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

Summary

Danny Jones Podcast #333

"What Destroyed VICE Media: The Story They NEVER Told" | Guest: Thomas Morton
Date: September 19, 2025
Host: Danny Jones
Guest: Thomas Morton (Former VICE staffer, journalist, documentary filmmaker)

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Brief Overview

In this episode, Danny welcomes journalist and former VICE staffer Thomas Morton (often known as "Baby Balls") for a dive into the untold, inside story of VICE Media—its cultural rise and fall, creative personalities, business misadventures, and how changes in the media landscape ultimately destroyed what once made VICE unique. The two reflect candidly on Morton's recent Gavin McInnes documentary, the larger social dynamics that shaped VICE, and the state of media and journalism in the age of content and algorithms. The conversation veers into personal anecdotes, the evolution of youth culture, immersion journalism, social trends, digital platforms, and more, all peppered with Morton's sharp wit and decades of firsthand experience.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Origins and Spark Behind the "Gavin" Documentary

• Why the Documentary?
  • Morton attributes the choice partially to timing—his pitch gained traction after the January 6th events made topics like the Proud Boys relevant.
  • Felt a sense of duty to capture his era at VICE:

    “I spent 15 years watching people from outside the company try to tell the story of VICE and just trip over their ass getting it wrong... so I kind of owe it to the good times to make a college effort at capturing the stories of that era.” (01:05)

• Greenlighting With Hindsight:
  • Admits it sounds mercenary, but sometimes “bankability” is needed to get sensitive stories told.

2. Nostalgia and the VICE Vibe

• Neither Danny nor Morton “misses” VICE exactly, but there’s nostalgia for its creative heyday—a feeling akin to reminiscing about wild school days, but knowing it’s gone:

  “Do you miss it [VICE]?”
  “Ish. Like, do you miss high school? …I had a great time being a teenager. I think fondly on that. I don’t need to do it again.” (02:26)

3. How VICE Changed Media (And Outlived Its Purpose)

• VICE once offered something radically countercultural, only to see the industry adopt its style and dilute its uniqueness:

  “What I thought was so cool was it’s the opposite of what all the other media is doing. ...eventually they just started parroting being the same thing.” (03:19-04:07)

• Morton: “Now it’s what everything does.” (04:06)

4. Unsung Heroes & Dynamics Behind the Scenes

• Many “geniuses” contributed, no single mastermind:

  “It was a room full of geniuses who all either loved each other or eventually hated each other, given, you know, depending what time of day it was.” (06:37)

• Founder attributions: Gavin McInnes as frontman/soul, Suroosh Alvi with the original “soul” in Montreal, and Shane Smith as the true business visionary.

5. Success, Money, & Selling Out

• Discussion of what McInnes made after leaving, and VICE’s insane rise in valuation.

  “He left the company with something like 13 million...when he got bought out.” (09:29)

• But McInnes remained true to his provocateur persona:

  “He kind of stuck to the game and stuck to his art and never changed...” (08:38)

6. The End of VICE As We Knew It

• VICE’s bankruptcy, rescue by a Nashville VC, and shift to a slow fade vs. a “romantic death.”

  “It never got the dramatic romantic death it deserved. It’s just going to kind of stumble along like Rolling Stone or Spin or something.” (12:14)

7. Inside VICE: Day One & Immersion Journalism

• Morton recalls his cockroach-infested first day:

  “As I was stepping out...just like, a volcano of cockroaches, like, enveloped my arm. ...That was within five minutes of my internship.” (16:05)

• VICE’s signature: “immersionism”—actually going places and living within a story, as opposed to “Google journalism.”

  “The funnest part of writing...is going out, meeting people, and talking to people. Sitting at your desk is the worst part.” (29:05–29:06)

• Parody of mainstream newsroom practices—the “anti-Google journalism” ethos.

8. Cultural Provocation, Punk Ethos, and the Limits of Edginess

• Stories about McInnes’ sense of humor, provocation, and punk influences.

  “Gavin was a super creative provocateur...strange guy, played these role playing things with people.” (09:07)

• Today’s culture is less tolerant of his brand of provocation; the “simulation” is gone.
• Memorable Anecdote:
  McInnes “sieg-heiling” a mailman as a weird, edgy, but (then) obviously not neo-Nazi joke—something both inappropriate and impossible today. (18:15)

9. VICE’s Expansion: Video, TV, and Hosted Content

• From magazine to web and finally TV; meeting Spike Jonze was pivotal.

  “Supposedly...Spike Jonze...asked, ‘Do you film your pieces? ...Of course we do.’ ...That leads to making online video stuff.” (32:14)

• Early video docs: “Balls Deep,” “Noisy,” and the evolution away from being purely gonzo.

10. Media Consolidation, Internet Culture, and Content Creation

• The rise of “content” over reporting or art:

  “Content is like...whatever the fuck we put in...whoever's art or writing...it's all interchangeable, it really doesn't matter.” (126:45)

• Social media’s effect on real reporting, the explosion of niche “content creators”—and how algorithmic pressures warp journalism.
  • “Now everybody can be a news source, right?” (72:32)

11. VICE Legacy Reflections and Generational Shifts

• What happened to the “immersive” spirit (as in Andrew Callaghan/Channel 5)?
• The “Flanderization” of personalities (Skip Bayless, Alex Jones) and the way creators lean into their audience’s expectations for money or relevance.

12. Investigative Stories, Death Row, and Human Connections

• Morton’s immersion journalism: stories from inside Death Row Texas, interviewing prisoners, and the curious phenomenon of “Death Row Wives.”

  “For a woman who's had a hard time with men and who's, you know, been traumatized, it's like, here's a guy, you always know where he's going to be...he's never gonna...turn it around on you.” (94:00)

13. Technopoly and Media Power Structures

• Media, tech, and government: everything from CIA influence (Project Mockingbird) to the rise of Google and the convergence of social/financial data.
• The “technopoly” (referencing Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan):

  “Means of the information revolution is controlled by companies. You can't build your own computer…this changes the lay of the land...” (123:51)

14. AI, Content, and the End of Journalism?

• Fears about what happens as AI mediates audiences, moderation, journalism, and discourse.
• Platform risk:

  “Journalism is about turning over rocks and finding stuff...If you’re doing that, YouTube is not the proper vehicle to do that.” (155:19)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On VICE’s True Nature:
  “There was no mastermind of Vice. It was a room full of geniuses who all either loved each other or eventually hated each other...” —Steve (06:37)
• On Content Creation:
  “Content is like...whatever the fuck we put in...it's all interchangeable, it really doesn't matter.” —Steve (126:45)
• On Immersion Journalism:
  “The funnest part of writing...is going out, meeting people, and talking to people. Sitting at your desk is the worst part.” —Steve (29:06)
• On Provocation in Media:
  “He was a super creative provocateur...Strange guy, played these role playing things with people.” —Danny (09:07)
• On Nostalgia:
  “I miss it in the sense that I'm nostalgic for it a little bit, but that's just, you know, sad old guy.” —Steve (02:26)
• On Modern Digital Life:
  “The Internet is…now everybody made by people who aren't doing something better with their lives at any given [moment].” —Steve (72:23)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:05 – Why Morton made the Gavin documentary; reflections on 15 years inside VICE
• 03:19–04:07 – Danny describes his first exposure to VICE and what made it different
• 06:36–07:32 – No single mastermind at VICE; breakdown of founder roles
• 09:29 – McInnes’ cash-out, myth vs. reality
• 12:14 – What’s left of VICE after bankruptcy
• 16:05–18:14 – Morton’s first day at VICE: cockroaches, chaos, and “the old days”
• 21:53–24:56 – The rise of immersionism and opposition to “Google journalism”
• 29:05–29:06 – “Part of the fun is going out, meeting people, and talking to people.”
• 32:14–33:20 – Spike Jonze and the video revolution
• 54:58–58:40 – Gavin doc conclusions: "What happened to Gavin?" (it's complicated)
• 116:32–121:10 – CIA, media, open-source journalism, and government influence
• 123:51 – The meaning of “technopoly” and how control of information changed
• 126:45 – “Content is like...whatever the fuck we put in...it's all interchangeable...”
• 155:19 – Risks and limits of journalism in an algorithmic, platform-owned world

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Tone & Style

The tone is loose, conversational, and sometimes irreverent—reflecting Morton's history at VICE and the host’s mix of curiosity and skepticism. There’s deep insider knowledge, honesty about the flaws and failures of the media business, plus plenty of humor (and a few wild stories) to leaven the heavier insights. Politics, tech, and social trends are covered in a way that’s more observational than polemical, bearing the scars and amusements of veterans who’ve seen the “youth media” revolution peak and recede.

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Conclusion

This episode will appeal to anyone curious about the meteoric rise and slow implosion of VICE, the hazards of modern media, or how journalism has changed in the age of “content.” Come for the inside dirt; stay for the sharp, funny, and sobering take on what’s become of the information age.

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Subscribe to Thomas Morton on Substack:

• compostmentous.substack.com (occasional articles and updates)
• Podcast: Borderline Friends (search for the cat and mouse in bow ties)

Potential upcoming work:

• “The Books Nook” for Two Way’s YouTube channel—think Reading Rainbow for adults.

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End of summary.

Transcript

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Geez.

[Danny]

Stuff, dude. No, it's all good. No, you've been busy.

[Steve]

No, no, I was the opposite of busy. Oh, you were like. Like, scooting around, not doing much. Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

We got the Canadian Oscar. The pr. The Canadian Oscar, so I'm told. Yeah. But I think it's also the Canadian Emmy. So One stop shop. Yeah. I'm like, no, I didn't go to the ceremony. I don't think anybody on the crew expected to win. We were up against, like, I think a doc about a guy from Gaza, doc about someone from the Ukraine. So.

[Danny]

So what made you want to make that documentary? I remember because we talked on it on the. On the phone about a year ago when we spoke on the phone, and you mentioned that you were working on this, and then I'm happy to see that it finally came to fruition. But, like, what. What lit the spark for you to. To work on to create this thing?

[Steve]

Well, a long, edible, editable pause while I think about this for a second. How to say this? I mean, there's a very honest answer in that it got greenlit. Right. That is an idea that had tossed out to a producer in Canada a year. Like, 2020, I think, because it was a year before January 6th, and then it was sort of like. It was like, oh, it was kind of an interesting figure. I get it. It's sort of like, you know, niche American politics. And then by once January 6 happened, it was like, oh, everybody knows who these people are now. It's a more. It's a more bankable, which makes it sound mercenary and gross, but that's sort of it in general. Like, you know, I was at Vice for 15 years, and I've watched. I spent 15 years watching people from outside the company try to tell the story of Vice and just trip over their ass getting it wrong. You know, just doing a really bad job. And so I figure for 15 years worth of fun and a little bit of money, but not much, you know, I kind of owe it to the good times to, you know, make a college effort at capturing the stories of that era and the people who are there, and Gavin was just, you know, first on the list.

[Danny]

Do you miss it?

[Steve]

Vice? Ish. Like, do you miss high school? No, like, I had a great time.

[Danny]

Hated high school.

[Steve]

Oh, you did? Okay. Did you miss.

[Danny]

Did you go to college for, like, six months, and I dropped out.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

There's something about it. Like, when I first discovered it, it was when I. I told this to. I think I told this to Gavin or. Or Hamilton maybe. But the. When I. First time I ever heard about it was when I was. I was traveling surfing videos with my friend Jerry.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Who introduced us.

[Steve]

Jerry Ricciati.

[Danny]

Yeah, he introduced us. Shout out to Jerry.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Now it's what everything does.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

There was you. You interviewed Hamilton Morris, right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Who I used to live with him, actually, I think. Oh. There was a picture up of us living together as covered in the New York Times. And he mentioned one of the. Like, there's many unsung figures in the Vice story, one of whom is Jesse Pearson, who is like, the editor. He was the editor while Gavin was there in charge of that. When Gavin got pushed out, Jesse ended up taking over the magazine.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Jesse. Yeah. Oh, in the doc. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. He's He's a bit of a old punk and an old crank. Right. Yeah. Comes through. But he started a magazine after he left VICE called Apology, and I used to be like, come on. Like, that's a little bit. There's a touch of sanctimony there. Right. But these days, watching all the.

[Danny]

That's not very hunk of him.

[Steve]

It is, in a way. It's very like American hardcore. You know, There's a.

[Danny]

Okay. Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right. You know, I'm like, well, and I always thought, too. I always thought Shane was the mastermind behind everything, because I. I only learned about it until after Gavin left. Right.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

So I was like, wow. Like, this guy, you know, and he did a really good job at sort of, like, parading himself as the mascot of Vice and, like, doing all these videos where he'd walk around the office drinking, wearing a jock strap or whatever. And I was like, wow, this guy's a genius. And then, you know, I watched the. There was an interview with him and Spike Jones where they went and. Or Spike Jones was entering, interviewing him or whatever.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right. But we didn't, like, due to who we could get to talk on camera, how much time we had. You know, we're making this thing for Canadian tv and.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

What they wanted factored into it. We don't get to talk about the other two founders or talk.

[Danny]

They didn't agree to be on the show now.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Ish. Yeah. Like, he was like the.

[Danny]

Like, the voice.

[Steve]

He was the voice.

[Danny]

The original voice or sort of soul of. It was really kind of him. He was the creative guy behind it. Right. He was the idea guy.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

His efforts.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

I remember that name.

[Steve]

Some people know. Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

You know, and Shane was like, I, like, I was like. I was saying he is a really good salesman because I remember watching videos of him when the, when they launched the cable network and I was like. At first. My first reaction was like, this is, why would they go make a cable channel? And then I listened to him talk about it for like 15 minutes. I'm like, I'm sold. That makes sense. It makes perfect sense. I'd buy it.

[Steve]

I love that. That was another. Hamilton was like this. That was a stupid business venture. And I'm like, it was art, man. I was like, for love of the game, like the great American medium, like programming a television network. How could you know? You know?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Provocateur.

[Danny]

Provocateur. That's the word I'm looking for. He was like a super creative provocateur also. Strange guy, played these role playing things with people. He's. He's treating the world like. It's like he's living in a simulation.

[Steve]

Or a cartoon or A cartoon, which is how he starts a cartoonist.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

He made plenty of money too, just to. Just to put that out there. When he got kicked out, he was never lacking. Yeah. He left the company with something like 13 million doll.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Steve]

I had always heard. Well, right. Would you say 100?

[Danny]

I thought it was 100.

[Steve]

Jesus Christ.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Well, the rumor when he got bought out was that it was something like 1.3 or 1.2, which. Which you gotta remember, he gets pushed out in 2007, and around that time, nobody there is making like, it was not. You know, one of the higher ups is making more than like $40,000, 50 a year or whatever. So 1.3 million was sort of like. It was like, oh, that's.

[Danny]

I guess.

[Steve]

Yeah, that's not horrible. But within two or three years, it's like, Jesus. Like, he really.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You know, missed the boat on that. Anyway, he got offended when I brought up that rumor of all the things after he did the interview and he texted like, he repeatedly texted me about that. He's like, who said I only made $1.3 million on that? And I was like, I don't remember. I was like, that's just. Maybe I got the figure bad. Like, that's just what I remember hearing.

[Danny]

Well, it was. The company was valued at a couple hundred at least half a billion dollars back then. No.

[Steve]

Right. Yeah.

[Danny]

So if he was a third of it, I would imagine he would get.

[Steve]

At least in 2007. I have no clue what it would have you that then it would have been less. But anyway, he said. He said, try adding a one to that. So.

[Danny]

Oh, there's our figure. Interesting. Probably so. And what is like the current state of it all is. I mean, Shane. So it looks like it's just Shane's podcast now. Right.

