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April 28, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:12:57
Re-carbon: Carbon Mike II
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I love Denny Pole.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Denny Pole.
And listen for the time, subscribe with me.
I love Denny Pole.
So, carbon white.
I know I'm not supposed to say this.
But you are kind of my favourite new podcast guest.
You see, you have certain advantages.
I mean, one of them is obviously that you're black.
And that means that people think I'm not racist because I've got this black friend.
And it's great, isn't it?
So I can say right-wing things and people go, yeah, but you're a racist bastard.
And I can go, no, I'm not.
No, I'm not.
Listen to Carbon Mike.
So that's good.
I wanted to talk to you, actually.
Because I think, like me, you are really worried about the whole world of economic pain that we are storing up with this lockdown.
Yes.
And I think a lot of people are going to be out of work and I'm astonished by the naivety and craven subservience to the government authority that we're witnessing right now of all these drones who seem to be incapable of making the connection between the lockdown that they're kind of enjoying because they feel safe and they're not working and And the economic reality,
which is, yeah, and you're going to lose your jobs, and you're not going to have a pension, and your career is basically stuffed.
And I'm amazed that people can't make that very, very basic imaginative leap.
I always think one of my curses is that I'm...
Two or three steps ahead of where the herd is in my thinking.
And it's like I knew that this stock market collapse was coming in January.
And yet somehow I sort of half believed myself and half didn't because I thought, well, the markets must know better than me.
They'd have collapsed by now, of course.
Had I taken advantage of that, I'd have made...
But anyway, that wasn't a whinge.
It was just really an observation of this blessing and curse I have.
I'm looking around now and I'm looking at a lot of my journalistic contemporaries and thinking, you are so behind the curve here.
You really haven't appreciated it.
You're still focusing on this relatively trivial disease.
I'm not saying that people aren't dying from it, but I am saying that the coming economic collapse is so much worse.
And I'm thinking, how are we going to survive?
How are we going to manage when all this is over?
I'm looking at the mainstream media, and I'm thinking, you have not distinguished yourself in this crisis.
No, they have not covered themselves in glory.
No, I think MSM has written a letter which goes something like, Dear reality, this is my suicide note.
I do not deserve to live after this.
And so I'm going to kill myself by writing more hysterical stories featuring Piers Morgan about just how grave this crisis is and how much longer the lockdown needs to go on.
And you say, hang on a second, guys.
You depend on advertising.
You depend on sales.
And right now your reputation is toast.
Yes.
Because you are not providing a counter-narrative to this massive globalist takeover that's occurring.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, but basically, people like Bill Gates, George Soros are creaming their trousers here.
They're creaming their pants here, aren't they?
It's Davos man's dream.
You know, Carbon Mike, you know me well enough, I think.
You know, you're familiar with my career.
I used to, about 10 years ago, I thought, you know, I'm so good.
You know, I may not be for everyone, but I'm a pretty interesting columnist.
And one of these days, I'm going to get a job.
I'm going to be a named columnist in either The Mail or maybe The Sun or somewhere like that.
And it's going to sort me out for the next 10 years.
Anyway, I gave up that dream.
A while ago, I just thought there really is no future for the MSM because they are so much creatures of the establishment now that at best they're kind of David Cameron, Theresa May, conservative lights.
There's no real red meat conservatives in there, so there's really not much place for me.
Moving on to the subject that we talked about briefly, which is me losing my column in The Spectator.
Outrageous.
Which I had for about, what, 15, maybe 20 years?
Matthew Dancona gave it to me when he was editor, so I don't know when that was.
But...
I used to really enjoy writing that column, and it was the perfect length for me for about 950 words, and I could write about whatever I wanted, and sometimes I was political, and sometimes it would be things like me destroying a wasp nest in my garden.
And I totally do not want to bitch or whinge or sound like I'm a bitter rejectee or anything like that, because no one wants to be that.
But I do want to...
I do feel...
That there are quite a lot of people out there who used to read The Spectator, and I was one of the first columns they turned to, maybe after Rod Lidl, and they no longer have anywhere to read that column.
So here's my plan, and you can tell me this is a good idea.
I want to put up a, not the Spectator column, but not my Spectator column, Behind the paywall on Patreon, and I will charge a cheapskates rate of $2.50 a month.
Obviously, people pay more if they want, but $2.50 a month would be effectively 50p Roughly per column.
And I think I'm worth 50p a column.
And is that a good idea?
Will that work?
I think yes.
We need to see what...
I'm sorry you said that.
That was the right answer.
My wife thought of it.
It was my wife's idea, not mine.
And I think she's right.
No, she's right.
And listen, you should...
Whatever else you can think of in terms of content that you want to...
I mean, because Patreon lets you tier things, right?
So you can stack things onto that for higher-tier subscribers.
But yeah, you should...
I mean, I think, look...
The subscription model of content for people like you should be the baseline.
That should be assumed that you're doing something like that.
In my alter ego, which we can talk about offline, I've been researching and writing code and trying to figure out how to do a more direct technical disruption of what the default kind of consensus model is for online newspapers I've been researching and writing code and trying to figure out
Long story short, they've just all settled around the same thing because newspapers are also impossibly kind of hidebound, technically illiterate, you know, dens of, you know, mostly kind of lefties, what have you.
But even the right wing ones, I mean, they just don't know tech.
They just don't really understand it.
After the internet went and kicked everyone's ass and a lot of them went running and sold off all the valuable parts of their business, this is something that David Simon, the guy from The Wire, who used to work for the Baltimore Sun, has written extensively about.
Right?
They kind of went into this panic because they didn't know how to deal with this technology.
They didn't understand the nature of the conduit.
Now, this many years later, they've kind of come to a grudging consensus on what to do.
But you know something?
It's actually not a very good model.
It's just what they've decided.
There are better models.
And so I've been researching some of those models and kind of writing software to figure out What is a design that would let you kind of monetize content in a different way and kind of shake things up more at the ground level?
So we'll talk about that offline because I don't want to blow my cover.
But long story short, you got the right idea, obviously.
Yeah, well, I like the sound of your model.
Okay, so take, for example, the newspaper where I spent a significant chunk of my journalistic career when journalism still counted for something, the Daily Telegraph.
And I've seen how that's responded to the growth of the internet and the decline of print journalism.
And you're right that newspapers have really not responded in an intelligent way.
And I'm wondering whether their time is pretty much up.
I mean, it's definitely been an observable experience.
Yes.
In the old days, when you went to stay with somebody in the country and you went to the local newsagent, on Sunday morning you would go out to the newsagent to buy up the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday because you could not have a newspaper on the Sunday.
