Danny Jones Podcast - #333 - What Destroyed VICE Media: The Story They NEVER Told | Thomas Morton
Aired: 2025-09-19
Duration: 02:54:02


=== Vice Mascot and Creative Chaos (12:52) ===

[00:00:07]  I'm happy to be able to finally have you on the show.
[00:00:09]  Yeah, sorry for dicking around for like five years.
[00:00:11]  Yeah, geez.
[00:00:12]  Stuffed, dude.
[00:00:12]  How dare you?
[00:00:15]  No, it's all good.
[00:00:16]  You've been busy.
[00:00:17]  No, no, I was the opposite of busy.
[00:00:19]  Oh, you were?
[00:00:19]  Like, scooting around, not doing much.
[00:00:21]  Yeah.
[00:00:22]  And you just finished that amazing documentary.
[00:00:24]  You just won an award for your documentary on Gavin.
[00:00:26]  We got the Canadian Oscar.
[00:00:28]  The Canadian Oscar.
[00:00:30]  So I'm told.
[00:00:30]  Yeah.
[00:00:31]  But I think it's also the Canadian Emmy.
[00:00:33]  So.
[00:00:33]  Okay.
[00:00:34]  One stop shop.
[00:00:35]  Okay.
[00:00:36]  Yeah.
[00:00:36]  I didn't go to the ceremony.
[00:00:37]  I don't think anybody on the crew expected to win.
[00:00:41]  We were up against, like, I think a doc about a guy from Gaza, a doc about someone from the Ukraine.
[00:00:47]  So, what made you want to make that documentary?
[00:00:50]  I remember because we talked on it on the phone about a year ago when we spoke on the phone.
[00:00:54]  And you mentioned that you were working on this.
[00:00:57]  And then I'm happy to see that it finally came to fruition.
[00:01:01]  But, like, what lit the spark for you to work on to create this thing?
[00:01:05]  Well, A long editable pause while I think about this for a second.
[00:01:14]  How to say this?
[00:01:16]  I mean, there's a very honest answer in that it got greenlit, right?
[00:01:22]  That it is an idea that I had tossed out to a producer in Canada like 2020, I think, because it was a year before January 6th.
[00:01:32]  And then it was sort of like, oh, it was kind of an interesting figure.
[00:01:35]  I get it.
[00:01:35]  It's sort of like, you know, niche American politics.
[00:01:38]  And then once January 6th happened, it was like, oh, everybody knows who these people are now.
[00:01:43]  It's a more bankable story, which makes it sound mercenary and gross.
[00:01:47]  But that's sort of it.
[00:01:49]  In general, I was at Vice for 15 years and I've watched, I spent 15 years watching people from outside the company try to tell the story of Vice and just trip over their ass getting it wrong, just doing a really bad job.
[00:02:04]  And so I figure for 15 years worth of fun and a little bit of money, but not much, I kind of owe it to the good times to.
[00:02:16]  You know, make a college effort at capturing the stories of that era and the people who were there.
[00:02:22]  And Gavin was just, you know, first on the list.
[00:02:25]  Do you miss it?
[00:02:26]  Vice?
[00:02:28]  Ish.
[00:02:28]  Like, do you miss high school?
[00:02:29]  No.
[00:02:30]  Like, I had a great time.
[00:02:31]  Fucking hated high school.
[00:02:32]  Oh, you did?
[00:02:32]  Okay.
[00:02:32]  Did you miss, did you go to college?
[00:02:34]  For like six months and I dropped out.
[00:02:36]  Okay.
[00:02:36]  So you probably didn't like that.
[00:02:37]  I just like, I miss it in the sense that, you know, I had a good time being a teenager, I think, fondly on that.
[00:02:44]  I don't need to do it again, although.
[00:02:47]  It isn't, you know, it doesn't exist in America right now as a cult.
[00:02:52]  Like, there's no cultural equivalent to it that I could, you know, be covetous of joining.
[00:02:59]  I had a great time, right?
[00:03:01]  So I miss it in the sense that I'm nostalgic for it a little bit, but that's just, you know, sad old guy.
[00:03:05]  There's something about it.
[00:03:06]  Like, when I first discovered it, it was when I told this to, I think I told this to Gavin or Hamilton maybe, but the first time I ever heard about it was when I was traveling shooting surfing videos with my friend Jerry.
[00:03:19]  Yeah.
[00:03:19]  Who introduced us?
[00:03:20]  Jerry Ricciotti?
[00:03:21]  Yeah.
[00:03:21]  He really introduced us.
[00:03:22]  Jerry Ricciotti.
[00:03:22]  Shout out to Jerry.
[00:03:23]  Yeah.
[00:03:24]  And I noticed some Vice videos and I noticed that he was posting on his Instagram being in Antarctica and then North Korea.
[00:03:33]  And I'm like, what?
[00:03:34]  What is he doing?
[00:03:34]  He can't be doing surf videos in North Korea.
[00:03:37]  And I followed the YouTube video and I found it all.
[00:03:41]  I'm like, whoa, this is wild.
[00:03:42]  All these things these guys are doing.
[00:03:44]  And then the noisy thing happened, which was freaking amazing.
[00:03:48]  And That was my basically my introduction to Vice.
[00:03:53]  And I thought it was so like, this is the opposite.
[00:03:56]  What I thought was so cool about it was it's like the opposite of what all of the other media is doing, right?
[00:04:01]  Which I think is cool.
[00:04:02]  And, you know, obviously eventually they just started parroting or being the same thing.
[00:04:06]  Now it's what everything does.
[00:04:07]  Maybe it was like everyone tried to be vice and then vice just kind of like, you know, kind of like faded away.
[00:04:12]  There was, you interviewed Hamilton Morris, right?
[00:04:15]  Yeah.
[00:04:15]  Who I used to live with.
[00:04:16]  Actually, I think, oh, there was a picture up of us living together as covered in the New York Times.
[00:04:20]  Yeah.
[00:04:22]  And he mentioned one of the like, there's many unsung figures in the vice story, one of whom is Jesse Pearson, who is like the editor.
[00:04:28]  He was the editor while Gavin was there in charge of that.
[00:04:31]  When Gavin got pushed out, Jesse ended up taking over the magazine.
[00:04:36]  He was the guy that was like, I don't want to say anything mean about Gavin.
[00:04:39]  Jesse?
[00:04:40]  Yeah, oh, in the doc.
[00:04:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:43]  He's a bit of an old punk and an old crank, right?
[00:04:46]  Yeah.
[00:04:47]  Comes through.
[00:04:49]  But he started a magazine after he left Vice called Apology.
[00:04:54]  And I used to be like, come on.
[00:04:56]  Like, that's a little bit.
[00:04:59]  There's a touch of sanctimony there, right?
[00:05:01]  But these days, watching all the shit that.
[00:05:03]  That's not very punk of him.
[00:05:05]  It is, in a way.
[00:05:06]  It's very like American hardcore.
[00:05:08]  You know, there's a.
[00:05:09]  Okay, yeah.
[00:05:10]  There's a purity to it, which he exemplifies.
[00:05:14]  And like I say that as someone who admires his sense of purity, even though it's pretty funny.
[00:05:20]  Anyway, now I get it.
[00:05:21]  Like watching everybody, watching what effect the format of the Vice video has had on how general.
[00:05:32]  Like video content to call it what it is versus documentaries, like and just the explosion of uh sort of hosted crap, right?
[00:05:42]  You know, I'm like, well, and I always thought too, I always thought Shane was the mastermind behind everything because I only learned about it until after Gavin left, right?
[00:05:50]  So I was like, wow, like this guy, you know, and he did a really good job at sort of like parading himself as the mascot of vice and like doing all these videos where he'd walk around the office drinking, fucking wearing a jock strap or whatever.
[00:06:02]  And uh, I was like, wow, this guy's a Genius.
[00:06:04]  And then, you know, I watched the interview with him and Spike Jones where they went and, or Spike Jones was interviewing him or whatever.
[00:06:11]  Yeah.
[00:06:11]  And I was just like fascinated by the whole thing.
[00:06:15]  And which was why, like, when I watched your documentary, I was like, holy shit, it all makes sense now.
[00:06:22]  Right.
[00:06:22]  But we didn't, like, due to who we could get to talk on camera, how much time we had, the, you know, we're making this thing for Canadian TV and what they wanted factored into it.
[00:06:32]  We don't get to talk about the other two founders.
[00:06:35]  Or talk to you.
[00:06:36]  And they didn't agree to be on the show.
[00:06:37]  Nah, they didn't.
[00:06:38]  Yeah.
[00:06:38]  Shane Smith and Sarush Alvi.
[00:06:40]  And it's like there was no mastermind of Vice.
[00:06:43]  It was a room full of geniuses who all either loved each other or eventually hated each other, given, you know, depending what time of day it was, who would either all work in sync or against each other.
[00:06:53]  It was wild.
[00:06:53]  Yeah.
[00:06:54]  But it seems like Gavin was the soul of Vice, though, right?
[00:06:57]  Ish.
[00:06:57]  Yeah.
[00:06:58]  Like he was like the voice.
[00:07:00]  He was the voice.
[00:07:00]  The original voice or sort of soul of it was really kind of him.
[00:07:04]  He was the creative guy behind it, right?
[00:07:05]  He was the idea guy.
[00:07:07]  When it was getting big in New York.
[00:07:08]  For sure.
[00:07:09]  He was the front man, right?
[00:07:12]  I'd argue Sarouche was the soul of it for its first like five years in Montreal, based on everybody I've talked to, both on camera and off.
[00:07:20]  And neither of them, I don't think anybody gets to New York without Shane.
[00:07:23]  Like he gets dismissed as he was just the businessman, but it's like he turned it into what it was.
[00:07:29]  There would be no Vice Video shit without his efforts.
[00:07:33]  There's another guy, Eddie Moretti, who's completely written out of the story.
[00:07:36]  I remember that name.
[00:07:38]  Some people know.
[00:07:39]  Yeah.
[00:07:39]  Yeah.
[00:07:41]  Yeah, you need a good sales guy, right?
[00:07:43]  Like Shane was a really good guy.
[00:07:45]  Well, it was a business, right?
[00:07:46]  And Gavin puts himself out as a businessman, which he, like, frankly is, like, a businessman about eight times over, given all the, you know, jobs he's lost for himself and companies he's had to shutter.
[00:07:57]  It's, I think Michael Moynihan talked about how it's admirable that he's stuck to it and that he can pull himself back out, like, time and time again.
[00:08:04]  I agree, you know.
[00:08:06]  And Shane was like, I was like, I was like, I was saying he is a really good salesman because I remember watching videos of him when they launched the cable network.
[00:08:16]  And I was like, at first, My first reaction was like, This is retarded.
[00:08:19]  Why would they go make a cable channel?
[00:08:21]  And then I listened to him talk about it for like 15 minutes.
[00:08:23]  I'm like, I'm sold.
[00:08:24]  It makes sense.
[00:08:25]  It makes perfect sense.
[00:08:26]  I'd buy it.
[00:08:27]  I love that.
[00:08:27]  That was another Hamilton was like, That was a stupid business venture.
[00:08:30]  I'm like, It was art, man.
[00:08:31]  I was like, For love of the game, like a great American medium, like programming a television network.
[00:08:36]  How could you say no?
[00:08:38]  Right.
[00:08:39]  So, like, the thing about Gavin is, which I think is really cool, is that he, from my perspective at least, like, Take it for what it's worth, is that he kind of stuck to the game and stuck to his art and never changed his views on things.
[00:08:58]  And he always wanted to be sort of a contrarian, sort of over the top, get reactions out of people.
[00:09:07]  Provocateur.
[00:09:08]  Provocateur.
[00:09:09]  That's the word I'm looking for.
[00:09:10]  He was like a super creative provocateur, also strange fucking guy.
[00:09:14]  He did these role playing things with people.
[00:09:16]  He's treating the world like he's living in a simulation.
[00:09:19]  Or a cartoon.
[00:09:20]  Or a cartoon.
[00:09:21]  Which is how he starts, a cartoonist.
[00:09:22]  And I think it's pretty cool that he never fing changed that to make more money.
[00:09:27]  He just kind of said, fing it, this is who I am.
[00:09:29]  But he made plenty of money too, just to put that out there.
[00:09:32]  When he got kicked out?
[00:09:33]  He was never lacking.
[00:09:34]  Yeah, he left the company with something like $13 million.
[00:09:36]  Oh, really?
[00:09:36]  I was like 100 million.
[00:09:37]  I had always heard, well, right?
[00:09:38]  Oh, would you say 100?
[00:09:39]  I thought it was 100.
[00:09:40]  Jesus Christ.
[00:09:41]  I just, I don't know.
[00:09:42]  I was just guessing.
[00:09:43]  Well, the rumor when he got bought out was that it was something like 1.3 or 1.2.
[00:09:49]  Really?
[00:09:49]  That's it?
[00:09:50]  Which you got to remember, he gets.
[00:09:53]  Pushed out in 2007.
[00:09:55]  And around that time, nobody there is making, like, it was not, you know, one of the higher ups is making more than like $40,000, $50 a year or whatever.
[00:10:01]  So $1.3 million was sort of like, it was like, oh, that's, I guess, yeah.
[00:10:04]  That's not horrible.
[00:10:05]  But within two or three years, it's like, Jesus, he must be like, he really, you know, missed the boat on that.
[00:10:11]  Anyway, he got offended when I brought up that rumor.
[00:10:14]  Of all the things about it being $1.3 million after I did the interview and he texted, like, he repeatedly texted me about that.
[00:10:20]  He's like, who said I only made $1.3 million on that?
[00:10:23]  And I was like, I don't know.
[00:10:24]  Remember, I was like, that's just maybe I got the figure bad.
[00:10:28]  Like, that's just what I remember hearing.
[00:10:29]  Well, the company was valued at a couple hundred, at least half a billion dollars back then, though.
[00:10:35]  So, if he was a third of it, I would imagine he would get at least a third of it.
[00:10:38]  Oh, in 2007, I have no clue what it would have been valued at then.
[00:10:40]  It would have been less, but anyway, he said, try adding a one to that.
[00:10:46]  So, oh, interesting.
[00:10:49]  All right.
[00:10:51]  So, and what is like the current state of it all?
[00:10:55]  I mean, Shane, so it looks like it's just Shane's podcast now, right?
[00:10:59]  I think that podcast is a separate venture.
[00:11:01]  I'm not really sure.
[00:11:02]  I don't.
[00:11:05]  There's a VC firm in Nashville that I read bought it in receivership or whatever, like post bankruptcy a year ago.
[00:11:14]  It went bankrupt, right?
[00:11:15]  They announced bankruptcy.
[00:11:17]  And then it has been bought up and is being restored.
[00:11:21]  I heard by someone in Nashville.
[00:11:24]  I've actually, they've been putting out a new magazine.
[00:11:30]  That's kind of like, I think, on a quarterly basis.
[00:11:31]  I think it's subscriber only.
[00:11:33]  Like, if you've seen like Cream Magazine or the Mountain Gazette, one of those places that they make like a big format, kind of like Italian fashion mag style paper, and it comes out like once or twice a year.
[00:11:47]  And you just sign up for a subscription.
[00:11:49]  They don't do newsstand or anything like that.
[00:11:51]  Anyway, run by some people from, you know, not the old, old days, but from recent days advice.
[00:11:56]  They've hit me up to try to write articles, but I'm lazy.
[00:12:02]  And as you know, I let things slip.
[00:12:07]  So it's somewhere.
[00:12:07]  It didn't die, right?
[00:12:11]  It never got the dramatic, romantic death it deserved.
[00:12:14]  It's just going to kind of stumble along like Rolling Stone or Spin or something.
[00:12:19]  Right.
[00:12:19]  Well, Gavin's happy now.
[00:12:20]  Weird parody of him saying, hey, that guy is either always happy or always miserable.
[00:12:24]  Well, he's happy about Vice being dead now.
[00:12:26]  Well, it's not.
[00:12:27]  That's the problem.
[00:12:28]  Well, it's practically dead, right?
[00:12:29]  Well, sure.
[00:12:30]  But anything, you know, it's not worth billions anymore.
[00:12:33]  Nothing that builds itself on being youth media is going to outlive the generation of youth that.
[00:12:38]  Right.
[00:12:39]  It was addressed to in the first place.
[00:12:41]  It's a, you know, 30.
[00:12:44]  Yeah, this year would be its, sorry, can't do math, 30 year anniversary.
[00:12:48]  Like, you know, a 20 year old who read early issues in Montreal of it would be 55 right now.
[00:12:57]  Like, how's that youth media, right?

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[00:14:51]  So, like, what was, like, how did you view, like, your first day advice?
[00:14:56]  Maybe you can just explain for the, I think this would be a cool story for people to hear, like, explain what it was like when you first went to go apply for a job and be it to be an intern advice.
[00:15:04]  Well, my first day, we were moving from this tiny little office that was on the third floor of a building above a fashion brand called Triple Five Soul.

=== Hacker Conventions and Immersionism (13:01) ===

[00:15:14]  And then there was a Polish furniture warehouse.
[00:15:16]  And then there was, And you went up a staircase, and my first day we were moving to a new office.
[00:15:24]  So, and it was an internship.
[00:15:25]  And so I was just like hustling boxes.
[00:15:28]  And I mean, funny day.
[00:15:33]  I remember the very first thing I did was went.
[00:15:36]  Did you ever see Gavin's old column, The Tidbits?
[00:15:41]  It was like a parody of a, you know, kind of like a gear guide from something like Maxim or something, where they're like, here's the hot new whiskey, here's, you know, $80,000 watch you should own.
[00:15:53]  And in that, it was just like weird little objects.
[00:15:57]  Generally, Like foreign snack products, yeah, with funny names.
[00:16:01]  Like they've got like Haribo Creamy Dreams.
[00:16:03]  I remember this one.
[00:16:04]  It's something about, can you think of a more like, is that a Hitler wine?
[00:16:07]  Hitler's Spirits.
[00:16:10]  Schnapps von Fuhrer.
[00:16:11]  I remember that one.
[00:16:13]  This would have been from the hate issue, I think.
[00:16:15]  Yeah.
[00:16:16]  So it was weird shit, right?
[00:16:18]  And there was a closet at the office.
[00:16:20]  The office was like one room, about the size of your studio, maybe, with about 25 people crammed into it, all making the magazine.
[00:16:29]  Or half of them worked for like an ad agency.
[00:16:31]  It was weird.
[00:16:34]  And so, first thing I did was go way back into this closet where all these old food wrappers were kept in boxes to go start taking them to where like a truck was going to pick them up or whatever.
[00:16:46]  And I picked up this big box, and as I was stepping out of the closet, just like a volcano of cockroaches enveloped my arm.
[00:16:55]  And I ran out, and I was like shaking them off me like a wet dog, like onto people in the office.
[00:17:03]  That was within five minutes.
[00:17:05]  Of my internship starting.
[00:17:09]  It was like then, like then the very next thing I did was accidentally unplug like the router that everybody was, because everybody was still kind of working.
[00:17:18]  At which point it was just sort of like, guess we're not working anymore.
[00:17:22]  Like, guess this is the move.
[00:17:26]  And then, and I met, it was funny, I met Gavin that day because he'd gone downstairs.
[00:17:31]  We're on the third floor, right?
[00:17:31]  And we have a window overlooking North 4th Street on Williamsburg.
[00:17:36]  And, um, He and Jesse had figured out instead of taking garbage bags full of shit downstairs, down three flights of stairs, you could just throw it out the window.
[00:17:44]  Right.
[00:17:45]  And that had led Gavin to run downstairs and dodge.
[00:17:49]  Like he was trying to, shit, how do you describe this?
[00:17:53]  Like in Braveheart, when he has the guy throw the rock at him and like he stands perfectly still.
[00:17:58]  How do you even say that he's not trying to dodge them?
[00:18:00]  He's trying to like stand his ground.
[00:18:02]  Jesse was trying to hit him with a garbage bag from three floors up.
[00:18:06]  Anyway, I had to go down and get him for something.
[00:18:07]  And right then the mailman.
[00:18:09]  Uh, drove up and Gavin Sieghild, the mailman.
[00:18:12]  And I'm like, it's like a funny.
[00:18:14]  I was meant to be here, yeah.
[00:18:16]  And then he taught me like an anti Catholic football chant to the tune of She's Coming Around the Mountain, but it was about Bobby Sands, the Hunger Striker.
[00:18:26]  But it's weird, it's funny.
[00:18:27]  I've started, I wrote a book proposal to just be like, whatever, memoir of ice.
[00:18:33]  And in writing that out, I was like, this sounds fake as hell.
[00:18:37]  It's like this guy who ends up starting the Proud Boys, very first time I met him, he was Sieghilding, the UPS guy, you know.
[00:18:45]  But so I guess that funny joke that shows that he's that he maybe never changed.
[00:18:49]  He was, I was always, I was always part of his uh his character.
[00:18:52]  It's certainly part of his character, yeah.
[00:18:55]  And that's also like that's also like the whole ethos of the British punk scene, right?
[00:19:02]  Like he always Nazi shit, yeah, yeah, basically to a degree, yeah, not like hardcore Nazi shit being like a neo kind of like although then it's like you look at you know provocative punks and um.
[00:19:16]  Take, for example, Screwdriver, who start out as a Rolling Stones cover band, basically, on a lot of speed, and end up being the poet laureates of the National Front.
[00:19:28]  Actual, avowed racist skinheads.
[00:19:30]  The most racist band, punk band, right?
[00:19:35]  Which is still on Spotify, by the way.
[00:19:36]  I looked it up the other day.
[00:19:37]  Oh, no.
[00:19:37]  Somebody sent that.
[00:19:38]  Yeah.
[00:19:39]  I've got a friend who doesn't love Screwdriver because he's a racist.
[00:19:43]  We take an ironic sort of appreciation for his stewardship.
[00:19:46]  Up voice.
[00:19:47]  Gavin was telling me he had a screwdriver belt buckle.
[00:19:50]  Can I open this?
[00:19:50]  Of course, yeah.
[00:19:51]  Oh, yeah.
[00:19:52]  He put that in the tidbits.
[00:19:53]  Yeah.
[00:19:53]  Yeah.
[00:19:54]  And then that reminded me, I'm like, shit, I haven't heard a screwdriver since high school.
[00:19:57]  So I went on Spotify to see if it was still there.
[00:19:59]  I was playing it for my girlfriend.
[00:20:00]  She had never heard it before.
[00:20:01]  And she's like, what the hell?
[00:20:02]  This is like a racist Louis Armstrong.
[00:20:04]  She's like, what's up with this guy's voice?
[00:20:06]  Right.
[00:20:07]  Yeah.
[00:20:07]  That shit was, there's a ton of stuff like that.
[00:20:09]  You better believe it.
[00:20:11]  That was perfect.
[00:20:12]  Louis Armstrong's great.
[00:20:13]  That was great.
[00:20:13]  That was amazing.
[00:20:16]  So after you started it, you didn't get any of these like, I mean, obviously, culture was different.
[00:20:21]  It's good, right?
[00:20:21]  It is good, yeah.
[00:20:22]  It's a peach flavor.
[00:20:23]  Peach.
[00:20:24]  Enjoy that.
[00:20:24]  It'll give you a nice little kick.
[00:20:27]  Check me up.
[00:20:28]  Yeah.
[00:20:29]  But, like, so obviously, his persona didn't, like, kind of throw you off back then, right?
[00:20:38]  Like, you didn't think, like, oh, this guy's, like, kind of weird.
[00:20:40]  He's sigiling the mailman.
[00:20:41]  Maybe he's.
[00:20:41]  Well, of course, I thought he was weird for sigiling the mailman.
[00:20:43]  It was weird and funny, yeah.
[00:20:45]  Yeah.
[00:20:45]  Funny, weird.
[00:20:46]  Right?
[00:20:46]  Yeah.
[00:20:48]  Part of the humor in it, I was explaining this to the.
[00:20:50]  With some French people recently, I was like, part of the humor, like, what made that funny was the fact that it was like, oh, it's a bunch of like gays and weirdos in Williamsburg in 2004.
[00:21:01]  Like, none of us, like, none of you're not going to run into an actual neo Nazi here, you know, that's clear as day.
[00:21:07]  But then, like, the way the culture's changed now, like, the guy he can't exist in a society like today, the way he was back then, right?
[00:21:13]  Uh, he won't have the same type of fans, and that's proven out.
[00:21:17]  He won't be able to have a successful business, right?
[00:21:21]  Especially a media business that people take seriously.
[00:21:23]  But he's also not in like the indie rock world at age 32 with a bunch of peers anymore either.
[00:21:30]  And the internet changed everything too.
[00:21:32]  I don't know.
[00:21:32]  It's, yeah.
[00:21:34]  Right.
[00:21:35]  Different times.
[00:21:36]  I know different times is like an excuse, but sometimes an excuse is all you can make.
[00:21:42]  You guys created this term called immersionism, where you're like, oh, we're just going to start immersing ourselves.
[00:21:50]  How do you say the word?
[00:21:51]  Immersing?
[00:21:51]  Immersing.
[00:21:52]  Immersing.
[00:21:52]  There we go.
[00:21:53]  Like in water.
[00:21:54]  Yeah.
[00:21:54]  Immersing ourselves in these situations and in these different.
[00:21:58]  Types of cultures around New York.
[00:22:00]  And you went to like a, where was it?
[00:22:03]  Like a Haitian house with a bunch of Haitians or something?
[00:22:05]  No, I mean, years later, I took part in a voodoo ceremony out in like East New York with a bunch of Haitian immigrants.
[00:22:13]  He's talking about the first article I wrote like under my own name, right?
[00:22:17]  Which was with a Dominican family just up in Washington Heights.
[00:22:21]  I just hung out in these people's house for three days and wrote about it.
[00:22:24]  Oh, okay.
[00:22:25]  That's how we did things back then.
[00:22:26]  That was a good way to do stuff.
[00:22:28]  Oh, it's fun.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  Yeah.
[00:22:29]  They were real nice.
[00:22:30]  Yeah.
[00:22:31]  I think it's cool.
[00:22:31]  I think it's like with podcasting, with like the explosion of podcasting, which I think has reached a critical mass a while ago, probably.
[00:22:41]  It's, you really kind of can appreciate the immersionism stuff.
[00:22:46]  It's the best way to do anything, right?
[00:22:48]  Because with podcasting, it's just like we're just talking about things, right?
[00:22:52]  You've been to these places, you've seen stuff.
[00:22:55]  And, you know, I by no means am trying to say that that's the only way to do stuff and you can't.
[00:23:00]  Talk about things.
[00:23:01]  It's a good way to do stuff.
[00:23:02]  It's a great way to do stuff.
[00:23:03]  You missed that, you know.
[00:23:04]  You missed, exactly.
[00:23:06]  It's easy for the telephone game to when you're doing podcasts and somebody's coming on a podcast and saying, Oh, I read an article that somebody wrote based on a book that somebody wrote about an experience that they had when they were in Nazi Germany in the 40s or whatever.
[00:23:24]  Right.
[00:23:24]  You know what I mean?
[00:23:24]  Versus like you specifically were the direct source on the ground experiencing shit, talking to people that were there.
[00:23:30]  Like that's something you kind of lose with the whole podcasting.
[00:23:33]  Right.
[00:23:33]  And there's a lot of intangibles that really don't.
[00:23:36]  You have a difficult time properly communicating to someone who's never been to a place that you've been or dealt with the people that you've dealt with.
[00:23:45]  Like just the smells in different places are a sense that you don't can communicate a lot of things.
[00:23:52]  It's the difference between knowledge and experience, really.
[00:23:55]  And what in Gavin mentioned that we were, he coined the term immersionism to describe the way that Vice did stories, which was go to the place, hang out with the people, or get the people to write the thing.
[00:24:06]  One of Jesse's crowning moments was he did a.
[00:24:10]  An Iraq issue that was 2007 ish, written 100% or mostly written cover to cover by Iraqis.
[00:24:19]  Really?
[00:24:20]  That laid out, and they did the music reviews.
[00:24:24]  I forget if there was a fashion shoot in that or not.
[00:24:27]  But anyway, I thought it was like, I was fucking proud to work on it.
[00:24:31]  And it was a masterpiece of something.
[00:24:33]  It was like, we've been at war with these goddamn people for four years.
[00:24:35]  And it's like, this is the first time I'm reading.
[00:24:37]  There was an article at the beginning of it that's just like, Here's what Baghdad looks like.
[00:24:41]  Here's the shape.
[00:24:42]  Here's a map of Baghdad.
[00:24:43]  Here are the different neighborhoods.
[00:24:45]  And I was just like, How, like, four years of war, and we are the first people to print the geography of like the green zone and the different neighborhoods and shit of that nature.
[00:24:56]  It's crazy.
[00:24:56]  Wow.
[00:24:58]  But so that was set in opposition to what was called Google journalism back then, which was, you know, the worst case scenario would be Jason Blair.
[00:25:05]  You remember him at the New York Times?
[00:25:06]  He was a reporter who kind of like, I think he was just having one really.
[00:25:11]  And he stopped going out on assignments and he started just making up.
[00:25:14]  Like details about it.
[00:25:15]  He would, so he'd be like reporting on a story.
[00:25:18]  I think the one that got him in trouble was he reported on something at a farm in Virginia, right?
[00:25:24]  And he actually called the people and interviewed them on the phone.
[00:25:27]  But he, when he wrote it up, he wrote up that he'd been there and he wrote all these details about, you know, the way their barn was situated or what they were wearing or things like that.
[00:25:36]  And somebody, some subject called, you know, whoever the person you call for that kind of crap is at the New York Times, the ombudsman or something.
[00:25:46]  And was like, hey, this guy never came to our house.
[00:25:47]  Like, we talked to him on the phone and we did some emails or whatever.
[00:25:50]  And then it became a scandal because they looked back through his reporting for the previous, I think, two or three years.
[00:25:56]  And they were like, oh, shit, this guy hasn't left his apartment for all of this.
[00:26:00]  And then he wrote a book called Burning Down My Master's House, where he pretty flagrantly played the race card in excusing his own shitty journalism.
[00:26:11]  Anyway, that was what Vice was trying to set ourselves to use black.
[00:26:14]  But, yeah.
[00:26:16]  This was what we were, you know, immersionism was set against.
[00:26:18]  There was also Stephen Glass.
[00:26:20]  There was a movie about him.
[00:26:21]  He was doing it for the New Republic.
[00:26:22]  No, these are all, okay, generation gap.
[00:26:24]  Tell me about him.
[00:26:26]  He's made about 42.
[00:26:28]  Okay, you're only four years older than me.
[00:26:32]  That's a full, you know, a full set of high school classes, though.
[00:26:37]  That's a proper, well, that's how the generation gaps in America work.
[00:26:40]  I had six years in high school, but.
[00:26:41]  Oh, do you start when you're in like seventh grade or sorry?
[00:26:43]  Six of the best years of my life.
[00:26:44]  Hey, there you go.
[00:26:45]  Oh, I see.
[00:26:46]  We're having fun.
[00:26:48]  Okay, sorry.
[00:26:50]  Whoosh.
[00:26:52]  Stephen Glass is just like, he was a couple years before Jason Blair.
[00:26:55]  He wrote for the New York Republic.
[00:26:57]  He was like a hotshot young reporter.
[00:27:02]  I think they're based out of DC.
[00:27:03]  I forget.
[00:27:04]  There's a movie about him called Breaking Glass, right?
[00:27:06]  And he, it turned out he was just making, completely making shit up.
[00:27:11]  Like, he wrote an article about a hackers' convention that he got into.
[00:27:15]  And there was like a 16 year old hacker there who had been hired by somebody he had hacked.
[00:27:22]  He'd hacked like a big computer firm.
[00:27:24]  And so they were hiring him to do their security.
[00:27:26]  And so this kid who was, you know, after he hacked a famous hacker, which like this kind of shit did happen in the world that, you know, people who grew up hackers became.
[00:27:35]  Security consultants because they knew.
[00:27:37]  Yeah, the FBI hired him too.
[00:27:38]  And that kind of shit.
[00:27:39]  Yeah, no, there's a history of that.
[00:27:41]  And, um, but he claimed he had gone to this hacker convention.
[00:27:45]  He'd met this kid.
[00:27:45]  This kid was getting now, you know, a six figure salary at age 16 from having committed crimes against this place.
[00:27:52]  And so he was being celebrated by all the other hackers, and none of this shit existed.
[00:27:55]  None of this shit was real.
[00:27:56]  And then he tried to, he would cover his ass by, I think he had his cousin or his brother or something would answer the phone.
[00:28:02]  He'd be like, oh, here are my notes.
[00:28:04]  You know, here's the number if you need to corroborate any of this with, you know, whatever.
[00:28:10]  Whoever I'm claiming I got quotes from or whatever, and they'd call the number and it would be his brother being like, Yeah, that's what I said.

