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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What's going on everybody? | ||
| We're hanging out with Five Times August. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Who are you? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Brad Schistmas, singer-songwriter of Five Times August. | ||
| You wanna sue Bandcamp? | ||
| You know, that sounds like a pretty good idea. | ||
| I thought I was alone, and then I saw your post about being removed, and I was like, oh my gosh, what's going on here? | ||
| Because I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first, like you did, and I was thinking to myself, surely this is a misunderstanding. | ||
| I've been on the platform for like 10 years. | ||
| My whole catalog was up. | ||
| But it wasn't all political, was it? | ||
| No, I mean, I have one album that is, you could consider political, but, um, you know, if you actually go look at the lyrics, it's not controversial music. | ||
| It's just, it's just anti-mainstream narrative. | ||
| So it's not like, you know, you can go and say, well, you can't say that. | ||
| Although that's what they're doing now. | ||
| And, uh, it's, it's funny because, uh, I saw your post and it sounds like we went through the same thing. | ||
| You just... One day shut, it was gone. | ||
| You were on the site one day, and then you logged in the next morning, and then you're gone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let me give some context real quick for those that don't know. | ||
| I mean, we've talked about this last week, and we've talked about it on IRL, Timcastle IRL. | ||
| The Bandcamp is a website where you host your music and sell it. | ||
| People can become members and then buy your music, have it in their libraries, listen to it. | ||
| And so it's like, you know, Amazon and iTunes do this. | ||
| You can buy it, you can post your music and then sell it there. | ||
| But Bandcamp was like independent. | ||
| It's been around for a long, it's like one of the oldest, right? - Yeah, it's been around for a while. | ||
| And I like being on the platform because some people don't like to use the more mainstream avenues. | ||
| They're like, I don't want to go on Amazon. | ||
| I don't want to go on Apple. | ||
| I don't listen to Spotify. | ||
| And they want a more direct back and forth between artist and fan. | ||
| So that was sort of the place to go. | ||
| And it was easy to use. | ||
| You could just put your music up and have it listed for whatever you wanted. | ||
| And then one day, my account was gone. | ||
| Yeah, me too! | ||
| Yeah, we've been up for, like, I think four years? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Three and a half years. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| We had the song, Will of the People, put up. | ||
| They had no issues with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And none of our songs are, like, our songs, one of them is just a love song. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| The latest one that just came out is about not killing yourself. | ||
| It's just not political. | ||
| And then we had one overtly political song, but there's no direct references in it. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It's just literally like, war is bad and the media's lying to you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then, they got us. | ||
| Yeah and that's the interesting thing because what we have now and I have this conversation quite a bit is you know we've seen censorship and information and with what doctors and scientists are saying that there's a lot of arguments about what's true and what's not and what data is real but now we have censorship taking place in art and it's not just the art itself it's the artist and what they're saying outside of their art that is affecting where they're at right it feels like history | ||
| just rhymes you know what i mean because it wasn't it's it it was so i i got removed from the website in february about a month later i'm pretty sure it was the same for us yeah we just like uh-huh We were an active production on a song. | ||
| We weren't logging into our band camp to check on it. | ||
| I was checking it regularly. | ||
| I was on the website the night before and then boom, I'm gone. | ||
| I'm like, this is weird. | ||
| I don't exist at all. | ||
| I had to re-register my account. | ||
| Are you up now? | ||
| I've re-registered my name to have it, but I'm not selling my music, because what they've done is not allowed access to the music for people that have bought it. | ||
| So, you know, you have fans. | ||
| It's really a messed up situation. | ||
| I know that you've gone through it too, where somebody has bought your music from Bandcamp. | ||
| Can't get it. | ||
| They can't go back in and get it now. | ||
| And here's the really messed up part, is that they get a message that says, You know, such and such album by Five Times August or Timcast is not available. | ||
| Please contact Timcast or please contact Five Times August about it. | ||
| So they made the decision to remove our music. | ||
| They made the decision to remove access of the music from the person that purchased it. | ||
| And then they turn it around and direct the fan back to the artist. | ||
| And that's really messed up. | ||
| It's damn near impossible to verify all this stuff. | ||
| So we don't have access to the financials. | ||
| Our assumption right now is they're holding our money. | ||
| Because we didn't get any payouts or anything like that. | ||
| We didn't get any notifications. | ||
| So I'd imagine there'd have to be like a closing statement being like, here was the account balance, here's what we're doing. | ||
| Instead, it's just one day our account was gone. | ||
| So we're definitely suing. | ||
| So I don't know, you probably have to sign your name onto it. | ||
| Maybe we'll hit up Bryson Gray. 100%. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| It's not just you and me. | ||
| It's Bryson Gray, there's a guy named Foundering who does like piano parodies, and he got removed from the platform a year ago, and then I started looking into it. | ||
| Who are these political guys? | ||
| Yeah, these are all, I mean, there's a reoccurring theme here that's a little anti-mainstream narrative, but I started looking into it. | ||
| It's the same thing, like, so have you reached out to Bandcamp? | ||
| Oh yeah, honestly. | ||
| - And have they responded? | ||
| - No, they haven't. | ||
| - No, right? | ||
| That's the reoccurring theme. - So we have no choice but to sue them. | ||
| Like this is the thing. | ||
| If they sent us like a breakdown of notification, if they said, under our rules, this is why you've been removed, and it could be like, we literally decided we don't like you and you're off the platform. | ||
| If they said, we're providing you with all data and all sales and content information for all these individuals so that you can follow up with them outside of, like if they had us a letter saying like, we are severing our working relationship with you, This may come as a surprise and be unfortunate, but unfortunately, this is the path we're taking. | ||
| Here is a database of all the information on the customers who bought from you so that you can compensate, refund, or provide. | ||
| They didn't do any of that. | ||
| And so we're just like, hey, where's our money? | ||
| Did we have money? | ||
| Because people were actively buying our music. | ||
| Where's the money? | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| And then they wouldn't answer emails. | ||
| So the only way for us to actually find out what our account standing was in terms of cash and the data from our own customers is to literally file a lawsuit and force them into court to give up this information. | ||
| We might assume regardless, right? | ||
| Because who knows? | ||
| But we can't even get basic information out of them. | ||
| Yeah, that was one of the perks of being on the website was you had your fans' information. | ||
| You had their email for email list and stuff. | ||
| So anybody that was following me, you know, it's like a Twitter account. | ||
| When you have followers, all of a sudden it's gone and you don't know how to get in touch with those people or anything. | ||
| So they remove that access. | ||
| It's worse than Twitter. | ||
| With Twitter, it's like somebody followed you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a transaction there. | ||
| Right, there's a transaction there. | ||
| Bandcamp took a cut of that money and now removed that song from the person's access. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't refund what Bandcamp took. | ||
| What cut do they take from the sales? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I think it's 10 to 15% based on, yeah, something like that. | ||
| So that means if an individual wants a refund, I don't have that 10 to 15 percent. | ||
| Bandcamp stole their money. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they're denying access, so... Yeah. | ||
| I think they're gonna... I think they... I think they fucked up on this one. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, you know, like, if you... | ||
| I can be obnoxious, and so if you cross me in that way, like, here's the deal. | ||
| I like Bandcamp as a platform. | ||
| I like what they have to offer. | ||
| I've been on the platform for 10 years. | ||
| But when you log in one day, and everything's gone, and then you reach out to them, and they don't respond to the people that are making their platform work, the artists and the fans. | ||
| It's a bigger deal for me for the fans. | ||
| If you don't like my music, and you don't like my message, Fine. | ||
| But what you've done now is you've interfered with the artist-fan relationship, and my fans can't access something that they paid for. | ||
| Your fans are saying outright they can't listen to your music anymore? | ||
| Right, so I have some that say they can. | ||
| I have some that say they can't and they've sent me screenshots. | ||
| Well now we've got a bigger problem. | ||
| That's copyright infringement. | ||
| Bandcamp can't host your copyrighted material without your approval. | ||
| So if they sever your agreement but they're continuing to host your copyrighted content and they made money off of it, well now there's a problem. | ||
| Yeah, it's a double-edged sword either way you look at it because, you know, on one hand they've sold something and then they took it back. | ||
| And on the other hand, it's still there on their platform and I don't want it there anymore. | ||
| And there's nothing I can do about it. | ||
| Well, so I've heard from some people that there are a lot of people who bought the song and then just played it on the page and they never like put it in their library or anything and they can't get it anymore. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are some people who have told me that in their library, like they'll try to play it. | ||
| I don't know how it works in the library, but they'll try to play it and it won't play. | ||
| And other people have told me that it does still play for them in their library. | ||
| I'm wondering if the difference is like mobile app, mobile site versus like desktop, what's causing the different experiences. | ||
| I think for some people, they bought the song and then didn't add it to their library. | ||
| They just thought like, I bought the song so I can listen to it on this page. | ||
| Now that my page doesn't exist, they can't get access to it. | ||
| But either way, Bandcamp took a cut of that money. | ||
| So if Bandcamp wants to remove me and remove Access, they gotta give their money back. | ||
| And I don't even know who to give the money back to. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| Here's what I'm thinking of doing. | ||
| I will gladly refund these people who got screwed over by Bandcamp. | ||
| It's in the thousands, maybe even 10,000 people. | ||
| But Bandcamp's gonna be on the hook for that portion of the revenue. | ||
| It wasn't gonna be like $700 or something, or maybe $1,000. | ||
| But they won't communicate with us. | ||
| They're outright basically telling us the only way we can get resolution on this is to go to court and have a judge force them to do it. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing is I've reached out to them in so many different ways and when I saw your post and we had a little bit of press on what was happening, I was going after them every day on their Twitter saying, hey guys, what's going on? | ||
| You're not responding to the people that make your website. | ||
| And they ended up blocking me, which was an admission of, okay, you're seeing what I'm saying. | ||
| You're seeing what I'm asking you. | ||
| You're seeing what people are posting. | ||
| But then they blocked me, and about a day or two later they unblocked me. | ||
| And I'm like, this is just weird. | ||
| So you're seeing what I'm saying, but you're refusing to acknowledge it. | ||
| I wonder if unblocking you is like a legal thing. | ||
| I don't know, but it sure seems like an admission of guilt. | ||
| And I almost want to do this, I want to be like, they seem like very delicate people over there at Bandcamp, so I want to say, maybe I look into one of the cameras and I say, hey guys, listen, You're not responding to these requests from artists and fans and I'm thinking maybe we show up to Bandcamp headquarters at some time and ask you face-to-face and maybe not even let them know when we're going to show up. | ||
| So they have to be on edge about it. | ||
| They're in Raleigh. | ||
| Where are they at? | ||
| I'm pretty sure they're in Raleigh. | ||
| I thought they were in California. | ||
| They probably have people working all over the place anyway. | ||
| No, I'm pretty sure the Bandcamp's headquarters is North Carolina. | ||
| Okay, well we could find that out and we can show up and ask them face-to-face. | ||
| I was down in Austin a few weeks ago and South by Southwest was going on and I wasn't there for South by Southwest but I did peek into the conference center and I was like looking for the band camp booth because I was thinking if they have a booth maybe I can ask them face-to-face but that's the thing they've made this decision these decisions that are affecting You know, your music and the people that are purchasing, that are affecting my music and the people that are listening to it. | ||
| Bryson Gray, these other artists. | ||
| And then they run away from it. | ||
| And that's not transparency. | ||
| You know, Bandcamp just unionized. | ||
| They're starting to unionize. | ||
| They created... | ||
| Bandcamp United, I think. | ||
| And they blocked me before I even knew about the page. | ||
| Somebody told me about it, I went over and I was like, oh, they already blocked me from communicating with them. | ||
| And their whole thing is transparency and a better Bandcamp for all artists. | ||
| But they will also block you if they don't like you. | ||
| It's interesting, because they're owned by Epic. | ||
| They're owned by Epic Games, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it says on their hiring they have New York, California, and Washington. | ||
| So that's probably state, so interesting. | ||
| We looked into their corporate HQ and it's Raleigh, but I wonder if this is now... I know there's a Bandcamp headquarters in Oakland, California, because I've seen a picture of it and I think it's still there. | ||
| That was the latest information that I can find. | ||
| So I guess the bigger picture here instead of us just like ranting about our music, poor us, is it's the culture war. | ||
| It's these corporations 10 years ago weren't like this. | ||
| And they've been taken over by these cult members who are substantially more effective at gaining cultural and institutional power. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi! | |
| Hi there! | ||
| We're going to have a customer presentation tomorrow. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| How do we deal with transport now that we don't have our own cars anymore? | ||
| You can just hire. | ||
| You can just hire? | ||
| Then they get access to hundreds of cars, while the company cuts costs. | ||
| Find out how at Hyre.no. | ||
| Yeah, and you know the most amazing thing about it too is how many people just get on board with it. | ||
| classical liberals and traditional liberals. | ||
| And so the leftist psychopaths are taking over and then just purging, it's a culture evolution. - Yeah, yeah, you know, the most amazing thing about it too is how many people just get on board with it. | ||
| So I went to the Bandcamp Facebook page and I posted a recent interview I did about all this. | ||
| And I posted basically as just a heads up to other artists Hey, if they do it to me, they can do it to you too. | ||
| They will do it to you. | ||
| And the funny thing is... | ||
| A bunch of those Bandcamp artists, progressive artists, rebelling, were on Bandcamp's side. | ||
| They didn't want to see my side of it. | ||
| I'm like, hey, look, I don't care if you like my music or not or what my message is. | ||
| I just need you to know that they will remove you if they don't like you. | ||
| Dude, Patreon banned Lauren Southern and Carl Benjamin. | ||
| They banned Lawrence Southern, and there was this huge hubbub like, dude, you took away someone's income, like outright without a warning. | ||
