Julian Dorey Podcast - #295 - "Secret Scholar" on Banned History, KGB's Warning & his Viral Firing | Warren Smith

Starting point is 00:00:00 If I were to just sit down and describe what I've seen at colleges, people don't believe it. This is a perfect example of the group of people that claim there's no such thing as the fabric of reality. The trans movement needed post-modernism because woman is an invention. I think we're getting silly. Hold on here. The category of man becomes meaningless. This is not supposed to be a dumb guy. No, he's a professor.

Starting point is 00:00:20 So we can see now how the academy has been taken over by this type of thinking. Where do you think that started? The 60s. Pendulum shifts so drastically. That generation is now the professor class. So we have this cultural movement now where everyone is going into the pipeline. The pipeline's been corrupted. But I have had cultural media studies.

Starting point is 00:00:36 I have the textbook from it. And on the front is a raised fist. Chapter one. Then it goes through. So imagine that playing out in a classroom. Hey guys, I'm going to make a documentary about Winston Churchill. But you know he's racist, right? So when these postmodernist professors are up there claiming everything's malleable, nothing means anything like bullshit. College has been

Starting point is 00:00:51 corrupt. Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. Warren, it's great to meet you, man. Thanks for driving down from Boston. No problem. Thank you for having me. This is a really cool setup. I appreciate that, man. I actually, I was turned on to you by Alessi. Alessi heard you on Rogan, so he sent me that. I listened to some of that. And then I went down the rabbit hole of your channel and your channel is fucking awesome. You do incredibly philosophical breakdowns that are, I think, totally fact-based rather than, you know, trying to put emotion into it, which is important with a lot of these, let's call it what it is, very high octane cultural discussions we have these days so you know when did you first start like almost seeing something in society where you're like wait we're looking

Starting point is 00:01:53 at this all wrong i can lend my voice to this kind of thing well i wasn't sure i could lend my voice to it but i would say 2016 when i went to or first arrived at Emerson for graduate school for filmmaking or whatnot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? And yeah, they have the come meet potential roommates and find an apartment at the orientation. This is the first time I'd ever heard pronouns. Oh, you never heard those before?

Starting point is 00:02:21 No, I had no idea. And I was blanking on what a pronoun. This is a true story. There was 30 people approximately in this room. They say, okay, we're going before? No, I had no idea. And I was blanking on what a pronoun. This is a true story. There was 30 people approximately in this room. They say, okay, we're going to go around, introduce yourself, and give us your preferred pronoun. And they started going around, and I couldn't pick up on the pattern. And I couldn't remember what a preferred pronoun was, like a verb. I understand that and everything.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And I was trying to figure it out. And I don't remember what I said when it came to me but i was something like like we are like i don't people won't but and everyone looked at me like this freaking guy like i had no idea i swear yeah that sticks up but that whole year we had trump come into office yeah the pushback i think was the pendulum just went haywire and that's when i started to question things yeah were you politically active before that would you say not at all have you ever really thought about it that much or no i always assumed republicans bad democrats good yeah everyone i knew i've never known i would say even someone who would be like i'm a conservative yeah and i'm not saying i'm a conservative i don't really want to pick a a side in that or i think you just think it's a limiting

Starting point is 00:03:32 game i agree with you there's something about like society not only wants us to have a strong opinion on everything where it incentivizes that, especially with social media, but they want everything to have a label. And yet, you know, I always talk about it. The average person votes on the one, two, or maybe three issues that are actually important to them, you know, but there's fucking 10,000 issues or a hundred thousand issues. And yet you'll see people, regardless of what side of the spectrum they're on, kind of take on the rest of what the team does once they're like, oh, my team supports this thing that's important to me. Therefore, they must be right about everything else. And this like groupthink thing happens and then suddenly you get ideological capture. For sure.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Yeah. We're seeing some interesting moves where people are having different perspectives on the right video and I made a little response to it. And we had sat, we'd spoken, we did a six-hour sit-down. You and Destiny. And some other people. I'm sorry to hear that. The Act Man. I think he needed someone to be the fourth person. It was over the summer and I forgot how it came about, but I was like, sure, I'll do it.

Starting point is 00:05:04 Did you take some meth before that? It was a deep dive, man. That guy's like, I respect the, he does have a mind for absorbing information. I think about, I'm more interested in how people think and how to, the moves that are being made. So like what to think is the information and he's really good at that, the deep dives

Starting point is 00:05:23 and I know more about this topic than you, but some of the best debates I've had, I come in as a blank slate kind of where it's like, I don't really know anything. And you just analyze the incoming information. And just by asking questions, you don't even need to have a wealth of information on that topic. Like the, that video we were talking about

Starting point is 00:05:46 earlier about like the harris voter changes his mind kind of he came in with trump is guilty of rape and i was like i've never heard that tell me about it i'm just asking questions and then it dissolves that doesn't require me being like destiny doing a deep dive into blah blah so we just do different things i've been thinking about maybe he wants to do a conversation. It would be a debate with him, but I'm not that interested in political debating. My issue with guys like that, and this reflects people on either side of the spectrum, in this case, Destiny is a guy who's on the left side, is that there's no doubt in my mind Destiny is a very smart guy no doubt about that but he has to comment on every single thing and it's at a predetermined conclusion and also i think his thoughts get out of control he gets ahead of himself he's probably doing a little too much adderall and he will like you you know the look on someone's face when they're like oh shit i just went too far didn't know i was going

Starting point is 00:06:42 to say that that happens a lot with him. And I saw that. I think you made a video on it as well. But like after the attempted Trump assassination, you know, I don't know if he was like trying to quickly like get a side rim joke in there or not. But when you start saying like I'm going to make fun of the dude who dies because he got shot because he was at a Trump rally. It's like, you're not, not only are you not helping here, but that that's kind of a, I mean, let's call it what it is. That's a pretty inhumane, sick thought. You know, someone that disagrees with you and has a different opinion comes from a different worldview than you. And because he was in this case, Corey Comparatory, who was killed at the, at the Trump rally in July because he was at supporting someone that

Starting point is 00:07:26 you don't like, therefore is fair game for me to say, ha ha, you're dead. That's crazy. Yeah. And then he doubled down on it, you know, ran with it, went on Piers Morgan and that's what I made the video about. There is also that element with, it's the attention currency so he did get attention from it did it hurt him his fan base is pretty adamant with him i don't think he could he recently had a worse scandal i would say what what was that this i don't know something about like leaking sex tapes or nudes of a girl with some other girl in discord and he's getting sued for it and it's like nothing's gonna take him out because his fans are just whatever but he he is very smart and that's what i realized with that document that took us six hours to go through just on january 6th but intelligence is not wisdom it was a deep dive

Starting point is 00:08:20 into everything surrounding what he called the insurrection jan January 6th, and all the lead up to it, the aftermath. Yeah, the false slate of electors. It was illuminating. Yeah. At the end of it, though, it's still, I tried to articulate the fact that we're still, good job, Destiny, but 50 we have a binary choice here between two you know we have two choices which is the least bad option everything you has if it's a fact it's a fact and he does a good job presenting that but that's not a compelling case to me necessarily that kamala harris would be the least option, even with all the context that you

Starting point is 00:09:05 have provided. So what do you think on something like January 6? Because obviously, there's been, I would say, like, you know, radically differing opinions from the respective two spectrums on what that day was. But as someone who's obviously trying to go into it, just saying what are, what are the facts? What seemed to happen here? What was your takeaway from that? I think it was a mistake, the way it was handled. I think Trump gave people the ultimate ammunition that's still being used. So politically, it was a mistake. You can't hold him accountable for indirect actions, other people's actions i understand destiny's points around the false slate of electors and the the moves that he was trying to do with that forget the name of the lawyer cheese bro cheese bro cheese bro or i think cheese borrow or bro yeah it but apparently

Starting point is 00:10:01 it's a legal maneuver it's a little it was kind of kind of a Hail Mary, harebrained move. But I do think there has been injustice around people being locked up for years that didn't commit direct violence. I can understand his move to pardon. I think that people oversimplify it i think you're 100 right on the oversimplification and i also it's refreshing to hear a nuanced take on it because it's one of those like whenever it comes up i get killed on that by either end of the spectrum because i always say i'm like he was dumb enough to do that day like you knew nothing was gonna happen no one in that town likes you you lost an election you're arguing over whether you lost the election or not you're going to invite your most rabid supporters who are very pissed off who you're giving a bullhorn to to come to this town on that day you're inviting the people who don't like you to take advantage of that situation that's why i didn't feel bad for him that said you know it was crazy to me. You have a guy who on January 7th, he was at like his lowest point in 2021. And I always look at him like all if I were a democratic strategist or something like that, all they had to do was just go like this and back up. Just be like, hey, leave it there. Don't pound the drums. Don't call this 9-11 or something like that.

Starting point is 00:11:27 But on January 8th, they took him off the internet. A year later, a year and a half later, they raided his wife's panty drawer. Just made him stronger. Charge him with all this shit. Then they add a bunch of more cases to it over the next year. Then he almost gets shot. It was a four-year evolution of him, of proving his point. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're, you're absolutely right about that. And that's like what I've been exploring through looking at things through

Starting point is 00:11:55 stories because that's, that's how the public is perceiving all of this. It's the hero's journey. The hero has to have adversity, conflict, drive, story. And all of those things you just mentioned were forms of adversity that he overcame. It just makes him stronger. So yeah, it was a mistake. I think we can all see right now the Democrats are at their lowest point now. All right. So we all know that cannabis is slowly starting to become legalized across the United States. With that in mind, did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door and that this company has found a way to combine THC with carefully selected functional ingredients to target nearly every mood and health concern you can think of? If you're not familiar with this

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Starting point is 00:14:06 It feels – it's a different type of – like it's a very different road as to how they got there. But it's a similar vibe to me of like Republicans in 2009 after you do like eight years of Bush Cheney where it's just like – i mean everything you can get wrong they got wrong and now it's like the pendulum shifted hard to the left and this time the pendulum feels like it shifted hard to the right because once again you know in this case biden harris they come in everything you can kind of get wrong just on like a basic level you get wrong like let's open the border let's double down on woke stuff let's double down on letting kids be trans, you know, or telling having the government tell parents what they can do with their kids. At some point, you know, people are going to have some common sense a classic Democrat, a classic liberal, I should say. Yeah. Brett Weinstein, all these people, Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard.

Starting point is 00:15:13 So, yes, we've got the conservative party, but it's – I think it's more complicated. For sure. Yeah. But you, so you started making videos, like you said, you started at least thinking about this stuff during when Trump first came up and you're going to Emerson and you're hearing some new. The reaction to it was crazy because I remember the day after the election when you won, I was working as a freelance videographer to pay my way through grad school and I was working as the videographer for the Dean.

Starting point is 00:15:44 So I had my camera and everything working as a one man band. So I did everything myself. And the day after the election, I took my camera to the Boston common. There was, they were losing their minds with this protest and it was huge. I have that footage. So yeah,

Starting point is 00:16:00 it was everything that happened after that. And I remember finding Jordan Peterson. That was like peak Jordan Peterson time. And the intellectual dark web and all that. Yeah. And I think truth has a power that when you find that stuff and you're watching him debate someone like in that GQ interview and it's just like bullets bouncing off a tank, you see truth and you're like, wait a minute, it stands out. And then you start, that's what intrigued me,

Starting point is 00:16:36 was watching that hero's journey kind of from the power of like, that there is this objective reality yeah and that's what interests me too every in almost every video that i've made is kind of that battle of one person thinks that there's no such thing either there's no such thing as objective reality or it's malleable and i can explain this if it doesn't make sense. Then the other side, it's like, because what Peterson was saying is nothing will improve your life more than

Starting point is 00:17:11 recognizing that there is this fabric of reality that's beyond social constructs, the reach of society, nothing will improve your life more than living in accordance with those laws. So it's like being in a boat, trying to get to shore and sailing with the wind and the currents versus a rudderless boat that doesn't even believe there are currents or

Starting point is 00:17:32 winds it's like you can put an outboard motor on it and force your way through but so that's the analogy i would use and so it's like discovering those currents and then when you debate and stuff, some people, when you have one person like that who's sailing with the tides, debating someone who's coming from the opposite view, they make it look easy. And I don't think it's so much like being able to recall information, like what destiny does.

Starting point is 00:18:02 It's more, are you in in accordance with those are the most interesting debates to me and those aren't really about deep dives into politics it's things that are much more fundamental like whether it's can a man be a woman but tomorrow can i decide i'm a woman then gain access to all women's spaces legally which is claiming reality is malleable. Yeah. And it's also people conflate language and science these days like crazy. So they try to, it's almost like the tragedy of philosophy in a way. Like you try to deeply think about something to get to a new truth that you erase all the definitions on the way and then don't have a basis to work off of after that. That's it feels like especially when you look at you know some of

Starting point is 00:18:48 the things you're referring to like what jordan peterson was coming up about which had to do with like gender ideology or there's no such thing as a man and a woman well the fuck you mean there's no such thing like the like there has to be some sort of agreed upon definition now if you want to say like our understanding scientifically of what that all comprises of at some point will be discovered to be slightly different that's fine but like we are able to create life because man comes together with woman and has a kid it's just how it is i mean you can fight it with your language all you want but that is the reality yeah that's the what i was trying to get out the analogy of like boats floating on the surface then beneath that is subtext but not only subtext but that's where the fabric of reality would be which isn't going to change even if you want to change the the

Starting point is 00:19:35 linguistics around that so when you are hearing someone debate something like equity then there's this game they're playing right now of redefining what that means no it's just putting posters for your job opening around it's like that's advertising it's not equity equity it has a specific meaning and so it's really looking at those deeper realities yeah do you think that people, the algorithms are really what unknowingly change people and remove their ability to think because it's feeding them like a consistent idea that suddenly becomes their truth. Like the YouTube algorithm? Anything. YouTube, X, Instagram? I still think there's, you're going to seek things out. I know I myself, I'm not, I guess it determines what pops up in my feed, but there's a lot that pops up in my feed that I, I guess that's where critical thinking will come in. Because I think critical thinking is thinking for yourself to navigate the stories that

Starting point is 00:20:40 make up the world and identify the patterns that really matter, which are acted out. They're not even verbal, I think. And that's where the world and identify the patterns that really matter which are acted out they're not even verbal i think and that's where the real data resides and that's the game that you're playing every day whether you like it or not and um so i don't know the algorithm sure it's a contributing factor but i don't think that's what's going to break your brain honestly yeah it's also you know again like if people like we were talking about earlier, if people just adopt one idea because that's what speaks to them. Like, oh, I'm really upset Roe v. Wade got overturned. I want to be pro-choice. And then suddenly that means these hundred other things and you just kind of take that on without thinking about it.