[Steve]

I think that podcast is a separate venture. I'm. I'm not really sure. I don't. I. There's a VC firm in Nashville that I read. Mm. Bought it in receivership or whatever, like post bankruptcy a year ago. It went bankrupt. Right. They announced bankruptcy and then it has been, you know, bought up and is being restored, I heard by someone in Nashville. I've actually. They've been putting out a new magazine that's kind of like. I think on a quarterly basis. I think it's subscriber only. Like, if you've Seen like Cream magazine or the Mountain Gazette, one of those places that they make like a big format, kind of like Italian fashion mag, style paper. And it comes out like once or twice a year and you just sign up for a subscription. They don't do newsstand or anything like that. Anyway. Run by some people from, you know, not, not the old, old days, but from recent days advice. They've hit me up to try to write articles, but. But I'm lazy and I, and I, and as you know, I, I let things slip. So it's somewhere it didn't die. Right. It never, it never gets, it never got the dramatic romantic death it deserved.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

It's just gonna kind of stumble along like Rolling Stone or Spin or something, right?

[Danny]

Well, Gavin's happy now.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Well, it's practically dead, right?

[Steve]

Well, sure, but anything, you know, nothing's.

[Danny]

Not worth billions anymore.

[Steve]

Nothing that builds itself on being youth media is gonna out live the generation of youth that.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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[Steve]

My first day we were moving from this tiny little office that was on the third floor of a building above a fashion brand called Triple Five Soul. And then there was a Polish furniture warehouse and then there was us and he went up a staircase. And my first day we were moving to a new office. So. And it was an internship and so I was just like hustling boxes and I mean, funny day. I remember the very first thing I did was when did you ever see Gavin's old cod? Call them the tidbits. It was like a parody of a like, you know, kind of like a gear guide from something like Maxim or something where they're like, here's the hot new whiskey. Here's you know, eighty thousand dollar watch you should own. And in that it was just like weird little objects generally like foreign, Foreign snack products. Yeah, with funny names like they've got like Haribo Creamy dreams. I remember this one. It's something about. Can you think of a more like.

[Danny]

Is that a Hitler wine?

[Steve]

Hillary Hitler's spirits Schnapps Von Furrer. I remember that one. This would have been from them Spider coffee issue, I think. Yeah. So it's weird, right? And there was a, there was a closet at the office. The office Was, like, one room about the size of your studio, maybe with about 25 people crammed into it all making the magazine, or half of them works for, like, an ad agency. It was weird. And so first thing I did was go way back into this closet where all these old food wrappers were kept in boxes to go start taking them to where, like, a truck was going to pick them up or whatever. And I picked up this big box, and, like, as I was stepping out of the closet, just, like, a volcano of cockroaches, like, enveloped my arm. And I, like, ran out, like. And I was, like, shaking them off me, like. Like a. Like a wet dog, like, onto people in the office. That was within five minutes of my internship starting. It was like, then, like. Then the very next thing I did was accidentally unplug, like, the router that everybody. Because everybody was still kind of working, at which point it was just sort of like, guess we're not working anymore. Like, guess this is the move. And then. And I met. And it's funny, I met Gavin that day because he had. He'd gone downstairs. We're on the third floor, right? And we have a window overlooking north fourth street on Williamsburg. And he and Jesse had figured out instead of taking garbage bags full of shit downstairs down three flights of stairs, you could just throw it out the window, right? And that had led Gavin to run downstairs and dodge. Like, he was trying to. How do you describe this? Like, in Braveheart, when he has the guy throw the rock at him and, like, he stands perfectly still. How do you even say that? He's not trying to dodge them. He's trying to, like, stand his ground.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

I was meant to be here.

[Steve]

Yeah. And then he taught me, like, an anti Catholic football chant to the tune of She's Coming around the Mountain. But it was about Bobby Sands, the hunger striper striker. But it's weird. It's funny. I. I've started. I wrote a book proposal to just be, like, whatever memoir advice. And in writing that out, I was like, this sounds fake as hell. It's like this guy who ends up starting the proud boys. Very first time I met him, he was sieg hiling the UPS guy, you know?

[Danny]

But so I guess that funny joke that shows that he made me never change. He Was. I was always. I was always part of his. His character.

[Steve]

It's certainly part of his character. Yeah.

[Danny]

And that's also like. That's also like, the whole ethos of the British punk scene, right? Like, he always Nazi.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, basically, to a degree. Yeah.

[Danny]

Not like hardcore being a provocative. Being like a neo kind of like.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

The most racist band. Punk band. Right. Which is still on Spotify, by the way. I looked it up.

[Steve]

Oh, no. Somebody sent that. Yeah. I've got a. I've got a friend who. He doesn't love Screwdriver because he's a racist. We take a ironic sort of appreciation.

[Danny]

It's funny because.

[Steve]

Stewards up voice.

[Danny]

Gavin was telling me he had a screwdriver belt buckle.

[Steve]

Can I open this?

[Danny]

Of course, yeah.

[Steve]

Oh, yeah. He put that in the tidbits.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah. And then, like, that reminded me. I'm like, I haven't heard a screwdriver since high school. So I went on. On Spotify, see if it was still there.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right. Yeah, that was. There's a ton of stuff like that. You better believe it. That was perfect.

[Steve]

Lou Armstrong's great.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It is good. Yeah.

[Danny]

It's a peach. Peach flavor.

[Steve]

Peach.

[Danny]

Enjoy that. It'll. I will give you a nice little kick.

[Steve]

Jack me up.

[Danny]

Yeah, but, like, so obviously his Persona didn't, like, kind of throw you off back then, right? Like, you didn't think, like, oh, this guy's, like, kind of weird. You sick Highly. Than a mailman, maybe he's.

[Steve]

Well, of course I thought he was weird. For C. Kyling the mailman, it was weird and funny.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve]

Funny weird, right? Yeah. Part of the. Part of the humor in it. I was explaining this to the. Some French people recently. I was like, part of the humor. Like, what made that funny was the fact that it was like, oh, it's a bunch of, like, gays and weirdos in Williamsburg in 2004. Like, none of us. Like, none of you're not going to run into an actual neo Nazi here. You know, that's clear as day.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

He won't have the same type of fans, and that's proven out.

[Danny]

He won't be able to have. He won't be able to have a successful business.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

Especially a media business that people take seriously.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Like in water. Yeah.

[Danny]

Immersing ourselves in these situations and in these different types of.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

Cultures around New York. And you went to, like, a. Where was it, like, a Haitian. You went to, like, a Haitian house with a bunch of Haitians or something?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

That's a good way to do stuff.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Good way to do stuff.

[Danny]

It's a great way to do stuff.

[Steve]

Miss that.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right. And there's a lot of intangibles that really don't. That you have a difficult time properly communicating to someone who's never been to a place that you've been or dealt with the people you've dealt. Like, just. Just the smells in different places are a sense that you don't. Can. Can communicate. A lot of things can be, you know, it's the difference between knowledge and experience really. And what. In, you know, Gavin mentioned that we were, you know, like, he coined the term immersionism to describe the way that Vice did stories, which was go to the place, hang out with the people or get the people to write the thing. You know, one of Jesse's crowning moments was did a. An Iraq issue that was 2007 ish, written 100 like, or mostly written cover to cover by Iraqis really, that like laid out and they did the music reviews. You know, I forget if there was a fashion shoot in that or not. But anyway, anyway, I thought it was like, I was proud to work on it and it was a masterpiece of something. It was like, we've been at war with these goddamn people for four years. And it's like, this is the first time I'm reading. There was a. There's an article at the beginning of it that's just like, here's what Baghdad looks like. Here's the shape, here's a map of Baghdad. Here are the different neighborhoods. And I was just like, how like four years of war and no and this. And we are the first people to print the geography of like, the Green Zone and the different neighborhoods and shit of that nature.

[Danny]

Crazy. Wow.

[Steve]

But so that was set in opposition to what was called Google journalism back then, which was, you know, the worst case scenario would be Jason Blair, you remember him in the New York Times. He was a reporter who kind of like, I think he was just having. Having one really. And he stopped going out on assignments. He started just making up, like, details about it. He would. So he'd be like, reporting on a story. I think the one that Got him in trouble was he reported on something at a farm in Virginia, right. And he actually called the people and interviewed them on the phone. But he, when he wrote it up, he wrote up that he'd been there. He wrote all these details about, you know, the way their barn was situated or what they were wearing or things like that. And somebody, some subject called, you know, whoever the person you call for that kind of crap is at the New York Times, the Ombudsman or something, and, and was like, hey, this guy never came to our house, like talked to him on the phone and we did some emails or whatever. And then it became a scandal because they looked back through his reporting for the last, the previous, I think two or three years. And they were like, oh, this guy hasn't left his apartment, Jesus, for all of this. And then he wrote a book called Burning Down My Master's House, where he pretty, pretty flagrantly played the race card in excusing his own shitty journalism. Anyway, that was what Vice was trying to set ourselves, he was black, but in this was what we were, you know, immersionism was set against. There was also Stephen Glass. There's a movie about him. He was doing it for the New Republic. No, these are all. Okay. Generation gap.

[Danny]

Tell me about him.

[Steve]

42.

[Danny]

Okay. You're only four years older than me.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

That's a proper.

[Steve]

Well, that's how the generation gaps in America.

[Danny]

Six years in high school, but.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Sorry, six of the best years of my life.

[Steve]

Hey, there you go. Oh, I see we're having fun. Okay. Sorry. Whoosh. Stephen Glass is just like. He was a couple years before Jason Blair. He wrote for the New York Republic. He was like a hotshot young reporter. I think they're based out of dc, I forget. There's a movie about him called Breaking Glass, right. And he, it turned out he was just making, completely making shit up. Like he wrote an article about a hackers convention that he got into and there was like a 16 year old hacker there who had been hired by somebody he had hacked. He'd hacked like a big computer firm and so they were hiring him to do their security. And so this kid who was, you know, after. He hacked a famous hacker, which like this kind of shit did happen in the world that, you know, people who grew up hackers became security consultants because they knew.

[Danny]

Yeah, the FBI hired him too.

[Steve]

And that kind of shit. Yeah, no, there's a history of that. And, but he claimed he had gone to this hacker convention. He'd met this kid. This kid was getting now, you know, a six figure salary at age 16 from having committed crimes against this place. And so he's being celebrated by all the other hackers and none of this shit existed, none of this shit was real. And then he tried to, he would cover his ass by he, I think he had his cousin or his brother or something would answer the phone, he'd be like, oh, here are my notes, you know, here's the number if you need to corroborate any of this with, with, you know, whatever, whoever I'm claiming I got quotes from or whatever. And they'd call the number and it would be his brother being like, yeah, that's what I said. I did that. He made some websites, you know, for like it was, you know, the, the hacker kids, like security company or whatever. So he's like, you can go check out their website. Like it's totally up. And I think this is, I think he'd been doing this for years. But the story that got him was the hacker thing because they went, they were like, this kid's hacker website like, makes no sense. It looks like shit. It's like, it's like the kind of like HTML programming I would do. You know, it's like this kid's a computer expert. Anyway, there was, you know, there was a rash of that shit happening in the 2000s and, and those are the extreme examples in general. Google journalism was just, you know, lazy people didn't leave their desks and would just be like, oh, I'll just get a quote from them, you know, over the phone, right? Which to me at least, but I think to us, like people advice, it was like, why, you know, why bother that? Like that sounds like a shitty job.

[Danny]

It doesn't sound like a shitty job.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Like today's sponsor, Brunt Workwear just sent me these brand new marlin boots. And I have to say, anytime I'm doing real work outside or I want to wear work boots, these are my go to and all my construction buddies swear by them. And if you've ever worn a cheap work boot, you know all about the blisters and the pain, but right out of the box, these marlin work boots were super comfortable. No painful break in period. No limping around for a week waiting for them to soften up. Just straight comfort from day one. And it's not by accident. Eric Girard founded Brunt after his work friends complained that their work boots haven't changed since the 1920s. Their boots are lightweight, waterproof, slip resistant, heat resistant, and even electrical hazard rated. Basically, whatever the job throws at you, these boots can handle it. And the best part is it, it doesn't hurt. I can't stress that enough. Brunt's got over 500,000 workers backing them up, and you can even send them back if you don't like them. That's how confident they are. So if you're tired of boots that destroy your feet even more than the job itself, do yourself a favor and check out Brunt Workwear. And your feet will thank you. Brunt was tired of the workwear brands out there cutting corners. You work too hard to be stuck in uncomfortable boots that don't hold up. So they built something better. Boots that are insanely comfortable and built for the job site. And for a limited time, our listeners can get $10 off at Brunt when you use my code Danny at checkout, just head over to bruntworkwear.com and use the code D A N N Y and you're good to go. After you order, they're going to ask you where you heard about Brunt. And please do us a favor and tell them we sent you. The link to Brunt is down below. Now back to the show. At what point did you guys start bringing video cameras?

[Steve]

When did you bring video things? Well, you know, there's a wait. What.

[Danny]

Were there any video. Did you guys, when you guys went to Iraq, did you bring any video.

[Steve]

Cameras for the Iraqi issue? Yeah, we didn't go to Iraq. We communicated with Iraqis and they wrote from Iraq.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Went to do. They made, they made a whole doc. It was called Heavy metal and bad. Yes, that's what it was with a Krasakowta. A band of Iraqis, you know, under Saddam who came out, went to Turkey. I think half of them live in Canada now. I forget it was a while ago. Good doc, though. Amazing. Which was based on an article that Gideon Jago, who again, this is going to be. You're going to be too young to know who he was. He was the, he was the glasses wearing guy on MTV News.

[Danny]

Oh, okay.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

They had to sing pro Saddam songs.

[Steve]

There was. Yeah. By law.

[Danny]

Did they ever do any songs in the Palace?

[Steve]

No. Oh, no, no, no. They were. They were. They were an underground band. You know, they were punk. All right, well, they're metal, but.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

2006. I mean, working with.

[Danny]

Working with this post, Gavin, or pre. Or during.

[Steve]

Middle. Middle of Gavin getting kicked out. Yeah, It's. It's a.

[Danny]

A.

[Steve]

It's a loose, foggy history and none of the dates are solid. Right.

[Danny]

Sure.

[Steve]

People love to ask this, like, was, like, when did you know Gavin? When did. I guess. But, you know, he got properly bought out in 2007. But by 2006, there was already, you know, tension and like that.

[Danny]

Yeah. And then. At what point did you start? Balls deep?

[Steve]

2006 or 7.

[Danny]

There was an early.

[Steve]

There's a web. There was a web version. You're talking about, like, you know, the. Because obviously once we had the television channel, I made a. Like, two seasons of the TV show. But that was back when we called the video stuff vbs. That was. That was the thing I worked on. I shot episodes with leather daddies in New York. A guy named Kristoff. I forget his last name. He was Mr. Leather 2005. He took me around to, like, the Eagle and places like that. He let me sleep on his floor. Which is kind of how we operated back then. Hung out with, like, a Chinese lady in, like, proper Chinatown, like, down under the Manhattan Bridge. We were selling crabs together. I. What were the other ones, I wasn't able to finish editing this because Gavin wrote some crazy release for these guys, which I thought was. How you did was I spent like two weeks, two, three weeks with a motorcycle club called the American Brotherhood 911. And they were a 911 memorial motorcycle club.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

They were based out of New York, right? Yeah. And they were all older. I think some of them were, you know, kind of former Hell's Angels and stuff.

[Danny]

There were.

[Steve]

It was like a older guys retirement club. They had all been in motorcycle clubs, like, growing up. And so this one was a bunch of guys, you know, getting into their 50s or whatever. And one of the presidents of the club's brother, I think had died in 9 11. And so the club was in his honor. Just a great name, right? American Brotherhood 911 MC.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

A bunch of firefighters on Harley's.

[Steve]

I mean, that's the.

[Danny]

If those were the right guys.

[Steve]

Oh, yeah, there's. Yeah.

