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Jan. 23, 2025 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:49:25

Joe Rogan Experience #2261 - Warren Smith

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joe rogan

01:49:27

warren smith

52:11

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jamie vernon

03:08

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brett cooper

00:57

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Joe Rogan Podcast.
		Check it out.
		The Joe Rogan Experience.
		Train by day.
		Joe Rogan Podcast by night.
		All day.
		How's it going?
		How are you?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pleasure to meet you.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for having me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My pleasure.
		I wound up seeing you, as many people did, on those videos that you were making where you were talking to students.
		You know, just kind of like...
		Exploring critical thinking and asking students questions and why they're upset about certain things and getting to the bottom.
		And I'm like, wow, this guy is like – he's young.
		He's obviously an academic but super reasonable and like really level-headed.
		I'm like, we need more of this.
		This is really interesting.
		And then I found out you got fired for doing that.
		And I was like, if this isn't an encapsulation of all that is wrong with our current – Higher education system, then I don't know what is.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Well, to be fair, I didn't get fired for that technically.
		I think I got fired for posting another one similar to it, but I think they were looking kind of...
		That whole thing was so bizarre for everyone.
		It was so big.
		I think there was...
		At the school where I teach, there's kind of one...
		Echo, sorry, I've got to get used to this.
		One person in control of everything that makes these decisions.
		And it was so nuts.
		I think they genuinely, like, we don't know what to do because if we fire him, our name might get out there, which is their primary concern, I think.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you not want their name to get out there?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		No, it doesn't feel right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not important.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, what's important is...
		That what it is, is that this is a resistance to thinking.
		I mean, it's really what it is.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's out there for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and I don't teach critical thinking.
		When I was a teacher, I was teaching multimedia, like what we're doing now.
		Working with cameras, did a lot of podcasting.
		I had this lab that I developed over four years with a bunch of Mac computers, with Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, a 3D printer.
		So it was using...
		Technology to make art at a special education school with kids that had behavioral challenges and a variety.
		Anything you could come up with, we had it there.
		It was like the last line of defense kind of for public schools that couldn't handle these kids.
		They would send them there.
		And so I would just use this tech to work with them in a therapeutic way.
		That was my goal, the way that would most benefit them.
		And so one day they asked me to do a, hey, can you do a newscast?
		For the school, like this week at the school, you know, there was this field trip, the soccer team did this, blah, blah, blah.
		Sure.
		And we want this kid to be on camera and like to do, he's really good at that.
		And he was getting really nervous on the day.
		And so I was like, let's just sit down.
		You've seen like Joe Rogan and stuff.
		Let's do like, just treat it like a five minute warmup podcast here.
		I'll sit down and be on camera.
		You ask me whatever you want.
		Well, you know, how have your thoughts on Harry Potter changed?
		Giving J.K. Rowling's bigoted opinions.
		So that's where the video came from.
		So I just want to be clear.
		I don't teach.
		I wasn't like, we're going to sit down and learn in the moment.
		We do have conversations like that because when you are doing something like this with students, well, what are you going to talk about?
		Kill two birds with one stone.
		Be as effective as you can.
		A lot of students have questions.
		I've had students ask me, what's the difference between fascism and socialism?
		What's the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?
		They don't know.
		They're genuinely curious.
		Sometimes you can get another.
		I had one teacher, the music teacher I worked closely with.
		He was my best friend there.
		He would be in the room often and we would have little debates.
		He was from Romania.
		I think Romania.
		I'm blanking.
		And so he had a very different political perspective.
		And when you're in those debates, the kids are like locked in and you can tell.
		Normally they're just making noise and then they're just quiet and they turn around and they're like watching it.
		There was an effect.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I think that has a lot to do with it.
		People kind of labeled me as the critical thinking guy all of a sudden, so I really started to think about it.
		What is critical thinking?
		And the best I can articulate, it's thinking for yourself to contend with the stories that make up the world.
		Because a lot of stories are nonsense, some are true, and there's usually a middle ground.
		And my background's in filmmaking.
		I kind of fell into teaching.
		And I spent time in L.A. and made some movies.
		And I teach at Emerson a filmmaking course still where I went to grad school and got my master's.
		And film is probably the wrong term now because it's all digital.
		It's like visual media art.
		But I think you can study movies today like scholars are now studying, you know, the great thinkers.
		Movies will be the artifacts that people look back on for our time.
		You know, be in museums and things like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
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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.
unidentified		Talking.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's changed.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not the way, like if you were having dinner with someone and they were saying, tell me, Warren, where did you grow up?
		You'd be like, oh, this is not a real person.
		This is bizarre.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		The transformation in acting is remarkable.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Remarkable, right?
		Marlon Brando is probably the first example of someone who sounds like a real person.
		This is what I really expect a person to be behaving like on the waterfront, under duress.
		This is a real human being.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it became internalized.
		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.
		It has great utility.
		It's pretty interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, it's very interesting.
		So when you were doing these videos, when you initially did it, did you have any idea of the impact that it was going to have?
		I mean, did you think, like, wow, this is actually, like, really unique and interesting, and I think people are going to really enjoy this?
		Or were you, like, really shocked?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I was shocked.
		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Super far left.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Can you provide any evidence of that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It was just nuts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did it come out of nowhere?
		Was it like right after the election?
		What year did you first attend?
		2016. 2016. So this is like September of 2016, August of 2016?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the beginning of the academic year.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So this is like when the elections are kind of heating up and people didn't think that Trump was going to win yet.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And there's no going back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Well, it turns out, no.
		It turns out not even a little bit.
		They're terrible at it.
		They're not just not good at it.
		They're really bad at it.
		They're really bad at it and they lie a lot.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're not much smarter than you or I. No.
		And then you realize that about your professors.
		This guy really doesn't know much more than my dad.
		What makes you a professor?
		What qualifies you?
		And often there's just this, and that's going back to that core thesis, if we see the world through stories.
		Professor means something.
unidentified		Yes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Politician means something.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		These are experts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		They're not much different than us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you were in school, so at the beginning, everybody's thinking, there's no way Trump can win.
		I think on the day of the election, I think they had some crazy odds of Hillary winning.
		It was like in the 90%.
		And we watched it from the Comedy Store.
		We did a podcast from the Comedy Store called the End of the World Podcast.
		And we did this live stream while the election was going on and we just kept bringing in different comedians.
		We had a whole like...
		Like a conference table, and it was fun.
		We did it in front of a live audience, and then we updated the crowd.
		And then when marijuana became legal, Bert Kreischer takes his shirt off and runs around the stage.
		It was really funny.
		It was fun.
		It was a fun time.
		But what was most fascinating was the podcast was over, and then we all went to the bar.
		The Comedy Store has this, like, private bar in the back.
		And on the television, Jake Tapper was, like, just, like, seriously bummed out talking about Trump winning all these different states.
		And then we watched a little bit of The Young Turks.
		And Cenk Uygur was fucking screaming.
		He was freaking out.
		In the beginning, they were so cocky and so confident.
		And by the end, they were just fucking freaking out.
		They couldn't understand how everybody got it wrong.
		And it...
		I think for a lot of people, that was the end of trust in mainstream media.
		That was the first nail in the coffin.
		That was to be like, you guys didn't...
		You were so wrong.
		You were so wrong.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		How could you get something so wrong?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Yeah.
		I'm just trying to go back to those days and think about it, but...
		It was at Emerson.
		I remember I was taking a class with the dean of the student body.
		And it was a pedagogy class, the philosophy of teaching.
		And it was right in the midst of these protests.
		It was the day of the protest.
		And there was like 10 people in the class.
		It's a four-hour class.
		So they're like, we're going to devote the four hours to talk about the problematic racism occurring at Emerson.
		We're all sitting around.
		But the white students were not allowed to speak.
		We had to concede our space for four hours.
		And I was like, what the fuck is going on here?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why was that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the reason given for that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Because it was the moral right thing to do.
		Because they said to me, I remember he said, I said, what can I? I did say, I was like, what?
		What can I do about this?
		I genuinely believed everything.
		I was just starting to question things.
		I feel terrible speaking to the student who had just spoken.
		You genuinely feel every day you wake up and come to class, you feel oppressed?
		That sucks.
		What can I do?
		They didn't have a response.
		They just said, you can just listen.
		Just take your time to concede your space and listen.
		So that was the reason given.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Concedure space.
		And then why did they feel so threatened?
		Did they articulate that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		There was a Facebook group that was designed to provide that evidence called Emerson, hashtag Emerson so racist or something.