Starting point is 00:21:19 Like because I think this, then I'm going to think all that. That's certainly an issue. And guys like Jordan Peterson, you know, when, when they came up in that era, I think part of the allure to them was that they were encouraging people to not think about things one dimensionally and look at things themselves, issue by issue and make a decision. And if something seemed like, if something that, you know, more more reflective what they thought their team was seemed to not make sense then you should have the courage to be like well i may agree with this but i'm not gonna agree with that yeah it was these stories are vastly

Starting point is 00:21:56 more complicated than we think so for example he sits down with the gq interview or kathy newman and it's the simple like the inequality pay gap with women. And it's, well, it's not that simple. And then he spends an hour dissecting that and it's, that opens the door to so many other stories that are oversimplified. So, and he did it, he did it through the lens of the, going back to the fabric of that reality, the fabric of reality of there is human nature it's different with males and females and there are there's a logic to male behavior and female behavior has a logic it can be understood to some degree and because it's coming at it from a clinical psychologist perspective what do you

Starting point is 00:22:36 think like people like kathy newman or you know i forget who the name of the interviewer was at GQ, like some of these places, you know, you're dealing with people who went to university, are intellectually capable and all those things. And yet they come into a sit down with a Jordan Peterson now or back then, whatever, regardless of the era, and someone like a Jordan Peterson and they have this predetermined idea of what they want to do they want to be combative do you think that's just because they want to be combative to go get clicks because that's what the story is or do you think that they're ideologically captured i think it wasn't that they want to just get clicks i think they had an idea of who this guy was and they wanted to bring him down in that interview and that's what backfired in those two very famous examples i would say it forever altered kathy newman's career yes she and the meme that came out of that okay what you're saying is so yeah you could say to some extent it was just she just wasn't listening to what he was saying and then doing this caricature the surface level caricature over and over again it's just a

Starting point is 00:23:48 tactic that was so became so obvious yeah that it was comical so that is an example of how that happens for sure yeah it's having an idea that's goes back to how we see the world through stories characters who's he's a villain you know and then they come in with that yeah and that's the thing though we're living in like two separate realities at the same time where the heroes are someone else's villain and the villain someone else's heroes to an extent that i've never seen in the world yeah and it's i think it's it doesn't work like that in reality it's not just one a person's not just all good or bad and that's the best storytelling understands that a walter white a tony soprano that's right it's and that's one of i'm not going to talk about peterson this whole time i promise but that's his point about

Starting point is 00:24:35 if you had lived in germany during the second world war you really think you didn't have the capacity to be a nazi it's like you're made of the same thing it's just a matter of what were you surrounded by at that time are you just somehow enlightened because you ask your average person at a college that and they're like i would never have it's that's a lack of wisdom it's important to recognize that you have that capacity because that's where wisdom comes from so that you can understand your capacity to go bad. And that being conscious of that allows you to avoid it. It's a good way of putting it. There's a line I think about all the time. I said it on the

Starting point is 00:25:16 podcast a bunch, but we throw around this term, if I were blank, then I would blank. And sometimes I'll think about it and be like, okay, I'm willing to say that on this thing. But we say that for so many things that we comment on. And you don't know. You don't know how you'd handle certain other environments with different, a different impetus in them or a different time. And in the case of the example you bring up, and yet people seem to have this, especially like when looking at history, they have this idea that you either had to be perfect or you were bad. And that seems to be an increasing problem because I understand that, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:58 we learn more about history as we get more information or go back and look at questions that were left unanswered. But when we start, we're kind of at this point now where any history, particularly even history that's like net good involving the United States or something like that, I would say like across the political spectrum, you see people on either end of the spectrum trying to constantly just say, no, no, this was all bad and they try to you know like whitewash things in into one category and i get really worried about that as someone who loves history because it's like yes history is written by the victors yes there are certain things that are kind of like yeah we're not going to talk about that but if you can accept some of the basic things that formulate the society that I feel really lucky to live in today, at some point, it feels like that will crash it down in on itself. Do you ever worry

Starting point is 00:26:50 about that? Society crash on itself? Yeah, man. I mean, yeah, I was talking like with Churchill, and there's that. And I think that's a fine conversation to have because he had flaws for sure yes he did because I was when I first pitched okay my thesis movie or whatnot which had to do with him the only note I was presented with I stood up in front of the class and present this idea and then it's like crickets and the feedback is you know it's Churchill's a racist right it's like that and that's all i got and yes and now on the right we have like rogan just had him on that daryl cooper which is fun that's i get his point he's kind of making that point that you're making honestly it's like he goes a little bit further

Starting point is 00:27:35 but it's essentially he's just it's more nuanced and that's there's nothing wrong with that but yeah yeah i mean i think that the the the thing about that guy and I – especially when someone I haven't talked with yet, I'll have my opinions kind of off camera but I'm a little careful with going at things until I've litigated the idea myself. But all right, you want to look at – in Daryl Cooper's case, you want to look at World Wari and say maybe there's a couple things we weren't told here fine when you then start to meet that with confirmation bias so let's run with that thread you just talked about with churchill churchill's a racist every world leader of every empirical nation at that time or high level nation at that time was a little bit racist right it was imperial right i'm not condoning that I'm not saying that's a good thing. I, for one, think that some of Churchill's policy with India was putrid, and that's one example. But you have to measure things against scales of evil. And when we start then getting to a

Starting point is 00:28:41 confirmation bias area where you are – are even if you're not saying this overtly but you're starting to now be like well actually no churchill was the bad guy in the war and hitler's still a psychopath still psychopath it's like it's like you're grounding people in that like listen you know token one on the team i'm still saying hitler's a psychopath but he really wasn't the bad guy that's gonna i see where that goes right i know where this goes over time yeah i think that was a mistake to say i just fundamentally think it's inaccurate yeah it is and then i saw someone reacting to that video two days ago and they pulled up an old tweet of his which i think was a mistake would you see that tweet where it's like

Starting point is 00:29:18 germany back then and then shows germany during the olympics saying germany back then and it's got hitler walking through the shot saying this was preferable yeah to these numbskulls dressed up in purple makeup it's like maybe not the best move but yeah do you think did you watch the episode of rogan i did do you think he pushed back enough no love joe it's the greatest to ever do what we do. He's the reason we're allowed to exist. But no. Yeah, there was, what was it? There was one point where he trapped himself, Daryl Cooper did.

Starting point is 00:29:55 Joe kind of started to call him out. He's like, what was it? What was it? He was like, well, when? Okay, so you're saying this about, at what point did Hitler start making these moves against the Jewish people? As though he was trying to talk about like, and Cooper tried to, he doesn't really answer it. And he starts to try and he didn't want to admit that it was way sooner than people think. He kind of blurs that line. It's like he was making moves way before war had really broken out like the lebensborn program what was that 38 37 i believe was the beginning of the lebensborn program where they were kidnapping children dutch children to breed human breeding to create their next generation

Starting point is 00:30:39 so anyways it's also what about the 3 million polls too? Right. That they killed along the way. Yeah. You know, this isn't, they make it all, they make it all about one issue. And like now the internet's pushing every single thing on the Jews and stuff like that. And it's like, okay, when people do shit wrong, call it out. Like I'm going to sit here and say like hold two thoughts

Starting point is 00:31:06 at the same time the current israel the current israeli government is very bad i do not fuck with smotrich i do not fuck with ben gavir who i believe is out now but was in that government for a while i do not fuck with netanyahu i think what they're doing in gaza is completely wrong and i also think that as a party that you know there's a lot of parties in israel that want a minority part of the vote they do not represent all the people of israel i for one would not want people around the world and i know they did and i understand this conflating me with george bush and dick cheney when we started all those wars right so i try to pay the same respect to the people i i can say all that and i can say

Starting point is 00:31:44 that like massad is extremely good at what they do and they do some very dirty shit, including Jeffrey Epstein, which I believe was their operation. And at the same token, I can also say that World War II was very bad. The Holocaust was very bad. It did happen. There's all kinds of evidence for you people out there, for people who are now trying to relitigate something like this. And a guy like Hitler who, yeah, he hated the Jews a lot. He also hated a lot of other people and hated things that in his mind weren't pure. All of that was bad. And the fact that you either have to be all here or all here on an issue as historically like separate, by the way, as something like that is where we're just in this case now focusing on one race being like the jewish people is fucking crazy and it does make me wonder how many people out there who are saying these things like are friends with any jewish people or something you know my one friend noah used to i'm from new jersey obviously my

Starting point is 00:32:41 friends are italian irish greek and jewish like that's what it is and you know hispanic but you know my one friend noah used to say like where's my check i'm like what check he's like the check i'm supposed to get a check from the cabal that's what everyone tells me it comes in the mail like once a month it pays me off and obviously the joke is that like you think there's like this big thing with everyone but now you're just falling trap to the same thing we've fallen into the trap of over time which is that you start to you start to pick bad people and then conflate an entire race with said bad people i got news for you man every race has bad people and they do bad things you know go look at the fucking what's it called what's klaus schwab's thing world economic

Starting point is 00:33:26 forum there's every race represented on that thing i can tell you a lot of those people aren't too good but people don't want to talk about that why why why are we like why do we go back to this pattern where we have to like pick the one boogeyman and people are like it's everything them because we make sense of the world through narrative makes it easier that complexity it's almost like our minds no i agree i think what you're saying makes is perfectly reasonable and it's a good way of approaching this but to answer yeah i think that is why it's just it it's a way to simplify the vast complexity. You bring up the one tweet.

Starting point is 00:34:13 And I do try to be careful when people are just posting screenshots of some tweets because things can be taken out of context. The one you bring up I don't think is. He said what he said there, whether or not – talking about Daryl Cooper, talking about the picture of Hitler in front of the Eiffel tower in 1940 versus the olympics pre-ceremony you know he could have it could have been like kind of a joke i'll give him that i i don't know but yeah like do i i did a live on youtube back when that happened like the olympics pre-ceremony that was cringy as fuck and like you call it it out. But it's an anecdotal thing, right? And it's not to say that that's not representative of a bigger pattern that people are like, okay, maybe we should get something like this in line. But like society will move in pendulums and start to get in line. You've seen that in some of the elections since then already. Whereas when you're talking about a nation that had significant GDP and minus their crazy eugenics science, some very high level engineering and scientific endeavors as Nazi Germany did with a psychopath who wanted to take all the land, Lie that and say, you know, maybe that would have been better. You think someone like that wants to stop there?

Starting point is 00:35:27 Like people talk about Putin. Oh, where will he stop? Putin has the GDP of Italy in Russia. All due respect, he don't have 17, 18 trillion dollars of GDP. So it's limited. Hitler had a high GDP. He rebuilt a lot of that economy. It was a threat.

Starting point is 00:35:45 And sometimes I feel like people can't... But Russia has more weaponry than the Nazis ever had. That's true. That's true. So you're saying that... So if people are concerned about Putin as a Hitler, they have a reason to do that, not necessarily because of his economy.

Starting point is 00:36:04 No, no, no no i'm not trying to compare putin i think that would be a mistake i think that's one of the mistakes that's being made because people looking at i think churchill made the right move that was the right move to stand your ground and not negotiate or try for a ceasefire which which they honestly had tried a ceasefire with Hitler. But he had already taken over all of Europe except England at that point, or the UK. He was bent on as much domination. I don't think we can compare that. It's just not quite accurate to compare the two. But my point there is just... So I think when trump is sitting there with zelensky he's that should be his we are trusting him to make that his number one priority is avoiding nuclear conflict because

Starting point is 00:36:53 it would be the end for us and them and yeah that's that's my only i haven't i don't have much of a i did one video on that and it's's really all... That was the only point I was trying to make. I don't think it was that nuanced. It's just like that's the framework in which we have... That's the first principle to examine this through. I just forgot what I was going to say, but... I do that too. Oh, and if you have the chance to do a ceasefire, try it.

Starting point is 00:37:29 I understand people are saying, well, there's a huge chance he'll break the ceasefire, but okay, we'll cross that bridge when we get there then. If you can stop the bullets, let's stop them. I understand the argument that that'll just allow them to become stronger in the meantime. They'll rearm. So.

Starting point is 00:37:51 It's not a black and white solution for something like that. No, it never is. Exactly. It never is. And people want that because they'll either say they'll get pissed, righteously so, in some ways that, oh, we've given fucking 500 billion dollars to ukraine and so they decide that the issue is completely null and void or they'll be like throw a ukraine flag in their bio and say fund them into perpetuity yeah and what's interesting is when i see comments just on what i just articulated there like i was saying that was the point of that video i see a warren is a um a russian or a putin sympathizer now and everything. It's like, really? How do you deduce that from just that?

Starting point is 00:38:26 So... And that's also just the general... the critics, I would say, that some... There's some people that really don't like me. And what I'm doing. And I guess it's because they think I'm... Like, Destiny wants to debate in the conditions of debating me. He's like,

Starting point is 00:38:43 I don't want to talk about philosophy or anything esoteric. Like, I don't like all that mumbo-jumbo I'll debate you on anything to do with Trump's policy like man that doesn't interest me I'm not an expert on it's not what I you know But you're more interested in how people think rather than the information, which is what people think. Destiny is an information guy. It's what he does for hours every day. And he's good at it.

Starting point is 00:39:11 But he's going to out information me on whatever it is. I don't, I'm just, and for the same reason, he doesn't want to get into the philosophical or the esoteric or how, you know, this, the, the just mentioning his video when he made the video, it was so funny. Cause I was, I forget which one it was talking.

Starting point is 00:39:36 Oh, it was a Neil deGrasse Tyson on like with Shapiro. And he's talking about, you can't make an, you can't observe an objective fact. It depends on how you want to use that fact. And Shapiro's pointing out, why is it not enough to just be able to make an observation about an

Starting point is 00:39:51 objective fact? Destiny lost his mind. I started talking about the difference between a social construct and objective fact. It's like the suit he's using every like keyword for a suit, a pseudo intellectual is it made for some funny content out of that but so we just come we're just different interested in different things but he wants to try to pull you into his well his his i messaged him after i was like hey man i'd be happy to chat because i

Starting point is 00:40:21 think there's he had some good points he was first he was analyzing it was during his regular show he was covering um no i forget which one oh tim pool verse that new guy i forget his name he's like this younger guy and they were talking about smith tim pool talking about the january 6th thing i think i made some mistakes because i was i was just analyzing the moves the plays that are occurring on the field of that game and i think i made some mistakes on it like there was some information back information maybe tim wasn't as right as he was pretending and so he made some good points around that then he launched into that other video and that's where i was like i can fair enough on that other Then he launched into that other video. And that's where I was like, I can fair enough on that other one, but there's some points I think I can clarify on, on the Shapiro versus Neil deGrasse Tyson, because that's the entire point of that video is how the objective reality is under attack. And that's important. Yeah, I actually, so your, your channel is so bingeable for people out there

Starting point is 00:41:22 who haven't seen it. We're going to have Warren's link down in the description. All the videos are like seven to ten minutes. And you put them – I can tell you come from like a filmmaker, like director background because you put them together so perfectly with like a clear resolution and analysis of the conflict and all that. But the Neil deGrasse Tyson one you're talking about with Ben Shapiro, it's like – when I hear stuff like that, like I've heard Neil's science takes over the years. I don't necessarily agree with some of the stuff he says on, for example, not being open to their being or seemingly not being open to the idea of life beyond here or what it might do to interact with us but the guy's so smart and and he spent his life building you know as to use his words trying to find objective fact or whatever and yet he it's almost like he can't hear his own words what he's saying with ben shapiro because he's arguing right right when it gets to that it's like john stewart we're talking about that it's like when you get they

Starting point is 00:42:22 can be how they can have a great reputation you're, I'm really, I jive with everything they're saying, but they get to that one thing that doesn't fit within the larger story. And it's like, how, how can we? So that's what, but that's the point that interests me, that space where that occurs. It's, can we actually play a little bit of this one right here we have it up the the tim pool it's called tim pool destroys the left's new star whiz kid luke beasley this is the one you were talking about right yeah this is the one that destiny was i've gotten some criticism on this

Starting point is 00:42:56 one okay let's hear this are you gonna make the fentanyl case i'm not gonna make i'm gonna ask you what you think happened you're the one who brought it up i was just curious what your belief was about it yeah i think that someone kneeled i think he brought it up and so he asked you about it and then you asked him back and i'm just curious about what you what your opinion is on it i think you don't have one i think you don't know what to say when trapped he tries to act as though he's maintaining the frame with sarcasm if you can't define what any data that stop it, if I stop, define it, define it. If I took the time to properly write out a definition, the same technique David Pakman uses, this guy has spent a lot of time with David Pakman. Some people call him a David Pakman clone because he's using the same techniques, but they are weak techniques and they just dissolve. I'm only going to speak on things I'm very informed on. So I'm not going to tell you exactly to the month that they should get. If you don't have a thought on how long they should be in prison, it's fine to say what you do a lot. It's fine to say like, you don't know how the argument fails. You're just going to ask

Starting point is 00:43:58 hyper specific, slightly irrelevant questions to me. How is it irrelevant? And Luke Beasley just continues to play stupid. It's this dismissal of evidence that is so alarming, which is why I think this debate resonated with so many people. How is that irrelevant? Because I don't think it's relevant for me to figure out, because I didn't sit in these courtrooms and listen to the details of every case, exactly how long each one should be in. How could you advocate for someone to be in jail if you don't know?

Starting point is 00:44:21 Well, I can tell you. Because Trump is saying we should subvert that process because he thinks what they did was patriotic and should then pardon them. Trump is not conducting these pardons because he feels that what occurred on that day was good. I think it's that he feels that it was unfair. That's a big difference.

Starting point is 00:44:40 Or I think three years is long enough. And that's a wrong stance, but okay. How is it wrong? I just explained it to you. No, no, no, no, no. You didn't. You said the court process should play out the way it is. It could literally count in this exchange how many times Luke Beasley says,

Starting point is 00:44:54 I just explained it to you, therefore I don't need to articulate it again. It's like, Tim Kool does a good job of not letting him get away with that. He says, no, you didn't. Explain it to me. My opinion on the amount of time should be served for a crime is not just wrong because you like courts. No, no, I get that.

Starting point is 00:45:11 You need to explain. I'm saying that why the timeframe I'm asserting should be longer than three years. No, no, I'm saying the default, you have to have overwhelming, compelling evidence that someone has been wronged to justify a president stepping in and saying, I'm subverting the justice system outcome. Pardoning Hunter Biden disproves that

Starting point is 00:45:31 argument. I don't know. Yeah. Looking at it now, I'm not, I don't remember what everyone was so up in arms about, but for me, it was first thing thing is interesting it's like how you're maintaining the frame which is just a technique it's not so much like the information the frame yeah so the confidence level the david packman does this a lot and i that i was noticing but so this is the non-verbal communication the patterns that yes we pick up on and i see david packman doing that i had just done a video about david packman so i've just been i was noticing that and he uses some of the same phrases i can't remember what it was we talk about it in the video but if it's tim pool seems to be coming from that blank slate position we were kind of talking about where it's like okay you're the one making the assertion that they deserve this so therefore you're the one who's compelled to have the evidence. So if I'm accusing someone, I have to provide the evidence. He's simply saying, okay,

Starting point is 00:46:28 you need to present your justification for why they do deserve this sentence. And I think the criticism is coming around. Maybe it was something that wasn't in that cut, or it's something to do with a specific case that Tim was defending with one of those people. But looking at that portion of it, it seems to be around what is the right number of years for a nonviolent crime? Maybe, because I'm just looking at like, without outside information, just looking at that game, the moves that are occurring and trying to analyze those moves. Like you're watching, you're like you're a commentator watching a sports game. That's the approach I started taking with it. But the video that interests – my favorite video, the one that interests me the most was when Joe Rogan had on the postmodern professor.

