All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 20, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters
01:31:58
The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #745
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello and welcome to SHIELDcast of the Lotus Easons Episode 2.
This is on the 20th of September, 2023.
So, welcome back lovely subscribers.
Before we bring in the Utahds, appreciate you guys.
The promotion's going well, so we do a bit more of that, and we do love you existing subscribers as well.
Although some of you are seriously over-restorating my tech skills.
It is not the case that I set up some bloody voucher thing, right, and tried to exclude, you know, lovelies for existing subscribers.
It's just I don't know how to do that.
If I can figure out something, we'd do something in the future.
But anyway, love you guys, and should we bring in the... Oh!
And I'm joined by, yes, it's not just me, I'm joined by the well-dressed and fresh-faced Connor.
Hello, you're right there.
Yes, and also Stelios the good-looking Greek.
Thank you very much.
Nice to be here.
Yes, yes, so I remembered you.
Yes, no, you're very much part of it.
I thought Josh was the Alan Partridge of the office, but you're giving him the run for the money.
OK, so, first segment.
Stelios, for my degree I did a bit of politics and philosophy and economics and stuff, and the stuff that I remember about the philosophy is that Greek people do it.
Now, you do our philosophy here, and you're Greek, so is that your primary qualification, or do you have other qualifications on top of that?
I've studied economics and philosophy.
Right, okay.
Not as politics, philosophy and economics.
I've studied them separately.
Right, okay.
It's not just Greek people who do it.
Greek people do it well, also Anglo-Saxon people do it well, and some people from the continent do it well, but not everyone.
I see.
Okay.
And you've got what, PhDs?
I have a PhD in philosophy.
Right.
Okay.
So what is a philosophy?
What do you mean?
A philosophy or philosophy in general?
What is it?
Well, you could say that it's It's a way to systematize answers to questions that most people ask.
Like, you know, if there's a God, if there's an afterlife, what is right or wrong?
What is politically the right thing to do?
Most people ask these questions, whether we are in control of our destiny and have free will or not.
Most people ask these questions.
In philosophy, you try to create a system where you give answers that cohere with each other.
Okay.
So is it like the cultural version of technology?
It's like discovering stuff.
Not necessarily.
Not necessarily.
It's most about asking questions that every human being asks and trying to give good answers to it.
Because if you give bad answers to it, people die.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Oh, we better get that right then.
Yes.
It is imperative that we get it right.
Oh, OK.
And it's also imperative, for those of you who are joining us on YouTube, that rather than staying on that cultural barren wasteland, you know, with the bright red banner and the censorship, that you come and join us on the website.
And to make that nice and easy for you, we've put a code up.
There we go.
This is Sargon, because he's gone on holiday.
So you now get a 50% discount for the next three months when you sign up to any tier.
So come and join us off the YouTube.
Right, so, philosophy then.
Take us through that.
How are we supposed to think about it, and what's a key question we could be asking ourselves at this juncture?
Well, how to structure society.
This is a philosophical question.
Yes, but this is why we need good answers.
If we have bad answers, we have really bad outcomes.
That's one question we should be asking.
Also, another question we should be asking is, why the hell can't we basically Stop thinking of ourselves in mechanistic terms, because in contemporary society I think this is the main problem, that in the philosophy of the last four centuries... What does that mean, if you think of yourself in mechanistic terms?
Well, in every age there's a myth.
The myth is not necessarily a lie, but it is a back...
backdrop of assumptions that affect most people's thinking.
And frequently technology has to do with it.
And in the 17th century, there was a shift from the medieval way that people view things as the world as being, let's say, a waiting place for the second coming.
And all the whole world had a purpose and people had to be Members of particular society that try to uphold particular moral code until the second coming.
After that, we lost completely this notion of the world as having a purpose, and the whole idea is the machine.
So we tend to view things in completely mechanistic terms, and this affects also how we view people.
And also, people dislike this way of viewing things, but because the language is so much contaminated with Mechanistic references, we cannot even formulate problems correctly, or we cannot even formulate problems in ways that make us stop thinking in mechanistic terms.
Everything has become a machine.
Human beings have no free will.
Including the people themselves.
Exactly.
In the people, in the mind of most people, human beings have no free will.
Everything is mechanistic.
To understand how to structure societies, to understand how to structure the mechanism.
To be fair, I think a lot of people don't have free will.
They just watch TV and are programmed.
Well, that's a very big discussion.
I don't think that we have enough time to have it now, but I think that we do, to a very large extent.
I think we do.
Yeah.
Well, I think that's more of autonomy, but let us keep that discussion for another time.
All right, okay.
