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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| We're hanging out with Mark Pellegrino and Brett Dasovic. | ||
| Mark, do you want to introduce yourself real quick? | ||
| Hi, I'm Mark Pellegrino, a Hollywood actor and entrepreneur of other things like liberty. | ||
| That's good stuff. | ||
| Whenever I ask people, they're like, oh, he's Lucifer. | ||
| It's like supernatural. | ||
| Well, I do feel like Lucifer. | ||
| Lucifer was the first rebel, right? | ||
| He rebelled against arbitrary authority. | ||
| So I feel like I'm in, I'm really walking in his footsteps. | ||
| Right on. | ||
| I'm Brad Host, Pop Culture Crisis. | ||
| Yes, hello. | ||
| Very excited to be here. | ||
| Yeah, so the context, I suppose, as to why you're here is you're a radical capitalist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| You make these videos on YouTube, but you're also in Hollywood, and it seems like if in any way you're deviating from leftist orthodoxy, you're in the crosshairs in Hollywood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So, you know, that's interesting. | ||
| It's potentially interesting. | ||
| I mean, but you could be in the crosshairs and it's a stealth crosshair, so you don't know that you're being slowly excommunicated from Hollywood, but you are. | ||
| for your beliefs. | ||
| The good news is when you're a radical capitalist, you you're at first glance, you appear to be a Republican to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But once they dig beneath the surface, they see that you're not. | ||
| And so they don't know how to place you. | ||
| So that's good news. | ||
| The good news is they can't say, oh, you're a conservative, you're a Republican. | ||
| Actually, I'm not, I'm actually a liberal. | ||
| And I've been trying to steal back that term for a long time. | ||
| When I went on Dave Rubin, he was calling the left liberals. | ||
| I said, no, no, no, that gives them moral authority they don't deserve. | ||
| We're the liberals. | ||
| We're the liberals, and we have to steal back that name. | ||
| Dave used to do that. | ||
| Dave would call himself a classical liberal. | ||
| And I think he got that. | ||
| I'm not going to take credit for that, but I will. | ||
| I think he got that from me. | ||
| Classical liberalism is more like old school, like 1700s, very individualist. | ||
| Yeah, Jeffersonian liberalism. | ||
| So, I think some good context for people. | ||
| What big roles have you done? | ||
| Obviously, Lucifer and Supernatural is why people mention it. | ||
| We've got people here who are huge fans and they're gushing that you're here. | ||
| But what are some other roles that you've done that people might know you from? | ||
| Jacob from Lost, which I was doing at the same time as I was doing Lucifer, so a lot of people don't understand how you could play God and the Devil in the same week, but I did that and it's actually not a stretch. | ||
| And I was in Dexter TV show, Dexter, the first, I guess, season and right up into the first episode of the second season. | ||
| I played Dexter's nemesis. | ||
| We were in a love triangle with my ex, my ex-wife. | ||
| Good show. | ||
| I was not a good guy. | ||
| In fact, when people meet me on the street and they are fans of Dexter, they're like, oh my God, you were Paul from Dexter. | ||
| You were such an asshole. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| I guess I did my job. | ||
| I'm also on American Rust right now, which was on Showtime. | ||
| We did season two. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's for freebie, but don't shoot me if that's wrong. | |
| Season two is gonna be phenomenal. | ||
| If you like season one, season two is gonna be great. | ||
| And you know, there's the big Lebowski, which a lot of people seem to like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah, absolutely. | |
| I was a small cog in that machine, but it was a fun machine to be a part of. | ||
| The Returned as well. | ||
| Oh, The Returned, yeah. | ||
| That's Carlton Cuse from Lost, who is one of the creators. | ||
| Executive producers have lost. | ||
| I think that show should have gotten a season two. | ||
| I think it really ramped up and got pretty good towards the end. | ||
| There was a couple of shows at that time period that I was really, that, The Returned and Resurrection were all shows, were kind of shows that had similar concepts. | ||
| And I was enjoying that kind of weird aspect of Hollywood where they were kind of trying to go the M. Night Shyamalan route on like network television for a couple of years with like Wayward Pines and these other shows that I was, I was actually a really big fan of, but I actually feel like they were prototypical and probably would have thrived more once we went into the streaming, to the streaming era. | ||
| You're probably right. | ||
| Because they would have been able to be written out further in advance. | ||
| Ours was a remake of a French show called Le Revenant. | ||
| It was almost a shot-for-shot remake. | ||
| It's stuck very purely to the original, but we don't have the French sensibility, so I don't know that it translated over as well. | ||
| They shot it with a different texture. | ||
| It's interesting too because now considering people can't seem to find a way to get any of these companies to do shot for shot remakes other than The Last of Us, people would like that now given that they take so many liberties with most of the shows that they make. | ||
| Are you a fan of The Last of Us? | ||
| I didn't really care. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I liked it. | |
| Sacrilege! | ||
| It was fine. | ||
| But it had no heart to me. | ||
| It had no heart? | ||
| It had no heart to me. | ||
| No heart? | ||
| I thought it was all heart. | ||
| I didn't play the game so I should have been the target audience. | ||
| That's sin number two. | ||
| But I didn't play the game either and I did like it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
However, I didn't say I didn't like it, I said it was fine. | |
| I was obsessed with the game. | ||
| I was doing The Returned at the time, living in Vancouver, and they had a PlayStation there, and I got The Last of Us. | ||
| I don't even remember why I got it, but I could not stop playing that thing for two months straight until I got all the way to the end. | ||
| I did enjoy that they were able to incorporate the Ashley Johnson, the actress that voiced Ellie in the game, that they were able to get her into the show. | ||
| In a very cool scene. | ||
| If you have not seen The Last of Us, that's a really cool scene. | ||
| But I'm going to go right for it. | ||
| I'm going to go right for the culture war element here, which I think you know where it's going. | ||
| So true story. | ||
| I'm at a poker table just on the street and we're all nine players. | ||
| Everyone's having a laugh and then someone brings up I don't know, someone brings up, oh, a guy had a Bowser, Mario Bowser, card protector, which is like, you put a thing on top of your card so you don't accidentally fold or something. | ||
| And then someone asked a question about Mario, the story, then Toad came up, and I explained that in the Mushroom Kingdom, Toad, there are actually people suffering the Cordyceps fungus, that's why they have the mushrooms going out of their heads, and they're actually plagued, and then everyone laughed, and then this one guy goes, have you guys been watching The Last of Us? | ||
| Everyone at the table's like, oh, it's such a good show. | ||
| And then it gets quiet, and one guy looks around and goes, except for that one episode. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then everyone goes, yeah, that one episode. | |
| See, I'm gonna vary again. | ||
| That was one of my favorite episodes. | ||
| And you know which one I'm talking about already. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do, of course I do. | |
| It's episode three, man. | ||
| Three or seven. | ||
| They were detours to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fine on their own. | |
| If you'd added a half an hour to it, you could have made it a movie in and of itself. | ||
| But in the context of making only nine episodes in a season, a lot of people saw it as a detour from the story and slowed down the storytelling. | ||
| Well, a lot of people didn't like it also because the character Bill, I guess, has a lot more to mind because he's a fairly significant character in the game. | ||
| Although I don't remember him, I have to say. | ||
| But what I love about The Last of Us is it sort of picks up where Walking Dead sort of leaves off, right? | ||
| Walking Dead isn't so much about the zombies. | ||
| They're the backdrop. | ||
| It's really about the dramas between the people. | ||
| And the people are the monsters that you should be more afraid of than the zombies. | ||
| And in this case, this is a monster series where the monsters play a very, very small part of the narrative. | ||
| The narrative is really of the relationships between the people. | ||
| You see very little of the actual cordyceps in the show. | ||
| Maybe three times? | ||
| Maybe three times in what, eight or nine episodes? | ||
| So I'm wondering if for season two, they're going to go straight for the story. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think they'll prolong Joel as long as possible. | |
| Yeah, how are they going to get rid of Pedro Pascal? | ||
| People love that guy. | ||
| He's like the most bankable actor in Hollywood right now. | ||
| I didn't play the second game, so I don't know where that character goes. | ||
| Do you want me to spoil it for you? | ||
| You know? | ||
| Spoiler alert! | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've spoiled scenes from movies that are like 20 years old and I'll get somebody in the comments who's like, how could you do that to me? | |
| Before you do the spoiler, before the Sony scandal came out, you know, where all those emails were released that showed all the executives were misogynists. | ||
| They were going to do The Last of Us as a movie, and we did a table reading of that, and I was asked to do the table reading, and I played David, the cannibal cult leader, and it was so fun. | ||
| Sam Raimi was actually going to produce that, and maybe even write it. | ||
| You think? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't see. | ||
| Sam Raimi? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's so campy, like his movies have that camp element to it. | ||
| I don't think that would have fit for this. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| It's a dramatic show. | ||
| It needs a more serious tone, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think. | ||
| Well, should I spoil it now? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| So, Joel, he kills the scientists at the end to save Ellie. | ||
| The daughter of one of the scientists Seeks out Joel for revenge and murders him. | ||
| And I think it was in front of Ellie too, right? | ||
| And then Ellie wants revenge. | ||
| And so Joel dies like right away. | ||
| You know, they sort of put you on that little gentle cliffhanger at the very end. | ||
| Cause he tells a lie to Ellie. | ||
| Ellie knows that he's telling a lie and you're wondering, oh, how is this going to create a rift? | ||
| But you know, they might do it Walking Dead did, and they might take it in an entirely different direction as they did with many of the characters in Walking Dead. | ||
| I think they should. | ||
| I think it's a great launch. | ||
| The concept of the cordyceps fungus, the virus, exploring the different communities and how people have emerged after an apocalypse. | ||
| I think they should run with it. | ||
| I mean, here's what I wasn't a fan of in the show. | ||
| The very opening speech was a total pitch for global warming. | ||
| So I hated that agenda. | ||
| So that's your culture war line. | ||
| That's my culture war line. | ||
| So I'm assuming that some people probably don't know the reference we were making when I said that one episode, but it was about, you know, two gay lovers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in fact, I think the main bill wasn't actually gay, since he's never been with a guy before, but then... | ||
| I actually can respect this. | ||
| It's the apocalypse. | ||
| You've been alone for five years. | ||
| No, I think he was gay. | ||
| I think that was the point. | ||
| He was living with his mom. | ||
| He was gay. | ||
| He hadn't been with a woman. | ||
| He'd been with a woman one time in his life, but he was repressed, right? | ||
| He was just a repressed, closeted gay guy. | ||
| And now he had a chance to come out. | ||
| And I don't know. | ||
| I thought it was a great episode. | ||
| I could see how people would be a little bit, you know, Unnerved by it, because it was so explicit. | ||
| It was very explicit. | ||
| But the sex scene itself, I think is what... Yes, it's explicit. | ||
| Probably pushed people over the limit. | ||
| We go back and forth on the show all the time, is that most of the time, I'm of the opinion, most of the time, that sex scenes in general aren't necessary. | ||
| I feel like most of the time... Then you haven't seen the sex scene in Mulholland Drive, because that was utterly necessary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There are examples where it feels- I'm joking, so you may be right. | |
| It was just such a hot sex scene that- Brokeback Mountain is specifically about two men who are entering a gay relationship. | ||
| I can understand why the plot is driven by sex scenes. | ||
| And how one is torn by being closeted and not being able to accept who he is. | ||
| But a lot of shows aren't really focusing that deeply on that issue. | ||
| They're just inserting sex scenes because the networks tell them they need to have sex scenes. | ||
| But look, here's the thing. | ||
| When a network says, put a sex scene in it, they're basically saying 99.9% of people are going, like, maybe not 99, but the overwhelming majority of people seeing a man and a woman engaging, they're gonna be like, this gets people involved. | ||
| But when it comes to two men doing it, you're talking about a much, much, much, much smaller market share. | ||
| In which case, you're not actually enticing anybody to watch other than perhaps the gay community. | ||
| Or activists who are very much in favor of watching that for the cultural ramifications. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think, not to play devil's advocate, but I felt like if you could get on the page with those two lovers, it was a sort of horizon expanding experience for people, right? | ||
| We're working on normalizing. | ||
| I mean, I think the political activists are working on normalizing something else, but accepting and extending that arc of rights and normality to lots of different folks that don't necessarily fit our profile. | ||
| Well, see, that's the classical liberalism and the traditional liberalism, because that's where I'm at. | ||
| And, you know, we have conservatives on the show. | ||
| One individual came on and said that he thought transgender surgery should be banned for all people, no matter what. | ||
| And I said, I'm of the position, if you're an adult... Exactly. | ||
| "I think you should be able to live your life." And he made the argument, we're not gonna let someone cut some guy's arm off. | ||
| And I'm like, "Well, look, cutting your arm off, I can understand." Like if you go to a doctor and say, "Please remove my arm." It's like, "Well, now we're making you dependent. | ||
| That's a serious impact on your life." Taking away someone's ability to reproduce is the argument. | ||
| Like you're removing healthy organs. | ||
| I'm like, you can still live, you can still walk, you can still run, you can still work. | ||
| And so understanding where that line is, where we say you can't remove someone's arm. | ||
| I don't think there, I don't think this is going to sound crazy to you. | ||
| I don't think there is a line. | ||
| You know, I think, look, I think there should be a healthy trade in organs. | ||
| If you have a kidney to give somebody and you want to, you should. | ||
| I mean, you shouldn't be subject to, um, To some, you know, uh, lottery system where your life is completely in the hands of other people. | ||
| If you're willing to pay somebody enough money and they think that exchange is worth the trouble and the pain that they would have to go through, uh, I say more power to you. | ||
| Um, it, and, and make that, that trade illegal. | ||
| And I'm not, this isn't China. | ||
| I'm not talking about China where they imprisoned, you know, political prisoners and, And religious dissenters and then steal that from them. | ||
| This is an actual exchange of people who've decided beforehand that the terms are appropriate for their particular lives. | ||
| So let that happen. | ||
| And if you want to get a sex change and you have the funds to pay for you, as long as you're not making me pay for your transition, by all means, go ahead and do it. | ||
| It's your life. | ||
| But no kids? | ||
| No kids. | ||
| Yeah, no kids. | ||
| I don't, I think, yeah, I don't think, I don't think it should be children. | ||
| Yeah, the, the, I'm probably starting to agree more with the radical capitalists, anarchists, libertarians on this issue, particularly. | ||
| We're not the same. | ||
| No, I know, but there's just like, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an umbrella of some agreement on more laissez faire capitalism. | ||
| Not that it's all identical. | ||
