Episode 6 | Sasha Stone - 5 Great Questions

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
She actually talked, get out of here.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Oh yeah, yeah, really gotten into the bad habit of
asking a huge amount of questions.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Just a question between friends, you know.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
She actually talked, how are you doing?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm doing fine. Are we on air? Are we going
to do an intro?

Speaker 3 (00:33):
Or I'll do my normal intro?

Speaker 1 (00:38):
Let's see.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Yeah. Well, welcome to five Great Questions the podcast. This
is a little bit of a different version, but I
still think it's going to be two or three Great questions.
I just think that the questions are longer and more involved.
So if it's not exactly five, please don't hold me

(01:00):
to it. And I'm very, very, very excited and grateful
to have my special guest, Sasha Stone.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Long time gosh.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
I don't know what to call what I mean, what
are we supposed to call these online connections that we
have where we where we have like a serious, uh
soul connection, and yet we've never met in person. I
don't know what to call them.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
I know, well, we should meet in person sometime. That
would be fun, yes, but.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
For now, Yes, my name is Alden Olmstead. I've my
dad was a crazy you know, John Muir Save the Redwoods,
guy who left my family when I was a year
old to go literally save the redwoods and build California
State parks. And that led to my first documentary film
and my second and third and YadA YadA. And on

(01:57):
the other end is Sasha's Stone, who has I'm trying
to think of a.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Good to even describe what I am. There's so many
different ways to go about it.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
I know, I just I want to come up with
like a little bit of a Tarantino slash manson, you know,
seventies to Pangy Canyon. I mean, I just, yeah, it's difficult.
But on the other end of Sasha Stone, who some
of you may know from her two websites, and you

(02:32):
can correct me if I'm totally off base, But Oscar
Watch it.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
Used to be Oscar Watch, but I was sued in
two thousand and six and so now it's called the
very boring Awards Daily dot Com.

Speaker 3 (02:48):
So Oscar, the fact that you were sued, just so
you know, you know, FYI is that's just a total
badge of honor for Hollywood, right.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
I mean it was a shock for me because I
was such a I was such a scrappy startup person,
you know, and to have the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Science assumed me. It felt like a very
big deal at the time.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
That's what.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, that's what I mean. I mean, that's it. I mean.
I have a tiny little documentary about my BMX company
that that I started when I was nineteen and dropped
out of college, and I just, you know, got screwed
by my distributor back in May, and now I just
become my own distributor and got it back on Amazon.
And I kind of feel like it's a little bit
of a badge of honor to have your distributor, you know,

(03:36):
not give you any of the royalties and then sell it,
sell your movie to you're not gonna believe this, but
to chicken soup for the soul.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Okay, I know it's so.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
And then they go bankrupt and then my agent says,
you know what, Alton, why don't you just go it
on your own? And so I do. And anyway, so.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
That's the best way seriously nowadays, you know.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
But I but I feel like it's it's it's kind
of the minimum of feeling that you're a part of Hollywood.
You kind of have to get screwed at least once, right.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, yes, I mean, uh, yeah, I mean it. Yeah,
I think, you know, because I write on my other site,
which is free thinking through the fourth turning on sub stack,
it's a more political. I feel the same sort of
cold shoulder from Hollywood now that I feel for the

(04:31):
Democratic Party the left, you know, I feel the same
because they're all kind of one and the same, right,
and I sort of feel like you and me and
other people are part of a counterculture that's growing and
that is that's exciting. So it's not depressing so much
as it's to me, it's sort of exciting that this
is happening, you know.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
It is. And I and I got to say from
the beginning, I'm I am glad that we postponed a
little bit and that we're you know, speaking on you know,
I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but a little bit
of a historic weekend with RFK Junior and Cornell West
and a little bit Jill Stein all chiming in the

(05:14):
fact that they have all been sued and been and
or been marginalized and had money, you know, dumped on
there at them to try to keep them off the
ballot by a party that claims to be preserving democracy.
I do feel like something has shifted in the last

(05:36):
couple of days. And like I said, I don't I
don't want to sound, you know, overly dramatic, but my goodness,
it it just feels like something has shifted. If if
you're going to put this many bright, bright minds and
free thinking, entrepreneurial people against you, I don't know it.

(05:59):
It just feels like you're you're just you know, you're
just setting yourself up for just a huge brick wall
of a failure.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah, I mean it goes what's the I always think
of one of my favorite movies is Witness, Peter Weir's Witness, Yeah,
and I always think of that scene at the very
end where you know, the cops have done everything they
could to cover up their corruption and their crime, and
he's hiding out with the Amish and they come all
the way out there to kill him and they're they're

(06:29):
threatening these nice Amish people, and Harrison Ford's like, when
is it going to be enough? When is it enough?
You know, look at how far you've gone. That's how
I feel about the Democrats, Like, yes, they want to
stop Trump, yes they think he's an existential threat, but
look at where it's taken them complete and total corruption.

(06:50):
I mean, it was bad enough when they just pretended
that they were giving Bernie a fair shake in twenty sixteen, right,
and that was sort of four appearances, But then they
just gave up that. I like, forget it. Where I'm
gonna bother with appearances, right, We're gonna do everything we
can to crush anyone who dares to run for office
against us.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
Yeah, yeah, I know it is, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
It is.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
It is truly so so crazy.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
So but let let me go to make it so
depressing right out of the gate. I know, I know
it's not pleasant exactly.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
No, thank if you if you're listening right now and
you you know me or you know Sasha, or you
know neither of us, that's great. I really am glad
that you're listening. I'm thankful for Sasha for doing this.
And I do think it's it's interesting and I think
it's very helpful for your audience to hear you, you know,

(07:50):
air quotes on the other side of the of the microphone.
So I am no Charlie Rose. I had a brief
moment in time where I idolized Charles Rose until you know,
he had his coming out me two moment. But I
know it seems like so long ago.

Speaker 1 (08:08):
Huh, But I just I love.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, I just I love the setting with the I'm
just a you know, I'm a I'm a you know
a little bit like how Seinfeld, how Jerry Seinfeld is
with comedians and cars getting coffee. It's all all of
it is just fluff because what he really wants to
talk about is he wants to break down, uh, each

(08:34):
joke by itself, and he wants to break down what
gets a comedian to go on stage and and do
that joke. And for me, it's like the reason I
did like Charlie Rose and I didn't know it at
the time, was that I loved the breaking down of
of just this black background with I just want to

(08:56):
talk about the story and how you construct it, you know,
like whether you were Joel and Ethan Cohen or Wes
Anderson or Cameron Crowe, Like how did you actually create
these characters that we just that that were just larger
than life, you know? And so I did love that,

(09:17):
and so that's yeah, that's just what it well anyway,
that makes me nostalgic.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
For well, it's like a lot of these guys that
they just disappeared. These these guys, there's never been anybody
to replace them, you know, like they take things away,
but they don't put back. There's never been another Charlie Rose,
and there never will be. All we get now is like,
you know, one awful puff piece entertainment story after another

(09:44):
that nobody watches. Whereas Charlie Rose made us interested in
things and people and he would just sit there and talk.
I mean, and you can find it, right, You can
find it on Joe Rogan and Les Lex, Lex Friedman's
Lex Friedman's name, right. And I was listening to Ben
Shapiro talk to Dennis Quaid the other day and they

(10:04):
were talking about acting and stuff the way that Charlie
Rose used to. So you can find it. But that
was like right there. Everybody could watch it. You didn't
have to splinter off into fringes to watch it. Everybody
could see it. It was. So things have changed so
dramatically in that way. But I think that the rule
of cancel culture, my opinion, should be, if you can

(10:24):
replace that person, then you can spare them. But if
you can't, then you can't spare them.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
Hmm.

Speaker 1 (10:32):
Yeah, that's interesting.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
It's almost Yeah, if if there were, if there were
like an SNL or a kids in the Hall that
we could create, it would be you know, it would
be Yeah, give us a sketch, you know, showing like
the rules of cancel culture. That would actually be interesting. Yeah,

(10:53):
you know, to make light of it. Like, let's say
you want to honor cancel culture and not make fun
of it. But but what if you did have some
rules like, yeah, you can only cancel if you can
replace with something of equal or greater value exactly.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
I mean it, it's not It's not been a good,
a positive thing. I don't know why people feel that
it is positive. It's just leaves us in a state
of fear and paralysis, I think, And I can't wait
till it's over. And I don't think it ever will
be over in the mainstream. I think we just have
to build outside of it, build new pathways, new culture

(11:34):
that people can find.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, now, you might be right.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
I think there were there was a little bit of
a slim moment where we thought maybe we could rebuild within.
But I do think you might be right. So let's
to try to keep with a little bit of my
five great questions. The first one I don't like. I said,
I'm not gonna have five for you. But the first one,
which I do think is a good question, is and

(12:01):
people can you know, there's plenty of your podcasts that
people can go on and hear your background, your life story,
your Topanga Canyon.

