Elephants in Rooms
Hi, I’m Ken LaCorte. I spent 20 years behind-the-scenes at Fox News and now host “Elephants in Rooms”.
Here, we jump into topics that many people avoid and that the mainstream narrative often vilifies. Even when they’re true.
If you’re looking for true insight into issues – without straw men or sensationalism – you’ve found the right place.
Elephants in Rooms
The surprising math behind revolutions | BJ Campbell
BJ Campbell is the creator of the Handwaving Freakoutery blog, where he uses statistics and numbers to challenge the mainstream views on anything from culture and the media to crime and guns.
In this episode, Ken and BJ Campbell have a wide-ranging discussion about the numbers behind violent revolutions, crime trends, media bias, and more.
To watch the video version or find Ken in the social world, click here: https://linktr.ee/KenLaCorte
A few months back, I stumbled across a headline that at first glance looked kind of dumb. It was called the surprisingly solid mathematical case of the tinfoil hat gun prepper. But the article actually backed up the claim better than I thought it could. Its writer is BJ Campbell, a stormwater hydrologist who writes hand waving Freekeh Ratterree. On substack. He looks at society in a uniquely smart way. I was super happy to talk to him about things like revolutions, media bias, and scientists who cave into politics, Vijay Campbell is i i read something that was one of the more eye opening articles that I've ever that I've ever read. And I understand I kind of gun math and in my life, and I've been involved in that, that issue for a long time. But it was the surprising math behind preppers. And basically, the guys with the tinfoil hats, of which I'm kind of one of those, but step me through that because it was a terrific example of math meeting, something that we kind of all instinctually were wondering about.
BJ Campbell:Sure. So Well, I'm a, I'm not a writer, officially, I guess technically, I am a paid writer now because I've been published in recoil magazine and met a couple of other publications since I started writing in 2018. But I got into that, because I think you recall the the culture war in 2018, around guns was was awful on Facebook, it was really, it's ramping back up now. But it was particularly disgusting back then. And there was a lot of things people were saying just simply mathematically wrong. So I started compiling, I'd have these responses that were just so long, and I'd have to redo them that I would just copy paste them and save them in word articles, and then nobody read them. So then I figured I'd look for someplace to stick them. So that I could just put a link in instead. And I found medium.com on off of medium now. But that was where I launched it. And so you know, the thing that you're talking about was, I guess, Article Five in a series of articles that went so viral that like Cato Institute was referencing it and all kinds of stuff, I was really kind of surprised. But so the that article that you're referencing, goes back to get connects my professional experience to it because I'm a I'm a stormwater management engineer, and I, so part of what I do is I analyze floodplains. And we don't build a house in a floodplain. Not because we expect it to flood next year, right? It's a it's a risk analysis thing. So when they draw floodplain line on a map, they're looking at the 100 year event, the worst event you expect to statistically happen average over 100 year span. And the way you analyze that is by figuring out what the 100 year rainfall is, and based on, you know, historical rainfall data. And then you take a look what the watershed looks like to that spot on the river, where you're building your house. And you do hydrology, which is the mathematical science of trying to figure out what that much rain is going to look like when it flows down to that point, you do hydraulics to figure out how big the, the rivers gonna be to carry that amount of flow and draw that line in a map. Right? And then you don't build your house there. Why don't you build your house there? Well, it's not that it's gonna flood next year is that it might flood at some point during the 30 year mortgage of the house, right? So because your, your bank is a risk analysis group, too, right? So the bank says, Well, if you got 1% chance of flooding, that's 99% chance of not flooding. So it's a point nine nine chance of flooding. Well, if it's not going to flood two years in a row, the way the probability math works is you multiply point nine nine times itself and you get like point 9801, something like that. And if you wanted to find out what the chance that it doesn't flood 30 years in a row, you'd multiply point nine nine times itself 30 times. So it's point nine, nine to the 30th power, and you do that and you end up with a you know, 73.9% chance that it doesn't flood. So you've got 126 years 26% chance that it's going to flip, right? So then they don't give you your loan, right, you know, or they make you buy flood insurance. And so then you can do the same thing for violent revolutions in the United States. So walking through it, you've got us the average date of colonial establishments, maybe 1678. You've got 340 years and the sample size. You've got two qualifying events because you had the American Revolution and the Civil War both happened inside that span was nationwide and
Ken LaCorte:January 6, of course, you start well,
BJ Campbell:I mean, like you could, you could expand this out a little bit more. If you wanted to get it broad. You could do like you know, Japanese internment or you could do you know
Ken LaCorte:What about how about violence? violent riots that take over my town? I mean, I mean, like, you know, a couple of those,
BJ Campbell:right? I mean, like it well, you know, so those 2020 were bad, were they as bad as the stuff in the 1970s. With the Weather Underground, it was 1000 nationwide bombings back then. So wherever you draw the line is, you know, I decided to draw the line at Nationwide violent revolutions with armies attacking each other. That's, that's a pretty bright line. So so if you do that line, you got two qualifying events, this is about a half a percent chance of point five 8% Chance per year, something like that, well, how long are you going to live, you're only gonna live like 79 years, not, you know, 30. And so if you invert that percent chance, and then you raise it to the 78th power 79th Power Unit with a 37% chance that you are i is going to be stuck in a violent revolution at some point in our lifetime.
Ken LaCorte:Now, I'm 57. So I've already wiped out half of that. So I probably have about a 12% chance remaining,
BJ Campbell:maybe something like that, we could go back and do it you, you know, mathematically what you do is you get a raise point 994 to the, you know, 20th power, however many years you plan on living, but yeah, you could do you could do it that way. But now, this is a this is historical frequency analysis. It's super basic statistics. Sure. And at risk analysis, people, if they're going to do this kind of thing, they don't use historical frequency analysis like hydrologists do, it's me. But the risk analysis people when they do the same kind of stuff, they're looking at indicators. And, um, you know, they might have any number of indicators to try and draw from a
Ken LaCorte:breakdown of civil civilization an increase in violent rhetoric, a separation of the of the parties based on ideology. Yeah, so
BJ Campbell:so so party ideology is a big one that they look at. Another thing that they look at is the number of unmarried men in a certain younger age bracket. That's, that's a big one that they look at, they look at some other stuff like that. And a Guinea coefficient is another huge one is, which is wealth inequality. So the ratio of like poor people to rich people is a and how rich those are, there's math for that. And that's been shown to tie to violent revolutions as well, like, for instance, the Cuban revolution. So when they look at that kind of stuff, they're coming up with a 37% chance over the next 10 years instead of your lifetime. Right, which means their projections are much more dire than the historical frequency analysis.
Ken LaCorte:But that one, you know, that's like a 538. Pole, you're never quite sure, once you get into that. I mean, the interesting thing about yours is it looked at the very base level of just okay, and that there's not much wiggle room in that to say, well, rhetoric versus now like you said, Man, I lived through the 70s. I don't remember hardly any bombings. But then you read the the numbers on it that the FBI was looking at, there were 1000s of them. Now, they were mainly not against people, they were smaller. They were smaller handheld things, and they'd blow up a car or a mailbox or something. But yeah, that wasn't nothing.
