Intellivision Amico could have worked, Tommy Tallarico's plan could not.

if you have no idea what the title of this video is about i promise you it's interesting if you do have some idea what the title of this video is about i promise you this is going to be much more interesting than you think i i have regular viewers on this channel who have no idea who tommy talarico is or why i would make a video talking about him who don't know what the word in television means nor specifically the intellivision amiko and i probably also have a few hundred regular viewers who have long since grown tired of this topic and who think they already know everything i have to say on the matter give me a chance i actually think this raises a lot of really interesting questions that are ultimately kind of political in nature one of the interesting things about business one of the interesting things about an enterprise is that it brings together people of totally different talents and totally different personality types now tommy talarico is a musician he is the type of person who loves getting on stage in front of a cheering crowd one of the first things he said to me when he started talking to me was that he saw that i was learning chinese i think also that i was teaching chinese and he said you know how much he loved being in china and how he'll remember for the rest of his life the enthusiasm of the crowds as he played the guitar live on a stage in china that's a particular type of guy it's a particular type of talent it's a particular type of personality that comes with it and then certain types of attitudes that are self-reinforcing over time being the leader of the band so to speak being the front man behind the microphone standing in front of the crowd so on and so forth now think about the personality type for a coder for a career computer programmer maybe someone who's not narrowly devoted to the video game industry think about what a different personality type that is what a different way of thinking a different way of working what different way of living right different way of handling conflict and these are not the only personality types you've got to bring together a coder is not an artist a graphic artist a cartoonist so there are all these different types of talents that have been brought together to work as part of one enterprise have to be brought together as moving cogs if you like serving some kind of greater whole working towards one grand plan i remember talking about this with my mother she said that the most fundamental challenge of working in the museum industry was bringing together radically different personality types with radically different political tendencies herself included she was someone with radical political tendencies in case you didn't know uh in the service of this greater ideal that probably none of them fully understand so let's say you've got an art gallery it may be founded by and it may be led by the ceo maybe a multi-millionaire whose only interest his whole life has been making millions of dollars that's like in a sense that's what he's got a talent for it's a self-reinforcing set of behaviors he used to being an executive someone who made millions of dollars millions of dollars by millions of dollars and then at some point he thinks art collecting and his reason for doing that may be to get a tax write-off it may be to get certain kinds of benefits that come with taking a portion of your fortune and putting it into the arts putting into education now he finds himself at the head of a multi-million dollar art gallery and there's some very different types of people involved there are some people who are just there because they like doing public education and outreach there are some people who are there because it's their mission in life to help educate underprivileged urban youth about modern art that's what motivates them that's they're thinking about and they have to sit at a boardroom table with this multi-millionaire art collection then there's someone else at that table who's an historian and there's someone else at that table who's just dealing with the chemistry of the paintings the organic chemistry of the paint and how the colors fade and how to restore them how to deal with how to deal with technical issues like this i remember uh with one museum problems had to do with having a carpenter you needed to have a carpenter on site to make small wooden objects so you have like a precious vods you have to put it on a piece of wood that's shaped just right you have to carve a piece of wood so that you have the vods at the right angle and it won't move and even if there's an earthquake it won't move around this kind of thing you have a carpenter at the table too you have these very very different people brought together but one kind of enterprise there's a theory right now about the failure of tommy talarico's project the intellivision of mikko there's a theory that it was an intentional scam along there's a more specific theory that he was looking for he was trying to attract a certain kind of investor he was trying to create all this hype and then attract this kind of investor and then sell off the enterprise he'd created to the highest bidder to assume that comes in now if we were talking about anyone else anyone other than tommy talarico i i would think it was actually a good theory you know like looking at the facts on the surface seems like a good theory okay so this is what this person had in mind and by the way that's not necessarily immoral you can start up a new company with the intention of selling it off for someone else to someone else to take over i have a different theory however i think that when you work as a musician in the way tommy talarico did you get used to creating hype and then recruiting a team of the right people putting together a band you have the right talent in the right place at the right time you create a lot of hype for it and then the magic just happens you don't have to deal with a whole lot of technical details you don't have to have a plan you don't think in terms of having institution right you know you bring together the right people in one place at one time maybe you throw out some money on the table maybe not even that and then it just happens you sort out the details later if you bring together the right musicians in the booth