Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Conversation with Nicholas Goroff

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Aug. 6, 2014 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

04:08:33

A Conversation with Nicholas Goroff

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	Right.
	Hi, everyone.
	I'm having a conversation with journalist Nicholas Goroff, who has interviewed some very interesting people and written for various places that I've put in the about bar of this.
	If you want to go and investigate, see what kind of guy he is.
	Hi, Nicholas.
	Do you want to tell me about yourself to get us started off?
	Oh, just a pleasure to talk to you.
	Followed your video series actually for a while, so it is a little strange looking at that same icon and hearing the voice in live time.
	The icons are all anyone's getting because I haven't tidied up for my place.
	Got to get a backdrop, man.
	Backdrop.
	I'm running an amateur outfit here.
	Tell me about yourself.
	Yeah, well, like I said, I do quite a bit of journalism work.
	I'm a writer with Occupy.com.
	That was sort of sprung from the Occupy Wall Street movement and the sort of resurgence of indie journalism and activism.
	Been republished by Truth Out, was once republished by Esquire, which was pretty cool.
	That's sort of a sad gig because any freelance journalist will tell you you take the work where you find it and then you just keep writing and hope someone buys it.
	Yeah, aside from that, though, I also do some film acting.
	Actually getting ready to re-enter the field of actual in-the-field political organizing, which I did for the better part of seven, eight years or so, off and on.
	It's a decent gig when you can get it.
	And naturally, being a fan of channels like yourself and Thunderfoot and Random or Cam, who used to be pretty much like when I jump on YouTube, I'll see any new videos.
	Yay!
	10 to 30 minutes of entertainment.
	Yeah, I get the same thing.
	Yeah, and since then, though, it is an interesting thing because I listen to you folks, and you take an anti-feminist stance, a lot of people come out, like, oh, he's on my side.
	He must be a conservative.
	He must believe in all these other principles.
	And then listen a little while further, and all of a sudden it's like, maybe not so much.
	Yeah, I get mistaken for a conservative quite a lot by liberals.
	And then when I'm talking to conservatives, I get mistaken for being a liberal very often.
	It's fun, right?
	Yeah, it's frustrating, actually.
	It's really frustrating because they've got this kind of absolutist mindset that if you're not them, you must be the other thing.
	And they don't really consider that there might be anything between those positions.
	And it seems to be a bit of a symptom of the world at large these days.
	Everything's very easy, and that's a very easy position to take.
	And I think the problem really comes from labels.
	But what I'm going to ask.
	I'm sorry, you said from Abel?
	Labels.
	Oh, labels, yeah.
	I thought that you were comes from Abel.
	No, no, as soon as you label yourself something, then it's they always come with too much baggage.
	Well, I think it's a coping mechanism.
	I mean, it can drive a person kind of crazy if they really try and objectively balance out all of the issues that they're both presented with and all of the subsets of issues beneath them.
	And then you try and reconcile a position on one issue that is conventionally leftist, and this is just giving temporary credit to that bullshit paradigm.
	But when you take one position that's on the left and another on the right, and then it sort of works out to this law of averages, If you're not really objectively trying to dig into everything and really get a comprehensive view, then you need to take this off-the-shelf pre-packaged thing because it's easy.
	And you say, okay, well, I agree with 60% of what this general ideology seems to be.
	I feel comfortable identifying with it, so I will support it if for nothing else than I oppose, 70, 80% of what the other side says that I don't like.
	Yeah, I agree with you.
	I think that's actually a really astute way of putting it.
	Yeah, I've literally got no criticism of what you said there.
	I really do think it is actually completely about the intellectual laziness of the modern world.
	And that, yeah, as you say, it's far easier to just take someone else's ideas and form ideas of your own.
	I don't even know.
	I mean, I think laziness might even be a little ⁇ I mean, it's an honest way to put it, but I also kind of think in some senses for your average person, your average 40 to 50-hour work week.
	Yeah.
	Well, maybe it's not giving them credit.
	Yeah, there's no time.
	I mean, it takes time and agonizing effort a lot of times to really sort through the shit and then check yourself and recheck your mental work to make sure that you're not being intellectually dishonest or taking shortcuts.
	I agree.
	I fully agree.
	I mean, recently, like I said, I was listening to some Hitchens talks earlier.
	I've sort of recently come across him, which now that he's dead is like a shame.
	But to hear him, yeah, to hear him and Dawkins speak about things like ideology, especially when it's one of those sort of like nice little affirmations where points that you more or less came to in your own mind and then you notice that you can't fully articulate maybe, and you don't find many other people expressing them, and then you find somebody who's well-respected intellectual expressing that and articulating it the way you couldn't.
	You're like, oh god i'm, i'm not crazy.
	Yeah no, I agree exactly with you that I one of the most common messages I get about my anti-feminism videos is people saying, thank god, someone is saying how.
	I want to say it but can't find the words to do so, and that's honestly, that's probably the highest compliment I get, because it it's nice that people, it's so nice that people think that i'm at least making the points that they're thinking you know, and and I don't, I don't know how to describe why that's so nice, but it's it's that's, that's probably the the nicest thing people say to me.
	It's it's, it's that affirmation that you're not crazy, it's that, it's that notion, it's that notion that you know, I mean it's it's funny because i've heard um, like I said, I follow your channel and i've noticed too, like if it's just your hit pieces and you even admit to it, you're like it's just taking the piss out of them.
	Yeah, most of the time, although I do try to make sure that I I have um, an overarching message behind it definitely uh, i'm just speaking more in terms of tone, though.
	Listening to yeah your, your hangouts with Goodfella or T, for instance you're, you know when you, when you're speaking, you're not taking the same hard line, because it's not, you know, there's not the emphasis on, I guess the entertainment value which is Part of that is.
	And a lot of them are kind of sarcastic rebuttals as well.
	You know, I mean, if we're discussing, if I was having conversations with these people, I might well take quite a hard stance against them, but I wouldn't openly mock them to their face because that's incredibly rude.
	Unless that's what they wanted, I suppose.
	Yeah, I mean, if you're talking, you know, if you're, I mean, it is pretty hard to not approach something as bombastic as saying criticism on YouTube is worse than rape threats, ah, Rebecca Watson.
	It's hard not to just take that, all right, well, you decided you were going to take the low road, I'll meet you down there.
	Exactly.
	I know that I should be the best person to always take the high road on things, but fucking, come on, these people, all you can do is take the piss at some points, you know.
	I sometimes wonder with them, though, if it's not.
	I mean, you see, you know, I mean, Sarkeesian is a great example.
	Oh, God.
	You know, the just obvious dishonesty to that.
	You have to sort of wonder, I mean, is this inane shit what they actually believe?
	Is this like a true hardline stance?
	Or is this sort of shooting for the moon and hitting the stars sort of thing?
	Like, is it an attempt to really shoot as high as possible so that some sort of underlying message that they actually believe can be conveyed?
	I mean, Glenn Beck is, I mean, it's funny.
	I've actually had via Twitter, and I honestly, in terms of his persona and his politics, I cannot stand Glenn Beck in this light.
	But I've argued with him via Twitter, which is one of the fun things, because in Twitter you can have a conversation with anyone if you get their attention for it.
	And he was obscenely reasonable.
	He was going...
	That's not fair.
	Yeah.
	It was a letdown almost.
	I was like, okay, why is he openly acknowledging to me now that he recognizes big money interest influence mechanisms and the way they corrupt things in the same manner that every other rational person I've ever spoken to about this does?
	This just spoils the fantasy.
	Yeah, that kind of is a bit of a look behind the curtain, isn't it?
	Because you can see the very clear delineation between his kind of stage persona and obviously what he actually believes.
	Yeah, it's infotainment.
	You get beyond the infotainment and then you get to the substance and suddenly you find out this person who spends as much time obviously as the most involved political reporter or activist or whatever is not just this frothing moron that he necessarily pretends to be.
	Now, his core conclusions and convictions may be just as subjectively full of shit in my opinion as they come across on TV.
	But to see that it's not this barking mad animal.
	And I mean, I've met Bill O'Reilly once, and it was a brief interaction.
	And the impression I got from him, he was in this interaction, he was as much an uptight, stuffy asshole as he appears to be.
	Yeah, I always got the feeling that Bill O'Reilly probably wasn't putting on a persona.
	I always got the feeling that it was probably the real him that everyone was seeing.
	He's like Bill Maher in that sense, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	I mean, I actually prefer that.
	I would prefer someone who was honest that I just genuinely disagreed with than someone who was pretending to be someone I disagreed with.
	You know, because at least then I know we will know where we stand.
	You know, there's no pretensions there.
	That's kind of a double-edged sword, though, too.
	I mean, ideology itself is inherently reductive.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I still remember the first my very first political science course in college.
	It was, you know, and the funny thing with that, it was taught, you know, in this really low-rent, corporate-owned, community-level school that was barely accredited.
	It's the kind of place where, you know, if you show up 70% of the time, congratulations, you are now college-educated.
	But every so often, these gems of professors and instructors would come through.
	And there was this one really intelligent man named Peter O'Lawler who took on this intro to political science class.
	And in the first class, he posed the question, what is an ideology?
	And of the various slackers and tired double job workers that were trying to get ahead, a couple hands went up and it's like, oh, it's what you believe.
	It's like, okay, yeah, what else?
	Oh, it's your position's on an issue.
	Okay, that's true too.
	And once he'd waded through those, he posed that an ideology is really just nothing more than a web of ideas that are constructed together to support each other to hold up a more general sort of philosophical idea.
	And he pointed out, yeah, and if you dissect any orthodox ideology, you find just all of these contradictions between their positions.
	It's like parsing out the Bible almost.
	And because of that, and because of the groupthink dynamics and the necessity for numbers in relation to political power, I don't know.
	I mean, I oftentimes sort of like to take sort of an almost biological evolutionary stance to this thing.
	The anti-feminism, MRA, and even the MAGTO movements.
	Whether or not you agree with them, you can look at them and say, okay, well, how does this, you know, how did they come to be?
	What is their nature?
	And what caused them?
	And what caused them is essentially, like a lot of people say, this extension of new wave feminism, which is overreaching.
	It sort of defies its own central principles.
	And this sort of is, I guess, the development of socio-political antibodies to what is now an infection.
	Yeah, I think that it's absolutely a natural reaction.
	In fact, I'd probably go as far as to posit that it was an inevitable reaction.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	How they thought turning the world on its head, effectively, was going to just be plain sailing from there on out is baffling.
	I mean, obviously, you're going to disenfranchise large numbers of people from the new systems.
	So I guess they're playing the long game and just waiting for these people to die off and get the kids at school.
	But I really think that this is based on sort of the flawed assumption that men and women are the same.
	And I really don't think they are.
	It's the difference between equal and the same.
	Men and women are not the same.
	You would have to be willfully dishonest or willfully ignorant of basic physiology to say that.
	Are they equal?
	Are people, regardless of gender, entitled to equal rights?
	Well, absolutely.
	You'd have to be.
	You would have to have a very primitive sort of sociological sense of things or some very skewed, very structured idea of the way you think things should be to say otherwise.
	Yeah, and I think a great comparison for this would be just the sort of orthodox mentality that sort of came out of the Cold War when you consider the notions of what we understand as capitalism and socialism, which is really nothing more than private or public interest or private or public power.
	And so during the Cold War, you've got these two sides threatening to annihilate the world over their ideals and in such to drum up support for each other's ideals.
	You paint them as mutually exclusive.
	You paint one is good and one is evil.
	And then once one effectively wins in whatever way it does, in this sense, capitalism won out over communism, the benefits to that, the good side to that, is allowed to flourish.
	But over time, once it continues to sort of enjoy its victory lap a few too many times, then you start to find that there are inherent flaws because it's an incomplete idea and that incorporating aspects of the other idea, the opposition to it, and in this sense, socialism was effectively an uprising against what was a capitalist model, an exploitative one.
	You find that eventually it kind of comes back around after a couple generations where aspects to that thinking, people start to say, well, maybe we shouldn't write off the entire thing altogether.
	And I think feminism is experiencing that same thing.
	It's sort of had its post-Cold War victory lapse since the 70s, and now its own flaws are starting to make themselves evident.
	And those who are loyal and utterly orthodox to the overarching theories, they're presenting shit that people are just generally saying, well, no, that doesn't work.
	We can't keep saying this.
	I fully agree.
	I really think that once feminism got beyond the bounds of legal equality, then they really started to overreach.
	Because this whole concept of absolute parity that feminists seem to have and the way that women keep betraying the feminist movement by not going into STEM fields, for example, it's one of those things where there is going to come a point where they realize that it's not feasible to achieve parity.
	It's not even the goal of freedom of choice.
	The goal of freedom of choice is not to have parity.
	It's to have people doing what they feel naturally inclined to do.
	And so this current sort of, you know, we need more women in STEM fields.
	Why?
	What's the reason?
	It's because you have a preconceived notion of how many women you think should be in STEM fields based on the idea that men and women are exactly the same.
	You know, have different desires, they gain different sort of senses of achievement and accomplishment from different, the same, you know, and so basically they are ignoring reality, and now they're coming to the consequences of reality, which is the Women Against Feminism movement and all these sort of things.
	So, yeah, I think you're right.
	It's definitely overreach.
	And there's definitely a rising tide against them.
	And I'm interested to see how they're going to take it.
	Really?
	What were you saying there, sorry?
	Well, no, no.
	I mean, ultimately, what I sort of see happening with this, and it's been funny because, I mean, I've got a young daughter.
	She's six.
	And almost immediately after she was born, you know, we were not married.
	And without going into too much detail, she ended up taking advantage of the whole American family court dynamics.
	And I know in Britain, it's, I mean, I read things about Britain, and I say, well, that's fucking insane.
	And then I'm like, oh, wait, it's insane here, too.
	It's just a little bit different.
	I don't think it's quite as extreme, but it's definitely on that path.
	You're saying Britain's not as extreme as the U.S.?
	Yeah, I hear worse horror stories coming out of American courts.
	I think it's really down to scale.
	I think it's because there's more money in America.
	Well, also, I mean, I asked, I sort of tweeted a question the other day.
	You know, I mean, obviously, I noticed that, you know, especially within the atheist and skeptic community, this issue of identity politics versus the core narrative of, you know, let's assert that there is no God and religion.
	You know, it created this, it created that crazy rift, which, you know, the atheist movement and all that.
	But one thing I noticed is that for one thing, most of the skeptical sort of objectivist viewpoint, not to misconflate with the whole libertarian object to this thing, but the objectivity and the skepticism I noticed in the UK, it seems to be, and I may be wrong, but it seems to be a little bit healthier than it does here in the US.
	In the US, I've always noticed that people are just fucking love bandwagons.
	The minute you can thump your chest and pump your fist and feel righteous about something, then you've found the truth and no one tell you otherwise.
	Yeah, I mean, I suppose there probably is a skeptic movement in Britain.
	I'm just not really aware of it.
	I think most people, if they're not atheists, it's very culturally impolite to talk about your religion with people in Britain.
	No one gives a fuck.
	No one is interested.
	There is nothing that's going to shut down the conversation at a British party quicker than bringing up your personal religion and your personal beliefs.
	So in that case, then it might just be that Britain still has some greater amounts of manners and civility.
	Possibly.
	It's possible because one of the things I find very peculiar when I'm watching American politics, and I watch a lot of American politics, is the amount that God gets brought up and brought into it.
	And that's just something you don't see in Britain and you couldn't see because it would override the entire message you were trying to put across because you would have torrents of people on social media saying, stop talking about God.
	I think in the last census, it was something like 47% of Britain were atheists, registered as atheists.
	And it's like that from a lot of Europe.
	I can't imagine anyone in Europe, even if they're religious, trying to really foist it on you.
	Apart from, I mean, every town's got like this one lone nut who is stood in the towns, in the sort of town square, like ranting about God and the Bible, but nobody believes it.
	Nobody cares.
	Everyone's just like, oh, no one wants to hear this.
	And so, yeah, I mean, I'm sure there is a skeptic movement.
	I just don't need to be part of it because there isn't really a religious movement over here.
	Islamic side, of course.
	Yeah, I think maybe that's, well, I think maybe that also feeds in, I think, that same sort of social dynamic difference between Britain and America.
	And to a similar extent, I might almost say Australia, as I've seen a great swath, which is strange.
	In Australia, though, you almost see equal numbers of local atheists and evangelical Christians, your Ray Comforts and such.
	But I think that same sort of dichotomy, that same sort of difference and just cultural difference might be also what feeds the gender politics here.
	It's been funny.
	I've watched meetings of Parliament just here and there, and I've compared it to congressional hearings.
	And it's kind of strange because Parliament, on the one hand, can be more entertaining to watch.
	But at the same time, it oftentimes comes across as a lot more sensible in some aspects than Congress does, whereas Congress can be extremely dry.
	It's like watching paint dry sometimes.
	I've seen some as well.
	Yeah, and at the same time, you just hear the most asinine shit come up, especially with this Congress.
	But in respect to family law, When I got dragged into the system, I mean, it started out with that nightmare of false allegations of abuse and threats.
	Really?
	Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I was accused of having threatened my own infant daughter with a gun.
	And I'd had a tertiary sort of education in law by way of my studies in criminal justice and politics.
	And I hadn't learned anything about family law at the time.
	All I knew is there was two courts, a civil court and a criminal court, and they had different burdens of proof.
	And when I was put under this accusation of threatening, I said, well, this is clearly a criminal charge.
	So, you know, I have the presumption of innocence until I'm proven guilty.
	And then I go before this family court judge, and I discovered, no, no, no, that's not the case.
	In fact, we're going to have a 15-minute hearing.
	10 minutes is going to be dedicated to listening to the accusations against you.
	Then you're going to be given the remainder of however much time we feel like going through these motions to try and defend yourself and prove this negative.
	Even when I brought up the fact that, you know, I'm like, you know, I've got eyewitnesses that can testify to the fact that I'm almost never in communication with her in private anymore, that there was never an opportunity for this, and that this entire thing was rooted in this incident, which can be verified by talking to this particular officer.
	No interest was taken in that.
	Hang on, so they don't presume your guilt in a family court, in a civil court in America.
	They don't presume your innocence.
	Sorry, yeah, your innocence.
	Sorry.
	Yeah, it works in civil...
	I mean, I imagine it's similar over there, but in criminal court...
	I'm just not aware of it.
	Oh, no.
	Well, this is how I've discovered it works, and this is really how it is.
	Yeah, but that's how it works over here.
	This is important information.
	Yeah, you've got two courts.
	You've got your criminal court and your civil court.
	And everyone knows in a criminal court, you're innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof is you have to prove the accusation beyond a reasonable doubt.
	In a civil court, it's called preponderance of evidence.
	The question being, does the argument and whatever evidence is presented, which most of it can be testimony, but do the arguments presented, with the arguments presented lead a reasonable person to believe that the accusation made is true?
	So just to interrupt, is this so basically this seems very akin to character witnesses.
	Oh, witnesses don't come into play.
	No, no, no, not necessarily like, no, no, sorry, that's it's.
	It's a, it's a term from Roman law where basically if, if you're accused of something, then you could have a very respected member of the community that you're in come and testify on your behalf of how you're such a great person and you wouldn't have done that.
	Those yeah, those factor into both um, criminal and civil hearings.
	Quite often um right, you know, evidence testimony in terms of character, witnesses are frequently used.
	The fascinating thing is though, with family courts over here, I mean, talk about a rigged system.
	You know, i've brought witnesses to court when i've been under accusation, and I mean, those accusations I faced at the beginning were just, were just the beginning.
	Literally, I have a packet in this family court that is the thickness of a phone book.
	Right now, I have been accused Of everything, leading up to, and stopping at, physical sexual abuse.
	Give us an example of something.
	Oh, I've been accused of refusing to feed my daughter, refusing to change my daughter when she was an infant in diapers.
	Taking those examples and burning her?
	Burning her.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	She lived with her mother naturally because courts, you know, it's statistically verifiable.
	But, you know, after the restraining order, the courts default automatically gave guardianship.
	And in New Hampshire, they've gotten around a few things by eliminating custody.
	So they call it guardianship and parenting time now.
	But it's just another workaround.
	But I mean, in these hearings, an accusation is made.
	It's filed as generally a petition for contempt or an accusation.
	Then you're given the accused or the respondent is given 10 days to reply, to respond to the accusation.
	Just to jump in a second there, sorry.
	So I'm very curious about how this works.
	I've never been through a family court.
	So she accuses you of, say, refusing to feed the daughter.
	And how exactly do you prove that you didn't do that?
	You don't.
	You go in and say that's not true.
	So it's just he said she said.
	What is the point?
	That gives the most convincing he said she said, then, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, that's where we get to this breakdown of preponderance of evidence versus beyond a reasonable doubt.
	Because within family court, you can level accusations of a criminal nature, such as threatening, abuse, maltreatment of children, etc.
	Now, from these courts, if it's a serious enough charge, if it's a serious, you know, the charge of, you know, if someone says, oh, my ex is beating our kids, it can start in family court, go in for a contempt hearing for abuse of the child, and if the court finds that they're, you know, within those parameters of preponderance of evidence, that it sounds like a reasonable charge, then it can actually result in a criminal trial.
	But alternately, I mean, the bridge between that, getting back to restraining orders, for instance, they hand those out like candy here.
	All you need to do is go into court and utter the words, credible fear, I have a fear of this person, and they give you a restraining order.
	Now, once you've got that restraining order, and this is what happened to me in 2009, she takes this restraining order out, and then one day, so I'm not allowed to talk or speak or contact or know where she or my daughter are.
	I'm only allowed these court-ordered visitations, which at the time were this bizarre setup that she insisted upon, where it was every first three Wednesdays of the month and alternating Saturdays, I would get six hours with my daughter.
	And I'd have to pick her up and drop her up at the police station.
	And so we're at the police.
	Yeah, in the lobby of the police station.
	And the sickest thing was, too, is whenever I would show up, especially on the weekends for these pickup and drop-offs, the majority of people in the lobby of the police station were there for the exact same thing.
	It's just a thing now.
	And so once they've got this order, though, all they need to do, all they need to do, because once you get an order issued against you, they go and file for a restraining order and they make their initial claim.
	A temporary order is issued just right away without any hearing or anything.
	And then a hearing is scheduled.
	Once the initial order is scheduled, or once the initial order is issued, sheriffs come and serve you like they would any other court paperwork.
	And then they search your home for anything that they deem to be weapons.