BJ Campbell:Yeah, if you, okay, if the number of bombings were happiness, if we had one bombing now, it would seem to like 500 did back then. Because we would all get that bombing on our phone. Right? It'd be like, Oh, my God, there's a bombing, oh, my God, whatever. And so the perceptions of how violent we are right now are very warped. And we seem like we're more violent than they were in general. But on the flip side, I think what's going on, you know, maybe I wrote an article in 2018, you know, spent two years, you know, really seeming like things were tracking up towards something awful. And then when 2020 happened, I was like, here it is. We're buckle up. Here's the popcorn, like you say, you got your you're loading your mags. And, and I think that this, this might not be a popular thing to say. But I think that the BLM and the Magaz, and everybody else is involved in 2020 all need to be congratulated for things not getting any more awful than they did. To be honest. I mean, like, there could have been any moment where somebody just started hosing crowds, right, and whatnot, the worst violence we had was, was reading house. And that was really quite, it was obviously self defense. If you look into all this, you know, all the actual, you know, facts about what happened. And so we didn't seal near as much violence as I thought we would. And I think I could be wrong. So I'm kind of reevaluating some of my priors from 2018 when I wrote that article, I think what's going on right now is that Twitter and social media are providing like a pressure release valve. I think if we didn't if I think what's going on right now is when people get really angry and the culture wars they're popping off on Twitter and then they're going to sleep instead of instead of at the mall instead of leaving and deciding to enact their behaviors in a more destructive way. Which is weird because well, you know, if you kick all the culture orders off Twitter, are we gonna end up with more actual violence? I don't know.
Ken LaCorte:It's it's an interesting topic to explore. The I don't I
BJ Campbell:don't know the answer. Yeah, it's a that's a that's hypothesis and I don't know how you prove it or not.
Ken LaCorte:Yeah. Because because there's a lot of, it's also you can get a hold and get into your own bubble of, of people in your certain specific brand of extremism too. So I mean, certainly it helps in the planning. And the, the echo
BJ Campbell:chamber problem is, is intense and it's a big problem and but, you know, like the, I'm not as worried about the Flat Earthers Okay, together bomb and something as I am the fact that our two main blue and red tribes are in such echo chambers that they can't resolve basic facts. That's something that's very concerning to me. And I don't know what the solution is, at all. Like I like I, the more I look at it, the more just seems like it's just destined to get worse, because of how it worked because of the nature of media. virility, right.
Ken LaCorte:No, I so I, my theory on on a primary driver of this is the media. And from my point of view, it is it is the, the breakdown of, of monopolies in the media world. It kind of started in our lifetime with Fox being a, an opposite voice on on cable news, you know, everybody was kind of 20 degrees to the left, and then fox came out a little bit to the right. But what got it hyperactive was was the internet, allowing it, you know, most most large newspapers had back then a monopoly, right? The LA Times? Yeah, there was little la Herald or the New York Times, they didn't really they didn't compete against the post. They said, You know, here's the news here. And they had kind of a built in business incentive to not be complete assholes. And not like try real hard for a specific tribe. So yes, they leaned left, but they didn't have to try hard until every single article was was competing with every other article out on the internet. And, and the clickbait concept, and fortunes rose and fell based on headlines. And what's the main immunity
BJ Campbell:changed? The community changed? So their audience? Absolutely, right. So when you have a print newspaper, your community is geographical, right. And it's going to have reds and blues and yellows, and who knows what other kind of ideology in there, you've got your Christians and you've got your atheists, you got whatever, and you have to present something that is going to get the most number of newspapers sold inside that geographical boundary. Whereas as soon as things shifted to the internet, you could create, you could piece together your own community full of like minded people, and it's not that even they tried to do that, it's that that was naturally going to happen, because of the way traffic works. So traffic is all about sharing. You know, like, once we pivoted over to getting our news on social feeds, we were all getting anything that agreed with our prior indoctrinations and if somebody else had different indoctrinations, they were getting a feed of things that, you know, met their indoctrinations. And then the thing that met the indoctrinations, the most went the most viral and everybody's getting paid by the click. So you're chasing that, that viral Jeeps. Right? And, and so you could piece together whatever kind of weird stuff. And it's not like this is unique to one tribe, you talk to a red tribe or about it, we're like, that's obviously what CNN is doing. And if you talk to a blue tribe, or they'll say, that's obviously what Fox is doing. And it's difficult to make sense of the world when you're, you're online tribes are have such a different understanding of what's happening in reality. Right, you know, you see, A J and six was a big one, you know, reading house was a huge one, you know, like, like, the fact that nope, nobody on the blue side knows what happened in Kenosha, they don't know,
Ken LaCorte:right? That was a, I actually think that's good. When those happen. Sometimes, I won't I remember the, the gal on the chuangke weegar show or whatever, how everyone pronounces his name. She was intellectually honest, when it came back, because she actually watched the trial and she was like, this is nothing like what I read for months and months before this, and I saw a number of, of people get to that. So I think, to me, what's overlaying? That is, as that process that you described, and I think it was a good description of it was undergoing the journalists have have gone from you know, really people trying to be the referees to more players in the game. Because as they've they've targeted now their ideological audience more, you know, I used to I used to read the New York Times all the time. I mean, and and now I will on a science story or something else until they until it touches anywhere on politics or social issues. I don't trust them at all now, because they are literally radically dishonest, dishonest people in their in the way that they hide facts they It was fine. They just today, they just did a big poll. So they did this. The dangers of democracy, Syria, right because threats to democracy dangerous to democracy that is now the big catchword, because you know who the biggest danger democracy is? That orange fucker and those people who don't believe in elections anymore? Right, right. And so they did this long poll where they asked an open ended question What do you think the biggest threat to democracy people were all over the map, the one that came out the most only had like 19% and it was political corruption. And then everything else was kind of kind of down and then they asked a dozen. Most of the poll was asking you about some specific Well, how about Donald Trump? How about Maga people? How about liberals? How about the media? How about the Electoral College Supreme Court? And both parties of course their top some of their top answers are blaming the other party, you know, those guys are? Those guys are bad, right? The top one overall was the mainstream news media. Because it was like 90% and Republican side and 60% and Democratic side. And the guys were really the guys were flabbergasted. But but not only that, so the New York Times does this, this write up on it talking about how Wow, we expected it to be this and this, but they only mentioned the open ended answer. So they said you know, what people are all concerned about in America, it's corruption. And they literally in their story didn't mention the meat of their of their of their poll it took the Washington Post was how I found it. And I was kind of surprised that they did it. And it was so it's like that kind of intellectual dishonesty from probably the smartest group pound for pound people at the New York Times is just like a terrific example of, of you know, of that, that new players. But I guess my point for optimism, and let me see if you share this is. So people right now kind of trusted the referees in this game, you know, again, you knew they were biased, but you would believe largely when you get an LA Times story. Yeah, I know, their op ed is gonna say vote for the Democrat, whoever is the Democrat on the on the on the election this this November. But you would anticipate that that story, more or less presented you the important facts, and now I don't trust that anymore. And that we're in a weird disconnect as as the as the media is changing its stripes. And people haven't caught up with that yet Republicans have to a much larger extent than than Democrats. But that's why everything's feeling so fake. I mean, I worked down in South America, where everybody knew that, oh, channel two is owned by the Rodriguez family and, and a political family. Oh, and Channel Four is owned by the Jimenez family. So you kind of knew that, that they reached spin in there things, whereas now they're spinning it and a lot of America still thinks that they're the, you know, the referee out there. And I guess I'm optimistic and thinking that once we all understand, oh, The New Yorker, The New York Times is on the liberal side, Fox is on the conservative daily wires here CBS is there, that maybe people will be able to better integrate that information and and understand what's going on as opposed to living in their silos,
BJ Campbell:I'm way more pessimistic than you are. And the reason why is is part of the dynamic and what causes media bias is also playing out in fields other than the media, particularly science. So if you're at the New York Times, and you're gonna write that article, the article in the media, you're gonna hide the part that people distrust the media the most, because not just because you are, you know, biased towards the media, but because your social group is similarly biased towards media. Right. And if you're, you're going to write the article about gun control, you're going to write it in such a way that your social group will approve of the way you wrote it. This is natural psychological behavior among humans, right? You know, like you, you want to get along with the people you're around, you don't want to piss off your friends. Right? You know, this is part of being part of being in a tribe. Well, when COVID came out, most of the scientists realized the thing came from a lab. And most of the scientists are like that, that was the most likely reason. Right, you know, and they know then they know
Ken LaCorte:it within five seconds of somebody popping in their office saying, sir, in Wuhan,
BJ Campbell:yeah, right, right. The second
Ken LaCorte:somebody said that the Fauci is the world.
