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March 6, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:34:20

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #603

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast Hello to Cetars episode 603 on today the 6th of March 2023.
	I am your host Connor joined today by Stelios and we'll be discussing how far right is just a meaningless smear, the dangers of statism and Gen Z's dating purgatory.
	One that many of our audience are probably trapped in, I am sure.
	Without further ado, let's jump straight into today's news.
	Have you or any of your favourite content creators ever been smeared as far-right for taking a fairly banal and sensible political position like Don't lock me in my home for two years.
	Or maybe we shouldn't be racist to white people on behalf of slavery and historical atrocities that they didn't commit.
	You know, that really kooky stuff.
	Really ridiculous. Have you ever been confused or offended by the fact that you've been smeared as far right when it couldn't be further from the truth about your principles?
	Well, good news is the insult is so worn thin because they've overused it and applied to people like Russell Brand, where it obviously doesn't apply, that we can just laugh it off and dismiss it now.
	Here's why far right is just a baseless smear and we can disregard it quite happily.
	Let's start off with Bloomberg here.
	So this is just a good example.
	Recently, I don't know if you've been too aware, Stelios, but we've been doing lots on 15-minute cities.
	Yeah. And the 15-minute cities is apparently conspiracy theory according to outlets like The Guardian and now Bloomberg.
	What 15-minute cities actually is, and you can look at all the websites from the Clinton Foundation and the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is an initiative to keep you within a 15-minute radius of your home and make it so that cities have all you would ever possibly need within that radius.
	And it's to reduce carbon emissions.
	The problem with that is they're going to tie penalties to your ability to leave with...
	Traffic recognition cameras, facial recognition cameras, and they will lower your social credit score should they pass things like a digital ID or a carbon credit tracker limit, which people at the Green Party have proposed.
	So it's a totalitarian imposition in your freedom of movement.
	It sounds like ideal for people who are bored of living.
	Yes. Well, it's people that are happy to be confined to a pod and sedated by material pleasures but don't have any curiosity.
	And that's not really the human spirit.
	I mean, we're generally quite intrepid as a population.
	But people who are obsessed with controlling things on spreadsheets don't want us to move too far outside our home because it has all those inconveniences like litter or pollution or road use or resource use.
	And so they think they can just control you so it looks all nice and good on their bar graphs.
	Or people... Yeah, well, you are the carbon they want to reduce.
	And so they end up saying things like this, which is, the far-right protesters in the UK claim that a local traffic control plan is part of a global authoritarian plot.
	What the heck is going on?
	Well, one of the cities that's been targeted by protests over the 15 Minute Cities initiative is Oxford.
	And Oxfordshire Council have been putting in traffic bollards and flower boxes like Sadiq Khan has in London and people have showed up fairly recently to go down there and protest this.
	And this is a video, if we go to the next, by the Oxford councillors.
	And if you notice the things that they say, they are...
	They're not just standing there like it's some kind of hostage video where they're being shown a piece of paper with the gun pointed behind them saying, say this or else.
	But everything they say sounds like received wisdom.
	They are tired platitudes.
	It's very scripted and very inauthentic.
	So let's listen to how they dismiss your concerns about being locked in your home by their technocratic interventions.
	If we could play this clip, please. Hello, everyone.
	Recently, we've seen a lot of misinformation about traffic filters circulating online.
	This misinformation is being spread by many disreputable sources and it has been extremely disappointing to see it being picked up by the national media outlets as well.
	These conspiracy theories are causing real-world harm and need to stop.
	We have been receiving many calls and emails from worried residents in genuine fear that they might be locked in their own homes.
	This is categorically untrue and we're talking you today to explain the truth.
	To reassure residents and set the record straight, we want to be absolutely clear.
	We are not planning a climate lockdown or a lockdown of any kind.
	The traffic filters will be installed as a trial on six roads in Oxford in 2024.
	They will not be physical barriers.
	They're not steel walls or electronic gates.
	They're simply traffic cameras that can read number plates.
	Okay, so there are physical barriers because there are literal bollards in some roads to stop you from going down these low-traffic neighbourhoods to the point of where the fire department and the ambulance service have complained and people have literally picked them up and removed them and thrown them in bins.
	But the gaslighting there is astronomical because they use the phrases which have just been, again, tired old buzzwords.
	Four uses there of misinformation, conspiracy theorists and real-world harm.
	All things that the WEF types are obsessed with legislating against.
	What does misinformation mean?
	Who are conspiracy theorists? People who say things we don't like, because it gets in the way of our agenda.
	It's just disingenuous. It is, and I think that it is very dangerous that after the COVID lockdowns, many people have been accustomed to it, to lockdowns, and this sends a really bad message to people in governments who may see this as an opportunity to restrict further liberties or as a sign that people are okay with their liberties being restricted furthermore.
	One of the UN's economic advisors who also works for the World Economic Forum, Manira Mirza, penned an op-ed which said we should re-appropriate lockdown measures to reduce carbon emissions.
	And so what we see there is the government has forced through a policy that nobody asked for.
	It then becomes the norm, the expected thing to do, because it scaremongers enough people into complying with it, as we'll see that they did later when we go through one of Matt Hancock's leaked WhatsApp messages.
	And then you, as a person who is opposed to this, who raises fair objections to the policy, the efficacy, or the morality of it...
	Are marginalised as a conspiracy theorist, a spreader of misinformation, or a far-right harm spreader.
	And it's just a buzzword to enact repressive tolerance on you, to label you as an other, and then to get the renter mobs like Stand Up For Racism or any of the various lobbyists who act as left-wing organisations like Momentum to go and bash you in the street and discredit you online.
	It's just a dog whistle.
	This reminds me of 1984 and the use of language there.
	I'm not saying that we live in such a society, I don't want to be misunderstood, but the practice It resembles such a practice progressively more.
	And the idea of corrupting language to such an extent that terms lose their meaning because there is a chaos, a linguistic chaos that is caused by how carelessly words are being used is very dangerous.
	And again, it sends the wrong message to the wrong people.
	And I think people are, fortunately, wising up to this linguistic chaos because you can only move around in the fog so long until you stumble into something and people feel like lockdown was stumbling into something, a policy they weren't asked about.
	A similar policy they weren't asked about was Sadiq Khan's expansion of the ULEZ zone to all of the London area because in the consultation period everyone was overwhelmingly against it and he pushed it anyway because he got orders from on high from whichever think tank or place in Davos he would quite like a job in after he's voted out as mayor or or has his terms up that says we need to reduce carbon emissions so again restrict freedom of movement inconvenience people out of driving through London and this was a people's forum where Sadiq Khan presented the ULES and the plan to roll it out to a group of London constituents he decided to marginalize all of them as far-right he conflates a bunch of different groups together and they're not too happy about it so let's listen to the people's displeasure please There were objections in 2006 when we banned smoking from public places and there are objections now.
	What I find unacceptable though is some of those who've got legitimate objections join in hands with some of those outside who are part of a far-right group who are...
	Some of those outside Let's be frank.
	Let's call a spade a spade.
	Some of those outside are part of the far right.
	Some are COVID deniers.
	Some are vaccine deniers.
	And some are Tories. Look, hang on, hang on.
	The Mayor has a right to be heard, right?
	This people's question time is an opportunity for you to have an exchange of views, not to hack or shout, please.
	Otherwise, we could end this very quickly.
	Now, to those people who've got legitimate concerns...
	Anyway, fact.
	Some of you have got good reasons to oppose you, Les, but you're in coalition with Covid deniers...
	You're in coalition. You may not like it.
	You may not like it.
	You may not like it.
	You're in coalition with the far right.
	And you're in coalition with vaccine deniers as well.
	So, I am very glad that the crowd decided to boo that, because the nakedness of the far-right label being a smear is on pure display.
	Because he lumps them in with COVID deniers, vaccine deniers, obviously trying to invoke the ludicrousness of Holocaust denial when COVID and vaccines exist.
	So it's not like they're saying they don't exist.
	They just have questions which cannot be voiced on YouTube.
	And also, Tories.
	Now, I know Sadiq Khan's head has disappeared up his rectum because he's so left-wing.
	But I don't have a principal complaint of the Conservative Party being too conservative.
	If anything, it's quite the opposite, as we've covered timelessly.
	And I think that's why the British public now are not voting for them in droves.
	A large amount of people that voted for Boris Johnson won't vote conservative in the next election because they didn't get what they were promised and because they were socially conservative.
	And so it just embarrasses the far-right smear as being unable to be defined, but here's a bunch of groups I don't like, and so I'm just going to hit them with this label.
	But he does this because he wants to blackmail the population.
	And he wants to say the percentage of people that support the Tory party, however large it is at the moment, you are going to be labeled as far right if you are not going to buy into the entirety of the agenda that he's putting forward.
	And the alternative is, if you are labelled as far-right, you will be marginalised, you will lose your job, and you will be, let's say, castigated from society.
	Exactly. It's the underlying threat of the same of Marcuse's repressive tolerance, which is violence, which is we will permit all...
	Movements which move us further to the left and repress all movements which move us anywhere closer to the right.
