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Dec. 13, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:31:26

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #544

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 544.
	I'm your host for today, Harry, joined today by Dan.
	Hi, good to be back.
	I'm ill as balls, but I'm here.
	Yes, he's surviving.
	And we've never done a podcast together yet, so this should be interesting as well.
	I'm looking forward to it.
	And today we're going to be discussing whether politics is downstream from culture, which is a phrase I often use heard by people on the right, and I want to examine how...
	We're also going to be discussing the end of the US hegemony as Saudi realigns with China, something that I've no idea about.
	Nice and ratey, taking the podcast seriously, and then what have we got after that?
	We're going to be examining three years of Royal, the extraordinary story, the extraordinary true story of Meghan Markle, because Dan and I decided to take it upon ourselves to watch that bloody awful documentary.
	I actually managed it, yeah.
	Yeah, we watched the full thing before Part 2 comes out on Thursday, and we're going to give that a little review, so don't say we never do anything for you guys.
	But before we get into any of that, I just want to remind everybody we do have a career opportunity going at the moment for Video Editor on the website.
	So if you want to just go to Careers, if you're interested, you can try that out.
	You can send us the application and we can see where that goes.
	You do have to be able to live in Swindon or commute to Swindon, as we point out every single time.
	So if you're living in Germany or Australia or somewhere else halfway across the world and you're not able to get to Swindon, sadly we're not going to be able to look at you.
	But if you can, then send your application and we'll see where that goes.
	And without any further ado, let's get into the news.
	So...
	I wanted to examine whether politics is really downstream from culture.
	As far as I can tell, this is a phrase that was originally coined by Andrew Breitbart, or at least certainly popularised by him.
	It might have come from somebody else, but it's typically attributed to him whenever I find the phrase.
	And it's something that a lot of people on the right tend to point to as being like, Well, if we just change all of the woke culture that's coming from pop culture, like Hollywood, if we just take all of the wokery out of Hollywood films, then politics will automatically shift to accommodate that.
	People's minds will be changed.
	And there is some truth in all of this.
	There is some truth in the idea that media and pop culture affects the way that people on the ground think.
	And after all, COVID is more than enough to show that just mass media manipulation is very, very effective at propagandising people into positions they never would have taken before.
	But I don't think that politics, being downstream from culture, is just the be-all and end-all of it.
	I think there's a lot more to it.
	I think it's a little bit simple because, you know, just taking wokeness out of films isn't going to change everything because these...
	These messages have been in films forever, ever since the golden age of Hollywood.
	It's just that recently they've got really bad at it is the only thing.
	I think we've got to distinguish between popular politics, which is what the media are talking about, which is what the rank-and-file MPs are talking about, and then there's those guys with the agenda.
	Because I think what you're going to be leading us to is that actually culture is downstream of law.
	That's generally what I find.
	And when you get those hardcore activists, when you get that Blair era where they went in there within agenda, they pushed certain policies, that then influences the culture because it has to, because it's a legal requirement, it affects the corporations, and then the popular politics, that follows that.
	Of course.
	Well, as soon as it becomes enforced, I think, is when it suddenly starts to influence the culture.
	If you've just got a law in the books, like you can go and find old laws maybe from 300 years ago, that classic one that everybody points to, like in Wales in a particular town, if you're on a bridge at noon on a Sunday and fire an arrow, you're allowed to kill somebody or something like that.
	But nobody does that.
	And you're not going to enforce that law.
	Nobody is actually going to let you off if you try and do that.
	So that doesn't really influence anything.
	It's when you start to enforce these restrictions.
	Because what got me on thinking about this is recently I started reading the book The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell, which I've really been enjoying.
	I finished it recently.
	And it's tracing the change in American culture since the 1950s, 1960s, when a lot of the civil rights legislation started to come into play and get legislated.
	So I haven't read that book, but I have seen a number of interviews of the author.
	My general understanding is that there was the legal framework, which was established by Congress, and then there was a sort of parallel constitution that got implemented by the Civil Rights Act that effectively gave them a different track that they could enforce through the judiciary rather than that.
	Yeah, that's exactly what's happened in the argument that he makes throughout the book, which is that the Civil Rights Act comes in and suddenly legislates that you're not allowed to discriminate on race and sex.
	Well, there's a number of other pieces of legislation, but it all kind of culminates around Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965, which made loads of changes and basically abolished a lot of the protections of the First Amendment and a lot of the first ten amendments of the Bill of Rights,
	Where now, instead of going to them, most judicial judges and activists focus entirely on the civil rights, and generally, activist judges have used the civil rights as a way to upend the American social order.
	And I found that very interesting, because it is basically accurate, as far as I can tell.
	Obviously, when it was first implemented, they didn't really know how it was going to work.
	They didn't know how they were going to be able to enforce this.
	But as precedents were set...
	As legal understandings were built around it, what we experience now as woke culture is basically just an expansion of the Civil Rights Regime, the Civil Rights Act, being enforced in a way that it wasn't before.
	And I think he makes the argument that...
	It's not like you can pass a law and then you know what that means.
	You kind of have to wait in the American system for judicial review to come along.
	So arguments to come forward, challenges to come on a particular issue, the judges make a ruling.
	So it continuously evolves over time.
	So as the judges, as the decades go by, as the judges become more activists, they become more left-leaning, they become more woke...
	the interpretation of the law also sort of shifts with it and so you start off with a situation where you can't have a boss saying like I'm just not hiring any women that would have fallen foul of the original interpretation of the law but by the time you get to today it's you know you've got to have a certain number of trans kids on your board otherwise yeah well the problem was that in I think it's title seven of the civil rights act it implemented the affirmative action
	That's the affirmative action clause that says that you need to, you know, have a certain amount of people of this race or gender, otherwise you're not going to be able to get federal funding from the United States federal government.
	And that was originally set at, I think it was like 50 employees, but...
	Then it came down to 15 employees.
	I don't know exactly how many it is in the UK, because basically the Blair era just copied a lot of the civil rights legislation and turned it into the Human Rights Act 1998 and such.
	But you've got all of these affirmative action programs that suddenly had to be implemented by law, and if you didn't, then all of a sudden you were just going to get the full...
	The full might of the US government coming against you.
	People are suddenly able to amount civil class action lawsuits against organizations just on the idea that they might be discriminating.
	Even if you can't prove the evidence, the burden of proof suddenly comes onto the business to prove that they're not being racist, not the people alleging racism to prove that there is racism.
	So I found all of that really interesting.
	And like I say, you've also got an expansion on that, don't you?
	That the law comes from...
	Money.
	So I'm kind of happy to accept the notion that politics is downstream of culture, and I'm happy to accept that law is basically what comes downstream to culture.
	But I'd only go one further, and I'd say that I think law is downstream of money.
	So I think the money agendas, because basically in any system you get a certain group who rise to the top by definition...
	They enforce their agenda through the law.
	They back the politicians they want to see successful.
	This is even more extreme in the US example, where legislators have not written legislation for many, many years.
	It used to be that, you know, the legislators did it, then it was their staffers did it, and now it's lobbyists.
	They do it.
	It's the special interest groups.
	They write the law and they basically pass it over.
	So you get situations where Nancy Pelosi says things like, you know, we've got to pass this bill so we can find out what's in it, because she had no hand in drafting at any point.
	And what I think Christopher Cardwell does quite well, because I haven't read the book, but I've seen a number of interviews, and you can tell me if this is accurate having read the book, is he says he's not against the legislation itself.
	It's the judicial activism that follows, because it's that continuous creeping process.
	And it's the things that you mentioned, but what he also comes to is the more extreme example is the situation you got to a couple of years ago, where you were having young men having...
	Allegations of sexual impropriety made against them in colleges.
	And it was like no legal process was required.
	That young man could be expelled from school.
	He could be, you know, even after having paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in tuition fees, he could be expelled from that school.
	He could be sort of blacklisted.
	He could be pushed out.
	And there's allegations are sufficient at that point.
	Yeah, he doesn't really bring that much up in the book, so that must be more a talking point that he breaches in the interviews.
	But that is interesting, because it is just another example of the way that it's turned on its head.
	You're guilty until proven innocent, and this isn't necessarily because of anything that strictly came from the legislation.
	Although, if I remember correctly, there are parts of it where it basically says, if we can prove the intent or there appears to be intent to discriminate, and that's of course far too subjective and ends up without any particular legal standards around that, that just ends up being the realm of activist judges saying, "Well, it that just ends up being the realm of activist judges saying, "Well, it just looked to me that way, so that's what we'll But yeah, that is just the way that it's upended.
	And it didn't just stop in the US, of course.
	I mean, so that basically provided the framework for it.
	And of course, who really ran with this was Tony Blair.
	So, I mean, those of us who can remember the 90s, the 90s were great.
	Everything was fine, even though labour and power for the early part of the 90s, society just kind of worked.
	It was okay.
	I was three by the time the 90s ended, so sadly I don't get to enjoy any of that.
	It was good.
	Not as good as the 80s, but still, you know, I'm pushing that a bit.
	Now, what Blair did is he instituted a whole bunch of legal programmes.
	The Equalities Act is probably the most direct parallel to what we're talking about here, the Civil Rights Act in the US.
	But he institutes a whole load of things that basically put obligations on companies and corporations to behave in a certain way, which then gives rise to the whole format which the woke agenda can arise from.
	Because if you've got that legal framework in place, companies are going to follow it.
	And when the radicals, they start to push on this stuff, and so they take it from what the original intent of the law was, you know, don't be mean to women and gay people.
	That's pretty much what it was driving at.
	And then it becomes a basis in which you can do horrific surgical things to children on the basis that we're following this pathway.
	Yeah.
	And I would say as much as you can say the legislation aims to be neutral, I would say a lot of the time it's basically used as a Trojan horse.
	Even if you go back to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, it's...
	Having looked into it, it's not what it's sold to the public as nowadays.
	These people were radical activists and they were trying to sneak all of this in after the civil rights at MLK and other people were all saying it doesn't go far enough.
	We need really strict affirmative action quotas.
	We need to have it so that if there's 30% black representation in the population of a town, we need every single business in that town to have at least 30%.
