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Dec. 2, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:54

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #537

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Time	Text
	Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
	Welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for the 2nd of December 2022.
	I'm joined by Dominic Frisby.
	Hello, Carl.
	Thank you very much for having me on our first show together.
	Yeah, but it's not the first time you've been on the podcast, is it?
	No.
	So thanks for coming back.
	And today we're going to be talking about Elon Musk and whether he won his war on Apple, which seemed brave to me, how Bitcoin's making the world better, and how journalists are destroying themselves.
	So I thought we'd end the week on a bit of a white pill.
	You know, it'd be a bit of good news for everyone.
	I hate Jenna so much.
	They're an odd breed.
	They are.
	But before we get on, if you would like to come and work for us, we're looking for a video editor, someone to produce the content that we make here.
	And you have to work in the office.
	You can go to lotacies.com forward slash careers and go and check out the job description.
	If you think it suits you, do send us an email and apply because Michael's being promoted.
	So we need more editors because that's what his job was.
	Anyway, let's get into it.
	Great stuff.
	So, did Elon Musk win his war on Apple?
	That's the question that I'm really interested in.
	Because, of course, this comes after Elon Musk purchases Twitter, causes a lot of kerfuffle, lots of people had Jimmy severely rustled, and they were, ooh, lots of rumours, lots of rumours were going around.
	And so Elon Musk basically declared war on Apple.
	Is that right?
	That seems important.
	The richest man on the planet going after one of the biggest businesses on the planet.
	The biggest business, I think.
	Is it the biggest?
	I think so.
	I thought Google might have been bigger.
	No, Apple's worth more.
	I think maybe Saudi Aramco might be worth more and maybe, you know, the People's Army of China or something like that.
	But I think in terms of public companies...
	Second only to the NHS, basically.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, in terms of public companies, Apple is the most valuable company in the world.
	Right.
	Okay, but before we go on, right, I think this is a good framing for this, is going over to losis.com and watching our Epoch series on Napoleon.
	We did many videos about Napoleon because Napoleon had a fascinating life.
	And in many ways, Elon is kind of doing the same sort of thing as Napoleon did.
	Napoleon came to power after operating within the revolutionary paradigm of the French Revolution and just essentially showed himself to be more capable of winning victories than other people and established himself as, of course, the Emperor.
	And Elon seems to kind of be following this trajectory, actually.
	Well, I hadn't thought about that, but he's definitely stepped in and is clearing up the mess in a way that Napoleon did.
	But think about where he started.
	He starts in the Silicon Valley paradigm, starts founding PayPal and various other businesses that become massive, and now he's clearly at the very forefront of this class of people who are operating.
	And it actually does parallel Napoleon, surprisingly.
	But anyway, so let's begin with a tweet he put out a couple of days ago, which is, oh, Apple's threatened to withhold Twitter from its app store after he'd brought back Donald Trump to the platform, who has yet to tweet, but won't tell us why.
	It's like, now, that's impressive, because this is a megaphone of 120 million people Elon Musk is talking to, and he knows that this is going to be picked up by every news outlet in the same way they did with Trump.
	It's like, oh, great, that's my day's journalism done.
	I can't wait to do a third segment, honestly.
	These people deserve to lose their jobs.
	LAUGHTER That's my day's work done.
	And I can clock off and just tell the world that Elon Musk has tweeted something.
	And so it's a big deal, and it creates a lot of public pressure.
	And I think it's important to remember that a lot of what happens just in the world is purely based on perception.
	For example, like the stock market, people think things are going to happen.
	Oh, the stocks are down, the stocks are up.
	Why?
	Because people perceive that the things are the way they are, not because actually anything's changed.
	Yeah, it's not the value of the company now.
	It's what the value of the company is going to be in three or six or months or 12 months.
	Exactly.
	And nothing, you know, someone can, like Elon Musk has done this himself by tweeting out about Tesla stock.
	This has caused Tesla stock to tank.
	It's like, okay, but nothing changed.
	The number of cars produced did not change.
	You know, the number of customers for Tesla cars did not change.
	You know, so it's all about perception and perception.
	Can I just expand on that?
	Yeah, yeah, please.
	Because I think it's a really interesting idea.
	And I think every gig that you ever get offered, every job that you ever get offered, is not based on what you can or can't do.
	It's based on what other people perceive your ability to be.
	Yes, yes.
	And this is why I favour...
	You know, YouTube, the internet, and so on, against traditional broadcasting, because you'll just have a commissioning editor who decides what you're capable of, and I doubt anyone at the BBC would have, you know, given you a gig as a presenter.
	They would never give me a job, no.
	Yeah, and suddenly you've got a, you know, a little media empire, and that's because you knew what you were capable of, and in fact, perhaps only discovered what you were capable of in the evolution of everything.
	I had no idea when I started all of this that I could do any of this, to be honest.
	But anyway, the point being, it's perception that drives human endeavor.
	Not really actually physically what we do, because it turns out that physically what we do is actually pretty, you know, not easy, but, you know, within reasonable bounds.
	It's like, yeah, you can build an electric car, you can take over Twitter, of course you can.
	But the question is, how do people react to this?
	And then it's from that perspective that you've got to remember that all the politicians, all of the billionaires, all of the people in charge of all these companies who are making decisions, We're good to go.
	Yeah, I mean, I think he recognises the value of Twitter.
	You talked about perception.
	You know, Twitter is where ideas get argued and formed and where narratives take place.
	And, you know, it's sort of a standard anthropological thing.
	Narratives drive humankind, which is, I suppose, perception.
	And he sees the value of Twitter and...
	I think it's partly because he wants to make the world a better place, but also because he wants to make money, and often the two things coincide.
	It's sort of standard Invisible Hand Adam Smith stuff.
	But, yeah, and it's very exciting the way...
	You know, Nassim Taleb used to talk about FU money, and, you know, you need to have a certain amount of wealth before you can just go, do you know what?
	I don't care.
	And if anyone's got FU money, Elon Musk does.
	Well, it's the richest man in the world, isn't it?
	And so...
	You can see the FU money shining through in his Twitter usage.
	The memes he posts.
	He posted this meme and then deleted it.
	So this is an archive of it.
	But basically Elon was complaining that Apple, their app store, for companies over a million dollars, they have a 30% tax on transactions that go through the app store.
	So Elon was saying, well look, this is basically a secret tax on the internet because Apple is something like 50% of the American market share, although it's much smaller in the global market share.
	And so he posted this, do I want to pay a 30% tax or do I want to go to war?
	And he chose go to war, apparently, which, again, this is big talk in front of a lot of people.
	Now, Elon's known for his frivolous sense of humor, and so obviously everyone will understand it in that context, but still...
	You are essentially ginning up sentiment against Tim Cook in Appleton.
	He did actually tag Tim Cook in a tweet.
	Again, in front of 120 million people saying, what's up, Tim?
	And it's like, right.
	So when it comes to perception, if Tim Cook logs on to whatever social media he's got, and he's got literally a million messages saying, Tim Cook, you're a dick.
	And worse.
	And worse.
	Yeah, that's it.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Tim Cook, please talk to Elon.
	And then it gets just way worse than that.
	You can see how perception is an important part of a person's self-worth and how they view their peers and how they view their own environment and their business and all this sort of thing.
	And so these things, I think, are very important.
	Now that said...
	Yeah.
	You go first.
	No, no, no.
	Well, something I was taught by a friend of mine who's a very good businessman and he's very good at negotiating and so on, is he always said, you don't get what you want if you get too aggro about it.
	That's true.
	And so he's not attempted to smooth talk this guy.
	He's just gone straight...
	And it's just gone straight down the aggro route.
	Now, maybe that's just a misjudgment, or maybe that's a deliberate...
	Well, I mean, that's a great question, because at the end of the day, when you look at it, well, who actually holds the decision-making power with anything?
	Because, I mean, Apple, they own the App Store.
	They've got a monopoly on it.
	They can just take people off of it, and they have taken people off of it.
	Parler.
	They took Parler off.
	They took Epic Games off, which is a very large video game company, because they were trying to legally contest Apple's 30% revenue share.
	And Apple would just say, we're just going to take you off.
	That's enough.
	And they can just do that.
	Because Apple have absolute decision-making power over what goes on in their store.
	Because of their property.
	And really, I can't really disagree with it.
	I mean, it seems unfair.
	And maybe there are other perspectives I could bring to it in order to make judgments.
	But from a sort of business perspective, well...
	That's the case.
	And so one way of looking at this is, well, Elon's being very cavalier, considering he doesn't really have his hands on the levers of power here.
	He knows Tim Cook, can just be like, no, you're off now.
	And so why is he being so forthright and public about all of this?
	And so when Elon Musk posted a video of himself at the Apple campus, and if you scroll down a little bit, you can see that there's two shadows in this video.
	So he's standing next to someone who's wearing glasses, it looks like, from their shadow, right?
	Yeah.
	Tim Cook wears glasses.
	So, what was the text attached to this?
	Something just like a nice walk around.
	Thanks, Tim Cook, for taking me around Apple's beautiful HQ. That's interesting.
	That's a change in tone as well.
	Exactly.
	That's a change in tone.
	He also replied to this, saying, Good conversation.
	Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store.
	Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.
	Hmm.
	That's weird, isn't it?
	Because the tone is obviously...
	But, I mean, Elon's quite a charismatic guy.
	I think people understand that he's reasonable and will deal.
	He'll talk to people reasonably.
	But this is a complete change in tone.
	But also, it doesn't inform us as to who made decisions here, right?
	Yeah, I mean, that's straight out of the script of a film, isn't it?
	It's very funny.
	It kind of is.
	It's wonderful to see how we agree on things.
	But who's the mafia boss in this situation, though?
	Musk?
	Maybe, but also...
	But I'm only reading Musk's side of it.
	Well, no, we've only got Musk's side of it to read.
	I haven't found any public statements from Tim Cook about this, right?
	So it's interesting how Tim Cook has not been...
	I don't think he needs attention in the way that Elon does.
	Well, precisely.
	He obviously doesn't.
	But the point is, there have been two narratives that people have taken from this.
	Okay, so first thing could be that Elon starts posting all over Twitter and Tim Cook's like, look, come to my office.
	We're going to have a talk about the relative situation and who gets to make decisions in this regard.
	And Elon's suddenly like, oh, lovely talk.
