Davis Aurini hosts a livestream debating the "Red Button, Blue Button" dilemma, arguing that while the logical choice is Red to prevent deaths, private fear might drive voters toward Blue. He critiques "nice" policies like minimum wage as economically stupid compared to business owners' "smart" automation strategies, then analyzes Luigi Mangione as a societal "cancer cell" akin to Travis Bickle and the Joker. Aurini concludes that these figures are tragic products of broken systems rather than heroes, asserting the button scenario is merely an escape from reality with no true winning move. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Choosing The Red Button00:15:23
So we got some cool, calm, bossa nova jazz playing, composed by the ever-brilliant Starving Vampires, with his alternative label, Later Than Eight.
This track is titled The Man Who Wined to Be Left Alone.
And what better calming music to accompany this live stream while we discuss genocide, which ought to be streaming right now.
Except it's frickin' not.
Is it?
Yes it is.
Yes it is.
You know, I learned something today.
I learned that if you set up the live stream on your phone and you're holding your phone like a normal person when you set up the live stream, you're only allowed to broadcast in the vertical window.
At least, I can't figure out how to change it.
Grindface says, hello from Ireland.
Glad to have you here, brother.
I'm going to turn that music down just a bit, I think.
There, that's reasonable.
Just a little hum in the background.
The topic of tonight's stream wait, it's okay, I don't want that to be repeat.
Do I want shuffle?
Oh my goodness, we'll figure out how this works.
Slowly but surely, we'll figure out how it works.
I haven't picked up the beans yet.
Told you, I'm waiting until the end of the month.
That won't be until Friday.
You know, I was thinking about going to Costco, actually paying for a membership.
I was at Costco the other day.
They didn't have any Starbucks coffee.
The woman that was working there told me that their signature house blend, was it Kirkland?
It's brewed by Starbucks according to Costco's own standards.
And so I bought some.
I made myself a pot of coffee, and I won't lie to you folks.
I think I would have preferred to drink rainwater out of a used ashtray.
It was worse than McDonald's.
I'd say it was even slightly worse than Tim Hortons.
The drink, we are having the usual wisers on the rocks.
But why don't we jump into the topic of this stream?
What we're actually going to be discussing.
With nice, calm, relaxing bossa nova jazz.
There's a new trolley problem that's been bouncing around the internet.
When was it?
Just a week ago.
Guy by the name of Tim Urban.
Link down below. posted this hypothetical question.
Everybody in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button.
If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives.
If less than 50% of the people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive.
Which button will you press?
Yeah, which button do you press?
Con Cottonmouth says he got a bag of Kirkland coffee that had wood chips in it one time.
Geez, I wish I'd had your bag, man.
It would have tasted better than mine did.
Good Lord, how do you take dark roast coffee and make it so acidic and bitter?
Like, seriously, used engine oil.
It was awful.
It was terrible.
So red button, blue button.
What's the correct choice?
What button should everybody choose?
If people were sane.
The correct choice is the red button.
Because if everybody chooses the red button, nothing happens.
There's no reason to get involved in this scenario in the first place.
Wait, red button?
If everybody chooses the red button, everybody lives.
Okay, why not choose the red button?
You choose the blue button.
Everybody lives if more than 51% choose the blue button.
Why in God's name would anybody choose the blue button?
Makes no freaking sense.
At least that's where my default intelligent choice leads.
But let's listen to LP, iHypocrites, live stream on the topic.
Mira Mira says she'd push the purple button, and we got Butterfly Ballerina with her electric day glow hand waves.
How are you doing, babe?
Now, Alpi pointed out something that I didn't initially assess.
Because I was studying alright, so here's my default approach to these things.
I tend to lean logical.
I tend to look at, like, what is the construct of this?
Like, what's the prisoner's dilemma aspect here?
What's going on with that?
What's the math of the situation?
What's the cold, raw math?
And so I ignored an important piece of context, which is everyone in the world has to take a private vote.
That's an important point.
First of all, you have to take it.
You're required to participate in this event.
On a semantic level, the red button's nothing.
The red button semantically is non-participation.
But because this is a mandatory vote, it's a mandatory opt-out, well, that changes the context a little bit.
You can't just passively choose the red button.
You have to deliberately choose the red button.
The sun god demands blood sacrifices.
Sometimes he does.
Sometimes he just inflicts skin cancer.
The other aspect is the private.
It's a private vote.
In other words, you don't get to explain it to anybody.
One of the responses to this vote, and I wish I had OBS properly set up right now.
I don't.
I just got home an hour ago.
Should have been in bed an hour ago, but, you know, this is keeping me alert.
Did the music stop playing?
Is it just changing tracks?
Okay, can we what if I hit shuffle?
Alright, this should keep the jazz going.
This track is known as Initiated.
See how I initially read it?
And sorry, I was saying one of the responses, one of the responses was summed up beautifully with an illustration.
On the one side was a big shredding machine.
And all the people in blue shirts were saying, guys, if we all get into it, there'll be too much weight.
It will destroy the mechanism.
