Seth Tower Hurd

Seth Tower Hurd [00:00:00] I saw white kids in very expensive SUVs with out-of-state plates that gathered into a very big crowd. And those mobs burned down local black businesses that had just rebuilt from the violence a few years ago. That burned down a police station that has, from what people in Ferguson have told me, has done a complete 180.

Listener intro (station ID) [00:00:00] I'm Bruce figure, a veterinarian living in Sylvia, Kansas. And you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast,

Vance Crowe [00:00:31] Seth Tower Hurd. Welcome.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:00:32] Hey, thank you. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:00:34] So you are an author on substack and I get your newsletter twice a week. It is the only, there's

Seth Tower Hurd [00:00:40] Only

Vance Crowe [00:00:40] You and one other person that I read their newsletters first. What is Substack and why do you put what you put on there?

Seth Tower Hurd [00:00:47] Yeah. You know, I think that every few years you see where people are writing, like move, like, do you remember, I would say 2009, two th to 2012, everybody had a blog.

Vance Crowe [00:00:58] Like

Seth Tower Hurd [00:00:59] Everybody had a blog. And then what happened? It was, it just sort, sort of started to burn because first of all, Google to get a little technical for, if you're into stuff like this Google reader went away. So it used to be that people got traffic to their blog off of like Google Reader when that went away, when there was a tool that you could follow all kinds of blogs and sort of get it, like you get a social media feed, people kind of just quit blogging. And then podcasting was starting to rise. And I would say that's right when Twitter started to get really big. And so people transferred kind of to other places. During all that time. I wasn't ever writing for myself. I was actually writing for magazines. And that, that came to an end, which I'll let me get back to right after the technical, you know, aspect of this. And as the, you know, my magazine career was actually sort of wrapping up, if you will. Newsletters were starting to rise. And what we were seeing is that, you know, like there's, you can consume a lot of YouTube, you can consume a lot of podcasts. But as people started consuming tons and tons of those, there sort of became this resurgence for like, you know what? I actually wanna read something once in a while.

Vance Crowe [00:02:07] Oh yeah. I'm totally there. Because there's sometimes when you're just like, I want to be the gauge of how fast I read this. Yeah. And how much fidelity I get out of this. So, but it's not very often. I don't wanna sit down and read all the time.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:02:18] Yeah. And so, you know, I sort of stumbled on this by accident and I thought I was done. I was never a full-time journalist. Like that's the main thing I was doing. But I was always, you know, a, you know, a paid writer, if you will. My career was in radio and TV and then in business. And, but I always kept writing, kept publishing in some way odd. I'm, I'm actually not gonna mention the publication 'cause I don't want to go down the road of like, you know, starting a social media fight or anything. But I, I'd written for a magazine for 13 years that I think maxed out around somewhere between like two and 7 million hits a month. You know, several hundred thousand print copies kind of at their heyday and everything. And the, somebody I had worked with there got promoted to managing editor who clearly had a, a beef with me, just, I guess because of my views or my writing style or whatever, this person was a pretty pretty avid socialist and really put that out a lot on, on social media and everything. And so this editor couldn't fire me. But what happened was that in, it wasn't political content, it was actually like pop culture content. The editor kept, you know, reassigning, nitpicking, double assigning me with somebody else and being like, oh, whoops, I can't believe that I assigned two people to this, not responding to emails. So after 13 years, I went through a period of three or four months where I could not get one thing published. And then I just was like, okay, I can just try to throw a fit here or I can just call it.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:03:50] And it felt like that was a good long run and I thought that I was done. The other thing that happened there was that I had this major, and this is gonna dip a little bit into conspiracy theory, but I've, I've got some backing here. I had a major breakthrough in my writing career, which is, I got picked up as a certified rolling, I'm sorry, rotten Tomatoes critic. And so I was supposed to be like one of the starred ones. 'cause I was with a bigger publication. It wasn't like, you know, the, and nothing against this, if you're listening and you're a writer for a Wichita paper, but it wasn't like the Wichita, Kansas newspaper. It was a pretty big outlet. So I got the acceptance letter that I was going to get it, and then I emailed and, and tried to get that go to go through for a year. And for a year they kept messing with me, not giving me, you know, the, the keys so to speak, to where I could upload my reviews. And eventually I realized it was because, you know, I was moderately politically conservative in a space where that's not okay. Which is film critic work, you know, on the political compass test.

Vance Crowe [00:04:56] Really. So, so you think, you think conservative like media people or not media people, people reviewing movies don't get don't get a showing.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:05:07] Okay. So I will tell you what I heard from multiple PR people in Hollywood. Okay. And I was getting opportunities to interview. I mean, I've interviewed Oscar winners. I was getting offers to like fly out to interview Christian Bale. Like, it, I was not a, you know, a minor player in this game. And some, some PR folks that worked in film and TV that, that had known me for years said, absolutely they are, they're, they're absolutely blocking you and Rotten Tomatoes. You know, essentially once move your reviews to go a certain way. I mean, to take a very neutral example, you pretty much can't, you, you pretty much can't get a bad review if it's a Marvel movie. You can't, and you know, these really big Oscar winners, you can't get a bad review even though people don't like them. I actually mentioned recently in one of my sub stacks that like the last three years, the best picture winner, less than one and a half percent of the population has actually seen the best picture Oscar winning movie in theaters. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:06:13] That's fascinating. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:06:14] 'cause I ran the numbers on the, you know, I averaged like 12 bucks a ticket, and then how many, what the box office did, and how many people are actually seeing this. And so if you take that compared to like, you know, return of the King one in 2003, Rocky won Best Picture back in the day. There clearly is a whole little network of people that are trying to push certain kinds of movies and not push other kinds of movies. And because I had a few things out there that, that touched on, politics was never a political writer. I clearly was not going to be allowed into the club, you know, and I figured that out and I was able to pass that knowledge along. I've got a friend now that is at one of the, I'll just say that he's at one of the largest magazines in the country. And he came to me privately because we wrote for the same magazine. And he said, you know, I feel like, you know, we're, we are not in the political space. We're pushing politics really hard. You know, do you think I should speak up? What's my place on this? And he said, you know, I'm a fairly moderate conservative. I voted for Republicans, I voted for Democrats. And I just told him, dude, based on what happened to me with Rotten Tomatoes, you either need to switch careers or you need to bury that opinion really deep and see where you can have some very mild influence. And you just need to make peace with that. Because I essentially lost my, you know, I lost my like, quote unquote like movie writing career over it.

Vance Crowe [00:07:42] And so once you didn't have this, you, how do you somehow maneuver your way to getting into Substack and building up your audience there? Yeah,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:07:50] Well, I, I took a couple years off and I just thought that part of my life was done. You know, we moved to St. Louis, you know, I had become a parent. It was just like, oh, that's, that's kind of it. And I don't even know what it was, but on my lunch hour one day, I was just like, you know, it would be kind of cool to do like a list email maybe once a week. And I just, I copied some of my contacts outta Gmail and I just shot out an email to 50 people. Like, Hey, here's a list of something. I'm gonna write a list of five things. And it wasn't even the format it is now where it's necessarily news. I was just kind of screwing around. I just thought it would be fun to write again. And from there I was really surprised at how much people liked it. And then, you know, it became a thing when I realized that people were like reading every single one of these. And I just couldn't believe it because in the corporate world, if 27% of people open an email, you're like, oh my gosh. And I started to see the numbers and that, you know, that people really cared about this. And I was like, I should, I should keep doing it. And from there I expanded it to, you know, 'cause I previously worked in pop culture, I do new hard news on Tuesdays, pop culture on Fridays, and I have, with the exception of taking a week off for vacation for the last, for the last two years, every Tuesday and Friday I put something out.

