Spencer and David Bloomberg dissect fandom’s extremes, from RFK Jr.’s vaccine critics confronting Peter Hotez in Texas to doxing threats forcing relocations. They debate whether supporting artists like Cosby—whose comedy funded his crimes—is ethical, contrasting it with Hotez’s vaccines, which save lives despite his personal views. Bloomberg rejects Rogan and Musk for amplifying harmful narratives, while Spencer critiques blind devotion to flawed figures. The episode argues that fame demands accountability, even beyond professional work, forcing fans to weigh enjoyment against harm. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back today again with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
I'm good.
I'm good.
And I'm happy to be back.
I'm such a big fan.
Yeah, big fan.
Big fan.
Yeah, that's alluding, of course, to the fact that we're going to, as a talk today, we're continuing.
We didn't know we would be continuing this, but we missed some relevant subject matter words to put into our episode that we did about fandom.
And then an event happened that reminded me of exactly what we missed.
And then I talked to David and he said, let's just pick up where we left off and put this stuff in there and just pretend like, you know, like when you walk by a display case item in the grocery store and you bump it and it all falls apart, you just kind of like, well, and just kind of shuffle away.
And it was like that before.
Everything is exactly the way it should be.
Or sometimes you just kind of hastily put some stuff back and then realize you'll never get there.
And you're like, well, that's what we're going to do.
We're just going to throw this stuff back with the other things and just pretend like it was meant to be there the whole time.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it makes sense because this is what we're really going to be talking about is the dark, dark side of fandom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this, I mean, the darkest side of fandom is stalkers, right?
Right.
But, and I think we touched a little bit on the aspect of stalkers just a brief couple sentences last time we did this.
But the thing that leads to stalkers is the idea that we're generally thrusting at today with this today, which is that does fame give society the right or the right to have access to the famous?
Does the fact that society has elevated people to a higher status give us the right to, you know, have a greater amount of views or access to them?
And I think that's a fascinating thing.
And I think a lot of people fall on the wrong side of this line.
And so let's get into it.
I mean, I can conclusively say it depends.
Well, yeah, this is a, there's no clear, clear line here, which is, which is why it makes it an interesting topic, I think.
Yeah.
So we should, we should timestamp this properly with the event that led to this coming up, which was that RFK Jr. appeared on Joe Rogan.
Now it was a week and a half ago or something.
And I think I can't remember how Peter Hotez's name got dragged into it, but he tweeted something about the falsehoods being spread.
And Joe Rogan challenged him and said, well, then you should come on and debate him.
Yes.
Peter Hotez had the temerity to point out that some things that were said in the conversation between Joe Rogan and RFK Jr. about vaccines was inaccurate.
And then because he is, I mean, it's possible that Peter Hotes is the most famous and visible.
Well, certainly now he's the most famous and visible, but even then was probably the most famous and visible vaccine advocate in the world.
Well, certainly in the English speaking world.
I don't know enough about the rest of the parts of the world to know, but.
Well, he should be in other parts of the world because his coat vaccine that he helped invent is going to many non-English speaking areas where the big pharmaceutical companies wouldn't normally reach.
And because he has right.
He and his team created this vaccine with no trademark, no copyright, you know, for all the people.
And you will see them every single day on Twitter saying, Oh, he's in the pocket of big pharma.
He's taking all the big pharma money.
No, he literally didn't take a dime for this.
You know, he has created this, put it out there for free to help people.
Yeah.
And it's being used in many of these what I would call non-first world countries that don't have access to the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines, among others.
And also not access to pretty much any of the other medications from Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca and all the other big pharma outfits because there's no money in trying to sell to them.
They are from nations that are less fortunate than ours.
Yeah.
And so this is a man who, if I could grant sainthood, I would give it to him.
And I know you have to be dead, but I would grant him living sainthood, not just for the work he has done, but for the way he deals with people.
I mean, you and I are on Twitter and we see some of these people and the vile, hateful BS that they spew.
And he responds to them with such kindness and such patience that I truly do not know where.
I mean, I don't have that inside me.
I really don't.
And, you know, he does.
And he does all these things for truly the good of humankind.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, you have people like Rogan, who does things for the good of his wallet and RFK Jr., who does things for the good of his wallet and popularity.
And, you know, them attacking him.
And so.
Yeah.
And now people may be wondering: okay, how is this leading to fandom?
It doesn't sound other than us being fans of Peter Hotez.
Right.
Yeah.
The, so the, as, as we mentioned before, RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan challenged Peter Hotz to come debate the topic of whether vaccines are safe or not.
