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What is the real story behind J.K. Rowling? Solomon Schmidt on Dangerous Laughter · Dangerous Laughter

• 0:01
  Speaker A: Dangerous laughter Laughter Dangerous. Dangerous laughter Dangerous laughter.
• 0:20
  Speaker B: Danger.
• 0:25
  Speaker A: Laughter sa. Day 8.
• 1:09
  Speaker B: The Emergency Destruct system is now activated.
• 1:14
  Speaker A: The option to override detonation procedure has now expired. The ship will automatically destruct in E minus one minute. And we are back on dangerous laughter. I'm your host, AJ Rice. We are unfit for polite company. So welcome back, everybody. I've got an amazing guest today. He's just, he's like a. He's like a wonder. Wonderkind. Wonderkind. Wonderkind. I'll have to ask Larry David how I actually say that. I use both. He's like Doogie Howser. I'm telling you. You know, I grew up with Ben Shapiro. This guy is basically sharper than both of us put together, which is saying a lot. Although Ben talks faster than both of us. We're gonna be talking about. And look, I, you know, one of the reasons it took me till age, you know, 40ish. I know people are out there screaming, there's no way this guy's 40 something is because I'm a big nerd. You know, this is why none of the ladies wanted to get down. But I'm more of a, I'm more of like a Star wars nerd over Star Trek and I'm definitely more of a Lord of the Rings nerd over Harry Potter. Although I am. Look, I'm an 80s baby. So a lot of the Harry Potter phenomenon took place for the people born in the 90s and after in the 2000 and tens all the way up till now. I mean, I think we're probably on three generations of Harry Potter fans. I know you've got millennials like myself having kids and they're getting into it. But my next guest wrote a biography about J.K. rowling rally, which means he voluntarily walked into one of the most radioactive cultural debates on earth, armed only with his research notes and his survival skills. He is the author of A Pen to change the world. Please welcome everybody. 22 year old Solomon Schmidt. Solomon Schmidt. Oh, here comes Solomon. Bring it in. I've been having some fun lately with Solomon. Solomon and I went out drinking recently. He put me under the, he put me under the table, right? I mean, him and his, him and his old man, you know, they're from the Buffalo area, working class guys, which, you know, the audience. I'm from Philadelphia, so the audience knows that I get down. They're my people, right? We don't, we weren't drinking with the fancy people. But Solomon's a heck of a guy. He wasn't really drinking. He Was drinking like, Diet Cokes, I think, but Solomon, great to be here, my friend. A pen to change the world. Everybody's got to get a copy.
• 4:12
  Speaker B: Thanks a lot, AJ Hit. I'll have you know that the intro with my scarf. For any Potter fans, I am a Hufflepuff, I must say.
• 4:21
  Speaker A: No black coloring there.
• 4:24
  Speaker B: Oh, no, no, I, I, that's not a critique. That's just for Potter fans watching. I am.
• 4:29
  Speaker A: Okay. We just drove, we just drove away all the heterosexual women, I think. But no, I get the huff. Hufflepuff. I don't know what I think. They're, are they pink or something? You know?
• 4:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, they're, they're yellow and black and actually one of the best.
• 4:47
  Speaker A: Color people could recognize. I was trying to pick a. I
• 4:51
  Speaker B: love, I love it. And I, I should say we have a similarity in that I started off as a Lord of the Rings fan and still am. And I had, I had a sort of distaste for Harry Potter without even reading it because I thought that you couldn't be a fan of both or that, or that the Potter fandom stole a lot of the attention that told the Rings deserved. So I was in that camp for a while and I still have some feelings in that regard. JK took a lot from Tolkien, but Tolkien took a lot from Beowulf. Right. And from the Viking sagas.
• 5:22
  Speaker A: Sure, sure. Dwayne the Green Knight and I mean, all kind, I mean, you know, Gilgamesh, I mean, they look for. Sure, absolutely. You know, that's the thing about when you build mythological worlds, whether you're George Lucas reading, you know, Hero of a Thousand with a Thousand Faces, you know, a lot of what these, whether it's Narnia or Middle Earth or Never Never Land or wherever it is. You know, when you're, when you're talking about literature and, and building out worlds, these intricate worlds and you know, even, even shows like Game, Game of Thrones. Right. They're all pulling from somewhere. Sure, you know, without a doubt. Especially when you're dealing with the English language. Which brings us to this question. You know, my first question for you is. And, and, and look, I want to get into your biography here in a second, but I, I, when we first, first started talking, I was shocked that there really hasn't been a biography of J.K. rowling ever done. I mean, this would be like no one tackling Dickens or Shakespeare. I mean, the idea that, I mean, her books in the English speaking world and, and, and really in a thousand languages probably at this Point. I mean, it's amazing that no one had tackled it. Why did you decide, like Captain Ahab to go after this Hufflepuff? Why did you go? Why did you decide to do this? Tell us.
• 6:59
  Speaker B: I was, after I got over my initial hesitancy for reading Harry Potter as a Die Hard Lord of the Rings fan and I crossed the Rubicon and, and read the series. I fell in love with Harry Potter, with Severus, I shouldn't say fell in love with Severus Snape as a, you know, in any weird way, but just fell in love with the characters.
• 7:21
  Speaker A: Hans Gruber, he fell in love with Hans Gruber from Die Hard. Right.
• 7:26
  Speaker B: So I, I was breathtaking, flabbergasted. All the spurlatives you want to use by plot line that JK put together for that seven book series. If anyone's read the series, and if, even if you haven't, the seven book series plot line that she put into place is one of the most extraordinary, breathtaking, incredible, sweeping narrative sagas that's ever been devised by, by the human mind. And it to see the ultimate finish in book seven in Deathly Hallows and all the adventure and thrills and fears and hopes that lead up through all the characters and you're taking the ride with them to lead up to this satisfying conclusion in book seven. Just the whole series is this spectacular narrative and I was just blown away by it. And then to find out that this series, the best selling book series of all time, was written by a single mother on welfare, battling domestic abuse, poverty, sexual assault, depression, the death of her mother. Like I wanted to know how the heck did she do this? And then to find out, yeah, the only book about her, with all due respect to the author, was published 25 years ago, before the movies came out, before the Harry Potter series was even completely published, before we had a lot of the information to work with that we do today. I was just blown away. And I knew this was a gap that needed to be filled and I had a very personal reason for doing it from the standpoint of I went looking for resources for a tour. I told you about aj. I run a tour through England and Scotland themed around Tolkien, C.S. lewis and JK, JK Rowling. And there are books there, you know, robust, comprehensive, full length biographies about Tolkien and C.S. lewis. And other than the text from 25 years ago about JK, there was no comprehensive biography overviewing all of JK's life and works. And it was like, oh my gosh. And I went to my publisher Skyhorse, they were enthusiastic about the idea, and we said, let's roll. And I should say you talked about me stepping into a hotbed of controversy here. I think that also plays into why there might not have been a book about her already, because a lot of the. A lot of the communities you would have thought would have had an interest in her have erased her name. I can't get coverage. You know, this. I can't get coverage. Barely any coverage in the Harry Potter fan world banned all coverage of anything to do with her. It doesn't matter.
