The Pomp Podcast - #445: Nicole Arbour on Creating Viral Content

Episode Date: December 5, 2020

Nicole Arbour is a comedian and digital renegade that has racked up more than 1 billion video views online. She is constantly reinventing the game, both for herself and for your favorite brands.  In this conversation, we discuss how Nicole has built her audience, where she makes the most money, how to create a viral video, how comedy has helped her, and the importance of freedom of speech. ======================= Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Try CoinList Pro and be first to trade on network launch. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and earn $10 in BTC after you trade $100. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 90,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to The Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Nicole Arbor is a comedian and digital renegade that has racked up more than 1 billion video views online. She's constantly reinventing the game, both for herself and for your favorite brands. In this conversation, we discuss how Nicole has built her audience, where she makes the most money, how to create a viral video, how comedy has helped her, and the importance of freedom of speech. I really enjoyed this conversation with Nicole, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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episode with Nicole. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Nicole here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for having me. All right. Let's just jump right into your background. Somehow people know you as a comedian and like 10 other

things. What do you do every day and what is your background? Well, I am a comedian. That's my main thing that everybody knows about me um people call me a digital renegade and i kind of ran with it what does that mean that means i can make shit go viral it means i like to tinker with products and work on dev teams and beta teams in advance to make sure shit goes viral um yeah and i'm a nerd when it comes to all things digital and absolutely love it analytics kind of like get me all tingly okay before before you became a digital renegade what were you doing um comedy it was so yeah i was just straight up comedy except i was working in marketing a bunch too because i was hired as a comic years ago for a molson canadian giant campaign and i was the

host of this cross canada tour i went into their marketing meeting with the president of the whole company and everyone on their marketing team they told me what i had to say in the commercial and what was going to go on and i didn't know i wasn't supposed to tell them it sucks and I was just like no this is really bad you guys sound like a bunch of late 40s people trying to sound like you're in college the terminology you're using the lingo is like four years old I'm not saying any of this you're gonna kill my brand and there was like what would you do and I told them and then it went viral before viral was viral and then that campaign led to a campaign with virgin mobile helping launch it in Canada led to working with Nike and Unilever

and Axe products, helping launch them. And I was just a comic that ended up good at marketing. All right. So how much of the experience and knowledge of being a comic and people forget, like that is a skill and that is something that you can kind of hone your craft with is dependent or is necessary to understand how the internet works and how to make content go viral. Like, do you, does that experience help or is that just kind of a coincidence that you have the comedic experience and also understand how to make things go viral? It's 100% together. It's timing. It's eliciting emotion from people. The emotion doesn't always have to be laughing, but you have to get an emotion from someone. And fear seems to be

doing very well these days. Not a fan of it, but it's doing well. But yeah, it's super helped because I've learned comedy performance and writing. I've learned kind of how to influence people. And that's really what I think it comes down to. And telling the truth. Comics tell the truth a lot. And people like that nuts. It's literally the only reason why I like having comedians come on here is because the comedians are allowed to say the truth and no one gets mad because they're told that you're supposed to laugh at the end oh no they get mad yeah they've tried to cancel me like 12 times now it's just yeah all right let's just talk about it you did this fat shaming or like dear fat people video what was going on there what happened by

the way that video that video has 15 million views on youtube it has over 100 million views over 100 million okay walk us through that whole thing yeah sure i just uh i had been disabled for most of my twenties after a car accident. And I set out to basically make all the videos that I wanted to make, say all the things I wanted to say before I was dead. And I was like, I'm going to say these things because they need to be said. I've been in bed for all these years. If I was going to die tomorrow, what do I want the world to know? And seeing people harm themselves every fricking day is ridiculous, especially when we pretend we care about people, but then we let them kill themselves slowly in front of us. It's ridiculous. So I just made that

video. And I'm like, here's the truth. You're killing yourself and just made it funny. And at the end, I edited out a little part where I said, as someone who's been disabled for this many years and couldn't walk, and all I wanted was a healthy body. I took it out the last second because I knew that wouldn't make it go viral. They had to hate me. I had to let them hate me. So I did. And then every day I get hundreds of messages still from people that that video has helped them lose ridiculous amounts of weight. It was the verbal bitch slap that they needed. And that's exactly what I wanted. So where's the line in terms of there's this like political correct world that exists and everyone, you know, has their own opinion as to what you're supposed to

do. And they want to tell you what to do and, and basically force their views of the world onto you versus like the old school mentality of just like tough love. Right. And I always like to talk about like most people, if you talk to them, they'll tell you a story about their mother or their father who like at some point in their life, like intervened in a very serious way. And some people it was like, my parents like spanked me all the way to like, my dad was like, we don't do that here. Right. And so like somewhere in between like tough love ended up having a positive impact that seems to not be so popular now. So like, how do you think about the balance between those two things and what can be said and what can't be? I feel like with the, the lowering of tough love,

the rise of lying has, it has been completely, you know, together. So I think being politically correct is just lying with a bow. It's not what you really think. It's not what you really believe. You're saying it because you think it'll make you popular and you're a liar. And I was brought up being called out constantly by family members, by whoever. We were just funny and tough love is all I knew. And without it, tough love is honesty. That's all it is. Without that, we're all just full of shit. So what's the point? We can't let people tell us to stop being honest because it's not popular. That's really messed up. I don't know a single comedian who doesn't have this like pursuit of ruthless honesty. And that's what ultimately leads to all of the emotional

reactions, right? Yeah. A hundred percent. Like look at my wall of my favorite people. They all tell the truth. It's my wall of heroes. I love them. I get Kyle on my shoulders staring at me, making sure I do shit right. Yeah. Some of those aren't people, they're inanimate objects, but they still tell the truth. Barbie is not inanimate. She taught me I could be anything I want to be. She, she was an astronaut and a teacher and she was a lawyer and it was the Barbie dream house, not the Ken dream house. She had her shit together and she looked hot. So what else? How did you get a billion views on the internet? Like what is the secret? Or when people come to you and they're like, Hey, I want to be a content creator. I want to make things go viral. Where do