And then Elon Musk turned the screw by amplifying it to the degree that only Elon Musk can at this point.
And everyone was like, yeah, yeah, why don't you?
Elon Musk specifically said, if you don't, it's because they're not safe.
It's because you know that they're wrong.
Yeah.
And every cogent argument for why you shouldn't do this is has then been reminded of people.
And I think we did talk a little bit about this exact thing when we talked about free speech.
Although I've come to understand by looking at the numbers that that's the least popular set of episodes That we really went on for so long, but okay.
Well, sorry, everyone.
We had a lot to say.
So, you're saying we're making a two-parter, a second part to an episode after a three-parter didn't do well.
Yeah, yeah, well, whatever.
I don't do this for money.
But after that, after the challenge, and Elon Musk amplified it, someone who lives sufficiently close to Peter Hotez and is a notable asshole based on all of his other content went to the home of Peter Hotez,
happened to know where he lives, went to his home and did a video, TikTok video, I believe, about approaching him to ask him about, you know, why he won't, why he won't do this.
He didn't just go to his home.
Just to make it clear, this was on Father's Day.
Yeah.
Okay.
Dr. Hotez and his wife were coming back from a bakery on Father's Day.
These two guys were waiting for him with a cell phone to confront him about not debating so they could get it on video.
And, you know, Hotez managed to get himself and his wife inside and lock the door.
And, you know, he later told the Washington Post: all we were trying to do is get a cake for Father's Day.
Yeah.
And yeah, these, like you said, these assholes just come up and confront him and, you know, harass him.
And again, this is where, you know, I differ from Hotez because I probably would have punched the guy.
Now, Hotez said, who knows?
They could have been carrying a weapon.
You know, I mean, it is Texas.
Odds were good.
They had a gun.
But yeah, it's that's insane.
And obviously, these two guys were not fans of Hotez, but they were fans, clearly, of RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan.
Yeah.
And as we are recording right now, neither Rogan nor RFK Jr. said anything to condemn their actions.
Yeah, not to walk it back, not to say, look, everyone should just chill, like, don't go to this guy's house and hurrah, you know, like nothing like that.
So this is where we're at.
This is where we're at in the world, in society, that the truth about vaccines has been distorted and corners so badly that and to such a degree, like both sides on this think that they're saving a huge number of lives by doing what they're doing.
Only one of those sides is correct.
And the fulcrum across which that swings is objective reality, objective reality.
Once you, all right, I'm going to stop, climb off my hobby horse now, get back to the topic.
So, well, I mean, it's, you know, it is one thing that Hotez talks about is why I won't debate you.
And is, you know, you have objectively caused like hundreds of thousands of deaths through your anti-vax, you know, promotion.
Yeah.
But to, you know, to finish off the, well, hopefully finish off for now, the Hotez story and just emphasize the danger here.
On June 23rd, Hotez was out of the country at a conference, you know, like about saving lives and stuff like that.
Yeah, right.
And he tweeted to thank the Houston Police Department, FBI, several security firms and more for keeping his family safe.
And he added, over the years, you have always been there for us through bad waves of aggression.
This one has been especially challenging and rough.
Thank you.
That's how bad these people are because they are fans of someone like Joe Rogan.
Yeah.
And this comes up with a concept that happens online, which is a thing called doxing, which is doxing is when you publish a person's home address typically, but also maybe some other personal information about them that identifies them, identifies where they work, where they live, other things about them that could make them targets for identity theft, for example.
And there have been legitimately famous people who have had to move because they felt unsafe, because people that are angry at them or whatever know where they live now.
And maybe they're paranoid.
There's a car parked outside the house ever since that happened.
I mean, these things can happen.
And, you know, I hope Peter Hotez doesn't have to move.
I hope that the people around him help to keep him safe and report the people who are getting out of hand.
And I, where are we?
So when I was thinking about this, when I was thinking about this topic, I thought of a song from Eminem.
Eminem has been notably irascible with his fans.
At times, he's not in the mood to sign, you know, give autographs and do this sort of thing after concerts.
He's moody and unapologetic for it.
And I mean, in a lot of ways, it's very rock and roll, right?
He doesn't do what most people consider to be rock and roll, but he has exactly, in my opinion, the rock and roll attitude, which is the, I don't care what anyone else thinks of me.
That's kind of the young person's rock and roll rebellious view is the, I don't care what anyone thinks of me.
And this is, in some ways, some people have said this is sort of a theatrical thing from him, but I think after this many years, I don't think it's an act.
I think it's real.
He really just doesn't care what people think.
And he famously got angry and threatened to assault the insult comic dog at one of these, I think it was the MTV VMAs or something one year.
