In this episode of Gamer Flex Podcast, host Alex Blumberg is joined by his good friend and former co-worker Colin to discuss Colin's controversial tweet about a day without a woman, and how it got him in hot water with the rest of the gaming community. Alex and Colin also discuss why Colin left his job at a company that he co-founded, and why he left the gaming industry in the first place. Alex also talks about how Colin handled the backlash to the tweet and how he dealt with it, and what he's going to do now that he's out of the game. Also, Alex and Alex talk about why they think Colin should have been fired for the tweet, and if it was really as bad as it seemed. We also talk about Colin's decision to leave his job and why it was the straw that broke the camel's back, and whether or not it was a good or bad one. And, of course, Alex talks about why he thinks Colin's tweet was a bad one, and who's to blame for it. Alex also gives us his thoughts on why Colin should or shouldn't be fired for it and how to move on from his job, and Alex gives us the inside scoop on why he resigned from his company and why we should be mad at Colin for tweeting about a woman being left out of a woman. It's a good one, y'all. This episode is a must-listen! and we hope you enjoy this episode. . We'll see you next week! - Alex, Alex, we'll be back next week with a new episode of the Gamer Flex podcast, so stay tuned for that's coming soon, and we'll talk about the future of the next episode of The Mandalorian. -Alex, Alex & Alex, and much more! -- Alex, - & -- - - and + (featuring: , and , AND is coming soon! - and (and :D) - ( ) And we'll get back in the next one, , we'll have an update on Colin's new book, coming next week, and more on the new podcast, coming in the future, so don't forget to check us out on the podcast! (listen to this episode! ) - And we're going to talk about it on Tuesday, so be sure to check it out!
00:00:14.000I don't listen to a whole lot of people's recommendations, but Dave Rubin's one of them.
00:00:16.000He's been an amazing figure in my life just in the last less than even a month.
00:00:21.000He kind of was like my savior when everyone was, you know...
00:00:25.000Kicking me while I was down, he was the one that kind of reached a handout, and so I owe him a great deal.
00:00:28.000Well, we should kind of explain what kicking you while you're down means, because it's more silly to me than anything, because it doesn't really make sense.
00:00:43.000Colin tweeted a joke about a day without a woman.
00:00:47.000And everybody knows that a day without a woman was like that day without a Mexican thing, where you're supposed to like, well, imagine if there were no women.
00:01:21.000Sent this tweet which was roundly condemned as sexist.
00:01:26.000Yeah, not really true if you leave the gaming industry, but, uh, roudly condemned in the gaming industry for sure.
00:01:33.000Outside of that, people, I think normal everyday people that don't have an axe to grind about literally everything, found it, you know, read it, maybe groaned or maybe laughed and then kept going about their day like a normal person.
00:01:43.000You're not allowed to have any personality anymore.
00:02:31.000But at the same time, you know, I was in bed with my girlfriend actually when I wrote it and I showed it to her and I was like, it's kind of funny, right?
00:03:27.000And I say also that if a person that wasn't a self-described moderate conservative or libertarian sent that joke, it also wouldn't have gotten the firestorm.
00:03:43.000Maybe in a different place, but not in the gaming industry, which is almost completely hyper-liberal.
00:03:49.000So, I've had a target on my back for years, and that's, I think, kind of the point that's lost on some people, is that this was just an opportunity.
00:03:59.000Like I said on Ruben, the second time I was on there, I said, like, no one was crying in their shower, losing sleep, tossing and turning over this joke.
00:04:57.000I made a name for myself, not only with criticism and with long-form pieces, but basically, I was writing pieces about political correctness in 2011. In 2012, people going after game developers, people going after all these things, and me kind of standing up and saying, this isn't okay, this character assassination.
00:05:11.000A good example for everyone out there that doesn't know games, there's this game called Borderlands 2. One of the developers was giving an interview about it.
00:05:21.000And this was back in, I think, 2011. He said something to the nature of, this particular mode in the game is accessible for everyone.
00:05:27.000It's like a girlfriend mode if you want your girlfriend to come play.
00:05:31.000He insinuated that women can't play games and don't know how to play games by using the term girlfriend mode.
00:05:36.000And people went after this guy and tried to get him.
00:05:38.000You know, and I wrote this piece saying like, what the hell is everyone doing?
00:05:41.000This guy just is trying to explain something.
00:05:49.000So I was outspoken about this and I was outspoken for my support of Mitt Romney and I was outspoken about my support for Gary Johnson and my outspoken.
00:06:02.000So you feel like there's a sort of a reinforced type of thinking, like a very liberal, reinforced type of thinking that you must subscribe to if you want to be a part of this.
00:06:30.000And I got literally thousands of people tweeting at me and Facebook messaging me and doing everything, being like, wow, this is fucking crazy.
00:06:35.000These people really are out to get you based on that.
00:06:38.000You know, you would think I said some horrible, just offensive, just truly awful thing.
00:06:44.000Do you think they're really out to get you?
00:06:45.000Or do you think they're capitalizing on a moment where they feel like you have a target on you?
00:06:53.000But this reaction culture that we have, like this overreaction culture that we find ourselves in today, It really does seem to foster that kind of behavior.
00:07:03.000People really like it when someone gets caught doing something or when someone says something inappropriate, when you can just point the finger and then everybody can pile on.
00:07:22.000The domino was tipped and they were down.
00:07:25.000That's why I brought up the example before of if one of the people that they actually liked within that insular industry said the same thing.
00:07:31.000They might have been aghast, but they might have reached a handout or given that person a second chance.
00:07:35.000So I think that that all plays into the...
00:07:37.000I have the Gadsden flag as my Twitter icon.
00:07:39.000I've had that since 2009. I've not been shy of...
00:07:43.000The Gadsden flag being, don't tread on me, the snake...
00:07:47.000So there are just certain things that made me very different than other people in the industry, and I definitely think that that plays a huge role.
00:07:54.000Well, your Twitter name is No Taxation.
00:07:56.000Yeah, which is a reference to the American Revolution, which I know you know.
00:07:59.000A lot of people think, well, no taxes?
00:09:06.000And the beauty is, too, as you've probably noticed, is that I think in the last year or whatever, images used to take up characters, too, and videos and links.
00:09:13.000I think the links are the only thing left that takes up the extra characters in addition to the name.
00:09:29.000Her poop was a little wet, so I went and picked it up, and I left, like, some, you know, just, like, smear.
00:09:33.000You'd have to use your fingernails to get off the ground.
00:09:35.000Some woman came out of her apartment and started scolding me.
00:09:38.000Like, she was waiting by the window to scold me for this, and I, like, what the hell is going on?
00:09:43.000So I had to tweet out a few tweets about that just for posterity.
00:09:47.000Yeah, the Twitter thing is very weird, but here's something that I really don't like, and I'm glad I don't see much of it anymore, is that twit longer shit.
00:10:44.000I mean, in writing, it's very difficult.
00:10:47.000I mean, even if you're reading a book sometimes, you have to go over the previous paragraphs to figure out exactly how this guy was setting this up.
00:10:54.000But I think what's happening, what you're saying, See, there's two parts.
00:11:00.000One, the example that you gave before about the guy saying that it's like girlfriend mode.
00:11:05.000If he just said, it's like, say if your girlfriend doesn't play video games and she wants a really easily accessible, you could do it that way.
00:11:12.000But people probably would attack him even for that.
00:11:14.000They would say, what are you implying that girls don't play video games?
00:11:18.000Well, it's always the implication, right?
00:11:20.000Everyone's always out to assume the absolute worst.
00:11:23.000And that's what I was trying to write about.
00:11:46.000And I feel like, yes, people are allowed to exercise their free speech on the other end and be like, I don't like that joke, or I don't like this, or I don't like that.
00:12:11.000Like, I actually, after I saw all the stuff, I went and watched the first one and then I watched half of the second one and I was falling asleep, so I didn't want to watch it anymore.
00:12:24.000Anthony Jeselnik or Daniel Tosh would make these people shit their pants compared to what's going on with this kind of stuff.
00:12:29.000And it's always this drama that seeks to kind of...
00:12:33.000It doesn't stop at saying, like, I don't like it.
00:12:34.000It's often insinuated or outright spoken that they want to censor it or change it.
00:12:38.000That's like where I... Because I was reading a piece specifically about Chappelle where they're like, this calls up questions as to how far should comedy go?
00:12:46.000And I'm like, no, that doesn't call...
00:12:48.000And that's when the free speech argument ends for me.
00:12:51.000That's when I'm like, you're actually now talking about changing it.
00:13:01.000I understand what they're trying to do because when they live in that world of cubicles and human resources and very restricted patterns of behavior that you have to follow...
00:13:11.000If you live in an office environment and work in an office environment or other, there's a lot of people out there that are boxed into these terrible situations where you have to pretend to be this thing that you're not.
00:13:20.000And again, you don't have any personality.
00:13:23.000You're not allowed to say anything ridiculous or silly.
00:13:26.000And when you have that kind of environment and you see someone who's free, like Dave Chappelle, You want to stop it.
00:13:33.000And if you can, if you can point something out that can...
00:14:02.000So they have to write about something that's inflammatory, write about something that's salacious, something that's going to get people excited.
00:14:09.000I mean, that guy that wrote that thing about you for the International Business Times, I looked into that International Business Times, and one of the things about it is that there was a, I think it was a Mother Jones article about that website, where they were told that the people who write articles were given some ridiculous task,
00:14:26.000like they have to get 10,000 hits per article they write.
00:14:29.000So that might have, for people who don't know, there was a guy who wrote an article about Colin where it said, Kinda Funny's Colin Moriarty resigns after writing a racist joke that targeted women.
00:14:43.000It wasn't racist even remotely in the slightest.
00:14:47.000But when you take into account the environment that these people are forced to work in, and you say, well, this guy literally is forced to write something that's more fucked up than it really is.
00:14:56.000So you have to get people excited about this in a way that's going to get them to click on it and hopefully get him to his 10,000 hit quota.
00:15:34.000But I tried to stay out of my way for, you know, writing inflammatory things.
00:15:37.000Actually, there are a couple of examples where I wouldn't write a story because I felt like it wasn't pertinent to any information and it was specifically to assassinate someone's character.
00:15:47.000Alright, well we found a problem here.
00:15:54.000I had a high-profile woman in the gaming industry tell me in an interview that was unrelated to what I was actually interviewing her that she never was once the victim of sexism in the industry, ever.
00:16:06.000And I was like, I could write this, but this isn't why I was there.
00:16:51.000Like, wouldn't you assume that if there is a person who can reach a high level of prominence in this very complicated business, right?
00:16:59.000I mean, the gaming industry is incredibly complicated, especially how weighted everything is when it comes to male versus female stuff.
00:17:06.000That whole Gamergate shit exposed so So much of that, which was really confusing to people on the outside, especially people like me who don't play games.