Well, on the other side, all the people in red shirts were like, why are you guys getting into the blue shirt machine?
Why are you even doing it?
Just hit the red button.
If everybody hits the red button, nobody dies.
Why would you hit the blue button?
Well, an LP made an interesting point.
If it's a private vote, well, there's the rub.
What button would your mother hit if you weren't there to point out, like literally just hit the red button.
Just hit the red button.
Somebody else said every soldier in all of history by their actions has hit the blue button.
And so LP, as a Christian, would hit the blue button.
Well, and here's the interesting thing.
Here's something notable.
He said as a Christian, he would hit the blue button because he's going to have to stand for account in front of God.
And that's where things start getting a little bit weird for me.
This is where things start getting a little bit interesting.
I think I myself would wind up hitting the blue button.
If it was a private vault, if Omega showed up and said, I have to pick one of these two buttons, I can't leave the room until I do, I can't talk to anybody else, red button or blue button, which one do I hit?
And even though red is the correct choice, I know that a lot of people aren't going to make the correct choice.
People I care about, people that are soft-hearted.
I might even say they're soft-headed sometimes.
But soft-headed isn't the same thing as evil.
So yeah, I think in that context, I hit the blue button even though it's not the right choice.
Red button's the right choice.
If everyone just hits red button, there's no thresher machine.
Nobody needs to die.
They just need to hit the red button.
We don't need to risk the blue button.
Earth Alchemy Holistic 333 says the same thing.
Yeah, it's like red is the correct answer.
But in the poll itself, which, how many votes did this poll get?
There's a link down below to it.
98,000 votes.
So 100,000 people.
I'd say that's, for an informal internet poll, that's a fairly representative sample.
Particularly given how many, the leaning towards high IQ.
I know, on Twitter.
Twitter is a very high IQ TV show.
It does lean towards more intellectual, though.
It's not ESPN, okay?
So even in this more hairy, fairy, ivory tower environment of Twitter, or shitter, as it's now called, even there, you find about 60% of people choose the blue button.
Why We Picked Blue00:02:01
But it's the wrong choice!
Debex says, I deliberately choose the red button.
If you chose the blue button, you'd be so nervous waiting for the results.
Well, presumably you're not being tortured to death.
Right?
Let's just keep it simple.
There's like, we could iterate this in so many different variants.
You know, it's like, how much risk?
If it's a painless death, if it's just a shot to the head, you know, shot to the heart and you're too late, you know, then okay, I can deal with that.
If it's the thresher machine, well, I don't know about the thresher machine.
Even if you want to choose the blue button, maybe you're too scared of the thresher machine.
No, this is don't get lost in the semantics.
Don't get lost in silly iterations, okay?
Like, it's missing the point.
Because Omega is not going to appear and give us this choice.
Where can I read this riddle I didn't hear of at all?
It's right down below.
Link to it.
It's actually described in the video description.
I'll repeat it again.
As it was originally posed, everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing either a red or a blue button.
If more than 50% of people press the blue, everyone lives.
If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who press the red button survive.
And that's it.
I mean, the red button is, in my mind, like it's not even a choice.
Minimum Wage And Dilemmas00:15:58
It's just where we already are.
But the blue button, it's like, let's all collectively enter a gamble where if we win, nobody dies.
Like, you don't die by choosing the red button.
It's a really frustrating question.
Like, you choose the blue button not because you think it's smart, but because you think it's stupid and you don't want your stupid friends to die.
Or you choose the blue button because you're stupid.
Yeah, I wasn't even going to talk about this.
I didn't even think this was that interesting until I heard iHypocrite talk about it.
And I was like, okay, here's a guy I really like.
Who disagrees with me on this.
He has some interesting points, but there's one thing.
He briefly touched on this, but he didn't explore it, and that's why i'm making this live stream.
That's where I started to see oh, there's some depth to this question.
This question's making me think, let's talk about minimum wage for a second.
Minimum wage is a terrible economic policy.
And that's just a statement of fact.
Okay, that like it's literally made minimum wage doesn't help poor people, doesn't help middle class people.
If anything, it might help rich business owners.
But even there, I don't think it really does.
Not really.
But it's nice.
It's a nice idea.
Should we go into this?
Maybe a little bit.
Maybe a little bit.
So arguments against the minimum wage.
So let's say we want to raise the minimum wage to $15.
Let's say that the kid working at McDonald's is making $10 an hour.
Just for sake of argument.
And we want to raise it to $15 an hour so he gets a living wage.
I mean, sounds like a good idea.
I'd like people to make living wages.
Problem is, what about the people making $15 an hour already?
You know, like maybe his manager at McDonald's makes $15 an hour.
Now that you raise the base kid's salary up to $15, you're going to have to bump up the manager's salary, which creates a ripple effect throughout the economy, which creates inflation.
And once the ripple effect has moved through the economy, We're back to where we started.
By bumping up minimum wage, you raise the cost of everything.
That's one argument against it.
Another argument against minimum wage.
Oh, okay.
So we're just going to say by law that the kid needs to be paid $15 an hour.