they start? And I'm not talking about like the actual like secret sauce of each individual video for a client or something like that but just like from a holistic standpoint what are the keys to that that you think you understand that other people are just missing stop acting everyone can see through your shit it's weird the the hey guys blah blah like if that's not how you talk why are you doing that now why do you think you're going to stand out when you're trying to act like everybody else it's just dumb and i see it with brands too brands are constantly playing it safe constantly worried about what are they going to say what's my competition going to say it's like why do you care? And you know, it's just like athletes swing to hit it out of the park or why

are you playing? And people have to be ready for that. And you have to be ready. If you're going to make a viral video, people are going to love it and they're going to hate it. And if you can't deal with both of those, then you're in the wrong business. Well, it's almost like the, uh, controversial nature of it, right? The fact that some people do love it, some people do hate it, that especially on social media drives more engagement, which has more virality. and you almost have to be willing to have the downside in order to get the upside?

Sometimes, like it doesn't have to be a negative video to go viral. It can be happy. I had one go viral that it was me and an old lady unboxing sex toys for Adam and Eve sex toy company. I was told you can't make a sex toy video.

Like that's like the only thing that you can't make it go viral. It's not going to happen. It's going to get flagged and taken down. I'm like, not if I get a sweet 87 year old Jewish lady to do an unboxing with me. did you know her beforehand i had met her once yeah it was my friend's mom and okay so you got your friend's mom to do a sex toy unboxing video with you and what do you just like text her and

like hey i have an idea or like how does that come about yeah yeah i told her we're gonna do an unboxing video and it's gonna be a lot of fun and she came over and sat on my couch with me and i didn't tell her what was in the box and that's it and then we just went through shot the whole thing and at first she was a lot of like oh oh oh my and then eventually she's like grabbing at the toy she's like what's this one do like she asked if she could take a couple things home yeah but she doesn't like like the thong body suits she's not into that yeah when I there was like a magic wand that came out in the one box and I put it on her back at one point she's like uh wow yeah it was great okay I could I could only imagine an 87 year old woman going through this and like all

of things going on in her head that she doesn't say out loud but then there is this element of like older people kind of just don't care anymore right so they just say what they want to say yeah it's the oh they're the best the best all right so one being honest what else in terms of like standing out on the internet going viral creating content that people actually care about it's the same as comedy you have to have have an angle what is it you think about this thing so it's like water do you love it do you hate it do we need more of it do we need less if you're not saying anything, then be quiet or find, find a reason to speak. It shouldn't just be content for the sake of content. It should be content because you have something to say or a message

to convey. And when you go from there, what is the message? And you make sure you hit that over and over. That's step two. And so how does that balance with, you know, there's some people who just say like, Hey, it's the consistency of content. You have to constantly crank out content. There's a lot of people who don't have an idea every day or every week. How do you balance those to think between like only do it if it's high quality, you have something to say with the need for consistency to remain relevant and kind of keep growing the audiences and things like that. Um, I disagree with the, you have to be posting every single day, something every day. Those people that are doing that are creating content because they're repurposing talks that

they're doing the repurposing zoom calls that should be meetings that is actual high quality content. Um, people who are just posting for the sake of posting, you can see it and it's trash. And it's like, if you're feeding your audience trash most of the time, they're not even going to pay attention when you're posting something quality. So I think you end up losing more people than keeping them that way. What platforms do you focus on now? Is it YouTube? Are there other platforms that you think are worth spending more time on than others? YouTube, I stopped posting regularly on a couple of years ago. I was one of the first people on the Facebook monetization program and it slaughtered. It was a good time. So I was Facebook strong for a while. Now I'm

mostly on Instagram and I am monetized on there. Same as YouTube, which is sweet. Uh, so I like Instagram parlor right now is crushing the reach on parlor is I posted the same video on parlor, but no same video on Instagram, 200,000 views with my audience of 1.3 million, exact same video got 1.6 million views on parlor. And I was like, there we go. What is the size of your audience on Parler? Around 61,000 right now. I just started. And is Parler got some of the same algorithmic advantages that like, let's say a TikTok has where anyone can kind of build an audience quickly and get distribution, or is it much more aligned to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, something like that? I think it's a mashup of all of it right now.

I haven't seen that it's easy to be discovered on Parler, but what I am seeing is that the reach, if I have 61,000 people following me, this is going to go to 61,000 people. So if I'm making something good, they're going to share it. And then it's going to get to all their people. So it's, it's that ability. They're not hindering anyone's reach right now. It's just sweet. When you create content, how much of it is like, I'm going to create a video to go on parlor. I'm going to create a video to go on Instagram or Tik TOK or YouTube or wherever versus I'm going to create a great video. And then I'm going to cut it into different formats for these various platforms. I just make it and then post it everywhere. Yeah. Okay. How do you monetize in terms of

not like take out the consulting and the, and the brand work stuff, but for you personally, if you were just a creator, how do you monetize and where have you seen kind of, uh, the greatest growth in that monetization of the last couple of years? Brand deals. So, you know, finding partners that work for your brand and doing package deals. So I'm going to do this many videos with you or this many posts with you. Um, obviously monetizing just your views on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all the regular stuff like that. But I see brand partnerships as my favorite way to do it. Yeah. Okay. And so you keep mentioning like Instagram monetization explain to people what exactly you're monetizing there and how that works.