00:17:13.000I was like, what in the fuck is going on with these gamer people?
00:17:18.000The second story I think was more pertinent, though, which was this guy worked at a big publisher, and he was laid off, and he had this huge meltdown on social media.
00:18:49.000I mean, it is a great way to look at things.
00:18:52.000It's weird that it's so unusual, you know, and that most people would be more self-serving and would choose the path that's going to get them the most clicks and, hey, if I got to fucking crack a few eggs to make an omelet, that's how it goes.
00:19:05.000I never wanted the canon to be turned on me, even though it was eventually.
00:19:38.000And I think that when there's all these people scrambling around, like we're seeing now, you know, trying to find their niche and trying to get attention, you find more of that kind of predatory behavior.
00:20:32.000And I hate the whole argument of like, well, you don't have, you know, or you kind of pass by your rights or give them up when you're in the airport.
00:20:39.000And I'm like, no, they're inalienable, actually.
00:20:48.000Well, it's kind of reasonable because there are carbon fiber blades and all these different plastic blades that they can make now that you could really fuck somebody up.
00:20:58.000That are not going to show up in a metal detector.
00:21:34.000But to me, it's like the old Benjamin Franklin thing.
00:21:37.000It's balancing your liberty and your freedom with security.
00:21:41.000And I think that we've given them so much power with the Patriot Act, with the TSA, with all these things where I'm like, this is a bad road to go down, and they're just going to take more and more.
00:21:49.000Yeah, what is the Benjamin Franklin quote?
00:21:57.000I think the TSA has a ridiculously hard job.
00:22:00.000And I think the requirements that people have, what people request of them to make sure that they are safe, and then you give them $10 an hour, whatever the fuck they make.
00:22:15.000bunch of underqualified people who are tired and they're tired of working like that the constant flow if you watch how I like to study people at the airport because I feel like it's one of the rare times where you could just stare at people while they're doing their job and no one gets weird with you because everybody's staring at that guy or that girl that's taking your license and scanning your ticket and all that jazz I just stare at him and I watch How they interact with all these people.
00:23:01.000Well, sir, you have to take your shoes off because it's going through this thing.
00:23:03.000It's not like he has one guy he's dealing with in the whole day.
00:23:06.000He's dealing with this constant river of human beings that are coming through, and some of them have water bottles, and you've got to make sure those dangerous water bottles don't get on the plane.
00:23:14.000There's a lot of stupid shit that goes with the TSA, but...
00:23:17.000How the fuck else are you going to keep people from bringing shoe bombs or knives on planes?
00:23:24.000I mean, I don't think that the counterpoint would be to just get rid of it, to just walk into a terminal and be able to get on an airplane.
00:23:32.000But I remember, you know, and you remember too, and a lot of people do, We had a security apparatus before 9-11.
00:23:37.000These guys outsmarted the security apparatus by doing very specific things, including, like, knowing how to fly planes and doing all the things that you can't possibly check for.
00:23:46.000And also, people get guns and knives and weapons intentionally through the TSA all the time.
00:23:50.000I think, wasn't it something like over 90% of, like, agents that were trying to get things through the TSA succeeded?
00:23:55.000So, these are the people standing in between us and ISIS, you know?
00:23:59.000People do it accidentally all the time.
00:24:01.000They have stuff in their bag and it gets through and then they go, what the fuck?
00:24:26.000Yeah, it's not a perfect system, and it's not going to be, and that's just the way it is.
00:24:31.000It would be nice if it was more efficient.
00:24:32.000It would be nice if people got paid better.
00:24:34.000It'd be nice if it was easier and quicker.
00:24:36.000There'd be a lot of, it would be nice.
00:24:38.000But I don't know of anybody that's come up with a better system for scanning people and making sure that they don't bring guns or bombs or whatever the fuck it is on an airplane.
00:24:46.000It's just bizarre that airplanes are the one place where we have so much fucking security.
00:24:50.000Where malls, which are filled with way more people than your average plane...
00:24:54.000There's something about terror and flying, where it's already terrifying, like, yeah, you think you're scared now, bitch?
00:25:00.000What if it blows up in the fucking sky?
00:25:02.000A dude pulls a fucking turban out of his bag and wraps it around his head and starts lighting his underwear on fire.
00:25:07.000You know, that's what we're scared of.
00:25:09.000We're scared of someone taking it to the next level, because people are already tensed, because you're in a metal tube hurling through the sky at 500 miles an hour.
00:25:16.000If it blows up while you're doing that, it's even more freaky.
00:25:26.000That seems to be the preferred method of terror that we're really worried about, which is why the TSA exists in the first place.
00:25:33.000Because the volume of humans that go through a lot of places is probably commensurate with the volume of humans that go through the airport.
00:26:27.000And I really think it's that they, you know...
00:26:29.000To your point with the mall and all these kinds of things and these public places, I think it just speaks to the fact that most people, vast majority of people, are just good, decent people that want to go about their lives.
00:26:38.000And that these terrorists could target all these different places.
00:26:40.000I don't think they do maybe because they can't, but probably more because they don't want to give themselves away for something that might be seen as minor.
00:26:49.000It wasn't only that 3,000-some-odd people died.
00:26:51.000It was that it was the spectacle of killing those people in that way.
00:26:54.000And so I think that there's something about that as well, which is why I'm more scared about, like, A dirty bomb or something like that today than I am of anyone taking an airplane over.
00:27:02.000Because everyone knows what happened in 2001, so now if someone pulls out a knife on an airplane, someone's just going to tackle that guy and probably kill him.
00:27:21.000And we can be vigilant in all these ways, but then I wonder, it goes back to, like, NSA and all these things, like, how much are we going to give the government and how much are we going to give up in order for safety?
00:27:28.000I'd rather live in a more dangerous world, personally, and know that no one's reading my text messages or no one's throwing out my hand lotion, you know, or harassing.
00:27:37.000I saw these two women, Australian women, in the airport at SFO when I came down to LA last week, They were in wheelchairs.
00:27:44.000They were going through all of their stuff and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing to these people?
00:28:31.000I don't know much about it, you probably know more about it than I do, but someone was telling me a little bit about the way the Israelis do airport security, specifically, that it's all about, they're not profiling even based on race or anything, they're profiling based on your behavior.
00:28:44.000And it goes to your point, these are well-paid, professional people that know what the fuck they're doing, know what they're looking for, and they're in the airport and they see someone just acting a little weird.
00:30:15.000You know, violation of the Fourth Amendment.
00:30:17.000But there's no alternatives that I've seen that are even remotely responsible.
00:30:22.000No, I mean, I think it goes back to me of like, I can't speak necessarily to the level of incompetence because I'm not in security.
00:30:28.000I don't know like what they're specifically doing.
00:30:30.000I don't know what their level of training is.
00:30:31.000It just goes back to the constitutionality of it.
00:30:33.000Like if we if we and it brings up those tough questions, it's the same way I feel about about the Second Amendment.
00:30:38.000If we start seeding what this means in certain situations and before you know it, they'll just continue to erode it away.
00:30:44.000Like and so what I'm like this is a warrantless search This is by definition a warrantless search if you went and got John Jay and James Madison and all these guys and asked them and Somehow told them what the fuck was going on and then said like what is does this look like this?
00:30:58.000But you would have to go and get them and then go okay This is Isis and this is the internet and then this is Twitter and this is this is how they send information through pictures with metadata You know it's encoded in the picture and you have to break it down.
00:31:12.000That's where the message is like They'd be like, oh yeah, search everybody.
00:31:16.000Oh my god, you live in a terrible place.
00:31:18.000They'd be like, I gotta go to bed and really process this.
00:31:20.000Yeah, like, back in the day when we only had muskets, it was so awesome.
00:31:23.000I don't know if my argument makes sense to you, but to me, I just feel like these are certain sacred rights that need to be protected in any way they can.
00:31:29.000And if we want to have a conversation about why we should cede this right in a specific way, then you have to do it a little more clearly.
00:31:34.000And to me, I just, I think people take some of these things for granted that, you know, what's stopping them from, you know, if these rights continue to erode, then what stops them from busting into your house at some point and be like, well...
00:31:45.000Well, they can do that, and there are some search and seizure methods that they're really being criticized for, lately in particular, for drug offenses, where they don't even knock.
00:31:56.000They just break open people's doors and wind up shooting their dogs all the time, shoot people all the time.
00:32:02.000I mean, there was an article written recently about the amount of people that are wounded in unnecessary How do they describe that kind of altercation between the cops?
00:32:14.000No knock, searchless warrants, or what is it?
00:32:22.000I don't know how they describe it, but if you've seen the way the DEA treats any sort of a situation, even when they just have marijuana, they'll kick down the door.
00:32:31.000If they see a dog, they shoot it, and then they make people huddle up in the corner after they just murdered your family pet, and oftentimes they find like a pipe.
00:32:40.000You know, I mean, there's many people that have been called on, like someone has turned them in or someone has said something about them that turned out to not be true.
00:32:48.000Like, hey, these people have a grow up in their business or in their house, rather.
00:32:51.000And one of them was a former FBI, a couple that both worked in the FBI. They kicked in their fucking door, held them at gunpoint.
00:33:52.000So he would get that package and somehow or another it got intercepted before it got to the postman and then they had a dummy postman come and bring it and then do the whole break down the door, shoot the dog thing.
00:34:04.000They chased the dog, a golden lab, chased him out in the yard.
00:34:07.000The dog ran and was running and hiding and they shot him in front of everybody.
00:34:11.000And it turned out that the guy who was the victim of this and his family who were held at gunpoint and zip tied It was a mayor.
00:34:19.000And so, you know, he was like, what in the fuck are you people doing?
00:34:36.000No, but it is a Fourth Amendment issue that are allowed to be eroding.
00:34:39.000No one should be allowed to go into anyone's home without a warrant, no matter what.
00:34:42.000But don't you think that you sort of imply at least a certain amount of consent when you get in that line and give them your bag and say, here, search this.
00:34:50.000Like, no one's telling you that you have to do that.
00:34:53.000Like, you could choose to fly with no baggage at all.
00:34:56.000You could choose, if you wanted to, to send your stuff through the mail, and it would probably cost the same amount as it would to pay that 50 bucks or whatever it is with Southwest.
00:35:04.000If you wanted to send your package through the mail, you could do it that way and just walk through with nothing on you.
00:35:11.000And you would still have to go through the machines and all that.
00:35:12.000I don't dispute that, because I agree with you.
00:35:14.000In the pre-9-11 world, going through the metal detector, having your bags, looking at it through the machine, I think that that's all reasonable.
00:35:20.000I just don't like the people being pulled aside, pulled into rooms, people just kind of very disrespectfully going through shit.
00:35:55.000You can't say that because you can't look at everyone.