	Black employee status.
	So these people knew what they were doing.
	They knew what all of this would lead to.
	They were just really good at selling it.
	That's what they were really good at.
	They were really good at selling this vision to people that just sounded nice.
	As far as I can tell.
	And that's why we kind of romanticise it now in a way, because we look back and go, oh, the original people, they never would have wanted...
	No, this is exactly what they wanted.
	It's just that we were...
	Oh, the Blair government was really radical.
	But they hid it really well.
	They pushed their agenda.
	It was only years afterwards when they started doing their interviews, having left government, that you found out that Blair was a Trotskyist.
	You know, this whole process that you're talking about, this radical push through the legal system to influence culture, all the downstream effects.
	That's exactly what the Trotskyists do.
	So, you know, he was a real radical.
	Nobody really picked up.
	Peter Hitchens, to his credit, has picked up on it since.
	But it's not something to talk about since.
	Now, a slight variation on this thing.
	I put out an interesting tweet the other day.
	So I saw a video going around on Twitter, which at first I just thought was a little bit disturbing.
	So I kind of pulled on the thread to see where it went.
	John, if you just want to go to those last three links for us, because yeah, these are the ones that you can talk about.
	Yeah, unfortunately I think the account that I showed...
	I don't think it's that unfortunate, given how horrific some of the stuff that you're about to talk about is.
	So basically what it is, is a video from China.
	And it's a woman coming down the street on a bike, and I think she goes into a theatre, has a stroke or something like that, and she collapses and has a crash and is really struggling.
	She's trying to wave for help.
	And the people surrounding her basically just do not interact at all.
	They don't watch.
	So I just put this up, and I found out that actually there was Chinese law which stopped people from getting involved.
	And it got me thinking about this whole dynamic of, you know, is culture downstream of law?
	Was it the other way?
	And some of these effects.
	Now, this is quite interesting because I put this video up and I put some commentary around it.
	And I started getting a lot of people engaging with it.
	And, you know, one woman came back to me and said that it explained a lot because she had been in China a few years earlier.
	An old man had collapsed in a train station.
	She went to help and people were physically restraining and saying, no, you can't help.
	Now, apparently the reason for that...
	It's because through Chinese case law, in the past when people have taken people to hospital, the judge has refused to believe that anyone would take anyone else to hospital unless they had a guilty conscience.
	So if you're taking somebody to hospital, you obviously are responsible for their injury and therefore you basically have to pay disability for them for the rest of their life.
	Yeah, you mentioned that it's a kind of weird perversion of the idea of karmic retribution almost, this idea that, well, Bad things only happen to bad people, so therefore, if you're helping somebody, even though that's a good thing to do, because even the act itself of taking someone to the hospital, I could have just run across somebody who twisted their ankle and needed help getting there.
	Whatever.
	Apparently that makes it a bad act, because something bad happened to them, I'm helping them, therefore I'm a bad person.
	It makes no sense, but China is an absurd and strange country.
	But that was the interesting dynamic.
	So, okay, people in China don't help because of this law.
	This case law.
	But the judges, you know, interacted that case law in the first place because they thought that because it was a cultural thing, because they couldn't believe that people would actually help out.
	And that then took me on another whole thread.
	Then I started looking at these incidents of and there was a Slate article.
	I think we can we can pull it up.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Pull up the Slate article.
	It's the one at the end for us, John.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, so I recommend to everybody don't go and read this article because it is one of the...
	It's awful.
	It's absolutely horrendous.
	I felt nauseous after finishing reading this.
	And basically, it's lots of examples of, in China, people in, say, high-end BMWs hitting a child And then very deliberately reversing back over them and then over them again.
	To make sure they're dead.
	To make sure they're dead.
	Because it is cheaper to pay a burial fee than it is to pay disability for the rest of their life.
	And one of the most shocking things for me is...
	Well, there was two of the most shocking things that you pointed out.
	The idea that the example they give is somebody doing that and then immediately getting out of the car and speaking to the family and saying, don't worry, I can pay for the burial fees.
	Here, I'll take the...
	They offer a bribe.
	They're basically trying to bribe them.
	The idea that the culture has become such that it's just expected that you could do that.
	You could just kill someone's kid and then expect a bribe.
	The extraordinary thing for me is that the woman driving that BMW got out of the car with a reasonable expectation that the family would accept a bribe for the loss of their three-year-old, that she just...
	Driven over and then reversed over and driven over again.
	Now, in this country, it doesn't matter how much money you offered.
	If a billionaire drives over your kid and then reverses and does it again, they could offer you billions.
	You're going to dismember them.
	It doesn't matter how much money.
	But there was this cultural expectation that she could do that and then just immediately give money and get out of it that way.
	And look, the point is, culture matters.
	Absolutely, it does.
	I'm a Western chauvinist.
	I think the West is the best, and that has been a very unpopular opinion in this country for a long time.
	But genuinely, I think our culture is the best.
	And this is going to lead through, actually, into what I'm going to talk about in the next segment, is that it's important to maintain Western culture.
	It is important to uphold it.
	It is important to maintain our place in the world, because...
	It's not going to be long where the Chinese culture is going to be the dominant global culture, and that's going to have an effect on everything else.
	Absolutely.
	And that's a good point, because we in the West, we've basically been legislating for so long to destroy our own culture, to make it more accommodating for people to come in from other cultures.
	Because if you include a pluralist society, a multicultural society, you're going to have to be ridiculously heavy handed to try and maintain peace or get everybody to get along.
	And what our elites have shown is they don't care about peace.
	Certainly the riots of 2020 show that.
	And they don't care about the cultures getting along.
	They care about destroying the white majority in these cultures, in these countries and the culture that created those people.
	So we've got legislation basically making it illegal to do anything to stick up for your own culture.
	So if we want to change the way the West is heading, what we need is people with moneyed power to repeal, repeal, repeal.
	Find these laws, repeal them.
	We've been going on about this for ages, like the Information Communication Act 2003, the one that includes, what is it, Article Section 127, the one that means that you're not allowed to say mean things online.
	Repeal.
	If I could speak to you, of course, the Tories have had 12 years to do all of this stuff.
	I remember when the Tories first came into power, was it 2010 now?
	And they were talking about a bonfire of the Blair era legislation.
	And they talked and talked and talked.
	That would have been glorious.
	And eventually they just dropped it.
	And now they've done nothing about any of this stuff over this whole point.
	In fact, if anything, they're going further.
	I mean, they...
	David Cameron's written articles for The Spectator bragging proudly about how he implemented affirmative action quotas in the Tory party.
	So how am I expecting this guy, or any of the people who are just like him in the same party, to come in and repeal those same acts that make it legal For everybody else to do the same thing.
	Well, I mean, they're going further.
	So was it the changes...
	Online Humsberg?
	Online Humsberg is a great example.
	Or the changes they're looking to make to the Public Order Act.
	It's all about...
	Because you could almost say the origin story of Western civilisation, it's starting from laws like Magna Carta.
	It is the promotion of the individual over the sovereign.
	Everything we're seeing from the Tories today, it is a promotion of the sovereign over the individual.
	It's, you know, we get to decide how you go online.
	It's we get to decide how you push back against the state in any particular way.
	All of the stuff that they're trying to build support for changes to the public order bill by what's happening with the...
	The eco, you know, the yoghurt-weaving lentilists who are super-gluing themselves to Bridges and Van Gogh and stuff.
	Oh, well, just stop oil, Extinction Rebellion.
	All of that is already illegal, but they're trying to use that to build consensus to control us so that next time they lock us down, we can't push back.
	It's controlled opposition, so it can do the old known chompski manufacturing consent.
	That's what they want.
	They want it to look as though there's a big populist uprising of people who desperately want it, just so that the elites can do what they were already going to do.
	So, yeah, I thought that was just a bit of an interesting discussion that we could have on that subject.
	I hope you've enjoyed that.
	And if you're interested in finding more discussions along with philosophical topics and anything like that, you can become a premium subscriber on the website.
	And if you just go to the original one for us, John.
	Yeah, we've got this one that I wanted to just point out.
	Recent contemplations that Josh did with Connor, talking about are we a...
	Are we a society of drug addicts, being that we're constantly being told that if you've got typical male behaviour, what you need to do is you need to get on antidepressants, you need to get on ADHD medication.
	You know, little boys, full of energy.
	I was full of energy.
	I was pretty misbehaving when I was a child.
	Do you know how my dad got me to stop misbehaving as a child?
	It wasn't by pumping me full of ADHD medication.
	It was from giving me a sharp smack on the wrist.
	That's how I learned to behave myself.
	Absolutely.
	Having said that, I could do with at least a LEMCIP right now, so I've got some sympathy for it.
	Well, of course, I'm not saying that LEMCIP is off the table.
	Well, maybe a bit strong, I don't know.
	I don't know what's next after that.
	I'm not saying that cough medicine is, you know, if you enjoy your cowpole, just don't overdo it on the cowpole or anything.
	More just the idea that these basic behaviours that we have are something that we shouldn't just automatically be medicating against.
	And Josh, coming from a psychological background, of course...
	I'm sure he has a lot of insight into the places where those kinds of medications are genuinely appropriate as well.
	To be fair though, if Canada is the future, we will look back on the days when they tried to over-medicate us fondly because it's better than being euthanised every time you go to the doctors with joint pain.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We're in a spiral.
	Okay, so let's talk about the end of US hegemony.
	Now, this, I think, does follow on quite nicely from the last segment, because, you know, I was saying I am a Western chauvinist.
	I do think the West is the best.
	And it's going to matter when China overtakes as the dominant global culture.
	And I think that is in the process of happening.
	Before I get into this segment, though, I do want to talk about a segment that we've got on our premium side.
	And this is Josh from Bew discussing how the United States achieved its dominance in global power in the first place.
	That is a superb example to the starter to what I'm going to talk about today in this segment.
	So let's get into this segment.
	Look...
	The background to what is happening at the moment is it is a big deal.
	And I like to pick stuff for the podcast segments that mainstream media is not talking about and they should be.
	Maybe they're not because they don't understand it or because it doesn't fit the agenda.