| That's why I say I'm agreeing with all of them in different respects. | ||
| Just because I'm thinking about, so one of the things we're doing is trying to open a social club with poker, and it's completely illegal in West Virginia. | ||
| And so, but get this, I'm like, and gambling in general, okay? | ||
| I'm not the biggest fan of gambling, right? | ||
| I like going to an arcade, you take 50 bucks, you get your tokens on your card, and you can play beer pong and basketball, and you might win a stuffed animal. | ||
| My view of casinos are, you come with $100, when that $100 is gone, you add your entertainment for the night, you don't go there trying to get rich. | ||
| That being said, You're allowed in this country to walk into a Ben & Jerry's, buy a five-gallon drum of half-baked, and eat it till you are hospitalized, but you can't wager amongst your buddies your own money on a sporting event. | ||
| You're watching a football with your friends and you're like, let's put 100 bucks down. | ||
| Oh, now you've broken the law. | ||
| Not like anyone's gonna come and hunt you down for it. | ||
| But when it comes to playing poker with your friends, in Texas, they actually raid some of these social clubs of people who have decided among themselves to play a game. | ||
| And I'm just like, It got me thinking about the constitutional limits of what someone is allowed to do with their money. | ||
| We had the Citizens United ruling, like 10 years ago or whatever it was, where they said, money is speech, and you can spend an unlimited amount of money on political speech, so long as it's not directly colluding with the politician. | ||
| And then I'm just thinking about that, and I'm like, so we agree, you can spend your money as you see fit, on whatever you want, even if it's a billion dollars into our political system, which changes the fabric of society, But I can't take 25 bucks and bet my buddy that the Bengals or whatever team is gonna win or something. | ||
| Thank God for the political class saving us from ourselves. | ||
| See, not without the government getting their cut anyways. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of profit going on in there. | ||
| There's capital gains that they need to get ahold of, so. | ||
| And then we had, in New York, Bloomberg wanted the sin taxes. | ||
| But this is actually, man, I'm completely opposed to this. | ||
| I completely oppose taxation for the purpose of social engineering, like taxes on gas, or taxes on cigarettes, or taxes on soda. | ||
| Sure, me too. | ||
| But I guess going back to what you were just talking about, I don't know if I would agree with the whole organ thing. | ||
| Yeah, how do you prevent the lowest class of person who is struggling financially from making a decision that might be bad for them? | ||
| Well, you don't, because that's what free will is all about, is making decisions, some of which are good, some of which are bad. | ||
| But if that person decides, given the alternatives that they have, that this is actually the best possible alternative for them, why would you deprive them of that? | ||
| That's what I want to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Make sure that they're properly informed. | |
| I mean, look, being informed about something is your responsibility. | ||
| So like if there was somebody and, uh, You went to them and said, I would like to offer you a hundred grand for your kidney. | ||
| And they're like, I'll pay for your hospitalization. | ||
| I'll pay for everything. | ||
| Here's the hospital we're going to be at. | ||
| Here's the doctor. | ||
| I'll give you any research material that you need. | ||
| You can consult with a doctor. | ||
| I mean, of course, if you're, if you're going into an exchange with somebody, you have to go in with both eyes open and, and know as, as much as you possibly can about the territory you're going to enter into. | ||
| And so would you then say defrauding the individual, lying to them in any way is a criminal element? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Just like it would be in any other exchange. | ||
| So like, right. | ||
| So if you went to someone and said, I'll buy both your kidneys, don't worry, you'll be fine, you don't need them anyway. | ||
| And then they say, sure. | ||
| Well, that person would be stupid to take that because you can't live without your kidneys. | ||
| But that's the issue, right? | ||
| There's this balance we try to find between protecting stupid people from assholes. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And to a certain degree, you can't. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You can't, but you can prosecute them when they do bad things like that, when they lie, and there's actual consequences in the material world for them defrauding somebody. | ||
| Here's a challenge, I suppose. | ||
| Okay, so in this scenario, a guy goes to a stupid person, maybe their IQ is very low, and says, I'm gonna buy both your kidneys, and I'll give you 100 grand. | ||
| And the person's like, well, that sounds good to me. | ||
| And then, so that's fraud, and it's causing harm. | ||
| But then I wonder, what if they're both stupid? | ||
| What if the guy offering the money is actually really dumb as well? | ||
| He's like, I'm pretty sure you don't need kidneys. | ||
| And the guy's like, sounds good to me. | ||
| You know, like, I mean, yeah, we could, we could probably trace these examples out forever and ever and ever, but you can't, you can't prevent people from making bad choices. | ||
| I mean, you know, all these vice laws are about, you know, trying to prevent people from making bad choices. | ||
| Gambling may be legal in the United States if there weren't people who gambled their entire lives away and their life savings and ruined their families and their own reputation. | ||
| Maybe they should. | ||
| I kind of feel, and maybe I'll be callous, it's callous to say this, but we can't just preserve stupid people. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| Now, look, I'm not saying we'll die. | ||
| I'm saying if you see someone walking towards a cliff with a blindfold on, you stop them from going off the cliff. | ||
| But at a certain point, if there's, you know, stupid people will do stupid things that cause harm to themselves, their families, and lives. | ||
| And that's reality. | ||
| It's natural selection. | ||
| And the left's view of this is like, how dare you? | ||
| We must save every single person all the time. | ||
| Okay, my view is Within our means, within our power, yes, we try to save everybody. | ||
| But I'm saying, we can't save everybody. | ||
| We can save as many as possible, but this means ultimately there will be, right now, somewhere in the world, a guy just fell off a cliff. | ||
| A guy was taking a picture on the edge of a canyon, and then fell backwards, and now he's dead. | ||
| It probably just happened. | ||
| We actually just covered a story like that recently, where an influencer was taking a selfie on a balcony and fell over. | ||
| Do we put nets around every building now because that happened one time? | ||
| I'm kind of of the same opinion because I'm in recovery and but I also am one of those people that does like the drug war has done irreparable damage To the country and to the world, so I'm of the opinion that you have the right as an adult to do what you want to do. | ||
| Now you can't drive drunk, you're not supposed to be driving inebriated, but I don't think that it's beneficial to spend billions of dollars trying to stop people from doing things that's just going to push them to a black market anyways. | ||
| Yeah, plus what are the unintended consequences of the drug war? | ||
| I mean, you're introducing a black market, which introduces violence and has had the effect of building up these massive criminal enterprises right on the border that control entire towns. | ||
| Now, Americans may be a little remote from the fact that these cartels control towns, murder people indiscriminately, hang them from freaking cranes, you know. | ||
| They're not subject to the terrorism. | ||
| They were starting to be subject to the terrorism. | ||
| But, you know, the conservatives will bitch and moan about immigrants and the cartels controlling the flood of humanity in here and the drugs that they're bringing into the United States, but their solution is never to legalize drugs, which would immediately castrate the cartels in the same way that, you know, ending prohibition stopped the growth of the mafia. | ||
| Get this. | ||
| So with the legalization of marijuana in places like Colorado and Oregon and things like that, the cartels lost a substantial amount of revenue. | ||
| So they started to look for a different cash crop and you know what they settled on? | ||
| Avocados. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No joke. | ||
| Avocados. | ||
| The cartels realized Marijuana's become legal and it's a cheap product. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| And when you smoke some weed, you're gonna want that guacamole. | ||
| No joke. | ||
| But here's the thing, avocados are very expensive. | ||
| So when it came down to marijuana was only valuable because it was restricted. | ||
| Once the restrictions were lifted, all of a sudden it's like, well now it's just this cheap product that everyone's got everywhere. | ||
| But avocados are much, you can grow pot wherever. | ||
| You know, we were in Austin, they had pot shops with the pot growing in the windows. | ||
| Yeah, Austin. | ||
| in Austin. | ||
| And so now the cartels are like, okay, we can't make as much money off this anymore because it's readily available, cheap, and legal. | ||
| Avocados are also readily available, cheap, and legal, but hard to grow. | ||
| So they immediately started going to producers and being like, we're going to handle the transport for all your avocados. | ||
| Now it's all legal. | ||
| Now it's the cartels are legally dealing in avocados. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And that's how capitalism brings peace to a market, right? | ||
| And When you start restricting products for which there is a market, you introduce violence into it because people are going to get it one way or another. | ||
| And by the way, I don't have any dog in this fight because I'm six years sober. | ||
| I don't care about drugs. | ||
| And also impurity, like with the fentanyl, with people talking about the fentanyl crisis, that is because the cartels and people that are making it illegally can substitute ingredients that would be healthier, or not healthier, but would be able to make them at the pure state so they would be able to use them safely, as safely as possible. | ||
| So when you start to outlaw and they have to substitute things like that, then you get the crisis we have with fentanyl right now. | ||
| And you get the breach of rights that happens when you give organizations like the Drug Enforcement Agency all of these powers to seize your assets, break into your home, take your prisoner. | ||
| They do it selectively. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| There's a really funny story on the internet a long time ago where a guy bought a house and then he put grow lamps all over the house. | ||
| And then I think it was the DA, I'm not sure, or Sheriff's Department. | ||
| They were illegally scanning houses for high power consumption and grow lights, and then just raiding them under the assumption it was an illegal, you know, pot grow house. | ||
| And so they break into this house, and what do they find? | ||
| It's empty, and there's live streaming cameras all over the place, and like a sign saying like, you've just violated the Fourth Amendment, something like that. | ||
| They got so pissed off. | ||
| I think they tried to arrest the guy or something. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we're approaching police state status. | ||
| I think we're in. | ||
| We're probably in it, but it's still a little more benign than what we've seen in the past and what exists other places, but we're getting there. | ||
| Michael Malice was telling me, people do not understand what bad is. | ||
| So you've got a lot of people complaining about selective enforcement. | ||
| I mean, pro-life activists are getting arrested while left-wing activists in front of the judge's homes are allowed to keep doing whatever they want. | ||
| And so people are getting rightly pissed about this imbalance, but he was like, they don't understand what bad is. | ||
| Bad is like the cops show up to your house and they just black bag you and then kill you on the spot in front of your family. | ||
| And that's what happened in many of these countries. | ||
| And he's from Russia, so he knows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's true. | ||
| And he rightly points out that our language of hyperbole is actually a great thing, because we have so much freedom that little violations like this are the end of the world for us, when they're really not. | ||
| They're not really comparable to the things that are going on in the rest of the world. | ||
| And that is a good thing, but we're getting there. | ||
| Yeah, and I think it's going to happen faster and faster. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I think over the... What did we just say? | ||
| We have the mobs rampaging through Chicago, the teen takeover, they call it. | ||
| Compton too, yeah. | ||
| And then, right in Compton. | ||
| And then we had a state senator say, they're just poverty and segregation protesters. | ||
| Yeah, well see, this is the ethics of altruism rearing its ugly head in the world, you know. | ||
| If you need, then need creates a A moral dynamic in which you have claims to anything you want and anything you do to satisfy those claims is justified. | ||
| So those kids need and they shouldn't be, they shouldn't be arrested. | ||
| They're not taking anything. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| But, but see, but because they need their moral status is such that you have no right since you have, you have no right to complain about what they're doing. | ||
| Anything they do is justified. | ||
| We see that all the time is David and Goliath scenario that they, They put us up against where the people who need and are quote-unquote impoverished Have a moral claim on anything they want and any way of getting that is justified Well, so let me let me ask you used to you used to be a Democrat. | ||
| Yeah, just like a more mainstream liberal voter and Yeah, I mean, I was an environmentalist. | ||
| How can you not be? | ||
| Growing up in California, they sort of indoctrinate you with environmentalism. | ||
| And this was in the 70s, you know, so this was at the very beginning of that kind of indoctrination. | ||
| Now it's far worse. | ||
| That was global cooling back then, wasn't it? | ||
| It was global cooling back then, but it was also, you know, we had to be concerned about our limited resources, you know. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Paul Ehrlich had written Population Bomb, and of course, Silent Spring had come out. | ||
| So, you know, we were all gonna die within the next 10 years if we didn't get a handle on this. | ||
| You know, they keep saying that. | ||
|
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Yes, they do. | |
| Every 10 years. | ||
| Every 10 to 12 years. | ||
| Yeah, Greta Thunberg, she deleted that tweet. | ||
| She tweeted a few years ago, like, by 2023, if we don't do this, and she's like, oh, better delete that. | ||
| But how did you, I guess, change? | ||
| What awakened you into a different way of thinking? | ||
| Ayn Rand. | ||
| Well, I was in acting school and I used to get in debates with one of my actor friends about pretty much everything. | ||
| And he would always beat me and it used to irritate me. | ||
| And so I thought if I could just give him some books, That back up my philosophy, he'll get it. | ||
| So I said, let's have a book exchange. | ||
| You and I, I'll give you five books that have influenced me. | ||
| You give me five books that have influenced you. | ||
| And he gave me two books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and they changed my life. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| My books had much of an effect on him. | ||
| Do you remember what they were? | ||
| The books you gave him? | ||
| One was The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. | ||
| I think the other was Illusions. | ||
| By Richard Bach. | ||
| It's all primacy of consciousness. | ||
| I mean, M. Scott Peck is, I think, a psychotherapist, so it's a little more scientific with him, but Richard Bach, Illusions, is all about primacy of consciousness. | ||
| I don't know if you know those terms, primacy of existence, primacy of consciousness. | ||
| It's two orientations to reality. | ||
| Primacy of existence is existence exists whether you're here to perceive it or not, and your job as a conscious being is to integrate your perceptions and figure out what reality is. | ||
| Primacy of consciousness is, your consciousness creates reality. | ||
| So a lot of the political movements today, specifically the trans movement, is all about primacy of consciousness. | ||
| What I feel, how I identify. | ||
| That's, I think, a strong distinction between the two factions in the culture war. | ||
| People who think the universe is, and people who think the universe is what I want it to be. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And they never seem to understand that the cognitive dissonance they feel when the universe isn't Meeting up to their expectations is a cue for them to change their perspective, not to change the universe. | ||
