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Sept. 13, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:09
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #740
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Hello and welcome to the podcast, Lewis here for 13th of September, 2023.
There we go.
Not 9-11.
Anyway, joined by Carl and Bo.
There we are.
You gotta say hello.
I'm not Gary of Nerdrotic.
Oh yeah, forgot about that.
Hello, anyone who wanted to see Gary, including us, he's busy.
He's staying in bed or something.
I think he's probably incredibly hungover, which is why he couldn't make it.
Yeah, that happens.
So if, Gary, you're watching, hey, enjoy the show!
Anyway, today we're going to be talking about a few things.
So we're going to be talking about how the Republic ends, the fact that it's never enough, and the case against AI, which I feel like that's an easy one.
Is that a softball?
Maybe, but I want to make it quite solidly.
Right.
Well, I shall begin with an announcement, though, which is that we have an announcement, which is tomorrow in the evening.
Well, the afternoon.
Three o'clock in the afternoon.
Yeah, not that late.
Anyway, Lads Hour, number two, the Mexican alien question.
We're going to be talking about Mexican aliens and how they all need to be, I don't know, believed?
Deported back to Alpha Centauri?
Do we want to deport all the illegal aliens?
Well, I mean, they didn't get a bloody passport.
No, that's true.
Have you seen the footage?
I know this was kind of spoilers for the whole thing, but they just look like fakes.
Yeah.
Okay.
But why is the Mexican government taking it seriously?
That's a great question.
We'll talk about it tomorrow.
All right, well, come and join us and we'll find out, I suppose.
Anyway, we shall begin with the end of the Republic.
Yeah, so things, I think, are not going very well in America politically.
Anyone disagree with that?
Seems to be quite self-evident.
Could be worse.
Well, I mean, it probably has been worse, actually.
It's not open civil war yet, but I think we're arriving at a point where it's genuinely sort of starting to spiral down and out of control.
I think that the two warring factions have been locked in a kind of social war for a long time now, and I think that they've Forgotten that the opposition has legitimacy and should be treated with decency and one of the important things that is a way of expressing that is to not persecute the political opposition as soon as they lose power in the game.
I know this all seems like really basic stuff.
Is it true, though?
Well, in a functioning country, yeah.
Yeah, but what is that?
Because I always... What is that?
It's a country that doesn't descend into civil war.
Well, you always hear about this mythical past back in the times before 9-11 in which the country was normal and blah blah blah.
Well, you hear about it, but I lived through it.
Yeah, but was it real is the thing in my mind.
Yeah, but you remember, for example, George Bush and whoever the hell he was against, I don't care.
But the thing was, back when that election started, but I mean, whichever Democrats were in charge once he was in the presidency is what I mean.
And when we have Donald Trump come along, everyone realized like the whole system was uniparty.
Clearly George Bush got a lot more along with the Obamas, etc.
Sure.
So was there really ever?
Yeah, but like Margaret Thatcher didn't lock up the Labour Prime Minister, she replaced.
That's true.
Even though that wouldn't have been unjustified, would it?
I mean, there's been cracks in the American Republic for decades.
Obviously, one of the biggest examples is the murder of John Kennedy.
Nothing's been quite right ever since then.
So yeah, even back before 9-11, everything wasn't perfect.
But yeah, it does seem to be getting worse in the last half generation or so.
I think it's interesting you said to use the term social war.
Of course, there's the parallels with Roman history.
Just Google that, the social wars in Roman history, the late Republic.
But when you get a judiciary, which is completely politicized, that's a lot of things that people on the right or on the conservative side have said, the politicization of the American justice system.
Well, that's one of the things for me, which is truly disturbing, truly, truly worrying, and really will rip apart the fabric of a republic quite quickly.
I kind of think that's the American norm.
I don't know.
I mean, literally vote for judges.
Yes, but it's gone way too far and we'll cover it in a second.
But before we begin, if you want to know more about this and question what our understanding and knowledge of the fall of republics is, well, we've covered this extensively on the website, actually.
It's one of mine.
It is one of yours, yeah.
And one of mine as well.
Beau and I have spoken at length on the fall of the Roman Republic, and so we know exactly the sort of steps that occur.
The difference, I would say, between America and Rome is the softness of the modern era.
Because, of course, all the Roman senators had to spend time in the army before they could join, become politicians.
So killing people was kind of normal to them.
Just say we've also got one on Pompey, haven't we?
Oh, yeah, we do.
And we'll have more to come.
But the point being, the underlying forces are the same, even if they're expressed with slightly less intensity in the United States.
So let's let's begin with just lawfare.
So a lot of this has been going on.
So it's interesting that a couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk announced that he was suing Soros because of his NGOs.
And this speaks to the sort of web of influence that George Soros has.
You'll hear a lot of Republicans saying, well, Soros backed DAs are doing this.
And this is what you were speaking to with the politicization of the judicial system.
Yeah.
It seems that foreign agents have been spending money to politicize the American judicial system.
And now Elon Musk has decided, well, I'm going to push back on that because why not?
Seems totally legitimate.
Of course, they've been attacking Twitter because Twitter has been Allowing people to post a bit more freely than before.
It's not perfect, but it's certainly better.
And so various NGO networks connected to George Soros's Open Society Foundation have been going after him, and so he's going to be going after them.
Good.
And so the next thing that came up was You're not wrong.
It's just the way you put it.
They're like, yeah, screw them.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
They're actually terrible people.
Yeah, they should be banned.
Donald Trump should have legislated against them and said, no, all of these are illegal.
You're not allowed to operate in the United States.
Look at what you've done.
Look at what you intend to do in the future.
Gone.
Right.
But of course, and Trump said this in his interview with Tuck Carlson.
He said, I was kind of naive because he wasn't a politician.
He didn't realize how deep the rot was.
He didn't realize how bad things would get.
He didn't realize how uncooperative the institutions would be.
Well, we know now, and let's hope that next time he cracks on.
But anyway, for some reason, the Biden administration is suing Elon Musk.
It's like, this came shortly afterwards.
That's interesting.
Interesting timing that they've decided, because I mean, like America's space program at this point is basically privatized and outsourced to Elon Musk.
Who else is putting things in space?
I mean, NASA still exists.
Yeah, I know it still exists, but what was the last thing they put in space?
I can't remember off the top of my head, but they still do stuff.
I just can't remember.
I know they do, but that's the point, isn't it?
You can't even remember what the last thing they put in space was.
Well, I'm sure they've shoved a satellite or two up, but who cares, right?
They also decided to believe in wokeism so I kind of, well I hope they die frankly.
Well incidentally Elon Musk is being persecuted for not believing in wokeism because he didn't allow people who weren't allowed to be recruited to be recruited.
Do you know the law on this?
Apparently it means it legislates against him hiring So he works in, well, rocket science, which in the United States is obviously a specialized science that you can't just hire anyone for.
Because it has national defense connotations.
Yeah.
So the federal government says you cannot hire foreigners.
In fact, Elon Musk gave a speech long before he bought Twitter and engaged more in politics, where he said he'd love to hire more people from outside the United States to help him, but he literally can't.
Like someone in the audience came up and said, please give me a job.
And it was like, no, you're Indian.
I can't hire you.
Yeah, he's being sued for enforcing the law the government wants him to enforce.
Well, the US Justice Department is claiming that this is wrongly claimed by Musk, and that he actually would be able to hire, well, lawful permanent residents, sometimes referred to as green card holders.
Yeah, so foreigners with a visa.
Yeah.
You can't hire them.
Well, that's not what the Justice Department is alleging.
I don't know the truth.
But the point is, is it really sensible?
I mean, look at the angle they're attacking him on.
Anti-discrimination law.
But why would you do that?
Why are you attacking Elon Musk?
He's providing, what is it, Starlink to U.S.
forces in Ukraine.
So why are you... Ukrainian forces in Ukraine.
Correction, Ukrainian forces.
Do I stand by that?
No, I better not.
But anyway, the point is, Elon Musk is actually key to a lot of the US government's operations at the moment.
And instead of accepting the fact that maybe he was actually following the law there, they're instead going to take this to what I presume to be a politicized judge and get a ruling against him in order to persecute him in some way.
Why do you think they're doing this?
Well, it does fit in with their MO of doing things that are not in the national interest, like abandoning Billions of dollars worth of equipment and people in Afghanistan, for example, opening up the border, allowing the rule of law to be abandoned all over the place.
Bring in civil suits against Elon Musk, one of their greatest citizens.
It's just, it's all in line with that, isn't it?
If the Biden administration was to undermine American greatness and stability every turn, well, it makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
I think what they're doing is just identifying an enemy, a political enemy, because Elon Musk has gone against the general narrative of the left in America.
And so I think what they're trying to do is take down a kind of enemy agent in their view.
They view him as being essentially not part of the cause.
But he is.
Exactly.
Right.
And so his worst mistake is also being competent.
Yes.
And fair minded when it comes to political discourse.
That's Elon Musk's crime, it seems.
They're also investigating something called Elon's Glass House.
I hadn't heard of this until recently.
The Security and Exchange Commission and federal prosecutors are investigating Tesla for allegedly using company funds to construct a secret glass home for billionaire Elon Musk in Texas.
Why could he not have just paid for it?
I don't know.
I don't know anything about this.
The structure was known internally as Project 42, and now they're investigating him for that as well.
It's like, okay.
You don't have anything more important to do?
No, this guy is a political liability to the Democrats.
He is empowering their opponents and so let's just keep going after him.
Is it that Merrick Garland is the Attorney General of America?
Yeah.
That's what I was talking about, the politicization of the judiciary, is that it does seem to be unprecedented that they will be, it's a cliche, but weaponized in order to bring trumped up charges, no matter how absurd, against their political opponents.
It's not that that's never happened before, it certainly has, but to the degree And it really is full spectrum of that.
