Modern Wisdom - #546 - Baggage Claim - Modern Cinema Treats Women Like Idiots

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Baggage Claim is a YouTuber and movie critic. There have been a lot of female leads in TV and cinema over the last few years. She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, Dr Strange 2 and The Rings Of Power all showed women leading the charge, but just how aspirational and admirable are these role models for the women that watch them? Is it treating them like mature humans or patronising them like fragile idiots? Expect to learn how cultural narcissism has taken hold of Hollywood, why perfect female characters teach women nothing about how to be a good person, why Hollywood relies on performative empathy to feel good, the problem with She-Hulk's dating life, why no one is going to be guilted into watching anything, the lessons to learn from Bros romcom failure and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Subscribe to Baggage Claim on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/BaggageClaim  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is baggage claim. She's a YouTuber and a movie critic. There have been a lot of female leads in TV and cinema over the last few years. She hulk, Captain Marvel, Doctor Strange 2, and the Rings of Power all showed women leading the charge. But just how aspirational and admirable are these role models for the women who watch them? just how aspirational and admirable are these role models for the women who watch them. Is it treating them like mature humans or patronising them like fragile idiots? Expect to learn how cultural narcissism has taken hold of Hollywood, why perfect female characters teach women nothing about how to be a good person, why Hollywood relies on performative empathy to feel good, the problem with She Hulks dating

life, why no one is going to be gilted into watching anything, the lessons to learn from Bros. romcom failure, and much more. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means you're going to miss episodes when they go live. So, go to Spotify, press the follow button in the middle of the page, there there is a plus in the top right hand corner of Apple Podcasts. It really helps to spot the show. It means that you will never miss episodes when they go up and it makes me very happy indeed. Ah, thank you. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome...

baggage claim. baggage claim, look at the show. thank you so much, it's so good to be here. the next James Bond films will have bigger roles for women and a more sensitive 007, according to the producers who said Bond is evolving just as men are evolving. This is from the telegraph. Producers said Daniel Craig's successor will continue the work of cracking Bond open emotionally as the franchise seeks to evolve. Next James Bond film will have bigger roles for women, more sensitive to 007, Bond is evolving.

Barbara Broccoli said that the next actor will take the role, continue the work of Daniel Craig, Craig's last film no time to die, humanise Bond by making him a devoted family man, also featured meteoroles for female characters. What are your think about this? So I think partially it makes sense to me and partially it doesn't. I'm glad that the strategy isn't to just have a female, you know, play James Bond and completely change the character because James Bond is a male character and I think an important aspect of having more female characters and female heroes should come with creating new heroes for females or you know new roles for females.

But the idea of making James Bond more sensitive, I guess I would ask what they would mean by that. I think part of what's very attractive about James Bond is that he is a macho character who is very powerful physically but also mentally that physical strength that is very, we encourage that in men, you know, specifically when they have very difficult jobs. I think a couple of weeks ago you spoke to someone who's in the high rungs of the CIA, right? And it's not an easy thing to be doing work like that. It takes a lot of mental fortitude, and that's not to say the women can't do it or men can't do it. It's just a different type of strength that looks very masculine when a man like James Bond

is doing it. I think that's what makes him super attractive. I think if we take that and break it down and in the way that you know every every male character these days has gotten this like deconstruction that's happening to him where maybe he's a lot more emotional maybe he's a lot more you know showing his vulnerabilities and stupid. That's definitely the biggest one. I think that's not the right approach to take to male characters. I think men who watch, you know, watch the movies, they look for inspiration is that how can I to emulate strength. But that shouldn't ever come at the cost of then your emotions don't exist. You're not a real person. You don't get to you're not a real person,

you don't get to feel anything, it should never come to that, there are always extremes to anything, right? So I think if they go to extreme in the other end where he stops being what makes James Bond so exciting and interesting, I think that would be a really big mistake, but I'm also glad that it's not the sort of 1950s approach to how Met Masculine and feminine people would interact with each other, right? Where there was definitely a lot more misogyny in the 1950s and 60s in the way the female characters were treated. It's very different and I think Vesparlene was a very big shift, right? She was a great female character to introduce to, well,

obviously she was in the books, but it was very different in the movies. I like that approach, where it's become more of this equal thing, but it shouldn't be that James Bond stop, speaking James Bond. I think the concern that people have is that James's character gets eviscerated, and he's left as sort of this husk of a man. We've seen, I mean, you do these amazing video essays online and one of the best examples are two of the best examples, I think, have been low-key, what happened to him and then thought and what happened to him as well, like just completely gutted from being capable, confident guys that could overcome things to, how would you describe what's happened to their trajectory?

I think it's a public humiliation. I think it, to me, the way those characters got written and how they evolved from, let's say, their initial introduction onto the screen, it felt as if the writers were exacting some form of revenge on these characters. And taking all of the things that made them exciting, interesting, to let's just make them really stupid and let's eclipse them with the, their obvious counterparts that are going to be better than them, right?

And that's the female version. There's a female Loki. There's a female Thor. And I think it was less obvious with Thor where they just, you know, where Jane wasn't necessarily a bad character in the way that she was written or anything like that. But they just really dumb down Thor. He's his outfit, his hair, the fact that he grabs his hammer and it looks like a witch's broom and he rides it. It was just so, it was so such a farce to take a man that is supposed to be this God, right? And to completely make him

this joke. And they took all the ideas that they built out in Ragnarok and then just took it so much further that it just it became and it was embarrassing. It was embarrassing to watch him. What about Loki? Loki, it was less obvious, but you know, it but it was similar things that he's bumbling, he's dropping things, he's breaking things, you know, he's not aware of the mission, he's kind of dancing around and singing for some reason and forgetting that he needs to be in disguise. And it's female Loki, what was her name? Sylvie, she's the one who has her wits about her and she has to remind him that you're being a real idiot

right now. And so it was things like that, that even with Loki, oh, the dressing downs he received repeatedly, right? Even from Owen Wilson's character, where he says to him, like, calm down for a second. You know, you're, or him repeatedly having to affirm that he's better than the other Loki. How come the other Loki has more protection

or security than him? And it's hard to then remember that when you look back on the first Vendors film where Loki's this formidable, you know, almost like, I think, uh, Nertorodic said this on the stream I did last week on critical drinkers being it when he said it almost, it was like he was resurrected from hell, right? But that's how he was introduced into the Avengers as, uh, this really formidable force. And then now he's just this dancing monkey.