	But we are seeing a major geopolitical shift at the moment.
	Now, for me, this is one of the reasons why global Western leaders are behaving so badly at the moment.
	It's because they can feel this loss of confidence that they're going through because there is this shift In dominance from west to east.
	And the story that I'm going to pick on to highlight this is the recent visit of President Xi of China to Saudi Arabia.
	Let's throw up the Zero Hedge article because this is a good introduction to the story.
	Now, basically, so Xi goes to Saudi Arabia, he gets the full red carpet treatment, the king comes out to the airport to meet him, and they proceeded to sign about 30 billion worth of agreements between the two countries.
	And look, this is coming off the back of a really extraordinary period of US weakness that we've been going through.
	So under-elected President Joe Biden, you saw the complete rout of the US forces from Afghanistan.
	And I remember watching that at the time thinking, oh, this is a herald of something a lot bigger.
	But, you know, it was weird at the time.
	The press didn't want to talk about it.
	They just wanted to...
	It was the biggest embarrassment that America has seen since Vietnam, easily.
	They've never faced such a catastrophic defeat from such backwater peoples as well.
	Just a bunch of guys living...
	A bunch of beardy-weirdies and sandals, yeah.
	Yeah, beardy-weirdies.
	It's like Lib Dems with Kalashnikovs, and they drove off the US military and got them to leave hundreds of billions of equipment behind them.
	I think you're making the Lib Dems sound far too intimidating there.
	Yeah.
	I need a better example than that.
	And it also comes off the back of the energy crisis that we're experiencing as well.
	Again, this is the US-led effort to sanction the world's biggest energy exporter, which was not helped by Joe Biden shutting down the Keystone Pipeline on his very first day.
	So let's pick up on the key threads of this article before I go into what I really think is going on here.
	So the article is talking about how...
	There were pledges for further trade agreements, pledges to extend military cooperation, which is really significant.
	The $29 billion in agreement signed.
	They're going to set up a Huawei cloud computing region in Saudi Arabia.
	And they're building electrical vehicle manufacturing in Saudi Arabia and supplying hydrogen batteries.
	So this is significant because essentially what's going on here is China is saying...
	We can buy a lot more of your oil.
	You don't need to sell it to the US. We are going to buy it.
	So we're going to handle the hydrocarbon side of things.
	But also, we're going to provide you the tech so that you can transition.
	So if we are moving into a post-hydrocarbon world, we're going to make sure you're on the leaching edge of that as well.
	So we are providing a solution for now and the future as well.
	But the most interesting thing this article talks about is how most of these conversations were held behind the scenes.
	So we don't actually get to find out the full extent of what was discussed.
	Now, almost certainly, because these are themes that have been going on with the Saudis and the Chinese for some time, is it's going to include things like advanced military sales.
	It's going to include the expansion of the 5G and 6G network across that whole region.
	The 6G now.
	Yep, the 6G network as well.
	I've not heard about that one.
	And yeah, I don't know if you can name all the Gs.
	It's like Snow White, isn't it?
	But that's all going to be underpinned by Huawei, of course, which is essentially a sort of Chinese spy network.
	So anybody moving through this area is going to be subject to whatever level of surveillance that goes with.
	And the most contentious bit of all is the selling of Saudi oil to China, denominated in yen.
	Now, this is...
	That is a really big deal.
	I want to explain to that.
	Although, actually, I just want to comment on how the White House responded to this.
	So the White House put out a statement, let me read this, warning that China's attempt to exert its influence worldwide were not conducive to the international order.
	Right.
	Oh, that's a big threat coming from Biden.
	Oh, what's Biden going to do?
	Biden's got his hand over that big red button.
	He's geriatric.
	He's Parkinson's.
	He's shaking over it.
	But let's unpick that.
	So China's attempt to exert influence in the world, right?
	All the US has done since basically the end of the Second World War is exert its influence over the world.
	So, you know, we live onto the US hegemony.
	And then he says it's not conducive to the international order.
	Well, what order?
	So basically what he's saying is our order.
	So, you know, this is why as the Western influence...
	It starts to diminish.
	They're desperate to put in place what they call the global rules-based order, which is we make the rules and then the rest of the world has to live with them even after the rest of the world becomes dominant.
	And one of the things I think makes a country like China, who are, as far as I can tell from looking from the outside, deeply nationalist and deeply interested in embedding traditional roles and gender roles and such within the national population.
	Yeah, weird stuff like that.
	Yeah, they look over at America and they see, okay, what's the American order trying to do?
	Okay, they're trying to make everyone gay, and they're trying to make sure that everybody can dye their hair stupid colours, they're trying to make sure that everybody can have as much degenerate sex as they want and take as many drugs as they want.
	They want every city across the world to be San Francisco.
	And China goes...
	Nah.
	Nah, not feeling that.
	Well, and it's also the case, of course, that the US is pushing that agenda worldwide.
	They have made it very clear that it is part of their agenda to roll out exactly that.
	Yeah, they want the degenerate monoculture.
	And it turns out that places like Saudi Arabia are not desperately fans of that sort of way of thinking.
	I don't know.
	I feel like someone could have predicted this.
	Yeah.
	There's something in their culture that made you think, yeah, no, that's not going to work.
	But, of course, if you change sides, and that is essentially what's happening here, they're changing sides from the US to China, you don't have to do any of that agenda.
	It doesn't come with it.
	So, you know, let's look at the background of it.
	Let's just talk about the petrodollar, because this is what really makes it work.
	So, look, the US has been the superpower.
	They are a global superpower.
	And unlike previous empires, they've not gone down the route of basically extracting tribute, because that's normally why you have an empire.
	Historically, you have an empire.
	The empire sends resources and taxes back to the home country or the home city.
	And it's that extraction of tribute that works them.
	The US has never done that.
	So does that mean the US has never taken tribute?
	Well, no, because it did it through the petrodollar.
	What the petrodollar basically is, is back in the 70s, the US went to Saudi and they said, we give you security guarantees if you agree to...
	Right, so that's clever.
	First of all, because the house of sale back in the 70s was not as strong as it is today, so they lapped it up.
	If the US have got their back and are going to help them out from any internal or even external force, They went with that.
	So they started denominating in dollars.
	And this is where it gets really clever, right?
	Because where the Saudis lead, and they were allowed to have OPEC on the back of this as well, where the Saudis lead, all of the other oil producers had to go along with it or get invaded.
	You can take your pick.
	And that means the whole world obviously needs oil.
	But in order to buy oil, they only need dollars.
	So where are you going to get dollars from?
	Well, you're going to make stuff or produce resources and you're going to give them to the US in exchange for pieces of paper with the President's face on it.
	So the US can exchange paper for real things, which made them incredibly rich, along with their own ingenuity and work ethic and other things that they used to have.
	And on top of that, because the rest of the world is then sloshing around in dollars, they've got to do something with them, right?
	So what do they do?
	Well, they buy dollar-denominated debt.
	So, you know, the US can run a permanent deficit.
	It can have a massive military.
	It can have Medicaid.
	It can have all of these extra things because it knows that the rest of the world is going to buy its debt so it can run this deficit and make the whole thing work.
	So this relationship between the US and Saudi is the key.
	To the US being an empire.
	Just wondering as well, because I know that the US dollar is basically the reserve currency for...
	Made possible by the system, by the petrodollar.
	So it's made possible by that system.
	How does that play into it as well?
	Is it just another case where they have to buy US debt?
	That's because the world has so many dollars sloshing around in it that you can make the dollar the global reserve currency because there's so much liquidity available in it that it's the default to go to.
	So make no mistake, the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia Is of extraordinary importance.
	But something tells me, given how important it is, that if Saudi were to just switch sides and decide we don't want to do that anymore, that sounds like it could be a bit catastrophic for the US. It could be a big deal, and the media should be talking about this, but they're not, and that's why we're talking about it here instead.
	So, look, what happened when Trump came to power?
	The first trip that he made was to Saudi Arabia because he recognised the importance of this.
	What did the Bidens do when they came to power?
	Well, they decided to call Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince, MBS, a pariah.
	Yeah, that wasn't particularly smart.
	That's not anything I've heard of recommendations for diplomacy, but carry on.
	No, so they decided to label Saudi Arabia and MBS in particular as a pariah.
	At the recent G7 meeting, Biden made a big point about he wasn't going to speak to MBS because he doesn't like him.
	We've had a whole bunch of the national security apparatus, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, going on CNN, absolutely lambasting Saudi Arabia because they didn't sign up to the Russian sanctions.
	They're working with our enemies.
	Now, this is the sort of mindset that the current administration has.
	They are so used to domestic politics where if you don't fall in line with 100% of what they want, they just denounce you.
	You're just a pariah, you're a Nazi, you're a MAGAist, whatever it is.
	It is 100% sign up or we are going after you.
	Biden can go out in a blood red background and denounce all of the evil MAGA Republicans who are enemies of the state.
	Now, you can kind of get away with that in domestic politics.
	You don't do that to Saudi Arabia unless you don't need them anymore.
	You especially don't do it if they could then go and strike up a very attractive trade deal with a country where you've offshored a hell of a lot of your own manufacturing to, making you even more vulnerable.
	Because Trump was very good at trying to establish some kind of manufacturing and energy independence within the US because he recognised...
	If we're completely reliant on every other country in the world for all of our resources, this could end bad for us if they decide they don't want to work with us anymore.
	And what's essentially happening is the US is not recognizing...
	In fact, the whole Western system, the whole Angus, they're not recognizing what's happening.
	So can we go to the next link?
	So I apologize in advance.
	This is a link from the World Economic Forum.
	But the reason I picked them is because they've got a really nice graphic.
	So let's slide down to the...
	Yeah, let's go down to...
	There's a nice colourful bit.
	Here we go.
	Right, so take a look at that.
	Can we just get the bottom of that in screen as well?
	So...
	Oh, the UK took quite a fall at some point, didn't it?
	Okay, right.
	So this is basically the world's largest economies.
	Right.
	And basically what's happening at the moment is the opinion makers in the West and the US, they are stuck in the mindset of 1992.
	So what's going on in 1992?