so to speak you don't even need to have a composition you can just have a vague idea of what the song is you want to the the way it's going to go right and you bring together i talked to johnny del rio i interviewed him this is the way he talks about hardware this is the way he talks about software you say to him because i did i challenged him in the interview i challenge you say well this isn't going to work for this reason or you know you tell me how are you going to make it work given that this isn't worth this reason and he says back to you i'm working with this person they have 30 years of experience i'm working with that person they have 20 years of experience and he'd say of himself i forget what he said 40 years of experience legitimately he has something like that 35 years experience whatever it is now you know and so when you add it together this is so many hundred years of experience and this person has this background this person is that this is an artist this is a creative art this is specifically a musician talking about putting together a band and this is just the way you'd hype up a gig right like all i got to do is rent the stage and i'm going to have this guy on guitar and this kind of drums and it's going to be great i've read detailed descriptions this is an old old 1950s um african-american rock musician and he was still doing gigs in the 1980s and he wouldn't even tell the musicians what songs they were going to play he was completely used to showing up and like the minute before five seconds before they started shout out to the band song like you know the expectation is you already know all the songs everyone knows and there's an improvised element to it and everybody involved has 30 years of experience 40 years experience whatever it is right that those kinds of musicians though that kind of that kind of talent well you know you know hashtag spoilers the computer hardware industry doesn't work that way you know the computer software industry doesn't work that way you can't just say we'll sort out all the technical details later come on guys come on this is going to be great right and you absolutely cannot build up hype that then the technical details in terms of hardware and software you know you won't be able to satisfy you won't be able to to follow through so some of you in my audience you've never heard any of these names before i say stick with me i think this is a really interesting i wouldn't be making this video if i didn't think this were interesting today in 2022 if i didn't think this were interesting enough that i could come back and watch the video myself five years from now when i will have forgotten all these all these details right now i felt about it at the time or what have you i really do think it's worth talking about it's worth thinking about it's worth reflecting on and if i didn't i wouldn't waste your time i wouldn't press the start button right there was a console in the past called the ouya o u y a everyone says it was a failure it sold 200 000 units i'm writing a book right now am i going to call that book a failure if i sell 200 000 units it would be the greatest success of my life if i ever sold 200 000 of anything right whether it's an album or a book or a vhs cassette and i'm dating myself whatever you know if i make a movie and it's you sell 200 000 copies of this movie and whatever format exists in the 21st century um admittedly i have way more than 200 000 downloads here on youtube admittedly i'm past coming up with six million now i'm way past five nine but anyway and yeah sure it's a great success too 200 000 sold and people say it's a failure why because the hype was so much greater than what they delivered the promise was out of proportion to the actual product and so this isn't just about hardware this isn't just about software this isn't just about writing a book about like authorship or art this even applies to politics guys a lot of people have this same mentality musicians it's endemic to the world of performing arts it's endemic to music we go around and create hype and tell everyone man you gotta come to this concert we rented a huge hall there's gonna be 50 000 people there it's going to be awesome man well only 5 000 people should musicians do this all the time it's in american legal parliaments it's puffery right the the historical term is puffing most people today say puffery in american law it is legal to lie in order to sell a ticket or in order to sell a product as long as your lies fall within the remit of puffing i wish i was making this up i have to grab degree of political science i'm supposed to know these things you're allowed to tell someone this is going to be the greatest concert of all time it's going to change your life forever there's a whole range of lies you're allowed to tell because that's puffery that's puffing and then at some point you cross the line right and you're telling lies you're not allowed to tell anymore and it's especially if you're a musician right so what what exactly did he promise sorry this is all spontaneous that's how i prefer videos to be when i watch it myself so this is not quite as strictly logically ordered as it might be if we scripted this out you tell me was it four years ago last time i had a scripted video so five years ago um what exactly did tommy talarico claim about his relationship to the creator of toe jam and earl classic sega genesis game toe gemini did you did you hear tommy talarico promised that he was going to make a sequel to toe jam and earl and that it would be exclusive to his console i think that's what i heard in my interview with him and on i'm i'm pretty sure that's what he said but maybe go back and try to see exactly what he said what did what did tommy talarico say about his relationship with with sesame street with crayola with uh uh the the foundation that owns the rights to cornhole right a lot of promises was it just puffery or were those specific tangible definite promises software was going to come out now again if you guys don't know and i said this to tommy and it's it's obvious but let's spell it out just that one title toe jammin earl that is a system seller okay middle-aged men will pay any amount of money for a new system with a new game that's called toe jam neuro all right that's that's all the hype you need you don't need to hype it