	Or traditionalism. Or the conservation of your civilisation.
	Anything that isn't socialism and communism.
	So it's a naked political power play.
	And when you say the perspectives that they're trying to marginalise, that they're trying to say are not sensible, if you go over to our website and read this article by Karl, our wonderful founder, the Sensible Centre, you'll see the kind of perspectives that they argue are far-right, are...
	Being against mass immigration on economic grounds.
	For example, you can't keep up with the population increase of a city the size of Liverpool moving into the UK every year and build houses and ensure there's enough money for healthcare and things like that.
	Pro-Brexit, so pro-personal sovereignty, not being governed by a European super-state, a German Fourth Reich, if it will.
	Not a big fan of the mid-century Germans.
	Not a big fan of the 21st century Germans at this point.
	And being anti-lockdown, so don't imprison us in our home.
	And even pro-death penalty.
	And there's even discord within this office here, which they're going to label far right over whether or not the death penalty is legitimate.
	I know Josh is more sceptical, and I'm tepidly more pro.
	So, as Cole goes through the statistics for each of these issues, that's most of the population.
	Now, I know as more philosophically minded types, we don't crowdsource the legitimacy of our opinions with how many people agree with us.
	Again, the same as they're going to bring up the mid-century Germans for the far right, lots of people voted for moustache man, so the crowd isn't always right, etc.
	But when they're trying to isolate you and say that you are a fringe and we are the majority, it is useful to look at some of the aggregate polling, not just from one place like YouGov, which is very corrupt, to see do the majority of the population share my concerns or am I truly a vanguard on the fringe?
	And when the majority of the population agree with the perspectives shared in this office, they'll label as far right, of the protesters opposing the ULES zone, then it's hard to marginalize them and it just shows the smear is meaningless.
	Even if someone disagreed with Brexit, it's an incredibly dangerous thing to say that the majority of the population that voted for it is far right.
	And in conjunction with what we said before about Shadiq Khan and the reason why he smears supporters of the Tory party, this shows that he doesn't care about what the majority thinks.
	He wants to marginalize the majority.
	So that majority is going to become a minority.
	Absolutely. And he's got his orders on high, and carrying those out secures him a job at the end of his term.
	So all of this rhetoric is purely self-serving.
	Yes, exactly. And I think that it is also self-serving.
	And one of the features that contribute to the linguistic chaos is that right now we should also talk about another divide, not just the left and right.
	We should also talk about the globalist and the non-globalist divide.
	Absolutely. We live in a very different world than the world we lived before three decades in.
	So this divide is something that maybe could not have been predicted.
	I mean, the gravity of it could not have been predicted three decades ago, but we need to wake up into the new world and understand where we live in.
	And this is something that we want to put forward.
	I am willing to...
	I don't think it's a wild guess, but I bet Sadiq Khan is against non-globalism.
	Well, no, he is a globalist.
	I mean, he just said... He's an out-and-out globalist.
	I mean, when he was pushing through the legitimacy of the ULESS, he used a chart from the World Economic Forum.
	Yes, of course. So what we want, I think the fulcrum of modern political debate is there is technology that we must contend with.
	We're moving inexorably towards things like AI and...
	Automation and 3D printing and all sorts of abundance that can distance us from nature and rapidly accelerate our technological evolution past the point of natural human evolution for what our bodies are suited to.
	So which way do we go?
	Do we go to further technological centralization, like China with a social credit score, or do we go to devolution, self-governing little communities with Their own energy supplies, the ability to trade independently, instant communication, things like that.
	I'd very much like to be on over the side where different people can live in different satellite states and feel a sense of community, and Sadiq Khan is more on the central control side because it'll earn in money eventually.
	And so that's why he's smearing you as far right.
	If you want to live on your own, with a nice little community, with a house that you own, with a family and children, and don't want to be told where you can and can't go, then you're apparently far right.
	It's ridiculous. Pernicious theme with particular politicians.
	One of the things that I try to see when I evaluate the character or when I make assessments about a politician's character is how much humanity they have, which of course it can be faked.
	But there is an issue there because there are some politicians who completely dive themselves into abstractions.
	They view things from a purely managerial perspective and you see that they do not, cannot enter into Ordinary human relations.
	Most ordinary human relations are relations of partiality, such as the communal relations you mentioned before.
	In a community, people know each other more than they usually do in the cities, where, for instance, you may not know your neighbor or you may avoid them in the corridor.
	So this is a kind of Pretension at an impartiality and an impartial perspective that you could say is a bit of hubristic and is not close to an immediate relation to human beings.
	Yeah, because he has to manufacture compassion in order to win over the undecided voter.
	But because he's in the Westminster bubble or the Davos bubble, he is so disconnected from the people his policies will impact that he can't actually care about them.
	And so he doesn't care. And that is why for him and people of this persuasion...
	They are not thinking of a human person who is locked into their home, whose liberties are being restricted, who live in cities where, for instance, their communities disintegrate and a healthy sentiment of national identity is lost.
	They just see numbers, whether it comes in terms of carbon emissions or whether it comes in terms of economic.
	They just see numbers. Yeah, and you're an inconvenience on their roadmaps to Utopia.
	So, again, trying to embarrass the far-right smear, as it truly is meaningless.
	Let's go to Joe Rogan's recent episode with Russell Brand, where Joe and Russell, and I don't know if we'll have to cut any of Russell's clips for YouTube, because YouTube are very censorious, but if we do have to cut them, go over to our website linked in the description or our Rumble channel to view those for context.
	But Joe and Russell discuss how during the pandemic, because they endorsed equestrian-related interventions, that they were smeared as far-right.
	And they properly articulate how silly this is.
	If we play the clip, please.
	That wild shit that they did cost them their credibility.
	I just don't think they understood the landscape when they were doing that.
	I don't think they do at all. I think they took an extreme editorial perspective without realising that's what they were doing.
	And I think that the entire mainstream culture has actually found itself on a kind of a peninsula Where there is insignificant variety, in my view, between the two parties, which is why they're so willing to remain engaged in cultural war discourse and the conventional hot-button topics in this country in particular around the pro-life, pro-choice and guns arguments, they're willing to remain in that territory because financially and economically they are ultimately aligned.
	The most powerful interests in America Are happy with either outcome.
	I think that what's happened in the media space is they've unwittingly found themselves in a place where there's a kind of a...
	that incompetence was afforded, that they're not used to being challenged, that the assumption was that you would be sunk by that narrative, that it was an insignificant new space and obviously it was a massive miscalculation because they weren't watching what was happening.
	They weren't listening to the conversations with McCulloch and Malone and Weinstein and that it is apolitical and that also the over...
	In order to make themselves seem distinct from one another, they have amplified their small differences to the point where they don't recognise, actually, that that isn't America anymore.
	Even when I was a kid, if someone was just, like, right-wing, that's just like, oh, that's a right-wing person.
	You'd be in your family around your table.
	I read something about Tucker Carlson the other day, because of the release of those January 6th documents to Fox and to Tucker in particular, and it said...
	Far-right journalist, Tucker Carlson.
	Tucker Carlson's not far-right.
	He's like a normal right-wing guy.
	Far-right means marching and red, white, and black flags.
	I've seen me written as far-right.
	Far-right. They've described me as far-right.
	Tattoos on the face, extreme, boots.
	You know, like... Far-right's not just like, oh, I believe in Christianity and stuff like that.
	So, I quite like that quite effectively, just because, number one, Brand and his long and storied career of being a former drug addict who is openly left-wing, who has even befriended Yanis Vanofakis, one of your favourite politicians, who, for those who...
	He's not, sorry. No, for those who don't know, not just did he screw up Grease, but he also authored the...
	Intro to the 2018 Penguin edition of the Communist Manifesto.
	So, Brand, I disagree with him on plenty.
	I find him very entertaining. But the point he makes is very astute, is that they marginalise him as far-right, because they have minute differences in CNN, MSNBC, and somewhere like Fox, because they might focus on the particular colour of politician they vote for, Republican or Democrat, But what they actually agree on is endless Ukraine funding, endless subsidies for the big pharmaceutical companies, the military-industrial complex.
	They agree on modern monetary theory.
	They agree on a trickle-up form of wealth creation towards their biggest donors.
	They are capitulating to corporate interests.
	And so they try to stigmatize you as far-right with the image of like American History X just to dismiss all your concerns no matter which political background you come from.
	I want to say two things here.
	One is really short. I want to say that if I did not misheard, I won't say I disagree with him on a small point.
	I don't think that having your country's flag and protesting or marching with your country's flag makes you far right.
	No, but I don't believe he said that.
	I believe that he's saying the media stigmatise as that.
	Okay, okay. But back to this.
	I think it's ridiculous to call Russell Brand a far right, a person who belongs to the far right.
	It's completely ridiculous, especially if you have watched him more than a minute.
	Absolutely. And so we're going to watch him for more than a minute because he also went on Bill Maher on the same week with an MSNBC journalist.
	And again, this clip probably won't be able to be shown on YouTube, so go and watch it on our website.
	He Let's play.
	John, I've not known you long, but I love you already.
