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June 2, 2021 - Viva & Barnes

02:08:13

Sidebar with Nick Rekieta! Viva & Barnes LIVE

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Time	Text
	On.
	Seven on the nose.
	If I'm not mistaken, oh, look at that.
	It is seven on the nose.
	Good evening, people.
	Let's just wait for the standard Fs so that I know my audio is working.
	Looking through the chat, a lot of comments that I will not be able to read tonight.
	I am not, I am virtually never late.
	It is better to be one hour early than one minute late.
	And I am not late tonight.
	And Nick is not late either.
	He is in the back drop in the, what do we call it?
	The studio.
	He's in the studio.
	He was actually five minutes early.
	So to some of those comments, Nick was early.
	Okay, so what's going on?
	But while everyone trickles in, we'll get the standard intros, the standard disclaimers.
	Before I ever forget, shoot, there was big news actually on Rumble with Steven Crowder that I have to read a message about.
	But we are simultaneously streaming on Rumble.
	Rumble also now allows for comments, which is good, except some people don't like having to create an account and enter their cell numbers.
	No system is perfect, but Rumble is the Canadian alternative.
	It's the alternative that I like.
	I have a relationship with Chris, and it's a good platform.
	So we're simultaneously streaming there.
	If people can let me know periodically how many...
	Viewers we're up to.
	That would be good, but I'll check in.
	Okay, other things.
	Standard things.
	You're on 20-second slow mode, and that is just so I can make sure I can read through the chat.
	As relates to the chat, Super Chats, thank you in advance for all your support.
	YouTube takes 30%.
	If you don't like it, I understand some people don't.
	There are other methods to support us.
	VivaBarnesLaw.locals.com, yada, yada, yada.
	You'll hear it 15 times tonight.
	Try to keep the discourse civil, although we all are...
	Fully grown adults, as we say in French, des adultes vaccinés.
	There's an expression in French, fully vaccinated adults, as in we know what the internet is like, so try to keep it civil.
	If you can't keep it civil, keep it funny.
	If you can't keep it funny, whatever.
	But keep it civil and keep it friendly and yada, yada, yada.
	What else?
	Superchats.
	If I don't read them and you're going to be miffed, don't give them.
	I don't like people feeling miffed.
	They are not a right of entry with...
	Insults or whatever, you all know the shtick.
	Now, who do we have on tonight?
	We have Nick the Great, or it's Nate the Great, Nick the Rackets.
	I'm going to find out why they call him Rackets.
	There's a lot of inside jokes with Nick, some of which, you know, may or may not be channel-friendly to this channel.
	And speaking of which...
	I'm just going to read it.
	All right, so I learned, is it futas or futai?
	I think it was futai.
	I learned what it was the last time.
	I googled it.
	I'm very proud to say I didn't know what it was before.
	I'm also very proud to say it wasn't the worst thing that appeared in my search history, but such is the internet.
	So Nick is going to come on.
	It's going to be just a fantastic discussion.
	Barnes is coming in too.
	What else?
	Bring some questions and we're going to have a chat and go over things.
	But now.
	I see Nick in the backdrop.
	We are three minutes and 30 seconds in, which is enough time for people to trickle in.
	Share the links around.
	YouTube has been notoriously delayed on some of the notifications.
	Oh, futa.
	Futa.
	I say futons.
	That's what I used to sleep on in university.
	And one more.
	I promise not to be miffed if I don't see my super chat highlighted.
	Thank you very much, Theophrastus.
	Okay, so let's bring this in.
	Oh, God.
	I got a good vlog coming out.
	It's either tonight, after the stream, or tomorrow, but update in Project Veritas.
	But we're going to talk about a bunch of stuff tonight.
	No real order, no real system.
	But with that said, Nick Ricada, how you doing?
	Hey, good, buddy.
	How are you?
	Good.
	Now, I'm going to say now...
	Oh, Barnes just came in too.
	Look how perfect this is.
	I'm going to bring you that timing.
	This is amazing.
	Wait, I don't like that plot.
	We're going to do like this.
	Booyah.
	It's beautiful.
	Now, Nick, I've got to observe.
	You're so soft and shiny and clear and crisp and your depth of field is magnificent.
	What is your rig?
	And dear God, can I get one?
	You can.
	It's a pricey one, but I've got a Sony Alpha 7 R4, which is like a 61 megapixel mirrorless camera.
	And I've got a 24 millimeter.
	F-stop 1.4 lens.
	So one of the Sony Prime lenses.
	So it's an expensive rig.
	The chat hates it.
	They hate every second of it.
	But I love seeing my face in 4K.
	Well, it is beautiful.
	Okay, now Nick, am I going crazy or is your channel going through some changes?
	I think I noticed you have a Nick Ricada Live new channel, which is at 10,000 subs.
	Yeah.
	You were not recently suspended from Twitter on your main Twitter handle?
	My main Twitter handle got permanently deleted, let's see, about a year and a half to two years ago.
	Because I called someone a mutant.
	And apparently, like, of all the things I've said to someone on Twitter...
	That's about as low rent as it gets.
	But you can go on Twitter.
	It's amazing to me.
	You can blow up someone's life.
	You can ruin their relationships.
	You can get rid of their employment.
	You can do everything to them.
	But if you call them a mutant or if you call them fat too many times or something like that, you're gone forever.
	And so that's been a process.
	But my new...
	I have two other channels on YouTube right now.
	I have a media channel which has been pretty dormant, and that's for non-law-related topics, just fun stuff, nerdy stuff usually.
	And then my live archive channel is where all of my live streams go to die.
	So after I do a live stream, I take it down from the main channel and I put it up on the archive channel, which has several strategic advantages.
	Okay, no, actually, go with that, because you have a YouTube manager who gives you advice, so I presume this is good advice that maybe others like myself would be listening to.
	What is the strategic reason?
	So the main strategic reason is that live streams in general don't grow channels.
	You'll find that channels that exclusively livestream might blow up and it's topic by topic usually, but they have a hard time actually growing at a reasonable pace.
	They tend to grow very slowly.
	And so what I was finding out is that the short videos bring people into the channel and they perform really well, but having them on the same platform as a livestream, which is a whole different format, can turn people off.
	Especially when you're live streaming as often as I do, which is every single night.
	And so I just remove those.
	It keeps my video page a lot cleaner.
	When people are coming in for the short videos, they're not bombarded with a three-hour epic full of liquor and crazy inside jokes.
	But I also have that same accessibility for the people who've been watching my show forever.
	So then I just move it over to the Archive channel.
	The strategic advantage in growth aside, it also is a little bit of a buffer for things like strikes and stuff like that.
	So you're not actually immune from a strike on YouTube for deleted content.
	You can still get struck for it, but I find that taking them down from the main channel...
	Gives a little bit of opportunity.
	And as evidence, I have actually a warning and a strike on my archive channel, but only a warning on my main channel.
	Very interesting.
	Ancestrally, Minnesota has some different groups that are disproportionately represented there, particularly Swedes and Norwegians.
	Any ancestral connection to that, or what is your family background that led you to central Minnesota?
	Well, I'm actually from Texas.
	I was born in Houston, Texas.
	My dad was born in Houston, Texas.
	And my mom was born in Louisiana.
	So I've got...
	Where in Louisiana, perchance?
	She grew up in Slidell.
	Okay.
	But, you know, I think she was born in New Orleans, grew up in Slidell.
	And then my...
	Yeah, so my family roots are in Texas.
	They're very Polish.
	On my dad's side and on my mom's side, we got a little bit of French, a little bit of German, a little bit of whatever you want to put in there, but primarily Polish, which would explain the proboscis.
	What led to Central Minnesota?
	My dad worked for Cray, the supercomputer company, and he actually worked for Control Data before...
	Cray existed.
	Then Steve Cray left control data.
	A bunch of people went with them.
	My dad was one of them.
	We stayed down in Houston for a while, but Cray moved their headquarters up to Minnesota.
	And I think their manufacturing plant was in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin or something like that.
	And so we eventually got moved up here by them.
	We were in a fun neighborhood in Houston in the 80s where my parents got that fun adjustable rate mortgage and then the mortgage crisis happened.
	So we were stuck there until someone moved us out.
	And they were happy to get out from under that.
	Cray moved us up here.
	I mean, I've been up almost 30 years now in Minnesota.
	Now, Nick, I think everybody on this channel knows who you are and what you do.
	And I suspect there's a bunch of people coming from your channel here.
	For those who don't, your live streams, and it's the first place we met where I think I did a live stream with you where we started at midnight hour time, one hour more east of you.
	Your live streams are marathons.
	I mean, in the literal sense, three, four hours.
	The drinking part is incidental, but they're like lively marathons and you do them five nights a week from 11 o 'clock to three in the morning where you go afterwards and you read the super chats and you go to Twitch after your streams.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	I have a problem.
	It's called narcolepsy.
	And that means that when I should be feeling wide awake, I feel very tired.
	And when I should be fast asleep, I feel very awake.
	And so that's kind of what started it.
	And that's one of the reasons I stream so late.
	The other is because I have a boatload of kids.
	And those kids go to bed.
	And then I can finally sit down and do something for a length of time.
	That's the genesis of why I stream so late.
	But yeah, I start at 11 every night on my time, and I get done around 5 in the morning pretty much every night.
	And when do you sleep?
	And for how long?
	I sleep from about 5.30 to 6 a.m., and then I go till about noon most days.
	Sometimes, like today, I got to sleep until 1. It was great.
	But other days, you know, I might have to get up and do something with the kids.
	So it could be short nights.
	Then I just take a nap later in the day.
	How did you meet your wife?
	Oh, well, you would go to that story, wouldn't you?
	At the beginning of the stream so we can be made fun of for the rest of it.
	So we were in college.
	I went to undergrad at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota, which is a...
	Which is a wonderful little town of wind.
	Wind and cold and ethanol plants.
	But we were down there.
	I showed up to Taekwondo.
	I was in Taekwondo.
	I had at the time been in martial arts for a significant amount of time.
	I was like, oh, okay, I'll just do this in college then.
	And I showed up early to do some warm-up and sparring.
	Before the class.
	And I open the door and this little blonde cheerleader runs up to me.
	And she says, hi, are you here to join cheerleading?
	No.
	No, I am not.
	But then she made a deal with me.
	She said, however many guys you can get to join cheerleading, I'll get cheerleaders to join Taekwondo.
	And this is a good exchange.
	So I ended up being a cheerleader.
	She was my stunt partner.
	Which mainly meant I stood around and lifted her in the air.
	And then, you know, about a year and a half.
	What was it?
	No, it was about two years later we were married.
	And how many kids do you have?
	I know you have a lot.
	Someone said a boatload.
	How big a boat?
	I have five.
	I have five kids.
	So they range in ages from 13 down to three.
	And every day is a little bit of an adventure.
	That's fantastic.
	And now, does your wife ever get mad at you at the amount of time you spend doing this, or does it actually not interfere just at all because of the timing of the event?
	She used to.
	Early on, so I stumbled into this livestream YouTube thing, right?
	I made a couple videos on a lawsuit for a Facebook group that followed a podcast where there's a lawsuit in the podcast, and I uploaded them to YouTube because it was a convenient place.
	Um, and then people said I should do this more and more and more.
	So I started doing it.
	And at first, you know, like that, that was one of those things where you should probably talk to your spouse before you start making yourself public.
	Um, but I, you know, I didn't expect anything to happen.
	I never expected to have more than a couple, a couple of people watch this video.
	Um, and then suddenly it was thousands and 10 thousands and, and growing.
	And it was like, Oh my God.
	So, uh, but at first, you know, I was still, Very active, practicing law.
	I was building a business, and so the YouTube plus the business was a lot of work, and it was a lot of time.
	But as you get into rhythms, and really, I think it was as it became viable income.
	That's what really changes everything.
	It's like, okay, this is no longer a fun little hobby thing that you're doing that's disruptive.
	This is now employment.
	I wasn't going to bring it up, but you mentioned it.
	It's an interesting thing when what looks like a basement hobby actually turns into I call it a job, but consistent income.
	Then it becomes more justifiable when you can say it's not just for fun and it's not just to get away from the five kids.
	It's actually to support the five kids or the three kids.
	People can put up with it.
	Right.
	Full disclosure, I mean, when I decided to do YouTube full-time, because at first it was kind of sporadic, I was getting into it, but I was laying in bed one night.
	We had had a lot of issues.