	Well, the blue bit is the Americas.
	So US is dominant.
	They're at the top.
	Canada features.
	It's a bit far down the list.
	You've got one Asian country, which is Japan, but they pretty much mind their own business, so that doesn't matter.
	And then you've got all of the American Empire orbiters, that green European section, they're backing up the US. And then you've got Russia down there, and you've got China right at the bottom.
	Spain just drops off.
	Yeah.
	Well, of course, yeah.
	But I mean, so 1992, that is the mindset that Biden and our political leaders, they all think they're all stuck there, right?
	What's happening now?
	Well, it's starting to shift a bit.
	I mean, sanity has reasserted itself to an extent because the UK has overtaken France and Italy.
	There's no world where that should be otherwise, of course.
	But China has really ramped up.
	But I mean, otherwise, the picture is broadly the same.
	So the sort of 2008 era.
	And that probably was the case back in 2008, because before 2008, the green section and the blue bit at the top of the US, they actually used to have economies that did things instead of just literally making money.
	And when I say making money, I don't mean working hard.
	We mean literally fabricating money out of thin air.
	Yes, exactly that.
	That's what they do.
	So look at 2024.
	This is the situation that we've got coming right up on us now.
	It's a completely different picture.
	China is at the top.
	How accurate would you say that these predictions are for 2024?
	Oh, I would say, if anything, this is understating it.
	And that's a good point.
	That's going to be my next link.
	Because all of this is basically measuring...
	So we're measuring it in US dollars.
	So when we say that China has the biggest economy, we're measuring it in US dollars.
	And as soon as the US dollar falls, and suddenly we're measuring everything in yen, China's going to be looking pretty good for it.
	In fact, that's my next link, so hold that thought.
	Sorry, there was one other thing as well, which is that a few months ago, Josh and I did a contemplation talking about the economy of China, and Josh was talking about a lot of the economic mismanagement that was going on in China.
	They've got They've got full cities that are completely abandoned because the housing developers were about to crash and they just thought we need to get these people working on stuff.
	Build a city, no one lives there.
	How would you say that's affected them?
	Do you think that is going to lead to any sort of economic collapse in China?
	It's a mess.
	They are a centrally planned socialist mess.
	But they still actually do stuff.
	They actually produce steel, they actually produce goods, they produce energy, and all of those are things that the Western sphere is trying very deliberately not to do.
	So even with the economic mismanagement, they're still in a more independent and stable situation?
	I'm not trying to say they're shiny.
	I'm just trying to say that they have floated to the top because everybody else is torpedoing themselves.
	So, I mean, look at Germany on this chart.
	Germany used to be, you know, number three.
	It dropped to number four.
	On this chart, which is a couple of years old, actually, Germany's dropped under there.
	But the only reason, like, Germany is on this list at all, Germany has a two trillion economy.
	And that is underpinned by 20 billion of cheap Russian gas.
	And that's no longer true.
	They have essentially de-industrialized themselves.
	So I don't think even Germany's going to hold up on here.
	So yes, China makes stupid decisions all the time, but...
	That's what we've been doing in Europe, and that's what the US has been doing, and so it is a race of self-harmers, effectively.
	I've got to say, the predictions for the future, there's some interesting countries popping up almost out of nowhere.
	Obviously, in 2008, Brazil just suddenly...
	Rises up.
	And then we've got in, what is that, fifth place on the right in 2024, suddenly Indonesia has decided to join the chat.
	India, in third place, has decided to jump in as well, whereas before they weren't even players.
	It's a completely different picture, and what this is essentially showing is, on the left you've got a US-European-led world, and on the right you've got an Asian world.
	So I need to get John to start teaching me Mandarin?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Is that where you speak, John?
	Yeah.
	Oh, Cantonese.
	All right, fair play.
	Okay, right, next link.
	Let's now go to the next link.
	So this is an infographic, and again, this is a slightly older one, but it makes the point quite well.
	I don't want to go through all of this.
	Let's just go down to the bit that sticks up at the three o'clock position.
	Yep, you just went past it.
	Right, that bit there.
	So that bit is total reserves, and the red is China, and the blue is the US. And so I just want to pick out a couple of aspects of this.
	First one, look, China actually saves.
	The US is a debtor nation.
	And that disparity in savings between the two is quite sharp.
	That tells you something about the country.
	Let's go down now to the three o'clock position.
	Those bars out to the side, you might need to zoom out a bit, but these two long bars going out here, that displays, this is your question, so this displays the difference in the size of the economy between the US and China.
	But it's measured in dollars.
	So according to this, the economy of the US is about 17 trillion, whereas the economy of China is only about 10 trillion.
	But let's measure it a different way, OK? Let's go down to the bit that juts out...
	To the bottom right, these two bars.
	So this is basically, again, measuring the economy, but instead of doing it in dollars, we're doing it in something called purchasing parity power, so what you can actually buy for your money.
	And on that metric, and this is from 2015, China has already surpassed the US. And that was before all of the incredible inflation that's been going on in the US. One final thing I'm going to show on here before I move on, quickly to the left, energy consumption.
	If you look at the amount of energy being consumed in the two economies, the US is consuming the equivalent of 2,000 million tonnes of oil equivalent.
	China has already surpassed that by 3,000 to 2,000.
	So the amount of energy being consumed now, maybe they're not as efficient as the US, but the point is they're doing something.
	And it's another way of looking at the economy without having to measure it in dollars.
	So thanks for the link.
	We don't need a link.
	But what I'm essentially talking about here is the reason this is important...
	As anyone who's ever played a real-time strategy game will know.
	Only the real chads out there.
	The way you win is you turtle at the beginning, you build up your economy, and the reason you do that is because where the economy leads, military power invariably follows.
	I mean, this is the actual, if you go back to, I've forgotten the name of the author, Frederick, German author, did the National System of Political Economy.
	The Nietzsche?
	No.
	No, not Nietzsche.
	There's so many Fredericks.
	Yeah, you know who I'm on about.
	He talks about, okay, if you want...
	Let me just Google it very quickly.
	But he basically said that if you want to build a strong nation, what you need to do is you need to be protectionist for as long as possible so that you can build up your own national industries, and then you force everybody else to start accepting your products, and then you force them to be free trade so that you can just exact economic dominion over them.
	So whichever Frederick that was, that's exactly right.
	And that is the game that is taking place at the moment.
	Frederick List.
	Yeah, okay.
	So that is exactly the game that's taking place at the moment.
	China and the East is building up their economy.
	They're not being front foot militarily because they can't yet because the US is still strong in that respect.
	But because they have overtaken or, you know, depending on what measure, even if you want to use a dollar as the metric...
	Even using that metric, China is about to overtake the US. The Asian region as a whole, as we saw, they're overtaking the US. And this matters because mismanagement in the West has allowed this to happen far sooner than it should have done.
	And that means the dominant culture in the world is going to be one where you can drive over kids in BMWs and then offer a bribe to the family, and that's the expected standard.
	Brilliant.
	Can't wait.
	Yeah.
	This matters, and the mismanagement happens.
	Like I say, you're not going to get any of this on mainstream media.
	They don't talk about this change in hegemony, but it is real, and it is happening, and it means that the world that we spend the next 30 years in is going to be very different to the world that we spent the last 30 years in.
	But on a lighter note...
	Oh, was that the end?
	I thought the segment was going to end with a lighter note, but that was it.
	There you go.
	Cheery tidings for all.
	Merry Christmas.
	This is not the segment that has the white pill, I'm afraid.
	I don't know if the next one has it, but on a lighter note...
	It should be cathartic.
	Light entertainment.
	This will be very cathartic, because we're going to be discussing...
	Three Years a Royal, otherwise known as Harry and Meghan, the most recent release from Netflix, a documentary documenting the incredible hardships that Harry and Meghan have gone through ever since they started to go out, all the way up until the end of part one, which is what we got to last night.
	I think the two of us watching independently got to the end of part one, which closes off right as they're about to get out.
	Oh no, I actually managed to get through all three episodes.
	No, so did I. Oh, you did.
	But it does close off right before the wedding.
	Oh, okay, yeah.
	So first of all, I never watch TV, so...
	I'm sorry that this had to be breaking you back into it.
	Normally I watch podcasts on YouTube and I put everything on 2x speed, and the fastest Netflix will let you go is one and a half times speed.
	I didn't even know they let you speed it up.
	Yeah, so it was excruciating having to watch...
	Well, you had to watch three hours, I had to watch two hours.
	Yeah, I didn't know you could speed it up, so I was watching all three hours.
	You did it in real time.
	I was livid the whole time.
	It was excruciating.
	I was screaming at the screen at everything that they were saying.
	So, before we go any further, I'll just point to this old article from over a year ago now from Bo, almost called him Bade, called McCarthy Did Nothing Wrong.
	And I just wanted to point to this, because one, we don't...
	I don't promote Bo's articles enough, because he does put some really fantastic articles on the website.
	You can really feel the vitriol through his writing, and I think that's one of the things that really brings me onto his writing, because he writes very passionately from the heart, and also because McCarthy is a great example of how the media can be used as a tool of politics to manipulate the way that future generations see everyone.
	McCarthy legitimately was just a guy trying to root out communists in a time when the US military and Hollywood...
	Very much like it is nowadays, was completely infested with communists.
	Everything he said was right.
	And you had propagandists, you had people like Arthur Miller doing the Crucible, which is all about witch hunts, and it's like, I'm sorry, Arthur, witches aren't real, communists are, and communists were actually infiltrating the US, but what I was taught in school, I don't know if it was the same for you, because for some reason, in my English secondary school, they thought it necessary in media class to teach us about the evils of McCarthyism...
	And they told us, obviously, that it was all just a witch hunt.
	Everything that he did was wrong.
	He was very mean and evil and he brought a lot of people up for trial who turned out to have nothing to do with communism.
	Apart from his factual statements, which were bang on every single one of them.
	And apart from the fact that almost every single person he brought up and called a communist turned out later to be a communist.
	So that's just a great example.
	And just to remember that when we're talking about Harry and Meghan, if things go wrong, people are going to be looking at people like us insulting Harry and Meghan the same way that they want to look at McCarthy in that same way.
