#333 - What Destroyed VICE Media: The Story They NEVER Told | Thomas Morton

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Thomas Morton is a writer, documentarian & former editor for VICE magazine who began working at Vice following a summer internship in 2004. After several years helping edit the print edition of the magazine, he became Vice.com's online editor. SPONSORS https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY for 20% off + free shipping. https://bruntworkwear.com/danny - Use code DANNY for $10 BRUNT. https://shopify.com/dannyjones - Sign up for your $1 per month trial & start selling today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://x.com/Babyballs69 FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Unsung heroes of Vice Media 05:44 - The mastermind behind Vice 14:53 - Morton's first day at Vice 21:42 - Vice's "immersionism" approach 32:18 - Beginning of Vice video 34:41 - The decline of clubs 42:16 - Joining Scientology 56:41 - What happened to Gavin McInnes? 01:01:58 - The trans agenda 01:11:51 - Independent media landscape 01:18:26 - The story of Noisey & Chiraq 01:22:04 - Women who marry death row inmates 01:39:50 - antisemitism & r@cism 01:46:22 - IQ is bullsh*t 01:52:54 - Thomas' view on media in 2025 01:59:05 - The internet killed democratization of media 02:00:54 - Open AI & Palantir defense contracts 02:05:59 - Thomas' war on the word 'Content' 02:10:46 - Shame over nostalgiac music 02:19:16 - Are we turning into China? 02:31:15 - Vice's trip to North Korea 02:38:23 - Morton's writing process & future plans 02:44:42 - Why they call Morton "baby balls" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:52Danny Jones?

  I'm happy to be able to finally have you on the show.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, sorry for dicking you around for like five years.

• 0:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  Geez, that's on me.

• 1:00Danny Jones?

  No, it's all good. You've been busy.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  No, no, I was the opposite of busy. I was just like scooting around, not doing much. Yeah.

• 1:07Danny Jones?

  And you just finished that amazing document. You just won an award for your documentary on Gavin.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  We got the Canadian Oscar, le prix accord.

• 1:13Danny Jones?

  The Canadian Oscar?

• 1:15Speaker 03

  So I'm told. Yeah. But I think it's also the Canadian Emmy. So one stop shop. Yeah. I didn't go to the ceremony. I don't think anybody on the crew expected to win. We were up against like, I think, a doc about a guy from Gaza, a doc about someone from the Ukraine. So...

• 1:32Danny Jones?

  So what made you want to make that documentary?

• 1:36Danny Jones?

  I remember, because we talked on the phone about a year ago when we spoke on the phone.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Did we?

• 1:39Danny Jones?

  And you mentioned that you were working on this. And then I'm happy to see that it finally came to fruition. But like, what lit the spark for you to work on, to create this thing?

• 1:50Speaker 03

  Well, um...

• 1:55Speaker 03

  A long editable, editable pause while I think about this for a second, how to say this. Um, I mean, there's a very honest answer in that it got greenlit, right? That it is an idea that had tossed out to a producer in Canada. A year, like 2020, I think, because it was a year before January 6th. And then it was sort of like, it was like, oh, it was kind of an interesting figure. I get it. It's sort of like, you know, niche American politics. And then by once January 6th happened, it was like, oh, everybody knows who these people are now. It's a more, it's a more bankable story, which makes it sound mercenary and gross. But that's sort of it in general.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  Um, like, you know, I was at Vice for 15 years and I've watched, I spent 15 years watching people from outside the company try to tell the story of Vice and just trip over their ass getting it wrong. You know, just doing a really bad job. And so I figure for 15 years worth of fun and a little bit of money, but not much. Um, you know, I, I kind of owe it to the good times to, um, you know, make a college effort at capturing the stories of that era and the people who were there. And Gavin was just, you know, first on the list.

• 3:11Danny Jones?

  Do you miss it?

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Vice ish, like, do you miss high school?

• 3:15Danny Jones?

  No.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Like, I had a great time.

• 3:16Danny Jones?

  I can hate it, high school.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Oh, you did? Okay. Did you miss, did you go to college?

• 3:19Danny Jones?

  Uh, for like six months and I dropped out.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Okay. So you probably didn't like that. I, I just like, I, I miss it in the sense that, you know, I had a good time being a teenager, I think fondly on that. Um, I don't need to do it again, although it isn't, you know, it doesn't exist in America right now. As a cult, like, there's no cultural equivalent to it that I could, you know, be covetous of joining. Um, I had a great time, right? So I, so I miss it in the sense that I'm nostalgic for it a little bit, but that's just, you know, sad old guy.

• 3:50Danny Jones?

  There's something about it, like when I first discovered it, it was when I told this to, I think I told this to Gavin or, or Hamilton, maybe, but the, when I, the first time I ever heard about it was when I was, uh, I was traveling, shooting surfing videos with my friend Jerry.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:04Danny Jones?

  Who introduced us.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Jerry Ricciardi?

• 4:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he really introduced us.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  Jerry Ricciardi.

• 4:07Danny Jones?

  Shout out to Jerry.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:09Danny Jones?

  And, um, I noticed some Vice videos and I noticed that like he was posting on his Instagram being in like in Antarctica and then like North Korea and I'm like what? What is he doing? He can't be doing surf videos in North Korea. And I followed the YouTube video and I found it all. I'm like, whoa, this is wild. All these things these guys are doing. And then, you know, the noisy thing happened, which was fricking amazing. And that was my, basically my introduction to Vice. And I thought it was so like, this is the opposite. What I thought was so cool about it was it's like the opposite of what all of the other media is doing. Right? Which I think is cool. And, you know, obviously eventually they just started parroting, being the same thing.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Now it's what everything does, right?

• 4:53Danny Jones?

  Maybe it was like everyone tried to be Vice and then Vice just kind of like, you know, kind of like faded away.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  There was, you interviewed Hamilton Morris, right?

• 5:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Who I used to live with him. Actually, I think, oh, there was a picture up of us, us living together as covered in the New York Times.

• 5:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  And he mentioned one of the like, there's many unsung figures in the Vice story, one of whom is Jesse Pearson, who was like the editor. He was the editor while Gavin was there in charge of that. When Gavin got pushed out, Jesse ended up taking over the magazine.

• 5:21Danny Jones?

  He was the guy that was like, I don't want to say anything mean about Gavin.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Jesse? Yeah, oh, in the doc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, he's, he's a bit of a old punk in an old crank, right?

• 5:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Comes through. But he started a magazine after he left Vice called Apology. And I used to be like, come on, like, that's a little bit, there's a touch of sanctimony there, right? But these days, watching all the shit that, you know.

• 5:48Danny Jones?

  Punk of him.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  It is in a way. It's very like American hardcore, you know, there's a.

• 5:54Danny Jones?

  Okay, yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  There's a purity to it, which he exemplifies and like I say that as someone who admires his sense of purity, even though it's pretty funny. Anyway, now I get it. Like watching everybody, watching what effect the format of the Vice videos had on how. General like video content to call it what it is versus documentaries like and just the explosion of a sort of hosted crap.

• 6:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  You know, I'm like, well.

• 6:29Danny Jones?

  And I always thought too, I always thought Shane was the mastermind behind everything because I I only learned about it until after Gavin left, right? So I was like, wow, like this guy, you know, and he did a really good job at sort of like parading himself as the mascot of Vice and like doing all these videos where he'd walk around the office drinking, but then wearing a jockstrap or whatever. And I was like, wow, this guy's a genius. And then, you know, I watched the, there was an interview with him and Spike Jones where they went and Spike Jones was interviewing him or whatever.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:57Danny Jones?

  And I was just like fascinated by the whole thing. And which was why, like, when I watched your documentary, I was like, holy shit, it all makes sense now.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Right, but we didn't like due to who we could get to talk on camera, how much time we had, you know, we're making this thing for Canadian TV and so what they wanted factored into it. We don't get to talk about the other two founders or talk to them.

• 7:21Danny Jones?

  They didn't agree to be on the show.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Nah, they didn't. Yeah, Shane Smith and Sarush Alvi. And it's like, there was no mastermind of Vice. It was a room full of geniuses who all either loved each other or eventually hated each other, given, you know, depending what time of day it was.

• 7:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Who would either all work in sync or against each other. It was wild, yeah.

• 7:39Danny Jones?

  But it seems like Gavin was the soul of Vice though, right?

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Ish, yeah, like.

• 7:44Danny Jones?

  He was like the, like the voice.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  He was the voice of Vice, right?

• 7:46Danny Jones?

  The original voice or sort of soul of it was really kind of him. He was the creative guy behind it, right? He was the idea guy.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  When, when it was getting big in New York, for sure.

• 7:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  He was the front man, right? Um, I'd argue Sarush was the soul of it for its first like five years in Montreal, based on everybody I've talked to, both on camera and off. Um, and neither of them, I don't think anybody gets to New York without Shane. Like, he gets dismissed as he was just the businessman, but it's like he turned it into what it was. There would be no Vice video shit without.

• 8:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  His efforts.

• 8:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  There's another guy, Eddie Moretti, who's completely written out of the story.

• 8:21Danny Jones?

  I remember that name.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Some people know, yeah.

• 8:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you need a good sales guy, right? Like Shane was a really good talker.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  It was a business, right? And Gavin puts himself out as a businessman, which he frankly is. Like a businessman about like eight times over, given all the, you know, jobs he's lost for himself and companies he's had to shutter. It's, I think Michael Moynihan talked about how it's admirable that he's stuck to it and that he can pull himself back out like time and time again. I agree, you know?

• 8:52Danny Jones?

  And Shane was like, I was saying, he is a really good salesman. Cause I remember watching videos of him when they launched the cable network. And I was like, at first, my first reaction was like, this is retarded. Why would they go make a cable channel? And then I listened to him talk about it for like 15 minutes. I'm like, I'm sold. It makes sense. It makes perfect sense. I'd buy it.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  I love that. That was another, Hamilton was like, that was a stupid business venture. I'm like, it was art, man. I was like, for love of the game, like a great American medium, like programming a television network. How could you say no?

• 9:24Danny Jones?

  Right. So, um, like the thing about Gavin is, which I think is really cool is that he, from my perspective at least, like take it for what it's worth, is that he kind of stuck to the game and stuck to his art and never changed his views on things. And he always wanted to be sort of a contrarian, sort of a over the top, get reactions out of people.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Provocateur.

• 9:53Danny Jones?

  Provocateur, that's the word I'm looking for. He was like a super creative provocateur, also strange fucking guy. Played, did these role playing things with people. He's treating the world like it's, like he's living in a simulation.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Or a cartoon.

• 10:05Danny Jones?

  Or a cartoon.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Which is how he starts, a cartoonist.

• 10:08Danny Jones?

  And I think it's pretty cool that he never fucking changed that to make more money. He just kind of said, this is who I am.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  But he made plenty of money too, just to, just to put that out there.

• 10:17Danny Jones?

  When he got kicked out?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  He was never lacking. Yeah, he left the company with something like thirteen million dollars. I had always heard, well, right, would you say a hundred?

• 10:24Danny Jones?

  I thought it was a hundred.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 10:26Danny Jones?

  I just, I don't know. I was just guessing.

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Well, the rumor when he got, uh, um, bought out was that it was something like one point three or one point two.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Which you gotta remember, he gets pushed out in two thousand and seven. And around that time, nobody there is making like, it was not, you know, one of the higher ups is making more than like forty thousand dollars, fifty a year or whatever. So one point three million was sort of like, it was like, oh, that's

• 10:49Danny Jones?

  I guess, yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  That's not horrible, but within two or three years, it's like, Jesus, he must be like, he really. You know, missed the boat on that. Anyway, he got offended when I brought up that rumor. Um, of all the things. After I did the interview and he texted, like, he repeatedly texted me about that. He's like, who said I only made one point three million dollars on that? And I was like, I don't remember. Like, I was like, that's just, maybe I got the figure bad. Like, that's just what I remember hearing.

• 11:15Danny Jones?

  Well, the company was valued at a couple hundred, at least a half a billion dollars back then, no? So if he was a third of it, I would imagine he would have get at least.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Oh, in two thousand and seven, I have no clue what it would have been valued at then. It would have been less, but. Anyway, he said, he said, try adding a one to that, so.

• 11:33Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 11:36Danny Jones?

  So, and, uh, what is like the current state of it all? Is, I mean, Shane, so it looks like it's just Shane's podcast now, right?

• 11:44Speaker 03

  I think that podcast is a separate venture. I'm, I'm not really sure. I don't, I, um, there's a VC firm in Nashville that I read. Bought it in receivership or whatever, like post. A year ago, it went bankrupt, right? They announced bankruptcy. And then it has been, you know, bought up and is being restored, I heard by someone in Nashville.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  I've, I've actually, they've been putting out a new magazine.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  That's kind of like, I think on a quarterly basis, I think it's subscriber only, like if you've seen like Cream Magazine or The Mountain Gazette. One of those places that, um, they make like a big format, kind of like Italian fashion mag style paper and it comes out, uh. Like once or twice a year and you just sign up for a subscription. They don't do newsstand or anything like that. Anyway, run by some people from, you know, not, not the old, old days, but from recent days advice, they've hit me up to try to write articles, but, um, but I'm lazy and I, and I, and as you know, I, I, I let things slip.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  So it's somewhere. It didn't die. Right. It never, it never gets, it never got the dramatic, romantic death it deserved.

• 12:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  It's just gonna kinda stumble along like Rolling Stone or spin or something.

• 13:04Danny Jones?

  Right. Well Gavin's happy now.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Weird parody of, say, that guy is either always happy or always miserable.

• 13:09Danny Jones?

  Well, he's happy about Vice being dead now.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's not. That's the problem.

• 13:13Danny Jones?

  Well, it's practically dead, right?

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Well, sure, but anything, you know.

• 13:16Danny Jones?

  It's not worth billions anymore.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Nothing that builds itself on being youth media is gonna outlive the generation of youth that

• 13:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  It was addressed to in the first place. It's a, you know, 30, you, yeah, this year would be, it's, sorry, can't do math, 30 year anniversary, like, in, you know, a 20 year old who read early issues in Montreal of it would be 55 right now. Like, how's that youth media, right?

• 13:45Danny Jones?

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• 14:22Danny Jones?

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• 15:04Danny Jones?

  two free products of your choice like mini body wash and deodorant wipes and free shipping. And as a special offer for our listeners, new customers can get 20% off site wide with our exclusive code. Use code DANNY at shopmando.com for 20% off site wide plus free shipping. That's S H O P M A N D O dot com and use the promo code D A N N Y. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Mando's got you covered with deodorant plus sweat control. Protect your pits and smell great doing it. So like what was like, how did you view like your first day advice? Maybe you can just explain for the, I think this would be a cool story for people to hear. Like, like, explain what it was like when you first went to go apply for a job to be an intern advice.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Well, my first day, we were moving from this tiny little office that was on the third floor of a building above a fashion brand called triple five soul. And then there was a Polish furniture warehouse and then there was us. And you went up a staircase and my first day, we were moving to a new office. So, and it was an internship. And so I was just like hustling boxes and um, I mean, funny day.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  I remember the very first thing I did was when, did you ever see Gavin's old column, The Tidbits? Mm-mm. It was like a parody of a like, you know, kinda like a gear guide from something like Maxim or something where they're like, here's the hot new whiskey, here's, you know, an $80,000 watch you should own. And in that, it was just like weird little objects, generally like foreign snack products, yeah, with funny names, like they've got like Harry Bo Creamy Dreams. I remember this one. It's something about, can you think of a more like? Is that a Hitler wine? Hitler, Hitler's Spirits. Schnapps Von Fur. I remember that one. Spider cock man. This would have been from the hate issue, I think. Yeah. So it was weird shit, right?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  And there was a, there was a closet at the office. The office was like one room, about the size of your studio, maybe, with about 25 people crammed into it, all making the magazine. Or half of them worked for like an ad agency. It was weird. And so first thing I did was go way back into this closet where all these old food wrappers were kept in boxes to go start taking them to where like a truck was gonna pick them up or whatever. And I picked up this big box and like as I was stepping out of the closet, just like a volcano of cockroaches like enveloped my arm. And I like ran out like, and I was

• 17:42Speaker 03

  like shaking them off me, like, like a, like a wet dog, like onto people in the office. That was within five minutes of my internship starting. It was like then, like then the very next thing I did was accidentally unplug like the router that everybody, because everybody was still kinda working, at which point it was just sort of like, guess we're not working anymore. Like, guess this is the move.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  And then, um, and I met, it was funny, I met Gavin that day because he had, he'd gone downstairs. We're on the third floor, right? And we have a window overlooking North Fourth Street on Williamsburg. And, um, he and Jesse had figured out, instead of taking garbage bags full of shit downstairs, down three flights of stairs, you could just throw it out the window, right? And that had led Gavin to run downstairs and dodge, like, he was trying to, um, shit, how do you describe this? Like in Braveheart, when he has the guy throw the rock at him? And like, he stands perfectly still.

• 18:43Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  How do you even say that? He's not trying to dodge them. He's trying to like, stand his ground.

• 18:47Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Jesse was trying to hit him with a garbage bag from three floors up. Anyway, and I had to go down and get him for something. And right then the mailman, uh, drove up and Gavin Siegheiled the mailman. And I'm like, it's like a funny.

• 18:59Danny Jones?

  I was meant to be here.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And then he taught me like an anti-Catholic, um, football chant to the tune of, she's coming around the mountain, but it was about Bobby Sands, the hunger striper, striker. But it's weird, it's funny. I, I, I've started, I, I wrote a book proposal to just be like, well, I remember memoir advice. And, um, and in writing that out, I was like, this sounds fake as hell. It's like this guy who ends up starting the Proud Boys, very first time I met him, he was Siegheiling, the UPS guy.

• 19:27Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  You know?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  But.

• 19:30Danny Jones?

  So I guess that,

• 19:31Speaker 03

  Funny joke.

• 19:32Danny Jones?

  That shows that he, he made me never change. He was, I was always, I was always part of his, uh, his character.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  It's certainly part of his character, yeah.

• 19:40Danny Jones?

  And that's also like, that's also like, the whole ethos of the British punk scene, right? Like, he always talks about-

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Nazi shit? Yeah.

• 19:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, basically.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Uh, to a degree, yeah.

• 19:52Danny Jones?

  Not like hardcore Nazi shit, being like a neo, kinda like-

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Although then it's like, you, you look at, you know, provocative punks and, um, like, uh, take, for example, Screwdriver, who start out as a, uh, you know, Rolling Stones cover band, basically, on a lot of speed, and end up being like, the poet laureates of the National Front.

• 20:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Actual avowed racist skinheads.

• 20:15Danny Jones?

  The most racist band.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Blood and honor.

• 20:18Danny Jones?

  Punk band, right. Which is still on Spotify, by the way. I looked it up the other day.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Oh, no, somebody sent that. Yeah, I've got a, I've got a friend who, he doesn't love Screwdriver because he's a racist asshole. We, we, we take an ironic sort of appreciation for Ian Stewart's fucked up voice.

• 20:32Danny Jones?

  Gavin was telling me he had a, um, a Screwdriver belt buckle.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Can I open this?

• 20:36Danny Jones?

  Of course, yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. He put, he put that in the tidbits. Yeah.

• 20:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And then, uh, that guy, that reminded me. I'm like, shit, I haven't heard of Screwdriver since high school. So I went on, on Spotify, see if it was still there.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  I was playing it for my girlfriend. She had never heard it before. And she's like, what the hell? This is like a racist Louis Armstrong? She's like, what's up with this guy's voice?

• 20:51Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, that shit was, there's a ton of stuff like that.

• 20:56Danny Jones?

  That was perfect.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Louis Armstrong's great.

• 20:58Danny Jones?

  That was great. That was amazing. Um, so, so after you started it, you didn't get any of these like, I mean, obviously, culture was different. It's good, right?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  It is good. Yeah.

• 21:07Danny Jones?

  Peach, peach flavor.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Peach.

• 21:09Danny Jones?

  Enjoy that. It'll, uh,

• 21:10Speaker 03

  I will.

• 21:11Danny Jones?

  Give you a nice little kick.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Jack me up. Yeah.

• 21:14Danny Jones?

  Um, but like, so obviously his persona didn't like, kind of throw you off back then, right? Like you didn't think like, oh, this guy's like, kind of weird. You seek hiring the mailman. Maybe he's like,

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Well, of course I thought he was weird for seek hiring the mailman. It was weird and funny. Yeah.

• 21:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Funny weird.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Right? Yeah. Um, part of the, part of the humor in it, I was explaining this to the, some French people recently. I was like, part of the humor, like what made that funny was the fact that it was like, oh, it's a bunch of like,

• 21:43Speaker 03

  gays and weirdos in Williamsburg in 2004. Like none of us, you're like, none of, you're not going to run into an actual neo-Nazi here. You know, that's clear as day.

• 21:52Danny Jones?

  But then like the way the culture's changed now, like the guy, he can't exist in a society like today, the way he was back then, right?

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Uh, he won't have the same type of fans and that's proven out, you know?

• 22:02Danny Jones?

  Be able to have, he won't be able to have a successful business, especially a media business that people take seriously.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  But he's also not in like the indie rock world at age 32 with a bunch of peers anymore either. And the internet changed everything too. I don't know. It's, yeah.

• 22:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Different times. I know different times is like an excuse, but sometimes an excuse is all you can make.

• 22:28Danny Jones?

  You guys created this term called immersionism, where you're like, oh, we're just gonna start immersing, immersing ourselves. How do you say the word? Immersing?

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Immersing.

• 22:37Danny Jones?

  Immersing. There we go.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Like in water. Yeah.

• 22:39Danny Jones?

  Immersing ourselves in these situations and in these different types of cultures around New York. And you went to like a, where was it? Like a Haitian, you went to like a Haitian house with a bunch of Haitians or something?

• 22:51Speaker 03

  No, I mean, years later, I took part in a voodoo ceremony out in like East New York with a bunch of Haitian immigrants. He's talking about the first article I wrote, like, under my own name, right? Which was with a Dominican family just up in Washington Heights. I just hung out in these people's house for three days and wrote about it.

• 23:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  That's how we, that's how we did things back then.

• 23:12Danny Jones?

  That's a good way to do stuff.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Oh, it's fun. Yeah. They were real nice. Yeah.

• 23:16Danny Jones?

  I think it's cool. I, I think it's like, with podcasting, with like the explosion of podcasting, which I think has reached a critical mass a while ago, probably, it's, you really kind of can appreciate the immersionism stuff.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  It's the best way to do anything, right?

• 23:33Danny Jones?

  Because with podcasting, it's just like, we're, we're just talking about things, right? You've been to these places, you've seen stuff, and, you know, I by no means am trying to say that that's the only way to do stuff and you can't talk about things.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  It's a good way to do stuff.

• 23:47Danny Jones?

  It's a great way to do stuff.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  You miss that, you know.

• 23:49Danny Jones?

  You missed, exactly. Like, it's easy, it's easy for the telephone game to, when you're doing podcasts and somebody's on, coming on a podcast and saying, oh, I read an article that somebody wrote based on a book that somebody wrote about an experience that they had when they were in Nazi Germany in the 40s or whatever.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:09Danny Jones?

