Bridget Phetasy exposes LA’s $4,000 tax penalty on artists despite earning under $300K, calling it "legalized mafia tactics," while Joe Rogan contrasts California’s 14% state tax with Nevada’s zero rate. They critique cultural shifts—like Drag Queen Story Hour’s evolution and surrogacy ethics—debate UBI’s mixed effects (e.g., Stockton’s 50% drop in child malnutrition), and question mainstream media’s silence on disasters like East Palestine’s toxic derailment. Rogan’s podcast grew $278K last month, but he rejects metrics, favoring organic content over adaptation. The episode blends sharp social commentary with speculative history, like the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, suggesting humanity may have lost ancient technological knowledge, and ends by advocating humor, creativity, and resilience over culture-war bitterness. [Automatically generated summary]
Like, I think you pull your head out of your butt, like, in different waves.
So I feel like I just came to a bit and I'm like, what's going on with my business?
I ended up having to pay this ridiculous, I can't even get into it because I'll burn the whole thing down.
But it was a ridiculous tax that you're generally exempt from if you file by a date, which why do you even have this rule that punishes small businesses who are usually drowning and it's easy to miss this stupid arbitrary date?
And so the city of LA came after me, and they basically shook me down for like $4,000.
And I was like, this shit keeps me up at night, Joe.
Why we thought we were filing for that exemption in time.
And it might be because they were sending me, because before I incorporated, I was just self-employed.
And so I had to file as a self-employed worker.
They kept sending me a little card to renew my license, but it was to me personally.
So he very well could have thought that we were renewing it, but it wasn't for the corporation.
It was for me personally.
It's like such a...
God.
I can't.
I'm not a rich person.
And it's money that could go.
I was saying to my husband, I'd rather go give that $4,000 to a homeless person under the freaking highway than the city of LA, which is just going to set it on fire.
I never blame the people who are just enforcing these ridiculous laws.
And I was like, is there anything I can do?
And she said, well, you might be able to apply for an exemption on your penalties.
You get a one-time kind of exemption.
And I was like, what about all of the taxes which I would be exempt from?
And she's like, there's absolutely nothing you can do.
It's like once it's set in stone.
I'm like, how is anyone doing this as a small business?
Because anyone who has a small business knows you're always...
Particularly when you're not making millions of dollars and have lots of people doing this stuff for you, you're always trying to just keep up with all of the things that you have to manage.
Well, it's so different than any other business, like running a state.
Because any other business, you would say, well, where are our necessary expenses?
We need to pare them down.
We need to figure out, like, what makes things profitable, what's necessary, what's not.
And with bureaucracy, they don't do that.
Instead, they have so many people, we need to figure out new ways to suck money out of these poor people that are stuck, rooted, literally rooted in this state.
So one time I lost a shoe when I was in Vegas and I went down to the...
I forget where we were staying.
It was one of the big hotels on the Strip.
And I went down to Lost and Found to see if they had it.
And this place was like...
It was insane.
There were just lockers, and it was a little old woman with this huge, giant ledger that looked like something out of a movie.
And I went in there, I was like, oh my god, what's the craziest thing anyone has ever left here?
And she didn't even hesitate.
She said, "Someone left their prosthetic leg for three days." For three days they're hopping around on crutches going, "What did I do with it?" Amazing.
It's like having a physical thing is nice and turning pages is nice, but there's no, like, especially if you're traveling, there's no better thing than a Kindle.
But isn't that what they're trying to do now with, like, obese kids?
Recently it came out, they're like, you can get surgery for these kids who are under 12, 12 years old, and it's like, or tell them to go get their fat asses outside and play!
It is dangerous, but it's also a sign of being captured by an industry.
There's an industry that relies on human beings and their illnesses in order to generate vast amounts of wealth.
And that's what they're doing.
They're further feeding this.
And this industry was propped up during COVID in a massive way.
The amount of money generated during COVID for the pharmaceutical industry was fucking tremendous.
And so when they're trying to figure out new ways to...
You know, expand their income.
This is a way to expand their income.
Look at all these obese people that were, you know, unnaturally or, you know, disproportionately affected by COVID. Why don't we figure out a way to fix them with drugs and then we can sell them the drugs?
And that's what they're doing.
Or sell them the surgeries or sell them the Treatments.
And the treatment is don't eat fucking horrible things.
I think these guys are really truly, and I did see this even when I was with the wealthy guy referenced earlier, just you get so used to getting whatever you want and never hearing no, it like damages your brain.
It's not good to never hear no in your life, even as a child and even as an adult.
You know, you have to, there need to be, when was the last time you heard no, Joe?
It doesn't bother me the way it bothers some people.
Because I feel like...
I mean, it depends on who the guy...
Like...
You know, if you're dealing with some sort of a situation where you feel like that person's being forced to do things or being exploited or, you know...
No, I was thinking about this, and I don't know why 19 is different for me than 23. It was like he was kind of bordering on Dirty Old Man, and I feel like 19 tips you into Dirty Old Man and that age gap.
And I was saying to my editor, I'm like, I don't know, there was just always this moment When I was with guys who were that much older than me, when I distinctly remember it, when I noticed the elasticity of their skin or the lack thereof.