Speaker 1 (12:12):
You know, I don't even know.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
I'm trying to think of hippie Pega Canyon, hippie kid.

Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, Topanga Canyon, hippie kid for people that aren't from California.
I don't even know how to describe it. I mean,
once upon a time in Hollywood had parts of it, Yeah,
but that it nailed. But what movie, if you know,
if an alien landed, or if somebody came from Ohio
and they had never heard of Topeka Canyon, what movie

(12:40):
nails your childhood or adolescents the best?

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Well, it's not really into Panga. But the movie that
I always think of that reminds me of my childhood
is Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, because
I think back then he was trying to tell sort
of the truth about what things were like in suburbia
as opposed to an idealized a version of childhood that

(13:07):
he kind of got you later. But in close encounters,
you see these like Brady kids screaming at each other.
You see, you know, a beleaguered mom screaming at the kids,
screaming at the dad. You know, even though they were
in suburbia, they weren't into panga.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
I was more of a if you watch Woodstock documentaries
or you know, any of those Charles Manson you know,
we weren't obviously hanging out with mass murders or anything.
But that was the hippie ethos in that barefoot ratty
hair riding ponies. You know, that was my childhood into panga.

(13:44):
But but you know, we moved out of there pretty quick,
and then I moved around California a lot. But but
my childhood I always think back to that that I
think got it almost exactly right of what it was
like back then. Was that movie Spielberg's Close Encounters.

Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, okay, huh, I would not I would.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Not have picked that. Well, I just mean because he
doesn't try to he doesn't try to put a he
doesn't make it happy ish, you know. Right for those
of us who grew up around that time, we know
that children weren't the center of the universe back then.
In fact, quite the opposite. They were. They were not,
I mean in conservative homes, I think it was different,

(14:25):
but on the left it was more like feminists were
ready to go live their lives. And it was the
me generation and people wanted to you know, tune in
and drop out or whatever. And the kids were kind
of scrambling behind them, and you know, we'd stay out
till all the way till dark. Sometimes later we'd hitchhike,
we'd drive without seatbelts. You know, we'd ride our ponies

(14:47):
all over to pangas. So we were not hemmed in.
We were not monitored at all.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
I think it was like I feel like every every
Chips episode with like the kids driving the station wagon
with a skateboard gets caught in the gas pedal and
like that that just.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
What or who's that?

Speaker 3 (15:04):
Who's the kid who was in He was in Breaking
Away and he was also.

Speaker 2 (15:08):
In New Bear Bears Jackie Earl Lelly Ye name is
Jackie Earl Hayley, and he played Kelly Leak. And speaking
of Bad News Bears, that was I mean, there are
a lot of movies that remind me that I watched
back then. Not necessarily that reflected my childhood, but that
when I think of them, I think of my childhood,

(15:29):
and Bad News Bears was definitely one of those.

Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yeah, yeah, that that kid that what's his name, his.

Speaker 2 (15:36):
Actor name, Jackie Earl Haley.

Speaker 1 (15:39):
Okay, that kid.

Speaker 3 (15:41):
If I had to pick, if I had to pick
one image, one kid for the nineteen seventies, it would
be the girl would be Jodie Foster and the boy
would be that guy. Yeah, absolutely, because I mean I
didn't grow up, you know, quite with like a Bad
News Bears like that, But obviously I grew up watching

(16:03):
Little League with my of my brother was playing, and
just that that scrappy kid that was fighting the world,
that the chip on his shoulder was like the size
of the chip on his shoulder was like the whole world,
and a lot of us in the seventies, in the
early eighties I think grew up with that because, as

(16:25):
has been well documented, kids, you know, children and kids
were not were not well cared for in that time frame.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
No, they weren't. In fact, in Bad News Bears, people
don't believe me when I tell them this, but she
was eleven in that movie. Tatum O'Neill played an eleven
year old very sort of and she's she's on there,
she's on sitting there and on sunset boulevards alone, selling
you know, maps to the stars homes. No way would

(16:56):
an eleven year old girl today be able in a
two top be able to sit there on some sup
bulevard selling maps by herself, so that would never happen.
But also she was very precocious. She you know, Kelly Leek,
he was her same age. She smoked, and he rode
his motorcycle and she goes out on a date with him.

(17:17):
You know, she's talking about the pill and this and
that she's eleven, right, Like that's how different things were
then in the seventies and nowadays, you know they think
of nineteen year olds as being children, you.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
Know, right, Yeah, gosh, no, that's it's so interesting and
there's a little bit of a well we'll follow up
with a fourth turning later, but let me let me
just keep us on our track. Like I said, if
anyone's listening and you want to hear Sasha's childhood and

(17:52):
adolescent story and growing up, there's there's many, many, many
podcasts that you can go to that, will you know,
we'll give you color and details of that time, but
let's jump forward to the early mid nineties. I do

(18:13):
have an interesting question that I don't know if you've
ever been asked. I'm assuming when you started blogging it
wasn't even called blogging, but you just started, I guess,
writing online in the internet. Why So, there's two part questions,
why did you get online so early looking back now?

(18:35):
And what career do you think you would have gone
into if the Internet had not come along?

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Hmm? Very interesting. Well, it just so happened that I
was built for the Internet. My personality was built for
the Internet because I was a really sensitive kid, really
really sense, too sensitive for my mom. She didn't like
that I was as sensitive as I was. I was like,
my daughter is the same way, and she's lucky she

(19:03):
had me as a mother, so she had a nicer
life than I did. But so I was really like,
you know, I was a very extroverted person, but I
was very actually naturally introverted and shy. I just put
on the extrovert act like so many other people do,
and so I wanted to be an actress. I left
my hometown at nineteen and then I was like, no,

(19:25):
I want to be a writer. And then I was like, no,
I want to be a filmmaker. And so I wrote
this screenplay in a couple of weeks and I want
a writing contest at UCLA. I won third place, and
I couldn't believe I won third place, even though I
just wrote this thing really quick. And at that time
they told me speaking of Quentin Tarantino. Just funnily enough,

(19:47):
I got this tiny bit of attention from Hollywood after that,
After that prize hit the trades and they were saying,
you're a lot. Your writing is a lot like this
guy named Quentin Tarantino. And of course he would go
on to become Quentin Tarantino. But this was the nineties, right.
So I got a scholarship to Columbia Graduate Film Program

(20:10):
in New York, and I went there and it was
like my dream come true. And all of a sudden,
I got there and I realized I couldn't do it.
I was too shy. I was too shy to ask
people to help me with the lighting. I was too
shy to ask actors to help me. I could do
the writing part, but I couldn't do the social part.

(20:30):
And I was just frozen in fear. And at the
same time, I met this guy that I'd known for
a while and he had just been dumped by his
wife that he loved more than life itself. In fact,
they're still together now, but at the time I was
there to sort of nurse him back to health. I
thought it was love. It wasn't love. I fell hard

(20:51):
for this guy, dropped out of school, moved back to
la and then he went back to his wife. So
I was just a lot of other terrible things happened
at that time, but I was hollowed out as a person.
I just I couldn't face myself and my life and
the mistakes I made. So I was staring at the

(21:12):
wall and I wouldn't even leave the house. And my
sister showed me how to get online. She's like, you know,
you might really like this. I like it. She had
met her her now husband that way. I wasn't looking
to meet people. I was just interested in this internet thing.
What is this, you know? And so you know, everybody
got those free DVDs from AOL where you can just

(21:35):
sign on, you get like three weeks for free. You've
got mail, and like right away I was hooked, right,
the algorithm got my brain. With that, you've got mail.
And the first thing I did was join a cinema
group bit less served dot Cinema dot l back in
the nineties, and all I did all day long was

(21:56):
right about movies with people all over the world. And
it was that was like my blogging school, because that
was how I learned how to communicate online. How I
learned how to communicate my ideas through words, express emotion,
move people, excite people, you know, argue with people. All
of that came from that little Usenet group that I
did for many years. And then I decided around nineteen

(22:19):
ninety nine after I had my baby, because I met
a guy from Italy in that group and had a baby.
And I mean I met people from all over the world, right,
I had you know, relationships with people not in physical life,
but you know, almost felt real. Some of them were real,
but some of them weren't. Some of them were just online.

(22:41):
I was like Germany and you know, Texas and New
Mexico and Michigan and all over the place, and these
people we just have these connections. A lot of those
people I still know, not all of them, but yeah,
but anyway, so I wanted to. It was right nineteen
ninety and the Internet was starting to really come to life.