Well, why not just say $50 an hour or $500 an hour if we can just legislate?
what people get paid, then why not infinity dollars?
Starving vampires.
He is here.
Glad to have you, brother.
The live stream won't let me use any other video format because I programmed it in this video format and you can't change it afterwards.
See, if bumping it to $15 would work, bumping it to a million dollars, would also work.
And it should be pretty self-evident that doing such a thing will not work.
And finally, there's the prevention of job creation.
If hiring a new kid at McDonald's costs you 15 bucks an hour, but they're only worth 12, then you're not going to do it.
And so some jobs never get created and people stay unemployed.
They get $0 an hour instead of 12 or 10 because you said you can only hire them for 15.
And yes, super chats are, in fact, appreciated.
And this is what got me thinking about the second part of the title of the stream.
Smart, nice, what's the right thing to do?
Bumping up minimum wage is the nice thing to do, but it's not the smart thing to do.
Zachary, is that Zachary Lin?
10 US dollars.
Thank you very much.
The support is appreciated.
And Butterfly Balleria says, what is this music?
It's composed by Starving Vampires.
And JT, can you toss a link to the music?
It's bossa nova renditions of some of his other songs.
You've actually, I think some of you have heard some of these songs already.
They're much more lighthearted.
They're far more appropriate for discussing mass genocide.
So we have a bunch of people that decide to be nice.
They push the blue button for minimum wage.
Even though minimum wage is stupid.
It doesn't work.
It's a nice idea.
It's a nice concept.
I want people earning living wages.
I'm not opposed to living wages.
I just know enough economic theory to tell you it won't work.
It's like, I don't know, it's like trying to push a rubber band.
Here's another example.
You all know I hate the government, okay?
There was a protest in Eastern Canada, I think, trying to remove I need to start the music again.
You can only loop one track, it turns out.
There we go.
You can't loop all the tracks.
How silly.
So they were trying to protest because gas prices are so high, the government should get rid of their tax on the gasoline.
Nice idea.
Government taxes makes up about 40% of the price of gasoline here in Canada.
But because of how the market is structured because of how supply and demand works, if you got rid of that huge chunk of tax, market demand would push the price of gas up to almost exactly the same price.
And so you'd just be cutting government revenue, and the government isn't going to start spending less money, and you'd see no savings at the pump.
You'd see almost no savings.
There's a reason economics is called the dismal science.
Because so often you try and do something and it either does nothing or it makes everything worse.
Usually a little bit of both.
And minimum wage is definitely one of those categories.
Yes, I want people earning a living wage.
However, mandating minimum wage won't do that.
Nonetheless, you get a bunch of voters, you get a bunch of politicians.
They do the nice thing.
They push the blue button and they institute a minimum wage.
And then no, I don't want to I just want play all the songs, you damn thing.
There we go.
Then the business owners, inevitably, because business owners need to be smart.
Okay, if you're not a smart business owner, you are no longer a business owner.
Those are the rules.
I didn't make the rules.
I guess God did.
Saturn, at the very least.
I didn't make the rules.
I'm just telling you what they are.
If you're not a smart business owner, you are no longer a business owner.
So the voters, the public, they do the nice thing.
They push the blue button and they vote for minimum wage.
The business owners do the smart thing.
They push the red button.
And the red button is, oh, minimum wage is going up to 20 bucks an hour?
I guess I'll replace half my workers with robots.
Thank you.
Every time somebody pushes the blue button, somebody else pushes the red button.
We've got the nice thing and the smart thing.
But what's the right thing?
At what point is the smart thing dissolving homeless people for the residual components to sell them on the commodities market?
Unintended technocrat says the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
But also the path to hell is paved with smart intentions.
And that's what I find so interesting about this thought experiment.
About the red button, blue button.
They're both kind of the wrong answer.
In fact, the only way you can come up with the right answer is in the context of the question.
What I'm saying is, my stance on this question was changed when I heard LP point out that it's not about just getting the intellectually correct question.
It's about what is your mother going to choose?
What is your girlfriend going to choose?
What is your sister going to choose?
And I'm using mostly female examples.
Women are call me a sexist.
But women are a little bit more caring for other people and a little bit less logical than men are.
I know radical, radical opinions here on the genocide stream.
But to that context of private vote and no discussion, it's the one-off prisoner's dilemma.
JT, I love you, man.
I actually think I'm going to be switching to Subscribestar.
I've got a couple of weeks off.
I've got a lot of work to do.
Now that I have time off, I've got a lot of work to do.
I think I'm going to switch to Subscribestar.
Shut down the Patreon.
A couple other things.
I've got that really interesting video.
I need to we need to finalize that video.
Got some stuff to do.
Really, this blue button, red button question, it is just a version of the prisoner's dilemma.
But what makes it so damned frustrating is that there's no payoff.
You know, it's not like if 51% of the people press the blue button, then nobody dies and we get a nice hat.
No, we don't even get a hat out of the deal.
We get nothing.
We get no more.
than we get than if we press the red button.
