Warren Smith and Joe Rogan critique YouTube’s algorithm suppressing high-viewership content like Rogan’s Trump interview, while debunking climate change narratives around California wildfires—historical data shows desert winds, arson, and poor management as key factors. Smith’s thesis film reveals Churchill’s WWII tech negotiations with Harvard, and Rogan ties this to Operation Unthinkable’s Cold War strategy. They expose how storytelling, from Hollywood’s woke bias to Musk’s misinterpreted hand gesture, often eclipses facts, arguing that critical thinking demands evidence over emotional conformity. [Automatically generated summary]
It's a resistance to questioning why people have like certain like deeply ingrained thought processes that are a part of an ideology.
And I think what you were doing was really pretty brilliant.
It was awesome.
And I love the way you were handling it.
It was like, you know, very calm and rational.
Just having discussions with students, and you kind of see a lot of their flailing and trying to rationalize while they have these sort of incoherent beliefs.
Well, I think most kids are aware that you're being forced to think a certain way or at least to talk about things a certain way.
And most people are...
They don't like being told what to do.
People don't enjoy that.
And when they feel like there's a lot of social pressure to adhere to a very specific ideology, I think people don't like it.
And so when you see debates where people have differing opinions and they have these sort of logical, objective ways of describing why they think about things a certain way, it gets people like, okay, is there another way to think?
How is this guy doing this?
What does this mean?
Like, why do we have to say, well, what is wrong with what J.K. Rowling said?
And it's exciting to people.
And the videos were exciting.
And there was a tremendous amount of response to them.
I know you're aware of that.
I mean, there's so many comments and so many people were interested in them.
They got very popular.
And then when I heard you were fired, I was like, of course.
It was too good.
Because it gave me hope.
I was like, more people should be doing this at schools.
And, you know, it would help a lot because a lot of this really sort of polarized positions that people are taking one side or the other, they just want to win and they dig their heels in and they don't exactly even know why they have this particular opinion that they're defending.
They just know that they're supposed to.
And so they just kind of bite down and dig in and, you know, I've been playing with the idea of how we see the world through stories.
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Yeah.
No, we talk about it all the time that it's a great sort of postmark for culture.
Like, if you go back and watch movies from the 50s and then the 60s and the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and then today, you can see how different the narratives are, how different the way the films are made, the way people communicate, the subjects that are covered, the quality of the acting and filmmaking, the quality of the cinematography, and it really just shows.
Human civilization and human history, like modern society, is so recent.
You know, the Industrial Revolution and giant cities and cars and transportation and all that.
It's so recent.
It's a couple hundred years maximum.
You know, you go from trains and horses to cars and cities and then you have Morse code to all of a sudden now you have...
Digital communication that's instantaneous worldwide.
I mean, it's a rapid change in humanity, and a lot of it is...
The artifact, as you said, is really our media.
Like, what have we created?
You know, we were talking the other day about the limitations of mainstream television and how mainstream television, you know, they're trying to kind of, like, adapt more towards what...
What is going on on the internet?
But they're so hampered by their format.
The censorship, the format, and the fact that they're sponsored by a bunch of different enormous corporations that they can't really critically talk about.
So there's a bunch of things they can never actually say.
So there's news that they can't cover.
There's like significant health.
Problems that have probably been a direct result of medication that they literally can't cover because they're being sponsored by these companies.
So they're so hampered.
And if you go back and watch the early broadcast from 1945, people had like this way of communicating.
And now we're in this phase now where I think the best actors are doing both the external, like Heath Ledger is my favorite actor of all time and had a huge impact on me.
That's why I went into filmmaking.
And he, think about his externality in The Joker and all his roles.
He had this, I think the key to acting is about what is not said, what's unspoken.
And it ties into everything about critical thinking.
It's the best metaphor I ever got from a directing.
Professor, they drew on the board the ocean with a squiggly line.
And they drew little boats on the surface and said, these are words.
This is everything you need to know about directing actors.
Everything beneath the surface is subtext, what's really important.
So, if you're an actor and I hand you a screenplay, anybody given enough time can memorize those words.
What really sets an actor apart is everything else.
What's not said, what they do with the words, the intention behind the words.
The words are just floating on the surface.
They're just the tools that we're trying to use to communicate the elusive intangible, the subtext, everything that's...
And the best we can do are bumbling cells or formulate with these tools.
So to treat words as the end-all be-all is so silly.
You know, like people say the wrong thing now and you get...
It's politically incorrect.
Papa John's CEO. Right.
Right.
With no context.
It's a larger issue.
But it's just fascinating how that correlates beyond just film.
It's true that most communication is nonverbal.
So the more time you spend studying it, working with actors, studying movies, you start getting really tuned into body language.
I had been playing with YouTube as a medium since discovering Jordan Peterson in 2017. Because I remember, maybe it was even earlier than that, because I arrived at graduate school in 2016, Boston, Emerson, and all hell breaks loose, Trump gets elected, and there seemed to be a huge pushback.
And I had never thought about these things before.
And then being a grad student and seeing what I witnessed at school, like protests claiming Emerson was racist.
This is one of the most far left schools I've ever seen.
I vividly remember the day of the election because I was renting a house with three roommates and I was watching the election and I remember just being like, guys.
I think Trump might win this.
It's not even worth watching.
And they were walking around.
Time goes by, I'm like, guys.
And then they started to, what?
No one saw that coming.
And my big takeaway was, how could so many experts get something so wrong?
And that caused me to question my presuppositions, basically my view of the world.
And then that opens your mind to someone like Jordan Peterson and all these other great thinkers, intellectual dark web, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Suddenly it's so difficult to articulate what that does to someone like me, an average viewer, like a genuine lover of this space.
So it's surreal to be here because it suddenly causes you to, if you feel like everyone's moving in slow motion, all of a sudden you feel like you're waking up and it doesn't, I don't want to talk about the matrix because it's so, it's such a strange, it's gotten all this momentum in a different.
But it's what it felt like.
It felt like you were suddenly, like, how?
What?
This is so much more interesting and complicated than I thought.
Yeah, I think we like to adhere to certain narratives about the world.
And we want to think, the big thing is we want to think that there's a central, there's some sort of competent control, some sort of competent leadership.
That exists.
And that the structure of government and the structure of media is established, rock solid, and logical.
And that these are the smartest people in the world.
That's how they've risen to this position.
And now they're there to provide this, you know, like...
If you have a knee injury, you want to go to an orthopedic surgeon because he is an expert in knee injuries and he's going to tell you what's wrong with your knee and what can be done.
And, you know, that's a real expert.
And we think of politicians and we think of the media as being real experts.
And it was just fascinating to watch what's supposed to be the news, right?
So the news is supposed to be...
At its best, an objective analysis of what's going on, giving you the facts.
But they were so clearly upset.
And, you know, there's a lot of editorializing on how bad this is and what this means to the world and what does this say about us that this guy who said, grab him by the pussy, is now the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the world has ever known.
For us, as comedians, we're like, this is gonna be fun.
It was just like they opened up the door to the candy store and said, go crazy.
Have fun.
This is all free.
But it was a real wake-up call for a lot of people that this system is not really as well-managed as we'd like to believe it is.
And this goes back to seeing the world through stories.
If you believe a story is true...
I'm oppressed.
The world is active.
There's systemic racism.
There's active racism at my college.
I'm a victim.
You're going to start seeing what you believe to be true.
You're going to start finding hints of it.
And it's true as well for why it's important to have a moral code.
I personally believe in a higher power, but if you believe in objective truth, you're going to see those lessons when they occur in life, and it's going to help be a guiding star for you.
But it can be wielded in both ways.
It's like the response that I got about J.K. Rowling.
It was the ContraPoints YouTuber.
Everyone was like, you've got to counter ContraPoints.
She's the one who's taken down J.K. Rowling.
The argument essentially is, I'm so done arguing.
I'm not even going to debate this.
If anyone who believes in transphobia can see that J.K. Rowling is obviously transphobic, that's it.
It's the same thing.
If you believe in that definition of transphobia, you can find it almost.