	They take any firearms you may have.
	They may take any blades you may have.
	I've heard stories where they've actually taken the assortment of kitchen knives because they were deemed to be weapons.
	That is shockingly authoritarian.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, w and it so s it's it's it's insane, but it gets even f more fun as you go along.
	Because after they've done that and, you know, you try I I try and ev I imagine everyone does to explain whatever situation, you know, resulted and how and this isn't to say that in all cases they're all fraudulent.
	Uh it's just yeah, there's widespread abuse though.
	And you explain this to the sheriffs and the sheriffs in an obviously well-rehearsed manner tell you yeah, tell you that you will have a hearing and that the hearing is scheduled.
	So you go into the hearing and then that's that 15 minutes to half an hour hearing.
	It's he said, she said.
	And the ability to really argue against these is really really difficult.
	The only person I've known and I've known a number of people who've been put under these orders the only person I've ever known who was able to get out from one, who incidentally was also accused of similar things as I was accused of by my same ex.
	Yeah.
	He happened to have money, which I do not, so he was able to afford a very good attorney.
	And also in this particular case, she had also made a few, let's say, errors by making additional allegations inside of it and then also acting in ways and he was able to get out from under it, but he's the only one I know.
	Now, once they have the order, though, and this is what happened to me in 2009, so I picked up my daughter one Saturday, I believe it was Saturday, yeah, Saturday morning, I pick her up.
	Now I didn't say I don't say a word because just speaking a word gets you thrown in jail without bail.
	And she comes in and she tells me that she wants me to sign my parental rights away so that her new boyfriend can adopt.
	And mind you, this is about three, four months after my daughter is born and we'd split up.
	Jesus Christ, all right.
	Yeah.
	I say nothing and she tries to reason with me saying, oh, and it'll let us move to Florida and she can grow up and have a dog in a yard and this and that and this and that.
	And I just didn't say anything.
	And then I spent my six hours with my little girl and then I brought her back down the street to the police station to drop her off.
	And while I'm there, I just sort of like, you know, I just shook my head to express, no, I will not do that.
	And then it just, I mean, I wouldn't even go into what she was saying then, and I just kind of walked out.
	Now that very night, I had I believe it was four police cruisers and a paddy wagon show up at my apartment and place me under arrest because she made filed a report saying I violated the order and saying that I had called her a skank.
	Had you done so?
	No, no, that was the thing.
	I mean, even funnier than that, I believe the words were skeezy skank, which which aren't really words I use.
	I have a much bigger vocabulary than that.
	But yeah, on the spot, without anything other than her word, I was put in cuffs, thrown in the paddy wagon, and brought down to the county jail, and I sat there.
	I even asked, I'm like, you know, can I post bond?
	And they said, no, because this is a violation of a domestic restraining order.
	You don't get to post bail.
	You have to be arraigned first, and then the judge will determine whether or not you can postpone.
	And so I spent the weekend in county, and then I managed to get bonded out by my family.
	And the asinine thing to this was, is this resulted in a misdemeanor criminal trial.
	And I was denied the opportunity to even see my little girl or have any contact in that time.
	Based on a lie.
	Based on a lie.
	And then when the trial date came around, I'd been able my friends and family had actually managed to help put money together and I was able to lawyer up with a lawyer who is friendly with my family in this sense.
	And I went to trial at Superior Court, mind you.
	Like in the U.S., we have district-level, superior, and then supreme.
	Superior is county-level felony indictments, typically.
	But I get to the superior court.
	She doesn't even show up to testify.
	The prosecutor looks over the statements inherent in the case saying that she admitted to antagonizing me and that she'd spoken with my attorney and said, I don't really see this as something worth actually going forward with.
	If she shows up to testify, we will, but it's not really something we're going to go for.
	She didn't even show up to testify.
	Rather, she actually, in that exact same hour, went back to the family court and filed the first of what would be, I want to say, dozens upon dozens of allegations.
	This was when the allegation was that I wouldn't feed, change, or in any way take care of my daughter.
	And they just gave it up.
	And they were happy to hear that case, even though she tried to file a criminal charge against me and then decided not to pursue it for a myriad of reasons.
	And this began this kickoff of what was on average every other month, every two to three months or so, I'd receive a court summons saying that I've been accused of some horrible shit and that I had to come into court and answer for it.
	Is it any wonder with such lopsided laws that they're being exploited?
	I mean, I can only imagine that the police who are doing all these things and the people around who are enforcing all of this are thinking to themselves, well, this is absolute bullshit, but it is written here that I have to do this and therefore I have to do this.
	I can't believe that they are watching this happen to someone else and thinking, well, there's no evidence for that.
	She's obviously talking shit.
	She's made, you know, this is the second time this week I've had to speak to her about another claim that there is no evidence for.
	And, you know, this is insane.
	Well, the family court and like criminal courts and then the police are separate entities.
	Now, I can say that even the night I was arrested, the officers who were arresting me when I was being booked down at the station, they had this rookie, really clearly a rookie, young guy, behind the desk inputting the information.
	And you could tell he was really trying to impress his superiors because he was very, very robocop about it.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, you know, and this old, you know, this slightly older cop, let's say he's probably in his mid-30s.
	He'd been on the force for a while.
	He was a local cop.
	I'd seen him around forever, traffic details, that sort of thing.
	And he even said, he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, dude, listen, stop.
	This guy's getting fucked, okay?
	And I was a little encouraged by that.
	Yeah, and in typical fashion, too, after while I'm sitting in the cell awaiting transport to the county jail, they always have, anytime, most times you're arrested for something, they'll have a detective come up and start asking, you know, hey, listen, you know your rights.
	Are you interested in talking with me about this?
	And this detective comes up and he's like, okay, well, you don't want to talk about it?
	I'm like, sure.
	And he's like, did you call her these?
	Did you violate the order and call her these things?
	I'm like, absolutely not.
	And he's like, well, what happened?
	And I explained the situation.
	And he kind of stood there and he kind of looked and thought about it.
	He shook his head and he's like, so just really off the record, did you call her anything?
	I'm like, no, I know better than that at this point.
	Yeah, I'm not so stupid.
	And he shakes his head and he's like, my God, sounds like a cup.
	And they understand.
	I've had the police call to me multiple times by my ex because, you know, I mean, since then, she actually dropped her restraining order because her own father decided to come after her through the family court.
	And this is the thing about American family courts.
	They're a five billion dollar a year industry.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Yeah, between the lawyers and the judges and the special investigators and social workers, guardians at Leitem and the contract consulting psychologists and all this myriad of fucking people who are involved.
	It's a five billion dollar a year industry.
	Now, people who are in the legitimate criminal justice system and most real jurists of any repute who are not sort of indoctrinated either into like you know feminist ideology which says that men are abusers and they need leashes or otherwise are taking and making a living from this shit.
	These you know the most real jurists and law enforcement person you know personnel often regard this as a devastatingly broken system.
	Right, okay, so at least the people on the inside can see just how malfunctioning it is.
	Mm-hmm.
	Oh, there's...
	The only thing...
	As long as they care, that is, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, the only thing's propping it up as far as I can see right now, and this is sort of what led me to this, like, coming around to finding the MRA movement.
	I don't even necessarily identify as an MRA myself, but you know, finding this I can empathize very much with their position these days.
	Yeah, it's it's that's it that's the thing.
	I'm sympathetic to the position and especially within my own personal experience it's kind of hard not to be.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And what I've noticed with family law, the only real supporters that exists are either the die-hard feminists who see the gendered advantage that it offers.
	There's them, there's the legal professionals who make a living operating in the system.
	And then there's just the public at large.
	Now the public at large, generally, this is one of those weird areas where no one is necessarily understand how broken it is because they're not involved in it.
	It's not until you're already neck deep in the shit that you know what shit smells like in this sense.
	Yeah, no, I do agree with you there.
	But it's the funny thing with the MRA movement and even like just the fact that people like yourself are just openly and unabashedly taking on feminism from something other than a traditionalist Christian sort of you belong in the kitchen bullshit sense.
	It's another one of these like, well, I guess I'm not fucking crazy things because for this whole time I was, you know, I felt that this was just an instance of me slipping through a whole series of bizarre fucking cracks.
	And then the more I looked into it, the more I realized that it's common and that it's starting to catch on and that people are starting to pick up on the fact that this ideological purity and its legislative agendas have gone too far and we just sort of missed it on its way.
	Maybe we should start talking about it.
	I really agree with you.
	I think that what's happening is actually the result of raising men to believe that women are equal.
	I really think that this is the result of it.
	And I think this is where my own opposition to feminism comes from.
	Because my whole life, my family situation was I mean, the women were very clearly in charge, and so it was easy to see women as capable.
	But I was always raised by my parents that men and women are equal.
	They weren't feminists.
	They were just like, you know, everyone's equal, everyone gets treated the same, then there's nothing to complain about.
	And so when I see the feminist movement, everything they do is predicated on the idea that women aren't equal to men, that women are the victims of men, that they can't take care of themselves, that they can't make their own way in the world without extra help.
	And that's that really offends me.
	I mean, it's they are still approaching it from an angle that is fundamentally sexist against women.
	So just to clarify, though, so what you're I mean, because initially when you came out with that initial statement about equality, now what you're saying is that you think that the ignorance as to the problems is rooted in the notion of equality?
	The ignorance as to where these people are coming from, I think, is the problem.
	Where anti-feminist men are being generated from.
	Because they think that I genuinely think that feminists think that anti-feminist men are misogynist.
	They think they just, of course.
	Some of them are.
	Just like some feminists are, you know, we need to castrate every male and find a way to procreate asexually.
	Exactly, yeah.
	They're out there.
	They're always going to be fringe lunatic elements.
	But I really think the majority of men are just really sick and tired of, A, feminism not treating women as equal to men and demanding all the special treatment for women when what they were asking for is to be treated like men.
	And B, feminists just infect every sphere of existence and can't bear to have men getting along on their own because, God forbid, I don't even know why.
	It's like a religion.
	Yes, yes, religion.
	Well, it's just like religion, really.
	And even when you view it through the scope and lens of degrees, I know plenty of Christians who know that the earth is older than 6,000 years old, know that evolution happened, know that there could be extraterrestrial life.
	It's just their conviction is like, okay, well, the more we discover, there's still that unanswered question, and I still believe at some point it comes to God, but I'm not going to say that you're evil or whatever.
	And then you've got these evangelical buckwits who are saying that if you don't believe the way I believe you are, damn, go to hell or I'll kill you, whatever.
	And it's the orthodoxy, and this is what I think really poisons any idea.
	I mean, feminism's assertion, feminism's core assertion that women should, on a social, legal level, be viewed as men's equals, that women should be entitled to the same rights as men and no more, no less.
	That's a valid notion.
	Yeah, it's when the core thinking takes on this orthodoxy, that it's the root of all other thoughts, and that any thoughts that do not conform to it are evil and wrong and whatever pejorative term you want to use.
	You can use the Cold War analogy, too, with ardent free market capitalists.
	They'll say that any public service is theft by taxation, etc.
	It's the same sort of orthodox nonsense overtaken it.
	But that's the thing, though.
	Everything about feminism was based on the idea that men and women didn't have all the same legal and social rights and weren't treated in public discourse as equals.
	And I really think that we're beyond that.
	I can't think of any example in, say, politics that I see where there's a man openly being dismissive of a woman based on the fact that she's a woman.
	Well, you don't live in a U.S.
	I don't.
	That's true.
	I mean, maybe... Tom Hagen.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	There is no shortage of it, and I think that especially...
	Well, it's funny because I noticed that, like, the majority of the more prominent voices in what could be considered the anti-feminist or MRA movements seem to be coming out of, you know, the UK or Canada.
	And I mean, in my struggles here with the family courts, I mean, like I was, like I said, a political operator for seven years.
	So when I find something like a cause or a legislative agenda that I feel needs to be addressed, assuming that it's not just something I'm being paid to go out and work on, you know, my first instinct once I started studying it, at first I was thinking, like I said, I just fell through some cracks.
	And then I started studying it and I learned that, no, this is institutional.
	This is built into the system.
	It's built to work this way.
	It's built to be biased and work in this way.
	And I began, yeah, so I naturally reached out and looked for whatever sort of groups, organizations that may have existed to address the issue that I could find.
	And I did find some, but the biggest problem I found is that, for one thing, it's a very marginalized, very vocal sort of minority rooted either in people who are fed up because they've been through it.
	And those are usually where you find the sensible voices, or they're reactionaries.
	There are a great number.
	I mean, I post in terms of political strategy here, just in the state of New Hampshire.
	And I was working with an I am the furthest thing from a conservative you can get.
	And I was working with a very ardent conservative Republican state representative who's sort of like he's in some ways he's the only member of the legislature, which, just a side note, New Hampshire actually has the largest representative government in the world.
	It's 400 members of the House of Representatives alone for 1.3 million citizens.
	Yeah, so he was just a voice out in the wilderness with very marginalized support.
	And he brought me into this fold and showed me the sort of organization they had.
	And it was a Yahoo group, the Yahoo online group.
	I posed the notion because same-sex marriage was at the time, I can't remember if it was either under debate or just been passed.
	And in terms of family law reform, and in my profession, like in my professional mind, started going, I'm like, okay, we need to devise a communication strategy for this that extends beyond our own ranks, something everyone can understand and not see as like, you know, misogynist or whatever.
	I said, for one thing, instead of calling it father's rights, let's call it court reform.
	Even though we know what it is, let's market it as this.
	And I think is another step.
	We should perhaps court, because this is, you know, right now, all of our support is on the, more or less, it's viewed as being on the fringe right of the traditional, sometimes legitimately misogynistic reactionary conservatives.
	Let's try and reach more towards the middle and the left.
	Let's court the marriage equality movement and lobby, because if they're going to be getting married, they will start to get divorced.
	And when they start to get divorced, they're going to come into this same broken court system where one party gets to do victory laps on the corpse of the other.
	Yeah, I'm very much convinced that, say, in the case of lesbian divorces, the most masculine party is going to be treated like the man.
	Absolutely sure of it.
	That or whoever's got the best lawyer.
	Because, I mean, yeah, I mean, in those cases, too, I mean, in those cases, what it oftentimes comes down to in terms of alimony settlements and shit, it is just a financial thing.
	Who has the more money?
	It does typically go, you know, man pays the woman regardless of what her situation is.
	But when I posed this idea of let's reach out and try and break this sort of ideological monopoly that is sort of by default dominating this idea and this movement, the reactions, I mean, this arch, the conservative house rep I was working with, he even, he came out and said, he's like, I don't agree with gay marriage, but it is the law of the land, and I think this is a good idea.
	Let's go with it.
	He was supportive of it.
	But so many of the members, I mean, I heard shit like, I won't stand shoulder to shoulder with no faggots to.
	Jesus Christ, all right.
	Yeah, all the way up, all the way up to like, child support is Obama socialism.
	Like, what the fuck planet are you living on?
	I mean, he didn't implement child support, you moron.
	No.
	And he's still married, so he probably has no idea how it actually affects people who have to pay it.
	And he probably has no idea that court orders are often issued in excess of your actual income.
	But it's just this ideological sort of logger jam, this partisan logger jam that just kept it going.
	Now, I noticed, like, you yourself, you know, in the U.S., you would probably largely, I mean, do you support having an NHS in your country?
	Yeah, I absolutely do.
	You're a fucking communist, Sargon!
	I actually am, yeah.
	You see?
	No, I'm not really a communist.
	But yeah, no, just for anyone listening who's like, I knew he was always a secret communist.
	I think I've got, like all systems, I don't think it's good to be, like you were saying, it's not good to have an extreme position on one or the other.
	And I really think that certain things could be cherry-picked.
	And I think certain things should be socialized.
	And I think it's unhealthy to a society for them to not be.
	The prison system is very much something that the taxpayer should pay for.
	Very much so.
	Or we still pay for it.
	It's just that some people get extremely rich cutting costs.
	It shouldn't be privatized, then, would be a more accurate way of stating that.
	Because, like you say, certain people then get rich off prisoners.
	For me, I'm of the opinion that a society is judged by how it treats its worst members.
	And so if your society actually says, I'll tell you what, I'll give loads of money to some people who are going to make profit out of this, and then we'll also put the prisoners to work for what is effectively slave labor.
	And, you know, that sort of thing, I think, is probably really bad.
	I mean, just from the sort of moral compass of a nation, to have someone to be able to say that about your country is something that would bother me greatly.
	If the UK government was going to say, look, we're going to privatise the prisons, and then we're going to let the people who are running those prisons for profit put the prisoners to work to earn money out of them extra.
	I would probably be actually protesting in front of Parliament about that.
	I actually think it is.
	I'm not an activist in any way, and it's the sort of thing that would actually get me off my ass, because that is really bad.
	And America's feeling the consequences of that right now with the just ridiculously large prison population and laws that are basically designed to send people to jail.
	Oh, yeah.
	Well, I mean, like, I watch, you know, I'm a, to a certain respect, we call it anglophiles over here, you know, British culture.
	Americans who just, you know, love things like Doctor Who and Sherlock and, you know, BBC programming and just British culture.
	I've been a fan of it for a long while.
	And I've watched, I can't remember the name of the documentary.
	It was about, I think, it was one of the more notorious gangsters in Britain.
	Oh, the craze?
	Shit, I can't.
	This is my fantastic memory.
	A very British gangster, I think it was called.
	Right.
	Yeah, and well, I mean, one of the things I found striking about it, though, was that when he would, throughout the course of this documentary, they followed him as he was repeatedly arrested and tried for various crimes.
	And they would always go over the potential sentences that he could get.
	And for the things that one can get, you know, two to three years in prison in Britain for, here in the States, like, you could be looking at 40 to life.
	It's absurd.
	And it all kind of comes back to, like, I think largely the war on drugs and also what we call get-tough mentalities.
	I'm well aware of it.
	Yeah, and it's in the media.
	Yeah, and it speaks to the American sort of bandwagon enthusiasm.
	There's not much rationality really going on here.
	It's like, you know, all right, what will rile people up?
	How can I whip masses into a frenzy about something and capitalize on it?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Yeah, I don't know what the original point was now.
	Yeah, I'm in favor of a lot of social things.
	Basically, I think that anything that all of the people in a society may well use should probably be free, which means that they should probably be paid for by the taxpayer.
	So, just, you know, like sewer collection, sewage removal, rubbish collection, presents, healthcare, you know, the things that you use to keep the society running and to improve people's quality of life, I genuinely think should be paid for by the taxpayer.
	Well, see, I mean, I don't know where you fall in terms of like, you know, English political paradigm consideration, but I can say for certain that despite even your anti-feminism, which would, you know, have you, have you immediately slung as a fringe right-wing radical in this country, just saying what you just said would also get you branded a communist,
	and they would even go as far as saying you hate America and that you want to enslave people through taxation.
	And it's this hyperbole shit, and it's obscene.
	See, I'm not even against the idea of taxation, so I must be a communist.
	Exactly.
	Well, this is what, and I guess I think where we got onto this track, though, is that when it comes to the MRA movement, the most sensible, the more sensible, the majority of sensible voices that at least I have found in my admittedly cursory sort of indulging in this seem to be largely Canadian and British.
	And I've noticed, you know, I live on a border state with Canada.
	And Canada has no shortage of its idiocy and it's no shortage of its radicals.
	But they're not the same sort of bombastic level that the U.S. is.
	And I sort of wonder if maybe that's not why, because I mean, you know, compared YouTube videos, the biggest critics, the biggest retort videos that I find at least are usually from people like yourself, like Random or Cam, like Thunderfoot, all Brits, or then the Honey Badgers, who are largely Canadian.
	And if they're not Canadian, if they're American, they're typically women, you know, who there's a whole conversation, I guess, to be had about rational sensibilities between men and women, but that's a different conversation.
	But it's this thing, though, but when you look at who are the most sensationalist feminist bloggers, Lacey Green, Rebecca Watson, any sort of ladies.
	They're all Americans.
	That's true.
	And the amount of young American women making, you know, they've just done their first semester of gender studies degrees, and then they're on YouTube saying how nobody understands feminism.
	My girlfriend, when I was going through all the restraining ordership, the girlfriend I had at the time, when we were living together, and we had a lot of, you know, there were problems, just normal relationship problems that led to us not being together anymore.
	But she was there and she was by my side and watched me through the whole restraining order shit and the constant accusations and the fighting tooth and nail and even going to jail just to stay in my daughter's life.
	And she was in her last year of college at the time.
	And as an elective, she took a women's studies class.
	And having observed, I guess, well, actually, firsthand, because she was in the courtrooms a number of times, she went to this childless feminist women's studies teacher and raised the issue of false allegations.
	And her teacher's response was, well, you should break up with him because those are probably true.
	Jesus Christ.
	Yeah, I mean, the academic institutionalization of this, you know, and it's not broad spectrum.
	I'm not going to say every women's gender studies teacher is like this, though I would go on a land to say that a majority of them.
	Yeah, but I mean, this is being taught in schools.
	This is interesting, actually, because only today I actually came across an article on the BBC.
	Let me just grab it a second because it's incredibly pertinent, and it's the sort of thing that I'm going to investigate when I get a little bit of money through.
	There was this BBC article about how there's a gender battleground in the Lego universe, basically.
	But essentially what it is, is Lego have done research into what boys and girls respond best to and created their products to sell as many as they can to each particular type of person.
	And the feminists are going crazy over it, which I'm sure you know about, because it's gendered.
	There are certain kinds of toys that boys tend to be responsive to and certain kinds that girls tend to be responsive to.
	And so what Lego have done is produced sort of a range of women who are scientists as Lego figures in their own little things.
	And it's found.
	I'll say, yeah, I love that.
	I mean, my daughter, well, this is like the ironic thing.
	I'm a harsh critic of feminism.
	And my ex exploits all of the legal things that it has so far, more or less.
	I mean, she even actually threatened me with a false rape allegation when she was served with my latest round of court paperwork, which was the Supreme Court appeal on a judgment.
	And in that appeal, I laid out that, you know, this is what we have.
	In the States, we have it.
	It's called vexatious litigation.
	And in the state statute, it says if three or more instances of questionable or false litigious action is taken that can be seen as being with the idea of harassing, maligning, or attacking someone, then that is vexatious litigation and it is a civil tort and it will be put into record.
	Well, I put this in my Supreme Court appeal.
	And when she was served with the paperwork, I got a phone call, an angry one.