And he's, he's no threat at all. He's in fact, easily, he just transitions away from his power, you know, power hungry phase. Surely though, for a long time, women haven't been as represented when it comes to superhero movies and stuff like that. Is it not a good thing? Is it not an advantage that we've now got females that are putting men in their place and telling them what they think about them? I think it would be just as good as as men putting women in their place and telling them that they're not so good. I think anything that is a reaction that's such an intense pendulum swing where you're motivated not by storytelling or or sharing deeper human stories but instead you're motivated by revenge I think nothing good ever comes

out of that. It's good that there are more roles for women. That's great. But it's not good if those roles actually create a false perception of what it really means to be a woman. And what I mean by that is so much of, so many of the Marvel Super female superheroes are so perfect that it's impossible to connect with them. It's impossible to know a deep connection with a character comes from seeing yourself in that person's place. And if you do connect with these people, you think your life is perfect and you think that you won't, you don't, anything that wrong that goes in your life is undeserved. Right? And that's a lot of the way that these stories are written is that there's not the traditional heroes journey. There's not the development of the power. You run rings around them, you're amazing. How did you learn magic?

I taught myself. And you'll see that theme throughout Marvel, even in Shang-Chi, which is a movie I actually liked. But Shang-Chi's sister, whose name I can't remember right now, but his sister, she was not allowed to train with the boys, and she just taught herself, and she's even better than Shang-Chi, right? She gives him that good old kick

and the groin to prove that point. And I think what would traditionally happen is that if someone taught themselves anything, the idea would be that they have major holes in their knowledge, that then they would be really, they would basically suffer consequences for not knowing about those gaps, and then have to fill that in,

and then excel to that next level. But that doesn't happen. An example of that might be the classic MMA underdog story, where the guy gets angry, because the bully beat him up our stall his girl, and he goes and kind of learns on his own. But goes into a MMA gym finally to find out that he doesn't know grappling or he doesn't know Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He has the gumption and the motivation to go and do the thing, but he needs to discipline it. He needs to be able to wrangle it within the existing format.

So there's this sort of wild brilliance that people come in with, but it still needs to be honed in that way. Yet it seems that it's something that is self-generated at the moment, is already perfect. It blooms and blossoms into something that was better than it ever could have been.

Right, right, no, that's exactly right. So I think that's my main issue, is that my problem is never with the fact that there are so many female characters. I think what is wrong with that really? There's nothing wrong with that. I think it's that it's rooted in an understanding of people that's not accurate and it's spousing a sense of entitlement that's not good on an individual level. So what is it specifically, give us some examples about characters that people

wouldn't resonate with, female characters that girls particularly wouldn't resonate with and why? I think Sylvie is a good example of that but maybe I can think of, you know what, actually she Hulk is probably the best example of it. Because so much of she Hulk talks about, you know, okay, she gets someone else's power, she gets her cousin's power. And her friend asks her, does that mean you're going to be part of the Avengers? And what does she say? She says, no, it's for narcissists.

And so immediately there's an immediate cut down of one of the most successful stories that this universe has told, right? But a group of people that come together despite their varying power levels and personalities and they overcome a major supervillain Thanos. And immediately it's like, no, they're all a bunch of narcissists. So I think she calls them adult orphans and narcissists. And it right off the bat sets that tone that if a group of people choose to live not for, let's say their own day-to-day glory, but to come

together and do something that's dangerous and that's a risky that might mean that they lose their lives and some of them do lose their lives and still they're willing to put their next out on the line to do the right thing. That's somehow narcissistic, but then the whole show that follows is entirely revolved around her dating life, her wardrobe for some reason, her career, which is, you know, that's fine, but the whole thing is about her, and that's okay, I think on a personal level that's fine, but how is that not a narcissistic endeavor in itself, right? I think people often now will start

to look at it as like, oh, if you want to put an outfit on and fight for the little guy, oh, you're just doing that for yourself. You're a narcissist, right? You just want the glory. You want the brand name out there. But if it's female motivated, it's like if she wants to put herself out there and she wants to do, she wants to fight for the little guy in the courtroom instead of out on a battlefield, then that's okay. Her motivations are not to be questioned. And I think there's that subtle difference that I think makes her a bad representation out in the world for little girls. To look at someone else who's putting themselves out there as narcissists, but my motivations are never to be questioned because I'm a female. I think that's a very bad lesson to teach

anybody. That's interesting. I think that you can see this, catty antagonistic, sort of just petty behavior that comes through. It seems it portrays women in kind of the most juvenile way. All of the things that for quite a long time, I think women have been trying to dispense with this sort of, you don't know me, there's this line from Shea Hulk where she's saying that I deal with anger on a daily basis when men tell me about my area of expertise and when guys look at me on the street and when blah, blah, blah, like you don't know anything about anger. As she points at Bruce Banner, someone that apparently the law suggests his Hulk persona is his

abused child battling with his real adult self. Like, you're going to say, you're genuinely going to sit there and tell the guy that was abused as a child that the fact that men cat-could you on the street is somehow comparable. But no, because you're a man, because you're coming from a place of patriarchal, oppressive, super, how do you say like, advantage, privilege. You don't get to, you don't get to make a comment about this. And I mean, let's just talk about the fact that in Shehulk, when she transforms into the Shehulk, she's able to still speak

and pick guys up and take them to bed and stuff. Yeah. I mean, Bruce, Bruce Banner destroys cities. Yeah. She presumably annihilates guys' hips. Yeah. Oh my god, yes. I don't even think about that, but yes. I'll try not to think about that during the next episode, but yeah, I think immediately she has control over her emotions. Immediately she has control over her emotions, immediately she can speak like you mentioned. And the fact that she compares herself to what Bruce endured, right?

But this is another way that they're really driving home that point that men are so clearly worse than women in so many different ways, that it took Bruce, I think, something like 15 years to come in really, I would say, integrate with his shadow that's the way to put it. And the fact that the story says that he saw his mother get, I think, get murdered by his father and that's why he has all this rage pent up. And here he is offering

His wisdom his expertise, but it's it's so funny. It's like her very argument that if someone That I have to control my anger as a woman when men in my level of expertise come and tell me what what to do And here she is putting down a man that has been the Hulk for so many years and dealt with it for so many years. And he has his expertise and there's no room for her to even consider that he might teach her something. Irony, completely lost. Yes, but that's the whole point, right?

