Jacob Savage details his exclusion from Hollywood writing roles despite qualifications, citing a drop in white male representation from 48% to 11% between 2011 and 2024 due to rigid DEI mandates. He argues meritocracy has collapsed as corporate pressure and social media activism freeze out talent, forcing many into crypto or podcasting while academia remains resistant. Savage advises marginalized professionals to pivot careers rather than resent the system, suggesting identity politics will eventually recede in favor of traditional differences as markets self-correct. [Automatically generated summary]
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We were about to give you this staff writing job and we can't because you're a white guy.
For the person that is your age that feels like I'm being massively screwed, how do you how do you deal in that world?
I was definitely a liberal.
I am not a liberal anymore.
It's like, here's the most popular show in the country for half the country, and we're just going to pretend that it doesn't exist.
Hey, Jacob, thanks for being on with me.
Hey.
Oh, sure.
Thanks for thanks for having me.
Yeah.
I read your story and it, and I'll tell you why in a little while, it really frightens me.
It concerns me a great deal because we're losing a whole generation.
For anybody who doesn't know your story and the article that you wrote, you were a ticket scalper.
You wanted to be a Hollywood writer.
What happened?
Well, I moved out to Hollywood not to be a ticket scalper.
I moved out to be a writer.
When I first moved out, it was like 2011.
There were actually a lot more opportunities than there were maybe five years later, even though the industry really expanded.
I mean, the truth is I got into ticket scalping as a side hustle.
I was SAT tutoring and I just got better at and better at ticket scalping because I had no opportunities to make money screenwriting.
So basically I tried and I tried and you end up sort of throwing your head against the wall.
And obviously it's an industry where no one's guaranteed success.
But the truth is a couple of times in my career, I was brought into like various spaces and told we were about to give you this staff writing job and we can't because you're a white guy and we already have too many white guys on staff.
And that was sort of the, you know, and then you spend another eight years banging your head against the wall and then you write a big article.
So so I just want to play devil's advocate with you.
I don't mean to I don't mean to I'm going to push you, but just playing devil's advocate.
Sure.
Because I think we got to get to a place to where people can actually hear you.
So let's let me ask you this.
Why should I believe you're not just a disgruntled guy who was not a good writer and just couldn't get a job?
And so now you're all pissed off about it and you're doing this.
I mean, I am partly exactly that.
But I think part of the thing is this, I mean, I mean, I wouldn't have written the article if I was if I was good for you.
At least you're on this.
Yes.
But I think if you look at the numbers, the number, you know, I went into depth in this article about the sort of broader numbers within all these different industries.
And the year I moved to Hollywood, there were about 48% of the lower level writers were white men, which honestly seems, I think white men, for whatever reason, were more likely to go into this field, partly for, you know, whatever historic reasons, maybe partly because of some residual discrimination.
I can't, I don't know.
But I think 48% was about the number of white men who were aspirants for these jobs in 2011.
By 2024, that was 11% was the number of white men who were getting these jobs, which is, you know, obviously you go from being one and a half times more represented via your population to like one-third within the space of a decade.
And it's sort of astonishing when you really unpack that, what that means.
It was not a slow change.
It was not, you know, we're going to have, we're going to hire, you know, 1% less white guys every year.
It was, we're just going to stop.
And I spoke to a showrunner who reached out after the article was published.
And he said, actually, that 11% number is not even right because the 11% involves all of the true NAPO hires that the showrunners had to make.
So an actor's son got that job.
Someone with some connections got that job.
So you're really talking about is that no one was like let in who didn't either have like a connection to begin with or some sort of other identity, I suppose.
You believe in merit-based I do believe in merit.
Yes.
Yes, I do.
So, I mean, it's amazing you have to actually ask that in today's world.
But I mean, I really don't care what color you are.
Funny is funny.
Talent is talent.
I mean, whatever it is you're good at, hire the best.
I don't want my surgeon to be a DEI hire.
I don't want my surgeon to be a white guy if he's not the best surgeon, you know?