Let me give you another example.
So this was, uh, uh, just an article about how Trump's truth social may end up coming to an end at some point, uh, because of various timings with company mergers and things like that.
Right.
But in here they give a timeline of truth social itself.
And I didn't realize just how difficult it had been for Trump to get truth social off the ground.
Now you might be like, well, hang on a second.
It's just a website.
This is surely textbook.
You could go on.
If you're a multi-billionaire, you could probably hire some guys.
Yeah, exactly.
How difficult can it be?
Well, that's interesting, right?
So in January, 2021, of course, Trump has kicked off Twitter.
So in October, 2021, they formed this company, sell a bunch of shares.
Totally normal, right?
But they failed to disclose talks with some other share company, holding company, whatever, to the Securities and Exchanges Commission.
Fair enough.
And then Elizabeth Warren in November asked the SEC, the Security and Exchanges Commission, to investigate whether they committed securities violations.
Okay, that's normal.
And then February 2022, their shares go up because they debut on the App Store.
Of course, then it's taken off the App Stores and things like this.
Then it's subpoenaed as part of a criminal investigation Through its attempt to go public, and then Google bans it over insufficient moderation policies.
And so you can see how the structure itself that's imposing this kind of order just completely shears away as much as it can at Donald Trump's website.
Okay, why are you doing that?
That's not normal.
You know, that's really weird.
If there's anything that Donald Trump should be able to do, it's probably just to host a website.
That's our job.
that should be uncontroversial but even to this point and then of course Donald Trump's like okay well I think I'm going to lock up my political enemies if I return to the White House and the response to this was like how could you that's our job you're going to put us out of work it does put me in mind of the civil war between Marius and Sulla where they both sort of lose faith in each other especially
Yes.
It's both sort of a tit-for-tat war of words until there's a few sparks here and there and they start trying prosecuting each other and try prosecuting each other's lackeys and so on and in the end it turns into a full-scale hot civil war and right then the Republic is...
And the interesting thing about Marius and Sulla is they weren't unknown to one another.
Sulla served in Marius' army as a lieutenant, winning victories for him.
Donald Trump comes from within the New York Democrat scene.
He knows all of these people.
For years and years he was a Democrat.
Exactly.
He's been to all of their galas.
He schmoozed with them all.
He deals with them all.
And now he's essentially the traitor to the regime.
It's just remarkable how there does appear to be a parallel playing out here.
I think it's just worth observing.
And of course, I mean, they're complaining in this being like, well, how dare Trump say this?
But they also include this.
Earlier this month, Politico calculated that Trump faced a maximum of 641 years in jail because he's being political.
It's so self-evident.
And then you've got just compilations of them being like, Oh, Trump's destroying America by weaponizing the department of justice, blah, blah, blah.
And this goes on for four solid minutes of different talking heads.
Okay.
But you're doing it as well.
You're, you're all doing it.
You know, Trump actually seems to be a response.
Trump actually didn't.
And this was probably his failure.
Go out and persecute a bunch of Democrats.
He didn't actually clear anything up.
He was actually a moderate in his governance.
The thing they're complaining about here is the corruption that was obvious from Hunter Biden back when Trump was in office.
So he said, yeah, you should probably investigate.
We'll find out that Joe Biden guy's corrupt.
Before Joe Biden had even said he was going to run for office for the presidency.
And that's considered unjust persecution in all of these talking heads.
But when you just arrest the president or candidate for the other team, that's not.
Or the ex-president.
One of my criticisms of Trump was going to be a lot of his promises running up to 2016 was that he was going to drain the swamp.
Didn't do much draining actually, Donald.
Not as much as really anyone hoped or expected.
Like he kept saying he would seriously look at if not actually lock up Hillary Clinton.
The day, the first day in the White House he just said no I'm not going to do that.
That's just one example.
You know, he did something at the FBI with Comey.
There was a small amount of swamp drainage going on.
Only after he'd messed him over for so long.
Right.
Yeah.
While he kept the guy for ages whilst he's stabbing Trump in the back and Trump's like, okay, we can make this work.
No.
And there were a bunch of them like that as well.
I mean, there was, let's say, a small amount of drainage of the swamp going on, but not really anywhere near enough.
Obviously.
Now, I've seen him say in the run-up to this one that he'll be people's champion on this.
He really will drain the swamp this time.
You said that last time.
Or, in fact, without being too cynical, can he drain the swamp?
Even as Chief Executive?
As the president, can he do much draining?
I do think they've assassinated American presidents for less.
Right.
So just saying, um, but interestingly, you bring it up to Biden because of course, that's the next thing that comes up.
Uh, the white house cited executive privilege and withholding hundreds of emails relating to Hunter Biden's business dealings.
And then vice president Joe Biden requesting a legal aid according to records requests returned to the legal firm.
So basically.
You can see how Biden has been using the system.
I mean, this is just one example.
I mean, we've seen this over and over and over and we've been documenting it over and over and over.
There's just one thing that passed through my timeline where it's just so self-evident that, okay, there is obvious corruption here that would be actually worthy of being investigated.
I mean, we've said this many times, but Donald Trump is probably the most investigated man on earth.
And how is he the goodest boy?
How is there literally nothing that he's really done?
But how is that the case of all the people on all of the earth that you'd be like, yeah, if you investigate everything that guy's done, he's going to have done basically nothing wrong.
Would it be Donald Trump at the top of your list on that?
That's kind of yes, but no, no, he doesn't drink or do drugs.
And that's the thing that make people do stuff like, you know, you can remember the eighties and nineties, Donald Trump was known as like a billionaire party boy, right?
Yeah, but he never drank.
Sure, but that doesn't matter.
So how wild are those parties really going to be?
Yeah, but you assume that he's going to be doing drugs, and he's going to have lots of prostitutes, and he's going to have all these... You assume all of that.
And being a property mogul, it's difficult to not get in some sort.
It's hard to believe that it's Donald Trump that actually didn't really do anything wrong.
And the double standard is just so unbelievably blatant.
For example, where he's up on charges for simply questioning the result.
But Hillary Clinton and Stacey Abrahams and others A long, long laundry list of them doing exactly that, and yet the Justice Department decides that there's nothing to see here.
It couldn't be more obvious, really.
This is what we call repressive tolerance.
There's tolerance when one side does it, but there's no tolerance for it when the other side does it.
And that's exactly what Herbert Marchese was Suggesting we should do.
And this is exactly what the Democrats are doing.
And it's there's no point like, oh, that's hypocrisy.
We're not pointing out hypocrisy.
Well, I mean, it is obviously hypocritical, but they don't care.
And we know they don't care.
The point being is that they don't see any moral legitimacy in their political opponents.
So they're not having a debate between two peers who are like, no, we're both invested in this country.
We both want the best for the country.
And we both probably have some good ideas, but some bad ideas.
We're going to have a discussion.
The old liberal order is gone, is what I'm saying.
What we're looking at now is at best a cold civil war or a kind of social war where the mechanisms of power are just being turned against the opponents to the very maximal extent that they can be done.
And this is grossly demonstrated in the arrest of Owen Troyer, who was a reporter for Infowars, who was at the protest on January the 6th outside of the building.
And, I mean, as the Associated Press have to report, Schreuer didn't enter the Capitol.
But he is getting two months in jail.
What for?
What's the charge?
The charge is being influential.
Really, that means that actually... No, that's literally it, right?
He led the march to the building and led rioters in chants near the top of the building steps.
He's among only a few people charged in the riot who neither went inside the building nor accused of engaging violence or destruction.
Context is everything, said the judge.
I do not believe you were trying to distract the crowd or turn the crowd away from the Capitol.
So incitement is what he's being charged with.
What was he chanting?
Probably that the election was stolen.
Well, it kind of matters, because if he's chanting, you know, just stock American chants, then I don't really care.
But if he's chanting, like, we've got to take the capital or something, you can make an argument for incitement?
Possibly.
They didn't put that in this.
I thought you were allowed to say whatever you wanted to America.
It's the land of the free.
Direct assignment to violence is banned.
Sure.
But that's the thing.
I would have to look deeper into it.
But the point is, the reason that he's spending two months in jail is because he's a right wing activist.
That's the reason.
He's on the wrong side of the political argument and the left control the institution and therefore the right is going to get all of this.
You don't see the Black Lives Matter protesters being systematically hunted down and jailed in the way that the January 6th protests are doing, even though they have committed way more damage.
They forced a sitting president into hiding.
They forced a sitting president into hiding.
They turned the Capitol into a war zone.
Yes.
They went to the House of the Supreme Court Church.
Yeah.
And yet, nothing.
But he presumably exercises First Amendment rights without committing a demonstrable crime, as they have to report, and he's spending two months in jail.
And this is, I mean, I talked about the Ricky Vaughan guy the other day who was convicted.
He's spending something like 10 years in jail because he posted a meme that told an untruth about how to vote.
The meme was, if you text Hillary to this number, then that'll be your vote.
And they're like, right, that's election interference.
You have deprived people of their vote by posting this meme.
A theoretical 90 year old, who apparently doesn't know how to vote, might have taken that as legitimate.
I mean, to be honest, I think if someone takes that as legitimate, they shouldn't be voting.
Sure, but also it doesn't actually deprive anyone of their vote.
Even if they do.
Evidence that it happens.
Well, no, even if it does happen, right?
Even if worse comes to worse.
That person can still vote.
Exactly.
That person could still just get up off their couch and go and vote on voting day.
Right?
They can still do this.
You know, so they can, they can say to their friend, Oh, I voted because I texted them last night.
Oh, right.
Okay.
I better get out of the voting booth.
No one has actually been denied the vote.
They, he just posted a lie on social media and they were like, right.
10 years.
