Vox Day is the Lead Editor of Castalia House and the author of the Sigma Game blog. He has been nominated for 7 Hugo Awards and is an Award-winning Cruelty Artist. In this terrifyingly erudite podcast, the publisher, polymath and provocateur - and far-right white supremacist misogynist, per Wikipedia - tries to persuade James that AI isn’t totally evil. Also on the menu: what’s really happening with the Iran thing; comic books; why Milo and Owen Benjamin get more hate than Vox; composing film scores; and why James’s ‘we’re all going to die soon’ pension plan may not work.
https://aicentral.substack.com/
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↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, James tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
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x
There was no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition of my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed, tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed, in a scandal that I helped christen ClimateGate.
So I give you the background to the skull juggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Guy.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
I love Delipo.
With me, James Dellingpole.
I know I always say, don't I, that I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
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Enjoy.
Welcome back to the Dellingpod Vox Day.
Thank you so much, James.
I do genuinely, because you know so much and I don't know what directions we're going to go in.
Although I do a bit, because I know that you want to talk to me about something that nobody else has suggested.
And I think it's probably a really interesting subject, and that is AI being used to do film scores.
Yes.
But we'll talk about that a bit later on.
First of all, I wanted your take on where we are at the moment, what's happening in the world.
Presumably, Iran is something we should be talking about?
Well, I think it's a little bit premature simply because we don't know what's actually happened.
We don't know what's actually happening.
And there's such a tremendous quantity of both disinformation and misinformation out there that it's absolutely impossible to reach any reasonable conclusions on the basis of what we're told.
For example, a lot of very learned military observers don't believe that the recent airstrikes by the United States were anything more than symbolic.
Basically, the equivalent of Clinton lobbing a few rockets at camels in the desert.
I feel sorry for those camels.
Obviously, obviously.
But the thing is, is that all this talk about bunker busters and this and that and the other thing.
Well, the B-2 bombers were spotted both leaving and coming back to the U.S. The Iranians reportedly didn't see anything, including the F-16s, the non-stealthy F-16s that were escorting them, and didn't fire a single shot.
Now, how credible is that when neither Ukraine nor Russia can fly a plane anywhere close to the front lines without getting shot down by the air defenses?
You know, it's just, it's not credible.
And then, you know, of course, after the initial announcement that, yes, complete success, everything destroyed, then suddenly it's like, well, maybe it wasn't completely successful.
And the Israelis are saying, well, maybe we didn't actually destroy all the uranium.
And then suddenly the U.S. is asking China for help to stop Iran from blocking the Straits of Hormuz.
Never mind the fact that the Chinese have just spent billions and billions of dollars building a rail link from Aspirin to Xi'an.
And they've almost certainly built more than 300,000 rail tankers to replace the 16 oil tankers they need coming through the straits every day.
You know, there's a lot of things going on that nobody's paying any attention to and that tend to paint a very different picture than the massively apocalyptic one that you get from Fox News.
Yeah.
Do you know what my indicator was that this is all bullshit?
What's that?
On Saturday, I went around for drinks at the house of these essentially normies.
And I got given the third degree about my wild and crazy views and stuff.
And in the course of the conversation, one of the characters, who's a QC, a Casey, a barrister, a king's counsel, is really not stupid, at least in the terms of The normie world.
But he was talking about things like female oppression in Iran.
And by the way, this is somebody who's not politically correct in the slightest.
He's the most politically incorrect person I know.
But he was so smitten with the narrative, so obedient to it, that he was bringing out the kind of topic that would never concern him in a million years.
And this is a guy with sons, with military-age sons.
I mean, I didn't put him, I should have done it.
So hang on a second, you're going to, you're happy for your two boys to go out and fight and potentially die to preserve the rights of schoolgirls in Iran, not to have to be oppressed by the Mutawan and forced to wear...
Well, not only that, but there's not really that much female oppression in Iran.
It's not the Taliban.
I don't remember exactly what the percentage is, but if I recall correctly, the percentage of women in higher education in Iran is higher than it is for men, Just as it is in the United States and Europe.
And so the fact that they don't want them running around with short shorts and their butt cheeks hanging out is not indicative of massive oppression.
Yeah, I think I would be inclined to agree with you.
And the picture of the people hanging from cranes, that seems to be whipped out at moments like this.
Look at the Iranians.
They hang people from cranes.
Well, okay, so they do it in public as opposed to doing it behind closed doors?
Is that really better?
We hide our executions away so that people don't see them and maybe don't even know about them?
I mean, how is that a improvement?
I'm not defending the way in which the Iranians apply the death penalty for various crimes.
I don't know anything about it.
But to claim that a society is intrinsically barbaric because it doesn't hide its executions away from everyone, I don't think that that's really a very strong argument.
And certainly both the United States and the United Kingdom, until relatively recently, were doing the same.
The other thing you hear being wheeled out is that we've got to stop them getting the nuclear bomb, which I know has been...
Yeah, 30.
Well, the worst thing is they've been two weeks away from getting a nuclear bomb for 30 years, reportedly.
It's like climate change.
We've only got 15 months to save the world from.
Yeah, and then after the 15 months, we've only got another 15 months.
But the reality is that it's totally impossible to prevent any country from getting a nuclear weapon because the easiest way to get a nuclear weapon is not to develop one and make it yourself.
It's to buy one from somebody who already makes them and already has them.
I would be absolutely astonished if Iran hadn't acquired nuclear weapons from North Korea or Pakistan 15 years ago.
Presumably.
They almost certainly have them.
If they exist, if nuclear weapons even exist, which I'm sure.
If they exist, and yes, there is some reason to be a little bit dubious about that based on the historical records of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and so forth.
I was really astonished when my friend Owen was first talking about that.
I was just, I thought, oh, that's nonsense.
Because I'm the grandson of a Marine who fought in Guadalcanal and Tarawa and would have been involved in the invasion.
And so there was always the belief that, well, if they hadn't dropped the bomb, I wouldn't be here, that kind of thing.
And then in addition to the fact that there's actually trees that were planted before the atomic bombing that are still growing in the middle of those cities with no sign of radiation.
But beyond that, what sealed it for me was it was uncovered that there was a firebombing mission that was targeting a very, very nearby town that day, and that town never got firebombed.
Well, there's a funny coincidence, eh?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, the craziest thing now that has been coming out, I mean, there was always some very dubious things about Pearl Harbor, but the fact that John M. Ford happened to be there on vacation with his film crews and cameras.
I mean, can you imagine if it suddenly came out that Martin Scorsese was in Tehran with all his cameras and film crews?
How seriously would we take the reality of the events if Martin Scorsese provided us with all the footage?
Well, these things do happen because we know that sometimes these guys can just be in the right place at the right time.
Look at the guy who took the image, the iconic image of W being whispered in his ear, the news of 9-11.
And the same photographer was there to capture the bullet mid-flight that nicked President Trump's ear at the rally.
What an astonishing coincidence.
So don't coincidences.
No, they're not coincidences because the guy was there to record both events and was told to go there, obviously.
I mean, that's that Occam's razor.
You're going to invent both events.
If necessary, yeah.
I mean, but the point is, is that, I mean, I've actually coined a term that I think is much more useful than conspiracy theorist.
When people say, are you a conspiracy theorist?
I say, no, absolutely not.
I am an omni-narrational skeptic.
And that means no matter what the narrative is, I believe it is at least partially and probably substantively false.
I'm going to write that down.
I think it's a bit of a mouthful for regular usage.
This is why I am not considered a master of rhetoric.
Yeah, you're not like Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford.
I'm not even like Owen Benjamin.
He asked me once to explain to him the fundamental problem with free trade.
And I go on this long spiel explaining comparative advantage.
I explain the fundamental problems with it as identified by Ian Fletcher and also the labor mobility Problem that I pointed out myself.
I mean, probably half an hour of this detailed dialectic explanation of why free trade doesn't work.
And he looks thoughtful for a second and he says, You know, I think I'll just tell everybody, Ricardo, Ritardo.
Boom!
That is so much better.
And it's so funny because like literally everybody understands it.
If somebody says, what about free trade?