(23:03):
It was like the wild wild web, you know, anybody
could build anything, and I was so excited by this.
I was like kind of felt like, now, you know,
we're in a little bit of a big bang right now,
even though it doesn't seem like it because the totalitarian
left controlling everything, But really, these other avenues, this counterculture
feels very much like it did in nineteen ninety nine
two thousand. So I decided to build a website about

(23:26):
the oscars oscar predicting called oscar watch dot com. Yeah.
It got pretty popular, and eventually over the year as
a whole industry would bloom around it, all the way
to now when I've just been kind of canceled in
my own community for a stupid thing that happened online.
But it looks like it could be the end of

(23:47):
my blogging. It wouldn't it be just so ironic that
it ends with like a cancelation after all? Oh, it's
almost to be true. You know, it's a movie, right,
But all I mean by that is that I've survived
all these years on studios advertising on my site, you know,
like I made good money. I made enough money to

(24:08):
buy cars, to take trips, to support my daughter, to
keep the business going, to pay people you know that
worked with me. And now, because of some stupid story
in the Hollywood Reporter, it looks like I will probably
not make any more money on the site, so I
have to find other ways to build up my income.

(24:30):
Oh yeah, yeah, But the Internet was perfect for me
because I was able to be everything online that I
couldn't be in real life. Right. I could be confident,
I could be articulate, I could write, I could be bold,
I could you know, I could invent things. I could
tell stories. And I love to write and I love
to move people with what I wrote. And I've found

(24:53):
over the last say, ten five years, a narrowing of
thought in creativity on the left, which is why I
started my sub stack and why I'm branching out, because
to me, it's just become so deadly boring if you
can't write about the truth, you know, right.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
What was the what was the title?

Speaker 3 (25:16):
What was the title of your third place winning screenplay?

Speaker 1 (25:20):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (25:21):
I love it. I'm still I still am planning on
writing this thing. I'm going to finish it. It was
called Indulgences, and it was about four poets who drive
across country to have a poetry reading and they meet
up with a guy, like a Texan guy who has
a gun, and he ties them up and he holds

(25:42):
them there and he makes fun of them, and he
makes them read his ponent and he's a poet too,
and so they the poetry becomes kind of the ammunition
that they're using. And the whole point of the story
was you don't really know how much you appreciate life
until you come close to death. Like these people are
so arrogant, and then he pretends he's going to kill them,
and they're so shook up by the whole affair that

(26:04):
it changes how they feel when they go back home.
That was the story. I have no idea where that
screenplay is now, but I still want to write it,
rewrite it in today's kind of situation.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
You know, No, that's yeah, that's interesting. So the guy who, uh,
do you see like a brewce Den or like a
dwite Yoakum, because I feel like a dwite Yoakum could
do that the bad he.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Would be more like it. It was I envisioned him.
You know, he was a young guy, not an older guy.
He was a young guy who was just And it's
funny because it kind of foreshadowed today. Like I didn't
know anything about anything. I was, you know what, twenty
five or something when I wrote that, twenty six, so
I didn't know anything. There were no like, there wasn't
two Americas back then, right, there was right. I mean, yeah,

(26:52):
there were Republicans and Democrats, but we weren't divided the
way we are now. And if people read that today,
they would think left and right, think liberal and uh trumper.
And it could be written that way very easily, because
I did write the poets as the arrogant, you know,
jerks who get their come ups. It was fun, it

(27:15):
was fun to write. And it was called Indulgences because
the I had heard that that that in the Catholic
Church before the Reformation, uh rich Catholics would buy absolution
with indulgences. Yes, it didn't. It doesn't really make sense
to my story now that I think about it, because

(27:36):
these they weren't really rich people, so I'd have to
reconfigure that a little bit. I very stupidly went into
it thinking, oh, this is a great title, but looking
back on it now, it doesn't quite fit. But that's a.

Speaker 3 (27:50):
Well, well, yeah, no, the the yeah I have I
have a couple of Catholic friends, and then I have
a couple of referee Reformation friends, and they, yes, the
the indulgences of the Catholic Church were. Yeah, it's very heated. Obviously,

(28:10):
you could go to Ireland and and deal with the
Protestant and Catholic uh you know, violence and see it
on that end, or you could go to Germany and
just you know, have some local beers and kind of
laugh about it now. But but it's yeah, there's there's
a lot to that. So that's kind of interesting that
you that you just kind of stumbled on. There's something

(28:34):
that's incredibly incredibly important to you know, to two different
to two different sects. There.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
No, I know. I have a friend on my substack
who's a man of faith, and he gets very bothered
when I bring up the indulgences because he thinks I
get it. I get it so wrong and I'm oversimplifying it.
It's not true. He might be a Catholic, but yeah,

(29:04):
I didn't believe me. I had no idea what I
was talking about. When I was a young person, I
just thought it's sad cool.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
Well, but I mean, but look at look at Robert
Rodriguez and Tarantino they had I mean, that's how they
built their careers by having no idea and just spitting
out what they thought was cool and and and and
it worked because they didn't overthink it at the time.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Right, And that was that era coming up in the nineties.
That was that was what I was like. It was
such an exciting time. I mean, you look at film now,
what a what a wasteland it's become. But uh, it
used to be like you know that these these ideas
would just burst forth. Back then, you had to have
some sort of representation in the studio system. You had

(29:53):
to have an agent, you had to have, you know,
a way to make money to make a movie. Robert
Rodriguez did it for famously for three thousand dollars. You
figured it out. Of course, now you don't need any
of that because anybody can make a movie because of
digital production. You know, used to be film, you had
to buy film, and that was your biggest expense, right,

(30:14):
film and camera equipment. But now you don't need that.
You can use an iPhone make a movie, you know, right,
and you can put it.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
On you someone I know, I know someone. Someone gave
me Robert Rodriguez's book Rebel Without a Crew, and I
do think eventually I would have made a movie, but
I do know that that.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
It.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
It definitely instigated in me to make my movie much sooner,
because as soon as I read that book, I was like, oh,
this this is me, I can do it. I started
writing a screenplay and nine months later I was shooting.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
Yeah, that's amazing, that's amazing. That far.

Speaker 1 (30:53):
Yeah, I called up.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
I called up a guy at Kodak that I had
because I would I had done wedding films on super
eight millimeter, and you know, would sell people on the
idea of doing their whole wedding, the idea that nobody
wants to watch a two hour wedding video, so instead,
you know, let me shoot three to four rolls of
super eight millimeter wedding you know, film, and usually one

(31:17):
black and white role and three color and then I
would give them like a twelve minute highlight reel of
their wedding. And I did that around two thousand and
two to two thousand and seven. And then I called
my friend at Kodak and I said, hey, I you
know you sold me all this this, this super eight milimeter.
You know, can you sell me some sixteen millimeter? And

(31:40):
I went on Craigslist. I bought an Airflex sixteen millimeter
and I nine months later, Yeah, I was shooting my.

Speaker 1 (31:45):
Firste there you go.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Don't when you don't have the shy gene like I do,
I could never do any of that. No, but isn't
it funny how we obsessed on film for so long?
Right to me, that was the big obstacle. And I
remember when I went to Columbia, the requirement was that
we buy a VHS camcorder. My mom very kindly bought
me one. And I remember being at Columbia thinking this

(32:09):
is exactly what I said. When I was dropping out.
I was like, you know, it's it's like they don't
even want to teach us on film. They want us
to do video. Like that's going to go anywhere. You know,
I dropped out. Of course. Now that's all it is.
It's digital. You know, I had no idea back then
that that's the way I was going to go.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
No, No, I know, no, it's it's awesome, and I
I mean, I still do love film, and I've you know,
I've after my dad died, I found some of my
dad's film footage of people hiking across the United States
in nineteen eighty and it's now in the Appalachian Trail
Museum in Pennsylvania, and me, yeah, no, there something about film.

(32:53):
I still do absolutely love. But but the equalization that
has happened where you're like, you're right, like, you know,
anybody can make a movie. But I think what none
of us anticipated is that the ideas and the willpower,

(33:15):
you know, to tell news stories. Yeah, I had no
idea that would dry up. I just thought, I mean,
I just thought that was a never ending reservoir. I know.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
But it turns out that having that obstacle making it
harder to make movies made better movies because people had
to have good ideas to sell and they had to
care about the audience, like they don't care about the
audience now. And you see that there's just an endless,
endless see of content and nothing almost none of it

(33:46):
is good. Like I get in, I watch it like
fifteen minutes, I'm like, oh, this is terrible. It's terrible.
Turn it off like. And also I will say this,
I never thought I would because I, uh, you know,
I know the director David Fincher a little bit, because
we did that little Netflix movie of my life. If
you go on Netflix and you look for a v
O I R voir, you'll see a movie, little movie

(34:08):
called The Summer of the Shark that's made about my childhood. Wow,
it's a short film. It's on Netflix. You can find it.
I worked with him on that, and he's very much
a devot of digital. He says it's just the greatest thing.
But when I watch movies on film, I can tell
the difference, you know, all those like The Godfather, Like

(34:31):
I mean, you can you can just watch a movie
on film and you know you're watching something tangible. It's
not something that can be fused with or changed, you know.
I can tell the difference between digital and it's it's
not necessarily that one is better than the other. But
I think I prefer film, although it could just be that,

(34:52):
as you say, storytelling was so much better then then
maybe it's the association of better movies. But I always
feel like what I'm watching a movie on film, I'm
always can relax a little bit. Ah, that's what I remember.
That's the look I remember.

