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00:01:51.720today. All right, guys, you've heard it. Go woke, go broke. Woke is dead. Woke 1.0 was wild. The
00:02:01.240woke is being put away. We all know that the era of wokeness just sailed on by and we've solved
00:02:07.320that problem, right? Actually, maybe not so much. Even though much of the woke content was very
00:02:14.000cringe and often failed financially? What if it had a bigger impact on us socially?
00:02:19.820Joining me today is Aiden Paladin. She's a great YouTuber and she does sociology and
00:02:25.360psychological research. She put together a fantastic video on this and I wanted to talk
00:02:30.200to her today about it. So thanks for coming on, Aiden.
00:02:32.800Yeah, thanks for having me and I'm glad you enjoyed the video. Thank you. Yeah, my background
00:02:37.220actually explicitly is in media psychology, which I don't cover as much as I do more
00:02:43.040politics and social stuff. But that's where I really came from was specifically studying video
00:02:48.820games. But to go into that field, you obviously are going to study, you know, television, film,
00:02:53.960literature, and how people interact with those mediums. So given the kind of state of, you know,
00:02:59.400particularly now, you know, woke one was crazy. We're in woke two now. And a lot of the more
00:03:04.400recent with Marvel, right, with Avengers Doomsday, it looks like we'll be bringing back much of the
00:03:08.880old cast, it does seem like there's some push towards getting away from at least the greatest
00:03:14.320offenders of the woke era. And some of that might have to do with Larry Fink's letter to
00:03:19.760investors from BlackRock in 2024, or was it 2025? It was 2024. But the question really was that I
00:03:27.720wanted to investigate in that analysis was, well, if woke does go away, is there any of the woke
00:03:32.760that gets left behind sort of, you know, in the remains. And it seems like it's at least according
00:03:38.880to the psychological literature, yes, that is at least possible. So you make a really interesting
00:03:44.000point at the beginning of the video, which is, again, a lot of people wanted to sell themselves
00:03:49.760this narrative that it doesn't matter because basically the marketplace wins, right? Like
00:03:54.680ultimately, people will vote with their dollars, they'll vote with their attention, and companies
00:03:59.600will be forced to respond to financial incentives and so even if there's some kooky message getting
00:04:05.680cooked up by the progressive left in hollywood ultimately once that fails they'll have to come
00:04:10.820back to good old-fashioned slightly less subversive media narratives i guess and so you know this was
00:04:17.900the story that a lot of people told every time there was a failure in a movie every time there
00:04:21.480was a box office crash every time a stock dip they said look woke you know you go woke you go broke
00:04:27.220it's not going to work out but your thesis in the video was that actually even if you know the
00:04:35.680problem with woke and the transferring of the message was not so much that the message was
00:04:41.400so radical it wasn't that you know you just can never communicate these false ideas through
00:04:47.400literature or through media it was that there was not enough uh kind of cohesiveness inside the
00:04:55.360storylines. It was the juxtaposition of the woke messaging that pulled people out of what was going
00:05:02.160on there. And that's why many people felt like this was unsuccessful, at least in the commercial
00:05:07.720arena, because it couldn't actually put them in a place where they could understand the rules of
00:05:12.380the world, the fiction or the story that was being told. Right. Yes. So the big topic sort of that I
00:05:19.100covered was narrative transportation. And what narrative transportation is, is the feeling as
00:05:23.540if you have been transported into a story world. So whatever the world is, no matter how fantastical
00:05:28.740or how similar it is to our own, we have to feel as if we are there. It's a sense of presence.
00:05:35.000And when something is incongruent about the story world, either with its own rules or with
00:05:39.400what we know about reality, well, that damages narrative transportation. It draws us back out.
00:05:43.120It reminds us that we're watching a movie or a television show, we're playing a game or reading
00:05:46.760a book. And once you're taken out of the narrative, the messages that are within that narrative can be
00:05:51.960less persuasive. Messages are most persuasive when you don't notice that you're being proselytized
00:05:56.160to that when you don't even notice there is a message. So what happened with Hollywood,
00:06:00.240essentially, and it's many failures financially, was that the message was way too obvious. It was
00:06:06.620it beat people over the head with it constantly, constantly. And people don't like being preached
00:06:10.400to people don't really like do not like being assigned homework when they show up to watch a
00:06:15.060movie that's supposed to be entertaining. So that was the preachiness and the in your face
00:06:19.420interestedness, I suppose, of it was certainly a detriment. But from the same psychological
00:06:23.980research, the same area of research, fiction and narratives are capable of giving people
00:06:31.280new information that they then take back with them into the real world. There's all kinds of
00:06:35.640things that we learn through narratives. The problem is that the information that people
00:06:39.060learn from those narratives, it doesn't matter if they're true or false, you learn the information
00:06:42.900regardless. And that's Marshmaden Roediger 2004 is a citation on that. And what they found
00:06:48.160consistently is they gave people stories, and within the narratives, there was a little bit
00:06:52.980of information that was either true or false. In one example, for example, or in one instance,
00:06:56.880for example, they said that the instrument that's used to measure the stars while at sea is,
00:07:02.400which is a sextant, they said it's actually a compass. So it's just a little bit of information.
