Shinzo Abe, the Man, the Meme
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Summary
After the assassination of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, people in Japan became convinced that he had told President Trump to move away from the White House in order to avoid being assassinated. This is the story of the conspiracy theories about what really happened.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone! Today, occasionally I will go down a rabbit hole and I'll be like,
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this is something I really wish I could find a good, succinct video on,
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And this topic is the Harambe of pronatalism, Shinzo Abe.
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I have just seen so many pronatalist Shinzo Abe memes of him trying to promote fertility.
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And then after the recent thing happened, which we'll go into, where people in Japan became convinced
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that Shinzo Abe from the dead had told Trump to move, to avoid being assassinated.
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So first, I'm going to bring the audience along with me on a journey through some memes about Shinzo Abe.
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Then we're going to go into who he actually was, like what did he accomplish in his life,
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how pronatalist was he really? And then we're going to go into the assassination.
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And then we're going to go into the, what led to the assassination.
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So we're starting with meme number one of Shinzo Abe here, which is him holding a gun out.
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It says, stop watching VTubers, you stinky meats. Do your duty. Have sex. I'm no longer asking.
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The next one I love, and this is something that as I first started, like going into Shinzo Abe,
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I really realized how well liked he was, was in like meme community.
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So here's one that's a political compass that shows a former, former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe shot dead.
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And it shows people on all sides of the political compass, sad about this.
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But then the next political compass one, which I think is more true,
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shows everybody horrified except for the authoritarian lefties who are,
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It says, and it shows from China news, like from one of their main sources.
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And all of the, you know, far, far commies, they're being like, you know,
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don't be stunned, celebrate, stuff like that, so horrified.
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But I think what this shows is that the only people who were really happy that he died
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was the crazy, like pro-China people, which again, if you're not pro-China,
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And this was something that a lot of people were saying in the analysis of him
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that made me want to learn more about him is that one, longest serving PM in the history,
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And people were like, they don't understand, like Japan losing him in some of the analysis I saw,
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they said could significantly hurt the country because he was so effective at everything he did.
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For the next meme here, this takes place in the Fren universe.
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But across the board, we lack romantic feelings and reproductive instincts.
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Last time I met a fellow elf was more than 400 years ago.
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Perhaps we're closer to the end than I thought.
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You doing a girl voice, by the way, is so out of character for you.
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Well, I read that a boy and a girl can create new life by joining their bodies together.
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Can create new life by joining their bodies together.
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And it shows Sun Tzu Abe smiling in the background.
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And then this one, it's Korobo and Mitsubo are having their force.
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And then this is one of my favorite, where this was after the assassination.
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And it shows a picture of the scenery of Japan with Shin Tzu Abe's face fading out.
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And then on the bottom right, it says, see ya, space cowboy.
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So now I'm going to talk a bit about the really funny thing that happened.
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But there's memes about like women, like I cry at the Titanic.
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And it shows the men like crying over memes of a protecting Trump from the assassination.
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They were, they did have a very, very strong relationship.
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And we'll get into why this was the case in just a second.
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But here in a Japanese Twitter post, it says, during his speech, Trump heard Shin Tzu Abe's voice calling him to attention in his ear.
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When he tilted his head to listen to the voice, he heard the sound of a bullet cutting through the air.
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If Trump had not tried to listen to Abe's voice, he would have been killed by the bullet.
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And for people who are like, wait, why would a lot of people in Japan actually believe this?
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Well, a big group that liked Shin Tzu Abe was extremist Christians, specifically the Unification Church, specifically the Moonies, who would have believed something like this was possible.
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And people were memeing about this in the West, and they thought it was serious.
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Well, apparently that was why Shin Tzu Abe was shot, right?
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Yeah, it was the Unification Church, which we'll get to.
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And I mean, in light of all these memes, you can think, oh, these memes are so silly, etc.
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One of my favorites has always been the, what I watched, which it shows Franks.
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And it goes, what I expected, which is Gurren Lagann.
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It's Shin Tzu Abe's face pointing at the screen, and occasionally it flashes, have sex.
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My very favorite Shin Tzu Abe meme I found after we recorded this episode.
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It shows a post from rredditwitchesvspatriarchy.
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Some other witches have mentioned that doing spells directly against Trump are not as effective
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as we might hope, as he seems to have some kind of protection around him.