Starting point is 00:47:13 Oh, dude. The Thaddeus guy? Thaddeus Russell. I did two videos on him. All right. Let's pull that up because, first of all, it's a great video. I saw that one. Secondly, I remember listening to that podcast when it when it came out and i that whole segment when that went off the rails

Starting point is 00:47:30 i just kept going back and listening to like the guy's tone and i'm and i'm hearing like how he arrived at these conclusions and i'm like this is not supposed to be a dumb guy. No, he's a professor. Right. Yeah, he's debated on stage. But this is a perfect example of the group of people that claim there's no such thing as the fabric of reality. So how can you even live in accordance with it? It's all malleable. And he's going to make that argument. It's crazy. Alessi, let's hit that play.

Starting point is 00:47:59 Let me hear him take that a step further. None of these things are biologically determined, that there is no natural essence to anything. Fabric of reality. Think about those words, the claim that there is no natural essence, no natural reality. Which means that we now are free to choose our own destiny. That's the benefit of it. See why this is motivating, why this is their goal, because it is liberating for so much more ideology to follow, which we'll see in a moment. Prior to the 1960s and 70s, it was the dominant belief that if you were born a woman, you were going to be a wife and a mother. He's bringing in examples of the role of a woman in a household, which is going to be a wife and a mother he's bringing in examples of like the role of a woman in a household which

Starting point is 00:48:46 is going to be a cultural idea which can evolve but he's tying that in quickly with the sleight of hand into biological reality we saw first of all that all these categories have changed over time which tells us that they're just inventions they're just inventions that get reinvented all the time okay he's so serious. And second of all, they serve the purposes of ruling elites. Because they get to put people in their boxes and control them more easily. And there's the point of how these are just tools for power,

Starting point is 00:49:18 tools of the tyrants. Those people over there, those are black. Therefore, they should be our slaves. So it's okay for us to have them as slaves. Those women over there, we don black. Therefore, they should be our slaves. So it's okay for us to have them as slaves. Those women over there, we don't want them, you know, working for NASA. So we will have a rule against women working for NASA. Yes, but women working for NASA has nothing to do with biology. That's a false parallel.

Starting point is 00:49:37 He's slyly slipping in there. So postmodernists said, none of this is biological. None of this is inevitable. You are now free to do what you want as an individual. It was a liberating moment. It has become the dominant way of thinking in academia. What he just said there is very important. This has become the dominant way of thinking in academia. He's openly acknowledging that. I have to say, in my view, it is the supreme achievement of academics joe's reaction to that is priceless he's like that's it keep this going that's it that's it this guy really does have a bone to pick with jordan peterson he did call out last video he

Starting point is 00:50:22 calls out jordan peterson in this appearance on Joe Rogan. So, and this is my second disagreement with Jordan Peterson. He thinks that all the stuff in college campuses that's crazy is because of postmodernism. This is a big deal. And you heard him earlier articulate that this has become the predominant way of thinking in academia. So this is important. It has become the dominant way of thinking in academia. It is the supreme achievement of academics. It's kind of ironic. This is actually impeding the places women have access to. Women are allowed very much so into places they weren't allowed before.

Starting point is 00:50:57 A woman in a changing room with a five-year-old daughter no longer has privacy from male genitalia, which according to this, is there's no such thing. He's literally going to make that argument. The trans movement needed that, needed postmodernism to make that intervention and say, no, that's not true, right? You can actually be a woman because woman is an invention. It's a social construct. We're talking about no one is born a man?

Starting point is 00:51:20 You're not born a man? I'm not born a man? I'm saying that, no, I think... I think we're getting silly. Hold on here. I think it's the category of man becomes meaningless does it yeah we just did this man but it's not an invention yeah no it is of course it's not an invention one of them has a penis and testicles it's a male the thing we see we call it a penis all right so here's where we start to move into the wacky territory and actually attack the fabric of reality and biology.

Starting point is 00:51:45 What trans, much of the trans movement now is doing, which makes me so sad, is that they're saying that I am biologically, essentially, naturally, you know, in my core, a woman. Oh, no. No, no one is. No one is. Because there is no such thing, according to his logic, as a biological woman. A lot of the trans movement now is doing, there's a good word, reifying. They're making these ideas, these abstractions real again. They're making these claims that are similar to Sam Harris's claims and to old racist claims and to old sexist claims.

Starting point is 00:52:20 Right there, he's equating biology with racism and sexism right because you've heard a lot of trans people say this right i was born a woman that's that's what they often say what i'm saying is no one was born anything well you are losing me in a huge way why you don't this is where it goes off the rails you don't think you're born a man no what are you born why are you a man for all sorts of reasons for all sorts of reasons none of them being biological we just decided we just none of them being the xy chromosome none of them being you have testicles being you have a penis he's conflating how we use categories of language which are tools made by human beings to be able to communicate and he's

Starting point is 00:53:06 conflating that with biological categories that's why i think joe rogan is getting disconnected because that's a leap is there certain inventions certain social constructs that do nothing but bad things this is a very common tactic there are because there are some categories that do bad things therefore we cannot have any categories that's similar to saying because there are some categories that do bad things therefore we cannot have any categories that's similar to saying because there are some bad aspects to capitalism capitalism needs to be overturned that do no good and they're only social constructs like race and gender what what is that like what what again not not it's postmodernism but not a dumb guy like intellectually as it's supposed to be making an opinion that is it's like too much time in

Starting point is 00:53:57 the academy too much education they they get caught up in it it's and it's not as that's a that's gold right they're just that not but the segment with rogan i love that that guy in general because i was it's kind of like you if i were to just sit down and talk into the camera about this and describe what i've seen at colleges and things people don't believe it this gives us a chance to see the words coming out of his own mouth and so you can't dismiss it and that's why i enjoy the format so when i say gold it's like that's why it's like oh there's something this it serves that purpose it's because i have encountered so many professors like that studying even okay i'm a graduate student studying filmmaking but i have had cultural media studies that are required at the college. Cultural media studies?

Starting point is 00:54:47 Yeah, and I have the textbook from it still. And on the front is a raised fist, and the first chapter one is Karl Marx. And then it goes through postmodernism. It's applying Marxism to you as a content creator, essentially, as a college student who's trying to make movies or whatever it is, you're making content, which is true. How Marxism can be applied to that,

Starting point is 00:55:12 how the ruling class, it went from in Marxism claiming that the ruling class are the only ones because they're not working all day on the factory lines, they have more time to think therefore they dominate the intellectual landscape to now applying that same logic to content creation right marshall mccluhan the medium is the message and so it's that seeps down to even filmmaking so you are literally learning post-modernism as a graduate film student. Where do you think that started? Well, they say that in France in the 60s with postmodernism, that's when it, I believe, well, in the 60s is when we started seeing it in America. Can you just stay with the, by the way, keep the mic like in front of you? Yeah, the French, apparently the French intellectual movement. Yeah, it was France in the 60s. And then we saw the cultural movement in the 60s just think about the counterculture

Starting point is 00:56:11 culture vietnam war for very good reasons but the pendulum kind of went and now that was my parents generation so that's why i think i grew up surrounded by everyone who it's like republic conservatives were these nasty things in Vietnam and I can see why they view the world through that lens but they're not adapting to the new information as the story changes they're locked into the old story and that's blinding them to everything now with Elon Musk and it's like and that's where the disconnect occurs so now I go home and I'm vilified by like my best friends. Well, they're starting to get better. But when I first went home, when I went home the first time after like that viral video thing and I started making content, like they were.

Starting point is 00:56:55 Warren, how could you? That's literally, they were in tears, man. Oh, no. Yeah, I felt bad. But at the same time, I'm happy. I'm like, anytime you want to talk about it i will talk about it i'm not going to invade like and i'm just very calm about it and ratchet like you're met with emotion yeah but i'm happy to talk about any time and i'm trying to lay out

Starting point is 00:57:17 the logic as simple as i can about okay if i okay we'll call him john but okay john but tomorrow if i decide i'm a woman i still have male genitalia like i can you acknowledge that and it's like but you can't say that warren and it's like and they can't say that that was what i was he's you can't yeah yeah he was saying you can't say that they're not a real woman and why did you say why make him explain it well essentially you're what you okay john but look at the but that would allow me then tomorrow to have access to this space where there could be a six-year-old and her mom does that mom is it fair to that mom does she have a right to decide if that six-year-old sees my junk or not and their only logical response that it's not a logical response the only response is but you're not allowed to say that because they can't contend

Starting point is 00:58:12 with it logically you're not allowed to say that well that's transphobic i i exactly that's all jk rowling is saying we're going to talk about JK Rowling. You had one conversation. It could have been longer than five minutes with one kid where you just annihilated him with how people run with group things. I want to get to that. But staying on this point, how did we get to a point? Is it strictly you think because of academia and where it got with Marxism, which I do want to come back to in a minute. But like, how do we get to a point where the answer to a question is, when you say why, they just say, because you can't say that. And when you say, but why can't we? And they just say, because like how? Well, let's walk. We started walking through it. So the 60s pendulum shifts so drastically,

Starting point is 00:59:00 that generation is now the professor class those are the approximate age they're starting to age out they're retiring now so but they predominantly they dominated academia and the number of diverging perspectives conservative perspective like i don't i don't know the exact number but it's very small like 10 something%, something like that. We'll approximate. So we can see now how the academy has been taken over by this type of thinking, right? Yeah. Okay. Then what is the impact of the academy college

Starting point is 00:59:34 when we're telling kids that you have to go to college to be able to succeed? So now it's the only thing that you can't go. You can qualify for a loan really without any collateral. Like, we'll give you the loan. You can never default on the loan. You can never claim bankruptcy. It's the only loan like that, I believe.

Starting point is 00:59:52 So we have this cultural movement now where everyone is going into the pipeline. The pipeline's been corrupted. I would say it's not so much Marxism. Marxism morphed into postmodernism. And postmodernism has morphed into this larger story that we'll just call the left and if you the problem with that thinking though is it just takes that little bit of question that little bit of prodding to now be a bigot and we saw this with jk rowling so imagine that playing out in a classroom hey guys i'm gonna make a documentary about winston churchill or make a

Starting point is 01:00:24 narrative film on that but you know he's racist's racist, right? Here's another example. I wrote a movie. I was building the world of the secret scholars before there was a YouTube channel. Okay. This kid, he's a genius and he's like, is he insane or is he really a genius? And he's trying to make a flying ship that's powered by lunar power. Okay. It's a, it's a movie. Okay. And he he's gonna try and make this this flying ship and it looks like a gypsy wagon and it can fly i met i pitched that crickets warren you're not allowed to say gypsy that's racist and i'd never heard that before and okay but what do you think about the story crickets and so yeah that's what the experience is kind of like

Starting point is 01:01:04 that first day of like okay preferred pronouns don't know what that is and it yeah that's what the experience is kind of like that first day of like okay preferred pronouns don't know what that is and it just it's one thing after another there's protests at emerson college because they're claiming emerson college is racist one of the most left-leaning brainwashed colleges out there and no one can really provide any evidence because it's all and i was talking about this with with with joe rogan and i couldn't remember any specific examples and i think the reason for that is because it's it's subconscious if their their argument is that it's microaggressions it's critical race theory you don't need evidence when it comes to critical race theory it's micro no

Starting point is 01:01:40 it's microaggression i'm so racist i can't even I don't even know I'm racist. I don Next day, I'm in a pedagogy course with the dean and the head of the social justice center. I left this part out of the story, which I wish I had included that. There's a social justice center. The head of that office is sitting in there. And even the dean was like, this is bullshit. And he's the same generation as my parents and like same thinking and everything because i remember and in that meeting four hour class there was three white students we were all told to shut up for the entire time concede our space we weren't allowed to talk and see color base right color of our skin all that i was like this is weird this seems

Starting point is 01:02:38 like logically the opposite of treating people the same regardless of the color of their skin, but okay. Hadn't really started to wake up fully yet. Get in the elevator going down with the dean. It's just me and him in the elevator. And he's like, and I literally remember this. And he says under his breath, he's like, they were talking about decolonializing the canon, meaning the great works of literature that are being shared. And it's his responsibility to monitor the canon in order to decide what the canon is and is it being taught or not. And so he's being told that he's racist unless he decolonializes the canon.

Starting point is 01:03:13 He's in the elevator. He's like, this is bullshit, decolonializing the canon. But he wouldn't say anything out loud in that room because everyone was terrified. People's jobs were on the line. One professor spoke out then and he was the the president of the college wrote a letter i still have it to this one professor who was willing to say we shouldn't bow to mob rule this isn't a good thing to do that's essentially all

Starting point is 01:03:38 it was that's all he said essentially but articulated in a full way. Right, right, right. The president of the college writes a letter. I'm so disappointed. And sends it out to every single individual with an Emerson EDU email address. Open letter. Yeah. That's like mobbing him. Yes.

Starting point is 01:04:02 Bullying him into silence. The one person who was willing to say something. True story. that's fucking now that that professor had you had classes with him did you know i don't know that professor you didn't know so you don't know like what his viewpoint is that that is the idea of group think and how it gets into things. I remember when I was in college taking a management 101 class. They were teaching us a few different business terms or whatever. And they had efficiency, effectiveness, one other very normal one. And then it said groupthink. And I had never seen this word before. I thought they had made up a word. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like they're

Starting point is 01:04:49 making up a word here, some type of term. And they explained what it was, which is the idea that when, you know, one idea is prevented and I'm paraphrasing here, but in a large group, other parts of the group will go along with it to be agreeable or whatever, regardless of whether or not it actually is merit or makes sense or whatever. And I think about that moment all the time in my life because it's defined how I look at so many things. Cause I never realized that it's probably like the most important term in our modern like discourse that could possibly exist. And when you tell me a story like that, that is groupthink at its highest and worst form because you have someone who I'm going to – and I don't know this because you didn't know the background of the professor. But let's say that at this school where most people seem to think one way, this professor was no exception and he did as well, which means for however many years he's been there, whether it's five or ten years, when every issue where it's like, oh, insert one coin here.

Starting point is 01:05:44 I'm a part of the team. He's been a part of the team and has in good faith in that way, proven himself to be a part of the team. The minute he says, wait a minute, maybe the intention, he's not even saying the intentions are bad. He didn't even, based on what you told me,

Starting point is 01:06:00 he's not even saying they're bad. He's saying the outcome is. The outcome has downstream effects that we should think about and they go off with his head yeah that's wild yeah there's a lack of evidence if we are bowing to a mob of people they're making these claims without evidence which is probably not a good thing to do and we're supposed to be standing for the opposite we're supposed to be shaping the young minds and yeah it's i should have talked about that i think yeah with you i didn't i gave like a half-baked version of that story but

Starting point is 01:06:33 it's just even crazier than afterwards i was thinking i was like wait there was so much more to that and so i'm glad i never say everything you want to say i did the part of that episode i listened to i thought was awesome so you're being critical, but you're self-critical. But, you know, I was also – and I'm, like, surprised you haven't been on a ton of more podcasts as well. Because, like, your videos are obviously great, but you're thinking about things and you're coming at it from a real – like I said earlier, like a logical lens, which is so welcome to the conversation. There's only been a few people I've said yeah i was talking about with you about this a little bit and i was there's one more for that shortly after i got fired the free press said barry weiss wants to sit down with you in person and i didn't know who that i googled it

Starting point is 01:07:18 okay cool free press like she's and and but they sent michael moynihan who's a great guy cool guy and everything and he sat in my right in front of that bookcase and we did this whole thing he brought a hired a professional cinematographer lights decided it was too over lit i was like man i do i record down here every day like you can light down here just take down some of the lights i didn't say that i was like you're in charge of what you want. It's like, let's move it to the driveway. So they move it out to my driveway and we do it. And then there's a lawnmower going off and we have to stop it. And there's airplanes. We have to stop everything. Anyways, they ended up not even releasing it. And I didn't release it. No. And I emailed Michael, like, are you still planning?

Starting point is 01:08:01 Because at the, this is interesting because going into it, I was like, sure. i'm not going to mention the name of the school though i was like as long as you don't mind that well you worked right that's my one thing i'm not the name i'll talk about it all you want but and they agreed to it and then afterwards he um we rapped and he said uh yeah you know i was like skeptical about whether this whole thing was real or not but then enough people talked about it that i figured it's real and And I said, well, that's not logical just because a bunch of people talk about something doesn't mean it's real. And he was probably like, who the hell would say that? And I was just thinking logically, like how I do. And he might've taken that to be like, I'm pulling a scam or something. Because then a few days later I was driving down

Starting point is 01:08:41 here. The other one I did is actual sit down the comedy seller was driving down to do that the next day. And I get an email saying, Hey, from him saying, Hey, just for my journalist integrity, I just need you to share the name with me off the record. And I was like, dude, I don't know you. I don't trust you. Like, and me and him had even talked about how it's a common tactic because Fox news were like, we want to write a piece about it, but we need the name of the school for legal. And I was like, a mob and he's like yeah they often do that and they wait till the last minute to pressure you saying we won't run it otherwise and then he does the exact same thing and they never ran it and i don't know it's because of that or maybe it's because my address was in the background because they did it in the driveway it might have doxed the house maybe it was the airplanes i don't know

Starting point is 01:09:20 but they never released it so they never released it and And then I made a video about Barry Weiss and Joe Rogan. She probably wasn't happy with that. Yeah, I'm going to have to check that one out. So what did you go at her about? She did the same pattern as the student with JK, rolling a presupposition around Tulsi Gabbard. I forget what it was, but she was making a claim. It had no evidence to back it up and she got trapped.

