Blood Satellite - The 5 AM Man Behind the Curtain [“which means ilu in the charismatic pastor who thinks you get anything”]

00:00:00.000 as far back as i can remember i always wanted to be a

00:00:07.840 blood satellite yeah i'm gonna start by saying this can i just say this okay i'm in no kind of

00:00:23.320 mood so we took last week off because um my baby son uh dimes child arrived literally as i was

00:00:41.060 finishing editing the episode as it was going up i think i posted the episode after i snuck away

00:00:47.160 from the hospital because it was already done right yeah i just needed to like post it the

00:00:52.500 The Dime Shop was done or the episode was done?

00:00:55.360 Both.

00:00:56.780 Right at the same time.

00:00:58.680 And I had what we call a Sophie's Choice.

00:01:01.900 Do I want to attend this or do I want to provide the content?

00:01:05.380 Do I want to give the nectar, the gravy?

00:01:08.940 It was kind of a funny story.

00:01:10.580 So he arrived a week early.

00:01:13.460 To start off, if I sound crabby, low energy, bitter, homicidal,

00:01:18.980 and if i start crying um that's why it's because you know i'm averaging an hour and a half of sleep

00:01:26.660 per week at this point and uh it's not that bad but it's it's not great it's the first week

00:01:34.780 it wasn't great it takes a lot it takes a lot of getting used to yeah for sure yeah like i ask you

00:01:41.440 am i having fun yet i don't know are you you're gonna have to tell you you'll you'll you'll you'll

00:01:47.900 clearly have the answer to that in about six months and then you'll you'll look back on it

00:01:52.640 and laugh yeah i just marathoned last week how did i feel about it it's been

00:01:56.780 um yeah so that was let's say there's a learning curve and you all get to be a part of it

00:02:05.980 all are fine listeners you know a lot of people will look at this they will become a parent

00:02:12.060 a mother or father and they'll feel as if they transition to a new phase of their life that i

00:02:17.700 I must leave these childish things I talked about behind or I must treat this new this new construct that I'm in with more dignity.

00:02:27.340 I mean, none of that around here.

00:02:28.460 You're going to get the gory details.

00:02:33.120 I'm going to stop short of giving you a guided tour of my wife's vagina.

00:02:38.400 But everything up into that point, I think people can use.

00:02:42.280 We're all about utility.

00:02:44.180 Yeah.

00:02:44.720 Yeah.

00:02:44.980 And there's not a lot of people who will give you the skinny on what it's

00:02:48.820 like.

00:02:50.040 You know,

00:02:50.640 first of all,

00:02:51.360 you know,

00:02:52.020 during the delivery,

00:02:52.980 there's not much to say.

00:02:54.220 I was not staring down the barrel as it were.

00:02:59.620 Some guys do.

00:03:00.980 You know,

00:03:01.260 they didn't let you put the GoPro in there.

00:03:04.060 They didn't get the catcher's mitt.

00:03:07.440 I brought my big league chew just in case,

00:03:09.900 but you know,

00:03:10.740 I left that in my back pocket because once you're in it,

00:03:13.320 you don't want to get to chewing you bring your catcher's mitt and the nurse is like oh that's so

00:03:20.480 that's so nice is that for your son what the fuck are you talking about this is for me

00:03:24.160 it's for a grown man you think this could fit a fucking child is that for your son well not in

00:03:28.140 the sense that you mean but um so it's actually kind of amusing um and it's a i'll start at the

00:03:37.080 beginning um i found this kind of amusing and this might dovetail into something we're gonna

00:03:41.640 talk about later as well but my wife is kind of in the area of giving birth we know it's going to

00:03:47.780 be coming we don't know when she's been having these things called braxton hicks contractions

00:03:52.660 braxton hicks contraction for the gentlemen out there who don't know it's like you're you got a

00:03:57.280 woman who went and fucked around and got herself pregnant let's say and she's going to start having

00:04:03.500 what feel like contractions but it's her body playing a prank on her um all through the

00:04:08.940 pregnancy your body will be goofing on you uh one of them it's going to be teasing you thinking

00:04:13.920 that you're about to give birth and then it'll yoink it right back and say nah you just showed

00:04:18.900 your ass um so she was but we were getting though that means it's close that means the real birth

00:04:25.220 is about to happen so she was starting to feel real contractions and you go to the doctor you

00:04:32.260 go to the nurse and they say you know don't come in unless you're having your contractions at a

00:04:38.340 certain regularity and at a certain severity so you could be having contractions but they're very

00:04:43.180 spaced out you might get one an hour so they say hey go about your day you know go to the fucking

00:04:50.000 bingo hall um and then unless they're like a minute apart and five a minute long and five

00:04:57.040 minutes apart that's what they're supposed to be so early in the day she's feeling them and

00:05:02.280 And, you know, she's like, I think it's going to come today, maybe tomorrow.

00:05:06.400 And I'm like, okay, well, here's the thing.

00:05:09.160 We have tickets for John Wick 4.

00:05:13.200 So, and I'm like, well, what do you want to do?

00:05:17.160 And maybe I'm massaging the situation a bit too much by saying, like, look, whatever you want to do.

00:05:23.040 Yes, we paid for these tickets.

00:05:24.480 Yes, we're not going to be able to see it right after.

00:05:26.360 Yes, this is the end of the series.

00:05:28.620 And we'll probably never get to see it on the big screen again.

00:05:31.440 but it's up to you like it's you come first all those things are true by the way like you didn't

00:05:38.520 make any of that up those are all facts these are all facts i'll undo i'm a man of science

00:05:44.280 and i'm saying like you know sweetheart i love you if you want to if you want to piss money down

00:05:48.920 the toilet and flush it like uh like a spaniard uh we can do that if you want to be spanish oh i

00:05:56.440 everyone i married a spanish woman that's up to you if you want to be a toilet flushing spanish

00:06:03.840 bitch so she made the right decision and we went to go see john wick for while she was having

00:06:11.160 contractions while she is very visibly pregnant at the level of pregnancy where for a while you

00:06:21.360 could hide it but now it's like the shirts coming up it goes boing and we're going to the middle of

00:06:27.040 the day in the afternoon because that was before she was giving birth i just want to be an afternoon

00:06:31.480 movie guy yeah so we go there and there's only a couple people in the theater and i'm on the way

00:06:36.440 i'm like these are the ones with the seats that go back they're recliners so this is good and she

00:06:42.200 wants to see it too so she's into it and i got a big thing of popcorn and i tried fanta lime i

00:06:49.520 didn't know they had that what a day and maybe we'll get to review john wick for later but uh

00:06:56.280 as we're doing there she's going

00:06:57.540 and she's it sounds like she's about to give birth it's like oh she must really love this movie

00:07:05.760 wow yeah she she's in it and and you know i'm sitting beside her i'm like i know this it didn't

00:07:10.660 start off great but it got there and i'm like nodding at her but so over the years this story

00:07:17.780 is going to morph into your son being born in the matinee my my son john wick was born in

00:07:25.180 but um yeah so we and then we get home great time and we get this app and because we're over

00:07:35.340 prepared you know that's a danger of being over prepared for this stuff you start filling your

00:07:39.680 head with all kinds of new technology for how to judge this so we got an app that gauges your

00:07:45.480 contractions and you like press a button when it starts and averages them out over the hour

00:07:50.180 and so i'm looking at that and it's like 11 p.m and i'm looking at this and she's like no no we

00:07:57.780 can't go in now they'll turn us away if a contraction and it's like an annoying thing

00:08:01.600 you don't want to be driving over speed bumps and shit so we get there and i decided to go in

00:08:06.360 because i'm like i don't trust this ad it seems like they're happening pretty fast let's just go

00:08:11.140 there you know and you know i'm she's feeling like she's about to get burned so i'm racing there

00:08:18.220 it's night no one's around um playing fallout boy uh hitting every conceivable speed bump on the way

00:08:26.880 there um i don't know why i picked the speed bumpiest road but it made sense at the time

00:08:33.220 so with every speed bump she this baby is a cannonball about to shoot out of her so long

00:08:39.500 story short we get there and um they say that you're supposed i'm not going to get too graphic

00:08:45.460 people but we're going to use a lot of terminology here here's a little uh freak show fast forward

00:08:51.220 for you people out there um your relationship with the female body will change forever after

00:08:57.700 this happens uh not for the worse but it's just a change uh i'd liken it to if you love movies

00:09:07.000 and you get into screenwriting you'll never look at movies the same way again because you'll see

00:09:12.380 the script on screen and you'll start thinking about how you might have improved that it's not

00:09:17.580 that doesn't make it so you can't enjoy the movie arguably you can enjoy the movie even more

00:09:22.540 so when you have a woman who gave birth she becomes a different type of woman i would say

00:09:28.260 better i think she's got a glow about her there's a dignity and a maturity to her now

00:09:32.520 but you end up if you're doing it right and you do a natural birth there's certain new words you

00:09:40.940 have to learn and if you're a man you might have had a different relationship with the female body

00:09:47.780 south of the border for me the only there's a couple of holes right i'll say there's three

00:09:54.180 holes if i'm trying to impress them it's like oh look at me i'm an encyclopedia i know that the

00:09:59.400 the piss and everything else comes out different holes but now once a baby's involved you got to

00:10:05.300 learn female anatomy you got to learn how a baby changes their body um if you're doing lactation

00:10:11.100 if you breastfeeding traditional breastfeeding you got to know the function of the boobs whereas

00:10:17.460 before they were just a bunch of fun pillows it was just a it was just a wink and a nudge from god

00:10:25.260 that's what they were there for yep it was god doing you a solid saying you know what hey you're

00:10:32.200 gonna love this you're gonna love this one crazy trick and now you realize oh they do a bunch of

00:10:37.520 shit and there's work involved anyway i'm not gonna get too graphic though but um when you're

00:10:44.280 admitted to the hospital they would like your uh to be three centimeters dilated the top is 10

00:10:52.360 centimeters dilated 10 centimeters dilated means you're about to give birth when we got in there

00:10:56.820 she was eight centimeters dilated so she what we essentially went through the entire labor

00:11:03.300 in our bedroom without even knowing it um because she's just that much of a soldier

00:11:08.920 she's a trooper you know what i mean and because because and also if you've never been through it

00:11:14.060 before you don't know what your pain threshold is so some people are like how bad are the

00:11:19.080 contractions you're like okay well hmm i've seen movies and tv shows where women are wailing their

00:11:25.380 heads off and crying and screaming and cursing me cursing god uh but and it's sort of like okay

00:11:32.760 it's not that so maybe this is mild so if you have that as your frame a very very serious pain

00:11:39.360 could you can you can tamp that down if you want to which is we ended up doing anyway i i i need to

00:11:45.880 maintain a certain relationship with my wife south of the border another thing i don't do

00:11:51.880 i don't go to the bathroom in front of her i don't know but let me ask you that do you do

00:11:56.840 you do bathroom stuff with your wife because some couples do that they'll go to the bathroom at the

00:12:01.260 same time or one will be on the toilet we'll be brushing your teeth what do you do do you

00:12:05.240 yeah we we don't do it we don't go out of the way to do it but we do it oh no but i mean part of it

00:12:11.300 is that we we lived in hong kong when we lived in like a you know 180 foot flat for years well

00:12:17.640 also like i the other thing is i know you too so that was a dumb question i'm like i know you're

00:12:21.600 probably taking the shit in the kitchen sink and she's uh lighting a cigarette on the electric

00:12:25.980 stove i mean we lived under a bridge so i mean we do whatever yeah i know you you live some kind

00:12:32.920 of carnival life over there yeah but um but i i'm very secretive i want nothing to do with what

00:12:40.740 she's doing in the bathroom i have a non-shitting wife i feel sorry for guys out there who got

00:12:48.000 wives who shit couldn't be me not one of those not today satan

00:12:54.500 so yeah a baby is born born a bit early um because it was born a bit early came out on

00:13:03.700 the small side and they kept saying he's small he's not that small he actually gained a lot of

00:13:09.360 way back um since then but that literally stuck in my craw i kept saying he's small and i kept

00:13:16.600 saying look he can be small as long as he's not short and then they they took him they had the

00:13:22.380 baby they took him away took him into this special part of the hospital because they had to say keep

00:13:28.540 an eye on him for a while and so i got to go visit him first because your wife is recovering she just

00:13:33.720 for people who need it put in simpler terms a woman who goes through birth is

00:13:39.900 more or less like getting into a car accident so my wife just got hit by a car so you know

00:13:47.160 and good and she's again a real soldier about it but i go to see him and to keep him in a special

00:13:52.080 place for babies and i'm walking i'm shown there by one of the doctors i look at the door and

00:13:58.600 there's a whole banner above it and it says this is where this is where the children are superheroes

00:14:05.980 fighting their ultimate battle and i said oh no i hate the health department oh no this is a sick

00:14:13.360 kids thing this is like aren't they he is so brave don't call my child brave don't call him strong

00:14:21.020 he's i know he's not i know if i look at him wrong he's gonna blow into a smithereens

00:14:26.900 just by his nature but now he's he's you're so brave for this oh no no no no no was this the

00:14:33.940 the n the n icu yeah yeah i think you did you have um we had the same thing but i mean it's not

00:14:40.640 it's not uncommon like especially if your kid's a little bit early it's pretty standard procedure

00:14:44.900 yeah and also he wasn't crazy early it's like a week early but even a week early his problems and

00:14:50.460 also um from what i know for the guys out there i'm hoping people are getting something from this

00:14:56.120 for guys who might be going through this um you kind of wanted a more early than late because if

00:15:03.300 the baby's late they got to do all kinds of fucked up shit to get that baby out of there they got to

00:15:06.880 induce labor and stuff and my wife she no epidural by the way she went straight no no guff um a little

00:15:17.520 i gotta share this with you i got a little bit of drama so where this is in canada um i don't know

00:15:25.860 if you're allowed to get a private room

00:15:27.680 in most hospitals. So you have a semi

00:15:29.780 private room. So it's a room

00:15:31.560 so you have a special place in the hospital where

00:15:33.740 people who just gave birth

00:15:35.000 and then there's the woman on the bed

00:15:37.600 and I get to sleep in a chair

00:15:39.840 designed for pain.

00:15:42.940 I get

00:15:43.840 to sleep in something pulled

00:15:45.620 from Le Marchand's box.

00:15:47.580 I get to... They might

00:15:49.740 as well have stuck me on a

00:15:51.440 horizontal Iron Maiden. Whatever.

00:15:53.420 I don't know why they have...

00:15:55.420 I know the exact chairs you're talking about,

00:15:57.500 and it's like they came out of, like, a bank lobby or something.

00:16:02.200 Like, I don't know who was responsible for purchasing these fucking chairs.

00:16:06.520 I would rather get a vase of praying mantises that just said,

00:16:10.180 go fuck yourself.

00:16:12.820 But anyway, I'm not complaining.

00:16:15.160 I'm dad, you know?

00:16:17.860 And I'm in the belly of the beast because I don't really like hospitals.

00:16:21.140 But anyway, so we're there,

00:16:22.400 And then there's just like a little curtain divider between hypothetically you and another person who just gave birth.

00:16:28.840 So how the fuck is this supposed to work?

00:16:30.900 Because you got two traumatized, terrified people and screaming babies.

00:16:34.920 I'm like, what?

00:16:35.920 This is just a place where people lose their minds.

00:16:39.040 But when we got there, there was no other person on the other side of the room.

00:16:42.860 And they weren't there for like the entire first, first like 12 hours or something.

00:16:47.560 I thought that was weird because there's a lot of bottles of Pepsi on that side of the room.

00:16:51.160 so i'm like no no self-respecting white people leave their pepsi behind oh my god am i here

00:16:58.480 with indians uh-oh the panic crossed my mind no but it's uh they came in and so i'm going to tell

00:17:04.960 you what i saw when they came in and i'm here characteristically dressed like an eastern

00:17:09.500 european gangster i don't do that on purpose it's just i followed my bliss and this is how i ended

00:17:14.840 up looking um so they come in and i'm it's a a real big bitch so a woman who looks like six and

00:17:24.940 a half feet tall but also what's what's i'm bad at guessing weights i want to say 400 pounds

00:17:32.420 she just gave birth she's in her mid to late 40s the husband couldn't have been older than 21

00:17:39.500 so what and she's got like a 17 year old kid at home and what i'm picking this up as i'm there

00:17:48.960 through their little whispers and murmurs and the phone calls and i'm learning that on one phone

00:17:55.120 call apparently the mother of the man the father wants nothing to do with them hates the woman

00:18:03.900 wants nothing to do with the baby denounces them both i hear on speakerphone with her son their

00:18:10.100 17 year old son she's like are you excited to meet the baby and he's just not really

00:18:15.420 i'm cold as ice what cold as ice and then he's trying to console her i'm one this is this is

00:18:24.140 true white trash shit this is straight out of hamilton finish her and like what this is i'm

00:18:32.600 thinking is this a teacher student situation he looks like a blue collar guy he looks like

00:18:37.740 he looks like an oshawa guy you know back where we're from kind of trashy but he's good natured

00:18:42.440 i like the look of him he's a kind of aw shuck steel town guy she looks like an absolute chemical

00:18:48.620 spill but you know what you know you're gonna have that when you're when you live in a society right

00:18:54.700 but well i don't know if you should necessarily have like a 21 year old impregnating a 47

00:19:02.360 seven-year-old trash fire that's kind of weird but i guess it happens well i mean he's out here

00:19:08.860 slaying in miracle whip like he she shouldn't be getting pregnant yeah i don't know what i don't

00:19:14.040 know what he's packing that's that's wild he's got he's got some he's got god on his side is what

00:19:18.880 he's got he's got god on his side he's got the lord jesus christ holding her ankles up during

00:19:25.720 whatever business they were getting into that's debatable somebody's holding the ankles up

00:19:30.400 geez it's some kind of nephilim some kind of what the feeling you get or the emotion you get i've

00:19:40.440 never felt this before but i only think you get this once you're a parent it's this feeling of

00:19:46.440 i think i'm more frustrated than i've ever been in my life but i'm not angry you know what i mean

00:19:53.260 like i'm looking at a child who's doing everything in his power to upset my day and i'm not mad at

00:20:00.200 like i don't want to if this were this for anyone else do you know like the last guy who screamed

00:20:08.040 in my face shit his pants and pissed on my shirt we got a fucking one-way ticket to timbuktu let's

00:20:14.020 just say that oh yeah oh yeah yeah free a free platter of knuckle sandwiches yeah the same

00:20:20.940 happens this little guy is pulling the same shit you know what i'm a-okay yeah and i'll tell you

00:20:26.680 did you get this and people feel free to skip ahead if you don't like talking about uh soiled

00:20:32.520 diapers but this is just a little bit of soiled diaper corner i was scared about like changing

00:20:38.920 diapers i don't really give a i stopped i didn't give a shit immediately and everyone would say

00:20:44.660 you don't care about it when it's your kid but that is a strange thing to feel it is it is and

00:20:50.180 i've i've forgotten about it now because i've been doing it for so long but i remember a lot

00:20:53.880 of the stuff even like like like you were joking about um learning to shoot their arms and legs

00:20:59.580 into the into the uh the jammies at like the onesie yeah like mock five like yeah you learn

00:21:05.920 this stuff really quick you're really afraid of it at first before you've done it and then you

00:21:10.120 watch your wife or you watch the nurse do it the first time and it's like oh oh it's that okay and

00:21:14.940 then it's not not that bad also it takes you around two days of handling a child boy or girl

00:21:22.080 before you're doing tricks with them like at first you're thinking this fragile little orchid

00:21:28.640 my god if i just blink at him he's gonna fall apart then you realize he's made of tires he's

00:21:35.380 made of high impact rubber i'm shooting his fucking feet and his arms through the thing

00:21:40.700 i'm flipping him around i'm doing cartwheels i'm saying look at you i'm getting used to going

00:21:45.060 through time and space i'm holding them upside down telling them how to get forklift certified

00:21:49.860 you know i'm i'm yelling in his face about vril i'm being a utter psycho he's loving it

00:21:55.840 my wife is in a day she doesn't know what i'm getting up to over here

00:21:59.980 she doesn't know and i'm just you're having fun and you get this feeling that they're just like

00:22:05.480 invincible and they kind of are um except their heads which get dented so be careful about that

00:22:11.560 that didn't happen to me but apparently that is a thing that happens yeah they're fragile in

00:22:16.080 specific ways but in different ways from adults so yeah and i will say you you have two daughters

00:22:22.180 i will say the um the rumor that boys are a handful seems to be ringing true to me so and i don't know

00:22:31.660 if it's all boys or just mine but despite him being born slightly early he's shockingly strong

00:22:38.640 and i'm not saying that as any sort of flex that is probably the biggest you know the biggest

00:22:45.740 spear in my spine right now the fact that he can he can he can roll over which is like a big

00:22:51.240 developmental thing but he can also you know if he is breastfeeding he is throwing haymakers into

00:22:57.180 my wife's chest for no reason well everybody that i talked to like anecdotally that especially i

00:23:04.140 have a buddy who has um has a daughter and a son close in age and he was saying the same thing but

00:23:09.260 everybody kind of says yeah boys are generally stronger than the girls but the other thing is

00:23:12.640 i think first-time parents underestimate how strong babies are like well before they can walk

00:23:18.380 before they can even actually see they've got the grip and arm strength because they don't weigh very

00:23:23.520 much right they've got the grip and arm strength to like grab a stable object and like yank

00:23:29.120 themselves over or onto it when you're not looking he almost threw himself out of my arms

00:23:33.980 yeah oh yeah they don't look like they can and they're especially at that like the first few

00:23:38.480 weeks like they're just they're just waving their arms wildly they don't even know what they're

00:23:42.320 doing um and they can they'll you know grab your shirt and like you gotta watch what you're doing

00:23:48.020 essentially because you don't yeah he's got the intimidating strength of a mobster when he grabs

00:23:53.240 your collar you feel it you get oh sir i'm calling my son sir there is a new king um but yeah that's

00:24:02.440 I won't go into too much of it because I'm very wary of becoming one of these guys that,

00:24:08.920 and you've never done this.

00:24:09.920 So you're kind of, you're the model for a lot of things in my life.

00:24:12.580 Cause you, you got, you did a lot of things first and a lot of very, very impressive things

00:24:15.960 with your life, but like you never, I know your belief is that, you know, being a father

00:24:21.300 is important and being a family man is important and all that stuff.

00:24:24.740 But you also aren't one of these guys who, I know this is weird because you're not on

00:24:30.280 twitter but if you were the guy who puts like father husband in his twitter account or i've

00:24:36.220 known guys in our political milieu who will have a husband and that becomes they or have a husband

00:24:42.820 these guys really gave it away there these guys give birth to their own husband um

00:24:50.940 well essentially that's kind of what i'm getting at here like they'll have a kid

00:24:57.160 and they become like really who i'm thinking of right now is this guy named logo daedalus

00:25:02.840 uh for people who don't know who he is i don't get into it but he was you know he was just like

00:25:07.580 really big theory political guy but now he's he has a kid he's like i give up on everything the

00:25:12.580 most important thing in the world is children i would burn the mona lisa to keep one child warm

00:25:17.920 like okay like there's bad kids there's kids with like fucked up sideways faces and you're

00:25:25.580 to burn the mona lisa for a fucking a bum hatchling take it easy so but i'm very cautious

00:25:33.040 of not leading with being a father especially you know because i don't want people to become

00:25:38.640 annoyed by me i think you should be a father i think that helps you know uh i think there's

00:25:44.740 also people who shouldn't be fathers because there's knowing us there's like 45 percent of

00:25:50.840 people should be dead tomorrow with another 30 you know i mean so yeah like father fatherhood

00:25:58.200 is kind of in the same vein as like leadership i think like it's a it's a valuable thing it's

00:26:02.500 a positive thing everybody should aspire to do it not everybody's cut out for it and some people

00:26:07.740 suck at it and should stop so or not stop with fatherhood you shouldn't stop i mean once you

00:26:12.560 start you you're on the road but like yeah well it's kind of funny like the people who probably

00:26:17.220 should become fathers do now i i was going to say something but it doesn't even sound like it

00:26:22.940 makes sense as i'm saying i was going to say like the people who should become fathers do become

00:26:27.380 fathers but like that is people who shouldn't become no i but you know what i i think that's

00:26:31.420 largely true in my there's something there there seems to be some kind of a social filter where

00:26:36.340 there is a relationship there's a there's a there's an overlap between the behaviors that

00:26:42.540 are exhibited by somebody who would be a poor father and they hate behaviors that are exhibited

00:26:47.120 by somebody who never gets laid you know like a big big filter is do women find you tolerable

00:26:54.560 because i mean if if if women find you in intolerable you probably are not going to be

00:27:02.300 the sort of person who can handle sleeping one hour a week for many weeks when you have an infant

00:27:09.360 so i might be exhibiting some behaviors as a father that i need to run by you and we can

00:27:16.720 rank it on the spectrum from virgin to chad right so all right one zero being virgin 10 being chad

00:27:26.280 um calling your son buckaroo that's uh an eight yep okay good yeah um i guess that's about it

00:27:39.360 That was the only important question.

00:27:42.020 I mean, I had to answer that one for myself as a pioneer.

00:27:45.720 And I also gave myself an aid.

00:27:47.460 You want to call him Buddy?

00:27:48.920 That's a good one.

00:27:49.940 Buddy might stay with you.

00:27:51.580 Buckaroo?

00:27:52.740 Am I planting the seeds of cowboyisms in his mind?

00:27:56.360 Is that a bell I want to ring this early?

00:28:00.520 So I've been fretting over this for a day, you know?

00:28:03.340 I mean, I have daughters, but I'm always going,

00:28:05.240 Buddy, what are you doing?

00:28:07.860 Guy.

00:28:09.360 bro

00:28:10.860 I'm wondering if I should

00:28:13.220 circle back to John Wick 4

00:28:15.980 you think I should?

00:28:19.640 we get the Coles notes

00:28:20.980 I'm gonna okay I'm gonna try and keep this short

00:28:23.480 um because

00:28:25.360 you know there's not a whole lot to say about John Wick 4

00:28:27.280 shut up! shut up! shut up! shut up! shut up! shut up! shut up!