And the comic dog tried to do a bit with him and he just told the dog to get the hell out of here.
And it's unclear what happened off camera, maybe even kick the guy that does the little sock.
I don't know.
Right.
The insult dog is a sock?
What?
Yeah.
But the song in question that I thought of immediately was a song called The Way I Am.
And this song, for anyone who's not a fan of Eminem, it speaks directly to the topic that we're talking about here, which is essentially what he's saying in the song is that I don't really owe you anything but music.
He says specifically in the song, when I'm out having dinner with my daughter, don't come and speak to me.
Like, I don't know how that could be more clear.
And so that's a good question.
Do fans of Eminem have a right to expect anything other than music from Eminem?
What's your thoughts, David?
I am not a fan of Eminem.
Sure.
I was unaware of this song.
I was unaware of almost anything about Eminem other than that his name sounds like a delicious candy.
And I'm not that out of touch.
But so I didn't know that he had this attitude.
But it is, and this is where what I said earlier about it depends comes up because he made his fortune on the back of being famous.
Well, and part of that can often be that, yeah, you do have to be open.
And yes, if you just want to go out and have a private dinner, you should be able to do that.
You know, I remember when I was at my old university town visiting, and we were having dinner.
My family and I were having dinner.
And the university football coach came in to the same restaurant with his family.
It was like, wow, I'd really like to go up and just shake his hand.
And, you know, but we were like, no, he's, he's having a family dinner.
Yeah.
Let him be.
And so we didn't, you know, even though I'm sure in Champaign, in where Champaign Urbana is the town, I'm sure he's used to it there.
And, you know, but they people who are famous for whatever reason, and this is just a football coach.
He didn't get famous for, well, for being famous, you know, whereas Eminem, I think more, yes, he's a musician, but he's also famous for being Eminem.
You know, he created certainly has tried to make that true.
Right.
And so, you know, it's a contradictory situation.
And I thought about, you know, I knew you were coming with a song, so I had to come with a song too.
Okay.
All right.
What's your song?
And my song is from up in your neck of the woods from the late, great Neil Peirt of Rush.
And the song is Limelight.
And some of the lyrics go, cast in this unlikely role, ill-equipped to act with insufficient tact, one must put up barriers to keep oneself intact.
And then it goes on later: living in a fisheye lens, caught in the camera eye.
I have no heart to lie.
I can't pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend.
Notice I did not try to sing that because that would benefit nobody.
Yes.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Yeah.
And it's talking about, you know, they're musicians, but they found themselves to be stars.
And, but they don't know how they can't act as though every single person who comes up is this long-lost friend.
You know, they can't act that way.
And they do have to put up these barriers that they that they said.
But at the same time, they're not like a-holes or they weren't historically known to be a-holes about it.
No, not like Eminem.
Certainly they.
Yeah.
I think it was more explaining like, I cannot be everything you want me to be.
And, you know, it's so again, it depends.
Did, you know, they, I think, more got famous for their music.
They slowly over time built up and built up and built up.
Yeah.
Eminem is his music plus his image.
And, you know, and there, so that's where it depends comes into it.
And some people are literally famous for being famous.
You know, you look at some people on, I won't start naming names, but Kardashians, I'll name them.
Those were exactly, you, you pulled that one right out of my head.
I've named them before on this podcast.
I'll do it again.
Yeah.
And so, you know, those are the type of people who it would seem to me, if a fan comes up to them, they'd better be nice because they're literally famous for just being famous.
Yeah.
I think that the music industry, as well as the, I mean, you could look at it more generally as the entertainment industry has changed significantly between the time when Rush was becoming famous and the time when Eminem was becoming famous.
It became much more of a marketing machine.
In the 70s, when Rush was becoming big, I think the marketing was either not present or just confused as to what to do, or, you know, probably hadn't been mechanized quite as well.
You can listen to their song Spirit of Radio on the same album for that topic, as a matter of fact.
Yeah.
And I mean, it was still there, but it wasn't like it is now.
Now it's an industrial machine more than anything else, the marketing of these artists.
And so I think what we credit to the artist is often, if I can look deeply enough in the machine to say this confidently, I think what we, some actions we can attribute to the artist are probably more attributable to the machine.
And from our perspective, we have trouble telling the difference between them.
And in my reading, I think an artist that where the lines are blurred almost entirely is Taylor Swift.
I've read some things.
There's an article here.
I don't know how true this article really is.
The article seemed interesting when I did some looking.
I think it says something about how paparazzi stage celebrity pictures.
And I don't know how much of that is really true.