Starting point is 01:09:48 Hold on, let me turn on your mic. I remember that video. It was about the whole Russian agent thing and she was making the whole argument being that Tulsi Gabbard's a Russian agent on Joe Rogan and Joe's like, I know Tulsi. We're good friends and she's like, she's an agent. She's a Russian agent.

Starting point is 01:10:04 There's the proof. Go look at it. And then Joe's like, what? Yeah. And then he asked her and he's like, so given that you don't have any proof, do you think that's a good thing to say? And she's like, well, it's known. I don't know how I know, but it's known, which is exactly what that student said in that first video. Well, a lot of people have said, right. I've heard a lot of people say it, so it must be true. That's all I was trying to say to Michael. I was like, dude, just because a lot of people have said, right. I've heard a lot of people say it, so it must be true. That's all I was trying to say to Michael. I was like, dude, just because a bunch of people, I'm not lying about this, but your logic is off.

Starting point is 01:10:32 And he was probably like, probably not. That's so disappointing, though, that they didn't release it. I mean, I went on to have, you can't complain when you get to sit down with Jordan Peterson for two hours later, so it panned out. What was that like, sitting with him? That was, I deeply respect. You can't complain when you get to sit down with Jordan Peterson for two hours later. So it panned out. What was that like sitting with him? That was a guy that you really deeply respect.

Starting point is 01:10:52 It's like one of those moments that and Joe Rogan. Those are two things I'll never forget. But it's interesting how I feel like sitting down with Jordan Peterson. I feel like that one went way better for some reason. Like he was, Joe just has a different style. And it wasn't Joe at at all it was me i feel like i um because with peterson there's this thing where he talks about you just you can feel when your words make you feel weak or strong so i said that's how i'm going to go into this and i mean i i promise myself if i ever do get the chance to talk to jordan peterson i'm just gonna be like completely honest and let the he talks about that just letting the cards fall

Starting point is 01:11:30 where they may yeah and that's the philosophy i took is like no prep really or anything and i feel like that made for a much better conversation in the given also the way that he psychologically can guide a conversation and the the premise, the framing of it, there was a better story as well. On Rogan's, most people watching that one are like, who is this guy? And I didn't talk really as much. He opens it up with, yeah, and you got fired. And I just kind of moved on from it, right? And that's what people wanted to hear about.

Starting point is 01:12:02 So then they're like, who is this guy talking about Heath Ledger and making movies and stuff? Because they don't know anything about it. So then they're like, who is this guy talking about Heath Ledger and making movies and stuff? Cause they don't know anything about it. So then it's less interesting. Here's the thing. You're like, it's fine. We were talking off camera before this and you're like very self-critical and, you know, watch everything you say.

Starting point is 01:12:15 And I appreciate that a lot because you want to put the best foot forward. But people like when they see someone like you who makes very straightforward, very on topic, very niche type videos on one specific thing where you get to demonstrate your power of how you think, they like then learning about how that person got there. If they know, right. If they've seen the videos maybe and if they – and those people seem to enjoy it. But it's like looking at it and I shouldn't – Joe told me he's like, don't read the comments and he's right. But the person who is like who is this guy like i didn't do a good job of setting the stage or anything to then make that interesting whereas the whole peterson conversation it was around that journey so and also with rogan there was no there was no lead up with peterson either

Starting point is 01:13:00 but i just like walked in we just sat down and i I was like, whoa, and you're on, you're on like the biggest podcast in the world. And it's pretty cool though. I'm glad, I'm glad he, I mean, we wouldn't have found you if, if, I mean, maybe eventually we would have, but that's how we got turned on to it. I know a lot of people probably went to your channel. So you think it went okay? Yes. Yeah. I listened to like the first hour of it, unless you listen to like all of it, right? Yeah. It was very good. Yeah, of course. I, I thought that's what made me interested. I was like, Oh, this guy's thinking deeply about first hour of it unless you listen like all of it right yeah it's very good yeah of course i i thought that's what made me interested i was like oh this guy's thinking deeply about things versus reactive responses i could tell because you take your time when you respond it reminds

Starting point is 01:13:36 me that keanu reeves interview where they asked him a question he just sat there and then he answered or like don't think it's the wrong way like kanye was some moments like i'm gonna take my moment wait and i was like i i like that i'm like that's funny this guy actually takes better to say three years ago but that's no i get it i get what you mean because that's funny because i thought i i didn't take enough time on that one like peterson i did and that one i was just but it was it was a lot of fun man it was a great conversation i just feel like we were just talk shooting the shit you know and most people like but it was a lot of fun um it was a moment i will never forget and i feel like i didn't quite articulate that enough to him just how much it meant to me either because i'm sure i'm sure he got it i'm sure because he sees what you're talking about and there's got to be a piece of

Starting point is 01:14:23 it from a philosophical standpoint that he's like, ah, that makes sense. That like he listened to me coming up. You know what I mean? Because that is what the allure of him was when he was first coming up. It was just trying to stay strictly with what's the logic of the situation. Remove your emotion. What are the facts here? How can we best find them?

Starting point is 01:14:42 And, you know, i think the political spectrum is different now and i think everyone gets you know pushed in different ways i don't i don't think he's any different with that but he's certainly a guy that from a from a deeper thinking perspective i've respected a lot in the past and and i think it's i think it's cool when you know the new era of that gets to you know kind of cross of cross pollinate with him a little bit. He's getting so much hate right now, I guess. I don't know how much of that is real or not.

Starting point is 01:15:11 The, cause I looked at the comments like I shouldn't have on, but it was funny. YouTube. You look at your positive. Sometimes I try to, but you know, I try to,

Starting point is 01:15:22 but you're looking at it on Spotify, it was like all negative. And it's almost to the point where it looks like bots. Because it's, I don't get it. There's, with guys like him, I can't give you percentages. I can't sit here and give you the exact evidence of stuff. But there's no doubt that there's some unnatural things. Because how could there be such a discrepancy between YouTube and this other platform i think that's a fair question i think that's probably i mean look at look at the attacks he's taken for so long my biggest wish of jordan peterson my biggest criticism of him has been one

Starting point is 01:15:57 thing over over the past few years delete your fucking twitter because he reads everything and he comes at things like i it's it's human nature this is another one of those perfect situations of like be very careful saying if I were blank then I would blank I've never dealt with the kind of shit that he has dealt with now for Christ like nine ten years it's been like a decade right so the when when you get pushed, it's like the physics law of life. For a reaction, there's an equal opposite reaction. When that reaction is like this, human nature says you're villainized, all these things. And now, while this is all happening, a lot of people were loving him. A lot of people were seeing through that, which I think sometimes we lose sight of. And he might be no different. But it got to a point where, especially from behind the keyboard, where people say, you know, fuck you, die.

Starting point is 01:16:59 I think that got to him too much. And there's things in his Twitter that, to me, I'm like, damn. So I'll give you an example. It was actually one that hits close to home. He, he, you know, I'm talking about the Hoboken hasn't had a traffic death in like, what is it? Like eight years or something like that. Right. So we got a really good system. This is a great neighbor right here. We got a really good system with the lights. They're all delayed by like six or seven seconds between the walking symbol and I studied this stuff. But, you know, so the AP wrote a story about how new or what was the title? It was like Hoboken's traffic laws have prevented no deaths in the last eight years or something. And Peterson took a screenshot of that title and he said, this is your woke agenda or something like that. And I'm just like, doc, log off. All right. This is, this is a good thing. All right. I don't give a fuck whether

Starting point is 01:17:56 it was Republican Democrat or, you know, the fucking lemon peel over there that made this people aren't dying. The roads are pretty safe yeah here it is you have become pathetic beyond comprehension at ap and the woke death will soon visit you and the and and it's literally the title is a new jersey city has that limited street parking hasn't had a traffic death in seven years yeah man you know like i've just been off twitter good for you i don't have one that's what he should do just get off twitter. Good for you. Because that's what I'm saying. That's what he should do. Just get off Twitter. Yeah, I hate seeing the recent stuff with him and Candice.

Starting point is 01:18:31 I don't know what to make of any of that. You don't know what to make of it? Well, I mean, what do you make of it? I think it's what I said. I think people, when their finger is thrown in their face over and over again, you and I are capable of this. Everyone listening is capable of this. You can eventually become what they want you to become. There's a human psychology done that. But are there aspects of him like when they were trying to say, you're just a right wing troll or something like that 10 years ago? Are there aspects of him where now you can point to it and be like, it might not be your intention, you might be having a bad morning. But do you see where the people who don't like you can take something out of context and now define you this way? And again, who the fuck am I to say I've never dealt with something

Starting point is 01:19:23 like that. And like, I would love to think I would deal with it the best way. I'm also from New Jersey though. And I don't know how much, you know, people from Jersey, but like we punch back. Yeah. We punch back twice as hard. I'm no different on that. So it's like, I do try to look at guys like Peterson. I try to look at guys like Rogan who dealt with ridiculous attacks for two, three years

Starting point is 01:19:44 there during the pandemic on stuff that he was much more right about than the other side. And it's like, you know, I think he handled a lot of that extremely well. And so I take that as like, Oh, there's a lesson from the goat. Like, okay, what do you do? Do you log off here? Do you not comment on this thing? It's never going to be perfect, but you know, I can, I can learn from the great things people do and I also have the benefit when you're coming behind people like this to learn from the things where it's like,

Starting point is 01:20:11 ooh, they could have done this better because they had to face it before I may have to face it or you may have to face it. Yeah. I hate seeing the division and the stuff going on with Daily Wire and all that. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. It's like

Starting point is 01:20:26 Alessi was saying, it's almost like independent media became the media there, from a business perspective. Yeah, and you saw Jeremy Boring, right, stepping down? Yeah. Yeah. It's like there's these two factions forming.

Starting point is 01:20:42 What are the two factions in your mind? In my mind? I mean, I guess you could say it's just what are the two factions in your mind in my mind i mean i guess you could say it's around israel but it seems to be more and more there's just a lot of people that don't like daily wire and jerry i think it was yeah and i understand it i stepped in this on rogan with brett cooper next thing i know he's asking me to explain the cooper situation i was like oh god and then you get flack for that because people like why are you talking about Cooper, next thing I know, he's asking me to explain the Cooper situation. I was like, oh, God. And then you get flack for that because people are like, why are you talking about drama on Joe Rogan or anything?

Starting point is 01:21:14 But it was interesting because it definitely played out into something bigger. And then he had Ian Carroll on. I'm surprised he didn't talk about it at all. About the LA Wire stuff. He's the one who kind of like broke the whole. But yeah, no, I think they made, this goes to the, I think it's a really important idea that it's not what you do, but how you do it. So the school that fired me, they could have gotten rid of me easily without it posing,

Starting point is 01:21:37 whatever threat they view it as like they there's some in the same way they could have parted ways with her and relaunched the show i think there were some mistakes made i can i don't think i believe them that they didn't hire an acting coach or anything i probably should have clarified that i hope i didn't piss anyone off when i was talking about that yeah for people that didn't hear the rogan podcast can you just briefly give a well he's just like i said i was talking because we were talking about movies everything i was saying the daily wire is positioned to really do something if Pin Dragon Cycle lands. Like Game of Thrones, it's a big if.

Starting point is 01:22:10 But this recent Brett Cooper stuff is going to probably throw a wrench in that. And it's definitely going to now. Yeah, but what happened there? And he goes, exactly. That's what he asked me. He's like, what Brett Cooper stuff? And I'm like, oh, right. And I, Jamie, are you familiar with this? And he's like what brett cooper stuff all right and i jamie are you familiar with this he's like yeah i've heard a little bit so i tried to break it

Starting point is 01:22:28 down as basic as like what we actually know and he's saying why did she leave but we don't know nda isn't anything okay we can kind of think it through and speculate about she's pulling more views than almost i think she was the second biggest maybe the biggest that time now that candace was gone she probably wasn't she's like i'm not getting paid based upon the views maybe i'd like to negotiate maybe i want to she just bought a farm probably the commute she was probably just kind of now we have new evidence though of like indicators data that shows she probably maybe there was something between her and jeremy boring but so i kind of just like stepped stepped into that trying to explain this

Starting point is 01:23:05 thing and he's like but I don't get it I don't I was like yeah we don't get it we don't know what's going on so I couldn't really answer it adequately and I but I do think yeah now they're getting flack for like Ian Carroll saying that's what screwed them over was trying to enter the realm of filmmaking and everything and that's why Jeremy Borden's gone, they think, because it's driven them in debt. And it's because it is making a movie, one of the worst things you can invest in. It's like nightclubs, restaurants, and movies.

Starting point is 01:23:34 It's one of the most difficult ways to make your money back, to make a profit. It's so difficult. His whole point in their philosophy was that the culture, that's a, Hollywood has a foothold on the culture it's like the factory of dreams that has impacted the culture so if someone could and we don't have an alternative to this union model that's so it was exciting to me to see someone offering alternative we have angel. They were even partnering a bit for distribution with Daily Wire. But it's, yeah, they could have done it.

Starting point is 01:24:10 They did make mistakes there. And then the story, because this goes to how we view the world through stories. And then there's a villain now. And the story catches momentum and becomes larger and larger. And that's what this is an example of. It just snowballed because of not

Starting point is 01:24:25 what they did but how they they did it yeah what he came out and said afterwards yeah i i don't i'm not the most like read-in guy on that because like i don't i never really followed daily wire content but i have seen from afar just over like the twitter drama like over the years it's a shame that guy was always in the middle of it. Obviously, like the guy Jeremy Boring, he's running the ship or whatever. But it felt like, and unless he was making this point off camera, it felt like in this case, you know, with respect to calling it independent media, this is a conservative independent media outlet. They're upfront about that. So that's their side but they're they were trying to market themselves as

Starting point is 01:25:05 like the you know the antithesis of the mainstream media and yet the same exact kind of backroom suit shit seems to be happening there you know like pulling the strings like that and it's kind of big money it's big exactly it's gotten big so it's still alternative in the sense it's not like cnn or one of the you know it's it started as this yes they had seed funding and yeah i think there there was some yeah i guess we'll see ian in's a internet friend of mine but he's gonna be coming on the show oh cool in a couple months he he was all over that one so i'd like to see like where it's played out Oh, cool. a part of it. You're looking at our fucking operation in our quotes right here. This is like an underdog kind of thing. I love that. But especially as society moves in these pendulums over time, which it always will. You look since World War II, you got Truman, Eisenhower, JFK slash Johnson, Nixon slash Ford when he gets kicked out. Carter, Reagan. Reagan bought four years of HW, Clinton.

Starting point is 01:26:28 Bush, Obama, Trump. It goes back and forth. So that's just how society runs from one spectrum to the other. So I think in the middle of that, if independent media is going to solve for the sins of mainstream media we need to be very careful to not fall into those same traps and that includes the business side which is what you're pointing out right now with daily wire and making it you know a bunch of suits saying what content's going to play the best versus like what are we covering here and what type of truth are we trying to get to? Right. And then the other part of it is also bias and, and not, not teaming up with any political party or things like that, you know, and unfortunately, where I'll defend people in independent media right now, sometimes it is just how things look rather than how things are, which is a shitty part of our world. But we do got to be cognizant of

Starting point is 01:27:23 that, you know, and I'd like to think I am, and hopefully I'll get better at that too. But you know, that's why when I bring people on here, I'm trying to bring people from all spectrums. I stay away from extreme political stuff as much as I can, but you know, it should be like people learn more listening to entertainment, whether it be on my show or other people's shows, but they also are in a position where they can make their own conclusions about stuff. I don't want to sit here and like, what's that? What's that fucking term?

Starting point is 01:27:53 Why is it not like, I don't want to be like, oh, he's the thought leader or whatever, like stuff like that. I'm like, no, I'm the independent media covering different shit,

Starting point is 01:28:04 talking to different people, shooting the shit. You guys all make your own call like that's in an ideal world. That's we'll be 10 years from now looking back on and we'll be like, all right, that's where we are. Yeah. Yeah. You're doing a good job. I'm trying. Well, let's get to your story a little bit because I did want to hear a little more of that. When you were on Joe's show, but you were going into some other stuff that I thought was really good.