| That's one thing that really gets me, because I probably fall into the universe is category, and we're experiencing it, but then there are people who believe that the universe is theirs. | ||
| It's this egocentric, I'm the only thing that matters kind of perspective. | ||
| Yeah, I think the culture wars, the main warriors on the left are extremely narcissistic. | ||
| Yeah, and then you certainly have that element. | ||
| You know, it's funny because it's not a mirror image between in the culture war. | ||
| It's the left is highly clustered. | ||
| You actually there's a there's a political map showing social justice versus anti-social justice and economics for social versus laissez-faire and the quote-unquote right is spread out all along the From moderately for social justice to oppose to it, from moderately more socialist to laissez-faire, but the left faction was clustered all extremely tightly in communist and social justice. | ||
| Well, that's why the right is losing, because the left is morally consistent, and in a debate between two ideas, the most consistent wins. | ||
| Well, I disagree. | ||
| I don't think they're morally consistent at all. | ||
| I think they're I can defend my position, but you go ahead and defend yours. | ||
| So, for one, the Coalition of People of Color says that Slavic people are people of color. | ||
| So blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white men are people of color, which is completely inconsistent. | ||
| There was one instance where they said, in order to be inclusive of all women, we now must spell women with an X instead of an E. | ||
| And then what happened was another faction immediately came out and said, that's exclusionary to trans women because trans women are women, therefore you're offensive. | ||
| And another group said, we're spying with a Y because man. | ||
| So the one thing I find among the left is a complete lack of moral consistency and a rapid shift in what their morals are supposed to be. | ||
| Well, that standpoint is epistemology, which is you see the world from different perspectives. | ||
| And your reality is different depending upon the perspective, where you sit in, you know, the intersections of various cultures. | ||
| I don't see any moral framework. | ||
| So, well, the moral framework is radical skepticism. | ||
| It's just taking, you know, it's taking what we got essentially from Plato, which is you can't know what's really in front of you, which is perpetuated by Kant and what most people believe. | ||
| And it's just putting it in practice, you know. | ||
| There is no set reality. | ||
| There's only your perception, your assessment of that, which sort of makes it up. | ||
| To me, their consistency is in that primacy of consciousness, radical skepticism, framework, whereas, you know, some on the right buy that, some on the right like objective reality, some on the right are, you know, they're all over the spectrum. | ||
| But it's completely contradictory to what they do. | ||
| So if the corporate press comes out and says, what, two plus two equals five, they all immediately agree. | ||
| So it's paradoxical. | ||
| But yeah, you're right. | ||
| But to them, it's a paradox and change are the realities. | ||
| For them, logic is the means by which you exercise out paradoxes. | ||
| If there's a paradox, you know something is wrong in your reasoning and you have to sort it out. | ||
| You have to get rid of contradictions. | ||
| They don't care about those contradictions. | ||
| The existence of the contradiction is their moral framework, essentially. | ||
| It's something they're pleased not to try to sort out for themselves. | ||
| I think the two plus two equals five thing that they've pushed so heavily is a good example of what you're saying, that skepticism, you can't know that not everything is, but at the same time, the fact that there appears to be a logical inconsistency is exactly their worldview. | ||
| Also, it has an enormous power, those kinds of strange statements. | ||
| And the power that it has is to undermine your confidence in reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And to the extent that you cede any moral ground to them at all, you're undermining your own confidence in reality. | ||
| And that's what they want. | ||
| Because when you don't have confidence in reality, they can tell you what to do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They can tell you you're actually mistaken, you're making a mistake, trust me instead. | ||
| And look, they use pressure and violence and the threat of violence and the threat of exclusion to press their point home and to intimidate people into silence. | ||
| So I do think it's fascinating that the two books, it's probably the most, what's the right way to say it? | ||
| It's the most obvious, right? | ||
| You were given The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and you went, wow! | ||
| And those are like, those are the books, I guess, right? | ||
| If someone was gonna make a guess before the show what books you read that made you think this, it'd probably be those books. | ||
| Absolutely, yeah. | ||
| I mean, The Fountainhead is, I think, the better book, artistically speaking, but it's about an artist and it's about artistic integrity. | ||
| It's about Rational egoism and what that means what does selfishness mean if you want if you want to know what selfishness means and you don't want to go through Objectivist epistemology, which can be a drudgery like any kind of philosophy Then read the fountainhead and you'll see an example in the hero of what rational egoism actually is have you ever played Bioshock? | ||
| Yes, and it's disturbing because it's clearly- Anti? | ||
| It's clearly anti, yeah. | ||
| It takes every stereotype of objectivism or Rand's philosophy in narrative form and reverses it on its head. | ||
| Yeah, like the worst possible interpretations. | ||
| Like a Nietzschean, like it's more Nietzschean. | ||
| It's such a good game though. | ||
| It's a pretty good game. | ||
| But it definitely takes the worst interpretation of her work and created a pretty interesting narrative to it. | ||
| And that's part of- You fight Atlas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I never got that far. | ||
| I never got that far because the narrative was so bad. | ||
| It was so obviously, it was didactic, but you know, I mean, we have to do things like that. | ||
| We have to make games like that, where you're getting that little piece of indoctrination, but good indoctrination. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| One of the things I like to talk about is Harry Potter being so incredibly popular among millennials. | ||
| It's like the only cultural reference they have. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Trump is Voldemort. | ||
| Everyone's Voldemort. | ||
| But, I mean, it's the most unoriginal story to be completely honest. | ||
| Now, the universe building that J.K. | ||
| Rowling did with Harry Potter is fantastic, which is Wizards and all that, but really all she did was write about Hitler. | ||
| It's like Voldemort is Magic Hitler who wants pure-blooded wizards. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| We get it. | ||
| And then what has she done for all of the... So now Harry Potter finishes with Book 7. | ||
| They do secret Fantastic Beasts. | ||
| And what do they do? | ||
| It's another Magic Hitler! | ||
| Grindelwald! | ||
| He's also Hitler. | ||
| And like, it's the only idea she has in her mind. | ||
| And so my thought was, I would love... Maybe she'll consider doing it now that she's under fire from the left over the trans issue. | ||
| My view of the next very obvious cultural reference you could make would be the Soviet Union, Stalin, and communism in that the story writes itself. | ||
| The bad guy in the next arc for Harry Potter is someone who thinks magic puts people above other people and that wizards and muggles are all human so they should be equal and then seeks to suppress the use of magic. | ||
| You end up with a Stalin-esque figure as opposed to another Hitler that she's written like four versions of. | ||
| I like that, I like that. | ||
| You explore the idea. | ||
| If you watch the History Channel at all, you'll see that they have almost an infinite number of Hitler episodes and almost nothing of Stalin. | ||
| And I think, or Mao, and the Mao stuff is so crazy, the pig iron, the destroy all your tools, the killing the sparrows. | ||
| We know Hitler was evil, okay, but so were Stalin and Mao. | ||
| So can we also teach kids that? | ||
| Trying to explain to them what a struggle session was now in the day and age now where that's becoming almost commonplace on the internet. | ||
| Didn't Mao have everybody go out and kill the sparrows or something like that? | ||
| What was that story? | ||
| That I don't know, but it sounds it. | ||
| And then the bug population exploded and created a famine. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of really stupid things these people do when they hyper-centralize power. | ||
| Ultimately, where I end up falling more on the capitalism side is that capitalism is a decentralized economic system, whereas communism, of course, is a command centralized economy. | ||
| And these people are trying to wager that the individual, them, as one person, is smarter than the entire decentralized network of human thought, which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| Absolutely impossible for any one person to understand the transactions of any 50 or 100 people let alone 350 million or 7 billion people You need to leave that to them, right? | ||
| And that's the great thing about capitalism that I always focus on I don't focus on it as a system of capital or private ownership I focus on it as the only system the only liberal system there is it's about choice. | ||
| It's about It's about self-sovereignty, two of the most important moral innovations of all time. | ||
| Going back to your point about, what is it called, the primacy of? | ||
| Consciousness or primacy of existence. | ||
| This is a really good point when you think about their economic views on resources and things like this. | ||
| I'll give you a couple examples. | ||
| I was arguing with the Great British Socialist Party or whatever on Twitter. | ||
|
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And they were arguing that- I'm sorry, by the way. | |
| But it's fun, it's fun. | ||
| I'm not being mean to them. | ||
| They're mean to me. | ||
| We're exchanging ideas in a rather hoity-toity kind of way, but it was a good exchange. | ||
| And I said, the system doesn't work because the allocation of resources doesn't make sense. | ||
| An individual who wants to be a musician, for instance, everybody would be playing guitar. | ||
| If they said, everybody just pick your job and do whatever you want, then people are gonna be like, I always wanna be a musician. | ||
| The problem is, they're not good at it. | ||
| And so I always tell people, how many people do you know play music? | ||
| And they're like, oh, a bunch. | ||
| How many of them want to be professional musicians? | ||
| Oh man, half of them. | ||
| And how many of them are good enough to do it? | ||
| They're like, none of them. | ||
| And I'm like, now imagine if we had a communist system where in their utopian view, you could do whatever you wanted. | ||
| Everybody would be playing awful music and nobody would be making bread. | ||
| So I tell the Socialist Party that, and they responded with, that's absurd, they disagree. | ||
| And so I presented a scenario, I said, okay, let's say somebody wants, someone's a carpenter, but they really like building cars on the side. | ||
| And then, you know, they want to fix up an old 1969 Mustang or something. | ||
| How would they do that in a communist system where their job is ascribed to them based on their skills? | ||
| You know, according to their skills and what they get is according to their needs. | ||
| And they were like, what do you mean? | ||
| They would just go down and get whatever they wanted. | ||
| And I'm like, somebody whose job is to fix plumbing really also wants to try and invent a new kind of car or something. | ||
| Do they go to the government and say, here are the parts that I need? | ||
| Wouldn't the government say, you don't need those and your skills don't apply to those? | ||
| In a capitalist system, there's a guy who is a janitor who comes up with a really great idea for a food product and makes it, presents it to the company, and they say, this is brilliant, congratulations, this is your job now. | ||
| You're able to find the diamond in the rough and craft it. | ||
| Capitalism allows for this, communism doesn't. | ||
| Communism would say, we're not gonna, so I'll slow down. | ||
| The guy who invented Flamin' Hot Cheetos, I think he was a janitor. | ||
| He worked at Frito-Lay. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And yeah, and it's their most popular product. | ||
| The company said, anybody who works here, feel free to submit your ideas. | ||
| And so what he would do is he would take the dry Cheeto pieces and put chili lime stuff on it, like the Mexican candy. | ||
| And then he brought it to them and they said, this is delicious, let's go with it. | ||
| In a communist system, you can't do that. | ||
| The communists are going to be like, we're not going to give you the things you need to experiment. | ||
| These are not according to your skills or needs. | ||
| The Great British Socialist Party told me that in a socialist system, anyone at any time for any reason could go down to the government and acquire whatever they wanted. | ||
| And I just said, you realize resources are finite, right? | ||
| They're not just going to give something. | ||
| In a capitalist system, you have access to it, but you still have to allocate the resources yourself. | ||
| You still have to trade something of value so that you can then make the choice to trade the value you've produced for the value you want to, you know... And the price of that resource tells you exactly how much work you need to put in to get it. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, right now we're talking about economic systems that are reflecting A primacy of conscious which is Marxism or a primacy of existence which is capitalism. | ||
| And that's why I wanted to bring it up. | ||
| Maybe it was a bit convoluted, but the point was, in their mind, things just exist if they want them to. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| And so they're like, I can have whatever I want. | ||
| So my favorite meme is someone, some leftist tweeted, what are you going to do once communism wins? | ||
| And a person responded, I will, he said something like, teach people to grow vegetables on my farm and do book readings. | ||
| And then someone else responded, your farm? | ||
| But it's a great point. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| They think when the economy is completely under control of a centralized authority, they will have things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I got news for that guy. | ||
| You know, his farm is going to be co-opted by the government and he is going to be forced to grow food because somebody's got to do it. | ||
| So I interviewed these people who traveled through North Korea. | ||
| It was a Vice documentary called the North Korean Motorcycle Diaries, I think it was. | ||
| They explained how if a farm in North Korea has a cow die, they can't touch it. | ||
| They have to contact the government, who sends in military, who will then transport the cow to the central authority to break the cow up into parts to be distributed evenly across the entire country, which makes no sense. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| So what they do is, The police will, like, secretly help the family. | ||
| Because, like, if you're a family with a cow, and you can eat that cow right now, you need to do it. | ||
| It's gonna spoil. | ||
| So they do things where they say, oh no, it's rotted quick, we have to dispose of it, and then they'll let the family eat it. | ||
| But then if you get found out, they put you in the gulag. | ||
| They send you to a work camp. | ||
|
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Lovely. | |
| You're stealing from the people. | ||
| Yeah, lovely systems. | ||
| You've actually talked a lot about the separation of states and economy, right? | ||
| I wanted to bring up Hollywood because there's a lot of oversight from the government As far as tax breaks related to projects in Hollywood, do you see that as something that's gotten worse over time? | ||
| I was reading something about a month ago where they're looking to add quotas that if they don't make good faith gestures to meet certain quotas as far as demographics by the year 2024 that they'll lose A certain amount of their tax breaks, which were originally bonuses that they were giving these companies to keep them in California when they were all started moving to Georgia and Chicago to do all these productions. | ||
| Is this one of those things that you're seeing that a lot of, sorry to switch the subject, a lot of what they're doing, that direction, is that because of these tax breaks? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think I've worked in Los Angeles I did a job there, a rookie's FBI. | ||
| And then before that, I want to say it was The Closer, which was several years before that. | ||
| Every other- Keir Sedgwick. | ||
| Keir Sedgwick. | ||
| Every other job I have is in Canada or some other state. | ||
| Because everything goes to Vancouver. | ||