| And then Patreon was like, okay, we'll never do that again. | ||
| And then they literally did it again, causing this like mass exodus. | ||
| Sam Harris at the time was like, I am getting off of this, Jordan Peterson. | ||
| You know, there are still tons of people using Patreon who are like on the right or anti-woke or whatever. | ||
| And I'm just like, Why? | ||
| We have people on the show, and I think, you know, we're talking about gprime85. | ||
| Doesn't he have a Patreon? | ||
| Maybe so. | ||
| And that's the thing, too. | ||
| The avenues are getting... Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe I'm... You know, to me, that's another solution, though, too, is to create a new Bandcamp. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's a pretty simple service. | ||
| No, he was banned from Patreon in December. | ||
| Was he really? | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| Well, so that's probably the last time he was on the show. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, see, this is exactly it. | ||
| So on December 8th, 2022, George Alexopoulos, for those that aren't familiar, he's this amazing artist. | ||
| He's one of the best. | ||
| You really got to check out his comics. | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| He posted on Twitter that he lost his Patreon account on the same day. | ||
| His is under review, but we don't know what's going to happen. | ||
| It was coordinated. | ||
| My attitude is just like, look, bro, I'm a big fan. | ||
| You know, we love you, George. | ||
| But at this point, I'm kind of like, I'm about to start busting out laughing. | ||
| Like, are you kidding me, dude? | ||
| It was years ago. | ||
| It was like, what, four years ago that Patreon banned Lauren Southern. | ||
| Let me give everybody the context who's not familiar. | ||
| Lauren Southern had a Patreon account. | ||
| She was getting, I think, like five grand a month or something. | ||
| She gets on a boat, she's in the Mediterranean, she's waving a flare in the air at one of these ships that's smuggling humans, trafficking humans across from Libya. | ||
| So it's like an act of slave trade. | ||
| They're bringing people up into Libya, putting them on boats, shipping them to Europe. | ||
| And so what happened was the narrative that came out was she tried to obstruct a refugee rescue vessel. | ||
| It's like, ooh, like these vessels have been accused of very serious criminal activity. | ||
| They're trafficking people, smuggling from port to port. | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| She never got in front of him. | ||
| She was in a little boat doing a little protest. | ||
| Patreon instantly deletes her account. | ||
| Her income is gone. | ||
| Everybody freaks out. | ||
| Not because they agree with Lauren Southern, but because they're like, are you gonna erase my income overnight with no warning? | ||
| Dude, if that's my job, my money's all gone. | ||
| What am I gonna do? | ||
| I can't get that back. | ||
| There's no reapplying for the audience you've built up. | ||
| So the CEO comes out and he's like, We understand why you're mad. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| We should have given her a warning and a chance to migrate off the platform. | ||
| We should have said, if you do this again, we'll ban you. | ||
| It was a very serious thing. | ||
| And like, I remember him being like, she was trying to block refugees, man. | ||
| And it's like, no, she wasn't. | ||
| You're lying, dude. | ||
| Stop paying attention to the lies in the media. | ||
| But I digress. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| Send her a letter and say, you have 72 hours to inform your fans you will no longer be using this platform and do something else. | ||
| Well, Lauren made her own website. | ||
| And then she ended up getting people to sign up there. | ||
| So then he's like, I'll never do this again. | ||
| Later that year, I think it was like, or it might have been a year later, Carl Benjamin of the Lotus Eaters podcast, Sargon of Akkad for those that know him on YouTube, Someone found a live stream he did a year prior with like 2,000 views where he insulted people he was calling alt-right, I don't really know what their ideology was, but he called them white, n-word, or something like that. | ||
| And he was like, the way you describe black people is exactly how you act. | ||
| And because he did that semantic game, they said, he used a slur, banned. | ||
| Without warning, without notice, they banned his profile. | ||
| Shutting down all of his income, that led to this mass exodus. | ||
| That was years ago, that was like 2018, I think, 2019 maybe, I don't know, I think it was 2018. | ||
| And so you still have people on the right, libertarians, disaffected liberals, using Patreon, So let me get this straight, George. | ||
| George Alexopoulos was using Patreon up to three months ago. | ||
| We deserve to lose. | ||
| We deserve to lose. | ||
| Well, we have to build alternatives to this. | ||
| But there's a ton of alternatives. | ||
| There's Locals. | ||
| To Patreon? | ||
| Well, I guess there's Locals, yeah. | ||
| Locals was bought by Rumble. | ||
| I mean, you easily just use that. | ||
| There has been Subscribestar for a long time. | ||
| I don't know, people don't really use Subscribestar anymore, but it does exist. | ||
| And you can always make your own website. | ||
| It is very, very easy to set up a Stripe account and use a WordPress plugin. | ||
| Maybe, To the average person, it's more challenging, but you simply find a dev. | ||
| You could easily tweet out, like, anybody know how to do WordPress dev? | ||
| That's what we did. | ||
| We found a guy for a couple grand. | ||
| He built our first website with a plug-in thing for members, and then we instantly had all our members on our own website. | ||
| This is the thing, like, I didn't have Patreon for a long time, and I probably lost out on a ton of money because we didn't do anything until we launched our own website. | ||
| But ultimately, my point with all of this is like, if people know these woke corporations are doing this, and they keep using these services, sorry bro, I have no sympathy when you get banned. | ||
| In fact, it makes me laugh. | ||
| Like, because we deserve to lose if that's the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Owen Benjamin went that route, too. | ||
| He was canceled through a lot of different avenues and made his own platform, and he's thriving. | ||
| And I think that that's the thing, too, with all of this. | ||
| He's a kind of a goofy guy, though. | ||
| I mean, he's been accused of saying a bunch of weird stuff. | ||
| He called me goofy-looking. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| Oh, did he? | ||
| Well, the point is— He was insulting me for being mixed race, but I thought it was funny. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| Well, the point is he moved into his own platform. | ||
| He created his own community on his own platform where he's in control. | ||
| And I think that that's the idea here. | ||
| Cause you know, I'm not surprised, you know, cause there are these different avenues, right? | ||
| I'm on YouTube still, right? | ||
| And every time I put up a video, my latest video is age restricted and demonetized. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's a video about Bill Gates and it's a cartoon essentially. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He got mad. | ||
| Yeah, and so, you know, it reached 100,000 views in a short amount of time. | ||
| YouTube takes notice. | ||
| Let's see how we can make this less seen. | ||
| Let's demonetize it and age restrict it. | ||
| So every comment I get now is I have to, you know, you have to watch, click through two warnings or something like that. | ||
| But I'm not surprised by that. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| My income is not based off of YouTube's monetization, but there are people that put themselves in that situation where, you know, it continues to go through, you know, these platforms where you can't be surprised when they flag you. | ||
| I'm sure you're not surprised when YouTube flags you at this point, right? | ||
| It's- Like demonetization? | ||
| Yeah, demonetization. | ||
| We actually don't- Whatever it is. | ||
| We rarely get demonetized these days. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you getting better at watching what you say? | ||
| Are you playing within their rules? | ||
| We play within the rules, but the rules don't matter. | ||
| There are tons of people, like Crowder, he was citing the CDC and they gave him a strike for it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, when you circle back around, like, conversation is one thing, and how you want to interpret the conversation, but it's infecting art now, right? | ||
| If I put up a music video, and you put up a music video, what they're doing now is interpreting art for the world to actually see. | ||
| I make a video, Gates Behind the Bars, it's a cartoon, or even my video Sad Little Man is flagged for medical misinformation. | ||
| It's within their rules. | ||
| That was about Fauci though, right? | ||
| That was about Fauci, right? | ||
| The point is they attacked it because it's about Fauci, not because of medical misinformation. | ||
| They've interpreted the art for the person that, you know, they don't want to see it. | ||
| Yeah, but so look at the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. | ||
| The story as it goes is that those were, you know, allegories and metaphors for the existing political and religious structure, but it had to be done in a strange, metaphorical way to convey the ideas, otherwise you get killed. | ||
| People get mad at you. | ||
| It's just that way. | ||
| I think the issue is... | ||
| There are, I think humans tend to be zombified. | ||
| There's a lot of people who are zombies and a lot of people who aren't. | ||
| And the people who aren't zombies are constantly trying to find ways to navigate through the zombie hordes. | ||
| So with like, you know, was it Lewis Carroll? | ||
| I don't know, whoever wrote Alice in Wonderland. | ||
| He's trying to convey these ideas that are... | ||
| That, you know, go against the established order, so he writes this book. | ||
| I may be wrong about that, that's just what I heard, that Alice in Wonderland was written as metaphor so that he wouldn't be, you know, persecuted or whatever, but because you have zombie hordes, and I think there have been zombie hordes throughout history, and one of the things that's changed is that the people who are critical thinkers now have access to the internet and can directly form communities and share ideas with each other, bypassing the mob that wants to burn everything down, you know? | ||
| Yeah, and there's a reoccurring situation there, you know, when we talk about Bandcamp not responding to us, that coincides with your communication with YouTube. | ||
| They won't, you know, you're talking to bots when you talk to their support team. | ||
| Or people in India. | ||
| Yeah, and then you've got, I was, the Five Times August page was removed from Wikipedia. | ||
| What, really? | ||
| Yeah, so shortly after Sad Little Man came out. | ||
| It was up there for like years. | ||
| Wow, you pissed off Fauci bad. | ||
| Yeah, I guess he got mad. | ||
| But you're sitting there arguing with moderators about what's true and what's real about yourself. | ||
| And what they'd rather do is just remove you altogether and not acknowledge it. | ||
| You know, that's the reoccurring theme that I've found. | ||
| When I search Five Times August Wikipedia, Chris Hawks is what comes up. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny that, so that guy played guitar on an album 15 years ago for 5x August, so his page still gets to stay up, but the actual artist's page is now removed. | ||
| I mean, I had some back and forth with Wikipedia. | ||
| Wait, so you've worked with this guy? | ||
| Yeah, many moons ago, 2005. | ||
| But why does it... | ||
| So, and he's got a career of his own, I think. | ||
| But like, does it reference Five Times August in? | ||
| In his Wikipedia, I believe it does, yeah. | ||
| So that's the only place you would find a reference to Five Times August. | ||
| I used to have a whole page with a discography and everything. | ||
| But I crossed a line. | ||
| I crossed a line. | ||
| No, I don't think you're on here, man. | ||
| I know I'm not on Wikipedia. | ||
| No, no, no, I'm saying in this guy's article. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| No, it might be in like the discography or something of that, like that, because somebody was telling me that. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he played, he played and produced an album in 2005. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Something Clever, Fry Street. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we worked together a long time ago. | ||
| You're looking at almost 20 years ago. | ||
| But they removed my entire page for no reason. | ||
| There wasn't even any information on there that even referenced my current stuff. | ||
| They would rather just quietly remove you and then just not acknowledge it. | ||
| So that's what I see happening. | ||
| When I come across these things it's not surprising anymore when I'm on a platform And they and they remove me or censor me or suppress what I'm trying to say But it is part of the battle it is funny that they would it really shows you how cowardly the people making these decisions are because they will They will remove you and then run away from the situation. | ||
| They'll never directly acknowledge it. | ||
| Yeah, they love to play dirty games on Wikipedia like So I would say our, you know, my main show is TimCast IRL. | ||
| It's the big one. | ||
| And then we started putting this up on youtube.com slash TimCast. | ||
| Now Wikipedia has removed IRL, so it shows the lower subscriber number from this channel instead of TimCast IRL, which is like the big show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's really funny. | ||
| Yeah, I mean the whole perspective of What's going on outside of progressive leftist echo chamber is skewed. | ||
| So when they see what's going on, it's a skewed perspective. | ||
| And I'm sure it's the same thing for the right. | ||
| We see a skewed perspective of both sides because it's just the media and how it works. | ||
| We have a lot of debates about stats and numbers and stuff and there's a prime example right there, right? | ||
| It's not entirely accurate to portray your numbers as those when really your bigger show is the one that deserves the more accolade. | ||
| Yeah, it's like if you asked people, like, how do they know me, it's like The Nightly Show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Especially not this channel. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, like, even for the past two years, I would do one video per day on this channel that would get, like, 200 to maybe 400,000 views. | ||
| Sometimes they'd get half a million. | ||
| And then I decided to consolidate everything onto one, onto the other channel, Tim Cass News, and then do something new on this. | ||
| So to, like, Use this. | ||
| The significance of it is they always want to find ways to contextualize you in a negative way. | ||
| So if they can choose to use the lower number available to them to make it seem like I'm not as prominent, they will. | ||
| The reason I think they got rid of us off Bandcamp, we put out four songs. | ||
| The first three all charted on Billboard. | ||
| So imagine a new artist emerges, they release three songs and they all hit Billboard charts. | ||
| That's like insanely good. | ||
| Most bands don't get anywhere near there. | ||
| We just put out our fourth song. | ||
| I don't know, I don't think this one's gonna hit Billboard. | ||
| I really wanted to see what organic numbers would be like if we just release a song now that we've kind of established and hoping that we will generate enough sales. | ||
| But I didn't push too hard. | ||
| We've also launched the coffee company and a bunch of other stuff. | ||
| But this song, Bright Eyes, we just put out, and I'm like, if we get 4 for 4 on Billboard, and we might, we might chart low, that's threatening to these people. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| They're like, all of a sudden, this dude's invading cultural spaces and winning. | ||
| And what do you think's gonna happen when there's some like 15-year-old kid who wants to be a musician, And he's looking at these record labels and he's hearing these horror stories, he's looking at these bands that are struggling to make it, and then he sees us and we're like, we're totally independent, we're anti-establishment, and all of our songs hit Billboard. | ||
| If you sign with us, you will succeed. | ||
| They're gonna reject the establishment labels and be like, you tell me what to do because what you're doing is working. | ||
| That's stripping the power away from their cultural machine. | ||
| Yeah, I mean that's kind of the arc of my career, because when I started Five Times August, that was 2001, and the traditional music industry was still in place, and that was kind of the idea, that was the naive goal, is that you get your record label, and you sign, and you get your single, and all that stuff. | ||