So I'm not going to say that there's a whole lot of celebrity features that are staged, but it's clear that Taylor Swift, I think what I read in there about Taylor Swift is true.
She doesn't go anywhere without knowing that pictures will be taken of her.
So whether they're staged or not, or whether she's just using the paparazzi that follow her as an additional, fairly inexpensive marketing tool is up to debate, I think, but it's clear that that's what she's doing.
She's never seen anywhere unless she's done up like she's going to the award show every single day.
Obviously, she doesn't shop for groceries, right?
Someone else does that, brings them to her home, and she eats that food because, you know, presumably she doesn't run on batteries.
I assume.
I don't really know.
I'm not there in her house.
I don't know.
I assume that.
It seems a safe assumption.
But she is using this framework of how the world is shaped around her to her advantage in this way, where she is, like I say, she knows.
People say, well, you know, they caught her, you know, smooshing with some new guy or whatever.
And then other people say, oh, no, no, you didn't catch her doing anything.
She knew they were watching and she did that on purpose to create another headline.
And I can't tell which is true.
Right.
But I suspect that it is true that she knows that she's being photographed at every moment and she doesn't do anything without that in mind.
What's your thoughts on this?
Because I think that we have the situation where, and I kind of missed my own point a little bit.
So I started to pass the mic to you and then immediately grabbed the conch back again.
Where artists are creating art and their publicists are trying to create a sales machine to sell more records.
I think it's possible that Taylor Swift would probably have sold fewer, I call them records.
It's not even really records anymore, but whatever.
Yeah, she probably would have sold less music if she hadn't been photographed so much and in a spectacular way with all the goings on with you know breakups and all the rest.
But would that be a worse world?
I think that's the real question here.
Would it be a worse world or a better world if we just treated artists like everyday people and didn't try to make the artists and their image themselves into a sales force on its own?
What's your thought on that?
I mean, that could be said about anything.
I mean, that could be said about sports stars.
That could, you know, you look at, you know, people say, is it right that this guy who can hit a baseball 30% of the time is getting paid $30 million per year.
Well, it's right if someone's willing to pay him that.
Right.
You know.
And so you can, you can say that about anything.
You know, do I know why people, you know, pay to go to an MM concert?
No.
You know, did I pay to go to multiple rush concerts?
Yes, absolutely.
And so it's, you know, it just, again, it cycles back to this.
It depends.
There are certain people whose fame is elevated for one reason or another.
And, you know, you mentioned on Twitter that there's an idea that elevating a person's fame means that everyone has access and the right to photograph them or even harass them.
And I, while I would certainly never say harass them, and I don't think you would either, but some people do believe that.
You know, it's like, well, I'm a fan of yours, therefore I do have the right to ask you for an autograph.
Well, okay, maybe you have the right if they're walking down the street, just like someone would have the right to ask me that if they saw me walking down the street.
But I have the right to say, no, not right now.
You know, I do have some people, and I hate to use myself in the same context, but I did it in the first part of this in fandom number one.
You know, in my limited fandom, I do have people who DM me and they ask me questions.
And some of them go on and on and on and on.
And they start to monopolize a lot of my time with, you know, and at some point, I just have to say, hold on, I don't have time for this.
You know, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to do a deep dive into, you know, everything.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's not just in case one of those people is listening.
It's not just you.
You know, there are multiples.
So, but it goes for all these different people and the different levels of fame.
And, you know, every famous person, no matter what the level of fame is, is going to draw the line in a different place.
You know, some people want to know every little thing that happens to the person they're a fan of.
Like, oh my gosh, this person hasn't been seen in public for two days.
Are they sick?
We need to know their medical records.
We need to know everything about them.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, the late, great Neil Purt, he died of brain cancer, which no one except his closest friends and relatives even knew he had.
Yeah.
Because he didn't want to deal with it.
Yeah.
And I can't say I blame him.
Yeah.
And that's his right.
That's yeah.
He doesn't have to say anything if he doesn't want it.
And he was, well, I hate to say he was lucky.
He was not lucky in any, you know, but I guess for this one thing, it's not like they were in the middle of a tour.
He had just, they had just finished what was going to be, you know, their goodbye tour anyway.
And that's when he discovered it.
And so, you know, so it's not like they had to suddenly cancel a tour and there were all these questions.
He was able to keep his privacy.
Other people can't.
You know, if something happens, everyone wants to know what's going on.
Bruce Willis.
You know, all of a sudden, everybody wanted to know everything that's going on with Bruce Willis.
Yeah.
And in the year before, they didn't really care what was going on with Bruce Willis.
No one was watching his movies.
They were like, oh, but suddenly he's got dementia.