	I just got your paperwork.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	I was going to take it easy on you in court, you know, but after seeing this, you fucked that up.
	And then she even said, she's like, if you continue harassing me like this, I'll report you to the police and won't they love to hear about the date rape?
	I'm like, and before I could even say what the fuck, she'd hung up and then sent a series of threatening text messages saying, if you serve me with any more court paperwork, I'll get another restraining order like I did last time.
	Which I'm glad to have that in record at least because that means hopefully that'll never happen again.
	Absolutely.
	But the point is this is entirely malicious and she absolutely understands how the system benefits her at your expense and she's using it as a weapon against you.
	Well, she's also admitted, I mean, you know, it's tempting for me to say that, you know, this is just pure malice on her part.
	But the reality is that, you know, gauging observations I made from the time we were together, as well as her actions since then and things that my daughter has said to me, you know, in her specific case, there's, you know, I'm not going to go into details and make a clinical diagnosis, but there's more going on to it.
	Now, but the interesting point in relation to the Legos, though, my daughter, I'm a I'm I'm a broke poor man.
	I'm a journalist and an actor with a history of union organizing.
	You do not get hired for lucrative professions when you have that on your resume here.
	And and um well like I get my daughter every other weekend now.
	In fact I'm going to be seeing her this weekend again.
	And you know she's brought these things up to me.
	The the more I talk to her about it and it and it really is like her mother is sort of raising her to value superficiality, being pretty.
	You know, everything she owns is almost pink.
	Her mom has said she can't have Legos because they're boys' toys.
	Raising her, I mean, I didn't really have the money to go out and get enormous dollhouses and Barbies and stuff, but I discovered she really doesn't care because I gave her this like crate of my old comic book action figures and she fucking loves them.
	I mean she doesn't play like battles with them like I used to, but you know she arranges them all like they're in class and then one of them's the teacher and she's asking me, she's like, can I have Legos?
	I'm like well yeah of course you can have Legos.
	Everyone should have Legos.
	I mean it's an essential part of childhood.
	And she's like mom won't let me have them because they're boys' toys.
	I'm like what the fuck?
	Okay, this is something, yeah, maybe feminism has a point with this.
	If there is a social concept within female ranks of this sort of thing, this sort of gender nonsense, then that's crap.
	Because my daughter's already, you know, I hear all this debate about STEM fields and this and that.
	And we need to be more encouraging of our girls.
	I can only speak for myself, but my daughter's already said, Dad, I want to be a scientist.
	I'm like, yeah, yeah, do that.
	I mean, Christ, if you can avoid social sciences, like the trap I fell into, and study something with actual answers to it, go for it.
	See, I actually made the other I actually made the mistake the other way around.
	I found science and technology very easy to get along with when I was in education.
	And so I ended up doing computer science at university and it bored the hell out of me.
	I hated every second of it.
	And I wish I'd known at the time that I was going to love history.
	I had no idea.
	And because, you know, up until then, I'd literally just had the standard sort of middle school education on history, which was essentially World War II.
	And it was just, you know, World War I and World War II, which were lots and lots of grey photographs of men in trenches.
	Which I mean, oh God, it was so boring.
	You know, and that they they they it was as if they went out of their way to take out any historical drama from the subject, you know, as if as if it wasn't like Churchill's decision and then his his like r taking responsibility of Gallipoli and the failure of it, you know, it w as if as if there wasn't any sort of person behind that decision.
	You know, it was always portrayed in very much a sort of disconnected way.
	It wasn't just a narrative.
	Yeah, a narrative, yeah, exactly.
	You know, so yeah, the the the British Empire sent however many thousands of troops to the Gallipoli Peninsula.
	They landed on the beaches and it turned into Basically, an early version of World War I, one's trench warfare.
	And it was a complete disaster, you know, from the British point of view.
	But none of that was taken in a human context of the people there.
	And so it was entirely boring.
	And it was entirely, I don't want to say academic, but it really was exceptionally dry.
	And it really turned me off history.
	And so I think I would have preferred the social sciences, actually, to be honest.
	Well, you know, it's an interesting thing that you bring that up, though, because one thing I noticed is that explicit study of social science can often, it's a very, very easy path to walk.
	If you take one wrong step, you're going to sink into the quicksand that is ideology.
	Yes.
	Now, in yours, now, I mean, I've come to really respect especially your conversations.
	And you're taking the piss out of people aside, the intellect you pour into your social thinking.
	And social scientific thinking is admirable, but I kind of have to wonder if maybe part of that isn't rooted in your sort of more hard science-oriented background.
	My father, well, my dad, for instance, he went to Cooper Union and he studied astrophysics.
	Now, he left that study and went into the field of computer programming.
	He was a mainframe programmer for 30 years because it was a growth industry.
	And he's like, all right, I can try and build gravity slingshots for all that and light sales, or I can do something pragmatic and realistic.
	And that's the way he went.
	Now, I was raised with Nova.
	And I was, you know, he really, you know, it's that sort of thing where you sort of vicariously, in one way or another, live through your children.
	I was raised with, you know, like when I was like a young boy, even learning what string theory was when it was new, because he'd be on the early days of the internet with other computer programmers who had the internet.
	What the fuck is the internet?
	And they'd be, you know, talking about this shit.
	So I was raised with that, but my granddad was a social worker in Brooklyn during the 50s and 60s.
	He was actually an open Marxist during that time, which that took balls.
	Yeah, he marched with King and all that.
	I never learned that until later in life.
	And I sort of naturally gravitated towards politics and law and civil considerations like that on my own.
	But I did so with constantly having it from especially my dad driven into my head that, you know, well, that's not real science.
	You know, there's hard science that has questions and answers, and you can prove them soft science like that.
	It's all variable written.
	Well, it's funny because, and this sort of gets to a grander sort of theory I've developed, which is the grander sort of macro sociological evolution.
	Like we said, the men's rights movement, the father's rights movement, MGTOW, all that.
	It's rising now.
	It's still a new thing, and it's rising in response to the, you know, feminism comes up and reaches its peak, and now it's kind of on the downgrade.
	And in response to that, this is what's evolved.
	Now, one thing I've been trying to rack my brain about and study ideology is how can you apply a hard science model to a soft science like that?
	And the closest thing I've been able to really find is biology.
	Physicists are terrified of biology because it is so variable-laden, and there's so many things that if one little thing is often a biological assessment, it all breaks down.
	Can you hear me?
	Hello.
	Sorry, yeah, that's my internet connection clicking over.
	Yeah, sorry about that.
	Sorry, yeah, what were you saying there?
	Sorry.
	Well, the whole point I was saying was just I have this kind of strange thinking that the natural evolution of the social and political sciences is going to sort of evolve more into a hard science sort of way where it's less artistic and philosophical and more considering the given variables, the way one policy affects the issue it's addressing, as well as exterior policies and what proper balance is.
	Because in biology, if one chemical composition is this whole thing dies, it takes a shit, gets sick, or whatever.
	Yeah, can I just say that?
	Yeah, I actually can I can I just jump in there because you made a point there.
	I really think that that's something I've been meaning to bring up at some point as well.
	I absolutely agree that social sciences are definitely moving to a more statistical model because statistics are so much more readily available on everything.
	So it's so much easier to collect them these days.
	It's so easy for people to go to say Facebook and see what percentage of men and women like the game Call of Duty compared to what percentage of men and women like the game Farmville.
	And this is what a lot of the gaming press are basing their sort of, I don't know, their current ideological trends on, I think.
	And that is actually something that really bothers me because I think what they end up doing is removing the human element from what is essentially a science about human beings and how they act.
	And I haven't fully formed this thought yet, so it's going to sound kind of garbled as it comes out.
	Oh, I think we're in the same boat on this.
	I mean, I haven't either.
	I'm trying to put the theory together.
	It's just not there yet.
	Yeah, I think very much that the statistics seem to be becoming the conclusions and becoming and I guess kind of calcifying into, like you said, about the institutions and how they become an orthodoxy.
	I think that this is going to end up in the same way.
	And I think for feminists, the access to statistics has absolutely informed everything they do, just using them as an example.
	And it bothers me because it's this sort of trend of the modern world, isn't it?
	That everything is becoming very much categorized.
	Well, and I think maybe that is sort of because one thing I've found interesting, actually, it came up on Facebook the other day.
	One of the directors I worked with back in March on this really bizarre film, which when it comes out, at least I have no idea actually what it fully plays like, so it might be under shit.
	It might be great.
	Who knows?
	Yeah, but I mean, he idly posted this question on Facebook, do you believe in magic?
	And a bunch, yeah, and a bunch of people were jumping in saying, yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I'm like, no, no, there's no such thing.
	Yeah, magic doesn't exist.
	And then he says, well, what about love?
	Love is magic.
	I'm like, no, love is a biochemical trick of evolution designed to keep humans bonded long enough for the young to grow and not die.
	Yeah, well, as reductive as that is, though, I mean, it raises an interesting question, which is like, you know, I love, you know, Hawking said back in 2010, undoubtedly in an attempt to drive controversy and sell books, but he said, I believe philosophy is dead because everything can be explained through physics.
	Now, if you take raw human biology and the natural animalistic design of our biological obligation is to procreate and make the species.
	And from that, all of these other things have sprung, like the concept of love and devotion, marriage, family units, et cetera.
	Now, I've kind of like a lot of people are either eager to embrace those as ultimate truths or dismiss them as just utter fantasy.
	I sort of think that it maybe is more about a matter of human biology and the animalistic nature to us coming up and butting up against the evolved intellect and psychology that we've developed as a result of our socializations and our advancements.
	And that we have outpaced our own nature to a point where now we're having to sort of stop and revisit concepts that we sort of institutionalized and enshrined in our societies to wonder, okay, well, how do these actually fit into our societies as they are?
	How do they fit into our vision of what we want our society to be?
	And to what extent can we defy our nature, our biological nature, to conform to these desires.
	That's a very interesting point.
	One of the things that I've actually noticed on those lines is the ability to satiate desires is so much more easy and just done in abundance now.
	In fact, we live in a world of just insane abundance.
	If you look at a thousand years ago, just the scarcity, the level of scarcity, and they considered their king to be rich, and proportionally he was compared to what the rest of society had.
	But that king would have had to have paid a small fortune for some pepper.
	Whereas I can just get Pepper for about 60p, a dollar or so, you know.
	And it's this sort of...
	Or salt.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Salt, exactly.
	We're not having wars over salt anymore.
	Exactly.
	And that principle just goes to everything.
	I mean, if you wanted to see a naked lady as a 16th century peasant, you had to get a wood cut.
	Now, I can see naked women doing whatever I want in as many positions as I want.
	And I could do it all day if I wanted to.
	And it would be a picture.
	It would be a moving image of a real woman.
	And it's just like, Jesus.
	And the thing was, sugar, if you wanted something sweet, you'd have to have honey or something like that.
	If you're a medieval peasant, but now I can just go and stuff my face with chocolate all day if I wanted to.
	The same with everything, everything is just, the ease of satisfying your desires is so easy that, and like anything, if you can do it regularly enough it becomes less exciting, the desire for, you know...
	The desire changes, and it requires more and more and more down that road.
	And so this is why we've got kids who have got ADHD where they can't concentrate for more than two minutes because they want some kind of new stimulus on their iPhones.
	And so what they're using effectively, I'm watching some of these iPhone games.
	They're effectively interactive wallpapers.
	There's no game, there's no challenge.
	It's just, oh, put block in and then flashy light.
	And it's just like there is no brain interaction there.
	There are no higher functions operating.
	Well, alternately, too, there are also some games out there.
	I mean, especially the more social ones, like even words with friends, right?
	It's just, it's, it's, it's, oh, it's, it's, um, I had it on my, my phone for a while.
	Like, uh, it.
	It's just Scrabble.
	That's all it is.
	It's Scrabble.
	But the reality is that Scrabble is an intellectually engaging game.
	You have a series of letters.
	You need to make words.
	You need to make valid words.
	And I think you're really striking to a good point there as well in terms of I actually want to say that it was Mike who had it in one of his videos, but we are among the first generations to suffer from abundance rather than scarcity.
	And in that, though, it's funny because there's still that natural human instinct to size it up, judge it as right or wrong, good or bad, as opposed to really viewing it as just sort of objectively like, remove yourself from the species as it was, just as a thought experiment and look at it objectively as something you're studying anthropologically.
	Like you are Jane Goodall and society are the gorillas.
	And when you're looking at that, I mean, there are positives and negatives to all of these things.
	So with this abundance, like you say, to our generation, for instance, let's just take you and I, males in the 21st century, the ability to view not only naked women, but naked women doing things which in eras gone by would have been either unthinkable or you would have had to go to like, you know, the shadiest, skankiest part of town and find some slave who was filled with opium and didn't know any different.
	The fact that we can see these things, I mean, on the one side, you know, it could be said that, you know, just taking gender dynamics, male sexual arousal and interest can be satiated or even the most really out there can be.
	Then you could also say that like the abundance of this has led what is classically described as deviancy to go leaps and bounds beyond what it used to be.
	I mean, I can't think of another time in history in which a thing like two girls, one cup would ever, ever have attracted any interest.
	People would rightfully say that's just fucking gross.
	Why did anyone do that?
	That's the thing.
	You read, I mean, some of the most crazy stuff comes out of the Roman Imperial Palace through history.
	But it's not that extreme.
	You know, everything, it sounds not conservative, but it's like, yeah, okay, it's debauched, but it's not so debauched that I was covering my mouth in shock.
	Oh, my goodness.
	I was just like, yeah, yeah, well done, Caligilly, you dirty bastard.
	Yeah, or horror movies are a great, like, you know, less sensational example.
	I mean, you take horror movies from decades gone by.
	They had aspects of psychological thrill to them.
	They had tense moments and build-ups and like, you know, moments of what the fuck.
	And these days, most of them are just, you know, gore slasher films because it's not about doing that thing.
	It's not about tapping into this or that.
	It's just about shock value.
	Hey, look at us pushing the turn around and say, oh, well, this is just horrible.
	This is just this is evidence of a society in decline.
	But if you take a long view approach, I think, and you apply a modified concept of entropy to it, you know, the general reaction to this really wacky fringe shit in In any respect, over time, once it becomes normalized, people will either just accept it on whatever merits it may be possessing of, or they'll reject it as just utter nonsense.
	As much I think, you know, I mean, we're having a conversation about everything from like politics and general social thinking, which sort of defies the established paradigms.
	And these sort of conversations are becoming more and more ordinary.
	They're still new, but they're becoming ordinary.
	Yeah, they are.
	I do agree with you.
	It's very hard to it's not hard to find people who are willing to engage in them in real life.
	You know, I find it quite incredible that YouTube is the intellectual battleground of the 21st century.
	This is where these ideas are being formed and propagated because it's so easy to share a video.
	You know, like five minutes video, get your concepts across.
	And it's, you know, I don't do fucking the videos, but I'm not looking to talk to idiots, I guess.
	A hundred years ago, if you and I, where we are, wanted to have this conversation, it'd be a series of what, like telegrams, maybe, maybe a phone call.
	Yeah, it would take years to have.
	And it's interesting, too, this same sort of like sort of semi-entropic balancing act you can see playing out between the social media streams.
	You know, you take Twitter.
	Did you catch Amazing Atheist?
	He had the feminist debate between Awesome Rance and Janet Bloomfield.
	Did you catch that?
	I did see some of it.
	I saw, I saw, yeah, no, I think I watched the whole thing because it wasn't the whole podcast that he did, was it?
	No, and it was half an hour's worth.
	Yeah, and it wasn't, you know, I mean, I mean, I was watching it live and especially watching the comments, which honestly, a lot of them were just fucking cringe-worthy.
	But, you know, that's definitely.
	Oh, I mean, like, well, I mean, awesome Rance, who, I mean, and just in just for the record on this conversation, I was fucking, I was greatly impressed with her.
	She did very, very well.
	She was, yeah, and you could tell, too, that Janet came into this expecting the same thing that most of the viewers probably did.
	Yeah, she was expecting fight bombastic flame war, yeah.
	And even over the course of it, she was like, you could kind of see in her own demeanor, she's like, oh, okay, I'm having a reasonable conversation with someone face to face.
	But you take to Twitter, and these same people who you know are completely capable of being reasonable, rational people who can listen to a point and then respond to it.
	It's all fucking hashtags.
	But then in the middle ground between YouTube, where people can, you know, if they're talking live, or even sometimes in video responses, be completely rational.
	If not a little hostile or adversarial for entertainment.
	I'm killing myself.
	Yeah.
	Well, you got Facebook dead in the middle, though, I noticed, because you're not limited to 140 characters, but you're generally still just typing out your shit, and really it's a bunch of one-upsmanship in a lot of senses.
	So it's kind of on Facebook, everyone can see what you're writing.
	All your friends can see that you've written something to someone else.
	I've had loads of my friends call me up on something that I've said.
	So I don't use Facebook on anymore.
	Oh, as somebody who writes for what is conventionally looked at as a progressive leftist publication like Occupy.
	And one of the things I love about Occupy is it's rooted in the sort of original spirit of the movement, which I did get involved in, which was, you know, everyone gets a turn to speak, and your ideas as you present them will be judged on their merits by those you present them to.
	But even there, I mean, my publishers, the other writers, you know, will agree on 70% of shit.
	You know, campaign financing.
	Oh, shit, yeah, we got to address that.
	Healthcare, we need single payer.
	Most of the people there.
	But I mean, there, because it's not the venue for it, I don't, you know, express, you know, gender politics.
	But yeah, I mean on Facebook, luckily the people I work with are open-minded enough to understand that we're going to have divergences of opinions.
	But I have had people for matters of gender politics, religion, you name it, I've made statements, and then all of a sudden what could have been a decades-long friendship ends.
	Just like I.
	Yeah, I've literally had that with a friend of mine, and I'm gutted about it because I still see him in real life.
	And it was for some comment that I made about women a while ago.
	I mean, to be fair, I probably wasn't being polite, but I was a bit in the heat of the moment, and I meant to write feminist rather than women.
	I don't even remember what the actual comment was, to be honest.
	I'm probably guilty, but it was before I'd really got it into my head to never use the word women when I'm arguing with feminists, no matter how much they use the word women, because they don't represent women.
	They only represent feminists.
	And I'd fallen into that trap with them.
	And he'd seen this comment and got really offended by it.
	And it's just like, you know, and the thing is, he didn't even tell me, which pissed me off the most.
	I was like, man, come on.
	If you've got a problem, fucking tell me.
	I just want to get back to the point I was making about the desires and the ease of being able to satisfy desires.
	Because one of the things that I genuinely think is actually what is I think this is probably the very root of what is going to ruin us as a society, as a Western sort of Anglo-Sphere society.
	I mean, it's not healthy for people to get everything they want.
	And it's not healthy for them to get everything they want as soon as they want it.
	Because then the desire isn't satisfied.
	So they just look for a new way of satisfying it because they become numb to it.
	They become the new high, the new fix.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And I found myself doing it.
	I just want a new interesting bit of information for whatever interests you personally.
	I mean, obviously there's no putting the genie back in the bottle, but I think that maybe I've got a funny feeling that in a few hundred years' time, people are going to look back on the excess of the dawn of the internet, I think it's going to be that people really, probably about the year 2000, when the internet became sort of really widespread and everyone was on it, to now when absolutely everyone is on it all the time.
	I think it's going to be looked at as some sort of time of something like the American West where there were great opportunities and great things were done, but also the negative aspects of those really started to seep in.
	And I do think cultures mature to absorb those and try and remain healthy.
	And I think that, frankly, what we're doing now on the internet is that inaction.
	Future historians would look at this conversation and say, this is a natural social pushback against what is going on in the society, however small this is.
	That's what it would be if I was looking at it in a history book.
	That's how I'd consider it.
	Yeah, if you take that same dynamic, though, and I mean, like, sort of to tap into the whole hard sciences, soft sciences thing.
	I've sort of had this idea percolating a little while.
	It's a really general analogy, but call it the forest floor analogy.
	When it comes to civilization and empire and dominant superpower, et cetera, et cetera.
	You look at any empire, they follow the same sort of courses.
	They dominate due to whatever military, technological, economic, cultural advantages that they have.
	They dominate.
	They spread that through imperialism, which subjectively is an awful thing.
	And in practice, it's usually a pretty awful thing on a human level, but in a grander sociological scale, it sort of serves this weird purpose.
	The forest floor analogy comes when you consider what the forest floor is made of.
	It's plants and plants and even the living creatures on it grow, age, die, contribute what their remains are back into the floor, and in addition to feeding whatever springs next from it, it also contributes to the floor effectively rising.
	And so in this sense, I am of the growing opinion, like I think you just expressed, that I think Western civilization, which in effect is the new, you know, it's the modern empire.
	It's global.
	Yeah, it's just bigger than any has been.
	I mean, to be really reductive with it, you know, you had Rome, Rome fell.
	Then the next real greatest one after that, in terms of Western societies, we think of it, probably be England.
	And England had, you know, England had a very traditional sort of colonialist military-backed empire that was fueled by the economy and bolstered by the military.
	Now, and I think I recommended it to you, actually, Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States.
	He expressed this brilliantly.
	Some of the biggest debates within the Allied forces in respect to how to deal with Germany, how to approach this war, what we were all after.
	England at the time, Churchill wanted not only to defeat the Germans, but he wanted to preserve the British Empire as much as he could.
	FDR opposed traditional sorts of empires.
	He thought they were antiquated and harmful and terrible.
	And as the British Empire fell, both during World War II and after it, the American model of empire, which was really promoted under Truman at the behest of party bosses and their interest factions, which those kind of dated back to Wilson and even before then in terms of military industry and trade deals and that sort of thing.
	But the US has established a new kind of empire which is almost purely economical.
	Yeah, I just want to, yeah, sorry, if you don't mind, the U.S. Empire is very interesting because they do have a compelling case when they say, oh, America isn't an empire, because it doesn't follow the traditional infrastructure of empire.
	And it is quite ingenious.
	In fact, I mean, when you say FDR thought they were antiquated, the old imperial European empires, they absolutely were.
	Because the sort of the business empire, the trade empire of the United States, is so much more efficient at what it does.
	It's just so much better.
	And it's intense.
	And it keeps the appearance of clean hands.
	Yeah, we have 900 military bases around the world.
	And that figure might be up for debate, whatever.
	We thought it was over 1,000.
	Yeah, well, that's the thing.
	And I mean, it also depends on what you decide is a military base.