00:28:36.440 uh last in the series

00:28:38.100 the longest one it's like three hours long um one thing i know is uh there's a different writer for

00:28:46.240 this one from what i know so john these these were never academy award winning movies these

00:28:51.980 never genius movies or artsy movies you know what you're getting with them to their big dumb action

00:28:57.080 movies but that's why you like them what i found and even with like the third one even though they

00:29:02.920 were dumping more and more strange lore and exposition scenes into it you still got the

00:29:08.600 sense that there was a momentum of the movies and this was the first movie where i felt it lost its

00:29:13.860 momentum and it was very confused um and for the first half hour of the movie it's an absolute

00:29:20.760 fucking mess and i watched the other movies leading into this one so i was very familiar with

00:29:26.640 the flow up into this point and kind of where the trajectory of where the plot was going because the

00:29:31.940 plot was like him going to assassinate i guess the high table like the whole idea of the story

00:29:37.240 was it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and he penetrates deeper and deeper and deeper into this

00:29:41.840 like secretist society of assassins and he makes more and more of a name for himself and he kind

00:29:47.060 of it shines more light on how it works and leading into this movie it was good um and it

00:29:54.180 has this guy named donnie yen um it's very clear that there's like a ton of uh chinese and asian

00:29:59.260 people in this one which again i don't mind that was a feature not a bug for the franchise

00:30:02.700 and this guy donnie yen i really liked him he was this he's another assassin who is familiar

00:30:10.340 with john wick who is tasked with killing john wick but he's also blind um and so you're thinking

00:30:15.980 like oh this is like a quentin tarantino thing a blind assassin oh here we go and it's going to

00:30:20.960 turn out that he's amazing at it like daredevil or something but he's not the way they do it is

00:30:27.320 so fucking cool where it's

00:30:29.340 very obvious that he is blind he's

00:30:31.400 good at what he does but like as

00:30:33.500 he's moving through a room he's got his cane

00:30:35.260 and he's kind of flicking it to like figure out

00:30:37.440 where things are and he

00:30:39.360 does this scene where people

00:30:41.460 are after him so he goes in there and he

00:30:43.380 plants these like doorbell ringers

00:30:45.240 all around the fucking room like

00:30:47.260 slaps them down and hides and as people

00:30:49.240 they go in they trigger the doorbell

00:30:51.320 ringer and then he aims to that

00:30:53.280 part of the room and shoots them

00:30:54.400 i'm like okay that's that's cool like you gave you wrote yourself a challenge and you worked

00:31:00.660 within that challenge and so it didn't feel cheap where they just said he was blind but he functions

00:31:05.380 like a fucking superhero uh but the entire thrust of the movie is that like john wick you don't

00:31:13.380 really know why he's doing what he's doing in the movie like in the first few minutes he kills

00:31:18.720 like that like he's like this like leader figure in the in the third one who like lives in the

00:31:25.460 desert so he just goes and shoots him then you actually don't know why he's doing anything in

00:31:30.020 this one and i have a suspicion my i have a theory for why this movie was kind of confused

00:31:35.240 i think what they were trying to do was make the movie so that he goes and he assassinates the big

00:31:43.140 bosses the high table the the people you've never seen in the movie before but this will be the one

00:31:48.340 he he takes his war straight to the top to get out once and for all but they started uh the

00:31:54.680 creators got into creating these uh spinoff shows so they're doing a show called the continental

00:32:00.760 which is just about other characters within this world i think i think they decided to step it back

00:32:06.980 and say okay if we kill these people we can't have our spinoff shows anymore so i think they

00:32:12.080 rewrote it to really kneecap the movie and make it unsure of what the point of it was because

00:32:19.880 the entire point of the movie is like he has to take on this like this villain this guy the high

00:32:26.780 table brought in to assassinate him who is this the martini gramo challenge him to single combat

00:32:35.160 we're to lose it's a way out i don't sit at the table your family does you win

00:32:44.200 the table will honor its worth you will have your freedom

00:32:50.300 and apparently you've never heard of him before but he's just like the ultimate

00:32:57.220 badass i guess you don't really know anything about him they'd spend no time setting up the

00:33:02.540 villain but the whole the through line of the movie is john wick needs to challenge him to a

00:33:10.320 duel and that's kind of the lead up the movie but then you're like okay this doesn't feel

00:33:14.780 like it has the same momentum of the last movies this feels like a plateau

00:33:18.420 like a side quest almost but this is what they're going to end the movie on

00:33:22.680 but that's my theory of why that happened and why the movie's confused and for the first

00:33:28.820 that's weird for the first 40 minutes john wick isn't even into that much it's setting up this

00:33:34.100 other side thing with a bunch of like chinese people which again i don't hate because it's a

00:33:40.200 well shot movie it's the best looking of the movies um here's another thing i didn't like

00:33:45.880 about it and for people who've seen the john wick movies before you'll know what i'm talking about

00:33:50.580 was this is the first one where it seemed like john wick had plot armor where oh no have you

00:33:57.480 seen these movies by the way i've seen the the first one like up to this point i haven't seen

00:34:01.820 this one there's something that they do in the second one i believe um and it's it's treated

00:34:08.120 as just sort of a throwaway thing but they really rely on it in the the subsequent ones which is

00:34:12.840 he gets a bulletproof suit and by bulletproof i mean like it can stop people like it can stop a

00:34:20.680 bullet being fired like three feet away and it might not knock him back but not in any significant

00:34:26.760 it away and what happens is there's like scenes where he would like take the suit jacket and use

00:34:32.000 it to cover his face and run and gun like that so he's using this little thin fabric like a shield

00:34:37.020 and at first then the second movie i believe that scene has a cool that's kind of a cool thing like

00:34:42.840 and that's like a video game thing and the the thing about the john wick franchise is they're

00:34:47.620 like video games if you play video games you'll recognize like there's a certain feel like he's

00:34:52.200 leveling up he's before the level he gets his kit and he gets the new armor and it's supposed to be

00:34:57.760 so fantastic but who really gives a shit right yeah but in these movies almost everyone has a

00:35:03.220 bulletproof suit and it's just an excuse for them to like unload like 20 magazines into each other

00:35:09.080 and not die and i'm like at a certain point like okay there's no stakes here now because how do

00:35:15.020 you kill john wick at this point like you need to like stab him in the neck but he's taking like

00:35:20.040 shotgun blasts to the back and he's flying down he's just shaking it off and like somersaulting

00:35:25.920 away i'm like okay now these fight scenes don't matter to me because the second one like you got

00:35:31.440 the feeling like he had to these fight scenes where there's knives involved and guns like if

00:35:36.480 he gets shot he could die and so he's gotta we have to design that but now you're designing these

00:35:40.880 scenes where it doesn't matter if he gets shot that changes the the tone of the entire thing

00:35:46.600 in my opinion at least and so that that's okay but then okay whatever you're just watching it

00:35:52.700 for the choreography and i would say it has the two some of the two best action scenes in the

00:35:58.040 entire franchise i'd recommend you watch it just for these two there's one scene some people didn't

00:36:02.880 like it i thought it was really cool might have been cgi i don't know but it's in the arc the

00:36:07.760 whole last half the movie takes place in paris and it's at the arc de triomphe at night and if

00:36:13.080 you know the arc to triumph there's this big roundabout around it it's like five lanes deep

00:36:19.020 this massive so it's loads and loads of cars there's like a fight scene between him and like

00:36:23.700 25 people like as cars are flying by and they're like weaving between cars and throwing each other

00:36:29.880 into cars and like jumping on top of them that was really cool then there's a scene later and

00:36:36.360 this is where it's straight out of a video game for me and i loved it and the movie literally

00:36:41.000 reached out of the screen and gave me an attaboy on the shoulder it was you know if you even play

00:36:47.660 video games like fucking deus ex where you can like get upgraded ammo called dragon fire ammo

00:36:53.340 like it's bullets that like burst into flames when they hit someone yeah so they do that

00:36:59.860 i don't know if this is real i don't know if i think it's real i've heard of that yeah so there's

00:37:04.800 this whole scene it's fucking weird so it's it's done like it's one shot it's not really one shot

00:37:10.020 there's ways you can do this where it looks like it's one shot but like the camera panned up to

00:37:14.220 view this entire fighting from above so it looked like one of those video games like like fucking

00:37:20.140 hotline miami right yeah yeah and i think that was the main thing and it's so it's him

00:37:26.040 and he gets like the dragon's breath dragon's breath ammo yeah and he's just like shooting

00:37:31.140 these guys and it's exploding on their chest it's the coolest thing you've ever seen but it almost

00:37:35.400 seems a bit too fake you know i mean like it's i'm looking at this i'm like you know what

00:37:40.600 this could be cgi this whole scene because it zooms out so far is that supposed to deal with

00:37:46.620 their armor or is like is there a specific reason he's doing it it's just because it's cool like he

00:37:51.100 goes basically by this point in the movie he's he's got a duel with this big bad guy and they're

00:37:56.860 in paris and then you know if he wins the duel he gets out and then but you know whatever so

00:38:01.680 they're trying to make it so he never makes it to the duel so they put out like a 70 million

00:38:06.100 dollar contract on him and all the assassins in paris over the course of like eight hours

00:38:12.880 are coming after him so the entire back half of that movie is like that one night and he's making

00:38:18.360 his way across paris it's really cool actually and it just it never lets up so that arc de triomphe

00:38:23.860 triomphe leads right into this scene it leads right into like a couple other action scenes

00:38:28.820 it's non-stop and that's pretty cool but this is one scene the one i'm talking about where i'm like

00:38:33.620 ah this whole thing could be cgi i wouldn't be able to tell the difference maybe it's it's trying

00:38:38.940 to be a bit too stylish you know what i mean where it's obvious that the director made a director

00:38:45.700 decision you know what i mean and i'm like i do i like this or do i not like this i'm choosing to

00:38:51.200 like it because why at this point who the fuck cares in the third movie he was like riding a

00:38:56.820 horse down fucking new york city streets with a samurai sword like we're in retard world now and

00:39:03.880 i love it i'm okay i'm okay with the bulletproof suit that can stop 700 bullets like the best

00:39:11.180 kevlar vest can make can take like two shotgun blasts and you're still in the hospital right

00:39:16.860 yeah anyway i'd say watch it but there's it's a bit slow in the start and it's a bit slow

00:39:22.960 in the middle but you know the fight scenes are still good but it's almost it's almost like they

00:39:28.740 were making a joke like this movie they were determined to have keanu reeves only say the word

00:39:34.820 yeah like he never talked a lot in these movies and people kind of made fun of it which is already

00:39:40.660 a meme yeah yeah like i think they were where we're like dean tires he speaks like maybe three

00:39:46.160 times in the movie it's like yeah okay and i'm like okay you're doing this on purpose and if

00:39:54.260 you're doing it on purpose it seems less of a movie because at least the first john wick is

00:39:58.400 was a movie that took itself seriously and the second movie it got kind of ridiculous of course

00:40:03.700 i'm like okay you know i'm still with it the third one is just dumb but we like it's like rambo

00:40:08.960 but the third like this is you have to admit this is essentially rambo of the 21st century that's

00:40:15.340 you know what we this we double teamed that i like that tag team tag in you got it this is the

00:40:22.600 21st century rambo the first one was the first one could be mistaken for a very serious movie

00:40:28.740 this is not this is like bullet train and if you like bullet train bullet train's a fine movie

00:40:35.260 it's great it's a great movie yeah i wish this movie took a bit more time like bullet train did

00:40:41.580 because bullet trade actually took the time to give you a bit about all these characters you

00:40:46.860 actually cared about these characters as over the top and preposterous as that movie was

00:40:51.380 i was invested and i wasn't as invested in these these uh characters i was invested in the asian

00:40:57.440 guy the donnie whoever i was talking about yeah he's good and there's also this other black guy

00:41:02.980 who i'll tell you what i didn't hate the black guy either what do you think about that well there

00:41:08.460 you go and he's he's the type of black guy i think they choose this guy because a certain type of

00:41:15.300 black guy plays in asia he needs to be like dark as midnight to the point where his eyes are red

00:41:22.780 you know that you know these like straight out of africa guys they're so dark that they just have

00:41:27.660 bloodshot eyes all the time that's this guy and he looks fuck he's bloated he's got a fucked up

00:41:32.680 face but that's you won't tolerate an african-american but you'll tolerate like a guy

00:41:38.040 who looks like a slave this guy looked like a slave related to that i wanted to ask what you

00:41:43.460 thought of donnie yen not the character but the the actor what you thought of his performance as

00:41:49.260 an actor because i got some stories there okay you got some stories i'll i'm gonna try and cover

00:41:56.360 my ass right now so it does not get shown subsequently with your thing but i i liked

00:42:01.860 him i thought his performance in this was fine um he was uh it's not a very demanding performance

00:42:08.980 at all but um what i find with when the scenes where he was in it like the early scenes it was

00:42:15.880 all like chinese people in it and i find it looked like chinese cinema because chinese cinema has a

00:42:21.780 very distinct flavor to it um so i found him acting in a very chinese cinema way people can

00:42:28.020 make of that what they will but i found that kind of charming in a way i didn't mind him what do you

00:42:32.480 think so that and that that's how that's almost exactly what i was going to say so you hit all

00:42:36.440 the points accidentally already so the first thing is every scene that he's in seemed like chinese

00:42:42.100 cinema that wasn't an accident and in all likelihood it was not actually the choice of

00:42:46.880 the director or the producer really there was a deal that they made in order to get him in the

00:42:50.960 film because he is a a mainland chinese communist jingoist who is part of the chinese communist

00:42:58.640 party he's actually like their their um like global representative oh this guy was this guy

00:43:04.620 was ip man that yeah he's he's ip man so i didn't even make that connection i'd seen all those

00:43:09.660 movies okay sorry he's in very few western movies but when they do get him in you always notice that

00:43:15.520 exact thing that he's essentially like white glove roles and it has to be really chinese

00:43:22.440 there's very often more opportunity for him to speak in his native language than in english

00:43:27.160 because his english is actually terrible like he's okay the thing is he's quote unquote a

00:43:31.660 hong konger like he lives in hong kong but he's not a hong konger he's a mainlander um but anyway

00:43:36.660 so there's that he does all these chinese cinema things and all the all in chinese cinema it's

00:43:41.620 always state propaganda like pro china 5 000 years history china good because i remember when i

00:43:48.480 watched the it man series there was a lot of that um it was a very nationalist movie from what and

00:43:54.440 to me at the time i'm like oh well that's and that's you pay the ticket you go on the ride

00:43:58.760 with chinese they kind of like vanned jackie chan like five ten years ago and replaced jackie chan

00:44:04.040 with him so he's supposed to be the new jackie chan who's like under the thumb of of the communist

00:44:09.940 party so yeah he's a he's a fucking plant so if you see him in western films it's kind of like

00:44:15.280 the film might actually be good but you got to know that this is this is essentially completely

00:44:21.860 sold out for the chinese market because they would have made a lot of cuts in order to get

00:44:25.860 him in there so this would have been like a handshake deal to make sure this goat this plays

00:44:30.080 well in china yes yeah because you know what i was doing the other day i was watching just this

00:44:35.000 little mini documentary about jackie chan's son because jackie chan's son is this huge failure

00:44:40.440 and they made a comment during the whole thing about how he tried to get into acting he just

00:44:46.120 wasn't good at it and this one movie he was in was actually it was what was the movie it was i

00:44:53.920 forget the name of the movie but it was like people were almost forced to watch it like the

00:44:58.800 movie was about china so it was mandatory that it played in so many cinemas and people were

00:45:04.920 encouraged by the government to see it but it still only made like four thousand dollars

00:45:08.300 because he just sucks but that's a whole different ecosystem of films that so when i see him because

00:45:14.820 i saw him in star wars too this guy was in that uh road was i don't watch star wars that much but

00:45:21.060 he's in one of those ones um and he's in all these movies so i'm like oh this is an open handshake

00:45:26.800 deal to get these franchises in china which i suppose makes sense yeah yeah and that's i mean

00:45:32.940 my understanding is part of the reason jackie chan was actually taken out of circulation was

00:45:38.380 because he couldn't get his family under control but this was one of the things that they need

00:45:42.100 absolute loyalty and they need you're essentially you're a chess piece to them right so if you can't

00:45:47.880 get your family and your shit under control they might not it's like jack ma as well like they

00:45:52.060 might not kill you but i mean your face is suddenly no longer in newspapers and you're not

00:45:57.180 on in films anymore you're relaxing somewhere but you're not you're out of circulation so

00:46:02.700 yeah yeah it's pretty weird the other thing is just this guy i've seen because he's a because

00:46:07.300 he's now a hong kong personality and um he's such a piece of shit like he's really he's notoriously

00:46:14.560 narcissistic and levain like he always has like insane amounts of makeup when he does like

00:46:22.400 television interviews so there's like light flash reflections off his fucking forehead

00:46:26.800 when he does when he's in like the the news room doing an interview it's so weird i think he might

00:46:32.560 be i i think he's gay just based on that like he's so fucking effeminate and weirdly vain

00:46:38.120 it's just he's absurd like he's almost surreal to see him in real life because i'm looking at

00:46:43.180 photos of him now and i think i see exactly what you're talking about yeah something uncanny about

00:46:48.780 this guy he's a weird fucking guy yeah he's is it he you know what he is to me he's like he's the

00:46:53.860 hollywood version of the way china like china's uh government like grows olympic swimmers they

00:47:02.340 take them they take them from birth and like they live their entire lives in a swimming pool or some

00:47:07.640 shit like you know what like imagine how much better we would be doing at things if we did

00:47:14.060 that like the last guy who probably flirted with that idea was hitler maybe america might have

00:47:20.420 done that in like the 50s they might have like experimented with eugenics programs but i'm like

00:47:25.500 imagine if we just acted like china and just made arian supermen yeah what if that who would be

00:47:32.440 upset at that i actually don't think black people would be upset that i think black people would

00:47:36.880 fall down and worship that guy if we came out with like a race of uber mensch they'd have to

00:47:43.080 they wouldn't have a choice they would unironically and literally have to yeah

00:47:48.280 um so so that's john week four um we're trying to move this long i'm trying to see

00:47:56.740 if we can get this episode done in an hour and a half instead of two hours and change i don't know

00:48:03.520 if i'm gonna do it but i'm gonna move to the next thing which is something i really want to talk

00:48:08.600 about and then we'll get into the book discussion and this is you're going to cover this last week

00:48:14.760 because i believe this happened last week and we you know obviously didn't have the episode so we're

00:48:19.600 kind of late to the game but i think that was necessary to get the full scope of everything

00:48:24.160 that occurred in the wake of this story and just bring people's attention to set the stage for

00:48:29.720 everything that i'm about to talk about was there was an entire transgender shooting that was memory

00:48:36.180 hold i don't know if people remember this but i'm looking at uh just as exhibit a a story from

00:48:43.140 reuters this is from uh three years ago this is a july 24th 2020 and the headline is transgender

00:48:50.600 teen sentenced to life in prison for delhi colorado school shooting mckinney already pleaded

00:48:57.440 guilty in this case. Now he's taken the stand to testify against the other

00:49:01.520 shooter, Devin Erickson. McKinney testified the two of them planned for

00:49:05.420 weeks before carrying out a shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch in May 2019,

00:49:09.880 specifically targeting one classroom room 107 narrowed down to Devin

00:49:16.140 disliking the classmates he had in that classroom and saying that that was the

00:49:23.380 most ideal place to do it because that was where most kids he hated would be at the same time.

00:49:30.220 McKinney says there were specific students in that class they wanted to target,

00:49:34.200 including someone who said negative things about transgender people like McKinney.

00:49:38.860 Just I'm not going to go deep into that, but that's just one example of sort of the rabbit

00:49:43.980 hole I was going down. And I think a lot of people were going down in the wake of this most

00:49:49.860 recent shooting that occurred in nashville the shooting was a transgender female to male

00:49:56.580 individual who shot up a school karen the shooter was 28 years old and a former student at covenant

00:50:04.600 school a small presbyterian church elementary school in nashville audrey hale now identified

00:50:10.220 by police as the person who shot through a locked door to get into the school about 10 30 this

00:50:16.280 morning. A five officer team went straight to the gunfire on the second floor here at Covenant

00:50:23.960 School and killed the intruder who was armed with an AR style rifle, an assault style pistol and a

00:50:30.260 handgun. At least two of them legally obtained according to authorities. Even though it appears

00:50:36.000 to have been a rapid police response, three adults and three children were killed before officers

00:50:41.720 could end the incident what i noticed was some people would say oh just to set this all up they're

00:50:47.380 saying oh why do you care about that there's only been like you know one transgender school shooting

00:50:52.500 the past 10 years and then i noticed in real time as trannies were saying that the number kept going

00:50:58.880 up it was who cares that there's been two what are you going to give a shit about three mass

00:51:03.640 shootings in the past five years like what does eight mass shootings in the last two years even

00:51:08.540 meme like and in real time i saw like transgenders like learn that there were way more tranny shooters

00:51:14.720 than they had thought because it was memory hold even to them and then they just of course they're

00:51:21.120 going to wallpaper over and not give a shit about it but i just wanted to to call people's attention

00:51:25.180 to that that as we enter this story this happens a lot more than people probably remember uh first

00:51:32.780 of all the news is kind of buried when it happens and then it's it's rushed out of the news cycle

00:51:38.180 obviously did you remember that at all or no i didn't it's funny because i remembered the the

00:51:44.920 recent recent one the fat guy who said that he was trans yeah and also the weird hair kid which

00:51:49.980 is maybe like i forget his name but like a year or two ago but this one is not what i didn't even

00:51:54.900 remember this one this is one of the larger ones and you look at it and it's like they are like

00:51:59.520 statistically overrepresented in mass shootings they actually are not by a huge margin but they

00:52:04.120 are yeah and remember by saying oh not a huge margin the conversation started by not a significant

00:52:11.840 margin and they had to like bargain that up and up it's like well well who cares if it's it's like

00:52:17.940 one in a thousand okay well it's one in a hundred but one and you know it's like we're getting

00:52:22.160 closer and closer and so i have a whole bunch of stories open here just for people who haven't been

00:52:29.180 following it or people who are listening to this in the future why you might have forgotten about

00:52:34.360 some of these other transgender shooters so i'm looking at a story here from the new york post

00:52:39.120 and this is about the most recent shooting in nashville the headline is cbs executives bar

00:52:46.540 the word transgender from reports on nashville shooter quote this is not journalism so uh top

00:52:53.640 executives at CBS News have

00:52:56.720 banned staffers from using the word

00:52:59.340 transgender when describing

00:53:01.340 the shooter and the quote here is

00:53:02.660 the shooter's gender identity has not

00:53:05.380 been confirmed by CBS News

00:53:07.020 as such we should avoid any

00:53:09.260 mention of it as it has no relevance

00:53:11.540 to the crime should that

00:53:13.220 change we can and will revisit

00:53:15.580 so ridiculous

00:53:16.840 yes and this has been

00:53:19.240 this goes on at every

00:53:21.480 newsroom banning the

00:53:23.340 the transgender identity and uh for people who were not again with their finger on the pulse of

00:53:29.200 this this is the line going in every single transgender community online right now saying

00:53:36.200 why does it matter that they're transgender why are they saying this on the one hand that they're

00:53:40.900 like misgendering this person but the other hand it's like they shouldn't be mentioning that this

00:53:46.140 person is trans at all despite the fact that a manifesto was written as far as i know the

00:53:51.620 manifesto has not been released yet uh this very clearly was a hate crime i'm going to start with

00:53:58.620 that just i don't want that to get lost in the sauce there was literally a manifesto like a

00:54:03.780 weirdly drawn manifesto that was pro like trans activism and anti-christian it was a hate crime

00:54:09.760 it was a straight up hate crime this is happening in nashville because there was legislation that

00:54:14.540 was on the table to prohibit um child gender transition that's what it is they wanted to

00:54:21.300 make it illegal to transition your children.

00:54:27.960 Demonstrators at the Texas State Capitol Monday fighting against anti

00:54:31.780 trans bills being considered by state lawmakers as news broke that the

00:54:35.840 Nashville school shooter identifies as transgender. It doesn't excuse

00:54:40.180 anything that happened. I am concerned about how opposition and people who

00:54:45.440 are anti trans will try to spin this concern about tweets like this from

00:54:51.280 GOP Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene writing how much hormones like testosterone and medications

00:54:57.200 for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking? Everyone can stop blaming

00:55:02.560 guns now. The comparison of they did it because they're trans is very unfair to trans people.

00:55:09.280 Andrea Segovia from the Transgender Education Network of Texas joined Monday's battle at the

00:55:14.320 the Capitol, fighting House Bill 1686, which would block doctors from providing gender transition

00:55:21.900 health care treatment to children. And the response to this from the transgender community

00:55:26.700 was to shoot the children. Now, some people might be saying, well, why did they do that? Well,

00:55:31.520 it is Nashville. So you have to think that a lot of people in Nashville are armed.

00:55:38.200 So a lot of people were saying, like, why did this person shoot the children? Why didn't they

00:55:41.840 shoot the politicians well the politicians in nashville probably got concealed carry permits

00:55:46.380 a lot of people in nashville probably pretty heavily armed this little faggot couldn't get

00:55:52.060 away with doing a mass shooting unless he or unless she rather targeted children so that's

00:55:57.920 the reason they did it so what it wasn't that this this fucking bitch even went to the school

00:56:03.080 like that's the the story i'm hearing it's just it was a soft target for a hate crime targeting

00:56:08.880 christians because the transgender community hates christians the transgender community does not hate

00:56:15.980 muslims they do not hate jews they do not hate any other abrahamic religion or any other group

00:56:22.500 especially not blacks who have negative opinions on transgender it's only white christians and

00:56:29.720 that's you must keep that burned in your mind and they will try and bury that this was a hate crime

00:56:35.480 Now, there's some people out there who are going to keep shouting that from the rooftops that it's a hate crime.

00:56:40.840 That's fine. We can keep doing that.

00:56:41.960 But we're going to go a bit deeper in the story.

00:56:44.700 There's that. The fact that they are trying to cover this up.

00:56:48.100 The second layer to this is that how the narrative in the days that have passed have centered trans people as the real victims.

00:57:00.380 So I'm looking at a news article here from CTV News here in Canada.

00:57:05.480 this was published just a couple of days ago and i'm not making this up so after and there's i was

00:57:12.980 shocked about how they released the video of this honestly there was like very clear video of the

00:57:19.140 shooter entering the school and gunshots and stuff very very morbid stuff i know you know as i get

00:57:24.520 older i don't have the gumption to you know find this stuff interesting but they have it embedded

00:57:31.940 on the fucking article here that's why i bring it up uh the but the headline is trans people face

00:57:36.820 rhetoric disinformation after shooting wow that's the that's that's the bell being rung in the

00:57:43.580 entire nation of these united states of america right now that we need to gather around transgender

00:57:50.000 people because they are the real victims right now there is still a lot that we don't know about

00:57:56.180 monday's horrific and deadly mass shooting at a nashville christian school but after police said

00:58:00.960 the suspect was transgender, one thing is clear. Tennessee's already under siege transgender

00:58:06.520 community is terrified. One advocate told NBC News, we are already fearing for our lives.

00:58:12.900 Now it's even worse. So just the first few lines here. Anti-transgender rhetoric and

00:58:20.700 disinformation in the days following the shooting at a Nashville Christian school that killed

00:58:25.640 six people have heightened the fears of a community already on edge amid a historic push for more

00:58:32.780 restrictions on trans people's rights this year that's the first thing here fuck me authorities

00:58:40.120 haven't shared in the evidence uh linking audrey hill's gender identity to the motive of the attack

00:58:45.040 which has killed three children and three adults yet right-wing commentators politicians and other

00:58:51.120 figures have cited the shooting as they've shared false claims of a rise in transgender mass

00:58:56.740 shooters um true that is true 100 100 actual facts and suggested that the fight for trans rights is

00:59:05.340 radicalizing people so now if you well it is it is um you know who's radicalizing trans people

00:59:13.500 i encourage people to um it'd be difficult to do it right now because they've locked down and

00:59:19.500 mattened down the hatches but um it won't take them long to regress to how they were because

00:59:24.180 these are insane faggots remember um all they do is talk about wanting to shoot guns at christians

00:59:33.240 trans people in tennessee it's time to fucking fight trans allies in tennessee it's time to

00:59:39.600 fucking fight trans women if they lock you up for identifying as a woman fight resist you're

00:59:46.160 gonna die anyways. We're going to die anyways. It's time to fucking resist. Fight them. Hurt

00:59:51.960 them. If they put their hands on you, beat them. We are at an attack. It's time to fight

01:00:00.220 back. Do you hear me? Trans people in Tennessee. Trans men, trans women, non-binary. Fight.

01:00:07.560 if they try to arrest you or have you arrested on a felony for existing

01:00:12.540 beat them team up gang together get people who agree with you to come and fight carry a weapon

01:00:21.320 at all times and yes you have to attack the police officer and i'm not making that up i'm

01:00:28.340 not exaggerating if you go to trans reddit accounts go to trans you know there's like

01:00:34.820 boards on 8chan where there's trannies and antifa people most trans communities are very open with

01:00:42.100 their calls for violence and they're saying like you like you must be armed trans people must buy

01:00:48.640 weapons they had to cancel a recent event called the trans day of vengeance the trans day of

01:00:56.540 vengeance was going to be held in washington dc the organizers behind the trans day of vengeance

01:01:02.980 protest announced the event will not go on as scheduled due to a quote, credible threat to life

01:01:09.660 and safety. In a lengthy statement, the Trans Radical Activist Network blamed the reaction to

01:01:15.760 the Monday shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, where three children and three adults were killed

01:01:20.760 at a Christian school by a person who identified as transgender. The statement said, quote,

01:01:26.720 we lack the resources to ensure the safety of the protest and cannot in good conscience move

01:01:32.160 forward with it. The event was originally scheduled to take place over the weekend

01:01:36.360 in Washington, D.C. The goal of the event was to protest laws that restrict transgender surgeries

01:01:42.340 for minors and political rhetoric about transgender people. This is the language

01:01:48.660 trannies use. They say a genocide is coming. They are coming to kill you. You need to kill

01:01:55.540 them first. This is what they say in their communities, in their forums. You can go

01:02:00.120 fucking see it in fact when um there was a post on reddit in a very very big trans forum

01:02:08.060 a trans subreddit rather that basically called this out and said look i i don't advocate for

01:02:14.360 violence at all but the rhetoric that we've been ramping up over the past few years has been

01:02:20.140 has been radicalizing people and encouraging them to commit violence uh so to cut sold who got

01:02:27.380 deleted by reddit legal says trans posters and trans forums and trans accounts and put a regular

01:02:32.720 promote violence against quote-unquote nazis and quote-unquote turfs and quote-unquote fascists

01:02:38.140 they mean it they want violence they talk about punching shooting stabbing beating with baseball

01:02:41.520 bats and they put all the images of rifles on trans flags when you look at the targets of the

01:02:45.360 rhetoric most of the targets aren't actually nazis turfs or fascists they're dissident voices

01:02:48.520 conservative christians and feminists and everyday people who don't hold the fringe belief about sex

01:02:52.940 that many trans people hold last week i saw a video of a 72 year old butch woman being punched

01:02:58.260 full force closed fist by a bearded trans rights protester in new zealand i saw trans people

01:03:02.000 commenting to minimize or justify it i see a lot of that i've been seeing it for years so has

01:03:06.560 everyone else on social media and that's precisely what happens and that post was deleted by the

01:03:12.820 moderation team that's the big story because you have to understand like trans people will

01:03:18.300 see themselves as the victims they're releasing tiktok videos they're releasing press releases

01:03:23.980 where they'll say we denounce the the killings but how even though this happened that's no excuse to

01:03:33.340 make us the bad guys like they cannot stop themselves um so that's the other angle to this

01:03:39.720 which is trannies are centered in this whole thing and if you check joe biden came out because it's

01:03:46.820 also trans dare visibility leading the charge was president joe biden who released this frankly

01:03:55.300 absurd statement where he said transgender americans shape our nation's soul proudly

01:04:03.300 serving in the military curing deadly diseases holding elected office running thriving businesses

01:04:09.100 fighting for justice raising families and much more and white house press secretary corinne

01:04:14.500 Jean-Pierre was also eager to express support and solidarity not with the Christian community that

01:04:20.140 had just been attacked but with the trans community. It is shameful it is disturbing

01:04:25.940 and our hearts go out to uh the those the trans community as they are under attack right now.