I think one of my major motivations for starting this channel was that so, especially in the last five years, I, you know, it has become a very polarized land across the Western society in the way people view each other, think about each other's motivations. And it's also this, this massive belief that I should never wonder about my own motivations and what drives me. But I should always wonder about what drives everybody else. And it's the if I am a woman, if I am brown, if I'm an immigrant, I fall into all of those categories, I'm perfect.

There's no reason for me to doubt what I should, what I should, what I'm saying, what I'm doing, how I'm treating people. And that's what I hear. Like, I was hearing that out in the world all the time that people were telling me like, hey, you're put upon woman. You're someone who should be resentful of life. Like, aren't you just the most biggest victim that's ever existed? aren't you just the most biggest victim that's ever existed? And it's like, first of all, I've never looked at myself like that. And if I don't look at myself like that, then people are like, well, that's because you're privileged. So the idea that you might have a good perspective in life and look at it as like, hey, it rains on everybody. Everybody has problems. I don't care if you're a Rockefeller. You have problems. I don't care if you're a rock-a-feller, you have problems,

you are not guaranteed happiness just because you have money. That's my perspective. And some people are dealt a worse hand than others, but the best you can do is to make the most of it and get on with it. Oh no, that's a very privileged perspective. That means that you actually had it better than other people, that you were privileged enough to even think that way. So the more I was encountering that in the real world, I said, this has to stop. Like, at least I'm in a position where I can address it without necessarily easily being canceled.

It's hard, I mean, they say women don't have privileges, I have privileges. It's that immigrant privilege that you can talk about whatever you want without someone coming for you. So, yeah, I mean, I can have privileges, I have privileges. It's that immigrant privilege that you can talk about whatever you want without someone coming for you. So yeah, I mean, I can see the allure from somebody that sits in a movie studio that hasn't spoken to an immigrant for 10 years, unless they catch their gardener or whatever on the way out of the house

to go to the air conditioned studios, their driver picks them up on a morning. I can see why they would think in the current atmosphere of social justice and upholding victimhood as a virtue that if we were to make a film which completely mask off breaks the fourth wall about how the underdog is always the person who is always going to be perfect, that women and minorities, whether they be racial, sexual, gender identity, they are already perfect as they are, the issue is always that the world didn't believe in them enough. I can see why somebody would presume this is an amazing way for us to weaponize, galvanize,

commercialize, monetize this current cultural milieu. But the problem is that that's not how people think. And this is what I learned from watching your stuff, that people, especially women, because we've spoken mostly about women so far, that it's patronizing. As far as I can see, most modern depictions of women in media patronize them. I mean, how does it feel for you as a female woman of color that also happens to be an immigrant? Like, I imagine that it doesn't empower you. I'll make you feel particularly good either. No, in fact, I feel like the treatment based on my color, based on my status as an immigrant, it's as if it's a handicap that I'm,

that just because I was born a woman means I'm handicapped. I feel like that's how people look at me. And it's not with, and they're not looking at me with encouragement, but it's with pity. And it makes me, it makes me not, it doesn't make me feel empowered, it makes me feel discouraged. And I think this desire, like you were saying, the cultural milieu, is that, is the rise of narcissism. Right? And I think that's partly what I talk a ton about on my channel is that especially amongst women, the

perspective has become seasong between I'm incredible and then going the on the other side which narcissists do all the time, so that if anything is wrong in my life, the fault lies with someone else and their desire to bring me down. And that entire perspective creates a really hard shell around you as an individual that is almost impenetrable where if you need to change and grow, if you need parts of you like Jordan Peterson would say like if you need parts of you to die so that you can evolve to the next level, nothing is going to, nothing is allowed, your narcissism is not going to let that happen. So if we continue to patronize people who live on the edges of society, even though they don't necessarily, they're, you know, majorities

in a lot of ways, we're going to create a culture of people that refuse to change, refuse to grow, and most importantly, refuse to negotiate with anybody. And I don't know if you come across this online because I see this a lot and I specifically see it with people that are acquaintances where there'll be a lot of content that'll be like, ignore the haters, it'll say something like, you know, forget the haters. If anyone doesn't believe in you, you know, f them, like forget about them,

and it's this very interesting perspective that like, either someone's with you or they're against you. There is no in between, and there's no room to talk that out. And, you know, there are times that I'll say something on my channel, and I'll hear some criticism, and I'll hear some feedback, and I'm like,

okay, maybe I was flawed in that particular thinking, and that's fine. This is a conversation in a lot of ways. But the perspective that they're trying to sell is like, no, no, no, no, no. If you said it, you were right all along. They just want to keep you down. And it's just, it's like, that's you bearing your, that's you digging your own grave. If you buy into that, you are digging your own grave because there's not going to be a successful life that you can live at that perspective. If people aren't taught to be able to take criticism,

especially if the portrayals that they see of themselves represented in media never take criticism. If somebody does criticize them, then there's a clap back boss bitch moment where they tell them exactly put them in their place and tell them and sure enough all along. I mean, we're seeing this with the Lord of the Rings. Galadriel is just permanently in the right. We saw this with the saw wars with the Lord of the Rings. Galadriel is just permanently in the right. We saw this with the saw wars,

with the fact that the female, the new female superhero there. She was, she taught herself, and then immediately was able to destroy everybody around that. I think it's her, and all's had some sort of weird stuff like that in it. She hooks had some stuff like that. I mean, Batwoman got canned, presumably, because who does that?

Is that Warner Brothers that do that one? But yes, it was Warner Brothers. Okay, so Warner Brothers, it seems, can't continue to piss money away, but Disney can. So Warner Brothers are binging things that they can foresee might not make money. Because I mean, this is the long and short of it, is that people aren't going to go and see these movies.

Like when I think, I enjoy going to the cinema, but when I think about going to the cinema and then look at what's available for me to go and see, I didn't want to go and see Thor Love and Thunder. I looked at that. And I was like, trailer doesn't look very good. It looks kind of cheesy, it looks kind of stupid. We'd already seen Thor start to kind of creep into that in the one that he did with the Hulk. What was that one? Ragnarok. Ragnarok. He was kind of a bit of adult there and I was like, I get a sense that this is going to go even further, but it's not just one of

the places that a lot of the movie studios go to is the reason that people aren't going to go and watch this music at this movie is because of bigotry and one kind or another. Charlie's Angels director said that men need enough empathy to see movies starring women because I've been forced to do it with men my entire life. Like look, you are not going to be able to guilt people into watching your movie. I learned a term. Have you heard of fanbating? No. Oh, so this is the name for it, apparently. This is the actual name that's been given to it.