• 9:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's. That's. That. That. That kind of shocks me a little bit. I mean, I'm sort of stunned at that. I'm stunned that, you know, this is a towering figure of not only children's literature, but Western literature. Right. The English speaking world, the Anglosphere. And let's be honest, I mean, this is a cultural figure. Yep. Not just from her characters and her worlds, but she herself has become a bit of a cultural figure. Now, before I dig it, dig in any further, I'm going to follow up on what you just said there. You're 22. This is. How many books have you written at this point?
• 10:32
  Speaker B: This is my 10th book. My 10th baby. They've never had children, but they feel like children with great.
• 10:38
  Speaker A: With great. They do.
• 10:39
  Speaker B: With great pain. You bring them into the world. You know.
• 10:41
  Speaker A: That's right. I mean, I've got two of my children behind me. You can see the Walking Dead and the White Privilege album. My children ride the short bus. But let's talk about. Let's talk about your children. You started your first book when you were 10. 10 years old, is that right?
• 10:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, pretty close. 11. Not. Not to be stickler.
• 11:01
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 11:01
  Speaker B: So I basically, I had passion for politics and history from the time I was little. I had my mom giving me books from the time I was in her. In her stomach. She was reading me books and just giving me all sorts of picture books from the time I was little about the Statue of Liberty or the Titanic or World War II. And I just. I dove into the world of American history and just fell in love. And I wanted to write a book for kids my age about history that would get them excited about the same topics, the people and events I was. So I wanted to not do a big, long textbook, some of which are excellent, but some of which, you know, kind of get dusty and are scary to kids and sit on the shelf, but a book with fun facts and pictures and vocabulary and review questions along with the substantive text to Engage readers, young readers, and. And bring them in and. And hopefully get them inspired by history if they haven't been before, or if you're already into history, learning about new people and events that perhaps weren't exposed to before. So I did a series of books called History Bites, where I cover hundreds of people and events from all different time periods. And the great thing is, AJ I've had a number of little kids that I've met at conferences all throughout the US who have said, I love these books. They're my favorite books. I've had parents say, oh, old Jimmy reads the books with a flashlight underneath his cover at night. Like that kind of book. And the wonderful thing to me is to know that it was never. It's not history that's the problem. It's. It was the way it's presented. And how cool that if you can present it in a way that's successful to kids, they're eating up history books like a fictional novel, which was just awesome to see.
• 12:48
  Speaker A: And, you know, anyone that watches this show knows that. I mean, and I talk about this all the time. These kids know nothing. They know. And look, I'm a geriatric millennial, okay? But with these devices or, you know, why do I need to know History bikes. If Chachi PT and Claude and Gemini and all the rest of them can just tell me anything I need to know.
• 13:11
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 13:11
  Speaker A: I mean, that's the thing, you know, especially when you're talking about. I mean, look, they can't do math. They can't put a subject and a predicate together to form a sentence. So, I mean, kids need this and they need history. That matters. Right?
• 13:25
  Speaker B: And we need good. And we need good stories, too. Like that.
• 13:28
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 13:29
  Speaker B: I was at an elementary school a couple weeks ago talking to the kids about history. And what I said is, basically, history is just stories of what people like you and me did 10, 50, 100, a thousand years ago. Some of them did absolutely crazy things. Some of them did horrible things. Some of them did very cool things.
• 13:46
  Speaker A: And.
• 13:47
  Speaker B: And it can get scary because it's a black and white photograph and they're not smiling. And your teacher makes you memorize a lot of dates that you don't want to, potentially not getting down on. Teachers. My mom was a teacher, but that. I mean, that's it. I did a book called Great Adventures. History Bites about the Vikings and Charles Lindbergh and guys who went to the top of Mount Everest, Thor Heyerdahl across the Pacific on wooden raft. They'd be all over the front page of the news. But again, black and white photograph, scary dates, and oh my gosh, it's history. But what I tried to break through with History Bites was to just get at the exciting nature of history, the stories, and also just give you what you need to know, the essentials. Not, not necessarily the Cliff Notes, but sort of that idea. And of course, in the age of AI, I think parents are going to want to keep their kids interested in physical books and, and that hopefully will never go away. And those Barnes, certainly the Barnes and Noble statistics show that everyone thought Barnes and Noble would have gone under during COVID Their business is bigger this year than it was last year.
• 14:49
  Speaker A: And look, they. Some of that. I mean, they stay in business for a couple reasons. One is the, the amount of manga that they sell, but also the fact that, you know, they've got a Starbucks in every single one of those locations that brings foot traffic. You know, it's funny because you talk about history, you know, kids, you know, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha and so on, we are, we have been up against a lot trying to re. Either rewrite history or memory hole. Certain people, remove certain people. So I think, look, I think it's admirable. I mean, you started when you're 11 years old, you do this series of books, History Bites. Then you do recently a biography of Alan Dershowitz. You know, and full disclosure, you know, we've worked on some of Alan's books here. We had run the PR for some of his books. We had a couple New York Times bestsellers with him. And now the jk, the JK Rowling book. And just to bring it back a little bit here to what you said in the opening with your, with your answer. Look, I run a PR firm by day, you know, by night, I, I drink with Solomon. But I'll, I'll tell you, you know, as someone that understands corporate pr, as someone that understands the fact that, look, I. Look, I've been here in the swamp in Washington D.C. for now. I'm in my third decade. There are dumpster divers everywhere. There is intimidation practices everywhere. There are lawyers everywhere, private investigators armed with NDAs, cease and desist and so on, everywhere. So I've got to know, you know, these books, probably the biography of Rolling, probably hasn't been done because people are afraid of what I just said.
• 16:41
  Speaker B: Oh, sure.
• 16:42
  Speaker A: Oh, sure.
• 16:43
  Speaker B: Well, I had, I, I can't confirm or deny that, but I strongly suspect that people have been dissuaded from researching JK's life. With all due Respect to her, and I mean that sincerely, and to her privacy and the privacy of her family and her. Which I never tried to intrude at all. I would say that as someone who experienced somewhat aggressive attempts from her, her, her legal team to impede some of my research, I got to imagine that I'm not the first who's tried to research her life. I know for sure that there are others who have approached her about doing a biography. And what happened with me is I went to her team and was told that it's nothing personal against me. She just doesn't want to authorize a book. She's pretty private, understood completely. Then I went back with, hey, you know, for whatever it's worth, I'm one of billions of people who have been impacted by Harry Potter and who want to know her life story and who feel very passionately about her work. I was told she understands that. But again, I was told that even still, they don't really want any biography, period. And to me it was, okay, I respect your privacy. And this, this book is just going to be a comprehensive resource like all other world changing historic figures have. And as I conducted my research in the UK I was contacted by her legal team with a letter insinuating that some kind of threat would come my way if I didn't stop trying to visit. It certainly wasn't comfortable, but biographers have been doing that since Robert Carroll was researching Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s and he went off from Texas to learn LBJ. I mean, that's, that's pretty standard fare.