00:07:06.280In one version, they correctly identified it as the sextant, and then in another,
00:07:08.980they said it was a compass. And a significant portion of respondents who read that story and
00:07:13.860then were asked afterwards a series of general knowledge questions reported when they saw it
00:07:18.240that that instrument is called a sextant or when they were told it was a compass that it was a
00:07:22.360compass. So it probably works better with more obscure information. But one of the things that
00:07:27.680Hollywood was often doing was introducing people to what were up until recently more obscure
00:07:32.500sort of topics, ideas of, you know, transgender stuff and racial hierarchy in terms of the
00:07:41.880progressive stack these sort of ideas that people may not have been exposed to as much uh and if
00:07:46.500they were exposed to it via news they might not or you know just being lectured they might not be
00:07:50.640able to internalize it as much whereas if you just say it in the if you see something in the
00:07:54.660form of a film or a television show or a video game you go well that's just how things are
00:07:58.220because i've seen it there and particularly if it's your first time seeing it that's the primacy
00:08:01.840effect so if people have never been exposed to something before and then their first exposure
00:08:05.640is to a false bit of information it's going to be really hard for that information to be overridden
00:08:09.660psychologically so while the films failed commercially i don't think that was ever the
00:08:14.340point of making all the now you know the individual directors writers i don't know how much say they
00:08:19.200had in it in the first place really it's their pet projects their you know their causes but in
00:08:24.400terms of when you talk about funding from big companies like disney from companies like black
00:08:27.960rock that back up these media entertainment companies well at the end of the day it didn't
00:08:32.900really matter whether or not it succeeded financially a little little nugget some
00:08:36.680information could have ended up in people's minds permanently anyway. It's way harder to forget
00:08:43.140something that you've already learned. Yeah, so there's a couple things happening there. So the
00:08:47.940first one is your point about how if it doesn't jive with the rest of the world as you understand
00:08:57.180it, you're not going to pick it up. But if you generally understand the world, then it can nudge
00:09:02.140you in small ways that you don't quite understand so when you have this scenario that people are
00:09:08.220rejecting a lot of what was happening with the woke entertainment it's not that these stories
00:09:13.300couldn't be subversive there's been lots and lots of very successful very you know celebrated
00:09:18.160subversive media it's not like alan moore was less subversive uh you know when he was writing his
00:09:23.800comic books it's not like the crucible hasn't been you know brainwashing people for generations
00:09:28.900and generations, there is a lot of very successful subversive media. But the key is that they're
00:09:35.180always making that subversion part of a longer, more coherent narrative that people can understand
00:09:42.600that's less jarring to them. So that's the first thing we need to understand is the message itself
00:09:47.540does not necessarily pull people out all by itself. It's the way it's implemented. It's the
00:09:53.100level of kind of breaking of the world that it does. If all you're doing is preaching in a very
00:09:57.860unbelievable way then the message becomes far more obvious however if you're weaving its values
00:10:02.820subtly into a world that is otherwise well realized then that becomes something that people
00:10:08.360will absorb very easily so the idea that people just don't absorb narratives is entirely incorrect
00:10:14.680but then the second thing you're pointing to here is that if you have this uh situation where people
00:10:20.480are getting an idea framed for them by the uh by the uh narrative of the entertainment that they've
00:10:27.800never experienced before that's going to set in their mind what the reality around that subject
00:10:32.500is because they've just never experienced it before so many of like the kids cartoons or
00:10:40.100young adult stuff that i had where i first experienced a topic because that piece of
00:10:46.380entertainment was addressing it i had never ever you know it'd been influenced in this in any other
00:10:51.180way and so i would take on false leftist narratives about that topic simply because it was being
00:10:57.120explained to me and this is anybody who's ever worked in media if you've ever told a story or
00:11:02.340even read the news or written an article you understand the power of narrative framing that
00:11:07.960in a lot of ways people want the world explained to them they can't experience everything around
00:11:12.760them and so you know communicating those narratives is critical but whoever gets to set the frame of
00:11:19.400the discussion the frame of the idea gets to define it going forward even if ultimately the
00:11:24.720thing in which they framed it, the piece of entertainment was unsuccessful. As long as you
00:11:29.120are getting that first mover advantage, then everything that follows after we'll have to
00:11:33.460discuss that issue inside the frame you set. Yeah, exactly. That actually leads into an agenda
00:11:38.480setting theory, which is in McCombs and Shaw. And, you know, what they found there was that
00:11:42.380whatever topics people think are important in the world today are the correlation between what the
00:11:47.700topics people think are important and what the news is currently reported on is correlated by
00:11:52.1600.98. So it's a near 100% correlation, one-to-one, whatever the news is talking about. And in that
00:11:57.580sense, whatever you see in films and television and video games, whatever you see in culture,
00:12:01.740whatever is their obsession. So the transgender stuff that was huge, huge, really a couple years
00:12:07.500ago, and it was just in everything. But also you can go back into like the 2000s and the 90s,
00:12:11.640also with gay and lesbian representation and how important that was. I didn't talk about it
00:12:18.520in my piece here, but there's been significant research that's been done on people's attitudes
00:12:23.020towards homosexuals and lesbians and their exposure to Will and Grace, because that was
00:12:27.480kind of like the first big show where there were gay representation on TV where it wasn't supposed
00:12:31.940to be an inherently negative, although Will and Grace, I think there was some negative negativity
00:12:37.200to that representation. But what the research on that had found previously is that by just the
00:12:42.480mere exposure of being introduced to these characters who were gay, people's attitudes
00:12:46.440towards homosexuals increased. The mere exposure because they saw, oh, now I recognize it. These0.83
00:12:51.460are people. They're not just abstract ideas. And if that's your first exposure, it's difficult.