It was like this weird thing where I was like, what am I doing?
It's something, no matter how much money and how handsome and how successful they were, there was just something where I'd be like, and maybe it's just me, but I was in my prime.
I'm not in my prime anymore.
But when I was, everything was taught.
When a woman's in her prime, it's so fun.
It's just such a fun time to be a woman, especially in the West.
Yeah, it's very tricky because also working in an office all day doing a job you hate, being exhausted at the end of the day and being drained and making very little money is also not a path you want to go down, but that's a traditional path.
And obviously it has nothing to do with the way you look and your pictures on Instagram.
It's not like you're a sex object that's generating you this money.
But if you're a woman that is—if you're any person that's doing a job that you hate and it's incredibly time-consuming and taxes you emotionally, you're there all day, you're working in this very bizarre power structure where you have to adhere to certain social rules and regulations, and it's your whole life because it's most of your day.
You can't be an intellectual and you can't show your boobs.
You can be both.
And a lot of men have pushed back and said, well, boobs are a sexual thing.
It's not the same as men.
And that's a whole other discussion.
I I still I think there was a moment where I was doing a little bit of both like boobs online and waiting tables and there was something waiting tables was soul-crushing in a different way but I didn't feel there was something you wouldn't didn't feel exploited It wasn't...
I would be guilty of self-exploitation.
Right.
If that's even a thing, which feels like a weird thing.
And I don't feel like I was necessarily exploiting myself.
But then when I saw...
I don't know.
You know, my husband and I were just talking about this.
We started a podcast called Factory Settings.
And we were just having a discussion about porn.
And I was like, every time I look at porn, I feel...
There's something in me that I feel, it's like going to Vegas.
I feel like my soul gets a little bit sick or something.
I can't explain it.
It's just a feeling.
And I feel like on the other side of that, even if I was like, oh, this is just tasteful nudes, there's still random guys jerking off to that out there.
It's like I'm so thinking about all of this because I'm trying to write a book and it's all about like I don't know how to explain my life to my daughter and how do I have conversations with her about sex and love and marriage.
And this in particular is I don't think.
And then I wrote that piece that I regret being a slut and got a lot of pushback from people.
I think a lot about this because there seems to be kind of a pornification of everything.
So I don't know if it's an overcorrection.
One of the things I did push back against when I was posting nudes online was this kind of Puritan ideal that we have about sex and particularly like a woman's sexuality.
And I think there's been a lot of progress in that department, but it is now an overcorrection because there's this idea of luxury beliefs.
Rob Henderson writes a lot about this.
It's brilliant.
And when I interviewed the Women's Liberation Front, when they came on my podcast, they were talking about We look at what people who consider themselves allies do with their own kids as opposed to what they say.
So I think it's very easy to be like, sex work is work.
So when you sit in your mansion and say, yeah, let's let men self-ID into women's prisons, that affects a population of women that you don't really give a shit about or have to worry about.
That's the wildest shit that's going on with the transgender movement, this idea that you can murder women, be self-identified as a woman, and then you don't have to even take hormones, you get erections, you have sex with women in prison.
I think Constantine had a really funny tweet about that where he's like, I would like someone to do a study on how many people experience gender dysphoria in the courtroom when they're being sentenced.
Yeah, I think people who are voting for these, in particular in California, you're seeing so many of these policies get put into law and they're going to have long-term effects.
And Abigail Schreier just did a whole long-form article on...
Where was that?
She just was writing about how they've kind of decriminalized prostitution, basically.
So they've made it harder...
for the police to, if they see something, a young girl who looks like she might be pimped, to actually intervene and stop.
And she, in her article, is like, who is this even helping in this law?
But again, she mentions this in her article, it generally hurts poor women who don't really have a voice, these laws.
So, And this is this idea of luxury beliefs.
You can afford to have this belief because it's not really going to affect you or your daughter.
As the women from Women's Liberation Front said, are these women who are out there saying, sex work is work, yes queen, go do it, are they encouraging their daughters to go into sex work?
No.
They're encouraging them to go to USC and become a filmmaker.
There's a I see a lot of that with older liberal women that have children that have these views on things like I saw that with children or don't have children.
I'm at like you see I've seen some of those arguments about drag queen shows for kids like family friendly drag queen shows, which is a very bizarre thing.
It's very bizarre that that's not a singular event.
There's a lot of that going around.
And I've seen this argument where people are saying like, You know, I would want my, you know, child to grow up and know that you can express yourself in any way possible.
Okay, well, how would you feel about family-friendly strip shows?
Where you have biological women that are sticking their ass out and put a dollar in their G-string, Billy.
You know, like, you would be weirded out by that, right?
Well, it's not much different because it's sexualized.
Like, a drag queen show, in a lot of ways, is sexualized.
And so you're sexualizing this idea of these men.
Many of them have autogynephilia.
They get a sexual kink out of dressing up as women.
And then they're doing that in front of children.
And then the children are...
It's one thing to say, hey, they should be able to do whatever they want.
People love drag queen shows.
You should definitely be able to do that if you're a grown man.
But it's another thing to say, let's take children to see this and encourage this and also encourage these children to participate and to go and give them money.
