaching of critical thinking skills as an essential foundation for the future.
Takeaway
This episode serves as a reminder of the crucial importance of critical thinking in education and society. As both Rogan and Smith highlight, fostering open dialogues and understanding different perspectives can lead to a more informed and engaged public.
By encouraging critical discourse and resisting pressures to conform, listeners can contribute to a healthier, more reflective society.
Was this summary helpful?
My pleasure I I wound up seeing you as many people did on those videos that you're 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 is like, he's young. He's obviously an academic but super reasonable and like really level-headed. I'm like, we need more of this. This is really interesting. And then I found out you got fired for doing that.
And I was like, if this isn't an encapsulation of all that is wrong with our current higher education system, then I don't know what is. Well, to be fair, I didn't get fired for that. Technically, I think I got fired for posting another one similar to it, but I think they were looking kind of that whole thing was so bizarre for everyone. It was so big. I think at the school where I teach, there's kind of one
Sorry, I got to get used to this one like person who controlled 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 concern. I think and Do not want their name to get out there? I just know it doesn't feel right. Okay, I um
It's not important. Yeah, it's not. No, what's important is that what what it is is that this is a resistance to thinking. I mean, it's really what it is. It's out there for sure. It's a resistance to questioning why people have like certain like deeply ingrained thought processes that are a part of an ideology. And I think what you were doing was really pretty brilliant. It was awesome. And I love the way you were handling it. It was like, you know, very
home and rational, and just having discussions with students and you kind of see like a lot of their flailing and trying to rationalize while they have these sort of incoherent beliefs. Yeah, and I don't teach critical thinking. I was, when I was a teacher, I was teaching multimedia, like what we're doing now, working with cameras, did a lot of podcasting. 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, kind of that was my goal, the way that would most benefit them. And so one day they asked me to do a, hey, can you do a newscast for the school? Like this week at the school, you know, there was this field trip, the soccer team did this, blah, blah, blah, sure. And we want this kid to be on camera and like to do, he's really good at that.
And he was getting really nervous on the day. And so I was like, let's just sit down. You've seen like Joe Rogan and stuff. Let's do like, I'm just treated like a five minute warm up 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 and learn in the moment.
We do have conversations like that because when you are doing something like this with students, like, well, what are you going to talk about? Right. Kill two birds with one stone to be as effective as you can. And so 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.
And 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, I think Romania, I'm blanking. And so he had a very different political perspective. And when you're in those debates, the kids were 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 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? How's this guy doing this? What does this mean? Why do we have to say, well, what is wrong with what JK 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're fired, I was like, oh, of course. It was too good. Because it gave me hope. I was like, more people should be doing this at schools. And 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. 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. Because people kind of labeled me as the critical thinking guy all of a sudden. So I really started to think about it. What is critical thinking? And the best I can articulate, it's 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 my background is in filmmaking. I kind of fell into teaching.
I spent time in LA and made some movies and I teach at Emerson a filmmaking course still where I went to grad school and got my masters.
Film is probably the wrong term now because it's all digital. It's like visual media art book. I think you can study movies today, like scholars are now studying the great thinkers. I think 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. No, we talk about it all the time, that it's a great sort of post-mark 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. It really just shows. If you really think about it, human civilization and human history, modern society is so recent. The Industrial Revolution and the giant cities and
cars and transportation, and it's so recent.
It's a couple hundred years, maximum. You go from trains and horses to cars and cities and then you have Morse code to all of a sudden now you have digital communication that's instantaneous worldwide. It's a rapid change in humanity and a lot of it is, the artifact as you said, is really our media. Like what have we created?
We were talking the other day about the limitations of mainstream television and how mainstream television, they're trying to adapt more towards what is going on on the internet, but they're so hampered by their format.
their form 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 there's a bunch of things they could never actually say so there's news that they can't cover there's like significant health problems that have probably been a direct result of medication that they literally can't cover because they're being sponsored by these companies so they they're so hampered
And if you go back and watch the early broadcast from 1945, people had like this way of communicating. It's changed. Right. It's not the way, like if you were having dinner with someone and they were saying, tell me, Warren, where did you grow up? You'd be like, oh, this is not a real person. This is bizarre. The transformation in acting. Yeah. It's remarkable. Remarkable, right? Yeah. You go Marlon Brando. It's like Marlon Brando is probably like the first example of someone
Yeah, 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 we think the best actors are doing both. The external 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 and the Joker and all his roles. He had this
I think the key to acting is about what is not said, what's unspoken, and it ties into everything about critical thinking. It's the best metaphor I ever got from a directing professor. He drew on the board.
the ocean with a squiggly line. And they drew little boats on the surface and said, these are words. This is everything you need to know about directing actors. Everything beneath the surface is subtext, what's really important. So if you're an actor and I hand you a screenplay, well, anybody with given enough time can memorize those words.
what really sets an actor apart is everything else. What's not said, what they do with the words, the intention behind the words, the words are just floating on the surface. They're just the tools that we're trying to use to communicate the elusive intangible, the subtext, everything that's
And the best we can do are bumbling cells or formulate with these tools. So to treat words as the end all be all so silly. You know, like people say the wrong thing now and you get put politically incorrect to the Papa John CEO. Right. Right. With no context has gone up. But it's a larger issue. But it's just fascinating how that correlates beyond just film to
Because it's true that most communication is nonverbal. It's the more time you spend studying at working with actors studying movies, you start getting really tuned into body language. It has great utility. It's pretty interesting.
Yeah, no, it's very interesting. So when you're doing these videos, when you initially did it, did you have any idea of the impact that it was going to have? Did you think, wow, this is actually really unique and interesting. I think people are going to really enjoy this. Were you really shocked? Yeah, shocked.
I had been playing with YouTube as a medium since discovering Jordan Peterson in 2017, because I remember maybe it was even earlier than that, because I arrived at graduate school in 2016, Boston, Emerson, and all hell breaks loose. Trump gets elected, and there seemed to be a huge pushback. And I had never thought about these things before. And then being a grad student and seeing
What I witnessed at school, like protests claiming Emerson was racist, which is one of the most far left schools I've ever seen. Super far left. Can you provide any evidence for that? It was just nuts.
And did it come out of nowhere? Was it like right after the election? Like, what year did you first attend? 2016? 2016. So was this what time? So this is like September of 2016, August of 2016, 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. It's not even worth watching, and they were walking around.
time goes by my guys like and then they started to what no one saw that coming and I my big takeaway was how could so many experts get something so wrong and that caused me to question my presuppositions basically my view of the world and then that opens your mind to someone like Jordan Peterson and all these other great thinkers intellectual dark web you know but that and suddenly it's so difficult to articulate what that does
To someone like me an average viewer like a genuine lover of this space. Mm-hmm. So it's surreal to be here and because like It suddenly causes you to if you feel like everyone's moving in slow motion all of a sudden you feel like you're waking up and it doesn't It's I don't want to talk like the Matrix because it's so It's such a strain. It's gotten all this momentum and 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 and
Yeah, I think we like to adhere to certain narratives about the world. And we want to think, the big thing is we want to think that there's a central, there's some sort of competent control, some sort of competent leadership that exists, and that the structure of government and the structure of media is established
rock solid and logical and that these are the smartest people in the world that's how they've risen to this position and now they they're there to provide this you know like if you have uh... a knee injury you want to go to an orthopedic surgeon cuz 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 on knotting it a little bit. They're terrible at it. They're not just not good at it. They're really bad at it. They're really bad at it and they lie a lot. Yeah, they're not much smarter than you or I. No. And then you realize that about your professors. This guy really
doesn't know much more than like my dad or what's the, 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, professor means something, politician means something, these are experts, 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 percent. And we watched it from the comedy store. We did a podcast from the comedy store called End the World podcast.
