This is the Babylon Bee weekly news podcast special episode for 7/10/2020. Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann and Creative Director Ethan Nicolle are joined by The Babylon Bee Senior Writer Frank J. Fleming to talk about the week's big stories. Frank has a new book Superego: Fathom which is a sequel to Superego. They talk about the week's big stories like Kanye West declaring a run for the Presidency, how modern Americans are definitely morally superior to slaveowners from 200 years ago, and why a Russian grandmother was caught smearing poo on playground swings. They also talk about how the rich and the powerful can say whatever they want and then in the subscriber portion talk about all of Frank's problematic writings. Show Outline Introduction Kyle and Ethan come down from their high of celebrating freedom by almost blowing themselves up and letting their kids play with fire. Weird News Driver fights off snake with just a knife and seatbelt while speeding at 76mph Germany goes nuts over sausage vending machines Alligator with missing limbs shows up on Florida family's porch Escaped pigs cause traffic chaos on Virginia highway Cat falls asleep in washing machine and miraculously survives 12-minute cycle Woman, 90, caught smearing 'poo' on children's swings in bizarre protest Stomach-churning footage shows an elderly woman smearing what appears to human faeces on a children's swing she wants removed. Gavin Newsom could do this. Layering the skateparks with excrement. Married woman, 32, used doctored baby scans bought on eBay to fool her 18-year-old lover into thinking he was the father of her child and let his family bring the boy up as one of their own Stuff That's Good Kyle likes Robot Jox. Ethan likes The Napoleon of Notting Hill by Chesterton. Frank likes Hamilton. Stories of the Week Story 1 - Kanye West Seizes Opportunity To Be Most Rational, Coherent Presidential Candidate Summary: Noticing a lack of rational, coherent, sane presidential candidates, Kanye West announced this weekend that he will be running for president. The move surprised everyone who hasn't been paying attention to 2020 at all so far. The real story: Kanye West actually announced his presidential run -- though it's not clear if he can actually still run. The Forbes interview Story 2 - Nation That Kills 3,000 Babies A Day Feels Morally Superior To Slaveowners From 200 Years Ago Summary: Leftists who support killing 3,000 babies a day were trying to virtue-signal but quickly ran into a problem: there's no one alive to whom they can feel morally superior. So, the movement was forced to look to people from 200 years ago to find someone they could somewhat credibly criticize for moral failings: slave owners What is it about humanity that makes us think the sins of other ages are so much worse than the sins of our age? Most people go with the crowd, how do you know you would not? It is like Chesteron's picture of the cad who climbs up to the top of a castle turret then kicks down all ladders that got him there. Real abolitionists who paid the price at the time Story 3 - New App Reminds You To Look Up From Your Phone To Check If Your Kids Are Still Alive Summary: The tech world is abuzz after the announcement of a new smartphone app that could save millions of lives. The new app, called Kid-Alyve, will remind parents to look up from their phones every so often to confirm that their children are still breathing. -Parenting is crazy Topic of the Week Cancel Culture / Harper's Letter Hate Mail LOVE MAIL Subscriber Portion Bonus Frank Stories And The Ten Questions Story 1 Innovative New Process Turns Vegetables into Meat by Feeding Them to Cows Story 2 Superman Criticized for Unrealistic Portrayal of Journalist as Heroic Story 3 Retraction: Those Kids We Accused Of Holding A KKK Rally Were Actually Just Playing Duck, Duck, Goose
In a world of fake news, we bring you up-to-the-minute factual inaccuracy and a heavy dose of moral truth with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
This is the Babylon B. Fake news you can trust.
Welcome, everybody, to the Babylon B podcast, where you hear several white dudes tell you what to think about the news.
Not several, just a couple.
Well, usually a couple.
Right, but we got more today.
It's a few.
It's a few.
Three is a crowd.
And today we have a crowd because Frank Fleming, senior writer of the Babylon B, so named because he's old.
He's the eldest?
Is he the eldest?
He might be.
So senior writer might be Doc.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Doc is older.
That's true.
Senior writer Frank Fleming joins us today.
Hi, Frank.
Hey, guys.
Thanks for having me.
It's great to be here.
I'm a big fan of the podcast.
Feel like I know you guys.
Fan of you.
Your favorite podcast is the one where two guys are constantly talking about how funny Frank Fleming is.
What a surprise.
Yeah, a lot of podcasts don't mention me or talk about how great I am, and they kind of lose my interest over time.
That would be funny if you were listening to a true crime podcast or something, and right in the middle, they go, by the way, Frank Fleming.
Hilarious.
Hilarious.
Did murder people.
That's why we're talking about this.
You know who didn't murder anybody?
Frank Fleming.
Hilarious guy.
Something to shoot for.
So it was 4th of July, which by the time this podcast comes out, this is going to be like ancient history.
It will be, but this is our recap.
This is our recap of the week.
We had a good time.
Me and Dan and Ethan all hang out together and families.
Tried not to blow ourselves up successfully, I think.
You had some relatives who were more bent on blowing people up than us.
One of my relatives decided to launch one of those in the mortar tube that goes way up.
The giant ones.
Which is completely illegal here.
Yeah.
But our entire neighborhood is just lit up with those.
They're huge.
I don't know.
I don't understand how people afford those fireworks.
It's my.
My understanding.
They're expensive.
You buy one of those little ones that shoots out little spouts and stuff, and that thing's like, what, 20 bucks or something?
Yeah, we had that pack that was like 50, and you got 10 of them or 15 of them or something.
So one of those giant ones that goes in the sky.
That's crazy.
Those are $100 or something or a couple of to go get them in Vegas and bring them back.
Yeah, that sucks.
So I'm sure we all saw the video of LA.
It was just lit up with those.
And apparently Gavin Newsom said no fireworks for 4th of July.
So this is the response.
Did Newsom say no fireworks?
That's what I read.
Am I wrong?
I hadn't heard that.
I read that he did a full, like, I don't know.
Maybe that's just a good story.
I make up the news.
I don't know.
It's more fun when you make up.
Well, I'm sure L.A. was no fireworks.
And I know that those ones that shoot in the air are illegal pretty much everywhere.
They're legal everywhere.
If they're interesting to watch, they're illegal.
This is like the snare.
Yeah.
When you were driving them from your house, you could just see them everywhere.
It was like, you didn't have to go to a fireworks show if you were in California or maybe across the nation.
I don't know, but it was wild.
Which was nice because a lot of them are canceled.
A lot of those fireworks displays were canceled.
Oh, really?
The community ones.
And so people are just like, you know what?
Boom, blow up my own stuff.
That could be.
Maybe they were canceled.
So the people that had all these stockpile of fireworks, they're going to blow up.
They're like, just started going door to door and they're like, here, you guys want to do these?
Wouldn't fireworks scare away the Rona, though?
I mean, it's real loud and stuff.
Is it like a dog?
They go high.
Yeah, it just goes and whimpers under the kitchen table.
Yeah.
A lot of people were posting signs for lost coronavirus after the on light poles and stuff.
Because it all ran away.
My son burned his hand.
I handed him one of those.
This is very smart of me.
I handed my four-year-old one of those little smoke bomb type style ones.
And he was, and I was showing him like, hey, you put it on your hand and then you just throw it like this.
And he like, I put it in his hand and he immediately closes his hand.
And I'm like, yeah, I remember, yeah, the fireworks, the little ones you set off.
That was like my first experience as a kid of playing with matches and stuff.
I didn't do that with my kids this year.
I almost like completely forgot about fireworks.
It's all the everything closed down sort of thing.
Sad.
Yeah, very sad.