I've seen these drag queen shows where there's a woman, a trans woman or a drag, I don't know how they identify, but with a g-string and high heels with stars covering their nipples and they have giant fake tits and they're holding hands with this little child.
And everyone's cheering.
And they're walking a little child around and showing them how to twerk.
And I'm like, this is fucking wild.
Because it's only sexual.
So you're sexualizing this in front of these children, which is very weird.
There's just been a lot of, you know, a lot of the far right people, the far right.
A lot of, you know, Christians were protesting against this.
They find it offensive and libs of TikTok will, you know, find these videos and post it.
And the thing is, it's like it's not one.
It's not just one instance where some wacky community thought it was cool to do this.
It's like, why is this happening and why was this never happening before?
Is this a side effect of openness and tolerance where because we're more open-minded towards people that are trans or drag queens or what have you and that there's going to be some outer limits of this push?
I think it's always interesting because it's easy to cherry pick one or two things.
And like you said, there's many instances of this.
And I've seen them and I don't understand bringing your child to something like this.
I don't know how, like, common that is.
Or if it's a cherry-picked instance that now gets picked up by everybody as kind of chum and passed around and it's something that happened once and now it seems like, oh, everyone's doing this.
Drag Queen Story Hour started in 2015 in San Francisco, was created by Michelle T, T-E-A, then the executive director of the non-profit Radar Productions, non-profit, LOL. The first events were organized by Julian Delgado Lopera and Virgie Tovar.
T, who identifies as queer, came up with the idea after attending children's library events with her newborn son and finding them welcoming but heteronormative.
She imagined an event that was more inclusive and affirming to the LBGTQ families.
Okay.
First event was held at the Eureka Valley Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library, LBGT Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and featured drag queen Persia as well and was well received by that community, I guess.
And Other DSH events in San Francisco featured several drag queens of color, including Honey Mahogany, Yves Saint Croissant, and Panda Dolce.
As of February 2020, there are 50-plus official chapters of DSH. Spread internationally as well as other drag artists, holding events at libraries, schools, bookstores, and museums.
October 2022, a non-profit organization officially changed its name to Drag Story Hour to be more inclusive and reflect the diverse cast of storytellers.
I think even Sarah Silverman did, like, a whole video about this, but she was saying, what's the difference between, like, a drag queen and a clown reading to your kids?
If you're part of an LBGT family and, you know, your kids are only used to seeing a traditional father-mother relationship and, you know, they have two moms or they have two dads.
Yeah.
That could be fucking weird and this would be like a nice little thing to make them feel comforted.
Like it makes them feel like there's other communities other than these traditional, you know, communities that have been depicted in the media for decades and decades.
But I mean, I guess this is the conservative kind of slippery slope argument for like gay marriage is, oh, when you start normalizing things like drag queen story hour, then you have drag queen...
Strip club hour for the kids and now you have, you know, degeneracy.
Yeah, but that argument against gay marriage is preposterous.
It doesn't make any sense because what percentage of people that are involved in a gay marriage or adopted or surrogate children that come along with that are involved in these things?
It's probably a tiny amount.
But the problem with something like libs of TikTok, not even the problem with them, but the problem with the internet in general, is that you have literally billions of people.
And out of those people, hundreds of billions of posting things.
And out of those hundreds of millions, you're going to get thousands of things that some people are going to find questionable.
But what percentage of that exists in your community?
Very, very few.
But the problem is when you broadcast that and then put it online, then it sort of becomes a thing that exists out there in, you know, the zeitgeist.
The person who's broadcasting it, there's a person who's putting it out there the first time, but what really gets it in the zeitgeist is when you use it as a flashpoint for the culture wars.
So suddenly now all of conservative media has a video and it's like chum in the water.
So you're just feeding and both sides do this.
You know, you can cherry pick some right wing chud and be like, this is representative of all the right wing chuds.
Sure.
I feel like this is the downfall, why things like your podcast and podcasts in general are good, because you actually get to tease apart some of these things instead of it just being like, this is representative of every liberal that you know.
The one good thing is, well, one of the things that I've learned as I've gone down this rabbit hole is that in most states, many states, you have to have at least had a child before.
So it's not totally like, how can you consent to something that you don't know?
How can you consent to giving up a child if you've never had a child?
So I think usually there's a law in place that you have to have had a child.
And look, I've heard many stories of like, oh, a friend had cancer and I had the baby for her.
And people are like, if it's the free market, if a gay couple wants to get an egg from somewhere and then they want to have a mother incubate that egg, what's the problem?
But I'm like, yeah, but there's a third individual that In this free market transaction, which is a child.
And that's where I've become very like, okay, but what about the kid?
But they still have to, they still have some kind of They don't have any say in the matter, but I guess I just have an issue talking about kids as if they're like a commodity.
Yeah, and I definitely have the, like, women in me issue of using women for their parts.
And again, I know these women have consented and all this stuff, but it's still...
It's still questionable to me because you're using all these women for their parts and then the women is kind of like a race.
Like, you see these pictures of men in hospital beds with their baby that they got the egg from someone and they used the body of some other woman and there's no fucking women in the picture.