	So you should really check out that article.
	It's very, very interesting.
	So one of the things that people really got annoyed at when this first came out, just to draw your attention to some other stuff, was go to that first Twitter link for me, John.
	The one from Calvin Robinson was that clip.
	Everybody hates this clip.
	And honestly, I understand it's the one where there's the interview between the two of them.
	Harry is incredibly meek, incredibly submissive.
	You can definitely sense the relationship dynamics in that interview.
	So this is probably not going to be a popular view.
	Alright, alright.
	I actually do have some sympathy for Harry.
	He comes across like a kicked puppy.
	Yeah, look, he is a total blue-pilled male.
	I mean, he's not particularly bright.
	He doesn't run at a high clock speed.
	He's the physical embodiment of the Kuma meme.
	Yeah, but look, to be fair, in fact, if they just did the first episode and stopped there, that probably would have been all right, because the first episode is mainly about Harry and his upbringing.
	And look, Harry didn't choose to come into this life.
	You know, his mother did get a genuinely hard time from the press.
	And I can completely understand why he is a bit traumatised by the media and the paparazzi.
	So I completely get it.
	Plus, he did spend 10 years in the military.
	So that's more than I did.
	Thank you for your service.
	Honestly, the moment in the third episode where he goes to the military base and starts speaking to everybody, you can almost see him kick to life.
	The second that Meghan goes away from him and he just sits down with the military guys, all of a sudden he's jovial, he's charismatic.
	Any footage of him before he met her is a completely different person.
	It is quite shocking, the change.
	After the first episode, it really starts to focus...
	It becomes the Meghan Markle-only show, and...
	God.
	Any sympathy that I could have had...
	Yeah, because everything you say there, I completely understand.
	I recognise that what he went through in the first episode does do a relatively good job of showing you what he went through as a child, being hounded by the press constantly, not even being able to go on holidays with the family to be able to just enjoy themselves in peace.
	Wherever they go, everyone's following them constantly, but that's no reason to sell your family down the river and stick it with this American harpy.
	He feels very much like a passenger in this whole thing.
	But look, the show has a difficult job, because clearly the entire point of this Netflix series is to rehabilitate Meghan Markle in our minds.
	Oh, it's possibly the most self-serving piece of propaganda I've ever seen.
	But there are essentially three legs to the stall of this series.
	The first leg is that Meghan had absolutely no idea what she was letting herself in for.
	They repeat that constantly.
	Oh yeah, that's a big thing, constantly.
	Literally every five minutes.
	John, do you want to just put the...
	If we're going into the discussion, just put the clips on in the background.
	Yeah, the trailer, so you'll see some of the episodes.
	Part two of this is coming out on Thursday.
	No, I don't want to watch it, whether I end up watching it or not.
	I turned up to work this morning, really pleased with myself for having done my bit and watched the three series, and then somebody just casually mentions, oh, by the way, there's another three episodes.
	That was me.
	Yeah, I was not happy about it.
	Yeah, but anyway, so the three legs of the stall is one that she had absolutely no idea what she was walking into.
	The second one is that the UK is just an irredeemably racist place.
	They constantly bring up the empire in the third episode.
	I saw as well.
	That really jumped the shark.
	So in the second episode, the only evidence that they can give for the UK being a fundamentally racist place is Brexit.
	Brexit happened, therefore England bad.
	Well, there was that, but then in the third episode they start talking about empire.
	Throughout it you've got some interviews from race grifters, like, for instance, David Olusoga, who wrote that book Black and British.
	So Guardian journalists who have a very clear agenda that they want to push.
	And one of the things that they do in the third episode is they bring up the British Empire.
	And the British Empire was obviously a wealth extractor.
	We never did anything for any of the countries that we were ruling.
	We didn't put infrastructure, we didn't build cities, we didn't...
	Take manufacturing and industry over there.
	We only ever extracted wealth from those places.
	Because they've got a hard job with Meghan, because everybody thought that she was white.
	Even her own casting director makes the point that she got hired for suits, and it wasn't until she'd been working there for some time before it occurred to anyone that she wasn't white.
	Well, I think she said she had to point it out to them, and they thought that she was joking, because they thought that she was just a tanned Californian woman.
	But at the same time as that, they've got to push this whole agenda of racism, and so they're looking for examples of it.
	So like I say, Brexit, and they basically just conflate the union jack, people waving the union jack and wanting Brexit, and they showed an example of one guy who was complaining about illegal immigration.
	As an example of how racist it was in the second...
	By the third episode, it's complete jump-the-shark time.
	It's because there was slavery in the British Empire in the 1600s.
	That's an example of racism.
	Oh, and they point out as well, you know, we're taught that the English abolished slavery, which, I mean...
	Shockingly enough, I don't remember ever being taught that in secondary school, so by the time I was going through the education system, I guess they wanted to just sweep that one under the rug.
	But then he goes, yeah, they might have abolished slavery, but did you know they did it by paying off the slave owners?
	Yes, we didn't want a gigantic worldwide war to destroy slavery.
	We didn't want to have to send thousands and thousands of our own men.
	We just decided, hey, up until this point, legally, these slave owners have done nothing wrong.
	Take the money and just stop it.
	And essentially, the argument was there, is that they didn't end slavery the same way that we would do it today.
	They didn't have a civil war over it, I think is the big problem.
	Well, despite the fact that we do actually have slavery today, because of the Obama policies in Libya, there are open-air slave markets today, and the US isn't doing anything about it.
	However, I acknowledge that if they were going to do something about it today, they wouldn't try and pay them off the way that it was done in 1807.
	They would just bomb them again, because the US basically has two settings.
	It's either subsidise it or bomb it.
	And so, yeah, I appreciate they're not going to do it the same way.
	And the other example they gave for racism, and this was really pushing so hard because they had to make her out to be a victim.
	And the only hard evidence that they could actually produce is that Meghan and Harry went to a dinner with about 40 family members and Lady, whatever her name, sitting seven down on the left.
	Oh, wore a brooch.
	Yeah, wore a brooch that had some tenuous connection to slavery.
	Right, now, look, I'm sorry, but if you're sat at a dinner with 40 family members, which includes the Queen, you've really got to have your antenna up to notice a brooch, because I'm pretty sure it wasn't I Heart Slavery.
	I don't know, it was some face that was done in traditional African garb and was very black.
	So that just means racism.
	I think you're right, if it had been...
	But that's their strongest case.
	If she'd come in...
	Waving banners that said, I really love slavery, bring back slavery.
	If the Queen had stood up after a lot of gin and just went on a 45-minute parade about the Darkies, I can understand.
	She goes, William Wilberforce and his consequences have been a disaster for the West and...
	But it wasn't any of that.
	And so they were really pushing the racism out and they couldn't provide any evidence of it.
	And the other thing, the other really big thing that they wanted to have was that Meghan, like Harry, because Harry is traumatised by the press.
	He doesn't like seeing paparazzi.
	He doesn't like seeing press.
	Fine.
	I get it.
	I believe that is probably true, because Harry is not a seek-the-line-right kind of guy.
	I mean, there is one thing I would like to point out in massive hypocrisy, which is that at various points his own children are included in this.
	So if you've been traumatised from a very young age by the press, what you should probably want to do when you have children is not put them through that same stream.
	And that is what you are doing.
	To a lesser extent, perhaps.
	They talked about Meghan's life before she met Harry.
	And every example, because she was clearly absolutely obsessed with this, was that she wanted to get in front of a camera.
	So they give an example of her yearbook from when she was like 11.
	And the yearbook read, one day I'm going to be rich and famous on TV. It was pretty much that.
	Her dad was a lighting engineer and took her to this set of...
	Married with Children.
	He was the lighting director on Married with Children, which suggests just a hint of nepotism for me.
	And the thing is, her quote was that she absolutely loved being on set.
	She wanted nothing but to be on TV. And then it takes us through the story about...
	And they tried to play the poor Megan angle of her trying to get into TV, but she would go to rehearsals and she wouldn't get picked for the part.
	I don't think anybody has ever experienced that when trying to break into Hollywood.
	That's just how it bloody works.
	But anyway, so she eventually gets in, and then we have this weird juxtaposition where we've got footage of her on the red carpet, and, you know, she does...
	I don't know what it's called, but it's that thing that famous women do when they get in front of the camera.
	They just drop into the pose, and then they do the other thing.
	There's the hand on the hip.
	You push the hip to one side.
	Working the camera.
	You do the thing, and then you do the other thing.
	You hold it for a second while a few photos are taken, and then you drop into the...
	And she works the camera.
	So all of the footage before she met Harry is about her desperately trying to get in front of the camera.
	Every time a camera is put at her, she works it.
	She clearly loves it.
	Oh, you can see her doing it in the new footage for the documentary.
	There are these weird little cut-ins that they put in, cutaways, where it's like they're in a flat, they're preparing for the interview, and she's having her makeup done, and they're having little jokes with one another, and she's looking towards the camera, and she's smiling.
	But the whole point of those is so that you as the audience member go, oh my god, they're having little relationship banter.
	They're just like me!
	They're so relatable!
	No, they're not.
	They're living in a penthouse suite of a gigantic flat apartment complex.
	They're having clothes air dropped into them.
	At one point she just opens the door and it's almost like something from a Super Mario or something.
	They just pull through all of these clothes on this rack.
	And it's just like, this is not relatable.
	This is not relatable to me.
	And the things that she complains about, she complains about having a press team which is too small.
	Oh, relatable problems.
	am I right?
	And then look, there's other weird stuff.
	So look, I think what happened is that the documentary wants us to believe that she had absolutely no idea what she was walking.
	She had no idea that the press had any interest in the British royal family.
	So she signed up for it.
	And even though she had been, you know, she had basically been seeking out a camera whenever she had the opportunity before she met Harry, but the moment she met Harry, all of a sudden now she's scared of cameras.
	And there's that really weird scene where we're in a Land Rover, being taken away by something by their driver, and there might be a paparazzi guy behind them somewhere.
	Maybe.
	Yeah, maybe.
	You can't actually see it.
	There's no actual evidence of this happening.