| Everything goes to Vancouver. | ||
| Vancouver, I mean, I've watched it grow up from when I first started working there in the early nineties to now. | ||
| It's a thriving metropolis. | ||
| Despite all the regulations, it's still thriving, but in part because all of Hollywood pretty much has moved up there and to Toronto. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I've noticed so much. | ||
| Montreal. | ||
| The X-Files started out in Vancouver and then eventually moved to California once it was big enough and they had the clout to say, we want to move it down there. | ||
| And then you didn't have to watch them try to make every city, like every like woods in Vancouver look like some Midwestern town. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So many shows, so many shows do that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I was actually in one of the, one of the first episodes when they moved back down to California. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Do you think that for some news, you've talked also a lot about like BlackRock pulling your money out of BlackRock if you want to get as far as investment, ESG and stuff like that. | ||
| Do you think that this is also something that you should be applying that same logic to for companies like Disney, which do seem to be making things and do base a lot of their projects on this type of investment, that you should be speaking with your dollar, and if you see something from them, don't watch it? | ||
| Yeah, if you disagree with the beauty of capitalism is that you have total sovereignty and control over your own life. | ||
| And if you don't like what a company is doing, how they produce their product or what it is they stand for, then you just you vote with your with By withholding your dollar from them. | ||
| There's an interesting point though in the size of these companies where we're at the point we know Disney is doing bad things. | ||
| The example I like to use is the thanking the Shinwa security forces who are keeping these Uighur Muslims in concentration camps. | ||
| They thanked them in... Mulan. | ||
| It was Mulan, yeah. | ||
| And so, the people who are cognizant of what's happening say, okay, we better boycott this, but 90% of the people just don't know, don't care, and they keep funding it, which empowers this machine to keep doing crooked things. | ||
| We don't have enough knowledge among the population to resist that. | ||
| They just lost like 258 million between Strange Worlds and Lightyear, and they're about to lay off a thousand more people. | ||
| And I mentioned this in a video recently. | ||
| I said, like, Disney lost all this money. | ||
|
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Like, that's nothing to them. | |
| And I'm like, yes, but you can only do that for so long before it's stolen. | ||
| And it's much more powerful and much healthier than, say, a DeSantis, you know, taking political action against a company that Whose policies he doesn't agree with. | ||
| I think that's very scary. | ||
| That's what makes DeSantis a scary character to me. | ||
| So I guess my point was, I agree with the vote with your dollars. | ||
| But I don't think it's effective when you have these big pharmaceutical companies that are untouchable. | ||
| Granted, Fairpoint, the laissez-faire guys always want to bring up, the government subsidizes them to the point where it doesn't matter what the public does. | ||
| But there are big companies that their profits are so high, you can't move the needle. | ||
| Yeah, but it's only because they're subsidized. | ||
| Because not being subsidized means they are dependent upon the market and have to produce values for that market and have to be receptive to the market. | ||
| But what I mean is, the market doesn't care about things like aspartame or high fructose corn syrup. | ||
| Sure it would, it would. | ||
| You think it would? | ||
| Yeah, I think, look, if we didn't have a regulatory state where people just cut themselves off from, if they cut themselves off from their own, Safety. | ||
| They put that completely in the hands of the government, so they ignore that aspect of looking into products. | ||
| We would have a private regulatory system where people would start organizations that gave you information with respect to companies and products, and you would look into Into things like that on your own, and you would become a more knowledgeable producer. | ||
| So what I'm saying is the regulatory state... It's possible now, though. | ||
| It is possible now, but for the most part, when you have an apparatus that does the work for you, you're not going to do the work, right? | ||
| You know, we all know that the government sucks the air out of the private sector in every respect. | ||
| It doesn't just kill business, but it also kills your intent to defend and protect your own life. | ||
| People assume the job's already being done, we don't need another one. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| But I also think too... Right, so that's why, pardon the interruption, but that's why something like the FAA makes our skies less safe because, you know, any... Stop signs. | ||
| Well, I'm saying any airline without an FDA would have to probably link its safety record to its saleability, and the safest airline is the one you'd probably want to fly. | ||
| It would become an aspect of the marketing. | ||
| So I read this, I don't know if it's true, so feel free for those listening to correct this, but I was reading that stop signs have potentially increased accidents because before, people would always stop out of a fear of getting hit. | ||
| So when cars were first coming about, everybody would slow down at intersections to look and then carry through if it was safe. | ||
| When they created stop signs to create the forced safety, people, so if you've got a one-way stop sign, people will fly through and then someone who blows a stop sign creates an accident. | ||
| Whereas it was always stop. | ||
| Humans naturally would take that action among themselves. | ||
| The government action actually made it worse. | ||
| But what I will say in regards to, You know, one of the arguments we often bring up when it comes to capitalism versus regulation or whatever is that big companies, as I mentioned, will become too big to fail or they'll produce products that are bad. | ||
| It's never happened in the market. | ||
| Well, I'm thinking about it and I think the argument is... It only happens in a mixed economy where government and economics are linked together at the hip. | ||
| And the government is- But I'm talking about like morbid obesity, right? | ||
| Like America's becoming more and more obese because we have high sugar, high salt foods. | ||
| Fats are actually really good for you, by the way. | ||
| But you know what I was gonna say is, this may sound once again callous, but if people... I ultimately agree with you in the end. | ||
| If there's no regulation, or regulation doesn't matter. | ||
| No state regulation. | ||
| But none of it matters. | ||
| If companies mass produce things that kill people, those people will die, they won't have kids, and the future will just end up being people who are more fit and don't like high fructose corn syrup. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| So, it may be cold, but... I think that is also a monster of the regulatory state, right? | ||
| The corn subsidies that... | ||
| Make people produce this stuff and make it cheap. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's the only reason they have it, actually. | ||
| Sugar subsidies as well. | ||
| I'm pretty sure high-fructose corn syrup is only possible because of corn subsidy. | ||
| It's actually harder to produce than sugar from beets or cane. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| And because the US government's like, make more corn, we make so much of it, we figured out how to make plastics and fuel and sugar syrups. | ||
| But my point is basically, Let people have free will. | ||
| The people who are prone to gargling sugar to the point of death will die. | ||
| But they'll have been happy the whole way down. | ||
| And then the future will end up being people who don't do that just by natural selection. | ||
| It's cold, and I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I'm saying that's what will happen. | ||
| Maybe, maybe not. | ||
| Maybe once they don't cede their moral authority to, you know, some government bureaucrat, they'll stop doing the bad things because they will be entirely responsible for their own lives. | ||
| Right now, they're not. | ||
| They're not responsible for looking for... And they want free health care. | ||
| Yeah, they're not responsible for almost any aspect of their life. | ||
| I think 50% of the population now is in some respect tied to the government dole. | ||
| So it's a huge constituency that has to wean itself off of the drug of government. | ||
| You think abolish the police? | ||
| Should we abolish the police? | ||
| Yeah, abolish the police. | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, I would assume your position wouldn't be in the leftist camp of cops are bad, but more so in that they should be private, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| You don't think so? | ||
| Force is a public issue. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Force is not a market. | ||
| Wherever force is, there's no market, right? | ||
| Force is always a monopoly. | ||
| If you break into my house and I contend with you, each of us is going to try to Assert our will over the other and one of us will win. | ||
| Yeah, and that's not a market There never is a market so a market and force organizations is called war. | ||
| That's that's what the Soviet Union in America We're doing through some of their proxies over the over the Cold War So no, you can't you can't market force you can certainly have private security so long as you're under the umbrella of you know an objective system of law and and you're beholden to that what the fire department Private mostly private. | ||
| I think it was that that's that's not for so right mostly private probably tied to insurance companies and if insurance were private and free and well, so we actually have expensive volunteer fire departments out here. | ||
| Yeah, and they just ask you to donate and I'm a big proponent of giving them as much money as I can. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's like then one of the one of the Last remnants of honor we have in this country is people deciding to go and sign up to be a volunteer firefighter with no pay just because they want to make sure everyone is safe. | ||
| Hey, and there's going to be free riders in a system like that, but that's okay. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| There's always going to be people that don't pay. | ||
| I guess they used to do the emblem thing, right? | ||
| You'd buy an emblem from the fire department. | ||
| You'd put it on your house. | ||
| And if your house ever caught fire, they'd come see the emblem and say, you're paid up. | ||
| Let's put the fire out. | ||
| And see then people, which isn't bad, but the altruists out there in the world would say, oh, so only people who are covered by insurance or have the emblem or pay for it, the only they, yeah, that's correct. | ||
| They're paying for a service, that's okay, that's just. | ||
| So there was a story I read. | ||
| This young kid had a genetic disease. | ||
| There's a cure for it. | ||
| It's extremely hard to produce, and it costs about a million dollars in labor to cure this disease. | ||
| And the leftists demand, they demanded the state government, I think it was Louisiana, pay for the treatment. | ||
| And Louisiana said, we can't, we cannot allocate to treat all of the people who have this disorder because it would bankrupt us. | ||
| And so when I try to explain to these leftists, you can't have universal healthcare because sometimes cures don't exist. | ||
| So if you've got somebody Who has a rare disease and there's no cure. | ||
| They say, healthcare is a human right. | ||
| I say, no it's not. | ||
| Go into the woods and then break your leg and tell me what human right you have to have your leg set. | ||
| Ain't nobody around. | ||
| You'll get eaten by a bear or something. | ||
| But I tell you this, when you're out there, you're allowed to defend yourself. | ||
| You're allowed to say whatever you want. | ||
| You can trade whatever you want. | ||
| But you can't force someone to treat your broken leg. | ||
| Now when it comes to universal healthcare, the example I like to give to the left is, Let's say someone's got a disease called Pellegrino syndrome. | ||
| It's newly discovered and there's no cure. | ||
| There's no cure. | ||
| Sounds good to me. | ||
| What treatment could we offer them? | ||
| What money could we spend? | ||
| We don't have it. | ||
| But then one day, a team of 500 of the world's best scientists who've dedicated 20 years of their lives in their respective fields team up Create a single dose of the cure for this syndrome. | ||
| And it took 20 years in the making. | ||
| We can give it to one person. | ||
| Who gets that human right? | ||
| The fact is the treatment doesn't exist. | ||
| So people can't have it. | ||
| This idea of universal healthcare is an impossibility because healthcare is a technology and a labor service. | ||
| So you can't guarantee any of it. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Nobody else's labor is yours by right. | ||
| Or technology. | ||
| Whatever has to be created by an act of human production, thought and action is not anybody else's by right. | ||
| What about air and water? | ||
| You think air and water? | ||
| Water has to be processed too. | ||
| I mean, you know, the earth has about 1% fresh water and I dare you to go out to a stream to go out to the Potomac or we got into a river and take a sip from there. | ||
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Also, don't they, doesn't New York regulate air rights for the height of buildings? | |
| Like you're only allowed to build buildings so high? | ||
| I mean, like the breathability. | ||
| Oh, the actual breathability. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, I think, I think there's certainly there's, this would be the responsibility of like legal philosophers to figure this kind of thing out because they're, If there are the neighborhood effects of a product are, you know, damaging to somebody, then they certainly have a right to make claims. | ||
| So yeah, you know, if somebody's polluting downstream to you or somebody's polluting the air, then it's on your property and your time, then you do have a right to seek answers for that. | ||
| This is interesting because this is a very common argument that's brought up when it comes to lots of fair capitalism, libertarianism or objectivism. | ||
| I was arguing with an objectivist who said that the government shouldn't have control of waterways, it should be privately owned, the river should be privately owned, all that stuff, and I said, my question is, how do you determine ownership of the stream? | ||
| Is it first come, first serve? | ||
| You show up, you put a flag in the ground, and now it's yours? | ||
| And what if someone upstream from you is shitting in the water, and now your water's tainted, you can't drink it? | ||
| Well, I mean, I imagine it's something like homesteading, where you do claim a plot of land or property, and then to the extent that you develop it, mix your labor with it, it becomes yours over time, right? | ||
| And if somebody is polluting upstream, then you certainly have a right to pursue legal action against them and get them to stop. | ||
| You know, things like streams are property that's sort of moving and in a sense, and it's complicated claims to things like that. | ||
| What if they divert the water? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think even if, especially if you're dependent on that stream for something, I think they would have to get your permission because it's on your property before they diverted the water. | ||
| And they would have to offer you some kind of compensation. | ||
| I imagine for whatever you calculated, you would lose by losing that resource. | ||
| So you think there does need to be a legal mechanism by which to... Yes, but it has to be strong property right and clearly understood property right so that, you know, these kinds of conflicts could be sorted out. | ||
| And I even think this should be in the ocean. | ||
| I don't think there should be waters where countries can fish as much as they want. | ||
| companies should own as parts of the ocean and then they would be responsible for that part of it. | ||
| And I think that would solve a lot of the overfishing issues that we have because just like the logging issue and the lack of forests, the disappearing forests was pretty much solved by privatizing the land and making these logging companies responsible for their crop. | ||
| And you notice that once that started happening and trees started replenishing, the argument from the environmentalists then became old growth forests were the values that we had to preserve. | ||
| Because suddenly we had more trees now than we did 125 years ago. | ||
| What are you going to do as a rabid environmentalist when you have more forests now than pre-industrial times? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| When they just strip the trees or the fish from the land or the water with no thought, it falls apart. | ||
| When we say, no, this is your portion where you have fish, the business says, we got to make sure we keep having fish here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The tragedy of the commons. | ||