	She had, let's see, this would have been about the time that she was about to give birth to our last child.
	Things were really, really hectic.
	I hadn't even been to my office.
	I'd been working from home on the law front for about a month and a half.
	I hadn't been to my office even for more than a minute to pick up a file or something.
	And I said to her, I was like, I think I can, if I focus on YouTube, like the money had gotten to this point where it was like, I think if I focus here.
	I can do this as a job and I can do it from home and I'll be available during the day.
	And all of these sounded like, and I can close down the office and get rid of overhead.
	And these all sounded like really great things.
	And so we made that decision and she was 100% on board.
	She was very, very supportive at that time.
	And the money wasn't very good back then.
	It was just like, there was...
	A horizon of this has a possibility.
	Let's take the risk and do it.
	And yeah, that was September of 2018.
	And it's been a wild ride since then.
	Now, does she work or is she, given the number of kids, a stay-at-home mom?
	No, she's a stay-at-home mom and she homeschools our kids.
	So we've always been homeschoolers.
	Because our oldest, he was actually reading at two.
	We didn't do anything for this.
	We're not like crazy, overbearing parents who are like, read the book, bigot, to our kid or anything.
	He just picked up words and letters really easily.
	And so at two years old, he started reading.
	He would type out stuff on keyboards.
	And we're like, what is this kid going to do in three to four years when we put him in kindergarten?
	Like, he was just way ahead.
	And so with that, we started looking for alternatives pretty quickly.
	And we discovered homeschooling was probably the best method for us.
	Private schooling gets really expensive, especially when you start adding in kids.
	And she has an education degree.
	And so it was like, okay, well, we can do this.
	And so she mostly takes care of the house and kids.
	Always has.
	And that's been the thing.
	We're pretty traditional in the gender role thing.
	Actually, I got to explore.
	I don't think I knew about the homeschooling.
	And I'm Canadian.
	We don't have much experience with homeschooling here.
	And I can readily admit, until I became more familiar with it in the States, I had certain preconceived notions about it.
	Because my first question is...
	Did you have any experience with the public schooling system at any point, or has it always been homeschooling?
	I was public schooled.
	My wife was public schooled.
	So we both know the peaks and valleys of public schooling, and I would say they're mostly valleys, in all honesty.
	And if you think about it, this is the way I think about schooling, which is, when I think of government programs, I always think of them as the last-ditch effort.
	Like, okay, you're on Social Security, that's your security net, because the private sector could do it better, but maybe you can't afford it.
	So you go, whatever you're doing, except schooling.
	Schooling is the one place where Western countries go, you know what?
	No, we want the government to do the best job ever.
	But I don't have faith in the government to do a good job.
	And I know what it was like for me in school.
	And it was very, very difficult because I was bored.
	All the time.
	I never understood why I should be doing all of this homework if I understood the material.
	I didn't get along with teachers because I don't do well with authority.
	And that's always been a thing.
	When I was younger, I was very wary of homeschooling and homeschool kids.
	They all seemed weird.
	And they are.
	But the reason that the homeschool kids are weird is because we socialize them into an environment of...
	Can I use mild profanity?
	Girlfriend.
	Girlfriend.
	We socialize children into a society of assholes.
	And that's junior high and high school.
	And when you get out of junior high and high school, your first goal in life is to never be like that ever again.
	Because the worst thing ever is you show up at a family reunion, right?
	Or a high school reunion.
	And they go, you're the exact same as you were in high school.
	You're like, oh my god, I was terrible.
	You don't want to be that way.
	And so I thought about this and I was like, wait.
	Homeschool kids are weird because they're socialized with adults.
	And so they don't act like kids so much.
	They act more like the adults that you run into.
	And that has its own challenges.
	But I was like, why do we put our kids into this socialization?
	Like, why do we value the socialization of high school and junior high if the entire point is to deprogram them after that?
	So I stopped seeing homeschooler kids as weird once I thought about it that way.
	And I stopped seeing school as anything more than sort of the government safety net that I think we should kind of have it.
	But I just don't think we should value it as the best thing.
	I would prefer to see children in private schools or homeschools or, I mean, now.
	After the pandemic, we should have learned that you could have PhDs teaching...
	Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of kids.
	I mean, the right PhDs, but you can have a PhD in mathematics leading curriculum for hundreds of thousands of kids not relying on a public school teacher, and we could have merely local tutors with pods, however you wanted to do it.
	The opportunities that have been shown to us in education by the pandemic, I know we're not going to take advantage of them because we have teachers' unions, but...
	But they're really there.
	And you can have real expertise.
	I remember my psychology teacher in high school was a global studies major who took Psych 101 in college and is in there trying to teach these kids psychology.
	And I'm like, this is silly.
	And now we have the opportunity for real expertise to be teaching volumes of kids.
	You don't need to worry about the...
	Teacher to student size.
	You could have just sort of managers in smaller groups.
	I think it would be great.
	How have the kids taken to the homeschooling?
	And where do they or how do they socialize with people their own age?
	How do they take to the homeschooling?
	Well, they're kids.
	The funny thing is me going, I had to go to school for eight hours at a time, you little jerk.
	And they're like complaining when they have to do two hours of work.
	What I've learned on the homeschooling front is kids learn so much more just by doing things.
	So they have their math.
	They have their English.
	We'll do lessons on science at the house.
	But they learn a lot through stuff, oddly enough, like Minecraft, Roblox.
	They've got a Roblox server that actually generates income.
	And I'm like...
	What is this?
	You're grifting already?
	This is ridiculous.
	So they build things.
	And we're very expansive on what learning means and how it is.
	But when you spend time in a household of other people and in a household of adults, you learn a different set of things than you would in an academic environment where you're stuck in a desk for six to eight hours.
	We have specific subjects that we really do hit hard with them.
	All of our kids are readers.
	Their extracurricular stuff, they do violin and piano.
	And my oldest does violin, piano, and percussion.
	Where they get their socialization is in their music classes, their band classes, through our church.
	We also have a homeschool co-op where every other week, basically, all of the kids in this co-op, we have over 200 kids, I think, in the co-op now.
	They all get together and do classroom experiences and learn different subjects.
	I teach at the co-op.
	I teach high schoolers stuff, which will make some people really cringe.
	But yeah, that's where we get their socialization.
	We've been very...
	We've been very cognizant that while I don't like the socialization of high school and junior high and that environment, kids do need to be around other kids, and so we give them tons of opportunities to go do that.
	My daughters do dance as well, and they have activities where they meet up with other kids.
	Did you ever think about moving from central Minnesota?
	Every minute.
	What is the community life like?
	How big is your town?
	Do they have neighbors that have kids with friends?
	Do they have that type of interactive community?
	I'm picturing Fargo where you have highways of expansive snow and nothing else.
	Pretty much.
	We live on eight acres.
	We're not a big fan of neighbors.
	We used to live in a suburb of the Twin Cities when I first got out of college.
	That's the house that I I grew up in Minnesota, and it was nice, but people are too close.
	So, you know, we do have neighbors with kids that our kids will hang out with, but usually they actually don't hang out with them as much.
	It's weird.
	It's like they're close enough, but not close enough to make it super easy to go hang out, but they spend a lot of time with their cousins who live pretty close.
	And other big families who are friends of ours.
	So when people come over to our house, there's like 10 or 15 kids running around.
	It's horrible.
	But no, the town we live just outside of is about 1,500 to 2,000 people.
	The big town's about 15,000.
	And we have no desire to be near a bigger city.
	I miss the restaurants.
	But other than that, I don't miss city life at all.
	That's one thing.
	We don't eat out as a family.
	My parents do.
	They love it.
	They don't like cooking at home.
	I hate it because you always end up paying more for food that you could have cooked better at home.
	It's less healthy and the drinks are smaller.
	I've always hated it.
	I've got to read this chat and then get into a question that I had for you.
	Public school, Matt, call them government school.
	That sums it up nicely.
	I remember the preconceived notions that I always had in the back of my head about homeschoolers.
	Primarily because of the jokes I saw on TV, sitcoms, etc.
	Right.
	My kids are in high school.
	One's going into high school.
	Three kids.
	I would never do the homeschooling thing only because I don't think that relationship could work between parents and kids as far as my life experience goes.
	But I have no judgment towards it whatsoever.
	I can actually much more understand it and sympathize it now when my kids come back from school and their friends come back from their schools and I hear the stuff that they're being taught.
	I hear the discussions that their teachers are having with them.
	And I love it because I get to be the contrarian kid yet again, but as an adult where I say, like, all right, have that discussion with your teacher and maybe, you know, push back and ask X, Y, and Z. But I can understand why people who see what is being taught in public and even private schools and you see the types of teachers you have, you just want to pull your kid out of that and have nothing to do with it and teach them the values and the morals that you think are proper and not what you know is prevalent.
	Whereas me as an individual, I prefer to have the argument with the kids and have them take that back to the school.
	But I mean, I guess the question is, if you haven't had the kids go to the school, you might not know about it, but I guess you still know what's going on in schools even today.
	Oh, I think the parents of the kids at Dalton Academy right now are strongly reconsidering that $50,000 a year tuition.
	I assume you saw that story.
	Yeah, for us, it was never actually about the morals and values.
	When I criticize government schooling, I don't really criticize that.
	It's the lack of ability to give individual attention or teaching styles to kids.
	That's not a criticism of teachers.
	It's a reality.
	The pragmatic approach is to teach to the middle like 60% because that's where most of the kids are going to be and that's where you have to go.
	If you have a kid who's ahead or a kid who's behind, either one of them are going to get left.
	They're going to get left back by the academics.
	It's going to be wasting either their time or their potential.
	And a lot of kids who are behind are not behind because they learn slow or they learn worse.
	It's just they learn different.
	And so one of our kids really, really thrives when my wife sits down next to them and helps them with work.
	Another one of our kids really, really thrives when they're left alone.
	And so like having those individualized approaches to learning, that's the type of stuff that concerned us.
	I mean, I'm of course concerned about the sort of lessons that are being taught that are outside of the curriculum that you get from teachers and all of their baggage that they bring into a classroom.
	But those are the types of things that I dealt with as a kid.
	And the way I dealt with it was, you know, my parents always encouraged me to kind of just think for myself.
	And this is going to sound weird because my parents never taught me this, but somewhere I picked up the point where I don't really have inherent respect for anybody's position.
	I mean, I will respect people.
	I'm always nice to people to start, and then I will meet them at their level.
	Happily, happily meet them at their level, right?
	If you want to take me into the back alley, well, I'll bring the back alley with me.
	But that being said, I always had respect for adults and respect for teachers in that general sense, but I never respected their opinions as anything more than an opinion.
	And that has kept consistent throughout...
	Throughout college and law school, as you get older, as you get more educated, you realize that the guy giving you all of this great information on the Fourth Amendment, outside of his expertise, is just a dummy like you or me.
	He's just a random guy with a bunch of opinions, and his expertise doesn't make those opinions valid at all.
	And so once you do that, you can kind of inoculate yourself from those.
	That's one thing I teach to the high schoolers that I teach, and that's one thing that I instill in my kids as they get older, is like, look, I mean, teachers will teach you about a subject, but outside of that subject, they're just opinions.
	The same opinions you have, they're not more valid, they're not less valid, and as long as you hold on to that, you can use them to inform your own opinions.
	Well, and I see this like three different things.
	One is almost all of your great intellectuals over history's time were privately tutored.
	They were not the project of some mass education experimentation, which is what our public education system in the States in particular really is.
	And that goes to the individualized attention that you're talking about as well.
	The second aspect is I think what you pointed out is very true.
	One of the drawbacks of public education is the socialization.
	Because the socialization is distorted.
	It's negative.
	It often draws back on emotional and psychological experience.
	It often stunts emotional development, doesn't develop it.
	It often hurts and harms kids, doesn't help it, because it's the bullies and the bums, the snobs and the bigots who often dominate those school campuses.
	Social setting, and they're taught the wrong values, not the right ones.
	And then third...
	Particularly our American educational system, which was always about acculturation, not education.
	That's why we have a clock that's designed as if you're going to work at a factory.
	Makes no sense.
	Why do we have 45-minute classes, 55 minutes?
	There's no logic to this.
	This is solely, if you dig into its history, it was solely to condition people to get used to an eight-hour workday and to get out at certain breaks and certain structures.
	But also, our democratization is not merit-driven.
	So what happens is, by putting everybody in the same class, It drags down the top student.
	It doesn't lift up the bottom student.