So using sex as- I'm assuming this is what Bros is doing, right? Yes, precisely correct. Precisely correct. So for the people that don't know, Bros was this rom-com, but it was a gay rom-com. And very quickly, it perhaps even before it started, Amazon did this with Lord of the Rings,

they, the rings of power, they front-run the fact that it was a very diverse cast, they played on that a lot. And what it does is they're using the speculation and the controversy around the production of the production itself to generate news, rather than allowing the value of what the content consists of to be able to carry itself through. So using sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia is the justification for why a particular film doesn't do well.

But the bottom line is like gay people didn't go and see bros either. Women aren't going to go and see Gay people didn't go and see bros either. Women aren't going to go and see shehulk and Thor, Love and Thunder either. It's people within the demographic that is supposed to be the one which is being upheld also think that it sucks. Like it's just bad cinema. And one of the perfect examples that we've got here, especially with Lord of the Rings, I think, I mean, there's a lot of problems with the most recent Lord of the Rings, which it's like a dunk fast if you just search Lord of the Rings online. You get the first two trailers and then the rest of the videos are just people annihilating

it. But you have the comparison between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, right? Game of Thrones has got, I mean, Game of Thrones has got a Albino Black man in it with a gay son. But it wasn't the front of the identity wasn't wrapped up in the fact that they're black and or gay. It just happens to be that way. And yeah, I think that you are seeing play out in real time

what happens when casting and agenda is forced down people's throat and what happens when casting an agenda is forced down people's throat, and what happens when casting an agenda is sort of naturally emerged from what is going to make good TV. Yes, and you're absolutely right about when you look at House of the Dragon, you have, you know, too, too very powerful women playing out a big chunk of the drama,

and none of that feels contrived in any way, it doesn't feel patronized. And because they are, you could make the argument that they're, you're seeing all facets of each character. You're not just seeing one side of them. And so what, what that means is that there is positive and negative aspects to each character that then play out on the screen, that just like it does naturally in real life, and that makes for compelling story. And you have a diverse cast, but it's not obvious. It's not something they're like hammering over your head that just because someone is black,

then they're definitely the good guy. I mean, what happened in this last episode showed like, you know, that no one's protected, right? Obviously in the stories. But with Marvel and, you know, I chose not to watch Rings of Power by the way, because I'm a really big Lord of the Rings fan, just huge Lord of the Rings fan. And I, it was one of those things that I didn't want to take a risk of like, what kind of bad taste was it going to put in my mouth. And I talked about this, I think I've been saying this all over the place, but my biggest frustration with rings of power is Galadriel, and that she was this incredibly powerful feminine character in Lord of the Rings and her powers were so, there were so intensely quiet,

you know, and represented in a very powerful way, but it was without her lifting a sword, right? But when you were in her presence, you knew that she possessed incredible wisdom and power and there was so much eeriness going into that situation where then she's looking at each member of the fellowship and she's seeing right through them and she's reading them and talking to them while talk like she's talking in their heads while she's talking to them I mean, it's like really intense power that I think can be very well attributed to women's ability to see things and like have intuition and perceive

perceive what might happen, right? I think I think it was a conversation you had with Louise Perry. Did I get her name right? Yes, that was it by the way I loved that conversation. She's one of the things she talked about is that how women have that incredible intuition to pick up on danger, especially in men, right? Because the consequences for a woman are so much higher. And I thought that Galadriel was a great example of that feminine strength. And then in rings of power, who cares about that?

She has a sword. She's, you know, everybody calls her Guy-Ladriel now. She's, it's like, who cares about feminine strength? It's better to be a man, obviously. I see. They did that in Thor too, sorry, but like like I'm clearly very angry about this, but they did this on Thor Valkyrie gets the title of leadership for just being a drunk But she's not queen of Asgard. She is king. Why? Oh apparently it's better to be king than queen

Right, isn't that like the messaging that they're saying? And at a time the world had a queen, you know, I know not the world, but the United Kingdom. I read a quote earlier this week, and I've been trying to put this together for a long time. I was referring to it as the male default for a long time, which is the assumption that whatever men do, the masculine is preferred, that the boss bitch, lean in, disagreeable, career woman, is the path

that women are supposed to go down, and if you're a mother, you're a second class citizen that's kind of been duped into it by the patriarchy and so on and so forth. And someone said early on, female empowerment means acting like a man. That's the new way that this is seen. Yeah, I mean, you've taken someone that could have been queen, which we've had a lot and in Game of Thrones, they have queen. You're going to become queen. There are battles between queens, queen of the Stormlands, queen of the realm.

But no, no, no, no. I mean, watch the subtext that that says, like, yes, on the face of it, it sounds cool, but the subtext immediately is that it places king in a superior position to placing queen. Like, that's the least equality promoting idea that I can think of. It's so patronizing to women. Absolutely. Completely agree with you. And I mean, and then there's also the, I mean, it's a very sensitive subject, but then there's also the degeneration of a title like mother, right? It's like, no, you're a birthing person. The womb, have a.

Yeah, and it's like, it's like, it's like like reducing us to just flesh and bone. It's like, oh, the status of mother can't exist anymore. I think it's this whole desire that there should be no definition of anything. We should all be person. You shouldn't even have a name, probably. Should all just be a person, because, you know, if you have names that means you have a hierarchy, that means you have people that don't fall,

that fall off of the hierarchy, and everything is, you know, is destroyed from there, in the way that the, so the extreme is left tends to look at it. When it comes to the mother thing, I'm a right in saying, Galadriel is supposed to have a husband and kids. Yes. And in rings of power, they've kept them away,

and it looks like they're maybe going to try and introduce them in season two, because at the moment she needs to be in boss bitch mode. But she may actually have them already, or she may meet them in few, I don't know. Yeah, I believe Galadriel is somehow, I can't forget now, but she is somehow related to Legolas, either through marriage or something like one of her kids is my, maybe I'm forgetting, anyway. But I don't know what the, what their plan is with rings of power. I try my best not to watch any of it. Or I think I watched those like initial promo photos.

And when I saw Galadriel was sitting, she was, you know, in this full armor, doing the man's spread with a dagger between holding it between her legs. I realized that this was not going to be a show that I was going to enjoy. So I decided just to completely lock it out of my stratosphere as much as possible. What else are the messages that you think are trying to be promoted here, whether they be hierarchical, racial, societal, gender driven? I think the idea of ideological consistency being patriarchical is one of the biggest messages that they're trying to push. If someone asks for logic in the way that you think, then they're trying to oppress you.