Well, the problem with that kind of arguing is that it's a total cop-out.
Like, if there is any sort of debate, and there clearly is when it comes to trans issues, if there's any sort of debate, you have to be able to discuss things.
And as soon as you say, if you want to debate, we're done.
If you want to have a discussion, we can't.
You don't see it?
Well, we're done with it.
Well, what you're essentially conceding is you don't have a logical ability to shut this Because if you did, you would just do it.
You would have a rational conversation with that person and you would say, clearly, look, this is why this is racist.
This is why this is transphobic.
This is why this is sexist.
Whatever the argument is.
And you would lay it out.
And as soon as you say, if you don't believe that, then we're done talking.
Well, they can't have the debate because they're not equipped for it.
That's all it is.
They don't have any weapons, right?
If you're going to go to battle, you have to have some sort of resources.
There's nothing there.
And when there's nothing there and you just say, I can't.
Instead of saying, like, is there a logical argument that there are men who are manipulating this in order to control women's paces?
And, like, it used to be that we protected women against men.
Particularly, we protected women against predatory men, right?
Like perverts or sex offenders, for example.
But somewhere along the line, with this woke ideology, we completely eliminated the even possibility that a man in a dress that wants to go into the woman's room could be a pervert.
Which, to me, was the most insane thing.
The grossest members of society that we've always feared.
We've always feared people that would try to take advantage of women and do so in a weird way where you claim to be one, but you have a penis.
You're walking around with an erection in a locker room and anybody who calls it out is transphobic.
You're claiming that trans people are walking around with erections.
It allows for that capacity.
It allows for that to occur.
After all this craziness occurred with the video, viral video or whatever, I went back to North Carolina for the first time, and my best friends, you know, who I've grown up with, and we just, I guess, fine.
They were deeply concerned about what I was doing.
Right?
You're talking to too many people from the right.
I sat down with Destiny for six hours, but it's never enough.
But I laid out what you were saying, and I was amazed that they couldn't follow that logic.
What about the mother in the dressing room?
With a six-year-old, does she have a right to decide if that six-year-old is exposed to male genitalia?
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And there's a lot of things that the Democrats believe that I believe too.
There's a lot of things they say that I say that makes a lot of sense to me.
And there's a lot of things that the Republicans say.
They're like, that makes a lot of sense to me too.
And the idea that I have to ignore things that make sense to me because it's coming from the wrong team is just stupid.
These are bad faith arguments where you have to have a conversation with someone and pretend that what they're saying is not logical because they're supposed to be your opponent.
That to me is just dumb.
That doesn't benefit me at all.
It doesn't benefit anybody listening at all.
It's just stupid.
It's a stupid way to think.
It's so limiting.
And it's so bad for you cognitively because I think when you put up those blinders...
Have you ever talked to a person that's a liar, especially when you're younger?
You meet people that are liars, and they lie all the time about all kinds of things.
One of the things about liars is they can't really recognize how other people see their lies because they're living a lie.
They're lying so often, they don't realize the language of truth and honesty.
And so when they're talking to people, they don't even realize that people know they're full of shit.
Because they've lost their ability to sort of discern what natural conversations are about.
It's not about you bullshitting me to try to get me to believe something that's not true.
It's about you just expressing yourself.
So they stop doing that.
They stop just genuinely expressing themselves.
And then they just live with these...
Blinders on.
And so everything exists.
And the only way they can find someone who will buy into their bullshit is if someone is like so bad at thinking and reasoning that they don't have the tools to discern when someone's full of shit.
And this happens with ideologies.
This happens with Yeah, I think there is a power in truth.
I think we're entering a unique moment in history where a lot of those narratives are just dissolving and a lot of that very tribal thinking is being critically analyzed and it's found to be lacking and people are abandoning it left and right and you're seeing it you're seeing sort of the consequences of A lot of this ideology affecting people's day-to-day lives,
and that's causing people to abandon it.
You know, I was watching this left-wing podcast where they were discussing being gaslit about the problems with violence and crime rising in New York City.
You know, you're being told that it's not.
But if you live day to day life, you're like, no, this is real.
Like you guys have led in a bunch of Venezuelan gang members and you have a sanctuary city.
And now it's kind of chaotic.
And you're seeing like the woman who got lit on fire on the subway and like that kind of shit.
You're seeing this with with ever increasing frequency.
You're also seeing the way they lie about crime statistics because they'll tell you that crime is down.
But what they don't tell you is crime is severely underreported and that people.
People are being released for even violent crimes very quickly, which has direct consequences because then there's no incentive whatsoever to not commit crime if you're going to be right back out on the street.
The findings did not match the story that people wanted to be true at Harvard, which caused him to literally go under police protection, like a one-year-old he had at the time, for days.
Now, I don't know the deep dive beyond that, but that's the...
And then he came to the University of Austin and taught a class.
It's on YouTube.
And watching that class, to summarize it in a minute, look at it through economics.
If my job is to approve or disprove loans...
I've been able to get that down the best I can.
I want to keep the default rate as low as possible and I've achieved like a 0.5 default rate.
Out of anyone who comes in my office, 0.5 after I've done my job defaults.
Alright, that's pretty good.
Someone could come along later and analyze all that and say, wait a minute, you're turning down 60% black people though.
His point is you can't look at it through that lens.
You have to look at it through what is the goal that's trying—what is the result we're trying to achieve?
So in policing, it's to—his study showed that 40 percent of stops approximately, I think, if we use that as an example, 40 percent of stops recover contraband, which is pretty crazy, pretty good, across demographics, which means it's being done correctly.
And people, this changes how you view so much.
It's kind of difficult to understand at first glance.
I'm trying to tell me if this makes sense.
Okay.
So it's 40% across whatever color the driver is.
That means we've done correct.
We've done it right.
If it was 60% white drivers were recovering, we should be pulling over his arguments.
We should be pulling over more white.
Drivers.
But that's assuming they're pulling people over upon race.
Let's go back to the default rate.
You're just coming in after the fact and analyzing the results and looking at it through a racial lens.
I'm going to judge each case based on a merit, regardless of...
Because are you going to default or not?
And whatever, I'm going to run my analysis, whatever that is.
So anyone can come in after the fact and say, but there's always going to be a discrepancy.
Okay, but you turn down more...
Black people than whites.
Okay, so according to your logic, for every black driver I pull over, every Latino, I have to pull over a white driver now, which affects policing itself.
As opposed to, what's our goal?
All the police are meeting that morning.
Our job is to go out and recover contraband in this neighborhood.
But for every black driver, you've got to pull over a white driver.
That's not how it works.
That kind of...
That boggled my mind when I first heard it.
I was looking at it through the lens of what are we trying to achieve and seeing if that achievement is even, then there's nothing off about it.
If the contraband being recovered is 40%, regardless of the rate of which you're pulling those cars over, the success rate is the same, which means you're doing it right.
Yeah, I've seen that argument, that not everybody starts at the same spot, so you have to raise up people who've started at a different spot.
Which is, to me, a band-aid on the real problem.
The real problem is that we have crime-infested areas that we've done nothing to fix.
That's the real problem.
The real problem is we have parts of our society that have been, you know, because of Jim Crow laws and redline laws, there's a long history of them being riddled with crime and gangs, and it could be fixed.
There's been no effort.
There's been no real...
National effort to take impoverished, gang-ridden, crime-ridden neighborhoods and rehabilitate them.
The more you do that, if you did that, you would have less losers.
If you have less losers, you have a better country.
And that's including the Appalachias, areas of West Virginia that are filled with people that are addicted to pills and committing crime because they're drug addicts that are all poor white people, coal mining people, those folks.
It's everybody.
It's just...
Crime and poverty.
And crime and poverty causes people, you imitate your environment, you imitate your atmosphere.
If you grow up in a crime-ridden, gang-ridden neighborhood, the chances of you getting involved in gang activities and crime are much higher than if you don't grow up in an environment like that.
So if you can trace your ancestry, then you don't have to pay taxes or some form of tax.
Okay, but what about the white person in Appalachia who is in an equally bad socioeconomic position, but they don't get the tax or whatnot, the award, your solution?