	In fact, if anything, it's part of the social problem.
	You put a mediocre student in with a smart student, the smart student gets picked on aggressively and obsessively.
	That's why it's part of popular culture, revenge of the nerds, etc.
	Because it's so common, a phenomenon.
	You have the idiots trying to bully everybody because they happen to be slower than the rest of the group.
	And so I think homeschooling is a dramatic improvement over definitely American public education.
	So I think you're definitely doing that.
	I'm a fan of it.
	My sister, well...
	I got a lot of sisters, but my oldest sister ended up homeschooling all of her grandkids, and that worked far, far better.
	Because if they'd been in the public school environment, a couple of them would have been in serious trouble because they already ran with some less than desirable individuals.
	And friends of mine that have tried to send their kids to elite public schools, negative social experiences repeatedly.
	The only time they could get a positive one is they actually transferred.
	Their oldest daughter, oldest child, from an elite public school to a rural Tennessee public school, where then she started achieving much more because the social pressure was radically different.
	I mean, it was a place where you're supposed to have a pet pig, you know, that kind of thing.
	But that's the other thing I want to ask.
	How much do you think raising them in a place that's a small town?
	It dramatically improves their social, moral, educational development compared to if they were stuck right now in a place like the Twin Cities.
	Massively.
	Massively.
	I remember if I would have stayed living in Houston, those who happen to be familiar with Houston, the stream, I would have gone to Eisenhower High School.
	If I were the same person...
	In high school, even in suburban Minnesota, that I was, if I would have been the same in Houston, Eisenhower, I probably would have been killed, literally killed in the school.
	Because you can't, you know, you want to talk about bullying in Eisenhower as a white kid, you're in the minority.
	And I grew up...
	First through, or kindergarten through fourth grade as a minority student, which is a weird thing for people to understand, but it's a minority student near very, very scary neighborhoods in Houston in the 80s, particularly.
	Akers Homes was a great, great place.
	Lots of crack busts and lots of murder.
	So, you know, getting me into a suburban school was good, suburban Minnesota school, because it was such a different environment.
	And then further removing our children from that, because even there, you run into severe drug problems, you run into lots of violence, you know, kids run unchecked no matter where you are, and those kids have lots of hormones, lots of changes, and like you said.
	It's the bullies and the bigots or whatever who get to be running the school.
	So taking them out of that environment and putting them even into a small town, I think, I'm a big proponent of small town America.
	Never would have heard me say that until I was about 20, you know, 26, 27. Because I always grew up in cities.
	But once you get outside of those cities and things just slow down a little bit, you realize how much more time you have and also just how different people act.
	All of that bravado just goes away because no one really cares.
	I was just thinking that the dynamic of homeschooling versus small town, there is an interplay there because...
	I don't think you could do homeschooling in a big city without the kids being exposed to a world where they necessarily think that they are bizarre in comparison to.
	And so the homeschooling sort of goes more hand-in-hand with smaller town because you can't do it in a big city without the kids really feeling ostracized.
	And growing up, I guess everybody knows, but I bounced around in three high schools in five years.
	I look back at high school as like that necessary period of suffering that everyone should go through and that you should be talked through afterwards.
	Not thinking there was an alternative and still not really thinking that there is a viable alternative in a big city.
	You go, you suffer, you hate every minute of it, and then you build, you know, you spend the next 20 years trying to get over it.
	But I see an alternative, especially now during COVID, where having the kids at home, yeah, man, I could see how I could do it differently, better.
	But it's still not a realistic alternative, I think, in a big city because there is just, I call it a class warfare.
	It just wouldn't work in a big city because you'd go out and be exposed to people in schools and they would look at you like a freak.
	Whereas in a small town, it's more culturally appropriate, culturally acceptable.
	I think year over year that that's changing.
	And I don't know where that transition will take place for the big cities.
	I think there is definitely a distinction that you're bringing up.
	But we see in the United States, homeschooling growth is dramatic.
	And they keep...
	Whatever you're doing to public schools, keep doing it.
	It's great.
	But homeschooling growth is going up and it's becoming more...
	As it becomes more mainstream, these homeschool co-ops and stuff like that do start forming.
	And so the kids, I mean, they do get a lot of socialization when you go through it that way.
	And the curriculums are more kind of solidified.
	You get less of the crazy like...
	You know, the meme about homeschool is it was always like a cultish parent, like hyper-religious, trying to infuse this into him.
	I mean, there is some of that still.
	Even amongst a major published homeschool curriculum, you can find that type of stuff.
	But it's becoming less and less of a particular religious approach and more and more of a mainstream approach with lots of options for people.
	And so I think at some point that is going to shift.
	But as a percentage of homeschool kids keeps rising, it's more and more normalized.
	But I mean, if you look back 30 years ago to homeschooling, we're talking a completely different world than what you have today.
	And that is largely through efforts of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and stuff like that.
	They have really been pushing for parents' rights, advocating to the parents, saying, you have these rights.
	Exercise them.
	Do it.
	Do it for your kids.
	You can do it.
	And that's the one message for all homeschool considering parents out there.
	Trust me, you literally can do it.
	Don't ever let some teacher or whatever tell you you can't, because believe me, they're not qualified to tell you what you can do with your kids.
	They're just not.
	Yeah, I mean, the people that I know that have homeschooled, and I homeschooled my kids for a brief period of time, all generally turned out better off and welcome it.
	I know none who regret it.
	By contrast, there's a lot who regret it.
	I would have not had my kids in high school at all.
	The problem is cultural is just so bad.
	So it's just bad.
	And the best schools in the public educational system or the private educational system are full of rich kids.
	And they all have bad values, frankly.
	And they're just going to negatively influence your kids.
	Not just in terms of ideas, but in terms of drug habits and a wide range of other personal.
	Because they celebrate Hollywood culture.
	And they emulate it.
	The worst example of this was Malibu.
	You know, you think Malibu, nice coastal community.
	The kids are all nice.
	Up until about ninth grade, I used to watch it when my daughter participated in the band.
	I noticed that by ninth grade, there was a drop-off.
	Tenth grade, a bigger drop-off.
	And there was almost no seniors in the band.
	It's because that was no longer popular.
	That was no longer cool.
	That was no longer chic.
	They wanted to emulate Hollywood culture.
	So they're doing secret.
	Now, my daughter had a tendency to confess on herself.
	So she explained this at ninth grade, how you handle a party.
	You go to one house, but you're actually going to go to another house and then another house.
	And these kids all end up on the River Phoenix path.
	And so that's one of the reasons I left Malibu at the time.
	The Malibu also turned out to have public schools with buildings that had a bunch of problems in the walls because of when they built it and hid it for 30 years.
	But that's a whole other story.
	Even rich kid schools are doing that stuff.
	But now, how about social media?
	Because I underappreciated how detrimental social media were, particularly for young women.
	But, I mean, the data that's out there is it's done severe psychological damage, not only corrupted our culture.
	I mean, it's just my daughter's friends.
	I mean, it's just an epidemic, really.
	How are you handling the social media aspect for your kids?
	Our kids are not on social media.
	As much as I dislike Things like Facebook and stuff like that conceptually.
	Some of them really do put together some good stuff.
	Facebook has Messenger Kids, which is a highly regulated type of messenger where the parental approval is required for pretty much anything.
	And that allows them to use the good parts of social media, keeping up with close friends, family, relatives that we know.
	So they're able to do stuff like that.
	But outside of that, even the 13-year-old, you know, and he...
	Doesn't even really want a Facebook account, as far as I can tell, or Twitter or anything.
	They don't care.
	It's not part of the thing.
	And I think the homeschooling insulates them from that largely.
	My theory is that cyberbullying is not real so long as you are not forced into contact with the people who can do the cyberbullying, right?
	Because if cyberbullying is someone stating their opinion online, well...
	Then cyberbullying is just as effective offline.
	It's gossip circles.
	But if you never encounter the gossip, or if you never encounter the people who do the gossip, the amount that's done by someone having an opinion about you is dramatically mitigated.
	This is why schools and social media as a combination, I think, are one of the worst cancers on society.
	I cannot imagine having a kid in high school.
	And all you have to do to realize like how, and this sounds cliche or whatever, but to realize how bad it is, is just to look at any popular television show right now that involves kids in a set in current times.
	And the amount of devastation that is wrought on these kids through social media and the shows is directly ripped, not from the headlines, but from literally every high schoolers experience.
	If they haven't been shredded on social media, they know someone who's.
	And so, you know, that...
	Keeping them in that environment where their embarrassments can be given back to them over and over, I think that's where it's really, really damaging.
	It's interesting, Nick, because one of my kids has a YouTube channel, not very active, but I look at this as in one of those things that it has very, very strong negatives, but it has very strong positives as well.
	But I've operated from the basis that you can't shelter them from it, so you have to In a sense, desensitize them or sensitize them to what it's going to be.
	And so before they put up the first video, I said, look, look at yourself in the mirror, pick out whatever feature you don't like, and just imagine someone telling you how bad that feature is day in and day out for a week.
	That's what it's going to be like to go out here.
	Do you want to go out into this environment?
	And it might be the wrong approach, and I don't know.
	It might be traumatizing or sensitizing or desensitizing.
	But I've come to grips with the fact that you cannot...
	At least in my mind, you can't isolate them from it.
	So the question is, how do you get them used to it?
	And how do you get them used to dealing with the stress it is going to cause?
	But maybe I'm wrong in that you can just absolutely not shelter them from it, but isolate them from it.
	I just don't think you can.
	Same thing with violence.
	Same thing with sex.
	They're going to see it.
	They're going to have to understand it exists.
	The question is, how do you sensitize their reaction to it?
	And I go with sort of like the small doses over time and then learning how to respond to it.
	What's your take on that?
	Well, I think you should have also given them a list of suggestions of things they should be insecure about.
	Like, here's what I noticed about your face that I hate.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	It's a fair game if I ask them to provide those answers, so I guess in a way I did that.
	But no, I think you're right.
	There is no amount of sheltering you can do.
	And I think over-sheltering kids in any aspect is going to lead to an explosion on the other side.
	You know, there's memes about the Amish community having this when their kids all turn like 16 or 17 and they kind of explode into these behaviors.
	And then they either come back to the community and kind of get forgiven because everybody kind of went through it or they don't.
	For my kids, where we are, certainly our kids will be exposed to social media at some point.
	I'm not sure now is the proper age.
	My 13-year-old is getting up to the point where it's like, okay, we're going to have to start stepping into these waters.
	How do we navigate it?
	Of course, all my kids want to have YouTube channels, especially because they know I do YouTube.
	But part of the caveat of that is, you know, you're so nice, Viva.
	That's this gem about you is that you're so wonderful.
	I, on the other hand, am not.
	So I have collected a group of people.
	Who very much despise who I am.
	But I think I'm delightful.
	So one thing I know is that, and it's kind of sad, is that I cannot really be involved in my kids' social media.
	Can't really do it without knowing that they're going to be bombarded by a bunch of very, very hateful people online.
	So that's...
	That's part of the balancing act that I think we all have to follow as semi-public people that even changes the game for us.
	So I honestly don't know.
	And you mentioned you don't know if that's the right approach.
	I think no one knows it's the right approach.
	Social media is still so new anthropologically that what kind of studies have we actually done on this?
	That'll show long-term effects of someone who went through high school with social media.
	Social media as it is now.
	Because there was social media when I was in college, but it was literally just Facebook and MySpace, which you can't even compare that to what Twitter is or Tumblr or these other things.
	Now, the other thing I'm fascinated by is just small-town life in general.
	One of the things that was still underappreciated was that you could know how people tended to trend in voting in both 2016 and 2020.
	A perfect example of this is Minnesota, by the size of the community.
	That was the number one effect, more than education, class, race, religion, region.
	None of that mattered nearly as much as the size of the community.
	The smaller the community, the more it trended toward Trump.
	The larger the community, the more it trended toward Biden.
	And this was true across states in a relatively unique phenomenon.
	Normally, if that happened, it happened just within a certain region or just within a certain area of states and so forth.
	This was across the board.
	It doesn't matter whether you're talking about New Hampshire, you're talking about Minnesota, you're talking about Maine, you're talking about New Mexico, it doesn't matter where.
	Though it peaked in the Midwest.
	Now, when I was traveling through eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, I sort of understood this better in 2016.
	Just because there was a way of life of Americana still existing in small-town America that is mostly gone.
	From urban America.
	Your drive-in theaters.