=== Brunt Boots for Tough Jobs (02:39) ===

[00:28:15]  I did that.
[00:28:16]  He made some websites, you know, for like, it was, you know, the hacker kids like security company or whatever.
[00:28:23]  So he's like, You can go check out their website.
[00:28:25]  Like, it's totally up.
[00:28:26]  And I think this is, I think he'd been doing this for years, but the story that got him was the hacker thing because they went, they were like, This kid's hacker website, like, makes no sense.
[00:28:35]  It looks like shit.
[00:28:36]  It's like, it's like the kind of like HTML programming I would do.
[00:28:40]  Right.
[00:28:40]  You know, it's like this kid's a computer expert.
[00:28:43]  Anyway, there was a rash of that shit happening in the 2000s.
[00:28:48]  And those are the extreme examples.
[00:28:49]  In general, Google journalism was just, you know, lazy people who didn't leave their desks and would just be like, oh, I'll just get a quote from them, you know, over the phone.
[00:28:58]  Right.
[00:28:58]  Which to me, at least, but I think to us, like people advice, it was like, why, you know, why bother?
[00:29:04]  Like, that sounds like a shitty job.
[00:29:06]  It doesn't like a shitty job.
[00:29:07]  Like, the funnest part of writing an article is going out, meeting people, and talking to people.
[00:29:10]  Sitting at your desk is the worst part.
[00:29:13]  Like,.
[00:29:14]  Today's sponsor, Brunt Workwear, just sent me these brand new Marlin boots.
[00:29:18]  And I have to say, anytime I'm doing real work outside or I want to wear work boots, these are my go to.
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[00:29:33]  But right out of the box, these Marlin work boots were super comfortable.
[00:29:37]  No painful break in period, no limping around for a week waiting for them to soften up, just straight comfort from day one.
[00:29:44]  And it's not by accident.
[00:29:46]  Eric Girard founded Brunt after his work friends complained that their work boots haven't changed since the 1920s.
[00:29:52]  Their boots are lightweight, waterproof, slip resistant, heat resistant, and even electrical hazard rated.
[00:29:58]  Basically, whatever the job throws at you, these boots can handle it.
[00:30:01]  And the best part is, it doesn't hurt.
[00:30:04]  I can't stress that enough.
[00:30:06]  Brunt's got over 500,000 workers backing them up, and you can even send them back if you don't like them.
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[00:30:51]  The link to Brunt is down below.
[00:30:53]  Now back to the show.

=== Templar Clubs and Freemasons (15:47) ===

[00:30:54]  At what point did you guys start bringing video cameras?
[00:30:57]  When did you bring video cameras?
[00:30:58]  When we started making video things.
[00:31:00]  You know, there's a.
[00:31:01]  Wait, what?
[00:31:01]  Did there any video?
[00:31:02]  Did you guys when you guys went to Iraq bring any video cameras for the Iraqi issue?
[00:31:06]  Yeah, we didn't go to Iraq, we communicated with Iraqis and they wrote from Iraq.
[00:31:11]  Oh, I thought I might be mixing that up because I thought Shane did a video in Iraq.
[00:31:15]  Sarush did, Sarush and Eddie went to do um, they made a whole doc, it was called uh, Heavy Metal and Bad.
[00:31:21]  Yes, that's what it was with a Krasa Kauda, a band of Iraqis, you know, under Saddam who came out, went to Turkey.
[00:31:29]  I think half of them live in Canada now.
[00:31:31]  I forget, it was a while ago.
[00:31:32]  Good doc, though.
[00:31:33]  Fucking amazing.
[00:31:35]  Which was based on an article that Gideon Diego, who, again, this is going to be, you're going to be too young to know who he was.
[00:31:43]  He was the glasses wearing guy on MTV News.
[00:31:47]  Oh, okay.
[00:31:47]  Well, the girls liked, right?
[00:31:49]  He wrote the first article that was just about, he's like, holy shit, there's this cool metal band in fucking Saddam's Iraq, you know?
[00:31:55]  And I, like, I met them.
[00:31:58]  They have a crazy practice space or whatever.
[00:32:00]  They have to sing pro Saddam songs.
[00:32:01]  It sucks.
[00:32:01]  They had to sing pro Saddam songs?
[00:32:03]  There was, yeah, by law.
[00:32:05]  Did they ever do any songs in the palace?
[00:32:07]  No, oh, no, no, no.
[00:32:10]  They were an underground band.
[00:32:11]  They were punk.
[00:32:12]  Well, they're metal, but they were an extreme metal band, right?
[00:32:18]  Anyway, and then the story of doing video things at Vice is supposedly promulgated by Shane and Eddie, Mereddie, meet Spike Jones.
[00:32:27]  We're on a call with Spike Jones, the director, a guy made Jackass.
[00:32:32]  And he's like, I like your magazine a lot.
[00:32:34]  I like these articles.
[00:32:35]  Do you guys film your?
[00:32:38]  Film your pieces.
[00:32:39]  You guys, you know, just roll tape while you're reporting these things.
[00:32:42]  And they're like, oh, of course we do.
[00:32:44]  You know, and they were like, we should be doing that.
[00:32:47]  And so that's what leads to, you know, making the online video stuff.
[00:32:51]  Or before that, there was a DVD that was basically just like magazine articles shot on video with the people who would have written them.
[00:32:59]  Yeah.
[00:33:01]  And so is that, so what year was that when Spike Jones started working for you guys?
[00:33:05]  2006.
[00:33:07]  I mean, working with, working with.
[00:33:09]  Was this post Gavin or post Gavin?
[00:33:12]  Middle of Gavin getting kicked out.
[00:33:14]  Ah, okay.
[00:33:17]  It's a loose, foggy history, and none of the dates are solid, right?
[00:33:20]  Sure.
[00:33:20]  People love to ask, when did Gavin get properly bought out in 2007, but by 2006, there was already tension and shit like that.
[00:33:31]  Yeah.
[00:33:32]  And then at what point did you start Balls Deep?
[00:33:37]  2006 or 2007.
[00:33:40]  There was a web version.
[00:33:41]  You're talking about the.
[00:33:45]  Because obviously, once we had the television channel, I made like two seasons of the TV show, Ball Steve.
[00:33:53]  But that was back when we'd call the video stuff VBS.
[00:34:00]  That was the thing I worked on.
[00:34:03]  I shot episodes with Leather Daddies in New York, a guy named Christoph.
[00:34:08]  I forget his last name.
[00:34:09]  He was Mr. Leather 2005.
[00:34:13]  He took me around to like the Eagle and places like that.
[00:34:15]  He let me sleep on his floor.
[00:34:17]  Which is kind of how we operated back then.
[00:34:19]  Hung out with like a Chinese lady in like proper Chinatown, like down under the Manhattan Bridge.
[00:34:26]  We were selling crabs together.
[00:34:29]  What were the other ones?
[00:34:31]  I wasn't able to finish editing this because Gavin wrote some crazy fucking release for these guys, which I thought was how you did it.
[00:34:42]  I spent like two weeks, two, three weeks with a motorcycle club called the American Brotherhood 9 11, and they were a 9 11 memorial.
[00:34:51]  Motorcycle club.
[00:34:52]  Whoa.
[00:34:55]  So you find some pictures of these guys, Steve.
[00:34:59]  Were they based out of New York?
[00:35:00]  They were based out of New York.
[00:35:01]  York, right?
[00:35:02]  Yeah.
[00:35:02]  And they were all older.
[00:35:04]  I think some of them were, you know, kind of former Hells Angels and stuff.
[00:35:07]  It was like an older guy's retirement club.
[00:35:11]  They had all been in motorcycle clubs, like growing up.
[00:35:14]  And so this one was a bunch of guys, you know, getting into their 50s or whatever.
[00:35:18]  And one of the presidents of the club's brother, I think, had died in 9 11.
[00:35:23]  And so the club was in his honor.
[00:35:25]  Just a great name, right?
[00:35:26]  American Brotherhood 9 11 MC.
[00:35:28]  Yeah.
[00:35:28]  Is that them?
[00:35:31]  I don't think that's them.
[00:35:33]  They made a bunch of firefighters on Harleys.
[00:35:35]  I mean, unless those were the right guys.
[00:35:39]  Oh, yeah, there they are.
[00:35:40]  Oh, that's their logo.
[00:35:41]  American Brotherhood 9 11.
[00:35:41]  Oh, nice.
[00:35:42]  I wonder what the Jason's name is.
[00:35:44]  Were you in New York in 9 11?
[00:35:45]  Yeah, it was my first day of college.
[00:35:47]  That was your first day of college.
[00:35:49]  Wow.
[00:35:49]  I just got in there, yeah.
[00:35:51]  I was like, this town's exciting, man.
[00:35:53]  Oh, my God.
[00:35:54]  What a day to start college.
[00:35:56]  Yeah.
[00:35:56]  Well, and in fact, I didn't.
[00:35:57]  They, I, I. You got, yeah, they probably shut it down that day, right?
[00:36:00]  Yeah.
[00:36:01]  I wrote the tackiest email of all time at about 10 30, which is, I'm, it might have been between.
[00:36:06]  Tower one and tower two coming down.
[00:36:08]  I had a class at 11 with an Irish lit professor who I ended up, he was my mentor in college, great guy.
[00:36:17]  But at 10 33, I wrote this email where I was like, I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but I just wanted to make sure we're not having class today, right?
[00:36:27]  And he wrote back pretty quickly.
[00:36:29]  He was like, Alas, we won't be having class.
[00:36:32]  Take care of yourself.
[00:36:33]  And I was like, Holy shit.
[00:36:34]  I was like, a sincere use of the word alas in 2001.
[00:36:38]  How about that?
[00:36:39]  But yeah.
[00:36:41]  Oh, Jesus Christ.
[00:36:43]  Yeah, these guys look crazy.
[00:36:44]  Crazy day.
[00:36:44]  These guys look awesome.
[00:36:45]  They were nice.
[00:36:46]  They look like they're fun to hang out with.
[00:36:47]  They were fun.
[00:36:48]  Yeah.
[00:36:48]  A little on the older side.
[00:36:51]  I broke my arm with those guys.
[00:36:54]  The idea of wanting to start a club is an interesting idea.
[00:36:59]  You know, like the idea of getting a group of friends together and saying, hey, man, let's come up with a title for our group and let's make rules that we can live by.
[00:37:12]  Right.
[00:37:13]  It's like a.
[00:37:14]  It's fun.
[00:37:14]  It's an American tradition.
[00:37:15]  De Tocqueville referred to early United States as a nation of clubs, I believe.
[00:37:22]  Really?
[00:37:22]  Yeah.
[00:37:23]  It's a thing that I never thought about doing, but it does sound fun.
[00:37:27]  Well, that's the old.
[00:37:28]  Have you ever read the book Bowling Alone?
[00:37:30]  No.
[00:37:30]  Okay.
[00:37:31]  Whose author I couldn't tell you right now.
[00:37:33]  It's also a super thick, it's a sociology book, and it was about the decline.
[00:37:37]  The titular Bowling Alone is about the decline in bowling teams, sorry, over between about the 60s through, I think the book comes out in the middle of the 90s.
[00:37:47]  Mm hmm.
[00:37:48]  But in general, it's about the erosion of what would you even call that?
[00:37:54]  Like part of civil society, of clubs.
[00:37:57]  Like that, you know, if you look back into the 1950s and 60s, most adults in middle class adults in America belong to something, right?
[00:38:04]  It's like some sort of club.
[00:38:06]  Like Freemasons are Rotarians or they're part of the Elks Club.
[00:38:10]  The women do Tupperware parties or are a ladies auxiliary in town, things of this nature.
[00:38:15]  People are members of, you know, five and six clubs and things that.
[00:38:19]  And it could buy.
[00:38:21]  You know, the early 90s, it is all but gone away.
[00:38:24]  And if you look at it, I've known a couple people who are Freemasons who joined, you know, who are roughly my age.
[00:38:29]  Yeah.
[00:38:29]  And be like, oh, is that hard to, you know, is like, I thought there was, you know, you had to save a Freemason's life or something like that.
[00:38:35]  And they're like, no, no, no.
[00:38:36]  They're itching.
[00:38:37]  Like they're getting so old, they're itching for new blood, right?
[00:38:40]  Like all these places are graying out.
[00:38:43]  And then there's, you know, and then various explanations for that.
[00:38:47]  I think I've been teased in this cult.
[00:38:48]  The Nights Templar.
[00:38:49]  The drug cartel?
[00:38:52]  No, no, no.
[00:38:52]  The Knights Templar.
[00:38:53]  Oh, okay.
[00:38:53]  Because those guys are kind of fucked up.
[00:38:55]  Yeah.
[00:38:55]  There's a cartel called the Knights Templar in Mexico.
[00:38:58]  Wow.
[00:38:58]  I haven't heard about this.
[00:39:00]  They're not, they're, well, I don't want to be on camera saying they're not cool guys, but they do some pretty uncool things, man.
[00:39:06]  Tell me about it.
[00:39:08]  They're rough dudes.
[00:39:08]  They're up there with like los zetas, you know?
[00:39:11]  But you mean like the historical Knights Templar?
[00:39:14]  Like the historical Knights Templar, yeah.
[00:39:17]  Except I wouldn't want to do any of the gay shit that they were doing.
[00:39:21]  What gay shit did they do?
[00:39:22]  Oh, they did a lot of gay shit, bro.
[00:39:23]  That's fucking like anti Kathar fucking propaganda.
[00:39:26]  No, I don't think it is.
[00:39:28]  This is like listening to Herodotus tell you that the Thracians were sacrificing children.
[00:39:31]  You got to take it with a grain of salt.
[00:39:33]  Was it, so.
[00:39:34]  What was the claim?
[00:39:35]  Why?
[00:39:36]  I don't know what the gay anti Templar claim was.
[00:39:38]  No, the Templar.
[00:39:39]  I thought it was that they were seizing too much temporal control due to their banking practices and that.
[00:39:44]  Well, they had the French king who burned Jacques de Molay, but he was like, hey, these guys are muscling in on my turf.
[00:39:50]  That's what it was.
[00:39:50]  They wanted to see.
[00:39:51]  And he owed the money.
[00:39:52]  They didn't like the fact that Templars had all that money, right?
[00:39:54]  So they wanted to get the money from them.
[00:39:56]  So they were trying to.
[00:39:57]  So this is the.
[00:39:58]  So they concocted.
[00:39:59]  This is the argument.
[00:40:00]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:01]  So they made it say, like, oh, they do all these gay ritual things where they kiss their buttholes and all this weird stuff.
[00:40:06]  Right, right, right.
[00:40:07]  Okay.
[00:40:07]  And they invented the God.
[00:40:09]  Baphomet, which is like the goat-headed Satan figure that they worshiped.
[00:40:12]  They kissed the head.
[00:40:13]  They had to kiss the head of that thing.
[00:40:14]  Right.
[00:40:15]  And yeah, there's a whole bunch of gay stamp on a Bible and shit stories about the, oh yeah, that's the other thing.
[00:40:20]  They were like, they didn't like Christians at all.
[00:40:22]  They say that about everybody.
[00:40:23]  Everybody's making you stamp on the Bible.
[00:40:26]  They're making you do what?
[00:40:27]  Back then.
[00:40:28]  Oh, that was how you'd fire up the Christian hoi polloi back then.
[00:40:32]  It'd be like stamping on a Bible.
[00:40:35]  Yeah.
[00:40:35]  No, but there's like a newer version of like a Redux of the Knights Templars in the U.S.
[00:40:41]  Well, it's kind of like a style.
[00:40:44]  Oh, in the US.
[00:40:44]  Okay.
[00:40:45]  I was thinking in like continental Freemasonry, there's a degree in like the Yorkish, right?
[00:40:49]  I think that is Knights Templar.
[00:40:51]  It's like either above or below Knights of Malta.
[00:40:53]  I forget.
[00:40:54]  Yeah.
[00:40:55]  Whatever.
[00:40:55]  Those things are fun.
[00:40:57]  Yeah.
[00:40:58]  Yeah.
[00:40:58]  I'm sure they are.
[00:40:59]  There's a lot of, I guess there's like a lot of big musicians and like famous folks that are joining the, trying to join the Knights Templar, like become Freemasons.
[00:41:08]  Oh, because they're getting older and they need buddies.
[00:41:10]  They're getting older.
[00:41:11]  They need buddies.
[00:41:12]  They need an excuse to get out of the house.
[00:41:13]  Sorry.
[00:41:13]  Sorry, honey.
[00:41:14]  They also need to.
[00:41:14]  It's Tuesday night.
[00:41:15]  You know.
[00:41:16]  Yeah.
[00:41:16]  Exactly.
[00:41:16]  And they need good marketing too.
[00:41:17]  So it's helpful for them.
[00:41:18]  You know what I mean?
[00:41:19]  When they get these big shots in there.
[00:41:20]  It's kind of like Scientology.
[00:41:21]  That's where they got like Tom Cruise and.
[00:41:24]  I was in a hotel last night and there's a Scientology channel here.
[00:41:27]  Do you know this?
[00:41:28]  Where's your hotel?
[00:41:29]  Like.
[00:41:30]  Is it in Clearwater?
[00:41:30]  10 minutes down the road.
[00:41:32]  That way?
[00:41:32]  Pinellas.
[00:41:33]  Yeah.
[00:41:33]  Is it that way or that way?
[00:41:35]  East.
[00:41:35]  So it's closer to Scientology.
[00:41:37]  Because Clearwater is where the Sea Org's based out of, right?
[00:41:40]  Yeah.
[00:41:41]  Right.
[00:41:42]  It's where it's like the flag building.
[00:41:44]  This is where L. Ron Hubbard had his pirate ship parked like five minutes down the road from here when he was here.
[00:41:48]  Yeah.
[00:41:49]  So that's interesting.
[00:41:49]  No, I haven't had cable, but I'm not surprised.
[00:41:52]  It's funny.
[00:41:52]  All their programming looks like commercials for medicine.
[00:41:56]  Like, it's all cut that jarring, obnoxious way, like a Paxil commercial.
[00:42:01]  They fucking advertise on the Super Bowl.
[00:42:02]  Every Super Bowl, there's a Scientology commercial.
[00:42:04]  They got the money, yeah.
[00:42:06]  But their membership is supposedly declining badly.
[00:42:10]  Like, they're supposedly not.
[00:42:11]  Understandably, yeah.
[00:42:12]  You ever read that stuff?
[00:42:13]  Yeah.
[00:42:14]  I haven't, but I want to.
[00:42:15]  I went, there was, we did a Drugs and Cults issue of the magazine.
[00:42:19]  Back when the magazine used to have themes.
[00:42:21]  And I joined three cults simultaneously.
[00:42:24]  And one was like this guru cult called Adidam, whose guru was a guy who was born Franklin Jones, but he had become Adidas Samraj.
[00:42:34]  And it was your basic guru, kind of jazz.
[00:42:37]  Yeah.
[00:42:38]  Then what were the others?
[00:42:38]  I went to the Moonies, the Unification Church, like the Koreans, you know?
[00:42:45]  They had a church on like 44th Street.
[00:42:47]  And I joined, or, you know, I went to church with them.
[00:42:52]  Hung out, effectively joined.
[00:42:54]  I, you know, once I was done with the article, I never went back.
[00:42:57]  But then Scientology was up on 46th Street.
[00:43:01]  And so I joined Scientology.
[00:43:04]  Legally, I don't know if I should, you know, legally, I'm not even sure if I did or not.
[00:43:08]  I went, hung out with them, took a bunch of classes.
[00:43:10]  I was twinned to someone who was joining Scientology.
[00:43:13]  Twinned?
[00:43:14]  Really?
[00:43:14]  They give you a buddy for your introduction.
[00:43:17]  And his name was Thomas, too.
[00:43:18]  And he was like this Indian kid who had, I think, taken a job in the city.
[00:43:22]  Like everybody I met there who was being brought into the church.
[00:43:28]  Very lonely, like just clearly lonely and nothing to do, right?
[00:43:32]  And so I felt bad.
[00:43:33]  I was, you know, I guess I was open minding it and just like getting books, learning about the stuff or whatever.
[00:43:41]  And then to watch a guy like totally eat it up, I just always wanted to be like, hey, buddy, just like a grain of salt with this stuff.
[00:43:47]  Or it's like, if you need to meet, like, you need to meet some girls or something.
[00:43:50]  I don't know, like, give me, like, I can take you to a bar or something, yeah, right?
[00:43:54]  And it was, it was crazy the mood of that place.
[00:43:59]  Because, and you know, I was doing all this at the same time as kind of like you know, funny stunt or whatever.
[00:44:04]  Yeah, I'd have to pick what night I was going to my different cult or whatever.
[00:44:09]  And the Moonies were great.
[00:44:10]  I don't, you know, I guess it's just a sign of the times that you know, back in the 70s, that kind of was scary to people.
[00:44:17]  And I think they've eased off of the mass marriage kind of thing, which is what bummed people out, right?
[00:44:23]  But though, like that first month or you know, the month I was going to stuff at the Church of Scientology, I was like, it feels like being in a subprime lending.
[00:44:32]  Bank here or like shady financial operation.
[00:44:35]  It's like one, that's how everybody dressed, but two, they'd, you know, get people to sign up for a $200, you know, 30 minute course or whatever.
[00:44:44]  And they'd go back, you and you'd see them go back to the like the office and like start high fiving each other because they had made a sale.
[00:44:50]  And you're just like, Christ, it's like, you know, we can hear you, right?
[00:44:54]  Are you just like vigorously making notes this whole time?
[00:44:56]  Like, uh, or are you just memorizing this and then writing it at the end of the day?
[00:44:59]  I'd get on the subway and I'd write my notes, okay, yeah, because I was being, I was being super sneaky, you know, right, yeah, covert.
[00:45:05]  Covert, I mean, when there's a classroom, you can take notes, you know.
[00:45:09]  Oh, sure, did my best to be fair about that.
[00:45:11]  Did you do any auditing sessions?
[00:45:13]  Yeah, a couple.
[00:45:14]  Really, what was that like?
[00:45:15]  Uh, halfway between like a stage hypnotism and therapy, like auditing.
[00:45:23]  You like, should we explain what it is?
[00:45:26]  Yeah, explain what it is.
[00:45:27]  Well, I didn't, you know, and they didn't break because because I was there of my own accord and they weren't trying to like trick me into coming to a Scientology office, I didn't get the e meter.
[00:45:37]  Which I was kind of sad about.
[00:45:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:40]  That's basically to bring in, you know.
[00:45:42]  Funny story.
[00:45:43]  To dazzle the rubes.
[00:45:45]  Yeah.
[00:45:45]  My real fucking broker bought me an e meter as a gift.
[00:45:49]  Oh, that's neat.
[00:45:49]  Hamilton had, I lived with Hamilton Morris for a little bit.
[00:45:52]  Yeah.
[00:45:52]  He had an e meter at his house, I think.
[00:45:54]  Really?
[00:45:54]  I don't think we ever fired it up or anything.
[00:45:56]  But I was always like, oh.
[00:45:58]  He told me he has an astrology computer.
[00:46:00]  Oh, I saw that.
[00:46:01]  No, I texted him after watching the interview.
[00:46:05]  And I was like, you found one of those?
[00:46:07]  He's like, my pride and joy.
[00:46:09]  That thing's amazing.
[00:46:12]  Yeah, what did he show you?
[00:46:14]  Picture like the printer is a whole different component for the astrology thing.
[00:46:17]  Oh, we just looked up photos on Google.
[00:46:19]  Okay, but did you see the whole thing?
[00:46:21]  It's enormous.
[00:46:22]  Oh, no, there's like a um, what do you call that?
[00:46:25]  There's a thing that looks like an old calculator, and then that's what we saw the brain of the thing that also has its printer in it, so it prints out uh, like ticker tape and you rip it off.
[00:46:36]  Whoa, that's your horoscope.
[00:46:38]  How crazy is that that they actually spent taxpayer dollars to make this?