Speaker 3 (35:08):
Well, I do think, yeah, no, I do think there
is something with There's something to be said for, you know,
the amount of takes that you could have when I
I got Kodak to donate, you know, give me like
a third reduction in my film costs when I shot
my first film, and you know, so I told people, hey,

(35:30):
we got you get one take and maybe if it's
an important scene, you get two takes. But that's it,
and there is something to be you know, there is
some otherwise Otherwise you just hear, oh, we'll just keep
shooting and keep shooting and keep rolling on digital. Well,
then there's no urgency, you know, right, You're like, what

(35:51):
if what if you were what if you're a sixteen
year old guy and you're going to ask a girl
out and you've got to knock on her door and
meet her dad and take her out. What if the
dad said, oh, that's no big deal, you can do
it five times. That just doesn't work. Most you know,
most guys growing up at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old,

(36:13):
knocking on the door of the girl of their dreams
is like, oh crap, this is I have one shot
and this is it.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Yeah. I was also thinking that, like when audiences mattered,
which they don't anymore, When audiences mattered, do you had
a bunch of people at the studio saying, does it
have to be this long? Can you cut it here?
You know, this woman has to look hot. There has
to be a you know, they had all these things

(36:42):
that they knew would would audiences would respond to. And
because they had those high standards, because they measured everything
on whether or not people came to see it, and
people would watch it. I mean, you know, they dug
their own hole when they made it about opening weekend
that that helped kill it. When they made it about
superhero movies, that helped kill it, and people were just

(37:05):
they just went to the movies like they were going
to an amusement park. But you could never I don't
think you can ever go wrong if you put your
faith in the free market and you go by what
people want to pay to see, I mean, superhero movies notwithstanding,
let's just take that out of the conversation for a minute,

(37:26):
and I'm talking about when I was a kid. You know,
if you look back in nineteen seventy six, nineteen seventy seven.
You look at the box office, you look at what
movies were in theaters. You see the array, the variety.
They're all good man, all of them. Yeah. Every so often,
you know, you see a dud. Some of these movies
weren't that great, but it was something to do on
a Saturday night. People would go to the movies. I

(37:48):
lived in the movie theaters in my childhood. That's all
I did was watch movies. I grew up watching them.
It's how I learned everything in life. I learned from movies.
And so, you know, it's been devastating to watch that
Go Away. It's gone right?

Speaker 3 (38:05):
It is that that great line from Steve Martin in
Grand Canyon. Doesn't he say something like, uh see. That's
when he's talking to Danny Glover and he says, see,
that's your problem. He says, everything and everything in life
can be learned from the movies.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
Yeah, right, I mean when they used to tell good stories. Right,
Like what was I watching the other day? I was watching? First?
I watched Chinatown because I think I'm gonna do a
video essay about Chinatown about the line. Forget it, Jake,
It's Chinatown because there used to be these movies where
one line, you know, would open up a whole universe

(38:43):
of ideas, and that was one of them. You're gonna
need a bigger boat, you know. Here's looking at you, kid. Frankly,
my dear, I don't give a damn like you know,
those kinds of lines and movies. We don't have them anymore, obviously,
you know.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Yeah, you're right, show yeah, show me, show me the money.
You can't handle the truth.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
You can't handle the truth? Yes, right, these are awesome, great.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
Come out to the coast. How if you laughs?

Speaker 3 (39:13):
You know, Bruce Willis, I mean, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
I love I mean, you know, I love that. And
I think of that line forget it Jacob's Chinatown all
the time, all and and what about follow the money,
you know, from all the president's men, like right, I mean,
there's so many of them that, you know, my entire life,
and I keep I keep hearing this voice in my
head say, forget it, shake it's Chinatown, like it's over right.

Speaker 3 (39:41):
You had a.

Speaker 2 (39:42):
Great run, you know, this is you were lucky to
be growing up in the in the speaking of the
fourth Turney in the baby boomer era, because they might
be useless and horrifying to a lot of people now,
But they created some of the best culture this country
has ever known. And I got to live in that.
I got to see those movies and read those books,

(40:03):
and to see it all go away and be replaced
by this awful, dogmatic, you know, woke crap is heartbreaking.
But I also have to think, you know, you're in
a generation on your way out. The future doesn't belong
to you. So you can't sit there and shout at clouds,
you know, you have to just find another way to,

(40:24):
you know, get that what you used to get from movies.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
Right, And yeah, and it's funny that the seventies, I mean,
you know, so many problems with the seventies. I mean,
there's so many problems with the seventies as a decade.
And you know, I was just in the middle of
Gen X, born in seventy one. But oh, not repaying

(40:51):
attention until you know the gas lines, you know, barely
just vague memories of the gas lines and vague memories
of you know, of my first song that I heard
on the radio that I recognized was a pop song
was was Me and Julio down by the schoolyard. Yeah,

(41:11):
so Paul Simon was, you know, just a part of
my life. But but and then growing up really you know,
coming of age in the New Wave and the Blondie
and the and the depeche Mode of the early mid eighties.
But it's it's funny how it's just bizarre, how the
seventies had so many problems as far as you know,

(41:34):
the environment and economics, and yet my gosh, look at
the amount of art that was produced, both film, both
film and books and and music. I mean, I don't
I don't know if there's I don't know if there's
a better decade than the seventies. And yet it was this,

(41:56):
It was this morning after hangover from the sixties.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, and it was the I mean, you know, I've
gone over this so many times. I sound like a
broken record. But it was the counterculture, right because the
boomers broke free from traditional religion in the nineteen sixties,
because their parents were coming out of World War two,
the last fourth turning, when society was as aligned in

(42:24):
the utopian fifties as it is now, and we had
government and we had culture together right with the blacklists
and MacArthur era and not reflecting this Americana, this perfect
nuclear family, this ideal American life. But it left a
lot of people behind, right black community for one thing.

(42:45):
But you know, and people started to want to fight
for their rights. Something was uncorked heading into the sixties.
I think it was John F. Kennedy's election in nineteen
sixty I think that's what uncorked it. And I think
something about this young, hip, cool president that wasn't your typical, boring, old,
you know politician. I think it ignited something. Plus, the

(43:09):
Civil Rights era was starting in there in their administration,
the Kennedys. So that's what really did I was. I
just listened to the audio book of two thousand and one,
right Arthur C. Clark, and he wrote that audiobook concurrently
with the screenplay with Stanley Krubrick's help to make this
movie two thousand and one and nineteen sixty eight. Imagine

(43:30):
nineteen sixty eight. They come up with this movie like
it's an incredible movie. It's mind blowing. Go ahead, yeah, sorry, No,
I mean.

Speaker 3 (43:42):
The fact that the fact that that C. S. Lewis
and John F. Kennedy and Aldus Huxley died on the
same day, right November twenty second nineteen sixty three is bizarre.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Yeah, but you know it right, and it uncorked something
the psyche of America that change things. And so these
these boom boomers, you know, they were like, Okay, well,
we're going to break free from traditional religion, which gives
us all the answers, and we're going to go start
asking questions. Right, We're going to strike forth and we're
going to find out. And it was in that exploring,

(44:18):
in that searching that all the greatest books and all
the greatest movies were made. All the rock bands like
we don't have led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, like
we don't have anything close to that now. And and
so we've come all the way full circle now because
now the left is the side that has the answer.
If you notice, every movie you watch now has the answer.

(44:40):
They're not asking questions, they have the answer. Their only
problem is all the people that won't go along with.

Speaker 1 (44:46):
Them, right.

Speaker 3 (44:49):
And it's it's so interesting because even when I was
growing up, it was the big deal was to like
to ask the right questions. That was the was the
big deal was was you know, Alden, there's there's no wrong,
there's no wrong, questions. The only thing wrong is to
not ask the question. And there's there's no stupid questions.

(45:13):
And now it's like, oh, any question you ask is wrong.
Why are you even asking that question?