up any more than that and you know yet another huge name he claimed he was making the next game in the series of earthworm gym so earthworm gym number four all right a lot of middle-aged men some middle-aged women right who will pay any price for that now in explaining this phenomenon i am not excusing the phenomenon um [Music] ten years ago if someone said to you there's a new company sort of starting up now and they are gonna make pacman arcade cabinets the smallest ones are two hundred dollars bigger ones four hundred dollars five hundred dollars some luxury ones six hundred dollars yeah yeah yeah yeah people are going to pay people going to pay 200 just for pac-man people are going to pay 400 600 just for pac-man oh yeah and then when we're done with pac-man we're going to get into more obscure arcade games we're going to do tron we're going to do tempest and there are all these people and they'll pay like six hundred dollars just to play tron or tempest games most people they don't remember but yeah and pac-man it's a huge market okay any of us right now can sit here and say that's not rational but in the world of economics and the world of politics we partly deal with things that are rational and we partly deal with things that are irrational but they're actual it doesn't matter what the [ __ ] you think it is an empirical fact that people are lining up to spend two hundred dollars four hundred dollars six hundred dollars for an arcade box that plays pac-man it's now a it's proven okay arcade one up huge success story the ii arcade a direct competitor huge success story all right and even though it might seem like it's on a lower level of cost it's the same kind of absurdity all right the evercade right evercate is a handheld it's not one of these big clunky things but any of these cases guess what guess what game comes with the ever k pac-man okay and by the way none of these are arcade perfect pac-man none of them none of them are that good they're actually not all right it's crazy but it's but it's true if you're into the minor differences between different versions of pac-man and you're really paying attention um you could add up how much money i've spent on pacman in the last two years and each purchase is really cheap i got one copy of pac-man for five dollars uh there's one i got for three dollars there's one i got for about ten dollars with shipping and handling you know i own a bunch of different copies of pac-man uh sorry i mean i'm not not super precisely here but let's say let's say there was one other i don't know maybe six seven dollars you know like so okay so each each one is is cheap why do i keep buying them because they're not good enough each one is kind of broken or or screwed up i am not gonna spend two hundred dollars on five i'm not gonna spend four hundred dollars in batman all right but i get it right there are probably all of these guys have already bought pac-man five times in their life maybe ten times in their life and they reach a point where they say no i'm done i'm done with this i'm going home they're gonna spend 400 just to have pac-man to get it to get it right to get it perfect and they're going to be disappointed because it's not perfect but it's still a lot perfect all right see this is interesting to me though right i could sit here and say to you and maybe you have a brother who who bought one of these high-end arcade rigs why would you do this that's totally irrational you can play pac-man on your mobile phone for free or you know okay look around there's so much here you can play this version of pac-man for 2.99 something like that you know you can look around say oh yeah why would anyone spend 300 for something they can get on their mobile phone for three dollars and it's the same all right but that's that's part of what makes free market economics so fascinating as part of what makes politics so fascinating too okay what's hypothetically rational is very different from what is empirically actual all right and we are dealing with a wildly irrational segment of the free market so um i just bought my daughter ever kate okay so if you don't know the arcade you don't need google okay okay the evercade is a brand new console you can google right now ever cade screen resolution oh gee that that's really low now you can google nintendo ds screen resolution that's from 2011 dsi i guess 2011. now you can google ps vita screen resolution that's 2011. it's more than 10 years ago now why don't you google something like like google pixel cellular phone screen resolution it is blindingly obvious how overpriced this is the hardware is overpriced the software is overpriced why would anyone buy for themselves or buy for their daughter something so wildly irrational there are so many ways to play pac-man there's so many ways to play any of these retro games why would anyone do something so stupid and sorry just real quick there were comparisons to be made here right why would you buy the evergreen let's say in total hardware and software you're talking about 200 us dollars being spent on the uppercase my point being you buy a bunch of cartridges for it as well as the base yeah okay okay what can you get from ann burneck for 200 us dollars ever make that comparison and include the screen resolution like the hardware as well as the software all right it's insane there's no argument for it it's completely irrational and anyone in their right mind 10 years ago could have looked at any of these market segments and say oh there's no way that'll work there's no way the ever cade will be a success that's irrational nobody would buy that and today we're in a position to say empirically you were wrong it's a big hit right i can repeat myself arcade one up 10 years ago you could have said there's no market for this either it's going to be a total failure or this is going to be a tiny niche market you were wrong it's a big success ii arcade anyone could have said this can be a tiny niche market it's going to be a complete failure and we can keep going super nintendo mini sega genesis mini pc engine mini this was a sensation that took the world by storm neo geo mini all totally technologically redundant like total total waste of money objectively rationally speaking i'm not running out of examples so in that context in that context of the last 10 years this comes back to the