And we did this live stream while the election was going on, and we just kept bringing in different comedians. We had a whole conference table, and it was fun. We did it in front of a live audience, and then we updated the crowd. And then when marijuana became legal, Burke Chrysler takes his shirt off and runs around the stage. It was really funny. It was a fun time, but what was most fascinating was the podcast was over, and then we all went to the bar.
The comic 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 Jank Jugger was fucking screams freaking out. In the beginning, they were so cocky and so confident. And by the end, they were just fucking freaking out. They couldn't understand how everybody got it wrong.
And I think for a lot of people, that was the end of trust in mainstream media. That was the first nail in the coffin. That was to be like, you guys, you were so wrong. You were so wrong. Yeah. How could you get something so wrong? Yeah. And it was just fascinating to watch what's supposed to be the news, right? So the news is supposed to be
at its best an objective analysis of what's going on giving you the facts but they were so clearly upset and you know there's a lot of editorializing on how bad this is and what this means the world and what does it say about us that this guy who said grab him by the pussy is now the commander chief of the greatest army the world's ever known just for us as comedians were like this is gonna be fun it was just
It was just like they opened up the door to the candy store and said, go crazy. Have fun. This is all free. But it was a real wake up call for a lot of people that this system is not really as well managed as we'd like to believe it is. Yeah. I'm just trying to go back to those days and think about it.
It was at Emerson. 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 there was like 10 people in the class. It's a four-hour class. So we're going to devote to four hours to talk about the problematic racism occurring at Emerson. So we're all sitting around. But the white students were not allowed to speak. We had to concede our space for four hours and actually we're like, what the?
Why was that? What was the reason given for that?
because it was the moral right thing to do, because we, they turned that, they said to me, I remember, he said, I said, what can I, I did say, I was like, what can I do about this? I 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 they just said, you can just listen. Just take your time to concede your space and listen. So that was the reason given. Conced 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. It was a student, like a teacher said, no, you gotta turn in the work or you're going to fail the class.
My first teaching gig occurred shortly after that, and I remember this video of 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, remember when I was saying that? Because she got called out on the Facebook page for some stupid, I don't remember what it was, quote. Yeah, Warren, you remember what I was saying about that?
Don't, I was wrong. Don't forget to be compassionate because that student is black and it, and she reminded me of how difficult it is to be black at Emerson. And so I couldn't fail her. I couldn't give her the grade. You know, so. That objective she deserved. Why was it, why was it articulated that it was so difficult for her, uniquely difficult as a black student?
That's the thing about these claims, though, is there is no concrete evidence. It's things like microaggressions. Someone made a reference about fried chicken. I've heard that one. That happens to my mom as a professor, runs a study abroad program. She said,
where really, this place is, 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. And she was like, what? The fried chicken one is so crazy. Fried chicken and watermelon, those are the two things that are associated with racism, as far as foods, which are universally loved.
Like fried chicken is delicious, watermelon is delicious. Like how could that possibly be a negative that certain people like delicious food? Like to this day, it's one of those things. It's so bizarre. You could bring up all kinds of different delicious foods. But if you bring up fried chicken, which everybody eats, everybody who eats meat and loves delicious food, loves a good fried chicken. Have you tried gusses in town? Is that 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 going to have in your life. But if you brought that up to a black friend, they might like, sorry, what the fuck are you trying to say? Like, I'm not trying to do it. Food's good. Good food. Let's go eat good food.
And keep that analogy in your mind about the boats floating on the surface. And they're just the tool. What's the intent? There was no intention there. You can't claim that's racist, unless you want it to be. And this goes back to seeing the world through stories. If you believe a story is true, I'm oppressed. The world is active. There's systemic racism. There's active racism at my college. I'm a victim. You're going to start seeing what you believe to be true. You're going to start finding hints of it.
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 going to see those lessons when they occur in life, and it's going to be a guiding star for you. Yeah. But it can be wielded in both ways. It's like the response that I got about JK Rowling. It was the ContraPoints, YouTube, everyone was like, you got it.
She's the one who's taken down JK Rowling. And the argument essentially is, I'm so done arguing. I'm not even going to debate this. If anyone who believes in transphobia can see that 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 almost infinite places. Well, the problem with that kind of arguing is that it's a total cop-out.
Like, if there is any sort of debate, and there clearly is when it comes to trans issues, if there's any sort of debate, you have to be able to discuss things. And as soon as you say, if you want to debate, we're done. If you want to have a discussion, we can't. You don't see it. Well, we're done with it. Well, what you're essentially conceding is you don't have
uh... logical ability to shut this down because if you did you just do it you would you have a rational conversation 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 look whatever the whatever the argument is and you would lay down as soon as you say if you don't believe that then we're done talking
I can't even. I can't even do this. That's what I started. My mom disagrees with me heavily on politics, which is okay. In the wake of we were talking about 2016, I found Jordan Peterson. I was like, yeah, this guy, look at this. This is really interesting. If I had any kind of conversation with her about even to this day, it's often, I think she's getting better now that I've been making content.
But it was often a formation of that pattern. I just can't do this with you, Warren. 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? And 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, is there a logical argument that there are men who are manipulating this in order to control women's faces? And it used to be that we protected women against men, and particularly we protected women against predatory men, 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 once he'd 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. It got real weird. People with counter and seek Jopie.
But like you're taking extreme, you're claiming that trans people are walking out with directions that it allows for that capacity. It allows for that to occur. 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, I've grown up with and we just guess fine. They were deeply concerned about what I was doing.
You're talking to too many people from the right. I sat down with Destiny for six hours, but it's never enough. 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. Is it fair to her? And they just can't, it seems so clear.
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. There's very specific rules and they're very much like a cult. You have this very cult-like thinking. And if you deviate from that at all,
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. And so to defend against that possibly happening to them, they attack things like without any logic at all. They just say, you don't think, you don't know. Well, I'm done talking to you. Like this has come in. And that it's like a get out of jail free pass and you can just get away from the conversation and you don't have to confront the logical fallacies. You don't have to confront all the problems with what you're saying.
And the only solution I've been able to find is to just push through. And I say to them, Chris, like one day, I genuinely believe you'll look back and understand, like one day. And I believe that.
Now 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 they'll push back against it in a way that's also not logical.