And yet, if it's a private vote, if there's no discussion, if there's no polling, if there were polling, if we could have a society-wide discussion about this whole thing, that would change the context quite a bit.
Then it's an iterated prisoner's dilemma.
Solving Newcomb's Problem00:15:23
But no, if it's a one-off, if it's just a one-off, One boxing or two boxing the newcomb dilemma Does everybody know what the newcomb dilemma is should I I should probably explore that one All right,
so in the newcomb dilemma Omega arrives Omega is not God, but he might as well be Omega is a perfect predictor and in front of you there are two boxes.
Box number one has $100 sitting in it.
Box number two is opaque, but it either has a million dollars or $0 sitting in it.
And Omega informs you that it's a perfect predictor.
And it's already predicted what your actions are going to be.
But nonetheless, here's the rules of the game.
If you take the opaque box and leave the room, inside the opaque box you'll find a million dollars.
However, if you take the opaque box and you take the transparent box with a hundred dollars and you leave the room, then you'll find that the opaque box is empty.
And once Omega tells you these rules, explains them, answers any questions, it deletes itself from existence.
And so the question is, are you a one-boxer or two-boxer?
Omega's not there to punish you, but it did say it was a perfect predictor.
What is a perfect predictor?
What is free will?
Are you going to just take the one box?
Because once you take the one box, well, Omega doesn't exist anymore.
You could take the second box.
Why wouldn't you?
What makes these games interesting is that you can only play them once.
Yeah, I'd one box.
The new comb problem.
If that box turned out to be empty, then I'd start believing in free will or multiverse theory or something.
Or that maybe Omega was just an asshole in the first place.
Now all that said, I what is this guy talking about?
Box, we're talking about the newcomb!
The newcomb box problem, one box or two box?
Let's get back to Red Button, Blue Button.
And let's talk about my issue with LP's answer.
Even though I agree with his answer, I don't agree with his reason for it.
So let's argue about that.
His reason is that one day he's going to have to stand before God and account for his actions.
Yeah, the music does sound good.
Who wrote it?
And that right there, that, I don't even think that's biblical.
Necessarily.
Necessarily.
Do not throw pearls before swine.
Be gentle as serpents.
Or is it gentle as serpents, but wise as doves?
I mean, that's the problem.
There's far too much of that.
Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.
In that thought experiment where it's either the one button or the other button and you have to push them and you don't get to discuss.
In that case, yeah, maybe you press the blue button to save all the idiots that press the blue button, including yourself.
Even though there's no advantage.
But far better than the blue button would be convincing people not to press the blue button.
Nobody's at risk.
If everybody just presses the red button, like, don't even play this game.
There's no winning in this game aside from not to play.
A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.
Red button, blue button could very easily be turned into, uh, let's play global thermal nuclear war.
Whoever hits the button first wins.
But what do they win?
Whereas if nobody hits the button, we all win.
What I dislike I dislike morality replacing intelligence.
Excess empathy replacing intelligence.
We need hard-nosed people in charge of things.
One of the interesting stats has come out of this.
Well, two stats that I think are worthy of mentioning.
They have done some surveys on people answering it.
And the red button pushers are more likely to lie to get ahead.
Which shouldn't be too surprising.
Like, you're going to lean towards psychopath.
The same way, people that are opposed to minimum wage are going to lean towards psychopath.
Even though it's the right answer.
The other interesting thing is that red button pushers are substantially more likely to support Luigi Mangione.
And let's ignore the question as to whether or not he did it.
We all know what support him means.
I found that really interesting.
If Luigi had come up to me, I'm fairly strongly certain that this whole thing is, I'm pretty sure it's fake.
I don't believe he did it.
I think it was an assassin.
I think Luigi was a patsy.
I think he had nothing to do with it whatsoever.
And I've got some fairly strong reasons for believing that, but that's not relevant here.
We're not talking about whether or not he did it.
We're talking about the fictionalized Robin Hood.
I mean Luigi Mangione.
Was he in the right?
The term vampires, you know perfectly well why it's illegal to speak to dolphins.
It's the foot jobs.
It's not the speaking, it's the foot jobs, okay?
Let's just leave it at that.
I don't know if I'd go so far to say I support Luigi.
But I kind of think.
You fuck around, you find out.
Like if Luigi had come to me and said, Uncle Leo, I want some advice.
Should I engage in this very improbable assassination? scheme and then get away with it but carry around my gun and journal in my backpack for a few days and then get recognized by some random woman at a McDonald's.
I'd say, you know, Luigi, I don't think you should.
Don't think that's a smart use of your prodigious intellectual resources.
However, I kind of think the guy had it coming.
I don't think Luigi should have done it, but more because I'd rather have guys like Luigi wandering free and participating in society.
I don't think it was worth it.
Dustin Cameron, is that Charlie Brown?
Is that who I think it is?
Okay, are you gonna play all the tracks or just the one this time?
What a frustrating app.
So yeah, I'm not exactly for assassinating CEOs.
I don't think it really solves our problems.
Don't really think it gets us anywhere.
So in that sense, I'm not for it.
But I think the guy had it coming.
I think the guy was an asshole.
