Ian Miles Cheong, Nicki Clyne, and Andrew Stern dissect the "dark Nordic" aesthetic of Cheong's home before debating how capital-L libertarians undermine conservatism by defending CRT. They analyze Facebook's algorithmic shift toward political content, the media's victimization of Megyn Kelly in Bombshell, and the role of misinformation in the January 6th insurrection. The group critiques the movie Contagion as a potential Chinese psyop, discusses systemic corruption in criminal justice regarding Keith Raniere, and confronts the ethics of cancel culture versus protecting the mentally disabled from ableist slurs. Ultimately, they conclude that emotional manipulation by media drives tribalist impulses regardless of intelligence or political affiliation. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, that would be like an amazing troll if we found like an interior design company that worked primarily with celebrities and we hacked into their systems and changed all the mood boards that they had on file for clients.
So how do, first of all, Ian, the other guy that I have on this call is my close family friend, Andrew, whom I know personally.
And he's been on before.
I just want you guys to meet each other.
I wanted him to join us for a couple of reasons, just because he's one of my favorite critical thinkers to just bounce ideas off of, and it's always fun to talk to him.
And also because he's a big fan of Battle Star Galactica.
So I'm just totally exploiting my relationship with him.
I think they are straddling the fence and they don't seem to understand that this culture war is not just some simple internet spat, right?
It's like it's an existential thing.
I mean, right now you see libertarians defending critical race theory, not because they support critical race theory, but because they think that trying to stop it from being taught in educational, in academia and schools is somehow infringing upon the First Amendment rights of the critical race theorists.
And I'm like, what are you guys talking about?
It's publicly funded.
Like they can decide what the curriculum is.
The government decides it because the government is dictated by the people, right?
I feel like they do more damage to their conservative movement, capital L libertarians, you know, not like people who are just like regularly libertarian.
They do more damage to the conservative movement than even liberals because they are constantly in the center, constantly making excuses for the far left.
And I'm not even talking about, you know, like regular liberals, which, you know, I have no problem with, really.
I mean, if anything, conservatives have become very liberal over the past 10, 20 years, you know, compared to like the 90s or something.
But, you know, libertarians have, you know, every step of the way kind of allowed the far left to make a lot of progress just by making these arguments that, oh, resisting them is somehow illiberal in some way.
You know, it's not illiberal to stop a person from, you know, or stop a group of an ideology from gaining ground.
I mean, especially when that ideology threatens to destroy you.
One of the things that I thought was really funny about the libertarian movement this last cycle was, and I like the libertarians, so sometimes they kind of take it personal when you criticize libertarianism.
I mean, these are people who, you know, they're always talking about voting for the third party and how they don't want to, you know, vote for the two-party system.
But that doesn't work.
I mean, the two-party systems here stay.
There's just not enough of them.
There's just enough of them to damage the one side or the other, right?
Which, you know, obviously they're damaging conservatism because most of them are conservatives to a sense.
And so it feels on that subject on taxation.
So I'm thinking, you know, if you guys are really smart, you'd be more like Rand Paul, where you wouldn't run a separate candidate or a separate party.
What you would do is you would run as Republicans, right, and take it over from within.
I mean, not necessarily take it over.
I'm not saying they should do that, but run as Republicans and reflect the Republican values as much as libertarian values.
And I think that would work.
I mean, look at what the DSA did, right?
The DSA has run several major candidates, AOC being one of them, Ilhan Umar, Rashida Talib, all these people work for the, not work for, but they are represented by the Democratic Socialists of America, and now they're Democrats, but they're still the same, you know, they're still part of the DSA, right?
And the DSA has successfully run a number of, you know, DA candidates to take positions of power in prosecutor's office, like Joseph Boudin or that new guy that they have down in Austin, Texas, right?
The activist DA.
So why can't libertarians do the same thing?
I mean, why not run as a Republican candidate and not damage the standing of the Republican Party?
Because a lot of people simply vote along party lines.
And it was cool because we ended up talking, but also in that tweet thread, I ended up apologizing, like not apologizing, but acknowledging that what I said was kind of dumb and off point.
So I was just looking at like a Billboard Top 100 or most successful artist of all time because I was playing this game trying to name who I thought would be on the list.
And YouTube was way higher than I thought should have been on that list.
I don't know how you guys feel.
And no offense if you don't like them that much, but they're pretty mediocre compared to all the kinds of talents.
I know a little bit of Mandarin, but English is my primary language.
Yeah.
I'm not good at speaking other languages.
I sound really bad.
I have, you know how, like, you ever watch a Japanese movie or like an anime and they have like some white character and he's, you know, he's like, he's made to be an American, right?
But he's speaking Japanese and American accent.
That's how I sound when I speak different languages.
I have that twang, you know, and it's just people, people locally, you know, like if people try to hear me speaking some different language, you'll be like, where are you from?
The first Iron's always like he kind of sucks in the later Iron Man.
So I mean, well, it doesn't really suck.
I mean, still playing himself, but the first Iron Man is still the best because he actually kills people, you know, like the Taliban just blows him up.
The reason I like the first ones most of the time is because I really enjoy seeing the superhero discover their powers, right?
