Decoding the Gurus - Blindboy, Part 1: Unmasking the Evil Elite Cabal
Aired: 2026-03-06
Duration: 02:32:41


=== Horse Outside: Cody's Hook (08:53) ===

[00:00:25]  Hello and welcome to the Cody of the Gurus podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listens to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
[00:00:34]  I'm the psychologist, Matt Brown, and with me, as always, is the cognitive anthropologist, Chris Kavanaugh, and I join you Chris, back in God's own country Queensland, after being down in the hellhole that is Melbourne Victoria Australia, went to the Big Smoke.
[00:00:53]  It was like crocodile done.
[00:00:54]  The internal version yes, internal version, that's right, but it could well be the same.
[00:01:01]  Everyone down there, it's raining, there's multi-story high-rises, everyone's wearing leather or black or grey.
[00:01:07]  Were you confused by moving escalators and whipped out?
[00:01:10]  That's not a knife, this is a knife.
[00:01:15]  Not quite that far.
[00:01:16]  You city folk don't know how to wrestle an alleged.
[00:01:20]  Watch this.
[00:01:20]  Well, that's my Australian accent.
[00:01:24]  Let's just say, like I know you've, you've often admired the, the bronzed, even orange coloring that I have.
[00:01:30]  Um uh yeah, you know um, I I stood out in the same way in Melbourne.
[00:01:35]  They're like wraiths um, hardly kissed by the sun.
[00:01:39]  Probably that's all relative, because I I feel what you regard as a reif in Australia would be uh, a swarthy town versus a garment.
[00:01:50]  Well, let me put it this way, I think they're about as Un-Australian as you can get while still being technically Australian.
[00:01:56]  Oh, that's good.
[00:01:56]  I like that you're annoying Australians after upsetting the Northern Irish and Scottish people last time.
[00:02:03]  Nobody's safe.
[00:02:04]  That's safe.
[00:02:06]  You'll all come to hate me.
[00:02:07]  That's right.
[00:02:10]  Speaking of your company here, no, that's not fair.
[00:02:14]  That's not fair.
[00:02:15]  We're looking today, Matt, at a beloved figure amongst some quarters.
[00:02:22]  Actually, somebody that I enjoyed quite a lot back in the day when they were primarily part of a satirical Irish comedy hip-hop band.
[00:02:37]  We're looking at Blind Boy Book Club.
[00:02:40]  Okay.
[00:02:41]  So originally was one half of the band, The Rubber Bandits, which is where I came across him with a famous song, I've Got a Horse Outside.
[00:02:51]  Right.
[00:02:52]  That's you.
[00:02:54]  I swear it is a famous song.
[00:02:57]  That's if it's so famous.
[00:02:58]  Why haven't I heard of it?
[00:02:59]  That's what I was saying.
[00:03:00]  You will have heard it.
[00:03:01]  The other thing that they're known for, that band, I don't think they still perform.
[00:03:05]  I think they've kind of gone their separate ways, but they wore plastic bags on their heads, like shopping bags with high holes and mouth holes.
[00:03:13]  So, this was a signature look of them.
[00:03:16]  Sorry, it was Horse Outside.
[00:03:18]  That was the title of their song.
[00:03:19]  You probably didn't get it because of that.
[00:03:24]  You would know it as Horse Outside.
[00:03:26]  Yeah.
[00:03:57]  So, what the fuck would make you think I'd wanna go with you?
[00:04:00]  He said, Fuck your underceived horse outside.
[00:04:05]  Fuck your sober row, I have a horse outside.
[00:04:09]  And fuck your mental bitch.
[00:04:11]  Hey, I'll give a horse outside.
[00:04:13]  If you're looking for a ride, I'll horse outside.
[00:04:18]  Oh, yeah, and also, Matt, he is a fellow Irishman, right?
[00:04:21]  He's from the south, you know, the real Ireland, as you would put it.
[00:04:25]  Yes.
[00:04:25]  He's from Limerick.
[00:04:26]  And, you know, I'm a pretender, as you like to say, Matt.
[00:04:30]  I'm just a northern man, you know?
[00:04:33]  So I probably don't, I don't read, you know, the same level of Irishness, but I'm just saying that, you know, we're from a related background, shall we say?
[00:04:42]  Yeah, you're from the same landmass.
[00:04:44]  We can agree on that.
[00:04:45]  The same landmass.
[00:04:46]  That's right.
[00:04:46]  We're all from the Emerald Isle.
[00:04:48]  Okay.
[00:04:49]  Yeah.
[00:04:50]  So, like I said, kind of satirical comedy stuff.
[00:04:54]  Some of it is specific to Ireland.
[00:04:56]  It's like Irish humor, you know, making fun of different counties and this kind of thing.
[00:05:00]  But some of it was just also broader stuff.
[00:05:03]  And this is one half, right?
[00:05:04]  So this guy goes by Blind Boy Book Club.
[00:05:07]  After the band, he started a podcast, The Blind Boy Podcast, which is apparently very popular.
[00:05:15]  Lots of people listen to it in Ireland and the rest of the world.
[00:05:19]  And you might see him pop up on like Novara media, left-wing media, he mainly features in, or some talk shows.
[00:05:29]  But yeah, but we are looking at his podcast, The Blind Boy podcast, which in the blurb, often discussing mental health, masculinity, socio-political issues, so on, right?
[00:05:43]  Yeah.
[00:05:44]  And he's very well regarded, isn't he?
[00:05:46]  I don't think there's been much criticism of him online.
[00:05:49]  Even when I consulted with Claude, Claude was very complimentary.
[00:05:53]  I noticed.
[00:05:55]  Is that correct?
[00:05:56]  I think a loyal following on social media like Reddit.
[00:06:01]  So that this will be fun.
[00:06:04]  Yes, you are right.
[00:06:05]  He is generally very well regarded.
[00:06:07]  You know, the thing is, Matt, in general, Irish people, you know, people like them.
[00:06:12]  And when you're talking about the stances, which you have to work really hard to get people to distract you.
[00:06:18]  I've carved out of the video.
[00:06:20]  The one Irish person that you know doesn't get that.
[00:06:26]  Well, me and Bono, me and Bono.
[00:06:28]  But yeah.
[00:06:30]  So the thing is that he is often talking about, like I say, mental health awareness, but also anti-globalization, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, the Gaza conflict, right?
[00:06:45]  So these are things which, at least in left-wing quarters, are generally seen as positives.
[00:06:51]  You're drawing attention to important issues, raising awareness of mental health issues and geopolitical conflicts that need more attention, as well as the horrors of capitalism, right?
[00:07:05]  Yep, yep.
[00:07:06]  Certainly ticking a lot of boxes there.
[00:07:08]  Yes.
[00:07:09]  So he had a series that was on BBC3 called Blown Boy Undestroys the World.
[00:07:14]  And it would be familiar, you know, the kind of manufacturing consent type analyses of how the world functions and global exploitation.
[00:07:25]  He's not a fan of neoliberal capitalism.
[00:07:27]  Let's put it like that.
[00:07:28]  I mean, we're going to hear that.
[00:07:30]  Yeah.
[00:07:30]  And on that subject of his popularity, Matt, may I invite the listeners this time to recall what we do on this podcast, which is we are interested in secular gurus, right?
[00:07:46]  That's the hook of this podcast.
[00:07:48]  And we note features that are recurrent amongst that set.
[00:07:53]  We look at people from that perspective.
[00:07:56]  And there are people that we've covered that we genuinely don't like.
[00:08:01]  You know, Dave Rubin, the Red Scaregirls, for example, who don't fit the template very well, right?
[00:08:08]  Never been critical of them, but just because we don't like them doesn't make them a guru.
[00:08:14]  On the other hand, just because we might agree with someone politically on various issues does not mean that they are not a secular guru.
[00:08:26]  So we've covered this with Gary Stevenson whenever we were talking about is inequality a problem?
[00:08:33]  Yes.
[00:08:33]  Does that mean that Gary Stevenson is not engaged in guruish things because of that?
[00:08:39]  No, right?
[00:08:40]  So I just invite people because I know that, you know, in our audience, there's a little bit of a skew towards the left-hand side of politics.
[00:08:47]  And Blind Boy says things that appeal to that side a bit more.
[00:08:51]  But don't ask yourself, do I agree with Blind Boy's politics?
[00:08:55]  Ask yourself, are the things that he's doing similar to what we've covered with other gurus, right?
[00:09:04]  That's the question because you can completely agree with whatever criticisms or completely disagree.
[00:09:10]  And it's a kind of separate question about whether the person is engaged in guruish tactics and rhetoric.

=== Custom Plastic Bag (03:19) ===

[00:09:19]  Okay.
[00:09:20]  Yeah.
[00:09:20]  Yeah.
[00:09:21]  Well, that's a valiant attempt to avoid getting accused of being a neoliberal shield, Chris.
[00:09:28]  But, you know, I respect it.
[00:09:29]  I don't like your chances, but I respect it.
[00:09:33]  Well, we know what's going to happen, Matt.
[00:09:34]  But you just got to, I just got to encourage people.
[00:09:37]  Come on.
[00:09:38]  Like, just think, you know, this is the thing that occasionally happens, which is like, Matt and Chris, they're very good.
[00:09:45]  I really like what they're doing until they cover someone that I agree with.
[00:09:49]  And then it just falls apart.
[00:09:50]  The whole system, it doesn't work.
[00:09:52]  None of it makes any sense.
[00:09:53]  They're just biased assholes.
[00:09:55]  And you're like, just, I mean, is it that?
[00:09:59]  Is it that?
[00:10:01]  That's all I'm saying.
[00:10:02]  Anyway.
[00:10:03]  Anyway, anyway, let's have nothing but nice things to say about that's true.
[00:10:08]  Who knows what we're going to say?
[00:10:10]  Who knows?
[00:10:13]  And the bag he wears on his head.
[00:10:16]  It's not just any old, like a shopping bag.
[00:10:19]  Well, it is a shopping bag.
[00:10:20]  Is it?
[00:10:22]  It looks tightly fitted, at least to the pictures I've seen.
[00:10:25]  It's almost like a balaclava, but made out of plastic.
[00:10:27]  It sort of clings to his head.
[00:10:30]  Yes.
[00:10:31]  So I don't know if he was joking.
[00:10:33]  He said at one point that he has like a custom one, which looks like a plastic bag, but which is more comfortable.
[00:10:39]  But that could have just been a joke.
[00:10:41]  But the general thing with a plastic bag on the head, the main argument as to why he wears it is that he wants to maintain anonymity, right?
[00:10:51]  If he has this plastic bag, then outside of his public persona, he's not identified.
[00:10:58]  He's not recognized in public and he has issues about anxiety and introverted person, according to himself, right?
[00:11:09]  So this helps him to remain anonymous.
[00:11:13]  This is the justification, the primary one that he offers for wearing the bag.
[00:11:17]  Now, a cynical person, Matt, not me, but a cynical person might note that it also functions as somewhat of a brand.
[00:11:28]  You know, like he rose to prominence as part of a band where the gimmick was that they have a plastic bag on their head.
[00:11:37]  And into his following career, he kept the moniker from the band and the plastic bag.
[00:11:44]  The other member of the band didn't, right?
[00:11:48]  He's actually on YouTube doing these quite weird experimental art projects.
[00:11:53]  Like he makes these videos about creating these very intricate dioramas or art projects.
[00:12:01]  And as I mentioned to you, one of the things that the other guy did who goes by the name of Bobby Chrome, right?
[00:12:10]  Mr. Chrome, was that he transplanted one of his horse hairs onto the top of his head in Turkey?
[00:12:17]  This was like part of, you know, one of those videos.
[00:12:19]  So like he's very involved.
[00:12:21]  But that guy is not wearing the plastic bag anymore.
[00:12:24]  So I'm just noting.
[00:12:26]  Otherwise, and otherwise completely normal with the transplantation of his YouTube channel is interesting, though.
[00:12:34]  It's like it's very, you would like him avant-garde.
[00:12:37]  Avant-garde art.

=== Thoughts Whispered in Your Ear (02:59) ===

[00:12:38]  I get it.
[00:12:38]  Yeah, I get it.
[00:12:39]  I get the statement that was getting made there.
[00:12:42]  Okay, so he's stuck with the bag.
[00:12:44]  And yes, a cynical person might say it's a brand, a bit of a gimmick, a memorable one, but he's offered other explanations for wearing it, hasn't he?
[00:12:54]  Well, I think he's talked about that the specific bags are associated with a like local shop, which is no longer in existence.
[00:13:06]  So it's like sort of a tribute to that as well.
[00:13:09]  But I mean, the majority explanation that gets cited is that it enables him to maintain anonymity that he otherwise wouldn't have.
[00:13:20]  He told a story, for example, where he was out and he got wasted.
[00:13:24]  And the next day he threw up while he was walking, you know, down a street in Dublin or somewhere, Limerick, I don't know, somewhere in Ireland.
[00:13:34]  And he was saying if he didn't have the mask, people would have been like, oh, look, that's Blind Boy thrown up there in the street.
[00:13:42]  But because he wore the mask, like people were just like, oh, it's a drunk Irish person thrown up.
[00:13:46]  And yeah, it's useful for that purpose.
[00:13:49]  That makes sense.
[00:13:50]  That makes a lot of sense.
[00:13:51]  Okay.
[00:13:51]  So in the material we listen to, and you've heard a lot of other stuff by Blind Boy.
[00:13:57]  I've only heard this one.
[00:13:59]  You know, and I'm doing just enough to get by.
[00:14:02]  But so this is a, this is like a, what's he called it?
[00:14:06]  A phone call episode?
[00:14:07]  Like an it's it's an off-the-cuff riff and a stream of consciousness, isn't it?
[00:14:11]  Yeah, so he refers to this as a phone call episode.
[00:14:16]  And well, let me just play it because I have the clip where he's explaining what he's doing.
[00:14:24]  Repel from the melty bell, you sweltering Emmets.
[00:14:28]  Welcome to the Blind Boy podcast.
[00:14:31]  If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.
[00:14:39]  I'm a busy boy this week.
[00:14:41]  I'm in the middle of my Irish tour.
[00:14:44]  Tomorrow night, well tonight if you're listening to this podcast on Wednesday morning, I'm in Vicker Street, sold out gig in Vicker Street.
[00:14:53]  I cannot wait.
[00:14:54]  As I've mentioned before, gigging and touring is very time-consuming.
[00:14:59]  So for this week's podcast, I'm gonna do a phone call episode.
[00:15:04]  And a phone call episode is where it's where I kind of riff.
[00:15:09]  I riff off the top of my head.
[00:15:11]  And the podcast isn't rigorously researched or written.
[00:15:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:17]  So, and you can hear that too, something we forgot to mention, which is that this is a kind of ASMR.
[00:15:25]  Yeah, there's that clinky music in the background, soft piano or whatever it is, is going to play throughout.
[00:15:31]  And the delivery is like a guy whispering in your ear and telling you stories.

=== February's Stream of Consciousness (03:19) ===

[00:15:38]  And that's that's what it's like throughout, right?
[00:15:42]  Some people might love that, man.
[00:15:44]  Some people might enjoy it.
[00:15:46]  I can't say I'm a fan of this kind of delivery.
[00:15:50]  I think, you know, podcasts create, in general, a kind of audio intimacy, if you like, right?
[00:15:57]  And there are ways to ratchet that up.
[00:15:59]  And like whispering with soft music playing might be one of those ways.
[00:16:03]  But yes, so that's that's the delivery, take it or leave it.
[00:16:08]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:08]  And of course, the framing there is that this is a stream of consciousness riff.
[00:16:14]  So I guess it's a caveat that you shouldn't take any of this too seriously.
[00:16:20]  It's not carefully researched or anything.
[00:16:23]  It's just thoughts coming into his mind that he's sharing with us.
[00:16:28]  Yes, that's the general disclaimer, if you like, right?
[00:16:33]  And just to highlight, man, so that's the way that this episode gets introduced, right?
[00:16:38]  This is the next episode that came out after.
[00:16:42]  So just to give you a comparison about the introductions.
[00:16:45]  If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.
[00:16:53]  But if you're a regular listener, you know the crack.
[00:16:56]  We're in the gusset.
[00:16:57]  The gusset of February.
[00:17:01]  Things are getting nice and sweaty out there.
[00:17:04]  I experienced my first blast of decent sunshine the other day.
[00:17:09]  The type of sunshine that hits your back and lets you know that you have to start changing the clothes that you're wearing.
[00:17:17]  That you have to adjust your attire because you're moving into a new season.
[00:17:21]  And the birds have started chirping.
[00:17:24]  There's no more silence in the trees.
[00:17:26]  Now February, it's a greasy month.
[00:17:30]  It's dirty.
[00:17:31]  It's mucky.
[00:17:32]  It's very teenage.
[00:17:34]  It's a very teenage month.
[00:17:36]  Remember when you were like 12 or 13 and you get subtle hormonal changes in your body?
[00:17:42]  You come home from school and your school jumper is sticky and so is your shirt.
[00:17:47]  And you're suddenly thrust into this new routine of personal hygiene.
[00:17:50]  It's like, oh, you got to shower every fucking day now.
[00:17:53]  You have to wear deodorant.
[00:17:55]  And you get spots in your face.
[00:17:57]  And the change comes so quick that it takes a while to figure it out and to get comfortable with the new things that are happening to your body.
[00:18:05]  February is a month that's a bit like that.
[00:18:07]  Visually, it still looks like winter.
[00:18:09]  The trees are bare, but the ground is warming up so everything's all muddy when you walk in it.
[00:18:15]  And you're just waiting for things to settle so you can finally call it spring.
[00:18:19]  And I'm not going to say February is my favorite month.
[00:18:21]  It's not.
[00:18:23]  But the name, the name February, by far it's my favorite month.
[00:18:29]  Because the origin story of where the word February came from.
[00:18:35]  And he's going to go in there to explaining the origins of February.
[00:18:39]  So I play that just to mention that his non-funkoal podcasts, they don't have a completely different feel to them.
[00:18:49]  You know, they're riffing from topic to topic and, you know, going into history and myth and legend and linking things together, which he does in this episode.