	But I have to say that it's disingenuous to claim that the biases that are exhibited on Fox News are any different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC. It's difficult to suggest that these corporations operate as anything other than mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in Blackrock and Vanguard.
	And unless we start to embrace...
	And also, mate, like, just spiritually, if I may use that word in your great country, we...
	We have to take responsibility for our own perspective.
	I've been on that MSNBC, mate.
	It was propagandist nutcrackery on there.
	I went on a show called Morning Joe.
	It was absurd the way they carried on.
	Good Morning Joe. I don't know what it was.
	It wasn't morning. There was no one called Joe there.
	No one could concentrate. They didn't understand the basic tenets of journalism.
	No one was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like Edward Snowden.
	No one was willing to talk about Julian Assange and what he suffered trying to bring real journalism to the American people.
	And I think to sit within the castle of MSNBC throwing rocks at Fox News is ludicrous.
	My friend... Make MSNBC better.
	Make MSNBC great again.
	My friend, my friend, I would... The moment that you give me a specific example, an actual example...
	I'd like to hear a specific example, an approval specific example of an MSNBC correspondent or anchor being on television saying something they knew was false and were saying behind the scenes to people, this is, I'm about to go out and we know, we know that the election wasn't stolen or something equivalent, but I will go out on television and say the opposite.
	I will lie. When's my answer?
	Just give me the specific example.
	Give me a specific example.
	I'm with you. I think it's a false equivalency, Russell.
	It's not about bias.
	It's a false equivalency because you don't actually know anything about any of these organizations you're talking about.
	Even at MSNBC once. Big fucking deal.
	My darling, it was more than enough.
	You can't come out with this. You don't have a single actual stat.
	Do you want an example? Do you want an example?
	The ludicrous, outrageous criticisms of Joe Rogan around Ivermectin, deliberately referring to it as a horse medicine when they know it's an effective medicine.
	Rachel Maddow turning up on the TV saying, if you take this vaccine, you're not going to get it when it hadn't been clinically trial-to-transmission.
	You have to listen. Do you think you can improve America by Determinantly and avowedly condemning Fox News without acknowledging that you're participating in the same game.
	Did you not just listen to Bernie Sanders, someone who plainly legitimately believes in this country and believes it's possible to change, but is bound by corruption, is bound by the lobbying system?
	Surely it's clear to you, Bill, as one of the great pundits and experts We need experts and comic voices that systemic change is required.
	Money has to be taken out of politics.
	We need new political systems that genuinely represent ordinary Americans so that we can overcome cultural differences.
	And bickering about which propagandist network is the worst is not going to save a single American life, not improve the life of a single American child, not going to improve America's standing in the world and the world needs a strong America.
	I'll tell you that. I'll tell you that.
	So you have an obligation, a duty not to condemn these people.
	Other than assuming that Bernie Sanders has the best interests of Americans at heart, I don't disagree with anything he said there.
	And he is coming at it from an avowedly left-wing perspective, so to marginalise him as far-right is madness.
	And I think he missed a trick, actually.
	actually.
	He didn't need to focus on criticisms of MSNBC for unspecified medical intervention that we can't mention on YouTube.
	Instead, he could have just said something like Rachel Maddow knew the Russia hoax was complete nonsense.
	They said Carl Rittenhouse was a notorious mass murderer when he obviously wasn't.
	Joy Reid has said numerous racial untruths and even said that critical race theory had nothing to do with Marxism in front of Kimberly Crenshaw, and Kimberly Crenshaw embarrassed her on her own network because Kimberly Crenshaw was saying, no, all critical race theorists are avowedly Marxists.
	So these are easy wins and That embarrass the mainstream networks as a uniparty from even a left-wing perspective.
	So he's not far right.
	I think we can explain why he's called far right in the following way.
	In every society there is a structure or a social order.
	And very frequently that social order is unjust.
	People who want to disrupt it are, let's say, are assaulted.
	Whether just by words or by physical force.
	Some may be far right.
	But it is not necessarily the majority.
	Russell Brand is doing the same thing.
	He's not for right, but he is.
	Denounced as being far right.
	And I want to ask you, how many times have you heard the accusation against someone being far left?
	We do hear it, but if we compare how much we listen to the accusation far right and how much we listen to the accusation of someone being far left from the people who are parts of the establishment and from politicians, We will see, I think, that most politicians think that they are going to use the word far-right more liberally.
	And curiously, no one defines it anymore.
	Yeah, and also because, well, one, if you try to define it, it dispels, like Freddy Krueger being told he's nothing, the obvious mental image that comes to your mind first, which is mid-century Germans.
	Again, another word we can't say on YouTube for some censorious reason.
	But it's curious, again, the embarrassment of the far-right label is that most of the politicians they define as far-right, like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, who are in the pocket of the World Economic Forum, who are globalists and not localists, who are not conservatives, themselves, don't really use the term far-left all that much.
	So it is just repressive tolerance.
	It's just playing whack-a-mole with any dissent to their preordained plan.
	And so I'd just like to scroll down, again, for some more evidence from the fact that it can come from a left-wing perspective and that this is a divide-and-conquer agenda.
	This tweet thread here, which goes through graphs of how many times terms like systemic racism, transphobia, homophobia, intersectionality, unconscious bias, were in headlines prior, to occupy Wall Street.
	So prior to 2008, when a bunch of leftists decided to go out and complain about the military industrial complex and big pharmaceutical and all of the hedge funds which are now pushing ESGs, the left were pretty much unified and on a similar page to some of the Tea Partiers in saying, well, we've bailed out all of the people that caused a crash.
	We shouldn't be doing this. We need to look at the money system here.
	We need to look at the Fed. We need to look at the IMF and Bank of International Settlements.
	All of the corporate press started talking about racism and sexism and they decided to divide the left up with intersectionality and fragment it into identity interest groups that are constantly infighting in order to tear down the civilisation they exist in.
	So it's all astroturfing.
	Just like far-right, just like racist, bigger and all of these other labels which have gotten so boring.
	It's just to propagandise you and distract you from having actual criticisms of the establishment.
	And the problem is that when people become desensitised to this, they cannot easily distinguish between the actual far right and those who are merely labelled as being far right.
	Exactly. And so, the consequences of the PSYOP. Let's wrap up on Matt Hancock.
	This is some consequences biting this man in the backside.
	Now, this is a leaked WhatsApp as part of the Telegraph's lockdown files, which Callum went through last week, and I may go through in-depth at some point in a hangout.
	And during a time when COVID was falling out of the headlines, Matt Hancock asked one of his advisors, when do we deploy the new variant?
	So... Before the lethality of various COVID variants had been determined, SAGE, the behavioural scientist sitting on that committee, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock had decided that it would be expedient to use it to scaremonger the public into compliance with COVID lockdown restrictions.
	That is not questioning the lethality of COVID, more so it is just saying, YouTube, that the politicians were willing to use it when convenient to make you follow their arbitrary laws.
	And... We have this because journalist Isabel Oakshot, who I was on Piers Morgan with back in October, so she decided to hound him for that, leaked all the text because she was meant to be writing his book.
	If we go to the next one, please, John.
	This was a masterclass in not accepting the framing, I know.
	So what you're saying is, Stelios, so what you're saying is...
	I leave and when the video finishes, I'll be...
	So, Kathy Newman on Times Radio, now from Channel 4, decided to interview Isabel Oakeshott about the fact that she leaked the WhatsApps.
	Isabel Oakeshott discontinued the interview when Kathy Newman disingenuously went after her salary, when Kathy Newman is played plenty as a mouthpiece of the establishment.
	This is a masterclass into how to deal with these people.
	You rip away the curtain...
	You break the fourth wall and you show the audience that it is not about the story for them.
	It's just they're trying to smear your reputation because you're getting in the way of accountability for and the aims of the establishment.
	Let's play this clip, please. What matters is the content of these messages and what they reveal about the mistakes that were made and the attitude and the power-hungry nature of the way we were being governed behind the scenes.
	Honestly, I just think a preoccupation with who's saying what about me or so on.
	It's not about me. I mean, you have hit the headlines, and this slot is about you because you're the one who's in the headlines.
	And there was a bit of a shouting match I hear with Harry Cole, political editor of The Sun.
	I just wonder whether you understand why he was exasperated, given that you're paid a reported £250,000 a year by Top TV. Hang on a minute.
	Hang on a minute. Hang on a minute. Now producers and reporters on a fraction of your salary were having to kind of put up with your sloppy seconds and follow up the story in a rival newspaper.
	It's a bit galling, isn't it?
	I'm just not going to go down this route, Cathy.
	People don't know the details of my work contracts.
	I'm just not going to go there.
	I just don't think that this is of interest to people.
	I think people are much more interested in what the investigation reveals.
	Most of our listeners won't know the individuals that you're referring to.
	I think it's kind of absurd that you should be quoting wild figures about my contract with any news organisation.
	That's my business.
	It's not yours. But I'm just interested why you decided to go with the Telegraph when you do work for Talk TV and, you know, that's in a...
	Kathy, if your focus is on this angle, I will terminate the interview now because this is not what I've come on here to talk about.