  You know what I mean? Versus like, you specifically were the direct source, on the ground, experiencing shit, talking to people that were there, like, that's something you kind of lose with the whole podcasting phenomenon.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  And there's a lot of intangibles that really don't, that you have a difficult time properly communicating to someone who's never been.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  To a place that you've been or dealt with, the people that you've dealt, like just the smells in different places are a sense that you don't can communicate a lot of things can be, you know, it's the difference between knowledge and experience, really, and what, you know, Gavin mentioned that we were, you know, like, he coined the term immersionism to describe the way that Vice did stories, which was go to the place, hang out with the people, or get the people to write the thing. You know, one of Jesse's crowning moments was you did a, an Iraq issue that was 2007-ish, written 100% like, or mostly written cover to cover by Iraqis. Really? That like laid out, and they did the music reviews, you know, I forget if there

• 25:10Speaker 03

  was a fashion shoot in that or not, but anyway, anyway, I thought it was like, I was fucking proud to work on it, and it was a masterpiece of something. It was like, we've been at war with these goddamn people for four years, and it's like, this is the first time I'm reading. There was, there was an article at the beginning of it that's just like, here's what Baghdad looks like. Here's the shape. Here's a map of Baghdad. Here are the different neighborhoods. And I was just like, how, like, four years of war, and no, and this, and we are the first people to print the geography of like, the green zone and the different neighborhoods and shit of that nature? It's crazy. Wow. But, so that was set in opposition to what was called Google Journalism back then, which was, you know, the worst case scenario would be Jason Blair, you remember him at the New York Times? He was a reporter who kind of like, I think he was just having, having

• 25:55Speaker 03

  one, really, and he stopped going out on assignments, and he started just making up, like, details about it. He would, so he'd be like, reporting on a story, I think the one that got him in trouble was, he reported on something at a farm in Virginia, right? And he actually called the people and interviewed them on the phone, but he, when he wrote it up, he wrote up that he'd been there, and he wrote all these details about, you know, the way their barn was situated, or what they were wearing, or things like that. And somebody, some subject called, you know, whoever the person you call for that kind of crap is at the New York Times, the Ombudsman or something, and, and was like, hey, this guy never came to our house. Like, we talked to him on the phone, and we did some emails or whatever, and then it became a scandal because they looked back through his reporting

• 26:39Speaker 03

  for the last, the previous, I think, two or three years, and they were like, oh shit, this guy hasn't left his apartment. Jesus. For all of this. And then he wrote a book called Burning Down My Master's House, where he...

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Pretty, pretty flagrantly played the race card in excusing his own shitty journalism. Anyway, that was what Vice was trying to set ourselves at.

• 26:59Danny Jones?

  What race was he?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  He was black, but uh, this was what we were, you know, immersionism was set against. There was also Stephen Glass, there was a movie about him, he was doing it for the New Republic. No, these are all, okay, generation gap.

• 27:09Danny Jones?

  Tell me about him.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  He was made up, uh, forty-two.

• 27:13Danny Jones?

  Okay, you're only, uh, four years older than me.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  That's, that's, that's a full, um, you know, a full set of high school classes, though.

• 27:22Danny Jones?

  That's true.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  That's a proper, that's how the generation gaps in America work.

• 27:25Danny Jones?

  I had six years in high school, but.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  Oh, you start when you're in like seventh grade, or sorry?

• 27:29Danny Jones?

  Six of the best years of my life.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  Hey, there you go. Oh, I see, we're, we're, we're having, we're having fun. Okay, sorry. Whoosh. Um, Stephen Glass is just like, uh, he was a couple of years before Jason Blair. He wrote for the New Republic, he was like a hotshot young, uh, reporter. Uh, I think they're based out of DC, I forget. There's a movie about him called Breaking Glass, right? And he, it turned out he was just making, completely making shit up. Like, he wrote an article about a hackers convention that he got into, and there was like a sixteen-year-old hacker there who had been hired by somebody he had hacked. He'd hacked like a big computer firm, and so they were hiring him to do their security. And so this kid who was, you know.

• 28:13Danny Jones?

  After he hacked him?

• 28:14Speaker 03

  A famous hacker, which, like, this kind of shit did happen in the world that, you know, people who grew up hackers became security consultants, because they knew.

• 28:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the FBI hired him, too.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  And that, that kind of shit, yeah, no, there's a history of that. And, um, but he claimed he had gone to this hacker convention, he'd met this kid. This kid was getting now, you know, a six-figure salary at age sixteen from having committed crimes against this place, and so he was being celebrated by all the other hackers, and none of this shit existed, none of this shit was real. And then he tried to, he would cover his ass by, he, I think he had his cousin or his brother or something would answer the phone. He'd be like, oh, here are my notes, you know, here's the number if you need to corroborate any of this with, you know, whatever. Whoever I'm claiming I got quotes from or whatever and they would call the number and it would be his brother being like, "Yeah, that's what I said. I did that. He made some websites, you know, for like, it was, you know,

• 29:04Speaker 03

  the hacker kids, like, security company or whatever. So he's like, you can go check out their website. Like, it's totally up. And I think this is, I think he'd been doing this for years, but the story that got him was the hacker thing. Cause they went, they were like, this kid's hacker website, like, makes no sense. It looks like shit. It's like, it's like the kind of like HTML programming I would do, you know? It's like, this kid's a computer expert. Anyway, there was, you know, there was a rash of that shit happening in the 2000s. And, and those are the extreme examples. In general, Google Journalism was just, you know, lazy people who didn't leave their desks and would just be like, "Oh, I'll just get a quote from him, you know, over the phone."

• 29:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Which to me at least, but I think to us, like, people at Vice, it was like, why, you know, why bother? Like, that sounds like a shitty job.

• 29:51Danny Jones?

  It doesn't like a shitty job.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Part of the fun, like, the funnest part of writing an article is going out, meeting people and talking to people. Sitting at your desk is the worst part.

• 29:57Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Like...

• 29:59Danny Jones?

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• 30:43Danny Jones?

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• 31:24Danny Jones?

  Just head on over to bruntworkwear.com and use the code D A N N Y and you're good to go. After you order, they're gonna ask you where you heard about Brunt and please do us a favor and tell them we sent you. The link to Brunt is down below. Now, back to the show. At what point did you guys start bringing video cameras?

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Uh, when we started making video things. Oh, you know, there's a, wait, what?

• 31:47Danny Jones?

  Did, were there any video, did you guys, when you guys went to Iraq, did you bring any video cameras?

• 31:50Speaker 03

  For the Iraqi issue?

• 31:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  We didn't go to Iraq. We communicated with Iraqis and they wrote from Iraq.

• 31:56Danny Jones?

  Okay. Oh, I thought I might be mixing that up because I thought Shane did a video in Iraq.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Sarush did. Sarush and Eddie went to do, um, they made, they made a whole doc. It was called, uh, Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

• 32:06Danny Jones?

  Yes, that's what it was.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  With, uh, a Krasikouda, a band of Iraqis, you know, under Saddam, who came out, went to Turkey. I think half of them live in Canada now. I forget. It was a while ago. Good doc, though. Fucking amazing. Which was based on an article that Gideon Yago, who, again, this is gonna be, you're gonna be too young to know who he was. He was the, uh, he was the glasses wearing guy on MTV News.

• 32:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  Well, the girls liked, right? He, he wrote the first article that was just about, he's like, holy shit, there's this cool metal band in, uh, fucking Saddam's Iraq, you know? And I, like, I met them. They have a crazy practice space or whatever. They have to sing pro Saddam songs. It sucks.

• 32:47Danny Jones?

  They had to sing pro Saddam songs?

• 32:49Speaker 03

  There was, yeah, by law.

• 32:50Danny Jones?

  Did they ever do any songs in the palace?

• 32:52Speaker 03

  No, oh, no, no, no. They were, they were, they were an underground band, you know? They were punk. All right, well, they're metal, but.

• 32:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  They were an extreme metal band, right?

• 33:03Speaker 03

  Anyway, like, and then the story of doing like video things at Vice is supposedly promulgated by like Shane and Eddie. Where Eddie meets Spike Jones or on a call with Spike Jones, the, you know, the director, a guy made jackass. And he's like, I like your magazine a lot. I like these articles. Do you guys film your, you know, film your pieces? You guys, you know, just roll tape while you're reporting these things? And they're like, oh, of course we do. You know, and they were like, we should be doing that. And so that's what leads to, you know, making the online video stuff. Or before that, there was a DVD that was basically just like magazine articles shot on video with the people who would have written them. Yeah.

• 33:46Danny Jones?

  And so is that, so what year was that when Spike Jones started working for you guys?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  2006. I mean, working with, working with.

• 33:54Danny Jones?

  Was this post Gavin or pre Gavin or during?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Middle, middle of Gavin getting kicked out.

• 33:59Danny Jones?

  Ah.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a loose foggy history and none of the dates are solid, right?

• 34:05Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  People loved to ask, it was like, when did, you know, Gavin, I guess, but you know, he got properly bought out in 2007. But by 2006, there was already, you know, tension and shit like that.

• 34:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And then, um, at what point did you start Balls Deep?

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Um, 2006 or '07.

• 34:24Danny Jones?

  That was the same time.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  There was a web version. You're talking about like, you know, the,

• 34:30Speaker 03

  because obviously, once we had the television channel, I made like two seasons of the TV show Balls Deep. But, uh, that was back when we called the video stuff VBS. That was, um, that was the thing I worked on. I, uh, shot episodes with Leather Daddies in New York, a guy named Kristoff. I forget his last name. He was Mr. Leather 2005. Um, he took me around to like the Eagle and places like that. He let me sleep on his floor. Um, which is kind of how we operated back then. Hung out with like a, um, Chinese lady in like proper Chinatown, like down under the Manhattan Bridge. We were selling crabs together. I, uh, what were the other ones?

• 35:16Speaker 03

  I wasn't able to finish editing this because Gavin wrote some crazy fucking release for these guys, which I thought was how you did it. It was, I spent like two weeks, two, three weeks with a motorcycle club called the American Brotherhood 9/11 and they were a 9/11 memorial motorcycle club.

• 35:37Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 35:41Danny Jones?

  So you find some pictures of these guys, Steve? Were they, they're based out of New York?

• 35:46Speaker 03

  They were based out of New York, right? Yeah, and they were all older. I think some of them were, you know, kind of former Hells Angels and stuff. There were, it was like a older guys retirement club. They had all been in motorcycle clubs like growing up. And so this one was a bunch of guys, you know, getting into their 50s or whatever. And one of the presidents of the club's brother, I think, had died in 9/11. And so the club was in his honor. Just a great name, right? American Brotherhood 9/11 MC.

• 36:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Is that them? Uh, I don't think that's them.

• 36:18Danny Jones?

  They make a bunch of firefighters on Harleys.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 36:22Danny Jones?

  Unless if those were the right guys.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, there's, yeah.

• 36:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's their logo.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  American Brotherhood 9/11.

• 36:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, nice.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Wonder what the J.

• 36:29Danny Jones?

  Were you in New York in 9/11?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was my first day of college.

• 36:32Danny Jones?

  That was your first day of college? Wow.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  I just got in there, yeah. I was like, this town's exciting, man.

• 36:38Danny Jones?

  My God, what a day to start college.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and in fact, I didn't, they, I.

• 36:44Danny Jones?

  You got, yeah, they probably shut it down that day, right?

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I wrote the tackiest email of all time at about 10:30, which is, I'm, it might've been between Tower One and Tower Two coming down. I had a class at 11 with a like Irish lit professor who I ended up, he was like my mentor in college, great guy.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  But I, at like 10:33, I wrote this email where I was like, I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but I just wanted to make sure we're not having class today, right? And he wrote, like, and he wrote back pretty quickly. He was like, alas, we won't be having class, like, take care of yourself. And I was like, holy shit. I was like a sincere use of the word alas in 2001. How about that? But yeah.

• 37:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 37:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, these guys look crazy.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Crazy day.

• 37:30Danny Jones?

  These guys look awesome.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  They were nice.

• 37:31Danny Jones?

  They look like they're fun to hang out with.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  They were fun, yeah. A little on the older side. I broke my arm.

• 37:37Danny Jones?

  The idea of

• 37:38Speaker 03

  With those guys.

• 37:39Danny Jones?

  The idea of, of wanting to, to start a club is an interesting idea. You know, like to, like the, the idea of like getting a group of friends together and saying, hey, man, let's come up with a title for our, for our group and let's make rules that we can live by.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:58Danny Jones?

  It's like a

• 37:59Speaker 03

  It's fun. It's an, it's an American tradition. DeTocqueville referred to early United States as a nation of clubs, I believe.

• 38:07Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:08Danny Jones?

  It's a weird, it's a thing that I never thought about doing, but it does sound fun.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  Well, that's the old, have you ever read the book Bowling Alone?

• 38:15Danny Jones?

  No.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Okay. Who's author? I couldn't tell you right now. It's also, it's a super thick, it's a sociology book and it was about the decline. The titular Bowling Alone is about the decline in bowling, bowling teams, sorry, over between about like the sixties through, I think the book comes out in the middle of the nineties. But in general, it's about the erosion of, what would you even call that? Like part of civil society of clubs. Like that, you know, if you look back into the 1950s and sixties, most adults in, middle class adults in America belong to something, right?

• 38:49Danny Jones?

  It's like some sort of club.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Like Freemasons or Rotarians, or they're part of the Elks Club. The women do Tupperware parties or are a ladies auxiliary in town, things of this nature. People are members of, you know, five and six clubs and things that, and it, and it could by, you know, the early nineties, it is all but gone away. And if you look at, I've known a couple of people who are Freemasons who joined, you know, who are roughly my age.

• 39:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  And be like, oh, is that hard to, you know, is like, I thought there was, you know, you had to save a Freemason's life or something like that. And they're like, no, no, no, they're itching. Like they're, they're getting so old, they're itching for new blood, right? Like all these places are graying out.

• 39:27Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  And, um, and then there's, you know, and there are various explanations for that.

• 39:32Danny Jones?

  I think he was told to join the Knights Templar.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Drug cartel?

• 39:37Danny Jones?

  No, no, no, the Knights Templar.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, cuz those guys are kinda fucked up, yeah.

• 39:40Danny Jones?

  There's a cartel called the Knights Templar?

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, in Mexico.

• 39:44Danny Jones?

  Wow, I haven't heard about this.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  They're not, they're not, they're, well, I don't wanna be on camera saying they're not cool guys, but they do, they do some pretty uncool things, man.

• 39:51Danny Jones?

  Tell me about it.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  They're rough, they're rough, they're rough dudes, they're up there with like Los Zetas, you know? You mean, like, the historical Knights Templar?

• 39:59Danny Jones?

  Like, the historical Knights Templar, yeah.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  There's...

• 40:02Danny Jones?

  Except I wouldn't, I wouldn't wanna do any of the gay shit that they were doing.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  Well, what gay shit do they do?

• 40:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, they did a lot of gay shit, bro.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  That's fucking like anti-Catholic fucking propaganda.

• 40:11Danny Jones?

  No, I don't think it is.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  You can't, this is like listening to herodotus tell you that the Thracians were sacrificing children. You gotta take it with a grain of salt.

• 40:18Danny Jones?

  Was it, uh, so, what was the claim? Why, why?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  I don't know what the gay anti-Templar claim is.

• 40:23Danny Jones?

  No, the Templars...

• 40:24Speaker 03

  I thought it was that they were bank, that they were seizing too much temporal control due to their banking practices and that...

• 40:29Danny Jones?

  Well, they had, right.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  The French king who burned Jacques de Molay, but he was, he was like, hey, these guys are muscling in on my turf.

• 40:35Danny Jones?

  That's what it was, they wanted to...

• 40:36Speaker 03

  And he owed the money.

• 40:37Danny Jones?

  They didn't like the fact that Templars had all that money, right? So they wanted to get the money from them, so they were trying to, so this is the...

• 40:43Speaker 03

  So they concocted?

• 40:44Danny Jones?

  This is the argument.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:46Danny Jones?

  So they made it say like, oh, they do all these gay ritual things, like they kiss, kiss their buttholes and like all this weird stuff.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Oh, right, right, okay, and, and they invented the, the god Baphomet, which is like the goat-headed Satan figure that they worshiped, yeah.

• 40:57Danny Jones?

  They kissed the head, they had, they had to kiss the head of that thing.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:00Danny Jones?

  And, uh, yeah, there's a whole bunch of gay...

• 41:02Speaker 03

  Stamp on a bible and shit of that nature.

• 41:04Danny Jones?

  Stories about, yeah, oh yeah, that's another thing, they were like, they didn't like Christians at all.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  They say that about everybody, everybody's making you stamp on the bible.

• 41:11Danny Jones?

  They're making you do what?

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Back then, that was, well, that was how you, that's how you'd fire up the, um, Christian hoi polloi. Back then, it'd be like, stamping on a bible!

• 41:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, but there's like a newer version of, um, like a...

• 41:23Speaker 03

  The Templars?

• 41:24Danny Jones?

  A redux of the Knights Templars in the US.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's, um...

• 41:28Danny Jones?

  Kinda like a spin-off of Freemasonry.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Okay, I was thinking in like continental Freemasonry, there's a degree in like the Yorkish, right, I think, that is Knights Templar. It's like either above or below Knights of Malta, I forget.

• 41:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Whatever, those things are fun.

• 41:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they are. There's a lot of, um, I guess there's like a lot of big musicians and, uh, like famous folks that are joining the, trying to join the Knights Templar or like become Freemasons.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Oh, cause they're getting older and they need buddies.

• 41:55Danny Jones?

  They're getting older, they need buddies.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  Need an excuse to get out of the house. Sorry, sorry honey.

• 41:59Danny Jones?

  They also need-

• 42:00Speaker 03

  It's Tuesday night, you know?

• 42:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, exactly. And they need good marketing too, so it's helpful for them, you know what I mean? When they get these big shots in there. It's kinda like Scientology. That's why they got like Tom Cruise and-

• 42:09Speaker 03

  I was in a hotel last night and there's a Scientology channel here. Do you know this?

• 42:13Danny Jones?

  Where's your hotel?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Like-

• 42:15Danny Jones?

  Is it in Clearwater?

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Ten minutes down the road. I-

• 42:17Danny Jones?

  That way?

• 42:17Speaker 03

  Pinellas, yeah.

• 42:19Danny Jones?

  Is it that way or that way?

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Yo, east. I'm in Pinellas.

• 42:21Danny Jones?

  So it's closer to Scientology?

• 42:22Speaker 03

  Cause Clearwater's where the Sea Org's based at, right?

• 42:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:26Danny Jones?

  It's where, it's where, it's like the, the flag building. This is where-

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 42:30Danny Jones?

  Elron Hubbard had his pirate ship parked like five minutes down the road from here when he was here.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:34Danny Jones?

  So that's interesting. No, I haven't had cable, so I'm, but I'm not surprised.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  It's funny, all their programming looks like commercials for medicine. Like it's all cut that like-

• 42:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  Jarring, obnoxious way, like, like a Pac-Cell commercial.

• 42:46Danny Jones?

  They fucking advertise on the Super Bowl. Every Super Bowl, there's a Scientology commercial.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  They got the money, yeah.

• 42:51Danny Jones?

  But their, their, um, their, their membership is like supposedly declining badly. Like they're, they're supposedly not doing-

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Understandably, yeah. You ever read that stuff?

• 42:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I haven't, but I want to.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  I went, there was, I, we did a drugs and cults issue of the magazine. Back when the magazine used to have, uh, themes. And I joined three cults simultaneously. And one was like this guru cult called Adidam. Who, um, who's guru was a guy who was born Franklin Jones, but he had become Adi Dash Samraj. And it was, it's your basic guru, kinda jazz.

• 43:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Um, then what were the others? And I went to the, the Moonies, the Unification Church. Like the Koreans, you know? They had a, they had a church in on like 44th Street. And I joined, or I, you know, I went to, went to church with them. Hung out, effectively joined. I, you know, once I was done with the article, I never went back. But then Scientology was up on 46th Street. Did you join Scientology? Legally, I don't know if I should, you know, legally, I'm not even sure if I did or not. I went, hung out with them, took a bunch of classes. I was twinned to someone who was joining Scientology. Twinned? Really, they, they give you a buddy for like your introduction and his name was Thomas too. And he was like this Indian kid who had, I think, taken a job in the city.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Super, like, everybody I met there who was being brought into the church, very lonely. Like, just clearly lonely and nothing to do, right? And so I felt bad. I was, you know, I guess I was open minding it and just like getting books, learning about the stuff or whatever. And then, and then to watch a guy like totally eat it up, I just always wanted to be like, hey buddy, just like grain of salt with this stuff. Or it's like, if you need to meet, like, you need to meet some girls or something. I don't know. Like, give me, like, I can, I can take you to a bar or something. Yeah. Right? And it was, it was crazy, the, the, the mood of that place. Because, and you know, I was doing all this at the same time. It was kind of like, you know, funny stunt or whatever.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  I'd have to pick what night I was going to my different cult or whatever. And the Moonies were great. I don't, you know, I guess it's just sign of the times that, you know, back in the seventies, that kind of shit was scary to people. And I think they've eased off of the mass marriage kind of thing, which is what bummed people out, right? But the, like, that first month or, you know, the month I was going to stuff at the Church of Scientology, I was like, it feels like being in a, like, a, a sub-prime lending bank here, like shady financial operation. It's like, one, that's how everybody dressed, but two, they'd, you know, get people to sign up for a $200, you know.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Thirty minute course or whatever and they'd go back and you'd see them go back to the like the office and like start high fiving each other because they had made a sale and you're just like, Christ, it's like, you know, we can hear you, right?

• 45:39Danny Jones?

  Are you just like vigorously making notes this whole time? Like, are you just memorizing this and then writing it at the end of the day?

• 45:45Speaker 03

  I'd get on the subway and I'd write my notes. Yeah, because I was being, I was being super sneaky, you know?

• 45:49Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah, covert.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Covert. I mean, when there's a classroom, you can take notes, you know?

• 45:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, sure.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  I did my best to be fair about that.

• 45:56Danny Jones?

  Did you do any auditing sessions?

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, a couple.

• 45:59Danny Jones?

  Really? What was that like?

• 46:00Speaker 03

  Uh, halfway between like a stage hypnotism and therapy. Like auditing, you like, should we explain what it is?

• 46:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, explain what it is.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Well, I didn't, you know, and they didn't break because, because I was there of my own accord and they weren't trying to like trick me into coming to a Scientology office. I didn't get the E-meter, which I was kind of sad about.

• 46:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, you didn't get the E-meter?

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's, that's basically to bring in, you know?

• 46:28Danny Jones?

  Funny story, my-

• 46:28Speaker 03

  To dazzle the rubes. Yeah.

• 46:30Danny Jones?

  My real estate broker bought me an E-meter as a gift.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Oh, that's neat. Hamilton had, I lived with Hamilton Morris for a little bit.

