 Well guys, this is it, the last episode of Out of Frame. When I first joined the Foundation for Economic Education in 2016, my goal as Director of Media was to build up a creative team and an effective content strategy from scratch. At the time, Fee's YouTube channel had about 13,000 subscribers with barely any views and there hadn't been a new upload in a long time. So for the first year or so, I just started experimenting with a ton of different stuff. We did news briefs, animated shorts, a vlog series, a few different podcasts, a bunch of documentaries and even an educational series featuring my buddy Kevin Lieber from Vsauce 2 and Handmade Puppets. Hey, Kevin here. Some of that stuff worked pretty well and a couple of my documentaries won some awards but out of all that experimentation, there were really two shows that stood out. Common Sense Soapbox, which I created with Seamus Coughlin before Freedom Tunes really blew up and of course, Out of Frame, which started in 2017 with an eight minute episode about Star Wars. Everything I've done at Fee has always been a reflection of my creative vision but Out of Frame is a lot more directly me than anything else. To some extent, it's just the extension of the way I think about stories combined with my long-term interest in economics and political philosophy. Sure, the video essay format is uniquely suited to this kind of project but to be honest, most of what I do here isn't all that different from the conversations I have with friends whenever we hang out and watch movies. I think that's partly why this series works. The other reason it works is because since the beginning, my colleagues at Fee have trusted me to make content the way I want to make it. As much as some people in the comments have imagined that there's some big committee of overlords deciding what I say, the fact is there's never been much of a filter between me and you. That's true both in terms of how I choose topics, write episodes and edit the show and in terms of how I interact with people in the comments. Most nonprofits and for-profit companies I've worked for or with over the years are too afraid to allow creators that kind of freedom but it makes a big difference just like it does in every other area of life. And over the last five years, I've learned a lot about YouTube, about what you all care about and about the overall landscape of ideas that are taking hold in society. So that's what I want to talk about today on this very special final episode of Out of Frame. At the risk of this becoming too maudlin, I've been pretty amazed by all the comments I've gotten since I announced that I was leaving. Over the run of the show, I've tried my best to stay engaged and respond to as many people as I can. That's always meant trying to be grateful for all of you who have said kind things about episodes and also responding to criticism. Of course, with hundreds of thousands of comments since 2017, there's been quite a lot of both and there's really no way I could ever have replied to everything. That said, since my goal without a frame was and is to spark important conversations and get people thinking about ideas that are often unfamiliar and new, it's super important that we all keep talking to each other with at least a modicum of respect in the comments. I know that at least in a few cases, these conversations have made a significant difference. So that's one thing that I hope everyone will think about even after this series is gone. Talking to other people matters. Taking the time to actually communicate your ideas in a way that everyone can clearly understand and empathize with is critical. And that's going to be one of the most important skills any of us can develop right now because we're entering what I think is going to be a very difficult time. But it's also important to keep our own challenges in perspective. To that end, there's a movie I've never talked about on this series that I think is fitting for the final episode, Steven Spielberg's 1997 Academy Award-nominated film, Amistad. Based on horrifying true events, Amistad is the story of a group of illegally enslaved West Africans who managed to free themselves and kill most of their captors while being taken from Cuba to the United States on the Spanish ship La Amistad in 1839. After the Mendee tribesmen led by Sang B. Pia, later known as Joseph Sincay, get control of the ship, they demand to be taken home to what is now Sierra Leone. But the surviving crewmen take them north instead, where they're discovered off the coast of Connecticut by the Navy brig ship, the USS Washington. This sets off a complex legal case that becomes the central plot of Spielberg's film. Since none of the captive Africans spoke English and no one in Connecticut could translate for them, the whole situation turned into an epic international conflict. The slavers, backed by the Queen of Spain, claimed that the Africans were their property and needed to be returned to Cuba where they supposedly came from. Some of the naval officers who captured the Amistad claimed the ship and the men and women on it as their property by right of salvage. And of course, the Mendee tribesmen insist that they are rightfully free people, which by international law could very well be true. You see, at the time, the British empire had already outlawed slavery and engaged its Navy to crack down on the transatlantic slave trade in their territories. As a result, no African from a British colony was legally allowed to be captured and transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet the abduction of freemen from the British protector of Sierra Leone and their illegal transportation to the new world, as described by Sincay, is not unheard of, is it? Not even unusual, regrettably. Unfortunately, it was still illegal to transport people who were enslaved outside of the British empire, including Cuba. So this rule created some truly grotesque incentives, which were brought to light in the Amistad case. For one thing, slavers began keeping two different sets of records so that they could credibly lie about the origin of the human beings imprisoned on their ships. In the case of the Amistad, the Mendee slaves had been illegally captured in Sierra Leone and were sold at the Lomboco slave fortress to the Portuguese ship to Cora, which recorded them as having come from Cuba. But worse, if slavers felt like they were at risk of being boarded by the British Navy, they would sometimes chain their captives together and push them overboard, drowning dozens of people just to hide the evidence of their crimes. That also happens in Amistad. Ultimately, the court case was about whose story was correct. Were the captives on La Amistad, native-born Africans, illegally enslaved and transported across the ocean to the Americas? Or were they born in Cuba, where