Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Friday the 22nd of April, I believe it is.
It is, yeah.
God, are days just bleeding to one another for me.
Honestly, I'm still convinced we're trapped in 2020.
Starting with some existential dread.
Yeah.
Happy Friday, everyone.
Have you ever considered moving out of Swindon?
No, but my wife has, and I was like, too bad, I'm setting up a business here.
I'm joined by Leo, as you can see, and today we're going to be talking about why they hate Elon Musk, how the woke media is basically being buried at this point, and why Europeans are fleeing Europe.
And I'm going to be talking about Netflix tanking because it's too woke.
So it's got horrible woke comedy that nobody wants to watch and totally noncy shows like, what's it called?
Cuties and Sex Unzipped.
I haven't even heard of that.
Oh man, worth it.
In terms of hate watching, Sex Unzipped, even The Guardian gave it zero stars.
The Guardian, this woke show about pronouns and genderqueer ideology and all the rest of it.
And when you've even lost The Guardian.
And The Guardian, even The Guardian had to say, look, this is so bad we can't give it any stars.
Right, well, before we get into that, go check out my special Deep Think, which is the Politics of Warhammer 40,000.
Now, this is 16,000 words of me exploring, believe it or not, philosophical concepts through the lens of a very nerdy tabletop game.
But there's loads in here that I think is actually really important and explains a lot of what's going on.
I mean, the distinction, the moral distinction between the left and the right, which is drawn largely from Jonathan Haidt, I think is really interesting.
And also, what the purpose of a story is.
Why do we tell each other stories?
And also, what does representation actually mean?
And things like this.
And of course, the very illusory nature of what a piece of art is.
And this is why when the wokists come along and say, right, we need to break into this franchise.
We need to do that.
This is why everyone starts reacting negatively.
Because, look, we've created a precious illusion here.
It's a representation of something that we all will agree is real in this particular little micro universe.
And so when they come in and go, yeah, but we need, say, in this case, female space marines or something like that.
It's like, look, you just can't have that.
And the reason that Warhammer is a great example of this is because the heroes of Warhammer are the most intrinsically right wing faction you could ever have in your life.
So coming in with communism and saying, look, can we make him a bit communist?
It would ruin the entire thing.
And this is old as well.
It's like 40 years old, this franchise.
And so it's calcified.
And so they're coming in with demands that simply can't be met.
And I've gone through why all those things are.
It's free.
And I've recorded the audio track myself.
It's two hours long.
So get your miniatures out and get listening.
That's a key thing.
I mean, when people come in and change Ghostbusters or Star Wars or Disney stuff or the Marvel Universe or whatever, they've got to make it 50% genderqueer and 50% from the global majority.
I think they say now instead of minority.
Oh, really?
So we're a minority now.
There's got to be a new word every week.
But yeah, so when they do that, that's why people get upset.
It's like nobody's complaining like, oh look, Lena Dunham's show Girls has got too much genderqueer representation.
Yeah, no one cares.
Because that already did and that's fine.
You made it for them.
And honestly, a lot of us probably watch it and enjoy it.
But if you come along and start messing with things that already exist, you try and make Indiana Jones an intersectional feminist, that's not going to work.
It's not what the story is.
That's exactly it.
Because the whole premise about buying into a piece of media is that it's a shared universe between the people who engage in it.
And so if someone intrudes in with something from the real world, you destroy everything about that.
But anyway, I won't carry on.
I'll let people go watch that in their own time.
So let's talk about why we know why now that they hate Elon Musk.
It's not because he's a bit of an edgy boy on Twitter.
It's not because he likes memes.
It's because he is genuinely threatening a kind of...
This is what Saul Alinsky would describe as a conflict within the haves, the elite class of the world, basically.
Of Silicon Valley.
And Elon Musk is upending this apple cart.
He's causing a lot of trouble.
And he's bringing in a different moral order.
And they can't stand it.
And so I think it's worth just pointing out that we actually have another deep think on Lotuses.com about this.
About how do antitrust laws actually work to break up monopolies?
And specifically in this, they talk about Facebook, but the same principles that apply to Facebook also apply to Twitter.
Because the answer is actually no.
Because these aren't actually monopolies as we understand them.
Because there's lots of competition.
There's lots and lots of different places where you can go to use social media.
The problem is that it's got a kind of monopoly of attention.
And so this is outside of the government's purview and ability to control.
Because we self-associate on these platforms, there's nothing the government can do about it.
The only way it could be fixed is if there was somehow you could transfer data between platforms so you can take all your network because it's your personal network that's the value because if you go to a new social media platform it doesn't have the value because you can't speak to all the same people you're speaking to.
If there's some sort of open source XML that allows them to speak across platform so you go to Getter but your tweets are still seen your posts on Getter are still seen by your Twitter That's probably the apex form of social media, isn't it?
Yeah.
You know, that's how it all ends up.
Well, I just use whichever one I want and I speak to anyone, anywhere at all times.
But this is the problem.
And so basically, as they conclude in this, this is Josh and Harry's deep thing.
It's really good.
There essentially isn't a solution to the Twitter issue.
And so it has to come from private realms.
And so this is why what Elon Musk is doing, he's actually got the effective method of attack against the woke monopoly, ideological monopoly on Twitter, because they can't really attack them through legal methods.
So anyway, let's talk about Elon Musk a bit.
Is he a bad manager?
Well, Bloomberg thought, no, actually, he's amazing as a manager.
And let's be honest, he does have a track record that kind of implies it.
Now, a lot of his critics will say, yeah, but this is just built around his cult of personality.
It's like, so?
Yeah.
So what?
Yeah, this cult of personality that allows them to spend zero dollars on advertising.
Yeah.
And get trillion dollar companies and things like that.
I mean, that's a hell of a cult of personality.
Leverage it if you've got it, right?
As they say in here, Elon's a pretty good business manager.
In fact, the chief executive officer of the world's most valuable automaker has no equal.
Among the 10 largest publicly traded companies, Tesla Inc.
is number one in growth in the past decade, and with revenue increasing more than 260-fold to $53.8 billion.
Number one in the past 12 months, with sales surging 71%.
Number one in share performance over 5 and 10 years, with its stock appreciating between 15 to 146-fold, respectively to a recent $1,000 increase or something.
And number one in employment by more than quintupling its workforce since 2016, according to the data that Bloomberg themselves have compiled.
I mean, that's amazing.
You have to have some kind of talent for managing if you get the results like this.
And I mean, at the end of the day, he's hit on a very trendy social force, isn't it?
Oh, we need electronic cars.
We've got to get it off oil.
Well, okay, well, I make electric cars.
And the guy for electric cars is what I'm famous for.
What are you going to do?
Not come to me?
And isn't this what the left wants?
Electric cars instead of like V8s?
Yeah, but not like that.
Not like that guy.
It's like, well, too bad.
We want terrible ones made by Owen Jones in a communist-era factory.
Yeah, and so someone's just pointing out, look, he's really done well here.
Half a dozen companies are all worth over a billion dollars.
What have you got?
And it's like, okay, fair point, to be honest.
Anyway, Tesla's doing so well.
He's worth about $249 billion, generally.
And he's expecting a $23 billion share bonus from Tesla, if you go to the next one, John.
Just because of their record profits, because he's doing an amazingly good job.
And so when he's like, look, I'm going to pull out 43 billion to buy Twitter, he can do that.
And it's like, okay, well now we have a wild card.
And so this ties in very interestingly with a lot of elite theory that I've been reading recently.
People like James Burnham, Mosca, Pareto.
And they talk about how...
And this ties in as well with people like Saul Alinsky, who talk about, look, there's always conflict within the elites.
And what Elon Musk is showing us is how this conflict within the elite class plays out.
And we'll go through exactly what Elon has actually managed to leverage here in a second.
Because...
He is definitely causing the right waves, and he is tearing off the mask, right?
Because everyone on the left thinks, oh, well, the billionaires just care about money.
No, absolutely not.
Elon Musk is basically burning money at this point.
And when you've got $250 billion...
Why would you care about money?
You've literally got no concerns whatsoever about money.
You must be considered about other things because it's literally Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
You know, what are you looking for?
Well, all my material needs are met a billion times over.
So I must be looking for something else at this point.
And so it's not just about money.
And we know that it's not about money for the people who already control Twitter as well because essentially the academics are coming out and telling us this, right?
So this was from Business Insider and this was fascinating, right?
Elon Musk's plans to privatize Twitter have spurned concern among privacy experts and social media researchers.
Great.
That's great news.
One former Harvard professor told the Washington Post that having one person in control of the social platform is a disaster for user privacy.
I think we've crossed that rubric on.
I mean, there's people in control of it already.
And it's all opaque.
They're insanely rich California elites.
We don't see what rules they're using.
We don't see what processes.
Elon Musk wanted to put their algorithm as a public algorithm, didn't he?
And they're like, no, you can't have that.
It's like, why not?
And there could be user privacy.
User privacy.
What is Mark Zuckerberg doing with my data?
What the hell are you like?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, Zuckerberg, I'm pretty sure he's the controlling stake of Facebook.
And that's got like two and a half billion users.
And he's got all of their data and is obviously farming this out to me.
And WhatsApp and Instagram are owned by Facebook as well.
Absolutely.
And also, I mean, for people on the left, they should be worried about the current ownership of Twitter and Facebook because we saw the Cambridge Analytica scandals.
The right very cleverly leveraged Facebook data to push Brexit over the line and to get Trump elected.
So surely if you're a leftist and you're worried about public discourse and the state of social media platforms, having this openness and showing the transparency in how the data is collected and used and how the algorithms are used and how anybody being deplatformed, how those rules are applied and what those rules are, because at the moment it's completely Arbitrary, capricious, and opaque.
Are you sure that's a good thing for the left?
You would think so, but I just love this.
I think this is a Rubicon that's been long crossed.
I mean, we've got no user privacy on the internet.
I don't know why we'd pretend that we do.
But anyway, a former professor called Shoshana Zuboff said that huge ad revenue from Twitter, huge ad revenue, I don't think so, an unregulated data collection about user behavior have changed the social media industry, which now holds incredible sway over real world events.
