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Aug. 22, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:36:23

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #724

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	Thank you.
	for today, Tuesday 22nd of August 2023.
	It's a Tuesday, so I am your host Connor, joined once again by Dan.
	Hi chaps, regular crew as per usual.
	Today we're going to be discussing the end of Twitter's golden age, the rich men north of Richmond, and how men aren't useless, and that last one's going to be a special...
	segment in communication with our audience because I think it's worthwhile doing some audience engagement every now and then.
	A few announcements before we kick off.
	I know that there were audio issues with Evil Origins of Feminism Part 2.
	Heart was a little bit broken when it came out that week before last so what we've done is our intrepid editor Jack has put blood sweat and tears into fixing it and so it's going up on Wednesday so that's that's this particular video there if you haven't subscribed to the website yet do because Carl and I had a two and a half hour conversation about feminism and how to stop it.
	So it's really rich and interesting.
	We also have Broconomics coming out tomorrow.
	Today, 3 o'clock.
	Fantastic.
	Who are you interviewing?
	Oh, that's a US hedge fund manager, James Lavish.
	Interesting chat about sort of macro in the world in general at the moment.
	Right, fantastic.
	And then just drawing your attention again, we've been asked to draw your attention to the feedback survey, so you can fill that out.
	I'll be shouting that out in a segment as well.
	And there's also the Gold Tier Zoom call on Friday, which will be, I believe, me, Josh, maybe someone else that shows up.
	So that's me.
	Stop being Town Crier.
	Let's get into the news today.
	So Elon Musk and his newly appointed minion, that's CEO Linda Iaccarino, are making some strange borderline suicidal moves in their restructure of Twitter.
	These include the return of shadow banning.
	Policing disinformation at the behest of the EU and advertisers, and acting a bit like Stasi.
	So, let's look at the Silicon Valley getting back to business, as usual.
	Before we do, I just wanted to promote something on the website, and that is our free articles that go out.
	I've done one on the weekend, because everyone insults my music tastes, and I thought I'd vindicate it by looking at existentialist themes in Zoomer music.
	Not everything is Gnosticism, but weirdly enough, He is.
	He's a bit of a demonologist.
	And so we have free content on the site, but if you pay us £5 a month, you know, it helps keep the lights on.
	You get all the other premium content behind the paywall as well.
	And if you want to talk about what premium content you like, just a reminder, we have this survey that we've been asked to plug.
	The last question is a bit of a league table about which presenters you prefer.
	So all the YouTube commenters who can't stand me and Dan can go have fun with that one.
	Can't quite.
	Keep crying.
	Right, anyway, let's get on to the announcement.
	So Elon's spoken about Twitter recently and he said that the sad truth is there are no great social networks right now.
	We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.
	So he's trying to say there are some noble intentions with his restructuring of Twitter and the rebranding of it as X. Now, as a Gen Xer, I'm sure that you're familiar with getting blamed for everything, but I do think the X branding is horrendous.
	I understand the intention behind it is to make an everything app, Yeah, it's been a bit of a long-running theme, and I might have some thoughts on this segment, actually, because the Broconomics which I just filmed, which will be going out next week, is actually on Elon Musk.
	I spent a bit of time talking about what he's doing with X, but there's definitely an X theme to this, guys.
	So if you look at, he bought a McLaren F1, and the number plate was X. SpaceX.
	Yes.
	His son literally called X. Yes.
	Some weird variation.
	Final Fantasy game.
	Yes.
	He tried to call, well, he sort of, he had a payment company which became PayPal that was called X.com.
	So it's been a long running theme of the man's.
	Right.
	And so he's going to try and consolidate pretty much everything into an everything app, which will be your go-to for media, music, subscription-based, long-form writing.
	He definitely thinks big.
	I mean, we haven't seen the fruition of what's come about from Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink and all that kind of stuff.
	But the scale of the ambition with each of those companies is significantly more than most people think it is when they look into it.
	And so it is sort of playing to his strength that he's got this big vision which he's trying to implement on.
	I have seen people that have said that he acquired Twitter because he wants to make it the means of instant communication between us and the future Mars conference that he wants to make, which is quite an interesting angle for him.
	Yeah, I don't know if it's so much that.
	I mean, it could be.
	I mean, my immediate reaction when he bought it was, first of all, he wants to train his AI algorithm on it because this is the largest real-time natural language processor going on in the world at any time.
	So that'd be enormously valuable if he wants to get into AI, which he has, he's launched.
	XAI, presumably.
	That's probably it.
	And also, there was the original vision for X.com, which is a bigger version of everything included.
	But actually, I will just acknowledge, it is a hell of a lot better than it was two years ago.
	Low bar, admittedly.
	I think that what we're doing is we're cresting the curve of where it's been fun and usable.
	Because the person he's appointed, Linda Iaccarino, echoed this sentiment, but it's a very hollow echo.
	Linda Iaccarino says there is an important place in the world for X. Now, reminder, Carl and It was Harry who did a segment on Linda Iaccarino's checkered past.
	She was a former executive of NBC, I believe, and also she was one of the heads of the World Economic Forum, one of their chair people.
	So she's a regime plant, and it's slightly eyebrow-raising that Elon has appointed her, but you think it's something to do with placating the advertisers?
	Yeah, I mean, I do.
	I mean, I'm no fan of this Linda person.
	She is sort of standard identikit globalist managerial type.
	But she also had great connections in the advertising world and basically the situation that he came in is that Twitter was losing four million a day when he bought it.
	It could well be.
	It was a lot of money that it was losing on a regular basis.
	And even the world's richest man, there is a limit to the amount of money that he wants to give away and how many Tesla shares he wants to sell in order to pop this thing up.
	So I kind of view it as he's doing what he needs to do to basically keep the advertisers in place.
	and she's like the right pick to do the advertising job, keeping them on board and keeping them happy while he builds his other plans.
	And then I kind of imagine that she will either bend to his will when he starts to move it in the direction he wants to do, when he kind of changes the revenue model, or she'll possibly go.
	I don't know which of the two it is.
	But yeah, no fan of hers, but I think he was doing what he had to do to stop the business from hemorrhaging cash.
	Yeah, I don't know what the board structure's like, but I would think that might be a risky Oh, the board structure will be him and a couple of his mates who he lets stay on.
	Okay, so he could just jettison her when the time comes.
	Yeah, it wouldn't be a problem.
	Well, so let's start off with some positive news.
	One of the things I've seen recently is that they've gotten rid of their TweetCred system.
	Now, I wasn't really aware this was a thing.
	I didn't even know that was a thing.
	What was that?
	So this is something that Elon's acknowledged.
	He says, TweetCred is possibly the worst product name I've ever heard, and it will be deleted, not renamed.
	What it does, it's a covert algorithmic shadow banning tool that sets you a social credit score based on the accounts that you frequently interact with, not just follow or what you tweet out, but it's what you like, it's what you retweet, it's what the algorithm itself presents to you in your suggested feed.
	So it'll put a black mark against you, a form of guilt by association, and so it'll use that to derank you.
	They're getting rid of that, so that's a step in the right direction.
	I quite like the people who come up in my 4U stream.
	Well yeah, but they're not getting rid of that, they're getting rid of you being deranked because of who you associate with.
	So that's positive, that's positive development.
	There's a new one that is a bit of a fulcrum, there's interesting implications for it, and that's that they're going to be verifying your ID.
	Is this required?
	I think it's only for the blue ticks, but this is because you're going to be getting monetized and we'll get on to how monetization works later because people have raised some queries.
	The interesting part about this is that it sold off to an Israeli data collection firm.
	Yeah, I mean, the Israelis have been doing a lot of tech stuff on this kind of front.
	So what that strikes me is that if you want to buy crypto through a regulated exchange, you have to do that whole thing where you take a photo of yourself.
	It's all part of the KYC requirements.
	So this would suggest that his plans to move into the financial sphere are reasonably well advanced.
	He's taking the first step for the KYC process.
	Yeah.
	And especially if you're setting up monetization channels, then Twitter could have its own blockchain technology.
	Yes.
	Like it could have its own Twitter currency.
	Yeah, I mean, it would make sense to use one of the existing ones rather than invent a new one.
	So it's probably going to be Bitcoin or Doge.
	But yeah, I suppose it could be Doge.
	You could use the existing infrastructure, but you just rebrand it as the Twitter currency.
	You could use the Ethereum tech, but rebrand it with Xcoin, something like that.
	Yeah, you could do, yeah, something like that.
	Staggeringly, they take it down.
	So yeah, that's what that's for.
	Weirdly enough though, this has been pointed out, they don't require age verification for all users.
	Yes.
	Well, there's been a bit of a debate at the moment about whether or not adult material websites should do that.
	So there's been a bunch of states, I think this is Louisiana, they've instituted age verification requirements for access to pornography websites.
	And the companies themselves, rather than house all of the information in a secure database, because there's a lot of money in that, they've made cost-benefit calculations just block it in that state and say, your local legislator has blocked access to X amount of websites.
	Teenage boys everywhere learn the value of a VPN.
	Well, yeah, but the overall traffic to the websites has plummeted, which Oh, it's a good thing in my opinion.
	Cutting off the boomers, basically.
	The ones who are actually allowed to watch it.
	Well, and also lots of the non-tech savvy zoomers and types that just don't know how those things work.
	So the companies themselves have gone, well, hang on a minute.
	You know, we've made a cost benefit analysis here that we would like quite a few people that probably shouldn't be watching this have free access to it so we can sell the inflated viewing figures to our prospective advertisers.
	So it's actually more expensive to run the website in that state than it is to safely secure all of your ID stuff for the people that can actually watch it.
	Yes, and there is actually quite a surprising amount of porn on Twitter.
	That's what I was going to say, because if you look at Twitter, this isn't the case for Twitter yet, but then Twitter's age requirement is 13.
	Right.
	So they're going to institute age requirements and government ID verification.
	You can have porn on Twitter, but you only have to be 13 to use Twitter.
	It's a bit of a strange inconsistency here.
	I must say, I never see it on my theme, but whenever I've used the search function to try and research a topic, if you put in a term, like a couple of segments ago, I was doing a segment on Haiti, so I put Haitian into my search thing.
	A lot of porn came up on that.
	There's been a recent trend where a lot of these gimmick accounts that I've just muted now, because one, they try and incessantly blackmail you into thinking that every woman's awful.
	Which is just serving regime agitprop.
	Not all of them.
	Well, most of the gimmick accounts that... No, no, not all women are awful.
	No, no, exactly.
	They've started now taking sponsorships from OnlyFans girls that, like, fake really extreme posts to then promote themselves underneath it.
	And you can see that loads of popular posts, the OnlyFans women have gained the algorithm where they'll put, like, a seemingly unrelated reply or something.