I just mooched.
We just went to Kyle's house and used his fireworks.
Yeah.
Well, and we were just mostly just mooching off our neighbors anyway because they were all launching off so many crazy.
Yeah, they all the big ones.
So, all right, you guys ready to do some weird news?
Let's do it.
Sure.
This news is weird.
Driver fights off snake with just a knife and seatbelt while speeding at 76 miles per hour.
This is in Australia.
And he gets pulled in by a cop.
Well, is it unusual in Australia?
Yeah, I assume isn't even a news story in Australia.
Yeah, if you go to Australia.
Yeah.
Or like eight of the most poisonous snakes like in Australia.
They just got snakes everywhere.
I mean, it's just something they do.
I guess a cop pulled him over and he's like trying to explain.
There's a snake in here, mate.
He's like, got a bloody knife and the snake.
The thing that was weirdest to me about this is if you look at the picture, they show the dead snake and they've blurred out the wound on the snake.
Like people can't emotionally handle seeing a snake that's been wounded.
Right?
Is that weird?
It's not that graphic.
It's a little like.
Yeah, I could understand if it was decapitated or something.
It's just like a little stab wound on the snake.
Yeah, a little stab wound on the snake and they blur it out.
That just makes me feel like we can't, we can eat, we can look at a chicken breast and eat it, but we can't look at a wounded snake.
Yeah, I mean, as kids, we used to eating a wound all the time.
That was just something we did as kids.
And now it's like, oh, they can't even look at that.
You can't even look at it.
Stab a snake.
Get over it.
Stab a snake.
I don't want to live in a society where we can't look at a wounded snake.
Much as a man.
Fall a man.
I don't know if, yeah, it wasn't Samuel Jackson on the truck because he's Australian.
So I don't know if he would swear as much.
Was the snake?
Was it getting agitated if you slowed down?
Like, I had to keep it over 50 miles per hour.
Yeah, I was wondering.
Why was he going so fast?
Was he going to slam the brakes so the snake goes through the windshield?
Because I don't get how he included the seat belt in the fight.
I was trying to figure it out.
I really like how specific the headline is: that it was 76 miles per hour.
And like the cop's sitting there and he's like, well, it's because it's Australia and they're in what, kilometers or whatever?
Are they?
Or are they miles?
I don't think they're miles because the weird thing is in the, it says, or maybe the, oh, you know what?
I think they are miles, but the story, no.
Because I was reading the miles per hour that he used kilometers per hour translates to a really weird number of miles per hour.
Rounded up.
So he probably had cruisers.
At the whatever weird number would be.
Yeah, whatever weird number they go at.
Yep.
I figured in Australia they use some weird one like dingery dos or something instead of miles.
Yeah.
Or they use an Australian mile, but it's really like 48 miles.
It's Australia.
Koalas per hour or something.
Germany goes nuts over sausage vending machines.
We're going nuts.
We're going nuts over here.
It's like Pong.
They're just all lined up for it.
It's a jam full of corners.
This number is hard to process.
570,000 sausage vending machines are in Germany.
Germany's not that big, right?
570,000.
That's every Germany.
So many.
That's like every corner.
I'm assuming.
I just can't imagine that kind of thing.
Do you want to go to the next corner and see if they got any knockworks?
Because this one's kind of running out.
I know in Japan you can buy like underwear and vending machines and stuff.
Yeah.
You can buy everything there.
Apparently in Germany you can buy all sorts of cooked food.
You can get like corn and gravy and potatoes and all sorts of crazy sausages and like liver paste.
Do you get free refills in your gravy cup?
Yeah, you get like a gravy cup refill.
Yeah, it's wild.
So, yeah, Germany, I fully support it, though.
I go to the vending machine, and you know, you're low carb, your keto.
I just want a sausage.
Or if you put in a number, I want like eight sausages, and it gives you like a sausage rope.
You can just walk out of there, sling it over your back, and then hang it from the ceiling and gnaw at it while you work.
When you get lucky and like two chip bags come out, it's like the sausage link hooks onto another one, and then you're just like, oh, yeah, you can't just pull like a fire hose.
Plus, in Germany, they do it the real way.
You know, it's like it's not some kind of fake casing, like it's legit.
Yeah, it's a pig intestine.
Yeah, that's important.
Isn't that so weird?
How do you say pig intestine?
I was wondering if you can talk to animals in heaven and we have to explain to them sausage.
We ground you up and put you in your own intestines and then tie little knots.
It was really good.
That doesn't sound like a great image of heaven.
You just talk to all the animals you need to explain.
You were really tasty.
I mean, you ever had a bacon snake?
You didn't get it.
Come on.
You all ate animals.
Don't look at me that way.
You all ate each other, mostly.
Do you want to read the next one, Frank?
Sure.
Alligator with missing limbs shows up on Florida Family's Porch.
Wouldn't an alligator missing his limbs just be like a really fat snake?
He's well, he's got two, he's got two back legs, but he's got no front legs, so he's a real wiggly alligator.
Oh, okay.
Or a dancing alligator.
There's actually like a legendary Japanese animal that's a fat snake, which seems kind of a lame thing for a legendary animal, but that's what it is.
Yeah, because that first Australia story could have been driver fights off alligator with missing limbs.
Maybe that's he had just left that fight and then the snake showed up.
He had cut off all the limbs in the two.
So is this a field glitch story?
Like, you know, it's missing its limbs.
Yeah, they made it.
I was thinking it was like when you leave your child, leave a child on a doorstep.
Like the alligator.
Maybe some alligators were like, he's not going to survive out here, man.
So they carried him and left him on the doorstep, knocked.
These people look like good people.
These are good people.
They'll take care of him.
Oh, it's only missing two limbs.
Yeah, not all of them.
Two limbs.
The two front.
So he had to do the push, but no.
The scoot.
He was doing the worm.
Yeah, doing the worm all the way there.
I can't feel my arms.
How did it lose its limbs playing with fireworks?
Yeah, I don't know.
Their guess was it was an alligator fight.
So somewhere out there is an alligator eating alligator arms.
There's an alligator with six limbs somewhere.
That's just wrong.
Alligators band together.
They got enough to deal with.
They shouldn't be fighting each other.
This is all animal news.
I always like the animal ones.
I would guess technically it is because we had snake, we had sausage.
Yeah.
We have alligator.
And the next one is: escaped pigs cause traffic chaos on Virginia Highway.
It's not a big story.
It's just pigs running free on the highway.
Yeah.
Cars all stopping.
Are people just not used to that anymore?
Pigs all running around.
They get all panicked by it or something.
Yeah, it makes the news.
It looked like the video kind of looks like babe pig on the freeway.
Like it's just the pig looks fine with it.
Everybody else is freaking out.
They were blocking the freeway.
Were they protesting?
Yeah, so I thought maybe they were blocking and protesting bacon or something.
I don't know what they'd be protesting.
Anti-farm.
Sorry.
Well, it doesn't seem, yeah.
It doesn't seem like the pigs would be on the side of Black Lives Matter because they're always calling.
And they're always calling cops pigs.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know if they're going to be able to do it.
So would they side with cops?
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out, like, wouldn't they be offended by that?
So pigs would be all about the thin blue line?
They're with the cops because they're like.
Yeah, pigs are usually on the side of toast and eggs.
Where do we find this guy?
Where's Frank's chuckle?
We need to play Frank's audio.
We'll explain that later.
Anyway, this is a stupid story.
Cat falls asleep in washing machine and miraculously survives 12-minute cycle.
It is animal news.
It is all animal news.
Told you.
The next one's not.
It's poop.