| I mean, if it's, if, if, if, if everybody owns it, then nobody owns it. | ||
| Nobody takes care of it. | ||
| Nobody monitors. | ||
| But if you do, and you're responsible for replenishing that, if people say when people use a word today, um, called sustainability, it's absurd. | ||
| The concept is absurd to me because capitalism is the way in which you have sustainability. | ||
| The price system keeps resources from going completely extinct. | ||
| Right? | ||
| If something becomes too expensive to manufacture, you look for a new technology or you look for a new way of mining for it until you can't find it anymore. | ||
| But the resource itself never goes completely away. | ||
| And when your company is failing because your idea is garbage, it should fail and it should cease to exist. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And government pumps money into these things indefinitely. | ||
| And then you get a tumor on your system. | ||
| Well, I mean, zombie corporations are just one example of altruism in action. | ||
| The big banks should fail. | ||
| And if they can't function properly, they shouldn't function. | ||
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Yes. | |
| But it's the way I see it with government is You get a wound in your society, and so the government decides, we're going to put a bandage over that wound. | ||
| But that doesn't actually solve the problem, it covers it up. | ||
| Six months later, the wound's festering, so they say, put another bandage on top of it. | ||
| And they keep stacking these things. | ||
| And what happens is you get these entitlement programs, you get, I'll bring it to the real world, you create a welfare program saying, okay, if you're homeless, we'll give you a little bit of money. | ||
| Well, this creates a reverse incentive. | ||
| There was a meme I just saw where a guy says he's 22 and living with his parents they say get a job or get out. | ||
| So he looks up online that he finds out online on San Francisco if you're homeless they pay you 700 bucks a month just for no reason. | ||
| So he says okay goes to San Francisco signs up instantly gets the money and he says I get 300 bucks for rent 300 bucks for food and then I play World of Warcraft all day. | ||
| I'm like Okay, that's actually made the problem worse. | ||
| Now, there's a bigger drain on resources. | ||
| This person's not being helped. | ||
| These government programs create obsolete systems that are indefinitely protected. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Is that what UBI would do? | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Is that what UBI would do, you think? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think UBI is a terrible idea. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What are your thoughts on universal basic income? | ||
| I'm not a fan. | ||
| I'm not a fan of any kind of subsidies like that. | ||
| I don't agree with subsidizing the poor or subsidizing the rich. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that the poor, if they need something, should go to those who have and ask, and then those who have can make the choice on their own how much or how little resources they want to devote to that. | ||
| Let me shift back to Hollywood. | ||
| I'm curious, when you read these books and started to shift your views, What was it like in Hollywood? | ||
| I mean, you mentioned they'll assume you're a Republican, but then give them a minute, they might figure it out. | ||
| Did you get a backlash where people, or even today, as things are getting more, you know, polarized, are people getting mad at you? | ||
| No, actually, the folks I talked to on the set are pretty open-minded, believe it or not. | ||
| Wow, that is surprising. | ||
| You've also mentioned that people do come to you privately about talking out about these issues. | ||
| And that that's one of the big problems we have right now is that if more people were just willing to come out and talk about these things openly and honestly, it would be able to create a more conducive environment for people to have these discussions where they could talk about ideas they disagree on. | ||
| Some things you'll meet in the middle on, some things you won't. | ||
| But it seems like in Hollywood, at least from one side of the aisle, like you said you're not a conservative so it doesn't really fall there, that there is an echo chamber, at least as far as the messaging, especially in the output of the media. | ||
| One thing that I would say about the misunderstandings of capitalism, I think Hollywood plays a huge role in promoting ideas that are extremely utopian and speaking to need, and because they make great stories. | ||
| They make great feel-good stories that people at the base level can understand because it speaks to the good of human nature. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It speaks to the in those stories they're saying that like uh the the rich guy does the right thing and he helps this guy out even though he gets nothing in return. | ||
| You'll see stories like that all the time. | ||
| They certainly don't understand at least in my opinion a lot of people who are growing up increasingly Through media. | ||
| They're not reading as much. | ||
| They're watching more movies. | ||
| They're watching television. | ||
| They're seeing these stories and expecting them to translate to the real world. | ||
| And they don't because they don't have the perspective to understand that it's still storytelling. | ||
| Well, the simple explanation is people think that like gunshots, for instance, in movies, the sound of them and the damage they cause people or another example is like The good guy will punch a henchman and the henchman just falls to the ground and is gone. | ||
| Never gets up again. | ||
| Never gets up. | ||
| It's my favorite part. | ||
| Or that you can be knocked out and they'll like hit someone in the back of the head and the person wakes up an hour later. | ||
| Five minutes later. | ||
| None of it's possible. | ||
| Movies just warp the perception of people into thinking these things are real. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think I read a statistic somewhere that by the time somebody is 18, they've seen businessmen kill like 10,000 people. | ||
| So certainly Hollywood is It has a very conventional morality, which I find interesting in many ways because so many of the creators, the writers, the actors are so dynamic and talented and they're so good at what they do, but their ethics is just so doggone cliche. | ||
| And they're dreamers! | ||
| And they're dreamers, right? | ||
| And they dream in that platonic sense, in a way that's detached from reality, and then they pass that on to other people. | ||
| And you're right, they do make good stories, but it's harder to tell the story that maybe charity isn't a virtue. | ||
| I don't think charity is a virtue. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I think it may be a sometimes necessary thing that one has to do, but I don't define the world in what I would call malevolent universe terms. | ||
| And the only goods I do is combating this malevolent universe, so that charity and weakness and pain and suffering is what grounds my ethics. | ||
| And the existence of pain and suffering is what grounds my ethics. | ||
| No, I think charity might be a necessary evil. | ||
| What's really virtuous? | ||
| Rationality, independence, sovereignty, productivity, integrity, honesty. | ||
| Those things that ground you in what is and help you to navigate the world. | ||
| Those are virtues. | ||
| Like the idea, it's one of the funny things that I love the military in the cop show propaganda, which are absolutely propaganda at the highest level most of the time, because they're portraying stories that eventually come back to the concept of integrity and honesty and justice. | ||
| But we know that the real world is not that simple. | ||
| These are bureaucratic institutions that work at a much different scale than that. | ||
| But it makes for great storytelling in Hollywood. | ||
| But the thing is, I don't think... Well, it's lazy storytelling in a way, too, because it's relying on tropes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I love them. | ||
| I love boomer television to the highest order, like all of the police procedurals and dramas. | ||
| I love it because I do believe that a lot of people still long for a world where they could buy that the FBI was a Not a corrupt institution that's out there to help you and protect the American citizens that believe that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan were good. | ||
| Those were things, those were story ideas that were being pushed for a very long time that I think made, they weren't aspirational, but they told stories that people understood on a more basic level. | ||
| And now, first of all, I find it more nihilistic now, Wokeness, I was gonna ask you one define wokeness as it pertains to Hollywood because you talk a lot about how the the idea of wokeness is nihilistic and anti-human Yeah, well, I mean wokeness is being awake to power structures and oppressive power structures and to power dynamics in society and | ||
| And trying to reverse those power dynamics by empowering the people who have been at the bottom. | ||
| First of all, by first being aware in what respects they're oppressed and then trying to reverse that. | ||
| And that's what I think Hollywood is attempting to do, but they perceive certain groups to be on the wrong side of the political hierarchy and they're now trying to elevate them through awareness and then by giving them narratives that tell their story. | ||
| Critical consciousness. | ||
| In a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think, I think in some respects it's, I think it's good. | ||
| I mean, I like learning about, uh, people and cultures that I was unfamiliar with before. | ||
| And I like the fact that people who, who didn't get a chance to exhibit their talents because Hollywood is chauvinistic and misogynistic and they are the things that they claim to be fighting against. | ||
| now get a chance to because Hollywood's so afraid of the woke mob, but it's still giving me a chance to see these lifestyles and these types of people that I wouldn't have seen before. | ||
| And now that's good. | ||
| That's good. - So one of the things I disagreed a lot with the anti-woke people on back during like the Gamergate stuff 10 years ago, I was like, you know, look, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor. | ||
| Marvel's big three, the first big movies they put out. | ||
| It's three white dudes. | ||
| I don't care if they're white. | ||
| I don't care if they're white dudes. | ||
| I like those movies. | ||
| I'm a big fan of Marvel. | ||
| I also have no problem with Shang-Chi having an, like, they're doing a movie which is more Chinese-American focused, and that's awesome. | ||
| And there are a lot of people who are like, oh, they're getting woke because they're doing these, you know, multicultural or whatever stories. | ||
| And I'm just like, they're trying to make, they're trying to, they made a show, they made money. | ||
| One example, I guess, to go back to The Last of Us, it was, I think Bella Ramsey said it, maybe not, maybe the other young woman, if you don't like the show, don't watch it. | ||
| Both of them said that. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, yes, absolutely. | ||
| You don't have to watch it. | ||
| Like, make something. | ||
| I'm sick and tired of, Two things. | ||
| People complaining that something like Disney is doing woke stuff. | ||
| Like, I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But make stuff. | ||
| We got a comic book here from the Van Skuyver. | ||
| Ethan Van Skuyver. | ||
| Yeah, Ethan Van Skuyver. | ||
| They're making their own things. | ||
| And that's the solution. | ||
| Like, do stuff. | ||
| And, uh, you know, so that's what that's mostly my point, right? | ||
| Like, if Hollywood is going to woke-ify things, I think it's totally fair to say, look, I don't like that they're doing this character in this way because it ruins the character for this reason. | ||
| I don't like the hand-me-down element of the wokeness, where it's like, I don't like the collectivism in wokeism, right? | ||
| And it's just kind of like, well, why don't you make- - I don't like the collectivism in wokeism, right? | ||
| I don't like the identification of groups by non-essentials, by things that don't really matter, 'cause there's no choice in the matter, right? | ||
| So to me the the only thing the thing that makes you human your rational faculty and your character your choices that you make in life That's what defines you as a human being that's what you have moral control over But to say to claim someone's identity is based on things. | ||
| They have no moral control. | ||
| No, no, no choice in the matter is Ridiculous, and I hate that But it's also regressive. | ||
| I know people like to say it's the regressive left. | ||
| What I mean is, if a society begins to understand that individuals are unique snowflakes, that a person, white, black, gay, straight, male, female, is going to have a unique perspective and experience, that's progress. | ||
| And that's why we expanded civil rights. | ||
| We said, you know what? | ||
| We were wrong to assume that that Chinese guy was going to come up to us and speak Chinese or Mandarin or whatever. | ||
| In fact, the Asian guy walks up to you and then you're expecting it and he goes, what's up, dude? | ||
| I'm from St. | ||
|
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Louis. | |
| And you're like, wow, individuals are all totally different. | ||
| It is regressive to start saying, We're gonna lump people based on race, and that's what woke people do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's the opposite of progress. | ||
| Yeah, identify them by things that are non-essential. | ||
| That said, I'm gonna seemingly contradict myself, but I don't think I am. | ||
| I'm amazed when I see commercials now, even commercials will say African-Americans who are in a home, a beautiful home, and they're advertising something. | ||
| I'm amazed that, wow, you know what? | ||
| I never saw that. | ||
| You know, if I saw a suburban home, it was white people. | ||
| And that does have an effect on the way in which you view yourself. | ||
| And I think as much as I disdain those kinds of identities, it's also important for people to see someone like them achieving something. | ||
| I mean, that's the purpose of art is you know values, you have values, and you want to know that they're achievable. | ||
| And sometimes it's easier to understand that when that person looks like you. | ||
| I've talked to a lot of more right-leaning people about this. | ||
| I'm like, imagine your whole life, every billboard you saw, every TV show, every celebrity was black. | ||
| You never saw your brother, your mother, your sister, or anyone from your community. | ||
| Unless he was dealing drugs or in a courtroom somewhere. | ||
| Or even when you have prominent figures, they're singing songs about being degenerates. | ||
| Like our generation, like my generation grew up listening to Tupac and Biggie and Bone Dugs and Harmony, which were cultures that I couldn't I couldn't understand. | ||
| I could I could listen to it. | ||
| I could enjoy it as art, but it was not something speaking to my lived experience. | ||
| So, you know, I see people complain about stuff where it's like, you know, they're going to do a movie with a black female cop or something. | ||
| And then people are like, oh, it's woke. | ||
| They'd have a black woman. | ||
| And I'm like, I have literally no problem whatsoever with them being like a white FBI, a man who's a white FBI agent. | ||
| His partner is a black female FBI agent. | ||
| The issue I take with a lot of the stuff they're doing is they always try, they can't just say, We're gonna have a strong female character, an Asian, a gay, a straight, or whatever. | ||
| They'll be like, we'll do that, and then make a white man who's really stupid, and to be mocked. | ||
| Yeah, no, I hate that. | ||
| Now, Rand was one of the, I think, the first people who wrote very strong female characters. | ||
| I mean, if you read Atlas Shrugged, Dagny Taggart is basically the head of a railroad. | ||
| She runs the railroad. | ||
| She's an extremely formidable character, but in no respect does she diminish Francisco D'Anconia or John Galt or any of the other, Hank Reardon, none of the other characters are diminished by her stature. | ||
| But nowadays I feel like, yeah, nowadays they're just turning the cliches. | ||
| You know, at one time, you know, the black guy had to be the guy being brought into jail or committing a crime. | ||
| Now the white guy is just a dumb ass. | ||
| It's uh, I was noticing that I've been watching, I started watching Will Trent and there's an actor named Jake McLaughlin who I, I love. | ||
| I love Jake. | ||
| He's a, he's a fantastic. | ||
| Jake's a friend of mine. | ||
| He's a, well, uh, like, yeah, I guess cause you were on Quantico and he was on Quantico, right? | ||
| We were both on Quantico together. | ||
| He's a great actor who does a good, like, uh, Yeah, he's got that role down, right? | ||
| And when they put him in Will Trent now, he's kind of goofy and he might like as an actor, he might enjoy it because it gives him the opportunity to stretch his, uh, his acting skills and he's acting differently than he has in past roles, but it does make it look more kind of buffoonish. | ||