	But you can tell from the profile picture or the name or... Yeah, a weird enough reply that it sort of makes you click into it and then... Yeah.
	Yeah, and then you find out it's not even there.
	Yeah, it's a clever marketing gimmick.
	So, that's everywhere, but you only have to be 13 for Twitter and then they're going to make you age forever.
	I'm just pointing out it's a bit of a weird inconsistency.
	Yeah.
	They need to fix that.
	So, the next one that's happening, Block is being deleted.
	Now, I understand he's already had a bit of a back and forth from Matt Walsh saying, we're going to replace it with something better.
	But Elon's saying it's just not going to exist anymore except for DMs.
	Now, one, if you're getting those OnlyFans girls spam replying your popular posts, block is very useful because it means they just can't do that.
	It deprives them of the marketing strategy that they're going to use.
	But also people have pointed out it's useful for stopping stalkers and the like.
	I use mute fairly frequently if someone's just being a moron and they want to incessantly be a moron and waste their own time then I'll just press mute because I don't have to see you and you don't realize I'm not seeing you so you think you're owning the comms or whatever but actually you're just terminally online and I get to go Yeah, I never used to bother with any of those until once you get your account up to a certain size.
	We're both sort of around the 20,000 mark.
	You get a lot of scammers and, well, the OnlyFan girls and the crypto related stuff.
	And also boomer spammers who want to definitely send you this one video that's convinced them of the New World Order.
	Well, I don't really mind them so much, but the ones that are definitely bots, I do do a lot of blocking of that now.
	Well, it's just when it's unrelated and it's incessant, I'm like, okay, alright, calm down.
	I'm sure your Telegram chat really enjoys it.
	I don't mind those guys so much.
	It's like, I've got photo roast potatoes here and you're showing me how Jacob Rees-Mogg is a stooge to the weft.
	Cool, thanks for the info, maybe not right now.
	But the idea that the block is going to go away, we don't know what he's replacing it with.
	Yes, that's the thing.
	And so it's pretty precarious.
	And when block is gone, what happens to your block list?
	Do they come flooding back or something?
	I don't know.
	Well, presumably they're... Or do they get converted into mutes?
	I don't know.
	Yeah.
	So there's, you know, if I've got all my ex-girlfriends on that list, I don't want them knowing what I'm up to.
	Not excellent, but alright.
	So Jack, former Twitter CEO, agrees, and he says 100% mute only, and Elon says Jack understands.
	Yeah, it seems that the block feature is not being replaced by anything quite as permanent.
	Yeah, I don't get the logic here, but I don't know.
	We'll see what they come out with.
	And now, for the bad news.
	This is all about monetization.
	So, this is Ian Milestrong, who is quite buddy-buddy with Elon.
	He spends a lot of time replying to him, and Elon replies to him, and fair enough.
	And he's saying, X pays incredibly well, a complete game-changer for creators and commentators.
	There's a bit of brown nosing here, because obviously if you're the one benefiting from the payment system, you're going to say how good the payment system is.
	The revenue sharing model is one that every other platform ought to adopt, but of course they won't because they're greedy.
	X is the future.
	Now, I agree with that in terms of there should be a value neutral, even though neutrality is a value.
	Advertising model.
	You won't get that with ESGs and GARM and all of these ethical advertising strong-arming boards.
	But Ian Miles-Strong has posted his stats.
	He's doing very well for himself.
	In early August, he got about $13,000.
	In mid-August, $7,000.
	In July, $16,000.
	So he's getting paid out for... That's not bad.
	How many followers does he have?
	He has... Let's hover over.
	700,000 followers.
	Oh, that's quite a few, yeah.
	Well, you'd think that, but then... Are you monetised, Connor?
	No, I don't get enough engagement.
	Yeah, because I'm sort of hovering around the 4 million impressions a month level.
	You need to be 5.
	I'm about 2 and a bit.
	So, Carl, boss man, 45.5 million impressions, $188.
	Right.
	Something's up here.
	Something's very strange.
	And bear in mind, Cole has, what, about 300,000 followers?
	Oh, so it's about the same as Mr Chong.
	It's about half of Imar Chong's, but a hell of a lot of impressions.
	But even if he was half the followers and half the impressions, he's getting less than a tenth.
	Right?
	Yes.
	Why is Carl being so punished?
	And this isn't the only one.
	Tim Poole is saying 243 million impressions, $4,000.
	Now, Tim Poole has way higher than Ian Miles-Chong.
	Tim Poole's at 1.7 million.
	He's got a million more followers and a lot less money.
	Bit of an odd trend.
	Laura Loomer as well.
	Now, Laura Loomer, you know, very high up in the Trump campaign.
	Banned off everywhere.
	500,000 followers.
	Very respectable.
	Yes.
	And she's saying that she got a payout of $190.
	Very weird.
	And she's actually responding to Ashley Sinclair here.
	And Ashley Sinclair worked with Babylon Bee, and she's got $6,000.
	got $6,000, but Ashley only has $700,000.
	I know with YouTube, it depends very much as to the type of adverts that get put on it.
	So finance is very highly scored, but I don't know, whatever else, nail bars or whatever Yeah so so Laura Loomer is saying that oh it's because these people are in Santa's camp but I don't think that's true even though there is a bit of a correlation there I don't think it's as myopic as whoever you support in the Republican primary is who is gonna get paid.
	Yeah I don't think Twitter has enough staff anymore to go through and create those individual lists it probably is an algorithm.
	Yeah, and even though Elon is a DeSantis guy, obviously, because he posted DeSantis' launch campaign on X, first of all, I don't think it's as simple as Trump being DeSantis.
	I think that's ridiculous.
	Yeah, whether he's still a DeSantis guy, because when he did that, DeSantis was in a different place.
	Yeah, he seems to be a bit more of a Vivec guy now.
	But in either sense, I think it's more likely that the advertisers are being a bit more discretionary about who they advertise with.
	And we're seeing that because Elon replied to me in Miles Chong, he's confirmed that only verified views count, which is quite interesting.
	So only the people that view your posts that are also verified is who you get paid for.
	So it's not correlated to follower counts, but who are the people also getting advertised on?
	Because you have to attract enough adverts for those verified viewers to see your tweets.
	So there is the ethical dimension in there of where certain advertisers will not be advertising.
	Yes, I mean it might not be as simple as only the verified users count but it could be some standard metric which applies to the ratio of verified to total number of people that view it because you don't want to pay people for bots.
	And basically, when he was buying this, he made a big thing about at least whatever percentage of the Twitter base was bought.
	So he could hardly then turn around to advertisers and say, I need you to pay the standard rates.
	But he could get around it by saying, look, we're going to base the number of the rate that you pay on people we know are absolutely true and a standard metric between the ratio of people we absolutely know to be true to the rest of them.
	Yeah, which is why he could also be instituting the government verification system.
	So he shores up his payment system as saying, well, here, advertisers, I know these are the amount of guaranteed human eyeballs looking at yourself.
	But the problem is we know the advertisers are also ethically captured.
	So are they precluding certain accounts and content from being advertised on?
	I mean, I just kind of see an opportunity in that because if that is the way that it's being done, then that gives the possibility of being able to buy some cheap advertising from people on the right.
	Yes.
	For people on the right.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	True.
	Yes.
	However, the issue with that is if your posts get seen at all.
	And we are now seeing Linda Iaccarino saying that that's not going to happen.
	So I'm just going to play this clip in the browser here.
	Staggeringly, they take it down.
	And that reducing that hateful content from being seen is one of the best examples how X is committed to encouraging healthy behavior online.
	And today, I can confidently sit in front of you and say that 99.9% Of all posted impressions are healthy.
	How do you define healthy though?
	Is porn healthy?
	Are conspiracy theories healthy?
	You know, it goes back to my point about our success with freedom of speech, not reach.
	And if it's, if it is lawful, but it's awful It's extraordinarily difficult for you to see it.
	But how many millions of people follow Kanye West?
	Lawful but awful.
	And he's allowed back on.
	You know, Kanye, who hasn't rejoined the platform yet, but is planning to do so, will operate within the very specific policies that we have established, that we're clear on, that everyone who's watching this or listening
	And we have an extraordinary team of people who are overseeing hands-on keyboards, monitoring all day every day to make sure that that 99.99% of impressions remain at that number.
	But we also have to remember what's at the core of free expression.
	You might not agree.
	With what everyone is saying.
	We want to make it a healthy debate and discourse, but free expression at its core will really, really only survive.
	When someone you don't agree with says something you don't agree with.
	And what a great place we would live in if we were able to return to a healthy, constructive discourse amongst people that we don't agree with.
	So the banality of taking every position under the sun there might have sent you to sleep.
	Um, however, it feels to me that's, that's a strong three steps forward and one step back type thing.
	Yes.
	Cause I, I do still want to acknowledge we are in a much, much better place than we were two years ago when that awful, uh, what was that?
	Yes.
	The JJ.
	Yes.
	She, she, she was bloody awful.
	Yeah, she was.
	However, what she's just said there is the exact phrase that the joy I got was parroting freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, but what that translates to.
	Is arbitrary, opaque, capricious persecution of things they don't like under the guise of repressive tolerance.
	So you'll never know if you are being suppressed, you can only infer it, and you'll never know quite why.
	And it's coming up to election season so we're going to see certain stories stop trending or certain accounts be locked out or...
	Yeah.
	So new boss, same as the old boss, basically.
	It's better, but it is three steps forward and one step back.
	Yeah, we're coming back.
	We're coming back around.
	So it was better.
	We're here.
	We're here.
	Well, I can see the roller coaster start dipping down now.
	Yeah.
	Not encouraging, but all right.
	So this is also coming down the pipe.
	We've got, they're hiring a senior software engineer.
	And this is, so Aaron Rodericks works at Twitter and he works at the Disinfo Elections Information Operations and he's looking for Civic Integrity and Elections Team Lead.
	Do we have the actual document open, Jack, by any chance?
	No?
	Okay, no worries.
	So he's in there, it says in the thumbnail, are you passionate about building innovative projects that connect people and enable conversations on a global scale?
	Do you want to be part of a dynamic team that influences how the world communicates?
	As part of trust and safety engineering, we make the platform safe for millions of users working across safety tooling as well as the front-end product to build systems that protect conversational integrity.
	A number of projects that work on, that under this role will work on, will be related to civic integrity, information integrity, platform manipulation and spam.
	So in there they're talking about, in the actual document itself that we haven't got open, they're talking about election integrity and election misinformation.
	The way we use the word safe these days...
	Yes, it's to insulate you from things that the regime finds inconvenient.
	There's also, speaking of the regime, this that's happening.
	So I've taken this screenshot from Bernie.
	She's currently got her account on private, so I hope I haven't violated anything, but this seemed innocuous enough.
	This is a screenshot of what the new, as of August 25th, interface is going to look like for anyone that's in the EU.