I actually had a cat.
I actually had her in the dryer.
We heard this big clunking after we started the dryer and opened it up, and there she was inside it.
But, you know, we heard that right away.
She wasn't in there 20 minutes.
We've gone to feed the cats and one doesn't come running.
One of our many, many cats doesn't come running.
And we're looking around and we found them in the dryer.
I think it just, you know, they didn't go through the cycle and they just jumped in there and someone got clothes out and closed the thing again.
So we do have this irrational fear that they're going to end up in the washer somewhere.
Yeah, unrelated, I once peed on that cat's head because the cats are just popping up where they shouldn't be.
It popped up in front of the toilet?
Well, yeah, this was, I was used to living with cats.
It was like I was home alone, and so I was like, I didn't bother to close the bathroom door, and then cat head just popped and looked into the toilet bowl just the wrong moment.
Right in the stream, huh?
Yeah.
Wow.
Frank, do you have a poster behind you that just says poster?
Well, I didn't realize, you know, we're going to do video and I didn't have any decorations in my office, so I thought I'd put up a poster.
He's like, poster, window, potted plant.
All right, Frank.
You got this one.
The next one?
Okay.
Women, woman, 90, caught smearing poo on children's swings in bizarre protest.
That sounds like some editorializing in that headline.
How is that bizarre?
There's editorializing inserting their opinion.
Stomach churning footage shows an elderly woman smearing what appears to be human feces on a children's swing she wants removed.
Local residents in Gachina, Russia.
So this is Russia.
Okay, this makes sense.
Oh, obviously Russia.
Nah.
It could have said Florida or Russia, and I would have been like, oh.
They claim the substance is human.
I've never seen feces spell like that.
Feces.
Must be like a UK site.
They're always adding weird letters.
They're always being weird with their speech.
Throwing a U in.
Yeah, throwing an A in there.
They say the pensioner has been doing similar things for years as she wants the swings removed so she can have a flowerbed there instead.
Flower bed.
Flower bed.
Flowerbed.
Did you just flowerbed bleeps?
No, it's a real word.
Flowerbed.
I was thinking this could be something Gavin Newsom might try.
Like, just cover the entire skate park, human feces.
Well, they essentially did with the sand.
And we've all seen what the homeless people do at the beach.
I love this lady's ingenuity.
Yeah, I think she's out there.
She's doing it just like she's butter and toast.
She's just out there covering the swings.
Because sometimes I wonder about the effectiveness of different protests.
And, you know, this is a different one.
It might work.
I don't know.
It's less violent than the ones that have been going on.
You have to admit it's actually probably preferred to what's been happening.
Like a lot of people who had their storefronts destroyed, they probably would have rather had their storefronts covered in human feces because then they could just at least hose it off.
Yeah, I think she's more progressive.
Yeah, I think this is a nice compromise versus just saying, hey, I disagree with you and blowing stuff up.
Married woman 32 uses doctored baby scans bought on eBay to fool her 18-year-old lover into thinking he was the father of her child and let his family bring the boy up as one of their own.
That is a long headline, huh?
It is a very long.
Did that get rejected by I would reject that headline from Babylon B.
So you got to convince that.
Yeah.
I got to edit it down.
Nothing left in the story there.
Got it all.
Doctored baby scans bought on eBay to fool her lover.
I think he's the father of her child.
Okay, I don't get this.
Why does she need to doctor him to fool her child?
Like, what was there something?
Yeah, what previous feature was like, that's definitely not my child.
Yeah.
How do you doctor the scans?
Like, if he's got a mustache, give him his nose.
Yeah.
He's got your mustache.
Give him your, he has a birthmark on his forehead right in the center.
Give him the same one.
Maybe, yeah, she just cut out his face and pasted it on the age this face down.
It's doctored.
So whoever did this had a doctorate.
So age the face down from his face to a baby and put it on a fetus.
Maybe I'll do a Photoshop where we do that with Frank just to see how that would look as an example.
Yeah.
All right.
He does have kind of a lovely cherubic face.
Yeah.
So we'll take Frank now.
Age down.
This is the baby.
This is the overlay of the baby.
Now this is the scan.
You're going to make a Frank baby.
Okay.
Yeah.
We're going to make a Frank one.
A little Frank Furter.
Little, yeah.
All right.
You want to move on to some stuff that's good?
Let's do it.
Yeah, let's do it.
Nothing's good.
Everything's terrible.
But now, this week's edition of stuff that's good.
Yeah, well, the wife and I stayed up late playing Gears of War on the cooperative thing.
And yeah.
I've never played that.
That's weird.
I can't imagine playing video games with my wife.
She suddenly wanted to.
She's like, let's play something.
I don't know.
Playing that Gloomhaven super complicated board game.
She thinks it's like I'm trying to trick her into playing a video game because it's like so much stats and stuff.
You're like, you know what would be easier?
We let a computer handle all of this.
So my stuff that's good today is, well, let me clarify.
This isn't strictly good.
This is more of a so good it's bad.
But there was an old movie in 1990 called Robot Jocks.
You guys ever see it?
I saw it when it came out.
I hardly remember it.
I was into battle tech at the time, and that was like the closest thing to a battle tech movie.
It's just a video story.
Yeah, it's like straight to video.
It's one of those concepts that like a grade schooler would come up with as a cool idea for a movie.
And they're like, what if instead of wars, we just had robots punch each other?
And that's the whole movie.
That's it.
That's the entire movie.
I just described the movie.
Even as a kid, I was like, to the premise, they outlawed war.
It's like, oh, okay, I need a lot more explanation of that.
How does that happen?
And it's just great.
And there's a fan.
I don't know if I want to ruin it, but there's a fantastic scene where the Russian and the American come together and they're beating each other up and they're all bloody and then they just put their fists together and give a thumbs up.
The robots are bloody?
No, they actually like destroy the robots, get out of the robots and start punching each other.
But that was like the symbol that they would do when they would fight.
So in the finale, the giant robots aren't even there.
There's just two guys fighting.
Yeah.
And it's supposed to be really emotional, but you could tell it's kind of like the Star Wars craze and they're trying to do cool effects.
And it's just, it's a complete train wreck and absolutely worth watching.
I'm kind of wondering if Rift Tracks or Mystery Science has ever done it, but I've only ever watched it straight.
It's a robot jocks.
And that's jocks with an X. Pacific Rim is just like a ripoff of it, basically.
So in character, I'm recommending another GK Chesterton book I just read.
GK Chesterton.
But it's one of his fiction books.
I hadn't read it for a long time.
A lot of people said it got brought up a lot when Trump got elected because it's called The Napoleon of Notting Hill and it's about that they say that it takes place in 1984 and they say that Orwell named 1984 after this or he chose that year because of Notting Hill.
I don't know if that's true.
That's the legend.
But in this book, England is highly unchanged, but they've decided that they will just let a random person be king because society has become so progressive and perfect and everything has been kind of like figured out.
And it's kind of this bland future.
There are no borders or anything.
And so this king, he's kind of just a jokester and he likes to just mess with things.
And he decides he wants to make everybody very patriotic and partition them off.
And everybody kind of just to be silly.
I don't know.
But then there's one guy who is insanely patriotic about his little, his little tiny town where it has a toy store and a chemist and just has like a few shops.
And they decide they are going to defend their area to the death that you can't have a road go through it or whatever.
Anyway, it's very fast-paced and there's like a ton of battles in it, like really funny, insane battles because they're trying to stop these guys, like these armies that are built of guys that have never fought a war for like 100 years are trying to fight these insane, passionate, patriotic.
And it's actually about satire.