=== Conspiracy Theories and Connections (15:27) ===

[00:18:58]  But yeah, yeah, doesn't seem to be a big distinction.
[00:19:03]  And you get a, it was very familiar there, kind of the, I guess, artistic associational approach he's got there.
[00:19:09]  His main, his main motif there was comparing the month of February with being an adolescent, like a life stage.
[00:19:18]  And then he, yeah, presumably just moved on from there.
[00:19:21]  So yeah, I heard a lot of that coming through in this episode too.
[00:19:26]  It's kind of an artistic mode, isn't it?
[00:19:29]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:19:30]  It's very based on associations.
[00:19:33]  You know, it actually isn't a million miles from the way that the Sensemakers or Jordan Peterson work, that, you know, they connect things thematically and they go into like extended discussions of little stories to illustrate points.
[00:19:47]  So it's interesting in that respect because like I think the people that find Jordan Peterson appealing would not find Blindboy appealing, right?
[00:19:56]  Because he's hitting on very different motifs and political points of view.
[00:20:02]  But in terms of the approach to evidence, to reasoning and so on, it is actually very similar.
[00:20:09]  It's interesting, isn't it, how things can be immediately recognizable as being right-wing, conservative, coded, and left-wing coded.
[00:20:16]  But as you say, that doesn't really mean anything.
[00:20:20]  They can't be structurally or formally like underneath it, very similar, but be appealing to completely different audiences, depending on how the coding is, for want of a better word.
[00:20:31]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:33]  And, you know, the Epstein files, Matt, and the release have been just a gold mine.
[00:20:41]  A kind of like online gold hot takes and conspiracy takes and so on, as well as legitimate outrage revelations, all these kind of things.
[00:20:54]  But whenever you dump a huge amount of content out into the public, it you know.
[00:21:00]  It's the same thing that happened with WIKI leaks or anything like that.
[00:21:03]  You know the the Democrats email right, the Podesta email hacks or these kind of things like there just is a a rush to kind of connect them to.
[00:21:15]  Whatever your particular perspective and interpretive framework is right, and Blind Boy is doing an episode here because people have asked him.
[00:21:27]  You you've got to give your take on these, these Epstein stuff, right?
[00:21:32]  So yeah well, let's see where that goes.
[00:21:35]  So here's the beginning of how this episode is framed.
[00:21:39]  Hundreds of ye have been sending me dms and asking me to speak about the Jeffrey Epstein carry-on, which is the U.S Department OF Justice.
[00:21:53]  It's the U.S Department OF Justice is releasing some of the Epstein files and it's the U.S Department OF Justice now, you see.
[00:22:02]  So you have to take that seriously, and a lot of the Epstein files would suggest that a group of very powerful billionaires multi-millionaires, people involved in politics, the royal family, a lot of very, very powerful people are alleged to be involved in sex trafficking, abusing people, abusing children,
[00:22:32]  things that to speak about them would get you labeled as a conspiracy theorist.
[00:22:40]  Now you're looking at files being released by the?
[00:22:42]  U.sice which align with Illuminati conspiracy theories, and it would also appear nothing's being done about it.
[00:22:55]  The current president of of the United States, Donald Trump, is implicated heavily.
[00:23:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:03]  So here there, um Blind Boy emphasizes a couple of times that this material was released by the U.S. Department OF Justice.
[00:23:12]  And I think he goes on to repeat that theme a bit.
[00:23:15]  The implication being that this sort of institutional authority of the DOJ, I guess, elevates the credibility or epistemic status of whatever is in those files.
[00:23:28]  You have to take it seriously.
[00:23:31]  Yeah.
[00:23:31]  Yeah.
[00:23:32]  And there's reference to, you know, the like conspiracies by the Illuminati have been vindicated.
[00:23:38]  And this echoes what other commentators have said about, you know, Pizzagate is not so much of a conspiracy as actually also highlighting mentions of pizza in the emails.
[00:23:50]  And I'll just say, Matt, that like, no, that's not actually true.
[00:23:53]  Like the lurid claims of Pizzagate, QAnon, Illuminati people have not been vindicated by this.
[00:24:00]  This is like a popular narrative that you see online.
[00:24:02]  It's been echoed on the right by a whole bunch of people as well.
[00:24:06]  People like Bill Maher also saying, you know, now we know it's true.
[00:24:10]  And that's not what the emails show.
[00:24:12]  What the emails show is elite networks, people being sycophantic to Jeffrey Epstein, not caring about his crimes, people like Elon Musk asking to party with him, all this kind of thing, right?
[00:24:26]  Lawrence Krauss being a creepy dude, all these kind of things.
[00:24:29]  What they don't reveal is that there's a network of secret paedophile trafficking going on that is out in the open, discussed in the emails.
[00:24:39]  No, actually, the emails don't support that claim.
[00:24:43]  They support what we already knew, which is like Jeffrey Epstein abusing underage girls and people not caring about that, right?
[00:24:51]  And of course, there's a massive corpus of material released.
[00:24:54]  Like it's a real bulk release, including not only emails, of which I've read that like only a small percentage of them are in any way sort of connected to the scandal.
[00:25:06]  Like the vast majority of communications there are just basically this mover and shaker schmoozing with a bunch of other powerful people.
[00:25:16]  Right.
[00:25:17]  Now, there's also a bunch of material like victim statements and things like that, but like a lot of them are anonymous or there's FBI tip-offs, for example, from anonymous callers, right?
[00:25:28]  Which are later, some of them, which Blind Boy will reference that, you know, were later sort of removed whenever they were making lurid claims about Donald Trump.
[00:25:36]  But like in this case, you're talking about a call-in line where people are just free to say anything, right?
[00:25:45]  There are also more serious claims and so on, but it's like there's everything mixed in here.
[00:25:51]  So it's fertile ground for conspiracy theorists.
[00:25:56]  So with that in mind, let's see where we go here.
[00:26:00]  One thing that you've noticed is that Blind Boy does constantly appeal to the fact that the Department of Justice has released this, so now you have to take it seriously.
[00:26:08]  And I'm kind of like, you know, an anonymous tip-off to the FBI isn't suddenly valid because the FBI released it or an investigative reporter talk about it, right?
[00:26:21]  Like it doesn't make it valid because it comes from the government.
[00:26:26]  No, that's right.
[00:26:27]  It's conflating random and sometimes totally unsubstantiated allegations as revelations and sort of leveraging the fact that this came through the USDOJ as implying something it doesn't.
[00:26:42]  Yeah.
[00:26:42]  And oh, just I'll clip from later, Matt, to make the point that he actually is talking about conspiracy theorists being vindicated.
[00:26:50]  So look, Lordsy, you were asking me to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
[00:26:57]  The thing is, right?
[00:26:58]  So fair play to the conspiracy theorists.
[00:27:04]  All right, you were right about a lot of stuff.
[00:27:06]  Unfortunately, you were right.
[00:27:10]  What a lot of the conspiracy theorists were not right about was who was doing it.
[00:27:15]  You've elected into power Donald Trump, right?
[00:27:18]  So the people who are funding right-wing groups around the world, the people who want you to turn against immigrants, the people who want you to turn against feminists, trans people, women, the people who want you to hate wokeness, the people who tell you everyone is a Marxist communist and they want to destroy the world.
[00:27:46]  The people who've told you to turn against a woke.
[00:27:49]  They're funding all of that.
[00:27:51]  Okay, so those people are actually the ones who they really want you to be against immigrants and feminists and trans people.
[00:28:00]  They really want this so that we have the type of division that distracts us from what they're doing.
[00:28:07]  I think they funded things like QAnon, the alt-right.
[00:28:14]  They also funded conspiracy theories about a shadowy global paedophile elite to make it look ridiculous so that some people would never touch it because it is so ridiculous.
[00:28:29]  Like adrenochrome.
[00:28:31]  I think it's ridiculous.
[00:28:36]  It only just occurred to me now, but that theory has got there.
[00:28:41]  It's actually incredibly similar to one of Brett Weinstein's theories, or it could have been Eric's.
[00:28:45]  Do you remember, Chris?
[00:28:47]  Which one?
[00:28:48]  Well, he had a theory that the powers that be, Goliath, Was actually putting all of this, releasing all these clues about this crazy conspiracy so it would attract conspiracy theorists and then would delegitimize them by believing it.
[00:29:05]  Do you remember that?
[00:29:06]  Yes, yes, he did.
[00:29:08]  That was Brett.
[00:29:08]  Yes, Brett was saying people are trying to make this conspiracy appealing so that we can delegitimize conspiracy theorists.
[00:29:18]  Yeah, there is like a similar DNA there in that claim.
[00:29:22]  And the thing that is presented there is the conspiracies are right, but it's just your targets are wrong.
[00:29:29]  Like the shadowy elite are the right wing people and they've created all of this.
[00:29:35]  It's like they funded QAnon in order to throw you off the scent of the real conspiracies.
[00:29:43]  And yeah.
[00:29:44]  Yeah, that's that's quite a meta-conspiracy theory that is up there.
[00:29:48]  I've got to say with Brett.
[00:29:51]  Okay, but you can also hear he's obviously linking this to like kind of all of the left-wing badges, I suppose.
[00:29:59]  Yes, yeah, yeah.
[00:30:00]  Yeah.
[00:30:00]  And this is, of course, the commitments of the audience.
[00:30:04]  So I think that's quite a, well, I can see that such a move would be effective, I think.
[00:30:09]  Oh, yeah.
[00:30:10]  Yeah.
[00:30:10]  And actually, Matt, there's another parallel.
[00:30:12]  I was going to point this out later, but I think it fits in with these clips that we're playing.
[00:30:18]  So there's one where he's talking about the global elite's plans, right, and what they're up to.
[00:30:24]  And he's going to connect it to Gaza, which is something that dramatically comes up quite a lot.
[00:30:29]  And again, as you say, this is something that is more appealing to the kind of left-wing audience.
[00:30:37]  But when you listen to this, I just want you to try and see how this differs from the great reset conspiracies that were popular on the right.
[00:30:48]  Let's see if there's a difference.
[00:30:50]  In the face of climate collapse, I think they're trying to replace a huge amount of the population with artificial intelligence robots.
[00:30:59]  I know this sounds fucking nuts, but you can see it unfolding.
[00:31:03]  They're putting a lot of money into artificial intelligence robots that can perform the work of the working class.
[00:31:10]  They want to move to a type of technological feudalism where, and you can see this now with how huge giant investment funds invest in property.
[00:31:24]  So they don't want a future where people own their own property.
[00:31:28]  They want a future where we perpetually rent.
[00:31:31]  So everything is perpetually rented.
[00:31:34]  Not just your home, but access to resources like food, water, the technology that you use.
[00:31:42]  Everything will be shifted towards a subscription model where you're not really even a consumer anymore.
[00:31:49]  Everything is you're subscribing or renting and you're tied to that.
[00:31:54]  And then likely because of what Palantir is doing, which is Peter Thiel's company, they're going to use AI to try and have some type of social credit system where your access to the things that you can rent is denied if you don't behave properly.
[00:32:14]  If you look at Trump and his Freedom Council and some of the proposals that what they want to do to Gaza, the city that they will rebuild in Gaza, like if you look at the plans that they have explicitly laid out, the people in Gaza won't have cash.
[00:32:34]  They'll have like digital credits, like Disney dollars.
[00:32:38]  So there's full control over how they spend.
[00:32:42]  The land is treated as a redevelopment asset, not as a homeland.
[00:32:46]  Gaza would be a humanitarian zone rather than an autonomous political entity.
[00:32:52]  The population would be viewed as like aid recipients rather than citizens.
[00:32:58]  Just this weird AI-controlled technocracy ruled by Trump's board of peace, as he calls it, right?
[00:33:09]  Well, Chris.
[00:33:11]  On the surface, that does have a lot in common with the QAnon level conspiracies.
[00:33:17]  Different branding, of course, different vibes.
[00:33:20]  So, you know, yes, they're replacing all the people, but it's not the white people they're replacing.
[00:33:25]  It's the working class and so on.
[00:33:26]  So the details change, but the structure is very similar.
[00:33:30]  Yeah, I just heard a lot of echoes of James Lindsay type stuff, right?
[00:33:35]  You'll own nothing and be happy.
[00:33:37]  They want to take everything and make it subscription services.
[00:33:40]  And I looked into some of the stuff around like cashless Disney box in Gaza.
[00:33:46]  And this relates to like kind of proposals that have been made about the fact that because there's going to be these rebuilding efforts in Gaza, you know, this is part of the idea because of how much resources have been degraded there, like with money production facilities and so on, that cryptocurrencies or whatnot might play a part in it.
[00:34:07]  But it's all, you know, it's just very much in the thing of Trump saying, we'll rebuild and it'll be an incredible utopia and all that kind of stuff.
[00:34:16]  Like it's not that they're now setting up that there's going to be like a techno-utopia in Gaza where people won't own anything and this is a trial for the rest of the world.