	Your local diners where people still know you.
	Your local bars and pubs where people still recognize you.
	Your small town churches that are interconnected and interwoven deeply within the community and its history.
	What is your small town like?
	Does it have something like a small diner, a small bar, a place people gather in the community?
	What is it like in that way?
	Our town is like a resort town.
	It's one of the big fishing lakes in Minnesota, Green Lake.
	So the governor will come out.
	Oh, yes, yes, yes.
	Is that a musky lake?
	Sorry, what was that?
	Is that a musky lake?
	I have no idea.
	I don't fish.
	Well, I'm going to Google it while you continue answering the questions, Nick.
	If you come down in the winter, I'll take you ice fishing, though.
	So if you're an open invitation, bring the family.
	Wait for supreme leaders to open our borders so we can visit our American counterparts.
	Yes, yes.
	But, you know, there's not really a small-town diner.
	There are, of course, small-town bars and restaurants.
	The diner is actually, like, the real community diner is in the little bit bigger town, Wilmer.
	But the way I look at it is, it's going to sound wrong, probably.
	But when you drive around a small town, you see a lot of American flags.
	And when you drive around bigger towns, you see less American flags and more identitarian flags.
	And I think there's a lot to do with that on the right versus the left.
	The right still has these ties to at least the conceptual idea of what America is.
	And I think that's maybe waning as stuff like 2020 has really taken a toll on it and the damage that...
	That the pandemic and the election really did in 2020 is going to be...
	It remains to be seen, but I think it's pretty big.
	But just in general, especially leading up to 2016, small towns, you're going to drive around, you're going to see American flags and people who have these kind of Americanized values and respect what that meant.
	And then in larger cities, you're going to see more identitarian signage and flags.
	I mean, obviously it's Pride Month, so the pride flag is out there.
	But people have started putting individual identities above their sort of cultural heritage.
	And we hear this a lot coming from public school and mass media, that America doesn't have a culture.
	We're just a bunch of borrowed cultures.
	It's like, but we really do, though.
	And that's the right versus left in a nutshell.
	And I think in small towns, you're going to see people who are a little more reliant on their neighbors.
	They might buy milk from the farmer down the road.
	They might get eggs from a neighbor with a chicken coop.
	I mean, we do.
	We get our eggs from someone who raises their own chickens.
	Our Thanksgiving turkeys sometimes come from a friend with a farm.
	And just that little bit of reliance allows you to...
	Even though you're more isolated physically, kind of integrate into the community in a practical way.
	And in bigger cities, to integrate into a community, you have to make a lot of effort.
	You have to go and join a cause or a thing.
	But even then, you're integrating into identity rather than into community.
	And I think that is the big divide.
	It's interesting.
	I'm going to bring this one up.
	Homeschooled since grade two.
	Too poor to afford to go to school or have shoes that fit.
	Amish roots went to a library every day.
	Now 200,000 plus a year.
	There's no question.
	When I hear some stories of the things teachers are teaching their kids, our kids, in school, I'll be happy to be the stay-at-home rebel parent who says maybe questions certain things.
	But yes, there's no hard and fast rule.
	But it's an interesting thing, Nick.
	Also, you're talking about...
	The sense of community that small-town life has, where you're led to believe that community and the greater good prevails in cities, where it is interesting when you say it, it really...
	I can see how it's more individualist in big cities disguised as collectivism for the greater good, whereas in the small towns, yeah, it is actually about communities.
	You know your neighbors.
	I was always brought up thinking that...
	Small town stuff, bad things happen.
	Your neighbors are always weird, but it is the big city versus the small city generalizations, sort of mischaracterizations that separates people, I guess, over the long run.
	What was I going to go with that?
	It's an amazing thing.
	I was going to ask, so you started out at your legal practice as a small town lawyer.
	Can you describe it?
	Because one, that was an interesting choice.
	It may have been out of necessity, practicality, desirability.
	I'd be curious as to that aspect.
	I've heard you talk about it before, but I think it's a good summation for the audience.
	And then equally, what was your first case, first client?
	What was something that introduced you to the practice of law that was a lot different than what they may have taught you in law school?
	Well, so I opened my own practice out of part necessity, part practicality.
	The law firms around my town weren't really hiring.
	It's a small town.
	There's plenty of lawyers because there's always plenty of lawyers.
	But I also don't do well, as I said, with authority.
	I had no particular desire to be under someone's supervision.
	Happy to be under someone's wing.
	Some mentoring was part of the prospect of someone I was talking to, but then their firm got busy.
	They didn't get back to me, so I was like, I can't wait around.
	I'm going to rent my own place and just do it.
	My first case was a family law case, which I absolutely hate, loathe, and despise family law.
	Opposing counsel was a 30-year family lawyer and actually has run unsuccessfully the past several terms for Minnesota Supreme Court justice.
	And I always tell people to vote against her vehemently.
	She seems to be a barely competent attorney.
	And as evidence...
	Every single hearing we had, I stomped her into the ground.
	And I shouldn't have, right?
	Like, there should have been...
	This is not credit to me.
	I was bringing up basic points of facts and law.
	But I think maybe as she's been practicing so long, she...
	And with family law, this becomes particularly true.
	And this is what they don't really infuse into you in family law.
	Is that you get a lot of people who get comfortable with sort of norms of family law.
	Rather than laws.
	And so they get into methods of practice where it says, well, we're going to do things this way.
	If you come out and you say the law says the opposite and then you bring that to a judge, it turns out you actually do win on those subjects.
	And so I'll briefly summarize the most baffling part of this.
	We were trying to negotiate custody and...
	And support.
	We had this one issue of back child support because there was about eight months where the one parent was out of the home due to restraining order.
	And so they, under the Minnesota statutes, owed a particular amount of money.
	It was about six grand of back child support.
	And we negotiated out an entire parenting plan, everything two days of mediation to get there.
	We got it down.
	We get to the issue of back child support.
	And they said, we're not going to pay a dime.
	And I had said, oh, before that, I said, I don't want to negotiate this.
	We can finish this up.
	Give my client $4,000.
	Take a haircut and everything will be good.
	And they said, nope, we're not paying a dime.
	I said, well, I mean, the law says you could pay.
	$6,000.
	We're saying $4,000.
	It's a nice compromise.
	We've had everything else worked out.
	And they said, nope, we're going to go to court on this issue.
	And so then what they tried to do was bring our partial agreement as evidence of full agreement on all of these individual terms and leave out the back child support as if it were something separate, as if that was not consideration during all of the other negotiation.
	And we stomped him into the ground on that.
	The guy ended up paying his lawyer an extra $15,000.
	And then he ended up paying my client the $6,000 that the state said they owed.
	And we got more child support than we had already agreed to.
	So my client didn't need the statutory amount.
	And so we were negotiating down and trying to get things done.
	And they didn't want to do it.
	And it was all because of this guy's lawyer telling him over and over, no, we can get out of this.
	You're not going to get out of this.
	So that was the part of law school they really don't prepare you for as far as family law goes, is that family law is not built on the law.
	But when you go to court, you're going to win on those legal subjects because you have to.
	But there's so much wiggle room in it.
	But that was my first experience with...
	My first case did everything great.
	My client was very, very happy.
	And then after that, I decided I hate family law and will probably never do it again.
	Now, my assumption is your small town lawyers, I call them street lawyers, have to take in everything off the street.
	So the utility, like one of the first lawyers I worked for, or intern, well, yeah, actually I had a law school work for, deliberately was a street lawyer because I wanted upfront experience, wanted a wide range of experience, small town courts, big city courts, criminal courts, civil courts, you name it, state courts, federal courts, et cetera, because literally a guy took everything off the street.
	Was that what your legal practice was like?
	And was it something you enjoyed or something you didn't enjoy?
	And if so, what?
	It was.
	You know, you take kind of what you can get.
	You get your name out to everything.
	I joined a business networking organization, BNI.
	I was in BNI for a while and you go and you make your presentations and you just try and get referrals every day.
	That's what you do.
	I mean, I didn't like it because you take in a bunch of stuff that you really don't want to deal with.
	But at the same time, you know, a lot of the stuff that I was doing was transactional.
	And that's the stuff I really enjoyed because it was really easy, right?
	You draft up a will, you handle an estate, you set up a 501c3.
	Those things are bread and butter type things.
	And that's, you know, I like doing that.
	And then I found through taking in everything that I like doing criminal law too.
	So that was the other good thing, is doing those two practices came out of taking everything that comes in the door.
	But I also met some very special people doing that.
	And, you know, I've run into some crazy farmers who want...
	Wanted you to sue literally everybody under the sun because you mess with a farmer's land or anything like that, and they want you to sue them even if they really don't have claims that are pursuable.
	I liked where it got to be with my law practice before I started doing YouTube, of course.
	But I also didn't like all of the other stuff.
	I really did not like managing some...
	Some clients.
	And I'm really bad at billing.
	I hate billing people.
	I say people should have the experience of operating a small business, but a small law practice.
	When you do it on your own, and you only appreciate this when you either start on your own or go out on your own.
	At a big firm, you have secretaries, you have assistants, you have billing departments, you have collections.
	When you go out on your own or when you start on your own, you're the only person to do it.
	Billing.
	You do the work.
	You do the billing.
	You do the collections.
	You do the reminders.
	And if you need to sue in small claims, you do the actual, you know, suing.
	And it's a humbling experience.
	It's a learning experience.
	And it can make you cynical because, you know, by the time people get to lawyers, they're in a bad spot.
	They end up hating their lawyers regardless.
	Because if you win, they hate you because they paid you too much.
	If you lose, they hate you because you lost and they paid you too much.
	That and they're sitting there dealing with bad opposing counsels, people who are fighting them.
	And it's a bizarre thing, but if anybody has never done it, do it.
	And if you like it, all the better.
	But Nick, when you're talking about your early experiences dealing with lawyers, that's what traumatized me.
	That's what turned me off of the practice.
	It's what I never got over 10, 13 years in.
	You're dealing with lawyers who will say, Why pay now when you can pay later?
	Why look for an amicable solution now when it will pay the lawyer better not to get that amicable solution?
	I mean, Robert has...
	I guess the one of the three of us who's actually still doing it full-time, I couldn't deal with it.
	How did you deal with it?
	When did you say enough is enough?
	I never want to see any of this again.
	Well, it was once YouTube became economically potentially viable.
	Literally, that was like...
	I still do a couple cases.
	I really don't like to take them, but the people I was helping before were people who would have trouble paying in general.
	They have trouble paying.
	That's why they've gone to other lawyers and the other lawyers tell them what the retainer is going to be.
	I would take the case and then try and worry about the billing later.
	I resolved criminal cases for $500 a shot just because they didn't have any more money.
	They spent it all on meth.
	What were they supposed to do?
	Sometimes you just do it.
	Once I was able to do it through YouTube, I said, I can now practice law at my leisure.
	I can help people when I want to, and I don't have to charge them a penny to do it.
	So all my work now that I do legally is pro bono.
	People offer to pay me and I tell them no.
	I don't want to be involved in that part of it.
	It's something I've always been bad.
	I'm the worst salesman ever because I, and believe me, my sales manager bosses when I was really young would tell me this.
	You never ask people to just buy the thing.
	Just buy the thing and take their money.
	And I can't do it.
	It's not my cup of tea.
	So as soon as I was able to get out of that, I gladly did.
	If I would have persisted as a full-time law practice, you know, would have been building up the administrative staff to take care of that stuff.
	Because I'm not good at it.
	I don't want to do it.
	It's not my style.
	I prefer to just try and help people when I can and not worry about the economics of it.
	Now, if anything, how prepared were you for criminal practice and how the criminal justice system really works?
	I remember you did an early introductory video, or one of your first videos was on Flynn, and never talked to the feds, never talked to the cops, always good advice.
	And sometimes that's sort of universally known, but a lot of people who go into it, who weren't, you know, purposefully going into it, or even if they were, are shocked by how ugly our criminal justice system is, particularly from the prosecutorial and judicial side of the aisle.
	What was your experience?
	Right.
	Small Town is not immune from that exact same thing.
	It is very ugly.
	Here's an example.
	I represented a guy who was charged with domestic assault.
	The short story is he was dating a woman with a teenage son.
	That was not his.
	The kid was mad about something.
	Arguing with the mom, this guy stepped between them and grabbed hold of the kid, kind of grabbed around him to just keep him down because kids' hands were going up against his mom.
	So he's like, okay.