And this is probably the hardest thing to then negotiate with. It's like, it's like, okay, if you're saying, if you're against racism and sexism, but you turn around and do reverse racism and reverse sexism and people point out to you, hey, this is ideologically inconsistent. And then you turn around and say, well, your desire to make sure that I'm ideologically consistent is patriarchical. And it just, it's, I think that the more people buy into that line of thinking, the harder it is going to be to bridge that gap of how are people going to see each other and understand each other.

Because if you can't even understand each other, you can't understand yourself for sure. So I think that's probably the one that I find shocking. I'll often get comments on my videos, I'll get really hateful messages on Instagram, Twitter, wherever, set, wherever, sit calling me a Pick Me Girl, which is really interesting. What's that mean? I don't know that name.

So it's the idea, you know, those types of girls who are like, I don't hang out with guys. I don't hang out with other girls. I like hanging out with guys. You know what I mean? Like, oh, girls, this is just so complicated. I'd rather be wearing basketball shorts

and playing with the guys. Like, those are called picnic girls who, or they'll say, like, oh, that person, that woman has internalized misogyny because she doesn't even wanna be a woman almost. Someone actually sent me a comment saying, you don't even wanna be a woman or you don't even wanna be an Indian.

You're probably, you know, you pass as white and you probably love that. And so it's that whole idea that if you don't think a certain way, you don't even belong in the class that you happen to be born into. Wow. I mean, that's that whole race traitor thing that people come after, anybody that doesn't decide that they're going to agree with the current hegemony in whatever particular group it is okay, so you've done a lot of stuff as well related to cultural narcissism and the self-esteem movement. What's the, how does that tie into what we've spoken about so far?

high into what we've spoken about so far? I think the trends of Marvel, of Star Wars, and even shows like Batwoman that you mentioned, they are all selling really neatly packaging the ideals of narcissism. And I know it does stand very closely with the self-esteem movement, right? That the idea that you don't necessarily need to work on something, you need to instead work

on just believing in yourself. And that self-belief is what will make you someone that's whole. And that's sort of all of the plot lines seem to be around that, right? Even if you watch, um, Dr. Strange 2. I watched it on the plane over here and I'd seen your video, I'd seen you reference it before, didn't watch the video, watch the movie, watch the video, I was like, that is just so perfect. Can you explain what the role of America Chavez

is for the people that haven't seen it? Yes, she gets introduced as this character who clearly has a very powerful power, which is to move in between various dimensions, or I guess you could say, what did they call it? Multiverse, right? Multiverse, yeah, she call it? Multiverse, right? Multiverse, yeah. She can traverse the multiverse,

and that's her main power, and she doesn't know how to control it. And, you know, they definitely made her a character that's very clearly like token, token, marginalized person, right? She has two moms moms and she's clearly of South American descent. And then her name is America Chavez. And then her entire plot of the movie

is basically Dr. Strange Baby setting her and trying to help her out because she's being hunted by Scarlet Witch. And until the end of the movie, there's not really any development for her, which is real shame, I think, that could have really beefed up her as a character. And the final battle is really just Dr. Strange telling her, like, hey, you just, you need to believe in yourself. You all make.

You all make. There's this scene where zombie Benedict Cumberbatch comes back to say to her, I just came here to tell you that you need to believe in yourself. And you go, okay. Okay, nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing else. I mean, you went through a car crash that shattered all of your bones.

You've been banished to the shadow realm. You've gone and been taught by a lady who doesn't have any hair about how to be, you know, all of that journey that you had to go through and then you've assisted the Avengers and so on and so on and so forth. And you're not the, he's not even the Lord's King of whatever the thing is at the moment, the head monk of the... It's a Wong. Yeah, it's the other guy.

But no, she, American Chavez, because Waman, she just needed to believe in herself. Yeah, and I think that's actually of that. Okay, that in itself is just such a narcissistic trait. Like if you actually talk to someone who's very high, obviously narcissism gets thrown around a lot. So just to clarify what I mean by that is that there are people who have healthy form of narcissism,

which we all need some level of that. And then there are people that have unhealthy levels of it. And then there are people that have unhealthy levels of it. And then there are people that can be diagnosed as having a narcissistic personality disorder. And then when you have disorder behavior, that means that you're the way you view the world ends up creating a lot of creating situations for yourself where you're not able to,

you're not able to make accurate decisions and like perceive reality, right? So there's, you know, borderline personality disorder which became this whole thing when Amber her, the Amber her trial was going on, she was diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. So anyway, with narcissistic personality disorder, the big belief is that if I'm doing something, it's right. But if someone else does that same thing to me, I'm the victim of that. That's one of the big hallmarks of having any kind of relationship with the narcissistic personality disorder or NPD is that they can't stand boundaries. They have, they want to have a free roam approach to their lives and their relationships, and specifically their work.

And if they put out a persona, which they always do, they put out a persona that's pretty far off from their true self, true identity. If anyone rejects that persona even slightly or questions it, they come down with a hammer, but sometimes it can be aggressive. If you're dealing with aggressive types, or it can be just such an intense amount of victim behavior, that a reasonable person is shocked into retreating. like retreating. Like, oh my God, I didn't think I was gonna hurt you that way. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say any of those things. So, you know, that pattern sounds very similar to the self-esteem movement,

to even that idea that you are perfect. You just need to believe it. It's so scary. And it's quite easy. Having done watching a lot of different videos about criticisms online, as people via further and further inflammatory, sometimes right, it can be used to kind of deliver a anti-progressive message.

And there's a debate to be heard about whether or not that's something that needs to be said. There are some aspects of what culture that are going too far forward. However, I think that the most compelling argument here is it's patronizing to women. If I was a woman, I wouldn't want to hear that I'm perfect as I am. I wouldn't want to hear that I'm perfect as I am. I wouldn't want to hear that all of the characters that I'm supposed to look up to don't need to go through any trials or tribulations. They're not strong enough to deal with criticism, to deal with setbacks, to do whatever. I mean, the strongest character at the moment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, what is it? Not Wonder Woman. Captain America? Captain Marvel. Captain, that's it, sorry.

Yeah. She's basically a god who flies around the universe. I don't know what she does. She flies around the universe. She comes back and she can just defeat everybody straight away. Why? The first was, was she the one that did the Amazonian thing in the first movie and then in the second movie,

it looked like, who was that? That was Wonder Woman. Yes, okay, so one woman in the first one went through some trials and tribulations. That was pretty cool. But in the second one was kind of given all of this stuff. So you had the same character that was delivered this. So my point being that I wouldn't want this

if I was a woman. I don't want this for the girls and the women that I care about. If I have a daughter, I don't want her to look up to these sorts of characters. I think that it inevitably creates a fragile environment, like you say, where if you believe that any kind of criticism of you can't be about actions or decisions, it's an existential comment on your worth as an individual.