	Honestly, there were so many parts of these three episodes that was just fluff to try and make you like the three of them.
	But, sorry, on your point of how obviously transfixed by herself she is...
	One of the very first scenes, they put a little phone in front of Harry and Meghan, and they play them a video where it's before Meghan had met Harry.
	It was 2015, between her divorce and...
	That's the very first scene in the series, isn't it?
	Yes, right after the...
	And that, you tell the story, but it completely undercuts this whole narrative that she didn't know anything about the royal family.
	Well, of course, because the person who was interviewing her said, like, oh, would you Harry or William?
	And she's like, oh, I don't know Harry, I suppose.
	And they're laughing about it.
	But one of the things I picked up on was, and this might be going a little bit armchair psychologist here, but the body language was very, very telling...
	Harry, the second it comes up, they're watching the footage, his eyes darting between the camera and Meghan.
	He's looking for her, he's trying to make a little quip here and there.
	He's so obviously desperate for her approval and to understand her reactions, her behaviour, not so that he can, say, guide it, but so that he can react against it.
	Whereas she doesn't look at Harry, doesn't do anything.
	She's the boss.
	She's purely transfixed by her own image.
	She doesn't glance at him once apart from when it's required of her to do the thing where she turns and smiles.
	There was one point in the third episode as well where they've got separate interviews where they interview them one at a time where Harry comes across a bit more confident than he does when the two of them are together, I think at least.
	Because there's one point in the third episode where they're discussing something about how they first met.
	And Megan's in the middle.
	She's in a role.
	And Harry suddenly interrupts her.
	And he seems happy.
	He's trying to get onto a role.
	And she just stares at him.
	She gives him the daggers.
	That was a mistake.
	You don't interrupt her.
	He glances over and he suddenly stops.
	He gets his head down, eyes down.
	He might as well have gone, sorry, dear.
	So that was the curtsy thing.
	So she did that elaborate curtsy and he was clearly uncomfortable.
	You could see it in his eyes.
	He didn't like that this was happening.
	But when she comes up from this elaborate curtsy, she's then smiling and turns at him and smiles.
	And that's his cue, oh, this is supposed to be a smiley, happy smile at Megan moment.
	Oh, this was a joke.
	This was funny.
	He instantly changed his whole demeanour from being really uncomfortable to, oh, yes, isn't this brilliant because, you know, he doesn't want to get a beating.
	I know, and to go on to some of my points here, one of the things is, this is obviously, like I said, a smear against the royals and the England in general.
	With no evidence.
	With no evidence.
	They bring up the Commonwealth after they bring up the Empire being so evil, and they say Commonwealth, literally this is the quote, they say Commonwealth is British Empire 2.0.
	They present no evidence for this.
	All of the evidence is there to emotionally manipulate you because they flash up a map Of all the territories of the British Empire where it's all red, all of the territories red meaning it's evil and then when they say Commonwealth it changes to green but then British Empire 2.0 changes back to red so you know that it's still evil so all of the Americans in the audience who have no idea what any of this is about really other than the celebrity drama of it go Oh my goodness, that means that the Commonwealth is evil as well.
	Canada's evil as well, because Canada's part of the Commonwealth.
	These people are absolute morons.
	And then there's the fact that it comes out, they make sure to sell you at the beginning, amusingly.
	There's the cold open, where it flashes up some infographics at you, and it says no royals decided to comment on all of this.
	Big surprise right there.
	But, um, one of the things that they point out is that all of the footage and all of the interviews were done in August of this year.
	Right.
	Meaning that it came out, that it was all done before the Queen had passed away.
	And you could say, oh well at least, you know, he wasn't insulting her from beyond the grave.
	The problem with that is, because I can see, I can see in my head people trying to excuse Harry for that, is that Harry could very easily have just gone to Netflix and said, hey...
	It's only been about two months since my nan died.
	Do you mind pushing this back maybe six months just to allow a bit more of a respectful period of mourning so that this doesn't come out so soon after she's died?
	He did nothing of the sort.
	Well, Megan would not let him...
	No, of course, that would be allowing the Queen to steal her limelight.
	One final note on this.
	What did you make of the bit with the dad?
	Because that was really weird.
	That actually calls up something that I... a bit of a broader subject that I wanted to honestly have a little bit of a rant about, but finish your question first.
	Because, basically, the dad raised Megan along with the mother.
	They shared custody between...
	They were separate, though.
	Yeah, from the looks of it, he was a really good dad.
	He used to do loads with her.
	He seemed like a nice guy.
	Yeah, he took a fishing...
	He basically did loads for her.
	There's all the footage of them when they were younger.
	It's probably his connections to the TV industry that got her acting in the first place.
	Exactly.
	So, I mean, he seems like a perfectly decent guy.
	You know, an average, normal guy.
	But anyway...
	Her mum seemed fine as well.
	He gets the treatment in the third episode because...
	What did he do?
	He basically allowed the media to pay him to take some innocuous shots.
	So there's a shot of him in a cafe reading a book about Britain.
	It's completely innocuous.
	He's not bad-mouthing anyone.
	He's not criticising the Queen.
	He's not doing anything.
	It's just he allowed the press to take photos of him and he got a bit of money for doing that.
	And that is held up as an example of him being...
	I mean, he's just excommunicated at that point.
	He's betrayed her.
	He might as well have stabbed her in the back.
	This is the Brutus moment with Julius Caesar.
	But why is it so wrong that he took a bit of money for being photographed reading a book...
	But she can take millions for taking a Netflix documentary.
	I was just watching this thinking, why is what he has done so evil, but you're taking 200 times that amount from Netflix, and that's fine?
	The only thing that I can think is, despite the fact that they're related, despite the fact that he is literally her biological father, he is white, and she is black...
	You wouldn't notice as long as she points out to you that she is black.
	Therefore, the different standards are applied.
	It doesn't go with the whole narrative that they're trying to build, which is racism, poor Meghan.
	They wouldn't point out the hypocrisy of even making this in the first place.
	But that's an interesting point, because what I wanted to point out in the first place is, along with Meghan herself being a central fixture, you've got people like David Olusoga, who I looked up, because I've read a few of his articles, his book, Black and British, I've not read it, I've Not really particularly interested in it, because I'm sure it's going to be pushing a very one-sided narrative of Britain's interaction with black people during the Empire and such.
	But he's mixed race as well.
	He's got a white mother or father, English mother or father, I forget exactly which one.
	But at one point they bring up that in getting employed and cast in suits, they say that Meghan was one of the first big representations of mixed race people on television, which is...
	Nonsense.
	That's a complete lie.
	Everything in this documentary is meant to be self-aggrandising to Meghan, because other than those early parts with Harry, it is the Meghan Markle show all the way through.
	And then I thought to myself...
	After the first episode, Harry is in this in the same way that the Lone Ranger's horse is in the Lone Ranger.
	He's a side character at most.
	He's an extra.
	But I decided to look up, okay, that's obvious bollocks, how many biracial actors, mixed-race actors, are there out there who've been around?
	And I looked it up and immediately found this list from Variety magazine or something of 60 different people who are all of mixed-race backgrounds, and...
	Oftentimes there were, say, black and Asian, there was one that was Chinese and Lebanese, something like that.
	So there was quite a few, and they inevitably asked them about the divide between cultural backgrounds.
	But every single time there was somebody who comes from a mixed-race background where it's black and white, other than Slash, because Slash comes from a mixed-race background, interestingly enough...
	Every single one of them is more than happy to sell their white family down the river.
	They say, I identify entirely as black.
	I identify with the black culture.
	And I just think to myself, it's the same with David Olsoga.
	It's the same with Meghan Markle.
	They are, for the sake of political points and money to be made, they are more than willing to sell one entire half of their family down the river.
	They are more than willing to sell half of their entire heritage down the river.
	And I find that absolutely disgusting.
	I think it is absolutely repugnant.
	If you come from a mixed-race background, I think, given that they're all your family, you should probably respect them and treat them as such, as all of your family, and not like Meghan has done here, and used this third episode of the documentary as a tacit way We've come full circle, haven't we?
	It's all what we started with, which is the cultural agenda pushed by these various race acts over the years, which creates a culture where one half of the family is preferable to the other half, because it's more...
	It's vile.
	And two more quicker points.
	One, they're trying to act as though this whole piece is some kind of whistleblowing exercise on the royal family.
	I could believe that if you decided to speak up about Andrew, but neither of you did, so that's immediately discredited.
	And the other thing was it was amusing in the first episode that they focus a lot on Harry.
	And they point out that in his younger years, to try and escape from the media attention he was constantly getting, he went to, what was it, Lothoso and Botswana, and spent a lot of time doing charity and relief work there, getting to know the locals, understanding what they went through, befriending a lot of them.
	I think he's friends with the Prince of Lothoso, something like that.
	Very interesting, and it was nice to see him go out and experience a bit of the real world, get himself out of that bubble that he was in, that he acknowledges that he was in.
	But then in the third episode...
	There's the clip where the two of them go to the NAACP awards ceremony where she's accepting some award for female representation or something like, yeah, woke award, blah, blah, blah.
	And he's got a voiceover in the background talking about, you know, I thought I'd understood the world.
	I thought I'd understood the plight of people across the world.
	But listening to these people really opened my eyes to the unconscious biases that I was swimming in.
	And I just thought to myself, that sums it all up, doesn't it?
	It wasn't actually going and experiencing the lives of impoverished people in Africa that showed me the differences and commonalities between people.
	It was listening to speeches by the most rich and entitled black people...
	In the entire world...
	I think that gets us closer to the core issue here, because there's obviously been a split in the family.
	They are completely unable to provide any evidence as to why it occurred, apart from that Britain is an inherently racist country and an armed war coach once.
	Whenever they actually try and prove that, like you said, they've got no evidence, and whenever they do show footage of the two of them out doing royal attendances in public, they keep showing footage of little old ladies going...
	Oh, doesn't Meghan look amazing?
	Oh, I'm so happy for the two of them.
	So their own footage is just proving them.
	So there is obviously the other half of this conversation which has been missed out, the other half of what caused this family breakup.
	To your last point, it is probably Harry and Meghan started turning up and giving them woke lectures.