Well, their ancestors weren't oppressed.
So I would be all for it if it was looking through a consistent...
Applied across all demographics equally, socioeconomically.
Anna Kasparian got sexually assaulted by a homeless person.
So when she's walking down the street, she's probably going to be...
Recoil a bit maybe and if she sees someone home, you know, it's there's a human psychological element She's gonna try probably not to do the business human nature if you have a bad experience and it's gonna Goes back to how we see the world, but you're right.
Yeah, we'll never be able to solve racism Well, that's the type of bias that like is kind of logical like if you see a guy and he's covered his own shit and he's you know lighting Notebooks on fire.
That guy might be out of his fucking mind.
You should probably go around him.
And if you run into a bunch of them and they're camping out right in front of your house, you should act accordingly.
You shouldn't treat them the same the way you treat your neighbor who's just walking his dog waving to you.
It's a different kind of human being you're encountering.
There are certain people that you should be wary about.
And if you are severely mentally ill and addicted to drugs and you live in a tent in front of someone's house and you're cooking meth...
You know, like you're in the backyard barbecuing and you smell someone cooking meth in your front yard.
And if you pretend it's not a problem because, you know, oh, you have to be sensitive to people's socioeconomic needs and it's a housing crisis and it's a this and it's a that.
No.
No, there's people that are really fucked up because being a person is hard.
It's difficult.
It's complicated.
And if you grow up with abusive parents who are drug addicts themselves and in and out of jail and you've been psychologically scarred since you were a baby because they beat you and you've encountered a lot of domestic violence, you're going to be more fucked up than the average person.
This is just the development cycle of you as an entity, as a human being that is...
A product of your accumulated experiences, your genetics, your biology, your environment.
There's just a lot of factors.
And to pretend that those factors don't exist, and that if you do recognize them, that somehow or another you're racist, or you're sexist, or you're ableist, or you're this or you're that.
You're the problem.
No, the problem is we've got a bunch of people that are really fucked up.
You know, and we have to figure out a way to have less people that are fucked up.
You're always going to have a certain percentage, but is there something that can be done that would mitigate the number of people that are growing up really fucked up and becoming problems?
Start at the root.
Get to the root.
What's the root?
Crime-infested, gang-infested neighborhoods, abusive family life, abusive neighborhoods.
But even personal responsibility for a person that has no...
There's no examples of someone taking personal responsibility.
Everyone around you is doing something fucked up or most people around you are doing something fucked up.
And there's nowhere you can turn or you can relate to someone who can give you tools and objective reasoning and an understanding of how you got to the situation and what are the steps you can take to get out of that.
Right, or finding something that you can do that elevates you, finding something you can do that gives you a very clear example that hard work and dedication can lead to success and then you can kind of get addicted to this positive feeling that you're getting from seeing yourself progress and get locked into that and it can elevate you out of certain situations.
You see that happen with sports, you see that happen with art.
You know, sports and art are probably the two best ways that people can escape impoverished childhoods and bad neighborhoods.
The student who was, we're not supposed to have fairs, but was my favorite, he came from that kind of background, but he could draw like I've never seen.
And so we got him a Krita drawing tablet, a digital drawing tablet.
And he would just sit and draw all day.
But here's the issue is, well, how do you...
But he wouldn't go to any other classes.
And we kind of...
For some reason, he liked being in my classroom.
So they would literally sit him in my room, and he would stay there all day.
And then he would try and bring work from his other classes and get him to do the work from the other classes.
So through that pattern, he and I... He got me into Elden Ring, telling me these video games.
He got me into the whole art style behind Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
But how do you foster...
Then the school kind of comes along and they're like, yeah, but he's not doing academic drawings that are not relevant to the school.
And I get that.
But how do you then take that talent for drawing and show him that this can be monitored?
monetized man like you could be up like yeah let's get you maybe freelancing i worked as a freelance videographer it's a it's a hustle but it's a way you're not gonna make but it's better than nothing like trying to think outside the box and he ended up getting kicked out for a stupid he didn't want to go on a field trip one day and he was like um he made an offhand passing comments He's like, I don't want to go on the field trip.
Don't make me go on the field trip.
I'll just bring a gun so I don't have to go to the field trip.
And he's like, oh my god.
And this goes back to the idea of telling the truth.
What got me is they lied to him and told him because the teacher that he said it to, you're compelled to report it and everything and we run it up the chain.
When I was young, I wanted to be a comic book illustrator.
That's what I wanted to do.
That's the only art that I was interested in.
I read a lot of comic books and I was really into Frank Frazetta and I was really into Jack Kirby and all these different artists that would draw for comic books and fantasy novels and that kind of stuff.
That's what I was interested in.
That was the only thing I was interested in.
And my art teacher was an asshole.
He was such an asshole.
Shout out to my friend John DeVore because I communicate online with a buddy of mine in high school who was also in that art class who was the most talented guy in the class.
It was me, John, and our friend Kevin.
And we were like the three most talented people.
I was like third.
It's like John was number one, Kevin was number two, and then it was me.
But we were all like...
Much more talented than everyone else and all we wanted to do was like comic book art and John was so good and he told me that that teacher gave him an F in his final year.
Because he's just an asshole.
He would never look at your art and say it was good.
He would look at your art and say you're not going to be able to do that for a living.
You're going to have to draw diaper commercials.
You're going to have to do this.
You're going to have to do things you don't want to do.
He was a bitter guy with a pot belly who looked depressed.
Because a lot of times they're demonetizing things that are absolutely accurate.
And that's where it gets really weird.
Like, this is what we faced during the COVID crisis.
Like, if you said that you think this disease came from a lab leak, you would get demonetized on YouTube.
Well, that's...
It's proven to be true now.
So, like, what happens?
Does YouTube owe you money from all those videos that you put out that they should have monetized?
I can't even think about it.
It's crazy.
You're saying accurate things, but these accurate things were being suppressed by our own federal government, which is really weird.
We're in cahoots with these corporations that were making these medications.
And so it got real fucking weird.
Like, real weird.
Unfortunately, a lot of those laws still stand.
We had an instance where there was a video that we put out during the pandemic when we were only on Spotify.
So when we were only on Spotify, all of our videos, all of our episodes got released only on Spotify.
We banked them all to eventually, you know, just like we'd have them if we ever wanted to put them up on YouTube.
Well, then 2024, I signed this new deal.
And in the new deal, what I want to do is put it everywhere.
I was like, we'll be Spotify, but let's put it on.
And Spotify wanted to do this as well.
It was actually, they were very supportive of this.
Put it everywhere.
Put it on YouTube, put it on Apple, but it's a Spotify exclusive and we work out this deal that way.
So when we take these videos that were available on Spotify, in order to put them on YouTube, even though they're factually correct, they have a strike against them because it's still adhering to their old laws that were applicable at the time that we made the video.
Yeah, something changed in the news and they were like, that's actually accurate now, but the system had already, there was no way to change it in the system.
It's just the news started reporting it accurately.
And because initially the government narrative was that it was incorrect.
So we're in the situation where you're getting educated about something that's absolutely true and you have to sort of pretend that you did a bad thing.
That was just an issue with just how the upload system works.
It's more effective to upload on a timer, apparently.
But that had nothing to do with YouTube.
That was just a thing.
And then when it was being suppressed, and I knew it was being suppressed.
I talked to Spotify and talked to Elon and said let's just put it on X and so we put on X as well and then Elon put it on X and It wound up getting across all platforms somewhere in the neighborhood of like 250 million views Fucking insanity, but a lot of it was X Like a lot of people on independent pages, they just took it when it was a problem finding it and they just uploaded it to their own channel on X. A lot of people did that.
And then, you know, I uploaded it.
Elon's alone got like 65 million views and I got like 25 million views.
It was just nuts.
It was like people wanted it.
And it's the Streisand effect.
As soon as you try to suppress something.
I don't buy into the idea that there wasn't some sort of manipulation behind the scenes.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Whether it was rogue employees or whether it was someone who was gaming the reporting system, like reporting something.