Vance Crowe [00:09:10] So your Tuesday newsletter is usually about, you know, like the news and things that are going on. I find it really interesting because I have, I used to believe that like, in order to be a good citizen, I genuinely believe this like a, like a patriot, a person that was a good American knew what was going on in the news all around the world.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:09:31] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:09:32] And now I don't have that opinion at all. Like, it's, it's much more slimmed back because I, I realized like, really I was caught up in a soap opera that I have as much control over the weather as I, as I have on that. So it is, I, I've kind of come full circle. I went from being like international relations, all of these things, reading the New York Times, thinking you needed to stay up on all the big publications. And now unless somebody sends me a post paywall article, I, I don't say anything at all.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:10:02] Okay. So just, just curious there, what, what form that new, what made you, because most people are not, that most people are not that interested in, you know, tensions between India and China right now.

Vance Crowe [00:10:14] Well, I think, like I was living on the East Coast, I was hanging out with a lot of people that were Peace Corps World Bank Yeah. Diplomacy world people. And, and I think like that's kind of the, the mentality that's taught in colleges. You should know about what's going on in the wider world. More important than what, what, when your city council meets or Yeah. Or, you know, when leaf pickup day is right. Because people are so transient. It's like, ah, it's not worth the time energy investment for me to learn this little microcosm. I might move in a year or two, so why would I put all that effort in? And I can feel so much more important if I know about what's going on in the wider world. But my whole point about this is, I, so I abs abstained from all this stuff until I came across your blog because I felt like it was a good way to get a broad spectrum of things. I often see things that I'm like, I don't agree with that, but like, not, I, not in the sense that I disagree with your assessment of it. More, more just like, I, I don't even know. I think it's a wonderful thing. I think it really pushes the envelope. So how do you decide what gets into that, that Tuesday? All about the media

Seth Tower Hurd [00:11:26] Yeah. Article. Well, you're, and you're not supposed to agree with all of it or, or like it or anything. I, what's been very surprising to me and like nobody's more surprised than I am that this works. It, it's been very, that the readership, I did a poll last Christmas and it's about a 60 40 split politically right and left. Okay. And there actually aren't a lot of people who consider themselves like very far. Right. But there are people who consider themselves very far left that read it, which given that I'm, you know, moderately to the right, that was surprising that like, you know, I reached that far over. And what I'm looking for is like the stuff that's, that actually matters. You know, so much of you just call it a soap opera. So much of the news cycle right now is more or less the same as like early to mid two thousands reality tv. It's like, well this person said this, this

Vance Crowe [00:12:20] Person said this. Yeah, that's exactly, it looks like the real world Right. Cut to commercial breaks. Exactly. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:12:24] And I try to ignore all that stuff and just say like, so what is, what's really happening? I, I don't even know because I, I really only, I consume news to write the newsletter and then I'm pretty much done. I try to stop after that. So I don't know how big of a story it is that, you know, that there's talk of minting a $1 trillion coin to raise the debt ceiling. You know, if that gets headlines, it's because it's kind of novel. Like, oh, look at this trillion dollar piece of money, you know, as, as if you could spend it or do anything with it. Right. It's, it's a way to get around the debt ceiling, the national budget, and how much we're getting hit by inflation and the supply, the supply chain stuff that you've been sort of aggregating on Twitter, people sending in, that's a really big deal. And it's like, it's not a headline.

Vance Crowe [00:13:15] Yeah. That's been the most surprising thing. And I think it's fundamentally, it's the fact that most people in the United States don't understand what inflation is. Yeah. If you understand it, you're suddenly evaporated from that group. You know what it is, you can be afraid of it, you can see how it plays out. But if you don't really understand what inflation is like, then all these supply chain issues, all the, the prices that are going wildly up or the unavailability of rent in a place where it's like, yeah, but there's, there's, you know, I have all this money in my, in my bank account that I've never had and I still can't rent. Like it seems like the hand of God. It doesn't seem like an inevitability. Yeah. And that's like the weirdest thing in the world once you understand how inflation works. 'cause you're like, well of course this was gonna happen. But when you talk to people that don't think it's gonna happen, they genuinely don't understand how inflation works.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:14:05] Yeah. Well there, we heard a lot of think at, at the start of the COVID lockdowns of like, oh, well, the government needs to pay people to stay home so this disease will go away. A year and a half later, we just drove up to Peoria last weekend for a family thing. I stopped at a gas station for water. There was no bottled water, none. I went to the gas station across the street. I asked, she said, well, I've got some in the back, I'll sell you one. I was like, well my, you know, my daughter is asleep in the car seat. But I was like, my wife and I are both thirsty. Can I have two? No, you cannot have two bottles of water. I mean, that's developing nation stuff right there. And that's not a one-off. Like you're, you're starting to see shelves that are, that are just like big stores that just just have open shelves and you don't normally see that ever.

Vance Crowe [00:14:54] My impression is that most people aren't going to big stores. Right? Yeah. We've become so used to ordering our groceries and Amazon online that when you think about like, are the ta are the shelves at Target full or not? I don't know. Right. If, if I go on Amazon and I say, Hey, I'm looking for some pens, then they're only gonna show me the full shelves of pens. They're not gonna show me the shelves that are empty, that don't have the pens in that they normally would. And so I think people have been lulled into this sense of not really understanding just how behind we are, even in, in regular retail goods, let alone things that are way harder to manufacture and have a much bigger impact. Things like tractor tires or Yeah. Or the, the chips in, in trucks, things like that.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:15:38] Yeah. And that stuff's all gonna filter down, you know, I would say buy some extra dog food, buy some extra paper towels. If you listen to this right now, I mean, the supply chain will catch back up, but you don't wanna be, if there's a few essentials you could keep around your house now, it'd be a good time to do it. Getting back to that question of what goes in, to me it is sort of like your, like in the corporate world, it's like your priorities matrix. It's like what's important versus what's urgent. And I, I wrote about this at, I don't know, 4 45, 5:00 AM yesterday morning. But the, the using whips on Haitian immigrants who'd crossed the border refugees who'd crossed the border. I looked at that and anybody that's ever been around horses like immediate were like, oh my gosh, that, that's clearly split reigns to a horse. That's, that it's connected to the bridal of the horse. That's how you drive the horse. And so that's, that's a, that's a journalism era. What was the most amazing to me was that USA today ran a piece that said we're whipping Haitian refugees and it's not okay. And then in the first couple paragraphs it says, according to the El Paso times, a border patrol agent cracked a whip. Okay. So the piece even contradicted itself. And then there was no evidence of whips in the, the images that were taken. And then it was confirmed. The border patrol agents do not carry whips. People who grew up in town don't know a lot about livestock or about horses, and they didn't understand that those were were rains.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:17:17] And so I was just amazed by that because I would've gotten fired for that. Like my career 15 years ago as I started out doing, you know, doing some on the ground reporting in Chicago, I would've been done. Like, I would've had to go into sales or something else because if I would've interviewed for another job, why'd you get fired? Oh, I said, somebody got whipped. But there was no like whip present in this law enforcement group. We're not gonna hire you. You're done now. You can do it at the highest level. And they don't even print retractions. They just change the story.