	The kid breaks away from that, ends up punching my client and then going outside.
	So the mom and this guy follow the kid outside and the kid's waiting there with a shovel and just beats the brakes off my client, right?
	Hits him with a shovel, a whole bunch.
	And then the kid runs off.
	My client sits down.
	The police come.
	Tells him what happened.
	The kid hits him.
	When they arrest the kid, the kid says, no, this guy was hitting me.
	Right?
	And so the prosecutor charges my client.
	And they've got testimony, I guess.
	So they have enough probable cause to make the charge.
	And then the guy and the woman come in and hire me.
	And the woman writes out this letter.
	I've been with this guy forever.
	He does not hit me.
	He never would.
	He's never hit the kid.
	He was the victim here and all this stuff.
	And so I take it to the prosecutor.
	I'm like, you don't have any witnesses to this.
	Why don't we just settle this out?
	Why don't we dismiss this case?
	And he said, no.
	I'm going to disqualify the mom as a witness.
	I'm going to rail your client into the ground.
	I think that he hits her and all this stuff.
	And I was like, based on what?
	And I was like, the kid?
	And so then he's like, no, we're going to trial on this.
	So then our next hearing is a pretrial.
	And that morning...
	The kid goes in and confesses to another crime that he had committed right before coming home, which was the source of the fight.
	He confesses to that crime and in that confession even admits that he was the aggressor against my client.
	So I go to the prosecutor and I say, all right, surely you're going to dismiss this now.
	And he says, no way.
	I've got my case.
	I'm going to rail your client into the ground.
	And I was like, what?
	You know, and after a bunch of argument, we got the thing dismissed.
	But it was like, what are you doing here?
	And he just, he wanted that conviction.
	And this is a misdemeanor domestic.
	Like, this is not murder two or something.
	You know, but he just, that was his thing.
	He wanted that conviction.
	He thought he could bring it.
	He thought he could, through gamesmanship, disqualify.
	Evidence that he knew to be exculpatory, he just wasn't going to do it.
	And that's what you run into, and that's what really blows your mind when you get into the criminal system from the defense side, is you see this stuff happening all the time.
	And you see people who may have made a mistake or may not have made a mistake getting railroaded by prosecutors.
	I was talking with Robert Gruller about this the other day.
	You see them make deals on people who should be in prison, and you see them refuse to make deals on people who never should step foot in a jail.
	And it's the most frustrating thing in the world.
	It is.
	This is the thing.
	First of all, you see the same thing in civil.
	The only distinction is that in civil, typically you're dealing with money and not actual money.
	Taking your kids away, imprisonment.
	Although in civil, you know, you're dealing with bankruptcy, which ruins lives as well.
	And then you have people like myself who say, I can't stomach this.
	I can't deal with it.
	I can't fight that type.
	And I'll call it dishonesty.
	You can't compete with that.
	In order to compete with that, you have to lower your own standards for what you're prepared to do in order to combat that.
	Because, like you say, if you're going to an alley fight, you've got to bring the alley with you.
	And if you don't have that in you...
	It becomes very difficult to even compete.
	And you can be called a coward, you can be called whatever, but you might have your use in life and you might have your productivity in life and it might not be there.
	It's what I noticed in civil practices.
	There's no end to it.
	There's no end to what people will do justifying it as, well, it's in the interest of my client, even if it's not in the interest of justice.
	And then...
	The flip side is when people start saying, well, it's in the interest of justice, the client starts saying, well, you're not protecting me and you owe all your loyalties to me, even if it means doing things which are unethical.
	And it's why people hate lawyers.
	It's why people hate the practice.
	It's a cesspool to some extent because it's just a dirty, dirty business.
	Let me add one final thing on that.
	The problem with the prosecutor side of it in the criminal aspect is there's really, really minimal avenues for punishment.
	Kim Gardner has a case against her with like 76 pages of alleged ethics violations.
	That's literally only because she went after a governor.
	I mean, make no mistake, and this is...
	This is going to sound meaner.
	There are great prosecutors out there, but a lot of prosecutors have a laundry list of ethics violations that they just call normal day-to-day work.
	And until you get into the practice and see it happening on the daily level, I've had prosecutors lie.
	I've had prosecutors encourage witnesses to lie on the stand, and those witnesses are cops.
	Until you see that, it's hard to fathom what that system looks like and realize.
	How broken it is.
	And there is no punishment for the overwhelming majority of the crimes.
	At least in civil practice, you can ask the judge to sanction them and they might do it.
	In criminal practice, well, the state made a mistake.
	We saw it in the Chauvin trial, right?
	Now, I'm very disappointed in how the state has acted on some of these things.
	It's like, sanction them.
	Do something.
	Recommend them for disciplinary action.
	You have options, but no.
	It was just...
	Now, now.
	But if the defense had done the same things, we would have seen real fireworks.
	No doubt about it.
	Now, in terms of sort of the YouTube environment, did you have a plan about how you were going to sort of develop your audience, develop your content, or did it just sort of organically arise?
	I didn't mean to laugh.
	I just laughed at having a plan because I did not.
	It was so haphazard.
	It was unexpected.
	It grew up organically.
	I got a jump start because I was in an existing...
	Very active community.
	And so that brought thousands of eyes to my videos right away.
	And I had fostered a presence in that community in a closed Facebook group.
	I was very active in there.
	So people knew who I was.
	They knew I was a lawyer.
	And so I came out talking about this thing and it got a lot of looks really quickly.
	And at the time, I didn't even know lawyers would be on YouTube.
	Like that wasn't a thing I had ever thought of existing.
	So no.
	It was very organically grown.
	I've had some, we'll call them strategic moves.
	But all of the things I had planned for my channel have not come to pass.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Actually, I was going to say, because I'm bringing up anime says, maybe this is old news, but I never heard the end of it.
	Vic Mignone's situation.
	Now, is this the file you're talking about?
	The one that had a lot of eyes on it that you were involved in?
	This was one of the earliest...
	No, this was not the first case I covered, but this is the big one.
	This is the one that made my channel kind of explode in early 2019.
	It was the Vic Mignogna case.
	There is no update waiting on the second court of appeals in Tarrant County to decide if they will send back the case, if they'll remand it, or if they'll declare it dead.
	We're still waiting.
	It'll be nine months on June 22nd, but that's within their own guidelines.
	And as anybody who knows, Court of Appeals don't actually have rules about when they issue decisions.
	They just have suggestions for themselves.
	We're just waiting on the answers to that.
	No, the first case I covered was a guy named Maddox suing a guy named Dick Masterson.
	These are two internet satirists.
	Maddox had a webpage called The Best Page in the Universe.
	Maddox X Mission.
	I rate your kids' artwork.
	It was...
	Holy cows.
	If anybody hasn't seen that, go Google rating kids' artwork.
	Maddox X Mission.
	It's the funniest thing on earth.
	My goodness, this is news to me.
	What was the wrong thing?
	That was one of the original websites I remember flipping over back in the day.
	Yeah.
	Oh my gosh.
	I have so much red pilling to do for you from Maddox.
	So Maddox had a podcast with a guy named Dick Masterson.
	Dick wrote a book called Men Are Better Than Women, which is a satire book, but people don't understand what satire is.
	So everybody hated Dick Masterson.
	They had a podcast called The Biggest Problem in the Universe.
	It was a great show.
	They would bring in problems and argue.
	And then the crowd would crowdsource top to bottom what were the biggest problems in the universe by voting.
	Brilliant.
	And it was great for two years.
	Then it just ended one day.
	And then about, I don't know, five, six months after it ended, they had their own shows going.
	And Maddox sues Dick for somewhere between $20 and $400 million.
	I'm sorry.
	It's hard to tell because the complaint was so poorly worded that you can't figure out if they meant to aggregate all of the amounts or if the amounts were individual to each claim or if they were a total amount and all of the claims contributed to it.
	It was written by a guy.
	I will say it.
	He's one of the worst lawyers in existence.
	His name is Kevin Landau.
	Hopefully you guys don't know him.
	He's out of Michigan and New York City.
	And if you ever see his files, they are abysmal.
	Abysmally.
	Nick, I'm reading these comments.
	I loved Maddox for like 15 years of my life.
	That was a huge...
	Okay, so Maddox sues his former business partner.
	You know what?
	To me, it doesn't matter if it's $20 or $400 million.
	If it's over a million, I have flags going off.
	What's the basis of the lawsuit?
	Copyright infringement?
	Breach of contract?
	No, making fun of him.
	He made fun of him.
	The real basis for the lawsuit is Dick ended up dating a girl that Maddox dated four years after he broke up with her.
	And I'm not joking.
	That's what caused everything to come crumbling down.
	And that's the basis of it.
	And then it was defamation.
	It was false light.
	But there wasn't any defamation.
	It was literally just insults.
	Not even that part where...
	Oh, you're insulting them by calling them a child aficionado or something like that.
	No, no, no.
	It's just literal baseline insults became sources for defamation.
	And the shenanigans of that lawsuit are actually really, really funny.
	Because you do have...
	Maddox, you think, is like a funny guy.
	He's very creative.
	Except he's not.
	All of that stuff that seems ludicrous and far out there, that's what he really believes.
	And that was the best part of the lawsuit, is finding out that none of it was an act.
	This is actually just who he is.
	So, I mean, if you can give the abridged version so he sues for 20 to 400 million...
	Does it go to depositions?
	Does it get advanced in its litigation process?
	Or does it get shut down early?
	It got shut down.
	It took a while, though.
	It went into New York court in New York City.
	Maddox, who lives in L.A., sues Dick, who lives in L.A., in New York State court in New York City because of Kevin Landau, I guess.
	Was it a defamation-type claim?
	Yes, but nothing even close to based in New York City.
	There was no jurisdictional event.
	I'm assuming that they're just dodging anti-slap law.
	At the time, New York didn't have one and California did.
	Right.
	And I think that's the reasoning behind it.
	But still, New York was...
	The link to New York is they both had contracts with Simon and Schuster and they...
	Eventually tried to make that.
	Once it got pointed out how bad this was.
	But because it was such a huge claim, they moved it into the commercial division of New York and they got this old judge, Carlos something.
	And I mean, he had no time for any of them.
	He was just, he was like, this is the dumbest case.
	And he ended up dismissing it.
	It didn't go to deposition.
	God, I wish it would have.
	That would have been...
	Oh, premiumly funny.
	How old is Maddox?
	He's got to be in his 50s now?
	No, early 40s, I think.
	I think he's about 44, 43, something like that.
	But the best part of the case, in my opinion, my favorite thing that happened before I got ethics complaints from Maddox's lawyer, that was the best thing.
	But the best thing that happened in the case is at one point Maddox asked the judge for an injunction.
	On the entire internet from saying his name.
	And as a basis for the injunction, he sent in 60 pages of internet insults against him.
	And so it's like, wait a minute, you just went to the internet and told them all of the things that really get under your skin and put them in a legal document and sent them to a judge.
	Oh, it was magnificent.
	This is that old expression, never meet your heroes.
	I mean, I swear to you, I remember sharing links around.
	It was the best page in the universe.
	Yeah.
	It's amazing.
	Okay, well, dreams have been dashed.
	Memories have been ruined.
	I'll send you the files sometime so you can just read them because they're beautiful.
	That would be, I may or may not, I don't want any ethics complaints in the Quebec bar against me.
	So that was the file that launched, I say launched, that really brought you to the internet world and that got you an audience.
	Yep.
	Yeah, because I had immediately about 5,000, 6,000 views on this video, like really fast.
	And then as the motions kept coming in, I would do it.
	And I put out some other videos.
	One of my early videos is a critique of Marbury vs.
	Madison, which I say it's a garbage ruling.
	Stand by it, by the way.
	And those things would get like 800 views.
	But then these Maddox videos and Dick Masterson would get thousands of views.
	But that's what started it.
	And then from there, I just started looking for interesting lawsuits to cover for people.
	But the show's kind of morphed outside of that now.
	I mean, it's hard to find.
	Very funny lawsuits.
	That's an extremely difficult thing to do.
	Usually, as you guys know, they're long drawn out and they're not very dramatic except at very specific points.
	Other than that, you're really at a drought if you're just trying to cover one lawsuit at a time.
	Or they're unpleasant substance, like subject matter where the Chauvin case, the Chauvin trial had a lot of twists and turns and had a lot of novel questions.
	The underlying issue was tragedy.