[Danny]

Oh, that's their logo.

[Steve]

American Brotherhood 911.

[Danny]

Oh, nice.

[Steve]

I wonder what the. Jason, were you in New York in 9 11? Yeah, it was my first day of college.

[Danny]

That was your first day of college? Wow.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh my God, what a day to start college.

[Steve]

Yeah. Well. And in fact, I didn't. They. I.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah. I wrote the tackiest email of all time at about 10:30, which is. I'm. It might have been between tower one and tower two coming down. I had a class at 11 with like, Irish lit professor who I ended up. He was like my mentor in college. Great guy. But I. At like 10:33, I wrote this email where I was like, I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but I just wanted to make sure we're not having class today, right? And he wrote, wrote, like, he wrote back pretty quickly. He was like, alas, we won't be having class. Like, take care of yourself. And I was like, holy shit. I was like a sincere use of the word Alas in 2001. How about that? But yeah.

[Danny]

Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. These guys look crazy day. These guys look awesome.

[Steve]

They're nice.

[Danny]

Like, they're fun to hang out with.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

The idea with those guys, the idea of.

[Steve]

Of.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

It's like a.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Really?

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

No.

[Steve]

Okay. Whose author? I couldn't tell you right now. It's also. It's a super thick. It's a sociology book, and it was about the decline. The titular Bowling Alone is about the decline in bowling. Bowling teams. Sorry. Over between. About, like, the 60s through. I think the book comes out in the middle of the 90s. But in general, it's about the erosion of. What would you even call that? Like, part of civil society? Of clubs like that. You know, if you look back into the 1950s and 60s, most adults in middle class. Adults in America belong to something. Right.

[Danny]

It's like some sort of club.

[Steve]

Like, Freemasons are Rotarians or they're part of the Elks Club. The women do Tupperware parties or are a ladies auxiliary in town. Things of this nature. People are members of. Of, you know, five and six clubs and things that. And by, you know, the early 90s, it is all but gone away. And if you look at. I've known a couple people who are Freemasons who joined, you know, who are roughly my age.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Templar.

[Steve]

The drug cartel?

[Danny]

No, no, no. The Knights Temple.

[Steve]

Okay. Because those guys are kind of up. Yeah.

[Danny]

There's a. There's a cartel called the Knights Templar I haven't heard about.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Tell me about.

[Steve]

They're rough. They're rough. They're Rough dudes. They're up there with like Los Zetas, us, you know. You mean like the historical Knights.

[Danny]

Like the historical Knights Templar?

[Steve]

Yeah, like there's.

[Danny]

Except I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to do any of the gay that they were doing. Like.

[Steve]

Well, what gay did they do?

[Danny]

Oh, they did a lot of gay, bro.

[Steve]

That's like anti. Kar propaganda.

[Danny]

No, I don't think it is.

[Steve]

You can't. This is like listening to Herodotus tell you that the Thracians were sacrificing children. You got to take it with a grain of salt.

[Danny]

Was it. So what was the claim? Why? Why?

[Steve]

I don't know. What the gay. Anti Templar?

[Danny]

No, the. The Templar.

[Steve]

I thought it was that they were bank. That they were seizing too much templ. Temporal control due to their banking practices and that. Well, they had French king who burned Jacques de Mole, but he was. He was like, hey, these guys are muscling in on my turf.

[Danny]

That's what it was. They wanted to.

[Steve]

And he owed the money.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

So they concocted.

[Danny]

This is the argument.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right, right. Okay. And. And they invented the. The God baphomet, which is like the goat headed Satan figure that they worship.

[Danny]

They kissed the head. Kiss the head of that thing.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And yeah, there's a whole bunch of gay stamp on a Bible and stories about the. Oh, yeah, that's another thing. They were like. They didn't like Christians at all.

[Steve]

They say that about everybody. Everybody's making you stamp on the Bible.

[Danny]

They're making you do what?

[Steve]

Back then. Well, that was how you. That's how you'd fire up the Christian hoy below back then and be like stamping on a Bible. Like.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

The Templars.

[Danny]

A redux of the Knights templars in.

[Steve]

The U.S. well, it's kind of like a. Oh, in the U.S. okay. I was thinking in like continental free Freemasonry, there's a degree in like the Yorkish. Right. I think that is Knights Templar. It's like either above or below Knights of Malta. I forget.

[Danny]

Yeah, whatever.

[Steve]

Those things are fun.

[Danny]

Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure they are. There's a lot of. I guess there's like A lot of big musicians and, like, famous folks that are joining the. Trying to join the nice Templar, like, become Freemasons.

[Steve]

Oh. Because they're getting older and they need buddies.

[Danny]

They're getting older.

[Steve]

They need an excuse to get out of the. Sorry. Sorry, honey. They also need Tuesday night, you know?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Where's your hotel? Like, is it in Clearwater?

[Steve]

10 minutes down the road I.

[Danny]

That way?

[Steve]

Pinellas? Yeah.

[Danny]

Is it that way or that way? East, so it's closer to Scientology.

[Steve]

Because Clearwater is where the sea org spaced out of. Right? Right. Yeah, right.

[Danny]

That's where it's. Where it's like the. The flag building. This is where L. Ron Hubbard had his pirate ship parked, like, five minutes down the road from here when he was here.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It's funny. All their programming looks like commercials for medicine. Like, it's all cut that, like, jarring, obnoxious way. Like. Like a Paxil.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

They got the money.

[Danny]

Yeah, but they're. They're. They're. Their membership is, like, supposedly declining badly. Like, they're.

[Steve]

They're supposedly not understandably. Yeah. You ever read that stuff?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

I went. There was. I. We did a Drugs and Cults issue of the magazine. Back in the magazine used to have themes, and I joined three cults simultaneously. And one was, like, this guru cult called Adidam, who. Whose guru was a guy who's born Franklin Jones, but he had become Adidas Samraj. And it was. It's your basic guru kind of jazz.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Then what were the others? And I went to the. The Moonies, the Unification Church. Like, the Koreans, you know, they had a. They had a church in. On, like, 44th Street. And I joined, or I. You know, I went to. Went to church with them, hung out, effectively joined. I. I. You know, once I was done with the article, I never went back, but. And then Scientology was up on 46th street, and so ontology, Legally, I don't know if I should. You know, legally, I'm not even sure if I did or not. I went, hung out with them, took a bunch of classes. I was twinned to someone who was joining Scientology.

[Danny]

Twinned?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I'd have to pick what night I was going to my different cult or whatever. And the Moonies were great. I don't, you know, I guess it's just sign of the times that, you know, back in the 70s, that kind of was scary to people. And I think they've eased off of the mass marriage kind of thing, which is what. What bummed people out. Right. But the, like that first month or, you know, the month I was going to stuff at the Church of Scientology, I was like, it feels like being in a, like a subprime lending bank here, like, shady financial operation. It's like one, that's how everybody dressed. But two, they'd, you know, get people to sign up for a $200, you know, 30 minute course or whatever, and they'd go back, and you'd see them go back to the, like the office and like, start high fiving each other because they had made a sale. And you're just like, Christ. It's like, you know, we can hear you.

[Danny]

Right? You're just like vigorously making notes this whole time. Like, are you just memorizing this and then writing it? At the end of the day, I'd.

[Steve]

Get on the subway and I'd write my notes.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve]

Yeah, because I was being. I was being super sneaky, you know? Right, right.

[Danny]

Yeah, Covert.

[Steve]

Covert. I mean, when there's a classroom, you can take notes, you know. Oh, sure did my best to be fair about that.

[Danny]

Did you do any Auditing sessions?

[Steve]

Yeah, a couple.

[Danny]

Really? What was that? Like.

[Steve]

Halfway between, like, a stage hypnotism and therapy. Like, auditing. You, like. Should we explain what it is?

[Danny]

Yeah, explain what it is.

[Steve]

Well, I didn't, you know, and they didn't break because. Because I was there of my own accord, and they weren't trying to, like, trick me into coming to a Scientology office. I didn't get the E meter, which I was. Yeah, yeah, that's. That's basically to bring in, you know, funny story. My dazzle, the rubes. Yeah.

[Danny]

My real.

[Steve]

Just did mine.

[Danny]

Broker bought me an E meter as a gift.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Really?

[Steve]

I don't think we ever fired it up or anything, but I was always like. I was like, oh, he told me.

[Danny]

He has an astrology computer.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

What a.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh, we just looked up on Google.

[Steve]

Okay. But did you see the whole thing? It's enormous. Oh, no, there's like a. What do you call that? There's a thing that looks like an old calculator.

[Danny]

And then that's what we saw.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Whoa.

[Steve]

That's your horoscope.

[Danny]

How crazy is that? That they actually spent taxpayer dollars to make this. This is it.

[Steve]

Oh, yeah. Okay. There you go. Yeah, you can see the whole thing. The digi comp. Yeah. Jealous of that. He's got an impressive archive of arcane crap. Anyway, auditing. It was just. I just sat chair to chair with a nice little old lady who, like, I think we held hands while we did it. And you shut your eyes and you try to, like, basically remember back, but project yourself back into a memory and then walk through that memory. And, you know, you pick a memory based on a time when you had some sort of hardship or something like that or whatever, and then you just keep doing it, right? And so you'll. You'll. You'll explain the memory to them. You'll walk through it, and then they'll be like, okay, go back. Is like. And then you start over, and you try to. And they're like, what was the term. Sorry, it's been 20 years. They'd be like, remember. Basically, remember more. And it'd be interesting as. As you do this, that you either are confabulating or recovering more and more member. It becomes a more and more vivid picture.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

In your head. The details fill in. And you can have insights that way. I thought auditing. It's. It's interesting in that, you know, it's a real.

[Danny]

It's like a real thing, like you. It's actually totally. Can be helpful.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, sure.

[Steve]

Whatever you want to say.

[Danny]

Right. Did it help you at all, you think?

[Steve]

Help me write the article. That's all.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah. For sure.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah. I have a friend especially. Yeah. Let's just call him a friend who works for a big company in downtown Clearwater.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

That is all. I think the owners are Scientologists or members of the church. It's weird because all the richest people around here are Scientologists.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And you see how that works.

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And there's. The floors are, like, segregated. Right. So you'll have floors of workers that are non sios.

[Steve]

Oh.

[Danny]

And then you'll have separate floors where you have all the executives are SIOs.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And they can keep all the. It's kind of like a. It's kind of like a weird.

[Steve]

Keep the unclear away.

[Danny]

It's kind of like a. A cultish version of the office where they all kind of like. Like, whisper and make jokes under their breath about the Scientologists.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And then when they come around.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Try to cover their ass. And. And. And he was explaining to me. I was asking him because we were. We were getting lunch in. In Clearwater. I'm like. I'm like, how do you know? Can you tell just by walking down the street who's a Scientologist and who's not? Like, just aside from, like, the. The. The Sea Org members that what? They. They all wear the best.

[Steve]

No. Oh.

[Danny]

Oh.

[Steve]

They don't wear their dress whites.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

They aren't in full uniform, so some of them.

[Danny]

Well, they typically wear like a vest with, like a white collared shirt. And they're all. They all dress wear the same exact thing.

[Steve]

Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. Okay.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah. They look like, like.

[Steve]

Like a regular. Like a formal vest.

[Danny]

They look like. They look kind of like. Like flight attendants.

[Steve]

Right, Right.

[Danny]

But other than that, like a. If you could find like a pedestrian or a. Just a civilian Scientologist at a restaurant.

[Steve]

Or like a grocery store, it's like Mormons. There's.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

There's a look.

[Danny]

And I asked him, I'm like, what is that? How do you. How do you find it? And he's like, just look into their eyes and you will just get this sense of this robotic soul. They just. They're like. They're like robots. And I was like. He's like. And he goes. He goes, let's try it right now. He goes, look around this room. And we're sitting in this little dining room attached to a grocery store. And he goes, there's one of them in this room. And I'm like, okay. So I'm like, trying to look around, and sure as I could tell, I'm like, that's the guy. He's like, yeah.

[Steve]

Yep. Amazing.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Day walkers.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Because it's against their religion to talk to. Talk about it to. To.

[Steve]

Non.

[Danny]

To non Scientologists or non.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Because they're afraid of getting ratted out by other Scientologists because they. Can they tell on you or made fun?

[Steve]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we're thinking you get a right squirrel. Yeah.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

So it's an interesting phenomenon, suppressive persons.

[Danny]

That's. Suppressive person.

[Steve]

That's what they keep the suppressive persons on. On a different floor. Floor.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

At whatever this business.

[Danny]

Well, no, they're not. No, no, no. The business is allowed to have non Scientologists.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Well, that's. Yeah, that's exactly who SPS are.

[Danny]

Sure. Yeah. Right.

[Steve]

People.

[Danny]

But you can also be a suppressive. Can you be a suppressive person that is also a Scientologist?

[Steve]

Yeah, that's. That's like. I believe so. You know what? Don't take. This is 20 years ago.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Don't take.

[Danny]

Yeah, this is. This shit's ancient.

[Steve]

Any of my words about this?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

What was. Did. Did he surf?

[Danny]

David Miscavige?

[Steve]

Oh, David. I thought he said Dana. Which. Okay.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Steve]

I just invented a person. Oh, I know.

[Danny]

No, he's the leader of Scientology.

[Steve]

I know. David Miscavige is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I misheard you. And then I invented a son or daughter for him in my head, surfs. And I just fully filled it out right there.

[Danny]

Gavin told me.

[Steve]

Oh, why is that?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

How does that even work?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

I mean, that's cute. It is cute, right?

[Danny]

But he also.

[Steve]

What are you gonna say?

[Danny]

Yeah, I don't know. He was. I don't. That's just a random animal.

[Steve]

Yeah, it was funny. I was talking to old Montreal cartoonists who knew Gavin back in his cartooning days, and kind of like a minor from. From that period was no matter how much Gavin, when he would be writing about arts and culture, would like, because he loved shitting on musicians for pretending. He's like. He's like, music's bullshit, you know? And he's like, acting. Acting is really Bullshit. He's like, comedy. Frankly, comedy is a little bit of bullshit. He's like, I respect making a good joke, but it's not, you know, oh, it's a craft. The one group of people, no matter whether or not he liked their art or not, that he would never like. I never once saw him bad mouth a cartoonist because he knew, like, how much work and torture and craft went into it.

[Danny]

It's fun, interesting.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

But like, right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right? I don't think. He wasn't really on it. He was just kind of like thinking, riff. Yeah, it was a riff. And he thinks it's just like, you know, too physically taxing for somebody like him to do at the age of whatever the age he is. I think he slammed a whole 12 pack. Oh, by the way, how many beers did he drink in your video? I didn't. I didn't catch it. What?

[Steve]

Oh, when we were interviewing him when.

[Danny]

You did the watch party.

[Steve]

Oh, we went to the bar before we even started filming. It was like really 11am on a Friday. Yeah. Yeah. He seemed no worse for wear.

[Danny]

Yeah, I think it. I think it helps him. I think the booze maybe helps him. Helps him get into character. If you've ever shopped online, then chances are you've made purchases from a website powered by Shopify. It's super easy to spot. That beautiful purple shop pay button. That's what we use for our merch store. That purple button has all your payment and shipping info so you don't have to track down your card or hope that your browser remembered that payment info. There's a reason why so many businesses use Shopify. That's because they make it incredibly easy to run and start your own business. It's the business behind the business that really matters. And that's where Shopify excels. With convenient tools and workflows, Shop Pay has the best converting checkout on the planet, meaning fewer abandoned carts and way more sales. That's a game changer. You can spread your brand's word with the built in marketing and email tools. Don't want to build your own page? Shopify has hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates to express your brand and forget the code. Code like Daylight Computer, whose website is absolutely gorgeous. So if you've got a product, a dream, and a drive to make it happen, Shopify is the platform that helps you do it with ease because businesses that sell sell more with Shopify. If you want less carts abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com Danny Jones all lowercase again, that's shopify.com d a n n y j o dash n e s to start upgrading and selling today. Shopify.com Danny Jones it's linked down below. Now back to the show, the Theory, going back to the. The Gavin documentary. You. You came up with a bunch of theories, right, on what happened to Gavin.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Wasn't able to reach Kyle.