And I can't believe that we're at this place where, you know, especially in, you know, some place like Hollywood, you, I mean, Hollywood deserves everything they're getting.
You know, you're just seeing, yeah, you're just seeing this destruction of merit.
I think a lot of the people who would have come up to create the next generation of shows, and I'm not counting myself there.
I don't consider myself a genius.
I think I'm a good writer, but I think there are plenty of people who would have been releasing shows around now and been at that stage in their career who never got off the ground.
And I think that is no small part of why Hollywood is struggling so much at the moment, that they just sort of cut off a generation of talent the way that they did.
And I don't even consider myself within that.
I just wanted a job.
Right.
The people that do have a job that are there, do they feel that these are the best people?
No, I've gotten some pushback from people I know in the industry who've gotten who work.
And some people basically will tell you, you know, a TV writer's room was always like a political thing.
It wasn't about who wrote the best stuff.
It was about, you know, who got along the best with the, you know, gelled in the room, didn't cause friction.
And there's some truth to that.
But and I've also, some, and also I think some people, you know, I think film has been less affected.
It's still been very effective.
But overall, some movies still get made that are good, I guess, as part of it.
And there's a whole, there's only like one writer who you're hiring versus an entire crew.
can kind of, okay, you can hire, you can get a white guy who wrote the script.
But yeah, I think, I think Hollywood is suffering because I think they spent 10 years not both not following their audience.
You know, it took, I don't know, Yellowstone was on for a long time before they started making Yellowstone clones.
You know, it was like, like, like, you know, it's like, it's like, here's the most popular show in the country for half the country.
And we're just going to pretend that it doesn't exist.
I mean, they stopped.
Eventually, I think, I actually think Hollywood is in terms of this stuff improving now because I don't think they ever, because they never believed in anything.
You know, I think academia is the one that is like lost forever.
But so before we get into academia, let me just stay in Hollywood for a second.
So do you think so you don't think that the people that were in these rooms or making these decisions actually believed in any of it?
They were just doing it why to stay on what?
I think there are a few people who believed, but I don't think sort of the senior executives ever believed that this was like good.
I don't think that the most showrunners really thought, you know, I really just don't want to hire the best person for this job.
I think a lot of people were frustrated.
And I don't, and I think they've pivoted.
You know, again, I spoke to this showrunner recently who was basically like, we're back to 2012 rules, which is, you know, don't embarrass us with an all white male writer's room, but other than that, you can hire whoever you want.
So it is going back.
Yeah, I mean, they're not like going back to sort of, we don't care at all, but they're going back to, you know, I think we can all acknowledge we went too far with this and we just want, you know, to make some money again.
So what, you know, if you were, they were all white writers' rooms, that would imply that the people up at the top were white males as well.
Why did they just roll over or were they part of this?
I think both.
I think some of them sort of, some of them really were believers.
And, you know, the hypocrisy of fully pulling up the ladder behind you is something, you know, both interesting and, you know, it could be a case study and its own sort of indie movie.
But I think a lot of them felt very direct pressure.
And I think what was interesting about this whole moment is the pressure came both from the bottom and from the top, where from the bottom, you know, you don't want to get, you know, have some sort of Twitter threat in 2020 go viral about how racist you are because, you know, you're still only having, you know, white men in your writer's room.
But at the same time, there were literal mandates from the companies where, you know, unless you were maybe the most powerful writer in Hollywood, I'm not even, you, as a showrunner, had to have a room that was 50% diverse.
And if you're trying to hire senior writers and the pool for them, you know, is still primarily white men.
So you hire a couple of senior writers and you're left with you have to, everyone else who you hire has to not be a white man.
So I think some of them were believers.
And I think some of them, you know, people do what they have to do to, you know, make a living and get along.
And I don't think it was possible in a lot of these contexts for them to even say no.
It was just a total mandate.
I mean, you could quit.
I think that would have been a more respectable, you know, moral position.
But, you know, you wouldn't have worked.
It wouldn't have worked.