01:04:33.540 And fuck me if that the entire nation isn't saying that the right-wing people concerned about this

01:04:39.280 are the real bad guys as trannies are celebrating it i've seen countless videos in the past few days

01:04:45.640 of trannies saying i don't think you should shoot children but fuck around and find out

01:04:51.900 i wonder if the parents of the victims of the nashville shooting today would still have

01:05:01.880 their children if these trans bills in tennessee were never a thing

01:05:06.260 i'm not a parent but if i were i'd be real real mad at the government

01:05:11.140 i'd be real real mad at the government fuck you know what if you don't if you don't want your

01:05:19.180 kids to die maybe you should stop misgendering us these are things i've heard not not just a few of

01:05:25.980 them say so i hope we're building again it's it's interesting how they amplify it because

01:05:32.140 there might be all kinds of trannies who are not saying this but then the militant ones are

01:05:37.660 deleting those posts or like i'm gonna say this every single trans person believes this stuff

01:05:46.240 every single male to female and that's another thing we'll get into a second

01:05:50.700 but every single male to female tranny is saying that you know what this is what you get

01:05:57.060 there's not a single one that i've seen actually come out against this except the one that the

01:06:03.660 occasional ones that are like deleted and suffocated and called right wing here i'm

01:06:07.580 looking at yahoo right now how republicans are using the nashville shooting to further

01:06:13.080 their anti-trans agenda first line it's been a banner year for anti-transgender hate in america

01:06:20.780 the result of a concerted right-wing effort to alienate and attack trans people a school was

01:06:27.120 just shot up if people forgot that okay by a tranny who had a manifesto most likely saying that

01:06:33.600 it was because this was on purpose because they were white christians okay um in the wake of a

01:06:39.240 mass shooting at a private christian school in nashville on monday conservatives have only

01:06:43.300 heightened their anti-trans rhetoric twisting the shooter's purported gender identity into what they

01:06:48.860 claim is a civilizational war by all trans people against christianity well it is um it actually is

01:06:57.180 um i you know there's only one tranny i can think of that really came out against muslims and it was

01:07:02.400 blair white and i don't want to start talking saying nice things about blair white but well

01:07:07.860 they're all against christianity distinctly sorry that's why i was gonna say because you said you

01:07:14.260 know we need to treat this as though all of them are are in favor you know all of them are

01:07:20.000 supporting this and i was going to say i don't i don't really care whether they are all in favor

01:07:24.480 maybe only a small minority of them are in favor i don't care because so long as they continue

01:07:29.560 moving as a block even the innocent ones are guilty they're all guilty right and i think

01:07:34.260 your point about it being a civilizational existential war between trans and christians

01:07:40.000 is correct because you're now part of a block you've you've you've now planted your flag and

01:07:45.400 we all know what side each of us is on so i don't care if you want to surrender you want to roll over

01:07:50.100 and apologize i'm not listening i'm done listening to you you're you are forever my enemy until one

01:07:54.620 of us is dead it's the end of it like there's no more discussion at this point yeah um and just i

01:07:59.980 want you to keep that thread so keep that sentiment because that's going to be the next

01:08:02.840 thing i talk about but just so people can get some of the flavor let's take a trip to flavor

01:08:07.920 town right now oh yeah so i'm looking at the female to male ftm reddit subreddit uh the thread

01:08:17.740 that was posted nine days ago when they just found out about this the title of the sub uh the post

01:08:23.780 here fuck the uh tn shooter was trans linking to the story that they just found out these trans

01:08:30.480 so i'm just gonna let's go through some reactions here from honest to goodness female to male

01:08:36.440 trannies okay top one uh what kills me the most about this is that all the people are talking

01:08:42.920 about is the fact that he's trans not that he fucking killed six people and that we should be

01:08:47.320 trying to stop the fucking madness but that he's trans uh the next comment just says i'm so tired

01:08:55.640 so look at that again just to back up imagine you know one of you shot the school i'm so tired

01:09:03.000 here's one from feral punk 420 i know this isn't the politically correct reaction to have but i'm

01:09:11.140 so angry at the shooter odd thing to say the fact he killed several children is the obvious reason

01:09:17.460 but he also acted in a profoundly selfish way that made trans people's situation in the u.s

01:09:22.760 significantly worse so again the real victim is you yeah and and the dinner table being a bit

01:09:31.920 more uncomfortable um because they're going to say oh did you know the shooter and you probably

01:09:37.160 did yeah you all fucking know each other there's not that many of you uh there's evil people in

01:09:43.340 every group just so happens some people are now going to use this incident to fuel more hate

01:09:47.680 towards us great oh here's one they didn't need to address that in the article especially not with

01:09:54.740 everything going on right now he was this he was a school shooter he was fucked up and killed

01:10:00.240 children that has nothing to do with him being trans by blackberry agile 193 here's one by

01:10:08.180 zebulon 96 i am spiraling this is the only representation that most people have of us in

01:10:14.980 the near future i am afraid i am hurt most of all i am angry i here's one from liniwium

01:10:23.680 i feel so sick i'm trying to stay positive but holy shit this is going to destroy so many lives

01:10:29.600 and lead to only more legislation to make it okay to hate and kill trans people well we're fucked

01:10:36.540 it's over literally everyone is just trying to talk about how this impacts them um but here's

01:10:44.180 the thing um and we sort of touched on this before but i think this is the real crux of this whole

01:10:51.260 thing the fact that it was female to male and not male to female so male to female are the ones

01:10:57.820 people think about the most deranged individuals but on the off chance i saw an individual

01:11:05.820 actually cop to this and say like we're saying like we're fucked this sucks oh my god it's me

01:11:12.320 as even though they're making about themselves there is sort of a defeatist like we fucked up

01:11:18.360 we need to do something about ourselves it's the male to females that i see celebrating this it's

01:11:24.940 only them it's it's the most deranged people who go yeah we'll fuck around and find out and here's

01:11:31.740 what i'm just here's one more example just i thought this was really great it's pulled from a

01:11:35.240 a forum um so here's what's it i detest what the killer did that's what this individual said

01:11:42.520 if america was a sane society there'd be a moment of contemplation that perhaps

01:11:47.620 everyone responsible for passing laws on that are in par with the genocide of transgender people

01:11:53.880 and admit maybe they went too far wow there's a lot of minority groups out there who have had it

01:12:00.500 up to here with the othering they're tired of the constant boxing in of who and what they are

01:12:06.500 they're tired of the laws that strip them of their humanity and existence i'm not gonna read the

01:12:11.100 whole thing but it basically goes into well this is what you get oh actually wait one more sorry

01:12:16.980 let's do this one too um the trans journalists association so an official sounding place let's

01:12:25.500 just read their official release today three children and three adults were killed in a

01:12:30.940 shooting at the covenant school a private christian elementary school in nashville tennessee

01:12:35.900 no information has been released and is unclear how the police came to that determination that

01:12:43.180 they were transgender. The TGA's guidance is to not assume someone is cisgender or transgender

01:12:50.040 based on their appearance, gender presentation, or pronouns. We urge newsrooms to refrain from

01:12:55.540 speculating without further facts. It is additionally important to keep in mind that sharing

01:12:59.660 partial, unfact-checked, or contextless information and public records during breaking news events

01:13:06.520 can have outsized consequences for members of marginalized communities. So basically,

01:13:11.520 the Trans Journalists Association is saying, don't say that he's trans because that will

01:13:17.720 impact us down the road. So I just wanted to establish if anyone has any questions, like this

01:13:22.500 is individuals, this is their professional organizations, this is every single level

01:13:28.160 of trans society is in lockstep with this response to it. Now, the reason I bring this up,

01:13:35.020 and this is where we can, I want to hear a bit more from you, which is we were talking about

01:13:38.660 this in the chat and you know we can all say this is heinous and this is this is wickedness and this

01:13:46.660 is to be expected it's to be expected because it's happened before and that if you've paid

01:13:51.280 any attention to these groups in these communities this was destined to happen because they talk

01:13:56.780 about it all the time and they think it's funny especially if they're male to female however

01:14:02.760 the question was posed to me and you as well it's like what do we do with this this is new

01:14:08.340 this is breaking news everyone is riled up the nation is grieving and the nation like fuck

01:14:15.100 tucker carlson's talking about it all the republicans are talking about it now the question

01:14:20.780 was posed to us like i said like what do we do with this information how can we use this to

01:14:24.620 wake people up or move the needle on what on what we want to accomplish which is

01:14:30.840 let me just say this i'll start by saying this what is it that we want to do

01:14:37.100 um and i'm going to try and thread the needle with this but

01:14:41.100 transgender individuals are essentially correct when they say what we want is transgenocide

01:14:49.960 by that i mean genocide in the definition of the current era so the definition of genocide that we

01:14:58.840 might think of it's like oh you're exterminating a race of people uh the way genocide is used now

01:15:05.840 is that it's exterminating the culture of a people it's exterminating the spirit or the essence

01:15:10.160 of a people which is what they say happened to aboriginals in canada so if we're using that

01:15:16.980 definition i kind of want to start this discussion by saying they are pretty correct when they say

01:15:22.620 what we want is trans genocide in the sense that i don't want transness around i want to remove

01:15:31.240 this concept of transgenderism from society i want trans i don't want kids to know about

01:15:37.900 transgenderism and i want to i want to pursue legislation that would prevent children from

01:15:45.500 engaging in transgender bodily mutilation and by their definition that is genocidal because

01:15:51.880 their identity is defined by bodily mutilation so if i have anti-bodily mutilation i am necessarily

01:15:59.980 anti-trans and i believe transgenders have defined themselves by spreading to children

01:16:08.040 and had to interpret that however you want so by barring them from children it is genocidal

01:16:14.640 to them so within that framework i am genocidal but i'm saying that not in the sense that

01:16:19.720 i want to actually rather than kill them then i mean would you agree with that first of all

01:16:24.380 absolutely i agree yeah so i think people who want to engage with this discussion

01:16:31.500 need to start at least internally acknowledging that because what i see a lot of people doing

01:16:37.100 is saying that oh they're engaging a transgender genocide and we go nah i think you gotta say

01:16:45.900 yaha to yourself at least to know that what the stakes are the stakes are you want these people

01:16:53.120 to fuck off forever and for the people who want transgender people to go away transgender people

01:17:00.180 are saying if you don't celebrate us every single day we will kill ourselves and if you say okay

01:17:07.720 that's more or less genocide and i think you need to own that i need to think you oh you need to own

01:17:13.040 that on the outset to take this seriously now then the other thing and you tell me what you think

01:17:19.820 about this moving forward okay so let's actually collect what i think are the bad takes so here's

01:17:26.680 one here's a take i think is bad you tell me if you think it's bad too this is coming from marjorie

01:17:31.380 taylor green of the republican party uh her tweet had said and i i can kind of i see where she's

01:17:38.540 coming from with this this is a tweet a take that a woman of her age and her persuasion would make

01:17:44.420 It's that, you know, how many, how much testosterone was this woman on?

01:17:49.540 How many, you know, mood stabilizers were they on?

01:17:52.480 You know, how many, again, how much testosterone basically, you know, let's talk about that

01:17:56.980 as the real cause and stop blaming guns.

01:17:59.940 Now, my reaction to that is this is another trap door you've set for yourself because

01:18:06.420 you're essentially teaching to people who don't know any better that testosterone is

01:18:11.300 the problem.

01:18:11.880 and realistically there's a lot of older men who take testosterone uh for athletes do it regular

01:18:19.360 guys do it for some godforsaken reason comedians take testosterone now i blame joe rogan she should

01:18:25.660 have just said drugs she should have just said she's this woman was sick and she was pumped full

01:18:30.320 of drugs and that affected her decision making that would have been a safer thing to say you

01:18:34.140 make it about testosterone suddenly it's about masculinity and it's about a whole bunch of other

01:18:37.720 things so yeah and a lot of the times conservatives will get themselves into that like ben shapiro

01:18:43.200 was famous for this about almost making feminist arguments like i just don't want uh males in

01:18:48.920 female places and just to so we're clear marjorie taylor green and ben shapiro they do this

01:18:54.040 intentionally this isn't because they're dumb i mean green is stupid but the reason that they're

01:18:58.840 doing it is because they think they can kind of play both sides and not get cancelled by including

01:19:03.880 like language and framing from the opposition but as you said you've you've literally set a snare

01:19:09.500 around your own foot as you as you did that so yeah and also the other one which i know you're

01:19:15.360 very sensitive to which is saying that oh here's another example of someone who shouldn't have a

01:19:19.320 gun what we really need is more common sense gun legislation and you'll even hear that come

01:19:23.580 from the right saying like okay like i guess i'm in favor of gun grabs for transgenders and like

01:19:29.120 i don't want to wander down that alleyway we we should have common sense gun legislation which is

01:19:35.040 to say everybody should have guns at all times in all places amazing iv88 came out with that

01:19:41.420 like two days after saying it he went full political on it when i thought this was really

01:19:46.240 funny without talking about trans or about anything he brought it around to this is why

01:19:50.980 teachers and security guards at schools should be armed at all times when children are around

01:19:56.460 it's in order to protect children and the reason that she targeted this place was because as you

01:20:01.500 said it was a soft target and i think somebody had mentioned that she there was some writing in

01:20:06.220 the manifesto that she considered other places but those other places she would not have been

01:20:10.660 able to do anything because they had guns and this is a common story we see this across many

01:20:14.600 shooters that when you get to read their manifesto or online discussions that they had had they'd

01:20:19.060 chosen their targets based on the fact that they could get away with it because they knew that the

01:20:24.220 the people they're going to shoot were unarmed yeah so yeah it's it's not that we should disarm

01:20:29.340 trans people we should arm everyone else now if you want to say um we should make sure that

01:20:36.780 insane people don't have guns we already do that and i'm actually okay with that like schizos and

01:20:43.100 down syndrome people should not have guns and we just need to reclassify trans people where

01:20:47.580 they belong which is insane people who should be locked up right let me say i i'm going to count

01:20:53.480 this as a rare judas l i do believe that down syndrome people should have guns not just that

01:21:02.600 they should have the right to have guns i think they should have the rights and that they're not

01:21:07.180 going to get their own guns they're mandated yeah no you have to hand them a gun yeah they're not

01:21:13.100 going to do it on their own they should also have like babe girlfriends and harley davidson's all of

01:21:18.580 them i want guns and bimbos for every down syndrome chat out there it's time they're talking

01:21:26.040 about giving fucking reparations to every nigger in new york and you're telling me you're not going

01:21:29.920 to get a fucking down syndrome guy laid he's not gonna fuck a bitch at the ass with a gun

01:21:35.860 is that the america you want to live in

01:21:38.320 stumbled into a great bit here

01:21:43.180 we really really went backwards into the saloon on that one

01:21:50.040 but so there's a bunch of takes like that where i'm seeing like i i don't think that's the right

01:21:56.380 thing and also you know the the angle that a lot of people are taking which is like

01:22:02.180 trans people are dangerous true but i don't even feel comfortable doing that like i just want to

01:22:09.320 really set a strong base of these people are disgusting and evil and if even if this individual

01:22:18.120 didn't shoot up a school that would be unchanged i would the the disgust the disgust and hatred

01:22:25.800 I feel for these psychopaths would be completely the same, irrespective of if there's any school shooting.

01:22:33.280 School shooting is just a symptom, but there's hundreds of other symptoms.

01:22:37.680 Right. I was going to say the fact that these shootings happened shouldn't make shootings or the prospect of shootings the centerpiece of a new public hatred of trans people.

01:22:48.900 It should be just a doorway opening where people are now receptive.

01:22:53.080 People feel like for now, while tension is high, they have the right to be angry at trans people.

01:23:00.300 And now you can go back and re-examine the litany of other problems with trans being in our society and that maybe it's time that we started treating them once again like the insane and locking them all up.

01:23:14.260 Yeah. And for me, it's difficult for me to engage in these discussions because this whole, even the framing of male to female and female to male, that's just a symptom of what's going on here.

01:23:26.780 So I reject transgenderism as an identity. In fact, I reject most modern identities. I think a lot of people do. A lot of people reject that.

01:23:36.200 this thing called transgenderism i think most sexual identities are made up first of all i

01:23:42.280 think they're just clusters of behaviors that could have any other name attached to them or

01:23:47.420 they could be subdivided into a few other actual um what's the word not chronic problems chronic

01:23:58.600 mental issues so transgenderism transgenderism as almost like an ontological phenomenon

01:24:05.280 is a mind virus and it is a mind virus that has infected the western world so transgender people

01:24:14.760 are just the most corpsified hosts of that they are the bloated hogs of this that the virus has

01:24:24.060 taken root most deeply and but it spreads outward um and in fact i i look at transgenderism as

01:24:31.920 something of a cognitohazard um have you ever heard that term before like something that like

01:24:38.900 gets inside your brain like a parasite yeah basically a cognitohazard it might have been

01:24:43.640 coined in some meme related thing but my familiar it's the it's the fucking sc is it the scp thing

01:24:52.000 no not scp it's the uh fuck why can't i think of it now the ghost in the shell

01:24:57.920 yeah it's an anime thing yeah it's okay well i've really gotten myself into a dilly of a pickle on

01:25:05.080 this one now yeah i had to make sure you you stepped over that landmine you really you threw

01:25:10.260 me under the bus and crashed another bus into that bus humiliation thank you but really the idea of

01:25:16.380 the concept of a cognitohazard is interesting because it's um it's like an idea or a concept

01:25:22.840 that infects you the moment that you are aware of it so it's tree and which would not be far and

01:25:29.180 away from our understanding of what a meme is and i mean meme in the original meaning that was coined

01:25:38.520 by richard dawkins um and memes as we know them we've talked about this before but memes as we

01:25:43.940 know them follow uh the concept of a meme because a meme is just an idea that propagates and spreads

01:25:50.040 as if it is an organism and you can map the spread of an idea or a trend like it was a virus and it

01:25:57.080 lives and it dies it has life cycles and spreads as if it's an organism so the idea of a cognitohazard

01:26:03.680 spreading and infecting isn't far and away from what our understanding of how how ideas work and

01:26:11.220 this is where you get into information theory as well we're not going to do into that we already

01:26:14.680 discussed that in a previous episode you guys can find the clip about information theory uh go back

01:26:20.400 a few weeks you find it there anyway but i treat transgenderism as if it's something like a

01:26:25.260 cognitohazard where it's people being exposed to it and it is corrupting them um and i had a bit of

01:26:32.000 a debate about this on telegram i'm not going to say who it was with but this person was challenging

01:26:37.540 me um by the the lie and this is a rotten take i'm going to roll this out right now just so people

01:26:43.800 can get ahead of this um i think people who forward this idea really need to rethink some

01:26:49.400 things but the idea that they were discussing was that this transgenderism it's sort of a mania

01:26:55.220 it's a transgender mania that's only uh purport it's only engaged with by the lower classes and

01:27:02.100 the deplorables the maga people that you know like this is a common and a phenomenon on the

01:27:08.240 right where if you're on that right or the dissonant right or the far right and you hate

01:27:13.080 republicans so much and you hate maga people so much and anything that they are for you are

01:27:19.840 automatically against you're in essence a reactionary so now that republicans are marching

01:27:26.680 against transgenderism now is the time for you to not care about it so i was arguing with this

01:27:32.080 individual who was saying like okay look what are the actual numbers on transgenderism i found the

01:27:37.900 numbers i found several pulled from the new york times pulled from scientific america uh numbers

01:27:43.640 such as the rate of transgender youth from 2017 to 2020 has increased by 300 percent and it broke

01:27:53.280 down by state you can see these huge upticks in transgender youth youth specifically kids

01:27:59.240 and there's interviews with doctors who say like look it's a psychological thing

01:28:04.540 can we say that it's like brainwashing no but we know that the media has a massive impact on youth

01:28:12.560 and transgenderism is big in the media so it seems that there would be a one-to-one correlation with

01:28:18.840 the rise in transgenderism with the children who are exposed to it in the media so to me i'm looking

01:28:25.640 at transgenderism as if it is a mind virus and it's a mind virus that is infected children and

01:28:31.900 joe biden and almost everyone with the lever on the at their hand on the lever of society

01:28:38.400 to the point and it operates like a virus in the sense that it is killing us it's killing us in

01:28:45.580 the form of shooters but it's also killing us the mind virus makes you ignore who is responsible

01:28:52.340 and also it's got us so deranged that it's got us not understanding like we don't know how to

01:28:59.120 report on other types of news we don't what we should be freaking out about is how so many other

01:29:05.540 nations in the world are decoupling themselves from the petrodollar that like china and russia

01:29:10.520 are partnering up and mexico and fucking india and whoever the fuck are are trading in fucking

01:29:16.340 crude oil in different sorts of currencies there was a very interesting and noticed clip from fox

01:29:24.100 news where senator marco rubio actually went on fox to decry brazil ditching the petrodollar for

01:29:30.580 future oil transactions with china and talking about the declining efficacy of u.s sanctions

01:29:36.260 let's take a listen to that today brazil in our hemisphere largest country in the western hemisphere

01:29:40.900 south of us cut a trade deal with china they're going to from now on do trade in their own

01:29:44.580 currencies get right around the dollar they're creating a secondary economy in the world totally

01:29:49.380 independent of the united states we won't have to talk about sanctions in five years because there'll

01:29:52.980 will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won't have the

01:29:56.420 ability to sanction them as we are sitting here you know focused on some of these nuttiness that's

01:30:00.220 going on people that are basically dedicating their lives in this country to ensuring that

01:30:03.320 it is legal to mutilate children to do drag shows in schools they dedicate their lives to this and

01:30:07.940 we have a another superpower that basically wants to become the world's dominant power at our expense

01:30:12.820 and these people don't want to focus on it that's a big deal we actually america doesn't really know

01:30:18.940 how to report on that because america has been infected with a cognitohazard called transness

01:30:25.720 and there is no such thing as a transgender individual there is a host for this fucking

01:30:31.540 viral meme that has infected them which is why it seems so disjointed which is why it doesn't

01:30:37.760 make sense this identity doesn't make any fucking sense and it is so self-destructive because that's

01:30:42.980 what sick people do what sick people do is they die they go insane you see a praying mantis

01:30:48.900 that's been infected by some kind of worm

01:30:51.480 and all it does is it teaches that prey mantis

01:30:53.840 to eat its own fucking babies.

01:30:55.600 That is essentially what is going on here.

01:30:58.600 So I'm trying to engage with this,

01:31:01.000 not as the wrong type of person who had a gun.

01:31:04.260 I'm trying to see this as a new way

01:31:06.480 that we become zombified by this fucking viral worm

01:31:11.640 and what do we do about that?

01:31:12.940 And I think the thing you do about that

01:31:14.620 is always returning to the fact that

01:31:17.360 these people are sick we are all sick and we need a cure and maybe that cure is quarantine

01:31:24.000 maybe that cure is some kind of fucking medicine but it's like a chemical spill kids are dying

01:31:32.480 kids are killing themselves and dying and it it seems to be focused on children and the fact that

01:31:40.240 more people aren't freaking out can only let me know that there's a everyone's mind has become

01:31:45.320 disease now that's a bit of a that might sound a bit dramatic but what do you think about that

01:31:49.740 no it's true it's true this is one of those things where you have to go you have to go all in no half

01:31:57.800 measure is going to even begin to resolve this once you realize what's actually happening that

01:32:03.300 it isn't the action of individuals like you said it's a mind virus it's an action of a class of

01:32:09.500 people most of whom don't even realize they're in this class because it's the doctors and the nurses

01:32:14.040 who are letting it happen it's the families of trans people that are letting it happen it's the

01:32:18.580 schools it's government officials all of them are in on it so as you say because it's it's

01:32:23.960 transmitted through essentially communication through media and through social interaction

01:32:28.520 you have to cordon off the people like the trans people themselves you probably also have to

01:32:35.080 cordon off all of the people who aren't themselves trans but are open supporters of it and then you

01:32:40.640 probably have to put some kind of ban some censorship in place to prevent it from even

01:32:46.240 being discussed i don't i don't think people are ready to hear that but the truth of it is

01:32:50.680 it's the rhetoric that allows it to be transmitted i mean we might be able to create some kind of

01:32:57.180 rhetorical antidote i would hope that would be possible but up to this point we haven't been

01:33:02.520 able to and this isn't a new thing this has been going on for at least 10 years maybe 15 years

01:33:06.800 so unless we can find a rhetorical antidote soon to start pushing it back there there needs to be

01:33:13.920 a physical response because it is objectively resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands

01:33:20.120 of children like children are dying right now because of this and they're dying with the

01:33:25.460 assistance of a massive medical and government operation like it's just it's disgusting you know

01:33:32.820 in a lot of ways like you you look at this group this group that's come to dominate america and

01:33:39.300 once again do not listen to people who try and explain to you that this isn't a big deal and

01:33:46.240 that's something i'm noticing on our side where maybe it's fatigue maybe people are just tired

01:33:51.300 of hearing about it and tired of complaining about the same things over and over again but

01:33:55.580 in my mind that means it's more normalized like this is what normalization feels like the fact

01:34:02.240 that oh we're complaining about trainees again that's because they've essentially won uh and we

01:34:07.120 see if we cede the ground of interest then they're there forever and we will begin to forget a world

01:34:14.440 without them we will begin to forget of a world where we thought this thing called trans day of

01:34:21.180 vengeance was an odd thing but keeping in mind that this is just like a ragtag group of people

01:34:29.280 And as I was reading this, it actually did remind me of this book that I read recently.

01:34:34.480 And I didn't know what to do with it.

01:34:36.680 But I think I want to talk about it because I find it pretty interesting.

01:34:40.800 And I hope you will too.

01:34:42.680 This book was called The World of the Huns.

01:34:47.560 And this book was written by Otto J. Manichin-Helfin.

01:34:54.980 this book was published in 1973 which is a good time to read history books because you get

01:35:01.580 mentions of the Soviet Union and you get guys talking about race which you don't really get

01:35:06.500 them talking about before but the reason I wanted to talk about this was because a couple of reasons

01:35:13.540 one is that we talk so much about Rome and we talk so much about the Roman Empire and the Roman

01:35:21.240 Empire's relationship with the barbarians and, you know, the story of Rome ending with the barbarians

01:35:27.500 overwhelming them and flooding in. In 408, Alaric demanded to settle his people in the rich province

01:35:34.760 of Pannonia. The Western Roman Emperor Honorius steadfastly refused, but it was a hollow threat.

01:35:41.380 Alaric was well aware the Romans had no legions stationed in Italy and decided to take it by force,

01:35:46.740 culminating in the sack of rome in 410 a.d the roman empire was now fragmented and crumbling

01:35:54.460 the island province of britannia was abandoned in 410 with its legions transferred back to italy

01:36:00.840 and we never really talk about who those barbarians were and what are these barbarians

01:36:06.460 and the other reason i wanted to talk about them is because the huns are brought up a lot

01:36:11.380 when discussing history and they're related to the mongols and the vikings occasionally because

01:36:16.700 they're depicted as these like these boring savages that just sweep over and decimate everything

01:36:22.580 but um i wanted to know how they actually differed from the mongols and what i believe

01:36:29.460 having read this i believe that they were true barbarians and that's kind of what i wanted to

01:36:35.280 talk about like what are when we talk about barbarians who are the true barbarians because

01:36:39.140 i don't really think mongols would count as barbarians i think the story of the mongols as

01:36:44.260 we cover them were a distinct people an ethnic people and they kind of maintained that and they

01:36:50.060 can they maintained a sort of identity-based unity and sort of the vikings a lot of ways the vikings

01:36:55.800 maintained uh unity and identity especially in opposition to christianity um but if you don't

01:37:04.000 mind i'd like to kind of relate the topic we were just talking about to descriptions of barbarians

01:37:10.500 and how they actually act and kind of what happens to them

01:37:13.140 because I kind of see a lot of commonalities in their nature.

01:37:17.200 Maybe I'm reaching on that, but I think there's some symmetry there.

01:37:20.760 So the Huns, as a group, are kind of disjointed.

01:37:25.340 They're a bit more difficult to track down.

01:37:29.260 And when people talk about the Huns, they talk about Attila the Hun.

01:37:32.540 Attila the Hun is a noteworthy global figure,

01:37:34.880 and I'm not trying to downplay the importance of Attila the Hun.

01:37:37.580 The legend of Attila makes him into this ferocious, wild beast, which has a lot to do with the way in which Roman writers think about persons who come from the outer edge of the world.

01:37:51.580 I'm not trying to downplay the importance of the impact that the Huns had on the Roman Empire, but I do want to put forward an idea that we may overestimate the importance of the Huns and the importance of the barbarians, especially at the time.

01:38:08.180 so just to give a brief overview of who am i talking about with the huns here

01:38:12.280 so set the stage with the roman empire at this time the roman empire stretched from the atlantic

01:38:18.700 ocean to the black sea from hadrian's wall in england right to the border of africa massive

01:38:24.200 empire and the huns the barbarians were what existed outside of that it was a broad sweeping

01:38:30.860 term that encompassed a lot of different groups of people a lot of different tribes

01:38:35.360 The Huns themselves ruled the south of Russia into the Danube area.

01:38:41.500 And the first accounts of them around the 370s was when we started talking about the Huns and seeing them.

01:38:48.340 And unlike the Vikings, it's very hard to pinpoint, I think, specifically when you first started hearing about them.

01:38:54.200 They were just sort of ever-present.

01:38:56.660 The area in between Europe, the Middle East, India, China, and Siberia, known as Central Asia,

01:39:02.720 was conquered and settled by Indo-European migrants from the Pontic Caspian Steppe,

01:39:07.440 which for a time essentially made it an extension of Europe, demographically speaking,

01:39:12.620 or perhaps somewhere between Europe and the Middle East.