| In a way and in the past that character wouldn't have been written like that He would have been either written more stoic or it would have been written with more Actual like he'd had more personal responsibility and he wouldn't have been somebody who was just needed to be saved on a regular So what was there? | ||
| There was a TV show. | ||
| I'm blanking on the name right now. | ||
| It was based on The Bachelor Do you remember this? | ||
| Okay, so there's a TV show that had about four seasons. | ||
| It was a very well-acted show based on The Bachelor. | ||
| I think the executive producer was one of the producers of The Bachelor, so she took a bunch of stories, I think, and then cobbled it into this cool series. | ||
| But the series primarily revolved around two of the producers and some of the terrible things that they had to do to get reactions from people in the real world. | ||
| It's sort of selling their souls. | ||
| But it shows them, Living in a very misogynistic world and all the men are awful. | ||
| There's not a single good man in the show and they're navigating this horror show of misogyny and having to become very steely, strong, intelligent predators in their own right in order to survive it. | ||
| Now, I would have loved to have seen a show with very strong female characters like that who can get the job done without terrorizing Men in the process and I think it was it would have been it could have been possible. | ||
| Who did it? | ||
| Well was Buffy the Vampire Slayer back in the day? | ||
| The X-Files did it. | ||
| Well, the X-Files in fact, they would be equals but in Buffy the Vampire Slayer Xander who is not a slayer and is essentially kind of a goofball is never talked down to by Buffy or in any way ridiculed because he is not of the same level of competence as her because he is not a slayer. | ||
| It's not his role. | ||
| He He plays a different role, but he's never treated with outward disrespect. | ||
| And I would actually argue that Hollywood, more than anything, television has been doing strong female characters way, like, for 30 years. | ||
| Before the film. | ||
| Way before films. | ||
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Castle, Stanna Kadic's character. | |
| She's awesome too. | ||
| I've worked on Castle. | ||
| But they never turn Nathan Fillion. | ||
| He plays a goofball, but they make a point early on in the show that he can deadshot at a range. | ||
| And he's a smart goofball. | ||
| He may be a goofball, but he's really smart. | ||
| He's always smart. | ||
| There's one scene that I love so much is in Man of Steel. | ||
| But before you get that, just remind me I have a Nathan Fillion story. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So who's the female Kryptonian in Man of Steel? | ||
| Do you know her name? | ||
| Oh, I forget her name. | ||
| I like that they have, she's a strong character on right, she's female. | ||
| I don't even, like, you have a woman on screen, she's a villain, she can be a villain, you don't have to make her a hero, whatever. | ||
| My favorite scene is when Chris Maloney, Maloney, I don't know how to pronounce his name, he's just a military guy, and he's confronted with a Kryptonian, super powered, and he just pulls out a knife, and he's just standing there, and she's, I love that scene. | ||
| He was weak, he had no chance against her, but he stood strong, and I'm like, You can make a strong female character and you can make a strong male character who is weaker than her in the same respect. | ||
| I just thought that was fantastically done. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| Look, what we need are heroes. | ||
| We need to know that, you know, we can win even against the odds. | ||
| And I don't give a crap What color my hero is, what gender my hero is. | ||
| A hero is a fucking hero. | ||
| A hero is somebody who rises up to the occasion and wins despite being afraid, despite having all the odds against him or her. | ||
| That's what I want to see. | ||
| There's a great video on YouTube breaking down Captain America versus Captain Marvel. | ||
| And why Captain America was beloved and why Captain Marvel was divisive. | ||
| And they explain how Captain America's character is scrawny, weak, his only real worth is his willpower and his passion, his loyalty. | ||
| He gets selected for this program, is gifted these powers, and he's very humble, he's very honorable, very noble. | ||
| Captain Marvel's story is she just gets these powers on accident, she's too powerful, and then she like steals a guy's clothes and she just does whatever she wants. | ||
| Not realizing the Terminator was the bad guy. | ||
|
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When the Terminator did it in Terminator 1, he was the bad guy. | |
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's also because the female power fantasy and the male power fantasy are inherently different in a lot of ways. | ||
| Yeah, I've read that. | ||
| And I wonder if some people have said, I read a breakdown of the male versus female power fantasy and why there's two like principle types of movies, the chick flick and the action film. | ||
| It's because the male power fantasy is risking everything to save those and everyone you care about. | ||
| And the female power fantasy is being able to do whatever you want without consequence. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So if you look at female rom-coms, it's the woman who's bumbling about, or an example is the woman who's got a husband. | ||
| She goes back home to visit family, and then there's the old high school guy who's charming, and she ditches her longtime boyfriend because they got into an argument, and then on a whim, for the first time in 20 years, just hooks up with this guy at her house. | ||
| Like, there's no consequences. | ||
| She can do whatever she wants. | ||
| Paperbook romance novels from back in the day, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, the difference in- Sounds like life. | ||
| It doesn't sound like a fantasy to me, but- But it's always- It's reflective of life, I mean- It's the exaggeration, I suppose. | ||
| I would also point out that the reason that the race and the gender shouldn't matter is because when it's done right, when the storytelling's not woke, it tends to be a universal ideal. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Whereas a lot of the stories that people find divisive now is because one, they're putting down another group, And two, it's already limiting its target audience because it's speaking to an experience that I can't understand. | ||
| If it's a story about something that an African American has struggled with, I can watch it, I can enjoy it, but I can't relate to it the same way a universal story about a good guy saving somebody from a bad guy. | ||
| You may not be able to relate to Yes. | ||
| maybe some of the particulars, but the essence of a story like that, to injustice or cruelty or crushing somebody's dignity are things that you would relate to and empathize with. - And I believe 20 years ago, those stories were done more deftly and with more care than they are now. - those stories were done more deftly and with more care than they are now. - Probably Probably had better records back then. | ||
| I want to jump to this story and maybe we'll argue a little bit. | ||
| Alec Baldwin had his charges dropped. | ||
| And I know you've done, you've probably worked with guns a lot on set for a very long time. | ||
| So how long have you been, would you say you've had experience with guns on set? | ||
| Decades? | ||
| 30 years. | ||
| 30 years. | ||
| You had a great episode in Burn Notice where Jeffrey Donovan gets your gun inside a nightclub. | ||
| Do you remember that one? | ||
| I remember being in the nightclub, but I don't remember specifically. | ||
| Yeah, I love that episode. | ||
| That was one of the first times I'd seen one of your roles was that show. | ||
| I love that show. | ||
| Yeah, he's a good actor, man. | ||
| How many episodes of Burn Notice were you in? | ||
| Just one. | ||
| Just one. | ||
| It's one of my favorite shows ever. | ||
| So Alec Baldwin is on set. | ||
| He has a gun, I guess he's dry firing it or something like that. | ||
| And then a live round was placed in it, kills this woman. | ||
| I'm curious your thoughts before we get into like this story and the argument on what happened. | ||
| I think everybody along the chain of custody of a firearm is responsible for it. | ||
| I could see how somebody who's been in the business a long time might trust the armor and the prop person to give him a gun that's not hot, a cold weapon. | ||
| Especially if they said that. | ||
| But you have the gun and you're pointing it at somebody, your responsibility. | ||
| Oh, we agree. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, so I mean, every, everybody knows that when you have a weapon like that, this revolver, where you could actually see the rounds inside, you got to crack that cylinder open and check each round. | ||
| And the way you check each round is to make sure it's a dummy round. | ||
| Is you shake it and if it rattles, it is a dummy round or you look where the firing pin depressed in the back of the shell. | ||
| And if it's depressed, then that means it won't fire as well. | ||
| And then you clear that with everybody you're going to be pointing the weapon at. | ||
| Then you can load it back up if they want to see what the rounds look like inside. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But you have your finger off the trigger and you never cock it. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| I mean, that's what I did. | ||
| All of the opposite. | ||
|
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When you watch, when you watch prop firearms fired, the slide never moves. | |
| Well, I mean, you mean one that fires blanks? | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| Yeah, the slide will move and it'll eject a shell. | ||
| That's why they have those types of guns, but it's firing a blank. | ||
| And they're non-guns too, right? | ||
| They make non-guns which are like... For close shots. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you'll see the slide will rack on a non-gun. | ||
| There's nothing will be ejected out of the port. | ||
| They have to do that probably in post. | ||
| And they have airsoft guns, which they use now, which will have the same mechanics as a regular gun, but it doesn't shoot anything. - We've got them. | ||
| Yeah, the slide goes back and everything, racket and magazine and all that. - I'm actually a constant adder to IMDB. | ||
| It's one of my favorite things to do is to add to the trivia section of IMDB. | ||
| And there's an episode of Person of Interest where Jim Caviezel just basically removes the magazine from a gun and it's very clearly an Airsoft gun. | ||
| So I'm glad to hear that we agree, I think. | ||
| But do you think Alec Baldwin should have been criminally charged? | ||
| Yes, but maybe not for, what was it, second degree manslaughter? | ||
| Yeah, manslaughter. | ||
| Yeah, something less, lesser perhaps, but he was criminally responsible. | ||
| I think in addition to that, I'm not sure if this is true, so forgive me if I'm saying something not factual. | ||
| He was a producer on the show. | ||
| Yes, he was. | ||
| Okay, so that's a truth. | ||
| That makes him even more responsible. | ||
| For the hiring also of the people who handled the firearms poorly. | ||
| I think it's his role as a producer that makes him even more just as culpable, if not more. | ||
| I think he should have been charged with murder. | ||
| First degree. | ||
| Yeah, they wouldn't know. | ||
| First degree, no. | ||
| But if you know the details of the story, I think you might disagree. | ||
| So the context of the story as to why I think there's potentially a grand jury indictment for first degree murder is that Alec Baldwin was feuding with the staff. | ||
| He was not friends with this woman. | ||
| In fact, in an interview, he explained that she was antagonizing him by constantly giving him instruction, and he was saying things like, she is not the director, she cannot say these things to me, and she's making me blah blah blah, do the scene over again, and she's just a cinematographer. | ||
| Very angry. | ||
| So here you have a story about a producer on set where the budget's low, there are safety issues. | ||
| The staff members are threatening to walk off, screw up the production. | ||
| He explained that he doesn't like being away from home and that these actions are causing him distress. | ||
| This woman is then, as he describes, being antagonistic and making him do things she is not entitled to do. | ||
| They then had a meeting for some reason to discuss issues on set. | ||
| Alec Baldwin, there's clear circumstantial evidence of some kind of conflict between him and this woman, then goes and does a scene where he shoots and kills her. | ||
| He claims his finger wasn't on the trigger. | ||
| Camera footage shows that his finger actually was on the trigger. | ||
| Questions arise as to how the live ammunition got in the gun. | ||
| Surprise, surprise, Alec Baldwin on his person had two live rounds found after the shooting. | ||
| I think these facts warrant an investigation at the very least into intentional killing of this woman. | ||
| And the fact that all the charges were dropped is, I shouldn't say shocking, but wrong. | ||
| I definitely think that dropping all the charges is wrong. | ||
| I think he should be held responsible in some way. | ||
| Even if, maybe the family of the cinematographer will take him to civil court. | ||
| So this is much lower standard of evidence there, a standard of proof. | ||
| So they might be able to get something out of him for that. | ||
| But connecting the dots in this sense doesn't, I mean, Makes sense to me. | ||
| Motive, opportunity, and possession of live rounds. | ||
| He may be a dick, you know, and he may have cocked the thing and, you know, imagined in his head, you fucking bitch. | ||
| He had the bullets on him. | ||
| He had the bullets. | ||
| I don't know what any of that means or if it's related at all. | ||
| How did live bullets get on a movie set? | ||
| Well, they were shooting him off set too. | ||
| I did a Western called The Cherokee Kid and we had armorers on the set and we fired live rounds to practice shooting live rounds. | ||
| They wanted us to get the feel of what it felt like to shoot that kind of weapon and to do it proficiently. | ||
| I mean, if you're a guy in a Western, you've been with a firearm that even if you're around firearms, you're not used to because it's an old Colt, you know, it has a whole different feel. | ||
| Yeah, single action. | ||
| The cylinder doesn't even come out. | ||
| You flip open a little tab and you spin it manually to load the bullets. | ||
| And then you pop the bullets in one at a time. | ||
| Well, yeah, it's, It's a weapon you have to familiarize yourself with, but that puts extra stress on the armor and the prop person. | ||
| Usually when a weapon is on the set, they call a meeting. | ||
| This has happened since Brandon Lee, right? | ||
| They call a meeting. | ||
| Everybody, come here! | ||
| And they make everybody sit down, even if it's just a rehearsal. | ||
| We have a cold weapon on the set, and they make sure, the armor makes sure it's open. | ||
| Now, when I have a modern weapon, even if it's an airsoft, I lock the slide back if I have to point it at somebody. | ||
| I don't have my finger on the trigger and I locked the slide back. | ||
| Sorry, I locked the slide back additionally. | ||
| That's just me because I'm a gun owner and I know how to, you know, work around guns. | ||
| He's a New York guy. | ||
| He's a New York lefty, you know, from Tisch. | ||
| What does he know about guns? | ||
| Probably not much. | ||
| I think we can look at it a few different ways. | ||
| There's, I believe, motive. | ||
| There is opportunity and The question of how the rounds got, the live rounds got into the gun was a big question. | ||
| And so that's why people were blaming the other people on set, the armor perhaps, they're saying, she must have loaded the live rounds. | ||
| But they found two live rounds on Baldwin's person, which perhaps- He could have had them in his pocket when they were test firing the weapons before. | ||
| I mean, I don't- But he put it in his, it was in his gun belt. | ||
| So I look at it like, Certainly, perhaps the most reasonable position is some kind of involuntary manslaughter or negligence charge or something. | ||
| But it seems to me particularly conspiratorial to argue all of these Final Destination-type things happened, which culminated in Alec Baldwin accidentally shooting this woman, versus a woman he was mad at, he shot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he had the bullets and he had the gun. | ||
| But I would be interested in knowing what would happen, Alec, if you were a Republican. | ||
| They did an episode of a show called iZombie where they're on the set of a zombie TV show. | ||
| Is that guy a libertarian who does that? | ||
| Rob Thomas. | ||
| Oh, Rob Thomas did. | ||
| He was from Supernatural, wasn't he, Rob Thomas? | ||
| So he's not Libertarian. | ||
| So in this episode, a person gets shot on the set of a TV show about zombies, and they find out that it's because the armorer was mad at the one guy. | ||
| No, when was this episode? | ||
| It was like 2018. | ||
| Rose MacGyver and Malcolm Goodwin. | ||
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After that happened, I was like, whoa. | |