Starting point is 01:28:34 But were you a teacher right away after school? Or how did you get into teaching and who did you teach without? Yeah. No, I could talk about everything. i'll talk about whatever yeah so grad school i started teaching some classes at emerson and i still teach one to two classes a semester i developed a classic how to make a living with a camera and which is essentially what we're doing you know it's whether it's narrative or whatnot most of the people taking the class now are doing this kind of stuff and so then i'm like okay i need a full-time job because i'm not going to make enough just doing that and it who gets the professor kind of

Starting point is 01:29:16 positions i was like i'm not going to hold my breath like anyways so i i ended up at a public school regular average public high school for a year and then COVID hit and I was teaching the same thing. And yeah, it was a really cool department because it's kind of like there's the woodshop teacher. I was like the digital vocational, how to make a living with these tools. COVID hits and because of the teacher's union, they cut all first year hires, regardless of performance. So that's kind of one of the bones I have to pick with unions is the fact that it allows things like that to happen rather than how you're doing your performance metrics or anything. Right. And through, yeah, that was a turn of fate that i found myself at this school that was still open during covid that for behaviorally challenged students and some students there's two floors like students

Starting point is 01:30:12 upstairs have more physical serious handicaps or drawbacks like down syndrome whatnot downstairs it might be what you're they were either too much of a bully too bullied in a gang struggle with drugs whatever like so those students need somewhere to go so the the public schools pay 25 000 ahead to send them to this school wow and what is what what age are we are we still middle school and? Middle school and high school. Okay. Mostly high school though. So the first three years I was just working with high school on one site. I grew the multimedia program then had my, then I opened it up to the entire building. So both floors and all the students and, and I had my own space,

Starting point is 01:31:01 kind of like a crawlers street and across the street. I had my own space and it like across the street. I had my own space, and it was really cool. And that's how I fell into it. Okay, and how many years did you spend there? I was there four years. It seems like the way you talk about it, it was very fulfilling work. Like you really enjoyed working with the kids. Yeah, those kind of students, you know, it's challenging.

Starting point is 01:31:23 We're all on walkie-talkies because fights and things can break out any time. And we go through training to where we can go hands-on if we need to. Oh, you got a left hook? We can't punch them. We don't test that out outside? We don't punch them. But, yeah, man, a lot of stuff like, yeah, craziness. So it keeps you on your toes.

Starting point is 01:31:45 It felt kind of like this is how it should be in an ideal world. It would be like special forces of education, right? Small teams working with like the most challenging students. But in reality, what ends up happening is kind of many of them are kind of bottom of the barrel. Like don't give a crap what you know um and so that's some of the flaws i saw it was kind of the people making the decisions didn't even work in the school and this is the problem we're seeing in colleges high schools as well the administration's growing massively so outside my room across the street they would have their quarterly meetings

Starting point is 01:32:23 or once a month meeting so i'd walk out out of my lab and there would be 20 people and I didn't know a single one. I'd never seen them before, I mean, except for these meetings. And they're the ones making all the decisions. So it was a business with a board and everything. And they're making the money, $25,000 a head. It's a turning amount. And then it's like, okay, well, how do these students get accepted? You would think there would be some kind of protocol or policy

Starting point is 01:32:50 because if they don't get accepted there, they don't have many other options. But what would happen is they would just tour them through and then they would be like, okay, you think we should accept this kid or not? And oftentimes it was just like five people kind of being like, sure, vote. It was kind of what i saw was this person's going to make our life too challenging so let's just say no and it's like well what's going to happen to that kid so there was a lot of that it's all it became this thing where the the adults are just trying to keep their lives as simple as possible and they kind of forget what

Starting point is 01:33:20 we're trying to do so and it's just run as a business. There's a lot of those types of schools within this district. There's multiple of them. And they're all running around this kind of business model and no one knows really what's going on there. And they've never had to worry about anyone knowing what's going on or seeing or caring. So when that video went viral, I think it was like, caught everyone off guard, caught me off guard. So I think it was more just having a teacher there suddenly.

Starting point is 01:33:57 And then clearly I'm going to try and run with this opportunity and give this YouTube thing a go. Cause I'm not making that much money doing this. It's like, it's almost like you take that job because it allows you the schedule to try and grow something else. So I'm not going to sacrifice trying to grow something else because I can't do this for my whole life. I can't afford it. It's just, you don't get paid much. Yeah. It's a thankless job. So when you do suddenly this door opens, yeah, I'm going to run, see how far I can go. And I think that scared them because they saw I wasn't stopping. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:28 And so I think that's, yes, there was. You never said the name of the school in your videos ever. No, they, they, their big thing was like, Hey, if you sign this document and NDA essentially saying, you know, it would have given them control. My YouTube channel will pay you all this money. We'll pay you all this money. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:43 They said, we'll pay you for the end of the year plus this bonus and then i had i got a lawyer peter bagos and helped me get a lawyer she reached out she's like look man this guy's got a my audience at that time it's like 50 000 yeah but she was like look he has the potential to grow it's not worth the money that you're offering so she got him to raise it but it's still she looked at it and it was like, you should use her exact word. She goes, I've done a lot of these negotiations. And usually I tell my client, just take the money because who cares? Why do you need to be able to talk about this? Just move on. But I wouldn't sign this. If there's any way you can afford to pass on this money. And I needed that money.

Starting point is 01:35:18 She's like, you're going to be looking over your shoulder with the rest of your life. Cause if you ever, all the HR called me, the only contact i got from the school around this thing was so you need to get a lawyer to look at this it's just a document saying that um that uh you won't say any lies you won't lie about the school it was not i was like sure sign me up i won't lie like if that's all it is but no it was it would have given them control over the rigid that viral video there was narratives that I had done with the music teacher that were filmed, like in part, a scene we did in the classroom or in the recording studio, you know, it's like, cause that's where a lot of the tools were. We would film after school

Starting point is 01:35:55 and stuff. And so it would have given them technically given them control of that. And for the rest of my life, they could have, if, if they had ever found a way that I'd, Oh, I'd breached it. They would just take all that money back. And I'd be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life they could have if if they had ever found a way that i'd oh i breached it they would just take all that money back and i'd be looking over my shoulder the rest of my life i just wanted to she goes if you just don't say you can move on with your rights they call it your rights intact yes it's good advice and so i bit the bullet i'm so glad i did so glad i did you were making some money though and even though the audience was smaller at that point you were making some money on youtube right two thousand a month okay so three thousand a month so i was freaking out man i was like but you're still a teacher at the time when i got fired i freaked out because i was like i'm not making enough right

Starting point is 01:36:37 right we're gonna get there in a minute i i just i want to stay on this track because that's fucking wild so they were if i'm understanding this correctly they were going to basically take ownership of your channel and once i got fired they that was like we'll pay you for the we're gonna so that's they stay trying to act like it's standard like we're gonna pay you what we owe you if you like the right like you're the salary we owe you even the money we owe you for the time you've already taught. No, they were going to give me that like to the end of this week, we'll pay you for like, there was two, there was like a month left in the year. This was around June, I believe. Oh, so this is when you go to get fired. I get fired. And then like three days

Starting point is 01:37:18 later, I get a call from HR with this document and they email it over and that I never hear another word from them. And I was not, I was like like i can't even afford a lawyer and so eventually i did bite the bullet and she worked for for what she didn't charge me what she should have she charged me like 2 000 to do all of it oh that's nice two or three thousand nice lady yeah because she knew i was in a pickle i want to go back for a second though even before this so i'd like to actually kind of similar to you with your background i like to see the the how people's stories generate and how their worldview generates so to me the way i'm looking at it correct me if i'm wrong is is two kind of seminal things happen on the one hand you go to emerson to pursue

Starting point is 01:38:05 you know your dreams and your passion what you love which is obviously like making films and getting into that end of the industry and you encounter this new kind of like group thing very weird call it maybe like marxist ideology well let me correct like i what i i wasn't trying to get in i had been in la for two you know almost three years i was trying to get in. I had been in LA for almost three years. I was trying to become a professor or a teacher, something like I loved working with a camera, trying to connect with an audience. I had written and produced a feature film,

Starting point is 01:38:40 some short films, but I didn't see Hollywood in my in you in my future and i still i don't i still don't i think it's it's not a lifestyle or a game i want to play so i was trying to find my parents were both professors so i was like this is a cool way to do what you love to teach what you do and so that's how anyways okay so you're trying to get into the teaching side of it but you're in like teaching within like filmmaking and media and stuff like that so it's towards your passions okay you encounter this kind of ideology and you're like that's interesting and this is a world that i'm maybe trying to get into and this is how they i never thought i would be doing this kind of in that world like sitting with peterson

Starting point is 01:39:25 or rogan or something like that like i was a consumer of that world i liked it never thought that would be the kind of content i made oh yeah that's not what i mean i mean like the world that the people who were saying these beliefs are in like the professors and academia itself right so you're kind of thinking like oh this is interesting they all think like this and i'm gonna be a part of that so that's got to be a little weird yeah yeah but i figured like and i still teach that class i just wouldn't allow that to enter in my classroom it's you know i mean it's not like i could yeah being a professor would still be a really cool lifestyle. So you still think that, but it's strange to see what the culture was becoming. Yeah, the college has been corrupted.

Starting point is 01:40:11 This is helpful. I want to make sure I have this right. So that part happens. Then one thing leads to another. You end up teaching, not at a university, but you're teaching at a high school. You end up in this middle school and high school area where you're working with kids who have some difficult challenges. And so, you know, to do that kind of job where you're not getting paid well at all, you and, you know, you're working with some of the more difficult type of situations like that, that takes a lot of heart

Starting point is 01:40:39 to do that. And like, I, for one, have so many, I wasn't in a situation like that. But I have so many teachers just from school, growing up who I'm sure never made any money but like got me to where I am today that I'm so appreciative of. So it's a thankless job as I say. But you're doing that at a young age like in your 20s working with these kids. 30s. Early 30s working with these kids and you're starting to form these worldviews. And now suddenly, at the level of children and education, which is supposed to be in theory, like the purest, like, open minded, we're going to go try to educate the next generation. You're seeing a business around it with people who have nothing to do with what happens in the classroom, trying to dictate what happens in there. And so you're seeing, the reason I'm bringing this up is because to me, you're seeing two different things here. You're seeing like a cultural shift group think ideology that seems to be permeating spaces that it shouldn't permeate. And you're also seeing that

Starting point is 01:41:39 the world, even at the level of things that are supposed to be pure is running in like a in in a business standpoint rather than what's best for the kids in this case and so i would imagine that's got to be disheartening and maybe even lead to some cynicism it was definitely disheartening it felt like i was in a game often where it's so it's so surreal it's so hard to describe that's why i like doing videos like that where they're saying the words you have the evidence i can describe it for you but it felt so there's the principal and assistant principal that hired me got taken out on the same day in this kind of coup a year before me there was two factions that that emerged that were kind of vying and they won they both are just vanish one day like they're let out they're just in the middle of the day that's how they do it

Starting point is 01:42:35 there so those people that were meeting make the decision there's one lady who is in charge the executive director it's a bullshit reason she gives a bullshit reason we all know it's bullshit it's just this goes to the idea of it's not what you do but how you do it she's so used to seeing the outcome and she has the power to make that outcome occur she doesn't even care how she does it she's like we can pull the trigger and get rid of them doesn't who cares and no one can push back doesn't matter there's matter. There's no transparency. That's how they run it. That's how she runs it.

Starting point is 01:43:11 So there was that kind of with me where it was just like, we just got to find the thing, the way to pull the trigger. So does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay. So there was this game often. That's why I talk about people don't. So if you have a coworker you don don't like like that coup that was happening it's not verbal it's not spoken out loud in the same way that when they fire them they don't say the real reason their behavior indicates

Starting point is 01:43:34 that you have all this these patterns the data that we act out so if i don't like this co-worker i'm not going to say it to their face my body language and behavior my decisions will indicate what i really think so that's the information you had to navigate this game. That's kind of like, it's not survival, but survival within that office place, that workplace. And I think a lot of people can relate to this workplace politics. It's common. So you're learning how to identify these patterns. That's critical thinking. And just what's their motivation? What's coming next? How can I counter counter this so there was a lot of that but cynically there was times where it's like maybe i need to yeah and then but there's

Starting point is 01:44:12 also that you get comfortable and you're doing your thing every day it's allowing you time to work on these other things and i was working on a secret scholars society short film and the music teacher and i were doing that and playing with YouTube stuff, actually movie reviews and conversations. And, um, but it kind of changed when that viral video did hit,

Starting point is 01:44:35 he and I made a point of trying to run with it. And once a week at my house, set up a studio, sorry to go for it. Now, the viral video, to go back for a minute, was the JK Rowling one, right? Yeah. So I teach students podcasting as one format, video editing, photography, 3D printing. And they wanted me to do a newscast.

Starting point is 01:44:57 And we had the student in my classroom, supposed to do a newscast, getting cold feet. Cast, getting cold feet. doing getting cold feet i was like here i'll sit in the chair let's have a conversation as a warm-up is there anything you want to talk about yeah i'd like to talk to you about harry potter i think he said i said all right so the camera was rolling and that's where the exchange came from and then uh there was this thing called your teaching portfolio with artifacts and And I'd already had the YouTube channel. So I uploaded it to there. This is vaguely interesting.

Starting point is 01:45:28 I'll try something different. It's kind of interesting. I was really inspired by Jordan Peterson recording his lectures. I thought that was really cool. And I had done that in the past. That first year of teaching, I did that a lot. The students really liked it. Archetypes in Harry Potter.

Starting point is 01:45:42 And those are still on my channel. And so it wasn't completely alien to me i was like those are fun i was admire peterson doing it so i uploaded it didn't expect anyone to watch it boom that's how it yeah can we actually pull that video up this is the one that's like four minutes 50 seconds something like that something like that yeah so just hit popular on warren's channel it's good that top one right there when a student asks about yeah right there let's let's listen this because you it was such good logic hold on get the ad off so these guys want to talk about JK Rowling? So what's going on with that?

Starting point is 01:46:26 What do you want to know? She's had a pretty controversial past. I just want to know what are your thoughts on it? Do you still like her work despite her bigoted opinions? So let's get specific though. Let's define bigoted opinions. What opinions are bigoted? We're going to treat this as a thought experiment.

Starting point is 01:46:45 I'm not going to say what's right or wrong or which way to think. The whole point is to learn how to think, not what to think. So when you say bigoted, you're starting with the conclusion that given her bigoted opinions. So first let's start with does she have bigoted opinions? So when you say bigoted opinions. She has had a history of being extremely transphobic, I've heard. You've heard. So can you give bigoted people? She has had a history of being extremely transphobic, I've heard. And you've heard, so what, can you give me an example? Uh, if you look at her Twitter,

Starting point is 01:47:10 I think you can see a few things. If you want, I could try and find some. Yeah, see if you can find one. So, one of these tweets that she came up with in 2019, she said, dress however you please, call yourself whatever you like, sleep with any consenting adult who will have you, live your best life in peace and security, but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. So you find that bigoted? What do you find about it?

Starting point is 01:47:45 It was deemed transphobic. Like, I myself... Do you find that transphobic yourself? I don't really have an opinion on it, but I'm just going with what a lot of other people have said. So let's pause there. Let's not go with what other people are saying. Let's try and learn how to critically think.

Starting point is 01:48:04 So let's analyze there. Let's not go with what other people are saying. Let's try and learn how to critically think. So let's analyze the tweet ourselves. So that statement, do you see anything problematic disregarding other people's opinions? She did try and pin some things on a specific group of people. Where does she do that? Can you read that? But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. So when I hear that, I'm interpreting that as meaning, if a woman is saying that there is a difference between men and female, and then being attacked as transphobic,

Starting point is 01:48:44 I think that's what she's saying by attacking someone for stating that sex is real. That is exactly what she's saying. Is that transphobic to you? So, to me, no. Stating that sex is real is not transphobic. It's just a fact of life. It exists. So is there anything you disagree with in that tweet?

Starting point is 01:49:13 In that tweet, I can't really see anything that I myself disagree with, but I can see why some people would think, oh, this is offensive. We can't have that here or something. There's an apology tweet let's read that what did she say there I respect every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans at the same time my life has been shaped by being female I do not believe it is hateful to say so.

Starting point is 01:49:48 Do you see anything problematic there? She's apologizing, so no, not really. If I could read it again. It sounds like a very similar statement as what she was just saying. She's basically saying, like, nothing to me, this is what I interpret as, I have nothing against someone being trans in your life, but you just don't get to impose on my... you can live how you want, I can live how I want. Yeah. And let's all, you know. Exactly. So I guess now, so now that we're looking at it like oh there's not much difference between me or her, do you have, why do you. Do you think it's fair that she's being attacked by a large group of people and people are calling her?

Starting point is 01:50:30 Like you said at the beginning of this conversation, you said, given the fact that J.K. Rowling is transphobic, how do you feel about Harry Potter? Now, retroactively looking at that statement, do you think that that was the best way to phrase it? No, I feel like an idiot now. That's okay. It's fun to learn how to think. looking at that statement do you think that that was the best way to phrase no i feel like an idiot now that's see it's the most basic thing it's what you were talking about earlier it's like people just hear noise they don't have even bullet point understanding of maybe even what happened. And they're like, therefore, a lot of people are saying this.