And so they dig their heels in on their ideology, you know, left digs their heels. And you know, you have things like people say, people on the left don't get it. People on the left this 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. I don't. Exactly. And I really don't like it because of me. Like, I don't fit in there. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
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And 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 that in a story of what a Republican is. She'll never deviate from that. My parents are the same. Right. Exactly the same. I'd rather be homeless. They're blue no matter who. They're just locked in. 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? It's like, who cares? It doesn't. I'm not a part of any. I'm just going to be like, call it as I see it. Follow the logic. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to be on a team. Right. It doesn't make sense at all. Even for some like me, like, you know, who.
Yeah, I went to the inauguration. How was that? Bizarre. But I don't consider myself a Republican. I don't consider myself a Democrat either. I consider myself an American. I'm just a human being. And there's a lot of things that the Democrats believe that I believe too. There's a lot of things that they say that I say that makes a lot of sense to me. And there's a lot of things that the Republicans say that makes a lot of sense to me too.
And the idea that I have to ignore things that make sense to me because it's coming from the wrong team is just stupid. And the idea, these are bad faith arguments where you have to have a conversation with someone and pretend that what they're saying is not logical because they're supposed to be your opponent. That to me is just dumb. It doesn't 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 if you're a talk to a person that's a liar, especially when you're younger, you meet people that are liars and they lie all the time about all kinds of things. One of the things about liars is they can't really recognize how other people see their lies because they're living a lie.
like they're lying so often they don't realize the language of truth and honesty and so when they're talking to people they don't even realize that people know they're full of shit because they're they've lost their ability to sort of discern what natural conversations are about where it's really it's not about you
bullshitting me to try to get me to believe something that's not true, it's about you just expressing yourself. So they stop doing that. They stop just genuinely expressing themselves. And then they just live with these blinders on. And so everything exists. And the only way they can find someone who will buy into their bullshit is if someone is so bad at thinking and reasoning that they don't have the tools to discern when someone's full of shit.
And this happens with ideologies, this happens with religion, and it clearly happens with politics. It's like you get locked into these blinders and you're incapable of looking at any sort of positive aspects of someone who is on a team that you believe is the opposition.
Yeah, I think there is a power in truth that can be felt like you're saying. And that's the underneath the boats, the surface, that which we can't articulate. We can't explain how we know these, how we can sense that on someone when they're bullshitting. But you can feel it. So as a teacher, you really learn
that reality, if you're going to be effective. First thing I would say on the first day to my students is by law, by ethical bounds, there are going to be some things I can't tell you, confidentiality, whatever. But I will never, I promise I will never tell you something I know to be untrue. They try and embody that through all behavior and that I saw that resonate because 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 school. That wasn't an art school. No, I'm talking about the ones where like the kids kicked out of high school. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. So there's like gangs, drugs, you know. 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. You know, I was watching these, this left wing podcast where they were discussing being gas lit 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 in the subway and like that kind of shit. You're seeing this with ever increasing frequency. You're also seeing the way they lie about crime statistics because they'll tell you that crime is down but what they don't tell you is crime is severely underreported and that people are being released for even violent crimes very quickly which has direct consequences because then there's no incentive whatsoever to not commit crime if you're going to be right back out on the street.
Are you familiar with Roland Fryer? Yeah, Harvard. Yes. Have you had a moment? I have not, but I would. It's really interesting. He's changed the way I've used statistics. But in 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, after all that research that caused him to go into hiding. 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. Right. And we should say he's a black gentleman. Right. Yes. So he says the colleagues told him, don't publish this warning. You'll ruin your career.
Right. For releasing findings that contradict popular left-wing narratives on policing. And he said, I'm going to do it anyways. Yeah. And then he came to the University of Austin and taught a class. It's on YouTube. And watching that class to summarize it in a minute, look at it through economics. If my job is to approve or disprove loans,
I've been able to get that down the best I can. I want to keep the default rate as low as possible and I've achieved like a .5 default rate. But if anyone who comes in my office, .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?
What is the result we're trying to achieve? So in policing, his study showed that 40% of stops, approximately, I think, if we use that as an example, 40% of stops recover contraband, which is pretty crazy, pretty good. Across demographics, which means it's being done correctly. This changes how you view so much. It's kind of difficult to understand at first glance. I'm trying to tell me if this makes sense.
So it's 40% across whatever color the driver is. That means we've done it right. If it was 60% white drivers were recovering, we should be pulling over his arguments, we should be pulling over more white drivers. But that's assuming they're pulling people over upon race. Let's go back to the default rate. You're just coming in after the fact and analyzing the results and looking at it through a racial lens.
I'm going to judge each case based on a merit, regardless of, are you going to default or not? And whatever I'm going to run my analysis, whatever that is.
So anyone can come in after the fact and say, but there's always going to be a discrepancy. Okay, but you turned down more black people than white. So they're okay. So according to your logic, for every white driver, every black driver I pull over, every Latino, I have to pull over a white driver now, which affects policing itself. As opposed to what's our goal? All the police are meeting that morning. Our job is to go out and recover contraband in this neighborhood.
But for every black driver, got to pull over a white, it's like, that's not how it works. Right. 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, you're doing it right. I'm trying to boil that down as simple as I can.
And so that was problematic for a lot of people. They didn't want to hear that. Because they're pulling over, let's just say 60% of the drivers are black, which is bias. The question is, is it unwarranted bias? Because there's always going to be bias. Right. Is it unwarranted bias, meaning are more black people causing them to get pulled over? Like the default rate.
70% of the people, I turned down, let's say 70% of people that come in that office that were black got turned down. My rebuttal to that is that has nothing to do with it. My job is for the bank to get a .5 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? Right. That would be the only logical course of action in response to that. Right. Which is the argument for equity. Right. Over equality.
Yeah, essentially, that would be a form of equity, equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity. Right. Yeah. I've seen that argument that, 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 bandaid 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, and those folks. It's everybody. It's just crime and poverty. And crime and poverty causes people, 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. Like near Asheville. Asheville. Yeah. It's rough out there. Which people don't believe. Like the Asheville Mountains. Beautiful. Right. No, it's like very high per capita crime rate. There's a meth capital right now where I live. So 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 one of my professors from Emerson. He's like, I solved racism. This was in one of the videos. I was like, sure, come over. Let's record. Hit me with it. So the solution is we're going to have a tax. So if you can trace your ancestry, then you don't have to pay taxes or below 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 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, 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, 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, Anik Asperian 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, you know, there's a human psychological element, she's going to try probably not to do the bit. It's just human nature. If you have a bad experience, then it's going to go 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. You know, 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,
You know like you're in the backyard barbecuing you smell someone cooking meth in your front yard like that's a problem Yes, that's a problem and if you pretend it's not a problem because You know oh you have to be sensitive to people's socioeconomic needs and it's a housing crisis and it's a this and it's a that no No, there's people that are really fucked up because being a person is hard. It's difficult. It's complicated and if you grow up and
with abusive parents who are drug addicts themselves and in and out of jail and you've been like psychologically scarred since you were a baby because they beat you and you've encountered a lot of domestic violence that you're going to be more fucked up than the average person. This is just the development cycle of you as an entity as a human being that is
a product of your cumulative 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 ablest or you're this or you're that, you're the problem. No, the problem is we've got a bunch of people that are really fucked up.