01:39:15.760 Over time, many invading tribes from the Far East intermixed with some of these Central Asians,

01:39:20.540 such as the Scythians, creating new people groups and nations even before the Huns.

01:39:24.940 Since at least 2,000 years in the past, Turkic peoples from eastern Siberia had been making conquests into Central Asia,

01:39:32.340 and even as far as the fringes of Europe, where they clashed not only with the Scythians, but also early Slavic and Germanic peoples.

01:39:39.780 And the Huns themselves are difficult to trace because at various points, different groups were called Huns, and the same with the Scythians.

01:39:48.780 So the Scythians were another group, but it's like anything over there, those are all the Scythians, which could have been like five different groups.

01:39:54.940 um it was kind of a cat and for a while hun itself was like a catch-all term for barbarians

01:40:01.020 and so going through the history it's kind of hard to track down who's referring to them

01:40:06.180 specifically um and another difference a lot of people would liken them to the mongols because

01:40:12.340 you got a genghis khan over here or chinghis khan rather you got till of the hun these two people

01:40:17.160 who you uh purportedly united all these tribes to take on a greater empire that was their neighbor

01:40:23.440 But what you found was that Attila the Hun came to power at the peak of barbarism, but there was no unity based on race, ethnicity, geography, or spirituality.

01:40:37.300 And one thing that he notes in the book, and I kind of like this, was that he refers to Huns frequently as half-breeds.

01:40:44.540 yeah he says like the the huns were half breeds and not together altogether asiatic

01:40:53.740 he's got like a whole section here this is a fascinating book that breaks it down by history

01:40:59.240 and then art and then warfare and then culture and he's got a whole part here about what the

01:41:05.700 huns actually looked like based on their arts that the rare art that we did locate

01:41:10.680 yeah he says like and he disguised he discusses this as if you were discussing physiognomy he's

01:41:16.400 like the wide shoulders and the broad chest um are for the racial diagnosis as irrelevant as the

01:41:23.540 narrow waist the great sitting height might be of more importance um uh jordan is one of the people

01:41:30.920 who documented them stressed their small stature and their swarthy complexion of the huns uh priscus

01:41:37.360 described Attila as swarthy

01:41:39.820 and of short stature.

01:41:41.820 Various others described them as

01:41:43.860 nimble and slender. Whereas their

01:41:45.880 height and their color of their skin did not

01:41:47.960 markedly set the Huns apart

01:41:49.460 from many Romans, the difference between them

01:41:51.820 and their Germanic and Atlantic

01:41:53.720 white-skinned and tall subjects and allies

01:41:56.100 must have been striking.

01:41:58.660 So, describing

01:42:00.160 them as these sort of squat

01:42:01.800 kind of Asian

01:42:03.080 mongrel people across

01:42:05.680 history is kind of interesting so it's not like they were really like a unified race in any way

01:42:11.480 and the point made in the book is that that's kind of what kept them disjointed over history

01:42:17.180 because Attila the Hun managed to unite them sort of like Genghis Khan did but he didn't try and

01:42:22.920 like unify them ethnically so they were routinely like betraying each other and there was they were

01:42:28.580 just really rampaging bands and they didn't really have like the Vikings did a war against

01:42:34.600 christianity they weren't like against any roman religion or the roman identity they were just

01:42:40.760 true fucking barbarians who uh even the first instance of uh coming across the barbarians

01:42:47.220 which is i believe in run the 364 um was their first uh intrusion into roman lands

01:42:54.640 it's generally agreed on that it was because of famine like they just showed up to steal slaves

01:43:00.320 and cattle and so they're just there because they were starving and they lived in the north

01:43:04.220 you know they came from the Caucasus they came from uh this place called Tene and Fasis

01:43:10.000 the extreme north and then that was their part of what was called Barbaricum so Barbaricum was

01:43:20.040 the region of the barbarians and that was also full of Visigoths full of Vandals full of Ostrogoths

01:43:27.180 these are all different groups they were always warring with each other in fact the Huns were

01:43:31.380 warring with the visigoths right up until the end so there was no sort of unity there but what they

01:43:36.780 did was they were always trying to just shake people down for money so they did what the mongols

01:43:41.660 did which is like we're going to invade you until you pay us to stop and that worked for a while

01:43:47.780 and what he notes in the book that i found very interesting was that this is evidence that rome

01:43:53.760 didn't really take them seriously which is that rome just stopped paying them rome called their

01:43:59.080 bluff repeatedly it's like okay fine attack us and then they didn't for a long time because they

01:44:03.700 knew that they couldn't win eventually they did but there was there were the argument made in

01:44:08.840 this book was that rome he was trying to counter this historical narrative that you see put forward

01:44:13.940 a lot which is you know the huns were this like terrifying barbarian race that shook rome to its

01:44:19.600 core this the author is making the case that rome didn't really actually give a shit and they saw

01:44:24.700 the huns as a nuisance just like the chinese saw the mongols more of a nuisance and i guess it has

01:44:30.780 more narrative strength that they were with this terrifying force but they were just more like

01:44:35.320 okay yeah you're you're taking all our peasants just fuck up here's some gold fuck off we have

01:44:40.000 other real wars to fight and they never saw them engage with huns as as a war and this is uh going

01:44:47.140 back to the book we discussed in the bronze age which is that the only reason the huns really won

01:44:52.200 in this author's opinion was because rome was already weakened in a hundred different ways

01:44:57.040 and this is this is what's so fascinating about the barbarian identity that i think challenges a

01:45:04.740 lot of historical narratives which is that they weren't scary and they're more like this will

01:45:09.460 sound rude but vermin like they move into places that are weaker and like um like a lot of these

01:45:15.880 i had an argument with someone the other day in some channel where they're talking about you know

01:45:19.520 these great barbarians like dude they're not fucking great just like they love targeting

01:45:25.260 women and children they love targeting cities that are already at war and the soldiers aren't

01:45:31.020 there just like we were talking about before huh like they they pick soft targets because you know

01:45:37.380 they're they can be seen as like admirable warriors but they're not fighting for a cause

01:45:42.600 these people are never unified they're fighting for their their god or their people they're just

01:45:47.540 taking what they can get and the way they fight is they have ways of fighting that work uniquely

01:45:52.880 well against fleeing women and children so you know like the mongols were as well the story we

01:45:58.840 get of the huns of being so scary is kind of just like the mongols most of what we know about the

01:46:05.880 huns was said from their enemies and from the people who were terrified of them mainly christians

01:46:13.160 even um you know saint augustine uh and socrates i love what we know about the huns is from letters

01:46:19.620 panicked letters they wrote to each other but these were letters from stuff they had heard

01:46:24.060 they had heard about this great barbarian race who clad themselves in bones and the flesh and

01:46:30.900 they boiled babies alive just like just like the mongols just like a lot of these other like the

01:46:35.680 vikings too like all the vikings like they wore the skins of their enemies that never happened

01:46:40.680 but you know that's the rumor mill spreading and so a lot of what we know is based on that but

01:46:46.480 from the historical records we have here it's like no they didn't really wear bones they had

01:46:51.000 leather armor um one thing that uh they would say about the huns was they were convinced that they

01:46:57.300 had like triangular or pointed heads but that was because they wore helmets that kind of went up to

01:47:03.300 a point so that would be like going to a fucking english bobby and thinking that their heads are

01:47:09.080 just like egghead tall but that's you know that's hega in the in the fog of illiteracy that's the

01:47:16.440 type of shit that gets circulated so again one of the claims made of the book is that you know

01:47:20.360 a lot of these barbarians they're they're not as scary as they would have thought but again they're

01:47:24.700 not as impressive as they would have thought either um and really at their peak there were

01:47:30.560 only two types of hun groups there was the huns who were at war with the romans these were uh led

01:47:37.100 by Attila. Attila who was

01:47:39.240 this great unifier of

01:47:41.180 the Huns but after Attila

01:47:43.320 died you see the

01:47:45.120 Huns fall apart pretty fast. His sons

01:47:47.280 try and take control of

01:47:49.180 the Huns but really what happens

01:47:51.120 is so you got Attila leading an

01:47:53.120 army against Rome and the rest of them

01:47:55.160 are what known are the Scythian hordes

01:47:56.800 who literally just want what they

01:47:59.020 were promised. What they promised was loot.

01:48:01.840 They're just we'll follow you as long

01:48:03.060 as you get us paid. So you know

01:48:05.160 there's no difference between them and just bandits so it's like okay are these really a

01:48:10.300 people you know they have you know art and stuff they've got some some sense of themselves but

01:48:16.060 they never would reach the level of the romans so some people will say that the romans called

01:48:20.700 them barbarians as some form of you know ethnic bigotry but i'm like or they were calling it as

01:48:26.980 they saw it they were calling it as sort of a confused people who you could only get them in

01:48:32.080 the same room as long as you were offering good raping but if you couldn't they would just wander

01:48:37.040 off you know so here's a part on their housing that i find interesting um the huns said a manis

01:48:46.000 uh one of these early early documentaries you can always tell when someone's an early historian

01:48:50.620 because they got one name he said the huns are never protected by any building but they avoid

01:48:56.200 they avoid buildings like the tomb which are set apart from everyday use for not even a hut

01:49:02.020 thatched with reed can be found among them but roaming at large amid the mountains and the woods

01:49:07.120 they learn from the cradle to endure cold hunger and thirst when away from home they never enter

01:49:14.000 a house unless compelled by extreme necessity for they think they are not safe when staying

01:49:19.080 under a roof so you know there's some evidence that the huns had a command of agriculture but

01:49:24.960 you have a group of people that what made them interesting was that they were were so savage

01:49:30.980 and they just slept outside and you know this is why at various points the romans would employ the

01:49:37.140 huns because the huns were good warriors like they were good at fighting because they were raised like

01:49:42.700 absolute savages and you know the hunnic horses were notorious for being the strongest horses so

01:49:48.920 you'd want these huns who were famous like the mongols for going into war on horseback you know

01:49:54.420 but the reason their huns uh the hun horses were so strong was because they would just mistreat

01:49:59.260 them so it's kind of like you're looking at orcs from lord of the rings you're looking at people

01:50:04.960 who are riding these horses with fucking whip wounds and like knives sticking out of them

01:50:10.400 because they just didn't know how to take care of horses so it's almost like these are just

01:50:14.320 people who emerged under what we might call harsh darwinian conditions so i i just found that story

01:50:21.540 interesting where if you remove that strong ethnic identity you have a group of people who are

01:50:27.600 seen clustered just because they emerge from harsh or winning conditions of the north

01:50:32.220 and then the story of the huns is as they started getting introduced to more civilized places you

01:50:41.100 start to see them disappear just like the mongols you saw like one group of mongols just kind of

01:50:45.940 become chinese because they don't have the wherewithal to withstand assimilation and that's

01:50:52.660 why you know the huns portrayed as this great conquering race kind of but i think the historical

01:50:59.080 narrative makes more sense if they're just kind of a nuisance uh and it's like if you look at what

01:51:06.360 what their diet was they go into the diet in the book their diet was primarily horse meat and horse

01:51:11.100 milk you know like they didn't have a command of cooking or dishes you know um they fought on a

01:51:17.340 horseback usually with scavenged weapons no real organization to speak of unlike the vikings and

01:51:23.720 the mongols uh their primary mode of combat was the bow and arrow they had they were famous for

01:51:30.560 these very very strong bows but in that same sense you know you can just take their bows you know

01:51:36.800 which is actually what the romans did like they'd get them involved and kind of learn how they made

01:51:41.040 their bows and edged them out later as as they went um there's one thing just a cool piece of

01:51:48.260 two pieces of information i learned from this book that i didn't know going into it

01:51:51.660 um the huns like a lot of different groups at the time had two kings so you would have like a king

01:52:00.760 that was responsible for conquest and you would actually have a separate king that was for a

01:52:06.620 spirituality and religion and their spirituality was largely shamanistic it was about sacrifices

01:52:13.440 it was about luck it was about doing rituals before war it wasn't anything that we would

01:52:18.800 understand not like below paganism i think if you were to like rank them but i didn't know that that

01:52:24.500 it was common for tribes to have two kings responsible for two aspects of the people

01:52:31.280 that would be operating at the same time um just one other thing that i thought was kind of cool

01:52:36.320 was that when Attila the Hun died,

01:52:42.140 they were all in mourning.

01:52:44.100 And the Huns, and this is documented,

01:52:46.120 the Huns engaged in an act called Strava.

01:52:49.940 And Strava is when they're in mourning,

01:52:52.400 they cut all their hair off

01:52:53.960 and they disfigure their faces with knives and wounds.

01:52:58.640 And the reason they do that is because

01:53:00.860 that's the only way they will admit to crying.

01:53:04.120 They're crying like men.

01:53:06.320 And crying like men is bleeding from the wounds on your face,

01:53:10.220 which I never heard of before,

01:53:13.300 but I think that's actually pretty cool.

01:53:17.160 The history of the Huns isn't really significant until if you actually look

01:53:20.700 at the battles they engaged in, like, you know, the Huns, you know,

01:53:24.420 they tried to invade Gaul and they failed and then they were chased.

01:53:28.220 They tried to invade Italy and they massacred Milan,

01:53:31.120 but they eventually got chased out of there too.

01:53:33.200 like the Huns were making kind of a name for themselves but as they were making a name for

01:53:38.660 themselves they started to lose battles and had to retreat back into the Danube and back into the

01:53:44.500 frozen north so like the history of the Huns is more of them kind of conquering lands but not

01:53:50.500 really hold even the lands they conquered they didn't hold for very long and they only sort of

01:53:55.380 moved in as this like mass organism later to occupy the corpse of Rome and occupy the corpse

01:54:02.560 of these sort of dead regions that no one really gave a shit about yeah and really after attila the

01:54:09.780 hun dies his son takes charge for a minute then his son is killed in battle and his head is brought

01:54:16.740 to constantinople uh paraded through the streets and then after that the huns essentially dissolved

01:54:23.200 um so the huns as we know them as a conquering force lasted about two generations as a you know

01:54:31.840 as a formidable force that could really, you know,

01:54:35.780 strike out in every direction and conquer land.

01:54:37.980 After that, they just, you know, fell back to their regions.

01:54:42.120 And he summarizes here pretty good.

01:54:44.140 I think this is a fair treatment.

01:54:46.120 This is actually an essay by Paul Alexander.

01:54:48.580 He says,

01:54:49.040 During the late 4th and early 5th centuries after Christ,

01:54:52.680 a people of Asiatic origin, the Huns, overran a number of tribes

01:54:57.140 then living in Eastern and Central Europe.

01:55:00.040 Their onslaught upset the military balance that had existed for centuries between the inhabitants of the Roman Empire with its Greco-Roman civilization and the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples beyond the frontiers.

01:55:13.460 The Huns thus ushered in a period of the barbarian invasions.

01:55:17.880 They left no written records.

01:55:19.720 A study of the Huns, therefore, must be based largely on historical sources composed by residents of the Roman Empire.

01:55:26.800 as a consequence all information on the huns and their subjects and allies is embedded in materials

01:55:32.900 written by and for men viewing the movements and activities of barbarian peoples beyond

01:55:38.160 the imperial frontiers um so basically yeah that's essentially summarizing what we did like

01:55:43.540 they ushered in the barbarian invasions but the barbarian invasions weren't terribly impressive

01:55:49.320 in my opinion and i i don't know i think people are kind of reaching when they look at the huns

01:55:55.900 as you know this formidable force that really threatened the roman empire what do you think

01:56:01.160 of all that i know that was kind of a wandering meandering one but i really just wanted

01:56:05.820 to to put the magnifying glass on true barbarians because that word is bandied around a lot but

01:56:12.260 if we're going to call people barbarians i think we should know who the actual barbarians were and

01:56:16.960 separate them from other historical groups what do you think about that yeah yeah i think that's

01:56:23.600 reasonable they sound like you know just eminently savage like defined by a total lack of civilization

01:56:30.260 as it would be defined otherwise it's and barbarian like barbarians as you know a savage

01:56:35.620 people but also a starving people and also a disorganized people and you were saying earlier

01:56:42.220 and i feel this way too sometimes because you know in our context as canadians as as westerners

01:56:48.120 we get this thrown at us all the time that we don't have a culture and yet you'll take any

01:56:52.820 random band of 150 savages all mutts from different corners of the earth who happened

01:56:59.360 to raid together for 30 years and that's a historical civilization right but but not us

01:57:04.880 so yeah it's a little it is a little bit um i'm a little bitter about it especially given the fact

01:57:09.920 that what they were known for was like going into villages when the men were away and raping the

01:57:14.820 women taking the grain and leaving and still starving because they're that stupid like they

01:57:19.320 just sound like they should have like i wish the romans had have exterminated them all i don't know

01:57:23.840 yeah well it's like they're like they're bums they're homeless people yeah they're fucking

01:57:28.640 yeah they're bums it's it's like you know even the mongols like their diet wasn't just like they

01:57:33.880 loved horses but they also didn't just eat their horses you know what i mean like they they would

01:57:38.600 hunt but they say yeah the huns like they they ride horses and they eat them and they drink the

01:57:42.500 milk and they bathe in the piss and then what were their weapons for well they just find them

01:57:47.220 mostly you know their their armor it's like it would be better if it was bones it would be better

01:57:54.440 if they were orcs and i think you need to know about barbarians to recontextualize that it really

01:58:01.220 did seem to have no unification other than its relationship to rome and the brief period where

01:58:08.220 it was united by attila but barbaricum itself was always you know full of the huns and the visigoths

01:58:14.500 and the Scythians and they were always at odds anyway and for that brief moment they're united

01:58:19.980 but they never really achieved rising out of that negative space defined by its relationship to Rome

01:58:29.220 but I still did want to show how this non-unified multi-ethnic largely unintelligent desperate

01:58:38.980 savage group could be corralled by a charismatic leader and get a charismatic momentum behind them

01:58:46.260 and could be and that momentum was defined by their existence within that negative space

01:58:54.880 and i just don't reject the modern characterization of the hunnic tribes as something that is

01:59:04.400 so distinct and interesting i have no problem with defining the barbarian hordes as simply

01:59:11.060 that which is not rome because i think that which is not rome was the animating spirit behind them

01:59:18.920 as well and they had their own art yes they had their own values they had their own gods as we

01:59:24.640 saw in their own rituals however i don't think it was as developed obviously as a lot of the other

01:59:30.500 civilizations at the time and even a lot of the civilizations that came before because remember

01:59:36.360 at this time across the way there there's still China and that is not to say that they were not

01:59:42.820 engaging with the Roman army and achieving victory that is not to say that they were not

01:59:46.940 sieging cities that isn't to say that there wasn't valid concern over their conquest because the

01:59:53.540 Hunnic tribes did conquer a lot and they did win battles and they were notorious warriors but

01:59:59.820 But like a lot of these barbarian tribes, they loved exerting force on peasants.

02:00:06.160 They loved collecting slaves and stealing and exerting and extorting the empire through these soft targets.

02:00:15.060 Not only the extorting, but also they just got to take and rape everything as well.

02:00:19.200 and i suppose what i was getting at was unless they take the steps to evolve into something

02:00:26.360 approaching a coherent ethnicity or a coherent group in opposition to a religion like the vikings

02:00:35.300 or the ethnicity like the mongols unless there is something generative from beneath them that is

02:00:42.060 also their weakness that momentum of sort of the alt multi-ethnic disconnected savagery you know

02:00:50.420 it's written in their dna that they can that will be the the cause of their failure my interest is

02:00:57.320 in this phenomena almost this ontological phenomena called barbaricum and the relationship

02:01:05.340 of barbaricum in the modern era to the center and how my fear is that

02:01:13.320 if the barbarians over time manage to craft an identity for themselves however it is they do that

02:01:22.360 usually through internal struggle but if they do that they can become an identity and they can

02:01:28.340 pose a much much greater threat and when i say that i mean modern barbaricum i mean

02:01:35.280 modern barbarians that define themselves outside of the center and are possessed by a desire

02:01:41.760 to collaborate with each other to overtake that center and only really being able to do that

02:01:48.500 once the center is weak and having that relationship with it where they're always

02:01:52.180 trying to extort it but i'm interested in exploring modern ways this negative barbaricum

02:01:59.400 can manifest in advanced and complex societies even within the society itself um and maybe this

02:02:07.040 book was uncharitable but this is one of the more academic books that i've seen on the subject i

02:02:12.100 didn't want to go just for you know an airport paperback here's how here's how badass and metal

02:02:19.160 Attila the Hun was you know this it goes deep and over the course of 500 pages about their sculptures

02:02:25.580 about their art about their dietary habits which I didn't get into on this obviously I had them in

02:02:31.400 notes but I didn't think people would find that very interesting it's very very dry stuff I found

02:02:35.060 it interesting but to me all that information and all that data serves the central story that

02:02:42.620 you know they were just they were just like the people ruining san francisco

02:02:46.900 um anyway we that's that's good i know it got kept you pretty long so we can end it there

02:02:53.240 uh thank you very much thanks for taking the time today no worries buddy good one

02:02:57.040 i'll talk to you soon see you

02:02:58.360 I am here with a very, very special guest.

02:03:18.260 I'm speaking with the Z-Man.

02:03:21.420 A lot of people will recognize that name,

02:03:23.380 but if you don't, do yourself a favor right now

02:03:26.120 and check out the Z-Blog.

02:03:28.360 at thezman.com you're going to find that updated daily with posts on a wide range of topics

02:03:35.180 including geopolitical events war sports culture tech economics whatever you could want it's a

02:03:41.620 great spot for content he's also the host of the z man power hour located on that very same website

02:03:48.060 and several other uh podcast syndication platforms you can also check out his sub stack for all these

02:03:53.980 sub stack guys who listen at the dissident dot sub stack dot com and first of all i'd just like

02:04:01.820 to say thank you very much for taking the time mr z man oh my pleasure and sorry for the boomer

02:04:07.680 tech i've been listening to ramsey paul too much we're watching him fiddling around with his

02:04:11.520 well you know i was listening one of the great joys in life is um there's this a great show

02:04:17.360 hosted by devin stack called black pilled and a common theme is that his internet is always going

02:04:23.040 out. And so I'm starting to think technical difficulties are just one of the perks of being

02:04:28.380 a dissident right content creator. Yeah. I mean, I ran into this last week. I record my show on

02:04:35.160 Thursdays, usually it's Thursday, sometimes Wednesday night, kind of depends, but I was

02:04:40.480 prepared to do the recording and we had a lightning storm here and I have everything shielded. I'm

02:04:46.620 usually pretty confident about this stuff, but I made the mistake of not running my ether cable

02:04:51.580 through uh through a surge protector and uh power uh power surge went through it hit my my pc fried

02:04:59.600 it fried a bunch of other stuff oh shit connected to it and and of course that's the machine i use

02:05:03.800 to do all my recording on i'm like oh well you know guess what the show's canceled which you

02:05:08.940 know it's just just part of life you know that's one of the few i think acceptable reasons for

02:05:14.320 missing a show it's like oh no it was destroyed by god yeah you know it's it's funny i mean i've

02:05:19.800 been on i i've actually why was i this was a while ago i forget i was with jared taylor we were on

02:05:25.760 some sort of like um the live stream thing and uh he and i were talking about something and we

02:05:31.500 suddenly realized that the host his internet had gone out and he wasn't there anymore and so we

02:05:37.960 just filled like the rest of the show off and then we said well we don't have anything else to talk

02:05:41.320 about and but we couldn't turn the uh the live stream off so we just disconnected same thing

02:05:46.800 happened to me and my uh co-host who couldn't be here today but uh we were on with this young guy

02:05:52.200 named jay burden who was a very very popular show that i i admire but his internet went out and then

02:05:57.420 it's just it was just us for like 15 minutes i'm like well i guess it's our podcast now we're just

02:06:01.940 shooting the shit for everyone yeah it's it's one of those things i mean think about i learned about

02:06:08.000 the podcasting racket though entirely by accident in fact i'm the only reason i did a podcast at all

02:06:14.180 is this Canadian guy he was a radio guy and he was getting into podcasting this was five or six

02:06:19.460 years ago now maybe something like that and he hunted me down and said uh I'd like to interview

02:06:24.480 you I said look I don't have any audio equipment I just and I don't feel like going through the

02:06:28.400 hassle he goes no look I will show you everything you need to do it's real simple if you just give

02:06:33.240 me the interview I'm like okay so uh you know he walked me through you know the basic stuff

02:06:37.080 and I've never been into audio and it's not that hard but uh so I did the interview okay and that

02:06:43.000 was he was he was a nice guy and and uh he's still kicking around uh kevin michael grace i think his

02:06:47.460 name is oh cool and um yeah and uh but anyway uh it went up and all these people started sending me

02:06:53.620 emails saying oh i never thought you really sounded like that and you have this radio voice

02:06:57.520 you know and it kind of it became a running joke that i sounded like uh i was on npr or something

02:07:02.620 but uh so i thought well what the heck maybe i'll try a podcast and uh what i learned though is that

02:07:08.500 if it shouldn't be too professional you know if it's too professional it doesn't really work as

02:07:13.700 well you know and i noticed this for myself i don't listen to the highly produced stuff

02:07:17.220 i want to listen to a guy who's you know doing a history podcast from his office at the university

02:07:22.380 you know yeah you know that kind of thing you're trying to capture an electricity and that's

02:07:26.840 something we try to do on our show too and you you go astray when you're like okay i'm going to

02:07:31.500 start building in these segments and each segment's going to have a stinger kind of like you know

02:07:36.360 daytime radio where it's like everything's blocked in and when it's more free-flowing

02:07:41.380 you could actually have fun and kind of wander into areas you wouldn't be familiar with but then

02:07:46.500 the flip side of that is a lot of people who stream now just bullshit for nine hours straight

02:07:52.760 i'm like okay well we can't just do that i can't just the show can't just be me reading the news

02:07:58.460 and then people pay me money that's the far end of that yeah you know there is a definitely a

02:08:04.360 middle ground there I one of the things that I figured out I was doing the segment business

02:08:08.840 because John Derbyshire was probably the first conservative podcaster ever yeah and he does that

02:08:14.780 he does segments and he has this little belly rings and so I thought well what the hell it

02:08:19.120 worked for him I'll give it a shot I used to do that but it was a lot of work and and then one

02:08:23.300 day I don't know what I was thinking I just I didn't have a lot of time so I just turned on

02:08:27.260 the mic and I said okay I'm just going to talk for an hour and I got a bunch of people saying

02:08:31.080 you know what you should do it that way that's much better there you go yeah follow your interest

02:08:36.300 if something once you trust that if this is interesting to me it's going to be interesting

02:08:40.260 to other people and i will caution you against going down the uh the sound effect and post

02:08:45.660 production road because on our show that i've over i've gone insane with the amount of sound

02:08:51.860 effects that i started dropping in and playing around with and with background music and it's

02:08:57.400 kind of like getting a tattoo soon you're going to start getting shit on your face and neck if you

02:09:01.520 start putting in like air horn sound effects and stuff yeah i i played around i use audacity and

02:09:09.440 what i did is i take out the breathiness you know the the sound of uh breathing and i figured that

02:09:15.120 out professionally i could actually see my own i can see my arms i can see now i can see all those

02:09:20.740 those uh little ticks that we all have yes it'll drive you crazy it'll drive you crazy once you

02:09:25.680 start seeing your little imperfections visually in front of you. And what I figured out is that

02:09:32.380 I know what they look like. I do a three or four minute little talk at first, just off the top of

02:09:39.360 my head. It has all of those in there. And then I just do the remove tool and it's good enough.

02:09:45.660 It doesn't have to be any better than that. So it takes a good five minutes to do. But yeah,

02:09:50.640 I used to try to, I mean, really try to edit the thing and all. And the thing is, no one

02:09:55.500 appreciated it and and uh it was so uh the one time i just turned on the mic and talked for an

02:10:00.520 hour and people liked it better like there's the lesson you know i'm putting all this work in trying

02:10:05.240 to make myself happy about a product that people just want to hear what i have to say they don't

02:10:08.380 care if it's a little weird you know yeah as long as the audio quality is good and yours is good and

02:10:13.860 that's why i recommend your show to people because it's a good it doesn't it's not like choppy and

02:10:19.480 staticky and also it's just an hour long and again i i'm the worst for this because our episodes are

02:10:25.880 like four hours long but an hour is actually a nice convenient chunk of time to get an idea across

02:10:32.820 you know yeah i i figured out well first of all i'm usually after about an hour's worth of talking

02:10:38.200 i i get a lot far less interesting than i am in the first hour but the other thing is you start

02:10:43.740 to get tired and and i think people also have a cap about an hour's what they're willing to

02:10:48.900 tolerate because you think about what people are doing they're in the car um i i can't tell you

02:10:53.580 there's it's always funny the women always tell me that they listen to me either taking a walk

02:10:58.380 or going to sleep which is kind of always makes me laugh you know uh that was uh um jared taylor's

02:11:06.420 wife years ago i met her for the first time because i think he had just they were just

02:11:11.500 engaged to point something like that but anyway she says oh i recognize your voice i listen to

02:11:16.680 you while I go to sleep at night. And I just started laughing. I'm like, okay, I'm not sure

02:11:21.700 what that's supposed to mean. But if I'm putting you to sleep, well, good for me, I guess.