• 18:30
  Speaker A: But let me, let me, let me drill down, let me drill down, let me drill down on this real quick. So the threats, the threats you got, they were all digital, they were all paper. They were lawyers saying, please stop visiting family members. Please stop going after the ex husband. Right.
• 18:44
  Speaker B: Yeah, it was.
• 18:45
  Speaker A: Well, specifically, were they specific in who you were and weren't allowed to go after?
• 18:50
  Speaker B: It was, it was one letter which is actually being published in the biography, in which they said, we know that you're trying to, to interview, you know, colleagues or business associates of.
• 19:01
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 19:02
  Speaker B: Our client. And, you know, if you don't cease doing this, our client will, will, you know, take the security of her colleagues and friends very seriously. Again, I'm not quite sure what that meant. I was not trying to visit her children.
• 19:18
  Speaker A: When you look at the bottom of the letter, was it something like that? When you looked at the bottom, at the bottom of this threat letter?
• 19:24
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 19:24
  Speaker A: Did it say like, sincerely Voldemort on there? Like. Well, it felt.
• 19:31
  Speaker B: It felt like that I was. I'm not trying to sound like a baby, but you can picture me. I was 21 years old at the time. I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I had just wrapped up a tour themed around J.K. rowling. Like I was guiding American fans about her life and work all through England and Scotland. We had a wonderful tour. It's a four, It's a. We stayed at four and five star hotels, fine dining, it's a really high end boutique tour. And I stayed afterwards in the UK to conduct some of my research for the biography. So here I am in Edinburgh, really just trying to do what. What I believe to be was innocent research, which was my duty as a biographer. Not trying to chase a certain story to get an angle. There was, it was nothing like that. These were generic questions. Not trying to pin people down for dirt, nothing like that. And to get that message, it was, you know, it was.
• 20:21
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 20:22
  Speaker B: Quite frankly, I mean, sure.
• 20:27
  Speaker A: But there was never anything physical, though. You never gotta knock at the door, you never gotta, you know, you know, somebody, you know, confront you in the alleyway. Look, I'm Irish Catholic from Philadelphia. Like, you know, we would. We handle things a certain way in Philadelphia. Right. The Irish do, the Italians do. Right. So you never, you didn't need a food taster, you didn't need a remote starter for your car, you know. Well, that's good. That's good.
• 20:55
  Speaker B: Just to be clear, in case this is. This somehow gets back to her team. No, but I can tell, I can tell you I did leave Scotland right away. And I again, in. In. In what I can only describe as anxiety, fright. And I, And I should point out again, I have great admiration for her work and even members of her team, I communicated with in a. In a friendly way. But this instance was. Was really shocking to me. And it, and it made it clear to me that, well, and certainly to people who knew about the book, that in some ways this was kind of the book she doesn't want me to write and doesn't want people to read, which, of course, that question has to be answered.
• 21:39
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 21:40
  Speaker B: Well, why not? I mean, that's her own business. But in terms of an investigative question, I mean, some of the things I learned during my research from family members who hadn't spoken at length before kind of made it obvious to me that there were, you know, parts of her past and her family history that I wouldn't say she was trying to cover up. Because here's the interesting thing, A.J. you know, that there are details in the book that will be released for the first time. In terms of autobiographical references put in her best selling work, we're talking about specific direct allusions to her family and her past life.
• 22:19
  Speaker A: Right.
• 22:19
  Speaker B: Which the public did not have access to about or to information about. But once you do, you can kind of decode her. For whatever reason, she felt the need to kind of allude to some of her family history in her best selling work. And so I stumbled across that.
• 22:37
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Now you, you discovered a lot of the Easter eggs that are hidden in there. We're going to get into that on the other side of the break here. We're going to take a little break, pay the bills. You are listening to Dangerous Laughter. I've got Solomon Schmidt, everybody, live from Hogwarts, his new book A Pen to change the World. I'm AJ Rice. We will be right back.
• 23:00
  Speaker B: Women's rights champion Riley Gaines calls it a fierce defense of principle wrapped in humor from a satirist who dismantles the Trans Mafia's propaganda number one. Amazon best selling author AJ Rice completes the trilogy that started with the Woking Dead and the White Privilege album. The Curse of the Bearded Lady. How the Trans Mafia whacked American Sanity, Volume 3 of Publius Prosecution, already a bestseller. Get your copy today. Available everywhere books are sold. And now please enjoy another elegant celebrity endorsement of dangerous laughter with A.J.
• 23:53
  Speaker A: rice. A.J.
• 23:57
  Speaker B: rice, no one wants to hear your voice. Just like high school, you'll get kicked out of the Preston AV Club like a total freaking loser. And then you tried to be a DJ but never played Jamiroquai. Your podcast was called Dangerous Laughter. Only a host with no girlfriends would have a garbage show called that Girls don't want boyfriends who have great skills. You have less than zero skills. You have minus skills. That's why President Pedro stole your fat tubby girlfriend. Do you practice your show talking in the mirror like Batman with a high cholesterol? Like good luck with the Dangerous Laughter. A podcast is so stupid not even Uncle Rico will listen to it. Idiots. This endorsement has been brought to you by collapsing standards everywhere. And now back to Dangerous Laughter. The management of this station are clueless. You're listening to Dangerous Laughter with AJ Rice on the publies media network.
• 25:05
  Speaker A: And welcome back. We are having a nerdgasm today. We're. We're nerding it up here on Dangerous Laughter. Having a little fun. I am your host, AJ Rice. And remember, there is no substitute for perfectly timed derision. And I gotta tell you, the people who don't like Harry Potter, they're missing out on a, you know, full fledged cultural phenomenon. And we're here with Solomon Schmidt. He's got a new book out, the biography of J.K. rowling. And it's, it's an amazing book. A pen. Thanks ag to Change the world. And it's gonna be published by Skyhorse, who's, you know, a friend of the show. We love Skyhorse. We work with Tony Lyon. Solomon, for those who don't like Harry Potter, what is your message to them?
• 25:57
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, even, even if folks don't like Harry Potter, the story of JK is just a fantastic rags to riches story. And I wrote the book in such a way that even folks who aren't intimately familiar with the details, Harry Potter can follow along her train of creativity. And of course, the story of her going from being a mother goddess of the left to being censored and getting death threats from communities that used to adore her. It's one of the unfortunately high profile, cancel cultural culture stories of our, of our 100.