You know, and we have to figure out a way to have less people that are fucked up. Here's going to have a certain percentage, but is there something that can be done that would mitigate the number of people that are growing up really fucked up and becoming problems? To start at the root, get to the root. What's the root? Crime infested, gang infested neighborhoods, abusive family life, abusive neighborhoods, like that's the root. It's the root of all of our problems.
I think that's why Jordan Peterson tapped into this so much because the only solution is taking a personal responsibility.
But even personal responsibility for a person that has no, there's no examples of someone taking personal responsibility. Everyone around you is doing something fucked up or most people around you are doing something fucked up and there's no where 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 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 because what do I do is 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 alternative.
Right. Except for having someone hopefully come along and provide that role model. Right. Or finding something that you can do that elevates you, finding something you can do that gives you a very clear example that hard work and dedication can lead to success and then you can kind of get addicted to this positive feeling that you're getting from seeing yourself progress and get locked into that and 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. And so we got him a critted drawing tablet, digital drawing tablet, and he would just sit and draw all day. But here's the issue is how do you, but he wouldn't go to any other classes. And we kind of, 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 this video, like he was, he got me into the whole art style behind Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
But how do you foster, then the school kind of comes along and they're like, yeah, but he's not doing academic drawings. They're 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, man? Like you could be up like, let's get you maybe freelancing. I worked as a freelance videographer. It's a hustle, but it's a way, but it's better than nothing, like trying to think outside the box.
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 an offhand passing comment. He's like, I don't want to go on the field trip. Don't make me go on the field trip 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.
And then, and this goes back to the idea of telling the truth. What got me is they, they lied to him and told him because the teacher that he said it to, you're compelled to like report it and everything. And we run it up the chain. I don't think he should have been kicked out. I know this kid though. He's done. That's why they're there because they stay, they say stupid stuff. Right. And we're the last line of defense. He was graduating in two months. Oh God. I don't know where he is now.
Well, it brings you back to like, what is school supposed to be for? It's supposed to be preparing you for independence out in the world. And it's supposed to be preparing you to eventually have a career. Well, there's real careers in art. It's a viable pathway. Yeah. And the idea that this guy is extremely talented and that's not accentuated. He would draw these Japanese, like, samurai, sword fighting, just beautiful. And then I had the photo printer.
And but they were like, well, how's he going to make a living drawing Japanese photos? No, he's like, get him to draw school, like logos for multimedia projects for the culinary program. But then I was 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 could, 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 Frasetta 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 because I'm still... I communicate online with a buddy of mine in high school who was also in that art class, who was the most talented guy in the class. 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 it was me. But we were all like much more talented than everyone else. And all we wanted to do was like comic book art. And John was so good. And he told me that that teacher gave him an F in his final year.
Because he's just an asshole. When he would never look at your art and say it was good, he would look at your art and say, you're not going to be able to do that for a living. You're going to have to draw diaper commercials. You're going to have to do this. You're going to have to do things you don't want to do. He was a bitter guy with a pot belly who had depressed and he was... A lot of teachers are. 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 when he would draw, he would draw in a class where we would do projects. And his stuff was unexceptional. Just wasn't that good. And it just, they wanted you to fail.
I had a student, I may have had multiple students. The number one profession kids want to do now is be an influencer, a YouTuber of all of us. So I get the apprehension when a kid's like, I really want to do YouTube, make a YouTube channeling. I want to deal with what Joe Rogg is doing, whatever. But the school was kind of...
You can't make money on YouTube. You should be fired for being competent, not just incompetent, but you're counter to what's true.
Like you're saying things that are objectively untrue. You can't make money on YouTube. 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 and make a fool of myself. But that's not why you got lucky. You got lucky because you put out good content. It's a merit-based thing. It really is. And it doesn't necessarily have to be good, right? There's content that's just, it's inflammatory. And then 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 like awful things. So people keep believe this person saying these awful things and they got a lot of attention for saying awful things. And so, you know, and then YouTube has ways to sort of manage that which are, you know, a little Orwellian, right? Like they demonetize people for talking about specific things 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 face 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, what if you're saying...
It was crazy. You're saying accurate things, but these accurate things were being suppressed by our own federal government, which is really weird. We're in cahoots with these corporations that were making these medications, and so it got real fucking weird. Like, real weird.
And 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 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 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 this 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? We wound up doing with that. Jamie. I don't know what case you're talking about. You know what you were saying that like there was a video that we're 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 right. We wasn't re uploaded. That was from the past. I was like, oh it was. Yeah. I was putting clips up on that channel.
Oh, it was 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... There was no way around not doing the education fucking thing, whatever it was called. Right. Really? There's the problem. No way around it. Did you have to do that? No, I'm not doing shit. Yeah, but here's the problem. That clip was accurate.
The problem is the things that they were saying were accurate. Yeah. Something changed in the news and they were like, that's actually accurate now, but the system had, there was, there was no way to change it in the system. Yeah. It was always accurate. This is the news started reporting it accurately. And because initially the, the government narrative was that it was incorrect. So we're in the situation where you get an 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 all in 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, but I'm so kind of... There's probably something to that.
And I'm so dependent on YouTube that I'm like, here's an interesting statistic about YouTube. This shows you like this is probably one of the best examples of bias that you're ever going to see during the time where I release the podcast with Trump. It was getting what was the most it was getting an hour? Was it 1.2 million?
or I think so, maybe one, two, one, three, something like that. As much as 1.5 million, I think, at one point in time. An hour. Never trending. I heard about that. Never trending. Never trending. What's trending then? Tell me what trending is. If something gets 50 million views in a couple of days and that's not trending, what's trending? What do you call trending? What does that mean then? Are you curating your trending thing? Why would you do this on Call Her Daddy trend?
I don't know. That's a good question. Well, it didn't get any views. No, it didn't get much. I mean, what did Kamala Harris on call her daddy get? Less than a million, I think. That's crazy. Yeah. I get a million for some random. Should have gotten a million. That's crazy. Yeah. But that doesn't make any sense. Oh, I think it might be wrong about that. Well, it wasn't extraordinary. It wasn't interesting enough. That's, you know, it's merit-based, essentially. I was curious what I would say.
How the trending page is controlled on the screen that 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. I'm going to call about this response. Yeah. OK. YouTube's trending page is controlled by an algorithm that's trained by human engineers. There's no employees who manually curate the trending page. How the algorithm works. The algorithm considers many factors to determine which videos are trending, including view count, view velocity, and video age.
The algorithm considers where views are coming from and how the video performs compared to other recent uploads from the same channel. The algorithm aims to create a list of trending content that's relevant and representative across the platform. The algorithm refreshes every 15 minutes to stay current.
filters. The algorithm applies strict content filters to keep the trending list family friendly. These filters ensure that videos don't contain excessive profanity. Well, that gets me out. Mature content, violence or disparaging others in the community. Okay, so just that line alone disparaging others in the community. Yeah.
It would be in YouTube's best interest, though. They need you. Well, don't they like views? Yeah, that's what you do. If I was YouTube, I'd be like, no, we need views. Well, not only that. If you put it in trending, you'll get more views, so you get more advertising revenue. On that specific one, I think they were worried about something else.