Well, yeah, and that's why it's pretty bad that we don't, I mean, could you name a single person on the board of Twitter?
Jack Dorsey?
Apart from Jack.
Should have mentioned apart from Jack.
Obviously he's the go-to guy.
I bet a few of them have got green hair and nose piercing.
We'll talk about it in a minute.
So they say, well, because content on social media platforms can influence public opinion and lead to changed behaviours, she said, the people in control of the sites hold a tremendous amount of power.
Boom.
That's the statement.
Yes, we know.
We all know.
We know, you know, and you know, we know...
That we know, right?
So that's what the discussion is really about.
This isn't about money.
This is about control.
Who gets to decide who can misgender someone on social media?
Who gets to decide what gets buried, like the Hunter laptop story?
You know, that's the problem.
And that's what Elon Musk is challenging from the inside of the elite class.
This isn't like a rogue element that's come from without...
No, this is a guy with unbelievable institutional support already, and he's the one battering down the door.
So it's no wonder that they are absolutely shook by this.
But I love what they say here.
Putting that power in the hands of a single person would be incompatible with democracy.
Well, why is it incompatible with democracy putting it in the hands of ten people?
Yeah.
How is it any less democratic?
That's an oligarchy.
That's an aristocracy.
You're just moving from an autocrat to the Communist Party.
Exactly.
It's absolutely no different.
There are simply no checks and balances from any internal or external force.
Well, what checks and balances are there now?
Literally, there's nothing they can do.
And the issue is that the Constitution of the United States always, the Supreme Court, they always side with the social media companies and their freedom to de-platform because this is their freedom of expression to allow you to publish on their thing.
And so there is no such thing as some sort of social media constitution and in the way the United States is constituted at the moment.
And I'm not saying this should change either, nor could there be.
But anyway, should Musk take ownership of Twitter, the Tesla CEO would have near complete control over an amount of user data that cannot be compared to anything that's ever existed.
Facebook, how about that?
It's way bigger than Twitter, right?
But again, it's not the user data they're actually concerned about.
This is a mask that they're hiding behind, right?
It allows intervention into the integrity of individual behavior and also the integrity of collective behavior.
they know that twitter is the the public square as they say where opinion is formed and from these opinions people behave in certain ways in the way their voting patterns and things like this this filters down through the politicians through the media through the talking heads through just you know activists who are using the platform and it's that that is the influence they are wielding and they know it this is the admission
and uh we know that this isn't going the way they want because they say this is a disaster great Great!
And it's not only about Elon Musk, but he kind of puts it on steroids.
Fantastic.
Because, I mean, really, we should leave Twitter in the hands of, like, a Saudi prince or something.
That's the guy.
He really needs to be controlling the public discourse across the world and in the West.
You know, I mean, it's a disaster if Elon Musk gets hold of it.
This guy, though, this guy's fine.
He, of course, didn't want to sell the company to Elon Musk.
And so Elon Musk was like, well, there's a plan B. And so the Twitter board were like, right, we could accept this massive overinflated price that he is offering for our platform.
You know, he offered 43 billion, the platform's worth like 30 billion.
So if it were about money, there would be like cash in.
You know, we're 13 billion up.
This is great for us as shareholders.
But they don't care about that.
It's interesting how the board has decided to take the poison pill, which is, as the Daily Wire describe it, I'll talk about that in a second.
But anyway, sorry, if we can go to the...
It is this one, actually.
So Elon Musk, if you can scroll down, there's a tweet in here, right?
So that shows, these are the board members of Twitter, right?
Brett Stephen Taylor, don't know who he is, but he's got a 0.007% ownership of shares.
Parag Agrawal, 0.063%.
He's the CEO. Mimi, can't even pronounce that, 0.00 shares.
She's got so few shares, she doesn't even register to the third decimal place.
How mad is that?
Fei-Fei Li, 0.001%, and you've got Jack Dorsey going down at 2%, right?
And so Elon Musk replies to this saying, wow, with Jack departing, he's leaving the Twitter board apparently, the Twitter board owns collectively almost no shares.
I mean, yeah, less than a decimal point.
It's worth of shares, like 0.1% shares, right?
And objectively, their economic interests are simply not aligned with the shareholders, and that's true.
That's a very strong argument.
Now, Plan B is something that Elon Musk mentioned in a, I think it was a TED talk, an interview he did with some guy, and he's been, but he kept it under wraps, but he's been teasing it.
He tweeted out this, something is the night.
Hmm.
Tender is the nice song, I believe.
And so this is his next move as the Daily Wire report.
So because they took this poison pill, the poison pill is a limited duration shareholder rights plan that allows the existing shareholders, except for Musk, exclusively except for him, to purchase additional shares at a discount, as in diluting the number of shares that he controls in Twitter.
And so he had 9.2% or something like that.
And so they will sell a bunch of shares to various other people and it will reduce the amount that he controls.
And so he will be a less influential agent within Twitter.
So would this be like, would this basically create more shares to sell to dilute his, right?
Yeah, because I mean, the shares, they're not physical things.
They can just say it.
They can just make up as many as they want, basically.
And so this will dilute Musk's holding in the company, making the cost of a takeover even higher because these are just fabricating shares out of nothing, selling them to people who already own shares, and so he's got to pay even more.
So it's a way of preventing his hostile takeover of the company by simply making it just too expensive.
And so Elon Musk had proposed, he's teasing, sorry, we can go back to the, we're still on that one.
He's teasing a tender offer.
So a tender offer is an offer to buy the shares of shareholders of a public traded company at a specific price at a predetermined time.
So he can go directly to the shell and say, "Look, I'll buy your shares, me and you, rather than going through anyone else." And so, in some cases, these tender offers may be made by more than one person, such as a group of investors or another business, and they're used commonly as a means of acquisition of one company by another.
And, you know, the shareholders make fat stacks of cash, so they're all happy with it.
The people who want to own this company end up owning the company that they're looking for, and the board may not have anything they can do about this.
I'm no expert in this role.
So if I'm wrong about any of this, correct me in the comments, please.
And if you've got any ideas where you think that's going to go, let me know.
And so the question is, okay, well, 43 billion, that's a lot.
But Elon Musk, richest man who's ever lived, can he raise 43 billion?
And Elon was like, yeah, but actually, how about I raise 46.5 billion instead?
Because, I mean, if this is about profitability, as the Saudi prince said, to give you the Saudi prince's quote, I don't believe the proposed offer by Elon Musk comes close to the intrinsic value of Twitter, given its growth prospects.
Twitter doesn't have growth prospects.
It's been about 300 million users for the last five years or so.
Yeah, particularly as they seem to decapitate their most popular users like Donald Trump.
They kick him off.
Yeah, they're constantly shooting the most popular users in the head.
And so it's obvious that this is not about money.
As the academics said, this is about control.
And so Elon's like, right, okay, well, boom, here's an even bigger stack, an extra three and a half billion.
How about that?
But the question is, where did he raise it from?
So, he has committed $21 billion funding of his own, and he's got $13 billion from Morgan Stanley Senior funding, which is very interesting.
And then Morgan Stanley apparently gave him another $12.5 billion in margins loans, according to his securities filing.
That's fascinating.
Who are Morgan Stanley's?
Big bank.
That's right.
Big investment bank.
They also own 8.4% of Twitter.
That's interesting, isn't it?
Because this now, Elon has managed to essentially conscript onto his side a fairly large segment of the elite class that controls Twitter.
Because as the shareholders go, this is now about what?
About 17-18% of Twitter shareholders.
They're essentially in Elon Musk's corner against, well, not the board because they don't own any shares, but against the rest of the shareholders.
And it's very interesting because, I mean, I imagine that Morgan Stanley, as much as they're concerned about Twitter control ideologically, and who knows whether they are, but I think they might actually be concerned about money, about returns.
And so Elon Musk, I mean, if you are concerned about money, you are definitely going to put the money on Elon.
Yeah.
Because, I mean, he made himself the richest man in history somehow.
You know, you're not going to bet on the Twitter board.
You've got a track record of incredible success.
Yeah, exactly.
So the people who are actually concerned about money would side with Elon Musk.
And those people who don't, well, I'm guessing that they are the ones who are concerned about the ideological control.
And so this shows us there is a rift, a crack within the elite, because the elites can fall from grace.
They can lose their positions.
And they are aware of this.
The stakes are incredibly high in all of this, and they do stand to lose a lot of money.
So the question is, are they prepared to stare down, like play this game of chicken with Elon Musk?
Because it's entirely possible that Elon Musk could just keep raising more money.
It's entirely possible.
And so the question is, how far are they willing to go?
And how ruined could they be in response?
And it's not that there aren't other things that are happening around this.
So Florida man, Ron DeSantis, is obviously keeping his eye on this.
Next one, please, John.
Have you not got an Instagram link?
No, there we go.
Twitter link.
So Ron DeSantis is chiming in on this.
Now, there's probably not a lot that Ron DeSantis can actually do, but he's basically saying, well, look, if they're not taking the money, they're not giving the best value return for their shareholders, which is true.
And legally, they do have an obligation to do such a thing.
And so he's going to look into what the legal system in Florida can do.
Now, there's probably not that much other than find some Floridian shareholder who feels wronged by the fact that They're not giving the payout that they are legally entitled to and take it to court.
But it might matter.
Who knows?
I don't know.
If you think you know, let me know in the comments.
But this is good.
It's good to see pressure mounting from people who are in this elite class, people who have influence and power and actually can make things happen.
So it's really, really good to see.
And just as a final thing, Elon Musk has got this interesting perspective.
You can scroll up just above this one.
He says, if our Twitter big succeeds, we'll defeat the spam bots or die trying.
And he's going to do that by authenticating everyone on Twitter.
Now...
There are going to be lots of people who say, well, I like having an anonymous Twitter account because it means it can't be cancelled for voicing my opinions.
I'm entirely sympathetic, as someone who's been cancelled, to that position.
However, this, I think, only prolongs the reign of terror of cancel culture.
While they are essentially just shooting anonymous accounts, that means there aren't any real victims as they're concerned.