	That's probably what drove this split in the family.
	Yes.
	But with that, I just want to end this by saying it was a horrible, horrible way to spend three hours.
	Don't do it yourself.
	We did it so that you don't have to.
	Yes, you absolutely do not need to watch this.
	Don't watch it.
	And if you want to repay us in some way, please become a subscriber to the website.
	It helps to pay all of our wages.
	So thank you very much.
	Let's move on to the video comments.
	That weekend segment with goblin mode was racist against us green skins.
	So we's taking that meme back.
	We's going orc mode.
	See, that's when you does your bestest at what you does bestest and have a zoggin' good time while doin' it.
	We's gonna have another meme.
	Take the orc pill, my brudda.
	Right, we're good on that one.
	Yeah, you know what?
	Actually, you've won me over.
	I completely disavow everything that was said in the Goblin Mode segment.
	I didn't realise my own unconscious biases were bleeding through that entire time.
	And in fact, the Orc pill sounds delicious.
	I'm going to avow myself as an Orc nationalist from this point onwards.
	Wah, brother!
	Carry on.
	I guess maybe I should be apologizing for what I put you guys through last week, but no.
	You all need to share my pain.
	A shout out for all those who just have to keep their mouths shut at Christmas for the sake of Christmas peace.
	Don't worry about me though, I am currently reading for a glaring pincer and I'm actually quite enjoying this so far.
	It's a bit heavy, like Selma Rillian, but I'm enjoying this.
	I've not read the supplementary Tolkien stuff.
	Have you?
	I have watched the movies.
	Really?
	Is that it?
	Have you not even read the books?
	No.
	Oh my goodness gracious me.
	It turns out we've got a usurper in the office ladies and gentlemen.
	Now the books are very good.
	Obviously start with The Hobbit.
	The Hobbit is also written The easiest, it's the easiest read, and then Lord of the Rings gets very in the weeds with the details, but obviously it still tells an amazing story.
	I've heard that the Silmarillion is very heavy going, especially because Christopher had to finish off from the notes that were available that J.R.R.R. Tolkien left him.
	But I do need to read those.
	Also, yeah, thankfully I'm actually very lucky that the majority of my family tends to fall very conservative.
	Not as conservative as myself, which I think, if I've been having any conversations with them maybe eight years ago, they certainly would not expect that to be the case.
	You can work on them this Christmas, then.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	So I don't have those struggles.
	Do you have those struggles?
	No, they just let me go.
	They just let me run on my rant.
	Oh, that's alright then.
	I mean, outside of them already agreeing with you, that's the next best thing.
	Have we got one more video?
	Looks like it.
	As a physician and a pathologist who's done autopsies on fetuses, I can state with authority that abortion ends human life.
	Yes, abortion is baby murder.
	Yep.
	Well, I'm sorry to hear that you've had to go through those sorts of experiences, because I can't imagine that is very nice to do those sorts of autopsies, but no, I understand exactly where you're coming from.
	It's nice to get some official backing for that, even if I didn't necessarily need a doctor to confirm it for me.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Alright, let's go on to the written comments on the website then.
	So, first one, Victor E. San says, that initial discussion about politics and culture was very good.
	That's all I have to say.
	Well, thank you very much, Victor.
	I hope you enjoyed that.
	I hope everybody enjoyed that.
	I just thought it would be an interesting change of pace to have more of just a chat about something.
	That was a good chat.
	Andrew Tao says, hi Dan, have you heard of the geopolitical strategist Peter Zaihan?
	Well, look, yes I have.
	The thing with Peter is you need to take his data points because his data points are absolutely golden but disregard his conclusions because that guy is a full-on neocon.
	So, I mean, he is all over the sort of Russian-Ukraine thing.
	He takes any report from the Ukrainian side as gold.
	So his question is nothing.
	He's a total war kind of guy.
	So, yeah, I agree.
	Zyhan is good for the data points but just ignore everything that he says after he gives you the data.
	I'm assuming his conclusions for his data points inevitably results in, and this is why we must invade.
	Well, so his basic takeaway is that the US is going to remain on top forever, and you can pretty much disregard China and Russia.
	Oh, a Fukuyama end of history kind of takeaway.
	Liberal democracy in the West.
	He's very, very neocon on his takes on everything.
	Yeah, alright.
	Right, well, let's carry on.
	So FreeWill2112 in Politics Downstream from Culture says, if you allow an ideologically motivated group to have almost total domination over education for nearly two decades, don't be surprised if the people who pass through those institutions are totally transformed by that ideology.
	Yes, of course.
	Yuri Bezmenov warned us about how this would fan out into the institutions beyond education and it would take about 20 years to come to full fruition.
	People like to dismiss his views and yet here we are.
	I... I actually haven't met anybody who isn't just a raging leftist who dismisses what Yuri Bezmenov says.
	Because what he said back in the day is demonstrably and obviously true.
	So if you get someone who's a non-believer, all you need to just do...
	Yuri Bezmenov was right.
	Yeah, absolutely he was.
	I mean, that's all very true as well.
	Like I say, that whole 20 years to come to full fruition is absolutely helped along, and in some cases often pushed along very forcefully by the fact that the legislation gets put in place.
	And then it takes maybe about 20 years for people to understand with judicial precedent exactly how that legislation is enforced and how it needs to be enforced, or even how it shifts to be enforced.
	Because like we said, it's like, you know, you could say affirmative action could potentially work for a limited amount of time if applied correctly.
	Well, the people who are going to be applying that are not going to be thinking about how to apply it for only a limited time.
	And it always has to become the cutting-edge issue wherever that moves to over time.
	Kevin Fox makes an interesting point.
	He says it's not just injured people in China you can't help, it's also suicides.
	If you prevent somebody from committing suicide, you can be prosecuted because you've interfered with karma.
	As for the injured people case, that only affects Chinese people.
	If you see a foreigner injured, even the Chinese will help.
	Well, that's reassuring.
	If I go to China, I can happily walk out in front of a car.
	I have been to China.
	It was slightly horrifying in that you'd see a pretty girl at a restaurant.
	Chewing with her mouth wide open.
	Is that what they do?
	They just chew with her mouth wide open.
	It is disturbing.
	I thought they try and instill really strict manners in them from a very young age.
	No, that's Hong Kong.
	Completely different culture.
	Surely their food just goes everywhere.
	It is disturbing.
	I mean, I do remember the most exposure to China I have, having not been there, is from the classic series An Idiot Abroad.
	Carl Pilkington's travels there.
	And I do remember the probably quite infamous marketplace scene where he's just watching people eat, and there's that person who's just got an egg.
	He's like, oh, at least that guy's got an egg.
	Cracks open the egg, takes out a fetus, and just starts chowing down.
	It made me feel ill.
	I would absolutely be a Carl Pilkington.
	I'm not desperate.
	I'm desperately keen to go back, I've got to say.
	Yeah, I'd be there with my bag of monster munch.
	Yeah, so, oh yes, we've got another comment on the Chinese thing from Zen Chan.
	So China actively punished Good Samaritans.
	Does this make China the most unchristian country ever?
	I suppose it's not a Christian country.
	I'm an atheist, but I can still see parts of Christian culture makes us better.
	So actually, on the Good Samaritan point, they did pass a law in 2017, which was effectively, I think it was a translation of Good Samaritan.
	I was going to say, I think I think it was just called Good Samaritan in 2017.
	So they have tried to make a push back against this kind of cultural thing, but it's embedded in the culture, and so obviously it is stuck.
	I'm glad at least they recognise that it's a problem, but I think, once again, if you want to get rid of that problem, you either need to tell judges that they have to disregard the legal precedent or eliminate the law that pushes it in the first place, and if they're guaranteed, if they desperately want to make it so that it appeals to the law of karma, so to speak, then I don't know if they're going to be able to do that.
	Free Will, did you have one you wanted to read?
	No, no, no, let's go to the...
	Free Will again says, Unfortunately none of these big parties will do anything about this, so forget about them.
	We need to persuade people like Richard Tice, and there is a concerted effort to change the West against its will.
	And if his interview with Bo was anything to go by, I haven't actually listened to that one yet, so it should be quite interesting when I do get around to it.
	He doesn't really believe in this anti-West conspiracy.
	That's the problem, isn't it, when you do have people in positions of power with money who don't see the problem.
	He thinks it's just bad governance.
	I mean, it is bad governance, but it's bad governance in a particular direction.
	I think it's beyond obvious that there is some kind of concerted effort by our compromised elites to make radical change to the West.
	Oh, absolutely.
	That is absolutely what they've been planning on doing for a long time.
	I would say that...
	If we're going to talk that power, essentially, power being the ability to kind of become your own sovereign and create laws and not apply those same rule of laws to yourself...
	Sovereign is he who decides the exception.
	Yes, if that comes from money, it is good that we do have someone.
	I know we've been going on about him a lot recently.
	It's good, though, that we've got someone like Elon Musk who is pushing...
	Oh, I'm a fan.
	In the other direction on Twitter at the very least.
	And you can see exactly what I'm talking about when you see that he decides, I'm just going to fire all the lazy people.
	All the people who don't need to be in Twitter, and you can remember Carl's little meme that he shared about this yesterday, when what actually turns out happens is then all of the women...
	Women who got fired in that downsizing of the company then turn around and say it's not because I was lazy it's because I'm a woman and therefore we can get together and push a class action lawsuit and even if that class action lawsuit doesn't succeed most companies are at the point where they don't want to have to go through the time and they don't want to have to spend the money fighting such a lawsuit so they end up just bowing down anyway and we're lucky that Elon He's somebody who will actually take the fight on sometimes.
	Yeah, he's got the cojones for it, which so many people do not.
	So moving on to the comments from the end of US hegemony, Miles Mitchell points out that the issue with China is the one-child policy.
	So some predictions are that by 2050 the Chinese may drop to a billion.
	So yeah, they are going to experience population declines as much as other areas, but as that infographic showed earlier on, the population distribution is not wildly different to the US. So yeah, they have got a bit of a pyramid diamond as opposed to a triangle, like some of the more Southeast Asian countries.