Yeah. It's the exact same as YouTube. So, uh, if you get a big enough following and they like your content, Instagram will come to you and say you're approved for a monetization program. And it's the exact same as YouTube. I'm getting paid for views and a watch time exact same way that I went on Facebook. Got it. And are they running ads in front of your videos or they're just paying you for the content basically. And then they're figuring out other ways to monetize because people are staying on the platform. Uh, I've seen both. So I've seen some ads coming and I kind of think a few more ads went into my feed. They didn't specify that with me. I just realized that all of a sudden I'm monetized and money's coming in. Not mad at it. Yeah. Got it. And when you

think of when you were monetizing on YouTube versus Instagram now, uh, was it pretty equal in terms of, uh, CPM rates and, um, kind of the size of the audiences or do you see a pretty big difference? Huge difference. Facebook and byproduct of Instagram, bigger reach, bigger dollars, higher CPM. Everything there has been bigger for me during the last five years. And YouTube, of course, their algorithm crushes adult content a lot or comedic content. Yeah. I've just seen a way better return on Facebook. Got it. And so when you create a video for Facebook or Instagram talk us through like what exactly goes into that video are you cutting these into you know one two minute videos are these more like 10 20 minute videos and then the different styles

are you just basically sitting down and recording it or are you going back and like almost doing like the vlog style cut where there's just cut after cut after cut in the video okay it's different every time so for example two days ago I had my camera people come over and I was like I'm gonna shoot something I was like I'm gonna buy a gingerbread house all right oh I have this like fifties outfit. I'm going to put that on. Okay. We're going to do a kitchen thing. Roller camera. That's it. That's all we did. I said, shoot, we shot for 15 minutes. Uh, it was a, you know, a tutorial on how to make a gingerbread small business. And I think it's at like half a million views so far, which is great in today. And I just shot it. I just improv and just shot. And it is

what it is. If I have a very specific message, I'll sit down and, you know, shoot probably like 45 minutes. I have to tighten it up because I don't want to edit all that after anymore. And then just edit from there. All right. And one of the biggest questions I always get from people is, uh, when you're successful on the platforms with content and, uh, monetization, how big is the team and team can be what you think of as like direct employees that you have, or it could even be contractors and kind of people you'll pull in for a video like that. Yeah. So I got a 1 billion views with just my iPhone and my Mac book and a single ring light that cost me $200. So every time people are like, Oh, I don't have a team. I'm like, yeah, I was physically disabled

on disability shooting videos like this and then ended up on the view. So enough with your excuses. Anyways, uh, now it's easier for me to have a video person come in. So that's like, I like to keep it small. One video person, I already have the lights and then hair and makeup person, the end. Uh, sometimes I'll tag in an editor for a first sweep, but I always do the comedy stuff and then, yeah, keep it tight. You don't need a billion people. And so that was gonna be one of my questions is basically you'll do a lot of the editing in terms of the final product that people see out on a platform. That's basically you've, you know, kind of blessed. And before it went out the door, you actually went in and edited it and made sure it was what you wanted.

I completely edit myself 99.9% of my content. Uh, the odd time I'll have someone do just the first sweep to take out my ums, ahs, pauses while I'm switching a costume, but everything that goes out, I've edited. Got it. And so we've, everything we've talked about is like ad type monetization, uh, or platform-based. Are you doing merchandise, physical products, like anything else in terms of driving monetization, uh, while using, trying to figure out how to make money off of the views? Uh, next year I'm doing more of that, but every time I've done merch, it sold out quickly. And I was like, oh, I should put more time into this, but I was busy over here. Um, and then go team Academy. Absolutely crushed, which was sweet. It's, uh, basically my get happy, learn business,

get your shit together, get your life together. Uh, partnered with Danelle Delgado that a lot of people know is like the millionaire maker featured in Forbes and all the magazines. And yeah, we did an Academy for people, eight week program, ran it twice and it crushed. It it's great. Their lives are just like very different now. So it makes me happy. That's awesome. Uh, I want to switch gears when you tell the truth, it obviously brings all sorts of controversy and a very polarized audiences. Uh, one of the things that's fascinating to me about you is you were a lifelong Democrat and then hung out with a bunch of Trump people and then became pro Trump, Republican, et cetera. That violates a lot of people's view of like what's allowed in

the world, uh, that you could change your mind. That's a shocking idea. Um, talk us through kind of your upbringing and kind of political leanings and then kind of what you did to, uh, eventually end up on the other side, uh, of a lot of this political beliefs. Yeah, sure. So I'm from Canada and I've always been a liberal in Canada. Uh, I was part of the parliamentary process kind of stuff in high school. My first main real person job was junior prime minister of Canada working for the federal government, which was pretty dope. Um, and then by working at our MP and MPPs offices, which is kind of like senators, I realized that most of them are full of shit and exactly what they say, they live the exact opposite. So instead of taking a scholarship

for political science, I decided to be a comedian, which is, I thought it was about the same. Um, and then for years, I'm just like, yeah, I'm, I'm a liberal, obviously I believe in liberal things and, you know, equal rights for gay people and women's, you know, choice on their body and all the things I thought were good people choices. And these are bad people over here. And then after the last election, I've told this story before, but I was speaking right before the last election at USC, two days before the election. And some people from Hillary Clinton's camp came up to me and told me that I'm going to tell the students that I'm voting for Hillary. They didn't ask me, they told me. And I was like, no, I'm from Canada. I'm here to talk about social media

and how it's affecting the election. And when I was on stage with people, I told no to got on the mic and said, yeah, you know, Nicole was just backstage saying that she would vote for Hillary if she could. And I was just like, fuck you guys. Like, no, I didn't say that. And that was like my first little inkling in my head. And then after that, um, I had run down to Texas where I was just like these people are crazy they have guns everywhere they got dogs in the office they believe they got trump flags i'm like these people are nuts but let's go on a field trip and they're ready to roll they are ready to roll in texas they're ready to roll all the time but while i was in texas um just at a bar that i was at i saw someone push a little gay twink