	Well, I'm talking about you hitting the headlines and this is part of the story, but I mean, let's talk about what happened next.
	My work arrangements are not part of the story, actually.
	They're actually absolutely nothing to do with it.
	But you have no qualms about taking this story to the Telegraph.
	You're happy with how that went?
	I'm going to terminate the interview.
	This is my last warning.
	I'm going to terminate the interview.
	I've not come on here to justify where the story was placed or how I chose to go about that.
	I've come on here to talk about the story and the fact that you have started wheeling out inaccurate figures about my contract Or any working arrangement I have had, I think that is frankly unprofessional.
	Well, we're talking about your story that has hit the headlines.
	You hit the headlines. No, you're talking about my salary.
	That's what you've been talking about.
	Well, no, I'm not talking about your salary anymore.
	What has that got to do with you? What has that got to do with you?
	Do you want to talk about your salary?
	I want to talk about the story that has played out this week.
	How much do you pay, Cathy?
	I haven't hit the headlines.
	You've hit the headlines, Isabelle.
	Well, maybe if you broke some stories, you would.
	Well, I've broken a couple of stories this week since you mentioned it, but don't worry about that.
	I'm not going to go into that because I haven't hit that.
	This is not me being interviewed on this.
	Right. What I want to ask you, Isabelle, is here we are, that you've ripped up an NDA to dump Matt Hancock in it.
	You dumped Vicky Price in it.
	Wait, let me finish. She ended up going to prison on the back of correspondence with you about speeding points.
	Well, Isabel Oakshard, I'm afraid, has terminated that interview, but we will now...
	I would have liked to know the answer to that question, but perhaps she'll come back on and tell us, or maybe she'll tell another news organisation.
	Perhaps she'll answer that series of questions on her talk TV show.
	I would like to hear the answer to that.
	Okay, so I just want to chime in also from a little bit of Talk TV experience there, and we'll get on to this last thing before we wrap up, so I don't go over too much time.
	But for those who don't know, both Times Radio and Talk TV are in the same building, News UK. Sometimes we're on the same floor.
	So Cathy Newman's point about it's a rival station.
	How could you go to... Okay, mouthpiece of the establishment.
	You work for the same conglomerate.
	Don't be ridiculous. But Oakshot immediately went there, okay, you're distracting.
	You're not talking about the story. You're not talking about accountability for the lockdown that you supported too.
	Instead, you're just trying to smear my character and detract it.
	So let's finish up and have a good laugh to palate cleanse from Kathy Newman with the kinds of people that are instead representing the establishment because the man who is to be Matt Hancock's lawyer...
	Suing Isabel Oakeshott for breaching her NDA, for being in the public interest that we see the lockdown text for the next three months, by the way, that's how they're going to be rolled out, went on GB News.
	And he complained that GB News identified him as Matt Hancock's lawyer.
	And Steve Allen, again, a man of the left here, self-identified left winger, handles this very well because he smears GB News as a far-right outlet and gets his comeuppance.
	So we can learn from this.
	These people are embarrassments.
	Just repeat their own words back to them and the smears dissipate into thin air.
	Code, who was actually recently asked to act for Matt Hancock.
	Thank you for joining me. Yes, I have to say, that's disappointing.
	Because I made it absolutely clear to your programme.
	I asked them not to disclose that.
	And that is very, very poor journalism.
	Okay, well, it seems like, I mean, are you okay to carry on?
	Or is that the kind of thing that means you don't want to carry on?
	No, because I disagree with what a lot of you say, but you've stood there in front of an obeying audience throwing poo left, right and centre at Matt Hancock, when your own television station has engaged in correspondence with me where I explained I'm in a position to be able to comment on this and mention that I'd been approached by Matt Hancock.
	I asked you not to mention that.
	Well, I apologise that we've...
	I apologise that we've mentioned that.
	If anybody's tempted to take you seriously or your programme seriously, here's a good reason not to.
	Well, in this moment, I can apologise for including that information and I just need to know you are, of course, and I would love to know your counters to any points that I made.
	We're not specifically talking about this.
	I've just been given the actual email that you sent to my producer, which they'd like me to read out.
	As a courtesy to the lady who approached me to act for MH, Matt Hancock, I would be grateful if it was mentioned that he asked me to act for him.
	So it seems that you actually...
	You're absolutely right that it's my mistake.
	I missed out the knot. I take all of that back.
	My absolute... Like, abject apologies.
	You're right, but I'm wrong.
	No, fair dues.
	I'm absolutely wrong about that.
	My apologies. I think we will leave it there, but thank you very much for partaking in that conversation.
	Best wishes. Jonathan Code, thank you very much for joining us.
	Bear in mind, that idiot went on for about seven minutes, complaining about how this entire station's far right and to be discredited.
	So I think the lesson we can learn from all this is that far right means nothing.
	He was an automatic pilot.
	Yep, pretty much. His NPC programming kicked in and suddenly there was a bug.
	Because far right means nothing, you can just repeat the hollowness of their words back to them, embarrass them on live and public air, and eventually they'll have to find a new smear to hit you with.
	But until then, we're not far right, we're just sort of sensible, really.
	The next topic is very sad for me, and I cannot not talk about it.
	So about a week ago, last Tuesday, the 28th of February, there was a tragic train collision that took place in Greece, and it cost the lives of 57 people.
	Now, it happened in northern Greece, but it could have happened anywhere, and such tragic train collisions have happened in Europe as well.
	Now, this tragic event has hit international news and it has revealed the sad state of operation of the Greek railway system.
	Before we say more about this, you can visit our website and have a look at the premium podcast called The Rise and Fall and Rise of British Rail by John Wheatley.
	And for £5 a month, you can have access to all our premium content.
	Now, back to our topic.
	Disasters like these are occasions for mourning.
	But mourning is not enough.
	We must reflect upon what could have been done better, and we also must reflect about how to prevent such tragedies in the future.
	And if it is too idealistic to think that tragedies can be completely prevented, there is a significant question as to what we can do to lower the chances of them taking place.
	But also reflecting is not enough.
	Diagnosing a problem is half the solution.
	We need to act accordingly and there needs to be implementation as well as diagnosis of the problem.
	Now, let us see what happened.
	I will make a short description of the event.
	Athens and Thessaloniki have two rail tracks, the northbound track that is used for trains that travel north, and the southbound one that is used for trains that travel south.
	Now on Tuesday the 28th of February at around 7.20pm a train left from Athens to Thessalonica.
	It had around 340 people and more than 10 members of staff.
	Now at some point it halted due to a problem in the rails and it was manually diverted into the southbound line.
	After a while it was again diverted into the northbound line.
	At some point it reached the Larissa station and then something really tragic happened.
	The train stations and the operations there, they have some keys that they manually use to open the tracks that divert trains from one track to another.
	And it has been said that there was a faulty train Descending, going south, and that it needed to be taken off course.
	And there was a switch key turned that diverted that faulty train away from the main lines.
	And then that key was left there.
	So, at some point, the train driver asks the train station manager, should I go?
	Should I leave?
	And he says, yeah, you should leave.
	And they didn't turn the key.
	And they started and they entered instantly the southbound line.
	Now, as rumors say, there were systems in operation and there were red alerts and sounds that notified that trains are in And a collision course, because there was a freight train going south.
	No one heard this, apparently.
	And after 12 minutes, the trains collided.
	Four carriages were derailed.
	The first one was literally burned because there were...
	Rumor has it that there were some explosives or some flammable materials in the freight train.
	And it was incinerated.
	There are some estimates that it reached 1,300 degrees Celsius there.
	And 57 people died.
	So the thing is that...
	This has led to a really big discussion about who is to blame, but it should also bring forth a discussion about how to move from here forward.
	I want to read a bit an article from BBC and then I will talk about the discourse and then I will talk about what I think is something that Greeks should definitely bear in mind and what everyone should bear in mind because if you will see there are many dangerous policies that were involved directly and indirectly in this event and it is these policies that need to be counted.
	Now I'm reading from this article.
	Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has asked for forgiveness from the families of the 57 victims of this week's train crash.
	In a Facebook message, Mr Mitsotakis said that in Greece of 2013, two trains heading in different directions cannot run on the same line and no one notices.
	Just for those who need to hear this, this is more of an ethical statement.
	He did not just suddenly discover the nature of possibility.
	Protests have continued for days.
	Clashes with police were reported on Sunday as thousands joined a demonstration in the capital, Athens.
	Police estimated 12,000 people attended the protest.
	They said seven officers were hurt and five arrests were made, the AFP news agency reports.
	Some demonstrators set fire to rubbish bins and threw petrol bombs.
	Police responded, firing tear gas and stun grenades, clearing the central Syndagma Square of the protesters within a few minutes.
	The protesters also reportedly released hundreds of black balloons into the sky in memory of the dead, with some holding signs reading, Down with Killer Governments.
	On the night of 28 February, a passenger train and a freight train that were travelling in opposite directions ended up on the same track.
	The first four carriages of the passenger train were derailed and the first two caught fire and were almost completely destroyed.
	The train crash has been widely attributed to human error.