And one way of getting around the toxic environment of Twitter would be to actually have everyone verify.
Yeah.
Yeah, it would remove that sort of road rage thing.
People feel anonymous, they're in their bubble, they can scream whatever they want, and they're not going to get in trouble.
And, you know, Twitter's harsh sort of adherence to rules around harassment and stuff means, you know, that's limited to a certain extent.
But people can just still be snide because they're not real people.
Yeah.
It doesn't reflect on them.
Yeah, yeah.
And also, Twitter's application of harassment rules and stuff is so arbitrary.
It stifles you.
When you're actually composing a tweet on Twitter, or you're engaging with people, you can't even ironically say things that you'd say to a mate.
And they actually have a thing that pops up saying, are you sure you want to tweet this?
Yeah, yeah.
It's the sort of thing that most people tweet.
Yeah, exactly.
But the point is, and like I said, I am very sympathetic to the people who are saying, well, look, I don't want to get cancelled.
It's like, yeah, but while you're still hiding, it means that cancel culture has more power.
That is its power over you.
Unfortunately, we all, as James O'Keefe points out, we'll have to kind of stand up and do something brave, and we have to do it all together.
Yeah.
And if we don't do it all together, then they keep sniping the individuals.
So I don't think this is a bad idea, as unpopular as it might be with a certain constituency.
Yeah.
And it's great to see woke people have been setting the agenda throughout.
So woke people have been setting the agenda with Twitter, setting the rules, how they're applied.
So it's great to see that non-woke people who actually have the power and have the money, like Elon Musk isn't woke.
He's anti-woke.
He's anti-woke.
So most sensible people are anti-woke.
Most successful people are anti-woke.
So it's great to see them taking a stand and coming in.
And when they get motivated...
Stuff's going to happen, because they're not just a bunch of screaming, green-haired people with nose rings.
Yeah, well, they're people who literally track records of success, and they post funny memes.
So anyway, that's that, and I love the way it's going.
I love the way it's going, and I love the way they're screaming about it.
Yeah, well, I love the way the same thing is happening to Netflix and across lots of woke media.
So, I mean, I'll just go back.
This is a classic woke media fail.
So there's this thing called Queeby that was launched.
We just want to pause this now.
Just a quick thing.
I've never heard of this.
Can we pause this?
Can we pause this and watch it in a moment?
But like, Quibi was basically, it was a new media company that was set up to provide its quick bite.
I mean, so it's short form stuff.
You know the sort of stuff you get for free on any social media platform.
It was like that, but you had to pay for it.
Why would they do that?
Because they don't have any sense.
It wasn't like a small thing that was set up.
They sunk Over $2 billion into this thing, and it failed within six months.
It was wonderful.
And they made it super woke.
All the people that were fronting it were people like Nish Kumar.
Oh, yeah, the most popular man in Britain.
And lots of Hollywood stars.
They paid a billion dollars to Hollywood stars.
Obviously, it was just a cash grab for people.
When you give people money, it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to be better.
People are going to chase people.
People are going to chase stuff, but if you just give them a bunch of money, they're just going to take the money and run.
If you pay them in advance, then why would they put the real effort in?
Exactly, which is a problem that Netflix has, which we'll come to later.
But if we watch a little bit, this is their own.
I haven't picked out a terrible one.
This is their best foot forward, right?
This is their best foot forward!
Nish Kumar, and from London, I'm saying hello to Mount Rushmore, where on Friday, Donald Trump held a 4th of July campaign event and celebration.
The incredible thing about Trump having his photo taken in front of Mount Rushmore is that he's still the most racist person in that photo, and two of those men literally owned slaves.
Fun fact, Mount Rushmore is actually naturally occurring, and then they had to find presidents who look like those rocks.
Meanwhile, Britain's search for a prime minister called Benjamin with a massive clock for a face continues.
I'm also saying hello to Ghislaine Maxwell.
I've seen an earthquake.
Where's the punchline, Nish?
Yeah, you know, I mean, I know making TV is difficult.
Making it on GB News, we're making a show at the moment.
It airs every Saturday at 8pm called Ministry of Offence.
It's sort of like a topical news show, but with balance.
With balance, we just changed it enough so we don't need to give the makers of have I got news for you any money.
But it's, you know, it is tough making a topical news show, but it's not that tough, Nish.
Come on.
I mean, as I understand it, the secret of comedy is surprise, right?
And so Nish Kumar, woke comedian, gets up and says, I'm about to call Donald Trump a racist.
That's not a punchline.
I know you're going to do that.
Yeah, imagine, and to come from, what woke people don't understand is they are the establishment.
All the institutions, all the media conglomerates, everything is systemically woke.
So when they come out and parrot the same opinions, they're not, comedy's supposed to punch at power.
And they're just enforcing this power, this cultural hegemony.
But yeah, moving on to Netflix!
Somebody just tweeted this to me last night, and look at the state of this graph.
You love to see it!
Netflix is down from over 700 pence or dollars, whatever it was.
Anyway, 700 units.
Down to 211 units.
So, I mean, it's a huge, huge drop.
69% drop.
Netflix is also crippled with debt, which peaked at $16 billion.
If I recall correctly, I saw a stat for that.
That's something like a $55 billion loss.
Yeah, in shareholder value.
Yeah, in shareholder value.
Exactly, yeah.
And so that's massive.
Yeah.
And they've got loads of debt, which could be a huge problem because we're going to see interest rates rising.
At least I hope we're going to see interest rates rising to try and stop inflation getting out of control.
So they've still got a huge amount of debt because that funded, they raised a lot of debt to fund their move from being a licensing company where they buy content.
So now they actually create their own content.
God, that was a mistake, wasn't it?
It kind of was a big mistake.
Netflix's own content is just pathetic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And in a letter to shareholders, so their shares have been plummeting because, you know, things weren't looking so good and they just lost 200,000 subscribers.
And in a letter to shareholders, the company projected that it could lose 2 million subscribers next year.
It cited several issues that had negatively impacted the company's growth, including mass password sharing and competition from other streaming services.
So there are some other streaming services like Disney, Amazon Prime, but I mean, there's been competition for a while.
And obviously there's a lot across the internet and across terrestrial television and cable.
There's always been a lot of competition.
The real problem is Netflix is terrible now.
So in this, newly released data from Antenna shed additional light on Netflix, losing 200,000 net subscribers in quarter one, which led to a huge plummet in share price.
So they had 3.6 million cancellations of their user base in the last quarter.
And they've also, I mean, they lost 700,000 when they cut off services to Russia.
Wow.
That virtue signaling worked, didn't it?
Yeah, and they've also hiked the subscription price.
So, I mean, Netflix used to be like $5.99.
Yeah, yeah.
It's now $15.99.
Is it?
I mean, apparently.
I've no idea.
I've got to pay for Netflix.
I use my mum's.
I'll give you my mum's password.
And you don't need to pay for it.
And now they're cracking down on that.
I saw an article about this.
So they're like, oh God, we're losing money.
What can we do?
Crack down on those passwords.
I'm going to try and open Netflix right now and see if my mum's password still works.
From Swindon.
Bear in mind, she's in Glasgow.
Don't you get your account cancelled.
Don't do it.
I'm doing it right now.
Get your mum's account cancelled.
It's still working.
I'm still logged in.
There it is.
Anatomy of a Scandal.
One of their flops.
Oh, look at the other stuff.
I can see Ozark.
Some films that went straight to DVD. A documentary about Jimmy Savile where they ask, how could it happen?
How could it happen in broad daylight?
While Netflix themselves broadcast the nonciest shows you could possibly get.
We'll get to that in a moment.
Okay.
But anyways, there's loads of problems.
They're saying, oh no, we've had to cancel Russia.
We've had to put the price up.
There's other stuff.
People are watching Disney instead.
No, there's other reasons.
So there's stuff like, if we scroll down on the Daily Mail article, there's stuff like, he's expecting...
I mean, this is like somebody doing a parody of a Netflix show.
This is a pregnant...
This is literally the parody of Netflix shows.
Yeah.
Like, this is the Stephen Hawking, the black Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair Netflix adaptation.
Like, what are you doing?
Who are you trying to appeal to with this?
And it might be.
It might be a great show.
I don't know.
I'm sure it is.
I already assume it's terrible just because of what else I've seen on Netflix.
And if we scroll down further, they've got a Harry and Meghan doc.
Well, the thing is, this is the thing about, they're paying a lot of people up front.
So they gave Harry and Meghan $100 million.
Was it that much?
$100 million!
That's what their deal's worth.
To make content, but you get that money, and you're like, ah, well, you know, I don't have time now.
Didn't they learn from Spotify?
They've got the money.
Spotify gave Harry and Meghan 18 million to produce a series of podcasts, and they made one and produced nothing in 2021.
Oh my god!
Like, absolute laziness is the thing that annoys me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, we do a podcast every day and we're going to get 18 million.
Also, sign up to Lotus Easters to come support us because we haven't got Netflix backing.
Goddammit, Netflix.
Come on, Netflix.
We want to expand.
We want a much bigger operation.
well the way things are going you might lotus eaters might be on netflix uh next year because they're obviously gonna have they're really gonna have to shake things up and get rid of all the green hairs and get some sensible elon musk type people in to turn this franchise around yes they paid i mean i don't know why you'd give like royals because harry and megan they're so lazy like they couldn't even be royal they didn't want to be members of the royal family all you got to do You've got to cut a ribbon in front of a supermarket.
You know what I mean?
That's all you've got to do as a member of the Royal Family.
The rest is all champagne and canapes and going to Lolita Island.
Like, it's just a gilded life.
And that was too much for Harry and Meghan.
And if anyone thinks that's wrong, just go and ask Prince Andrew.
That is actually what they do.
Yeah, man.
If you think it's wrong to go to Lolita Island, you're just saying that because you haven't had a chance to go to Lolita Island.
That place looked amazing.
It was like the best all-inclusive resort.
Well, I actually meant the weather was a lie that they were going to Lolita Island.
Alright.
But anyway, carry on.
Obviously we do not endorse Lolita Island on the list.