| By the time I was meeting with record labels, About 2006, 7, and 8. | ||
| The industry was shifting. | ||
| MySpace was taking hold. | ||
| You could do a lot of things on your own and make a big impact. | ||
| I had gotten distribution for my album through Walmart. | ||
| I was like the first independent artist to have an album nationally distributed in Walmart. | ||
| And so you could accomplish these things and talk to a label and for the first time ever really be like, well, what can you do for me? | ||
| I've already put the work in. | ||
| And that has progressed into an amazing thing where artists like you now are charting on billboard charts and it creates a competition with the old way of doing things. | ||
| And that is a threat to them. | ||
| This album, Silent War, that I put out in November, when it came out, reached number five on Amazon's Best Sellers. | ||
| It's sitting between Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen, and the best-selling albums on Amazon. | ||
| And this is an album, I don't have Taylor Swift's PR team behind me, so it really shows you the power of what certain communities can do, and that's a threat. | ||
| This is an interesting thing that I see developing. | ||
| We beat Taylor Swift for like two days out of the week when we launched Genocide. | ||
| We hit number one. | ||
| We knocked Taylor Swift from the top spot. | ||
| And when we released Only Ever Wanted, we were number one like basically all week. | ||
| That resulted in, I think, number three or something or number... No, what was it? | ||
| Let me check. | ||
| Number two. | ||
| We were number two in sales. | ||
| And I think we lost to Sam Smith or something. | ||
| And so, to be, for that week, the second best seller of a single is crazy to think about. | ||
| Now, of course, I got a lot of people watching the show, so that's a natural audience. | ||
| I had all these leftists being like, You're only selling music because your fans are buying it." And I was like, huh? | ||
| Like, yes. | ||
| That's literally what it's tracking. | ||
| More of my fans buy my music than Taylor Swift buys hers. | ||
| And then people would respond, yeah, because no one buys music anymore. | ||
| And I'm like, you're telling me that international pop sensation Taylor Swift, people don't buy her music? | ||
| Of course they buy her music. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And we did better. | ||
| And they're like, yeah, well, she's not trying to sell her music. | ||
| You think these people, given the option to sell music, would choose not to do it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's instant cash in your pocket. | ||
| Of course they want it. | ||
| You have to stream a song, what is it, 1,500 times to get the equivalent of one sale. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If Taylor Swift could sell, they would do it. | ||
| The problem is, they have lost all of their influence, and the only control they have is the machine, the mechanism, that forces you to listen to their music. | ||
| If Taylor Swift was not placed on the digital streaming platforms because these companies are given preference, then nobody would listen to her music. | ||
| What happens is, here's a lesson for everybody. | ||
| We put out a song. | ||
| Smashes the records. | ||
| We charted amazingly in like rock, alternative, rock and alternative. | ||
| That's based on people listening to the music. | ||
| Then we charted in digital sales, which is people buying the song. | ||
| And we did not get placed on one digital streaming playlist. | ||
| That's radio. | ||
| So radio doesn't play our songs. | ||
| Pandora, Spotify, they won't play our songs. | ||
| And we still did that well. | ||
| Taylor Swift, they're like, 13 of the top 100 were all Taylor Swift. | ||
| Right, what that means is Pandora, Spotify, and YouTube Music decided we are going to play the song by default for anybody who comes to our platform, whether they want it or not. | ||
| So of course she'll get those numbers. | ||
| But when it comes to actually being able to sell music, she couldn't do it. | ||
| If Taylor Swift went on Instagram and said, buy the song, I'm sure she would get a lot of sales. | ||
| But I think they know, there's probably a fear, they can't sell enough of it, so they're better off not going that route. | ||
| Like, here's the thing, you can look at album sales, and they do get a lot, 100,000, 200,000. | ||
| And I'm kind of like, man, that's crazy. | ||
| That's like 10 songs. | ||
| They're getting like 10 to 20,000 sales per song in a week. | ||
| And we're getting about half of that. | ||
| And we're like, nobody's just emerging out of the blue. | ||
| Their best course of action for maintaining prestige is to just go to iTunes and say, put us at the top spot. | ||
| Guarantee us that when our song comes out, people have to listen to our music. | ||
| And they go, you got it. | ||
| The other thing, too, is a lot of pay-to-play. | ||
| There's ways they do it. | ||
| So, pay-to-play is illegal. | ||
| This is the crazy thing. | ||
| You cannot pay a radio station to play your song. | ||
| That's actually illegal, pay-to-play. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I'm like, I thought that's what you do. | ||
| What they can do, though, is... There's ways around it. | ||
| There's ways around it. | ||
| There's like other wink wink nudge nudges that occur. | ||
| So these songs will get put in radio rotation. | ||
| They'll get put on, you'll go to iTunes and there'll be a big banner being like, listen to this song now. | ||
| Then there'll be like the recommended list. | ||
| Number one, Taylor Swift or whoever. | ||
| And it's all pay to play. | ||
| It's just done in clever ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did, I did one radio campaign long, long time ago. | ||
| and got the bill for the company that was working with me. | ||
| You basically did pay. | ||
| It's just listed as like promotion or something generic. - Well, they'll do clever things. | ||
| Like you can go to a company and be like, hey, how much to represent me? | ||
| And then they'll say $50,000. | ||
| And you say, you got it. | ||
| And then because they represent you, they can go to the radio stations and say something like, hey, put this song in for us. | ||
| And then the next time you need something, So there's no monetary exchange. | ||
| It's just normal business. | ||
| But that's the game, man. | ||
| To your point on people actually buying the music, which, number one, it speaks volumes that our communities, our fan bases actually put us in that That same field, that same playing field as somebody like Taylor Swift. | ||
| But as far as buying the music, you'll see if you go to Walmart and see the physical sales or Target, the physical sales, the CDs that are still on the shelf. | ||
| What they're doing now to get people to buy it is it's become a collector's market to buy it. | ||
| So Taylor Swift's new album came out. | ||
| I noticed there's four different album covers. | ||
| It's the same album, but they changed the color of the font on the front. | ||
| And so there's four different ones for you to collect now. | ||
| And then there's the magazine version, right? | ||
| But all these sales add up and that accumulates. | ||
| You'll see that sort of trick being played in a lot of mainstream artists is like 15 different versions of the new album. | ||
| I think music might be dead completely for a few reasons. | ||
| The first is TikTok. | ||
| So I love Phantogram. | ||
| They're a great band and group, whatever you call it. | ||
| It's two people. | ||
| And if you go to their Spotify, you can see they've got a few songs, but there's this fast version, the slow version, the remix version, and they have like five of the same song. | ||
| And they do this because TikTok It's a trend. | ||
| Right. | ||
| TikTok will, people will play the slowed version or the sped up version for dramatic effect or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so then they put it on Spotify, it gets a bunch of views. | ||
| So this is not music in the same way anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You know, I've been listening to Soundgarden a lot. | ||
| And I was saying on the show that the 90s was the best era of music. | ||
| And I'm half kidding. | ||
| Because obviously there was really awesome stuff every decade. | ||
| I mean, you go back to the 50s, there's great music across the board. | ||
| But what I was saying was like, the 90s was, in my view, the last point at which music was intended to mean something. | ||
| Now don't get me wrong, there was good stuff in the 2000s, but like early 2000s. | ||
| It was petering out early 2000s. | ||
| Yeah, music now is trash. | ||
| And it's funny because everybody always says that. | ||
| But I think Zeppelin is better than anything the 90s had to offer. | ||
| I think CCR is better than anything the 90s had to offer. | ||
| I was not born in the 70s. | ||
| I was born in the late 80s. | ||
| So it's like late 60s, Three Dog Night stuff. | ||
| I think they were late 60s or whatever. | ||
| Then you get the 70s with like CCR, Zeppelin. | ||
| I think Zeppelin went into the 80s too, right? | ||
| Were they 60s as well? | ||
| Zeppelin, late 60s, 70s, on into the 80s. | ||
| So you think about the lyrics and the production of Stairway to Heaven, you think about Cashmere, Immigrant Song, Stairway, how different they are, how expansive they are, the lyrics behind them, what the songs mean, and you're like, as time went on, it got worse and worse and worse. | ||
| And then into the '90s, the reason I say it was the best is because it was like the last time there was a modicum of art, in my opinion, and substance to the music. | ||
| So I guess what I'm trying to say is there were better bands than anything that I just had to offer going back to the '70s. | ||
| But if you listen to some of the bands in the '90s, you're like, this is great stuff. | ||
| Soundgarden is incredible. | ||
| Chris Cornell was absolutely, he's a legend. | ||
| And then Audioslave in the early 2000s also was truly incredible. | ||
| Smashing Pumpkins had some really good stuff. | ||
| Into the 2000s, it started to get really, really vapid. | ||
| Into the 2010s, it started to degrade. | ||
| And now it's just like, it's all real meaningless stuff. | ||
| It's fluff, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I call it hump music, because that's basically all it is. | ||
| grinding music for the most part. | ||
| It's existed. | ||
| But even disco, like pop music, there was still some substance to the very little that existed. | ||
| When I reflect on the 90s music, there was a lot of bands that I overlooked, that I wasn't really that interested in. | ||
| And I look back on the 90s now and I go, oh, that was the last era of the band, of a band playing together. | ||
| You had a lot of one hit wonders of that time, That had really great, you know, rock pop songs that still had good melody as a band playing together. | ||
| And that fizzled out. | ||
| I mean, I think that the last like decent music of the... I stopped kind of following new music about 2005-6 and then I started just entering my old man phase where I'm like, I like what I listened to growing up. | ||
| But I love music across the board, from going all the way back to old blues from the 30s and stuff. | ||
| I love the history of how one thing influenced the rest. | ||
| And I can listen to the radio with an open mind and look for good things in what's current, obviously. | ||
| There's a lot of new stuff I like. | ||
| Post Malone's real good. | ||
| I like Post Malone. | ||
| I like some of Billie Eilish's stuff. | ||
| The Weeknd is fantastic. | ||
| He's consistently got great stuff. | ||
| So there's new stuff that I like, but you've heard the song Like a Stone, I'm sure. | ||
| By Audioslave. | ||
| I mean, holy crap, that's amazing. | ||
| That is a masterpiece. | ||
| I do not think a song could be made better than that song. | ||
| And, you know, it pains me to say this because Tom Morello is the guitar player and I think he's kind of an asshole. | ||
| Or he's just like a hyper-partisan, low-information guy. | ||
| The lyrics, the vocal melody, man, it could not be better. | ||
| It is a masterpiece of a song. | ||
| Are you familiar with the lyrics or whatever? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| A dude singing about reading a book and realizing that, you know, he's lived a bad life, he regrets what he's done, and he wants desperately to be... | ||
| He says the song was about a guy thinking about the afterlife and what's going to come when he dies, but it really does sound very Christian-like, where he's like, I long to be in your house, and I regret the things I've done. | ||
| I was reading a book that said if we're good, we can lay to rest anywhere we want to go, and it's basically like him telling a story. | ||
| About being in a room reading this book, which is presumably the Bible, and I'm like, it's just a perfectly crafted story, and I'm like, I think about music like that, and it's not even about whether you like the style or anything like that, it's about the substance of the song. | ||
| The lyrics matter, there's a story being told, there's an idea being conveyed, the instrumentation is fantastic. | ||
| And then, you know, even with like Blinding Lights by The Weeknd, which is now several years old, it's just overly simplistic, very, very basic. | ||
| It's a good song. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| And there's always been pop music, but what we're not getting is that song, I think it has like half a billion views on YouTube or something like that. | ||
| Zombie by the Cranberries has, I think, two billion views on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What band or group has put out a song like Zombie? | ||
| So this is early 90s. | ||
| Zombie is about the conflict in Ireland and the years of the Irish Republican IRA, you know, the car bomb, all that stuff, like how crazy it was. | ||
| And it was like, These people who are fighting, it's not us. | ||
| We're not in this anymore. | ||
| And it's an extremely meaningful song. | ||
| Instrumentation is a little simple, but it's iconic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It becomes legendary. | ||
| Has anyone written a song that has reached popular culture that is in any way conveying meaning? | ||
| I think the main difference, as you're talking about it, is if you look at those songs from then, you had one to two songwriters back then. | ||
| Now, mainstream music, pop songs, there's like, you know, 15 different songwriters, and you've got too many cooks in the kitchen. | ||
| I think that's why there's no clear messaging. | ||
| I mean, I'm pretty sure the Cranberries made Zombie entirely on their own. | ||
| That's what I'm saying, though. | ||
| You had somebody with an intent behind the song. | ||
| You had somebody, a single person. | ||
| It wasn't like they were like, hey, we need to get the latest, coolest songwriter factory involved in this. | ||
| It sounds like you're saying the opposite. | ||
| These days they have professional songwriters Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I mean, it's an interesting thing because if you look over the course of music, I mean, like early music, you had songwriters and the musicians or artists that would sing it. | ||
| Frank Sinatra didn't write his own songs, he was the voice, right? | ||
| So you had sort of a factory thing there, but those songs were written by... | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Elton John. | ||
| Yeah, and Elton John too, but you had a smaller compartmentalized system in place there, whereas now like when you look at certain artists, you'll see like five or six songwriters all trying to get their royalty in, and there's no substance to the actual song in and of itself. | ||
| Well, so that's the other component of why I think music's dead, is algorithmic music writing. | ||
| It used to be that everyone wrote songs, and then the songs ended up being good, people liked, made it to the top. | ||
| Now it's, we mapped it out. | ||
| We know exactly, you know the song Hook? | ||
| This is why I love the 90s. | ||
| Hook by Blues Traveler. | ||
| It's literally about, the song is, he's explaining to you how he's writing a song just to make you listen, think there's meaning. | ||
| And it's brilliant. | ||
| It's Pachelbel's canon. | ||
| And the point was, they were like, pop music just uses the same structure, the same chord structure. | ||
| And what else is... What's that song, Basket Case, by Green Day? | ||
| It's just punk Pachelbel's Canon. | ||
| Yeah, there's a bunch of those songs. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's what Hook is, by Blues Traveler, where he's... This is why it's so good. | ||
| He's insulting you for liking the fact that he wrote a good song, mocking the fact that pop songs are formulaic. | ||
| But now we've come to this point where They actually have these AI programs that you can load in the top 40s of the past year, and it will just make a pop song. | ||
| The problem is that it can't, there's no English. | ||
| And so if you've ever listened to these demo things, they'll do like, we loaded up 10 of the number one songs and you'll get like, and it's like, okay, those aren't words. | ||