Like even the, even the Toby Maguire Spider-Man movie, the first one is my favorite of all the Spider-Man movies ever made.
Because it's just cool seeing him wake up the next morning after he gets bit by the spider and all of a sudden, you know, he can, he can stand up to the bully.
Like, I just love that kind of rags to riches, you know, story.
That's the orange story is always the most compelling part.
It kind of has to go downhill after there because having superpowers is so logically inconsistent that like every plotline they try and do thereafter is sort of like, well, why can't, why can't Harry Potter just cast a spell and make everyone nice?
Yeah, having too many superpowers makes it difficult to tell a story.
I mean, that's why Superman stories are probably the hardest to tell, right?
You have to give him some sort of weird weakness like Kryptonite, or you have to make it, you know, it becomes like convoluted, like, you know, Batman versus Superman, that movie, Zach Snyder movie.
It's like, why doesn't Superman just save both people at once?
It's also why Batman works compared to other superhero movies or stories because he's basically just a person, right?
You can't like, I mean, if you, if you write him properly and you do it in the constraints of the universe, so you know, he won't be able to invent a machine that cures cancer, right?
Even though it's Batman.
But if, you know, if you give him, in some stories, they give him too many powers.
So he becomes like the guy who can invent everything and that just becomes stupid.
It's like, why doesn't he invent a machine that's ends crime, right?
Like they made it so that you never have to remember.
But now, I don't know about you.
I never use Facebook.
So I like two years ago, I forgot my mom's birthday because I think I just like kind of like with phone numbers, you don't have to remember them anymore because they were just there.
But then I stopped using Facebook and didn't get notifications.
Well, I can kind of tell you with some reason why I think Facebook has gone downhill.
And part of the reason I know about this is just because I'm in advertising.
It's what I do for a living.
And when Facebook went public, they basically drastically reduced the organic reach of all posts from pages and business pages, any public page that you like, not profiles, but pages, so that if you want to reach your audience, you have to boost your content.
And nobody really did that because everybody's on a budget and it was fun because it was free.
And as a result, the algorithms really took over in terms of showing.
you content in your newsfeed, whereas before it was based on what you actually followed.
And it switched and they figured out, they figured out that like, you know, police brutality and politics got a high click-through rate and the algorithm, I think the machine learning just sort of started churning out very politically provocative content.
The thing that's crazy, too, is like the thing that is so menacing about Facebook to me is that it makes you hate people that you used to love because you know everybody on Facebook.
So like I have like I have like in like, for example, my favorite English teacher in junior high.
I have loved that guy.
And I still love the guy.
So if he's listening, Jesus Christ, don't take this the wrong way.
But every time I see him post about politics, which is every time he posts, it makes me like him less.
And this guy was an outstanding teacher.
He taught me how to read some of the most influential books.
We had great, like, he, you know, called on people and he was great at responding to their thoughts and ideas.
I mean, he was sort of like a dead poet society type teacher.
But like, imagine if Robin Williams in that movie was like, you know, a little bit of a Marxist.
So then like when all the kids went back to the rooms, logged on to Facebook, you know, they saw him posting all this like bullshit.
You know, it would just totally kill your buzz, you know, with the guy.
And that's kind of what I think is menacing about Facebook is that, you know, people that you otherwise love or would like to be around, you know, their politics can suddenly get in the way.
I don't know how accurate it was, but I thought it was inspiring.
You know, the sort of like start with nothing, even though starting with nothing means being a student at Harvard in that movie and building something amazing and, you know, kind of bootstrapping it.
It was sort of like a beautiful mind, you know, with the chalk on the window thing.
I kind of have an ethical problem, though, with making movies like that about real life without the people being involved.
Like, I don't know if there's a movie that just came out about Ross Ulbricht.
And I'm not, I don't plan on watching it.
But again, like, if the person that it's about isn't involved, like I remember watching the social network and thinking that actor was Mark Zuckerberg.
Like not, I knew he wasn't, but like viscerally in my feeling about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, I'd see that actor.
And like it is fiction, but we're, you know, we're flawed perceptual perception meaning-making machines.
And so I think it's, it's not the most responsible thing.
But at a certain point, if the people are living, and you don't consult with them at all, I think we kind of have to assume some of the intention is propagandistic.
Not trying to downplay anything that happened to her, but her, she, from what I understand, she just kind of shrugged it off or at least, you know, got over it.
But they depicted it as being this, like, traumatic thing.
Again, I haven't seen the movie.
But her quibble with it was like, what was the point of that?
Who did that help?
All you did was set an example for people that I need to be traumatized or that, you know, that's what always happens versus it could have been a very positive message, which is she's tough as nails and didn't let it get her down and went on to be kind of a badass, right?
And it's like, they're basically, Hollywood is, you know, creating this narrative that women are only victims.
Even the strong women can only ever be victims.
I mean, they did the same thing with Ann Coulter when they were making that Law & Order episode, that SVU episode where they cast her as, like, a rape victim.
You know, she's speaking at some conference and then some Proud Boy rates her.
It's like, you know, this is typical Hollywood shit, right?
It's like, this never happens in real life.
I mean, you look at Antifa, it's like, oh yeah, it's a whole pack of degenerates.