	A 59-year-old stationmaster in Larissa, who was charged with manslaughter by negligence, appeared in court on Sunday and has been taken into custody.
	His lawyer said the stationmaster had admitted to having a share of responsibility in the accident.
	He faces between 10 years and life in jail if convicted.
	But many in Greece see the crash as an accident that had been waiting to happen.
	And the Railway Workers Union blamed successive governments' disrespect towards Greek railways for leading to this tragic result.
	A government minister told the BBC that the lack of funding was the direct result of the strict terms of international bailouts imposed after the 2010 debt crisis.
	Union members were joined by residents of Athens and Thessaloniki in taking to the streets throughout the past week, shocked by the scale of disaster.
	The protests were also attended by many students.
	Several of the passengers on board, one of the trains were students in their twenties, returning to Thessaloniki after a long weekend celebrating Greek Orthodox Lent.
	The rail network looked problematic with worn down, badly paid stuff, Nikos Sava, a medical student from Cyprus, told the AFP agency.
	Train drivers in Greece have said there have been long-running problems with the electronic system that are supposed to warn them of danger ahead.
	The Transport Minister, Kostas Karamanlis, also resigned as a sign of respect for the people who had died.
	Mr. Karamanlis said he was taking responsibility for the government's failure to modernize the country's railways in the three and a half years it had been in power.
	Immediately after the accident, the Greek government declared the three days of national mourning and said the cost of the victims' funerals would be paid from the public purse.
	BBC Europe correspondent, Nick Beek, The crash seems to be becoming a defining political issue for Greece as it prepares to face a general election in the spring.
	Media reports have given 9 April as a possible date of the elections, but analysts say that date may now be pushed back.
	Okay, so, as we said, a three-day period of national mourning was declared, and Throughout this period and even now, and this will continue, there has been a significant attempt on various sides to engage in blame game.
	Now, to a degree, this is understandable.
	And of course, we need to find out who is to blame.
	But there are some dangers with this.
	Because it is a much more complex issue.
	Can I ask, are the Greek railways in national ownership?
	Like, did the government run them?
	So, they were privatized some years ago.
	But there has been, there are rumors that say that the company behind who bought it, that appears as a private company, is linked with the Italian public sector.
	Right, okay. Okay.
	But nevertheless, even if it's private or public, there need to be some standards that need to be operant.
	And there is both, I will claim that there is responsibility on both sides, and I will lay out the reasons why I think so.
	And I think that understanding them is key to moving forward.
	So the thing is that if we look at this complex situation, it is looking for a scapegoat.
	We'll absolve another side from responsibility.
	And maybe not for this case here, but for other cases, this is going to be terribly unproductive because the country needs to change and it needs to change faster than it does change.
	And there are people who protest against these reforms.
	They are the direct and indirect beneficiaries of a system of political clientelism that is the dominant paradigm in Greece since the 80s.
	But we need to focus on what each side is responsible for and know what to change.
	There are people who resist changes.
	But governments who have a reformist mandate, they need to push changes.
	And the people in general need to understand that when the beneficiaries of a particular system get upset because they think that they're going to lose their benefits, they will protest that the government is far right to link that with our previous thing, or that their lives are not being respected, or that they are thrown away and that they are going to suffer.
	There are issues that need to be taken into account, especially when it comes to who gets positions of responsibility, especially when human lives are at stake.
	In the same way that we wouldn't want an air traffic controller to be someone who is underqualified and also is negligent to be the manager of that system, Of the air traffic control industry.
	The same thing applies for trains.
	And I will say this, there have been people who go out in public and they say all sorts of things.
	Some of it is understandable, but there are other people who participate in this and they do not assume their own share of responsibility, not necessarily for this event, but for the entire structure that makes such tragedies more likely to happen.
	So, the thing is that right now the government focuses on human error and I think that there is human error here and there is criminal negligence.
	But I'm not a judge.
	I will leave that for the appointed judge.
	On the other hand, members of the railway union I must say that they did warn that some automated systems were not in place.
	So in that, they're right.
	And the government should have been more apprehensive of that.
	And they should have taken that more seriously.
	This is where they do have responsibility.
	But on the other hand, I think that if we blame it only on automated systems, we will lose also the human factor and the idea that however sophisticated our systems, we cannot ultimately eradicate the human factor.
	That is why we definitely need to be very cautious about who gets what job, who gets what position, for what reason, and to understand that very frequently lives are at stake.
	Now, so I want to say that if we engage in a scapegoat, The Swiss cheese model.
	James Reason's Swiss cheese model is a simple metaphor to visualize how patient harm happens based on a system's approach.
	This metaphor shows us that in a complex healthcare system, errors are prevented by a series of defenses, barriers and safeguards, represented by slices of cheese.
	Each slice acts as a defense against things going wrong.
	Ideally, all slices should remain intact, But each barrier has unintended weaknesses, or holes, which are inconsistent and are constantly opening, shutting and moving, hence the similarity with Swiss cheese.
	If an error occurs and breaks through a hole in one slice, it isn't a big problem and doesn't usually result in a bad outcome.
	But sometimes the holes line up in multiple slices, meaning all the defence layers have been broken.
	When all holes are momentarily aligned, it brings hazards into contact with patients and causes them harm.
	The holes in the defences arise for two reasons.
	Active failures and latent conditions.
	So, this video was a video about the medical system, but it can be used everywhere.
	Wherever there is risk, this model can be used.
	And what it says, ultimately, James Reason, who was behind this model, was saying that you cannot change the human conditions.
	This is the assumption of this model, but you can change the conditions in which humans work.
	And ultimately, there are no fail-safe systems.
	And there is always the human factor.
	The goal is to create these conditions that lower the risk of all hell breaking loose.
	It sounds like we're trying to engineer a Laffer curve of the optimum amount of bureaucracy and checks and balances so that it doesn't just go into slowing things down with too much paperwork and malfeasance, but it also doesn't centralize the authority and therefore make it so that there's only one hurdle to clear by an error until all hell breaks loose.
	Yes. So the thing is, back to the discussion about the automated systems.
	What the railway union members say is that although there were some automated systems that were beeping and the railway manager, the rail station manager was unaware of, possibly he wasn't where he should have been,
	There were some systems there, but there was not a system that would hold trains if they are on collision course within a particular distance.
	If we just focus on scapegoating, On the government side, we are going to miss this idea that we constantly need to create further conditions that lower the risk of an accident taking place.
	On the other hand though, if we focus only on the idea of Blaming the government instead of focusing on the human error, we will miss the idea that however sophisticated our mechanisms, we still need qualified people and people who are not of a negligent character, let's say, to operate them.
	Why? Because at some point they may malfunction.
	So you cannot not pay attention to the idea that the human factor is again pivotal.
	Yeah, so speaking from an English example, we haven't had any derailments due to this, but for my line for getting to and from work southeastern in and out of London from Kemp, they decided to chop and change all the timetables and cut a certain amount of trains in the mornings and evenings.
	And they thought that this would be totally fine.
	They didn't have to update any of the systems on their side.
	What ended up happening is there were bottlenecks at London Bridge and Lewisham, because that's where lots of trains flow through, and the signals were out of kilter with how they changed the trains.
	And so there were massive delays, overpopulated trains.
	And so one bit of human arrogance caused weeks of disruption to the point where it escalated to parliament and southeastern paid out lots in delay damages.
	These systems are very complex and human error will always make itself manifest.
	You just want to minimize the amount of things that can go wrong that will cause either inconveniences or tragedies like this one.
	So we need to focus especially on the dangers of statism and the dangers of status policies that are directly involved into this.
	And I will say that, unfortunately, since the 80s, the dominant political paradigm is Greek is a form of political clientelism, where we have The exchange of goods, services and positions for political support.
	So in a sense, since the 80s, even though not every party was equally happy with that, they played the game and they were promising, let's say, positions for some people.
	In order for political support.
	And I will say this, that this is not only in the public sector, because the idea of political support is also in the private sector.
	This has to be said.
	Yeah, it's just typical nepotism.
	Yes. So the thing is that there are problems with statism in here, particularly when that system of political clientelism Expands beyond proportions.
	Why? Because you create a class of people who have vested interests in not caring about their job the way that they would care if they worked in the private sector.
	You get the banality of evil because you have very little accountabilities for being thrown at your job if you make an error.
	Or to rephrase it, to bring into account my previous point, there is incentive for people to work without thinking that they have political support.
	That is a problem.
	If someone thinks that their job is secure because of political clout, then even if that is in the private sector or in the public sector, that's a problem.
	So this system creates A sizable amount of the population, it's not the majority, but it's a sizable amount, that has vested interest in things not changing.
	These are the direct beneficiaries of that system.
	But unfortunately, there are indirect beneficiaries of that system.
	It's the family members, friends and other people who don't want to see their family members losing their job.
	So there is a problem that we need to focus and shed light on the idea of how people get jobs and we need to push forward and stronger an agenda that is a bit more meritocratic and an agenda that is a bit more, let's say, serious in terms that takes seriously the idea that sometimes human lives are at stake.
	So what I want to say is that What the people should think from now on, what Greek people should think from now on, because there is going to be a future and the future requires courage.