Maybe that could be it.
If you get enough people that report that a video is a problem, maybe that could throw it off.
I don't know.
I don't even...
I don't want to ask because I don't think I'm going to get an honest answer.
Yeah, I you know, I wanted to just like we were clearly being manipulated We were clearly being gaslit and being told that this guy's Hitler.
Even though he was already the president for four years.
And he wasn't, he didn't act like a dictator.
Like, we know what it's like when he's running things.
We had experienced it for four years.
And they were telling us that this was the end of civilization, that trans people were going to be rounded up and fucking nets thrown on them.
It was really wild that people weren't going to be safe.
It was really wild.
It was really wild.
Yeah, they just demonized and they gaslit people to the point where when you actually do have the guy in and talk to him and say like, no, he's not mentally compromised.
He's not incoherent.
He's very coherent.
He's got an amazing amount of energy.
The guy sat here for three hours and we could have done another three hours easy.
He can go on and on and on and he's fine.
And he had some really good points.
First of all, the point about the California wildfires, where he's discussing their water issues, that it could all be fixed.
And then he gave them a plan to fix it, and then they rejected it.
And he's like, you could have all the fucking water you need.
And you should be doing things to make sure that these fires don't happen again.
There's ways to clean up the brush.
There's ways to do this.
There's ways to do that.
You stop the fuel.
You develop better systems for water distribution, sprinkler systems.
There are ways to do this, and he talked about those ways on the podcast, and it's like, you know, eerily accurate when you see what happened to the Pacific Palisades.
When I experienced that, this was not when everybody was chiming in about climate change being the...
Here it is.
I found it.
1960s, it was in the canyon.
Here it is.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
And it's one of those guys talking like this, because that's how they talked in the news back then.
So it's a 1961 documentary about the fires.
And so when I was talking to this fireman, I think it was 2003, if I'm correct, I think it was 2003. And we were experiencing a fire, and he told me, because where I lived, I had been evacuated three times.
I've been evacuated in the early 2000s.
So give me some volume on this so you can hear the way this guy talks.
unidentified
Ground cover in the Western Hemisphere.
The fire starting from its point of origin north of Mulholland on Stone Canyon.
Spreads out along canyon walls in three directions.
Clames begin spreading at the rate of 13 acres per minute.
We've got a report of four people trapped on foot between Shallon and Roskamera.
We need help from the police department.
How can a modern water system properly designed to meet emergency fire conditions fail to function?
484 times fire proved its deadly efficiency by incinerating in a few roaring minutes what families had taken years to acquire.
So this idea that these left-wing people, particularly media people, they want to use this binary thing.
This is what I saw.
Trump said, drill, baby, drill, right after we're dealing with this climate change-fueled emergency in the Pacific Palisades.
That is not climate change.
It is the climate of Los Angeles.
It's a fucking desert.
They put a city in the fucking desert because they wanted to film movies there.
It's also windy in the winter, because you get the Santa Ana winds, which is what just occurred, where you get these 100 mile, they're historic.
They've always happened.
Every year we get the Santa Ana.
There's fire season for a fucking reason.
Los Angeles has fire season.
Where I used to live, it was fire season.
And every time the winter would come, and everything was dry, and all the vegetation was brown, and the wind was whipping around, everybody would get nervous.
Because you get, you know, there's a bunch of different reasons.
The one big one from 2018, they found out that it was like some part that had failed that initially caused the fire that was a $1 part.
The part cost $1.
This $1 piece that they failed to replace.
Caused the sparks that led to the initial fire that was the 2018 fire where you saw, if you go down the 405 in Hollywood, like half of the side of the highway was completely engulfed in flames.
It looked apocalyptic.
It was bananas driving down the highway and the whole left side of the highway is completely on fire.
Giant hills of raging fires that they couldn't put out.
And the problem with this past fire, and here's another thing that's a lot of weird pushback against, that it was arson caused.
Hey, some of it was arson caused.
Fact.
They've arrested people.
They arrested people for starting fires.
They've arrested multiple people for starting fires.
My friend Andrew Huberman filmed people starting fires.
They were starting fires in the middle of this fire disaster because it doesn't mean it's the cause of it.
It means along the way there was a lot of arson.
Like some people were saying that, you know, oh, there's this false narrative that it was the homeless people.
Like, okay, whether they had a house or whether they didn't have a house, some people started fucking fires.
There's video footage of the three fires that are started semi-simultaneously.
That are near the Palisades and on one of the video footage It's very clear that there's a human being is like from the sky where they're filming this There's a human being that's near the fire Most likely the cause of the fire was a person who either accidentally did this or did it on purpose lit a fire So the problem is not fucking climate change.
The problem is LA is extremely vulnerable When it comes to fires, and always has been, and they've done very little to mitigate this yearly disaster problem that they have.
I mean, there's been a trend in California to vote in the opposite direction.
If you look at the map of 2020 versus the map of 2024, the counties that went red, like a significant number.
But the high population centers are in the trance.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, very difficult to get those people to vote anything other than blue.
And so if the people that are Democrat are giving them the exact same...
The exact same gaslighting, and they keep buying it over and over again and they still win elections, then there's no incentive for them to correct course.
So this is why.
California has been essentially blue since, except for the time where Arnold won, which is weird, right?
Because he was kind of like a moderate Republican and also famous, and that probably led to him winning.
But other than that, since Reagan, he, what did he?
He did something where he allowed people that came here...
What was the issue that Reagan did?
There was some sort of a voting issue where he allowed people from...
I think it was people that emigrated here illegally from Mexico.
There's coffee and water, whatever you'd like.
There's water in that glass right there.
But California is basically locked blue.
And the only thing that's going to change it is things like these Pacific Palisades fires, where people realize we have an incompetent government.
And if we have competent government that is right-wing, and as long as they don't infringe on civil rights and human rights and all the things that we're terrified of from right-wing extremists, as long as they don't do that, you'll probably be better off leaning in that direction.
direction, if someone's going to take a pragmatic solution, a pragmatic view of what these problems are and make meaningful change.
Like you've got to figure out what is – first of all, with the fires, it's like this all could be prevented.
What's causing the fire?
Well, all this brush.
They had record rainfall.
Record rainfall means record growth.
So you have record growth of all these grasses and brush and all this stuff.
So it's all green and lush until LA runs out of water because it stops raining for a long time and then everything turns brown and then it's tender.
The firefighters are saying once the fire is raging, even if they had 100 trucks, you're dealing with 100-mile-an-hour winds, and you've got this enormous...
If someone did start these fires, if they were started by arson, the way they did it was very strategic because they essentially did it upwind.
They did it like right where the wind was going to blow the fire into the city.
Like if you started that fire at the outskirts of the city, it would just burn to an area that's not populated.
They started it right where all the brush was, right where all the woods were, where the wind was at its back.
And then they started it in multiple areas so that it would come and spread out in this way that was like impossible to stop.
So once it gets big, like to this day, like what is the fire?
Yesterday I read that it was 60, I think it was 65% contained.
This is like, we're in weeks, right?
Weeks into this.
At one point in time, it was 0% contained.
It was just burning through.
And if you haven't seen, there's a great video, I'll send you this, Jamie, of an overhead view of what it looks like now.
And it's...
68% contained today.
I'm going to send you this, Jamie, because it's a helicopter that is flying over the Palisades, and you get to see, like, the extent of the devastation.
And until you see it, like, with your own eyes from the air, it's hard to understand how big the destruction is, how enormous the amount of land that was destroyed, the amount of homes that were destroyed.
And not just destroyed.
Here is, like, you can see this here.
I mean, this is crazy.
This is absolutely crazy.
And the video is larger, Jamie, if you could, like, shrink it a little.
So that way you can see the top.
So there's words at the top that block off some of it, but it goes on, like, way above that.
So now, not only are these homes burnt, but everything that was in the homes, all the plastics, all the chemicals, all the batteries, Teslas, all these different electric cars, all the electronics, all the toxic chemicals that come from the building materials, all that has now seeped into the ground.
So, you know, they can say the weather quality or the air quality is good in California based on how much smog there is.