Starting point is 01:51:09 It must be true. It's also a good example of the blank slate because I can't I'm not accountable or spun up or familiar with every tweet she's put out there. So I'm coming at her from, OK, you're making a claim. What evidence is there? That's very different than what we were using the example of destiny of doing a deep dive so people have tried to say well she said this this other time you missed that it's like i can't account for every single thing she's ever said the point is within the framework of that game being played what is pretty it's kind of like a courtroom it's

Starting point is 01:51:39 like that's why a courtroom agrees upon the evidence being presented in that case. It's not like everything else. It's what's within the walls of this room, what's being presented. Now, without going into all the specifics of what the back and forthhrasing, J.K. Rowling came out defending women's rights to the point that she was saying that trans women don't necessarily belong in women's bathrooms. It would open up the capacity. We were using the example, if I decide tomorrow I'm a woman, now i have legal access right that's going to have an impact on women so you do you but when we have an objective line that is crossed when what is your freedoms can't be imposed upon someone else so when we give this new group trying to be moral we're trying to do the right thing and give them these rights. But what that's doing is it's impacting another, an entire half the population's rights. It's opened the potential

Starting point is 01:52:50 for that to occur. It's not a matter of what the frequency at which it's occurring. It's logically, it will open the door for that to occur. And it's not just bathrooms. That's why this has become something larger. It's about the legal implications of this. Right? Yes. If we're going to legally declare you a woman, it's not like, do I think you're a woman? The law is saying that you are now a woman. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:53:26 That has legal ramifications. And God forbid, as a woman, you would speak out and say, this could be a slippery slope here. That makes you a transphobe or whatever all these terms they put on her were. Which is crazy because as far as I can tell, prior to this happening, she had, again, she had always been someone who had kind of signaled the right things with, you know. Probably a liberal right yes and now one thing where she says something that is based in in a strong objective fact which has to do with gender and spaces where they can therefore enter she suddenly kicked out from that she got a lot of flack from it that stuff i kind of wonder if that's starting to to turn though because society is like they've seen enough of the cancellations that they're like we can't do this yeah you just had gavin newsom break away and all that it's a lot of people know it but, but you can't break away from the team.

Starting point is 01:54:29 Yeah, they're dug in. But if someone like Gavin Newsom is breaking away. Yeah, I think the dam is about to break, honestly. I think that's a sign of a crack in the dam. I think it's just gotten too far. They have to pivot because they're losing. They've never been in such a bad position polling-wise. Jon Stewart was just articulating this the other day. It's like, you guys are cooked, so you've got to.

Starting point is 01:54:53 But then again, I wonder what his position would be on that specific. We heard him debate about, okay, it's okay, according to him, to have these irreversible surgeries and minors because he claims it's the equivalent it's life or death on the same level as cancer which i think is not logically true agreed but i would be curious to hear his thoughts on um this portion of the conversation yeah i i i wonder if some of that is like also again even people like john got caught up in ideological capture and it's almost like you come to at some point like wait a minute what the fuck were we saying and i'm willing to you know there's people who are like i'll never forget every single thing

Starting point is 01:55:32 they said fuck them but like just on the basis of like people getting along again and common sense trying to win out i am cool with people suddenly being like you know what i had really strong opinions on that and i was wrong like i think that's a part of the healing process with just just the things that got crazy that got off not not the stuff that's actually like you know a political policy type you know that could go this way it could go that way i'm talking the stuff that like a common parent could be like wait a minute fuck that that's what i'm talking about with the fabric of reality that's what interests me these kind of things not so much politics but politics can enter into that for sure

Starting point is 01:56:09 all right so back back to your story though so you a video like the one we just watched jk rowling goes viral that one goes viral what year was that last year okay so it's before how long after that did you get fired a month two months oh so it wasn't that long no it bubbled for a bit the other teacher and i started to make more content yeah there was people at school that probably but no one said anything to me to my face we were talking about non-verbal they're not going to say certain things that yeah i um and i was talking to jordan peterson about this where i had another exchange with a student a very similar exchange and i uploaded that so i did the exact same thing and they decided that they there was a rule change i guess that gave them the ability to use that and to say well it was okay before but

Starting point is 01:57:07 now there's a rule change retroactively i don't think it was retro there was an email that went out the day like a week so that i uploaded that and it took like three weeks before it someone put it on x and then like I did Pierce Morgan after that. And, and then the day after Pierce Morgan, I went to a meeting with the head executive director and her lawyers and they said, well, there's no rules broken. Kid doesn't appear on screen. We have releases for him anyways, and you didn't identify the school.

Starting point is 01:57:43 So good luck, you know? And and yeah but that same day an email went out a one sentence email that said just a reminder moving forward i think it said if you're going to upload anything check with your specific blah blah person okay and so i did that time i didn't check with this person that gave gave them what they needed. To fire you. And did you, if I remember this correctly, because you put out a video like the day after this happened, unless you and I watched it. When I got fired, yeah.

Starting point is 01:58:11 Right, this is like 10, 11 months ago, something like that. So you saw the writing on the wall that at some point that was going to happen? I knew it was coming. I thought that they would just not renew my contract over the summer and claim some bullshit thing. You thought you had time? Yeah, I was kind of looking for other things. I thought there was like a 70% chance they just wouldn't renew my thing

Starting point is 01:58:39 because of the lie. It would be easier for them to just get rid of it, get rid of me. I didn't see that coming. I honestly didn't think there would be any issue uploading that video. And I even told the music teacher that I was working with that I was uploading it. Days went by, they didn't say anything. And they had been, the lawyer later found out, because I had uploaded another one with that same kid talking about socialism. But the lighting was so bad because I was being backlit. found out because i had uploaded another one with that same kid talking about socialism but the

Starting point is 01:59:05 lighting was so bad because i was being backlit i uploaded it to x and removed it like i would test things on x to see how before moving it to youtube to not compromise the algorithm and later they used that as evidence well he knew he wasn't he uploaded it to x and then deleted it four days later so it's like and i was just thinking so you sat on that you could have said something to me but you wanted it to be a problem so you let the problem occur so that you could use it so that that's an indicator to me um i went home that day threw up the rest of the day slept on the bathroom got my crap kind of together there's some trails by my house i just walked around the trails all day the next day sat down recorded that video waited a few days

Starting point is 01:59:53 and then uploaded it you can see in the video you can see this stress manifesting in your body because you talk about the and this is what bothers me with any scenario like this regardless of what the context is again you taking the classy road not naming the school not naming the people involved which you know you had said some people were like yelling at you for that that's i think that's just taking the high road i think you should be commended for that that's really cool that you're doing that because you don't have to do that but you know you talked about that one woman who was saying one thing to your face and clearly the executive director back yeah that was the executive director and part of that was just cathartic recording that video i wasn't

Starting point is 02:00:34 sure i was even going to post it but i did record it that next day so it was fresh and it was just yeah and then i i wasn't sure what to do about it, but I posted it. And then I got a message from JK Rowling, which is cool. Oh, you did? What'd she say? She's like, I appreciate seeing a teacher be kind of like grounded or sensible. And she was offering to help. She's like, do you have anything lined up?

Starting point is 02:01:10 Write me a check jk like carve me out a hundred grand we'll be good yeah i was like i couldn't do that you know i didn't know what to say i was like i really appreciate it that means a lot but i was i couldn't ask she was off she was essentially you know she was like how are you doing financially? You know, I stand to help. Oh, wow, she went there. Wow. So it meant a lot. So that's another one of those moments that I'll never forget. That's very cool. And people were kind of like, yeah, it doesn't feel like it now, but they're doing you a favor.

Starting point is 02:01:37 And it turns out it probably was true. But in the moment, there was, when you're in the unknown, it sure doesn't feel that way. Oh, I know what you mean. No, I don't know it from that type of trauma i mean because they you know you said they literally took your laptop from you you had you there was a book you were working on for like two years on that yeah did you ever get that back the lawyer kind of negotiated that and i met their lawyer in a parking lot down the street from my house and got a bum drive back it was weird man it was because the music teacher we'd set up the

Starting point is 02:02:06 studio using our own equipment so i posted that video a few days later he's like okay i never heard he texted me one day like are you okay and then a few days later he's like can i come get the gear i was like yeah and so i asked i was like what do you want to do about the youtube channel he's like i can't do it anymore i can't keep going on it i'm not gonna be able to do it anymore and i kind of knew he was gonna say that like school probably was like what do you want to do with the youtube channel he's like i can't do it anymore i can't keep going on it i'm not gonna be able to do it anymore and i kind of knew he was gonna say that like school probably was like you can't oh yeah and so he packed up his gear but he left um there was like this little mixer kind of thing and i was like can i buy that off you so that'll allow me to run a podcast on my computer he just left it that in the mic and then i get an email from the school claiming i have their microphone

Starting point is 02:02:46 and i just like you and i because they had an identical one and i saw it the day that i left and i was like you guys are just being dicks but i um they're like if you give us the mic we'll give you your flash drive back and blah blah so, blah. So I got that. I've never spoken to that teacher since he's never talked to me or reached out. It was bizarre, man. It was strange. I'm sorry you went through that. It's looking back on it, you know, it's, that's part of why I kind of, when I was on Rogan, I was like, I mean, this is the stuff I should have

Starting point is 02:03:25 laid the foundation for, for people that have no idea who I am to, um, to give some kind of background. But it's like, when you go through something, I just, I don't want them to even live rent free in my head. It's like, I've, I was just looking, I remember in that, those days, I can't wait for the day where I can not think about this and be able to never think about them again. Well, after you post that first video, you're at this crossroads, obviously, because like you were saying, you're making two, three grand a month on YouTube. You just had your job taken from you. So financially, you can't live on that. So you're nervous, righteously so.

Starting point is 02:04:04 But you start creating a lot of content and it does well because you're good at what you do and people want to hear you talk now you it's the unknown though like you said you don't know that before that happens but looking back on it you mentioned something a minute ago about some of it being like sort of a blessing in disguise but like do you think the the desperation of the moment actually led to great work it focuses you you're like i'm all in on this and so that does and then you're doing it full-time which you kind of have to do if you're really going to make it work you got to treat it like a full-time job yes as opposed to what i was doing and i slowly did kind of find the format that like

Starting point is 02:04:42 what we've been looking at and i really enjoy that format because i do all the editing and that's really where it comes together because you find the logic in the editing it allows you to really play with some of these episodes where you can cut out you don't want to you don't want to recontextualize something unfairly but oftentimes in these conversations they'll make a point and then they'll divert off and there's filler and then they'll come back to it. If you remove that filler and you stay in the logical consistency, it really hammers home the game that's being played. So I really enjoyed that kind of format. And then it makes the content more transformative enough to where you don't get hit by a copyright strike because you're transforming it a little bit.

Starting point is 02:05:23 But as long as you're not unfairly doing that or you're making it look like something it's not, but it allows us to, through editing, to really explore the logic. And then I'll usually just sit down and do one take, often just one take, two takes. Sometimes I'll do a third after the fact if I think of something that I need to add, but it's usually just as simple as that. It's natural. I like that. Yeah. Cause like when I see that you're for people that, you know, haven't seen your channel, we did play one of the videos earlier, the one on Tim pool that shows it really well, but like the speed, the subtle speed you have with the edits in and out, in and it's good it's like i i don't

Starting point is 02:06:06 want to like overstate it but it has like that bum bum bum bum bum bum bum like kind of tarantino feel where it's like here we are here's the story oh let's go back to samuel jackson here's the story oh let's go back to samuel jackson and it played but you do it in like a really subtle way and it and it does make it entertaining and like you said the thing you do have to be careful with is like not having it go so fast it takes something out of context but you know it's almost like when i'm watching to it or listening to it i'm interpreting what they're saying and then you're kind of being our getting our brain in the right direction like you're the brain coming in and being like so that means and it's it's educational i like it well thank you yeah i'm trying with that sometimes it'll work better than other times and sometimes i get a lot of feedback it's like

Starting point is 02:06:53 stop interrupting the damn video and just well if you want to watch the video go watch the video you know and i have to do that often to avoid to make it copyright free. And, but more, more importantly, that's my thought process. I'm trying to, if there's not something, the hardest part is finding the video where I feel like I can offer something. It's not just reacting or recounting the news of what's just, I'm not really a political commentator in that sense. There got to be some kind of interesting move that's occurring that i can dig into a little bit so that's the hardest part is finding the ideas sure because it isn't just what happened yesterday in the news it's only been 10 11 months but you know obviously like success does help you know some wounds for sure, I would imagine. That said, you're still a human being and you were definitely up and down wrong in this situation.

Starting point is 02:07:54 But I am there where it's like, I don't care anymore. So my question was going to be like, do you forgive these people or is it just like, no. Yeah, it's fine. A part of it, man, honestly, it's – what the phrase it's it's it's it's not it's business it's not personal you know like i get it it's i i don't in a way like they did do me a favor in a way it was kind of stupid the way they did it because it just fueled me and it's kind of put them in a worse position like they were probably like now he's on rogan oh god like they're they're right so but it's but you're not throwing them under the bus no because in in the biggest i thought about it for a while and but i just knew it doesn't it

Starting point is 02:08:39 didn't feel right and it would just cause what would the point be no good would come from it it would cause potentially not i don't think no good would come from it it would cause potentially not i don't think most people would even care but some nut could be it just it would be a stupid thing to do it's it wouldn't be a wise thing to do it wouldn't do there's a lot of good people at that school yes it would be causing kids complications potentially though i don't think many people would care but it's's just, there's no point. It's not important. Yeah, it's tough living in the world we do now

Starting point is 02:09:09 where small things can be accessed by people around the world. I was talking with someone the other night who's from Springfield, Ohio, which is where the whole, they're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs, and that whole thing came from. And he was talking about like how they had to,

Starting point is 02:09:24 I think it was like they had to close some of the schools that were getting bomb threats every day from things that were emanating from outside the country. And it's like the second and third order effects of what was happening to people who had nothing to do with, you know, whatever the argument was over that, you know, take the, take the issue at hand and you forget there's collateral damage around it and so i i do think you know i again i would like to think i i would be able to take the high road like you too and i think i think you should be commended for that because again obviously that lady seems to me like she's kind of a bitch and you know it is what it is but there's a lot of other good people there who yeah it's no it's no fault of them she has done people dirty before even worse than I think than me like the principal who hired me and the assistant principal they're the they're the ones who got me that job like I interviewed with them they hired me that she really did them dirty

Starting point is 02:10:17 because they were there for eight years they messaged me afterwards and they're like hey if you ever need a resident or reference or anything because i was like how am i going to get another teaching position my whole four past four years i'm just and if i don't they said if you sign the nda will uh write you a letter of recommendation they throw that in like it's the golden ticket didn't really do much no but it's all good it's all worked out good well here you are now and you're making a lot of videos and moving the conversation forward and getting on to some good platforms, which is great. We'll see what happens. Now, one of the things I always think about is the term critical thinking and how it's thrown around. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:11:03 And here's my one issue with it we got to a point in the social pendulum where it seemed like particularly on like the far left side there was a lack of of quote-unquote critical thinking which i think is perfectly that's that's a fair assessment but to me what's happened is almost the majority of the time someone will talk to me and tell me to critically think is that if my critical thinking conclusion does not come out onto the right side, I therefore am not critically thinking, which defeats the entire purpose of what the term critical thinking is supposed to mean. Do you think, have you seen patterns like that as well? For sure. It can be thrown around. Yeah, for sure. I think it's thinking first and foremost, thinking for yourself, not just, oh, I've heard this, I've heard that. Thinking for yourself not just oh i've heard this i've heard that thinking for yourself

Starting point is 02:12:05 in order to navigate the stories that make up the world because we as we've identified we that's how we make sense of all this which leads to the oversimplification but not i've realized there's another part to that and it's not it's the non-verbal patterns as well but all patterns not just the non-verbal but the stories and patterns to make up the world so you can and why there's gonna be stories and patterns yeah we were talking about how like in the wake of the video the i could see that coming from nonverbal communication there's patterns people act out what they really think they don't say it through the behavior. And so picking up on that, use all the data that you can to navigate your own office work policy or politics, office place politics or politics or whatever it is.

Starting point is 02:13:00 But often it transcends politics and it's being able to anticipate what's coming at you whatever it is where it's coming from what's going to happen next so that you can make the best move at any given time i like that that's a good one i mean you've talked a lot about how your i guess like interest in filmmaking and and that background shapes how you look at things but what do you think of i i'd heard you say this with Joe, you think that in the future people are going to look at films as like the historical document. Potentially. I should have elaborated on that more.

Starting point is 02:13:35 That it's not just, that's going to be one of the artifacts. But also podcasting, the content will be on the when movies are really good or shows when content can get to that level but joe's most famous episodes maybe like elon musk smoking with you know that might be studied as an artifact one day with this mind um yeah it's when it's done right. And I was trying to identify kind of like when Christopher Nolan can nail it, some of these people can just nail it like Heath Ledger and what it's and then trying to identify what is it because we can't really that transcends language. We can't say why Heath Ledger is a good actor, why the Joker was. It's like you can have different theories. No one can really explain why this one actor is able to.

Starting point is 02:14:29 There's a lot of actors out there. What makes them good? They're very natural. There's all these different words, but it transcends what we can even articulate. And that goes to that idea of there's, yeah, the fabric of reality and those stories that are masterful. Because Christopher Nolan making Dunkirk, it's great. There's,

Starting point is 02:14:49 there's an infinite, this is where postmodern and postmodernism comes in. Cause there's an infinite ways to tell any story true. And that's where they get it right. But it's trying to find the, you can feel it click in when you find it's a pattern as well. It's like a puzzle you're figuring out. That's the screenwriting process. And it's, then it's almost

Starting point is 02:15:12 as though when it does click, you're telling the story for the sake of that story, not just to give the, like a snow white potentially might be one of those where they're making something, trying to make what the audience wants to see. She's saying, saying no this is for the sake of the story which is for the sake of the very fabric of reality in a way and as a consequence it now resonates with the audience so that i think can echo through all content creation but it's more of an observation on them the how limited words actually are yeah it doesn't take away from the fabric of reality though yeah i i completely agree you had you had made i'd heard you make the point that it's some of the greatness lies in what the great actors don't do and stuff like that i completely agreed with that point because

Starting point is 02:15:58 you know you're taught in any industry and any job like oh if you're not doing more you're not doing anything but the reality is simplification over over complication it goes to the idea that we act out what we really think so the actor that's what i was trying to use with that analogy it's like you give the anyone can have the screenplay but what the actor does is everything else beyond the words yes because what do they first thing they want to understand what do i want out of the scene because that's going to determine the subtext. It's going to determine everything. In the same way, your office place politics, they're going to act out what they want. And that's the data.