Yeah.
You know, but Seylevi, you know, you said, you know, they're pulling up the ladder.
I remember in De Tocqueville's book, Democracy in America, he says at some point, the rich or the powerful are going to be in a position and they will kick the door that they walked through.
They'll kick it closed behind them.
And that feels like what a lot of these people did.
I mean, we can go to the universities, but a lot of these elites, white men at universities, they kicked the door that you try to be a white professor, a white male professor now.
You're not going to get that job.
Yeah, I mean, they certainly did kick the door down after them.
And I think the big mistake that sort of everyone, you know, I don't think what I wrote about was like unknown, especially sort of among your audience and among more right-wing people.
Everyone knew this was happening.
But I think that the sort of interesting thing to think about that I don't think had been framed like this was just the cohort like type effect in term in terms of who was affected.
You know, you could say, I think it's not to say that there were no 50-year-old white guys who were affected or there were no 20-year-old white guys who were affected.
But I think, you know, specifically millennials, like we graduated college really believing that the world was trying to be a fair place.
Not, it's never a completely fair place, but that it was trying to be a fair place and people were basically going to be judged on who they were and the quality of their work.
And we got disabused of that very quickly.
But yeah, I think people, wait, wait, wait, but by what?
Because that was the argument from the left was it's not a fair place.
We're going to make it fair.
And it might not have been fair before they started, but it's so obviously unfair.
Now, I mean, whenever you say, you know, Martin Luther King was all about reconciliation, you can't have losers.
You have to reconcile all of this.
There's no reconciliation with this.
It was, we're going to punish you.
The only way to be not be a racist is to be a racist, you know, anti-racism.
I mean, which is nuts in its practice.
Yeah, I think the idea that the answer to past discrimination is present discrimination is just sort of perpetuating this cycle that will not end.
It does not end well.
And I think there was also, in some sense, a lot of stolen valor among people my generation who were not white men.
You know, if you're a white woman who graduated college in 2010, I don't think you ever faced real sexism in the workplace.
You did not grow up in the time of your mother.
Stolen Valor Among Generations00:06:57
You know, you were not like a woman in an office in the 1980s.
And the idea that that somehow was still the case in the 2010s was just so like patently false.
But everyone sort of was play acting at living in a different decade than the decade they were actually living in.
How did that happen?
I think it's tough.
I mean, part of me wanted to get into sort of the full origins of this, but it's hard to know exactly.
My sense is that there was a lot of disappointment after the first Obama term.
And, you know, race relations, gender relations had not been completely utopianly healed in America.
And I think that people went went crazy.
And I think the media drove cycle after cycle about this for almost a decade.
And it's hard when you're the CEO of one of these companies to say, you know, we're going to ignore it.
You know, think about how many people sort of got canceled in the 2010s for not real stuff.
It was just this hype cycle.
I think probably if you go into it, it was probably a combination of politics, technology, and media that made it take off so intensely without even, you know, because the interesting thing is there were no government mandates like mandating people.
Obviously, in fact, it's actually illegal to do this stuff.
But it all kind of swirled around to create this pressure, both from the bottom, from sort of like the generic Twitter user in 2015 and from the top, where you're like, the top, the people at the top didn't want to be called a racist or a misogynist.
So you ended up with converging on these pressures that kind of froze out younger white men.
So what do you think the fields are that are the worst that were hit by DEI?
So I wrote about in the article very specifically and in depth about media, academia, and Hollywood.
I think those, I wrote about those fields not because I think those were the only fields that were affected, but because they were the most relentless about cataloging what they were doing.
So, you know, every year there would be reports that told you what, how many new hires were of which gender and race, which makes it very easy to sort of go back and prove prove the case that you were making.
Now, I think it happened.
It obviously happened in almost every liberal field.
It happened in foundations.
It happened in advertising.
It happened in corporate America.
I think it happened in tech.
It happened in a lot of those to a lesser extent than it happened in media academia and Hollywood.