For republics to function healthily or properly in any real way, it takes good faith in quite a lot of different parties and there seems to be very little, if any, left of that.
That's exactly the point, isn't it?
The moral legitimacy of the standing of the opposition.
I mean, in Britain we always called the loyal opposition to reinforce the standing.
I know, I know.
I'm so silico about all of this because I really can't.
I think the best example to make my case is that look at Germany right now.
You've got the CDU and the SPD, the conservatives and the socialists, right?
And in your framing, they've always been like Fighting with each other about who should run the country and kind of courteous to each other about, you know, the other one gets in charge than the other one.
But what we can see right now happening is the AFD breaking through and the whole theater has collapsed.
What really is the case is all of the parties are on the same team.
They've always been on the same team and the AFD are actually an opposition that exists.
Well, that's why they want to ban them.
Exactly.
And that's what I'm seeing with Donald Trump in the United States, which is that you're framing this like there was once upon a time in which these people were courteous to each other and whatnot.
I'm suspicious that that actually was a complete lie that we were all taught through the TV and whatnot before the internet age.
And now people can see for reality, like, no, all of these people are on the same team.
The system suited them.
And occasionally in such systems, an advocate for the opposition breaks through.
And that's the real scary moment.
They do stuff like this.
You are right that the system suited them, but of course the Democrats changed.
The Republicans are still basically the same.
Republican talking points haven't really changed since Reagan.
I really don't think that's true because I mean you look at the kind of stuff they're posting now versus George Bush.
I'm not saying the activists haven't got more extreme, but what I'm saying is the underlying principles that they are trying to advocate for are basically the same.
The America First stuff is all new.
Yeah, OK.
And like the average Republican, if you walked up to them and just, you know, read out Ronald Reagan's speech, they'd be like, yeah, that's brilliant.
You know, they'd still be like that.
But the average Democrat.
Read out Bill Clinton's speech.
Exactly.
They'd be like, that's Donald Trump's agenda.
Burn it down.
Exactly.
Build a wall.
So I'd say at different times in history, what you're talking about has been more or less true.
So you talk about in another way, it might be the Uni Party.
You know, people say that, don't they?
The Uni Party, they're both the same thing.
You know, that's been true for quite a while now, but if you go back to the 1950s or the 1960s or the 19th century, that wasn't the case.
It genuinely wasn't the case.
The Republic as it existed, let's say, around the turn of the 20th century.
It's not the same thing as the 1990s or George Bush era 2000s.
Right, so what you're saying is right and has been the case for a while, but it certainly wasn't always the case.
It definitely wasn't always the case.
The political opposition didn't used to get mug shots.
Well, the next thing, the next big step is that there are mobs, political, overtly.
I mean, BLM is already sort of a type of political mob, isn't it?
But there'll be overtly violent political mobs in the street, if the Roman example is in it.
And then they'll start wholesale killing each other's congressmen and senators, and then the army will get involved, and then that's it.
Then a dictator.
I mean, I do see all of that in America's future if things don't change fairly radically.
It seems like we're sliding towards that.
Yeah, but do you think it's going to change radically?
I mean, the Republicans don't seem to realize that they're losing their lead.
Well, as Ken said, a lot of the Republicans, not Trump necessarily, and there are a few free radicals, but a lot of them, the RINOs and THENOs, are part of this uniparty thing.
So they're all for that.
Their ultimate agenda is just the same as Biden and Harris and Warren, i.e.
to destroy America, essentially.
Yeah.
I mean, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is thinking about endorsing an inquiry into Joe Biden.
He's thinking about me?
He's thinking about it, yeah.
He's really concerned.
No, no, that's exactly, literally exactly word for word, with the exact same facial expression.
Pack it up.
Listen to this, right?
He is expected to tell members of Congress about this, this week.
If you don't pipe down, Biden, I'll tell my friends that you're bad.
Yeah, well look, it's the next logical move.
Members of the GOP have long hinted that an impeachment inquiry was imminent.
It only raises more and more questions, and we're going to have to find the answers, he says.
This is all information about Hunter Biden that's been coming forward that we've all been able to find out.
But the other information we find that the Biden family delays everything, it benefits them to delay the information that the American public deserves to know.
It's like, my friend, did you forget this?
Did you forget that the last Republican president was arrested, given a bloody mugshot, and that the intent behind this was to publicly humiliate him?
For the crime of disagreeing.
Yeah.
With the result.
For the crime of having an opinion.
Only one ray of hope is that it's actually counterproductive in the terms of public opinion.
Most people like him more, if anything.
Or empathise, sympathise with him for being obviously persecuted.
But to be honest with you, this didn't change the polls at all.
So it looks like the factions are calcified at this point.
There are about 40% Republicans, 40% Democrats and about 20% in the middle who are probably really sick of politics at this point.
But, um, but yeah, so I, I think that the, the Democrats are leading the charge in destroying the American Republic.
I think this is just self-evident at this point.
And if you can't find goodwill, which it doesn't look like you can, you don't have a country.
Because on that cheery note, let's have a spiky debate, why not?
Go on then.
Alright.
So I want to make the argument that it never is enough.
That if you give up some part of your history to satiate the new radical part of whichever left-winger in your country who decide that this particular thing now has to go because times have changed, and as soon as that's done, they'll pipe down, trust me.
They never will.
I think this is pretty consistent.
We'll start off by, well, just talking about one people who definitely took it too far.
Mal and his friends.
I mean, this is the Cultural Revolution book club here on lotussears.com.
If you've always heard about the Cultural Revolution, such as I did, do go and check it out because I'd always heard about the nonsense.
And then we sat down and read it.
The details are way worse than you think.
Yeah, we put 400 pages into an hour there, so go and enjoy.
Boy, they took it too far.
And, well, we'll go to the United States because I have an interesting, well, discussion, maybe.
We'll find out.
Never know, I'll do it.
Here we have the Washington Post, who decided to come out with this, which made a lot of people confused.
So they put out this message saying that Mississippi became the latest state to remove the Confederate battle flag from its state flag in 2020.
However, seven states' flags still have design links to the Confederacy and white supremacy.
Here they are.
And then they list them from most obvious to least obvious in their view.
We start off with... I believe that's... I'm going to get some of these wrong now, aren't I?
I think that's Georgia.
Is that Georgia?
I have no idea.
Who knows?
Arkansas, because it's on the damn thing.
And then I'm just going to skip that one and go to Maryland in the middle with the Catholic symbolism there, which is pretty cool.
But right at the bottom is the most interesting one.
California is apparently a Confederate flag.
Despite not being on the side of the Confederacy, which is a weird argument, I mean... Was there even... I don't think there was a state of California in the 1860s, was there?
It might have been a territory, I don't know.
It was certainly a territory, I don't know if it had been... But it definitely wasn't on the Dixie side, because I remember the maps from the war.
California, even if it was a territory, didn't have slaves, did it?
Yeah, it would.
Well, it's obviously a territory has been for hundreds of years, but I don't think it was.
I don't think it'd been formally incorporated into the United States by that point.
But either way, it definitely was not a slave state.
Right.
And the idea that this is a form of the Confederacy is a bit strange.
I mean, they'll have some arguments later.
I'm just going to leave now.
But just real quick, I want to check out the Mississippi flag.
So if you remember what the Mississippi flag used to look like.
OK, well, it looked like this.
Right.
And to be honest, that's kind of cool.
I'll be honest, just from a Vexilla viewpoint, it looks like something someone made up in Photoshop.
Yeah.
I mean, it is an American state flag.
American state flag.
So not to be too mean, but some of them are rather weirdly designed compared to all of the flags.
But at least that has some... It looks like the Confederate States of France.
I was going to say... It's like Yugoslav Confederates.
The Australian flag is the British flag.
It puts me in mind of the French-language dubbed version of Dukes of Hazzard.
Yes.
That's what I'm thinking when I see that image.
It's the Yugoslav flag.
I forget which way the colours are after the Yugoslav one, but either way, anyway, that's what it was.
And obviously it was made that way after, well, independence in the form of the Confederacy, and then they kept it that way.
Because why change it back?
Do you want to start a civil war?
Rather not.
They changed it to this.
This I think is crap.
It is, but it's pretty inoffensive.
Yeah, but it's way worse.
Just every aspect of a vexology argument.
I mean, people go check out CGP Grey's video on that.
But just like, you know, there's some rules around making flags.
I haven't actually seen that video.
What are the rules?
Okay, so the rules.
Simple to draw.
That's the next one.
There you are.
Some base colors.
That's always simple.
What's not simple is weird insignias in the middle.
So all of that.
It's silly.
And then don't put text.
Just don't put text.
It's dumb.
It's not a good idea for a flag.
Don't do it.
Whereas this, from a distance, that's one of the rules, you can see what it is.
Whereas close up, I don't know, like this one, I don't know, it's just weird.
Anyway, just a few points on flags there.
But that's not our main point.
My main point is to go back to some other things, which is, I mean, of course, the Maryland flag is fantastic.
This is the video about flags.
Imagine trying to draw that.
Yeah, it's fantastic for a whole other reason though, which isn't because it follows any of the rules, but because it's so unique of American state flags.
The history here is actually quite interesting.
Basically, after the Confederacy, they decided they'd make a new state flag, and they decided to use, I think it was the first baron and second baron of Baltimore.
And their family crests.
So that's what those are.
And where I was to satiate a little bit of the divide in Maryland, because even though it was on the Union side, quite a lot of people preferred the Confederacy.
And that's cool and interesting.
And your flag is neat as a result.
And therefore, I like it.
So keep it.
But, of course, no, we've got to change everything.
Yeah.
Because mislavery.
You need to go to year zero and erase the history.
This is the perfect point, which is the thing that motivates these people is not, I care about black people's feelings, which is essentially the pathetic way they try and demonstrate themselves.
It's like, don't you know, when a black person sees this, they die.