And you say, Ricardo, Ritardo, it's like, boom, that's enough for 98% of the population right there to go, yeah, it doesn't work.
Even if you haven't heard of Ricardo, it's still a better explanation.
Exactly.
So, I mean, I'm content with the fact that I will never be a direct influence on anything on the intellectual side.
I'm in the E.O. Wilson originator class as opposed to the Richard Dawkins popularizer class.
And I'm okay with that.
Well, we've all got our parts to play, haven't we?
And you're not going to, you know, people like me cannot be on CNN, you know, GB News, that kind of stuff, because the way that I discuss things is too tedious and dialectic.
You would be so shit on GB News or CNN or anywhere else because they wouldn't give you, you knew the space apart from everything else.
You'd never be in there with your little jibes with your Ricardo Ritardo.
No, I'd be terrible.
I mean, Milo is fantastic.
We were talking once a few years ago.
And I said, you know, why is it that, you know, you, this is around the time of Gamergate, you know?
And the three of us hosted Gigi in Paris together.
And I was, you know, I was pretty much the senior figure, senior Gamergate figure there.
But Cerno and Milo were the ones that were just getting crucified by the media for it.
And I asked, I mean, the only media that even mentioned me was Le Monde in French, because I was the only one who spoke French.
But anyhow, I was talking to Milo about this and I said, you know, why is it that you guys come in for such stick?
And they just tend to leave me alone for the most part.
And Milo starts laughing.
He says, oh, that's easy.
Nobody in the media understands what the hell you're talking about.
I was like, well, there goes my media career.
I like to think of myself as a sort of more idiot, an idiot's version of Vox Day.
For example, I'm perfectly aware of all the fascinating theories as to why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not nukes.
They were firebombs.
Sure.
They were napalm, whatever.
And obviously that background stuff is really helpful.
But I like to take shortcuts.
And for me, the best way we can tell that there were no nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is because we know the name of the bombs.
We know that one was called Fat Man and one was called Little Boy.
Little Boy.
And whenever they do things like naming the bombs and naming the crew of the planes that flew this mission, you know you're being sold apart because they always give you these details to fix, to anchor it in your brain.
I'll tell you another example.
Although this is my latest rabbit hole.
Okay.
The USS Indianapolis.
What does that mean to you?
The city of Indianapolis.
So it's probably a battleship or a destroyer.
USS Indianapolis.
You'll know about it if you've seen Jaws.
And there was the famous scene where Quint is talking about how during the war he was on a ship that was torpedoed.
And they were not rescued for a very long time.
And while they were waiting in the water in open water.
Oh, this is that, yeah, where the sharks picked off people one by one.
The oceanic wine tips came in.
And this was long a scene of fantasy terror in my imagination, because I just imagined this actually happened.
It's like the other example, the Birkenhead.
The Birkenhead, which was the troop ship in about the 1880s, I think, maybe supplying the Boer War, got sank off Cape Town, and they all got eaten by great white sharks.
Anyway, why do we know about the USS Indianapolis?
Why do we know, why is the most interesting thing we know about them, about that ship, that people got eaten by sharks?
It's because Jaws made it a thing.
We learned about it through Jaws.
But actually, the more interesting thing in some ways about the USS Indianapolis is that it was the ship that was carrying components, allegedly, of the nuclear bomb for the mission.
Now, I think with my conspiracy theorist's hindsight, that it is more likely that that ship was deliberately destroyed in order to hide...
And there's a reason why the most famous thing we now know about it is shark attack.
And actually, the most important thing about that ship is something else.
And that it was probably not torpedoed by a Japanese submarine as claimed.
Because how would a Japanese submission?
What year was it?
45?
44?
45.
The Japanese submarine force was virtually non-existent.
Exactly.
And how fast do those ships move?
Well, I mean, the torpedo.
Yeah, exactly.
But, you know, if you look, a lot of times, if you just look, if you just do the math, like, you know, like I've done with evolution or even with regards to the Persian Gulf, you know, if you just do the math, then it allows you to see what is probable and what is not.
Like, for example, when they're talking about, you know, some people said, well, China can't replace the oil tankers going by sea with this train car length,
because with this train link, because each train car, each train tanker only carries 700 barrels of oil, whereas these oil tankers carry a million.
And so I just ran through the numbers, and as it turns out, they would need, given the amount of time it takes, China would need 275,000 train cars running every day, you know, one set a day, 275,000 total, so 9,150 a day, to carry enough oil to meet their needs, right?
Well, here's the thing.
China's largest train-related manufacturer manufactures 500,000 freight cars a year.
They've already built those $275,000 because they just finished the railroad in May.
Could you...
Yeah, I mean, you'd have to, well, you'd have multiple trains.
I mean, they don't all have to be, Are there enough hours in the day for that number of I mean, I get down that can build a number of carriages, but well, I mean, if we just think, okay, I don't know what's a reasonable number of train cars, say 100.
So you've got 9150 divided by 100 is 91.5, and then divided by 24, you'd have to have about four trains going off an hour.
That's doable.
Pretty tight, but yeah.
Yeah.
And so the point is, is that it, and of course, that's assuming that there's only one track.
For all we know, there's like a double track or quadruple tracks.
So what is the real reason?
What's the game plan for this kind of pretend war?
Well, from my understanding, the main reason for a pretend war would be that Trump knows that the U.S. military cannot defeat Iran.
Because they're so cucked.
No, not because they're so cucked, but there's not enough troops.
There's not enough drones.
The U.S. does not have the industrial capacity to win a war of the type that Russia and Ukraine are fighting right now.
There's not enough, and also it doesn't have the logistical capacity or the numbers or the drones to put everything there.
Plus, you're at the very end of a very long logistic line.
That's disaster in the waiting.
And so, and Israel and Iran are 700 kilometers away from each other.
So there's no direct war that's going to take place between the two.
They're just lobbing missiles at each other.
And so I think the whole idea is to try to make it look like we took action and now everybody can back down.
That doesn't mean everybody will.
It doesn't mean that the Iranians, they're producing 300 of their high-quality missiles a month.
So they can lob 10 every single day without even dipping into their backlog.
And apparently the Israeli interceptors are already running out.
But isn't this all being done at the highest level?
They're all agreeing with each other.
They're all in on it, aren't they?
Well, I mean, yes and no.
Obviously, they have different goals, but people are willing to settle for different things.
Netanyahu desperately wants the U.S. to declare war and go in in its full capacity.
The time, I think the reason that the Israelis are so desperate is that the U.S. has been revealed as a bit of a paper tiger by the events in Europe, by the Ukra-Russian war, and also by the fact that Chinese industrial capacity dwarfs it by a factor of 200.
And so the U.S. cannot win a war against Russia.
It cannot win a war against China.
It might not even be able to win a war against Iran.
Probably would not.
And so Israel is trying to spend its influence with the U.S. military while it can, because that ability is going away over time.
Why is that?
Because the changing demographics of the U.S. boomers care the most about Israel.
Gen X cares less, but a little bit.
Millennials don't care much at all.
And most of the Zoomers hate Israel.
Their experiences are different.
If you talk to a boomer, his experience of Israel is plucky little Israel surviving the Arab-Israeli wars of 1972.
For your average Zoomer, their Experience of Israel is, oh, yeah, they're murdering all the Palestinians in Gaza.
Now, whether you I'm not saying that anybody should agree or disagree with any of those positions, I'm simply describing what the obvious general consensus opinion is based on those generations.
And also, all of the quote-unquote new Americans, paper Americans from Somalia and China and whatever, don't give a quantum of a rat's ass about Holocaustianity.
It's just not relevant.
It's no more relevant to them than the Chinese boxer rebellion is relevant to somebody in Poland or Zimbabwe.
Yeah.
What happened to the red heifers that were sacrificed?
I don't know.
The Christian theological, you know, sort of the Hal Lindsay and Time sites report a red heifer about every two years.
So I have no idea what's going on with the latest one.
No, I just, because obviously when the great final conflict happens, isn't it going to happen in that region?
And presumably, people like me and Yahoo are itching for it to happen.
That's the theory.
But, you know, I think that I always look at the example of what happened in Italy in the year 999.
Everybody was convinced that the world was going to end.