00:35:59.000You can't just randomly look at everyone and look at their private information.
00:36:03.000You just can't do that because the people that are looking at that are just people.
00:36:07.000And that's the problem with the TSA. It's not even necessarily the issue being that you get to search people's stuff to make sure there's no terrorists and no people bringing weapons on planes.
00:36:33.000You go to the airport, man, what you see is a bunch of people, and I used to do a joke about this, that I think that How do I phrase this to make it sound less insulting than it used to be?
00:36:46.000But the idea was that I think that the people who work at Burger King at the airport and the TSA, they're the same people, and they just reach into a hat.
00:37:28.000And it's like, you always encounter the guys, like, have you not flown in the last 15 years ever to know that people trying to walk through the machines with their shoes on, their belt, it's like, what is...
00:38:37.000What kind of confrontations have you had?
00:38:39.000Well, just in the sense, like, just a couple of weeks ago, I guess it was, when I came down to see Dave, I was with my girlfriend, and they were going through...
00:39:09.000I had a massive, when I was still in high school, because 9-11 happened when I was in 12th grade, and I flew down to...
00:39:16.000In 2002, early 2002, I flew down to Virginia to see my sister who was teaching down there.
00:39:20.000And they were going through my bags and stuff like that, and I had a confrontation with the TSA where one of them was like, son, do you know what happened or whatever?
00:39:29.000And I'm like, yeah, I know what happened.
00:39:35.000You know, and, like, to the point where, like, where they called over, like, I was a 17-year-old kid, and to the point where they called over, like, some cops, and then they were just, they, like, just let me go, whatever, but I was like, at that point, it was so, so to me, where I'm like, why are you being so, why are you disrespecting me?
00:39:49.000Like, you're going through my stuff if I'm a little upset about that, or I have something to say about that, like, I understand you have to probably deal with this all day, but don't, don't, Because I'm a young kid, I don't know what happened because I'm a young man.
00:39:58.000You had no idea what my experience was.
00:40:00.000Were you at the funeral for a firefighter that you knew that died?
00:40:40.000Whenever you have non-skilled labor in those sort of situations, like the guy working the fries at Burger King or the guy who's, you know, doing that thing at the TSA, you're going to get a wide variety of people that need a job, and some of them are just going to suck at protocol.
00:40:55.000They're going to suck at being polite.
00:40:57.000They're going to suck at recognizing that this old...
00:41:00.000And I don't think they have any leeway either.
00:41:02.000If some old lady comes through in a wheelchair, I'm pretty sure you have to check her, just like you check everybody else.
00:41:06.000And if you don't, you probably get fired.
00:41:07.000They have cameras watching them everywhere.
00:41:10.000The organization itself, the TSA, I mean there's a diffusion of responsibility when you're one of the people that's responsible.
00:41:17.000You're at the top and you make these laws and you pass them down to the people that are supposed to enforce all these regulations that you've written down.
00:41:27.000There's almost like There's a diffusion of responsibility from the people that have created those laws.
00:41:33.000So someone else, it's someone else's job, the $10 an hour guy, it's his job to go out there and do all this stuff.
00:41:39.000And so it's real easy for someone at the top who's not experiencing the interaction, the day-to-day interaction with these human beings to be callous about it or to make hard, fast rules like, hey, if someone comes through in a wheelchair, there's no leeway.
00:42:23.000You can't think like that, because if you do think like that, that will be your vulnerability.
00:42:29.000That will be the path in that someone who's looking to do something horrible will take.
00:42:33.000I think the solution, Joe, to bridge the gap in the way we feel about this and come to some sort of consensus, what might be And this conflicts a little bit with my small government kind of mentality, but it's just to say, to ask the kind of fundamental question, why are these people being paid $10 or $15 an hour?
00:42:47.000Back to the Israeli experience of these guys that are professionals.
00:42:50.000They take a lot of pride in their work.
00:42:51.000They make maybe $80,000 or $100,000 a year.
00:42:54.000Not that they necessarily need to make that much money, but people that are professionals, should we invest more money in making this smarter?
00:42:59.000Well, it would be a substantial increase in our airline fees and much other things, I'm sure.
00:43:22.000Yeah, I mean, the Israeli thing is interesting because Israel has a mandatory military service requirement that I am not in favor of, but I am.
00:43:39.000It's very rare to meet people that are more patriotic than Israelis.
00:43:43.000People that are more committed to their country.
00:43:48.000They feel very marginalized, very Targeted and rightly so and so because of that like people that I've met that work for the Israeli army or that have been Soldiers over there.
00:44:02.000They have this very intense sort of view of altercation and of the world and when you're forced to do two years military service mandatory like they are you also have You're invested in this whole project of Israel.
00:44:16.000I mean, there's not there's no veterans and then civilians, right?
00:44:20.000Everyone's a fucking veteran And, you know, when you deal with a country where literally everyone does some military service, there's more chips in the game, you know?
00:44:31.000Yeah, I think, you know, I went to school with this girl that was Israeli when I was at Northeastern in Boston, and I remember very clearly she had this, very unassuming, you would never know, but she had this picture of her with an assault rifle shooting at a range, and I'm like, this is so interesting.
00:44:45.000It conflicts, because I agree with you.
00:44:46.000It's like one of those things where I'm like, I can see both sides of this, where...
00:45:02.000I agree with you Or do something that is for the society and really have some investment and some skin in the game in society.
00:45:11.000I think that that's a nice idea, but I think that the way I feel about the state's exertion of power over the individual kind of overrides that.
00:45:18.000But I like the idea in principle, like the idea of saying like, hey, and it's also easy for me as a 32-year-old that would be long, you know, to be like, ah, you guys do it.
00:45:26.000So at the same time, I understand that argument as well.
00:45:28.000No, I think I'm completely in agreement with you.
00:45:30.000I love the idea that they're all in, but I don't want anybody enforcing that on me.
00:45:35.000And I want a kid, if a kid grows up in America and then decides, hey man, I'm going to backpack across the country.
00:50:52.000But I think it's a very complex issue when you give away national secrets and you've signed an oath that you're not going to give away national secrets.
00:51:02.000You sign an oath of secrecy and then you give away national secrets.
00:51:06.000But, if those national secrets are, in the case of Edward Snowden, they're very detrimental to what we think of as freedom in this country.
00:51:15.000Like, if you have a bunch of people, like you or me or Jamie or just a normal person, and they work at the NSA, and they can, as he has said, spy on their ex-girlfriends, read their emails, go into anybody's email that you want to and check them out, and then We were also being lied to by the government about the extent of these searches.
00:51:34.000And he exposed that, that the president was saying it's just metadata.
00:51:36.000And he was saying, no, it's not just metadata.
00:51:48.000But this is also something that was exposed.
00:51:50.000There was an NSA whistleblower from...
00:51:52.000I want to say 2011, there was a guy who was a, I think he was a coder in the NSA, and he's gone public with this.
00:52:01.000But he didn't go public with this in the same way, where he dumped a bunch of documents and let people go through them like Edward Snowden did.
00:52:09.000And he also didn't face the consequences that Edward Snowden did as well.
00:52:15.000He was criticized and it was debated whether or not him talking about it at all was legal or whether he should be able to, but ultimately he didn't face the same kind of consequences.
00:52:24.000I mean, Edward Snowden can't live in America anymore.
00:52:26.000I mean, Chelsea Manning has been exonerated or pardoned.
00:52:36.000So they commuted the sentence, and she's allowed to be free in May, so in a couple months she'll be free.
00:52:41.000But he's stuck in Russia, and he essentially...
00:52:45.000The difference being, they said that Chelsea Manning went through the court system, was tried, and then Obama decided that it was a good enough amount of time, and then he was going to commute the sentence.
00:53:00.000So I kind of see their point there that...
00:53:03.000Edward Snowden fleed and didn't go through the whole, but why wouldn't he flee?
00:53:08.000You're going to lock him in a fucking cage.
00:53:09.000Chelsea Manning was locked in a cage 24 hours a day with the lights on with no fucking clothes in solitary confinement for I don't know how long, but it was a long period of time.
00:54:39.000There's a case of a transgender fighter who was a man for 30 years, became a woman for two years, and started beating the fuck out of these women.
00:55:27.000And conditions that he also found might have constituted torture.
00:55:31.000I was going to say, that sounds torture.
00:55:32.000Yeah, Juan Mendez has completed a 14-month investigation into the treatment of Manning since the soldiers arrest the U.S. military base in May of 2010. He concludes the U.S. military was at least culpable of cruel and inhumane treatment in keeping Manning locked up alone for 23 hours a day for over an 11-month period in conditions that he found.
00:57:29.000And it seemed like unchecked behavior in a time of war is extremely dangerous.
00:57:32.000And it was pretty obvious that when you looked at what Edward Snowden had revealed, it was pretty obvious that the majority of the American people had a huge problem with it.
00:57:42.000The majority of the American people, you or I, who are doing nothing wrong.
00:57:57.000And that, to me, is a way clearer violation of the Fourth Amendment than this weird sort of gray area, not necessarily gray if you're looking at it from a constitutional sense, of how They're allowed to check you at the airport.
00:58:10.000Yeah, no, that's a very valid and solid argument, I think.
00:58:12.000Because my stance on Manning specifically has softened over time, because I feel like, you know, when he or she...
00:58:38.000They didn't take the time to people died because of that stuff like there were people that were put in danger because of the things that they were put out because it wasn't they didn't Carefully comb through it and make sure that he's actually where people died.
00:58:48.000Yeah Because of the way WikiLeaks released it because I don't think that I don't know if they're gonna point that specific things but the Way things were out like I don't think all the names were blacked out I don't think like operate the operations in process like people were in play and That were being outed in that way.
00:59:04.000I think the reason I was a little softer on Snowden was because not only was it domestic, primarily, which I think is an important qualifier, but also because I think he went out of his way to not single any individuals out.
00:59:15.000It was all about the apparatus itself.
00:59:17.000It wasn't about like saying like general blah blah blah is doing this and general or admiral but it was about like hey this structure exists and it's really as quite nefarious indeed you know and I think that so I was always to me my stance on him is he's a patriot and he should be welcomed home and the fact that he wasn't he can't be I guess part he hasn't been tried or whatever but the fact that I know that some people think that Obama only pardoned Manning because it made him look good with the transgender community and with the LBGTQ community which I think is a little When
00:59:49.000Well, because it's part of his legacy.
00:59:51.000It's the same reason why how much Ford was hurt when he pardoned Nixon.
00:59:55.000That stuck with him forever in a negative way.
00:59:56.000Well, this is going to stick with Obama, I think, positively in a good way moving forward.
01:00:01.000But I don't know that I'm quite that callous in thinking that that's the only reason.
01:00:05.000I think that he probably had time to marinate on it.
01:00:08.000Clearly, she went through some rigors.