[Danny]

Yeah, a lot of the people like you talked to a lot of the co workers, the people that were in from early days of vice. And it seemed like the consensus was like, ah, we. He's a great guy. We. We liked Gavin. He did some weird stuff. I don't agree with his politics, but I liked him. So. And then you came up with a bunch of theories at the end. Right. Like those derived from all the different.

[Steve]

People I spoke to.

[Danny]

The theories derived from the people.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve]

That was. It's. It's interesting because he doesn't, like. I think he kind of portrays it these days as if one day he lost all his friends. Like everybody just turned against him or whatever. But it's. He. It was. It was staggered over like 10 or 15 years based on, you know, the people I know, like we, you know, mutually who are friends with him or worked with him. Everybody had a different breaking point or falling out with him. Some of them are, you know, political or getting, you know, pissed off or offended by something he said or whatever. Some of them are just straight up interpersonal problems. Some. Some are professional or whatever. And so everybody, you know, broke up with their friend Gavin at a different time. And everybody has a, like, sometimes completely different theory about what. What has happened to him between, you know, 2002 and 2022 or whatever. And so that's where those all came from. Yeah.

[Danny]

So what some of my own, after everything, what is your conclusion?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

He's been saying that. Yeah, I mean, it's. I. I mentioned this to someone else, too. It's like, if you go back, like, this guy writes and used to draw, like, prodigiously, and he has this huge body of work whereby you can go back and read stuff from his 20s and 30s, and you're like, of course you changed.

[Danny]

Well, everybody changed.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

He was writing about that in, like, 2012, 2013. I'm talking about stuff from, like, you're talking about way earlier, 1998, you know, 2002. Although it's funny, that article comes out and I'm. I'm gonna get the years a little bit screwed up right now, but it's around 2013 or so 2012 or 2013. And he publishes a book in 2012 called the Death of Cool, although it's original. If you find a book called how to Piss in Public, that is the same book with an earlier title, and it's a memoir of him up until that point, you know, from youth to think he's 40.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And I think the book kind of like ends with him becoming 40 and accepting adulthood and, yeah, being happy about having a family and all that. But the very end of the book, a little epilogue, I can't. I can't do a good paraphrase of it, but he lays out his credo for people, and it's like, he's like, you. You know, he's like, if there's one thing I've learned, it's like, if you don't fit in where you grew up, if you're, you know, if you've got to be, you know, a Mormon Abba impersonator, but you were born like an overweight cowboy or something like that. It's like you got to follow your dream. You got to change into who you want to be. Right? So, like, one year difference between saying, that's the point of my entire life up until the year 40, and the very next year, he's like, except trans. He's like, just don't around with your genitals.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

You know, and his argument is primarily based on. He's like, trans dicks look weird. Right? I'm like, that's not a great argument. You know, that's not the kind of thing you should base law.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Zoran Mamidami.

[Danny]

I thought he wanted.

[Steve]

Mom, dummy.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, Zoho. I heard he wants to give $60 million to trans surgeries.

[Steve]

Trans surgeons. I heard it was to trans surgeons.

[Danny]

That's what I meant.

[Steve]

And it's in cash. Yeah. No. Oh, I don't know anything about that.

[Danny]

I look right now, can you find that out if that's real?

[Steve]

I'm still catching up on Lori Lightfoot, you know. Do you hear she wants to raise the bridges on all the George Floyd? No, she's not around anymore. She lost office.

[Danny]

Okay. Democratic candidate Zo Gender Affirming Care has pledged to allocate 65 million to gender. Gender Surgeons. New Yorkers, baby.

[Steve]

All right. I wonder if that pledge is the.

[Danny]

Same as the Amber Heard pledge.

[Steve]

What's the Amber Heard pledge?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

The funny thing is? He also simultaneously said that if Netanyahu ever comes to New York, he's going to arrest victim.

[Steve]

Oh, like is a hair transplant. Gender Affirming Care. Like, that's all I gotta say. It's like that's. Is. Is.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I look at that and that's super broad. I was just. I remember reading something and it's like, I kind of, you know, I like to take a walk when these issues come up.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Well, the surgery stuff's kind of different though, right? Like, the surgery. Yeah, the surgery stuff, to me, my view on it. And there was a. Some lesbian athlete. I forget her name now. She wrote a tweet about the, about this whole thing, this whole like, explosion of trans stuff. And she was basically explaining how the, the pushing the trans agenda, whatever you want to call it, is building a barrier between the people who. Like my dad, who kind of like grew up in the 50s, in the 60s or whatever, and he's kind of like, maybe started out not think, not too fond of gays and all this stuff. And then over the, over the years, he's kind of like, okay, these people are normal. I'm friends with gay people, whatever. This is kind of normal part of culture. And then the trans thing comes and then you're like, oh, my God, this is getting too out of control. And people are conflating the normal, everyday gays with the people that are weirdly pushing this trans surgery on children. And they're like, this, all of it. I don't want nothing to do with it anymore. That's the. You know, and I think that was a good point that she made there.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, there was a. Gavin was showing.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah. Welcome to postmodern energy.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

You figured out the story? Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Confirmation bias sneaks in. Yeah. It's really on guard. Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

Yes.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah. Right.

[Steve]

Ever been in a room of 100 people and just had them all speaking? It's. It's glorious. It's like a public square.

[Danny]

Yeah. No, and there's also, like, the people, they want to be a part of their group. They don't want to say things, they want to signal the wrong thing to. To where their tribe is going to kick them out. Like, I just noticed this with this whole war and with Iran, the whole Iran war thing that's been kicking off all the heart. The people that have been blasting or that have been like, blowing the trumpets for Trump the whole time leading up to the election, obviously was running on being anti war, which I thought was great, and a lot of people thought was great.

[Steve]

He ran on a lot of things.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Candace. And Alex Jones. And Alex Jones is. I'm gonna use him as an example here. He was basically. He made it. I was watching a Twitter video he did yesterday, and he was talking about the Iran war and he was talking about how stupid it was and how, like, Trump shouldn't be doing this and all this stuff. And throughout the whole thing, he was qualifying himself, himself every 30 seconds. Don't get me wrong, I'm still MAGA. Don't try to say I'm not MAGA. I still support Trump. I still support Donald Trump. I'm still maga. I'm not. I'm not saying that. I just think that what he's doing is wrong. We need to stop this stupid war. Stop giving Israel all this money, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I've seen. I've seen a lot of that. Like, a lot of people are just saying, like, let me be clear, I'm still maga. Don't say I'm not maga.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

You know where that syntax comes from, that kind of cadence that you just, you did a really good impression right there. But you know exactly where that style of speaking comes from, right? Call in sports radio shows. That is how you would address the DJ on a sports call in show in the 80s and 90s. Be like, I don't want to, you know, I want to be a team player here. But you know, I really think, you know, they should get rid of Hernandez and you know, put, put Marcel in on shortstop for this. I think, I think the team's gonna go down the hill if not. Yeah, it's the exact same tone and it's like, I'm not the first person to be like, this is just all team sports. It is, but it is.

[Danny]

You're totally right. It is, bro.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah. The going to the trans stuff. Stuff. What? What? Kevin pulled up a. There, there was a. Apparently there was a Time magazine thing that came out where it said tomboys have gone extinct.

[Steve]

Oh. Cuz it's all because they're presumed to all be trans or they are just all.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Okay.

[Danny]

Because their parents are saying, oh, you're, you're really a boy, we got to chop your tits off. And it was like, is it something.

[Steve]

A lot like is this.

[Danny]

Apparently if Time magazine did a thing on it.

[Steve]

Time magazines journalistic standards are like sending a kid to Detroit for 12 hours and being like, write a story on the city.

[Danny]

Hey, these are, these are one of the top journalistic organizations in the U.S. time magazine.

[Steve]

Time magazine. A time honored. Yeah, Time honored institution in America. Yes, exactly.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah, kids want to chop their shits off. Welcome to America. Go nuts. You know, and he.

[Danny]

Well, the problem is we're gonna do.

[Steve]

Legislate something because they'll regret it.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

So if you're. If you're wiping out all the tomboys, you're. You're making it way more difficult for the evolute for the development of young heterosexual.

[Steve]

I don't think anyone's wiping out the tomboys. I. What I would. What I would fear personally more is that those these kids were talking about in the abstract aren't on baseball teams and of that nature. They aren't physically with other kids their age, like, on a routine basis. The. You know, I don't. I don't hang out with teenagers in my spare time and.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

I've got a pair of God kids, but they're pretty young or whatever. But the sense I get from people who work with teenagers and. Or, you know, some folks who are just slightly younger is that, oh, I could. I can bake. I can. I could pull up a chart if I wanted to. Right now, nobody gets their driver's license anymore. Right. Like. And in the 90s, if you looked at. They would do. Every year in Georgia, we would do. I think it was called, like, the Teen Behavioral Health Survey, where they'd ask, like, have you ever done drugs? Have you ever had sex, Anal sex? You know, what drugs have you done? Have you ever drank? Things of this nature? And we used to fuck with it all the time. And I used to love being like, I've never kissed another person, but I have anal sex three times a week. And it's like, I've never drank a beer, but I. But I do heroin, like, more or less daily. And I think it was funny. I think, like, there was a. Then, like, a fucking teacher at my high school started a rumor that I was on dope. And I think it's because she looked in the fucking Teen Behavioral Health Survey and fell for it. Anyway, in general, when those things would come out and they'd be, you know, from 1950 to 1960, you'd see drug use doing this, and you'd see sex doing this also, you know, I was so proud of my generation. I was like, look at that. We pushed it up another, like, three notches or whatever. Sometime around, like, mid-2000s, it crests and starts plummeting, you know, and it's like, it's Kids on the Internet, it's kids on their phones. You could probably correlate it pretty well to the. To the iPhone coming out, because I believe it is around like 2005, 2006, when it really. When those rates start to sink and it matches up with kids not getting their driver's license, kids being involved in the last, like, like outdoor physical activities and things of that nature. So I think. Yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't worry about. I'd worry that nobody's getting late.

[Danny]

It's a bad.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, it's. It's not good that the most of the population is now staying inside, not going out and doing stuff. That is not a good combination with the way media is going right now, because it is unmanageable. And now more people are inside surrounded by screens all day.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

So it seems like a fucking terrible combo.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve]

And so it's just over and over again. The Internet is. Is now everybody made by people who aren't doing something better with their lives at any given. Right. You know.

[Danny]

Interesting. Yeah. Now everybody can be a. A news source, right? Yeah, anybody can.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

That word YouTube.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

That's true.

[Steve]

You know that.

[Danny]

That's true.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Have you seen them? Have you seen that dude, Andrew Callahan from. He has this thing called Channel 5.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right, right.

[Danny]

To me, same as. Similar style to like Early Vice stuff.

[Steve]

Oh, like. Like Early Vice. I was going to say, he's. He's a bit on like the. The freak freaking mutant hunt. Although recently he's been doing some stuff that's like. He's. He's kind of come along and done some.

[Danny]

Yeah, he's a little bit more political, probably.

[Steve]

Intelligent. Well. And it's just that they're like, he's, you know, kind of growing as a documentarian, I guess. Whatever. Not my place to say, but. Yeah.

[Danny]

Sir.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

And it's all got to be Ron Punk. Right? Yeah. You don't want to sell out.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

Is that, like, people will find. And I don't know if you've noticed this, but people will find like, a lane, whether it be a specific topic or a specific, like, niche of content where there's like, maybe it's politics, maybe it's esoteric stuff like UFOs or whatever, and they'll find out, oh, wow, this vertical makes the most money. So I'm gonna make this my whole identity.

[Steve]

That's their beat. Yep, yep.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Ends. Ends with what? What are those, like, TV nerds on the Internet? Call it Flander Flanders Ization. Like where TV characters that have a trait like, get. Turn into caricatures of themselves if.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yes, but he's a good example of that. Wait, who is he?

[Danny]

He is a. A sports commentator.

[Steve]

Oh, he is. Oh, okay.

[Danny]

He had a show with.

[Steve]

He.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Was he a, like, proper announcer? And back in the day. Okay.

[Danny]

Chicago, I think, actually.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yep, yep. So he.

[Steve]

It was the same guy.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

He was the anti LeBron guy.

[Danny]

He was anti LeBron. Pro Jordan.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Same thing happened to Joan Alex Jones. Same thing happened to like any of the, like, right wing shock jock, kind of like Rush Limbaugh clones that existed across the country in the 90s. Ours was called Neil Bortz. And he just. You can like, over the years, you just hear him become more and more of a detached asshole. And you'd wonder if he was able to turn it off when he left the studio and went home. You know, when you read about his divorce and you'd say, probably not. Not.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

He's still around.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, he's. He, He's. It seems like he just has like the. The biggest hot shot celebrity or politician on his show. Like on.

[Steve]

Well, that's.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

Taylor Swift. Swift.

[Steve]

And it's not people like that. Yeah. Not porn stars and.

[Danny]

Which I think is like.

[Steve]

Which Stuttering John.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

I mean, he's basically Howard Stern. Right?

[Danny]

He's the top podcaster in the world. He's the biggest media thing. Platform. Biggest. What is the word I'm looking for? The biggest media outlet in the world. I guess you could say so.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Bigger than all cable channels. All cable shows.

[Steve]

Sure.

[Danny]

Combined.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It's good he does it. Sure, I'll say that.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, Trump.

[Steve]

And it's a good, It's a good habit to make. Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

You gotta have both sides talk to have both sides of the, of the, of the problem on or both sides of the issue and then also have people who nobody knows don't just chase the, the superstars, you know.

[Steve]

That's true.

[Danny]

So the noisy thing thing was that was that whole thing.

[Steve]

Which one? The one in Chicago and one in Atlanta.

[Danny]

Noisy Atlanta. Okay, Noisy Atlanta.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

How did that whole thing happen?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh, I started with Chicago.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah. Which I think the title was Noisy Shy Rack.

[Danny]

Shy Rack. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was good. Chief Keef and all that stuff with Chief Keef. Yes, yeah.

[Steve]

And Young. I was about to say with Young Thug. I'm sorry, with, with all the Drill kids. Yeah, yeah. So that was, I mean, you know, effectively a sequel. Right. In Atlanta where.

[Danny]

Well, how did the shy. How did the Shyrak thing start?

[Steve]

Shyrak thing started with. There's a he. There's a guy named Andy Capper who was the editor of Vice UK in London and he came to America and he started making videos, became a filmmaker. He's really good filmmaker. And he was fascinated with drill music in Chicago. Like he had been the former editor of. You ever heard of the nme? The New Musical Express? It's like a long running British, like Rock and Roll magazine. It's like it doesn't really have an equivalent in the United States, but I think of Rolling Stone or something like that. Anyway, he came from the music world, right? Not as a musician, but as like, you know, I wouldn't want to call him a music journalist because that sounds stupid, frankly. And he was, he was a real one. And he and this other, another filmmaker named Gregory Beef Jones started working on an idea about Chicago drill music. And I was at the time interested in Chicago as the crime capital of the United States or the murder capital of the United States. And so we both kind of came into the story from those two sides. Like, I couldn't, I couldn't tell you nothing about, about Chief Keef at that point. So he was exposing me to the music and I was telling him, you know, the last 30 years of history of Chicago street life or whatever, and, and that was it. I'm sorry. Not a great story. Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah, basically the history, like the gun trade even, frankly. Yeah, no, I came in today, I went into that. That pretty dumb and naive. I mean, by the time we were filming, I would listen to all the stuff. I was like, this is pretty cool. That guy's 16. I was like, that guy killed someone. Amazing. Like, I love it.