• 46:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  He had an E-meter at his house, I think.

• 46:39Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 46:40Speaker 03

  I don't think we ever fired it up or anything, but I was always like, I was like, aww.

• 46:43Danny Jones?

  He told me he has an astrology computer.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Oh, I saw that. No, I, um, I texted him after watching the interview and I was like, you found one of those? He's like, my pride and joy.

• 46:54Danny Jones?

  [laughing]

• 46:55Speaker 03

  That thing's amazing.

• 46:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what a weird story.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Did he show you the picture? Like, the printer is a whole different component for the astrology thing.

• 47:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, we just looked up photos on, on Google.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Okay, but did you see the whole thing? It's enormous.

• 47:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, I don't think so.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  There's like a, um, what do you call that? There's a thing that looks like an old calculator and then-

• 47:13Danny Jones?

  That's what we saw.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  The brain of the thing that also has its printer in it. So it prints out, um, like ticker tape and you rip it off and-

• 47:21Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  That's your horoscope.

• 47:23Danny Jones?

  How crazy is that, that they actually spent taxpayer dollars to make this?

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 47:27Danny Jones?

  This is it?

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Okay, there you go. Yeah, you can see the whole thing. The digicom, yeah. Jealous of that. Yeah, he's got an impressive archive of arcane, arcane crap. Anyway, auditing, it was just, I just sat chair to chair with a nice little old lady who like, I think we held hands while we did it and you shut your eyes and you try to like basically remember back, but project yourself back into a memory.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  And then walk through that memory and you know, you pick a memory based on a time when you had some sort of hardship or something like that or whatever, and then you just keep doing it, right? And so you'll, you'll, you'll explain the memory to them. You'll walk through it and then they'll be like, okay, go back is like, and then you start over and you try to, and then they're like, what was the term? Sorry, it's been 20 years. They'd be like, remember, basically remember more. And it'd be interesting as, as you do this, that you either are confabulating or recovering more and more remember, it becomes a more and more vivid picture in your head. The, the details fill in and you can have insights that way. I thought auditing, it's, it's interesting in that, you know.

• 48:39Danny Jones?

  It's a real, it's like a real thing. Like it's actually can be helpful.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  He ripped it off of a psychological school in the 30s. Oh, Ron Hubbard ripped it off from a psychological school in the 30s, whose name I forget. It's kind of like fallen by the wayside, but it's, um, yeah, it's good practice. And as, you know, it's, it's the kernel of truth at the heart of, uh.

• 48:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, sure.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Whatever you want to say.

• 48:58Danny Jones?

  Right. Did it help you at all?

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Um, helped me write the article.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Maybe, I mean, you know, I didn't, I wasn't itching to go back.

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  And have a loan pushed on me, but, um, but it seemed, you know, it was, it was cool to sit and talk about yourself. I had, I did it three times and it was like, it's, there was some sort of insight in there. Nothing, nothing major.

• 49:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I have a friend, uh, especially. Yeah, let's just call him a friend who uh works for a big company in downtown Clearwater. Yeah. That is all, I think the owners are Scientologists or members of the church. It's weird because all like the richest people around here are Scientologists. Right. And um. You see all that works, right? Yeah. Yeah. And um, there's, the floors are like segregated, right? So you'll have floors of workers that are non-sios. Oh. And then you'll have separate floors where you have all the executives are sios. Yeah. And uh. Then keep all the. It's kind of like a, it's kind of like a weird. Keep the unclear away.

• 50:07Danny Jones?

  It's kind of like a occultish version of the office where they all kind of like whisper and make jokes under their breath about the Scientologists. Right. And when they come around, they're. Yeah. Kind of try to cover their ass and uh, and he was explaining to me, I was asking him because we were, we were getting lunches in Clearwater. I'm like, I'm like, how do you know, can you tell just by walking down the street? Who's a Scientologist and who's not like just aside from like the, the, the Sea Org members that what they all, they all wear the vests. No shit. Oh, oh, they don't wear their dress whites. Right. They aren't in full uniform. So, so, so, well, they typically wear like a vest with like a, a white collared shirt and they're all, they all dress, wear the same exact thing. Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, they look like.

• 50:51Danny Jones?

  Like a regular, like a formal vest. They look like, uh, they look kind of like um, like flight attendants. Right, right. Um, but other than that, like a, if you could find like a pedestrian or a um, just a civilian Scientologist at a restaurant or like a grocery store. It's like Mormons. There's. Right. There's a look. And I asked him, I'm like, what is that? How do you, how do you find it? And he's like, just look into their eyes and you will just get this sense of this robotic soul. They just, they're like, they're like robots. And I was like, he's like, and he goes, he goes, let's try it right now. He goes, look around this room and we're sitting in this little dining room attached to a grocery store. And he goes, there's one of them in this room.

• 51:31Danny Jones?

  And I'm like, okay. So I'm like trying to look around, uh, and sure as shit, I could tell. I'm like, that's the guy. He called it. He's like, yep. Amazing. So it was, it was a interesting phenomenon, but like, you know.

• 51:48Danny Jones?

  It's one of those cults, the scient- or Scientology is one of those cults where like, it's borderline, it's not illegal, right? It's not an illegal cult where they're like breaking the, they are breaking the law. They're committing fucking human atrocities with slavery, you know, enslaving people and taking people's babies away from them against their will. But like, you could literally, especially around here, or I'm sure in New York and LA, everywhere, they could just be part of, they could be a part of your group and you would never know it. Like, it's not like they're actively pushing it on you or talking about it, you know?

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Day walkers.

• 52:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, day walkers, right?

• 52:25Speaker 03

  No, I get you.

• 52:26Danny Jones?

  It's like you would never know who they were because um, they're a part of this weird thing, but they also never talk about it. Like, you could never have a conversation, I've never had a conversation with an active Scientologist.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:37Danny Jones?

  Because it's against their religion to talk, to talk about it, to, to um...

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Non...

• 52:44Danny Jones?

  To non-Scientologists.

• 52:46Speaker 03

  Or non-interested.

• 52:46Danny Jones?

  I think so.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I was gonna say, how do you get more?

• 52:48Danny Jones?

  Because they're afraid of getting ratted out by other Scientologists, because they can, they tell on you.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  Or made fun, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no. Worst thing, he is a squirrel.

• 52:55Danny Jones?

  You get a write-up.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:55Danny Jones?

  Right. So, it's an interesting phenomenon.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Suppressive persons, that's what I was trying to remember.

• 53:01Danny Jones?

  Suppressive person, that's what it is.

• 53:01Speaker 03

  So they keep the suppressive persons on, on a different floor.

• 53:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  At whatever this business is.

• 53:05Danny Jones?

  Well, no, they're not, no, no, no, no, the business is allowed to have non-Scientologists.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Right, right, right, but they, but they keep them a floor below.

• 53:10Danny Jones?

  Yes, but they're not suppressive people, because, or they could be, it doesn't matter because they're not initiated into Scientology, basically.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Well, that's, yeah, that's exactly who SPs are.

• 53:18Danny Jones?

  Sure, yeah, right.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  People who...

• 53:20Danny Jones?

  But you can also be a suppressive, uh, can you be a suppressive person that is also a Scientologist?

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's like, I believe, so, you know what, don't take, this is 20 years ago, so don't take...

• 53:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, this is, this shit's ancient.

• 53:32Speaker 03

  Any of my words about this.

• 53:34Danny Jones?

  Allegedly, uh, David Miscavige still lives around here, but I haven't seen him or seen any interviews or anything about him in a long, long time.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  What was, did, did he surf?

• 53:46Danny Jones?

  David Miscavige?

• 53:47Speaker 03

  Oh, David. I thought you said Dana, which, okay, wow, I just invented a person. Oh, I know.

• 53:52Danny Jones?

  No, he's the leader of Scientology.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Oh, I know who David Miscavige is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I misheard you, and then I invented a son or daughter for him in my head.

• 54:02Danny Jones?

  That surfs.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  And I just fully filled it out right there.

• 54:05Danny Jones?

  Gavin told me surfing is fake.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, why's that?

• 54:08Danny Jones?

  He thinks he's a flatterer when it comes to surfing.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  How does that even work?

• 54:13Danny Jones?

  Uh, he just thinks it's impossible that people can paddle a surfboard out into waves and then surf them. He thinks it's physically impossible and not real.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  I mean, that's cute.

• 54:22Danny Jones?

  It is cute.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:24Danny Jones?

  But he also-

• 54:24Speaker 03

  What are you gonna say?

• 54:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't know. He was saying, that's just a random anecdote.

• 54:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was funny. I was talking to old Montreal cartoonists who knew Gavin back in his cartooning days. And we kind of, like, a minor insight from that period was, um, no matter how much Gavin, when he would be writing about arts and culture, would, like, because he loved shitting on musicians for pretend, he's like, music's bullshit, you know? And he's like, acting, acting's really bullshit. He's like, comedy, frankly, comedy's a little bit of bullshit. He's like, I respect making a good joke, but it's not, you know, oh, it's a craft. The one group of people, no matter whether or not he liked their art or not, that he would never,

• 55:04Speaker 03

  like, I never once saw him badmouth a cartoonist, because he knew, like, how much fucking work in torture and craft went into it. It's funny.

• 55:14Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  So it's funny to hear him talk about how, like, surfing's bullshit. It's like, that's a good line for the bar or whatever, but like-

• 55:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  This thing you don't do, yeah, it must not be worth it.

• 55:23Danny Jones?

  Right. I don't think, he wasn't really shitting on it. He was just kind of like thinking-

• 55:26Speaker 03

  It was a riff.

• 55:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it was a riff. And he thinks it's just like, you know, too physically taxing for someone like him to do at the age of whatever the fuck age he is drinking. I think he slammed a whole 12-pack when he was interviewing me. Oh, by the way, how many beers did he drink in your video? I didn't, I didn't catch it.

• 55:43Speaker 03

  What? Oh, when we were interviewing him?

• 55:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, when you did the watch party.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Five or so. Oh, we went to the bar before we even started filming. It was like-

• 55:51Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 55:51Speaker 03

  11 a.m. on a Friday, yeah.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  He seemed no worse for wear. Yeah.

• 55:59Danny Jones?

  I think it, I think it helps him. I think the booze maybe helps him.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 56:02Danny Jones?

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• 56:46Danny Jones?

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• 57:31Danny Jones?

  You, you came up with a bunch of theories.

• 57:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:34Danny Jones?

  On what happened to Gavin.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 57:35Danny Jones?

  And you talked to everybody in his family. You talked to, not everybody, but most people in his family.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Wasn't able to reach Kyle, yeah.

• 57:41Danny Jones?

  A lot of the people, like you talked to a lot of the coworkers, the people that were from early days of Vice. And it seemed like the consensus was like, ah, we, uh, he's a great guy. We, we liked Gavin. He did some weird stuff. I don't agree with his politics, but I liked him.

• 58:00Danny Jones?

  So and then you came up with a bunch of theories at the end, right? Like, uh, what happened to him?

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Well, those derived from all the different people I spoke to.

• 58:06Danny Jones?

  The theories derived from the people?

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Right?

• 58:08Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  That was, it's, it's interesting because he doesn't like, I think he kind of portrays it these days as if one day he lost all his friends. Like, everybody just turned against him or whatever. But it's he, it was, um, it was staggered over like 10 or 15 years based on, you know, the people I know, like, we, you know, mutually who are friends with him or worked with him. Um, everybody had a different breaking point or falling out with him. Some of them are, you know, political or getting, you know, pissed off at or offended by something he said or whatever. Some of them are just straight up interpersonal problems. Some were, some are professional or whatever. And so everybody, you know, broke up with their friend Gavin at a different time.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  And everybody has a, like, sometimes completely different theory about what, what has happened to him between, you know, 2002 and 2022 or whatever.

• 59:00Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  And so that's where those all came from. Yeah.

• 59:03Danny Jones?

  So what?

• 59:03Speaker 03

  And I threw in some of my own.

• 59:04Danny Jones?

  After everything, what is your conclusion?

• 59:06Speaker 03

  Oh, it's all of them. I thought, I thought I put that in the, uh,

• 59:09Danny Jones?

  Maybe you did.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Might not have ended up in the doc. We made a, we made a big, like, schizophrenic spider web board, right? With all the theories. And then the director, Sebastian, asked me, he's like, which one is the truth? And I was like, oh, it's, it's all of them. Like, it's, they are all, like, that's.

• 59:25Danny Jones?

  And his position is he never changed? He's like, this has always been me.

• 59:27Speaker 03

  He's been saying that, yeah. I mean, it's, I, I mentioned this to someone else too. It's like, if you go back, like, this guy writes and used to draw, like, prodigiously, and he has this huge body of work whereby you can go back and read stuff from his twenties and thirties and you're like, of course you changed.

• 59:43Danny Jones?

  Well, everybody changes.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  You did the classic left wing to right wing conversion. Like, like, how can you say you didn't change at all? And of course, what virtue is it not to change? Yeah.

• 59:54Danny Jones?

  Well, what part of him changed? So how did he become more right wing? Because he was writing about the fucking trans stuff and all that stuff early on, wasn't he?

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  He was writing about that in like 2012, 2013. I'm talking about stuff from like-

• 1:00:07Danny Jones?

  You're talking about way early.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  1998, you know? 2002. Although it's funny, that article comes out, and I'm gonna get the years a little bit screwed up right now, but it's around 2013 or so, 2012 or 2013, and he publishes a book in 2012

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  called The Death of Cool, although it's original. If you find a book called How to Piss in Public, that is the same book with an earlier title. And it's a memoir of him up until that point, you know? From youth to, I think he's 40.

• 1:00:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 03

  And I think the book kind of like ends with him becoming 40 and accepting adulthood and-

• 1:00:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  -being happy about having a family and all that. But the very end of the book, a little epilogue, I can't, I can't do a good paraphrase of it, but he lays out his credo for people. And it's like, he's like, you, you know, he's like, if there's one thing I've learned, it's like if you don't fit in where you grew up, if you're, you know, if you've gotta be, you know, a Mormon Abba impersonator, but you were born like an overweight cowboy or something like that, it's like you gotta follow your dream. You gotta change into who you wanna be, right? So, like, one year difference between saying that's the point of my entire life up until the year 40,

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  and the very next year, he's like, "Accept trans." He's like, "Just don't fuck around with your genitals."

• 1:01:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  You know? And his argument is primarily based on, he's like, "Trans dicks look weird." Right? I'm like, "That's not a great argument, you know?" That's not the kind of thing you should base law on, frankly.

• 1:01:39Danny Jones?

  What do you think about the new mayor? Didn't, the new mayor for New York? I heard Zohar-

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Zoran Mamadami?

• 1:01:45Danny Jones?

  I heard he wants-

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  Mamdami?

• 1:01:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, Zohar. I heard he wants to give 60 million dollars to trans surgeries.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  To trans surgeons? I heard it was to trans surgeons.

• 1:01:54Danny Jones?

  That's what I meant.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  And it's in cash. Yeah, no. Oh, I don't know anything about that. I live in Chicago now.

• 1:01:58Danny Jones?

  Can you find that out, if that's real?

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  I'm still catching up on Lori Lightfoot, you know?

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  Do you hear she wants to raise the bridges on all the uh

• 1:02:06Danny Jones?

  Is she still around?

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 1:02:08Danny Jones?

  She's not around anymore.

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  She, she lost office.

• 1:02:11Danny Jones?

  Okay, Democratic candidate Zoh- Zora

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Gender-affirming care.

• 1:02:14Danny Jones?

  Has pledged to allocate 65 million to gender, gender surgeons.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Well, you got your attention.

• 1:02:20Danny Jones?

  For transgender New Yorkers, baby.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 1:02:23Danny Jones?

  I wonder if that pledge is the same as uh, the Amber Heard pledge.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  What's the Amber Heard pledge?

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  Well, she pledged like, her money, but didn't actually get it.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Oh, didn't actually do it? I know, it's like, it's an easy thing to say. I will, I will also say, um...

• 1:02:35Danny Jones?

  You know what the funny thing is? He also simultaneously said that if Netanyahu ever comes to New York, he's gonna arrest him.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Oh. Like, is a hair transplant gender-affirming care? Like, that's all I gotta say. It's like, that's, is, is...

• 1:02:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, how do you define...

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  I look at that and that's super broad.

• 1:02:50Danny Jones?

  That is very broad.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  I remember reading something and it's like, I, kind of, you know, I like to take a walk when these issues come up.

• 1:02:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Uh, just cuz I've been, I grew up in the 90s, I've been around the bush. It was like, all the arguments about trans people are literally the same arguments that were made about gays when I was, you know, 10 or 11, right? Um, they're, you're gonna, children, they can't be trusted around children, it's mentally, they're, you know, it's a runaway mental illness that we should shun them for, somehow it's against God, etc.

• 1:03:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but the surgery stuff's kinda different, though, right? Like, the surgeries, the surgery stuff, to me, my view on it, and there was a, um, some lesbian athlete, I forget her name now, she wrote a tweet about the, um, about this whole thing, this whole like, explosion of trans stuff, and she was basically explaining how the, the pushing the trans agenda, whatever you wanna call it, is building a barrier between the people who like, my dad, who kind of like, grew up in the 50s, in the 60s or whatever, and he's kinda like, maybe started out not, think, not too fond of gays and all this stuff, and then, over the, over the years, he's kinda like, okay, these people are normal, I'm friends with gay people, whatever,

• 1:04:01Danny Jones?

  this is kinda a normal part of culture, and then the trans thing comes, and then you're like, oh my god, this is getting too fucking out of control, and people are conflating the normal, everyday gays with the people that are weirdly pushing this trans surgery on children, and they're like, fuck this, fuck all of it, I don't want nothing to do with it anymore. That's the, you know, and I think that was a good point that she made there.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Well, the root of it is that it weirds people out, you know? And as a teenager, I was really into like, you know, queer theory and all that, which was like, as I read it, sort of an anti-assimilationist vision of gays and lesbians and trans and other folks, uh, that was like, well, whatever, let's preserve our weirdness instead of like kowtowing to regular society. And I always, I always liked that, but what you gonna do, you know?

• 1:04:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah. There was a, Gavin was showing me a-

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Oh, but so the gender-affirming care thing. And I was like, this is, this is some classic, like, I read somewhere. But I don't know, I was reading somewhere about like the, you know, cause small numbers, right? Of like kids under 18 who get some sort of like gender-affirming care, but how like a few of those figures also involve boys who were given like basically mastectomies for gynecomastia, you know? Had like glandular issues, so they had like big tits. And it was like, there's always so much of this shit. And it's just the internet in general is just like presented in bad faith, in statistics especially. I'm always just like, sure.

• 1:05:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Like, let's see the survey, please, you know?

• 1:05:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to find the truth of anything nowadays.

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Welcome to Post-Mart Energy.

• 1:05:32Danny Jones?

  It's, yeah, and Hamilton was explaining this beautifully when he was on here. He was just like, he even, he, he wasn't like shitting on people who do this, but he's like, like, I even do this myself sometimes. I catch myself doing this where I'm looking for like, wouldn't it be cool if the Nazis were inventing LSD? And I'm trying to come up and find all this stuff and find all this evidence. And then I find evidence that goes against it and I wanna fucking ignore it, but I can't.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  You figured out the story, yeah. Confirmation bias sneaks in, yeah. You gotta be on guard, yeah.

• 1:06:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and it's bigger than ever now. It's just like, especially, you know, social media is really fucking put the brakes on critical thinking.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. Well, now we get to hear what everybody has to say. Isn't that great?

• 1:06:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right?

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Ever been in a room of a hundred people and just had them all speaking? Like, fucking, it's glorious. It's like a public square.

• 1:06:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, and there's also like the people, they wanna be a part of their group. They don't wanna say things and they don't wanna signal the wrong thing to, to where their tribe is gonna kick them out. Like, I just noticed this with this whole war and with Iran, the whole Iran war thing that's been kicking off. All the heart, the, the people that have been-

• 1:06:42Danny Jones?

  Blasting or that have been like blowing the trumpets for Trump the whole time, uh, leading up to the election. Obviously he was running on being anti-war, which I thought was great and a lot of people thought was great.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  He ran on a lot of things.

• 1:06:52Danny Jones?

  And some of the people that were, that were really behind him, like, like, um, Tucker.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Danny Jones?

  Candace and Alex Jones and Alex Jones is, I'm gonna use him as an example here.

• 1:07:04Danny Jones?

  He was at basically, he made, I saw, I was watching a Twitter video he did yesterday and he was talking about the Iran war and he was talking about how stupid it was and how like Trump shouldn't be doing this and all this stuff. And throughout the whole thing, he was qualifying himself every 30 seconds. Don't get me wrong. I'm still MAGA. Don't try to say I'm not MAGA. I still support Trump. I still support Donald Trump.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Still part of the team.

• 1:07:23Danny Jones?

  I'm still MAGA. I'm not, I'm not saying that. I just think that what he's doing is wrong. We need to stop this stupid war. Stop giving Israel all this money. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, I've seen, I've seen a lot of that. Like a lot of people are just saying like, let me be clear. I'm still MAGA. Don't say I'm not MAGA.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:07:38Danny Jones?

  But what Trump's doing, I didn't vote for this shit. I didn't vote to make Israel great again. I voted to make America great again. And, uh, you know, it just goes to the whole thing. Like people is, they want to be a part of their, of their tribe. They don't want to be kicked out of their so-called tribe.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  You know where that syntax comes from, that kind of cadence that you just, you did a really good impression right there. But you know exactly where that style of speaking comes from, right? Call-in sports radio shows. That is how you would address the DJ on a sports call-in show in the eighties, nineties. Be like, I don't wanna, you know, I wanna be a team player here, but you know, I really think, you know, they should get rid of Hernandez and, uh, you know, put, put Marcel in on shortstop for this. I think, I think the team's gonna go down the hill if not.

• 1:08:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  It's the exact same tone. And it's like, I'm not the first person to be like, this shit is just all team sports.

• 1:08:26Danny Jones?

  It is.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  But it is.

• 1:08:27Danny Jones?

  You're totally right. It is, bro.

• 1:08:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the, um, going to, to the trans stuff. What, what, Kevin pulled up a, there, there was a, apparently there was a Time Magazine thing that came out where it said, um, tomboys have gone extinct.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Oh, cause it's all, cause they're presumed to all be trans or they are just all trans now?

• 1:08:49Danny Jones?

  No, well, they're chopping all their tits off.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:51Danny Jones?

  Because their parents are saying, oh, you're, you're really a boy. We gotta chop your tits off. And it was like, it was like-

• 1:08:56Speaker 03

  Isn't that happening a lot? Like, is this-

• 1:08:58Danny Jones?

  Apparently if Time Magazine did a thing on it-

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Time Magazines. Journalistic standards are like sending a kid to Detroit for 12 hours and being like, "Write a story on the city."

• 1:09:08Danny Jones?

  Hey, these are one, these are one of the top journalistic, uh, organizations in the US.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  Time Magazine. Time Magazine, yeah.

• 1:09:14Danny Jones?