01:00:10.000Well, also what's important to point out is that Obama's website, the Hope and Change website that he had when he was running for president and when he got into office, the original website had in it these provisions for how he was going to treat whistleblowers.
01:00:25.000They were going to allow people to release information that showed crimes and they were going to protect them.
01:00:31.000They were going to protect whistleblowers.
01:00:35.000It was a very specific approach that they were having while he was running for president about whistleblowers, because he was about exposing these egregious offenses.
01:00:45.000And once he got into office, one of the things that happened after the Chelsea Manning thing and after the Edward Snowden things, they removed that from the Hope and Change website.
01:00:54.000They removed that provision about whistleblowers.
01:01:02.000Well, that goes back to the whole thing with Snowden when you were saying, well, you kind of take an oath...
01:01:06.000You know to protect these secrets and all that kind of stuff But yeah, I look at it, you know I want people to be flippant with that kind of stuff like you were saying I want people to be flippantly being like well this is I have some sort of personal problem with this But I actually think it takes a level of courage to be like what in the fuck is going on here?
01:01:19.000Oh for sure and also I believe that before he gave that information to Glenn Greenwald I believe he offered it to a bunch of different mainstream news sources like New York Times Washington Post correct me if I'm wrong Jamie I think that was in the documentary, the...
01:02:36.000Yeah, the one that just happened, where people, they seem to have identified the person, new sources that you think are reputable say it, and then they have to retract it later.
01:02:45.000Everyone's very quick to try to pull the gun first and be like, well, we have the story.
01:02:50.000And then we're all victimized as people that are just...
01:02:53.000We're not in the trenches, so we need the information.
01:02:55.000We have to trust these people, and trust is broken, I think, in a little way.
01:02:58.000Yeah, I certainly think there should be some sort of a national debate on whether or not Edward Snowden is a hero.
01:03:05.000You know, whether or not Edward Snowden did something that benefited the American people.
01:03:09.000Because I certainly think the overall reaction, the overall, like if you look at what Edward Snowden did and then you look at what are the consequences of what he did, I think it's good for us.
01:03:20.000Because we got to see that all these Alex Jones type conspiracies were actually true.
01:03:25.000When Alex Jones is ranting and raving about the government, looking into your emails.
01:03:28.000One of the great episodes of this show, by the way.
01:03:41.000I had been telling people that Alex Jones, who's my friend and has been my friend for a long time, I get criticized so much by people for that.
01:03:49.000They're like, he's so crazy and he's such a fucking right-wing wacko.
01:03:52.000I'm like, Alex Jones is not right-wing.
01:04:35.000He believes that 9-11 was preventable a month after it happened.
01:04:38.000He resigned to protest from the National Security Agency.
01:04:41.000Benny was part of an elite NSA team which designed and built an intelligence gathering system to target and collect data on terrorism threats.
01:04:51.000He belongs to an intimate group of four whistleblowers, each of whom left the NSA after raising concerns about failures in the agency's intelligence gathering capabilities.
01:05:04.000Yeah, so he was the first guy that was saying what they're doing is bullshit, and he alleges the NSA buried key intelligence that could have prevented 9-11.
01:05:14.000He alleges the agency's bulk data collection from internet and telephone communications is unconstitutional and illegal in the U.S. He alleges that the NSA is ineffective at preventing terrorism because analysts are too swamped with information.
01:07:41.000I mean, he's a very smart man, so he must know at the highest level that he's a geopolitical pawn that, like you said, could be played in any way at any point.
01:07:49.000If I was him, I would just be listening to Rosetta Stone with Russia all day long.
01:07:54.000I'd be like, I need to find out how to speak Russian, and I need to fucking go hide in Siberia or some shit.
01:08:58.000One of the things that I'm really interested in is, what is the level of complicity with the telecoms?
01:09:03.000What is the complicity with the government forcing these people?
01:09:07.000And how many thousands of people are in on this?
01:09:09.000And that's the crazy thing, is that Snowden, who was a contractor, not even really in the inner sanctum of the NSA, knew all of this stuff.
01:09:17.000There are people running around, thousands of people, just acting like this never happened or wasn't going on.
01:09:21.000It's not a conspiracy because we know it's true, but it's a pretty big thing where I'm like, focusing on Snowden is missing the entire point.
01:09:30.000No Sprint or T-Mobile or anyone was like, hey, imagine the kind of coup would have been for one of those companies to be like...
01:10:00.000I think it's just protecting the bottom.
01:10:02.000I mean, I'm sure that there's something they can do, but they don't care about anything but money.
01:10:05.000Well, I have a friend who used to be a big executive at Google, and she described to me some of the conversations that they had when they were dealing with the government and search engines and Right.
01:10:53.000Except, I want to listen to your voicemails.
01:10:55.000Except, I want to be able to track your calls.
01:10:58.000Except, I want to be able to know where your phone is at all times.
01:11:01.000I mean, that metadata from where the location of your phone is, is one of the primary ways they target terrorists.
01:11:09.000People who are not aware of why so many civilians die in these terrorist attacks.
01:11:15.000Part of the reason, especially in the early days of drone attacks, When they were trying to target terrorists, rather, was that they would use the metadata.
01:11:25.000They would find out where the phones are.
01:11:27.000So if your phone was in this apartment building, they're going to bomb that apartment building.
01:11:34.000And I have no problem with them going to a shadow court and getting permission to be like, we're tracking this guy's phone now.
01:11:41.000We're reading this guy or this organization's emails or people that are kind of within seven degrees of separation or whatever from this person.
01:11:46.000At least there's some sort of orderly nature to it, right?
01:11:50.000You don't need to be reading my emails or I'm just getting Uber receipts sent to my email.
01:11:54.000It's like, why are you even storing all this?
01:11:57.000What use is it other than obviously they want trends, they want data that they can do big...
01:12:01.000High up data, you know, eagle eye data and saying like this is the trend and all these kinds of things.
01:12:06.000But it's all ill begotten because it's like it's not it's not right.
01:12:28.000And to me, I feel like this is the thing where you've got to keep the pedal down, and you've got to keep going and be like, this is not okay.
01:12:42.000Sure, the NDAA. I mean, the NDAA, what they've essentially done is they've eliminated the right of due process.
01:12:49.000They can lock you up for as long as they want.
01:12:52.000They can deny you any sort of legal representation.
01:12:57.000That's all been taken away from us now.
01:12:59.000What used to be one of the foundations of being an American, the right to due process, right to have a lawyer, the right to a trial of your own peers, all that stuff is kind of gone now if they just decide that you're a terrorist.
01:13:11.000And they can decide you're a terrorist if you have weed on you.
01:13:15.000If you're involved in illegal drugs, you can be, under the Patriot Act, considered a terrorist.
01:13:21.000It is, and it's scary in the sense, too, because it goes back to what they were saying, or what this gentleman was saying that we were just talking about, where he was saying, like, they have too much data.
01:13:29.000And at some point, someone has to be like, hey, the guy with an ounce of weed, or the guy, you know, even with four ounces of weed, why are we dumping him in with all the stuff that's just going to muddy the waters more about the real target that we're really going after, which is someone that's actually going to hurt someone, or someone that's actually going to cause a terrorist incident?
01:13:56.000And here's another big part of the problem, was that when Obama was instituting these changes, and when the NDAA got passed, and when people were saying, well, hey, we're never going to use it.
01:14:21.000Crazy person is now president, and you're like, well, now what?
01:14:23.000Well, what about these fucking crazy laws, Obama, that you passed when you thought that it would be nothing but your standard politicians and hopefully Democrats from now to the end of time?
01:15:05.000But to me, it goes back to the argument of executive orders, it goes back to the argument of all these things where, or the filibuster in the Senate, where what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
01:15:16.000You can't set up these rules that are just going to backfire on you and then complain about them later.
01:15:56.000Well, explain what he said and when he said it.
01:15:59.000So Eisenhower was president from 52 to 60. Well, technically 53 to 61. And he was obviously one of the instrumental generals in the Allied assaults on Japan and on Nazi Germany.
01:16:13.000And he saw the influence of the military growing and that in the Cold War, in the nascent era of the Cold War, that We were making bombs to make bombs, that we were trying to have conflicts, like with Korea, which he did end in the early 50s,
01:16:28.000and seeing these seeds sown of a perpetual war, a perpetual war that the economy was actually benefiting from.
01:16:36.000Jamie, pull up that speech, because it's an amazing speech.
01:16:39.000It would be nice for people to hear it.
01:16:41.000Because a lot of people are not aware of the tone and the way he said it, and it was when he was leaving office.
01:17:17.000We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations.
01:17:30.000Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry.
01:17:38.000American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.
01:17:46.000But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense.
01:17:51.000We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
01:17:58.000Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.
01:18:05.000Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
01:18:14.000The total influence Economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.
01:18:25.000We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
01:18:34.000Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved.
01:18:38.000So is the very structure of our society.
01:18:42.000In the councils of government, We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex.
01:18:53.000The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
01:19:00.000We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
01:19:09.000Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel The proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
01:19:32.000Because people have to understand, and you know, before World War II, we weren't a built-up and militarized society.
01:19:40.000We would militarize when we needed to, and it was really...
01:19:44.000Teddy Roosevelt and all those kinds of guys that started getting a little more bullish in that kind of regard with the Spanish-American War and the USS Maine.
01:19:51.000But the fight over World War I was real.
01:19:56.000And people take for granted now that we have just massive military, we have this massive power.
01:20:01.000But in the 19th century, not that you can't equate them necessarily to the 21st century, we weren't going around running roughshod over people and doing those kinds of things.
01:20:11.000That was kind of the American tradition.
01:20:13.000And to hear that come out of Eisenhower's mouth, especially knowing his experiences in the war and his deep knowledge of the military and what was going on in the world, it's one of the great warnings of all time in American history.
01:20:25.000And it's very wise on his part because he recognized that there are survival systems.
01:20:29.000That are a part of any industry, you know?
01:20:33.000I mean, there's survival mechanisms, and the industry wants to stay alive.
01:20:37.000If all of a sudden there was peace on Earth, this gigantic industry, this multiple-billion-dollar-a-year industry, I mean, I don't know how much.
01:20:55.000So that massive amount of money, there's so many people that are involved in that, and so many jobs that have to be preserved, and so much of the industry relies on keeping conflict Active and I think that's what he was trying to warn us about but it's so interesting about it and it involves citizenry and that people need to be aware of it and to hear that from the president you're never going to hear anything remotely as even close to as candid as that is today.
01:21:22.000No absolutely not and I think that even hearing that from you know just to reiterate like hearing that from a Barack Obama for instance would be strong right but hearing that from a Ulysses S Grant or a Zachary Taylor or a guy that served right especially at the level he served is like that That meant something to people.
01:21:39.000And I think that's why that saying never went away, but under our noses it happened.