But yeah, they were worried about it promoting Donald Trump and whining up being president because of that. But then it got to a point where you couldn't find it. So that was real weird. Like if you googled Trump, Rogan podcast, you would not find that podcast at all. You would find clips of people discussing it. You would not find the actual podcast. When I first saw it, it was someone reacting to it.
Yeah. Live. Bizarre. Didn't you tweet? Like, we had to release it at the same time on multiple platforms. Sorry for the glitch, wasn't there? There was a glitch because the way we upload, generally, Jamie could speak to this, we upload with a timer, right? Like, it's going to upload a search up. Yeah, it usually is like at noon, and this time we were doing it at night, and
You know it just didn't for whatever reason it didn't go live. The platforms don't work the same. We just released it. We just said like let's just release it now. But it took a while to get up and to it was just that was just like an issue with
just how the upload system works. It's 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'd talk to Spotify and talk to Elon and say, let's just put it on X.
And so we put 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 and X. A lot of people did that.
And then, you know, I uploaded it. Elon'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 is this dry sand effect? As soon as you try to suppress something, I just, I don't buy into the idea that there was 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. Let me just put it, if there's a situation like that, I'll talk about that. And that's my way of responding to that. Make it make sense to me. 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's nuts. 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. 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 wasn't he didn't act like a dictator like we know what it's like when he's running things we had experienced it for four years and they were telling us that this was the end of civilization the trans people can be rounded up and fucking nets thrown on them and it it was really why the people weren't going to be safe it was really wild 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. The guy sat here for three hours and we could have done another three hours. Easy. He can go on and on and on.
And he's fine. And he had some really good points. First of all, the point about the California wildfires, where he's discussing their water issues, then it could all be fixed. And then he gave them plan to fix it. And then they rejected it. And he was 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 distributions, sprinkler systems. There's ways to do this, and he talked about those ways on the podcast, and it's like eerily accurate when you see what happened to the Pacific Palisades. Yeah, with that clip of you predicting the whole thing,
Yeah. See, here's the thing, this climate change narrative, this is a really goofy thing that people on the left are talking about. This is because of climate change. This is climate change causes fire. LA 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. See, 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 the desert. That's why the movie industry is there. Because you could film outside and you never have to worry about it raining on you. That's literally why they came there. Because it's the perfect climate. It's amazing. I was just there last weekend. The weather's incredible.
But the city, because of their ridiculous policies, is just a fucking disaster. A dangerous, creepy, weird disaster of a city. It's a 1961 bell air fire. It's from the same time being. Could be. So it's a windy-ass, windy sound the same. Brush fire, wind.
I mean, that's just what happens, man. So the situation that I encountered was from 2000, I was filming Fear Factor, so it had to be before 2007. So it was really before a lot of this, I mean, you know, you had the inconvenient truth, the 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. It's just LA. It's not a climate change issue. I've got to find this video. I know I have. 15,000 acres burned, 450 homes burned. Here's aftermath. Houses digging through it. Yeah, that is a black and white one. The one that I had was color footage. I know I have it. Just give me a second. I will find it. The documentary is called Design for Disaster that's popping up. This also says Bel Air.
here. I'm just going through my, Whitney Cummings sent it to me. So I'm going through my videos with her. I'll find it in a second. But the point is, it's like, when I experienced that, this was not when everybody was chiming in about climate change, being that here it is, I found it. 1960s, it was in the canyon here. It was all sent to you. Yeah.
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. I think it was 2003. And we were experiencing a fire. And he told me, because where I lived, I had been evacuated three times.
I've been evacuated in the early 2000s, so give me some volume on this. You can hear the way this guy tucks.
Spreads out 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 Sean and us, Commander, we need help from the police departments in the ambulance this 20-25 dollar 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
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 thought.
Oh, Trump said drill baby drill right after we're dealing with this climate change fueled emergency and 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 one hundred mile they're historic they've always happened every year we get the Santa Ana there's fire season for a fucking reason there's Los Angeles has fire season where I used to live
it was fire season and every time the winter would come and everything was dry and all the vegetation was brown and the wind was whipping around everybody would get nervous because you get you know what there's a bunch of different reasons though the one big one from two thousand eighteen they found out that it was like some part that had failed that initially caused a fire that was a one dollar part
The park cost $1, is one dollar piece that they failed to replace, caused the sparks that led to the initial fire that was the 2018 fire, where you saw if you go down the 405 in Hollywood, like half of the side of the highway.
was completely engulfed in flames. It looked apocalyptic. It was bananas. Driving on the highway and the whole left side of the highway is completely on fire. Giant hills of raging fires that they couldn't put out. It's always been like this. It's Los Angeles. It's Los Angeles. Why didn't they adapt? I lived in 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 concrete, like near there. Yeah, I know that. So there's no fire hydrants. So we bring our own water. That's so crazy. But it's possible, it's my point. It's possible. And the problem with this pass fire, and here's another thing that's a lot of weird pushback against, that it was arson caused. Hey, some of it was arson caused. Fact.
They've arrested people. They arrested people for starting fires. They've arrested multiple people for starting fires. My friend Andrew Huberman filmed people starting fires. They were starting fires in the middle of this fire disaster because it doesn't mean it's the cause of it. It means along the way, there was a lot of arson. Like some people were saying that, you know, oh, there's this false narrative that was the homeless people.
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 palcades. 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 the new sims gonna is this going to be the end of them or people are put up with i would like to think that people would wise up i mean there's been a trend in california to devote in the opposite direction if you look at the map of twenty twenty verses the map of twenty twenty four the counties that went red like a significant number but the high population centers are in the trance
the San Francisco, Los Angeles, very difficult to get those people to vote anything other than blue. And so if the people that are Democrat are giving them the exact same solutions, exact same 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, he did something where he allowed people that came here and what is, 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 immigrated here illegally from Mexico, there's coffee and water, whatever you like. There'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 or people realize we have incompetent government and if we have competent government that is right wing and uh... as long as they don't infringe on civil rights and human rights and all the things that were terrified of from right wing extremists so i don't do that you probably be better off leaning in that direction of someone's gonna take a pragmatic solution a pragmatic
a view of what these problems are and make meaningful change. You've got to figure out first of all what the fires, it's like this all could be prevented. What's causing the fire? Well, all this brush, they had record rainfall. Record rainfall means record growth. So you have record growth of all these grasses and brush and all this stuff. So it's all green and lush until LA runs out of water
because it stops raining for a long time, and then everything turns brown. And then it's a tender. It's just fire tender. It's just, it's a tinder box. When the fire chief says, if we'd had a thousand more trucks, it wouldn't have, quote, tamped this down. But then we see,
an old man with a garden hose, able to save his house, it's like, well, an individual was able to make a difference. So then logically, a difference could be made. There was one guy who put lawn sprinklers on his roof. Milk, orange juice. I saw one guy and 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 one hundred 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 have just burned 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 way you can see the top. So 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 that, the electronics, all the toxic chemicals that come from the building materials, all that is now seeped into the ground and will eventually seep into the water. It's going to get into the water supply. It's probably going to get into the ocean. It's going to wash into the ocean.
yeah i don't think people realize how toxic that stuff is not just that it's in the air so you know they can say the weather quality or the air quality is good in california based on how much smog there is but what's in the fucking smog now because this is not just automobile smog this is not just just dried dirt kicked up by the wind which they've always had like date the 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. It has to be bad for you if you live near that. All those firemen that are breathing that shit in, that's going to have long-term health consequences for those guys.