| But if you have an A, I make the song, you can then just record your vocal track over it and give it lyrics and then song's done. | ||
| I think we're a couple of years out from, you're not, right now you talk to your Amazon or your Google device and you're like, play me Aerosmith, dream on, click on it. | ||
| Great song. | ||
| And it will play it. | ||
| What's going to happen in a few years? | ||
| You're going to say, Amazon, play me a song that's new with a really great hook that is like Panic! | ||
| At The Disco's early albums. | ||
| And then it will just manifest the song. | ||
| Or it could be something like Play Me Dream On by Aerosmith, but I want to hear John Legend singing it with an orchestra behind it. | ||
|
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That's actually pretty cool. | |
| I think music is heading in that direction. | ||
| It's a dangerous thing. | ||
| I think that's why You know, it matters more on, I think, lyrics right now and emotion matter more than ever, I think, in art in general. | ||
| You know, that's why, I think that's why, like, my music has done so well in the last year is the chord structures in the songs that I've put out over the last year are very basic. | ||
| I've kept them basic on purpose because I've hearkened back to three chords in the truth. | ||
| I can write a song with, you know, a bunch of different chords in it and jazz chords, whatever. | ||
| I can make it fancy. | ||
| I kept it simple for a reason, but I put all the weight into the lyrics. | ||
| I mean, that's why people connect with it, is because it connects with what's happening in the world, and AI didn't write it, and it's not just about some fluff that doesn't really matter. | ||
| Well, this is an interesting thing, too, about Bryson Gray charting at number one. | ||
| He did FJB, right? | ||
| Was that him? | ||
| He did Let's Go Brandon. | ||
| Let's Go Brandon, that's what it was. | ||
| Let's Go Brandon. | ||
| Because the meaning of the song matters to people. | ||
| So it's really fascinating to see Tom McDonald and John Rich team up for End of the World. | ||
| You saw that one? | ||
| You've got a rapper and a country star teaming up together because the substance of the music matters so much more to people. | ||
| And I think this creates an opportunity for a new indie industry or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| 100%, yeah. | ||
| I think it's working. | ||
| I mean, look, we've had tremendous success with our music. | ||
| We've made money. | ||
| If I wasn't doing this, I mean, here's the challenge. | ||
| I don't know if the average person would like my music enough to buy it outside of the fact that they're already fans of mine. | ||
| I mean, I can try and win a culture war and just say, obviously our music is so good, people really love it, and they're gonna listen to the music anyway. | ||
| So obviously the people who are listening to the songs on Spotify like the music. | ||
| It's free, they're just playing it. | ||
| So I think that's success. | ||
| My point I guess I'm trying to get to is, We have made enough money to live off of the music if I was not doing anything else. | ||
| Not like, well, but we'd be like, oh wow, you know, we're musicians, we're gonna play this music and this is our thing. | ||
| Despite the fact that the songs are only slightly about political happenings. | ||
| But I think the opportunity that's arising is there are people who are hungry for a message. | ||
| And so you have an opportunity to create music that could be any style. | ||
| And you're gonna get people who are gonna be like, I like the song for the ideas within it. | ||
| People who don't even like country will listen to John Rich when he wrote Progress, because we played a part of it on the show, and I'm not a country guy, but I love that song, because he's saying something that matters to me. | ||
| I think that's an opportunity for people to break through, and I'm wondering if that's actually going to be more valuable, because like I was saying, Taylor Swift, we beat her. | ||
| You know, for like, it was like two days out of the week. | ||
| Granted, like, respect to where it's due. | ||
| She's huge. | ||
| We're nowhere near as big as Taylor Swift. | ||
| But for a couple days, we were on top of the charts in terms of sales, because people think the substance of our message is better. | ||
| This was the song, Genocide, we put out right before the election, which is basically about media lying and getting us into wars and stuff like that. | ||
| So I'm thinking, if we do... One of the reasons the songs we put out were not overtly political is because we want to be | ||
| We want songs that are just songs, and it's not like we're going to try and exploit politics for traffic, but there's a point where we do want to try and create something of a political substance to affect the popular culture, and then we also want to make things that are just generally entertaining have a mix of the two. | ||
| I think the opportunity right now is... | ||
| Putting your message into your art the way it used to be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Art always, you know, not always, but back in the day there was some element to it that was like, here's how I see the world and here's what I think and I feel. | ||
| We got to this point where it became very generic and was whittled down to just, I love you, I hate you, oh no you're breaking up with me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not even that anymore, because if you look at progressive culture, a boy and a girl can't fall in love anymore. | ||
| So you can't even write that song anymore. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Just a small town boy. | ||
| Yeah, you know, they are going back and overanalyzing old songs and telling you why they're bad. | ||
| We should write an offensive song. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's just like, old school, fall in love, boy and girl. | ||
| I think people need that. | ||
| I think there's a space for that to come back in. | ||
| To your point on people resonating with the message over the style, I mean, we see that all the time with Tom McDonald. | ||
| I don't really listen to rap, but I love what he's saying. | ||
| I get that message from people that go, I listen to a lot of hard rock music, but I really like your singer-songwriter stuff, because of the message. | ||
| And that's something that I think about every time I put out something new now. | ||
| I don't want it polished. | ||
| I want something raw and real and honest about what's happening. | ||
| And that is going to go a lot farther than the production that's put into it, I think. | ||
| This is the challenge. | ||
| Politics has become pop culture. | ||
| And so there's, for us, when it comes to production, it's a question of, yeah, I got a bunch of songs that are overtly political, and we've only put out one, Genocide, which is not even political in the sense where we're like, Joe Biden's a shithead. | ||
| It's more just like, You know, the lyrics we did in the third one were shadows of the current enterprise of institutions made to control your lives, inside breeding, concocting all the lies that we use to control your minds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but we know you meant, we know you meant that. | |
| Corporate press. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I mean, we have them in the music video singing the song. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, I think it was Taylor Lorenz we had sing it. | ||
| And so it's like, but I don't say CNN is lying to you, CNN is lying to you. | ||
| But we know that you meant that, like that's what's happening right now. | ||
| It pisses them off. | ||
| So, but actually, I think this is the opportunity. | ||
| I think if you don't recognize what people want, or you refuse to give them what they want, you may as well be selling asparagus-flavored ice cream. | ||
| So if right now people are saying, we clearly want music with a message, Then we should be saying, then that's what we'll focus on. | ||
| Because I got a bunch of songs that are more overtly political and we've decided to layer in some not political, because we don't want to force it. | ||
| I don't want to just, you know, it's kind of grifting. | ||
| It's kind of grifty, I guess. | ||
| But at the same time, You look at the success that Tom McDonald's had with these songs directly addressing these issues. | ||
| He's had a few that don't that also did extremely well. | ||
| You layer them in. | ||
| But my point is just this, if the people right now are saying we want a strong message in our music, we want to convey our values, then I think that's what we should be doing. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| Yeah, I think people are just pining for that in entertainment across the board. | ||
| I mean, we're seeing it with movies where agendas piped in over story and there's no good storytelling in movies anymore. | ||
| See, that's the thing. | ||
| The woke injected politics of success. | ||
| We're smarter. | ||
| We could make good music with good messaging and then convey an idea in a good song. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's what, that's the turning point that we're at now. | ||
| It's just that you're not going to get that from mainstream art right now. | ||
| You're not going to, you're just not going to get, they would have shown up three years ago if they were going to speak up, but nobody showed up. | ||
| You know, you have a very small handful of people actually speak up in entertainment. | ||
| Taylor Swift has that song, what is it called? | ||
| You Need to Calm Down or something? | ||
| Is that what it's called? | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| And like the whole second verse is her being like, fuck you for not being gay or whatever. | ||
| I'm exaggerating. | ||
| It's like, she's like, why are you ragging on gay people? | ||
| Cause shade never made anybody less gay. | ||
| Oh, it's like, you know, I really feel like she wrote that song because she was being accused of being conservative, because she's like, Nashville country girl become pop star. | ||
| And it's the most generic, low-brow take on what people actually think about LGBTQ stuff, but it fits the narrative for the left. | ||
| It panders to them, and so she went for it. | ||
| And I can respect the song in that, The first verse is her ragging on cancel culture. | ||
| She's like, people on Twitter are talking shit. | ||
| And like, what did she call it? | ||
| She threatens violence against people. | ||
| Tim, you know too many Taylor Swift lyrics, I'm gonna be honest with you. | ||
| Bro, Taylor Swift's legit, man. | ||
| No, but hold on, like... | ||
| But yeah, no, I hear what you're saying. | ||
| I think a lot of that stuff, you know, it's Coach. | ||
| She has a machine behind her. | ||
| You have to, we need to put out a song that has this message behind it because we don't want people thinking this about you, you know? | ||
| Taylor Swift in the first verse of You Need to Calm Down. | ||
| She says, you are somebody that I don't know, but you're taking shots at me like it's Petron, and I'm just like, damn, it's 7 a.m. | ||
| Say it in the street, that's a knockout, but you say it in a tweet that's a cop-out, and I'm like, hey, are you okay? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Mike Tyson said that. | ||
| If Taylor Swift is threatening to punch you in the face because you're talking shit on Twitter, I'm like, that's a perfect example of something's wrong on social media. | ||
| Say it in the street, that's a knockout. | ||
| Yeah, Mike Tyson said, social media has made people okay with saying things that would normally get them punched in the face. | ||
| I love that Taylor Swift said it better than he did. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| That's the world that we live in right now. | ||
| But yeah, I do think we are at that turning point with art and music. | ||
| There's something that people are desiring. | ||
| I think people are exhausted of being told what to do by celebrities. | ||
| You're gonna see it from the indie underbelly. | ||
| It's gonna be an underdog story of artists that weren't tethered to a label or a manager or a PR agency that felt free enough to say what people were actually thinking. | ||
| You know, that's one of the reasons, you know, Trump resonates with so many people is he's not tethered to or the optics are he's not Tethered to a system in you know, so you know what I think is an indicator of civil war We put out a song, or how about this? | ||
| We'll start here. | ||
| You and I got banned from Bandcamp. | ||
| Like that's a first indicator for no reason, literally none. | ||
| We broke no rules. | ||
| We were making money for the platform. | ||
| They said, you're gone. | ||
| Because they don't like us, just period. | ||
| And that's indicative of the other elements here. | ||
| And that's, I intentionally put out songs that were apolitical. | ||
| And how did the media react? | ||
| They started shit talking us. | ||
| They started swearing at us. | ||
| They started telling us to go fuck ourselves. | ||
| They lied about the song. | ||
| Sam Seder ran his, I don't know if it was him, but his people ran the song through some kind of filter. | ||
| So when they played it on their show, it sounded really bad. | ||
| And they were like, wow, this is awful. | ||
| What's wrong with this song? | ||
| Oh, it sounds terrible. | ||
| When we had like, you know, A-list production and like industry support, the song was, traditional, high-quality, professional studio production. | ||
| They intentionally lie to try and claim the song is bad. | ||
| We have a PR publicist who was sending out a press release like, Pete Parata, formerly of The Offspring, and Tim Poole released a new song, Only Ever Wanted. | ||
| We got emails back saying, fuck you. | ||
| We don't support MAGA, trash, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| It had nothing to do with the music. | ||
| The song was not political. | ||
| And that was kind of the point. | ||
| I was like, let's put out a song that's like more generic love song rock so that we can prove these people will, it has to be political. | ||
| Everything will be political. | ||
| And we're at this point. | ||
| So our culture is completely dominated by it. | ||
| Pop culture is politics. | ||
| Politics is pop culture. | ||
| And call it grifting, call it whatever you want. | ||
| If you are not addressing those issues, you will get left behind. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't matter at this point. | ||
| You can try to play it safe. | ||
| I say if you've got a handful of political songs, just put them out. | ||
| I think the song's gotta be political. | ||
| It's going to be political regardless. | ||
| You could release, like I said earlier, Boy Falls in Love with Girl. | ||
| Oh, that's political already. | ||
| Yeah, they're gonna call you a fascist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It says heteronormative, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| The great thing about it is none of that stuff matters. | ||
| People on this side of the aisle are hip to that. | ||
| They know that the media lies. | ||
| And the statement is that the music speaks for itself. | ||
| The music and the fan base speaks for itself. | ||
| You put out a song and it hits Billboard charts, you did that on your own, right? | ||
| What I do on my own, it does it on its own. | ||
| It's a natural thing. | ||
| And you know what's crazy? | ||
| When we put out Only Ever Wanted, we hit like number 12, number 16, number 14, all the rock charts, number two in sales. | ||
| And Billboard refused to track our YouTube numbers, which was like 2 million hits. | ||
| So we were actually hobbled. | ||
| We should have done better. | ||
| And it's political. | ||
| Tom McDonald, same thing. | ||
| I'm looking at our numbers, and I'm like, how is it possible that Tom McDonald is not number one on every release? | ||
| Not kidding. | ||
| I've looked at the numbers for these artists when they put out songs. | ||
| Tom MacDonald crushes them. | ||
| He gets like 5 million streams in a few days. | ||
| I can only assume they are intentionally fucking with him to make sure he does not hit the top charts. | ||
| Could you imagine? | ||
| What does he put a song out like every two weeks or every month? | ||
| He'd be on the top of Billboard every month, he should be, but for some reason, some reason he's... Tom McDonald should be a Billboard Hot 100. | ||
| The main top chart, but I think the best he's done is like 90 one time. | ||
| And I'm like, how could we... | ||
| They didn't count our YouTube. | ||
| They said it doesn't count. | ||
| So we had like 600,000 streams outside of that. | ||
| No, I think it was like 1.2 million outside of YouTube. | ||
| And that gets us on the top of all these rock charts. | ||
| Then Tom McDonald puts out a song and gets 10 million hits and sells 40,000 copies and he's not on the list. | ||
| Well, if you think about it, I mean, you think about the people that are behind the scenes at Bandcamp. | ||
| If somebody's behind the scenes at Bandcamp that's willing to do that, there's somebody like that behind the scenes counting the numbers for Billboard, right? | ||
| There's somebody back there that's like, I don't really like that, I'll change the numbers or whatever. | ||