But what's in the fucking smog now?
Because this is not just automobile smog.
This is not just dry dirt kicked up by the wind, which they've always had.
The smog in Los Angeles existed before there were cars, because there was always this problem with the way the valley is shaped.
The valley just contains all this air in there, and you would get dust.
Even back before there were fucking cars or if there was anybody that was burning coal or you had fireplaces or that kind of shit, you're getting all that smoke that was always contained in that area.
It's just a bad place for air.
And so then on top of that, you've got all these homes that were burnt and all this toxic waste, all this burning plastic and burning chemicals.
Now that's all in the air and no one's discussing that.
Like, it has to be bad for you if you live near that.
All those firemen that are breathing that shit in, that's gonna have long-term health consequences for those guys.
For all those people that are dealing with all that shit, all those people that are anywhere near it, your air is air of like...
Do you know the story of the toxic burn pits from Iraq in Afghanistan?
So, during the war, when troops were on a base...
Overseas, they would take all their garbage and burn it.
So they burned it in these waste pits.
And so the wind would shift and blow through the camp.
And all these people are breathing toxic air, extremely toxic.
In fact, Biden's son died from a brain cancer that they connect to his exposure in the military.
To the toxic burn pits.
There's a whole swarm of health consequences that veterans have faced because of these toxic burn pits.
It's the dumbest fucking way to deal with garbage of all time.
Make the troops breathe it in as you burn it.
It's the same kind of thing that's happening in LA. It's the same shit.
I was reading through something on the New York Times.
One possible thing, which doesn't sound right, but they're just going, it's possible.
In that area, someone was lighting fireworks on the night of the 1st, and there was a small fire that started, and some firemen went up to put it out, and they stayed to see if it was going to catch back up.
And five days later, they're like, is that the same fire?
Because it was in really close to the same spot.
It would be real weird if it started back up five days later.
Eco-terrorism, these friends living out of a van, they go around and back, originally monkey wrenching was sabotaging for environmental reasons, big equipment to fight back against that kind of thing.
I had a friend back in high school, went to this boarding school and he was really into it and that's where I learned about this book but it wouldn't surprise me if that kind of thinking carried over in someone.
Because we saw a copycat, so there's definitely people out there that have a reason.
Well, there's disturbed individuals in our society.
That's why we have school shooters, right?
That's why we have a lot of things that people do that's horrible, that are horrible.
And one of the things that people do is they start fires.
You know, it's a known thing.
And to pretend that it's not possible, because it doesn't...
It doesn't appeal to your narrative.
It doesn't fit with your narrative of the homeless thing.
We just have to be compassionate because these are people and there's a housing shortage and it's just housing, housing, housing.
No, you have open-air drug markets and mentally ill people and fire.
And it's possible that that's what's caused it.
Yeah, that's the thing.
There were fake firefighters that were arrested and there was also fake cops.
But I think that was, if I had to guess, it was more about stealing than anything because there was organized looting where they were breaking into homes in areas where there were people going to be abandoned.
You got to get rid of all the stuff that starts fire.
That's possible to do.
That's not impossible.
That's not like putting a person on Venus.
This is like something that could be done.
Like, if you have enough money for all that, you've spent $24 billion on the homeless crisis, didn't put a dent in it, you could have fixed the brush.
You could have fixed that reservoir that was empty.
Giant 11 million gallon reservoir of water completely dry.
You could have fixed that.
You could have saved homes.
Maybe you wouldn't have saved all of them.
You could have saved a lot.
You could have saved people's lives.
And they didn't.
And it was incompetent.
And it was poor planning.
And it was, you know, they had a lot of ideas that weren't good.
They had a lot of...
Things that they paid attention to and things they focused on that weren't important.
What was really important is preventing these kind of reoccurring disasters, continuously reoccurring disasters.
I've seen a bunch of them.
Like I said, I was evacuated multiple times, but I've seen multiple other fires that I wasn't evacuated from that were huge in all sorts of areas around LA. It's dry as fuck.
One of the big ones that we experienced was, it was like we were out filming in, like, out in the Tachapi area.
Like, we're near Tohono Ranch.
We were filming this thing at this ranch.
And we had to cut filming short.
And when we were driving home, the entire right side of the highway for, like...
Almost an hour was on fire as I was driving home.
So you're driving.
Ash is falling from the sky like snow.
And the whole time you're driving, it's apocalyptic.
So this has always been a problem with L.A. So these climate change kooks, these left-wing kooks that want to put everything into these, like, very binary categories.
Like, this is because the Republicans refuse to agree to climate change and call climate change as a hoax.
This is a climate change...
No.
This is LA. This is the climate of LA. Is this the firetrucks?
Oh, he probably posted it too.
Quite a few people on Twitter posted it.
But there was all these fire trucks that were in this lot.
This isn't the video that I saw.
I think multiple people posted them.
But they're all out of commission.
They're all just sitting there.
And, you know, obviously they could have used them.
But that's only part of the problem.
Part of the problem is planning correctly.
Part of the problem is, you know, there wasn't enough water for the fire hydrants.
So the fire hydrants went dry.
The whole thing's nuts.
And when Trump talked about it on the podcast, he was eerily accurate.
He was eerily accurate as to, you know, what the problem was, and he offered a solution.
And to save the smelt, they didn't want to do the solution.
One of the things, they arrest this one guy for arson, and they couldn't necessarily prove that he was an arsonist.
One guy they found with an actual blowtorch.
They couldn't prove that he lit the fires with the blowtorch.
But this guy had been arrested multiple times, including for vandalism and all sorts of other things.
And I believe assault.
And ICE wanted to deport him.
But the California Sanctuary State law, the way it's set up, they weren't allowed to deport this guy.
So they're just going to let him go.
He had been arrested eight times, this person, in like, you know, a short amount of time.
So it's like a real problem person.
And they were like, hey, maybe this guy shouldn't be in the fucking country lighting things on fire.
And they're like, no, we have sanctuary.
He's still here.
I don't know.
I don't know what the latest is.
I try not to pay too much attention.
I'll go crazy.
But California is deep in the trance.
Deep.
And I think the only thing that's going to snap people out of it is something like this, where they realize like, oh my god, these people are completely incompetent.
It used to be the homeless situation was a little bit of a wake-up call.
This is like next level.
This is like next level incompetence wake-up call.
And so I'm hoping that someone can come along that's a reasonable conservative person that can shift things in California, like appeal to people's concerns when it comes to social issues, you know, women's rights, gay rights, the things that people are terrified of when it comes to right wing.
You know, when you think about like far right fascist governments that are going to clamp down on people's rights, like what we're really worried about is disenfranchised people and marginalized groups and people that are more.
We're maligned, right?
So if someone can just like appeal to that.
So like we have no desire to stop gay marriage.
We have no desire to limit women's reproductive rights.
But what we do want to do is make a more fiscally sound city and have more conservative policies in terms of what are we spending our money on and what are the results?
You can't just say, oh, we work for a homeless initiative.
And so, oh, well, you got a blank check.
Do whatever you want to do.
It should be like, what have you done?
How have you solved the problem?
Hey, look, we spent $24 billion and homelessness went up by a significant amount.
Tens of thousands of new homeless people while we spent $24 billion.
This is not effective.
So whatever you guys are doing, you're shitty at it.
So we don't want you doing it anymore.
We're going to bring in someone who has some more...
Something that's going to progress the idea better.
Someone who's going to fix this problem better.
Someone's got a more pragmatic solution.
If they could do that, but they have to appeal to people that are deep blue.
They're deep blue.
They're blue no matter who.
And the problem with California is very unique and more unique than New York in that California, the entire city, is established around the entertainment industry.
And it's established around the dream.
If you go to Los Angeles, you can make it.
Well, in order to go to Los Angeles and make it, if you're an actor, you have to audition.
And when you're auditioning, you're auditioning to people that almost universally have a very specific political ideology.
You can't be a part of the group.
You can't be a part of the team if you're a right-wing Christian Republican and you're making films.
That doesn't exist.
You got like Mel Gibson and a few outliers.