BJ Campbell:What knew what happened then? Exactly. Well, and the reason you know, you go back to the statistics analogy, right. Okay, so we're doing statistics earlier in the podcast. How many wet markets you think you're in the Pacific Rim? Okay, there's 1000s in China. There's 1000s in Thailand. There's 1000s in Vietnam, there's hundreds or 1000s. In Cambodia, there's hundreds or 1000s. In Laos. There's hundreds all across that area. Okay, you've got, you know, conservatively 10,000 wet markets and that whole area and the cheek, you would
Ken LaCorte:you say? Are you saying that because it came out within 1000 yards of a level four Bio Lab lab that maybe there was a connection?
BJ Campbell:Let me let me phrase it this way. Obviously, that's what I'm saying. But let me phrase it, you know, just to to visualize it. If you had a brand new, never before seen global pandemic virus come out of a wet market in the Pacific Rim every single year since the birth of Christ, you'd still only have a 30% chance of one coming out of Wuhan. Okay, so that's all you needed to know. That's all Yeah, in the in the guys at the beginning knew it. But when Trump said, Mike came from the lab or whatever, when it became a talking point, yeah. When it when it became become a talking point among the reds, the blues, had to socially automatically oppose that, or at least hide their opinions about what happened in the media and everything else. And so there was a social dynamic in play that literally affected the science that was impacting, you know, everybody's life on the entire globe and the global economy and caused the the lockdowns caused inflation. Alright, like, let's do that inflation math conversation later. That might be fun. But the the the fact that this is also impacting science itself, is it's the same dynamic, right? It's the same dynamic with the media. It's the CNN it was it this we are in a giant connected tribalism and the tribes are separating and their culture warring. And so you're, you can't say anything true if it if it violates your cultural alignment, that's the fact that it's beyond the media and it's into every other, you know, element of, of, you know, professional and society and the rest of the hierarchy that we live by, makes me a lot more pessimistic than you are about fixing. Yeah,
Ken LaCorte:I guess my optimism comes from the fact that I believe that most Pete, you're 100%, right, that we are drawn to the to the news that makes us look smarter and makes our ideological opponents look stupid, or just sometimes people we don't like look stupid, that is human nature.
BJ Campbell:The Vox editors have that one nailed. Go ahead.
Ken LaCorte:I mean, it's like the Bill O'Reilly show, it was like, you could summarize it, like he's gonna pick some liberal guy here. And he's gonna beat the shit out of them. And he's going to do it in a in a intellectually fun and fun way to watch. And that was the O'Reilly Factor, which for years, trumpet a trumpet of everything on news. But I guess where I have the read of optimism is that when people start to understand and clearly see the positioning of their various news media's that they will at least be able to, to use that as a factor to say, Okay, I'm gonna like, look, I love. I was good friends with Andrew Breitbart, I'll go read breitbart.com. But I know that I'm not getting the whole story there. So when I'm done with it, I'll say, Okay, now let me go fact check it over with, you know, NBC or CNN or, or anything, anything that's on the left. And the fact that if you more clearly understand that everybody's a player, and it's not which half of the country 40% of the country still believes it's the media who's really trying to tell you the truth, and then it's the conservative crazies out here. I mean, when everybody kind of understands that everybody's a player in this game, like in South America, you say, okay, channel dose told me this, I'm gonna at least if I care to know about it, I know that I may not be getting the whole story here. And nobody, no New York Times readers are very few New York Times readers right now, have I think that same attitude that I have towards Breitbart? Yes, I'm reading something interesting here. But if I really want the truth, I need to broaden that out a little bit. And I think we're moving towards that.
BJ Campbell:Maybe, I mean, like, in some ways, your South America analysis, I think is quite good because folks down there, they pretty much just don't believe anything, right? And what we what what might get us there here in the United States is not just the fact that some people are awakening to the biases and what they're reading but, but the sensemaking crisis itself, like the deep fake apocalypse is right about upon us. You can you can take a video and with like publicly available software swap Trump's face onto it easily, right. And so you could say any viral video could be bullshit at any moment. And once people all start to realize that anything that is viral, could be bullshit. Oh, would you know one of the things you would Help, perhaps, and people are gonna hate me for saying this one. But maybe we just need to flood the media market with bullshit videos, like a race to the bottom. And then that would finally make it so that nobody believes anything. And then maybe we can get ourselves out of this echo chamber garbage, you know? Yeah, I'm
Ken LaCorte:not sure I'm not. I'm not sure I by the last aspect is a good you have the right to hit
BJ Campbell:the wall sometimes, sometimes for an alcoholic to get out of it. He's got to give, he's got to hit bottom right, you know, so maybe we need a new just go that way just makes instead of 30% of Twitter being bots, what if 95% was bots, then you know, maybe Twitter would be less
Ken LaCorte:than you influential anymore. And I had the New York Times do just a crazy hit piece on me where if I believed half of it, I'm just amongst the bigger assholes to walk the planet. Really Wow. And, you know, it was one of their totally perfect jobs of the facts that they used were true, but they made you know, red equal green, by the time they put it out there hiding certain things smartly done. And a friend of mine was, you know, on, you know, like, hey, Ken, I'm sorry, blah, blah, blah. And then he talked to a friend of his who said, Well, I don't know the facts, but I just trust the New York Times. That was like, alright, well, there you go. Yeah, if we can at least knock off some of some of that. I think that that's the first step towards but you know, we saw this happen. I mean, we've been in similar situations before in America. And I'd say probably the best analogy is the late 1800s, early 1900s. You had Pulitzer, you had Hearst, you had, you had the yellow journalism, the whole concept of that, and everybody was, was making up and spinning shit as much as they are right now out there. And it changed. And the big irony of that is, of course, is that the New York Times, and Adolph Ochs kind of led that change. I mean, they were he was they were the finally ones who said, we finally think there's a market in not sensationalism, but But telling the truth, and, and bringing in all sides and, you know, fair and balanced in a very real way. Right. And I tried that after I left Fox. And maybe it was because I executed poorly. But I got my rear end handed to me, and I lost, you know, a good chunk of my 401k Trying to find that market. Because yeah, nobody wants to share stuff like that. Nobody wants to say, hey, here's an article that says, Trump's not completely retarded, but he actually did something bad here. But this part was good. You know, there's not an audience for that yet. Right. Well, do you think there will be? I mean, do you think that that group of common sensical people will find outlets they like,
BJ Campbell:you know, if you do to sort of the basic sort of slate star Codex Moloch view of it, which is applying game theory to this to this system? You know, you come to pretty grim conclusions, right? Like, let's say tomorrow that The New York Times decided they were going to suddenly do what you're enacting. When they go to business, just like you had a hard time fun in that market, they lose half their subscribers.
Ken LaCorte:Well, my question is, is that market coming? Do you see any reason why people might be my that group may be able to support things like that?
BJ Campbell:I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question. I mean, like, you're in media. And you know, like, we said, I'm a data engineer, I make my money. I do this kind of stuff for as a hobby. You know, I'll show up on podcasts. And I write three articles a month, and they're fun and interesting, but I'm not trying to support my family doing this. If I was trying to support my family doing this, I might have to check to chase the free cattery, too. That's why I named the blog hand-waving Free cattery because it was a it was a you know, it was a criticism of the overall media system. And, you know, when I've talked to like, Benjamin Boyce and his podcasts, and if you've run into him, he'd be an interesting guy to get on your thing he does. He runs a podcast that's about not to monitor transgender wars, mostly nowadays. is evergreen college guy knows Brett Weinstein. But when I talked to him, you know, it was like, maybe the one we had the same discussion you and I are having I was like, maybe the solution is for more amateur media, or at least smaller media to
Ken LaCorte:step into that gap. Oh, and it's happening. Right, right. Right.