It's essentially the baby faced version of why we must get rid of these things, because they're symbols of hate.
And if there's a symbol of hate and a black person sees that, they just start crying and then just cease to exist.
It's dumb, is what I'm trying to get at.
And no, the reality reason, as you put it correctly, is they always want to get back to some new revolution, the year zero.
I mean, the same with the Maoists that I was mentioning from before, where, okay, we'll wipe away literally everything and recreate the perfect world.
Well, you never will.
So that's a complete waste of time, just on the basis of it.
I mean, check out Mao's perfect world if you want to.
But also, to hell with you!
Like, I don't care how bad the traditions are, this is where my argument comes in, I kind of like the idea that you could keep your so-called baddest parts of your history and best parts of your history, regardless of your viewpoint on them, and have them just displayed publicly And that be something you're at peace with?
I think that's the best way to live as a people.
And this way of trying to destroy everything that goes with the Confederacy I think is the wrong thing to do and doesn't bring peace to society.
Instead it brings year zero-ism.
I mean, that's right.
I agree.
I think sunlight is the best disinfectant.
So we'll just quickly go through some of the things they say, which they also say that Maryland and California, yes, California is included.
I really want to know what the Californian ties to the Confederacy are.
Well, we'll start off with their argument, because as mentioned, of course, this is all about black people's feelings.
Do I know any?
No, but that's why I wrote this article, says the author.
No, just a little bit of insight.
Yes, welcome to our life there.
But she says, amid the racial justice protests of 2020, when confederate statues all over the country were toppled, Mississippi became the last state to remove the confederate battle flag from the state flag.
So that's, that's the justification.
Yeah.
Okay.
The George Floyd riots.
Yeah.
That's your, we need to destroy all of our state flags.
Why?
I don't know.
There might be some more riots.
I mean, really all you care about black people's feelings, not just stealing money and killing people.
Yeah.
But all they care about that as a pretext.
Yeah.
They would do this tomorrow if nothing stood in their way.
And just a real quick history lesson.
I say that it was five years ago.
Donald Trump here talking about Washington.
And the fact here that he was arguing back when it started up in 2017, when they were thinking about getting rid of Confederate monuments in the news again, as he gives a speech where he says, well, you know, you talk about Robert E. Lee.
Well, what about George Washington?
What about Thomas Jefferson?
These people were slave owners.
What are you going to do?
Go after their statues?
And they did!
Yeah, they did.
CNN said to do it.
And then they did it.
Yeah.
There you are.
They literally did it.
There's Washington and Thomas Jefferson there having their statues destroyed because, well, it's the same argument.
Which is, Confederacy, that was about slavery.
Washington, he had slaves.
So destroy it all.
That's as simple as the thinking gets.
These sorts of things.
And, um, well, there you are.
This is Euro-Zeroism again.
It's not just the Confederacy that goes.
All of American history has to go because it's all sinned.
It's all tainted.
Yeah.
I wonder how familiar that man is with the life of Thomas Jefferson.
I'm sure he's a... Whether he's familiar with... Scholar on the subject.
How much of a staunch abolitionist Jefferson actually was.
Do you want to have a little bit of my time?
Go on.
So back in 2017, in here, I just love the author argues where he goes on to say, Mr. Witt, a professional historian, called Mr. Trump's warning of a slippery slope a red herring.
There have been, after all, no calls to tear down any Washington monuments.
It took two, three years.
Put that out of your mind bro.
Just to remind you that we can't trust these people ever to even just bring us the basic news that what they say they want to happen is what the future is going to happen in their minds.
There's a full list here in case you want to fresh yourself a bit.
This is just every monument that was destroyed during the Black Lives Matter riots.
Did you see there was at least one statue that was dedicated to a specifically black regiment, a union Black regiment, a regiment of soldiers, black soldiers, fighting on the north side.
But it was a Civil War era statue, so they destroyed it and pulled it down anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised.
Yeah, I seem to remember that.
It's very ironic.
I mean, it just shows that the people actually did it.
The iconoclasts did it.
The people at war with their own heritage and history don't care about any facts or truth.
It's just about destruction.
New Year.
You know what's interesting?
The iconoclasts.
A few years ago I went to New York, went to a museum in New York, and outside was a statue, I think it was Roosevelt, with a It was one of the American presidents with a Native American and a Black person walking with them, and he was on a horse.
Teddy Roosevelt.
Teddy Roosevelt, yeah.
But that was taken down a couple of years later because they decided that the depiction of the Black and the Native American was not noble enough.
Because, I mean, the white guy's riding a horse, they're walking.
The canon's quite exactly though, isn't it?
It's never enough.
Nothing is ever enough.
What we mean... I mean, I'm sorry, but while you guys have been scrolling... What they mean to do is to destroy, annihilate really, the memory, the history, their own heritage.
It's not really got anything to do with justice or truth or anything.
It just comes from a place of spite.
Statue of Louis XVI.
Why?
Because he's a moron.
Ancient regime.
Yeah, I guess.
I mean, he was the king who was beheaded by the French revolutionaries.
But he funded the American Revolutionary War?
Yeah, because he's a moron.
I think that's my point, though.
Literally got his own head cut.
No, even your financier for the American Revolution has to go.
Because year zero, everything has to go.
And this is what motivates this going after the Confederate stuff.
None of those people care about the Confederacy.
None of these people care about black feelings or any such thing.
I mean, they don't even care about white feelings, so.
Yeah, it's about creating the liberal utopia.
Yes.
I think you've hit the nail absolutely perfectly on the head when you talk about Mao and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
Because that is sort of obviously the logical end point.
If anyone doesn't know, Mao tried to, in various ways to various degrees, sort of destroy all of Chinese history in some ways.
Pull down all their temples.
Even the folklore had to go.
Yeah, yeah.
Anything before his brand of communism was counter-revolutionary.
And therefore had to be destroyed.
It's funny you mention Louis XVI there because it's also the example of the French Revolution.
The amount of French heritage and history and culture that was destroyed, physically broken up and annihilated and destroyed in the French Revolution is sort of sickening, unbelievable when you look back on that.
And that's what these people mean to do to America.
Absolutely.
I mean, we got here even Christopher Columbus, which... Well, I mean, he's the worst of the worst.
He was a terrible genocidal maniac who arrived out of nowhere and killed a bunch of people.
But weirdly enough, that's not why people put statues up to him.
No.
They put them up because, you know, this guy, he found this place.
So that was nice.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.
So it seems fair.
Also, Ulysses S. Grant, he had to go, even though he's a Union general.
He's the hero of the war!
He won the war!
Yes.
That was the funniest one I found.
Sorry, why did he have to go?
Well, because I think he owned slaves, even though he literally was fighting to free them.
There's a statue of Gandhi that had to go.
I didn't have time to read all these because there's just too bloody many.
Gandhi probably had bad opinions of Africans.
Pete Wilson, don't know who that is.
Not that that matters, obviously.
None of the people taking that statue don't know anything about Gandhi's niece.
I'll just say a super quick word about Jefferson.
He sort of famously owned slaves, that's certainly true.
But he was one of those slave owners who was very clement to the slaves he owned, even fathering children with some of them.
In his politics, he was an abolitionist.
He railed against slavery.
There's many, many, many quotes of him saying it's one of the most evil things of our time, and if I had the political capital to do anything about it, and he tried, in fact he tried multiple times to bring legislation to end slavery, and it just wasn't, he was before his time, he was ahead of his time.
So, to denigrate his memory as just simply an evil slave owner is to fly in the face of historical fact.
I mean, most of the Founding Fathers thought slavery was unjust.
They were liberals.
Ben Franklin wrote whole tracts about it.
As did George Washington.
George Washington owned slaves, but he was an abolitionist.
But they weren't dictators, they weren't just... And they say, if they were such an abolitionist, why didn't they free their slaves?
Well, there's many reasons.
Voltaire had to go.
Oh, he invested in the French East India Company, you see.
Got to go.
But my whole point to bring any of this up wasn't to rehash the American debate about, you know, Thomas Jefferson or such.
It was to make the point that literally it doesn't matter, none of this matters, none of them care about any of the facts, none of them care about any of the history, and they never will.
And I could prove this a bit further with her own writings, where she argues in here that the George Floyd riots It was a moment of reckoning for the Lost Cause mythology about the Civil War that dominated much of the 20th century.
But for visual artist Jason Patterson, the work is not done.
And this is because of the flags, as mentioned earlier, which is his point.
To Patterson, flags aren't just images.
They are representations of people, he says.
They can hold so much meaning.
Well, in an aggregate way.
But what does the meaning of a state flag have?
The California Republic, particularly.
Yes.
Well, I mean, even if we take, let's say, the most apparently obvious one on the top there.
Well, what is the meaning?
Well, they were in the Confederacy.
That's what the meaning was.
All right.
Does that enslave anyone?
Does that kill anyone?
No, that's just a factual reality about the place and its history.
You are right about the untruth of the whole thing though, Bo.
Like, this is the problem that I have with the... I mean, really, I think it boils down to the fact that not only is the idea of creating everything anew at Year Zero a lie in and of itself, because of course, Your philosophy isn't sprung out of nothing in this moment.
This is, everything is part of a history.
But it's also just the denial of what it took to make you what you are now.
Because I mean, I'm very much from the sort of Cromwellian school of, no, paint me warts and all, actually.
You know, I actually think that looking the cold truth in the face is better for us as people, regardless of what our ideals are.
That would be better for the civilization.
And this is your point, right?
It's to come to peace with what you are, to know where the mistakes have been made and to know what good can be done in the future.
I mean, never mind the whole thing about history, which is if you don't learn any of it, then obviously you won't learn the mistakes.
But if you literally delete it by destroying it, yeah, you literally are never going to learn anything from it.