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And then they wrote, quote unquote, some kind of protection around him.
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And it shows Shin Tzu Abe's face in the background.
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And here's a great one, which is a political compass one, which shows why Shin Tzu Abe was
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It shows, you know, people being shocked at his death.
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And it shows people at every side of the political compass sad, but it shows why they're sad.
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So the authoritarian left, he oversaw a 15% real increase in minimum wage while dropping
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That was lefty authoritarian, righty authoritarian.
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He worked to ensure Japan could stand with America and protect democracy in Taiwan when
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And then at the libertarian right, it just shows the economy going up under his leadership.
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And then in the libertarian left, it shows his policies opened the door to ensure millions
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And I will say that when I dug on him deeper, I didn't necessarily come away universally liking
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But unfortunately, his reputation took a hit in the investigation of the person who shot
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Because the person who shot him had, he didn't have no point.
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He should have written a sternly worded letter, you're saying.
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He should have written a sternly worded letter.
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But Shinzo Abe may have facilitated a cult that destroyed a lot of people's lives and used
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Now, whether you consider it a cult or a religion, I mean, it could be like people saying, well,
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you guys do the same with like, I don't know, you know, being overly positive about Mormons,
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people who are like really anti-Mormon and think of it as a cult.
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And I'd be like, one, I don't think we're that overly positive Mormon.
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But like if they became like a major voting block for us and we were running and then
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they blamed us, like I could see, I don't know.
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Because I don't think the unification church is a much more culty cult than the Mormons,
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Yeah, well, then it would have to be if Tom Cruise was president, but then someone assassinated
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Before he was ever in his party, actually during the age of his dad, who helped the unification
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church a lot get established in Japan, they began to...
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Yeah, which is a South Korean cult or religion.
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They began to help the party a lot with local organizational stuff.
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And when he took over the party, he didn't like clear them out of the party.
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And they still had a big role in helping with, you know, like flyers and door knocking and
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And people think that the party wouldn't have as much power as they had if they didn't have
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So Womanomics, in 2013, Abe called for a society in which all women can shine, setting
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a target that 30% of leadership positions should be held by women by 2020.
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This policy aimed to increase women's participation in the workforce, which Abe believed could potentially
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And so right away, when we've gone into other countries' fertility rates and we've like laughed
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at their like extended maternity leave and stuff like that.
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This is the first time I've heard one where I'm like, one, counterintuitive and two, probably
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The by far highest fertility rate in the region is Japan.
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Abe planned to spend 2 trillion yen, approximately 17.6 billion on education and childcare.
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This included promises of free preschool for children aged three to five, free childcare
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for children aged two and younger from low-income households.
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He attempted to break down Japan's two-tier employment system, which often excluded temporary
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These reforms were aimed at creating a more flexible labor market that could better accommodate
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And then Abenomics and Abenomics 2.0 in September, 2015.
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Abe announced an updated platform that centered on raising the birth rate and expanding social
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This included creating new cabinet positions dedicated to reversing Japanese demographic decline.
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Now, a lot of people think that he sponsored anime that had pronatalist themes.
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When we watched recently released anime, I don't know if you only watch pronatalist anime
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No, I mean, the studio that did, for example, Frank's, which is seen as having hugely pronatalist
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Yeah, I'm going to find another female partner.
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You think in the real world, your perfect girl will just come falling out of the sky?
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So no one besides me thinks this control scheme's a bit weird.
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Now spank me hard and I'll shout out daddy to get the engine started.
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You see, I've always thought of you as a brother.
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You mean like the normal kind or the anime kind?
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Don't you have anyone else that likes you anyway?
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And now you can look forward to paying a lifetime's worth of child support!
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I'd like to declare that we're getting married!
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Is also the studio that did Gurren Lagann, which came out a long time before anyone was
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Well, that was Gurren Lagann that I'm talking about.
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They were also, sorry, they were also Evangelion, which is an anti-nuda list.
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I think Gurren Lagann, did that overlap with Shinzo Abe?
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Shinzo Abe first served as Prime Minister of Japan in 2006 to 2007, then again from 2012
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Not that there is any chance that he influenced its development, but yeah, Simone was right
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And then they did a, um, like other, you know, pro-natalist anime that I've shown on
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here, like the one about old people and stuff like that.