01:21:44.000And what he said was going to happen is exactly what happened in Southeast Asia, in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos.
01:21:51.000He called it from a fucking mile away.
01:21:53.000Well, it wasn't even a mile away because he was living there.
01:22:11.000And it's the same, you know, some people say the USS Maine and Spanish-American War in 1898 was another false flag or something that they let happen or something that was blown out of proportion.
01:22:18.000Pardon the pun, because it was about a ship blowing up.
01:22:21.000But yeah, it is a provocation that gets everyone involved.
01:23:24.000But to have this industrialized nature of it, to have this need to lurch from one war to the next war to the next war to the next war is not what a thriving republic does.
01:23:36.000Well, it's definitely what an empire that's dependent upon the control, or rather an industry, rather, that's dependent upon the control that it has currently maintaining it.
01:23:48.000You need to maintain the business, the business of making these machines and of having these contracts.
01:23:54.000I mean, it's a huge industry, and like all of these unlimited growth industries, Every business essentially operates under this paradigm of unlimited growth, or most businesses do, most corporations do, where every year they want to make more money.
01:24:09.000And if that's applicable to a company that makes tanks, well, every year they want to make more money, they want to make more tanks.
01:24:42.000In case they talk some shit, or Godzilla shows up.
01:24:45.000Trump's proposed hike to military spending is bigger than all but two countries' entire budgets.
01:24:50.000Well, that's because we're America, and we're better than everybody else.
01:24:52.000Get that communist shit off my screen.
01:24:55.000I want to say, I mean, this is incredible, Joe.
01:24:56.000I want to say, I think this is right, that if you split the military spending of the world in thirds, we are responsible for a third of it.
01:25:05.000Ten countries are responsible for another third of it.
01:25:07.000And then everyone else is responsible for another third of it.
01:25:10.000We have four and a half percent of the world's population.
01:25:13.000So this is way out of whack with even our needs, like our actual very need to protect ourselves.
01:25:20.000Right, but when you get past those 10 countries, the other third, and then us, that's 11 countries, everybody else is using coconuts and catapults.
01:26:03.000GM, Ford, all these guys were making our armaments.
01:26:06.000You know, Mitsubishi made the Japanese Zeros.
01:26:09.000Offshoots of IBM were making friggin' punch card machines for the Nazis.
01:26:12.000You know, like, people, you know, for better or for worse, ramp up and do what they need to do in times of war to make money.
01:26:18.000And so we could have a plan in place to say, like, hey, if we need to ramp up, if something bad happens, if we need to go overseas or something, if we have to go engage the Russians because they're rolling into the rest of Ukraine, for instance, we can take care of that without having bases all over the world.
01:26:32.000Well, the problem with that kind of thinking is, as soon as you say that, then they realize, well, there's a lot of money to be had if that is the case.
01:27:20.000When I went to college, I went to school for American history, and I graduated.
01:27:23.000And when I got my job offer in the video game industry, I was about to start my graduate degree at Northeastern in American history because I wanted to be a professor at the time.
01:27:30.000So my real passion was American history and American politics, but I veered off into a different direction.
01:27:48.000I'm really interested in the founding generation.
01:27:50.000I'm really interested in their experiences.
01:27:52.000And the American Revolution, I think, is a fascinating revolution compared to a lot of other revolutions, primarily because it is, I think, an inherently, in some ways, conservative revolution, which is not common.
01:28:01.000These were incredibly rich people fighting.
01:28:30.000Union that we've established over here, and to see all these things that threaten what we find so amazing about it, like the violations of the Fourth Amendment, all the NSA stuff with Edward Snowden, all these different things that we see that are huge problems.
01:28:45.000What they are is also they're weakening the foundation of these ideas that were so amazing when they were first established in 1776. Yeah, and to me, that's why I think that they're worth protecting.
01:28:57.000It goes into the, like, is the Constitution living or not?
01:29:00.000Is it a strict constructionist or a loose constructionist?
01:29:02.000All those kinds of questions I think are valid.
01:29:04.000But to me, I'm like, we have this very unique vision into what the founders intended, because they were one of the few, I think, people at that time that were like, we're going to...
01:29:14.000The Federalist Papers are incredible if you read them.
01:29:16.000You don't have to wonder what they meant.
01:29:18.000They literally tell you exactly what they meant.
01:29:21.000So when you go to Supreme Court cases, I don't know that there are many Supreme Court cases that don't even reference the Federalist Papers because it's like, well, they said this at Article 3, Section 2, but actually in this paper that they wrote anonymously that we know Alexander Hamilton wrote, here's what he said about it.
01:29:36.000Now, how did this knowledge of politics and how did this fascination that you have with the history of the United States, how did this get you in, you know, quote-unquote, trouble in the video game industry with these people that are predominantly left-wing and predominantly progressive?
01:29:52.000I say progressive, but progressive is kind of a dirty word now.
01:29:57.000There's a difference between liberal and progressive.
01:29:58.000Well, it would be great if everybody was liberal.
01:30:01.000It would be great if everybody was progressive.
01:30:03.000It would be great if everybody wanted people to have freedom of choice and freedom to be whoever you want, but that's not really what those things are anymore.
01:30:46.000Not all my ideas are radical or even outside of the mainstream.
01:30:49.000Socially, I'm probably further to the left than many of these people.
01:30:53.000I think that it goes back to this idea, and this is something Dave Rubin has touched on a lot in his show, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is this idea that it's really all or nothing.
01:32:04.000I see a lot of people say all the time, like, Colin doesn't believe in welfare.
01:32:07.000Or Colin doesn't believe in social security.
01:32:09.000And I'm like, I never said that, actually.
01:32:11.000I just, I believe that these things should be reformed and maybe taken back a step.
01:32:15.000But they even look at that as a push too far on the system.
01:32:19.000I guess what I'm trying to say to you, and I'm sorry I'm not being more lucid with you, I'm trying my hardest, is that they, you have to agree with them lockstep.
01:32:27.000If they see you in one way that is injurious to their cause or that is conflicting or contrary to what they believe, they do not give a fuck about anything else you believe.
01:32:38.000And that's the thing that always frustrated me and what so surprised me when people really were running me out on a rail out of the gaming industry with a completely innocuous joke, which I think tells you everything you need to know about the intent, that they don't want allies in different ways, allies in different clothes, allies in different...
01:33:08.000But what's interesting is we've kind of turned a corner where, in many ways, the right is more tolerant than the left to variations in their ideology.
01:33:18.000Whereas the right is much more tolerant to people that support gay marriage.
01:33:22.000The right is much more tolerant to people that...
01:33:36.000Like, if you got to the point where, like, I got in a heated argument with someone once about abortion, which I'm pro-choice.
01:33:43.000But I was saying, well, essentially, it was a criticism of Richard Dawkins' quote, where he's comparing a human embryo to a pig fetus, or a pig embryo.
01:33:53.000I forget the terms you used, but I'm like, well, that's ridiculous.
01:33:56.000Because one of them is going to become a person if you don't take it out of your body.
01:34:22.000But that baby, I'm not saying you should be forced to make that baby a person and keep it in your body when it's a few cells and then two weeks old.
01:34:31.000I'm not saying that you can't choose when to terminate your pregnancy.
01:34:36.000What I'm saying is you're terminating a pregnancy.
01:34:57.000But let's not lie about what it is, because as soon as we distort the reality of what the thing is, Then we put up these ideological boundaries and blinders, and we make communication very difficult, and we make these rigid ideologies almost like a religion.
01:36:15.000Right, and this is what I always call, this issue to me particularly, Joe, is a 60-40 issue.
01:36:20.000What I always say is, like, I am pro-choice, but I respect the pro-life argument, and I don't think you should just have unfettered access to abortions forever.
01:36:55.000That because they're pro-life, for instance, which is a stance I don't share, but I respect.
01:37:01.000Why does that mean that they hate women?
01:37:02.000Why does it mean that like why does it always go from zero to ten you know for like immediately it's like and then and then there's all these lies mixed in like the The the pay gap which is a fucking lie.
01:37:25.000So why does everyone want to be so divisive?
01:37:28.000Why do you want to add more fuel to the fire when you can be like, hey, maybe we have problem X, Y, and Z, but this isn't a problem, actually.
01:38:07.000Doesn't take into account personal choices.
01:38:09.000Women, for instance, leave the workforce to have families.
01:38:11.000Sometimes men are gravitating towards engineering or physics or things that pay them a lot of money, while women tend maybe towards psychology or something like that.
01:38:21.000I think the argument is something like nine out of the ten top grossing career choices are men-dominated.
01:38:26.000And nine out of the ten lowest money-making career choices are actually dominated by women.
01:38:30.000I think the only exception there is clergy, which is dominated by men.
01:38:34.000But it doesn't adjust for any of these things.
01:38:36.000So when you actually adjust for choices, when you adjust for careers and longevity and hours and all of these things that are relevant, the pay gap closes to something like less than five cents.
01:38:45.000And then there's even arguments saying that those could probably be explained away completely as well.
01:38:49.000I know Christina Summers and some of these people that know way more about this than I do have videos about.
01:38:54.000If you actually dive in, you probably can get rid of the entire number completely.
01:38:57.000But it's preposterous to say that the woman makes $0.79 for every dollar.
01:39:04.000The real issue is it's implying that two people working alongside each other at the Apple store, the man is making $5 an hour, the woman is making $0.79 an hour less.
01:39:56.000Spewed out as an indication that we are an inherently sexist society.
01:40:01.000And whether or not you can find sexism in our society, I'm sure you can.
01:40:04.000It absolutely exists, just as racism exists.
01:40:07.000I don't think it is nearly as much of a problem as they're trying to pin it out to be.
01:40:12.000And I think there's a lot of other factors involved in why men make more money, and one of them may be the demand for a higher salary when they're being hired, better skills at negotiation, or more confidence in those sort of confrontations with employers.
01:40:27.000I mean, there's a lot of factors, but it doesn't do anybody any good to repeat a false statistic when it's provably false, and then when people find out that it's false, then they lose confidence in the information they're being given.
01:40:51.000I want to have, this is the starting point.
01:40:53.000These are objective truths, and then let's debate about those things.
01:40:56.000But if that's your starting point, if that's a third of the entire reason why you're angry and in the streets in Washington, D.C., well, then I don't even know what you're angry about anymore, to be honest.
01:41:04.000It goes back to Occupy Wall Street or all these things where I'm like, I don't know exactly what you're angry about.
01:41:09.000And this is why this protest isn't working and isn't resonating with people.
01:41:12.000I saw people in the March for Women, the Women's March thing, with signs talking about the gender pay gap.
01:41:19.000And so they had the time to make a sign.
01:41:22.000They had the time to take that sign and nail it to some boards and carry it around.
01:41:28.000But they didn't have time to Google whether or not that was true.