Everybody.
From the Pope on down.
And the funny thing is, is that the guy who was the leading candidate for the Antichrist is now somebody who is all but forgotten to history.
I don't even remember his name.
It wasn't even somebody like the Borgia or anyone.
It was like some absolute non-entity who was like a, I don't think he was even a duke.
But he was the one.
Everybody was convinced that the world was ending and he was the Antichrist.
And obviously now, you know, 1,025 years later, that theory was not correct.
We should invent his name.
Giuseppe Stronso.
It was probably like, you know, it was probably something on the order of, you know, Giuseppe something or other, you know, Maldini.
Yeah.
Giuseppe Maldini.
But I'll look it up.
I will look it up for you and I will send it to you.
But apparently not.
Apparently he was just a guy.
But yeah, they were convinced.
Okay.
I'm slightly disappointed in your voice because obviously this is going to dramatically affect my financial planning, which currently is predicated on my not living for another much more than five years.
And you're saying you've got to now.
Yeah, yeah, I think that you have to plan to live.
I'm sorry.
You bastard.
That makes it really hard.
There's plenty of ways to reduce your lifespan.
Just wait till the next COVID scare, and I'm sure they'll come up with something that will reduce things nicely for you.
Of all the ways I would consider topping myself, taking a clot shot which had been imposed on me by a government I despise would just be...
It still astonishes me how many people who I know are like generally skeptic of either the government or of globalist organizations or that sort of global warming, whatever.
It was astonishing to me how many people who genuinely are skeptical of those things just lined up and went for it right away.
I was like, okay, hang on a second.
This was my reasoning at the time.
The people that are really pushing this most aggressively are also pushing a program of global depopulation.
Oh, that's a conspiracy theory, Brooks.
It's not a conspiracy theory.
It's literally Bill Gates.
I mean, all you have to do is listen to Bill Gates open his mouth for five seconds.
He doesn't mean it when he says it.
It doesn't mean it.
But the point is, why would you ever...
I wouldn't trust Bill Gates to provide an operating system.
Or to play with your kids.
Or babysit my kids.
Yeah.
And so if you don't trust somebody to provide you with an operating system or babysit your kids, and he's actively pushing a program of global depopulation, I wouldn't even have dinner at his house.
I wouldn't trust him to not do something, put something in the wine.
Yeah, but Volks, he wears nice, cozy sweaters.
So that must mean something, mustn't it?
I don't know what.
It means he's a nice, he's an ordinary guy.
He's a bit geeky.
He's got a funny voice.
There's not mocking.
He's like Woody Allen.
Yeah.
What could possibly go wrong?
But anyhow, that was my, aside from everything else, all the actual information, all the actual science, et cetera, et cetera.
All I needed to know was, wait, they say it's a good idea?
Well, then it obviously isn't.
Yeah, but you're forgetting the most important factor.
These people wanted to go on holiday.
Well, I understand.
I mean, you know, I coined the acronym MPAI.
Remind me.
Most people are idiots.
Right, yeah.
And by most people, I literally mean most people, not like, you know, except for people I like or this.
I mean, plenty of people I like are, it just, it sometimes astonishes me that they managed to make it from morning to evening without somehow, you know, doing themselves in.
But so it's, it's in that context, I'm actually pleased that as many people resisted all the psychological pressure.
But still, it was a little disappointing when you look at people who are like, you know, people who have been like telling you about the UN stashing a secret army in the American public lands, you know, Yellowstone as a UN military base and all this kind of stuff.
And then the government's like, yeah, you should inject this into your body.
And they're like, oh, okay.
I'm like, they don't need the UN army if you're going to do that.
I've probably told you the story before, but I'll tell you again.
When I was at Oxford, I used to think, I really shouldn't be here.
I mean, I got in by a fluke.
These people are so clever.
They're so articulate.
I'm surrounded by geniuses.
And I can just about keep up with them.
But most people here are cleverer than me.
And is that when you got there or after you've been there for a while?
From the moment I got there, people, I've never been, never since have I been surrounded by so many people who are just, they've got a good mental processing speed, they're articulate, they've got good vocabulary, they're generally sparky.
But I went to my Gordy, which is like a college reunion, and this was just in the aftermath of the Jab terror.
And I looked around and I realized that I was just about the only person there who had not taken the jab.
And how were you able to tell that from talking or from the awkwardness of the conversations whenever I raised it?
The generally kind of washed out sick demeanor of a lot of the people there.
They looked really.
And there were lots of other indicators.
A bit like fat man, little boy is your shortcut to understanding that nukes aren't real.
In the same way, you didn't need to ask them a question direct about have you been jabbed to know that they've been jabbed.
Most people are normies.
And clever people from clever universities were and are no exception.
There seems to be no correlation between educational achievements and who didn't take the jab.
It's just like there's none whatsoever because intelligent people have a greater capacity for being able to rationalize stupid things.
Yeah.
You know, you have to, I mean, there's it's very easy, if you're intelligent, to come up with a very good sounding argument for something that's absolutely absurd.
And also, that's what our courses trained us to do.
To build a bullshit really well.
Next level.
Yeah.
I mean, I have to admit, I spent a weekend at Harvard and Dartmouth, which are the American.
Harvard would be the American equivalent of Oxford.
And I was not similarly impressed.
I was actually kind of amused at how not terribly bright most of the people were.
To be fair, that was the experience of a friend of mine who went from Oxford to Yale.
And she said, they really weren't that bright.
They were better at speaking up in seminars and things, but they were not nearly as bright.
Well, it was kind of funny because, you know, I'm from Minnesota.
And that particular, it was in the winter.
And this guy was kind of, he was a big guy.
And he was kind of talking about how he played hockey and he played hockey.
And, you know, Harvard hockey is a very elite program.
And however, one of the other elite programs in the country happens to be in Minnesota, the University of Minnesota.
And out of sheer coincidence, I happened to know that that night the Harvard hockey team was playing in Minnesota.
And so I said, oh, so, you know, this guy's like, he's really impressing these girls because, you know, he's Harvard hockey.
Wow.
You know, they know they know enough to know it's a big deal.
So I said, oh, well, that's interesting.
Are you injured?
He's like, what?
I said, you must have some kind of injury or something.
Why aren't you with the team?
He said, what do you mean with the team?
I said, the Harvard hockey team is in Minneapolis tonight playing the Golden Gophers in downtown Minneapolis.
Why aren't you there if you're on the hockey team?
That turned out, oh, well, I play intermural hockey.
I'm like, yeah, I bet you do.
That would have been my line because you're talking about ice hockey, I imagine.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, I would have just said I'm playing the hockey with the curved stick on the pitch.
That would have been an even bigger problem because only girls play that in American universities.
So that would have been really an interesting response.
I've played hockey, not ice hockey, on a couple of occasions.
I'd say it's actually pretty rough.
It's pretty violent.
You can really go for people's legs and things with those sticks.
I mean, being from Minnesota, of course, I played hockey.
I played hockey for, I don't know, seven years or so, maybe nine.
I can't remember.
But I was playing from the time I was five years old and I couldn't skate.
I had to use the stick to hold myself up.
So you must be quite good on ice skates.
I'm fine.
I mean, I haven't skated in years.
I shifted.
No, no, I mean, obviously I know how to do it and I'm perfectly competent.
I made the mistake.
In retrospect, it was a mistake.
I hit the point I did it for 10 years.
Then when I turned 15, I had to choose Between skiing and hockey.
And on the downside of hockey, they'd started this whole like practice at six in the morning thing, which, you know, I'm a night owl, so I was absolutely opposed to that.
And then even more significantly, when you went skiing on Friday nights at Ski Club, there were lots of girls from all the different schools on the slopes.
And so that kind of, I made a poor short time preference decision for once.
And I should have stuck with hockey.
No, no, no.
Skiing's good.
Do you want to talk?
Should we talk about this interesting thing?
Like, I'm worried about AI.
I'm worried about the effect it's having on my children's generation.
I'm watching all the jobs that they could plausibly do diminish by the day.
I disagree because almost all the jobs that can be performed by AI are essentially make work anyhow.
There's no difference between about 40%, maybe 50% of the jobs that people work.