=== White Collar Interrogation (15:40) ===

[00:34:26]  And yeah.
[00:34:28]  Yeah, I think there's a theme.
[00:34:29]  I mean, similar to James Lindsay or frankly any of them, there'll always be grains of truth in the things that they're saying.
[00:34:35]  There is a great reset.
[00:34:36]  There was a great reset argument.
[00:34:38]  That's right.
[00:34:38]  Like the World Economic Forum did mention eating bugs or something, you know, so there is, there's always raw material to build off, but you have to look at that narrative and ask yourself, is it reasonable?
[00:34:49]  I'm still a little bit stuck too about what's the great distinction between renting food and consuming food.
[00:34:55]  I mean, like, what is this?
[00:34:57]  Like, is it the same thing?
[00:34:58]  Like, you buy the food, you eat the food, then a few days later, you buy some more food.
[00:35:05]  Like, what's the big distinction between?
[00:35:07]  I think the claim would be linked to, you know, the kind of Monsanto renting the Terminator seeds and this kind of thing.
[00:35:16]  Like, I think if you got into it, you would get into it.
[00:35:19]  So once again, literal seeds of truth there.
[00:35:21]  Seeds of grains of truth.
[00:35:23]  That's what I would take it to be.
[00:35:25]  But, you know, the general thing is like they want to, you know, extract more money from you in shittification.
[00:35:31]  Yeah, enslave us.
[00:35:32]  Yeah.
[00:35:33]  The elites want to enslave us all.
[00:35:34]  Yeah.
[00:35:35]  Okay.
[00:35:35]  But, you know, even if you agree with that general overall statement, I think you have to realize there are parallels with what Alex Jones says.
[00:35:43]  Now, he's talking about the fact that Thiel and Kurtish Yarvin have these anti-democratic wet dreams about the techno-feudalist states that they're going to set up.
[00:35:54]  And those are true.
[00:35:55]  Again, we've listened to Thiel talk about that.
[00:35:58]  But the fact that people say that does not mean that it is actually a fact that Thiel is controlling all of the government policies.
[00:36:09]  Yeah.
[00:36:10]  And likewise, I think you have to take Trump's statements about turning Palestine into the Riviera of the Middle East filled with gold-plated hotels.
[00:36:20]  I think you have to take that stuff with a grain of salt.
[00:36:23]  Yeah.
[00:36:23]  I mean, he might want to do that, but, you know, that's the thing.
[00:36:28]  Trump wants to do a lot of things and claims a lot of things, right?
[00:36:32]  So you can't just take it as because he posted that video on Twitter or whatever, that's what's going to happen, right?
[00:36:40]  Like, no, you got to be more skeptical.
[00:36:44]  But like, it doesn't mean Trump wouldn't want that or Peter Teal doesn't want that kind of future where there's the tech feudal overlords, right?
[00:36:52]  It's not like that.
[00:36:53]  But even in that case, Matt, like Palantir, for example, he talks about a social credit system, but the CEO of Palantir and the various other people in that, they also are talking about, you know, that because they are anti-communist, right?
[00:37:07]  They're always presenting it, that China has social credit systems and we're, we want to destroy that.
[00:37:12]  But here, Blind Boy says, oh, no, Palantir is the one that's going to bring that in.
[00:37:17]  But they position themselves as the anti-communist.
[00:37:21]  So everybody's accusing everyone that they're all going to bring in social credit systems.
[00:37:26]  And techno-slavery.
[00:37:28]  Yeah.
[00:37:28]  I mean, it is interesting how the same, the same sort of conspiracy narratives actually could serve politically diametric purposes so easily.
[00:37:37]  Like it doesn't take much modification to do so.
[00:37:41]  Yes.
[00:37:41]  Well, let's return down to Earth because it was about Epstein, right?
[00:37:45]  Those clips that I'm playing come later.
[00:37:47]  But let's build up to those conspiracies.
[00:37:51]  It goes further, I should say, as well.
[00:37:54]  But here's the beginning.
[00:37:56]  Millions of files were released this week by the U.S. Department.
[00:38:00]  Here's the thing.
[00:38:02]  Some of the things in these files allege cannibalism of infants.
[00:38:11]  It's, I believe the testimony of a person who said they witnessed it may not be true.
[00:38:17]  But the point is, it's been released by the US Department of Justice, you see.
[00:38:23]  So now, see, things have moved from tinfoil hat online Reddit thread to released by the US Department of Justice.
[00:38:37]  And you see, that massively changes things.
[00:38:41]  And some information is being interrogated by media.
[00:38:46]  Some information isn't being interrogated by the media.
[00:38:49]  And from what I can tell so far, like I said, police are assessing something to do with Andrew and police are assessing, over in England, police are assessing something to do with Peter Mandelson and whether or not he disclosed, Mandelson was, he was business secretary to Gordon Brown when he was prime minister of the UK in 2009.
[00:39:16]  And the police are investigating whether he disclosed sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein, which is white collar.
[00:39:27]  We call that white collar.
[00:39:29]  And it's more serious than white collar crime because you're talking about someone in a position of political power and they're going against their country and they might bring a bit of sedition into it.
[00:39:43]  But it's in that white collar territory.
[00:39:47]  Okay.
[00:39:48]  So Matt, you heard there, you know, there's reports of cannibalism and like, you know, they're not verified, Matt, but the fact they come from the Department of Justice, that changes everything, doesn't it?
[00:40:00]  And like, I mean, just to point out, no, it doesn't, right?
[00:40:04]  It doesn't.
[00:40:05]  You can get anonymous tips that are reported on Reddit or that are reported to the FBI.
[00:40:11]  It doesn't mean that you have to take it, especially, I mean, people should be skeptical in general of, you know, authorities and so on.
[00:40:20]  But in this case, the fact that the Trump Department of Justice releases something, no, it doesn't mean that it's definitely now much more serious or that kind of thing.
[00:40:30]  The.
[00:40:31]  The Trump administration put out a thing saying the Lamb leak was proven on the.
[00:40:36]  You know the official government sites.
[00:40:39]  That doesn't mean no, you have to take that seriously.
[00:40:42]  Yeah yeah, and one of the epistemic problems I had with this episode was that he, he made those caveats uh, just just a couple around.
[00:40:50]  Now you know the cannibalism.
[00:40:52]  Those reports may not be true, but then he goes on to treat uh, a bunch of other equally unsubstantiated reports around.
[00:41:02]  You know ritualistic murder and bodies being buried all over the place in golf courses as being, you know, very substantiated, that they have to be taken extraordinarily seriously.
[00:41:13]  So yes um overall, the framing is we need to take everything, uh in these files as kind of verified to some degree.
[00:41:24]  Yeah yeah, so you brought up that there's going to be references made to secret buried bodies on golf courses and that kind of thing right, and what that is in relation to is some accusations right, which are reported in the files.
[00:41:40]  So here's details about them.
[00:41:41]  So the Department OF Justice released this one and then deleted it after an hour, which means this wasn't supposed to get released.
[00:41:48]  So this is it's it's a victim statement, I believe, and it says, an unidentified female friend was forced to perform oral sex on president Trump approximately 35 years ago in New Jersey.
[00:42:02]  The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13 to 14 years of years of age when this occurred.
[00:42:09]  She allegedly bit president Trump while performing oral sex and was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting president Trump.
[00:42:18]  The friend said she was also abused by Epstein.
[00:42:21]  There's another mention of a 14 year old girl at big orgy parties with Bill Clinton present, victorious secret models.
[00:42:29]  Donald Trump another part online complainant reported she was a victim and a witness to a sex trafficking ring at the Trump golf course in Palo Verde between 1995 and 1996.
[00:42:41]  She reported Ghillain Maxwell as the madame and broker for the sex parties with Epstein.
[00:42:48]  Robin Leech, Donald Trump complainant reported participating in orgies and that some girls went missing, rumored to have been murdered and buried at the facility.
[00:42:58]  Complainant reported being threatened by Trump's then head of security that if she ever talked of what went on there and who she saw she would end up as fertilizer for the back Nine halls, like the other cunts.
[00:43:13]  That's a quote there That was released by the U.S. Department OF Justice.
[00:43:19]  That was taken down very quickly, but it was released.
[00:43:22]  Stayed up about two hours.
[00:43:24]  It's well documented.
[00:43:26]  The only response from the White House and the Justice Department regarding that is that there was a release, a news release with the new batch of files.
[00:43:38]  And the Department of Justice and the White House said some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.
[00:43:49]  If you've been looking at like corporate media, they're focusing on Peter Mandelson, fucking Prince Andrew.
[00:44:03]  Oh, so this is true, by the way, Matt.
[00:44:05]  There was a bunch of material released, right, which included those accusations, and they were removed after a couple of hours or whatever, right, with this presenter.
[00:44:16]  But can I just mention here that Blind Boy says, you know, the media is not covering this, blah, blah, blah.
[00:44:22]  When I looked this up, the person who'd reposted it with the documents, right, with the claims in it, was Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor on Twitter, viewed 17 million times, right?
[00:44:36]  So like, if the CNN anchor is not mainstream media reporting on it, like, you know, it's that claim that they're not interested in connections to Trump or whatever.
[00:44:47]  And you're like, what are you talking about?
[00:44:48]  They are.
[00:44:49]  Like, the right-wing media is constantly trying to downplay it.
[00:44:54]  But the general media is very clearly interested in connections with Trump.
[00:44:59]  Yeah.
[00:44:59]  Yeah.
[00:45:00]  The right-wing media is very interested in connections to Bill Clinton or to Bill Gates, naturally.
[00:45:07]  Left-wing media, very interested in these connections to Donald Trump.
[00:45:10]  And, you know, they're obviously incredibly lurid and disturbing allegations, but they are treated as revelations rather than unsubstantiated reports without a source from a data dump.
[00:45:27]  Now, yeah, I think he is guilty of just laying that stuff out there without any kind of, what's the word?
[00:45:35]  You know, there should be some kind of caveat there, I think, rather than taking it or rather letting the emotive work of those statements just substitute for critical analysis.
[00:45:48]  Yes, and what he wants to see, Matt, what he suggests, like what should happen in this case, right, is this.
[00:45:55]  Now we can't remember it because we're wondering whether or not Trump has been burying women on golf courses.
[00:46:04]  And like I said, with that allegation, it's a victim statement in the files.
[00:46:10]  I mean, here's the thing.
[00:46:12]  If anyone ever says that, you then immediately expect that the golf course gets dug up, don't you?
[00:46:18]  Someone has just mentioned the murder and a specific place where bodies are buried.
[00:46:23]  Well, do you not just dig up the golf course then and find out?
[00:46:26]  I haven't heard anything about that.
[00:46:28]  The reason the golf course thing is sticking out for me is I'm not going to repeat the specific threat that was quoted in the files.
[00:46:37]  I said it a couple of minutes ago.
[00:46:38]  I'm not going to repeat it again because it's so violent and misogynistic.
[00:46:43]  But it's alleged that Trump's then head of security that his threat to girls who had participated in orgies was, you're going to end up as fertilizer in that golf course.
[00:46:56]  And I can't stop thinking about Ivana Trump.
[00:47:00]  Ivana Trump was Trump's first wife.
[00:47:05]  The mother of Ivanka and Donald Jr. and Eric.
[00:47:11]  When Ivana divorced Trump in 1990, she accused him of rape.
[00:47:20]  She accused him of cruelty and abuse.
[00:47:26]  She wrote a tell-all book about it.
[00:47:28]  She got a divorce settlement of 14 million in 91, which in these days of billionaires, 14 million doesn't sound like a lot.
[00:47:38]  That was a lot back then.
[00:47:40]  Knowing Trump's personality, he holds grudges.
[00:47:45]  Anyone who's close to him says that he holds grudges.
[00:47:48]  He doesn't let go.
[00:47:49]  He's not a person who forgives people.
[00:47:52]  Okay, so there, Matt, Blind Boy is like, isn't it suspicious that they haven't gone and dug up the golf course, right, to check if there's any bodies there?
[00:48:02]  But one, no, that's not suspicious.
[00:48:04]  Like, you don't off an anonymous tip.
[00:48:08]  If you did that, you'd be digging up things all over the place.
[00:48:12]  And in this case, I went and did a whole bunch of research for various claims that Blind Boy makes here, right?
[00:48:19]  And he's pointing out that Donald Trump buried his ex-wife, Ivana, on the golf course.
[00:48:25]  This is true.
[00:48:26]  Now, some things to note here.
[00:48:29]  Some people have pointed out, well, isn't that a fucking weird thing to do?
[00:48:33]  Like, why would you want to be buried on a golf course?
[00:48:36]  And it is, right?
[00:48:37]  Like, as a normal person, it is weird.
[00:48:39]  But some counter points to that view that it was like intended to disser is that, first, when Trump was requesting permission to create a cemetery on his golf course, the planning thing, he asked for a 10-plot course.
[00:48:58]  And the justification, this was before anybody died, was that he wants to be buried there because this is his life fever.
[00:49:08]  This is where he's going to bury his family, including himself, right?
[00:49:12]  Overlooking his golf course.
[00:49:14]  So, the initial thing should be: okay, and this was done before his wife died, right?
[00:49:19]  You can go and see the reports around him claiming this.
[00:49:22]  Other people have claimed it's because he wanted to try and get like a tax loophole where he wouldn't have to pay tax on some land if it was classified as a cemetery, right?
[00:49:31]  Could be as well.
[00:49:32]  I wouldn't put that past him.
[00:49:34]  But the other thing, Matt, is that this funeral for his ex-wife was very public.
[00:49:39]  It was in 2022.
[00:49:40]  It was attended by all her children.
[00:49:43]  So, if this was intended as a huge insult to her, doesn't it strike as odd that it was all done in public with Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. and stuff?
[00:49:56]  They were all there.
[00:49:57]  And it was intended as an insult, but like an insult where he justified it in advance by presenting it that that's where he wants to get buried too.

=== Threats and Burial Insults (06:45) ===

[00:50:07]  Yeah, but also that the argument or innuendo there is that this is some kind of proof that a bunch of murdered people are in that golf course.
[00:50:21]  And so, the reasoning is essentially the files contain an allegation that women were threatened with being buried on the golf course.
[00:50:29]  Ivana Trump was buried on a golf course.
[00:50:32]  And then this sort of the pit of his stomach kind of stuff comes out.
[00:50:36]  You know, he can't separate these two things, they're just there in his head.
[00:50:39]  And he builds this sort of emotional case connecting them as if Trump has followed through on this purported threat.
[00:50:48]  And he disclaims that he doesn't have proof of any of this, but you know, he spends quite a lot of time working on that framing, planting the inference firmly in the listener's mind.
[00:51:01]  So, this seems like a textbook example of just asking questions.
[00:51:05]  You know, it's conspiracy hypothesizing.
[00:51:08]  It might not be true, Matt, but what if it was true, right?
[00:51:12]  And yeah, like the other notion is like, isn't it suspicious that they haven't dug up the golf course?
[00:51:19]  And you're like, no, that's not how that works, right?
[00:51:22]  You know, if I rang up the police and said there's a dead body buried in the cemetery, they wouldn't be like, oh, shit, we better go.
[00:51:29]  Well, Chris, that wouldn't be.
[00:51:32]  Let me restate that.
[00:51:33]  Let me restate it.
[00:51:35]  You said limited.
[00:51:36]  It's funny.
[00:51:37]  If I rang up the police and said, there's a murdered person and they've been buried in the cemetery in an unmarked grave, you better get down there, Tootsuite, and start digging up.
[00:51:48]  Like, what does mine boy think is going to happen?
[00:51:50]  They're going to drive down and start excavating this at the cemetery.
[00:51:53]  No, it doesn't work like that.
[00:51:55]  So there's that implication that it's suspicious that they haven't done that.
[00:51:59]  And it's like, no, that's not suspicious.
[00:52:02]  And then, as you said, Matt, the inference that he wants to plant into the audience is, well, come on.
[00:52:08]  Oh, and a small point, Matt.
[00:52:11]  But in that clip, you heard him say that, you know, Donald Trump never forgives a grudge, right?
[00:52:19]  Like, he's a person that never forgets his grudges.
[00:52:21]  But, like, how does that claim hold up with JD Vance being his vice president?
[00:52:28]  Didn't JD Vance call him like the next American Hitler or something like this?
[00:52:34]  Or, you know, present that he was a terrible person.
[00:52:37]  And in fact, a lot of Trump's cabinet seemed to have previously, you know, disparaged him or claimed that he was a terrible person.
[00:52:45]  And counting to what Blind Boy says, which is kind of like he never forgives, it seems more like Donald Trump is extremely transactional.
[00:52:54]  If you're praising him unreservedly now, he doesn't really seem to care that much if you were, you know, strongly opposed him before.
[00:53:04]  The main thing is, do you bend the knee now?
[00:53:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:53:09]  I think that is his character.
[00:53:12]  Yeah, and he has interesting friends like Mamdani and from New York City, for instance.
[00:53:19]  They've got a bit of a bromance going.
[00:53:21]  So Trump will typically, you know, say a bunch of horrible things about someone.
[00:53:24]  But if that person is nice to them, nice to him.
[00:53:29]  And, you know, there's no barrier in Trump's brain to just doing a full 360 and either hating someone who was previously loyal or loving someone who was a previous enemy.
[00:53:43]  Yeah, it's not a, you know, it's not a huge point.
[00:53:45]  I was just like, that characterization seems like slightly off.
[00:53:48]  Yes, he's someone that holds grudges, but he also, it does seem like you can get him to forgive your judges or you can get him to forgive his grudges.
[00:53:58]  Just flatter him.
[00:53:58]  Just flatter him a few times.
[00:54:01]  Yeah, and his ex-wife, Ivana, seemed to go down that route, you know, initially, like strongly criticizing him and accusing him of reup and all that.
[00:54:09]  But in the end, like, you know, getting on as well as you can, right?
[00:54:15]  But when you're Trump's ex-wife.
[00:54:17]  Yeah, I think because Trump himself is such a bullshit artist and has absolutely is, like you said, totally transactional and just says things, he expects everyone else to be the same.
[00:54:29]  So it's all part of the game.
[00:54:30]  I don't know.
[00:54:31]  Let's not psychoanalyze Trump, but whatever.
[00:54:33]  Okay.
[00:54:33]  Yeah, I'm just saying.
[00:54:34]  I'm just saying.
[00:54:35]  You're just saying.
[00:54:38]  Ivana died in 2022.
[00:54:41]  She fell down the stairs.
[00:54:45]  And I don't know if you remember this, but it was very strange.
[00:54:49]  He buried her on a golf course.
[00:54:52]  Do you remember that 2022?
[00:54:54]  And it being in the media and everyone going, that's so fucking strange.
[00:54:59]  Why would you bury your ex-wife on a golf course?
[00:55:02]  The fuck is that about?
[00:55:03]  That's so strange to have a plot in a golf course.
[00:55:08]  That's really weird.
[00:55:09]  And everyone noticed how weird it was.
[00:55:12]  And there's just something in the pit of my belly that when I read that thing in the files where allegedly women were threatened with you'll end up as fertilizer in the golf course, that this was the threat, this was the violent misogynistic threat to women.
[00:55:33]  I can't separate those two things.
[00:55:36]  Ivana Trump was buried on a golf course.
[00:55:39]  I can't separate those two things.
[00:55:41]  It feels, it feels like he's getting his revenge on her in death.
[00:55:47]  It feels like he threatened her with that at one point and then followed through.
[00:55:52]  I don't have proof for that, but I'm just saying she's buried on a golf course.
[00:55:57]  And then you have this thing in the files threatening women to be buried on golf courses.
[00:56:02]  Yeah, so this is what I was saying.
[00:56:04]  These sort of emotional gut feelings are elevated to paper over the very large cracks in the analysis.
[00:56:14]  These, like talking about my gut feeling and there's something in the pit of my belly and I just can't stop thinking about it.
[00:56:21]  I can't separate these things.
[00:56:23]  He just keeps repeating this.
[00:56:25]  And of course, the allegations are awful, right?
[00:56:29]  They're very emotive.
[00:56:31]  So it's an effective rhetorical approach, especially when you're dealing with stuff that naturally sparks a strong emotional reaction.
[00:56:46]  Right.
[00:56:46]  Yeah.
[00:56:47]  Violent misogynistic language, right?
[00:56:50]  He hammers that point.