and then one of these huge texan guys walked up to the dude who did it and grabbed him and he's like we don't do that around here and pushed him and he was like you okay little lady sir man it was like the funniest shit i'd ever seen and i was like oh okay so they're not all homophobic crazy people that just want to shoot everyone predominantly a lot of them are former or current military who have a superhero complex in a great way that they'll run towards danger if we need it. Christian values care about people. Uh, they just don't like the bullshit. And the more I was in LA where I lived for like five years, the more I saw that liberals or Democrats, as we know them are the exact opposite of everything they pretend to be consistently. Like it wasn't like

once it happened five times, it's every, I'd say 99% of the time. And we're seeing that in politicians now it's like, these are the rules you have to abide by them. I'm eating at French laundry, you know, or like, you can't go there. I'm on vacation in Cabo. Are you a Simpsons character? Like, what is this nonsense? It's part of the playbook. It's literally like to be a politician and to make mandates, you have to go do the opposite thing. I'm convinced there's like a, a secret world order where it's like, Hey, if we shut down restaurants, we have to go to nice restaurants. If we tell people to stay in their homes, we have to go on vacation. Like it's a requirement. Yeah. That totally makes sense for that to happen. And just overall, I felt like I

was living in idiocracy over there. It's like, be kind to everyone. Fuck that bitch. She can't be blah, blah, blah. I'm like, do you hear the music that you guys are putting out? Do you see the films you're putting out? Why are there 11 year olds doing slutty TikTok dances? And that's cool. Don't judge. Everything is just upside down, upside down land over there to me. So I still, of course, support gay people. And I support all the same things I did. I just think to be an honest human being. You got to go the other way. What was the reaction when people started to figure this out that you were doing it? Um, well, actually I learned through Dave Rubin that I'm a libertarian. I was like, yes, this is all of my values. Libertarian. This makes sense.

Uh, and then right before the election this time, I was like, people, people are not paying attention to China. Are we, are we really, did you guys just say it's a conspiracy theory? What I said about China and how they've been buying property around the world for super low rates, and they're basically buying the whole world. Okay, you're dumb. I got to go endorse this side now. Because if Trump, Trump represents to me, the ego and narcissism that is aligned with a freedom that we require as Americans or North Americans. If we want this, we have to think we're better than other people, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard. His, you know, his touches of ego and his style of doing that aligns with murka yeah let's go crying all the

time being fake offended by everything does not align with a company that's capitalism rich and has benefited from that and is kicking ass worldwide because of that like it's just too weak so i had to go and be like yeah vote for trump it's not that i'm like a trump supporter i'm like these ideals make more sense to me i'm not going to tell black people who they have to vote for. That's racist. You idiots. I'm not gonna, you know, just all of the different things that sit well or don't sit well with me. It went that way. And people were fine. Like majority of the people were fine with it. How do you think that the balance between, uh, one being willing to go do the work? Like there's a lot of people who would say, Oh my God, that's crazy. You're

going to Texas. Like I hate all those people. They're all evil. Like I'm not even going to go. So you at least had like the open-mindedness to like, go see it. You had those experiences like balancing that with um you know this belief that like the way that you grow up is the way that uh those are your values those are the things that like for your entire life you like your entire identity is tied to them right i think there's a lot of people who even if they had the open-mindedness to go and have different experiences they literally end up tying their identity it's in their twitter bio right they're like i'm a democrat or i'm a republican like they can't get away from ever thinking about having their own thoughts or being an independent thinker

how did you do that? Or how do you suggest other people do it? Just truth. Just follow the truth. It's, it's kind of like the first lesson we're taught when we're kids is don't lie. And of course, as human beings, we all do it to, you know, not hurt feelings or to not go to jail, whatever Hillary. Um, yeah, but it's just, I follow the truth. And if something's going on and I'm like, my spider senses are tingling, this doesn't feel right. I need to research it. I'll go watch it on, you know, the, the different political stations that aren't edited. I'll watch a full video myself. I called out Jimmy Kimmel a couple months ago for running a completely fake story about Mike Pence that he knew was fake. All I had to do was

go find the full clip to see that Mike Pence wasn't moving fake empty boxes of charity food and PPE. It was a lie, but he ran the story anyway. And once I saw people doing that, I'm just like, yeah, I don't really care what people think. I got to be a real person and my integrity matters more to me than making people happy. So this brings up a really interesting thing where there's like this blind belief historically in media journalism, you know, these large institutions, like they're going to tell us the truth. They're going to do the work. They're, you know, these honorable people, uh, they're unbiased, all this kind of stuff. I think now we're seeing a lot of people being exposed. It's not everybody. Like, I think it's always important to say like, there

are some really, really good journalists on both sides of the leanings in terms of the political spectrum but for many many people they now are losing trust in these institutions they're saying hey these individuals are biased they're actually sometimes literally lying to us sometimes they're just twisting facts to tell a different story whatever so how do we balance that between like you have a large platform i have a large platform and so do they so now like there's this more like even playing field where like if you say something i say something and they say something like actually we may reach the same amount of people and so therefore like you have a different style of doing it than I do. And then they do, where is like the truth lie? And like, how does the

audience start to try to understand, like, who should I listen to? Should I listen to Nicole or should I listen to the New York times? Should I listen to Jimmy Kimmel or should I listen to somebody else? Like how did, how did they wade through that, um, kind of issue? Turn off mainstream news, turn it off. All of them, turn them all off. If not just America, if North America turned off all of their mainstream news, we would all be better period. And I've had to have these chats with my parents because they watch it. They always watch it. It's every night, you know, six o'clock news, whatever.

And I'm like, mom, you know, this isn't real. You've seen them do fake stories about me. You've seen them like run. There was this narrative that I was fired from the movie. I was never part of this movie. I don't even know these people. There was a narrative that I was mean to this guy in an airplane. They took a bit from my standup and pretended it was real.

And they like, everything is proven wrong. I'm like, stop believing them. They're liars. I would say most of them are liars now. It's opinion pieces and spin stories. And I just think that mainstream media is just like the National Enquirer. There is no difference now.