You are deficient, something is wrong with you, and that the way that you're supposed to get back at that is a Overblown passive aggressive female version of masculinity, which doesn't look very good on anybody least of all women I just don't think that that's the sort of Media that we should put forward and then we're seeing increasingly now I mean the amber herd trial was a great a great example of this and you've done some fantastic stuff about Prince William, Prince Philip, not Prince Philip, sorry Prince Harry and the difference between there two relationships. We are starting to see what happens when this takes hold of people that are in positions that would previously be pretty renowned. And it doesn't look very good on them either.

Yes. And you know, something Jordan Peterson talks about a lot is that we know where the right can go too far. And we've all pointed at that and said that's too far. And then we're struggling to do that when it comes to the left. And I mean, some people do that and other people disagree with it. But where does the left go too far? But I think it's a similar thing.

We've all agreed as a society where men go too far. Like, that's not okay if men are behaving in that way. But we're really struggling to do that with women and saying, where do women take it too far? And there was a podcast that Megan women and saying, where do women take it too far? And you know, there was podcast that Megan Markle released and she's been releasing quite a few podcasts lately and the one she just released this earlier this week, she talked about this, she talks about archetypes, right? What are archetypes that are holding women back? I think it's a misuse of the word archetypes,

it's a misunderstanding of it, but what she means is labels, fine. And one of the labels she talked about was being labeled crazy, the women get labeled crazy. And she was saying her own experience, that she's been called crazy so many times, and that it's a way to hold women back. And she brings in an expert, and the expert talks about how the concept of hysteria has this long history, again, state steeped in misogyny. And so it's this painting, this perspective,

that because doctors in 100 years ago, labeled women as hysterical instead of actually getting to the root of what they were going through, which you could make an argument that that has happened for people in general, but again, it's driven by misogyny and that has whittled down to the term crazy. And so if you call it woman crazy, you're being misogynistic and you're trying to exert control over them. And you look at the amber her trial,

and there were so many people that were willing to believe her, and then so many people using the hashtag of believe all women. And one of the best things about comedians that specifically Bill Burr was that his response was like, you know, believe all women, like, are you sure like all of them? How about like 20% of them that are crazy,

they wanna key your car? And it's this idea that like just because you're a woman, I don't know, I can't believe I have to say this, but like just because you're a woman does not mean you are inherently good, you can be crazy, you can be destructive. And that's what I like about shows like House of the Dragon is that it shows destructive capabilities that are both masculine and feminine. And even you know a show, I've talked about this in the past, but like a show like Fleabag.

Are you familiar with this show? No, what's up? You know Phoebe Waller Bridge? No. No, you know, you probably know of her because she was the one who came in and helped rewrite, do some rewrites for James Bond for that last film.

And people were pretty angry about it because they consider her sort of this feminist writer. But I actually think she rides that line pretty well. And she wrote this show called Fleabag. It's a two-season show. It's on, I think, Amazon Prime. And she, you know, I'm sorry for spoilers. I'm just gonna give it away to you

because I've brought it up now. But she is a character who's very self-destructive and she definitely does a lot of things including hooking up with men that make her unhappy. She herself identifies that as making her unhappy. But there's this whole season leading up where she shows to the viewer because she constantly breaks the fourth wall and she's letting them in at very specific times where she shows the viewer that her best friend passed away.

And the way that we find out is that she walked in front of a bus. And then for a long time, she hides the fact that the reason she walked in front of a bus was because the main character and her only name in it is Fleabag is that Fleabag slept with her boyfriend. And that's why she, and when the viewer finds that out, you know, you see her completely unraveled because it was a fact that she was hiding. And it's beautifully done because it shows that being feminine is incredibly powerful

in a way that can be incredibly destructive. There's a lot of chaos that we can create ourselves. We don't need men all the time to create chaos, right? Which is the overarching belief right now. So our way of creating chaos is that we have a deep perception of human emotion and we know how to unravel people. There's reason why it's much easier for a woman to win a, when an argument in a relationship with our husband. It's much easier, right? And if we don't recognize that, if we don't recognize that we have a dark power in us, then we actually

are likely to use it inadvertently on people all the time. And I know I've been referencing Jordan Peterson here and there, but like one of the things that really struck me, and I think it was something that really changed my personal trajectory, was I was watching his lectures. I think this was back in 2016 before before he like absolutely exploded but one of his lectures talked about helping people understand that you would be a Nazi guard and I hope I can say the word Nazi I know yes he doesn't love it that you would be and I don't mean

you but like me I would be a Nazi Guard. Everybody wants to believe that they would be the hero, and they would be Schindler, but they would probably be a Nazi Guard because of the fear and every, you know, there are all these different things that go into it. And if a person, an individual can recognize about their dark capacity, then it's less likely to turn into this massive pathology that exists in society. And I think that's what's happening now is that people are becoming less and less convinced of their own internal darkness, becoming more convinced of other people's darkness.

And I think that's a pretty dangerous place to be. other people's darkness. And that's, I think that's a pretty dangerous place to be. One of the most obvious places I think that this is starting to show up is in movie critic scores diverging from audience scores. And the performative empathy that's happening by the people who have something to lose, if they go against the dominant ideology, whatever it is that they're supposed to put out there. Most of the scores on Rotten Tomatoes are anonymous or they've done by a user name that you're never going to be able to track back to somebody. So they can say whatever it is that they want. And maybe there is what's it called review bombing, which Amazon turned

off the first 72 hours for Lord of the Rings, rings of power, and then extended it for another five days in a desperate attempt to try and stop people from giving a realistic review of what it is. And that was labeled with misogyny and racism, so on and so forth. But it seems to me that the powers that be, the people that believe they're supposed to be the elite media class that know what's good for everybody that will point at the plebs and remind them that you really should just put your faith in us.