		And it was like a student, like a teacher said, no, you gotta turn in the work or you're gonna fail the class.
		And my first teaching gig occurred shortly after that.
		I remember this vividly, the teacher.
		I was going to be teaching the screenwriting course with undergraduates for the first time.
		And before the protest, she said, don't let them walk all over you.
		They will try and take advantage.
		If they don't do their work, just be fair, honest, give them the grade they deserve.
		After the protest, yeah, Warren, you remember when I was saying that?
		Because she got called out on the Facebook page for some stupid, I don't remember what it was.
		Quote, yeah, Warren, you remember when I was saying about that?
		I was wrong.
		Don't forget to be compassionate.
		Because that student is black, and she reminded me of how difficult it is to be black at Emerson, and so I couldn't fail her.
		I couldn't give her the grade.
unidentified		That objectively she deserved.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why was it articulated that it was so difficult for her, uniquely difficult, as a black student?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Abracadabra.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's just like microaggressions.
		That's the thing about these claims, though, is there is no concrete evidence.
		It's things like microaggressions.
		Someone made a reference about fried chicken that was...
		I've heard that one.
		That happened to my mom, who's a professor, runs a study abroad program.
		She said, we're really excited.
		This place is...
		They were in Italy doing a study abroad program.
		She's like, I know you guys have been missing American food, and this place has fried chicken, and it's really good here.
		And two of the students she was talking to at that table were black and they claimed that that was racist.
		She was like, what?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The fried chicken one is so crazy.
		Fried chicken and watermelon.
		Those are the two things that are associated with racism as far as foods, which are universally loved.
		Like fried chicken is delicious.
		Watermelon is delicious.
		Like how could that possibly be a negative that certain people like delicious food?
		To this day, it's one of those things.
		It's so bizarre.
		You could bring up all kinds of different delicious foods, but if you bring up fried chicken, which everybody eats.
		Everybody who eats meat and loves delicious food loves a good fried chicken.
		Have you tried Gus's in town?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Is that where you get the slabs of meat?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, no, that's Terry Black's.
		But Gus's fried chicken is in Austin.
		Fantastic.
		Some of the best fried chicken you're ever going to have in your life.
		But if you brought that up to a black friend.
		They might like, what the fuck are you trying to say?
		Food's good.
		Good food.
		Let's go eat good food.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And keep that analogy in your mind about the boats floating on the surface.
		And they're just the tool.
		What's the intent?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If there's no intention there, you can't claim that's racist.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Unless you want it to be.
		Right.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I can't even.
		I can't even do this.
		That's what I started.
		My mom disagrees with me heavily on politics, which is okay.
		In the wake of, we were talking about 2016, I found Jordan Peterson.
		I was like, yeah, this guy, look at this.
		This is really interesting.
		And if I had any kind of conversation with her about it, even to this day, it's often, I think she's getting better now that I've been making content.
		But it was often a formation of that pattern.
		I just can't do this with you, Warren.
		And it's just neutralizing the debate because they can't have the debate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It got real weird.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		People would counter and say, Joe, but...
		But, like, you're taking the extreme.
		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?
		Just keep it as simple as that.
		Take out erections and all that.
		It's like, is it fair to her?
		And they just can't...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It seems so clear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But they're just scared.
		They're scared of thinking logically because if you do, you will be cast out of this group.
		You'll be ostracized.
		Like, there's very specific rules and they're very much like a cult.
		Like, you have this very cult-like thinking.
		And if you deviate...
		You run into the possibility of social ostracization, and that's what happens to a lot of people, and they're scared of that.
		So to defend against that possibly happening to them, they attack things.
		Like, without any logic at all.
		They just, like, say, you don't think, you don't know.
		I'm done talking to you.
		And it's like a get-out-of-jail-free pass, and you can just get away from the conversation, and you don't have to confront the logical fallacies.
		You don't have to confront all the problems with what you're saying.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And the only solution I've been able to find is to just push through.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And I say to them, like, Chris, like, one day...
		I genuinely believe you'll look back and understand.
		One day.
		And I believe that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I believe that too.
		If it's done logically and you can have reasonable discussions.
		But even in the opposition to that, right?
		You have people on the right who adhere to a right-wing cult-like thinking.
		Right?
		And, you know, they'll push back against it in a way that's also not logical.
		And so they dig their heels in on their ideology.
		The left digs their heels in.
		And, you know, you have things like people say, people on the left don't get it.
		People on the left this.
		Like, no, there's a giant spectrum of people on the left and a giant spectrum of people on the right.
		I don't like any of those labels.
		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And I really don't like it because of me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't fit in there.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I've been...
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warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And people want to box you in on that, and this goes back to seeing stories.
		Which story do you fit into?
		Like, my mom has a story of what a Democrat is.
		She can never think in a story of what a Republican is, and she'll never deviate from that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My parents are the same.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly the same.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I'd rather be homeless.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're blue no matter who.
		They're just locked in.
		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So, you know, it's...
		I'm just...
		I don't...
		I don't dread the question of, are you a Republican or Democrat?
		Who cares?
		I'm not a part of any...
		I'm just going to be...
		I'm going to call it as I see it.
		Follow the logic.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it doesn't make sense to be on a team.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It doesn't make sense at all.
		Even for someone like me.
		Like, you know, who...
		Yeah, I went to the inauguration.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		How was that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bizarre.
		But I don't consider myself a Republican.
		I don't consider myself a Democrat either.
		I consider myself an American.
		I'm a human being.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It can be felt, like you're saying, and that's beneath the boats, beneath the surface.
		Which we can't articulate.
		We can't explain how we know these, how we can sense that on someone when they're bullshitting.
		You can feel it.
		So as a teacher, you really learn that reality if you're going to be effective.
		The first thing I would say on the first day to my students is by law, by ethical bounds, there are going to be some things I can't tell you.
		Confidentiality, whatever.
		But I will never, I promise you, I will never tell you something I know to be untrue.
		Then you try and embody that.
		Through all behavior.
		I saw that resonate.
		But there's a lot of teachers that, you know, it's a strange environment, that school.
		A lot of weird stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's an art school.
		That wasn't an art school.
		No, I'm talking about the ones where the kids get kicked out of high school.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So there's like gangs, drugs, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Just interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's...
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Are you familiar with Roland Fryer?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Have you had him?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I have not, but I would.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's really interesting.
		He's changed the way I view statistics, but in like a three-minute synopsis of it that goes to crime statistics, I can't think mathematically.
		And I think this applies to logic.
		I think visually.
		So if I have a metaphor, I can suddenly understand a mathematical concept.
		I just don't have that mind.
		So he broke it down.
		After all that research that caused him to go into hiding, if you look at it through an economics perspective, let's say my job is to...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Explain why he went into hiding.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He conducted a study, a deep dive into police statistics to see racial bias in policing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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...
		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we should say he's a black gentleman.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He says the colleagues told him, don't publish this, warning, you'll ruin your career.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		For releasing findings that contradict popular left-wing narratives on policing.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And he said, I'm going to do it anyways.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I'm trying to boil that down as simple as I can.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so that was problematic for a lot of people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They didn't want to hear that.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Because they're pulling over, let's just say 60% of the drivers are black, which is bias.
		The question is, is it unwarranted bias?
		Because there's always going to be bias.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it unwarranted bias, meaning are more black people causing them to get pulled over?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Like, the default rate.
		70% of the people I turned down, let's say, 70% of people that come in that office that were black got turned down.
		My rebuttal to that is, that has nothing to do with it.
		My job is for the bank to get a.5 default rate, and that's the end result.
unidentified		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Can you prove that I'm doing anything wrong?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		What adjustment, logically, should I make?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Should you give loans to people that are more likely to default just because of their ethnicity?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That would be the only logical course of action in response to that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is the argument for equity, right, over equality.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, essentially that would be the form of equity.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm from North Carolina.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Like near Asheville.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Asheville.
		It's rough out there.
		Which people don't believe.
		The Asheville Mountains, beautiful.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, it's like very high per capita crime rate.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		There's a meth capital right now where I live.
		And so I agree with you.
		The thing is, if we look at it, I agree if we look at it through a socioeconomic lens.
		So I had one of my professors from Emerson, he's like, I solved racism.
		This was in one of the videos.
unidentified		Oh, boy.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I was like, sure, come over.
		Let's record.
		Hit me with it.
		So the solution is we're going to have a tax.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You're never going to stop racism.
		You're never going to stop ignorant thinking.
		I mean, unless there's some sort of groundbreaking human neural interface that completely changes our cognitive function and dissolves all boundaries.
		You're not going to stop people from...