Right, but if a gay couple hires a surrogate and they want to take a photo together with the baby and you see that, you're only seeing, like, one little tiny snapshot of a moment where this gay couple has this child together.
I mean, that's, again, just me probably cherry-picking one thing that I see on social media, and it tickles my, like, bias, and I'm like...
Fuck this.
But then once you go down the rabbit hole and look at how women in Ukraine, particularly, like, again, poor women are exploited in this industry badly.
And it is an industry that is rife for exploitation.
And then if you talk about the slippery slope, did you see that whole article about the woman who posited using brain dead women to incubate She's like some researcher and she put this out there that brain dead women could be used to basically gestate babies.
There's so much of this stuff, but again, that brings me to the point, so you can just take a baby away from the mom and then be like, see ya, once they're born?
There was a thing on the CBC... And it was talking about the word freedom and that the word freedom is being used many times by far-right activists.
Freedom.
Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie, because this is so fucking...
Canada is so fucking wild right now.
It's such a really crazy place.
Here it is.
Why the word freedom is such a useful rallying cry for protesters.
The word has become common amongst far-right groups.
So by putting that far-right in there, far-right, there's no indication whatsoever that those truckers in Canada were far-right.
A lot of those are working-class people that just did not like the idea that they were being forced to do this medical procedure in order to keep their job.
And so they label them as far-right.
Trudeau personally labeled them as racists and misogynists.
Just so he could disparage them.
Just so whatever they say doesn't mean anything.
So this is what they're doing here.
The term freedom, which is one of the most basic tenets for human rights, your liberty as a human being, your ability to express yourself, your ability to talk about things, to protest, to do what you want.
They're setting you up for this idea that you requesting freedom, it's like it puts you in the category of anti-vaxxers or racists or far-right people.
It's just these weird ways that mainstream media has fallen into labeling people in order to Pass an agenda and to put this narrative out there.
But the fact that they're willing to do it with something that is so important, like freedom.
And the pile of bullshit is you must give up your freedom in order for others to be equal.
You must give up your freedom in order for society to function in the proper way.
You must give up your freedom in order for things to be equitable and inclusive and fair.
And it's horseshit.
And it's a mindfuck.
And it's a mindfuck that you hear coming out of the WEF and Trudeau echoes it and they say the right words and Use the right phrases.
And at the end of the day, what's happening is you're going to lose your ability to protest.
You're going to lose your ability to express yourself.
You're going to lose your ability to have your say when things start moving in this general direction towards the centralized government being able to control various aspects of your life.
One of the things that we found out during this protest, the trucker protest, was they froze their fucking bank accounts.
And the people that are pushing for redistribution of wealth and universal basic income, if they can say that you shouldn't be forced to work and that your needs should be met by a society that has exorbitant wealth and that the way to have a more equitable society is to have these people with exorbitant wealth that,
you know, they got this wealth by exploiting the middle class and the lower class and that should be redistributed That's that's where it becomes an issue because that's all being that that narrative is being pushed by the left Almost entirely and that's one of the ways that you could say like if you wanted to reinforce the idea that you know not working hard and not struggling and really like putting in an immense amount of effort in order to succeed and you know pushing this idea this capitalist narrative that you
know that all that stuff is in fact negative And that all that stuff is, in fact, connected to the far right, connected to people that want to suppress other people's rights and take away a woman's right to choose and, you know, all these other different things.
You could do that far easier by promoting that idea to the left.
I mean, the overall net positive that it's like, if you can find something that has an overall net positive, that seems like that should be talked about on television and we should talk about trying to figure out other ways to implement that in society.
Depending on where you're born, the neighborhood you live in, the family you're from, and the idea that we can't have a way to sort of balance it out.
It just becomes a point in like at what time are you going to stifle people's desire to improve their position because you're going to take away money and de-incentivize people from being successful?
Yeah, and I think there's got to be some middle ground.
We have social safety nets in America.
And I don't think people...
I mean, you know enough comedians who are like one freaking injury away from financial ruin.
I don't think that...
Like, our health care in this country is a disaster.
And it's been my second largest expense after rent for...
Decades, always.
And now I have a child.
And even having a child and then seeing just the kind of lack of support that there actually is, you know, you get maybe six weeks and then you're supposed to put your kid in daycare or go back to work when you're just, you're barely done.
So I feel like there has to be, there's got, I don't want to be so cynical that I'm like, oh, well, I guess it's like...
We either have this free capitalist society where clearly that will just only try and make money for money's sake and a lot of people do end up getting left behind or we have this free handouts for everyone and people aren't incentivized to go be small business owners or take risks or go start their own thing and pull themselves up.
I think you and I shared that I didn't have the ideal background, and I didn't go to college, and I pulled myself up and made my own way and overcame addiction.
So I have a lot of empathy, but I also am like, hey, get your shit together.
I know it's possible to pull yourself up and make something of yourself.
You know, when you're stuck in survival, that's why I think something like universal basic income or something like the minimum that you can give people, if it can lift you out of...
Going from surviving to thriving is something that my therapist and I have talked about for years, but that's a very hard transition to make.
When you've been in survival mode forever, you're just...
How do you even envision a different life if you've only known that hustle and you're...
You feel like you're drowning.
And I know how...
And pretty average middle...