But I think it happened in any sort of liberal, and when I say liberal, I don't mean, you know, it could be in the heart of Texas, but if it's like a Fortune 500 company, they're still going to, you know, face those pressures.
It happened to anyone who sort of worked within liberal America, I think.
Are we done with it?
Has it peaked?
I think it's peaked.
I think there's still, there's still, I don't think we're done with it.
Every once in a while, you know, there's an article.
And I think the New York Times has gotten a lot better than it was four or five years ago.
But every once in a while, there's still an article that pretends it's 2019 again.
And you wonder if they're just sort of biding their time.
I think, like, for example, like a month ago, I saw an article about how there aren't enough cardiothoracic surgeons who are women.
And you read the article.
And basically, this is a specialty that requires people to be on call 70, 80 hours a week.
And most, you know, it also requires a high level of competence.
Most highly competent female doctors, I think, quite reasonably probably want a family and don't want to work 80 hours a week.
The idea that that could be the explanation for what for this gender gap just never came up in the article.
And I think that's sort of part, you know, my wife is a costume designer.
No one is ever like, we need to make this industry more male.
You know, it only ever goes, it only ever goes the other way.
I do think that academia, I get sent tips all the time.
Academia is still doing this in hiring.
They're doing it at a sort of lesser grade.
I think media has is in the process of self-correcting a little bit, you know, because it is like a sort of free market and eventually it catches up with you.
But I think academia is the one that like I'm not sure that they ever stop.
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So let me talk to you about people, let's say my age or look like me, I will hear them say, you know, when I was a kid, we just pull ourselves up.
It's different than it is now.
I mean, I believe in merit base.
I mean, I know.
I mean, my success was not given to me by any stretch of the imagination.
I mean, I'm the luckiest guy in the world.
I just happen to be at the right place at the right time and everything else.
And I worked hard as well.
But I don't know.
Is that, can you accomplish that?
You know, I mean, we're looking at, you know, kind of the Jim Crow laws, except not as bad and in reverse.
But when you, when you cap people and say, we're not going to hire these kinds of people, you can't break through on merit.
And so I look at people of your generation and say, you were sold absolute lies, absolute lies.
Then you go out and you find out that that's a lie and you can't, you can't break out.
Do you find that to be true or can you break out?
Is there any other way to get around this?
I think there, I mean, obviously there are ways to get around it.
I'm not the only, I'm not, there's not a single, there are white men my age who've made it in Hollywood or media or even academia.
I think that what happened, I mean, I think that what happened and what people, the illusion people are under is that actually they just the top 5% of white guys will still get through.
I don't think that's true.
Maybe 5% of white guys total will get through, but a lot of that, again, is luck and where you are at a point.
And I think that the issue as I see it is a lot of the more talented white men my age saw the, you know, if you were smarter than I was in 2016, you saw the writing on the wall and you didn't even try.
You just got into crypto or podcasting or something else.
And, you know, you're living probably a pretty good life and life is okay.
I think the issue, and I think you can and you should pull yourself up, you know, and you shouldn't wallow in your own self-complaint.
Sure, sure, sure, sure.
I think that what happened very specifically was that no one told us what that it would have been easier if there had been a quota.
If they had just announced in 2014, from now on, it's 7%.
And the rest of you like are out of luck.
We proceeded through this decade of our careers as if we had a chance.
And I think that that is the sort of true tragedy because you could have, you could have, you know, I could have gone into tech.
I could have gone into some other thing that provided a life for me and my family.
And I, you know, in the end of the article, I blame myself for not doing that because I think it was, you know, I knew what was happening and I didn't want to accept it.
And I think a lot of people feel the same way.
I think there are ways around it.
And I think you've seen a lot of ways around it that people who are smart and inventive have made.
It doesn't mean that it's good that it happened, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, I understand.
What I'm, I'm, I'm driving at is there's only two places to go from a point like this.
And a lot of people will say, you know, it's rigged against me.
I'm never going to make it.
Basically what we're hearing on the left, you know, for the last 15 years, it's rigged against me.