title of this video you can't say to me there's no way tommy talarico's in television could have been a success there's no way it could have worked it could have been a success it could have worked the problem is precisely tommy teleriko was the wrong man for the job tommy telerico made the wrong decisions at pretty much every fork in the road at pretty much every step and stage of this story let's see you have to say you've been through this crazy story with me and you know i like tommy talarico i really enjoyed my interview with him melissa was there she's one of the only witnesses this tommy talarico is my favorite vegan in the video game industry uh he's he might be my favorite vegan music composer dude one of don't have a long list uh tommy talarico moby you know whatever yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know there are aspects of the project i sympathize with and i think that's why you set up the interview with me was that he knew i was a parent who really disliked what nintendo was doing i was a parent who was interested in a console that would have some educational software on it which as with many of tommy's promises or to have you know seemed to seem to fade you know um there were a lot of different elements of it that i sympathize with but you know he never he never hooked me in i never pre-ordered this thing i never invested in this thing i never thought it would be a success and the the bad decisions he made i mean some of them are so obvious uh the type of controller huge liability it's just wrong and you can't change you know you can't change your mind about that like if that's how you started with this thing on the drawing board you can't see that the whole market for your console is being created by the promise that you have earthworm gym for you have toe jam and a roll whatever we're up to toe jamming roll 5. yeah yeah i could say that i paid for the like well that's right yeah i contributed to the kickstarter campaign for the newest tokyo game yeah because for me token role was a childhood memory i wanted to play another tokyo game and unfortunately uh i was disappointed by the game and just a conversation that we had a couple weeks ago about it um you know it calls into question the whole kickstart remodel for video game concepts for uh console systems if so this was just something that we were talking about and um you know i'm thinking about it in this in this regard too with the television and with the uh amico um you know at what point is it a problem with hyping up too much um and not actually funding anything uh sorry i'm not praising this very well sorry it's it's uh it's late but you know i'm just thinking of some of the parallels between those two projects obviously they weren't making a new system right it's just software yeah and a lot of people were disappointed with the game but when you're actually making you know a new console uh i mean it's a retro console but still it's like another level of um you know things that you have to deliver on to donate to the project right and um you know the funding up front um seems to be an issue with a lot of these yes a lot of these start campaigns or yeah so let me expand a little bit so some of you guys have never heard of the ouya but again it's this is even interesting to me politically so i i am a political leader in my own way i have engaged in fundraising i raised two thousand dollars in donations this year several years ago i did a fundraiser and i raised six thousand five hundred six thousand three hundred i think uh us dollars you know so i've i've been very successful in doing fundraising on my own small scale given my own position of privilege frankly um okay what if the ouya had been promoted in a way that was clinically accurate what if there had been no hype what if there had been no puffery what if people have been told really honestly this is what it is this is what you're gonna get this is what's going to do you know now you know i don't think they would have sold 200 000 units right like what percentage of the sales of 200 000 were leveraged by gross exaggeration by hype by puffery i don't know but like even if they had sold 100 000 units but they had a user base of 100 000 happy customers who really felt hey i got what i paid for this is a good product at a good price i knew what i was getting myself into i knew it was going to be able to do this this and this and there was this software this is always good you know this is how the next five years of the products lifespan was going to go and so on this was but you know what i'm saying like we have this great idiom in american english unsafe at any size well you know what you can also be safe at any size you know you can be successful at any size you know you can have a very successful product that's small you can have a very successful political movement that's small you see where i'm going this but it's got to be on the basis of radical honesty like really unexpected deep cutting honesty where you're telling people truths they never thought they'd they'd be told you know you're really letting people know what it is what you're all doing and you know i think the opposite perspective ultimately in american culture in the american experience it comes out of religion all political discourse united states america even going back to 1776 the revolution and so on all of it has been formed and informed by religious discourse by the uniquely american form of protestant christianity and the role of the preacher and you know what does the preacher tell you uh you know you may suffer on this earth for a short time but you know heaven in the afterlife after you die it's the original puffery i mean the the church preacher is the original hype man and preaching to the choir this is the original showmanship you know this is the original you know kind of musician's role like i described for for tommy talarico before and you know the vast majority of people who go into politics and a lot of the people who go into business they have that religious mentality they have that preacher's mentality where you know they're promising you something that the product can't possibly deliver on and they don't see that they're setting themselves up for failure they think they're creating success they're creating hype and then again there's this sense of spontaneous