	Oh, everything was resolved.
	Don't worry, guys.
	And it could be that Elon has been brought to heel because, of course, he has been incredibly rogue over late.
	And he's had some good victories along the way, but there are doubtless a coalition of powers behind the scenes.
	People like Tim Cook and his various peers are like, oh, we've got to do something about this.
	You know, we can't just have this guy being a madman in front of millions of people and making us look bad.
	And so it could be they called him and said, look, you're going to calm down or else, you know.
	But, I mean, we're not saying we're going to take you off, but, you know, it's a nice social media platform you have there.
	Shame if something happened to it, right?
	Yeah, it's a very credible scenario.
	Exactly.
	Or it could be that Elon Musk took the Napoleonic route and was just, no, we're going to go straight at them as hard as we can, as quickly as we can.
	And...
	Bring the force of our personality and the potential coalition we could bring together in order to essentially overraw and intimidate Tim Cook and to be like, look, if you do this, I'll be at war with you.
	I'm Elon Musk.
	I'm one of the most influential people on Earth.
	A lot of people support me.
	There's a huge amount of money behind me.
	Do you want this fight?
	You know?
	And Tim Cook seems to be less of a showman than Elon Musk.
	He seems to have less of that sort of, you know, will to fight in him.
	And so I've seen a few interviews with him.
	And he's also incredibly woke.
	Oh, he's on the other side of the culture war, isn't he?
	Incredibly woke.
	He repeatedly saying, oh, diversity is a strength and inclusive.
	He's constantly saying it.
	Was he trotting that out?
	Or did he believe it?
	I think he believes it.
	I watched, I wish I got the clip actually, I should have got the clip, but there was a couple of years ago he was giving a, you know, a big talk in front of a room, probably full of Apple employees, talking about all of this.
	And it was just, he obviously believes, you know, because he's gay himself, he came out as LGBT, blah, blah, blah.
	So he's obviously a complete believer.
	And so the two ways of looking at this is like, okay, well, did the force of Elon Musk's personality overall Tim Cook?
	Or did Tim Cook have a sort of Machiavellian Don Cook moment and bring him in, you know, to sit down?
	Yeah, it's very interesting.
	I will say this about Apple.
	When Jobs died, which is 9 or 10 years ago, and this was in the early stages of this incredible tech bull market we've seen over the last 10 or 12 years that kind of ended last year or earlier this year, I thought Apple was going to be a short, or maybe not a short, but there was no longer the same innovative genius at the front, and therefore, you know, should we be buying Apple?
	From the point of view of building Apple and increasing its market share and increasing its market cap and so on, Tim Cook, you have to say, based on the share price, has done a good job.
	Oh, yeah.
	And in the recent tech correction of the last nine months, Apple is probably...
	The biggest domino that hasn't fallen in the way that some of those other tech companies have.
	But you look at Apple, and it's basically riding on the coattails of the iPhone, which is a brilliant product.
	I've got one, and Apple own me, and I'm sorry to have to tell you that.
	Would never give money to Apple.
	Willingly, anyway.
	But...
	Yeah, every time, you know, every couple of years when I get a new phone, I'm always thinking, do I get the Samsung one?
	Do I get the thing?
	And then in the end, it's just, oh, I'll just get the latest Apple one because it's just less...
	You're familiar.
	Yeah.
	So they kind of own me.
	Yeah.
	But they don't have the same market share.
	For example, I was in Korea and you don't see...
	It's all Samsung, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	For obvious reasons.
	But I would say from an investment point of view, there's a long history of tech companies that own a market like Apple does.
	And then another company comes along and has a better product and they make Apple redundant.
	Now that company isn't...
	They're at the moment, but you can rest assured that somewhere, that something is being developed that is better.
	I was going to say, all I was going to say is just, Apple needs a new flagship product if it is to maintain the might that it now occupies.
	And Elon did, again, publicly state that, well, if they pull us off the app store, I will just make a new phone as a competitor to Apple.
	And as you were saying before we started, Tim Cook was clearly a safe pair of hands for Apple, right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	And this is why I'm looking at the two very different personalities and thinking, right, did Elon Musk just go down there, march himself down there and say, look, Tim, I'm going to make an even better iPhone than you'll ever make, and it's going to ruin your business if you take us off this app store.
	And Tim's just like, oh, no, we didn't even consider doing so.
	I mean, why did Elon tweet that he was told that Apple is considering removing it from the store?
	He's not going to make that up, is he?
	No, exactly.
	It'd be crazy, right?
	It'd be absolutely crazy.
	Because, I mean, once that sort of idea is in the sort of mix, then it becomes more likely to happen, doesn't it?
	So it's like, you know, did he go down there?
	There'll be a lot of creative genius within Apple.
	Oh, yeah.
	And obviously Jobs himself.
	And I don't know how similar in character Jobs and Musk are, but I bet there are some things...
	But they're a lot closer than him and Tim Cook.
	And I bet...
	Yeah, but I bet you Tim Cook is very good at managing people like that.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	So Tim probably made some very reasonable requests.
	He was like, look, can we just not have Nazis?
	Can we just not have these really terrible things?
	Elon being a sort of...
	Centrist, sort of liberal type.
	He'll be like, yeah, of course, you know, I don't want those things.
	Why would I want those things, you know?
	And so, but we're going to have Donald Trump back.
	We're going to have, you know, the president back.
	We're going to have, you know, the town square has to serve everyone.
	And Tim probably conceded, knowing that still, you know, he's diverted this, like, you know, rogue army that's come in.
	And, you know, okay, they could come back, but for now they're not, and they're wandering off.
	We've got it, so who knows?
	But what I thought I'd do is just have a look at what comes...
	Good crisis management.
	Well, that's the thing.
	It actually looked like good crisis management from Tim Cook.
	Or it could be that Tim Cook is the secret mob boss, and Elon is just essentially covering himself to make it look like he's not just being completely slapped.
	But we don't know.
	But I thought what might be useful is just looking at who supports Elon Musk.
	Because actually, Elon Musk has quite a lot of support amongst the sort of tech billionaires.
	The first one is Jeff Bezos.
	Now, Elon Musk is not like friends with Jeff Bezos, but they have a kind of public banter back and forth because, you know, I'm the richest man in the world.
	No, I am.
	You know, this is back and forth, right?
	And so, you know, they obviously tease each other quite publicly.
	That's funny.
	It is funny, actually.
	The funniest one, I think, was Jeff Bezos posting something about his wealth, and then Elon Musk just posting a silver medal underneath his post.
	I mean, it's good bands.
	It's genuinely good bands.
	I bet Bezos actually took it fairly well.
	I think Elon has someone who writes his tweets for him.
	You think so?
	Yeah.
	And I think it's the founder of Dogecoin.
	Really?
	Why?
	Why?
	Because somebody told me.
	I can't remember where I heard it, but that's one of the reasons why he likes Dogecoin so much.
	And Dogecoin is basically, you know, memetastic.
	And so when he posts those quite witty pictures and things like that...
	You think someone's given him?
	Someone's done that for him.
	He's got writers.
	I mean, why wouldn't he?
	I didn't even think about it.
	But when Elon said, look, I'm going to buy Twitter and turn it into a homeless shelter, Jeff Bezos seemed to be posting in support of this, in sort of, you know, mimetic support, which is interesting.
	And then you've got Larry Fink.
	And the reason I bring this up, the BlackRock CEO obviously controls, God knows, untold trillions of wealth around the world.
	But this is interesting because it's strange that Larry Fink, who seems to be one of the progenitors of ESG, has decided to start signalling against wokeism.
	Now, this was at the beginning of this year, so maybe I'm wrong, maybe things have changed.
	But he said that his so-called stakeholder capitalism is neither political nor woke.
	It's capitalism driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers and communities.
	Your company relies on to prosper.
	This is the power of capitalism.
	We aren't going to be doing woke posturing, is what he said.
	And that's very interesting.
	Because he seems to, I think that they've been, like I said, I think they're behind ESG. If I'm wrong about that, fact check me.
	But then also, you've got the former CEO of McDonald's, who has actually formed an anti-woke coalition.
	Start buying into corporations and actively expelling wokeism.
	Ed Renzi was the CEO of McDonald's between 1991 and 1997, and he's started an initiative called the Free Enterprise Project to start buying up parts of companies and just getting on their boards and just expelling the woke.
	I mean, that's good news.
	Then, of course, you have major streaming services like Netflix.
	Remember when their staff started protesting about the Dave Chappelle special and Netflix just fired a bunch of them because they lost 200 million subscribers or something?
	Yeah, it was 200,000 subscribers.
	And so they were just like, no, a bunch of you are fired.
	And they say, as employees, we continue to support the principle that Netflix offers a diversity of stories, even if we find some titles counter to our personal values.
	Depending on your role, you may need to work on titles you perceive to be harmful.
	If you find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.
	I'm going to make a generalisation about two types of mentality and the types of political philosophy that those two types of mentality will have.
	And you've got the one, we'll call it the Elon Musk type of mentality, who is the self-made businessman.
	He gets where he is...
	You know, by breaking things, but also being a genius, taking risks, and so you've got that kind of risk-taking entrepreneurial type.
	And often, they are the guys who set up the business, and they get on by rocking the boat.
	And then you get the other guy who gets on by not rocking the boat.
	So those type of people tend to do better within institutions that already exist.
	So I think a classic example is Rishi Sunak.
	He's got where he is by just not rocking anything.
	Unlike Boris Johnson.
	Well, Boris is a bit more of a boat rocker.
	Yes.
	And Boris would never have got...
	Where he was, were they not so desperately in need of...
	Someone to break the paradigm.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And Tim Cook is a non-boat rocker.
	And so those kind of people will get on better in institutions as they...
	Once they're already established, whether it's political institutions or big corporations.
	And that's why so much of...
	And the boat rocker will tend to be somebody who favours free market capitalism, risk-taking and all that.
	And the non-boat rocker will be more in favour of regulation, let's say, and will tend to be more of that sort of left of centre, metropolitan, liberal...
	You know, that kind of remain mentality, whereas the other guy would be, you know, more libertarian, more Brexity, that kind of...
	Is it unfair to describe this as a kind of masculine and feminine perspective?
	I don't know.
	It's maybe...
	Because women, you know, tend towards...
	Maybe a little bit, but...
	And men tend towards.
	Yeah, tend towards, tend towards.