I fully endorse Lolita Island.
He works for GB News.
I want them to bring it back.
And also I feel sympathy for Prince Andrew.
He gets to Lolita Island.
No, he gets to Lolita Island, there's all these scantily clad women all around.
Maybe some of them look a bit on the young side, and he's like, is this alright?
I don't think that was his attitude.
And then he looks to one side, there's Bill Clinton.
He looks to the other side, there's Bill Gates.
He's like, I must be fine.
You know what I mean?
I'm not getting caught.
I've got some sympathy for that guy.
I just want to make sure that it's clear that that is not what happened with Prince Andrew.
Prince Andrew is a nonce.
Sue me, Prince Andrew.
Sue me.
Anyway, let's carry on.
Yeah, please.
I'd love to see that.
You just settled with Virginia Guffrey.
You're a nonce.
Let's move on.
Settle with me.
Yeah, you can give me, what is it, 400 million or something she got?
Yeah.
You know, feel free.
12 million.
It was a lot of money.
The Queen.
It had to go from the Queen.
So let's pay our taxes.
That is our taxes.
Yeah, paying his nonce money for noncing someone.
Yeah.
It's mad where some of this money comes from.
Harvey Weinstein, so his fees, because people brought out civil cases against him for all his abuse, and he was paid by his insurance company.
Nonsense insurance!
How can you get insured for that?
I mean, doesn't that raise some alarm bells if you walk into your insurance broker and be like...
I need to take out 100 million nonce insurance, don't ask why.
I just feel like I might do some nonce in the future, so can I get covered for it?
I don't know, it's weird.
Anyway, getting back to Netflix, as well as paying the talent up front, they're getting people, including production side people.
Oh, Hannah Gadsby.
So they've got showrunners, these superstar showrunners, Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes.
They get them on exclusive contracts, golden handcuffs, give them loads of money.
And then because they've got the golden handcuffs, they don't have the incentive to really pull it out anymore.
So Murphy produced Ratched, which was boring, Hollywood, which was boring, and now has another 10 Netflix shows in development.
They're obviously going to be boring because he's lost that hunger that you have when you have to be good.
If you've got golden handcuffs, you don't have to be good.
And you can tell these things have had no cultural impact at all because I've never heard of any of them.
People talk about The Boys or other things that are interesting, but nobody ever talks about any of these things.
I've never heard of them.
Some stuff gets talked about, like Squid Games, Tiger King, the Jimmy Savile thing, but these things are few and far between, and Netflix seems to have an attitude of just overproducing.
There's way too much content on there, and you can never find anything that's good.
And...
They produced totally woke stuff.
So the big shows on Netflix when they were licensing stuff were The Office and Friends.
Like, you know, classic shows.
Everybody loves them.
Even if you've seen them before, you can sit down and watch them again.
Now, they're producing their own shows and it's terrible.
If you watch a little clip of Hannah Gadsby...
I've built a career out of self-deprecating humour.
And I simply will not do that anymore.
Not to myself or anybody who identifies with you.
Do you understand what self-deprecation means?
It's not humility, it's humiliation.
I want my story heard because what I would have done to have heard a story like mine...
When you're a comedian.
Again, I'm not a comedian, so I'm no expert, right?
I'm a comedian.
Yeah, she's not, though.
I thought it was about really the audience.
You're there to make them laugh.
You're not there to proselytize your life experience with them.
You're there to give them a laugh and entertain them.
Yeah, absolutely.
And comedians can talk about horrific things.
In my stand-up special, which is getting edited right now, I talk about getting sexually abused by a doctor when I was a teenager.
Doctor went to jail.
Not because of me.
I didn't even know I'd be nonced.
But it's a funny bit and everybody laughs.
You know what I mean?
I mean, it does help that I'm a man.
No one cares, yeah.
It's always funny.
It's about that too.
The thing that really annoyed me about the Hannah Gadsby thing, because when she talks about her abuse and all the rest of it, it's compelling and it's quite gripping and stuff for about five minutes.
But the rest of the show, the first half of the show, people are like, oh, it's peerless stand-up comedy.
And it wasn't.
It was really turgid, woke, lame comedy with jokes like, people say humour is the best medicine.
I think it's...
Penicillin.
And, like, that is just...
That's a Christmas...
Oh, thanks, Dad.
...in, like, 1974.
It's awful.
Other stuff they've made, the woke shows.
They made Don't Look Up, which was a comedy show, critically panned.
It pushed this cosy establishment narrative around climate change.
It's not challenging anything.
It's not...
People take the foot off the gas when they do stuff for Netflix because they know it's just going to be streamed.
It doesn't really matter.
It's not going to cinemas.
Some stuff does go to cinemas now.
But they take the money and they run.
And they also make incredibly noncy shows because they're systemically woke.
And woke people have got this thing about indoctrinating children and all this genderqueer stuff.
This is produced...
By Sima Ferdows, who coincidentally was the comedy executive who called me racist, even though I'm not racist.
And she produced this, which is the nonciest thing I've ever seen.
They basically used Muppets to try and lure children in to watch this show that's about completely adult stuff.
So yeah, if we just watch this clip.
Oh, wow, wow, look at this.
Y'all like the sex toys I asked for, but y'all are kind of fly.
Who are you?
Well, we're sex-positive puppets.
My name is Zeke.
My pronouns are they, them, because I'm a non-binary babe.
Gender fluid, pansexual as fuck, and down for whoever.
I don't know that's right.
Hey, I'm Molly.
Pronouns are she and her.
I'm in a girls.
I'm in a guys.
But more importantly, subscribe to my Just For Fans at Molly Gives It A Try.
Nothing beats good old-fashioned biwop.
One, seven, three, four, six, eight.
Ooh, catchy handle, sis.
And who's this hairy fellow?
Yes.
And yes.
What?
Oh, oh, oh, hey.
I'm sorry.
I'm Mike, and I'm a big gay bear.
Ooh, we love a thick boy.
You good?
Yeah, just getting my evening sorted out.
We're almost done here, right?
Daddy busy.
Yes.
Yes?
Hey, I'm Barb, and this hunky piece of felt is my husband, Tuck.
Is he okay?
Oh, don't mind him.
He's just in shock.
He's your biggest fan.
In fact, you're his celebrity hall pass.
What's that?
You're the one celebrity I've given him express permission to have sex with without any consequences.
Is that right?
That's probably enough of that.
You get the idea.
Well, hang on.
That's surely not designed for children.
This seems to be designed for lame millennials.
They say it's not designed for children, but there are lots of mothers tweeting and posting on social media that my daughter's added this to her watch list because it's got puppets in it.
It's got puppets in it.
So using that to sort of lure kids in and then they can find out about felching.
And that was just the most cringe thing in the world.
Yeah.
Who's entertained by that?
Yeah, nobody.
If we move on to the next tab, we can see even the Guardian, zero stars!
You've lost the Guardian, guys!
Even the Guardian of Titania and McGrath, one star.
You know what I mean?
Zero stars!
They had to admit, it's cringe, it's awful.
Fascinatingly terrible, as described by the Guardian.
Yeah.
And the next tab, that's not the only nonce show they had.
Cuties, which you've probably heard about.
If we scroll down, we can see the...
So this was about...
Twerking 11-year-olds, yeah.
Pre-PBS and girls twerking and stuff like that.
Even Prince Andrew would have been appalled.
So, yeah, I mean, basically, Netflix is...
How is he the standard by which we measure these things?
Yeah.
Yeah, he's our moral barometer.
If Prince Andrew wouldn't, then you know you've crossed over a very significant line.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Again, we come back to Elon Musk.
What's the next time?
That looks like a video.
Oh, yes!
Also, Netflix staff look like exactly what you'd expect.
They need a purge of Netflix staff and executives.
All the woke people, they're not making stuff that's morally justifiable.
They're making noncy stuff.
They're making really lame comedy.
They're not making stuff that's bringing in money and bringing in viewers.
And also, they look annoying.
So we need a purge of all these...
right on woke people here here's actual netflix staff protesting against dave chapelle who's one of the people one of the people on netflix who's actually bringing in viewers and bringing in you know like they've got some stuff chris rock dave chapelle bill burr these are comedians who people want to watch like hannah gadsby gets forced on them bill burr people like seek him out but this is them protesting it's dave chapelle because uh because he was allegedly transphobic The comedian's declaration that gender is a fact and
his characterisation of the LGBTQ community as too sensitive prompted a walkout by staff and support from transgender rights advocates, some of whom accused Netflix of profiting from hate speech.
We need to say it's not okay.
This hate conversation was not their intention.
We understand that jokes are jokes, things are things, but at the end of the day, if it's promoting hate and it's promoting discrimination, you are directly a cause of it if you're allowing it to happen and you're not doing anything about it.
And that goes for anyone in this country, specifically people of power in the entertainment industry.
Look at that absolute spiteful mutant.
Yeah, Miss Dundee 2018 right there.
Oh, damn it.
You know what I mean?
They're like, Netflix, they've lost the plot, they've gone too woke, and now they're going broke.
So now Elon Musk, I hope he's going to buy Netflix next.
Oh, yeah.
Because if we scroll up, he's been criticizing Netflix.
Can I just point to who's responded to it?
Niche Gamer.
That was a pro-Gamergate, like, very small website that was actively in favor of Gamergate, and Elon Musk is replying to them.
Kind of implies Elon Musk is pro-Gamergate, doesn't it?
I don't know what Gamergate is.
Ah, don't worry, you don't need to.
People in the comments will know.
I've heard it.
It was nothing but good things.
But yeah, Elon Musk has said the woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable.
And he's agreeing with people saying, so Niche Gamer says, not just Netflix, movies in general, video games, TV, it's all infested with current year trend woke garbage for fear offending a green-haired freak next to the band button.
I mean, that's literally what Netflix was being protested for and with.
And Elon Musk says, true, and says, can they please just make sci-fi fantasy mostly about sci-fi fantasy, you know, instead of downloading all these contemporary Guardian opinions into it.
So, yeah, hopefully, hopefully it means they're going to get it on.