	What we need to bear in mind constantly is that in order to destroy that system and weaken it, there will be beneficiaries, direct and indirect beneficiaries, who will scream far-right at anyone who tries to disrupt the system because it's an order,
	it's a social order. People who are fed from it Unjustly have an incentive for that system to stay the same.
	The point is, changes need to take place faster.
	And the society needs to bear in mind that these changes cannot happen without many people protesting and saying that their lives are torn away.
	They're not torn away.
	Unjust systems require change and change happen with reforms and reforms require the bravery to push them forward and enact them.
	Now, I want to show something slightly positive because this is not the image of Greece.
	This is not the entire image of Greece.
	And I want to say that there is an economist article for anyone who is interested about Greece's economic performance lately.
	And anyone who wants, you can click the link.
	But I want to read a bit from the next link.
	from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
	This is the Economic Survey of Greece 2023.
	I read. Greece has rebounded well from the COVID-19 crisis, generating strong employment growth, increasing investments and exports, government support measures, implementation of the Greece 2.0 Recovery and Resilience Package, and the reforms of the past decade have been supporting the economy.
	However, headwinds from surging energy prices and uncertain following Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine have slowed the recovery.
	Achieving and maintaining primary budget surpluses, better targeting energy support measures and maintaining public revenues while further broadening the tax base and improving its efficiency will further enhance Greece's prospects of achieving an investment-grade sovereign debt rating.
	Maintaining the reform momentum, completing the restoration of banks' health and continuing efforts to improve the business climate can ensure that a sustainable recovery continues over the long term.
	So what I want to say is that the country has become more extroverted economically and politically.
	And in that respect, the country is moving forward.
	But it is not enough to bring forth The kind of change we want to see.
	And the point is, in a sense, to take the lesson of the Greek crisis of the 2010 that has lasted.
	So when there is a wound that is bleeding, you do what you have to to heal the wound.
	Instead of doing that, there is a feeling among the population that we have just learned, we have just got accustomed to bleeding without dying.
	And this is because at the moment we lost some opportunities to implement the policies that were required to, let's say, destroy that clientele system or significantly diminish its power.
	And I want to say that political elections are coming.
	I mean, elections are political, but elections are coming.
	And for the first time, I believe that this government will win this election,
	but the new mandate If it wins, the new mandate will be to push even forward and push harder for these reforms that have to be made instead of just making a micromanagement and making some small steps and just saying, okay, we made some small steps, so let us keep the other people happy because we don't want the political cost.
	That seems the only just way to get recompense for all the people that died.
	Yes. So I think that it is a way of mourning is due, but to honour the memories of those victims, we need to learn from what happened to them and we need to reflect upon the kind of system that creates opportunities for disasters and makes disasters more and tragedies more likely.
	And when we reflect on this because diagnosis is not enough, we need to act accordingly and push forward the policies that must be pushed forward.
	I almost feel bad having some levity in the final segment now, but that was really well done.
	Thanks, man. I didn't want to interrupt too much because obviously your sphere of expertise and hopefully people got a lot of value from learning about Greek politics for the first time because I didn't know much either.
	So I don't know if anyone really remembers, but a couple of weeks ago, day after Valentine's Day, you and I... I have watched clips.
	So I didn't know who they were.
	I do now, and I hate it, right?
	Okay? It's basically sigma male groin set red pill banal dating advice, the kind of stuff that they've learned from Andrew Tate, who learned that from Patrice O'Neill, who regurgitated it not nearly as better from Patrice O'Neill, and we've done Patrice O'Neill videos on our website, so go check that out.
	While, unfortunately, instantiating the whore-ocracy of OnlyFans models in the economy, because if you notice, the premise of the channel is they get a bunch of OnlyFans girls who no one's ever heard of before to sit in a room and talk to them about dating advice and about how sleeping around is bad.
	But they don't ever actually challenge the economic structure which keeps these attractive bimbos in place as a parasite sapping in a parasocial relationship the money of beta males.
	And also it ensnares the kind of resentful men who want to be alphas into watching this content because they think, haha, I'm dunking on this woman.
	But the fact that you're paying money into the show and giving it advertiser bucks anyway is paying for these awful women to come on here, so it's perpetuating the whole economy.
	So you're never going to break the cycle of hookup culture and OnlyFans and pernicious, addictive garbage that women would rather go to rather than have a wholesome relationship with content like this.
	Because, I mean, look at the thumbnails.
	But this is a parallel podcast.
	This is called Whatever.
	My attention was drawn to this from two sources.
	One, Callum's been watching it and he knows much more about it.
	I'm sure he'll do a segment at some point.
	But two, you get their tweets all over Twitter, and they've been sort of organically marketed by the amount of people sharing their clips from TikTok and the like.
	And they have the same thing on their terrible thumbnails.
	I mean, it's just borderline pornographic, and they have the same premise of inviting OnlyFans models on there, and guys will pay Super Chats to shoot questions or insults at them.
	So it feels cathartic for you in the moment, but you're still funding the horocracy.
	But every once in a while, there's a little bit of wisdom that comes from the existential Cali Girl-accented screaming of the girls that go on this podcast.
	And so I wanted to take you through a couple of clips here just to illustrate the complete miserable emotional desert, the digital purgatory of Generation Z, me, I suppose, trying to date.
	So let's listen to the first girl who articulates the problem with modern male and female interactions.
	Let's play. If I went on a date with a guy who's single and he's not f***ing any other girls, then I would be like, well, why isn't he?
	Like, what's wrong with him?
	So exclusivity is no longer a concept for lots of women because they take it as your ability to sleep with lots of women alongside me is a marker of your high status and therefore if I'm just going to hypergamously trade up the value hierarchy in earnings and desirability then I've got the best I can because I know because you're shagging all my friends.
	That seems to me a very unhealthy way of picking a mate.
	It's very unhealthy and, I mean, it's silly.
	Yeah. What do you expect?
	Is the kind of woman that goes around saying, you know, I want the...
	I think... Ironically, we may see this as a sign of progress.
	Let me elaborate.
	I think it's regression, but there is a realization.
	There is some kind of honesty because we frequently know the kind of women who say that the kind of person they fall for is completely different from the kind of person that they say they fall for.
	And very frequently they do want guys like this.
	Yeah, this is the hypothesis that David Buss did a paper on a little while ago, and has since recanted, actually, because it wasn't replicable.
	But this was something that the Red Pill guys went onto for a while, which is men who are alpha, muscular, sexually desirable, high sociosexuality, are the ones that women sleep with while they're at university.
	This is the golden penis syndrome on university campuses, where a minority of men are sleeping with the majority of women.
	And they settle down with...
	The beta-type family guys who are more than willing to accommodate their stepchildren or their long body counts into their relationships because they think, this woman is so above me.
	It's what Patrice O'Neill used to say of, a lady shark swims with a male shark, gets tired of not being as big as a male shark, so goes and plays with these penguins or these seals, and she's playing with her food.
	And oftentimes she'll ditch the penguin or seal out in the middle of the ocean and swim back to the man shark.
	What David Buss findings originally were summarized as of Beta Bucks but Alpha Fs.
	Nice little rhyme there. Again, doesn't have any foundation in evolutionary psychology, didn't bear it out, but it's an interesting dichotomy to try and think about.
	But I think my point gives you another pass.
	Go for it. And I think you will definitely like it.
	There is an interesting point to be made about the fact that she does not feel ashamed when she says this.
	Mm-hmm. On the one hand, there is a realization and a kind of honesty that this is what I'm looking for.
	But on the other hand, there is a sad thing to be said about people not feeling that there is something wrong with it.
	Well, not just something wrong with it, but you have no timeline as to how your expedient desires will play out long term because you are going to actively make yourself less desirable to the kind of man that will look after you as your sexual desirability fades away with the inevitable passing of time.
	And also, you will not have any children to take care of you when you're old and nobody to hold your hand when you die.
	It's a long 40 years after 40 if you've just ridden the cock carousel so much that you can't settle down.
	And for women, divorce is dick dose dependent because of the amount of oxytocin that you emit when you sleep with someone.
	over time if you sleep with too many partners you build up to that tolerance like you would with any other drug and so you get utterly miserable the more people you sleep with you get unable to pair bond properly and that that's the bedrock for a good relationship and that is what i think this woman whose clip went around twitter like wildfire and was utterly mocked for her terrible accent and her inarticulateness was
	She was trying to get at the emotional vagrancy, the soullessness, the lack of commitment, and the kind of talking-only purgatory that Gen Z dating is trapped in.
	Let's play this clip. Warning, it is a little annoying, but she's right.
	I think, like, the biggest thing that, like, annoys me in, like, the whole dating world is, like, fucking talking stages.
	Like, that shit's so annoying.
	Like, the whole, like...
	And just, like, the inconsistency in them.
	Like, I literally, like, hate that, like, so much.
	But I think that's, like, my biggest thing.
	It's just, like... What specifically?
	Just, like, the fact of just, like, you, like...
	I don't know how to word this.
