Who to Watch on YouTube: Joe Folley’s Unsolicited Advice and the Seven Levels of Logic

Charles Scholx

3 min read

August 2026

As part of my series on interesting and worthwhile YouTube creators, one channel worth watching is Unsolicited Advice, created by Joe Folley. It is a rare example of a channel built around philosophy, logic, and serious intellectual questions that has managed to find a large modern audience.

The channel was created in January 2023 and has grown remarkably quickly. As of 2026, public channel tracking sites estimate that Unsolicited Advice has approximately:

• 950,000+ subscribers
• 67–68 million total views
• Around 260–270 videos

For a philosophy and education channel, those numbers are impressive. It demonstrates that there is still a significant audience for long-form ideas when they are presented clearly and accessibly.

Joe Folley’s background adds credibility to the channel. He studied philosophy at Cambridge University, with particular interest in logic, and his videos often combine academic knowledge with a conversational style. Instead of presenting philosophy as something locked away in universities, he approaches it as something connected to ordinary life: how we think, argue, believe, and understand the world.

One of his videos, “The 7 Levels of Logic,” is a good example of what makes the channel interesting.

The video presents logic as a progression from everyday reasoning to professional research.

The first level is Pre-Logic. This is where most people operate: they have an instinctive sense that some arguments seem convincing and others do not, but they lack a formal framework for explaining why.

The second level is the Fallacy-Monger. At this stage, people learn to identify common mistakes in reasoning, such as ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, and other informal fallacies. This is a useful beginning, but logic is much deeper than simply spotting mistakes in arguments.

The third level is Basic Formal Logic. Here reasoning becomes mathematical. Propositional logic introduces symbols, truth tables, and logical connectives such as “and,” “or,” and “if-then.” Arguments can now be tested with precision rather than intuition.

The fourth level is First-Order Logic and Friends. This expands logic into more complex statements involving concepts like “for all” and “there exists,” along with connections to mathematics, sets, and probability.

The fifth level moves into Specialized Logical Systems. This includes areas such as modal logic, which studies necessity and possibility; epistemic logic, which examines knowledge and belief; and formal semantics, which explores meaning in language.

The sixth level is Metamathematics and Metalogic: logic studying itself. This includes questions about consistency, completeness, and Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorems, which showed that even powerful mathematical systems have limits.

The seventh level is Current Logic Research. At this stage, logic becomes an active professional field connected with mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and philosophy.

What makes this video interesting personally is that I am familiar with six of the seven levels. That does not mean I am an expert in them. Far from it. Some areas are much more familiar than others, and like many people who have studied these subjects, I am also a bit rusty. Knowing about modal logic or Gödel’s theorems is very different from actively working in those fields.

That is also one of the strengths of Joe Folley’s presentation. It reminds viewers that there is a difference between recognizing a subject, understanding its basic structure, and mastering it professionally. Logic is not just a collection of tricks for winning arguments online. It is a centuries-long discipline that has shaped mathematics, philosophy, computer science, and our understanding of reasoning itself.

The appeal of Unsolicited Advice is that it makes these enormous subjects approachable. It invites viewers to move beyond simple opinions and explore the deeper machinery behind human thought.

For anyone interested in philosophy, critical thinking, artificial intelligence, mathematics, or simply understanding how people reason, Joe Folley’s channel is worth watching. 

Watch the Premiere on YouTube

 Cosplay Magazine Tucker Carslon Back Issues:

Tucker Carlson: Born to Privilege, Sold as a Rebel

Tucker Carlson's Revolt of the Rich

Tucker Carlson and the Politics of Elite Anti-Elitism

Tucker Carlson: Broadcasting Anger from the Manor House

Tucker Carlson and the Strange Appeal of the Millionaire Populist

Tucker Carlson: The Last King of Cable News

Tucker Carlson and the Great American Masquerade

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BRITNEY SPEARS

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 **#BritneySpears #MyPrerogative CITIZEN CANADA SHOW RED LIGHT** 🔴 **“BUY. BELIEVE. OBEY.”**