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] And why do you think that is? What changed in the media that made that, what was once unacceptable, acceptable?

Seth Tower Hurd [00:17:58] I think there's a few things going on. I think the first one is that, that honestly they just don't have budgets. You know, there's just less people working. There's less people fact checking, there's less people writing. They're under tremendous pressure to produce things fast because as much as they don't wanna admit it, the thing that's hurting big media the most is shows like this. It's independent substack like I do. It's the fact that now there's people are giving, you know, are, instead of getting a subscription to the New York Times or the Washington Post, they're actually, you know, donating five bucks a month to three or four different YouTubers. And that's where that money's going. So not only is like, at first it was like, oh, well nobody's paying for news now they're paying for news. It's that nobody, there's less trust in the, the big institutions. And so people trust individuals more so, you know, they're essentially kicking in tips, five bucks here, 10 bucks there, which used to go to traditional news subscriptions. And the more that big news outlets do things like I just talked about. And the more that they engage in like frantic coverage, that's not fact checked, et cetera, the more that people who are, you know, plugged in individuals like you talked about, you know, that it was important for you to stay up on, you know, stuff in the world, don't trust them because they just keep screwing stuff up and it just, the cycle continues, right? The more they screw stuff up, the less people want to give them money. And the more likely they are to give it to an independent substack or an independent YouTuber past that, you see people like Bari Weiss, who was the opinions editor at the New York Times, just say, this is corrupt, it's garbage.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:19:35] I'm out. And you know, she walked away last year, I think she's one of the best writers out there, period. She's a, you know, very pretty far left, you know, kind of theater nerd type. I mean, she uttered the phrase abolish the Second Amendment on Joe Rogan's podcast. But she's a really good journalist. And so where she and I may disagree on, you know, kind of individual issues, I have tremendous respect for the fact that she's a journalist when other people are not journalists.

Vance Crowe [00:20:05] Well, she was the one that, that had an article about Jordan Peterson that wasn't, you know, completely insane. And she was the first one after he had just gotten this onslaught Yeah. You know, one after another after another. And she was working for the times. Right.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:20:19] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:20:20] And I think she referred to him well, I, I, that article was, was just like such an explosion in the, in that world because the, the motion of the ocean had already gone in one direction. Yeah. Which was,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:20:33] Jordan Peterson

Vance Crowe [00:20:33] Is evil and, and the things he's saying are, are misogynistic and you just gotta get rid of him. And she said something different. And I imagine her life had to be flipped completely upside down when she did that.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:20:46] Yeah. Well, this actually goes back to something that happened about 10 years ago that I, I think it's one of the biggest stories of, of this century that nobody paid attention to. There was a scandal called JournoList. And so what this was, was all these journalists at the, you know, the big, the different big outlets in New York and Washington, DC they were all like WhatsApp and group texts and stuff talking about how essentially they should have the same opinions, how they were gonna throw stories towards certain things. It was Ezra Klein that was, that was quarterbacking this thing who since then I actually think has gone on to do, to do some pretty good work. But if you think about the fact that these are supposed to be like independent voices that are, you know, following the truth no matter where it leads, like the old school, like if your mother says she loves you, check it out, type of thing. You know, so this was 10 years ago that we saw all these journalists essentially, you know, give up on what they believed in and like to be a part of a club. And that's the biggest thing I see in the media right now having worked in it, having been in, you know, like some of the, you know, all the bigger kind of news stations in Chicago, you know, TV and radio and morning shows and everything is, unfortunately a lot of people go into this, go into it not just as a job or as a calling, but to have an identity as a journalist, as a media person. And that tends to skew the way they do their work because they don't just want to do a good job. They want to feel special, they want to feel like they are somebody.

Vance Crowe [00:22:12] It was, I, so a few years ago I was invited to MIT they have this program out there called the Knight Science Fellows. Yeah. And that's where they teach journalists, they can audit any class they want at MIT or Harvard that's at the graduate level. And it's journalists there for a year. So they don't even have to write a single story. They just get to take these scientific classes. And so they'd be from outside magazine, there's somebody from the Wall Street Journal and you know, all these big publications out there, Washington Post. And so I, I gave a lecture there and it was awesome because they were radically underestimating. They, they were like, oh, the director of millennial engagement's gonna be, this

Seth Tower Hurd [00:22:52] Is hilarious. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:22:53] And so we ended up having like a really good talk. We, you know, it was like something they didn't expect. And afterwards we went out to dinner. Now these people have taken me out to, this is Cambridge, so I'm having like one of the nicest dinners I've ever been at. They are ordering, you know, $200 bottles of wine. They have food that's like a little plate with just like little tiny things on it that are, you know, this is probably, you know, an $80 meal or something like that. Yep. And they're all there telling me like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We understand that you're growing food more bountifully than we ever have before, but the world is in an awful place. It keeps getting worse. And yeah, Steven Pinker, I know he's written like some good stuff, but he's wrong because basically, and it was just like a thousand reasons why we're headed to the Abyss. And I was like, if all of the journalists at the top science program at MIT that are, that are drinking $200 bottles of wine and eating some of the finest meals that, you know, you can have in western civilization believe that the world is getting worse, then what the fuck is their writing gonna talk about? Right? Like it's, this is, these are gonna be insane people. Right. These are people not living in reality.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:24:04] Yeah. You know, and you, you see that a lot where a lot of journalists were calling were saying that like, oh, you know, we're risking our lives, particularly during the Trump era. And both, I, I will say the last three presidents have all had their moments of being hostile towards journalists. People forget that Obama was fairly hostile at moments because, you know, he was so diplomatic for so much of his presidency. Obviously Trump just trumped all over Trump land when he was talking to journalists. And Biden will just ignore questions, walk out, turn his mic off, you know, say things like, my patience is wearing thin. You know, stuff like that. And there is this, this sense that like not only are we the good guys, but we're the martyrs. And then I look at that, compare it

Vance Crowe [00:24:52] To Yeah, that's right. Yes. We are the ones putting ourselves in danger here to get you the story that we already created before we ever walked in the room.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:24:59] Yeah. And I, you know, I forget her name, but some of the best journalism I've seen in a year was that CNN female reporter who stayed on the ground in Afghanistan as things were going to hell, and I can't think of her name, but she was putting herself in positions where she could have died to tell the stories of people who were dying. And you know, she got out right there at the end, a tremendous, tremendous person in, in the journalism industry. And I look at that and I'm just like, okay, so if you want to be like a quote unquote martyr, like go cover a war zone, I mean there are wars, you

Vance Crowe [00:25:36] Know, that's what makes what Glenn Greenwald is doing. Yeah. That's so interesting to me. So when I first heard gr Glenn Greenwald, I was working at a radio station called kz, YX and Z. This is in like Northern California Mendocino. So like yeah,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:25:49] The

Vance Crowe [00:25:49] People in Mendocino think the people in Berkeley are too conservative so they move up there. Right. So I I I was driving to work at this community public radio station and Glenn Greenwald would come on a show with, with a Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. Are you familiar with

Seth Tower Hurd [00:26:03] This? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:26:04] So like, definitely left, left, left, right. And then he helps out with the Snowden papers, like helps him get that stuff published. And then, you know, at the height of the cultural like wave crashing onto society, he switches teams and says, you know, my news outlet, which was has always been left, has been completely hijacked. We've left all of our principles. And so now I'm going to the other side. What's your take on what Glenn Greenwald's done and is doing?