I just know how it feels to feel like you're finally making headway and then you get hit with a tax bill from the city of Los Angeles or you get hit with a car repair or somebody in your family gets injured and now suddenly you are back to where you started.
It's so hard to get ahead.
So, yeah, there's got to be there's so many people who are struggling and the cost of living is fucking insane right now.
Financial literacy for sure, but also telling people like what you can do in terms of improving your position in life.
And also that's one of the things that drives me nuts about this idea that there's nothing positive about being healthy and being in shape because having more energy will allow you to be more productive and being healthier will allow you to think clear.
And so then it gets back to the cost of food, food deserts, and the prevalence of fast food.
We should really have a conversation about the prevalence of fat food.
Fast food.
It should be fat food.
It's really what it is.
When people have a small amount of money and the best way to get calories is to eat at these places, they give you things that are literally going to lead to disease.
The problem, too, that I have with the media ecosphere right now, which is vast, Is that in the vacuum of information, there's only left conspiracy theories.
And people are trying to fill that and say, here's what they're not telling you for, like, clicks.
Avian, this is 2023, January 11th, avian influenza outbreak reduced egg production.
So highly pathogen avian influenza.
Click on that link, please.
So scroll down, scroll down so I can read that.
Highly pathogenic avian influenza, a disease infecting birds and poultry, struck egg-laying hens throughout 2022.
As a result of recurrent outbreaks, U.S. egg inventories were 29% lower in the final week of December 2022 than at the beginning of the year.
By the end of December, more than 43 million egg-laying hens were lost to the disease itself or to depopulation since the outbreak began in February 2022.
Losses were spread across two waves from February to June, 30.7 million hens, and then from September to December, 12.6 million hens.
On constrained supplies, wholesale egg prices, the prices retailers pay to producers were elevated throughout the year.
The HPAI reoccurrences in the fall further constrained egg inventories that had not recovered from the spring wave.
So yeah, seems like you're right.
So that could be it.
That might be exactly it.
But that's a part of the problem with factory farming.
You know, when you have factory farming, like all of these things like the swine flu and the avian flu, those come out of factory farming.
Those come out of those horrible settings where you have these animals crammed in together in unsanitary conditions.
But then I heard from some farmer who was saying that it was actually the grocery stores.
They were just taking advantage of the fact that the supply was low and they weren't passing that off onto the farmers.
They were just jacking up the rates.
So, I don't know.
I'm not smart.
I try to keep track of these.
It's like I've been trying to follow this Ohio train derailment, which, by the way, it was infuriating to me because we have an administration that is constantly threatening us with climate change disaster.
Trains, Hazardous Waste, and East Palestine00:15:39
I mean, I guess the cynic in me would say that it's because the railroad is owned by companies that advertise on CNN. Also, the administration, and I'm not an expert on this at all, I was reading about how they busted a union.
So the union was fighting for something and then basically they busted the union fight for more days off.
And then this occurred after one of the rail workers was saying something like this was bound to happen because they're all sick and overworked.
And this was actually like the Biden administration.
We just heard from Pete, Secretary Pete, today about it.
Do you know that he gave a speech the other day about how there's too many white people working in construction sites?
Where these construction sites are set up in these communities where the people in the community could benefit from it, which shows a profound lack of understanding of skilled labor.
Because if you're talking about people that are carpenters and people that are plumbers and people that are electricians and people that are framers and roofers, That's skilled labor.
You have to hire people that are really good at that.
And if they don't exist in that community, you have to hire them from outside that community.
That's why those unions are important.
That's why it's important that...
Look, if you see what happens when you have unskilled labor and unskilled people working on buildings, you have fucking disasters.
I mean, there are people that have derailed trains on purpose.
So the fact that that's a vulnerability, and the fact that you're transporting hazardous waste On these trains.
Now, I don't know if they have to take additional precautions due to traveling with hazardous waste and whether or not those precautions were or were not taken.
That's what I'm hearing about this case, is that this is something that they were trying to cut money by transporting these things that are hazardous waste in a way that perhaps maybe they shouldn't have been transported that way, or maybe the regulation should be different.
He's actually taking what the APA is releasing and he's trying to make sense of it.
And he's like, why am I the person who's doing this?
Why am I the person who's asking these questions?
Because what he mentions is, when you look at the manifest of the chemicals that were on there, what we're looking at is they're doing what's in the air, but also he was saying there was petroleum, so we're talking about an oil spill too, but no one's talking about that.
So let's talk about the trail derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
East Palestine is about an hour north of Pittsburgh, almost halfway to Cleveland.
Norfolk Southern has a rail line that goes right through town, and this derailment happened right on the edge outside of town on the border of PA and Ohio.
Of the cars that crashed, five of them contained vinyl chloride.
It's a monomer used to make PVC. The reporting on this has gotten vinyl chloride confused with polyvinyl chloride, the polymer made out of vinyl chloride.
Now the reason that this distinction is really important is vinyl chloride is very hazardous and very flammable.
Polyvinyl chloride is a plastic that's used in like everything.
The other thing about vinyl chloride is that it boils at 8 degrees Fahrenheit, so it's shipped in its liquid form.