=== Scientology Cults and Suppression (06:35) ===

[00:46:42]  Oh, this is it?
[00:46:43]  Oh, yeah, okay, there you go.
[00:46:44]  Yeah, you can see the whole thing.
[00:46:46]  The DigiComp.
[00:46:47]  Yeah.
[00:46:48]  Jealous of that.
[00:46:49]  Yeah.
[00:46:49]  He's got an impressive archive of arcane crap.
[00:46:54]  Anyway, auditing, it was just, I just sat chair to chair with a nice little old lady who, like, I think we held hands while we did it.
[00:47:02]  And you shut your eyes and you try to, like, basically remember back, but project yourself back into a memory.
[00:47:12]  And then walk through that memory.
[00:47:14]  And, you know, you pick a memory based on a time when you had some sort of hardship or something like that or whatever.
[00:47:21]  And then you just keep doing it.
[00:47:22]  Right.
[00:47:24]  And so you'll explain the memory to them.
[00:47:26]  You'll walk through it and then they'll be like, okay.
[00:47:29]  Go back is like, and then you start over and you try to, and they're like, what was the term?
[00:47:33]  Sorry, it's been 20 years.
[00:47:35]  They'd be like, remember, basically, remember more.
[00:47:37]  And it'd be interesting as you do this that you either are confabulating or recovering more and more member.
[00:47:45]  It becomes a more and more vivid picture in your head.
[00:47:48]  The details fill in and you can have insights that way.
[00:47:51]  I thought auditing, it's interesting in that, you know, it's like a real thing.
[00:47:55]  It's actually can be helpful.
[00:47:57]  He ripped it off of a psychological school in the 30s.
[00:47:59]  L. Ron Hubbard ripped it off from a psychological school in the 30s whose name I forget.
[00:48:03]  It's kind of like fallen by the wayside, but it's, yeah, it's good practice.
[00:48:07]  And as you know, it's the kernel of truth at the heart of, yeah, sure.
[00:48:12]  Whatever you want to say.
[00:48:13]  Right.
[00:48:15]  Did it help you at all?
[00:48:17]  Do you think?
[00:48:18]  Help me write the article.
[00:48:20]  Help me write the article.
[00:48:21]  That's all it counts, right?
[00:48:22]  Maybe.
[00:48:22]  I mean, you know, I wasn't itching to go back.
[00:48:24]  Yeah, for sure.
[00:48:25]  And have a loan pushed on me.
[00:48:28]  But it seemed, you know, it was cool to sit and talk about yourself.
[00:48:33]  I did it three times.
[00:48:37]  And I was like, It's there was some sort of insight in there, nothing, nothing major.
[00:48:42]  Yeah, I have a friend.
[00:48:43]  Uh, it's actually, yeah, let's just call him a friend who works for a big company in downtown Clearwater.
[00:48:53]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  That is all I think the owners are Scientologists or members of the church.
[00:48:58]  It's weird because all the richest people around here are Scientologists, right?
[00:49:01]  And you see how that works, right?
[00:49:03]  Yeah.
[00:49:04]  Yeah.
[00:49:04]  And there's the floors are like segregated.
[00:49:08]  Right, so you'll have floors of workers that are non SIOs, oh, and then you'll have separate floors where you have all the executives are SIOs, yeah, and uh, then keep all the it's kind of like a weird keep the unclear away, it's kind of like a cultish version of the office where they all kind of like whisper and make jokes under their breath about the Scientologists, right?
[00:49:30]  And when they come around, they're yeah, kind of try to cover their ass, and yeah, and uh, and he was explaining to me, I was asking him because we were getting lunch in Clearwater, I'm like.
[00:49:43]  I'm like, how do you know?
[00:49:44]  Can you tell just by walking down the street who's a Scientologist and who's not?
[00:49:48]  Like, just aside from like the Sea Org members, they all wear the vests.
[00:49:53]  No shit.
[00:49:54]  Oh, they don't wear their dress whites.
[00:49:57]  Right.
[00:49:57]  They aren't in full uniform.
[00:49:58]  Some of them, well, they typically wear like a vest with like a white collared shirt.
[00:50:02]  And they all dress, wear the same exact thing.
[00:50:04]  Oh, I think I know what you're talking about.
[00:50:05]  Okay.
[00:50:05]  Yeah.
[00:50:05]  Yeah.
[00:50:06]  They look like a regular, like a formal vest.
[00:50:08]  They look like, they look kind of like flight attendants.
[00:50:12]  Right, right.
[00:50:13]  But other than that, like if you could find like a, Pedestrian or a, um, it's just a civilian Scientologist at a restaurant or like a grocery store.
[00:50:21]  It's like Mormons.
[00:50:22]  There's, right, there's a look.
[00:50:23]  And I asked him, I'm like, what is that?
[00:50:25]  How do you, how do you find it?
[00:50:26]  And he's like, just look into their eyes and you will just get this sense of this robotic soul.
[00:50:34]  They just, they're like, they're like robots.
[00:50:36]  And I was like, he's like, and he goes, he goes, let's try it right now.
[00:50:39]  He goes, look around this room and we're sitting in this little dining room attached to a grocery store.
[00:50:43]  And he goes, there's one of them in this room.
[00:50:45]  And I'm like, okay.
[00:50:47]  So I'm like trying to look around.
[00:50:50]  And sure as shit, I could tell.
[00:50:52]  I'm like, that's the guy.
[00:50:54]  He's like, yep.
[00:50:55]  Amazing.
[00:50:56]  So it was an interesting phenomenon.
[00:50:59]  But, like, you know, it's one of those cults, or Scientology is one of those cults where, like, it's borderline.
[00:51:10]  It's not illegal, right?
[00:51:12]  It's not an illegal cult where they're, like, breaking the law.
[00:51:14]  They are breaking the law.
[00:51:15]  They're committing fucking human atrocities with slavery, you know, enslaving people and taking people's babies away from them against their will.
[00:51:22]  But, like, you could literally.
[00:51:25]  Especially around here, or I'm sure in New York and LA, everywhere, they could just be part of, they could be a part of your group and you would never know it.
[00:51:33]  Like, it's not like they're actively pushing it on you or talking about it, you know.
[00:51:37]  Daywalkers.
[00:51:38]  Yeah.
[00:51:38]  Daywalkers, right?
[00:51:40]  It's like you would never know who they were because they're a part of this weird thing, but they also never talk about it.
[00:51:48]  Like, you can never have a conversation.
[00:51:49]  I've never had a conversation with an active Scientologist because it's against their religion to talk about it.
[00:51:56]  To non Scientologists.
[00:52:00]  Or non interested.
[00:52:01]  I think so.
[00:52:01]  Yeah.
[00:52:02]  I was going to say, how do you get more?
[00:52:03]  Because they're afraid of getting ratted out by other Scientologists because they tell on you.
[00:52:06]  Or made fun.
[00:52:07]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:08]  No.
[00:52:08]  We're thinking you get a right up.
[00:52:10]  Yeah.
[00:52:10]  Right.
[00:52:12]  So it's an interesting phenomenon.
[00:52:13]  Suppressive persons.
[00:52:14]  Suppressive person.
[00:52:15]  That's what it is.
[00:52:16]  So they keep the suppressive persons on a different floor at whatever this business is.
[00:52:20]  Well, no, they're not.
[00:52:20]  No, no, no, no.
[00:52:21]  The business is allowed to have non Scientologists.
[00:52:23]  Right, right, right.
[00:52:24]  But they keep them a floor below.
[00:52:25]  Yes.
[00:52:26]  But they're not suppressive people because.
[00:52:28]  They could be.
[00:52:28]  It doesn't matter because they're not initiated into Scientology, basically.
[00:52:31]  Well, that's, yeah, that's exactly who SPs are.
[00:52:33]  Sure.
[00:52:34]  Yeah.
[00:52:34]  Right.
[00:52:35]  But you can also be a suppressive.
[00:52:37]  Can you be a suppressive person that is also a Scientologist?
[00:52:39]  Yeah.
[00:52:40]  That's like, I believe so.
[00:52:43]  You know what?
[00:52:43]  Don't take, this is 20 years ago.
[00:52:45]  Yeah.
[00:52:45]  Don't take, yeah, this shit's ancient.
[00:52:47]  Any of my words about this.
[00:52:49]  Allegedly, David Miscavige still lives around here, but I haven't seen him or seen any interviews or anything about him in a long, long time.
[00:52:58]  What was, did he surf?
[00:53:01]  David Miscavige?
[00:53:02]  Oh, David.
[00:53:02]  I thought you said Dana, which, okay.
[00:53:05]  Wow, I just invented a person.
[00:53:06]  Oh, I know.
[00:53:07]  No, he's the leader of Scientology.
[00:53:08]  I know who David Miscavige is.
[00:53:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:53:10]  I misheard you.
[00:53:11]  And then I invented a son or daughter for him in my head.
[00:53:16]  That surfs.

=== Inventing David Miscavige's Son (03:22) ===

[00:53:17]  And I just fully filled it out right there.
[00:53:20]  Gavin told me to surf.
[00:53:21]  Full blown made up shit.
[00:53:22]  Oh, why is that?
[00:53:23]  He thinks he's a flattered earther when it comes to surfing.
[00:53:27]  How does that even work?
[00:53:28]  He just thinks it's impossible that people can paddle a surfboard out into waves and then surf them.
[00:53:34]  He thinks it's physically impossible and not real.
[00:53:36]  I mean, that's cute.
[00:53:37]  It is cute.
[00:53:38]  Right.
[00:53:39]  But he also.
[00:53:39]  What are you going to say?
[00:53:41]  Yeah, I don't know.
[00:53:41]  That's just a random adage.
[00:53:42]  It was funny.
[00:53:43]  I was talking to old Montreal cartoonists who knew Gavin back in his cartooning days.
[00:53:47]  And kind of like a minor insight from that period was no matter how much Gavin, when he would be writing about arts and culture, would like.
[00:53:57]  Because he loved shitting on musicians for pretending.
[00:54:01]  He's like, music's bullshit, you know?
[00:54:03]  And he's like, acting?
[00:54:04]  Acting's really bullshit.
[00:54:05]  He's like, comedy, frankly, comedy is a little bit of bullshit.
[00:54:08]  He's like, I respect making a good joke, but it's not, you know, oh, it's a craft.
[00:54:12]  The one group of people, no matter whether or not he liked their art or not, that he would never, like, I never once saw him badmouth a cartoonist because he knew, like, how much fucking work and torture and craft went into it.
[00:54:28]  It's fun.
[00:54:29]  Interesting.
[00:54:29]  So it's funny to hear him talk about how, like, surfing's bullshit.
[00:54:32]  It's like, that's a good line for the bar or whatever, but, like, this thing you don't do, yeah, it must not be worth it.
[00:54:38]  Right.
[00:54:38]  I don't think he wasn't really shitting on it.
[00:54:40]  He was just kind of like thinking.
[00:54:41]  It was a riff.
[00:54:42]  Yeah, it was a riff.
[00:54:43]  And he thinks it's just like, you know, too physically taxing for somebody like him to do at the age of whatever the fuck age he is drinking.
[00:54:52]  I think he slammed a whole 12 pack when he said it.
[00:54:55]  Oh, by the way, how many beers did he drink in your video?
[00:54:57]  I didn't catch it.
[00:54:58]  What?
[00:54:59]  Oh, when we were interviewing him?
[00:55:00]  Yeah.
[00:55:00]  When you did the watch party.
[00:55:01]  Five or six.
[00:55:01]  Oh, the watch party.
[00:55:02]  We went to the bar before we even started filming.
[00:55:05]  It was like 11 a.m. on a Friday.
[00:55:07]  Yeah.
[00:55:10]  He seemed no worse for wear.
[00:55:12]  Yeah.
[00:55:14]  I think it helps him.
[00:55:15]  I think the booze maybe helps him.
[00:55:16]  Right.
[00:55:16]  Yeah.
[00:55:16]  Helps him get into character.
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=== Trans Theories and Cultural Shifts (10:53) ===

[00:56:40]  Now back to the show.
[00:56:42]  The theory, going back to the Gavin documentary, you came up with a bunch of theories, right?
[00:56:49]  On what happened to Gavin.
[00:56:50]  Right.
[00:56:50]  And you talked to everybody in his family.
[00:56:52]  You talked to not everybody, but most people in his family.
[00:56:54]  Wasn't able to reach Kyle.
[00:56:55]  Yeah.
[00:56:56]  A lot of the people, like you talked to a lot of the coworkers, the people that were from early days of Vice.
[00:57:02]  And it seemed like the consensus was like, yeah, we, he's a great guy.
[00:57:08]  We liked Gavin.
[00:57:09]  He did some weird stuff.
[00:57:10]  I don't agree with his politics, but I liked him.
[00:57:15]  So, and then you came up with a bunch of theories at the end, right?
[00:57:17]  Like, what was the.
[00:57:18]  Well, those derived from all the different people I spoke to.
[00:57:20]  The theories derived from the people.
[00:57:22]  Right.
[00:57:22]  Okay.
[00:57:23]  That was, it's interesting because he doesn't like, I think he kind of portrays it these days as if one day he lost all his friends, like everybody just turned against him or whatever.
[00:57:33]  But it's, he, it was, um, It was staggered over like 10 or 15 years based on, you know, the people I know, like we, you know, mutually who are friends with him or worked with him.
[00:57:45]  Everybody had a different breaking point or falling out with him.
[00:57:48]  Some of them are, you know, political or getting, you know, pissed off at or offended by something he said or whatever.
[00:57:54]  Some of them are just straight up interpersonal problems.
[00:57:56]  Some are professional or whatever.
[00:57:59]  And so everybody, you know, broke up with their friend Gavin at a different time.
[00:58:05]  And everybody has a, you know, like sometimes completely different theory.
[00:58:09]  About what has happened to him between 2002 and 2022 or whatever.
[00:58:15]  And so that's where those all came from.
[00:58:17]  Yeah.
[00:58:18]  And then I threw in some of my own.
[00:58:19]  After everything, what is your conclusion?
[00:58:21]  Oh, it's all of them.
[00:58:22]  I thought I put that in the doc.
[00:58:24]  Maybe it might not have ended up in the doc.
[00:58:26]  We made a big schizophrenic spider web board with all the theories.
[00:58:30]  And then the director, Sebastian, asked me, he's like, which one is the truth?
[00:58:35]  And I was like, oh, it's all of them.
[00:58:38]  They are all.
[00:58:40]  And his position is he never changed.
[00:58:41]  He's like, this has always been me.
[00:58:42]  He's been saying that.
[00:58:43]  Yeah.
[00:58:43]  I mean, it's, I mentioned this to someone else too.
[00:58:46]  It's like, if you go back, like this guy writes and used to draw like prodigiously, and he has this huge body of work whereby you can go back and read stuff from his 20s and 30s, and you're like, of course you changed.
[00:58:58]  Well, everybody changed.
[00:58:58]  You did the classic left wing to right wing conversion.
[00:59:01]  Like, how can you say you didn't change at all?
[00:59:04]  And of course, what virtue is it not to change?
[00:59:07]  Yeah.
[00:59:09]  Well, what part of him changed?
[00:59:11]  So, how did he become more right wing?
[00:59:14]  Because he was writing about the fucking trans stuff and all that stuff early on, wasn't he?
[00:59:18]  He was writing about that in like 2012, 2013.
[00:59:20]  I'm talking about stuff from like you're talking about where 1998, you know, 2002.
[00:59:25]  But although it's funny, that article comes out, and I'm gonna get the years a little bit screwed up right now, but it's around 2013 or so, 2012 or 2013.
[00:59:35]  And he publishes a book in 2012 called The Death of Cool, although it's original.
[00:59:41]  If you find a book called How to Piss in Public, that is the same book with an earlier title, and it's a memoir of him up until that point, you know.
[00:59:51]  From youth to, I think he's 40.
[00:59:54]  Yeah.
[00:59:54]  And I think the book kind of like ends with him becoming 40 and accepting adulthood and being happy about having a family and all that.
[01:00:00]  But the very end of the book, a little epilogue, I can't do a good paraphrase of it, but he lays out his credo for people.
[01:00:09]  And it's like, he's like, you know, he's like, if there's one thing I've learned, it's like, if you don't fit in where you grew up, if you're, you know, if you've got to be, you know, a Mormon Abba impersonator.
[01:00:22]  But you were born like an overweight cowboy or something like that.
[01:00:26]  It's like you got to follow your dream and you got to change into who you want to be.
[01:00:30]  Right.
[01:00:31]  So, like, one year difference between saying that's the point of my entire life up until the year 40.
[01:00:40]  And the very next year, he's like, except trans.
[01:00:42]  It's like, just don't fuck around with your genitals.
[01:00:44]  Right.
[01:00:44]  You know, and his argument is primarily based on he's like, trans dicks look weird.
[01:00:48]  Right.
[01:00:48]  I'm like, that's not a great argument.
[01:00:50]  You know, that's not the kind of thing you should base law.
[01:00:53]  How about the new?
[01:00:54]  What do you think about the new mayor?
[01:00:56]  Didn't the new mayor for New York?
[01:00:58]  I heard Zohan.
[01:00:59]  Zoran Mamadami?
[01:01:02]  I heard he wants to give $60 million to trans surgeries.
[01:01:06]  To trans surgeons?
[01:01:07]  I heard it was to trans surgeons.
[01:01:09]  That's what I meant.
[01:01:09]  And it's in cash.
[01:01:11]  Yeah, no.
[01:01:11]  Oh, I don't know anything about that.
[01:01:12]  I look at the trans surgeons.
[01:01:13]  Can you find that out if that's real?
[01:01:15]  I'm still catching up on Lori Lightfoot.
[01:01:19]  Do you hear she wants to raise the bridges on all the.
[01:01:21]  Is she still in town?
[01:01:23]  No, no, no.
[01:01:23]  She's not around anymore.
[01:01:25]  She lost office.
[01:01:26]  Okay, Democratic candidate Zola has pledged to allocate $65 million to gender surgeons for transgender New Yorkers, baby.
[01:01:37]  All right.
[01:01:38]  I wonder if that pledge is the same as the Amber Heard pledge.
[01:01:41]  What's the Amber Heard pledge?
[01:01:42]  Well, she pledged her money, but didn't actually do it.
[01:01:45]  Oh, it didn't actually do it.
[01:01:46]  I know.
[01:01:46]  It's an easy thing to say.
[01:01:48]  I will also say You know what the funny thing is?
[01:01:51]  He also simultaneously said that if Netanyahu ever comes to New York, he's going to arrest him.
[01:01:57]  Oh, like is a hair transplant gender affirming care?
[01:02:00]  Like, that's all I gotta say.
[01:02:01]  It's like, that's is, is, yeah, how do you look at that?
[01:02:04]  And that's super broad.
[01:02:05]  That is, I was just, I remember reading something and it's like, I kind of, you know, I like to take a walk when these issues come up.
[01:02:12]  Yeah.
[01:02:12]  Just cause I've been, I grew up in the 90s, I've been around the bush.
[01:02:15]  It was like, all the arguments about trans people are literally the same arguments that were made about gays when I was, you know, 10 or 11, right?
[01:02:22]  They're, you know, they're gonna children, they can't be trusted around children.
[01:02:26]  It's mentally, they're, you know, it's a runaway mental illness.
[01:02:29]  that we should shun them for.
[01:02:31]  Right.
[01:02:31]  So now it's against God, et cetera.
[01:02:33]  Yeah, but the surgery stuff's kind of different, though, right?
[01:02:35]  Like the surgery stuff, to me, my view on it, and there was a, um, some lesbian athlete, I forget her name now, she wrote a tweet about the, um, about this whole thing, this whole like explosion of trans stuff.
[01:02:49]  And she was basically explaining how the, the pushing the trans agenda, whatever you want to call it, is building a barrier between the people who like my dad, who kind of like grew up in the 50s, in the 60s or whatever, and he's kind of like maybe started out, not, I think not, Too fond of gays and all this stuff.
[01:03:11]  And then over the years, he's kind of like, okay, these people are normal.
[01:03:14]  I'm friends with gay people, whatever.
[01:03:15]  This is kind of a normal part of culture.
[01:03:17]  And then the trans thing comes.
[01:03:18]  And then you're like, oh my God, this is getting too fucking out of control.
[01:03:21]  And people are conflating the normal everyday gays with the people that are weirdly pushing this trans surgery on children.
[01:03:28]  And they're like, fuck this, fuck all of it.
[01:03:30]  I don't want nothing to do with it anymore.
[01:03:31]  That's the, you know, and I think that was a good point that she made there.
[01:03:34]  Well, the root of it is that it weirds people out, you know?
[01:03:37]  And as a teenager, I was really into like, you know, queer theory and all that, which was like, as I read it, Sort of an anti assimilationalist vision of gays and lesbians and trans and other folks, uh, that was like, well, whatever, let's preserve our weirdness instead of like kowtowing to regular society.
[01:03:55]  And I always liked that, but what you gonna do, you know?
[01:03:59]  Yeah, there was a Gavin was showing me a oh, but so the gender affirming care thing, and I was like, oh, yeah, this is this is some classic, like I read somewhere, but I don't know, I was reading somewhere about like the you know, because small numbers, right, of like kids under 18 who get some sort of like gender affirming care, but how like a few of those figures.
[01:04:17]  Also, involve boys who were given like basically mastectomies for gynecomastia, you know, had like glandular issues, so they had like big tits.
[01:04:28]  And it was like, there's always so much of this shit, and it's just the internet in general is just like presented in bad faith in statistics, especially.
[01:04:36]  I'm always just like, sure, yeah, like let's see the survey, please, you know, yeah, yeah, right, yeah, it's kind of impossible to find the truth of anything nowadays, yeah.
[01:04:46]  Welcome to Postmart Energy, it's yeah, and Hamilton was explaining this.
[01:04:49]  Beautifully, when he was on here, he was just like, he even wasn't like shitting on people who do this, but he's like, I even do this myself sometimes.
[01:04:58]  I catch myself doing this where I'm looking for, like, wouldn't it be cool if the Nazis were inventing LSD and I'm trying to come find all this stuff and to find all this evidence.
[01:05:05]  And then I find evidence that goes against it and I want to fucking ignore it, but I can't.
[01:05:11]  You figured out the story.
[01:05:12]  Yeah.
[01:05:13]  Yeah.
[01:05:13]  Confirmation bias sneaks in.
[01:05:15]  Yeah.
[01:05:15]  It's real.
[01:05:15]  You're on guard.
[01:05:16]  Yeah.
[01:05:17]  Yeah.
[01:05:17]  And it's bigger than ever now.
[01:05:18]  It's just like, especially, you know, social media is.
[01:05:23]  Really fucking put the brakes on critical thinking.
[01:05:26]  Right.
[01:05:27]  Yeah.
[01:05:27]  Well, now we get to hear what everybody has to say.
[01:05:29]  Isn't that great?
[01:05:30]  Yeah.
[01:05:30]  Right.
[01:05:31]  Ever been in a room of 100 people and just had them all speaking?
[01:05:33]  It's fucking, it's glorious.
[01:05:35]  It's like a public square.
[01:05:38]  Yeah.
[01:05:38]  No.
[01:05:38]  And there's also like the people, they want to be a part of their group.
[01:05:41]  They don't want to say things and they want to signal the wrong thing to where their tribe is going to kick them out.
[01:05:47]  Like I just noticed this with this whole war and with the whole Iran war thing that's been kicking off.
[01:05:51]  All the heart, the people that have been.
[01:05:57]  Blasting or that have been like blowing the trumpets for Trump the whole time leading up to the election.
[01:06:02]  Obviously, he was running on being anti war, which I thought was great.
[01:06:05]  And a lot of people thought was great.
[01:06:06]  He ran on a lot of things.
[01:06:07]  And some of the people that were really behind him, like Tucker, Candace, and Alex Jones.
[01:06:14]  And Alex Jones is, I'm going to use him as an example here.
[01:06:19]  He was basically, I was watching a Twitter video he did yesterday, and he was talking about the Iran war.
[01:06:24]  And he was talking about how stupid it was and how Trump shouldn't be doing this and all this stuff.
[01:06:28]  And throughout the whole thing, he was qualifying himself every 30 seconds.
[01:06:32]  Don't get me wrong, I'm still MAGA.
[01:06:34]  Don't try to say I'm not MAGA.
[01:06:36]  I still support Trump.
[01:06:36]  I still support Donald Trump.
[01:06:37]  I'm not saying that.
[01:06:38]  I'm still MAGA.
[01:06:39]  I'm not saying that.
[01:06:41]  I just think that what he's doing is wrong.
[01:06:42]  We need to stop this stupid war.
[01:06:42]  We're stopping giving Israel all this money.
[01:06:44]  Blah, And I've seen a lot of that.
[01:06:48]  Like, a lot of people are just saying, let me be clear.
[01:06:51]  I'm still MAGA.
[01:06:51]  Don't say I'm not MAGA.
[01:06:52]  Right.
[01:06:52]  But what Trump's doing, I didn't vote for this shit.
[01:06:55]  I didn't vote to make Israel great again.
[01:06:56]  I voted to make America great again.
[01:06:58]  Right.
[01:06:58]  And, you know, it just goes to the whole thing.
[01:07:00]  Like, people want to be a part of their tribe, they don't want to be kicked out of their so called tribe.
[01:07:05]  You know where that syntax comes from, that kind of cadence that you just did a really good impression right there.
[01:07:10]  But you know exactly where that stylist speaking comes from, right?
[01:07:14]  Call in sports radio shows.
[01:07:17]  That is how you would address the DJ on a sports call in show in the 80s and 90s.
[01:07:24]  Be like, I don't want to, you know, I want to be a team player here, but, you know, I really think, you know, they should get rid of Hernandez and, you know, put Marcel in on shortstop for this.