You're doomed to repeat the mistakes.
Yeah.
But the whole flag point made by this guy, I mean, again, this whole thing just stinks of, I need to make up an argument, year zero.
Yeah.
But his argument that the flags represent things is like, yes, the history of the place.
The flag is meaningless without context.
If you've got a guy with a Confederate battle flag who is stomping a black man to death because he hates black people, well, yeah, then the Confederate battle flag in that instance gives quite a lot of context and its meaning, which is that it's a hate symbol there because the guy is literally a racist murderer.
But if we have a state flag Because it was in the Confederacy.
That doesn't stand for re-enslaving the blacks of America.
Like, the hell are you talking about?
It stands for the state flag.
Like, I'm so sick of this argument that it means something in terms of reality that isn't in reality.
Like, no one is being enslaved, so how can you argue that this has something to do with slavery?
Instead, what it has to do is with the past, which, yes, involves slavery.
But in the current world, where you currently live, There isn't any.
So bringing it up is just phony.
We get to dictate what value we ascribe to the thing in the modern era.
It's ours.
And I suppose his ultimate desire is to undermine and damage the United States, the fabric of their society.
It's an imperfect revolution, so let's have another one.
So to me, it's just mental gymnastics and a word soup, and therefore, let's destroy America.
So he goes on in here to moan about them.
There's the list here.
California.
There's the reasoning in there.
What is the reasoning for the California one?
Should we read it?
Yeah, I'm sure.
So in June 1846... Hang on, what does this have to do with the Confederacy at the bottom there?
Can we just skip to that bit?
Okay, sure.
You want to read it?
I can't really see it properly.
Okay.
First, California might have been a free state on paper, but it wasn't in practice.
Many of its early American settlers were pro-slavery southerners who brought enslaved people with them, and others engaged indigenous, enslaved indigenous people there, including most of the bear flaggers, according to historian So-and-So in her recent book, California, a Slave State.
Which is just a dumb argument.
No, I'm with it, actually.
Hang on, man.
We need to abolish California because it was a slave state.
It doesn't matter whether that was true or not.
You're the same person, aren't you?
Just like, I'll do anything for my own political will.
Yeah, but have we learned nothing from the previous segment?
Exactly, exactly.
We need to crush our opponents.
Dissolve California.
It's too tainted with the legacy of slavery.
He goes on to moan about all of them.
I hate this one, which is just... I love the idea.
Someone who once lived in the South moved to California.
Slave state.
Yep, the whole flag.
Sorry!
But this one here, they changed the wording at the bottom there.
So I think it's like, essentially the message is death to tyrants.
It's an American woman standing over a Roman emperor or king, I suppose.
Yeah.
It's liberty.
They used to have a different phrase under there.
And then after the Confederacy, they put the old one back.
What was it?
Thus always to slave freers.
Something like that.
What was it?
Thus always to tyrants.
There you are.
There used to be another thing.
I don't, I don't, you're not motivated by anything but hatred.
Yeah.
The person who's arguing this, they just want to reset the whole country.
And it's also irrational as well, there's no need to do anything.
And this is where it's going to get maybe a bit controversial, but like Russia, right now, you go to St.
Petersburg and you will see these three flags flying.
in what the old capital was for the Russian Imperial Empire.
And as you can see, we have the Imperial Russian flag first, then the Soviet flag there, and then the modern day Russian Federation flag.
And they fly all three of them at the same time.
And it's not just a single instance.
This is just the most visually appealing instance of trying to show this.
In my experience, they're far more at peace with their past than we are in the West.
And the way they do it is this.
Where they will just fly all three of them and be like, yeah, you know, you'll meet a guy who's an anti-communist.
He hates Lenin.
He hates Stalin.
Can't stand what was done to the country during those eras.
They'll still have a hammer and sickle somewhere.
But that's because they're not undergoing a liberal revolution.
No, they're complete traditionalists.
Exactly.
The point of tradition is the accumulation of years and whatever survives through the accumulation of years is just a part of what you are.
It's literally the fabric, the genetic makeup of the state itself.
And so if you're not engaging in a liberal revolution, you're not at war with that.
You're just, yeah, well, this is just what we are.
This is what we've inherited from a very long past in the case of Russia.
And so why would they be bothered?
I feel like Americans need to... If they want peace in their lives, this is one way to do it.
I made a crappy version here, just to make that point of what it might look like.
I don't know what particular flags to use, so I used the American Revolution, the modern day one, and the Confederacy.
But, you know, if you were going to do that, you'd have to be a southern state, obviously.
That doesn't make sense.
One small point I might make is that not necessarily all Americans, I think probably a lot of Americans are completely oozed, but maybe there's a small clique of deliberately subversive people at the top peddling all this crap.
You need a solid level of cultural competence and belief in yourself.
to be a bulwark against that so when a minority of freaks come along and try and dismantle the whole system you just tell them to go to hell and the uh well wet people who become politicians who will just do whatever the voters want if they think they're going to lose their seat over it will just do what the voters want and you need all of the voters to be in on this where well you used to see it at least i see it in old pictures and movies which is that you'd have well the battle flag in southern states and that was normal and it wasn't a question of well all these people clearly want to enslave enslave blacks tomorrow It was a question of, well, the Confederacy was here.
Have you ever watched the Dukes of Hazzard?
Exactly, right?
That cultural competence and confidence of that era of America needs to be brought back.
And that's my argument, essentially, which is that it seems to be in the last few decades that confidence evaporated somehow.
And instead, it is now just left to its own devices of destroy even the Washington Monuments.
Communist subversives is how it evaporated.
I'll just quickly end it off with, in case you don't believe me, I mean here's a new example just like the other day.
Kid comes in with a Gadsen flag.
Teacher goes nuts and insists that he needs to be removed.
Why exactly?
Year zero.
For some reason the slaves wouldn't be able to adopt the principles behind the Gadsen flag.
But she wasn't arguing from like...
She wasn't arguing from like, they hurt some black people's feelings or whatever.
She was just like, well, essentially that's American revolutionary imagery.
Yeah.
And that's got to go.
It's hard to imagine why a black person wouldn't fly the Gadsden flag, actually.
But it has nothing to do with black people.
I like on this bag, there's a little Dogecoin dog head thing there.
That's cool.
Anyway, that's my point, which is, you know, redesigning your whole country because I want a new year zero is a really dumb idea.
The Americans didn't used to do it, and the push to do it in the modern era needs to be destroyed by a level of cultural confidence in yourselves of, yes, this is our past.
Just because you fly a Confederate flag does not mean you want to enslave black people.
It's just, hey, I live in the South.
This is our history, good or bad.
I absolutely agree.
It's not just dumb, it's sort of pure evil.
It's sort of disgusting because it will end in massive bloodshed.
It has ended in massive bloodshed.
We've seen it.
So you're completely right.
But anyway, right.
So let's talk about the case against AI.
There are lots of people who are going to say, listen, you Muddite.
I'll say, yes, listening.
You just hate technology.
I'll be like, yes, that's correct.
And you just want to go back to the 1950s.
Well, that's not far enough, but good start, right?
I think that AI is actually a bad thing.
And actually, I think that once the genie is out of the bottle, it can't be put back in.
So perhaps we might want to think about what we're doing on this journey and maybe we don't have to take it.
Because there's always going to be the person going, wow, it's inevitable.
It's like, is it though?
Actually, it seems like it's a great effort to put all of this together.
And so if we stop doing it, it doesn't inevitably come about, actually.
I'm just saying, launch the Butlerian Jad.
If anyone gets that reference, I'm just joking.
Dear MI5.
Anyway, so there are people sounding the alarm being like, hang on a second.
Don't our enemies also have access to AI?
Yes.
Can't they also use AI to, like that, create wild propaganda that might actually cause massive social unrest?
Yes.
That's definitely a possibility.
Is this giving them a level of cultural competence they wouldn't otherwise have had?
Yes, that is.
It is doing that.
Because, of course, what does the Chinese person know about the inner workings of the American mind?
Well, not much.
But if you've got an AI that can literally scan every social media post made by an American ever, then actually that could give you a lot more insight and actually do it for you.
This is, of course, what the People's Liberation Army of China are going to do.
They're looking for a long term and high impact way to orchestrate large digital media campaigns and generative AI will be especially good at helping China accomplish that task, according to a new report.
For the Chinese military, the generative AI offers the possibility it could do something it could never do before.
Manipulate social media with high quality human quality content at scale.
Chinese military researchers routinely complain that the PLA lacks necessary amount of staff with adequate foreign language skills and cross-cultural understanding.
So there's real world practical reasons to be against the proliferation of AI and what it can do.
You look skeptical there Callum.
I, I think they could probably learn English if they wanted to.
Yeah, but they just don't want to.
Yeah, but they can't learn how to be Americans.
They can't learn how to be Brits.
That's the thing.
Like the human mind is loaded with cultural baggage because year zero is nonsense.
And you can't even, it goes down to not only just the way that we deal with each other, but even the way we form sentences in our heads.
I know, but my point is just, if you actually wanted to do this more confidently, you could just front it.
The screen is just flickering.
Okay.
Anyway, yeah, possibly, but as the Chinese researchers are saying, well, look, this is actually difficult.
You need to find the individuals who can do this.
It's a lot of work, it's a lot of effort, but actually, the AI doing it is not that much work or effort at all.
And so that, in and of itself, okay, there are actual dangers from geopolitical opponents.
Fair enough.
Do you remember when we did the Active Measures Book Club and the KGB made this pamphlet that was meant to be a fake KKK advert and it was like broken English?
It was hilariously bad.
Kind of a mess.
Yeah, that's what I'm imagining.
Yeah, but imagine if it wasn't in broken English and it actually was like it was done by someone who was very familiar with the subject.