Like at the end, the whole thing it's about is about the relationship between the satirist and the extremist.
So anyway.
Well, that sounds interesting.
The Napoleon Notting Hill is a fascinating, fun, and pretty short for a Chesterton.
Well, his books are pretty short, actually, usually.
Recommended.
And I want to see a movie of it.
It'd be a great movie.
Cool.
A lot of action.
Well, what I liked was Hamilton, because I finally saw that.
When is that again?
The president?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, the MD production.
Now I get why the elite few saw it on Broadway would do nothing but talk about it because it was actually really good.
And I saw it for like, you know, for like they put out Independence Day, and it was a great watch for that.
It really got me pumped about the country.
And it's kind of surprising.
It really, you know, kind of delved into how, you know, beating the British was kind of the easy part.
The hard thing was making a government that lasts.
And it was pretty cool.
It really enjoyed it.
All the music was catchy.
Like, kind of, kind of wanted to watch it again.
Nice.
Nice.
We started it last night and then got distracted by Gears of War, but it was very good what we saw.
But he was a slaveholder, so you can't.
That's what's so funny is that five years ago, this was like the liberals' ultimate movie.
Or not movie, play that everybody was going to see and talking about.
And now they're like, cancel Hamilton.
Well, yeah, it's kind of against the Zeitgeist or however you say that word right now, because like, yeah, they didn't actually.
Washington was only portrayed positively in it.
You know, he's a slaveholder.
You think they have like some little thing.
But Jefferson, they, you know, they went after on that.
But he was my favorite character in that.
They played him real flamboyant.
It was, it was fun.
Hmm.
Awesome.
All right.
All right.
Let's go on to stories of the week.
This has been stuff that's good.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
You're okay.
I need to slap myself or something.
I'm feeling low energy.
I don't know why.
Low energy, Kyle.
Low energy.
Sleepy Kyle.
I was remembering Jeb, low energy Jeb.
Yeah, it was low energy Jeb.
Sleepy Joe.
I hear Trump is rethinking his sleepy for Biden.
Like, he needs something better.
Skee's got the whole strategy meeting together.
Figure out a name.
All right.
Our first story of the week.
Noticing a lack of rational, coherent, sane presidential candidates, Kanye West announced this weekend that he will be running for president.
The move surprised everyone who hasn't been paying attention to 2020 at all so far.
So, yeah, he actually did announce his presidential run on Twitter.
Bringing a much-needed dose of sanity to the race.
And at first, we were all like, oh, it's just a funny tweet, but it just came out.
Like, he did an interview with Forbes and like went into the details.
The details.
So, his new political party he's forming is the birthday party.
Try explaining this to someone from a few years ago.
I know.
Yeah, what's the weirdest thing about all of it is how not weird it is.
We're just like, oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
People would have been going, you know, like not now.
Yeah, just a few years ago, like, that's ridiculous.
Kanye West.
But now it's like, hmm, makes sense.
It's probably going to happen.
It's literally probably going to happen.
There's nothing we can do to stop it.
I've already accepted it.
He says, we must now realize the promise of America by trusting God, unifying our vision, and building our future.
I'm running for president of the United States.
Hashtag 2020 Vision.
Yeah, he no longer supports Trump.
He's throwing off the red hat.
Elon Musk immediately tweeted his support.
That makes me wonder.
Are we going to make history here?
We'll have our first president on Mars performing a rap concert.
That'd be huge.
Giving the state of the union from Mars with freestyle.
Freestyle rap.
Yeah, I mean, can you come up with one rational reason not to vote for Kanye West?
Russia, we're going to crush you.
I'm just.
I'm freestyle.
Let's do more than that.
Not good enough.
Watch us.
Three white guys try to freestyle rap.
Oh, yeah.
Then he'll like, it'll be like the opposite of Hamilton.
The actual stuff will all be done in rap, and then they'll just change it to normal when they do a movie or something.
Yeah.
I'll do a play in like however any couple hundred years and it'll just be spoken.
Yeah.
He says he's he envisions a White House organizational model based on the secret country of Wakanda, Black Panther.
I didn't feel they discussed policy enough in Black Panther, so I don't really know what that means.
I mean, that's why I didn't like it as much as Hamilton, which had the I found it really like a lot of the big Marvel movies that were just like excessive.
I just found it excessive.
Like I couldn't keep up with it.
Well, I wanted to discuss trade a bit more and some of their tax policies.
And it was still this like, hey, we got to fight each other.
It's like, come on.
Yeah, so if he goes with the Black Panther model, then someone could challenge him to take the presidency once a year, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Trial by combat.
Trial by combat.
Or whatever.
Well, he also says he believes Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the devil's work.
That might be true.
Does that fit with Wakanda?
Is Wakanda pro-life or choice?
I have no idea.
I'm guessing Wakanda strikes me as, yeah, I don't know.
I'm sure that the Disney writers today would say it's pro-life.
Yeah, I'm sure they'd say that.
But I mean, Wakanda was, you know, the Black Planet in the 60s or 70s or whatever.
Wakanda.
Yeah.
And you ask, you ask the average Wakandan, you know, the fish seller.
So if we were to pull Wakandans.
Yeah.
Pull the Wakandans and the average blue-collar Wakandan, not, you know, some elitist up in his high-rise.
Yeah, some elitist with his Panther armor.
Well, yeah, so I think he says COVID-19 is suspicious of a coronavirus vaccine, terming vaccines the mark of the beast.
Well, he's just earned my vote.
So I'm me and Dan are just talking.
We're all pretty sure things are just like we're at the tip of the end of America, probably.
We're getting pretty close.
Things are kind of breaking down, winding down.
It's getting pretty messed up.
Why not just have fun and vote for Kanye and just watch it all?
Just have fun.
Yeah, I agree with that entirely.
Yeah, start working on Constitution number two, you know, for after things collapse.
I guess you need like a declaration first, you know.
Yeah, Revolution Part Two.
I think that again, the Hamilton got me pumped.
We should do that.
We should rise up and revolt against somebody.
Somebody.
I thought you were going to break out into a hip-hop song there, Frank.
Rise up.
I wish I could do that.
That looks complicated.
Well, Kanye has my vote.
Story two: nation that kills 3,000 babies a day feels morally superior to slave owners from 200 years ago.
You read that with a lot of enthusiasm.
I was trying to do the look at everybody.
I can't.
Once we get the new office, we'll be able to set it up where we can actually look at the camera because I'm trying to talk to you and do this.
Yeah.
And then Frank's on this little hologram on the table here, like Star Wars or something.
It's just what it is.
It's just what it is.
We just realized broadcasters have a very hard job.
Yeah, they do.
And they're like, and then they're all signaling.
I'm like, look at camera two.
And they got a little person talking in their ear.
Yeah, we don't give enough credit to them and journalists.
They're great people.
Yeah, journalists either.
We'll talk about that later.
Don't give enough credit to journalists for sure.
Oh, I read the wrong thing.
No, you read the headline.
That's funny.
But yeah, it's weird.
You know, there's these people that support abortion and we kill up to 3,000 babies a day in America.
And they're looking around the country for someone to feel morally superior to and they couldn't find it.
They see these bronze statues.
Hey, how about that guy?
Yeah, the statues.
They held slaves.
Yeah, everybody likes to think, oh, we're way better than those people back then.
No, same people.
Yeah.
We just got different.
You go along with this today because you're just one of the people that goes along with stuff today, and you would have gone along with that then.
Sorry.
Yeah, you get as much credit.
You get as much credit for being against slavery as if you taught a parrot to say racism is bad by feeding it a cracker.