00:12:55.700You only really get one shot, as I said. But if that's your first exposure and it's a positive
00:13:00.380exposure, well, then you're going to be more likely to maintain that positive attitude towards
00:13:04.360them. And the same thing happens with information. The problem that Hollywood ran into is they were
00:13:08.960so focused on teaching lessons, on being able to convince people of information that they totally
00:13:15.780forgot the the whole narrative aspect of narrative transportation things are more persuasive when you
00:13:23.480are you have your guard down that's how narrative transportation or narrative persuasion via
00:13:27.720transportation works if you become aware that you what you're watching is propaganda for example
00:13:33.840or that it's even just a story maybe even a bad story then all of a sudden uh you start paying
00:13:38.940attention to all the little flaws more and more and more and you can pick it apart including
00:13:43.200picking apart the message that it's trying to sell you but so hollywood messed up essentially
00:13:48.260is what happened but it doesn't mean that all of their messages were lost in the process
00:13:53.360that's interesting you know one of the things i tell people when you know because we've had so
00:13:59.620many fruitless debates on the internet we've had so many uh you know attempts to come and find the
00:14:06.040truth because we got oh you know someone got owned in a discussion uh but i tell people all
00:14:10.740the time that the very first thing to do if you want to persuade anyone of anything is to make
00:14:16.280them feel at ease uh to make them feel as if you know that you're not hostile to them that you guys
00:14:21.920are working on something together that you're trying to understand something together that
00:14:25.200you're you're on the same side and there's simply uh you know some kind of viewpoint disagreement
00:14:29.880you need to resolve uh that that's much more effective than coming in with the truth and the
00:14:34.320facts uh but putting someone entirely on the defense i mean it's one thing if you're trying
00:14:39.420to win their audience you know if you're just trying to own them for internet points then yes
00:14:42.660like you know windmill slamming somebody is the way to go but if you actually care about changing
00:14:46.740their mind as you say you put them at ease once they're at ease once they trust you the content
00:14:52.200of what you're saying becomes less important to them the the uh factual nature of it actually
00:14:57.720becomes far less important you could say the exact same thing to the same person but if you frame it
00:15:04.100in a specific way that puts them at ease you're going to get an entirely different response and
00:15:08.520And so that's really critical, though. I am interested in your thought about this.
00:15:12.120And I know this is on you might not have any research, but I just because you mentioned it with Will and Grace,
00:15:18.200I was looking at I did an episode a few weeks ago on Robert Putnam's E Pluribus Unum paper.
00:15:25.340And of course, he talks about in that paper how, you know, basically conflict theory ends up being somewhat justified.
00:15:32.860It turns out that people who are exposed over time to other people groups become less tolerant over time to that group, not more tolerant. And so it's interesting. Do you think it's the factual interaction versus the kind of entertainment depiction that makes this effect different between, say, watching Willa Grace or experiencing time in a highly diverse area?
00:15:56.020or do you think it has some difference to do with you know i guess sexuality and like culture and
00:16:01.780ethnicity are not the same like what would be your thought on why those results seem to be at
00:16:06.060somewhat odds yeah at first just wanted to briefly say that make putting people at ease that's social
00:16:11.500judgment theory that's you want you want to find where your anchor point is where you you stand on
00:16:16.020the issue and then you have to detect where the audience or your interlocutors anchor point is
00:16:20.540and you want to move your message and tailor it to wherever they are to meet them there and then
00:16:24.640your message is far more likely to be adopted as persuasive you move towards the audience but as to
00:16:29.740the um exposure to people who are different from us and does that inherently increase antipathy or
00:16:35.620outgroup bias yeah there's been considerable research on that as well and that's why i think
00:16:40.400at the time they were looking at well it would a positive portrayal like you know seeing these
00:16:44.340characters in everyday formats like in will and grace would that help uh what instead i talked
00:16:49.060about it a little bit in some of the research in the subsec article and in this video, where,
00:16:54.520again, if you do things that take people out of it, so for example, I think the study in particular
00:16:58.120was about code switching. And code switching is where you have people switch between languages
00:17:02.460while they're communicating. We've seen this more and more in several recent, for example,
00:17:06.820you know, Marvel and DC films, Blue Beetle used code switching where they used Spanish. There's
00:17:11.720a recent, I thought it was Pixar, but I think it's actually a different company, made a
00:17:16.960animated film, Forgotten Island, I think it's called, and that uses Tagalog. There's been
00:17:23.120tons of these where they code switch between English and another language, which is a
00:17:28.500representation of what I'm talking about, but that's like exposure to another culture in a
00:17:31.760very real way by having you're listening to them speak in their natural language. And what was
00:17:36.880found in that experiment is that the existence of code switching, people have no problem with
00:17:40.460a story being set in Vietnam. They have no problem with a story being set in Germany.