=== The Super Bowl Connection (15:10) ===

[00:56:52]  And, you know, if you think we're being a little unfair to blind boy in that, you know, he's just riffing and like he's not connecting dots that are too far apart.
[00:57:04]  So this is the next part of where this goes.
[00:57:07]  The other huge thing that's standing out for me from the recent release, the Epstein files release, is since the mid-2010s, we saw emerging online the culture wars, the emergence of the alt-right.
[00:57:24]  Like I've been using the internet a long time and I remember like coming across neo-Nazi message boards, like fucking hardcore racists, and coming across these message boards in like 2009.
[00:57:42]  And it was not mainstream.
[00:57:45]  They were weird racists on these tiny little message boards.
[00:57:51]  It rarely spilled outside of that.
[00:57:54]  It didn't become popular.
[00:57:55]  It didn't gain traction.
[00:57:57]  And then, in the mid-2010s, you start to see the emergence of the alt-right, neo-Nazis, the manosphere, real toxic, bad shit starts to emerge in the 2010s from starts on the likes of 4chan, an incredibly toxic place.
[00:58:16]  Ground zero for this was a message board on 4chan called forward slash pol forward slash politics.
[00:58:26]  And that the alt-right emerged from that message board, okay?
[00:58:31]  And in the fucking Epstein files, Jeffrey Epstein met with the founder of that board in October 2011.
[00:58:42]  And within 24 hours of their meeting, that message board is formed, which would, it would suggest that the culture wars themselves of the 2010s might have been a psychological operation.
[00:58:59]  The goal being chaos, division.
[00:59:02]  The chaos and division that we're living with right now.
[00:59:05]  You see, from that 2011 message board, you follow all of that up until Gamergate 2016.
[00:59:13]  That's what got Trump into power.
[00:59:15]  Brexit came from that.
[00:59:17]  Online radicalization, the polarization.
[00:59:24]  So what we have here is a hypothesis that the culture wars.
[00:59:29]  The conspiracy hypothesis, if you like.
[00:59:31]  Yeah.
[00:59:31]  The idea that culture wars were engineered to break the Occupy movement.
[00:59:37]  So this flowering of a unified class consciousness was threatening to the elites.
[00:59:42]  So they manufactured these identity-based division to break it.
[00:59:53]  what do you think chris well it's bstone so like to to lay it out for people right the There's a thing in the Epstein files that shows that Jeffrey Epstein met with Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, right?
[01:00:09]  And that shortly after that meeting, there was the creation of the R slash Paul board, right?
[01:00:17]  And these two events.
[01:00:18]  And by the way, Chris, it was at least from what I saw, it was about four days after the meeting that the or like it wasn't like within the next 24 hours, was it?
[01:00:30]  Oh, no.
[01:00:31]  Well, the guy Poole said that Epstein had nothing to do with the reintroduction of a politics board.
[01:00:37]  There was one previously.
[01:00:39]  And he said it was like the decision to add the board was made weeks before the meeting.
[01:00:48]  The board, according to him, was added 24 hours prior to the first chance encounter at a social event.
[01:00:56]  So that's the first problem with it, right?
[01:00:58]  Which is that the first of all, the details around this meeting are not quite correct.
[01:01:04]  That there are other, it can very easily be a coincidental meeting, especially given how many people Epstein was always meeting.
[01:01:13]  And this slash poll discussion board, Blind Boy claims, is like the key thing that created the entire alt-right phenomenon.
[01:01:26]  Yeah.
[01:01:27]  I mean, it was a forum that festered that, right?
[01:01:31]  But like the Reddit, you know, R slash the Donald also did that.
[01:01:35]  That was like a cultural movement, right?
[01:01:38]  At that time.
[01:01:39]  And also the notion here is this, this happened in 2011.
[01:01:45]  And then it created the grounds for like Trump to be elected in 2016.
[01:01:52]  So like Epstein planned this out, right?
[01:01:55]  He met Christopher Poole.
[01:01:56]  He said, you know, you better put this forum together so that we can gain control in 2016 with Trump.
[01:02:05]  And like the evidence for this is the meeting.
[01:02:09]  There's only two emails to like Chris that reference Christopher Poole.
[01:02:13]  And Poole's account is, I met him at a, you know, a social thing.
[01:02:18]  I went to one lunch.
[01:02:19]  It was uneventful.
[01:02:20]  And that's it, right?
[01:02:22]  Like there's not actually, I regret meeting him, blah, blah, blah.
[01:02:25]  But for Blind Boy, this can't be a coincidence, right?
[01:02:29]  Like it's, it's got to be connected.
[01:02:32]  And it's that thing, Matt, that like people once, you know, it's conspiratorial reasoning where Epstein is now this larger than life figure.
[01:02:42]  So he has to be a very important node in all these events, right?
[01:02:48]  Like it all comes back to whatever the specific person you're focusing on at that time is.
[01:02:54]  And it's a massive, and it's a massive claim that the decline of the Occupy movement was engineered by Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:03:09]  Like, like, we don't need, look, we're not going to spend all our time debunking these things, but I think most listeners can see that this is an incredibly weak conspiracy.
[01:03:22]  It's a massive reach.
[01:03:23]  It's a conspiracy theory worthy of Brett Weinstein.
[01:03:26]  Yeah.
[01:03:27]  And this comes after the golf course conspiracies, right?
[01:03:32]  So it's not like this is the point is there's lots of this.
[01:03:36]  You're going to hear a lot more of it.
[01:03:37]  Right.
[01:03:38]  And there's also a predictable villain that raises its head here.
[01:03:44]  This is the connection of where this conspiracy eventually ends up, Matt.
[01:03:48]  See, before that, you had the Occupy movement, the Occupy movement of 2010, 2011.
[01:03:54]  After the Great Recession, you had a lot of young millennials gathering online and in public spaces saying, we want to take down the bankers.
[01:04:03]  Something is wrong.
[01:04:04]  We want to get at systems of power here.
[01:04:07]  And then all of a sudden, just when Occupy looked as if people were unified against neoliberalism, then this division emerges where these people are racists.
[01:04:22]  Then these other people are mad walk.
[01:04:25]  And now nothing, there's no unification because everyone is fighting about identity politics.
[01:04:32]  Seek it tribalism and polarization and division.
[01:04:37]  There was always a part of me that felt that, well, I don't know if that shit was a conspiracy or not, but it's doing the job of what a good conspiracy would do.
[01:04:50]  I'm not saying it's true, Matt.
[01:04:53]  I'm just saying it could be.
[01:04:56]  It could be true.
[01:05:00]  Sorry, I was going to put out the structural connection similarity too.
[01:05:03]  Go ahead.
[01:05:04]  Do you remember Brett Weinstein's theory about the Israel-Palestine conflict?
[01:05:09]  It was engineered to foster a COVID dissidence.
[01:05:16]  Yes.
[01:05:17]  Just saying.
[01:05:18]  Just saying.
[01:05:19]  Yeah, that's the same.
[01:05:20]  It's just a different target group, right?
[01:05:22]  Brett's is very much focused on him and his friends.
[01:05:25]  Blindboy's is more like a traditional Marxist interpretation, right?
[01:05:31]  But the thing here, Matt, which I want to point out to people is that according to Browning Boy, right?
[01:05:37]  According to what he says, this was all about protecting the neoliberal world order.
[01:05:43]  So electing Trump was about protecting the neoliberal world order.
[01:05:50]  Has that worked out for neoliberal globalists?
[01:05:53]  Because what I see is protectionist tariffs, like attacks on the UN, cozying up to totalitarian regimes.
[01:06:01]  The greatest attack on the neoliberal global order is Trump and his cronies, right?
[01:06:08]  Like, so the neoliberals, globalists really miscalculated in this.
[01:06:16]  Yeah.
[01:06:16]  Yeah, look, this is a common feature of conspiracy theories.
[01:06:18]  Like the moment you stop and think about them, they, you know, they just fall apart.
[01:06:23]  It doesn't make sense.
[01:06:24]  But I do have to hand it to Blanboy because I think like his narrative is compelling and he tells it well.
[01:06:29]  Like it's like if you if you don't do the annoying stuff that we've been doing and you just listen to it, it's you know, it's a it's a nice sounding narrative.
[01:06:42]  The way he tells it, all of the pieces are kind of aligning and falling into place.
[01:06:48]  Yeah.
[01:06:48]  Yeah.
[01:06:49]  Now, Matt, one thing is that, you know, people, I suspect, will say, right, but this is, you're picking a very conspiratorial episode, right?
[01:06:57]  This is he's he's saying that he's just riffing and he's, you know, gonna float ideas out there and whatnot.
[01:07:04]  I just want to play you two clips from the following episode, right?
[01:07:08]  Which didn't have the same disclaimers.
[01:07:10]  I mean, it had disclaimers, but it was about various things.
[01:07:14]  But one of the things it was about was the controversy over the halftime show.
[01:07:18]  Right?
[01:07:18]  You know, in America, Bad Bunny performance and the outrage because it was in Spanish, right?
[01:07:28]  So, so this is from a separate episode, but listen to this.
[01:07:34]  And we can stop after we go through these two clips.
[01:07:37]  And then it's like there's the cave over there where Romulus and Ramis were born.
[01:07:44]  And now you celebrate this festival.
[01:07:46]  So now this pagan thing gets folded into a nationalism.
[01:07:50]  And the MAGA equivalent is like the Super Bowl there was at the weekend.
[01:07:56]  And the Puerto Rican performer Bad Bunny was the main event during the fucking Super Bowl.
[01:08:02]  I don't fully understand the Super Bowl, right?
[01:08:03]  But it was all Spanish language.
[01:08:06]  Now, first off, the Super Bowl was also propaganda.
[01:08:10]  No disrespect to Bad Bunny.
[01:08:12]  No disrespect to people in America who speak Spanish.
[01:08:18]  It was controlled theater.
[01:08:19]  It was the appearance of being subversive.
[01:08:22]  The NFL, the National Football League in America, is not fucking subversive.
[01:08:28]  It's billionaire-dominated.
[01:08:30]  It's a cartel of franchises.
[01:08:32]  It's the machine of American capitalism.
[01:08:35]  And it's broadcast on the networks, which are also funded by billionaires.
[01:08:40]  So I would call the Super Bowl halftime show that everyone saw clips of on the internet, that's controlled opposition.
[01:08:47]  The halftime show at the Super Bowl is one of the biggest events in America.
[01:08:52]  The advertisement slots that are purchased are the most expensive advertisement slots.
[01:08:58]  This is big money.
[01:08:59]  This year, the main performance, the main musical and dance performance was by the Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny.
[01:09:05]  It was all in Spanish.
[01:09:07]  Why do I consider that to be propaganda?
[01:09:11]  I think it was deliberately so that white American people would feel overwhelmed and it justifies the actions of ICE.
[01:09:25]  How about that?
[01:09:27]  So it was what do you call that?
[01:09:30]  Yeah, controlled opposition or whatever.
[01:09:32]  But it was basically, it was all a plot.
[01:09:35]  They deliberately platformed a Hispanic singer to do something in Spanish, knowing that it would be like a red rag to the bull of the American right and therefore spur them to greater heights of xenophobia.
[01:09:55]  Well, it goes a little bit deeper than that, Matt.
[01:09:58]  It's not just that.
[01:09:58]  So yes, it'll cause a counter reaction amongst the right, but also the American people in general, Matt.
[01:10:04]  I mean, listen to this.
[01:10:06]  ICE are operating as a Gestapo.
[01:10:09]  They're illegally detaining people, people who speak Spanish, people from Central and South America.
[01:10:15]  They're doing this.
[01:10:17]  They're killing people.
[01:10:19]  They're imprisoning, detaining people without due process.
[01:10:22]  You're seeing the collapse of civil rights, of law and order.
[01:10:27]  If you're a white person sitting at home trying to enjoy the Super Bowl in your small little white American town, and if for one second you're starting to think, Jesus, maybe this ICE thing is a bit heavy-handed.
[01:10:41]  Maybe I don't like this.
[01:10:42]  Two people were murdered in Minnesota, and you're seeing people who voted MAGA now going, I didn't vote for this.
[01:10:50]  I didn't want this.
[01:10:51]  Podcasters like Joe Rogan, who encouraged people to vote for Trump, they're now saying that, I didn't want this.
[01:10:58]  I didn't know this was going to happen.
[01:10:59]  Now all of a sudden, you're trying to watch the Super Bowl and the halftime show is in Spanish language.
[01:11:06]  It's to make those people feel overwhelmed.
[01:11:09]  It's to make those people feel, oh my God, the country is actually being taken over by people who are not quote unquote American, people who speak Spanish.
[01:11:19]  And maybe I'm being cynical.
[01:11:20]  I just, I refuse to believe that the NFL and the TV networks in America are going to do something subversive on behalf of the Spanish-speaking community in America.
[01:11:31]  I think it was theater, controlled opposition theater, to make a white American audience feel as if they're being replaced.
[01:11:39]  They're being overwhelmed.
[01:11:41]  And then Fox News, theatrically, were saying, this is wrong.
[01:11:45]  This is wrong.
[01:11:46]  We need something American.
[01:11:47]  So they did the alternative.
[01:11:49]  The Turning Point USA had an alternative Super Bowl show with Kid Rock.
[01:11:54]  White people stuff.
[01:11:56]  All white people stuff on the Turning Point USA Alternative Super Bowl show, right?