	Like, in, like, talking stages, and it's just, like, you're, like, labeled that, and it's, like, people, like, are considered, like, you can't, like, you're just, like, confused, and, like, most of the time, like, the girl gets, like, attached or something, and they, like, see it like it's gonna lead to a relationship, and it's always not, and it's just, like, that's, like, my biggest thing is, like, I just hate the whole, like, how, like, talking stages are so, like, normalized.
	Like, traditional dating does not exist in this generation.
	Stelios. Hello? Her eyes are up here.
	Stop it. Right.
	Okay. She's...
	What the hell is she saying?
	Right. Her voice is, as someone in the office once coined, auditory Medusa.
	But she's right. What she's referring to...
	You need to make sense in order to be right or wrong.
	I will translate from the woman.
	Right. So what she's referring to is the kind of...
	Non-committalness of dating apps and social media.
	So when people meet online, there's a carefully curated personality that you are presenting to each other as if you're marketing a product.
	Then you engage over text.
	And because you've never met this person in person, you have no obligations to not ghost them at any time that you see fit.
	You have no investment, so you can just mutually part as long as you're not meeting each other's needs.
	And the interesting thing is, as well, is that people will...
	Openly manipulate this more.
	Well, not openly. Covertly manipulate this more.
	Because if you change or set restrictions on the length of text, the frequency of text, who texts first, how many topics you can talk about, what's off limits, it all becomes very arbitrary and stifled.
	And so you never feel you're actually developing an intimate connection with someone.
	Do I get the sense that you're trying to interpret her very charitably?
	No, I think she's dead right.
	You want her to be the prophet of your movement?
	No, no. And I'm not building a movement or anything.
	But my point is, I have heard this from plenty of other people.
	This is why I don't use dating apps, for example.
	And this isn't even necessarily my experience, because when I've had girlfriends, I've spoken to them at length just because, funnily enough, I can talk.
	I kind of do it for a job. But lots of people feel unsatisfied because there is a kind of misunderstanding as to when is the right time to broach a date.
	Most people our generation have been raised on screens.
	Well, I say our generation, you're about 10 years older than me, but most people who've been raised on screens don't know when to get off them.
	They don't know when to take it into real life.
	And so all they ever do is go through swiping, swiping.
	Oh, I got a match. Okay, well, we'll talk for a little bit.
	And... I don't know if he likes me enough to want to take me out.
	I like him enough, but I don't want to tell him that I like him enough because I might scare him off.
	So all you end up doing is being so afraid of commitment, you never commit to anyone.
	And you die alone.
	And that is what that girl is articulating.
	She's saying, we never move beyond the talking stage.
	It's just talking. There's no action.
	There is also another thing.
	I think it's a kind of way to approach the idea of autonomy, where people think that The supreme ideal is to be completely independent in your whole life.
	Now, in some cases, of course, independence is important but if we look at what makes life valuable, we will see that it is It is entirely relational to the idea of dependence because in being a friend to someone,
	in being married to someone, in being a father or mother to someone, all of these are relations of dependence and all of these are relations that for the overwhelming majority of humanity has said that they make their lives better.
	I think maybe young people nowadays may disagree because they have this fear of Becoming dependent to another person.
	But this is what life is.
	I think it's a fear of vulnerability often because they haven't reconciled their own personal issues.
	And so they don't want the other person's judgment to be held up like a mirror to them to confirm all of their insecurities about themselves.
	But I can personally say, and I'm no perfect person, But one of my main life goals, it is the apotheosis of all I want, is to be a husband and a father someday.
	And some people really don't have that life goal articulated out.
	They're just sort of nebulously bobbing.
	But they do have that deep need for emotional attachment.
	And so that fear of being rejected, the interfacing with kind of artificial digital mediums to create relationships, and lack of understanding as the timeline of when you should have a family has created this paradoxical It's parasocialism of where you don't want to be dependent on anyone, but lots of people are dependent on things like OnlyFans to get their emotional fix vicariously.
	It's really sad. And that's, in a sense, bad faith on their part because they don't understand.
	They do become hooked.
	They do become dependent on something that is not beneficial to them.
	Yeah, and at least she was honest, even if she was slightly dim, about the existential pain she's in about not being able to find a man to commit to her.
	And this is why I wanted to bring up this meme.
	You ever seen the IQ midwit bell curve?
	So if we go to scroll down, John, just the image, if we have one...
	I don't know if it's in here.
	Yeah, so it's an explanation that at the lowest end and the highest end of IQ bell curves, you reach the same conclusion.
	And that is that someone just acting on their intuition that hasn't properly thought out properly has the same ability to come to the same conclusion as someone who pulls apart the tradition into its component parts and says, this is why the tradition exists.
	Whereas only the midwits in the middle don't get it.
	So it's like, no, no, I can be happy on my own.
	No.
	And that's the midwits.
	Whereas the enlightened person and the dumb person like that lovely looking girl there came to the same conclusion of, yeah, digital society and its consequences have been a disaster for human dating.
	And she's right.
	And if we go to the next article, just briefly, that's why just to add some data on from our last segment.
	Now, another study has come out saying about two thirds of Generation Z wishes they weren't on dating apps, but they feel they have to use them because they feel it's the only way to meet people.
	And I think we can see this in the next TikTok that I'm going to subject you to because you like torturing me offline with all sorts of TikToks during the day of a Japanese immigrant who's come to America and articulates her experience dating in the American context as completely alien to traditional ways of dating that have worked for hundreds of years.
	Let's play.
	Did you know we don't really have a talking stage in Japan?
	But we do in America, right?
	So I was like kind of ready to experience like, you know, some cultural differences in terms of dating.
	When I first started going out with this guy that I met online, we hung out like five times before I went his house for the first time.
	Yeah, and everything was fine.
	And you know, he was nice and we were having fun.
	So I went there and his parents and his grandma was there.
	And I was like freaking out because in Japan, this doesn't happen that much.
	If you do this in Japan, it's like you're marrying that person or like you're in a real serious relationship with that person.
	I was like, you know, Yumeca find you in America so this is maybe not a big deal.
	So I calmed myself down and I introduced myself to his family and they were all nice.
	His dad even asked me if I am thinking of coming back to America so that I can stay with him like So I didn't really ask him what we are or anything, but we were not in a relationship.
	I was pretty happy about it.
	Until I found out that he just wanted to be friends with me.
	I was like, excuse me, I didn't get mad or anything.
	I was just scared. He was thinking about it the whole time.
	We were on the couch, and I asked him, what's with you?
	He was like, you know.
	I've been focusing on myself.
	He was like, I am insecure about the past relationship, so I don't want to have anything super serious.
	And this dating app that we met on, that had like settings that you can put what you're looking for.
	And we both put that we were looking for a relationship.
	That's how we met and how we matched.
	So I felt so disrespected and I got lied because like he should have put I don't know or something.
	So yeah, I blocked him and I hated him.
	But like I had this second thought, why don't I use him for a bit?
	So I decided to use him as a transportation system since he had a car.
	I'm not a bitch like this, but this time I was pissed.
	I started texting him again.
	We hung out like twice after that like thing.
	And the last time before I was leaving, he was like, you know, we've been hanging out really long.
	And I was thinking, I'm like asking you if you want to become my girlfriend or something.
	And I said no. I'm like, okay, I'm going to become friends with guys first.
	And I'm going to become one of my friends after that.
	Like, how are you guys doing?
	I don't know. I think women nowadays who follow this, they hang together and they treat dating as a war campaign.
	They have a map in front of them.
	Maybe they have satellites and they say, there is a boyfriend here, there's another person there, let us find the best way to...
	And they have alternative A, B, C, D, you know, whatever.
	And they make a really...
	Careful calculations of the pros and cons of each alternative.
	All out of fear of losing.
	You artificially control the pace and direction of the relationship out of fear of rejection, and so it stops you from ever committing.
	And if you noticed, that woman there went from, this is a completely alien way of doing it, to, I'm going to adopt this way of doing it, to, I'm going to become a manipulative thief that's only using men for their time and resources.
	In the space of one interaction with the American dating scene, she became the worst kind of hypergamous parasite.
	And, to add to what I was saying before about the feeling of shame, she doesn't feel shame in publicly stating this.
	Exactly, yeah, because all of the incentive structures of the culture keep this going.
	And that culture is Simone de Beauvoir's.
	If you'd like to pay £5 a month and...
	Watch all of our premium content, which I really recommend you do.
	This is one of the favourite bits of content I've ever done.
	Was with Carl. The evil origins of feminism where for two hours I subjected him to quotes from Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
	And it explains literally everything about the mess we are in today.
	We're living in Simone de Beauvoir's world.
	Do you feel empowered, ladies?
	Now, I wanted to use another example here, please.
	I have said that I watched it and it was a really good conversation.
	Oh, thanks, man. Appreciate it.
	Thank you for reading it.
	Yeah, it's 900 pages.
	It's probably the worst book I ever read.
	So I guess pay my wages because I torture myself.
	I wanted to use an example of that controlling pace out of fear that was published in the mail recently.
	I put my boyfriend on probation and it might have saved our relationship.
	Do you give a notice period or something?
	Yes. You put an ankle monitor on him so if he goes near another woman it goes off.