Starting point is 02:16:32 So yeah, doing the subtext work and that determines your behavior. And that's where acting really resides. It's not because that determines how the words are delivered. It is though. I probably oversimplified it too much to where I made the mistake of saying most communication is nonverbal. I don't think that's true just when you're sitting on a podcast, but I think we,

Starting point is 02:16:54 we communicate. It's almost like more, it's almost as though we, we, we tell what we really think through our actions and our, our, our actions because talk is cheap. Anyone can say anything.

Starting point is 02:17:07 I would amend that slightly and actually say you're more right than you think. Instead of saying most communication is nonverbal, I would say most communication is not the words you say. So I would include the verbal part in the sounds we make to go along with the body language. But it's how you say things and what your body is doing when you say those things. You know, we can see the actor come on the screen as an example who's like, yeah, so what are we doing on Tuesday? And you're like, that would never be said like that in that scenario. All he's doing is walking into an apartment and talking to his girl about what they're doing. Then you see the guy walking and go, what are we doing on Tuesday?

Starting point is 02:17:46 And you believe you're it's like it's like that old Pacino quote. You can fool you can fool the eye, but not the heart. Right. And that's I think that's more what you're getting at. And it does include maybe the sounds we make, but not necessarily what we're saying. That's good. I like that. I'll use that.

Starting point is 02:18:05 Hey, all day. You don't even have to cite me. You can make it yours. I mean, you talk about you can't really explain in full words why something's great or why it works, but as best you can,

Starting point is 02:18:21 what made Heath Ledger have such an impact on you? I think he was fearless. And at the age I was, I was about to enter film school. I was like 18, 19. I hadn't, I don't know. Yeah, I was about to go to film school, I think. And I saw something, maybe I saw something in myself in it,

Starting point is 02:18:50 whereas it was like this guy who didn't want to, it was all about the roles that he turned down. He turned down everything. After 10 Things I Hate About You, he passed on everything until the point where he was almost broke. And then The Patriot came along. Great. One of my all-time favorites.

Starting point is 02:19:11 And he just chose these fearless roles and I admired that. Yeah, there's just things about him that I can't explain. I don't know. At the time, it was probably just the... And he was doing these little indie films that most people haven't even seen that it feels like maybe i just missed those kind of movies too they're still being made they're still out there but not being backed

Starting point is 02:19:36 by the studios in the same way monsters ball candy things like that that it feels like it's made for you or it's like it's not for i don't know commercial consumption if you will it's commercial but it's it was like when i read harry potter before it was cool i was i was 11 when harry potter came out i was the same age as him it wasn't a hit yet but it was like whoa this is really good and friends were reading it and there was getting it was getting buzz but there was no movies wasn't and then it became a phenomenon at that golden window there it's it feels like it was just for you yes i know what you're like and then people are talking about you're like no that's my thing like it starts then they make a movie it's like no no i see what you're saying what what did what i don't know much about that like what projects

Starting point is 02:20:25 was Heath turning down obviously there were some they wanted him to do the heartthrob stuff after 10 things I hate about you

Starting point is 02:20:33 did you see that of course I seen that okay yeah yeah so yeah he wanted to do he was like this art house guy this art guy

Starting point is 02:20:42 he was a weirdo but it was yeah man and then it just the right thing came along and he with the joker it was i mean but i was i was like he's amazing before that but just that mix of the fact that he could do something like that that would it's just universally recognized yeah it's like that kind of indicates that there is this fabric of reality when in the audience doesn't lie because if it's not just all subjective it's like we can recognize real almost it's not real but you know what i mean where it's the fact that it could be so universal shows that there's some connecting thread within all of us that,

Starting point is 02:21:25 yeah, that echoes to something deeper. So when these postmodernist professors are up there claiming everything's malleable, nothing means anything like bullshit. Yeah. He, he,

Starting point is 02:21:36 he took a, a comic book character and made it feel like the guy, the evil guy down the street. Well, I've never, I've never met a guy like that. I'm saying like on a smaller level. Right.

Starting point is 02:21:48 On a way smaller level, but like the patterns. Yeah. You know, he brought it home. It was relatable. Yeah. And just the way he did it, I think, yeah, to have that confidence and fearlessness, and that could apply to anything in your life.

Starting point is 02:22:07 Who else inspired you coming up? What made you want to be a filmmaker in the first place? It was the coolest thing. You're creating worlds. You're wielding time and space with music. We have literary patterns telling stories and books, but it's taking that to the three dimension and it's the culmination of everything.

Starting point is 02:22:32 And then that's why I love editing because it's fine. It's the rhythm combined with music and suddenly it makes the audience feel something. And that was the coolest thing is to be able to make them that, that feeling you get that. Cause that's really what you're trying to do at the end of the day is elicit an emotional response from the audience. It's, it's just crazy that if we can in music does this as well,

Starting point is 02:22:56 as well, the right frequency of the right notes in the right order. If you can get just the right note at this one, you have a hit and it creates a feeling like we respond emotionally. And that to me, it's crazy that that and no one can explain it really. So that was just really exciting. And I thought, I mean, what could be cooler than that? And I had a lot of fun doing it. And I, I, I was good at it, man.

Starting point is 02:23:23 In undergrad, I was on fire writing short films. You were writing short films then? That were produced at film school and they would finance them and they were not bad. People could watch them. Teal is my favorite one. What's it about? It's about a girl. It opens up in a gas station and there's this girl standing there next to the cashier he

Starting point is 02:23:46 starts flirting with her and something's off though and then this officer walks into frame puts down two coffees he's like let me get a pack of like cool blues he's an intern story because you want anything and he's got like a bulletproof vest and everything it's like what's going on and then she says goodbye and they walk out and you realize she's in handcuffs and then they and he's transporting her to this juvie center and the whole movie just takes place in the car and then it ends with them arriving and him dropping her off it's super simple but what was the thread where you came up with a story like that i have no idea oh well no idea i was at a house party just got into film school i was 21 so did. I was at a house party, just got into film school. I was 21. So I was drinking age at a house party and they raided the house party. And I'm the only one that got arrested

Starting point is 02:24:31 because I was like, I was like, I'm 21, dude, I'm going home. And I stood up to give them my ID. And they made an example out of me, threw me in cuffs. And then they, everyone left. They just told me, we just needed to make a show. And they they said but because we put you in handcuffs we got to drive you down there don't worry it'll get dismissed and blah blah blah they're really nice it was like weird this soon as like the party was over they were nice and we were in the car i mean cuffs in the back of this car he's like what music do you want to listen to blah blah that's where i got the idea of like this human connection that occurs when you're in that position and then it's weird to see that i kind of ended up teaching at a school that's like one step away from juvie yeah and then i did another movie set in juvie

Starting point is 02:25:13 you did another movie set in as a continuation kind of but with a different a different actress playing a similar character called redwoods and what was that like what was the concept it's this it's within juvie where this girl there's something's going on it's kind of unrealistic because there's males and females in the same juvie center but there are some like that but it's like what's going on where she's meeting with the psychiatrist and something's going on between the guy and the psychiatrist you're trying to figure out this dynamic it's a little dark but where do you think that where do you think that comes from like you mentioned the idea where the original film comes from but then when when you

Starting point is 02:25:50 start when you have when when you then take that thread and you're like okay now i got a second one it could be called redwoods it's gonna take place in juvie we're gonna kind of continue that but then you start going down the path of what these characters like what the story becomes and what it leads to and what the characters are like where it's the world at first you start i start with the world or it's like this is an interesting setting there's something about this character i know it's a girl i don't know the angle in i don't know where she is like are we at juvie are we not and then i it clicks where you find that pattern and it's like you can feel it you're like this will work and it worked it's one of the it can feel it. You're like, this will work.

Starting point is 02:26:25 And it worked. It's one of the, it really, I really think it was the strongest one I've ever made. Cause it is so simple and it's gotten great responses. You can feel it when it clicks and it's so, but it starts with like, there's something interesting about this.

Starting point is 02:26:42 I'm not sure what it is. It's a feeling you can feel. And I would often listen to music on repeat. the music is causing uh in the same way we're talking about the right notes it's causing this emotional response that you want to kind of replicate through the movie now you got to figure out how to connect that through a story but so i listened to the same few songs just on repeat it was like great it would drive someone crazy if they could hear literally there. Um, bun. I,

Starting point is 02:27:08 bun B was born. It's like, it's stupid. I don't, it's not stupid. I'm not going to even say, but there was something about this one verse that, uh, I can't explain it.

Starting point is 02:27:19 It hit the right chord in your bloodstream. And I did one mafia one where it was like inspired by the sopranos but high school like it's like the the son of the guy and he's like high school level and it's like the high school kids were like carrying out the collections for him and stuff and it takes all takes place on christmas eve i like to keep it simple where it's not most people when they try and do a short film they have they treat it like a movie where you have all these scenes. It's like, dude, you have 10 minutes, 15 minutes, five minutes. Treat it like a situation.

Starting point is 02:27:54 Many of the most impactful encounters in life are with a complete stranger, and then you never see each other again. But there's something about that that's really interesting to me. So yeah, it's keeping it simple where it's just this one, almost like one scene that plays out. Where would you write? Like, what was your process? Would it just be random? You get the idea and run with it?

Starting point is 02:28:17 Or did you have a real system? I would, I was trying to write before I got to film school where I was playing with the idea, listening to music. I'd make myself do it for like an hour, at least every day, two hours. Cause if I didn't feel like I was making progress, I would get really antsy. And you were strictly trying to write short films at the time. Well, I knew that that's what I would be able to make with the equipment and the crew and all that.

Starting point is 02:28:44 And then we established that crew. We were like, okay, we're going to raise 25,000. We were going to try and raise as much as we could. We got 25,000. Everyone worked for free. So we were able to produce a feature film shot on a red that should have

Starting point is 02:28:56 cost at least half a million. It's on, you can watch it on Amazon. If I put it up for free on YouTube as the crow flies, the original as the crow flies the original as the crow flies which i don't like that title is supposed to be hillbilly highway hillbilly highway yeah you can pull it up if you want but what was the concept there that is from where i i wrote it around where i grew up it's about two modern day bootleggers

Starting point is 02:29:19 trying to deliver money so they can get enough money to like set their family up modern day bootleggers so it was inspired by like winter's bone interesting so it was supposed to be this edgy neo-noir kind of western type like kind of like what taylor sheridan's doing now but yes they the editor and the director kind of changed the tone or, Oh, this is an hour, 15 minutes too. Yeah. It's a full length.

Starting point is 02:29:48 Whoa. So this is now, now are you, wait, are you, so you didn't direct this? I wrote it and produced it, wrote it and produced it.

Starting point is 02:29:56 But this is where I'm from. We filmed it. We were in my house, in my yard. Everybody was camping out at my house, my cabin, all these locations where I grew up. I love these establishment shots.

Starting point is 02:30:08 Yeah, so the cameraman, it's like, it looks good. Some of the acting's not great. Well, that's how it goes with... Right, but we were able to get production value that... It's an amazing way you can do now with these cameras. And this is back in 2014, too? Yeah, this was... You're filming this 2013, 2014?

Starting point is 02:30:24 We shot it the summer of 2013 it was distributed 2015 or 2016 that's got to be cool bringing something to life that you wrote where you grew up it's the ultimate feeling man when you create a world in your mind and then you see it brought to life with all these people that's one of my classmates that's so cool and you have that forever too yeah and then you have forever it's like a time capsule you know it's crazy we can pause it right there let's see just we can we'll put the link below so that's where it looks like where i grew up that's is that a far shot of the town that's a mountain nearby right outside town is that a rock right of the town? That's a mountain nearby, right outside town.

Starting point is 02:31:06 Is that a rock right there? That's a mining thing where they, yeah, fellspore mine. Wow. Yeah, like, you know, the beautiful thing about art is that you could look at something like the greatest movie of all time, like The Godfather, and see how it's lived on for over 50 years. It has its own brand. It sells billions of dollars around the world and whatever, and it's viewed as this seminal work. But then you can look at something that you create

Starting point is 02:31:36 that maybe doesn't get a ton of attention or something like this, but it hits right, and you know it hit right. And maybe you're not Leonardo da Vinci, so it doesn't. It didn't hit right, but it looks good, but it yielded. You you know it hit right. And maybe you're not Leonardo da Vinci. This didn't hit right, but it looks good. But Teal did. You know what I mean. I'll stand behind Teal. Like what you wrote and the fact that you were able to bring it to life.

Starting point is 02:31:54 There's something beautiful about that. Yeah, man. That's like Teal. Yeah, and that was the – well, it wasn't the first short film. It was the first one with like a real crew over time. And it was financed by the school. I did one little one at this filmmaking summer camp when i was in high school it was just a girl sitting on a bench reading a book this old man comes and sits down they have a conversation then she gets up and goes on her way and you realize she's like running away

Starting point is 02:32:17 from home and he gives her some advice of what was that encounter of like two strangers and then they go separate ways never see each other again that one was lost because we didn't have the tech back then we only had it on one dvd and someone tried to mail it to me and it got lost oh it's gone you don't even have it no it sucks that does suck yeah but we have teal and everything we have the other ones all right so you got some other ones how many did you do all together uh five wow well that's not including then the my thesis one the heart that the secret scholar society came out of that's the one i kind of talked about on joe rogan a little bit with the harvard in the world war ii that was my thesis in 2016 17 18 yeah can you refill us in on that there was the untold story of Winston Churchill needed to meet with Roosevelt.

Starting point is 02:33:08 Everyone was against the war, 98% of Americans. Prior to Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was up for re-election, so he couldn't be seen meeting with him. So he sent the president of Harvard. Roosevelt went to Harvard. There was a secret network. There was no CIA. There was only the FBI.

Starting point is 02:33:23 They had no spies. So they used colleges essentially like in this weird they realized we need these gentlemen this new breed of like gentlemen spy they have access they have money they have the charm blah blah that was their thinking so they sent him he flew in in the middle of the blitz met with Churchill smuggled back all this research set up a secret lab that started preparing for war, a secret to the American people that didn't even know about it prior to Pearl Harbor. Then Pearl Harbor changed everything overnight.

Starting point is 02:33:51 Harvard became like a war machine overnight. And only 50 students graduated the following year. Everyone went to war. It was crazy. But the network between Yale, there was the ivy leagues there was just like five yeah and they were all working together to try and help accomplish these things like and that leads to oppenheimer this is way before the movie oppenheimer was even coming out and then so to watch that movie i was like whoa did i know about all that because conan president of harvard

Starting point is 02:34:22 was leading that with oppenheimer he was so and what was the project again there that you were doing that's called harvard zero and that it was you have the a story of that and then the b story of the lacrosse team and there's one there was two black students at harvard that year there was no women they went to radcliffe and they were on the one was on the lacrosse team and they were supposed to play the Navy. And then the, they said, no, he can't play. So because you have a black player, so all the, the whole team was like, well, we just won't play. But the, they were ordered to by the school. And so they, my theory is they just forfeited kind of, they pretended to play because they didn't score a single point so the last thing that comes up you're interjecting that with this other story that's happening at the parallel time and all of this is true like that really happened that student was there and i i'm in it i'm playing the i'm playing langdon marvin jr roosevelt's godson who was the president of the student body who's got to give a speech and rally that he rall rally them for all the changes that are coming.

Starting point is 02:35:27 And yeah, in the last text that comes up, it's like, so they play blah, blah, blah. And this final score was Navy 12, Harvard 0. So it's called Harvard 0. What a crazy sub story right there. And then I messed around. I was messing around with the Secret Scholars society, which is a whole modern day. That was like an experimental me and the music teacher shot over like a month.

Starting point is 02:35:51 It's not very good. I need to recut it. What, what was it? It's like me. I'm acting in it. He's acting in it. I'm playing this guy at Harvard who can see the patterns that make up the

Starting point is 02:36:04 world. He was working in like a trading office and he's able to read the stock market and predict human nature. And he sees this symbol that taps. He's trying to find out the secret about the secret scholar society we were just talking about. Does it really exist? And he gets into like cryptocurrency. And he's able to like – there's this ancient knowledge that the secret scholars are like kind of protecting kind of that would allow the it allows him to predict

Starting point is 02:36:31 the stock markets and bitcoin and all that and it's half-baked it's not there yet but i've been playing with it so you want to come back i'd like to make it into a full movie so are you back in the mindset now as opposed to when you were going to i've been it's always in the back of my mind but i'm just so focused on trying to keep the channel going because yeah i like that you focus and like i live the same thing you get really great focusing at one thing seeing that through getting it to a point where it's like escape velocity where you're good and now at that point you can bridge out to some of your other interests. That's what I'm trying to do too.