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It's not that the Japanese government never sponsors anime or manga, but they're typically
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And it doesn't appear that there's any documented evidence of like super pro-natalist stuff being
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It appears that most of the pro-natalist anime was just created because people love their
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And I think that that shows in part why Japan has been more resistant to fertility collapse
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Is that there's just much more pride in the Japanese identity than there is, um, you know,
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and ask somebody who spent time in Japan and Korea, for example, uh, there is simply more
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pride in the Japanese identity than there is in the Korean identity.
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And I suspect it's, you know, people just pushing this into their own media in an attempt
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And I think it's sad that we don't see more of this in U.S.
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media, there's very few actual conservatives, um, because the, the far left in the urban
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monoculture sort of acts as a cabal, keeping them out of positions.
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Um, whereas in Japan, you don't have the same extent of conservatives, just not appearing
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in media, uh, which didn't used to be as extreme in the U.S.
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Constitutional reinterpretation in 2014, Abe's government reinterpreted article nine of Japan's
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past of its constitution to allow for collectivist self-defense, enabling Japan to come to the
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He really, really began to turn Japan into a military power again, to put it on a military
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And I think that as an American, this is something I am really glad that he did because he also
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pretty much unilaterally rebuilt Quad, or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which is
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an alliance between Japan, U.S., India, and Australia.
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And if you're wondering who would those four countries be allied against, specifically,
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They would really only kick into action against China, but it would be incredibly damaging
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to China, uh, especially if you had the U.S. and Japan plus Australia and India involved
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in any sort of a boycott because China imports around, I think last I checked was 83% of their
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energy needs and something like 86% of that is coming through the Strait of Malacca, which
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They could take it into the deep ocean, but then they need to go all the way around Australia.
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But if you go all the way around Australia, well, now you need to get through the island
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So there's really no way to supply China by water if there was ever a blockade and the
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And he increased military spending to one to 2% of GDP.
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And he also pushed through controversial security laws that allowed the Japanese Self-Defense
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Force to deploy overseas and engage in combat to defend allies when it used to be defense
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And the ally in contest here is very obviously Taiwan.
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Were you like this guy so far or he's sounding?
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I mean, for any elected politician, he sounds pretty solid.
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And also just the fact that he made some pretty meaningful changes, too.
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No, he's a I mean, in terms of a man of action.
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Yeah, he's one of those characters where like the way he got elected may have been shady.
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But as a politician, he was God tier and really only did good.
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A good example of this in the United States would be Nixon.
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And Nixon is generally considered one of the best presidents in American history by people
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who like know their presidential history stuff.
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Building our current relationship with China and building globalization was really important
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in securing peace and making America as prosperous today as it is.
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However, you know, he did cheat in the election cycle.
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And to give you an idea of how well like Nixon is in the US, Stephen Colbert, you know, far
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He said that out of all American presidents, Nixon is his favorite.
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So that should show you that he really does appeal across the aisle.
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So another thing to note here is he did a very good job building a relationship with Trump
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and he had a close personal friendship with Trump from what we've seen, you know,
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with Trump saying after he died, something along the lines of no one will ever understand
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how much Japan has lost, you know, with Abe's passing.
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You know, like he knew more from his position to know just how important he was,
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which is probably true from the position of president of the US.
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You have more information than other people have.
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Well, but I think Abe also demonstrated the first time Trump flew out to have a major
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meeting with him, just how much he wanted to invest in a good relationship with Trump
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They, he had special hats made that played on the make America great again slogan, but it
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had something to do with like their partnership.
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And he was the first person to call Trump of world leaders.
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And Abe appeared to genuinely like golfing as well.
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So, you know, Trump always loves just golfing all the time.
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I figure like Trump really works well for the Japanese mindset because he's a larger than
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And they really like characters that, that ham, you know, what's it, what, how do you use
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And he, he, he spoke with Trump and Trump words.
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And he kept the meetings private, which was another thing that he did to build.
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People were always trying to like Trump's foreign policy team was always trying to protect
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him from forming too close a personal relationship with people because that's what he would always
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In HR McMaster's biography or autobiography, he keeps talking about how Trump would say
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That doesn't mean you've just received an official foreign like visit invite.