Seth Tower Hurd [00:26:34] You know what I, I think that if you, you zoom out, 'cause I'm always looking for not individual stories, but patterns. I would say that Matt, if you look at, there's like almost a, a trio there. Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, and then Glenn Greenwald who have all done the same thing that have all been these essentially like internal whistleblowers to say the left have lost their minds. The stuff that, that we always have believed in is gone. And, and I and all three of them have basically said, I don't care if nobody else follows me. Like, you know, I'm gonna plant my flag in the ground right here and I'm not gonna move. And to me, there, there are three of the most important voices in the United States. What I think is so fascinating about what the political left is doing right now, you know, you and I are are very close to the same age, if not exactly the same age. And what I see on the kind of more fringes of the political left that's that's very popular right now is almost exactly what Jerry Falwell's moral majority was. You know, and from a religious standpoint only now it's on the other side. And it's so weird to me that that happened. Like, it's the same thing.

Vance Crowe [00:27:47] So Jerry Falwell would be a guy that, I remember his name, I remember he was like very like considered evil conservative. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:27:54] But

Vance Crowe [00:27:54] What so make it more specific. Okay. What do you mean? Yeah,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:27:57] Yeah. Let me, let me narrow that down. So Jerry Falwell did a thing called the Moral Majority, where it's like, you know, if you were a Protestant evangelical Christian, you have to vote this way. It was about like kind of solidarity and power, if you will. Right. And it got really weird. I mean, I was a really young kid, but there's some really good, you know, books you can read about this. There's one called Jesus and John Wayne Don't agree with everything in it, but it's a fascinating take on this time. And so what it was was, it was, it was very much demonizing the other, you know, side politically, you know, like without holding to any kind of standards. And you can see that with the left's treatment of, or the right's treatment of Bill Clinton and then Donald Trump over infidelity. You know, there's some space between those two things. And it was Bill Clinton is the worst person ever in the world for infidelity. You know, he is the devil incarnate. And then, you know, Trump who's been, you know, married three times and doesn't have the best record with, you know, with maintaining marriage vows, traditionally it was, oh well like, you know, he's learned from his past and, and that type of thing. So it was just, just rank hypocrisy in whatever it was it, you know, it was the Christian thing, the moral thing, the right thing is to line up with the political right. No matter what. We are now seeing the same thing where it is a religious fervor to where there's like no reason around a lot of this stuff, no logic, but we have to line up. You saw that in both the Emmys and the Met Gala to where just the optics of it, the, the wait staff were masked, the celebrities were not the mayor of San Francisco, you know, condemned people for going to outdoor music festivals.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:29:41] And then, you know, was seen like massless at, I don't know if that was like a blues concert or something like that. And she just said everybody shouldn't, you know, shouldn't basically kill my buzz. It was, you know, I was feeling the spirit or something like that when she was, she was like, you know, at this concert. And she can't even compute that. Like, it's like not even wrong to her that the rules are for everybody else, not the specials. You know, I mean you saw this with Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot getting her hair done while, you know, everybody else was locked down, like, and couldn't go anywhere. And she just said, well, I take my personal hygiene very seriously and I am the face of this city so I get a haircut. You don't, and it doesn't even compute, not necessarily for the people doing this, but for a lot of their acolytes, their followers, their disciples that this is wrong. You know, that we can't have different rules for different people and democracy and

Vance Crowe [00:30:34] Why not? Like I, I'm, I'm always like really suspicious of my own delusions from that I get from propaganda, right?

Seth Tower Hurd [00:30:43] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:30:43] So I like to differentiate between propaganda and education. Education is how to think. Propaganda is what to think. And I gotta tell you, when I turn on the news, they're not trying to teach me how to think. They're trying to show me like, hey, this is the way that you should understand that. So when I see that stuff about the haircuts and them, you know, like you shouldn't wear masks. Oh, oh yeah, we should. Right? These kind of lies I think, is it really as bad as it looks or am I being hijacked to go down this way and think that the other side are morons and crazy people that can't be trusted under any circumstance? Because if they're really behaving the way that it looks to me through the window of propaganda that I see, then they look insane.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:31:26] Yeah. I would actually take that back to like the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights. If you're born here, you know, it, it doesn't matter if you were born in 1983 or 1997 or 2003 or 2017, you were born into a world with what was supposed to be the same freedom of speech, you know, freedom of movement, all those old school ones. Like you can't be forced to, you know, quarter

Vance Crowe [00:31:54] British

Seth Tower Hurd [00:31:55] Soldiers Yeah. Soldier, rent free. Yeah. All that stuff that was supposed to apply across the board. And you know, I, a big part of what I try to avoid is like going into hysterics journalism. 'cause that's all journalism is because I don't think it's hysteric journalism to say it's very uncomfortable that, you know, essentially the, like the elites, the specials, the famous people now don't have to live like the way everybody else does. And you know, that's, and not even necessarily because it's stupid, which it is, but it's also how you get the French Revolution. It's also how you get people who so overreact that they're willing to become violent and murder people that, you know, that really had nothing to do with the situation.

Vance Crowe [00:32:42] A couple weeks ago I was hanging out with some friends in California and a buddy of mine, you know, a good guy, but he said, you know, I really wanna get back to pre COVID life and everything. There's, you know, it's been terrible, but, you

Seth Tower Hurd [00:32:55] Know, I

Vance Crowe [00:32:55] Do like the masks being on waiters and, and people cooking my food. 'cause you don't really want those people, you know, breathing on your food. Don't you agree? And I was like, no man, no. I don't want the masks for anybody. Yeah. This is like creating a tiered system. And you see it going on right now in the, in the county of St. Louis. I can walk into my favorite restaurant, I don't have to put on a mask. I go walk and sit down at my table and all around me are waitresses and I can see back into the, into the kitchen, all those people are shoved into masks. And it's like this performative thing that we're doing that creates two classes of people. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:33:33] Those

Vance Crowe [00:33:33] That do have to wear the mask and those that don't. And this is not good.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:33:37] Well, one of those comments that going back to, you know, sort of that attitude of, of media, of being the elites, being the specials, being the martyrs. I was in, I was in the WGN newsroom in Chicago, you know, you can see it nationwide on cable. And I was talking to one of the producers, which is kinda what you do when you're in PR while your guest is out there talking to the host, you're trying to build a relationship to get the next person in there Right. In whatever you're doing. And the producer said to me, had no idea how horrible this was. I never would've guessed you're from a farm, you're so well spoken and like swap in race there, swap in sexual orientation there. You know, I can't believe that you're illiterate. I never would've thought that people from group bleep are are literate. And that's what concerns me. It's not, you know, kind of the, the clap back journalism or you know, whatever it is. It's where we're at right now. And not even necessarily that like, this person has to wear a mask and this person doesn't. I worry that that kind of hypocrisy will push people who are mentally unstable to commit terrorism for one thing.