they had no legal rights? This critical decision would determine whether or not the Mendee had the legal authority to use deadly force against their brutal captors in order to free themselves. And the outcome would affect everything, from the United States' relations with Spain and Cuba, to the reelection prospects of President Martin Van Buren and the way we think of John Quincy Adams' legacy to the social division that would soon lead to civil war. Revisiting the film 25 years after its release, it's kind of remarkable. It's got an absolutely insane cast, full of people who have gone on to have amazing careers. German Honsu as Joseph Sinke, Matthew McConaughey as Sinke's attorney, Roger Sherman Baldwin, Stellan Skarsgard as the abolitionist, Louis Toppin, who, along with businessman Theodore Jodeson, played by Morgan Freeman, funded the Mendee's defense, plus you had Anthony Hopkins as former President John Quincy Adams, and a very young Anna Pakwin as Queen Isabella of Spain. Major supporting roles are also filled by actors like Nigel Hawthorne, Pete Possilthwaite, Tudel Ejiofor, and John Ortiz. And it features one of John Williams' most moving and sometimes most haunting scores. It's also a masterclass in how to tell a significant story from a deeply shameful part of our history without making its villains cartoonish caricatures or presenting its heroes as pious saints magically infused with the values from 150 years in the future. I can't even imagine how modern filmmakers would treat this story, but I'm pretty sure it would be a preachy identity politics-laden mess. Well, actually it probably couldn't be made at all, but I'm glad it was. And I'm glad it was made when it was because it perfectly encapsulates the most fundamental aspect of what a good film should do. In the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert. For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it's a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it's like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that to me is the most noble thing that good movies can do. And it's a reason to encourage them to support them and to go to them. This really is the true power of storytelling. And in a lot of ways, I think filmmaking is the most effective way of transporting audiences into a story. But it's rather hard to get anyone to empathize with anything in a story if your main focus is on scolding and insulting your audience. And it's pretty much impossible if your fundamental worldview says that we're all segregated into superficial identity groups that will never understand each other. But that mentality is part of why I'm really concerned about where our society is headed right now. If it wasn't obvious to everyone at this point, we're probably at the beginning of an economic recession. Either way, a lot of what I said a year and a half ago is starting to become undeniable. Even to those who desperately wanted to pretend that they could shudder huge swaths of the global economy without consequence. Back in early 2020, I talked a lot about the damage that stay-at-home orders and chaotic mandates would do to our economy. I've talked extensively about the utter havoc that most of the policies the government has enacted over the last few years would wreak. And while there are a ton of headlines popping up now about how no one saw this coming, you should know that that's a lie. Inflation, supply chain issues, international trade restrictions, volatile markets, rising prices and falling standards of living, all of this was predictable. But because that's not the narrative YouTube wants to promote, this channel took a hit and I'm sure we reached far fewer people than we probably should have. Unfortunately, few people in power seem to be remotely competent or interested enough to do anything that would actually help alleviate the situation. Instead, they've mostly doubled down on almost everything that got us into this mess in the first place. It's not going to go well for anyone and we're all going to need each other to get through what lies ahead. And yet, many of our academic, political and cultural institutions are undermining any hope of coming together as a society. As someone who has had kind of a front-row seat to a lot of the more divisive culture wars stuff that's been brewing lately, it's hard to imagine how we'll fix this problem without many, many more people learning how to effectively and persuasively communicate better ideas to those who need to hear them the most. It's easy to think that everyone who isn't already committed to creating a freer world is an enemy. It can be hard for some of us to imagine why anyone would want a world where property rights are not consistently upheld, where certain types of speech and creativity are off limits, where innovation and entrepreneurship are severely restricted, where somehow in the name of protecting a culture, cultural exchange and adaptation is forbidden, where even the most basic right to self-defense is attacked, where we've concentrated immense power in the hands of politicians and given up control over our own lives. I've spent most of my adult life trying to communicate the value of individual liberty to lots and lots of people. And I've had, I suppose, thousands of conversations with people who either don't understand these ideas, which is totally fine, or with people who outright hate the core concepts, which is baffling. I know what their arguments are. I know how they justify their beliefs, but I still struggle to really grok these kinds of people. Why would anyone want the world, their ideas so obviously create? It seems so miserable. But then when I look back at history, it's obvious that those of us fighting for a freer society have never been the norm. And that brings us back to Amistad. As I said earlier, by 1839, slavery and the transatlantic slave trade was already illegal throughout the British Empire. And abolitionists were already working to change the law in America. But the Civil War was still a couple of decades away. So the crucial thing that the Mende tribesman's attorney, Roger Baldwin, had to prove was that they were in fact from Africa and not from Cuba as their slavers had claimed. And prove it, he did, three times. After Baldwin presents the ships manipulated logs as evidence and the court hears Joseph Sincay's translated testimony, it's clear that the Mende have won their freedom. But with so many politically powerful interests riding on the outcome of the trial, President Martin Van Buren has the presiding judge replaced with one he thinks will be more likely to side with the US attorney. So the slaves have to endure this absurd legal injustice all over again. But in spite of a rigged process, the Mende still win. Were they born in Africa? As such, her Catholic Majesty's claims of ownership have no