	Because the EU are passing their Digital Services Act, so it was passed last year and it's going to come into effect, and there's now going to be a Stasi-like function where you can press on the side of any tweet, report this as illegal content in the EU, and the details of this bill are quite interesting.
	So they've got two pages here, so the Digital Services Act package focuses on content moderation and targeted advertising, quote, to create a safer digital space where fundamental rights of users are protected and to establish a level playing field for businesses.
	A core concern is the trade and exchange of illegal goods, services, and content online.
	Online services are also being misused by manipulative algorithmic systems to amplify the spread of disinformation and for other harmful practices.
	Now, they're currently funding, with 1.2 billion euros, a consultation for initiatives on how to tackle election misinformation.
	So the AFD, basically.
	Yes.
	Medical misinformation and anti-LGBTQ hate.
	Thank you.
	So that's what's going to go in there.
	So you basically, if you say things that we can't say on YouTube, you'll be taken down by Twitter.
	I can't really blame Twitter for this one because it's EU law.
	They're complying with it.
	They just don't have a choice.
	I mean, it's just another reminder of how awful the EU is.
	But yeah.
	But absolutely.
	But it's also a couple of things.
	Number one, the overall user experience on Twitter is just going to get worse.
	Yes.
	Because even if you aren't in the EU, people that might follow in the EU might be subject to these laws, so they'll start censoring themselves.
	And two, remember, the legislative framework is symbiotic, and Linda Iaccarino works at the WEF, where they get lots of their marching orders from.
	I mean, all the time I get emails saying that your post is illegal under German law.
	I get the same as well.
	At which point I just put my fist in the air and go, right, I'm doing something proper.
	And then there's just this last one as well.
	What they're doing is they're creating a digital ledger of public shaming, because as part of the Digital Services Act, Oh, wrong button.
	They're doing a transparency database of content moderation decisions.
	So what they do is that any time a ban happens, the social media platform must publish the reason as to why.
	And so if they don't ban people, they get fined.
	When they do ban people, they've got to publicly post the reasons.
	That's useful to us, but one, they're probably not going to be truthful about it, because they weren't truthful about taking down the Huntsman.
	Well, they just say something like hate or misinformation or some, yeah.
	Exactly.
	And then now there's like a public wall where forever your name will be tarnished, particularly if you use your verified ID to access your blue tick account.
	So there's going to be a permanent public digital ledger of scarlet letters from the regime against your social media account.
	Mind you, I was on the original Hope Not Hate list.
	I quite liked that.
	Quite a few people that we know, aren't they?
	Yeah.
	But that's a badge of honour.
	Yes.
	But the problem is, as soon as they start consulting on things like the online safety bill, or in Australia they've got pretty much the exact same legislation, we're probably going to be seeing that similar little pop-up that the EU are going to see.
	So overall, Twitter's user experience, some people are going to get paid more, Some people are going to get paid nothing.
	Other people might be permanently tarnished with reputational damage from the European Union and user interfaces trending towards the negative.
	So we'll keep you posted but Twitter's golden age seems to be transitioning into one where the metal is quite a bit less precious.
	Tarnished.
	Right, shall we talk about Rich Men North of Richmond?
	Have you heard that one, Connor?
	I have heard the song, yes.
	I was actually recently in Virginia, so... Oh, right.
	I was in DC, so... Oh, was that for the Tim Pool thing, was it?
	Oh, I did that while I was there.
	Right.
	So, my friend lives in... He lives in West Virginia.
	Yes.
	So, I actually drove through about three different states, but I spent about...
	Five days in Washington.
	So I was near all the people that Oliver and yes well that well that's the thing that's the thing that is just north of Richmond is of course Washington DC so yes so that's the reference in the song.
	Now we would like to play the whole thing for you but um you know we have to be careful with copyright and uh it's always it's always a bit of an issue for us on this channel because uh there are things called laws Well, and YouTuber me.
	So if you're watching on YouTube, by all means, you've probably seen it already, but if you haven't, do a quick search for Richmond, North of Richmond, and then watch this clip.
	And if you're on the website, we're going to play you a little bit, but you're going to get cut out if you're on YouTube.
	So let's play a bit for our subscribers.
	Be true, but it is all it is living in the new world with an old soul.
	These rich men, nor the rich men, Lord knows it all.
	Just want to have total control.
	Want to know what you think.
	Want to know what you do.
	And they don't think you know.
	But I know that you do.
	Cause your dollar ain't shit.
	And it's taxed to no end.
	Calls the rich men.
	Calls the rich men.
	Bye.
	Thank you.
	So yeah, that was a quick cut of the song.
	Now, I mean, immediate reaction, it's quite savage, the whole song when you listen to it.
	He's got a great voice, but it's powerful because everything he's saying on there is true.
	It's like the non-Boomer Truth version of Money's Too Tight to Mention.
	Yes.
	Yes, that's a good comparison.
	Yes, where it was very critical of Reaganomics at the time, of where Reagan tried to implement a trickle-down neoliberal system, and it's led to an even worse trickle-up oligarchic system, and he's taking... Yeah, exported manufacturing jobs and all the rest of it, yes.
	But, I mean, obviously this has done incredibly well.
	It's gone to the top of the charts, and this is an unknown guy.
	It's number one on Billboard 100 as of today.
	Wow.
	Yes.
	Yeah, that's powerful.
	And, you know, he was just some unknown guy standing in front of his his dear stands with a guitar playing.
	I mean, there's a bit of production value in this.
	So something went into this one.
	But I think it's worth talking about.
	So what I fancy doing is basically just breaking down the lyrics and getting into that way.
	And actually, before I do so, I also want to sort of mention that This has been out for a good week or so now, and we're getting to the stage where I'm just going to acknowledge, yes, there are people now coming out with their takes about how it's all a psy-op.
	Oh, this is what Rory in the office calls Fed Sheeran.
	Yes.
	Yes, that's a good one.
	I don't put any stock into that.
	And then you've got the people on the left basically trying to cancel him because they saw his YouTube playlist.
	which had...
	Yeah, stuff about 9-11 and stuff like that.
	Yes.
	They think he needs to be counseled for it.
	It's like, well, for God's sake, I'm not going to get into that.
	I mean, there was obviously something dodgy about 9-11.
	I mean, for God's sakes.
	I mean, honestly, Tower 7 and the Pentagon, I mean, I don't know how much of it is wrong, but there's definitely some wrong stuff in there.
	I don't think they objected to him talking about 9-11, more so just who he thought was behind it.
	Well, I was somewhat glossing over that bit.
	We definitely won't mention that because we take absolutely no position on that either.
	People are raising eyebrows as to whether or not the fact that he has an affiliation with conspiracy theories who would otherwise marginalize his perspective to the normie boomers who quite like country music is meant to make everyone that's jumped on this and made it successful look radioactive by comparison.
	Yeah, this is their sort of standard cancellation technique, and I did quite like his response to it.
	He just doesn't care.
	Because, I mean, that's the whole authenticity of this song, is he just doesn't... He's been so beat down, he just doesn't care about this.
	Well, I think what people might be wary of is if this is another Kanye situation.
	of where Kanye seems to pal up with Donald Trump, he seems to make some fairly base statements about black and white people, they should get along despite BLM, that fathers should have custody of their children, and then he starts talking about the mid-century Germans and retroactively everyone has turned around and said, well we liked what Kanye was saying right up until that point, looks like they also support... Yeah, he certainly has some messaging challenges around that when he came out and said, I love, you know, the German guy, the moustache man, yes.
	I have heard an analysis which he was trying to do it from a Christian perspective of he loves everybody including the most reprehensible people that's where his mind was but that's not that's not how it came.
	But he also said that technically he can't be anti-semitic because all black people are Jewish and then he also said that he stopped being anti-semitic implying that he was anti-semitic beforehand because he watched 21 Jump Street and he saw Jonah Hill in it and now he loves Jews.
	So, Kanye is not very consistent and so what people might be averse to is whether or not they've supported this guy and then they go digging into his YouTube history and then someone can have an easily applicable smear to everyone that has supported him.
	It doesn't seem like it.
	Anyway, forget that.
	Which is good.
	I don't want to get into that because, you know, there is a tendency sometimes in our sphere to just get so blackmailed that we can't have anything nice.
	But no, generally, this is an impactful song.
	So, you know, let's just break it down.
	So he starts off by saying, I've been selling my soul, working all day, overtime hours for bullshit pay, so I can sit out here and waste my life away.
	Drag back home, drown my troubles away.
	And look, this is just speaking to the sentiment that he's just working every day to survive.
	And I think a lot of people, that's why this resonates, a lot of people in exactly that situation.
	The sense of progress that people used to have, that they're building towards something.
	You know, I'm working towards buying a home.
	I'm working towards paying it off.
	I'm working towards my retirement.
	I'm working towards my lifestyle.
	Children's education all that kind of stuff that that for so many people at this point is is out of reach because.
	Ever larger proportion of the working working man.
	All that used to be good in life is being skimmed off the top.
	There's two angles to this.
	It's that one, there is a social mobility ceiling that is lowering like a tomb in Indiana Jones.
	Yes.
	And the second one is, what are you working for?
	Are you working for the subsistence of your household?
	Because fewer of us have relationships, especially young men.
	The stat that I've rattled off to you before is 27% of men 18 to 30 have never even had intimate partner, let alone married, let alone have kids.
	So You're not working for anyone in your immediate vicinity because no one's relying on you.
	And then also, you're not bringing home anything.
	It's not like you're pre-industrially working with the raw materials.
	Oh, yeah.
	The 1950s life is gone.
	No, no, no.
	Pre-1950s.
	Way pre-1950s.
	Yes.
	Like, the industrial wage economy means that you're... But everything is transient now.
	Yeah, everything is transactional.
	So, rather than working for the immediate subsistence of kids that rely on you, in your own house, you've not got anyone who relies on you, and you're also working to exponentially make the line go up for someone who's in Westminster.
	Yes, the working man these days exists to support the system, not himself, is essentially what we're saying.
	So he comes on to this, so the next line is, the next bit is, it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to, for people like me and people like you.
	Wish I could just wake up and it not be true.
	But oh, it is.
	And this is sort of speaking to, you know, this whole song feels like a funeral dirge for the American dream.
	You know, it's a sort of continuation of what we're saying.
	And when he says it's a shame, I think he's saying that because it doesn't have to be this way.
	You know, it could be other.
	And it really doesn't have to be this way.
	The reason why the working man is in this situation today is absolutely a product of our financial system.
	Yes.
	And I will come on to that more when there's another bit that relates to that.
	He has a line, and this one gets interpreted in different ways.
	So see what you think.
	He says, living in the new world with an old soul.
	So I've heard lots of reactions that take that either way.
	I took it to mean living in the new world, as in the Americas, with an old soul.