I mean, most of the jobs that they're doing are not productive jobs.
They're jobs that revolve around fulfilling the need to meet government regulations.
I mean, they might as well be digging holes and then filling them back in again.
I totally agree with you there.
I'm talking about nice jobs, like, for example, I don't know, say illustrating children's books.
I would rather they were done by a human than some kind of sinister technology.
See, I think that's flat out wrong because the effect that what you're actually going to see with AI, in my opinion, is an explosion of human creativity.
I mean, we are all in the comics publishing world.
We are all waiting to be able to replace the illustrators.
And when we can, it is going to be so much better because there is no flakier group of people in the world than comics illustrators.
We have multiple series that we had to basically stop for a while because an illustrator flaked out again.
We would be able to produce far more stuff, better stuff, and do it less expensively if the AIs were able to provide the character consistency that they can't quite deliver yet.
That's going to change.
Probably within two years, we'll have it.
And then you're going to see an absolute explosion of independent comics that are not going to be subject to the nonsense because all the gatekeepers will be destroyed.
Marvel, DC, they're gone once that happens.
I approve of that.
Okay, that's fine.
Same with music.
I've got 52 tracks up on Unauthorized.
I've got a whole album out that's professionally produced by the guy who is the engineer for the 1975 and the Bastille or Bastille, two pretty big bands.
I think one of them is headline in Glastonbury.
He was really skeptical about AI too.
In fact, he has an article on AI Central.
If your listeners have any interest in AI, I highly recommend visiting aicentral.substack.com because there's all kinds of discussions there from people who are experts in the various applications of the field.
There's even instructions on how you can roll your own local AI.
And this engineer writes a really nice piece about how he was skeptical of music AI until he saw how it could be used by somebody who is a musician and knows what they're doing.
The interesting thing is that it gives a less talented, less skilled musician like me the ability to produce stuff at a much higher level than I could do organically.
And I can do it much, much faster.
Yes, but is that a good thing?
I mean, why should we be rewarding mediocrity?
It's not because it's not mediocrity.
It's excellent.
What you produce, it depends on, like, if you just put in a prompt, for example, if you just put in a, this is why most, you know, one of the first things that this engineer said to me, he said, you're doing, he said, I've never heard any AI music like this.
And the reason was very simple.
Most people are just basically putting in a prompt and letting the AI do the music and the lyrics, right?
And so they get this really generic vanilla stuff.
It's not very interesting.
For some reason, it always involves the term neon.
Like, I don't know why AI loves the term neon when it comes to music, but it does.
Anyhow, but here's the thing.
The AIs use the lyrics as the prompt.
The lyrics are actually a more important prompt than the prompt itself.
And so when you write the lyrics and it's building off of that, then the patterns that it is recognized is it's recognizing what patterns work with those particular emotions and those particular words.
And then you get a much, much more powerful result to the extent that you cannot distinguish.
There's no way that anyone who's not a musical professional can distinguish between some of the stuff that we're producing and the stuff that we're producing organically because we've done both.
I play in regular bands too.
And the AI stuff is higher quality at this point already.
If I wanted to do an AI version of...
I would want it to be like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel.
I'd want it to be sort of left field, weird, sui generous, oblique, catchy, but not too obviously accessible, sort of cultish.
So how would I get that?
I'd have to write the lyrics, I suppose, because otherwise it wouldn't be.
You'd have to write the lyrics.
One thing that you can do, a trick that I use, is go ahead and let AI write something for you.
Write the initial lyrics about whatever it is, and then you go through and you completely rewrite them.
And that's what gives it the power.
That's what gives it the emotional power.
And then you put it in completely separately.
You completely ignore whatever the music is that kicked out the first time.
And then you get a much, much better result.
And so, for example, I was really pleased this last week because I've been, for 25 years, I've wanted to do something in the Enigma vein.
You know, Sadness, right?
The Cross of Changes.
You know, the band I'm talking about, right?
I think I do.
Enigma.
Enigma.
They do the Gregorian chant stuff.
So, anyhow, I mean, I wanted to do that stuff before I founded my band back in 1992.
And, you know, where do you find a choir to make a Gregorian chant?
You know, it just doesn't work.
And so anyhow, for the first time in 30 years, 33 years, I've been able to actually produce a very credible enigma-flavored sound.
I actually took the Sacris Solemnis prayer for Corpus Christi that St. Thomas composed at the request of Pope Leo, I think it was Pope Leo, and created a song that has a very sort of enigmaous style vibe.
It doesn't have the chick singing French, and it doesn't have some of the other sexual elements.
And then I took the next four stanzas and turned it into a more traditional style song that was like, I would call it, had a flavor of that, but was also mixed with a Spanish guitar sound.
And I'll send it to you.
It's fantastic.
Can you not play a bit now?
Maybe I can.
How would I do that?
I mean, could I just email?
I'm not Mr. Technology.
I'm just me.
I'm not.
I've never used your system here, so maybe it has to be share.
Let's see.
I'm a little hesitant to share a screen Somebody did want to share a screen.
They obviously need to share.
Okay, I'll try it then.
I'll try it.
Let me see if I can Well, again, we don't know if you can.
We'd like to live dangerously on the dunning pod.
Yeah, well, I don't have anything objectionable up, so that should be fine that I'm aware of.
My donkey porn collection.
Yeah, fortunately, I don't have those sorts of habits.
Okay, select tab to share.
There we go.
Okay.
Come on, share this one.
And let me know if you can hear this.
Okay.
Can you hear that?
no well that's a shame isn't it Can you hear it?
No.
Maybe this is coming through your headphones.
Hmm.
I like that.
These are all AI generated images I can see.
You said you can't hear it?
No, I can't.
Okay.
So people can go to your site and listen to it.
Yeah, it looks like it's not unless this microphone.
No, I think that's...
That's my microphone.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to have a way to...
Let me just check one more thing.
Yeah, I did that one more thing.
it doesn't seem to have a way to do that.
But anyhow, I'll send you the...
Yeah.
Maybe.
Insert it.
Yeah, that might work.
I'll email you the MP3.
Yeah, yeah.
So, okay.
So anyway, you were saying about it.
Tell me more about it.
First of all, that isn't even professionally mastered yet, and it already sounds CD quality ready.
It's good to go.
Is it in 440 or 432?
It's in 441.
Is that bad?
No, it's...
If you're going to put it on a CD, you have to have it in 441.
I mean, that's the CD.
You see you've sold your soul to the Dark Lord.
But actually, to be honest, we produce it in 48, 48.1.
Yeah, now you've lost me.
But if you would like me to send you a 43.2 kilohertz version, I will be happy to.
Well, good for my soul, you know?
Think about it.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, well, but on the other hand, it might extend your life, and that would be against your financial interest.
So, okay.
So these are essentially Christian themes, these are liturgical.
Those two songs, yes.
But I mean, I actually have no less than Five songs about Neil Gaiman.
He's not a goodie, is he?
No, that's what Mr. Tubcuddle is all about.
I don't want to libel him.
Oh, of course not.
I will say that I contacted the husband of Tanith Lee, the great, late dark fantasy author, and I wanted to look into the possibility of publishing some of her work.
And her husband had no idea who I was.
And obviously, if you look me up on Wikipedia, I'm not the kind of person who's generally going to appeal much to the sort of that folks from that particular militoo.
And so he said, well, introduce your, you know, tell me a bit about yourself.
And so I gave him a brief biography, but I also sent him one of the mixes of Mr. Tubcuddle.
And I get this email back saying, you had me at the song.
Because Tanith Lee famously loathed and despised Gaiman because Gaiman was nothing but a rip-off artist.
Yes, his stuff has always left me a bit kind of, why don't I like this?
I don't know why I don't like it, but I don't like it.
Because it's not real.
It's all ripped off and fake and posing and posturing.
He's not untalented.
He has a certain amount of literary talent.
I would say that he's got more than I do.
But he's got nothing to say.
He's got no ideas.
All he does is, like somebody said, grab a bunch of mythology, other people's ideas, and put a twee spin on them.
Yes.
Actually, that sums it up.
That's why they didn't like him.