BJ Campbell:I mean, like once once the gatekeeper internet removes gatekeepers from everything, right, you know, it sometimes but I mean, like, well, you know, there's no travel agents anymore used to get a call a travel agent to to book your so now you go to expedia.com, right. So when it removes those kind of like, you know, the barriers between people it creates a space where people can jump out and but on the flip side to it creating that space means that there's no way that this central media organizations can back away from the ledge, right? Like, I'll give you an example as mass shooting stories. It has been mathematically shown, like there's scientific studies on it that the press that mass shooters get after a mass shooting increases mass shootings by 30%. So the number one thing we could do to reduce mass shootings out of like a, you know, ubiquitous, you know, concealed carry would be to have media gag orders on mass shootings. Right, you'd reduce them by 30%. But, but at that one, you can't do that, from a government standpoint. And to even if all of the major media players were all to get together and say, we're all going to shake hands across Ireland have no stories about mass shootings, we're going to gag order ourselves kind of like the San Francisco media did about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. If the major players would do that, then you know, people like you and me would pick up the slack and we'd get all our traffic is people would be searching for the you know, they'd be looking for the the blood money they'd be looking for, find out what happened. And so the fact that it's distributed that way, means that the game theoretical motivations for covering certain things in a sensational way are for almost set in stone, which is alarming to me. Right?
Ken LaCorte:Well, but but what's changing, though, is the percentage of people who are going then to those large outlets versus the percentage of people who are watching this or watching Joe Rogan or watching industrials out there. Right? For me, the brightest spot was when I saw my first two or three Rogan podcasts. Because it was like, me, too. Here's a guy who's, who is, you know, he's got his political thoughts, but he's not pushing anything. And you clearly it doesn't didn't take much watching of Joe Rogan to say, I trust this guy. He's, you know, he's when he hears something different. He doesn't double down and stick with a bad philosophy. He says, Yeah, I didn't know that. And he's not, you know, like, like, the evening, the evening, so called comedy guys are now opening it up. And they're clearly like, just it's like a political rally and pushing you to causes and, you know, they have their box that they have to stay into. And here's a guy talking about, you know, shooting animals in the head and doing drugs and, you know, and, and having potty humor, and also being very, very smart and open minded. And, to me, it always boils down to is this person intellectually honest or not?
BJ Campbell:I wrote my first article in 2018, about two weeks after I saw my first Joe Rogan podcast, he inspired me to do all this kind of stuff. And it was I know vividly, it was Joe Rogan Episode 1006, which was the first time that Brett Weinstein and Jordan Peterson met.
Ken LaCorte:That is the only I don't know if those two guys were the only time I actually listened to a full three hour Joe Rogan podcast.
BJ Campbell:That was the first one I ever saw. I was glued, I couldn't stop watching it. I ended up like, you know, having to do a bunch of work late that night, because I ended up skipping out on a couple hours professionally, you know, I'll link to that below. What was the number again? 1000 6006
Ken LaCorte:Yeah, so as a TV guy, it kind of blew me away, because it's like, look, I produce television for most of my life. And you knew that that there were shows like that they just didn't get on audience. I mean, they were on PBS, and it was the dark background and, and there'd be kind of in depth guys were usually a little a little a little full of themselves both wearing ties a little bit boring. And, you know, that system evolved into Okay, new shows who you had to live with in an hour, you had to have three or four commercial breaks, you had to have intros, outros, you have to teach people to keep monitor, you know, I mean, there was a very set formula, in which you could put a lot of different editorial, but it really bound you up. And and watching that. So that could be one of our primary saviors is people going to individuals, not necessarily groups, because I have more faith in individuals out there than I have in any large group, whether it's Fox or CNN, I mean, you know, I clearly have my, I value these guys here, and these guys here, but when I look at individuals, it's easy to get a read on if you believe them or not, or if you should believe.
BJ Campbell:Well, I mean, these big organizations, their debt is fried chicken in the long term because kids aren't watching TV. Like, like kids watch YouTube. That's what they watch. They don't watch TV. They don't watch channels. They don't have they don't care, a lick about cable, they don't care about any of that stuff. And you know, even up through Gen X, like the only reason any of us have cable TV is to watch live sports. So
Ken LaCorte:I can tell you that that's also moving very slowly, though, because this was obviously at Fox News. This was a weekly topic of course. conversation. And I ran the.com there for about a decade. And and there was very much at odds with me and the rest of the channel because, you know, part of it is is those numbers were going very slowly, I might get a trillion clicks. But the finances weren't any. There was a time where I was getting 30 million clicks a page views a day, so close to a billion a month. Wow. And my segment, or my part of the company accounted for 3% of foxes bottom line. Dollar. Right. And so, you know, Roger, look at me ELLs and be like, Ken, if I put another ad in O'Reilly, you understand? That's way more than you bring in, right?
BJ Campbell:What was your like? Okay, because I tried to back for us by looking at some Fox, some publicly available Fox data two or three years ago, what was the amount of money you made per click, I figured it would be about a third of a penny somewhere in that range. Is that Is that accurate? Or
Ken LaCorte:was about it? It was it's kind of hard to you know, video bharden A lot more than and business articles could bring in a lot more than that versus entertainment articles. But you know, you put Britney Spears with a skirt hiked up and you get 17 times the amount. So I'd say that was roughly a third to a half a cent per click was.
BJ Campbell:So I got it. Right. Okay. That's interesting. All right. Yeah. Cool.
Ken LaCorte:I think that was a pretty good analysis. And, you know, so, I mean, there was like, I had to have fights internally there. Because there were times to like, well, we don't want to talk about the.com On TV, because we don't want people turning off their TV and going into they're turning off their TV where we're making a buck an hour from them, or whatever that is, and turning on that TV. So you can make a half a cent per story. That's, you know, so I mean, you know, we had to look, it was a,
BJ Campbell:it was a little as long as people are still paying for cable Fox is still gonna make their money out of that, right. But, you know, eventually that's going to, that's going to fade off. Because
Ken LaCorte:well, but that but those generational, those numbers went a whole lot slower than one would have anticipated. Because to be honest, there's a whole lot of 55 year olds watching Fox right now on TV, they're not going to die till their mid 70s. So it which means we have a 20 year stretch on a good chunk of that. But you're right, my kids, my kids, they moved out to college Am I do you want a TV, because that was the first thing on a TV and a fridge where all I cared about was in my dorm. And they looked at me like I asked him if if if I wanted to bring a Ferris wheel to school? Yeah. No, thanks.
BJ Campbell:No, it's, you know, like you say they're going to fall off, you know, as people die.
Ken LaCorte:You had an interesting comment earlier that we were talking about when we're talking about social social upheavals, the percentage of single men? Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that. Because it was this is one of those theories that I always said, You know what, that's, that's a
BJ Campbell:CIA marker. The CIA likes to try and predict violent revolutions around the world. And one of the things that was one of the things that they use to predict the Iranian Revolution was the number of young, unmarried men by ratio in a country is something that that is a one of the markers for driving, you know, a revolt, because they don't have anything else to do, right. Like if you're a married man, and particularly if you have kids, you're not revolting. Like I've got a undetermined number of guns and some undetermined 1000s of rounds of ammo in my house. Right now, I'm a widower with two elementary school kids, there is no way I would participate in any kind of violent thing on any direction. Like if we were invaded by a foreign country, I might pick up a rifle Other than that, no.
Ken LaCorte:Once the kids go to college, though, your math will change. And it's like, yeah, what am I gonna lose?