I'm never going to make it.
Everybody's going to hold me back.
I have no chance.
So you either then just go into depression land and you just become zero or you go dark and you start going towards, you know, I don't even know.
There's, it doesn't seem to be any real middle ground here.
I guess you go into like white power and, you know, I fight for the white man.
And it's like, no, wait, neither of those are, neither of those are good.
How do you solve this?
I think I'm not saying solve it for the institutions.
I'm saying for you, for the person that is your age that feels like I have, I'm being massively screwed.
How do you, how do you deal in that world?
I think, you know, I think it is a personal thing for sort of everyone.
Personally, the way I look at it is, you know, I have, I have two young sons who I love dearly.
And I think if I had made it in Hollywood in 2016, I'm not sure they would exist.
And I think my life would be in a lot of ways worse had, you know, so I think you have the life that you, where you are right now is where you are right now.
And you, and I think you can be angry about it, but I think I think you need to, I think the perspective of being able to say that this happened and I'm going to do my best to live my life like as a good person without being consumed by rage and to and to, you know, and you can fight against it and you can create alternate institutions.
You know, one of the critiques of the article that I read from the right that, you know, I find interesting, but I think is not quite right is, you know, who cares about these institutions anyway?
They're all just filled with, you know, rabid leftists.
We need to just create our own.
And I think that that's a valid reaction.
The issue is that it takes 20 years to, you know, even start to create new institutions.
And by then, I know you're past your career.
So I think, I don't know, it's hard to, I think that going forward, my hope, and I don't, I can't tell people how to feel individually, but my hope is that we just move past this in a way that feels fair.
You know, I think part of it is no one in this country at this point, not even not the left, not the right, no one thinks anything is fair anymore.
You know, the, and sort of dividing people up like this for the last 15 years has clearly not led to sort of good feeling towards our fellow citizens.
Right.
And I just, my hope is that, you know, we just start treating people as people and hiring them as such and acknowledging difference while not, you know, sort of harping on it in a way that is poisonous in the end.
But, you know, part of me is also pessimistic.
I'm not sure that that will happen.
Like, I don't, you know, that's my hope, but I sort of think this could just be going like a merry-go-round of this until, you know, I'm an old man, which I hope doesn't happen.
I hope my, I hope my kids grow up in a world that is, you know.
Well, usually, I mean, the world seems to, the world seems to be on a pendulum.
I mean, it always, it swings too far one way and then it comes back and it's, then it swings too far the other way.
I mean, you know, I just wish the swings weren't as rapid and we had more time in the middle.
But I unless someone grabs that pendulum by force and says, nope, this is the way we are, you know, and we become fascistic or authoritarian.
That's the, I think that's the real danger.
When you get out to these extremes, then you have people willing to say, it's not going anywhere.
It's staying just like this.
And that's, that's extremely frightening.
But if man is able to play out his worst instincts, as always happens, it'll, we will be in 40 years from now, we will be back at, you know, the absolute zenith of the individual.
Nobody else matters except the individual and forget the collective.
I mean, we just keep going back and forth like this.
I just worried about the swing because I'm worried that too many people are being left behind and being sold a load of goods that you can't make it.
You never will make it.
The system is so rigged against you.
Well, then if you believe that stuff, the only answer is to burn the system down because you're angry and resentful.
Yeah.
I mean, I think, I think that that's a real danger.
A Rigged System Left Behind00:02:19
And I don't, I don't quite know how to address it other than to say, you know, there are joys in life that like have nothing to do with your career or, you know, and you should try to find community however you can.
But again, it's a small consolation for people who really, you know, do feel in many cases legitimately iced out of, you know, what their capabilities are.
Well, speak to more of what you said a little while ago.
I mean, I, I could spend my life bitching, you know, if I wasn't a conservative, maybe a little smarter, but if I wasn't a conservative, I mean, I had contracts with Paramount Studios for movies and everything else until it became popular to start, you know, saying no to people like me.
And so a huge swath of the country was just ignored.