00:17:43.800but if you have the character speaking in German or Vietnamese then all of a sudden it again it
00:17:49.020takes them out of the story and it makes them like the out group less whatever group that you
00:17:53.740are introducing them to because it makes them seem more foreign and that's one thing another
00:17:57.920place where Hollywood is really before you knew what a stock was you traded snacks cards turns
00:18:05.180you knew what something was worth because you felt it that instinct to trade didn't disappear
00:18:33.920and all of the different minority groups0.95
00:18:36.800and diverse groups that they've wanted to make people like more,0.67
00:18:39.920they have continually intentionally othered by making them perfect, by making them just win at
00:18:45.440everything, by emphasizing how different they are and how their differences are great, but they're
00:18:51.160still different. And when you highlight those differences, rather than you look at stuff from
00:18:55.760the nineties or prior to the nineties, and even though there could be diverse casts, it was more
00:19:00.480about how, oh, but like Star Trek, right? Very diverse, but they all get along because they're
00:19:04.480working towards a common goal of humanity. That's not the way Star Trek works now. Now it's about
00:19:08.880how different and how great it is that we're all very, very different and we don't actually have
00:19:13.020anything in common. So that's going to make those differences more salient. And the more salient
00:19:16.860it is, the more it can draw you out of the narrative because you start thinking about it
00:19:20.260more intently. Yeah, that's very interesting. So you have this scenario where previously
00:19:25.680when we got the multicultural colors of Benetton type dramas in the 90s for teens and people like0.92
00:19:36.440that it was a lot of people who looked different but they were all becoming the same like beverly
00:19:43.320hills student or they were all coming becoming the same uh you know uh starfleet captain it was
00:19:48.380always a scenario in which there was you know these people might have looked very different
00:19:53.300but they were all becoming i mean even if you think about something like starship troopers you
00:19:56.860know which is you know funny enough uh you know considered uh you know now some fascist uh you
00:20:01.540know mocking movie but ultimately it's you know depicting a multicultural multi-ethnic even you
00:20:08.780know men and women all you know kind of becoming this perfect liberal you know soldier in the
00:20:15.220citizen army and so there's there's just kind of always this moment of assimilation where everyone
00:20:19.800is moving towards the same goal everyone is sharing the same culture and that is exactly
00:20:24.120the opposite of what the woke entertainment has been doing where no yeah this person is excellent
00:20:29.540but they are excellent because they are so much different from you so much better than you and so
00:20:34.020even if those traits are portrayed as somehow superior or higher in you know the the hierarchy
00:20:40.040that kind of thing like ultimately they are so different that they are off-putting and create
00:20:44.480a hostile situation that makes you less likely to accept those that that's fascinating i had not
00:20:48.960really thought about that as a as a big difference as to how how you would accept the the uh the
00:20:54.820push for diversity once it got kind of more radical yeah and people have no problem with
00:21:00.520accepting if you had a totally alien species do it it might not be such a such a problem because0.99
00:21:05.720we have no nor could we ever have any potential for a real world interaction with a klingon right0.95
00:21:11.280so then it can become idealized and people can like that thing that is different and othering
00:21:16.260but when you know you and you can potentially run into people who are of that group um and you know
00:21:22.200that they really exist, it's a little bit of a different effect there. That's narrative realism
00:21:26.300and external realism. And narrative realism is if the world and the story rules are cogent within
00:21:31.920the story world. And then external realism is when the story world aligns with what we know
00:21:39.220about the real one. And if you have a representation in a film of, let's say, a group that really
00:21:43.620exists that looks nothing like or is in a highly idealized version or a fantasized version of that
00:21:49.720group that really exists, that's going to create incongruity, which is also going to disrupt
00:21:54.340transportation, draw people out of it. And one thing that happens when people are less
00:21:58.700transported, they like all of the characters less. In some of the early research in it that I covered,
00:22:03.860it even made people like the dog in a character less. You know, man's best friend that we would
00:22:08.100think everyone's going to love the dog, obviously, but when people aren't transported, they even like
00:22:12.800extremely sympathetic characters. In the story in particular, it was an Inuit boy was trapped
00:22:18.960on an iceberg and he was starving and he's there with his dog and so he debates killing and eating
00:22:23.840the dog and in the version where people were not transported because they were distracted in that
00:22:27.520case with a different task they liked the dog less so any kind of disruption makes people like
00:22:32.940the characters less and as a result it draws them out which if the whole point of hollywood right is
00:22:37.900to make us like these other cultures like these diverse groups of people more then by fumbling
00:22:43.200their the vehicle they were trying to carry these ideas uh smuggle these ideas into people's minds
00:22:47.400through narrative transportation. They shot the tires out, you know, in doing so. They just had
00:22:53.380to make likable characters, and they refused to do so because they were more concerned with the
00:22:57.700message. It doesn't mean that the message completely failed to take root in anyone's
00:23:01.300minds, though, unfortunately. Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit, because, you know, this
00:23:06.020was my point from the very beginning when I was discussing wokeness and whether it would be put
00:23:09.940away or not, that kind of thing. Wokeness, you know, and leftism in general, because let's just,
00:23:14.560you know drop the stupid moniker it's progressive leftism yeah uh when when you have uh progressive0.97
00:23:21.280leftism it's always a ratchet right like we saw the radicalism of the kind of late 50s and 60s0.99
00:23:28.000get tempered down by say like richard nixon when he was you saw the landslide election to bring him
00:23:33.720back into power to like basically halt the revolution uh you know we we see this the same
00:23:38.420thing uh over and over again where uh the whole phenomenon gets pushed too far and there's a
00:23:43.820little bit of kickback but the key is every time it's always a ratchet it never goes back to where
00:23:48.440it all it was it's always locking in the gains of the revolution at every step and so yeah obviously
00:23:54.460like we weren't going to get full on 100 woke messaging forever but at some point even when
00:24:01.220that dials down the thing that conservatives like to tell themselves that people on the right tell