	Are we talking just like a frontier outpost?
	Are we talking just an embassy presence?
	If you say where does the United States anywhere the United States has troops and fortifications on the ground, you could justifiably say it has a base.
	But that's not the way we really expand our empire.
	The way we expand our empire is by banking manipulation, trade manipulation, subjugation of domestic workforces.
	I don't know if you're familiar.
	Are you familiar with the Yes Men?
	No.
	Oh, you can actually, and I know you're a pirate, so I have no problem telling you this.
	No, the Yes Men, they are, just as soon as you're done, go and find it.
	And you have their permission, too.
	They give their movies away for free.
	P2P editions are actually, yeah, they possess extended footage.
	They're political pranksters.
	They try and draw attention to their anti-globalization activists who operate by making documentary films and pulling pranks.
	And one of the pranks they pulled one time was they held a seminar.
	They're always setting up seminars.
	I'm not going to ruin.
	You're going to get such a fucking kick out of these guys.
	It's right, I've Googled them, so after this I'm going to...
	Yeah, you're going to fucking love them.
	In fact, the second movie they have out, the P2P edition has additional materials because they got sued by one of the institutions that they pranked, and they got an injunction saying you cannot sell a DVD with this footage.
	So they're like, okay, we're going to give it away for free with this footage.
	And then extra shit.
	Have fun, fuckers.
	But one of the striking things is they could have, and you'll see it, they have business, you know, they get invited by trickery to business seminars where they'll go in and they will, you know, they'll basically say like, you know, oh, hey, you know, we should sustain work for like low-wage, minimum wage workforces by recycling the fecal matter defecated after they eat cheap food.
	You know, we'll make it soil and sneeze.
	And, you know, and yeah, they go, they really go, you know, you'd expect this is the kind of shit that would get a real viscer reaction.
	In the business conferences and shit, that's typically not the case.
	But they held one conference at a business school with college business students where they, I believe this was the one where their presentation was saying that modern business should look at the American abolition of slavery as a great thing.
	Not as a humanitarian win, but because it allowed us to realize that we can more effectively subjugate and effectively enslave an entire population by keeping them where they are and just moving our industrial base there.
	Absolutely.
	That's exactly what we do.
	And the great thing was, the business students were like, I'm not going to fucking listen to this because they thought it was serious.
	But they got up in arms about it.
	That's actually what happens.
	Exactly what happens.
	They're pissed off about it.
	Why don't they get sort of changing the moral?
	Well, that's something actually, I mean, like, you've seen the video.
	I actually made a video a while ago called Better Than Slavery because I basically calculated how much each slave was worth.
	It was something like £25,000 to purchase an adult male slave who would then work in your vineyards picking fruit or whatever, doing labor, basic manual labor.
	And basically, the average factory worker in Indonesia, you can afford them for something like 41 years before you're approaching the buying cost of the slave, let alone the maintenance and upkeep.
	So it really is a system that is better than slavery.
	And your hands stay clean because you don't have to justify or rationalize putting them in.
	Yeah, it's fine.
	You're not enslaving them.
	You're employing them.
	And if they can't afford to feed their families and they starve to death and they die of dysentery and other conditions that in the Western world have not been around, no, they should have worked harder.
	And the thing about these things as well is you had things like Chiquita that in Guatemala owns something like 42% of the land of the entire country.
	And one of the things that I was watching a documentary about Indonesian sweatshop workers.
	And the person was like, why don't you go somewhere else?
	And there is nowhere else to go.
	The company owns everything.
	It's either this or go hungry.
	So that's what they do.
	And if you try to go to like the Western, you know, the Western Empire states like the UK or the US who who are really like your ultimate employers, when you get there, if you get there, no, you're no, we don't fucking want you here, you're fucking foreigner.
	You're coming to steal our jobs.
	It's like, okay, well, let's send them back over to their country so they can not only starve to death and watch their families suffer, but they can technically steal your fucking job by the company just deciding it's better suited over there for somebody who won't complain or try and organize a fucking union.
	Exactly.
	And because they buy the corrupt governments off, they don't have to.
	They don't have to do anything.
	They don't have to improve beyond a basic level of not screwing them even more than they would.
	And it's easy to, you know, and it's a natural question, especially for anybody who can actually, like, you know, of any political stripe, too.
	Anybody who is remotely intellectually honest with themselves in the world, despite their ideological positions, if they observe these things for how they actually are and how they work, they get opposed.
	So the natural question then has to come, like, well, how does this shit go on and how do people tolerate it?
	And that's when we come back to the idea of ideological orthodoxy.
	You know, we're all sold in the notions that you hear about an international trade deal between wealthy superpowers and impoverished nations.
	And from the sound of it, it sounds like, well, yeah, that sounds like a good idea.
	Just like in the United States, the Violence Against Women's Act or the Child Support Enforcement Act, you put a nice label on something, and the ideological purists and those who don't have the time or energy to dig into it are going to accept it as valid and just.
	And it's going to take, just like the Forest Floor analogy, that empire, that system, is going to need its corruptions to become self-evident in their practice before they're rejected, before the empire falls, and whatever remains of it is built upon by whatever comes next.
	I very much agree there.
	One thing that bothers me very much about this whole thing is the short-sightedness of it.
	Because production is where wealth is generated.
	So the people producing things, eventually, you start paying them a small amount, like Britain with the Industrial Revolution.
	But it really wasn't that long before the workers were like, hang on, we're the ones making you rich, and therefore, at the very least, we're going to demand certain rights, certain amounts of pay, and all that sort of thing.
	So wherever you do this, the workers will eventually realize that they're all being collectively screwed.
	And so collectively they will demand more.
	And if it's not given, then the gravy trends over for everyone.
	So whoever's making the money is going to make these concessions.
	And so basically, eventually, it's basically like a sliding scale of where the wealth is.
	And when things were produced in the West, then the wealth of the West was very, very high.
	And currently we're on this sliding scale where the wealth is not being produced in the West.
	The things that make the wealth aren't being produced in the West.
	And so, I mean, it's just going to eventually, in like, you know, say 100 years' time, I mean, China is already shockingly, it's the second most wealthy nation now.
	And it's just going to get wealthier.
	And, you know, we're going to find this, basically it's about the maintenance of the actions you take are the things that sustain themselves, become sustainable.
	So we're on the sort of downward slide into mediocrity.
	The majority of British jobs are service jobs.
	And no one pays top dollar for service.
	They pay for the products.
	The service jobs, they come secondary to it.
	And so we're going to find ourselves in the West increasingly trapped in a very...
	I mean, it's just going to be polarized between the rich and the poor.
	Because...
	Because the wealth creation, yeah, it already is, but it's just going to become more pronounced because the wealth creation of the middle class, who, you know, the people who Henry Ford was paying $5 to buy his cars, you know, these people are all being taken out of the equation by the exporting of the jobs to overseas.
	And they're never coming back.
	So we're going to find that the majority of people in the West are going to be extremely poor, whereas you're going to have quite a healthy middle class in the East.
	And so it's just not going to end well.
	I can't ever see how this is going to end well.
	And it's obviously a sliding stage.
	It won't end well.
	It won't end well for us.
	But again, if you take the global sort of humanistic long view, and you account for the entropic sort of dynamic in that, now you pointed out perfectly that China is rising.
	The East is rising to effectively replace the West.
	And part of what it's done in that, and I think it's going to sort of balance out in a strange sort of way between what we understand as left and right, capitalism, socialism, and such.
	Communist China has found its strength by sort of very dynamically and sort of in a cherry-picking fashion adopting Western, we can call it imperialism, we can call it capitalism, whatever, but they're opening up, as we say.
	But they're modifying their model of doing things, which at one point was an orthodox communist model, which rapidly tanked out because of its own inherent failings and because of the West's hostility to it.
	And they're adopting and they're sort of adapting to become what people like to sort of nebulously describe as a hybrid system.
	At the same time, while the West falls, and it was just like we were saying before, the corruptions of orthodox capitalism as an ideological mindset and as a social construct are making themselves evident at last.
	We were able to gloss over them for a good long while by creating artificial prosperity and creating a middle class.
	And then once the greed factor, which is endemic and inherent to the ideology itself, was taken.
	It's a different ideology, you know.
	Yeah, yeah, it's what it is.
	It's you get what you grab.
	It's the central sacrament.
	Yeah.
	Gordon Gecko in Wall Street said, you know, greed is good.
	And even though in the film he was meant to be a villain and that was meant to be sort of like a parable warning.
	Absolutely.
	So it came true.
	It's like, you know what?
	Fuck yeah, I want to be Gordon Gecko and Gordon Gecko doesn't give a fuck on who he fucks over to get to be Gordon Gecko.
	That's what I need to do.
	Shit, why didn't I think of this before?
	Now, that's starting to tank.
	So as the orthodoxy to the East's communism in this sense begins to crumble beneath its own dynamic needs, the same I think is going to happen in an opposite sort of direction in the West, where this classical post-Cold War anti-public, anti-communal, anti-socialistic mentality is going to break beneath the ultimate weight, especially in the States, for a need for things like a public health care system.
	Or, you know, we should have efficient public services that do not sidetrack enormous amounts of the resources just to make someone rich.
	It's the consequences of reality.
	You can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality, can you?
	And that's exactly what that is.
	And I completely agree.
	I really think that who was the American billionaire who said the pitchforks are coming in an article that I saw going around.
	Buffett, maybe.
	It wasn't Buffett, but he's an artist.
	Oh, oh, oh, I know the article you're talking about.
	Yeah, you saw it on there.
	But he's right.
	I've been saying it for ages.
	I've been making comparisons to the French Revolution because the wealth disparity is worse than the French Revolut than it was at the time of the French Revolution.
	And so it's seriously, I mean, from a historical perspective, the only thing that's stopped a revolution so far is technology.
	And it's the idiots being occupied on their iPhones.
	So, you know, they go to their crappy jobs, they do their crappy jobs, but they're on their iPhones all day.
	And, you know, it's I genuinely think that that's what's stopped the revolution so far.
	Well, I actually, I mean, I don't have, I don't necessarily even think it's a bad thing.
	A lot of people really love to embrace the notion and the concept of revolution.
	But you know, but I mean yeah, but I mean it's it's like anything else in society.
	Everything sociological or political is a double-edged sword.
	There's a plus and a negative to all of it.
	When it comes to revolution, there's a great film out called Land of the Blind, I believe it is.
	Donald Sutherland, Ray Fiennes, and it's a brilliant sort of, I guess, parable in a sense.
	It starts out with this, you know, overarching, it's very British, too.
	It's a very, you know, well, I've noticed that, like, because especially because your country has a much longer history, much longer political history, and you've had revolutions, you've had, you know, I mean, American wannabe revolutionaries are always looking at Europe and saying, well, you know, they take to the streets and shut down their countries if tuition goes up, yet we can go to war and no one makes a peep.
	But in this film, you know, it starts out with this very great, powerful, very repressive, very sadistic regime, and it follows the course of what is effectively a revolution against it, which, you know,
	it's the pendulum dynamic where you swing from one polar outside to the next, which is like when it comes to talking about issues like this, I just, it might be semantics, but I almost prefer the term paradigm shift because the revolution hasn't come, you're right, because people have their needs satiated.
	But it's funny because in the comparison to the French Revolution, you constantly hear in the States, you know, oh, how can you be poor?
	You've got a smartphone and a plasma TV.
	During the French Revolution, I bet you that same sort of shit was spattered out, except like, how can you be poor?
	You have a hat.
	Yeah.
	You've got to plow.
	You can still plow your field, can't you?
	And it's like, well, yeah, but the price of grain you haven't starved to death yet.
	Come and talk to me about starving to death once you've starved to death.
	Really?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, I'm not a fan of the idea of revolutions either, which I think is why I'm on YouTube trying to tell people that there's a revolution coming.
	And it's only because I've read about so many.
	There's actually a great series by Mike Duncan, the guy who did the History of Rome podcast called Revolutions, where he literally goes through the causes and consequences of 16 different revolutions throughout history.
	Most of them end well.
	Yeah, they don't.
	They don't.
	They're a terrible thing.
	We were all cheering on the Arab Spring here in the West.
	And for a number of countries, it did sort of work out.
	But for a number of them, it descended into fucking abysmal chaos.
	Yeah, well I tell you what, I watched much of the events in Libya live on the BBC website.
	And they had live feeds and regular articles.
	And I was infuriated by it.
	I was absolutely infuriated by it.
	There was this one bit that really stood out to me that just I just I was just head in hands just I can't believe you guys would put this bullshit on TV and expect anyone to buy it, right?
	So obviously they're anti-Gaddafi and I'm not pro-Gaddafi, I'm just not anti-Gaddafi.
	I'm just neutral on Gaddafi.
	Yeah, well I mean it's a question like you know Saddam.
	You know okay he was bad.
	No fucking questioning that.
	But look what's come afterwards.
	Yeah when we pulled out that sadistic drain plug you know this thing backed up with the sewage again.
	Oh fuck what do we do now exactly.
	And so this coverage was of a government building with a long line of people outside it who the camera was on them and they were all like leaning out of the queue waving and smiling and like you know just pratting around in the background.
	And the BBC journalist was there saying something along the lines of this this is a line where people where citizens can turn up and claim 250 pounds from the government as part of their share of Libya's oil wealth.
	And that was just like Christ, that's amazing.
	That's absolutely amazing.
	And you know all these people looked happy as anything.
	And then the journalist had the balls to say that you can't see it.
	It's off camera.
	But there's also a line at another building over there of people queuing up for bread.
	And it's just like bull shit is there.
	And it was, we're not going to show you because they've asked us not to.
	And it's like, look, right, I don't believe that.
	Even if that's true, I don't believe it.
	I don't believe that there are two queues, one for a loaf of bread and one for £250, and there are people in the loaf of bread queue.
	I can see that.
	I mean, on the one hand, if you can't show me something, if you cannot give me evidence of something that you're claiming, I am not inclined to believe it.
	But at the same time, you also remember that, yeah, okay, you know, regimes like this, it's not uncommon.
	You know, this £250 per citizen for the oil revenue, you know, can we verify that this is a project that's been ongoing?
	Or is this?
	Yes, we can, actually.
	There was a BBC article from two years ago where Gaddafi had gone to his own Senate or Parliament, I can't remember which one he had, and made a proposition that all Libyans should be given £250 worth of oil wealth.
	And the Senate blocked it.
	They actually said no, which then led into question how much of a dictator was Gaddafi.
	And what had happened is that obviously the Arab Spring had led them to go, okay, maybe we should do that because that will probably calm people down.
	So I'm absolutely convinced that they genuinely were giving oil wealth to Libyans.
	And there were a bunch of other interesting social programs that Gaddafi had implemented as well.
	I mean, no, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but that strikes exactly to, again, this, like, there are no absolutes.
	There is no purity in humanity.
	But what shocked me the most was the brazen lies of the Western media.
	I mean, Gaddafi was a populist.
	His base of support, and watching this coverage, I just want to go through it quickly, because...
	It's brutal as fuck.
	I mean, but he was a populist.
	It's really pissed me off because Gaddafi, right?
	He built this thing called the Great Man-Made River, which was basically drawing water out of the Sahara from under the Sahara to create cities where there was no possibility of cities before, which is an exceptionally populist move.
	That's wonderful.
	Newlywed Libyan couples got $50,000 to buy a house.
	Gaddafi turned that country into a house of tent dwellers, to a country of tent dwellers, to a country of modern homeowners.
	And all this, and distributing the Libyan oil wealth and stuff.
	And the people rebelling against him in this BBC footage, they'd come up to the camera and go, I'm a doctor, and I'm revolting against Gaddafi.
	It would be something very middle to upper class.
	These were the people who are so worried about suffrage, effectively.
	With the luxury of being able to sit around and think about what exactly do I think, what is wrong with you?
	Exactly.
	It was the people with wealth, and the people who are at the bottom who really I genuinely think that there was a huge groundswell of popular support in Gaddafi's favor.
	It's just that doesn't matter when you've got the most powerful imperial powers ever to have existed facing you, you know, and just supplying the rebels with absolutely everything they could desire.
	Well, this is, I mean, that's that's like, you know, this is it's again to the nature of, you know, there is no purity.
	You know, my family on my father's side were descended from Holocaust refugees, effectively.
	You know, most, like, we have no records on my father's side that go back, you know, past 1930, more or less, because of, you know, what we all know happened.
	At the same time, I mean, Nazism is probably the single most evil sort of ideology you can really look to throughout modern history, at least, I think.
	Outside of perhaps like the despotism and sort of godlike reverence in North Korea of that.
	Hang on, let's actually look at that.
	Because what is it about Nazism that makes it evil?
	Because the politicianism isn't Nazism.
	I don't see why you couldn't have a liberal national socialist movement.
	Well, it's the same thing, and this is going to be the analogy, which I'm sure is going to get me probably bumped up to level one on the atheism plus block list.
	But, you know, it's this issue of definition.
	It's like, you know, do you define a thing by what it was stated as being about and what it trumpeted as its virtues, or do you define it as its total effect on the world in terms of the consequences, the long-range consequences?
	And in this sense, you can do this with anything.
	I mean, Nazism, he built the Audubon, yeah, he, you know, had a hundred percent employment man of the year.
	At the same time, though, he tried to exterminate entire swaths of people and take over the fucking world.
	So, you know, I mean, how integral was that to Nazism?
	And how much was that political?
	How integral is subjugation of entire continents of people to capitalism?
	How integral is how integral are gulags to communism?
	That's a very good question.
	Yeah, it really is.
	And I guess it's all down to the way it's implemented, isn't it?
	Because the thing is, it's very easy to say that these are obviously terrible things because they were implemented by people who I wouldn't trust in any way.
	And so the people leading them were very pro-totalitarian regime.
	That's just the nature of power.
	Well, it is.
	It is.
	I mean, if you think of power more as a force of nature derived from human social interaction and psychology, it's observable throughout all of history and all political dynamics that the natural design of power, like any kind of hydrodynamic system almost in terms of pressures and valves and checks and balances,
	the natural course and desire of power as a force unto itself is to centralize and to condense as much power as it can, leading to totalitarianism.
	And then the efforts and needs to defend that, whether you're facing political adversaries in the sort of Marxist and Galen sense, or if you're perceiving enemies through racial lenses such as Nazism turned to do, You know, and it's funny because I was just thinking to myself, I mean, there are no limits to the criticisms that the American political system is open to.
	It is, you know, I mean, the levels of corruption here, we've we've institutionalized corruption.
	Corruption now, technically.
	But at the same time, the theory Yeah, the theory of it.
	If you if you modify the theory, if you take the theory, take it in a diff in a in another step, modify it a little bit to sort of address the things that you now retroactively understand that it's prone to.
	In that sense, it's the imperial contribution of the United States in terms of its spreading of democracy.
	The way we spread democracy doesn't work.
	But the efforts, but the setting of a paradigm.
	I mean, before we became this empire, the US was generally looked at favorably by most of the world.
	They said that's a fucking great country.
	Their system is fucking great.
	And it fell victim to its own vices and it fell victim to the inherent problems that exist within power structures and political dynamics.
	I agree with you that power definitely has a nature of advancing itself.
	It's really the checks and balances on the system.
	And I guess that being British, Britain's always had this luxury of it and this is the difference between Britain and the US, I think.
	The United States has never faced a mortal enemy.
	And I know everyone's going to, oh, the Cold War, the Soviet Union.
	No, no.
	The Soviet Union was never going to invade an American city.
	We've never had our cities bombed to the ground.
	Exactly.
	It was never going to conduct bombing raids on the US sort of thing.
	So that was, you know, the US has lived in this real bubble of isolation.
	So that 3,000 people being killed on 9-11 is effectively the same as bombing of London by the Germans in World War II.
	One bombing of Coventry.
	Yeah, 20,000 troops dying in Iraq and Afghanistan.
	That's an odd figure I know.
	I don't have it in front of me.
	But the handfuls of thousands of troops is almost, it's pedestalized and revered more than the, what was it, 800,000 who died, British troops who died in World War I. In the Western Front, yeah, alone.
	I mean, yeah, and in World War II, just untold numbers on the Eastern Front, just unbelievable numbers on the Eastern Front.
	And so, yeah, and this is the thing about Britain, that it's always been close enough to those things to be very affected by them, but it's always had the security of the fact that Britain's an island and the British Navy.
	And so Britain really didn't suffer any existential threats.
	No one I mean, obviously, whenever war on the continent broke out, I mean, you've got, I can't remember, I think it was Nelson who said, I can't say that the French will come, won't come, but I know they I'm just saying they won't come by sea.
	And so it's this very confident defense in the channel.
	And so it's always been the remotest of possibilities that a foreign entity is going to conquer Britain and we lose a liberty.
	So we've always had this, and yet we've always still been affected by wars on the continent quite closely.
	And so I guess it's given British people this kind of just as culture, it's this sort of cultural perspective that I really think is different to the European continent.
	And it's the luxury of security, but the knowledge of danger.
	Well, to us, keep calm and carry on as a t-shirt.
	Exactly.
	But that is the most British sentiment you could have.
	That is exactly.
	There's no hysteria.
	There's a job to be done, though.
	So you get all that.
	Yeah, the 7-7 bombings, I thought, were one of the most telling observations, at least in my own lifetime, of the difference that you're speaking about.
	I dared not knew about them when they happened.
	Yeah, well, that was the thing.
	We saw here on the news, I mean, in the U.S., any time an English-speaking country experiences a bombing or violence of any kind, especially if Americans are involved, because by media standards, American lives are worth more than whatever.
	But I mean, the 7-7 bombings, I mean, so like, you know, this this this this the tube station was blown up, people died, people were seriously gravely injured.
	But once the mess was all cleared out and it was more or less sorted as to more or less what happened, the people who weren't, you know, injured or killed or too traumatized from having been in the blast went back down into the tube and went to work.
	Now, here in the United, here in the U.S., I don't know if you ever caught this story, but when the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie was coming out.
	I didn't catch this one.
	Oh, you want to look this one up because it is.
	I mean, I remember catching it.
	I was working in an office at a call center between calls were checking CNN and all that.
	And it was reported that there was a massive bomb scare and that Boston was on lockdown.
	And what it turned out to be was it was a series of light brights that were put together to flicker and flash with the Moon and flipping anyone who saw them the bird that these two bands of Aqua Teen had just gone around putting around the city.
	And because they were unidentified devices with wires of lights, they were assumed that they must be bombed.