Yeah. For all those people that are dealing with all that shit, all those people that are anywhere near it, your air is air of like, do you know the story of the toxic burn pits from Iraq, in Afghanistan? So during the war, when troops were on a base,
overseas, they would take all their garbage and burn it. So they burned it in these waste pits. And so the wind would shift and blow through the camp and all these people are breathing toxic air, extremely toxic. In fact, Biden's son
died from a brain cancer that they connect to his exposure in the military to the toxic burn pits, is that there's a whole swarm of health consequences that veterans have faced because of these toxic burn pits. So the dumbest fucking way to deal with garbage of all time, make the troops breathe it in as you burn it.
It's the same kind of thing that's happening in LA. It's the same shit. You're breathing burnt garbage, burnt refuge, burnt buildings, burnt cars, burnt tires. All that stuff you're breathing in. I didn't realize how often, you don't think about firefighters, but they're exposed to that. All the time. The guys on the, it's all volunteering, but the guys that, you know, in their 50s, 60s, and you're just like,
hacking all the time. Yeah. And it's, it's like a sacrifice they make knowingly. Yeah. It's crazy. It's the gear is never because you can't just wash fire gear. Right. You've got to have it specially washed. And so there's like the, the kitchen and the firehouse, right? And you can't bring the no gear allowed in the kitchen because it's, but you know, you put it on, go home. You're supposed to shower every time. But that doesn't happen. So it's just crazy. So they're fucking exhausted.
Like, you know, you don't even want to shower. You just want to close your fucking eyes and work in 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 was today's date, the 23rd, 22nd. Some people talk about the lot was the big camp, the campfire from a few years ago. The deck 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 never.
Just eventually just goes away. What do you mean? Like the big number for the biggest fire, like they've contained 100% of a small fire. Like the biggest fire, it'll just, it'll always stay at a number that's below 100%.
Well, if it's still up, it's still a fire. It's like a political tool they were saying. The residents there just got sick of it. They're like, this is now a political thing. We're going back and forth. Tell us what it is. Where is the fire if it's not contained kind of thing? It just becomes a thing that no one has the answers for. Right, that is a weird thing, right? We want to put numbers on stuff. Like today, we're like, is it 65% or is it 68% contained? Like, what? It's a fire. Fire is 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? That was reading through something in the New York Times. One possible thing, which doesn't sound right, but they're just going, it's possible in that area. Someone was lighting fireworks on the night of the first, and there was a small fire that started. And some firemen went up to put it out. And they stayed to see if it was going to catch back up. And five days later, they're like, is that the same fire? Because it was in a really close to the same spot.
be real weird if to start back up five days later but yeah that doesn't really make sense that doesn't make sense also it doesn't make sense if you think about how windy it was and the fact that everything's dry there's nothing going to the roots which is as I'm never know that's from just starting to hear that okay maybe you can maybe but five days later it starts up again as a raging inferno that's just perhaps perhaps but there is also evidence that people lit fires there's also people who got arrested for lighting fires
Wouldn't surprise me, man. Have you heard the book Monkey Wrench Gang? No. Eco-terrorism, these friends living out of a van, they go around and back, originally monkey wrenching was sabotaging for environmental reasons, big equipment to fight back.
Against that kind of thing. Okay. I had a friend back in high school with this boarding school. He was really into it And that's where I learned about this book and but it wouldn't surprise me if that kind of thinking Carried over and someone because we saw copycats. 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, you know, it's it's a known thing and to pretend that it's not possible because it doesn't
It doesn't appeal to your narrative. It doesn't fit with your narrative of the homeless thing. We just have to be compassionate because these are people and there's a housing shortage and it's just housing, housing, housing. No, you have open-air drug markets and mentally ill people and fire and it's possible that that's what's caused it.
LA wire files, rekindle, eco terra, 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 a guess that was more about stealing than anything, because there was organized looting where they were breaking into homes in areas where there were people going to be abandoned.
L.A. Man, it's not my cup of tea, but it's tragic. One of those firefighters has a history of arson. That's why they're talking about that. Oh, great. One of the firefighters? One of the fake firefighters. Oh, yeah. There you go. One of them 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 fake 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. Seems like a million bucks. He got a used one. 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 them back in service? No, no, no. They were broken down. They hadn't bothered fixing them. So a journalist got to the lot and was filming from the outside. I think Shellenberger had it on his Twitter page.
But a journalist got to this lot where these fire trucks were where they were supposed to be repaired. There was hundreds that weren't repaired. Like just a fucking huge parking lot. Yeah, the cheese.
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 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 fix those. You would have had more trucks.
The reason is going to be, well, we're backed up. It takes so long to get a fire truck even ordered. It takes about a year. Oh, God. I mean, maybe that could work where there's very few fires, and it's just essentially home fires. We're fine where we are.
Yeah, but it rains where you are too. California, it does not fucking rain for long stretches of time. I think California had gone eight months without rain when these fires started. This is common. This is why this climate change, it's climate change. This is not a change in the climate. This is the climate of California.
You see it from that 1961 video. You see it from when I was evacuated. Three times I was evacuated. The houses in front of my old house burnt to the ground in 2018, both of them. Like when you were talking about it and that clip that goes around, it's like, there's nothing they can do. Exactly. It's the right wind. Yes, it's going. This firefighter told me that when we were filming Fair Factor, he freaked me out. He said, it's just going to take the right wind. He goes, we just get lucky.
So is there any preparation that could have? Yeah, you got to get rid of all the brush. 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, even spent $24 billion on the homeless crisis, didn't put a dent in it, you could have fixed the brush. You could have fixed that reservoir that was empty.
giant 11 million gallon reservoir of water completely dry. You could have fixed that. You could have saved homes. Maybe you wouldn't have saved all of them. You could have saved a lot. You could have saved people's lives and they didn't and it was incompetent and it was poor planning and it was, you know, they had a lot of
ideas that weren't good. They had a lot of things that they paid attention to and things they focused on that weren't important. What was really important is preventing these kind of reoccurring disasters, continuously reoccurring disasters.
I've seen a bunch of them. Like I said, I was evacuated multiple times, but I've seen multiple other fires that I wasn't evacuated from that were huge in all sorts of areas around LA. It's dry as fuck. One of the big ones that we experienced was
It was like we were out filming in like out in the Tachapi area. Like we're near Tahon Ranch. We're filming this thing at this ranch. And we had to cut filming short. And when we were driving home, the entire right side of the highway for like.
almost an hour was on fire as I was driving home. So you're driving, ash is falling from the sky like snow, and the whole time you're driving, it's apocalyptic. The whole right side of the highway is inflamed. So this has always been a problem with LA.