So do you think, because you obviously know about this, people like Alan Moore, Alan Moore knows the score, it seems to me that graphic novels and such like, and sort of Future Shock comics and stuff, have been a very key part of the revelation of the method and predictive programming and stuff.
How much do you think that these people are on board with the kind of the elite plans?
They just infer this stuff.
No, no, they get, I mean, they're like really, really, really low-level, you know, they're like the Igors of that world.
you know they get they get They're like, hey, yeah, we'd like it if you did this.
We'd like it if you did that.
I mean, you've been in the media.
You know exactly what the relationship is between an editor and a reporter.
Do you think it comes a level above that?
Oh, I think it comes from a higher level.
But the point is, I'm saying that I don't think that the Alan Moores are knowingly in on it.
I think that they're just fed ideas by people who are.
It hadn't occurred to me that Alan Moore would have an editor.
You think somebody was like watchmen?
Alan Moore wrote tons of stuff that he was given.
When he's left to his own, as we've seen once he's gone independent, what does he do?
He does questionable stories about underage girls.
Is that right?
I didn't know that.
Okay.
Yeah, he's got some...
I mean, it was one of his more recent projects have just been, you know, really on the wrong side of that line.
I have to say, there was something slight...
And there was something very strange about the way that Watchmen became this thing that everyone was quoting.
Everyone owned a copy of it.
How did that happen?
Well, the same way that every pop, the same way Jordan Peterson happened, the same way that every other organic, manufactured, popular thing happens.
They just put it out there and push it.
They do.
And then there's a few people that praise it to the skies.
I mean, that's why I was so confused the first time I read Gaiman because I'm not a comic book guy at all.
I got involved by accident.
And so people say, oh, you got to read Alan Moore.
You got to read Neil Gaiman.
They're the best of the best, the Shakespeare of the art.
And I read it, and both of them were very inferior.
Both of them were absolutely 100% derivative.
All of the Watchman characters are direct, they're not even rip-offs.
They're direct imitations of Steve Ditko's characters.
Do I say it in that books?
I'm going to say it.
Go ahead.
I've been...
But I'm flattered, but I have to tell you that I am married to a woman.
Yeah, it never stopped Nor Squirrel, did it?
I just want to say, I never liked Watchmen.
I pretended I liked it, but I didn't really.
Oh, I thought it was ridiculous from the moment that I looked at it.
It had its occasional moments, but, you know, because Alan Moore is a competent writer.
I'm probably one of the few people who's actually read Jerusalem and some of his other books.
And if he had a better editor Who was willing to chop out about 30% of the book?
It would actually be a pretty good book.
Alan Moore is a better writer than Neil Gaiman.
That's a very high compliment, not.
Well, yeah.
But I mean, Gaiman is a very, Gaiman is a very good stylist.
He's very good at creating the same image all the time.
But, you know, there's a reason that he hasn't written anything in a long time is because he doesn't have any, he has no original ideas.
And, you know, people forget he didn't create the Sandman.
You know, he was assigned the Sandman, who was an old character.
He completely transformed it.
But then he transformed it in a manner that was very derivative of Tanith Lee's Demon King.
Okay.
They even look alike.
You know, we know his big innovation of having death be this kind of goth punk girl.
We literally know the woman who he ripped the look off from.
He basically just drew somebody that he'd met.
How did she feel about that?
Oh, I mean, she was very, I've read some interviews.
She was very flattered, but she got nothing out of it.
So I think she was a little bit bitter about that because, of course, you know, I mean, Gaiman wouldn't even acknowledge his debt to Taneth Lee, you know, much less admit that he was ripping off designs from people he knew in real life.
I think we agree that in order to achieve massive commercial success, you essentially have to be manufactured in some way.
You don't absolutely have to, but you usually do.
And even if you are a genuine, proper, real talent, you probably have to compromise in some ways in order to get to that point.
Can you think of any examples of genuine, super talented people that kind of prove Okay.
I mean, I grew up in Minneapolis.
I met him a few times.
I've known several of the people that played in his bands and produced his stuff.
He was absolutely legitimate.
His first album, he played all the instruments himself and produced it himself.
At the age of 19.
Do you think then he didn't make the pact?
He didn't sign the pact?
We know he did.
He's my example of somebody who compromises.
Because remember, then he fought that battle to try to get out of his contract with Warner Brothers.
um what Indicative of what?
Well, it means that he had made some compromises and got to the level that he did in part because of that.
But then he wasn't taking orders, doing what he was told, et cetera, et cetera, because he didn't want to do what he was told.
He wanted to do what he wanted to do.
We're not really talking at cross-purposes, but possibly I need to explain what I'm talking about in case it's not totally clear.
So there was a really interesting podcast I listened to a while ago where somebody specialized in reading out stories, long letters that he'd been sent by readers and telling their story.
And there was a very, very interesting one about these two tech guys, I think, they were some kind of entrepreneur, I think tech, in LA.
And they'd been invited to this party.
And they were told, once you've got the invitation to this party, things will happen to you.
Don't you worry.
I've heard that one.
I know what you're talking about.
That doesn't cover the type, people like the Mel Gibsons and the Princes.
That covers the Bob Dylans and the Lady Gagas.
Those are the people that, you know, they might have a modicum of talent.
You know, Gaga can actually sing.
But she ripped off her whole stage presence from a woman of her acquaintance.
And, you know, you listen to her stuff.
It's not, there's nothing groundbreaking about.
She's actually in the service of Satan.
I don't think she makes any bones about it.
And her imagery, her iconography is all demonic.
I mean, that's she calls her fans little monsters or something.
mean that's obvious but maybe people like me shouldn't obsess about this as much as we do but I'm always curious to know is it possible to get to that that level say that the prince Mel Gibson level without having to go to one of those parties where you end up in the room where you have to kind Is it?
Yeah, I mean, I've heard what I've read is that because somebody asked somebody who was like not a major Hollywood figure, but an average Hollywood figure, I would say.
And he was talking about his perception of it.
And he said that basically 45% of the people there are complete sellouts.
45% are compromised and scared and just go along to get along.
And he said about 10% are just genuinely talented, original people who are required in order to keep the things going.
Because remember, evil can't create anything.
All of these manufactured people, they're all derivative.
Look at Jordan Peterson.
Jordan Peterson has not said a single original or creative or interesting thing in his life.
And he's portrayed as this greatest human philosopher since Nietzsche.
Despite the fact that if you read his books, you can see quite clearly the man has never read most of the major philosophers.
He was teaching on the Bible before he'd even read it.
I mean, you talk about a fraud, you know?
And I mean, how on earth do you talk for three hours about a biblical story when you haven't even read the Bible?
He's quite good on his pauses.
Yeah, he's really good at looking anguished.
And his one skill is what I call baffle garble, where he says absolutely nothing, but he says it in a way that allows the listener to believe he has understood what he wants to understand.
You know, I always thought it was funny to ask three different people to watch a Jordan Peterson clip, a short one, and then ask them what he said, and they all said different things.
So what he's doing is it's kind of a sophisticated version of mirroring.
Mirroring when you try to make someone like you by imitating what they do.
So what he's doing is he's doing a sophisticated form of it where he's just spinning this meaningless mirror, and then the person bounces their own ideas off it and hears their own ideas and therefore thinks that their ideas have been sanctified, rationalized, justified by this admirable intellectual figure.
It's total nonsense.
Well, we were talking, were we not, before it was a mistake, actually.
I should never, ever, ever not record everything.
But we were talking about satanic inversion.
Yes.
Or did we actually talk about this on the show?
I can't remember.
But it is how the devil operates, isn't it?
Yeah, the most certain way to know that something is not of God is if it is an inversion of the truth.
You know, Satan hates the good.
He hates the beautiful.
He hates the true.
He says that that which is bad is good.
He says that which is beautiful is ugly and that which is ugly is beautiful.
And he always inverts the truth.
And so whenever you see something that you know to be inversion coming out of somebody's mouth, reading it in print, seeing it in the narrative, then you know that there is a stink of sulfur on it.
Yes.
So viz.
The entire environmental movement, which is about destroying the environment, while pretending it wants to save it.
Yeah.
Or human rights.