		There's people that don't like people from other cities because they play sports against them.
		I hate people from Philly.
		There's always going to be people that discriminate against other people.
		Because there's always going to be ignorant people.
		And it's easier to do that.
		It's easier to decide this person is my enemy.
		These people are on my side.
		It's easy to be tribal.
		It's much simpler.
		You don't have to think as much.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Like, that's a problem.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's a problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a problem.
		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.
		Like, that's the root.
		It's the root of all of our problems.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I think that's why Jordan Peterson tapped into so much, because it's the only solution is, you know.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Taking a personal responsibility.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I encountered that.
		Every day at that school because those are the kids that I was working with.
		The majority of them did not have a parent.
		We would have an open house and no one would come.
		They had no example, no money.
		And it's heartbreaking.
		So what do I do?
		All I can do is try and lead by example and maybe communicate because that's their best hope.
		Trying and taking responsibility because no one else is going to do it at the end of the day.
		There is no alternative.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Except for having someone hopefully come along and provide that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There you go, art.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I don't think he should have been kicked out.
		I know this kid though.
		He's done.
		That's why they're there.
		Because they say stupid stuff.
		And we're the last line of defense.
		He was graduating in two months.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I don't know where he is now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it brings you back to, like, what is school supposed to be for?
		It's supposed to be preparing you for independence out in the world.
		And it's supposed to be preparing you to...
		Eventually have a career.
		Well, there's real careers in art.
		It's a viable pathway.
		And the idea that this guy is extremely talented and that's not accentuated.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He would draw these Japanese samurais, sword fighting, just beautiful.
		And then I had the photo printer.
		But they were like, well, how's he going to make a living drawing Japanese photos?
		No, it's like, get him to draw school projects, like, logos for multimedia projects for the culinary program.
		I was like, this kid won't respond to that.
		And he didn't.
		And then he gets kicked out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That was my problem as an artist.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		A lot of teachers are.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He didn't want you to have hope because he didn't have any hope.
		He didn't like teaching.
		He wanted to be an artist.
		When he would draw, he would draw in a class where we would do projects.
		His stuff was unexceptional.
		It just wasn't that good.
		They wanted you to fail.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I had a student.
		I've had multiple students.
		The number one profession kids want to do now is be an influencer, YouTuber, blah, blah, blah.
		So I get the apprehension when a kid's like, I really want to do YouTube, make a YouTube channel.
		I want to deal with what Joe Rogan's doing, whatever.
		But the school was kind of, you can't make money on YouTube.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's so dumb.
		That's like, you should be fired for being incompetent.
		Not just incompetent, but you're counter to what's true.
		Like, you're saying things that are objectively untrue.
		You can't make money on YouTube.
		That is...
		You could pull up statistics instantaneously.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's hard, but you're never gonna...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I got lucky, man, just because I was willing to put myself out there and make a fool of myself.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But that's not why you got lucky.
		You got lucky because you put out good content.
		It's a merit-based thing.
		It really is.
		And it doesn't necessarily have to be good, right?
		There's content that's just...
		It's, you know, inflammatory and that people...
		People gravitate to that because they like controversy.
		People like just people squabbling and yelling at each other, like shitty content.
		Or someone who's saying like awful things.
		So people, can you believe this person's saying these awful things?
		And they get a lot of attention for saying awful things.
		And so, you know.
		And then YouTube has ways to sort of manage that, which are, you know, a little Orwellian, right?
		Like, they demonetize people for talking about specific things.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That scares me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It should scare you.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So did they make adjustments?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What did we wind up doing with that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jamie.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I don't know which case you're talking about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, where you were saying that there was a video that we were going to put up, but it had a strike, and you were going to have to do training.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Remember that?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		That was already up there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		That wasn't re-uploaded.
		That was from the past.
		Oh, it was?
		Yeah.
		We were still putting clips up on that channel.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it was a clip that was the problem?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, but it was the full episode, wasn't it?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then when we upload the full episode, then it applied to that, right?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It just still had...
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		There was no way around not doing the education fucking thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Here's the problem.
		No way around it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Did you have to do that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm not doing shit.
		Yeah, but here's the problem.
		That clip was accurate.
		The problem is the things that they were saying were accurate.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was always accurate.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's scary for me because this is literally how I make a living.
unidentified		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I put food on the table.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you do other platforms as well as YouTube?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I'm on X, but I'm not monetized.
		I've never made a dollar on X. I'm not sure how to go about doing that.
		I could look it up.
		I should probably.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't know how that works either.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I hear rumors about don't post one-to-one to X because YouTube wants exclusivity.
		And if you're posting on X, your videos will perform less.
		I don't know how much truth there is, but I'm so kind of...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's probably something to that.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And I'm so dependent on YouTube that I'm like, I'm not even going to do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Here's an interesting statistic about YouTube.
		This shows you, like, this is probably one of the best examples of bias that you're ever going to see.
		During the time where I released the podcast with Trump, it was getting, what was the most it was getting an hour?
		Was it 1.2 million?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Sure, I think so.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Maybe 1.2, 1.3, something like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		As much as 1.5 million, I think, at one point in time.
		An hour.
		Never trending.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I heard about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Never trending.
		Never trending.
		What's trending then?
		Tell me what trending is.
		If something gets 50 million views in a couple of days and that's not trending, what's trending?
		What do you call trending?
		What does that mean then?
		Are you curating your trending thing?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Did Kamala Harris call her daddy trend?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		That's a good question.
		Well, it didn't get any views.
		I mean, what did Kamala Harris on Call Her Daddy get?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Less than a million, I think.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I get a million for some random...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Should have gotten a million.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But that doesn't make any sense.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I might be wrong about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it wasn't extraordinary.
		It wasn't interesting enough.
		It's merit-based, essentially.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I was curious what it would say.
		How the trending page is controlled.
		I looked up on the screen.
		that says there's no humans that manually curate the page.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But obviously the algorithm.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I don't believe this is what I'm saying.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't believe that.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I'm pretty cynical about this response.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Okay.
		YouTube's trending page is controlled by an algorithm that's trained by human engineers.
		There's no employees who manually curate the trending page.
		How the algorithm works.
		The algorithm considers many factors to determine which videos are trending, including view count, view velocity, and video age.
		The algorithm considers where views are coming from and how the video performs compared to other recent uploads from the same channel.
		The algorithm aims to create a list of trending content that's relevant and representative across the platform.
		The algorithm refreshes every 15 minutes to stay current.
		Filters.
		The algorithm applies strict content filters to keep the trending list family-friendly.
		These filters ensure that videos don't contain excessive profanity, mature content, violence, or disparaging others in the community.
		Okay, so just that line alone.
		Disparaging others in the community.
		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It would be in YouTube's best interest, though.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		They need you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, don't they like views?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's my point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Don't you sell ads?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If I was YouTube, I'd be like, no, we want Joe Rogan's thing up here.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		We need views.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, not only that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you put it in trending, you'll get more views, so you get more advertising revenue.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		On that specific one, I think they were worried about something else.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, they were worried about it promoting Donald Trump and winding up being president because of that.
		But then it got to a point where you couldn't find it.
		So that was real weird.
		Like, if you Googled Trump Rogan podcast, you would not find that podcast at all.
		You would find clips of people discussing it.
		You would not find the actual podcast.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		When I first saw it, it was someone reacting to it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Live.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bizarre.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Tweet, like, we had to release it at the same time on multiple platforms.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Sorry for the glitch, wasn't there?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There was a glitch because the way we upload, generally, Jamie, you can speak to this, we upload with a timer, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, it's going to upload a certain time?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it usually is, like, at noon, and this time we were doing it at night, and, you know.
		For whatever reason, it didn't go live.
		The platforms don't work the same.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We just released it.
		We just said, let's just release it now.
		But it took a while to get up.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You haven't asked?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I kind of have, but I don't talk to them.
		I don't have a direct channel where I talk to them.
		I don't want one.
		I was just like, eh.
		Let me just put it...
		If there's a situation like that, I'll talk about that.
		And that's my way of responding to that.
		Make it make sense to me.
		Like, why can't you find it?
		Why can't you find a video that has 65 million views?
		Why can't you find that?
		That doesn't make any sense.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That is crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's nuts.
		Like, what's wrong with your search system?
		And then eventually, because of me talking about it, it went back.
		And then you could find it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's one of the best things.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		A lot of people are really grateful you did that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Well, that clip of you predicting the whole thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		See, here's the thing.
		Climate change narrative.
		This is a really goofy thing that people on the left are talking about.
		This is because of climate change.
		This is climate change causes fire.