  They're, they're-

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  A, a Time honored, yeah, Time honored institution in America.

• 1:09:18Danny Jones?

  Yes, exactly. We can't just, we can't discredit them.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Do you have kids wanna chop their tits off? Welcome to America. Go nuts, you know?

• 1:09:26Danny Jones?

  And he, well, well, the problem is-

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  We're gonna do legislate something because they'll regret it?

• 1:09:29Danny Jones?

  Well, the problem is young heterosexual, heterosexual males, when they're first discovering that they like girls, they're playing on the playground with other girls. They don't like girls in high heels and skimpy outfits yet, obviously, because they're young and they're like on the baseball field or whatever. And like their first, their first experience, you know, maybe like kissing a girl or smooching a girl, copping a little titty feel or whatever is gonna be with another girl who's a tomboy, right? Tomboys are the stepping stone to somebody who, you know, is a traditional heterosexual who likes ass and titties, right?

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  I see, I see where you're coming from. I just think it's-

• 1:10:04Danny Jones?

  So if you're, if you're wiping out all the tomboys, you're, you're making it way more difficult for the evol-, for the development of young heterosexual males.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  I don't think anyone's wiping out the tomboys. I, what I would, what I would fear personally more is that those, these kids we're talking about in the abstract, aren't on baseball teams and shit of that nature. They aren't physically with other- Kids their age, like on a routine basis. Yeah. You know, I don't, I don't, I don't hang out with teenagers in my spare time. Right. I've got a pair of godkids, but they're pretty young or whatever. But the sense I get from people who work with teenagers and or, you know, some folks who are just slightly younger is that, oh, I could, fuck, I can bake, I can, I could pull up a chart if I wanted to right now. Nobody gets their driver's license anymore, right?

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Like, and in the nineties, if you looked at, they would do, every year in Georgia, we would do, I think it was called like the Teen Behavioral Health Survey, where they'd ask, like, have you ever done drugs? Have you ever had sex? Anal sex, you know, what drugs have you done? Have you ever drank? Things of this nature, and we used to fuck with it all the time. And I, I used to love being like, I've never, I've never kissed another person, but I have anal sex three times a week. And it's like, I've never drank a beer, but I, but I do heroin, like more or less daily. And I think it was funny, I think like there was, and then like a fucking teacher at my high school started a rumor that I was on dope. And I think it's because she looked in the fucking Teen Behavioral Health Survey and fell for it.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Anyway, in general, when those things would come out and they'd be, you know, from 1950 to 1960, you'd see drug use doing this. And you'd see sex doing this also. You know, I was so proud of my generation. I was like, look at that, we, we pushed it up another like three notches or whatever. Sometime around like mid 2000s, it crests and starts plummeting, you know? And it's like, it's kids on the internet, it's kids on their fucking phones. You could probably correlate it pretty well to the, to the iPhone coming out. Cause I believe it is around like 2005, 2006, when it really, when those rates start to sink. And that matches up with kids not getting their driver's license, kids being involved in less like

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  outdoor, physical activities and things of that nature. Hmm.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  So I think, yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about, um, I'd worry that nobody's getting laid.

• 1:12:31Danny Jones?

  It's a bad.

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  And they're all miserable about it and that's, that could have some really bad repercussions because it makes people crazy.

• 1:12:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's, um, it's not good that the, most of the population is now staying inside, not going out and doing stuff. That is not a good combination with the way media is going right now because.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:12:50Danny Jones?

  Media is unmanageable and now more people are inside surrounded by screens all day.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:54Danny Jones?

  So it seems like a fucking terrible combo.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's, it's like a feedback loop that, you know, makes itself worse because who's making media on the internet? It's people who haven't been outside for a while. It's people sitting at a computer screen, right?

• 1:13:09Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  And so it's just over and over again. The internet is, is like that thing made by people who aren't doing something better with their lives at any given point, right? You know?

• 1:13:17Danny Jones?

  Interesting. Yeah, now everybody can be a, a news source.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:13:22Danny Jones?

  Anybody can.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  It's funny to watch, like, uh, like the kind of like the, the aesthetic of the YouTuber, which I don't, I don't keep up super often, but just from glancing in. That for a while it was very.

• 1:13:35Danny Jones?

  Hate that word, YouTuber.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Oh, it's awful, right? Yeah. I mean, it replaced a worse word, which was vlogger.

• 1:13:40Danny Jones?

  That's true.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  You know that, right?

• 1:13:41Danny Jones?

  That's true.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Um, but the aesthetic for a while, the dominant aesthetic was this sort of lo-fi thing where you like hold a lavalier mic, you know, in your hand? And you go out and it really seems like kids, it's like, oh, I'm just out with my buddies and we're going to interview someone. I'll hold up my mic to them or whatever. And then in the last like five years, maybe four years, that suddenly everybody's, I, look, I like your studio, but everybody suddenly got these like weirdly like professional news. Well, this doesn't look like the, it doesn't look like you're trying to trick people into thinking you're a news network, you know? With like a little, the box graphic over the side of your shirt or wearing like a suit which may or may not fit well. Like these sorts of things that people have taken on the, the trappings of, you know, kind of like institutional legitimacy.

• 1:14:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:14:24Danny Jones?

  Have you seen, um, have you seen that dude, um, Andrew Callahan from, he has this thing called Channel 5?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. All, all gas, no brakes.

• 1:14:31Danny Jones?

  All gas, no brakes. Yeah. He has a very similar style where he just basically goes out, he takes a little lavalier mic and goes back and forth.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. What, to me?

• 1:14:38Danny Jones?

  Some uh uh same similar style to like early Vice stuff.

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  Oh, like like early Vice. So I was gonna say, he's he's a bit on like the the freaking mutant hunt. Although recently, he's been doing some stuff that's like he's he's kind of come along and done some.

• 1:14:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's getting a little bit more political now.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  They're probably intelligent. Well, it's just that they're like he's, you know, kind of growing as a documentarian, I guess, or whatever. I don't know. Not my place to say, but um yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:01Danny Jones?

  You're not supposed to grow as a documentarian. The best stuff is when you're young and retarded.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  It's all gotta be raw and punk, right? Yeah, you don't want to sell out.

• 1:15:08Danny Jones?

  No, you don't want to sell out and have a bunch of ad breaks in there and doing stuff for money. That's the other problem with with the with like the whole independent journalism stuff like and everyone being a content creator on online.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:19Danny Jones?

  Is that like people will find, and I don't know if you've noticed this, but people will find like a lane. Whether it be a specific topic. Or a specific like niche of content, whether it's like maybe it's politics, maybe it's fucking esoteric stuff like UFOs, whatever.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Danny Jones?

  And they'll find out, ooh, wow, this vertical makes the most money, so I'm gonna fucking make this my whole identity now.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  That's their beat. Yep, yep, yep.

• 1:15:44Danny Jones?

  Which is which is not good. It's super weird.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Ends ends with uh what what are those like TV nerds on the internet call it Flander Flanders-ization? Like where TV characters that have a trait like get turn into caricatures of themselves if uh.

• 1:16:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Skip Bayless. Have you ever heard of Skip Bayless?

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  Yes, but.

• 1:16:06Danny Jones?

  He's a good example of that.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Wait, who is he?

• 1:16:08Danny Jones?

  He is a uh a sports commentator.

• 1:16:11Speaker 03

  Oh, he is? Oh, okay.

• 1:16:12Danny Jones?

  He had a show with he he originally had a show called On First Take with Stephen A. Smith.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Was he a like proper announcer in back in the day?

• 1:16:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's from Chicago, I think, actually.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Right. He used to he took over for Harry Carrier. They overlapped in a way. Yeah, okay.

• 1:16:26Danny Jones?

  So he uh.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  It was the same guy I was thinking.

• 1:16:28Danny Jones?

  He used to be like a traditional just journalist, a sports journalist. And then he kind of became this talking head on TV who would be like. He would pick his stance on people. He was like, I'm gonna be pro this guy and anti this guy. And he made his career, he started, when he started to get real popular, it was almost like because he would shit on LeBron James and everything LeBron.

• 1:16:48Speaker 03

  He was the anti LeBron guy.

• 1:16:49Danny Jones?

  He was anti LeBron, pro Jordan.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Danny Jones?

  And LeBron will never be Jordan. And he kind of like, he was famous because everyone hated him so much. And he just like leaned into it and leaned into it. Eventually it's just like, he forgot, he lost the plot. And he became the character.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Same thing happened to Joan, Alex Jones, same thing happened to like any of the like right wing shock jock, kind of like Rush Limbaugh clones that existed across the country in the nineties. Ours was called Neil Bortz. And he just, you can, like over the years, you just hear him become more and more of a detached asshole. And you'd wonder if he was able to turn it off when he left the studio and went home, you know? When you read about his divorce and you'd say, probably not.

• 1:17:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. I wonder what happened to Howard Stern?

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  He's, I think he's just, you know, goes home and sleeps on his millions.

• 1:17:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  He's still around, yeah.

• 1:17:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's, he's, um, it seems like he just has like the, the biggest hot shot celebrity or politician on his show, like.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  That, well, that's.

• 1:17:47Danny Jones?

  I don't watch it every day, but like, yeah, it's like, but it's like presidential, presidential candidates and.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:17:52Danny Jones?

  Taylor Swift and.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  It's not, uh, not porn stars and, um.

• 1:17:57Danny Jones?

  Which I think is like, which.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Stuttering John.

• 1:17:59Danny Jones?

  One of the reasons I think that, um,

• 1:18:03Danny Jones?

  you know, Rogan is so unique is because he's like the top of his media field. He's like the top of his.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Basically Howard Stern, right?

• 1:18:12Danny Jones?

  He's the top podcaster in the world. He's the biggest media thing, platform, biggest, what is the word I'm looking for? The biggest media outlet in the world, I guess, you could say? Bigger than all cable, uh, channels, all cable shows.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:18:24Danny Jones?

  Combined.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:26Danny Jones?

  And he still has people on his show that nobody knows. Like he'll, he'll find some nobody, right? Who's like trying to make a name for himself and bring him on and, you know, prop him up.

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Danny Jones?

  And there's not a lot of people who do that. People get like their egos get in the way. Like, oh, I'm not gonna have this person on. Like, I'm not gonna give them a fucking platform. I'm too jealous. And, uh, you know, that's, that, nobody does that.

• 1:18:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:45Danny Jones?

  Which I think is probably partially responsible for some of the success that he's had.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's good he does it.

• 1:18:50Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  I'll say that.

• 1:18:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. Trump and Bernie Sanders.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  It's a good habit to make, yeah.

• 1:18:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you gotta have both sides. Talk, have both sides of the, of the, of the problem on, or both sides of the issue. And then also have people who nobody fucking knows. Don't just fucking chase the, the superstars, you know?

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:19:10Danny Jones?

  So. The noisy thing. Was that, was that whole thing?

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  Which one?

• 1:19:15Danny Jones?

  The Atlanta.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  One in Chicago, one in Atlanta.

• 1:19:16Danny Jones?

  Noisy Atlanta. Noisy Atlanta.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:19Danny Jones?

  How did that whole thing happen?

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  Well, we'd made. We'd, we'd, we'd made a previous one in Chicago.

• 1:19:25Danny Jones?

  It started with Chicago.

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I think the title was Noisy Shyrack.

• 1:19:30Danny Jones?

  Shyrack, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was good. Chief Keef and all that stuff.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  With Chief Keef, yes.

• 1:19:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  Uh, and Young, I was about to say with Young Thug, I'm sorry, with, uh, with all the drill kids.

• 1:19:39Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, so that was, I mean, you know, effectively a sequel, right? In Atlanta, where?

• 1:19:48Danny Jones?

  Well, how did the Shyrack, how did the Shyrack thing start?

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Shyrack thing started with, uh, there's a, he's, there's a guy named Andy Capper, who was the editor of Vice UK in London. And he came to America and he started making videos, became a filmmaker. He's a really good filmmaker. And he was fascinated with drill music in Chicago. Like, he had been former editor of, you ever heard of the NME? The New Musical Express? It's like a long-running British, like, rock and roll magazine. And it's like, it doesn't really have an equivalent in the United States. But I think of Rolling Stone or something like that. Anyway, he came from the music world, right? Not as a musician, but as like, you know, I wouldn't want to call him a music journalist, because that sounds stupid, frankly. And he was, he was, he was a real one.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  And he and this other filmmaker named Gregory Beef Jones, started working on an idea about, uh, Chicago drill music. And I was at the time interested in Chicago as the crime capital of the United States, or the murder capital of the United States. And so we both kind of.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Came into the story from those two sides. Like, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you nothing about Chief Keef at that point. So he was exposing me to the music and I was telling him, you know, the last thirty years of history of Chicago street life or whatever. And, um, and that was it. I'm sorry, not a great story, right?

• 1:21:14Danny Jones?

  So you didn't know much about the music side of it? You were just more about like the, the, the Chicago culture in general?

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically the history, like the gun trade, even frankly. Yeah, no, I came into, I went into that pretty, uh, dumb and naive. I mean, by the time we were filming, I listened to all the stuff. I was like, this is pretty cool. Like, that guy's sixteen? I was like, that guy killed someone? Amazing. Like, I love it.

• 1:21:38Danny Jones?

  The, um, yeah, that's it. It was, it was funny from, uh, on the Atlanta episode, the, I think it was the first episode, the Atlanta one. You go into that, uh, recording studio and the dude was like, "You don't know Big Meech?" or whatever.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Oh, because I asked a question in the wrong way.

• 1:21:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you're like, "How the hell you not know this? How do you not know the, who this guy is?" You're like, "Uh, that's my job is to ask questions."

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  Well, I, I remember, yeah, I remember you're talking about where I just like, I, I had meant like, "Can you tell us about Big Meech from the Black Mafia family, please?" And I'd phrased it, "Who is Big Meech?" And then, yeah.

• 1:22:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that was hilarious.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  So goes.

• 1:22:18Danny Jones?

  And Gucci, Gucci Man was in prison during the whole thing?

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  I believe so, yeah.

• 1:22:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that was a while ago.

• 1:22:24Speaker 03

  We were trying to get him on the phone because he had, you know, a phone in jail, but didn't.

• 1:22:28Danny Jones?

  He didn't want to do it?

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Or just, it didn't, like, I don't know if he didn't want to do it or if it didn't make it to him or whatever.

• 1:22:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  It's kind of, kind of hard sending, um, you know, interview requests to prison.

• 1:22:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  As it turns out.

• 1:22:43Danny Jones?

  I mean, a lot of people go to prisons now and like literally like conduct interviews there with cameras and all that.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  I've done one of those, God, it never aired, but I did a, a thing with a couple of ladies in, um, death row in Texas, um, where we went and interviewed some people on death row. And it was, it was about women who would get married to guys on death row. So like death row wives. It was, uh, I regret that we never finished that and got an edit out. It was. Crazy shoot. But the, the process of getting the prison to agree and then, you know, on top of that, you got to factor in a prison in Texas that is death row in Texas in Huntsville, right? It was like six or seven week pain in the ass, you know?

• 1:23:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of fucking bureaucratic bullshit.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  They make it, yeah. It's the bureaucracy is kind of the point, you know? And it was, it's funny, most of the time when you go somewhere to do like with a camera, to do a documentary about someone's job, anybody who sees it, they're like, oh, cool. Like taking an interest in us. And that was, death row was the one place where the guards were sort of like, great, here you are.

• 1:23:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  Like, no, I don't have anything to say to you guys.

• 1:23:51Danny Jones?

  Those guys don't want to fucking help you. Those guys make zero money.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  And they found out who we were talking to too. They were just like.

• 1:23:57Danny Jones?

  Who were you talking to?

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, oh shit, I forget his last name now.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  Shit, can I, can I, I don't even know how to look him up. He, he was a guy.

• 1:24:08Danny Jones?

  Spit out some keywords and Steve will find him.

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  Okay, his name's Hank something. I just feel bad not remembering his surname.

• 1:24:14Danny Jones?

  Hank, Texas death row. Try that.

• 1:24:16Speaker 03

  And, oh, this is going to answer a question I've had for years that I've been cautiously avoiding asking, which is whether or not he got executed.

• 1:24:25Danny Jones?

  Hank Skinner?

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  Skinner. Oh my God, right as I.

• 1:24:27Danny Jones?

  Look him up.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  That was crazy. Hank Skinner, thank you.

• 1:24:30Danny Jones?

  Did it zap into your head the same time you said it?

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  It did, like, like a second before, right?

• 1:24:33Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

  So Skinner was accused of murdering his girlfriend and his girlfriend's two adult, mentally disabled sons from a previous relationship with an axe, right? And this guy was, I think he was in his early twenties or something. He was kind of like, he was like a roughneck from, I think he's from Lubbock, Texas. He's from North Texas. He worked shampooing hair. Oh, he's, he did die. Okay. Sorry to hear that. God, that guy was remarkable.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  So anyway, he was accused-

• 1:25:07Danny Jones?

  Find like the latest, uh, find like the latest article about his execution.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  Well, there was one there saying that he'd, he'd passed away, which I-

• 1:25:13Danny Jones?

  Zoom out, Steve.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  Well, he had been scheduled to be executed-

• 1:25:15Danny Jones?

  No, zoom out.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  And Texas-

• 1:25:17Danny Jones?

  Look at that.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  Texas doesn't execute the most people. I think it's either Florida or California has them beat, but Texas prides itself on executing people the most quickly, right?

• 1:25:27Danny Jones?

  Go up, go up. Texas death row inmate dies after December surgery for tumor.

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  Sorry to hear that.

• 1:25:32Danny Jones?

  He didn't get executed. He died accidentally.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  Well, this, this was the whole thing. So Texas, like Texas justice is, we get you killed quick, right? Like, we bring you in there and we execute people as fast as possible. They're proud of that, right? Um, and-

• 1:25:46Danny Jones?

  Something to be proud of.

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  This guy, this guy was accused of murdering three people and, um, claimed he didn't do it. It was, it was a real, you know, like, I don't know, I don't know whose story is correct, which is exactly, it was a fantastic argument for not killing people, right? Like, leave him in prison until you can figure some shit out.

• 1:26:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the biggest, the biggest argument.

• 1:26:08Speaker 03

  Dubious case, right?

• 1:26:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  And he had been scared, he had been in death row the longest of any inmate who was alive at that point. We're filming him in like 2012, I want to say. Um, and he had, his execution had been scheduled. He'd gone through all his appeals, right? So he was done with all those appeals, but different things kept happening. Like, the prison warden was like, yeah, that guy's got nine lives, then some. Because different things had delayed his execution.

• 1:26:34Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Like, he should have been dead two or three years before we went and spoke with him. And he got married, just, um, married by proxy, right? Cause he can't leave death row, to a French woman who was a anti-death penalty activist named Sandrine Skinner. When she took his name, I forget her maiden name. Um, who, who we got to speak to, who was there because he was about to be executed. And then they stayed his execution once again. Like, first time in Texas history kind of shit. It was really weird. Um, but I remember we, we got an interview with him and we sat down and chatted with him. And, um, and he was, uh, like, classic North Texas roughneck, like, missing a tooth, just like, like,

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  kind of guy you'd see at the back of the bar or whatever. And it was a year after the, um- Werner Herzog documentary Into the Abyss, which was about death row in Texas in Huntsville, had come out and like in the course of just, you know, pleasantries, we're getting the interview started. He was like, uh, he goes, "Do you know my friend Werner?" And I was like, "Your friend who?" And he was like, "My friend Werner." And I was like, "Werner Werner Herzog?" He's like, "Yeah, that guy." He's like, "You know, I gave him his title, right?" I was like, "The title of his movie?" And he goes, he's like,

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  uh, what's the quote? "Be careful those y'all gaze into the abyss for the agis may be..."

• 1:28:01Danny Jones?

  Easy for you to say.

• 1:28:02Speaker 03

  Beware those. I'll, I'll, I'll stop doing my shitty impression. Anyway, it was like, it was, beware of those who gaze into the abyss for the, the abyss also gazes into you. And he goes, "Frederick Nietzsche, also spraggerethustra." And I was like, "Ah, be still my heart." It was like, this guy, this is a man who's just been sitting reading for 20 years on death row. It's like you took, you took the roughest lump of coal in Texas prison unit and have turned him into some sort of like

• 1:28:30Danny Jones?

  A literary scholar.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Rural diamond. Yeah.

• 1:28:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Dad.

• 1:28:36Danny Jones?

  What a weird phenomena about these women who want to marry dudes on death row.

• 1:28:40Speaker 03

  That was the whole thing?

• 1:28:41Danny Jones?

  I actually met a woman once when I was, I was doing a documentary about my friend who's a lawyer. And he was, uh, he was representing a guy who got the death penalty for killing two prostitutes. Uh, he was a truck driver.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:54Danny Jones?

  And, uh, he got two prostitutes and they, they wound up dead. He maintained his innocence. And he, this, this lawyer them talking about is very, very against the death penalty. So he'll just take random death penalty cases like this. And the lady who he was partnering with as her defense team. She fucking married this dude. Right. And she's been representing him for like the past fifteen years, twenty years, maybe. I think I might know who you're talking about, yeah. Yeah, he was, this was in Stark, Florida, which is like the, it's the middle of nowhere Florida. It's out of a fucking movie, dude. It's like, does it, it's not even a real place. Which, which, which part of the state? It's like. Was it near? It's like northern middle, I would say. It's, it's close to Gainesville, but more near to the middle of the state. Tallahassee, or?

• 1:29:38Danny Jones?

  Not that far north, a little bit lower. Okay, I know, okay, yeah. That is the middle of nowhere. Yeah, there's like a, there's like a couple churches, convenience stores, and like a water tower, and then the prison. Yeah, for the. Stark, yeah. Evocative. And the, the sun never shines in Stark. Oh. And, um, anyways, so this guy's maintained his innocence, and I don't remember what happened with the DNA. I don't even remember this guy's name, but something happened with, where the DNA was like inconclusive or something like this. Yeah. And they were still gonna execute him, and like, leading up to the hours where they were supposed to execute him, they were waiting, they were going back and forth with the Supreme Court, and we're there filming. Yeah.

• 1:30:21Danny Jones?

  And there's this group, there's this giant field, on one side of the group, there was people that were there in a group to stop him from getting executed. Right. And in that group of people, the guy had no friends, but he had people that were like former members of death row who got exonerated. Oh, okay. Through DNA evidence, right? So they're like, and one of the guys had just got off death row the week before, he's like, I just left death row, because they, they fucking finally got my DNA evidence right. Yeah. So, and then the other group of people on the other side of the field roped off with caution tape, were the victims of the prostitutes, or the family members of the prostitutes that got killed, and like all their friends, as well as other people who were victims of similar crimes. Right.

• 1:31:03Danny Jones?

  And, um, dude, what a weird fucking Twilight Zone situation that was, bro. And then like, we were, we were there for like eight hours.

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• 1:32:13Danny Jones?

  Waiting for this guy to be executed, like they had him strapped to the cross, right? I guess the lethal injection is kind of like a crucifix.

• 1:32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:19Danny Jones?