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Like, he'd just give people his cell phone number and they'd freak out about that too
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because they needed to monitor all the calls or something.
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One of the interesting things is, you know how Trump loved trying to play like hard maul
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with these deals that he would make with countries?
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Japan didn't really push back and basically took one of Trump's like fairly one-sided
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deals to flatter his ego, which was probably the right thing to do.
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Like, it is the proper thing to do at this point.
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Well, I mean, I think it showed an understanding of Japan's relation with the United States
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today and the importance on having it be incredibly strong.
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Now, the downside was Trump is one of Shinzo Abe's things was the TPP.
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So he wasn't like always going along with what Abe wanted.
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But broadly speaking, oh, by the way, for people who don't know my thoughts on the TPP,
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I actually think Trump's torpedoing the TPP turned out for the best.
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And a lot of people are very surprised by this because they're like, oh, no, it was an Obama
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era thing that could have like built this great relationship and caused us to be an economic
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A lot of it was like Hollywood lobbying to try to make the IP regulations super strong
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So let's see, because we do know what happened post TPP blowing up.
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And we can talk about what ended up happening in the region.
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And post TPP blowing up, China at first looked like they had gained all of the strings.
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They started really forming a tight relationship with the Philippines.
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They started really forming fixing relationships with Vietnam.
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Because the US wasn't there to act as a counter influence, China immediately began to overplay
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their hand massively and began to really push this nine dot line thing.
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Basically just claiming huge swaths of territory from like the Philippines and Vietnam and all
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of the people who they had just made friends with and then began to basically threaten Taiwan.
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Is it basically pissed off that basically because we didn't have this economic fenced in area in
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the region, China immediately overplayed their hand and turned the Philippines right now has an
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You know, Vietnam is becoming increasingly pro-US to the point where both countries, I guess you could
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say, are basically in our pocket at this point.
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Same with the only country they've really made any headway was this maybe South Korea, but not even
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And Japan has become increasingly pro-US because they don't like the moves that China is making
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Basically, it ended up making the entire geopolitical region extremely strong allies of the United
00:21:51.820
States from goading China into overplaying their hand with economic extinctions and land
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But I think that here you see, like with the Trump thing, just an incredible amount of strategy
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and charisma in terms of building the relations he needed to build.
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Now, let's talk about the assassination because this is something, anything you want to talk about
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Shinzo Abe was shot twice from behind with a homemade shotgun while giving a campaign speech
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The attack occurred around 1130, hitting Abe in the chest and neck.
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Despite being rushed to a local hospital, Abe was pronounced dead at five o'clock, just five hours
00:22:38.040
So the gun that was used was like a homemade thing that somebody he learned to put together
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And people said even somebody without a lot of knowledge could learn to make one of these.
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It used a battery for the ignition and some wires attached to the battery and then two tubes
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for the barrels and likely some sort of bot propellant in the region or something like that.
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It was all over the table showing the factlessness of laws against guns and the complacency it can
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The suspect, the shooter identified as Tetsu Yamanagi, was immediately arrested at the scene.
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Yamanagi is a 41-year-old former member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force, admitted to
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He was formally charged with a murder, violating gun control laws and motive.
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His motive was that his mom had donated tons of money to the Moonies or the Unification
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And this led to his family being in poverty and his brothers unaliving himself.
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They can be incredibly like, we're going to take all your money.
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And the Moonies as a community are kind of known for that.
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In the United States, by the way, if you don't know who the Moonies are, if you've ever
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seen a cult in like a 70s movie or stereotype where everybody went to work at a plantation
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and then was like tricked and kept hostage, those were Moonies.
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That was what the Moonies were famous for, was these big plantations where like yuppie
00:24:09.040
college kids would go thinking like, oh, I'm going to learn to live off the land.
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And then they'd spend extremely long hours working fields.
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And when they were doing that, they were exposed to constant messaging.
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I think in media, I've seen references to creepy cults that involve agricultural work,
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They do other things now, but there is still an incredibly high demand religion.
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The Unification Church's relationship with the Japanese conservative politicians dates
00:24:46.560
back to the 1960s when Abe's grandfather, sorry, I said dad, grandfather, former Prime
00:24:50.720
Minister Noboke Kisha, helped the church establish itself in Japan.