01:42:08.000Meanwhile, you ask them, you know, you ask one of these feminists, there's no reason with feminism if the goal is for total equality, but we all know that that's not really what feminism means today, that, you know, if you sit there and be like, can you name just one thing that I can do that you can't?
01:42:33.000I know, for instance, that, you know, the examples that people give, and I haven't seen the statistics, but I've heard it circulated, that even that, you know, companies are so desperate now to hire women because of this situation, this optical situation that they're in, where it seems like women are being pushed down,
01:42:50.000that women in their 20s and 30s are actually making more now.
01:42:52.000You know, and certainly they're more likely to get a higher education, certainly they're more likely to even graduate high school.
01:42:59.000So there are actually systemic benefits to being a woman, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that either.
01:43:03.000But I just feel like it goes back to that thing of, like, why are we fighting?
01:43:09.000And this goes back to your question about the video game industry.
01:43:10.000I'm like, hey, instead of yelling at me about this, we won't agree about these situations over here, but can't we advocate for these together?
01:43:17.000Or do you not want my advocacy for gay marriage because...
01:43:52.000Well, it's this argument about equality.
01:43:53.000I mean, to me, feminism was about equality.
01:43:57.000And I think that this, you know, I'm reading more about it and learning more about it, so I'm still very ignorant about it, but this more third wave, what they call third wave feminism, which I'm sure is a term you've heard, that seems to be more about a combative nature to actually...
01:44:11.000Instead of saying men and women are equal, men and women should deserve the same rights and the same treatment and all those kinds of things, it actually seems to be very anti-man in a way.
01:44:19.000It seems to be almost like the tables have turned.
01:44:22.000And I'm like, but why are you turning the tables?
01:44:23.000Didn't you achieve what you wanted in the first place, which was just that we were going to be here together at the nexus of everything as two genders?
01:44:33.000Part of the problem is that reinforcing that fake statistic The gender pay gap, that so many people have heard that.
01:44:41.000Sarah Silverman was just talking about it recently, and some big thing that she did.
01:44:45.000I'm like, that's not true, but yet people just say it.
01:45:33.000I'm very egalitarian in my ideas about the world, but I am opposed to anybody that likes one gender over the other, because I think that's foolish.
01:45:43.000Just like I'm opposed to people that only like white people.
01:45:45.000I'm opposed to people that only like black people.
01:45:47.000I'm opposed to people that generalize based on an enormous mass of human beings.
01:46:14.000The live and let live nature to judge people based on their character and the quality of their intelligence or whatever it is you're looking for in them shouldn't be categorized in these specific ways by sex or gender, by race or religion, by any of those kinds of things.
01:47:29.000It's impossibly hard to get on a stage and do that kind of stuff.
01:47:31.000But to me, I was like, hey, is anyone going to say that I'm not a sexist?
01:47:35.000Is anyone going to stand up that's known me for 10 years and say, hey, we don't agree with the joke, but the way you're categorizing this guy, who I know, is not accurate.
01:47:44.000And I heard that there were some fights behind the scenes with people, and I got a lot of DMs and messages, but very little in terms of public support.
01:48:21.000Yeah, and that's exactly what they did.
01:48:24.000And the thing that hurt me the most is that I'm not close with a lot of these people, but people that know me, there are people in this industry that are writing, that were piling on me, or remaining silent, that got freelance work because of me, that maybe even got hired because I was on a hiring committee, that pushed for them.
01:48:41.000And people I used to take out to lunch when I was senior editor to see how they were doing, if there was anything I could do for them, stuff like that.
01:48:55.000But when a person comes after your character, and you damn well know that there are a bunch of people around you that know who you are, whether or not they agree with what you said or agree with what you do, but they know who you are, and they know the severity of what people are saying, and they don't say anything...
01:49:10.000That really wounds a person and that really fucking hurt.
01:49:14.000Do you think that what's going on in a lot of ways when people did not come to your defense is that what you're doing in many ways is making a very complicated and nuanced perspective from a person in your in your stance you're kind of You're taking this path outside of the ideology.
01:49:40.000And by doing so, you sort of challenge a lot of the ways these people have been behaving for a long time.
01:49:46.000And as soon as you do that, they have to kind of reconsider these ideological boundaries they've set up in their own behavior and thinking and communication.
01:49:57.000They like to keep things rigid and simple.
01:49:58.000And they also want to continue to progress in their career.
01:50:02.000And in order to do that, you have to kind of have this predetermined pattern that you follow.
01:50:08.000I think simple is the key word that you used.
01:50:11.000Because, yes, there are people out there that cannot comprehend how a person who believes in small government, for instance, will use the same argument that says, the government can't touch my guns.
01:50:22.000That's consistent with saying the government can't tell a woman what to do with her body.
01:50:26.000That's consistent with the principle that says a government shouldn't even be involved in telling you who you can marry, and a man should be able to marry a man, and a woman should be able to marry a woman.
01:50:32.000And I would go as far as to say that even a polygamist totally on the up-and-up, everyone's in on a relationship should not be the government's problem.
01:50:40.000They cannot acknowledge that it's the lack of governmental power that gives you that right in my perspective.
01:50:46.000When they feel like it's the wielding of government power that ensures those rights.
01:51:16.000Instead of saying, give the power to the people, let people do whatever they would like to do as long as they're not infringing upon the rights of others, and let's have less and less people dictating what people get to do.
01:51:27.000Right, and that to me is liberty, right?
01:51:29.000And they look at it, I don't want to say they, but a lot of people, a lot of progressives or regressives, depending on you want to look at them, will look at it and be like, well, the government has to insure these things because these are not natural.
01:51:38.000These are not natural rights or these are not things that can be insured.
01:51:40.000And I'm like, but In the natural society, in the natural sense, we have to have consistent rights.
01:51:46.000I can't in good faith say, like, I have the right to wield a gun because the government can't tell me that, even though it's enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but then say, like, oh, the government can get involved in your bedroom, though.
01:51:55.000Oh, the government can tap your phones.
01:51:58.000I'm like, no, it's either all or nothing.
01:51:59.000And if that's a philosophy that's too hard for people to wrap their minds around, then...
01:52:04.000I don't know what to say about that, but to me, it's pretty clear and pretty lucid, the way I feel my principles are rooted in that philosophy.
01:52:10.000Also, I think when people, they're seeking this sort of comfort level in life and in their positions, and I don't necessarily think people understand that as soon as you allow the government too much power, you will never get that back.
01:52:26.000As soon as they have power, as soon as they can take away some of your liberties, those will never get returned.
01:52:44.000Something has to be just completely undeniably good.
01:52:48.000For it to have gone through all the propaganda, all the bullshit, all the lies, all the governmental regulations, all the people being locked up in jail for life for, and then still come out on the other side on 2017 and be legal in a bunch of states, recreationally,
01:53:15.000And that's what people have to be really scared of.
01:53:16.000And that goes to the point, it's like, I don't want to give anything an inch because I am afraid of the consequences of giving anyone an inch.
01:53:22.000That's why I wouldn't apologize for the joke.
01:53:24.000That's why I resigned from my company instead of apologizing for the joke.
01:53:37.000But the point is that I could have probably apologized and groveled, but I'm like, no, because A, I'm not sorry, so that would be a huge lie.
01:53:45.000B, I have to now really recalibrate the way I go about my business with my partners and with the audience, because...
01:53:52.000You know, I didn't have the protections that I thought I would have when the mistake was made.
01:53:59.000So I tried to do what I thought was the most principled and character-driven choice, which is be like, this is best for my partners, who don't agree with me.
01:54:06.000This is best for the audience, who might not agree with me.
01:54:21.000And the thing that, you know, it's sad to see because it's not my, I feel like I'm a pretty good natured person and I don't like seeing the rubber band effect going on where people now are suffering because they stood up and stood out or whatever.
01:54:32.000It's just that, and I don't care about the people that were out to character assassinate me.
01:54:35.000I'm talking about like, you know, my ex business partners and stuff.
01:54:37.000It's just that, like, no matter what I say, it'll be twisted.
01:54:40.000I tried to be very magnanimous and, like, very kind about it when I was on Reuben the second time, and people twisted everything to just be a problem anyway.
01:54:47.000So I'm like, I'll just remain silent because I'd rather them misconstrue the silence than misconstrue the words, you know?
01:55:44.000Or it's wrong, or it's hurtful in some ways.
01:55:46.000And people make mistakes like that all the time.
01:55:48.000And there's also, we have to take into account that a lot of times people don't realize the consequences of their words, or they say things in a flippant manner, or they're tired, or they're stressed, or things come out that they don't necessarily believe in that way, but especially when it comes to something like Twitter or some short form,
01:56:05.000I think it's really important that we be given the opportunity to express ourselves fully and then The disagreements with that be categorized in an honest way.
01:56:16.000And what I had the most problem with was not just someone calling you racist, but that everyone was making it out to be this horrible The sexist evil thing when it's clearly something said in jest and as soon as you can and that's my wheelhouse as soon as you start taking humor and something that people say that's absolutely Meant to be just funny and make it as like oh this guy just signed an affidavit that women should shut the fuck up because it's better I mean that's really the the
01:56:46.000worst case scenario interpretation of what you said yeah, and and yeah, I think that That was the disappointing part of it was, again, it goes back to this point of like, it ignored everything, like my body of work.
01:56:58.000I actually stood up very loudly for political and social causes many times.
01:57:02.000There are huge videos I have of my feelings on the Confederate flag or like how I feel like- What do you think about the Confederate flag?
01:57:09.000I think that you have the right to fly, I just think it's in terrible taste, and I understand why people are upset about it, and I don't think the flag of a traitorous country should be instituted in state flags in the United States.
01:57:27.000Yeah, I wouldn't see why it wouldn't be.
01:57:29.000I mean, it's legal to have the Confederate flag, but you just can't have it on the Dukes of Hazzard.
01:57:34.000Well, to me, I'm not talking about the legality of it, because if you want to fly a swastika out at your house, I think you should probably be allowed to do that.
01:57:40.000I don't think you're an absolute idiot for doing that, but that's your right to be an idiot.
01:57:44.000The Confederate flag thing was just a sign for me because it was this juxtaposition of saying, well...
01:57:51.000We're talking about the legal rights, but actually I'm talking about the taste.
01:57:54.000People don't remember what the CSA was.
01:57:57.000I don't think a lot of people that even fly that flag know what the hell they're flying.
01:58:00.000This country seceded from the United States.
01:58:18.000To protect its slaves, its right to own slaves.
01:58:21.000Any other interpretation of it is wrong based on what was going on in the 1850s and leading up to 1860. These states' rights advocates and all that.
01:58:53.000You know, like, they were all let back in.
01:58:57.000For some reason, because Reconstruction went the way it did, into the Ulysses S. Grant kind of era of presidency, people look at it and be like, well, things kind of ended good, and they're kind of like brothers again.