02:11:26.620 You learn a lot about your ideas by seeing who likes your ideas and what audience that appeals

02:11:32.120 to. And I always like podcasting because I was always a radio guy growing up. I liked radio. I

02:11:38.500 liked Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony, things like that. And the joke with them was they were really

02:11:44.980 big with truckers long haul truckers and i don't know if that's what they liked but it just ended

02:11:49.840 up so all the guys who call in were truckers and i noticed with our show uh well interestingly

02:11:56.320 enough a lot of our audience is in the uk it's in europe generally but there's a lot of british

02:12:02.820 and a lot of irish people and because we're a canadian show and so and we we oftentimes discuss

02:12:09.340 canadian news almost no canadians listen to this show it's all americans and europeans

02:12:15.540 it is the weirdest thing i don't get i have a few canadians in my readership i know about

02:12:20.800 but when i've i looked like on the site you can i could break out where you know the ip origins are

02:12:26.360 and even with vpns and stuff you can generally get an idea as to where your readership is and i

02:12:31.580 have a whole bunch of people in europe i like 15 of my readership comes out of russia but i have

02:12:38.040 more fins in my readership than canadians we got so many fins too yeah well first of all they all

02:12:44.340 speak english uh their english is fantastic and i and there's actually uh some of my stuff gets

02:12:49.720 translated into finnish so uh because one of the my readers has a finnish site and he you know i

02:12:55.840 tell him whatever you want to do and he just you know translates some of this stuff for his site

02:12:59.180 and and i i guess because i've been to finland and i've said nice things about finland it's a

02:13:03.220 small country so they're like hey this guy he's he's okay he's he's a good guy he likes finland

02:13:07.880 so but i you know i mean it makes sense it's kind of like when someone says something nice about you

02:13:13.620 know rhode island or maybe like if you're in canada you know nova scotia you know if you say

02:13:17.360 something that's about the nova scotia then you know you're gonna have all of them on your side

02:13:20.640 yeah that's the biggest way to get a canadian on your side is to notice them um because canadians

02:13:26.780 have it's strange you know i don't like to get down to canadians too much because the canadian

02:13:31.360 fans i do have they are very very patriotic but i i noticed with a lot of kind of lay canadians

02:13:37.620 is they're very insecure and they love being held up and that kind of guides the canadian foreign

02:13:43.620 policy in my opinion i'm sure you're aware of uh justin trudeau and a lot of people don't like

02:13:49.140 justin trudeau um i actually think justin trudeau is good in the sense that he's very very stupid

02:13:55.600 and he would do a lot there a lot more damage would be done if we had a competent person

02:14:00.800 with his political persuasion as it stands now everyone kind of knows he's dumb and so he can't

02:14:06.920 really accomplished too much but one thing about the canadian and every politician i know currently

02:14:12.260 is like this is they're desperate to be recognized on the world stage and if you look at what the

02:14:18.400 canadian government does you know year over year it's always trying to like be the leader of some

02:14:24.420 global movement well because we won't be taken seriously we want the u.n to you know give us

02:14:31.180 a headlock and tussle our hair and you know it's very insecure and that's bothered me more than

02:14:35.980 anything about us on the world stage, at least. You see that a lot with Europeans too. It's like

02:14:41.700 the Finns used to be pretty sane about this stuff, but like the Danish, I don't care. I don't give a

02:14:46.100 crap at all. You watch a Danish, like I was in Denmark. I like watching the Danish public affairs

02:14:54.640 shows. They're concerned about the pothole on 12th street. Europe, who cares? We're surrounded

02:15:01.760 by idiots we're not going to pay attention to them on our you know in our time it's a very very

02:15:05.920 strange thing but on the other hand like um the french you know they're french political class

02:15:11.960 they they're always looking for some reason to pretend that people care about the french

02:15:15.820 political class you know and um you know the the um of course the fins are you know they got that

02:15:21.320 goofy woman what the heck is her name the bimbo they have as a prime minister yeah are we is that

02:15:25.520 that's santa marin woman or yes yeah that's it yeah yeah and uh but you know it you see a fair

02:15:31.680 amount of was the europeans that sort of you know it's it's sad what's happened to them you know

02:15:36.260 they they should hate america because you know you can kind of understand the america canada thing

02:15:40.580 because you know let's face that canada is smaller than the united states and so you're always going

02:15:43.780 to have that sort of um big brother little brother thing going on perfectly reasonable it makes total

02:15:49.000 sense but the europeans should be looking at at north america and saying look that's just still

02:15:55.140 a savage land we just forget about this but they but they're not they they they want to be us so

02:16:02.320 bad it's sad i mean i i i do find it i'm going to europe well next month i'm going to be in europe

02:16:08.500 i'm going to be in the baltics and then uh slovakia and uh i guarantee that every cab i'll

02:16:14.540 be in every train i'll be in here i'm an american and they want to tell me about joe biden or yeah

02:16:19.780 well and that's a phenomenon that i have not had much exposure to because i haven't traveled as

02:16:24.420 much as I'd like to. The COVID vax mandate really threw a wrench in that. That's why I haven't been

02:16:30.480 able to get to America because I didn't get the vaccine. Hopefully I can soon. But I would hear

02:16:35.680 stories about people who go to Russia, go to Latvia, go to wherever it may be. And they have

02:16:41.900 got an encyclopedic knowledge of American TV and American culture. And they got very, very strong

02:16:49.000 opinions about you know tucker carlson or you know like and sometimes i forget i'm like you know

02:16:54.660 the american cultural machine you know there's this story i've told before um christ i forget

02:17:00.940 i'm gonna butcher it but it was um it might have been edward dunn or something but he was in a cab

02:17:06.620 in this sort of third world country um in eastern not maybe third world but somewhere in eastern

02:17:11.260 europe and it was very run down maybe it was estonia i don't know but he's in the cab and

02:17:16.140 all around him is poverty all around him is you know children in rags and then you know the guy

02:17:21.560 learns that this individual's american he turns around and he said you know i i want you to know

02:17:27.080 that i feel very bad about the poverty crisis in america because he watches the news and america

02:17:33.380 all they know is about america's poor and they see ghettos and stuff and these people are eating

02:17:38.060 their fucking boiled shoes but but but they're within always within the context of that media

02:17:44.840 And that's just, it's a mind-blowing thing to be exposed to, I think.

02:17:49.240 Yeah, I, when I first started going to Europe, it was really strange to how much they knew

02:17:53.480 about, I couldn't, because let's face it, I'm just a dumb American.

02:17:56.420 We always assume, this is true about Americans, we just assume that we don't know anything

02:18:01.240 about the world.

02:18:02.180 We're a bunch of clodhoppers from, you know, the wilderness.

02:18:05.440 We just assume this.

02:18:06.640 And so, you know, you go to Europe and you just expect it to be full of sophisticated

02:18:11.540 people and all this.

02:18:12.380 And instead, they're all talking about, you know, and, you know, the first cab driver I'm with, he's, oh, you're from Iraq.

02:18:16.660 He wants to talk to me about, you know, American politics, Barack Obama or something.

02:18:20.840 But but it's funny how much they consume our content.

02:18:23.740 I was in I was in Ireland, in Dublin, and I was waiting for some some people, some friends.

02:18:29.280 So I went to a pub and we're going to meet there.

02:18:31.760 And there was, I don't know, three o'clock in the afternoon or something.

02:18:34.960 And there was three or four younger guys.

02:18:37.200 And they heard me, you know, so they walk up and go, oh, you're a yank.

02:18:40.540 And I said, yeah.

02:18:41.160 And so we talked a little bit and the guy says, well, what part of America are you from?

02:18:45.700 And I said, Baltimore.

02:18:46.840 And they started whispering to each other.

02:18:48.540 And the guy looks at me, he goes, that's impossible.

02:18:50.660 And I said, what do you mean?

02:18:51.700 He goes, you're not black.

02:18:55.260 So I pulled out my driver's license and I showed him and I had my driver's license.

02:18:58.420 I said, see, it says there right there.

02:18:59.520 And they're like, how's that possible?

02:19:01.100 And it hit me.

02:19:02.180 They, what they knew about Baltimore was from the TV show, The Wire.

02:19:05.400 Exactly.

02:19:05.680 So they just assumed that that's what it was.

02:19:07.480 And I'm like, I mean, it is kind of like that, but it's not, you know, I don't live in the ghetto.

02:19:12.340 And it's the same thing with me, too, like as just as a Canadian until, you know, I've looked into it more recently, obviously.

02:19:18.980 But when I was growing up, Baltimore, you would know number one most violent city in America, black majority population.

02:19:26.260 And you equate those two is like, oh, that's just a black city that's shooting each other.

02:19:30.080 And you do forget that it's a city with, you know, lots of there's nice areas of Baltimore, right?

02:19:35.480 yeah and and well of course i had some fun with these guys i said oh well you know you get used

02:19:39.860 to it everyone carries a gun and uh you know there's certain times of day where there's more

02:19:43.580 gunfire than others and i was just you know having a good time with it and uh and and you know they

02:19:48.700 just had no idea they had no frame of reference to be able to qualify what i was saying so you

02:19:53.500 know i was laying it on thick but you know i mean baltimore is is what it is i mean it's like st

02:19:58.020 louis one of my readers and i've met him and his wife uh at events that he's a really great guy

02:20:03.200 And he's in St. Louis. And so we have this kind of friendly composition as to who's going to have the most murderous year. And, you know, it is I mean, it is a dangerous place and there are things that you have to be careful of. But there are nice places, too.

02:20:16.520 Well, let me ask you this. As someone who just knows Baltimore from the stuff I've heard in my disjointed schizophrenic chats that we're all a part of, is there a crash course in Baltimore? What can you tell us about Baltimore that might surprise people or highlights your experience living there?

02:20:34.840 well i mean the city has some extremely beautiful architecture it's an old city you know baltimore

02:20:43.520 was around you know at the very beginning it has all the history that america has there's

02:20:48.040 places for the revolutionary war hell out in the western part of state there's you know the things

02:20:53.400 for the french and indian wars you know and you got um you know of course the war of 1812

02:20:58.480 obviously the star spangled banner american anthem was written there and uh right in the

02:21:04.460 middle of baltimore and uh the civil war of course is there's tons of stuff happening it's a place

02:21:09.820 that's full of history but it's also full of great architecture some beautiful federalist

02:21:13.340 architecture and it's sadly it's in some really some of it's a really dodgy neighborhoods but

02:21:18.080 it is absolutely beautiful it's a city you drive around in and you think you know what

02:21:22.440 it shouldn't have to be this way somebody with some pride who had some sense that this is my

02:21:27.720 home and my place and had real power would clean this up in a hurry and uh but you know you're not

02:21:33.680 allowed to do that but it is it has a lot of charm to it in a lot of ways and and it's it's a kind of

02:21:39.320 a tragic place i think is a way to think of it because it doesn't have to be this way but it is

02:21:45.440 and it's it's a victim of things that i don't think anyone could have done anything about

02:21:49.660 you know in 1955 the city was like 19 black and it had very low crime people felt safe it was a

02:21:59.580 you know, it was a productive city. I mean, lots of jobs, a lot of pride, but then it tipped over

02:22:05.800 in that 20% range. And then what happens is a funny little bit of statistics. The black-on-white

02:22:12.680 crime is such a, you know, a lopsided thing. It's eight, 10 to one, something like that. So, you

02:22:17.420 know, in other words, for every one white-on-black crime, it'll be 10 black-on-white crimes. Well,

02:22:22.100 what happens is that as the black population grows, the number of people who know someone

02:22:26.920 who was a victim of black crime skyrockets and and it's at sense even though you may not have

02:22:32.800 been a victim of crime you know people who were and you know more and more people who were so you

02:22:37.760 get this sense that hey we got to get out and that's what you had this huge white flight and uh

02:22:42.180 and of course there's a very large jewish population here so you had a jewish flight out

02:22:45.360 of the city into the west side and so like some of the really hardest thumping neighborhoods will

02:22:50.480 have old broken down um synagogues in them well you know it's funny that i remember reading about

02:22:57.340 this a few years ago we covered this on the show with i believe it was bowling alone that book

02:23:03.000 and it goes into detail i'm pretty sure it was that book but you can track over time there is

02:23:08.520 that like you had said that 20 tipping point where once a community reaches that it actually

02:23:13.740 triggers a flight and it accelerates towards whatever that growing minority is and you see

02:23:19.420 that all across America. Yeah. I had a friend who lived out in the West side, uh, inner suburb

02:23:26.440 and, uh, you know, he, it was a nice, you know, uh, single family homes, townhouses. He was in

02:23:31.660 a townhouse and his wife and this was, you know, they were getting ready to have kids. So they

02:23:35.620 were looking to buy a single family house and, but they liked the neighborhood. And then he had

02:23:40.780 like one black neighbor. And then all of a sudden all the houses went up for sale and it turned

02:23:46.520 completely black he was like the last white guy to leave last the fucking eacons oh it was amazing

02:23:52.080 and the funny thing goes is like all of his neighbors were jewish except for the one black

02:23:55.060 guy and him and i said see the problem you had is that you didn't go to the meeting they had a

02:24:00.600 meeting and they didn't invite you and now you laughed but you know it seemed like what it was

02:24:04.980 but i mean it very well who knows but it uh it was pretty funny though i mean it was just instant

02:24:10.120 though wasn't funny for him what's interesting is there's this other book we we talked about

02:24:14.180 on the show, and you're probably aware of it because you did a lot of sort of that James

02:24:17.280 Burnham related stuff, which we'll get to in a little bit. But it's this book called Exit Voice

02:24:22.360 and Loyalty. And the main thrust of that book is it studied sort of the exodus of talent from

02:24:29.940 highly successful firms. And what it noticed was, you know, but it was in firms, but it was also in

02:24:36.080 communities. So what they noticed was whenever something is going wrong in an organization or

02:24:41.760 community that that and maybe this is also the Pareto principle something I know you talked about

02:24:47.140 that recently on your show as well but it's like the top performers and the most intelligent people

02:24:51.800 are always the first to leave and there's something about the most dialed in intelligent people where

02:24:58.480 just statistically they tend to be the ones who don't stay and change things they just run and

02:25:03.820 the moment and once they smell danger they're the first run then the high quality people leave and

02:25:08.900 And this is very evident in school districts.

02:25:12.760 So, you know, once you start some busing programs, the smartest families are going to leave.

02:25:17.100 And now all you have are like the new kind of lower classes and almost the lower end

02:25:22.180 of the people who were there before.

02:25:23.660 And that's all you have left.

02:25:25.140 And those people, the United thing about them is they tend not to advocate for themselves.

02:25:30.180 The types of people who would advocate seem to rarely do that.

02:25:34.120 yeah it is and it's funny to bring that up in the corporate space because i have observed that

02:25:39.180 myself i've been a part of that myself and uh yeah it's it's a and it's actually happening

02:25:44.680 at a wholesale level i think i've talked about this as a crisis of competence and look i'm i've

02:25:51.540 been busy for the last three years where i can't really take a vacation or anything like that i

02:25:55.560 mean i i when i go like i'll go to europe for um this kind of stuff and i will bring work with me

02:26:02.460 I will work on the road because I can work anywhere. And, uh, but, and the reason is,

02:26:06.960 is that, I mean, I turned down business. And the reason is, is that finding competent people,

02:26:13.080 you can find people that's easy. And you can find people who are mediocre and slightly above

02:26:17.480 average, but finding people who are competent and who have any kind of interest in doing work well

02:26:24.980 is becoming increasingly difficult. And no one knows what to do about it. It's, you know,

02:26:30.340 there's always these theories, well, we didn't train these people. We didn't do this, you know,

02:26:33.860 but there's something else seems to be going on. And I think, you know, it's, it's the

02:26:37.920 environment of the corporate world is so weird that you don't want to, the first, I know I've

02:26:44.760 seen this at like one of my larger clients that started doing the DIE stuff, the diversity,

02:26:50.060 inclusion, and equity business. Anybody who had a clue disappeared. I mean, they were instantly

02:26:55.220 gone. I was like, what the hell's going on here? I thought maybe they're, you know, they were

02:26:59.020 getting bought out or something. And then I got an email from their HR people saying, well,

02:27:03.320 even though you're not an employee of ours, we still need you to do your DIE statements and all

02:27:08.980 this stuff. And I'm like, oh, all right. I know what happened now. And the funny thing is I told

02:27:13.880 them, no, I'm not going to do that. And they were going to cancel my contract. And I said, okay,

02:27:20.120 I don't care. Just cancel the contract. And finally somebody stepped in and said, we can't

02:27:24.000 lose everybody. We can't run our company like this. And I think that

02:27:28.920 That's, you know, it's a problem that people don't appreciate so much is that, you know, the combination of the population getting dumber and older and, you know, all these baby boomers, everybody pisses and moans about the baby boomers, but there's a lot of smart people in that group.

02:27:44.700 And once they retire, they take that intelligence with them and they're not being replaced by, you know, the unicorn who floated over the Rio Grande, you know, named Jose, who is, you know, miraculously going to fill their position, you know.

02:28:00.260 So it's, you know, that thing you describe about the competent exiting, I think we're probably going to see that much more often because at some point, you know, the market adjusts and says, all right, well, you know, these guys can charge a premium.

02:28:10.960 Yeah. And also, I think there's a bit, and you talked about another thing that we'll get to in a second, but I think what had happened was that, because no matter what, there's going to be a sort ranking of the most capable and intelligent and disciplined. Discipline is what a lot of people don't talk about. Intelligence is one thing, but intelligence plus laziness doesn't help you. Intelligence plus discipline is very good.

02:28:31.460 but i think there's a poisoning of that sort of upper class where they don't they've been taught

02:28:37.980 that having loyalty to any organization is a fool's game so i don't know maybe this started

02:28:44.460 in the 90s or something but i know it's part of my generation like the expectation it's on both

02:28:49.180 ends because no one feels that they have job security on one hand on the other hand they feel

02:28:54.360 like well i'm not going to show any loyalty to this company because they don't show loyalty to

02:28:57.860 me so i'm always looking for the i've always got my eye on the exit and so these people are they

02:29:03.860 all they behave like consultants but if you don't have the highest performers willing to like

02:29:09.840 in truly invest themselves in an organization they're always just this free floating

02:29:14.520 entity that doesn't make the organization better and you know they're always moving around and i

02:29:21.920 don't know if there's a way to kind of go back to how it was where people felt like they were

02:29:26.580 invested in not only their job, but also their location as well. What do you think about that?

02:29:33.520 Yeah, I think, you know, it's this managerial ethic. You know, in smaller firms where the

02:29:39.160 owner is there, it's a vastly different dynamic than in larger firms where ownership might be

02:29:45.200 there, but they're, you know, they're not really a part of the day-to-day operations.

02:29:50.920 You know, my larger clients, I mean, I have, I deal with some global clients too.

02:29:54.700 And when you deal with those people, it's a miserable existence because there is no sense

02:30:00.520 of ownership. There's this weird managerial culture and you're ruled by rules and no one

02:30:07.060 could quite be sure where the rules come from. But in a smaller firm where the boss is there

02:30:12.540 and you know the rules come from him because there is rules, it's a much different environment.

02:30:18.140 You can see that people who go from the big machine to smaller companies, it's almost as

02:30:23.940 if they can breathe again, because now you can walk into somebody's office and say, I have a

02:30:27.680 problem. Absolutely. That's my work experience as well, because I've worked at very, very large

02:30:32.920 advertising agencies before, and I've worked with very, very large clients before. And my life was

02:30:39.220 so much better once I started working with small businesses or medium-sized businesses,

02:30:43.160 where I can speak with the primary stakeholders one-on-one. I'm not dealing with this whole

02:30:49.540 web of intermediaries. I'm not dealing with people, someone whose job is to make my life

02:30:55.420 difficult, that some liaison who just doesn't like that they got to talk to me. And so, yeah,

02:31:01.040 I feel that. Yeah, I think, you know, it's this whole, you know, the whole concept of managerialism,

02:31:07.940 which I really, it's funny that a lot of people have written about, but people haven't written

02:31:11.520 and talked about it as much from a cultural perspective, because it's an attitude in a way,

02:31:16.840 You know, it's like being in a large bureaucracy.

02:31:19.820 You know, there's, what the heck was the guy's name, Jerry Purnell, the great science fiction guy, writer.

02:31:25.320 He had this iron law of bureaucracy.

02:31:27.560 He said, you know, there's two kinds of people in a bureaucracy.

02:31:29.760 There's people there who actually care about getting work done.

02:31:31.820 And then there's people there who only care about the bureaucracy, managing the blob.

02:31:39.060 And those people always end up running the blob.

02:31:41.540 They run the machine.

02:31:42.480 They run the whole thing.

02:31:43.500 They make all the rules.

02:31:44.360 and all they care about is what the internal stuff, you know, is going on. And that's as a

02:31:50.440 part of this, you know, sort of aesthetic that's in the managerial culture is that, you know,

02:31:56.680 no one really, you know, it's weird in a way, but doing things actually becomes a detriment.

02:32:03.640 Now, I said this about Trump. One of the things that people did not appreciate about Trump is

02:32:07.360 that when he goes to Washington, all of a sudden you have all these people who are confronted for

02:32:11.740 the first time in their life by someone who's actually had a job, who actually had done something

02:32:16.460 in his life. It was weird. Look, I spent a fair amount of time in Washington. This is something

02:32:22.020 I see this in a lot of larger companies too now. You never ask someone what they do. In Washington,

02:32:28.940 you never ever ask someone what you do. You don't say, well, what do you do? Because I mean,

02:32:32.720 they don't do anything. You ask them, where are you with? Where are you with? Who are you with

02:32:37.780 now. That's what people say. It's like a question nobility would ask themselves. What's your

02:32:42.780 affiliation? Yeah. Yeah. It's the same kind of thing. It's because who these people are is

02:32:47.800 defined by this network of relationships. Look, feudalism worked this way. So it does have a

02:32:53.820 feudal aspect to it in that these people are defined by these horizontal and vertical

02:33:00.120 relationships that show up on their resume. I've always threatened to do a show by just going

02:33:05.520 through LinkedIn and pulling LinkedIn resumes and reading them. I've done shows. I used to do

02:33:12.860 this thing called Zerl Science, where I would read papers from the Grievance Sciences. I would

02:33:17.200 just read the abstract from it. People thought I was making it up, but I was just reading what

02:33:21.920 was there. I take some credit for somewhat popularizing the term people of uterus and

02:33:28.660 people of penis because people of uterus actually started in a paper written in Sweden. And, uh,

02:33:36.700 they use the term, uh, people of uterus to distinguish them from women who did not have

02:33:41.060 a uterus or, or not in fact women. And, um, so, you know, and so I started joking, I started

02:33:47.160 calling it people of penis, you know, and, and, uh, but anyway, yeah, but I've actually now started

02:33:51.820 hearing people use people of uterus. So I'm going to take credit for popularizing it, even though

02:33:55.260 It's a common enough thing on the internet, especially the distant right, where what starts as our sarcasm just becomes, you know, punishable law later.

02:34:06.120 Yeah, it's funny.

02:34:07.960 I mean, there's a shadow culture that I don't think our side quite appreciates.

02:34:14.660 But you see it.

02:34:15.500 People who watch Tucker Carlson from our side will notice this stuff.

02:34:18.560 I know he pays attention and his writers certainly pay attention to the content on this side of the divide.

02:34:25.260 But you see other people do, they'll pick this stuff up, you know, normie sort of mainstream

02:34:30.600 people, they pick this stuff up and they try to use it themselves.

02:34:33.380 And sometimes it's hilarious when they don't really know what they're doing.

02:34:36.760 And, you know, we have probably more influence than we realize over the general culture,

02:34:44.340 which we're probably better off if we don't realize it.

02:34:46.760 Yeah, well, it's interesting because I was thinking about this just the other day,

02:34:49.980 because a lot of the stuff we complain about, like, oh, there's not a lot going on online

02:34:54.820 or so it feels like you know there's not a whole lot of interesting sites there's not a lot of you

02:34:59.380 know stuff to tune into but you start thinking what do what do celebrities do what do they

02:35:04.940 browse around with because they're not just reading the news every day like they're playing

02:35:08.960 games under some fake name these politicians they but they're there's always this idea that's you

02:35:14.960 know we're always thinking the feds are watching us and they are but i'm like you know there's

02:35:17.880 probably maybe not some of the older guys but there's young guys logging on and checking out

02:35:22.580 4chan there's no doubt in my mind there's a lot of people just seeing what's going on in 4chan

02:35:26.920 and then probably within our ranks because if you listen to the news what's going on over here

02:35:33.640 sounds terribly interesting you know wouldn't you want to check in to see what all these

02:35:38.900 schizophrenic you know these crazy new ideas where they're coming from because what they're not doing

02:35:44.920 is watching steven colbert because nobody is i'm convinced no one's watching jimmy fallon anymore

02:35:50.880 yeah none of this stuff it's weird you know years ago i pointed out to someone it was just one of

02:35:56.820 those things that just kind of popped into my head this was probably 10 15 years ago i said to

02:36:01.680 someone i was chatting with you know when was the last time someone sent you a link to national

02:36:05.840 review and he thought for a second he goes i don't remember i go yeah i mean nobody does you

02:36:11.560 know no because no one's reading this crap yeah and uh i mean i figured out i actually had a little

02:36:17.280 inside information. When they shut down the weekly standard, which had, I think, a $6 million a year

02:36:22.280 budget, the rich guy finally pulled the plug on it. They had about 60,000 readers a month they

02:36:28.340 were getting. I get 300,000 readers a month. And I don't have a $6 million budget. And I found that

02:36:35.380 I'm like, this is unbelievable what goes on. And I stopped paying attention to a lot of this stuff

02:36:40.920 as a result. I'm like, you know what? Why waste my time? No one else is reading this. And I go

02:36:46.220 hunting for material in weird places now i mean it's much more interesting to write about some

02:36:51.500 you know some lunatic than uh because at least i mean the lunatic you know if there's genuinely a

02:36:57.900 lunatic at least they're living their life genuinely they're genuinely crazy the people

02:37:03.520 who are who are faking it in the mainstream i always wonder you know how do you work how do

02:37:07.140 you live with yourself working at the washington post where pretty much what you do is you fill in

02:37:11.520 the blanks. You know, here's the story we're writing. This is the narrative. Go call this

02:37:16.620 guy, get some quotes and fit them in the third paragraph. You know, I mean, it must be an awful

02:37:20.780 way to live. Yeah. One character that we always bring up on the show, because I just want to

02:37:24.740 keep in touch with them, is Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN. And I just loathe him with

02:37:30.900 such a preoccupied rage. But I always look at him and say, how does it make you feel like you

02:37:37.600 must know that alex jones is so much more popular than you and i bet if we polled america right now

02:37:44.340 even the people who hate alex jones they would like alex jones more than anyone who's working

02:37:50.680 at msnbc like to like you were just saying like you get like 300 000 people i'm like

02:37:55.220 that number you've got is bigger than the entire circulation of probably some high-end newspapers

02:38:00.920 too like time magazine i bet you got more of a readership and time fucking magazine and alex

02:38:06.980 jones is without question bigger than larry king bigger than you know no one's going to be as big

02:38:13.120 as like carson at his peak right i get that but like post carson when things start to fracture

02:38:19.280 like alex jones is so goddamn influential and that must drive them insane yeah i mean and i think

02:38:27.540 there's a big part of it i think there's a lot of the censorship that's gone on it is driven a lot

02:38:32.020 by just petty jealousy and envy because at some level they do know here's a good story that

02:38:38.460 relates to that and i i'll get to pat myself on the back a little bit here but i went to um

02:38:43.640 yorm hazani's first event down in washington dc that was about four or five years ago

02:38:48.600 something like that and uh and i you know one of the speakers uh she had to get to him she had to

02:38:55.360 let him know that i was okay you know so uh so i show up and it was a hilarious event i mean it

02:39:01.280 was i i got a ton of great material out of this and but i'm there and one of the strange things

02:39:06.940 that happened uh the first night's friday night i'm at the bar i'm having a few drinks with someone

02:39:11.540 who was an academic who was there and uh who i knew but he's like you know hey look you know

02:39:16.540 hope you don't mind but if somebody finds out who you are i'm gonna have to pretend i don't know you

02:39:20.140 i'm like that i understand you know and uh so we're chit-chatting and there's a couple of people

02:39:24.980 kind of you know orbiting around us younger people and finally you know they catch my attention and

02:39:30.440 they walk over and go, look, I hate to interrupt you, but I recognize your voice. Are you the Z

02:39:34.360 man? And I started laughing. I'm like, yeah. I thought you were walking around with a name tag

02:39:38.060 that says the C man. So, well, so this, but this started happening. People like, oh yeah,

02:39:45.600 recognize your voice or I heard you were here. And so, okay, I found out there's a, and it's

02:39:50.540 true. There was a, there's an underground community in DC that listens to outlaw material. I did. I

02:39:56.100 found out that they actually have like a Friday night get togethers where they'll listen to

02:39:59.320 podcast and drink, you know, drink beer and shoot the breeze. And they have to do it, you know,

02:40:03.820 in private because of fear of, you know, what could happen. So that was rather interesting.