And Musk has previously criticized wokeness.
so in an interview with a satirical conservative publication the babylon b elon musk said wokeness basically wants to make comedy illegal and commented on efforts to shut down his friend dave chappelle's stand-up special on netflix which many people criticized as transphobic uh must said come on man that's crazy do we want a humorless society that's simply rife with condemnation and hate basically at its heart wokeness is divisive exclusionary and hateful
it basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel armored in false virtue totally true Absolutely correct.
Yeah, totally true.
Anti-woke crusader Elon Musk is taking over the world, thank God.
Yeah.
Right, let's talk about why Europeans are fleeing Europe.
I've got a few theories.
You've got a few theories?
Yeah, well, they're not going to be wrong either.
But the thing I think is worth pointing out is just how much our countries have changed.
So we did a premium hangout that you can watch on literacies.com about how much Britain has changed since essentially the dawn of film.
So if you go back to 1910, there's video footage of what London looked like 100 years ago, what London looked like 60 years ago, 40 years ago, until about 20 or 30 years ago, and then what it looks like now.
And you can see that the change in what has happened because of mass immigration is a very recent thing.
This is within living memory that our countries were not as they are now.
And this change comes with its significant consequences.
So this is a trend that's been happening across Europe.
This one just happens to be about Britain.
But you could do the same for Germany, you could do the same for France, you could do the same for Spain or Italy, whatever.
Anywhere in Europe, basically.
Yeah, basically, yeah.
The borders have been left wide open and millions of people from the Middle East have come in and, well, this has consequences.
In Germany, people have decided, you know what, we're just going to leave.
And so the BBC did a segment on this about Germans fleeing to Paraguay.
Why?
Well, I mean, they're saying it's to escape COVID restrictions and vaccinations in Europe, but surely they'd be returning now.
No, that's actually not true.
If you scroll down a little bit more, BBC Mundo's Ma Pichal has been finding out that many of the new arrivals say they've become immigrants in Paraguay because they are uncomfortable with Muslim immigrants at home.
Because Paraguay does have some COVID restrictions still.
It's not actually about that.
A lot of them are unvaccinated, though.
But these are the people who are essentially not buying into the hegemonic narrative that vax is good, immigration good, progressives good, gender fluidity good, all that sort of nonsense.
The progressive approach to immigration seems to be that if you bring people from pre-medieval societies to Europe, they will suddenly become enlightened Europeans.
If a woman smiles at them, they won't rape her and they won't form grooming gangs and Or blow themselves up at pop concerts.
You know, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, well, that turned out not to be correct.
I mean, obviously, immigration brings a lot of benefits.
Screw the benefits!
It comes with a lot of explosions!
But you've got to look at the bad things as well.
And we're not allowed to, because if anybody mentions the bad things, they immediately got called racist.
Well, yes.
Let's watch the first one.
This is about a minute and a half long, but it sets the scene.
You can see, it's around 1.5 million migrants and refugees arrived in Germany.
That doesn't count, like, proper immigration, legal immigration.
Many practice Islam.
Oh, I bet they do.
I bet they bloody do.
Not everyone is happy about it.
I think it's just that it should just be regulated, the citizenship.
It must be considered how many citizens come here.
And that must be discussed with the population.
This country Paraguay is...
So, as we've experienced it, it's very christian.
And we also come from a christian culture.
We've known a great neighborhood and many people, with whom we can act on one level.
in Germany can't happen so.
It's also so that in general the Muslims are so provocative.
Yes, no, that's not supposed to be filmed.
It's too harsh.
How I say about Muslims, that's too harsh.
I might be worried about death threats as well.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
But this is the point, isn't it?
Like, him, a German man saying, well, look, the Muslims come over and they're very provocative, implies the Muslims aren't really taking German sensibilities into account, right?
I mean, there are lots and lots of examples of this.
One may be going outside of the Holocaust Memorial and chanting Adolf Hitler, Allah Akbar.
While waving the Palestinian flag and doing...
That's surely, that's surely, like, okay in the garden.
Is that provocative to a German?
That is purely...
Shall we watch the clip?
Palestinian flag!
*Squeak* Is this provocative to Germans?
Maybe I'm speaking about them too strongly.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe the free Palestine protesters here waving their Palestinian flags, chanting Adolf Hitler, Allahu Akbar, and doing the Nazi salute is a little bit provocative to the Germans.
Like, I can see why he wasn't a fan.
It's like the president of the NUS, right there.
It literally is, actually.
But the thing is, I mean, like, you know, what is this bold synthesis?
I mean, Hitler did wish he was a Muslim, according to the Wall Street Journal.
He literally quotes, You can see why they like Hitler.
Man!
These Palestinian activists who are chanting Allah Akbar and Adolf Hitler, you can see why they like him.
I didn't know that Hitler was so anti-Christian as well, the way he spoke about Christianity there.
Because I thought Christianity was like a sort of, you know, core thing of Hitler.
I had no idea myself.
Was that just a sucker in, you know, the mainly Christian?
I guess he had no choice, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
But he sat there reflecting, God, I wish we were Muslims.
So, God...
So anyway, what other things have Muslims done that are provocative?
Well, we covered the other day the Ramadan riots in Sweden in podcast episode 375, where there were just riots of peace.
There was an update to this, by the way, which is why I bring it up.
The police had to shoot three people in new riots after Ramadan.
They fired several warning shots after coming under attack because, of course, mobs and mobs of Muslim immigrants were chucking rocks and molotovs and things like that at the police.
And so the police fired into the crowd, injuring three people.
These three people who were shot have been arrested on suspicion of committing criminal acts.
Sweden's Justice Minister, Morgan Johansson, told the rioters, go home immediately.
And the person complaining about this was labeled as a right-wing extremist fool.
Whose only goal was to drive violence in divisions, said Johansson.
Really?
Really?
Is that the case?
So the right-wing party complaining about this were like, this seems bad, and they're like, stop being a racist.
Well, you notice with anybody who raises the assimilation of extremist ideologies into the West, like Pim Fortain, who absolutely...
Who was killed.
Who was killed.
By a leftist.
Yeah, yeah, by a leftist.
Because he was Islamophobic.
Absolutely wasn't any sort of...
He wasn't racist or anything like that.
He raised objections and he voiced the reasonable objections of many normal people, such as the German couple we saw speaking there.
Because of that, he was killed and he was then smeared as racist.
Posthumously smeared as racist and Islamophobic.
And it's ridiculous.
So we can't have a free debate.
We can't have a free discussion about it.
The danger is, the more this is suppressed, when it eventually pops up, it's going to be...
Far more horrific and brutal and violent than if a free debate could be allowed to take place.
And moreover, you're going to get way more victims, like the Jewish man in the run-up to the French elections, who's being chased by a mob of Islamists and ended up being killed by a tram because he had to run in front of the tram.
Can you go to the next one, John?
You can see this side reporting on it on just Twitter it was.
But this chap was being chased by an Islamic mob.
And no one cares, right?
And then you go to like Al Jazeera.
And there's regular killings of Jews in France.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Pepe.
Samuel Pepe got his head cut off.
Guys with knives.
So it doesn't even make the news over here.
It only makes news if it's a big one like the Bataclan or Charlie Hebdo or the Bastille dude.
Yeah.
Otherwise, it just goes essentially unnoticed.
But Al Jazeera, Qatar's favorite progressive outlet, are complaining about this.
Oh, the French culture war over Islam shows no sign of abating.
Yeah, no kidding.
No kidding.
Like, all of the murders, all of the violence, it seems that there is a real issue with this going on.
But anyway, we'll move on.
Let's have a look at what the German view of this is.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier says he believes there is a place for Islam in Germany.
Really?
Well, I mean, there could be a reformed Islam.
Like, you know, we've got Christianity, where it's basically just a club, and you sort of, you know...
So if the Muslims stop being Muslim, then that'll integrate.
No, they become Muslim 2.0.
So what, you can't modify Islam?
No, but Christianity used to be pretty wild back in the day.
Christianity, well, I mean, there are lots of modifications to Christianity.
But if you get that, you get civil war.
So you're proposing civil war in the Muslim community.
Well, you know.
I mean, a lot of...
I mean, it's why a lot of Muslims...
One of them openly admits that he's like, yeah, we're going to take over.
And he says, we're going to take over.
And then all those lefties who supported us, they're not going to get what they thought they were going to get.
You know, all these, like, LGBTQ for Islam.
He's like, they're going off the roof.
I mean, that's because that's what's going to happen, right?
And the thing is, as men...
No, but a lot of, like...
Okay, who cares?
A lot of Muslims who...
I'd say the majority of Muslims who come to the West, just assemble, because most people see that, you know, religion is just a social club.
It's not a, you know what I mean?
It's just a fun thing.
You've got your Ramadan, you've got Christmas, whatever.
You know, it's just a fun thing.
But like, obviously, you get some that take it too far.
Also, they recruit a lot of gingers.
Sure.
It's tied to not being able to get any sex.
But the thing is, those people who see it as just a social club are not going to be protesting.
When your radical friend is chucking people off roots.
It's going to be like, well, you know, whatever.
So, I mean, when the time comes, I'll just convert to Islam.
Like, okay, fine.
Okay, now I'm a man.
I'll get a bit of an advantage over my wife, actually.
This is going to be great.
So, anyway.
Anyway, so his view...
No, we'll go back to that one, actually, because this is really fascinating to me.
The leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, so Christians, understandably, don't really want a rival religion taking over Germany.
He claimed that Islam doesn't belong in Germany, which, I mean, they have fought crusades to keep it out of Germany, so I mean...
And so, the Interior Minister Horst Stierhofer said, of course Muslims living here belong in Germany.
My message is Muslims need to live with us, not against us or next to us.
It's like, okay, how are you going to do that?
How are you going to persuade them that that's what they need to do?
Of course, these people are called racists.
There was a view on this published by an Italian journalist in an Israeli newspaper, which I found fascinating.
Germany is no longer a nation, it is a condominium, and the rest of Europe is following its lead and we haven't seen anything yet.
We have already seen too much, but we haven't seen anything yet.