• 26:31
  Speaker A: 100 it is. You were on recently. You were on Newsmax television and we grabbed a little cut of it where you're explaining, you're going into detail about some of this. Yeah, Chris, let's, let's rack up there. Clip 1. Really been a champion for women and girls and keeping, uh, the transgender, uh,
• 26:53
  Speaker B: agenda out of all of that. That's right, yeah. And that's rooted in a number of events that happened in Rowling's own life. The most important one is that Rowling has commented very publicly on the domestic abuse and sexual assault she faced in her 20s, which is pretty terrible to learn about. I actually met her first husband in Porto, Portugal, who inflicted the abuse on her, which was, you know, terrible thing. An interesting conversation to have that, that totally shaped her psyche. And that happened also at the time where she was writing Harry Potter. So the amazing thing that got me interested in her originally was that this person who was dealing with domestic abuse and sexual assault and poverty and single motherhood was writing the best selling book series of all time.
• 27:42
  Speaker A: Unbelievable. You know, it's, it's, it. Here's the thing, you know, I didn't know that much about, you know, the details of exactly what went on on the personal side with her. I, you know, I had like the pop culture sort of stuff that has floated around like pass it down the lane. I had a. I surmised that her relationship with her father probably wasn't great. We're going to get into that later. But Tell me about the. The husband you. You. You go to. You go to Porto, Portugal, you track this guy down. He. He's the main villain of her psyche. Right. Like you just said there. So he's. He's the core abuser. And it's amazing to me, other people have never interviewed this guy because a lot of the, the. The sort of mythology around JK Rowling start with this guy, like, you know, the fact that she was a single mom, the fact that she had, you know, baby fact that she was, what, living, you know, basically hand to mouth, that, that this is the, you know, other than maybe her father, this is sort of the core villain of the story, is that right?
• 28:51
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One of them for sure. And she herself attests to that in the essay she wrote explaining why she spoke out on the transgender controversy, she mentioned what her experiences with her first husband as part of her motivation, and she talked about at length about that and in future explanations following that of why she waded into that controversy, basically. JK's life was thrown into a tailspin after her mother Anne died when she was. When JK was 25, and to me is the real hero of this story. She was absolutely lovely lady, kind, demure, gentle, warm hearted. JK and her mother were more like best friends than daughter.
• 29:37
  Speaker A: And she died of ms, Correct?
• 29:39
  Speaker B: Died of Ms. And it was a very. What was described as a very virulent form of the disease. So it, you know, it totally crippled her. She was reduced to sitting in the living room of her house for years in a wheelchair.
• 29:52
  Speaker A: Right.
• 29:53
  Speaker B: Utterly. Just tragic. The interesting thing, in a. In a terrible way is that this informed all of Harry Potter. JK would later say that her mother's death was on virtually every other page of the Harry Potter series.
• 30:08
  Speaker A: All of this informed.
• 30:10
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 30:10
  Speaker A: The creation of the Harry Potter character.
• 30:13
  Speaker B: Absolutely.
• 30:15
  Speaker A: She's pouring everything into the creation of this boy. And then continue what you were saying. Yeah.
• 30:21
  Speaker B: Especially in Harry's longing to see his parents again because he's. And Harry having to go through this whole journey of accepting his own death. So after JK's mother passed on, and I write at length about her mom in the book and the influence she had on JK and how that, how seeing her mother battle with that impacted her and what that was like to be on the inside of that, her life went into a tailspin. She winds up in Port au Port to go through a series of events and she meets this guy who, I mean, I don't want to besmirch him But I guess we're already.
• 30:58
  Speaker A: You can't hear. This is called dangerous. This is called dangerous. LAUGHTER. Let me just. Free to dunk on him.
• 31:03
  Speaker B: Yeah, well, let me just. Let me just tell you the. The facts. As far as I was able to find out, he's unemployed. He is a real macho guy. He's, you know, Blair's loud music that keeps everyone on the street awake at night. He is kind of bombastic, but he's. But he's charming. He loves books. He loves Jane Austin, who's JK's favorite author.
• 31:28
  Speaker A: Wow. He.
• 31:29
  Speaker B: He speaks English. And so they meet one night in a bar and it goes from there. And basically, in JK's desperation, she was hungry for any sort of love that she could get. And she winds up opening herself up to this guy who turns out to be an absolute terror, you know.
• 31:49
  Speaker A: Right.
• 31:50
  Speaker B: Rigorously controls every part of her life, who she gets into fights with regularly, who is physically abusive with her. And I uncovered new layers to that abuse that weren't even previously known. It was that bad. And that's terrible. And. And of course, they just.
• 32:09
  Speaker A: What is their. What is their age difference? When he. When they meet.
• 32:12
  Speaker B: Yeah, he's three years younger than her. He's 24. When they get married, she's 27. And one of the things that he has shared is that they were either in heaven or hell.
• 32:23
  Speaker A: And a lot of relationships, relationships where it's either high highs or low lows, it's a. It's a bipolar nightmare.
• 32:36
  Speaker B: So the bottom line. The bottom line of their relationship is it ends in utter disaster. And JK finds herself back home in the uk, in poverty, no money, on welfare, with a baby from this man.
• 32:51
  Speaker A: Right. And.
• 32:52
  Speaker B: And daughter. Right, yes, her daughter. And in her suitcase, the pages of the manuscript of her first Harry Potter book, which she's been working on all through this first marriage and her time in Porto, Portugal. And she returns to the uk, to snowy, cold, windy Edinburgh, to a dumpy mouse infested apartment with her and her baby and this book. And she goes from there. And then all the legends. And then all the legends come true.
• 33:22
  Speaker A: Sure, sure. Well, let me just say this. You know, this show is called Dangerous LAUGHTER and one of the reasons it's called that is because, you know, I have. You know, I'm working on a project now, and I have studied for, for some time the ingredients that need to be present for satire to exist, for comedy to exist, parody, farce, but just the intellectual mind. And unfortunately, one pattern, whether it's Comedy or drama, whether it's, you know, there's very few people that create masterpieces when everything is going amazingly, when everything is going just fine. And here you have a woman that comes out of this milieu, first by her parents and then by this man and then in her return to the United Kingdom, the way she's living. Trauma creates great art. It does. I don't care whether it's Hemingway at war or whether it's this or Tolkien or cs. Right. So, so that's the thing, you know, and, and that's a theme here on this show. And, and you. Well, look, people, people can be funny without trauma. But the best, the masters, they're fighting demons every day. Yeah. Or dementors, we should say they are. So whether it's George Carlin or Shakespeare or rolling. You know, that is something, it's a theme that has been repeating itself really since ancient Greece. Yep. And, and look, sometimes it's dangerous laughter, other times it's, it's dangerous writing dangerous, you know, fantasy world creation. Yeah, go ahead.
• 35:26
  Speaker B: Oh no, I was just gonna say you'll like this quote. Aj JK said that the way she views life is as a comic tragedy, that's the way she views life.
• 35:34
  Speaker A: So. Sure.