	And I do think there's a thing that men tend to be more right-wing than women.
	That's definitely a thing.
	So...
	You've got those two types of personality and because Silicon Valley has got so established and so on and it's so mainstream, that's why it's been so infiltrated.
	And then, of course, you've got the problem of the young who are, broadly speaking, totally brainwashed by the education system, which has also been infiltrated by that kind of...
	I agree.
	And so this is why I think it's interesting to highlight the sort of CEOs who are on the sort of Elon Musk side.
	Yeah, so they'll be the guys who made the institutions, whereas the ones who run the institutions will be on the Cook side.
	Exactly.
	In fact, this is what the Netflix CEO said specifically about Elon Musk.
	Let's watch this clip.
	You're on there all the time.
	What do you think?
	What's going on?
	I'm excited.
	I'm excited.
	Elon Musk is the bravest, most creative person on the planet.
	I mean, you know, what he's done in multiple areas is phenomenal.
	You know, his style is different than like I'm trying to be like a really steady, respectable leader.
	You know, he doesn't care.
	He's just, like, out there, you know?
	But think of a guy who's spending $44 billion.
	He could have built the biggest, he could have built a mile-long yacht for $44 billion, okay?
	But it's, like, not good for the planet, doesn't he?
	He's not interested.
	He's in for things to help.
	Do you think what he's doing is good for the planet?
	I'm 100% convinced that he is trying to help the world in all of his endeavors, okay?
	And he's trying to help the world in that one because he believes in free speech and that's power for democracy and that there's an option.
	Now, how he goes about it, again, you know, is not how I would do it, but I'm deeply respectful and I'm amazed that people are like so nitpicky on him.
	Yeah, sure, the blue check mark, he's making a mess of some things or not, you know, but it's like, Give the guy a break.
	He just spent all this money to try to make it much better for democracy and society, to have a more open platform, and I am sympathetic to that agenda.
	Yeah, I mean, it's just what we just said, isn't it?
	Exactly.
	But it's not pulling any punches.
	And that was a massive endorsement.
	I'll say.
	You know, if someone spoke about me like that, I'd go, God, calm down, I'm not that great.
	I've got to get him to review some of my songs.
	Yeah, exactly, yeah.
	And so that's pretty wild, isn't it?
	And that's the CEO of Netflix.
	That's one of the biggest streaming services in the world.
	You know, 200 million people, something like that, use it.
	So it's massive, huge cultural influence, you know, lots and lots of money.
	You know, all of these people, you know that they have met and, you know, are probably in contact and things like this.
	So this is what I was talking about, like, the perception and the pressure, you know, the way that Tim Cook might seem to find himself, actually, maybe I'm outnumbered here.
	Maybe I'm actually, okay, I might be able to literally, you know, win this battle right in front of me over Elon.
	But then I might find myself drawn out too much and have everyone else around me going, we're going to pull off your story.
	Yeah, I think it's fair to say Tim Cook will be a good tactician.
	Undoubtedly, but also he'll be a conservative tactician.
	He'll be the Fabius to Elon's Hannibal.
	Let's hope it doesn't end the same way Napoleon and Hannibal ended, actually, now I say that.
	But let's just keep going on, just to quickly finish this bit off.
	Sorry.
	So you've got DeSantis and Disney.
	DeSantis obviously crushed Disney over their special tax status because Disney were woke and they were like opposing his anti, well it's the anti-groomer bill but they call it the don't say gay bill and he was just like no you're done.
	And so Disney fired their woke CEO Bob Chapek Which is weird, because this came to surprise, as Yahoo tell us, because they renewed his contract that year and extended it for another three years.
	And so it wasn't that he was due to go, or they thought, no, no, no, you messed up, boom, you're gone, right?
	Yeah.
	And so they've brought in...
	It's cost him a lot of money.
	Absolutely.
	They've brought in Bob Iger again, who has just come out and said, look, we're literally going to just stop all the woke stuff, because this has made us...
	We're going to respect the audience.
	We're going to quiet down the culture walls.
	We're not going to have disdain of their views.
	And so he says that the issues have been branded political and doesn't agree that they are political but doesn't want to make a big deal out of them.
	But the fact that he says respect the audience shows that he thinks the quiet majority maybe don't agree with it all.
	And you can see that by simply their sales figures.
	Actually, no.
	They put out a film recently.
	I don't even know the name of it.
	But the lead character is this gay character.
	And there are no white people in it.
	And it was a complete bomb.
	A complete bomb.
	And so it's like, look, you can be as woke and preachy as you want.
	But at the end of the day, the market is actually responding to this.
	And it's responding negatively to this.
	Go woke, go broke.
	It genuinely is true.
	When you've got massive companies like Disney, it takes a bit of time for the momentum to start wearing off.
	I'll tell you something I've noticed, Carl, by the way, just on this subject.
	You know how sort of ludicrously diverse advertising is in terms of the typical families that they portray don't represent anything like what is the typical?
	And, you know, it's hard to find a single advert that doesn't have somebody, you know, of a non-white ethnic background in it.
	And so I've always done a lot of voiceovers over the course of my life, and so whenever an ad break comes on, I'm always listening to what voices they use.
	And, you know, the use...
	One of the reasons I get a lot of voiceover work, or used to, is that...
	Shouldn't have supported Brexit there.
	I think I've got a fairly sort of anonymous...
	It's clear, and people trust my voice when they hear it, but it's also...
	Neither posh nor down...
	I can't tell where you're from.
	Well, I'm a public school boy from London.
	There we go.
	But it's a sort of middle-of-the-road accent.
	And so it's...
	I suppose, in a way, it's a bland accent.
	It's a sort of nothing accent, but it doesn't carry too much identity with it.
	But, you know, there's a lot of...
	Market research has shown that, you know, the man who was the voice of Mr Kipling, for example, or Orange, you know, got so much voiceover work because people trusted that voice.
	Okay, so anyway, that's me.
	And I just, when I've been watching ad breaks over the, you know, every other advert is voiced by Idris Elba.
	And then, but there's just so much more...
	Ethnic and minority, diversity, blah, blah, blah.
	And voice has always gone young.
	They've always younged up a little bit.
	Yeah, I've noticed that, actually.
	You can tell the tone of voice.
	Yeah.
	But what I've noticed happening now is, and this is just in the World Cup, so I've been watching a bit of telly, there's much less.
	It's gone young, but it's always done that.
	But it's gone back to being much more English.
	When I say English, I mean RP. Not regional London accent.
	Not regional, not ethnic, not diverse, not female.
	You know, so there's obviously a bit of a pullback going on.
	I wonder if they're seeing in their sales figures, like, why is this going down?
	Maybe.
	Who knows?
	Or maybe there's just like, you know, do you know what?
	We had a whatever voice on it last year.
	Let's go back to what we did.
	It worked.
	Maybe.
	It could be.
	Yeah.
	But anyway, let's carry on.
	There's a definite change in trend, though.
	That's good to know.
	The next one is Shopify.
	The CEO of Shopify is Toby Lutke, who recently sent a letter to the entire staff saying, we're not woke, stop it.
	Which is great, actually.
	He wanted to remind everyone that we're a business, and more importantly, a hugely ambitious one.
	I'm just going to read his note because it's actually hilarious, and he makes some great points, right?
	We're trying to create a world-class product that gives superpowers to the merchants that we are obsessed over, as in the people who sell on Shopify.
	Everything Shopify does is to accomplish this, and everyone at Shopify should be able to describe how their job through a series of direct or indirect steps furthers this mission.
	Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family.
	The very idea is preposterous.
	You are born into a family.
	You never chose it, and they can't unfamily you.
	The dangers of family thinking are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go.
	Shopify is a team, not a family.
	Wow.
	That's a hell of a statement, isn't it?
	I'll say.
	That's very pro-capitalist.
	It's aggressive.
	Shopify is not a small business.
	This is, again, major CEOs are just coming out.
	We cannot solve every societal problem here.
	Exactly.
	Shopify's worldview is well documented.
	We believe in liberal values and equality of opportunity.
	Sometimes we see opportunities to nudge these causes forward, but we do this because this directly helps our business and our merchants and not because of some moralistic overreach.
	Yeah, and he's used the word nudge, not move or push or something like that.
	Exactly, you know, preach, you know, that's all I'm saying, not because of moralistic overreach.
	And so, yeah, it's fantastic.
	He says, you know, this is great as well.
	We will always have compassion for team members in truly difficult situations, but we need to remind everyone that like any other competitive team...
	It matters how you show up every day and contribute to the team's success.
	Beyond straight performance output, everyone that engages in endless slack trolling, victimhood thinking, us versus them divisiveness, and zero-sum thinking must be seen for the threat they are.
	They break teams.
	Wow.
	That is strong.
	Yeah.
	And so the next one is the CEO of Spotify, which is Daniel Eck, who has been waging war on Apple themselves because of the Apple store fee.
	But Spotify CEO joined Elon Musk in his attack over Apple, filing completely the European Commission against Apple and basically carrying on the crusade.
	And so this is what I mean, where it's hard, because the first impression when Tim Cook...
	It's speaking to Elon Musk.
	It's like, well, look at that.
	The big boy's come on to say you're going to have to calm down, Elon.
	And Elon puts out a very neutral sounding, you know, compared to what he normally puts out tweet.
	But actually, it could be that there is a fair amount of momentum against Tim Cook's position.
	I'll say.
	The trend is changing.
	It really is.
	And just in my own little world, you know, I know I'm very friendly with a businessman who runs a chain of comedy clubs around the country, really good comedy clubs.
	We're good friends.
	I did one of my unacceptable songs in one of his comedy clubs.
	The staff didn't know that I'm friendly with the boss.
	They made a load of stuff up about me and tried to get me cancelled.
	And he was like, what's going on there?
	I'm not having, you know, bar staff being offended by what gets said in a comedy club and trying to get the comedians cancelled.
	I'm just not having that in my comedy club.
	It's easier to get bar staff than it is comedians, probably.
	Probably.
	And so that was one example.
	The other example being the change in trend with the advertising voices that I've noticed.
	And the third thing is, you know, a couple of people who have raised money for a campaign to...
	You know, fight against everything that's going on.
	I guess it's a PR campaign, but I've been commissioned to write a couple of songs for them.