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This connection was based on shared anti-communist ideologies during the Cold War.
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The Unification Church provided valuable political support to LDP politicians.
00:25:04.620
Dispatching believers to volunteer in election campaigns, mediating organizational votes for
00:25:09.540
LDP candidates, and providing a volunteer army of campaign workers.
00:25:13.900
In return, many LDP lawmakers, including Abe, gave speeches at church meetings and related
00:25:18.860
organizations effectively acting as promoters of the church.
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The scale of the church's influence in Japanese politics was revealed after Abe's assassination.
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Almost half of the LDP's 379 diet members, Congress members basically, admitted to some
00:25:35.100
At least 180 of 379 LDP lawmakers in Japan's national diet were found to have ties with the
00:25:43.220
23 of 54 members appointed as vice ministers and parliamentary secretaries in second Kishida
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So Yamaniga alluded to the assassination before the incident, posting on his blog, Mr. Abe was
00:26:00.860
one of the most influential Unification Church sympathizers.
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Abe was alleged to have overseen LDP's relationship with the Unification Church, using it to help
00:26:15.900
That just sounds like they were a major donor block and he treated them like he would treat
00:26:23.560
That's basically, I don't feel like he did anything wrong.
00:26:26.420
Like even as a politician, would I have done that if a religion, like suppose like Jehovah's
00:26:30.880
Witnesses, I think Jehovah's Witnesses do some shady things, but like if I became the
00:26:36.280
presidential candidate for like the U.S. Republican Party and the Jehovah's Witnesses were like
00:26:41.960
always behind me a hundred percent, am I going to advocate for their policy positions?
00:26:48.140
Well, but yeah, that's what happens with politicians and unions, with politicians and corporations,
00:26:56.460
And people think that they might be influencing the policy that his government did, specifically
00:27:01.660
that Japanese still hasn't legalized same-sex marriage, could be downstream of this church.
00:27:07.120
But I mean, come on, the Mormons have pushed for that in the U.S. for a long time, right?
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Like, and I don't think that somebody deserves to be assassinated over that.
00:27:14.560
And the church's name change to the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification in 2015 was
00:27:22.240
approved by the government during Abe's tenure.
00:27:28.600
Oh, I think a normal government would have said, we're not going to call you the Organization
00:27:33.600
But I think that also when people look at our religious beliefs and the unique religion
00:27:39.160
we're creating, one of the things I really appreciate about it is that it isn't pro-unification,
00:27:45.060
unification, which sounds really nice on paper, World Peace and Unification.
00:27:50.040
You know, the Baha'is are also about this and they think that, like, we have similarities
00:28:01.080
Then I found this world where I was better able to focus on my passion for unification.
00:28:09.140
This world will be invited into the Galactic Federation.
00:28:12.060
From there I'll have access to countless planets and species.
00:28:15.420
One by one I will unify them and I will be what the single-minded once called a god.
00:28:25.200
There's no need for escape from the self when your world is one.
00:28:37.960
But I will say that also if I get myself in the mind of the-
00:28:46.360
You know, you grow up, your brother has unalived themselves, your family grew up in
00:28:51.060
poverty, you feel like they were scammed out of everything, and who do you blame the most?
00:28:58.180
You know that the Unification Church played a large role in this, and then you can ask,
00:29:02.400
well, who has done the most to aid the Unification Church's agenda in the country?
00:29:09.480
He needs to blame the members of the church who give the church the money, who donate to
00:29:32.220
I really like that he has been seen as sort of the face of pronatalism because the memes
00:29:40.160
Like, they do a good job of conveying a positive sentiment in a way where, like, suppose we
00:29:48.400
We're known as, like, the pronatalist people who speak on the topic all the time, but we've
00:29:57.400
And I really appreciate that because I think they'd come off, like, the Elieizer memes around
00:30:03.700
Are there Elieizer memes around AI apocalypticism?
00:30:05.700
They just make the movement look, like, deranged and, like, a bunch of fat neckbeards, whereas
00:30:12.060
Abe comes across as very sincere and worried about his people.
00:30:19.000
They could have framed him very differently, but they chose to frame him that way.
00:30:30.620
People who don't know, she was born in Japan, and her middle name is Haruko, because she
00:30:39.280
Yeah, we don't want to go into why Haruko's my name.