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Yeah, you should just go along.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
And I you know, I just don't know if they
I don't know if they've really realized how hardcore Gen
X is like Gen X, Generation X is is not just.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Little the best generation. We are the best generation. Where
this we're the awesome, coolest ones.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
Yeah, I mean when when when the when the slacker
movement came out in the late eighties early nineties, whether
it was the book by Douglas whatever his name is, Slacker,
whether it was the movie Slacker, and then Daston confused.
It was this, you know, this idea that, oh, well,
you guys are just slackers. And I remember thinking, well,

(46:02):
I'm working two jobs at five twenty five minimum wage
just to pay the rent. I don't know who you're
talking about a slacker, but I'm not a slacker. Like
And now you look at all the things that are created,
whether it's you know, whether it's Google or or Facebook,
love it or hate it, A lot of these things

(46:23):
are created. I mean, Zuckerberg maybe a borderline millennial, I guess,
but but a lot of them.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
He's definitely millennial. Fourth turn situation happening big time with
that guy.

Speaker 3 (46:34):
No, it's true, it's true. But but I just think
a lot of a lot of the I don't know,
a lot of the zeitgeist that has been set in
the in the late nineties, through the you know, through
the financial crisis.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
You know.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
I just I just think of the the the Will
Ferrells and the Luke Wilson's. I just think of all
the gen X culture or that has been set, and
I just have to have to think that it was
created by people that knew that the that the world
already assumed, you know, you guys are nothing and so exactly.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Really we were. Nobody thought of us like we were.
We were the we were the We were the people
standing on the sidelines observing right and it works now.
Like I love Bridget Fantasy. I don't know if you
follow her on Twitter, but she's so funny. She's such
a typical gen x er. She's always uh, you know,
she's not partisan, she's always but her jokes and her

(47:37):
observations to me are just so quintessential gen X all
the way. But but I look at these people like
Ben Stiller and all these guys, it's like you'd think
that they would be the ones standing up and being
courageous right now, but they are not. They are too
concerned about their status. They're going to play the game.

Speaker 1 (47:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
They are all cowards. None of them will stand up
to what's going on right now. Because the left found religion.
I think they found it in Barack Obama. They found rapture,
they found a collective sense of purpose. You know, this
is this is my purpose, this is my We're going
to make the world a more equal place, one marginalized

(48:20):
person at a time. And if you don't do that,
you're a very bad person. You know, You're a racist,
You're a homophobe, you're a transphobe. And people are too
afraid to be that bad thing, especially in show business.
So it's left up to people on the right like
Matt Walsh, who is part of the Daily Wire, Conservative,

(48:42):
very much a religious conservative. In fact, he's way too
hardcore for me. But he's funny and his latest movie
is very counterculture, very subversive. It's called Am I a Racist?
And he dresses up and he goes to these you know,
these groups where women are women are trying to absolve
themselves of their sins of whiteness. And so he's posing

(49:06):
as this left as he has this like like long ponytail.
It's hilarious, and he's you know, he's talking to them
in a way that he pretends to be part of
what they're doing. And and so that is the kind
of art that I'm used to, right, that sort of
speaking truth to power, poking you know at the beast.

(49:30):
That that's what I like. I like people who are
prepared to push that envelope. I just wish it was happening,
you know, not just happening on the right. I wish
people on the left were brave enough to do that.
But they can't. You know, they'll they'll ruin their careers.
You know, they won't have a career, they'll be blacklisted.

Speaker 3 (49:49):
Well, and it's it's funny that when you think of
the movie Reality Bites with Ben Stiller, it's like he's
still actually stuck in that role that he was in
Reality Bites.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I barely remember it, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
I mean he was he was just the corporate guy
working for like an MTV type corporation, just to tow
the company line and not get too edgy, but get
a little edgy. But you know, yeah, yeah, it's just
it's just funny that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
I was just gonna say, the only person that I've
been surprised by in Hollywood, literally, the only one has
been uh, Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins is the only person
that I've seen say we can't hate half the country.
We can't keep living like this. You guys have to

(50:40):
get over it and we all have to try to
get along. He's the only one I've seen do that right,
and it has made me a forever fan of his.
Good for him, you know, for standing up against what's
happening now.

Speaker 3 (50:53):
No, you're right, you're right. Yep.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
Well let's yeah, are we are?

Speaker 2 (50:58):
We running out of time? Now? We just just robling
on and on, aren't we?

Speaker 3 (51:02):
No? I know, I feel like you and I could,
you know, we could talk about screenplays and Tarantino and movies.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
All right, let's move on. What's the next question the couch?

Speaker 3 (51:11):
Well, what I want to like, I said, what I
want to talk about is I am really interested in
when you and I'm doing air quotes, when you woke
up in the summer of twenty twenty after the George
Floyd riots, and you realize that, Okay, I thought we
were in a global pandemic, but now, all of a sudden,

(51:32):
the global pandemic doesn't matter if you've got the right
reason to protest. I was that I want to know,
was that a Was it a literal wake up moment,
like somebody clicking on the lights, or did you wake
up one morning and just go what.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
Well, what happened?

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Was?

Speaker 1 (51:52):
I mean?

Speaker 2 (51:52):
I was really you know, as a single mom, I
had one daughter, and I was making her dreams come
true by sending her to NYU go into extreme financial
debt to do so. By the way, I might as
well have bought a house, I'm not kidding, and an
expensive house too, like a house in California, not just
a house in West Virginia or whatever. But I thought,

(52:15):
I'm gonna do this because I want this for her,
you know, and her senior year of college she had
to come home and sit with me at and miss
her senior year and then miss her graduation. She had
her graduation on my balcony. So I was already kind
of pissed off by that. But we were doing our
duty because we thought everybody had to sacrifice for the

(52:36):
war effort.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
You know.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
So I was putting on my masks, I was selling
my own masks, I was making my own owned the
hand sanitizer. I even have a picture of myself driving
to the store and my shield and my hazmat suit
because we were told we had to stand like six
feet apart, and I was going to do that and
take a picture of it and put it on Instagram
so everybody could say, oh, aren't you a good soldier

(52:58):
for the cause. And then Memorial Day comes and boom,
it's over. Millions of people from all over the world
pour into the streets. And so what I expected to
happen was panic. I expected people to say, wait a second,
this is a global pandemic. You can't be out there
as they've been doing, you know, for months, chastising Trump

(53:21):
supporters for going to the beach and going to church
and going to rallies. And now it was like, oh,
it's fine because they trotted out experts to say that
systemic racism is a bigger deal than And that's really
when everything changed. That summer, that's when everything changed. Everything
changed the mass formation took hold. When people decided to

(53:42):
go along with that. That was the moment when they
would go along with anything. But for me, I was
a Joe Biden supporter. I was an ardent, very passionate
Joe Biden's supporter early on, and I fancied myself someone
who could predict how the elections were going to turn out,
because I'd on one hundred bucks predicting Trump would win.

(54:02):
And so I kept warning them, you can't be too crazy,
or you're going to put Trump back in power. And
I knew from nineteen seventy two that part of why
Nixon won in a landslide was that there were protests
and violent protests and scared the Americans, the silent majority.
So I kept saying to people, you know, don't you
think that we should do something? You know, and this
is gonna Trump's gonna win because he's going to be

(54:24):
the law and order guy. And that's the thing that
shocked me, because I remember when Barry Weiss had Tom
Cotton write an essay that said send in the troops,
that the protests couldn't get be controlled, bringing the National Guard,
and the reaction on Twitter from all my friends and
everybody I knew to shame and scold the New York

(54:48):
Times for that op ed and to call for them
to take it down and to destroy the reputation of
Barry Weiss, who would then leave the New York Times
and launch a revolution. Not some stuck She's fine, But
I'm just saying, like, at the time, I was horrified
by the fact that everybody was so willing to go
along with this lie. And that's when I realized that

(55:11):
I was not being told the truth. That was the moment,
and I thought, what else am I not being told
the truth about? And so that sent me on a
journey quote unquote to find out the truth about everything
that I didn't know. And since I'd been on the
left for my entire life, heading over to the right
and learning what they knew and listening to them lots

(55:34):
of smart people. Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, You know, I
began listening to heterodox writers, and my mind, just in
my old age, I had a like a mind blowing
experience realizing everything that I didn't know. But everybody that

(55:55):
I know in real life and online is they're all
still back in the bubble, you know, And so they
can't relate to what I'm doing at all. They think
I've lost my mind.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
So it was in the days. It was in the
days and weeks after the Berry Weis piece.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
It was that's when I started this substackic. That's what
I started to realize that what I thought was going
to happen, that Joe Biden wouldn't win because of the violence,
wasn't going to happen because they were going to change
the narrative and they were going to force the media
to say mostly peaceful protests. And when I tried to

(56:35):
post about stuff that I saw violence that I saw
horrible violence, horrible burning of buildings and businesses being destroyed.
I was called a racist for doing so, and they
said that I, you know, how dare you care more
about property than people? And I was like, well, how
can this be happening? How can this be happening? And

(56:57):
it was watching them manipulate reality that really did it
for me. And I at that point is when I
started to watch start watching Trump rally because I remember
I heard a Trump speech in Mount Rushmore where he
called it out, He called everything out, he called out
cancel culture, he called out the protests, he called out

(57:19):
the violence, and I thought, Wow, that's the one person
in America who has the guts to tell it like
it is. He's the only person who does. And so
that made me curious about him, and so I just
started watching his rallies, you know, and spending time in
that world and finding out everything that I didn't know
about before, this entire universe that I had no clue about.