I'm not sure whether that is the case now, although I happen to think that the two best newspapers in this country currently are the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Telegraph.
They seem to be the ones which are least woke and are most countercultural.
But you look at the rest of the press now in our country, and I suspect the same is the case in the US, and you think, What reason do I actually have to buy you?
Okay, so there are columnists.
There are columnists that I really rate in The Telegraph, for example.
A lot of them are girls for some reason.
And I think, well, okay, I would go on getting the paper for them just about.
But then I look at the news journalism surrounding them, and I think...
Well, you've got your science correspondent bigging up stories about the wind industry and uncritically bigging up bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes, and now you've got the same science correspondent bigging up the coronavirus scare.
And they all seem to be touting the official line rather than questioning it.
So, what I'm asking is, what is the media offering me?
Why should I continue to subscribe?
And I can't see it, really.
The question almost answers itself.
Part of the problem, right, is that...
And again, of course, I'm always going to try to use any excuse to go back to the foundations and the roots of things, right?
It's like the...
Is that first principles?
It's a first principles thing.
Well, as a foundationist, yeah, I try to always kind of have an eye toward that, right?
But if you think about how the newspaper, the history of the newspaper industry, let's say, either in the U.K. or the U.S., it's not as if the early newspaper magnates were, you know, these highly virtuous souls who only had the best interest of the right of the republic at heart or the country at heart. these highly virtuous souls who only had the best interest
But the thing is that what was important is that, one, they came out of a society that thought there was something to virtue, that thought there was something to the nation, that believed in that first person plural.
And so that meant that they could only be so far out of step with their readership because at the end of the day, they didn't come out of some, you know, graduate course where the whole point was to disrupt Western civilization.
They came out of, you know, they were people of their society, not.
not always men of the people, but they were your countrymen.
Okay.
So now, you know, fast forward to today, you have the current situation where you do have papers that are kind of run by people who are at best kind of have this chilly skepticism about, you know, this whole, is this nation state thing really you have the current situation where you do have papers that are kind And are they, and, and at the worst, you know, people like, you know, the folks who, who I imagine run the guardian, right.
Who are actively there.
Like, yeah, we want to subvert this.
We, you know, we're, we're, we're revolutionaries.
Right.
And, and here's, here's the thing.
Think about, I don't know what the tip, the television, the TV situation is vastly different in the UK, but okay.
In the U S we have cable.
We have, you know, cable television.
And there's this thing that was very controversial.
They were talking about doing unbundling, right?
So the cable companies would sell you some large number of channels in a bundle.
Meanwhile, if you subscribe to cable TV, you really only maybe want a handful of those channels, right?
If you like movies and exclusive content, you might like HBO, you might like ESPN.
But you're forced to buy all these other channels too, okay?
Like CNN.
CNN and cable?
I think it is.
It is, right.
It's like, do you want a dog turd with your foie gras?
Exactly.
So that's such evocative language.
But you see where I'm going, right?
It's like you are, in the same sense, When you think about newspaper content, it's bundled in such a way that you're getting this whole package of stuff.
And the way in which we've come to consume certain journalistic content means that we are kind of a la carte-ing it.
We are kind of saying, oh, let me see what so-and-so has to say in this paper.
And let me see what so-and-so's column says.
And let me see what have you.
So there's that.
In other words, I think there's a kind of unbundling that needs to happen because if that content is behind a paywall, if you have like some newspaper, whatever, The Spectator, and the whole thing's behind a paywall, then essentially what you have to do is you have to pay for the whole subscription to get the three or four things that you really want to read that month.
Now, if one were to unbundle that, it wouldn't be good for them, but it would be good for...
It could possibly be good for readers, okay?
And it could possibly be good for content providers.
I want to just go down a path a second because, and again, I want to emphasize that this is not stuff that I have yet thought out completely, but...
There's a guy named Jaron Lanier, L-A-N-I-E-R. He was one of the pioneers of so-called VR, virtual reality.
He built an early VR company and he sold it to Microsoft, I think, and he's done a lot of technical writing and things like that.
And on some matters, he is really sound.
I think he's a little bit too optimistic about so-called driverless cars, but I think he's dead on about how the term artificial intelligence is exactly 50% correct.
It is artificial, but machines are actually not intelligent.
They're dumb as rocks.
And the fact is that what we're doing is the whole AI industry and the hype around it is Okay, a lot of what that is is a consensual hallucination.
We're all agreeing to pretend like there's not a huge amount of human labor making this thing work.
Now, bear with me.
This actually is relevant, believe it or not.
So, what he points out when he talks about these things is...
He gives the example of online translation, because language translation is actually a wicked problem.
There is no machine, and there are no machines that can actually do natural language translation all of a piece.
It is not...
You know, machines can translate small phrases and things like that, but to really take a text in one language and deliver a coherent text in another requires human minds.
And a lot of the online translation stuff is really, what it's really doing is it's amalgamating little phrase translations from all these unpaid translators that are just everywhere kind of feeding into that system.
And so at the end of that thing, he says, and correctly in my opinion, we end up with this thing that we're calling like an artificial intelligence.
But it's not really, it's just, it is a synthetic intelligence.
It is something that's synthesized from the actual human intelligence of all these people who are not paid.
Now, his point is that if we had a proper system of micropayments and if we had a proper system of kind of back identification, right, that was personalized rather than aggregated and used by players like Facebook to kind of basically,
you know, weaponize our attention, then we could actually have an internet economy in which people People are actually—we're not saying something's free and pretending that people didn't just work for free to give us this thing.
People can actually—I could translate a phrase if I knew Russian and English.
I could do a Russian-English translation, and I could forward that to the network and receive a micropayment for that.
And people could—it would be a much lower-friction way for people to monetize whatever they have to offer, whether it's skills— We're good to go.
But if we instead, you know, scaled things in such a way where you, a columnist, could generate content and be paid a little bit at a time when people...
And it would be under your control, right?
You could set prices.
You could let the...
And, you know, 10,000 people like you setting prices and letting the market kind of stabilize around prices.
Now we'd have a situation where...
You could possibly make a living or at least make a credible revenue stream without necessarily having to align yourself with a large player.
And then journalists, opinion, columnists, what have you, would be in the position of maybe signing a certain contract with a paper if that paper wants to bundle their content.
But it's much more of a mutual thing.
It's less of...
It's less of someone sacking you from a column and more of, oh man, I see looking at the metrics that so-and-so's column is rating very high in the same way that a Twitter feed can rate very high because of the number of follows.