	So the entire city was more or less locked down.
	And it remained a story for weeks and weeks and weeks.
	And even after that, even though it was determined there was no bomb or terrorist threat, especially the more bombastic infotainment sources like Box and CNN were like, but could this have been a bomb?
	And how ready are we if there is a bomb?
	And I'm like, well, I can't.
	Bombed quite a lot.
	And it was just bombed.
	And after it was bombed, people were like, fuck.
	Oh, God, that sucks.
	Do we even have an intelligence service anymore?
	Well, I don't have time.
	I've got to get to work.
	It's this culture of paranoia and fear.
	This is actually what I want.
	I can't remember who said it, but I'm just going to look at that man.
	I'm wondering if this is the quote.
	Well, I mean, it's different, but I think it was Steinbeck who said, and he said it about America, but it's applicable to the West.
	But, you know, the poor in the West never saw themselves as oppressed.
	You know, the reason socialism never took off in the West is because they never saw themselves as an oppressed proletariat but temporarily impoverished billionaires.
	Well, the quote I was thinking of was by a Roman statesman called Seneca.
	And it was constant exposure to dangers will breed contempt for them.
	And that's exactly how Britain has become as it is.
	Because the dangers are always there from the continent, but they were never mortal.
	They were never likely to really overrun Britain.
	And so it's the defining difference between Britain and the continent and why Britain is so different.
	Because people on the continent are genuinely worried about Russia.
	They're genuinely worried about just something coming out of Asia because it's happened so many times.
	And they've had their countries conquered and occupied.
	Whereas that hasn't happened in Britain for a thousand years and so it's really, there is a completely different mindset based on that.
	For the people in Britain, it's not sort of existence ending.
	Whereas for people on the continent, it may well be.
	And so it gives us a very, I guess, insular.
	Well, it's quite describing.
	Yeah, I mean, I can't obviously speak for British cultures.
	I've never been there, experienced it myself.
	But I mean, I can say one thing is like one thing that, especially like American liberals, those who are in favor of gun control, it's an unavoidable fact.
	I mean, whether you're pro-gun control, you want to blame guns, you want to blame people, whatever, the United States, its rates of civil violence, citizen on citizen violence, are absurd.
	I mean, I got caught, I was doing, I did community organizing at the beginning of my political career.
	I was a community organizer for the now defunct, but still invoked as the liberal boogeyman group called Acorn.
	And this was like, you know, this was one of the throwbacks from the 1960s style door-to-door organizing communities of color and poverty to act and to organize and get some things done in government.
	But I was in, well, I was in the shitty part of D.C.
	And most of D.C., outside of them all and the wealthier areas is a fucking war zone.
	I was shot, relatively shot at once because I was probably the only white guy for two or three miles in any direction.
	And there I am walking through this, like I decided to take a shortcut in this one project neighborhood.
	And I'm walking down this broad alleyway, back lot alleyway.
	And I hear, what the fuck are you doing here?
	And I'm like, okay, but that's far off.
	Maybe it wasn't at me.
	I'm just going to keep walking.
	I heard, get your white ass the fuck out of here.
	I'm like, okay, I'm just going to continue walking.
	And then I heard a snap and a ping.
	And I'm like, okay, I know what that sound is.
	I'm going to walk a little bit faster now.
	And then, about, yeah, oh, yeah.
	And then about a week later, the other organizers and I were trying to have a press conference to draw attention to the plight of this area called Anacostia, which is this extremely poverty-ridden area.
	In the U.S., when we do what's called gentrification, when they take a low-income area that has a high property value possibly, and they sort of forcibly buy out all of the residents and relocate them to other areas, they typically relocate those middle-to-middle-low-income residents into really shabbily made new developments in already highly dense, low-income, high-crime neighborhoods.
	And this was happening there.
	So we're trying to organize a press conference, and we're at this open-air transit station.
	It's a bus station on the surface, and it's trains below.
	And no press showed up because who the fuck's going to pay attention to some community organizers in Washington, D.C.
	And so the senior organizers and one of the other organizers on the phone trying to call members, this and that, and I'm just kind of milling around.
	And all of a sudden, this really loud pop goes off.
	Now, I trained with the Army previously.
	So I'm like, that was familiar.
	Then I hear another one, and I'm like, oh boy.
	And I look over and sure as shit, like, really close.
	There's these two fucking 15-year-old kids having a running gunfight through a crowded open-air bus terminal in the broad middle of the day.
	It's people all over.
	And one of them is running, and he's got his gun over his shoulder, and he's just errantly shooting back at this other guy who's following him and just shooting at him.
	Are you still there, Bill?
	Uh-oh.
	Seems as though we've lost Sargon.
	I'm sure he'll be back.
	And assuming we're still live, I can't tell.
	Why can't I tell?
	Now, what do I do?
	I suppose I'll just go and see if this is live.
	And if it is, who's here?
	We apologize for the break in programming.
	And oh, look at that.
	Okay, so I'm seeing comments now.
	Can anybody tell me, am I still Laj?
	It's just me now.
	I'm all on my own.
	My headphones are buzzing, and there's a lovely delay, which means that if somebody wanted to censor, no, no one cares, but why are you here?
	Oh, okay.
	No one cares that Sargon's gone.
	Okay, well, I'll continue then with the story, I guess.
	So there I am in DC.
	And there's this running gunfight going on.
	And it was really quick.
	It's not like a fucking action movie where, well, I know, maybe, this is like Jacob's ladder to Rakin.
	Yeah, he was, yeah, Sargon was taken on by the Illuminati slash patriarchy.
	So I am, I'm in a, I'm in the basement of a house in America.
	I'm pretty dead.
	So let's keep going.
	Running gunfight going on.
	People shooting all over.
	I see children hiding under cardboard-folded signs from, and the frightening thing was, is observing this.
	This was an everyday occurrence.
	This was not some aberration.
	I mean, it was new to me.
	I'm from New England where this shit doesn't happen outside of Boston.
	But to see the reaction to it afterwards.
	Whole bunch of press beginning.
	Oh my god, gunfight happened.
	After that, no one cared.
	It's just like, all right, let's move on to the next gunfight.
	Move on to the next ultraviolence.
	It was a really despicable thing to witness.
	Now, strangely, though, you know, we want to talk endlessly about gun control and all these other problems.
	Really wondering what the fuck happened to Sargon.
	But nobody likes to acknowledge that maybe it's more of actually a straight-ahead cultural problem that's enabled by guns.
	Oh, he's back!
	I think now he's just being quiet.
	Let me smoke again.
	Dragon, are you there?
	Maybe I need to undo this.
	There we go.
	Whatever your comments are, I've just closed the window in hopes that it'll help things.
	So Argon of Akkad has joined group chat.
	And there's a pencil with a mustache.
	Oh, I see.
	I'll be honest with everyone who's watching.
	This is the first one of these Google Hangouts I've ever done, so I don't really know how they work.
	He's battling to get back in.
	He's fighting with the Internet.
	See, this is the making of a true conspiracy theory.
	The Pink Silence.
	Not really, that's a load of shit.
	But I guess I'll go back into the comments to see what you lot think for those of you who may be still watching and commenting and saying, well, where's Sargon?
	do we have to listen to this irritating American prattle on.
	So I'm back.
	Progon Susan.
	Education police problems.
	See, I like that.
	That is true.
	Doesn't necessarily say that we should just issue guns, mail order to whoever wants, but the violence problem in this country would really seem to be a violence problem, right?
	I mean, take away our guns and the rates of stabbings will go up.
	Yeah, anyway?
	Show off the hearing in like 20, 30 minutes, Sargon, get back in.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's probably it, Razor King.
	Sargon, right now, he wanted to get back in, but he found the conversation in the comments just too fucking fascinating.
	I did.
	Oh, is it coming through?
	There's a bit of a delay.
	So I suppose anyone wants to ask a question, and I'll wait the three minutes between the time I ask this and the time in which one comes up.
	There's a lot of violence in the U.S., period.
	I mean, comparatively.
	I mean, sure, we're not like the sub-Saharan African continent where people are constantly hacking each other to bits, but for an advanced culture with all the prosperity and luxuries that we have, and as we talked about earlier, this absence of scarcity, and we are suffering from abundance.
	One would think in a society where so much of what we would baseline need is more or less in some sense taken care of or assured, that the needs for violence between people within this society would like to think they'd go down.
	Ah, I'm back.
	Guys, back!
	I think I care.
	Yeah, I can hear you.
	I like to think that I carried it for a little spell.
	Sorry, brother, everyone.
	I made the mistake of jumping in and looking at the comments.
	And there you go again.
	Are you still there?
	Any interesting ones?
	Actually, I mean, surprisingly, it's not as much racist shit as I saw on Amazing English.
	Oh, we're on delay now.
	Yeah.
	I'm glad to hear that.
	You know, I didn't realize his commenters were particularly racist.
	Oh, yeah, a lot of them there.
	We like live.
	Okay, well, since I'm back.
	Do you mind if I pop off and grab a cup of tea and I'll be you mean you want me to carry this by myself?
	Yeah, we're live streaming, yeah.
	All right, well your channel will suffer dearly.
	All right, go get your tea.
	Well, I was actually going to ask if you could.
	I was actually going to ask if you can hear you while I'll be making the tea.
	So could you tell me about your interview with John Perkins and just like how it went and how you found him?
	All right.
	Yeah, the interview with Perkins was interesting.
	When I first started writing with that group Progressive Press, the turning the volume down because I can hear feedback a little bit.
	When I first started writing with that particular outfit, that particular website, I took the idea that, hey, I'm press now.
	I have press credentials sort of to heart.
	And like everything else, and this is good advice for anyone trying to do anything, always sort of try and step beyond what you think you're capable of at the outset because that's how you get there.
	But with this, the first interview I had was actually with Brigitte Johnsdaughter.
	I came across her Pirate Party platform and her outspoken activism, and she was dubbed the mouse who roared.
	Found her a really interesting character, hunted down through onl you know, hunted around online to find some kind of contact information.
	And because she was a member of the Icelandic Parliament, it wasn't that hard.
	And basically, just reached out via email to her office and said, would you be interested in having a Skype interview conversation for the purposes of an article to discuss WikiLeaks and Assange and all the things you've been into.
	And we had that one afterwards.
	I'd been a fan of Perkins for a good number of years, ever since I first read Confessions of an Economic Hitman and then Secrets of the American Empire, both of which illustrated most of what we've been talking about in terms of economic imperialism and subjugation.
	And anybody who's interested on my channel, one of the very few videos I have is the interview with him.
	But reaching out to him, it was actually the same sort of thing, although I played networks a little bit more.
	He's part of an institution, an organization called the Pachamama Alliance.
	Not really the best thing for hardline skeptics, I'd say, as it focuses very heavily on spirituality and spiritual interconnectivity.
	It's an interesting thing in its own, right?
	But I had a friend actually who was part of that.
	He'd gone down to Peru and taken part in the ayahuasca rituals.
	It's a pretty tight-knit community.
	And he was able to reach out through some of his networks and get in touch with John, who, if I recall correctly, he put me in direct touch with his publicist, who then arranged for this Skype interview, and we got to talk for an hour, a little under an hour.
	At the end of the interview, it was actually rather flattering because apparently Rhino Films is optioned confessions for a film.
	Me thinking, I'm like, oh, that sounds like something maybe Matt Damon would jump into.
	It's like, oh, I think you'd be perfect.
	And I have yet to have Rhino Films respond to that.
	But yeah, I mean, in terms of independent journalism, the reality is that anyone with a talent for communication and writing can more or less do it.
	I mean, you know, blogs, if you've come across a blog that is well researched enough and written objectively enough, it could legitimately be seen as independent news reporting.
	And that's where a lot of these indie journalists at places like Truth Out and Occupy.com, reader-supported news, that's where they come from.
	I'm assuming you're back.
	Okay, I'm back.
	Yeah, yeah, you too.
	I am, yeah, yeah.
	I didn't want to interrupt.
	Okay, so what sort of things did you talk about with John then?
	Because I'm aware of his book, and I've seen him in interviews, but I've never managed to get a copy to read.
	So I'm aware of basic principles.
	Yeah, basically what we covered with there is John's professional history, it was what he describes as an economic hitman.
	And what these are to hear him tell it, too, because no journalist is true blue without saying alleged and that sort of shit.
	But the way John described it is that working through what was effectively a sort of a financial sort of institution, not necessarily like a bank or a brokerage, but through, I believe his was actually an engineering firm.
	They were sort of subcontracted by, he says, the NSA and other corporate interests to serve as a negotiator for IMF and World Bank loans.
	And what he would do is he'd be sent off, set it down to these countries, usually Central American, South American countries, or African, sub-Saharan countries, anywhere that was poor with a lot of resources.
	And he'd go in and he'd have negotiations where he'd say, look, this is how poor you are.
	This is how much money it would take in order to get your country viable and healthy.
	You have all of these resources.
	So here's the loan that the World Bank, et cetera, et cetera, with these sponsors and co-sponsors is willing to offer you.
	And they would negotiate/slash strong arms/slash pressure these governments into accepting them, provided that they weren't already corrupt enough to where the incentives and kickbacks that they received were not enough to get them in.
	Once they do this, these loans were, to hear him tell it, intentionally structured in a way that was designed for them to effectively fail.
	The stated aims of them, they countered on the corruption, they countered on the loans breaking down, because a lot of the provisions within them required things like, okay, you need to stop paving as many roads and building as many bridges, and you need to put more of these resources towards military policing and your military forces and your security forces.
	And then when these loans would fail, when these countries would continue to go not only deeper into poverty but deeper into debt, then the restructuring would come and the same economic hitman would be sent out again to renegotiate the terms of the loans with even more conditions like buy more guns from these companies, from our client states.
	And one of the bigger ones too, at that point, usually to hear him tell it was, in addition to the restructuring of this loan, you're going to effectively need to give exclusive contracting rights to your resources to our corporations.
	This is where, yeah, this is where, I mean, you hear about Nestle buying up water rights all over.
	Now, we're finally hearing about it in the States because it's happening in drought-stricken California.
	But these same sort of companies were buying up water rights, land rights, timber rights, mineral rights.
	And then they were using these loan packages, the money injected into these countries to build, as he says in our interview, office complexes, professional parks.
	And he points out that for the average citizen of these countries, there's no real employment opportunities there.
	So they're either marginalized and sidelined, or they're obligated to go and do this grunt labor, extracting these minerals and harvesting these resources at pennies a dollar for the benefit of these corporations.
	And it's just this rigged game.
	See, this is exactly the method I would expect American economic imperialism to operate under.
	They're not going to send armies in.
	They're going to send men in suits in.
	That's the last resort.
	In fact, in our interview, he even says, and this is an interesting thing, getting back to the privatization of public trusts and resources.
	To hear him describe it, the chain of events went, economic hitman goes in, attempts these negotiations, and then subsequent renegotiations.
	Now, if those fail, then they start applying political pressure, either through media and political posturing, like, oh, well, this is a repressive regime.
	All of a sudden, a benevolent socialist elected official becomes a tyrannical communist dictator in the eyes of the world.
	If they're not marginalized through that, then intelligence services go in.
	And this is something that we can sort of verify as well, to maintain the liability shield, to maintain the protection of keeping your hands clean.
	In the 1950s, the CIA engaged in Operation Ajax, which ousted Mohammed Morsi and installed the Shah.
	And that was a repressive regime, which led to the counter-revolution of the Islamic Revolution, hence leading to Iran the way it is.
	Now, in addition to the blowback as a result of that, intelligence services also came to realize that if we go in ourselves and one of our guys gets caught, then our hands are in the cookie jar.
	So now we have private contractors, intelligence agency contractors.
	In fact, in recent years, there's even a story.
	Oh, those are military contractors, but they have hands in it too.
	But there are like Titan, I believe, is a big one.
	Titan was also responsible for the Abu Ghraib prisoner.
	Ah, right, okay.
	Their names are very much kept out of mainstream media.
	Oh, they're changing.
	Yeah, Blackwater, right?
	Yeah, Blackwater changed.
	Once people knew what Blackwater was, they changed the name to Z, XE.
	And now that they know that, it's called Academy now.
	Yeah, they change their names frequently.
	But I mean, Abu Ghraib, you notice that all of these Army personnel who were doing sick and sadistic shit there, but they're the ones who took the fall.
	You never heard about any private contractors, but that prison itself was managed by a private contract.
	And that's how the U.S.
	Yeah, and that's the thing.
	And to hear Perkins tell it, if these intelligence operatives, for instance, fail to assassinate or coerce the powers that be to side with the economic hitban and the powers that be, he says then that's when the military comes in.
	That's when we drum up some excuse to go to war or military, maybe not a war, maybe it's just a military operation for national security purposes.
	But yeah, it's common.
	And I mean, it's not exclusive to the U.S. either.
	The UK has adopted this model.
	France has a lot of money.
	It's the model, I think, is as you say.
	I mean, because the thing is, the military operations are always with the intent of regime change rather than permanent occupation.
	It's costly and ineffective.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so Perkins' actions as an economic hitman are precisely what I'd expect from this kind of model of empire.
	Rather than sending in 10,000 red coats or something, they send one guy in a suit with a lot of money and a lot of threats.
	So I think it's something that people stick and get.
	Yeah, I mean, they still did all that in the time of traditional empire.
	I mean, the last thing you really wanted to do was send troops in, because it meant you're expanding your empire and capturing new territory.
	And the problem with new territory is it comes with a new frontier that you have to defend, because now you have an obligation to the people who you claim as your own property, effectively, as the state.
	And what the American model does is it gives that responsibility to whatever puppet they want to put into power.
	And that's their problem.
	And all they have to do is funnel the resources, and a lower amount of resources probably, to that person or that government.
	And so, yeah, it's very cost-effective as far as things go.
	Yeah, and a fascinating thing is, too, is that you can observe aspects of that geopolitical, military-based, traditional empire game being played.
	But that was primarily into the Cold War.
	Because it's no secret Saddam Hussein was installed effectively by American intelligence operations As a counterbalance to Egypt and also as a buffer against Iran,
	who curiously at just about the same time we sold arms to as part of the Iran-Contra scandal, so as to create what we thought was going to be another buffer against Russia as we sort of kind of goaded them into coming into Afghanistan because we knew they'd get shooted up there.
	Really the old military empires, the closest I think we really come to them now outside of the economic models are probably these intelligence operations, I mean which range the globe.
	South Africa for instance, the apartheid and the anti-apartheid.
	A lot of that, anybody who thinks that that was purely South America South African in that sense, I mean much of the resistance was funded by Soviet forces and much of the Western forces, even in the media.
	Pat Robertson, I believe, is famous for condoning the regime which was keeping it in place because his institution and so all this intrigue and shit.
	And it almost kind of makes you wish we had the old days where we just drafted the shit out of anyone who couldn't afford a tract of land and sent them off to die so that we can at least claim for God and country that we will take this land.
	Now we don't even we're not even that honest anymore.
	That's the point, isn't it?
	In fact, that's probably my big problem with the way America conducts itself on the world stage is that it is so dishonest.
	At least with European imperialism, you saw the people oppressing you.
	You have the opportunity to fight back, even if it was futile, even if you were going to die, at least that was an option there.
	But the people who suffer from this kind of economic imperialism, there's no one to strike at.
	There's no one they can fight.
	There's no way of them to fight back as well.
	And so it's yeah, I really dislike how under the table it all is.
	And it's so easy for the media to just not talk about it because it's very complicated and subtle.
	Yeah, and the kind of funny aspect is too is I mean the the rationalizations which were offered in the old empire, the old days of empire, you know, and even the white man's burden was written effectively as like sort of satire.
	It was satire, but it was kind of misinterpreted by the powers.
	It's like, you know, that's a very good point.
	We do very much need to civilize the rest of this world.
	They're just boarish and savage.
	Now, instead of telling them to thank us for civilizing them, we say, you should be grateful for the opportunities we extend to you and the nets we put around your factory to save your workers when they jump to their debts.
	Yes, absolutely.
	It's just a different kind of oppression.
	And at least with an old imperial regime, you can see who you hate.
	But the idea of being trapped in a system that's just soul-crushing.
	And for the average person in these countries who work exceedingly long hours and don't really get that much time to reflect on things, you know, I can believe that the way the system operates is just outside of the knowledge they have available to them.
	And so they don't really have the methods of figuring it out.
	Yeah, we call it mushroom method.
	We call it mushroom method.
	Keep them in the dark and throw shit on them.
	But that's exactly and it's it's an even m it's it's it's insidious, you know, whereas the the the European ones might have been brutal, but at least they weren't insidious.
	And I don't know which one I prefer.
	Why prefer either of them?
	Because let's come back to that.
	Let's come back to that grander sociological, global long view of things.
	And this is also the double-edged sword.
	Yes, the proliferation of technology has allowed people, wherever they want, to watch whatever kind of fucked up weirdo shit they can imagine, because it's out there and no matter how fucked up they think their imagination can be, guess what?
	There's the next step to it that they'll find.
	But on the flip side of that, this proliferation of information technology, you know, a lot of the passive acceptance of empire and the subjugation of other people has largely been because the distances between them, you know, the civilization which prospers,
	the great city of Rome, you know, the citizens of Rome may have not necessarily entirely been aware of like the necessarily repressive military aspects out in the frontier outside of what maybe they knew about and were told was glory.
	The British Empire well they did, yeah, they did.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, I don't it's not that I don't think they knew.
	I think that it's that they thought it was the natural order of things.
	Rationalized, yeah, rationalized.
	Well, yeah, evolve.
	Yeah, well, evolve it now to modern day, right?
	I mean, even the most you know, it takes a truly sadistic type of person to be able to personally rationalize with the knowledge of what's going on, to be able to rationalize the way things work today.
	And despite the fact that there are plenty out there making big noise on the internet and such, I don't believe they represent a majority of the population.
	And with the proliferation of information technology, I mean, just take this Gaza-Israel issue.
	I mean, you know, not getting into the rights or wrongs of it, which is a long conversation.
	You know, the reality is that, like, the suffering of the people in Gaza twenty or thirty years ago, all we'd have would be rumor about it.
	You know, you can't put up the same kind of information blockades that you used to.
	And I think in the long view, this IT and this globalization of communication, you know, aside, you know, the globalization of economies aside, the globalization of communication and the informationalization, if that's a word, of the world, I like to think that over time it'll sort of inspire a greater sense of sort of egalitarian humanism the world over.