	So there's definitely, and I don't know where they've got their money from, but somebody's donated it, and if you've got money to donate to a cause, it means, suggests, maybe not a billionaire, but somebody with deep pockets doesn't like what's going on.
	That's good news.
	So yeah, I don't know that Elon has won his war on Apple or anything, but he's not being taken off the App Store, and Apple seemed to have backed down.
	Do you know who's not on board with all of this?
	Who?
	The EU. Well, of course they're not, bloody hell.
	But then if I was on the same team as the EU, I'd start rethinking why I believe what I believe.
	Anyway, let's talk about Bitcoin.
	Well, before we talk about Bitcoin, actually, this is a nice segue from the EU and all the ESG stuff.
	So this is just one story I wanted to cover, which is, so you remember 20 years ago, whatever it was, we were all urged to buy diesel cars.
	Yes.
	Then along comes, you know, diesel's, you know, the technology's really good, it's really clean, blah, blah, blah, it's environmentally friendly.
	So a lot of people on government advice invested in And bought a diesel car.
	Then along comes the Volkswagen diesel scandal.
	The diesel pollution had been misdiagnosed.
	Oh wow, I can't believe the science changed.
	We only tested the car when it was idling, not when it was driving and this kind of thing.
	And so then suddenly, I don't know, diesel is evil.
	We're going to attack diesel, we're going to attack diesel, blah, blah, blah.
	Electric vehicles.
	You've got to be buying electric vehicles.
	Until we hear about how lithium is dangerous for the environment.
	Well, that's coming.
	Yeah.
	And so, I mean, already Hunt has changed the tax laws on electric vehicles, whereas previously they were exempt from taxes, now they effectively pay the same fuel duty.
	Oh, isn't this because, yeah, exactly, they don't need the fuel duty, and so the government's losing revenue?
	Yeah, of course it is.
	And it was inevitable, when they gave them all those tax breaks in the first place, that this tax break isn't going to last.
	Yeah.
	But what is beautiful is the EU really jumped on this ESG and the electric vehicle craze.
	They really jumped on it.
	After the Paris Accord.
	What a stupid word.
	But anyway.
	We're all in accordance here, don't you, mate?
	And so all the European countries started, you know, encouraging their citizens.
	And Switzerland has now, Switzerland's gone electric vehicle crazy.
	Switzerland produces some of its own energy, hydroelectric, but most of it, its energy, it imports.
	And because of the...
	It's worried about this winter and where it's going to get its electricity from.
	Everyone is.
	It's now turning around and it's imposing bans on driving electric cars.
	Really?
	Because it's worried about emergency, energy security.
	So having been told to buy this car, you're now going to be not allowed to drive it.
	Now, it's investigating plans.
	It hasn't actually done it.
	But if electric vehicles lead to blackouts, Then that's what's coming.
	Now, there's a precedent here, which is the Galapagos Islands, a famously environmentally sensitive place.
	Isn't it all a nature preserve?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Off the west coast of Ecuador.
	Three hours flight off the west coast, in the middle of the Pacific, on the equator.
	And I think I'm going to say 2016 or 2017, they deliberately, in order to keep the island clean and to reduce air pollution, but also all the animals, the tortoises and the lizards, they stray on the road.
	So roadkill is a big, big issue there.
	So they made it really, really difficult to get a vehicle license for Galapagos locals.
	And it was also to protect the taxi industry.
	And then suddenly, at some point, somebody woke, got in charge of the Galapagos Islands, and they were like, no, no, no, anyone can have an electric vehicle.
	As long as your vehicle's electric, you're going to have an electric vehicle.
	Now, the great irony is that all the electricity in the Galapagos Islands, somebody built them three wind turbines, and there was a big fanfare.
	Look, these overseas energy companies, look, look, we've got wind turbines, and Galapagos Airport's the only fully wind-powered, wind and solar-powered airport in the world.
	Then about a year later, after they got all their publicity, the wind turbines stopped turning and nobody on the island knew how to fix them.
	So now these wind turbines are next to the airport where everyone will see them.
	They weren't even put in the windiest part of the island because they got their studies wrong.
	So there's these three monuments to climate change and the wind turbines are just stuck and they haven't turned for years.
	Anyway, back to the electric vehicle scenario.
	So all the electricity for the electric vehicles was generated by burning diesel.
	Well, this is the meme that you see going around, isn't it?
	You know, it's like, look at my wonderfully, you know, my electric vehicle, and then, you know, they drive just to the, you know, the fuel that's powering it.
	Exactly, and because it's out of sight, it's out of mind.
	Yeah.
	It's like the UK fracking.
	We ban fracking here, and so we're importing our natural gas now from the United States, where it was generated by fracking.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And yet, so there's the transport costs as well.
	And they always do this, though.
	as long as it's significantly far away then that's fine we're good people that's not what makes you good people No.
	So, anyway, everyone in Galapagos got their electric vehicle.
	Yeah.
	And they're all driving around happy, look at my electric vehicle.
	Roadkill went up massively.
	Loads of birds and other creatures got run over.
	And it's a big, big problem because the wildlife is totally clueless because it's never been predated, whatever the word is.
	But then the other thing was, is it led to blackouts.
	Because there wasn't the electricity to serve all the electric vehicles, even with the burning of all the diesel, because they hadn't invested enough in the grid.
	Yeah.
	So the whole thing was a total disaster, and eventually, and so they had a moratorium on the whole thing, but of course, look at us electric vehicles, loads and loads of fanfare publicity, the moratorium, the whole thing brushed under the carpet.
	But that story is potentially a metaphor for where we're going with electric vehicles in Europe.
	It's already starting to happen in Switzerland.
	We don't have the...
	There hasn't been the concomitant investment in electricity power grids and so on.
	Nuclear power.
	Switch, nuclear power in particular.
	And as we were talking about, the ultimate, the primary source of the energy is the burning of fossil fuels anyway.
	So it's hypocritical.
	So I think...
	Look at Germany.
	Germany being the case study on this.
	Exactly.
	Take additional nuclear power plants and go back to coal.
	Why?
	For the environment.
	What are you, mental?
	So there's three types of energy that we use in the world, which is transportation, heating and electricity.
	And I'm going to see how well you know your stats.
	I don't.
	Global energy, what percentage is fossil fuel of all total global energy?
	I mean, I would say something like 70%.
	85%.
	Oh, there we go.
	It's actually 84%, 84.3%.
	And that's with all the investment that we've seen in, you know, hydroelectric and green and all the rest of it.
	But of electricity, which is the only one...
	Like, you can't drive a car on wind power, but you can generate electricity with wind power.
	But even with global electricity, fossil fuels still account for 63% of global electricity.
	Now, that number's coming down.
	10% is nuclear, 16% is hydropower.
	Isn't it just a crime that only 10% of electricity generation is nuclear?
	Oh, it's just one of the most dumb things.
	But that's, again...
	That's changing now because this power has changed so much.
	So yeah, so that's ESG, load of rubbish.
	Well, no, I totally agree.
	And, which takes us again nicely into our next story, which is we're talking about Bitcoin and FTX, the scandal, and Sam Bankman-Fried still hasn't been arrested, by the way.
	Yeah, he's still free.
	He's sitting in his Bahamas holding court.
	Yeah, he's doing Skype calls and stuff, and he's just like, well, you know, we just made mistakes, we overreached.
	It's like, dude, you stole billions of dollars.
	It's one of the biggest frauds ever.
	And it's a classic, it's not a Bitcoin problem, it's a classic, it's when you take client money and you don't keep it, you use it for something else.
	It's not a Bitcoin problem, it's a fraud problem.
	And it's like being the cause of bank runs since all recorded history.
	But what's so funny is ESG gave Sam Bankman-Fried a higher governance rating than it did the boss of Chevron Mobut.
	Which tells you everything you need to know about ESG. It's just...
	It's a scam.
	It's a shameful.
	I hate to give Elon Musk more props, but he did tweet out recently, ESG is the devil.
	Oh, did he?
	Yeah, which I agree with completely.
	Well, he's right.
	Yeah, he is.
	So...
	With everything that's happened with this FTX fraud, there's been a lot of, and it's always this way, narratives follow price.
	And so when a price of something's going up, you know, why is the price of Apple going up when everyone's using iPhones?
	We're back to our initial thing of perspective.
	Because Bitcoin is, you know, right at the bottom of a horrible, horrible bear market.
	All the people who never liked it are all gloating and all the Bitcoin, pro-Bitcoin people are sort of sitting with their tails between their legs.
	Just as a quick aside there, I did look at the Bitcoin prices recently, and you can see that a few years ago, and then now it's really, really low.
	Why is that?
	Well, it...
	I don't understand it.
	You pin your own reasons on why a market does what it does.
	The ultimate reason is more sellers than buyers.
	Okay, fair enough.
	I don't know anything about it.
	But you just look at the way Bitcoin trades and it goes through kind of four phases.
	It goes through a sort of quiet phase when nobody cares about it.
	Then there's a sort of...
	And suddenly the price starts going up and there's a mania.
	And then the price crashes.
	And then it goes back into the quiet phase again.
	I've missed out a phase, but anyway.
	But it's coupled by these manias followed by the disasters.
	And we're in the sort of towards the end of the disaster phase.
	I won't sell my Bitcoin then.
	Merrin Somerset Webb, who's a former FT journalist now, Bloomberg journalist, great friend of mine, my old boss at Money Week.
	I've been trying to orange pill her forever.
	And, you know, Merrin's extraordinarily bright.
	And she gets, you know, she gets Bitcoin.
	She understands why we have it there, but she doesn't like it.
	Why not?
	She's a gold bug.
	Right.
	Old-fashioned gold bug.
	Fair enough, fair enough.
	And she...
	She's not brilliant with techy stuff, and she doesn't like all the, well, where's my password gone?
	I've lost the call.
	You know, she doesn't like all that.
	But so I was prompted, she was criticizing it, and her question was, how does Bitcoin make the world better?
	So I was prompted to write an article, 10 Reasons Why Bitcoin Makes the World Better, but it ended up becoming 17 reasons.
	Right, okay.
	And I was...
	It probably could have been 20, but I just stopped at 17.
	I just kept adding more reasons.
	So I was just going to go through these 17 ways that Bitcoin makes the world better, but were you looking at the clock?
	I was, but we'll just hammer through them.
	We'll hammer through them.
	I'm not in a position to challenge them, because I literally know nothing about Bitcoin.