00:30:45.040
Hey, there's a lot of great anime characters with the name Haruko.
00:30:51.420
The character from the show where, I'm pretty sure it's this one, where the main character
00:31:01.060
So, the main character is a female girl who is a god, and she doesn't know she's a god.
00:31:09.520
But she creates the world around her and the world that everyone is in.
00:31:20.180
She's living in a simulation that she's creating around herself of being a high school character.
00:31:25.500
What's interesting about the show is that her best friends, who are created as members
00:31:32.020
of the simulation, begin to realize this as the show goes on, and they begin to realize
00:31:39.300
how dangerous their situation is, like, if she gets on to some conspiracy, that conspiracy
00:31:48.180
Like, if she gets into anime girls, and anime girls start appearing.
00:31:51.500
If she thinks that there's, like, robots replacing people, robots start replacing people.
00:31:56.060
And so, like, one of her friends will turn out to be a robot or something like that.
00:32:00.120
And so, her friends have to constantly guard this girl who is otherwise very much, I almost
00:32:05.960
want to say, like, a manic pixie dream girl type character, like, change her hair color
00:32:09.740
every day, like, really wants to believe all these crazy things.
00:32:13.520
They have to constantly be trying to ground her, because if they don't, it fundamentally
00:32:24.520
Maybe this world is a new one that Haruhi created.
00:32:27.980
And if that's the case, how would I go about confirming it?
00:32:37.760
I feel like with anime and manga, they nail the premise, they nail the aesthetics, and
00:32:43.980
then execution is 25 to 30% of the time okay, 7% of the time god tier.
00:32:57.300
I'm actually going to maybe be controversial here, but I think with anime, what I've noticed
00:33:02.100
is almost always when the theme and ideas are interesting, the execution is mid.
00:33:11.680
When the theme and ideas are boring, the execution is really good.
00:33:24.860
Something like Darling with Franks, which I think is a really interesting concept in mid-execution.
00:33:31.020
Dears, which I've mentioned before, is a really interesting anime, mid-execution.
00:33:35.900
Like, yeah, usually when the ideas are good, the execution...
00:33:43.460
What about the one that you really like that's depressing, that everyone's very smart?
00:33:56.860
Code Geass might be one of the rare instances of...
00:34:02.920
I'd say Code Geass is interesting, very interesting ideas.
00:34:11.020
But I wouldn't say it's, like, in terms of, like, execution and flow of a show, one of the better shows I've seen.
00:34:18.640
Where I just, like, love all the characters or anything like that.
00:34:25.980
God-tier execution would be High School of the Dead.
00:34:36.300
Okay, well then, so you kind of get Japanese culture.
00:34:39.980
You've traveled a little bit there, and you've watched a lot of anime.
00:34:43.580
I've met with a lot of heads of companies there, and I've met...
00:34:45.840
Yeah, if you were working with the Japanese government on pronatalist policy, where would you take things?
00:34:54.180
Because I would say the solution that works best for the United States, say, or France, or Germany, very different from what I think would work in Japan.
00:35:04.560
I think what Japan needs to do is, if you look at, like, latent parts of Japanese culture, which make it unique when contrasted with other culture, pronatalist animes do well in Japan.
00:35:18.680
A lot of people act like Spy Wars has been, like, pushed by the Japanese government.
00:35:28.320
But I thought Grandpa and Grandma turned young again.
00:35:31.420
That's a good anime, but it's not, like, super famous.
00:35:33.620
Like, Spy Family is, like, One Piece-level famous now in Japan.
00:35:37.620
Like, on every billboard, it's like, I go to Walmart in the U.S., and it's a quarter of the manga.
00:35:44.520
It's, like, about the joys of being a family, basically.
00:35:48.080
And then it tries to spice it up a little, but that's the core idea of it, wholesome family.
00:35:52.540
I think that the market in Japan loves wholesome family.
00:35:55.940
The other thing that goes really popular in Japan is animes that are about how awesome the Japanese military is.
00:36:02.780
God, a great one I want to say is Something Portal.
00:36:05.560
I'll put a clip from it here, but I love it as well, where they open a portal to the, like, a fantasy world in the middle of Tokyo.
00:36:13.060
And then the Japanese military goes in and starts, like, cleaning up elves and dragons and stuff like that, you know.