• 35:35
  Speaker B: And that was, that was reflected in her novel the Casual Vacancy, which was the first book she published for adults. The first book she published after Harry Potter. It is just a like shocking, depressing, eye opening account of a fictional town in modern day England where people are dealing with drug abuse and assault and poverty and all these things that have tortured JK herself unfortunately come to the, the, the surface in that book. And in interviews afterwards she was asked about how dark this book is and basically her response was, well, that's life for a lot of people. And, and she's fond of the Buddhist quote, life is suffering. Now she's found a way to get some amount of happiness through that and she gives us the key to it through what you just mentioned, the dementors, these agents of depression who are villains in the Harry Potter series, who JK herself said came out of her own experiences with depression while living a single mother on, on welfare in Edinburgh, Scotland. And the way to fight off these dementors in her universe is to fill up your mind with thoughts and memories of the people you love.
• 36:54
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:54
  Speaker B: So that isn't a key into her own.
• 36:57
  Speaker A: And you know, you know, and you have to stay busy and you have to stay. That's, you know, unfortunately that's, you know, everyone has their, their own way to channel Their creativity.
• 37:07
  Speaker B: Sure.
• 37:07
  Speaker A: And the people that watch this show know that. You know, I've written two political satire books. I have a third one coming out this summer. When I. When I first met Solomon here, I was telling him, I said, look, I have a new political satire book coming out. It's about the trans movement. And, you know, J.K. rowling is in it a lot. She's not in it as much as Riley Gaines. And, you know, Riley gave me a blurb for the book, but. But I'm gonna read. I'm gonna read a little section to you. If you only listen to the mainstream media and the trans cult, you'd think J.K. rowling wasn't the most successful female author in history. Not the first billionaire writer who conjured a world of unforgettable characters and stories. Not the creative force behind one of the top selling video games on the market. No. According to them, she's nothing but a controversial crank tolerated only by some dwindling band of maga die hards. Never mind that Rolling was hardly a fan of Donald Trump. But when Trump returned to the White house after the 2024 election and crack down on the gender ideology and the trans movement and the trans mafia, Rolling backed him, calling the left's handling of the issue a calamity. That alone was enough to get her blacklisted by the woke cultists out there. And I'll tell you, you know, I know Solomon doesn't, doesn't want to get into politics, but, you know, the reality here is that here you have the most successful female writer on earth currently. And this is a woman of the left. I mean, most of her pet projects were from the left. And in Trump's first term, you know, she was no fan of his. She was tweeting at him and dinging them and hitting him with zingers and all the rest of it. But on this issue, just like many others during the 2024 cycle, madness has trickled down from above on the left. Now, there's other issues. My book is called the Curse of the Bearded Lady. Obviously, I'm having a little fun with that, but, you know, I have studied a lot of what she's been called, and one of these terms is a turf. B E R, F. Now, you want to explain to the audience who calls her this and why.
• 39:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, so it stands for trans, exclusionary, radical, feminist.
• 39:48
  Speaker A: Right.
• 39:49
  Speaker B: This is a term used by elements of social media users, particularly the trolls who will follow her on X and spam her Twitter or X replies. It's also a Term used in the more mainstream transgender cultural figures.
• 40:18
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 40:18
  Speaker B: I would say that this is a term just exclusively used by people who you might think are just sitting by themselves in their computer angry about something, angry at jk. But it is a more mainstream term from what I.
• 40:34
  Speaker A: That's all leftist. What are you talking about? They're all. They're all kooky keyboard warriors. But what about. What about. Let me ask you this. Tell me about the fallout from the actors that played the roles in the movies, because some of them, like, like Ms. Watson or Miz Watson and others, Daniel Radcliffe. How have they, you know, the people that we all sort of fell in love with as we saw these movies. Right. How have they reacted to her believing that there isn't 72 genders hiding underneath your local Democrat skirt, that there's only two genders? How have they reacted?
• 41:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, Daniel Radcliffe came out and took a hard stance in favor of the transgender community. And he. He is involved in intimately, a. A charity, I believe it's called the Trevor Project, which is a famous LGBTQ plus charity. So he is. He works with them on a pretty pretty regular basis, as I understand. So he came out very clearly against JK's opinions. Rupert Grint took a pass, more or less. He, Mark, he put out a benign statement saying something along the lines of, we, we accept all people.
• 41:51
  Speaker A: That's Ron Weasley. Correct.
• 41:55
  Speaker B: But he also went out of his way to say that JK feels like an auntie to me, so I don't really want to get into that. Meaning an aunt, like.
• 42:02
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 42:02
  Speaker B: Family member Emma Watson. That's a little more twisted because she came out in a speech to the BAFTAs in March 2022 for the WHO. For the British. British film.
• 42:17
  Speaker A: The BAFTA. The British AFL film, The Film Institute.
• 42:21
  Speaker B: That's right. Saying that she was there as a feminist icon for all the witches, basically all the females. That is, I. E. Unlike J.K. rowling, who is only for those women who fit her ideological view of the world. After that appearance that Emma Watson had, she had a third party individual send a note to J.K. rowling, basically saying, from Emma, I'm so sorry for all you're going through. And J.K. laughed to herself because, as she says, this was coming from a person who was doing their very best to make sure I would still go through all this condemnation.
• 43:00
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 43:00
  Speaker B: Emma Watson has my phone number. She can pick up the phone and call me. So that's just. That's one example. That's. That's not even close to the Worst of. Of what JK has. Has gotten because.
• 43:12
  Speaker A: So.
• 43:13
  Speaker B: So she had actors in her Fantastic Beast franchise, which was a series she was actively working on at that time.
• 43:21
  Speaker A: Sure.
• 43:22
  Speaker B: As far as we can tell, stop acting in the series. And. Which may have been part of the reason that the entire franchise itself tanked. You're talking about an enterprise that was billions of dollars and 10 years talking
• 43:34
  Speaker A: about the fantastic Beasts. They also wrongly removed Johnny Depp. Okay. Because of the Amanda Heard trial.
• 43:46
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 43:46
  Speaker A: Which proved to be bogus. Like many of the MeToo movements. Scalps that they went hunting for, a lot of them turned out to be bogus, whether it's Depp or Kevin Spacey or Jeremy Piven. But I'm gonna go on a tangent there. So. So the main three, Harry and. And Hermione, they. They were. They were pissed. And. And Ron Weasley took a pass. We would not know who these people are without these movies. That's the thing, you ungrateful little pricks. So. And, and what you. So Emma Watson said she was there for all the witches. So now she's right. So in the Harry Potter world, men and women can both fly on broomsticks, right?
• 44:29
  Speaker B: That's right. Yes.
• 44:30
  Speaker A: So she was even. She was forgetting that she was saying, well, all the witches that are out there, even the male ones, the male witches, I'm there for the witches with the. With the right equipment. The wrong equipment. You know, look, it's just insane. You know, you've got. You've got witches riding a broomstick, and some of the witches apparently have two broomsticks, one attached to their body and one that they're riding on. On that note, we're gonna take a break here. We'll be back with Solomon Schmidt. He wrote a book on J.K. rowling. A pen to change the world. We're having some fun with him. We will be right back right after this. Now, A.J. another. Another actor I know you follow very closely is Elliot Page, who's making an argument about animals and lgbtqia. Plus two.