=== Tomboys, Baseball, and Time Magazine (03:40) ===

[01:07:33]  I think, I think the team's going to go down the hill in front.
[01:07:36]  Yeah.
[01:07:36]  It's the exact same tone.
[01:07:38]  And it's like, I'm not the first person to be like, this shit's.
[01:07:40]  Is just all team sports.
[01:07:41]  It is.
[01:07:42]  But it is.
[01:07:42]  You're totally right.
[01:07:43]  It is, bro.
[01:07:44]  Yeah.
[01:07:46]  Yeah.
[01:07:47]  But the, um, going to the trans stuff, what, what Kevin pulled up a, there was a, apparently there was a Time magazine thing that came out where it said, um, tomboys have gone extinct.
[01:07:59]  Oh, because it's all, because they're presumed to all be trans or they are just all trying to get together?
[01:08:03]  No, well, they're chopping all their tits off.
[01:08:06]  Okay.
[01:08:06]  Because their parents are saying, oh, you're, you're a really a boy.
[01:08:08]  We got to chop your tits off.
[01:08:10]  And it was like, it was like.
[01:08:11]  Is that something a lot?
[01:08:12]  Like, Is this apparently if Time Magazine did a thing on it?
[01:08:15]  Time Magazines journalistic standards are like sending a kid to Detroit for 12 hours and be like, write a story on the city.
[01:08:23]  Hey, these are one of the top journalistic organizations in the U.S. Time Magazine, they're a time honored institution in America, yes, exactly.
[01:08:34]  We can't just we can't discredit them.
[01:08:36]  Kids want to tap their jets off, welcome to America, go nuts, you know.
[01:08:40]  And well, the problem is what are we going to do, legislate something because they'll regret it?
[01:08:44]  Well, the problem is young heterosexual males.
[01:08:48]  When they're first discovering that they like girls, they're playing on the playground with other girls.
[01:08:53]  They don't like girls in high heels and skimpy outfits yet, obviously, because they're young and they're like on the baseball field or whatever.
[01:08:59]  And their first experience, maybe kissing a girl or smooching a girl, copping a little titty feel or whatever, is going to be with another girl who's a tomboy, right?
[01:09:09]  Tomboys are the stepping stone to somebody who is a traditional heterosexual who likes ass and titties, right?
[01:09:17]  I see where you're coming from.
[01:09:18]  I just think it's.
[01:09:19]  So if you're wiping out all the tomboys, You're making it way more difficult for the development of young heterosexuals.
[01:09:26]  I don't think anyone's wiping out the tomboys.
[01:09:29]  What I would fear personally more is that these kids we're talking about in the abstract aren't on baseball teams and shit of that nature.
[01:09:37]  They aren't physically with other kids their age on a routine basis.
[01:09:47]  I don't hang out with teenagers in my spare time.
[01:09:50]  I've got a pair of God kids, but they're pretty young.
[01:09:52]  Or whatever.
[01:09:52]  But the sense I get from people who work with teenagers and are, you know, some folks who are just slightly younger is that, oh, I could, fuck, I can bake, I can, I could pull up a chart if I wanted to right now.
[01:10:05]  Nobody gets their driver's license anymore, right?
[01:10:07]  Like, and in the 90s, if you looked at, they would do every year in Georgia, we would do, I think it was called like the teen behavioral health survey, where they'd ask, like, have you ever done drugs?
[01:10:19]  Have you ever had sex?
[01:10:20]  Have you ever had anal sex?
[01:10:21]  You know, what drugs have you done?
[01:10:22]  Have you ever drank?
[01:10:23]  Things of this nature, and we used to fuck with it all the time.
[01:10:26]  I used to love being like, I've never kissed another person, but I have anal sex three times a week.
[01:10:33]  And it's like, I've never drank a beer, but I do heroin like more or less daily.
[01:10:38]  And I think it was funny.
[01:10:39]  I think like there was a, and then like a fucking teacher at my high school started a rumor that I was on dope.
[01:10:44]  And I think it's because she looked in the fucking teen behavioral health survey and fell for it.
[01:10:50]  Anyway, in general, when those things would come out and they'd be, you know, from 1950 to 1960, you'd see drug use doing this and you'd see sex doing this also.
[01:11:01]  You know, I was so proud of my generation.
[01:11:03]  I was like, look at that.
[01:11:05]  We pushed it up another like three notches.
[01:11:07]  Or whatever, sometime around like mid 2000s, it crests and starts plummeting, you know?

=== Howard Stern and Media Decline (06:46) ===

[01:11:13]  And it's like, it's kids on the internet, it's kids on their fucking phones.
[01:11:19]  You could probably correlate it pretty well to the iPhone coming out, because I believe it is around like 2005, 2006 when it really, when those rates start to sink and it matches up with kids not getting their driver's license, kids being involved in less like outdoor physical activities and things of that nature.
[01:11:37]  Um, So, I think, yeah, I wouldn't worry about it.
[01:11:44]  I'd worry that nobody's getting late.
[01:11:46]  It's a bad thing.
[01:11:46]  And they're all miserable about it.
[01:11:48]  And that could have some really bad repercussions because it makes people crazy.
[01:11:51]  Yeah.
[01:11:52]  It's not good that most of the population is now staying inside, not going out and doing stuff.
[01:11:59]  That is not a good combination with the way media is going right now because media is unmanageable.
[01:12:06]  And now more people are inside, surrounded by screens all day.
[01:12:09]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:10]  It seems like a fucking terrible combo.
[01:12:12]  Yeah.
[01:12:13]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:14]  And it's like a feedback loop that, you know, makes itself worse because who's making media on the internet?
[01:12:20]  It's people who haven't been outside for a while.
[01:12:22]  It's people sitting at a computer screen, right?
[01:12:24]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:24]  And so it's just over and over again.
[01:12:25]  The internet is now everything made by people who aren't doing something better with their lives at any given point, right?
[01:12:32]  You know?
[01:12:32]  Interesting.
[01:12:33]  Yeah.
[01:12:33]  Now everybody can be a news source, right?
[01:12:37]  Yeah.
[01:12:37]  Anybody can.
[01:12:38]  Wow.
[01:12:38]  It's funny to watch, like, the kind of like the.
[01:12:42]  The aesthetic of the YouTuber, which I don't keep up super often, but just from glancing in, that for a while it was very.
[01:12:49]  You just hate that word, YouTube.
[01:12:50]  Oh, it's awful, right?
[01:12:51]  Yeah.
[01:12:51]  I mean, it replaced a worse word, which was vlogger.
[01:12:55]  That's true.
[01:12:55]  You know that?
[01:12:56]  That's true.
[01:12:57]  But the aesthetic for a while, or the dominant aesthetic, was this sort of lo fi thing where you like hold a lavalier mic, you know, in your hand, and you go out, and it really seems like kids, you're like, oh, I'm just out with my buddies and we're going to interview someone.
[01:13:08]  I'll hold up my mic to them or whatever.
[01:13:10]  And then in the last like five years, maybe four years, that suddenly everybody's.
[01:13:15]  Look, I like your studio, but everybody suddenly got these like weirdly professional news.
[01:13:20]  Well, this doesn't look like it doesn't look like you're trying to trick people into thinking you're a news network, you know, with like a little box graphic over the side of your shirt or wearing like a suit which may or may not fit well.
[01:13:32]  Like these sorts of things that people have taken on the trappings of, you know, kind of like institutional legitimacy.
[01:13:38]  Right.
[01:13:40]  Have you seen that dude, Andrew Callahan from?
[01:13:43]  He has this thing called Channel 5?
[01:13:44]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.
[01:13:45]  All gas, no breaks.
[01:13:46]  All gas, no breaks.
[01:13:46]  Yeah, he has a very similar style.
[01:13:48]  Where he just basically goes out and he takes a little lavalier mic and goes back and forth.
[01:13:51]  Right, right, right.
[01:13:53]  What, to me?
[01:13:54]  Similar style to like early vice stuff.
[01:13:56]  Oh, like early vice stuff.
[01:13:57]  I was going to say he's a bit on like the freaking mutant hunt.
[01:14:00]  Although recently he's been doing some stuff that's like he's kind of come along and done some.
[01:14:04]  Yeah, he's getting a little bit more political.
[01:14:05]  Properly intelligent.
[01:14:06]  Well, it's just that they're like he's kind of growing as a documentarian, I guess, whatever.
[01:14:11]  I don't know.
[01:14:12]  Not my place to say.
[01:14:13]  But yeah.
[01:14:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:14:15]  You're not supposed to grow as a documentarian.
[01:14:18]  The best stuff is when you're young and it's all got to be raw and punk, right?
[01:14:21]  Yeah, you don't want to sell out.
[01:14:23]  No, you don't want to sell out.
[01:14:24]  You can have a bunch of ad breaks in there and doing stuff for money.
[01:14:27]  That's the other problem with the whole independent journalism stuff, and everyone being a content creator online.
[01:14:34]  Right.
[01:14:34]  Is that like people will find, and I don't know if you've noticed this, but people will find like a lane, whether it be a specific topic or a specific niche of content, whether it's like maybe it's politics, maybe it's fucking.
[01:14:48]  Esoteric stuff like UFOs, whatever.
[01:14:50]  Yeah.
[01:14:50]  And they'll find out, oh, wow, this vertical makes the most money.
[01:14:54]  So I'm going to fucking make this my whole identity.
[01:14:55]  That's their beat.
[01:14:56]  Yep.
[01:14:58]  Which is, which is not good.
[01:15:00]  It's super weird.
[01:15:02]  In, in, with, uh, what, what are those like TV nerds on the internet call it?
[01:15:06]  Flanders, Flandersization.
[01:15:09]  Like where TV characters that have a trait like get turned into caricatures of themselves.
[01:15:16]  Oh, yeah.
[01:15:16]  Yeah.
[01:15:17]  So wait, Bayless.
[01:15:18]  Have you ever heard of Skip Bayless?
[01:15:20]  Yeah.
[01:15:20]  Yes, but.
[01:15:21]  He's a good example of that.
[01:15:22]  Wait, who is he?
[01:15:23]  He is a sports commentator.
[01:15:26]  Oh, he is.
[01:15:27]  Okay.
[01:15:28]  He originally had a show called On First Take with Stephen A. Smith.
[01:15:31]  Was he a proper announcer back in the day?
[01:15:34]  Okay.
[01:15:34]  He's from Chicago, I think, actually.
[01:15:36]  Right.
[01:15:37]  He took over for Harry Carrier.
[01:15:38]  They overlapped in a way.
[01:15:40]  Yeah.
[01:15:40]  Yep, yep.
[01:15:41]  So he.
[01:15:42]  It was the same guy.
[01:15:43]  He used to be like a traditional journalist, a sports journalist.
[01:15:45]  And then he kind of became this talking head on TV who would be like.
[01:15:50]  He would pick his stance on people.
[01:15:52]  He was like, I'm going to be pro this guy and anti this guy.
[01:15:55]  And he made his career.
[01:15:56]  He started, when he started to get real popular, it was almost like because he would shit on LeBron James and everything LeBron did.
[01:16:03]  He was the anti LeBron guy.
[01:16:04]  He was anti LeBron, pro Jordan.
[01:16:06]  Yeah.
[01:16:06]  LeBron will never be Jordan.
[01:16:08]  And he kind of like, he was famous because everyone hated him so much.
[01:16:12]  Right.
[01:16:12]  And he just like leaned into it and leaned into it.
[01:16:15]  And eventually, it just like, he forgot.
[01:16:17]  He lost the plot and he became the character.
[01:16:19]  Same thing happened to Alex Jones.
[01:16:21]  Same thing happened to like any of the like right wing shock jock.
[01:16:25]  Kind of like Rush Limbaugh clones that existed across the country in the 90s.
[01:16:29]  Ours was called Neil Bortz.
[01:16:31]  And he just, you can, like, over the years, you just hear him become more and more of a detached asshole.
[01:16:36]  And you'd wonder if he was able to turn it off when he left the studio and went home, you know?
[01:16:40]  Then you'd read about his divorce and you'd say, probably not.
[01:16:42]  Yeah.
[01:16:43]  Yeah.
[01:16:44]  I wonder what happened to Howard Stern.
[01:16:47]  He's, I think he's just, you know, goes home and sleeps on his millions.
[01:16:53]  Yeah.
[01:16:53]  He's still around.
[01:16:54]  Yeah.
[01:16:54]  Yeah.
[01:16:55]  He's, he's, he's, it seems like he just has like the, The biggest hotshot celebrity or politician on his show.
[01:17:02]  I don't watch it every day, but yeah.
[01:17:05]  It's like presidential candidates and Taylor Swift and people like that.
[01:17:10]  Not porn stars.
[01:17:12]  Which I think is stuttering, John.
[01:17:14]  One of the reasons I think that Rogan is so unique is because he's the top of his media field.
[01:17:25]  He's the top of his.
[01:17:25]  I mean, he's basically Howard Stern, right?
[01:17:27]  He's the top podcaster in the world.
[01:17:28]  He's the biggest media thing, platform.
[01:17:30]  Biggest, what is the word I'm looking for?
[01:17:32]  The biggest media outlet in the world, I guess you could say.
[01:17:35]  Bigger than all cable channels, all cable shows combined.
[01:17:40]  And he still has people on his show that nobody knows.
[01:17:44]  He'll find some nobody who's trying to make a name for himself and bring him on and prop him up.
[01:17:48]  And there's not a lot of people who do that.
[01:17:51]  Their egos get in the way.
[01:17:52]  Like, oh, I'm not going to have this person on.
[01:17:53]  I'm not going to give them a fucking platform.
[01:17:55]  I'm too jealous.
[01:17:58]  And nobody does that.

=== Death Row Lawyer and Execution (15:27) ===

[01:18:00]  Which I think is probably partially responsible for some of the success that he's had.
[01:18:04]  It's good he does it.
[01:18:05]  Sure.
[01:18:06]  I'll say that.
[01:18:06]  Yeah.
[01:18:07]  Yeah.
[01:18:08]  Trump and the Republicans.
[01:18:09]  It's a good habit to make.
[01:18:10]  Yeah.
[01:18:10]  Yeah.
[01:18:11]  You got to have both sides.
[01:18:12]  Have both sides of the problem on or both sides of the issue, and then also have people who nobody fucking knows.
[01:18:19]  Don't just fucking chase the superstars, you know?
[01:18:22]  That's true.
[01:18:24]  So, the noisy thing was that whole thing?
[01:18:29]  Which one?
[01:18:30]  It was one in Chicago and one in Atlanta.
[01:18:31]  Noisy Atlanta.
[01:18:32]  Noisy Atlanta.
[01:18:33]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:18:34]  How did that whole thing happen?
[01:18:36]  Well, we'd made a previous one in Chicago.
[01:18:40]  It started with Chicago.
[01:18:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:18:42]  Which I think the title was Noisy Chirac.
[01:18:45]  Chirac.
[01:18:45]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:18:46]  That was good.
[01:18:46]  Chief Keefe and all that stuff.
[01:18:47]  With Chief Keefe, yes.
[01:18:48]  Yeah.
[01:18:49]  And Young, I was about to say with Young Thug.
[01:18:51]  I'm sorry, with all the droll kids.
[01:18:55]  Yeah.
[01:18:56]  So that was, I mean, you know, effectively a sequel, right?
[01:19:01]  In Atlanta, where.
[01:19:02]  Well, how did the Chirac thing start?
[01:19:05]  The Chirac thing started with there's a guy named Andy Capper, who was the editor of Vice UK in London.
[01:19:12]  And he came to America and he started making videos, became a filmmaker.
[01:19:16]  He's a really good filmmaker.
[01:19:18]  And he was fascinated with drill music in Chicago.
[01:19:21]  Like, he had been former editor of, you ever heard of the NME, the New Musical Express?
[01:19:26]  It's like a long running British, like, rock and roll magazine.
[01:19:31]  It's like, it doesn't really have an equivalent in the United States, but I think of Rolling Stone or something like that.
[01:19:35]  Anyway, he came from the music world, right?
[01:19:37]  Not as a musician, but as, you know, I wouldn't want to call him a music journalist because that sounds stupid, frankly.
[01:19:45]  And he was a real one.
[01:19:46]  And he and this other filmmaker named Gregory Beef Jones started.
[01:19:52]  Working on an idea about Chicago drill music.
[01:19:56]  And I was at the time interested in Chicago as the crime capital of the United States or the murder capital of the United States.
[01:20:03]  And so we both kind of came into the story from those two sides.
[01:20:11]  Like I couldn't tell you nothing about Chief Keefe at that point.
[01:20:17]  So he was exposing me to the music and I was telling him, you know, the last 30 years of history of.
[01:20:24]  Chicago street life or whatever.
[01:20:27]  And that was it.
[01:20:28]  I'm sorry, not a great story, right?
[01:20:29]  So you didn't know much about the music side of it.
[01:20:30]  You were just more about like the Chicago culture in general.
[01:20:34]  Yeah, basically the history, like the gun trade, even frankly.
[01:20:39]  Yeah, no.
[01:20:40]  I came into that pretty dumb and naive.
[01:20:44]  I mean, by the time we were filming, I'd listened to all the stuff.
[01:20:46]  I was like, this is pretty cool.
[01:20:47]  I was like, that guy's 16?
[01:20:49]  I was like, that guy killed someone?
[01:20:51]  Amazing.
[01:20:51]  I was like, I love it.
[01:20:53]  The, um, Yeah, that's it.
[01:20:56]  It was funny from the Atlanta episode.
[01:20:58]  I think it was the first episode of the Atlanta one.
[01:21:00]  You go into that recording studio, and the dude was like, You don't know Big Meach or whatever?
[01:21:07]  Oh, because I asked a question in the wrong way.
[01:21:09]  Yeah, you're like, How the hell do you not know this?
[01:21:11]  How do you not know who this guy is?
[01:21:13]  You're like, That's my job is to ask questions.
[01:21:16]  Well, I remember.
[01:21:18]  Yeah, I remember you're talking about where I just like, I admit, Can you tell us about Big Meach from the Black Mafia family, please?
[01:21:26]  I had phrased it, Who is Big Meach?
[01:21:28]  And then.
[01:21:29]  Yeah.
[01:21:31]  Yeah.
[01:21:31]  That was hilarious.
[01:21:31]  So it goes.
[01:21:32]  And Gucci, Gucci man was in prison during the whole thing.
[01:21:35]  I believe so.
[01:21:36]  Yeah.
[01:21:37]  Yeah.
[01:21:38]  That was a while ago.
[01:21:39]  We were trying to get him on the phone because he had, you know, a phone in jail, but didn't.
[01:21:43]  He didn't want to get out.
[01:21:45]  Or just, it didn't like, I don't know if he didn't want to do it or if it didn't make it to him or whatever.
[01:21:50]  Yeah.
[01:21:50]  It's kind of, kind of hard sending, you know, interview requests to prison.
[01:21:57]  Right.
[01:21:57]  As it turns out.
[01:21:58]  I mean, a lot of people go to prisons now and like, Could literally conduct interviews there with cameras and all that.
[01:22:02]  All you gotta do is get those.
[01:22:03]  All you gotta do is get those.
[01:22:04]  Lawyers.
[01:22:04]  It never aired, but I did a thing with a couple ladies in um Death Row in Texas, um, where we went and interviewed some people on Death Row.
[01:22:14]  It was about women who would get married to guys on Death Row, so like Death Row wives.
[01:22:19]  It was a, I regret that we never finished that and got an edit out, it was a crazy shoot.
[01:22:26]  Um, but the process of getting the prison to agree, and then you know, on top of that, you got to factor in a prison in Texas that is Death Row in Texas in Huntsville, right?
[01:22:37]  Was like Six or seven week pain in the ass, you know.
[01:22:42]  Yeah, it's a lot of work, it's a lot of fucking bureaucratic.
[01:22:44]  They make it, yeah.
[01:22:46]  It's the bureaucracy is kind of the point, you know.
[01:22:48]  And it was, it's funny, most of the time when you go somewhere to do like with a camera to do a documentary about someone's job, anybody who sees it, they're like, oh, cool, like taking an interest in us.
[01:22:59]  And that was Death Row was the one place where the guards were sort of like, great, here you are.
[01:23:03]  Yeah, no, I don't have anything to say.
[01:23:06]  Those guys don't want to fucking help you.
[01:23:08]  Those guys make, Zero money.
[01:23:10]  They found out who we were talking to, too.
[01:23:11]  They were just like, Who are you talking to?
[01:23:13]  It was, oh shit, I forget his last name now.
[01:23:18]  I don't even know how to look him up.
[01:23:22]  He was a guy.
[01:23:22]  Spit out some keywords and Steve will find him.
[01:23:25]  Okay, his name's Hank something.
[01:23:27]  I just feel bad not remembering his name.
[01:23:28]  Hank, Texas, Death Row.
[01:23:30]  Try that.
[01:23:31]  And, oh, this is going to answer a question I've had for years that I've been cautiously avoiding asking, which is whether or not he got executed.
[01:23:39]  Hank Skinner?
[01:23:40]  Skinner.
[01:23:41]  Oh my God.
[01:23:41]  Right as I look him up.
[01:23:42]  That was crazy.
[01:23:43]  Hank Skinner.
[01:23:44]  Thank you.
[01:23:45]  Did it zap into your head the same time you said it?
[01:23:47]  It did.
[01:23:47]  Like a second before, right?
[01:23:48]  Wow.
[01:23:49]  So Skinner was accused of murdering his girlfriend and his girlfriend's two adult, mentally disabled sons from a previous relationship with an axe, right?
[01:24:05]  And this guy was, I think he was in his early 20s or something.
[01:24:07]  He was kind of like, he was like a roughneck from, I think he's from Lubbock, Texas.
[01:24:10]  He's from North Texas.
[01:24:11]  He worked.
[01:24:13]  Shampooing hair.
[01:24:15]  Oh, he did die.
[01:24:16]  Okay.
[01:24:17]  Sorry to hear that.
[01:24:18]  God, that guy was remarkable.
[01:24:21]  So, anyway, he was just.
[01:24:23]  Find like the latest article about his execution.
[01:24:25]  Well, there was one there saying that he'd passed away, which I. Zoom out, Steve.
[01:24:28]  Well, he had been scheduled to be executed, and Texas doesn't execute the most people.
[01:24:35]  I think it's either Florida or California has them beat, but Texas prides itself on executing people the most quickly, right?
[01:24:42]  Go up, go up.
[01:24:43]  Texas death row inmate dies after December surgery for tumor.
[01:24:46]  I'm sorry to hear that.
[01:24:46]  He didn't get executed.
[01:24:47]  He died.
[01:24:48]  Accidentally.
[01:24:49]  Well, this was the whole thing.
[01:24:50]  So, Texas, like Texas justice is we get you killed quick, right?
[01:24:54]  Like, we bring in there and we execute people as fast as possible.
[01:24:58]  They're proud of that, right?
[01:25:01]  Something to be proud of.
[01:25:02]  This guy was accused of murdering three people and claimed he didn't do it.
[01:25:08]  It was a real, you know, like, I don't know whose story is correct, which is exactly, it was a fantastic argument for not killing people, right?
[01:25:17]  Like, Leave him in prison until you can figure some shit out.
[01:25:21]  Yeah, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest case, right?
[01:25:24]  Yeah.
[01:25:24]  And he had been sketched, he had been on death row the longest of any inmate who was alive at that point.
[01:25:30]  We're filming him in like 2012, I want to say.
[01:25:33]  And he had, his execution had been scheduled.
[01:25:37]  He'd gone through all his appeals, right?
[01:25:39]  So he was done with all his appeals, but different things kept happening.
[01:25:43]  Like the prison warden was like, yeah, that guy's got nine lives, then some, because different things had delayed his execution.
[01:25:50]  Like he should have been dead two or three years before we went.
[01:25:53]  And he spoke with him, and he got married just by proxy, right?
[01:25:57]  Because he can't leave death row to a French woman who is an anti death penalty activist named Sandrine Skinner, when she took his name.
[01:26:05]  I forget her maiden name.
[01:26:09]  Who we got to speak to, who was there because he was about to be executed.
[01:26:12]  And then they stayed his execution once again, like first time in Texas history kind of shit.
[01:26:17]  It was really weird.
[01:26:19]  But I remember we got an interview with him and we sat down and we chatted with him.
[01:26:24]  And he was like classic North Texas roughneck, like missing a tooth, just like.
[01:26:30]  Like, kind of guy you'd see at the back of the bar or whatever.
[01:26:33]  And it was a year after the Werner Herzog documentary, Into the Abyss, which was about death row in Texas in Huntsville, had come out.
[01:26:45]  And in the course of just pleasantries as we're getting the interview started, he was like, Do you know my friend Werner?
[01:26:53]  And I was like, Your friend who?
[01:26:55]  And he was like, My friend Werner.
[01:26:57]  And I was like, Werner Herzog?
[01:26:59]  He's like, Yeah, that guy.
[01:27:01]  He's like, You know, I gave him his title, right?
[01:27:03]  I was like, The title of his movie, he goes, He's like, uh, what's the quote?
[01:27:10]  Be careful, those y'all who gaze into the abyss, for the agis may be the easy for you to beware.
[01:27:17]  Beware those.
[01:27:18]  I'll stop doing my shitty impression anyway.
[01:27:21]  It was like, Beware those who gaze into the abyss, for the abyss also gazes into you.
[01:27:27]  And he goes, Frederick Nietzsche also sprak Zarathustra.
[01:27:31]  And I was like, Ah, be still, my heart.
[01:27:33]  It was like, This is a man who's just been sitting reading for 20 years on death row.
[01:27:38]  It's like you took the roughest lump of coal, Texas prison unit, and have turned him into some sort of like literary school.
[01:27:46]  Yeah.
[01:27:46]  Yeah.
[01:27:50]  Sorry.
[01:27:50]  I'm sorry you died.
[01:27:50]  What a weird phenomenon about these women who want to marry dudes on death row.
[01:27:55]  That's the whole thing.
[01:27:56]  Yeah.
[01:27:56]  I actually met a woman once when I was doing a documentary about my friend who's a lawyer, and he was representing a guy who got the death penalty for killing two prostitutes.
[01:28:07]  He was a truck driver.
[01:28:08]  Yeah.
[01:28:09]  And he got two prostitutes, and they.
[01:28:11]  Wound up dead.
[01:28:12]  He maintained his innocence.
[01:28:14]  And he, this lawyer that I'm talking about is very, very against the death penalty.
[01:28:19]  So he'll just take random death penalty cases like this.
[01:28:23]  And the lady who he was partnering with as her defense team, she fucking married this dude.
[01:28:29]  Right.
[01:28:29]  And she's been representing him for like the past 15 years, 20 years maybe.
[01:28:32]  He's been on.
[01:28:32]  I might know who you're talking about.
[01:28:34]  Yeah.
[01:28:34]  Yeah.
[01:28:35]  This was in Stark, Florida, which is like the middle of nowhere, Florida.
[01:28:40]  It's out of a fucking movie, dude.
[01:28:41]  It's like, it's not even a real place.
[01:28:43]  Which part of the state?
[01:28:45]  It's like, What is it near?
[01:28:47]  It's like northern middle.
[01:28:48]  I would say it's close to Gainesville, but more near to the middle of the state.
[01:28:52]  Tallahassee?
[01:28:53]  Not that far.
[01:28:54]  A little lower.
[01:28:55]  Okay, yeah.
[01:28:56]  That is the middle of nowhere.
[01:28:57]  Yeah, there's like a couple churches, convenience stores, and like a water tower.
[01:29:01]  Stark.
[01:29:02]  And then the prison.
[01:29:03]  Yeah, for the Stark.
[01:29:04]  Yeah.
[01:29:04]  Evocative.
[01:29:05]  And the sun never shines in Stark.
[01:29:07]  Oh.
[01:29:08]  And, anyways, so this guy's maintained his innocence.
[01:29:13]  And I don't remember what happened with the DNA.
[01:29:17]  I don't even remember this guy's name.
[01:29:19]  But something happened with the.
[01:29:20]  Where the DNA was like inconclusive or something like this.
[01:29:24]  Yeah.
[01:29:24]  And they were still going to execute him.
[01:29:27]  And like leading up to the hours where they were supposed to execute him, they were waiting, they were going back and forth with the Supreme Court.
[01:29:34]  And we're there filming.
[01:29:35]  Yeah.
[01:29:36]  And there's this group, there's this giant field.
[01:29:38]  On one side of the group, there were people that were there in a group to stop him from getting executed.
[01:29:45]  Right.
[01:29:45]  And in that group of people, the guy had no friends, but he had people that were like former members of death row who got exonerated through DNA evidence, right?
[01:29:56]  So they're like, one of the guys had just got off death row the week before.
[01:29:58]  He's like, I just left death row because they fucking finally got my DNA evidence right.
[01:30:03]  So, and then the other group of people on the other side of the field, roped off with caution tape, were the victims of the prostitutes or the family members of the prostitutes that got killed and like all their friends, as well as other people who were victims of similar crimes.
[01:30:18]  And, dude, what a weird fucking Twilight Zone situation that was, bro.
[01:30:25]  And then, like, we were there for like eight hours.
[01:30:27]  Waiting for this guy to be executed.
[01:30:29]  Like they had him strapped to the cross, right?
[01:30:31]  I guess the lethal injection is kind of like a crucifix.
[01:30:34]  Yeah.
[01:30:34]  And they put it in like a peep show, right?
[01:30:38]  With the window.
[01:30:38]  With the window and the curtain.
[01:30:39]  It's like a peep show.
[01:30:40]  And then you have the people.
[01:30:41]  Wait, did you guys go to the execution?
[01:30:43]  No, we were across the street from the prison in the field.
[01:30:45]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:30:46]  And it's like, how'd you pull that one?
[01:30:48]  But apparently he was in the little showroom.
[01:30:50]  Like the people that were supposed to watch were sitting in the theater waiting for this to happen.
[01:30:54]  And this was like an eight hour ordeal, like going back and forth to the Supreme Court.
[01:30:58]  And then finally they lost and they fucking, you know, they killed him.
[01:31:01]  Yeah.
[01:31:02]  And, you know, just like such a weird, weird, creepy fucking situation.
[01:31:09]  And like, I understand like putting somebody to death for some fucking atrocious crimes.
[01:31:18]  But the, like, like you said, the biggest argument against it is the fact that they get it wrong so many times.
[01:31:24]  Like, how many innocent people have they fucking killed?
[01:31:26]  You know, we don't know.
[01:31:27]  Like, if we had a magic wand and could fucking go back, take a time machine back and figure out if they actually did it, then that would be, I would not have any problems with the death penalty.
[01:31:35]  But this guy, My lawyer friend, he's so against the death penalty.
[01:31:39]  He was just representing a guy.
[01:31:40]  Well, he knows how the sausage is made.
[01:31:41]  Yeah.
[01:31:42]  He knows the people who are involved in it.
[01:31:43]  This is how.
[01:31:44]  The level of intelligence you need sometimes.
[01:31:46]  Right.
[01:31:46]  Totally.
[01:31:46]  Talk to anybody in any field about how things actually go.
[01:31:49]  Right.
[01:31:50]  And they're like, you know, this is all made by idiots, right?
[01:31:52]  Yeah.
[01:31:52]  Totally.
[01:31:53]  This is life.
[01:31:53]  100%.
[01:31:54]  Yeah.
[01:31:56]  So much so that he was just representing a guy who was a dentist who killed his lawyer.
[01:32:00]  So he was representing a dude who just killed his previous lawyer and he was getting fucking the death penalty for killing a lawyer.
[01:32:07]  What did he have that lawyer for?
[01:32:08]  A previous murder?
[01:32:09]  I think so.
[01:32:10]  Geez, he's just going down the daisy chain.
[01:32:13]  So, exactly.
[01:32:14]  And then, so my friend is representing this guy who just killed his lawyer.
[01:32:17]  Yeah.
[01:32:18]  And he fucking somehow gets a hold of a phone call while he's in prison where he's calling his girlfriend or something saying, We're going to fuck this new lawyer out of everything.
[01:32:28]  We're going to somehow get a mistrial and we're not going to pay him a dime.
[01:32:32]  My lawyer friend got a hold of this.
[01:32:33]  Yeah.
[01:32:34]  And he's like, I'm bowing out of this trial or whatever.
[01:32:37]  And he had the option to give up his evidence.
[01:32:41]  Or the client, attorney client privilege was violated.
[01:32:46]  He could have given that to the judge.
[01:32:48]  Right, right.
[01:32:48]  Which would have made the guy be dead, basically.
[01:32:51]  And he elected not to do it, even after this guy conspired to fuck him over.
[01:32:56]  That's how against the death penalty he is, which is fucking wild.
[01:32:59]  Good for him.
[01:32:59]  Yeah.
[01:33:00]  Great guy.
[01:33:02]  But the fucking phenomena of people wanting, women wanting to marry people on death row is beyond my comprehension.
[01:33:10]  Takes all types.
[01:33:12]  But it's common.
[01:33:13]  It's very, very common.
[01:33:14]  No.
[01:33:14]  I mean, in terms of numbers, like compared to what?
[01:33:18]  Compared to guys on death row who don't get married, or compared to how many people get married in America.
[01:33:23]  It's a fringe thing.
[01:33:24]  It is a fringe thing.
[01:33:24]  Yeah.
[01:33:25]  Right.
[01:33:26]  But it's not, I mean, you hear about it.