creativity like you bring these things together and then let it let it happen as if it's going to emerge and worry about the details later as opposed to the grim realism of saying the grim realism of saying no no no details up front details first like from a hardware perspective all this is for the customer is a list of specifications clinical accuracy in terms of software that you know like really show people really share with people what it is and then they get to decide is this worth a hundred dollars is this worth 200 is it for 400 house and we live in a world where pac-man and pac-man alone is worth 400 to people so you can't sell it short you can't underestimate you can't pretend there'd be no market for that my point being an honestly marketed ooya and an even an honestly marketed in television amigo it would have it would have a market it could be successful but again with this caveat successful in any size you know and by the way the the feedback tommy talarico got from day one was exactly the feedback he needed and basically what people told him was it should look like the ii arcade it should look like our keyboard up people said right away was oh that's not what i want i want a classic arcade joystick they don't want this you know finicky controller with a touch that's not what they want what because that's who the market is like you know all kinds of feedback you go right she brushed away dismissed right then on the other hand there were people telling him hey i want this to be like the super nintendo mini which is a mass market i want this to be like the genesis mini uh you could fill in the blank with anything and then mini i want this to be like the pc engine mini and there were people saying you know they hadn't seen the the ever cade yet but they're saying oh i want this to be something like the ever gate like this should be for the intellivision what the ever kid was you know and then branch off from there there were people with all kinds of different visions about what this thing should be and every single one of those was more viable than tommy talarico's vision so you know i criticize all kinds of political movements i go after them really hard uh and one of the things tommy talarico liked about me is that i'm vegan but i'm not too left-wing you know if you want to know about tommy's politics uh his twitter history and his twitter contacts and his friendship with uh tenepal the guy who created earth you get enough hints of where he stands politically he he was very happy to talk to me because i was a vegan and i was not too left-wing you know i am morally opposed to police brutality i'm also opposed to black lives matter all right i think black lives matter is a bad movement now i think it always has been if you go back to my very first video criticizing black lives matter what did i do i went to their constitution and i read what exactly are they promising all right i think you could have a wonderful movement that was really all about improving police services in america improving the quality and quantity of policing immigration everyone put this improving police procedure improving police accountability reducing va you could have a wonderful movement that does that did you read their constitution that's not what they promised in their constitution they promised they were going to demolish the nuclear family they were going to end the existence of the family as we know it and replace it with a system of marxist slash anarchist a cephalos communities like you can get into the left-wing jargon about what this means they were going to replace the family with their new model of a community where there were in which there were no parents and in a sense no children the children don't belong to anyone that's what the constitution promised when you donated to black lives matter did you know that's what you were donating to let me ask a lot of years have gone by i'm sorry but now i record that video when i was still in in china um that's so it must be five years now about five years ago i made that and you know i don't know their constitution was at least a few months before that i don't know it was around for a year or something before i made that take so we're going back five or six years um what what's made more progress in the last five years the black lives matter utopian project of creating communities in which there's no nuclear family or tommy teleriko's video game console and everyone's like you know look at what they're promising you know and again it's not even that they're necessarily promising more or too much you're promising the wrong thing your promises in the mix that makes no sense okay i could go on about black lives matter for an hour i'm not going to i think this one example alone you know imagine if instead the leaders of black lives matter had a well-defined well-disciplined legal fund and they said look here's our agenda we're going to employ a team of just 10 lawyers in one office in the lowest rent neighborhood of louisiana you know and we are going to fight a whole series of legal cases and here's the list and here's what we're fighting for and here are our proposals and we want in all 50 states to have these resolutions in state law and maybe we want this new federal law passed to improve like you could have had a completely you know in my terms brass tax set of proposals for police reform that would have benefited black people would have benefited white people and would have benefited police officers too right but that's not what you got what you got were insane marxists you know and there they're a mix of marxist and anarchists there's some anarchist elements to what they're doing it's not pure marxism so to speak um [Music] you know the the problem with black lives matter is not grassroots it's it's from the top down it's in terms of food leaders where it's terms of their original design yes another problem is what happened to the money they had millions of dollars yes highly motivated to donate to spread the word about it the most important i think i think 90 million dollars is the estimate i could get the money but it's a huge amount of money we had going going you know people not caring about it and it certainly wasn't an issue about people not donating to the organization you know so it's just a where did the money where did the money go yes yeah no