The CCP are going to be sitting there printing off KKK adverts that... Well, no, they'll be printing off... Very insightful.
Other revolutionary pamphlets.
What's it called when you try and incite violence?
Agent provocateur?
Yeah, provocative.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's my point.
Yeah, but they, they, they will have access to all of this.
So this is something that we can undoubtedly expect to see in the pipeline in the next few years.
Uh, then you've also got, uh, don't, don't use AI to talk with on the internet.
There are loads of AI chat bots and things like that.
Don't ever just block it.
If it comes up in your timeline, you do not need to talk to a computer.
Computer is not really talking to you.
This is not good.
Uh, there was a study done at Ohio state university and they say, The obvious.
What we found is that people don't think a friend should use any third-party AI to maintain their relationship.
As in, there are going to be AI intermediates, right?
So you are going to have a little AI chatbot that you say, go and wish so-and-so a happy birthday, and it will write like a paragraph and send that to that person, and then their AI chatbot will get that, and it will translate into, this person says happy birthday.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
That is going to be the future.
The South Park thing.
Yes.
Post Zuma.
I thought you were talking about, do you get those adverts for like sexy AI?
I've seen them.
It keeps coming up being like, you can chat dirty with me.
I'm like, I'm just trying to play the game.
Yeah, bro.
Why would I want to?
But this, you know, they obviously found that effort is very important in a relationship.
Pretty.
Outsourcing your relationships with AI.
Have you tried loving your partner?
Not even loving your partner, just putting the effort in with your mates.
Don't mediate your friendships using AI.
I mean, obviously, but there are probably going to be some 17-year-olds who are hooked on internet porn and AI replica chatbots or whatever who don't know this, so I'm making this statement now.
But then you get to the sort of more nuanced arguments, like Tim Burton.
Now, whatever you may feel about Tim Burton's art, he is a notable artist.
I have my complaints about Tim Burton.
But he, I think, made a good point here, where he says, AI artwork was very good, as in technically very good, and some of it is amazing, but something about the pictures makes him feel uneasy because something important is lacking.
He says, I can't describe the feeling it gives you.
It reminded me of when other cultures say, don't take my picture because it's taking away your soul.
What it does is suck something.
What the hell's going on that screen?
Ice cream, so good!
something from you.
It takes something from your soul or psyche.
It's very disturbing, especially if it has to do with you.
It's like a robot taking your humanity or your soul.
Now, I think he's kind of right about this.
Ice cream's so good.
I mean, that definitely does take your soul out of it.
But that's not even AI.
No.
That's the thing.
That's a human mimicking AI.
But the thing about the AI art is that he is on something, right?
Because there is a purpose behind art, and that purpose is the transmission of a message.
It is someone has understood an aspect of reality and the human condition, and the only way they can describe to you what they have experienced to communicate that message to you is to create a work of art, write a poem, sculpt a sculpture, whatever it is, and then your experience on the other end of that process.
So they go through the whole process.
They actually don't know how it's going to turn out as they begin it, but then they, the skill of the artist is employed.
They produce this work of art that is designed to produce an aesthetic experience in you.
And so you are the recipient of a message that's being transmitted about what it is to be human, and I think that's really what he's driving at here.
It's like, look, the AI can only, in the most soulless way, try and replicate this.
There is no message from the computer to you about the human condition.
What the computer can do is just aggregate and say, well, I think you will respond well to this, and that's the best it can do.
And so there is definitely, again, I hate to be on Tim Burton's side, to be honest, because I find him insufferable, but But, this is definitely something I think he's right on.
There's this feeling that's hard to escape about AI in general, is that it will have sort of a Skynet moment.
I'm not even worried about that.
- Okay, I can't see. - I can see, just directly on my way. - Yeah, there's this feeling that's hard to escape about AI in general, is that it will have sort of a Skynet moment. - I'm not even worried about that.
- Well, I'm just saying that's sort of the ultimate fear.
And the scientist Brian Cox says that that's a long way off.
Yeah.
That may happen, but that's a long way off.
So we're now dealing with at the moment in 2023, sort of, sort of the first pangs of the, the weird, surreal oddness.
Unreality.
Yeah.
And unreality that comes with that.
And I absolutely agree.
Um, one thing I would say though, is I, I, And I may be wrong about this, because I've not researched it in any real depth, but AI at the moment, I don't think is truly intelligent.
It's still a reflection of whoever programmed it.
So if you keep that in mind, my thinking is that in fact, it's just an extrapolation of humans still at this point.
It's not truly its own soulless thing.
It's actually just sort of a second-hand or maybe third-hand reflection of whoever programmed the AI.
Now I think that some AI, although I agree with you and Tim Burton on this, there's something sort of uncanny valley about it.
Something weird and odd and unhuman and all that sort of thing.
It's actually sometimes Way better than some modern art.
Oh yeah.
Where it's just someone screeching, pouring baked beans all over themselves.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's quite a lot of AI.
It's way better than that.
In a technical sense, a lot of the AI art is incredible.
It looks incredible.
Some of the mid-journey renders, some of them just look amazing.
Of course, in other cases, it looks terrible.
Have you seen the Daphne drawing?
So some guy the other day tweeted out that he just purchased a drawing of Daphne from Scooby-Doo.
And, uh, that was really good for $500.
And then someone pointed out that the artist had given it to him through an AI.
It was completely AI generated and this guy paid 500 bucks for it.
Well, there we go.
But the thing is that the drawing is actually really, really good.
Like you're saying you get nothing out of it, but I looked at it and thought, no, that's actually quite nice.
Yeah, it is quite nice, but it's in.
It's like having an insubstantial diet, right?
It's like, look, I'm eating all of this.
Like artificial sweetener.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Empty calories, artificial sweetener, and you can consume it for days upon days upon days, but you will never have learned anything about being a human and about what reality is really like.
Cause you're just looking at a shadow of a shadow of a shadow.
of this thing.
And it's a really advanced, really complicated one.
It's really difficult to discern.
But if you look at it for long enough, you realize that there's nothing in here that makes you think about anything because there can't be because the thing that generated it has no idea why it's generating it.
It's just now three of them.
It's not just me.
This is what you get for bitching about AI.
Yeah.
It may well be.
Yeah.
John.
Yeah.
Have a quick look at it, man.
Anyway, so this, this is something that I think, unfortunately, I have to agree with the sort of people that otherwise I would definitely not agree with.
And I think this is a genuine problem.
We come from a position where we have had the previous era to live through, right?
As in, we know that great art is done by great artists who go through a period of trial and suffering and honing their skills to the point where they then can produce the immaculate thing, right?
There will come a time in like 50 years time where nobody has ever seen anything that wasn't just an AI generated, but your grandchildren for their whole lives would be AI generated pictures, AI generated TV programs, AI generated computer games.
The concept of a human producing something to transmit that message will have been lost.
And they won't know why, and they'll be acclimatized to the idea that all art is just nonsense that's produced at the drop of a hat for no reason and can just be disposed of anyway.
You don't have to spend any time engaging with that.
I actually think there's something quite bad about that.
Yeah, one thing I'll say, I think you might well be right, at least in a broad sense.
I think it'll probably take more than 50 years, but nonetheless the point you're making is fair.
I saw the other day, or a few weeks ago, that V was genuinely trying to make the argument that some manga drawing was better than the Mona Lisa.
No, it's complete nonsense.
It's one of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen someone try and argue.
It's just flatly wrong.
However... I'm sure he'll debate it with you on Twitter.
There's nothing to debate.
I've seen the Mona Lisa, it is kind of sh... Well, again, you're wrong.
I'm not saying the Manga Drawing is any good either.
I don't know what the Manga Drawing is, but I do agree that the Mona Lisa is overrated.
But yeah, the point you're making in a general sense is fair.
But then, I suppose, without being too sort of artsy-fartsy and vague and hippy-dippy about it, all art is subjective and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
If he genuinely thinks that's better, that's fine.
There's no wrong or right answer is what I'm saying, really, to be perfectly honest.
There's no wrong or right answer.
But there is a degeneration, like the bar is lowered for a lot of people.
So is that not sort of inevitable?
If we don't somehow eradicate all AI entirely, is it not just inevitable that in generations time most things that people see, most arts will be AI generated?
Unless you eradicate AI.
It probably is inevitable.
impossible though like you say the genie's out of the bottle um there's some i don't think it's quite fully out yet that's the thing there's some things um i've had this conversation with josh i think where it's possible for human civilization to sort of put the genie back in bottle at least to some degree so for example in the cold war um various countries including great britain actually worked on um sort of insanely poisonous nerve agents right vx gas and things so
Certain polymers that could potentially turn all the world's oceans to a solid.
Things like this.
And we realised... Do we want solid oceans?
Yeah, we realised that perhaps that's so...
that we would just stop doing it, actually make a conscious decision to stop doing it.
Or the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
You know, we have tried to stop rogue organizations and rogue countries from getting into it.
It might be possible, but with AI, you know, each case is separate.
With AI, I'm not sure it's going to be possible to keep that genie in the bottle already.
If there's a relatively small setup anywhere in the world, you've got enough processing power.
You'll be able to do it.
Who's going to stop the CCP if they decide that's what they want to do?
No one could stop them, really.
I agree.
Or the United States Intelligence Services or the British Intelligence Services or whatever.
I fear it's a genie that cannot, will not be put back in the bottle.
And it's entirely possible that you're right, but I still want to be on the record saying I warned you.
The 1980s were better.
Just anything.
Anything that was made by a human was better just because it was a human creation.
Because we are just about old enough, we've said this more than once haven't we?
We remember the days before the internet and mobile phones.
When just...
Just completely straight up normal human interactions were the complete norm.
We had no other, there was no other option.
And you didn't even think about it.
And, and, um, looking back on it, it does seem like it was a more healthy, wholesome, golden age, something like that.