🗞️ You no read magazine. Magazine read you. Pop lab open. Year ~2004. Beat drop. Voice split. Question asked. “My prerogative.” — system glitch. Star speak back. Industry blink. Tabloid loud. Camera everywhere. Narrative built. Narrative sold. But chorus cut through noise. Control challenged in 3 minutes. Think artist free? Or image scripted? Stage shine. Contract tight. Freedom marketed. Autonomy debated. Audience dance — but also listen. **INSIDE THIS PAGE:** 🧠 **“Pop as Rebellion.”** — Hook sweet. Message sharp. Mainstream song ask: who decide identity? 📺 **“Media Machine.”** — Headlines push story. Persona packaged. Reality edited. 🛒 **“Image for Sale.”** — Style, voice, attitude — monetized. Even “real” becomes product. 🕹️ **“Fan Circuit.”** — Fans echo, remix, amplify. Meaning move beyond original. 🚀 **“Prerogative Core.”** — Final line stay: choice claimed, even inside system. 📸 Photos of thought from #GreatguyTV #scholxpage2 #CitizenCanada #江戸門戸 / #by江戸門戸

 

Austin Russell: China’s Newest Useful Idiot? The Billionaire Who Bought Forbes with Foreign Pocket Change

So, Austin Russell, the self-proclaimed wunderkind behind Luminar Technologies, a company that makes lasers for cars that don’t drive themselves properly, just became the proud owner of Forbes. Yes, Forbes — the magazine most famous for putting every attention-seeking billionaire on a “rich list” like it’s an achievement, not a global indictment.

The Setup: Nothing to See Here, Just Foreign Money

Let’s be clear — Austin didn’t buy Forbes out of his own piggy bank alone. No, the $800 million deal came laced with foreign funding.

• His partners? The Sun Group (India-based) — whose Vice Chairman had former ties to Russian government advisory roles, which in spy-speak is code for “drinks vodka with spies.”
• Also onboard: GSV Ventures, a Silicon Valley fund — because no shady deal is complete without the blessing of people who invest in ed-tech scams.
• The previous owner? Integrated Whale Media, a Hong Kong-based group with long-standing Chinese links, who held the keys to Forbes for nearly a decade.

So, we’ve gone from Beijing to Bangalore to Austin, who swears he’s just passionate about “media integrity.” Yes, because nothing says journalistic integrity like needing foreign money to buy the most American business magazine in history.

The CFIUS Problem

The deal is now under scrutiny from CFIUS — the U.S. government’s official “Are-you-sure-this-isn’t-a-hostile-takeover?” committee. Their main concern? That foreign governments could influence U.S. media narratives — you know, like when Forbes mysteriously got much softer on China while under Integrated Whale’s ownership. What a coincidence.

Russell claims this is all just “entrepreneurial ambition”, but you have to wonder:

• Is it ambition, or is it being the world’s richest useful idiot?
• Or worse, is it just business as usual in a country where billionaires can buy institutions like they’re picking up groceries?

Austin’s Defense

Russell insists he’s running the show solo.

• $10 million came from his own pocket.
• The other $790 million? Ah yes, foreign consortiums. Because every red-blooded American billionaire looks for investment from companies with Russian political ties when buying a U.S. media outlet.

Let’s Not Forget

Russell is a 29-year-old lidar nerd, not exactly the guy you expect to understand geopolitical power plays. But that’s what makes it so believable — because the best agents aren’t moustache-twirling villains. They’re young, well-meaning Silicon Valley types who accidentally give China and Russia soft influence because, hey, the terms sheet looked good.

And the Content?

Under Chinese-linked ownership, Forbes had already started softening on China. Articles critical of Chinese business practices became rare. Could this new ownership simply continue the trend?

After all, if you can’t beat America militarily, you may as well make sure their business press sounds like the “Visit Beijing” tourism board.

The Punchline

Is Austin Russell a Chinese agent? Probably not — but he’s ticking every box for the audition.