02:40:08.780 But the best part was, is that Rich Lowry was there and he and I are standing kind of similar

02:40:13.800 to each other or near each other. And this person walks across the hallway, you know, with this

02:40:20.040 air of recognition looking right at us. And Lowry, it just assumes this person's walking over to them

02:40:26.040 instead walks over to me and he was so deflated he was just oh my goodness you know and I just

02:40:33.080 I just laughed I mean it's like you know what what I mean first of all this sort of minor

02:40:38.720 celebrity stuff you know I mean it's flattering but you know I could live without it it doesn't

02:40:43.060 matter I mean I'm I'm flattered that people walk up to me and you know feel like they you know they

02:40:48.120 you know need to say something nice and I appreciate that but you know I'm never a good

02:40:52.760 of person who ever really had the interest in being famous, but everybody in that room was

02:40:56.860 just desperate for people to recognize. I'm like, man, what a rousy way to live. I mean,

02:41:01.220 it was just, I don't know. I couldn't live that way. Well, there's something invigorating about

02:41:06.120 an entity like yourself who really bootstrapped it, for lack of a better term. You never actually

02:41:12.960 had to play the game, wheel and deal, sell out your principles. You actually built, you did

02:41:18.820 something on your terms which is something that none of them were able to do and sometimes they

02:41:23.840 give it a shot like a lot of these industry guys these yes men um the talking heads we're talking

02:41:29.760 about when once they try and start their own podcast it's uh it crashes and burns because

02:41:35.020 they actually it turns out all they know how to do is appeal to authority they don't know how to

02:41:40.300 work laterally they don't know how to be in a room and gather people around them which you think

02:41:45.280 they'd be able to do being on TV or radio or wherever else. So you've got a guy like yourself

02:41:50.960 who actually pulled this audience towards you in a lateral way, rather than selling out to

02:41:56.160 some machine. I sound like an anti-establishment guy right now, but like, you know what I mean

02:42:01.020 though, right? You didn't have to like make a deal to get where you're at. Yeah. And I think a lot of

02:42:05.980 it has to do with the fact that none of these people have ever had jobs. You know, when you,

02:42:08.980 when you live out in a regular work world, no matter what you do, whether you're, you don't

02:42:12.800 to be in the sales side. You could be in the accounting department. One of the things you

02:42:15.960 realize is that the business exists because of customers. So you better have a product that

02:42:20.660 could appeal to an audience. That's how it has to work. And when I started doing this, I said,

02:42:25.940 you know what? I know there's lots of people out there who have my opinions about things,

02:42:30.940 generally speaking. And I don't see people out there writing the kind of stuff I would want to

02:42:35.780 write. So I'm going to write that and see what happens. I started getting an audience. I'm like,

02:42:39.480 there. I've been confirmed in my suspicion. I'm going to go ahead. And this is going to be my

02:42:44.340 niche. This is what I'm going to do. And I'm going to have my audience. But that was all stuff I

02:42:48.660 learned in the business world. You know, that's just how it goes. I mean, lots of products, you

02:42:52.100 don't know if it's going to move or not. You don't know if it's going to work or not. And when it

02:42:55.360 does, you go, aha, you know, this is right. And these guys in the punditry world, they have one

02:43:01.720 customer. You know, it's the same guy who is the customer for CNN is the same guy who's a customer

02:43:06.680 for Fox News and all the other ones. So the selection pressure is all for the obsequious

02:43:12.780 rump swab, the guy who just knows how to court power. And then when they get out into the world,

02:43:19.220 they have no idea how to actually function. They're like children in a way. And I think a lot

02:43:24.560 of them, I used to make this point about the national review crowd, that if they actually

02:43:29.660 had to go out and earn their keep as a blogger or something like that, they'd all starve to death.

02:43:34.080 They wouldn't last a month. They would run out of food and water and they'd be out on the streets because you just don't know. And it gets back to what we talked a little bit about before we got started is that not having a job stuff, not actually being in the work world. It's become this huge dividing line between people.

02:43:52.000 yeah and right before the episode started i wanted to get back to this because a very

02:43:56.840 interesting thread to pull on um one uh thing you had pointed out and this is something that i think

02:44:02.980 was it was pointed out i think in revolt to the elites by christopher lash and in a sense pointed

02:44:08.760 out in the bell curve as well and i don't know why i keep thinking about these two books a lot

02:44:12.740 lately because i see it uh run its course um especially when i get in like edward dunn he

02:44:17.820 talks about the sort of bifurcation of this IQ in society, but they're talking about, you know,

02:44:23.120 America, let's say the fifties, forties, that area, you would have a factory. And within that

02:44:30.160 factory floor, which is a common enough experience for people, you would have a lot of cross

02:44:34.740 interaction between different classes, different, you know, doesn't even, not really ethnicities,

02:44:40.300 but like, you know, there's sort of intra-generational and intra-class interaction.

02:44:45.660 furthermore um and people would sometimes decry this as manipulative but the idea of like the

02:44:51.600 boss marrying his secretary or someone something like that which is frowned upon now but back then

02:44:57.420 that's what that actually is is class mobility you've got a poor person marrying into a rich

02:45:03.620 family and so now you see entire families start to kind of move up move down but there's no

02:45:09.420 stratification there people are actually surrounded by each other and interacting with each other

02:45:13.560 so you couldn't distance yourself and revolt to the elites if i recall correctly was about how

02:45:18.240 these days you have this sort of high performance upper class like we were talking about before that

02:45:23.060 has zero interest the you know zero interaction with anyone else a law firm for example like

02:45:28.080 the highest they don't talk to the cleaning staff they don't talk to anyone they just exist

02:45:32.100 in that you know three hundred thousand dollar a year world and they never interface with anybody

02:45:38.820 else. And that's, that's a problem first, irrespective of race. That's a problem of

02:45:44.160 even in a white, all white society, that would be a problem. Yeah, it's a very big, I, it's,

02:45:52.240 it's one of those things I never really thought too much about, because it's one of those things

02:45:55.580 when you come along in the world, you know, the world is just what it is, you know, you don't

02:45:59.140 examine it closely, you just take it for granted. And look, I grew up very poor. But, you know, I,

02:46:04.980 even at a young age, I was around people who were not poor. And I understood there's a difference

02:46:09.540 between being poor and being poor. If you get my drift, you could conduct yourself in such a way.

02:46:16.280 And it was good to be around other kids and see how they lived. It was a motivation for me to say,

02:46:23.420 hey, you know what? You can just better yourself. If you imitate these people, well, you kind of

02:46:27.800 are those people. It's not that hard. You had that opportunity with lots of examples around.

02:46:33.760 And I wasn't the only guy like this.

02:46:35.040 I grew up with guys I still know to this day who grew up working class, poor, and bettered

02:46:42.320 themselves and got into the middle class.

02:46:44.140 But it was because you had that experience with it.

02:46:46.760 But it works the other way, too.

02:46:48.540 People who have never been around poor people, have never been around working men, they have

02:46:53.280 no idea how to talk to them.

02:46:54.660 I don't understand it.

02:46:55.800 It's a veil of ignorance between those two sides.

02:46:59.000 and that's probably worse than poor people not knowing how the upper half lives you know you

02:47:05.060 a society can function fine if the poor people don't really know what's really going on in the

02:47:10.260 rich people's homes but those rich people better damn right know what the hell's happening in the

02:47:14.860 ghetto they got to know this because you can't be a ruling class without knowing that and you really

02:47:19.600 see this you hang around washington dc it's it's a a giant outdoor daycare center for people who

02:47:27.320 who are wildly over-credentialed, who have this absurd sense of confidence in themselves,

02:47:34.620 yet they're wildly ignorant of what's all around them. They can't talk to you about the rough

02:47:40.580 neighborhoods in Washington because they just avoid them. They don't go there. They don't even

02:47:43.540 drive through them in the daytime. They don't know any of these people. And it really is very,

02:47:48.380 it's very weird. And it's getting weirder. The insularity of it is becoming, you know,

02:47:53.780 that's why they sound so weird you know there was a woman in the united states she tried running for

02:47:58.620 president in um what didn't she run was that in 2016 yeah she was one of the idiots who was on

02:48:05.360 the stage initially in 2016 for the democrats and she spent her whole life you know upper middle

02:48:11.580 class pampered woman she was in congress or something like that and she shows up in like

02:48:15.580 youngstown ohio to her first campaign stop and starts lecturing people about their pronouns

02:48:20.640 I mean, it's a working class, it's a rough, tough working class town, you know, just be like a, you know, a steel town.

02:48:26.200 And these people are really suffering and they're all looking at each other like, who is this weirdo?

02:48:30.080 And why is she in our school talking about pronouns?

02:48:33.040 I know you're talking about Lindsey Graham.

02:48:36.560 No, no, that was a woman.

02:48:38.140 Different woman.

02:48:41.280 Yeah, but I mean, well, Lindsey Graham is a perfect example.

02:48:43.980 He will bang on about, you know, this Russia stuff.

02:48:46.920 And to him, it makes perfect sense.

02:48:49.480 yet no one who votes for him gives a crap about russia or ukraine or any of this kind of stuff

02:48:54.160 there's no interest whatsoever and it's this is this really this uh this huge divide that's

02:49:01.360 that's growing between the managerial elite and the rest of us you know what's happened is that

02:49:06.880 the administrative class and the managerial class has become this insulation this layer around them

02:49:11.340 and and to some degree it's you know i said earlier that they hated trump because they

02:49:16.620 confronted a man who had had a job you know because Trump you know if you watch videos of

02:49:21.020 him and I remember when I was a young man Trump making himself famous he was a guy who would walk

02:49:25.120 onto a construction site and all the hard hats loved him and he could talk to them he could talk

02:49:30.420 the language you know because he knew he knew he grew up around that stuff he knew exactly what

02:49:34.440 you know how a building was built and and that that kind of sort of earthiness it does not exist

02:49:41.560 anymore and it's even true in our our c-suites you know i don't know how you know you're a younger

02:49:46.840 guy so you might not have as much exposure to c-suites but there are times when i get around

02:49:51.360 these people like man this is like being on another planet i'm this is just so weird yeah

02:49:56.260 it's it's wild when you actually run them and how you know i said this recently that i'm at an age

02:50:01.600 where no one really impresses me anymore and some people say that sounds sad like no no like i've

02:50:07.120 been in the room with these people and sometimes they can have some good ideas but a lot of time

02:50:11.480 they seem so disconnected. And actually, you had mentioned Donald Trump, another example that

02:50:17.620 is more from my world, I find interesting, a lot of people don't like him, but Elon Musk.

02:50:22.800 And I think what he was doing at Twitter was very fascinating, because I work very,

02:50:28.620 very closely with a lot of these social media platforms. I don't like any of them. But me and

02:50:34.260 my wife, you know, we work very close with them. And the gambit he was doing by going to Twitter

02:50:39.340 and laying off all these people,

02:50:41.760 a lot of people thought he's trying to destroy Twitter.

02:50:43.920 Well, it turns out Twitter is not destroyed,

02:50:45.400 first of all, okay.

02:50:46.700 Second of all, that had never been done before.

02:50:49.300 You have to understand how bloated

02:50:50.960 every single tech company is.

02:50:53.240 You have to understand.

02:50:53.800 I've known people who work at Twitter,

02:50:55.860 at TikTok, at Twitch even.

02:50:58.560 And there's like tens of thousands of them

02:51:01.160 that are just known as product managers.

02:51:03.620 And a product manager,

02:51:04.660 their entire purpose is to be a liaison

02:51:06.840 between the platform and advertisers.

02:51:09.340 they're just just this sort of middle glut and what he went in was he came in and said

02:51:14.660 let's try and get rid of all these people who don't really do anything and i know a lot of

02:51:20.060 people i went to school with got laid off i'm like well you didn't really fucking do anything

02:51:25.280 you had an office and you talked to pepsi every day but he's saying can we just do this in a more

02:51:31.540 streamlined way and i told people thought that was crazy but i told him i'm like every single

02:51:36.080 tech platform right now is watching to see if twitter goes under because if they don't you

02:51:42.600 just taught facebook that that can lay off 50 000 people and then they did and so did amazon amazon's

02:51:48.640 a bit different because they they're losing you know locations and stuff but you know they've

02:51:53.580 never been done they never just got the same with the hr industry the first company the first big

02:51:59.240 company that fires its entire hr department and doesn't go under it's like that's gonna set a

02:52:05.780 real exciting precedent, I think. Yeah, it's a it's a weird thing. I mean, I have a story when

02:52:13.140 I was a young guy starting out. I have certain stories I like telling. It's funny. My stories

02:52:17.660 are never about me. My stories are always about something that happened to me. And that's why I

02:52:22.180 like telling them because, you know, it's because they still feel fresh to me. But anyway, I'm

02:52:25.980 increasingly becoming an old guy in that regard. But anyway, I get I was really my first indoor

02:52:32.440 job and i'm working in a finance department and and i you know i was a little bit out of my element

02:52:38.040 and the company it was pretty obvious i i uh this tell you how long ago it was i my job was to take

02:52:45.220 and convert lotus one two three spreadsheets to excel because we were we're going to convert to

02:52:50.560 excel i remember lotus i remember that so and i could write macros and translate them in both

02:52:56.780 side. So I was like the universal translator of the finance department. But anyway, so I'm sitting

02:53:03.580 there, I'm reading all the financials of internal financials of the company. I'm like, we're in a

02:53:08.580 lot of trouble. And I remember sitting in my little cubicle thinking, damn, this is my first

02:53:12.580 indoor job and I'm going to get laid off for sure. They're going to have to fire everybody.

02:53:17.100 Well, sure enough, they did. They wiped out the whole swaths of the company. But I kept my job.

02:53:22.740 And my boss, you know, when the layoffs all happened, he grabbed me and he says, look around

02:53:28.440 all the empty cubicles. And I said, yeah. And he goes, you know what I look at? And I said, no,

02:53:32.600 I don't. He goes, none of those people should have been here in the first place because they're not

02:53:35.820 going to be missed. And I thought, man, what a, what a, what a bastard, right? But he was right.

02:53:41.580 Nobody missed any of these people. Nobody even remembered their names in a week because they

02:53:45.180 didn't do anything. They just filled up cubicles. And the lesson though was, is that the cubicle

02:53:50.920 started to fill back up again and uh you know by the time i left they were full again yeah and

02:53:57.460 that's it's something we discuss on the show a lot you know it's a common enough phenomenon for

02:54:03.520 young people these days to work a job especially if they're in the service not the white collar

02:54:08.920 sector rather and they don't really know what it is they do they know that what they their job their

02:54:14.240 tasks are but they cannot tell you how they really fit in this the machine's too big they don't really

02:54:19.920 know they don't even feel like a cog in the machine they would be so much better if you

02:54:24.240 knew what part you were you just feel like you're present in this company and you send in receive

02:54:29.080 emails and those jobs are completely redundant a lot of you know me my co-host he's very much a

02:54:36.400 blue collar guy and he's like you know these people don't even need to be there i'm like that's true

02:54:40.700 however that does present a societal problem when you could effectively lay off 30 percent of all

02:54:48.220 employed people right but that means that 30 the workforce is fucking useless and it's just this

02:54:54.960 hamster wheel we need to keep going because as a as a civilization or as a society we don't really

02:55:01.220 have enough jobs that matter anymore so like what do we do about that too well you know covid made

02:55:08.100 that point you know i when when we started the shutdowns here in the states you know it kind of

02:55:11.940 rolled like from area to area and around here of course proximity to washington we we all of a

02:55:18.200 the big the big uh shutdown and i mean they actually we still had an office and our building

02:55:23.200 the landlord said hey look we were told we have to lock you out he says sorry man all right so we

02:55:28.440 went and worked at home you know and i i would go out on my bike and uh and streets were empty it

02:55:34.120 was great i mean i actually i missed that time because it was like uh being in one of those uh

02:55:38.140 zombie movies i loved it because me and my wife we're not supposed to go out we were out all the

02:55:43.820 time and i'm like this is great yeah i mean i was i was riding down the middle of you know

02:55:49.440 you know 50 mile an hour road you know on my bike because i thought a single car around there was

02:55:54.640 nobody around it was it was awesome people forget that too by the way people are like rewriting

02:55:59.340 history and acting like that never happened sorry to derail you there yeah yeah it's oh yeah it's

02:56:05.080 going to be incredible it will it won't be too long before when we talk about this that's a

02:56:09.060 conspiracy theory you know people making these wild theories up but yeah yeah but yeah but it

02:56:14.120 hit me i realized that like my one of my customers uh contacted me like i don't know a couple days

02:56:20.280 into it and say hey look i'm sending you over a document that makes you an essential worker

02:56:24.300 because you know we're gonna need you to do stuff and i'm like okay that's no problem i mean

02:56:28.300 no big deal and uh because i don't really my manufacturing customers i have to get

02:56:33.720 into their facilities sometimes we get on the shop floor and do stuff so you know i do need

02:56:38.060 to get out but uh but you know generally i can i can work remotely but anyway they um and i got a

02:56:44.320 few more set this stuff and i started talking to them i'm like you know how many of your people

02:56:47.060 are you getting these uh certificates for and they go probably about half and i said well what are

02:56:51.560 you gonna do with the other half and a few of my customers said you know we're gonna think about

02:56:54.240 whether we bring them back or not you know when this all blows over we're gonna have to rethink

02:56:57.060 this and it was pretty obvious that you know there were some disruptions and there were some

02:57:01.380 problems but the truth of it is as you said about 30 percent of the people weren't really needed we

02:57:06.060 wouldn't miss them if they if they you know we would notice them because now they'd be loitering

02:57:10.380 on the streets because they're unemployed yeah you know that's it and you know around here it

02:57:15.660 took a while for the office parks to start filling up again they slowly have over the last year but

02:57:21.520 a lot of companies took their time bringing these people back on board and some of it was the work

02:57:25.720 at home bs and all that stuff but i think it's amazing to me that more companies didn't realize

02:57:31.180 that hey you know what maybe it's time to get rid of the hr department or the training department

02:57:34.700 There's another waste of money. Yeah. The HR is a, almost a, a cancerous make work program

02:57:42.120 inside of every organization. It's amazing. And look, I remember confronting this when I first

02:57:48.420 started out, uh, you know, that when I first started working, it was a tolerance. And then

02:57:53.500 we quickly moved to, um, we moved from tolerance to, uh, sensitivity. That was a tolerance,

02:57:58.300 sensitivity, then diversity. And, uh, and it was obvious then, I mean, I'm in my fifties. So let

02:58:03.900 let's see, I mean, back here, most 35 years.

02:58:06.340 Yeah, so, you know, getting on 35 years.

02:58:08.640 It was obvious that the HR department

02:58:10.580 was nothing but a bunch of hens

02:58:12.360 making trouble in the company.

02:58:14.800 You know, they didn't do anything productive.

02:58:17.000 They actually made it harder

02:58:17.940 for everybody to do their job.

02:58:20.040 And yet it's only gotten worse.

02:58:21.500 I mean, because they have their arms

02:58:22.840 with all these tools

02:58:23.700 and, you know, they get to sniff around

02:58:25.940 in your life in ways, you know,

02:58:27.220 with their employees

02:58:27.860 and find out all kinds of stuff about them.

02:58:30.680 It's stunning to me

02:58:31.780 that no one has looked around and said,

02:58:33.440 you know what why don't we just get rid of this and and that solves a huge problem yeah uh does

02:58:38.820 this fit in at all with uh there's a concept you had discussed on your show uh you were discussing

02:58:44.260 the managerial revolution the james burnham book and you discussed this concept called

02:58:49.060 the managerial polyarchy uh would you be willing to kind of dive into that for a second yeah i it

02:58:57.260 could be a crackpot idea but basically you know what i've kind of landed on is that i've always

02:59:02.760 been a Burnham fan. I started reading about managerialism and the efficiency movement.

02:59:10.860 You know, there was all these guys in the 100 years ago, the beginning of the 20th century,

02:59:15.000 who thought, you know, they learned these lessons from the manufacturing world, said, hey,

02:59:19.040 when we systemized our manufacturing, we made it highly efficient. We maximized the labor that we

02:59:24.660 had. And we started doing these things in our offices by, you know, hey, we had people who

02:59:29.080 just did accounts receivable. We had people who just did purchase orders. They started to split

02:59:33.560 their work up and streamline it. Why can't we do this of all society? And of course, that's the

02:59:38.500 beginnings of the managerial revolution is the idea of managing society. And it's a really

02:59:45.440 critical concept that I think a lot of our guys struggle with because it's not fancy and it's not

02:59:50.820 sexy. They'd rather think about other topics. But this notion that the guy who owns something,

02:59:58.100 who owns a business has less power than the management of his company is something that's

03:00:03.520 hard for people to quite grasp. But, you know, you've been in the work world. You've probably

03:00:08.220 seen this. You know, you've been with companies where they have an owner. He doesn't really make

03:00:11.440 a lot of decisions. All the important stuff is done by a management group. You know, there's a

03:00:15.300 CFO, there might be a COO, you know, and these people do this. Well, this is metastasized

03:00:21.040 everywhere in our society. And you see it again, you know, if people who have been in the business

03:00:26.140 world, we recognize how this operates. A guy like Pete Booty Gig, I've seen that guy in the

03:00:32.000 business world a million times. How they manage to survive. It's amazing, really. A completely

03:00:37.300 incompetent person ends up in some position and no one really knows what he does. I actually

03:00:43.320 worked with a guy like that or worked for a guy like that. No one could figure out what this guy

03:00:47.300 did. It was baffling and he seemed like he was an unusually stupid person, but all the bosses

03:00:52.720 loved them. No one could figure it out. And it's just a part of the corporate system. But

03:00:58.580 this is happening throughout our society as you have this class of managers or people who look

03:01:03.640 at themselves as running some segment of society. Well, that's not really a great explanation for

03:01:10.840 what's happening to us, why things are the way they are. In the United States, no one's voted

03:01:15.980 for open borders. No one's run on their campaign promising open borders. Yet we have all these

03:01:22.740 immigration policies that are obviously in direct conflict with public opinion. How is this

03:01:27.940 happening? Is there somebody in charge who's deciding this? No one can really know. It's

03:01:33.180 very confusing. There's this thing that we all kind of live with sort of a model dependent

03:01:40.120 understanding of the world. We have this model of the world and we just kind of say, all right,

03:01:44.080 these are the rules, this is how the system works, and we hope that it allows us to make

03:01:48.520 accurate observations and predictions. You know, drive down the street, model of driving in this

03:01:53.180 country is we drive on the right-hand side, we have certain sign shapes, that kind of thing.

03:01:57.760 And as long as the predictions, you know, the things that we count on work on that model,

03:02:02.740 we accept the model. But our model of democracy is really not working very well. It's a liberal

03:02:07.960 democracy idea or a republican democracy or whatever you want to call it, because we're

03:02:12.060 getting these results that shouldn't be happening.

03:02:14.580 You know, it just doesn't make any sense.

03:02:15.780 What's happening is not making any sense.

03:02:17.420 So that kind of got me thinking about, you know, think about Burnham a little bit saying,

03:02:22.800 OK, you know, we have these elections, but the people who are making decisions in the

03:02:27.000 bureaucracy, they're not changing at all.

03:02:28.880 They're staying the same and they're going to continue doing what they're doing.

03:02:33.020 But there's this guy named Robert Dahl who wrote in the 70s and 80s, and he was really

03:02:37.460 kind of a, it was Harvard, I think Harvard or Yale, I can't remember which.

03:02:41.100 Yale, I think it was.

03:02:42.060 But anyway, he was a political theorist and political philosopher, and he wrote extensively

03:02:48.280 about democracy.

03:02:49.820 And he really spelled out what are the requirements of democracy, and he pointed out that no large

03:02:55.300 society could possibly have this.

03:02:57.260 You know, things that you have to have in a democracy, like everyone participates.

03:03:00.880 Well, that's never going to happen in a large society.

03:03:03.560 Everyone has to have the same access to information.

03:03:05.980 That can't happen.

03:03:07.200 Everyone has to have the same ability to understand the policies that are being put forward.

03:03:12.620 Well, that can't happen either.

03:03:14.460 We went through all this stuff and said, you know, this is impossible.

03:03:17.280 But you can have a democratic ethic.

03:03:20.040 And so we started looking at American political system and said, well, you know, you have

03:03:23.320 the judicial branch, you have the legislative branch, you have the executive branch, but

03:03:27.040 then you have these departments and stuff.

03:03:29.400 Well, what are they doing?

03:03:30.280 Well, they have some democratic elements, elections and so forth, directly or indirectly.

03:03:35.260 but all of them are motivated by trying to do things that are for the general good,

03:03:40.540 you know, or comport with the general will. And that's how he came up with this idea of polyarchy

03:03:45.400 that, hey, you have these different power centers in the political system. And even though they're

03:03:49.260 not directly elected and it's not democratic, they operate under a kind of democratic ethos

03:03:54.660 to try and, you know, approximate democracy. So that was his idea of polyarchy. So I took

03:04:00.680 these ideas and said, well, what if they're not motivated by the general will? What if they're

03:04:05.220 motivated by entirely eternal reasons? They're trying to maximize the power of the node in which

03:04:11.040 they're operating. Well, then we take this sort of managerial idea and the bureaucratic ideas and

03:04:17.320 say, all right, now we have managerial polyarchy. We have these different power centers. We have

03:04:21.360 the media. We might have Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the global corporations, whatever,

03:04:26.100 the academy. And even within them, you have sort of subsystems in it, but they're not motivated by

03:04:33.500 trying to do what's best for society or trying to determine where the, you know, where public

03:04:39.320 opinion is and comport with it. They're motivated by purely internal things, the same way in which

03:04:44.800 people politic within a corporation. You know, the guy who in the accounting department,

03:04:50.840 they're not as concerned about the accounting as they are with the personal politics, you know,

03:04:55.680 trying to get a favor from the CFO versus the guy over and, you know, purchasing, you know,

03:05:00.620 that kind of stuff. And that's the real dynamic. And so basically we're, we're, we're managed in

03:05:06.120 some respects by almost like a giant HR department, you know, but it's broken up into

03:05:10.540 all these sub departments that have specific domains of power. You know, Silicon Valley

03:05:16.140 controls a lot of information. They don't control all of it, but they control a tremendous amount

03:05:20.680 of information. And so they have real power, but they're dependent on Wall Street who has

03:05:26.140 money power, but Wall Street needs information power. So there's a codependency between those

03:05:31.460 two nodes. Of course, you have the political node and they have dependencies on these guys. And so

03:05:37.100 it's almost like a feudal system in a way. I mean, it's kind of a crackpot theory and I haven't

03:05:40.740 really thought it through completely, but it's this relationship, this interdependencies,

03:05:45.960 these relationships both vertically and horizontally in this ruling class that we have.

03:05:52.140 And that's why voting makes no difference. That's why elections make no difference.

03:05:56.060 And what's interesting is that sort of middle area, you know, if you're looking at sort of like

03:05:59.660 from a Dijuvenelian perspective, if anyone listening recalls our talks on the Italian

03:06:05.700 elite theory, you know, the sort of concentric circles of power, you got the central power,

03:06:10.300 then there's the intermediate power, then there's the periphery where kind of the regular people are.

03:06:15.960 And so what's interesting is, just to build on that idea, you know, what's funny about that sort of polyarchy is that middle glut area, they think they're the real America.

03:06:28.760 So when people talk about like a real American, they say, oh, Joe Sixpack, you know, Mr. Main Street.

03:06:35.900 But that whole HR managerial middle section, they're disconnected from that lower strata.

03:06:42.900 and but they think they're the true americans just like the people in washington they think

03:06:48.000 they're the real americans and the story i had was my wife used to work for uh when we lived in

03:06:54.160 different cities she used to work for a government a municipal government and uh what she noticed and

03:07:00.340 she's kind of like me you know she's pretty you know edgy and right and stuff but she had to kind

03:07:05.100 of keep that covered up because she's working around real real what my late father would call

03:07:10.120 pink okami liberals uh and so she but what she noticed was that they had not only a contempt

03:07:19.060 for the citizenry of the city that they were supposed to be governing most of them didn't

03:07:25.140 even live in the city they lived outside of the city and would commute in every morning

03:07:29.680 and that blew my mind but then they thought you know they would try to put forward legislation

03:07:35.220 and sneak things by and they had an entire process for okay we want to build this here

03:07:40.180 we have to we have to give ourselves a year-long runway so we need to make it look like we're

03:07:45.860 asking the public for input we're not gonna we're just gonna pretend like we give a shit

03:07:49.660 because we don't actually like them and we're doing this for the greater good we're doing this

03:07:54.460 for them but it's just that contempt towards the what we might call regular people but they thought

03:08:00.760 they were the regular people they thought they were the enlightened ones and even though they

03:08:04.520 didn't live in the city and they hated people who lived there they thought they were the true

03:08:08.740 vanguardists of that city similarly if you look at these other higher strata groups they're like

03:08:14.400 i bet if you asked them i bet if you if you asked everyone in silicon valley if you asked an indian

03:08:19.660 guy in silicon valley who got here 15 minutes ago he would say he's what america is all about

03:08:24.700 you know and we have this going on in every single area i'm like that's it's so disjointed isn't it

03:08:31.000 yeah i mean i i think that's one of the things you know it's one of a theme that i try to emphasize

03:08:36.740 is that yeah you know and again this is you know sort of a crackpot theory in a sense that you

03:08:42.380 know i haven't really thought it through as well as i probably should have but it's one of the

03:08:45.640 things kind of came to me one day is this idea of you know the the different aspects of it you know

03:08:49.940 we have there's a you know polyarchy you know i work in models a lot i mean i do lots and lots

03:08:55.780 of modeling and not the runway modeling, the modeling reality. A big part of what I do in my

03:09:06.560 life is I build models and a lot of statistical models, but also just different kinds of ways to

03:09:12.320 try and model some bit of reality. And one of the things that you know when you do this is that

03:09:17.200 you've got to be conscious of the fact that when you're working in the world of model-dependent

03:09:22.640 reality is that your biases will create a problem for you. You'll mistake observations for wishful

03:09:31.840 thinking. And it happens all the time. And you always have to be, it has to be on the front of

03:09:37.080 your mind to prevent yourself from making these kinds of mistakes. And everybody struggles with

03:09:40.500 it. Everyone does. Back during the beginnings of COVID, I did some models. I wrote some things

03:09:45.500 about how do you properly model the COVID. So it was funny, all these guys who I didn't realize

03:09:50.980 who actually know something about epidemiology were all over me.