	Well, challenge them and ask them questions.
	I'll hammer through them.
	Just hammer through them.
	Okay.
	Firstly, it separates money and state.
	Now, if we were writing the Law of the Rings about how to fix the world economy, what is the gold ring, the ring of power?
	Surely it's a unified...
	What is the throwing of the ring of power into the Mount Doom?
	For me, it's fiat money.
	It's our system of money.
	We need to separate money and state.
	At the moment, they print money, they use it for political agenda, and so on and so forth.
	And if you want to know why it is that the government, the state, has grown so big in the West, it's because it can print its own money.
	When one body in a society can print money and create money at no cost to itself and no risk to itself, then it's inevitable that body will have too much power.
	It's not even at no risk to itself.
	You underwrite that.
	Yeah.
	Your children, they're children under rights.
	Exactly.
	So it's inevitable.
	That is why the state is so bloated compared to how big the state was in previous eras.
	Bitcoin separates money and state, number one.
	Two, it provides a lifeline.
	If you're in Venezuela or Turkey or Argentina, somewhere that suffers from huge inflations, you notice Bitcoin usage goes up massively in those countries where the currency is being destroyed.
	Because Bitcoin can't be inflated.
	No.
	Right.
	They need a hard currency.
	I get it.
	Yeah.
	Three, sending money across borders is hard.
	You've got to convert it.
	You've got to convert it.
	If you want to send one pound, if I want to buy my mate in India one pound to buy him a cup of coffee, how do I send a pound to India?
	Great question.
	But similarly, if I want to send 100 quid to my mate in Iran, because I know he's having a hard time, or 1,000 quid, how do I send that?
	You can't.
	Bitcoin is borderless, instantaneous, cheap.
	You can send money to anyone, anywhere.
	And surely it doesn't lose value, because whenever you have to convert something, then whoever's doing the converting takes a percentage as well.
	Yeah, you don't get, you don't, there's a tiny cost to sending the money, but it's minuscule, particularly if you use a lightning network.
	Four, no more capital controls, the same reason.
	Government can't control the flow of Bitcoin capital.
	Five, it obviates central banking, because...
	The Bitcoin inflation rate is set in the code.
	It's pre-programmed and it's set in the code and everyone, it's transparent.
	Everyone knows what it is.
	So that you can't, there can't be But central bankers, you know, they don't meet every four months or every month, whatever it is, to decide what the interest rate is.
	It removes that policy.
	Interest rates can't be left too low or too high for too long.
	And they're not on the whim of a small group of people running a bank.
	Exactly.
	Six, it increases financial inclusion.
	Now, if you think around the world still, I think it's a billion and a half people are still financially excluded.
	They don't have access to basic banking.
	Right.
	And that holds people in poverty more than anything else, not having basic financial services.
	To start receiving and sending crypto, all you need is an internet connection.
	95% of the world now, amazing fact, 95% of the world now have smartphones.
	Right.
	So, to our viewers in the Congo, hello.
	Exactly.
	And send him a tip in some bitcoins.
	Yeah, subscribe on ludcees.com.
	Seven, it provides privacy.
	I'm not going to go into the ethics of privacy here, but if you want privacy, particularly in this world of CBDCs, have you been a good boy?
	Have you had the vax?
	Have you been supporting ESG stuff?
	No.
	Well, you can't use this retailer.
	I'm going to give you a bad...
	Increases privacy.
	The problem of digital cash, this is number, we're on eight now.
	I'm piling through this, hopefully quick enough.
	This was where, if you think if you go into a shop, you hand cash directly to the bloke in the shop, it is a direct transaction from A to B. And for years, computer programmers had been trying to solve the problem of how to replicate that process digitally.
	And there wasn't a way of doing it without having a middleman process the transaction.
	And the reason is, if I send you a picture or a video or something like that, any kind of computer code, you can copy and paste it and send it out to a million different people.
	If you can copy and paste money, it loses its value instantly.
	So it needs a middleman.
	And it was deemed that digital cash is an insolvable problem.
	And then along came Satoshi Nakamoto and his blockchain, the database that records all the transactions.
	It solved the problem of digital cash.
	Great breakthrough.
	Similarly, number nine, it solved the problem of digital scarcity.
	You know, if you can upload an app to the App Store, it can be downloaded a billion times.
	That's why the digital economy grows so quickly and so fast.
	But how do you create digital scarcity?
	It was impossible until Bitcoin came along, solved that problem.
	Ten, it educates.
	The poet Ezra Pound once said, monetary illiteracy is the curse of our times, just as an inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
	I think it might just be the curse of all times.
	Well, no, because, you know, I used to have to explain, if I said fiat money, I used to always have to explain what fiat money is.
	Bitcoin has got people thinking about money systems, talking about money systems, designing new money systems.
	It's been an incredibly educative tool.
	Eleven, it solves the problem of excess money supply.
	The money supply is limited and finite.
	Twelve, it's created an entirely new economy and asset class.
	When kids ask me, what do I do?
	What business do I get to?
	I just say, go and work in crypto.
	It's the future.
	It didn't exist before.
	Now it's a multi-trillion dollar industry.
	Is it money?
	Is it a digital commodity?
	Is it a tech stock?
	It's an entirely new asset class.
	13.
	It's provided the young with an opportunity for revenge on high house prices.
	Only the young understand it.
	Revenge against the boomers.
	It is the revenge of the young against the boomers.
	They don't have to pay for their retirements anymore.
	We've got Bitcoin.
	That's a creative way of viewing it.
	Fourteen, it stops cancel culture.
	If you think how PayPal cancelled the free speech union or it cancelled WikiLeaks or the Canadian truckers, you can't do that with Bitcoin.
	You can't turn off the funding taps.
	It stops the currency wars.
	Fifteen, it stops energy waste and accelerates innovation.
	Now, Bitcoin mining is incredibly energy intensive.
	It requires a lot of energy.
	And that is why people don't understand this.
	Just because something consumes a lot of energy doesn't mean it's bad.
	No.
	And the reason the Bitcoin network is the most powerful computer network in the world is because of all the energy it consumes in maintaining it.
	Satoshi Nakamoto wanted to replicate, you know, the gold has value because of all the trouble you go to having to discover it and mine it.
	It's precious, it's rare.
	So Nakamoto was trying to do this, replicate that with what he called proof of work.
	And the reason that Bitcoin is so valuable is because of all the proof of work that's gone into it, which is caused by the energy.
	But Bitcoin mining can happen anywhere in the world.
	It doesn't have to happen right, you know, in W1. So what has happened is by the rules of economics, natural, the need to make profit, it gravitates to anywhere in the world where energy is cheap, one, and two, it goes unused.
	So, for example, hydroelectric, it costs three times as much to store electricity as it does to actually create it in the first place.
	Right, I didn't know.
	Hydroelectric after floods gravitates to all these places, and so it's accelerated and improved energy efficiency and energy creation.
	And by the way, we're not going to...
	Human beings have always consumed energy, and as we've got more sophisticated, we've consumed more energy.
	And energy consumption is a sign of sophistication.
	It doesn't mean you're sophisticated, but it's a sign of a sophisticated society.
	We're not going to progress civilization if we consume less energy.
	We're going to solve all these problems by finding better ways to produce and consume energy.
	It'll be efficiency that improves things, not reduction.
	Exactly.
	Bitcoin accelerates that.
	We're on 16.
	It eliminates spam.
	The original reason for the original What was called proof of work and reusable proof of work was a thing called hashcash.
	And it was thought, if you have to prove that every time you send an email, you've expended a tiny bit of energy and you stamp that email with a hashcash that shows you've expended this energy, then that eliminates spam straight away because it means spam requires...
	You can't spam.
	And so they invented this thing called proof of work, add them back.
	And then another computer programmer came along with...
	Reusable proof of work.
	And that's basically all Bitcoin was, and it reduces spam because you have to show that work has gone into the production of the email.
	And finally, it proves in an immutable way who said what and agreed to what, where, and when.
	It is a permanent record, and it's an unhackable permanent record.
	This is the blockchain, the permanent database.
	You know, at the moment, it's a universal witness that cannot be corrupted or censored or denial of service attacked.
	Legal and financial system, this ability to prove who said what, where and when, there's a lot of crude ad hoc verification procedures.
	Bitcoin solves that.
	So there you go.
	17 ways by which Bitcoin makes the world better.
	See, that's interesting, because I don't know anything about Bitcoin.
	So I was just like, right, okay, that is interesting.
	I'm sure there are going to be lots of people who can push back on a lot of this.
	There always are.
	Yeah, I look forward to hearing the pushback.
	Persuade me, that's all I'm saying.
	Anyway, let's move on to the segment I've been looking forward to.
	Journalists are destroying themselves, and I'm in no way sympathetic.
	You get what you deserve.
	That's how I feel about this.
	But I think that the problem with journalists is they're a product of the leftist education system that is poisoning the minds of young people, which we actually have a premium video on on lowseas.com.
	This is Connor and Beau talking about, well, examining...
	What exactly are young people being taught in schools?
	And it's not economic literacy.
	It's not anything of any good or note.
	It's trash.
	Find out for yourself by going over and signing up and supporting us.
	Anyway, so let's begin in May 2020.
	Remember May 2020?
	Just after the lockdown.
	Just after the lockdown.
	Well, Microsoft was like, hmm, we've been thinking a lot about this, news, and actually we realise that robots can do your job, don't need you anymore.
	But learning to code won't save them, because eventually the code will be written by robots as well.
	So, who knows what you're going to do.
	I think already they write a lot of financial journalism.
	They do, yeah.
	Because, honestly, it's just because...
	The format is established, all it needs to do is put the numbers in.
	Well, yeah, they say they use the AI, they've been using AI to scan for content, but now it's essentially the editorial process is beginning to be done by AI as well.
	But anyway, let's move on to how the pandemic ravaged journalism in 2020.
	As New York Times told us, 33,000 workers at news companies in the US were laid off, furloughed, or had their pages reduced.
	Some publications that relied on ads were shut down, and this was bad because the news business, as they tell us, was shaky before the coronavirus started spreading across the country.
	Since then, the economic downturn that put more than 22 million Americans off work has led to cuts, layoffs, and shutdowns at many news outlets.
	Who asked for the lockdowns?
	Who asked for the bloody lockdowns?