Nobody made him choose that job.
He was no innocent stormtrooper on the Death Star.
I want to find the small foot.
So that's interesting.
Like, my knee-jerk reaction is towards the red button.
and I'm also very sympathetic to Luigi.
Is that some sort of...
Okay, how do we get all the tracks going?
Go to the next track, you silly thing.
Okay, now it will only play one track.
We've got a different one.
We're trying things out here, folks.
We're trying things out.
Moronality.
I mean, that's the goddamn thing, isn't it?
I do tend to take more of an evolutionary view of morality.
Like if you beat a dog, it's gonna bite you.
If you buy a pitbull, well, don't be surprised when it eats half your face off.
Hawk Dove Ratios00:03:40
Oh, thanks, Illuminator.
Illuminator, you gotta start being witty or you get banned.
Witty is allowed, okay?
But you gotta be witty.
Because excess of this niceness, excess of the blue button, well, it also relates to the hawks and doves.
So you can do simulations.
And again, this is just another version of game theory where you have hawks that if they meet a dove, they steal a food pellet.
If they meet another hawk, They fight and they both lose a food pellet.
And then you have doves that meet and they share food pellets.
And you run this random simulation of the hawks and doves engaging one another.
And you typically wind up with a ratio, like a certain predator to prey ratio, a certain good actor to parasite ratio.
And our question as a society is how do we get rid of as many parasites as possible?
while recognizing that it's never going to be zero.
There is a percentage of rat feces in your flower, which is acceptable, and that number is not zero.
Hate to break it to you if you thought it was.
And to say that I choose the blue button because I'm going to have to stand before God, I think is dodging the entire problem.
And possibly, in some circumstances, even making the problem worse.
When you run the Hawk Dove game theory simulation, There's going to be a certain number of hawks.
You're not going to get rid of the hawks.
You can have all the minimum wage you want.
They'll just replace you with robots.
And saying, I'm always going to do the right thing misses out on the fact that doing the right thing often creates circumstances where people who do the wrong thing can flourish.
So, oh, thank you for the likes, guys.
Thank you for the likes.
Alright, what if I turn off shuffle, will ya?
Alright, we played that one already.
Wait, can we go backwards?
Tragic Anti-Heroes00:03:17
There we go.
JT, how do I loop this track playlist?
Let's see, I believe JT linked the music earlier.
JT, could you link the music again?
My link is super long.
Going back to Luigi Mangione, I mean, like, isn't there such a direct comparison to the Joker movie?
You get what you deserve?
Oh, yeah, we are zesty Negroes around here, Illuminator.
Very zesty.
I wish I could remember the rest of that meme.
He's a zesty, he's a tutti-fruity nigga.
There we go.
There's the playlist.
You get what you deserve if you screw people over, if you create a huge, disaffected class of people.
The Joker movie is just a movie, let's keep in mind.
It's not a sociology report.
But Joker is such a heartbreaking character because he's a genuine guy trying to engage with society and being given no welcome, no opportunity for success.
Oh yeah, I consider Joker 2.
Joker 2 was disgusting.
I don't know that Joker is a fair representation of what's going on.
But as a character study, Joker is a very, very tragic anti-hero.
By the way, that's what an anti-hero is, okay?
Not not a hero that acts like an asshole, okay?
Joker is an anti-hero.
Tragic hero.
Tragic character.
Defining An Anti-Hero00:04:41
Yeah, I do need to look into that saxophone, don't I?
Jesus, I don't want to spend money.
It probably won't be that much money.
JT, I'll look into it soon, okay?
Yes, send super chats.
Send good questions as well.
Questions, problems, concerns.
Kind of winding towards the end of what anything too interesting I have to say on the topic.
It's just that it's my problem with the Christian answer that, oh, I'm doing it for God.
I'm doing it to be righteous.
Which is maybe what the Protestants mean when they say, like, it's not your works.
Maybe they're on to something with that.
Like, I hate to give Protestants any credit whatsoever.
Maybe they're onto something there.
That's exactly it.
I deal with my familial micropenis by faith alone.
No, sorry, not clever, not clever.
Now let's put him in timeout.
30 minutes.
If he comes back and he's funny, he can be back.
Are you not a moderator?
I'm pretty sure JC's a moderator.
I have no idea how to turn them into one.
You know what show I don't hear about a lot is The Good Place.
The Good Place is, honest to God, it's one of the best intros to moral philosophy that's pretending to be a comedy.
And, I mean, you can argue it's pretty basic, but it certainly does introduce I was going to say normies because I'm a condescending fuck, but it introduces normies to these ideas fairly, fairly freaking well.
And it's a fun show.
It's a fun show.
I don't know.
Watch The Good Place.
Watch it.
Don't get bent out of shape about it.
Just watch it.
It's solid.
It was trying to advance ideas.
You know, give the show credit for being good at that.
I know, I know.
I can see the liberal bias in it as well.
United Technocrat says, what is your thoughts on National Socialist ideals?
I mean, oh, it's kind of a huge question, but there really was this weird phenomenon.