[Danny]

The. Yeah, that's it. It. It was funny from. On the Atlanta episode. The. I think it was the first episode, the Atlanta one. You go into that recording studio and the dude was like, you don't know Big Meech or whatever.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Well, I, I remember. Yeah, I remember. You're talking about where I just like, I, I admit, like, can you tell us about Big Meech from the black mafia family, please? I had phrased it, who is Big Me? And then.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, that was hilarious.

[Steve]

So goes.

[Danny]

And Gucci. Gucci man was in prison during the whole thing.

[Steve]

I believe so.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a while ago.

[Steve]

We were trying to get him on the phone, cuz he had, you know, a phone in jail, but didn't. He didn't want to or just. It didn't like, I don't know if he didn't want to do it or if it didn't make it to him or whatever. Yeah, it's kind of, kind of hard sending, you know, interview requests to prison.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

As it turns out.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

God. It never aired, but I did a, A thing with a couple ladies in death row in Texas where we went and interviewed some people on death row and it was, it was about women who would get married to guys on death row. So like death row wives. It was a. I regret that we never finished that and gotten edit out. It was crazy. Shoot. But The. The process of getting the prison to agree. And then, you know, on top of that, you got to factor in a prison in Texas. That is death row in Texas in Huntsville. Right. Was like six or seven week pain in the ass, you know?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

They make it. Yeah, it's the. The bureaucracy is kind of the point, you know? And it was. It's funny most of the time when you go somewhere to do, like, with a camera, to do a documentary about someone's job, anybody who sees it, they're like, oh, cool. Like, taking an interest in us. And that was. Death row was the one place where the guards were sort of like, great, here you are. Yeah. No, I don't have anything to say.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

They found out who we were talking to, too. They were just like, who are you talking to? It was. Oh, I forget his last name now. Can I. Can I. I don't even know how to look him up. He. He was a guy.

[Danny]

Spit out some keywords and Steve will find him.

[Steve]

Okay. His name's Hannah. Hank something. I just feel bad not remembering.

[Danny]

Texas death row. Try that.

[Steve]

And. Oh, this is going to answer a question I've had for years that I've been cautiously avoiding asking, which is whether or not he got executed. Skinner. Oh, my God. Right as I look him up. That was crazy. Hank Skinner. Thank you.

[Danny]

Did it zap into your head the same time it did, like.

[Steve]

Like a second before? Right.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Steve]

So Skinner was accused of murdering his girlfriend and his girlfriend. Two adult mentally disabled sons from a previous relationship with an ax. Right. And this guy was. I think he was in his early 20s or something. He was kind of like. He was like a roughneck from. I think he's from Lubbock, Texas. He's from north Texas. He worked shampooing hair. Oh, he's. He did die. Okay. Sorry to hear that. God, that guy was remarkable.

[Danny]

So anyway, he was like the latest find. Like the latest article about his execution.

[Steve]

Well, there was one there saying that he. He'd passed away, which I. Zoom out, Steve. Well, he had been scheduled to be executed. And Texas. Texas doesn't execute the most people. I think it's either Florida or California has them beat. But Texas prides itself on executing people the most quickly. Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Sorry to hear that.

[Danny]

He didn't get executed. He dies. Died accidentally.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

And something to be proud of.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, the biggest.

[Steve]

The biggest case, right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And he had been sk. He had been on death row the longest of any inmate who was alive at that point. We're filming him in like 2012, I want to say. And he had. His execution had been scheduled. He'd gone through all his appeals, right? So he was done with all his appeals. But different things kept happening. Like, the prison warden was like, yeah, that guy's got nine lives. Then some. Because different things had delayed his execution. Like, he should have been dead two or three years before. We went and spoke with him and he got married, just married by proxy, right? Because he can't leave death row to a French woman who is an anti death penalty activist named Sandrine Skinner. When she took his name, I forget her maiden name. Who, who we got to speak to, who was there because he was about to be executed. And then they stayed his execution. Once again, like, first time in Texas history, kind of. It was really weird. But I remember we. We got an interview with him and we sat down and we chatted with him and. And he was like, classic North Texas roughneck, like missing a tooth. Just like. Like kind of guy you'd see at the back of the bar or whatever. And it was a year after the. The Werner Herzog documentary Into the Abyss, which was about death row in Texas, in Huntsville, had come out and like, in the course of just, you know, pleasantries were getting the interview started. He was like. He goes, do you know my friend Werner? And I was like, your friend who? And he was like, my friend Werner? And I was like, werner. Werner Herzog. He's like, yeah, that guy. He's like, you know, I gave him his title, right? Right. I was like, the title of his movie, he goes, he's like, what, what's the quote? Be careful. Those y' all who gaze into the abyss for the AIs, may the easy for you be. Beware of those. I'll. I'll. I'll stop doing my shitty impression. Anyway, it was like. It was Beware of those who gaze into the abyss, for the. The abyss also gazes into you.

[Danny]

Uhhuh.

[Steve]

And he goes, frederick Nietzsche. Also Sprag Zarathustra Extra. And I was like, ah, be still, my heart. It was like this. This is a man who's just been sitting reading for 20 years on death row. It's like you took. You took the roughest lump of coal Texas prison unit and have turned him into some sort of like a literary rural diamond. Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Sorry. I'm sorry you died.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

That was the whole thing. Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And he got two prostitutes and they. They wound up dead. He maintained his innocence and he. This. This lawyer that I'm talking about is very, very against the death penalty. So he'll just take random death penalty cases like this. And. And the lady who he was partnering with as her defense team, she married this dude, Right. And she's been representing him for like the past 15 years, 20 years. Maybe he's been.

[Steve]

I might know who you're talking about.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, he was. This was in Stark Florida, which is like the. It's the middle of nowhere Florida. It's out of a movie, dude. It's like, does. It's not even a real place.

[Steve]

Which, Which. Which part of the state?

[Danny]

It's like.

[Steve]

What is it near?

[Danny]

It's like northern middle. I would say it's close to Gainesville, but more near to the middle of the state.

[Steve]

Tallahassee or.

[Danny]

No, that little lower.

[Steve]

Okay. Yeah, that is the middle of nowhere.

[Danny]

Yeah, there's like a. There's like a couple churches, convenience stores, and like a water tower. And then the prison name.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

For the star. Yeah.

[Steve]

Evocative.

[Danny]

And the. The. The sun never shines in Stark. And anyways, so this guy's maintained his innocence. And I don't remember what happened with the DNA. I don't remember this guy's name, but something happened with. Where the DNA was like, inconclusive or something like this.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And they were still going to execute him. And like, leading up to the hours where they were supposed to execute him, they were waiting. They were going back and forth with the Supreme Court. And we are there filming.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And there's this group. There's this giant field on one side of the group. There was people that were there in a group to stop him from getting executed.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And in that group of people, people. The guy had no friends, but he had people that were like former members of death row who got exonerated.

[Steve]

Oh, okay.

[Danny]

Through DNA evidence. Right. So they're like one of the guys that just got off death row the week before. He's like, I just left death row because they. They finally got my DNA evidence. Right. So. And then the other group of people on the other side of the field roped off with caution tape where the victims of the prostitutes or the family members of the prostitutes that got killed, Guild and like, all their friends as well as other people who are victims of similar crimes.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And dude, what a weird Twilight Zone situation that was, bro. And then like, we were. We were there for like eight hours waiting for this guy to be executed. Like, they had him strapped to the cross. Right. I guess the lethal injection is kind of like a crucifix.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

With the window.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Wait, did you guys go to the execution?

[Danny]

No, we were across the street from the PR in the field. And it's like, how'd you pull down? But apparently he was in the little showroom, like, and the people that were supposed to watch were sitting in the theater.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Well, he knows how the sausage is made. Ye. Knows the people who are involved in it. This is what level of intelligence you do sometimes, right?

[Danny]

Totally, totally.

[Steve]

Talk to anybody in any field about how things actually go, right? And they're like, you know, this is all made by idiots, right?

[Danny]

Yeah, totally.

[Steve]

This is like death yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

What did he have that lawyer for a previous month? Murder?

[Danny]

I think so.

[Steve]

Geez. He's just going down the daisy chain.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And he's like, I'm, I'm. I'm bowing out of this trial or whatever. And he had the option to give up his evidence or the, the client. Attorney client privilege was violated.

[Steve]

He could have, he could have given.

[Danny]

That to the judge.

[Steve]

Right, right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Money. Yeah.

[Danny]

That's how against the death penalty he is. Which is wild.

[Steve]

Good for him.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah. Great guy. But the, you know, the, the phenomenon of, of people wanting. Women wanting to marry people on death row is beyond my comprehension.

[Steve]

Takes all types.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

It is a French thing. Right. But it's, it's, it's not. I mean, you hear about.

[Steve]

We're a big country, you know, maybe.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right? Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah, I forget.

[Danny]

He got married a few times, I think.

[Steve]

Is it more than once?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

What a good TV Show Death row wives maybe.

[Steve]

Actually they were, they were characters, you know, but it was in general and it wasn't. There was always a reason. You could always figure it out, really. Like there was always something that had happened. There was a lot of. I forget how many of the four had had previous, like had come out of abusive relationships and things like that. And so you think, well, you wouldn't want to keep go. You know, you wouldn't want to be connected to somebody accused of murder. Right. But it's also like trying to remember who it was who kind of broke this down neatly. It was somebody who worked either in the county clerk's office where they get married or something like that. But like, if you think about it, for a woman who's had a hard time with men and who's, you know, been traumatized, it's like, here's a guy, you always know where he's going to be. Anytime you see him, him, you know, he's never gonna, He's. Yeah, there's glass and guards between you and you can, you know, you can, you can have an emotional relationship with someone who can't turn it around on you. Right, right. Who's not going to be able to. Who can't get through the glass. You can go buy him little snacks that you, you know, put in the bucket. It goes over to them.

[Danny]

And so there's no conjugal visits on death row, right?

[Steve]

Not in Texas, that's for sure. Yeah. No, I don't know about elsewhere. That's a little European for us here.

[Danny]

A little European.

[Steve]

Well, so is death row, I should say.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Was used in 1978, right?

[Steve]

Yeah. So she was. Yeah, in her teens, I think. And she was an early. Like that was. She was part of the activist community that got them to outlaw the death penalty. It was either in France or it was in like Martinique, which is still France, or like French King Guyana, you know, it's a department of France. It's like a state. Right.

[Danny]

The last time the guillotine was used for 77.

[Steve]

Okay, sorry. The year Star wars came out.

[Danny]

19. That wasn't that long ago, bro.

[Steve]

I know, right? It's pretty funny.

[Danny]

Ten years before I was born, right? A. A Tunisian man was beheaded after being convicted of murder.

[Steve]

Does it say where they did it? I'm curious which department of France it was if it was in metropolitan France or rest. Oh, oh, he's in Marsai. Oh, it must have been. Yeah. Okay. They didn't probably. Oh, they did it in Marsai BT prison. Interesting. What he do? Oh Jesus.

[Danny]

Pimp killer. He was known as the pimp killer.

[Steve]

I mean, does that mean he killed pimps or is that. Was he also. Was it like pimp. Comma.

[Danny]

It says in 73 a 21 year old woman had met in the hospital. Our receiving being. Wow. Recovered from an amputation, filed a complaint against him stating that he had tried to force her into prostitution.

[Steve]

He beat women to death. That sucks.

[Danny]

He tried to force amputees into prostitution. Geez, that's pretty metal. Wow. Released from custody during the.

[Steve]

Oh, and he amputated her. What the.

[Danny]

Oh, he did the amputation.

[Steve]

This guy sounds like a bit of a jerk. Holy.

[Danny]

Dude, maybe you deserve the guillotine.

[Steve]

Hey look, I'm not God.

[Danny]

The guillotine would probably be pretty painless.

[Steve]

That's the whole idea.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, you wouldn't.

[Steve]

Public Safety razor. That's. It's. That was its official name, the Public safety razor.

[Danny]

Really?

[Steve]

Dr. Guillotine, who made it. Yeah. Made it because it was like the previous method of beheading people was you hit their head with an axe. And that depends on how well you swung it. How.

[Danny]

Sometimes takes a couple swings.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh yeah, because they hold up the head.

[Danny]

They hold up the head and it's still talking. Right, right. What is that, bro? Are you still conscious after that?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

But.

[Steve]

But who knows, you know?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, right.

[Steve]

Amazing documentary.

[Danny]

Incredible documentary, right?

[Steve]

Like Fred Looker, right?

[Danny]

Lucher. Fred Lucher.

[Steve]

Oh, it's Lucher.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Found himself a job. Yeah.

[Danny]

Got a great job, right?

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Made gas chambers. Then got hoodwinked by zil and into testifying against how the. The Jews weren't really killed by the gas chamber.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

I thought it was the Ernst Zundal.

[Steve]

That sounds right. Okay. I haven't seen it for. For a long time.

[Danny]

What year? Can you find out what year the Earl.

[Steve]

Those Holocaust deniers kind of, you know, sound the same after a little bit.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, they're still around, bro. They're still ever. It's like there's this news on the Internet. There's a crazy resurgence of. Of anti Semitism online and Christianity, interestingly enough, everyone's becoming a Christian right now, Right?

[Steve]

I've seen. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Do you think that's what it is? I had. My friend told me that yesterday too. I was talking to my. My buddy Neil about this and he was thinking. He was saying the same thing.

[Steve]

Yeah. Getting baptized on camera is his attention seeking behavior. I'm sorry, no.

[Danny]

Is this ERNST okay? Yeah. Oh, 85. Oh, 85. Okay. So it wasn't. I thought it was farther. Longer.

[Steve]

I got Lor in his. Or Luch Lucher.

[Danny]

Yeah. Whatever happened with that trial, he lost.

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

Is he. Where is he now, Zano? Does it say where he is? I don't know. Where's this weirdo now? He died bad.

[Steve]

Wild bad.

[Danny]

In Germany.

[Steve]

Baden Wurtenberg, Germany. That's three bads. That's how. That's how bad that guy was.

[Danny]

Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Is the. I guess there are a lot of Christians in the United States. I guess there's more Christians here than anywhere on Earth. Yeah, there's more Christians in the US this is a highly.

[Steve]

In South America. America.

[Danny]

Brazil would be number two, I think. United States is number one. More. More. Yeah, we're Number one. Brazil's number two. I think Mexico is number three.

[Steve]

And then.

[Danny]

And then probably Russia. I was a guess.

[Steve]

I would say also. Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Huh.

[Danny]

But yeah. What a weird thing to do for views. Become a Christian. I don't know. I can't. I can't. I just can't imagine that. That people would do that. Would grift Christianity.

[Steve]

Well, Right. Overturns your expectations, doesn't it? You'd never. What? What? What wouldn't you. You know, what's the least likely thing you'd think of to become like, an Internet trend? How about Catholicism? Right. And then here we are.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, right. That becomes Israel.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

That's your enemy. And he's like a third of all humanity.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah. Oh, got me there.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It's just bar. Bar arguing.

[Danny]

If there is like.

[Steve]

I don't.

[Danny]

I'm not calling Gavin racist. Okay. But if there are racists, I would rather them be self aware, funny racists.

[Steve]

And out in open. I was gonna say that. That's like Malcolm X. Yeah. I forget his term for it. I'm gonna use her for.

[Danny]

Is that. Is there a quote about that?

[Steve]

That. Yeah, I. I really wish I could remember the quote better because he was talking about like, overt racism.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

In. In American whites versus kind of like white liberals in the 50s and 60s who he referred to as. I want to say it was like wolves versus, like a dog that may turn on you or something. He's like, at least I know where I stand.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Steve]

With the, you know, the Wallaces and forget the sheriff's name. But yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Of the world.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, okay. I've Heard of him?