	But it's not materially different from the US, so you can strike them with both of that.
	I also thought that they...
	I remember learning about the one-child policy in secondary school.
	I'm pretty sure, didn't they basically loosen the whole thing up and go, well, that was a disaster?
	Yeah, it got loose and I can't remember when, and it's been scrapped entirely at this point.
	But it's one of the very few countries that actually has more men than women, but it's like 51% to 49%.
	So it is a problem at the margin.
	It does cause social issues, but it's not unrecoverable from.
	What have we got?
	We've got Bleach Demon says, Obama openly stated he wanted to ease the US down from lone superpower status.
	It will be a dark day when US hegemony falls.
	It's just a shame that the US has been destroying its own culture, because it was a great culture.
	It was something to emulate.
	US hegemony obviously is not ideal, but it would be much less of a problem if they didn't want to impose a really degenerate, really deracinated culture upon everywhere that they've got dominion.
	If it was the 80s and the 90s, when it still had faith in itself...
	When it was sort of blue jeans and rock songs and the media, the movies that it was putting across the world.
	Right, we need to return to Metallica nationalism.
	Something like that.
	But these days, all of the movies coming out of the US is that they hate themselves.
	And so, no, of course, if that's the influence they're putting on the world, of course the world is going to turn against them.
	And that and the economic, the military mismanagement under the current regime is just pushing us to a China-led culture.
	It's not going to be pretty.
	pretty not gonna be pretty at all and Bon Von Warhawk says honestly it's no surprise to see the despotic royal family of Saudi Arabia getting into bed with the CCP after all birds of a feather fought together well yeah but that's true But the US was in bed with them for the last 40 years as well.
	And you'll notice that the US periodically decides that they need to instill democracy around the world.
	They've never tried that with Saudi Arabia.
	So they're used for their power and influence.
	Kevin Fox is saying the Chinese don't care about the abandoned cities.
	They will wait until the buildings begin to fall and the millions of Chinese will move in and recycle the bricks and puzzles.
	Yeah, so they are very pragmatic on this.
	Those abandoned cities are clearly a mistake, but the US is making plenty of mistakes themselves.
	I think somebody also, I think it was AA in fact on Twitter, did point out that a surplus of housing is a nice problem to have.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And Casey Darling is saying China is building more coal power plants this year than exists in the US. Yeah, so that goes back to my point about the amount of energy usage.
	You know, at a fundamental level, what's an economy?
	It's a physics problem.
	How much energy, agricultural goods and services do you produce?
	China is producing more.
	And that's as simple as that.
	They have a bigger economy and military power will follow from that economic power.
	And we shouldn't have rushed into this point, but that's where we got to.
	Comments on Three Years of Royal.
	Yes.
	Beggar Hero says, I must ask, does Netflix blackwash Harry as a black man instead of a ginger actor?
	Now, it would be well within type for them to do something like that.
	They've not done it yet.
	Part 2 is coming out on Thursday, so it would be incredible if they did some dramatic re-enactments.
	If only Harry...
	Harry got sort of acting advice from Trudeau.
	He could have gone for that angle.
	He could have done it himself, yeah, but it would be incredible.
	Actually, wouldn't that be amazing if they did the dramatic reenactments and they just got Terry Crews?
	I'm a bit disturbed.
	I've just read Bass Apes' comments.
	Well, Base Ape saying, you're actually making me want to watch this trash just to see how bad it is.
	Now, Base Ape, I know you're a glutton for punishment.
	I know that you're something of a mad lad, something of a madman, something of a degenerate.
	But don't.
	You will only hurt yourself in doing such a thing.
	Like, you're stood over there with the knife.
	I'm asking you to put it down, okay?
	Everything's going to be better if you don't watch it.
	Omar Awad.
	Harry is so whipped, and I hate that he shares the same name as me, because it is really annoying, it It brings all the rest of us down for association.
	H is so whipped that he should have been played by Will Smith in his Netflix documentary.
	Actually, yeah, if they get Will Smith to play him in part two, that would be incredible.
	That island guy.
	Hard to believe H has gone from flying attack helicopter gunships in Helmand province and partying in Vegas, and also dressing as a Nazi, to the absolute cook that he is.
	Oh, wasn't it funny how they tried to brush over the Nazi bit as quickly as possible by just having him go...
	I just didn't understand the damage that it was doing to certain communities.
	So wearing a brooch to dinner is, you know, categorical.
	That's your entire case.
	Turning up to a party as a Nazi, oh, well, that's just hijinks, you know.
	What 20-year-old doesn't get dressed as a Nazi on the weekends, am I right, bros?
	Lord Nerevar says, With the best will in the world, I think the best solution to Megan and H is to just ignore them.
	They're already reviled by the nation and can't exactly do any more damage to their reputation.
	Let them fade away.
	You can say that, but they won't let themselves fade away.
	And they've got the backing of a massive media apparatus and millions and millions of dollars to make sure that they are always in your face.
	So the least that we can do...
	As your dedicated public servants is to watch this trash so that you don't have to.
	I'm just really hoping that that segment does really bad numbers because if our podcast today does good numbers we're going to have to watch the other three parts.
	Yeah.
	So please, log off now.
	Please don't share it.
	Don't spread the word.
	Please just keep it to yourselves that we watch this, okay?
	Callum Dayton, late to the podcast.
	Come into this H&M segment.
	I'm more in favour now than ever that their titles be removed.
	Yeah, I see no issue with just removing their titles.
	Harry, what he's done in throwing his family under the bus is personally repugnant.
	I would say close to treasonous in smearing the family name of our monarchy.
	So I think, yeah, get rid of the titles.
	Meghan should never have had a title in the first place.
	She was just another American divorcee harpy, which always ends the same way.
	They've not learned the lesson yet.
	Nicholas Valentine.
	For Meghan Markle's fantasies of smashing the royal establishment, she gives me the same vibe as my ex-wife, I'm so sorry about that, whom happened to be an abusive, narcissistic, manipulative, redacted.
	So I'm not surprised by the copious amounts of lies and bile that she's espousing.
	People like her thrive on it.
	I find it funny as well that Netflix put out the we're upset by the lies in the documentary.
	Bollocks are they.
	It generates controversy which generates views.
	Yeah, absolutely true.
	Edward Woodstock says, Yes, well, try being me, it's worse, because there's stuff I haven't said so far.
	However...
	Update on that first one, though.
	Go on.
	Yeah, to be fair, though...
	Yeah, that's because my view of the next couple of years is actually that things are going to get really bad, but I am actually quite optimistic about the longer term.
	So, you know, the main part of the 2020s I think is going to be bloody awful, but by the end of the 2020s there's lots of reasons that I have to be really optimistic.
	I think the elites, they are grasping at everything they've got at the moment because they can feel this slipping away from it.
	So there are plenty of positive things that I can talk about.
	I just haven't done it yet, but good for pulling me up on that.
	I will try and do the next segment on something really positive.
	Listen, just for when China takes over, start investing in elbows and knee pads and helmets, okay?
	Because if you go out on the street, you're going to need them.
	And besides, on good news, on some of the stuff that you talked about, SBF, Samuel Bankman Fraud, has just been arrested in the Bahamas by the authorities there, seemingly to potentially go to trial for defrauding all of his investors.
	So this is a guy who grew up in an ultra-democratic household.
	His mother was a Democrat organiser.
	He then went off to Stanford.
	He became a billionaire at a young age.
	He got his way through investor meetings by playing League of Legends or whichever one it was.
	You know, for the last few years, he's had luxury flats, sex on demand, drugs, the whole lot.
	So, you know, he's a young man with a certain expectations from life, and he's probably going to be spending the next hundred years in a federal jail.
	So that does cheer me up just a little.
	Oh dear, oh dear for him.
	Casey Darling says, Megan lived with her dad all through her teens while her mum was in prison for fraud and tax evasion, allegedly.
	Yeah, interesting that we watched the full three episodes and didn't hear any of that, did we?
	That would explain why there's so much of her life was based around her dad, but I didn't know that, that's interesting.
	I mean, I did think the way that she tried to make it sound as though her dad was almost a distant figure in her life, because they didn't do any personal interpretation.
	Oh, you get that from watching this series without knowing anything else.
	Edward again says...
	See, I tweeted out that I was going to watch this.
	Well, I was watching this last night.
	And so many of them were just sympathy for me because people think that my only job in this office is to watch terrible movies and give reviews of them.
	And to be fair...
	I put myself through it.
	I'm the one that suggested we do this segment.
	I'm the one that suggested that Connor and I watch Black Panther 2.
	At least I didn't have to do that.
	I've no one to blame but myself.
	If you want to get a much better experience, you can watch our review of it, because it's much better and much more entertaining than watching that film.
	Casey Darling says, I'm an American woman.
	I saw this gold digger coming a mile away.
	She was never famous.
	None of us ever heard of her cable TV show until she started dating Harry.
	There's a whole lot of YouTube commentary of Mexiteers that cover their lives and half of them are American.
	Yeah, so I just don't follow celebrity at all.
	I've never followed the royal family.
	So when I came into this with a genuinely fresh perspective, I knew there was a bit of a brouhaha going on with the whole Harry and Meggle thing, because you can't avoid that.
	But I've never paid it any attention.
	So I did actually come at this kind of fresh.
	And I've got to say, if this is their best attempt to rehabilitate her...
	It's not doing a good job.
	I can't imagine what the other side of the conversation is like.
	That's interesting that you said you'd never heard of the TV show Suits, because I had, but it's because I used to watch Dave all the time for QI, because they would all show reruns of QI. Oh, Dave was the one that, yeah, they used to show...
	And Suits was only shown on Dave, and I thought to myself...
	Top Gear, they used to show Top Gear at lunch times on Saturdays.
	Yeah, yeah, they used to show Top Gear, constantly.
	And whenever I was watching it and an advert would come up for suits, I thought, okay, this is an American cable television show that only Dave is showing in the UK. That's not a good sign.
	That's not a great sign.
	But anyway, I think that's all the time that we've got.
	Thank you very, very much for tuning in.
	We'll be back again tomorrow at 1 o'clock.
	Until then, take care.

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