	So that was a reference to European feudalism and the sort of elitist cap show, that sort of old-fashioned class-based system which wasn't supposed to transfer across to the America post their revolution.
	But the other interpretation of that is it's living in the new world, as in, you know, the post-GFC world, you know, this new digital post-internet world, and comparing it to, you know, what life used to be like.
	The bug men via the grass touchers.
	Yes, well, that sort of thing.
	But also, I mean, this is a guy who's about 30 years old, so he would have been a teen in 2000.
	And basically, I mean, I sort of look back now and before about 2008, the world was just normal.
	And, you know, he would be old enough to remember that.
	And now that it's just everything is decaying.
	Well, this is something in your fourth turning economics that you hit on.
	But I think this is something that I can speak to being in that generation that's had its metaphysical ties severed, not just looking at it from an above angle.
	If you start a school with a smartphone, you genuinely don't know how to interact with people.
	I didn't.
	I know lots of people that did.
	I've interacted with those people and they can't put it down.
	And they always have the open door in the back of their mind to what will the crowd think.
	Yes.
	And they're not very grounded people.
	Their concerns are very material and very conditional on social recognition.
	They don't have any deep, sincere and transcendental convictions that guide them along.
	And when he says old soul, he's talking about being, rather than that class system imported from feudalism, I think it's the opposite of what we're around.
	He's talking about the connection with the earth and the family and the people that you're bringing home to, the land you're working with.
	Before enclosure and before the centralization in industrial cities.
	That's a much richer and more romantic way of viewing the world as being a part of it, rather than itemizing it and taking it out of nature and putting it on the shelf.
	So just using you as an example, how much do you remember the world pre-2008?
	9-11 is in my lifetime, but it's not in living memory.
	That's a good way of putting it.
	Yeah, because I mean, the more I stop and think about how things used to be, it is more and more striking.
	And I think any listeners who remember the pre-2008 era, you know, it was it looked and felt superficially like the world that we live in today.
	But just without all of the intensity of the bullshit that you've got, I mean, there was elements of that creeping through like, you know, weeds coming through cracked concrete.
	But and there was a lot of that.
	It was it was infesting the media and it was getting through.
	But it just But it hadn't permeated the culture.
	It was something that you saw on a screen every now and again and you read articles where people were sort of pushing that sort of nihilistic sort of worldview and all the sort of cultural Marxism.
	It was there and it was trying to permeate it but it hadn't infected day-to-day life.
	It hadn't infected your office place or your normal working week that it has today.
	I just really feel what he's saying here is a damn shame What this world has become in a relatively short period of time.
	This is something that we were actually discussing on our lunch break, weirdly enough.
	It's that if you work in a job like ours, and you are constantly oppressed by the regime, then you would be miserable if you just treated this as a vector for your own material enrichment and self-empowerment.
	If you only cared about the money and the online recognition you were getting, because the regime is always going to crush you, and economic circumstances are always going to discourage you, so you'd actually hate working here.
	But the reason the hosts like working here It's not because we're all rich and super famous, because we're not, right?
	Just a bit of behind the scenes knowledge there.
	But it's because we're all friends.
	It's because we're all embarked on a project of moral restitution and our own little corners of the lotus seeds make a complete picture that we'd rather live on than in modernity.
	That's that old soul.
	It's the sentiment of what you're working for, rather than the abundance that you're working Yes.
	A sense of fulfillment.
	Actually, there's a, there's a website I'm going to bring up in a minute.
	And it used to be the case pre 1971, where if you ask people what they work for a, it was some wording was something like a, a rewarding, um, professional life or, or rewarding work life was, was very much at the top of the list.
	And then post 1971, basically it's slumped right down to the bottom.
	Now it's all about getting paid because people are needing to pedal faster and faster in order to, you know, to, to pay the bills.
	I'll move on to the next bit.
	So, these rich men north of Richmond, as we talked about, basically the rich people in Washington DC, Lord knows they all just want to have total control.
	Want to know what you think, know what you do.
	And they think that you don't know, but I know that you do.
	Yeah.
	It sounds like the thing that's often misquoted as a Solzhenitsyn quote, because it's not, We know they're lying, they know they're lying, they know that we know that they're lying and yet they still lie.
	Yes.
	So they don't think you know, but I know that you do.
	It's that latently you can see the decline made manifest observably and you know the people on TV are gaslighting you and they know that they're gaslighting you but they continue to gaslight you.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	And well, I mean, we've just had, of course, an incredibly obvious and overt example of total control, which would be, which were the lockdown crimes across most of the modern world.
	Which they're hoping will come back.
	Yeah.
	Well, there's another election coming, isn't there?
	So they need their postal votes back.
	But I mean, it's more than that.
	The IRS basically up your ass if you move around a few hundred dollars.
	But, you know, if you're Joe Biden.
	Yes.
	Selling housing developments in Iraq to your brother.
	Well, Big Tech, as we just talked about, I mean, even though it's under the new era, Twitter is reverting back into this, and the rest of them 100% signed up to the surveillance thing.
	The FBI, and God knows which other three little agencies, are sort of working to sort of monitor people on a constant basis.
	And it's just so, you know, this pretence of a government for the people, it's just so gone.
	It's the people for the government, you know, these days.
	You will serve the government.
	You will pay us.
	Yeah, tax cattle.
	Exactly that.
	Yeah.
	And it goes on to the next bit to say, because your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end because of rich men north of Virginia.
	And this, he absolutely nails it because again, the working man, he's being completely squeezed from both ends.
	He's got taxes, which are going up all the time that are sort of sucking the life out of him.
	But at the same time, his ability to actually buy anything is being squeezed at the other end.
	And so no wonder they're sort of being left with this sort of absolute despair and hopelessness.
	There's also the class dynamic as well.
	It's not just how the money supply is being manipulated.
	It's at the one end you've got the oligarchs who would like to permanently cement their power and they've got a symbiotic class that they're importing to create that dependent voting base who are in the UK specifically being battery farmed in hotels who have themselves None of that old soul.
	They're all mercantile, so they're actually content to sit like bug men in those little rooms and on the taxpayer tee just sit outside on the pavement and smoke all day at your expense.
	So you're squeezing, it's not the middle class, you're squeezing anyone who does any genuine productive work and has aspirations for family and social mobility to be discouraged to work to foster that dependent population so the people at the top never have their power challenged.
	Yeah, you've got to wonder what those hotel boatmen are being brought in for, you know, at what point they're going to be activated for whatever the purpose is.
	But yeah, at the moment we just of course see them, especially in Swindon, we just see them sat around smoking and going out and buying a new Adidas top because it's what they do.
	Actually, what I will do is, just on this point, let's have a look at this website.
	WTF happened in 1971?
	Yeah, there we go.
	Let me get the mouse.
	So look at that top chart.
	This is a lot of what I'm talking about.
	So, the pre-1971 era.
	Um, you know, basically the productivity of the economy was, was rising in tandem with the compensation.
	So basically the, um, the return on assets, um, was, was matched by the return that went out in wages.
	And basically since that point, there's been no, um, real terms wage increase, um, in the U S and it, and it's basically the same for Europe as well.
	Um, so, you know, if, if you are an asset holder, you have been getting richer over that period, but if you're a wage earner in real terms, you have not been getting any richer.
	This is the frustration when the Marxists say profit is theft.
	No, it's inflation is theft.
	Oh, yeah, absolutely.
	Well, yeah.
	Inflation is taxation.
	Taxation is theft.
	So exactly this.
	There's a whole bunch of interesting things on this website, which is well worth checking out.
	There's another good one if I can get too far down.
	The cost of living.
	Oh, yeah.
	So this is great.
	So the price of a tin of Campbell's condensed soup.
	I mean, look at that.
	And this is a lovely metric because it goes back well over 100 years.
	So you can see, you know, that realtor, well, he's not even realtor, that's just nominal terms.
	Price of a tin of soup as a standard commodity was absolutely flat for well over 100 years.
	And then you introduce this new financial system and the cost goes spiraling up.
	So you add the cost of the things that you buy in the shop to the taxation you're being forced to pay as well.
	You know, no wonder we're getting squeezed.
	And actually, we jump on to the next thing.
	I've actually done a Brokeronomics on this website.
	So it's the path to today's problem where I basically go through that website, a graph at a time and explain what's going on there.
	So that was actually a very popular one.
	It explains so much of why we are in the situation we're in now.
	Jumping back to Oliver, which actually, incidentally, isn't his name.
	That's his grandfather's name.
	I thought I'd mention that before the comments pointed out.
	His next line is, I wish the politicians would look out for minors and not just minors on an island somewhere.
	That is a hard hitting line, because I understand that there's a big minor community near where he lives.
	And of course, nobody gives a damn about minors.
	It has some synchronicity as well with the abandoned, left-behind manufacturing towns of the North in the UK.
	And this shows the Uniparty is at work, both in the US and the UK, because Margaret Thatcher is most famous for... The revisionist version of the history has obviously took the fight to the unions, which were infested with communists, and I wasn't a fan of the unions.
	But by deracinating those towns of their inherited Yeah.
	professions and prosperity, which usually were mining towns.
	She didn't replace them with anything.
	And so she thought, oh, by offshoring manufacturing and centralizing all the financial services in London, everyone will be happy in the country.
	Yeah.
	But those men in the time and place had no ability to generate personal income and some personal meaning for their families.
	Yeah.
	To be fair, the de-industrialization that happened under her was a trend that was very much underway before she came in as well.
	But yes, that is a part of it.
	But yeah, just focusing on this narrow aspect of it, I think it was either the miners or it might have been the oil workers, when they started to experience particularly hard times, the Washington class and the media class and the politician class, Basically came out with a learn to code thing.
	It's like they just do not give a damn about the plight of these people in the slightest.
	And when these people then sort of turned it around, about two years later, when there was that sort of tech crunch and started making fun of them on the same basis, they all started getting banned and censored.
	It's a ridiculous situation.
	And then, of course, the second part of the comparison, which is not just miners on an island somewhere.
	It is absolutely absurd, the situation with that.
	I mean, we probably don't talk about it enough, but we basically have a pedo class that's protected by an elite class because they're the same class of people.
	And everybody knows that these people are fiddling kids, and they're just getting away with it.
	I mean, I think we had a very popular segment, didn't we?
	Yes, that's about 450,000 views now on the website.
	Yeah, on Epstein's client list.
	Yeah, but that's some of the clients, but we don't know most of them.
	That's just the calendar that was released by the Wall Street Journal.
	Yes.
	We still don't know the contents of the black book.
	We still don't know, for example, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was prosecuted for trafficking children.
	Who to?
	Yeah.
	Oh, no one.
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah.
	Trafficking to no one.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	And it's just so obscene and so absurd that we know that there are these high-level paedophiles that operate with absolute impunity and we're supposed to just forget about it I mean, I haven't even forgotten about the 19,000 girls that were sexually assaulted and raped in Rotherham.