00:24:05.860themselves oh we won the victory you know look it's you've been defeated marketplace of ideas
00:24:10.260all that. But what they don't realize is that actually most of those messages did actually
00:24:16.140take hold. You did actually see a large amount of that stuff become normalized. And yeah, we'll just
00:24:22.140stay at this level for a few years. But when they kick back in, the next round will be even more
00:24:26.580extreme, right? We start with the liberalization of women's rights. Then we go to divorce. Then1.00
00:24:32.340we go to gay marriage. Then we go to transgenderism. Every time there's a sprint for five,
00:24:39.80010 years towards a social goal, we get a manic response. And then out of nowhere, you know,
00:24:45.240it seems like things break, things recede. But actually, it turns out we're just waiting to go
00:24:50.240on the next sprint towards a further leftist idea. Yeah, I mean, that's the Hegelian dialectic,
00:24:55.220right? It's that everything needs to be deconstructed. Okay, well, we've deconstructed,
00:24:58.640you know, men and women's roles. Okay, well, now we'll deconstruct marriage, now we'll deconstruct0.96
00:25:03.560sexuality, now we'll deconstruct gender, and so on. So there's always a new thing that has to be
00:25:07.380deconstructed there's no end to that it goes on forever and ever so i the idea of woke being put
00:25:12.160away and i think what many people what what is meant by that in truth is that woke is being put
00:25:17.260away temporarily in part because it's extremely frustrating and people really do just want bread
00:25:24.160and circuses at some point they just want to have entertaining entertainment with characters that
00:25:28.680they like and stories that they enjoy and it's been 10 years since people have i mean even with
00:25:34.760the big Marvel movies and stuff it's been 10 years more than that maybe since how long was it since
00:25:38.960Endgame that's been less than that but uh it's been a creep in through even like the biggest
00:25:43.880blockbuster films you know uh one of the things that really inspired me to to write this was the
00:25:48.480success of the Odyssey because I saw so many people online saying no it's gonna bomb it's
00:25:53.180a total flop because of Elliot Page and Lupita Nyong'o I had I was never under any uh pretensions
00:26:00.020that that was going to fail because it was Christopher Nolan. And in retrospect, people
00:26:05.320have gone back and said, well, of course, the Odyssey was always going to succeed because it's
00:26:07.920Christopher Nolan. Yes, I think that's the number one reason why it succeeded. But I think it's also
00:26:13.120because people now with these little ideas that have been left behind from the woke era that we've
00:26:17.980just, you know, sitting at the opposite shore of things like, well, who cares that Elliot Page is
00:26:24.580playing a Greek male warrior? Who cares that Lupita Nyong'o is Helen of Troy? At least they're
00:26:29.680not telling you how much they hate white men while doing it at least they're not uh you know
00:26:33.520actively signaling to you because there's been so much of that that's gone alongside of it where
00:26:38.180it's been so in your face it's like well they're just there and in a sense in many ways that goes
00:26:43.720back to something like you might see in the 90s where well there's been some uh we've decided to
00:26:48.360cast this person of this race or that race as as this character uh and it's just being done because
00:26:52.800they're the best person for the job it's that that kind of liberal idea that's just because
00:26:55.960they're the best actor for the job and that was pretty much well accepted it was the woke era
00:27:00.180coming through and and making it very clear that no we are casting them for this role because of
00:27:04.360dei reasons uh that people became more suspicious of casting but people liked the odyssey it was
00:27:10.860i didn't personally see it i mean um i wasn't going to contribute to that um but people seem
00:27:16.780to like it it made an enormous amount of money which i expected it to make and i think that
00:27:21.520there was a big so what who cares yeah I think that's exactly right and it was extremely frustrating
00:27:28.800because I was making exactly this argument you know I said I said I don't know I don't know if
00:27:33.520the Odyssey is good or bad I don't know if these people ruin the story and I'm never gonna know
00:27:37.440because I can tell when I'm being you know I'm having my culture deconstructed and I don't want
00:27:42.580to sit there and hand money to someone who's you know spitting in my face even if the movie is of
00:27:47.140quality like i just don't i just don't want to be there and it seems like that was such a you know
00:27:53.620there's the there's conservatives in such desperate denial because yeah they made i heard exactly
00:28:00.220those arguments you're saying oh well these two characters yes they're subversive but they're only
00:28:04.620in there for a few minutes and they don't play a major role and it's not that big a deal and the
00:28:08.580rest of the movie is just such a masterpiece which you know from what i've heard is not true as well
00:28:12.600But ultimately, the point is that, you know, there was this desperate need to sweep this under the rug.
00:28:19.100And very interestingly, I started to notice that the Odyssey became a tool of social signaling for conservative elites.
00:28:26.880You started to see guys like Ben Shapiro and these other people who want to be smarter than their audience.0.85
00:28:33.700And so, oh, well, you chuds, you won't go see the Odyssey because you're so small minded.0.96
00:28:40.200You you can't you can't even ignore a little bit of, you know, wokeness so that you can enjoy the great artistic thing like I can't can't can't you become a sophisticated.0.99
00:28:49.560And so even in those moments where, you know, these people are supposed to be crusading.
00:28:54.820I mean, Ben Shapiro literally made millions and millions and millions of dollars on the idea that he's fighting wokeness.
00:29:00.000And then he makes movies, you know, literally makes movies.
00:29:04.000Yeah. Attacking wokeness. And then the minute he has a chance to stand up against wokeness, he's like, no, I'm sophisticated.1.00
00:29:09.560I'm better than you. I can watch this and be just fine. And I think that desperate need to always signal to the left of your audience to always, you know, that status, even among conservative pundits, is built on the disdain of the people who watch them.
00:29:25.020I think it's really something that makes the gains of something like an odyssey almost guaranteed to be locked in culturally.
00:29:31.420yeah i that was exactly what i was noticing though it was even the conservative pundits0.95
00:29:36.720coming out and saying yeah what's wrong with you chuds you can't handle you know it's only in it a
00:29:41.160little bit making excuses for it um i think if that film had come out and again nolan is and his
00:29:46.960name is a big part of it that's unquestionable but if it had been anybody else and it had if it
00:29:51.920had been even maybe like two or three years ago i think there would have been far more outrage than
00:29:55.740there there was regarding the odyssey and i don't think you would have seen ben shapiro coming out
00:29:59.800and saying that kind of stuff about it.