	The Jussie Smollett, the underlying issue was idiotic to the point of comedy, which is why it was so beautiful.
	And everything that occurred in that case was a thing of beauty, corruption, absolute lunacy.
	And then it fizzled out.
	There's good ones.
	Michael Flynn was complicated.
	The underlying issues were frustrating.
	Discouraging as far as everything goes.
	But yeah, I can see the Maddox, it was one of those things that was just comedic in nature that you don't get angry listening to as opposed to Chauvin, as opposed to Flynn, as opposed to Roger Stone to a lesser degree.
	I remember the people involved in the Vic Magnona case were very dedicated.
	Did you get flack for that, for your coverage of that?
	And how did that go?
	Yeah, tons.
	I upped my game all the way to, I think I'm up to 11 ethics complaints now.
	10 or 11. Not a single one related to any practice that I've ever done.
	It was always YouTube related.
	All of them dismissed without investigation.
	But they were very, very mad that I covered this.
	And let's be real about why.
	The object of cancel culture is that the person is culturally gone.
	They are erased from society.
	They do not get...
	I mean, if they want to go work at a Burger King, they'll call the Burger King and tell them how much they hate the person and they'll try and get the Burger King to not hire them too.
	This is their goal.
	And the coverage that I did of the Vic Mignogna case combined with the GoFundMe that he had, which has over 8,000 donors and is at like $288,000.
	Put a numerical value on just how much people were pissed off that these people tried to cancel him.
	And despite promises and promises and promises of evidence for years, not a shred of any sort of actual evidence has come out to support any allegation beyond maybe this guy was a jerk to some con volunteer at some point.
	Maybe he was a little bit of a diva.
	Amongst his coworkers.
	But any of the allegations of sexual misconduct, there's never been any evidence to back any of it up, except for the one piece, which was from one of the defendants, a story that is uncorroborated by any witnesses.
	She even named a witness in the case, and he came out with an affidavit that says, I don't remember any of that happening.
	That's not real.
	And so it's like...
	Where is it?
	But the goal of cancel culture and the reason it doesn't go to court and the reason they were so mad about being brought to court is that it's supposed to just work.
	It's supposed to just happen on Twitter and someone's life is gone and then you never have to think about them again or the consequences of it because they're ostracized so effectively from society and particularly from the groups that you shared with them that you'll never encounter them again.
	And that didn't happen.
	And they still have people arguing with them.
	When I broadcast their depositions, it showed the world exactly who they were.
	And I am a firm...
	I think it's the best thing we can do.
	That's why I love what Veritas is talking about with New York Times.
	Because when you get these people under oath, and they have to sit there, and you watch their eyes roll.
	You watch their body language as they answer questions.
	You hear their vocal inflections.
	These are voice actors.
	And you can still see the untruth coming through.
	It's like...
	This is exactly what you need.
	And then you just let the world judge for themselves.
	They hated that.
	Man, they hated that I aired those depositions.
	Oh, boy.
	Now, had you done or defended depositions before this?
	I have not.
	No, and I didn't do these depositions either.
	I just broadcast them.
	I got them from the attorney who did them.
	I've never had to do a deposition in my small practice.
	The one time I was going to, my client wanted me to do something that I could not do.
	It was not an act that was doable.
	And I told my client this, and he said, another lawyer told me, you can do this.
	And I said, he's telling you what you want to hear, so you will hire him.
	I'm telling you what you have paid me to tell you, which is the truth.
	And then he threatened physical violence upon me, and that was the end of that attorney-client relationship.
	So, no, I have not had to personally do depositions, and hopefully, you know, I just get to laugh at them.
	But I would happily do one.
	I think they're amazing.
	They're this fascinating thing.
	You get to sit down and ask someone every question you ever wanted an answer to and watch them just hate to give it.
	The amazing thing is, like, I've done...
	You know, civil litigation, dozens and dozens of depositions, but ours are not video recorded.
	They're audio recorded, but you never produce the audio unless there's a disagreement on what was said.
	You produce a transcript.
	And when I first started doing these vlogs, breaking down depositions, I was like, holy cows, why in the States?
	I don't think they do it elsewhere in Canada.
	Do they video record depositions?
	But you're 1000% right.
	Imagine reading a deposition.
	It's like reading a Twitter feed.
	You don't know how to interpret some of the things that are said, but when you see them said, and when you see the visuals, when you see the demeanor, it gives you such a different perspective of the deposition that I think, to some extent, recording them, people tend to act a little more, but recording them, people tend to not be able to hide as much.
	And now, with that said, ask about Russell Greer, and that got a lot of...
	I don't know who Russell Greer is or what that means.
	I'll tell you about it in one second.
	I want to finish this deposition point.
	You brought up this thing that's right.
	When you read it on paper, it reads one way.
	When you see what someone says, it reads completely opposite.
	We saw that with Michael Flynn, right?
	Just this past weekend, the whole Myanmar.
	A coup thing, where if you read what's written on the page, he's calling for a coup.
	When you listen to what he says and how he says it, there's some ambiguity there on, is he calling for a coup or is he saying no coup is necessary?
	And people, when they hear it, they get to make up their own mind.
	When you read it, you're going to have a particular thing.
	What they tried to do after that deposition was submit a copy of Vic's deposition in court with about 60% of it redacted out.
	By transcript only.
	And all of the transcript stuff had all of the negative stuff about him in it, and nothing of the positive, nothing about his career, nothing about how he influences these anime fans or anything like that.
	It was only negative stuff, and that's what they wanted to come out in the record, and that's why they were so mad that I released the depositions.
	And of course, that was very intentional.
	Let's get the truth out.
	Let's do it.
	But Russell Greer is a special gem of a man.
	And your polite sensibilities may encourage you to not engage in discussion about Russell Greer because he has something called Mobius Syndrome, which is his lips do not close and his eyes do not turn.
	This is not...
	Why people make fun of Russell Greer.
	But Russ uses it as a shield for himself.
	People make fun of Russell Greer because he's a terrible, terrible human being.
	But incidentally, this terrible human being is a paralegal from Utah and he has sued Taylor Swift I think five times now.
	He's sued Ariana Grande, Katy Perry.
	He has sued a random stripper.
	He actually threatened to sue the Bunny Ranch.
	If you guys are familiar with the Bunny Ranch out in Las Vegas, he went to the Bunny Ranch and instead of doing what you do at the Bunny Ranch, he decided he wanted to take the girl to Olive Garden.
	So they went to Olive Garden first and they ate and had a conversation, I guess.
	And by the time they got back to the Bunny Ranch, his hours that he had purchased were gone, were used up.
	And so then he...
	He threatened to go after the Bunny Ranch for failure to deliver on the goods.
	But he's a magical human being.
	And his settlement offer to Taylor Swift's lawyer was he would drop the case if she would just have dinner with him.
	But it was not a date.
	It's very, very important.
	How did you come across this guy?
	So, in covering the Dick Show, I became friends with a bunch of other, you know, internet people.
	One of them is this guy, Asterios Kokonos, who's a jolly comedian, a jolly Greek comedian.
	But his girlfriend is this girl named Sriracha, and she's also a comedian.
	And she told me about Russell Greer.
	She learned about him through Kiwi Farms.
	Which is a website of notorious villainy.
	But Kiwi Farms has had their eyes on Russell Greer for a very long time.
	Because his antics are amazing.
	He also has an America's Got Talent audition that he did, which is beautiful.
	The reason he's suing Taylor Swift, this is important.
	He sent her a song that he wrote and he had someone else perform.
	It was called I Get You, Taylor Swift.
	It's about a...
	A minute and a half song.
	And it's basically a bunch of the titles of her songs organized into some sort of a story arc.
	And he composed the music himself.
	It took him two years of banging out this music.
	And he hired a guy to record it and he sent it to Taylor Swift.
	Her agents, specifically.
	And they sent back pretty reasonably, Ms. Swift cannot accept any submissions of music.
	She will not see it.
	She never can because of obvious intellectual property issues.
	As it is, it's already going to be the basis for an accusation of copyright theft.
	No, no.
	He genuinely did not want her to perform the piece or anything like that.
	It was literally a gift.
	And I believe him 100% on this.
	But he sent her this gift of music.
	Her agent said they can't do it.
	So he sued her on the basis of an implied duty.
	of celebrities who make a habit of acknowledging gifts or recognition of fans to either acknowledge the recognition of a gift of every fan that sends them one or provide a mandatory disclaimer on every acknowledgement that they do that says they will not acknowledge every single gift that they may receive.
	So he was suing Taylor Swift for not acknowledging his gift, like by putting it on Instagram or something like that.
	Because, you know, like some cancer kid sends her a card or whatever and she'll put it on Instagram and be like, oh, this is so great to receive.
	And she might even show up to the hospital and pay them a visit because that's kind of what Taylor Swift does.
	And he wanted that so desperately that he sued her for it.
	In terms of Vic's case, you were ahead of the curve in terms of fighting back on cancel culture and the rest.
	Vic's career, just by fighting back in the court of public opinion through the legal system, he was able to restore and maintain his economic abilities to make a living when he otherwise would have been wiped out.
	Was it following politics?
	Was it following culture?
	I mean, you're into gaming and a wide range of subject matters.
	Why were you ahead of the curve at understanding the dangers and the intentions of cancel culture and the necessity of fighting back legally, regardless of whether the lawsuit won in the court of law?
	What mattered was just using it to fight back in the court of public opinion.
	So I started off, the Dick and Maddox case was, in a lot of ways, a cancel culture case, just coming from an unconventional approach.
	And as you start covering those and you start seeing people get removed from culture, especially people that you like and you go, oh man, that's a shame.
	And you only ever get one side of the story.
	You know, it was kind of on my radar.
	And then I started covering this thing called Comicsgate, which I was not a part of Gamergate.
	I was barely on the internet then.
	I think Gamergate happened primarily while I was in law school and I was just really busy.
	But Gamergate got a couple other gates.
	Comicsgate is one of them.
	And that was where a bunch of comic book customers got tired of how the comic book industries, the big two, right, were going Marvel and DC.
	And we've seen nothing but that accelerating as you go.
	Well, there are some people in those companies who came out as supporting Trump in 2016, and they were, you're gone.
	You're done.
	And literally, you support Donald Trump.
	You can't write for DC.
	Get out situations.
	And so seeing that, talking to these people, one of them is my friend, Ethan VanSkyver, and then another friend of mine, Doug Tenapel, who is in more of the animation-type industry and Hollywood side, getting the same thing because of his Christian beliefs, just getting canceled over and over and over.
	The question that I kept seeing come up...
	In my discussions with people, in comment sections, was when is someone going to fight back against this?
	And then with Vic's case, someone says, hey, have you heard of this guy, Vic Mignogna?
	I said, never heard of him in my life.
	And then I look him up.
	He's the guy who voiced Broly.
	I'm like, oh, I like Broly.
	That's a fun character.
	But still, didn't really know anything about him.
	Started covering his case.
	And heard that he was thinking about suing.
	And I said, okay, well, we got to do this.
	We got to cover this case and talk about it.
	So I had a panel discussion with some people.
	He apparently watched it or saw clips of it or something, reached out to me about it and basically said, I'm looking for a lawyer to do this.
	So I referred him to a lawyer in Texas to do it.
	And that was that.
	I started the GoFundMe because people asked how to do it.
	But the real fuel for the fire was so many people seeing someone they absolutely loved.
	And whatever anybody thinks about Vic, I'm not here to be an advocate for him personally.
	I think he's great.
	He's a nice guy and stuff like that.
	But whatever you think about him, undoubtedly his connection with his audience, especially at conventions, it's something...
	I've been to a couple of conventions now where he's there and no one else does it like him.
	To put it in comparison, when I went to Bubba Fest in Knoxville, Tennessee.
	What is Bubba Fest for those who don't know?
	It was a convention of Southern heritage, I guess.
	So Vic Mignogna is there.
	Dog the Bounty Hunter is there.
	Chuck Norris is there.
	And all three of their lines are comparable.
	The only difference being Chuck Norris and Dog the Bounty Hunter were not there as long.
	So over time, Vic probably had more people visit him than Chuck Norris or Dog the Bounty Hunter.
	You also had Nikolai Kostu-Walder, Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones.
	He was there, not even close to the line.
	Kane Hodder, not even close to the line.
	Cary, the Japanese guy.
	I can't remember his name.
	Anyway, basically lots of people there.
	Vic's line is comparable to Chuck Norris and Dog the Bounty Hunter.