[Danny]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve]

Okay.

[Danny]

He was a. Basically, when he was a kid, he was, like, marching. Doing some march in some parade or something with the Boy Scouts. And then somebody. Somebody, like, threw a brick and hit him in the head. Head.

[Steve]

Jesus.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

That's a pretty bad one. Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah. Not a great way.

[Steve]

Usually it's someone says, you know, yeah, bad name.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Study abroad. Oh, no, there's foreign exchange.

[Danny]

Foreign exchange student.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Study abroad. I'm not that.

[Steve]

Oh, sorry. Which broad we study in.

[Danny]

How dare you. So anyway, so he came back here and when he was in his teens or whatever, and then. I forget. I think he was in Virginia maybe. I could be wrong. Tennessee. Virginia. One of the two. Anyways, he. He went to a bar, and there ended up being, like, a bunch of KKK people there, Right. And he was, like, talking to him, whatever. And then he met one guy or whatever, and he was, like, befriending the guy. They were talking about music and all this stuff. Stuff. And he said he really liked the guy. And then he learned, like, you know, a couple hours of the conversation that this guy was in the kkk and he's like, whoa, what? And so he basically, you know, he made his life's mission to, like, meet every KKK member he possibly could. And he had to, like, trick a lot of them. Like, he was trying to meet these grand wizards and stuff like that. So he was setting them up, saying, oh, there's this journalist who wants to meet you, or whatever. They wouldn't say he was black.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And they would walk, they would film some of the.

[Steve]

Gotcha.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

You know, ignorant of the world Right.

[Steve]

I mean, you know, I grew up in Georgia in the 90s, so it was like you hear from people's parents. It wasn't that, you know, there wasn't. It wasn't everybody. Right. Small, small percentage of the population in. But I never heard it from anyone who I figured out was smart later on. It always came from a, like the middle of the middle of the packer, low power types of people, you know.

[Danny]

On the IQ chain.

[Steve]

If you want to. Yeah. If you want to use that metric.

[Danny]

It's a good metric.

[Steve]

There's been, I've seen a resurgence of IQ talk a lot lately. Yeah, it's like, I feel like a lot of these people think it's like a Dungeons and Dragons stat. Like they don't understand how I. What IQ is supposed to be and how it's assessed or whatever. That it's just like a hard number that is intelligence, you know, and it'd be like that guy is, you know, the, the guy with the 118 IQ is 5 smarter than the guy with the 113. Right. So he should be in charge.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, was I?

[Danny]

Somebody comment complimented you about having a high iq, like, oh, that's nice. And you're like, you were like bragging or something. You know what it means something like, it's great. Like, you like the IQ argument when you're smart.

[Steve]

Oh, no. Oh, I'm sorry, you're right. I forgot that was in the. I made it into the cut. I was talking to Gavin about it. Yeah, yeah, I was talking about. Because he, he bases a lot of his arguments in IQ and stuff. And I'm like, I think IQ is kind of bullshit. I think it's like, I don't think it equates to intelligence. Like, I don't think there's a hard number that you can put on that. And there's.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

All right, but you didn't argue about it. You agreed with her.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right, right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

So what was the premise of that Bell curve book?

[Steve]

Oh, just that I never made it more than five pages into that. Oh, it. It's famously that there's. If you, if you look at IQs by race there, the Bell curve is a normal distribution and that the different races come out at different averages on it.

[Danny]

Right, right, right.

[Steve]

I think most within a standard deviation may be maybe some within two, but it's. It gets used. It helps prop up arguments that race is.

[Danny]

Oh.

[Steve]

Genetically determinative of people's intelligence.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

And achievement. And it's like, what. How many, how many people's IQ test is this based on?

[Danny]

Yeah, sure.

[Steve]

Like, how are we defining race? It's like.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

He treats everybody as individuals, keep everybody as individual.

[Danny]

Right. You can't automatically, like, take. Okay, okay, you. You are Chinese, so you are automatically better at math. Like, it's not right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, but the, The. So the Chinese argument is interesting. So is the. Are Chinese people generally more good at math because they're. Because of their, Their heritage, or is it because of their culture that they're. The way their school, the way their education system works.

[Steve]

It's going to be 99. Their culture in my mind exactly.

[Danny]

Of course.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, I had this.

[Steve]

Everybody in the world behaves like I, you know, like they look, you know, it's just not a. Not a great.

[Danny]

Yeah, the funniest.

[Steve]

That much scientific rigor to it, right?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Insane.

[Steve]

Crazy.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, it's. I mean, it's funnier than that. People talk about Palestinian anti Semitism and it's like there are Semitic people too, you know?

[Danny]

Yeah, it's like.

[Steve]

I know. I understand that we're dressing up the word Jew hate.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

With anti Semitism, but it's like, can we at least be a little more accurate?

[Danny]

Yeah, right.

[Steve]

No, it is the same.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

It's just culture.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Of course.

[Danny]

And you know, it's like Internet is.

[Steve]

A font of received wisdom.

[Danny]

Nothing is real anymore.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

We're in post reality.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

We're more aware of the now.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right, right. Project Mockingbird.

[Steve]

Wait, which one's that?

[Danny]

I think that was during Kennedy where he gave. He gave.

[Steve]

I was thinking of Project Mongoose. Okay.

[Danny]

Type in Project Mockingbird. I don't want. I don't want to this up, but basically what it was, it was like allowing the. The top four or five news publications. Oh, Henry Lutes, the CIA. So project refers to the two distinct but related activities by the CIA. One was a telephone intercept program officially named Project Mockingbird, targeting two journalists for publishing classified Information. There was Operation Mocking. Maybe it was Mockingbird. Operation Mockingbird. Much broader program.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Go Up. Focused on manipulating the American news media for propaganda purposes. Right. So what year was that? 63. Right. So it was the intelligence agencies specifically influencing the news media for propaganda, like.

[Steve]

Of course. Yeah. I mean.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

There's. What was it. We were talking about Time magazine earlier and Henry Lutes. I don't know how you pronounce his name. Lucy Lucci is famously like a effect. He's close friends with the Dulles brothers. An effective mouthpiece for whatever, you know, whatever ideas they want to put out into the public discourse. You know, that's the nature of the beast. Yeah, right.

[Danny]

Yep. Everything for the.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Like, what kind of guy are you talking about?

[Steve]

Sources.

[Danny]

Right, right.

[Steve]

What is a source? Right.

[Danny]

You know, and how does. Like. I wonder how it works today, like, in publications like the New York Times or these other big magazines. Right. Like, with. With. How. Like, did they know they're being influenced by the government or intelligence agencies? Or does that just kind of, like, happen without them knowing about it and it kind of, like, gets massaged in or, like, sources get planted. I have a friend who. Because I. Because it's interesting, because I have a friend who was publishing a piece on how the seat. This was like, two years ago. He was working on this piece where. With, like, 25 sources. Where. Who were all former intelligence community people in the U.S. yeah. And it was basically exposing how the CIA was using a. A NATO proxy intelligence service to conduct sabotage operations inside of Russia, like blowing up munitions depots and train tracks and things like this. And he worked in work. He worked on stuff. Wet works. No, he worked on the store for, like, over a year with 25 different sources or whatever, with an editor at. I don't know. He didn't tell me exactly. He didn't want to give me the exact name of the publication, but it was, like, one of the top three.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And it came Time to publish it around December. And he had like one final call before they pressed the button to launch the story. Right?

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And she, the editor of the piece that he was working with was like, okay, we gotta have one more call with the deputy Director of the CIA. He's like, what?

[Steve]

Here it comes. Yeah.

[Danny]

So like they're on the phone and they're going through it or whatever. And he goes like, category. He goes, I categorically deny all of this. This is untrue. And even if it was true, this would. Would put people's lives at risk. Right, Right. So it's like, we're not gonna. He's like, I completely deny this. Whatever, this is false, blah, blah. And he was like, okay, fine, we'll put a blurb at the end of the article saying the deputy director categorically denies any of this is real.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And then so he hangs up and he's like, cool, let's go. Let's go ahead and launch it. I'll. I'll write this up, we'll add it to the story and we'll be done. And the editor goes, no, we have an off the record agreement with the CIA day. So if they deny anything, we will not publish it. Click. Right, that's the end of that.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

So just one anecdote. If that's happening, you know, with people wasting a year of their life on a story and such like, that can happen. I wonder how much more is going on. Who knows? We. We will never know.

[Steve]

We don't.

[Danny]

We will never know. But yeah, Project Mockingbird, 1963, 3 Kennedy. It's a weird time we're living in with the media, bro, and all these individual content creators and put these, like. It's funny too. There's like only a certain amount of platforms that exist, right. To publish all this stuff. Right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah. You know, that was the best.

[Steve]

How did we end up with like four websites consolidated? This is called social media media.

[Danny]

Right, right, right.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right, right, right.

[Steve]

But it's interesting to see it on the, you know, the great democratizing medium of the Internet, you know, and then Google too.

[Danny]

Are you familiar with like, the history of Google and how it was like, it was like incubated by the CIA and.

[Steve]

Oh. And like funded with DARPA money and everything is. I I love when like tech bros talk about like the self made men of Silicon Valley. And it's like, guys, yeah. Subsidized by Sergey Brin was getting visited.

[Danny]

By the nsa, CIA, darpa.

[Steve]

The entirety of Silicon Valley's existence. Yeah.

[Danny]

Which is a little unsettling, right?

[Steve]

Oh, sure. The whole, whole thing's unsettling, you know.

[Danny]

So you have, you have Google and YouTube, which are basically one number one and two websites on the earth. Basically the earth.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh my God.

[Steve]

Don't take my word on that. Yeah, one of those things such that everybody was like, great. You know, it's like, well, this is the way to. It's the way all this has worked for the last 30 years. Why should it change now, you know?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Well, could, could be both.

[Danny]

Open AI has secured a 200 million dollar contract with us.

[Steve]

It is Defense Department to develop a.

[Danny]

Prototype AI system for national security applications. Okay, well that's not as bad as the contract Palantir got two weeks ago for 800 million from the Pentagon.

[Steve]

It's not as much. Yeah.

[Danny]

Can you google Palantir's recent, paler new Palantir defense contract?

[Steve]

There was. Did you see, what's his name, Alex Carp? Did you see the video of him fantasizing about getting drones to spray fentanyl laced urine on what CIA analyst who had him over? He was.

[Danny]

This is a real video?

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, it's him. He's doing some sort of Q and A on a stage with, with like, I don't know what the fucking context of it was, but they were asking him about like, like think about his like dreams and Earth's like fantasies for what they can do with technology or something like that. And he talked about, he mentions being like, oh, you want my like good dreams or like my dark dreams or whatever. And they go like, well, let's start with the dark dreams. And he's like, I wish you see him getting like his voice starts to crack. He's like actually angry and he's like, I wish I could have a fleet of drones spray fentanyl laced urine on every analyst who's me over. And it's like your fantasy is to frame intelligence agents for drug use. Like you're you're a man in his 50s or I believe, and like the head of one of the most, like, not only successful, but powerful companies on earth.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, did he?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

There you go.

[Danny]

Such a weird thing, bro. It's like this uni party thing behind the line, like behind, behind our projection of right and left is like all the billionaires who doesn't matter to them because they're just going to still get whatever. They're going to control everything, right. They're going to co opt whatever side.

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

So it's a. So the recent Palantir.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

I've read a little bit of Marshall McLuhan.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Oh, yes, I have heard.

[Steve]

You seen that? Yeah, the famous cover. And it's good. And it's, it's sort of like, you know, whereas Marshall McLuhan was like those who, those who fear, like, television for what. What is on it right now. Miss the fact that it's the format of the medium that is, that will impart the great cultural changes. That's the whole idea with, you know, the medium is the medium is the messenger, right? That it's like you can't cram Shakespeare onto television. Television will be its own thing. It'll have its own effect. It'll be disruptive and it'll be good and bad. And we have to, you know, it's like just wait and adjust. And Neil Postman comes along 20 years later and he's like, you Know, it wouldn't hurt if we put some Shakespeare or something on it. It's like, we don't. Just because, you know, the content is less important than the format of the medium doesn't mean we have to put literal garbage on it. You know, like watch TV in America in the 80s and it's like we could do a little bit better than turning all news into entertainment and. Etc and so forth. Anyways, you wrote a book called Technopoly in the early 90s, which, which is what I'm reading right now. And it's. Which it's predictive and it's amazing because it's so early. He doesn't even. Like, the Internet hasn't been named yet. So what he's referring to is he's like computer information systems. He's like, and. And computers will be, you know, recapitulating some of the, like, cultural effects and political effects of the printing press. He's like, but this is different. Different because whereas the printing press is a technology that you could, you know, if you taught someone how to make a printing press, they could go to their country or their little town or whatever and set up their new printing press. It's like we. We haven't had an experience before except, you know, arguably, like television, radio or something like that where the, you know, the means of the information revolution is controlled by companies. You can't build your own computer. Computer, like, you can't build your own silicon transistors. That. This is. This changes the lay of the land that people control. You know, people control every single element. Specific people, you know, specific people at specific companies.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Well, it's. I. I still think back with. With a sad sort of wistfulness about fighting the war against the word content. Because that was like mid 2000s. I'm trying to remember the first time I heard it, but it was literally something that like marketing and advertising guys would say as a placeholder.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

For something they were selling. Right. You know, well, we're gonna make like a tip in which would be like a little thing that goes inside the magazine, you know, for Camel cigarettes or.

[Danny]

Content is like commoditizing it and it will.

[Steve]

Content is like it. I mean, content makes it content. He's like. And then the content, which literally means whatever the fuck we put in.

[Danny]

Exactly.

[Steve]

You know, whoever's art or writing.

[Danny]

Exactly.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Doesn't matter.

[Steve]

Just, you know, just lorem Ipsum this up right now. And to have that become the actual.

[Danny]

Vehicle, all it means is it's taking art and turning it into a vehicle for revenue.

[Steve]

Sausage filling, right?

[Danny]

Yes.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

And it's just like brutal or just like going through your life and experiencing like an intricate, interesting moment. Like, whoa, hold on.

[Steve]

This is content grist for the mill. Yeah. We are all, we are all now millers of experience and people will like.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You know?

[Danny]

Yeah. It's just weird how like it's. It's reversed. Yeah, it's reversed. Now you're going to design your day based around how much content you can get.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, oh, that's very common. Yeah. And he was talking about National Geographic and how that was kind of the. The way they did their. The, the way they would pre produce a documentary, right. Instead of just being like, oh, this seems like. This seems like an interesting person. Go film him. They would want to know exactly, exactly what was going to be said there, exactly how it was going to be set up and exactly how it would end. And we'd sometimes get folks like that at. In the early days in the video stuff, they would come in sometimes from like commercial video, like making ads or whatever. And then sometimes from like places that are like Nat geo, where it's like not quite the news but like mainstream, mainstream media, whatever. Who would want to know how a story ended, you know, know, while writing the pitch. Right. In order to get the green light to get out the door. And you're like, well, you don't realize, like, if you haven't told this, you know, if you haven't seen and reported the story, how do you know how it's gonna end?

[Danny]

Right?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

But it is a crummy way to do anything that's supposed to be reporting.

[Danny]

Right, right, right.

[Steve]

To know your. It's. It's like not. It's like Google journalism too, where it's like, it's. It's boring. Like, why would you want to go tell a story that you already know the. You know the ending of? Like, why don't you just sit at your desk and chat it out? Why don't you just get chat. GPT in the Defense Department to spit out copy for you for your content? Right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Like, yeah, why bother?

[Danny]

That generation is. Is fading into the dark of people that are, you know, like, you're able to express that sentiment because you've. You were raised in the 90s going, you know, working at B, doing this stuff. Yeah.