	But again, you know, we're supposed to just tut and move on.
	By the UNAID workers, and Oxfam as well, that face no repercussions.
	Yeah, you know, the Sound of Freedom, which I haven't watched yet, but I intend to.
	It's a bit more difficult to watch it over here, because it's... When it hits streaming, we'll have to...
	Yeah, but definitely going to watch The Sound of Freedom soon.
	But, you know, again, this is all part of the deep frustration that these things happen and we're supposed to just forget about it and ignore it.
	And if we notice it, we're just called QAnon conspiracy theorists.
	Yeah.
	Even though we've been prosecuted for such crimes.
	Yeah, coming to that.
	The next part of this is, Lord, we got folks in the streets who ain't got nothing to eat and the obese milking welfare.
	Well, God, if you're five foot three and you're £300, taxes ought not pay for your bag of fudge rounds.
	Now, this is the one that has caused all the pushback from the left on this one, because the default position in the established class is that you're not allowed to touch entitlements and that you need to treat those on welfare with kid gloves.
	But this guy is authentic.
	He doesn't look at welfare as, you know, I'm being made poor by this system.
	Therefore, I have compassion for all poor people.
	No, he's a working man trying to work.
	And he knows that he's getting bled out.
	And these politicians are enriching themselves through the power of these entitlement programs.
	And they're using it as their personal patridge for the many trillions that they move around on this basis.
	People like that, they want to provide for themselves and their family and their community.
	They don't want to be paying for some lard barge in the middle of a blue city wobbling around, you know, stuffing their faces with corn syrup and sugars.
	And, you know, the system, the media class, the politicians, they basically just lump all of these people in together and just, you know, the pause.
	There's a two-fold critique there as well.
	He didn't go after the entitlement programs just in the trickle-up inverse demographic pyramid that the boomers are running up the debt and, you know, taxing people like me in this country, him in that country to pay for entitlement programs that they can never quite afford.
	He went after the people that are fat layabouts.
	Yes.
	Such a difference.
	The reason is there, he's almost talking to them.
	Like he's saying, if you are this person who's 300 pounds, you don't deserve that, and just know that the rich men north of Richmond want you to be this way because they've induced learned helplessness in you, because you'll never challenge their power.
	It's a vote plantation.
	Yes, exactly.
	And then the other point is as well, is that there is a general attitude, and this is why he got attacked by the positivity fat activists and the like, That you should be disembodied and that any judgment and any biological constraint on the satiation of your material desires, which is the new world, not the old soul, as in what can I do for you, what can I accrue to myself, is oppression.
	And so you, as a big fat 300 pound person, are actually serving elite interests because they are transhuman in their idea that their body should not be a limit for how much pleasure they can accrue.
	Well, those people would be coming under regime attack if they weren't useful to them.
	Yes, exactly.
	So they clearly are.
	And that's why they're offering, now, jabs to reduce your weight, rather than healthy diets.
	Yeah.
	It's more trans... It's not vegetables and exercise, it's having other products.
	Yes, it's the technological version of the Roman banquets to then go into the vomitorium for another course.
	Yeah.
	So the next line is, and this again speaks to the despair, young men are putting themselves six feet in the ground because all this damn country does is keep kicking them down.
	And actually, there was loads of reactions I could have pulled from in relation to this song.
	But this one in particular and this line in particular just caught my interest.
	And this guy, he goes into watching this for the first time.
	And at this point, he kind of throws up his hands because it's resonating so strongly.
	and you know the you know well watch for yourself watch this clip i never thought i would ever ever say something about like this about the united states about my country and i just feel it Every single day they just sit and they beat us down and you see the next person that you might want to like look up to a little bit, not just look up to, but like listen to and say, Hey, he's making sense.
	In jail.
	Next person.
	Maybe he might be, he seems to be making sense.
	Canceled.
	Next person.
	But you know what?
	He's kind of making some sense.
	Disappeared.
	I'm done with the CIA.
	No.
	No.
	And, you know, I feel it.
	And you can tell why this song has gone to number one.
	Because, you know, I had a very similar reaction the first time I heard it.
	And I don't even live in America.
	I mean, we're downstream of a lot of this shite.
	But, you know, we are still getting it.
	But we are a vassal state, so we import the same culture.
	Yeah, exactly.
	But I mean, if you're living somewhere and you grew up thinking that you lived in the land of the free, and then you look around you and think it's because it's so So slow and insidious, it's every day this sort of creeps on you like a slow dusk.
	It's like the alien blood working its way through the ship.
	Yeah, and then you sort of listen to this and it's all laid bare and I absolutely get that reaction.
	So the next part of this is, Lord it's a damn shame what the world's gotten to for people like me and people like you.
	I wish I could just wake up and it's not be true.
	But oh it is, living in a new world with an old soul.
	Yeah, I mean, There's no call to action to this song, I notice.
	Because, basically, if somebody in our sphere or somebody like that puts a call to action to something like this, we're either going to go to jail or we're going to get shot.
	Well, look at Trump.
	He said, peacefully and patriotically, make your voices heard, and he's being tried under the RICO Act.
	Yeah.
	And we have to be very conscious of what we say on podcasts like this.
	You know, we cannot put calls to action in anything that we do because it will result in an arrest.
	That would be very irresponsible and we wouldn't endorse that.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Which is annoying.
	I suppose we can hint at a few things.
	So it is... I disavow.
	Yes.
	So there's no call to action in this, but later on he did cite a Bible verse, which is Psalms 37.
	12 through 20.
	So I'll just read that because I do want to inject an element of hope into all of this.
	So the wicked plot against the righteous and gnash their teeth at them.
	But the Lord laughs to the wicked for he knows their day is coming.
	The wicked draw the sword and bend their bow to bring down the poor and needy, to slay those whose ways are upright.
	But their swords will pierce their own hearts and their bows will be broken.
	Better the little that the righteous have than the wealth of many wicked.
	The power of the wicked will be broken, but the Lord will uphold the righteous.
	The days of the blameless are known to the Lord, and their inheritance will endure forever.
	In times of disaster, they will not wither.
	In days of famine, they will enjoy plenty.
	But the wicked will perish.
	The Lord's enemies will, like the beauty of the fields, they will vanish, vanish like smoke.
	Now, you don't need to be a religious person to understand the resonance of that.
	that these people will get their comeuppance.
	I mean, I do believe that.
	I mean, I know a lot of the content that we produce is rather blackmailed, but they are going to get their comeuppance.
	The way I look at it is anything that cannot last will not last.
	You can only run against the immutable laws of reality for so long until entropy sets in.
	And this reminds me of Ephesians 6.12, which implies that these people are motivated by a malevolent will that they don't quite know.
	Which is, we struggle not against persons, but against the principalities and dark powers that work in this world.
	And that's his message.
	These people, I think the reason the elites are behaving the way they are is because they are scared and they are right to be scared because they can see their power base slipping away.
	They are losing control.
	That's why they're behaving ever more recklessly and dangerously.
	Because they know that their time is coming to an end.
	So, you know, there is something positive in this.
	There was one more reaction video that I wanted to give.
	In fact, I'm going to show you this graph.
	We got the graph?
	Yep.
	So basically, this is a podcast that I sometimes watch between three billionaires and some libertard who moderates it.
	So it's quite an interesting perspective they have on markets sometimes.
	And basically, so they listen to this song.
	And then they pulled up this graph.
	And what this graph basically shows you, it's the different quintiles of people of earnings.
	So you've got the dotted black line at the top, but they are all in, which is the top 5%.
	And then you've got the lines at the bottom.
	So basically, if you're listening, the bottom four lines haven't moved.
	They're just flat lines forever, basically.
	And then the people who are doing pretty well, their line has been going up.
	And the top 5%, their line has been sort of rocketing straight upwards.
	That's also, the four lines at the bottom are anything below or just above $100,000.
	Yeah, so we're not talking about people who are, yeah.
	And there's a higher proportion of people that make that in the UK per population than over in the US than in the UK, rather.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So it is the vast majority of people that this situation applies to.
	Anyway, so they get talking about this and they are perceiving this in terms of, well, you know, is this guy basically calling for somebody to come along and take away my money and just hand it to those people at the bottom?
	Complete swing and a miss.
	Listen to this swing and a miss of analysis.
	A lot of people want to pretend that this is an issue and they want to get the sympathy of the masses by giving the populist rhetoric of why this is an issue.
	But when push comes to shove and the question is, do you believe that the dashed black line or the blue line should be legislatively brought down to meet the other lines?
	People just evade the question.
	In my perspective, the answer is no, you cannot do that.
	And the reason why United States GDP is where it is, is because of that dashed line.
	It's an existence proof of the fact that this is the largest economy in the world.
	And so one has to make a really simplistic decision, which is, do you want economic supremacy?
	And then try to figure out ways of rebalancing things?
	Or do you not?
	I say you absolutely must start with that, which means that that dashed line and that blue line will always have a rate of acceleration that is greater than the other lines.
	And that's just natural OpEx leverage that exists in any company.
	If you look at a company with 50% EBITDA margins versus a company with 15% EBITDA margins, because one uses technology and the other one doesn't.
	Capitalism is rife with these examples.
	Yeah.
	Chamath, that is the smartest thing you've said in 142 episodes of The All In Pod.
	But I agree 100% Chamath with your... I think it's well said.
	But then you should just say it.
	I think we do a huge disservice by pretending to care and then not seeing the ugly truth.
	The ugly truth is none of us want the government to try to bring that dashed black line or that blue line down.
	We want them to stay out of our way.
	That is the truth.
	Yep.
	So if you talk to that guy that wrote that song and his 80 million followers, what do you say to them?
	What do you say to them?
	I don't know.
	It's my honest answer.
	Yeah, thank you.
	New world man.
	No, the problem is not that we all want the Bernie Sanders tax for millionaires and the billionaires.
	No.
	No, the problem is the government has been in bed with some of the largest corporations, namely BlackRock, which you've done an excellent pro-economics on, to fudge the monetary policy, to instantiate themselves as the unquestionable oligarch class while robbing us of upward mobility.
	Yeah, I mean, if I was going to try and explain it to that bunch of millionaires, and actually that one who was just about to interject, David Sachs, he gets a bit more.
	He's the one who's been pushing Vervaken and DeSantis, and he actually comes back with a much better perspective on some of that stuff, which I'll mention in a moment.
	But what I think Chamath is not getting there is that it is the financial system itself.
	If you derive your income from assets, And I showed that line earlier, it's like you're a bird trying to fly on a planet with low gravity.
	If you make your income through wages, and so it's not derived from dividends or capital returns or the OPEX leverage that he's talking about there, it's like trying to be a bird flying on a high gravity planet.