And so I had to go out and build my own thing.
And while that's not what I wanted to do, it's been a good life and it's been, you know, I've hopefully paved the road for others to be able to have access to, I mean, when I first started doing stuff online, Netflix was still doing movies.
And I built a network, I've been doing movies online in the mail.
You know what I mean?
And I built a network.
Now everybody's doing that.
When I started, everybody said that couldn't be done.
I didn't want to do that, but I did.
And so expand a little bit more on, you know, the fact that where you are, you are.
And it's not necessarily bad.
You don't always get what you want, but you get what you need.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I think life, I think life is filled with disappointments.
Like even if we lived in a perfect meritocratic world, you know, you'd still be disappointed in many ways with a lot of the way that your career goes or your life.
And I think, you know, again, for me personally, you know, I do, I do not like scalping tickets on the internet.
It is soulless.
Culture Shifting and Disappointment00:11:35
It is boring.
But it provides a life for my family that, you know, is a good enough life that makes us happy most of the time.
And there's like a, you know, there's an honor to that.
And the truth is, you know, it's not miserable.
And, you know, take joy in the things.
Are you exploring other ways to write?
I mean, you know, this article that I wrote, I mean, I think it would have been picked up a lot more if it wasn't calling out the power so much.
But I mean, let me read this.
JD Vance said, a lot of people think DEI's lame diversity seminars are racial slogans at NFL games.
In reality, it's a deliberate program of discrimination primarily against white men.
It's an incredible piece that describes the evil of DEI and its consequences.
I mean, I don't know how you feel about JD Vance, but I mean, it was read by a lot of people, your article.
You ought to be a writer.
You were a very successful writer on this article.
The response has been very gratifying and it's great.
And, you know, it's what you want out of a piece of writing is for people to hear you and to grapple with it.
I have been exploring more writing pathways.
What I'll say is that I've been contacted by a bunch of people.
No one in Hollywood has been like, maybe we should see what his scripts were all about.
Right.
But what do you write?
What kind of scripts do you write?
I wrote a bunch of hour-long drop TV pilots, dramas, a couple that were very good.
I did, I wrote a couple movies.
One I thought was bad, one I thought was very good.
There were a bunch of, you know, I love your artists.
You write scripts.
You know, you write some clunkers, you write some stuff that you think is actually really good.
Yeah, I think what I'll say, and one of Part of the issue, and this is what my critics from the left will say, is that this is a structural problem and it's a sinking ship in all these industries.
And you're, you know, sure women and people of color got more of these jobs, but it was just because it was the white men had fled because they knew it was a sinking ship.
No.
And what I'll say to that is I do think there are structural problems in media and Hollywood and academia, but part of those structural problems are because they didn't, A, follow the market to what people wanted to watch and read and hire the best people.
And I don't know what the world, I don't think that it would have solved, say, a Hollywood streaming problem or the decline of all newspapers that aren't the New York Times.
But it certainly would have, if they had given more, you know, talent and different voices, you know, different political voices that were not all identical.
I think, you know, like take the free press, like that within four years, that company went from nothing, you know, and it was just because there was a market need for that and no one was paying attention to it.
So were you a cons were you conservative?
Are you, I mean, I don't want to get into politics, but where were you when this started?
And have you moved?
You don't even have to tell me where this started, I was definitely, I was definitely a liberal.
I am not a liberal anymore.
My politics are honestly all over the place.
Like there are some things that I'm super conservative about.
There's some that I'm super liberal about.
And so in other words, you're human.
Yeah, no, I think, I think people, I think part of, you know, this is not part of the article, but part of the thing that I felt within my social milieu for the last decade is, you know, everyone pretended that they had to, that every political question had been agreed upon and that you were not allowed, that no one could disagree with sort of the New York Times' stance on anything.
And, you know, I think that among a lot, I would say that combined with this DEI stuff in my own career just broke me politically and just made me question everything from the, from, from the get-go.
There are more of you every day?
There are a lot.
I think people, people, people swing back and forth.