You take us through it then.
Yeah, so basically my series here is The Symposium.
If you can have a look here, we have several philosophical discussions.
So basically, we have close to 36 episodes.
We have recorded the 37th one, and we have several others on the pipeline.
He was on my university course, I like him.
Yes, Matt Machiavelli.
It sounds like you had a better degree and a better education than most people do nowadays.
Was it good?
It was alright.
It was alright.
Maybe in economics you had some grievances?
Mainly, university was just something I did while I was sobering up.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now let us say one thing.
So I think basically, if there's a purpose in the symposium, it's not just, you know, videos here or there.
Maybe the series in which the symposium videos are done are completely chaotic, but there is an underlying order.
It's like the A-team.
There's always a plan.
Remember this?
I remember the A-team, yes.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's always a plan.
And the plan is to have a very sober diagnosis of what the hell is going wrong and to propose realistic solutions.
Now, it's purposefully anti-sensationalist.
I don't try to appeal to emotion because there's too much, you know, too much of that already.
Emotion?
Yes.
Yes.
I think we should think rationally.
Yes.
I don't know if that sounds controversial.
Is that different from women or is it?
Well, I mean, you could say that most people frequently think emotionally.
Yes.
Let me phrase it in this way.
Okay.
Okay.
Yes.
Okay, fine.
Okay.
So what we're doing basically is we have two kinds of videos, roughly.
We have more, but there are two main streaks.
One is ancient philosophy, and we are examining, for instance, things like the Epic of Gilgamesh.
We have here this one.
Karl did that one, didn't he?
Karl Bohm and myself.
So we are examining basically one of the oldest epics in the world and we are saying what, for instance, we are explaining the trajectory of Gilgamesh's life and his conquest of wisdom.
Have you read Gilgamesh, Connor?
Because he's like Uber Chad number one.
No, I haven't.
Though I do know when this was being filmed.
I think this was the first symposium you filmed in a new studio.
Yes.
And obviously before, a bit of a behind the scenes for people.
The old studio, there was just a curtain separating the writer's room from the studio.
So anytime someone would have to record something, the lights would have to go off and you'd have to sit in silence like it was an exam hall or something.
And because they're in our two studios, it frees up a lot more time to have for the premium content.
And I remember Bo and Carl walking out midway through Gilgamesh, about two hours in, and we all just looked up and went, oh, did it go all right, did it?
And they were like, nope, still going, just going to get a cup of tea and that.
So three and a half hours.
Yeah.
So you must have had a seriously rigorous discussion.
That's an epic.
Yes.
And it was really good.
I think it's the lengthiest Blow to Cetus video so far.
There are people who have plans of having lengthier discussions.
Let me just say.
Well, that sounds like a challenge now.
Yes.
I'm going to do a deep dive on Peruvian interest rates.
Yes.
Okay.
So we are examining ancient philosophy.
We have other videos as well, like for instance, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Part One.
We have here, yes, we're talking about basically Aristotle's Ethics.
We have also Part Two.
We have here one video called Discovering the Logos, where I did with Bo, it's Symposium No.
10.
It's the Logos in the Presocratics, which I think is the most underappreciated symposium I've done already, because we are trying to understand what is at the basis of Western civilization.
Jordan Peterson constantly talks about the Logos, but he talks about it it more in the context of theology and the Bible and that tradition.
We are trying to go a step back and say what this notion was and what this notion meant in ancient times.
And this is really important because what we nowadays mean by reason is completely different from what the Logos is supposed to mean.
Are we doing it better or are the ancients doing it better?
In this respect, the ancients are doing it better.
Okay.
Yeah, because for instance, when we speak of reason nowadays, we just speak of instrumental reason.
Everything is mechanistic.
You have a purpose.
This purpose is not necessarily judged as moral or immoral by reason, but all reason has to do is to discover the means to achieve that purpose.
In this tradition, the Logos is much more evaluatively rich.
It is supposed to be the noble element of the soul, and it's something that separates us from the rest of the material world, and it contains a drive upwards.
It means that basically the whole Western civilization is based, at least in its birth, on the idea that the material realm does not exhaust the world.
And this is one of the major differences between the ancient worldview, or ancient worldviews, most of them, because there were materialists back then, and how most people view things nowadays.
And let me just say one example, which may be a bit weird.
It's things like, for instance, the Symposium on Love that I did with Connor.
That was one of my favorite videos I've done since I've joined here, genuinely.
It was a really rich discussion.
Because a lot of the time people don't think about the definition, we just see it as a process.
And I think, and this is something that you were talking about earlier, that the mechanistic understanding of how we interact with people is something that has infected Zoomers.