If they succeed in all of this when they're still 5%, what will society become when they are 20%?
What does your Muslim friend think of that?
Well, he says, you know, we're here to take over.
Yeah.
The German state has officially capitulated to Islam, writes the famous German Islamologist of Syrian origin, Bassam Tibi, in New Zucker Zeitung, because the end of nation states was not just the end of states, as the globalists had hoped, but the end of nations.
So this, as they think, is a clash of civilizations.
And your Muslim friend thinks it is also a clash of civilizations.
They probably can't believe their luck.
Also, they're just going to let us come here and take over, aren't they?
Well, I guess we are.
I guess the Germans are.
Anyway, so moving back to the Paraguay interview, let's watch the next clip.
Do you have any evidence that Muslims don't value Western women?
That is a strong accusation.
Do you have or do they have any evidence of that?
Is there any evidence that Muslim men don't respect Western women?
Quite a lot of evidence.
It's mountains of evidence!
Right, so this is from Bild, right?
Apparently in 2021, I believe this was, there was a report that showed there were two gang rapes every single day in Germany, half of them done by migrants, refugees, people going through asylum, right?
They don't have German citizenship, just...
People who have arrived in the 1.5 million asylum seekers.
Once you arrive in the West, you know, you have an asylum claim.
It can take years to be processed.
And you won't get deported.
And you never, if you get, you just get told, oh, your claim wasn't successful, so now you have to leave.
And this is seven years after.
You don't have to leave, you just disappear, but don't leave.
Yeah, this is what happened with the Liverpool bomber.
He was supposed to be deported like four years ago.
He was still around.
But yeah, so on average, two girls and women in Germany are raped by groups of men every single day.
This is what the Federal Criminal Police Office reported.
Literally 700 gang rapes a year going on in Germany, which, I mean, why are the German men so like this is the question.
Every second suspect was not a German citizen, so they were immigrants, but then the German citizens, of course, were not, like, you know, ethnically German either, obviously.
The men often came from Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq.
What a shock!
Apparently 6% of the suspects were Afghans, even though they make up only 0.3% of the population.
And most of them committed the act while the asylum procedure was ongoing.
Can I have asylum to your country?
Why, what are you going to do?
Well, I'm going to start raping some people.
I mean, that's actually what they're doing.
But the thing is, this data has been suppressed by the German authorities for years now.
Like the data is around the grooming gangs in the UK. We'll get to that in a second, because we're going to go through this.
Do you have any evidence that Muslim men don't really think very highly of Western women?
Yeah, we've got loads, actually.
So the Gatestone Institute did a great article about this, how the data has been suppressed by German authorities for years, right?
Germany, and this was in 2016, when they were suppressing it then...
Do you remember the Cologne sexual assaults that happened in Cologne New Year's Eve?
Germany's migrant rape crisis has now spread to the cities and towns in all 16 of Germany's federal states.
It finds itself in a vicious circle.
Most of the perpetrators are never found, and a few who are frequently receive lenient sentences.
Only 1 in 10 rapes in Germany is reported, and just 8% of rape trials result in convictions upon the Justice Minister.
Up to 90% of sex crimes committed in Germany in 2014 do not appear in the official statistics.
According to the Association of Criminal Police, quote, there are strict restrictions from the top, instructions, sorry, from the top, not to report offences committed by refugees.
It's extraordinary that certain offenders are deliberately not being reported about, and the information is being classed as confidential, says one high-ranking police official in Frankfurt, quoted by Bild.
But do you have any evidence?
The BBC Journal, the blank face, progressively, that's a strong claim.
Do you have any evidence?
Yeah, loads of rape victims.
Mountains of rape.
There's a repeated mantra in woke culture that this is a right...
And the Guardian openly stated this, that the idea of rape gangs, grooming gangs, is a right-wing conspiracy theory.
Even though the data and anecdotal reports...
Look at the trials!
Well, let's go for a report, in fact.
The next one is talking about the grooming gangs victims in Britain.
This was interesting.
This was from last month.
Sorry, I did.
Two months ago now, because I can't keep track of time.
But this was a report that was done, an independent inquiry into the child's sexual abuse.
And they held 11 days of hearings and took written evidence from victims.
So again, what more do we need?
What more could we get, right?
So this was where grooming gang victims were called slags and accused of lying in court by the authorities, while another reported being drugged and raped, only to see the perpetrator let off with a caution by the police.
A police officer told me I was what was going wrong in our society.
So you've got a person who was abused as a 12-year-old, and they're like, yeah, so I was raped and abused and drugged, and like, yeah, you're the problem with society.
Really, it's not the rapist.
He's not the problem.
The nonce rapist.
And the authorities higher up, so, you know, the labour establishment.
You wonder why labour lost support across, you know, post-industrial towns in the north.
Yeah.
The Labourist MP Nas Shah, I think it was, retweeted a tweet saying that the victims of grooming gangs should shut up for the sake of diversity.
So let me carry on with some of these quotes because they're just staggering.
Another one said that we are going to get these men in trouble because we wanted to act like child prostitutes.
She was 12.
Yeah.
She was 12.
Somebody talking like that and being treated by the police and being treated by social services and health and whoever else as the willing participant in this is absolutely abhorrent and disgusting.
And it's also a perfect example of the classism in British society because you know for a fact...
Working class English.
These girls in care homes, the absolute bottom rung of the British class system.
If the grooming gangs had gone after the daughters, the privately educated daughters of guardian journalists...
Do you think they'd have been able to operate for decades and decades?
Do you think they'd have got off with lenient being able to apologise and just walk free?
It's an absolute disgrace that establishment completely failed these girls.
Well, they were totally against these girls.
Again, like, you are going to get these Muslim men rapists in trouble.
It's like, good.
They should be in trouble.
Why would that be a problem?
Well, because they're, of course, on the wrong side of the question.
And so, like, when Ukrainian refugee women went to Sweden, how do you think that went?
Not great.
You know, we're fleeing the Russians.
Yeah, well, you came to the wrong place.
You went to Sweden.
We can go to the next one, as Visigrad24 reports.
Why would Swedish men be like this?
Any solutions?
Any questions?
Any suggestions?
But anyway, let's go back to the BBC Journal because we need to know whether this person is just a racist or not.
What would you say to people who think that argument is racist, that you are being racist?
You're a racist if you don't let the Muslims rape you.
So why, like, she's not being racist against Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jainas, Zoroastrians, atheists, Mormons.
Being racist against Muslims, huh?
It's mad, isn't it?
It's mad.
This is what I've seen so many times.
It's bracketed as a race thing when so many people are absolutely fine with quite high levels of immigration from China, from the Caribbean, from Africa.
Hindus aren't doing this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And they say, oh, it's a race thing.
It's like, okay, look, Pakistanis and Hindus are genetically virtually identical.
It's an ideology problem.
That's the problem.
The culture, values, and ideology problem.
Exactly.
It's like we wouldn't...
People in the West wouldn't like it if Nazis...
Not that I'm saying...
Obviously, the majority of Muslims are absolutely fine, but there are...
Man, you cannot say that people from Afghanistan and Syria, you cannot say that people have got the same values, and if you bring them here, they're going to suddenly become enlightened Western liberal, like, you know, with equal rights for gay people and women.
And the people who, I thought, gay people, trans people, women, these are the people the left usually stand up for.
Entrenched cultural attitudes from the Muslim world.
And Pew have done loads of polling on the Muslim world, and it's everywhere.
They just really have very regressive beliefs, socially.
And it's just one of those things that manifests in the way that they treat women.
So women essentially can't be free in our society, in the way that women aren't free in their society.
And we just want women to be free because we're woke.
Yeah.
But anyway, so yeah, I mean, you know, is it racist?
Well, maybe.
I don't know.
Who are these people?
You know, communists who are like woke communists who are like, that's racist.
Well, they think everything about our country is racist.
They think that Tony Blair's policy of sending illegal Muslim immigrants to Rwanda to be processed is racist.
Is that okay?
I don't care.
Priti Patel's policy.
She's a racist.
This policy was created by Tony Blair.
Oh, is it Tony Blair?
No way!
Well, maybe it's terrible.
Yeah, well, exactly.
Yeah, maybe it is bad.
Given a lot of this was caused by Tony Blair's wars in the Middle East.
No, I don't agree that this is the consequence of Tony Blair's wars on the Middle East, actually.
I think this is the consequence of us being essentially totally soft touches in every way, shape or form.
Well, and also Russia, because Putin saw an opportunity to go into Syria, create a huge amount of destabilization and send waves of immigrants up into Europe.
Yeah, they definitely ferried migrants across the Poland's borders, didn't they?
But anyway, they're complaining, oh, it's racist to send them there.
And I love Navarro Media's position on this.
We'll go to the last one.
Oh, it's worse than you think.
She'll deport them permanently.
They can leave Rwanda, surely.
Who cares if they leave Rwanda?
They should be permanently deported to wherever.
But Rwanda's safe.
I mean, I don't think the system...
The thing is, I don't think the Rwandan solution is the perfect system, but we've got to do something to stop the channel crossings.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I admit that these people are fleeing terrible conditions in France.
The bollocks of France is just not that bad.
Have you seen the service in France?
Have you ever been served by a French waiter?
No.
Oh my god!
These people deserve asylum based on that.
Man, they're stepping in dog poo on the pavement.
Come on.
The people who break into our country illegally deserve to get deported to Rwanda, which is way better than France, I have heard, from the Conservative government.
Honestly, I'd rather be in Rwanda than, like, getting put in some council estate in Dundee.
You know what I mean?
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
It's like, well, why would you want to be there, of all places?
Yeah.
But, okay, fine.
But the point is, the left is, once again, advertising the positive aspects of Priti Patel's Rwandan policy.
They're going to get deported permanently.
Well, fingers crossed.
Let's hope this isn't just a big promise that isn't going to come through.
Right, let's go to the video comments.
The Ultimatum of Hulagu Khan to the Caliph of Baghdad.
At the time of the conquest of the castles of the heretics, we sent envoys to you seeking for reinforcements.
You replied that you were our subordinate, yet you did not send troops.