no no i believe i mean maybe i'm wrong but currently it seems we will never know where that money went we will never get a breakdown of what happened to the money that was done into black lives matter and there have been some specific scandals some of which i've covered on my channel with specific little fractions of the of the many many millions of dollars you're talking about but it's true people are asking this now about tommy talarico's project because there were several million dollars involved and what what was the money spent on how was it that so many millions of dollars were spent and there's so little to to show for it very different when it said what it's adventure but in theory we could find out what happened with the accounting of uh the television we will never know that's a huge huge question uh for uh and but you know right why is it the case because it's an organization we'll it's insane and look you know by the way guys i'm vegan tommy talarico is vegan you know it's been mentioned in this video but like dude i'm on here all the time saying there are these vegan organizations there are these animal rights organizations they take in millions of dollars and it's com there's no accountability for where that money goes or what there is to show for it the money the money just disappears so you know i i again i've done so little fundraising that's very easy for me to be accountable with the money i i've uh i've raised that what i spend it on i'm able to show people and i've mentioned the example before when i printed t-shirts and sent them to my fans i just i literally photographed myself holding up the receipts for each package sent in the mail you know i was able to be accountable for every dollar spent on those on those projects um [Music] but yeah this is another really sad and sickening aspect of of american culture and in the business world in a sense it's even more permissive because people go into this with the assumption that no matter how much money they put in as an investor they're going to make even more back so who wants to question the salary of tommy teleriko which is now a cause of embarrassment how much money he was making every year when nothing was being produced and so on you know well now those questions get asked and now it's just embarrassing but as long as people are making making more money back than they're putting into it they're inclined not to ask those questions at all and look the american attitudes towards charity i have no i just have no comprehension of of why it is people give away millions of dollars i i mean it must ultimately be based on a supernatural belief that their generosity will be rewarded in heaven or something it must be because you talk about sorry earlier i was talking about the difference between what's rational and what's empirically actual you know it's it's wildly irrational the way people donate to political parties political causes charities of any kind and they just don't care about any of the outcomes where does the money go what was accomplished by it you know and yeah you can say it's irrational but then look at it empirically look at the reality a lot of the times what people are going into is a more nebulous concept of what is virtuous what is the ideology they care about so in this sense they think well i don't need to uh investigate i need to inspect this because i'm i'm giving them money in order to promote a cause so it's not as well but i think that's exactly how investment works too you and i have both heard this even the discourse about things like bitcoin we get this highly moralizing pseudo-religious all these statements about values and beliefs when it's supposed to be about business so i was gonna use one more example uh here in canada one of the movements i really like to pillory excoriate criticize harshly in plain english um is so-called nation rising so you know nation rising their original slogan was it's not a protest it's a revolution and i tried to get in touch with them again and again and say well look what do you mean it's not a protest the only thing you're showing me like the only thing you're organizing is a once a year an annual protest it seems you have no activities you have no your slogan is it's it's not a protest it's a revolution where's the revolution and more broadly where are you doing anything other than a protest you're collecting all these donations and you're organizing all these groups and you're asking all these people to spend their own money and spend their own time and volunteer and again like oh sorry one guy i've got to give him credit there was one guy who had first responded in a really kind of negative and kind of like jealous way to my criticism and then just a few days later he completely flipped and became appreciative and he sent me some emails saying hey look man you really opened my eyes i really appreciate that that i thought these things through because you remember one guy at first he wrote back really negatively and uh you know kind of how dare you ask these questions this this kind of thing and then i remember he kind of hit a breaking point when he just sent me a message he said you're right it's a protest [Music] and then after that a couple days later or a couple weeks later i forget he wrote to me saying you know thank you for taking the time to reply to me and thank you for making these youtube videos because it really led him to let into question you know what what's uh what it's all about um we have we have a comment coming in saying i can't wait to be able to read no more manifestos so i have another book coming out first so we have two books coming out in close succession yeah i'm almost finished uh future of an illusion so you're gonna have future of an illusion first that's a relatively short book that's and that's easy for me to write to and then we get uh the final text of no more manifestos which is indeed taking me a long time i didn't accept any donations for the books i'm not blowing my dead anyway thanks and thanks for the i can take the compliment thanks i'm glad you're looking forward to reading my book when it comes out uh for me it's i i hope it's the last book i've read about politics maybe not maybe 10 years now 20 years for me it's really the culmination of decades and decades of caring and reading and thinking about politics so it's uh