• 45:27
  Speaker B: Looking at nature as if it's some hetero patriarchal structure is absurd. And that this gender binary that we've created is nothing but a quaint little myth. What we have been taught in school in regards to these structures, men being superior, women being inferior, it being this heterosexual existence, is just completely false.
• 45:51
  Speaker A: AJ I know you're not heteronormative, so I'm really yearn for your analysis of this. Well, Elliot, they. Whatever. Whatever's happening there, the former star of Juno, never forget Ladies and gentlemen, what they took from you. Because that right there is what Homer. Because she's going to be in the next. She's going to be in the Odyssey movie this summer. That's exactly what Homer had in mind when he. When the great poet wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. That, that's the star right there, the bearded lady.
• 46:24
  Speaker B: You should be women. And yet your beards forbid me to interpret that. You are so. Someone once said comedy is the art of turning horror into humor. That's the essence of the Curse of the Bearded Lady. Laughing in the face of madness before it devours us whole. Nothing in living memory has been funnier or more horrifying than a movement convinced they're a 72 genders. Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina. The curse of the Bearded Lady. The curse of the Bearded Lady. The trans mafia has whipped America's sanity. It's Monty Python by way of mingalo. Absurd theater with real victims. I'm not here to conduct a medical examination of the trans mafia.
• 47:17
  Speaker A: This is a cultural autopsy.
• 47:19
  Speaker B: If Billy Shakespeare could write tragedies, histories and comedies, why can't I? The radicals refuse to surrender their gender mad stranglehold on America's vital institutions. This book will show how we got here, how we fight back and how the Democratic party's obsession with mainstreaming the bearded lady with will doom it to political extinction. Stay locked in with the man who slayed the Woking dead. This is Dangerous Laughter with AJ Rice on the Publius Media Network.
• 48:05
  Speaker A: Welcome back to Dangerous Laughter. I am your host AJ Rice on the bridge of the USF Publius, taking you through the Straits of Hormuz. Today we never going through the gay of Hormuz. We only stay in the Straits of Hormuz. And, and speaking of, you know, our friends there that don't know what gender they are, we were, we were just talking about the heat that J.K. rowling has taken. We're talking cancel culture. We're talking the social justice warriors losing their mind. I got ask you as someone that that studies fine art, that has been banned. Literature that has been banned. You know the most banned book ever. One of them at least. You know, top three ever across three centuries now is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by one Mark Twain. Twain gets banned every couple years. It started off religious. People on the right were banning it at the Concord Public Library. Now today the left tries to ban it. So it moved it. You know that always tells me if you're trying, if people are trying to ban you. You're doing something right. You're over the target, really. And that's what dangerous laughter is all about. Today we're talking about dangerous biographies. Solomon Schmidt's with us. A Pen to Change the World, the life of J.K. rowling. So has anyone tried, Solomon, to. To, you know, ban the Harry Potter books? Not Catholics that are worried about witchcraft, but have people that have tried to ban it based on her political views?
• 49:52
  Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. And I would say it followed the same trajectory you just mentioned for Mark Twain. I won't go into, as you said, the religious objections to witchcraft, but it was that exact same thing. Cancel from the Christian right 25 years ago now. Cancellations from the left. Yes. There are bookstores in California and other places that stop selling Harry Potter completely. They started with removing JK's name from the spines of the books and moved from that to removing Harry Potter completely from the stores. My book, my biography on JK is not welcome at a number of different organizations that represent independent booksellers because they've said there is simply no interest in anything to do with her or Harry Potter, or. I shouldn't say no interest because there's definitely interest from us, the public. No interest from, apparently, the gatekeepers at certain organizations. And currently. Oh, things happen all the time with jk. What are some examples? Not so much in the. Well, you wanted book. Book banning examples, I would say, when it comes to the uk, there was a letter that went out, put out by the Education Ministry of the UK about five, six years ago. So this letter from the British government to school children, instructing them on how to wade books by authors who were problematic. This came out just about a month after JK first stepped into the transgender controversy at large. So the timing was clearly not coincidental. I, I know of instances in the US where her books are being removed from the shelves and it. I, as far as I'm aware, it's also happening in places in, in Scotland and this on another level, it's also happened, as you said, from the, from the religious crowd, not. Not just the Christian fundamentalists, but back years ago, there were countries in the Middle east that wouldn't let their kids.
• 52:01
  Speaker A: Oh, sure. Well, them for sure. I mean, they're not, you know, Islam.
• 52:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's spread all over. She's been one of them. She's been the most canceled author in their yearly tracking of this, along with, like, Judy Bloom and Maya Angelo since 2001. Maya Angelou since 2001.
• 52:19
  Speaker A: So what's amazing, though, I can tell you you know, not just for my own research, writing satire. I mean, the, the Christian right, at least the media of the Christian right, once upon a time, might not, you know, they might not have been excited about a, you know, flying around Quidditch game, but the reality is that, you know, most of the American right came to her defense, continues to come to her defense. On paper, they might agree on two or three things. Right. We have not used a purity test on her, but, you know, the far left in Europe, the far left in the United States, all her other good deeds go in the trash can. I mean, she, like, rescued women from the Taliban and I mean, just like amazing things that this woman has done. Sure. You know, she's a creature of the left. Didn't, like I said earlier, did not like Trump or Trumpism or maga. And yet, you know, you have a situation where I, I, there was this, and, you know, I didn't tell the team this when we'll grab it later. But, you know, there was this picture of her smoking a cigar that she tweeted, and it was a picture of her, like on a yacht, sun setting, smoking a cigar. And I think it was the day that it was either the day that the, the British Supreme Court upheld that, you know, that there were only two genders and not 73 or 72 or 110. It was either that day or it was the day Trump signed the executive order removing girls, you know, men from, from women's sports. And now our friend Douglas Murray, very sharp guy, smart guy. Right. On a lot of things. He was on with Bill Maher on his HBO show fairly, fairly somewhat recently. But I want to play a cut here from that, illustrating what had happened here in the aftermath of the British Supreme Court basically saying, no, no, there's only men and women. Something that both Darwin and God can agree on. Chris, hit it.
• 54:39
  Speaker B: Questions from the actual people for Douglas, what is your reaction to the UK Supreme Court declaring that the definition of a woman is. Well, we should include you in this, too. It's about women, is based on biological sex and excludes transgender people. Yeah. This was a big ruling this week in, in England, the Supreme Court. Their definition of woman is biological sex. To put it in shorthand, J.K. rowling won. Yes. J.K. rowling.
• 55:12
  Speaker A: 1.
• 55:12
  Speaker B: Everyone who said this for years has won. All the particularly women who've been defamed and lied about and bullied and chased and much more for years, they were right. And I just think, apart from being
• 55:27
  Speaker A: a statement of the obvious, isn't it
• 55:28
  Speaker B: Amazing that the best legal minds in Britain spent years having to work out the first thing we knew as a species.