Like, oh, what a moral parrot.
Yeah.
I love that idea of handing out little ribbons of didn't hold a slave to all the children today.
Good job.
You didn't know a slave in a slave.
I can even imagine being somebody who's fighting something like that in its time.
Yeah, yeah.
I can't even imagine.
You would get canceled.
That's what would happen.
You would get canceled.
Yeah, well, it's like being against abortion today.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
It is canceled.
Canceled.
Yeah, because they got scared because they were like, and also it seems like an impossible thing to defeat.
Yeah, I mean, and people, they got really scared and panicked.
It's well, it's getting like the abortion, like, oh, women are going to die if this happens.
Well, with slavery, it's like, well, the South are going to get murdered by all the free people if we free them.
You know, and they were all thought, you know, so basically ending slavery was saying we're going to kill southerners is what that meant to them.
They just called it southern health care or something.
Well, they called it, what was it?
The South's peculiarity.
I don't know why abortion hasn't picked that one up.
I thought like the feminist peculiarity, feminism's peculiarity would be a great euphemism.
Peculiarity.
Yeah, I don't know.
You've mentioned Jordan Peterson's thing about how if you were in Nazi Germany, you would have been a Nazi.
Yeah, I just statistic.
I think it's 90 to 95%, nine out of 10 people would be a Nazi if they were born in Nazi Germany or whatever.
Like would they be part of that party?
It's probably a lot of like the jerks and stuff who wouldn't be, you know, the ones who don't really care what other people think.
Like, like of people in society today, it might be like Alec Jones, who's like most likely to not be a Nazi because he's just always bucking things.
It's probably, you know, it's probably like, it's not the DISIS people.
I think, I mean, it's people that really think about, and it's rare, people that really think about what they believe and why they believe it.
I mentioned it, we just did an interview with James Lindsay.
I'm reading a book.
I found it fascinating, a book on crowds and what kind of drives them to all do the same thing together.
And one of the main drivers was kind of your, or the main thing that makes you not join in on that is your character.
You could have completely different levels of intelligence.
And so I think that that's something that just why I try to stress it.
I mean, my kids, I don't need, I don't know how to tell that to your kids.
Your character, it's so much more important than your intelligence.
Yeah, we put way too much emphasis in today's society on intelligence.
Like, we think it's like, it's like morally wrong to be dumb or something.
Yeah.
It's like, no, it's not, that's something that's just like so not important versus like, because I think about that as like, you know, if my kids were successful, but horrible people, would I feel like a good father?
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
Nope.
Cheated their way to the top.
Engulfing in their high rise off of a corpse they just killed.
Well, I mean, if they helped take care of their dad, I mean, I don't know.
Yeah, that'd be good.
Yeah.
It'd be just one bad kid who's rich.
I got four.
You mentioned here in the notes Chesterton's analogy of the guy who climbs to the top of the castle and kicks down all the ladders.
Oh, yeah.
GK Chesterton.
What's the connection?
I remember we just read this the other night.
Yeah.
It's just having that.
I mean, to overcome and we were the forefathers that overcame slavery actually fought it.
I mean, that's one of the great unique things about America, right?
And we killed each other over this.
And that's the great thing about America.
We killed each other.
That's unique, though, right?
Like, I mean, I don't know.
You know, we fought to end it.
Yeah, that we actually fought each other.
Well, it's like, you know, Jefferson, you know, he's a complicated person.
He was a slave owner, but he put the nail in the coffin of slavery by saying all men were created equal.
I mean, that led, you know, I think he knew it almost at the time.
He knew this wasn't going to last forever.
And it's weird is having those principles that you can actually build on that led to the end of it.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff at that time.
Like, I believe George Washington couldn't legally free his slaves till he died.
He wanted to, but a lot of things sound really easy when you aren't living in the time.
Like, just like, be free.
You know, like, maybe it doesn't work that way.
And then, you know, what if they're just freed and then they're just killed once they get out on the street or whatever?
And I don't know what the rules and laws are, but it was a tough situation.
We haven't existed.
Seems like it would be tough.
We've gotten completely over it yet.
So.
Yeah.
Anyway, my analogy about the ladders, the Chesterton analogy, was that these presidents of the statues they're knocking over, they are rungs on a ladder that got us here to just kick them over and act like you didn't, now you don't need them because you're so high and mighty.
It's kind of my perspective on that.
Yeah, it's like the very first historical figure I remember learning about as a kid was Martin Luther King.
I mean, it was put in from the very earliest memory, don't be racist.
And it's like, but I mean, so as I make like a moral choice not to be racist or just go along with the crowd, you know, it's different when you had to be there and fight things, fight other people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Crowd, crowd, crowd.
All right.
Next story.
It's your turn, Frank.
All right.
I'll read from the summary, not the headline.
Oh, okay.
The tech world is a buzz after the announcement of a new smartphone app that could save millions of lives.
The new app called Kid Alive will remind parents to look up from their phones every so often, confirm their children are still breathing.
So, how many of you have almost had your children die?
Uh, from not looking just the other day, basically, I was looking on my eye, just the other day, I was looking at my iPad.
I look, where's Winchester?
He's like 18 months and crawling and like, uh-oh, can't find him.
He went, he found a gap in the we tried to barricade the stairs and went all the way upstairs.
And that's always a really scary thing with a little kid who sometimes falls.
Huh?
Yeah, we're constantly like, I wrote a headline once that we never used that was something like, Father saves child from certain death 68 times in one day.
Like, it's just like I kind of constantly feel like they're about to hit fall and their head on.
It's amazing, they actually don't do worse.
So, it's scary when you're hanging your phone and then you like zone out for 15 minutes or whatever.
Yeah, you're at the playground.
I have not heard my children in a while.
You know, it's the silence that's scarier than the screaming.
Yeah.
And when you got a little one, you got other kids, and the little baby is just silent sometimes.
You forget about them, and it's, it's, it can get scary.
My scariest thing, it had nothing to do with my phone, but I we went to Home Depot and Eliza was a brand new baby.
I mean, she was like in her first year for sure.
She was in the backwards-facing seat.
And I took, I was trying to get her out of the house to give the wife a break.
She was exhausted.
I was exhausted.
We had the two kids, older kids.
We were just going to run into Home Depot to pick up some stuff for a project we're working on.
When I got to Home Depot, we went in, and I completely forgot that Eliza was in the car.
So I have my two old, and then the two older kids said nothing.
None of us, and I think what happened was she's being really quiet.
She's no, she was never quiet.
She screamed constantly.
So I was always fully aware of her.
What happens is we get in Home Depot, and it's probably like 10 minutes, and I'm with my kids looking for whatever I'm trying to look for.
And this guy goes, Oh, cute kids, how old are your kids?
And I go, right as I'm about to say, I go, I just booked it out.
I was like, Like, I just freaked out.
I've never freaked out like that in my life.
My heart was just pounding.
I ran out because it was a hot day, not like a bad hot day, but it was like, and it was a traumatizing experience for me.
Like, I, I, I probably cried for like three weeks after that.
Just, I'd have these flashbacks to finding her in there.
Like, she's just a bit sweaty and scared, but like that I had done that, it just, oh, it was like one of the worst things.
Oh, yeah, I got shaken just for forgetting Winchester, my baby, just for like a few seconds with getting set up for outside church, getting all the chairs.
I got the three kids, we're heading over.
And my wife just goes, you forgot, you forgot the baby.
It's like, that just shook me just for a second, like completely.
Yeah, it just shakes you.
Yeah.
Never felt like that.
I can't imagine being one of those people that, you know, have the bad outcome.