=== Guillotine Stories and Marriage Rates (08:49) ===

[01:33:28]  And we're a big country, you know?
[01:33:29]  Maybe it's just when it does happen, we just, it's all over the headlines.
[01:33:32]  So we think it happens everywhere.
[01:33:34]  Right.
[01:33:34]  Yeah.
[01:33:34]  I mean, Charles Manson got married how many times when he was in prison?
[01:33:37]  Did he?
[01:33:38]  Yeah, I forget.
[01:33:38]  He got married a few times, I think.
[01:33:40]  Was it more than once?
[01:33:41]  Yeah.
[01:33:41]  I think so.
[01:33:43]  But I think it's like a real psychological thing, you know?
[01:33:45]  Like, I mean, I know people who marry people in prison.
[01:33:49]  Oh, they eventually got out, they weren't on death row, you know?
[01:33:52]  I think we, I'm trying to remember how many people we interviewed who were proper, like, death row wives, right?
[01:33:58]  And couldn't have been more than four.
[01:34:00]  What a good TV show, Death Row Wives.
[01:34:02]  Actually, they were characters, you know?
[01:34:08]  But it was in general, and it wasn't, there was always a reason.
[01:34:14]  You could always figure it out.
[01:34:15]  Really?
[01:34:16]  Like, there was always something that had happened.
[01:34:17]  There was a lot of, I forget how many of the four, Had previous, like, had come out of abusive relationships and things like that.
[01:34:26]  And so you'd think, well, you wouldn't want to go, you know, you wouldn't want to be connected to somebody accused of murder, right?
[01:34:34]  But it's also like, I'm trying to remember who it was who kind of broke this down neatly.
[01:34:38]  It was somebody who worked either in the county clerk's office where they get married or something like that.
[01:34:42]  But if you think about it, for a woman who's had a hard time with men and who's, you know, been traumatized, it's like, here's a guy.
[01:34:50]  You always know where he's going to be.
[01:34:52]  Anytime you see him, You know, it's never going to be between.
[01:34:55]  Yeah, there's glass and guards between you, and you can, you know, you can have an emotional relationship with someone who can't turn it around on you, right?
[01:35:06]  Right.
[01:35:07]  Who's not going to be able to, who can't get through the glass.
[01:35:09]  You can go buy them little snacks that you, you know, put in the bucket.
[01:35:12]  It goes over to them.
[01:35:14]  And so.
[01:35:15]  There's no conjugal visits on death row, right?
[01:35:17]  Not in Texas.
[01:35:18]  Not in Texas.
[01:35:19]  That's for sure.
[01:35:20]  Yeah.
[01:35:21]  No.
[01:35:22]  I don't know about elsewhere.
[01:35:24]  That's a little European for us here.
[01:35:26]  Little European.
[01:35:27]  Well, so is death row, I should say.
[01:35:29]  Death row.
[01:35:29]  Prison is pretty American.
[01:35:31]  There's not much.
[01:35:32]  Although it's thinking of the French lady who married Hank Skinner, Sandrine, and the fact that she was a French anti death row activist, it's always funny that 1980, I believe it's 1980, is the year France outlawed the death penalty.
[01:35:49]  And I think it's 1978, the year the Deer Hunter came out, is the last time the guillotine was used.
[01:35:55]  In 1978, right?
[01:35:57]  Yeah.
[01:35:58]  So she was Sandrine, yeah.
[01:36:00]  Sandrine was in her teens, I think.
[01:36:02]  And she was an early, like, that was, she was part of the activist community that got them to outlaw the death penalty.
[01:36:09]  It was either in France or it was in, like, Martinique, which is still France or, like, French Guiana.
[01:36:14]  You know, it's a department of France.
[01:36:17]  It's like a state, right?
[01:36:19]  The last time the guillotine was used for Xbox.
[01:36:21]  77.
[01:36:21]  Okay.
[01:36:21]  Sorry.
[01:36:22]  The year Star Wars came out.
[01:36:23]  19.
[01:36:23]  That wasn't that fucking long ago, bro.
[01:36:26]  I know, right?
[01:36:26]  It's pretty funny.
[01:36:27]  10 years before I was born.
[01:36:28]  Right.
[01:36:31]  A Tunisian man was beheaded after being convicted of murder.
[01:36:33]  Does it say where they did it?
[01:36:35]  I'm curious which department of France it was.
[01:36:37]  If it was in metropolitan France or.
[01:36:44]  Oh, he's in Marseille.
[01:36:45]  Oh, it must have been.
[01:36:46]  Yeah.
[01:36:46]  Okay.
[01:36:46]  They didn't probably.
[01:36:47]  Oh, they did it in Marseille.
[01:36:49]  Beaumont Prison.
[01:36:51]  Interesting.
[01:36:54]  Wow.
[01:36:54]  Oh, Jesus.
[01:36:55]  Pimp killer?
[01:36:55]  He was known as the pimp killer?
[01:36:57]  I mean, does that mean he killed pimps or is that.
[01:37:00]  Was he also.
[01:37:01]  Was it like pimp com?
[01:37:02]  It says in 73, a 21 year old woman.
[01:37:06]  Had met in the hospital while receiving, while recovering from an amputation, filed a complaint against him stating that he had tried to force her into prostitution.
[01:37:15]  He beat women to death?
[01:37:16]  That fucking sucks.
[01:37:17]  He tried to force amputees into prostitution.
[01:37:20]  Jeez.
[01:37:21]  That's pretty metal.
[01:37:23]  Wow.
[01:37:24]  Released from custody during the.
[01:37:26]  Oh, and he amputated her.
[01:37:28]  What the fuck?
[01:37:29]  Oh, he did the amputation.
[01:37:30]  I'm just saying, this guy sounds like a bit of a jerk.
[01:37:32]  Holy shit, dude.
[01:37:35]  Maybe you deserve the guillotine.
[01:37:38]  Hey, look, I'm not a.
[01:37:40]  God, the guillotine would probably be pretty painless.
[01:37:43]  That's the whole idea.
[01:37:44]  Yeah, you wouldn't.
[01:37:44]  Public safety razor.
[01:37:46]  That was its official name.
[01:37:47]  The public safety razor, really?
[01:37:49]  Dutch guillotine, who made it.
[01:37:50]  Yeah, it made it because it was like the previous method of beheading people was you hit their head with an axe, and that depends on how well you swung it.
[01:37:58]  Sometimes it takes a couple swings.
[01:37:59]  Sometimes it takes a couple swings, yeah.
[01:38:01]  And so the guillotine's whole point was that it was like, look, comes down evenly, heads off, dead immediately, or dead in six seconds, or whatever.
[01:38:07]  There's actually some people that refute that they die instantly because they hold up the head.
[01:38:11]  They hold up the head and it's still talking.
[01:38:13]  Right, right.
[01:38:14]  What the fuck is that, bro?
[01:38:15]  Are you still conscious after that?
[01:38:17]  Well, you know, you still got blood in your brain for the first.
[01:38:21]  Few seconds, yeah.
[01:38:23]  Why wouldn't your brain keep working just because it's been taken?
[01:38:26]  You know, maybe the shock of having your fucking spinal cord and you know, whole neck severed would be enough to like kill you, like the way some people, like when shot, are you know, dead before they hit the ground, just because the body it shocks the body so hard for that, yeah.
[01:38:45]  But who knows, you know, yeah, such a weird thing.
[01:38:50]  Like, let's try to find out more humane ways.
[01:38:51]  To fucking murder people.
[01:38:53]  Such a funny thing.
[01:38:54]  I'm sure I've fucking been telling this.
[01:38:56]  I told this story with Hamilton.
[01:38:57]  Me and Hamilton talked about the Mr. Death documentary.
[01:38:59]  Oh, right.
[01:38:59]  Yeah.
[01:38:59]  Well, his dad made that.
[01:39:00]  Yeah.
[01:39:01]  Right.
[01:39:01]  Fucking amazing documentary.
[01:39:02]  Incredible documentary.
[01:39:03]  Right.
[01:39:03]  Like Fred Luchter, right?
[01:39:06]  No, Lucher.
[01:39:07]  Lucher.
[01:39:08]  Oh, it's Lucher.
[01:39:08]  Fred Lucher just fucking figured out how to repair an electric chair and make it more humane so people didn't fucking get turned into vegetables.
[01:39:16]  Found himself a job.
[01:39:17]  Yeah.
[01:39:17]  Got a great job, right?
[01:39:18]  No.
[01:39:19]  Made gas chambers, then got fucking hoodwinked by Zundil and into testifying against how the.
[01:39:24]  The Jews weren't really killed by the gas chamber.
[01:39:27]  Was that during the David Irving trial?
[01:39:29]  Was he the character or the expert witness in that?
[01:39:32]  I thought it was Ernst Zundel.
[01:39:35]  That sounds right.
[01:39:35]  Okay.
[01:39:36]  I haven't seen it for a long time.
[01:39:38]  What year?
[01:39:38]  Can you find out what year the Ernst Zundel.
[01:39:40]  All those Holocaust deniers kind of sound the same after a little bit.
[01:39:44]  Yeah.
[01:39:45]  Yeah.
[01:39:46]  They're still around, bro.
[01:39:47]  They're still fucking ever.
[01:39:48]  It's like there's this new.
[01:39:49]  Oh, right on the internet?
[01:39:50]  There's a crazy resurgence of anti Semitism online and Christianity, interestingly enough.
[01:39:57]  Everyone's becoming a Christian right now.
[01:39:59]  Right.
[01:39:59]  I've seen.
[01:39:59]  Yeah.
[01:40:00]  Like all these podcasters are getting baptized and, you know, on.
[01:40:05]  What was that thing you were saying about figuring out your niche so that you can maximize your attention?
[01:40:09]  Do you think that's what it is?
[01:40:10]  Yeah.
[01:40:10]  Of course.
[01:40:10]  I had my friend told me that yesterday, too.
[01:40:12]  I was talking to my buddy Neil about this, and he was thinking, he was saying the same thing.
[01:40:15]  Yeah.
[01:40:16]  Getting baptized on camera is attention seeking behavior.
[01:40:20]  I'm sorry.
[01:40:22]  No.
[01:40:22]  Is this Ernst?
[01:40:23]  Okay.
[01:40:24]  Yeah.
[01:40:25]  Oh, 85.
[01:40:25]  Oh, 85.
[01:40:26]  Okay.
[01:40:26]  So I thought it was farther, longer.
[01:40:28]  It's like a Leuchterin or Luchter.
[01:40:33]  Yeah.
[01:40:34]  Whatever happened with that trial?
[01:40:36]  He lost, right?
[01:40:38]  Where is he now?
[01:40:39]  Zondo?
[01:40:40]  Does it say where he is?
[01:40:41]  I don't know.
[01:40:45]  Where's this fucking weirdo now?
[01:40:48]  He died.
[01:40:49]  Bad, wild bad.
[01:40:51]  In Germany?
[01:40:51]  Bad in Württemberg, Germany.
[01:40:53]  That's three bads.
[01:40:54]  That's how bad that guy was.
[01:40:59]  Yeah.
[01:40:59]  I don't know.
[01:41:00]  I don't know.
[01:41:01]  I guess.
[01:41:02]  There are a lot of Christians in the United States.
[01:41:04]  I guess there's more Christians here than anywhere.
[01:41:07]  On Earth?
[01:41:08]  Yeah, there's more Christians in the U.S.
[01:41:10]  This is a highly.
[01:41:11]  In South America?
[01:41:12]  Brazil would be number two, I think.
[01:41:14]  United States is number one.
[01:41:16]  Yeah, we're number one.
[01:41:17]  Brazil's number two.
[01:41:17]  I think Mexico is number three.
[01:41:20]  And then probably Russia, I was going to guess.
[01:41:21]  I was going to guess Russia also, yeah.
[01:41:23]  Yeah.
[01:41:23]  Huh.
[01:41:24]  But yeah, what a weird thing to do for views, become a Christian.
[01:41:31]  I don't know.
[01:41:32]  I just can't imagine that people would do that, would grift.
[01:41:37]  Well, right.
[01:41:39]  It overturns your expectations, doesn't it?
[01:41:42]  You'd never.
[01:41:43]  What wouldn't you.
[01:41:45]  What's the least likely thing you'd think of to become like an internet trend?
[01:41:49]  How about Catholicism?
[01:41:52]  Right.
[01:41:53]  And then here we are.
[01:41:55]  Yeah.
[01:41:57]  Or is it just like people copycatting other people?
[01:42:01]  Well, that too.
[01:42:01]  Yeah.
[01:42:01]  Then it becomes social contagion.
[01:42:03]  Yeah.
[01:42:03]  Right.
[01:42:04]  That becomes real.
[01:42:06]  And it's one of, you know, pick from the big four religions.
[01:42:09]  It's like pick the one you grew up with Muslim, Islam.
[01:42:14]  Yeah.

=== IQ Tests, Racism, and KKK (10:18) ===

[01:42:18]  I love how when you and Gavin were talking.
[01:42:20]  You're like, he was talking about how much he hates Islam.
[01:42:24]  And you're like, well, there's like a quarter of the world's population.
[01:42:27]  And you're like, a third.
[01:42:28]  A third of the world's population.
[01:42:29]  That's your enemy?
[01:42:30]  And he's like, a third of all humanity?
[01:42:32]  He's like, yeah, so.
[01:42:33]  And you're like, which Islam countries have you been to?
[01:42:35]  He's like, Paris.
[01:42:37]  Yeah.
[01:42:39]  Got me there.
[01:42:40]  If there's going to be racism, this is what I will say.
[01:42:42]  It's just bar arguing.
[01:42:44]  If there is, I'm not calling Gavin racist, okay?
[01:42:48]  But if there are racists, I would rather them be self aware, funny.
[01:42:53]  Racists and out and open.
[01:42:55]  I was gonna say, and out and open, right?
[01:42:56]  Yeah, that's like Malcolm X.
[01:42:58]  Yeah, I forget his uh term for it.
[01:43:00]  I'm gonna use is that is there a quote about that?
[01:43:03]  Yeah, I really wish I could remember the quote better because he was talking about like overt racism, yeah, in American whites versus um, kind of like white liberals in the 50s and 60s who he referred to as I want to say it was like wolves versus like a dog that may turn on you or something.
[01:43:23]  He's like, at least I know where I stand.
[01:43:25]  Yes.
[01:43:26]  With the, you know, the Wallace's and I forget the sheriff's name, but yeah.
[01:43:32]  Yeah.
[01:43:32]  Of the world.
[01:43:34]  Have you heard of, what is that gentleman's name?
[01:43:38]  Again, I've had him on the show.
[01:43:39]  He's the black dude who turned a bunch of KKK people out of the KKK.
[01:43:43]  Daryl Davis.
[01:43:45]  Oh, okay.
[01:43:45]  I've heard of him.
[01:43:45]  Yeah.
[01:43:46]  Yeah.
[01:43:46]  Okay.
[01:43:47]  He was basically, when he was a kid, he was like marching, doing some march and some parade or something with the Boy Scouts.
[01:43:52]  And then somebody, somebody like threw a fucking brick and hit him in the head.
[01:43:56]  Jesus.
[01:43:56]  Yeah.
[01:43:56]  Yeah.
[01:43:57]  And he was like, what the fuck was that?
[01:43:59]  And that was the first time he ever experienced racism.
[01:44:00]  His mom had to like sit him down.
[01:44:02]  That's a pretty bad one.
[01:44:03]  Yeah.
[01:44:03]  Yeah.
[01:44:03]  Not a great way to do it.
[01:44:04]  Usually it's someone who says, you know, yeah.
[01:44:08]  And his mom had to like explain to him and he didn't understand it.
[01:44:10]  He was like, what?
[01:44:11]  I don't understand.
[01:44:12]  And he spent like his whole college, he went to school overseas in like Europe or something like that.
[01:44:16]  What is that word again when you do an exchange?
[01:44:18]  Study abroad.
[01:44:19]  Oh.
[01:44:20]  No, there's like a foreign exchange.
[01:44:21]  Foreign exchange student.
[01:44:21]  Foreign exchange student.
[01:44:22]  Yeah.
[01:44:23]  Study abroad.
[01:44:23]  I'm not that retarded.
[01:44:25]  Oh, sorry.
[01:44:27]  Which broad we study in?
[01:44:28]  How dare you.
[01:44:29]  So, anyway, so he came back here when he was in his teens or whatever.
[01:44:32]  And then I forget, I think he was in Virginia, maybe.
[01:44:36]  I could be wrong.
[01:44:37]  Tennessee, Virginia, one of the two.
[01:44:39]  Anyways, he went to a bar and there ended up being like a bunch of KKK people there.
[01:44:44]  Right.
[01:44:44]  And he was like talking to them or whatever.
[01:44:45]  And then he met one guy or whatever.
[01:44:48]  And he was like befriending the guy.
[01:44:49]  They were talking about music and all this stuff.
[01:44:51]  And he said he really liked the guy.
[01:44:54]  And then he learned, like, you know, a couple hours of the conversation that this guy was in the KKK.
[01:44:58]  And he's like, whoa, what?
[01:45:00]  And so he basically, you know, he made his life's mission to like meet every KKK member he possibly could.
[01:45:05]  And he had to like trick a lot of them.
[01:45:07]  Like he was trying to meet these grand wizards and stuff like that.
[01:45:09]  So he was setting them up, saying, Oh, there's this journalist who wants to meet you or whatever.
[01:45:12]  And they wouldn't say he was black.
[01:45:14]  And they would fucking walk, they would film some of the.
[01:45:18]  Gotcha.
[01:45:18]  Some of it.
[01:45:19]  And they're like, What the fuck?
[01:45:20]  Whatever.
[01:45:20]  And they ended up sitting down and talking to him.
[01:45:22]  And he befriended a lot of them and got a lot of them to fucking lay down their wizard hats and, you know, denounce the KKK and all this crap.
[01:45:30]  And he was saying like the number one common denominator, I think.
[01:45:33]  If I remember correctly, between all of these people was that they had never left like the little town they were raised and born and raised in, never once like traveled outside of state lines.
[01:45:43]  Yeah, you know, I was ignorant of the world, right?
[01:45:47]  I mean, you know, I think.
[01:45:48]  Up in Georgia in the 90s, so it was like you hear it from people's parents, and it wasn't that you know, there wasn't everybody, a small percentage of the population.
[01:45:59]  Um, in but I never heard it from anyone who I figured out was smart later on, it always came from a like the middle of the middle of the pack or lower types of people, you know, on the IQ chain, if you want to, yeah, if you want to use that metric.
[01:46:20]  It's a good metric.
[01:46:22]  I've seen a resurgence of IQ talk a lot lately.
[01:46:26]  I feel like a lot of these people think it's like a Dungeons and Dragons stat.
[01:46:30]  They don't understand what IQ is supposed to be and how it's assessed or whatever, that it's just like a hard number that is intelligence.
[01:46:38]  It would be like that guy with the 118 IQ is five smarter than the guy with the 113.
[01:46:45]  So he should be in charge.
[01:46:47]  Yeah.
[01:46:48]  You guys were talking about this too.
[01:46:49]  Oh, was I?
[01:46:50]  Somebody complimented you about having a high IQ.
[01:46:53]  You're like, oh, that's nice.
[01:46:55]  And you were like bragging or something.
[01:46:56]  Yeah, you know what I mean.
[01:46:57]  Something like it's great.
[01:46:58]  Like you like the IQ argument when you're smart.
[01:47:00]  Oh, no.
[01:47:00]  I'm sorry.
[01:47:01]  I forgot that was in the cut.
[01:47:03]  I was talking to Gavin about that.
[01:47:04]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:47:04]  No, no, no, no.
[01:47:05]  I was talking about because he bases a lot of his arguments in IQ and stuff.
[01:47:10]  And I'm like, I think IQ is kind of bullshit.
[01:47:11]  I think it's like, I don't think it equates to intelligence.
[01:47:16]  Like, I don't think there's a hard number that you can put on that.
[01:47:19]  And there's a tremendous number of examples that you can pull from just to kind of demonstrate that.
[01:47:26]  And also, it was like when I was talking to them, this would have been in like the mid 2000s, you know, at the Vice office or whatever.
[01:47:32]  And it'd probably be in relation to that book, The Bell Curve.
[01:47:34]  And I'm like, when were all these, you know, when did he IQ test every race?
[01:47:39]  What, like the 70s?
[01:47:40]  Like, how hard of a, you know, kind of innate characteristic is this that it's going to last, that we can rely on it 40 years later with a completely different group of people than the sample or whatever?
[01:47:57]  And he said, he was like, well, His retort was, he was like, Well, one time I heard your first wife say that you had a high IQ.
[01:48:05]  And I'm like, That's your argument?
[01:48:07]  That my ex wife once said something?
[01:48:09]  It's like, All right.
[01:48:11]  But you didn't argue about it.
[01:48:12]  You agreed with her.
[01:48:15]  I don't even know if I was there.
[01:48:16]  I don't even know if that happened.
[01:48:18]  He didn't remember my ex wife's name.
[01:48:20]  Right, right, right.
[01:48:20]  He identified her by her breast, which I was like, I don't know.
[01:48:23]  It was a little.
[01:48:24]  So, what was the premise of that bell curve book?
[01:48:28]  Oh, just that I'd never.
[01:48:30]  Made it more than five pages into that.
[01:48:32]  Oh, um, it's famously that there's uh, if you look at uh, IQs by race, there the bell curve is a normal distribution and that the different races come out at different averages on it, right?
[01:48:51]  I think most within a standard deviation, maybe some within two, but it's it gets used, it helps prop up arguments that race is genetically determinative of people's intelligence, right?
[01:49:04]  And it's like, how many people's IQ tests is this fucking based on?
[01:49:08]  Yeah, sure.
[01:49:08]  Like, how are we defining race?
[01:49:10]  It's like.
[01:49:11]  Yeah, and the way he was explaining it, and I could be wrong, is that the argument was it was like recognizing patterns in IQ and different types of races, but like you have to look at each individual as like in a vacuum, right?
[01:49:21]  A separate individual.
[01:49:22]  And then he treats everybody as individuals.
[01:49:24]  Keep everybody as individuals, right?
[01:49:25]  You can't automatically like take, okay, you are Chinese, so you are automatically better at math.
[01:49:31]  Like, it's not.
[01:49:31]  Right, right.
[01:49:32]  Even though I could hear him saying that very easily.
[01:49:36]  It's tricky in that the term racism means both hates people of other races, but also there's, I guess, what we used to call scientific racism, too.
[01:49:44]  That is like race is a biological reality, and that a person's skin color is directly correlated to genetically determined traits which govern their intelligence and how they behave and that kind of shit.
[01:49:57]  And they overlap tremendously.
[01:49:59]  One can lead to the other, and vice versa, and so forth.
[01:50:02]  But yeah.
[01:50:04]  So the Chinese argument is interesting.
[01:50:06]  So are Chinese people.
[01:50:08]  Generally, more good at math because of their heritage, or is it because of their culture, the way their education system works?
[01:50:18]  It's going to be 99% of their fucking culture, in my mind.
[01:50:20]  Exactly.
[01:50:22]  Of course.
[01:50:22]  Because the whole language is different.
[01:50:23]  What is a Chinese person, somebody with pure Han heritage?
[01:50:26]  Where does that begin?
[01:50:28]  At what point does the Chinese race begin, and what delineates it?
[01:50:31]  If a Korean woman marries a Chinese guy and they have a kid, does he now have half?
[01:50:40]  The Chinese prowess in math, like it's just baloney, you know, it's discredited nonsense.
[01:50:47]  Yeah, I had this dude, everybody in the world behaves like I, you know, like they look, you know, it's just not a great uh, yeah, the funny doesn't have much scientific rigor to it, right?
[01:50:56]  Yeah, totally.
[01:50:58]  I had this dude from the Human Genome Project on here, and he was telling me that all every single human being on earth descended from something like 10,000 people, right?
[01:51:08]  There's the bottleneck, right?
[01:51:09]  Yeah, the big genetic bottleneck, it's insane, crazy.
[01:51:12]  We came from that many people, and they're like.
[01:51:14]  You know, it's not that fucking, we're not that fucking different.
[01:51:18]  We're pretty much the same.
[01:51:19]  And another funny thing is, even so, like, there's this whole generational war between Israel and Palestine, right?
[01:51:27]  Yeah.
[01:51:27]  Also, they have, they're literally genetically identical.
[01:51:32]  Oh, it's, I mean, it's funnier than that.
[01:51:34]  People talk about Palestinian anti Semitism, and it's like, there are Semitic people too, you know?
[01:51:38]  Yeah.
[01:51:38]  It's like, I know, I understand that we're dressing up the word Jew hate with anti Semitism, but it's like, can we, can we at least be a little more accurate?
[01:51:46]  Yeah.
[01:51:46]  Right.
[01:51:46]  No, it is the same fucking thing.
[01:51:47]  They have the same exact heritage.
[01:51:49]  They come from the Canaanites, both of them.
[01:51:51]  Right.
[01:51:51]  It's just fucking culture shit.
[01:51:54]  The idea that groups, back when I was taking high fluting critical theory graduate classes in college, we talk about essentialism and essentialist narratives.
[01:52:07]  And it's the idea that these, you know, the traits, specifically the traits you can see and the traits that you can organize people into groups with, are necessarily innate.
[01:52:16]  And that a Palestinian person must behave Palestinianly because of their Palestinianness, you know, is like 100% concocted horseshit, right?
[01:52:27]  Yeah, it's different.
[01:52:31]  It's like the borders of a country.
[01:52:34]  It's like some guy made these, right?