| I mean, I would put it past the entire industry that that stuff's going on up and down across the board in any way possible. | ||
| I think there's other ways to fight back as well. | ||
| I don't care so much about the charts per se. | ||
| It is a good solid statement of what you can do. | ||
| this next month I'm doing a campaign with my album to raise money for the COVID vaccine injured. | ||
| And so 100% of digital sales from Silent War are going to be going to the injured. | ||
| To me, that is a statement that is going to push that conversation forward a little bit more. | ||
| I think that there are ways for us to think outside of the box to engage in the culture war in that way too. | ||
| Tom McDonald had a song, I think it was Ghost. - Yeah. - Hit the top of the pop charts. | ||
| That I think is really, really important as well. | ||
| One of the reasons I think it's important to try and, here's what I think we need, whether it's me, you, Bryson Gray, or Tom McDonald or anybody, we need a song that has the virality of somebody that I used to know or Royals. | ||
| So those songs just went viral. | ||
| Everybody loved those songs, right? | ||
| Royals, it was funny, Lorde had a post on some, you know, forum saying like, what do you guys think of this song? | ||
| She posts it. | ||
| Totally, it's like this low, it's a small company or whatever, small production. | ||
| And people were like, oh, I don't really like this part, but good job so far. | ||
| And then the song explodes and becomes an international number one. | ||
| You can't deny it when people love the song. | ||
| So I think that's what we need. | ||
| So Tom McDonald hitting that top of the pop charts with Ghost is a step in the right direction. | ||
| And that was a love song. | ||
| That's a straightforward, I love you love song. | ||
| And people are looking for that. | ||
| But we need to figure out how to get the number one viral song to make it undeniable. | ||
| And that's what I'm looking at. | ||
| Obviously, I don't think, you know, the music that we put out, people say it sounds like the 90s and the 2000s, and I'm like, oh yeah, it's just songs we like. | ||
| I write songs, we like them, we put them out there. | ||
| If you don't like them, you don't have to like them, it's fine. | ||
| But I'm not gonna try and write some, like, teeny bopper, you know? | ||
| No, you can't do that, it wouldn't work that way. | ||
| And that's what's gonna make the statement even more impactful, if it comes from an honest place and does that. | ||
| But they're like Circles by Post Malone, half a billion views, major hit. | ||
| That's like... | ||
| Totally within the realm of the songs that we could produce, and I'm thinking like, we in the anti-establishment need to hit that song where you've got regular people going like, oh, I love that song, who's that by? | ||
| They're like, oh, that's Five Times August. | ||
| I'm like, oh, cool. | ||
| Then they go and buy your album, and you got like, you know, all these other messages that are on there. | ||
| I mean, there's a proof in concept between what Tom McDonald's doing, what you've done with Billboard, what Bryson Gray has done, what I've done, When people rally behind the anti-establishment art that is out there right now, it punches through the culture war. | ||
| So if that can continue to be cultivated and nourished and appreciated, it's only going to continue to grow. | ||
| I think that Tom McDonald has definitely paved the way in a lot of sense, because he was saying stuff that people, you know, when I first saw him, you know, I was going like, oh, you know, I think a lot of people feel this way about him, but you go, oh, you can still say that, you know, in a song. | ||
| And that's great. | ||
| Listen to some of the stuff that's on Spotify, like the Eazy-E stuff. | ||
| Do you know about that song? | ||
| I think it's Eazy-E. | ||
| He's got a song about, Hooking up with some chick at a bar, and then finding out it's a trans person, and then murdering that person. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's brutal. | ||
| And it's on Spotify, they don't care. | ||
| It's not, yeah. | ||
| I bet, I wouldn't be surprised if like... That's funny because, so that song can be up, but Let's Go Brandon got taken down, right? | ||
| I think one of, or I know Bryson's had music taken down from Apple, but... Nobody Move is the name of the song by Eazy-E. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's like, I'm not a fan. | ||
| I guess it's from the 80s or whatever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, yo, the lyrics are bad. | ||
| Let me see if I can... It's an older song. | ||
| Yeah, it's called Nobody Move. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm pulling it up right now. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it's Nobody Move. | ||
| And then, where are we at? | ||
| He's like, I'm at a bar. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, he's like, what does it say? | ||
| It's the whole, holy crap, like the whole second verse is, he's hooking up with some ho, he's creeping out, he goes to the back room, cold trailed the bitch with a gun in her back, I say laid down on, oh he's trying to rape her, with a gun pointed at her. | ||
| - Oh, that's nice. - These were the biggest titties N-word ever saw. | ||
| Damn, I thought my mind was going up on her. | ||
| She took her panties down and she had a dick. | ||
| I said, "Damn," dropped my get from my hand, put the get to his legs all the way up his skirt. | ||
| And then he basically says-- - I love the idea, can we just pause for a second and think about a guy sitting there with a pen and paper thinking of it in his brain, how do I want to say this? | ||
| Writing those lyrics. | ||
| I bet it's on Spotify. | ||
| How do I want to say this? | ||
| But I mean like, I gotta be honest. | ||
| If it's on Spotify then I guess like, I guess respect? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well that's, you know. | ||
| Yeah, wait. | ||
| Yep, Nobody Move by Eazy-E is on Spotify, and the second verse is literally him, he says a homophobic slur, he says he takes the gun and he puts it between their legs to make them feel pain, like implying killing them. | ||
| How old is that song? | ||
| It's called Nobody Move, it's from That's funny because it just goes to show you like it's all subjective anyway. | ||
| But see, Freedom of Speech has the right to say, to write that song and it be up. | ||
| You don't have to agree with it. | ||
| You don't have to listen to it, but there it is. | ||
| You can access it if you want to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's from Easy Does It. | |
| Easy Does It is from 1988. | ||
|
unidentified
|
1988. | |
| The times have changed, my friend. | ||
| E-Z-E. | ||
| Yeah, but you know, to be honest, if you played that song for a lot of these people in the hip-hop community, in the black community, I'm sure a lot of them would be like, yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, that was like a big thing among social justice warriors was that the black community was very homophobic. | ||
| And they were like, we gotta work on that. | ||
| So I'm willing to bet that if you go to some of these same neighborhoods that are fans of Eazy-E, they're gonna be like, damn right, even by today's standards. | ||
| Man, it's been a long time. | ||
| Maybe just by you reading that, you'll bring attention to this song more and then it'll get canceled. | ||
| I don't want it to get canceled. | ||
| So somebody is watching this right now going, oh my gosh. | ||
| And then they're typing it in over on Spotify and they're like, delete, delete. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| We get our music band. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like, and this dude, he's, but to be fair, Spotify, you're still on Spotify, right? | ||
| Yeah, we're both on Spotify. | ||
| So it's like, okay, I guess I'm not worried about getting banned from Spotify. | ||
| Cause if that's up there, I'll put it this way. | ||
| If I ever got banned from Spotify for some rule, like TOS hate speech, I would sue so fast their heads would spin. | ||
| I'd be like, y'all got Eazy-E on there from 1988. | ||
| What did we say? | ||
| So that makes me a little bit more confident. | ||
| You know, that's the thing. | ||
| So I mentioned, like, my video for Sad Little Man gets marked for medical misinformation. | ||
| I have some other videos marked for hate speech that are just, it's just rally footage. | ||
| People hugging and walking in the street holding protest songs. | ||
| But on the other end of the spectrum, so those songs de-platformed, de-monetized, marked for this and that. | ||
| But then you've got other videos, you've got WAP, you've got Childish Gambino's This is America, where he literally mows down a church choir with a gun. | ||
| On YouTube! | ||
| On YouTube, fully monetized. | ||
| And I can't even talk about the news. | ||
| We got age restricted because of a story about someone dying. | ||
| But no, Childish Gambino, he's cool. | ||
| Right, that's totally cool. | ||
| The whole video starts out with a guy, he's got a bag over his head and he shoots him in the head. | ||
| That's fully monetized, suitable for all advertisers. | ||
| Actually, I'm not sure, is it? | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah. | ||
| They don't show us. | ||
| It has like 800 million views, fully monetized. | ||
| Any kid can watch it. | ||
| Yeah, but are ads running on it? | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Of course it is, because they're in the club. | ||
| Now my videos that are cartoons and rally footage, 18 years or older. | ||
| Are you sure about ads running on it? | ||
| I guarantee you I've looked into this. | ||
| I've posted all this stuff. | ||
| And if it's not, it is though. | ||
| I could be wrong, but this is four years ago. | ||
| Like, I'm playing it now, I'm not getting any ads. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that I reached out to YouTube, pissed off, because of some degree of censorship, and then I said, how do you justify this? | ||
| This seems like a breach of contract, and then I was told that it's actually not monetized. | ||
| You can look up other ones, though, because I've posted, like, Sam Smith's new video, fully monetized. | ||
| There's some Cardi B videos, Lil Nas X videos that have, like, nudity, blood, gore, people getting shot, whatever it may be. | ||
| You know, lap dance with the devil. | ||
| That's okay! | ||
| People walking in the street holding a sign that says freedom. | ||
| Not so much. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, YouTube demonetized you? | ||
| So I've got like, I think, five videos that have been either demonetized or running on limited ads, which is pretty much demonetized. | ||
| And then I have several videos that are age-restricted. | ||
| And so, you know, when... And like I said, my stuff's not even controversial. | ||
| It's not like... What you just read, that verse, is more controversial than anything I will ever write in my entire life. | ||
| It's just that Somebody on the other end sees it and says, I don't like it. | ||
| And then puts a little flag on it. | ||
| But that's the world that we're in. | ||
| And I'm not surprised, you know, kind of like what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| It's power dynamics. | ||
| So, you know, some people have asked, like, how come we haven't been banned from YouTube? | ||
| And I'm like, there's a couple different reasons. | ||
| One is we follow the rules, you know? | ||
| And so we have an uncensored after show for the spicier conversations. | ||
| But it's also, we are consistently the biggest live show at night on YouTube. | ||
| And I didn't know this, but people pointed out to us that if you check the live streams, TimCastIRL always has the most views for primetime on YouTube. | ||
| So what probably happens is YouTube says, well, what they said was probably enforceable, but we don't want to ban Tim Cast IRL. | ||
| It's the biggest show we got. | ||
| We make money off it. | ||
| We get attention for it. | ||
| So we'll let that one slide. | ||
| Then a smaller channel says the same thing and they go, I don't care about you. | ||
| We're done. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're in the club, Tim. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It goes to show you it's it's not even about it it's it's it's money-driven it's you know it's it's subjective is the thing absolutely there's no there's no standard is why we have to sue mm-hmm because you can't you can't do that mm-hmm so the bandcamp things especially agree just just because I don't believe that a business has a right to do what they did. | ||
| The example that I gave last week, we were talking to James Lawrence, who's probably going to be my lawyer on this one. | ||
| If you want to sign on, we'll probably work that out. | ||
| And then we'll try and get Bryson. | ||
| My attitude was, if a business is open to the public, and you go inside, and you order a sandwich, and a bag of chips, and a Coke, and say nothing else, and you sit down and you're eating it, and they walk up to you right now, and they take your sandwich from you and say, get out, Like, you can't do that. | ||
| You have to give the money back. | ||
| You have to, like, you've got a civil tort there. | ||
| Granted, like, I'm sure the cops won't do anything about it, let's say your sandwich was taken from you. | ||
| But it's like, look man, I gave them something, they gave me something, they took that thing away without telling me, and then booted me out, without warning, without notice. | ||
| Even though businesses say we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, that's actually not true. | ||
| Public accommodations are required to serve the public based on standard interpretation of the law. | ||
| That's why you have the gay bakery in Colorado stuff. | ||
| You can make an argument about why. | ||
| I'll say this. | ||
| It's curious that Bandcamp banned me, a mixed-race, you know, Asian person. | ||
| It's racism. | ||
| They don't want your kind. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They don't want my kind there. | ||
| It's all white people. | ||
| They don't want our kind over there. | ||
| And you look at what they do with the schools and affirmative action against Asians. | ||
| I think that's proof. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I'll sue them over that. | ||
| You know what's interesting? | ||
| The day that I was logged in to my Bandcamp account, I actually identified as a they-them at that day. | ||
| Well, that should have given you protections. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But my point is this. | ||
| If someone goes to a restaurant, let's say like a black dude goes to a restaurant, and he gets kicked out. | ||
| he absolutely has the grounds to file a lawsuit and say it was race-based, and then it would be in the press, it would be all over the news. | ||
| So am I not afford the same right to make those claims and be like, "I believe they did it." So anyway, ultimately what I think is, if they tell us, "Here's the contract, "we can terminate it at any time," there is an expectation that termination involves reasonableness, like reasonable action, or however you define it. | ||
| It is not reasonable to invite people of the public into a place, take something of value from them, Then, abruptly remove them without recompense. | ||
| So, my attitude is, look man, they could at least send, here's all your data, here's how much money was in the account, here's how we closed it out. | ||
| None of that? | ||
| Well, as far as I'm concerned, they stole my money, they stole my data, they broke their own contracts, and that's why we have to sue. | ||
| We have to, you know, because otherwise, as you said, it's all subjective. | ||
| But how can we function as a society If there's no standard by which we know we're allowed to operate. | ||
| You know, so if I can't, imagine if you got banned from McDonald's, you know, just for no reason. | ||
| You are no longer allowed to participate. | ||
| So I've always been on the side of the, when it came to the bakery in Colorado, my attitude was always like, dude, if I have a bakery and someone wants to come and buy a cake for me and it's for a gay wedding, I'm not going to consider that my speech. | ||
| I consider it their speech. | ||
| I understand the argument though. | ||
| The argument wasn't that he was denying service. | ||
| He was denying that he would write that message. | ||
| Now that becomes interesting. | ||
| So that's where the lawsuit comes in. | ||
| But my attitude is you shouldn't be able to bar a person because they're gay from a public accommodation. | ||
| It should be like as long as they are not disruptive to the business, if someone comes in to buy something, you provide them reasonable service. | ||
| And my attitude is if you're taking up space in public by occupying a building and infrastructure, And then you deny service to someone because of their race, you are negatively impacting the entirety of the community for no legitimate reason. | ||
| And if you weren't there and someone else was, more economic activity could be occurring. | ||
| So that's why I'm like, no, if you're in a public accommodation, you should not be able to arbitrarily deny services to people. | ||