Oh, yeah.
Need that story.
Yeah.
Just let him go off into the sunset.
Right.
And so, yeah, you've got these, I would call them aggressive fans who it goes back to what was, I believe we were talking about this.
And if we weren't talking about it, it was something we didn't get to.
And now I would have to pull up my notes.
But it was the, it was the feeling that you really know someone just because you're a fan of them.
That's, we talked about the last time in Phantom because I, I had mentioned Rob Sesternino and I had mentioned him just as Rob.
Right.
And then you told everyone, oh, that he's referring to Rob Sestronino.
And I said, oh, and I hadn't even caught the fact that I had been referring to him just as if I knew him, even though I don't.
Yeah.
And I feel like there was something else that we, that I, I was thinking about going into that I didn't, but now I can't remember what it was because I didn't expect to go down this path at this point.
But, but yeah, it was, it was, um, because these fans feel like they are so close to the person, you know, like these, you know, to circle back to the situation of the people harassing Peter Hotez.
It's a different situation in that someone asking Eminem for an autograph while he's trying to have family dinner, that's obnoxious.
Yeah.
But it's not the same level of intrusion as, you know, because that's someone who admires him.
So that's someone who likes him.
And then you have someone going and waiting at someone's home to harass them because they dislike them.
But then it leads to the question of, well, why do they dislike him so much?
Well, it's because they're a fan of Joe Rogan.
And Joe Rogan has stoked this kind of behavior.
And so by being a fan of Joe Rogan, you feel so close to him that you want to take his side and you want to take part in what's going on.
And so they do.
They're like, well, we're close enough.
Let's go stand up for our friend Joe.
Yeah.
And if it hadn't been, if it hadn't been presented on the RFK Jr. side of this as a thing where we need to do this to save the children, I think you'd get less of this behavior against people like Peter Hotez.
And I'm sure Dr. David Korski has also had his share of people who've tried to cross that line as being one of the other very visible people speaking out on this issue.
By the way, there's a huge number of scientists that do this work.
Only some of them are known in the public space for it, right?
Most of them haven't tried to be famous for it and put information like Dr. David Gorski ran a and still runs a fairly famous website that is meant to be an advocacy for science.
And this is one of the things that's made him put him in the spotlight for this issue.
Peter Hotez got famous when he did the thing that no one expected people to do in this society, which was offer life-saving medication for free.
And before that, he had written a book.
I mean, he's been dealing with anti-vaxxer, you know, a lot of this stuff is coming out now, but RFK Jr. has been an anti-vaxxer for a long, long, long time.
18 years.
Yeah, at least.
And, you know, one of the claims was that it causes autism.
Well, Dr. Hotez has a daughter with autism.
And he wrote a book saying vaccines did not cause her autism.
Yeah.
And so, you know, he's been also doing this for a long time.
Yeah.
And so, you know, for anyone who's coming to it new, like Elon Musk or even Joe Rogan or some of these other anti-vax idiots, it's all new to them.
And you can see this from a name I wasn't planning to bring up in this podcast, but Steve Kirsch.
You know, he's a tech bro and he started off with, you know, kind of some COVID denialism and went there.
And now you could literally see it play out in real time.
He is full-blown anti-vax and he is recycling all the arguments from 20 years ago.
Like he's just discovering them.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's fascinating to watch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I, oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
Well, I was just going to say, and, you know, why is he doing that?
I don't know.
He has a lot of fans too, you know, to bring this back around.
And I do think that some of these people, you know, it's one thing to be a fan of a musician.
Okay.
I used to get, you know, 35, 40 years ago, I used to get involved in arguments online about music.
Okay.
Like, yes, Rush is the greatest band.
And, you know, don't, you know, Tiffany and Debbie Gibson suck.
You know, those were the levels of the debates that we had.
This was back in the FidoNet bulletin board system days, BBSs.
And, you know, okay, if I'm a fan of one and not a fan of the other, no one's going to die because of that.
Yeah.
You know, it was people having different tastes.
It's not like Rush is the life-saving medication and Debbie Gibson is the same.
Rush may be a life-saving medication.
But I'm going to need to see some literature, a published scientific paper that's been peer-to-peer.
We'll have a public debate.
Yeah, right.
But the point is, you know, if you're a fan of one of those people, well, good, be a fan.
You know, but being a fan of someone like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, you know, Steve Kirsch, RFK Jr. I think RFK Jr. is a little bit different than these other people because these other people already had fans.
And then they have morphed into these views.
And these fans have just been like, oh, well, if Elon says it, it must be true.
Not all of them.
Many, you know, there are certainly a number that have split off.