The sign of subordination and concord is that you send troops when we campaign against the enemy, but you did not do so, and sent only excuses.
I recall reading that in something like 2016.
Hulegu Khan's letter to the Caliph of Baghdad is amazing.
He's basically like, look, you didn't do as we said, and therefore we're just going to come over there and kill you all.
And they did.
They call themselves something like, we are the wrath of God that you've brought down upon us, upon yourselves.
But I love the way the Mongols used to write their diplomatic letters.
I mean, it's literally like a diplomatic letter with like Ted Bundy or something.
Except Ted Bundy's got 100,000 men under arms.
Yeah.
It's awesome.
Mongols were much smarter in the old days.
Much more brutal.
Let's go to the next one.
So this is a video for Leo and how I felt he was making some sort of – some minor tactical errors in his argument with that Shaga whatever person and the fact that he was saying that the cancel culture policies are harming people's livelihoods and whatnot.
And the problem is that that's by design, and the people that promote those policies know that, and if you tell them that, that just means it's working, and they're okay with that.
This is kind of like the rabbit telling the fox, don't eat me.
If you do that, I'll die.
I mean, I guess we're all on the same page, at least.
Yeah, it's a good point.
But, I mean, I was saying it on, you know...
It's not to her, personally.
It's not to her, it's to everybody watching, so they can understand.
Because people just think, you know, cancel culture, oh, it doesn't affect me, you know.
Like, mass Islamic immigration doesn't affect me.
I haven't been raped yet.
So, you know, people need to know that, you know, this happens and it's affecting people's livelihoods and it's destroying careers, like...
Lawrence Fox, you know, really successful actor.
Then, you know, voice is a reasonable opinion.
Bang.
Straight away.
Gone.
That's happened to all of us.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, he is right.
You're not going to persuade Dr.
Shola, but then she's not the target to be persuaded.
Yeah.
But anyway.
I mean, she's the daughter of a genuine Nigerian prince.
I know!
She's literally Nigerian royalty.
Like, you're literally royalty!
You're telling me about privilege!
Do you know what's interesting?
Callum was looking at her Wikipedia page and he noticed that it had been changed by someone who lives in the richest area of England where the average house price was £1.4 million.
And it's like, who in...
I can't remember the name of the area, but it's a tiny little area.
And it's like, why would someone from there be like, oh, I've got to change Dr.
Scholar's Is that you, Dr.
Shola?
Is that you and your mansion in the heart of England, the most expensive part of England, changing your own Wikipedia bio to take off the fact that she is the daughter of a Nigerian prince, or the granddaughter of a Nigerian prince?
Well, we don't know if it's her, but someone who's living in an area where the average house price was £1.4 million took that off of her Wikipedia page.
I think it was her.
I can't prove it.
But it's very interesting.
Let's go to the next one.
From now on, I am strength, lust, and power.
I was intrigued by Joshua's choice of adjectives, and then he told me that the reference to Beowulf had been missed by John and Harry.
It's a quote from the 2007 film, Not the Texts.
However, when listening to this version by Ian Soraya, I was struck by how much the dragon of the third part is like modern woke corporations, who would burn the landscape around them and defile the people, yet, when are taken on by a stout warrior and his loyal men, can be taken down to reveal the hordes of wealth on which they sit.
The only problem with that is that the stout warrior dies.
How Beowulf dies, and it's Wilfgar or something like that, is one of his warriors who will bravely come and stand by his side as he fights the dragon.
He survives, but Beowulf dies fighting the dragon.
They did a film of it with Ray Winston.
It was really good.
Yeah, I know.
It wasn't bad, actually.
I didn't mind it.
But the original poem is really readable, actually.
Because you'd think it'd be like, oh, it's got really arcane language.
It does have a bit of arcane language.
But it's like a really exciting story, and it's fascinating.
When Grendel comes in and is attacking the warriors as they're sleeping, and then they tear his arm off.
And then they have to go hunt him down by tracking the blood and stuff like that.
It's a real adventure story.
It's a fascinating read.
We'll have to do a book club on it at some point.
Hey, little diseases.
I'm celebrating St.
George's Day with my neighbour's cat.
Just wanted to wish you guys a happy St.
George's Day too.
A day that not many people celebrate, but I think if we celebrate St.
Patrick's Day, we should celebrate St.
Joe's Day as well.
Well, that's a good point you St George's Day is tomorrow, obviously you're Scottish.
Oh, is it tomorrow?
Yeah, it's tomorrow, yeah.
It's not in my calendar.
Well, why would it be?
I've got the Scottish calendar.
Really?
It is the birth of the man who invented Buckfast.
And William Wallace.
And the heroin season.
The poppy season.
But yeah, St George's Day tomorrow, so if you're watching this tomorrow, you know, happy St George's Day.
Right, let's go for the next one.
Just doing a quick recommendation of A Fighting Retreat, The British Empire, which was a book I ran across when I was looking for sources for the Urgoon in my terrorism class.
And it paints a very interesting picture of all the counterinsurgencies the British had to do after the World War II, and shows it really just how sometimes demonized they are by the Western media.
Yep.
British Empire did nothing wrong.
It does a pretty good breakdown of a lot of the operations that happened then and has a lot of very funny anecdotes from those times, particularly in the Falcons.
You're going to find some very interesting stories from some of the people on the ground there.
Also, a special shout out to the Gurkhas who seem to just show up in every chapter of the conflicts and raise hell for any enemies of the Queen at that time.
Yeah, they've been doing it since way before 1948.
Yeah.
Honestly, it's a fantastic story.
But anyway, it's the past, isn't it, where things used to be more interesting.
Now we've got managed decline.
Let's go for the next one.
I was arguing with a loved one about COVID mandates once, and I told them that less than 2% of people who catch COVID die of it, and they proceeded to counter that 100% of that 2% died, as though that argument was supposed to make sense.
Okay.
And so I just don't know how to deal with that sort of emotional argument.
So if emotional arguments can be made against electric cars, then I'm all for them because I just don't know how to debate with that kind of a person.
I'm just waiting for one of them to lose an eye.
Well, I think they're just foam swords, so I don't think they're going to lose an eye.
You've got to use an emotional argument yourself, obviously.
You've got to choose your own victims.
Say, well, look, look at the people who've committed suicide, look at the people who've got cancer, look at the people who've got depression, all the ruination of life that the lockdowns themselves caused.
You don't care about those dead people, do you?
You've got to stand on someone else's corpse, unfortunately.
They're going to stand on people's corpses.
Well, you've got to get a high pile.
It's horrible, but...
...with another legend of the Pines, the house of the Jersey Devil.
According to ancientorigins.net, this is the house at 399 Moss Mill Road in Leeds Point, New Jersey.
This is a picture from 1937.
It was owned by Deborah and Jaffet Leeds, and when Jaffet died, he wrote his will out to 12 children.
The 13th one being the Jersey Devil.
I guess that's why the Devil is so angry.
He got stiffed in his dad's will.
I love these stories.
Let's go for the next one.
Is that it?
All right.
Zen Chan says, how is this poison pill technique not illegal?
It's literally creating inflation for the explicit purpose of lowering the value of the currency.
It's devaluing Elon Musk's shares.
Yeah, it's the stock.
When a company that I've got shares in, when it decides to do a stock split or something, your stock gets split as well, so you get more stock.
So it doesn't dilute.
They specifically carved out Elon Musk.
It sounds illegal.
It does, doesn't it?
It sounds like it's rigging the game in real time.
But apparently it is a legal thing that they can do.
It's what the government does as well, the quantitative easing.
Which is exactly what Zen Chan says about Biden going, yes, I am printing more money for the express purpose of ruining American savings.
Yeah, exactly.
But yeah, I mean, I guess it is legal.
Otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, at least so publicly.
Taffy says, Why they hate Elon?
One, they have no compromat on him.
Clearly as well.
You know, there's no pictures of Elon on Epstein's Island or on the jets or anything.
Two, he actually has the talents and brains to be where he is.
True.
Three, he's not a member of the pseudo-demon elite.
That's true.
Not seen him at any spirit cooking dinners or anything.
Four, the public love him mostly.
Yeah, which is fairly true.
Omar says, The Twittards really don't want people to know how heavily the algorithm favors the left and who controls it.
Yeah, that's...
Isn't that the bloody truth?
100% and that's why Elon's trying to take it over.
Yeah.
Because it's so obvious and it needs to be opened up.
So many narratives against free speech and online discourse are built on these shaky premises that would crumble if normies caught on.
I'm not sure if the shadow behind the curtain is shaking because Elon is moving these things or because the man behind it's bricking it.
Great question.
Um...
Student Fisher says, Cult of personality of major successful businesses.
Random private flamethrowers in shitposting about the lol numbers 426 noise and catgirls.
Yes, he's a funny rich man.
We'll appreciate him for it.
Yeah, I mean...
And at the end of the day, we're kind of low on champions at this point, aren't we?
So it's nice that the richest man in the world is at least trying to do something to overturn the hegemony.
Ross says, How is it legal to create extra shares for sale that excludes one single shareholder?
No idea!
No idea!
If someone knows, let me know.
Lord Nerevar says, Tim Pool said that Elon is the main character in our story, and honestly, he might be right.
I don't know.
I kind of feel that, you know, Disney's Robin Hood.
I think he's like Richard the Lionheart.
You know, we're the main characters.
We're the peasants who are struggling under the tyrannical rule of the sheriff and King John.
And we're waiting for Elon to come back and save us from it.
Bring Trump back.
Justin says, my moral problem with electric...
I didn't realize we had moral problems with electric cars.
I don't care about electric cars.
But first, I believe that China owns roughly 75% of the mines that produce rare earth minerals used in EV production.
And the mines are reportedly run inhumanely.
And second, when I want to buy one, one of the features was that if you chose one option for the battery, the company could stop your engine from starting if you breached the terms.
Yeah, don't buy that.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, that's terrible.
I can totally see why you don't want that.
Omar again says, Yeah, and I can't help but feel that Elon isn't going to be an overbearing type either.
He doesn't seem to want to have actual control of things.