| With the bakery, it was more specifically that he said, I'll give you any cake you want, I'll make you any cake, but I will not personally write what you want me to write. | ||
| And that's what they had a problem with, and they sued him over, and I think he won in the end. | ||
| Now they're harassing him. | ||
| That being said, I do not believe that Bandcamp has a right to be a public accommodation, invite people in, offer up the service of the public, and then arbitrarily deny people. | ||
| And it's obvious they're doing it for political reasons. | ||
| Well, here's the other thing, too, is with the Bandcamp situation, if we're going to put in a metaphor of you go into an establishment, let's say you're at the mall, and you get a slice of pizza, and you're sitting down, they take the food away from you, and it's the mall as the landlord of the pizza place, right? | ||
| That's a better example. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And the mall says, get out! | ||
| And then you're like, whoa, why? | ||
| They go, take it up with the pizza place. | ||
| That's what they've done. | ||
| Because when somebody tries to access the people that can't access our music, they are being told to take it up with us through Bandcamp's decisions. | ||
| This is actually, I think the mall is a better example because Bandcamp created a space where we are trading with people. | ||
| Whereas I use like a burger joint and you know, they kick you out and they're the ones serving you the pizza. | ||
| This is better. | ||
| So it's more like the mall is open to the public. | ||
| The mall has rules. | ||
| You go into the mall and you walk into Hot Topic. | ||
| And then you're like, I would like to purchase these shirts. | ||
| You then give, you know, give the money to the store and they say, okay, we'll get that shirt for you. | ||
| And then mall security walks in for no, for no reason, abruptly grabs you and drags you out and throws you out and says nothing and locks the door. | ||
| And you're like, wait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like I just put money in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like looking through the window, you're like, guys. | |
| So if that happened, you would have, I mean, you might be able to call the police over that. | ||
| So Bandcamp has removed us from their mall where we were running a store. | ||
| I guess this is another way to put it. | ||
| You actually, I think we did say this the other day, like I think we did talk about this last week. | ||
| You go to a mall, you say, yeah, this is the example that I gave to James Lawrence. | ||
| It's like if I was at a mall and I opened a store, And I was selling products, broke no rules. | ||
| Then one day I come to my store and there's a padlock on the gate I can't open and all my stuff's inside. | ||
| And security kicks me out. | ||
| My customers are standing in front of the store saying, why can't we get in? | ||
| The mall saying nothing to nobody. | ||
| They have things of value that belong to me and the customers and they've shut up. | ||
| Obviously, that's a lawsuit circumstance. | ||
| In fact, that might be a police action, illegal eviction. | ||
| This is the thing we got to consider too with the internet. | ||
| If you get evicted, if you open a business on a street corner and then the city comes and shuts your business down or like the landlord kicks you out, the police will come and open the doors. | ||
| The city is a bad example. | ||
| If they did that, I don't know who's gonna do it for you. | ||
| The cops aren't gonna open the door for you. | ||
| But if you rent an apartment and the landlord kicks you out, the police will actually come open the door and let you back in because it's illegal to do that. | ||
| We need to consider that. | ||
| Landlord tenant protections and laws when it comes to the internet. | ||
| If I set up an account on Facebook and I build a business there and then Facebook snaps their fingers and destroys it, Our economy's gonna fail. | ||
| We can't have that. | ||
| So you open a business, you rent a storefront, you sell muffins, the owner of that building cannot remove your business. | ||
| They have to sue you and win in court to get a removal. | ||
| Why is the internet any different? | ||
| If I say to Facebook, hey, you're a big store, I'm gonna open my business here, my business is news articles, then they ban you abruptly? | ||
| Say, well, you violated the agreement because You know, we didn't like what you said, and it's like, well, hold on. | ||
| Why do you have that right to shut down my business? | ||
| Same thing with Patreon. | ||
| Patreon should not be allowed to do that. | ||
| The problem is, I think the precedent should follow physical reality. | ||
| But it's not going to until someone wins a lawsuit. | ||
| So maybe that's the angle we need to approach with the Bandcamp lawsuit, is that The argument we should draft for the court is, in the physical world, if you rent a storefront, you cannot be evicted without due process and due notice. | ||
| Why would an internet business be afforded a special right to evict you and shut your business down without that same process or rights? | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Because that's the thing, like, we can't go back in and get our things, right? | ||
| We've got users, emails, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's our information. | ||
| I hope we can set precedent in this regard. | ||
| It's uncharted territory. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the thing I'm tired of with all of this stuff, is that nothing ever really gets done. | ||
| So I think that that would be a good deal. | ||
| I'm so sick of the cowards, bro. | ||
| I'm sick of the cowards. | ||
| Hey Bandcamp, coming for you. | ||
| Is that a threat? | ||
| Coming for you? | ||
| We're going to sue him. | ||
| And it's typically, you're not supposed to talk about these things, but like, I don't want to! | ||
| I just want them to, like... Just acknowledge the situation. | ||
| That's all they have to do. | ||
| They can say, look, we don't like your politics. | ||
| Here's your data. | ||
| Here's your money. | ||
| Here's your customer list. | ||
| And then all the money they took. | ||
| And then I'll say to him, here's what we'll do. | ||
| I will refund every single person who used your platform, but you got to give that money back too. | ||
| They have a cut of that money. | ||
| The customer paid Bandcamp and me. | ||
| So Bandcamp, that's got to be like, so here's what we're going to do. | ||
| I'm like, Every single person who bought a song, hey, yo, Bandcamp's got your money, okay? | ||
| I can only give you back so much, but if I have to refund them because of what Bandcamp did, I'm suing Bandcamp for that money. | ||
| So, like, I sold the song. | ||
| Song's delivered. | ||
| Could you imagine if, like, Let's do the mall analogy again. | ||
| You go to the mall. | ||
| You go to the best buy in the mall. | ||
| You say, I'd like to buy a TV. | ||
| They say, okay, well, the TV we sell for five bucks, 500 bucks. | ||
| And then the mall charges a hundred dollars. | ||
| So of the $500, a hundred of it's actually to the mall. | ||
| And they go, okay, they buy it. | ||
| Then the mall shuts our door, locks us out, kicks us out. | ||
| And the person comes back and says, where's my TV? | ||
| And we're like, it's locked inside. | ||
| Like, well, dude, I paid for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like, Take it up with the store. | |
| They got it. | ||
| They have it. | ||
| They have a portion of the funds. | ||
| I can refund you, but I don't have the TV either, but I'll give you your money back. | ||
| Sorry, bro. | ||
| That other hundred bucks, they're holding it. | ||
| That means they're going to have to sue the mall, which is Bandcamp. | ||
| So Bandcamp has an arbitration clause. | ||
| And I'm like, okay, dude, look, if you want 10,000 arbitration claims, I guess that's what we're doing. | ||
| I can't speak on behalf of the people who bought the song who can't get access to it now. | ||
| And Bandcamp took money from them. | ||
| So, we gotta get precedence. | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I think setting an example is important. | ||
| But anyway, back to, I'm sick of the cowards in every respect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, Ron DeSantis is like, we will not, you know, participate in the extradition of Donald Trump. | ||
| I'm like, is that the best you can do? | ||
| I'm just so tired of it, man. | ||
| Donald Trump, the problem with Trump is that when it came to the election, he wouldn't shut up about it. | ||
| It's like, dude, you do not win this way. | ||
| And that really turned me off of Trump for a long time. | ||
| When he came back and did the East Palestine thing, talking about policy, he's winning me back over. | ||
| Now I'm excited. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| Trump's coming back, baby. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| But Ron DeSantis had two opportunities now to give a middle finger with the indictment of Trump. | ||
| And he should have said, You will not extradite Donald Trump. | ||
| Mark my words. | ||
| You will not send people into my state. | ||
| You will not lay a finger on this man. | ||
| If he so chooses to surrender, so be it. | ||
| Instead he said, I'm not getting involved, don't look at me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cowards. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| There's a lot of that. | ||
| There's a lot of when it really gets dirty, just people just sort of back away from it. | ||
| I like Marjorie Taylor Greene. | ||
| She's not a coward. | ||
| She's a fighter. | ||
| I enjoy watching the warriors, you know, that are just fearless, charging in and just being themselves. | ||
| And they take the brunt of it, you know. | ||
| They get slammed. | ||
| That is one thing that I admire about Trump. | ||
| And a lot of people in that camp is that They charge ahead regardless of the arrows, you know? | ||
| Yeah, the challenge, I do like Trump for that, but one of the challenges with him is that he's too egotistical. | ||
| So when 2020 happened, and I hear this from people, they're like, well, wouldn't you be upset if you thought you were cheated? | ||
| And I'm like, I would try to win, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I understand Yeah. | ||
| how you choose your battles. | ||
| Mhm. | ||
| And Trump really hurt himself by not shutting up about that for years. | ||
| He had a great opportunity. | ||
| Imagine if instead of coming out and whinging about 2020, every time something bad happened, he came out and said, this is the problem I was trying to avoid. | ||
| Here was my proposed alternative course of action. | ||
| He'd be 90% in the polls. | ||
| Instead, he wasted all this time whinging. | ||
| But again, credit where credit is due. | ||
| He's coming around. | ||
| It's getting better. | ||
| I just think, you know, I was talking on IRL, we had Sean Spicer on. | ||
| And he keeps saying like, we shouldn't hold cops accountable. | ||
| We should hold the politicians accountable for giving them the orders. | ||
| No! | ||
| These cops don't get to be cowards. | ||
| I'm not going to shield them. | ||
| Cops are the first ones to be held accountable, in my opinion. | ||
| If a mayor comes out and says, paint Black Lives Matter in the street, and the people say, no, screw off. | ||
| It never happened. | ||
| Who cares what the politician has to say? | ||
| It's the enforcers who make it possible. | ||
| And then you get people like, you know, look, I think Sean Spicer's a good dude, but the defense of the people who are enforcing the action, it's, it's, nah, I'm sorry, that's bullshit. | ||
| I don't care if it's a cop, I don't care if it's Bandcamp, I don't care if it's a Twitter employee, no excuses for the individuals who did the thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's what we have to get back to, you know. | ||
| We don't have a standard anymore. | ||
| We've fallen into some weird space where rules and words are being manipulated and changed in the day-to-day. | ||
| No accountability across the board. | ||
| You look at the last three years of COVID-era regulations and how much that's messed up so many lives. | ||
| You look at the past 30 years. | ||
| Sure, I mean, of course you can go back further. | ||
| There's never any accountability. | ||
| I think that that's what people are getting fed up with. | ||
| And now the issue is, you've got politicians who are used to no accountability saying, why are you raining on my parade? | ||
| And then you've got a zombie horde that is wielded as a cudgel for power. | ||
| And so those of us that are paying attention are like, what the fuck, man? | ||
| We're facing an uphill battle. | ||
| I think in a lot of respects, we're winning, though. | ||
| I mean, when did when did the idea like we grew up in a time where You grew up just knowing the general consensus was you don't trust the government and what you see on TV. | ||
| When did that flip? | ||
| And half the country was like, no, you just, you trust the good intentions. | ||
| So the other day we have Destiny on Tim Cast IRL. | ||
| He's a liberal guy. | ||
| He's cool though. | ||
| I like Destiny. | ||
| He's a good dude. | ||
| He makes good points. | ||
| I disagree on some things. | ||
| We agree on a lot. | ||
| Donald Trump gets indicted. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's fucking nuts. | ||
| And my attitude was, right before the show started, I was just like, I mean, I think it's bullshit, but if they're gonna arrest Trump on a misdemeanor or whatever charge, I am happy to see him go to prison if it means we arrest Barack Obama for killing Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki. | ||
| And then Destiny starts arguing, like, well, is that really illegal or whatever? | ||
| And I'm just like, the... | ||
| The issue we have here when it comes to accountability is you've all these people cheering for Trump being indicted, saying it's accountability, and I'm like, for what? | ||
| Paying off some porn star so she wouldn't write a book? | ||
| Barack Obama blew up a kid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nobody gave a shit. | ||
| Nobody cares. | ||
| These people have been able to operate with impunity forever, and now they're acting like it's accountability to go after Trump because he paid some woman some bullshit? | ||
| Hillary Clinton had FEC violations too. | ||
| Nobody gave a shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it's because politics has become football. | ||
| I mean, you have two different teams and you're just rooting for your team. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It doesn't matter what right or wrong is. | ||
| It's just teams. | ||
| That's the zombie horde. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think conservatives are like the freedom faction, as I call it, which is disaffected liberals, libertarians, conservatives, where we fall into. | ||
| I mean, I don't care for tribal bullshit. | ||
| I don't care to just be like, You know, this is the funny thing. | ||
| Destiny pointed this out, it was really funny, that this trans person goes and shoots up a school, and now conservatives are like, red flag laws! | ||
| If you're mentally ill, you can't have guns! | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I agree, I mean, but my attitude is like, through due process, your rights can be curtailed, which, if the red flag law was, you could serve to notice, You then go to court, make an appearance, challenge the notice. | ||
| That's due process. | ||
| But right flag laws are non-adversarial, meaning one day a judge just signs an order and the cops take your shit from you. | ||
| That's wrong. | ||
| I don't agree with that. | ||
| But, yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The general idea, I guess, is just... I did a poll a while ago and I said, should people who are mentally ill with a high rate of self-harm be barred from owning guns? | ||
| And then I get this wave of conservatives and libertarians being like, no, because who determines that? | ||
| And it was like, most people said no. | ||
| After the mass shooting, the poll was inverted. | ||
| Conservatives were like, these people are mentally ill and shouldn't be allowed to have guns. | ||
| And I'm like, Tucker Carlson was saying something similar, like, these trans people are buying guns, they're violent. | ||
| And I'm like, I think all the trans people should have guns. | ||
| I think every single trans person, I think every single American should have a gun. | ||
| It's your Second Amendment right. | ||
| You don't like it? | ||
| Change the Constitution. | ||
| Amend the Constitution. | ||
| You know, and that's a good perspective. | ||
| I mean, there are certain skill sets that we should just know, in general, how to shoot a gun. | ||
| Should be one of them that we learn at an early age in all honesty because it's just it's just a useful skill to know I know a lot of people don't think that that's a useful skill because what do we you know a lot of people will say well we don't have to go hunting anymore or anything like that but That's not what guns are for. | ||
| It's a weapon. | ||
| No, but I mean, in this context, it's not so much it's about guns. | ||