	Nobody else's lines even come close.
	And the way Vic interacts with people is so much different than all of them.
	He's very much interactive.
	So you see how much he puts into his fans and how much they love it.
	And they keep coming back.
	That's right.
	He just did a signing in San Antonio.
	Had 800 people show up to a comic store.
	In San Antonio to visit him.
	And it's like, whatever you think of him, seeing all that love that people have for him was the catalyst for this has to stop.
	This has to stop.
	Give me some proof.
	Show me some reason why everything I know about this guy is good, why he's bad.
	And they never got it.
	And they just wanted someone to fight.
	As you bridged into political commentary, what was your thought process about the risks of it, the rewards of it?
	Because basically, it's a quick and easy way to get cancelled.
	In that same vein, what technological means are you using to try to prevent or preclude the potential effects, deletrious effects of cancelled culture and big tech?
	Well, cancel culture for me, I guess I should point this out too.
	It kind of hit home because one of my best friends who's on my show all the time is this guy named Drexel.
	Big 6 '6 black guy.
	We've been friends since junior high.
	And there was a Halloween party at my house with like six people.
	And I dressed up as Drexel for Halloween.
	So I have a picture.
	What year was this in?
	2005, I think.
	Something like that.
	Which didn't even occur to me at the time that this would be a bad thing because I'm dressed up as my friend.
	There was no political message or even race message beside it.
	I did cheap Halloween costumes every year.
	Like one year I went as Britney Spears.
	It cost $4.
	My Drexel costume cost like $4 or $5.
	It was just a joke.
	So he came over.
	And I came downstairs dressed as him.
	I was even wearing like his headband and his cheerleading outfit and all of that stuff.
	It was just a funny joke.
	Well, that picture exists.
	So cancel culture, every time someone finds my channel, like I cover a new big topic and a group of people hate it, all of a sudden it's like the blackface lawyer.
	It's like, it wasn't really blackface.
	I mean, no, go ahead.
	This is what people do.
	I pulled up the wrong comment.
	This is what people don't understand.
	People make fun of our Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for having done the brown face, the Aladdin, the black face.
	People make fun of him not because they genuinely believe that there's something wrong with it.
	It's because they're just pointing out that by his own standards of purporting to believe there's something genuinely racist about having done it, that is the standard he has to apply to himself.
	Whereas other people, the kid who dressed up like Mo Salam, the soccer player, there's no one...
	Who's actually using the right side of their brain, as in the correct side of their brain, the honest side of their brain, who's going to truly believe that that's racism and that anything in that indicates racism.
	That is a kid who wants to look like their superhero.
	And there's only one way to look like Doc McStuffins if you're a little blonde girl with white skin.
	There's only one way to do it.
	You're not doing it with any malice.
	You're actually doing it with total admiration.
	So people don't actually believe the standard.
	But when you have people saying, So someone holding you to that standard saying, oh, it's the blackface lawyer.
	The hypocrisy is not that you did it.
	The hypocrisy is that people who purport that that means something themselves did it and should be held to that standard, not people who don't think it means that in the first place.
	So, bottom line, you can never become president because that photograph will circulate.
	Someone's going to hold it against you and it'll be the cancelable item.
	So, yeah, and because of that, I wasn't too worried about...
	Drifting into talking about politics because there's already sufficient cancellation for me.
	As long as I toe the line appropriately on YouTube, that's where it'll be.
	But I realized how people react to this stuff.
	And also, how little practical effect it has at some level.
	I mean, you're right.
	Like, I can't run for the House.
	I can't run for a judgeship.
	It'll never happen.
	Even though it is completely harmless and innocuous, it doesn't matter because it'll be used out of its context.
	And there is no explanation.
	The only thing you could do, and I learned this from Trump, is don't apologize for it.
	Never do it.
	Because I wasn't sorry for doing it.
	And I still am not.
	Would I do it again, knowing what I know?
	Probably not.
	But it's not because I'm sorry.
	It's just because of the fallout that it caused was ridiculous.
	But with that, talking about politics, I just think it's important to have people out there with as much honesty and integrity and transparency about themselves as possible, talking about these issues and just giving people a place to either agree, disagree, or at least say, you know what?
	I don't know if this guy's right or wrong, but I like thinking about these subjects and also feeling safe to do so.
	But if we all cower behind cancel culture, if we all worry too much about just talking about these issues, then they win entirely.
	And whoever they is, they've silenced us.
	And I don't think that's appropriate either.
	So it's kind of a mixed bag of reasons.
	Oh, and the other one is money.
	It pays good to talk about politics because it's something people are always interested in.
	They always click on it.
	There's a lot of content I prefer to cover other than political stuff, but political stuff always gets people's attention.
	Now, in terms of sort of the technological means, I mean, you've been branching out, not only, you know, Odyssey, Locals, other places.
	Why did you pick the particular platforms you did to create sort of backups and strategically and tactically deal with the big tech manipulation that's monopolistic algorithms that are designed to suppress and censor dissident speech and the like?
	Yeah, well, I've been on Patreon forever because it was just the place that you went to.
	And then after the Sargon incident and after seeing some other prominent cancellations from Patreon, I just decided I'm not a huge fan of them.
	I don't hate them.
	But I was also pretty successful.
	At my peak, I had about $2,400 a month on Patreon, which I think puts me in the list of the top 1,000 people or something like that at the time.
	I never have spoken to anybody at Patreon about anything.
	And then along comes this site called Locals, and they have someone reach out to me and say, hey, what's up?
	And so I start talking to them.
	They seem like a company that values free speech.
	They've set up a system that's relatively insulated.
	And they say, hey, come over here.
	Foster and build a community with us.
	And really, the main reason I pick Locals is because of how much they have personally advocated to me and shown interest in me and my brand.
	I guess my brand is such a pretentious thing to say, but it's true.
	It's just that aspect of it is the reason I pick Locals.
	And their basic freedom of speech stance is there.
	Odyssey is a similar type thing.
	Also, Odyssey is very, very functional.
	You set up your account to link your YouTube stuff and it just grabs it within like five minutes of uploading a video.
	It's on Odyssey.
	And people over there kind of...
	They kind of like the content that I do, I guess.
	So that's been growing.
	But Odyssey, I'm looking to do more over there because of their overt sort of free speech sort of stance on things.
	But I find it ridiculous that as lawyers, for example, would you be comfortable covering Brandenburg versus Ohio on YouTube?
	I've never been comfortable talking about it because the language in Brandenburg is extremely acidic.
	I'll show my ignorance.
	What's Brandenburg versus Ohio?
	It's a landmark case that basically determines the extent to which incitement is constitutionally protected.
	Then I do know what it is.
	That was targeting a specific group for a specific act, and they said it wasn't specific enough, or it wasn't...
	What did they say with the word?
	I think I know the concept was that it has to be a true threat type thing?
	True threat and imminent.
	And so basically you have a KKK member advocating for violence against African Americans generally, but not specifically against any particular people.
	And they're at a rally.
	There's not really anybody there for them to target.
	And so they said, even though this person is out there calling for violence, calling for death, he wasn't doing so with the purpose of inciting the crowd.
	And Brandenburg...
	It plays a big role in Trump's defense of January 6th on a legal level for those same reasons.
	It's an amazing thing from a Canadian perspective.
	I know Brandenburg in principle and what was said.
	The idea in Canada, not a chance in hell that would ever pass any sort of a test in front of the courts.
	It would be hate speech, it would be true threats, whatever, by Canadian standards.
	And I think a lot of Canadians would have a great deal of problems accepting that as...
	You know, case law that we would live by.
	But the flip side is, I say that with a but, eventually you just see where that slippery slope gets to where we're now in Canada and stand-up comics can't make fun of children that happen to be handicapped even though they're celebrities and even though it's in the context of an actual stand-up bit.
	So you see it's one extreme or the other.
	The only question is, do you want to live with the extreme freedom of speech or do you want to live where...
	You can't even say certain things, even if they are factually true, because they can be hurtful, which is, you know, some principles set out in Canada.
	That's fascinating.
	And what was I going to say?
	Hold on, I want to bring this one up.
	Dragon's treasure.
	The only way to stop cancer culture types is to start actively going after them.
	I presume you mean passively, but in a discourse sense.
	Passivity has only made things worse.
	Well, to quote Gadsad, and Robert has been...
	Rightfully badgering me to get that highlight out.
	Unleash your inner honey badger and don't let everyone else shoulder the burden of engaging in the act of discourse to combat this.
	I think you engage with it in discourse and no other means, but I'm not innocent of anything.
	I, for the longest time, never even wanted to discuss racial issues on YouTube because everyone is just looking for a sound clip to take out a context to hold against you.
	But at some point, you just get fed up self-censoring.
	You get fed up not saying what you think.
	And I think the more of us that do it, courage is contagious.
	Yeah, I agree.
	And that's been...
	Going back to the Vic thing, that's why it was such an effective catalyst is here's someone standing up through the proper channels and at least getting their story out there, whereas normally you don't because they isolate one person, they swarm around them, and then they destroy, destroy, destroy until they're gone.
	And then once they're gone, they move on to the next person and everybody's walking on eggshells trying not to be that next person.
	And you can't really blame people generally.
	They just want to go to work.
	They want to go to work.
	They want to do their thing.
	They want to go home, enjoy their families or whatever their hobbies are.
	And that's how most people want to go through life.
	But the Twitter mob has upset that sort of desire.
	And so having more and more people out there talking about it, talking about...
	And just being normal.
	Like reminding us all that...
	Off YouTube, we have these conversations and there's not a problem there.
	No one walks away thinking you hate everybody just because you talked about a subject.
	Only on Twitter does that ever happen.
	And so having more people get out and talk normally.
	Sorry.
	Nobody thinks that if you indicate that you've won three episodes of Jeopardy that you're actually flashing a Yahtzee symbol.
	Nobody thinks that in real life.
	Exactly.
	Catch a still frame.
	I know how many times I...
	I have my hands in that gesture.
	Catch it on social media and you can get a swarm of people who represent 1% of the population at best who act like they control society.
	Yeah, we've forgotten what actual human discourse was like.
	So maybe we'll all bring it back a little bit.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	That's the big thing.
	And we need as many people.
	It sounds so annoying.
	It's not a call to action or anything like that.
	It's like, I need you.
	No, it's just in general.
	The more we talk about it, the more other people will talk about it, and the more insulated we become, where we get to the point where we go, okay, people have words and they have opinions.
	Let's start worrying about the guy who actually goes out and murders someone.
	Let's start worrying about the guy who actually goes out and commits a race-motivated crime.
	Let's worry about the guy who actually assaults a woman.
	Let's do that rather than looking for An excuse in wording to take out our personal grievances on someone.
	Now, a lot of the point and purpose of cancel culture is to effectively gatekeep people from certain voices and information, as well as punishing people with dissident ideas to discourage and deter the expression of those in other contexts.
	What are your sources of information?
	How do you go about getting and keeping and staying outside of that gatekeeper role to bring that information to your audience?
	For me, well, usually the way I'm doing things is I'm giving you my opinion or take on what's going on.
	And so if I'm bringing you an article from CNN or whatever, I generally have picked that article for a reason.
	I want to talk about some way that they're framing things and give either an alternate or an agreeing viewpoint with how they're framing it.
	I think, really, the sources of how we should interact politically, we'll say this, how we should interact politically, the source should be internal.
	Politics is inherently individual.
	And so we don't need to...
	Be fed opinions.
	But that's what the media wants to do is feed people opinions.
	So we should be drawing that out of ourselves based on our experiences, our skepticisms, and then drawing conclusions and sharing them.
	And then other people are free to take them or leave them.
	So on the political subjects, you know, they're coming from me.
	This is my thoughts on the issue and people are free to agree or disagree.
	And I get plenty of both, which is great because sometimes those disagreements change my mind or at least change my perspective.
	As far as the other stuff, where you go to get information, I try and go...
	To the source as much as possible.
	And that's one thing social media has actually allowed us to really do.
	I mean, getting to the source of Vic himself, for example, was a product of doing a video on YouTube, having him, you know, and then utilizing email.
	To open up a dialogue with someone I never would have otherwise talked to.
	Before my Twitter account was nuked the first time, I had conversations with some very interesting, prominent actors and stuff like that who are experiencing some cancel culture stuff.
	And unfortunately, that contact was severed, which is why, again, another reason cancel culture can be so effective.
	Just having my Twitter account deleted.
	Remove that message link that we had.