• Young? ✔
• Naïve? ✔
• Willing to take money from anyone offering it? ✔
• About to control an influential media platform with foreign-funded backing? ✔✔✔

As they say, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and buys Forbes with foreign money — maybe it’s time to check if the duck speaks Mandarin

FOX NEWS NEW PANIC What Kind of Husband Goes Grocery Shopping with his Wife?

  FOX NEWS NEW PANIC What Kind of Husband Goes Grocery Shopping with his Wife?

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It has lately been brought to my attention, through the ever-vigilant sages of Fox News, that a most alarming degeneracy has taken root in our civilization: the modern man, once a titan of industry and remote controls, has begun… accompanying his wife to the supermarket.

I shall not soften the horror.

There he stands, in the produce aisle—examining avocados, comparing prices, even (God preserve us) holding the basket. What was once a fortress of masculine detachment has become a marketplace of shared decision-making. One trembles to imagine what comes next: recipe discussions? Coupon awareness? Eye contact over pasta sauce brands?

The commentators, in their wisdom, have hinted at two equally dreadful possibilities. Either the man has become a tyrant, hovering over his wife’s sacred domain of grocery selection, micromanaging the ripeness of bananas with despotic zeal—or worse, far worse, he has surrendered entirely, reduced to a docile cart-pusher under the gentle but firm dominion of a list.

In either case, civilization totters.

Therefore, I humbly propose a solution equal in proportion to the crisis. Let us establish designated Masculinity Preservation Zones—areas within supermarkets where men may stand idle, staring into the middle distance, occasionally grunting, while their wives shop in peace. Alternatively, for those already too far gone, we might introduce rehabilitation programs: brief seminars reminding them that knowing the price of milk is the first step toward societal collapse.

For if this trend continues—if men persist in participating in the mundane logistics of their own households—we risk a total breakdown of the delicate fiction that adulthood requires rigid theatrical roles rather than simple cooperation.

And once that illusion is gone, who can say what horrors await? Shared responsibilities? Functional partnerships? Mutual respect?

One shudders.

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2026,Social Media, Satire

 

https://pop-the-cherry-say-i.blogspot.com/2026/04/fox-news-new-panic-what-kind-of-husband.html

THE MEME THAT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO EXIST (2007–2012): A CULTURAL AND LEGAL AUTOPSY — PART II

There is a strange thing that happens when a culture passes through its own shock threshold. It stops remembering events as events and starts remembering them as atmospheres. The internet of the late 2000s was already doing this instinctively, long before anyone had language for it. It was learning, in real time, that certain artifacts do not persist because they are preserved, but because they are repeatedly re-invented in the act of describing them.

By 2007–2008, what had begun as a fragmented and unstable piece of Brazilian fetish film circulation had already ceased to be about the original clip at all. The object itself—compressed, reuploaded, stripped of context—was less important than the reaction it produced, and even less important than the reaction to the reaction. This recursive structure is what gave the meme its historical weight. It was not a video. It was a feedback loop.

And feedback loops, unlike media artifacts, do not require stability to persist.

The earliest traceable phase of this loop was simple: individuals recording themselves watching the clip and uploading their responses to early YouTube. These were not polished productions. They were not commentary in the modern sense. They were closer to involuntary theater. People sitting in bedrooms, in offices, in dorm rooms, confronting something they had been told not to see, and discovering that the only socially legible way to process it was to immediately perform that processing for others.

The reaction video became its own genre almost instantly, but more importantly, it became a distribution method that no longer required the original source. The clip itself could disappear entirely and still propagate culturally, because what was being transmitted was no longer the content—it was the idea of having encountered it.

This is where the meme crosses a threshold that earlier media systems could not easily conceptualize. In broadcast logic, content is primary and commentary is secondary. In this new logic, commentary becomes self-sustaining. The reaction no longer depends on the object. It begins to generate its own necessity.

By 2008, this structure had already begun to leak into mainstream entertainment, not as imitation but as absorption. Late-night television, still operating within broadcast constraints, began to import internet behavior as material. Comedy writers, sensing that audiences were already aware of viral shock culture, began to construct jokes not around the content itself but around the shared fact that something unwatchable existed and had been seen by “people online.”