Meaning that when these trains crashed and these started leaking, they weren't just leaking liquid, but they were spewing boiling gas.
So vinyl chloride is really toxic.
OSHA has the permissible limit of how much you can be exposed to it during an 8-hour shift as a 1 ppm part per million, average over 8 hours.
So prior to this the biggest spill of this chemical was in New Jersey where one train car and about 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride were spilled but it didn't catch on fire.
Now this crash in Ohio has five train cars.
These kinds of tanker cars can carry between 25 and 33,000 gallons.
Let's call it 250 to 250,000 pounds of vinyl chloride.
That's per train car, five train cars.
There's maybe a million pounds of this toxic chemical spilling into the ground and also boiling off into the air.
But then it caught on fire.
I think this is where the reporting is really bad because no one is mentioning what the byproduct of vinyl chloride burning is.
Of the many byproducts of burning vinyl chloride, one of them is hydrogen chloride.
Hydrogen chloride is really unstable and latches onto water, like just water vapor in the atmosphere, and that turns into hydrochloric acid.
So right now, government officials, officials from the railroad, both the governor of Pennsylvania and Ohio are calling burning off the million pounds of this stuff a success.
But not mentioning that it means that we have hundreds of thousands of pounds of acid in the air?
Potentially.
Now ever since engineering school I've studied a lot of industrial accidents.
I just find it really fascinating and organizations like the Chemical Safety Board, NTSB, and OSHA all have like really good reports available to the public.
I think as a designer it's really good to learn about mistakes.
When looking at these kinds of industrial disasters across time there are a couple things that are pretty universal across all of them.
One, the responsible party in this case, Norfolk Southern Railway, always plays down the reality of the situation.
Politicians also just repeat the same lines.
And then news outlets just repeat the same.
So all we're hearing is the responsible party's word.
Okay, he says, Joe Donatelli says, okay, let's do this again.
We reported from East Palestine yesterday.
We're doing more today.
Brief aside, I keep hearing from people, how come nobody is covering this story?
Many local news outlets are, and they're doing a good job.
What I think people are really saying is the cable network I watch isn't covering it, or it's not on a national newspaper's homepage, Or my social feed, all may be true.
But to say it's not being covered is wrong if you know how to Google.
If someone found where they're transporting these...
Hazardous chemicals and they decided to derail purposely.
We're fucked.
And the fact that this is how they transport these things on these unmonitored like steel bands where a train going at high speed is vulnerable for derailment.
There's a whole situation around the brakes that the trains use, and they're trying to upgrade to another certain kind of brakes that I was reading about, and this is part of the whole...
It's like when something like this happens, I'm like, I am so oblivious to the things that make this country work.
I start going down the rabbit hole like, I know nothing about the union.
I know nothing about these chemicals.
Where do these chemicals even come from?
I know nothing about the railroad.
Apparently...
These companies are owned by big corporations who are like the evil corporations behind everything because that's just the conglomeration that we live in.
This kind of stuff makes me more left.
This is when my lefty really comes out.
Some things do need to be regulated.
We can't just have an unregulated society where you can just...
Somebody did a video about how I believe there's something about this that was regulated during the Obama era, and then I think it was Trump who deregulated it, deregulated some aspect of this.
I wish I could remember things and have that steel trap memory for when you go down a rabbit hole at 1 in the morning and you're reading everything you can about it.
We really don't know the impact, and they're going to hide it.
They're going to pretend it's not as bad as it is.
There's no way they're going to give you a 100% accurate assessment of all the environmental damage that's being done to all these people, all the health consequences.
And that was one of the articles that I read that was talking about young women and how many young women voted exclusively Democrat and will continue to do so no matter what.
I wonder, too, like I was thinking about it for myself, why whenever I get something wrong like that, which is all the time, I wonder, you know, I look at my own bias and kind of echo chamber and what I'm listening to and...
I just think because I was in California and the lockdowns were so stringent and I disagreed with generally the way that it was handled, I underestimated the tolerance that most people had for the lockdowns that they experienced in their state.
So I thought it would be a much bigger response.
Like in Michigan, they had a lot of stringent lockdowns and it was very blue.
So I guess that's one area where I've learned of like I'm applying my own...
Lack of tolerance for these lockdowns and seeing how harsh it was on the kids and on small businesses and I'm applying it to everyone but a lot of people think that they did the best they could with the information that they were given and that it was handled they were okay with with the lockdown well I think if the vote came during the lockdown things would be very different but people have very short memories and once things are back open like I have friends in California that we're talking about moving out of California and they're like well You know,
things are kind of almost back to normal now, so I think I'm going to stay.
So there's a lot of that where people think, you know, better this than having some fascist Republican run things and take away abortion rights and take away this and that.
So I think that's part of it is that most things have kind of gone back to normal and people do have short memories.
And once they're working again, And once the wheels of society start turning again, they kind of forget about how bad it was in 2020 when everything was just fully locked down and all these businesses went under and 70% of LA restaurants.
People were worried about, like, don't California my Texas.
But when you actually poll the people who moved to Texas from states like California, they tend to vote more red because they're like, we know what this leads to.
And if they were personally affected by it, it's varying degrees of whether or not you're going to act or do something about it or whether you're just going to stick with your ideology.