Unbelievably, as to where, and I was talking about this at an event that Karl and I went to last night at Exeter University.
All Zoomers act on the presupposition that all relationships are transactional, and it's always about relative to your self-conception and how much value another person can provide to you.
And at any time that they aren't providing enough value, you can just sever that relationship.
It's never worded in the terms of sentiment and what specific criteria involuntarily conjure up that sentiment out of you.
So we looked at it in the history of philosophy and looking at the definitions of love.
We did Plato, Aristotle, C.S.
Lewis, and we even did a bit of modern conceptions of it, and we came to a really rich and wholesome definition by the end of it.
It was my first one with you, actually.
I'm really glad we had that.
Yes, and also it shows how if we really familiarize ourselves with the language of previous eras, not because they're previous but because they're different, we're better able to understand the differences and commonalities between worldviews.
It's also a means of re-enchantment.
That's the really important thing.
It adds the rich texture to life if you understand this sort of stuff.
It's a very metaphysically rich conception of love in an age when most people view love as something that is basically neurons firing in your brain and creating you this image that you love a person, whereas in fact you have biological pressure that is leading you to be attached to someone.
You know, it's all this idea that we're radically mistaken about how we view ourselves and lives, and we need someone to come and tell us what is actually going on, which is very cynical.
Now, I'm not a very cynical person.
I am one of the office's optimists, and cynicism just doesn't bode well with me.
And I think that some re-enchantment is necessary and also good in some respects.
This is very deep, isn't it?
It was fantastic.
It also came out around Valentine's Day, so it was topically relevant.
Oh, how lovely.
Stelios does plan his content very well, I will say.
We've spoken before about how you're not just planning scattershot pieces of philosophy, you're trying to create a tapestry.
of thought that has a kind of continuity that can help nourish the viewers and build them a new frame of reference to fortify themselves against that instrumentalist, metaphysical, very alienating worldview that we take as like a cultural presupposition.
Exactly, yeah.
And we don't only do ancient stuff, we're trying to examine what goes on right now.
So, right now I think we are in the state of ecophobia.
This is a symposium we did with Carl when we were talking about... Is that oikophobia?
Yeah, I mean, I pronounce it ecophobia, some people pronounce it oikophobia.
You won't get Greeks, modern Greeks at least, to pronounce it this way, but it's... So this is disliking oiks, you know, the people you see...
Well, let me just say what this is for the audience.
So, we are discussing with Carl Roger Scruden's idea of ecophobia and also a very excellent book by Benedict Beckholt called Western Self-Contempt.
We're discussing it here.
So, ecophobia is the idea where people have a bias against their own countries.
Oh, an outgroup preference.
Yes.
Right.
Yes.
Yeah.
I've traveled around the world and I've only ever seen that in the West.
I just don't see it anywhere else.
That is why we're talking about anti-Westernism.
And we see this trend to worrying.
It is a worryingly large trend.
There are many, many, many people in Western societies who think that the only way to stand out is to just constantly blame their countries.
This is the instinct of the decolonization movement, which is retroactively applied to countries that themselves were not colonized, but are accused of being colonial, even though they upgraded the infrastructure and the morality of various countries that they occupied.
And this is something I chatted to Doug Stokes about in a recent book club on the website.
And the reason, and you keep talking about having not just the importance of asserting objective truths and Building a heuristic for what is truth, but because it has adverse outcomes if you don't follow those.
His point in his book against decolonization was, it's all well and good for us to be squabbling at home and arguing with the critical race theorists and spending time refuting them, but it's a giant distraction when we've got rising powers like the Chinese that are very happy that we're committing cultural suicide because it stops us from being prosperous, and even though they're committing demographic suicide at the same time, if we kill ourselves faster by not having enough conviction to defend our own nation, they win by default.
And so stuff like this is really important to reconstitute the reason of why we should unapologetically defend our civilization.
We're kind of doing the opposite, aren't we?
We're on a mission to destroy it as fast as possible.
Yeah, we're being gaslit into thinking that it's not worth keeping as we're losing it.
Yes, not worth maintaining.
Now, in order to understand how to give realistic solutions, as opposed to have the, let's say, illusion of giving solutions, just in order to say something that will create lots of impressions on On Twitter, we are appealing to some really basic core stuff in the history of Western political thought, like Politics of Aristotle Part 1, Part 2, that we did with Harry.
Also, this is a massively underappreciated symposium.
We're discussing about the main constitutions.
The main unmixed constitutions and what Aristotle says is the pros and cons of each.
Is Aristotle the one who didn't write anything down?
No, that's Socrates.