Vance Crowe [00:34:51] Yeah. I mean like when you start telling people, I mean, just take the kid in high school, right? That was told all the time, you're bad kid. You're bad kid, you're bad kid. What does he start doing? He starts be living up to that, to that, you know, ideal because everybody already thinks it, that the floor is always slanted that way. And I think about this in terms of how will you ever reintegrate society back together if you've said those people are dirty and they have to wear a mask and we should be afraid of them. Like how do you ever get over that? You can't teach that to children. And then like five years from now be like, no, no, the dirty people aren't dirty anymore.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:35:31] Well, you know, when I think to, you know, the era when you and I were kind of in our maybe like prime pop culture years, when we had, when we had more attention, we had more attention to give to pop culture when we weren't like exhausted parents. You know, I, you didn't hear awards shows, sports interviews, you know, post game interviews and that type of thing. They didn't instantly turn political. Everybody had these common rallying points and we might vote differently, but we all kind of enjoyed the same stuff. And you know, we enjoyed the same holiday as the same food. And you know, there may be cultural differences, but you know, like it doesn't matter if you were a Honduran immigrant or you know, a Swede person of Swedish descent from North Dakota who's very into your heritage or somebody on the east coast or a grandma in Florida or whatever. It's, we all celebrated Thanksgiving. Right. I would actually, I'd love to get your take on this. What is a thing that we now all enjoy that is not politicized?

Vance Crowe [00:36:34] I mean, so the other day I was talking with my 101 year old mentor, right? Yeah. And I was really worked up about, you know, the potential for booster shots and vaccine passports. And one of the, the things that he said to me during this was Vance, whatever the past was, we're not going back to that. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:36:54] The

Vance Crowe [00:36:54] Makeup and the decisions and the who's in charge, it's, it's going to be different. Maybe that'll be you and the people you want to be in charge and maybe it won't, but it is going to change in a big way. And like the earlier you come to that realization, then the more you can build in that future area. And I, it like that really hit me like a ton of bricks, right? Because I don't think of myself as a conservative in the sense of me being like, I don't want to change, right? Yeah. I don't wanna update society. I'm a conservative in the sense of like, where I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's change at some moderated pace. But when you do finally come to the full conclusion, that shit is about to change in some big way.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:37:35] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:37:36] Well then I start saying like, maybe I should be having better conversations about where things are going. But it seems so chaotic to me that in in many regards, I don't know.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:37:45] Well, going back to the first thing you said, you know that you are a lot more concerned with like being local. You know, I can't control the fact that for the last 30 years, Congress has pretty much like defaulted on their duties. Congress just sort of recommends a budget there. Legislation is not driven outta Congress. There's a reason you see more protests in front of the Supreme Court than in front of the Capitol. And it's because the Supreme Court has a lot more say over laws than Congress does. And we're in this system now where we're, you're essentially, even if you're a senator, you're almost continually campaigning, right? You're not really doing your job. And that means that the Supreme Court and the, you know, the president have tons of power. And you saw it with the Trump Biden transition. Biden came in and just torched everything Trump touched. Even things that you just can't imagine why, you know, that was burned up other than it was a Trump thing. Trump had, you know, issued a, an executive memo to build federal buildings in the classical style as opposed to just the disgusting like seventies brutalism that just ruins like skylines and cities. Like it's gross, you know? And, and Biden just torched that 'cause that was a Trump thing. And you know, whenever power flips over again, you know, you're gonna see that again. I don't wanna live in like, you know, we, we had a revolution not to have a king. I don't think having a shorter term monarch is great.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:39:19] You know, my my seventh great grandfather died as a colonel in the American Revolution. Not, I don't think it was for shorter term kings. I think it was for no king. I don't know how to fix that. I don't know how to calm society down, but I do know how to put out 10 stories a week where people from all walks of life that have very different opinions can say, you know what, we can at least talk about these sane things because if you split up just pick anything 4th of July Thanksgiving, you know that those are now contentious holidays. Baseball, college football, NBA, you know, those are all now highly politicized soccer. It's like, soccer is like the white liberal sport, you know, NBA is like the young liberal sport. College football is like the rural, you know, kind of, and, and baseball kind of the like rural good old boy sport is how it, it, you know, it's seen now the NFL is probably somewhere closer to the left. And I actually think that's a, a huge deal that we used to build bonds with neighbors through like civic organizations and through shared experiences in addition to losing like all of our common pop culture touchpoints, like all that old school stuff like the Rotary Club, that we had no idea how much it was holding society together by holding our local communities together until like that nobody cares about that stuff anymore. And we all hate each other.

Vance Crowe [00:40:47] And you have to wonder is this tumult that you're going through, just the very fact that the bonds are breaking up because the old level of stability, the way that people were comprised together, needed to be different. And now the now you know, a new phase, you hit a new transition, you've gotta heat those things up and things break apart. I don't normally take this position, but I think it's an interesting one to consider with somebody like you. Like, so how long will you know college football be that, is that a permanent thing? Does that mean that football eventually goes away? Does it mean, you know, because they say, oh, it's too dangerous with concussions or,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:41:27] I, I think it it does football go away? I think that came and went if we were gonna stop watching it thi this gets into something else. The people who were saying they were gonna stop watching college football in the NFL because, you know, it was too dangerous or whatever, that didn't match up with the ratings at all. But what did match up with the ratings was that when the NFL started getting highly politicized, the ratings did dip and you saw all these people go over to the very short-lived XFL because that was just, and it was kind of novelty football in a way, but it wasn't like silly football like it was when they first tried to launch the league, it was more sports oriented and it was just sports. That was it. I think the other thing you're seeing on, on the sports thing is the, the rise of the UFC being just absolutely huge from a very fringe thing. And again, I think that goes back to people trust individuals more than organizations and that's an individual sport. So you don't have to worry about the, you know, whatever weird thing that the team said on social media or

Vance Crowe [00:42:27] Yeah. I mean men's UFC there's no, you know, there's no real way to cheat in there. You get into a ring Yeah. In an octagon with a person and you either beat the hell outta him or he beats the hell outta you. And it doesn't matter whether there has to be, you know, inclusion or I mean you can anyone is welcome inside. Yeah,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:42:42] Yeah. Anybody