(57:44):
And that's not to say that my politics changed, because
they haven't. Really, It's just that my tribal affiliation, my
mindset changed. I realized that we're not the good guys
anymore on the left. We're not We're not the good guys.
We're the bad guys, were the totalitarians, and and you know,

(58:04):
I just started writing on this sub stack a little
bit by a little bit, and sooner or later all
that stuff seeped out into public. And that's why they
wrote that Hollywood Reporter piece about me, How an Oscar
blogger became a Maga Darling is the is the headline?
So there you go, right, that's my story.

Speaker 3 (58:24):
No, so yeah, there's no there's so much there. Oh gosh, yeah,
well let's talk about let's talk about how did you so?
I you know, I'm my mom was the standard kind
of Reagan conservative, and oh yeah, my dad was a

(58:48):
you know, a standard environmentalist save the redwoods guy. So
even though my dad wasn't around, I was still I
kind of, I think, lucked out in being a little
bit like I always want both sides to see something
about the other side in themselves, you know, because I

(59:10):
always wanted my parents to get along. My earliest memories
of the divorce was of arguing over paperwork and divorce
and when I was five, six, seven years old, And
so I kind of always just want both sides, even
though I'm very opinionated about certain issues, I always want
both sides to see something in themselves in the other side.

(59:31):
I just I don't know. And so I think in
a weird way that the divorce has helped me to
kind of want to be just to be a little
bit of a human, you know, presence in the middle
of these two crazy, you know, competing arguments and you

(59:55):
know this, the world's going to end if this person
gets voted in the.

Speaker 1 (59:59):
Yeah, yeah, but I mean it's just crazy.

Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
But so what happened to me is I think in
August and I just thanked the Lord above that that
in around August of twenty nineteen, I was researching something
from Gene Twiny about you know, generations, and I always
have loved to think about and you know, work through

(01:00:27):
the generations. And I stumbled upon the House Straw book
called Generations. I didn't know anything about the Fourth Turning.
I hadn't heard about the Fourth Turning, but I bought used,
you know, for like six ninety nine, this huge, huge
freaking book called Generations by House and Straw, and I

(01:00:49):
ingested that thing, like, you know, like I was in
my you know, first first semester in college, and I
just ate it up. I all my friends that I know,
they were all sick of hearing about it. Dude, we're
sick of hearing about the generations theory. But I just
I was like, this makes so much sense, all this
stuff about the silent and the boomers and the you know,

(01:01:13):
every eighty to ninety five years something happens, and like,
I don't know it just it made so much sense
to me. So I wanted to ask you, what, how
did you find that the Neil how the Fourth Turning theory?
How did you find it?

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
Well? I tell you, I wish I had found it
in the nineties. I was way too much of an
idiot back then ton't even know about that, or even
think about that, or have any sort of awareness of
it at all, or even be curious about it. I
certainly didn't have any clue that this sort of thing existed.
But I well, when I was a good liberal, you

(01:01:55):
know I was, I would do my due diligence and
write about all the bad people on the road right.
And one of those people is Steve Bannon, who helped
Trump win in twenty sixteen via a very clever strategy
that they worked out together. Steve Bannon's really smart. But
I had heard that he was a bad fascist, that
he was a far right racist fascist who was going

(01:02:17):
to bring fascism to America, and I was investigating him,
and I ended up writing a story about him, saying
that because I had been reading Yasha Mounk on the
Persuasion site and I was I believed him when he
said that Steve Bannon was a fascist and that they
were part of a global far right movement that was

(01:02:38):
going to bring fascism anti immigrant fascist movement to the
US like in Hungary and Marine lapenn In France, Victor Orban,
that sort of thing. And so I in researching Steve Bannon,
I you know, of course you're going to find out
about the Fourth Turning, because that's all I ever knew

(01:02:59):
about the Fourth Turning was that Steve Bannon had made
a movie about it, and he did. He made it
a very like hyperbolic, dramatic documentary about the Fourth Turning.
That I watched it, I thought, Wow, he's insane. When
I watched it, it seems so insane to me. The
idea is in it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
Of course it doesn't because I understand it better. But
I was trying to find out information about him. I
was trying to find the smoking gun that would show
me that he's a racist and a fascist, and of
course I never found it. I never found the smoking
gun because that isn't who Steve Bannon is. And so
the more I found out about him, I wasn't quite
ready to change my mind yet. But I was intrigued

(01:03:39):
by this Fourth Turning idea. I had noticed that Steve
Bannon was able to predict things that I saw happen,
like when Trump got elected, he said that the Democrats
are going to take the House and they're going to
impeach Trump. And he knew that without even knowing what
they were going to impeach him for. But he was
one hundred percent right. And so I became intrigued by him,
and I thought, Okay, well, I'm gonna read this Fourth

(01:04:00):
Turning and I'm going to find out what he's talking about.
And that's when I read it. And of course, because
by the time I got to it, we were heading
into the Fourth Turning. Right when you found it, we
were nowhere near the Fourth Turning, because if you found
it all the way back in generations, you know, you're
we're not anywhere near that point yet. But I read

(01:04:22):
it and I thought, oh wow, we're about to head
into this really terrible time. I better figure this out.
What's going on, you know? And it turned out to
be kind of a you know, an illuminating experience. The
first book. I'm not as big a fan of the
second book, I will admit, But the first book, the
Fourth Turning, written in nineteen ninety seven, I found too

(01:04:45):
accurate to be believed. Like there's talk of pandemic, there's
talk of social unrest. I mean, they got it so right.
I mean, it was shocking how right it was, you know,
and as human beings, you know, we're uncomfortable with uncertainty.
We're uncomfortable with not having the answers to things. Even

(01:05:06):
if there isn't an answer and it doesn't make sense,
we'll often find a way to make it make sense
in our minds because we can't handle it otherwise. I'll
use this as an example. A lot of people listening
to this might disagree with me, but I'll you know,
and I'm not arriving at any conclusion here. But let's
just take the Kennedy assassination for example. Whether or not

(01:05:26):
you believe that the Lee Harvey Oswold acted alone, our
brains are hardwired to say he didn't act alone. There
had to be a conspiracy, because that is just too
hard to accept that some loser guy could get up
there in that window and take a one in a
million shot and kill the president popular president. It was

(01:05:47):
just really hard to believe, and so our minds naturally
want to lean in the direction of having answers. And
I think the trouble for Neil how now, as I
listened to interviews with him, as he doesn't have the answer,
he's worked out this theory, and he knows why history
turns and changes the way it is, but he can't
tell us like, the Democrats will win and we'll be

(01:06:08):
in a totalitarian nightmare for the next twenty years. And
he can't say, no, the populace are going to win
and the whole empire is going to collapse, which is
what I hope for. Like, he can't tell us that
because it's not a predictive model, the fourth turning. It's
more about the generations how they age out. Like the
boomers are on their last gas right now, and they're

(01:06:30):
clinging to these to the young and they're sort of
betraying every principle they once had because they want to
be well thought of on their way out. And the
millennials are becoming the new boomers. And you can see
it all around you with AI and social media, and
I mean, they've completely changed the world already, the millennials, right,

(01:06:52):
And so it's a fascinating theory and it's interesting to
look at and think about, but if you're looking for
definitive as in it, you're not going to find them.

Speaker 3 (01:07:05):
Right and yeah, and.

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
The reason that I at least for me that it
was so helpful was that literally those first that first
week of the pandemic. Rather than panic, I just thought, oh,
oh wait, this is what they were talking about. This
is that fourth turning thing. I got to go reread

(01:07:33):
that again. But it took it took me out of
you know, it took me out of the reality of Okay,
there's a shortage of toilet paper or or you know whatever.
Like it just took me out of it. And I
felt like I was, you know, on the space station,

(01:07:54):
just going around the orbit looking down, and so I
wasn't I just wasn't as concerned or freaked out about
you know, oh there were two hundred thousand new cases
this week. It was just like, oh, okay, well but
this had to happen, like, you know, the amount of
years and this, you know, yeah, it just it It

(01:08:17):
really helped me to remove any you know, emotion connected
to my own my own mortality. That's just how it helped.
How it helped me. And then and I and I
tried tried so hard to let people in, but it
was just few and far between because people were just

(01:08:39):
so invested so early on in the in the fear,
and and you know, and then obviously reading in the
Generations that you know, I always felt like a nomad
before I found the book, and then to find out
that we're called the nomad generation, it was like, oh, well, okay,
of course, of course with the nomad generation, I've always
felt like a nomad.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Yeah yeah, same always yeah yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:05):
So well so I only have a couple of questions left.
But given given the reason again air quotes cancelation, whether
it sticks or not, what what role do you see
yourself in going forward? And or does it matter who

(01:09:26):
wins in November?