Yeah, and I wonder, too, if there was no real red wave because a lot of the people who might have voted red in these places left those places and went somewhere red.
You know, I'm not I'm not I'm not anywhere near that level.
I do think with mail in ballots in particular, there is and like ballot harvesting being allowed.
That seems like a weird thing to me.
The mail in ballots.
I think it's like I'm torn about it.
On the one hand, I'm glad that people who it might be their elderly, it might be hard for them to get to the Polls that they can vote, but on the other hand, I think there's so much room for fuckery.
You're hearing rumblings of that now with the upcoming future presidential elections.
You're seeing some pretty staunch Republicans that are saying we need a sensible person that can do eight years, which is a thing saying that we don't want Trump.
I read a long-form New Yorker article that profiled him, and I feel like it was meant to be disparaging, but it didn't seem like they could come up with that much.
It was like, oh, he worked really hard in college and didn't like talking to people.
But wouldn't it benefit him if he became the vice president and Trump was successful and he would be the balanced, reasonable person and then it would set him up in 2028?
I think there's a massive benefit in Elon Musk owning Twitter.
I really believe that.
I believe if we're going to get a balanced perspective, having someone own Twitter who's not going to allow one individual narrative to be broadcast only.
I joke all the time, because on YouTube, we were like, it's such a struggle with Dumpster Fire, and I never know if it's something that we're saying on Dumpster Fire, because we don't hold back and censor at all.
But I was like, it could just be that we suck at YouTube.
Yeah, he had something interesting to say on the last one about that.
And because we kind of fall under like a news show-ish, even though we're joking about the news, I think Dumpster Fire would get caught in those levels that he just talks about.
And your take on things is humorous, and you're making fun of the powers that be, and you're not a mainstream.
Yeah, and yourselves.
But I mean, it's humor.
It used to be that those things could get magnified and that people would get recommended them and that you'd grow and you'd be on the positive side of the algorithm.
And now it seems like all those independent shows get stuck.
Any independent covering of news gets stuck in this...
When you look at what the ratios are, the number of comments that we get on a video, just from what we've studied about ratios of comments to how many views something has, we should have hundreds of thousands of views based on just how many comments we'll have on something.
It doesn't seem like it gets pushed.
We were doing really well.
We were like cruising along getting a couple thousand subscribers every month on YouTube.
And then it was like, I don't know what trip wire we hit, but it took us a year to get a thousand more subscribers.
And then only after I came on after the last time here did we get like 4,000 more and then we've just been...
Flat ever since.
So we hit some weird...
We just keep hitting...
It's so weird to being in this space because...
It's hard not to be...
I am a very much like take full responsibility person.
So I like plateaus.
I've talked to Constantine about this.
They're good because you can look at what can we do better?
What can we improve?
What can we streamline?
The show that we've been making is we treat it like a show for television.
We need to treat it like a show for YouTube so that we can...
Yeah, and I don't want to have to spend a lot of time thinking about that.
I have found my substacks growing, which is awesome.
I'm a writer.
I love it.
That's where Jaren and I started Factory Settings, a podcast, which is so fun.
We basically sit down and we talk about media bias and our own biases, but it's just fun because we feel like we just turned date night into a podcast because we can't have a date anymore now that we have a child.
And we'll just pick a topic like this today's was love and romance.
And then we just talk about like our factory settings, you know, our default kind, whatever was kind of put into our brain, whether it was from media or family and people like the comments.
It's it's so inspiring.
And I love it.
It really makes people think about their own.
We've done it on addiction.
We've done it on willingness on gratitude.
We just like pick a word and then discuss it.
That's been getting just so much nice feedback, and I feel like it makes people think about their own stuff.
And men seem to really respond.
Jaron's just such a grounded individual.
Much more grounded than my crazy ass.
And people seem to respond to that.
So I think that it's...
I just feel so happy to be able to create content and do what I love.
I always joke on Twitter and on YouTube, we're just happy to be there.
I'm grateful that I even have a presence, but it is frustrating because it's hard not to become paranoid when you're like, I'm being oppressed!
I think one of the things that we're very fortunate about is that we got into this a long time ago.
And there's a thing that happens where you just get overwhelmed with choices.
There's so many fucking shows.
And this is one of the things that I try to tell young comics that are starting podcasts.
I'm like, you have to be very consistent.
You have to be consistent and you have to put them out all the time.
You have to put out multiple ones and then you got to trust the process that it's just going to grow and it can grow organically.
But coming into the game today, if a comic tries to start a podcast in 2023, you have to understand you're coming into a game that has 5 million players.
The more time that you spend just doing what you want to do and trying to make it the best version of itself versus doing something that you think will attract more people.
We just try and figure out if we're doing something that is...
Impeding our ability to attract more people that could easily be remedied.
You guys probably naturally do it or you have people who are thinking about doing this for you that you can do your product and then they put the right card at the end on the video so that it gets shared or they roll to the next video.
There might be simple things that we're not doing.
That's what I... I just like it, because Walk-In's Welcome is so...
Like, I get to talk to people, and I... It's more...
It's just different.
It's a different part of my personality.
I feel like they all exercise parts of my personality.