I mean, there's nothing redeemable about them, but somehow you're going to go after, like, the Proud Boy because, you know, the media calls them racist or big or something.
You know, I just met my first group of Proud Boys.
I was at a political event in South Florida and we were walking out and all these guys had these pseudo biker vest things on and they had patches on the back and it said Proud Boys.
I mean, like, no, I'm not saying people need to go out and fight or something, but I think that having a bit of aggression, like that 1980s style machoism, is fine, you know, but somehow it's been dumbed down.
It's like, oh, that's toxic masculinity.
Even being masculine at all is a bad thing.
I mean, you have men apologizing for things they never did.
They took him off the spot off Spotify when, or not, I don't know if they took him off Spotify, but I don't think they transferred the Joe Rogan episodes where he was the guest.
And, you know, I think Alex Jones was talking to Rebel News about this, you know, because they interviewed him about Joe Rogan, strangely enough.
And they're like, so what's the deal with all the Joe Rogan Spotify episodes?
And my understanding, I think, well, Alex Jones explained was that there are all these activist types working for Spotify who took real personal issue with those particular episodes.
And so they removed them and then they told Rogan's team.
Obviously, he didn't believe them.
They said that, oh, it's a technical glitch that, you know, these episodes are somehow missing.
It's crazy how, you know, I experienced this a little bit in other organizations that I've been a part of, where you have sort of the principles of the organization and then you have the people who actually compose it, right?
And when there is an overwhelming amount of consensus within any group, then the rules at a certain point become irrelevant.
So for example, if in the United States there was like 90% consensus that the Second Amendment was a bad idea, you'd start seeing unconstitutional stuff pass like in legislation and it would happen.
And so it's just, well, I think what we see with big tech and with the media is that we've got these hyper-urban based businesses with very homogenous demographics within them who have very similar political views, lifestyles.
Outside of the accepted, like the Overton window, what they're saying is unacceptable.
But, you know, in a way, they are, I think they are moving the Overton window, which is a good thing.
I mean, we should not be afraid to do so, right?
We're speaking, you know, I hate to use that term, speaking truth to power, but that's exactly what people like us are doing, which is ironic given that, you know, the left is always claiming that they're speaking truth to power, that they are saying something that is politically unacceptable.
They're the heroes, the martyrs, they're saying all the brave things.
But that is the case with a lot of books that you read in high school, but they were written 20 years ago and they've become so much part of these leitgeists that like when I read George Orwell, it wasn't particularly profound.
I was like, duh.
But that's because everything that he wrote had sort of seeped into the culture.
And by the time I read it, it sounded like old hat.
Like, I mean, I think that the 2000s were colored with Catcher and Arai, you know, when everybody was being all hipster and cool and epithetic and not giving a shit about anything.
I mean, you had an epithetic society that was just giving into surveillance state and allowing themselves to be manipulated by the media.
I mean, that's the whole idea of the standalone complex is that everyone's manipulated by the media into acting and behaving in a certain way.
I mean, like, if anything, I would say January 6th is an example of a standalone complex because it's like a whole bunch of different people believing that they can come together and do something, can enact some sort of change, right?
So it was very fascinating to actually see that happen in the real world where it's like, wow, it's just as, you know, just people described it.
I think everyone from January 6th should have gotten on TV the day after and said, we were just inspired by Black Lives Matter and we owe everything we can.
I just, you know, and people try to pin the whole January 6th thing, which, you know, I think it was embarrassing.
I think it was complicated.
It was complicated.
It's, you know, it wasn't just Trump supporters.
There was, there were definitely some anti, some in a small way, Antifa members involved or just agitators involved.
And obviously with the rebel news reporting that, you know, we know that the FBI at least had agents that were involved.
I don't know if they were instigators themselves, but they were certainly within that.
Yeah.
But people try to blame it on President Trump's speech or his just rhetoric.
And I think that they missed the point.
And I've said this before, that the reason people didn't believe the results of the election is because the media lied so much about Trump the whole entire four years that when the election results came in, nobody was going to believe them.
I mean, you have Eric Adams running for mayor in New York City and they're doing an audit of the election there because they feel like 135,000 ballots were injected into the election to vote against him.
I mean, like, okay, I mean, if they themselves are admitting that this is a thing that can happen, that would mean that at least, you know, at least some of Trump's claims, you know, or at least his concerns.
Yeah, Ian, you couldn't ask for a better example for this thing because what they admitted was that it literally was human error.
There was no flaw in the machine.
There was no malicious intent.
It was human error.
And that completely proves our point, which is this shit is so vulnerable that a dummy at his keyboard trying to edit the database could topple the whole thing.
So if the system is vulnerable to human error, both sides are going to do this every single election.
One thing that really I was disappointed in Trump in, though, was on election night at like 3 a.m.
You know, his speech comes out and he's like, this is total bullshit, basically.
It's like, all right, it might be, but there's no way you know that yet.
And so like, I was just kind of like, come on.
Like, he's just, you know, like, he could have come out and he could have been like, listen, you know, we're, there's some very interesting things that happened with the vote count that we have questions about.
We're not doubting any of the authenticity of election integrity or any of the poll workers or anything like that, but we're definitely going to take measures to double check to make sure that votes were accurate.
He could have said something like that and it would have been much more.