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
Well, I I dread a November under the Democrats, but
I also know that their empire is collapsing. It's not
a matter of if, but when that's how I see it,
that's the only way that I can sort of reconcile
with what's about to happen, because I can't stand this
corrupt party, and I can't stand that they've been in power,

(01:09:52):
and I can't stand that they've weaponized the government to
go after the political enemies. I can't stand that they've
been lying to the people, and I can't stand that
everybody's going along with it, and I can't stand that
everything's been ruined by these people. I would love it
if Trump would win. Nothing would make me happier, and
not because I agree with his policies at all, but

(01:10:15):
because what we need is to be shaken out of
this mess. We need to be shaken up and shaken
out of it, the stupor that we're in, and we
need to take the government back and put it in
the hands of the people. But I don't know that
I think it's going to go that way, not after
what we've seen in twenty twenty and twenty twenty two.
They've built a full proof method of winning elections, and

(01:10:36):
it feels insurmountable to me. The amount of money they have,
the amount of media they have, the amount of wild
eyed zealots who will drive around and collect all the
ballots they need. I just don't know that the GOP
has it in them that they want to win as
badly as the Democrats do. So I have to watch
all my Maga friends that I've come to really love

(01:10:57):
and feel protective of, watch them have their heart broken
when Trump loses. But everybody can take solace in the
fact that Kamala Harris will fail spectacularly in this job
and it will bring the entire Democratic Party crashing down,
and that that might be fun to watch. As for me,

(01:11:21):
you know, I don't know, because I've eked out this
little place for myself. And if my oscar futures are
dried up and and you know, I don't know where
it's going to go, but I expect that I'll probably
be headed more into the podcast zone. I really like
doing podcasts. I like writing and producing them. And the

(01:11:43):
more creative I can become with those, I think that
I can. I can bring an audience enough to make
a little money, you know, support myself. But my goal
is to just stay alive, stay alive so that I
can be there for my daughter when she starts having
kids and I can be your grandma. That's my goal.
Stay alive for my daughter's sake. That's the only thing

(01:12:04):
I'm really looking forward to, you know. Stay alive for
my dogs, stay alive for my daughter. Everything else I
have to let go of, you know, because I don't
have control over it. I wish I did, how about you.

Speaker 3 (01:12:17):
Well, yeah, no, that's a good one, I mean. And
the Bible it does say that he who seeks to
save his life will lose it, and he who loses
his life for my sake, for jesus sake will gain
the world. And one of my one of my favorite verses.

(01:12:41):
And it is true that. I mean, even in movies,
even in almost every movie, the character has to let
go of everything that they thought they were going to
stand on, you know, to storm the castle, to get
into the finale, get into act three, whatever. They they

(01:13:03):
usually have to let go of something, something has to die,
the old person has to go away, and they have
to realize that that that they knew, you know, that
they knew the truth, The truth was in them all along.
And so I think there is something in that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
I do. Yeah, I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:13:28):
It could go yeah, it absolutely could go either way.
I do have to think. I just I don't know.
I just can't think that the Democrats can continue to
piss off the amount of people that they're pissing off
and they're pushing to I mean, just think about this,

(01:13:51):
if you just if you're a political just for a minute,
it doesn't matter if you're listening to this right now,
and I don't care if you're left or right. If
you're pissing off, you're pissing off Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy Junior,
Cornell West, Jill Stein, Tulsea Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, those all

(01:14:13):
those people you have marginalized and told them you don't
belong because you're not towing the line like you. You
do have to be worried that you're you're creating like
a dream team on the other side.

Speaker 2 (01:14:28):
Absolutely, and it's a it's coming down to a ground
game and if MAGA can get out there and they
can push that ground game in a way that I mean.
First of all, thank you for the quotes in the Bible.
I find that to be very interesting. I wish I
had more knowledge in that area. I do listen sometimes

(01:14:48):
to that Bible podcast that I have, but I don't
know it nearly enough to be able to quote scripture
like you do. But I do think that at the
end of the day, people, as the Left has proved,
the Left has proved over throughout this turning, that they
need that too. They don't have religion, but they went

(01:15:10):
ahead and invented a religion because they need it so badly.
Because it wasn't enough to make a bunch of money
and become successful, and it wasn't enough to create great art.
It wasn't enough to get on psychmeds and go to
therapy and have kids and being a narcissist. They needed more,
and they found more in Barack Obama and identity politics,

(01:15:32):
and that is now their religion because they needed it.
But I'll take Christianity over that any day, because at
least Christianity is thousands of years old, right, and it's
rooted in scripture, and people have been thinking about it
and talking about it for a very long time. And
it doesn't leave anybody out. In fact, it's the opposite.

(01:15:53):
It welcomes people in right the left. Their religion leaves
a lot of people out. Though this is our country.
You have the choice of going along with us or
you're out. But it's going to come down to the
ground game regardless. And I'm certainly going to do everything

(01:16:13):
that I can to help with this cause of taking
these people out of power. But at the end of
the day, you have to find a way to live
without that politics. You have to find a way to
be happy and live your life outside of that because look, man,
as you know, if you've lived a long time, you
realize that things change, things turn. What you think is

(01:16:35):
the most important thing in the world right now won't
even matter at all in a couple of years. So
you know, time is short and you have to be
able to live in the moment. Live your life too,
because that's my goal. Stay off of Twitter, you know,
don't get caught up in these petty dramas. Live your
life because it's slipping away and it's gone in an instant.

Speaker 3 (01:16:59):
Right, Yeah, rewatched Dead Poet Society if you haven't.

Speaker 2 (01:17:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go, There you go. And
that's the other thing is like we you know, you
and I anybody who has the energy and the desire
can write novels, you know, write novels and write create
art that people can find their way to that can
illuminate them, that'll be around longer. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:22):
Yeah, So I only have a couple of questions left.
I do want to quote Lieutenant Dan from you know
Gary soonicsee from from Forrest Company. It's it's a good
segue since we've just been talking about but have you
found Jesus?

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
I have not yet trying but not got there.

Speaker 3 (01:17:43):
Okay, Well, if we ever meet in person, maybe I will.
I'll be the one to show you. Sure, So the
best place that people can follow you is on sub stack.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Yep Sasha Stone dot substack dot com. That's where I
do most of my writing and I'll put links there.
You can find links to anything else that I write.
I usually post it there.

Speaker 3 (01:18:13):
Okay, the best question I could think of, because I
do love to think of good questions, The best question
I could think of for you is because you have such,
you know, such a rich and honest and organic background.

(01:18:33):
And I think that's what a lot of people resonate with,
is that you cannot fake. And you know, one of
my favorite verses in the Bible is this, This is
if you can't explain a lot of things, you just
have to share who you are, right. And it was
referenced in the great David Fincher movie The Game with
Michael Douglas is John nine twenty five. Is this this

(01:18:58):
man that was blind and Jesus put mud on his
on his eyes and that he could see. And then
the Pharisees came and they they they wanted to pin
him down about Jesus. Well, you know, was was this
man where his where his parents? Sinners? What really happened?
And he just kept pushing back, and I think it

(01:19:18):
was three or four times he pushed back. Finally, in
John nine twenty five, he says, whether this man Jesus,
whether he has a sinner or not, I do not know.
All I know is that once I was blind, and
now I can see HM and and so I think

(01:19:40):
that's one of the reasons that people resonate with your
story is that you don't you don't have to it.
You don't have to explain something for other people to
replicate your journey. All you know is that the life
you grew up in was like Taylor made hard or

(01:20:01):
liberal all your life and it all blew up. And
that's you know, that's what that's your story. And the
truth that came out of that summer of twenty twenty
is is the you know, the power of telling the truth.
Like we all know when a little kid says, you know,
Mo'm sorry, Mom, I lied, I didn't do you know,

(01:20:23):
she didn't do it. I did it. You know that
that power of the truth, you know, is always gonna
rise to the surface. And so the best question I
could think of is is, how do you think, again,
looking at yourself from outside yourself, how do you think

(01:20:46):
at this moment anybody that listening, Because I'm thinking of
people in my life that I really do care about,
I legitimately care about, that have not been red pilled yet.
What how do you think that completely died in the wall?
Obama is the savior of the Second Coming? What's the

(01:21:10):
best way that they can be red pilled or at least,
like I've talked to you about before, maybe they can
just be orange pilled. Maybe it's just a stepping stone,
But what's the best way that someone can be orange
or red pilled? In European?