At the start of the 20th century, like the 1850s to the 1950s, there was such a desire to get rid of everything we'd understood of as politics, as emotion, as family, as like get rid of humanity and replace it with technocracy.
I mean, we still have it.
We still have, you know, trying to like using nudge tactics, trying to control your vote through the internet.
Joker Meets Lady Gaga00:06:28
I don't really view it that differently than I view all the others.
It's just trying to turn free will into a scientific concept.
Wait, did Joker 2 have Lady Gaga in it?
Was that Lady Gaga?
I have no idea what she looks like.
I just know she's really obnoxious.
I found Joker 2.
It was mean-spirited.
It was mean-spirited and didn't really say anything at the end of it.
Yeah, it's okay.
So Gaga was actually Harley.
I think I heard that somewhere, it just didn't really register because she's I'm sorry, she's a non-entity to me.
I know she was on The Simpsons one time.
Lisa really liked her.
Listen, man, the Lisa Simpson I fell in love with when I was eight years old would not have loved Lady Gaga.
Eight, no, when did it come out?
I was like twelve or something, whatever.
Hello, butterfly.
The second movie was just such a you know, I went into it.
I went into it trying to trying to have an open mind.
Like, I've only seen the first Joker movie once.
I'm of the opinion that most of the crazier scenes, like the part where all the people are rioting wearing Joker masks, His catharsis is in his own mind, The.
There's this fantastical element to the movie where he's the Joker But lacking, like if this happened in the real world.
In the real world where it's actually happening in the movie, There's no Batman.
There's no Bruce Wayne.
Like, none of this exists.
He's just a guy that shot somebody on television.
And, yeah, Stop and Vampire points out, like, I've already seen Taxi Driver.
Which is another one of those movies that ends on that ambiguous note.
Is the ending of the movie real?
Or is it all in his own head?
One of the things that you guys should all look up, speaking of taxi driver, there's a really interesting conversation between a person claiming to be a member of the Illuminati on some conspiracy, was it like God's production?
Some conspiracy forum.
As person alleging to be a member of the Illuminati shows up and starts answering questions.
Ask me anything.
And there's this one guy that keeps angrily confronting him.
Why do you do things this way?
And he just starts calling this guy Bickle.
After Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.
And Travis travis effected no significant change in his society.
Up until the part of the movie where Travis shaves his head and goes on the killing spree, he doesn't really exhibit any strong set of moral values.
Like, he never shows that he stands for anything.
It's more like he was a loose cannon looking for somewhere to fire.
And he eventually found a target that is worthy of condemnation, as did Joker, as did Luigi.
I am more or less okay with the actions of Bickle and Mangione and Joker.
I don't really give a shit about those people.
Actually, Joker is probably the most evil.
Although the guy on TV was an asshole.
But he kind of got murdered just for being an asshole.
There aren't a lot of people that wanted to murder me, so.
Speaking as a professional asshole.
No, I get their targets.
Don't have a lot of sympathy.
I get really, really upset when I hear about genuine, innocent people being harmed by monsters.
That's the sort of thing that makes my blood boil.
Some rich, asshole CEO that is he's going right up to the point of legally it's defrauding somebody.
He's going right up to that line.
Oh, and he gets killed?
Toxic Social Welfare Systems00:08:26
Okay.
Not upset.
Oh, what?
A pimp that pimps out underage prostitutes gets ventilated?
Not upset.
You know, you mess with the bull, you get the horns.
Well, and JT says something good here.
He says, does this structure produce trust or constant conflict?
I guess that's a better way of phrasing it.
If you go around engaging in bad karma, don't be too surprised when bad karma finds you.
Thank you.
Thank you, LD Wang Kenobi.
Thank you.
So I'm gonna wrap it back around.
I'm gonna get closing down soon.
If anybody has any questions, problems, concerns, you go comments!
But to kind of wrap it back around, the red button, blue button.
Those are bad buttons!
Let's get better buttons.
Let's get more complex games to play.
Oh, is Joker red or blue button?
I would say that Joker is when you get too many people pushing the red button.
Or maybe, a better way of putting it, is where you've got a really unhealthy blue button and a really unhealthy red button.
Like, you've got the two extremes in the movie where you've got this massive social welfare system.
Which, like, the welfare system is just, it's absolutely terrible.
Because the welfare, it gives people just enough money to tread water without ever going anywhere in life.
You spend your whole life scrimping and saving and collecting coupons and buying Kraft dinner and filling out forms and waiting in line.
It's like you're the virus that the system needs to be inoculated against.
You're the problematic prole that the system has no use for that could become dangerous.
So we give you just enough welfare and we keep you busy, we keep you occupied, so that you don't explode onto the system.
But at the same time, we have this red button system where people just engage in untrammeled psychopathy.
Like the host of the variety show, I forget his name, the Joker eventually shoots.
The guy he was looking up to his whole life turns out just to be an asshole.
So you got toxic forms of the blue button and the red button.
That's what makes the whole thing such a goddamn tragedy.
Like, there are no good guys and there are no innocents in that movie.