		L.A. has had essentially the same weather pattern since the 1800s, since they started noticing them.
		There's a great video.
		Here, I'll send it to you, Jamie.
		There's a great video of the Topanga fires.
		You might be able to find it before I can pull it up.
		The Topanga fires from 1961, I believe.
		There was a huge fire that raged through.
		The Hollywood Hills, pre-climate change, 1961. L.A. has always been dry as fuck.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's a desert.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's why the movie industry is there.
		Because you could film outside and you don't ever have to worry about it raining on you.
		That's literally why they came there.
		Because it's the perfect climate.
		It's amazing.
		I was just there last weekend.
		The weather's incredible.
		But the city, because of their ridiculous policies, is just a fucking disaster.
		A dangerous, creepy, weird disaster of a city.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It's the 1961 Bell Air fire.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It's probably the same time period.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Could be.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		It sounds the same.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Brush fire, wind.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's just what happens, man.
		So the situation that I encountered was from 2000...
		I was filming Fear Factor, so it had to be before 2007. So it was really before a lot of this...
		I mean, you had the Inconvenient Truth documentary, but you didn't have...
		The type of climate change discussions that you have today.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So you think it was more...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's just L.A. Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just L.A. It's not a climate change issue.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		God, I've got to find this video.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		15,000 acres burned.
		450 homes burned.
		Here's the aftermath.
		Houses are digging through it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that is a black and white one.
		The one that I had was color footage.
		I know I have it.
		Just give me a second.
		I will find it.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		The documentary is called...
		Design for disaster that's popping up.
		This also says Bel Air.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Here, I'm just going through my...
		Whitney Cummings sent it to me.
		So I'm going through my videos with her.
		I'll find it in a second.
		But the point is, it's like...
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that has always been a problem.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So they had the same issue back then?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The 100% same issue.
		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.
		It's always been like this.
		It's Los Angeles.
		It's Los Angeles.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Why didn't they...
		Adapt.
		I lived in LA for two years.
		I'm on the volunteer fire department in my town where I live now, Massachusetts, and we don't have fire hydrants.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's so crazy!
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		We're out by Concord, like near there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know where that is.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So there's no fire hydrants.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So we bring our own water.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's so crazy.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		But it's possible, is my point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's possible.
		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.
		That's the facts.
		That's the reality of it.
		That's indisputable.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Do you think Gavin Newsom's going to, is this going to be the end of him, or are people going to put up with it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would like to think that people would wise up.
		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.
		It's just fire tender.
		It's just...
		It's a tinderbox.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		When the fire chief says, if we'd had a thousand more trucks, it wouldn't have, quote, tamped this down.
		But then we see...
		An old man with a garden hose able to save his house, it's like, well, an individual was able to make a difference.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So then, logically, a difference could be made.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There was one guy who put lawn sprinklers on his roof.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Milk, orange juice.
		I saw one guy.
		So it's difficult to have those two narratives.
		They contradict each other.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They do.
		But, I mean...
		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.
		See that?
		Like, this is an enormous piece of land.
		Covered with homes that's gone.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		All that's gone?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not just gone, but now poisoned.
		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.
		And will eventually seep into the water.
		It's going to get into the water supply.
		It's probably going to get into the ocean.
		It's going to wash into the ocean.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't think people realize how toxic that stuff is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not just that.
		It's in the air.
		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.
		You're breathing burnt garbage, burnt refuge, burnt buildings, burnt cars, burnt tires.
		All that stuff you're breathing in.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I didn't realize how often, you don't think about like firefighters, but they're exposed to that.
		All the time.
		The guys on the, it's all volunteer, but the guys that, you know, in their 50s, 60s, and you're just like hacking all the time.
unidentified		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And it's like a sacrifice they make knowingly.
unidentified		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's crazy.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		The gear is never, because you can't just wash fire gear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You've got to have it specially washed, and so there's like the kitchen and the firehouse, right?
		And you can't bring the...
		No gear allowed in the kitchen because it's...
		But, you know, you put it on, go home.
		You're supposed to shower every time, but that doesn't happen.
		So it's just crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, they're fucking exhausted.
		Like, you don't even want to shower.
		You just want to close your fucking eyes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I can't imagine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You've been working 28 hours.
		You've got a couple hours of sleep before you get back out there again.
		It's fucking insane.
		And still, 68% contained.
		Today.
		What's today's date?
		The 23rd?
		22nd?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I read some people talk about the big campfire from a few years ago.
		That containment number starts getting used as a big political tool and it'll never end up being 100%.
		It'll just keep pushing the number around to talk about stuff.
		It just eventually goes away.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you mean?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		The big number for the biggest fire?
		They've contained 100% of a small fire.
		The biggest fire, it'll always stay at a number that's below 100%.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, if it's still up.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		No, it's like a political tool they're saying.
		The residents there just got sick of it.
		They're like, this is now a political thing going back and forth.
		Tell us what it is.
		Where is the fire if it's not contained kind of thing.
		It just becomes a thing that no one has answers for.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, that is a weird thing, right?
		We want to put numbers on stuff.
		Like today, we're like, is it 65% or is it 68% contained?
		Like, what?
		It's a fire.
		Fire's still up.
		There's still a fire right now.
		January 22nd, there's still fire in Los Angeles.
		It's been going on for weeks.
		When did it start?
		What was the date the fire started?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that doesn't really make sense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Also, it doesn't make sense if you think about how windy it was and the fact that everything's dry.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		They're saying it can go into the roots, which is...
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		That's where I'm just starting to hear that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, maybe.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It can.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maybe, but five days later it starts up again as a raging inferno?
		Perhaps.
		Perhaps, but there is also evidence that people lit fires.
		There's also people who got arrested for lighting fires.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It wouldn't surprise me, man.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Have you heard of the book Monkey Ranch Gang?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		LA, man, it's not my cup of tea, but it's tragic.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		One of those firefighters has a history of arson.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		That's why they're talking about this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One of the firefighters?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		One of the fake firefighters.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		There you go.
		One of them who has a criminal history of arson.
		Gee, what's the odds?
		Well, he definitely didn't do it again.
		He learned his lesson, Jamie.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		A fake firetruck?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A pair of fake firefighters from Oregon.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Where'd he get a fake firetruck?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's, like, dedicated.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's like the Michael Jordan of fake firefighters.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		These are like a million bucks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He got a used one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did you see the thing in L.A. where they had the lot where they showed all of the fire trucks that were out of service?
unidentified		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hundreds.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Oh, they're bringing them back in service?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
		They were broken down.
		They hadn't bothered fixing them.
		So a journalist got to the lot and was filming from the outside.
		I think Schellenberger had it on his Twitter page.
		But a journalist got...
		To this lot where these fire trucks were, where they were supposed to be repaired.
		There was hundreds that weren't repaired.
		Like, just a fucking huge parking lot.
		Jeez.
		75 Los Angeles fire trucks wait for repairs as wildfires rage while city spends $1.3 billion on the homeless.
		This is New York Post.
		I heard it was more than 75. This guy had a film of it and showed, and it looked like a shit ton of trucks.
		That weren't fixed.
		You should have fixed those.
		You would have had more trucks.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		The reason is going to be, well, we're backed up.
		It takes so long.
		To get a fire truck even ordered, it takes about a year.
unidentified		God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, maybe that could work where there's very few fires and it's just essentially home fires.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		We're fine where we are.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it rains where you are, too.
		California, it does not fucking rain for long stretches of time.
		I think...
		California had gone eight months without rain when these fires started.
		This is common.
		This is why this climate change, it's climate change.
		This is not a change in the climate.
		This is the climate of California.
		You see it from that 1961 video.
		You see it from when I was evacuated.
		Three times I was evacuated.
		The houses in front of my old house burnt to the ground in 2018. Both of them.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		When you were talking about it in that clip that goes around, it's like there's nothing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If the right wind, it's going.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This firefighter told me that when we were filming Fear Factor.
		He freaked me out.
		He said, it's just going to take the right wind.
		He goes, we just get lucky.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So is there any preparation that could have?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you got to get rid of all the brush.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Number one.
		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.
		The whole right side of the highway is in flames.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I saw a clip of that.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It was surreal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Well, this department with Elon, like, you can just imagine what Elon could do with, like, the firetruck problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		But he can't do everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you can't do everything with states, right?
		Because states have states' rights.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And Hollywood runs off the blacklisting idea.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If you go against your union.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's how unions have power.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If you cross the picket line, you're going to be blacklisted.
		And you'd be ostracized, and that has real consequences in L.A. because people don't realize what...