You know, we need, like, look at what's happening in England.
Or here's a good one.
Immigration helps the economy.
Really?
No, it doesn't.
Immigration absolutely destroys the economy.
You know, there's, there's, after, you know, 15 years of open immigration, there's not a single country that has economically benefited from the mass migrations of the past 20 years.
Can I ask you, given that I've now rumbled you as a kind of evil spokesman for AI and you think it's great?
These make work jobs that the kids can't do anymore, I mean, I like to think of some of them as what we used to call the creative industries, but you probably did.
The creative industry is going to be fine.
The creative industry is going to be better than ever because AI is going to allow the genuinely creative to break the power of the gatekeepers who are keeping them out.
Okay.
You know, it's going to, like, I'll give you an example.
I've been signed to do two movie scripts with Asian film companies.
They don't have soundtracks.
Even the best high-quality Asian films where they spend, you know, $5 million making it, don't have what we would consider to be proper soundtracks.
And the reason is very simple.
They can't afford it.
Now, you know, I was talking to a director and he said, he's like, oh, can you send me some of that?
I heard you've been working on some music.
Can I hear some of it?
I sent it to him.
He's like, this is amazing.
Can you do a whole soundtrack?
I was like, yeah, sure.
And we can do a whole soundtrack for under 20 grand instead of trying to pay a bunch of record industry people $500,000 for it and end up with a better soundtrack.
That's just one of many examples of how AI is opening up a whole field of possibilities to a whole bunch of creative talents who were never going to get their foot in the door with the traditional method of, hey, are you willing to sell your soul?
And then we'll, you know, The same seven people are writing all the songs.
Who are they?
Oh, it's everyone from what's his name?
The guy who, what's that?
Max Morten.
Max.
I thought he died, but he did.
Yeah.
But he was one of them.
The guy who used to, Jack Obramovich or something.
I think he works with Taylor Swift now.
There's a Swedish house mafia.
You know, it's a remarkably small list of people.
Max Moz.
Okay, yeah.
So Max Mulligan.
There's also a woman.
Yeah, there's a woman who writes a bunch of stuff for Katy Perry and others.
And, you know, it's a very small group of people that sell their songs that's why you you always hear things like oh britney spears could have done umbrella but she passed on it and then rihanna bought it right you know there's a whole there's a whole cottage industry but the you know the the big names are the ones whose songs everybody wants because they they've got their formulas down um okay and so where does the creative element
come in, in knowing how to manipulate AI, in curating it.
In curating it, because what you do with AI is exactly what you do as a producer anyhow.
I mean, when you're a producer, when you're producing a song, you're very seldom picking up the guitar and playing a riff.
You're typically telling a guitarist, hey, play me a riff in C minor.
And the guitarist will play a riff.
You're like, ah, maybe a little more aggressive.
Basically, AI lets you do that only instead of having one moody guitarist who can only come up with like six different riffs, you can have it kick out 500 and pick out the best.
And should I not feel sorry for the moody guitarist whose livelihood has been curtailed by this?
I mean, you can, but you might as well feel sorry for the buggy whip manufacturer.
And the good guitarists also, by the way, they're going to, you know, one thing you can't do with AI is you can't play it live.
Like we, one of the songs that we did, we liked enough that we did a fully organic version with, you know, the guitarists, bass, drums, etc., etc.
You know, just, just because we thought that it was, it merited it.
Yeah.
Sorry, I just had a random thought.
I, I, this is probably not relevant to anything.
Sure.
But the cult of Nick Drake.
You familiar with Nick Drake?
Vaguely.
I'm definitely not a member of the cult.
No.
I, I just thinking about all these, these artists that we sort of intellectual musician, music lovers were encouraged to, to listen to.
And we had to have it in our collection.
I'm, I'm a David Sylvian guy.
Okay.
Yes.
But David, David Sylvian.
Mr. Lawrence, did he do that?
Yeah.
He did, didn't he?
Well, actually, Ryu Sakamoto did that.
And then David Sylvian did a song, I think, called Forbidden Colors based on the same, on the same music.
Which, by the way, is based, of course, on the Yukio Mishima novel.
But, but the, the interesting thing about Sylvian is, if you think about it, he's a singer.
He's not writing the music.
He's acting as the, but it always has a very distinct sound because he works with the same musicians.
And what he has them play, it tends to be the same sort of thing.
You know?
And, and, and what AI is doing is it's allowing much lesser talents than David Sylvian to do something similar, even if they don't have a good singing voice.
So what's the advantage of being talented in this new democratic era?
Oh, because AI is force multiplying.
I mean, AI force multiplies what you have.
If you've got genuine talent, the stuff that you're going to kick out is going to be, you're going to be able to do way more of it.
You know, you'll have a lot, you'll, you'll have so much more of it.
Um, and the ability to produce so much more of it because you can, you can, you can realize your artistic vision much, much faster than was possible before.
So in terms of film scores, say, do you think that people like Hans Zimmer or John Williams, if he's still alive, I don't know.
Are they still going to be used by, or are the accountants going to say, hang on a second, we, we can, we can get that.
The best are always going to be used.
Are they?
Always.
At the same rates?
Probably because they're profitable.
You know?
So I get, I give you another example that, that, that, that's happened in the last very, it all happens very, very quickly.
Um, some friends.
Wait, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me interrupt real quick.
Dude.
What AI is replacing is it's replacing all of the manufactured mediocrities.
It's not replacing the geniuses.
It's not replacing the people doing original stuff.
You know, Chuck Dixon, the legend with whom I have the, the privilege to work.
He's doing more stuff now than ever before.
Okay.
You know, um, he had the number one, he, he had the number one selling movie in the world, you know, a couple months ago.
And now everybody's coming to him because it's actually new.
It's actually different.
It's not, you know, bad boys, part 37 or fast and furious, you know, uh, Icelandic drift number 82.
And so, um, I think that because, you know, AI is not, is actually a misleading term.
It's not intelligent.
All it is, is a much faster artificial pattern recognition, putting, putting the patterns together.
You still need somebody who can say, Hey, put this with this and this with this.
You need somebody providing the purpose.
Um, I equate it to like my experience working with my friend, Paul Sebastian, who's a wonderfully skilled woman.
wonderfully talented musician but because he can do anything he sometimes has the problem of not knowing what he should do that's why we were very effective as a pair because i was like well i want to do this and he would just go oh okay and boom do it um you know if you have a if you have a genuine voice, if you have a genuine idea, AI is going to allow you to realize it much more effectively.
But the reality is like Twitter, we've seen with Facebook, we've seen most people have nothing to say.
Are we going to reach the point soon where?
I mean, I watch a lot of a lot of Netflix series and they do start to look quite generic.
And there are sort of moments of crisis which are then resolved before leading to a bigger crisis.
And often you can predict where the plot is going to go based on Chekhov's.
gun principles and stuff.
And I was just wondering, are we far away from when AI will be able to generate these scripts instead of quirky characters?
First of all, make this character more quirky, make this character more lesbian.
We're already there.
AI can already do that.
I've got three different AI-assisted novels that I'm currently running live, like basically putting up a chapter every week.
One is an Umberto Echo-style one that's much more difficult.
One is like a monster hunter type thing.
And the third one is a vampire novel.
And I can only do that while I'm doing my regular writing because AI lets me do that.
And there is absolutely no way that you could possibly determine that they are AI assisted.
I actually did an experiment on AI Central.
This is how interesting it is.
I took four poems by the great poetess Ono no Komachi.
She lived in Heian, Japan in 850 AD, and she's considered one of the 31 immortals of Japanese poetry.
And I took a literary expert's description of each of the four poems.
I put it into Cloud Force Sonnet, and I had it kick out a poem in Japanese and then translated into English based on the description of her poem.
And then I put the four sets of poems up, and not only were people completely unable to tell the difference between the AI-generated poem and the poem written by the master poetess, but their guess about which poems were human and which poems were AI were actually worse than random chance.
Now, I personally think that that's because the AI did a better job of appealing to modern sensibilities.
Yes.
But I still thought it was fascinating that they only got 37.5% correct on average when just guessing would have given you 50%.