And listen, the tools to do this are all here.
It's just that no one has actually built an infrastructure on top of the internet, on top of the web specifically, that is tuned to do this kind of thing.
But that's just a...
It's a design question.
It's not a...
It's not whether it's feasible to do.
It's just we haven't done it yet.
I think we're talking before about scaling certain things down to human scale.
Social networks, things like Twitter and Facebook, these are not supposed to be monoliths in the economy.
They're supposed to be patterns.
There are supposed to be 50,000 Twitters.
There are supposed to be 50,000 Facebooks.
It's, you know, in the same way that there are 50,000 front porches in any part of the map.
So if we can scale these things down and design it right, then all of a sudden we have a whole new generation of tools that let people like you turn their ability to generate content into revenue.
So I'll pause.
Yeah.
Well, obviously, I'm excited by that possibility.
Except I do remember about 10 years ago, when I still had my Spectator column, not that I'm bitter, you understand.
About 10 years ago, I seem to remember writing that very piece, saying, look, this is a golden age for people with talent, because they are going to be rewarded, because it's going to be very clearly evident.
Which ones have been...
I've got this lot basically because they're good at brown nosing and or because they push the right, you know, gentle buttons or whatever.
Yes, yes.
These times will soon be over.
People will be judged on pure quality.
Ten years on from that column, absolutely squat has happened.
Is it because there is no incentive for...
Because obviously you can see why businesses that own newspapers and magazines would want to keep a tight rein on their old model.
That's correct.
And...
What's in it for the disruptors who want to set up this new super system whereby you get this dream newspaper, this dream magazine, where you get to read all your favorite columnists and none of the froth, none of the nonsense that you don't want to read, none of the kind of liberal lefty stuff that's been inserted by right-wing newspapers because Hayek thinks that...
We can get down with the kids, which is what The Telegraph is doing, for example, and its soft features are very SJW, very kind of feminazi, because I presume they've drafted in some woman who thought, we need to make ourselves more relevant to the younger generation.
They're not buying newspapers.
So what is the incentive to create this wonderful newspaper that I would love to read if it existed?
Well, let's think about this for a second.
First, let's talk about why Why this many years on from you writing that, the situation is as it is.
Well, one reason is that a few big players have kind of gained ascendancy, and they've scaled up to the point where a lot of the natural ferment on the internet is behind a wall garden, right?
It's like Facebook is its own thing, and Twitter is...
That's one problem.
So that scale has tended to discourage innovation, right?
The other thing is that I think because no one—maybe the real problem is this.
We don't really have a market on the Internet.
What we have is clearinghouses, right?
A few big clearinghouses for, I'm sorry, when I say market, I mean a market for content.
We have a market for things like goods.
And, I mean, think about that.
Craigslist is great in terms of getting, right, buying and selling things.
Etsy is great for buying and selling things.
eBay, Letgo, all these are really viable markets.
Now, by contrast, we don't really have vibrant content markets on the Internet.
What we have is a few big clearinghouses for aggregated and labeled and weaponized human attention.
You see what I'm saying?
You see what I'm saying?
These companies can tell you the service is free.
These companies can tell you the service is free.
They can tell you Twitter is quote unquote free or Facebook is quote unquote free or whatever is quote unquote.
They can tell you Twitter is quote unquote free or Facebook is quote unquote free or whatever is quote unquote.
Why?
Why?
Because you are the product.
Because in order to give this away to you for free, they have to, they're selling some aspect of your behavior.
They're selling behavior analytics to other companies.
Okay.
Now, if we had a viable system of micropayments and it doesn't have to be just one system, by the way.
In fact, it probably shouldn't be just one system.
But we need to start looking at kind of pushing and fomenting an ecosystem of micropayment systems where we can make it so that you, James Dellingpole, can put something up and you can get a little bit of money every time someone accesses it.
And it doesn't have to be much.
What matters is that the analytics belong to you, right?
And you're in control of that.
Now, if we had enough of that, then...
I think everything else would flow out of that, but there needs to be, in other words, incentives.
We're back to incentives.
Okay, what incentive is there to do something reliably online if you're not getting paid for it?
Well, people do, sure, but it's a labor of love.
But if you're good at something, if you're professional at something, you need to be compensated for it.
I think the payment system is one.
I think the analytics and tracking, the ability to scale that down to where it's relatively easy for you.
And again, what I'm talking about is the same thing that happened to websites a while ago, right?
Where at first, a website was this thing and all these firms arose to kind of like shepherd companies through the digital content era and, you know, webify themselves.
And it was this thing.
But the grassroots thing of a website was you start a WordPress blog, right?
You start a blog.
Yeah.
And, you know, there was a lot of technology in, there is a lot of technology inside a blog that you just never have to really think about.
I mean, it's like a miniature content management system, but you don't have to worry about that.
It's, you know, there may be a database behind it.
You don't care about that.
You start a blog, right?
And these things have been productized enough where it's relatively easy.
You pick a service, you know, and you start a blog and then you, right?
Okay, so the same kind of thing I think we need.
In terms of online, you need to pick a service, and okay, I'm going to do this, and now I'm getting micropayments through this thing, and maybe you have more than one, right?
And again, all these technologies that enable this kind of thing to happen, they're all there for us.
RSS, for example, people listen to podcasts.
podcast indication happens on the basis of RSS, which was originally designed to allow you to kind of sip from the fire hose, as it were, of web sites so that you could have a lot of websites that you'd like to go to.
But basically, you would each website would publish its own RSS feed.
And then you'd have some RSS feed reader that would aggregate those feeds and let you know when there was new stuff on each of the sites in your list.
So it was like this organization.
And then that didn't take off so much, but RSS found its niche in podcasting.
And that's a very interesting kind of little baseline technology.
So long story short, the incentives haven't been there.
There have been big players that have crowded out the small ones.
And because everyone getting into the online business, all the startups, right, because they haven't been able to think of a way to monetize things, they always come back to ads.
We're going to pay for it with ads.
We're going to pay for it with ads, right?
Yeah, which is a shit model, I think.
Which is a completely shit model, exactly.
So that stifled a lot of things.
Because if you couldn't find a way to monetize something with ads, that is, if you couldn't find a way to pretend that you were really giving the thing away for free, then no one was going to finance you, right?
You couldn't get venture money.
Okay, so what does that mean?
Well, that means you have to lie about, so we have this whole market that's built on lying about whether your shit is free or not.
It's not free.
So I think that there's a lot of room for disruption.