		I always describe it when I'm teaching that class on filmmaking.
		Hollywood is the very definition of a rigged game.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it's a rigged game.
		They can shut you out.
		And so this is the underlying philosophy of the entire city.
		Even though there's only a certain amount of people that are actors in LA, there's a lot of people that wanted to be actors.
		And there's a lot of people that want to be famous.
		And so they get their fame from their small social media.
		They get like a little...
		Adrenaline and dopamine drip off of social media likes.
		And maybe my TikTok can go viral.
		And then they get a little fame from that.
		There's a bunch of fame seekers.
		All those people are locked into this cult-like thinking.
		So it's very difficult to get them out of that.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		They were doing an Arthurian legend.
		Their attempted Game of Thrones.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's that story?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		She's no longer at the Daily Wire, the comment section.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You know Brett Cooper, she created the comment section at the Daily Wire.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The comment section?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		The comments section.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you aware of this, Jamie?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		A little bit.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		A little bit, yeah, and then they hired someone else to host it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'll break it down.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What happened?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		She developed, they hired her.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		We want you to start this YouTube channel for Gen Z. We want it to feel like you're a streamer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear what she says.
		Let's rewind that shit.
		Let's hear what she has to say.
		Just a little bit.
brett cooper ▲ ● ▼		Hey guys.
		Some of you have heard the rumors online and the rumors are mostly true.
		Today, December 10th, will be my last day hosting the comment section and working for The Daily Wire.
		It is not true that I am being forced out.
		It was my own choice to leave.
		And believe me, this is bittersweet.
		I have had the most unbelievable three years helping to craft the show.
		And I'm grateful that we spent this time together.
		And I'm grateful that The Daily Wire gave us a platform to grow this community.
		But at this point in my life, I am ready to take on a new direction, both personally and professionally.
		This means new challenges and new endeavors, which I will share with you soon.
		As for this show, the comment section will continue with The Daily Wire.
		My producer, Regan, is taking over as host of the comment section, and I wish her and The Daily Wire all the best.
		We have had three great years, and I am proud of what we've accomplished together.
		Leaving this show and the platforms that we've built is hard, but I'm very excited for what's to come.
		Knowing that we have brought so many people together...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, pause this.
		I'm not hearing this.
		So what I'm not hearing is, like, what caused...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		No one knows exactly.
		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.
		And she starred in the Pendragon cycle.
		She used to act.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the problem, though?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		We don't know.
		We don't know.
		There's speculation that she...
		It exploded the channel.
		So she...
		If we're applying critical thinking to this, it's more than likely that she approached Jeremy Boring at Daily Wire.
		He's like, look guys, I'd like to be paid more than what I'm making because I'm pulling more views than anybody at the Daily Wire.
		Possibly.
		She was living on this farm with a commute.
		She was a little fresher with that.
		Maybe it's, she wanted to, there's speculation she wanted to run her show kind of from her house.
		But no one knows exactly.
		There's NDAs and everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		True, true.
		But Jeremy Boring's response would be, yeah, but we throw the Daily Wire's advertising money behind these people.
		We spend a lot in advertising.
		We lose a lot of money before we make any money.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but from what shows?
		Not the shows that are successful.
		The shows that are successful are successful.
		That's like the record business version of arithmetic.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You can't buy the elusive intangible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the record business is notoriously horrible with that.
		So they have a model where when they sign an artist, the artist gets an advance, right?
		And then the advance, you're...
		You're responsible for so much.
		You're responsible for advertising.
		They take into account a bunch of artists they spend money on that doesn't create money.
		So they have all this Hollywood math that they apply.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Hollywood accounting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And at the end of it, they make more than you, and you make almost nothing.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So that's very likely a possibility.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they throw as much shit against the wall as possible.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Think of a record company, you know, they might fund a bunch of different artists.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Prudhoe distribution.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and then only one or two of them take off, but those one or two of them, that's Prince, and he's getting fucked.
		And meanwhile, he's a giant superstar.
		Like, Prince had to change his name.
		He's like, okay, well, you own Prince?
		You guys own, okay, I'm this now.
		I'm a fucking squiggly line.
		That's what he did.
		So it was the artist formerly known as Prince.
		Do you know that?
		Prince, for a while, when he was in...
		Was it Warner Brothers?
		Whoever he was in dispute with.
		He changed his name to a symbol.
		And that was how he could still perform.
		It's like, yeah, you don't own this, bitch.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And there's probably a non-compete clause.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's just why she hasn't posted anything yet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Crazy.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you've got someone like Jordan Peterson who did partner with the same company.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Maybe that allows him to do more, like, traveling over, what did they do, like, the, you know, Jerusalem series?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, but I bet he got a better deal.
		First of all, it was Jordan Peterson.
		He's already famous, you know, and, like, they would throw money at him.
		You know, like, there was that famous thing with Stephen Crowder, where Stephen Crowder sort of, yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		People were using that in context of this thing, this kind of...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and the Crowder thing was kind of weird because he recorded a conversation, a private conversation that he had.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But the...
		The whole thing behind it is you're getting money to agree to be a part of a company.
		And the only reason why they would be willing to give you that money is if they're going to make money.
		They're taking a chance.
		I went through a similar thing with Spotify, but Spotify was great.
		There was no issues at all.
		It was like, we think this show is really valuable.
		We're going to give you a lot of money to be exclusive on Spotify.
		And just, that's it.
		Pretty simple.
		No input at all in terms of who I should have on or what I should talk about.
		There was nothing.
		There was a few hiccups during the COVID days where they were experiencing so many attacks.
		They were getting strong pressure to try to remove the podcast.
		And they didn't buckle.
		They hung in there.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Good for them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, good for them.
		I'm very loyal to them because of that.
		Because what they did was...
		Pretty extraordinary.
		A lot of people would have caved.
		And they did not cave.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		But you see how that now is going to...
		They've already filmed Pendragon Cycle, this whole thing, this Arthurian.
		So it's probably going to impact.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I hope it's good.
		Me too.
		The thing is, like, who's writing it?
		How good are the people that are writing it?
		How good is the story?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's all about the story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's all about the story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's all about how good is it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I was thinking about that on the airplane.
		The logic of story.
		Trying to connect all these dots and everything.
		I think there is an inherent...
		There are patterns.
		Like I was talking about mathematics.
		How I can't think about...
		I need a visual.
		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...
		Why this movie is interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, right, right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Then you're almost making it for the sake of the story, not the audience.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		But the audience will come as a consequence.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		As opposed to today, where people think they can make movies for the audience, like Disney.
		But they're discarding the very fabric of the reality of these stories.
		They're thinking, well, we can change Snow White.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And then that screws them up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it's also people really resistant to that now.
		They're getting so upset about it.
		They don't want you to force feed them some sort of activist version of a story.
		They just want stories.
		They want the thing where, you know, you're saying like, you get it.
		Like, oh, we found it.
		This is the hook.
		This is the meat of the story.
		This is the exciting part.
		This is the thing that resonates with people.
		That's why it's so frustrating when you go to a movie and that never happens.
		You never get hooked in.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, because you can take the same story and tell it different ways.
		Logically, there's one ideal way.
		You're never going to quite get there.
unidentified		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Because I was watching Beautiful Mind on the airplane, which is, I think, my favorite movie.
		I'm trying to think of one that's better.
		It's just...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Amazing movie.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		That movie nailed it.
		Yeah.
		They nailed it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So maybe that's why I'm thinking so much about, like, math and everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's kind of a math to it, right?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's my point.
unidentified		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And then Dunkirk.
		All right.
		So this blew my mind.
		So the golden ratio.
		It can be found in music, movies, everything.
		Then someone should be on your arm.
		This is the golden ratio, 1 to 1.6.
		Then from here, 1 to 1.6.
		In your hand, 1 to 1.6.
		Your finger to the knuckle, 1 to 1.6.
		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...
		The three stories converge.
		There's a mathematical formula to why.
		It's not a coincidence.
		And that was what separates him.
		So there's a math...
		Math isn't the right word.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He seems uniquely uninfluenced by pop culture, too.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		True.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's...
		I think he famously doesn't have email.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think you're writing for yourself.
		You should treat yourself like, that's what I do with my YouTube stuff.
		You don't try and do it for annoyance.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you do it for the thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You make the thing the best thing it can be.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, which is what you want to see.
		How do you judge it?
		How do you know if it's good or not, right?
		It's because of what I would want to see.
		I'm going to try and make it as good as what I would want to see.
		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's a fascinating medium, right?
		Because now it's also being challenged by these shows that are essentially long movies, like Ozark.