They are failing increasingly to resonate with the people who are going into Hollywood offices now is going to be even further away than most of the people that go to see their films, versus 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago for sure. You know, you think, I always think about this when I watch archive footage of sports games and stuff. You know, from the 1930s and stuff like that, and these professional athletes, they were basically the same as the people in the stands, except for the fact that they were well known. The only difference was really their renown and their lifestyle in terms of their routines, not in terms of the quality of life that they lived. They do these interviews

with old British footballers from the 1950s and the 1960s and stuff, and they lived an alright life, but it wasn't insanely different to everybody else. But we now have this divergence in terms of lifestyle. We have a divergence in terms of the ideology that people follow, the values that they have, what it is that they think should be upheld. And increasingly, as that happens,

people are struggling to, the powers that be, are struggling to find a way to resonate. And the only thing it seems to me, the only solution that they can find, is to be increasingly brazen without right virtue signaling. Because, well, if I can't get you to like what I do, at least I can guilt you into feeling good about it. That's the closest I think that they can get. Yes. And you're absolutely right about that difference between celebrities or athletes, because it's kind of similar to the kind of scale

that everything achieves now, right? Even if you look at companies, the size of companies, because the whole world is accessible as a product, versus your corner shop that existed in the 1920s where you probably were faced to face with the business owner and he cared about his reputation with you and same with doctors, doctors knew you and your family. And I think everything has become so scaled up that each brand has access to millions and billions of people. And so with what happens I think with celebrities is that they get scaled up so fast for doing something

like compared to how much they get paid and how much how much their lives change overnight. If you look at what their work is, it's not that different from any other job. And I think there's a level of insecurity that they start to experience that I'm looked at so desperately from who I really am. And I'm living this, you know, even if you look at Johnny Depp, right? And Johnny Depp talked a lot about this during his trial that after after he was in Pirates of the Caribbean His life completely changed that he could not live sort of the normal life that he used to going going and grabbing coffee

He just couldn't do things like that and to him He's he's clearly not someone who's made for celebrity and never really internalized it in the same way, but you can also see him completely unraveling from that and having a really bad drug addiction and alcohol addiction and like getting very scared about the people who are around him, like the whole cabal of Amber Heard's friends were basically living off of him and his like several penthouses and and that's that's sort of the life that happens but then with other people and I think this was kind of true with

Bri Larson is that she was this completely normal great down to earth person and then she became very famous because of her Oscar win which you know her acting was incredible in that movie that I think it's called room or the room, one of those two. And suddenly she just, I think she just bought into her own hype really intensely. But there's like a guilt there. Like, do I deserve all this fame? And then I'm living so apart from a regular person and I have guards around me and I have gates around me. And so there must be a reason that I'm here. So I need to speak for other people. And I need to go and constantly have a responsibility. And so someone asks her at the red carpet,

like, what does it mean to be a woman in Hollywood? And she says, it means it's really hard. And if you're a woman of color, it's really, really hard. Coming from a person who's like, what's so hard about your existence in Hollywood? What exactly is hard about it? You have a great voice. Like, people are listening to you, they're looking at you, they're paying attention to you. What is so hard to be a woman in Hollywood? But I think that helps alleviate that guilt. Like, oh, at least I'm taking all this, these feelings of insufficiency and turning them

hopefully to help people. But in the process, just creating this like victim narrative for myself. Because that helps to hopefully bring down the gap between where somebody is in terms of their status and the work that they know that they do. If they can manufacture artificial oppression, that outwardly appears like the gap has been reduced down. I actually do have to go through, it's not just the time learning lines and being unsettled, all of the expectation

and the oppression and the victim and all of that stuff that I've got to get through as well. Okay, so I had a thought that has come up a bunch of times when thinking about the role of media and what it's supposed to do. Do you think it should be the role of studios to create something which is popular or to create something which pushes a virtuous moral ideology, taking away the fact that we don't think much of the ideology that's being pushed at the moment is virtuous. What's the role of a studio here?

I would say the true role of a studio is to tell stories that resonate with people. And if you do that, it's not about necessarily morally what's right or wrong, right? If you, if you, because I know what I'm about to say does talk about morality, but a lot of the great stories and the reasons why actors became, became something that we really looked up to, it's because what do they represent, right? It's the story and I think a lot of actors of old, even if you look at Leonardo DiCaprio

or even Tom Cruise, those sometimes he breaks, he broke out of it a couple times. But they try to keep as much, like, you know, what am I thinking of, like a fog around the actual lives and who they really are, because let them instead be immersed into the world. Like Christian Bale does a great job of this. Like I don't really know who Christian Bale is. As you don't really get a sense of his personality or anything, except for the fact that he is very dedicated to his roles.

And so he immerses himself and plays those roles in a way that is heavily believable. And certain movies and certain books really resonate with people because they become this guideline of how can I live a life that's going to be meaningful. And if you tell stories around that, everything else becomes irrelevant. Things like just make sense. Like why is a movie like, I don't know what I was going to, but like the Dark Knight is a great example of this, right? Is it there are so many moral conundrums in that movie, and the questions are hard to

answer. Even the question around, you know, where Fox wants to, Fox wants to shut down the system that Batman built where he can hear, listening on everybody's personal conversation. And yet Batman feels vindicated in that because he knows that that's what's going to take to take down someone like Joker. And it's like morally, you could take either stand, but what's wonderful about that movie is that it is a deeper exploration of a heart to answer question and many different levels. And I think stories like that that then resonate with something that you're dealing with in your life.

Like you personally are grappling with and then you look up to someone and you say, okay, they're struggling with it, I'm struggling with it, I can start to piece together the answers in a way that's not just the easy way out. And I think those are the stories that, and whether these movie production companies wanna do that or not is irrelevant because the market is going to speak after a while and they're going to have to change course.

But those are the stories that are going to work. And if you look back on even movies and then sometimes it's like, I look back on even movies and then sometimes like I look at shows and movies from 1990s and then the early 2000s, and those are the kind of stories they were telling. And that's what was like sticking with us. That is the main question I think that I always have in my mind,

which is how long can a desire to push a popular ideology continue to last in the face of an ever-dwindling capital liquidity? Like, just how long can movie studios and Disney Plus continue to... I mean, how much was Batgirl was, like, 50 million or 100 million and they bind it before it even went to edit. I think they filmed the whole thing. They've done the hard bit. They sent it to edit, but no, we're just not going to bother. I don't know what the... Do you know what the relative proportion of budget that would be spent on edit versus on filming is? I've heard that it's like close to 20%.

Okay, so the lion's share of the cost for producing this. Yeah, get it out there, right? They've already done some marketing. Other marketing's probably going to be a bit on top and blah, blah, blah. But still, the point being that there are changes being made, the Aquaman 2 or Aquaman 3, obviously, it's got a lot of amber herding. So they're retroactively trying to unperson her. I don't know how they're going to do that.