That's it.
Clint Eastwood, a few outliers.
For the most part, if you are an actor and you want to work in Hollywood, and by the way, Mel Gibson and all those guys will hire left-wing people.
These people will not hire right-wing people.
So you see everyone sort of morph their personality and morph their political ideology and their social ideology around what's going to get them picked.
Because when you're an actor, you have to get picked.
So if you and I go for a part, and there's a bunch of other people going for a part, and we're all similarly qualified in terms of the look that this part is looking for, a lot of it is determined about whether they like you.
The technology, I think, is going to revolutionize.
We're on the precipice of this.
We were talking about Heath Ledger earlier.
What happened to...
Those kind of independent movies that I remember being in high school before going into film school and watching those Monsters Ball, Candy, these small, independent movies that made you feel like they were just made for you.
They weren't like Marvel or Disney, right?
And we don't see those anymore because everything's changing in the industry for multiple reasons.
The strikes had a lot to do with it, I think.
It's this strange paradox where you have more of an ability to reach an audience than ever before, but there's fewer writing positions, movies being made.
There's this hiring shortage, but cameras more accessible than ever.
You were talking about the potential for someone to come along.
I mean, I think it's only a matter of time until it does happen.
The Daily Wire is trying kind of with Pendragon Cycle.
Which would be, if it were to land, could be massive.
My theory is it could be the tipping point.
Because it's going non...
My understanding is it's non-union.
You have Angel Studios and they're kind of trying to compete.
But we've never had an alternative to the union model.
The traditional production model.
Which drives up production costs.
Because there's nothing stopping you from...
Getting a camera and going out there and doing it, except for the rigged game, which says, well, we're going to block you.
We won't distribute your movie.
There's all these different parameters.
You're not SAG-sanctioned, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
If Daily Wire could land the Pendragon cycle and it were to be a solid enough story on the equivalence of, like, Game of Thrones, it could change so much.
But there's the recent Brett Cooper stuff that's going on.
It's just so much Brett Cooper leaving the Daily Wire.
There's speculation, because the girl who took the place was her best...
Her maid of honor in her wedding, like best friend, was the producer of the show, would be like, Jamie, taking your place.
Except obviously not, you know.
But that's what's happened now.
And it's nose-dived.
It's pulling, like it used to pull like half a million views per video.
It's pulling 40,000 now.
And there was this theory that they had trained Reagan with, they hired an acting coach because her mannerisms were the exact same, hand movements, everything.
We were talking about nonverbal communication, the importance of that.
And it was eerie.
She has started a YouTube channel that's already amassed half a million.
She hasn't posted any videos.
So there's a lot of loyalists to her.
But she grew this channel to over 4 million people in the last three years, as you were just hearing.
It's hard when someone is a part of a channel and then their show blows up and they realize, like, oh, I could have done this on my own, which is the reality.
The reality is, like, being a part of a channel, like, it doesn't really get you much, obviously, because the new show only has 40,000 views, right?
But, you know, that's what you get if you want the shortcut, right?
The shortcut is being a part of a channel.
You know, I'm going to connect myself to a channel and, you know, I'm going to agree to give them X amount percentage of what I do.
It's really not a smart way to do it today, and it's not necessary.
Because today, all you have to do is have a camera and a backdrop and just start recording.
And organically, if your content is good, your thing can grow, and then it's yours.
It's all yours.
And then getting advertising is not hard.
If you're successful, you get an agent.
You get an advertising agent, and they bring you MeUndies ads and all kinds of shit.
Next thing you know, you're making money.
You're making money off your channel.
And then your channel grows organically.
And then you don't have to deal with executives telling you what kind of guests you should have on or what topics you should avoid or what things you should accentuate.
We would like you to talk about this today.
All that stuff is...
And then as you get more and more famous from your work, you realize, no, the people like me.
This is the reason why this show is going on, and I've got to pay these assholes 60% of everything I'm making.
And this is dumb.
If I was on YouTube independently, I would be rich right now.
I'd be making good money.
I'd have a nice car.
And instead, I'm getting a salary.
And my salary is not really representative of how much income I'm bringing into the company.
I think when you're writing a movie, when it clicks into place, you can feel it.
And they call it cracking the story.
And they hire writers to crack the story, almost like it's a math problem.
So to me, that indicates that there's this fabric, this is how I think about it, there's this fabric of reality that stories tap into that you're trying to connect to, so you feel it when it clicks in, and you're almost, when it is, when it does click and you have that hook, you're like, this is the reason to make...
Now if you break down what Nolan did in Dunkirk, this is probably getting too nerdy and everything.
He took three different storylines, did what he does with the shepherd tone.
And air, land, and sea.
Land is a, the story takes place over a week.
Air, an hour, sea, a day.
And then he does what he does with the Shepard tone, which is in Batman and all of his movies.
It's an ascending tone, like a barbershop spiral that is infinite.
Ryu, the first sound is like crescendo and then it fades out and the middle one is consistent and the top one is going down and it sounds to the human ear infinite.
He took that which he's used in the Batman's bike, the music he's used in the prestige in most of his movies.
If you listen to Dunkirk, you hear this sound, and it's just increasing tension, and you don't even notice it almost.
It's because it never reaches a crescendo, so you feel like something's off, but you never quite get there.
He then takes that and structures the frickin' story as a shepherd tone to the point where, at the very end, and you are in that frickin', the golden ratio, so this is the meat of the movie, and that final hour of air...
He's one of those guys who doesn't have a phone, doesn't have email, and obviously incredibly brilliant person.
So he's...
Obviously aware of email, he's aware of phones, but I think he's probably one of those guys who goes, you know what, the more that's coming in that's influencing me, it's gonna fuck with my ability to have a vision, a unique personal vision based on what I know resonates with people and what I know resonates with me and how to make a story that really works.
It may work, but you're still dealing with some kind of pollution from brake dust.
We actually pulled this up recently.
We were talking about it was an enormous percent of more pollutants are released into the atmosphere because of electric cars.
Than combustion engines because of brake dust.
So electric cars.
The one thing good about electric cars is specifically Teslas.
Teslas have regenerative braking.
So when I drive my Tesla, oftentimes I don't even have to hit the brakes because I just let off the gas when I'm getting close to an intersection.
I gently tap the brakes when I get close to the line where the red light is.
But when you're driving normally, it's like one foot driving.
The brakes work, but you don't have to use them.
Because when you let off the brakes, or let off the gas rather, the car slows itself.
And it slows, it doesn't coast.
Like you can't just hit 60 miles an hour and then let your foot off the gas and it'll just kind of cruise along.
It doesn't do that.
It slows down, like considerably.
Because it's regenerating electricity through this regenerative braking aspect of it.
So that probably has less brake dust than other electric cars.
But, you know, there's electric cars that you'll drive, like, if you drive, like, the Porsche Taycan.
It's an amazing electric car.
It doesn't have that regenerative braking thing, or at least maybe it's a setting.
You know, the car that I was in didn't have it turned on.
But when you let off the gas, it just coasts like a regular car.
So those cars are much heavier.
Than regular cars.
Much heavier.
And there's a problem with guardrails because of that.
So guardrails are designed for a car that's a specific weight.
And, you know, most cars weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000, 5,000 pounds.
But when you add batteries, so if you have a car that's filled with enormous amounts of batteries, that car is a lot heavier than a regular car.
And some of those cars just go right through those guardrails.
Whee!
Too much mass.
So you have more brake dust that gets into the air because you have to slow down this much larger, heavier vehicle or much more mass.
And when you're doing that, you're generating more brake dust.
And the only solution to that, we talked about it, like carbon fiber brakes, which are expensive and mostly in high-performance cars.
They have much less brake dust.
So, like, you know when you clean your car and if you're washing your car, you go to the wheels, there's all that dust that's around, the dark dust that's around the wheel that you have to clean.
That's all brake dust.
So that's getting it in the air.
So if you live in a place that has high traffic and, like, stop-and-go traffic, you get brake dust everywhere.
Okay, so it says, Many of the claims about EVs causing air pollution reference figures from Emission and Analytics, a private company.