And by the way, you know, just in general, I tend to be a lot more optimistic about the coming age just because what I often point out to people is in the same way that Nigel Farage wielded a huge amount of political influence without winning an election, right?
Okay.
Yeah.
Think about how influential cell phones are, mobile phones.
Now, the people who invented the mobile phone, the cellular phone and the cellular communications network, did they get elected to anything?
Did they run for anything?
No.
Do you see what I'm saying?
And how much influence have they...
Now, here's the thing.
The flip side is that that influence that they wielded wasn't necessarily coherent influence, right?
That is, it wasn't focused on a particular objective.
It wasn't like the inventors of the cell phones said, and now we want the marginal tax rate to be this.
No.
But they...
They created this vast seismic change, and all these new ecosystems kind of sprung up on the back of that change, and all kinds of follow-on effects.
It's a highly disruptive thing.
This is at least possible with the current situation in terms of journalism, in terms of online content.
So I'm not pessimistic.
I'm like, we are in, I think we're in an appropriately shit situation for, you know, for how we've misallocated our time and resources over these past years and how we've misused this gift of the Internet and what have you.
But none of that is cast in stone.
This was 1.0, 2.0.
Okay, next.
I want to emphasize how much infrastructure there is there.
For us to build these things and how cheap it is for people to experiment, for people to try things and fail.
When I got into this business, you know, if you wanted to actually have a bunch of servers doing whatever kind of work providing the service that you wanted to give your customers, you had to buy those servers up front and provision them and set them up and have them in a climate-controlled room, and you had to assume all that cost up front.
Now, you know, people who are in my business know that there are cloud computing services like AWS, like Google Cloud, like Azure.
And essentially, you can backload the cost of your infrastructure.
So it's never been cheaper to experiment with this stuff.
And there have never been more tools lying around, high-quality software tools that are free and open source for people to do this stuff.
Okay, end of rant.
Go on.
Okay.
No, no, no.
Well, I have a very simple thing to say to that.
Get your shit together, Carbon Mike.
Because obviously, it's not...
Here we are.
We've got the dream situation where we've got this guy who's a brilliant programmer with an eidetic memory who also happens to have the right politics.
You actually believe in markets.
So, okay.
So, all I'll say on that one is get your shit together.
But I wanted to sort of...
In the tail end of this podcast, to talk about that optimism thing that you mentioned.
Yes.
Look, I think we need to offer, you know, this is a song of hope.
Yes, exactly.
As Robert Plant said when he sang Stare Way to Heaven on that song remains the same concert.
And I agree with you that potentially, potentially, this disaster...
Could yet be productive.
Because you look at...
You and I both believe, I think, in free markets.
Yes.
And you look at the history of economic developments.
And you think, for example, of the Luddites and what they were doing.
And the Luddites were traditional weavers who had been made unemployed by the new technology.
So what did they do?
They went around smashing up this new equipment.
But actually, when...
If you believe in Schumpeter, if you believe in creative destruction, that when your job is destroyed for whatever reason, not that I'm going back to my spectator column or anything like that, but that shouldn't be a sign that you should top yourself or that you should feel bad about yourself.
It should be a sign, well, hang on a second.
How can I take advantage of this?
And there are going to be millions of people around the world who are going to be rendered unemployed by this.
And I guess that this could potentially be an opportunity, couldn't it?
They could find ways of working, well, working from home for starters, whereas previously they believed in the model where you have to go to an office.
I think that model has been more or less killed by this lockdown now that people realise you can work from home.
And I also think that people might begin to realize that they don't need the man anymore, not least when the man stops paying them.
That's going to be the killer, isn't it?
Well, I mean, so you touched on a couple interesting things.
I don't want to be too optimistic about...
The man.
No, I don't want to be talking...
Do you think the man will always own our ass?
Do you think he will?
I used to say the man's too big, the man's too strong.
No, look, I think...
It's almost like the man himself isn't my problem.
My problem is that the man has managed to self-deal and to enshrine a regime of rent-seeking, extracting fees merely for occupying a certain position within extracting fees merely for occupying a certain position within the economy as opposed to being paid to be productive in that economy.
to being paid to be productive in that economy.
He's put in place those things.
And I think the rank and file of people running around in our societies have bought into the narrative that those things are there to protect us.
But what they're doing is they're protecting him.
I'll give you, you know, occupational licensing requirements are a great example, right?
Now, you could argue that some of them are beneficial, but very many of them are not.
If you look at Reason Magazine, for example, Reason.com, they're always holding forth about how in certain states of the union, I think Tennessee may be one of them, but there are definitely several jurisdictions in the U.S. where if you want to do hair, you want to be a hairdresser like you're good with hair, you have you want to be a hairdresser like you're good with hair, you have to get a license from the That's right.
I have heard of this.
It's ridiculous.
Right.
Okay.
You think that actually the main criterion for a hairdresser would be, does that hairdresser attract clients?
And if they're giving shit haircuts, they'll very, very quickly lose clients.
Exactly.
It's a very simple mechanism.
Exactly.
So here's the thing.
This, I think that...
So, you know, so we shouldn't be—I don't want to be too cavalier about the idea that, like, you know, people losing—people who—blue-collar people losing their jobs are not going to be able to necessarily just, you know, quote-unquote learn to code or what have you.
But what I'm what I am saying is those of us who are in a position to need to in the wake of maybe even before we get to the wake of the crisis, push really hard to roll back these licensing restrictions to the extent possible.
As a society, we need to say that, yes, having unlicensed people in certain professions is a risk.
But given the situation, given that we're steamrolling into a recession, we need to we need to we need to accept some more of that risk in favor of allowing people to turn their expertise into revenue, into prosperity opportunities.
I'll give you another couple.
Our supposedly progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, one reason why he's dead to me is because he has essentially...
Well, to be fair, his predecessor, Mike Bloomberg, declared war on New York homeowners on behalf of his friends in the hotel industry so that the city would crack down on you if you had a brownstone, if you had a house in Brooklyn somewhere, and you were renting it out via Airbnb.
Now, what the so-called progressives will say is, well, if you're using your house for Airbnb, you're driving up rents, and you're doing that, and there's all this stuff.
But here's the thing.
At the end of the day, it's your property.
And for this government...
For any government to have any legitimacy, they need to understand that whatever suffering they've inflicted, whatever overreaction they've engaged in, now it's time for them to back the hell up.
I have a friend, a black woman, a family woman, who lives in this brownstone with her husband and her son.
She's a business owner.
She has roots in the community.
She got fined $10,000 by the city of New York for making her home available via Airbnb.
Now, she's an interior designer.
The place is spotless.