BJ Campbell:Well, then I'll be so old. I'll be hanging on my pool.
Ken LaCorte:Maybe you're like, I'm 65. Worst case, I lose 20 years of life. You know, because I always said that in the Mideast. They needed some of the of the of the consumerism things that would take 18 year olds and have them have fun, as opposed to what else? Because I'll never forget, there was an interview right after September 11. And they interviewed some some dude on the streets of some country that half the people hated us, Pakistan, and they said, What do you want to do in life? And he said, I either want to join the jihad, or I want to move to New York City and become a taxicab driver. Right? Yeah. And I was like, at one point, obviously, those are, you know, one guy wants to kill New Yorkers and the other guy wants to be one and I said, this guy just wants a bigger life. He wants something better than what he's got going on. And something more interesting than working the whatever he does.
BJ Campbell:I got a question for you. Do you listen to punk music at all?
Ken LaCorte:I listen to a little axe back in the day.
BJ Campbell:So there's a band called no effects. They wrote that song. It's called 72 hookers. And it is hilarious. It's talking about sending the girls gone wild to Afghanistan to end the war.
Ken LaCorte:That's now how do you how do they spell it? How do they spell effects?
BJ Campbell:And oh, FX and FX?
Ken LaCorte:Of course, I know it wasn't, it wasn't something that a person will get. Yeah, so I also had a theory on that I said, you know, they talked about those 72 virgins, but they didn't talk about like, how good looking they were or why they were versions, you know, you get me a 70 year old, obese woman, I don't care if she's a virgin or not. But that's, that's neither neither here nor there. So the single Okay, so that's an interesting, I never knew that it was kind of like tracked in an analytical way.
BJ Campbell:It's one of the NCAA likes to analyze stuff, right? You know, it's way easier to sit in Langley and analyze data than it is to go out and, you know, do whatever they, you know, weird murder shit that they do. On the side, right. So like, they've got a lot of really great data, data analysts there. And that was one of the things they they tracked wealth inequality ratio of young and unmarried man. And, you know, there's a couple other things that they determined, like, you know, on a, on an aggregate basis were indicators for for violent revolutions. And I thought that was really interesting, too. Is it?
Ken LaCorte:Is it wealth inequality? Or is it the, how do I
BJ Campbell:say it is not objective poverty? It is not poverty? No, I
Ken LaCorte:know, it's not poverty. But my question is, is how much of that is is mollified or mitigated by? I believe that I'm in a society where I can move up the ladder?
BJ Campbell:I don't know the answer to that question. I wish I did. I'm sure anecdotally
Ken LaCorte:anecdotally it makes sense. My dad was was born poor, died to an off okay. And everybody said, you know, my kids can do a little bit better than me. I'll never forget, we had a it was guy was paying my car. And he was from, I don't want to say the South American country because it's it was down south, it's either Argentina or Chile. And he was like, Look, if you were born in this status, you're gonna die in the status. There was no and I wonder how much it's that versus if Bill Gates makes if Bill Gates quadruples, his his, his, his wealth, my life doesn't feel that different. So
BJ Campbell:it is like Eric Hoffer talks a little bit about this true believer, he said that, which is something everybody should be required to read twice in their life once in their teenager. And once when they're 40. Hoffer said that it's not the destitute poor that causes revolutions. And the reason why is the destitute poor are busy. They're trying to survive and have time to embroiled themselves in this stuff, that the people who involve themselves in violent revolutions are the comfortable, bored, poor, right. And the comfortable board poor have a lot of time on our hands. And they spend some of that time on envy mechanic stuff, they see the rich people better off than they are. And this envy mechanic, and this isn't a Huffer thing, but it's more of a general thing. The Envy mechanic activates, you know, certain neurological hardware in our brains. And that neurological hardwiring is there we have, we have hardwiring to share, we have hardwiring to, you know, to elevate our communities that goes all the way back a primate days. And we also have this, this sort of like overall societal jealousy thing. And the tendency towards revolution is somewhat baked into our minds too, because the fear of that causes people to share, right? And so that way, the whole tribe of you know, apes can be elevated. And so this thing just gets activated, and it gets activated by when it's not a it's not about reality. First off, it's not about how poor rich you are. Right? If you go and look at the median, the median income in the United States puts you in the top, I think, 5% or 4%. of the world. Yeah, maybe might be closer to one. I did that math last week, because I was on a Facebook arguing with somebody, and it's somewhere between five and 1%. The top, you know, if your median income, which means, you know, median income was like, what, 35 $40,000 a year in the United States, maybe 50, if you're making that you're in the top, you know, very narrow band of worldwide, but you might not see that because the people you see might have a lot more than you do. Right? So it's not about overall poverty, it's about the differential, especially if you're especially if you're on Facebook and Instagram. That's and then social media exacerbates your perceptions about the differential because all you're doing is watching Real Housewives of XYZ, then you're seeing a bigger differential between them and you and also on Facebook, everybody represents the best thing about themselves and not the worst, right? You know, nobody's going to like have a 10 photo long thread about their toilet breaking. So the so that exacerbates that mechanic and then that tends to drive us more towards just this, you know, file revolution scenario, which is something that I was very alarmed about again, 2018 2019. And I thought for sure, like I said, 2020 was going to be it. But, you know, golf clap, we avoided it then. Um,
Ken LaCorte:so I think the huge group of people that you're most worried about are kind of guys like you and me who aren't going out and protesting in the streets who have weapons. And it's like, how do I say, the big fear is that the people who didn't want to get involved someday get involved? And I don't think we're close to that?
BJ Campbell:No, not at all. I mean, like, things are too good to revolt here. It's nice here
Ken LaCorte:live. It's weird. It's like, I mean, I live right right outside of San Francisco, right across the bridge. And you know, I turn on my computer and, and don't get me wrong. There's a lot of bad stuff going on there. The needles are real, but not everywhere. I go to certain parts of town. And it's just like, you might notice a homeless guy driving in or two, but it's not the planet of the planet, a Lord of the Flies type stuff going on, and certain parts of it. And man, you close your computer. life's pretty good. The air is clean the water is clean the kids school that you know that it's free, and they don't teach them too many crazy things that you have to over overdo. And yeah, life's going pretty well, in America. I was
BJ Campbell:in the Bay Area for the first time in several decades, like a couple of months ago. Taking a taking a pistol class, it was put on by open source defense, one of my one of the organizations I write for, to gun rights organization, and very cool and very interesting. We talk about them later if you want, I want to. But so we were doing all doing tactical pistol shooting class, it was there over the weekend and dry in San Jose. And I was surprised that I mean, I was surprised that there were any homeless encampments at all over there, you know, because, like, I, if I'm driving around Atlanta, I don't see him. Right. Um, and, and that's Silicon Valley, you think that like, ya
Ken LaCorte:know, it's spread, it spread from its spread from and this happened in LA, and certainly San Francisco. It's spread from the places where they always, I mean, look, there were some pretty bad slums in LA, but it's so spread apart, you never see them. I mean, I lived in LA for 20 years, and I never saw certain places until like, wow, you had to go down to get some item repaired in some parts of LA that you'd never been to. And you're like, holy crap, look at this. But but the freeways go right by him, and you just you just don't pop into that. But that's what's really driving a lot of people's awareness of it is because it's spreading out of those areas.
BJ Campbell:Right, right. I was reading what's what's going on things Shellenberger so the guy's name. And he was saying that, when he's done kind of polling and talked to the folks that are in those camps, that a lot of them are from other places in the country that moved there. Because it's easier to be a junkie in California than it is to be a junkie in Oklahoma, I'm sure.