		Ozark's a long movie.
		And you can get so much on The Sopranos.
		You get so much more into depth with the characters and the interactions and everything that's below the boat.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's so much more when you have six seasons or something.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I heard you talking to Tarantino about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Well, he was talking, he disparagingly talked about Yellowstone being a soap opera.
		But he also talked about Homeland.
		About Homeland was an exception to that because it was essentially this amazing moment at the end of the first season.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where the show is like a, Homeland first season was incredible.
		And it is like a movie.
		It's really good.
		It's really well made.
		And at the end of it, you're like, wow, this is a fucking incredible piece of just artwork.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Have you seen Taylor Sheridan's new show, Landman?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I watched one episode.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I haven't seen it all yet.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It takes a bit to get into it, but...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He's doing something that no one else is doing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was a little thrown off by the lady who's playing his daughter because she's clearly like 30 years old.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And I'm like, how are you telling me she's 17?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It gets worse with that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But that's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, that girl looks like she's got to be 25 years old at least.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You think?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's find out.
		Yeah, no, I know she is.
		We looked at it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		From a producer's perspective, yeah, you're not going to hire a frickin' 18. You're going to hire someone over 18 for labor laws, for sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, how about to hire someone that's 18?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		19, so then you can get around the labor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, even 18, 19. At least she looks like she could be 17. Yeah, that's her.
		27. Dang.
		Okay.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You got it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		27. Alright, you nailed it.
		Beautiful lady, but looks like a lady.
		Looks like a beautiful woman.
		Does not look like a high school kid.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Good point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And so, when you're seeing that, it throws you off immediately.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, what are you doing here?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Touche.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is nuts.
		It just doesn't make any sense.
		I'm not saying she looks bad at all.
		She looks great.
		But she looks like a mature woman.
		She doesn't look like a young child.
		So when he's got this dynamic or he's dealing with this wild, rebellious teenage daughter, and you're like, hey, bro, she's lying.
		When's the last time you saw her?
		That might not be the same person.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Billy Bob's hilarious, though.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's great.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's fucking phenomenal.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He has some great rants about climate change and oil.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's a phenomenal actor.
		Well, that's the other thing about climate change.
		If you really think that it's oil is the problem of climate change, well, you better change your whole fucking life.
		Is that what he says?
		Everything in your goddamn life is made with oil.
		Everything in your hair, everything in your car, everything in your phone, everything in your fucking life is made with oil.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And you're reading Elon's biography on the airplane, but do you think he could get the solution with the battery walls and the battery roof?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Could that work?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		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.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I'm reading an article that kind of disagrees with that, and it explains why here in this third paragraph.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		This was the third article I got to that said that there's less because of regenerative braking.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		What we just talked about.
		But regenerative braking, again, I don't think is in all electric cars.
		I know it's standard on Teslas.
		Crucially, all cars produce those pollutants.
		That's true.
		Not just electric version.
		That's true.
		But that's not true.
		What they're saying is not true either because these heavier cars produce more.
		That's just what they're saying.
		Measuring tiny particulates is very difficult.
		There are relatively few comparative studies so far.
		That means there's still uncertainty over whether the extra weight of EV batteries will result in worse particulate pollution.
		But it makes sense.
		It's logical.
		So if they're showing this, if he's done a study and it's showing this in a study, this is a logical conclusion.
unidentified		Is that an electric Range Rover?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't even know that they existed.
		Was that a new thing?
		I never saw one before.
		There's a lot now.
		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.
		It would be more expensive though.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I never heard of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so most brakes have steel rotors.
		You know, steel hits this carbon and it just releases more brake dust.
		Or steel hits the pads, releases more brake dust.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I've got a hybrid RAV4. I love it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, those are really good on gas.
		I mean, something that's good on gas is going to be better, for sure.
		Something that's bad on gas is going to burn more.
		But the bottom line is...
		There's problems with all technologies in terms of whether or not they go into a landfill.
		This is a giant problem with windmills.
		Windmills aren't efficient.
		They're gross looking.
		They pollute the landscape in terms of the way it looks.
		You just see these fucking windmills everywhere.
		And those things have to go in a landfill.
		So you have these enormous fiberglass propellers that now have to be buried in the ground.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And Billy Bob goes on a good rant about the wind.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He rips them apart.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, they're not effective.
		They're not good enough for what they do to the environment.
		You know, they kill whales.
		That's the other thing.
		You know, Trump talked about that, too.
		That these things, when they set these things up, you know, near the ocean, like the sound is fucking with these whales.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I didn't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's not good.
		It's not the way to go.
		Better.
		But, you know, if you have, like, enormous areas of land that are covered in solar panels, that looks gross, too.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Let's just turn the policies into a battery.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		How are they going to rebuild if it's like, yeah, there's nothing we can do?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If this happens again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		You know, like, goddammit.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I don't see the mayor making it through this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She doesn't seem like she should make it through.
unidentified		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wasn't she like some sort of a radical communist activist when she was younger, too?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
unidentified		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That clip of her in the airport?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Not good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not responding at all.
		She looks shell-shocked.
		And then smiling when she's on TV. We're going to rebuild with a bunch of construction workers behind her.
		They're like, look, we're rebuilding.
		She's smiling.
		We're going to get to work.
		You're not going to get to work.
		You're not going to get to work.
		These people aren't going to have the money to rebuild.
		Where's the money going to come from?
		Are you going to give them the money for those homes?
		You're talking now about $300 billion worth of damage and counting.
		Are you going to shell out $300 billion to give those people their homes back?
		When someone has an $82 million home, are you going to give them that $82 million rather than pay teachers more money?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		In North Carolina, in the middle of Appalachia, you have people with cheaper homes than anywhere in LA. They're not getting money back.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
		They're not.
		They're not even getting attention anymore.
		No, that's what's crazy.
		These people are waiting in line for fuel.
		They're waiting in line for propane fuel so they don't freeze to death.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Crazy.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well everything's gone there.
		It was a crazy disaster.
		But again, you could say that's climate change.
		But what...
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't doubt it at all.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't doubt that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Combined.
		And they're not going to change.
		They're not going to shift that.
		That's what they do.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Long term, I think China poses the greatest potential.
		Threats still.
		You had a CIA ex-CIA guy on who was talking about the 21-year plan for China that blew my mind.
		Because when I was in graduate school, it was like 80% of the other students were from China.
		No one believes that.
		There was multiple classes where I went in.
		I was the only...
		A non-China, not just American student, non-Chinese student.
		There'd be 15 people in the class.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		When I showed my thesis film, I went in and the whole auditorium was Chinese and every other film that played that night was in Chinese.
unidentified		Wow.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		So you're like, and I tried to do a documentary on it and then I was kind of, people didn't like that.
		All I was doing was asking questions like, how'd you end up coming straight for this?
		And it's a societal, there's a, you know, what's the word?
		The parents want to do it.
		There's a social aspect.
		It's viewed as something that you want to do.
		And then there was the one-child policy for a long time so they can afford to do it.
		But it's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we're in a very strange time of narratives and truth.
		Where narratives to many people are more important than objective truth.
		And that's never good for anybody.
		It's never good for anybody to ignore the reality of what's going on.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And the problem with people that talk about climate change is they never talk about China emissions.
		They talk about America.
		Trump wants to pull us out of the Paris Accord.
		They want to do this, they want to do that.
		Look at what's going on in the world.
		You're not going to stop China from producing more CO2 and more emissions than all the other developed nations combined.
		And you're not even talking about it.
		If you really wanted to address the problem, it would be that.
		That's the problem.
		That's the biggest part of the problem.
		What's the biggest offender?
		It's China.
		And they don't talk about that at all because they don't want to be racist.
		So it's like they just want to concentrate on people that, you know, live in America.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then criticizing the idea of drilling for oil.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Well, you said at the beginning of this conversation, too, you were talking about the potential for both sides.
		And we are in a strange time as well where we're seeing things coming from both sides that are very strange.
		This rethinking of Winston Churchill and everything, there's just...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's the rethinking of Winston Churchill?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		When Tucker Carlson had on...
		I'm forgetting the name of the historian.
		Doesn't matter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Martyr May.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Daryl Cooper.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Daryl Cooper, yeah.
		I think people ask me sometimes after all this video stuff, they're like, what would you recommend reading and studying for critical thinking?
		And I think Winston Churchill is the ultimate...
		Example of critical thinking.
		Critical thinking is all about thinking for yourself for the long term when everyone around you is telling you that you're wrong.
		When the stakes are at their highest is what he was dealing with.
		And it's such a fascinating time, World War II. I just think there's so much.