  And they put it in like a, it's like a peep show, right?

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  With the window, with the curtain, right?

• 1:32:24Danny Jones?

  The window and the curtain, it's like a peep show. And then you have the people.

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Wait, did you guys go to the execution?

• 1:32:28Danny Jones?

  No, we were across the street from the prison in the field.

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 1:32:31Danny Jones?

  And.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  It's like, how'd you pull that one?

• 1:32:33Danny Jones?

  But apparently he was in the little showroom, like the people that were supposed to watch were sitting in the theater.

• 1:32:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:38Danny Jones?

  Waiting for this to happen. And this was like an eight-hour ordeal, like going back and forth to the Supreme Court. And then finally they lost and they fucking, you know, they killed him.

• 1:32:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Danny Jones?

  And, you know, just like such a, such a weird, weird creepy fucking situation. And like, I understand like putting somebody to death for some fucking atrocious crimes. But the, like, like you said, the biggest argument against it is the fact that they get it wrong so many times. Like, how many innocent people have they fucking killed? You know, we don't know. Like, if we had a magic wand and could fucking go back, take a time machine back and figure out if they actually did it, then that would be, I would not have any problems with the death penalty. But this guy, my lawyer friend, he's so. Oh, against the death penalty. He was just representing a guy.

• 1:33:25Speaker 03

  He knows how the sausage is made. Yeah, he knows the people who are involved in it.

• 1:33:29Danny Jones?

  This is how.

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  Level of intelligence you do sometimes, right?

• 1:33:31Danny Jones?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:33:32Speaker 03

  Talk to anybody in any field about how things actually go.

• 1:33:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  And they're like, you know, this is all made by idiots, right?

• 1:33:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  And this is like.

• 1:33:39Danny Jones?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:33:39Speaker 03

  Death, yeah.

• 1:33:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. So much so that he was just representing a guy who was a dentist, uh, who killed his lawyer. So he was representing a dude who just killed his previous lawyer and he was getting fucking the death penalty for killing a lawyer.

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  What did he have that lawyer for a previous murder?

• 1:33:55Danny Jones?

  I think so.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  Geez, he's just going down the daisy chain.

• 1:33:58Danny Jones?

  So, so exactly. And then, so, so my friend is representing this guy who just killed his lawyer.

• 1:34:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Danny Jones?

  And he fucking somehow gets a hold of a phone call while he's in prison where he's calling his girlfriend or something saying, we're gonna fuck this new lawyer out of everything. We're gonna somehow get a mistrial and we're not gonna pay him a dime. My lawyer friend got a hold of this.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Danny Jones?

  And he's like, uh, I'm, I'm bowing out of this trial or whatever. And he had the option to give up his evidence. Or the, the client attorney-client privilege.

• 1:34:29Speaker 03

  Was violated, yeah.

• 1:34:31Danny Jones?

  Could have, he could have given that to the judge.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:34:34Danny Jones?

  Which would have made the guy be dead, basically. And he elected not to do it, even after this guy conspired to fuck him over.

• 1:34:41Speaker 03

  A lot of money, yeah.

• 1:34:42Danny Jones?

  That's how against the death penalty he is, which is fucking wild.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Good for him.

• 1:34:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Great guy. But the, you know, the, the fucking phenomena of, of people wanting, women wanting to marry people on death row is beyond my comprehension.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  Takes all types.

• 1:34:57Danny Jones?

  But it's, it's common. It's very, very common.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  No, I mean, in terms of numbers, like compared to what? Compared to guys on death row don't get married or compared to how many people get married in America. It's a fringe thing.

• 1:35:09Danny Jones?

  It is a fringe thing, right. But it's, it's, it's not, I mean, you hear.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  And we're a big country, you know?

• 1:35:14Danny Jones?

  Maybe it's just when it does happen, we just, it's all over the headlines. So we think it happens everywhere.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:35:20Danny Jones?

  I mean, Charles Manson got married how many times when he was on, when he was in prison?

• 1:35:23Speaker 03

  Did he? Yeah, I forget.

• 1:35:24Danny Jones?

  He got married a few times, I think.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  Was it more than once? Yeah.

• 1:35:27Danny Jones?

  I think so. But I think it's like a real psychological thing, you know, like, like, I, I mean, I know people who married people in prison, although they eventually got out, they weren't on death row, you know?

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  I think we, I'm trying to remember how many people we interviewed who were, who were proper, like, death row wives, right? And couldn't have been more than four.

• 1:35:45Danny Jones?

  What a good TV show, Death Row Wives.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  Actually, they were, they were characters, you know? But it was, in general, and it wasn't, there was always a reason. You could always figure it out.

• 1:36:00Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Like, there was always something that had happened. There was a lot of, I forget how many of the four had had previous, like, had come out of abusive relationships and things like that. And so you think, well, you wouldn't want to go, you know, you wouldn't want to be connected to somebody accused of murder, right? But it's also like, I'm trying to remember who it was who kind of broke this down neatly. It was somebody who worked either in the county clerk's office where they get married or something like that. But like, if you think about it, for a woman who's had a hard time with men and who's, you know, been traumatized, it's like, here's a guy, you always know where he's gonna be. Anytime you see him.

• 1:36:39Danny Jones?

  You know, he's never gonna cheat on you.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's glass and guards between you and you can, you know, you can, you can have an emotional relationship with someone who can't turn it around on you, right?

• 1:36:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:52Speaker 03

  Who's not gonna be able, who can't get through the glass. You can go buy them little snacks that you, you know, put in the bucket and it goes over to them. And so.

• 1:37:00Danny Jones?

  There's no conjugal visits on death row, right?

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  Not in Texas.

• 1:37:03Danny Jones?

  Not in Texas.

• 1:37:04Speaker 03

  That's for fucking sure, yeah. No. I don't know about elsewhere.

• 1:37:08Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  That's a little European for us here.

• 1:37:12Danny Jones?

  A little European.

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  Well, so is death row, I should say.

• 1:37:14Danny Jones?

  Death row. Prison is pretty, uh, is pretty American. There's not much.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  Although it's, um, thinking of the, the French lady who married Hank Skinner, Sandrine, and the fact that she was a French anti-death row activist is always funny that 1980, I believe it's 19, well, 1980 is the year France outlawed the death penalty. And I think it's 1978. So the year the Deer Hunter came out is the last time the guillotine was used.

• 1:37:41Danny Jones?

  In 1978?

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  Right, yeah. So she was, Sandrine, yeah, Sandrine was in her, in her teens, I think, and she was in early, like, that was, she was part of the activist community that got them to outlaw the death penalty. Uh, it was either in France or it was in like Martinique, which is still France, or like French Guiana. You know, it's a department of France. It's like a state, right?

• 1:38:04Danny Jones?

  The last time the guillotine was used?

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Seventy-seven, okay, sorry, the year Star Wars came out.

• 1:38:08Danny Jones?

  Nineteen, that wasn't that fucking long ago, bro.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  I know, right? It's, it's pretty funny.

• 1:38:12Danny Jones?

  Ten years before I was born.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:38:16Danny Jones?

  A Tunisian man was beheaded after being convicted of murder.

• 1:38:19Speaker 03

  Does it say where they did it? I'm curious which department of France it was. If it was in metropolitan France or, uh...

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  Uh, rest, oh, oh, he's in Marseille. Oh, it must have been, yeah. Okay, they didn't, probably, oh, they did it in Marseille. Bullmet Prison. Interesting.

• 1:38:38Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:39Speaker 03

  What'd he do? Oh, Jesus.

• 1:38:40Danny Jones?

  Pimp killer? He was known as the pimp killer?

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  I mean, does that mean he killed pimps or is that, um, was he also, was it like pimp comma killer?

• 1:38:48Danny Jones?

  It says in seventy-three, a twenty-one-year-old woman, uh, had met in the hospital while receiving, uh, while recovering from an amputation, filed a complaint against him stating that he had tried to force her into prostitution.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  Jesus, he beat women to death? That fucking sucks.

• 1:39:02Danny Jones?

  He tried to force amputees into prostitution.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Jeez.

• 1:39:06Danny Jones?

  That's pretty metal.

• 1:39:09Danny Jones?

  Wow, released from custody during the...

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  Oh, and he amputated her. What the fuck?

• 1:39:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, he did the amputation?

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, this guy sounds like a bit of a jerk.

• 1:39:17Danny Jones?

  Holy shit, dude.

• 1:39:21Danny Jones?

  Maybe he deserved the guillotine.

• 1:39:23Speaker 03

  Hey, look, I'm not a...

• 1:39:26Danny Jones?

  God, a guillotine would probably be pretty painless.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  That's the whole idea.

• 1:39:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you wouldn't feel shit.

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Public Safety Razor, that's it's, that was its official name.

• 1:39:33Danny Jones?

  The Public Safety Razor, really?

• 1:39:34Speaker 03

  Dr. Guillotine, who made it, yeah. It made it because it was like, the previous method of beheading people was you hit their head with an axe and that depends on how well you swung it, how heavy.

• 1:39:44Danny Jones?

  Sometimes takes a couple swings.

• 1:39:45Speaker 03

  Sometimes takes a couple swings, yeah. And so the Guillotine's whole point was that it was like, look, comes down evenly, heads off, dead immediately, or dead in six seconds or whatever.

• 1:39:53Danny Jones?

  There's actually some people that refute that they die instantly because like-

• 1:39:56Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, because they hold up the head.

• 1:39:57Danny Jones?

  They hold up the head and it-

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  And it's still talking.

• 1:39:59Danny Jones?

  Right, right. What the fuck is that, bro? Are you still conscious after that?

• 1:40:02Speaker 03

  Well, you know, you still got blood in your brain for the first few seconds.

• 1:40:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Why wouldn't your brain keep working? Just because it's been, you know, maybe the shock of having your fucking spinal cord and, you know, whole neck severed would be enough to like, kill you, like the way some people like when shot are, you know, dead before they hit the ground. Just because the body, it shocks the body so hard for that.

• 1:40:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  But who knows? You know?

• 1:40:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Such a weird thing, like, let's try to find out more humane ways to fucking murder people. Such a funny thing. I'm sure, I've fucking been telling this, I told this story with Hamilton, me and Hamilton talked about the Mr. Death documentary.

• 1:40:44Speaker 03

  Oh right, yeah. Well, his dad made that, yeah.

• 1:40:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:40:46Speaker 03

  Fucking amazing documentary.

• 1:40:47Danny Jones?

  Incredible documentary, right?

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  Fred Lookter, right?

• 1:40:50Danny Jones?

  Look, uh, no, Lucher, Fred Lucher.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  Oh, it's Lucher.

• 1:40:54Danny Jones?

  Fred Lucher. Just fucking figured out how to repair an electric chair and make it more humane so people didn't fucking get turned into vegetables.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  Found himself a job, yeah.

• 1:41:02Danny Jones?

  Got a great job, right?

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:04Danny Jones?

  Made gas chambers, then got fucking hoodwinked by, uh, Zundel and then to testify against how the, the Jews weren't really killed by the gas chambers.

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  Was that during the David Irving trial? Was he the character or the expert witness in that?

• 1:41:18Danny Jones?

  I thought it was the Ernst Zundel.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  Uh, that sounds right, okay. I haven't, I haven't seen it for, for a long time.

• 1:41:23Danny Jones?

  What year, can you find out what year the Ernst Zundel-

• 1:41:26Speaker 03

  All those Holocaust deniers kinda, you know, sound the same after a little bit.

• 1:41:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they're still around, bro. They're still fucking ever. It's like there's this new

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  Oh, what, on the internet, on Quora?

• 1:41:35Danny Jones?

  There's a crazy resurgence of, uh, of antisemitism online and Christianity, interestingly enough. Everyone's becoming a Christian right now.

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  Right, I've seen, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:45Danny Jones?

  Like, all these podcasters are getting baptized and, uh, you know, on, on, on YouTube.

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  What was that thing you were saying about figuring out your niche so that you can maximize views?

• 1:41:54Danny Jones?

  Do you think that's what it is?

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:41:56Danny Jones?

  I had, my friend told me that yesterday, too. I was talking to my buddy Neil about this, and he was thinking, he was saying the same thing.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Getting baptized on camera is attention-seeking behavior, I'm sorry.

• 1:42:07Danny Jones?

  No, is this Ernst Zono? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, Zono. Oh, eighty-five, oh, eighty-five, okay, so it wasn't, I thought it wasn't farther, longer ago.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  Has it got Freud, uh, Leuchter in his, uh, or Luch, Luchter?

• 1:42:17Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah. Whatever happened with that trial?

• 1:42:22Speaker 03

  He lost, right?

• 1:42:23Danny Jones?

  Is he, where is he now?

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  Zono?

• 1:42:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Does it say where he is?

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:42:31Danny Jones?

  Where's this fucking weirdo now? He died.

• 1:42:34Speaker 03

  Bad, wild bad.

• 1:42:36Danny Jones?

  In Germany.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  Picture Bad in Wurtemberg, Germany. That's three bads. That's how, that's how bad that guy was.

• 1:42:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the, I don't know, I don't know, is the, um, I guess there are a lot of Christians in the United States. I guess there's more Christians here than anywhere.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  On Earth?

• 1:42:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's more Christians in the US. This is a highly, uh-

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  In South America?

• 1:42:57Danny Jones?

  Brazil would be number two, I think. The United States is number one. More, more, yeah, we're number one, Brazil's number two. I think Mexico is number three. And then, and then probably Russia. I was a guess, I would say Russia was the best.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  I was gonna guess Russia also, yeah.

• 1:43:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 1:43:09Danny Jones?

  But, um, yeah, what a weird thing to do for views, become a Christian. I don't know. I can't, I can't, I just can't imagine that they would, that people would do that, would grift Christianity.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  Well, right, it, uh, it, um, it overturns your expectations, doesn't it? You'd never, what, what, what wouldn't you, you know, what's the least likely thing you'd think of to become like an internet trend? How about Catholicism, right?

• 1:43:37Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  And then, here we are.

• 1:43:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Or is it just like people copycatting other people?

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  Well, that too, yeah. Then it becomes social contagion, yeah.

• 1:43:48Danny Jones?

  Right. That becomes real.

• 1:43:51Speaker 03

  And it's one of, you know, you pick, pick from the big four religions. It's like, pick the one you grew up with.

• 1:43:58Danny Jones?

  Muslim, Islam?

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  You get a little bit of that too, yeah.

• 1:44:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I love, I love how, uh, when you and Gavin were talking, you're like, he was talking about how much he hates Islam. And you're like, well, there's like a quarter of the world's population.

• 1:44:12Speaker 03

  A third.

• 1:44:13Danny Jones?

  A third, a third of the world's population.

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  That's your enemy?

• 1:44:15Danny Jones?

  And he's like-

• 1:44:16Speaker 03

  One third of all humanity?

• 1:44:17Danny Jones?

  He's like, uh, yeah, so. And you're like, which Islam countries have you been to? He's like, uh, Paris.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  Got me there.

• 1:44:25Danny Jones?

  If there's gonna be racist, this is what I will say.

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  It's just bar, bar arguing.

• 1:44:30Danny Jones?

  If there is, like, I don't, I'm not calling Gavin racist, okay? But if there are racists, I would rather them be self-aware, funny racists.

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  And out in open?

• 1:44:40Danny Jones?

  And out in open, right, yeah.

• 1:44:42Speaker 03

  That's like Malcolm X, yeah. I forget his, uh, term for it.

• 1:44:46Danny Jones?

  Is that, is there a quote about that?

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I really wish I could remember the quote better because he was talking about, like, overt racism in, in American whites versus, um, kind of like white liberals in the 50s and 60s, who he referred to as, I want to say it was like wolves versus like a dog that may turn on you or something. He's like, at least I, I know where I stand.

• 1:45:11Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:45:11Speaker 03

  With the, um, you know, the Wallaces and, um, I forget the sheriff's name, but yeah.

• 1:45:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  Of the world.

• 1:45:19Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of, um, what is that gentleman's name again? I've had him on the show. He's the black dude who turned a bunch of KKK people out of the KKK. Daryl Davis.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Oh, okay, I've heard of him, yeah.

• 1:45:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:45:32Danny Jones?

  He was a, basically, when he was a kid, he was like marching, uh, doing some march in some parade or something with the Boy Scouts. And then somebody, somebody like threw a fucking brick and hit him in the head.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  Jesus.

• 1:45:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and he was like, what the fuck was that? And that was the first time he ever experienced racism. His mom had to like sit him down.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  That's a pretty bad one, yeah.

• 1:45:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah, not a great way.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  Usually it's someone says, you know.

• 1:45:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  Maybe a bad name or something.

• 1:45:53Danny Jones?

  And his mom had to like explain to him and he didn't understand it. He was like, what? I don't understand. And he spent like his whole college, uh, he went to school overseas in like Europe or something like that. What is that word again? When you do an exchange.

• 1:46:04Speaker 03

  Study abroad.

• 1:46:05Danny Jones?

  No, it was like.

• 1:46:06Speaker 03

  Foreign exchange.

• 1:46:06Danny Jones?

  Foreign exchange, foreign exchange student, yeah. Study abroad, not that retarded.

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry. Which broad we studying?

• 1:46:13Danny Jones?

  How dare you? So anyway, so he came back here and when he was in his teens or whatever. And then, um, I forget, I think he was in Virginia, maybe. I could be wrong. Tennessee, Virginia, one of the two. Anyways, he, uh, he went to a bar and there ended up being like a bunch of KKK people there.

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:46:30Danny Jones?

  And he was like talking to them, whatever. And then he met one guy or whatever. And he was like befriending the guy that were talking about music and all this stuff. And, uh, he said he really liked the guy. And then he learned like, you know, a couple hours of the conversation that this guy was in the KKK. And he was like, whoa, what? And so we basically, you know, he made his life's mission to like meet every KKK member he possibly could. And he had to like trick a lot of them. Like he was trying to meet these grand wizards and stuff like that. So he was setting them up, saying, oh, there's this journalist who wants to meet you or whatever. They wouldn't say he was black.

• 1:46:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:47:00Danny Jones?

  And, uh, they would fucking walk, they would film some of the, um.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 1:47:04Danny Jones?

  Some of it and they'd be like, what the fuck? Whatever. They ended up sitting down and talking to him and he befriended a lot of them and got a lot of them to fucking lay down their wizard hats and, you know, denounce the KKK and all this crap. And he was saying like the, the number one common denominator, I think, like if I remember correctly, between all of these people, was that they had never left like the little town they were raised and born and raised in. Never once like traveled outside of state lines. You know, they're just fucking ignorant of the world.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, you know, I grew up in Georgia in the nineties. So it was like, you hear it from people's parents. It wasn't that, you know, there wasn't, it wasn't everybody, right? Small, small percentage of the population. Um, in, but I never heard it from anyone who I figured out was smart later on. It always came from a like, the middle of, the middle of the pack or lower. Types of people, you know?

• 1:48:00Danny Jones?

  On the IQ chain.

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  If you wanna, yeah, if you wanna use that metric.

• 1:48:06Danny Jones?

  It's good metric.

• 1:48:07Speaker 03

  There's been, I've seen a resurgence of IQ talk a lot lately. And it's like, I feel like a lot of these people think it's like a Dungeons and Dragons stat. Like, they don't understand how IQ, what IQ is supposed to be and how it's assessed or whatever, that it's just like a hard number that is intelligence, you know? And it'd be like, that guy is, you know, the guy with the 118 IQ is five smarter than the guy with the 113.

• 1:48:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  So he should be in charge.

• 1:48:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, you guys were talking about this too.

• 1:48:35Speaker 03

  Oh, was I?

• 1:48:36Danny Jones?

  Somebody complimented you about having a high IQ. You're like, oh, that's nice. And you're like, you were like bragging or something.

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  I know what it means.

• 1:48:42Danny Jones?

  Something like, it's great. Like, you like the IQ argument when you're smart.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Oh, no, I, oh, I'm sorry. You're right. I forgot that was in the, they made it into the cut. I was talking to Gavin about that.

• 1:48:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. I was talking about, cause he, he bases a lot of, um, his arguments in IQ and stuff. And I'm like, I think IQ is kind of bullshit. I think it's like, I don't think it equates to intelligence. Like, I don't think there's a hard number that you can put on that. And there's

• 1:49:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  tremendous number of examples that you can pull from just to kind of demonstrate that. And also, it was like, when I was talking to them, this would have been in like the mid 2000s, you know, at the vice office or whatever. And it'd probably be in relation to that book, The Bell Curve. And I'm like, when were all these, you know, when did he IQ test every race? What, like the 70s? Like, like, how, how hard of a, you know, kind of innate characteristic is this? That it's gonna last, that we can rely on it 40 years later? With a completely different group of people than the sample or whatever? And he said, he was like, well, he had, his, his retort was, he was like, well, one time I heard your first wife say that you had a high IQ.

• 1:49:50Speaker 03

  And I'm like, that's your argument? That my ex-wife once said something? Just like, alright.

• 1:49:57Danny Jones?

  But you didn't argue about it. You agreed with her.

• 1:50:00Speaker 03

  I don't even know if I was there. I don't even know if that happened. He didn't know, like, he didn't remember my ex-wife's name.

• 1:50:05Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  He identified her by her breast, which I was like, oh, it was a little, you know.

• 1:50:10Danny Jones?

  So what was the premise of that bell curve book?

• 1:50:13Speaker 03

  Oh, just that, um, I'd never made it more than five pages into that.

• 1:50:17Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:50:18Speaker 03

  Um, it is famously that there is, uh, if you, if you look at IQs by race, there, the bell curve is a normal distribution and that the different races come out at different averages on it.

• 1:50:35Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  I think most within a standard deviation, maybe some within two, but it's, it gets used, it helps prop up arguments that race is genetically determinative of people's intelligence and achievement. And it's like, what, how many, how many people's IQ test is this fucking based on?

• 1:50:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  How are we defining race? It's like.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And the way he was, he was explaining it, and I could be wrong, is that the argument was it was like, it was like recognizing patterns in IQ and different types of races, but like you have to look at each individual as like a, in a vacuum, right? A separate, a separate individual.

• 1:51:08Speaker 03

  He treats everybody as individual.

• 1:51:09Danny Jones?

  Keep everybody as individual, right? You can't automatically like take, so, okay, oh, okay, you, you are, uh, Chinese, so you are automatically better at math. Like, it's not, doesn't work that way.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  Even though I could hear him saying that very easily. Um, it's, it's tricky in that the term racism means both hates people of other races, but also there's, I guess what we used to call scientific racism too, that you're, that is, like, race is a biological reality and that a person's skin color is directly correlated to, you know, genetically determined traits which govern their intelligence and how they behave and that kind of shit. And they overlap tremendously. One can lead to the other and vice versa and so forth, but yeah.

• 1:51:49Danny Jones?

  But the, so the Chinese argument is interesting. So is the, are Chinese people generally more good at math because they're, because of their heritage? Or is it because of their? Culture that they're the way their school, the way their education system works.

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  It's gonna be 99% their fucking culture in my mind.