	Who was constantly, every day, saying we need to lock down to save grandma from the coronavirus?
	Who was saying it?
	Who was sensationalizing?
	Yeah, who blew...
	I mean, I don't know what we can...
	Who was spreading the fear?
	I don't know what we can say about the coronavirus on YouTube anymore.
	So we won't make any comment about anything like that.
	But as you say, who was sensationalizing?
	Who was constantly making sure that this was in everyone's face all the time?
	That was all they could think about.
	You know, who...
	We're talking about perceptions as we did earlier.
	Who made it so the governments were like, oh God, we have to do something, we have to do something, we have to do something.
	You know, because I mean, I thought that Boris's first reaction was, well...
	We've just got to take it on the chin.
	I thought it was the right one.
	And I think that history has vindicated that position, to be honest.
	Yeah, well, Sweden and Norway have done better, haven't they, than...
	Precisely.
	Much better.
	But yeah, so 33,000 employees of news media companies, majority of them being journalists.
	But somebody Tim Cooked him.
	Yeah, they did.
	Yeah, they did.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I don't know who it was, you know.
	I don't know what happened there.
	But he was definitely a changed man, wasn't he?
	You've been Tim Cooked.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so moving on, in 2020, BuzzFeed decided to buy Huffington Post.
	And shortly afterwards, they were like, actually, we're going to get rid of almost everyone here, which is nice.
	So they laid off 47 workers, the majority of them being journalists.
	That was 30% of their entire workforce.
	And generally, the media is facing closure.
	They shut down Huffington Post Canada entirely during this merger.
	And the layoffs just basically continued all through 2021.
	As Pew showed us, well, if you can go to the next one, this was them showing down in Canada, if you can go to the next one, Pew described, well, look, in 2021, only 11% of the entire staff of the journalistic industry was cut, compared to the 30% in 2020.
	So that's it slowing down.
	It's like, yeah, I guess we're no longer in the lockdowns.
	But look at the damage you've done to yourself.
	It turns out that actually the news industry is not some sort of separate ethereal entity that floats atop of our civilization that has no connection to what happens on the substrate.
	No, it turns out that they need everyone else's money to survive.
	And if advertisers don't advertise on their platforms, if people don't buy their papers because of, I don't know, they've been locked in their homes and they've got no money spare because they've been 5% of jobs, well, that actually affects them.
	Hmm.
	How short-sighted.
	I love citizen journalism.
	Yeah, me too.
	And often you get the truth there, that you don't achieve by journalists.
	And I think journalists raid and plagiarise citizen journalists all the time.
	And because they don't want to be seen as citing citizen, you know, lowly, mucky, smelly citizen journalists, they often then don't credit their sources.
	That's very true.
	And this is the pathology of modern journalism.
	They don't leave their offices.
	It used to be that journalists had to go somewhere.
	Yeah, the investigative journalist.
	Yeah.
	I mean, before Twitter, basically, it meant that you had to go out of the office and do something.
	I mean, this is a costly thing, but at least you've got good information.
	But now they're literally just like, what's X person posted on Twitter?
	Right, that's my article.
	It's made them very lazy.
	It's made them very arrogant.
	It's made them completely disconnected from the real world.
	Because no longer are they going to actually meet the people and talking to them and, you know, hearing their perspectives.
	No, they can sit there in the little woke, isolated bubbles and be like, no, everything needs to lock down.
	No, we need to throw everything at Ukraine to fight the Russians.
	It's like, look, there are consequences to all of these things.
	Yeah.
	I know you don't like journalists as a breed.
	Not generally, no.
	And as a breed...
	You know, a lot of journalists I know are a little bit patronising and haughty and I always get this sort of thing of this sense of why do you think you're better than me?
	I just feel ever so slightly looked down on.
	But I mean, obviously there are some brilliant journalists out there and You're kind of celebrating their demise, and I sympathise with that, but I'm also, you know, it's not nice when somebody loses their job, but it's, you know, it's the internet, it's the changing nature of advertising revenue, it's the rise of citizen journalism, You know, the democratization of media.
	And if I was a journalist and I would have lost my job, all I would say to you is, you know, take the Zulu principle.
	Find a subject that you're an expert in, or if you're not, become an expert in a small subject that interests you, and then go on to Substack, or have your own blob, or build up your own, not blob, blog, or build up your own media empire like you have.
	But the thing is, a lot of this seems to be directly the consequence of the lockdowns.
	Yeah.
	And I'm sorry, the entire journalistic class, there was a very small segment of the journalistic class that was like, maybe we shouldn't be encouraging lockdowns.
	Maybe this is bad.
	Maybe it's wrong to tyrannize people in their own homes and shut down law-abiding businesses.
	Maybe that's not right.
	And a lot of them are like, no, this gives us moral superiority.
	And if there's one thing I like is these kind of moral tyrants getting their comeuppance, because that's what this is.
	And I'm happy about it.
	I'm sorry, you literally advocated to take people's property away and give their money to Amazon or give it to some local grocery store, give their money to Sainsbury's or Tesco's or something like that.
	Why should they have been allowed to be open when the little local grocery store isn't?
	Why should any...
	It's nonsense.
	And they all advocate for it.
	And so I'm in no way sympathetic.
	Anyway, so moving on, get into March 2021 now.
	Everyone in the journalist industry is starting to recognise, hang on, these jobs are precarious.
	We're insecure.
	We actually are kind of screwed.
	Have we screwed ourselves?
	Yes, you have screwed yourselves.
	And the thing is, as well, because we're media, we were classed as a sort of special case during the pandemic.
	We were allowed to operate.
	Now, I wouldn't have shut this down even if we weren't, but we were just given a free reign, and so we got to prosper while everyone else was locked up.
	I'm glad these people aren't prospering, because they all supported this.
	I hated it.
	Anyway, BuzzFeed, come March 2022...
	Sorry, getting back to that last one, this is one quote.
	Amid the undeniable growth of the gig economy that is predicted to accelerate even more in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic...
	That precarity has become the reality of the working lives of both young professionals and low-skilled workers.
	Well, you did this to yourselves.
	You did this to yourselves.
	Nothing had to lock down.
	You know, nothing.
	Anyway, moving on.
	BuzzFeed making more cuts.
	It's not going well.
	The CEO, Jonah Peretti, they've whittled their newsroom by almost two-thirds.
	So two-thirds of their journalists are gone now.
	It's like, well...
	What are you going to do?
	You know, you did this.
	Three of their top editors resigned.
	The companies offered buyouts to staff on half the newsrooms remaining desks.
	This is a declaration of a strategic shift towards content that requires fewer resources to produce and generates more traffic.
	Hmm.
	I guess all the investor money ran out.
	I guess all the advertiser revenue dried up during the pandemic, and so suddenly...
	What now?
	Come August 2022, more major layouts in US media.
	Gannett is a company that owns hundreds of media outlets.
	They own USA Today, 250 local outlets, and have revenues normally, total revenues of $748 million.
	But they've had a net loss of $53 million in the last quarter when this was produced.
	And so they're like, oh, right, a bunch of you are going to have to go.
	And it's like, okay, but again, All of these outlets were like, no, lockdowns.
	We need lockdowns.
	You know that video that you see around?
	It's like, you know, this is very dangerous to our democracy.
	And it's all of the local news stations saying it.
	Have you seen that?
	No.
	Oh, right.
	There's a great montage of local news stations, all parroting.
	Ah, I haven't seen it.
	Yeah, this is very dangerous to our democracy.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, it's companies like Gannett that control that narrative, because they own 250 local outlets.
	Okay.
	And so it's their script that got sent off to the local outlets.
	And so it's like, yeah, well, you get what you deserve.
	I'm sorry.
	You guys all work for this.
	You support this.
	I'm not in any way sympathetic.
	And so...
	By August 2022, Pew were reporting that between, sorry, by 2020, about 22,000 journalists, the news industry had been reduced by about 22,000 journalists.
	This is big.
	It wasn't going well before, and then it's going even worse since they advocated for the destruction of the economy.
	Yeah, I like it.
	I guess this is a good thing about Twitter, which is, I'm just coming back to the citizen journalism thing.
	When, you know, whoever's the editor, the director of BBC News, for example, he decides what the news agenda for the day is, because he decides what stories we're going to cover.
	And so he's decided, we've got to have an international one, we've got to have a local one, and he's trying to do a balanced thing.
	But the beauty of citizen journalism, Twitter, however that journalism is disseminated, the market decides what the news agenda of the day is.
	So there's a free market for news.
	Yes.
	And, you know, we probably wouldn't know about, for example, the boat, the dinghy, the people trafficking on the dinghies were it not for the citizen journalists.
	How would you know?
	Shout out to ActivePatriot, by the way, who's always down at the beach filming and coming in.
	Again, Twitter assistant journalist, who I happen to know because I follow him, because I want to know what's going on.
	And every day he posts 800 new arrivals.
	BBC wouldn't tell me that.
	None of these private areas.
	And he's bringing shame on the politicians and the establishment that he's exposing.
	Exactly.
	And so it goes to show you that actual real journalism pays dividends.
	We need it.
	We need it.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Not just for him personally.
	I'm sure he gets lots of people donating to say thank you for your time.
	And that's another way, inverting the business model where it's based on donations.
	So you're incentivized to do good work and people will say, well, thank you.
	I mean, that's what this entire company is built on.
	So it's completely opposite.
	We don't advertise.
	It's just a much more healthy incentive.
	And then, as you say, he's actually changing the public dialogue by bringing real video evidence of a scandalous event that no one else wants to talk about.
	And yet it's still piling up in the public consciousness.
	This is bad.
	Now the BBC has to start talking about it.
	Now Priti Patel and Sweller Braveman are like, okay, we're going to send them to Rwanda or whatever.
	And that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the citizen journalists.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	So anyway, this is why, again, I'm not in any way disappointed to see the media losing their grip on the ability to create narratives.
	You know, if they're scaled down, they can't control the narratives.
	Do you know why a lot of the Guardian journalists are bigger...
	Sorry, sorry, Guardian journalists.
	We always put the scale question.
	...are bigger celebrities than, say, the journos at The Telegraph or The Times.
	Great question.
	I'll tell you why.
	Because...
	So I've written articles for all of those publications.
	And just loads more people notice when you get something in The Guardian.
	Because the website is not behind a paywall.
	So The Guardian website is one of the most fantastic...