00:36:19.760
And they get to, like, nerd out about all the weapons.
00:36:33.280
And I don't feel that Japan has ever lost its order-focused, imperialist-focused identity at its core among my, like, Japanese friends who are really patriotic.
00:36:45.320
I think that Japan needs to combine the wholesomeness that it has at the core of its culture with the militarism and imperialism that it had historically to build, I'd say, almost a militarized iteration of pronatalism.
00:37:06.800
Maybe something like units that are dedicated to cultural—basically build an infrastructure for cultural warriors to protect the culture, to meet with other people, to dress in little uniforms.
00:37:26.740
These are things that Japanese people love, okay?
00:37:30.280
To have their kids dress in, you know, uniforms, go to events, maybe create, like, scouts, but make it a bit more military, make it a bit more ordered, get the parents more involved, and more focused on the number of kids you can have, getting you specific badges, military awards for parents who have a certain number of kids.
00:37:49.180
I think that's the direction Japan needs to go if it's going to hyper-ignite the existing Japanese cultural core.
00:37:58.360
And people are going to be like, well, that's not going to work for everyone in Japan.
00:38:01.000
Yeah, but it'll work for the most Japanese people in Japan.
00:38:04.260
And I think it would do a good job of creating one of the unique cultural solutions that might make it through the Valley of the Lotus Eaters.
00:38:17.060
Yeah, I think going—I would say a part of it, culturally speaking, would be to make it feel like they're going back to tradition, but really they're switching out an improved version of tradition with the context of modern technology and greater gender equality, but make it seem very traditional.
00:38:45.540
I mean, I think to not focus on it being tradition, but to focus on it being pro-Japanese.
00:38:52.540
Yeah, well, but what I'm saying is I'm thinking about, for example, office culture in Japan.
00:38:56.240
I'm thinking about how marriage is treated in Japan.
00:38:58.680
And there is a much more—the issues they're dealing with are not as toxic as the inter-gender issues that we're seeing in South Korea, for example.
00:39:09.240
But there are—there is some mismatch, and there are different expectations between men and women that I don't think you can just say, okay, well, now we're going to completely ignore them and they don't exist anymore.
00:39:21.420
Instead, you have to lean into them but redirect in a way that makes it productive.
00:39:25.560
That's what I mean is you make it something like a man's, like in one of these units, duty to treat women with, I'd say, honor.
00:39:36.020
Not, i.e., I'm going to be like a simp for women like Western feminism, but like an extremified version of manners in terms of women in the workplace and bringing women into the workplace.
00:39:50.440
And I think that this—in the same way that Abe was like, oh, well, you know, it is actually conservative to want to promote women because, you know, it helps Japan, it helps our economy, it helps our nation, right?
00:40:00.860
To have these organizations not focused on old ways—and Japan has actually been very good at modernizing historically while maintaining its unique identity.
00:40:12.700
Like, is anything more modernized but culturally unique?
00:40:16.880
And so one of the things that I think that they need to fight against is the stoji, we have to keep things the way they were people, i.e., whether it's gender roles or things like in Japan.
00:40:28.560
Now they still do, like, whale meat in school because people are like, oh, it's our culture, it's our culture, you can't take it out, which is just horrible.
00:40:37.860
And so I think that fighting against inefficiencies for the goal of preserving into or until we become an intergalactic civilization Japanese culture to ensure that they are one of the cultures that are part of this alliance.
00:40:54.280
And I also think turning Japanese culture, if you want to make this easier to fight for, into a unique cultural avatar within the ecosystem we're going into, but a cultural avatar that is pluralistic.
00:41:06.380
I think that that, when I say pluralistic, what I mean is they are fighting to preserve and advance Japan, i.e., for Japanese people in the Japanese island and no one else was in that environment, but alongside people like the Americans, alongside people like the Koreans.
00:41:21.640
When they can build into their honor system protecting global pluralism as one of their duties, which is something that America did a fairly good job of historically, it's not like it doesn't work.
00:41:35.140
I think that that can do a very good job in terms of this redirection.
00:41:41.180
I do have this hopeful feeling that Japan can pull through, but I don't know how delusional that is.
00:41:49.540
I think of the East Asian countries, it's by far the most likely to pull through because they have the best fertility race right now.