• 1:52:07Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:52:08Speaker 03

  What is a Chinese person, somebody with, you know, pure Han heritage? Where does that begin? Like, at what point does the Chinese race begin? And what delineates it? If a, you know, Korean woman marries a Chinese guy and they have a kid, is he now half? Does he now have half the Chinese prowess in math? Like, it's just, it's baloney, you know? It's discredited nonsense.

• 1:52:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:33Speaker 03

  Everybody in the world behaves like I, you know, like they look, you know? It's just not a, not a great, uh, yeah.

• 1:52:39Danny Jones?

  The funny thing-

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Doesn't have much scientific rigor to it.

• 1:52:41Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, totally. I had this dude from the Human Genome Project on here and he was telling me that all, every single human being on Earth descended from something like 10,000 people.

• 1:52:53Speaker 03

  Right, there's the bottleneck, right? Yeah, the big genetic bottleneck.

• 1:52:56Danny Jones?

  It's insane.

• 1:52:57Speaker 03

  Crazy.

• 1:52:57Danny Jones?

  We came from that many people and they're like, you know, it's not that fucking, we're not that fucking different, we're pretty much the same. And another funny thing is, even, so like, there's this whole generational war between Israel and Palestine, right?

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:12Danny Jones?

  Also, they have, they're literally genetically identical.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  Oh, it's, I mean, it's funnier than that. People talk about Palestinian antisemitism and it's like, there are Semitic people too, you know? I mean, it's like, I know, I understand that we're dressing up the word Jew hate-

• 1:53:27Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  With antisemitism, but it's like, can we, can we at least be a little more accurate? Yeah.

• 1:53:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  No, it is the same fucking-

• 1:53:33Danny Jones?

  They have the same exact heritage, they come from the Canaanites, both of them.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:53:36Danny Jones?

  It's just fucking culture shit.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  The idea that groups, we, back when, like, I was taking, like, high flute and critical theory, like, graduate classes at, uh, in college, we talk about, um, like, essentialism and essentialist narratives. And it's the idea that these, you know, the traits, specifically the traits you can see and the traits that you can organize people into groups with are, you know, necessarily innate and that a Palestinian person must behave palestinianly because of their Palestinian-ness, you know, is like 100% concocted horseshit, right?

• 1:54:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's different. It's, it's, it's, uh.

• 1:54:16Speaker 03

  That all these, all these, you know, it's like the borders of a, of a country is like, it's like some guy made these, right?

• 1:54:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:22Speaker 03

  These is, I guess it's, you know, become some sort of dog whistle or not to be like, this is a social construct, which doesn't mean it's not, it doesn't have validity or is not, you know, important or useful or whatever. It's like, but this is 100% socially constructed shit that could change, that, you know, should be examined.

• 1:54:39Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And this is also part of the thing we were talking about, like the social contagion and how like the media fuels all this stuff, right? Because like 99.999% of people who have an opinion on things like Israel and Palestine or Iran, don't have a fucking clue.

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:57Danny Jones?

  About what it's like there or like what the people are like there, nor have they met people there. And it's like, fucking, you know, just the television.

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  But they've all got an opinion. Yeah. They've all got a take.

• 1:55:09Danny Jones?

  They've all got a take, which is, you know, they've stolen from somebody else who, that person stole it from somebody else.

• 1:55:14Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:55:15Danny Jones?

  And, you know, it's like.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Internet is a font of received wisdom.

• 1:55:18Danny Jones?

  Nothing is fucking real anymore.

• 1:55:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:55:20Danny Jones?

  We're in post-reality.

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  But how, how real was it before? And why was it real before? Right? This is my thing. I've got a girlfriend who's kind of freaked out about the fact that you can no longer read the news and trust sources and things of this nature. I'm like, well, why did you trust them to begin with? How much does this actually change your life? Right? You know? And how much of this is seeing the lay of the land that previously felt firm and stable from a new vantage point? Right? You know, we all know now to take what the New York Times writers write with a grain of salt because they fucked up things, right?

• 1:55:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  And, you know, there's a, there's a slant to almost everything they write that is, that can be, you know, delineated into a discreet agenda.

• 1:56:07Danny Jones?

  We're more aware of the bullshit now.

• 1:56:09Speaker 03

  But what, you know, at what point did this start? Why was, you know, like, how do you not think that that was the case with specifically the New York Times in like the 60s and 70s? And what is then the basis for your understanding of history?

• 1:56:23Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Project Mockingbird.

• 1:56:25Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, which one's that?

• 1:56:26Danny Jones?

  I think that was during Kennedy where he gave, he gave, um.

• 1:56:31Speaker 03

  I was thinking of Project Mongoose.

• 1:56:33Danny Jones?

  Type in Project Mockingbird. I don't want to fuck this up. Basically, what it was, it was like allowing the the top four or five news publications.

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  Oh, Henry Lutz.

• 1:56:44Danny Jones?

  The CIA. So Project Mockingbird refers to the two distinct but related activities by the CIA. One was a telephone intercept program officially named Project Mockingbird, targeting two journalists for publishing classified information. There was Operation Mocking, maybe it was Mockingbird, Operation Mockingbird. Much broader program.

• 1:57:02Speaker 03

  There's two. One's an alleged program.

• 1:57:04Danny Jones?

  Go up, go up, go up, up, up, up, up.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  Engaged in a widespread advertisement.

• 1:57:07Danny Jones?

  I get it. Manipulating the American news media for propaganda purposes. Right. So what year was that? Sixty-three? Right. So it was the intelligence agencies specifically influencing the news media for propaganda.

• 1:57:18Speaker 03

  Like, of course, yeah. I mean, there's, what was it? We were talking about Time Magazine earlier, and Henry Lutz, I don't know how you pronounce his name, Lutzey, Lucci, is famously like a effect, he's he's close friends with the Dulles Brothers, an effective mouthpiece for whatever, you know, whatever ideas they want to put out into the public discourse, you know?

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  That's the nature of the beast.

• 1:57:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yep. Everything for the almighty dollar.

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  It has a project name, though, right? Because it's also, it's like, this is, it's like, frankly, this is how journalism, power, and society work. There's a few people, and no matter their, you know, specific duties, they they all, you know, kind of collaborate with each other, socialize, like, how do you think journal, you know, how do you think journalists get get the information that they get? It's by being at dinner parties. It's by knowing, having a guy that you can call regularly.

• 1:58:17Danny Jones?

  In, like, what kind of guy are you talking about?

• 1:58:19Speaker 03

  Sources.

• 1:58:20Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  What is a source, right? You know?

• 1:58:25Danny Jones?

  And how does like, I wonder how it works today, like in publications like the New York Times or these other big magazines, right? Like with, with how, like, do they know they're being influenced by the government or intelligence agencies? Or does that just kind of like, happen without them knowing about it? And they kind of like gets massaged in, or like, sources get planted? I have a friend who, because I, because it's interesting, because I have a friend who was publishing a piece on how, this was like, two years ago, he was working on this piece where, with like, 25 sources, where, who were all former, intelligence community people in the US? Yeah. And it was basically exposing how the CIA was using a NATO proxy intelligence service to

• 1:59:08Danny Jones?

  conduct sabotage operations inside of Russia, like blowing up munitions depots and train tracks and things like this. And he worked on the, he worked on, wet works, no. He worked on this for like, over a year, with 25 different sources or whatever, with an editor at, I don't know, he didn't tell me exactly, he didn't want to give me the exact name of the publication, but it was like, one of the top three. And it came time to publish it around December, and he had like, one final call before they pressed the button to launch the story, right? Right. And she, and the editor of the piece that he was working with, was like, okay, we gotta have one more call with the deputy director of the CIA. He's like, what? Here it comes, yeah. So like, they're on the phone, and they're going through it or whatever, and he goes, I

• 1:59:48Danny Jones?

  categorically deny all of this, this is untrue, and even if it was true, this would put people's lives at risk. Right? So it's like, we're not gonna, he's like, I completely deny this, whatever, this is false, blah blah blah. And he was like, okay, fine, we'll put a blurb at the end of the article saying the deputy director categorically denies any of this is real. And then, so he hangs up, and he's like, cool, let's go, let's go ahead and launch it, I'll, I'll, I'll write this up, we'll add it to the story, and we'll be done. And the editor goes, no, we have an off the record agreement with the CIA, so if they deny anything, we will not publish it. Click. That's

• 2:00:28Danny Jones?

  the end of that. So, just one anecdote, if that's happening, you know, with people wasting fucking a year of their life on a story and such, like, that can happen, I wonder, how much more is going on? Who knows? We will never know. We will never fucking know. But, yeah, Project Mockingbird, 1963, Kennedy.

• 2:00:51Danny Jones?

  It's a weird time we're living in with the media, bro, and all these individual content creators and put these like, it's funny too, there's like only a certain amount of platforms that exist.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:01:02Danny Jones?

  To publish all this stuff, right?

• 2:01:03Speaker 03

  Well, that's the weird part, right? Like, wasn't the dream of the internet that everybody can just publish their own thing and make their own website?

• 2:01:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:01:10Danny Jones?

  That was the best internet.

• 2:01:11Speaker 03

  How did we end up with like four websites?

• 2:01:13Danny Jones?

  Consolidated.

• 2:01:14Speaker 03

  And this is called social media, right?

• 2:01:15Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:01:16Speaker 03

  Well, it's media consolidation, which I grew up in the middle of, you know, in the 90s, right?

• 2:01:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  Um, but it's interesting to see it on the, you know, the great democratizing medium of the internet.

• 2:01:25Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:01:26Danny Jones?

  And then Google too, I'm familiar with like the history of Google and how it was like, it was like incubated by the CIA and.

• 2:01:33Speaker 03

  And like funded with DARPA money and shit like that.

• 2:01:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the whole search.

• 2:01:35Speaker 03

  Everything is, I, I love when like fucking tech bros talk about like the self-made men of Silicon Valley.

• 2:01:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:01:41Speaker 03

  It's like, you guys were fucking subsidized by.

• 2:01:44Danny Jones?

  Sergey Brin was getting visited by the NSA, CIA, DARPA.

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  The entirety of Silicon Valley's existence, yeah.

• 2:01:54Danny Jones?

  Which is a little unsettling, right?

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. And the whole, whole thing's unsettling.

• 2:02:02Danny Jones?

  You know, so you have, you have Google and YouTube, which are basically one, number one and two websites on the earth, face of the earth.

• 2:02:09Speaker 03

  What was the recent one that, oh, OpenAI just, um, what did they do? Like just this morning, it was an announcement, so maybe they did it a while ago. They either gave, they're in partnership either directly with the Defense Department or Palantir.

• 2:02:27Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:02:28Speaker 03

  Don't take my word on that.

• 2:02:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:29Speaker 03

  One of those things such that everybody was like, great. You know, it's like, well, this is the way, this is the way all this shit has worked for the last 30 years, why should it change now? You know?

• 2:02:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I don't know if shit's just getting worse or I'm paying more attention.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  Well, could, it could be both.

• 2:02:45Danny Jones?

  OpenAI has secured a $200 million contract with you.

• 2:02:47Speaker 03

  It is Defense Department, okay.

• 2:02:48Danny Jones?

  To develop a prototype AI system for national security applications, okay. Well, that's not as bad as the contract Palantir got two weeks ago for 800 million from the Pentagon.

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  It's not as much, yeah.

• 2:02:57Danny Jones?

  Can you Google, uh, Palantir's recent, uh, Palantir, new Palantir defense contract?

• 2:03:05Speaker 03

  There was, did you see, uh, what's his name, Alex Karp?

• 2:03:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:09Speaker 03

  The video of him, um, fantasizing about, uh, getting drones to spray fentanyl-laced urine on-

• 2:03:16Danny Jones?

  What?

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  CIA analysts who had fucked him over. He was-

• 2:03:19Danny Jones?

  This is a real video?

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's him, uh, he's doing some sort of Q and A on a stage with, with, like, I don't know what the fucking context of it was, but they were asking him about like, think about his like dreams and urges, like fantasies for what they can do with technology or something like that. And he talked about, he mentions being like, oh, you want my like good dreams or like my dark dreams or whatever? And, uh, they're like, well, let's start with the dark dreams. And he's like, I wish, and you see him getting like, his voice starts to crack and he's like actually angry. And he's like, I wish I could have a fleet of drones spray fentanyl-laced urine on every analyst who's fucked me over. And it's like, your fantasy is to frame intelligence agents for drug use?

• 2:04:04Speaker 03

  Like, you're, you're a man in his 50s or I believe, and like the head of one of the most like, not only successful but powerful companies on earth.

• 2:04:15Danny Jones?

  Isn't it also interesting that Peter Thiel's one of the owners of Palantir? Who's been one of the biggest Trump supporters in history? And Alex Karp is the CEO of Palantir, who just donated like millions of dollars to Kamala Harris for her campaign.

• 2:04:28Speaker 03

  Oh, did he?

• 2:04:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. He even, he admitted it in his New York Times article.

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 2:04:32Danny Jones?

  Such a weird thing, bro. It's like this uniparty thing behind, like, behind, behind our projection of right and left is like all the billionaires who, doesn't matter to them because they're just gonna still get whatever, they're gonna control everything.

• 2:04:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:45Danny Jones?

  They're gonna co-opt whatever side.

• 2:04:47Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:04:47Danny Jones?

  So it's a, so the recent Palantir-

• 2:04:49Speaker 03

  Have you ever read Harold Innis? It's, uh, they're, um, what do you call them? They're a technology monopoly. Anytime a new technology takes roots that the people- In control of it, eventually consolidate and often conspire into a new effective political elite, you know, happened with radio and television, you could argue it happened with the printing press back in the late 15th century, and we're watching it happen now. Do you ever read Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman?

• 2:05:18Danny Jones?

  I've read a little bit of Marshall McLuhan.

• 2:05:21Speaker 03

  Okay, do you know Neil Postman is, he had a protege who wrote a little less optimistically, kind of about very much around similar things. I've actually, I mentioned this because I've got his book in the other room, I just brought it on the plane. His most famous book is called Amusing Ourselves to Death.

• 2:05:37Danny Jones?

  Oh yes, I have heard of that.

• 2:05:38Speaker 03

  You've seen that? Yeah, the famous cover. And it's good, and it's sort of like, you know, whereas Marshall McLuhan was like, those who, those who fear like television for what what is on it right now, miss the fact that it's the format of the medium that is, that will impart the great cultural changes. That's the whole idea with, you know, the medium is the message.

• 2:05:57Danny Jones?

  The medium is the message.

• 2:05:58Speaker 03

  Right? That it's like, you can't cram Shakespeare onto television. Television will be its own thing, it'll have its own effect. It'll be disruptive and it'll be good and bad, and we have to, you know, it's like, just wait and adjust. And Neil Postman comes along 20 years later and he's like, you know, it wouldn't hurt if we put some Shakespeare or something on it. It's like, we don't, just because, you know, the content is less important than the format of the medium, doesn't mean we have to put literal garbage on it, you know, like watch TV in America in the 80s. And it's like, we could do a little bit better than turning all news into entertainment and et cetera and so forth. Anyways, you wrote a book called Technopoly in the early 90s, which is what I'm reading

• 2:06:39Speaker 03

  right now. And it's, which is predictive and it's amazing because it's so early, he doesn't even, like, the internet hasn't been named yet. So what he's referring to is he's like computer information systems. He's like, and, and computers will be, you know, recapitulating some of the like cultural effects and political effects of the printing press. He's like, this is different, because whereas the printing press is a technology that you could, you know, if you taught someone how to make a printing press, they could go to their country or their little town or whatever, and set up their new printing press. It's like, we haven't had an experience before. Except, you know, arguably like television, radio or something like that where the, you know, the means of the information revolution is controlled by companies.

• 2:07:23Speaker 03

  You can't build your own computer, like you can't build your own silicon transistors. That this is, this changes the lay of the land, that people control, you know, I mean, people control every single element, specific people, you know, specific people at specific companies.

• 2:07:43Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the idea of, of content being less important than the medium is interesting. You know, like, and how does that evolve, right? Like, how, like, just look how it's evolved so far.

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  Well, it's, I, I still think back with, with a sad sort of wistfulness about fighting the war against the word content. Cause that was like mid 2000s. I'm trying to remember the first time I heard it. But it was literally something that like, marketing and advertising guys would say as a placeholder for something they were selling, right? You know, well, we're, we're gonna make like a tip in, which would be like a little thing that goes inside the magazine, you know, for Camel cigarettes or.

• 2:08:27Danny Jones?

  Content is like commodizing it.

• 2:08:30Speaker 03

  And it will, content is like, it, I mean, content makes it content. And he's like, and then the content, which literally means whatever the fuck we put in here.

• 2:08:37Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:38Speaker 03

  You know, whoever's art or writing.

• 2:08:41Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:42Speaker 03

  But it's, it's all interchangeable. It really doesn't matter.

• 2:08:44Danny Jones?

  It doesn't matter.

• 2:08:44Speaker 03

  You know, just Laura Mipsom this shit up right now. And to have that become the actual.

• 2:08:50Danny Jones?

  It's a vehicle. All it means is it's taking art and turning it into a vehicle for revenue.

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  Sausage filling, right?

• 2:08:55Danny Jones?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  It's what goes in the casing. The casing is what you sell, but the content's what's in it. It's crazy to me, and this is, you know, a long lost battle to hear kids refer to this. Like my goal in life is to be a content creator. And it's just like brutal.

• 2:09:09Danny Jones?

  Or just like going through your life and experiencing like an interesting moment. And like, whoa, hold on, this is content.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  Grist for the mill, yeah. We are all, we are all now millers of experience.

• 2:09:20Danny Jones?

  And people will like, you know, this is real. People will choose what they're gonna do with their life or with their day based on what kind of content they can get or what kind of video they can get. Like, what are we gonna do today, Timmy? Oh, I don't know, let's fucking go to the lake and fucking see if we can catch a shark.

• 2:09:38Speaker 03

  If it gets them out of the house, I'm happy.

• 2:09:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just weird how like, it's reversed.

• 2:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:09:45Danny Jones?

  It's reversed. Now you're gonna design your day based around how much content you can get.

• 2:09:52Speaker 03

  Well, it's like flipping the news, right? From an event happens and you see it and so you write about it to communicate that event to other people too. You go and seek out the event and sometimes cause it such that it is news.

• 2:10:03Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's like even Hamilton was telling a story about this, how like some company tried to get him to conduct an interview and they wanted to reverse engineer the interview.

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, that's very common, yeah. And he was talking about National Geographic and how that was kind of the, the way they did, um, their, the, the, the way they would pre-produce a documentary, right? Instead of just being like, oh, this seems like, this seems like an interesting person, go film him. They would wanna know exactly, exactly what was gonna be said there, exactly how it was gonna be set up and exactly how it would end. And we'd sometimes get folks like that at, um, in the early days in the video stuff, they would come in, sometimes from like, commercial video, like making ads or whatever. Um, and then sometimes from like, places that are like Nat Geo where it's like, not quite the news, but like mainstream, mainstream media, whatever.

• 2:10:54Speaker 03

  Who would wanna know how a story ended, you know, while writing the pitch, right? In order to get the green light to get out the door. And you're like, well, you don't, it's like, if you haven't told this, you know, if you haven't seen and reported the story, how do you know how it's gonna end?

• 2:11:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:07Speaker 03

  And I think for the most part in those, like, at places like that, Hamilton wouldn't dance with them. But like, the way, the way it is, is that you just, you make up some bullshit and you get out the door. And then if the story changes, maybe you get some. Like guy with a dick up his ass. He was like, oh, you said it was gonna end this way. I don't, you know, you have to go back and make it end this way or whatever.

• 2:11:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:11:27Speaker 03

  But it is a crummy way to do anything that's supposed to be reporting, right?

• 2:11:33Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  To know your story. It's and it's like not, it's like Google Journalism too, where it's like, it's boring. Like, why would you want to go tell a story that you already know the, you know, the ending of?

• 2:11:42Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:43Speaker 03

  Like, why don't you just sit at your desk and chat it out? Why don't you just get ChatGPT in the Defense Department to spit out fucking copy for you, for your content, right?

• 2:11:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:52Speaker 03

  Like.

• 2:11:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:53Speaker 03

  Why bother?

• 2:11:54Danny Jones?

  That generation is is fucking fading into the dark of people that are, you know, like, you're able to express that sentiment because you've, you can't, you were raised in the nineties going, you know, working at Bice, doing this stuff.

• 2:12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, but my generation sucked too. We were one magazine out of hundreds of thousands, right?

• 2:12:10Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:11Speaker 03

  Um, and there were probably a couple other good ones, but we were, you know,

• 2:12:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  the shining stars of that.

• 2:12:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:17Speaker 03

  It's like when people are nostalgic for like, you know, the yeah, yes and stuff. And I'm like, you know, most people were listening to the Black Eyed Peas back then. But it's, we always edit.

• 2:12:26Danny Jones?

  The yeah, yeah, yes. I forgot about the yeah, yeah, yes.

• 2:12:30Speaker 03

  Still going strong.

• 2:12:31Danny Jones?

  You know, it's funny. I was listening to, uh, you ever ha- has it ever happened to you where like you randomly hear a song that you've like used to listen to when you were really, really young? And, uh, you hear it now, like for me, it would be like 25 years later. And it's like, fuck, I'm really embarrassed to be listening to this, but I'm gonna play it on repeat.

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, without the embarrassment, I do that every day. Yeah. No, no, no, no.

• 2:12:54Danny Jones?

  It happened to me recently.

• 2:12:55Speaker 03

  I love it. Little time capsules.

• 2:12:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I went to a Metallica concert the other day and Limp Bizkit opened for me. And I was like, oh, so I was like, okay, whatever. I would never go to a Limp Bizkit concert. I would never admit to going to wanting to go to a Limp Bizkit concert. But I got there and I was like in the middle of the snake pit thing.

• 2:13:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Danny Jones?

  And they fucking started playing Nookie and I was like, fuck, this is awesome.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  Jacked you up.

• 2:13:14Danny Jones?

  This is sweet. And I've been listening to it on Spotify in my truck for the last week.

• 2:13:21Speaker 03

  That's how they get you.

• 2:13:21Danny Jones?

  I'm kinda ashamed to admit, well, I take it back.

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  That is a generation gap, though.

• 2:13:24Danny Jones?

  It is a generation gap.

• 2:13:25Speaker 03

  I used to get driven to school by, when I was like fifteen, by a juggalo, a juggalot. A girl who was like a grade up, who was really into Insane Clown Posse. And we'd have to listen to Insane Clown Posse, like, every fucking day in the car. And it's like, I've grown to, I went to the gathering of the juggalos, I've grown to really love Insane Clown Posse, but at the time, you know, I was a little teenage sophisticate, and I was like, come on, man, Bugs on my nuts again? We really have to listen to this every fucking day at this volume? You know?

• 2:13:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:52Speaker 03

  In the back of your Civic? And, uh, one day, she was excited, she was like, hey, she's like, I just found this new band, they're punk, like, I'm really excited about them, and she's like, and I think, I think you, like, I think you'll like them, like, a little more than, like, ICP. I'm like, cool, I like, I was like, I like punk stuff, yeah, absolutely. And it was Limp Bizkit doing Faith, George Michael's Faith. And I was like, I did not think there was something in this world that could be worse than Bugs on my nuts, or Chicken Hunter, but here it fucking is.