Founder Nick Molden said that its measurements show that particulate emissions can be 1,850 times more than those from modern car exhaust, which have become cleaner because of regulations.
But the headline finding needs some context.
The tests have not been peer-reviewed by scientists.
And the industry disputes the findings.
That doesn't mean anything.
What they just said doesn't mean anything.
Just because they haven't been peer-reviewed and that the industry disputes it, that doesn't mean that it's not true.
It says, calculate that EVs are 400 kilograms heavier on average because of the bulky batteries.
Yeah.
So just because it hasn't been peer-reviewed doesn't mean it's true.
And the reason why they're saying this is because they're trying to put it into context.
Like, yes, electric vehicles are generally better for the environment, particularly if you have regenerative braking, but there's also an added element.
What the solution might be is to make carbon fiber brakes standard.
Carbon ceramic brakes standard that you need them just like you need catalytic converters.
But if we could just have, like, one designated area in the center, like, take, you know, a state and fucking make that state just a battery, maybe that would work.
Yeah, maybe L.A. Maybe when L.A. burns to the ground, like, look, it's already toxic.
Well, it's also the fire insurance problem that a lot of insurance companies pulled their fire coverage because they're like, look, nothing's being done to stop these fires.
We know the fires are coming.
We're going to lose all of our money.
We're just going to pull out.
And they did that.
And so now a lot of these people that lost their homes were not insured.
So now they're really fucked.
And then you got Gavin Newsom on TV talking about speculators coming, land speculators, doing his little fucking dance.
And they're like, what are you guys doing over there?
This is horrible.
This is horrible.
And what solutions are on the table?
I'll tell you, it's not as simple as don't drill for oil.
I was just down there over the holidays and saw my brother and I, we invested in a little, the only thing I've ever invested in, like that little Airbnb, like super cheap and it's just gone.
The problem with that statement is that the climate has never been static.
There has never been a moment in human history where the climate was absolutely predictable to the degree every year.
It's just not the case.
Climate varies.
It has always varied.
The real question should be, how much of an impact are we having on it and how much of an impact are we having on pollution?
The pollution in the particulate, that's a real issue.
That's a real issue.
And if other countries aren't addressing that, I read something, find out if this is true, that China right now is responsible for more pollutants in the atmosphere, more carbon in the atmosphere than all the other countries combined.
The majority of the pollutants in the atmosphere are coming from there, and they're not going to change.
So you switching to an electric car or you stop using a gas stove or whatever you're doing, it's not going to have an impact if CO2 is entirely what's going on.
And even if we got down to climate neutral, that doesn't stop global warming.
It doesn't stop a shift in the change that has always gone up and down throughout recorded history.
When we do ice samples, when they do core samples, and they go back 10, 15, 20,000, 50,000 years, there's always been enormous shifts in the temperature.
Half of North America was covered in a mile-high sheet of ice up until 12,000 years ago.
So miles in some places, more than a mile.
So there's always been shifts in the climate.
Long before there was any industrial revolution, long before there was any gas-powered cars, China emissions exceed all developed nations combined.
And there's a lot of, I mean, Peterson and you talked about this a lot, the postmodernism, the effect of postmodernism, the fact that there's an infinite variety of interpretations to stories, but that doesn't mean that there's not, everything's not just a social construct, and it doesn't mean that there's not an ideal to strive for.
That was a proposal from Winston Churchill at the end of World War II to go to war with Russia, that the Soviet Union was getting too big and powerful, and they would take the Nazis, that they'd take the German soldiers and then go invade Russia.
The untold story of Churchill's role with Harvard, Harvard's role, the president of Harvard, meeting with Churchill secretly when the blitz was going on and Roosevelt was up for re-election, couldn't travel over there to meet with him because, and this echoes to today, exactly what we were talking about, 98% of the public were against involvement in World War II. That's why they called it the European conflict.
It's not our fight.
And he knew it was inevitable.
And he couldn't be seen talking to Churchill in that way because they were publicly, they were like, nope, lend-lease program, we're not assisting.
If you watch Darkest Hour, they do a good job of showing the extrangers.
They're like, we can send horses to pull the weapons across the border, but we can't be seen.
So he sent the president of Harvard of all places.
This is where the Secret Scholar Society came from.
It's the story, and I found it in the Harvard Archive when I was researching for my thesis film.
It's illogical and weird, but it's a sign of this thing that is a real problem in today where people will pretend something is something other than what it is if it suits their narrative.
What it does is it opens the door for people like yourself.
It opens the door for reasonable, logical people who can talk about things in an objective, critical way and just, like, analyze, well, what is this?
Why do we think this?
What is the cause of this?
And that's really how you got on the map.
By just being a voice of reason.
And in a time where there's very little reason, anybody that steps up and says something that resonates with people to the point where they're like, yes!
It's filled with, like, there's all the moon landing conspiracies have all clung on to it.
Because the room number, like the haunted room, is, I think it's 237. Is that the room?
Whatever the number is, is the amount of miles and hundreds of thousands between Earth and the moon.
The little boy, when he's in the hallway, is wearing the Apollo 11 t-shirt.
He's got a sweater that has the Apollo rocket on it.
There's, like, all sorts of weird shit.
I love stuff like that.
Oh, it's fascinating.
There's a whole documentary on it, the subtext behind The Shining.
The Shining is a fucking incredible movie, which, by the way, which is really interesting, Stephen King didn't even like.
He didn't like that movie, which is so crazy because it was different than his novel.
So in his novel, the Jack Nicholson character, I forget the name, the Jack Nicholson character starts off normal and becomes crazier and crazier.
And what he didn't like is that Jack Nicholson is pretty on tilt right away and seems off from the very beginning and then just descent into madness accelerates very quickly.
Kubrick's assistant says in an interview in 2013, like a year after the movie came out, that Kubrick would have agreed that 70-80% of that movie was pure gibberish.
That said, what Stephen King said and what Kubrick's assistant said, Also rings true because people try to find patterns in everything, even patterns that don't exist.
They always try to find conspiracies that don't exist and patterns that don't exist.
There's a natural inclination that people have to uncover secrets.
I mean, I do look at it that way because any kind of really intelligent discourse where you get to watch it and observe people talking about things, and you've done a lot of really good stuff where you're breaking down interviews and breaking down congressional testimonies and things like that and the way people are reacting to things and how people are laying stuff out.
All that stuff is very educational.
And for young people in particular, maybe people that found you through those initial videos.
Then they'll be able to see how you sort of break down all of these interactions.
And they'll be able to sort of think that way themselves.
Like, oh, why does a person say things that way?
What are they trying to do?
Why are they appealing to authority?
Why is it important to recognize that this is a pattern to shut down criticism?
And then why is it that this is not necessarily the truth?
They gravitate towards it because there's not a lot of it in the world.
And especially if you live in, if you exist day to day in a corporate culture.
Where you're sort of locked into whatever ideology your company is and you're trying to make your way up the company ladder.
So there's like office politics and there's a certain sort of mentality and narrative that's been distributed through the company and you're connected to it.
Like you're very suppressed and your thinking is very boxed in and you're forced to put those blinders on that we talked about earlier.
You have to put those on if you want to move in the company.
If you're in an environment that requires you to behave and think a certain way in order to...
Well, you want to succeed.
So what are the rules of this game I'm playing?
Okay.
You know, if you're playing poker, you have rules, right?
If you're playing chess, you have rules.
And you can't succeed without following the rules.
And that's the case in everything.
But oftentimes in society...
When you exist in a corporate environment or any kind of, especially an educational environment, right?
If you exist in an academic environment, it has very clear rules.
And if you do not follow those rules, you will not succeed.
If you go against the people that are in charge, you're going to, like, what happened to you?
You're going to get fired.
You're going to get removed.
You have to follow the rules if you want to succeed.
And people feel very suppressed by that.
Because they know that these rules aren't necessarily just.
They're not necessarily accurate.
They're not objective.
They're not reasonable.
They're not logical.
They're just the rules.
People hate the rules when they're just the rules.
And now there's examples of the rules being bullshit.