I think what I did sense is even among my old friends who sort of were liberal, true believers and still sort of are, is that they're not into it anymore in the way that they were a decade ago.
There's like an icing out that happened, even for people who held their noses and decided to vote for Kamala Harris.
I think there's no enthusiasm left among white men my age for the mainstream Democratic establishment.
How does that work?
I mean, because you must know people like you that are not married.
How is that working?
Because women have become much more progressive and men are going the opposite direction.
And how are many, now you get into a world where you're disgruntled, you don't have a job, you feel like every world's against you, and you don't have a woman that wants to spend their life with you.
Most of my friends at this point are married and have kids.
And I think there's nothing that makes you more like both, but there's something that makes you both care less about politics and be less sort of dogmatic than just having to deal with your kids every day.
Like you're tiger.
No, it's like, you know, I don't, I think, sorry, I, I lost my train of thought on the question, but I think people sort of have come around to the fact that not everyone agrees with them about everything.
And I think the more that that happens, the better for, for, um, for, for everyone.
I would agree with you.
You have, you said you had two sons, right?
Yeah.
How old are they?
They stopped three and a half and one and a half, and they stopped sleeping a month ago.
So if I'm, if I'm not quite articulate enough, it's, it's because of that.
Well, that's okay.
Uh, you stop when they stop sleeping, you stop sleeping.
And I guarantee you, you're not going to stop sleeping until they're both 20 and out of the house.
Um, uh, but enjoy every second of it, every second of it.
Um, do you think the culture is going to change or how do you prepare them to live in the world that you're seeing today?
I, I think the culture is changing.
I don't think that you're seeing the sort of most out there, uh, you know, like, like a like a friend of mine who's a black woman was on a TV writer on a show and she told me that this other writer, this white woman came up to her and told her that she wanted her, you know, she was trying to make sure her toddler sons like didn't grow up to be toxic white men.
And this woman was like, that is the craziest thing I ever heard.
They're, they're like innocent little children.
But I think you're seeing less of that.
I think you're seeing less of this sort of, you know, but I, you know, I just want them to grow up in a world in which, you know, they can, I'm more concerned about AI and all this other stuff for them and for the future than I am about this identity stuff.
I hope it will work itself out decently.
But and I'm more concerned about the fact that kids all have, you know, Chromebooks in California and kindergarten than I am with the maybe with what they're teaching.
I think that I can teach them, you know, what they need to know, but not if they're on their Chromebook all day.
Amen.
Go ahead.
Oh, so I just, I don't know.
My hope is that it works itself out at least that there's more room for like actual political difference and less identitarian issues as they as they grow up.
Because the truth is we live in a, you know, whether you like it or not, whether you think, you know, immigration should have been stopped in 1965 or 1925 or 1880, like we're all here and it has to work.
And the only way to make it work is to, you know, is to, is to work together as a, as a political entity to, to make it work.
Right.
Find value in each other.
I want to end with this.
Give advice to somebody that may be you at your lowest moment, whatever that moment was where you were like, I can't, whatever it was, describe that.
And then what would you say to yourself or somebody who's living in that moment right now?
It was my lowest moment.
I think there was a moment I was at a party and I was told that, you know, there were a couple of women who had gotten these TV jobs sort of purely by virtue of canceling this.
I'm not going to say names of canceling this other guy.
And it just made me, and I had been banging my head against the wall to try to get a job for five or six years at that point.
And I was just super upset.
I think what I would tell myself is to pivot.
I would tell myself to stop, you know, if you're banging your head against the wall that much, if it makes you that upset, like find something that doesn't.
You can still be upset about the sort of general socio-political environment, but stop banging your, there's no, there's no reason, stop banging your head against the wall and find some other path that lets you either be creative or financially successful.
Pivot to Find New Paths00:00:36
Think outside the box of what you think your path should be.
I guess that would be my advice.
Great advice.
Jacob, thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thanks so much for having me.
I appreciate it.
You bet.
You too.
You bet.
Thank you.
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