And I think a lot of, yeah, and some of the praise Trump gets about being a like a hard hitter is actually just another way of saying that he gets out in front and fights a propaganda war before fighting an actual facts and logic.
What he saw that night going down was, I'm going to get out ahead of this and establish such a strong narrative that there's no way that they won't do an audit for me because I've got the narrative sentence going.
I got so many people believe in this.
And so he goes out and he fights this propaganda.
His first instinct is, I got to get public sentiment on my side before we try and do any of the rational stuff, like talk about what actually went wrong.
Right.
Now, that's sort of his MO.
And that is probably one of my least favorite characteristics about Donald Trump is that instinct to go straight for the winning over the public sentiment before trying to make a rational argument.
So like emotionally, I thought it was very appealing the way that Trump behaved.
But when I step back from what, you know, like, and when I was, when I was watching the insurrection stuff on, I don't like to call it an insurrection, but when I was watching the January 6th, when I was watching the January 6th stuff, despite the fact that I think it's embarrassing and it was wrong what happened and what they did, there was a part of me emotionally that was like, fuck yeah, Pelosi's in lockdown for the first time during this whole day.
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You know, like there's a part of me that was riled up and excited about it.
So, you know, it's not, you can, you can have sort of, you can sort of land on both sides, but you have to make, you know, decisions based on your mind, not your heart.
Yeah, being able to have the self-awareness to acknowledge that you have certain feelings or something's compelling based on a visceral reaction, but also be able to make decisions and recognize that doesn't mean it's good.
You know, but I think that's the issue with most of the country is people are just not self-aware and they're driven by their emotions.
And then the second thing they're doing is trying to justify it with their intellect, you know, as opposed to having them be separate mechanisms and unrelated and using your intellect to be aware of your emotions.
People are driven by their emotions and then making decisions and actions and then justifying it using the mind.
So Nikki, do you think that in the last year since we've been locked down and we haven't had sports to kind of let out some of that tribalist impulse and get all emotional about something else that it's sort of been channeled into politics at a greater level?
Well, we definitely, Nikki, I know you've had some firsthand experience with that, with all this bullshit with Nexium and HBO.
Like I saw it a little bit after our last interview with like the comments and stuff that come out where people are clearly reacting emotionally and like, she's an occult.
You know, she's so brainwashed, I can't believe it.
And it's like, it's, it's, it's because the, the, if, the emotional manipulation of the media and documentaries is so strong that if if if people in and it just doesn't really I don't think it has much to do with intelligence As much as it has to do with intention, because I get caught up in it too for just various things.
I can tell that I'm like being influenced just by what I consume on a subconscious level.
And you have to consciously decide in like a hyper-aware state that you're going to rationally think through something before, right?
So, like during the pandemic, for example, I would get so frustrated at like the panic among friends and family.
And I was like, I'm like, looking at the numbers, I'm like, this doesn't really add up.
It's like, it's not like the Spanish flu.
It's not, you know, but everyone's freaking out and all the toilet paper's gone.
It was a lot of fun in the beginning of the pandemic.
I couldn't get anyone to watch it.
I kept telling people, but they were scared to the point that they were like, no, why would I ever watch something about, you know, they were like scaring themselves.
I just looked it up and it's got an interview with Anthony Fauci from 2011 where he said, and I quote, it's one of the most accurate movies I have seen on infectious disease outbreaks of any type.
But like, wouldn't it be cool if like you just sort of followed this zombie around and like throughout the movie, the zombie would find a group of people and just say, you could still make it thrilling if you were a good writer.
I don't know if you've seen it, but the characters are nameless and they don't really have any dialogue, but it's like a group of random survivors surviving the zombie apocalypse.
And they don't really do anything stupid.
It's more like the situation is so rough and so difficult for them that they have to kind of do everything they can to survive.
And it's actually kind of compelling because they don't give these characters any sort of real, you know, like they don't caricaturize them, right?
They just make them real people.
Like, oh, this guy's a bus driver.
This guy's a teacher.
This guy is a gym teacher.
This one's a student, a female student.
It's like, you know, it's just like very just regular people surviving.
And it's actually really, really good compared to, you know, shit like Z Nation, which is like, oh man, this is so campy.
So I am endeavoring on a very interesting project that I'll be speaking more about soon, which is I'm partnering with someone who has been kind of an arch nemesis throughout this story to investigate the truth and investigate the due process and how the government handled it.
So we're putting our differences aside and we're investigating whether the government violated due process rights in being able to get these convictions.
Now, obviously, I have my opinions from my firsthand experience and what I know to be true, but I also understand because there's so much prejudice and hate and misinformation that, you know, the most important thing is first to examine the process and then we can start to kind of uncover and unfold the truth.
So I'm very, I'm very excited about that.
I think it'll be very interesting for people to follow along.
There's just so much just misinformation.
Like people have so many assumptions about what happened that aren't true.
And it's sort of like playing whack-a-mole trying to be like address all those things.
And that's why I think the most important thing is to first examine the process.
How did this happen?
How do we get here?
And hopefully, in doing that and uncovering the ways in which the government can basically fabricate a narrative and put people in prison, we can prevent it from happening again.
Like, I think people should care about this.