	You know, it's not a question because they then get into this whole thing about, oh, we worked really hard and we came from nothing.
	It's not just a function of how hard you work or how smart you are.
	It's the game that you're playing and what all of these guys do.
	And actually, you know, this applies to me as well.
	I mean, I'm not smarter or harder working than a whole bunch of people.
	The reason why I've had some success is because I've been playing the assets game.
	And assets, it's just so much easier to lift up in this sort of permeable market that we've been in for the last 20 years, because you get that much greater return on your effort than if you're just trying to sell your time or your labor through wages.
	That's what's happening, which he just doesn't get, which is why I sort of cited that brokenomics episode, the WTF happened in 1971, because it is all key to this.
	Now, to be fair to that David Sachs guy who's just going to cut in the end there, he does point out that actually a large part of it as well was basically every manufacturing job that could be exported to Asia has been exported.
	That's a large part of it as well.
	And he also points out that anybody who complains about that is called deplorable or cancelled, or I would add taken out by Fed as well.
	So that's worth talking about.
	And these guys aren't even in Washington.
	They're just Silicon Valley billionaires.
	But you can see the complete disconnect that is opening up in some way of America, because there is a financial system which rewards people like that, and just keeps kicking down, like the relics go.
	Keeps kicking him down every day.
	If you have a sentiment of old soul, it's not of interest to people that want to commodify everything.
	Yeah.
	I'm going to quickly mention now The Guardian, because of course they never disappoint.
	Thanks.
	They came out of a reaction to this.
	I'll do this quickly, but I've got to throw this in here.
	So their analysis in this article.
	We can all agree that politicians have caused many of America's problems, but it's harder to argue that our country is being destroyed by short, overweight chocolate enthusiasts.
	I mean, Christ.
	So they've gone straight for that line about the people being £300, and they're trying to say that this guy is saying that that's causing all of it.
	I'm not even going to get into the analysis here.
	It's just, this is how the mind of a... well, this is a quisling.
	This is a regime, and this guy isn't even rewarded by the regime.
	He's probably struggling to meet his wages as well.
	Like most leftists, he probably thinks of himself as part of the rebellion, but you're actually just a midwit serving regime interests.
	Yeah, a classic Quisling.
	If you don't know that term, look it up from the war era.
	It's exactly what these Guardian writers are.
	He then goes on to say, still a reference to politicians looking out for miners on an island somewhere, apparently a reference to Jeffrey Epstein's ties to elite figures.
	Anthony could be nodding to QAnon for far-right conspiracy theories.
	Or he's nodding to Jeffrey Epstein, who was prosecuted and then suicided for exactly that.
	Again, it's like, why is this guy going out to bat for the pedo class?
	They always do this.
	Compared to the likes of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and the right-wingers sharing his story, he also seems to have a modicum of empathy.
	Granted, standards are incredibly low.
	It's just buzzword buckshot.
	He's just peppering his article with as many inflammatory accusations as possible.
	It's just tribal symbolism.
	Bloody midwick quizzling.
	He's been compared to Bob Dylan and Wooden Guthrie, but if either of them ever recorded a song mocking the poorest of the poor, it's been lost to history.
	If Anthony wants to keep moving upwards, he should aim his punches in the same direction.
	Thank you, Guardian.
	You know, these people are not getting, these people are the apparatchiks for the system.
	Well, they are heavily funded by Bill Gates.
	Yeah, and I'm just going to leave this segment with a nod to another song that's a bit more recent, which is also doing incredibly well, which is, I don't know if you saw it, but the Tom McDonald Anthony Cahoon one.
	Yeah, I think it's actually, this song is more successful because it's more palatable to normies, because most of the Tom McDonald stuff is rap.
	And you're not going to get your average guy picking up his kid's... Yeah, I've never had any interest in Tom McDonald, but his new one, Your America, is quite powerful and speaks to this.
	And hopefully, this is going to become a genre now, because, you know, we can't criticise by making a call to action, otherwise, especially if you're not in America, you're going to get the Feds turn up at your door like that boomer waffling a couple of weeks ago.
	Yeah, the 70-year-old man, yes.
	You got assassinated.
	But this culture is broken, and it is spilling out into the culture.
	Right, well then.
	So, I don't often descend into the bowels of online comment sections, but I do like engaging with the people on our website, mainly because you pay our wages, and some of you have some very insightful takes.
	Good people.
	And so, many such cases.
	Some, I assume, are good people.
	And so, I recently had a chat with Helen Joyce, as you can see, on our website.
	This is free, but of course, if you do become a paying member, you can ensure that we can pay for the expenses and all this fancy equipment so we can keep having these conversations.
	And Helen and I had a really cordial conversation.
	She knew coming in it was a bit like a lion's den, because she knew that we probably wouldn't agree on everything.
	We would agree on the diagnosis, but not the trajectory of travel, which is why we had a broad discussion about whether or not the TERFs, the Trans Exclusion Radical Feminists, which she is friends with, she doesn't identify herself as that, she still thinks of herself as fiscally conservative, socially liberal, which I think is an oxymoron, but When she comes back, hopefully, we'll hash more of that stuff out, and if folks like us, the more reactionary types, can remain allies after we put Woke away.
	And it was a really constructive conversation, but towards the end, in the last 10 minutes, we had quite a lot of comments that weren't happy with some of the things that she said.
	Now, we did post this to YouTube, but then we had to take it down because of YouTube's terms of service, because they don't like biology.
	But you can watch this in full on our website.
	And in the last 10 minutes, one of the things she said was that men are kind of useless.
	Now.
	I don't suppose you've watched this interview yet?
	No, I haven't yet.
	Out of context, that sounds bad.
	And some of the comments here, I won't read out because it's a bit of swearing, but some of the comments here took an uncharitable interpretation because I think we've heard the term sexist or we've heard misandric rhetoric so often that our ears prick up and it's either boy who cried wolf or we immediately categorize those people as enemies because they might still be holding on to some liberal presuppositions.
	Yeah, they usually are.
	That is true.
	So, I'm going to play the clip in context, and then we're going to discuss whether or not men are useless, and what she actually meant by it, because I think there's a lot of dispossessed men who feel denigrated in our audience, they need speaking to, and I don't think they should be put down, but I also don't think that getting this angry at someone who might be persuaded and on our side is the way to go.
	So, let's press play.
	I mean, I'm a heterosexual woman, I'm married, I have two sons, you know, I have five brothers.
	I'm really not anti-man.
	No, no, I've never had that impression.
	And, you know, I do look at young men and think, gosh, you know, I mean, men are just a bit useless compared with women.
	I mean, historically and through evolution, in the sense that men are disposable.
	Like the thing that men give to the next generation is very substitutable and you don't need very many men.
	Women are much more precious.
	If you look at a tribal group, the precious thing is the fertile women and the babies.
	That's the resource in a pre-money society.
	Men are not the resource, and that's why men are corralled into going out and fighting and their blood's wasted in wars and so on.
	I often wonder how Freud couldn't have noticed that.
	The idea that women envy penises, obviously men envy wombs, for goodness sake.
	That's the scarce resource in humanity, is reproductive capacity and it's women's.
	And that's why men have liked to control it.
	So young men have always had to be given a purpose and a reason and a way to become men because women don't need that because it's obvious how we do it.
	And every time I say these things, people misquote me and say, I think that a woman doesn't matter if she's not a mother.
	Please put in all those disclaimers.
	I'm just talking about sort of archetypes here in the way that societies are laid out.
	So, yes.
	So a lot of cultures try to find some way to make men feel like men because there isn't a natural.
	You don't like becoming a father is not like becoming a mother.
	And we don't do that.
	And we tell young men that what makes you a successful man is things that are just very hard to achieve.
	We've got rid of a lot of the things that used to be participation ways of feeling good about yourself, for both men and women, but it matters more for men, I think.
	If you've got rid of the church, you haven't got ways of just being part of the way that your church does stuff, which you don't have to be particularly good at, you just have to show up.
	And we've foolishly, in my opinion, told young men that they don't need to look after mothers and children.
	You know, I mean, I was amazed now when I see young men not get up for a pregnant woman on the train or not help people with their shopping or help people with their buggies or whatever.
	It's always women who help you.
	It's not men.
	But, you know, men have to be told that there's a purpose.
	They have to be given a purpose.
	I don't know if you need an initiation ritual, but that needs some thought.
	And we're not doing that thinking.
	We're leaving men to be quite useless and aimless.
	I mean, I'm not against men-only spaces because I think, you know, there are times that men want to be with other men.
	So, did you get any contempt from anybody?
	Certainly no contempt.
	No, I agreed with like 97.5% of it.
	There was a little bit that I disagreed with.
	She made a comment about men need to be given purpose.
	Do they?
	Or do they need to go out and find their purpose?
	And there's something in society which is blocking that.
	You know, I might have some wobble around that bit, but actually the rest of it and the bit about men being Well, whether it's useless, but you know, they are the evolutionary bottleneck.
	They are the precious resource.
	I mean, certainly, yeah, if you are in a pre-industrialized society, Absolutely.
	You want to protect your women more than your men because well, quite frankly, you can repopulate the entire village with one man, but you can't do one woman.
	Yes.
	Um, so no, I, I didn't take issue with any of that apart from possibly the bit about how a man comes into his own.
	Yes.
	So, so the, what prompted that discussion was actually a question about whether or not men have had their participation rituals and the stages at which you can call yourself a man, deracinated and removed from them.
	Oh yeah.
	So there's a lack of male only spaces.
	For example, there's a lack of gun clubs.
	The scouts is now unisex.
	Lots of sports clubs have significantly less funding.
	Um, there's, uh, schooling is skewed particularly towards a female way of learning.
	And there's a lack of male teachers.
	There's a lack of male mentor figures within popular culture.
	It's a lack of fathers generally, because 50% of kids in the UK are split between two households.
	Some rarely see their dad, some never.
	Because a lot of women are marrying the state now.
	They don't need men for that.
	Exactly.
	And so when can you call yourself a man?
	You're not in proximity to danger.
	You're not looking after a dependent.
	You don't always have a father figure hanging over you.
	And all of those men, there's lots of men that don't have families, don't reproduce, either never will or later and later haven't.
	There aren't any vocations for them, like she brought up the church, like priesthood, for example.
	But they can serve the role of a father culturally without having their own children.
	All those things are stripped from them.
	And so what I think Helen was actually saying there, Is that when she said men are a bit useless, what she meant is, evolutionary, some of them are superfluous, so culture is a safety net that gives those men who aren't killed off in a war, and who don't have their own children, direction, so they don't launch revolution against the civilization.
	Yeah, I mean, I've seen stats that suggest that, you know, throughout the entirety of human history.
	So we're talking about the, you know, the, you know, the Stone Age as well.
	But throughout the entirety of human history, something like 80% of men have died violent deaths.