So if you don't believe in Bigfoot, you should probably turn off Fox and CNN and then listen to people online. Is it because they have to be entertainment to drive the ratings? Like they're losing viewership and so you have to be entertaining. You have to elicit those emotions.

The best way to elicit emotion is basically scare the shit out of people into thinking like the world's ending so they tune in tomorrow yeah 100 and i really think with the rise of online and the click-through rate and making money from ads that way they've tried to clickbait us all so if you keep us terrified and more later stay tuned we're gonna tell you more later then they got us it's just a hook for stupid people so we just have to stop being dumb be like oh good game but you know you've been cheated on by that boyfriend multiple times now you're to keep going back what are you doing the one that just blew my mind is for six seven eight

nine months whatever it's been now uh cnn has had the what i call the death scoreboard up on cnn right and like by the way like yes we should address this seriously we should absolutely take all the steps that are necessary there's science like everything that people know that we should do we should do science is great yeah but the idea of putting a scoreboard on cnn every day and literally making people feel like if they walk out of their home they're gonna die just feels like complete fear-mongering and literally is the definition of like, how do we get people to tune in tomorrow

to check the numbers? Yeah, 100%. I really think that reporters should be put in prison for lying or if they're doing something that they know is fear-mongering and they're trying, I just think that there should be crimes against humanity

charged on these media outlets sooner than later because they know what they're doing. So people who hear that, there's gonna be a lot of people who will immediately say, we need freedom of the press. We have to protect people in the press. We can't throw them in jail, blah, blah, blah. That whole argument. I'm not going to go through the whole thing because people understand that argument exists. Okay. You disagree. Why? Because they're not reporting.

When they were reporting, freedom of the press. They're not journalists anymore. They're doing puff opinion pieces and they're activists. I don't care about your activism. You're not giving me facts. If the fact is this many people died or there's a war in this place and this is what's going on, freedom of the press, but you're lying to us now. And once you lie on purpose, I think that should be a crime. Okay. So I always use this framework of people in the media basically fall into one of three categories. I'm going to put media very, very loosely here, right? But I usually think of it from a financial media standpoint, but let's just talk media in general. So there's journalism. These are people who are legitimately doing journalism. They have a story, they go,

they investigate it. They talk to people on all sides of the story. They kind of fact check, they do all the things they're supposed to do. They write a, uh, as unbiased a piece as possible. They present all the different, uh, viewpoints in the story and they publish it and then they see what happens. If there's an issue, they correct it. They, you know, do all the things that a journalist would do. That's one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum, you have what I call market participants. These are people in the story, right? So this is, uh, something happens to you. You go and you write a blog piece or you, you know, create a video or whatever in the financial markets. It's literally the investors who are investing in the markets

that when they are wrong, they have skin in the game, right? So if you say something and you created a video and you're wrong or you're a racist or you're an asshole or whatever, like there's blowback directly because you've put your name on that thing. Financial markets, if you go out and you say, I believe X and you're wrong, you lose money, right?

Like that's the whole point of a market. Those are the two kind of extremists. But in the middle, and it's an ever-growing middle, is what I call bloggers masquerading as journalists. These are the people I think you're talking about, which are they essentially are using blotter tactics they use clickbait headlines sensationalism etc but the pieces that they write are being published under the news section but it's their personal opinions there's no yes they're not talking to sources they're not going and getting

quotes they're not fact checking anything it's literally they wake up and they write a story and the story is just it's an opinion piece it's activism it's you know whatever you label you want to put on it but it doesn't fit into the market participant bucket because if they're wrong there's no downside and it doesn't fit into the journalism side and to me that's the danger right like that's kind of like the threat to american democracy is just we're allowing things that are being passed off as journalism but they're not actually journalism yes exactly and my favorite game to play now is who wrote that so if you see an article i go and i click on it and i'm like who wrote that and i click on them and recently business insider has been my favorite to roast

because it will be a student who their only credits are writing for their student newspaper. And now they're a reporter for Business Insider giving completely fake info about, let's say, Tesla or whatever. And all the only things they've written are puff pieces. And if you don't know and respect the people that are giving you the info, stop reading it. The headline, who cares? Click on who's writing this. Look at them. If you don't respect that person, don't take their opinion. So how much of it is it's young people, right? Because this is actually a huge piece of it, right? And pretty much every what I'll consider true journalists that I know, everyone from my wife all the way to a number of friends of ours are actual journalists that their biggest complaint

is so many young people now are running these places and they don't have experience. They don't have the you know 30 year veteran there to say hey this is the way journalism is done kind of you just went to journalist school or literally you were a blogger and then you got hired somewhere and now you just keep doing what you've always done because you don't have anyone to tell you to do anything differently and it feels like it may literally just be an inexperienced thing that contributes to the problem as well somebody's to spank them they need to be spanked this is you know there needs to be some kind of ramification for their actions and if no one's holding them accountable, then we need to hold them accountable by just unfollowing all those

accounts. I don't want to see business insider. If you're going to feed me crap and you know, I don't want to follow Fox or CNN. If you guys are going to lie to me, screw you. Like I almost threw up the middles, but I don't know where this goes. Yeah. Like that's how we can vote on that. So what are those ramifications that you think are appropriate? Right? Obviously it sounds like you think if somebody is egregiously lying and it's like super bad, your position is like, Hey, there's literally could be crimes, jail, like really, really bad stuff. Uh, I'm assuming that's not what you think for everybody. So like, what are the ramifications or solutions that you think could be imposed to try to help solve this problem? I think make it like sports. The first

time you get fined, you know, you do something wrong in the game, you get a fine. The second time you get a fine and a flag. And then the third time, if you're doing something that can lead to, let's say someone being assaulted because you painted them as a racist and that's not the story, then that is jail time to me. If you're printing that someone did something awful to another human being and that's going to affect the rest of their life, that's jail to me. That's human being assault, whatever it is. But I do think first time, give them a warning. Second time, a bigger fine and a warning. And then third time, if people aren't afraid of going to jail for what they're doing, they're just going to keep doing it. All right. Hold on. So you think fine, fine, jail,

not like fine, fine, fired, something else. And then jail's like the end of the road. You, you immediately jumped to the final thing. Yeah. Because if you get fined twice, you know what you're doing. I'm not stupid. So you stop playing stupid. You know, now, now another piece of it is there would be some, I'll call them labels, right. Or kind of buckets of this that are not very well defined. So for example, uh, they're a position of perspective, right? So let's say that you were a journalist, uh, and you're writing about me and you're like, you know what? Pomp's a fucking asshole.