03:09:54.140 We're like, oh, this is great stuff.

03:09:55.640 And finally, somebody out there understands the struggles we're having.

03:09:59.420 But anybody who works with models knows this is a huge problem.

03:10:02.560 Well, so when you're trying to model what's happening and saying,

03:10:05.460 OK, what are we really living under?

03:10:08.740 What are the rules really happening?

03:10:10.120 You know, it's hard because, well, it's hard to test.

03:10:15.040 And I think, especially for Americans, we've been so conditioned,

03:10:17.820 so intensely conditioned to believe in voting and democracy and the marketplace of ideas and

03:10:23.400 the marketplace for goods and services and all that stuff. And we all struggle to break free of

03:10:28.060 that. But I guess the point I'm getting to is that there's pieces here that I think might fit

03:10:34.240 into that kind of model. The polyarchy idea, I think, is one. But it's also very similar to what

03:10:39.140 happened at the end of the Roman Empire. And it was really obvious in early medieval Spain

03:10:44.060 in early medieval Italy, where you didn't have really central authority. Yeah, there was some

03:10:49.180 kings somewhere kicking around, you know, Goth or Ostrogoth or Visigoth, I forget which ones it

03:10:53.060 were. I think it was Visigoths in Spain. But they didn't really have power. The guys who ran the

03:10:59.900 city, you know, I think it was Barcelona, were run by Jews, you know, and they actually got to pick

03:11:03.460 the bishop. Think about that. Jesus. Yeah. And I mean, there was, I forget the guy's bishop's name.

03:11:09.720 He was a bishop and he was warring with some rabbis in like Barcelona and stuff and constantly going to the king or relevic or something like that.

03:11:19.380 But anyway, but you had these local power centers that had real authority and the central authority really had to negotiate its power with these guys and maybe play one off the other in order to try and get some advantage.

03:11:30.820 And that was a thing that started at the end of the Roman Empire.

03:11:35.180 And this is, of course, we're at the end of the American Empire.

03:11:37.960 So we're starting to see the kind of same sort of stuff. I mean, who are you really afraid of in the United States? Are you really afraid of the IRS now, or are you more afraid of Google? You know, I mean, Google has much more authority in your life. If they decide, like they did to Alex Jones, that he's got to go. Alex Jones, I mean, he's got a $1.6 billion penalty hanging over his head, you know. They have real power and can do real damage to you.

03:12:03.500 And so, you know, we're starting to see this disaggregation there. So you have this sort of futile sort of element to it, where you have these different power centers who are working out the relations. So you have the polyarchy idea, but you have managerialism is layered over it. And, you know, there's a lot of different pieces here that I think, you know, we're trying to build a model. If we're trying to build a model of, hey, this is what's really going on in our society. I think probably some, there's probably some big missing pieces there.

03:12:27.600 But, you know, I was gonna say that's what I liked about Trump and to a similar extent, Elon Musk, because even though, you know, there's a lot of things they do and say that I might not agree with, but I think what they represented and even people who really hate him now will probably still agree with this was that he was a shock to the system and forced the system to react in a way that I like what Trump forced the news media to do is going to go down in history is some of the most insane shit.

03:12:57.480 You had to live it to understand how crazy everyone went for a while, how the entire system was convulsing at this thing that shouldn't have happened.

03:13:06.660 And even though he didn't, you know, enact a lot of the policies people would have wanted, I'm like, well, he showed this system operating in a way that a lot of people didn't think was possible.

03:13:16.480 and similar with elon musk and what the reason a lot of people hate these two guys is because they

03:13:21.440 are in essence saying the quiet part out loud that people who have lots of money and power are

03:13:26.680 supposed to be more machiavellian and cunning and then they're showing they're forcing other

03:13:32.460 similarly placed power structures to react and quiet them down thereby showing people's like

03:13:37.780 wait i didn't know so the entire news media is against the president that's not supposed to

03:13:43.260 happen, you know? So I thought at the very least, we have an interesting evidence of that.

03:13:50.580 Yeah. I mean, and this is one of those really interesting things too, is that why did the

03:13:57.740 whole system go berserk all at the same time? It was really from a, you know, we want to believe

03:14:03.880 that these people are very cunning and calculating and Machiavellian, but yet the opportunity they

03:14:11.040 had to really solidify their control with Trump and office, they completely pissed away.

03:14:16.560 They could have cut any deals. Trump would have signed anything to be part of the club. He wanted

03:14:20.920 to be accepted. If they were as shrewd and manipulative as we'd like to, we would actually

03:14:28.120 wish they were in a way. We want them to be smart and shrewd. You know, one of the hard things about

03:14:32.740 a guy like Justin Trudeau, I think for probably a lot of Canadians is how can someone this stupid

03:14:37.900 get to this position i mean what the hell kind of a system is selecting for this idiot and uh

03:14:42.540 i don't know if you ever watched the uh the duran guys there's a guy named alexander

03:14:47.900 something or other he's um he's in greece but he uh was educated in the united states

03:14:53.100 but uh what the alexander not mercurius something other constantinopolis or something like that

03:14:58.140 anyway he does this great impression of uh justin trudeau talking to the prime minister of germany

03:15:04.060 it's just hilarious but um anyway um you can cut that part out when you edit this

03:15:09.300 no i want to look at it because i'm as you're saying that i'm looking it up i'm like

03:15:13.560 alexander constantinopolis i'm trying to find him some kind of greek name uh actually i can

03:15:19.360 tell you right now let's see um oh what the heck is his name alexander something or other

03:15:24.900 alexander christophoro okay christophoro he's a part one of the the duran is their sort of main

03:15:33.040 hang out. And they do a lot. They do all this Ukraine stuff and all that. Yeah, I see here.

03:15:39.320 Good. I'm going to look into him because I hadn't heard of him before.

03:15:42.680 Yeah. And the one guy, his partner, Mercurius, he's got an interesting speaking style. I'll just

03:15:48.280 leave it at that. But anyway, I lost my train of thought here. But the thing is, though,

03:15:54.980 is that Washington could have gotten sweetheart deals out of Trump. They just had to give him

03:16:00.480 some crumbs, but they couldn't. And the reason is, again, it goes back to this sort of model.

03:16:05.940 They had this vision in their heads. And this is kind of serious stuff, because the reason that

03:16:12.460 America is in a crisis right now is that 30 years ago, the ruling class all came to the same

03:16:18.840 conclusion that Fukuyama was right. This was the end of history. All the moral questions have been

03:16:24.780 answered when it comes to politics and economics. Now it's just a question of implementation.

03:16:28.620 they have been operating under that belief they defeated the pat buchanons and the ross perot's

03:16:35.620 and the paleocons and all these guys who who criticized the the you know the project those

03:16:41.660 guys had all been swept aside and then trump comes along and wins an election and that should

03:16:46.800 you know their worldview their logic of the universe said that was an impossibility and yet

03:16:51.080 it did happen so that means meant that the logic of the universe was no longer valid and that's why

03:16:56.860 started calling him the mule i don't know if you've read much science fiction when you're young but

03:17:00.500 there's um these asimov isaac asimov wrote this uh series of novels called the foundation series

03:17:06.140 yeah yeah and in the in the first book they have this character it's called the mule the

03:17:10.080 destroyer of worlds and the reason he's a story of worlds is that the logic of the universe says

03:17:14.660 he shouldn't exist so the fact that he actually exists means that the logic is flawed and it

03:17:20.340 means everything they understand about the world must be flawed and it of course it calls everything

03:17:23.620 into question and and that's that was trump he was the mule and and that's why they couldn't make

03:17:28.640 a deal with him because it would be kind of like you know it'd be like if um a unicorn or a leprechaun

03:17:34.480 shows up at your door and and as you're trying to sell you insurance no matter how good a deal it

03:17:39.640 is it's like i'm not going to buy insurance from a leprechaun you shouldn't exist it's a glitch in

03:17:44.880 the system and i can't i can't make a deal with someone if i can't really understand that's like

03:17:50.580 a game theory thing too. Like I can't really work with you if I don't understand you or like you're

03:17:56.060 not supposed to have happened. Something happened here. So they were like, okay, everyone stop what

03:17:59.300 you're doing. We got to figure out what happened here. Yeah. And it don't really seem to have

03:18:04.760 recovered from it. I mean, they're, they're trying to put a guy, he's, um, uh, he's on trial right

03:18:09.020 now. I went to the jury and I guess the jury is hung as of today. They want to put him in jail

03:18:13.060 for, he was said mean things about Hillary Clinton on Twitter. This is no joke. I mean,

03:18:17.120 he made these hilarious jokes about Hillary Clinton back in 2016. And he's been arrested

03:18:23.640 and he's facing 10 years in federal prison for basically being funny. And there's no reason to

03:18:30.180 prosecute this guy. It's been seven years. They could just forget about it, but they can't let

03:18:35.440 it go. They're trying to put Trump in jail. He wrecked the system and they've never been able

03:18:41.420 to recover. And we've been wobbly ever since. And it's a good thing, I think, in a way,

03:18:47.600 because I think it has kind of caused a lot of people to wake up. One of the things I've started

03:18:52.580 talking about recently is escaping the 20th century. We need to close the door on all that

03:18:58.540 stuff. Let's try to live in... It's 2023 now. Let's stop talking about the 1980s. I mean,

03:19:04.020 I was alive in the 80s. It was a great time. Clothes were not that good looking.

03:19:07.920 And music was hit or miss, but it was fun.

03:19:11.360 The economy was good and, you know, it was a nice time.

03:19:14.440 But I don't want to go back to that.

03:19:16.180 You know, I want to live in here now and make the most of this time.

03:19:21.840 And I think a lot of people are getting that.

03:19:23.300 I had a question for you, returning to just what we talked about, about sort of this end

03:19:29.340 of history, Fukuyama way that they believe that the world's operating in.

03:19:33.580 how much does what we might call leftism still uh how much how present is that in there because

03:19:41.400 you had made an interesting point on one of your more recent podcasts about how paleoconservatism

03:19:47.700 as a movement was infested with marxists and leftists and you had said also that sort of

03:19:53.460 leftism intellectual movement was the only exciting intellectual movement uh in the kind

03:19:59.840 of mid to late 20th century, and it attracted some of the minds. It was the only kind of edgy thing.

03:20:04.740 Do you think that's still present? And is leftism still kind of uniquely attractive to intellectuals?

03:20:12.820 I think we, right now, we're in an intellectual dead space, at least in this country. And I think

03:20:21.380 in Europe as well. I've spent enough time in Europe, and I've been around enough European

03:20:25.560 nationalists, you know, a lot of those that's seen. And I have a decent number of European

03:20:31.680 intellectuals who will email me every once in a while. And the read that they'll say is that the

03:20:37.340 only interesting things that are happening are people who've all been fired from their jobs and

03:20:42.040 get together on their own. That's where interesting conversations now happen. You cannot have an

03:20:46.320 interesting conversation in an institution. And that's, I think, true here. You just cannot

03:20:53.780 question orthodoxy at all in anything you can't talk about crime you can't talk about uh uh humanity

03:21:00.740 you know all human diversity at all you can't talk about uh you know obviously uh uh geopolitical

03:21:07.120 stuff that's become you know monolithic you everyone has to have the same opinion

03:21:11.300 and you know there's it really isn't much interesting going on i mean and i but i think

03:21:15.780 i mean outside of the dissident swamps you know i i i know i get emails from people

03:21:21.700 I call them day walkers.

03:21:23.560 You know, I have these,

03:21:24.960 they're the college professors

03:21:26.520 who listen to my show or read my stuff

03:21:29.440 and they'll zip me an email

03:21:30.240 and they'll say, oh, you know,

03:21:31.220 I really like this,

03:21:32.040 but, you know, please never,

03:21:33.460 ever mention that I know you.

03:21:36.040 And I'll laugh, like, don't worry,

03:21:38.020 I get it, you know,

03:21:38.820 and that's fine.

03:21:40.260 I'm not hurting my feelings with this stuff.

03:21:42.520 And, you know, but it's,

03:21:43.840 what they'll say is that

03:21:45.060 in their day life at the university,

03:21:47.580 nothing interesting happens

03:21:48.940 because everyone's afraid

03:21:49.900 to have a conversation.

03:21:50.900 so it can't. You have to go outside of it. So I think, you know, I don't think we have a left

03:21:57.680 or a right. We probably really didn't ever have a left and right in America. And, you know,

03:22:02.000 Canadians had like real socialists. I remember when I was a young guy, one of my friends was

03:22:06.960 going to McGill. He was a graduate school in McGill. And I went up to see him and we went

03:22:12.660 to like some graduate seminar thing. And he had these people arguing about the finer points of

03:22:16.460 marxism and socialism that never happened over an american university and uh you know you guys had

03:22:22.160 some real genuine leftists and because you had that whole weird thing in montreal um are you

03:22:27.420 which side of canada are you are you an anglophile or the well i i am an anglophone but i i unlike

03:22:33.940 other anglo guys i don't hate the francophones i don't have any oil towards quebec because usually

03:22:39.600 like i know people in my family who just hate french quebec people i'm like i i really love

03:22:45.540 at quebec go in there it's one of the best places to go so uh but that's rare in this

03:22:49.940 fucking country yeah yeah i mean it was it was funny because i spent a fair amount of time in

03:22:54.960 montreal and in quebec and uh you know montreal was a great city it was one of those places if

03:23:01.220 he lives in new england too especially younger people you'd go over the border because you'd

03:23:05.160 go party in montreal and uh it was relatively cheap compared to um the u.s and um but and it

03:23:11.240 was also back in the days when you guys had like a 12 dollar a pack cigarette tax you could find

03:23:16.580 you could finance your trip into montreal but you'd fill up we'd rent a minivan and we'd fill

03:23:20.820 it up with uh cigarettes yeah and uh and we drive over the border you were making like five bucks a

03:23:25.540 pack of smokes that's what the reason i had to quit smoking all those years ago because it really

03:23:30.420 is that they're trying to price everyone out of smoking up here yeah it was crazy they were there

03:23:35.320 was actually cigarette boats you know the speed boats that you see like in miami they were going

03:23:39.280 across the Great Lakes hauling cigarettes into Canada. But no, I mean, on the university campus,

03:23:47.500 you had genuine, you know, sort of radicalism or the old sort of 20th century and even 19th

03:23:52.280 century radicalism that really never existed in America. And I don't really think we have a left

03:23:56.320 and a right anymore. You know, what passes for the right is just really, you know, it's the

03:24:01.920 granny in the backseat telling the driver to slow down. I mean, that really is all it amounts to.

03:24:07.460 but even the left itself i mean it's i all this gingerbread with the insane people you know men

03:24:13.820 and dresses and all that stuff the the important things they everybody agrees the consensus is

03:24:21.620 there's going to be open borders there's going to be you know you know literally a borderless world

03:24:26.480 um you know ruled at the top you know the pox americana is going to cover the whole planet you

03:24:33.720 So China will be an industrial park.

03:24:37.400 Russia will be the gas station where we'll eventually use North Africa and the Middle East for raising food in South America.

03:24:44.360 You know, that's that's kind of a vision they have.

03:24:46.860 They all agree on it.

03:24:48.180 So, I mean, there really isn't functionally a left and a right in the classic sense.

03:24:52.300 What's interesting is I think what my good friend Thomas seven seven would call this thing of ours.

03:24:57.940 um you know one thing we'll notice people always complain about on the dissident rights that

03:25:03.320 it's too much infighting too much complaining no one gets along and i see that as a feature not a

03:25:08.960 bug i actually find that very uh stimulating um but it does seem sort of like like you had mentioned

03:25:14.340 the uh coalition of the fired and what i notice about our side it does seem like there's two

03:25:20.420 hemispheres to this and there's no left and right but there's like the kind of you know the trannies

03:25:25.640 and all that then there's us the ones who are actually fired for what they say and even on our

03:25:30.280 side the reason it may be and i'm kind of working through this as i say it but it might be uniquely

03:25:35.660 interesting to intelligent and ambitious people because we're this side as far as i can tell is

03:25:42.760 the only side that's talking about these issues in serious way for example open borders like let's

03:25:48.660 say like you said people are convinced it's going to happen the people who are advocating for it i

03:25:53.120 don't even think i've thought about it all the way to the bottom and there's people on our side

03:25:58.160 uh for example there's there's a individual that i have a lot of issues with probably has no idea

03:26:03.540 that i exist but whatever you know richard spencer um while i may disagree with him on many points

03:26:09.320 what i can say is that when i do kind of tune in and he's not just saying the worst shit imaginable

03:26:15.540 on twitter at least he seems like a guy who's trying to work through this problem all the way

03:26:20.680 the bottom he's trying to say okay if there is going to be where are white people going to go

03:26:25.300 if this is going to happen i'm convinced this is going to happen what are white going to be what

03:26:29.860 people what are white people going to do on a global stage and i don't see that sort of inquiry

03:26:34.880 happening even for the people who are advocating for it to happen they're just like yeah open the

03:26:39.580 borders and uh it's it's the right thing to do it's like no no think about what happens the year

03:26:44.500 after that five years after that so if you're the type of person who likes to think about things

03:26:49.560 i think this thing we got going over here could actually attract a lot of interesting and

03:26:55.800 connected people in a way that i don't think that other side could now what do you think about that

03:27:00.160 yeah i mean all the interesting i mean look we we certainly have on our side some some uh eccentric

03:27:08.640 characters for sure there's no question about that and look i'll put myself in there because

03:27:14.400 you know I can be difficult and and I understand that you know and uh but the fact is is that

03:27:23.540 most of the look most of the people on our side are very smart that's one of the things

03:27:29.500 that when I started writing 10 years ago and you know at first I I honestly I didn't really

03:27:35.840 expect to make much of it at all I just thought you know I'll screw around with this and we'll

03:27:40.340 see what happens and i wound up you know stumbling on to i wrote i forgot what happened it's one of

03:27:46.120 those things where i just i don't know the spirit hit me i wrote this essay i had something to do

03:27:49.820 with rome i don't remember anymore and i get an email from a college professor and and he said

03:27:55.920 he thought about it was a thoughtful email like wait a second this guy's a smart guy who he's

03:28:00.600 written books on this subject how in the hell did he stumble onto me and it got my the wheels

03:28:04.800 started his like wait a second how do i stumble onto some of the people i read there's a lot of

03:28:09.860 us out here. There's a lot of people out here. And that really is, wow, I wound up writing these

03:28:14.340 daily essays of thousand word essays. Like, you know what? I'm in that audience. I bet you there's

03:28:19.560 lots of people in this audience. And sure enough, there's a big audience for this stuff. Because

03:28:22.760 if you're a smart white guy in America, you've got no place professionally. You can go and do

03:28:28.620 the thing that you naturally want to do. And that is be curious. You're not allowed to be curious

03:28:33.700 at all. You're not allowed to think about stuff. And so we've got this great dispossessed of

03:28:38.860 honest talent, you know, very eccentric in many cases. And I think a lot of people who get into

03:28:45.000 this kind of politics are always going to be kind of loner-ish, you know, that kind of thing,

03:28:50.280 a little ornery, but it's vibrant. It's exciting. I mean, you know, when I write something and I

03:28:57.580 read my comment section, I'm often looking at the comments and thinking, you know, I wish I had said

03:29:01.300 that. That's much better than what I wrote, you know, because there's just a lot of really good

03:29:05.880 people and and and in the end you know human capital is the deciding factor you know you

03:29:10.760 can't escape this you know you if you take two people who have a 150 iq and put them together

03:29:16.620 they're going to produce more than 10 people with a 75 iq i mean it's just a fact of life you know

03:29:21.380 and you know it's the difference between amperage and voltage you know and and um you know so i

03:29:26.880 think you know that's one of the things that keeps me optimistic i like that i like that thing you

03:29:30.860 just said it's the difference between amperage and voltage i want to steal that yoink yeah you

03:29:37.080 know it's one of those things see that's see there's the other thing too is that if if i said

03:29:41.580 something like that in uh the at american enterprise institute or at heritage they'd all

03:29:48.180 be looking at it's like what the hell is that guy talking about you know somebody turned along i

03:29:51.540 mean they had no idea they would no idea at all because these are not people who have ever taken

03:29:55.220 a science class or anything like that you know that you know i had a back and forth with michael

03:29:59.340 anton a month or two ago forget what it was and i'm using concepts from theoretical physics to

03:30:07.020 talk about you know models of the universe and he completely has no idea what i'm talking about

03:30:13.140 and and i realized as i'm kind of going through this is that this is a guy who's never probably

03:30:17.320 cracked a science book in his life he just don't know you know he popped out of a philosophy

03:30:21.960 department you know and and he that's all he knows and then that is that is pretty much the

03:30:28.140 totality of the people on the other side. They know their political science. They've memorized

03:30:31.900 what they're supposed to memorize. They're not curious. They don't enjoy debate. I think really

03:30:38.000 one of the things about our side is that we do kind of like fighting. We like those in our arms.

03:30:43.700 And look, I know, look, I'm a Gen Xer. And when I get into events, guys my age will always end up

03:30:49.600 talking about how much fun we had in the early days of the internet. Back in the early days,

03:30:54.220 like with Usenet, you would spend a fair amount of time at your work because that's where you had

03:31:00.020 internet access, going back and forth, calling some guy, every name you could think of. I mean,

03:31:05.480 just horrible things you would say to somebody who you didn't know on the internet

03:31:08.780 because you were arguing about something about baseball statistics. And you knew that if you

03:31:13.820 got them pissed off, you would win the argument. So that's what you were trying to do is piss them

03:31:18.060 off. And you would just spend hours doing this kind of stuff. And it was fun. It was a fun time.

03:31:24.220 and i i think you know that that's a thing that white guys like white guys like being curious

03:31:31.680 and fighting you know i mean not you know you know i mean that's just i mean that's just it

03:31:36.140 i mean that's that white guys like being curious it's steel sharp and steel yeah it's it's um it's

03:31:42.320 the it's the star trek the first series we want to go to strange new worlds and have sex with

03:31:47.100 their women and kill them and this is what i would always tell people because i would get interested

03:31:50.660 and stuff like conspiracy theories and stuff just because well why wouldn't you i mean it's

03:31:55.700 exactly i was thinking the same thing why not even if i don't agree with it like i'm not a flat

03:32:00.800 earth guy but i'm like there's guys over here who are talking about the earth is flat i want to i

03:32:05.380 want to hear about that don't you who doesn't want to hear about this shit who doesn't who doesn't

03:32:10.820 want to hear about ufos and stuff but the same thing with a lot of these big ideas i'm like

03:32:14.340 like the world this is so much more fascinating than whatever the fuck is going on anywhere else

03:32:19.680 And I don't know, that seemed obvious to me, but it's not obvious to everyone.

03:32:23.820 Well, there's another, I think there's another thing too on our side is the willingness to be wrong.

03:32:29.660 You know, I like, you know, like we were talking about this managerial polyarchy idea and, you know, I fully, I could, this could just, I could be barking up the wrong tree, but I'll write about it.

03:32:38.220 You know, I did a show on it.

03:32:39.420 I'll, I'll come back to it more than once.

03:32:41.800 And at some point I might, you know, somebody might say to me, look, you know, this is stupid.

03:32:45.360 Why do you keep talking about this?

03:32:46.500 Oh, you're right.

03:32:47.240 is, you know, it's, but you know, it's, that's how you learn though. That's how you get better

03:32:51.440 is you keep trying things. And that's another weird thing I've noticed about in my corporate

03:32:56.800 experiences. When I go into these places, particularly the younger people, they're all

03:33:01.240 terrified of a being wrong or being seen to be wrong and taking any risk. It's the weirdest thing.

03:33:07.020 The risk adversity is just, I find it off-putting, frankly. You know, we were talking about this

03:33:12.280 before the show uh we're talking about how the younger generation generally seems to be you know

03:33:17.920 this is might be related to the incel thing but that's kind of a different can of words to open

03:33:22.700 but generally younger people find it a lot more difficult to uh talk to girls or to engage with

03:33:29.360 them and you know to me we're like this said before the show when i was in my late teens early

03:33:34.220 20s it seemed obvious that as a young man you gotta be go out trying to get laid get girls get

03:33:39.800 a girlfriend whatever it might be and then again it was obvious that how do you do that well it's

03:33:44.160 trial and error it's just like learning any fucking skill just like going to the gym just

03:33:49.320 like learning to drive it's like well it's gonna suck for a while and like i just had my uh my

03:33:53.920 first son was born just the other day and i knew like there's this is a steep learning curve and

03:33:59.560 it's gonna be bad for a while but then you're gonna get good at it and it's good to get good

03:34:04.260 at it but like you had said there's a like a fear of failure and to me um when i work in business

03:34:10.840 development and things like that especially with startups um there's that book called the lean

03:34:17.280 startup but there's a start mentality where you always want to get the minimum viable product for

03:34:23.020 some a new piece of technology don't make this big complicated thing try and test market the most

03:34:29.320 stripped down version of that to test your own assumptions and it's going to fail it's probably

03:34:33.300 going to fail but it's important to fail as fast and as cheaply as possible just to like reveal

03:34:40.120 certain things so i you almost become addicted to failure because you're at least getting out there

03:34:45.220 you're getting some scars and bumps but that's called wisdom and so you know it may be a more

03:34:51.180 advanced way it's like you have people who are afraid to acquire wisdom through trial and error

03:34:56.140 and that's that's very scary to me yeah and i don't it was shocking to me and i guess you know

03:35:02.920 we were, I think we were, maybe we were before we were recording, but my first experience of it,

03:35:07.740 when my, my friend was at, uh, doing graduate work at Yale and we, um, you know, we, we were

03:35:14.180 happy, both he and I are drinking men. And, uh, so, so, uh, and the best part was that he was

03:35:21.440 there as a seminary student. So, you know, we're, um, me and a priest walk into a bar. Um, but

03:35:28.320 anyway um so so we're we're start drinking with them and i you know we're you know and of course

03:35:34.560 at a certain point we're playing matchmaker you know saying look you know that woman she's too

03:35:38.780 tall for you she'll never respect you this one's you know that kind of stuff you know and these

03:35:42.160 guys i mean it was funny you know they got a few drinks in them and they started to kind of be

03:35:45.500 you know normalized i think you know just kind of took the edge off for them but you know talking

03:35:49.980 with them in the evening you know we're having that late night sort of graduate students you know

03:35:53.400 stuff. And, you know, it's, you know, they're, they had all the bits to be normal. It's just,

03:36:00.700 they weren't conditioned to be normal. They had spent so much time, particularly at that level,

03:36:04.920 you're talking about elite of the elite students. They had went to elite prep schools. They had

03:36:09.480 went elite, you know, undergrad, you know, and, and, you know, they, that was the focus of their

03:36:14.900 life and they had to kind of work within the system, but they, the bits were still there

03:36:19.260 for them to be normal. But what was striking to me about it is how fearful they were. Because

03:36:25.220 the difference between being a Yale graduate student and being a University of Connecticut

03:36:30.780 graduate student was so narrow in their minds. So it's a small difference. They made one mistake.

03:36:37.020 Instead of being at Yale, they're at UConn. And who wants to be there? That's like going to Fred's

03:36:42.720 University or something. And we were talking about this. I said, you guys have to understand

03:36:47.080 something, nobody gives a damn about your diploma five years after you're into the workplace,

03:36:51.520 unless you're in the academy. Nobody cares. I mean, other than, again, if you're in the workplace

03:36:57.160 and you're socializing, and you tell a story about your college days, where did you go to

03:37:02.140 college? Oh, it went there. Oh, really? I knew somebody that went there. And then you move on.

03:37:05.860 That's the end of it. But I think it has a lot to do with this, the middle-class angst,

03:37:12.760 you know, this fear of somehow or other,

03:37:14.640 they're going to fall down the ladder and end up, you know, poor.

03:37:19.160 And especially at a place like Yale, you know,

03:37:21.420 I don't know how much have you traveled in the United States at all?

03:37:24.480 I've only been to a few places. I went to DC. I went to Vegas.

03:37:27.500 I haven't been to New York even, but yeah, a couple of places.

03:37:30.700 Well, like Connecticut, you know,

03:37:32.400 it's just like a big suburb for the most part.

03:37:33.980 You have all these old smallish sort of cities and where Yale is,

03:37:37.120 it's called New Haven and it's on the top of a hill. Really nice,

03:37:41.560 nice neighborhood all these nice white people and the asians and you know all the elite college

03:37:46.060 experience down the hill is a ghetto a black ghetto and and the cops all sit at the top of

03:37:54.440 the hill to make sure that you know the black ghetto stays where it is and i always think that

03:37:58.620 the reason that these you know and you know not all universities like harvard is you know doesn't

03:38:03.180 have this problem but but i always thought that these kids at yale had this angst because they

03:38:08.820 could just look down the hill and say if i make a mistake i'm at the bottom of the hill you know

03:38:12.520 i mean i don't want to be like that yeah but yeah it's like south america it's like the favelas are

03:38:18.900 right next door to the mansions yeah you know that that was one of the wildest things i ever

03:38:23.640 learned when i first i went to mexico is that the further up the hill you were the better off you

03:38:27.340 were and i'm like you know it actually there's a logic to that you know i mean it just actually

03:38:31.160 makes perfect sense but you know as an american we you know we were conditioned to believe that

03:38:36.140 we don't have classes and anybody can be rich and all that stuff.