=== Responding To Conspiracy Narratives (15:43) ===

[01:12:03]  There you go, Matt.
[01:12:04]  It goes deeper than you thought.
[01:12:06]  Yeah, how about that?
[01:12:08]  Well, yeah, that's kind of a wild theory, isn't it?
[01:12:11]  I mean, I haven't.
[01:12:13]  I didn't expect that.
[01:12:16]  Look, I mean, the thing is, Matt, right?
[01:12:19]  He says there, you know, I don't think the NFL were intended to be subversive like that.
[01:12:24]  No, they weren't.
[01:12:25]  They were.
[01:12:26]  They hired a very, like the world's most popular musical artist who performs in Spanish.
[01:12:32]  Like, it's not a subversive thing.
[01:12:34]  No, he's a mainstream, very popular artist.
[01:12:37]  So, my boy's like, there's no other explanation.
[01:12:39]  Why would anybody want to have a Spanish singer on the thing?
[01:12:44]  You're like, what are you talking about?
[01:12:45]  Like, if you remember the Korean guy that went popular with Whoopum Gangnam star, yeah, yeah, like it's love listen to, yeah, Bossa Nova or whatever.
[01:12:56]  Like, people always often, like, whatever your political persuasion often listen to music.
[01:13:02]  Yeah, the lyrics will often be in another language.
[01:13:04]  It's not, it's not the subversive thing that he thinks it is.
[01:13:09]  Yeah, it's a, it's a, look, let's just be, let's just be frank.
[01:13:12]  It's, it's an absolutely stupid conspiracy theory that he's proposing there.
[01:13:17]  Yeah, and it's Brett Weinsteinian level, right?
[01:13:20]  Like it's again this notion that it's all it's all kayfabe, it's all controlled opposition and secret things.
[01:13:27]  And it's like the millionaires and the billionaires and the capitalists, they're all creating this play of conflict.
[01:13:33]  And, you know, this is a separate episode, right?
[01:13:36]  So I'm just highlighting that this is his narrative across episodes, which is like the culture wars and all that stuff, but it's not really what it's about.
[01:13:46]  And yes, there are, you know, cynical interests, Matt, right?
[01:13:50]  There are people that are interested in whipping up anti-immigrant, like there are people that benefit from culture war channels.
[01:13:59]  I complain about them every week on here and on Twitter, right?
[01:14:04]  Like that does exist.
[01:14:06]  And yes, capitalists are interested in, you know, selling products and increasing the thing.
[01:14:11]  But this notion that it's all about dividing the working class and to like, so the note, his conspiracy, just to recapitulate, is that the halftime show was orchestrated in order to increase support for ICE by making white people uncomfortable by seeing a Spanish singer talk, right?
[01:14:33]  And or sing.
[01:14:34]  And you're just like, no.
[01:14:40]  At the very least, it's again like a hell of a reach from the existing evidence.
[01:14:46]  Yeah, it certainly is.
[01:14:48]  It certainly is.
[01:14:50]  And I think, Matt, you know, even if people realize that that is like, that is paradigmat conspiracy hypothesizing, a la Brett Weinstein, the fact that he invokes ICE and, you know, ICE, they're acting as a Gestapo.
[01:15:04]  They're imprisoning people.
[01:15:06]  They're killing Americans in the street.
[01:15:08]  That's all, you know, this is all well documented and true.
[01:15:11]  And so the feeling is like, well, that's right.
[01:15:14]  I agree with that, right?
[01:15:16]  Like, I think that this, what's going on in America and the way that Trump is using ICE as a private army to terrorize like immigrants is a problem, right?
[01:15:27]  So it's kind of like that is baked into the foundation.
[01:15:31]  And if you are being critical of the conspiracy theorizing, aren't you then like defending ICE?
[01:15:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:15:41]  I don't know whether he's doing it consciously or not, but it's an incredibly effective rhetorical tactic.
[01:15:46]  I mean, we saw before how, you know, he took care to mention all of the paradigmatic left-wing issues, you know, people we should be concerned about and supporting, you know, immigrants, trans people, feminists, etc.
[01:16:02]  And the other kinds of ways in which sort of emotion is laid into it.
[01:16:07]  So I can imagine, yeah, I mean, if you're a progressive lefty person like I am, and you're relaxing at home and you're listening to that, there might be a couple of warning bells going off and sort of thinking, well, maybe, but then the sort of emotional gut punch comes in and you totally don't like those things.
[01:16:28]  So you nod along and accept it.
[01:16:32]  I think it's effective whether he's doing it on purpose or not.
[01:16:36]  Yeah.
[01:16:36]  And when you add in a disclaimer, like I'm not saying, no, I don't know, you know, this is just speculation, but it just feels right to me or whatever.
[01:16:42]  And then when people respond, they can say, well, he, you know, he said, right, that it's, he doesn't know definitely that it's like that.
[01:16:50]  And it's just like people pick up on this with Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein and, you know, Dev Rubin or whoever, whenever they add in strategic disclaimers, that they don't really mean it.
[01:17:00]  They, because they're going on to outline, you know, the conspiracies in great depth and very strongly.
[01:17:07]  And it's, I just want to say it's the same here, right?
[01:17:10]  That's the same feeling I get here.
[01:17:12]  Same picture.
[01:17:14]  Yeah.
[01:17:15]  Well, anyway, back to the Epstein stuff.
[01:17:18]  Oh, well, anyway, let's get back to the Epstein business.
[01:17:21]  Okay, so that's where we were.
[01:17:23]  And I have the clip ready.
[01:17:26]  Ma.
[01:17:27]  So there you go.
[01:17:29]  Okay.
[01:17:31]  So here it is.
[01:17:34]  I always had a feeling in my gut that we would one day find out that the culture wars of the 2010s, both left and right, were being stalked by an intelligence agency of some description.
[01:17:49]  And the reason I thought this was because sometimes I would look at how people become so divided online.
[01:17:55]  And I just say to myself, well, if this isn't an intelligence operation or stalked by some type of military intelligence, it's certainly doing the job of it because what I see is chaos.
[01:18:07]  And one thing I always said too, whether it be Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, fucking Twitter, you're trying to have political arguments on a platform that's owned by billionaires, or the billionaires have decided that all discussion must take place in the form of turn and response combat with algorithms that reward hate, fear, and anger.
[01:18:32]  So you can't fucking solve anything on those platforms anyway, because they're designed for conflict.
[01:18:38]  But you have it there in the Epstein files released this week.
[01:18:43]  Ground zero, ground zero for the fucking culture wars 2011, that message board on 4chan forward slash Paul.
[01:18:51]  That opens 24 hours after the moderator meets Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:18:58]  And there it is in the emails from 2011.
[01:19:00]  And then there's another claim, but this one isn't as verified.
[01:19:04]  You can't see an email about it.
[01:19:05]  But a lot of people reckon, and this is hearsay, that Ghillane Maxwell was doing the same shit on Reddit, except for the left.
[01:19:15]  That one has less proof.
[01:19:16]  That's not in the files.
[01:19:22]  That's got less proof than the other one.
[01:19:23]  And the other one had very little proof.
[01:19:26]  I'm sorry.
[01:19:28]  Yeah.
[01:19:28]  Yeah.
[01:19:29]  I mean, it's tempting to fact check this because there's.
[01:19:34]  I did fact check this.
[01:19:36]  I know you did.
[01:19:38]  It's kind of boring doing fact-checking.
[01:19:42]  No, I disagree.
[01:19:44]  I think it's necessary at times because I heard this same thing crop up two or three times in different contexts about Gillian Maxwell, you know, stuck in the culture war on the left and Epstein created, involved in, at the very least involved in, the creation of our sorry, slash Paul on 4chan.
[01:20:08]  So that's them, you know, taking the right and the left and pitting them against each other.
[01:20:13]  And it's like a kind of appealing narrative, but it's not true.
[01:20:17]  We've already mentioned the issues around the claims that he created or was instrumental in the formation of 4chan Paul, right?
[01:20:26]  And how it doesn't really hang together.
[01:20:28]  But in the case of Ghillen Maxwell, this mostly hangs around an account that was identified.
[01:20:35]  That the two key pieces of evidence presented are that it has a name which includes Maxwell in the username, and that it supposedly stopped posting whenever she was arrested or another key event where she was attending something and stopped posting around that time, right?
[01:20:56]  And that's it.
[01:20:57]  That's literally the only pieces of evidence.
[01:21:00]  So, you know, people on the internet, Matt, being people on the internet, I'll put a link to it.
[01:21:06]  Somebody did a very, very detailed, deep dive into that account and why it isn't Gillian Maxwell.
[01:21:17]  And like the only evidence presented is, you know, very, very, not just very weak, but just it's not even convincing in the minimum form because they point out, for example, that these two specific dates that people point to, like we have a whole bunch of records of Gillian Maxwell, you know, official appearances.
[01:21:38]  And you can go and look at the account's history and what, you know, she was doing.
[01:21:43]  And there's plenty of events where it's just posting away about, you know, random things at the same time.
[01:21:48]  And then on top of that, this is a Reddit power user.
[01:21:52]  It's like one of the people that got to, you know, the million promotions or whatever before anyone else and so on.
[01:22:01]  So it's like a head moderator on a whole bunch of different channels.
[01:22:05]  So it's somebody like who was devoting a huge amount of their time to moderating on Reddit.
[01:22:11]  They took complacent things like talking about themselves and described themselves as a middle-aged man.
[01:22:15]  Now you could say, oh, that's all, you know, disinformation that they're, they're trying to do for that.
[01:22:21]  But also on top of this, the account was posting after the like the alleged stop time.
[01:22:28]  It was just posting internally to other mods and stuff.
[01:22:32]  And those messages have been relieved, released.
[01:22:35]  So like when she was in, you know, going through the legal system, it was busy being a Reddit moderator.
[01:22:44]  So yeah, it just.
[01:22:46]  Yeah.
[01:22:47]  I know it just, but it doesn't work on any level.
[01:22:50]  Like what the Occupy thing happened in about 2011.
[01:22:54]  This, this poll thing, this board was around then, sure.
[01:22:58]  The culture wars emerged much like years later.
[01:23:02]  So as you said, it's just retrofitting explanations to things that don't need a conspiratorial explanation.
[01:23:12]  Well, there were culture wars, though, like before 2015 and 16, but you mean like the alt-right kind of.
[01:23:18]  Well, I'm sure there were culture wars before 2011 as well.
[01:23:22]  But you know, like, it's just looking for an explanation for something that doesn't require a conspiratorial explanation.
[01:23:28]  Like, oh, gee, people fight a lot and respond to rage bait and post provocative things on the internet.
[01:23:35]  Anyone who was using the very early internet knows what the medium encourages.
[01:23:42]  And the only version of that I think that is reasonable is the version whereby corporations that are keen to attract users and are keen to promote engagement will obviously design their algorithms to prioritize engagement.
[01:24:03]  Whether it's cute kiddie videos or stuff that encourages a lot of responses.
[01:24:10]  Yeah, unfortunately, it's just human nature to respond to emotional and negatively valued content more than serious debate.
[01:24:20]  Likewise, Occupy fell apart for well-documented, for well-documented, mundane reasons.
[01:24:27]  And also that sort of shift towards identity politics also had mundane explanations.
[01:24:36]  Well, like you said, you know, tabloid headlines highlight that, you know, people are susceptible to outrage and demonization of art groups and so on.
[01:24:45]  But, you know, what people will be thinking, Matt, raising counterexamples.
[01:24:50]  Oh, hold on.
[01:24:50]  Are you saying that, you know, various propaganda organizations don't engage in efforts to stir up like social division?
[01:25:00]  Didn't we have well-documented cases from the Internet Research Agency, right?
[01:25:07]  The IRA that Renee De Resta talked about, where Russia was attempting to sow Discord prior to the 2016 election on Facebook and all our social media, right, posing as either progressive or hard right groups and like encouraging division amongst American society.
[01:25:26]  So that does occur, doesn't it?
[01:25:29]  Professor Brown.
[01:25:30]  Yes.
[01:25:31]  Well, that structure of rejoinder is the one that conspiracy theorists apply to literally every conspiracy.
[01:25:38]  Oh, you think that the government didn't organize for the Twin Towers to be brought down as a false flag operation?
[01:25:47]  Don't they do false flag operations?
[01:25:50]  And don't they do nefarious things like this?
[01:25:53]  Don't they try to control the haven't they?
[01:25:56]  I think like the usual thing is to point to a specific example.
[01:25:59]  But actually, somewhat interestingly in this case, the well-documented propaganda by like Russia and enemies of America and whatnot tend to not be of much interest to the kind of like Blind Boy, I don't think, spends much time, you know, discussing, discussing Russian disinformation efforts and that kind of thing.
[01:26:24]  Because the point is, is that when you have a very clear mundane, for want of a better word, because often the real causes are not like mundane in the normal sense.
[01:26:34]  For instance, it's not mundane for planes to fly into the Twin Towers.
[01:26:40]  But terrorism is in this sense a mundane thing.
[01:26:43]  It exists in the world.
[01:26:45]  It's not a speculative thing.
[01:26:47]  So you don't need to search for extraordinary answers for events that have pretty clear and well-documented non-conspiratorial reasons for occurring.
[01:27:02]  You kind of accept the conspiracy interpretation of events if there is good evidence for it.
[01:27:10]  And as we just discussed, there isn't any for the idea that the culture wars were orchestrated by a secret group of people involving Jeffrey Epstein and the person that created the poll message board as this huge long game back in 2011 to suck energy out of the Occupy movement.
[01:27:35]  It's, you know, it's an extraordinary thesis, which isn't required to explain the social events that have happened over the last 20 years.

=== Drip Feed Control (04:25) ===

[01:27:46]  Sure, sure.
[01:27:47]  But Matt, I put it to you that maybe there's another explanation.
[01:27:52]  I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty of what's released in the files.
[01:27:55]  Millions of them.
[01:27:56]  I've only seen some.
[01:27:57]  What I have seen is shocking, especially some of the fucking images.
[01:28:02]  Some of the images are almost child sexual abuse material.
[01:28:07]  The Department of Justice themselves said they did not release images that depict torture and death.
[01:28:15]  So that means they exist, but they haven't released them.
[01:28:18]  What we're seeing is organized crime.
[01:28:22]  That's what this is.
[01:28:23]  It's organized crime perpetrated by the most powerful people and wealthiest people in the world.
[01:28:30]  I don't think there's going to be accountability for it.
[01:28:33]  I think the fact that it's slowly being dripped out to us, the fact that the like, why aren't they just releasing everything at once?
[01:28:42]  They're not.
[01:28:43]  They're drip feeding.
[01:28:44]  And the other thing, too, is like they have to release these files because of the law, U.S. civil procedure, and the transparency laws.
[01:28:54]  They require that the disclosure of evidence once secrecy is no longer legally justified.
[01:29:01]  So they have to.
[01:29:02]  This is evidence and they have to release this legally.
[01:29:06]  The slow drip feed.
[01:29:09]  That's the bit that's quasi-legal.
[01:29:13]  And I think it's like what we saw with the genocide in fucking Gaza.
[01:29:19]  There's a brazenness to it, it's a flaunting of a lack of accountability to exert control and power.
[01:29:32]  What about that, Matt?
[01:29:34]  Did I?
[01:29:34]  Did I follow that correctly?
[01:29:36]  The, the drip feed release of the data dumps associated with the Epstein files is uh, is a way to what's the word flaunt their lack of accountability and to sort of send a message, in the same way that the Israeli actions in Gaza were.
[01:30:01]  I'm struggling to see the connection.
[01:30:03]  Well, I think the claim is that, like it's psychological warfare, right.
[01:30:08]  That like the, the powers that be right.
[01:30:12]  So here he says, you know they're not releasing it all all at once and like, why aren't they?
[01:30:18]  Well, I mean one, there's good, clear reasons why they're not doing that which like, on the one hand, concern things around, like you know, privacy of victims and so on right, if you take a, a very charitable thing, but in a lot of cases is more along the lines of protecting people that will get mentioned in the files and which might have connections to the Trump administration or or other powerful people and so on right.
[01:30:43]  But even with that, they released like three and a half million documents.
[01:30:47]  So that he's like, why didn't they just put it all out there?
[01:30:50]  And they did.
[01:30:51]  They put out like a whole bunch of it.
[01:30:53]  They haven't put out a whole bunch of other material I think there's six million documents or something that is supposed to be so but but they have just dropped a huge amount.
[01:31:01]  Now he's saying the fact that this keeps happening, where they're like shoving out a whole bunch of documents in various releases.
[01:31:08]  It points to it's a strategy, it's a conscious strategy, right like by them to do psychological warfare, where they're flaunting yes, their ability, right and and in the same way, in Gaza, they're denying what everybody can see is happening on social media, right like, because the mainstream uh, media is just like going along with the, the kind of Trump regime uh, this kind of thing yeah, yeah.
[01:31:35]  So so once again, there's an incredibly mundane reason for the um, the fact that every single document hasn't been released all at once.
[01:31:44]  Whether you agree with that reason or not, but I, I think, I assume that when any government department just releases information under Freedom Of Information, there is some kind of rules there.
[01:31:56]  And like some human has to kind of cite it and tick it off.
[01:31:59]  There's some administrative overhead.
[01:32:01]  And when you're talking about gigabytes and gigabytes of text files, yeah, there's a very mundane reason why it all hasn't been released in one go.