I'm gonna write an article today and say he's racist. Right? When you write that article, your definition or the evidence that you use in your mind to rationalize racist may actually be different than somebody else's, right? And so then there's also very clear examples of racism. A perfect example is Yale was literally found guilty

of being racist towards certain demographics because of quotas and things like that, right? And that's not up for debate. like that was in a court case etc and so when you look at this it's like some people have a very narrow defined provable view of what racism is other people have a different view how do we determine like who's right and who's wrong like it's it's a thing that is so myriad webster can help us with that uh you just go to the definition and then if it fits in that that is racism it has to be an actual hatred for someone because of the color of their skin their background whatever

you don't get to just be like you use a different water than me you racist there's a joke i don't like sexist homophobic racist like no let's let's go back to basics and be adults and read the dictionary and i think it's pretty standard and i've seen that i've seen people called racist homophobic whatever it might be if you're harming someone's professional reputation based on your opinion i don't think that should be allowed i think if i say i think you're an asshole okay I think you're an asshole. Me saying, I think you're homophobic. I better have some fricking examples showing that you hate gay people and not just this, my opinion of it, because he didn't wear a rainbow on rainbow day. You know, I just think that there has to be a harsher consequences

for the things we're doing. Cause the people who are doing that is the anti-bully crowd. Pick a fucking team. Are you anti-bully anti-suicide pro-mental health, or are you trying to cancel people? You can't be both. This is where I'm at. Oh, my favorite is definitely the people who uh claim to be inclusive etc and then bully people on the internet yeah those are kind he's canceled yeah he just wrecked his whole life be kind those are the best um in terms of where the solutions lie we talked a lot about like addressing the problem what other solutions do you feel like are out there in terms of that people outside of maybe kind of that traditional media system can do to try to solve all this

um comics I think there's going to be a rise of the comedians in the next year and it's because everything got so crazy everything bubbled up and where comics might have been more like you know just kind of doing jokes and whatever everyone has to commentate now because we're the only ones telling the truth and the comedy that I've seen coming out of people the last few weeks even it's some of the best shit I've seen in like 10 years so I'm really excited I think follow your local comedians and they're going to tell you the truth who are your favorites to watch right now my favorites are a lot of my friends um i would say jp sears is hilarious if you like sarcasm buddy of mine um i said a couple weeks ago that john christ is killing me with his videos they're

really fun uh chris de stefano is awesome history hyenas they're just hilarious podcasts and i just think everyone you know watch rogan because they'll have they'll have someone on but they'll talk about both sides and they're not coming with an angle on any one topic which i think is great and yeah what's the when you talk about this rise of wait what i think most like a lot of comics are great right now that are none of like the old ones i wouldn't say the liberal comics are great right now i'd say the opposite if if they're a comedian and they're mostly being a social justice comedian get away from that it's like all the other ones are way better are there bad comics right now yeah yeah um i'd say you're not a comic if you're doing a fucking ted talk and expecting

an applause break at the end that's not that's not comedy like if you're trying to cancel another comedian you're not a comedian period that guy can say whatever he wants lenny bruce you know like all of these guys who came before they were nuts in the best way possible let let people andy Hoffman if they want to. There's no cap on comedy. And anyone who's trying to put a cap on it or say you can't say that about anything by get out. So where is the voice for comics? Because a lot of comics will listen to this and they'll be like, what do you mean I can't talk about serious issues? Right. And I put it in air quotes because everyone's serious issue is different. Yeah. Is there a space for that or is it only within the confines of cracking jokes, making people laugh

and like kind of the spirit of comedians no we've always done that comics have always like this dude has always you know had a speech with punch lines in it like there's always an underlying message for the good stuff at least to me and yeah you can talk about real topics and make it funny but when there it's it's happened a lot I saw in stand-up the last few years where there's a lot of comedians that'll go up and just talk about their life and everything that's wrong and but you have to be nice to me because I'm a pansexual Libra, hocus pocus, whatever. I'm like, I don't know what you just said. I'm not clapping because you changed your sex. That's not a joke. Entertain the audience. This isn't therapy time. If it feels like therapy time, I don't want to be there. You

should be paying me. Yeah. I want to talk about censorship in general, right? So I hope you liked that definition. Like that was ridiculous. But anyway, Oh my God, I should have just used this. i have the one sitting right here jesus all right so censorship there's two types of censorship that i think are uh well three times three times actually so there's the politician censorship of like you can't do what we don't want you to do and we're basically god and so we're gonna you know impose our will on you there's social media censorship in terms of uh literally we're going to stop you from saying things we're going to cut down distribution we're going to do all that stuff and they're doing it frankly to all sides of the aisle uh and then there is what i'll

called just... No, they're not. That's only happening to one side of the aisle. Okay, explain. They are only censoring conservatives. And I have not seen a single liberal comedian censored ever, period. No Democrats, never. From influencers, anything. Only one side is being censored that I've ever seen. So here's my pushback to this, is if we're talking about what I'll call audience recognizable censorship completely agree right like you know my one of my favorite examples is like literally twitter is putting um a like a cover over you know like a like a disclaimer over the president of the united uh states tweets but the ccp state sponsored media organization is on twitter saying that the coronavirus didn't come from wuhan and like there's no disclaimers