[Steve]

But my generation sucked too. We were one magazine out of hundreds. Thousands. Right. And there were probably a couple other good ones, but we were, you know.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

The shining stars of that.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

It's like when people are nostalgic for, like, you know, the. Yeah. Yes. And stuff. And I'm like, you know, most people were listening to the Black Eyed Pennies back then. Like, it's. We always edit the.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, I forgot about the yeah, yeah. Yes.

[Steve]

Still going strong.

[Danny]

You know, it's funny, I was listening to you. Ever had ever happened to you where, like, you randomly hear a song that you've, like, used to listen to when you were really, really young and you hear it now. Like, for me, it would be like 25 years later, and it's like, I'm really embarrassed to be listening to this, but I'm gonna play it on reboot. Repeat.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

No, it happened to me recently. I love it.

[Steve]

Little time capsules.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And they started playing nookie, and I was like, this is awesome.

[Steve]

Jacked you up.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

That's how they get you.

[Danny]

I'm kind of ashamed to admit. Well, that's fine.

[Steve]

That is a generation gap, though.

[Danny]

It is a generation.

[Steve]

I used to get driven to school by. When I was, like, 15, by a Juggalo, a Jugglette girl who's like a grade up. It was really into Insane Clown Possum. We'd have to listen to Insane Clown Posse like, every day in the car. And it's like, I've grown to. I went to the gathering of the Juggalos. I've grown to really love Insane Clown Posse. But at the time, you know, I was a little teenage sophisticate, and I was like, come on, man. Bugs on my nuts again. You really have to listen to this every day at this volume, you know, in the back of your Civic. And one day, she was excited. She was like, hey. She's like, I just found this new band. They're punk. Like, I'm really excited about them. And she's like. And I think. I think you like. I think you'll like them, like, a little more than, like, I see. I'm like, cool. I like. I was like, I like punk stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And it was Limp Bizkit doing Faith, George Michael's Faith. And I was like, I did not think there was something in this world that could be worse than Bugs on My Nuts or Chicken Hunter, but here it is.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, no. Fly your fart proudly. Isn't that what Benjamin Franklin said?

[Danny]

Did he say that?

[Steve]

Well, I'm paraphrasing it. That's how it's known. He wrote an essay about that.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Which Is like, fly your flag, man. Like. Yeah, I listen to Embarrassing, too. We were talking about listening to Screwdriver earlier.

[Danny]

Who cares what you listen to exactly.

[Steve]

If it makes you happy? How does the rest of that Sheryl Crowe line go? It's not that bad. It's something that bad. I'm getting the.

[Danny]

It's scanning that goes, though.

[Steve]

It might not be that bad now. I can't.

[Danny]

If it makes you happy.

[Steve]

It's not. It can't be.

[Danny]

It can't be that bad.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah. Well, how the hell. If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad?

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

They went to a bunch.

[Danny]

You went to them.

[Steve]

I missed. There's. You ever heard the band Orchid?

[Danny]

No.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

But you can. You could certainly do it in Atlanta in the 90s. And then I met the singer from Orchid. He actually worked, like with Vice for a little while or whatever. He was in other bands like Panthers and. What was his third band? It was even better. Violent Bullshit was his band. His name's Jason Green. And he was like. And he would hang out, like, I was friends with a bunch of people. I got to know him. He'd be at the bar, be very friendly and. And he was like. Kind of like. Like, you know, year or two older. But it was like teenage icon to me. And I missed him again. He was in Chicago and I got sick and so that's the one. That's the one thing I regret.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And that just happened last year.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Here's the DOD thing with Palantir. So what was it? How much was it? 800 million.

[Steve]

One. I see. 1.3 billion.

[Danny]

Well, it was a. The 1.3 billion was like a three year deal. Right. So. Though, for Maven, their most recent installment, which was like two weeks ago, was 800 million yeah.

[Steve]

So goes.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

What does Maven do?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

So it can scan people's faces and figure out if they're terrorists.

[Steve]

Scanning crap. Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

I'll see.

[Danny]

Sounds like it. Nothing could go wrong there.

[Steve]

Exactly.

[Danny]

There's this lady I had in the other day who is a, like a math wizard who was a part of the. Worked for the department of HUD during the Bush years.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It's not pronounced doggy.

[Danny]

Oh, I thought it was pronounced Doge.

[Steve]

I thought the whole, the whole deal was. That was how the dog spells it. Right, right.

[Danny]

I like that. That's good. I'm going to start calling it Doggy Doge. So. So I'm going to steal that doggy. So she was basically talking about how, you know, doggy is all about creating the, you know, figuring out all this waste, fraud and. Waste, fraud and abuse or whatever. Whatever. And Elon's going for the irs, the Social Security, hhs, Treasury, all this stuff and trying to weed out all these things and all these people in these departments. And she was making the case. She's like, I remember during the Bush years, in fact, it was the day before 911 when Donald Rumsfeld came out and said, There's $2.5 trillion missing from the penalty Pentagon.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It may or may not have been that. May or may not be.

[Danny]

That's your main. That's the word on the street.

[Steve]

Sorry. Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Sure.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Fire a bunch of middle managers.

[Danny]

A bunch of middle managers at the irs, HHS and Social Security. And like, I was like, whoa. And she's like, okay, if you look at that, she goes. And this was her theory. This is all conjecture, obviously, but this was an interesting story. She was saying that if I wanted to create a A digital social credit system that was controlled with. With money.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

And HHS and all this stuff. She goes, I would go to get all the data from the irs, the Treasury, HHS and Social Security, and I would. I would integrate it with AI to have like a complete, comprehensive 360 degree database of every citizen in America.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

She literally.

[Steve]

He.

[Danny]

He literally was working with Paler.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

To integrate all the. And Xai. To integrate all that data right into these AIs.

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

But, like, somehow stable coins will be able to make this whole thing work with creating, you know, basically. Like, you know, Elon said before that he's a. He's really. He admires China's WeChat thing, right? Where China has this thing where like finance and social media and everything is condensed into one app. Right. Essentially, it's called WeChat. And he thinks that that's cool. And he wanted a Model X off of Blah. So she's like, if I wanted to do that, she's like, that's exactly what the.

[Steve]

Well, he's. He wants to make the Everything app, right?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Really?

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last time you were there, it's been a bit. 2014, 2015 maybe.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve]

Or something. So. But I, like, growing up, like, I. I was really, you know, like, we didn't. We didn't have the term weeaboo yet, but me and my friends, we loved, like, Akira and we called it Japanimation back then. Like anime. Right. Like, I remember when Hollywood video changed the shelf from Japanimation.

[Danny]

Really?

[Steve]

And we were like, anime? What the is this? Like, that's how they say it in Japan. Right. Anyway, so I always loved Japan growing up. Right. Right. And it didn't mean I hated China, but it was like, my preference would have been, oh, if I can go anywhere in the world, I would love to go to Japan.

[Danny]

Yes.

[Steve]

And I ended up pitching and then getting roped into some stories in China, like, which I was equally excited to do, but I just. I never thought China would be my thing. And then I went there and I was like, this place rules. This feels like what I assume 1970s America felt like, these people are all awesome. This place is great.

[Danny]

How so?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Really?

[Steve]

China? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the editor was this rad gal named Maddie Jew. Right? It might be up her last name.

[Danny]

Maddie Jew. Sh. Shout out.

[Steve]

Shout out. And then this other guy who's. I forget his title there, but he ruled. His name was Billy Starman. Anyway, they were, you know, served as fixers. Helped me around, like with the rest of the crew and all that. And, you know, anytime I go somewhere, you at least try to learn, like, how do I say, like, please and thank you in the language? Or like, how do I go to the better. Or excuse me would be a big one. You know, just so, like, you know, you know, you can at least learn those 10 phrases in any, any language, right? And so I was trying to do that with Mandarin and they gave me, you know, nihau shushu, the basics and stuff. And I was like, well, how do you. I was like, well, how do you say please? And they're like, we don't really use that very often. They're like, don't worry about that. I was like, okay, well, how about like, excuse me. Like, just the basic. If I bump into someone or if I do something wrong or whatever. And they're like. They're like, yeah. They're like, we never say. Say that.

[Danny]

No, man.

[Steve]

They're like, but what I can tell you. But let me tell you how to say stupid. And this is shabby. And I was like, oh, okay. So they taught me shabby newbie, which is like. They were like, that means. Yeah. And I was like, doesn't that literally mean cow vagina? And they're like, there you go. You're catching on, right? And then like, sonima, which is like, I am. I'm butchering these. Like, no doubt. Which. It means your mom. And they taught me that. They were like, don't. Don't say that to people. People will actually fight you over that.

[Danny]

Oh, really?

[Steve]

But then. But then one time I was. I was there. I was having. It was like, November. I was in Beijing, and Beijing is kind of like Washington, D.C. it's not my. Not my favorite city. I went to. I got to go to a lot of different parts of China. And that was. I prefer. I don't prefer Beijing. Whatever. It was, like, raining and shitty, and I kept having. We're staying at this hotel where in the morning, these, like, shady adoption services would bring a Chinese baby that was going to be adopted to an American couple. And for some reason, all the American couples, like, we saw this over and over for, like, a week and a half. There's always different couples. And the. I want to say all of them, but at least the majority were lesbian couples. Kind of funny. And they. So it's like six in the morning. We'd be getting up and going, Getting. Getting ready to get our coffee or whatever. And that's when they would be introduced. These American would be parents to their adoptive children. So it just had a real kind of up mood there. And then my underwear kept getting stolen, which the other members of the crew were like, no one's stealing your underwear. I'm like, I. I'm not out here trying to accuse some maid of stealing my underwear. But it's like, but where is my goddamned underwear? Like, why do I have zero underwear? And then I mentioned it to Maddie and Billy Starman, and they're like, oh, they 100 stolen. Stole your underwear. I was like, see? Thank you. It's like, the Chinese back me up on this, right? And anyway, so any. And I got, like, slightly sick, and it was like ice rain, right? Like, Beijing's like, I think on the same latitude as, like, Minneapolis. So it gets, like, nasty there, right? Anyway, so I had to go buy underwear on, like, a day off that was technically, like, a sick day. And I just remember having my, like, having my underwear, not being happy about having to, like, go out and find a shop, shopping mall, standing in, like, ice rain without an umbrella. And I was like, two, you know, two miles from the hotel. And so I was trying to get a cab, and every time I tell the cab driver the name of the hotel, they'd just peel off. Like, I think the deal was it wasn't far enough to be worth it. They wanted to take me to the airport or something like that, and just, like, they were gonna go find a better fare. And the third or fourth cab who did it I just, like, I just momentarily lost my mind. He rolled up the window, started to pull off, and I kicked his door, like the back door, back passenger side door. And I yelled, sony, Ma, maybe I did it better, maybe not.

[Danny]

Fuck your mother.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

You got my.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, fuck, yeah, that's. I mean, that's, that's an important. I'm trying to think anywhere in the world I've been where people aren't in general funny. That's a big thing about Iraq. I have a, like, I got to go to Iraq twice. And the northern part, which is safer. Well, was until isis. And I, I know a couple kids who like, were Americans but grew up in Baghdad or ones from Mosul. And those guys are the funniest I've ever met in my life. Like, I think, I think a major sort of sense of cultural friction that maybe could have been avoided in the buildup to Iraq war. Because I've, I was like, you know, I've also spoken about this to one. I was gonna say a bunch, but a single soldier who had been in Iraq mid 2000s. I forget what year whose sense of the Iraqis was. He was like, oh, these are backwards rural, goat herding people. And it's like my sense of Baghdadis especially, but Iraqis in general. I was like, those guys are the New Yorkers of the Middle East. I was like, they are from an 800-year-old urban environment. They act like, guys who grew up in the Bronx, basically, you know, which is not without its own set of, you know, issues, but it's like. It's like. I wonder if it's just a little pet theory that. It's like, if American soldiers were taught that, then I'd be like, watch out for these guys. They can. They can sheist you sometimes, but they're. But they're overwhelmingly funny, and they like joking and they like, you know, so don't, you know, don't get your panties in a twist if they're joking with you or whatever. Recognize this how that might have affected the world war if, like, all the American soldiers didn't think there's like, oh, these guys are rednecks, like, who don't understand anything.

[Danny]

Right, Right. Yeah. These guys have a personality and a sense of humor.

[Steve]

They're human beings. Right.

[Danny]

What is it about. What is it about these specific cultures, parts of the world that, like, makes people like. Because I. I would never imagine. I would never guess in a million years that somebody in China or Iraq would. Would be like, that would be funny. I just imagine them to be blank, you know, no emotion, ocean, inscrutable.

[Steve]

Yeah, right? Yeah. You got to go there and meet them. They're not all funny, but in general, they're. They're pretty funny. Swear like those goddamn sailors. Once you learn, like, I only learned like five or six swear words, but then I was just like, whoa, you guys. They aren't letting everyone have it. Yeah.

[Danny]

Maybe it has something to do with like. Like living in a shitty situation. Being in a shitty situation, you're horrible life. You kind of have to have a sense of humor to get through it. Maybe.

[Steve]

Yep.

[Danny]

What? So working in China, though, like, doing journalism in China, were there any guidelines?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

You didn't talk about or anything.

[Steve]

Oh, not that either. Yeah. Or the Uyghurs. Yeah. No. Yeah. No there.

[Danny]

Is that a rule or was that a choice? Choice.

[Steve]

This is a choice. I didn't. I mean, that just wasn't the stories I was there to cover. People love to be like that. Especially, like, about Vice. They're like, whoa, would you ever write a story while I was working at Vice? Like, read a story about the founder's advice. And I was like. I was like, now you're gonna make it sound. If I say no, it sounds like I'm afraid of doing something. I was like, why would I. Like, why would I Be interested in that in the first place. I don't know. Anyway. Yeah, no, it was like. Like a thing about dating due to the gender disparity, which is kind of like a lingering effect of the. Oh, yeah, one child policy.

[Danny]

One child policy. Right.

[Steve]

So it left. It's. I don't. I don't know if this is evened out over the years, but a woman named Mara Vistandahl wrote a really good book whose name I don't remember, but it's about how they're. You know, whereas in most parts of the world, women are slightly disproportionate to men, that in China, it's the. The reverse that there's more men than women. And it has these weird, you know, weird effects. Like. And we're there specifically, like, inspired by that book, to try dating and to meet matchmakers and to go to weird things where, you know, guys grow up in villages where there's, like, you know, almost literally no women. And so they have to go to the city and find one or they have to try to online date and da, da, da. And then what else? Yeah, so, yeah, no, nobody with us, but we had our paperwork in order. We were there with, you know, Chinese nationals who ran in addition to the magazine scene, although. And that edition started in 2009 or 10, maybe later. There was a little bit of back and forth sometimes between the editors because, you know, the website was supposed to be this kind of collecting place for all the different foreign editions of Vice. So you could see something from Vice Germany, that'd be cool because, you know, who knows anything about what's going on in Germany right now or whatever. And there'd be some, like, anti ccp, like, not anti Chinese, but anti Communist Party things occasionally. And in the Chinese editors would be like, hey, like, we got it. We can't have this show up on our side of the site. We need to, you know, kind of cordon this off. This could actually get us in trouble, you know. Different places, though, right?

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Anyway, it didn't feel like Orwellian.

[Danny]

It didn't feel like. Did you ever go to North Korea? You didn't go to North Korea?

[Steve]

I didn't go to North Korea, no. I wasn't on that trip. That was. Those were two, Ryan.

[Danny]

They did two trips. Right?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

And they got it out. Checking the memory cards.

[Steve]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Danny]

That's nuts.