	Like, okay, well, I get this iPad and it's cheap, you know, it's relatively cheap here in my country, but I'm, you know, I'd be willing to forego purchasing it, or I'd be willing to pay more if I knew that I could buy it without the materials being mined by slaves and being assembled by wage slaves and finally polished by German engineers.
	Yeah, no, I'm with you.
	I think that with all evils, it does contain the seed of its own destruction.
	And that's the the problem with this sort of corporate model that we've got.
	Eventually people are going to realize how screwed they're getting.
	And you know, it's necessary.
	Or how badly they're screwing others.
	Well, yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the only reason that I I do think the only reason that's allowed to be perpetuated is primarily ignorance.
	And like you say, I mean, yeah, I mean, it might not have applied necessarily to the Romans, but I think it definitely applies now that I think if people actually saw or were like or stood in the factories that these people had to work in, I think people would be outraged.
	You know, well, they are.
	But the average person who's watching X Factor or, you know, America's Got Talent or whatever, they they have no idea and I think they've got even less inclination to care.
	But I think if they were suddenly plopped in that factory, they'd really care.
	You know, I'm sure that they personally would be hugely outraged by it.
	We've had a project going here over the minimum wage debate where certain members of Congress have taken a challenge to live for an extended certain period of time on minimum wage.
	And not one of them really comes out of this saying, oh, yeah, no, this is something doable.
	If they're just more fucking responsible with this shit, they wouldn't be so fucking poor.
	No, they come out like, okay, I don't get how these people are doing this.
	Yeah, there's this politician in Britain called Ian Duncan Smith.
	And he may well be the reincarnation of well, he might just be the devil, actually.
	But he's basically very strident.
	He's the Secretary for Work and Pensions, I think, in the UK.
	And of all the least compassionate people to hold that position, he's come out saying, oh, anyone should be able to live on £51 a week.
	And it's like, yeah, that's easy to say when you're a millionaire.
	But £51 is probably about $80 a week.
	And it's impossible.
	Yeah, not up on exchange rates, but yeah, it'd be between 80 and 120.
	I've tried living on that while couch surfing at families' homes.
	And no, you can't do it.
	It's impossible.
	It's absolutely absurd.
	And obviously everyone's just like, why don't you do it then?
	And there was a petition created to try and force him to do it, but obviously he didn't do it.
	And he knew who he was talking about with us.
	And everyone knew.
	And it's just like, well, look, right, if we can all agree that these people are full of shit, why are they in charge?
	You know, and I think the concurrent theme throughout pretty much everything we've talked about, it does come back to orthodoxy, but I think it's also like the growth of it.
	I mean, it's funny because you've got one side in their orthodoxy which insists on maintaining status quo's that either benefit them or that they can just live with because they don't want to risk what could happen if you make change.
	And then on the other side, you've got these social justice warriors as they've spoken of, which is funny because that used to be a title in my profession, which was that was what we more or less were, union activists and shit, going out and fighting for marriage equality.
	That's a social justice fight.
	Social justice in that sense isn't fucked up.
	That's probably all started, I imagine.
	But yeah, but these folks, the hardcores, the orthodox, hardcore progressives, if they don't want to completely, you know, well, libertarians are more the ones who want to tear everything down and just let the chips fall where they may.
	Not all together, so don't get too pissed, libertarians.
	Plenty of the politicians.
	Yeah.
	Oh, speaking more to the peanut gallery.
	But yeah, I mean, you've got some people who want to maintain the status quo because they benefit from it and they're scared of how things could fall apart.
	And then you've got other people who insist that if we just do exactly everything according to their model, that we'll have this set it and forget it, you know, government by Ronco system.
	That's a joke for a chicken marinator.
	But they believe that an ultimate perfection and utopia is possible.
	And it ultimately comes down to everyone just wanting to accept the system of one kind or another and then not have to do fuck all about it afterwards.
	No proactive looking at what's going on and adjusting policies on an objective level.
	And if you want to be wicked, feminists, capitalists, communists, red faction anarchists, black bloc anarchists, libertarians, Ron Paul for president, God, let Jesus be the way.
	Any one of them, they're shutting off critical thinking.
	They're shutting off objective faculties.
	And one joke I like making is, you know, instead of being Joan of Arc or some kind of crusader, maybe try and be, you know, Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes and tell everyone with their established ideas that they're absolutely certain that they're most likely an idiot.
	And then, like, all right, let's look at the facts.
	What's actually going on here?
	Yeah, I'd be very much in favor of some sort of more enlightened governance.
	I've been watching, one of my favourite British politicians, and I don't have many favourite British politicians, is a guy called Daniel Hannan.
	And he's a conservative, and I wouldn't call myself a conservative, but he's also a very intelligent man.
	He's got a very agile mind.
	And he writes particularly, and he makes particularly good speeches.
	He sounds as if he's on the floor of the Roman Senate or he's on the Athenian Panix or something when he's delivering his speeches.
	They are brilliant.
	But it's not just the delivery, it's the content.
	He's very much, I suppose you could call him libertarian.
	He's very anti-government interference in business.
	And I'm not saying that that's wrong because I don't think it is, but I think that the differentiation needs to be made between business and corporation.
	Because when you say business, you think start-ups, or you think local businesses, you know, like the local car mechanics or something like that.
	And I really, I mean, there may well be some sort of actual differentiation in what he's saying.
	I'm not that familiar with it, but not familiar with any difference if there is one.
	But it's more the way that he posits his arguments and he listens to criticism.
	And if, you know, he's a very intelligent man.
	Excuse me.
	And I would like to see more intelligent men in politics rather than the talking point idiots that we see constantly.
	I mean, I can think of too many politicians whose intelligence I simply don't respect.
	And that worries me.
	I find that to be a very disturbing prospect.
	Yeah, well, I mean, here in the States, we've got Michelle Bachmann, who is sitting on the intelligence committee.
	I mean, after you hear that, there's not a whole lot more you need to know about the American political system.
	Well, that's the thing.
	It's no different to anywhere else, really.
	Yeah.
	Well, it's, I mean, with that comes, you know, I mean, like, you've got these, you know, I learned in that sense, in terms of practical actual governance in politics, it's a confluence of corruption and ideology.
	And ideology is quite often really invoked just to whip the masses into the frenzy, to court the grace of the horde and the masses by stirring their emotional reactions to your proposed solutions to problems which may or may not even be real.
	War on Christmas, anyone.
	And then at the same time, once they're in power, well, in order to stay in power, at least here in the States, because it's like a completely commercialized system, the this was before Citizens United in the cutcham, was that a sitting House of Representatives, a sitting congressperson in the House of Representatives had two days of work that they could do free of influence before they needed to begin raising $10,000 a day to ensure re-election.
	And even this is still, I mean, when you try and raise the issue, this is what I write a lot about.
	I've got two articles in the works right now about industrial and interest collusions by way of money affecting policy.
	But even when you try to bring that issue out, you get this same capitalist versus socialist dynamic where they say, well, it's a free marketplace.
	We need to embrace free markets wherever we can.
	And so then, like, the libertarians in this country are they position themselves, and they often are in spirit.
	They're sort of the rebellious outliers in many respects.
	And in terms of social policy, many would call them liberals.
	They're anti-drug war.
	They're pro-gay marriage.
	They're saying, like, stop telling me how to live my life.
	But at the same time, they also step up and they say, we need to get rid of industrial regulations because they hamper business.
	And again, just like you said, they're thinking about small business and entrepreneurship.
	Because in this country, regulation does stifle that.
	But the disconnect that they make is that the regulations that they're decrying and not proposing actually replacing were drafted by industrial insiders who were appointed to these positions after making substantial campaign contributions and lobbying.
	And so they get into these regulatory bodies and they set regulations which not only deal competition to their own industries, but also bolster and enhance their own previous employers' industrial standing.
	And so right there, you've got this rebellious underdog political movement that is in many senses unwittingly fighting for the establishment that has created most of the problems that they despise.
	And the same goes for liberalism in terms of this interest movement.
	Feminism is the same way.
	They say equality.
	And then you get all this.
	That's what I mean by being so subtle.
	Exactly.
	Objectively, you've got to tip your hat.
	You're like, fucking, well, well done.
	I mean, you guys just thought of everything.
	You magnificent bastards.
	Please pull the cock out of it.
	This actually segues nicely.
	Yeah, exactly.
	This actually, this comes to something I really do want to talk to you about.
	It's the idea of globalization.
	And specifically, conspiracies.
	What's your stance on the idea of globalization, just to start with?
	In theory, like most everything else we've talked about, in theory, it is a good thing.
	In theory, it can bring money to very poor areas.
	In theory, it can help enrich very poor people that are very rich in resources.
	And in theory, it could bring information technology to the furthest corners of the globe so that foreigners in foreign countries on other continents wouldn't be fucking space aliens to us, especially here in the States.
	But in practice, it works out to be like I discussed with Perkins.
	It's a manipulative game of empire because I think largely because people still don't have a solid grasp on what power really is.
	They think of it in this very sort of nebulous, kind of subjective term where it's just something that parties or individuals possess somehow.
	They don't understand the mechanisms of power and they don't respect it as a force of nature.
	And so it's left to its own devices.
	It does what it does best.
	It centralizes.
	And then when you equate wealth with power, which has always been the case, you end up with centralized wealth and centralized power.
	And those people have enough money and power to propagandize their message that their systems, while not perfect, are actually really good.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I think that I always find it strange that anyone's willing to give business or government the benefit of the doubt.
	I find that baffling.
	I would presume their guilt just by the amount of wealth and power that they have.
	Because at the end of the day, who watches the watchers somewhat?
	These are the people that the public have to be wary of.
	And this is why I wanted to talk about conspiracy.
	Because one thing that really annoys me is people who just dismiss the idea that the rich and powerful conspire.
	I'm always baffled when someone's like, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist.
	It's like, listen, right?
	The only people who conspire are the rich and powerful.
	It's not the dustman conspiring.
	It's not the bin men.
	It's not the people running your corner shops.
	It is the wealthy.
	It is the powerful who conspire.
	So to say that conspiracies are a joke is to give them far too much credit.
	If I was rich and powerful, I personally would probably be conspiring.
	So this is something that drives me crazy.
	What's your position on that?
	Well, I think that opinion, it's largely reactionary.
	And I think with good cause to a certain extent.
	You take the Alex Joneses of the world.
	Yeah, I mean, he's fun, but he is inanely full of shit.
	I mean, he really is.
	Well, he is, but I think I actually saved a video of him because I'm going to use it in a future video of mine.
	Because he has this.
	It's about probably a minute or two of him talking.
	And it's lucid.
	I've met him.
	I've met him.
	Really?
	Yeah, he's a really nice guy, actually.
	Yeah, he's a wonderful guy.
	I mean, he's a wonderful guy to talk to.
	And I have no doubt that he's very intelligent.
	And in the course of his rants and shows and such, he does touch on things that are very real.
	But much like in the larger context of things, it's difficult to really parse out, especially with him, but even in the broader context, if you're going to assert that a conspiracy is going on, the plethora of conspiracy theories that are out there, from the moon landing was faked to chemtrails to the moon is a projection.
	Ew.
	Did you see that Cool Heart Logic video?
	Huh?
	Oh, yeah, yeah, Cool Heart Logic.
	Actually, I found that.
	Oh, I've watched them all.
	I found it through.
	I looked at your page and then I saw, like, oh, liked.
	I'm like, cool hard logic.
	That sounds interesting.
	I'll take a look.
	My favorite had to be the Moon Loons one was good.
	I think my favorite had to be the spirit science test spirit science one because that's another one.
	And it's the same thing, though.
	I think science itself is actually experiencing a similar dynamic to conspiracy.
	You can point to the library.
	That's a legitimate conspiracy.
	We can observe it.
	It's true.
	It's factual.
	But some people still don't believe it.
	Because it has the label of conspiracy.
	They say, oh, well, that's just more fake moon landing, lizard people in disguise in the White House kind of shit.
	And pseudoscience is doing the same thing with science.
	And I think it's all just part of this larger sort of immaturity within our species and our various cultures to be able to parse out fact from fiction and do our own research to the point where if something is a conspiracy or looks conspiratorial, it's either you either accept it and roll it into a bundle of other conspiracies that you're enthusiastic about, which could be full of shit, in which case you discredit it,
	or you oppose it and write it off as just another bullshit conspiracy theory not worth looking at.
	Yeah, that is entirely the problem with the term conspiracy theorist and conspiracy theory these days.
	And what annoys me most, though, is like with this Alex Jones bit.
	He was basically saying, listen, right?
	The rich are all in collusion with each other to a greater or lesser extent.
	And at the core of this, there probably is a banker conspiracy.
	And I've been looking into it, and I think he's right.
	I think on that point, that point alone, I genuinely think there is what you could legitimately call a conspiracy amongst several banking families and prominent politicians.
	Call them trade groups.
	The problem with conspiracy theories is that sorry?
	You know, you can call them trade groups.
	Same thing.
	Trade groups.
	The much demonized Michael Moore covered it in Fahrenheit 9-11 when he went into an analysis of the Carlisle group.
	Yeah, it's a collusion of major corporate powers working together towards a certain industry.
	There's a funny video, actually.
	You may have seen it about telecom here in the States.
	It's like, you know, we value our customers.
	So once you sign up, we'll have a barely trained technician to show up sometime between the hours of 9 a.m. and midnight, just at the time you're in the shower, knock once and then leave.
	Once we get your service installed, you'll enjoy roughly 48 hours of prime service before we cut it in half to squeeze you to optimum cockbag levels.
	Exactly.
	And yeah, these companies are competing in a technical sense, but they get together and decide between each other, all right, how are we going to present this appearance of competition while we collude to make sure that we all get what we want.
	Yeah, I definitely think there is definite collusion in a sort of like grand scheme between politics and business like that.
	They've understood that what's in both of their best interests as groups, as classes.
	But I think specifically there actually genuinely is like, you know, like the sort of cigarette smoking men around a darkly lit room sort of thing.
	I think there genuinely is one in the US.
	And I don't say this sort of out of some sort of internal desire to make people feel more comfortable.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But I don't say this hysterically either.
	It's something that I've been looking at for a long time.
	And it's hard to get people to listen.
	Because I'm trying to say, listen, right?
	All we need to do is apply Occam's razor.
	We really don't need very many moving parts in this because, let's be fair, if you look at your average politician, they're an egotistical idiot.
	If I were to engage in some sort of banking conspiracy in a major nation around the world, I would also give lots of money to useful idiots who are very much concerned about their own personal crusades and were just a little bit too stupid to see the wider picture.
	And I really think that is what's happened in the U.S. Stupid or something or just willing.
	Yeah, they don't even know they're part of a conspiracy.
	They don't need to know.
	They're not really part of a conspiracy.
	They're just a tool.
	George Bush is the perfect example.
	There is no way George Bush masterminded his own fucking presidency.
	I doubt George Bush can mastermind his own clothes.
	That was Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.
	Mainly, I mean, a whole host of other things.
	I think part of the problem with it is, though, is that, and this is sort of, I think, part of where Alex Jones falls off.
	Is that the way it's presented, it's presented in a way that it's much like the patriarchy is presented by Fanny?
	Yeah.
	That it's this well-oiled machine.
	Everyone in power is in on it, despite what they may say.
	And it sort of falls off because when you look at them, you find that it's not so much like singular central groups, but it's competing for power, parties, industrial institutions.
	Look at the, right now, here we've got the net neutrality debate.
	And you look and you find there's major, highly influential industrial players on both sides of the debate.
	But the thing is, this is not a systemic or a systematic issue.
	These people are debating within the system, within the paradigm.
	And so, absolutely, you do absolutely see interests often on both sides, or funding both sides.
	The same interest will be funding both sides to keep the debate going, to make sure that there's something for the press to cover.
	But it's nothing that's a threat to the system.
	And I think that this system is being masterminded ultimately.
	And I don't want to say masterminded really.
	I think that's the wrong way to say it.
	I think that it's the ambition of a very small number of people, relatively speaking.
	And I completely agree.
	When you say, like, people have the impression that every politician's in on it.
	People have the impression that all the people involved are in on it.
	And absolutely not.
	The idea is absurd.
	And I really do think there are cases of useful idiots.
	And the reason I say this is because I genuinely think that what we are seeing is a push towards global government.
	And I think it's by those people.
	If you have a look at John Rockefeller's memoirs, he is an unapologetic globalist.
	And instead of denying that he's part of a conspiracy, he goes on to try and justify the positive results of his actions towards globalization.
	Now, I'm not actually against the idea of globalization.
	I'm just really against the idea of these people implementing globalization.
	These people to me seem very nefarious, and I wouldn't trust them.
	And the problem is you've got so many connections between the Rockefeller and the Bush families.
	And then you've got the whole skull and bones thing, where both Bush and Kerry were skull and bones members.
	And then you've got Bush in an interview going, oh, well, I'm not going to lose the election.
	It's like, how do you know that?
	Well, the distance too.
	Exactly.
	The distance comes too.
	I think that's, I mean, I really do think in terms of the practical aspects of these collusions of power and such, that that's really more coincidental than anything else outside of the fact that wealth and status and class is pretty well preserved down the line.
	You don't have too many homeless people who come from long lines of prestigious billionaires, and you don't have that many new billionaires that just are self-made, largely because the system is designed to keep them out.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, it certainly doesn't want to broke new competition.
	But the thing is, once you've got these facts laid out, even if there is no conspiracy going on, even if it's all somehow, somehow above board, it needs to be investigated.
	I am happy for an independent investigator to go in to the secret Skull and Bones Society, go through all the letters and emails these families have sent each other.
	And if by some fucking miracle they are not actually conspiring, then I'll say, you know what, I was in the wrong.
	But seriously, this shit really needs to be looked into because I think there is a genuine push towards this sort of thing.
	And I think the aim ultimately is global governance.
	Well, I mean, to play devil's advocate here, I mean, there are aspects to global governance which may not necessarily be nefarious.
	Yes, like you said, if it's these fucking people who keep even in this age of plenty, they try to keep down alternative energy.
	I mean, in the U.S. here, right, Tesla launched its retail division or attempted to, and right away, like New Jersey prohibited effectively retail sales of the cars within the borders.
	I didn't know that.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, that was an interesting story recently.
	Jersey's kind of weird about that.
	So, I mean, it might not necessarily just be influence peddling by the automotive and oil industry.
	It could be, you know, it could even be things like union pushback or whatever.
	there's a whole range of things.
	But when you consider...
	That's not...
	Oh, sorry.
	Yeah, I just wanted to stress that that sort of thing I don't think is part of any conspiracy.
	I think it kind of feeds into it, though.
	Because the plethora of interests in any political system, especially advanced ones.
	I mean, I worked in organized labor.
	I was organizing unions for a little over a year all around the country in the service sector, security guards, nurses, that sort of thing.
	One of the things I found that was most problematic with the labor movement in this country is that they are partially by the design of very ambitious people within the union ranks, like the brass in the office, not the workers, as well as obligation to be such by way of the dynamics they're presented with.
	The amount of political intrigue that they engage in, the amount of resources that they sidetrack from what should be going to supporting new organizing efforts to build new bargaining units instead is sidelined to political causes, both by design and by desire and by obligation.
	It comes back to this confluence of competing forces as opposed to necessarily central orchestration.
	Because for one thing, if nothing else, that whole Illuminati central orchestration, everything is just smoke and mirrors game, while there's some truth to it, it would require a level of communication and collaboration that I'm frankly just not convinced people are capable of.
	That's exactly my position on this.
	This is the thing.
	When Mark Dice is going on about his Illuminati stuff, a lot of his videos are very compelling, and they're very good entertainment, I find anyway.
	But yeah, I don't think that it's possible.
	I think the scale of it is too large.
	So I really think it's more cultural, and it's more sort of the reinforcing mechanism of power.
	They've hit upon something that's successful, and therefore they're just going to keep pushing it until you've got Miley Cyrus twerking on what's his face.
	Yeah, I mean, the bait and switch dog and pony show.
	I mean, that's classic politics.
	But with the question of like global, with the question of global governance, though, I mean, this, I think, is another double-edged sword, because on the one hand, you could end up with the Star Trek Gene Roddenberry sort of world of plenty where we no longer have to fight amongst each other for resources.
	That's the dream.
	I know.
	Well, I don't know.
	Maybe if we ever get to the point where we actually do leave the planet and we're sort of obligated when we're out in space and on colonies and multiple nations are colonizing individual areas, it's like, okay, well, guess what?
	We're here on Mars, and if we don't do things just right, we're all going to fucking die.
	Maybe that could trickle down.
	Maybe.
	But the other question remains, though, too, is that if you had a singular world government that was, let's say, let's say somehow it achieved something s resembling the paragon of democracy that the US initially purportedly ascribed to try and establish.
	Well, I mean, short of civil wars, assuming that the centralized global authority and the regional national autonomy were balanced appropriately, there's not it's not you know, it could get really, really bad or it could go really, really well.
	And I wouldn't say that I'm advocating for such, at least not at this point, because we're still pretty, we're still sort of in like we're just coming out of our infancy as a species.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I sorry, go on.
	No, that was pretty much the end of that.
	And again, that was just devil's advocacy.
	No, no, not at all.
	Yeah, I mean, I actually think that global governance is inevitable.
	Now, because the world is too small these days.
	Technology has made the world too small.
	I know what's going on on the other side of the world immediately thanks to Twitter.
	So the idea that we won't have global governance is absurd.
	Regions aren't really regions anymore because of communication.
	Now it's communities.
	So I think that global governance is inevitable at this point.
	I think it's, yeah, like you say, who implements it?
	Because I think if it was a system that was actually designed from the ground up, we could probably design quite a good system these days.
	I think the scientific method could be applied and if certain results is desired, then I think that we could probably achieve it to within a tolerable limit, certainly to a better position than we're in now.
	And also the underlying, again, coming back to power being a force of nature and operating under according to given laws, be it a nation or an entire planet governed by a single authority.
	In the long run, if the authority does its job, if it both provides for the population while also maintaining and protecting the established human rights freedoms and such that people demand in all facets, and it varies by culture, like Russians under the Tsar into Stalin had a much different idea of political, individual, and popular sovereignty than any Westerner did.
	But when a power fails and a power becomes too repressive, it's got a shelf life.
	It can't last forever because an unhappy population will eventually organize and overthrow it in some way.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So in that respect, I guess, you know, as long as, you know, I mean, again, in the long view, it can be really, really shitty for a very, very long time, but the societal entropy will either kick in or we will just die off.