	Whereas that is a significantly lower number for women.
	But yeah, and it leads through to the genetic data, which is just that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors.
	Well, that's this.
	So I actually decided to bring that up.
	So here's some research from eight years ago now.
	These are researchers in Germany, and they said, imagine if a population of 100 females and 100 males, if all the females but only one of the males reproduce, then while the males and females contribute 50-50 to the next generation, the male contribution is just from one male.
	The next generation would have the same Y chromosome, but 100 different sets of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed solely down the maternal line.
	The majority of women get to reproduce, but some men reproduce with more than one woman, because you might remarry or you might have concubines.
	Well, I mean, that's represented in modern dating as well.
	Yes.
	Yeah, it's the golden penis syndrome you see on university campuses.
	Yeah, where women are sharing a small number of high value men because it's programmed into them to do that.
	Yeah, there's a Pareto principle when it comes to dating.
	And also, because a woman's fertility cycle is more embodied, It means that they are more, and because their eggs are limited, it means that their path to womanhood is more set in stages.
	They don't have to have those participation rituals as men do culturally, and they have a more scarce resource because they have a shorter window of time in which they can actually have children, and the gestational period is very long and physically risky.
	Yeah, and on that sense they certainly need to get their shit together.
	Yes, yes.
	And so what in other times would happen is that women would set fair standards For the men to have their stuff together in order to have exclusive sexual access to them.
	The standards going askew is a lot of why men are feeling purposeless and without relationships.
	This is the women just are, but men have to become.
	Yes.
	And that is so important.
	Men have to become, but we have set up a society where we're basically trying to make it impossible for men to become... Well, we punish them for not displaying feminine traits.
	Yes.
	And this is where I think that she was making the Freudian penis envy argument from.
	One, she was alluding to Um, the particular group in dresses that we can't talk about on YouTube.
	Oh yeah, we really can't, can we?
	No, we're not allowed to, but judging by Helen's work, you know exactly the group she was talking about.
	But the other thing that she was talking about is the fact that women have, they front load their social value and the things they can accrue without having to work for them just by being young and pretty and fertile.
	Yeah.
	They get that from a much earlier age, at the point where men get basically nothing.
	This is the message of Andrew Tait that resonates with some young men, of the universe is apathetic to your existence until you prove yourself.
	And so, there is not women be there, but there is a little bit of feeling it is unfair when civilization says, not only are women systemically oppressed by men so we have to give them the leg up, but also, biologically, women frontload their value and get lots of free things Before men can even work to achieve them.
	So I understand why, I'm not actually condoning some of the language used, but I understand why there's that bubbling resentment there in reaction to what Helen said.
	They just might be misidentifying it.
	Because there's lots of men that are resentful of how civilization is rigged against them, both naturally biologically and culturally in saying that, oh, if you've achieved something as a young man, you're actually just furthering patriarchal oppression.
	So we should take all that away from them.
	Yeah, and I don't know if you want to mention it here, but I'm still blown away by that book that you handed me today.
	Women just don't realise quite what it's like.
	Oh, Nora Vincent's Self-Made Man.
	We'll be covering that at some point in the book club, but Nora Vincent was a lesbian who masqueraded as a man for 18 months.
	She didn't have gender dysphoria.
	In fact, she wrote against it and was cancelled by the LGBTQ plus LMNOP community.
	She got so depressed by her time as a man that years later she went and got euthanised.
	And part of the catalyst that was, she spent some time dating women while disguised as a man, and she felt that men unilaterally had to front the risk for interacting with women, and they were regarded with contempt just for approaching the women, which discouraged them from ever approaching them, but the women also wanted to be approached.
	So there's this constant paradox where the man takes on all of the risk, but the reward is unilateral, but the women, because they're risk-averse, understandably, because they don't know the motivations of men who might be stronger and creepier than them, Um, women will self-sabotage by not being approachable.
	And so she's like, this is, this is a constant thing that men have to navigate.
	It's an impossible tightrope walk of where I've got to approach you, but I've got to be somehow exactly the type of man you want before I approach you.
	But I don't know that until I approach you.
	And so you might just hate my existence for giving it an unscathed look.
	Yeah.
	And in previous generations, we got around that by getting very drunk in bars.
	Um, but, but Zooms don't do that these days.
	So it's even harder.
	No, they rarely drink and also the way dating apps are set up actually discourages you from getting into it.
	Yeah, I'm thinking of doing a segment on that soon because I've started looking at it and yes, it's not good.
	Yeah, well actually, speaking of dating preferences here, Rob Henderson's broken down the data.
	I'll be talking to Rob at some point on the podcast.
	And he said about 6 in 10 young men are single, 18 to 29.
	Among young women, a little less than half are single.
	Pew Research survey in 2019 said that men 18 to 29 reported being single, half of them, and women, the figure was 32%.
	So from 2019 to 2023, singlehood among young men increased 51% to 57%.
	For women, it increased from 32% to 45%.
	singlehood among young men increased 51% to 57%.
	For women, it increased in 32% to 45%.
	But even though they're increasing, more than half of single men, that's 52% are saying they're interested in dating, but only 36% of women.
	So lots of women that are single are choosing to remain single and elongate those years.
	So not only are women dating a fewer selection pool of men, they're rating 80% of them as below average attractiveness, there's also a disproportionate number of men wanting to get into relationships but being barred from relationships by those women.
	Yeah, and then they're basically going to wait until their prime years are over and then expect one of these guys that they basically ignored to then provide for them.
	Yeah.
	And they get a nasty shock when he's like too blackmailed.
	Exactly.
	So you need men not just to have kids with, but also to look after you when you've got those kids.
	And to look after you when you're a hell of a lot older and you're not able to climb the ladder to reach the top shelf and things like that.
	But you need men for that.
	Also you need men to keep up civilization.
	So there's fatal employment statistics here.
	So this is from the US Bureau of Labor.
	This was a couple of years ago.
	I just like the framing from Forbes here.
	They looked at the annual census of fatal occupational injuries.
	Looking at 139 separate occupations and discrete industries, an obvious pattern quickly emerges.
	The safest workspaces are indoors and the safest occupations frequently require education beyond high school.
	The most deadly occupations, on the other hand, are outside and often involve operating equipment.
	This largely drives the huge difference in workplace fatalities between men and women, with 4,761 men dying on the job compared to 386 women in 2017.
	Now the latest figures in 2022, this was women were 8.6% of all workplace fatalities.
	86 women in 2017.
	Now the latest figures in 2022, this was women were 8.6% of all workplace fatalities.
	So that's men making up 91.4%.
	And they genuinely say, this is surprising.
	They say in this article it's a surprising disparity.
	And this is only surprising if you get all of your worldview from Marvel movies where women are just as strong, but that's fine.
	But the four most dangerous occupations are commercial fishing, logging, aircraft pilots, and roofers.
	Now, the reason that men are important is because you don't see the feminists demanding equal access to deep-sea trawling.
	No.
	And the reason is that's a difficult... Yeah, it's only equal access to the sort of stuff that they decided they want.
	Yeah, the unisex avenues of wealth and power as well.
	So ultimately, feminism serves regime interests because it liquidates you down to the unisex individual consumer.
	Atomized and having no family, which is also what you need men for, but all right.
	I understand that people were therefore a bit mad when they picked up on men being useless, because even though she didn't mean useless in the sense that the regime says useless, but of course men uphold civilization.
	They're taking all of these dangerous jobs.
	Yeah, well when they're allowed to, yeah.
	Well, yeah, exactly.
	But they're still reliant on them for the time being until they're replaced by robots.
	There's also the uselessness of men that she raised They are just sent off to fight and die in wars.
	This is an article by Freya India, who's been on the podcast.
	Interview with her coming out soon.
	Funnily enough, did you know that female leaders wage war more often than men?
	Well, we've sort of seen that yesterday, haven't we?
	The Victorian-Newland effect.
	Yes.
	Because we had this dialogue for ages that if women were in charge of things, there'd be less wars.
	And then, as soon as you look at the numbers, and especially today, it's like the complete opposite.
	Yeah, for about 500 years, so 1480 to 1913, this was University of Chicago research, they found European queens were 27% more likely to wage war than kings.
	And I think the reason is, is because they know they're sending the men off to fight and die, so they're distanced from the consequences.
	Well yeah, this is the sort of upscale version of the drunk girl in the bar trying to get her boyfriend into a fight kind of thing.
	Exactly, yes.
	She's insulated from the physical repercussions of her actions, whereas men understand, because most interactions are undergirded by the threat of force if you take it too far.
	But any violent exchange has the significance to be very serious, even if it doesn't necessarily look that way from the outset.
	Exactly.
	And so all of those are the reasons why we need men, but why are people sensitive about the devaluing of men?
	Well, their social circles have basically gone extinct.
	So 30 years ago, a majority of men, 55%, reported having at least six close friends.
	That number's cut in half.
	This is as of 2021.
	Slightly more than one in four, that's 27%, Men have six or more close friends, but 15% say they have no friendships at all.
	That's a five-fold increase since 1990.
	So there's plenty of lonely men out there.
	There's also men that just don't have relationships.
	Women are now outclassing them in college degrees at about nearly 60%.
	of college degrees.
	Nearly half of them say that they earn more or the same as their husbands if they're married.
	A survey at the Brookings Institute found that US parents, regardless of political affiliation, are now more worried about their sons than their daughters because the sons are failing in education attainment, they're failing in friendship, they're failing in their careers.
	And part of the reason is marriage over the last five decades has dropped by 60% but cohabitation is coming up.
	So people are treating each other as fungible economic opportunities that you can trade up at any particular time.
	And relative to men, a large percentage of women are saying that not being able to find someone who meets their expectations is the major reason they're single.
	Women's expectations are mis-skewed, and they are undervaluing men, and so they're not happy either.
	There's a lot I could say on that.
	There are some perverse incentives.
	I'll save my thoughts on that one.
	At work here that isn't serving anyone.
	And so this is why US suicides have hit an all-time high.
	It's particularly pronounced among white men, according to the CDC.
	Their deaths rose nearly 7% in ages 45 to 64, and 8% in people 65 and older.
	This was nearly 50,000 people that died last year.
	And from the ASFP, they've looked at the stats and why this is increasing.
	The age-adjusted suicide rate in 2021 was 14.04 per 100,000.
	The rate of suicide is highest among middle-aged white men.
	That's adjusted as well.
	The times that are most prominent are when they get divorced, so they lose their jobs.
	So, the avenues of purpose are going extinct for men.
	In 2021, men died by suicide 3.9 times more than women.
	There are 132 suicides a day.
	White men accounted to 69.68% of suicide deaths, and firearms did 54% of that.
	So, again, more manufactured consent for the Democrat machine to rob you of something that lets you protect your family.
	So, great stuff.