Starting point is 02:37:09 I feel you there. Because I posted the awful rough cut of that experimental concept like a week, literally I think a week or two before that viral video. Have you ever read the book The Splendid in the Bio by Eric Larson? No. Crazy book. Now it's more, I guess, forte of the moment given the whole Churchill argument. But it's about May 10th, 1942, I believe, like May 10th, 1941 about Winston Churchill. And it reads like a thriller and covers the bombing of Britain, which is crazy history.

Starting point is 02:37:44 Yes, and it's phenomenal what's it called again it's called the splendid and the vile and there are it taught like i've studied world war ii all my life and the great thing about it is there's always new things and new threads that you find and like oh my god i never knew this i never knew. But the crazy thing is that, because you mentioned it in explaining your concept right there, America was extremely isolationist prior to Pearl Harbor. And so it's interesting that you found the thread where the Harvard president literally has to do almost like a covert meeting because Roosevelt can't be seen to do this but roosevelt had an election on november 5th 1940 and in the build-up to that churchill was calling him going

Starting point is 02:38:32 fuck like this hitler guy is crazy he's bombing us please help and roosevelt wanted to help him but he's like lynn leese i'm gonna lose the election if i help you yeah so there was even a point where churchill they the u.s had like two boats that were completely unusable ships in some port somewhere in the caribbean and they had literally put a vote through congress to yay or nay are we going to destroy the boats because they're not usable and churchill calls him up and goes listen those two pieces of shit you it didn't pass in congress but you guys don't want them can you please give them to us and roosevelt's like if i give you that i'm gonna lose the election so we got to figure out like a backhanded way for me to get you see darkest hour they show that in darkest hour they did he's on the phone with him and he's like, we can get a team of horses up to the Canadian border.

Starting point is 02:39:26 We can't use vehicles to tow them across the border, but we can get a team of horses and pull those across because we're not allowed to use vehicles according to this treaty, the Lend-Lease Agreement or whatnot. I think that's similar to – Very similar. He talks about two destroyers in that there's a line in the movie and I think that's what he's talking about. Yeah. It just – and now it like drives home as well like we were talking about like daryl cooper saying and stuff like churchill was the one trying to say like yo this i never realized how bad the bombing of britain got and how much of an onslaught it was and the way because like the way that the the nazi luftwaffe the their air force, it was very advanced.

Starting point is 02:40:06 But planes were still coming along. So like there was a strict system they had to follow to be able to make it across the channel and back on whatever. Not much air time. Right. Did you watch Dunkirk? Yes. Yeah, and it shows like you had – what was it like in less – yeah, 30 minutes or something. It was crazy.

Starting point is 02:40:22 Yep. Of air time. Nuts. And they're just bombing everything and land's falling and no one would get into the war. And then Pearl Harbor happens. And I've had a couple guys on the podcast. Jesse Fink was on here talking about it. And then Colonel Greg Gadsden actually brought it up as well a month or two later. later but you know there's a lot of evidence to show that there was intelligence that both britain

Starting point is 02:40:48 and the united states had that something like pearl harbor would happen and it's a it's a really dangerous thing to kind of get at but that was a horrible event obviously i'm very frightened to wonder what the world would look like if it hadn't happened yeah and afterwards what did churchill say he's like tonight i i sleep the rest of the saved and the thankful i think it was because he knew that was his he was praying for something and yeah it's it's crazy to frame it in that way because lives were lost they woke a sleeping dragon man and yeah had that not happened i wonder what hitler's response to that though to that was because if that hadn't happened man who knows he was probably like god yeah he made he made a huge mistake though because

Starting point is 02:41:37 it was his move he had this pact with japan that you know he didn't have any allegiance to anyone he got pulled out of that he didn't think anything of them but you know it happens on december 7th and then i think it was like december 11th he has one of the you know like government conferences or something in munich or berlin one of them and he decides to declare war on the united states because he's probably methed out and like fucking gosh we're gonna do it but that you know took his forefront war and made it a real forefront war and that was the beginning of the end i mean like it's a crazy thing like sometimes the one thing is that once the war never should have happened. And, you know, hindsight being 2020, hopefully people could have seen what an issue Hitler was earlier than they did.

Starting point is 02:42:27 But once it was happening and minus, obviously, all the death and everything that came with that, it's a good thing that he was in charge of the military and not someone with a little bit more, I don't know, patience because they were so powerful that if they had gone one front at a time, it might be a different world. Yeah, he screwed up. Screwed up Ben. They had him at Dunkirk, man. If they had just pushed forward at Dunkirk, they could have wiped him out. They held back. You know what?

Starting point is 02:43:03 Unrelated, but I just was thinking that one thing I didn't ask you about earlier when you were talking about academia was the whole – we were talking about like Marxism and some of that. And you talked about how to inject Marxism into – Okay. Alessi, can we pull this up? I know you've seen it. For people out there, I know a lot of people have seen it, but for those who haven't, we should definitely play this. It's interesting because he kind of play-by- plays how this is going to go down. When the Soviets used the phrase ideological subversion, what do they mean by that? Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate, all word, and open. You can see it

Starting point is 02:44:01 with your own eyes. All you have to do, all American mass media has to do, is to unplug their bananas from their ears, open up their eyes, and they can see it. There is no mystery. There is nothing to do with espionage. I know that espionage intelligence gathering looks more romantic. It sells more deodorants through the advertising, probably. That's why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about james bond type of thrillers but in reality the main emphasis of the kgb is not in the area of intelligence at all according to my opinion and opinion of many defectors of my caliber only about 15 percent

Starting point is 02:44:41 of time money and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process, which we call either ideological subversion or active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information No one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves their families their community and their country It's a great brainwashing

Starting point is 02:45:24 Process which goes very slow and it's divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy, exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. The result? The result you can see. Most of the people who graduated in the 60s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system.

Starting point is 02:46:21 You are stuck with them. you cannot get rid of them they are contaminated they're programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern you cannot change their mind even if you if you expose them to authentic information even if you prove that white is white and black is black you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To get rid of society of these people, you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of the United States society.

Starting point is 02:47:14 And yet these people have been programmed and, as you say, in place and who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept. These are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country? Most of them, yes. Simply because the psychological shock when they will see in future what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice, obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people. And the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people. Obviously, they will join the links of dissenters, dissidents. Unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy rich like Jane

Starting point is 02:48:09 Fonda for being dissident, for criticizing your Pentagon. In future these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. This they don't understand and it be a greatest shock for them, of course. The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years, actually it's over-fulfilled, because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would would even dream of such a tremendous success most of it is done by americans to americans thanks to lack of moral

Starting point is 02:48:54 standards as i mentioned before exposure to true information does not matter anymore a person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information the facts tell nothing to him even if i shower him with information with authentic proof with documents with pictures even if i take him by force to the soviet union and show him concentration camp he will refuse to believe it until he he is going to receive a kick in the in his fat bottom yeah when the military boat crashes so who is this guy this is a former kgb agent named yuri bezmanov how'd they get him to talk so openly he was a defector so he was explaining in this case how the kgb does ideological subversion I like how he says that but I remember episode 43 of Matt Kaminash first time I saw this clip he had us pull it up

Starting point is 02:49:53 and when I heard it for the first time all the patterns made sense and the reason I wanted to bring it up was because I wanted to ask you like you mentioned maybe the post-mariners and being born in France or whatever you know we don't think it's France, like you mentioned maybe the post-mariners and being born in France or whatever. We don't think it's France. It's like they're a friendly country in a lot of ways. But when you look at a Russia or you look at countries that have ideological differences with us where we're a China, where they – there's things about us that they don't like obviously and would like us to hate about ourselves because they they want their ideology to win do you think that within academia it's reasonable to say that perhaps the trail of money and some of the funding comes from sources not necessarily like the kgb but it could be things like that to get people to think a certain way as he put it over a generation so

Starting point is 02:50:43 that it starts to infect and spread like a cancer china China, yes. And I'll tell you what I saw at Emerson. With Russia, I don't know how they would be. I believe everything you say makes sense. How are they pumping that in, though, given that it did come from France? So I'm curious of that. Let's think about that. But with China, at Emerson, so when I screened in the graduate program, it's different from undergrad, the demographics. I'm not exaggerating. I would estimate 75%, if not 80%, of the student body was Chinese, meaning they had just come over from China to study. And I don't know if that's unique to just Emerson, but I'm telling you what I saw firsthand. They have deep business ties with China where in my third year, they were asking for a student ambassador to go over to China for the

Starting point is 02:51:30 meeting. And they do that. They have a heavy marketing in China. The Dean who hired me to be her personal videographer that I was working for would regularly fly to China each year. The night I screened my feature film, told joe about this but i was in the audience almost the entire auditorium was chinese every other movie that screened that night was in chinese only like the obviously there was not completely chinese in the audience but the professors there was a couple there were numerous classes i enrolled in, showed up. I was not only the only American student. I was the only non-Chinese student. And I would withdraw from those classes because it was, for example, one was I specifically remember was a directing class.

Starting point is 02:52:18 And there were many group projects. I sat for the first class. She laid out the syllabus. I saw the group projects. And we had to group up. And they were speaking in Chinese. And I was like, how am I going to do this? So I switched classes for that very reason. It just wouldn't have been practical. from China. I even did a little mini documentary where I would interview them and ask them about that. And they said it was, well, we had the one child policy for a long time and it's very prestigious where I come from. The parents want their one child to be able to study at one of these universities. So they do that and then they go back. There were those cries of racism in

Starting point is 02:53:03 their claims where there's not enough professors that look like me i don't have enough classmates that look like me okay if you want that solved well when 80 of the students are chinese yeah well most of them are chinese so so white we'll just use the term white people, were definitely not by any means in the graduate program a majority at all. Though those protests were coming from undergrads predominantly. But that was very unusual. I was bewildered by that. So they definitely, absolutely have business ties over there. Yeah. So they definitely, absolutely have business ties over there. Yeah, I see how when you have an open democracy that allows protests and allows free speech, which is a part of what the fabric of this country is built on, I see how other nations who hate that can use that against itself.

Starting point is 02:54:07 That means they're free to fund things to inject conversation. I always cite this example, but probably the one benefit of the CCP being communist is that with their kids, for example turn off their tiktok at whatever it is nine o'clock at night and their tiktok feed is nature videos and science videos so they're learning and then our tiktok feeds 24 7 and it's titty videos that course i was talking about with the textbook it has marx's first chapter that class that cultural media studies was one of those classes 80 as usual chinese i remember the specific day we were talking about policing the internet and i remember he he called on me and i said well let's ask like one of you guys do you think that it's possible as a practice how's

Starting point is 02:55:04 it working out like do you what's your experience that it's possible? Is it, how's it working out? Like, do you, what's your experience? Does it work? Because I don't see how we would police the internet or, I forget, like, the government controlling the internet or shutting it down. We were talking about the practicality. I was like, well, how's that working? Like, is it possible?

Starting point is 02:55:18 And he goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't talk about that with them. Like, I was, like, it was off limits. I was like, what's the point of having a graduate student level course if we can't talk to the students about the reality of what we're examining in the class so there was a lot of that like oh we can't talk about that can't insult this it's and they often those students they will not speak ill of their government because it's deeply it'll get back programmed in and they're afraid for good reason as well people tell on them too i've heard i've heard of that before you know

Starting point is 02:55:52 there's different kids that go to the same college and then one hears some they report it back i mean it's it's called what it is it's 1984 type stuff yeah i've met people in the wake of getting fired. I was trying to get a startup going in the sky. I was like, yeah, we can help with this. So I was at his house that week before leading up to, I posted that video from his house. He's married to a Chinese woman. Her parents were visiting and when not just her parents, like three aunts and uncles, I remember sitting there at dinner and they was talking about how he had been in a reeducation camp and had all his property seized and his business seized. And I remember feeling a deep respect for him though.

Starting point is 02:56:32 Cause he was like, had been through it and you could see it in his eyes. I just can't imagine that he had been reeducated sent to, and he won't, and no one knows really what would go on and he won't talk about it but it was crazy man and i was just thinking to myself i would how why not stay here but they can't legally i guess like they had they were they were just visiting for a while but it was like i can't imagine going back to that yeah it's it's terrifying and it's stuff like that when i hear things like that or see some things along those lines, like that's what I'm really grateful to live here with all the problems we have. Like, I do think I do think we can solve these things. You know, like, if you look at social media, which is the source of the public square, that's causing a lot of the division. I mean, let's just be frank about that. You know,

Starting point is 02:57:32 we're in 2025. If you view like the dawn of Facebook is the real dawn of internet 2.0, social media, that's like 06, 07. So effectively, whether you are the 80 year old grandma on Facebook right now or the 18, 19 year old on Instagram. Everyone's the same age when it comes to social media. We're all just leaving teenager and headed to college. Now, I don't know about you, but I was a fucking idiot when I was 18. I didn't know shit about the world. And so we've all been playing with this toy of ideology and spreading ideology and opinions and gossip that is social media and is the internet like babies or pre-adolescence with matches and fucking around. And so society has not had a chance to mature with that yet. Again, regardless of what your age is. Maybe you're older and have more wisdom. Well, when it comes to this, you're 18 years old as well in a lot of ways.

Starting point is 02:58:27 And I wonder as we age, obviously there will be things that transcend social media and internet 3.0 and 4.0 will change some of the interaction. But that behavior of being able to live behind a keyboard or the phone or whatever the medium is going to be, I wonder if as a society, we will be able to mature and deal with that tool better. What do you think? Get better at using the internet? Yeah. Get better at how we interact with each other on the internet. i don't know i don't know i think it's maybe if we can get a return to wisdom like working with stu with that generation like there's that new netflix series that just came out that's it is a masterpiece i get that

Starting point is 02:59:23 it's really well done i understand some of the concern because it's like criticizing the manosphere and andrew tate and all that but the um what's it called adolescence if you haven't seen it watch it yeah it's worth it it's every episode is one long take but it's exploring like it's exploring that idea of what's going on i think it's more of they're trying to make it sound like it's the manosphere and andrew tape but i think it's showing the impact of social media on kids that would lead a kid to do what he does in that and then it's all the whole thing is just exploring in four episodes why how what's going it's in england so i'm about to check that the adults use language the story to make sense of it as it's entertained

Starting point is 03:00:08 it's the manosphere it's this red pill movement not the red the manosphere red pill yeah because that makes it understandable more digestible but you never hear any of the kids say that i think it's the adults that's how they make sense of it though what makes me a little bit hesitant about it is listening to the filmmakers discuss that was one of the things they were trying to critique so you had i not heard that i'd be like oh that was an artful take on it because that is more of a reflection of reality but um i don't know man i don't i don't i think it doesn't have to do with the internet. It's more like returning to wisdom,

Starting point is 03:00:47 which transcends the internet. It's just another tool. If you have the wisdom, then you can... You'll be fine, but do the kids have the wisdom? There's more of a pushback, though. Things are changing. I think having people... I know there's a lot of hate around Elon Musk right now,

Starting point is 03:01:04 but having people like that, that are like what you guys are doing, Joe, all these, it's, it's not what it was a few years ago. Things are changing. We'll have to see.

Starting point is 03:01:16 I don't know. What do you think of guys like Andrew Tate who come up, you know, bombastically as a response to something? I think he's playing a character a lot. don't know enough i get the concern i also believe in innocent till proven guilty i don't know i can't really comment on it you know i um i think it transcends him he's just he understands that we make sense of the world through stories and we need characters and he's playing a character within that story he mastered that but he's filling that void around masculinity i think jordan peterson does a better more wise job

Starting point is 03:01:57 of it and there's a rift between them that we're seeing and i would probably go more with Jordan Peterson. I think you're right that he's playing a character. Oh, yeah. And it's like kind of sees in the moment and it's like one of those things where he'll say 10 things really fast and like eight of them are like fucking like, what did he just say? Yeah, he played it beautifully.

Starting point is 03:02:21 Right. But then he'll hit that thing that's like, ah, all right, that makes some sense and that kind of anchors kids yeah there's there's wisdom within it that's how why it's so effective because he's taking a deep message dressing it up in a way that it's the attention economy yeah it worked he can you know so i don't know i'm not saying he's a good guy or anything i don't know what he did or didn't do yeah well dude we we covered a lot of ground today yeah great we talked for like three hours oh really well yeah but you're you're for everyone who hasn't seen your channel

Starting point is 03:02:56 highly recommend it we'll have the link down in the description i love your videos i love how you think about things and i'm glad to see you doing well and, and, and taking advantage of, of a tough break that you've now turned into a real positive. Hopefully I can keep it going. And your feedback has been really, it's a rare thing getting like face to face, a real person who's seen the videos and you're like, Oh,

Starting point is 03:03:15 this is cool. So it helps a lot. So really, I really appreciate you guys. I'm glad to hear that, dude. We're going to have to do this again sometime. For sure.

Starting point is 03:03:21 Anytime. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Peace. Thank you guys for watching. Anytime. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace. Peace.

Starting point is 03:03:26 Thank you guys for watching the episode. If you haven't already, please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video. They're both a huge, huge help. And if you would like to follow me on Instagram and X, those links are in my description below.

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