Vance Crowe [00:42:44] You

Seth Tower Hurd [00:42:44] See all kind, you know, from the first major LGBT sports champ in America being, you know, the female UFC champ to, you know, a couple fighters who have like gone and, you know, taken their, Colby Covington, took his belt to President Trump's office and everybody's kind of cool, actually that is one where everybody's kind of cool and, and is cool with everybody's opinions and everything. Getting back to that question of like, how much do things have to heat up before they break apart? I, I don't want to believe the answer that I'm giving you, but from what I can tell people calm down when the, the consequences of their anger, of their hatred is so horrific that they actually see it. So if you look back at World War I, like you got all these guys that are like ready to go. It's exciting. There's a book that's titled before the Leaves fall because they thought they were gonna go become men. And what happened was that they went and it was the most horrific war, you know, that, that we can imagine. I mean chemical warfare, you know, people just piled up in trenches and then disease from that spreading. And then what happened is all those vets came home and said, don't do it. Don't go to war, don't glorify this. And then we learned the lesson too much that way and allowed Hitler to rise to power because Europe and the United States were so not wanting to get into conflict again that we let like the most evil person ever get into power. Right.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:44:15] Unfortunately, I think what's gonna happen one way or another is that people will probably remain angry until something happens that makes them realize that it's not everybody else. It's, if I continue to believe this horrible things will happen in the world, I got that earlier because part of my family that married in from that married in my very large farming family, there was a population of Laotian refugees that were sponsored by local churches. I grew up with people who watched people beheaded in a civil war. There was a guy that is from the county I grew up in that his relatives sponsored him out of Auschwitz very early on when you could actually pay a ransom to get your relatives out. You know, I remember being 8, 9, 10, 11-year-old kid, him telling me about the concentration camps showing me the tattoo on his arm. So I've never been this person. I, I think that people just like these, you have these irrational thoughts on World War I that like we're gonna go become men that, you know, those conservatives, those liberals are so stupid that they're just, we're gonna have to kill some of them, you know, to like get things back to normal so they can learn their lesson. And the only way that you can talk like that, and you can think like that because there's been this conversation about like American civil war for, you know, the last six years or so. The only way you can think that or utter those words is because you are completely ignorant to what those words mean.

Vance Crowe [00:45:44] Yeah. Or to, to think of them as like, this will somehow be the easier path than figuring it out with what we have right here. Right? Yeah. Like that when, when I lived in Kenya, like the, the real experience that you get from that is, okay, you can do what you want in Kenya. Like there's very few people around the, I mean your social, there's a lot of social pressure, right? Yeah. But you can do what you want 'cause there's no police there. But then you see what it's like when people live and they're afraid. Then you see like how mobs handle, you know, justice. And I think about like the idea of, you know, defund the police has kind of come and gone and I wonder what the next one will be, but I do think we're still just as primed as we were for another George Floyd incident to go off in any direction. Yeah. And I think that there are people that the reason they're excited about it is 'cause just like we were talking about in the beginning, it's a continuation of the opera, the soap opera that they've been watching as opposed to understanding like, no, those are real stores that burned down. No, those are real truckers that were pulled out of their their truck and and beaten, right? Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:46:51] These

Vance Crowe [00:46:52] Are real things.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:46:53] Well, you know, I, if I had to do over again, I would've done some on the ground reporting during the, the riots in St. Louis. I drove around some and what I saw, because people were congregating Ferguson, again, I saw white kids in very expensive SUVs with out of state plates that gathered into a very big crowd. And those mobs burned down local black businesses that had just rebuilt from the violence a few years ago that burned down a police station that has, from what people in Ferguson have told me, has done a complete 180, like complete, like again, I I'm just going off of what a couple of residents have told me, okay, complete 180, that community is way better off than, than when it first made the news. And you have rich white kids who don't even live in Missouri who came and were a part of the crowd. I can't tell you who did the burning, but were a part of the crowd that burned it down. You know, like just

Vance Crowe [00:47:58] Even the way you're describing it there, I mean, I understand why you are, but it was, it would've been so weird when we were kids to have described the race of people that, that were, that were doing things or to talk about white kids doing something or black kids doing something that would've been so weird that like people, everybody would've looked at you and been like, what, what's up with that dude? Like, why

Seth Tower Hurd [00:48:20] Does he keep

Vance Crowe [00:48:20] Referencing that? And now it's become a normal part of the way that people like, feel like you have to describe things.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:48:27] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's weird that like, as much as I don't wanna be part of that world, that's now the language that all of us are in, right? Like we've, we've just had, we've all picked that up.

Vance Crowe [00:48:42] You know, the other thing that's weird that's changed is, I mean there was a time there where everyone associated St. Louis with riots and like horrible race issues. And now maybe they still do, I don't really know, but there's been so many other places Yeah. That have had so many conflicts that like, I don't know, you know, do you think people would, would recall Ferguson off the top of their head and then the, right now,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:49:06] You know, I've tried to trace this because I did some writing about how every social movement goes to the same arc, right? And as somebody who tries to have sane conversations when somebody says, you know, something like, I support Black Lives Matter, my question is not, what do you mean? But when do you mean? Because in 2015 when you saw some of the stuff that was happening at Mizzou is actually where it really started to pop off of the Mizzou football team. And then you had the, I believe it was Trayvon Martin who was like a 12-year-old who was shot in Ohio and then you had the, the guy that was the neighborhood neighborhood watch guy that, that wound up shooting Trayvon. Wait, no, I got those, I got those mixed up. But you know, I'm talking about the guy

Vance Crowe [00:49:47] Anymore. This is exactly the point, right? This

Seth Tower Hurd [00:49:48] Is, this is is exactly the point.

Vance Crowe [00:49:49] Those were things that were so clear in our minds that it's, and now are a distant memory. It's so,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:49:53] Yeah. And you know, so to me, even Black Lives Matter, I think is actually something we don't talk about a lot anymore. I think the fact that the, that some of the voices at the top came out as open communists and then one of them bought like $7 million of real estate and is living in, you know, an all white, predominantly white, you know, subdivision in this mansion really started to sort of, that was just the arc of, of that social movement, right? I don't know what's gonna happen after that, but I don't know that out of all of them that people are really gonna remember St. Louis, if they, if you say Ferguson, they're gonna remember something happened in Ferguson. But things have been so topsy-turvy that I, I think that what's happened in Portland and Seattle with the ongoing riots, you know, a hundred nights of riots in a row and that type of thing that, you know, the rise of Antifa and that type of thing has really taken the, the heat off of where we live.

Vance Crowe [00:50:50] So the other part of your newsletter that you send out on Fridays is the, you know, the, the culture fashion layer kind of the what's going on in

Seth Tower Hurd [00:50:59] Everything

Vance Crowe [00:51:00] From movies to music. How do you curate that? So

Seth Tower Hurd [00:51:03] What I'm always looking for is what's going on bigger? So this is, this is not my original thought. This is actually one of my mentors who's, you know, a very high level consultant that told me about the Walking Dead. He said that came out after the War on Terror and after we, you know, so what happened was you had these hijackers in nine 11, they were living among us and then all of a sudden they transformed to something else and killed a bunch of Americans and the Walking Dead, even though they didn't mean to made a show with that theme.

Vance Crowe [00:51:33] That's very interesting.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:51:35] And so I'm looking for the fact that people can't help but right about the time that they're living in. And actually, this is something I, I'm close to writing about, but a pop artist named Halsey came out with an album a couple of weeks ago titled, if I Can't Have Love, I Want Power. And what I actually think we're seeing that's a connection between pop culture and these social movements, and actually a predominant religious movement is that, you know, if you look at Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, kinda the two big, you know, two of the biggest writers right now, right? White

Vance Crowe [00:52:16] On critical race theory, Ken, yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:52:17] On critical race theory, you know, and, and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, essentially that is all a conversation about power. Ibram has a, a line that a lot of people know, which is the cure. It's something like the Cure for Injustice yesterday as Injustice Today, something like that. Like we need to flip the script. And to me, that is the same thing as that album title. If I can't have love, I want power. And at the same time, I would actually argue that the most predominant religious system in the United States now is actually old school. Paganism Barnes and Noble in Chicago has a bigger witchcraft section than they have philosophy section.