Yeah.
I don't want to get too, uh, sentimental.
Yeah.
I totally understand what you mean.
I saw a video the other day going around of like an American high school in like 1997 and the people just look happy and healthy.
They just all look totally normal.
They're not like weirdly neotenous.
You know, like young people now look very childlike, whereas these look like young adults.
And they were just happy and smiling and just fooling around.
And there were lots of, you know, diverse, you know, you could say.
But they were all just normal people being normal.
And I'll send it to you after this kind of film because it's just, you won't believe it.
This is what we used to live like, right?
Everyone was just normal and it was great.
I don't really know what you're saying all this for.
Yeah, he doesn't care.
No, I mean, it's not that he doesn't care.
You're saying all this and then it's like, well, yeah, well, life's going to change.
The technology is going to do the thing.
The only thing we can actually do is decide how to live with that.
Yeah.
I think, I don't know if I was talking to you about that.
Yeah, I was.
Where, yeah, we live in the modern age of phones and blah, blah, blah.
I'm going to, again, use Russia as an example, just because it's weird, different enough, but close enough that it makes sense.
Which is, for example, they banned OnlyFans.
And so they don't have that culture there.
So yeah, we have this technology, but that aspect, which people like us would complain about in the West, as a bad part of the West, you can just turn it off.
Well, that's the point.
That's exactly the point I'm making.
You actually can just turn these things off.
In fact, this is what Netflix is doing as well, because you remember that they are in an argument with, again, a bunch of people I, on a personal level, really despise, but I think actually are in the right here because, of course, the Film Actors Guild, Uh, are objecting to the fact that they're not going to get paid for digital representations of their own images or voices and things like that.
And Netflix was like, yeah, great.
We're just going to get AI generated content from now on.
Uh, well, that's not true.
They have that.
There was a Disney movie recently where the entire intro of it was AI generated.
Uh, so it's begun basically.
Right.
Uh, and just to be clear, I completely disagree with this in the same way as the, any other art piece.
What, what is the problem with it?
Right.
Is it's generally quite degrading to what a human being should consider themselves to be as in this is the equivalent of just putting like nodes into your brain and activating the pleasure center.
And that's what the, that's the equivalent of AI generated content because with a human made content, you've got the human intentionality behind it.
They're like, right.
I'm going to tell this particular story so you will learn something, right?
There is always an aspect of learning in any kind of art, any kind of storytelling.
This is what I was talking about in my deep think of the politics of why I'm a 40,000, right?
This is what Aristotle recognized 2,000, 2,500 years ago.
The entertainment value of it comes from the entire thing and the arc of the story and the closure of the story and the skill in which it's told.
If that is abstracted into a formula that a machine just customizes and creates, then actually what it is is kind of like a Skinner box or something, something like that, where it's just right now, it's you've reduced my capacity as a human being to something that is algorithmic.
and now you're like right okay what do i need to do to flash this up to spark a brain signal that gives me the pleasure of watching it and therefore you have my attention and now i've been reduced merely to the material realm of How many hours can I get you watching this piece of content?
What's your attention span?
Blah, blah, blah.
It's not engaging with me as a person dealing with an issue that other human beings deal with.
And so that's really my big objection to AI.
It is the total reduction of the human being into a fungible, just consumer product.
And I really hate it.
And they will, they absolutely will make AI generated TV shows, movies, stuff like this.
It may not be tomorrow, but this will happen in the future.
Um, I'm not denying that.
Um, the reason I said it won't happen with Disney is because that thing will go bankrupt before they end up making that adjustment.
Sure.
But Disney plus doesn't make money.
It never will.
Yeah.
But like I said, they've already started doing it.
So I'm not saying you won't be able to make AI movies.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It may not be Disney, but Disney situation.
Sure.
But someone's going to do it.
I think you're right.
I don't disagree with anything you say, but I fear that for a lot of people, they won't care.
You made the analogy there of just plugging in some sort of thing into your brain and just stimulating the right synapse to make you feel pleasure.
I mean, you could sort of say that's all narcotics or SOMA or something.
A lot of people are like, I'll take that, that's fine.
That's better than the misery I've got without that.
I'll take that deal.
But most people agree that being on drugs is not a good thing.
I know, I know.
But I'm saying there's always going to be a fringe.
If there's a market for a thing... I do think we have to have a sort of consciousness about why we aren't As in why, why, why art at all?
Right.
And we actually, we actually do need a conscience because it's not, it's not merely the quality of the picture.
It's also the intent behind the picture that in fact matters more than the quality of the picture because you could do an amazing picture of something
evil and you wouldn't want to look at it right you could you know if you did an amazing picture of someone being abused you wouldn't want to look at that picture because you'd be like why does the artist want me to see this person being abused you know whereas if you look at um talking about John Podesta's private art collection possibly I possibly might be actually but then if you look at this amazing picture of the god emperor of mankind
uh wielding his flaming sword uh you know that's a you know there's different intent behind this you know there's the entire thing the entire experience contains different messaging different intent and this speaks to what you are as a person and the person who made this and interrupting that i think actually just ruins art as a concept i kind of i kind of hate it and i realize this is quite abstract and kind of like well i don't
Do I have a concrete thing in my life where I think that, but I think this is a real thing.
And this is really something we have to worry about.
And this, I think is one of the reasons why, uh, Amazon, for example, like, right.
Okay.
We're going to have to start making it.
So, well, you've got to declare if using AI to generate your content, because actually it's become apparent that there are going to be consumers like myself who are going to be like, I don't want AI BS.
Is this vegan friendly?
Is this Luddite friendly?
Please buy!
Honestly, I think this will become the kind of hipster, this is made by a human.
This will become the hipster art in the future.
Your daily life will be so subsumed with AI generated content, you'll be sick of seeing it.
You'll recognize it when you see it.
I mean, you can already tell when somebody's mid-journey, right?
You can already tell when something's stable diffusion.
You can actually already pick these things together.
I mean, they'll get more advanced, but eventually it will come to a point where you're looking for things that are kind of rubbish.
You can see the brushstroke on it, right?
For authenticity.
This is a real thing that a real human being made.
And I'm not just being manipulated by an algorithm, right?
Perhaps human made art will become a lot rarer.
Yes.
And be a lot more valuable.
I was watching the original Blade Runner just the other day, and there's, I don't know if you remember the bit where there's an owl in it.
And he says, is that real?
And they're like, of course it's not real.
Of course it's not real.
But yeah, but that's exactly the kind of world we're living in.
As if I could afford a real owl.
Yeah.
Whereas the perfect fake one is, you know, you could mass produce them or something.
Whereas a painting on the wall, it can't be mass produced, but this is what gives it the sort of mythological significance.
This is the only one of this in all of the universe, in all of history.
This is what makes it valuable.
We have a very horrific outcome in the political world here, which is that all of that crappy art and blah blah blah is also going to be where all the politically incorrect stuff is, because all the humans rebelling will be down there.
Yeah, and the AI will be at the bottom.
Perfect AI stuff made by the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Defense to talk about how two mums is actually a great idea and blah blah blah.
Yeah, that'll be all AI made.
Yeah, for sure.
But anyway, yeah, so, I mean, you know, if you just want more, come and watch our Cyberpunk dystopias.
I've got another one lined up.
You looking forward to it, Callum?
Oh my god, why?
Because they're great.
Because this is the world we're making.
Look at that thumbnail.
You think I'm hyped for this?
Yeah.
I'm hyped for just how bad things can get.
Yeah.
but anyway yeah so there we go anime okay that's Kaczynski podcast Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks, bro.
Very appropriate.
You're listening to the generative.
Don't see.
You go along with the generative.
I do wonder what it must be like to be trapped in the bodies of these people.
Who was the one the other day, where it was just... In phraseology, they are trapped in their own bodies.
Yeah.
Like, imagine being trapped in Eddie Izzard's body.
Yeah, exactly.
And then you think, okay, what kind of person would I be?
And suddenly Eddie Izzard looks a lot more rational.
It's a pretty funny, like, who would you rather?
Like, would you rather be trapped in Eddie Izzard's body or become Edward Snowden and have to live in exile for the rest of your life?
I'd rather Edward Snowden.
Yeah, yeah.
Split second.
Definitely.
Snowden's at least a normal person.
Would you rather be hunted by the government where they're going to shoot you on sight or being trapped in whatever it is?
Than become a Labour MP in Eddie Izzard's body, yeah.
Hell yeah.
Oh boy.
Even if they're the same age or whatever, you know.
Welcome to your new favourite after show, Lotus Eaters Cooking.
Today we're doing a British classic, Beans on Toast.
Lightly toast some bread, add some butter and cut diagonally.
If you ever see anybody cutting lengthwise, contact the police immediately.
Arrange the toast.
Add beans.
Egg.
Fry on a medium heat.
Use butter, not oil.
Sunny side up, baby.
Cheese.
Cheddar.
Mature.
Obviously.
And there you have it, the classic Beans on Toast.
What other British food would you like to see cooked on Lotus Eaters Cooking?
Bangers and mash.
A dash of pepper wouldn't go amiss on this.
I wouldn't.
But it's not necessary.
Maybe a bit of salt as well.
You dirty foreigner seasoning your food.
That looks good to me.
That does look quite nice.
I love melted cheese on egg.
And egg on toast as well.
This is a very good idea from Baystate though.
I'd like to see his culinary skills increase in aptitude.
Yeah.
Like a YouTuber who's starting out.
And then they make more and more complex dishes.
I'd like to see him do Beef Wellington by next year.
Bangers and mash, definitely.
I don't understand how other countries and cultures don't understand beans on toast.
I don't believe them.
I don't believe them.
What is the problem with beans on toast?
That's the main problem.
How is there a problem with beans on toast?