Yeah. But what do you they're going to do that. But what do you think is going to happen given your view from the lofty media critic mountain? What do you predict for the next few years of movies? Are we going to see more Top Gun or are we going to see Mochi Hulk? Yeah, Top Gun is such a great example of content that these activist writers, you know, pseudo writers, really they're activists that have sort of taken over various companies. They would have argued that, oh, no, there's no appetite for a movie like Top Gun

because it's so oriented towards weaponry and the Navy and military and yet it did so well. And I think that that's such a great indication. And I think even Spider-Man No Way Home is such a great indication that if you prioritize story and you respect the intelligence of your fans, then you will get a good result out of it. I think this is going to go on for quite a while because there's all this good will that got built up with good storytelling.

With Marvel, they had 11 years of really good storytelling and great characters and great movies. So even though we know that Thor, Love, and Thunder is an absolute abomination, it's still made, I think close to, I think it maybe is crossed a billion dollars by now. I haven't checked in a while, but that was all based off of the Goodwill from Thor, Ragnarok, and the rest of the series, because people, there is an appetite to go see these movies, but does it have the kind of earning potential earning power that Top Gun did? Absolutely not. And will the next movie that Tyka White TV does, will it have as a great of an earning potential it won't? I think everything is going to whittle off very slowly and I think it's it's highly likely that for at least the next five years we're going to continue to see

this domination by activist writers because they are also now all installed in very powerful positions. Yes and the cultures have have really absorbed them right they've they all believe in this and they think of us as the we're on the wrong side of history, right? They think that they're, you know, they're shin learned where the Nazis are something and that they'll win out in the end. And I think as long as there's an introduction of intelligent people that can see beyond all

of this into these kind of environments, which is not going to happen, I think. I think all those people have gotten slowly kicked out. I think until that happens, we're not going to see a change. More likely, I think we'll see new powers come up. New sources of content are going to come up. And I think it'll be, you know, in the form of definitely YouTube content or Netflix because Netflix has already given out that word, right? That things are changing. That if you are woke, you can get out. I mean, that was a very breeze and move. And I think Netflix knows that it doesn't have

the kind of staying power that Disney does. It needs to get its act together. Otherwise, it's going to be gone. So I think from Netflix, we might start to see some major changes. I agree completely about not respecting the intelligence of the audience. I think that's, it's that patronizing, pointing at the plebs down in the peasantry as they walk past and saying, we know what's best for you. But as well, you're right, you know, if you've installed a group of people that have a victim had complex, that are dealing with dysnasticism, if you do decide to get rid of them, they're going to kick up a pretty big stink. And it's very easy to lay the issues of a poor performing series or movie at the feet of people who don't know what's good for them. I mean, Bros was a perfect, so perfect of an example of this.

And I don't know how many times it's like that 2022 has just been a sequence of releases that have fallen flat on their face. And it's the same formula they get to roll out to explain it. Oh, it's because of bigotry. It's because I went to go and see movies with male leads so can you come and see mine. Like are you really hoping to guilt me into watching your movie? Like is that really the stage that we've got to? Is it not good on its own merits? Is it not sufficiently capable to actually get me to want to go and say, no, I have to go and see it with a gun to the back of my head because I don't know what's right for me. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I really hope that that's not the case, but I suppose that there's so many different layers as well, the director, the producer, the

execs, the studio, the publisher, the marketing, all of these people, the script writers, all of these people at different stages. You only really need one of those to have this sort of ideology for them to be the person that puts a stop on it all, right? Even if you had everybody else was on board with one particular thing because you're always going to have the flag of victim or oppressed or marginalized and everybody else that's around that is who I'm not gonna touch that that that is the sort of thing that I get cancelled for, so I'm not even going to try and push back against this and say, well, maybe what you think is right for people.

Maybe we should have a strong female lead who is strong in a feminine way. Maybe we should have a strong male lead who isn't a complete imbecile. It's gonna be very hard for them to get that through. Yes, and this is sort of an unrelated example but my friend who lives in Oakland, you know, he, the crime in Oakland is outrageous if you're not familiar with that.

So California in general has had a really intense surge in crime since COVID hit. And San Francisco is one of those cities where you know, car breakings are very common, but Oakland's crime has been a really intensely steadily on the rise. And a big chunk of the population in Oakland is African American. So it makes it for a very sensitive subject. And there are a lot of shootings that have been taking place.

And a lot of people have been losing their lives. I think they reported something like the hundredth shooting that took place this year that was fatal. I might be wrong on that number, but and my friend plugged in because he's lived in Oakland for about five years now and he plugged into a city council meeting as it was happening live. And one of the people was making in this argument that can we please increase and one of the people was making in this argument that can we please increase police presence in particular neighborhoods that have high instances of murder and crime. And immediately the response from one of the other people was absolutely not. Those are predominantly areas with African Americans. So this

is clearly a very racist policy to request that. And immediately the argument was shut down. There was no more room for discussion. And I understand that. I understand because along with everything else happening, there's also the, you know, intense fear that everybody has, that the idea of being canceled, and to be labeled, I mean, we throw around the word racist so much. But if you think about it, it's like that is a very intense insult to throw at someone

that you would be that terrible person that you would judge someone on based on the color of their skin. But so everyone is trying to protect their own reputations, but it comes then at the cost of the bigger vision, right? I don't want to be called racist, but at the same time, you know, one could make that argument that like African-American people are dying

as a result of this supposedly anti-racist, you know, discussion happening here, right? And it's the same thing, I think, in these situations that if anyone questions the making of bros, being a very, you know, very specific movie, which is fine. I think people can go and see movies about gay people. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But in the trailer, one of the people says, guys, remember street people and someone else says, yeah, they had a good run. And it's like, okay, do I really want to go watch a movie where it's very clearly pro gay and anti-street people? And it's like, I don't want to be scolded for two hours.

Like I would rather go do something else. And I think in a movie like in the production process of a movie like that, if anyone has a reasonable question even, then they're probably afraid to voice it at the risk of you know because they might get called anti gay or bigoted or anything. And that's the biggest fear. You always have to pander to the wokest common denominator. Yes. baggage claim, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go if they want to check out your stuff online?

I absolutely adore your YouTube channel. It's blowing up at the moment. Where should they go? Please search for baggage claim on YouTube where I have a lot of my content. You can also follow me on Twitter, baggage claim 11, and I'm also on Instagram, baggage claims within S. I appreciate you. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Get on set