=== Project Mockingbird and CIA Control (15:43) ===

[01:52:36]  Yeah.
[01:52:36]  These, I guess it's become some sort of dog whistle or not to be like, this is a social construct, which doesn't mean it doesn't have validity or is not important or useful or whatever.
[01:52:47]  It's like, but this is 100% socially constructed.
[01:52:50]  Shit that could change that, you know, should be examined.
[01:52:55]  And this is also part of the thing we were talking about with like the social contagion and how like the media fuels all this stuff, right?
[01:53:00]  Because like 99.999% of people who have an opinion on things like Israel and Palestine or Iran don't have a fucking clue about what it's like there or like what the people are like there, nor have they met people there.
[01:53:16]  And it's like fucking, you know, just the television.
[01:53:21]  But they've all got an opinion.
[01:53:22]  Yeah.
[01:53:22]  They've all got a take.
[01:53:23]  They've all got a take, which is, you know, they've stolen from somebody else who that person stole it from somebody else.
[01:53:29]  Of course.
[01:53:29]  And, you know, it's like the internet is a font of received wisdom, if nothing.
[01:53:33]  Nothing is fucking real anymore.
[01:53:34]  Right.
[01:53:35]  We're in post reality.
[01:53:37]  But how real was it before?
[01:53:39]  And why was it real before, right?
[01:53:40]  This is my thing.
[01:53:42]  I've got a girlfriend who's kind of freaked out about the fact that you can no longer read the news and trust sources and things of this nature.
[01:53:49]  I'm like, well, why did you trust them to begin with?
[01:53:51]  How much does this actually change your life, right?
[01:53:54]  And how much of this is seeing the lay of the land that previously felt firm and stable from a new vantage point, right?
[01:54:05]  We all know now to take.
[01:54:07]  What the New York Times writers write with a grain of salt because they've fucked up things, right?
[01:54:11]  Yeah.
[01:54:12]  And, you know, there's a slant to almost everything they write that can be, you know, delineated into a discrete agenda.
[01:54:21]  We're more aware of the bullshit now.
[01:54:23]  But what, you know, at what point did this start?
[01:54:26]  Why was it, you know, like, how do you not think that that was the case with specifically the New York Times in like the 60s and 70s?
[01:54:34]  And what is then the basis for your understanding of history?
[01:54:37]  Right, right.
[01:54:38]  Project Mockingbird.
[01:54:40]  Wait, which one's that?
[01:54:41]  I think that was during Kennedy where he gave.
[01:54:46]  I was thinking of Project Mongoose.
[01:54:48]  Type in Project Mockingbird.
[01:54:49]  I don't want to fuck this up.
[01:54:50]  But basically, what it was, it was like allowing the top four or five news publications.
[01:54:57]  Oh, Henry Lutz.
[01:54:58]  The CIA.
[01:54:59]  So Project Mockingbird refers to the two distinct but related activities by the CIA.
[01:55:04]  One was a telephone intercept program, officially named Project Mockingbird, targeting two journalists for publishing classified information.
[01:55:11]  There was Operation Mockingbird.
[01:55:12]  Maybe it was Operation Mockingbird.
[01:55:16]  Much broader program.
[01:55:26]  There's two.
[01:55:29]  One's an alleged program.
[01:55:34]  Go up, go up, go up, go up, up, Effective, he's close friends with the Dulles brothers, an effective mouthpiece for whatever you know, whatever ideas they want to put out into the public discourse.
[01:55:56]  You know, that's the nature of the beast, yeah, right?
[01:56:01]  Yep, everything for the all-minute project name, though, right?
[01:56:05]  Because it's also like, this is it's like, frankly, this is how journalism, power, and society work.
[01:56:10]  There's a few people, and no matter their you know, specific duties, they they all you know.
[01:56:17]  Kind of collaborate with each other socialize, like.
[01:56:21]  How do you think journal you know?
[01:56:22]  How do you think journalists get get the information that they get?
[01:56:25]  It's by being at dinner parties, it's by knowing having a guy that you can call regularly, um in like, what kind of guy you're talking about?
[01:56:34]  Sources right right, what is a source?
[01:56:36]  Right right, you know.
[01:56:39]  And how does, like I wonder how it works today, like in publications like the NEW YORK Times or these other big magazines.
[01:56:45]  Right like with with how, like Did they know they're being influenced by the government or intelligence agencies, or does that just kind of like happen without them knowing about it and it kind of like gets massaged in or like sources get planted?
[01:56:59]  I have a friend who, because it's interesting, I have a friend who was publishing a piece on how to see this was like two years ago.
[01:57:05]  He was working on this piece where, uh, with like 25 sources where who were all former intelligence community people in the US, yeah, and it was basically exposing how the CIA was using a proxy intelligence service to conduct sabotage operations inside of Russia, like blowing up munitions depots and train tracks and things like this.
[01:57:29]  And he worked on wet works.
[01:57:30]  He worked on wet works.
[01:57:32]  No.
[01:57:33]  He worked on the story for like over a year with 25 different sources or whatever, with an editor at, I don't know, he didn't tell me exactly, he didn't want to give me the exact name of the publication, but it was like one of the top three.
[01:57:42]  Right.
[01:57:43]  And it came time to publish it around December.
[01:57:47]  And he had like one final call before they pressed the button to launch the story, right?
[01:57:51]  Right.
[01:57:51]  And the editor of the piece that he was working with was like, okay, we got to have one more call with the deputy director of the CIA.
[01:57:57]  He's like, what?
[01:57:58]  Here it comes.
[01:57:59]  Yeah.
[01:57:59]  So like they're on the phone and they're going through it or whatever.
[01:58:03]  And he goes, I categorically deny all of this.
[01:58:06]  This is untrue.
[01:58:08]  And even if it was true, this would put people's lives at risk.
[01:58:14]  Right.
[01:58:15]  Right.
[01:58:15]  So it's like, we're not going to, he's like, I completely deny this, whatever, this is false, blah, blah, blah.
[01:58:18]  And he was like, okay, fine.
[01:58:20]  We'll put a blurb at the end of the article saying the deputy director categorically denies any of this is real.
[01:58:25]  Right.
[01:58:25]  And then so he hangs up and he's like, cool, let's go.
[01:58:28]  Let's go ahead and launch it.
[01:58:29]  I'll write this up.
[01:58:30]  We'll add it to the story and we'll be done.
[01:58:32]  And the editor goes, no, we have an off the record agreement with the CIA.
[01:58:38]  So, if they deny anything, we will not publish it.
[01:58:41]  Click.
[01:58:42]  Right.
[01:58:42]  That's the end of that.
[01:58:43]  Right.
[01:58:44]  So, just one anecdote.
[01:58:45]  If that's happening, you know, with people wasting fucking a year of their life on a story and such like that can happen, I wonder how much more is going on.
[01:58:54]  Who knows?
[01:58:55]  We will never know.
[01:58:55]  We don't.
[01:58:56]  We will never fucking know.
[01:58:58]  But yeah, Project Mockingbird, 1963.
[01:59:04]  Kennedy.
[01:59:06]  It's a weird time we're living in with the media, bro, and all these individual.
[01:59:11]  Content creators and put these like, it's funny too, there's like only a certain amount of platforms that exist to publish all this stuff, right?
[01:59:18]  Well, that's the weird part, right?
[01:59:19]  Like, wasn't the dream of the internet that everybody can just publish their own thing and make their own website?
[01:59:24]  Yeah.
[01:59:25]  You know, that was the best thing.
[01:59:26]  How did we end up with like four websites consolidated?
[01:59:28]  This is called social media, right?
[01:59:30]  Right, right, right.
[01:59:31]  Well, it's media consolidation, which I grew up in the middle of, you know, in the 90s, right?
[01:59:34]  Right, right.
[01:59:35]  But it's interesting to see it on the, you know, the great democratizing medium of the internet, you know?
[01:59:41]  And then Google too.
[01:59:42]  I'm familiar with the history of Google and how it was incubated by the CIA and funded with DARPA money and shit.
[01:59:49]  Yeah, the whole thing.
[01:59:50]  Everything is.
[01:59:50]  I love when fucking tech bros talk about the self made men of Silicon Valley.
[01:59:55]  It's like, you guys were fucking subsidized by Sergey Britton.
[01:59:59]  Sergey Britton was getting visited by the NSA, CIA, DARPA.
[02:00:02]  The entirety of Silicon Valley's existence.
[02:00:06]  Yeah.
[02:00:08]  Which is a little unsettling, right?
[02:00:11]  Oh, sure.
[02:00:12]  The whole.
[02:00:14]  Whole thing's unsettling.
[02:00:17]  You know, so you have Google and YouTube, which are basically one, number one and two websites on the earth, face of the earth.
[02:00:23]  What was the recent one that, oh, OpenAI just, what did they do?
[02:00:30]  Like just this morning, it was an announcement.
[02:00:32]  So maybe they did it a while ago.
[02:00:34]  They either gave, they're in partnership either directly with the Defense Department or Palantir.
[02:00:42]  Oh my God.
[02:00:42]  Don't take my word on that.
[02:00:43]  Yeah.
[02:00:44]  One of those things such that everybody was like, great.
[02:00:46]  You know, it's like, well, this is the way.
[02:00:49]  This is the way all this shit has worked for the last 30 years.
[02:00:51]  Why should it change now?
[02:00:54]  Yeah, I don't know if shit's just getting worse or I'm paying more attention.
[02:00:57]  Well, it could be both.
[02:00:59]  OpenAI has secured a $200 million contract with the US Department.
[02:01:02]  It is the Defense Department.
[02:01:02]  Okay.
[02:01:02]  To develop a prototype AI system for national security applications.
[02:01:05]  Okay.
[02:01:05]  Well, that's not as bad as the contract Palantir got two weeks ago for $800 million from the Pentagon.
[02:01:10]  It's not as much.
[02:01:11]  Yeah.
[02:01:11]  Can you Google Palantir's recent Palantir, new Palantir defense contract?
[02:01:20]  Did you see, what's his name, Alex Karp?
[02:01:23]  Did you see the video of him fantasizing about getting drones to spray fentanyl laced urine on a CIA analyst who had fucked him over?
[02:01:33]  This is a real video?
[02:01:35]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:01:35]  It's him.
[02:01:36]  He's doing some sort of QA on a stage with, like, I don't know what the fucking context of it was, but they were asking him about, like, think about his, like, dreams or his, like, fantasies for what they can do with technology or something like that.
[02:01:48]  And he talked about, he mentions being like, oh, you want my, like, good dreams or, like, my dark dreams or whatever.
[02:01:54]  And they're like, well, let's start with the dark dreams.
[02:01:57]  And he's like, I wish.
[02:01:58]  And you see him getting like his voice starts to crack.
[02:02:00]  He's like, actually angry.
[02:02:03]  And he's like, I wish I could have a fleet of drones spray fentanyl laced urine on every analyst who's fucked me over.
[02:02:12]  And it's like, your fantasy is to frame intelligence agents for drug use.
[02:02:19]  Like, you're a man in his 50s, or I believe, and like the head of one of the most like, Not only successful, but powerful companies on earth.
[02:02:29]  Isn't it also interesting that Peter Thiel's one of the owners of Palantir, who's been one of the biggest Trump supporters in history, and Alex Karp is the CEO of Palantir, who just donated like millions of dollars to Kamala Harris for her campaign?
[02:02:43]  Oh, did he?
[02:02:43]  Yeah.
[02:02:44]  He even admitted it in his New York Times article.
[02:02:46]  There you go.
[02:02:47]  It's such a weird thing, bro.
[02:02:48]  It's like this uniparty thing behind our projection of right and left is like all the billionaires who doesn't matter to them because they're just going to still get whatever they're going to control everything.
[02:02:59]  They're going to co opt whatever side.
[02:03:02]  So the recent Palantir.
[02:03:03]  Have you ever read Harold Innes?
[02:03:09]  They're a technology monopoly.
[02:03:10]  Anytime a new technology takes roots, the people in control of it eventually consolidate and often conspire into a new effective political elite.
[02:03:21]  It happened with radio and television.
[02:03:24]  You could argue it happened with the printing press back in the late 15th century.
[02:03:29]  And we're watching it happen now.
[02:03:30]  Do you ever read Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman?
[02:03:34]  I've read a little bit of Marshall McLuhan.
[02:03:35]  Okay.
[02:03:36]  Do you know Neil Postman?
[02:03:37]  He had a protege who wrote a little less optimistically, kind of about very much around similar things.
[02:03:43]  I've actually, I mentioned this because I've got his book in the other room.
[02:03:47]  I just brought it on the plane.
[02:03:49]  His most famous book is called Amusing Ourselves to Death.
[02:03:51]  Oh, yes, I have heard of it.
[02:03:52]  You've seen that?
[02:03:53]  Yeah, the famous cover.
[02:03:55]  And it's good.
[02:03:55]  And it's sort of like, you know, whereas Marshall McLuhan was like those who fear like television for what.
[02:04:02]  What is on it right now, miss the fact that it's the format of the medium that is that will impart the great cultural changes.
[02:04:09]  That's the whole idea with you know, the medium is the message, right?
[02:04:13]  That it's like you can't cram Shakespeare onto television, television will be its own thing, it'll have its own effect.
[02:04:20]  Um, it'll be disruptive and it'll be good and bad, and we have to, you know, it's like just wait and adjust.
[02:04:27]  And Neil Postman comes along 20 years later and he's like, you know, it wouldn't hurt if we put some Shakespeare or something on it.
[02:04:32]  It's like we don't just because you know.
[02:04:36]  The content is less important than the format of the medium.
[02:04:39]  Doesn't mean we have to put literal garbage on it, you know, like watch TV in America in the 80s.
[02:04:44]  And it's like, we could do a little bit better than turning all news into entertainment and et cetera and so forth.
[02:04:49]  Anyway, you wrote a book called Technopoly in the early 90s, which is what I'm reading right now.
[02:04:56]  And it's predictive and it's amazing because it's so early.
[02:04:59]  He doesn't even like the internet hasn't been named yet.
[02:05:02]  So what he's referring to is he's like computer information systems.
[02:05:06]  He's like, and computers will be recapitulating some of the cultural effects and political effects of the printing press.
[02:05:13]  He's like, but this is different because whereas the printing press is a technology that you could, if you taught someone how to make a printing press, they could go to their country or their little town or whatever and set up their new printing press.
[02:05:25]  It's like, we haven't had an experience before, except arguably like television, radio, or something like that, where the means of the information revolution is controlled by companies.
[02:05:38]  You can't build your own computer.
[02:05:40]  Like, you can't build your own silicon transistors.
[02:05:43]  That this is, this changes the lay of the land.
[02:05:47]  That people control, you know, people control every single element, specific people, you know, specific people at specific companies.
[02:05:59]  Yeah.
[02:05:59]  The idea of content being less important than the medium is interesting.
[02:06:06]  You know, like, and how does that evolve?
[02:06:10]  Right.
[02:06:11]  Like, how, like, just look how it's evolved so far.
[02:06:13]  Well, It's, I still think back with a sad sort of wistfulness about fighting the war against the word content because that was like mid 2000s.
[02:06:24]  I'm trying to remember the first time I heard it, but it was literally something that like marketing and advertising guys would say as a placeholder for something they were selling, right?
[02:06:33]  You know, well, we're going to make like a tip in, which would be like a little thing that goes inside the magazine, you know, for camel cigarettes or content is like commoditizing it.
[02:06:44]  And it will, content is like it, I mean, Content makes it content.
[02:06:48]  He's like, and then the content, which literally means whatever the fuck we put in here.
[02:06:52]  Exactly.
[02:06:53]  You know, whoever's art or writing.
[02:06:56]  Exactly.
[02:06:56]  But it's all interchangeable.
[02:06:58]  It really doesn't matter.
[02:06:58]  It doesn't matter.
[02:06:59]  It's just, you know, just lure him, Ipsum this shit up right now.
[02:07:02]  And to have that become the actual art.
[02:07:04]  It's a vehicle.
[02:07:05]  All it means is it's taking art and turning it into a vehicle for revenue.
[02:07:08]  Sausage filling, right?
[02:07:09]  Yes.
[02:07:10]  It's what goes in the casing.
[02:07:11]  The casing is what you sell, but the content's what's in it.
[02:07:14]  It's crazy to me.
[02:07:16]  And this is, you know, a long lost battle.
[02:07:18]  To hear kids refer to that as like, my goal in life is to be a content creator.
[02:07:22]  And it's just like brutal.
[02:07:23]  Or just like going through your life and experiencing like an interesting moment and be like, whoa, hold on, this is content.
[02:07:30]  Grist for the mill.
[02:07:31]  Yeah.
[02:07:33]  We are all now millers of experience.
[02:07:35]  And people will like, you know, this is real.
[02:07:38]  People will choose what they're going to do with their life or with their day based on what kind of content they can get or what kind of video they can get.
[02:07:47]  Like, what are we going to do today, Timmy?
[02:07:49]  Oh, I don't know.
[02:07:49]  Let's fucking go to the lake and fucking see if we can catch a shark.
[02:07:53]  If it gets him out of the house, I'm happy.
[02:07:55]  Yeah.
[02:07:55]  You know?
[02:07:55]  Yeah.
[02:07:56]  It's just weird how, like, it's reversed.
[02:07:59]  Yeah.
[02:08:00]  It's reversed.
[02:08:00]  Now you're going to design your day based around how much content you can get.
[02:08:06]  Well, it's like flipping the news, right?
[02:08:08]  From an event happens and you see it.
[02:08:10]  And so you write about it to communicate that event to other people too.
[02:08:13]  You go and seek out the event and sometimes cause it such that it is news.
[02:08:18]  Right, right.