	You put him in the sin bin. So this woman decided because they had certain incompatibilities in their personality to break up with her boyfriend and say go away and come back to me with your stuff fixed.
	Now I understand the desire to want to iron out your incompatibilities in a long-term relationship, but that doesn't make necessary the need to break apart and split, especially because once you dismantle that moral prohibition against splitting, then that means that's a crutch you can fall back on at any time.
	Okay, I think I'm linking the pieces now because they were saying that they want some guy who has been, who sees other people.
	I think they use it as a referencing system.
	How so? Because they are going to say, well, do you have any references to date me?
	Oh, okay. And they're going to give the email or contact details of each lady and they're going to ask, how was this guy?
	Also as well, if the break is instigated and other women show him interest in the meantime, that's validation for her that she's got high value man.
	So that... Ah, that's very clever.
	I can see that. But my point is, don't try and artificially distance yourself from emotion and try and figure out your problems while you're in a relationship, because this isn't how it was historically done.
	Before, men and women struggled together despite adverse conditions, in sickness and in health, in death to us part.
	And we were much happier, rather than trying to micromanage and utopian social plan our relationships towards this platonic ideal of soulmate romance.
	No, instead, we come together and we work out our problems with commitment as the underlying axiom that never gets questioned.
	That if you don't get to break up more than once, that's just it.
	It shouldn't be an option on the table.
	So I wanted to go to instead my dream, if we're going through female TikToks.
	I'm a traditional housewife and I love spending hours cooking and cleaning for my husband.
	I'm subservient to him in a healthy way.
	And the reason I brought this up is the same reason I brought up the Simone de Beauvoir podcast earlier.
	Women have been pathologized against dependency, as you said.
	Now, men are dependent on women for their emotional support.
	Definitely. They're dependent on women in order to raise their children.
	In order to, as well, if men just earn money, what do we spend it on?
	Like, there's only so many books I can buy, or there's that meme of how do men live like this?
	They live on an inflatable mattress with no doozy cover, on the floor, in the middle of the room, with a TV on the floor, and maybe an empty pizza box.
	Like, we want to earn money to facilitate you guys having a good time, you guys being our wife and kids.
	So, that dependency, for us, is for emotional support on you.
	Just because you were to financially depend on your man, doesn't mean you're doing any unpaid labour, or you're a parasite, or you're somehow subservient.
	In some kind of manipulative or imbalanced power dynamic way.
	No, we're complimentary and we want to take care of you.
	And that's why I ended up tweeting the following, which is just that...
	If we can go on to the next one, please, John.
	Men will literally work their entire lives just to make so that you can have this lifestyle as long as you're just pretty and nice.
	It's not that difficult. You haven't got to be an OnlyFans thought.
	You haven't got to spend endlessly talking digitally.
	You haven't got to have a curated profile.
	Get offline... Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And even theological at times, definitions of love.
	And we come to a really wholesome place.
	This is a really white-pilling segment.
	Didn't look at the clock once the entire time we discussed it.
	And I think we ironed it down to you're only able to recognize love if you meet and deeply connect with a person and you are both virtuous, but that requires a level of vulnerability that requires you be honest with the person.
	And I wanted to just finish with, I don't think you can have that honesty by presenting someone a commodified version of you through a dating app.
	Get offline, talk in person, fall in love, get married, and have wholesome lives, ladies and gents.
	And remember Elvis Presley with a little less conversation, a little more action.
	That's brilliant. Alright, let's finish with the comments.
	In the Brokonomics series, Dan suggested that perhaps a 30,000 to 40,000 pound limit would be put on you guys for a digital currency.
	Unfortunately, it seems he was a little bit too optimistic on that one.
	So, I just wanted to share this.
	I know it's probably not enough for you guys to do a segment on.
	And I was also curious if Dan had any plans to talk about The Sovereign Individual in either a book club or in a future episode of Brokonomics.
	Dan will be listening in, and I'm sure he'll take the suggestion, and yeah, I'm sure he will.
	I mean, Dan's going to be interviewing authors and things like that as well on Brokeconomics in the future, so there'll be plenty of good content still to come.
	I'm sure we'll have to run a couple of minutes over just to get to your comments, but you've done such insightful stuff that we'll have to.
	Matt P. Far-right is merely another word for enemy.
	Anyone that disagrees with a single thing the regime pushes is far-right, and that's the new definition.
	Well, you and Harry did an entire podcast on the Friend Enemy Distinction and it just smells of it, doesn't it?
	So what you're saying is you get paid to be a journalist and you did some journalism.
	To be honest, though, it's not surprising that so-called modern journalists are confused by this notion.
	Well, yeah, Cathy Newman gets paid no matter what journalism she does, which is absolutely none.
	Sophie Liv Peterson, and what if they really are in coalition with COVID deniers?
	He never even addressed the argument.
	He just went straight for name calling.
	Well, yeah, you can't really deny COVID. Like, the entire grievance of people that hated lockdown was that US government members and big pharma lobbyists helped fund the Wuhan Virology Institute to engineer COVID in the first place.
	So you're not denying it exists. It's just not lethal for children that you put imprisoned in their homes for ages.
	It's... Stupid.
	SH Silver. Smeared through guilt by association to dismiss legitimate concerns in real time.
	That Sadiq Khan can remain mayor so long, despite how nakedly he hates people, speaks to how passive and captured London has become.
	Well, it's not just necessarily captured.
	He has certain high-voting constituency identity interest groups that come out in droves, whereas most of the population are transient, and lots of them are just tourists and immigrants as well.
	Like, if you think London's busy, and I live there and I go there all the time, then remember that all the people you see on the street right now are only half the population, the rest of them on tubes underground waiting to spill up like filth from the sewage.
	Do you want to go to your comments? Yeah, okay.
	SH Silver. Well, just like East Palestine, none of the operators raised a red flag over the axle being on fire for 20 minutes before it melted and derailed the train.
	I'm not aware of this, but thank you for pointing it to my attention.
	Lord Nerevar, you wouldn't happen to know if that train was carrying dangerous chemicals, would you, Stelios?
	Terrible tragedies.
	May the victims find peace.
	I don't know and at the moment there are all sorts of rumors going around and I think that it would be responsible of me to just say, but there have been some rumors and yes.
	Ruda Dei, one of my gripes with the world in general is that the most gorgeous countries have such economic and humanitarian issues.
	I've seen this pattern and now can't unsee it.
	The human factor can also be exacerbated by introducing extra processes and checks, etc., if done improperly.
	If it's harder to do the right thing than the wrong thing, then people will inevitably try and find a way to cut corners.
	If you throw in a time element into that process, and people are under pressure to get things done in a time frame that is impractical, then people will again look to cut corners.
	Likewise, if the alarm that sounds for an impending collision is the same one used for something trivial that goes off every 10 minutes, such as a deer on the track, then it might as well not sound.
	The information to noise ratio is too bad so the human bearing it will just ignore it.
	I bring this up as statism and bureaucracy often leads to people far away from the actual issue trying to engineer a perfect system from 500 miles away without any expert knowledge or consideration of the longer term consequences.
	Yeah, that's the dichotomy that you and Karl explored in your recent symposium between practical knowledge and received knowledge from a book.
	And if you're miles away from where the consequences of your bad actions will happen, you'll become indifferent to how accurate your knowledge is.
	And thank you for this comment.
	I'm not an expert on this.
	That is why I try to focus on the second question, not on the first one about who is to blame, but on the second one as to what can we do to have a better system that reduces the chances of things like that happening.
	Okay, just to finish off with a couple from the last segment.
	Someone online. Considering that most Gen Z doesn't have married parents and our men are wising up to how dangerous marriage is, it's not surprising that no one wants to get married.
	Dangerous only insofar as the legal system is horrible and if you marry the wrong woman it is dangerous for you.
	What you need to do is iron out all of the philosophical contradictions and ensure that neither of you are captured by ideology before you commit to each other.
	And ensure that, as I said with the breakup to fix our problems thing, is never on the table because otherwise then divorce will be on the table.
	Divorce should only be an option if one partner or another is cheating or beating the other person.
	I think that's a sensible thing to do.
	Kevin, speaking of Japanese and dating, not Nobita?
	I don't know who that is.
	Recently did an interview with a very damaged Gaijin hunter, someone very interested in foreigners, namely American.
	She said some horrid things and Nobita's shocked reactions were amazing.
	I don't have the context for that.
	Base tape. The irony that the red pill crowd have become such a black pill.
	Well, yeah, because much like the Beauvoir, men going their own way means a discontinuation of the species.
	It means nobody breeds. So, yeah, of course, it's nihilistic.
	And finally, rue the day. We all know how women work.
	We don't need to hear from you until someone else already claimed you.
	That's when you get really hot and interesting and funny.
	This is an issue, but it also shows up in girls who are barely civilized.
	Yeah, unfortunately some women only find their man most attractive when other women are in the vicinity.
	But that's a very insecure woman who doesn't really know the value of the man that she's with.
	Okay, well, that's it for us.
	Thank you as always, Stelios. We'll be back tomorrow at one o'clock.

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