	And the universe will continue on and not give a shit.
	Yeah, no, absolutely.
	It's not really so much whether I think it's a good or bad thing.
	I think it's whether it's going to happen or not.
	And I think it definitely is going to happen.
	And I'm really worried about the way it's going to happen in.
	Because I was just thinking about the motivation of billionaires.
	My motivation in life is to be wealthy enough so I no longer have to work.
	So I can just do what I like and just relax and enjoy my life and Just have fun, enjoy myself.
	But that doesn't seem to be the sort of motivation of these ultra-elite banking families.
	And I can, I mean, once you've got all the wealth you need, the only thing left to accumulate is power.
	Well, it's the neoliberal theories.
	Oh, go first to left.
	Yeah, I mean, it's neoliberal economic theory, though, because neoliberal economic theory as practice is really little more than a justification for these things.
	It says that abuses of power and centralization of wealth are necessary evils, you know, using the Reaganomics mentality that it ultimately will trickle down somehow.
	Which, to a very minimal extent, yeah, to a very minimal extent, there is truth there.
	But I mean, if you have Netflix, I'd recommend checking out Robert Reich's documentary, Jesus, I'm forgetting the name of it, Inequality for All, I believe.
	And in it, he interviews these hedge fund billionaires, these people who, by legitimate commercial, traditional capitalist means, they built a company, their family built a company, they make a product, and the amounts of wealth that they've made from it, it's gotten to a point now where he interviews one guy who's like, he's like, I honestly have no idea where most of my money is.
	He's like, I know it comes in, I put it into my accounts, send it out to my brokers, and somehow it goes off and makes more money.
	And this guy's not a nefarious bad guy.
	I think it comes down to disconnection from the rest of society and the ability to sort of rationalize what you may or may not observe being the effects of what you do on the world.
	I'm actually not talking about the businessmen.
	I really think it's actually bankers.
	Yeah, I really do think it's bankers.
	I really do.
	I think the people who want to be able to do that.
	Oh, I was just going to say, if there's one class of people on this earth who are just rubber masks over lizard faces, yeah, it's probably the financial banking sector.
	Yeah, and I don't really understand what their goal is other than to either gain higher numbers on the computer screen or to enact some sort of social change.
	And if you read David Rockefeller's memoirs, he's very concerned.
	He has a plan for the world.
	And I've only read excerpts from it, and it's very clear from these only, you know, literally like five pages that I've read.
	I'm going to get a copy of it at some point so I can read the whole thing.
	He very clearly has an idea of what he wants.
	And this is the point.
	It's like, why do they want to do anything different?
	Why do they want to change the world?
	They are at the apex of the world.
	This guy's, you know, he was the CEO of Chase, and they've got 2.5 trillion in assets.
	They've got 100 billion a year turnover.
	He's a billionaire himself.
	What more do you want?
	Why do you want to do anything?
	That's a system that you have just won.
	And yet they keep talking about how they've got a plan for the world and they want to change things.
	And it's definitely global government.
	Well, are you familiar with Edward Bernays?
	Have you ever heard of that?
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, Godfather of Public Relations and Advertising.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, Bernays' formulas modeled on his uncle's psychoanalyses and applied to masses is what allowed us to get to this sort of commercialized zeitgeist political environment we live in.
	Now it's really easy.
	Yeah, and I'm not sure on a very basic study and familiarization with his works and what they led to, it's easy to come to the conclusion that he was this mustache-twirling sort of supervillain who was like, I will control the masses and dance, puppets, dance.
	The reality to him, though, was like his he devised these theories with this real true, you know, egalitarian notion that they could be used for good.
	And he was and I mean, you can even see this in practice.
	It wasn't just some mea copa from somebody who didn't want bad scrutiny.
	he devised the entire cigarette marketing industry, and then when it became apparent, Yeah, and he felt like when he was able to see what these products that he had helped sell had done to people, he basically started what we now have as the anti-smoking campaigns that we have today.
	He effectively started those.
	So I think with these bankers even too, and you see this a lot, and it's very present in business schools, and this is something that Perkins has talked about, and it's something that the Yes Men have sort of covered, and you hear this a lot.
	The neoliberal economic theories, like any other orthodox thinking, like any we've discussed here, when it's applied, it comes with a whole ready-made set of rationalizations.
	I mean, even just look at economic reporting now.
	You never hear about the price of milk.
	You never hear about actual cost of living.
	You hear about how the market's doing.
	And if you're lucky, you'll hear about the price of gas.
	But outside of that, it's all focused on the top end of the economic model, the market itself.
	And that's the basis of neoliberal economic thinking.
	And so within these economics courses, and it's a frightening thing, too, because the ones who could be looked at as potentially nefarious, specifically here in the U.S., the Koch brothers.
	I wrote an article a while back for the tabloid rag that I shall not speak its name.
	But it was discovered that they have been having this arrangement with universities throughout the country where they give them these great big endowments for their business and economic departments in exchange for a certain amount of influence as to who is teaching and what they're teaching students, what they're teaching them.
	And so you've got these generations of business and banking and finance majors coming out with these notions that, okay, we do need to take care of the top end of the market.
	As long as we can secure and maintain the top end of the market, everything below it will naturally just sort of work itself out.
	Step two is still three question marks or then a miracle happens.
	But they don't, you know, that's all they know.
	And so these bankers who are conspiring, yeah, there's definitely a level of greed in play.
	They're definitely seeing like, you know, to them, income and pay has just become points on their MMO video game.
	It's just, I need to get a higher score than the other guys.
	But then I think that's the amount of ammo they have remaining in their guns.
	You know what I mean?
	It's not even the points.
	I think the points are something else.
	I think that the numbers are the weapons that they use to fight with.
	And again, I didn't actually...
	I know it sounds like I'm thinking they're malicious, but I do want to stress that I know that in everyone's mind, they're the good guy.
	You know?
	No matter how warped and disjointed from reality their rationale is, in everyone's mind, no one thinks they're evil.
	Even if they're doing something evil, they've always got a rationale for it.
	So I'm not necessarily saying the Rothschilds and all that and the Rockefellers, I'm not necessarily saying they're evil, but I definitely think there is an active conspiracy.
	And again, it doesn't have to be for...
	One thing that I think everyone really forgets is that or doesn't really consider is that no one really thinks that we may be dealing with people who are smarter than ourselves.
	You know?
	And that's something that everyone has the conceit that they understand what the other people are doing fully to the full.
	And, you know, I'm just some guy on the internet.
	I probably don't understand what they're doing to the full.
	And I'm quite willing to accept that they might be a hell of a lot brighter than me.
	And so I think the opinion that the masses are too stupid to know what's good for them.
	And if they find out what these banking families are doing, then they will actively stop it, even though in the end it may well be in their best interest for them to allow this to continue.
	They are too short-sighted and stupid.
	I think that really comes down to the thing of globalization.
	I've got...
	Let me just grab a paragraph that Rockefeller wrote.
	This is...
	I really think this is quite interesting.
	Sorry, let me just find it.
	No rush.
	And it was really the state of mind that, you know, I mean, when you were just saying that, I was sort of reminded of the whole, you know, the original Star Wars.
	When you hear Darth Vader say we will restore order to the Empire.
	That sounds actually like a good thing.
	Maybe this Empire could use some order.
	It's just probably not the order you're trying to establish.
	Yeah.
	I'll read this.
	It's a couple of paragraphs, but it's on page 405 of his memoirs that he's got a chapter called Proud Internationalist.
	And he says, for more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon the well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over the American political and economic institution.
	For some even believe that we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interest of the United States, characterizing my family and me as internationalists, and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure, one world, if you will.
	If that's the charge, I stand guilty and I am proud of it.
	So now how do you claim there isn't a conspiracy going on?
	I think, you know, that's a conspiracy, but I think the jumping off point, I think that the...
	Not you particularly, I mean people, sorry.
	No, no, no.
	I hear exactly what you're saying.
	I think the problem is, though, is that it comes back to the need for absolutes.
	Much like you said that, and it's sort of the opposite side of the coin in regards to the population being perhaps too in the dark or stupid or however you want to put it.
	But if you take it, well, if you take your die-hard conspiracy tinfoil hatter, right?
	You notice, and it's the same thing really with the religious folks, any ideologue of any kind, but it's a little twisted with hardcore conspiracy enthusiasts, is that it's this relishing of this perceived knowledge, this, oh, I know this shit.
	I know, I know who's pulling the strings.
	You don't know.
	I can teach you.
	I can teach you.
	And it's like any ideology.
	It just fills them with this purpose and this sense of meaning and this sense of self that they might not have otherwise.
	Because it's scary not knowing what's going on.
	That's scarier than knowing something bad is going on.
	Also, when everything sucks around you, now you have, you know, you found your central boogeyman, whether it's the Illuminati or the patriarchy or the theocracy or the liberal media or the list goes on.
	When you've got your enemy, you know where you think you know where you stand.
	Yeah.
	I'll just read the next couple of paragraphs, because this is what I mean by the mindset, right?
	He says the anti-Rockefeller focus of these otherwise incompatible political positions owes much to populism.
	Populists believe in conspiracies, and one of the most enduring is that a secret group of international bankers and capitalists and their minions control the world's economy.
	Because of my name and prominence as the head of chase for many years, I have under the distinction of conspirator-in-chief.
	He then goes on to say, populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted from our active international role during the past half century.
	Not only was it the very real threat posed by the Soviet communism overcome, but there have been fundamental improvements in societies around the world, particularly in the United States, as a result of global trade, improved communications, and heightened interaction of people from different cultures.
	See, he's admitting that he's doing this, but he thinks it's a great thing and that people are too stupid to understand why it's a great thing.
	And this is exactly the point that everyone's the good guy in their own mind, in my opinion.
	I genuinely believe there is a conspiracy happening because the conspirator is admitting it.
	And he's doing it for what he sees to be the right reasons.
	Yeah, well, I mean, he himself, even just in that, even in that passage, he sort of alluded to his own ideological standing in that sense.
	Invoking he basically laid it out that in the Cold War, the Cold War was an absolute battle versus good versus evil.
	And this is something that is, again, getting to the Oliver Stone series.
	The rise in tensions between the West and the USSR was largely because of hardline ideologues who were so absolutely certain that their standpoint was the only valid one and that it was either infallible or it was the best there was, and that the enemy, the other guy, needed to be destroyed.
	An interesting thing with, you know, you're a fan of history, and I'm a big fan of history myself, especially true American history.
	I definitely recommend if you want a couple really good books to read, Ray Raphael, he wrote Founding Myths and Founders, the People Who Brought You Revolution.
	And in these, he lays out the more realistic history as opposed to the popular legend.
	And part of modern American history that's been glossed over by way of legend has been especially the ascension of Truman.
	Now, Harry Truman only became president by way of being elevated to be FDR's vice president towards the end of his presidency there.
	Part of that happened because FDR's original vice president was the paragon in many senses of progressivism.
	And his vision, and this was FDR's vision as well, was for the competition between the East and the West, so be it communism, socialism versus American capitalism.
	He wanted it to be an economic competition.
	He's like, let's both go about our business, and whichever system works the best, we'll see in the end.
	The hardliners in the party, yeah, who were either ideological purists or in the pocket of major military industries which are still booming.
	All these hardliners on both sides got together and made it absolutely impossible for those who wanted a peaceful competition of ideas to be an outright hostile conflict.
	And as that filtered down and was written rather than it was written in the legendary mythology and the reality, the reality was rewritten to the legend of evil versus good.
	People like Rockefeller, who not only his family became extraordinarily wealthy and powerful by means of being on this side in his position, but also had that narrative continually fed, right there.
	You know, while he may not be telling untruths in his memoir, there, it's clear that he's also bought into an ideological purity which puts kind of blinders, which put blinders on him to a certain extent.
	Yeah, I think that that is exactly the sort of thing that's happening.
	I'm not necessarily, I don't think it's through malice, necessarily, any of this.
	And what's interesting about this, right, is that there was a book written in 1930 by a British author called Olaf Stapledon called The Last and First Men.
	And it's a history of the future and what he predicted would happen to the human race.
	And he goes on for like millions of years, and it's highly entertaining past the first 50 or 60 years because then it becomes science fiction.
	But for when he wrote it in 1932, there was a bit very early on where he basically invents the atomic bomb.
	I assume that he'd read something about splitting the atom.
	So I know that the knowledge was around long before it actually happened, probably about 30 or 40 years before it actually happened.
	So I assume that he'd heard this scientific theory and been like, right, okay, so what's going to happen is that someone's going to invent the atomic bomb.
	And in it, there is a war between America and Europe instead of America and Russia, effectively.
	And at some point, two businessmen sit down on an island somewhere in Polynesia or something, write a contract and shake hands, and that effectively brings in a global governance.
	And it's the sort basically, you know, he's suggesting that businesses will take over the world and they'll realize that world wars, catastrophic wars, and are in nobody's best interests.
	And so they basically become a thing of the past by the businessman taking over the world.
	And I thought that was a very prescient thought because it really does seem to be the way the world is going.
	Trade is the thing that guarantees peace or something like that.
	I can't remember how the quote goes.
	And I really think that that's the way the world's going.
	And I think that when politicians, a lot of politicians say New World Order, and I think that's basically what they're talking about.
	It's not necessarily like centralized global government.
	It's more sort of businessmen running the world to conduct business.
	So the world is going to basically become a giant corporation.
	The idea of nation-states is going to be very vestigial for a long time, but it's going to be vestigial.
	I could definitely see.
	I mean, you can almost say that we're watching that happen right now.
	Yeah, I really think we are.
	That's why that paragraph really struck home to me when I was reading it.
	And after I read that, I was just compelled to read the rest of it.
	It was a really good book.
	I'd really recommend it.
	I actually just will.
	I turned my mic down so it wasn't feedback, but I actually just made a note in an open notepad.
	I'm like, all right, I'll have to check that one out.
	I mean, that's the fascinating.
	That's a fascinating thing with science fiction, as always.
	It's oftentimes frighteningly predictive, and if not predictive, it's very analytical.
	I just sometimes worry about people misreading it.
	Things like Brave New World by Huxley.
	It's one of the most epic.
	Yeah, it's one of the most renowned.
	It's up there with 1984 in terms of what are seen as warnings of dystopian centralized tyrannical futures.
	Oh, absolutely.
	Well, the thing, I don't know, I always kind of got something different from it, though.
	And what I always sort of gauged from Huxley's presentation in that story was that as the world progresses, gets bigger and smaller at the same time, and like you say, technocratic governance is going to come into play, automation is going to dominate things.
	Yeah, and a lot of it, you know, and a lot of it in terms of the genetic processing of people, like that sort of thing, I don't necessarily, I think that may be of, you know, that was poetic license to an extent.
	But as opposed to being a warning about a technocratic tyrannical future, I always sort of also took it as being sort of a parable of that, you know, even within the society you live in right now, there are going to be aspects to it that are so much greater than yourself that you are either going to have the options of just gritting your teeth and dealing with them and living within them and around them, or you take your chances out in the savage lands.
	You take your chances out as a wildling.
	And that the reality is that between the two of them, in respect to being polar opposites, in respect to being a mechanical collective society versus a wild, anarchistic, individual savagery, neither one of these systems will ever actually provide people with what they need.
	And that the attempts for one who is raised in and ingrained in one to transition to the other will result in nothing but failure, as is evident from the final sequence in the book, for those who haven't read it, as well as the mother of that character who was left behind.
	Yeah, I think that's actually something that came up in The Last and First Men as well.
	The idea that basically there's going to be a world state, and it will be very concerned with preserving certain areas for nature.
	And going and living in these areas for like two years or something like that will be something like a teenager touring Europe, a university graduate touring Europe.
	It'll be very much that sort of thing.
	So they'll spend two years in the wilds and camping and hunting and stuff.
	It's a quaint idea.
	One of the things Martian college students will be like, you have to live a year on Earth and deal with that shit before you graduate.
	Like, really?
	Just do some community service.
	That places it down.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	They're going to miss all their conveniences.
	It's going to be awful.
	And this actually leads me onto an aspect of human nature that I've been thinking about.
	I don't think it's actually a good idea for humans not to have an adversary.
	Because they always have.
	The human species has evolved to have enemies outside of the area it personally controls.
	It's been like that since the dawn of humanity when it was a tiny tribe and the wild beasts around to the great sort of states of the classical world to the great empires of the modern world.
	So the idea of not having an enemy on your border is alien, absolutely alien to the human condition.
	It's never happened before.
	And so I think Orwell was very on the money when he said, look, it'll be three great states, you know, and they'll always be at war with one of them because you always need an enemy.
	Because I really do think you always do need an enemy, or at least human beings in some way.
	And this is where like Reagan's, oh, if we discovered aliens tomorrow, humanity get together and we'd be against the aliens.
	You know?
	And so I don't really see how feasible a one-world government is, even though I think it's inevitable.
	So, I mean, I think these are going to be sort of world government's going to be the result of just the technological progress we've made, but it goes counter to our evolutionary intuition.
	And so what is going to replace the enemy, the neighbor, the border, you know, that we've always got to man?
	I'd like to think, and this is, you know, again, the hopeful Rodney-style utopian, but, you know, I mean, if we change the word adversary or enemy to challenge, then,
	you know, it could just as easily be, yeah, well, if we just simply change that term, you know, it's a subtle change of thinking, but it's like, you know, it's like the difference between if you take off, it's like a few series of degrees on a thousand mile straight line journey.
	At the beginning, that few degrees is nothing, but at the end, it's a great expense.
	Now, if we were able to achieve that global society of plenty and stability, even if we're still facing problems, if the adversary, if the challenge in this sense becomes simply the unknown, if the victory becomes discovery, this is something I'd actually like to say.
	I think that's too broad.
	Yeah, I think it's broad.
	I think at the same time.
	Well, I think at the same time, that it does sound broad, and it does sound utopian and fantastical.
	But at the same point, I find some encouragement in this idea, much in the way that, like I said in the beginning of this conversation, when I felt like I was just out in the dark woods on my own in relation to butting up against this feminist legal system, the family courts that I'm at.
	And then I gradually started discovering that I wasn't the only one and I wasn't crazy.
	That was encouraging because it says that there is social recognition and movement towards that.
	At the same time, as I study the skeptic movement, I notice that it's growing, growing.
	And as part of that, I like to think that gradually over time, more or less we'll sort of shed naturally the dogmatism and the wackiness of religion and embrace science.
	And science, even if you're not a scientist educated with it, but if you're an enthusiast like the millions of people who tune into YouTube to watch scientific videos or watch cosmos and the like, yeah, that thirst for discovery, it's like as soon as someone's turned on to it, it's like you're fucking awake.
	You're like, whoa, oh God, yeah, I mean, I had no idea that the universe, you could study it at levels that get bigger and bigger, or smaller and smaller, almost into infinitum, and that there's just always more to learn.
	Are you suggesting that science, the love of science, has effectively replaced theology for the modern era?
	I don't know.
	Or is replacing.
	I think it's slowly beginning to.
	I think it's slowly beginning to, because I mean, really, they're not all.
	Oh, yeah, at least when Elise first started that page, I started following it, and it was funny because I actually got permission from her via Twitter to aggregate whatever stories they put out for one of the publications I was working on.
	I was like, oh, sweet.
	Now she has millions and millions and millions of fans, and no one will respond till they roll me.
	But I mean, you know, you listen to Hitchens or Dawkins talk about religion, and they always say that it was this necessary thing that we had in our species infancy to explain the dark and death and where the sun goes and why we're all here, et cetera, et cetera.
	All these big questions.
	We needed these answers because we have this thirst for knowledge and discovery within us.
	Now that religion is becoming less and less necessary, I think, yeah, I think in a certain respect that I hate to feed that idiotic creationist notion that, oh, science is your new relation, Boys.
	You got to tell me I ain't no fucking monkey.
	I hate to feed that notion, but I think in a way, yeah, I think scientific discovery and exploration will overtake theological and to an extent philosophical considerations.
	Yeah, I think so.
	I think it's the...
	I think it's the underlying drive to explain the universe that is replacing.
	And I find a lot of science, I mean, is unprovable.
	It may as well be religious in a lot of ways.
	I'm not saying it is, by the way, before anyone was like, oh my god, someone grab Captain Andy and tell him that Sargon just said science was like religion.
	But it's effectively unprovable.
	Whether a Higgs boson exists or not is as unprovable to me as a person as to whether Saint Simeon on top of his stelle in the desert had a revelation from God.
	It's the same, I'm happily, if I was some second century Christian, I'd happily believe Simeon, just as a modern 21st century man, I'm going to happily believe Professor Higgs.
	But the passion, instead of speaking to the religious nutjob, I'm speaking to the scientist because I feel that his views are far more informed on reality.
	But before science existed, so obviously the people went to the prophet and stele.
	Yeah, well, I mean, he's willing to be wrong, of course.
	Yeah, that wasn't just my only reason for believing him over the prophet.
	But I meant the sort of the average man on the street, what he's going to be looking at this and taking from it.
	You're absolutely right.
	I mean, he is obviously a scientist and willing to be wrong.
	Well, you notice one of the central questions.
	You watch Armored Skeptic at all?
	You know, he's notice he does the same sort of response, taking this out of people's videos that are pretty much the definition of YouTube these days.
	At least thinking you do, it seems.
	But you notice...
	It works for me, though.
	I love it.
	Yeah, well, the central question that always comes up in the debate is where does morality come in?
	And once we're able to sort of touch back on that soft science becoming hard science thing, if you consider morality as you notice, we look at Kaype Pack's great quote that every living creature in the universe knows right from wrong.
	And it does take a psychopath or a sociopath of some kind or somebody who's been traumatized or marginalized to be deviant from those within respect.
	If you look at that through a biological, anthropological viewpoint, saying that these sort of traits are inherent in us, just like as males, when we first see our young, we get a rush of endorphins to keep us from eating them.
	You could take that mythological step to say that, well, gradually as we incorporate what we understand as this semi-mystical humanity into our understanding of human, mankind as an animal species in a scientific sense, it's that same sort of thing Tyson talks about in embracing the wonder at the grand scientific designs of the universe as being something that's fulfilling and personally spiritual.
	I'd like to think that down the line that the natural sort of progression of mankind will be to gravitate more towards that less, you know, you don't need an enemy, you need a challenge.
	once you've sort of overcome the basic social problems yeah I really like the the exchange there because I think the reason that that would work or at least that works in my mind is
	is I approach the same an adversary is a challenge, you know?