People should care that the Constitution goes out the window as soon as someone is hated and that the media can make anyone be hated.
Well, I can't wait to see to see how that plays out.
Such a crazy, crazy, wild story.
And, you know, regardless of what the outcome is of like a Nexium specific investigation, it's unquestionable or undeniable that we have some serious criminal justice problems in the United States in terms of who doesn't get prosecuted, who does get prosecuted, prosecutions that are used just to bully, even, you know, when district attorneys know that there's not any sort of potential for a favorable outcome for the prosecution, right?
We see this, we're seeing a lot more political prosecutions and litigation than traditionally.
And so, you know, if along the way we can make some corrections to this, and I don't know how, but that's a huge, a huge win for everybody in America.
Like in the conversations I've had with this other person, you know, at the end of the day, if I were to find that Keith isn't the person I thought he was, I would still be doing all the same things I'm doing.
Because again, if the process was corrupt, it matters.
It doesn't matter if the person is hated or is a bad person.
Just like what happened with Cosby, where, you know, everybody knows that he's everybody think I think everybody has a good idea of what he's probably this gumbag.
Yeah.
And, but, you know, you got to let him out if the prosecution was illegal.
And you have to, you can't allow that to be like, you know, to set a precedent where you allow prosecutorial misconduct to just go unanswered because that would mean that they could get away with anything.
And that's, that's the thing that I've learned about the justice system in this country that I really had no idea about.
Like I, I admittedly, and I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't do my due diligence to really understand the issues in this country because many demographics know how it works, but we pride ourselves on having a justice system, you know, but we don't.
People literally, as long as you can make someone hated, you can convict them.
Like, and that can be in the media.
That can be in the courtroom, whatever it is.
You know, and it's interesting.
We were talking earlier about our emotional biases and being kind of swept away by our emotions, but having the self-awareness to recognize that's not reality.
But we're just not living in a culture where people are educated and informed and able to separate those things.
You know, the whole trial, Keith Ranieri's whole trial was just prejudice.
Like most of the testimony had nothing to do with the charges.
I mean, if you go to the men's rights movement and you look at the, you look at, you know, the custody rates between versus men and women and alimony rates and things of that nature.
And it's just, you see how the empathy for single mothers plays out in the judicial system, you know, and it's good to have empathy for single mothers, but there's a lot of guys out there that, you know, probably should have more time with their kids regardless of you.
Yeah, honestly, if we if we don't reduce the amount of uh unlawful incarceration, we should at least increase the amount of time that we're putting women in prison.
And I, and I have a theory and I've spoken to people who've been, I guess some people say criminal, criminal justice involved, like who've been to prison or still in prison.
And I've asked them, like, would you be so afraid of police?
Would you resist arrest if you thought it if you thought you got would get a fair trial?
And really, like, the issue isn't so much police.
It's that they know once they're arrested, they're fucked.
They're not going to get a lawyer who will invest the time necessary to even to understand their case, let alone defend it.
And, and they're not going to get a fair trial.
If there's, especially if there's a woman accusing them of something or, you know, they have a cooperating witness or, you know, some confession from someone else, like they know they're screwed.
That doesn't get a lot of, that doesn't get talked about a lot.
I think I hear a lot of, I'm thinking of someone like Coleman Hughes, who was talking about police brutality.
He happens to be an African-American.
And he relates back, you know, yes, I've had racist incidents with the cops, but I was raised to say, I was raised to keep both hands on the wheel and say yes, sir.
And, you know, and that would basically solve the problem.
But I haven't heard it articulated that a lot of people in those situations actually, it's their resistance could potentially be just due to their lack of faith in the criminal justice system.
So I know a number of people who are in prison now and some of some who've gotten out.
And one, one of my friends, he lives in the Bronx.
He was being asked to come down to the precinct to talk to the detective.
And he had a bunch of charges thrown at him by a former friend.
Now, I know for a fact, because I'm close with this person, what the situation was about.
It's kind of a, you know, he said, she said thing.
No one was hurt, but the person got really angry and went to the police.
So, but the detective was telling him, like, I know that her story doesn't add up.
I just need you to come down and sign this paperwork so that I can have the paperwork done.
Now, my friend has been incarcerated.
He doesn't trust anyone in a uniform and he's, he's dying.
Like, he's having a panic attack.
He's making himself sick.
He's so afraid.
And he's like starting to get angry with the detective and defensive and start a fight.
And I'm like, you can't do this.
Like, you have to just go.
At the same time, I feel like I'm trying to convince him to like go in front of the firing squad because I don't know.
I don't know if this detective is being honest.
Sometimes they're not honest.
He sounds like what he's saying makes sense.
But here I am trying to convince him to go down and just assign the paperwork, but he thinks he's going to get locked up.
And it's such a difficult situation, but I can see how someone who just his whole life has been, you know, abused by the system and by police doesn't trust them.
It ended up that he was able to go sign the paperwork and he was okay.
Thank goodness.
But like without the capacity to like handle emotions and evaluate what's really going on, he thought the whole world was out to get him that day.
So it's, it's tragic.
It's tragic because they're not, you know, a lot of people don't have the support, the emotional kind of resources or, you know, the understanding of everything that's going on to navigate it in a way that's not going to get them in more trouble.