• 2:14:26Danny Jones?

  Hmm, yeah, yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad, but it's so bad, it's good. You know, and listen, if you're a Limp Bizkit listener out there, there's nothing wrong with listening to Limp Bizkit, you shouldn't be ashamed of it.

• 2:14:37Speaker 03

  Oh, no, fart proudly, isn't that what Benjamin Franklin said?

• 2:14:41Danny Jones?

  Did he say that?

• 2:14:41Speaker 03

  Well, I'm paraphrasing it slightly. That's how it's known, he wrote an essay about that. Which is, you're just like, fly your flag, man, like.

• 2:14:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, own it.

• 2:14:51Speaker 03

  I listen to embarrassing shit, too. We were talking about listening to Screwdriver earlier, who cares what you listen to?

• 2:14:56Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:14:56Speaker 03

  If it makes you happy, um, how does the rest of that Sheryl Crow line go? It's not that bad, it's something that bad? I'm getting the, uh, it's scanning wrong.

• 2:15:05Danny Jones?

  How does that go?

• 2:15:06Speaker 03

  It might not be that bad? Nah, it can't be.

• 2:15:08Danny Jones?

  Uh, if it makes you happy, it's not that bad. It can't be that bad.

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  It can't be that bad, okay, yeah. And then it becomes, why are you so sad?

• 2:15:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Why the hell, if it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?

• 2:15:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:15:25Danny Jones?

  I'm really, I noticed, I realized that I'm like... I regret not going to more concerts in my youth.

• 2:15:33Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:15:34Danny Jones?

  I don't know if you have that same regret, but like it's a.

• 2:15:37Speaker 03

  They went to a bunch.

• 2:15:38Danny Jones?

  You went to a bunch.

• 2:15:38Speaker 03

  I missed, there's, you ever heard of the band Orkid?

• 2:15:41Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:15:41Speaker 03

  They were like, I feel bad calling them, they were a hardcore band, right? I guess you could call them screamo, right? I, I tried to see them at least twice in high school and something happened each time I went to go see them. Like my car broke down one of the times, I think I got lost one of the times, which is a funny thing to even consider in this day and age.

• 2:15:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00Speaker 03

  But you can, you could certainly do it in Atlanta in the nineties. Um, and then I met the singer from Orkid, he actually worked like with Vice for a little while or whatever. He was in other bands like Panthers and, um, what was his third band that was even better? Violent Bullshit was his band, his name's Jason Green.

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  And he was like, uh, and, and he would hang out, like I was friends with a bunch of people, like I got to know him. He'd be at the bar, be very friendly and, um, and he was like, kinda like, like, you know, you're too older, but he was like teenage icon to me. And I missed him again, he was in Chicago and I got sick. And so that's the one, that's the one thing I regret.

• 2:16:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:39Speaker 03

  And that just happened last year.

• 2:16:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:16:41Speaker 03

  Right. But otherwise I saw plenty of concerts, I'm pretty good.

• 2:16:44Danny Jones?

  Here's the DOD thing with Palantir. So what was it? How much was it? Eight hundred million.

• 2:16:51Speaker 03

  One, I see 1.3 billion.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  Well, it was a, the 1.3 billion was like a three year deal, right? So the.

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  For Maven.

• 2:16:59Danny Jones?

  Their most recent installment, which was like two weeks ago, was eight hundred million.

• 2:17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it goes.

• 2:17:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I had this lady in here the other day.

• 2:17:09Speaker 03

  What does Maven do?

• 2:17:11Danny Jones?

  Maven is one of their new, uh, products. I don't know what exactly this, scroll down.

• 2:17:15Speaker 03

  It accelerates the targeting cycle and reduces civilian casualties. According to AI Invest.

• 2:17:23Danny Jones?

  So it can scan people's faces and figure out their terrorists.

• 2:17:26Speaker 03

  Facial scanning crap, yeah.

• 2:17:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:28Speaker 03

  I'll say.

• 2:17:29Danny Jones?

  Sounds like it, nothing could go wrong there.

• 2:17:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:17:33Danny Jones?

  There's this lady I had in the other day who was a, uh, like a math wizard who was a part of the, uh, worked for the Department of HUD.

• 2:17:40Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:41Danny Jones?

  During the Bush years.

• 2:17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:43Danny Jones?

  And, uh, she was talking about Doge, like Elon's Doge thing.

• 2:17:47Speaker 03

  It's not pronounced doggy.

• 2:17:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, I thought it was pronounced Doge.

• 2:17:50Speaker 03

  I thought the whole, the whole deal was that was how the dog spells it, right? Right?

• 2:17:56Danny Jones?

  I like that. That's good. I'm gonna start calling it doggy.

• 2:17:59Speaker 03

  Doge.

• 2:18:00Danny Jones?

  So, uh, so, um, I'm gonna steal that. Doggy. So she was basically talking about how, you know, doggy is all about creating the, you know, figuring out all this waste fraud and waste fraud and abuse or whatever. And Elon's going for the IRS, the social security, HHS, treasury, all this stuff, and trying to weed out all these things and all these people in these departments. And, uh, she was making the case. She's like, I remember during the Bush years, in fact, it was the day before nine eleven, when Donald Runsfeld came out and said, there's 2.5 trillion dollars missing from the Pentagon.

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  And it was the part of the Pentagon that got hit by the plane.

• 2:18:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, it was. It was, wasn't it? You're right.

• 2:18:45Speaker 03

  It may or may not have been. It may or may not be germane to anything.

• 2:18:49Danny Jones?

  That's the word on the street.

• 2:18:50Speaker 03

  Sorry, right.

• 2:18:51Danny Jones?

  Anyways, so now that missing money that is still unaccounted for from the Pentagon has ballooned to like somewhere in the realms of like 20 something trillion.

• 2:19:00Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 2:19:01Danny Jones?

  From the DOD and the Pentagon. So she's like, if I'm Elon, and I'm trying to find missing money, I'm going to look at the 21 trillion dollar black hole in the Pentagon, not trying to like waste time with-

• 2:19:12Speaker 03

  Go fire a bunch of middle managers.

• 2:19:14Danny Jones?

  A bunch of middle managers at the IRS, HHS, and social security.

• 2:19:19Danny Jones?

  And like, I was like, whoa. And she's like, okay, if you look at that, she goes, and this was her theory, this is all conjecture, obviously, but this was an interesting fucking story. She was saying that if I wanted to create a digital social credit system that was controlled with money-

• 2:19:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:19:40Danny Jones?

  And HHS and all this stuff, she goes, I would go to get all the data from the IRS, the treasury, HHS, and social security, and I would, I would integrate it with AI to have like a complete, comprehensive 360 degree, uh, database of every citizen in America.

• 2:20:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:02Danny Jones?

  And she goes, that's exactly what Elon did.

• 2:20:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:05Danny Jones?

  She literally, he, he literally was working with Palantir-

• 2:20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20:10Danny Jones?

  To integrate all, and XAI, to integrate all that data-

• 2:20:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:14Danny Jones?

  Into these AIs.

• 2:20:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:20:16Danny Jones?

  And they're trying to do this thing, then apparently a part of this big, beautiful bill is the stablecoin stuff. So she's saying like, they want to use stablecoin. I don't remember exactly how she worked in the stablecoin angle.

• 2:20:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:26Danny Jones?

  But like somehow, stablecoins will be able to um make this whole thing work with creating, you know, basically like, you know, Elon said before that he's a, he's really, he admires China's WeChat thing.

• 2:20:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:20:40Danny Jones?

  Where China has this thing where like, finance and social media and uh everything is condensed into one app, right? Essentially, it's called WeChat. And he thinks that that's cool and he wanted a Model X off of it. Um, so she's like, if I wanted to do that, she's like, that's exactly what the fuck I would do.

• 2:20:55Speaker 03

  Well, he wants to make the everything app, right?

• 2:20:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he wants to make the everything app. So uh, are we turning into China?

• 2:21:04Speaker 03

  Uh, there are worse places to turn into. I kind of like China, frankly.

• 2:21:07Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:21:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:09Danny Jones?

  When's the last time you were there?

• 2:21:11Speaker 03

  Uh, it's been a bit. Uh, twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, maybe?

• 2:21:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:21:16Speaker 03

  Or so. But I, like, growing up, like, I, I was really, you know, like, we didn't, we didn't have the term "Weeaboo", yet, but me and my friends, we loved, like, Akira. And we called it Japanimation back then. Like anime, right? Like, I remember when Hollywood Video changed the shelf from Japanimation to anime. And we were like, "Anaim? What the fuck is this?" Like, that's how they say it in Japan, right? Anyway, so I always loved Japan growing up, right? And it didn't mean I hated China, but it was like, my preference would have been, oh, if I can go anywhere in the world, I would love to go to Japan.

• 2:21:49Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:21:49Speaker 03

  And um, I ended up pitching and then getting roped into some stories in China, like, which I was equally excited to do, but I just, I, I never thought China would be my thing. And then I went there and I was like, this place rules. This feels like what I assume nineteen seventies America felt like.

• 2:22:07Danny Jones?

  What?

• 2:22:08Speaker 03

  These people are awesome. This place is great.

• 2:22:10Danny Jones?

  How so?

• 2:22:14Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's, you know, speaking in crass generalizations, it's a bunch of second generation farmers who were just yanked into modernity like 30 years ago, maybe 40 years ago at this point or whatever. Like, people spit in the streets constantly. You see comb overs that you can't believe. No one expects to be filmed or appear on TV. They don't have that like star lust that's just like endemic to the average American. You know, they're just kind of going about their own fucking business. And I would, you know, when I'd go somewhere, we had a really cool office too. We had a foreign office in

• 2:22:55Speaker 03

  China, Vice China. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the editor was this rad gal named Maddie Ju. Right, guy might be fucking up her last name. Maddie Ju, shout out. Shout out. And then this other guy, who's I forget his title there, but he ruled, his name was Billy Starman. Anyway, they were, you know, served his fixtures, helped me around like with the rest of the crew and all that. And you know, anytime I go somewhere, you at least try to learn like, how do I say like please and thank you in the language? Or like, how do I go to the better? Or excuse me would be a big one, you know, just so like, you know, you know, you can at least learn those 10 phrases in any, any language, right? And so I was trying to do that with Mandarin. And they gave me, you know, ni hao, shu shu, the basics and stuff. And I was like, well, how do you, I was like, well, how do you say

• 2:23:40Speaker 03

  please? And they're like, we don't really use that very often. They're like, don't worry about that. I was like, oh, okay. Well, how about like, excuse me? Like, just the basic? If I bump into someone or if I do something wrong or whatever? And they're like, they're like, yeah, they're like, we never say that.

• 2:23:58Speaker 03

  No matter. They're like, but what I can tell you, they're just like, but let me tell you how to say stupid. And that's shabi. And I was like, oh, okay. So they taught me shabi, newbie, which is like, they were like, that means fuck, yeah. And I was like, doesn't that literally mean cow vagina? And they're like, there you go, you're catching on, right? And then like, tsunima, which is like, I am butchering these, like, no doubt, which it means fuck your mom. And they taught me that. They were like, don't, don't say that to people. People will actually fight you over that. Oh, really? But then, but then one time I was, I was there, I was having, it was like November, I was in Beijing and Beijing is kind of like Washington DC. It's not my, not my favorite city. I went to, I got to go to a lot of different parts of China and that was. I prefer, I don't prefer Beijing, whatever.

• 2:24:42Speaker 03

  It was like raining and shitty and I kept having, we're staying at this hotel where in the morning, these like shady adoption services would bring

• 2:24:55Speaker 03

  a Chinese baby that was gonna be adopted to an American couple. And for some reason, all the American couples, like we saw this over and over for like a week and a half. It was always different couples. And the, I wanna say all of them, but at least the majority were lesbian couples, which is kind of funny. And they, so it's like six in the morning, we'd be getting up and going, getting, getting ready to get our coffee or whatever. And that's when they would be introducing these American would be parents to their adoptive children. So it just had a real kind of fucked up mood there. And then my underwear kept getting stolen. Which the other members of the crew were like, no one's stealing your underwear. I'm like, I, I'm not, I'm not out here trying to accuse some fucking maid of stealing my underwear. But it's like, but where is my goddamned underwear? Like, why do I have zero underwear?

• 2:25:41Speaker 03

  And then I mentioned it to Maddie and Billy Starman and they're like, oh, they 100% stole your underwear. I was like, see? Thank you. It's like, the Chinese back me up on this. Right? And anyway, so, and I got like slightly sick and it was like ice rain, right? Like Beijing's like, I think on the same latitude as like Minneapolis. So it gets like nasty there. Right? Anyway, so I had to go buy underwear on like a day off that was technically like a sick day. And I just remember having my, like having my underwear, not being happy about having to like go out and find a shopping mall. Standing in like ice rain without an umbrella and I was like two, you know, two miles from the hotel. And so I was trying to get a cab. And every time I'd tell the cab driver the name of the hotel, they'd just peel off.

• 2:26:26Speaker 03

  Like I think the deal was it wasn't far enough to be worth it. They wanted to take me to the airport or something like that. And just like they were gonna go find a better fare. And the third or fourth cab who did it, I just like, I just momentarily lost my mind. He rolled up the window, started to pull off and I kicked his door. Like the, the back door, back passenger side door. And I yelled, Tony Ma! Maybe I did it better, maybe not.

• 2:26:50Danny Jones?

  Fuck your mother?

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, fuck your mom, right? And he, in the brake lights immediately and I was like, oh shit, that was so stupid. I was like, no, I was like, now I'm getting, I'm drenched, I'm freezing, I have like the flu or something, holding my underwear like a chump and now I'm gonna get in a fight or whatever. And he backed up and I was like, I had nowhere to go, like it was a crowded sidewalk. And he rolled down the window and I like, I saw his face and he was like, hey, he's like, hop in. And I was like, and I got in the car and he just took me, took me straight back to the hotel, knew exactly where it was.

• 2:27:22Danny Jones?

  You got Moxie, pal.

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  Didn't overcharge me. He was talking to me the whole time and I was like, you know, I was like, oh sure, yeah, that, whatever, I, I don't, I don't speak Mandarin, but keep the ball rolling with you. And I mentioned that to like Matty and Billy the next day and they were like, dude, you're learning. They're like, you're adapting to Chinese culture.

• 2:27:38Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious. So they got a sense of humor.

• 2:27:40Speaker 03

  Oh, fuck yeah. That's, I mean, that's, that's an important, I'm trying to think, anywhere in the world I've been where people aren't in general funny. That's a big thing about Iraq. I have a, like, I got to go to Iraq twice and the northern part, which is safer, well, was until ISIS, fuck.

• 2:28:00Speaker 03

  And then I, I know a couple of kids who like were Americans but grew up in Baghdad, or one's from Mosul. And those guys are the funniest motherfuckers I've ever met in my life. Like, I think, I think a major, sort of, sense of cultural friction that maybe could have been avoided in the build up to the Iraq war, because I was like, you know, I've also spoken about this to one, I was gonna say a bunch, but a single soldier who had been in Iraq, mid 2000s, I forget what year, whose sense of the Iraqis was, he was like, oh, these are backwards, rural, goat herding people. And it's like, my sense of Baghdadi's especially, but Iraqis in general, I was like, those guys are the New Yorkers

• 2:28:42Speaker 03

  of the Middle East. I was like, they are from an 800 year old urban environment. They act like guys who grew up in the Bronx, basically, you know, which is not without its own set of, you know, issues, but it's like...

• 2:28:59Speaker 03

  It's like, I wonder if, it's just a little pet theory, that it's like, if American soldiers were taught that, that I'd be like, "Watch out for these guys, they can, they can shyst you sometimes, but they're overwhelmingly funny and they like joking." And they like, you know, so don't, you know, don't get your panties in a twist if they're joking with you or whatever. Recognize this, how that might have affected the war. If like, all the American soldiers didn't think, it was like, "Oh, these guys are rednecks, like, who don't understand anything."

• 2:29:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, these guys have a personality, a sense of humor.

• 2:29:29Speaker 03

  They're human beings, right?

• 2:29:30Danny Jones?

  What is it about, what is it about these specific cultures of parts of the world that like, makes people like? Because I would never fucking imagine, I would never guess in a million years, that somebody in fucking China or Iraq would, would be like that.

• 2:29:42Speaker 03

  Would be funny?

• 2:29:43Danny Jones?

  You would never, I just imagine them to be fucking blank, you know, no emotion.

• 2:29:47Speaker 03

  Inscrutable.

• 2:29:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Speaker 03

  Right? Um, you gotta go there and meet them. They're not all funny, but in general, they're, they're pretty fucking funny. Swear like, "Those are goddamn sailors, once you learn." Like, I only learned like, five or six swear words, but then I was just like, "Whoa." You guys.

• 2:30:05Danny Jones?

  They aren't offended.

• 2:30:06Speaker 03

  Letting everyone have it, you know?

• 2:30:08Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. Maybe it has something to do with like, like, living in a shitty fucking situ-, being in a shitty situation your whole life. You kinda have to have a sense of humor to get through it, maybe.

• 2:30:16Speaker 03

  Could be, yep.

• 2:30:20Danny Jones?

  What, um, so, working in China though, like, doing journalism in China, were there any fucking guidelines?

• 2:30:28Speaker 03

  Did they come and throw us in the clink? Yeah, no. No, no, no, we were doing like, cultural shit though, right?

• 2:30:33Danny Jones?

  Hmm, you didn't talk about, uh, PLA or anything?

• 2:30:36Speaker 03

  Oh, not that either. Yeah, or the Uyghurs? Yeah, no.

• 2:30:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:39Speaker 03

  No, or they're, they're...

• 2:30:40Danny Jones?

  Was that a rule, or was that a choice?

• 2:30:42Speaker 03

  It was a choice. I didn't, I mean, it just wasn't the stories I was there to cover. People love to be like that, especially like about Vice, they're like, "Whoa, would you ever write a story while I was working at Vice?" Like, "Write a story about the founders of Vice?" And I was like, I was like, "Now you're gonna make it sound like, if I say no, it sounds like..."

• 2:30:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, you're a part of it.

• 2:30:58Speaker 03

  "I'm afraid of doing something." I was like, "Why would I, like, why would I be fucking interested in that in the first place? I don't know." Anyway, yeah, no, it was like... Like a thing about dating due to the gender disparity, which is kind of like a lingering effect of the Oh, yeah. One child policy. One child policy, right? So it left, it's, I don't, I don't know if this has evened out over the years, but a woman named Mara Vistendahl wrote a really good book, whose name I don't remember, but it's about how there, you know, whereas in most parts of the world, women are slightly disproportionate to men, that in China, it's the, the reverse, that there's more men than women, and it has these weird, you know, weird effects, like, and we were there specifically, like, inspired by that book to try dating and to meet matchmakers and to go to weird

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  things where, you know, guys grow up in villages where there's, like, you know, almost literally no women, and so they have to go to the city and find one, or they have to try to online date, and da, da, da, da, da. And then what else? Yeah. So, yeah, no, nobody fucked with us, but we had our paperwork in order, we were there with, you know, Chinese nationals who ran an edition of the magazine. Although, and that edition started in 2009 or 10, maybe later, there was a little bit of back and forth sometimes between the editors, because, you know, the website was supposed to be this kind of collecting place for all the different foreign editions of Vice, so you could see something from Vice Germany, that'd be cool, because, you know, who knows

• 2:32:26Speaker 03

  anything about what's going on in Germany right now, or whatever. And there'd be some, like, anti-CCP, like, not anti-Chinese, but anti-Communist Party things occasionally, and the Chinese editors would be like, hey, like, we got it, we can't have this show up on our side of the site, we need to, you know, kind of cordon this off, this could actually get us in trouble, you know?

• 2:32:51Speaker 00

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• 2:33:52Speaker 03

  Different places, though, right?

• 2:33:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:55Speaker 03

  Anyway, it didn't feel like an Orwellian shithole.

• 2:33:58Danny Jones?

  It didn't feel like an Orwellian shithole. Did you ever go to North Korea? You didn't go to North Korea, did you?

• 2:34:02Speaker 03

  I didn't go to North Korea, no. I wasn't on that trip.

• 2:34:04Danny Jones?

  Those were two, they did two trips, right?

• 2:34:07Speaker 03

  Well, Shane went, yeah. Shane went with photographer Jamie James Medina, and they shot a secret documentary. Like, Jamie James Medina was a photographer from London. Just kept his camera in video mode. I think it was like a Canon L for something. And they just pretended to be taking pictures the whole time, which is like... I always thought that was a cool way to fucking make, make a piece. And the fact that they got an entire piece out of it. You know, it was almost a feature-length doc.

• 2:34:35Danny Jones?

  And they got it out of there without checking the memory card?

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:38Danny Jones?

  That's nuts.

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can't do that again, right? Yeah. And then Ryan Duffy, and then that, that trip was set up by Vice's old news director, Jason Mohica, who worked out that the way you could get in, in with the, you know, then recent, recently-installed Kim Jong-un regime, was that he loves the Chicago Bulls. So they tried, I think, I believe he tried to get like Scottie Pippen or Michael Jordan to do it, like Dennis Rodman was like fourth or fifth down the list. Or no, he went to the, um, there was like a back channel that, it's like a famous back channel for the North Koreans, and I think they live around DC or whatever, and so they helped set up the whole thing. And they were hoping for Michael Jordan or Scottie Pippen.

• 2:35:22Speaker 03

  You know, and then Dennis Rodman was...

• 2:35:24Danny Jones?

  We'll settle for Dennis.

• 2:35:25Speaker 03

  We'll settle for Dennis Rodman, yeah.

• 2:35:27Danny Jones?

  I think he, oh my god, yeah, that was completely nuts. I think Jerry went there and that dude Jake...

• 2:35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know Jake?

• 2:35:34Danny Jones?

  I don't, I've never met him, I've just heard about him.

• 2:35:36Speaker 03

  He's Florida, he's from, I think he's from St. Augustine. He's a Gainesville kid, though. He was in the Gainesville punk scene. He was friends with like Against Me and stuff, yeah.

• 2:35:43Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, yeah. Gavin was saying that he was a big surfer.

• 2:35:46Speaker 03

  Big surfer, yeah.

• 2:35:48Danny Jones?

  Spicoli Dad.

• 2:35:49Speaker 03

  He is. When he's good, he's good, man. That's a good line.

• 2:35:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, man. Yeah, the, um, the whole thing about like, how this fucking technocracy or whatever, or techno oligarchy, whatever the fuck you call it.

• 2:36:09Speaker 03

  Oh, the technopoly is what, uh,

• 2:36:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, techno.

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  Postman calls it.

• 2:36:13Danny Jones?

  Right, but that, yeah, so he was writing about it being a technopoly, but now it's like turning into like tech running the fucking world or running the government at least.

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:36:20Danny Jones?