Vance Crowe [00:52:56] Dude, you're tea, you're speaking my language here because, and I have, I have a working hypothesis in this. Yeah. So whenever we bring over like a babysitter that's gonna, you know, be here for a couple of weeks, you know, we always interview 'em. And one of the things that they kept bringing up, now, I didn't ask them, I didn't know anything at all about this would be astrology. They'd be like, oh, I'm a Sagittarius. And you know, when we watch over a Leo that's, you know, good. And I looked up, you know, Violet's birthday and I know exactly the moon was rising. And so this happened a couple of times. And so I started being like, you know what? I'm gonna start asking them. And so I do, and every single college age to 34-year-old women that I've met in the last, I don't know, 12 months, yeah. They're all super into astrology. Every single one of 'em,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:53:43] I, I would say that connects pop culture and then some of the more academic writing that's highly controversial. It's all the same thing. Here's what concerns me about that. You know, I'm a committed Christian. I would actually say that it's a fairly religious experience for me to write the five, because even though I never mentioned my belief, it is rooted in the fact that I believe that putting truth out in the world is part of the mission that is in front of me. You know? But, but I understand that I live in a world with all kinds of, you know, all kinds of beliefs. When my brother was dying of cancer, he had a female Muslim doctor who was at that point, essentially the most important person in the world outside of my own family. You know, my, my wife is half Jewish, you know, and you know, obviously part of her family are, you know, Jewish, you know, not just culturally, but like actual, you know, practicing, you know, beliefs. And so, you know, I, and that, and I, I grew up around a bunch of Buddhists because I grew up around Laotian refugees. And I've worked with a lot of people in India who are, are practicing Hindus. And I can look at all those things and I can say, okay, so we're probably never gonna believe the same thing, but we at least have the same, there's at least some things kinda the golden rule thing we can like all agree on, you know, like the treat others is you wanna be treated. My concern with this rise of witchcraft being the cool thing paired with the, the, you know, the political writings and actually paired with journalists even thinking they're special, is that when everything is about power, then you can justify anything. And you can get into some really weird stuff.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:55:14] This, this YouTuber Instagrammer who, you know, they unfortunately just found her body in Wyoming. There was a really viral tweet that people were agreeing with that said, you know, I think she was strangled because something about astrology, like whatever sign controls the throat. And I bet she was strangled and this is why she died. And I was like, okay, so imagine like a Muslim tweeting that girl probably died 'cause she ate pork.

Vance Crowe [00:55:41] Oh, yeah. You

Seth Tower Hurd [00:55:42] Know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [00:55:42] Yeah. Like

Seth Tower Hurd [00:55:43] That, imagine a Christian tweeting that I bet that girl died because she didn't honor her father and her mother, like in the 10 come command that, I mean, that's so beyond insane. Like, it really does concern me. And it goes back to how do we calm society down? I I've really, you know, planted my flag around having sane conversations with all different kinds of people. If your worldview is, I worship power,

Vance Crowe [00:56:09] I don't know where we go. You know, the, the some of the things that come with Christianity being your societal baseline, even if you are not Christian, is just the, the cultural energy that goes behind that, right? Yeah. Like, not one, not least of which is our judicial system being like, Hey, there's a place for forgiveness here. Yeah. There's a place for mercy here. There's, and maybe people would say the reason that the thing is decaying is because you had these ideals and they weren't playing out for certain groups of people. But you, you have the idea that we don't live in a, in an honor culture. We live in a meritocracy. Yeah. We live in a, in a culture where you can transcend the problems of your, your parents and, you know, you don't have to, you don't have to be responsible for those types of things. And when you change belief systems, you don't know what else you're porting along with them. Yeah. I mean the, the, the ethics smuggling that happens when you just whole cloth take on, whether it's astrology or however you want to, you know, define it wi witchcraft, whatever. I mean, this sounds like so far beyond what we would've, like if you and I had been watching a show on, on open access television, you're like, it's, it's

Seth Tower Hurd [00:57:26] Satan,

Vance Crowe [00:57:27] Right? It's, it's the, you know, they're double worshipers. That would be where this goes. How do you know you're not jumping the shark here? Because I, I'm, I'm saying like the, the babysitters are into astrology and you're like, I believe witchcraft is on the rise.

Seth Tower Hurd [00:57:42] No, and I don't think that necessarily, you know, people who are like, oh, I, I find some meaning or some direction in this. I don't think that necessarily makes them bad people. We obviously disagree. There's obviously, to me that's a massive suspension of logic as to where, you know, I, I think that there's a pretty easy case for like, the universe started somewhere, you know, maybe you're an atheist and that's cool, or maybe you're just like, well, I'm a person who thinks there was some sort of force that started life, but at, at some point there was matter. You know, it's the, the universe is not eternal as far as we can tell. It's going out into space and it's gonna die. So if it's gonna die, it has an end, it has a beginning, you know? And so I can see how you can get to different religious belief systems there, or even no belief, right? I, I personally can't see how you get into like this astrology stuff and think that a girl died because of her sign. And, you know, like that's, that's just, I can't wrap my head around it. I don't think necessarily that, that just, if you, if that's something you subscribe to that makes you a bad person, what I am saying is that the ideas that are circulating right now of everything being a power dynamic and, you know, I believe I was victimized, so I'm going to do whatever I want. Take things from people, you know, a lot of the, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:09] My victim status gives me certain special rights that other, that aren't afforded to people that were not the same victim as me. Well,

Seth Tower Hurd [00:59:16] Oddly enough, Christianity is the basis for like reparations there. I'm sure there are a lot of evangelicals, you know, mainline denominations, Catholics, that would say, I don't believe in reparations and I'm not making argument for or against that today. That's, that's a complicated subject. But the idea that you can't just kill people and take their stuff like that started in Israel and went through Athens and became America. Like, nobody ever worried about that until the last like two, 300 years, right? Like Genghis Khan was not slashing and burning his way through Russia and Eastern Europe and into the Middle East being like, you know, maybe this isn't cool. Like, maybe I should turn around, go home and like give the gold back and just be like, I'm really sorry Moscow, that not only did I defeat you, but like I tortured the soldiers who surrendered. You know? I mean, that was a fairly new idea that that's fairly unique to America, that we would, you know, the, the Japanese that we interned during World War ii, that we would try to make amends there, right? And when we're back to this, this, you know, power driven paganism, it is a, an updated version of it's cool for me to kill you and take your stuff. My my wife showed me these Facebook groups and I can't believe it. There's all these people who are into like crystals now and there's even like a Christian moms Crystals group. I'm like, which I'm like, what the hell? But we're back to like, if you put this crystal like on you, when you sleep, you will like make this man fall in love with you and he won't have any choice in the matter.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:01:00] We're back to just quite literally power dynamics. Like, if you will not have your own free will choose me, I will use magic to override your personhood. Which, sorry, I ain't gonna work. But the fact that we're back there, I have a hard time figuring out what we do with that to become a society that doesn't wanna kill each other, that doesn't hate each other. Because that's, there's a lot of things that you can reconcile. Pure power is not something you can reconcile. Well, I wanna kill everybody and take their things well. I wanna kill you and take your things.