The shift is subtle but irreversible. Humor stops describing things and starts indexing awareness of things. The audience is no longer being told a joke about a video. They are being reminded that they belong to a cultural moment in which that video could exist.

Around this same period, stand-up comedy begins to mutate under the pressure of the internet. Comedians operating in the late 2000s club circuit—performing in rooms where audiences were increasingly shaped by early YouTube exposure—begin to rely less on narrative setup and more on shared cultural shorthand. Names like Sarah Silverman and Daniel Tosh circulate within this ecosystem not as direct archivists of specific meme references, but as participants in a broader shift where shock, taboo, and internet literacy collapse into a single comedic language.

But what is notable in retrospect is not what was explicitly said. It is what no longer needed to be said. The existence of the meme becomes sufficient context. The joke is not in the description, but in the acknowledgment that description is unnecessary.

Meanwhile, outside comedy, mainstream news media begins to engage with the phenomenon from a different angle entirely. Networks such as CNN and Fox News frame the rise of “disturbing online videos” as a social concern, particularly focused on youth exposure and the breakdown of content boundaries. But these discussions are structurally constrained: the material itself cannot be shown, only described, and even description is often softened into euphemism.

This creates a strange asymmetry in public discourse. The meme is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere—present in conversation, absent in representation, fully known without being fully visible. It becomes one of the first truly modern examples of what might be called “distributed cultural knowledge,” where shared awareness replaces shared experience.

And yet, as with many internet-origin phenomena of this era, the legal system becomes a site where memory attempts to anchor itself incorrectly.

There is a persistent belief that the meme “went to court,” or that some judicial body ruled on its status as art or obscenity. This belief is not entirely irrational—it emerges from proximity. Around the same period, obscenity prosecutions involving extreme adult material were indeed occurring, most notably under frameworks such as Miller v. California (1973) in the United States and R v Butler (1992) in Canada. These legal standards governed what could be classified as obscene material, and they were actively being applied in cases involving distributors of extreme pornography in the late 2000s.

Among these cases, figures such as Ira Isaacs became symbolic in public discourse, not because they were connected to the meme itself, but because they embodied the kind of legal struggle that the internet imagination mistakenly retrofitted onto it. In Isaacs’ case, repeated prosecutions and a final conviction in 2012 became part of a broader cultural narrative about whether extreme sexual content could be defended as art, intent, or expression.

But none of these cases involved the meme. None adjudicated it. None stabilized it.

What happened instead was a collapse of distinction. Multiple unrelated legal processes, similar in subject matter but distinct in object, began to merge in public memory into a single imagined legal event. The internet, which had already blurred the boundaries between original and copy, now blurred the boundaries between case and narrative.

This is how the myth of the “court ruling on the video” emerges—not from legal fact, but from narrative compression under conditions of cultural overload.

By 2009, the reaction video economy had matured into infrastructure. YouTube, still in its pre-algorithmic but rapidly scaling phase, had become the primary environment for this behavior. The platform itself was engaged in a contradictory process: attempting to remove the underlying material while simultaneously hosting and amplifying its derivatives. Reaction videos remained accessible, commentary proliferated, and the original clip existed only in intermittent, unstable fragments.

Virality, in this sense, was no longer a matter of persistence. It was a matter of oscillation. Content survived through cycles of appearance and removal, each disappearance generating renewed curiosity, each reappearance triggering renewed reaction. The meme was no longer a single artifact but a system of recurrence.

And by the early 2010s, that system had already begun to fade—not because it was resolved, but because it had been absorbed. The internet had moved on to faster cycles, shorter attention spans, and more structurally integrated forms of recommendation and amplification. What remained of the meme was not its content, nor even its reaction videos, but its afterimage in cultural memory.

It survived as a reference to a time when the internet still produced shocks that felt unstructured, unmoderated, and unrepeatable. A time when seeing something once meant carrying the knowledge of it indefinitely, because there was no guarantee you would ever be able to locate it again.

And in that sense, the meme did not disappear.

It simply became the first recognizable form of something the internet would eventually perfect:

a culture built entirely from what it has already seen, even when it can no longer remember how it saw it.

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