Yeah.
Your children die.
That's psycho.
Yeah, it's just like my wife was with the three boys at Disneyland and our three-year-old got away.
Oh, that's scary.
And it was like a big crowd.
They were doing the parade, so all the lights were off.
They're doing the light show at night, so all the lights were off.
And they're like, you know, immediately got somebody and got a person.
And it was like 30, 40 minutes before they found him.
Man.
And, you know, we're thinking he's going to be crying and scare.
No, he goes, he tried to go on the rocket ride.
Just standing in line.
He knew where it was.
We were on Main Street and he runs all the way.
He managed to weave his way through this parade all the way over to the rocket ride.
Tomorrow land.
And someone grabbed him while he's running through the exit to jump on a rocket.
Didn't even know that the parent, that we were gone.
Yeah, it's something my son now, he, you know, a lot of like my other kids, if I would walk away and go, all right, they don't want to leave the playground.
I was like, all right, bye.
And then you start to walk away like you're not, you're going to leave them there.
And eventually they'll go, wait, wait, run after you.
Calvin, my youngest.
Oh, Calvin doesn't care.
Or my Calvin doesn't care at all.
At all.
He's like, okay, he'd be fine.
Yeah, Mike Calvin will do that.
And then we'll kind of look at it.
And he just doesn't care.
He's like, oh, great.
They're gone.
Last time I was supposed to watch the kids for a little bit, my younger daughter is like four.
She, I didn't realize it got scissors, decided to give herself a haircut.
Luckily, she did a pretty good job.
Eliza did that too.
There you go.
They're scary with scissors.
Well, should we get into our topic of the week?
Mayor for Frankie?
Sure.
Were you asking me or Frankie?
Kyle, you're the boss.
I fully support it.
Let's do it.
Frank brought the topic.
All right.
And now, the Babylon Bees topic of the week.
Well, today we're talking about cancel culture.
Specifically, there was this Harper's letter that a bunch of prominent people signed saying, you know what?
This cancel culture thing is going a little too far.
It was coming from a left-leaning side, right?
Left-leaning side.
They took a lot of swats at Trump.
And they were saying that Trump's horrible.
We can't be like that.
We're being horrible.
It was a lot of it was the left coming to grips with the fact that, oh, no, we've created a huge monster and it's about to eat us.
Yeah, they had to couch it in like, well, it's the right who are always the bad ones with this, but we're starting to hitch over into that area.
It's like, okay, whatever.
Long is here.
Finally doing something.
I was about to go on there and see how I could get on board with this.
And I was like, oh, I see where they're coming.
And then I saw people posting like, this guy, people on this list have tried to cancel us before.
Like, this is ridiculous.
Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, they're already, it's such generic, like, we need free exchange of ideas and things.
And there should be a bunch of fear about it.
And they don't list any specific examples, but it's already just like people are freaking out about it.
And like, I remember one guy from Vox, was it Matt Iglesias?
He had like, so he works with already say, I feel unsafe because he signed on this letter with other people.
It's just, it's insane.
So, yeah, what have some of the responses to this been?
There really are people who have already renounced it.
They said, well, when I signed this letter about how cancel culture, I didn't realize who I was signing it with or, you know, like free, or it was like free exchange of ideas.
I didn't realize who I was signing it with.
It's like, there's nothing wrong with a message, but you don't want to get associated with other people.
Of course, they don't even mention who or what.
That's the weird thing.
You can't have both.
Like, you can't have this, like, I can't associate myself with this other human being and free speech.
Like, if you're going to, you know, if that's the only thing you're sharing, free speech.
If they're going to be violent, then yeah, like so many of the like, but free speech encompasses people saying whatever they want.
Yeah, I've seen like two main reactions to Chris, with like people saying, well, either cancel culture is not real or cancel culture is real and it's just what we call accountability and it's a good thing.
And it's, but both.
Yeah, like it's just the free market working.
Yeah.
And yeah, other people act like it's complicated.
Like, what is cancel culture?
Please define it.
And it's like, to me, it was like simple.
It's like, normally someone says something you disagree with, go, I disagree with you.
Well, in cancel culture, it's like, let's see what your employer thinks about what you just said.
And it's all about using fear to keep people in line.
Yeah, and it's not in the sense of it being free market.
It's not customers of that business usually that are attacking that business.
It's like, in a lot of cases, they're coming from outside.
They never even cared what these people made or what this company does, but they come and try to destroy them from the outside because of something they said or did online.
A viral video of them doing something or saying something.
Yeah, we just say, it's like we have a very illiberal group now, and they don't know how to argue anymore.
They just know how to like bully and try to scare people from disagreeing.
And I think that's what you have.
You have like so many people disagree with these things, but they just, they don't, they aren't going to speak up unless they're like a billionaire and uncancelable.
I liked that Vox writer that was upset about, well, it was a co-worker.
It was the Matt Iglesias guy that had signed it and said they felt unsafe or whatever.
And then I think, I don't know, it's a trans woman or something.
I don't know if I was reading it right, but she goes, then she goes, like, I'm not trying to get anyone fired here.
It's like, why are you writing a public letter?
I mean, it's so weasel.
I mean, that's someone I would feel unsafe working with.
So what are like, it's like a real weasel and trying to get other people fired?
Yeah, I've seen it a few times where someone will point out something that they're trying to get someone canceled for.
They'll do all these screenshots.
They'll link in this big thread.
And then at the end, they'll be like, no, I'm not saying that anyone should contact their employer.
I'm not saying that this person should be canceled.
But I just wanted to, I'm just, I'm just posting their own words.
And it's like, you know exactly what you're doing, you weasel.
Yeah, it's so foreign to me.
It's like, I hear, see, stuff I really disagree with all the time.
And my reaction is maybe at worst I write an angry tweet.
I try not to, but it's like the idea of just like going after someone's employer and stuff.
It's like, it's insane to me.
It's, I mean, these people.
I've never had that thought in my life.
I've never had that thought in my life.
I don't know.
I wonder who you work for.
Oh, Enterprise Rent-A-Car?
I wonder what they think about what you just said.
The only time I had the thought is if this person did that.
Yeah, I get that vengeful thought.
I want to get them back.
Yeah, and they're really squirming now because they know everybody, they know they're the villains, but they're trying to just try to justify all their horrible behavior.
And it's like, because that's the worst thing, you know, it's like the left, they always want to be on the right side of history.
They don't want to be, they want the history books to, you know, be published.
And, you know, they look under the wrong side section, see their names put there.
Is that the classic, are we the baddies?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sketch.
I was trying to find it.
I thought there's like a quote from George Orwell or something about how he fears the censorship from other people more than he does from like the media or whatever, or from the government, right?
Or I guess it's from media from within, like us censoring ourselves.
Well, yeah, it's got really scary.
We don't have government censorship, but it's just like, but every employer seems very vulnerable if they have any outrage that they just got to like fire people and stuff.
And it's, it's, you know, it's, everybody's getting terrified.
It feels very Soviet.
Yeah, it was always the division between the two kinds of dystopian futures that novelists always imagined was like one of them was the government just cracks down on everybody.
And the other one was the people first turn against free speech and turn against the free exchange of ideas.
And then the government comes along and bans it.
We're in that one.
That's kind of what it feels like right now because, you know, there were very strong court decisions for free speech.
The Constitution has done a pretty decent job of protecting free speech.
You know, we're a satire site that writes jokes all the time and we don't like sit here and worry that someone's going to crack down on us because we have pretty good free speech protections for the most part.
But it feels like it's the culture that is going to turn against that first.
Yeah.