=== Limp Biscuit and Social Contagion (07:18) ===

[02:08:19]  Yeah.
[02:08:19]  It's like Eamon Hamilton was telling a story about this how, like, some company tried to get him to.
[02:08:23]  Conduct an interview and they wanted to reverse engineer the interview.
[02:08:27]  Oh, oh, that's very common.
[02:08:28]  Yeah.
[02:08:28]  And he was talking about National Geographic and how that was kind of the way they did their, the way they would pre produce a documentary, right?
[02:08:39]  Instead of just being like, oh, this seems like, this seems like an interesting person, go film him.
[02:08:43]  They would want to know exactly, exactly what was going to be said there, exactly how it was going to be set up and exactly how it would end.
[02:08:51]  And we'd sometimes get folks like that at, in the early days in the video stuff, they would come in sometimes from like, Commercial video, like making ads or whatever.
[02:09:00]  And then sometimes from like places that are like Nat Geo, where it's like not quite the news, but like mainstream media, whatever, who would want to know how a story ended, you know, while writing the pitch, right?
[02:09:13]  In order to get the green light to get out the door.
[02:09:14]  And you're like, well, you don't realize, like, if you haven't told this, you know, if you haven't seen and reported the story, how do you know how it's going to end?
[02:09:20]  Right.
[02:09:22]  And I think for the most part in those like at places like that, Hamilton wouldn't dance with them.
[02:09:27]  But like the way it is is that you just make up some bullshit and you get out the door.
[02:09:31]  And then if the story changes, maybe you get some.
[02:09:34]  Like, guy with a dick up his ass who's like, Oh, you said it was going to end this way.
[02:09:38]  I don't, you know, you have to go back and make it end this way or whatever.
[02:09:41]  Right.
[02:09:42]  But it is a crummy way to do anything that's supposed to be reporting, right?
[02:09:47]  Right.
[02:09:48]  Right.
[02:09:48]  To know your story.
[02:09:50]  It's like Google journalism, too, where it's like, it's boring.
[02:09:53]  Like, why would you want to go tell a story that you already know the ending of?
[02:09:57]  Like, why don't you just sit at your desk and chat it out?
[02:09:59]  Why don't you just get Chat GPT and the Defense Department to spit out fucking copy for you for your content, right?
[02:10:06]  Yeah.
[02:10:07]  Like, yeah.
[02:10:08]  Why bother?
[02:10:08]  That generation is fucking fading into the dark of people that are, you know, like you're able to express that sentiment because you've, you can't, you were raised in the 90s going, you know, working at BICE doing this stuff.
[02:10:20]  Yeah, but my generation sucked too.
[02:10:22]  We were one magazine out of hundreds of thousands, right?
[02:10:25]  And there were probably a couple other good ones, but we were, you know, the shining stars of that.
[02:10:31]  Yeah.
[02:10:31]  It's like when people are nostalgic for like, you know, the YAAS and stuff.
[02:10:34]  And I'm like, you know, most people were listening to the Black Eyed Peas back then.
[02:10:37]  Yeah.
[02:10:39]  It's we always edit the yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:10:42]  I forgot about the yeah, yeah, yes.
[02:10:44]  Still going strong.
[02:10:46]  You know, it's funny.
[02:10:46]  I was listening to, uh, you ever had, has it ever happened to you where like you randomly hear a song that you've like used to listen to when you were really, really young and uh, you hear it now?
[02:10:56]  Like for me, it would be like 25 years later and it's like, fuck, I'm really embarrassed to be listening to this, but I'm gonna play it on repeat.
[02:11:04]  I was gonna say, without the embarrassment, I do that every day.
[02:11:07]  Yeah, no, no, no, no, that happened to me recently.
[02:11:09]  I love it.
[02:11:10]  Little time capsules.
[02:11:11]  Yeah.
[02:11:11]  I went to a Metallica concert the other day and Limp Biscuit opened it for me.
[02:11:16]  And I was like, so I was like, okay, whatever.
[02:11:18]  I would never go to a Limp Biscuit concert.
[02:11:19]  I would never admit to wanting to go to a Limp Biscuit concert.
[02:11:22]  But I got there and I was like in the middle of the snake pit thing.
[02:11:25]  Yeah.
[02:11:25]  And they fucking started playing Nookie.
[02:11:27]  And I was like, fuck, this is awesome.
[02:11:28]  Jacked you up.
[02:11:29]  This is sweet.
[02:11:29]  And I've been listening to it on Spotify in my truck for the last week.
[02:11:33]  That's how they get you.
[02:11:36]  I'm kind of ashamed to admit.
[02:11:37]  Well, I. That's fine.
[02:11:38]  That is a generation gap, though.
[02:11:39]  It is a generation gap.
[02:11:40]  I used to get driven to school by, when I was like 15, by a A juggalo, a juggalette girl who's like a grade up, who was really into insane clown posse.
[02:11:48]  And we'd have to listen to insane clown posse like every fucking day in the car.
[02:11:52]  And it's like, I've grown to, I went to the gathering of the juggalos.
[02:11:54]  I've grown to really love insane clown posse.
[02:11:56]  But at the time, you know, I was a little teenage sophisticated.
[02:11:59]  And I was like, come on, man, bugs on my nuts again.
[02:12:02]  Like, we really have to listen to this every fucking day at this volume, you know, in the back of your Civic.
[02:12:08]  And one day she was excited.
[02:12:11]  She was like, hey, she's like, I just found this new band, they're punk.
[02:12:14]  Like, I'm really excited about them.
[02:12:16]  And she's like, and I think, I think you like, I think you'll like them a little more than like ICP or whatever.
[02:12:21]  I'm like, cool.
[02:12:22]  I like, I was like, I like punk stuff.
[02:12:23]  Yeah, absolutely.
[02:12:25]  And it was Limp Biscuit doing faith, George Michael's faith.
[02:12:30]  And I was like, I did not think there was something in this world that could be worse than Bugs on My Nuts or Chicken Hunter, but here it fucking is.
[02:12:41]  Yeah.
[02:12:42]  Yeah.
[02:12:43]  It's pretty bad.
[02:12:44]  It's pretty bad, but it's so bad it's good.
[02:12:46]  You know, and listen, if you're a Limp Bizkit listener out there, there's nothing wrong with listening to Limp Bizkit.
[02:12:50]  You shouldn't be ashamed of it.
[02:12:51]  Oh, no, fart proudly.
[02:12:54]  Isn't that what Benjamin Franklin said?
[02:12:55]  Did he say that?
[02:12:56]  Well, I'm paraphrasing it slightly.
[02:12:58]  That's how it's known.
[02:12:59]  He wrote an essay about that.
[02:13:00]  Yeah.
[02:13:01]  Which is, you just like fly your flag, man.
[02:13:03]  Like, yeah, own it.
[02:13:05]  I listen to embarrassing shit too.
[02:13:07]  We were talking about listening to Screwdriver earlier.
[02:13:09]  Who cares what you listen to?
[02:13:10]  Exactly.
[02:13:11]  If it makes you happy, how does the rest of that Sheryl Crow line go?
[02:13:16]  It's not that bad.
[02:13:17]  It's something that bad.
[02:13:18]  I'm getting the, it's scanning.
[02:13:19]  How does that go?
[02:13:21]  It might not be that bad.
[02:13:22]  Nah, I can't.
[02:13:28]  It's not that bad.
[02:13:30]  It can't be that bad.
[02:13:31]  It can't be that bad.
[02:13:32]  And then it becomes, why are you so sad?
[02:13:33]  Yeah.
[02:13:34]  Why the hell?
[02:13:35]  If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?
[02:13:37]  Right.
[02:13:38]  Yeah.
[02:13:38]  Right.
[02:13:40]  Metallic.
[02:13:40]  I'm really, I noticed, I realized that I'm like, I regret not going to more concerts in my youth.
[02:13:47]  Oh.
[02:13:48]  I don't know if you have that same regret, but like it's.
[02:13:51]  They went to a bunch.
[02:13:52]  You went to a bunch.
[02:13:53]  I missed.
[02:13:53]  You ever heard the band Orchid?
[02:13:55]  No.
[02:13:56]  They were like, I feel bad calling them.
[02:13:58]  They were a hardcore band, right?
[02:13:59]  I guess you could call them Screamo, right?
[02:14:02]  I tried to see them at least twice in high school, and something happened each time I went to go see them.
[02:14:07]  Like my car broke down one of the times.
[02:14:09]  I think I got lost one of the times, which is a funny thing you even consider in this day and age.
[02:14:14]  Yeah.
[02:14:14]  But you can, you could certainly do it in Atlanta in the 90s.
[02:14:18]  And then I met the singer from Orchid.
[02:14:19]  He actually worked like with Vice for a little while or whatever.
[02:14:23]  He was in other bands like Panthers and what was his third band?
[02:14:27]  It was even better.
[02:14:27]  Violent Bullshit was his band.
[02:14:29]  His name's Jason Green.
[02:14:31]  And he was like, and he would hang out.
[02:14:34]  Like, I was friends with a bunch of people.
[02:14:35]  I got to know him.
[02:14:36]  He'd be at the bar, be very friendly.
[02:14:39]  And he was like, kind of like, you know, a year or two older, but it was like a teenage icon to me.
[02:14:44]  And I missed him again.
[02:14:46]  He was in Chicago and I got sick.
[02:14:49]  And so that's the one thing I regret.
[02:14:53]  Yeah.
[02:14:53]  And that just happened last year.
[02:14:55]  Oh, really?
[02:14:55]  Right.
[02:14:56]  But otherwise, I saw plenty of concerts.
[02:14:57]  I'm pretty good.
[02:14:59]  Here's the DOD thing with Palantir.
[02:15:01]  So, what was it?
[02:15:02]  How much was it?
[02:15:02]  800 million.
[02:15:06]  I see 1.3 billion.
[02:15:07]  Well, it was a.
[02:15:08]  The 1.3 billion was like a three year deal, right?
[02:15:11]  Gotcha.
[02:15:12]  So, for Maven.
[02:15:13]  Their most recent installment, which was like two weeks ago, was 800 million.
[02:15:17]  Yeah.
[02:15:19]  So it goes.
[02:15:22]  Yeah.
[02:15:22]  I had this lady in here the other day.
[02:15:24]  What does Maven do?
[02:15:25]  Maven is one of their new products.
[02:15:28]  I don't know what exactly to scroll down.
[02:15:30]  It accelerates the targeting cycle and reduces civilian casualties, according to AI Invest.

=== Elon Musk, Palantir, and AI (03:17) ===

[02:15:38]  So it can scan people's faces and figure out if it's terrorist.
[02:15:40]  Sounds like facial scanning crap.
[02:15:41]  Yeah.
[02:15:42]  Yeah.
[02:15:42]  I'll see.
[02:15:44]  Sounds like nothing could go wrong there.
[02:15:47]  Exactly.
[02:15:48]  There's this lady I had in the other day who was a math wizard who was a part of the department of HUD during the Bush years.
[02:15:57]  Yeah.
[02:15:58]  And she was talking about Doge, like Elon's Doge thing.
[02:16:02]  It's not pronounced doggy.
[02:16:03]  Oh, I thought it was pronounced Doge.
[02:16:05]  I thought the whole deal was that was how the dog spells it, right?
[02:16:10]  Yeah.
[02:16:11]  Right?
[02:16:11]  I like that.
[02:16:12]  That's good.
[02:16:13]  I'm going to start calling it doggy.
[02:16:14]  So I'm going to steal that.
[02:16:17]  Doggy.
[02:16:18]  So she was basically talking about how, you know, doggy is all about creating the, you know, figuring out all this waste, fraud, and abuse or whatever.
[02:16:28]  And Elon's going for the IRS, the Social Security, HHS, Treasury, all this stuff and trying to weed out all these things and all these people in these departments.
[02:16:38]  And she was making the case.
[02:16:42]  She's like, I remember during the Bush years, in fact, it was the day before 9 11 when Donald Rumsfeld came out and said, there's $2.5 trillion missing from the Pentagon.
[02:16:54]  And it was the part of the Pentagon that got hit by the plane.
[02:16:58]  Oh, sorry.
[02:16:59]  It was, wasn't it?
[02:17:00]  You're right.
[02:17:02]  It may or may not have been.
[02:17:03]  That's the word on the street.
[02:17:04]  Sorry, right.
[02:17:05]  Anyways, so now that missing money that is still unaccounted for from the Pentagon has ballooned to like somewhere in the realms of like 20 something trillion.
[02:17:14]  Sure.
[02:17:15]  From the DOD and the Pentagon.
[02:17:17]  So she's like, if I'm Elon and I'm trying to find missing money, I'm going to look at the $21 trillion black hole in the Pentagon, not trying to like waste time with.
[02:17:27]  Middle managers, a bunch of middle managers at the IRS, HHS, and social security.
[02:17:34]  And like, I was like, Whoa!
[02:17:36]  And she's like, Okay, if you look at that, she goes, And this was her theory.
[02:17:39]  This is all conjecture, obviously, but this was an interesting fucking story.
[02:17:43]  She was saying that if I wanted to create a digital social credit system that was controlled with money, right?
[02:17:55]  And HHS and all this stuff, she goes, I would go to get all the data from the IRS.
[02:18:01]  The Treasury, HHS, and Social Security.
[02:18:05]  And I would integrate it with AI to have like a complete, comprehensive 360 degree database of every citizen in America.
[02:18:16]  Right.
[02:18:17]  And she goes, That's exactly what Elon did.
[02:18:19]  Right.
[02:18:19]  She literally, he literally was working with Palantir to integrate all the, and XAI to integrate all that data into these AIs.
[02:18:29]  Yeah.
[02:18:31]  And they're trying to do this thing then.
[02:18:32]  Apparently, a part of this big, beautiful bill is the stablecoin stuff.
[02:18:36]  So she's saying, like, they want to use stable coin.
[02:18:37]  I don't remember exactly how she worked in the stable coin angle.
[02:18:40]  Right.
[02:18:40]  But, like, somehow stable coins will be able to make this whole thing work with creating, you know, basically, like, you know, Elon said before that he's really, he admires China's WeChat thing.

=== Underwear, Couples, and 1970s Vibes (06:56) ===

[02:18:55]  Right.
[02:18:55]  Where China has this thing where, like, finance and social media and everything is condensed into one app, right?
[02:19:02]  Essentially, it's called WeChat.
[02:19:03]  And he thinks that that's cool.
[02:19:04]  And he wanted to model X off of it.
[02:19:06]  So she's like, if I wanted to do that, she's like, that's exactly what the fuck I want.
[02:19:10]  Well, he wants to make the everything app, right?
[02:19:12]  Yeah, he wants to make the everything app.
[02:19:13]  So, are we turning into China?
[02:19:19]  There are worse places to turn into.
[02:19:21]  I kind of like China, frankly.
[02:19:22]  Really?
[02:19:22]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:19:24]  When's the last time you were there?
[02:19:25]  It's been a bit.
[02:19:28]  2014, 2015, maybe.
[02:19:30]  Okay.
[02:19:31]  Or so.
[02:19:32]  But growing up, I was really, you know, we didn't have the term weeaboo yet.
[02:19:38]  But me and my friends, we loved like Akira and we called it Japanimation back then, like anime, right?
[02:19:44]  Like, I remember when Hollywood Video changed the shelf from Japanimation to anime.
[02:19:51]  And we were like, Anime?
[02:19:52]  What the fuck is this?
[02:19:53]  Like, that's how they say it in Japan, right?
[02:19:56]  Anyway, so I always loved Japan growing up, right?
[02:19:58]  And it didn't mean I hated China, but it was like my preference would have been, oh, if I can go anywhere in the world, I would love to go to Japan.
[02:20:03]  Yes.
[02:20:04]  And I ended up pitching and then getting roped into some stories in China.
[02:20:09]  Like, which I was equally excited to do, but I just never thought China would be my thing.
[02:20:14]  And then I went there and I was like, this place rules.
[02:20:17]  This feels like what I assume 1970s America felt like.
[02:20:22]  What?
[02:20:22]  These people are awesome.
[02:20:23]  This place is great.
[02:20:25]  How so?
[02:20:29]  Well, I mean, it's, you know, speaking in crass generalizations, it's a bunch of second generation farmers who were just yanked into modernity.
[02:20:41]  Like 30 years ago, maybe 40 years ago at this point, or whatever.
[02:20:45]  Like, people spit in the streets constantly.
[02:20:48]  You see comb overs that you can't believe.
[02:20:51]  No one expects to be filmed or appear on TV.
[02:20:55]  They don't have that like star lust that's just like endemic to the average American.
[02:21:00]  You know, they're just kind of going about their own fucking business.
[02:21:04]  And I would, you know, when I'd go somewhere, we had a really cool office too.
[02:21:08]  We had a foreign office in China, vice China.
[02:21:11]  Really?
[02:21:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:21:13]  And the editor was this rad gal named Maddie Ju, right?
[02:21:17]  Game, I might be fucking up her last name.
[02:21:18]  Maddie Ju, shout out.
[02:21:19]  Shout out.
[02:21:21]  And then this other guy who's, I forget his title there, but he ruled.
[02:21:24]  His name was Billy Starman.
[02:21:25]  Anyway, they were, you know, served as fixtures, helped me around like with the rest of the crew and all that.
[02:21:31]  And, you know, anytime I go somewhere, you at least try to learn like, how do I say like please and thank you in the language?
[02:21:37]  Or like, how do I go to the better?
[02:21:37]  Or excuse me would be a big one, you know, just so like, you know, you can at least learn those 10 phrases in any language.
[02:21:45]  Right.
[02:21:46]  And so I was trying to do that with Mandarin and they gave me, you know, Nihao Shushu, the basics and stuff.
[02:21:52]  And I was like, well, how do you, I was like, well, how do you say please?
[02:21:55]  And they're like, we don't really use that very often.
[02:21:59]  They're like, don't worry about that.
[02:22:01]  I was like, oh, okay.
[02:22:02]  Well, how about like, excuse me, like just the basic if I bump into someone or if I do something wrong or whatever.
[02:22:07]  And they're like, they're like, yeah.
[02:22:09]  They're like, we never say that.
[02:22:13]  No, man.
[02:22:13]  They're like, but what I can tell you, they're just like, but let me tell you how to say stupid.
[02:22:18]  And that's shabby.
[02:22:19]  And I was like, oh, okay.
[02:22:21]  So they taught me shabby, newbie, which is like, they were like, that means fuck yeah.
[02:22:25]  And I was like, doesn't that literally mean cow vagina?
[02:22:27]  And they're like, there you go.
[02:22:28]  You're catching on.
[02:22:30]  Right.
[02:22:30]  And then, like, which is like, I'm butchering these, like, no doubt, which it means fuck your mom.
[02:22:37]  And they taught me that.
[02:22:38]  They were like, don't say that to people.
[02:22:39]  People will actually fight you over that.
[02:22:41]  Oh, really?
[02:22:41]  But then, but then one time I was there and I was having, it was like November.
[02:22:46]  I was in Beijing and Beijing is kind of like Washington, D.C.
[02:22:48]  It's not my favorite city.
[02:22:50]  I went to, I got to go to a lot of different parts of China and that was, I prefer, I don't prefer Beijing, whatever.
[02:22:57]  It was like raining and shitty.
[02:22:59]  And I kept having, we're staying at this hotel where, In the morning, these like shady adoption services would bring a Chinese baby that was going to be adopted to an American couple.
[02:23:13]  And for some reason, all the American couples, like we saw this over and over for like a week and a half, it was always different couples.
[02:23:19]  And I want to say all of them, but at least the majority were lesbian couples.
[02:23:23]  It's kind of funny.
[02:23:25]  And they, so it's like six in the morning, we'd be getting up and going, getting ready to get our coffee or whatever.
[02:23:31]  And that's when they would be introducing these American couples.
[02:23:35]  Would be parents to their adoptive children, so it just had a real kind of fucked up mood there.
[02:23:41]  And then my underwear kept getting stolen, which the other members of the crew were like, No one's stealing your underwear.
[02:23:45]  I'm like, I'm not out here trying to accuse some fucking maid of stealing my underwear, but it's like, But where is my goddamned underwear?
[02:23:52]  Like, why do I have zero underwear?
[02:23:55]  Um, and then I mentioned it to Maddie and Billy Starman, and they're like, Oh, they 100% stole your underwear.
[02:23:59]  I was like, See, thank you.
[02:24:01]  It's like, the Chinese back me up on this, right?
[02:24:03]  And anyway, so and I got like slightly sick, and it was like ice rain, right?
[02:24:08]  Like Beijing's.
[02:24:09]  Like, I think on the same latitude as like Minneapolis.
[02:24:13]  So it gets like nasty there, right?
[02:24:15]  Anyway, so I had to go buy underwear on like a day off that was technically like a sick day.
[02:24:20]  And I just remember having my underwear, not being happy about having to like go out and find a shopping mall, standing in like ice rain without an umbrella.
[02:24:30]  And I was like two, you know, two miles from the hotel.
[02:24:34]  And so I was trying to get a cab.
[02:24:36]  And every time I'd tell the cab driver the name of the hotel, they'd just peel off.
[02:24:41]  Like, I think the deal was it wasn't far enough to be worth it.
[02:24:43]  They wanted to take me to the airport or something like that.
[02:24:45]  And just like they were going to go find a better fare.
[02:24:48]  And the third or fourth cab who did it, I just like, he just momentarily lost my mind.
[02:24:55]  He rolled up the window, started to pull off, and I kicked his door, like the back door, back passenger side door.
[02:25:01]  And I yelled, Tony Ma!
[02:25:04]  Maybe I did it better, maybe not.
[02:25:05]  Fuck your mother?
[02:25:06]  Yeah, fuck your mom, right?
[02:25:07]  And he then brake lights immediately.
[02:25:09]  And I was like, oh shit, that was so stupid.
[02:25:11]  I was like, no, I was like, now I'm getting, I'm drenched, I'm freezing, I have like the flu or something holding my, Underwear like a chump, and now I'm gonna get in a fight or whatever.
[02:25:21]  And he backed up, and I was like, I had nowhere to go.
[02:25:23]  Like, it was a crowded sidewalk, and he rolled down the window.
[02:25:27]  And I saw his face, and he was like, Hey, he's like, hop in.
[02:25:31]  And I was like, and I got in the car, and he just took me straight back to the hotel, knew exactly where it was.
[02:25:36]  You got my job overcharged me.
[02:25:38]  He was talking to me the whole time, and I was like, You know, I was like, Oh, sure, yeah, that whatever.
[02:25:43]  I don't speak Mandarin, but keep the ball rolling with you.
[02:25:46]  And I mentioned that to like Maddie and Billy the next day, and they were like, Dude, you're learning.

=== Dennis Rodman and Cultural Shit (06:49) ===

[02:25:51]  They're like, you're adapting to Chinese culture.
[02:25:53]  That's hilarious.
[02:25:53]  So they got a sense of humor.
[02:25:55]  Oh, fuck yeah.
[02:25:56]  That's, I mean, that's an important thing.
[02:25:57]  I'm trying to think anywhere in the world I've been where people aren't in general funny.
[02:26:04]  That's a big thing about Iraq.
[02:26:06]  I have a, like, I got to go to Iraq twice and the northern part, which is safer.
[02:26:11]  Well, it was until ISIS.
[02:26:12]  Fuck.
[02:26:14]  And then I know a couple kids who, like, were Americans, but grew up in Baghdad or once from Mosul.
[02:26:21]  And those guys are the funniest motherfuckers I've ever met in my life.
[02:26:24]  Like, I think a major sort of sense of cultural friction that maybe could have been avoided in the build up to the Iraq war.
[02:26:34]  Because I was like, you know, I've also spoken about this to one, I was going to say a bunch, but a single soldier who had been in Iraq mid 2000s, I forget what year, whose sense of the Iraqis was he was like, oh, these are backwards, rural, goat herding people.
[02:26:51]  And it's like my sense of Baghdadis, especially, but Iraqis in general, I was like, those guys are the New Yorkers of the Middle East.
[02:26:58]  I was like, they are from an 800 year old urban environment.
[02:27:01]  They act like guys who grew up in the Bronx, basically, you know, which is not without its own set of, you know, issues.
[02:27:11]  But it's like, it's like, I wonder if I did, it's just a little pet theory that it's like, if American soldiers were taught that, then I'd be like, watch out for these guys.
[02:27:21]  They can, they can shyst you sometimes, but they're, but they're overwhelmingly funny and they like joking and they like, you know, so don't, You know, don't get your panties in a twist if they're joking with you or whatever.
[02:27:32]  Recognize this how that might have affected the war if, like, all the American soldiers didn't think there's like, oh, these guys are rednecks, like, who don't understand anything, right?
[02:27:41]  Right, yeah, these guys have a personality and a sense of humor.
[02:27:44]  What are human beings, right?
[02:27:45]  Yeah, what is it about?
[02:27:45]  What is it about these specific cultures and parts of the world that, like, makes people like this?
[02:27:50]  I would never imagine, I would never guess in a million years that somebody in China or Iraq would be like that.
[02:27:57]  It would be funny, you would never, I just imagine them to be blank, you know, no emotion, inscrutable.
[02:28:03]  Yeah.
[02:28:05]  You got to go there and meet them.
[02:28:06]  They're not all funny, but in general, they're pretty fucking funny.
[02:28:10]  Swear like those goddamn sailors.
[02:28:12]  Once you learn, like I only learned like five or six swear words, but then I was just like, whoa.
[02:28:18]  Like you guys, they aren't letting everyone have it.
[02:28:22]  Yeah.
[02:28:23]  Maybe it has something to do with like living in a shitty fucking situation, being in a shitty situation your whole life.
[02:28:29]  You kind of have to have a sense of humor to get through it, maybe.
[02:28:31]  Could be.
[02:28:31]  Yep.
[02:28:33]  Hmm.
[02:28:35]  What, um, so working in China though, like doing journalism in China, were there any fucking guidelines you guys had to work on?
[02:28:43]  They come and throw us in the clink.
[02:28:44]  Yeah, no.
[02:28:45]  No, no, no.
[02:28:45]  We were doing like cultural shit though, right?
[02:28:48]  You didn't talk about Tiananmen's Clair or anything.
[02:28:51]  Oh, not that either.
[02:28:51]  Yeah.
[02:28:52]  Or the Uyghurs.
[02:28:52]  Yeah.
[02:28:53]  No.
[02:28:53]  Yeah.
[02:28:53]  No.
[02:28:54]  Was that a rule or was that a choice?
[02:28:56]  It was a choice.
[02:28:57]  I didn't, I mean, that just wasn't the stories I was there to cover.
[02:29:01]  People love to be like that, especially like about Vice.
[02:29:02]  They were like, well, would you ever write a story while I was working at Vice?
[02:29:05]  Like, write a story about the founder's advice.
[02:29:07]  And I was like, I was like, now you're going to make it sound like if I say no, it sounds like I'm afraid of doing something.
[02:29:14]  I was like, why would I be fucking interested in that in the first place?
[02:29:16]  I don't know.
[02:29:17]  Anyway, yeah.
[02:29:18]  No, it was like, Like a thing about dating due to the gender disparity, which is kind of like a lingering effect of the one child policy.
[02:29:26]  The one child policy, right?
[02:29:28]  So it left, it's, I don't know if this has evened out over the years, but a woman named Mara Vistendahl wrote a really good book whose name I don't remember, but it's about how they're, you know, whereas in most parts of the world, women are slightly disproportionate to men, that in China it's the reverse, that there's more men than women and it has these weird, you know, weird effects.
[02:29:49]  Like, and we're there specifically like, Inspired by that book to try dating and to meet matchmakers and to go to weird things where you know guys grow up in villages where there's like you know almost literally no women and so they have to go to the city and find one or they have to try to online date and da Um, and then what else?
[02:30:09]  Yeah, so yeah, no, nobody with us, but we had our paperwork in order.
[02:30:14]  We were there with you know Chinese nationals who ran an edition of the magazine.
[02:30:19]  Um, although and that edition started in 2009 or 10, maybe later.
[02:30:26]  There was a little bit of back and forth sometimes between the editors because, you know, the website was supposed to be this kind of collecting place for all the different foreign editions of Vice.
[02:30:37]  So you could see something from Vice Germany that'd be cool because, you know, who knows anything about what's going on in Germany right now or whatever.
[02:30:44]  And there'd be some like anti CCP, like not anti Chinese, but anti Communist Party things occasionally.
[02:30:55]  And the Chinese editors would be like, hey, like we got it.
[02:30:58]  We can't have this show up on our.
[02:31:00]  Side of the site, we need to you know kind of coordinate this off.
[02:31:02]  This could actually get us in trouble, you know.
[02:31:06]  Different places, though, right?
[02:31:08]  Yeah, right.
[02:31:10]  Did you anyway?
[02:31:10]  It didn't feel like an Orwellian shithole.
[02:31:12]  It didn't feel like an Orwellian.
[02:31:15]  Did you ever go to North Korea?
[02:31:15]  You didn't go to North Korea.
[02:31:16]  I didn't go to North Korea.
[02:31:17]  No, I wasn't on that trip.
[02:31:19]  That was those were two, they did two trips, right?
[02:31:21]  Well, Shane went, yeah, Shane went with photographer Jamie James Medina and they shot a secret documentary.
[02:31:27]  Like Jamie James Medina was a photographer from London, um, just kept his camera in video mode.
[02:31:33]  I think it was like a Canon Elf or something.
[02:31:36]  And they just pretended to be taking pictures the whole time, which is like, I always thought that was a cool way to fucking make a piece.
[02:31:43]  And the fact that they got an entire piece out of it, you know, it was almost a feature length doc.
[02:31:49]  And they got it out of it.
[02:31:50]  They were never checking the memory cards?
[02:31:51]  Yeah.
[02:31:52]  Yeah.
[02:31:52]  That's nuts.
[02:31:53]  Yeah.
[02:31:53]  Can't do that again.
[02:31:54]  Right.
[02:31:55]  Yeah.
[02:31:55]  No.
[02:31:55]  And then Ryan Duffy, and then that trip was set up by Vice's old news director, Jason Mojica, who worked out that the way you could get in.
[02:32:05]  In with the, you know, then recent, recently installed Kim Jong un regime was that he loves the Chicago Bulls.
[02:32:13]  So they tried, I think, I believe he tried to get like Scottie Pippen or Michael Jordan to do it.
[02:32:18]  Like Dennis Rodman was like fourth or fifth down the list.
[02:32:22]  Or no, he went to the, there was like a back channel that it's like a famous back channel for the North Koreans.
[02:32:27]  And I think they live around DC or whatever.
[02:32:30]  And so they helped set up the whole thing and they were hoping for Michael Jordan or.
[02:32:35]  Scotty Pippen, you know, and then Dennis Rodman.
[02:32:38]  We'll settle for Dennis Rodman.
[02:32:39]  We'll settle for Dennis Rodman.