Speaker 2 (01:21:26):
Well, since I know a lot of people on the
left and I know how futile, the conversation is, humanity
is the key. You should never This is what changed
my mind is you should never allow anyone to tell
you that you have to align with them on against

(01:21:50):
a whole group of people and hate them, and that
to dehumanize them. Right, I saw that we were dehumanizing
and still are dehumanizing Trump and dehumanizing his supporters. And
that's never going to be the right thing to do. Never,
not at any point in history has it been the
right thing to do to dehumanize a person and his supporters.

(01:22:13):
And the only reason they're doing it is because they're
cause playing this fantasy that they're fighting the Confederacy, that
they're in a civil war fighting Hitler and the Confederacy,
and that that gives them license to dehumanize people who
are the nicest people in the world, right, nicest people

(01:22:33):
you've ever met. No, they didn't go to a lot
of these universities. They don't speak the same language, they
don't believe the same things. Maybe they're pro life, maybe
they're Christian, maybe they believe in traditional marriage, whatever it is.
You have to be accepting of them, and you have
to humanize them, and to do anything other than that
is immoral. And so that's the way in for anyone,

(01:22:58):
because once they realize that they're caught up in this thing,
that they're the bad guys and they're on the other side,
then they are the Southern Whites and the Jim Crow South.
They are the good Germans and Nazi Germany. They are
the Puritans hanging witches in Salem. They're those angry women
that didn't want to share their college or their public

(01:23:20):
school with black students. The hate on their faces is
the same hate we see now. They can dress it
up with joy all they want, and they can pretend
that they're the side of tolerance and love, but they're
not because this broughts their soul. And if they can
fix that, if my mother or my friends who see

(01:23:40):
Trump as Satan is the devil, is the most evil
person to ever walk the face of the earth, give
me a break. Those of us who grew up in
the eighties, we know who Trump is, right, He's none
of those things. So you are destroying yourself over your
hatred of this person, and you're allowing the best things
about being alive, the best thing about being an American

(01:24:02):
and a human being, to destroy you. So that's the
best thing I can offer them. I can't talk about,
you know, because they're so transfixed or so brainwashed by
MSNBC in the New York Times and n NBC News.
It's their normal, right, What terrible thing did he do today?
What did he say? What awful thing did he say

(01:24:23):
about immigrants? You know? And they did the same thing
throughout history when they wanted to justify to humanizing exactly
the same thing. They lie, and they brainwash people into
hating and that's wrong. And I knew that was wrong,
and whatever it does to me, I had to stand

(01:24:43):
on the other side.

Speaker 3 (01:24:44):
Of that.

Speaker 2 (01:24:47):
And that will always be true for me, and it
should always be true for everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:24:55):
Yes, so that's my speech. Yeah, no, yeah, no, that's great.
I think that's a good I think that's a good
place to end. The place I think the place I
will end is that, you know, I moved back from
Nashville to California a couple of years ago. I left

(01:25:15):
California during the pandemic because I didn't know how long
they were going to stay crazy. And I really enjoyed Nashville.
But my mom, her husband passed away, and it was
you know, navigating the senior living situation was just too difficult.
So I came back and caregiver for my mom, who

(01:25:36):
was a single mom and raised me. And it's incredibly rewarding.
And but but trying to find the trying to find
things we can watch that are safe is a challenge.
And I'm just reminded as I as I watch it
with my Silent Era generation mom, who was born in

(01:25:58):
nineteen forty one, born before Pearl Harbor. You know, she's
very compliant. She's assumes that the government is doing the
right thing. She assumes that we all are going to
work together for a good because that's that was her
early life during World War Two, was that we're all
going to work together and and I couldn't be more

(01:26:20):
opposite and with Generation X, but is we've always been
able to go forward because we laugh at our differences.
And there was My mom was watching an episode of
All in the Family just the other day where Archie Bunker,

(01:26:40):
I swear, this is so funny. If anyone's listening, you
really should google this. Archie Bunker and George Jefferson, who
didn't have his own show yet, they're at a party
and they're celebrating the marriage of Jefferson's son, who's black,
to a white girl, and it's actually the black parents

(01:27:04):
who are upset at the you know, at the at
the racial makeup of the of the wedding, of the marriage.
And Archie Bunker is is so disappointed he goes over
to the drink to the bar, and then George Jefferson
is so disappointed, despondent, he goes over to the drink
art and they and they have this moment where Archie

(01:27:27):
and George Jefferson are having a drink together because they're
both just shaking their heads at what, you know, what
the world, what this new world looks like. But but
that's that's how we used to be as a country.

Speaker 2 (01:27:42):
Yeah, but you make me think that, like, how funny
it would be if they made a ship sitcom that had,
you know, a funny Trump supporting comedian. There are a
lot of them, you know, as they are one of
the characters, and then you had like a funny person
from the left the other character, and they could just

(01:28:02):
do what they did in All in the Family, just
make those jokes and everybody would watch, because all the
Trump supporters would watch to watch the Trump supporter be
mean to the other guy, and and the and the
other side would would watch. You know, they don't do
that on Saturday Live. They don't do that in any
culture because they've decided that they're just going to wall
themselves off in their own little bubble and everybody else

(01:28:24):
can just fend for themselves out there. You know, it's
really disgusting personally think it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:30):
But yeah, that would be nice something. Yeah, it's something
that Key and Peel could do if they if they
wanted to.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
But he's so but they're so afraid of humanizing Trump
that they can't do that. But if anybody did that
they'd have a huge hit on their hands, right.

Speaker 3 (01:28:51):
Yeah, yeah, no, I'll definitely put a link to that episode.
It's just it's just so awesome to watch that. Well,
if you've been listening, thank you very much. I we
got a little long winded. That's just that's just the
way I am. And uh and I know that that, Sasha.
I know when you get a couple of gen X
people and we're talking about culture and movies, you know,

(01:29:15):
this could go on for hours and hours. But but
thank you for listening. I do appreciate and Sasha, thank
you very much for for being on.

Speaker 2 (01:29:26):
Thank you Alden for asking me. It was actually really enjoyable.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (01:29:32):
Yeah. Yeah, let's well, we'll have to meet up in
person and we'll get a nice picture. But but until then,
I I hope you've enjoyed five great questions the The
Different Kind of Podcast with my interview with Sasha Stone,
and I hope you'll delve in on your own if
you're listening. I honestly I believe this. It doesn't matter

(01:29:55):
where you've come from. You need to look into Neil
Howse and and Billiam and Bill Strauss. William Strauss his
book The Fourth Turning, and you just be honest with yourself,
knowing that it was written in nineteen ninety seven, be
honest with yourself of how accurate it it has been.

(01:30:15):
And you can follow Sasha on on her substack The
Fourth Turning, you can follow me. I don't. I don't
put out a lot of podcasts and five great questions,
but I put out a little bit on I'm not
on Twitter much anymore. I got permanently suspended for a
Joe Biden meme last summer.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
No, yeah, a year.

Speaker 3 (01:30:38):
Ago about when you know, when the when the trans
girl was topless at the White House? Right, and uh,
and I apparently I always spoke the truth a little
too accurately, and I was, but I was channeling you know,
the jerk where he said, what does he see us
as a couple of boobs?

Speaker 1 (01:30:55):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:30:56):
You know you could get back on because elon Muscone's
and now.

Speaker 3 (01:30:59):
So ever, maybe I could, but I just thought I couldn't.
I couldn't miss that one. So that got me permanently bad.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
But any for boating for boating topic there.

Speaker 3 (01:31:10):
I know, gosh, yeah, I had no idea that that
would get me permanently My little tiny account, but well,
thank you very much for listening. We really, both Sasha
and I really appreciate all the audience the comments. We
really do, and and we're gonna continue in what we're

(01:31:32):
doing no matter what happens in November. And Sasha, thank
you for your insight. And please, if you're listening to this,
any comments, we're all welcome.

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):
Yes, thank you, thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (01:31:46):
Yes, all right, well over and out, thanks everyone.

Speaker 2 (01:31:51):
Okay, thank you so much.

Speaker 4 (01:32:00):
Well it's all right, riding around and freeze. Well, it's
all right. Maybe you're seleb you please, Well, it's all right.
You in space. You can well live, all right, as

(01:32:20):
long as you left your hand

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Episode 6 | Sasha Stone

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Episode 6 | Sasha Stone