| Maybe Alec Baldwin and his buddy watched it and said, this is how we do it. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But also just think about that. | ||
| If it's true, if these charges being dropped, congratulations. | ||
| That's how you murder somebody now. | ||
| Well, I think if you're on the left, you could probably get away with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Trump said, you know, famously he can go on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody. | ||
| But the reality is more like Hillary Clinton would get away with it. | ||
| Yeah, Hillary Clinton could. | ||
| He could. | ||
| At least he might be able to, you know, wheedle his way out of it somehow, but they would certainly not make it easy. | ||
| They're going to put him in jail for filing his legal paperwork wrong. | ||
| Yeah, they will. | ||
| There was a like Hillary Clinton got involved in the DeSantis thing and posted a memes like I'm on Team Disney And it's like a picture of her and Bill with Mickey and somebody's like and then Mickey was found with two shots to the back Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't know I I can't say I'm surprised about the Alec Baldwin thing, but I just I I'm surprised that the response I got from talking about it, from so many people who worked in film, was that I was wrong, I don't know what I'm talking about, and that they did everything right. | ||
| And there's a disconnect between me as a gun owner, and what I know you must do at all times with guns, and this idea among these actors that they have special privileges that exempt them from gun safety because they're on a movie set. | ||
| They might think they have special privileges in general that exempt them from lots of things. | ||
| But Alec Baldwin, he's getting released? | ||
| I mean, look, if you were doing anything other, if you were at a gun range and you had a gun and was told it had blanks in it and you shot and killed somebody, you're going to jail. | ||
| You're going to get some kind of negligence charge or something at the very least, but put a camera on it and now all of a sudden he's exempt? | ||
| These people do exempt themselves. | ||
| It's like porn. | ||
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It's prostitution unless you film it and then suddenly it's a movie. | |
| I, people were telling me, so, you know, Alec Baldwin said he's not allowed to check the weapon. | ||
| When he's handed the gun by the armor, he can't check it because if you were to open it, they'd say, what did you just do to the weapon? | ||
| We have to check it again because you may have loaded it. | ||
| So he's lying. | ||
| He lied about not having his finger on the trigger. | ||
| He lied about the fact that you can't check a weapon after it's been given to you. | ||
| That's also not true. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| They can also start pushing gun control now because these guns just go off whenever they want. | ||
| It's like, I didn't even have my finger on the trigger. | ||
| I can't imagine this, that someone hands you, someone walks up to you and says, here's a gun, point at that person and pull the trigger, and you'd be like, you got it boss! | ||
| Whoa, I can't believe it was loaded! | ||
| A single action takes a lot of work to pull that trigger. | ||
| So it's like, it's not accidental. | ||
| It's not like a hair pit, you know, it's not like you've racked something in a customized, you've racked around in a customized like 9-11 and you touch the trigger and it goes off. | ||
| This is something that requires quite a bit of Yeah, it's single action. | ||
| You have to cock the hammer back, then you have to release it. | ||
| I know that The Rock said that for his production company from now on, they're using nothing but rubber guns in response to that, to what happened. | ||
| That's kind of awful. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| Like, it just doesn't look right, and then they have to do a bunch of work in post. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, rubber guns are solid. | ||
| I mean, they might have some that have the barrel bored out, but... | ||
| Yeah, and then you have to make the pretend that you're doing that. | ||
| You have to actually move your hands. | ||
| You sort of have to do that even with blanks. | ||
| If they put quarter loads in there, it doesn't have any kick at all. | ||
| And then you actually notice the actors who've been doing it for a long time because they're better at faking it. | ||
| Or guys who fire guns. | ||
| On a regular basis, yeah. | ||
| I mean, my favorite thing is to go through and look at all the times they don't do, they don't have good trigger discipline. | ||
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Oh yeah. | |
| Like that's, that's my favorite like that. | ||
| Finger on the trigger. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I hate when they have it off the whole time. | ||
| You know, they're going through, they're clearing a house, but their finger is off the trigger the whole time. | ||
| Or they say silencer rather than suppressor. | ||
| Yeah, I noticed that too. | ||
| There's a lot of movie scenes where they'll be pointing the gun at the bad guy who's armed and their fingers off the trigger. | ||
| I'm like, that's when you get prepared to shoot the person who you're trying to stop because they're evil. | ||
| Exactly when your fingers should be on the trigger. | ||
| Or they're balling a cup in the bottom and they're not holding it properly. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Scary stories. | ||
| I'm sure everybody who's worked with guns has seen someone put their hand over the slide or whatever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's a good way to have your whole thumb ripped off. | ||
| Thumb taken off. | ||
| My Nathan Fillion story real fast. | ||
| First of all, I love Nathan Fillion. | ||
| He's great. | ||
| He's a great actor. | ||
| Have you seen Slither? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of my favorite horror comedy movies of all time. | ||
| Firefly. | ||
| Everyone loves Firefly. | ||
| And Firefly is great. | ||
| Everyone loves Firefly. | ||
| For video game fans, he was in Destiny. | ||
| Oh yeah? | ||
| He's a good voice actor too. | ||
| I forgot the, I can't remember, Cade 6, his name was. | ||
| They killed him off though. | ||
| So I did an episode of Castle and it was a cool episode where they were playing in two different He played both the old-time character and the new-time character. | ||
| I played the old-time character and the new-time character. | ||
| The old-time character, we were doing it like as a 40s noir film. | ||
| So we were talking in a very specific way, right? | ||
| And very different from the modern guys. | ||
| But as the modern guy, I'm sitting there being interrogated by him. | ||
| And we're doing a few shot, you know, a few angles and stuff. | ||
| And after a while, you know, we're sitting there in between shots and he looks at me, he goes, so did you do it? | ||
| I say, what? | ||
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Did you do it? | |
| Did you, you know? | ||
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I'm like, didn't you read the script? | |
| He said, no. | ||
| And I'm like, I'll tell you what, after this take, you tell me if I did or not. | ||
| And he's like, okay, cool. | ||
| So we did the take. | ||
| He's just so cool. | ||
| I think he just, you know, when you're a lead in a show, you don't have a lot of time to read everything. | ||
| And so you might have to just read the scenes on the day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But so free and fun, and you can see that in his work. | ||
| It translates in the screen. | ||
| That seems really funny, too, because they're like, you look just like him. | ||
| You're like, it's genetics. | ||
| Because you look just like your grandfather or something like that. | ||
| I actually really like that show through most of the those seasons because that is an example of a female character that is very very strong but one of the ways that they managed to do is because the problem people have is the idea of Mary Sue's right is they don't like the idea of a character without flaws but a lot of these characters it's more like they're they're great in their professional life but they're bad in their personal life yeah right so both characters and that have unique flaws therefore everything feels more human Yeah. | ||
| I've never really watched the show, but I love him as an actor. | ||
| And she was awesome too, to work with. | ||
| Did you work with her on something else or just that? | ||
| No, just that. | ||
| She was really cool. | ||
| Do you watch every show you do? | ||
| No. | ||
| I figured, honestly. | ||
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Dude, I don't watch anything. | |
| Even when I'm editing our show. | ||
| Just if I want to steal a scene for my reel, because we have to have reels, you know, that we show producers and stuff. | ||
| That's, that's an interesting thing too. | ||
| People don't, don't realize a lot of actors probably do not watch the shows or movies they're in. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I try to watch things in playback. | ||
| I learned from Jeff Bridges. | ||
| I used to be afraid of watching playback, what they call playback. | ||
| So you do a scene and then you can ask the video department because they're videotaping it. | ||
| If you can see playback and you can judge for yourself, whether you like what you did or not, and then maybe ask for another take if you don't like it. | ||
| Uh, a lot of actors hate watching themselves like that, but I love it. | ||
| And that's, if I've, if I get to see a lot of playback, I don't have to watch the episode. | ||
| Cause I don't like watching clips from our show. | ||
| I don't watch anything. | ||
|
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Cause I have to edit our segments and I'm just like, Oh my voice. | |
| It's horrible. | ||
| Just don't like, I have to like get through it as quickly as possible. | ||
| Luckily. | ||
| This is the crazy thing too, that I think a lot of people don't understand. | ||
| Uh, the actors don't even know what the story is sometimes. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| All the time? | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| Yeah, like if you're doing a 22 or 23 episode show... | ||
| A lot of times they're figuring out the character arcs in the writing room and you don't necessarily know where you're going. | ||
| And sometimes you'll look back and go, holy fuck, I wish I knew, you know, I wish I knew that then when I was acting it, but somehow it all gets worked out in the wash. | ||
| I actually wanted to talk to you about that because there was a, I do believe there's a fundamental difference now between when Hollywood was doing 22 to 23 episodes seasons. | ||
| And now shows getting sold to streaming services, it fundamentally changes the approach to storytelling. | ||
| I think in like a great deal. | ||
| One thing that I've noticed is that when a show was 22 episodes and you have like a mid-season finale and you're writing as you go, characters can become more prominent as audience response comes in. | ||
| And characters that do well end up, you know, like talent, you know, creamerized. | ||
| Real quick, an example. | ||
| I don't know if this is true, but the story goes that the janitor in Scrubs was supposed to have like a single bit where he made fun of JD, but the audience reaction was so positive they kept bringing him back. | ||
| Walton Goggins was supposed to die at the beginning of Justified, and they made him a series regular because they liked him so much. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So like, but now with streaming services, they just get what they get. | ||
| They make it. | ||
| And there is no audience feedback. | ||
| So a lot of times you don't get the growth in storytelling because it's just done start to finish from one start of the season to the end. | ||
| That may be true. | ||
| I don't know if that's true, but the good news about having these compact episodes, like six, 10, 12 episodes, uh, is that you have a great continuity of story. | ||
| The writing is better. | ||
| It's more seamless. | ||
| There's no plot holes like there. | ||
| There can be. | ||
| The arcs are better. | ||
| And oftentimes they have a greater continuity of directors. | ||
| So sometimes a director will be the primary director through most of the season, as opposed to, you know, you're getting a different director each episode, which can sometimes give it a schizophrenic style. | ||
| Do you enjoy this working streaming stuff now more than the network television stuff? | ||
| Uh, I like them both because they pay money. | ||
| No, for the same reason, because they pay my bills. | ||
| Have you ever been in a circumstance where they made you film a scene in several different ways so that no one could leak the outcome or something like that? | ||
| No, no, not yet. | ||
| But I did have a circumstance in Lost where one of the extras Leaked information about what was happening on the set and potential plot information and they shut that guy the fuck down. | ||
| Whoa I don't want to say that it was a Hillary Clinton thing where the guy was found somewhere Two bullet holes in his head, but They did they did that with the scream movies early on because who the killer is became really important to the right to the story So they would film multiple endings with different people. | ||
| Oh and I when I auditioned for lost I They audition a different scene with a different character name in case those sides get out and get leaked to people. | ||
| So I didn't even know what character I had actually gotten when I went to the island. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| So I was like, I literally landed and went to go for a wardrobe fitting and Michael Emerson came up to me. | ||
| He's like, Hey, so you're our Jacob. | ||
| It's like, Oh fuck, I'm the guy. | ||
| I'm the guy, the keeper of the island. | ||
| Holy crap. | ||
| Mike Lemerson's great too. | ||
| He is great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was on like on person, but you did person of interest with Jim Caviezel. | ||
| And that was one of my favorite episodes because that's the episode where they, the husband and the wife take out the hit on each other. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I love Jim Caviezel. | ||
| He's such a cool dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Such a down to earth guy. | ||
| He, um, there's a really interesting story about him where he had, uh, because he's very conservative, uh, religious conservative, right? | ||
| And he told this story about how, um, he had a friend who was pro-choice who basically, or like he, he, um, a friend of his said he would, uh, change to pro-life like him if he adopted kids from, from China. | ||
| And he adopted kids from China. | ||
| And the guy's like, I'm not changing my opinion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's brutal. | ||
| Yeah, but it doesn't matter because they love their kids. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you know, don't do things for political gain. | ||
| Do things because it's the right thing to do. | ||
| And he's got a movie coming out. | ||
| Was it Sound of Freedom? | ||
| It's about human trafficking, which has been in production hell and trying to find a distributor for years because a lot of people don't think that Hollywood likes stories about human trafficking all that much. | ||
| Well, Netflix seems to like Shows like Big Mouth and Cuties. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, in general, like we talk a lot about like Hollywood degeneracy as far as like the types of stories that are getting made now, whether it's euphoria, things like that, which just aren't my cup of tea, but I understand that different people like different things, but not my, not my thing. | ||
| I feel like one of the, one of the problems, this is, this is outside of Hollywood too. | ||
| It's just society in general is that It's like the rat utopia experiment. | ||
| Are you familiar with the rat utopia? | ||
| No. | ||
| Dude gives a bunch of rats unlimited food and water, but finite space, and then just sees what happens, and the rats basically lose their minds. | ||
| They start acting strangely. | ||
| A bunch of rats become gay. | ||
| Some only just groom themselves. | ||
| They call them the beautiful ones. | ||
| And when there was no responsibility, When they were given everything they needed, there was a functional decay of the ability to survive that existed within the rats. | ||
| And I think what you end up seeing here, you know, with us, the culture or whatever... | ||
| Things feel good. | ||
| Why pursue things that feel bad? | ||
| But the reality is things, you need the bad and the good. | ||
| You need the balance. | ||
| And we're losing the balance. | ||
| So without light, there's no dark. | ||
| Without pain, there is no joy or whatever. | ||
| Hollywood is just targeting the positive as much as possible over and over and over again. | ||
| And so that means it's going to pursue social things that can, it's not just Hollywood, it's big tech, it's the media. | ||
| This is why the right tends to get banned and the left tends to get overly promoted. | ||
| Because the left takes that entitled approach to things where everyone should feel good and be given everything they want all the time. | ||
| If someone is hungry, they should be fed. | ||
| And then the right takes a more realistic approach of sometimes there's no food and sometimes there's no medicine. | ||