Ken LaCorte:Mike, could you imagine showing up at Salt Lake City, needing or wanting drugs, and no job and just you like stripped down junky clothes, it's like, you probably have many more, it would be much easier to get help in a real way than it would be to find the drug addicts there. Whereas in San Francisco, I'll give you the address to go right here. It's legal, the guys are selling it right over there. You can actually go get your free needles from the city here. And you can pick up some payments from from from the state and the county over this block over here. It's very, yeah, you know, everybody in life,
BJ Campbell:they should build a wall.
Ken LaCorte:Everywhere. I tell people about the wall, and I probably should stop repeating myself too much. But I'll never forget going into the Soviet Union in the late 80s. I did on a college trip. And they had a massive triple, triple fence design where you know, they got a clear cut so they could machine gun people and who made it past one of the of the barbed wire fences. And it was weird to be in a country that was building that kind of a wall to keep people in. I mean, I mean, it's very rare to have and you've got a few walls in the world. And it's but it's interesting to live in a country where things are going so well. We actually are contemplating and debating over keeping a wall up to stop people from pouring into our borders. Because if we if we opened up that border, we'd have 20 million a year coming in.
BJ Campbell:I think if we open up the border a little bit more, we might be able to get enough labor to handle the demand spike that's you know, flowed from the back end of the lockdown personally, I mean, like a, you know, I did bring him in temporarily or some at least it's hard to, it's hard to find anybody. It's hard to find enough people to meet the demand for news going on because, you know, post COVID Well, we were told not to make anything or build anything or buy anything for a year. Right? And then we were told okay, go and everybody decided to try and buy two years worth of shit in one year. Well as he
Ken LaCorte:had more had more disposable income with some of those some of those things, and they didn't have it
BJ Campbell:was that but a huge part was a lockdown. And I just It drives me nuts that like, well this goes back to the original thing or when we were talking about media and scientists both being afraid to talk about true things because they're gonna get themselves ostracized from their peer group that's going on economists right now, too. Okay, so, like, let's take a macro economic view of just pure basic macro economics about flooded currencies. And we'll do hamburgers, you got to island in the South. pacifical Hamburger, Stan, okay. Their economy is nothing but hamburgers, they sell 100 Hamburgers per day. There's 100 You know, hamburger stand dollars in circulation at any given time. And so the hamburgers cost $1 A hamburger. Right? This is basic economic model. And if you government prints 25 more dollars and throws it into circulation, then all the hamburgers are going to cost $1.25. And the Ron Paul people freak out. Right? So what they've been doing for forever, but then inflation never happened when they freaked out. Because if the government prints 25 extra dollars, but also the hamburger makers make 25 Extra hamburgers, the hamburgers still cost $1. Right. So as long as the amount of money that you're introducing into circulation tracks with the amount of production of the things that are available to buy, then you don't end up with inflation, or at least it's not noticeable. Right. Okay. So that's one angle of it. And that's always been the discussion that everybody's had about whether or not money circulation and you know, the production of stuff or tracking appropriately. This is the thing that that, you know, the Fed always talks about. But there's another thing that you could do is that what if you only had$100 in circulation, and yeah, prevented people from making hamburgers, you only let them make 80 Hamburgers instead of 100, then you'd get inflation too. Because those 80 Hamburgers would you feed worth what is a buck 25 or something like that, right? See the same amount of inflation without any money printing it all by reducing supply. Okay. And the worst thing that hamburger stand could ever do is print $25 and also prevent people from making 20 hamburgers. Soon, I'm saying. And now that the Preventing people of making stuff has never been on the docket for like a government knob, they've never had the ability to turn that until 2020. And then they locked us down to where you couldn't make stuff. If they didn't, can't print any money at all in handouts and 2020, we still would have was still would have ended up with an inflationary event purely because it wasn't a stuff to buy. And when they printed out the money as well, they did both of those things. And the thing that's even worse is that we're connected into a global economy. So some of the lack of stuff to buy doesn't even have to do with domestic stuff. It has to do with China shutting their plants down or wherever else because the entire world all took the same approach to this thing at the same time, which is everybody put in money and everybody stopped making stuff. But an economist cannot come out and say inflation was caused by the lockdowns because he'll get run out of every cocktail party that he goes to. Right, you know, with crude minute friends. Right? You know. So there's that kind of this just another example of how tribalism is influencing the overall understanding of what's even happening around us the fact that nobody's talking about how the lockdowns have caused inflation boggles my mind.
Ken LaCorte:You know, I love the mathematical approaches. Sometimes when it gets into economic theory, I think it gets deep enough. It's kind of like predicting, predicting the weather and 100 years, it gets deep enough where nobody knows what the hell they're talking about. And I think that they can all be full of shit. I went to Claremont McKenna, where a probably a third of the kids majored in economics. But I remember that in the not too previous pass from that. Two guys who won individually, separately, the Nobel Prize for Economics had diametrically opposing views on how the economy worked. And I thought, so I can go my whole life, be the smartest economists that anybody's ever shook hands with win the Nobel Prize for Economics, and have a 5050 chance of being completely full of shit or not.
BJ Campbell:Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely accurate, because the economy is a is a system that is so complex, that it's impossible to model on a micro level.
Ken LaCorte:It's if I never understood like, I was in a rich guy's house and he had a, like a painting that he bought for $20 million, which looked like my daughter could upend it. And now that painting was sort of like$43 million over five years and he was happy and it was and I was like little I'll never make as much in my entire Her life is that guy's painting painting there. And I thought that if I stole that painting, and sold it for $10 million, and then bought a yacht a car and coke and hookers and whatever one might do, did I help the economy? And did he hurt the economy by hoarding that? I mean, you know, it's money circulation, but I never under was able to answer that question. And economics the basic if somebody steals something, and then spends that money, has he helped the economy?
BJ Campbell:Well, this is why the hamburger model is nice, because everybody needs a hamburger. Right? You know, so how much money is sunk in? You know, bullshit is certainly part of the equation and how much money is in a bank, like, for instance, go back to the hamburger thing? What if the government you got $100 in circulation and 100 Hamburgers you're selling and that's your economy, if the government prints $100, but they hand it to one guy and he puts it in a bank, there's no inflation is there. So only inflation if that suddenly rich guy turns around and decides to start buying hamburgers, which is why we didn't see a whole lot of inflation in the 2008 bailout. Because the money went straight to the banks. Right? It didn't go to the people it is much more and made a bunch of people rich, who were awful people who should have been thrown in jail instead of made rich but but the fact that it didn't go, it is objectively more fair to run a bailout like we did in 2020, where you give money directly to people who need the money. But that will put it directly into circulation. Right? So right but
Ken LaCorte:of course inflation isn't isn't the only factor. Right? You go back to your your island of hamburgers, you give it to one dude who puts it in the bank? Well, nobody's making hamburgers, because because his$100 is now in the bank and somebody has to pay the flippers there to create,
BJ Campbell:you got 100 You got$100 in circulation, you got an extra 100 that goes in there was an extra 100, right, you put an extra 100 to give to that one guy, but if he's becomes rich, but you know,
Ken LaCorte:but but if he spent that, yes, there's more inflation, but then there's more job creation and and happiness in the in the society, despite the incremental inflation now, you
BJ Campbell:know, I mean, like in the trying to attach happiness to economics is tough to you know, because there's a, you know, the, that's nonlinear for sure, like your happiness increases with your annual earnings in the United States up to a threshold of about $80,000 a year, I think, maybe 100, I'd have to go back and
Ken LaCorte:look at flattens, I think it's even less than that.
BJ Campbell:But it flattens out past that. It's like once you get out of the out of the you know, the economic insecurity, then happiness is really uncorrelated to much money. And that
Ken LaCorte:number also tracks pretty well with small business earnings. A guy makes enough to be a I've got a car that's maybe not new every year, but it's good enough, my kids are clothed, everybody's happy, I got a roof over my head, we get to go out to Denny's on on Saturday morning, and I get to go to out to dinner once a week. And they stop making the sacrifices that you need to in a small business to get that to the 234 $100,000 range. So yeah, I think that those things are,
BJ Campbell:are that's about where my small businesses that I've got, I make enough money to be very comfortable. And I'm happy with that. And I don't feel like expanding that's like I could I could throw in the time and effort to do it. But I got kids, you know?