	There's going to be no cause to equalize these stats, I'd imagine.
	No, and so this is why, and I'll finish on this, this is why there was a bubbling of aversive sentiment to something that Helen had said, even though I think she was actually being sympathetic to men by saying, history has treated us as generally superfluous, and
	Because there hasn't been a war, because the atomic bombers cut us all, and institutionalized risk, because there's no nobility for fighting and dying for a higher cause now, or even just the brutality of trench warfare, there's a hell of a lot of men that are just sort of lingering about without wives, girlfriends, father figures, mentors, upward social mobility, and vocations that allow them to serve.
	And the entire society around them is trying to design them out of the process.
	Yes, well, when I went on Piers Morgan, I was told it's actually good that men are terrified of a false accusation.
	That is the devouring feminine spirit of endless henpecking.
	So even if you try and struggle upwards and try and have a relationship with someone, you will be kicked down and in the face.
	And so I see the anguish that men are experiencing.
	And this all requires really sincere solutions, vocations, and cultural change.
	But my only statement here will be, and I know I'll be chewed up in the YouTube comments for this, it's blue-pilled and whatever, but I don't think the resentment is serving you lads.
	And the reason is...
	When these particular women would like us to remove perverts from their segregated spaces, I'll put it that way, who are they going to call?
	Women of married estate?
	It's not good.
	It's going to be up to men to physically remove them.
	It's going to be up to men to lead the idea revolution that brings these women back towards tradition, particularly when the hard times hit.
	And so, if we are just resentful, we are serving the regime interests that would like us to be atomized, unisex, and against each other.
	The more you resent women because we're in the sibling economy where we're more like Cain and Abel than Adam and Eve, the more you do that, The more you play into their dialectic, what you need to be is not resentful.
	What you need to be is accept that some people might still have liberal sensibilities that they're bitterly clinging on to, but that if we're more inviting, they might be more convinced by reality and the fact that we are good, virtuous men who will lead them out of this problem.
	And then when they need us, Well, they're going to ask.
	So be the kind of man that you are reliable enough that they can call on you when a crisis strikes.
	Well, we are in our civilization's moment of crisis right now, and it's the old meme, hard times create strong men.
	You should be going through this period being a stronger man because of it.
	Yes.
	So men aren't useless, especially when they're strong.
	Fantastic.
	Right, on to the video comment.
	We'll leave a little bit of time to run through some of the written ones.
	So I have some thoughts regarding Peter Hitchens and his Denethor posting and besides it being defeatist about fleeing your country, the problem is like all the Anglo countries are kind of on the same trajectory so it's a redundant action and all the third world countries that you can go to them but you're kind of putting yourself at the mercy of a Largely non-white populations that don't really like Westerners and only tolerate them because of the perceived power of Western nations.
	It's only going to get worse and you're not going to have any NGOs to back you up in the coming days.
	So it's better to stay in a large group in England.
	Well, there's two factors here.
	Number one, if technology and global finance has their way, then you'll continue to see the ratcheting effects of cultural liquidation, and you'll get that universal homogenous state that will chase you to the ends of the earth.
	The point of global homogenization is that it's global.
	You know, there is not a single corner they won't find you in.
	So you might be able to hold out for a bit, but you won't be able to stop them.
	So running away won't help.
	And if you do run away to some backwater place, if that place decides to kick up a fuss against the forces of modernization, even if they don't cave to the UN funding and the like, they will start getting resentful of white people.
	So they'll just do a South Africa and your life might be at risk.
	So stay on fire.
	It's probably the best approach.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, this is something I thought about a great deal during the during the COVID era when I was sort of worried about, you know, are they going to force me to vaccinate the children or take them away?
	I mean, you just didn't know how it was going.
	And the wife and I spent a lot of time thinking about, OK, well, if we need to leave the country, where do we go?
	And it was a bloody difficult analysis to make.
	I think we came down on possibly El Salvador, Mexico in the end.
	But, you know, those aren't particularly great choices.
	They're not exceptionally well-developed, no.
	Yeah.
	And also, Bikali is currently being threatened by the U.S.
	Hegemon.
	Yeah, and it's only a matter of time before their people get put in there as well, so yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Right, a few comments on the website before we go in about five-ish minutes then.
	The Wigan Survivalist.
	I work in an office, a job in finance, surrounded by leftists and the only thing that keeps me sane is listening to you guys to keep me from being nihilistic.
	One thing that you can be proud of your job is that you're providing a difference to lots of other people, opening their minds and keeping us informed in these dark times.
	Never stop guys, you're doing a fantastic job.
	Best £10 a month I spend.
	Well, we really appreciate all of your support.
	It's Difficult to know the extent to which you're having an impact on discourse sometimes, but then when I say edgy things on GB News and don't get debooked, I suppose that we might be nudging the Overton window.
	Yeah, I mean, I've been on the other side of this.
	I've been doing those office-based jobs surrounded by lefties, and it is soul-crushing that you just can't speak your mind.
	Well, you can, but you won't last that very long if you did, and your promotion prospects go and all that kind of stuff.
	So yeah, I mean, I remember back in those days that The sphere was a bit earlier there, but the work that Carl was doing was really important.
	Absolutely, and I'm glad I get to work with all of the hosts that I do, because some of them genuinely, like, we get on a rib each other on air, but some of those guys are like my brothers, so kudos to Carl for building a really healthy workplace institute.
	Good team.
	Mason.
	Joined Twitter out of curiosity once Elon bought it.
	It's poison, it brings out the worst in people.
	James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson are the best examples.
	Anything long-form by those two is interesting.
	Anything by them on Twitter is unnecessarily confrontational and just plain crap, let Twitter die.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so both of them, Jordan Peterson's writing in haikus now for some reason.
	Though he's definitely got his bigger back after his coma.
	He's seeming more like himself.
	I'm going to be talking about him on Friday.
	James Lindsay is Oh, he's just full of shit.
	I'm just bored of it.
	He's utter containment.
	He hates Christians and he has nothing but contempt for people that have tried to speak plainly and in good faith for him.
	I mean, anytime you say, oh, have you read this?
	Actually, you might be, you know, dismissing something out of hand.
	He'll go on and do baby talk at you and call you a Nazi, which is just pathetic.
	So yeah.
	Jettison.
	Jettison, I think.
	Also, not everything is narcissism.
	It's a giant distraction.
	Okay, rant over.
	Athelstan, any influential billionaire that admires the Chinese WeChat and all the functions of an anything app should be treated with the same suspicion and skepticism the right has for those like Bill Gates.
	Don't be blinded by Elon's lip service to free speech.
	I was a bit skeptical of his courting of the Chinese when he first took over Twitter.
	He did celebrate the Chinese Communist Party and he did placate them to launch a Tesla factory in Shanghai.
	Yeah, I mean, we can't regard him as our guy because he's his own guy and he's got a lot of business interests in China, but he's definitely far more in our direction than the rest of them.
	Pecorino, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So all we can hope is that we accrue advantages by accident.
	All right.
	Ross Diggle.
	Tom McDonald also has some cutting lyrics.
	He does well and is also independent.
	I just don't like his music style.
	Well, I never liked his original stuff, his rap stuff, but this one that I just saw today, that was bloody good.
	So if this whole thing launches a genre, I'm going to be happy about that.
	It's like Zuby.
	You know, Zuby's a very, very nice guy.
	Seemed very personable, but I just don't like his rap.
	Fair enough people that do, alright.
	Yeah, I'm not a rap guy.
	But yeah, not my thing.
	Lord Nerevar, Elon Musk did one good thing with Twitter, which was the free speech policy.
	Everything else has been the exact wrong thing to do.
	How can a man be so smart and so stupid simultaneously?
	But I think he's playing a long game and he's hiding his true intentions.
	So we'll see more of that in Brokeconomics.
	Do you want to read some stuff from your one?
	Yeah, so we got the Unbreakable literally saying, I think the class system is a natural state of affairs for human society, at least in a feudal society, was dependent on bottom-up economics.
	Yeah, if you're peasant-style, you would soon follow.
	Yeah, but we kind of had this interesting experiment period in human history, sort of post the Great Plague, the Black Death, in sort of the end of 13th century.
	where you've got a reorganization of social structures and you've got a whole set of competing elites and it sort of set up this period for several hundred years that you sort of had this sort of emergence of liberty and what we regard as sort of um what English liberty essentially sort of was born as a result as a result of that sort of competing system of elites and what's happened is that those elites are starting to sort of coalesce
	Into a sort of a more unified vision, because those who have not prospered under this system have, as a natural result of that, fallen away out of that sort of elite status.
	And these guys are just coordinating more.
	But they've gone too far with this financial system and it's going to come back to bite them.
	I have a whole series of my thoughts on that.
	Do you want to do one from your last one?
	Yeah, I can do.
	I'll read a more critical one.
	Mari Amanzi.
	Connor, you're correct.
	Helen Joyce is understanding and sympathetic to the way society is seemingly trying to destroy manhood.
	But for an intelligent woman, she came across as crass and somewhat triumphal.
	Sitting in the room, I didn't get that.
	There was also the time pressure of that she had to go and get a train, so there wasn't as much time to disentangle that.
	But, one, if you've met some of the other people that are in the camp that she has another foot in, you will be able to better distinguish the fact that she is actually very sympathetic compared to the people that blame all of transgenderism on being a men's right movement, like Judy Bindel, who's an insane person.
	Also, we all, particularly if we have lots of airtime, occasionally use the word we don't mean, or her word was misinterpreted and In kudos to her, she did acknowledge the fact that, when she shared the clip on Twitter, that the interview was very interesting because she was challenged on some of her presuppositions from a perspective that's completely alien to hers, because she's an atheist, materialist, 90s-ish feminist, and I'm obviously not.
	And she didn't consider, for example, how trans is a consequence of technological progress and feminism decoupling femininity from female biology.
	She just didn't really think about that.
	And so she's still got a bit of a way to go.
	So my thing was more just don't swear at the poor woman.
	And yeah, that's fair.
	And actually, I know we're out of time, but there's just one more comment I'll pick on the next one, which is Miss Rapp says, I think boys and men need to be taught how to find a purpose that will make life more meaningful.
	Yeah, I mean, she's absolutely right.
	I mean, they used to be called fathers and male spaces and sort of the fathers have been chased away to the greatest extent the state can do so.
	Or told that they are redundant or they're stupid, the Holmes Simpson meme and all the rest of it.
	And male spaces are being closed down, of course, and yeah, those things existed for a purpose.
	Yeah, so destroy no-fault divorce, destroy the welfare state, some kind of national service thing.
	That'd be pretty good.
	And on that note, thanks very much for watching.
	We'll be back again tomorrow at one o'clock.
	Cheers, as always, Dan.
	Cheerio, chaps, yes, and thank you, Connor.
	Yeah, till next time.

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