• 55:41
  Speaker A: That's right,
• 55:44
  Speaker B: yeah. And I've. I actually met Douglas Murray last year at a conference in the uk. He's an interesting guy. Sharp gu, obviously. Yeah. So that. That Supreme Court ruling back In April of 2025, I, as a mat, as you can imagine, I had to do a bit of research about that. Essentially what they were saying was that for term, for purposes of the Equality act of 2010, the definition of a woman is based on biological reality. What that means is basically inter. As it was interpreted by JK side of the aisle, it means that women's only spaces are only for women born biologically female, even trans. Even transgender activists in the UK said that this was a massive defeat, and there's some disagreement over there about how exactly that should be applied, but it was very clearly even recognized, even among JK's enemies, as a. A massive defeat for their side. And it was something that JK had been working towards through a group called 4 Women Scotland, who she helps to fund. This was something that had been years in the making. And a year previously, of course, an interesting case had happened because JK violated or tried to violate a 2024 hate crime law that the Scottish government put in place, which said that if you made threatening or abusive. If you. If you. If you exhibited threatening or abusive behavior towards any of these minorities, which included the transgender community, you could be potentially subject up to seven years in prison. So JK went out of her way, right? We, as she saw, not threatening, but perhaps emotionally abusive, if you want to call it that, to go out of her way to try and break the law by deliberately misgendering transgender activists, by including those activists in lists of transgender rapists and criminals, and. And basically said, if this is enough to get me arrested, I look forward to being arrested in. In my home country of Scotland. And there we go. It's. It's an interesting story. There she is on her yacht in the Bahamas.
• 57:58
  Speaker A: There she is. Salute. Salute. Jk. Really? I mean, bravo. I mean, I, you know, and look, let me just say this before we, you know, have a little fun here. I. The left is not going to learn from these defeats. They have not learned. They are not in power right now in the United States. But, you know, hopefully JK is with us a long time because she's gonna have to fight these people probably forever. There is just a lot of money being thrown around. The Democrat Party learned nothing from the 2024 election. It wasn't just the trans issue. It was a lot of things, a lot of overreaching, overreaching on immigration, overreaching on, you know, trade, overreaching on wokeism. But the trans mafia and the bearded lady basically are running the Democrat party. And as far as England goes, it's funny when you're saying that about how, you know, they're not sure how they're going to implement it. You know, that's what these totalitarians in the United Kingdom have basically become. They vote for Brexit. Oh, let's slow walk the Brexit thing. And then here you have the Supreme Court decision, you know, and I don't know what that's worth in England, you know, might be toilet paper, but you know, they're going to say, well, we're not sure how they implement this. This is Western civilization. The English speaking world is the core, at least in the last two centuries of Western civilization. And they learn nothing. They learn nothing. I don't want to suck Solomon into, you know, my, you know, some political rant by your humble correspondent here. But, but look, let's have a little fun here, Solomon. I bought something here. The bonus point if you can ID what this is here. Well, I'm about to drive away all the single ladies here. All right, let's see here. We got, I got, all right, here's, I've got a little, little scarf action here. And you know, which, if you were the sorting hat, which, where would I get sorted to with this, with this, with these colors, sir?
• 1:00:08
  Speaker B: Is that green?
• 1:00:09
  Speaker A: It is green.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker B: Slytherin.
• 1:00:12
  Speaker A: There you go.
• 1:00:13
  Speaker B: Ambitious.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker A: There you go, there you go. Anyone that knows me knows that that's, that's exactly what the sorting hat would say, you know, because I am the anti hero here. Someone has to be, someone has to be, right? I mean, look, let's, let's be honest. There's no substitute for perfectly timed derision. And I am here to deride lots of people, but not you, Solomon. So we're talking, ladies and gentlemen. Go ahead.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker B: Oh no, I was just going to say you could put that on your business card. Cunning and ambitious, that's the trademarks of the Slytherin.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker A: So we're talking to Solomon Schmidt, the 22 year old whiz kid. The book is called A Pen to Change the World. The life of J.K. rowling. So, all right, I'm gonna give you a Hogwarts SAT test. Okay? That's what I'm gonna give you here. All right? Some of these Guys, the staff put these together here. You know, I, some of these I knew the answers to, if you can believe it. Some, some I did not. So they, they sort of, hopefully they go from, you know, from easy to hard. But let's see, let's have a little fun here. You know, I don't get to give freaking pop quizzes to most of my guests. You know, I'm just usually waiting for them to leave. All right, here we go.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker B: There we go.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker A: All right, here we go. Question 1. What is the name of the prison guarded by soul sucking creatures that somehow, that somehow still seem to be more cheerful than MSNBC hosts Azkaban?
• 1:01:46
  Speaker B: Which I won't give the backstory.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker A: That is correct. That is correct. All right, you're one for one.
• 1:01:53
  Speaker B: Here's a little backstory on, on the name Azkaban. It comes from the Hebrew word Abaddon, which means place of destruction. Yes, that I believe. That's right. And it, and it's also has some etymology, etymological links to the word Armageddon. So that's. Wow, that's J.K. the wordsmith for you.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker A: All right, all right, here we go. Question number two. The chicks are loving this out there in, in the audience, let me tell you. What is the name of Dumbledore's Phoenix Fox? Oh, two for two, some people believe
• 1:02:35
  Speaker B: is an allusion to Guy Fawkes, the GU who blew up Parliament.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker A: That's right, that's right, that's right. You know, the V for Vendetta mask. Right. All right, so question three. All right, these are going to progressively get hopefully a little bit harder. What? What publication constantly lies, exaggerates and manipulates the public perception of Harry Potter? And this is the, the answer is not the Washington Post or the New York Times. What is it?
• 1:03:10
  Speaker B: The Guardian in the uk. I just, Just kidding, just kidding. Okay. Actually, I think the Guardian might be more pro JK now than I thought. Okay. It's Daily Profit.
• 1:03:21
  Speaker A: The Daily Profit is correct. Dude, this day is. This dude's killing it. All right, he's three for three here. I mean, you know, all right, these questions are too easy. All right, I'm like, all right, here we go. Next 1. Question 4. What potion does Hermione, Hermione Granger accidentally turn herself into a cat while trying
• 1:03:46
  Speaker B: to brew Polyjuice Potion?
• 1:03:50
  Speaker A: Oh, that is correct. This guy, you know, I can't stop him. No wonder he wrote the book on this woman. All right, all right, we're almost, we're halfway there. There's only 10 questions we don't want the audience to commit suicide. Go ahead.
• 1:04:07
  Speaker B: Oh me? Oh, oh no. I was just gonna say there's, there's stories behind JK making up the potions. The funny thing here is that this was just what she did for her hobbies. Some people go out and play sports, some people roll on social media nowadays, obviously, but 30 years ago, JK was coming home from her office job in London and making up the ingredients of Polyjuice Potion in her little apartment as a 25, 26 year old.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker A: Absolutely. Look, we all gotta, we all have to have those kind of fun hobbies. Mine is interviewing you. All right, next question. Which character kills Bellatrix Lestrange?