there's no anything like okay so we're gonna we're literally gonna put disclaimers on the president of the United States, which by the way, people will debate whether we should do that or not. That's not what I'm here to debate. What I'm here to debate is if you're going to do it to anybody, you have to do it to everybody. Right. And they don't, of course. So like I call that like the audience recognizable censorship, right. Or, or the disclaimers, blah, blah, whatever. What I think happens though, in a very different way that is not recognizable and it's very hard to get data on is they actually will change the algorithm and distribution and kind of all the invisible things to all kinds of people right so if regardless of your political view if you go on

twitter or facebook or whatever and you say certain things they will absolutely take distribution away and so it's less about i'm going to censor you because of uh your political views or your leanings and it's more about certain topics just you can't talk about and i think that it is um what is it i think it was rogan actually uh him or kanye one of the two of them said like once you can't talk about a topic anymore. Now it's a religion, right? Once it's crossed over. And so I think that's where the censorship of both sides happens, but we just never see that, right? Because we don't know what people posted that we never get in our feeds, whatever. But I do agree with you that there's a very heavy leaning on one side of the aisle in terms of the audience recognizable

stuff. You know, to what you were saying, there is a large censorship right now, specifically on Instagram on sex workers or women who post content with a lot of skin on it, which is not my thing. you know it's just not my thing period but especially right now when people are trying to make money with their only fans because they don't have a job I do think it's unfair that they're only censoring those specific people when there's naked women all over Instagram you know I do see that so how do you balance like that's a perfect example how do you balance that between like hey we don't want nudity on our platform and like there's kids on here right like that type of argument right those two things are uh in a very over generalized way they're like

at the extreme ends of the angle or of the uh of the spectrum like how do you balance we want to help people make money and like not take away people's freedoms but at the same time like we don't want nudity and we don't want uh you know kids to see that content whatever and that's a weird one because i would get not wanting kids to see adult content but at the same time there's 12 year olds doing tiktok dances saying go down on me so you know like if we're gonna start it let's start it over there that's fair they've already seen it they've already seen the porn we're not we're not stopping anything yeah so when we talk about censorship from politicians and the politically correct censorship like is it just hey don't worry about it and literally

just kind of throw your virtual middle finger up in the air and just do the things that you want to do that make you happy or do you think that we're in a world where like people still have to be cognizant of that and almost address it in some weird way in what way can you expand on that so let's take for example uh they're the same things that instagram you talked about like posting a certain type of photo, Instagram will decrease distribution, et cetera. If you go on Twitter and, uh, Chinese concentration camps, right. It would be like a really extreme kind of, uh, thing. If you go on Twitter and yeah. And you start tweeting about a bunch of this stuff. Now, I don't know exactly the way Twitter would do it, but I'm just saying in an example. So there's

something that, uh, a lot of people don't want to talk about, right. But it's pretty factually provable that, hey, this is happening. And the platform then either through algorithmic distribution takes it down or literally there is social pressure, right? Like we saw with the NBA, for example, and the whole China thing, like there was definitely social pressure within the NBA and that organization to not talk about this, to not make this a story. How do individuals operate in that world? Do they literally have to say, look, I can't be in that world. I have to step outside and literally hang my hat on being an independent and independent thinker. And basically I'm gonna say whatever I want. And that's gonna be part of my image. Or can people actually operate within

those confines, knowing that this stuff's going on? No reality can operate within those confines. But if for work purposes, if you're going to get fired, and you don't think you can get another job, be smart, do what you need to do until you can exit to somewhere where you're more welcomed being a whole human being. I think, you know, depression has gone up, anxiety has gone up, suicides going up. And it's because we're not letting people be whole people and think and relying to them to their faces. So I saw this concentration camp. This is happening in China. No, it's not. That's called gaslighting. We're gaslighting mass amounts of people at once and then wondering why we're taking so many pills and ODing and all these things. Everything is a

by-product of the thing before. So I think if you're put in a circumstance where you can't be yourself, you got to get yourself out of there, at least create an action plan for an exit plan. We have to be whole people or we're not happy people. That's my thought on that. All right. Before I get into the rapid fire to wrap this up, I have one question and I've been thinking all day as to what you're going to answer. And I literally have no clue, but if you were president for one day and you can do whatever you wanted, what are the things you would do first? Oh my gosh. President for one day. Okay. Well, Snowden, he's good. You're good. Snowden. Um, like that's near the top. Uh, can I use my martial law? No, my things AOC, you're

gone. You just got to go. If I could, if I could make my own laws for one day and I'm like king of the world style president, the whole squad, they got to go. They're too stupid to be participating in politics, period. If there's anyone on the other side that's that dumb too, they got to go. You can't sell a sweatshirt for $65 that says tax the rich. You are a dumb person. I don't know if you saw those ones. I saw. They changed the price to $58, I saw. Oh yeah, that's still a giant margin. Where's that money going? Anyway. Uh, we know that sweatshirt costs eight bucks max. Um, yeah, I would definitely, I got one day. Okay. One day I would tell Texas they're doing a great job. I would tell LA, you guys are nuts. You got to open small, but if it was right now,