I have seen this done with, I think possibly Shakespeare's sonnets or something like that.
And people often preferred the AI.
But then looking at the AI version that I saw, it was just because it was more shit and dumbed down.
Yeah, if you are fake clever.
Right, but if you're a sufficiently elite and informed reader, you can tell the difference.
I personally thought the difference was obvious, you know, but I am an East Asian studies minor.
I'm very, very well read in Japanese literature.
I mean, basically, if it's been translated into English, there's a pretty good chance I've read it.
And so, you know, to me, it seemed very obvious that the AI versions were a little bit flatter, that the references were a little bit less intense.
But honestly, they were excellent.
I mean, you can go if you go to AI Central, you can read all eight poems.
And these are short poems.
They're waka.
So it's like the five, seven, five.
It's the 31-syllable one, not the usual haiku.
But they're good.
I mean, they're not, and when it comes to writing prose, especially if you keep it short, the AI can really, really imitate certain styles really well.
It's funny because it really seems to like imitating Chuck Dixon style.
Like the level of violence and stuff is just off the charts.
Oh, really?
Well, because Chuck writes The Punisher.
And so it knows...
And it had a young man getting shot because he'd failed to return.
His book was overdue.
Seems to be it.
In the punishment library.
Exactly.
I was reading it to Chuck on the phone, and we were laughing ourselves almost sick just because it was more Chuck than Chuck.
Like, Chuck's like, I don't know if even I would do that.
So while I've got you, I've just finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, which is my first Murakama.
What should I read next?
I would read The Rat Trilogy.
Okay.
The first two books, Pinball and 1971, are really neither here nor there, other than they were his first books.
But the reason that you should read them is because the third book in the Rat Trilogy, which is called A Wild Sheep Chase, is one of his best.
I would say it's one of his three best novels.
What are the other two?
It's called the Rat Trilogy.
You might be able to find an edition that has all three.
But I think it's Pinball and 1971.
And you reckon what are his three best?
Oh, the three best are a wild sheep chase, one Q84.
Yeah.
I really like killing Commandante.
You say it like there's loads of people who are going to be arguing with me.
Most people probably have one Murakami.
I'm arguing with myself.
I'm actively arguing with myself.
You are Sasha.
The geek is the wrong word.
What is it that's wrong with you, Vogs?
Well, according to Chuck, he was vastly amused because I had come up with some solutions for something, and then I'd also come up with some AI solutions for something.
Like we're discussing some different plot possibilities.
And he calls me up and he's like, I just wanted to let you know that you sound more like an AI than the AI does.
I was about to say, I think I know what your problem is, that you don't actually exist.
You are AI.
And here you are admitting it.
I sometimes wonder about that myself.
Well, actually, the truth is that certain people, Martin Van Creveld is another one, have a very coldly analytical mind, and it doesn't always show.
And in fact, like with Martin, he's a very warm, pleasant guy.
But then you read his sort of biography as a historian, and you just occasionally catch these glimpses of this vast glacial mind behind the smiling, affable individual.
And so, you know, I think that that's what occasionally comes out when, especially when I'm working on the creative side.
Wow.
Yeah.
But like, for example, if you want to, I tell people this, if you want to get a flavor for just my perspective, listen to the Soul Sigma album.
It's on iTunes and Spotify and stuff.
I mean, that was just my attempt to delve into some things in an unvarnished sense, without a lot of posturing, without a lot of posing, without plot, without style.
And one of the things that I did that I think you might appreciate is, and I'm going to do a full album of it, is I took two of Lord Byron's poems, the one about lines from a cup, carved from a skull, and then another one called Once There Was Sorrow, and turned them into songs, like created, wrote choruses for them and turned them into proper songs.
And they're really good.
I mean, honestly, I think you'll like them.
If you like Byron.
I mean, I love Byron.
I know some people don't.
I quite like the idea of having been Byron.
Yeah, and he's...
He likes to get a Luffin meter.
I don't think it would be fun to be him, but I would have enjoyed spending a long weekend with him.
Well, he would have been popping off constantly to go and shag a new bird, wouldn't he?
So you wouldn't have much time with him.
That's all right.
So your ideal companion is somebody who would not be there with you most of the time.
That's actually pretty telling, to be honest, isn't it?
Well, my best friend once gave me a hard time because this is years ago, back in the early days of the MMO.
And I came up with this design.
We even applied for a patent on it.
I think the patent office rejected it because they didn't understand it, which is fine.
I just wanted to make sure there was fire art so that Sony or somebody couldn't patent it.
But it basically arranged for what was essentially a zero-player or a one-player MMO, where all the other MMO characters were AI controlled.
Because what I realized is that as a designer, I could provide a better experience for the player than actual people would provide.
Because the way that most people play is at a very, very low bar.
They run around like chickens with their heads cut off.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure you would.
I don't know how long it would take to create all the myriad characters, but if anyone could do it, it's you.
But it's basically designed so that all of the bots play very more realistically than humans do.
Because I want something where the players can come in and take over a role and then leave, and then the character will stay in the game playing with the AI.
That solves the problem of needing enough players to keep the game viable at its highest level.
Can I tell you something I really hate?
I changed the subject slightly, but not much.
I absolutely hate with vengeance.
I don't know why I feel it so strongly about it.
I hate those AI-generated photographs of pretty girls that you see on Twitter.
And I hate even more than...
They've normally got a sort of pigtail down the back of their...
But the ones I hate even more are the, could you live in this castle or something?
And it's got this imaginary room in a castle overlooking these sort of craggy gothic interior with a view over the sea.
And you think, fuck this shit.
This is not real.
I don't like it.
There's nowhere like that has ever existed.
Why are you doing this to me?
That seems like a highly specific irritation.
I don't know that I've ever seen it myself.
But I do think it's funny because the AI system that I use to provide the images for my various sites that I run, I use Bing just because it's very simple, it's very reliable, and it does it quickly.
But it is kind of funny because apparently Bing's idea of the perfect woman is Denise Richards.
Because in every...
It was like one of the most ludicrous castings in the history of Hollywood.
But anyhow, she's the one who's married to Charlie Sheen.
So, you know, she's hot.
But it's kind of funny because all of the, if you tell it to do an attractive or beautiful woman, it always does some variant of her face.
So I don't know why, but I'm sure that they're all like that.
That's why they all tend to have a bias towards a certain actress's look.
I have to say, I've been a bit disappointed by the general sort of direction of this podcast, which is you being optimistic about stuff.
I was kind of hoping you were going to tell me that we're all going to die sooner rather than later.
But you seem to be all like, yeah, AI, it's our friend.
Yeah, the Israel Iran war is fake and they're not going to win.
But come on, you're a Christian.
What about the Bible?
What about Revelation?
Stuff like that?
No man knows the day.
I know.
It's pretty tedious, that.
And so, I mean, what's the meme that some of the Zoomer Christians like to say?
You can't be blackpilled when you've already won.
Well, I agree with that.
I obviously agree with that.
Where are you on?
People have been asking me about crop circles recently.
I don't have an opinion.
I have no idea.
I can't understand why anyone would fake them.
I also can't understand what possible alien-related reason or occult-related reason there could be for them.
It's just one of those things where I just find the whole thing totally inexplicable.
Well, obviously, it's not going to be aliens.
I mean, you're with me on this, aren't you?
Aliens don't exist.
They're demons.
Well, I mean, what's the difference?
Well, the difference is that in the schemata of people who aren't Christians, there is space, outer space, and lots of galaxies and universes.
And there are these creatures that live out there, and they come in their flying saucers, and they buzz with them.
To me, what is the difference between an alien being from our dimension, but a different planet, and an alien being from a different dimension?
Which would be a demon.
Well, the difference is an angel.
I'll tell you what's different.
It's the cosmology.
The whole cosmology is very different.
Well, I understand, but again, from a human perspective, they're all non-human, and they're all from a different order of being than we are.
I think that the greater universe slash multiverse is much more complicated and interesting than we have any idea.
And personally, probably one of the main reasons that I'm just generally optimistic, regardless of what negativity might be happening day to day or year to year, is that, I mean, won't it be fascinating to find out what's on level two?
Well, I was going to ask you, what's your best guess?