[Steve]

Yeah. Can't do that again, right? Yeah. And then Ryan Duffy and then that. That trip was set up by Vice's old news director, Jason Mojica, who worked out that the way you could get in. In with the. You know, then recent, recently installed Kim Jong Un regime was that he loves the Chicago Bulls. So they try. I think. I believe he tried to get like, Scotty Pippen or Michael Jordan to do it. Like, Dennis Rodman was like, fourth or fifth down the list or. No, he went to the. There's like a back channel that. It's like a famous back channel for the North Koreans. And I think they. They live around D.C. or whatever. And so they helped set up the whole thing. And they were hoping for Michael Jordan or Scotty Pippen, you know, and then. And Dennis Rodman.

[Danny]

We'll settle for.

[Steve]

We'll settle for Dennis Rod.

[Danny]

Yeah, I think he would be. Oh, my God. Yeah. That was completely nuts. I think Jerry went there and that dude. Jake.

[Steve]

Yeah, you know Jake.

[Danny]

I don't know.

[Steve]

I never met.

[Danny]

I've never met him.

[Steve]

I've just heard Jake's good. He's Florida. He's from. I think he's from St. Augustine. He's a game kid, though. He was in the Gainesville punk scene. He was friends with, like, Against Me and stuff. Yeah.

[Danny]

Right, right, right. Yeah. Gavin was saying that a big surfer.

[Steve]

Big surfer, yeah.

[Danny]

Spicoli, dad. That's what he is.

[Steve]

Oh, that's dang. He's. When he's good, he's good, man. That's a good line. Yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Oh, the technopoly is what.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Techno Postman calls it.

[Danny]

Right. But that. Yeah. So he was writing about it being a technopoly, but now it's like turning into, like, tech. Running the world or running the government at least.

[Steve]

Right.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

And a Lot of that stuff is like, for the most part, can be reasoned against or like there's no, it's.

[Steve]

Not like there's no appeal.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

It's like you might have just triggered a algorithm.

[Danny]

Yeah, yeah, you triggered an algorithm. And, and you've seen like, we've seen this happen to so many people for so many different reasons, right, that like, now you're operating from this mindset of like, I have to make sure I can keep this gravy train going in. But I'm a journalist and YouTube is my employer. Basically make. I'm making all my money off of YouTube, which is all of the tentacles of the government are in, right? So like whatever, the decisions are made there. You know, we saw, I don't know if you pay attention to Twitter files, but basically they found out like FBI people were like meeting with the moderation team of at Twitter every week, right. And like, if that's happening at Twitter, imagine what's happening, happening at Google and YouTube.

[Steve]

Right?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Of like, makes you want to unalive yourself, right?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

In because you're gonna lose your mammon. Aren't they part of Google? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Why are they the biggest employer of, you know, know, video journalism? Right? That's, that's the part that sucks to me. Yeah, that's. That's ne. You know, it's the fact that it's like an, a necessary condition for people's livelihood that they're not able to. That we ended up with like three platforms basically. And you know, which of the three are you going to get on right? And that's going to be your career. And that's the only career path people have available to them. And you see the effect, you see the effect with like shitty language, like unalive. And what are the other ones? Ones, you know, algorithm and moderation team dodging workarounds that just sound like deranged speech, you know?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Viewers.

[Steve]

They'll. Yeah, yeah. What do you mean that it won't be people watching it? They'll just have AI viewers. Oh, oh, oh. So AI can make the content and then watch its own. AI can consume its content and that'll. That'll feed back into the content that AI is, is making.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

And we've got a whole world.

[Danny]

We don't have to work anymore.

[Steve]

Yeah. Go sit under the shade tree.

[Danny]

Yeah. What are we going to do?

[Steve]

Tie a fishing line to our toes? Yeah. Take it easy.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

We'll figure something out.

[Danny]

You think?

[Steve]

Yeah.

[Danny]

What are you gonna do?

[Steve]

Maybe not much different than I do at present. Hang out, read a book. Are you go see people?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

What do you write about? Like, how, what is your writing pro? You just journal every day or what?

[Steve]

Yeah, more or less. Call it that. Yeah. I just, I've done it Since I was a kid. I like it.

[Danny]

You know, what do you want?

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You know, yeah.

[Danny]

It's good to have a system, Right. That you're a part of that you can just like.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Why don't you do more documentaries?

[Steve]

Great question. I don't have a good answer for you.

[Danny]

Not motivated.

[Steve]

A little of that, Yeah. I pitch a bunch of stuff and it's, you know, it's hit or miss. Like, I have. I have pitches outstanding. I'm working on a. A book show, basically, with an old friend from Vice. I don't know if you ever saw really early video stuff. Trace Crutchfield. Tall text, and he kind of looks like Dick Van Dyke. No. Okay. He was like. I think he was like, the first on air host when Vice started making video stuff. He's great. Grew up in Austin. He's a little older than everybody else. I think he saw Minor Threat, like, when he was in college, which. Apologies for dating him anyway. Or hey, you know, you catch back up with the gang every so often. There's. There's this eternal impression impulse to try to get the band back together. Right. So I'm in the middle of that right now. We'll see how it goes.

[Danny]

It's always, you know, once you start a podcast.

[Steve]

I've recorded a Bunch of stuff. I've made a few tips. I did a podcast, actually, I did a podcast with Seth abramson during the 2020 election. That guy from Twitter, you know. Okay.

[Danny]

Never heard of him.

[Steve]

Did it. Did. Okay. That was my first podcast, but we just made it. It was limited. We made 10 episodes. That was the whole.

[Danny]

Oh, it was like a. Okay.

[Steve]

Like a, like a limit. What do you call that? Limited. Limited series. Yeah, that was what it was.

[Danny]

And what was it about?

[Steve]

It was about Trump. He's written, I think it was three books. When I was talking to him. I think there's a fourth of. What does he call it? Meta journalism, I think, where he just basically, I mean, it's, it's not dissimilar from Google journalism, but he assembled like the full Trump story from previous, like almost Wikipedia style from previous reporting, you know, and it was just did a good job of digging up all the, you know, on record elements of the story, the dirt, the funny stuff and whatever, and just assembled it into one big narrative. And he did that three times with three different subjects or three different facets of Trump and like the Trump Organization. But anyway, I'm sitting on a lot of recordings. I should, I should get around and get it doing. It's. They, they have a limited bandwidth for the Internet. As I age, you know, you see the same arguments play out three or four times on a like, grand cultural level.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

Over your life. And you start being like, like, really? We argue. What? We're arguing about abortion again. It's like, oh, oh, look at that. Same, literally the same arguments. Like, yet I get, oh, we're blaming feminism for like, like every ill in modern society. It's like just like that 1979 book by Doodlebug Murphy, Feminist, destroyed, you know, Nixon's America. But, but, you know, but, but I do. I mostly just sit around a little bit too much. I've got, I, I've, I. Maybe I'll have this done and finished, which I should have done over a year ago. Do you know Brad Phillips?

[Danny]

No.

[Steve]

He's a painter, but he's also. He wrote a book of essays that did really well. For a book of essays, we have a dead friend named Giancarlo di Trapano who used to put out Amazing. He was the best publisher in the English speaking, like, publishing industry. He had a book line called Tyrant Books and he put out his essay book. Anyway, he's a smart, cool painter guy from Canada and we had a recorded episodes of a podcast that. All I need to do is Finish it and get it up. That was about the differences between Canada and where he's from in America. Where I'm from. The conceit kind of being like, he just moved to America. And it was like, oh, we're, you know, quiz each other for the citizenship test. Right. But also it's like, who, whoever really gets into the weeds about what Canadian culture is like. Right. I don't know jack about it. I just made a documentary for their, you know, the CBC and I couldn't tell you. Like, like a Red Louis Real by Chester Brown, you know, the night before, like the, the video aired and anyway, so that's the gist. Right? It's just the differences between American Canada. Right. But it's got a good name. Whoa. Oh, well, now, okay, so now I'll tell it to you so that I have to get it done so nobody else steals it. Borderline friends.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

Thanks. Right, Anyway, yeah, you know, the real answer is like, combination of happenstance and laziness, but got some things in the works. Why not?

[Danny]

I take it you voted for Trump.

[Steve]

Oh, I don't vote.

[Danny]

You don't vote. That's good.

[Steve]

No, no, I voted for Cornel West.

[Danny]

Oh, did you Really?

[Steve]

I love Dr. West. Long time journalist. Seeing him run. Right? Yeah.

[Danny]

The interview that Gavin did with Cornell west debating Candace Owens was.

[Steve]

Saw that west, west holding his own.

[Danny]

That was great American treasure. Yeah.

[Steve]

He is last American man of letters.

[Danny]

He's been holding strong for a long time.

[Steve]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

How that, where the nickname came from?

[Danny]

They nicknamed baby balls.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

So like, Gavin, I heard the ketchup bottle story. Which version of the ketchup bottle story did you hear? Right?

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Hero. Of course he is.

[Steve]

So what actually happened was we went out for drinks my. The first week of my internship. All the interns go out for drinks, right? As a. You know, because we're not. None of us are getting paid. This is before, like, back when you could have unpaid internally up or. Right. In New York. And so they took the petty cash and the office manager. We all went to a bar, like, big outdoor place that's not there in Williams Williamsburg anymore. And like, one by one, everybody from the office came by and was like, oh, what's going on here? Free drink. Like. Like, you know, like, oh, you drink it on petty cash. You mind if we just sign in? And so eventually the whole office assembled and Sooosh. Who held, like, the company credit card at that point was like, okay, guys, we're covering drinks tonight. It's an event. This will be fun. And I had just met Gavin and Jesse, like, two or three days before that. And Jesse's the editor of the Message magazine. And they're seated across from me, and Gavin bets me $300 that I can't break ketchup bottle over the back of my head. Jesse hears that and he goes, I'll put 200 in there. That's a $500 bet, right? And they're staring at me. And just to be clear, you cannot break a cat.

[Danny]

The glass.

[Steve]

The glass is so. It's like marble.

[Danny]

Horrible.

[Steve]

It's so fucking thick. But we're here in the middle of a, you know, a tense sort of riff, and I'm holding the catch a bottle. I'm waiting in my hands considering. I was like, if we're.

[Danny]

If one are full of ketchup.

[Steve]

Full of ketchup. It's just the ketchup bottle that's on the table. Nobody went and got a ketchup bottle. And, you know, in considering how I'm going to respond to this provocation, I'm like, you know, if I were to try to break it, how would I even do it? Like, how would you. The back of my head, like, I think that was specified or whatever. And so I'm holding the ketchup bottle. Looks as if I might be taking some practice swings. And as. As of yet, unnamed bystander named Trevor Selmser, who was Andrew WK's manager and went on to be the publisher of Noisy, who was a cool Old, like New York hardcore guy. Tall, towering, scary, very, like, skin headed, not a skinhead, but, like bald muscle dude who's also a great guy, was sitting right next to. And I was friends with, you know, Gavin and Jesse, like, like, threw his arms out and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's like, dude, these guys don't have 500 on them. And he's like. And by the way, he's like, the ambulance ride alone is gonna cost you a 800. And it sort of diffused it. And so we came up with a. And like, in. Gavin and Jesse were both like, hey, you got us. Like, they wouldn't have paid out on a bet no matter what. Right? And so there was a backup bet that was in that I think Jesse came up with. And he's like, all right, we'll each. Is everybody at this table will give you $50, but we're each allowed to slap you as hard as we can. And I was like, I'll take that. Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. I went to the bathroom and I came back and they were talking about something else because this whole thing was just a fucking riff. And I was like, hey, what happened to that bet we were gonna do? And Trevor, who had just saved me from ignominy like five minutes prior, goes, what? You welched on that, baby? Balls. And that was it. It was just like. It was as if lightning had come and engraven upon my, you know, forehead. It's just a fitting name. Yeah, but that was. Gavin made himself the hero of the story or the voice of reason, didn't he? Never fails with that guy. Unbelievable.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

History is written by the writers. Yeah.

[Danny]

So are you and Gavin friends now?

[Steve]

Oh, I. I don't know. That's a.

[Danny]

It seemed like that. That when you guys were sitting. Did he say we are when you guys were sitting?

[Steve]

I'll leave that. I'll leave that up to him. I.

[Danny]

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

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah, I think you guys up.

[Steve]

Yeah, we.

[Danny]

We'll leave it at that.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

Yeah. Well, thanks for doing this, bro. This was. Of course, tell people where they can follow your stuff, get a Hold of you. All that jazz.

[Steve]

You can find me on [e-mail] or also on Substack, the podcast Borderline Friends. Look for the picture of the cat and mouse wearing bow ties.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve]

That'll be the right one. And if this ends up going up in late July, you can find me me on two ways YouTube channel.

[Danny]

Two ways.

[Steve]

Two way. Like. Like the most basic sex act. Two way.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve]

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

[Danny]

You're trying to work.

[Steve]

We're pitching them a show about reading that's kind of like Reading Rainbow for adults. Right.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Steve]

And the show is called the Books Nook.

[Danny]

The Books Nook. So, like, teaching people how to read?

[Steve]

Plural? I guess, in a way, yeah. Yeah. Just encouraging reading.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve]

It's an excuse to blather about books. Right. I look. I like books.

[Danny]

Yeah. What kind of book? Well, how do you. What's your preferred way?

[Steve]

What you like? Oh, read. To read it.

[Danny]

Like, to read, like the physical paper book?

[Steve]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Danny]

Okay. You're old school.

[Steve]

I. I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feels good. Yeah.

[Danny]

Most.

[Steve]

Most ways people all put them on their pads and whatnot.

[Danny]

Yeah. Get it on your iPad.

[Steve]

If I can't find. If I don't have a. I have a lot of books. Right.

[Danny]

Do you find it easier to recall to. To, like, retain the information by reading it?

[Steve]

That's a good question. Oh, then what?

[Danny]

Versus, like, listening to it?

[Steve]

Yeah, for me, for certain. Yeah. And I'm kind of a slow reader, so I guess it gives it a little bit of time to, like, sit in. If I'm listening to a book, I'll go do things. I'll go, like, tidy up around the house or go get in the car or whatever I like listening to there. It's. Certain types of books are better to listen to, and certain types of books I would prefer to read.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

You know, certain types of books, I don't mind reading them as a PDF on a screen. Other books I'd rather have, you know, I. The whole reason I went to work, advice. They made a nice book.

[Danny]

Right.

[Steve]

The magazine was like, a whole book that she got every month for free.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And they put like. That was one of the first things I recognized in. And Gavin and Jesse, I was like, these guys care so much about what they're making. They're like. And they're way smarter. Because I was a fan of Vice, that was why I wanted an internship with them. I thought they were the Funniest motherfuckers in publishing and in the English language publishing sphere. And. But I didn't. They. It took me by surprise how fucking smart those guys were.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve]

And how well they knew what they were doing and how much they fucking cared about it. And how much what they made was derived from how disappointed they were with the rest of media. Right. Like, the first four months into the. I interned for, like, almost a year. And then I graduated. And they gave me a job the day after my graduation, which was as long as I don't say the salary. It sounds like a real nice thing. Nice thing for them to do to me. But they made. On their 10th anniversary advice. They made an issue that was a parody of mainstream print journalism, and they called it the worst issue ever. Although on the COVID it had the best issue ever. And I. I shouldn't, like. I'd be, like, trying to describe a YouTube video. I'm just gonna not do it justice by explaining these things. But it was, like, page by page and, like, line by line. Like, one of the sharpest and funniest, like, parody, satire or whatever send up of what was happening. Like, you could learn more about magazine culture in the United. Mainstream magazine culture in the United States in 2004 from that issue than you could from, like, an entire, like, bookshelf of Paper magazine and whoever else.

[Danny]

Wow.

[Steve]

Like, no, that's cool. That's me. That's. That's my. Giving my old bosses a blowjob portion of the show for you. But it was. It was cool.

[Danny]

Beautiful way to end it. Thanks again, bro. I appreciate it, man. All right, good night, folks.

[Steve]

Thanks.