But some of them, you know, the Musk fanboys, you know, I'll call them on Twitter.
They'll just be like, oh, Musk said it.
It must be true.
You know, and it doesn't matter what the evidence is.
You know, Musk said Twitter was suppressing Trump's speech or free speech about Trump.
A new information came out shortly before we recorded this saying exactly the opposite, that the Twitter staff was going above and beyond to keep pro-Trump speech on the site, despite the fact that they were violating, clearly violating the rules.
But is Musk going to talk about that?
No, because it doesn't fit in, and therefore none of his fans will talk about it either.
And so you have that same sort of situation, except this is important.
Like you were saying before I made a joke about it, this is important.
This is life-saving medication or, you know, not having a coup or just all these different things.
It's not a subjective situation.
And maybe that's kind of not maybe that's where the difference lies.
You like one music, I like another music.
Fine, we can have a subjective difference of opinion there.
Science in that way is not subjective.
There are the objective facts and there is things that are objectively untrue.
And being a fan of things that are objectively untrue has real ramifications.
Yeah.
And so you can't treat it the same way.
People should not be fans of those types of personalities.
Yeah.
Me and someone else go walking in the woods and we see a sign and the signs say that down this way lie sunshine and butterflies and down this way lie, you know, crocodile swamps.
And I say, well, I think I'm going to take this one that's sunshine and butterflies.
The other guy says, I don't believe everything I read.
I'm going to take this other one.
One of us is going to have a better time.
I mean, maybe the signs are lying to me.
Maybe.
Well, but maybe he's a fan of crocodiles.
Go ahead.
And it's possible, I guess, to make it through that crocodile swamp, maybe.
Yeah, I would alter that a little bit to say it's not just signs.
It was, you know, one of them was, you know, Peter Hotez and one was RFK Jr.
Yeah.
You know, and he was saying, oh, crocodiles are good for your health.
Go pet one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They have the magic ingredients.
So I have this one other aspect of this that I'd like to circle back to because when we think about artists and they certainly, whether it's the artists themselves or the publicity machine that's pushing them to a greater level of fame to sell more records or whatever it is, they are part of that machine.
So whether they are actively partaking in it or pushing back on it or whatever, they are still part of that machine.
So they get kind of smeared with that brush, as it were.
But I think that when I advocate for something like Eminem doesn't owe the world anything other than music and that you don't have a right to expect anything of him other than music, I run into a problem with my own logic in that at the same time, in the same way that we pretty much at this point fully canceled Bill Cosby, if we found out that Eminem was doing terrible things the way Bill College was,
we would have a right to then not buy his records and any music of his and support anything that he was doing because that would give him money with which to perpetrate worse worst crimes and or to try to get away with it.
And so in my own logical stream, I have this inconsistency where I say, yeah, if you see your favorite artist and they're not in a situation that they're meaning to act in such a way as to push their own publicity.
For example, if they're at a press conference, they're obviously there to talk about the things to the press and about the, you know, so a sports guy after the game is at the press conference.
By all means, ask him all the questions that are relevant to what's going on, preferably the game, not his divorce or whatever, because I don't really care about, unless we think the divorce is going to affect the next game.
I don't really care about the divorce.
Or his wife accused him of beating her, and that's why she's getting divorced.
Yeah, maybe, maybe there's another relevant reason.
Right.
But if it's just like they're not in love anymore and they're moving on, I don't really care about that.
Right.
But, you know, he's at the event for the purpose of moving his publicity forward and keeping everyone current or whatever the current thing is.
So by all means.
And when that same guy is or or girl is out somewhere not doing that, they're walking down the road.
They're buying groceries or whatever.
My thought that I have is just leave them be.
Just let them be people in that moment.
But at the same time, this doesn't mean that everything they do when they're not in front of a camera is not something we should judge them for.
Right.
So we just inconsistency happens.
Yeah.
We discussed that in the first fandom episode, you know, where listening to someone's music and then you find out about them, you know, and you're like, you know, I mean, you could say the same thing about a lot of different topics.
You know, do we expect anything more than chicken from Chick-fil-A?
And, you know, well, on the one hand, it's a restaurant.
It's a chicken restaurant.
A lot of people like it.
I don't see what the big deal is.
But beyond that, I don't want to give them money because of what they do with that money, what the owners have done with that money.
Right.
And, you know, to the same extent, you know, we talked about in the first episode about this, you know, what certain actors, you know, Tom Cruise will just turn around and give that money to promote his cult.
And, you know, other, you know, actors, musicians who have done and said terrible things, when you find out about that, yeah, you may not want to support them anymore.