So these climate change cukes, these left-wing cukes that want to put everything into these like very binary categories. Like this is because the Republicans refused to agree to climate change and call climate change as a hoax. This is a climate change. No, this is LA. This is the climate of LA. Is this the fire trucks?
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. And this isn't the video that I saw. I think multiple people posted them, but they're all out of commission. They're all just sitting there. And, you know, obviously they could have used them, but that's only part of the problem. Part of the problem is planning correctly. Part of the problem is, you know, there was enough water for the fire hydrant, so the fire hydrant's went dry.
The whole thing is 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 fire truck problem. But he can't do everything. Well, you can't do everything with states, right? Because states have states rights. One of the things, they arrested this one guy for arson, and they couldn't necessarily prove that he was an arsonist. One guy they found with an actual blowtorch.
where they couldn't prove that he lit the fires with the blowtorch but this guy had been arrested multiple times including for vandalism and all sorts of other things and and i believe assault
And I just 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 gonna let him go. He had been arrested eight times, this person, in like a short amount of time. So this is 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, I don't know. I don't know what the latest is. I try not to pay too much attention or go crazy.
But California is deep in the trance, deep. And I think the only thing that's going to snap people out of it is something like this, where they realize like, oh my God, these people are completely incompetent. It used to be the homeless situation was a little bit of a wake up call. This is like next level, this is like next level incompetence wake up call.
And so I'm hoping that someone can come along that's a reasonable conservative person that can shift things in California, like appeal to people's concerns when it comes to social issues, 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 in 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 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 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're auditioning, you're auditioning to people that almost universally have a very specific political ideology.
You can't be a part of the group. You can't be a part of the team if you're a right-wing Christian Republican and you're making films. That doesn't exist. You got like Mel Gibson and a few outliers. That's it. Clint Eastwood, a few outliers. For the most part, if you are an actor and you want to work in Hollywood, and by the way, Mel Gibson and all those guys will hire left-wing people.
These people will not hire right-wing people. So you see everyone sort of morph their personality and morph their political ideology and their social ideology around what's going to get them picked. Because when you're an actor, you have to get picked. So if you and I go for a part, and there's a bunch of other people going for a part, and we're all similarly qualified in terms of the look that this part is looking for,
A lot of it is determined about whether they like you. And Hollywood runs off the blacklisting idea. Oh, yeah. If you go against your union, that's how unions have power. Yes. Across 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 radio game.
yes it's a red game they can shut you out and sold that this is the underlying philosophy of the entire city
So even though there's only a certain amount of people that are actors in LA, there's a lot of people that wanted to be actors. And there's a lot of people that want to be famous. And so they get their fame from their small social media. They get a little adrenaline and dopamine drip off of social media likes. And maybe my TikTok can go viral. And then they get a little fame from that. There's a bunch of fame seekers.
all those people are locked into this cult-like thinking. So it's very difficult to get them out of that.
It's the technology I think is going to revolution. We're on the precipice of this. We were talking about Heath Ledger earlier. What happened to those kind of independent movies that I remember being in high school before going into film school and like watching those monsters, ball, candy, these small heath, I think.
Independent movies that made you feel like they were just made for you. They weren't like Marvel or this way, 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 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 this hiring shortage, but camera's 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 so it does happen.
The Daily Wire is trying kind of with Pendragon cycle. What's that? They were doing an Arthurian legend, their attempted Game of Thrones, which would be, if it were to land, could be massive. In my theory is it could be the tipping point.
because it's going non, my understanding is this non-union. You have Angel Studios, and they're kind of trying to compete, but we've never had an alternative to the union model, the traditional production model, which drives up production costs, because there's nothing stopping you from getting a camera and going out there and doing it except for the rigged game, which says, well, we're going to Black History. We won't distribute your movie. There's all these different parameters. You're not sag, sanction, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If, if Daily Wire could land the pin dragon cycle and it were to be a solid enough story on the equivalents of like Game of Thrones, it could, 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 was, she's no longer at the Daily Wire. The comment section, you know, Brett Cooper, she created the comment section of Daily Wire. The comment section? The comments section. Comments section. And it's got a- Are you aware of this, Jamie?
a little bit. Yeah. And then they hired someone else to host. Yeah. I'll break it down. Break it down. What's happened? She developed. They hired her. Like we want you to start. Yeah. We want you to start this YouTube channel for Gen Z. We want it to feel like you're a streamer. Let's hear what she says. Let's rewind that shit. Let's hear what she has to say. Just a little bit.
Hey guys, some of you have heard the rumors online and the rumors are mostly true. Today, December 10th will be my last day hosting the comment section and working for the Daily Wire. It is not true that I am being forced out, it was my own choice to leave. And believe me, this is bittersweet. I have had the most unbelievable three years helping to craft the show, building this community and telling stories and sharing the truth every day. Through the comment section, you all have made me braver.
more articulate, more thoughtful, more hopeful than I could have ever imagined. And I'm grateful that we spent this time together. And I'm grateful that the Daily Wire gave us a platform to grow this community. But at this point in my life, I am ready to take on a new direction both personally and professionally. This means new challenges and new endeavors, which I will share with you soon.
As for the show, the comment section will continue with the Daily Wire. My producer Regan is taking over as host of the comment section, and I wish her and the Daily Wire all the best. We have had three great years, and I am proud of what we've accomplished together. Leaving the show and the platforms that we've built is hard, but I'm very excited for what's to come. Knowing that we have brought so many people together in last year. Okay, pause this. I'm not hearing this. So what I mean, not hearing is like what caused
No one knows exactly. There's speculation because the girl who took the place was her best, her maid of honor in her wedding, like best friend was the producer of the show. It'd be like Jamie taking your place, except obviously not, you know, but that's what's happened now. And it's nose to 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.
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 4 million people in the last three years as you were just hearing. And she started in the pin dragon cycle. She used to act. What was the problem though?
We don't know. We don't know. There's speculation that she exploded the channel. So it's likely for applying critical thinking to this. It's more than likely that she approached Jeremy Boring at Daily Wire. He's like, look guys, I'd like to be paid more than what I'm making because I'm pulling more views than anybody at the Daily Wire, possibly. She was living on this farm with a commute. She was a little frustrated with that. Maybe it's, she wanted to, there's speculation she wanted to run her show kind of from her house.
But no one knows exactly. There's NDAs and everything. It's hard when someone is a part of a channel and then their show blows up and they realize, oh, I could have done this on my own.
which is the reality. The reality is like being a part of a channel, it doesn't really get you much, obviously, because the new show only has 40,000 views, right? True, true. But Jeremy Boring's response would be, yeah, but we throw the daily wires advertising money behind these people. We spend a lot in advertising. We lose a lot of money before we make any money. Yeah, but from what shows? Not the shows that are successful.
The shows that are successful are successful. That's like the record business version of arithmetic. You can't buy the elusive intangible. Yeah. The record business is notoriously horrible with that. So they have a model where when they sign an artist, the artist gets an advance, right? And then the advance
You're responsible for so much. You're responsible for advertising. They take into account a bunch of artists they spend money on that doesn't create money. So they have all this Hollywood math that they apply. Hollywood accounting. And at the end of it, they make more than you and you make almost nothing.