00:30:28.380and difficult to tolerate that it can be and how in your face it is and comparatively yeah
00:30:33.660nolan making some questionable casting choices is really at that who are both in it for
00:30:39.560combined what five minutes i think of a three hour long film yeah it looks like nothing and
00:30:44.980in fact then if you're still talking about it and saying look but this is it disrespects the story
00:30:48.740this disrespects history this disrespects the culture and of course it was boycotted and there
00:30:52.140were um the niki party in greece came out against it um greek people i would imagine
00:30:57.240not all but certainly i know there was some backlash against it in greece uh it was just0.96
00:31:01.700like well whatever at least again yeah at least they're not you know calling you a horrible white
00:31:06.680male and telling you to check your privilege or whatever it had been years prior so this is an
00:31:10.400improvement um and i guess in that sense things are relative but at the same time does that not
00:31:15.200mean how it's acceptable to have a glaring historical inaccuracy like that in the film
00:31:19.580as long as it's not as bad as it was before right yeah you're you're slowly getting used to the
00:31:26.160poison and uh that that really is it's amazing that no matter how many times we go through this
00:31:31.580cycle you just can't get people to hold a standard here you can't get people to hold a line and i
00:31:37.740guess yeah is this before you knew what a stock was you traded snacks cards turns you knew what
00:31:46.600something was worth because you felt it that instinct to trade didn't disappear it just grew
00:31:52.560up. TD Easy Trade taps into that instinct so you can build something real for the future with no
00:31:58.980minimums, no monthly fees and 100 free trades. You already got this because you are made to trade
00:32:06.080and TD Easy Trade is made to help. Download it now. There's a lot of different places we could
00:32:11.960go with this, but when it comes to the inability of the right or conservatives in general to resist
00:32:16.600the cultural zeitgeist of the left is it simply the the money machine behind it the level of
00:32:23.980cultural influence already baked in the the fact that so much of cultural status is attached to
00:32:30.340the consumption of different types of entertainment or is it simply that you know the left really is
00:32:36.900the only force that can produce things culturally they're going to be compelling like why why is it
00:32:41.640that the right has such a difficult time of just saying yeah i i don't care if it's got you know
00:32:47.220really cool you know battle scenes or effects or whatever i'm not going to participate in the
00:32:52.700destruction of my own culture or you know to be fair there are a lot of movies like again starship
00:32:57.920troopers or uh you know properties like uh warhammer where uh people see them as you know
00:33:03.600continuing to be based despite the best efforts of the people who make them i don't know what do
00:33:08.800you think ultimately drives the inability of us to kind of put some distance between us and the
00:33:15.960leftist propaganda that continues to get pushed out even when we recognize what it is? I think
00:33:20.100there's a bit of an aversion towards art in general on the right that I really do think needs to be
00:33:24.460ameliorated and addressed more. I think part of that comes from the idea of how artists tend to
00:33:29.740be and they tend to be very liberal, very left-leaning, and so many people on the right
00:33:34.620just kind of abandon the idea of art and its importance and the focus on numbers and science
00:33:38.800and facts and philosophy rather than art. But absolutely, art can be a, it doesn't have a
00:33:44.160political valence. Anyone can create art. Hollywood's very much had a stroke, a stranglehold
00:33:47.900on it for a very long time. And Hollywood is, of course, left-leaning. But that doesn't mean
00:33:52.620that you can't create art that can become popular anyway. There have been, this last year in
00:33:57.160particular has been an incredible example of small directors doing things like the back rooms
00:34:02.580that have been and obsession that have become monumentally successful given their small budgets
00:34:07.240right now appears to be and um what was it uh market pliers movie also did very well
00:34:11.720all of these films that are made on a much smaller budget than the massive bloated budgets of
00:34:15.960of hollywood blockbusters are making their money back two three four times over making that that
00:34:21.320obsession film was a huge thing on tiktok and twitter was trending for weeks and even months
00:34:26.520afterwards now it's still a big cultural landmark of the past year so it absolutely is the case and
00:34:33.040I think right now is the time as the woke is put away right now it's probably the best time that
00:34:37.300people have to be creative I think also the whole Malfoy thing if you've seen that it's just people
00:34:42.740who are largely right leaning not all of them just being creative doing creative writing doing art
00:34:48.100creating things that they're passionate about and they're able to just share it I brought up the
00:34:52.380Daily Wire and some of the films they've made, like Lady Ballers and what was the one that came0.85
00:34:56.460out this year where they kicked the gay woman or gay guy off of a roof. That kind of stuff is also0.51
00:35:03.320tedious in the exact same way that the left-leaning propaganda is tedious. And it's going to take you
00:35:07.840out of the narrative. Now, Lady Ballers, I know it was a comedy. I don't think that other one was,
00:35:11.100though. I think that was a serious film. If you make the same kind of films that are just all
00:35:16.860focused on selling a message before selling a story, or delivering a good story, well,
00:35:22.280then it's going to be annoying for the same reasons. It might still be able to translate
00:35:25.880some of the message, but it's the problem that Hollywood ran into over and over again
00:35:30.040and why their propaganda wasn't as effective as it could have been. That was kind of the
00:35:34.620conclusion that I drew at the end of my piece there was that Hollywood probably has done some
00:35:40.180damage to people psychologically and in terms of their knowledge and their understanding of things
00:35:43.480through these subtle messages and via exposure to them. But it could have been so much worse
00:35:49.300If they had cared at all about making confident and good art before selling a message, it could have been so much more pervasive and persuasive. And so if people on the right want to be able to combat that kind of stuff, making good art that is good as art and compelling as art first should actually be something that we want to invest our time and money and interest in because we have to have people who want to do it.