		You could just study that conflict and gain so much insight.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One thing that my friend Chris DiStefano brought up on the podcast that blew me away was Operation Unthinkable.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I haven't heard that one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I haven't heard that.
		It wouldn't surprise me.
		He did not like Stalin.
		Because with Roosevelt, they got buddy-buddy.
		My whole thesis was on this.
		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.
unidentified		Whoa.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And I was blown away.
		I was like, how is no one?
		And it taps into Oppenheimer.
		So James B. Conant, that guy on the left, that's the president of Harvard.
		This is afterwards.
		Churchill comes for an honorary degree after everything's won and everything.
		Conant on the left flies over there, meets with him.
		They make a secret deal.
		They have all this research.
		They're ready to do radar.
		It's developed, but they can't build it.
		They're cut off from the world.
		All of Europe has fallen, except England.
		They stand alone, their darkest hour, and he is desperate.
		He's just trying to hold out until America will join.
		Imagine being in that position.
		Everyone around you is saying, we have got to surrender.
		We have got to negotiate.
		And he's like, no.
		He's like, no.
		Only when the last of us are choking in their own blood.
		He's like, we have to fight to the death.
		That's not logical.
		But it's what saved them.
		When does illogical behavior save you?
		That's something that connects to the very fabric of reality that goes beyond what we can articulate.
		It connects to spirituality.
		When does living as though God existed save them, in a way?
		So he negotiates with Conant, and they bring that tech back, develop a secret lab at Harvard to build it all.
		That's where sonar came from, napalm.
		There was a special, the Harvard candle, named after Harvard.
		It's a remarkable story.
		It's so deep, I could talk about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what I found out last night?
		My friend Kurt Metzger told me this.
		We were talking about the Elon gaffe, where he's like, my heart goes out to you.
		Like, hey, don't do that, though.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's the perfect example of when you see a story, you believe it's true.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		If you believe he's a Nazi, you're going to see him do a silly hand gesture and see that as that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, he's saying my heart goes out to you.
		But that...
		That is how the Nazis did it.
		But this is the thing.
		This is what I found out last night.
		That's also how they used to do the Pledge of Allegiance.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Pledge of Allegiance used to be done like this until the Nazis came along.
		And then we switched it to this.
		Your hand over your heart.
		So we cut out that part.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		There's going to be a screen grab of you doing it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's already a screen grab.
		This is what's funny.
		CNN, during the COVID times in particular, whenever I get in trouble, the photo they would use of me was me at the UFC weigh-ins.
		So when I do the weigh-ins, I announce the weigh-ins.
		I say, welcome to the weigh-ins, everybody.
		I'm waving to the crowd.
		That's what they did.
		So they would use this photo of me to try to make it look like I was some sort of a Nazi.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because I'm waving to the crowd and they take a freeze frame of it.
		I'm like, welcome to the weigh-ins, everybody.
		I put my hands out to the crowd.
		I'm saying hi to everybody.
		I'll show you this, Jamie.
		You probably could find it if you look for it, but I'm going to show you what it looked like in the old days.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I'm looking at it.
		I was trying to find a different explanation.
		I have a picture of it.
		I was just digging for better versions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, that's it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's how they did the Pledge of Allegiance.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Oh, interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How crazy is that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's in 1942. Yep.
		So this is, you know, and then we realize, oh, we can't do that anymore.
		That's how the Nazis do it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's right around that time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pledge of Allegiance would be your right hand up in the air.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How crazy is that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Well, we were just getting into World War II, so we didn't have the views of Hitler embodied in us.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pretty bizarre, though.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know?
		Yeah.
		Now you're not allowed to do that anymore.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I didn't know that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so funny because of this, there's all these photos of AOC with her arm out like this and Michelle Obama.
		It's like everybody's a Nazi.
		It's so dumb.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You can go look at anybody and find that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, if you move your arms at all.
		You try to catch a ball.
		Anything you're doing with your arms up in the air, now you're a Nazi.
		How about that Hindu guy that kept his arm up in the air for like 60 years?
		Not familiar.
		We talked about him the other day.
		Who brought him up?
		I did.
		Jamie brought him up.
		So there's this guy who has not put his arm down in some insane amount.
		His arm is shriveled.
		It's useless.
unidentified		Why?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a devotion to Lord Shiva.
		To show his devotion, he decided, I'm going to keep my arm up forever.
		And now his arm's frozen in place.
		And now he's like a really old man.
		That's what he looks like.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How crazy is that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He has a useless right arm now.
		Look at his fingers are all twisted up and fucked up.
		His nails are all fucked up.
		His right arm is essentially completely useless.
		It just stays like that.
		It doesn't move anymore.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Power of stories.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Nuts.
		Yeah.
		1973 decided to raise his right arm 90 degrees to the air.
		His fingers have withered to the palm of his hand.
		His knuckles are white with rot and his nails have grown long and twisted.
		Well, he's a Nazi.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I didn't make that connection.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I was like, why are you...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That guy's doing a Nazi salute forever.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I didn't think about that.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's how dedicated he is to being a Nazi.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He won't even put the hand down.
		He's all in.
		All in forever until he dies.
		They're going to have to get him in a super long coffin.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		How's Elon handling this whole...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He's probably like, what the...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he was definitely what the fuck, and he was happy that the ADL, of all people, defended him.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that was good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, it's obvious.
		But all these people on Twitter are just chiming in, saying it's clearly a Nazi salute.
		He's doing a Nazi salute.
		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
unidentified		It's so dumb.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so dumb.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's not clearly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		The whole thing's crazy.
		But that's a sign of the times.
		And they couldn't help it.
		They saw a thing.
		And they're like, we're going to run with it.
		He's clearly showing he's a Nazi.
		You know, that Trump's in office.
		And he's a Nazi.
		And this is...
		Fascism is real, folks.
		Here it is.
		My heart goes out to you.
		It's just weird.
		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.
		And that's what this is.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		The power of story.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the power of story.
		That really truly is a great example of the power of story.
		Because the story that everyone's afraid of is that this right-wing dictator has gotten into power and he's brought with him this...
		Billionaire oligarch who happens to be one of the richest men, if not the richest person, on the planet Earth.
		And this guy is secretly a Nazi.
		He's been hiding it all these days until Trump got in office.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He'd make a great movie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Let's go!
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He'd make a great movie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		It's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's fascinating, but it also...
		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!
		More of this guy.
		More people like that.
		I like how this guy thinks.
		I like how this guy talks.
		And that's what I got out of it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's surreal.
		I don't know.
		I don't think about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you shouldn't think about it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you can't think about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, then you get audience capture.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And you freeze, too.
		It's like Heath Ledger acting.
		If you think about it, like, oh, 100,000 people might see what I'm going to see, then you just can't talk.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's probably why Christopher Nolan doesn't have a phone.
		Same kind of thing.
		To make the kind of films that he makes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Have you reached out to him?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I haven't.
		I don't even know if he does any interviews.
		I don't know.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Rarely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would love to have him on, though.
		I'm a huge fan of his work.
		I think he's brilliant.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Obviously.
		Not just brilliant.
		Like, amazing.
		Like, unusual.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Uniquely brilliant.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		He's got this mathematical mind.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And he approaches story in that way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So did Kubrick.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		There's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A lot of parallels there, right?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Kubrick, in his spare time, would do complex math.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I wish.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's crazy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So his films were all, like, Kubrick's films all had, like, encoded things in there.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I heard you talking to Tarantino or somebody about the lost...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Eyes Wide Shut.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was Roger Avery.
		Roger Avery and Tarantino.
		And so Roger Avery was discussing how there was supposed to be a narrator through Eyes Wide Shut.
		And they changed that.
		And after...
		He died, when Kubrick died, before they made a different cut of the film.
		And he firmly believes that it should be, like, recut and it should be done with a narrator.
		And in AI, you could actually probably do Kubrick narrating it if you wanted to.
		You know, you could get samples of his voice and he could narrate it.
		But that would, you know, you would also, like, how would you know how he would cut it?
		He'd kind of be fucking around.
		But apparently there's many scenes that never made it into it that Kubrick wanted in and then in the final cut they changed.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Shining is filled with them.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's what I was talking about.
		There's different ways to tell that same story.
		You can feel it when it kind of clicks in, which is right.
		The audience doesn't lie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And then Stephen King did his own version of The Shining as a television miniseries.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Did he?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it wasn't.
		It wasn't very good.