Vance Crowe [01:01:34] So as you're listening, you're making up your list on Friday. Yeah. What, what is interesting music that would guide people to a better understanding of what's going on in culture right now? Because like, it's hard to find new music unless I just trust the algos like Spotify. But what could I listen to that would give me a good view into like what the young people are thinking these

Seth Tower Hurd [01:01:53] Days? You know, it's so splintered. I, I, I have had this conversation, you know, individual songs pop off and you see them go viral because like the hook got big on TikTok or something like that. But these common moments that everybody's listening to the same thing. Like there's five or six CDs that if you pick a given four years of high school school, almost everybody owned there isn't, there aren't those albums that people really rally around anymore. There's three or four artists that can still pull that off. Two of them are Taylor Swift and Kanye West. A third is probably Adele that, you know, kind of cross like, you know, generations and that people really are events, albums are not events anymore. And man, it's tough for me to say, even though like when I was teaching in Chicago in my early thirties, like I was way more up on hip hop and like what was going on in blogs that even kids that were, you know, that had grown up in the city that were, you know, that were like plugged in there. Like, how did you know about that before me? I'm like, dude, 'cause I'm checking Twitter. I'm checking vlogs and everything as far as as what's popping off. I do think the fact that music and fashion are now in lockstep, that I think that's really interesting. So you're seeing like, my wife bought me these jeans that are like short at the ankle or whatever, and she's like, you have to wear these now. And I'm like, oh boy. And that she actually did that for, for a living. So her work as a stylist has been in like Rolling Stone and, and stuff like that, working styling for multi-platinum rock bands.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:03:29] And at the same time that's happening, like you're seeing like the Olivia Rodrigo early nineties like Nirvana, Alanis Morissette thing pop off. And so it's interesting to me that everybody's kind of taking the same cues. It's like, oh, well we're all dressing like friends. Maybe we should not make the next teen pop star Miley Cyrus. Maybe we should make her Alanis Morissette. I think that's fascinating man. As far as recommending individual artists,

Vance Crowe [01:03:56] Have you heard anything from Tom McDonald? Are you familiar with this guy? Yeah,

Seth Tower Hurd [01:04:01] I'm trying to figure out if he's any good or not because there's individual lines where I'm like, that actually takes some wisdom I to find something that everybody was feeling and nobody had said yet. I think that if you look back at Green Day's, American Idiot album, kind of when public opinion was starting to turn on, particularly the war in Iraq, everybody was feeling it. Nobody put words to it. Tom McDonald has some of those moments, but some of the other stuff I'm like, just dude, I'm bored.

Vance Crowe [01:04:32] Yeah, I agree with that. I, I listened to him. I was sealing my driveway and I listened to a whole bunch of him and I really kind of came to the conclusion like every once in a while he has a line that I'm like, oh man, I wish I would've thought of that. And then there's a whole bunch of it that I'm like, I don't know, is like, this just doesn't speak to me at all, but I'm also, you know, 40 years old sealing my, my driveway. Right? Like I'm not, well

Seth Tower Hurd [01:04:56] Yeah. And I, I actually think that, you know, as, as far as what, what do I kind of see as the future? I would actually argue he's probably one of, from what I know about the music industry, he's probably one of the 10 or so highest grossing artists of 2021. I

Vance Crowe [01:05:13] Believe that just because

Seth Tower Hurd [01:05:13] Nobody toured.

Vance Crowe [01:05:14] Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:05:15] He puts out singles and makes you buy his CDs and people see them, see him as a part of their identity. Going back to like the elitist of journalism, the weirdest thing ever, like the Hollywood actors that are sort of collaborating with like the East coast journalists that are collaborating with the Democratic Party somehow made being a Republican punk rock.

Vance Crowe [01:05:37] Yeah. Isn't that the weirdest thing? I mean like, you saw that happen when Milo Yiannopoulos was, was coming up, right? Yeah. It started to be that these like normally Wall Street frat boy kind of thing all of a sudden started carrying a gay man on a throne to, to go give a speech

Seth Tower Hurd [01:05:55] At a straight pride parade,

Vance Crowe [01:05:56] Right? And, and then yeah, that's right. And then having that come, you know, really all the way to like the college dudes that are, you know, cooler guys are I think conservative. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:06:08] Well what's interesting about kind of pairing what's cool with music right now, with what's happening with, with, with like the kids, one thing that's interesting about the kids is they no longer want their driver's license. You're seeing this trend up of high school kids don't want a driver's license. And I think that's splitting between this traditional teenage rebellion. I'm gonna do my own thing, gonna be my own person to like, I feel microaggressed, I don't want to drive. And that's gonna split into two camps as far as what the kids are into. And you're going to see both a screw you, I don't care. And a more, you know, and I, I, and it's, I think mental health is very important. It got really weird when mainstream pop culture started using mental health as the marketing element for pop music.

Vance Crowe [01:07:01] Yeah. That is weird. That's super weird. Like how, how people will be so open about their mental health things and their, you know, their problems with their fans and how much they need their fans, but like all caged around because I have this mental illness.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:07:18] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:07:18] Feels super bizarre.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:07:20] Well I, you know, I, it's, you can sort of see lockstep and I, we probably gotta, we gotta wrap 'cause you, we, you know, we both have lives here that we gotta get back to. And I, I certainly don't wanna disparage this individual at all, but Demi Lovato, I, you know, I noticed as the conversation around like, you know, non-binary identity was, was coming up, she seemed to pull that out right as she couldn't have a hit single anymore and she had been in trouble for like, bullying a yogurt shop. Like, which is a

Vance Crowe [01:07:54] Really weird flex.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:07:56] You know, she, she sort of recovered with like, oh, by the way, like I identify as, as non-binary. No, it's, it's not my job to say whether or not, you know, if you're a person I know in real life I will address you and be kind to you as

Vance Crowe [01:08:11] You wish to be addressed. This is, I mean like, but I take your point, like she just brought up a whole bunch of issues that are like, you know, not singing

Seth Tower Hurd [01:08:17] Well. Yeah, I mean, same thing you saw with like Kevin Spacey where it's like, you know, he had sexually abused boys and he's like, oh by the way I'm gay. It's like, well that's, that's not a hall pass for abusing minors,

Vance Crowe [01:08:29] So we are gonna leave it there. This will be, this will be fun to still works fun to bring up again, but we gotta, we have a hard stop. But it was really fun to finally have you come by, you know where the studio super man, where the studio is. We will have you back and we'll do this again, man. Yeah.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:08:42] And next time I won't end on

Vance Crowe [01:08:45] Well, so let's let you end on how, how have people wanted to sign up for the newsletter? How do they go about doing that? Yeah,

Seth Tower Hurd [01:08:50] I've, I've actually got two of 'em now. Seth Tower Hurd.substack.com is my name, my main one you're talking about, you know, being plugged into where you are locally and that being the most important thing, check out that one. You'll also find a link from that one to a new one where I just started a new substack to report specifically on very, very local corruption that's happening within a couple of miles of my house. So, you know, that'll be fun. I'll just start over

Vance Crowe [01:09:16] With, oh man, get that going and come back on and talk about it on the show.

Seth Tower Hurd [01:09:19] That'll be fun. Okay, we'll, we'll do that. Alright. Thanks dude.

Vance Crowe [01:09:20] Thanks man.