=== Administrative Overhead (04:39) ===

[01:32:12]  But I guess it's just a springboard for another bit of speculation.
[01:32:18]  Yeah.
[01:32:19]  And so one thing I want to make clear as well is like the criminal conspiracy stuff that Frankenstein invoked, right, or around these kind of things.
[01:32:30]  So like just to be clear, there was a primary criminal conspiracy that is very well documented.
[01:32:38]  You can find it in the emails and it was litigated in court cases as well, right?
[01:32:44]  And it concerns Jeffrey Epstein, Gillian Maxwell, and other people in Epstein's orbit and employ that primarily served for him to get access to young women for his sexual pleasure, right?
[01:33:01]  This is the primary thing.
[01:33:02]  Like he's a super predator in the realms of the guy in the UK, Jimmy Savile, right?
[01:33:10]  Or the Japanese idol company, Johnny Kirigawa, right?
[01:33:17]  Like the so the super predator, if you like, right?
[01:33:21]  And that is well documented.
[01:33:23]  And the way that it operated, which was detailed by the people doing the investigations, the women themselves who were coerced into taking part in it, was that it was like a pyramid scheme of sorts where young women, vulnerable women and underage girls were coerced into giving massages to this elfie or to this wealthy millionaire/slash billionaire, right?
[01:33:51]  And then inevitably they would go beyond that, right?
[01:33:55]  Be forced into sexual encounters.
[01:33:58]  And then they got out of that role by bringing in new girls, new women, their friends, contacts, right?
[01:34:06]  And it created this horrific pyramid scheme, which a lot of the women involved have talked about, you know, the kind of shame and stuff that's involved in it, because they also hurt other people, right?
[01:34:19]  And as a result, some of them were potentially going to be prosecuted, right, for their role in it.
[01:34:25]  Now, there's other people, and there are people mentioned in the files that were considered possibly to be treated as co-conspirators, co-conspirators, right?
[01:34:36]  But that's a limited amount of people.
[01:34:39]  I think you're talking like less than 10 people in total, right?
[01:34:43]  definitely you know under 20 or that kind of thing you're not talking about a network of hundreds of thousands of people like trafficking women you know across countries and whatnot to all these different men and figures in like different countries based on like you know a client list that jeffrey epstein had that is what's not documented and that's why like the new york times If you read,
[01:35:12]  they have an article which is saying, you know, how we're digging through it.
[01:35:14]  And they're asking people and they're very clear.
[01:35:17]  There's all these horrific crimes going on.
[01:35:19]  There's abuse of young women and so on.
[01:35:21]  But they're saying, but what we don't have evidence of in this material is a like huge criminal conspiracy, right?
[01:35:28]  The kind of thing.
[01:35:29]  And that is partly why you're not currently seeing prosecutions, right?
[01:35:35]  The prosecutions that have started to emerge are all to do with things like sharing state secrets or what's the other one that the person's getting done for.
[01:35:47]  There was Mandelson is sharing state secrets.
[01:35:51]  And then who's the other guy?
[01:35:52]  Do you remember Matt?
[01:35:53]  There's another high personal one.
[01:35:55]  I did, sorry.
[01:35:56]  Oh, yeah.
[01:35:56]  And sorry.
[01:35:57]  And Prince Andrew, right?
[01:35:59]  And in Prince Andrew, the case that they're going after is him like improperly performing his role as a, like, you know, some official role in the government because of what's in the emails and the way that he's performed that kind of thing.
[01:36:16]  So that's what they're going after.
[01:36:18]  Prince Andrew already did go through a court case because there was, you know, credible evidence for his abuse of some of the girls, right, associated with Virginia Guffery and so on.
[01:36:32]  So it's just that like the thing I want to say is that, you know, more details might emerge, could emerge, there's wider thing.
[01:36:40]  But from what it looks like, it looks like there's a powerful individual who had a predilection for young women and underage girls.

=== Powerful Predilections (04:51) ===

[01:36:51]  And many, many powerful people didn't give a shit about that.
[01:36:58]  In some cases, they were happy, you know, to party with him or, you know, him to bring girls and do, you know, the kind of things that you would imagine that wealthy men want to do with young women.
[01:37:12]  Right.
[01:37:12]  But the way that it's treated is like, that's not interesting enough as a story, right?
[01:37:20]  Like that there was this highly like connected, this highly, highly connected and very wealthy predator that was indulged by the people on this orbit and by many powerful and well-connected people, right?
[01:37:38]  He didn't care that he was doing what he was doing out relatively in the open right, they joke about it and all that kind of thing like that's not enough.
[01:37:47]  What it has to be is that that was a front for intelligence agencies in order to gather information which ties it back to, you know the, the Gaza conflict, or the creation of R Slash Poll to get Donald Trump into power, or you know, creating the actual culture wars.
[01:38:06]  And you're like, why is it not?
[01:38:09]  Like there is a conspiracy here and there is abuse of people and there are sexual crimes, and but it's just not.
[01:38:17]  You know, that's the bit that seems to be.
[01:38:20]  If you focus on that, you're missing the forest for the trees.
[01:38:25]  Yeah yeah yeah, I mean and I think uh Blind Boy is not alone here right, of course, this is, this is a massive hullabaloo uh, in the public discourse and um.
[01:38:35]  I think the broader point there is that there's kind of a fuzzy distinction in people's minds between what is established um versus this, the spectrum of increasingly lurid um theories and narratives ranging from a eyes wide shut type um, you know, deviant and immoral uh network and secret club of of ultra-rich people uh,
[01:39:03]  to the kinds of stuff that uh Blind Boy is outlining, and uh yeah, I mean what you said is is right.
[01:39:12]  I mean, I think I think where you and he wouldn't disagree at all is that it all reflects very badly on the so-called great and the good in in modern Western culture.
[01:39:22]  I mean, there's no doubt about that, and as well it should.
[01:39:26]  It's just maintaining that distinction between reality or what we can establish with any kind of confidence, and lurid speculation.
[01:39:38]  Yeah yeah, and you know, one point that often strikes me in these conversations is like there's a, I think, taken for granted where we're getting these revelations that, like the rich elites, you know the kind of the people in the all-in podcast, the people in Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein's orbit.
[01:39:57]  Do you realize that behind closed doors they're actually like bastards, You know, they're the kind of people that look down on others, that, you know, don't seem to show much concern except for like, how they're going to have fun, make more money, and you know, the kind of people that make off-color jokes and are puerile, yeah, or cheating on their cheating on their wives, you know, like all these kind of things.
[01:40:24]  And I'm like, that's, I mean, am I just unusually cynical that my background means that my general baseline point of view towards like rich millionaires and billionaires is that they're arsholes, right?
[01:40:39]  Like, that's my, that's my baseline.
[01:40:41]  I recognize it's a bias that some of them are not going to be.
[01:40:45]  And there's probably, you know, like a spectrum of arsholeness or like shower of bastardness.
[01:40:52]  But the general thing is, I expected them to be, you know, when I see David Sachs and Jason Calcinus and whatever talking on that show, I'm not like, oh, yeah, they seem really nice guys.
[01:41:04]  I'm sure their emails are, you know, very reasonable.
[01:41:07]  And every time Elon Musk's emails or something gets released, it's full of sycophantic simpering and like people imagining themselves the master words.
[01:41:15]  We listen to them talk on podcasts constantly like that.
[01:41:19]  So it's just, I don't know who it is that finds it a revelation that, you know, rich people are sometimes very terrible people.
[01:41:32]  Like I don't know.
[01:41:36]  It's been, I've just seen it being presented as, well, now we know.
[01:41:40]  And I'm like, didn't we always know that?

=== Charges And Justice System (16:04) ===

[01:41:43]  Like, yeah, yeah.
[01:41:47]  Well, I don't know.
[01:41:48]  It's a spectrum.
[01:41:49]  I mean, you know, Bill Gates might have been having affairs, but he did some good in the world as well.
[01:41:54]  So, you know, the people you can do both, right?
[01:41:58]  Like, but that's that's the thing.
[01:41:59]  There's nothing in my mental apparatus that is like Bill Gates couldn't be someone that cheats on his wife and was sleeping with, you know, young women or underage women.
[01:42:08]  It's possible.
[01:42:09]  And is somebody that helped to eradicate like polio or, you know, with the, what is it, measles, right?
[01:42:17]  But whichever ones he's trying to get rid of.
[01:42:19]  Like, I can imagine both things are entirely possible.
[01:42:23]  Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:42:24]  Entirely.
[01:42:25]  There's no contradictions there at all.
[01:42:27]  No.
[01:42:28]  Okay.
[01:42:28]  Well, anyway, that's.
[01:42:29]  You got that off your chest.
[01:42:31]  You got that off your chest.
[01:42:31]  Good, good.
[01:42:32]  Or no, I'm sure it'll come back.
[01:42:34]  But, okay.
[01:42:36]  So after that, Matt, let me just see.
[01:42:40]  Where is it here?
[01:42:41]  I was about to add the next one.
[01:42:45]  Nothing.
[01:42:46]  Oh, yes, yes, yes.
[01:42:47]  Okay.
[01:42:48]  So, right.
[01:42:51]  So where that goes from next is here.
[01:42:58]  And the goal is to exhaust the average person so that we become conditioned to this being the new reality.
[01:43:04]  And that's what the Epstein files is doing.
[01:43:06]  It's conditioning us to go.
[01:43:09]  Oh, I guess there's a big elite paedophile ring and sex trafficking ring and nothing's going to be done about it.
[01:43:18]  And I, as an individual, can't do fuck all about it.
[01:43:21]  So better just get on with my life and hope they don't target me.
[01:43:26]  See if our media isn't aggressively calling out the things that we can see with our own eyes.
[01:43:33]  And then the justice systems around the world aren't doing it.
[01:43:37]  Like the Brits are under pressure.
[01:43:39]  So you've got things like police are assessing the Andrew situation.
[01:43:43]  You're assessing, really, are you?
[01:43:45]  If that was my neighbor down the road, I'm pretty sure they'd be arrested.
[01:43:49]  Don't think he'd be assessing it.
[01:43:52]  He'd be arrested.
[01:43:53]  So then we are like, well, you can't rely upon journalism.
[01:43:56]  You can't rely upon the justice system.
[01:43:59]  I guess this is the new reality now.
[01:44:02]  Familiar motifs, Matt.
[01:44:04]  Journalists are all liars.
[01:44:07]  The justice system and the institutions can't be corrupted.
[01:44:12]  Yeah, and there's a secret elite pedophile ring which is being flaunted in public and it's not going to be taken care of.
[01:44:23]  Like it does, it is very much.
[01:44:25]  And also like the, you know, Alex Jones often says that they have to do it in public, right?
[01:44:32]  They have to leave clues and whatnot because it's like tended to rub it in your face.
[01:44:36]  And he's saying the same thing, right?
[01:44:37]  They're conditioning you to be like weak-willed and, you know, what's that word where you like demur to authority?
[01:44:47]  Yeah.
[01:44:49]  Subservient.
[01:44:49]  Where you're coward.
[01:44:50]  Subservient.
[01:44:51]  Subservient and coward.
[01:44:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:44:54]  Yeah, look, I mean, you're right.
[01:44:56]  Just in purely analytic grounds, you might agree or disagree to some degree with the wide variety of things that Blind Boy says, but it does fit the structure of conspiracy theories, right?
[01:45:11]  This is exactly the same format that you will see, regardless of the political orientation.
[01:45:17]  And, you know, it's the kind of messaging that is going to be much more appealing to you.
[01:45:21]  If you are, I guess, more on the populist left kind of side of politics and you don't like elites and you think that the system is all set up to hold the little guy down, then this kind of thing will work for you.
[01:45:37]  But you just have to be aware that those motifs, like they're doing it in plain sight to just so that they can laugh at us and or make us feel that we're completely impotent, that they're leaving clues.
[01:45:53]  You just have to recognize This is the structure of all conspiracy theories.
[01:46:00]  So, yeah, you know, like again, the mundane reasons, like it could be like, like there's no doubt there is a degree of incompetence and corruption in any human institution, including, I'm sure, the current justice system and police in the UK.
[01:46:19]  But there is a more mundane view of events, which is that to the extent that people are not getting rounded up by the police and getting charged with things, is that they may not have the evidence yet to clinch a case, just like with any criminal investigation.
[01:46:37]  Yeah, and there is this, there is the fly in the ointment that like Epstein was facing trial.
[01:46:43]  Ghillean Maxwell was convicted, right?
[01:46:46]  They're supposed to be in this, but if there's so much powerful control over the justice system, like the bit that is true is like it's well known that if you have money, you can hire better lawyers.
[01:47:02]  You can have more complex accounting arrangements.
[01:47:05]  You know, Donald Trump gets treated in court very differently than, you know, some random guy on the New York subway, right?
[01:47:13]  This is true and is known all across the world.
[01:47:16]  It's very hard to prosecute leaders in international courts, right?
[01:47:20]  Like these kind of things are well established.
[01:47:24]  But it's this like kind of claim that once accusations exist, that that means that, you know, like Blind Boy wants the graveyard or wants the cemetery dug up, right?
[01:47:39]  He, if there aren't people clapped in chains every time a release comes out, you're like, no, but it wouldn't even work that way.
[01:47:47]  Like Jeffrey Epstein still would have had to go through a trial, right?
[01:47:50]  And he says, like, my neighbor wouldn't get that treatment.
[01:47:53]  Really?
[01:47:54]  Your neighbor wouldn't like have to go through a trial if he was alleged to be a paedophile.
[01:48:00]  Like, I know people that are, you know, connected to family members, right?
[01:48:06]  And were accused of child abuse or involved with child abuse or whatever.
[01:48:10]  They went to trial, Matt.
[01:48:12]  The people presented evidence.
[01:48:13]  They were sentenced.
[01:48:14]  Right.
[01:48:15]  And it wasn't like they just said, well, we don't need any evidence because you don't have very much money.
[01:48:20]  Like, it's, it's not like that.
[01:48:23]  So justice systems are never perfect.
[01:48:24]  There's always mistrials of justice.
[01:48:27]  And you can look at like the deal that Epstein got in the first case as an example of a miscarriage of justice.
[01:48:34]  But it's just like that presentation that it's all like the whole system is corrupt.
[01:48:41]  Nothing applies to things.
[01:48:43]  Like on the right wing, people talk about two-tier, two-tier policing, two-tier judgments, right?
[01:48:49]  So what's the difference in the rhetoric?
[01:48:53]  Isn't it just the same thing?
[01:48:54]  But their target is like saying, you know, white people are not treated the same, white, white right-wing people are not treated to see them as like the, you know, the liberal progressive groups that are favored.
[01:49:08]  And yeah.
[01:49:11]  Yeah.
[01:49:12]  Yeah.
[01:49:13]  Well, well, well, okay, okay.
[01:49:15]  Next clip.
[01:49:16]  Next clip.
[01:49:16]  Let's move on.
[01:49:17]  Next clip.
[01:49:18]  Okay.
[01:49:18]  So in comparison, Matt, to the non-treatment of the criminal elite class, you have counterexamples where they do throw the book at people and these are telling.
[01:49:32]  I mean, that's why Luigi Mangion terrifies them.
[01:49:37]  They come down hard on Luigi Mangion, very hard on him.
[01:49:41]  Because Luigi Mangion went, hold on a second.
[01:49:45]  The US health insurance system.
[01:49:48]  So people pay for health insurance, but health insurance companies make money not by helping people who need health care, but by profiting from denying it.
[01:50:01]  Oh.
[01:50:02]  So ye make money when the person dies from cancer.
[01:50:07]  That's how ye make money, is it?
[01:50:10]  When the little child whose parents have paid for health insurance, ye make money by denying the health insurance to that child and figuring out a way to let that child die.
[01:50:21]  That's how ye make money, is it?
[01:50:24]  Why isn't that illegal?
[01:50:25]  It's not illegal.
[01:50:26]  Oh, that's the system.
[01:50:27]  And then Luigi Mangion went, that seems like a very serious, evil crime to me.
[01:50:33]  And the justice system isn't working for me.
[01:50:36]  And politicians aren't working for me.
[01:50:38]  And the media isn't working.
[01:50:41]  And what these healthcare, what these health insurance companies are doing, that appears quite like an evil crime.
[01:50:48]  So Luigi Mangion went, I think I'm going to have to do justice myself.
[01:50:55]  And he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare.
[01:50:58]  And he wrote a little manifesto and laid out very clearly, no, this is what this is, and this is why I'm doing it.
[01:51:05]  I'm not crazy.
[01:51:06]  This is what I'm doing.
[01:51:08]  And then the justice system came down really hard on him.
[01:51:11]  They were pushing for the death penalty.
[01:51:13]  The media came down harder than politicians, the system came down hard and said, that's a criminal.
[01:51:19]  See that guy?
[01:51:20]  Luigi Mangion, that's a criminal.
[01:51:23]  He's a criminal doing crime.
[01:51:30]  Yeah, yeah, the system, man.
[01:51:33]  Yeah, look, I mean, again, he's been here.
[01:51:36]  You're popping a bit, so be.
[01:51:38]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:51:40]  Yeah, the system, man.
[01:51:42]  So, yeah, I mean, look, again, he built a lot of narrative on to a single point, which is that Luigi Mangioni was charged with the crime.
[01:51:52]  And there's a mundane explanation, which was that he clearly did shoot someone and kill them.
[01:52:00]  So in broad.
[01:52:02]  Yeah.
[01:52:02]  Well, it might have been evening, but I mean, it was video footage.
[01:52:07]  Yeah.
[01:52:08]  So that's why he's been charged with the crime.
[01:52:11]  Like, I think if there would, it was incontroverse, controvertible evidence of such a serious crime in the evidence around the Epstein case against a particular person, let's say Bill Gates, then Bill Gates would also be charged with the crime.
[01:52:29]  There is a simpler explanation why Mangioni was charged and someone like Bill Gates or some other rich random person who was named in the files hasn't been.
[01:52:39]  Yeah, but so they'll, you know, but if you remember his narrative is that there's videos in the files of torture and potentially cannibalism and stuff.
[01:52:48]  And, you know, nothing's so like, I think the implication throughout this has been there are documented crimes, probably even worse, because according to his description, Mangioni was, you know, pretty much doing the right thing.
[01:53:02]  He was doing the only reasonable thing by executing the head of the United Health because they are the immoral murderers.
[01:53:10]  You know, their goal is to make money by denying like life-saving treatment to young children.
[01:53:17]  Right.
[01:53:17]  And that, you know, I think you got to realize that that is presenting a cartoonish villain, right?
[01:53:24]  Like what's presented is like elites are potentially feasting on the bodies of young children, right?
[01:53:32]  The health care CEOs, they're sitting around rubbing their hands because the only way they can make money is denying coverage to children.
[01:53:43]  Chris, where else have I heard the claim that the healthcare system only profits from making people sick?
[01:53:48]  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
[01:53:51]  So there is some overlap in the anti-facts.
[01:53:54]  To be clear, to be clear, for anyone who's not liking what we're saying, I mean, I live in Australia and I would ban private health if I could.
[01:54:02]  I like socialized healthcare.
[01:54:04]  I don't like it either.
[01:54:05]  But it is cartoonish, I think, to then treat anyone involved in a private healthcare system as being guilty of murder in the same way that Luigi Mangioni is.
[01:54:22]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:54:23]  And, you know, just to be clear as well here, Matt.
[01:54:26]  So there's another, you know, flying the ointment fact here because he's talking about, you know, they came down and like, let's accept his framing for a second that Mangioni, you know, he killed someone possibly, right?
[01:54:40]  But lots of people have killed many people.
[01:54:44]  So, you know, why, why is he being singled out?
[01:54:48]  And even if we adopt that, Manchoni is not facing the death penalty anymore.
[01:54:54]  The judge forout the charges that could have led to that, right?
[01:55:00]  So he's facing life imprisonment.
[01:55:02]  But given his narrative there, where they seek to do the harshest thing, it's not really about justice, right?
[01:55:09]  It's all about things.
[01:55:11]  Yeah, so I guess this is the thing when people are talking about the system and gesticulating wildly at all of this.
[01:55:17]  When you have a politician or a journalist or a justice system that does something good or in line with what they think is good, for instance, prosecuting someone or maybe dismissing the charges that would lead to a death penalty for a man's journey, like that's not the system.
[01:55:37]  But when the system does something they don't like, like even the prosecutors even proposing that in the first place, or not charging someone that you would like to see charged, then that is the system.
[01:55:50]  I think the like on epistemic grounds, and that's my issue here, not political ones per se, is that it's very easy to just wave your hands at all of this.
[01:56:03]  And it's very vague and nebulous what you're referring to.
[01:56:08]  But it only works as long as you keep things incredibly vague as to what the system is.
[01:56:17]  And you have to posit these like really strong, nefarious motives to this all-pervading and all-powerful entity.
[01:56:29]  Whether you call it Goliath, like the Weinsteins do, or you call it the neoliberal capitalist system, it sort of functions the same way.
[01:56:41]  Yeah.
[01:56:41]  And like the thing is, insurance, Matt, you know, like as a system, it functions as a business, right?
[01:56:51]  By it makes more money than it pays out, right?
[01:56:55]  Like you insure your car and the hope is that you don't get into a crash.
[01:57:00]  But if you get into a crash, your insurance will cover the majority of the expenses.
[01:57:04]  But the system only works because most people don't crash, right?
[01:57:08]  Like this is the general thing logic of insurance companies.
[01:57:13]  So it's not wrong to say that like an insurance company profits by denying payouts, right?
[01:57:22]  That's part of its profit.
[01:57:23]  But like the primary way that insurance company make money is that most people are not making insurance claims.
[01:57:31]  So it's the premiums that people pay.
[01:57:33]  And then, you know, like the payouts are less than the amount coming in, right?
[01:57:39]  So like they presented as the only way it makes money is like by denying, you know, necessary medical treatments.