01:59:07.000And I'm like, that's not really the way it was when Jim Crow came up and stuff like that.
01:59:09.000This fucking flag means something nefarious.
01:59:49.000Yeah, but I think the issue is what it means to other people, you know, and whether or not that's valid.
01:59:55.000I mean, you're not talking about, like, touchy-feely, like, people being oversensitive.
01:59:58.000No, you're talking about a horrible war about slavery.
02:00:02.000It's, like, probably one of the worst kinds of wars.
02:00:05.000Like, a war, because we would like to keep people imprisoned and working for free, so we're willing to kill other people over it to fight for that right.
02:00:14.000To the people of today, it doesn't seem like that because they're not living in 1850. They're not in the days when, you know, they would have these massive, like, Gettysburg.
02:00:26.000They'd have these massive areas where people would be slaughtered.
02:00:29.000I mean, there's people to this day that still find, like, Civil War shit where they have these massive battles and they can dig through the ground with metal detectors and they find...
02:00:42.000I mean, I took the idea from Saving Private Ryan, the guy that would take dirt from all the battlefields that they'd go to and put it in jars.
02:00:49.000They only showed it once in the movie, but I used to go to all these battlefields when I was a kid because I was fascinated by it.
02:00:53.000My parents would bring me, and I would go buy baby food and dump them out and then go to all the battlefields and put dirt in each of them and put them on.
02:01:07.000Yeah, since I was, you know, my earliest memory is of being into politics and history was the Gulf War, which was, you know, in the lead up to it with Kuwait and stuff in 1991. So I was like six or seven.
02:01:17.000I remember, you know, Newsday is Long Island's newspaper.
02:01:19.000I remember just seeing images and kind of maps.
02:01:23.000And I didn't really understand what was going on.
02:01:25.000I couldn't even read most of the words.
02:01:28.000But ever since that point, I was very politically focused.
02:01:31.000And my dad is a staunch, like Rockefeller Republican, like a paleocon, like a moderate Republican.
02:01:37.000In the old north, you know people out there might know but like Republicans are pretty disparate group like Republicans in New England or Republicans in New York are very different than Republicans in Texas, but they're both Republicans and my dad grew up just in You know giving me things to read and feeding that fire and buy me maps and buy me books and we would listen to talk radio and we would Debate things and we would kind of come to these conclusions of different things and we disagree about a lot of things still to this day,
02:02:03.000but he's a great man and Ever since then, I was really, really interested.
02:02:07.000And I knew when I was fourth or fifth grade that I would study history.
02:02:09.000And I remember in New York, we have this thing called the Regents in high school, which are like these tests, these state-run tests that you have to pass to graduate.
02:02:16.000So, like, you take your class, but then you have to take your final, but then you have to take a Regents exam, which is the state-run thing.
02:02:21.000Say, like, you know math, you know whatever.
02:02:23.000And I remember when I was in sixth grade, my sister, Allie, who's six years older than me, was taking the U.S. history Regents, like, the next, or a few days from then.
02:04:54.000People are just sick of this bullshit.
02:04:57.000This is them speaking and being like, we need a conduit that's going to get into the history and get into the philosophy and the politics, but also that will stand up and say, I'm not sorry for a joke.
02:05:07.000People have the right to make mistakes.
02:05:08.000People have the right to express themselves.
02:05:09.000It goes back to the Confederate flag thing.
02:05:11.000I might disagree with a person that flies that flag, but I'm not going to go rap-bap-bap on their door and pull it off and call them a racist.
02:05:17.000I'm just going to shake my head and walk.
02:05:19.000Because there are other things to worry about.
02:06:03.000But yeah, you can hide it, but I want it to be totally transparent.
02:06:05.000What I keep telling people is as long as we keep a level, a sustainable level of money, which is way less than what I have now, there'll be no baked in ads, no product placements, none of that.
02:06:59.000I don't have people that are religious about listening to everything I do.
02:07:02.000So I want people to look forward to saying, oh, twice a week, Colin might put up a 10-minute video that I can just, when I'm making dinner, just listen to it in the background and then go about my day and maybe learn something or maybe feel a certain way or maybe I disagree.
02:07:12.000And then move on and just be a part of people's lives in that way.
02:07:16.000So clearly you put a lot of thought into this and you've thought this through.
02:07:19.000This is obviously something you're really planning out well.
02:07:35.000It's like the imposter syndrome where you never really know that you're earning it or whatever.
02:07:38.000And I'm like, I don't want to let anyone down.
02:07:41.000I only have right now the intro video, which is just me talking to the camera kind of with what my plan is.
02:07:44.000I'm trying to really keep people engaged and putting update videos on and letting them know where everything is.
02:07:49.000But yeah, I was horrified because I'm like, you know, I only have the bandwidth to do two videos a week, whether I'm making $15,000 a month or $40,000 a month.
02:07:57.000And so I put out a video to everyone being like, if this level is sustained or even a level that's in the 20s or 30s, whatever it is, I have to recalibrate what I'm thinking.
02:08:06.000Maybe I do hire someone to help me shoot.
02:09:13.000But being able to engage with someone like yourself with someone like Dave Rubin or someone like a Steven Crowder or whoever it might be I was on Glenn Beck's radio show last week.
02:09:29.000He could have been naked for all I know.
02:09:32.000It brings out an energy in me where I'm like, I can finally engage with people that know what the fuck they're talking about in this particular realm, which I think is so exciting and so interesting.
02:09:57.000I'm trying to use this as an opportunity for myself and trying to use it as an opportunity to just carve out a little slice of the internet, however big or small it might be, where we can affect some positive change and ideas and learning and free expression and free thought.
02:10:11.000And making mistakes and disagreeing and all that.
02:10:55.000I was going to say, a lot of them talk to me.
02:10:56.000I mean, I know people that are like heads of studios that feel the way I do.
02:10:59.000I know people that are in the trenches at QA and doing very menial things at gaming studios that feel the way I do and everything in between.
02:11:04.000I remember a GDC game developer conference in San Francisco, which happens every spring.
02:11:10.000Six or seven years ago a guy pulled me aside.
02:11:12.000This is the first time it ever happened to me and this is when I was kind of starting to make a name for myself And he pulled me aside and he's like hey man I work at X Y& Z and I'm it works on a big game and he's like keep doing what you're doing There are a lot of people out there that agree with what you're saying But there's there they they don't dare speak out because they'll get lambasted in some way look what happened to me over something so innocuous and Well,
02:11:33.000obviously you were saying that there's some pushback about your ideas before this.
02:11:40.000Well, so every time I would write a politically driven op-ed, for instance, when I was at IGN, I was senior editor, but I kind of had like editor-at-large qualities, meaning for people that don't know, editor-at-large basically...
02:12:08.000The history of Naughty Dog was like my opus.
02:12:10.000Naughty Dog's this very huge, actually in Santa Monica, very huge game developer, very talented game developer.
02:12:15.000I went and talked to 19 people, got about a bunch of primary sources and And all these things and wrote this piece that I really cared about.
02:12:22.000But when I would write things like the political correctness piece about...
02:13:21.000It goes back to this whole thing of like the...
02:13:24.000I'm sorry the girlfriend mode the Borderlands story I told you where the guy and they get they were all going after him and going after his job and all these things and I wrote a piece being like hey Yeah, like if this is a farce guys like right he made a mistake Maybe and I don't know that he should it was a soft target and they just went after it exactly and It reminds so you've experienced blowback yeah every time from that yeah every time what was the blowback from that from you defending this guy saying well He just really fucked up the way he described things,
02:13:52.000but he was it was innocent in that regard Well, you lose, like, social cachet when every time something like this would happen, right?
02:13:57.000So that's why I say, like, this was the moment, the joke was the moment that they were looking to pounce, really.
02:14:02.000And I'm not saying that they were calculating everyone's waiting, but they saw an opportunity and they took it.
02:14:06.000Because over time, you lose respect over people because your political stances, completely reasonable political stances, I think.
02:14:14.000Where they remember that you said this and you said this and you said this and you said this.
02:14:18.000You weren't really having debates with people where you were disagreeing with them.
02:14:21.000It was simply a matter of reaction to some of the things that you had written where they were trying to box you into some sort of a conservative group.
02:14:38.000To me, it seems like the far fringes, like the Richard Spencers of the world, the neo-Nazis, and the white supremacists, and the actual nationalists, you know?
02:14:46.000Well, as soon as you write alt on something, I feel like it's a message board thing.
02:15:07.000How would they define you as being alt-right?
02:15:09.000What would they say that you have alt-right characteristics?
02:15:12.000You can see these message boards, for instance.
02:15:15.000A lot of people were very supportive on Reddit and all these kind of places that are a little more known for free thought, but there's this one video game message board in particular that is just insane.
02:15:24.000And there was a 125 page or so thread about me.
02:15:28.00020 posts, or I think it might even be 50 posts a page.
02:16:33.000In video games, one of the big things is like, you know, there's a need for diverse casts, diverse protagonists and stuff like that.
02:16:38.000And I often use the case that I used to use the saying, I don't believe in diversity for diversity's sake.
02:16:43.000I believe that an artist should tell his story.
02:16:45.000So if an artist, a writer of a game wants to have an all white cast and that's what he thinks serves his story, I don't think that makes him a racist.
02:16:51.000If he wants to have an all-Asian cast, I don't think that makes him a racist either.
02:17:11.000I had a debate once about that with a friend who was an Asian actor and he was talking about the lack of roles for Asians in Hollywood and what a massive issue is and you know that he wanted to raise awareness of it I was like man, but this we're talking about a creative venture you're talking about somebody writing a story like I think the the correct way to go about it is to try to figure out how to get your own project through or someone else who feels very strongly about this trying to get their own project through but The right way is not for someone to have to compromise their creative vision
02:17:42.000in order to encompass the full spectrum of races in whatever story they're writing.
02:17:47.000Like, a creative story, like, if you want to write a story about a small town in Maine like Stephen King has done so often, you shouldn't have to have 10% Asians in that story.
02:17:59.000There are places and people that you're going to run into all black folks, or you're going to run into all Norwegian people.
02:18:08.000Those stories are just as valid as a story that's fully diverse.
02:18:12.000I don't think that that necessarily makes anything better.
02:18:15.000And I also think that when you're talking about that, you're sort of talking about it like there should be a quota, you know, and like Hollywood should recognize the need for these people to be in films and movies.
02:18:29.000And it's just, you're making this politically correct sort of...
02:18:35.000You're passing these judgments on this thing that is all about imagination.
02:18:41.000I mean, Hollywood essentially, when you're making a television show or you're making a movie, it's really about an imagination.
02:18:47.000It's about imagination and vision and having that vision being entertaining for people.