You know, now because of your show and a bunch of your Jordan Peterson, a bunch of different things that are available now for young people to consume, they can realize like, no, these people that are making these rules are idiots.
They're assholes.
And they might be intelligent.
They might have a good education.
They might have a lot of information that they can spit out that makes them seem logical.
they're they're captured by a narrative yeah i reading elon's books like on the airplane he had that algorithm it's essentially If there's a regulation, if there's a rule, figure out who's requiring that rule, question it.
I forget the other ones, but it's making it all more efficient.
But you're also going against a culture that has operated with impunity for so long.
And has grown exponentially.
Like, there's more government agencies than there have been years of the government.
Which is crazy.
That's crazy.
They just keep making new government agencies.
And the way to combat that?
Make another one.
Make another government agency that corrects all the government agencies' inefficiencies.
It's going to be...
To me, the Department of Government Efficiency and then the Make America Healthy Again movement, those are the two most fascinating things that are going on simultaneously with the Trump administration.
Because I'm so curious because there's so many hurdles with whatever Bobby Kennedy is going to have to jump through to make real change.
And you're seeing the response to that, like red dye number three getting pulled by the Biden administration.
Like, hey, motherfuckers, you could have done that a long time ago.
You knew that stuff shouldn't have been in food.
It's not in food in Canada.
You knew that shouldn't have been in food.
You waited until right before Bobby Kennedy got in, where you know he's going to make it outlawed.
You know he's going to get rid of all that.
And you see the resistance to it.
You're seeing this resistance to fluoride being removed from the drinking water.
Everybody's saying, oh, no, we need fluoride for teeth.
Like, brush your fucking teeth, bitch.
Let's not put neurotoxic chemicals in everybody's water.
The way I describe it, I said, it's like, people are dying of skin cancer.
Let's put sunscreen in the apples.
Like, no, no.
Put sunscreen on, motherfucker.
Or don't.
It's probably bad for you, too.
There's a lot of evidence that that's not good for you, that really, like, progressive sun exposure is the way to do it.
And the real problem is that no one gets sun exposure, and then you get too much all at once, and that's how you get sunburned.
And there's a lot of resistance because there's been gatekeepers to information that have existed for the longest time, and it made the distribution of propaganda much more easy.
There's a concept in jiu-jitsu that the Gracies came up with about cooking someone.
And the idea is, like, someone can spaz out in the beginning, they can be real strong and pull out of submissions, but eventually I'm gonna cook them.
Eventually, I'm going to keep hitting my moves until I'm going to get to a dominant position.
They're going to get tired, and I'm going to cook them, and then I'm going to submit them.
And you need time to do that.
If Hoist Gracie had a jiu-jitsu match with a giant bodybuilder and the match was only 10 seconds long, he might not be able to get the guy in 10 seconds.
He doesn't have enough time.
But if you give Hoist Gracie an hour, that guy's going to get cooked.
And the thing about a conversation like with the Kamala Harris thing was like I genuinely just wanted to talk to her.
I thought I could like have a real conversation.
I've seen her be really funny.
This is like a really funny video of her meeting her.
Her mother-in-law and father-in-law for the first time.
And that the woman grabs her face.
She's like, oh, look at you!
Doug Emhoff's mom grabs her face.
It was really funny.
She's laughing hard, but she's laughing like it's authentic.
See if you can find it.
It's very funny.
And I was like, that person's in there.
And that person...
She is dealing with incredible pressure of being in front of millions of people.
They're all scrutinizing every word she says, and that pressure causes people to bumble their words and say things in cycles because they're trying to dismount and they don't know how to.
Maybe they're not the best public speaker.
Maybe they're not the most articulate at forming sentences, but they have good ideas, and you've got to get those people comfortable.
You've got to find out what is in there.
My thought was there was a few things they didn't want to talk about.
They initially didn't want to talk about internet censorship, but then they changed their mind and did want to talk about it, which I thought was interesting.
Maybe they had a solution.
They said, if he throws this at you, you're going to say this.
I'm like, okay, we got it.
Tell him we want to talk about internet censorship.
They didn't want to talk about the legalization of marijuana, but that was probably because of a prosecutor.
Prosecutorial record.
She prosecuted a lot of people for marijuana crimes.
So I was like, okay, we don't have to talk about those things.
I'll talk about whatever you want to talk about.
I don't care.
I just want to get to you.
And you give me three hours, I'll find out who you are.
We could talk about nature.
We could talk about the environment.
We could talk about space.
We could talk about, do you believe in reincarnation?
Because you could fucking bumble it, you could fuck up, you know, or you could be Trump, where he comes in, he doesn't give a fuck, there's no discussion whatsoever about topics, he'll talk about anything.
And just talk.
And that guy would talk for three fucking hours, no problem at all.
No problems.
Didn't ask to edit it.
They wanted to know whether they had editing control.
They wanted to be able to edit things out.
Like if she did Bumble, which is Trump's big lawsuit with CBS because of 60 Minutes.
Because they edited her answers that made her seem like she had a more intelligent answer, which is essentially election interference.
In the debate?
Yeah.
No, an interview.
So there was a Kamala Harris interview and Trump sued.
And there's a lawsuit that's still going on right now.
So someone fucked up and released, like, a teaser of the conversation.
And in the teaser, she was bumbling and fumbling to answer this question.
In the actual show on CBS, they had edited that and put in a completely different answer to something else as the answer to this question that seemed more logical and made more sense.
It was much more succinct and short.
And he was saying, like, you fucking idiots.
Like, you did this.
You released it on video on the internet first, and then you had a different version on CBS. Do you think people don't remember something that was just released?
Like two days ago?
As like a preview to this thing?
But in between the time that the video—his—this is Trump's argument—in between the time the video was released on the internet and the response that it got, all the negativity and all the criticism that it got and all the backlash to how she responded to that question, they edited it and changed the response.
And so he's suing.
And he's got a point.
You got a real point because you shouldn't allow them to edit it and make it look like it was better than it really was.
I mean, this is not just a conversation where someone fucked up about they made a flub and they said, oh, can you take that out?
No, this is like a response to critical policy issues that are going to affect the entire country if you run into president.
If you become president, do you know how to address a situation?
Do you have a plan?
Do you know what this problem is?
And do you have an actual solution?
And if you don't and if You're kind of bumbling around your words.
People should be able to see that because that's one of the things that we're deciding this election on.
For someone like her that's had those kind of experiences where she said the wrong thing and said things like, God, I wish I had a chance to reconsider that.
I would have said it differently.
Because that thing that you say, even if it's under a high-pressure situation like an interview on CBS, that high-pressure situation that caused you to fumble, now people are going to say, that is your opinion, period.
This is your perspective, period.
Meanwhile, if she had time to consider that...
Question and come up with a logical answer and then like rehearse that logical answer and been ready She might have done a much better job.
So That's the fear of not having any power over editing because in a three-hour conversation You can't really prepare.
I think they did think they had a preparation The only thing that makes sense to me is why they would just change their tune on internet censorship that they wanted to talk about that They must have had some sort of logical reason why a certain amount of censorship is important because you want to protect against misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech.
And so this was something that Tim Walsh was saying openly when he was on the campaign trail, is that free speech does not include hate speech, but it does.
Because your definition of hate speech might just be misgendering.
Caitlyn Jenner.
That might be hate speech.
So if you're talking about Bruce Jenner winning the decathlon, what are we saying?
If you can't say Bruce Jenner, because if you want to look at the reality of this biological male who wins the Olympics as a male and then transitions to becoming a woman, if you're telling me that I can no longer discuss the fact that this was a biological male with a different name and it's hate speech, well, you've essentially put the handcuffs on reality.
The quote, my favorite Churchill quote, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
And I use that if anyone tries to get into the free speech debate, I do think the approach that Elon's using on X, short of the law, freedom of speech, short of the law, we already have that objective line, that framework.
We know when it's crossed, that's what the law is there for.
We don't need any other subjective interpretations.
What is hate speech?
What's happening in England?
It doesn't mean that there's not potential for someone to misuse it.