And other people don't care.
And so it's a different or it's a difficult balance in those terms.
And it's, you know, just learning more about them.
Like, I mean, I had a discussion with someone that I've known online.
Somehow we never met in person, but I've known him online for years and years.
And he was saying things like, well, I like Joe Rogan, but and I don't know if he meant like he's met him in person or he likes him in general, whatever.
And I'm like, there's nothing to like about Joe Rogan.
He is doing this.
He is promoting a child murderer because he wants to make a buck.
I don't, I can't like that.
I'm sorry.
No matter what you, you know, Joe Rogan may be a, may have been a funny comedian, but no, I can't like someone like that.
I don't know how someone can.
Yeah.
And when I circle this back again to where we started, artists are creating a product and that product does sometimes affect our lives.
We can get joy out of them.
And in the case of someone like Bill Cosby, that joy from his comedy is undivorceable from his personality.
And once in our minds, we create the image of a monster in that personality, we can't really listen to those records anymore without that.
I've done some looking into this in the past and Jerry Seinfeld, when the first notifications of all the things coming out that came out about Bill Cosby started coming out, Jerry Seinfeld considers himself to be sort of this historian of comedy.
He wants to know every joke that was ever told and who first told it and who repeated it and where everything came from.
And this has been his life's work.
And he at first said that he didn't think that this should affect the enjoyment of the comedy.
And then just a few short months later, he said that he tried to listen to the records after all of the revelations and he found that he just couldn't.
And if you know anything about Jerry Seinfeld and Jerry Seinfeld's relationship with Bill Cosby, that's really remarkable because there was no one really that Jerry Seinfeld looked up more to than Bill Cosby.
He really revered the guy as a comedy god.
There was several documentaries where it came up and the light in which Jerry Seinfeld would cast Bill Cosby was that petals should fall at his feet for him to walk on.
And then over a few short months of what really was going on behind the scenes, even Jerry Seinfeld just can't listen to that comedy anymore.
And you could even hear it.
Like he's Jerry Seinfeld's rich enough that he also has a situation where he doesn't really care what anyone really thinks.
And he'll do things where people give him crap for it.
And he says, okay, so are you going to not invite me then?
Like, I don't care.
And he was in, so I say that because I don't think he was saying this just to like placate the crowd.
He did have a kind of sadness when I listened to that interview.
And he was, he was, he didn't like that he did, he couldn't enjoy that anymore because he really only likes comedy and presumably his family, but he doesn't talk about his family very much.
So he was profoundly, you know, he's got, I don't know how many records Bill Cosby ever came up with.
It was well over 20.
And definitely Jerry Seinfeld had them all in probably every form they ever came out in.
And he, you know, one of the most prolific comedians of all time and his one of his idols.
And he had to just never listen to anything he said anymore, any joke he told anymore.
And when we look at that situation, artists are, especially these commercial artists, are in this place where they're pushing this.
And we rightfully should not give them the capital fodder with which to continue or to escape justice or anything else.
That particular tune is attempted to be played in some other situations.
I hate to even hesitate to think about it, but what if we found out that Peter Hotez had a dark inner life that was not great?
Should we, you know, tear up all of his vaccine work?
Obviously, I think we shouldn't because unless we thought that the vaccines were created as a part of that dark life, like we attempted to not use some of the information that we got from Nazi doctors who got that information by doing terrible things to humans.
But if they had done the work to get that knowledge in an ethical way, but then in their private life had done terrible things to humans, the work and the information that we got from it is divorced from those terrible things.
But again, to take that same thing and say, well, okay, we should be able to listen to Bill Cosby because the things he was doing on stage weren't the same as the terrible things he was doing behind closed doors.
I think there's a, that on the surface seems like a logical inconsistency, but it's really not because of the commercial venture being performed with Bill Cosby's with the comedy.
He's selling the records.
He's selling tickets for the shows.
Well, and more than that, he was selling himself and he was selling himself as a certain type of person.
And that type of person wasn't a rapist.
Yeah, that was definitely a thing he was attempting to do with his celebrity was he's not just famous.
He's the clean and wholesome famous person.
Yeah, right.
But if you, I, okay, I, I'm going from decades-old memory here, perhaps.
But my recollection is there were some jokes that when looked upon in retrospect, he talked about essentially spiking a woman's drink.
Well, yeah.
You know, so it isn't completely divorced.
I do think there's, I mean, and I don't think you were trying to compare the two, but just to emphasize, there's a world of difference between, you know, Nazi doctors and Bill Cosby, mostly because they were doing it with that goal.
Yes.
Yes.
You know, and so that's why I think it is right in that case to not use that information.