Stuff of Empire says, Joker is what happens when the system stops making sense.
Yeah, I think he nailed it.
I think that's why it speaks to people.
Ostensibly, the movie's about 1970s stagflation, all the issues going on back then.
But it's not about the 1970s, for fuck's sake.
I mean, it has the Joker and Batman in it.
It's not about those things.
It's set in the stagflation of the 1970s.
So why the hell does it speak to us so much these days?
And I think you nail it, because things don't make sense.
Everything feels broken.
Dating is broken.
Law and order is broken.
Politics is broken.
Yeah, let's take the question, the red button, blue button.
Which obviously I've just spent, you know, like an hour and a half.
How long are we going?
Yeah, okay, just over an hour.
All right.
I'm not doing five hours tonight.
We'll close it down in about 15 minutes.
So obviously this is a question that has some interesting aspects to it.
But at the same time, it's a question that's a total escape from reality.
Jeez, Butterfly Ballerina asks, is Bruce Wayne actually, or Senior Wayne or whatever, actually, I was left with the impression that that's just something the mother made up.
But I've only seen the movie once, and I would be open to other interpretations.
I need a girl to come up here to Alberta and watch the movie with me, Butterfly.
So we'll see how things go.
On all these questions of economy, politics, like that we don't have answers.
Like the things that matter the most have become the most vague.
And so we try and shake things up.
We try and make them interesting.
What's interesting about the red button, blue button is that the answers actually do trans.
One of the few things that transcends the left-right divide is this question.
Right, Cycling Nowhere, yeah, you're correct.
Monsters From Ancient Stories00:15:38
Bruce Wayne and Joker would have been brothers if Joker's mother was telling the truth.
So it's Wayne Sr.
I forget his name.
Wayne Sr. is the one that would have possibly been Joker's father.
However, I think it's implied this is just something that Joker's mother made up.
Has anybody else made the connection to Grendel's mother?
So in the Tale of Beowulf, Grendel is the monster that's terrorizing the Mead Hall.
But Grendel's mother is the more primordial monstrous form.
She's actually very, very much Like Tiamat in the.
What would you call the Babylonian mythology?
I guess you call it the Babylonian mythology.
Tiamat is the.
Now, in Dungeons and Dragons, Tiamat is the mother of dragons.
And I believe she's a chaotic evil god.
In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is the goddess, the serpent of the.
Salt water versus the good gods of the sweet water, meaning not like river water.
Because these religions were founded where rivers meant sea.
And Marduk, who became king of the gods, who is the Zeus of that pantheon, who lots of parallels to the Greek pantheon.
Marduk slayed.
Tiamat.
Tiamat was the mother of monsters.
So she gave birth to all these.
Marduk's father.
I might be getting a couple of details wrong, but bear with me.
Marduk's father was the Saturn.
Saturn that ate his own.
Ate his own young.
And Marduk was the Zeus that slew his father to free his siblings.
Tiamat, who was Saturn's bride, was outraged and gave birth to the monsters to fight against the gods, Zeus and the, well, Marduk and the other deities.
Kind of the equivalent of Titans in some ways in Greek mythology.
And we see this pattern with Beowulf, with Grendel and Grendel's mother.
And Grendel is a watery being of transitions who lives under the water but attacks on land.
A very froggy sort of a being.
And I think there is huge comparison between Joker and Grendel and Joker's mother and Grendel's mother.
These monstrous outcasts, these single mothers that raise monstrous sons.
Oh, Butterfly Battle Rain says the king is Grendel's father.
Is that clearly established?
It's been a long time since I read Beowulf.
Or is that implied?
Hrothgar is the king, isn't it?
See, Storm Vampire says the problem isn't just that the social contract broke, it's that it pretends it didn't.
That's how jokers are made.
Yeah, like Joker, who was a bastard, would not have been brought into the world if Wayne Sr. hadn't slept with Grendel.
Although it's also unclear that she actually did.
There's an animated Beowulf?
Man, I gotta check that out.
Yeah, the copy I read, it was great.
It had the English on one side and the Old English on the other.
And it was fascinating.
Some of the words were identical.
Beer and helm are the same word.
They haven't changed in a thousand years.
Everything else was unreadable.
But every song you see a word that was completely unchanged.
I mean, Grendel had to come from somewhere.
I didn't even know there were other films.
I only knew about The 13th Warrior, which was loosely based upon it, I guess.
It had a Muslim POV character, which was interesting 30 years ago, but now it's.
Hey, Michael Crichton did it, so I'll stand by Michael Crichton.
That guy was really cool.
I wonder,
are there these similar connections in Taxi Driver to Beowulf?
Here's some cynical analysis about Taxi Driver.
So to remind you, the climax of the film is the eponymous taxi driver, Travis Bickle, rescues an underage child prostitute from her pimp in a blazing gun battle.
Again, been 15 years since I saw this movie, so don't consider this a film review.
Do you think a year later that the girl he saved was not a prostitute all over again?
That forum I mentioned where the alleged Illuminati kept making fun of the one guy calling him Travis Bickle.