And it used to be because it used to be like something, yeah, the left-right would agree on is like free speech is important.
And it's just, it's, it used to be that there's like at least a few things we all agreed on, and now it just doesn't feel like there's anything there anymore.
You have like people going after free speech.
It's not just, you know, the Second Amendment, it's the First Amendment.
It's, you know, due process now, people going after.
It's getting crazy.
People trying to quarter soldiers in our homes.
Yeah.
It's like, I did.
I don't have a guest room.
I got four kids.
Yeah, what was that?
There's a guy that tweeted recently.
He's like, there's no culture war, right?
There's just people that don't like racism versus people that really love racism.
I can't remember the exact.
It was crazy, though.
Like, he couldn't see that they're not on his side.
You're a racist.
I love to look at the world that simply.
Like, it's all like, you know, very first Star Wars movie.
Everything's black and white, evil.
Yeah.
Guys, there's a lot of people that do.
That's what's insane to me.
And it's really hard to make the case for free speech to like this generation.
I don't know what the right way to framing it is.
It seems like there's arguments to be made for why we let people say mean things.
Yeah, it's like, what are we teaching in school?
It's like, this is like the most important thing, the whole point of this country, the civics and liberty.
I mean, why these are important.
It's like, I mean, it's like people want a hate speech law.
It feels like that's elementary explain why that's a bad idea, yet people don't get it.
Oh, yeah.
The moment you say it shouldn't be a hate speech, like, oh, you're a racist.
Well, it's like you're trying to protect the KKK?
It's like obvious.
You want Trump deciding what's hate speech?
I mean, it's like, you don't see the problems with this.
It's like they are suggesting more government power when there's a guy in charge that they hate and distrust and they don't get it.
And it's like, I don't know how you get through their skulls on that one.
Yeah, I have no idea.
So vote for Kanye.
Kanye, he will do it.
He will.
I don't think he'll do anything, but it is since we're all headed down the tubes anyway.
Hashtag Vision2020.
Vision 2020.
Yeah, when he turns things around, you'll think differently.
We'll finally, you know, be running in America again.
So if cancel culture is real, then how come J.K. Rowling is still around?
Yeah.
Yeah, I saw a lot of the people that, well, no, these people have been canceled.
Well, yeah, that's why they could speak out on it.
It's like the Joe Schmo, who like nobody's heard of.
That's who you should be worried about because they're going to get canceled and no one will know and no one will help them.
Yeah, you get to a certain amount of wealth and you can kind of say whatever you want.
Yeah.
But it's the guy that's working at Target that has a political opinion people don't like.
And that's where the can that's what the cancel culture really comes after.
Yeah, that's where that.
Yeah, small businesses, too.
Like, yeah.
I can't remember that.
There's a recent one online.
One of these women who's accused of being like a Karen or something.
Yeah.
They just completely destroyed her business.
I can't remember all the details.
Yeah.
It's billionaires going to stop.
My wife was reading.
That's why left hates billionaires.
I know those are the only people who aren't afraid to speak out.
It's like the emperor's new clothes.
You know, like it's like the little kid who says like the emperor's actually naked, but in real life would be some jerk billionaire.
It's like that emperor's naked.
Yeah, he's the only one I can say without getting canceled this mail.
He's like, I got money.
Who cares?
Emperor's new.
Sail away on my young naked.
Beautiful.
All right.
Well, is that all we got to say about that?
Yeah.
Are you still googling things?
We covered it in Tara.
There's nothing left.
I should have come.
I don't know why I didn't think to take some, put some notes for myself there.
I figured Frank had a lot to say on this.
He's always tweeting about it.
Yeah, I don't like it.
You always got jokes about people that say cancel culture isn't real.
Does that mean that Frank is a secret billionaire?
Oh, yeah.
Well, yeah, that's what I say.
There's like, you know, we're talking about how most people would be Nazis.
The cancel culture isn't real.
People would 100% be Nazis.
Oh, yeah.
That's problematic.
Okay, well, let's go on to some hate mail.
I really miss Adam Ford.
We're going to dive into our iTunes reviews.
Is it even called iTunes anymore?
I think it's called Apple Podcasts.
No, something.
They're taking off the little eye off everything.
I guess it's not futuristic sounding anymore.
So, is the Apple iPhone still called the iPhone, or are they going to?
Oh, it is, huh?
Yeah.
They call it the Apple phone.
iPhones and iPads.
Yeah, eventually they'll probably change to Apple.
But just keep in mind, these bad reviews are before I'm on the podcast.
Yeah, you had nothing to do with these bad reviews.
Well, you had been on it once, I think.
Or twice, maybe.
All right, so here's we're going to read a few bad iTunes reviews and then a few good iTunes reviews.
So here's a bad one: one star ramblings with no humor.
I was pleased to find a podcast to go.
I was pleased to find a podcast to go along with the hilarious Babylon B.
Oh, thank you.
What a disappointment.
Just rambling with nothing funny.
Talk with none of the humor of the emails and app.
Pointless.
I am unsubscribing.
So they don't like us talking about how we almost killed our kids.
They don't.
They don't find that funny.
I like the ramblings with no humor.
I get this vision of a guy sitting on a porch in the south somewhere and this old uncle or something, and they're sitting there listening to him and he's just rambles for like two hours.
You didn't say a single funny thing.
Yeah.
I was expecting a joke.
As long as you're rambling, you might as well include some humor.
I mean, we try to be funny.
We try really hard to be funny.
I'm just trying a little bit.
I'm not going to hurt myself over it.
There are ramblings, though, for sure.
All right, we've got the next one.
This is from Jeremy777.
Love the B, but four periods.
Oh.
It's not ellipses or three periods, right?
So I don't know what that is.
That's a mega.
It's three periods.
And then they wanted to emphasize ellipsis.
Sometimes you do four periods.
Okay.
I really enjoy and appreciate the Babylon B. Thank you.
But was really disappointed by this podcast with episode 41 about the Trojan mouse.
Waited patiently for over 45 minutes for some substance and then told we need to pay for a substantive part.
Just wasted my time with pointless fluff.
Guys, give some meat on the free side.
Then I might be willing to pay for your subscription for more.
I'm subscribing from the podcast for now.
You know, I've listened through the whole podcast.
I listened to the subscriber portion.
I do have to say, like, the part before the subscriber portion is utter garbage.
It's like all the good stuff is in the subscriber portion.
Oh, the good stuff.
He's got a press.
Frank's not invited back on the podcast.
You know, it's funny is that like people we've talked to consultants about how to monetize the podcast, and they always tell us we're giving away too much for free.
There's all you know, you only need to talk for like 10 minutes and then hack it off.
But I think they think we have this massive audience that wants to hear about podcasts.
And really, we're still trying to kind of get people on board with it that would like it, right?
Well, you could, I've never seen a podcast that just gives away 10 minutes and then you get you pay to get like a whole hour, unless it's somebody really famous.
Well, here's an idea.
You can give them this whole podcast for free, but I'm only with the subscribers, so they'll just have blank audio where I was talking.
Yeah, empty this for Frank.
You want the audio with Frank included.
Yeah, we just cut one guy out whenever for subscribers.
Yeah, normal one would just be Kyle or Ethan.
Yeah.
Yeah, or we could like Kyle talking to himself.
We could cut out all verbs.
Verbs are subscriber exclusive.
All right, Frank, can you read our four-star one there?
Sure.
Well, that's not too bad.
Four stars.
Yeah.
By Jackson WC.
Actually, though, three-period ellipses.
Hello, Mr. Mann and Mr. Nicole.