	But there were some people I was...
	What's his name?
	Chachi, right?
	Scott Baio.
	I was talking to him about coming on the show and talking about his experiences with cancel culture and stuff like that.
	That connection was severed, unfortunately.
	But it's the power of social media to go direct to the source and say, hey...
	Talk to me about this.
	What do we got?
	What's going on here?
	That's what I try and do, is get to that as much as possible.
	But it can be difficult because the way cancel culture works, there's a legion of lawyers right now who, if I try and reach out to someone, they will go and badger them.
	And it's baffling to me that those people exist and purport to be lawyers.
	It's like, wait.
	Why are we engaged in this practice?
	We should be wanting people to have conversations.
	I'm just thoroughly convinced everyone supports it until they realize that they could be the next object of it.
	And then when they're the next object, then they realize, but then it's too late.
	And it's this vicious circle that unless you have the foresight to feel and understand what it will feel like when it happens to you and appreciate that it could happen to you just as easily as it happened to the person in front of you.
	I mean, that's the foresight and the empathy that you need.
	And just a lot of people don't appreciate it because they think if you are just holy, if you just go out and just do everything right, they will never turn on you.
	And we've seen it time and time again.
	I mean, and that's it.
	Just people have to learn through their own mistakes, but they learn through their own mistakes faster than they learn through the mistakes of others.
	Yep.
	Now, go for it, Robert.
	Have you always been a Scotch fan?
	No.
	It was a mid-30s hobby.
	I was not a big drinker ever in my life.
	I didn't even really drink outside of a few isolated incidents until I was basically 30, 33, 34 years old.
	I was not a whiskey drinker at all, but I decided that as a man, it was my duty to drink whiskey.
	And so I started out and I got hooked on one of the manlier whiskeys, Lagavulin 16, which I'm a huge fan of.
	And then I decided, you know what?
	The couple different whiskeys I've tried all are so vastly different.
	I should try as many as possible.
	So now that's what I do.
	I go to the store and I try and buy something new every time and just give it a shot.
	Any particular interesting ones, like, well, where would you rank them?
	I mean, well, I guess, what is your favorite Scotch that you've ever had?
	And then where would you rank, like, because you have Japanese, you have such a wide range these days.
	Where would you rank some of the more interesting Scotches that you've had the chance to taste?
	My, let's see, the best Scotch, my favorite Scotch I've ever had was a 25-year Dalwini.
	I have the box of it.
	Right there.
	I bought it as a celebration for my wife's birthday on the show.
	So it was one of the first things I bought for the show was this $550 bottle of whiskey, but it's really good.
	Dalwini is exceptionally smooth.
	That one has a little bit of a smoke to it, which is weird for Dalwini, but I loved it.
	That still, I think, holds my top place.
	But these days, I'm really getting into rye whiskeys.
	And that's kind of taking over my favorite spot.
	I think I go rye, scotch, bourbon.
	And then I like Japanese whiskeys.
	They're really hard to come by in my town.
	That's the downside of the small town.
	And then below Japanese, I'm not a big fan of like a...
	Just a regular sour mash American whiskey.
	I prefer a bourbon or a rye, personally.
	But I like all of them, except, you know, I'm not a big fan of Jack Daniels, generally.
	But the worst one I've had is Merica Bourbon, which I thought would be great, because it's Merica.
	I'm like, this is very, this is perfect.
	And it is garbage.
	Absolutely terrible.
	But yeah, so that Dahl Winnie is my favorite.
	My go-to daily whiskey, if I had one, that I was going to, like, you can only have this whiskey every day, would be Lagabool and 16-year.
	It's a good, solid, very balanced, smoky whiskey.
	Do you still have those Ricceta Law glasses?
	Yeah, I do.
	I have one.
	It's dirty, but I have a Ricceta Law Glencairn glass right here.
	Oh, that's a good one.
	That's a good one to have.
	Yeah, and I have a couple other tumblers.
	I was just going to say, what do they call it?
	The crafts market for gin is what's really exploded now, at least in Canada.
	There's only so many scotches that exist, and there's very few new ones that are coming up, at least from what I can tell.
	Now it's the gin market and the crafts gin.
	There's a new gin out there every day, and that's the place where I've been exploring.
	But Nick, I want to read some Super Chats before I forget because I said I would get to them.
	We got Vienna Waitsu4u says, ask Nick how to make a Subway sandwich with a U-cut.
	And I don't know if that's a bad thing.
	We got Com1Cbook says, Nick, what are your thoughts on Poulter versus Van Shiver?
	Mark Dutch to Barnes.
	Thanks for representing Everlord Josh Null.
	I know of no greater radical free speech activist.
	Ask Nick about his love of Australian culture and I gotta pause on that.
	What is the meme about Australia and you denying its existence?
	One, Australia can't exist.
	It's too funny to think of a...
	It's an entire continent of deadly things.
	And they sent a bunch of criminals there, allegedly.
	And the criminals created this civilization, lost two wars to flightless birds, but also breed some of the most beautiful women on the planet.
	And again, I must remind you that literally everything can kill you.
	It's also on the bottom of the disc.
	So we know it can't exist.
	Australia's fake.
	So that's that.
	That's not a meme, that's just reality.
	Subway sandwiches.
	Okay.
	I don't know how old either of you gentlemen are, but I assume you're at least around my age.
	Do you guys remember when you'd go to Subway and they would cut the U shape out of the top of the bread?
	100%.
	That was a better cut.
	It was a better Subway sandwich with a U gouge.
	I will die on this hill.
	And I hate every time I go in there and they cut down the side and open it up because you take a bite of your sandwich and the meat comes out the front.
	It's embarrassing.
	So I don't eat sandwiches like tacos.
	And if you're going to have a long hoagie style, you've got to cut out the top and put the fillings in the boat and then put the top back on.
	And they stopped putting mayonnaise on the bread.
	They put all the toppings on both sides of the bread and then they put the mayonnaise in the middle of the toppings.
	Nobody does that at home.
	You put it on the bread.
	Who else out there might have noticed that they put six of everything?
	They put six slices of meat if you get the 12-inch, six cucumbers, six tomatoes, and maybe four slices of cheese.
	I don't think they gave six slices of cheese.
	You'd get lucky if you get six slices of cheese.
	Four cheeses.
	Yep.
	Okay, well, there's some interesting random observations.
	I haven't eaten at Subway in probably a decade because bread goes straight to my hips.
	Okay, here's a good question.
	Ovid, I said I would get back to this one.
	Gentlemen.
	I am newly engaged in my mid-20s.
	What advice do you have for building a happy married life?
	Also, what can we do in the next two years to prepare for my fiancé going to law school?
	My only advice is don't get married.
	It's expensive.
	But I'll let them answer.
	Outside of that particular opinion, which my friend Drexel says the same thing, I would suggest you go into it knowing that marriage is a choice that you will make every single day when you wake up.
	Because there will be times when you will be very, very upset with your spouse.
	There will be times where you guys feel distant or whatever.
	And the one thing both of you need to do is choose every day to remember the choice you made and make it again.
	And that is one step.
	As long as you're conscious and intentional about it, I think you will be well on your road to happiness.
	And my analogy is always, I analogize it to a business relationship.
	Where in business, people tend to fight over money and sex, and it's not much different than in a marriage.
	The only issue is businesses fall apart when people no longer trust each other, when they no longer communicate with one another, which invariably leads to each party thinking that they're doing more work and that they're not being appreciated by the other.
	And that's how marriages fall apart.
	In a way, if you treat them like a business relationship, just in the way you deal with people, trust, communication, and openness.
	It'll be a successful marriage.
	The only difference between marriage and business is not enough sex in a marriage causes problems, whereas too much sex in a business relationship causes problems.
	The inverse applies.
	But communication and everything, and just appreciating and recognizing the hard work that everyone else is putting into the business leads to good business relationships and good marriage, in my humble opinion.
	Now, Nick, how'd you get the nickname Rackets?
	How did that come from?
	Well, covering the Dick Masterson case, Dick and I are friends.
	And he could never remember how to say Rakeda while he was talking on his podcast.
	So he eventually just resorted to calling me Nikki Rackets.
	Since at the time, a large portion of my fan base was overlapped with Dick's audience.
	You know, it just kind of stuck from them.
	They would call me Rackets in the chat.
	And then as, you know, people came in and joined the show, it just kind of goes with that.
	So that's why I'm Nikki Rackets.
	No other reason.
	Amazing.
	Let's see.
	If anyone else has any chats, we're at the two-hour mark, and that's typically Nick.
	I can't do the marathons.
	I hear people screaming upstairs.
	If anybody's got any questions, get them in the chat.
	Nick, actually, one question that I think we touched on, but your relationship with YouTube and what you see on the platform, what's your impression?
	How do you see that relationship going, and what's the plan for the future?
	YouTube is a weird animal.
	Because they have a lot of verticality but stratification in their backroom operations.
	This is what I've learned.
	For those that don't know, I have a YouTube partner.
	I have a partner manager, which is very rare for a channel my size, but I got one.
	And in discussions with them about how YouTube works, I've learned a couple different really interesting things that people may not realize.
	Community guidelines and monetization are actually not combined.
	So a lot of people think if you flag a video a whole lot for community guidelines stuff that it will impact monetization.
	It actually intentionally doesn't.
	And I will give YouTube maybe more credit than we want to on the outset.
	A lot of YouTube's choices for a lot of channels are actually rather mundane and disconnected.
	Ultimately, at the end of the day, YouTube exists to serve ads.
	And once we remember that that's how YouTube exists, it makes things a little bit less nefarious.
	Now, I will say that there is definitely an organizational structure within YouTube that has the Gestapo control over what we put out there.
	And they do.
	And I am fully convinced that there are tweaks to the algorithm for distribution that favor or disfavor individual people or individual subjects.
	Absolutely.
	But by and large, I think most of us go for the majority of the time we're on YouTube unaffected by those things, which is testament to how guys like us stay on the platform, really.
	And I have found that the individual people that you work with, just like in any organization, the individual people you talk to tend to be very down to earth and actually...
	Even when they have vastly different politics from you, they tend to not bother them because they're working with creators on all sides of the political spectrum.
	So one of my YouTube creators, I thought he was really mad at me for a while because he didn't talk to me for like a month.
	Turns out he was on vacation.
	But I had an issue I needed help with, and so I was emailing him.
	I eventually looked him up, and I found his Twitter, and I went, oh, Jesus.
	I'm done.
	My life is over.
	Because he was way full-on BLM and stuff like that.
	But in all of our conversations, and we had a whole bunch of them, it was always very cordial, and he was always encouraging me on different things to do for the show, how to watch out and avoid community guidelines issues and stuff like that.
	Never once did he ever complain or even raise a lip at my comments, or the types of my content.
	I just think we have a tendency to make everything we talk about into a monolith.
	It's an easy way for our brains to operate.
	But I want to remind people that a lot of us get to say a lot of stuff on YouTube, and that's good.
	We should always advocate to say more.
	But I think we'll find that a lot of people behind the scenes at YouTube would like that too.
	I don't even remember the question, but it's kind of what I've learned.
	One from the chat says, Viva, ask Nick about New Project 2. It's a cancel culture by the credit card companies to shut down a Patreon competitor.
	I don't know anything about it.
	Yeah, Dick Masterson made New Project 2. It was when Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin came out and said they were going to make Patreon alternatives.
	Dick said, you guys will overthink it.
	I'll make one in a weekend.
	So he did.
	He made New Project 2 with WordPress and a credit card processor.
	It was viable.
	And then a bunch of people determined that apparently that was money laundering.
	So they told the credit card companies.
	They complained about it.
	And they complained about some of the people who were on the platform.
	And the credit card companies.
	This is the real thing with cancel culture in a lot of cases.
	And I think this is true with Patreon as well.
	I don't think it's the platform so much.
	It's the credit card companies.
	MasterCard told the bank.
	Shut him off.
	They put him on the match list for a completely indiscernible reason.
	I think it's rule 10, which is the most open-ended rule on the match list.
	And there's nothing you can do to get off of it outside of spending thousands and thousands of dollars on legal representation to send a bunch of letters.
	And that's about all the lawyer can do too.
	They're the...
	Cancel culture, at the end of the day, and this is the scariest one, comes from the people who give you access to the monetary system.
	If you imagine if MasterCard put Trump on the match list, it doesn't matter how many billions you have if you can't get those billions to someone else.
	And that's the real scary thing.

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