=== Premiums and Profits (03:13) ===

[01:57:47]  And like you say, I'm not a defender of whatever decisions are made by United Healthcare or any insurance company.
[01:57:55]  I don't know enough about the details, although I don't think the blind boy will have looked in detail given all the other topics that he that he raises.
[01:58:03]  But it's if you present it as purely like the CEOs are all just there and they're all just plotting, like, what is the way that we can kill the most people and make the most amount of money?
[01:58:16]  I think you have a cartoonish view of how those people function, right?
[01:58:22]  And it is the kind of view where you can then kill them, right?
[01:58:28]  Because they're villains who, like, if you take them out of the world, it's a better world for it.
[01:58:35]  Yeah, I mean, if, as you say, if you're going to run a private health system or a private anything system, a private telecom system or a private education system, then some of the payments will be spent on payouts or services and some will be spent on administration and there'll be a profit margin.
[01:58:53]  I think the payouts for American or Australian private health companies, and I've got it too.
[01:59:03]  I've got a private health insurance because you're kind of forced to in Australia because you get taxed more if you don't have it.
[01:59:10]  But anyway, it's in the high 80s to, you know, in terms of what the payout ratio is to what the premiums are, right?
[01:59:18]  And that residual of 10 or 12 or 15%, whatever it is, is going to incorporate all of the administrative stuff, all of the costs of doing business, plus some percentage profit margin.
[01:59:31]  I don't know what the profit margin is, but it's probably not exceptional.
[01:59:35]  Now, you know, you could frame that as them feasting on the bodies of sick children to get their filthy lucre.
[01:59:45]  And you could think, like me, that it's much better just like to be clear, if the government runs it, you're still going to have administrative costs, right?
[01:59:55]  So it's not going to have denials as well for like, you know, claims under any system.
[02:00:03]  That's right.
[02:00:03]  There are certainly denials in the Australian system.
[02:00:05]  The Australian public health system will cover what it can afford and it won't cover other things because they're so expensive.
[02:00:13]  It's just not considered to be a good cost to benefit ratio.
[02:00:20]  And yeah, so you could frame that stuff as nefarious or more nefarious than it is.
[02:00:27]  But, you know, it's, again, it's pretty mundane.
[02:00:31]  A lot of the stuff that is getting pointed to as just the absolute evilest thing in the world is, you know, you can like it or dislike it, but it's not the caricature that he's presenting it as.
[02:00:45]  No, and you know, one of the things that I would notice, like when people want to do this, like construct the, you know, the worst villain on the other side or for whatever it is, they'll just emphasize, you know, particular selective features.

=== Initiation Rituals in Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (14:57) ===

[02:01:01]  Like when the right-wing media wants to talk about these events, which Blind Boy is talking about, they will much more strongly emphasize the family life of the United Healthcare CEO, the young children he had, right?
[02:01:15]  And so on, which in Blind Boy's story, they're just not mentioned, right?
[02:01:19]  Like, because it's a better story to focus on Luigi Mangioni as somebody like, you know, crusading to help people.
[02:01:28]  And like, they're the ones killing children and doing the evil things, right?
[02:01:33]  So it was like a, you know, it was a vigilante act, it was a vigilante action on behalf of the people.
[02:01:41]  But he doesn't spend much time like dwelling about the impacts, right, of the person that was executed or whatever, because that would be less, you know, it would be, it just isn't as simple, as nice a story.
[02:01:56]  And in the same way, like right-wing media won't want to focus on, you know, the like the excesses of the insurance company or like things that they've done, which have lead to them being readily vilified, right?
[02:02:12]  In the like the coverage of them on the, you know, the left that supports what he did and so on.
[02:02:20]  So yeah, I'm just, I'm just saying, you know, the kind of binary manichaism and the selective portrayal of sympathetic characters.
[02:02:29]  These are classic rhetorical techniques, yeah, that never go out of style.
[02:02:33]  Yeah, and you just pick whoever's the good guy and whoever's the bad guy, right?
[02:02:38]  Now, Matt, let's turn to something a little bit, let's get out of politics for a little bit.
[02:02:44]  I mean, there's going to be politics in it, but let's go to rituals.
[02:02:49]  Rituals are important things.
[02:02:51]  I'm a researcher that focuses on rituals, right?
[02:02:53]  This is my Baliwick, as you like to say.
[02:02:57]  And Blind Boy had some things to say about initiation rituals, something which I've written about.
[02:03:02]  So I think what we're seeing with the Epstein stuff is a conspiracy, but I contextualize it as it's organized crime, right?
[02:03:11]  That is organized crime at a massive international scale involving the most powerful and wealthy people.
[02:03:19]  It looks like a combination of blackmail and gang initiation.
[02:03:23]  Let's use the Hell's Angels as an example.
[02:03:27]  We can all agree that the Hells Angels are an international criminal organized crime organization, all right?
[02:03:33]  Across different countries, they're involved in drugs, murder, prostitution, everything and anything.
[02:03:41]  The Hell's Angels and other Some outlaw motorcycle groups are mafias.
[02:03:49]  That's what they are.
[02:03:50]  The reason I'm singling out outlaw motorcycle gangs is because of their really strict initiations, right?
[02:04:00]  In order to have a successful international criminal organization where your co-workers are not nice people, not people with honor, not people that you can trust, psychopaths.
[02:04:14]  In order to have a good business relationship, you can't trust your co-workers because they're murderers and scumbags.
[02:04:26]  So what they have to do is everyone has to have dirt on each other.
[02:04:30]  So if one person falls, everyone falls.
[02:04:33]  So do you follow the logic there?
[02:04:38]  Is the implication that everyone in these elite circles has dirt on each other?
[02:04:43]  But you're connecting it to the.
[02:04:47]  Yes, that is.
[02:04:48]  That is the broader connection.
[02:04:50]  But I meant about the criminal gangs and what they're up to, like why they are engaging in initiations and this kind of thing.
[02:05:01]  Oh, okay.
[02:05:02]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:05:03]  I guess so.
[02:05:03]  Yeah, I guess there's truth in that.
[02:05:06]  And, you know, it's fine to make analogies, right?
[02:05:08]  Like, I think you could certainly make an analogy with the way the Trump administration works as some kind of organized crime gang, as long as you appreciate it's a metaphor.
[02:05:24]  Yeah, and you know, look, my, like I said, I specialize insofar as I specialize in anything in dysphoric collective rituals, right?
[02:05:33]  So I'm very well aware of like the bonding effects of you know, painful rituals and initiation type rituals.
[02:05:41]  I've written about hazing and all these kinds of things.
[02:05:43]  So there are elements that are true about like, you know, the bonding effects of people have talked about initiation rituals as a either a means of inducing cognitive dissonance, which we discussed recently under the Code in Academia, or as a kind of coalitional psychology thing where you're testing out for free riders, right?
[02:06:05]  You have to go through the bad initiation in order to be trusted enough with like groups' resources and so on, right?
[02:06:13]  There's work by Aldo Simino on this topic, right?
[02:06:17]  So there's stuff there.
[02:06:18]  And it is the case that groups that are involved with more high-risk activities have to be more concerned about the faction and loyalty of members.
[02:06:29]  So you tend to find initiation events amongst military groups, terrorist groups, criminal organizations, like secretive societies or whatever the case might be, right?
[02:06:44]  So there are these things and also sports teams, sumo clubs as well.
[02:06:50]  But these are like groups that require kind of tight bonds, right?
[02:06:56]  And high levels of trust amongst members.
[02:06:59]  But, but, Matt, so he mentions that the criminal gangs in particular, right, that they are gathering, they get people to do this in order that they have like collateral on the people in general, right?
[02:07:16]  And that's how they're able to keep everybody in line.
[02:07:19]  It's a bit like what we've covered with the cults, where they're encouraged to give incriminating information or talk about, you know, provide photos, nude photos of themselves or whatever.
[02:07:29]  And then if they leave or Scientology, you know, keep the darkest secrets.
[02:07:33]  If you leave the group, we'll tell everyone what you've told us, right?
[02:07:37]  So this, this is a thing which exists.
[02:07:39]  But now, does it exist where he says it exists and the way he says it exists?
[02:07:47]  So let me move on with the, he's still talking about the biker gangs here.
[02:07:52]  So there's court reports of in order to get to the highest echelons of certain outlaw motorcycle gangs, you have to do some pretty depraved shit in the presence of other people.
[02:08:06]  One of them, necrophilia is one of them, which is sexual intercourse with a corpse.
[02:08:12]  Because if a person will do that, well, they're definitely not a police officer.
[02:08:17]  Because they've figured out any police officer as a job who's undercover, even if they're in the job 10 fucking years, it is highly unlikely that they're going to have sex with a dead body in front of other people in order to get to the top of the organization.
[02:08:33]  So if you're willing to do that, then you're not a cop.
[02:08:35]  So you get to get into the elite inner circle of this outlaw criminal organization.
[02:08:41]  Now let's move from like motorcycle gangs, which, you know, with motorcycle gangs, you're talking about very traumatized, poor, working class, usually white men joining motorcycle gangs.
[02:08:59]  Now let's go for really, really posh people.
[02:09:03]  So in, I think it's either fucking Oxford or Cambridge, I'm not sure which one, but there's a club called the Bullingdon Club.
[02:09:13]  Okay, Matt.
[02:09:14]  So there, the claim is in there's court reports that in outlaw motorcycle gangs, one of the ways that you get the top of the organization is being forced to do public performances of necrophilia.
[02:09:31]  And that will prove that you're not a cop.
[02:09:33]  Matt, that's not true.
[02:09:35]  Cop?
[02:09:35]  No.
[02:09:36]  That's not true.
[02:09:37]  That is not a documented or proven thing.
[02:09:41]  That is an urban legend.
[02:09:43]  And it's not. associated just with biker gangs.
[02:09:47]  It's associated with, you know, whatever, take your pick, right?
[02:09:51]  Like whichever moral panic that you want.
[02:09:54]  So like Blind Boy there, this is the tone of confidence that he explains that event, right?
[02:10:00]  And how this is, you know, the kind of thing that they're doing.
[02:10:04]  And we know this.
[02:10:06]  And this is the puzzle piece that is going to help us understand the behavior of Donald Trump and the all-in guys and some English aristocrat, et cetera.
[02:10:17]  Yeah.
[02:10:18]  The other little non-secretarism that before his thesis was these terrible things are done in order to have blackmail material prevent people from defecting.
[02:10:31]  But then in this one, he said, no, no, this is a way of proving your loyalty, proving that you're not a cop, that kind of thing.
[02:10:38]  So it's a bit, I guess it's kind of related.
[02:10:42]  Yeah.
[02:10:43]  I think it kind of fits both.
[02:10:45]  But it's like Matt.
[02:10:47]  There are things where you're, there are gang initiations where you're required to like kill people, right?
[02:10:52]  Attack people, beat people up, where you have to, you know, get facial tattoos, various other things, right?
[02:10:58]  There are like costly signals of commitment to a group, but it's the, he goes for the most lurid example of like having sex with a corpse, right?
[02:11:10]  And it's, it's presented like, and all of the examples that we hear throughout it.
[02:11:15]  So Donald Trump is murdering young women and burying them on the golfer remains on his like golf course, right?
[02:11:23]  As an insult.
[02:11:24]  There's cannibalism in the files where people are being accused of eating the health care CEOs.
[02:11:33]  They're like profiting off the blood of young children, right?
[02:11:36]  Like every example is always the most emotionally evocative and lurid.
[02:11:43]  And this one struck me because I specialize in this particular topic, like ritual.
[02:11:49]  And I know that that is not true, right?
[02:11:51]  Like it is, it is not a well-documented fact that outlaw motorcycle gangs or any group required like sex with corpses as part of its like hierarchy.
[02:12:06]  And definitely not ones that were, it was like a public spectacle where the people were like, well done, you're now in and you now respect you as like a, you know, a high-ranking member of the group.
[02:12:18]  Like it's just as a humiliation, it would even be better as like a punishment or, you know, this kind of thing.
[02:12:25]  But it's based on the truth that there are groups and organizations which require you to perform costly signals of commitment.
[02:12:39]  And these can involve things that involve breaking taboos, right?
[02:12:42]  So it's if you just don't reach for the most lurid example, you can kind of, you know, make the argument better, but it's not as evocative without the reference to having sex with corpses.
[02:12:54]  So yeah, I think this gone balance was actually one of the better, relatively speaking, parts of his dialogue where, you know, the general thesis that you could understand elite depravity through the lens of group cohesion, blackmail, and escalating commitment.
[02:13:15]  You know, that general point is fair, I think.
[02:13:19]  But like you say, when you look at the sorts of things he cites, it is one on the less verified end of the spectrum, or in the case of the you mentioned, just merely urban legend, when he could have gone with examples that are better verified.
[02:13:41]  And also that he chooses, of course, the most lurid and the most emotionally affecting points.
[02:13:51]  This is a theme throughout the entire episode, that the argument is kind of stitched together from statements of emotion, statements of feeling, and evocative, lurid examples with a kind of tendentious relationship with what is actually verified.
[02:14:11]  That's the common pattern.
[02:14:13]  Yeah.
[02:14:13]  And he moves on here to talk about like the David Cameron story.
[02:14:16]  You remember this about like he was accused of putting his penis inside a pig when he was at university?
[02:14:24]  A dead pig's mouth, I should say.
[02:14:27]  And like this being part of, you know, the upper elite jeeps that people get on in the Bullingdon Club or whatever, right?
[02:14:36]  You know, whatever elite group he was a part of in Oxford or Cambridge.
[02:14:41]  Did you remember the story?
[02:14:42]  I vaguely remember that.
[02:14:43]  Yeah.
[02:14:44]  Yeah.
[02:14:44]  There was a Black Mirror episode kind of based on the same theme, right?
[02:14:50]  I don't like David Cameron.
[02:14:52]  I'm not a big fan.
[02:14:53]  And I'm also not a huge fan of, you know, the elites in British society.
[02:15:00]  The Bullingdon Club has well-documented terrible history.
[02:15:04]  He talks about them, you know, trashing places and then paying for it after the meal.
[02:15:09]  Again, that is something that's like actually quite well documented.
[02:15:14]  But the pig thing, Matt, the pig thing, it's not well documented.
[02:15:19]  It's based on one person giving a quote that they were there and they or that they heard from someone that they'd seen the photograph or something.
[02:15:31]  And then nobody was ever able to find a photograph and other people, you know, denied it.
[02:15:38]  It was, it was reported like in a book as I heard this from a source.
[02:15:43]  So like, while it was fun to imagine that David Cameron did that, it doesn't, there's actually not evidence that he did.
[02:15:53]  But Blind Boy, when he reports it, he's like, you know, why would he do that?