00:41:57.440
Like, it basically went into the collapse that China hasn't even gone into yet, you know, a few decades ago.
00:42:02.620
And it got to deal with that before things got as bad as they are right now.
00:42:08.000
So that's one reason why Japan's in a really strong position.
00:42:10.460
The other reason is that they've been a very, very successful cultural exporter, which is, in the grand scheme of things, going to earn them a lot of friends that want them to pull through.
00:42:22.540
And friends in high places, specifically, their cultural exports.
00:42:27.140
So this is what makes Japan as a cultural exporter very different from Korea as a cultural exporter.
00:42:31.680
So Korea has been as successful as Japan as a cultural exporter.
00:42:34.900
Korea has disproportionately hit, well, basically dumb commie high school girls in the U.S.
00:42:41.280
And it's disproportionately hit countries where American media is partially banned, like Pakistan, like a lot of countries in Africa, like a lot of the Middle East.
00:42:53.420
Korea does really well in Islamic countries that partially ban U.S. media.
00:42:57.640
So they've done really well in these environments, but none of these people really matter.
00:43:03.220
Japan, on the other hand, if you, for example, were to take a polling of the people who work to develop things like OpenAI's model and Anthropik's model and ask how many of them are big anime fans, I bet the number is 90, maybe even like 95%.
00:43:21.760
Oh, no, no, no, there's, there's a lot of bro-ish people in Silicon Valley now, but it's high, it's higher.
00:43:31.220
Sorry, you have friends who work at these companies, right?
00:43:33.720
Like you remember from the events, like these are not Silicon Valley bro people.
00:43:49.140
We've actually looked at holding a conference in Japan tied to prenatalism that's going to focus on like the U.S., Japanese, and maybe the rest of the Quad Alliance in, in, in the ways that they are fighting fertility collapse.
00:44:01.800
Mostly just to dunk on China, because I think it can create a lot of good press and China will get very angry when we talk about, okay, what are we going to do with China when they're no longer here?
00:44:10.500
You know, maybe have a picture on the screen was like a divided map of a depopulated China, like the Paris Accord.
00:44:33.980
Because I think that would get a lot of Americans excited.
00:44:36.000
When you could turn this into one, a national defense issue and a patriotic issue, I think that's when a lot of people are like, hell yeah, hell yeah.
00:44:45.620
Well, you know, I honestly could see pronatalism becoming the new space race.
00:44:50.880
Once demographic collapse really starts to hit in, it's kind of the, the national signal of vitality.
00:45:01.820
There's something there because I know how much the space race and especially this whole Russia, U.S. thing really captured the public imagination.
00:45:12.520
And I feel like this is one of those things that would be even more powerful because every individual family could be involved.
00:45:18.240
It's a whole, I doing, I'm doing my part thing.
00:45:36.060
So I can get from the freezer and quickly thaw out one smaller packet of...
00:45:44.300
No, I feel like the kids are in the mood for pizza.
00:46:07.200
Looks like, oh, you have a bunch of your curtains down, don't you?
00:46:44.140
Titan, when I make her shower warm, not hot, mind you, warm, she says, too hot, and then
00:46:52.660
she insists that I give her, like, what I would consider a cold shower.
00:46:57.260
Yeah, all of our kids, and I love the news, it's like, they deprive them of even the warmth
00:47:02.780
I'm like, no, and this is why, I'm about to go on a sci-fi podcast, so to talk about sci-fi,
00:47:07.780
Frostpunk is the genre, is the post-collapse world I most want to wake up in.
00:47:15.840
As long as you're well-dressed, as one of our friends would say to us, there's no such
00:47:22.260
thing as being cold, there's just being poorly dressed, so just bundle up, I guess.
00:47:30.080
Speaking of being dressed, everyone makes one of our glasses, Malcolm.
00:47:34.760
Cutler and Gross, who makes these glasses, they had two actors in the Kingsman, Secret
00:47:44.680
Yeah, Colin Firth's character, and then also Samuel L. Jackson's character were wearing
00:47:49.280
Cutler and Gross glasses, because they're awesome.
00:47:54.040
So we are going to start with, go down to the first of the...
00:48:01.880
Sorry, look, I just saw, like, the latest meme that you said.