What's going to happen to you when you die?
I think that we level up.
And I think that, you know, I'm a gamer.
So my perspective is fundamentally game related.
And I'm thinking that, you know, the wall goes and then all of a sudden, boom, and here you are on level two.
Better weaponess.
Exactly.
Better health pack.
Exactly.
That is exactly how I look at it.
Because I do not believe for a second that I don't believe for a second that we're going to just sit around and strum harps all day.
I think that maybe we get to become the angels in another dimension.
If we've proven our value to God, if we've proven that we are capable of reaching the next level, then I assume that he uses us somehow.
Right.
I hope so.
Do you think that God is generally happy with what you've been up to?
On a public level, yes.
On a personal level, less so.
Well, I mean, that would be the stock Christian answer, wouldn't it?
I mean, we're not, but it's an honest answer.
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not accusing you of dishonesty.
I'm just saying that, like, you're a Christian, that's kind of what we should do.
But that's, you know, I mean, the two things that I've probably asked for most for myself have been to know the truth and to be used as a effective weapon against his enemies.
Do you know what?
That is kind of what I prayed for, those two things, after my encounter that I had this morning, that I told you about before we started, where I had an argument with a Christian who was very born again, and obviously very...
He obviously had direct contact with the Almighty in one form or another, God doing amazing things, working through the Holy Spirit in his life and stuff.
But we had a massive ding-dong about the nature of Israel and the Bible and stuff.
And he was trying to lay on me, what I considered his particular trip, which was that I was not, that my spirit or my soul, I forget which, was resistant to God's message.
And that the reason I didn't agree with him on Israel was because I basically didn't get it.
That sounds like every single Christian dogmatist of every single flavor ever.
This is rather my view.
I don't accept that reasoning and I don't accept that thinking.
And my personal belief, and I think the biblical evidence is that God uses those who are willing to be used.
And sometimes those people are not the good people.
Sometimes those people are not the people you'd expect.
And that's why I think that the best thing that we can do as Christians is to volunteer.
I mean, obviously in any capacity that he wants, but typically he's going to use us in the capacity that we're designed for.
I am, for whatever reason, very well suited for conflict.
I don't have any need to have anybody agree with me.
And so whether it's with the irrational atheist or whether it's punching through this, that, or punching through the lies of evolution and that kind of thing, the one thing that I can control is I can control my pursuit of the truth.
And that's what I try to do.
That's all I try to do.
If I don't know, I don't pretend that I do.
And if I'm pretty confident, then I let people know that I'm pretty confident.
But even for the non-Christian, Aristotle talks about the good, the beautiful, and the true.
And of course, the good, the beautiful, and the true, if you follow that, it's eventually going to lead you to their source, which is the way, the truth, and the life.
Yeah.
I'm with you, bro.
I'm with you.
Well, I've enjoyed this chat.
As always, you're very entertaining, Vox.
Although, I don't know whether everyone would find you as entertaining as I do.
I think you're great.
The evidence would tend to suggest otherwise.
Yeah, it's funny.
You do get a mixed reaction.
I think some people are like, yeah, how did you get Vox Day?
I mean, you lucked out there.
He's brilliant.
And some are like, what was that about?
And then others are like, but Wikipedia says he's a bad person.
Why talk to a bad person?
I still can't work out what bad things you've done.
Well, I mean, among other things, I did blow up the Hugo Awards.
But that was controlled by the forces of evil, wasn't it?
Well, yeah, but I think so, but apparently they find it very humiliating that we got immortal works like Space Raptor Butt Invasion and Alien Stripper Bone by the T-Rex up there on the list of nominees with Asimov and Heinlein and Clark, you know.
They were probably more edifying than the work because most of those people were like Romans, weren't they?
They were the sci-fi gurus.
Yeah, they were not as wrong as Space Raptor Butt Invasion.
That was next level.
Good.
Now, Vox, tell us about that.
On that note, tell us where, where everyone's going to rush out and buy, tell me that title again so that where people can get it.
Oh, it's famous.
It's Chuck Tingle.
Space Raptor Butt Invasion on Amazon.
Space Raptor Butt Invinvas.
It's literally about homosexual space dinosaurs.
Yeah, that's unrealistic because we know that dinosaurs never existed.
Well, we know space, you know, it's fake.
Yeah, space is fake.
Dinosaurs are fake.
So all you've got left is...
So.
Well, the AI site is AICentral at substack.com.
And all the music is on unauthorized.tv.
You can subscribe to that for five bucks a month.
And my streams are there.
Owen's streams are there.
There's tons.
I mean, there's like 10,000 videos And all kinds of audiobooks and music and stuff.
It's a treasure trove.
And then I also blog daily at sigmagame.substack.com, which is where we discuss the whole social sexual hierarchy, which has been getting a lot of attention, even in the Daily Mail recently, which was kind of funny.
Do you know how else I can tell that you are, in fact, AI?
How's that?
You have no life at all.
You just spend your time doing stuff, doing work.
Yeah, I do.
That is an occasional criticism that I hear from time to time.
And it's a fair one.
Have you thought about taking up bell ringing, which is what I've been doing recently?
I can honestly say that thought has never ever occurred to me.
i'll tell you what it's it's scary you think you think that It's right by the way.
Wow, I had no idea it was such an alpha activity.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It's right up there with skydiving.
On the plus side, demons hate bells.
That is also useful.
Actually, I still play football.
I play for a veterans team.
Kicky ball, as we call it.
Kicky ball, as you like, yeah.
So that's weird.
You are weird.
So, Vox, it's been absolute joy having you on the Delling Pod again.
Everyone else, even if you hate this podcast, you shouldn't, actually.
This is one of my favourite recent ones.
You should bloody well make with the money.
Sponsor me.
I mean, subscribe, subscribe.
You can do that on Substack.
Substack's probably the best place or local Patreon.
I like to spread it out, Vox.
Hardly anyone, well, nobody I don't think has signed up to Patreon recently.
But I think Substack is a trap.
Your income, the rise in the income, sort of, what's the word I'm looking for?
goes flat after a time, because I think they suppress your But any one place could be a trap because if you get too successful on YouTube or something and then they, like with the Stefan Molyneux, then they pull the rug out from under you and you've got nothing.
No.
I got cancelled by YouTube ages ago.
Yeah, me too.
But that's why we set up unauthorized.
And so we have that as a backstop for some folks.
And then I just, what I like to do is I like to have multiple sub stacks which are focused on the topic rather than me.
Yeah, yeah, well, that's clever.
You know, I just don't want the discussion to be about me.
And for the most part, we've been very, very successful with that on both Sigma Game and on AI Central.
Although, you know, with Sigma Game, there's a little bit because of the way that it went viral around the world.
And you've got people trying to redefine things and all that sort of stuff.
So I've got a book coming out on it pretty soon, and that should help people at least have a reference.
But this is a, it's a good, Sigma game is the place for, if you're at all interested in the male socio-sexual hierarchy and things like alpha males, gamma males, et cetera, et cetera.
The discussions are really good.
I think we've got like, you know, 7,000 subscribers or something, and it's pretty well populated.
Does it get all the way from alpha, beta, gamma?
We don't use beta because there's already too many negative ramifications from the pickup artists.
So it's basically alpha, bravo, delta, gamma, omega, sigma, and lambda.
Oh, which one am I?
I don't know.
I mean, I just don't know.
I don't know your social and sexual context well enough to have an opinion.
I like riding horses and jumping over hedges.
Well, I don't like it.
I find it bloody terrifying.
That doesn't help as much as you might think.
To be honest, I actually avoid like the plague, the inevitable what about me questions because I think that's indicative of an erroneous focus because the utility of the SSH is being able to correctly anticipate other people's behavior.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, so you want you to be able to make a less intention seeking child like I am, in which case it's kind of interesting.
All right.
Do you know what I've got to go and do now?
I've got to go and make, like a hunter-gatherer, I've got to go and make a lamb and potato and tomato stew for my wife so that when she gets back from the work, she'll praise me.
I wish you the best of luck in that.
Good.
Thank you.
Thank you, Vox.
I'm going to turn it off now, but I want to ask you a question afterwards.