=== Coffin Rituals And Urban Rumors (05:22) ===

[02:15:58]  Right.
[02:15:58]  This is why.
[02:15:59]  And he goes into the psychology of like, you know, why David Cameron would do that and why it makes him different than normal people.
[02:16:08]  But he was just talking about motorcycle clubs and stuff and presented that they're working class.
[02:16:14]  So in his version, working class people also have sex with corpses, right?
[02:16:19]  Whenever they want to get up their criminal organization.
[02:16:23]  But in his next stage, it's like they've got a different psychology than the rest of us because they're willing to do these weird, you know, David Cameron and others are willing to do these weird initiations with pigs.
[02:16:36]  And he talks about the Skull and Bones Society in America, right?
[02:16:41]  And so listen to this.
[02:16:43]  So with the Skull and Bones, I think Bill Clinton was in it.
[02:16:46]  George Bush was in it.
[02:16:47]  A lot of presidents.
[02:16:50]  It's Princeton or one of them.
[02:16:52]  I don't know.
[02:16:53]  Same shit.
[02:16:54]  Elite colleges in America were future presidents.
[02:16:57]  Okay.
[02:16:59]  One of the skull and bones rituals.
[02:17:02]  Again, this is rumor.
[02:17:03]  It's not 100% verified.
[02:17:05]  But I think they have to climb into a coffin and masturbate in the coffin while being surrounded by other members and then listing out secrets as if they're at a confession.
[02:17:18]  And if they do this for group cohesion, humiliation, everyone has dirt on each other and then a lot of them go on to become American presidents.
[02:17:28]  The point I'm trying to get at is it's not satanic worship.
[02:17:33]  You don't need anything supernatural here.
[02:17:35]  You just need horrible people with access to power.
[02:17:40]  So can you guess what in this case?
[02:17:44]  I imagine you don't know much about the Skull and Bones Society, but how do you think, how accurate would you imagine that is?
[02:17:55]  I'm probably guessing not very accurate.
[02:18:00]  Yeah, well, so there is, at least in this case, there is citations.
[02:18:06]  So one Bill Clinton, no, not a member, okay, but whatever.
[02:18:10]  This is a phone call episode.
[02:18:13]  But the coffin masturbation ritual comes from a single investigative article in 1977, right?
[02:18:24]  And it's not.
[02:18:28]  It's not that they masturbate in the account in that one was they lie in the coffin and recount like histories and personal secrets, right?
[02:18:37]  Like, you know, the same kind of thing that we've talked about, like that, you know, high demand cults get people to do.
[02:18:46]  So the masturbation detail has like been added in here, right?
[02:18:52]  And this is a society that, you know, is like associated with an elite university, a bit like Freemasons, right?
[02:19:00]  I can imagine dramatic rituals around like, you know, skulls and coffins and all this kind of stuff.
[02:19:07]  But here, again, it's kind of like Indiana Jones.
[02:19:10]  You know, people jerk it off of Francis and they're all going to become the future presidents.
[02:19:17]  And you're like, no, it's not.
[02:19:20]  The thing is, I could very easily imagine that at some points in time in some fancy private school, I don't know, Zeta, Omega, Delta society, or some weird back alley of Westminster, all kinds of weird shit has happened from time to time.
[02:19:41]  Right.
[02:19:42]  But I think, you know, what's going on here is pulling out mostly unverified accounts, if not just urban rumor, and weaving it into what is a compelling narrative about the psychology of elite depravity.
[02:20:03]  And I think it's fine to have a thesis and it's fine to make analogies and whatever, understand the psychology and stuff.
[02:20:14]  But the methods here and what he's resting it on is pretty weak.
[02:20:21]  And it does remind me of Jordan Peterson or a Weinstein kind of citing these rather weak little, you know, cherry-picked things of evidence and from that weaving very strong, very strong claims and building basically an entire edifice off of a foundation that's very insubstantial.
[02:20:49]  Yeah, and often psychoanalytic, right, in the reasons that people are, you know, like why left-wing people are doing what they're doing, right?
[02:21:00]  It's because they love like, you know, whatever, right?
[02:21:04]  The transgressions and it's connected to their like authority figures and their love for postmodern neo-Marxism and, you know, all these kinds of things.
[02:21:16]  I've seen narratives like this recently built around the idea of the feminization.

=== Self-Deprecation vs. Positivity (09:08) ===

[02:21:21]  Yes.
[02:21:21]  Yes.
[02:21:22]  Yeah.
[02:21:23]  And same kind of sighting, cherry-picked random little things, weaving it into a narrative.
[02:21:29]  And yeah, you could do that.
[02:21:31]  It's just, I wouldn't trust it.
[02:21:34]  I know, again, you're going to say, well, this is just, Chris, come on.
[02:21:37]  It's a pedantic fact-checking.
[02:21:39]  But can I also mention that the three presidents were William Taft, right, from the early 20th century, and then George H. Bush and George W. Bush.
[02:21:51]  So there might be, you know, another factor, like the familial collection might play a bigger role than their membership in the Skull and Bong Society.
[02:22:01]  But in any case, so you mentioned about like the whole goal of this is kind of to support the broader edifice about like the psychologizing of how, you know, CEOs and politicians are not like the rest of us.
[02:22:18]  And, you know, like I said, Matt, I share the kind of baseline negative image of that class of people, right?
[02:22:28]  Because I think it's very normal, depending on your background or culture.
[02:22:32]  But, you know, Blind Boy is from Ireland and definitely in Ireland.
[02:22:36]  It is very, very normal to have a negative view of like elite British Tufts, right?
[02:22:43]  Or elite Irish people, but to a lesser extent, right?
[02:22:48]  And yeah, so just listen to this.
[02:22:52]  I'm sure Obama rationalized it by saying, look, I'm defending the constitution, but like the CIA told me to do it.
[02:22:59]  I don't know.
[02:23:00]  People who get into positions of extreme power, they know they have to.
[02:23:05]  Under the system, they have to create a hell of a lot of pain.
[02:23:10]  Not even drone strikes.
[02:23:12]  Someone who rises to the very top of a corporation.
[02:23:15]  The company can make more profits this year if you close that factory and 500 people who are supporting their families lose their jobs, but we'll make more profits.
[02:23:23]  Okay, do it.
[02:23:24]  The CEOs of health insurance companies.
[02:23:27]  Your job is to make profits by denying people health insurance.
[02:23:34]  That person who's dying of cancer, who has paid for their health insurance every single year for this exact moment, you have to figure out how to not pay them and let them die because that's how this model makes money.
[02:23:47]  The people who rise to the top of the system, the top of that fucking global international shit, they're not good people.
[02:23:57]  A lot of them might be incredibly cruel sadists.
[02:24:03]  They might be people who have a curiosity and about other people's pain, who get a thrill from other people's pain, who enjoy dominating, enjoy heartening, enjoy abusing, enjoy humiliating and, judging by the Epstein Files, these are the, the roles of being part of that club.
[02:24:27]  Again, it's it's, it's a stretch and it's built on uh emotions yeah, like lurid, lurid imagery and and emotions.
[02:24:38]  I mean there's always a reasonable version of this, like I I read uh, I thought you know, was it John Ronson or someone?
[02:24:44]  Or John Ron Johnson, John Ronson?
[02:24:47]  Yeah yeah, the other way around um, like he what he wrote the psychopath test or something like that yeah yeah yeah, I mean you know, so he had a thesis there that uh, you know psychopaths, you know right, are overrepresented.
[02:24:59]  Overrepresented because because essentially, the role requires a kind of inhuman kind of attitude.
[02:25:05]  You know, and I think I think there's a reasonable version of this.
[02:25:08]  Is what i'm saying.
[02:25:09]  I've no idea whether it's empirically true or not.
[02:25:11]  Um, but his version is is, is is pushed up to the max right, like it is, it is, it is incredibly lurid.
[02:25:21]  It is like taking delight, like stringing these things together where you have whatever, some initiation rituals in some silly elite school and combining that with uh, a health private health insurer not Improve, not approving a thing and weaving it together with the Epstein thing into a thesis that they're just bloodthirsty people who enjoy inflicting pain.
[02:25:48]  And these are the people that are running the world.
[02:25:49]  We have essentially, vampires.
[02:25:51]  A secret yeah, secret clan of vampires are running the world.
[02:25:54]  Is what is, is what is uh, the thesis is and it's just over the top.
[02:26:00]  It is and it isn't what the Epstein files present because, like what the Epstein files present, matt is people that feel that they have immunity right, and also people who are like arrogant, entitled arsholes right, but they're not people who are like cartoonishly, you know, rubbing their hands and plotting out, you know, I've seen a great suffering video.
[02:26:28]  Watch this.
[02:26:28]  Like people will find there's a reference to torture in one of the, like, in one of the emails or whatever.
[02:26:35]  But what he's painting is that should be the primary thing throughout all these emails because like what they're actually about behind the scenes is you know like getting off on pain and suffering and abuse.
[02:26:49]  And they're they're all like, like you say, evil vampires, but that's not what it shows.
[02:26:54]  It shows a much more mundane, pervasive evil, right?
[02:26:58]  Which is just people being, you know, like self-centered, narcissistic, abusive, sexually abusive, entitled pricks.
[02:27:11]  And the other people primarily care about like what their interests are.
[02:27:15]  You know, can they get connected to this other person?
[02:27:18]  Can they have a nice dinner with someone?
[02:27:22]  And so on.
[02:27:23]  And that is a much more mundane cruelty and exploitative system than what Blind Boy presents, which is like a cartoonish world of an evil vampire class that is feeding on pain and suffering.
[02:27:36]  Like the reality is, most people at the top of systems, including the super wealthy and whatever, they don't see themselves as evil people and they're not engaged in satanic rituals to like increase their bonds together, right?
[02:27:52]  The guys in the all-in podcast think they're the masters of the universe and they think they're all great guys.
[02:27:58]  Yeah, they're probably not cannibals.
[02:28:00]  Probably not.
[02:28:01]  I mean, in that case, I don't know if that, but it's, it's just, it's so frustrating.
[02:28:06]  It's so frustrating.
[02:28:07]  I don't like them.
[02:28:08]  I really dislike them.
[02:28:10]  I don't like them.
[02:28:10]  I know after that, they're probably not cannibals.
[02:28:13]  Now, Matt, you know, there we've painted quite a picture, right?
[02:28:18]  There's quite a ghoulish collection of individuals.
[02:28:22]  And, you know, if you think that is how the world operates, then maybe you have a lot more sympathy than we do for the, you know, you might be more sympathetic to Blind Boy's message.
[02:28:34]  But there are some people in Blind Boy stories that come off better, that are, you know, presented generally as doing good in the world and having good motivations.
[02:28:46]  Principally Blind Boy.
[02:28:49]  It's a very blind boy.
[02:28:50]  And I do want to point this out because there's a, you know, there's a thing where we often make the point, Matt, that like self-deprecation, right?
[02:29:01]  We coming from Northern Ireland and Australia come from cultures that value self-deprecation.
[02:29:07]  There's actually even this debate in the cross-cultural psychology literature about the universality of positive self-regard, right?
[02:29:15]  And this is questioned by the fact that when they do studies in East Asia and some other countries, they tend to find that people are self-deprecating to the point where they seem to have no positive self-regard, right?
[02:29:28]  And this led some people to say universal positive self-esteem is not, or positive self-esteem is not a universal thing.
[02:29:36]  And other people countered that actually in self-deprecating cultures, this is how you create positive self-regard by saying that you are, you know, the most humble, the most like out of the others.
[02:29:51]  So this is a debate.
[02:29:52]  But Blind Boy comes from partly my culture, right?
[02:29:56]  The Irish culture.
[02:29:58]  So I feel like you and I are in a position to examine, you know, self-deprecation genuinely presented and when it is perhaps self-serving, self-deprecation in other ways.
[02:30:12]  So I'm going to play you a little story and see what you think.
[02:30:17]  See if you pick up.
[02:30:18]  I know I've loaded the dice in a particular way, but yeah, I think it's worth examining this, especially in contrast to what we just covered.

=== Examine Self-Deprecation (02:11) ===

[02:30:30]  Now, Matt, do you have time for two or three clips and we'll finish on this part?
[02:30:35]  Well, first of all, I've got to go to the toilet.
[02:30:37]  And secondly, yeah, I do have to go for a swim.
[02:30:40]  If I don't leave now, then I'm not going to be able to cook dinner.
[02:30:42]  And I probably, well, then hold on, hold on.
[02:30:46]  Before you.
[02:30:48]  So you don't want to play them, right?
[02:30:49]  Just to be clear.
[02:30:50]  No, I don't want to play.
[02:30:50]  I don't want to play them.
[02:30:51]  Okay, okay, okay.
[02:30:52]  So then I say instead of that, we record just a like brief two-minute outro to say, okay, that's part one.
[02:31:02]  We'll be back, you know, we're back in part one to talk about the non-vampiric aspects of the conversation.
[02:31:08]  And maybe, you know, I can just insert the yellow pivot, right?
[02:31:11]  So let me say it.
[02:31:15]  Yeah, well, so Matt, okay, that's a, you know, a cast of villains, world vampires, uh, like corpse fucking gang members.
[02:31:25]  It's, it's a terrible, the bloodthirsty CEOs, right?
[02:31:29]  We're living in the hell world.
[02:31:31]  Fortunately, in this world, there are some good guys.
[02:31:36]  You might be looking at two of them, you know, you might agree or not, depending on your point of view.
[02:31:42]  But, you know, Blind Boy does detail people that he thinks, you know, are doing good in the world and it makes quite the contrast.
[02:31:50]  And it might surprise you to find out who is chief in his presentation of being a good guy.
[02:32:00]  But I think I'll leave that, Matt, that surprise for next time.
[02:32:05]  Why do we leave people on that dark note with the ray of hope that they're going to hear about some more good guys?
[02:32:12]  See if you can guess.
[02:32:13]  This is an exercise.
[02:32:14]  Can you guess who who who was who was a good person in this otherwise terrible and fallen world?
[02:32:22]  Yes.
[02:32:23]  Okay.
[02:32:23]  And we look forward to feedback on this episode, as we always do.
[02:32:28]  Yeah.
[02:32:29]  And this will probably be a long episode.
[02:32:32]  So, you know, this is part one, part two, coming soon.
[02:32:38]  To a theater near you.
[02:32:40]  Bye-bye for now.