Travis Bickle didn't overthrow the system.
He didn't change anything.
He just shot a pimp.
And the girl he rescued was probably back in the exact same position all over again a year later.
What did he accomplish?
What did Joker accomplish?
You know, there's a part of Beowulf, which is, it's one of the most interesting parts of the story to me.
Because the first two-thirds of Beowulf, the bulk of the story, is a typical adventure story of Beowulf and his warriors.
They show up at Hrothgar's Hall, and they fight Grendel, then they fight Grendel's mother, and they're the heroes.
This is typically where the story would end.
This is where a Hollywood movie ends.
But not Beowulf.
Beowulf then, 20 years pass, and there's a dragon of greed that Beowulf fights.
And Beowulf kills the dragon but dies in the process.
Which is a commentary.
Okay, so JT just said, Travis can see a monster, but he can't see the system that produces it.
That's what's so interesting about the end of Beowulf.
It's like an addendum.
It's like an expansion pack.
It's almost like Baldur's Gate 2, and then the expansion pack.
Which is so much it's not as big as Baldur's Gate 2.
It's an expansion pack that completes the story, but it's very, very winnowed.
Beowulf is the adventuring hero for most of the story.
And then 20 years pass, and he's the old king.
And the dragon is as much a reflection of him, like the dragon of greed.
And he's the greedy old king.
I really feel like the end fight between Elder Beowulf and the dragon is crucial to understanding the story.
It's crucial to not producing another Grendel.
I do think that Beowulf is justified in the end.
I do think Beowulf stays the hero.
I don't think Travis Bickle does.
One of the standout scenes in the movie, A Taxi Driver, is Travis Bickle practicing in the mirror, imitating the gunslingers from the movies.
There's this constant theme of Travis comparing himself to movie characters.
Which is something I think we all do to some extent or another.
Yeah, the next day we started all over again.
So if we were to posit that Grendel was sired by Hrothgar, that Grendel and Grendel's mother are the Joker and Joker's mother,
those that are kicked out of society, those that are inconvenient, those that society doesn't have a place for, those that get used.
And they're bitter and they're angry.
They're rejected.
Unlike Hrothgar, who exports his sins to the wilderness and calls for some other hero to solve the problem, Beowulf,
who gets old and greedy, and brings upon himself the dragon of greed, deals with his own shit.
He slays his own dragon.
He doesn't export it onto the youth.
You know, one of the thoughts I've had many, many times in my life is, like, I've read something, I can't promise that this is true.
So, take it as metaphor.
That humans produce cancer cells.
We produce cells that naturally absorb all the poisons in our body.
And then they commit suicide.
They are the cellular scapegoats.
of all the toxins we ingest.
And once in a while, these cells go cancerous.
I have no idea if that biology is true.
But it does seem to ring true sociologically.
Rogue Cancer Cells00:07:10
Movies like Taxi Driver, Joker.
These are about, yeah, they're about cancer cells that go rogue.
Well put.
So's Beowulf.
Grendel is a cancer cell that went rogue.
Grendel was supposed to commit suicide.
Instead, Grendel lashed out against the Mead Hall.
What ought we to do about this?
Yet, Beowulf does seem to be a hero that takes account for his own mistakes.
I really need to reread that book.
These are hard questions to answer.
Life would be a lot easier if there were just a right answer to these questions, wouldn't it?
What's so gross, butterfly?
His ears?
Oh, Gregor's ears.
I need to look this damn thing up.
Alright, guys, I'm going to get the stream shut down.
I think it's been an interesting stream.
I do have a really good video that's coming up pretty soon.
Tentatively on Tuesday.
I like posting videos on Tuesday.
For reasons.
But it should be ready by then.
If there's any other questions, problems, concerns, toss them out.
I'd love to keep going all night, but dolphin Sun?
I don't know what that means, Lampshade, but thank you for sticking through the whole stream.
Yeah, JT's been doing some editing work on the video.
I need to review it.
Go back and forth, create a process.
I want it to be a good video.
Yeah, I did not think I was going to be talking about Joker and Beowulf.
There are interesting connections between those.
Anyway, folks, let's get her shut down.
Have you seen Promising Young Women?
No, I haven't.
I don't know if you mean if that's a film.
Promising young women.
You know, let me, I'm just going to Google that.
Okay, interesting.
Alright, so years after a heinous act destroyed her best friend, a woman seeks revenge against a system that enables and protects its predators.
That sounds interesting.
Is it good?
What do you think of it, Butterfly?
I'm curious.
Yes, it's good.
She has it on DVD.
Okay.
That sounds really interesting.
All right.
I will have to check out that film.
But I think I've run out of creative and clever things to say on this live stream.
I should probably shut her down.
It's better if you okay.
So I got to listen.
I got to listen to my computer.
I got to get TV.
Maybe I'll listen on the TV.
God, I wish I had something really solid to end on.
I don't, though.
I don't know that I haven't even solved that stupid red button, blue button thing.
Anyway, we'll keep trying to solve the problems of existential reality here on Stairs of the World.
And we might just watch, we might just check out that film.