yeah um a lot of sorrow and a lot of wisdom and equal parts of foolishness have gone into this book many decades of of making mistakes i've gotten this book anyway look when i complain about a political movement like nation rising quote unquote it's not a protest that's a revolution when i complain about black lives matter promising to abolish the family and create these new communes and all this they're going to restructure society and all these crazy goals they have okay well i want to ask the same question i asked before about the ouya you know it's video game console what if you had been radically honest like you know jarringly honest you know stupefyingly honest what have you been way more honest than anyone ever expect you to be maybe you could have sold 100 000 consoles it would like the same console but you would have actually had happy customers you would have had people getting involved in committing to this project whether they were software developers or customers who really knew what they were buying and knew what they were committing to now even with something as simple as the promises made by nation rising but with many of these vegan groups i knew this hypothetically and then i met and talked to people face to face who went through this uh actually she talked about young people who have a crappy job working at starbucks or they work in the warehouse at walmart or sign they're working a minimum wage job and they saved up their money for months to take a flight to ottawa canada and stay in a hotel and attend your revolution and guess what there's no revolution it's just a protest it's big money the the same amount of money you could have taken a vacation in egypt and seen the pyramids he could have taken a vacation in thailand and i don't know seen whatever there is to see in thailand um you could have done all kinds of things that would have changed your life forever positively and instead you made a promise to these people you were engaged in puffery you over hyped this thing you promised something you couldn't deliver and you know again one guy in particular i talked to him at length he was himself an organizer he was a really committed well moderately committed vegan activist he'd organized things say okay so you spent all this time and all this money to go to this thing and when you get there it's like 15 losers you know standing around in a coffee shop having a chit chat and that's what you bought the airplane ticket for and that's what you booked the hotel room for like my point is even at that level of political organization you have to be radically honest with people like really you know way more honest than they're expecting you to be and i think you have to demand that kind of honesty you know in in return so yeah um i want to come back to the late mode if i open this video with and guys you have to think about this in your own lives too tommy talarico was a musician who surrounded himself with computer programmers two very different types of talent to very different types of personality and for middle-aged men you live in that loop for a few years you're just a coder you're just a computer programmer or you're just a musician it reinforces certain types of attitudes and certain types of behaviors right if you weren't a weirdo when you first became a musician do it for 30 years now you're a weirdo and you're a very different kind of weirdo being a being a computer programmer by the way guys i write about this in my book my forthcoming book no more manifestos if you think about your own parents you think about your own grandparents maybe they would have been better people if they didn't do the same job every day of their lives for so many years no matter what that job was like whether it was a job that was denigrating in an obvious way or even you know i remember my grandmother saying to me how much she hated being a dentist it's considered a good job we'll do it every day for 30 40 years and you can learn to hate it you know every day the you know you know the the self-reinforcing aspects of that of living that you know and look my father was a terrible person terrible person but i have wondered that how much better a person could he have been if he had worked five or six different jobs you know if he had some more diversity of experience in his life that way instead of having success at this relatively early age and then doing exactly the same job sitting down at the same desk you know living in the same loop again and again and again for for so many years i think that's a really difficult question for all of us to examine okay well you know what the thing is about computer programmers computer programmers cannot understand anything other than computer programming i've a lot of my fans are computer programmers you're [ __ ] terrible people okay a lot of my top donors my top supporters on patreon are computer programmers you're all terrible people all of you and you know a lot of them they're the guys whatever they they donate a few bucks a month or they donate right now during these live streams or something and they want to ask me these difficult questions about politics and they can't really deal with the answers and they can't really think it through they can't really even have a conversation about politics you see just how limited they are in coping with anything outside of their box in terms of politics and you know what yeah exactly so we got people in the audience right now and look if you're struggling against those limitations maybe you can maybe you can overcome them maybe you can compensate but dude we have yet to enter the phase of history when computer programmers take over our government right but i shudder to think of it there was a time in history when what everyone was afraid of was military leaders taking over the government okay so you know what guys in the military they have a lot of people skills that computer programmers lack okay if you've been through the military for 10 20 years you know how to work with people who are mentally disabled not an exaggeration you know how to work with people who are really smart you know to work with people who are really macho you know how to work with people who are really weak and really cowardly you know how to work with a whole lot of different people including a lot of the poorest and most disadvantaged people