A lot of times, you know, when you're put in a difficult situation in a tough spot, you need someone else to evaluate the position for you.
You need to have them look into the situation and inform you of what you need to do because you cannot make these decisions on your own.
You're, you know, you, you have this tunnel vision and all you're seeing is the firing squat.
You're seeing the bad outcome, right?
You're worried, you're panicking.
But the fact is, you know, let's say you're in a bad situation where someone has made up lies about you.
That's all you see.
That's the only thing you hear because your brain is so focused on it.
It's looking for patterns that it's ignoring the fact that 99% of people out there either have, they don't care or they've seen it and they don't care, right?
They just don't know about it and just don't care.
And so you have to ask somebody, someone, you know, that you trust, obviously, and have them evaluate that situation with you because they are able to navigate you because at that point, it's like, it's like that, that movie, that Senator Bullock movie where she's got a blindfold on and she needs to have someone else lead her.
So Nikki, you know, one of the things I'm really curious about in terms of our incarcerations system is people don't really talk about the abuse.
There's, you know, there are rumors and jokes and stuff.
But I did a little bit of research on this.
I don't know if this is true or if you know anymore, if it's just off base, but the research that I did, the extent of it was Wikipedia pages was that was that there's actually the majority of abuse that occurs within prisons is actually from is guard on prisoner not prisoner on prisoner is that is that consistent with your experience in terms of speaking with um those incarcerated um so just not come up no i mean i i definitely
so depending on the type of prison um you know if it's like a maximum or a camp uh or a pre-trial facility the culture is very different and it's all run by politics so you know there's you know people who are gang affiliated people who associate because they've been charged with certain types of crimes there's it's all political there's all sorts of rules um and so there's if you want to call them like abuses
that happen when you break those rules or codes and and things like that um in terms of guards uh it's interesting like i think there there are guards who are good good people they're just doing a job they're underpaid it's a hard job especially like i said like you're dealing with sometimes with violent felons who have no respect for guards and they're constantly testing them so that's that's challenging but then there are guards who
really take uh advantage of the fact that they have weapons and you know bulletproof vests and have this ultimate ultimate power and i think they're even there's a lot of there's a lot of corruption like all the cell phones all the drugs um all the contraband that gets in prisons
yeah so think about since covid there's been no visitors and yet drugs cell phones contraband contraband has run rampant how does it get in there you know there's yeah it's all they all have a not all of them a lot of them have a side hustle because they don't get paid very much and it's very compelling you know you can you can sell a cell phone for a thousand dollars really how do you get how do you how do you if you're a prisoner how do you pay how do you pay somebody off you got family send you money and then you send it you give it to them or
yeah like uh through cash app or um there's there's different i guess ways that they can move coin for the win huh yeah bitcoin yeah
but um but to answer your question i mean there's definitely yeah it just people take advantage um of their positions and and there's a culture around it you know there's definitely a culture around it um there's a book really interesting book called american prison and uh it's a journalist went undercover his name is shane bauer i believe he went undercover as a and
became a ceo at a private prison in louisiana and he talks about the training and how the ceos of this corporation which private prisons are being kind of zoned out at least in the criminal uh world but but he talks about how they treat it like a corporation like you're part of this money making scheme essentially and they're very transparent about it and the training when you learn about how they're taught to deal with
inmates and how to objectify them and not see them as people like they're they're taught deliberately to never if if they feel like they start treating them as a human being like that's when they need to like put on the brakes and you know not see them that way it's it's really the whole system the whole the whole so really so the first half of your description of the criminal justice system it's appeared to me as if fundamentally the problem wasn't systemic per se it was more just
a widespread lack of integrity um and then the latter half that last thing you just shared sounded like that might have been a systemic problem and some i would what do you mean by systemic i don't know well you hear a lot about their systemic problems we need so there's some law in the books or there's some um perverse incentive where private prisons are incentivized to keep people in there longer so i'm wondering nikki in your eyes where does it break down how much of this is just humans a fundamental lack of integrity on on the part of a bunch of humans involved and
how much of this is sort of codified into our laws and our systems and and perverse and caused by perverse incentives um well i mean it's definitely a system you know like kind of when you look at uh other problems like you can't just change one thing like you you replace one thing in a car you know and then and then other things start to go so it's it's not just as simple as changing a law um i i think i don't think the issue is uh that
we need to change laws really i think we need to change people i think we need to change the culture uh both in prosecutors offices um in in the way we view people who commit crimes i think you know like most of the world thinks of criminals as these like bad people once and once you're a felon you have such a difficult time reintegrating into into society mostly because
of how you're viewed uh and then within prisons again there's a culture there's a culture that starts from the warden down but it it's systemic i suppose in the way that like there's a feedback loop inmates are treated a certain way so then they treat guards a certain way and it it sure feeds off itself so one of the talking points i will always hear is this abolish the private prisons how much effect would that have on it zero
i mean i mean the federal and state prisons are essentially private prisons it's just the money goes to the government yeah well i mean the question would be like like how would how is a question is how how is private prison hypothetically making the problem worse and the only thing i could think of would be if you were able to like make a link between private prisons lobbying for uh longer sentences for crimes for example so like that would be like an example if that were happening of private prisons you know but it's not happening they could well they could
they could be setting the inmates up for failure so that you could purposefully bring all the black nationalists and the white supremacists into the same room so that the fights you can keep them longer this is totally hypothetical but you could see how that no but there are so um it i i know someone who was released last year and uh you know he's on probation and there's all these rules and he was getting his life together he was going on job interviews he got a car he got a place to live
and he ended up violating um i to my to the best of my understanding it was some paperwork with his car that he didn't register when he was supposed to and he got in front of the judge and he he's still in a county jail he's been in a county jail for almost two months now and you know it's the same judge who's handled this case for years and years
there's there's the same the same prosecutor in his words now obviously i'm only getting his side of the story but he doesn't have a lot of reason to lie to me like you know he i i find him pretty um honest you're going on you're going on one american podcast with chase geyser right here's my story make sure you say it like this make sure you say it like this make sure you say it like this Yeah, right.