Ken LaCorte:Yeah, I mean, look, there's there's a clear different personality, to the ones who are, you know, I know, a young guy right now, he's going to be worth many millions of dollars in his life, because he wants it so badly. And he's willing to not go out on dates and to not spend his money on cars and to and to, you know, and to work seven days a week, you know, he's just laser focused on that. And it works. I've seen it, I've seen it over time. I mean, the one nice thing to growing old, is that you don't have to look at your theories as snapshots, you get to look them as movies over time. You know, as you and I have seen, and we talk about crime, well, man, I lived through the late 70s. I mean, it was it was it was crazy. And as far as crime rates. And as far as the same, that were coming back to that pendulum, the same concept of Oh, this guy murdered three and rape too. You know, he's gonna need extra counseling courses on on here. I mean, there was that same kind of kind of attitude. And I live that very, very explicitly backpack through that, and it was, but so seeing changes over time seeing theories implemented against against time. Maybe that's where the word wisdom comes from. For people who pay attention and are smart. You throw in, you throw in being able to see that over time. And perhaps that's what the word wisdom comes from.
BJ Campbell:Well, you know, I'll dial it back a little bit. Now, as far as like crime trends. The late 70s, early 80s. were awful on a per capita basis if you want to look at like murder rate. Now was about the same murder rate as the the teens and early 20s During Prohibition, and then we saw that same peak level of murder rate in the early 90s, the crack epidemic. And we're, I guess, really kind of mid 90s is when it peaked. And then after that, it fell off to about half what it was. And we had a whole a lull in crime in the United States, the entire 2000s. And all the way up really, until 2020. Where their crime rates if you're, again, just looking at Homicide victimization rate, they were as low as they were in the 1950s. Right? They were very low on a per capita basis, but everybody was screaming about, like, you know, gun, crime and gun. So what they did is they substituted gun deaths for gun homicides to try and make people think it was going up because they were using suicide as their thing, which is an important problem, because suicide is two thirds of gun deaths. And seven eighths of gun suicides are men. It's a male mental health problem. That's where the gun deaths progress. So but like, right, yet we did didn't really rise at all until 2020. And 2020 Rose because of, you know, sort of general lawlessness and the fact that people are burning buildings down right, you know,
Ken LaCorte:yeah. And a lot of policy decisions that said both a Don't worry about the cops and back
BJ Campbell:half cab. All cops are bad. Cops, cops just got they decided to stop policing in dangerous areas, because the risk wasn't worth the reward. Yeah. And there's, there's a like, I have not seen any good studies on this. But I have talked to cops who did that they were like, well, if we go to this area of town, there's a chance that we're going to end up on YouTube. And then we're going to get fired. Because for doing what we unfortunately may have to do in that area town. So we're just not going to answer that call. There were 911 calls that were just went unanswered in 2020. Because yeah,
Ken LaCorte:I mean, we saw a lot of in the in the northwest, which had always been kind of reasonable before the other the murder rate is is interesting, because it's it's both. One thing that's happened right now is is as as opposed to other crime rates, which kind of came up slowly. This washed up very quickly. It also broke out of its normal places. In other words, the crack epidemic and the murders that occur there were largely among drug dealers. I mean, that and people involved in that a lot of murders are within one ethnic class in America, there's just not a whole lot of murders in my neighborhood. In fact, I barely even see cops in my neighborhood, right, but I don't need them. But this time, the recent thing and I think it's what's spiking some of the some of the feelings on this, which I think are totally justified is that there seems to be more of a randomness in some of these murders. New York subway attacks, New York subway attacks, generally over the last 10 years, I'd have one or two people would push somebody into onto the onto the subway tracks. Last couple years, it's been like seven or nine where we're literally now those are still small numbers overall, but they are equal to the entire decade per year on that you know, home the videos not not of, of you know, of homeless guys just stabbing a girl walking to the restaurant, the randomness of it, kind of like the homelessness situation is bursting out of the places that are that are used to it if that's a fair way to say it into societies that aren't and
BJ Campbell:that's, I would caution you. I would caution you one of the things that we do at my publication handwaving free catteries The first thing we do and we hear about something and push on a subway is like, Okay, what's the actual rate? And is it actually increasing? And is the increase a big and like, you know, so like, if, if one person a year gets pushed onto a subway, and then a one year three people get pushed on a subway? Is that a 3.3 100% increase in subway? You know, train track deaths? Yes, but is it a big deal? You know, not by brace
Ken LaCorte:ratio? Per capita?
BJ Campbell:Right? Yeah, it's like it's way safer than shark attacks. So so like, you know that before but at anytime I just school shootings, yeah. Yeah, right. Exactly. Anytime you you. You see something like this. It's like, okay, well, why did I see that? I saw that because somebody was making money off of clicks. Right. So anytime you see anything, it's like, oh, well, this wants me to click on it. It's, you know, 5050 chance it's it's either lies or statistical omissions or general bullshit. So, like, I I'm very wary to say that and I have not looked specifically at demographic shifts in homicide. And most of what I do look at Homicide it's it's you Usually it's directly related to gun death numbers because that those are the spaces in which I swim I write for open source defense, I write for recoil half my podcasts have been just like talking about gun stuff explicitly. I don't think that, um, I've seen a whole lot of major demographic shifts in it, but I don't I would have to look into it more.
Ken LaCorte:Probably as you can't right now, because the FBI numbers are a always a couple years behind it. And be you've undoubtedly followed the the when they changed their method of collecting numbers and putting millions of dollars worth of of efforts on local police departments. Now the FBI crime stats, half those police departments are saying, fuck it, it's just not worth it given. It's not worth hiring more people to give the Feds their numbers. So the numbers are starting to get a little difficult to track now
BJ Campbell:I noticed that half half your your police have about I think it was about half or exporting the new system and about half of it just decided yes, it's just too big of a pain in the ass.