in our society by the way i won't digress into it i read a whole book that was just dealing with mentally disabled people in the us army it's a real phenomenon there were mentally disabled people in the us army today but over the last decades there's been a whole policy of this of including and employing you know literally mentally [ __ ] people in the army you have all kinds of experience and if you've been in the army you have experienced following orders you've experienced giving orders you have experience having a boardroom meeting in front of a chalkboard when you explain something to people and you do questions think about all the advantages an old military man has over a computer programmer okay and the the kind of connection to social reality you're in the military you know what it's like to go hungry right you know what it's like to deal with scarcity you know it's like to deal with poverty of of different kinds going just kind of battlefield scarcity you know and probably in the military today you might have experienced traveling in africa traveling throughout you know iraq iran afghanistan seeing some of the poorest and most disadvantaged places in the united states of america i remember passing military bases uh out in navajo country in the middle of the great desert you know i feel like you know you might have you actually a career military officer today has a lot to offer in the united political leadership in the united states america everyone's afraid of it everyone thinks this is you know somehow worse than having a multi-millionaire lawyer be a political leader right you know what in a lot of ways career military guys they even have advantages over a waitress like alexandria ocasio-cortez you know what i mean i shudder to think what's going to happen if or when the um if or when the the computer programmers instead become the people in government so you got one type of people computer programmers can't handle anything but computer programming then you've got another type of person who's a musician who's a showman right and he can't handle the economics he cannot handle the business planning he cannot handle the strategy you know what um [Music] [Laughter] a lot of you guys presume i should be in a leadership role right just because i talk a good game you know when you're comparing me to aaron janus it seems like i should be in a leadership role when you're comparing me to james aspy when you're comparing me to brian turner you know yeah i admit you know but you know what i've never once had someone write into me i've never once had someone communicate me where they felt that they should be the person in the leadership role i've never had someone write to me and say hey look look kid you've got talent you need to be working for me you need to be working for my opportunity never and i have people write into me at least every month maybe every couple of weeks some of you if you're on patreon you've seen this i have people writing into me and they're asking to be my employees they're asking for my leadership politically but even like professional like for me to be running some kind of institution or company or something that can employ them i like tommy talarico you know and and it may not show but i'm the creative artist type 2. i'm a creative writer type and a lot of what i'm doing right now is creative writing and you know what there's actually a really good argument that i shouldn't be running a business i shouldn't be doing the actuarial science you know what i'm saying i shouldn't be doing the math and i shouldn't be doing the leadership either and maybe the reason why i talk such a good game is that i'm good at asking the right questions and maybe i shouldn't be in the executive role of giving the answers now i say all this and i'm aware like if the only choice you've got is between me being in the leadership role and durian writer it's between me and freely me and her like i get it talent is scarce and i may be the best you've got i get it you know but my point is um [Music] the mistake tommy talarico made in thinking of this like a musician organizing a band i think a lot of us make very similar mistakes whether we're organizing a political movement whether we're organizing some kind of enterprise that maybe you know you're trying to make a short film and maybe the most fundamental question of all is who is in charge here and why how how did the music director from earthworm gym end up being ceo of this company the music director should not be the ceo of this guy it's so obvious once you take a step back right right he was a music director and then he basically was like a kind of game show host he was a talk show host for electronic playground you know that's that's his background so you can already think of a very positive role he could play in this kind of company but who is going to be the ceo who is going to be doing the actuarial science who is going to be making the hard decisions about hardware who's going to make the hard decisions to include multi-million dollar investments in software so developing software costs money all right and you pay the money now and then the software is done like two years later you know like you're talking about not even aaa games triple c games whatever you know these these are these are big decisions ah okay so now we're talking about organizing a team we're talking about organizing a team of talented people and we're starting to think about what talents they've got and what they should be responsible for and what they should be in charge of i'm saying this i'm neither boasting nor am i you know uh humiliating myself or something right i think probably none of you have ever looked at me this way you know you've probably never looked at me and never looked at yourself and thought well what talent have i got and you know what talent has this guy got but like the fact that i have this talent right now it's a lot like tommy talarico being able to come on stage and play the guitar and being able to come on camera and do a talk show electric playground was his most famous show you know that's that's what he can do right but you've got to put together a whole team you've got to put together a whole strategy if you want to have a successful enterprise even if it's just in business let alone if what you want in politics is to change the world