Exactly.
But he told me that his parole officer and the U.S. Marshals, you know, they, I forget what the comment was specifically, but they basically view him as dollar signs.
You know, like they, they know that him being locked up, so he got an 18-month sentence in federal prison for this violation, that that's, they get money for that.
You know, like prosecutors are incentivized to win.
So I think there's a lot we can do, you know, we the people by bringing attention, by sending messages to prosecutors and judges that they can't just sweep corruption.
They can't just under the rug.
They can't just cheat and get away with it.
I think we need an arm of journalism that's dedicated solely to that because right now many journalists don't want to burn bridges with their government sources and things like that.
Like I found that a very difficult thing in trying to bring attention to the corruption in our case is like people don't people don't want to say bad things about the person in the DA's office that gives them leads.
You know, one thing that could solve the problem in my mind is if we made it so that if you're a public defender and you win your case, you get a fat bonus.
And we don't even have to change anything about the prosecution relationship.
But what that would do would it would keep the DA from pressing charges if they have less confidence in the case because they know that it costs the state money paying fat bonuses to public defender.
Yeah, you incentivize and the public defender busts his ass.
The public defender busts his ass instead of just shuffling papers around.
Like that could be one thing.
Like, hey, listen, every case you win, you get a brand.
Yeah, you're solving a state problem with a capitalist solution because look, we live in a capitalist society.
Why not go all the way?
I mean, this actually works.
Curiously, like in Singapore, what they do is in order to accommodate for the fact that people are corrupt and many people will take bribes is they pay government salaries.
Like if you work for the government, you get paid an insane amount of money.
Like we're talking CEO salaries here.
So people feel like, okay, if I do something, I'm going to lose all this money.
So guess what?
They're incorruptible because of that.
It's brilliant.
It works.
And people, you know, you might get angry and be like, well, why are they getting paid like $500,000?
Yeah, I'm not so sure about how that would play out in the United States because it's not like our politicians aren't making a lot of money on the side from that job.
If you take that away, you take that out of the equation, then they might actually be inclined to actually work for the people because they're getting paid by the people.
Yeah, but you're going to invest massive amounts of money and mask manufacturing businesses, for example, and then make all these mandates with your leverage for people to wear double masks.
You know, like, well, I'm not sure I'm being rational about this, but I just listened to a podcast with Yon Mi Park, which was a she's the North Korean refugee.
She was Friedman.
And she was talking about how much it breaks her heart that people will go up in arms if anybody abuses a dog.
I mean, geez, Louise, you could start a GoFundMe and raise a quarter of a million dollars in two in 20 minutes.
And she's going to say there's people being literally starved to death in North Korea and nobody does.
I mean, people in prison in this country, if their dog, if a dog was being treated the way people in prisons are treated, especially during COVID, like you said, there would be a GoFundMe.
I think, I think for me, so much of it has to do with precisely that is what it does to our own humanity that we hurt and are violent towards a being that we can project into.
You know, like we can look at a dog and be like, oh, he's happy because his mouth is turned up.
So yeah, which is one of the things that I think is so funny about this Nexian thing, Nikki, is not that anything's funny about it, but you're vegan because you love animals so much, yet, you know, you allegedly were involved in this, you know, human abusive sort of organization.
I think I mentioned this, Chase, when I came on your podcast about that episode of 30 Days where a hunter from the Midwest went and lived with a vegan family.
And I found him far more humanitarian than this family because they were angry and they were like judging him, whereas he was actually open-minded.
He changed some of his views and was very kind.
And for me, that's what it's about.
I don't, yeah, I think, you know, compassion and empathy and humanitarianism is not about what you eat.
So, you know, like people, you know, they did sling accusations around, not that they can even prove it or anything like that.
And, you know, to get some, they paint you in the worst light possible.
And then, you know, if you say anything about it, you draw attention to it.
Even like by bringing it up right now, I'm sure some of them are watching this, you know, the haters, they're going to be like, oh, see, look, he's admitting to it.
I'm like, no, I'm not admitting to anything.
I didn't do anything wrong.
You know, it's like, so a bunch of people made up this lie that I swatted someone and killed their dog.
You know, like he's going left and right, doxing people like it's his fucking hobby or something.
Right.
So now he gets his come up and somebody has his docks, sends it to me.
I pass it along to somebody else.