Again, she lives in the house.
It's not a case of someone having some substandard housing or what have you.
And again, if you put pictures of your thing up, people have reviews.
There's a feedback loop.
It's very easy to filter out who the bad actors are in that ecosystem.
The problem we have is, you know, busybody bureaucrats thinking they need to protect us.
And the rank and file of our citizens not having the kind of the, I don't know, the fortitude to say, listen, never mind all that protection shit, okay?
This is my decision.
It's my risk to take.
Mind your business.
So to the extent possible, we have to, now, we have to, whoever, wherever you are, whatever jurisdiction you're in, find out what kind of occupational licensing requirements are keeping people from turning their assets into Into revenue.
And get rid of them.
Will it introduce more risk?
Yes.
And it's like you don't, you, whoever you are, if you can hear the sound of my voice, you do not deserve to be a free people.
If you can't accept the risk that comes with saying, I'm going to start something, I'm going to go and I'm going to start a lemon.
I mean, for God's sake, there have been instances of cops shutting down kids who started lemonade stands.
You see what I'm saying?
When it was convenient to him, when his friends who owned high-end boutiques in Soho or whatever complained that there were too many people selling their own homemade jewelry on the streets and what have you, he said, okay, and he sent his cops around to rob.
I had friends, some of whom I bought things from.
I'm not talking about just a homeless person with a table full of rags.
I'm talking about craftspeople, making their crafts.
When people talk about...
You see, conservatives haven't figured out how to resolve these contradictions and how to appeal to the natural energy and dynamism of young people.
If you tell young people that the market is a good thing and they're supposed to like markets and creative destruction, all this business, then they can see...
A Republican mayor rousting people from the streets for engaging in business, then what the hell are you expecting to think?
Of course they're going to think you're full of shit, because you are full of shit.
And when I say you, Republicans should know better than this.
And so now is the time that we need to jump on this thing and say, if all of you Republicans, man...
Y'all are Johnny on the spot when it comes to deregulating certain parts of the economy.
Okay, we need to, right now, the deregulation needs to happen now is at street level.
It's a level of someone who owns a car and wants to bury people around town for money.
It's at the level of someone who makes something and wants to sell the thing he or she makes on the street.
It's at the level of someone who wants to make something and put it in a box and ship it somewhere.
It's at the level of someone who wants to do their friend's hair in their living room.
It's like there's all this talent in the American economy that can be unlocked.
And what needs to happen is governments, I don't care whether it's a Democratic government or a Republican government, they need to back the fuck up and let people turn their expert, their natural wealth into economic wealth.
Because if anything is going to save us from the absolute disaster that this sissified overreaction is likely to cause, that's going to be it.
But that's not going to happen if we go with business as usual.
First, I'd say, amen, bro.
But secondly, what you've just outlined is the age-old conflict.
I mean, this has been going on for years.
It's between disruptive technologies and vested interests.
And, I mean, history is full of these things.
Look, for example, at the thing that caused the biggest split in the Conservative Party in the 19th century, the Corn Laws.
The Corn Laws, right.
Yeah, yeah.
And Peel repealed the Corn Laws, which were basically a form of protectionism.
They were propping up the interests of landowners, keeping the price of their agricultural produce artificially high.
Thus preventing cheaper imports, thus making the poor poorer because a higher proportion of their budget went on food.
And Peel is my kind of conservative because he made a principled gesture.
He did not listen to those.
I mean, imagine how hard it must have been.
All those aristocrats with their big houses, their agreeable houses that you could get invited round to if only you did the right thing by them.
And of course, the Hollywood elite is like that now, isn't it?
Everyone wants to, a piece of that lifestyle, everyone wants to suck up to vested interest because they've got all the money.
But the people who suffer are the ordinary Joes, people who just want to make a buck, people who want to...
I mean, I want to be optimistic, and I agree that people should be saying the things you're saying, but at the same time, my goodness, there are loads and loads of crony capitalists out there who don't want...
In fact, here's the perfect modern example, the perfect example for now.
Look at how the vested interests do not want hydroxychloroquine to be an effective treatment for coronavirus, because...
Because, number one, it's a generic drug, so you can make it for about five cents a pill.
So there's no big pharma profits in it.
And secondly, this kind of big pharma and the globalist elite, which seemed...
I mean, I had no idea that Bill Gates was going to be the new George Soros, but he seems to be very much emerging as the new George Soros in this thing.
In cahoots with the World Health Organization, Whenever I hear somebody say, well, of course, the lockdown may have to continue until we've got a vaccine.
I know that these people have been...
These are brainwashed.
These are like the Eloy in World of Worlds.
They're going to be fed on by...
Sorry, Time Machine.
They're going to be fed on by the Morlocks because they don't understand that they are just pushing the narrative of Bill Gates.
Yeah.
And all the people who've got investments in companies like Gilead, I don't blame people for investing in Big Pharma.
Obviously, there's going to be money if they do get a vaccine.
But we know that the vaccine is not going to come at least until next year, possibly never, because we haven't found a vaccine for the common cold, which is also a coronavirus, number one.
And number two, we can't afford to lock down the economy in that time.
We've got to make do and mend in the spirit of the emergency.
And that means hydroxychloroquine and zinc.
But it's astonishing how many of my fellow people I see swallowing this absolute bullshit.
Yes.
And I think, well, if people swallow so much bullshit, what hope is that they're going to come out of the wreckage and survive like proper, healthy cockroaches and scorpions rather than being corrupt in their own, which I think is more likely?
Well, here's the thing.
I see what you mean, but let me push back just a little bit on that.
I do, please, yeah.
The same thing I would have said before, right?
This is a sissified elite phenomenon, okay?
And what I think...
Listen, it wouldn't take much of a critical mass to really turn this thing around.
It doesn't necessarily take a majority, okay?
But it just takes people to start to activate the right kind of networks of people and to approach the thing a certain way.
But look, ordinary working class people don't buy all that shit.
Like, I mean, in other words, they don't buy, they don't believe that, you know, they, like, they know someone's doing something slick.
It's like when I talk to my neighbors, you know what I'm saying?
It's like, it doesn't matter whether they, I mean, it's funny.
I have a West Indian neighbor across the street who is, you know, she's, um, she's 100% Donald Trump, you know what I'm saying?
And I mean, it's obviously she reminds me of the older ladies in my family, but she's a Trump voter.
I have people around the way who are, you know, for this person, that person, but like, they, they know someone's doing something slick.
I know.
So my point is this.
Let's roll it back to, you talk about the corn laws, which has to do with kind of protectionism and free trade.