00:36:12.660And like I said, there seems to be some evidence that you don't need huge, huge, huge Hollywood AAA budgets to be able to do it anymore.
00:36:19.860Yeah, there has been obviously a big switch.
00:36:22.460And again, this is this is a cyclical as anything else.
00:36:24.900This feels like a Hollywood learning the same lesson of scale that everybody else is.
00:36:29.320You know, originally there were a diverse number of movies that would get made from Hollywood, you know, small little indie movies, you know, lower budget horror movies, that kind of things.
00:36:39.320then you get mid-level dramas and and things you know uh for for adults uh thriller type stuff and
00:36:45.820then and then you would have the big blockbusters too but there's you know one or two of those a
00:36:49.920year you know that was you know the the big movie was coming out and that was gonna be a big deal
00:36:54.500in the summer uh and then hollywood moved into this mode where everything had to be a blockbuster
00:36:59.260you know no there there is no budget below 200 million dollars you know everything has to uh
00:37:04.740have some insane uh turnaround globally to make any kind of profit and so we've just seen over
00:37:09.940and over again that movies that otherwise would have been profitable if marvel could just do them
00:37:14.400on the same budget they used to now become complete failures because you're doing a movie
00:37:18.600that used to cost you 115 million dollars on a 250 300 million dollar budget and you just you know
00:37:25.360go back and you're just never going to make that budget back even if the movie would have numbers
00:37:29.560that look successful so we see halloween started to realize that oh well okay we can't just do the
00:37:35.360blockbuster anymore there there are these people who can make a movie for two three million dollars
00:37:41.000and turn 50 million dollars and that's a profit and it turns out profit is actually what you're
00:37:45.880looking for not always just the largest number at the end of the the movie uh and so uh there's
00:37:51.600definitely a shift in that direction and that does open up moments for people who you know would not
00:37:57.660need that same amount of budget i also have people looking at of course ai i still think that there's
00:38:02.460a lot of problems with ai as just a pure uh form of movie making however uh we do have uh people
00:38:09.560like my friend josh dawes who put out that mary sue uh series on ai that looks very good and you
00:38:14.900know that's something that he would have needed you know 10 million 20 million dollars uh to get
00:38:19.420a pixar level quality animation short out for 15 minutes and now you know he can do it for uh way
00:38:25.880way less and and do it without a massive studio team and everything else and so there there is a
00:38:31.300much like drone warfare has shaped reshaped the uh the battlefield there is there is now
00:38:36.800a possibility where you can have these much smaller forces uh come up against and make a
00:38:42.000real attempt at something and people are so burnt out on really bad 30 minute cgi fights that
00:38:49.520dropping another one into the story doesn't do anything anymore so you don't need that anymore
00:38:55.060You can you can actually just tell a decent story over that time without people being like, OK, but when does a purple sky beam come down and blow up a whole army of animated people?
00:39:03.480That's just no longer something people are looking for, I think, in general, in their entertainment.
00:39:08.300Yeah, I mean, the first blockbuster was Jaws, which is Steven Spielberg.
00:39:11.220I believe that's the first one that classified as a blockbuster was Jaws.
00:39:13.760And Steven Spielberg put out a film this year that completely flopped this closure day.
00:39:17.440I don't know if anyone even knows that it came out because it was it was awful.
00:39:19.720And it also had a progressive message, of course, that was very heavy handed, which is trust the main trust the mainstream legacy media because they know what's best and they're always looking out for you.
00:39:29.080Very, you know, on the nose. That was the message of that film, which is illustrative of how out of touch Spielberg is.
00:39:35.260But that movie flopped. And it used to be that although Nolan's name is that big now, there was a time when it was unfathomable that a Steven Spielberg film would flop.
00:39:42.800That just happened earlier this year. And so I think this, you know, the Odyssey, Nolan still has that huge name behind him.
00:39:48.300But things are changing. And I do think particularly when you do have these massive films like Obsession, like Backrooms, like, again, I can't remember the name of Markiplier's film that he put out that all have made money on a fraction of the budgets and have a lot of people who are otherwise no names to come up and actually make something that people express a genuine, you know, love for and fascination with.
00:40:11.220at least for a while I think that you are going to see some more opportunities for that to come
00:40:15.340back as the heavy hand of Hollywood DEI starts to at least level off for a little bit because
00:40:21.100at some point it does have to make a little bit of money and if even if it doesn't need to make
00:40:24.860money people need a pressure release valve they've been under pressure from this DEI stuff in their
00:40:30.720bread and circuses for so long that they need something to take away from thinking about I
00:40:35.660don't know things like war for example that's when you absolutely do need entertainment that's
00:40:39.920when you need the bread and circuses is when other things are just that we want to distract
00:40:44.400from other stuff that's unpleasant so I do think you're going to see a comeback to some some good
00:40:49.640media that's you know at least independent media things that wouldn't have been greenlit before
00:40:53.300might get greenlit in a positive way you're also going to see the dredges of all it's going to
00:40:57.300take years it's going to take years so like I know if I say woke if you ever see anyone say
00:41:02.040woke's being put away they go yeah but look Wolverine game came out and it's incredibly
00:41:06.340woke and Sabretooth is gay and it's like well they've been working on that game for probably0.64
00:41:09.440four or five years you know so of course and with these films they work on them for several years at
00:41:13.620a time there's always a staggered release to it so it's slower over time i mentioned uh before
00:41:18.480larry fink's uh 2024 letter to investors and it was the first time in i think i think a decade if
00:41:24.260not over a decade that that letter that he sends every year to the investors made no mention of
00:41:28.640dei made no mention of any kind of woke stuff and what they needed to be looking for in terms of
00:41:33.900representation and inclusion and what did we see as a result of that in terms of hollywood
00:41:38.080representation, almost every single metric went down the following year. There were fewer BIPOC
00:41:43.220lead roles. There were fewer BIPOC movies that made huge amounts of money. There were fewer women
00:41:49.000in, I think, directing roles. There were fewer women on screen, I think, in general. There's a0.52
00:41:53.060whole big Hollywood report that came out at the end of 2025 where they're lamenting what's happening.