I would open all the small businesses. I'd be like, no, wear a mask, wash your hands, do the things you're supposed to do. We cannot tank all of these people's livelihoods because of a virus with a survival rate of 90, whatever percent, if you are scared, stay home. And you guys are the ones who get the subsidies. We're going to give the subsidies to this, you know, the people who are most affected. That makes more sense to me. Um, I'm like one day I would do this to China. Um, I would stop letting them, I would set up rules and regulations. So they're not going to be buying more property in Canada and America. I tell Justin Trudeau to fuck himself. Um, what's your problem with him what's not my problem with him let's just boil it down to one like just

other than the fact that he suddenly talks like a robot and it's really creepy um months ago all these tons of air canada planes were coming from china at the beginning of the pandemic i'm tweeting him i'm like hey hey maybe we don't want those planes coming in from luhan directly nothing five six planes coming in every day i don't know why it's spreading in canada i'm like hey man maybe maybe don't let more planes land from wuhan that's racist no it's not look up the definition of racism morons 20 more planes come in and then suddenly it's like oh maybe we should stop letting planes from china like it's just such basic shit i don't understand how they don't do it and i just think he's done a horrible job during this entire pandemic i just i just think

i would have voted for him at the beginning i did vote for him before but now he's just shown that he can't handle pressure at all. All right. I have a follow-up question now. Okay. What is the politician that you think has done the best job during all of this? Dan Crenshaw. Why? He's someone I would go to for news. Dan is so stoic. And I think it's that SEAL background that he has where he's just going to tell it how it is as it is, deal with the reality of it. And that's it. And he cares about facts. He will put up what's real, what's not, what, you know, a celebrity said, what the reality of it is. And I just like that he stays chill. I can trust him. And I like that. You do realize that most people who are listening to

this, who have any sort of left-leaning are, their minds are blown right now that you are a lifeline Democrat who now supported Trump and thinks that Dan Crenshaw has handled this the best. That's okay. Their minds can be blown. That's okay. Of course. You know, I think it's really what was really weird to me was seeing people who are like kind and tolerant and whatever let's say Jonathan Van Ness for example from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy he went on a live stream the day before the election and I'm a fan I watched him and he said anyone who votes for Trump is a racist and homophobic that's half of America and that's just not true and putting that into people's heads is freaking criminal that's that's mind rape I don't like it that's a lie and I

actually helped organize world pride multiple times i was on a float standing next to jonathan van ness in pride in la a year ago i'm not homophobic but you just told me i am like it's just such lunacy i just can't play anymore so if they start realizing how silly they sound i'm cool with that be nice people that's it i think it's a fair way to to view the world all right two questions to wrap up and you could ask me one uh first is what's what's the most important book you've ever read um the alchemist why uh i love the way it shows you how everything in your life happens for a reason the hard stuff the good stuff everything and it all circles back to why you're here there's just a lot of good lessons in it yeah it's a great answer uh second question is

more fun aliens are you a believer or non-believer yeah of course i'm a believer are you kidding me why come on ancient because aliens ancient aliens um yeah that's my answer to everything just look i've had weird experiences in my life but you know just look did you see an alien i haven't seen an alien per se but i've definitely seen craft and i've seen weird things in the sky multiple times i used to have a real crazy about aliens when i was kids when i was a kid i'd have it like every night for whatever but i just look at like the structures in the world i look at you know, energy coming from crystals. I look at how did suddenly we have these crazy ass weapons. Are you, hold on, hold on. Time out. This is important. Are you one of these crazy crystal

people who has a bunch of crystals laying around their house? Cause it has good energy. I have like two giant, I have a skull right here. Dude, it's quantum physics. Bring it back to science. You get 30 seconds to explain the absolute craziness around crystals. I recently learned about this you get 30 seconds explain it okay well for craziness around crystals come on um okay dude what do we use to make lasers how do lasers cut crystals crystals are used in every major weapon in the world they're used in surgeries they're used in all sorts of things uh for us to pretend that there isn't power and crystals is actually kind of silly you know it that's what does the crystal do by having it sit there what does it do

it depends what it is so it's just like that one the one you just held up you just held up a crystal and this is given to me by a fan yeah um this one i believe it's just like it's just good vibes it makes it chill but there's different vibrations just like everything is energy there's different vibrations and us having these headphones in our ears and anything uh it just changes vibrations around you and that's that's the easiest way to do it and then you can turn it into lasers yeah all right that's fair you could ask me one question to finish up what you got for me. What do you invest in the most? Uh, Bitcoin by far. Okay. That was an easy answer. That was easy. I only have one investment philosophy, which is basically this idea that, uh, innovation

drives returns. And so basically look for the farthest thing away from the center mass of the investing world. Uh, so if everyone else likes, you know, I like domestic tech stocks, like, okay, well that's stupid. Like just go as far away from the center as possible and look for the things on the fringe where innovation is highly asymmetric, meaning that it has a low probability of working. But if it works, it will be off the charts in terms of the return profile and then put multiple bets on the table. And what you basically end up doing is you're looking for the power law to take over. So venture capital is a perfect example of this. Give money to a bunch of small entrepreneurial teams, let them go literally try to work every day to grow your

money. Bitcoin is a very similar thing. It doesn't have a corporation or company behind it, but it's basically an innovative piece of technology that thousands of people around the world are working on to, uh, to make successful. So that's like pretty simple strategy. The hard part is finding people that fit within it. Sweet. Well, I listened to you and I invested in grayscale. So Bitcoin via grayscale. And I told you I did a hundred thousand dollars in two and a half weeks. So it's not that bad. I'm not mad at it. Uh, you shouldn't be mad at that. If, uh, if those are the returns you're getting, uh, where can we send people to find you on the internet, uh, and find all your content On Twitter, I'm Nicole Arbor with a U, you know, Canada. Instagram is letter I, letter B,

Nicole Arbor. Nicole Arbor fans on Facebook, just type Nicole Arbor everywhere. On Parler, I'm Nicole Arbor. Yeah. Where's the one place if you send everyone you want them to go? Instagram. Instagram? All right. Yeah. And it's Nicole Arbor on Instagram? I-B, Nicole Arbor. Oh, I, okay. Got it. Letter I, letter B. Someone stole my name. Out of principle, I wouldn't give them 30,000 to get it back. I refuse. That's fair. That's fair. All right. Thank you for doing this. We'll do it again in the future. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Go team.