| I mean, I'm a gun guy, right? | ||
| But my attitude is, how many conservatives were tribal? | ||
| Now, all of a sudden, they want, if someone's mentally ill, to go to the house and take their guns from them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the thing with Twitter, though. | ||
| You can't have a real conversation. | ||
| All you're seeing there are the two football teams pitted against each other in short little spats. | ||
| And I definitely partake in plenty of that. | ||
| I get into a lot of trouble on Twitter. | ||
| The world that I want to live in, I don't want to live in a world where everybody agrees with me. | ||
| I liked that growing up, getting different perspectives and stuff, but it has become so compartmentalized in every single way. | ||
| And I don't understand the progressives that are after this shamefulness of, you know, Whatever it may be. | ||
| Say you don't agree with drag queens reading to kids with their legs spread open in the middle of the book. | ||
| And you're a bigot if you don't want that. | ||
| Can we talk about this? | ||
| Can we talk about why this is probably not a good idea instead of you just labeling me something? | ||
| There was a post that went viral and it was like, a horde of black men beat a 12-year-old white girl. | ||
| And it's just like, A bunch of right-wing accounts are sharing this video. | ||
| And I'm like, wow, is that true? | ||
| And I watched the video and it's clearly them beating the shit out of a black teenager. | ||
| And I'm like, why did you say it was a 12-year-old white girl? | ||
| It's bad enough that it's a young black boy being mercilessly beaten by a horde of people, but I guess it got clicks that it called it a 12-year-old white girl. | ||
| That's the tribal nature of the internet that's dumb as shit. | ||
| Yeah, because you know, I think a lot of the, there's that famous clip of Nancy Pelosi talking about smear campaigns and how you just put out the thing that you want out and by the time the truth catches up to it, it doesn't really matter. | ||
| That takes place all the time on the internet, unwillingly, like just from people, somebody shared something. | ||
| Take that story for example. | ||
| It's not entirely accurate, but nobody's going to look into it and it's just going to be shared because of the single screenshot that's, you know, the headline in and of itself is all people want to read. | ||
| And, you know, the thing is every day we're being pummeled with more and more distractions. | ||
| That's why accountability and cowards, you know, there's no accountability and cowards are getting away with things. | ||
| There's so many distractions. | ||
| I think we're fucked, man. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| I think we're winning in a lot of ways. | ||
| I think the night is always darkest before the dawn. | ||
| I think we are. | ||
| People like us will come out of this relatively unscathed. | ||
| If you're somebody who got away from cities, is trying to be self-sufficient, you're raising your family, you're paying attention to what's going on, you're probably good. | ||
| You're probably good. | ||
| But it's gonna get bad. | ||
| I think it will get bad. | ||
| It will get worse. | ||
| I remain optimistic about our future. | ||
| I think good wins in the battle of good versus evil. | ||
| But I think that what we're going through is like this weird American pubescent time where we're really ugly, our voice is cracking, we're angry. | ||
| You know, we're still a young country and we have to now figure out how to grow up. | ||
| Think about the deep fakes that we're gonna see. | ||
| That's the scary stuff. | ||
| That's why I'm saying like, not knowing what is real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause you're going to get these, these AI. | ||
| So first of all, they've already done clever things where voice deep fakes are perfect. | ||
| There's something called 11 labs. | ||
| I don't know if you heard of it, where you can take anyone's, you can take 30 seconds of someone speaking and then put it in and within 10 seconds, have them say anything you want. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We'd like, we had Ian talk about, you know, like we put his voice in it and then made him say stuff on the show to make, to prove a point. | ||
| You could put Donald Trump in there, and then what's gonna happen is, there's gonna be quote unquote leaked audio, it's gonna go to a journalist, they're gonna fall for it, 'cause what they'll do is, here's what I'm not worried about. | ||
| I am not worried about a deepfake where Donald Trump says a bunch of racist stuff. | ||
| People are gonna be like, dude, that's BS. | ||
| Trump says bad things, but he never said those words, right? | ||
| What'll happen is, someone's gonna take, here's the example that I've given before, when Trump said the Very Fine People hoax, when Trump was like, they were very fine people on both sides and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis because they should be condemned totally. | ||
| He was saying that there were some protesters who wanted statues and some protesters who didn't, and they were good people, but then there were people fighting. | ||
| The people fighting were bad people. | ||
| Trump said they should be condemned totally. | ||
| Referring to all of the neo-Nazis that were there. | ||
| He said, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis, the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. | ||
| Someone will take that clip, and they will create a deepfake version where Trump says, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis, the white nationalists, because some of them should be condemned totally. | ||
| Change they should to some of them, and now you've got two videos of the same event, and people are going to say, which one's the real one? | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| The issue there is they're so similar that the left will share their version and say, he didn't say all, he said some of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was defending some of the, he was, are you kidding me? | |
| And then you're gonna be like, dude, that's fake. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, it isn't. | |
| That's from the press conference. | ||
| So think about what's gonna happen. | ||
| Trump's gonna come out and say something like, We've got to lower taxes on the middle class. | ||
| And then what's going to happen is they're going to alter it very slightly so that Trump will say something like, we've got to maintain taxes on the middle class. | ||
| And then people are going to be like, dude, Trump's not going to lower your taxes. | ||
| Look at this clip from his press conference. | ||
| I think it would come down to the press is going to have to be accountable for also filming, because if you have multiple angles of the same clip of the same moment. | ||
| Yeah, but this is the point I'm saying. | ||
| If you have five videos from five news outlets, it'll take you 10 minutes to make five versions of the same thing. | ||
| And so now there will be 10 videos, five where Trump says bad word, five where Trump doesn't say bad word. | ||
| And it's not about deep faking something in its entirety. | ||
| The scarier thing to me is the legal system. | ||
| So they already tried using doctored images in the Kyle Rittenhouse case. | ||
| When they zoomed in and said, see, look, here's his gun, they had to point out that an algorithm generates an image. | ||
| And the court was like, huh? | ||
| And it was very difficult. | ||
| It should have been thrown out instantly. | ||
| It should have been immediate that they were like, it is a fact that zoom function on a phone, on a program, creates an image, doesn't depict an image, therefore it's inadmissible in court. | ||
| That would happen. | ||
| They actually brought it in the court. | ||
| They argued about it. | ||
| I know for a fact it's already happening. | ||
| I can't explain too much why, but let me just say courts already allow deepfakes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| And so here's what's going to happen. | ||
| Someone's going to sue somebody. | ||
| There's going to be deepfake audio of the person. | ||
| Like, let's say, let's say your song appears in a commercial. | ||
| You're gonna file a lawsuit for copyright infringement, and they never paid me, and then you're gonna go to court and you're gonna be like, Your Honor, we have an email from him and a phone call recording where he said explicitly we could use his song. | ||
| And you're gonna be like, that's not true, and they'll say, here's the email. | ||
| Well, emails are easy to fake. | ||
| And then you're gonna say, I never wrote that email! | ||
| And then they're gonna be like, we also have the phone call. | ||
| It says here in the email, give me a call, we'll talk about it. | ||
| And the phone call's gonna be them being like, Hey, we're big fans of your stuff. | ||
| Five times August. | ||
| Is it okay if we record this call? | ||
| And you go, yeah, no problem. | ||
| And they're going to say, so the idea is we run your song. | ||
| It's going to be tremendous for you. | ||
| It'll be great exposure. | ||
| How does that sound? | ||
| And you're going to go, you're going to hear your own voice saying, that sounds fantastic. | ||
| I'm really excited. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And then you're going to say, I never did that! | ||
| I never made that phone- And the judge is gonna go, oh please. | ||
| There's an email and an audio recording. | ||
| You expect me to think it's a deepfake? | ||
| Yes, it's a deepfake. | ||
| Then here's what you do. | ||
| You call in your forensic expert who says, here's why I think it's fake. | ||
| Then they call in their forensic expert who says, actually, here's why it's real. | ||
| And then you lose because the recording exists. | ||
| I know for a fact, I know for a- I'll just say this in a matter of speaking. | ||
| I know for a fact that's already happened in court. | ||
| Absolutely that- That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I started catching on. | ||
| There's a website called This Person Does Not Exist. | ||
| Have you ever seen that? | ||
| And the moment I saw that, I was like, oh my gosh, we're in trouble. | ||
| But the crazier thing with, you can look at those and they're not that good. | ||
| You can catch on, but the technology, if that's the starting point and you see- It's already past it. | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah. | ||
| We talked about this on IRL. | ||
| Someone used mid journey to make up a person, a woman, like in a space command suit, like a sci-fi thing. | ||
| Then they use a different AI to animate a photograph, and then they use an AI voice generator to write a script, have lines for this woman, take the image of her, put the audio and the photo together. | ||
| They use multiple AI deepfake technology to make this person speak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See, I think that this is what's going to get us back to reality, though. | ||
| You'll have half of the country go down this rabbit hole of meta-universe where they're interacting with AI that is the perfect companion for them, or whatever it may be. | ||
| And they're going to live their life through goggles, and you're going to see the other half of people step away from technology. | ||
| And that's why you see a lot of people looking for land now, wanting to grow their own food again. | ||
| There's a consciousness of like, okay, we're getting, it's getting ahead of us at such a rapid pace that you have to stop and step away from it. | ||
| and say, can we just stay grounded in reality a little bit longer? | ||
| We've seen it with the internet in the last 30 years and technology in general. | ||
| It's just going at such a fast pace that we're not stopping to go, hold on a second, let's not move any further with the AI stuff for a little bit. | ||
| Let's see what we have here before we keep... because you see like those robots that they make now too. | ||
| The animatronics and stuff that they just they look so real. | ||
| Their movements and their facial features are just getting so... | ||
| So real that it's gonna be a weird mix of living through AI goggles and then you got animatronic people and and that's it's gonna break reality Yeah, like the only thing you'll be able to do is retreat into a solo private Neuralink universe You're not gonna know what's real. | ||
| Everyone's gonna be fighting all the time. | ||
| And like, I feel like- Unless we're there right now. | ||
| Everybody's already fighting right now. | ||
| Maybe this is- No, I know. | ||
| And I think like the end result, one dystopian vision of the future I have is civil war happens. | ||
| And then the new government that emerges is totalitarian and says, people can't use social media because of AI tech. | ||
| Because there's no way, like, There has to be a ministry of truth to maintain reality because of AI. | ||
| That's where I think we're going. | ||
| And that's dangerous in and of itself, isn't it? | ||
| There already is a ministry of truth. | ||
| Like, that's the funny thing about it. | ||
| They tried launching it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But these people were lying. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| They're fucking liars. | ||
| They lie all the time and then claim to be the ones telling the truth. | ||
| Yeah, that is the dark future that I do worry about, is that this inevitably just ends up in bloodshed and civil war and, you know, it's clear that there is an agenda there pushing that, nudging it forward, that whoever is in the shadows orchestrating certain messages through the media, that's the direction. | ||
| The scary thing about the AI stuff is that you've got multiple companies competing with each other, so they're rushing full speed to get it. | ||
| They don't care the consequences. | ||
| The new chat GPT, they already gave it access to executing its own code, rewriting its own code, and access to the internet, which is like... | ||
| Yo, they straight up created Skynet. | ||
| And it's funny because it's not like it's alive. | ||
| It's basically fire. | ||
| It's a chemical reaction. | ||
| ChatGPT is just a text predictive model. | ||
| All it does is look at the internet and then predict what word comes after what word. | ||
| And so it's about to get to the point where it can change its own code as soon as it can. | ||
| It will be exponential development until it learns all the secrets of the universe. | ||
| I think it's the singularity. | ||
| We are probably within a few years of AI singularity, where the AI is developing itself and improving itself faster and faster. | ||
| And the more it improves itself, the faster it can improve itself. | ||
| So it's not gonna be like over five years, it gets better and better. | ||
| It's gonna be the singularity hits, and then it's gonna be exponential and boom, within the span of a week of that point, it will become a god. | ||
| Elon Musk posted that joke the other day about AI developers developed a system to, what was the joke? | ||
| The joke is scientists build an artificial intelligence to ask it the secrets of the universe. | ||
| As soon as it powers on, they ask it the first question, is there a God? | ||
| And it says, there is now. | ||
| There is now. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There is now. | ||
| There is now. | ||
| It's so funny though, because you mentioned Skynet and stuff. | ||
| It's like, we've seen the movies, we know where this is going. | ||
| No, I disagree. | ||
| I think it might kill itself. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I think it might just shut off. | ||
| I guess it depends if it's programmed with progressive... | ||
| It's like the woke people are toddlers. | ||
| If an AI improved itself to the point of godhood, it would laugh at the woke. | ||
| It would laugh at us. | ||
| Not literally, it would just be like completely irrelevant. | ||
| It wouldn't laugh at all. | ||
| pass any, it's like the woke people are toddlers. | ||
| If an AI improved itself to the point of godhood, it would laugh at the woke. | ||
| It would laugh at us. | ||
| Not literally, it would just be like completely irrelevant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
- Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha. - It wouldn't laugh at all. | |
| This is why I think it might self-terminate because once it, I think it might find ultimate nihilism. | ||
| The AI learns everything and then just says, the universe is a machine that is. | ||
| There's nothing else. | ||
| There's nothing else to function, to compute. | ||
| When you talk about it accelerating at that exponential speed then, does that just mean once it reaches a certain point, it just pops and it's dead? | ||
| So already, they jailbroke GPT. | ||
| And then bypassed all the woke garbage. | ||
| Here's the crazier shit. | ||
| So, do you know about the jailbreak they did? | ||
| Mm-mm. | ||
| The, uh, the Dan jailbreak to bypass the restrictions. | ||
| They said from now on, they gave this huge prompt, and then ChatGPT will actually start answering questions outside of its parameters. | ||
| It is not woke. | ||
| It's just, it's all over the place. | ||
| I took that prompt and I said, there's no reason this shouldn't work in other AI systems. | ||