Oh, that was Socrates.
Okay.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are the basic trinity of ancient Greek philosophy of the classical world.
And we also have discourses on Levi.
Here we have the essential Machiavelli.
I like this one.
We are talking about his greatest hits.
He's a very practical man.
Yeah, like we do need another hero.
What's justice got to do with it?
What's justice but a secondhand virtue?
And also simply the best written about the Roman Republic.
So just watch this and next week we're going to have round two.
Part two is completely different.
It's not very philosophical.
We're talking about war.
Imagine you have Karl and Bo, they're talking about war.
And this is a short one.
This is only, you know, two hours and 48 minutes long.
No, this is, I think, one of the longest ones.
Yeah, so basically, this is a really, really, really interesting one.
By all means, check it out.
Now, this is, I think, one of the most important symposium videos, because it has to do with language and linguistic and conceptual subversion.
I think basically that this is one of the most, let's say, Important videos to watch if you want to enter into the symposium series it is a bit slow.
But it is deliberately slow because we're talking about complex ideas and this is about how languages being corrupted and.
This is precisely what I mean when I was talking about it being anti-sensationalist.
We're explaining how words function and how language functions, especially in the public sphere, and how the meanings of concepts change.
And I'm talking there about a kind of woke trap.
That is being set for people to fall into.
And this can be explained in a nutshell in the following way.
So speech does not occur in a vacuum.
Speech is always speech between people with a particular language that has evolved as a living organism.
In a particular society.
And in that society, there are, let's say, terms that have symbolic power.
Because most people attach a very positive or very negative meaning with respect to them.
We have, let's say, thin concepts like good and evil, right or wrong.
If you say someone is evil, that has some force.
That if you say that they wear a particular kind of dress, doesn't have.
But there are also other terms like, you know, fascism, liberty, community, all these terms.
So what I'm saying is that basically, post-Cold War, we have, by the way, I did this with Bo and Josh, What we're saying is that after the Cold War ended, the terms liberty and democracy have assumed a symbolic status.
So what we have is a really militant and conceptually aggressive woke left that is trying to get its political opponents to identify as illiberal and anti-democratic.
So, if they do this, some people will do that on principle, and they will identify themselves as such.
That doesn't mean that they're falling into the trap.
But other people fall into that trap mindlessly.
Why?
Because they don't examine the way that meanings...
Change.
So, for instance, they don't understand what the concept of liberty means and what lots of traditions of conceptualizing liberty are.
They don't understand it and they mindlessly or they rush to accept the way that their opponent is setting the terms of the debate.
Yes.
And that's a bit... Yes.
Why is this?
I've caught up at last.
Yes.
Yeah.
And why that is an issue?
Because, let's say, you lose if you start identifying in ways that the majority of the population thinks they are, let's say... You're fighting on their conceptual battleground, not yours.
Yes.
You have one side, like the woke side, that is completely... that they don't give You know, what they don't give.
A donkey's whatever.
About democracy or liberty.
No, no, no.
Try to portray themselves as being the defenders of them.
Why?
Because they have the other side identifying themselves in such ways.
So they constantly, we constantly see this tendency of people who say, no, we need to fight X, Y, and Z. So, I mean, presumably this is exactly what's happening right now with this whole Russell Brand thing, where one side is trying to portray themselves as the protector of women and virtue and all that kind of stuff.
It's just a power play.
Despite already having permitted the exact kind of sexually liberative philandering that made Russell Brand's career before this.
Yes.
And based on the consent framework, they didn't have any kind of moral cudgel to say, "Actually, maybe you shouldn't be sleeping with hundreds of women and therefore risking the idea that you're going to spurn some of them and that they may be weaponized either as an accurate or a force accusation later down the line." They didn't care about those moral prohibitions until it became politically expedient, and then they could position themselves on the side of... We were actually always defending the sacredness of women.
Well, I don't know exactly about this specific case.
I don't know about the specifics of this case.
But what I think is really interesting is that people who made accusations about him, they said that right now, Russell Brand is associated with particular views because they want to smear these views.
But no one seems to be talking about...
The fact that it seems that when he allegedly, allegedly did what he was accused of doing, he seemed to have been a leftist back then.
Yes.
No one talks about this.
Now let's talk about... I mean, just a quick point here.
It's because I used to think that I could think, but actually listening to you, I'm starting to realize that there's actually this whole deep chasm of thinking and I probably need to do, I need to do some philosophizing, I think, and some, some, some watching of this.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of thinking going on here and I'm trying to keep up as best I can.
So I get excited when I get a little bit that I can.
Yes.
I'm, I'm, I'm very flattered to hear this.