merit. Neither, of course, do those for salvage made by lieutenants Mead and Gedney. I hereby order the immediate arrest and detention of Seniors Ruiz and Montez. The officials on the charge of slave-treating! Obviously, this should have been more than enough, but thanks to pressure from pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun, the case gets appealed again and ends up in front of the Supreme Court. This time, Baldwin, Tappan, and Jodeson enlist the help of former President John Quincy Adams, who at that point was 74 years old and largely dismissed as both past his prime and a poor substitute for his father. But they get to work. In the real case, Adams spoke for four hours in front of the Justices. In the movie, he delivers one of the most powerful appeals for freedom in cinematic history. Our gentlemen, I must say, I differ with the keen minds of the South and with our president, who apparently shares their views, offering that the natural state of mankind is instead, and I know this is a controversial idea, is freedom. It's freedom. And the proof is the length to which a man, a woman, a child will go to regain it once taken. He will break loose his chains. He will decimate his enemies. He will try and try and try against all odds, against all prejudices to get home. It's an incredible speech and there's a lot more of it that I didn't include here. That said, I think Adams' words are only half true. The vast majority of people absolutely do want freedom, but a lot of people also want power. Others are simply weak and do whatever is easiest and most convenient for them, even if that means stomping on other people's lives, liberty and property. This is why I think the battle to protect individual rights for human beings around the world will probably never be one for all time. Freedom is something every generation will have to work hard to maintain. That's why I started this series and in some ways, it's also why I'm moving on. From an early age, I've always been interested in a lot of different kinds of things. Biology, psychology, neuroscience, economics, philosophy, storytelling, art, music and creativity. The more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized that the unifying thread that runs across everything is this deep sense of curiosity about why people do the things they do. I think that's where a lot of my fascination with storytelling and filmmaking as a professional craft comes from. As Roger Ebert said, films allow us to explore the world from someone else's perspective. They let us see through another person's eyes and if they're made well, we feel what that person is feeling. And because movies combine the visual arts with narrative storytelling and emotional music, they're extremely powerful in a way that other art forms by themselves can't really approach. Once I realized that I wanted movies to be my career, I went off to grad school for film scoring and then found work in Hollywood, mostly as a music supervisor, music editor, composer and occasionally as a video editor and graphic artist. But working in that industry as someone who had already spent a lot of time reading about economics and political philosophy, I often felt bombarded by ignorance. My colleagues and friends were often driven by the same ideology that has since metastasized and turned into the kinds of insanity we see all the time today. And even before canceling was as common as it is now, it wasn't exactly safe for anyone to speak out against the majority opinion. I've had bosses in the entertainment business who sent out mass emails, literally telling employees how to vote. Conversations at parties and at dinners with other industry people often made it clear that as long as I was in Los Angeles, my career depended on towing the party line. But being a monk and keeping quiet for the rest of my life while the people most responsible for shaping our culture broadcast bad ideas into movie theaters and homes all over the world wasn't really going to work for me. Meanwhile, there was nothing I could point my friends to that they would actually care about that might help them rethink some of their ideas. Let's just say white papers and textbooks aren't exactly persuasive. So I started creating my own videos. Over time, I got better and better at that and eventually found myself where I am today. It took time, but I learned how to become more clear, more concise, more entertaining and hopefully more persuasive. And now I want to take those skills and help build a company that is capable of producing bigger projects, working with a wider array of clients and growing my own creative capabilities even more. So that's why this series is coming to an end. If you've been a fan of Out of Frame at all, I want to sincerely thank you for watching. I've seen a lot of your comments saying that you want this show to keep going because of how unique it is. And I'm really proud of that. But as much as I love Out of Frame, it takes a tremendous amount of my time every week. And what I want to do next is going to require a lot of effort. I need that time to develop new ideas, train a new team and produce new kinds of content. However, that doesn't mean what I've started has to end here. You can pick up where I am leaving off. I wanna see a world where there are way more people making good content in defense of a free society. So allow me to encourage you to stop just watching shows like this and start creating your own. Learn how to write, how to speak, how to debate. Learn how to make videos, how to draw, how to create a great meme. Learn to empathize with an audience. Figure out how to speak their language and give them content that they're actually excited to consume. Learn to become genuinely interested in other people and practice seriously listening to them. Even those who think they disagree with you on everything will give your ideas a shot if they know you actually care. Persuading others to see the value of individual liberty is the only way we can find our way back to a more unified society built on better values. So don't be afraid to start conversations with strangers and remember to keep your cool in the face of disagreement. And lastly, know that it's okay to fail. It's gonna happen, I promise. That's life. As long as you keep getting back up and trying again, your skills will improve over time. No matter what, your creativity is the key to the future of our civilization. So don't just stand by as the enemies of a free and prosperous society dominate our culture. Don't wait for me or anyone else to do it for you. Find something you're passionate about and contribute to the marketplace of ideas. Write a book, make a movie, draw a comic, compose a song, paint a mural, start a podcast, whatever you want to do, it's your turn. Thank you for watching Out of Frame and goodbye.