03:38:39.760 I'm like, you know what?

03:38:40.480 The Mexicans got the right idea.

03:38:42.160 You know, if you know you'll never get up the hill, you won't waste your life trying

03:38:46.040 to do that.

03:38:46.620 You'll go find some other ways that make yourself happy.

03:38:48.960 Yeah.

03:38:49.320 There's sort of a liberation in the caste system revealing itself because it implies

03:38:55.160 that if you're not a millionaire, well, then you're just stupid.

03:38:58.160 You know, can you be a middle class or poor person and also smart?

03:39:02.780 I've got a lot of people in my circles who would say no.

03:39:05.500 if you are poor you're stupid i disagree with that but it's a common enough uh belief more

03:39:11.980 common than you'd think for people like yeah everyone is exactly where they should be financially

03:39:16.260 well i tell you look i grew up poor and i will say that most people are poor because they make

03:39:22.640 poor choices that's certainly true um but it we used in america there used to be a way to select

03:39:29.040 people out of poverty when i was a young guy you got tested all the time in grammar school

03:39:34.300 every year you had standardized tests and if you excelled on those standardized tests you got

03:39:39.580 pulled out and and you know tracked into you know hopefully get you into college or something like

03:39:44.880 that there was definitely an interest in doing that it's kind of fallen away now so it's hard

03:39:49.040 to know you know whether we really do have a you know a lot of competent people in the lower

03:39:54.640 classes i i think you know the working class there's a weird thing happening in america now a

03:39:59.220 lot of white guys, and I've run into this a few times now, have said, you know what, I don't want

03:40:05.140 to go to college because I don't want to work in an office. I'd rather go be a tradesman where I

03:40:09.340 can make a very good living and I don't have to put up with all this other stuff. So that may be

03:40:14.060 kind of what's happening. The plumber is actually smarter than the lawyer, but that kind of stuff.

03:40:20.260 It's common enough, people have noticed it, and I've heard a few of influencers mention it before,

03:40:25.520 But the idea of the university transitioning to essentially a credential mill and that, you know, that now that's the purview of credential oriented people like the HR people we're talking about.

03:40:38.760 So it's only for people who want like my family.

03:40:41.140 I come from a family of fucking bureaucrats, Canadian bureaucrats.

03:40:46.760 And the common thing to say was like, just go to school and get the piece of paper.

03:40:51.040 And that's all you need to do.

03:40:52.360 Get the piece of paper and then you'll be set.

03:40:54.020 And I heard that my entire life.

03:40:56.640 And I think you're going to witness a lot of, not witness, it's happening now, a lot

03:41:01.140 of the top intellectual people who, you know, there's still going to be like Yale guys who

03:41:06.000 are very, very important, but there's a lot of, a surprising amount of intellectual people

03:41:09.920 who are saying like, you know what, this credential doesn't mean a lot to me.

03:41:13.640 Are there ways to seek fame, fortune, recognition, and status outside of this system?

03:41:19.400 And I think increasingly, I think Yale and Harvard are always going to be Yale and Harvard

03:41:23.660 and stanford and mit are always going to be that but there's a whole lot of other universities that

03:41:27.900 are just going to fall way the fuck off and there's there might be some parallel you know

03:41:33.540 place for status and wealth seeking people as a lot of these other universities fill up with just

03:41:39.580 diversity quotas and shit yeah i mean you know there's a a short story from the 50s i always

03:41:45.720 refer to it's called the marching morons and i'm not sure if you're familiar with it no but i like

03:41:50.300 it already yeah well the it's free online if you just google marching morons as a pdf you can get

03:41:56.940 and uh but basically uh the gist of the story is this this guy in the 1950s he's a salesman he's

03:42:03.180 like a great salesman and he falls he goes to get to the dentist they put him asleep and he wakes up

03:42:08.140 in like the 25th century he's in the in the vast future and and he suddenly you know he gets woken

03:42:14.680 up and he gets oriented he starts figuring out what's going on and he's puzzled because all the

03:42:18.820 people in charge are idiots they're all stupid people except for this one guy this one guy seems

03:42:24.540 to really be on top of things and eventually it's explained to him that well there's a tiny number

03:42:30.140 of really smart people who run everything but there's so many of these idiots they had to give

03:42:34.740 them all these positions of authority and make them pretend that they're in charge of things

03:42:38.300 so but the reason they woke him up is that they did their research and they found that he was the

03:42:43.840 best salesman of his era and their plan was they're going to sell all these idiots free trips

03:42:48.660 to venus and they know they're gonna you know come up with some way to do this and launch them

03:42:53.900 all into space and so he comes up with this great idea you know and then all the all the stupid

03:42:59.120 people they all take their trip to venus and they don't come back and and uh so finally it almost

03:43:04.380 has like a precursor to the scientology mythology as well yeah yeah well and and the last the last

03:43:11.340 of the story ends is that the guy's all proud of himself he he finally got rid of the last moron

03:43:15.500 and his mentor, the guy who helped him along, who woke him up and all this stuff says, okay,

03:43:19.480 now here's your ticket. They launch him into space. But the way he describes it, that's the

03:43:26.980 world we're starting to live in now. You're seeing like one competent guy in a company

03:43:31.320 and there's all this periphery, these people who no one really knows what they're doing or why

03:43:37.320 they're doing it, but they're there. And really the guy who's actually doing the work, he's not

03:43:41.840 getting much of the credit for it. You know, the guy who looks good on the brochure gets the credit,

03:43:45.520 you know, the diversity hires and all this stuff. And at some point, though, those people who are

03:43:50.100 actually doing the work, they are going to say, well, you know what, you know, I can do something

03:43:54.640 else. They're going to have choices. I mean, you know, the world isn't going to change to such an

03:43:59.560 extent where we can get by without competent people or with punishing competent people.

03:44:04.900 Yeah, I think that's really, you know, that's that's because, you know, what's happening for

03:44:08.440 boiling off all these smart white guys out of the corporations they're going to do something

03:44:12.400 you know they're going to find some way to busy themselves you know yeah i mean look i mean you

03:44:16.580 know i mean i'm a good example of this i mean look i've been out on my own for 20 over 20 years

03:44:21.040 23 years something like that and um i found a way to make it work you know i get to live the lifestyle

03:44:27.220 that i want you know something i'm keenly interested in is finding options for those

03:44:31.340 people i know there's been a lot of people on our side especially in the uh more aggressive

03:44:36.020 white nationalist sphere who were kind of pioneering that white strike thing and you know i was wasn't

03:44:40.980 thrilled with that because i'm like well that's just relinquishing power but then you actually saw

03:44:45.680 recently the u.s military especially the army doing about face and try to desperately hire and i know

03:44:53.560 some guys have taken them up on it who are they're trying to get the white guys back basically because

03:44:57.660 no one knows how to do anything there anymore and i'm i'm looking at that i'm thinking you know what

03:45:02.660 i wish there's going to be a lot of people who do return to the fold once the system admits its

03:45:08.380 mistake and and has to look at the numbers but i'm like i wish we were presenting those skilled

03:45:13.520 people with more options to not feel like they have to go back into that system because it will

03:45:18.280 likely betray them again it'll likely cast them out or disparage them or or you know oppress them

03:45:24.200 once again i'm like we i feel like we're missing the boat or there's like a window of opportunity

03:45:29.860 where these highly competent people are in the wind

03:45:32.840 and they can be snatched up and brought over

03:45:35.100 to something more interesting.

03:45:37.960 And we're just not making A while the sun is shining on that.

03:45:42.000 And that's kind of just a tangent, but I don't know.

03:45:44.460 It's happening, but in quiet ways.

03:45:47.700 I was in an event last fall and a secret handshake event.

03:45:52.420 No one knows that we're meeting.

03:45:53.960 And one of the themes, one of the things that was done

03:45:56.360 it was a breakout session to talk about how do you live outside the system and still have a life

03:46:01.960 and uh and i can talk about this particular person because i do know them as a good example

03:46:06.360 and she's on my site uh is above time coffee uh they they were organic farmers in indianapolis

03:46:13.380 and uh they they're uh they got more hardcore after what happened to them but they were pretty

03:46:20.440 much just sort of, you know, edgy normie sort of world. But then Antifa found out that they were

03:46:27.320 kind of edgy and destroyed their business, uh, started picketing them at, you know, and, and,

03:46:31.820 and ruined their, tried to ruin their lives. And they sat down as a family, as a husband and wife

03:46:37.320 and a whole pastoral kids. And they had a farm and they realized, you know, okay, we can sell

03:46:40.680 some stuff online, you know, but they came up with making coffee. The husband had actually worked at

03:46:46.800 a a coffee place that actually uh cook the beans or whatever however you make coffee uh you take

03:46:53.040 roasting right bean roasting yeah and and he you know there's a craft to it and they wound up

03:46:58.480 creating this company and they sell coffee and they you know mostly word of mouth and all that

03:47:02.000 and they're making they're being able to pay their bills and and uh there's a lot of that happening

03:47:07.440 you know um like the people on my i put on my site they're people i know and uh you know i've

03:47:12.960 know their story. So I helped promote them. And at this event, there was a lot of people talking

03:47:18.520 about this. Hey, you know, this is what I did. You know, this is how I made a go of it. You know,

03:47:22.780 there was a guy who's in real estate in rural areas. He's like, you know, I found out that I

03:47:28.260 can buy a house for 25 grand or a double wide trailer. And the rent is actually paying twice

03:47:34.800 what the mortgage is, you know, you know, that kind of stuff. So it is starting to happen. People

03:47:38.620 are starting to talk about it. I did a show on this last year about what it's like to be a

03:47:42.820 small business man i got tons of of feedback tons of people were like yeah i'm this is what i'm

03:47:48.820 working on and you know i'm gonna probably do a follow-up on it this year for that reason that

03:47:53.960 there's a ton of interest in this it's a it is a it's a hot subject a lot of people you know

03:47:59.300 who fit our demographic profile um are looking around and saying particularly family guys you

03:48:05.660 know guys are like look i don't you know they don't want their kids exposed to a lot of this

03:48:08.720 stuff. They're thinking in those kinds of terms. And so I think it is happening, but I do think

03:48:14.020 you're right. A lot of people will just go, they'll take the blue pill and go back into the

03:48:16.680 blob. Well, I'm glad to hear that these are happening and that there's, because it's very

03:48:22.600 easy for people, and this is why I recommend people would tune into your show. It's very easy

03:48:26.760 to feel disconnected and feel like you're the only one who's talking about this or thinking about

03:48:31.940 this. But in fact, there are organizations and meetings and groups all over the country.

03:48:38.100 America, Canada, and elsewhere, of people trying to work through these problems. And I encourage

03:48:43.820 people, 2023 is a big year. I hope more people, especially in our audience and listenership,

03:48:49.160 will make more attempts to network with each other. We've talked about this before, about

03:48:54.700 the necessity, because I think the online space will become increasingly hostile to the point

03:48:58.740 where it might be that meeting up is the only way to do anything anymore. But to explore that idea

03:49:05.440 of actually trying to break out of the real world

03:49:08.460 and make real networking relationships

03:49:10.720 and essentially discuss what you're just talking about.

03:49:14.620 I'm a big fan of secret societies.

03:49:16.700 We need more of them.

03:49:17.880 And just general fraternities.

03:49:19.980 When I was a kid, my dad went to,

03:49:21.900 I always forget that he was an elk or moose

03:49:24.280 or I don't know, it was an animal.

03:49:27.080 He went to, he belonged to the club.

03:49:28.640 And every man did.

03:49:29.480 They all belonged.

03:49:30.080 He belonged to this club.

03:49:33.040 and every Friday he'd drop off his paycheck and he would go down for a couple of pops at the club

03:49:39.000 and play cards or pool or whatever. Once a month, they had a family deal where, you know, everybody

03:49:43.760 went down to the club, you know, you bring your wife and your kids or whatever, but it was a

03:49:46.960 fraternal organization. Now in the United States, they've all been banned. You can't have a men's

03:49:50.360 only club, at least not publicly. And, but those were wonderful things because what happened at

03:49:55.960 those places is that, Hey, I'm having this problem. You know, one guy says to another,

03:49:59.840 oh yeah, I had that problem too. This is what I did and it worked. Or this is what I did,

03:50:03.520 it didn't work. So don't do that, you know, that kind of stuff. And, you know, these simple sort

03:50:08.060 of social organizations are really, they're the connective tissue of any society. And we've lost

03:50:14.780 that in America. And I would say it's probably true in Canada as well. And we need to start

03:50:19.880 thinking about rebuilding those. And the simplest way to do it is if you know people in your area

03:50:24.140 is somebody's going to say, hey, look, guys, we're going to make a commitment every Tuesday,

03:50:27.620 we're going to get together and we're going to try at least once a quarter to find somebody we

03:50:31.500 can bring into the fold you know there's one guy the one guy who will join our group you know

03:50:35.340 and you start doing that and it's a it's a rewarding thing when i go to events i always

03:50:39.960 i'm always invigorated when i'm there mostly because everybody's normal it's so great to

03:50:46.760 be in a room full of people who are not crazy they're just normal people you know and not

03:50:52.480 having to worry about them being crazy that's the thing this is something it was one of those

03:50:56.700 things i couldn't put my finger on it i was at american renaissance back in november and uh

03:51:02.840 and it's a great event it's a it's a fantastic event it's it's uh you know you have some speeches

03:51:07.880 it's mostly socializing you know you have a few drinks you have some food it's very casual it's

03:51:12.800 very safe too you know the way it's set up you don't have to worry about antifa or that kind of

03:51:16.620 stuff and you know you go to this event and you're what you're you're relaxed in ways you can't be

03:51:23.320 relaxed anywhere else you you can say whatever you're thinking without doing that look over your

03:51:27.480 shoulder business or thinking about where where am i and or using you know funny euphemisms but it

03:51:33.240 hit me i my twitter account got reinstated a couple weeks ago and i'd been banned for over five years

03:51:40.400 and uh and then suddenly it came back to life you know i'm like okay you know i i you know whatever

03:51:45.640 and i was so i went you know back on twitter i was never really a big twitter user and uh i use gab

03:51:52.680 for joking around with people i know and who are also on gab but but i don't do a lot of that so

03:51:58.520 but i went on twitter and one of the things i realized is that hey i have to be careful what

03:52:03.220 i'm going to tweet and i never do that on gab gab i can just let it rip and say whatever i want

03:52:08.940 and don't have to worry about it because it's just it's the normal internet it's the way the

03:52:12.380 internet was supposed to be and i'm like you know what that's the difference you know i don't i want

03:52:16.720 to live in a world where i don't have to pull my punches you know what i mean i can just i could

03:52:20.700 just be normal and not have to worry about some lunatic trying to impose their morality on me.

03:52:24.460 And you do that in social societies where you say, this is a closed society. We're only going

03:52:30.420 to be normal people. The weirdos, sorry, you might be a nice guy, but you can't be one of us

03:52:35.580 because this is a weirdo free zone. I agree completely. And my experience with Twitter

03:52:42.640 is very much the same. And this is why I like Telegram so much. A lot of people don't like

03:52:46.280 telegram um but i actually like it because it's not the most intuitive platform uh there is a

03:52:52.220 steep learning curve if you if you just download telegram and put it on your phone or your desktop

03:52:56.680 it's not obvious what to do with it you really need to put the time in and kind of network and

03:53:02.360 figure out where you go and listen and then you get invited to other chats but when i would go

03:53:06.820 on twitter because i got it back for a minute and i was similarly to you banned just because i was

03:53:12.460 being a reply guy and just make messing with people but um I didn't even say like any slurs

03:53:17.880 or anything but um I remember I got back on there I'm like I don't like the vibe here I'm not having

03:53:23.420 fun I'm not enjoying myself it's strange and claustrophobic on here everyone even the people

03:53:29.320 I like have to speak in this fake way whereas in telegram that learning curve filtered out a lot

03:53:35.500 of the shittier people so now it's only my people and everyone talks freely and they kind of get

03:53:40.700 like a little secret language going it's almost like an as close to an internet secret society

03:53:45.680 as you could get but yeah i hated twitter and i i probably could get back i just don't see the

03:53:51.760 need to at this point really yeah it was never any great value to me i i actually did this we did i

03:53:58.980 was part of this experiment where i forget what the guy's name was some politician was running

03:54:02.540 somewhere i forget his name but one of the people in his campaign said hey could you write something

03:54:07.000 about them. So I did. And what they wanted to do is they wanted to test their social marketing

03:54:13.340 campaign or whatever it was. So they tweeted it out and they wanted me to keep track of how many

03:54:18.860 links I got, you know, how many hits I got back. So I'm sure, you know, I was kind of curious too,

03:54:24.580 because I never really got a lot of traffic on Twitter ever. And Ann Coulter wound up picking

03:54:29.400 up my post and she tweeted it out. Now she's got 2 million followers. That day, I got 700 link

03:54:36.240 backs from and colder out of 2 million people yep point not surprised not surprised because i for

03:54:42.760 years i was telling people no advertiser really gives a shit about twitter um it oddly enough

03:54:49.060 now it's probably the best time to go on twitter but like up until 15 minutes ago every it wasn't

03:54:55.420 talked about a lot but everyone knew it was lousy with bots no engagement he couldn't make a dollar

03:55:01.080 on twitter most companies if it was just like an extra thing to spend money on but like it feels

03:55:07.620 fake it is fake and even the people around there i don't know it's not a good place to like do

03:55:13.100 anything except it's talk shit i guess but it's not yeah it's not i mean from gab gab i get i don't

03:55:21.000 know 10 000 hits a month a day from gab yeah you know it's just because it's normal it's actual

03:55:28.300 real people there are no bots on gab and it's actual real people and of course it's obviously

03:55:32.680 it it attracts a certain crowd but um but yeah i like i use telegram a lot for that reason i mean

03:55:38.140 i i belong to a lot of um like uh i belong to some ukrainian channels some russian channels

03:55:43.420 um i am on a finnish channel and it's great for that because you know you know i got it's

03:55:50.700 narrow casted you know i don't have to and the nice thing is too like in the finnish channel

03:55:54.320 have to worry about some lunatic showing up and you know causing trouble i mean you know it's

03:55:58.740 obviously a very uh niche audience but it's um i i like telegram a lot for that reason because it's

03:56:04.640 kind of semi-private really i mean i guess that's really what uh what the truth of it is and you

03:56:08.180 can actually make the channels private i'm on some purely private channels and who knows who's

03:56:13.020 looking in on it my guess is is that i think it's a russian guy who runs it so is a russian guy who

03:56:17.440 founded telegram yeah there's some rumors about him because i've known some people correctly

03:56:23.440 pointing out like what does he get from this i'm pretty sure it's the founder of vk as well

03:56:27.960 and this is like a side thing and no one could figure out how it was generating a lot of revenue

03:56:33.940 like you can buy premium stuff now but it's there's a lot of people on telegram and it doesn't

03:56:39.360 seem like it's making any money so everyone is thinking like this is suspicious i'm not sure i

03:56:43.680 subscribe to that but you know there's there's something there i think like what's he getting

03:56:47.880 out of this thing because it's it's it's not a cheap platform to run i would imagine

03:56:52.100 yeah i mean i it's probably using for the most part the same sort of uh chat technology that

03:56:58.700 everybody else uses like session and uh a key base is another one i use and um there's some

03:57:05.500 other ones though there was a signal that's one yeah um so i mean that's one of the things about

03:57:10.760 all these platforms when you ever if you ever peek under the hood they're almost always the

03:57:14.000 same frameworks yeah same stuff so i was going to say i know you probably got to get going soon

03:57:19.360 um and this has been a fantastic conversation um if you had any a closing thought i was going to

03:57:25.480 ask you a question and we can keep this short but i think it will relate a lot to what we've

03:57:29.980 talked about this this episode you mentioned it on your blog recently um i was wondering if you

03:57:35.600 had any thoughts on what we might call the intergenerational war mainly in north america

03:57:42.940 By which I mean, like we were talking about earlier, you know, the millennials complained about Gen X and then everyone complained about the boomers and the boomers just complained about Gen Z.

03:57:52.580 And it seems more pronounced, at least to me, it seems more pronounced here than anywhere else in the world, even in Europe.

03:58:00.080 This idea that the generations are almost like political parties in themselves or sports

03:58:05.400 teams, and that we spend so much time shooting across the lines of age like that.

03:58:12.920 I wonder if you had any thoughts on that.

03:58:15.640 Yeah, I've always kind of hated generational politics in general.

03:58:18.980 And a lot of this has to do with the fact that in America, if you're in my age group,

03:58:23.040 one of the things that you had to kind of suffer through in your teenage years is hearing

03:58:26.860 all the baby boomers hit their early middle years and and uh reminisce you know and everybody does

03:58:33.300 this when you hit those like you're in your early 30s you you're something happens to you i mean i

03:58:39.420 went through this you start to realize that you're an adult you're no longer young but at the same

03:58:44.380 time you're not you know you're not a geezer you know you're in that weird middle space where you're

03:58:48.460 starting it's like your sophomore year you know we have the i don't know if you guys have this in

03:58:51.660 canada but the united states we have this you know your second year student you're a sophomore

03:58:55.200 wise fool you know and that's what that's where you are when you start at 30 you start becoming

03:58:59.220 the wise fool until you know about my age where I'm starting to actually lose the stupid parts and

03:59:04.180 just have the wisdom part left you know and uh at least I hope and um but you know it's just a

03:59:09.800 normal development especially I think especially for men but you know when we were young we were

03:59:14.680 of course we were confronted with this giant monolith this huge body you know of the demographic

03:59:19.160 and I think a lot of my generation came away thinking you know what generational politics

03:59:24.420 are terrible. We don't like being told that we're kids when we're young adults. And, you know,

03:59:29.220 we just don't want to, we don't want to be that way. So it was a little easier for someone my

03:59:33.300 age to be sort of, you know, dismissive of generational politics. I'm much more sympathetic

03:59:39.620 to Zoomers who probably, you know, they had to hear it from both millennials and baby boomers.

03:59:47.580 And of course, they, you know, the tortured environment of schools and college and so forth.

03:59:52.920 But but by and large, you know, only white people have this kind of stuff.

03:59:58.140 You never see black people talk about generational politics.

04:00:00.860 This is what I've been telling people.

04:00:02.360 Like it's it's mainly I don't see this with Asian people either.

04:00:05.800 No, no.

04:00:06.700 I mean, Asians, they love their old people.

04:00:08.380 They love their dead people, for goodness sakes.

04:00:10.040 You know, I mean, you know, it's a totally different thing, you know.

04:00:13.240 And the weird thing about it is that you'll have I always love this.

04:00:16.060 You'll have commercials in the United States where you'll see an old black guy, a middle aged black guy and a younger black guy.

04:00:22.520 you know three generations of black men statistically speaking you're more likely to

04:00:26.860 see a red-haired left-handed midget than you are to see that you know i mean it's just not going

04:00:33.440 to happen i mean but it just you know you know the statistics are where they are but anyway

04:00:38.420 but that kind of stuff gets promoted if it was white guys but they still had white guys on tv

04:00:43.000 here you know the the old guy would be his role would be to complain about his son and his son

04:00:48.620 would complain about the father and his son you know it's always this this is uh intergenerational

04:00:53.340 war and it's stupid because look i i really like talking to baby boomers i get together with a

04:00:58.440 group of these guys who are mostly retired now they have a lot of fun stories they're they're

04:01:03.340 old people are fun they're you know they're they have funny stories they have a lot of wisdom they

04:01:08.040 know a lot of stuff they're a good source of information and and me as i get older i want to

04:01:12.140 be that kind of guy too i want to be the kind of guy that young people can feel comfortable talking

04:01:15.620 to and say, you know what, this guy, he might be wrong about a lot of stuff, but he wants

04:01:19.220 to know why he's right.

04:01:19.820 So go ahead and ask him, you know, he might know.

04:01:22.720 That's great.

04:01:23.380 That's what you should strive to be as a man, as someone who, as he moves through life,

04:01:28.980 that people will start to respect how he's lived and want to talk to you, you know, want

04:01:34.140 to pick your brain, you know, want to take that knowledge that you've accumulated and

04:01:39.480 continue it on and build on it, not just let you take it to the grave.

04:01:42.700 And I think that's what we have to be.

04:01:44.980 My lived experience with that was, you know, last, maybe it was last year, a while ago, my grandfather passed away and he was a pretty connected guy locally where he would live.

04:01:55.840 And he was part of the secret societies. He was, I think he was kind of a Navy guy early on, but he was a member of, I don't even know what it would be, like an healthcare, I forget, it wouldn't be an American version.

04:02:07.340 anyway but at his funeral i i delivered a speech and everyone loved it and and all his friends

04:02:14.600 were there and that's the thing he had this whole network that showed up and wouldn't be terrifying

04:02:19.660 for a lot of the younger generations who would show at your funeral ask yourself that anyway

04:02:24.040 but this guy yeah no that's a perfect way to think of it yeah and so and even my uh i think my my mom

04:02:30.060 who's there she's like you know there's a lot of experience in this room everyone there's like 80

04:02:34.860 90 70 and like you know you should go talk to these people everybody here's connected

04:02:40.940 every single person in this room knows like a judge can get you a job can can they're they're

04:02:48.620 they're these gatekeepers of so much information and if you actually do talk to them it's so common

04:02:54.140 for our generation to be like fuck boomers you know we joke it's okay to joke we all joke

04:02:59.160 yeah but also i'm like i've seen it begin to emerge more of the year it's like you know what

04:03:04.220 like go talk to them and see what you can kind of get out of them not just wisdom but also maybe

04:03:10.280 it's advice maybe it's connections show that you're engaged there's no reason to just treat

04:03:16.140 this entire generation like trash especially if you're on our side of the distant right where

04:03:22.020 you're supposed to be all about your ancestors you're supposed to be all your people your folk

04:03:27.360 family all that stuff we talk about and but if you ask your average person they'd want to destroy

04:03:32.380 the last five generations of their bloodline i'm like you gotta square this somehow you know and

04:03:37.600 they're not gonna they're not gonna be they'll love everything you agree with sure you're not

04:03:42.200 gonna agree on everything but it's like i'm very interested in not you know sabotaging ourselves

04:03:47.960 the way we've been you know yeah i completely agree with that and it's one of the things like

04:03:52.380 i really find disappointing with uh like fuentes and the groipers you know all this boomer bashing

04:03:57.420 stuff and i look they're young and they're supposed to do some of that and but you know

04:04:01.880 they they uh they're falling into the same trap that i think a lot of people have fallen into

04:04:07.000 again you know it's it's probably easy for me because my generation is kind of weird it's a

04:04:11.540 small cohort you know there will be no like sentimentality about my generation because

04:04:16.600 there's just not enough of us for anybody to sell that crap to so you know we're not we're

04:04:20.700 going to spare people that stuff but the but even so the the joy like when i went to his events

04:04:27.820 nip fuente's events i had and i was with one of my buddies you know we've known each other for

04:04:31.920 40 years and he said you know i told him i said be prepared you're gonna be around a room full

04:04:37.780 of people who are you know could be your son and at first at first he was like holy crap i mean he's

04:04:43.540 like i feel like i'm i'm in a junior high school but it didn't take long after a few drinks he was

04:04:50.100 having a blast he's like it's so much fun to be around these young people because he and i we had

04:04:53.920 some adventures when we were young so we have some good stories and uh you know and we you know we

04:04:58.840 lived a lot i would say wildlife but maybe but uh you know so you know we we can we can do those

04:05:05.720 old guy things oh let me show you my scar you know and uh you know uh that kind of stuff but

04:05:10.060 the uh but it was fun it was fun being around young people because they got a lot of energy

04:05:14.300 and and really you know i think in person we're much better with the generational stuff than we

04:05:19.580 are online online amplifies all of our worst attributes our worst qualities which is another

04:05:24.940 reason why we need to try as best we can to start building in real life stuff because that solves a

04:05:33.120 ton of problems there's a guy i won't i won't say who it is there's a person that he wanted to start

04:05:39.080 a public spat with me and at one point we found each other in the same room and we're having

04:05:44.680 drinks and we never had a problem since then even though we completely disagree on most things

04:05:49.860 we we have we share the taste in alcohol we have a good time socializing with each other

04:05:55.820 even though we are politically not really in agreement and all of a sudden all that internet

04:06:00.880 shit stopped and he the guy said to me he goes you know i kind of feel bad about trying to start

04:06:05.440 shit with you online i'm like don't worry about it no i i get it i do yeah i said i told him i

04:06:10.460 that i was so tempted you know but i i held back because i you know kind of been down the road once

04:06:14.860 or twice before and and that's what in real life stuff i mean even just talking like this makes a

04:06:19.860 huge difference you know that that's the other thing is that even if you can't get together in

04:06:23.500 real life you can start a zoom session nothing wrong with that yeah hey baby i hear the blues

04:06:31.140 to call in, toss salads and scrambled eggs.

04:06:36.820 And maybe I seem a bit confused.

04:06:39.520 Yeah, maybe.

04:06:40.380 But I got you, Peg.

Blood Satellite - April 08, 2023

The 5 AM Man Behind the Curtain [“which means ilu in the charismatic pastor who thinks you get anything”]

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