So that's very likely a possibility. And they throw as much shit against the wall as possible. You can think of a record company. They might fund a bunch of different artists. Predo distribution. Yeah. And then only one or two of them take off. But those one or two of them are suits that's prints. And he's getting fucked. And meanwhile, it's a giant superstar. Like, Prince had to change his name. He was like, OK, well, you own prints. You guys don't go, OK, 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 any you know that like prince for a while when he was in it was a warner brothers
Whoever he was in dispute with, he changed his name to a symbol. And that was how he could still perform. He's like, yeah, you don't own this bitch. And there's probably a non-compete clause. That's just why she hasn't posted anything yet. Crazy. But that's what you get if you want the shortcut, right? The shortcut is being a part of a channel. I'm gonna connect myself to a channel and 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. They bring you meundies ads.
All kinds of shit. Next thing you know, you're making money. You're making money off your channel. And then your channel grows organically. And then you don't have to deal with executives telling you what kind of guests you should have on or what topics you should avoid or what things you should accentuate. We would like you to talk about this today.
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 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, you did partner with the same company. And maybe that allows him to do more traveling over what they do, like the, you know, Jerusalem series. Right. But I bet he got a better deal. First of all, 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 Stephen Crowder or Stephen Crowder. Yeah. People were using that in context of this thing, this, this kind of
Yeah, and 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 have to take into chance. I went through a similar thing with Spotify, but Spotify was great. There was no issues at all. It was like, we think the show is really valuable. We're going to give you a lot of money to be exclusive on Spotify. And just, that's it. Pretty simple. No input at all in terms of like who I should have on or what I should talk about. Or, you know, there was nothing. It was, there was a few hiccups during the COVID days where, you know, they were experiencing so many attacks.
They were 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, you see how that now is going to, they've already filmed the pin dragon cycle, this whole thing, this Arthurian. So it's probably going to impact.
Well, I hope it's good. You know, the thing is like, who's writing it? How good are the people that are writing it? How good is the story? It's all about the story. Yeah, it's all about the story. It's all about how good is it, you know, because I was thinking about that on the airplane.
have the logic of story, 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, 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. They hire writers to crack the story, almost like it's a math problem. To me, that indicates that there's this fabric of reality that stories tap into.
That you're trying to connect connect to and you can so you feel it when it clicks in Yeah, and you're almost when it is when it does click and you have that hook you're like this is the reason to make Why this movie is interesting right right right then you're almost making it for the sake of the story not the audience But the audience will come as a consequence
Yeah. As opposed to today where people think they can make movies for the audience, like Disney, but they're discarding the very fabric of the reality of these stories that they can we can change to know what. 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 until a different ways. Logically, there's one ideal way you're never going to quite get there, right? Because I was watching Beautiful Mine 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. It nailed it. That's why I'm thinking so much about like math and everything.
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 so much of 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 one point six. 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 air land and sea, land is a, the story takes place over a week. Air, an hour, see a day.
And then what he does with the shepherd tone, which is in Batman and all of his movies, is an ascending tone, like a barbershop spiral that is infinite. The first sound is like crescendo, and then it fades out, and the middle one is consistent, and the top one is going down, and it sounds to the human ear infinite. He took that, which he's used in the Batman's bike, the music he's used, and the prestige in most of his movies.
If you listen to Dunkirk, you hear the sound and it's just increasing tension, you don't even notice it almost. It's because it never reaches a crescendo, so you feel like something's off, but you never quite get there. He then takes that and structures the frickin' story as a shepherd tone to the point where at the very end, and you are in that frickin' the golden ratio, so this is the meat of the movie, and 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 that he seems uniquely uninfluenced by pop culture too. True. He's, I think he famously doesn't have email. He's one of those guys who doesn't have a phone, doesn't have email, and obviously incredibly brilliant person. So he's
Obviously aware of email, he's aware of phones, but I think he's probably one of those guys that goes, you know what, the more that's coming in that's influencing me, it's going to 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 a you don't try and do it for annoy you because you do it for the thing. You make the thing the best thing it can. Yeah, 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. 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. Ozark's a long movie. And you can get so much on this pronto. So you get so much more into depth with the characters and the interactions and everything that's below the boat. There's so much more when you have six seasons or something. I heard you talking to Tarantino about that.
Well, he was talking, he disparagingly and talked about Yellowstone being a soap opera. But he also talked about a homeland. About homeland was an exception to that because it was essentially this amazing moment at the end of the first season. Yeah. Where the show is like a homeland first season was incredible. And it is like a movie. It's really good. It's really well made. And at the end of it, you're like, wow, this is a fucking incredible piece of just artwork.
Have you seen Taylor Sheridan's new show, Landman? I watch 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. But that's crazy. Like that girl looks like she's got to be 25 years old. Do you think? Well, let's find out.
Yeah, no, I know she is. We looked at it. From a producer's perspective, yeah, you're not going to hire a frickin' 18. You're going to hire someone over 18 for labor laws, for sure. Well, how about to hire someone that's 18? But you can't 19. So then you can get around the labor. OK, even 18, 19. 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, it is. 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 a media, like, what are you doing here? T-shirt. This is nuts. Yeah. This doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, I'm not saying she looks bad at all. She looks great. But she looks like a mature woman. She doesn't look like a young child. So when he's got this dynamic where he's dealing this wild, rebellious teenage daughter, and like, hey, bro, she's lying. Well, it's the last time you saw her. That might not be the same person. Billy Bob's hilarious, though. He's great. He's fucking phenomenal. He has some great rants about climate change in oil. He's a phenomenal actor.
Well, that's the other thing about climate change. Like, listen, if you really think that it's oil is the problem of climate change, well, you better change your whole fucking life. Everything in your goddamn, somebody 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 reading the Elon's biography on the airplane, but do you think he could get the solution with the battery walls and the battery roof? Could that work? I don't know.
um... it may may work but you're still dealing with some kind of pollution from break dust you're dealing with uh... we we we actually pulled this up recently we're talking about it was an enormous percent of more pollutants are released into the atmosphere because of electric cars then combustion engines because of break dust so electric cars
The one thing good about electric cars is specifically Tesla's. Tesla's have regenerative braking. So when I drive my Tesla, oftentimes I don't even have to hit the brakes. Because I just let off the gas when I'm getting close to an intersection, I gently tap the brakes when I get close to the line, where the red light is.
But when you're driving normally, it's like one foot driving. The brakes work, but you don't have to use them. Because when you let off the brakes or let off the gas rather, the car slows itself and it doesn't coast. Like you can't just hit 60 miles an hour and then let your foot off the gas and it'll just kind of cruise along. It doesn't do that. It slows down considerably because it's regenerating electricity.
through this regenerative braking aspect of it. So that probably has less brake dust than other electric cars. But there's electric cars that you'll drive. If you drive the Porsche Taycan, this is an amazing electric car. It doesn't have that regenerative braking thing. Or at least maybe it's a setting. 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. We, because they're just too much mass. And 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 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 like, 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's all brake dust.
So that's getting into the air. So if you've been 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 Mouldens said that its measurements show that particulate emissions can be 1,850 times more than those from modern car exhaust, which should 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.