And then a whole bunch of people find out about it because, you know, leaky pipes, right?
Somebody leaked it that I had it somehow.
And so a bunch of people confront me on some stupid podcast and then they're like, oh, Ian did have to dox.
I'm like, yeah, I did.
You know, and then the dude who I apparently had his dox, right, shows up and he's like, don't you know doxing people is dangerous?
You know, like a like, for instance, you know, and then he comes up with this weird story about how like he had a dog.
It was like a golden retriever and you know, even like gives it a name.
I actually don't remember if you gave it a name, but he claims that, you know, in a hypothetical situation, if somebody got doxed, somebody could potentially swat them.
And then, you know, like, are you going to pay for the dog, Ian?
Swatting is like when you call the police and somebody and it's like a false alarm thing, you know, like you say, like, hey, this person says they have a bomb in their house.
And the first time it happened, it was hilarious, but then it like kept happening.
And it's like, wait, guys, we got to stop.
Because you see the guy streaming, and it's like this kid, and he's saying all these bad words, and he's being just a snot, and all of a sudden it's like, Get on the ground!
And then now, obviously, everybody listening to the stream, they know it's a fucking joke, right?
Because they were there for it.
But then, you know, it gets spread through like Chinese, again, a Chinese telephone.
And now everybody, like, whether, you know, if they're like in Tifa or if they're like on the, you know, I would, I wouldn't say they don't write, like the fringe communities on the internet and they don't like me or something, you know, like the comics get community, some of them don't like me because they know a guy who knows a guy who knows Ian.
You know, it's like they're all repeating this weird story about how I dox somebody and then I swatted their house and I killed a dog.
It's like, you know, you guys just like, you're fucking stupid.
You're retarded.
You know, like, I'm just going to say it.
You're fucking retarded if you believe that because you can look into the evidence yourself and you'll see that you put out a video of something.
Like, I mean, like, if I read something bad about, you know, any one of you, like Nikki, for example, I've read a lot of bad things about you before even talking to you.
But, you know, in my personal interactions with you, it's like, oh, none of this even adds up.
So even if it's true, it's like, who gives a fuck?
You know, that's how I treat people.
It doesn't bother me one bit.
But some people, you know, they are so, you know, they have all these emotions and they're just ready to pass judgment because they want to think they're better than you somehow.
So they'll read somebody saying something bad about you.
You know, maybe they're a fan of that person or they trust that person or whatever reason.
Like it's a weird parasocial relationship that a lot of people have with influencers, whether it's YouTubers and Twitch streamers.
So this guy, you know, is facing false accusations of rape that showed up when he was famous.
He basically got canceled by the press, by the media, and nobody really asked him any questions.
They just sort of ran with that rape story, which is not provable.
It's not real.
It's not a real story.
And a lot of people, after that initial accusation came out, which is outlandish as it is, and he can totally disprove that.
He has chat logs and all the documents to prove that this person's lying about him.
A bunch of other people who doesn't even know or like maybe met in passing started making their own stories up.
They're like, oh, yeah, when I actually, when I was friends with him and you guys didn't even see this, but like this guy actually groped me.
It's like, when did this even happen?
Like, I mean, they just, they want to pile on.
And, you know, I've heard of a few stories like this where sometimes like a legitimate, you know, legitimate abuser, like an actual rapist in college or something.
This actually happened to a friend of mine many, many years ago.
You know, somebody raped her and a group of other girls in college, you know, like not at the same time, obviously, but sequentially.
And then another girl comes up and makes up the false accusation about this guy because she wants to join in on the dog pile.
And so when it went to court, all they had to do, all the defense attorney had to do was disprove her one story and the whole thing just fell apart.
Like, first of all, victimhood being a currency that has incredible value in our society right now, that it incentivizes people to claim victimhood.
And it hurts real victims.
It hurts people who have actually been abused, who've actually been, you know, raped or had crimes committed against them.
I know even like I try to be very critical and analyze things not emotionally, but I have a tendency to disbelieve because of my personal experience.
When there's an accusation towards someone, I have a tendency to not think it's credible.
And I watch myself because I think abuse is a problem.
And people who are abusing power or committing crimes most certainly should be held accountable.
But it's just, we've created this really inverted paradigm where the like, I think abuses of power that especially, you know, women are doing against men are terrible.
That's exactly what happens, though, because like, you know, there are no, sorry for interrupting, but there are like no legal ramifications to lying about someone.
So what happens is the media, rather the mob, the social media, goes after somebody, like say Ellie Kemper, right?
That actress who was accused of being like a KKK member.
Like a few years ago when Twitter was banning people, you know, I mean, Twitter was defaming people and then banning them for violating some nonsense rules.
We go a little bit overboard with the policing of speech, but if there were ever a group that was actually defenseless and really should have us, you know, stand up for them, it would be the mentally disabled community.
I have much less problem.
Look, I think 2021, we just had an entire month full of gay crap.
They can fend for themselves.
I know a ton of awesome gay people that are very funny and ruthless and can Tim Dylan, right?
He does not need to be protected from me saying the word fag, right?
But it doesn't.
The one word, retard, actually, I was in college and I said it in a college class and a girl's brother was mentally handicapped and she and it made me.