  That's like, uh, that's, I think about like that sometimes with making stuff for the internet in today's day and age. Because like now you can literally, if you do the wrong thing on YouTube specifically, I don't know about other platforms. You can get like kicked off of YouTube permanently.

• 2:36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:45Danny Jones?

  And a lot of that stuff is like, for the most part, can be reasoned against or like, there's no, it's not like,

• 2:36:54Speaker 03

  There's no appeal?

• 2:36:55Danny Jones?

  There's no appeal, right? It's not like you sit in front of a jury and like they make a decision or whatever. This is often like just one person presses a button and it's like, once that button's pressed.

• 2:37:04Speaker 03

  You hope it's a person. Yeah.

• 2:37:06Danny Jones?

  You hope it's a person. It's like,

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  You might have just triggered a fucking algorithm. Yeah.

• 2:37:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you triggered an algorithm. And, and you've, like, we've seen this happen to so many people for so many different reasons.

• 2:37:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:37:16Danny Jones?

  That like, now you're operating from this mindset of like, I have to make sure I can keep this gravy train going, but I'm a journalist. Uh, and YouTube is my employer, basically. I'm making all my money off of YouTube, which is,

• 2:37:38Danny Jones?

  All of the fucking tentacles of the government are in.

• 2:37:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:37:42Danny Jones?

  So like whatever the decisions are made there, you know, we saw, I don't know if you pay attention to Twitter files, but it was basically they found out like FBI people were like meeting with the moderation team of at Twitter every fucking week.

• 2:37:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:37:53Danny Jones?

  And like if that's happening at Twitter, imagine what's happening at Google and YouTube.

• 2:37:57Speaker 03

  Right, right, right.

• 2:37:58Danny Jones?

  So it's like, it's like the, the antithesis. It, it creates this fear, this constant fear of like.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  Makes you wanna unalive yourself, right?

• 2:38:07Danny Jones?

  Makes you wanna unalive yourself, but it's like, it makes you not wanna, because like for me at least, like journalism is like putting stuff out there that hasn't had, which gets, at least what gets me excited is like turning under, over rocks and finding stuff that hasn't been, had light shined on it yet. That, you know, might not make a lot of people happy. And if you're doing that, that's my definition of what like exciting journalism is. And if you're doing that, YouTube is not the proper vehicle to do that in because you're gonna lose your.

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  Mammon, aren't they part of Google? Yeah.

• 2:38:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:38:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:38:41Danny Jones?

  So it's like, it's, uh, it's like, it scares me to think that, you know.

• 2:38:46Speaker 03

  Why are they the biggest employer of, you know, video journalism, right? That's, that's the part that sucks to me. That's, that's, you know.

• 2:38:56Speaker 03

  The fact that it's like a necessary condition for people's livelihood that they're not able to, that we ended up with like three platforms, basically.

• 2:39:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:04Speaker 03

  And you know, which of the three are you gonna get on, right? And that's gonna be your career and that's the only career path people have available to them. And you see the effect, you see the effect with like shitty language like unalive and what are the other ones? You know, algorithm and moderation team dodging workarounds that just sound like deranged speech.

• 2:39:24Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:39:24Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:39:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:26Speaker 03

  It's a bummer.

• 2:39:27Danny Jones?

  It's fucking scary, man. I don't know. I don't know where it goes. I don't know where it goes. But when you have AI running all this stuff, when you have AI in charge.

• 2:39:33Speaker 03

  Well, it's okay, cause AI can all, like, they'll be the viewers too. We can all take a hike.

• 2:39:39Danny Jones?

  The AI viewers?

• 2:39:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:42Danny Jones?

  What do you mean?

• 2:39:43Speaker 03

  That it won't be people watching it.

• 2:39:44Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:39:45Speaker 03

  They'll just have AI viewers.

• 2:39:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh.

• 2:39:47Speaker 03

  So AI can make the content and then.

• 2:39:49Danny Jones?

  Watch its own content?

• 2:39:50Speaker 03

  AI can consume its content and that'll feed back into the content that AI is making.

• 2:39:56Danny Jones?

  Hmm, right.

• 2:39:57Speaker 03

  And we've got a whole world.

• 2:39:58Danny Jones?

  And we don't have to work anymore.

• 2:40:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, go sit under the shade tree.

• 2:40:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what are we gonna do?

• 2:40:03Speaker 03

  Tie a fishing line to our toes, yeah. Wow. Take it easy.

• 2:40:08Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:40:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What happens when we don't have to work anymore? AI does it all. We're gonna lose everything, gonna lose our meaning, we're gonna lose everything. It's gonna be fucking weird.

• 2:40:19Speaker 03

  We'll figure something out.

• 2:40:20Danny Jones?

  You think?

• 2:40:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40:21Danny Jones?

  What are you gonna do?

• 2:40:23Speaker 03

  Um, maybe not much different than I do at present. Hang out, read a book.

• 2:40:31Danny Jones?

  Are you?

• 2:40:32Speaker 03

  Go see people.

• 2:40:33Danny Jones?

  Do you, uh, do you still actively try to like put out new work?

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  I don't put it out very well. I'm really shitty about that. I write every day, you know? Um, and I've worked on some things. I mean, obviously the Gavin doc, that, that was about a year, years worth of work. I have to remind myself I'm just coming off a feature length doc, cause otherwise I'll look back, you know? I get laid off in 2019. I'm like, what have I been up to since then? Just like dicking around and went and lived in Mexico, was roused about or whatever and came to Chicago. Um, but.

• 2:41:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:09Danny Jones?

  When you, when you write, what do you write about? Like, how, what is your writing? You just fucking journal every day or what?

• 2:41:13Speaker 03

  Uh, it's more or less, call it that, yeah. I just, I've done it since I was a kid. I like it, you know?

• 2:41:22Danny Jones?

  What do you wanna do?

• 2:41:22Speaker 03

  It'd be nice if it was turning into something that I was putting somewhere. I used to be better about writing for something. And obviously when I was working at Vice, I was at Vice 15 years. And so I just had an automatic platform and I couldn't have asked for a better one.

• 2:41:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:35Speaker 03

  You know?

• 2:41:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's good to have a system, right? That you're a part of that you can just like.

• 2:41:38Speaker 03

  Right, or just that it was automatic. Like I've, I've played the game of trying to be like a freelance writer and, you know, pitch stories to different places. And like even getting once accepted and then you're like, oh, that's great. That'll pay my rent this month, you know? And then the invoice takes eight weeks to put through, which I, when I was in, you know, editing for the magazine and the website, I was the guy who was getting yelled at for not getting an invoice out on time and et cetera. So I have the dueling sympathies for that. It's just, it's a hustle, you know? You never, um. You never get to rest easy like you do with a salary.

• 2:42:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:42:13Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:42:13Danny Jones?

  Well, what do you want to do? Like, what's an ideal situation look like for you as far as like creating shit and writing?

• 2:42:19Speaker 03

  Jesus, I don't know. Someone gives me a lot of money and I just, I go do.

• 2:42:25Danny Jones?

  Why don't you do more documentaries?

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  Uh, great question. I don't have a good answer for you.

• 2:42:31Danny Jones?

  Not motivated?

• 2:42:33Speaker 03

  A little of that, yeah, yeah, you know. I pitch a bunch of stuff and it's, you know, it's hit or miss. Like, I have pitches outstanding. I'm working on a book show, basically, with an old friend from Vice. I don't know if you ever saw really early video stuff. Trace Crutchfield, Tall Tech, and he kind of looks like Dick Van Dyke. No? Okay, he was like, I think he was like the first on-air host when Vice started making video stuff. He's great. Grew up in Austin. He's a little older than everybody else. I think he saw Minor Threat, like, when he was in college, which apologies for dating him. Anyway, or, you know, you catch back up with the gang. Every so often, there's this eternal impulse to try to get the band back together, right?

• 2:43:14Speaker 03

  So I'm in the middle of that right now. We'll see how it goes. It's always, you know.

• 2:43:20Danny Jones?

  Why don't you start a podcast?

• 2:43:22Speaker 03

  I've recorded a bunch of stuff. I've made a few attempts. I did a podcast, actually. I did a podcast with Seth Abramson during the 2020 election, that guy from Twitter. You know, okay.

• 2:43:32Danny Jones?

  Never heard of him.

• 2:43:33Speaker 03

  It did, it did okay. That was my first podcast, but we just made it. It was limited. We made 10 episodes. That was the whole deal.

• 2:43:38Danny Jones?

  Oh, it was like a, okay, like a...

• 2:43:39Speaker 03

  Like a limit, what do you call that? A limited series?

• 2:43:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:42Speaker 03

  That was what it was.

• 2:43:43Danny Jones?

  And what was it about?

• 2:43:44Speaker 03

  It was about Trump. He's written, I think, it was three books when I was talking to him. I think there's a fourth.

• 2:43:51Speaker 03

  Of, what does he call it? Metajournalism, I think, where he just basically, I mean, it's not dissimilar from Google Journalism, but he assembled, like, the full Trump story from previous, like, almost Wikipedia-style, from previous reporting. You know, and it was just, did a good job of digging up all the, you know, on-record elements of the story, the dirt, the funny stuff and whatever, and just assembled it into one big narrative. And he did that three times with three different subjects, or three different facets of Trump and, like, the Trump Organization.

• 2:44:30Speaker 03

  But...

• 2:44:32Speaker 03

  Anyway, I'm sitting on a lot of recordings. I should, I should get around and get it done. It's, uh, they have a limited bandwidth for the internet as I age. You know, you see the same arguments play out three or four times on a like grand cultural level. Yeah. Over your life and you start being like, like, really? We argue, we were arguing about abortion again? It's like, oh, oh, look at that. Same, literally the same arguments. Yep. Like, yeah, to fucking get, oh, we're blaming feminism for like every ill in modern society. It's like, just like that 1979 book by Doodlebug Murphy. Feminist destroyed, you know, Nixon's America.

• 2:45:13Speaker 03

  But, uh, you know, but, but I do say, I mostly just sit around a little bit too much. I've got, I've, I've, I, maybe I'll have this done and finished, which I should have done over a year ago. Do you know Brad Phillips? No. Yeah, he's a painter, but he's also, he wrote a book of essays that did really well for a book of essays. We have a dead friend named Giancarlo Di Trapano, who used to put out a ma, he was the best publisher in, fuck, the English speaking, like publishing industry. He had a book line called Tyrant Books and he put out his essay book. Anyway, he's a smart, cool painter guy from Canada. And we had a, um, recorded episodes of a podcast that all I need to do is finish it and get it up.

• 2:45:56Speaker 03

  That was about the differences between Canada and, uh, where he's from and America, where I'm from. The conceit kind of being like, he just moved to America and it was like, oh, we're, you know, quiz each other for the citizenship test, right? But also it's like who, whoever really gets into the weeds about what Canadian culture is like, right? I don't know jack shit about it. I just made a documentary for their, you know, the CBC and I couldn't tell you like, fucking read Louis Reel by Chester Brown, you know, the night before like the, the video aired and, um,

• 2:46:31Speaker 03

  Anyway, so that's the gist, right? It's just the differences between America and Canada, right? But it's got a good name. Whoa, oh, should it? Well, now, okay, so now I'll tell it to you so that I have to get it done, so nobody else steals it. Borderline Friends.

• 2:46:43Danny Jones?

  Borderline Friends. Ooh, that's a good name. I like that.

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  Thanks, right? Anyway, yeah. Um, you know, the real answer is like, combination of happenstance and laziness. But got some things in the works.

• 2:46:57Speaker 03

  Why not?

• 2:46:58Danny Jones?

  I take it you voted for Trump?

• 2:47:00Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't vote.

• 2:47:01Danny Jones?

  You don't vote? That's good.

• 2:47:02Speaker 03

  No, no, no, I voted for Cornel West.

• 2:47:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, did you? Really?

• 2:47:05Speaker 03

  I love, I love Dr. West. Long time.

• 2:47:07Danny Jones?

  Journalists shouldn't vote.

• 2:47:10Speaker 03

  Right?

• 2:47:14Danny Jones?

  The interview that Gavin did with Cornel West debating Candace Owens was great.

• 2:47:18Speaker 03

  Saw that. West, West held his own.

• 2:47:20Danny Jones?

  That was great.

• 2:47:21Speaker 03

  American treasure.

• 2:47:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he is.

• 2:47:23Speaker 03

  Last American man of letters.

• 2:47:24Danny Jones?

  He's been holding strong for a long time.

• 2:47:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:27Danny Jones?

  By the way, I wanted to ask you this in the front of, in the front of the show, but I heard, I heard the story. But what about the baby balls thing?

• 2:47:35Speaker 03

  Where the nickname came from?

• 2:47:37Danny Jones?

  The nickname Baby Balls?

• 2:47:38Speaker 03

  It's weird. It's a really convoluted story, the real version, and everybody simplifies it into a different. It, it always, it ends up changing. It's weird, right?

• 2:47:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:48Speaker 03

  So like Gavin.

• 2:47:49Danny Jones?

  I heard the ketchup bottle story.

• 2:47:51Speaker 03

  Which version of the ketchup bottle story did you hear, right?

• 2:47:53Danny Jones?

  I heard, I heard the story.

• 2:47:55Speaker 03

  Let's hear what you hear, yeah.

• 2:47:56Danny Jones?

  Was that like you guys were somewhere at dinner or whatever and you were like, I don't give a fuck. This one dared you to smash the ketchup bottle over your head. And you were like about to do it. You're, this one was egging you on to do it. Then Gavin was like, no, no, no, you're gonna end up with like a fucking, you know, a Nazi dueling scar on the, on your, across your whole face and you're gonna hurt yourself. Don't do it.

• 2:48:12Speaker 03

  So Gavin told you that version, right? He's the hero in that version, right?

• 2:48:16Danny Jones?

  He's the hero, of course he is.

• 2:48:18Speaker 03

  So what actually happened was, we went out for drinks. My, the first week of my internship, all the interns go out for drinks, right? As a, you know, cause we're not, none of us are getting paid. This is before, like back when you could have unpaid intern labor, right? In New York. And, um, so they took the petty cash, the office manager, we all went to a bar, like big outdoor place that's not there in Williamsburg anymore. And like one by one, everybody from the office came by. Like, oh, what's going on here? Free drink? Like, like, you know, like, oh, you're drinking on petty cash? You mind if we just side in? And so eventually, the whole office assembled and Sarush, who held like the company credit card at that point, was like, okay, guys, we're covering drinks tonight. It's an event. This will be fun. And I had just met Gavin and Jesse like two or three days before that.

• 2:49:02Speaker 03

  And Jesse's the editor of the magazine. And they're seated across from me. And Gavin bets me $300 that I can't break a ketchup bottle over the back of my head. Jesse hears that and he goes, I'll put 200 in there. That's a $500 bet. Right? And they're staring at me. And just to be clear, you cannot break a ketchup.

• 2:49:27Danny Jones?

  The glass is so thick.

• 2:49:29Speaker 03

  It's like marble. It's so fucking thick. But we're here in the middle of a, you know,

• 2:49:36Speaker 03

  a tense sort of riff. And I'm holding the ketchup bottle. I'm weighing it in my hands, considering I was like, if we're.

• 2:49:45Danny Jones?

  Empty or full of ketchup?

• 2:49:46Speaker 03

  Full of ketchup. It's just the ketchup bottle that's on the table. Nobody went and got a ketchup bottle.

• 2:49:52Speaker 03

  And, you know, in considering how I'm going to respond to this provocation, I'm like, you know, if I were to try to break it, how would I even do it? Like, how would you the back of my head? Like, because I think that was specified or whatever. And so I'm holding the ketchup bottle. It looks as if I might be taking some practice swings. And, and as, as of yet unnamed bystander named Trevor Silmsor, who was Andrew WK's manager and went on to be the publisher of Noisy, who was a cool, old, like, New York hardcore guy, tall, towering, scary, like, skin-headed, not a skinhead, but like bald muscle dude, who was also a great guy, was sitting right next to him. I was friends with, you know, Gavin and Jesse, like,

• 2:50:37Speaker 03

  like threw his arms out and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's like, dude, these guys don't have $500 on them. And he's like, and by the way, he's like, the ambulance ride alone is going to cost you 800. And it sort of diffused it. And so we came up with a, and like, and Gavin and Jesse were both like, "Ha, ha, ha, you got us." Like, they wouldn't have paid our own a bet no matter what, right?

• 2:51:03Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 2:51:04Speaker 03

  And so there was a backup bet that was, that I think Jesse came up with, and he's like, "All right, we'll each, is, everybody at this table will give you fifty dollars, but we're each allowed to slap you as hard as we can." And I was like, "Fuck, I'll take that, yeah." "Yeah, let's do that." And I went to the bathroom, and I came back, and they were talking about something else. Because this whole thing was just a fucking riff, and I was like, "Hey, what happened to that bet we were gonna do?" And Trevor, who had just saved me from a nominee, like, five minutes prior goes, "What? You welched on that, baby balls?" And that was it. It was just like, and it was as if lightning had come and engraven upon my, you know, forehead. It was just a fitting name, yeah. But that was, Gavin made himself the hero of the story, or the voice of reason. Give me, fucking, never fails with that guy.

• 2:51:49Speaker 03

  Unbelievable.

• 2:51:50Danny Jones?

  The history writes itself, bro. It's beautiful.

• 2:51:52Speaker 03

  History's written by the writers, yeah.

• 2:51:53Danny Jones?

  So, uh, are you and Gavin friends now?

• 2:51:57Speaker 03

  Oh, I, I don't know, and that's a, fuck.

• 2:51:59Danny Jones?

  It seemed like that, that when you guys were sitting-

• 2:52:01Speaker 03

  Did he say we are?

• 2:52:02Danny Jones?

  When you guys were sitting doing that watch-

• 2:52:03Speaker 03

  I'll leave that, I'll leave that up to him. I'm, you know-

• 2:52:06Danny Jones?

  It seems like you guys kinda like kissed and made up during that little watch party.

• 2:52:08Speaker 03

  Follower of our Lord Jesus Christ, I'm friends with all of humanity and all children of God, right?

• 2:52:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:12Speaker 03

  Uh, whether or not he thinks we're friends, I'll leave it to, you know, leave that up to him.

• 2:52:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I think you guys are friends.

• 2:52:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:52:20Danny Jones?

  Well, we'll leave it at that.

• 2:52:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Good question, though. They literally don't know the answer. Yeah.

• 2:52:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, thanks for doing this, bro. This has been fun.

• 2:52:31Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 2:52:32Danny Jones?

  Tell people where, uh, they can, uh, follow your stuff, get ahold of you, all that jazz.

• 2:52:36Speaker 03

  You can find me on Substack at compostmentis.substack.com. Or also on Substack, the podcast Borderline Friends. Look for the picture of the cat and mouse wearing bow ties.

• 2:52:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:52:54Speaker 03

  That'll be the right one. Um, and if this ends up going up in late July-

• 2:53:01Speaker 03

  You can find me on Two Ways YouTube channel.

• 2:53:07Danny Jones?

  Two Ways?

• 2:53:08Speaker 03

  Two Way. Like, like the most basic sex act. Two Way.

• 2:53:14Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:53:14Speaker 03

  It's a company I'm trying to work for. Trace works for them.

• 2:53:17Danny Jones?

  You're trying to work for the company.

• 2:53:18Speaker 03

  And we're pitching, we're pitching them a show about reading. That's kind of like Reading Rainbow for Adults, right?

• 2:53:22Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:53:23Speaker 03

  And the show is called The Books Nook.

• 2:53:27Danny Jones?

  The Books Nook?

• 2:53:28Speaker 03

  So like the book nook with plural. I guess in a way, yeah, yeah. Um, just encouraging reading.

• 2:53:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:53:36Speaker 03

  It's a, it's an excuse to blather about books, right?

• 2:53:38Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:53:39Speaker 03

  Look, I like books.

• 2:53:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What kind of, well, how do you, what's your preferred way of consuming a book?

• 2:53:44Speaker 03

  Oh, read, to read it.

• 2:53:46Danny Jones?

  To read, like, to read like the physical paper book?

• 2:53:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:53:50Danny Jones?

  Okay, you're old school.

• 2:53:51Speaker 03

  I, I guess, yeah.

• 2:53:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Feels good, yeah.

• 2:53:54Danny Jones?

  Most, uh, the most ways.

• 2:53:56Speaker 03

  People all put them on their pads and whatnot.

• 2:53:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you get it on your iPad or your.

• 2:54:00Speaker 03

  I'll, if I can't find, if I don't have a, I have a lot of books, right?

• 2:54:03Danny Jones?

  Do you find it easier to, to, to like retain the information by reading it?

• 2:54:08Speaker 03

  That's a good question. Oh, then what?

• 2:54:10Danny Jones?

  Versus like listening to it?

• 2:54:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, for me for certain. Yeah. And I'm kind of a slow reader, so I guess it gives it a little bit of time to like sit in. If I'm listening to a book, I'll go do things. I'll go like tidy up around the house or go get in the car or whatever. I like listening to. There, it's, certain types of books are better to listen to and certain types of books I would prefer to read.

• 2:54:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:31Speaker 03

  You know, certain types of books, I don't mind reading them as a PDF on a screen. Other books I'd rather have, you know, I, I. The whole reason I went to work at Vice, they made a nice book, right? The magazine was like a whole book that she got every month for free.

• 2:54:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:46Speaker 03

  And they put like, that was one of the first things I recognized in Gavin and Jesse. I was like, these guys care so much about what they're fucking making. They're like, and they're way smarter, because I was a fan of Vice. That was why I wanted an internship with them. I thought they were the funniest motherfuckers. In publishing and in, in the English language publishing sphere and, um, but I didn't. They, it took me by surprise how fucking smart those guys were.

• 2:55:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:09Speaker 03

  And how well they knew what they were doing. And. How much they fucking cared about it and how much what they made was derived from how disappointed they were with the rest of media, right? Like, the first four months into the, I interned for like almost a year and then I graduated and they gave me a job the day after my graduation, which was, as long as I don't say the salary, it sounds like a real nice thing, nice thing for them to do to me. But they made, on their 10th anniversary of Vice, they made an issue that was a parody of mainstream print journalism. And they called it the worst issue ever, although on the cover it had the best issue ever.

• 2:55:53Speaker 03

  And I, I shouldn't, like, I'd be like trying to describe a YouTube video, I'm just gonna not do it justice by explaining these things. But it was like page by page and like line by line, like one of the sharpest and funniest, like parody satire, whoever, send up of what was happening. Like you could learn more about magazine culture and the mainstream magazine culture in the United States in 2004 from that issue than you could from like an entire like bookshelf of paper magazine and whoever else.

• 2:56:32Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:56:33Speaker 03

  Like, no.

• 2:56:34Danny Jones?

  That's fucking cool.

• 2:56:36Speaker 03

  That's me, that's, that's my, giving my old bosses a blowjob portion of the show for you. But it was, it was fucking cool.

• 2:56:44Danny Jones?

  Beautiful way to end it. Thanks again, bro. I appreciate it, man. All right, goodnight, folks.

• 2:56:48Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 2:56:49Speaker 00

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