And Dumpster Fire feels always like I'm doing stand-up.
We do Dumpster Fire live streams now, and it feels so...
Like, I get that same rush because it's a live stream, and I'm like, I don't fucking know what I'm going to say half the time when I'm doing that show.
But it's one of those things where if you do all these and you count the views from all of them, do you think you would have all those views on one channel if you only did one?
What I like about it is they attract different people.
Not everybody likes Dumpster Fire.
A lot of people love Walk-Ins Welcome.
There's a whole new audience that we're getting through factory settings because I think it's nice to have the male influence and people just like the conversation.
So I don't...
I think if I put it all together on one show or something, it would be kind of weird.
Honestly, it's just beautifully designed, and I love how easy it is to share the work.
I started doing on my Substack, I wanted to just force myself to do a writing prompt every day, so I just started doing it, but on Write Club, on my Substack, and people are joining in, and then they post their writing prompts.
It's such a fun, interactive thing, and they introduce a chat function, so you can chat with your audience, which is really cool.
There's video now.
So yeah, I think the sky is the limit really.
I really love that platform.
And as a writer, it just speaks to my soul just how easy it is for me to post a very beautiful looking blog.
What's crazy to me is I asked my friend, I'm like, wasn't this, am I mistaken or was this like a conspiracy theory that got you labeled as like a Putin apologist?
The most astounding claim in the blockbuster new article from Seymour Hersh alleging that the U.S. is responsible for sabotaging two of Russia's natural gas pipelines is that the Biden administration is led by a no-nonsense crew of highly capable tacticians.
Huh.
Forget what you've heard about the secret classified documents turning up in various Biden residences.
But first of all, those Biden residences, that's documents from when he was a vice president.
That's really not applicable for this current administration.
And Hirsch is telling that the Biden White House practices exceptional operational security.
You're talking about different administrations.
Also, you're talking about something the vice president took with him to his home.
And it would need to because according to the single anonymous source on whom Hirsch bases his piece, the Russians have superlative surveillance of the Baltic Sea.
Pulling off a plan to blow up Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines between Germany and Russia would acquire not only vision and leadership, But sophisticated cover.
So what kind of highly advanced self-technology did the Biden team employ to cloak the underwater operation?
In fact, they did just the opposite.
They hid the plot to start World War III in plain sight.
According to the source, who had direct knowledge of the operational planning, writes Hirsch, A team of U.S. Navy divers planted the explosives in June 2022 during an annual NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea, while tens of thousands of naval personnel from allied countries on site and hundreds of thousands more were monitoring the exercise remotely.
That is, according to Hersh's source, Team Biden thwarted the Russian superb Surveillance by planting explosive before the eyes of an audience of military and intelligence officials from the European countries that depend on Russian gas carried through the pipelines.
Right, but what Seymour Hersh is saying is they planted it months in advance and then detonated it remotely.
So saying that this is sort of...
I don't think this is that good.
Because someone could do that.
You could plant something in front of everyone, but nothing happened.
And then it gets detonated remotely months later.
So to prove that they did it during that time.
It's like if all these people are monitoring it and they were there and they just blew it up.
Well, obviously they did it.
They were there.
They blew it up.
And you could say, you know, these people were monitoring them.
They caught them doing it.
But if these people were there and no one knew that a team of divers planted this, no one's monitoring the bottom of the fucking ocean.
You're not having people monitoring whether or not people are planting explosives that will be detonated remotely three months, four months in the future.
Yeah, people write articles and they have narratives, but I don't like the way they're phrasing it.
They're saying that the Biden administration is inept because you're seeing these classified documents show up in Biden's home because that's all stuff that was from many years ago when he was the vice president.
Yeah, I don't know enough about the Nord Stream thing.
I just know that if it is in fact true, it's another instance where people were labeled conspiracy theorists and then five, three or four months later, it's like, oh, just kidding.
But the idea that they're a bumbling administration because they found these classified documents at Biden's estate Just doesn't seem accurate.
Not only that, my suspicions when they found all these classified documents, and these documents were released by his aides, was that they probably are concerned with Biden wanting to run in 2024. The fact that they released that, me, my conspiratorial mind was like, they're trying to sink him.
After experiencing everything that they experienced, all the racism, all the attacks over the eight years that Obama was in the White House, why would she want to subject herself to that when she's escaped from it?
That's why I really would be, I'd question DeSantis going up against Trump because of the unhinged attacks that you're subjecting your family to from the crazy, like, Trump-alites.
I mean, you're already going to be dealing with, like, the left calling you a Nazi, and then you're going to be dealing, you're going to be getting a two-pronged attack.
Because this- The character became popular in 2005, his role in a viral video of game footage where, when having been absent during his group's discussion of a meticulous plan, Leroy returns and ruins it by charging straight into combat while shouting his own name as a battle cry.
That was one of my favorite South Parks where they made fun of all the World of Warcraft and like the kids just got super fat and like bad acne and they were just taking a shit in like a bucket in their room.
I feel like it would just be a funny, it's like a funny idea that there's like someone who's like got me and their job is to get me to sign up for TikTok and they're trying to like find the stuff that appeals to me and they're like, oh, I almost had her!