He just wants to see the game run fairly.
That's very much the impression I get.
Yeah, open it up.
Make it transparent.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Because it's basically a public utility at this point.
It's not a private company.
It can't have the protections of a private company.
And it's amazing how the left isn't like, well, why don't we nationalise Twitter?
Because then it would actually be a right.
It'd be a government-provided service that you'd have to have access to.
And that would actually be...
I mean, much as I'm a libertarian capitalist, I'm totally in favour of that.
I don't think...
There's a lot of public services trained...
Rail and water and things like that, they should be publicly owned.
They'd be better services publicly owned.
I mean, there's a capitalist argument because they're natural monopolies, because you can't just create the infrastructure for it.
And there's a capitalist argument as in, if these things are attention-based, if that's where the attention is, that can't be changed.
So, you know, there is an argument from capitalism to me.
And the left have always been like, well, it's a private company.
Why don't you just set up your own one?
It's like, well, yeah, or we could buy it.
That's how the stock market works.
It's not a private company.
It's a publicly traded company.
So don't give me that.
Anyway.
And it's amazing how many leftists become like anarcho-capitalist libertarians as soon as Twitter comes up in a conversation.
Longshank says, the Russian ruble looks like it's more stable than nonceflix's stock price right now.
Good lord.
It's amazing, isn't it?
Brandon says, that Muppet show is basically, hi, my name is Vice, and my vices are this vice and that vice.
I love my vices.
Accept my vices.
What are your vices?
Which is fine, you know what I mean?
Not really.
If it's for adults, and if it's entertaining.
I can show you, there's a website I sometimes go on called Pornhub, and it's got all these vices on it, and it's hugely entertaining, and I spend a lot of time browsing the excellent content on there.
Netflix, not as good.
Apparently, Tomo says, Netflix have decided to introduce a double plus good button.
Have they?
I mean, I never used Netflix, so I have no idea.
But anyway, Barron of Warhawk says, It's been less than a month than CNN Plus is already going under.
It turns out people don't want to pay to hear propaganda about how evil they are.
I'm going to do this on Monday's podcast, talk about CNN Plus, because it's fascinating how they massively overestimated how much people will pay to be indoctrinated.
A 24-hour news channel thought that people would want more than 24 hours of news.
That they give away for free.
That they give away for free.
I've no idea.
Bleach Demon says, The short bus special by Hannah Gadsby sounds about as entertaining as watching The Erosion of Rocks.
Netflix is burning through cash faster than Potato Joe Biden.
Yeah, watch the Hannah Gadsby shows and like, you know, watch Hannah Gadsby, then watch Bill Burr.
Tell me which one you like best.
Apparently, I didn't know this, Anon Immy says, Let's not forget the Obamas are on the Netflix board.
And they're narrating documentaries and stuff.
I did not know that.
It's nice to know they're losing, he says.
American Dark Lords.
Yes, indeed.
Brandon says, Netflix is making a show about a pregnant dude while the network is dying like Tom Hanks trying to shoot the German tank with a pistol and saving Private Ryan.
It's mad, isn't it?
George says, how much do you think wokeness contributed in the fall of Netflix?
Most normies don't really care unless it's too insufferable.
But the thing is, I think it has been that insufferable.
That's the thing.
They haven't been making good stuff because their attention has been on, oh, we've got to make this diverse, we've got to make all the rest of it, make it super woke, we've got to make stuff that's forcing lessons about fisting on children.
And some of that actively turns people off.
I know a lot of people.
My mate Nico, he cancelled his Netflix because of Cuties.
So you're going to lose people who do have kids and do have a moral backbone.
And people like me who don't have a moral backbone aren't going to watch because it's just pretty lame.
Me and my missus, we sit there and we try and find something to watch and it's all terrible.
Well, that's the thing.
I remember, I mean, I haven't tried to watch Netflix in probably over a year now.
We have it, and I don't know why.
But, you know, you just look through the films and the series, it's like, I just don't care about any of this.
It's like all the straight-to-video films, it feels like.
The equivalent of that in the 80s.
So all the good content, like Disney obviously own a lot of good content.
They've got their own platform now.
And yes, you just don't get the...
Netflix isn't paying the big bucks for the good stuff, and instead they're creating a lot of terrible stuff and paying over the odds for it.
But I do think that wokeness does contribute to this.
It's not necessarily that people are ideologically offended by the wokeness, right?
I mean, they might just think, well, this is weird and kooky or something.
But I think it's that the focus on wokeness means that the focus isn't on stories.
It's not on entertainment.
It's on political propaganda.
And also it plays very safe Exactly.
And so nothing's particularly interesting.
Nothing's particularly edgy.
I feel like I'm being lectured.
This isn't boring.
I don't want to watch it.
It's not that they're like, oh God, it's woke.
Cancel.
I don't think it's that.
I think it's just the sort of erosion effect of like, I'm just not interested.
Yeah.
Silly Midon says, Netflix are well and truly in trouble.
Even if you set aside the woke non-story, their business practices are going to do them in.
They lost a lot of subscribers because they're a luxury item and the cost of living crisis, so their approach to fix that is to raise prices and crack down on account sharing.
The biggest brain moves there, exactly, annoy those who are left.
That's exactly right.
These are not the right steps to take.
Reducing the cost of your service is the right step to take, but of course they can't do that.
This comment, Kevin Fox, that guy being interviewed would have been just as affronted if Dave Chappelle had told jokes about diabetes and bad haircuts.
Yeah, yeah, he would!
Can you even imagine?
He's obviously got diabetes and a bad haircut.
Yeah, but he would have been like, that's ableist and fat shaming and stuff like that.
There would have been some aspect.
Anyway, student of history, Leo is entirely correct about the suppression of complaints.
Five years ago, it was like, oi, this is kind of a problem.
Ten years or so ago, I bet people are going to stop asking.
It's not an advocacy, simply an observation.
Yeah, that's true.
There's a brilliant book, Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe, and it details the cultural approach and the backlash on anybody who raised this as an issue.
Even us talking about it now, I guarantee it'll get clipped out and people will be like, oh, look, they're racist.
You know what I mean?
And then in 50 years' time, it'll be revealed that actually we weren't racist.
Oh, that'll be so reassuring when we're both dead.
When we're doing this in Paraguay.
90-year-olds in Paraguay.
This will be a real jungle behind it.
Well, in fact, here's an interesting comment from Joseph Smith.
Part of the problem in proposing reform in Islam is that it doesn't allow for it.
The Quran is the written word of God literally rather than figuratively as in the Bible and can never be changed.
In Christianity, the phrase, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven and whatever you lose on earth shall be lost in heaven.
It means that there can actually be changes to the religion over time, but Islam has no equivalent capability, which is why it's still stuck in the 6th century.
So this is something, I spent a bit of time looking into Islam, and it was like, right, ISIS of the Protestant Reformation of Islam.
Yeah, isn't that worrying?
Yeah, slightly.
Wasn't that supposed to make it a bit less?
Well, the difference is that over a thousand years of, more than a thousand years of the church existing and being essentially the gateway to learning about Christianity, a lot of tradition had accrued around there.
And things that simply were not in the Bible or nothing to do with Christianity, like indulgences sold by the Pope, right?
And these are obviously corruptions of the institution.
And so Martin Luther putting his 95 theses on the door of the church is him saying, look, these are not Christian.
And the phrase was sola scriptura or something like that, which is scripture alone.
And that was the heart of the Protestant Reformation that set off a bunch of wars of religion across Europe.
Well, the same thing has happened in Islam, because people like Napoleon, people like the British, when we went in the Age of Enlightenment to the East, well, we brought liberal values with us, and a load of Muslims were like, well, this is corrupting Islam.
And so a lot of the Diabandi school and the Salafi schools are basically the most hardline Protestant versions of Islam.
And they're like, no, we need to live exactly as the Prophet Muhammad lived.
And it's like, okay, that's scripture alone.
None of these liberal traditions.
But that's really, really medieval.
And these hardline schools are funded in the West by Saudi Arabia.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the Diabandi school is half of mosques in the UK are Diabandi mosques.
Pakistan is a Diabandi country.
It's the religion of the Taliban.
They're really, really hard-line.
And they were explicitly founded in this town called Diaband to oppose the British Empire.
So it's an anti-British strain of Islam that we have in this country.
It's like...
This doesn't sound like a good idea.
And Joseph's absolutely right.
I don't think there can be the sort of Christian Reformation of Islam that we had.
And certainly not when there's no scrutiny in this country.
Just a week or two ago, two gay guys were killed in Ireland, I think in Sligo?
By a Muslim migrant.
Yeah, and basically a homophobic attack.
If you read about it in the...
I read about it in the papers.
You didn't know.
They were all saying about Irish homophobia.
Yep.
And I'm not sure it was Irish homophobia.
I think it might have been homophobia from a different ideology than Irishness.
And don't get me wrong, the Irish, deeply Catholic.
I'm not saying there's not homophobia in Ireland.
But they're very open to...
But this wasn't homophobia from Ireland.
Yeah, yeah.
Beheadings have never been part of the Catholic...
Well, never been part of, like, in the last few decades.
No, there's always hangings and burnings.
The head came off because the person was too fat.
Yeah, basically.
Just a quick one from Rose.
This is quite tangential.
Culture and values.
Yeah.
And that's all the complaint about Islam in the West is.
It's about cultural values.
If it was literally just a culture that acted in the same way, as you say, as the Chinese, as the Hindus, or any of the other cultures that don't have this very aggressive mentality, then this wouldn't come up at all.
Yeah.
And we've got a lot of faith in people.
So there's a lot of, you know, Muslims that come to this country and just...
Obviously, the majority of people get their religion as just a fun social club.
And they assimilate, and they're great citizens, and they feel very British.
A lot of Muslims, they've done studies, they feel very British, and that's fantastic.
But there's a strata.
There's a layer that doesn't assimilate, hates the West, and has antediluvian values that are very corrosive and very destructive.
Not just the West!
Yes, but to Muslims themselves.
From a human perspective, you know.
But anyway, we're going to have to leave the expert out of time.
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