00:41:58.680All of our metrics in terms of DEI are down. Well, Larry Fink told you last year that he just
00:42:03.360didn't mention it. And so I don't know if that's the exact reason, but it's an interesting
00:42:07.020coincidence that BlackRock isn't pushing for it anymore. And it doesn't show up to the same degree
00:42:11.700the next year. For the first time, it really started to go down just last year. So the
00:42:15.760interesting thing that I think is might short circuit the ratchet cycle. Normally, things get
00:42:22.100more extreme, more extreme, more extreme. You hit a breaking point. There's a big correction and
00:42:26.300they lock in their gains and we still slowly start ratcheting again. I think the one thing
00:42:30.940that might short circuit that cycle is how deeply religious the creatives became when it came to
00:42:39.840woke ideology uh we're not just seeing um we are seeing a reduction in some of the on the metrics
00:42:46.260that you're talking about but the writers are not happy about this they are rather furious in fact
00:42:51.240we're seeing over and over again revolts you know from these different you know inside studios
00:42:56.120saying, hey, you can't cut this stuff. This is transviolence. This is violence towards brown
00:43:04.020bodies. All that kind of stuff starts popping up. And I think this is why you even started to see
00:43:09.260the woke 2.0. Now, obviously, that rhetoric has been more political than cultural. But it's very
00:43:15.880clear that there is a part of the Democratic Party, the part that seems to be in charge of
00:43:21.520the democratic party the dsa at this point that really is uh furious that woke would even go away
00:43:28.020that they don't even understand the natural rhythm that allows their victory you know they're they're
00:43:32.940so zealous that they have no impulse control and so they can't just say hey we'll be back in five
00:43:37.720years guys and all of the stuff that we talked about is going to get locked in and then we're
00:43:41.520going to get even more radical they don't even understand that they can't they don't have the
00:43:45.460time preference to like grasp that and so they just continue to say well if every single moment0.97
00:43:50.760of every day is not filled with leftist propaganda, then we are murdering black and0.99
00:43:55.240brown people. And so therefore, you know, we can't stop this. And so when you see the kind of1.00
00:44:02.000intensity that these people have for returning back to that peak woke period that was just a
00:44:07.580few years ago, I start to wonder if how long kind of the, you know, the more controlled left,
00:44:14.680what's left of the mature center left can actually hold back these people. It seems like the inmates
00:44:20.080really are in many ways, you know, if not in charge of the asylum, many of them have been
00:44:24.600elevated into positions where they're, you know, they're pretty close to managing the asylum.
00:44:28.040Yeah. I think that's an opportunity. Let them all walk out and stage big protests and say that
00:44:33.820they're, you know, going to go on strike as they've done before. I mean, there've been massive
00:44:37.500Hollywood writer strikes that have gone on over the past couple of years, which have caused some,
00:44:42.840you know, every time it happens, there's a significant detriment in quality in the industry
00:44:46.980that follows. Well, if there's people who are not in the extreme far left who are willing to work
00:44:52.060in Hollywood, which I know sounds like a nightmare, but at least I wouldn't want to do that. But if
00:44:56.180you're a creative person, replace them. If they refuse to let go of their stranglehold just for
00:45:02.520a few years, because that really is all it is before some element of this in some form or
00:45:06.560another ends up being whipped back up again. Like I said, I think right now there's multiple reasons
00:45:11.280why in regarding the economy regarding the war in iran and uh you know people's issues with
00:45:17.180israel for example the left is very upset about that there's so many things that people are
00:45:20.900talking about and upset with that right now is the time that they need bread and circuses to
00:45:25.440distract them from things that you don't want them to be paying attention to so that the hollywood
00:45:29.980machine is going to have to keep turning it's going to have to keep you know turning stuff out
00:45:33.800something for people to be entertained by and if they decide that they want to walk because they
00:45:37.000can't get because they can't what they want from a temper tantrum that they're throwing
00:45:40.660replace them if there's open opportunities i think that's an opportunity for creative people
00:45:45.080on the right who i know exist and oftentimes feel afraid to express themselves because they're afraid
00:45:50.160that their art's going to get them canceled for not that the art itself but them being an artist
00:45:54.620and being right wing well you don't have to tell anybody just take their spot you know before you
00:46:00.720knew what a stock was you traded snacks cards turns you knew what something was worth because
00:46:07.640you felt it that instinct to trade didn't disappear it just grew up td easy trade taps
00:46:14.420into that instinct so you can build something real for the future with no minimums no monthly
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00:46:27.260is made to help download it now fair enough yeah hopefully you know i don't know if it's realistic
00:46:33.520yeah i don't know what the the realistic chance of a right-wing takeover of hollywood is but at
00:46:38.100the very least uh you know as as i always say you win by winning you know just take victories where
00:46:44.160you can find them every time uh don't don't get too ideological uh about it just just take the
00:46:49.460win when you can yeah and don't i would say just also if you get into that such a position
00:46:55.240don't just go and do the same things that they did.