Ken LaCorte:So tell me about the that that gun group I went and I looked at that. And what top line that came out of me is we're not here to yell about politics. We're actually here to to, to encourage gun use and safe use of that. And it was kind of an interesting mix on that it
BJ Campbell:is 100% gun rights, the 0% culture war, right. It is a group of people. There's me and a couple other writers. The main the lead writer is not me. He's a guy named Kareem Shi'a. And he is he does a weekly newsletter comes out every Monday. And it is fantastic and short to read. And it is written for really Kitt to cater towards the intellectuals and the tech community who are gone positive. A lot of the folks who are involved in it are in a really I think everybody except me and Mike the photographer were in blue states or blue cities, Kareem used to live in Manhattan. Shaka Rossi is a very important member of open source defense. And he was one of the first 50 some odd, maybe 100 employees at Facebook. He was like one of the lead developers at Facebook for a decade. And when he was at Facebook, they used to do you, each of the sort of managers would take their people to offsites you're just like, you know, socialization things. He used to take them all a gun range and take him to a shooting course. Chuck was his story in Facebook is really kind of interesting. There was a period gun people hate Facebook, right. And the main reason they hated us because it was a period where Facebook decided they're gonna ban gun sales on the platform, and is getting around 2018. And they did it in a very ham fisted way and accidentally just banned all the gun groups, even if they weren't selling guns. So these are like big 200,000 You know, member groups and stuff like that, or people look at their local shooting club or whatnot. And they just nuke them all. And, you know, Chuck is a tux, a competition shooter, you know, he he's quite good, very runner carving run a pistol, very, very talented. So and he was also like, one of the one of the bigwigs and on the dev side, he walked into Zuckerberg office, and he said, Mark, we just did something very bad. We have to fix it, and explain what it happened and marks it Yeah, you're right. That was bad. We need to fix it. And we also need to come up with policies. So we don't do anything this bad. Again, whenever we decide to ban something else. That didn't work. Well, good guy. So what he said is Chuck, moving you over to the client side, you're going to stop your job, you're gonna move over here, you're going to start by fixing this and getting all the gun groups back. And then the next thing you do is come up with policies and procedures for banning things appropriately, or whatnot. Now, how much of that stuck? Right, but, um, but Chuck was involved in getting a lot, not all but many of these groups back, he has a lot of connection to all of them and also wrote up, you know, sort of a guideline to make sure that this stuff is done. If not lacking a ham fisted, least less ham. Right, you know, so speaking to
Ken LaCorte:somebody who had just under three and a half million followers on on Facebook sites, they took them down in one day because of a because of a lying New York Times article that we didn't know about that because they took it down the week before. I never even got an email back from anyone there. Oh, my God after spending a quarter million dollars in advertising to help build those on there and kind of having that as the base. Yeah,
BJ Campbell:yeah. It's, it's, it is it is. Yeah, there. What goes on in there is is heavily ideological. And so one of the things that we were, you know, because it's open source offenses, 100% gun rights 0% culture words like we can talk and the people in that gun space realize that that you know, are also very usually heavily First Amendment And against censorship and stuff like that. But, you know, given the world that we live in, one of the things that we've decided OSD is, well, if it's so happens that the tech community is going to have this kind of power, what we have to do is we have to work to convert them to our SOC, go where the actual power is, and convert on a on a one to one basis, do everything we can to try and bring them around on our one issue. Because we're not going to try and fix the world, we're just pro gun. And, and so that's where some of the point of these shooting events is where we, you know, when we went to San Jose, we ran that.
Ken LaCorte:Did they have a presence there? Do they have a presence there was that a one off in San Jose?
BJ Campbell:Um, so Chuck used to live in San Jose. And so he had a lot of connections and he had a he has a house there. So he kind of ran that one when Oh, it did. Karim currently lives in Austin. And we did one in Austin, a, you know, 2021, it was a carbon course it was air fifteens and stuff. And I don't know where we're going to do the next one yet, but we've tried to do one a year and we might scale it up to two or three year. And these are, you know, the idea is to try and get influential people inside the tech community come out and do it. Now. We've got a photographer, he's, you know, featured in Time magazine before doing B roll for Instagram and you know, that kind of thing.
Ken LaCorte:And does that does that aspect freak him out? When when there's like, Oh, you're gonna be posting stuff like this does that? Oh, no,
BJ Campbell:we don't we get permission for anything we're gonna post and then yeah, but
Ken LaCorte:when you're saying, hey, tech guy, not only do I want to teach you to shoot, but we're gonna have a cameraman there does that does that extra as
BJ Campbell:we talked about? We every person is briefed individually. And they're like, you know, we have a list of who doesn't want their photos up and who doesn't? And we follow it. Right? You know, like, that's, that's because we're sensitive to that. Dije or graphic artist actually runs a separate kind of merch company on the side, which is hilarious. He writes, he does. He'll have like T shirts, and hats and merch that is gun specific. But only someone who knows about guns would get the joke, right? So like, he's got one like, for IT people that it's got a little symbol right here on the on the thing and it's got one file folder, three file folders, five, file horrors, but there's a little switch. So like a selector switch for M 60. But it's file folders. And so nobody else who doesn't know anything like edit, but like you can wear it to work. And then if you there's somebody else, you know, that's like the also an
Ken LaCorte:employee over the side. It's like the old Christians who would make half of the half of the fish symbol and nobody Well, what that was right,
BJ Campbell:no, what's even better, like, I got a shot here. Every year in the last couple of times, I've hung out with Chris Chang from air with him. He's a one top shot the TV show season five or six. He's a competition shooter very famous, well connected to recoil magazine, also a gay Asian dude in San Francisco. Right? Right. So he breaks the mold. He's spoken before Congress in favor of gun rights or whatnot. And we were having drinks last year. And he was talking about what it's like being in San Francisco being a gun person. And he said, it's like, being gay in the 1980s. Where you have to hide it,
Ken LaCorte:you have to hide it, because you and
BJ Campbell:like, I would never say that. But the fact that he told me that means that I feel like I can share it because he would know. Right? You know, and he's he's heavily involved right now in the, in the leadership for the pink pistols, which is the gay gun rights group, one of them, um, and also is involved in an Asian American gun rights organization, that kind of thing. And he does good work. And he's interesting, I hung out with him.
Ken LaCorte:My claim to fame is when I ran for office in 1998, I was either the number one or number two recipient of NRA money in California, which, which made me feel pretty good.
BJ Campbell:So one of the things that drew round it back to open source, by keeping the culture war stuff out of it and keeping the information clean. One of the things that liberal gun owners have a problem with, is they don't have any articles or any websites they can share with their liberal friends that gives them their position
Ken LaCorte:without screaming without,
BJ Campbell:right exactly without banner ads on the sides talking about lib tarts or whatever. Yeah, so So like what we providing them, we're just we're out of it. We're not liberal, we're not conservative, but we're providing them something that is shareable among people who don't get involved. And so we get a lot of traffic that way. And that's also kind of the this is Game Theory in that too, right? So, if you you know, first past the post voting system, everything is going to devolve into two parties because of math. And right now, guns have 100% support inside one of the two parties. That's a broad line, but because of the way the A sort of clickbait engine works, it's always going to these two things are going to maximize source 50% splits. And if you can ever get 60% That's a blowout, right? Well, if we're starting at 50%, we only got to get 10% to be a blowout, we only got to get, you know, two out of 10 blues to switch on the gun issue and guns were safe. Right? Guns when so the so the headway to really happen winning it is taking up a little bit. But it's like, if you look at any by any of the available metric gun rights are winning in a big way. Kareem wrote a very long article about that. If you just go to google and type open source defense, gun rights are winning. You can see graphs, charts, mathematics, I mean, the Brady Campaign, the Brady campaign started out as the campaign to end handgun ownership. Now their backs up against the wall, they're saying, Can we at least get rid of the AR fifteens? And the answer is no. Right? So like they've had their they've been continually going backwards. But this isn't understood very well in the gun community gun community thinks that there's lions at the gates and the and the gun rights organizations. They kind of think they're winning, but they're not. Constitutional carry isn't but I don't know, dozens of states now at least
Ken LaCorte:well, because political political analysts and insiders on both sides could read cross tabs and election returns. And there were a couple of years where the Democrats got their rear ends handed to them in a bad way because they because they took the Twitter concept seriously and got hit as a Californian though. I see it a little bit differently as a California and I see a death by 1000 paper cuts kind of so
BJ Campbell:So yeah, the blue coast in the Northeast, the heavily blue states New York is you know outside of Supreme Court intervention main Bruin was extremely broad, right. But outside of that the blue states are getting worse on guns and you know, the other 40 states in the country we're getting more pro gun and so like, you know, and the other thing you see there's so many guns out there you can't take them away.
Ken LaCorte:Yeah, one of my favorite charts of the world is the private ownership of firearms in the world. And it's got it was a it was a it was an infographic and the size of America compared to the rest of the world is kind of mind boggling and in a very real so we
BJ Campbell:got more we got more guns and people here there's no way to get rid of them.
Ken LaCorte:Yeah. All right, dude. Well, look, that's a good a good wrapping point. This was fun. I could have done this for an extra extra two hours. I know you got things to do in the afternoon, but I do I enjoy this. I enjoy Yeah,
BJ Campbell:well if you want to do it again some time, reach out and let me know