A while back, I wrote a review entitled Cowards simply because I wondered if mine would be read on the podcast.
It was.
But it was kind of sad to see a satire site not know satire when it is served to them on a silver platter.
All joking aside, though, I love this podcast, and the news articles are sometimes quite funny.
Sometimes, however, as with every podcast, it isn't perfect.
Oh, Mr. Mann sometimes sounds a little bit like he, along with Joe Biden, has one foot in the coffin and one foot out.
Oh, wow.
If you could please just saying he's sleepy today, too.
If you could please liven up a little, that would be great.
Okay, you getting this, man?
In the early episodes, there were a lot of stories from Mr. Nicole.
It would be awesome if those would come back, despite this things.
Sick.
I love this podcast.
Great job, guys.
Sincerely.
Should I say the name?
Oh, no.
I kind of like to get flowerbed.
It tells you how to say it, huh?
It's going to get flowerbed.
Well, he included the name in the review.
It's public.
Jackson Crap Yuchettes.
I think it's crap Yuchettes.
The name is French.
It means little over a pond.
Likely a derogatory term referring to those Frenchmen, my ancestors, who immigrated from France to America over the pond.
That's an unfortunate last name now, like in school.
Crap Yoshettes.
Crap Youchets.
Yeah.
I thought Drew Dick had it bad.
Yeah.
What I'm taking from this one, so he wrote a different review that said Coward, and it was like a one-star review or something like that.
That was supposed to be a joke, I guess.
It was a joke.
It's satire.
It's kind of dull.
So because of this, I'm just going to look at every bad review and go, oh, it's satire.
So he just, those two we just read are satire.
Oh.
Get it?
It's a joke.
So one-star reviews are not satire.
That's violence.
That's violence right there.
That's why I say that.
So it's violence books on Amazon.
That is violence on Amazon for sure.
You're taking away somebody's livelihood.
So you're basically murdering my children.
So his entire compliance is too much Kyle and not enough Ethan.
You know, you're sleepy.
I weigh that twice as much as Kyle.
Sleepy Kyle.
Sleepy Kyle and some more Ethan stories.
I always get accused of therapy when I tell stories.
Don't take it personally.
By all sleepy over here.
It's a comedy podcast.
We're supposed to Ruby.
Let's move on to Love Mail.
Love Mail.
That was kind of a Love Mail, though.
Crap Youchettes.
This is where we are going to read some positive reviews of the podcast.
At first, man, one time when I was five years old, I got my head stuck in the door.
Really happened.
Love mail, baby.
Better deal than Amazon Prime says unique name goes here.
The only two non-essential subscriptions I have are the Amazon Prime and the Babylon B, and I spend the same amount on both.
You hear that, B?
You are as important to me as a free two-day shipping on my Impulse Buys.
Modest discounts at Whole Foods and on-demand crappy Prime originals.
And those things are very important to me.
I heart you all.
P.S. Throw a coin to Frank Fleming and producer Dan.
They deserve it.
I like this guy.
He's smart.
We have really good faith.
I like that Frank was here.
Frank was here for that one.
And Dan.
All right.
We're a little concerned about this positive review.
We're concerned about this guy.
Bryce gives us a five-star review and he says, need more hours of endless entertainment.
Just listened to all 79 episodes in the span of two weeks and I never got bored.
Spelled sick.
B-O-A-R-B-O-A-R-D.
I recommend you start doing three to four episodes a day to keep up with the demand.
Thanks.
Well, he probably said that in like Gary Busey waking up from a drunken stupor.
Just sitting there at a table drinking coffee all night, listening to his earbuds.
Twitching the eye.
79 episodes, two weeks.
So, what's the average length of a Babylon Beat episode?
Probably 90 minutes.
I thought we got over 100 episodes now.
Each one's about an hour too long, so, you know, I don't know.
Yeah.
So, 120 hours, the span of two weeks.
How many episodes in are we?
How many hours are in a week?
So, 150-ish.
What's that, Dan?
82?
Yeah, so this was a couple weeks ago.
I don't know why I thought we had hit 100.
I guess I'm wrong.
Oh, Ango's excited.
We're gonna.
Are you gonna do something special?
Yeah, what are we gonna do for the hundredth?
They're not really numbered like that because now we do the interview show and this show.
Okay, so figuring that every episode is let's just say an hour.
That's 80 hours.
They're way more than an hour, though.
I mean, well, I don't know, subscriber.
No, he's a subscriber.
Why would you listen to that much and not be a subscriber?
Bryce, you better be a subscriber.
There's some of those shows where you get like a lot more.
So, 24 times 14, because it was 336 hours.
How many does somebody like Joe Rogan do?
I mean, who you should be emulating?
I mean, you want to see.
Because he puts like two, yeah, that's the thing.
He puts it like two to three hour episodes like three times a week.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Well, if you want to make 100 million, that's what you got to do.
Yeah, that's what you got to do.
So he would have had to listen to the Babylon Beat podcast for seven hours a day.
Wow.
For two weeks?
Yeah.
That's pretty insane.
He just wakes up in the morning.
He's like, I got to read it.
I wonder if he just heard our voices in his head.
That's what I, when I get into a podcast and I listen to it non-stop.
That becomes your inner monologue.
Yeah, my inner monologue is in that voice when I listen to Carl Pilkins.
I've got a bunch of invented podcasts.
Ricky Gervais.
Yeah.
Like British podcasts.
I'll get British voices in my head.
All right.
Well, we are going to go into doing more here.
We are actually going to dig up some old Frank stories.
We dug up some offensive old racist articles written by Frank Fleming, and we're going to grill him on them and ask him why he's so dumb and racist.
I'm not sorry.
I can't buy him nothing.
I cancel him.
Just make that clear.
So if you want to get in on the cancellation of Frank Fleming, you're going to have to be a subscriber.
So let's move on to our subscriber portion.
You want the cancellation?
You got to subscribe.
Everybody else, thanks for joining us.
And we love you.
Passionately.
And deeply.
I think you're okay.
Hey, hey, wait, wait.
Hold that fade out, Dan.
We got one more thing to say about Frank here.
Frank?
Well, I wrote Frank Wright's book.
Yeah, I write the best novels in the world.
And recently I just released a sequel to Superego, Sequel Rego, Fathom.
And you should buy them or you're like some sort of idiot who should be canceled.
Superego is about a hitman in space.
Yeah, who's a psychopath?
A sociopath.
Yeah.
A psychopath.
Yeah.
No feelings.
It's got kind of like a Dexter vibe.
Like it kind of struggles with that question of a guy who's trying to be human, even though he has no feelings for anybody.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The first one.
It's written by a man with a lot of feelings.
Yeah.
First one, it kind of explores the morality of it.
And the second one, him trying to be a hero, even though he also doesn't feel good if he does anything good.
It's very good.
Interesting.
And I highly recommend, as I have before, SideQuest.
Yep.
I like SideQuest.
SideQuest is a, I don't know what the pitch is on that.
It's a guy who lives in a.
He's a computer programmer, but they're doing like devil sacrifices in his office and he finds a sword and he goes to a magic world and finds out that he is dating the devil, the girl, the girl.
He doesn't go to it.
He just notices the world is a little weirder than he was noticing.
Yeah, it's just like.
He gets woke.
He gets woke.
Basically.
I was going to go.
I was the title for the book.
It was woke when I was trying to come up with a better title.
Read all Frank's books.
Mine too.
Goodbye.
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And Ethan would like to thank Seth Dillon for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.
Until next time, this is Dave D'Andrea, the voice of the Babylon Bee, reminding you to go forth and share the gospel often, but use swear words as little as possible.