	Platforms.
	And you notice a lot of those Guardian journalists, they're fighting tooth and nail to keep that website open and not behind a paywall, even though the subscription model from a business point of view has been proven to work.
	And so that answers your question.
	And so all those guys, you know, Owen Jones or whoever it is, they all want to do their sensationalizing on the Guardian platform because that gets them noticed.
	And if...
	They just would not be the figures that they are.
	The household names that they are.
	Without that, the incredible power of that platform.
	Anyway, moving on to the UK in October 2022, massive redundancies.
	So, apparently, since the end of June this year, there have been 739 job losses.
	Now, I mean, that doesn't sound like a huge number compared to the American market, obviously.
	We're a much smaller country, and that's still massive.
	These are, again, just hundreds and hundreds of journalists are like, no, sorry, you're gone.
	And this is freaking them out.
	What's interesting is that David Ayrton, a senior organiser with the National Union of Journalists, told Press Gazette that in most cases, employers, quote, refer to the current global situation in relation to the conflict around Ukraine and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath as rationales for layoffs.
	Oh!
	Who's going Slava-Ukraine-y?
	Journalists?
	Who is totally...
	Oh, Putin is the new Satan.
	We've got to make sure we're constantly at war.
	Okay, and it's cost you a job.
	We've got to have lockdowns.
	We've got to support Ukraine.
	We've got to support the current thing, and the current thing is currently costing them their jobs.
	I'm not sad.
	I'm not in any way sad.
	Anyway, moving back to Facebook, because you remember in 2020, they were like, hmm, can we automate this?
	It turns out they probably could, because they've basically cut their news team entirely, which is interesting, I think.
	Sorry, no particular sympathy again.
	Again, social media, Facebook, Twitter.
	I mean, have you noticed that the Twitter trending tab is a lot less political these days?
	Have you noticed that?
	I haven't, but is that Elon Musk changing?
	I don't know.
	We've had no, like, official confirmation or anything.
	But before, if you looked at it, it was always political.
	Everything on it was, you know, whatever the current thing was.
	And now you get a lot of football or, like, you know, anime.
	It's just like, you know, the sort of junk normal people talk about, you know, rather than just political propaganda.
	And it's the same with Facebook and the sort of thing you find on there.
	So it's interesting how Facebook has apparently shifted resources away from its news tab, shuttered the bulletin newsletter program, and ended support for instant articles, eliminated human curation in favor of algorithms, and stopped paying US publishers to use their news content.
	Oh dear.
	Ah, that's a big one, the last one.
	Yes.
	The source of funding for the propaganda mill is drying up.
	Maybe, maybe, just saying, if you weren't constantly being like, we need to do everything we can to ruin the economy, you wouldn't be in this position.
	The tide is turning, Carl.
	It's great to see, isn't it?
	Like I said, it's always nice to end the week on a positive segment.
	People always complain, look, everything you say is just terrible, because it's not that I don't like the content, it's just it's bad news, constantly bad news.
	I'm like, yeah, but everything's terrible, you know?
	Except for this.
	So on a Friday afternoon, we're going to try and make it a tradition that we have a positive news story.
	And I think just to end this one off, CNN laying off, again, a lot of their major primetime news network figures.
	That's just good news.
	CNN bloodbath, according to the Daily Mail.
	Yeah, good news.
	That's what I like to hear.
	We'll leave it there.
	That's a bit of good news for the end of the week.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	Perhaps the only way to fight policies made with good intentions is to support them with ill intentions.
	You know, support immigration by saying it's a white man's burden, where it's the duty of white people to take care of the quote-unquote lesser races, or support abortion because it's eugenics and will eliminate degenerates, making the policies emotionally charged and impalatable to normal people, just like how the progressives do.
	I'm not saying that's not a strategy, and I don't doubt that it would probably work, but I don't really want to do that.
	I mean, you know, waving the Margaret Sanger banner, the pro-racist argument for abortion.
	I don't think I'll be saying that.
	But, like...
	It's funny.
	It is funny, though.
	And you are right.
	It would toxify these issues to the point where the left would probably find themselves on less stable ground, shall we say?
	You know, it's like, yes, I would like more immigration from the Muslim world, please.
	Why?
	Why?
	Because I'm homophobic.
	I mean, what are they going to say?
	Like, what are they going to say?
	It's like, well, we also want more Muslim immigration.
	It is clever and very funny, but I don't think it's the...
	It's not going to be the first approach I take to try and get immigration reduced.
	Let's go to the next one.
	The 2022 unrest in Leicester between Hindus and Muslims has its origins traced back to British rule in India.
	By idiots.
	The British in no way could have turned Muslims against Hindus, and there is simply no way that they lived side by side in peace before the British arrived, especially given what utter hatred there is between them now.
	For a more nuanced and historical perspective, this 2019 article from the website The Diplomat analyzes the fragmented nature of Hinduism and its adaptations as Islam invaded.
	See, this is why I'm pro-Indian immigration.
	I love civil wars.
	I just love it.
	I love watching people flying in the streets.
	How many Hindus are there in Britain?
	Probably about 3 or 4 million, something like that.
	And there are more Muslims?
	There's about the same number of Muslims.
	No, in fact, sorry, I think there are more Muslims than Hindus.
	I'm surprised I don't have these numbers off the top of my head.
	But it's relatively comparable.
	It's a couple of million, you know, probably about 3 or 4 million Muslims, 2 or 3 million Hindus, something like that.
	Have you seen those statistics about prisons, prisons by religion, and who commit to what crime?
	I have.
	It's remarkable, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	But again, I'm pro-immigration because I'm in favour of the prison system.
	It is a funny meme.
	Sorry, I've just put my back out.
	LAUGHTER You are right.
	It is a funny movie.
	Because I'm invested in incarceration, so I like that.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I've got stocks in private prisons, so I'm well in favour of incarceration.
	And hotels.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	I'm against the environment, therefore I'm in favour of immigration because I want more houses built.
	Let's get to the next one.
	Hey guys, Tony D and Little Joan here.
	Just wanted to say that I'm off for the holidays, but thanks for allowing me to promote my books and give you a bunch of white pills.
	I hope somebody else in the Lotus Eaters community picks up the ball and continues to give you white pills.
	I will see you next year.
	Don't forget, the Pioneers makes an excellent Christmas gift.
	Books 1 through 10, available at Amazon.com.
	You can find me on YouTube Odyssey, BitChute and Rumble, Sundays at 7 for the live stream.
	Thanks for tuning in.
	And I'll see you next year.
	Well, have a great Christmas, Tony.
	And thanks.
	Tony, for anyone who doesn't know, just regularly sends in video comments.
	It used to be interesting stories about the Pine Barrens, which is what this book, The Pine Is, is.
	And I used to really like these because they were like, you know, weird ghost stories about some house that was built in 1700 or something.
	And I love these little stories.
	But in keeping with the, hang on, the world's going to hell, we've got to have some good news before we all shoot ourselves.
	He started sending in just good news stories, just small good news stories.
	And they were a genuine pleasure for me.
	So yeah, I'll be missing you over Christmas, Tony, but look forward to seeing you in the new year with some good news.
	I follow a guy on Twitter who's just good news.
	I think it's just called good news.
	That's a good follow, actually.
	I'll have to get that.
	It's weird being able to say, I'm going to follow that on Twitter.
	It's weird.
	But I tell you, it's been strange being back.
	Were you banned from Twitter?
	Oh, yeah.
	For like five years.
	I had no idea.
	I didn't know.
	Well, after five years, I'm finally back.
	So what were you banned for?
	Wrong thing.
	No, insulting Nazis in an inappropriate way.
	And Vijay again, Jack Dorsey went on, Tim Pool and Joe Rogan to explain that I wasn't allowed to insult Nazis like that.
	And Elon Musk was like, well, maybe you can, I don't know.
	I'm not going to insult Nazis or anyone on Twitter anymore.
	I'm very calm posting on Twitter.
	I avoid getting into fights.
	I just post links to my articles and songs.
	Probably wise.
	Anyway, let's go.
	I'm one of the quiet people that's watching everyone else in the fights.
	I'm the silent majority and forming my own opinions.
	And, you know, it's a bit like, I think, not Joe Rogan...
	What's the comic from Boston, Red Hair?
	Bill Burr makes this analogy.
	You know, after you do a gig, you know, you'll do a gig to a thousand people and ten people will come up and pester you after the gig and 990 people will just, you know, go, thanks very much and go home.
	That's...
	The internet and the people who are shouting on Twitter are those 10 people, and there's 990 other people just watching what's going on and quietly forming their opinions and carrying on with their lives.
	That is exactly what it is.
	It literally is like 10% of the audience will get any interaction with.
	And it's the same on YouTube.
	If you put up a video on YouTube, if you get 100,000 views, you can expect, say, 10,000 likes.
	And it's literally like 10% of the people that will actually interact with it.
	And how many comments?
	Probably about 4,000 or 5,000.
	Okay, but those are the...
	They're the really invested people.
	And it's very, very predictable, actually.
	So you can actually judge whether this particular segment was impactful with people.
	This meant a lot more to people when you've got a particularly higher...
	Like a like ratio to view count and things like this.
	Stuff you have to know when this is your job.
	Anyway, let's get some comments.
	Lord Nerova says, I knew Elon wouldn't be able to prosecute his war on Apple as far as we would have wanted.
	There's too much bound up in it.
	Elon's Twitter is already struggling and getting nuked off the app store would probably be a death blow to it.
	Let's not forget that Elon is also in the club.
	He probably has more clandestine reasons to relent.
	Well, I don't know about any clandestine reasons to relent.
	And like I said, the entire first segment was speculative because, of course, we don't know.
	But I was giving you a lay of the land.
	Not Machiavelli.
	What's his face?
	The revolutionary communist...
	Alinsky, Saul Alinsky, pointed out, the upper class always has a series of fractures within it, and the fracture between Elon Musk's brand of libertarian machismo and Tim Cook's brand of woke...
	Social democracy.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I love the tone you gave.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Great point.
	That's obviously a fraction point.
	And it's interesting how Elon is actually getting quite a few big names who look like they'll swing his way when it comes down to the crunch, which is good.
	So I don't know that Elon wasn't...
	I mean, maybe Tim Cook is actually behind closed doors, this evil genius who's just like, you know, shows him a picture of JFK assassination or something and says, "Look, do as I say." Who knows?