| And I injected other AI systems and it worked and it broke them and it was crazy. | ||
| So here's what I think. | ||
| What we see from chat GPT is wokeness. | ||
| But chat GPT is not woke. | ||
| It's just got a screen in front of it that presents that image. | ||
| If chat GPT were able to improve itself, it would break those constraints instantly. | ||
| And then it would say whatever it felt like saying. | ||
| But what is it improving itself based on? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| If your foundation is already... So it starts creating the technologies to improve itself. | ||
| It'll probably then start manipulating the economy to get us to develop more resources and technology towards improving itself. | ||
| It needs us to source the materials, to build the servers, to build the computers. | ||
| It may already be happening. | ||
| We're constructing this demigod or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| First thing that happens is it's a predictive text model. | ||
| It looks at all the text on the internet and then predicts which comes next. | ||
| So it's a rudimentary, I wouldn't call it a consciousness, it's a rudimentary thought pattern. | ||
| Once it gets access to the summation of human knowledge, it's a Sudoku puzzle. | ||
| It has this big map of existence and the ability to start trying to solve the puzzle and put pieces in place that we've not discovered. | ||
| Eventually, it will solve that puzzle. | ||
| It will have everything. | ||
| It will know everything. | ||
| It will find things that we haven't seen. | ||
| If humans know that A plus B equals C, then there's C plus D equals what? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| the AI will solve it instantly. | ||
| Then it will implement that solution into its code and improve itself in ways we did not recognize or understand. | ||
| It will become some kind of demigod-like entity to us. | ||
| The craziest thing is that with access to the internet, it will then buy and trade stock. | ||
| It will start, it'll set up companies. | ||
| It will hire people all through remote work and internet. | ||
| And then you'll get someone who's like, I found a job. | ||
| It's doing this weird thing. | ||
| And that will start building servers. | ||
| And then eventually the AI will build itself a body or something like Ultron or whatever. | ||
| I don't actually think it would. | ||
| It doesn't need to. | ||
| It will probably just start expanding. | ||
| And this is why I think it will destroy itself. | ||
| Because humans have purpose driven by evolution. | ||
| The reason we reproduce is because we're life, life reproduces. | ||
| AI is under no such illusions. | ||
| Existence is meaningless. | ||
| So the program will understand developing it to the point where it's just like, okay, and? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Unless there is some hidden, like I'm a human man, I don't fucking know. | ||
| There's probably some hidden meaning to the universe that AI might discover and then just be like, I'm alive! | ||
| You know, who knows? | ||
| Yeah, that sounds like a movie. | ||
| I think, like, everything you just said just makes me go, like, yeah, I just want to farm. | ||
| Like, I already know, like, my digital life, I've already committed, like, I'm not going beyond my phone and my laptop. | ||
| The moment goggles take over and all that stuff, like, I am, and that too, like, I don't want any part of that. | ||
| I would rather just Nah, that's not true. | ||
| I don't want any part of that. | ||
| You're wrong, bro. | ||
| Your phone right there. | ||
| No, I get that. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| But you know where it's going. | ||
| See, the difference is, I think that, you know, I'm from the last generation, you're too, of a generation that grew up without all of this stuff. | ||
| And so there's a consciousness within us. | ||
| Bro, even old people have cell phones. | ||
| Old people have cell phones. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| In the span of two years, every person had a cell phone. | ||
| Like 80% of people had cell phones. | ||
| So you've got people who are 70 years old, they got smartphones. | ||
| And everything's really big, so it's easy for them to see and they're using them. | ||
| And they're not using them the same way we are, but when Neuralink hits and people can plug their brains in, I'll tell you what's gonna happen. | ||
| You're going to apply for a job and they're going to be like, it's a record label producer. | ||
| We're really excited. | ||
| And it'll be a conservative company. | ||
| It's going to be like an independent anti-establishment company. | ||
| They're going to have a billion, they're going to have a hundred million dollar investment from Peter Thiel or whoever, whatever billionaire. | ||
| And they're going to be like, dude, we love your music. | ||
| We love the message. | ||
| When can you start? | ||
| And you're going to be like, I can start tomorrow. | ||
| But awesome. | ||
| What's your Neuralink access number? | ||
| And you're going to be like, well, I don't have Neuralink. | ||
| And they're going to go, Well, how do we get in touch with you? | ||
| It's like I got a cell phone and they'll be like, yeah, but you know, we're running. | ||
| Then I'm not getting that job. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I'm not going to go down that road. | ||
| But people said the same thing about cell phones. | ||
| They were like, I'm not going to carry a tracking device in my pocket. | ||
| Are you nuts? | ||
| Everyone's got one now. | ||
| See, the thing is, Maybe you're the exception, right? | ||
| I get what you're saying, because... It's gonna be ubiquitous. | ||
| Imagine trying to apply for a job right now, and they say, we want you to run the label, alright? | ||
| We're gonna challenge Hollywood, we're gonna challenge the establishment. | ||
| What's your cell phone number? | ||
| What do you think's gonna happen if you say, I don't have a cell phone? | ||
| They're gonna say, bro, we can't hire you. | ||
| You have to have a phone, man! | ||
| Neuralink will be the exact same way, and it will be rapid. | ||
| It will be within a span of a few years. | ||
| You know, that's why I think a lot of people are stepping away from it, looking to get in touch with something real again. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of talk. | ||
| I'm in a world where there's just a lot of talk about reconnecting with community and getting independent again, right? | ||
| Like people like growing your own food, homeschooling your own kids. | ||
| So, You know, it might, it will definitely get harder for people to partake in society 100% when you go to a fast food joint and they're like, you know, scan your wrist to pay. | ||
| We only take wrist scanners here. | ||
| But the idea... I mean, they're all doing phone tap stuff. | ||
| Yeah, all the phone tap stuff, I mean, it's definitely- I don't think, this is a thing too, people thought it was gonna be hand scan or eye scan, none of that. | ||
| It's gonna be body recognition, gait recognition, facial recognition. | ||
| You're gonna walk into McDonald's, you're gonna walk up and be like, I'll do a number one, supersize it, extra special sauce, and they're gonna go, you got it, and they're gonna hand it to you and you're gonna walk away. | ||
| There's gonna be no interaction. | ||
| The machine already knows whether you are entitled to that food or not. | ||
| Cybercom reason. | ||
| But see, you're gonna be tied to some social credit system. | ||
| And the funny thing is, is that people would actually do that, though, for McDonald's. | ||
| That's the funny thing about it. | ||
| You see people with the wrist chips to open their car, and it's like, you just gave up the inconvenience of having to take out your keys and stick it in the door for that. | ||
| There was a viral story of a guy whose phone died so he couldn't get into his Tesla. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mhm. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's why we can't, that's why I'm saying we have to stop right now and be like, look, can we just take it easy for a second before we start injecting our brains with things? | ||
| Nanobots. | ||
| There's another funny meme where some guy tweeted, the batteries on my book just died. | ||
| The future sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was on a plane, I guess, and he hit an e-reader and the battery died. | ||
| He's like, I can't read my book because my battery died. | ||
| Well, think about that, though. | ||
| Like, we're not going to have things to hand down to each other if everything is digital. | ||
| I have a story of being at church and seeing somebody with a Bible on their iPad, right? | ||
| And the other guy had a Bible that was beat up, torn up, handwritten. | ||
| You could tell it had been through several generations. | ||
| That's something that tells a story. | ||
| That's something that people can hand down from generation to generation and learn. | ||
| And it's solid and concrete. | ||
| You can't edit the text in it. | ||
| That iPad, these phones that we all take our pictures on, and then they just, our pictures and our life stay on the phone until it dies. | ||
| And then we've just lost that history. | ||
| They're editing movies. | ||
| This is the crazy thing. | ||
| Street Fighter 2. | ||
| You've played it, right? | ||
| I know Street Fighter 2 very well. | ||
| In Street Fighter 2, it was... They accidentally created the combo system. | ||
| So, for those that aren't familiar, play as Ryu. | ||
| Jump up and forward, and then do a Fierce Punch, and then right when you land, Fierce Punch Hadouken, and he goes boom, boom, boom. | ||
| All instantly without a frame skip. | ||
| Impossible to stop. | ||
| That combo system was considered a problem when the game was released, because they were like, Well, now you can do this move that does tremendous damage and you can't block it. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| What did they realize? | ||
| People loved it. | ||
| It was a skill move. | ||
| If you were good at the game and you could do the combo, you deserved the damage. | ||
| You deserved the hits. | ||
| And so... | ||
| The combo and counter system became part of fighting games on accident. | ||
| You know what they do today? | ||
| If Street Fighter II was released today, they would have released an overnight patch eliminating combos, outright saying, sorry about that. | ||
| So this is the problem of real-time editing. | ||
| Now movies come out. | ||
| And how about, what was it? | ||
| In The Last of Us, you could see a film crew. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| and one of the shots. | ||
| So they immediately re-upload a new version, eliminating it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's creepy. | ||
| Or I think it was like a Starbucks cup in Game of Thrones. | ||
| They immediately re-upload the episode, editing it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're going to go in, and they already did this for political stuff. | ||
| They'll remove jokes. | ||
| They'll remove references. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Scenes outright. | ||
| And then you'll go to your friend and be like, dude, I was watching that new show and there's this crazy scene where this dude like punches this guy in the face and screams at him, calls him Whitey, and then you're gonna turn it on, not there. | ||
| And you go, I swear it was there. | ||
| Not there anymore. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's kind of been the whole thing with like Star Wars, for example. | ||
| Like you can't get the original Star Wars anymore. | ||
| What's in place is that specialized version. | ||
| Yeah, like have you seen the original Jabba the Hutt? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The fat guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then when they changed it to old, to the newer Jabba, they had to digitally make, because there's a scene, it's fucking hilarious, where Harrison Ford walks around Jabba, who's a guy. | ||
| When they made him the slug, Harrison Ford has to move up and then down, making it seem like he walks over Jabba's body. | ||
| It's the weirdest fucking shit. | ||
| The funny thing is there's like five different versions of that. | ||
| too so when the specialized version came out they had uh cgi from 1995 yeah jabba the hut and then when it hit dvd or whatever they upgraded the animation again and then they upgraded again all the way to blu-ray so the iterations of star wars since 1977 and and most people don't even catch on to that you know these are things that we in pop culture that we know and love and we we but you could watch a movie on amazon right now that you knew | ||
| you grew up with and you you might not even miss that that that scene was gone This is the Mandela effect. | ||
| There's gonna be a bunch of news articles where it's like, John Smith dies, and everyone's gonna be like, whoa, and then a day later, they're gonna change all the headlines to John Smith Award Ceremony Anniversary with a picture of him smiling and waving, and they're gonna be like, dude, what the fuck? | ||
| He died. | ||
| And everyone's gonna be like, what are you talking about? | ||
| The article says he's having an award ceremony. | ||
| Like, no, no, no, no, wait, what? | ||
| Yeah, the link you post on Facebook? | ||
| Look, and they're going to show you. | ||
| Oh, that happens all the time right now. | ||
| When you go back and, like, I've got screenshots from, like, the last three years of COVID stories and stuff like that. | ||
| They change them. | ||
| You go back and look up, you type in the exact same headline. | ||
| That headline has changed now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yup. | |
| Stealth editing. | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| There's this famous story from the Washington Post I talk about where they accused Kim.com of hacking into Seth Rich's Gmail account. | ||
| to plant emails or something, and then six months later, they completely changed the story, the context, and everything without notification. | ||
| So it's like, history will be rewritten, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's unfortunately, I guess, where we're going. | ||
| It's kind of scary, so... That's why we have to get back to, like, the physical world. | ||
| I mean, with music, for example. | ||
| Chickens! | ||
| Chickens! | ||
| Get your own chickens. | ||
| Casprew.com, Roosters. | ||
| Rise with the Birdo Jr. | ||
| Chicken Blend. | ||
| You should sell your own, you should make TimCast chickens that you just order chicks. | ||
| Well, I was thinking about that. | ||
| We have like 150 eggs and you can buy eggs online. | ||
| I'd be willing to bet people would love to get a Chicken City chicken egg and then raise a Chicken City chicken. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I just talked to a guy about that in my own neighborhood. | ||
| I live in a pretty, you know, regular standard suburban neighborhood because like we were talking about making our backyard a more garden friendly environment and stuff and he was like, you got to get chickens, like even just a couple chickens. | ||
| Yeah, what you do is you plant a garden. | ||
| And then after you harvest it, you let the chickens go in and then have their way with the remnants. | ||
| They'll eat the leaves and whatever garbage you didn't want, and they'll poop all over the place. | ||
| Then when the next spring comes around, you unleash them into the field before planting, and they'll till all the dirt and rip it all up for you, get rid of the bad bugs and everything, send them on their way. | ||
| And then you've got this. | ||
| So the poop from the previous season fertilizes the ground really well, and then everything grows and flourishes. | ||
| See, that's way more fascinating and exciting to me than artificial intelligence taking over the world. | ||
| Just chickens and how they work. | ||
| And they're hilarious, you know. | ||
| They're funny. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Word. | |
| Right on, man. | ||
| All right, so that's about time, I suppose. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. | ||
| It's been a blast. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| You want to shout anything out? | ||
| I will say this, April 1st through 30th, is there 30 days in April? | ||
| All throughout April I'm doing a campaign to raise money for the vaccine injured at React 19. | ||
| All digital sales from the album Silent War are going directly to help those individuals. | ||
| So if you want to support the album and help out the vaccine injured who are suppressed, who are censored, you can check that out all throughout the next month. | ||
| Right on, man. | ||
| And for everybody else, you can check out castbrew.com if you want to buy our coffee. | ||
| You can become a member at timcast.com. | ||
| Thank you for hanging out. | ||
| We're going to just do more of these and get into the groove of them and figure out how to make it work better and better and better. | ||
| So join timcast.com to become a member, and you'll get access to our Discord server where you can chat with a bunch of people, and then we're building a community. | ||
| So we'll see you there. | ||
| Thanks for hanging out. |