Okay.
So I want to separate things just a bit because both things, we know that to a certain extent, to a certain extent.
Free trade fosters prosperity in your own population because your people can buy things for less money.
Now, there are caveats to that.
You mentioned Sir Robert Peel.
Benjamin Disraeli is one of my favorites, and the quote I like from him is that free trade is not a goal.
It is an expedient, right?
It's like the what we want is a certain level of prosperity and we want the prices of things to to be favorable to our people so that we can.
OK, so if free trade can accomplish that, wonderful.
I want to separate those two things, international free trade, which which does affect consumers ultimately, but but is not the kind of direct issue that, you know, opening up these restrictions on the local economies.
And for that, it's like we-- it's not enough to-- it almost doesn't matter who's in the White House.
We've got to start pushing on local and state politicians.
You know, people need to really activate these local networks and make a lot of noise and make a lot of trouble for these politicians that are sitting, you know, sucking up these occupational licensing fees and kind of, you know, handing out these ruinous fines to people for you.
Using their own property in a way they see fit.
You know, I'm sorry, man.
It's like, yes, it is true that under certain circumstances, you know, renting houses via Airbnb can drive up rents.
I'm sorry, but that's beside the point.
This is my house.
If I want to rent a room in my house to someone, mind your business.
And especially in black neighborhoods and historically black sections of town, you know, the black boarding house.
Is a very kind of old and sacred tradition in black America.
You know, when all these people, man, all these people who are all up and upset about this and that and POC and oppression or what have you, you know what I'm saying?
And they don't know because they've gone to the wrong schools.
They don't know about the history of black people and black boarding houses, the same civil rights leaders, okay, that we read about all the time.
When they went through the South...
Okay, there was the big segregated hotel chains.
They didn't go there.
They couldn't go there.
Where did they go?
They went to black boarding houses.
A lot of the jazz musicians that I grew up listening to, you know what I'm saying, when they went around toward the country, you know, couldn't stay in some big fancy hotel, they'd stay in black boarding houses.
Okay?
So, so, and now Bill fucking de Blasio is going to tell a black woman in Brooklyn that she can't rent out a room in her house to somebody because what?
Because what now?
And it's like, this is what I'm saying.
And, and, and listen, let me, I don't want to, I don't want to hammer on bill too much before I hammer on Republicans again.
The reason people like this man can get away with this It's because you all, Republicans, not Tories, but you all, okay, have not made a case for yourself.
Whenever someone holds a mic up to you, instead of talking about this, instead of talking about this grassroots, bottom-up case for smaller government and for less interference in the lives of ordinary people, what do you say?
You say a noun, a verb, and Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton.
And whenever I hear someone say Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, I know right away that they don't know and they don't want to know.
Because I have to tell you that none of us are taking our marching orders from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
In other words, they're not driving politics in black America.
They're just not.
It's a lazy way of saying that you don't—I mean, look, listen, you've heard the saying that great minds talk about ideas, small minds talk about people.
Okay, so what does that say about the Republican Party right now?
Whenever they have a rally, they're like, oh, yeah, Jesse Jackson, Dallas Rockton.
And when they're not saying that, what they're telling me is that I need to learn the value of work.
I've been working since I was 16.
I've been in the world of work for 25 plus years, okay?
In the Great Recession, one of the things, I'll tell you that, I'll dig into that story later, but one of the things that drove me toward being a conservative was We're good to go.
And at the time, I think Bloomberg was the mayor, and he had these big plans to have this universal fleet of a certain kind of taxi.
But at the time, there were these hybrid taxis.
There were these yellow Priuses or whatever.
And so I asked the guy driving the tow truck was a mechanic in the garage.
And I said, what do you think about these hybrids, man?
And he said, we got to see how they break.
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, well, you know, they're all going to break down, so we've got to see how they break, what happens when they break.
And that blew me away.
Because what he was saying was that...
The system's not going to be perfect, so everything will have its natural breaking point, and over time, they're going to get used to the specific defects that that kind of car has.
To me, what that translated into was that centralization, central planning, this is one reason why central planning is such a bad idea, because if you impose one thing on a system from above, We're good
to go.
And that was when I really began to embrace this thing of, yeah, man, this conservatism doesn't just have to mean stuffy people with money.
It can mean this kind of fast, cheap, and out-of-control risk-taking thing of, hey, listen, what can we do that's new?
Okay, well, that's risky, yeah, but let's go for it.
Come on, let's do it.
Okay, let's do it.
Let's build something.
What do we have instead of people talking about those ideas?
We have people inverting dumb racial insults and repeating them in front of the party faithful and then wondering why, for example, black people Don't vote for them.
Are you kidding me?
If you can't get the most, I mean, West Indian immigrants, for God's sake, my parents, you know, fanatical, insane about education, will literally beat you with power tools, okay, if you don't hit the books properly, okay?
If you can't get people like that, if you can't get people like my parents, you don't deserve to be in the politics business, okay?
You don't deserve to be in the politics business.
So, you know, as much as we know that progressives are annoying and what have you, and when two conservatives get online like we're doing, you know, the thing is we want to talk about how annoying lefties are because they are fucking annoying.
But the fact is that this is a real problem because, you know, a lot of this stuff could have been rolled back by now.
But the fact is that people don't but people don't trust it in the U.S., especially in urban centers.
People don't trust conservatives and they're not wrong not to trust them, even though the ideas of the liberal left are clearly wrong.
Conservatives have not made a case for themselves.
Because if I look, man, if I offer to you, James, to be your to be your life coach, let's say.
Right now, you may you may say that you may look at my my brochure and you may say this guy really has the best nutrition plan.
The best exercise plan or the best whatever of all the other life coaches I've talked to.
Okay.
But then it comes back to you that when I go to the pub, right?
Yeah.
I can be heard to kind of loudly disparage you.
You know, man, that James Dellingpole, what a knob.
Jesus Christ, what an idiot.
Yeah, he's thinking about using either me or someone else's life coach, but Jesus.
I mean, the kind of dumbass he is, you imagine, you know, do you think he's going to make the right choice?
I don't think so.
Now, if you heard that I had been saying that, right?
If you heard that I've been disparaging you to my friends in the pub, Would you trust me?
Would you hire me to be your life coach?
Of course not.
Well, I think there's a bigger issue here, which is I don't know about whether you feel the same, but...
I have more contempt for squishy conservatives than I do for the left.
I mean, the left is what the left is.
It's the scorpion on the frog's back.
We know that.
But it's squishy conservatives who betray everything that is good about conservatism and actually poison the brand.