• 1:04:47
  Speaker B: This is a spoiler alert for this is a spoiler alert but Molly Weasley.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker A: That is correct. That's the great mother figure of the scene.
• 1:05:01
  Speaker B: That's the great mother series of the figures. Molly Weasley against the great anti mother figure who also actually in some. I think it's Bellatrix who bears Voldemort's child. Might be her.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker A: Oh, well, now we're talking. All right. Hey, we just swerved into PG13 mode here. That's right.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker B: That's the basis though of the Harry Potter Broadway play which has been running since 2016 in its 10th year, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. So that's
• 1:05:37
  Speaker A: speaking of Voldemort, what is Voldemort's actual full name?
• 1:05:42
  Speaker B: Tom Marvolo Riddle, which can be spelled I am Voldemort when you I am Lord Voldemort when you take all the letters of that name and rearrange them.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker A: That is correct, Marvolo. I mean like I knew his name was Tom Riddle. I didn't know he had a middle name too. Yeah, was. He has a middle name. Marvolo. I mean my God.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, but that name, Tom Riddle comes from a tombstone in Edinburgh where I guide guests around on my tour. And it's right near one of the cafes where JK was writing Harry Potter in the 90s.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker A: All right, so I can't believe. I mean we're going in, we're going into the deepest, darkest trenches of, of nerd world here today. All right, this is so. I feel like I, I can't get you. What are Harry Potter's parents names?
• 1:06:31
  Speaker B: James and Lily.
• 1:06:33
  Speaker A: How about his uncle
• 1:06:37
  Speaker B: Jimmy? Oh, his uncle.
• 1:06:40
  Speaker A: I think we got him, ladies and gentlemen.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker B: Oh, oh, his uncle. Oh right, right, right. Okay. Duh. Vernon Dursley. And it's, it's his.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker A: Not.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker B: It's his uncle by, by marriage. Not by blood.
• 1:06:50
  Speaker A: Oh my God. That is. Oh my. Killing us. Killing us, right. I'm telling you.
• 1:07:00
  Speaker B: All right, you're on the edge of your seat.
• 1:07:03
  Speaker A: That's right. There's two people watching now. All right, here we go. Which. Which ghost is hanging out on the second floor girls bathroom of Hogwarts Owning Myrtle? Ah, correct.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker B: There's a whole range of ghosts which JK had a lot of fun with they allude to different mythical characters and other parts of the series Moaning Myrtle
• 1:07:24
  Speaker A: ironically is named after an adult film all right, next, next thing here, here we go. All right, question nine. What creature can only be seen by people who have witnessed death?
• 1:07:37
  Speaker B: A festral.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker A: Oh God, I thought I was gonna get. Oh my God.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker B: That ties into JK's own experiences with death which I alluded to earlier. There's a whole.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker A: Also known as Democrat Congresswoman Maxine Waters I think that she's a thestral. All right, here we go. Who. And this is the final question who are the four original founders of Hogwarts? I want their full names.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker B: All right? Godric Gryffindor Hufflepuff. Who is the leader? My house Hufflepuff.
• 1:08:14
  Speaker A: Correct.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker B: Helena Ravenclaw.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker A: What word was that?
• 1:08:20
  Speaker B: Helena Ravenclaw.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker A: It's not hell enough. We got his ass. All right, all right, Nerd verse. Rowena
• 1:08:41
  Speaker B: and Salazar Slytherin.
• 1:08:43
  Speaker A: Look, there is a character almost. Oh my God, you know what. And look, we're having some fun here but I guess the real, the real question as somebody that, you know, I mean you're 22 so you're a different generation than me but I think, you know, and everyone can probably take different lessons but there's a one final sort of bonus question it's not really on the test and you. Look, you're not getting kicked out of Hogwarts. All right, thank you. What, what do you think the real lesson of Harry Potter is? I mean there's no correct answer here but if you were to, you know, if you were to talk to somebody who loves the books that's Rolling's own age all the way through to a 10 year old, you know, for you personally, what, what made it interesting, what continues to allow it to sustain the excitement that it had It's.
• 1:09:40
  Speaker B: I mean the simple answer is it's just a darn good story. It's funny, it's exciting, it's suspenseful. There's no one like JK to make you keep turning the pages at a more profound level I would say the main moral truth and lesson in the series is simple self sacrifice. Be ready to give everything for those you love. It's a Christian ideal, but obviously it's in other religions. Of course. But I say it's a Christian ideal because JK deliberately alluded to the Christian idea of self sacrifice in the seventh book Deathly Hallows. And J.K. has attended church herself for many years of her life. And I. But I would say for anyone, the main takeaway from her own words and what most impressed me was this idea of this guy facing his death.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker A: You talk about Harry, right?
• 1:10:30
  Speaker B: It's Harry. The whole bedrock moral truth lesson of Harry Potter is self sacrifice. Sure. Give it all for those you love. Which is exactly what Christ said. And words that, that JK herself pointed to greater love had known than this. And that he lay down his life for his friends. It's exactly what Harry Potter does. And if that sounds overly dramatic, it's a dramatic series.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker A: Sure, absolutely. And look, I mean that, you know, the great stories, they do blend those, those elements. Yeah. You know, it really doesn't matter whether you're talking about the Lord of the Rings or. Right. The Matrix or Anakin Skywalker. I mean the reality is in most instances, you know, Judeo Christianity is present in the underpinnings of a lot of these stories of, you know, good versus
• 1:11:19
  Speaker B: evil up the Messiah, Messiah story, the Jesus story. I even have a whole plot line I worked out that I call the Jesus plot line, which you can see it in it in movies, even like the Pixar movie Cars, for crying out loud. I mean that plot line comes up everywhere. How to train your dragon avatar.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker A: I mean, it's everywhere. Yep, absolutely. Well, look, we gotta run. I mean the reality here is that there's a lot of. There's news being broke about this book. It's been in the National Enquirer, it's been in the New York Post. I would advise the audience to go find some of those things, the stories that are out there, the exclusive things that are out there. It's going to be a smash hit. Solomon Schmidt, how do, how can the audience find you here?
• 1:12:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, I have a website, solomonschmitt.com and then you can find the book available wherever books are sold and there's a page dedicated to it on my publisher's website. If you just Google append to change the world, all those buying options will be readily available.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker A: That's right. Solomon Schmidt, everybody. Author of A Pen to Change the World. The life of J.K. rowling. He is a 22 year old superstar. He's written. He's been writing books since he was 11 years old. I mean, I don't know how he does it. He's just. He's a machine. We had a little fun with you today, Solomon. Appreciate you coming on here. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:12:43
  Speaker B: Thanks, AJ. It's gonna be fun. Yeah.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker A: Books for sure. Well, that's.