	You know, your enemy is the challenge that you need to overcome.
	It's the very basis of heroic literature, you know, is that there is a challenge to overcome.
	And it's that feeling in people that you need to give them.
	You know, people would be celebrating in the streets tomorrow if they announced a definitive cure for cancer.
	You know, there would be cheering and joy in the streets.
	And much in the same way that the death of Bin Laden did.
	And so, yeah, I think that's a great way of looking at it.
	And I hadn't really considered that.
	If you just replaced enemy with challenge, then you get the same.
	I'm really concerned about feasibility of ideas as well.
	I've got a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas, but I don't think that anything too abstract is feasible for Joe Schmo working in his job.
	So I think that if there were scientific goals and challenges, that we could literally say, okay, if we put a huge amount of science research into this particular thing and then this particular thing, and if you set particular goals, then I think you could have it engage the same feelings that fighting wars against foreign enemies would engage.
	And having an enemy, an other to blame everything on.
	I think you could engage the same feelings.
	And I think that's the way to make it a long-term prospect that would have mass appeal.
	Consider the space race.
	Yes, it was the competition between the USSR and the US.
	But I mean, here in the US, and I imagine in Russia as well, the enthusiasm wasn't just about let's get there before they get there.
	It was about, holy fuck, we landed on the moon.
	And I don't imagine there was really anyone, I mean, maybe some Politburo bureaucrats in Moscow going, oh, they beat the moon.
	Fuck, what?
	No.
	Okay, well, let's just make more rifles.
	I imagine that even Russians were like, oh, there's people on the moon.
	It's not made of cheese.
	It's too bad.
	I need some cheese.
	Yeah, I mean, I think it's sort of like Lincoln.
	The better angels of our nature.
	I think our violence, I think our hostility, our adversarial nature towards each other, our interests in tribalism and nationalism and dividing each other up and fighting and all that, you know, the competition between it's more than just I need to win and feel the pride of victory.
	I need to defeat my opponent and humiliate them and rub their face in the oil.
	I think that's something that I like to think that's something that as a species we are gradually outgrowing.
	And I think that the direction we're going, I think that even from the grander long view sense of science maybe overtaking religion to us weeding out and fighting and getting gnashing our teeth over ideas like men's rights versus feminism is all sort of part of this evolutionary process.
	I actually think we're going the other way.
	I don't think we're growing out of it.
	I actually think that we're descending further into it.
	The social justice thing is just the epitome of it.
	I can hardly believe some of the crazy bullshit white men have been accused of by social justice warriors and feminists.
	I'm just baffled.
	And so I'm thinking more the sort of George Washington line of let's accept man as he is rather than how he would have him and say, okay, people are tribal.
	They need something to rally against.
	That's fine.
	That's the way they are.
	I can accept that.
	So let's give them a definitive scientific goal.
	So the challenge for the generations isn't to overcome the Nazis or to overcome the communists.
	It's to overcome cancer would be the first thing that springs to mind.
	If the human race had any sense, that's what we'd get on with.
	But yeah, I don't see us coming out of it anytime soon.
	It feels too good.
	Oh, not soon.
	People in a tribe feel really good about being in a tribe.
	Yeah, no, it will.
	I mean, I don't see any social disincentive to do it, though.
	Well, consider this, though.
	I mean, throughout the world, consider the advanced world.
	I mean, you know, the concept, you know, less than 100 years ago, the idea that black people and white people could occupy the same spaces, do the same work, coexist on equal footing.
	I mean, sociologically and practically, we're still not there, but the notion of it is not, you know, it's not alien to us anymore.
	In fact, it's something that you'd have to really go out of your way to find somebody who doesn't agree with.
	And, you know, it's taking, you know, it's a long game.
	It's like biological evolution.
	It's a long, drawn-out series of trial and error that ultimately leads to whatever it needs to be for the environment that it's in.
	And I think in regards to humanity, as we have both individual and mass psychology, which is, you know, it seems to naturally sort of gravitate in one form or another, like you said, no one thinks they're the bad guy, towards one form or another of basic sort of egalitarian humanism, where nobody should suffer.
	Nobody should, you know, everyone should be afforded opportunity.
	These are concepts that are sort of relatively new, and I think that they're just starting to sprout in Germany.
	I think they are, but I think the inherent tribalistic nature of humanity is really causing problems with that.
	I mean, the social justice movement in itself is just the epitome of it.
	I remember a few years ago when it was just like Lesbian and gay, and you know, and then it was then it's now it's trans, now it's the ridiculous number of denominations of Tumblrites, you know, where they're they're they're fracturing into smaller and smaller niche communities of tribes, tinier and tinier tribes, where you know, now that there's no real sort of outside force that's actually compelling them to do anything,
	they they're finding themselves breaking down into smaller and smaller groups and differentiating themselves with the people who are on their side.
	You know, and I, you know, I've seen like Tumblr posts of idiot one attacking idiot two for idiot two's stupidly but marginally different beliefs in this sort of entire category.
	And so I think that there is this innate desire for tribalism.
	And I don't see any, I think it's increasing because of the internet, because of communities that can build on the internet.
	They become self-reinforcing, whereas in real life, you wouldn't get the reinforcement that these Tumblrites are getting, for example.
	So I think that it's actually on the rise.
	And I don't think it's going away.
	So I think giving them better boogeymen, more constructive boogeymen, like with your idea of the challenge rather than the adversary thing, is definitely the way forward.
	Well, I mean, that's, you know, it comes back, you know, it's like a common thing I'm very tempted to tell Tumblr feminists, for instance, who say, well, female genital mutilation in Yemen and child brides in Yemen is just a half step away from gawking and street harassment.
	Like, no, it's not.
	So let's parse out what we're actually talking about here.
	When it comes to, you know, and my response when it comes to like, oh, well, we need to do something about street harassment.
	It's like, no, what you're talking about is not some institutionalized sexism.
	What you're talking about is people acting like fucking jackasses.
	And, you know, it's like racism.
	Yeah, like racism itself.
	Racism in the West is still very much present.
	I mean, very, very much present.
	There's no denying that.
	But at the same time, it's not institutional like it used to be.
	What we're dealing now is with the remnants of the old institutions still playing themselves out through the social construct, you know, through the social structures that we have in terms of ghettos and economic inequality between races.
	But the notions of racism now are regarded more as a matter of stupidity.
	If you're a racist, if you're an outright racist, you're a fucking moron, clearly.
	And that's why.
	Absolutely.
	I think it's just going to take time.
	And I don't think the eats are going anywhere.
	Oh, no.
	God, no.
	We're always going to have idiots.
	Yeah, always.
	I find it interesting that we're definitely seeing the decline of the nation-state.
	And it's very interesting that it's being replaced very much with the corporatocracy.
	And the corporatocracy has no use for nationalism or racism.
	And so it's very much on the decline.
	But when the nation-state was very powerful, racism was very prevalent.
	So, you know, I really think it is something to do with the structure of society and the mechanisms by which it operates.
	I don't think it's anything necessarily to do with morality.
	I think it's been justified very heavily with morality.
	I think that if we lived 100 years ago, we would think black people were inferior.
	Yeah, well, we would have been taught as much.
	I mean, we would have been taught as much, and that notion would have been reinforced by their lower levels of education, their lower social standing.
	So everything we've been taught is reinforced by what we're witnessing.
	And I hate to sound like a Tumblr social justice.
	Of course, that's how it has been.
	That's how it is.
	Now, the fact that that kind of thing is recognized, it's then capitalized on by people like, you know, and looking to Tumblr, it is a mind-boggling just sewer of asinine, not even, I wouldn't even call them ideas, they're just notions.
	And they're all rooted in I am a special little snowflake, law and legislation.
	It needs to be crafted around my emotional comfort and stability.
	We need to make a world where I, personally, never feel threatened, offended, or uncomfortable at all.
	And that's because you have comfortable idiots sitting behind computers with nothing to do but think about the things that they're not happy with, and then they get to externalize them, and suddenly there's like, you know, society's on a war campaign against them.
	Like, I mean, I just diverge from a lot of MRAs and especially the MGTOWs in that, you know, I don't necessarily think that the feminization of the world is necessarily as far-reaching and endemic and purposeful as it's often portrayed.
	Is it happening?
	Yes, but is it a singular injustice outside of and irrespective of others?
	No, it's part of social malfunction.
	It's part of miscommunication between people and the divisions between genders and races and sexual orientations and just individuals who define themselves as being different than others, either by choice or by their own nature or however it plays out.
	And so, yeah, it's the same sort of tribalist dynamic, but I think in the same sense that the inherent flaws and logical failings of that gradually over time will be sort of acknowledged and to an extent it'll be marginalized and this will be replaced with a whole new kind of stupidity.
	Absolutely.
	There's no way that social justice, feminism, social justice, whatever they want to call themselves, there's no way that in this current incarnation it's going to last.
	It's the most unsustainable model I've ever seen in my life.
	But one thing that I've got this tendency to kind of picture what the future is going to be like.
	And imagine in say 30, 40 years' time, all the baby boomers are dead.
	And the social justice warriors now, the 19-year-olds of now, are approaching 50.
	The millennials are approaching 50 or 60.
	And they're the ones running the world.
	What the fuck?
	The world's going to look weird, isn't it?
	The social justice warriors are going to be the ones in charge.
	Because there won't be anyone.
	Do you think they'll still be that way?
	I mean, I can draw from personal experience here.
	I was a professional leftist for almost a decade.
	I made calls on behalf of Planned Parenthood to buck for a Democrat in a state election because he favored pro-choice over anti-choice.
	And I'm always kind of struck by that Churchill phrase.
	And it's funny because Americans invoke it and forget that British liberalism and conservatism mean something completely different.
	But I don't necessarily think that these 19-year-old Tumblrites and that these 20-something undergrad feminists with the thick product glasses and the chips on both shoulders.
	I don't think that this sort of righteous indignation is necessarily going to universally carry on with them.
	There's going to be a handful who get deeper and deeper into that shit.
	No, I don't think righteous indignation is.
	I think it's more the doctrines.
	Well, I think as the doctrine, you know, I think as the doctrines themselves are debated, I mean, like we said, MRA, the whole MRM and MGTOW thing evolve in response to this.
	Now, you can only be intractably obstinate to the points that are being thrown at you for so long.
	Feminism talks about that.
	That's true.
	And so eventually, you know, when these people get to power, for one thing, you know, this message is not going away.
	You know, no one's going to stop Karen or the Honey Badgers or Mike or Spetsnaz or you or any of us from talking.
	And the more we talk and the more these ideas get out there, I mean, just yesterday I saw the feminist dictionary hashtag started with Janet's help.
	And I watched that.
	I sort of checked that out.
	Oh, it was hilarious.
	Jackie from Hall State is her name.
	She started, like in the early morning, she's like, should I start this hashtag?
	I'm like, fucking go over it.
	Why not?
	That'd be funny.
	You know, these ideas, I mean, even in that debate between Janet and Awesome Rance, Awesome Rance.
	I'm pretty sure that what we were looking at was a college dorm possible.
	She's a young, she's a young person who identifies as a feminist, does so honestly in the name of equality, concedes points.
	I don't think that these Tumblrites are necessarily going to be controlling the narrative as much.
	Yeah, it's not really the Tumblrites.
	They're more like a symptom of the problem, I think.
	And this actually gets back to a point I made at the beginning and forgot to follow up on.
	So if anyone was bringing a closure for something I said five hours ago.
	Yeah, I'm bringing it back around.
	The thing is, the education system, for example, what I was thinking of was this woman called Becky Francis.
	She's the professor of education and social justice at King's College London.
	She was one of the ones criticizing the Lego Friends.
	And she the very position of education and social justice disturbs me greatly because that seems like a label that could quite easily be replaced with, say, communism or Nazism, professor of education and Nazism, professor of education and communism, because it's an ideology.
	It's an ideological position being put in charge of educating the youth.
	And so, yeah, Tumblr is the lunatic fringe of this, of course.
	But it's about the mindset.
	And someone in the comments said that it's conformity that's actually the new religion, not science.
	And I really think there's a lot to be said for that, because what worries me a lot these days is how, I mean, I'm Generation X, I'm 34.
	And one of the last things I ever wanted to be was some conformist fucking, you know, I'm like one of the joke kids from South Park, the goth kids from South Park when it comes to that.
	You know, I really don't like this sort of conformism.
	And it's weird because if you look at like, you know, 90s and Generation X, a lot of their stuff, all the most popular stuff was so anti-conformist.
	You know, it's like the punk rock, sort of the new sort of like popular punk rock sort of thing came from Nirvana and all that sort of stuff.
	And then the millennials are the complete opposite.
	They are the dictionary definition of conformists, and they are the people who are being given all this social justice education right from the get-go.
	And that's why they're coming out of university going, hey, you don't all understand all this because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Because it's a form of indoctrination.
	It's a form of like they're being given very rigid ways of thinking.
	And I really think that because they've been trained in these ways from a young age, and the schooling system, I remember in my time that the schooling system didn't teach you to think at all.
	And there was this one time where the school I was at was going to try having like a philosophy class, and I was the only person in it who enjoyed the class.
	Everyone was like, oh, this is boring.
	Why are you fucking asking questions?
	Shut up.
	And I'd just be like, no, what if this, what if that, what if the other?
	I was only about 15.
	I didn't give a shit.
	But I was interested in talking about it.
	Yeah, but I was literally the only one in our entire class who was interested.
	And the rest was trying to shut me up.
	It's like, no, that's what we're here for, you idiots.
	And now I know that you're idiots.
	And it's this kind of rigid thinking that they have.
	They don't have any flexibility.
	And appointing professors of education and social justice.
	This is what I mean.
	So Tumblr and those people are probably never going to be in power.
	You're right.
	But even the people who do go through the conformist sort of avenues of power and enter the business world and think it's a good thing to do these things, they're going to be very much social justice inclined, if not, you know, on the lunatic fringe.
	So it's going into a world that I find very uncomfortable.
	And I think that the people in 30 years' time, because this is how it is now, and there is a growing backlash against feminism, but it's a bit specific against feminism.
	It's more the system they have infiltrated that is going to be the problem.
	It's the way these people are being taught to think or not, as the case would be.
	The lack of critical thinking skills and the respect for authority and all that sort of thing that are just symptomatic of the millennials.
	It's just like in 30 years' time, I don't see this.
	I think this is one of those trends that's going to be very subtle for most people to see.
	And it's too in the background.
	It's not, you know, the angry feminists shouting in your face and the men getting screwed in court.
	They're very easy to identify and address.
	And so those things could well be addressed.
	But this sort of greater the way that and I do think that this is a natural conclusion of having like a corporateocracy, paying for interest in colleges and schools and stuff.
	Just like Ford wanted to get the American middle class was created by the education system to provide workers who could produce things in factories.
	I think that this is going to be very much the same, but for like the modern corporate world, it's going to be people who are very accepting of anyone from around the world, which is I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it leads into very rigid frames of thought.
	And I really think that this is going to get worse before it gets better.
	No, I mean, even with like with it getting worse before it gets better, but I think that's actually just sort of part of the process.
	One thing that I find, you know, well, two things I find really hopeful, you know, things to be hopeful about is one is that within every generation, there is a natural sort of just, you know, you talk about non-conformity, but beyond that, within youth of every generation, rebellion against whatever they were handed as the established norms to accept, you know, especially in the teenage years, they automatically, you know, they'll sometimes automatically throw off.
	And so I think that if this does become the established norm, that it much like orthodox capitalism, much like every older way of sociological political thought that's fallen beneath the weight of its own failures, that it'll be uprooted.
	Just to jump in, that's that I think that is actually the nail on the head for what the problem is in my mind, right?
	Is look at what they're railing against.
	They're raining against who they put their genitalia into.
	That's not going to change the system, which is the problem.
	So I'm about to sneeze now.
	Well, I mean, the other thing that's I'll say just too, the other thing that you know encourages me and this might just be like, you know, hopeful optimism on my part.
	She's a little girl and you know, I wonder a lot about like, what the fuck kind of world is she going to inherit?
	What is she going to be?
	And you know just the way that I'm raising her.
	I mean, you've got one thing I, one thing I found in politics when I work there, when I work in the political field, is that yeah, in both in power and in the public eye, those you hear the most are the most lunatic fringe, you know, the people who shout the loudest, as opposed to the people who speak in reasonable voices at length.
	And when I'll, you know, with the limited amount of time I have with my daughter, and maybe this could, maybe this can factor in on some grander scale in terms of fathers relationships with their children which, in being challenged, a lot of dads, a lot of dads, do give up and walk away.
	I myself, you know, I'll walk through hellfire again to stay there for her because she's the you know, the cool, the best thing in my fucking life.
	But you know, in the times that we have, I make sure to challenge her mind, even at six.
	I'll ask her questions like, what's more important, being pretty or being you know, or being intelligent?
	What's more important being popular or being kind?
	And and you know, because of our conversations and it's like and I'm dedicated to raising her as best as I can I like to think I'm not alone in that and I like to think that a lot of these young children now like yeah, when these millennials grow in in their 40s and their 50s and they're in power and they're running shit, I mean, for one thing, maybe they're going to carry a lot of these bad ideas with them, but at the same time, those ideas are going to come up against the hard cold realities that that oppose them and then the generation after that.
	I'd like to think, if only for my daughter's sake, we'll have a slightly more refined understanding of this, because nuance is is is more apparent to us now than it's ever been.
	Dynamic qualities to life in this world, arguments and thought and skepticism itself are more readily available.
	They're right in your face, in fact, like the, the notions of questioning authority and of questioning established norms, is what's leading a lot of these, you know, self-obsessed identity, political champion, social justice warrior types out there.
	It's not just the idea that I need to change the world to suit my own agenda, it's also that, like you know, the notion of modern, of the modern age for youth is question fucking everything, and so, even if you can't find something to question, make it up.
	Well, once those become the established norms, I think maybe, just like technology flips over and advances exponentially, I wouldn't be surprised if the same happened in society.
	If these children raised in broken homes, with parents who struggle against things that are greater than themselves and struggle against each other and are pitted against each other by systems that are designed to make them adversarial for profit, that you know they'll, they'll.
	I like to think my daughter and her generation are going to come up with a with a better head than up with them, than ours is.
	So maybe the children of the baby of the millennials will be the ones To realize that the millennials got it wrong.
	Yeah, and if we're really lucky, maybe they just won't breed.
	Well, there is always that.
	Hopefully, that, yeah, and well, at the end of the day, I'm going to put off having children until I feel ready.
	Are you ready yet?
	No, but gene therapy can restore my reproductive organs.
	The rest of us idiots can scrap up.
	Well, we'll be trying to make the generation that follows you a bit better prepared.
	Oh, the idea of pregnancy probably triggers them.
	That's a fucking terrifying thing.
	I mean, you don't have kids, right?
	No, no, I don't.
	I mean, you know, I mean, and I, you know, I had to go through hell.
	I come from a big family, so I'm not sure.
	Yeah, I mean, my name right now has only got like two more people to carry it.
	Fuck knows what will happen with them.
	But, you know, I mean, like, you know, it was an unexpected, you know, fatherhood was unexpected, and it was terrifying.
	And when it happened, it still was terrifying.
	And then to find out that there's all these additional levels of hell on top of what was already supposed to be challenging is there.
	But, I mean, I could say for myself, it's a really forged character within me.
	And I like to think that I'm not alone in that.
	I know I'm not.
	And I like to think that the parents who are both adversarial and trying to get through it, and those who are pitted against each other almost against their will, which is something the system here does a lot.
	Yeah, there are states here, actually, if you want to get a divorce or if you want to separate and you have children, the law dictates that you must have a lawyer and you must go before a court.
	I mean, that's just obscene.
	These kids are going to grow up knowing this is the way it is, and hopefully, and I'm fairly confident that as a result of these struggles and this idiocy, that it will change.
	So, I don't know.
	I guess you and I have slightly different perspectives.
	I have an obligatory hope, and you have a realistic depression.
	Well, no, I am an optimist.
	I really am.
	If I was a pessimist, I wouldn't actually be making any videos.
	I wouldn't be trying to have a voice in the public dialogue, you know.
	I'd just be like, fuck it, we're idiots and we're going to hell.
	So, you know, it's just, I'm just going to sit on the downward spiral and slide along with everyone else.
	I don't think things are necessarily inevitable.
	But I just worry about the kind of intellectual railroads that these millennials seem to be on.
	And again, it's not that I think they're bad or anything like that.
	I just think they're being sold up the river a bit, you know?
	And they don't know it because they're kids and they're being got when they're at school.
	And I mean, there will always be a percentage of them that are lucky enough to be born smart, you know, and have smart parents and to see the system for being what it is.
	And so, hopefully, there will always be people who can think outside of it.
	But I don't know that, you know, and that's why I bring it up, I suppose.
	Well, I guess, you know, it could be said history is a long story of small handfuls of very smart people trying their very best to lead a massive flock of total idiots towards some promised land.
	So, you know, even in our utopia, even if we achieve our utopia, we'll still have problems.
	And, you know, you talk about tracks.
	I mean, if we're going to take that analogy, if a track's not finished and doesn't lead to the right destination, then the train derails.
	That's true.
	That is true.
	Okay, well, I'm definitely going to take a more positive stance on it.
	Oh, I'm going to try anyway.
	I have changed Sargon of Akkad's mind.
	Oh, a lot of things changed my mind.
	The whole internet is going to break now.
	It's no, no, no, not at all.
	I change my mind all the time.
	I'm not going to stop being worried, but I will try and be more optimistic.
	But it's two in the morning here, so I think we'll have to call it a night.
	Yeah.
	Fears have run through me, so I'm about ready to go myself.
	Fair enough.
	Well, thanks a lot for being here, and thanks to everyone watching.
	I've really enjoyed myself.
	How about you?
	No, no, definitely.
	We should do this again, perhaps, with a more structured content.
	Absolutely.
	There are definitely.
	Sorry, say again?
	Sorry, yeah.
	No, faucets were going on.
	Yeah, I'm definitely down to do this again.
	And again, thanks to everyone who's watching.
	Technically, I suppose this would be my, well, second sitting in front of a camera video.
	So, yeah, we'll have to do this again, brother.
	Yeah, absolutely, mate.
	Absolutely.
	All right.
	Take care, everyone.
	Thanks for listening.

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