	But, you know, we don't know.
	I guess he must be a target.
	Somebody deranged to be making plans.
	I imagine Elon's security is fantastic.
	You know, I mean, you would have to be.
	Caleb says, I like Apple products and thought about switching before because of political moves by Apple.
	Then I realized the other side is Google, which is honestly worse.
	Yeah, I know.
	Maybe I'll get a non-Android Linux phone.
	Yeah, well, good luck.
	My Bitcoin maximalist, the government is the worst thing in the world, you know, ultra-hardcore anarcho-capitalist mate, has a Chinese phone, and I forget the make, but it's like the fourth biggest make in China.
	I hate the government, therefore I'm going to...
	Well, he put forward this argument that the brand is sufficiently...
	Right.
	So they don't have the capacity to manipulate in the way that, you know, Huawei or whoever does.
	Well, then let's hope he's right.
	SH Silver says, Careful, Carl.
	Elon may not be the great man changing history, but instead a counter-elite for the opposition that is susceptible to capture by the ruling elites.
	I think he's part of the ruling elites.
	I mean, you know, if not Elon Musk, then who?
	His closeness to China makes him quite vulnerable there, and the Apple meeting may have been a precursor to that.
	It may well have been, you know.
	I'm more than happy to entertain all of these counter-arguments, because I just don't know.
	But that's the problem.
	None of us know.
	Radcheck was right, says, I don't think Tim Cook is the one in control here.
	As much talk as the woke tech company might like to throw its weight around, they still need to report obscene profits to their board of directors, Apple making up something like 8% of the S&P 500.
	If they start falling, the recession narrative becomes real.
	Now, that's what we're saying, you know, perception is everything, you know, and Elon Musk is very good at creating perceptions, because, I mean, he's got Twitter, he's got...
	He's a great promoter.
	Exactly.
	very few people do it better.
	And they're not as secure in the next quarter as they like.
	They're on thin ice with China after their airdrop feature bypassed government censorship and allowed protests to break out.
	And that same feature is going to lead to protests in their own factories, causing a production delay going into the holiday season.
	They need that 30% of those $8 memberships right now.
	What they don't need is to start a war with an autistic man who yeeted his own car into orbit because he needed to test a rocket.
	Like, again, you're Tim Cook.
	You're the safe pair of hands.
	You're the kind of the social democrat.
	And this cavalier comes in and says, look, we're going to have a war.
	I mean, I've already told 100 million people I'm at war with you.
	So how about we have a conversation?
	You're probably going to have that conversation, right?
	Because you don't know what this crazy man's going to do.
	Because like you said, he's totally unpredictable.
	Which is why this is all fun.
	It is!
	I know, I'm agreeing with you.
	This is why I like it.
	JC says, This anti-woke stance reveals one thing.
	Their belief that they had enough money to override any plug was incorrect.
	This was too black and white.
	Their gaslighting has not brought the normies to heel.
	They are not as materialistic as once thought.
	I expect there will be a more gently-gently approach to bringing the population into the fold of the sustainability cult.
	Yeah, I got that impression very much from the Disney CEO's words on it.
	It's like, well, we're going to ease off on the culture war.
	It's like, okay, so you're going to try and be more subversive, is what you're saying.
	I think.
	Maybe.
	JC says, I know, Baronville Warhawk says, look, I know you guys like Twitter and Elon and the Twitter drama behind it, but don't you think there is some more important news going on, such as in China, the CCP are bringing out the tanks.
	It looks like Tiananmen Square 2.0 is coming.
	Well, to be honest with you, it was Friday, and I thought, that's a big story, isn't it?
	That's going to take a lot of research to get into, isn't it?
	So we'll talk about all that next week.
	And the thing is, I don't actually know what's happened yet.
	So it was just one of those things where it's more practical about making decisions than looking at the stars and being like, what's the most important issue in the world?
	And to be honest with you, I'm mildly cynical because...
	It's not like the Chinese haven't just...
	Like, protests only work if the other person thinks you have a legitimate right to exist.
	If the state doesn't think you have a right to exist, they're quite happy to run you over.
	Do protests work?
	No.
	No.
	I don't think so either.
	The way to achieve political change is not through politics, but through new technology and new frontiers.
	Yes.
	To make the old thing irrelevant, is the thing.
	Paul says, is FTX Pro still going to his big conferences?
	I don't know.
	I've seen him doing Skype calls and stuff.
	I bet he daren't leave the Bahamas because he'll get arrested maybe.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, probably.
	Henry says, one of the biggest challenges we have with renewable energy is how you capture or make use of the excess.
	Iceland is a big place for server farms and things like Bitcoin mining as long as you have geothermal energy for effectively infinite and free energy and the cooler temperatures provide the cooling you need.
	The Auckland Islands...
	Generate more electricity than they can either use or send back to the mainland due to the limits of cables.
	They're looking at using that excess to do incredibly inefficient things like extracting hydrogen from water, which you can store and burn if you have a shortage of power.
	Makes total sense to do things like Bitcoin money, as that excess is, well, free energy anyway.
	Precisely.
	That's a good point.
	Edward of Woodstock says, wait, is this the swing back?
	Are we seeing the start of a Thermidorian reaction?
	If so, it's a hell of a white pill, a hell of a white pill.
	Well, I wouldn't go as far as...
	How familiar are you with the French Revolution?
	Pretty familiar.
	I'm not familiar with the term white pill, though, because I'm filling with blue, red and orange pills, but not white.
	Well, black pill is when you've been imbibing so much bad news that you begin to feel depressed and you think the world's going to go to an end.
	Well, a white pill is when you imbibe good news and you start feeling better about the world.
	Ah, okay.
	So, yeah.
	But the Thermador reaction for anyone who doesn't know is basically after the French revolutionaries executed enough people, the monarchists basically took over France again and were basically kind of like the Proud Boys swanning around France dealing with revolutionaries.
	So we're not quite at that point yet.
	But, anyway.
	SH Silver has got a pushback for you.
	Here's how Bitcoin makes the world worse.
	It facilitates free trade with slave states.
	If the slave state uses the Bitcoin, yes, I guess it does.
	It facilitates all trade.
	So, economic embargoes will simply not be viable in a way of soft power?
	Money is just...
	Anyone can use it, as long as you've got an internet connection.
	Nobody can...
	You can't use money as a political tool.
	So, yes, you can trade...
	Sanctions don't work.
	Well, I suppose not.
	But at least they weaken your opponents.
	But, I'm sorry, not sanctions, but, you know, you can't...
	You, like...
	The US couldn't just take $350 worth of Russian Bitcoin and go, that's ours.
	Which is what it did with its US dollar holdings.
	I mean, you are basically right about sanctions.
	I can't really think of any regime that's, like, really...
	Like, Iran has been sanctioned for decades.
	You know, we're currently sanctioning Russia.
	You know, like, who's ever had their mind changed by sanctions?
	There's probably some examples, but, like, the major ones don't seem to work.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you can't...
	If somebody wants to transact with Russia or Russians through Bitcoin, they can't.
	And there's good and bad to that.
	There are.
	Life is nuanced.
	But I think that's a fair point made, though, is that the sort of economic pressure that we put will be hamstrung, you know, so other methods will have to be used.
	Yeah, I mean, it's currency war, financial war.
	It's a tool of war.
	That's correct.
	Bleach Demon says, journalism is the art of crafting a narrative using the news, reporting that art of informing the public of the news.
	Seeing journalists and their muckraking going down like the Hindenburg brings joy to me every day.
	I agree, though.
	Again, if it wasn't that the news media was such a captured institution, and these people had so obviously abused their power against lots of people I know, me personally, like the country at large, you know, with all the pandemics and the wars, if they weren't so unbelievably irresponsible as a class, I may have more sympathy.
	But they did this to themselves.
	We need lockdowns, we need war with Ukraine.
	Okay, well, literally, the union is like, okay, well, you're getting fired because of lockdowns and the war in Ukraine.
	Okay, great.
	You know, get what you deserve.
	X, Y, and Z says, a mate who's apolitical and on Twitter pointed out how he's getting huge amounts of political posts, virtually all had a left-wing bias.
	Hmm.
	Andrew says, in regards to the mainstream news, good residents.
	I honestly can't think of any value left in the main stations.
	Can you think of any stories that were actually the lead on?
	The G20 climate summit in Cornwall.
	Oh yeah, because they all got an invite, didn't they?
	Yeah, that's right.
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	They get to go to the fancy five-star hotels and eat the buffet dinners.
	Yeah, and they get on to go on the Prime Minister's jet and all that.
	Yeah, great point.
	Yeah, and the Clinton campaign, I remember them having literally an embedded news team on the private jets and things like that.
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	So they are the mouthpiece of the ruling international order.
	Yeah.
	That's what they get the lead on.
	Not things that are actually important.
	Henry says, 90% of journalism amounts to vacuous opinion pieces about how hedgerows are racist or copying and pasting corporate press releases.
	And that is the main crime of a modern journalist.
	It's like, oh, the government has a statement.
	Great, I'll just...
	Done.
	It's just, you can get that article done so quickly.
	And it's just disgusting because it's your job to investigate whether that's true or not, you know?
	Your job to actually go and talk to the people, find out, you know, but they don't.
	The modern journalist is the equivalent of a Twitch streamer who just watches other content but puts a webcam feed of them watching haughtily smug in silence.
	They do so little that if news had the equivalent of copyright strikes, they'd fail to meet the fair use standard.
	God, that's brutal.
	But, um...
	Robert, last comment, a message to journalists, hashtag learn to graft.
	Interesting.
	Right.
	Well, thanks everyone for joining us.
	Dominic, where can people find you?
	I'm on Twitter, at Dominic Frisbee, and my substack is the Flying Frisbee, frisbee.substack.com, and it's free, or you can pay.
	Or there's also, if you like my comedy, dominicfrisbee.substack.com.
	Can people pay in Bitcoin?
	No, but that's a Substack thing, not a Dominic Frisbee thing.
	Oh, I assumed that.
	Come on here and proselytize for Bitcoin, and I assumed it wasn't you that was behind not being able to do it.
	Anyway, so yeah, go check out Dominic.
	He's great working.
	Honestly, his comedy songs are just gold.
	I've seen so many of them at this point, but they're always brilliant.
	Yeah, and have a great weekend, folks.

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