I mean, they actually...
They actually take it backwards because they give people...
They're wearing the conservative label, and yet what they are actually embodying is values which are not conservative and are therefore destructive.
Yes, that is exactly correct.
That's exactly correct.
Now listen, but...
We could go on talking all day because we just are the dream team.
But I'm thinking, have we got space?
Is the time now, or should we take another time, to talk briefly about the crazy modelling used for the lockdown?
Have you looked into that?
Oh, yes.
A few days ago, you were saying to me, you have no idea, because you're not a modeler, just how bad this is.
Yes.
Can you remember that?
Yes, absolutely.
So tell me briefly what's going on.
Okay.
So to begin with, a lot of people don't know that...
That the things being claimed as scientific fact are, in reality, the outputs of computer programs.
And these computer programs are called models.
A simple example would be that you, let's say you're in the real estate business.
And you know that I'm a programmer, so you say, I need you to build a mortgage rate estimator, right?
And I'll say, okay, what are the inputs?
Well, the inputs are going to be the zip code.
I guess you don't have zip codes over there, but whatever the equivalent of a zip code is.
The postcode, right?
The average age of the housing stock, maybe the median income in the area.
You know, some set of variables.
You're going to say, I'll hand you these numbers.
And then what I want you to do is you compute what the mortgage rate is like, what rate I'm likely to get on a mortgage, let's say.
Now, the thing is, it cannot be said that the output of this program that I write for you, you know, this real estate program that I write for you, it cannot be said the output of that is necessarily true just because it's computer generated.
It cannot be said that the output of that is, you know, is the science of economics just because it has to do with numbers.
You have to check that against reality.
So that is we have to go and we have to say, like, if let's go to 10 different postcodes and put these variables and then see what we get.
And is does that does it really reliably predict the mortgage rates in these postcodes and in these?
And if it doesn't, then the model is wrong.
That's one.
Two, people need to know if if if we're if we're trying to figure something out, it can be very helpful to know, well, how was this modeling software written?
What was the source code?
And what were its inputs?
Because, for example, if you knew that my mortgage rate calculator was taking in things like the average daily temperature, Then all of a sudden you'd be like, well, hang on, that's a dodgy mortgage rate calculator that's going to give you different results in the winter than in the summer.
And that doesn't make any goddamn sense at all.
A mortgage being the kind of long-term debt that it is, why is that relevant?
So you see how seeing how a model is built and how it's designed is critical to understanding whether the model is, forget about whether it's right or wrong, or whether it predicts reality, but whether it's full of shit or not.
Okay?
Now, the fact is that some time ago, a gentleman named Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, I believe.
Imperial College is a place in the UK that generated this threat assessment of COVID-19 that, quote-unquote, showed scientifically that such and such a response would be necessary because these were the projected deaths.
Okay?
And this document was the basis, if I'm not mistaken, for a great deal of the government's response to COVID-19.
All right?
So, some time ago, Neil Ferguson admitted in public, in writing, that the software, the model that was used to generate those estimates is 13 years old.
It's 13-year-old code in a language called C. It's 13-year-old C code that he wrote.
It's undocumented.
And then, when people said, okay, well, can we see, can we look at the source code?
Can we look at this software?
Essentially, he refused.
He said, well, no, because it's 13 years old and undocumented, so we can't support questions about the code because we don't have time, so Microsoft and GitHub are going to Fix the code up for us, and then we'll put a web-based interface on it, and then we'll make it available to other people.
Now, this is astounding!
I mean, first of all, anyone who can hear the sound of my voice who's a software developer knows that, above all, you stand by your work.
And forget about software developers.
Actually, anyone who's working class knows that you stand by your work.
All right?
And then the fact is that, I mean, it would be The level of outrage, I mean, it's hard for me to kind of stay calm and convey the outrageousness involved in this.
It would be as if someone designed some extension to your house and built it, okay?
And then later on, you came and said, well, hang on a second.
It looks kind of shaky there.
Can you show me the blueprints that you used, that you generated to actually build it?
And they said, uh, no.
But I'm going to get British Aerospace to come and fix up the blueprints and then I'll put them under glass and then you can observe them.
Like, excuse me?
Like, in other words, if I'm not mistaken, and look, maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet there's a better than 50% chance that he was paid government money to come up with that original estimate, that original model, the original pandemic model.
So, which means that you all paid for it.
You British taxpayers paid him to do this.
Okay, fine, show me your work.
So really, is that what you, are you going to let him get away with that?
Like, in other words, you paid him to develop this software, and now he can refuse to show it to you until Microsoft and GitHub come and fix his bullshit.
Really?
And that's okay?
That's acceptable?
And of course, right away, that gives rise to the question, well, who is the Neil Ferguson of climate, quote-unquote, science?
Because this is a thing we hear all the time, is that the reason why you're an idiot because you don't believe in catastrophic climate change, or you don't believe in the Green New Deal, or believe we have to stop driving cars or burning fossil fuels, is because you don't believe in this, quote-unquote, science.
You're denying science.
But the thing is, estimates generated by scientists are not necessarily science.
They're not observations in the same way that someone in a lab observing, you know, the energy on this electron is so and so many electron volts, you know, or what have you.
It's not science in that way.
They are guesses.
They are models and they can only do so much.
They are computer aided guesswork.
And I've had plenty of plenty of people storm out of conversations with me when they when they kind of religiously quote all these climate alarmists.
And then I ask them, well, on the basis of what RCP? Based on what RCP, will we go off the cliff in 15 years?
And of course, they don't know what an RCP is.
An RCP is a representative concentration pathway.
It's a time series.
It's a series of guesses.
How much carbon dioxide will there be in the atmosphere?
What will the concentration at these time intervals going some distance into the future?
It's a series of guesses.
And there are multiple RCPs.
And depending on which RCP you plug into your climate simulation, you'll get different answers.
So we need to really hammer on this.
And not even because Neil Ferguson, going back to him for a second, not even because he might have been wrong.
Because again, I'm a software developer and I would be a complete hypocrite if I banged on someone for a wrong estimate.
Software developers are notorious for their wrong estimates, usually with respect to time, right?
So no, it's that he won't stand by his work.
That's what I object to.
It's like you were paid.
The rest of us have to stand by our work.
If I go to work for a company and I write something, it's like, well, first of all, unless I had a writer in my contract, the source code belongs to them because they paid for it.
It was a work for hire.
So there's not even any question of me going to a job and writing some software and they don't have access to the source code.
And I've written a lot of open source software.
Well, my open source software is such that, well, yeah, it has to be available to them.