02:18:52.000And if you only want to write about the people that you were in college with, that you shared a dorm room with, you should be allowed to.
02:19:01.000And if there's a disproportionate amount of people that are doing that, that happen to be white males, you know, we should probably try to figure out why.
02:19:09.000But the idea that you have to force people to hire Asian folks or black folks or women or whatever, that seems so crazy to me.
02:19:18.000And to give you a little glimpse, to give you some context with what might be going on in gaming, there was this very popular game series called The Witcher, which is made by a Polish developer called CD Projekt.
02:19:29.000And it's based on the fusion of, like, Polish kind of identity with this famous book series that's based on, like, kind of Polish lore, you know, like kind of the Lord of the Rings, but in Eastern Europe.
02:19:41.000And One guy, this cartoon character that works at this website called Polygon, in his review was talking about how there was no diversity.
02:19:52.000And everyone's like, Dude, it's Poland, and it's based on Poland of yore.
02:19:59.000And it's about dragons, and goblins, and there's some white guys.
02:20:43.000Why do people feel like they have to put a black person in a game about Poland in the 1500s or whatever it was?
02:20:52.000Thankfully, the people that make the games don't care.
02:20:54.000They're like, we're going to make our game.
02:20:56.000The people that are complaining about it, they're virtue signaling, which is not even a term I even knew what it meant until a few weeks ago.
02:21:02.000I heard people throw that term around.
02:21:09.000It's the idea that these virtuous people, it's the same people that attack me for the joke.
02:21:12.000I have to be virtuous and show that I am against sexism, so I have to attack the man.
02:21:17.000I have to do all these kinds of things in this need.
02:21:20.000But what they're saying when they're saying we have to have black people in this game in Eastern Europe in the 1500s, what they're really saying is you're a racist.
02:22:54.000Gawker on Thursday evening helped a disgruntled sex worker extort the chief financial officer at Conde Nast and brother of former Treasury Secretary Kim Geithner.
02:24:08.000Because he tried to, you know, it's not our business if he's cheating on his wife, and it's not our business if he's gay, and it's not our business if he's trying to be with a male escort.
02:24:24.000Because he's a famous person, his sex tape, which is going to ruin his friendship, ruin his marriage, ruin all these connections.
02:24:29.000What kind of pleasure do you get out of that?
02:24:31.000That goes back to the point I was making about how I wouldn't write stories about a couple people back in the day, because I didn't want to ruin them.
02:24:40.000So it all plays into the same culture, the same culture of character assassination, neopuritanism, witch hunting, enjoying the fall of random people.
02:24:49.000There's a responsibility that comes with this that there's almost like a power that has not been earned.
02:24:55.000The power of whether it's social media or whether it's ability to write blogs about someone like that or whether it's ability to just to make tweets and just attack someone.
02:25:07.000This ability is really very, very new.
02:25:10.000And the ability to mass publish, like to make a tweet about a guy like you, just decide Colin Moriarty is a piece of shit, I can't believe that joke, fucking sexist, and then boom, put that out there, and then it gets retweeted over and over again.
02:25:24.000That people don't necessarily understand the repercussions of these actions.
02:25:29.000That this is like, there's an amount of power that they really haven't earned.
02:25:33.000There's an amount of power and influence that you have.
02:25:38.000Your ability to express yourself today, that's a really new thing.
02:25:42.000I look at it a little differently in the sense that, because I think you're right, I think you're on to something there, but I think it's also the mob mentality that exposes the fact that Say I was ruined forever, right?
02:26:11.000Do you think that there's also an inclination to do it because you're worried that it's gonna happen to you and you want to attack first?
02:26:17.000Like this is almost a thing where the people want to take the vision off of themselves, or they want to take the scrutiny off of themselves.
02:26:26.000And when you point it at someone else enough and you keep pointing it at other people, I mean eventually people kind of get it after a while.
02:26:34.000It's that little expression that if you want to look at, like, with girls, it was always like the girls who would talk shit about other girls being sluts were always the biggest sluts, right?
02:26:44.000I mean, there's this weird thing about people where if you're going after folks in a lot of those sort of situations, what you're trying to do is take some of the eyes off of you.
02:26:56.000I think that's probably a huge element of it.
02:26:58.000I find it strange because I went about my business in a different way for the same reason, if that makes any sense.
02:27:04.000You're making the argument, which I think is true, that it's like, don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
02:27:22.000And I think it's important that you have this ability to express yourself and let people know that that is a good way to look at the least amount of conflict that you can go through life with, the better you're going to be off.
02:27:31.000As long as it's unnecessary conflict, you know?
02:27:35.000And I think in this situation, this is clearly unnecessary conflict.
02:28:15.000Because it could be like the evil eye.
02:28:18.000But to me, I'm like, you know, and that's why it goes back, you know, the fact is, and I think this is an important component to maybe making you understand what happened a little bit better, because you're not in that ecosystem, but I think you can relate because you're seeing it happen elsewhere, is that the gaming media is dying.
02:28:33.000And they're dying because no one really trusts or cares, trusts them or cares what they have to say anymore.
02:28:39.000People, 10 year olds and 15 year olds today are not growing up being like, I wonder what Polygon has to say about the newest game.
02:28:44.000They go to YouTube and find a guy there that they trust and believe, which is why the only people unanimously pretty much that came out in my defense were YouTubers.
02:28:52.000Because they know that they're the next rung of this evolution of the way we absorb and communicate and absorb information and have news.
02:29:00.000Meanwhile, these people, to your point, are writing clickbait, trying to stay relevant, but no one really cares what they're saying anyway.
02:29:23.000What Wall Street Journal did to him, this is just a sign of the times.
02:29:26.000These are people fighting, and I really feel this way, and you might disagree, but I feel like a lot of it is these people are fighting for their lives.
02:29:32.000If I were a person that was writing about- Hold on.
02:29:38.000If I had written in the video game industry for 10 years, right?
02:29:43.000I wrote in the gaming industry for 14 years.
02:29:45.000But if I was a 10-year industry veteran, and I had fewer than 10,000 Twitter followers, and I'm writing for a site no one reads, and I'm trying my hardest to stay relevant and to do my thing, I'd be pretty mad, too, if I saw a guy that turns on his camera and speaks whatever he wants and gets the amount of views in 30 minutes that I'll get the entire year.
02:30:30.000But I'm just saying, their thought process sucks.
02:30:33.000Yeah, and ostensibly, it's actually adding to their destruction, because people are looking at this, like the media, for instance, in the political landscape is dying anyway.
02:30:43.000Wall Street Journal put up a piece not too long ago saying that per capita, viewership on television is actually starting to be outpaced by YouTube.
02:31:49.000And the thing that really caught on was that he was using this service called Fiverr, which is this kind of TaskRabbit kind of thing where it's like you can pay people to do whatever you want.
02:32:19.000And this combined with some other imagery he had been using, some, like, kind of fascist or Nazi imagery and some other things that have been going on over the months.
02:32:28.000And so eventually the Wall Street Journal caught wind of this.
02:32:32.000Wall Street Journal obviously have a prolific right of center but still pretty moderate newspaper and basically went after him and basically tried to destroy him and took a lot of things out of context and forced Disney...
02:32:47.000Funds him and all these kinds of things and caused a lot of personal and economic destruction for this man.
02:32:51.000It seems like they intentionally took things out of context, too, and they distorted the actual intent of what he was trying to do, especially with telling people to not be Nazis.
02:32:59.000He was, like, mocking people that were being Nazis, and they used that to say, this guy is pretending to be a Nazi.
02:33:38.000And to me, it showed a lot of cowardice.
02:33:41.000It showed a lot of half-cocked thinking on the Wall Street Journal's part to think that this wasn't going to blow back on them.
02:33:47.000And it showed a level, and I hate using this word because I don't think innately it's necessarily a bad thing because I think it drives you forward, but there's a level of jealousy at play with a lot of these kinds of things that are happening.
02:33:56.000So that's what you were thinking about before when you were saying that someone who's struggling to get 10,000 views in any story they write is going to look at a guy like this that can do one video where he talks about farts and he makes...
02:34:07.000You know, his 7 million views or something like that.
02:34:10.000Yeah, and he makes 15 million a year or whatever.
02:34:14.000You know, I look at some people that are famous or some people that are, you know, have a platform and I'm like, I don't get this, but I'm not going to like sit here and like rain on their parade.
02:34:24.000Maybe look at yourself and why you don't have an audience.
02:34:26.000Maybe look at yourself and realize that if you've been doing this for so long and you're so proud of that, why isn't anyone listening to you?
02:34:33.000You know, instead of looking around for people to assassinate, which is what's basically happening here, I find it so distasteful, I find it so destructive, we're at the precipice of a very dangerous time because the trust in institutions, no matter where you are now,
02:34:49.000And a lot of it has to do, and that's what I was saying, with media precipitating the fall by not telling the truth, by not doing the right thing.
02:34:59.000I think the media in terms of politics, for instance, is really rebounding from the fact that they thought Clinton was going to win, so they thought they can get away with saying and doing anything for that means to an end.
02:35:08.000The Donna Brazile thing, for instance, where she was feeding questions to the Clinton campaign, is so incredible.
02:35:16.000It shows such a level of bias and systemic inherent bias.
02:35:20.000They thought they were going to get away with all of it.
02:35:38.000I don't even know who to trust anymore.
02:35:39.000They did that to themselves, and they precipitated their own downfall.
02:35:43.000More and more people are going on YouTube to listen to people like you, to listen to people even like Alex Jones, to listen to Dave Rubin, to listen to- Giant problem.
02:36:41.000That's why the women on Fox News are wearing these tiny little dresses and they have beautiful legs and heels on and they're talking about important issues.
02:36:49.000But they're giving you a little bit of eye candy while they're doing it.
02:36:52.000It's so transparent too when I see that kind of stuff.
02:36:53.000I'm like, that was a very attractive woman.
02:36:55.000I'm sure she knows what she's talking about.
02:36:56.000But I know why she sits at the end of the table.
02:37:11.000We're in this just very bizarre space.
02:37:13.000Do you feel like this is like almost an adolescent period in human communication, that we're going through this weird growth period where we have this incredible access to information and the ability to spread it like we have now with...
02:37:24.000With social media and with YouTube and all these different things where anybody can kind of hop in and all of a sudden get a platform like this PewDiePie guy.
02:37:45.000If it was easy, everyone would do it, but it is not insurmountable.
02:37:49.000I wonder what the next stage is in terms of the ability to share information, if it's going to change past where it's at now and get to some new level.
02:37:58.000Yeah, I think you're right in the sense that the internet specifically had taken off so quickly.
02:38:03.000The World Wide Web is only 24 years old.
02:38:38.000But I don't think we need the media as it is right now either, because the media we have right now is bloated, dishonest, partisan politically and motivated, all these things that don't really serve a purpose to educating and informing someone.