Well, you go and buy beans in their country and it's not like our beans, and then you realize, oh, you're putting those around.
That's okay.
I've seen... I thought Heinz Baked Beans was, at least in America, the same, but if they're not, I guess they're not.
You can get them, but you also can get what the locals call beans, which is what they might be confusing beans on toast for.
Isn't Heinz an American company?
Yes, they is.
Anyway.
You know what's really annoying about that?
I did a segment, I think, Mind about the price of beans.
Price of beans is mental.
I don't know what the price of beans is.
Heinz beans.
They grow the friggin beans.
They make the sauce.
They can it all up in the United States.
It's run by an American company.
And then they ship it across the ocean to us and the Spanish because of all the British tourists.
And the beans in the UK are still the most expensive somehow.
Spanish ones are cheaper.
The American ones are cheaper.
It's like, well, okay, at least it's made in America.
£1.40 a can.
Never used to be that much.
Never used to be that much.
Nowhere near that much.
Madness.
Anyway, we went shopping one day.
I just went shopping.
It used to be like 50p.
And that's for the good ones.
Like you, you, you, when I, when I was in university, you get, I would eat 9p cans of beans from the local Sainsbury's or whatever.
They were just like white labeled and they were just, they were terrible, but they were edible.
So, you know, you would survive till the next day on them.
Yeah.
You could get non-brand tins of beans that were insanely cheap.
Yeah.
9p, 15p or something.
I've realized we kind of sound like an old folks home now.
Yeah, but... Don't you remember when the cans of beans were left?
Why did I bring that up?
Don't you remember when people weren't depressed and on antidepressant medication in school?
No.
No, of course you don't.
Like, don't you remember?
It's like, this was only 25 years ago!
This is how much this has changed!
Anyway, let's go to the next one.
Long live the sloth.
That literally looks like someone out of a napkin.
I quite like him as well.
What's he doing?
Joshua, what are you doing, bro?
Don't do it.
Don't be subverted by the Mexicans.
Nothing good comes of it.
This thing is all right.
So on my Facebook feed all the time, I get American cooking videos, and I'm just in awe that the Americans think that food is anything.
Sorry, Americans.
I have eaten your food.
I mean, just genuinely, not even offensive, just mind-boggling.
We talked about it the other day.
The potato chip mashed potato.
It was just amazing to watch.
This woman pouring crisps into the slow cooker, and then a stick of butter, and then all this pre-shredded cheese.
She doesn't even grate it herself.
It's all pre-shredded stuff.
So there's all this sort of dusty starch on it.
Yeah, exactly, right?
And I'm just watching this, and then she pours in loads of spices and stuff, and I'm just Why would you eat that?
And then another one was just, um, just rolls of meat, which sounds good on Facebook, but of course it's filled with like plastic American cheese and then like really weird other ingredients you wouldn't add.
And like, and it was rolled around a stack of hot dogs.
I'm not joking.
And then the guy cuts it and opens it up and it's like the weird layers and then the hot dogs in the middle.
And he's like, yeah, I'm like, What is wrong with you?
You guys eat beans on toast?
Yeah, we damn well eat beans on toast.
What the hell's wrong, America?
Anyway... Yeah, guys, while I really, really like the idea of Stelios doing the whole Souvlaki and all that stuff... Love Souvlaki.
Yeah, I really think you should do a traditional English cuisine on a cooking show.
Drop the trad wife idea, that's okay, but I thought of doing it, but the problem is I'm still far too busy with my next book.
Damn.
Give me an idea though.
What if we do a cooking show, but the whole thing is literally just called How to Be a Trad Wife and we explain it to women?
It's some big hairy guy.
Had to be a trad wife.
Yeah, like just stood there like, you know, I forget the channel now, the guy with the beard, and just explained like, hey, yeah, I want beans on toast.
This is how I want it made.
And thing by thing.
If only we had a kitchen.
But then you could show, be like, look, I can make it.
Why the hell can't you?
You're the one at home with all the time.
Shred the cheese daily.
You don't buy the pre-shredded cheese.
You brought that up.
I hate it.
I can't eat it.
No, it's gross.
It's so simple as well to shred your own cheese.
It tastes so much better.
It takes two seconds.
When I go to someone's house and they've got pre-shredded cheese in their fridge, I get so angry.
I'll just say, yeah, never mind.
I'm not hungry.
Trash.
Yeah.
They're always dusty.
And I'm like, why?
And that's the thing, the quality of the American ingredients, whenever they come up with these cooking shows, I can't believe this is such a big topic conversation.
Yeah.
Why is everyone talking about this?
Because it's all low quality.
It's all low quality and it's indicative of the kind of culture that they've become.
Because I'm sure that American food wasn't always this prepackaged, heavily processed.
Have you ever seen James Townsend's YouTube channel about American cooking?
No, I bet it's amazing.
It's so basic stuff.
It's like, you know, 1700s food, but it looks great.
Yeah, I bet it does.
And that's the thing, like all of these American things, like they've got this great steak and I'm like, that is a good looking steak.
And then they'll just add all of these really low quality ingredients.
And it's all like pre-made, pre-fabricated, pre-ground stuff.
But it's all sus.
And I'm putting in mind of the woman, the seasoning police woman.
And it's like, yeah, no, she's got a really good point there, actually.
She's absolutely right.
Look at this.
Look at this.
Look at these ingredients are in my garlic or whatever.
I just want the garlic.
Why do you have all of these other, you know, and the Americans like, oh, why are we being poisoned by our own food?
That's why.
Because you need to prepare it yourself, just from the fresh thing.
It's a little bit of extra work, but it's really not that hard.
I did see a statistic somewhere or a tweet or something or other saying that in Amish communities, all sorts of diseases and cancers, particularly childhood cancers, are massively less or don't exist.
And it's, you know, quite possibly just because they're not poisoning themselves every single day, day on day with processed foods and preservatives and just all sorts of things.
Yeah.
Um, can't take it.
No, sometimes you see, again, I've seen on Twitter where they'll show, um, pictures of, uh, people on TV, anchor people on news a few years apart where they're sort of normal size and then they're like bloated balloon people.
And there's like, what's doing this?
Gluttony and processed food Eating too much processed food What do you mean what's doing it?
Honestly, whenever I go to America I put on weight, it's really insufferable Last time I went to America I put on about a stone I wasn't trying I know, I wasn't trying I know It was a lot It's taken me a lot of time to get it off Whenever you go and eat anywhere They put the calories next to it And it's literally like twice the calories of the same food back in England.
But I went to Disney World in Florida and I thought, right, okay, I don't want to eat all my calories for the day.
I don't normally count calories, but I had to because I was in America.
There are Americans about.
Yeah, no, literally.
And you know, I hate America.
There could be Americans here.
By the way, in case people are wondering, we're all joking.
It's a meme.
But the point is, I was like, right, OK, I'll order some food.
So I looked at the burgers and the burgers were like 3,000 calories.
I was like, OK, I didn't want more than 2,000 calories.
So I looked at the salads and the salads were one and a half thousand calories.
One and a half thousand calories in a salad.
How's that possible?
Yeah, exactly.
Drenched in ranch.
Sauce and cheese.
Exactly.
How is that possible was my question.
I got it.
And it's exactly the same.
It's just coated in slop.
You know that thing on that guy's plate?
It didn't look appealing, Josh.
It looked, um, yeah, disgusting.
It looked dangerous for you, to be honest.
It's horrible.
I'm going to tweet that later and ask people to rate it.
And then the real bullying will commence.
Don't get me wrong, Americans, we love you guys.
It's just, I feel that you've been kind of culturally abused by your own food.
That's just, I view it as a mission to liberate Americans from the poison that they eat on a daily basis.
We've got two minutes left, so we should probably finish off the last comment.
Sorry, yeah, go on.
In order to gain power, the progressive needs his enemy's institutions.
He needs to pretend he's something he is not in order to gain power.
Probably like that feller being a MAGA communist.
However, anyone anti-progressive, all they have to do is act normal and simply win their fight by existing.
As a whole, people are lazy and don't like putting in effort, so that's why progressives will always lose.
They keep winning.
I love the fact that your project has just taken on a life of its own.
Like, act normal, says the guy who made this.
I just love that you've got enough time to do stuff like this.
What am I even looking at?
Really?
It looks massive as well if that's a truck or a car in the background.
That thing is massive.
He's making like a dreadnought suit or something.
Okay.
I mean, yeah, why not?
You know, it sounds like fun.
If I had the time and resources and space, I'd probably do something really similar.
But, uh, yeah.
But I don't know, man.
They keep winning.
So.
Sadly, we're out of time.
I'd love to read a whole bunch of comments, but we've got 20 seconds.
Sorry, we've got one comment here that I'd like to read.
Screwtape Laser says, Your Union Jack flag is literally just an overlay of the individual territory flags.
Who the hell are you to throw stones about flag design?
And I would say, we're the people with the overlay of the individual territory flags.
Really simple.
Yeah, no, that fits all the rules of making flags.
Exactly.
Yeah.
See?
You can draw it easily.
You notice it from afar.
You can instantly identify it.
I can't remember the last ones, but don't put any words on it.
We're coming after your food and your flags.
Your TV's next.
They do do flag redesigns in the United States that I'm proud of sometimes.
It's just, you know, doing it for stupid political ideological reasons doesn't make sense.
Make it to make the flag better.
That's all.
Save the Americans from themselves.
Says we.
Yeah, well... Situation we're in, but... But we do know how to make flags.
And some food.
That's what we've got left.
We're going to cover that like refugees being like, look, we have flag designs and food recipes.
Every American's got to eat beans on toast by the time I'm done.
Okay.
All right.
If you want more of that, ludacris.com, support the crusade to bring beans on toast to every American household.
If you don't, then... The Jamie Oliver crusade.
I don't know.
Sports for another reason.
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