		It wasn't effective.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There was something about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It just didn't work the same way.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That elusive, intangible thing that can't be bought, can't be replicated.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Everyone's after it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		No one can articulate it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		What makes a good actor?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Why was Heath Ledger a good actor?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And that's another great example of why those boats are superfluous to everything else.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It's all about telling the story.
		Right?
		And some people...
		What's going on?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		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.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Because he wouldn't be doing stuff like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which movie?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was watching it.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Room 237. The one about the shining and all the hidden stuff behind it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even 80% is pure gibberish.
		What does that mean?
		That means 20% is legit?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he wouldn't tell an audience what to think or how to think.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		And if they came out thinking something different than him, that's fine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's hard to say, though, because someone saying that is their personal assistant, they're not speaking for Kubrick.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Stephen King said the same thing when he saw it.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		He said he had to turn it off because it was bullshit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Turn what off?
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		The movie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The Shining itself.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no.
jamie vernon ▲ ● ▼		Room 237. The documentary about The Shining.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, but Stephen King also didn't like The Shining.
		You know, these are, like, people's personal opinions on things.
		It doesn't mean it's not true.
		And it's also, like, Kubrick, in many of his films, did have, like, hidden subtext.
		He was a fascinating guy.
		Like, 2001. 2001 is a fascinating movie.
		You miss a lot of it when you have to, like, re-watch it over and over again to get what he was trying to say.
		What was he doing in that film?
		There's many, many layers to his films.
		He had his own way of doing it.
		He might not have done it mathematically with the score the way Christopher Nolan did, but there was something to it.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Mathematically, I shouldn't even say that word, though, because it's just patterns.
		He's still using patterns.
		Mathematics is just a language that allows us to articulate a form of those patterns.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Like, what's the secret behind this?
		What is he really saying?
		What's he really doing?
		Are you still...
		Are you going to make films?
		Are you more committed?
		Do you feel like this thing that you're doing...
		What is your Secret Scholar?
		What is your YouTube page?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Secret Scholar Society is the YouTube channel.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why did you decide to call it that?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That story I was telling you.
		That was from that, yeah.
		Right before the viral video, I was working on a short film.
		There's a little experimental...
		I shouldn't call it a short film.
		It was me with a camera and that music teacher.
		In like a month, we threw this thing together.
		It's not a movie.
		So people love to...
		Warren's last movie is like...
		It's like, dude, that's not...
		Don't hold that to the standard of like...
		The other ones you can hold to a standard of a movie, but that one was just an experimental...
		Me by myself.
		I would love to keep doing that.
		Right now, it's about putting food on the table and fighting for the algorithm, keeping the algorithm on my side, which is...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, because you're unemployed.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And there's potential to teach, but...
		I'm making more doing what I'm doing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and you're teaching by doing that too.
		You are.
		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?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the art of critical thinking.
		I was kind of thinking like...
		Sherlock Holmes was my, as a kid, my favorite fictional character.
		And I think it appealed.
		He was really the first kind of superhero serial monthly episodes, Strand Magazine.
unidentified		Sure.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		And he has no superpowers, just his mind.
		Which makes us feel like, I could do that if I could just see the world like him.
		He has nothing I don't have, technically.
		And he does it.
		We're presented the same information.
		It's just what he does with that information.
		It makes you feel like you have a potential for that power within you.
		You just got to know how to unlock it.
		So that's kind of playing with the art of...
		That's why the slogan on the channel is the art of critical thinking.
		His was the science of deduction.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		It is an art, too, though.
		Because when someone does it really well, it's kind of beautiful.
		Critical thinking when you watch a conversation between two people and there's an igniting of your mind that is kind of beautiful.
		It's artistic.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Hopefully you can sometimes get there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, I think you do get there.
		You get there for sure.
		You've gotten there with me.
		I think there's a lot of people that do that.
		And it's that kind of critical thinking.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Especially students.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, especially young people, man.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and they can sniff that out so fast.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		But they're not looking at things correctly.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It all stems from just questioning everything.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what's going to be really interesting about him becoming a part of the Department of Government Efficiency.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If he's going to apply that to the most inefficient...
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I bet he will.
		Because it says, right, he would go around preaching this algorithm.
		And he genuinely believed it, and it makes logical sense.
		There's a logical flow to him and his decision-making that's laid out in that biography.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It'll be interesting to see what he does with education.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Good luck.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		We need...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		That's one thing I miss.
		I do miss teaching.
		I miss being in the classroom like that with those kids.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think you should definitely do more of that, but I'm really happy you're doing what you're doing.
		Thank you.
		Like I said, when I saw you, I was like, oh, is this young, intelligent guy, super reasonable?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I look younger than I am.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How old are you?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		37. You're still young.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm 57. I'm old.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm allowed to call, you're just a kid.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I wish.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, it's like, it's an important service.
		It really is.
		And there's more people like that now in the public eye than I think has ever been because of YouTube, especially in terms of the impact.
		Like, what's the most watched video that you have?
		Like, how many views does it have?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		A million.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Just imagine a lecture that reaches a million people.
		When does that ever happen?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Peter was talking about this Gutenberg revolution of YouTube.
		And there's only one other professor.
		Okay, you've got like...
		Eric Weinstein and all that.
unidentified		Okay.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Putting all of them aside, Sam Richardson, School of Communications, is the only—and he's doing it.
		Every class is streamed live, and the university is cool with it.
		All the students are cool with it.
		There's like 200 students in the auditorium.
		They come up on stage, and he's applying critically.
		He challenged them on the CEO of Papa John's concept, where he got fired for saying the N-word with the context of, that's not a good thing to say.
		It's really interesting to see.
		And his office hours, I got to join him for his office hours and was live-streamed.
		That's just using this technology in such a remarkable way.
		There's so much potential for that in schools and education.
		Everyone's so afraid because they don't want to put themselves out there.
		That school was terrified that their name would get out there.
		They're so used to going through life without any ability for the...
		Public to see what's going on because no one would care.
		First of all, no one cares.
		And then suddenly there's the potential and it changes your world.
		And the question is, look, if you're that scared of transparency, you're probably doing something wrong.
		Right.
		It's not just what you do, but how you do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you should never be scared of discussions.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially if you're an educational institution.
		You should never be scared of discussions.
		It's one of the most important things.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Or innovation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		This technology is incredible.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's nuts.
		And it never existed before.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Much easier and much more effective.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And now that doesn't work anymore.
		Because these things, like this, is bigger than all those things.
		Why?
		Because it's not full of shit.
		It's that simple.
		Interesting conversations from people that aren't full of shit.
		Turns out that's what people actually want.
		They've just been dumped on with nonsense for so long that people have got accustomed to thinking, no, that's what you're supposed to get.
		You're supposed to get a late night talk show host version of what's happening in politics.
		That's what you're supposed to get.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		You need people with integrity.
		So I would say thank you for having the integrity.
		How many people, when presented with Kamala Harris or Kamala Harris, to do that interview, to be like, no, we're going to do it for real.
		If we're going to do it, I'll do it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		It's like there's just so many other people would have just compromised.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I thought about it.
		I thought about it.
		I was sitting around like, how do I do it?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Sure, that's just tough.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I didn't know.
		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?
		I'll get to who you are.
		I want to get to who you are.
		I've got to cook you.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Why wouldn't you do that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because she didn't want to get cooked.
		Because it's scary!
		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.
		It is CBS, correct?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		What were his ground?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because they changed her answer.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		How do you define hate speech?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Exactly.
		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.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Of course.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		The same way democracy is going to end in inequality in certain areas.
		You're going to have inequality no matter what we do because there's going to be in capitalism.
		Capitalism is the worst economic approach except every other one.
unidentified		Right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		There's problems to it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		People love when they debate you.
		They point out...
		These little flaws.
		Well, here's an anecdote of how hate speech was used.
		Here's a potential.
		Of course, there's going to be potential flaws, but it doesn't mean you have a better alternative.
		What is your alternative solution?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
		Exactly.
		Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed talking to you.
		I really enjoy what you're doing.
		I appreciate you, and thank you for being here.
		Tell everybody again, it's Secret Scholar Society.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Warren Smith-Secret Scholar Society.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		On YouTube.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's the only thing you're using currently?
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I'm on X. It's WTSmith17 for some reason.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Secret Scholars is the handle on YouTube.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And on Patreon, you have a Secret Scholars thing.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's like, yeah, if you go to Patreon, you can watch behind the scenes and exclusive.
unidentified		Oh, beautiful.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Perfect.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Love Patreon.
		I love what they do.
		Thank you very much.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		Thank you for having me, Jay.
warren smith ▲ ● ▼		I really appreciate it.
unidentified		It was awesome.
		Thank you.
		All right.

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