| Well, you gotta ban those things! | ||
| Those are sad things. | ||
| Only promote the things that are, everyone feels good all the time. | ||
| And that leads us down this path of, I guess, moral corruption or social decay or something. | ||
| Well, I don't know that they focus on the happy, but they certainly focus on the altruistic. | ||
| That's what I mean to say. | ||
| And the right, this is where the moral inconsistency comes in. | ||
| The left is 100% altruistic. | ||
| If you need, you have moral priority. | ||
| If you don't need, you're expendable. | ||
| And you're only more valuable to the extent that you satisfy that need. | ||
| The right says you need to hustle in a little selfishness in order to live. | ||
| But not just that, what I mean to say is if someone is doing something, like we're seeing this expansion with like child sex change surgery and things like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If the child says they're a dragon, they're a dragon. | ||
| Don't be mean to them. | ||
| Affirm what they want. | ||
| Yeah, that primacy of consciousness. | ||
| Yeah, you don't want to cause any discomfort. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't wanna make them feel stressed. | ||
| It's the primacy of emotions over reason, right? | ||
| It all goes down that binary road. | ||
| And it's destructive. | ||
| It's very destructive. | ||
| That's what I mean to say. | ||
| Because people take their emotions as primaries, and your emotions aren't primaries. | ||
| They're based on values. | ||
| You've evaluated something to be good or bad An accumulation of thinking or not thinking about it, and whether or not that emotion reflects reality is something you have to determine. | ||
| You can't just take your emotion as a given and as a metric for truth. | ||
| You know what's interesting? | ||
| I think church probably used to be the primary mode of influence for society. | ||
| It's where people would gather once a week and then share ideas. | ||
| And then with the expansion of mass media, radio, et cetera, the primary driver of cultural influence and culture itself left moral structures and entered entertainment structures. | ||
| I wonder if that's gonna change. | ||
| Do you like- In what direction? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's still very much so that Hollywood is a primary driver of influence, mass media is. | ||
| I think that may be the case, but I'm wondering if we'll see a shift I think, I think entertainment has always sort of been the delivery system for ethics. | ||
| You know, narratives have been older than the church even for, for, for teaching and for moral platforms. | ||
| So, uh, you know, even if it's not the church, it could be the theater and you'd, you'd learn, you'd learn probably the same values watching, uh, uh, all my sons, Arthur Miller play or the crucible as going to church. | ||
| This is a point that I brought up a couple weeks ago. | ||
| You know, people on the right, anti-woke people, whatever you want to describe them as, they like to complain about woke movies and woke shows, but I don't see them celebrating the inverse. | ||
| I don't see them coming out being like, this is the movie, this is the movie. | ||
| Captain America, for instance, every conservative in this country should have been Cheering for it? | ||
| Buying multiple tickets? | ||
| It's a story about a young man who wants to sacrifice for his country so much so that he tries to lie his way into the military, then becomes Captain America who fights Nazis? | ||
| I don't... I'm just like... | ||
| You can complain about woke movies all day. | ||
| It wasn't as much of a cultural issue when Captain America came out in 2011. | ||
| We weren't quite having the same level of culture war that we're having now when the original Captain America came out. | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| I'm just saying there needs to be a reminder of, hey, that was pretty over the top in the direction of conservatives. | ||
| It's why I love, my Twitter is literally just me talking about awesome stuff for movies and television that I like, or like I post scenes from things that I enjoy because it is like, I've, because most of my job requires a lot of, it is complaining or it is at least like analyzing what I'm seeing happening in the industry. | ||
| And at the end of the day, that's draining to me. | ||
| It's important. | ||
| I do think it's important to talk about it. | ||
| Most of the time, it's less about the people and becomes more about the ideas behind these discussions. | ||
| We've been talking about Jonathan Majors and what's going on with him losing a lot of work right now without even being convicted of a crime. | ||
| Wait, I'm clueless. | ||
| Jonathan Majors was in Creed 3. | ||
| Do you know who Jonathan Majors is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's in Creed 3. | ||
| He's in Ant-Man. | ||
| He's a new Marvel. | ||
| He's Kang in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. | ||
| He's a star on the rise and he had an incident recently where he and a girlfriend had an altercation in a taxi cab and It's a whole story that basically boils down to toxic relationship. | ||
| He ends up getting arrested and in the time span of three weeks has lost almost every role he's been in except for the Marvel role. | ||
| He lost an advertisement from the the US Army which he was doing a bunch of ad campaigns for. | ||
| He was associated with the Texas Rangers. | ||
| They dropped him and all of this stuff is going on. | ||
| And I'm like, there's scumbags in Hollywood. | ||
| All the, you know, there've always been bad people in these industries that don't seem to suffer the same consequences. | ||
| And especially not that fast. | ||
| I have my own opinions on whether I think he's guilty or not. | ||
| It doesn't matter because I wasn't there. | ||
| Would he hit her? | ||
| Like, like apparently she reached for his phone and like he got scratched. | ||
| There was no pictures of the scratches or anything, but she, when the, when the cops came the next day, like he called the cops because she passed out drunk. | ||
| And then when they got there, basically that what they're saying now is that she, they pressured her to file a complaint. | ||
| And the, That's all hearsay. | ||
| His lawyers are saying that, that they coached her. | ||
| I can't verify whether that's true or not. | ||
| It's not really the point. | ||
| The point is that he hasn't been convicted of a crime yet, and there's an insane amount of backlash for something that in the end of the day is a personal problem. | ||
| But I can't figure out why the New York district attorney is actually going after him so hard. | ||
| Now, two more women apparently have come forward. | ||
| There are no names given for that, saying he's guilty, but I couldn't figure out how something like this happens where he's been dropped by all these companies that fast when you see a lot of similar cases in these industries where it just doesn't feel like there's that much backlash that swiftly. | ||
| Some people are bringing race into it. | ||
| They're saying, why is Ezra Miller allowed to chokeslam women in Iceland? | ||
| But Jonathan Majors gets in an incident that nobody can corroborate. | ||
| Is he Republican? | ||
| I don't think, I don't know if he's Republican. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Some people floated that idea. | ||
| I'm like, I don't think so. | ||
| Let me ask you, I mean, with the videos you've put out, Have you felt like there's a backlash in the industry or they're upset with you? | ||
| You know, I think they're too smart to be open about it if they were upset with me. | ||
| But have you felt it? | ||
| I do feel something. | ||
| I do feel, but it could be my paranoia, you know, because I'm, I, I, it's not like I was a closeted guy with my politics. | ||
| I was always very open about what I thought. | ||
| That's why it was sort of a relief to talk to somebody like Jake on the set because, excuse me, Jake McLaughlin, because he was sort of, you know, in my camp. | ||
| He's a conservative, but you know, we can, there was a lot of things that we could agree on. | ||
| You worked with David Boreanaz? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who? | |
| David Boreanaz. | ||
| David Boreanaz. | ||
| Angel from Buffy. | ||
| And Bones. | ||
| Bones. | ||
| He's on the SEAL team. | ||
| I think Bones is bigger than Buffy. | ||
| I don't know why I went to Buffy first. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| That show's really, really good too. | ||
| Another good example of a strong female character. | ||
| And an example where he's a religious conservative, basically. | ||
| Yeah, he's not a religious conservative. | ||
| He's a Hollywood religious conservative. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is he? | |
| I mean, I don't know what he is in real life. | ||
| He posted a thing about Fauci in court, so I can make assumptions from that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So you're saying Jake McLaughlin, he is somebody who's on the conservative side, but he's still working. | ||
| I don't know if I just outed him and didn't mean to, but he's very open on the set about his perspective, like I am. | ||
| And so I don't I don't know if that's affecting me, but I suspect that it might just because I know that And I know that it's affected me in a good way in the sense that some of the folks have you know circled the wagons around me because they know what I'm like personally and they're not going to believe the crap that Some of these woke activists online, throw at them. | ||
| I know that a few of them have tried to get me fired from my convention circuit and the convention. | ||
| The people who run the convention are like, Mark, we got your back. | ||
| We know that this is all bullshit. | ||
| You know, they accused me of being a homophobe, a transphobe, a racist, a Islamophobe. | ||
| Because of being pro-capitalism. | ||
| Because I'm pro-capitalist, yeah, I'm pro-individual. | ||
| But they have a lot of those people have groupthink, and they are the type of people, a lot of them, are the ones that will label. | ||
| If you have one belief, you likely have all of these other beliefs, which degrades the idea of the individual, which is what you talk about. | ||
| They don't have that view. | ||
| They don't have that view. | ||
| So, uh, again, I don't, I don't know if it's affecting me. | ||
| It could, but I feel like in 2014, I noticed a change coming over Twitter, uh, where you could have before that you could have arguments, legitimate discussions with people that weren't vitriolic, even if you really differed with the person. | ||
| But after 2014, the atmosphere became very toxic. | ||
| And people, I noticed then, were very afraid to fight the toxicity. | ||
| And I decided, man, when a bully attacks you, you've got two choices, give in or fight. | ||
| And at least if you lose the fight, you're gonna gain the respect of that bully to a degree. | ||
| And so I decided to fight the bully culture that's out there now. | ||
| Any cool projects coming up that we should know about? | ||
| American Rust, you know, is the big one. | ||
| I'm going to be releasing, I think, reality checks every couple of weeks. | ||
| I love the reality checks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good. | |
| I just did one on minimum wage. | ||
| I just watch it. | ||
| I got one coming up on altruism. | ||
| Oppose the minimum wage? | ||
| Opposed. | ||
| Yeah, I was talking to an accountant a few years ago, New Jersey, up the minimum wage, and he said he lost 20% of his clients, they went out of business overnight. | ||
| Because he said what people didn't understand is they do this thing where they say, We're gonna raise the minimum wage by $3 and we'll do it 30 cents every six months or whatever to help people get acclimated. | ||
| And he was like, it doesn't work that way. | ||
| He was like, look, I got a small business. | ||
| They got 10 employees. | ||
| All of a sudden they're looking at a three to 6% increase in the span of a couple months. | ||
| That's huge. | ||
| That's way over their margins. | ||
| Their margins are gone. | ||
| Their margins are now zero. | ||
| People don't understand what that means. | ||
| They think profits are really arbitrary. | ||
| And that they could give those to the workers. | ||
| They have no idea what profits mean. | ||
| And there's people who think that a restaurant owner is rich and the workers are poor. | ||
| And sometimes the owner makes less money than the waitstaff because there's no profit for them. | ||
| And he's like- Yes, sometimes nothing. | ||
| Sometimes he's making nothing. | ||
| Restaurants notoriously go out of business. | ||
| Really low margins. | ||
| So he's like, this guy's got a 10% margin, now a 6% increase in costs in six months. | ||
| They just shut down, sold off the assets and now they're looking for work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I don't make, I don't make practical arguments. | ||
| I make a moral argument. | ||
| I feel, I feel the conservatives over the years, even though they betrayed capitalism, totally. | ||
| One thing that they've tried to do is, is show the left that capitalism works. | ||
| It's practical, but the left doesn't care because the left is doing the moral thing. | ||
| And the moral thing is not to profit. | ||
| The moral thing is to lose. | ||
| The moral thing is to sacrifice. | ||
| Which you agree with, don't you, Wright? | ||
| And the Wright says, yes we do, but you have to have a little, and that's why they lose. | ||
| So I always, if ever I, I'm going to have one on capitalism come out too. | ||
| Whenever I talk about capitalism, whenever I talk about wages and prices, I never, I never reduce it to facts and figures. | ||
| I talk about the ethics of it. | ||
| The right of the individual to be free and to- Why it's good. | ||
| And I agree with this. | ||
| I've tried to explain it to a lot of my lefty, very lefty friends. | ||
| I'll ask them quite simply, do you think an individual has a right to keep the fruits of their labor? | ||
| And they go, yes, absolutely, of course. | ||
| I'm like- Except- Right. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, so you think the government shouldn't be taking stuff from them? | ||
| They're like, well- No. | ||
| And it's just like, the argument I find on the left tends to be, the CEO has no right to steal the fruits of the labor of the workers. | ||
| The government does. | ||
| And I was like, okay, well, you know, I kind of think it should be neither but you know, whatever. | ||
| Do you remember when Gadsad got in an argument with Seth Rogen about socialism? | ||
| Did you ever see that? | ||
| No. | ||
| And basically he was... With Seth Rogen? | ||
| With Seth Rogen. | ||
| It sounds like a fever dream and weird, right? | ||
| Basically talking about like you're pushing the ideas of socialism on kids. | ||
| He's like not realizing that you're a product of the most capitalist industry in literally the most capitalist country in the world or what used to maybe what used to be the most capitalist country in the world. | ||
| I don't know, but definitely Hollywood being a hyper capitalist industry. | ||
| Uh, you know, that's very profit driven. | ||
| You know, if a project doesn't make money, they're not going to make a sequel. | ||
| Like we, uh, we make jokes all the time because Hannah Clare can't stand the Fast and the Furious movies. | ||
| And I'm like, well, they make money. | ||
| And as long as they're making money, they're going to keep making more. | ||
| And it's just, it's a clown show. | ||
| I love Fast and the Furious. | ||
| She just doesn't understand fun, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Women. | ||
| But yeah, I've actually never seen Fast and the Furious, unfortunately. | ||
| Oh, you're missing out. | ||
| Yeah, so was this a Twitter argument? | ||
| Yeah, it was like a couple years ago and I'll never forget that because like a lot of those people to the youth of today, maybe Seth Rogen isn't a thought leader, but people with his, you know, champagne socialists are a lot of times thought leaders on the youth and not realizing that many of them, uh, uh, uh, uh, Hassan Piker, who's a socialist who makes millions of dollars, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, well, I, I did derail. | ||
| I was asking you about your projects. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So American Rust and Reality Checks. | ||
| I'm writing a couple of scripts as well. | ||
| I'm going to do a mockumentary, I think, with my wife. | ||
| So it's going to be sort of objectivist geared. | ||
| She's not an objectivist, but we have some ideas that we're going to throw out there. | ||
| And I'm going to be in the summer in Paris, teaching and doing theater. | ||
| So you teach acting as well? | ||
| Yes, I teach acting. | ||
| And my wife has a theater out there, Playhouse Paris. | ||
| Tracy, what's up? | ||
| And so I'm going to go out there May 10th and I'll be teaching and working on the stage with them until July 2nd. | ||
| Right on, man. | ||
| Well, this has been a blast. | ||
| It's been so fun, guys. | ||
| Is there anything else you want to mention or shout out before we wrap up? | ||
| Just always check your premises, folks. | ||
| Always check your premises. | ||
| I dig it. | ||
| Guys, my name is Brett Dasovic. | ||
| If you'd like to follow me, I'm on Twitter and Instagram at Brett Dasovic on both. | ||
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