It's open source so anyone can read it.
So I stand by my work and I'm a nobody with a day job.
So this guy is getting governments to shoot their own economies in the head, right?
On his say-so, on the output of a piece of software that he wrote 13 years ago, and now we can't see the source code?
Really?
Okay.
All right.
Well, I don't know what to tell you, James, but if your countrymen want to put up with that, well, I can't.
That's on you.
But if, you know, yeah.
Go on.
Thank you.
I love your rants.
I really do.
So my final question, because I think we've got to save ourselves.
We're like top athletes, Mike.
We've got to, you know...
We've got to pace ourselves.
Who knows when the next game is going to be?
I don't know what a game is, but it's...
It requires a lot of physical exertion and manhood and probably the possession of very large penises as well.
Jesus Christ!
Anyway, what I was going to say was, given it seems to me these days that every other person and his wife is a software developer, How come there's not more outrage about this?
As you say, every software developer in the world is looking at this stuff, if they know about it, and going, that's not right.
Well, why aren't we hearing more about this?
Well, first of all, I don't know if...
Here's the thing.
I don't know how widely known it is.
That Ferguson said that about his...
I mean, look, Ferguson is not...
Neil Ferguson is not a Twitter star in the same way that, I don't know, some vacuous pop star is a Twitter star, right?
So I don't know that that many people even were aware that he said it.
Do you know what I'm saying?
So maybe that would be the first thing.
Like, what...
Let me look up...
If he were a pop star, who would he be?
Would he be Milli Vanilli or Kajagoogoo or something even worse?
I think he's got to be fairly down the scale of...
Of really bad pop stars.
I'm trying to think who else I really hate.
Bruno Mars.
I hate Bruno Mars.
You actually said Kajagoogoo.
Jesus.
And you get the reference.
How many Americans get the Kajagoogoo reference?
I actually had.
Do you know what?
Yeah, tell me.
I'll tell you something.
This will fascinate you, because I know you're fascinated in my life, my early life particularly.
I once got my hair tipped at the hairdresser, where you put on a cap and you have strands pulled through these holes and you have it a little bleached.
I had that done in, well, not in homage exactly, but I had it done because Limol from Kajagoogoo had his hair like that.
Holy smoke.
It was fashionable at that time.
Yeah, there we go.
Wow, that's crazy.
I gave you that bit of a...
I gave you that bit of an autobiography for free, Mike.
So what was your final point before we wrap this one up?
So yeah, I think the thing is that more people...
The first thing is that I think people need to...
You, people in your network, right, need to make sure as many people as possible know that this is what's going on.
I think there's a lot of software developers who simply are not aware that he said this, that he said this on Twitter in writing.
This is something.
And by the way, I want to say that what this also tells you is how far removed he is from even software development culture.
Right.
The culture of software developers and how we think about our work, I can't think of anyone who would say that I wrote this code and now Microsoft is going to fix it for me and think that that was some kind of statement about the quality of your code.
Like, really?
You know what I'm saying?
And again, he's counting on the fact that people would be impressed about a web-based interface.
And it's like, listen, never mind all that.
All this stuff needs to be able to run headless on a server.
It's like, let me download the source code and let me play with it, and I'll let you know if I have any problems.
And I can tell you, by the way, as an aside, that I've tried to download a lot of the...
I've tried to go around and say, okay, where's the source code for the climate stuff?
Some of this stuff isn't available.
Some of the stuff is closed source.
The links are dead, right?
One of the packages I was able to download, the build wouldn't even run.
Long story short, y'all need to hammer on this because this is important.
It is a chink in the armor of scientism in general because we have a particularly insidious form of scientism where we not only trust science as if it were God, but we trust software as if it were science.
And we've got to stop that.
Good point.
Well, of course, that was the essence of Climategate, wasn't it?
It was Michael Mann refusing to show the code by which he'd reached his hockey stick.
And Steve McIntyre approached him and instead of giving him the code, Mann said, no, I can't because this is private.
It's secret.
My donors have got to pay for this stuff.
Well, as you say, that is not science.
Exactly.
So, you know, what I've started saying on my Twitter feed is, okay, I'll consider believing the science after I inspect the source code.
Send in carbon, Mike, to inspect the source code.
You know, I reckon that could be the solution to everything.
Just send in carbon.
In a movie.
Don't start.
No, I'll tell you who you are.
You are like Mr.
Wolf, aren't you, from Pulp Fiction?
You are like the Harvey Keitel character who goes in to sweep up the bodies.
And with a voice like that, you know, you are perfect for it.
You know, I was counting on more of...
I always thought of myself as more of a...
Who do you want to be?
Do you want to be Blade?
Is that who you want to be?
No.
I was thinking of Christopher Walken in King of New York.
Remember that movie?
Oh, it's been so long since I saw it.
Oh, man.
What does he do?
Well, his name is Frank White, and he's just this gangster who gets out of prison and tries to turn over a new leaf by killing people for the right reasons.
Yeah.
I've got to see that film again.
Does he have some kind of necklace thing?
I think he does.
No, no, no.
He's just like a shirt and jacket and what have you.
Lawrence Fishburne plays a gangster, a street gangster named Jimmy Jump, who works for Frank White.
And, you know, he does, like, it's kind of this, one of these new Jack gangster movies that was all the rage back then.
It's definitely a cult favorite.
But, yeah, you know, Walk-In's got some great scenes in that movie, you know.
So, yeah, when next you, once you watch that, then we'll circle up and we'll compare notes.
But, yeah.
Okay, and I will let you know which movie character I think I most resemble.
So you can be Christopher Walken in that film.
I mean, obviously, I'm going to be somebody on similar lines, perhaps.
I don't know, Al Pacino in Scarface.
But let me think about this one.
I know a guy named James Dellingpole.
James, don't make me come down to London...
The plane ticket alone is going to cost nine million dollars.
Actually, do you know who I think I am?
Who?
Have you ever seen Michael Caine in, oh God, Get Carter?
Get Carter?
Oh yeah!
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
You're a big man, Harry, but you're out of shape.
Oh man.
There's something sort of bleak and careworn about the character, but he's a survivor.
And I think, you know, that's how I feel about this world.
I feel that there's just so much shit around, but I'm just going to get through it somehow.
On that note, we've given, listen, we've given our special friends far too much.
It's like, you know, they came in from McDonald's and we gave them caviar.
Yeah, I think that's right.
That's where it's going to be.
Okay, I love you, Carbonite, obviously.
And till next time.
Till next time.
Thanks, brother.
Yeah, good.
Take care.
Take care.
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