Right.
Because it encourages other people in the future to be like, well, you know, they may not have liked the methods of doing it, but they eventually use the information so that, you know, that's okay.
By just drawing that line and saying, no, we are not even looking at that information.
Yeah.
You know, then it's more for the future than it is for the past.
That's right.
It's meant to be an example that you don't get to cross this line in the name of getting information and make that okay after the fact.
It's that would be a situation where the end justifies the means and we'd like to move away from that.
If we, like I say, if we found out that, God forbid, Peter Hotez has a dark inner life of some kind, I'm not even going to speculate what, because it doesn't matter.
It's just a hypothetical scenario.
Hopefully he's as good in the inside as he is on the outside.
But if we found that out, we shouldn't hesitate to use his vaccines in that case and the knowledge that he gained from that because unless we think that he did the unethical things in pursuit of the knowledge that he used in the vaccines, which is pretty unlikely because everything that he used to get that knowledge is pretty well known.
It's all published in papers and journals.
And it's so to some people, they try to draw this false equivalency between these things.
They try to look back in the past and they say things like, well, you know, George Washington owns slaves.
And so obviously all the things that George Washington did shouldn't be held up to any with any kind of positive light.
And they try to say that I'm picking some other examples off the top of my head.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're going a bit far afield because those are long discussions in and of course, of course, but that's the same thing is true that we look at that fame in that way.
And then someone points out, well, they aren't a fully wholesome person.
They did a terrible thing once upon a time.
And in that case, it's also different.
Yeah, it depends how terrible the thing was.
I mean, yeah, do I think we should?
Well, we shouldn't even go down this path because it's a whole different thing.
But if you look, if you want to talk about, you know, doctors who were, you know, doing unethical things to promote themselves, look at Andrew Wakefield.
Yeah.
You know, the guy who the anti-vaxxers hold up as their hero was actually the one unethically experimenting on children.
Yeah.
You know, the idea that you're going to save children is by holding up Andrew Wakefield and crucifying Peter Hotes is really permanent opposite day, really.
Everything is upside down at that point.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I think that it, you know, again, it comes back to it depends.
And so, yeah, if we found out, you know, I hate to even say these sorts of things because someone's going to take it out of context somewhere.
But if we found out, probably cut this part out.
Truth be known.
He was, you know, that he was experimenting on kids to find, to get his vaccine, and somehow he hid it from all of his university and every oversight board that he had, then, yeah, there would be some serious ethical issues there.
But there's absolutely no indication that that's true, of course.
You know, if he, if we found out that he, you know, accidentally, you know, forgot to send in one of his quarterly income tax reports, you know, then that's, you know, which I think is about as dark a side as Dr. Hotez would have.
Well, you know, what he maybe had an illegitimate child back in college or something.
I don't know, like there's things, right?
That, yeah, yeah, maybe, but none of that matters to the vaccine that he created.
Like, so, but people try to draw that because they think it should matter.
And in the case of other people that we talk about in this way, it does matter.
And in his case, it doesn't.
And I just wanted to make sure that there is a definitive line that we draw and why we draw it that way.
It's not hypocritical to do it in the way that we draw it in these cases because of that.
Right.
But if someone is, and to try to lasso this and pull it back towards the topic, you know, the problem with fandom, you know, goes back to what I was saying earlier.
If someone is solely a fan of a person and refuses to give up their fandom of that person, no matter what the facts say, that is where the problem lies.
Yeah.
You know, because, you know, and that's why if someone is a fan of a survivor player and you find out that he's been using the N-word and is part of QAnon and is promoting these ideas, well, maybe you should reconsider being a fan of that survivor contestant.
And maybe the fact that they could do well in challenges on a TV show isn't a good reason to be a fan of them.
Similarly, if there's an actor who, and we mentioned this actor on the last one, who gets drunk and starts yelling out a bunch of anti-Semitic bullshit, and it turns out that actually represents his true inner feelings, then maybe you shouldn't see that person's movies anymore.
And you shouldn't be a fan of them just because they happen to be good at acting in action movies.
Yeah.
Good point.
Yeah.
And similarly, just because someone was a good comedian and likes to rant on a podcast doesn't mean you should harass the people that that person is tweeting at.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I think we'll tie this up in a bow and put it on the assembly line.
So, just as a reminder, you can, if you have any gripes, complaints, you want to disagree with us, especially if you want to disagree with us, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
I'm available on Twitter as well, Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
And I am at David Bloomberg on Twitter, on Mastodon, on Blue Sky, on I don't even know where else Post.
Sure, much more social media fluent than myself, but that's okay.