=== Ketchup Bottle Hustle and Algorithms (15:08) ===

[02:32:40]  Yeah.
[02:32:41]  I think he was great.
[02:32:42]  Oh my God.
[02:32:43]  Yeah, that was completely nuts.
[02:32:44]  I think Jerry went there and that dude, Jake.
[02:32:47]  Yeah, do you know Jake?
[02:32:48]  I don't know.
[02:32:49]  I've never met him.
[02:32:49]  I've just heard of him.
[02:32:50]  Jake's good.
[02:32:50]  He's Florida.
[02:32:51]  He's from, I think he's from St. Augustine.
[02:32:53]  He's a gangster kid, though.
[02:32:54]  He was in the Gangsville punk scene.
[02:32:55]  He was friends with, like, Against Me and stuff.
[02:32:57]  Yeah.
[02:32:58]  Right, right, right.
[02:32:58]  Yeah.
[02:32:59]  Gavin was saying that he's like a big surfer.
[02:33:01]  Big surfer, yeah.
[02:33:02]  Spagoli dad.
[02:33:03]  That's what he is.
[02:33:04]  Oh, that's dang.
[02:33:06]  When he's good, he's good, man.
[02:33:07]  That's a good line.
[02:33:08]  Yeah.
[02:33:11]  Oh, man.
[02:33:12]  Yeah.
[02:33:14]  The whole thing about, like, How this fucking technocracy or whatever, or techno oligarchy, whatever the fuck you call it.
[02:33:24]  Oh, the technopoly is what Postman calls it.
[02:33:27]  Right.
[02:33:28]  But that, yeah.
[02:33:28]  So he was writing about it being a technopoly, but now it's like turning into like tech running the fucking world or running the government at least.
[02:33:34]  Right.
[02:33:35]  That's like a, that's, I think about like that sometimes with making stuff for the internet in today's day and age.
[02:33:47]  Because like now you can literally, If you do the wrong thing on YouTube specifically, I don't know about other platforms, you can get like kicked off of YouTube permanently.
[02:33:58]  Yeah.
[02:34:00]  And a lot of that stuff is like, for the most part, can be reasoned against or like there's no, it's not like there's no appeal.
[02:34:09]  There's no appeal, right?
[02:34:11]  It's not like you sit in front of a jury and like they make a decision or whatever.
[02:34:14]  This is often like just one person presses a button and it's like once that button's pressed.
[02:34:18]  You hope it's a person.
[02:34:20]  Yeah.
[02:34:20]  Yeah.
[02:34:20]  You hope it's a person.
[02:34:21]  It's like you might have just triggered a fucking algorithm.
[02:34:23]  Yeah.
[02:34:23]  Yeah.
[02:34:23]  You triggered an algorithm.
[02:34:25]  And you've seen, like, we've seen this happen to so many people for so many different reasons.
[02:34:30]  Right.
[02:34:31]  That, like, now you're operating from this mindset of, like, I have to make sure I can keep this gravy train going, but I'm a journalist.
[02:34:45]  And YouTube is my employer, basically.
[02:34:49]  I'm making all my money off of YouTube, which is.
[02:34:52]  All of the fucking tentacles of the government are in.
[02:34:55]  Right.
[02:34:56]  So, like, whatever the decisions are made there, you know, we saw, I don't know if you pay attention to the Twitter files, but basically they found out like FBI people were like meeting with the moderation team of Twitter every fucking week.
[02:35:07]  Right.
[02:35:07]  And like, if that's happening at Twitter, imagine what's happening at Google and YouTube.
[02:35:11]  Right.
[02:35:12]  So, it's like, it's like the antithesis.
[02:35:15]  It creates this fear, this constant fear of like.
[02:35:20]  Makes you want to unalive yourself, right?
[02:35:22]  Makes you want to unalive yourself.
[02:35:22]  But it's like, it makes you not want to, because like, for me at least, like, Journalism is like putting stuff out there that hasn't had what gets at least what gets me excited is like turning under over rocks and finding stuff that hasn't been had light shined on it yet that you know might not make a lot of people happy.
[02:35:41]  And if you're doing that, that's my definition of what like exciting journalism is.
[02:35:46]  And if you're doing that, YouTube is not the proper vehicle to do that in because you're gonna lose fucking mammon.
[02:35:52]  Aren't they part of Google?
[02:35:53]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
[02:35:55]  So it's like it's uh, it's like it scares me to think that.
[02:36:00]  You know, why are they the biggest employer of you know video journalism?
[02:36:04]  Right, that's that's the part that sucks to me.
[02:36:07]  Yeah, that's that's you know, it's the fact that it's like a necessary condition for people's livelihood that they're not able to.
[02:36:15]  That we ended up with like three platforms basically, and you know, which of the three are you going to get on?
[02:36:20]  Right, and that's going to be your career, and that's the only career path people have available to them.
[02:36:25]  And you see the effect, you see the effect with like shitty language like unalive, and what are the other ones?
[02:36:30]  You know, algorithm and uh, moderation team dodging.
[02:36:34]  Workarounds that just sound like deranged speech.
[02:36:39]  You know?
[02:36:39]  Yeah.
[02:36:40]  It's a bummer.
[02:36:41]  It's fucking scary, man.
[02:36:42]  I don't know.
[02:36:43]  I don't know where it goes.
[02:36:44]  I don't know where it goes, but when you have AI running all this stuff, when you have AI in charge.
[02:36:48]  Well, it's okay because AI can all, like, they'll be the viewers too.
[02:36:51]  We can all take a hike.
[02:36:54]  The AI will be viewers?
[02:36:55]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:36:56]  What do you mean?
[02:36:57]  That it won't be people watching it.
[02:36:59]  They'll just have AI viewers.
[02:37:00]  Oh, oh, oh.
[02:37:01]  So AI can make the content and then watch its own content.
[02:37:04]  AI can consume its content and that'll feed back into the content that AI is making.
[02:37:11]  Right.
[02:37:11]  And we've got a whole world.
[02:37:13]  We don't have to work anymore.
[02:37:14]  Yeah.
[02:37:14]  Go sit under the shade tree.
[02:37:16]  Yeah.
[02:37:16]  What are we going to do?
[02:37:17]  Tie a fishing line to our toes.
[02:37:18]  Yeah.
[02:37:21]  Take it easy.
[02:37:25]  Yeah.
[02:37:26]  What happens when we don't have to work anymore?
[02:37:28]  AI does it all.
[02:37:29]  We're going to lose everything.
[02:37:31]  We're going to lose our meaning.
[02:37:31]  We're going to lose everything.
[02:37:33]  It's going to be fucking weird.
[02:37:34]  We'll figure something out.
[02:37:35]  You think?
[02:37:35]  Yeah.
[02:37:35]  What are you going to do?
[02:37:39]  Maybe not much different than I do at present.
[02:37:43]  Hang out.
[02:37:44]  Read a book?
[02:37:46]  Go see people.
[02:37:48]  Do you still actively try to put out new work?
[02:37:52]  I don't put it out very well.
[02:37:53]  I'm really shitty about that.
[02:37:54]  I write every day, you know?
[02:37:57]  And I've worked on some things.
[02:37:58]  I mean, obviously, the Gavin doc, that was about a year's worth of work.
[02:38:03]  And I have to remind myself I'm just coming off a feature length doc because otherwise I'll look back, you know, I get laid off in 2019.
[02:38:10]  I'm like, what have I been up to since then?
[02:38:11]  Just like dicking around.
[02:38:12]  I went and lived in Mexico as a roustabout or whatever and came to Chicago.
[02:38:17]  Yeah.
[02:38:18]  But yeah.
[02:38:23]  When you write, what do you write about?
[02:38:24]  Like, how, what is your writing?
[02:38:26]  You just fucking journal every day or what?
[02:38:29]  More or less.
[02:38:30]  Call it that.
[02:38:30]  Yeah.
[02:38:32]  I just, I've done it since I was a kid.
[02:38:35]  I like it.
[02:38:35]  You know, what do you want to do?
[02:38:36]  It'd be nice if it was turning into something that I was putting somewhere.
[02:38:39]  I used to be better about writing for something.
[02:38:43]  And obviously, when I was working at Vice, I was at Vice for 15 years.
[02:38:45]  And so I just had an automatic platform and I couldn't have asked for a better one.
[02:38:49]  Yeah.
[02:38:49]  You know, Yeah, it's good to have a system, right?
[02:38:51]  That you're a part of that you can just like.
[02:38:52]  Right?
[02:38:53]  Or just that it was automatic.
[02:38:54]  Like, I've played the game of trying to be like a freelance writer and, you know, pitch stories to different places and like even getting once accepted.
[02:39:03]  And then you're like, oh, that's great.
[02:39:04]  That'll pay my rent this month, you know.
[02:39:06]  And then the invoice takes eight weeks to put through, which I, when I was, you know, editing for the magazine and the website, I was the guy who was getting yelled at for not getting an invoice out on time and et cetera.
[02:39:17]  So I have the dueling sympathies for that.
[02:39:20]  It's just, it's a hustle, you know.
[02:39:22]  You never.
[02:39:23]  You never get to rest easy like you do with a salary.
[02:39:27]  Right.
[02:39:27]  Right.
[02:39:27]  Well, what do you want to do?
[02:39:29]  Like, what's an ideal situation look like for you as far as like creating shit and writing?
[02:39:34]  Jesus, I don't know.
[02:39:34]  Someone gives me a lot of money and I just go do.
[02:39:38]  Why don't you do more documentaries?
[02:39:43]  Great question.
[02:39:43]  I don't have a good answer for you.
[02:39:46]  Not motivated?
[02:39:47]  A little of that.
[02:39:48]  Yeah.
[02:39:49]  I pitch a bunch of stuff and it's, you know, it's hit or miss.
[02:39:51]  Like, I have pitches outstanding.
[02:39:53]  I'm working on a, A book show basically with an old friend from Vice.
[02:39:57]  I don't know if you ever saw really early video stuff.
[02:40:00]  Trace Crutchfield, tall Texan.
[02:40:02]  He kind of looks like Dick Van Dyke.
[02:40:04]  No?
[02:40:04]  Okay.
[02:40:05]  He was like, I think he was like the first on air host when Vice started making video stuff.
[02:40:10]  He's great.
[02:40:12]  Grew up in Austin.
[02:40:13]  He's a little older than everybody else.
[02:40:14]  I think he saw Minor Threat like when he was in college, which apologies for dating him.
[02:40:20]  Anyway, or a, you know, you catch back up with the gang every so often.
[02:40:24]  There's this eternal impulse to try to get the band back.
[02:40:28]  Together, right?
[02:40:29]  So I'm in the middle of that right now.
[02:40:31]  We'll see how it goes.
[02:40:32]  It's always, you know.
[02:40:34]  Why don't you start a podcast?
[02:40:36]  I've recorded a bunch of stuff.
[02:40:38]  I've made a few tips.
[02:40:39]  I did a podcast actually.
[02:40:40]  I did a podcast with Seth Abramson during the 2020 election, that guy from Twitter.
[02:40:45]  You know, okay.
[02:40:46]  Never heard of him.
[02:40:47]  It did, it did okay.
[02:40:48]  That was my first podcast, but we just made it.
[02:40:50]  It was a limited, we made 10 episodes.
[02:40:52]  That was the whole thing.
[02:40:52]  Oh, it was like a, okay, like a, like a limit.
[02:40:54]  What do you call that?
[02:40:55]  A limited series.
[02:40:56]  Yeah.
[02:40:56]  That was what it was.
[02:40:57]  And what was it about?
[02:40:58]  It was about Trump.
[02:40:59]  He's written, I think it was three books when I was talking to him.
[02:41:03]  I think there's a fourth of, what does he call it? Meta journalism, I think, where he just basically, I mean, it's not dissimilar from Google journalism, but he assembled, Like the full Trump story from previous, like almost Wikipedia style from previous reporting, you know, and it was just did a good job of digging up all the, you know, on record elements of the story, the dirt, the funny stuff, and whatever,
[02:41:31]  and just assembled it into one big narrative.
[02:41:34]  And he did that three times with three different subjects or three different facets of Trump and like the Trump organization.
[02:41:43]  Anyway, I'm sitting on a lot of recordings.
[02:41:48]  I should get around and get it done.
[02:41:52]  I have a limited bandwidth for the internet as I age.
[02:41:56]  You see the same arguments play out three or four times on a grand cultural level over your life.
[02:42:04]  And you start being like, really?
[02:42:06]  We're arguing about abortion again?
[02:42:08]  It's like, oh, look at that.
[02:42:10]  Literally the same arguments.
[02:42:11]  Yep.
[02:42:12]  Like, yet again.
[02:42:13]  Oh, we're blaming feminism for like.
[02:42:16]  Every ill in modern society.
[02:42:18]  It's like just like that 1979 book by Doodlebug Murphy, Feminist Destroyed Nixon's America.
[02:42:30]  But I mostly just sit around a little bit too much.
[02:42:34]  Maybe I'll have this done and finished, which I should have done over a year ago.
[02:42:38]  Do you know Brad Phillips?
[02:42:40]  No.
[02:42:40]  He's a painter, but he wrote a book of essays that did really well for a book of essays.
[02:42:46]  We have a dead friend named Giancarlo di Trepano who used to put out amazing, he was the best publisher in the English speaking, like publishing industry.
[02:42:56]  He had a book line called Tyrant Books and he put out his essay book.
[02:42:59]  Anyway, he's a smart, cool painter guy from Canada.
[02:43:03]  And we had recorded episodes of a podcast that all I need to do is finish it and get it up.
[02:43:11]  That was about the differences between Canada and where he's from and America, where I'm from.
[02:43:17]  The conceit kind of being like he just moved to America.
[02:43:21]  And it was like, oh, you know, quiz each other for the citizenship test, right?
[02:43:25]  But also, it's like whoever really gets into the weeds about what Canadian culture is like, right?
[02:43:29]  I don't know jack shit about it.
[02:43:30]  I just made a documentary for their, you know, the CBC, and I couldn't tell you, like, fucking read Louis Real by Chester Brown, you know, the night before, like, the video aired.
[02:43:43]  And anyway, so that's the gist, right?
[02:43:47]  It's just the differences between America and Canada, right?
[02:43:49]  But it's got a good name.
[02:43:51]  Whoa, oh, shit.
[02:43:52]  Well, now, okay, so now I'll tell it to you so that I have to get it done so nobody else steals it.
[02:43:55]  Borderline Friends.
[02:43:58]  Borderline Friends.
[02:43:59]  Ooh, that's a good name.
[02:44:00]  I like that.
[02:44:01]  Thanks, right?
[02:44:02]  Anyway, yeah.
[02:44:04]  You know, the real answer is like a combination of happenstance and laziness.
[02:44:09]  Got some things in the works.
[02:44:11]  Why not?
[02:44:12]  I take it you voted for Trump.
[02:44:14]  Oh, I don't vote.
[02:44:15]  You don't vote?
[02:44:15]  That's good.
[02:44:16]  No, no, no.
[02:44:17]  I voted for Cornell West.
[02:44:19]  Oh, did you really?
[02:44:19]  Good for you.
[02:44:20]  I love Dr. West.
[02:44:21]  Long time.
[02:44:21]  Journalist.
[02:44:22]  CNM run.
[02:44:24]  Right?
[02:44:24]  Yeah.
[02:44:28]  The interview that Gavin did with Cornel West debating Candace Owens was great.
[02:44:33]  Saw that.
[02:44:33]  West held in his own.
[02:44:34]  That was great.
[02:44:35]  American treasure.
[02:44:36]  Yeah, he is.
[02:44:37]  Last American man of letters.
[02:44:39]  He's been holding strong.
[02:44:40]  Right.
[02:44:40]  For a long time.
[02:44:41]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:44:42]  By the way, I wanted to ask you this in the front of the show, but I heard the story, but what about the baby balls thing?
[02:44:50]  How that.
[02:44:50]  What did the nickname come from?
[02:44:51]  The nickname baby balls.
[02:44:52]  It's weird.
[02:44:53]  It's a really convoluted story, the real version, and everybody simplifies it into a different story.
[02:45:00]  It always ends up changing.
[02:45:01]  It's weird, right?
[02:45:02]  Yeah.
[02:45:03]  So, like, Gavin.
[02:45:03]  I heard the ketchup bottle story.
[02:45:05]  Which version of the ketchup bottle story, Jier, right?
[02:45:08]  I heard the story.
[02:45:09]  Let's hear about Jier, yeah.
[02:45:10]  Was that like you guys were somewhere at dinner or whatever, and you were like, I don't give a fuck.
[02:45:14]  This one dared you to smash the ketchup bottle over your head.
[02:45:17]  And you were like, about to do it.
[02:45:18]  This one was egging you on to do it.
[02:45:20]  And then Gavin was like, No, no, no.
[02:45:21]  You're going to end up with like a fucking, you know, a Nazi dueling scar on your, across your whole face and you're going to hurt yourself.
[02:45:26]  Don't do it.
[02:45:27]  So Gavin told you that version, right?
[02:45:29]  He's the hero in that version.
[02:45:30]  He's the hero.
[02:45:30]  Of course he is.
[02:45:32]  So what actually happened was we went out for drinks.
[02:45:35]  My, the first week of my internship, all the interns go out for drinks, right?
[02:45:39]  As a, you know, because we're not, none of us are getting paid.
[02:45:41]  This is before, Like back when you could have unpaid intern labor, right in New York.
[02:45:45]  And so they took the petty cash and the office manager.
[02:45:48]  We all went to a bar, like a big outdoor place that's not there in Williamsburg anymore.
[02:45:52]  And like one by one, everybody from the office came by and was like, Oh, what's going on here?
[02:45:56]  Free drink?
[02:45:58]  Like, you know, like, Oh, you drink it on petty cash?
[02:46:00]  You mind if we just side in?
[02:46:02]  And so eventually the whole office assembled.
[02:46:04]  And Sarush, who held like the company credit card at that point, was like, Okay, guys, we're covering drinks tonight.
[02:46:10]  It's an event.
[02:46:10]  This will be fun.
[02:46:12]  And I had just met Gavin and Jesse like two or three days before that.
[02:46:17]  And Jesse's the editor of the magazine, and they're seated across from me.
[02:46:22]  Gavin bets me $300 that I can't break a ketchup bottle over the back of my head.
[02:46:29]  Jesse hears that and he goes, I'll put $200 in there.
[02:46:32]  That's a $500 bet, right?
[02:46:35]  And they're staring at me.
[02:46:37]  And just to be clear, you cannot break a ketchup bottle.
[02:46:42]  The glass is so, it's like marble, it's so fucking thick.
[02:46:46]  But we're here in the middle of a, you know, A tense sort of riff, and I'm holding the ketchup bottle.
[02:46:56]  I'm weighing it in my hands, considering I was like, if we're empty or full of ketchup?
[02:47:01]  Full of ketchup.
[02:47:02]  It's just the ketchup bottle that's on the table.
[02:47:03]  Nobody went and got a ketchup bottle.
[02:47:06]  And in considering how I'm going to respond to this provocation, I'm like, if I were to try to break it, how would I even do it?
[02:47:15]  How would you, the back of my head?
[02:47:17]  Because I think that was specified or whatever.
[02:47:19]  And so I'm holding the ketchup bottle.
[02:47:21]  It looks as if I might be taking some practice swings.
[02:47:25]  And as of yet, unnamed bystander named Trevor Silmser, who was Andrew W.K.'s manager and went on to be the publisher of Noisy, who was a cool old New York hardcore guy, tall, towering, scary, skin headed, not a skin head, but bald, muscle dude, who was also a great guy, was sitting right next to him.

=== Trevor Silmser and Reading Nooks (06:12) ===

[02:47:49]  I was friends with Gavin and Jesse, threw his arms out and was like, Whoa, He's like, Dude.
[02:47:58]  These guys don't have $500 on them.
[02:48:00]  And he's like, and by the way, he's like, the ambulance ride alone is going to cost you $800.
[02:48:07]  And it sort of diffused it.
[02:48:09]  And so we came up with a, and like, and Gavin and Jesse were both like, hey, hey, hey, you got us.
[02:48:14]  Like, they wouldn't have paid out on a bet no matter what.
[02:48:17]  Right.
[02:48:18]  And so there was a backup bet that I think Jesse came up with.
[02:48:23]  And he's like, all right, we'll each, is everybody at this table will give you $50, but we're each allowed to slap you as hard as we can.
[02:48:30]  And I was like, Fuck, I'll take that.
[02:48:33]  Yeah.
[02:48:34]  Yeah, let's do that.
[02:48:34]  And I went to the bathroom and I came back and they were talking about something else because this whole thing was just a fucking riff.
[02:48:38]  And I was like, hey, what happened to that bet we were getting?
[02:48:40]  To do and Trevor, who had just saved me from ignominy, like five minutes prior, goes, What you welched on that baby balls?
[02:48:47]  and that was it.
[02:48:48]  It was just like it was as if lightning had come and engraven upon my you know forehead.
[02:48:55]  It was just a fitting name, yeah.
[02:48:56]  But that was Gavin made himself the hero of the story or the voice of reason, never fails with that guy.
[02:49:03]  Unbelievable.
[02:49:04]  The history writes itself, bro.
[02:49:05]  It's beautiful.
[02:49:06]  History is written by the writers, yeah.
[02:49:08]  So, uh, are you and Gavin friends now?
[02:49:11]  Oh, I don't know.
[02:49:12]  That's a It seems like that when you guys were sitting, he said we are.
[02:49:16]  When you guys were sitting, I'll leave that up to him.
[02:49:19]  I'm it seems like you guys kind of like kissed and made up during that little watch fire.
[02:49:22]  Follower of our Lord Jesus Christ, I'm friends with all of humanity and all children of God, right?
[02:49:26]  Yeah, uh, whether or not he thinks we're friends, I'll leave it to you know, leave that up to him.
[02:49:32]  Yeah, I think you guys are friends, though.
[02:49:34]  Yeah, we'll leave it at that.
[02:49:35]  Yeah, yeah, good question, though.
[02:49:39]  Great, they literally don't know the answer.
[02:49:42]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:49:43]  Well, thanks for doing this, bro.
[02:49:44]  This was, of course.
[02:49:46]  Tell people where they can follow your stuff, get a hold of you, all that jazz.
[02:49:51]  You can find me on Substack at compostmintus.substack.com or also on Substack, the podcast Borderline Friends.
[02:50:04]  Look for the picture of the cat and mouse wearing bow ties.
[02:50:07]  Okay.
[02:50:08]  That'll be the right one.
[02:50:10]  And if this ends up going up in late July, you can find me on.
[02:50:18]  Two Ways YouTube channel.
[02:50:22]  Two Ways?
[02:50:23]  Two Way.
[02:50:24]  Like the most basic sex act.
[02:50:27]  Okay.
[02:50:28]  It's a company I'm trying to work for.
[02:50:30]  Trace works for them.
[02:50:31]  You're trying to work for them.
[02:50:32]  And we're pitching them a show about reading.
[02:50:34]  That's kind of like Reading Rainbow for Adults, right?
[02:50:36]  Wow.
[02:50:37]  And the show is called The Books Nook.
[02:50:41]  The Books Nook.
[02:50:42]  So you're teaching people how to read?
[02:50:44]  Plural.
[02:50:46]  I guess in a way, yeah.
[02:50:47]  Yeah.
[02:50:48]  Just encouraging reading.
[02:50:50]  Okay.
[02:50:50]  It's an excuse to blather about books, right?
[02:50:53]  Okay.
[02:50:53]  Look, I like books.
[02:50:55]  Yeah.
[02:50:56]  What kind of book?
[02:50:56]  Well, how do you, what's your preferred way of teaching books?
[02:50:58]  What do you like?
[02:50:59]  Oh, read it.
[02:51:00]  To read it.
[02:51:01]  To read like the physical paper book?
[02:51:03]  Yeah.
[02:51:03]  Yeah.
[02:51:04]  Okay.
[02:51:04]  You're old school.
[02:51:06]  I guess.
[02:51:06]  Yeah.
[02:51:08]  Feels good.
[02:51:09]  Yeah.
[02:51:10]  Most people all put them on their pads and whatnot.
[02:51:12]  Yeah.
[02:51:13]  Get it on your iPod.
[02:51:14]  Okay.
[02:51:15]  If I can't find, if I don't have a, I have a lot of books, right?
[02:51:17]  Do you find it easier to recall, to like, Retain the information by reading it?
[02:51:23]  That's a good question.
[02:51:23]  Oh, then what?
[02:51:25]  Versus like listening to it?
[02:51:26]  Yeah, for me, for certain.
[02:51:27]  Yeah.
[02:51:28]  And I'm kind of a slow reader, so I guess it gives it a little bit of time to like sit in.
[02:51:31]  If I'm listening to a book, I'll go do things.
[02:51:33]  I'll go like tidy up around the house or go get in the car or whatever.
[02:51:37]  I like listening to it.
[02:51:39]  Certain types of books are better to listen to, and certain types of books I would prefer to read.
[02:51:45]  Yeah.
[02:51:45]  You know, certain types of books, I don't mind reading them as a PDF on a screen.
[02:51:49]  Other books, I'd rather have.
[02:51:51]  You know, I, I, it's the whole reason I went to work at Vice.
[02:51:54]  They made a nice book, right?
[02:51:56]  The magazine was like a whole book that you got every month for free.
[02:52:00]  Yeah.
[02:52:00]  And they put like, that was one of the first things I recognized in Gavin and Jesse.
[02:52:04]  I was like, these guys care so much about what they're fucking making.
[02:52:07]  They're like, and they're way smarter.
[02:52:09]  Cause I was a fan of Vice.
[02:52:10]  That was why I wanted an internship with them.
[02:52:12]  I thought they were the funniest motherfuckers in publishing and in the English language publishing sphere.
[02:52:17]  And, um, but I didn't, they, it took me by surprise how fucking smart those guys were.
[02:52:23]  Yeah.
[02:52:23]  And how well they knew what they were doing, and how much they fucking cared about it, and how much what they made was derived from how disappointed they were with the rest of media.
[02:52:34]  Right?
[02:52:35]  Like the first four months into the, I interned for like almost a year and then I graduated and they gave me a job the day after my graduation, which was, as long as I don't say the salary, it sounds like a real nice thing, nice thing for them to do to me.
[02:52:50]  But they made on their 10th anniversary of Vice, they made an issue that was a parody of mainstream print journalism and they called it the worst issue ever.
[02:53:05]  Although on the cover, it had the best issue ever.
[02:53:07]  And I shouldn't like, it'd be like trying to describe a YouTube video.
[02:53:11]  I'm just going to not do it justice by explaining these things.
[02:53:14]  But it was like page by page and like line by line, like one of the sharpest and funniest like parody, satire, whatever, send up of what was happening.
[02:53:30]  Like you could learn more about.
[02:53:35]  Magazine culture in the United States in 2004 from that issue than you could from like an entire like bookshelf of paper magazine and whoever else.
[02:53:47]  Wow.
[02:53:47]  Like, that's fucking cool.
[02:53:51]  That's me.
[02:53:52]  That's my giving my old bosses a blowjob portion of the show for you.
[02:53:57]  But it was, it was fucking cool.
[02:53:58]  Beautiful way to end it.
[02:53:59]  Thanks again, bro.
[02:53:59]  I appreciate it.
[02:54:00]  Yeah.
[02:54:00]  All right.
[02:54:01]  Good night, folks.