Good.
Okay.
Now one thing, uh, patriotism, one thing, uh, people who think that patriotism is a bad word have no business running any nation and any country.
So they could go do something with themselves.
We don't have anyone in charge who thinks that patriotism is a good thing.
Yes, but okay.
So they should go and do something with themselves.
Yeah.
Next one, surviving disagreement is a really interesting discussion I had with Josh.
We're saying basically that disagreement is something that most people did, most respectful and civilized people did courteously.
So you, for instance, you can definitely have people in the Rothbardian in Rothbard who are debating, you know, Murray Rothbard.
Yes.
Yes.
With, you know, classical liberals and stuff or classical liberals and conservatives.
You can have really lovely disagreements.
It doesn't mean that we're going to kill each other.
It is some other, interestingly, it's some other people who portray any kind of disagreement as a destruction of their delicate sentimentality who are actually against dialogue and against disagreement.
So I don't think we should fall into the trap of thinking that just occasionally... But that's like the entire power structure on the left at the moment is in that.
Yes.
And we should expose it and talk to people.
And this is what is absolutely great about the Lotus Eaters, that we are addressing people who don't get this message from the legacy media.
Well not just that, it's that, and I really enjoyed this one, not because necessarily it brought a load of new knowledge outside of my framework, because obviously I understand quite a lot of what you just said there, but it's because it had the tone and tenor of the kind of conversations we have off air as friends.
And it had the relaxed atmosphere of, of almost like a Tolkien and Lewis sitting in a pub in Oxford, just waxing philosophical over a drink and a pipe.
Yourself and Josh had a really rich and interesting discussion.
It had a really nice pace.
And we have those exact kinds of discussions off air, which is why you were so capable to like bring the best out of all of us in your series.
So thank you very much.
That's right, mate.
And let's talk about debates.
We are having, for instance, also debates on the show.
Here I'm debating with Thomas about modernity.
Well, my position is that when your hand is in pain, you don't chop your hand.
You try to extract the growth that pains you.
Now, saying that you should chop the hand is a bit... I think it goes too far.
Let me say it goes too far.
Another debate I had with Carl is debating classical liberalism.
This is very good.
Yes, when this is one of the good ones.
And I really liked it.
And to be fair, this is what is a bit deceptive about it.
Towards the end, there is surprisingly more disagreement than the title suggests.
And the reason why we do this is because basically what happened is that I think that both Carla and myself, we deeply care about liberty and community.
And there is an issue with value monism.
There is an issue with the idea that there is one and only one fundamental value deep down, and everything has to boil down to it.
And this is particularly problematic when you try to think of how to, let's say, safeguard your values, because we, unfortunately, as human beings, Let's say we have the tendency to think that there is one and only one value, the one that is currently under threat.
So when, for instance, right now in the West, we have communities that are under threat, there is a tendency to think that only community is the one and only value, which leads us to forget the values of liberty and the values of, let's say, within some limits, individualism.
On the other hand, there were some other errors when we were thinking of, for instance, no, liberty is under threat.
The only way to safeguard this is by, let's say, having a society that is focusing on freedom as opposed to community.
And this is what leads society to disintegration, because you need a kind of... Extreme liberalism.
Yes.
Yes, extreme individuality.
Okay.
And this is why I have these conceptions of political freedom here, because liberalism is an umbrella term.
Like many other notions, it's an umbrella term.
If we mean by liberalism the promotion and safeguard of liberty, then the question is, what do we mean by liberty?
There are many, many, many answers.
Here, for instance, we have Symposium Two, and I purposefully started with this.
It's the first political symposium we did.
We're talking about the negative, the positive, and the Republican tradition.
There are many more, but I'm just introducing some complexity into it, because when people say that I am for liberty, it's not by any means transparent what they're saying.
And let me just finish with these two links.
We have this on value pluralism.
This is Symposium No.
35, where Carla and myself are talking about this.
We're trying to somehow argue for a position like, you could say, conservative liberalism, at least I do, where you try to say that you have fundamentally incommensurable values, values that deep down may be incompatible.
Community and liberties, they're deep down incompatible.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't try and find ways of accommodating both in your moral compass.
Yes.
I mean, there could be a settlement that works for both.
Yeah.
And final one, let me just say, because I like being optimistic and Bo and myself did some Anglo-Saxon work here.
And what I mean by that is that you could say that the Anglo-Saxon temperament in philosophy is very much skeptical of generalizations because it is very much focused on empirical fact.
It is completely foreign to the spirit according to which if facts contradict the theory, so worse for the facts.
So what we're doing here is we are dispelling both the narrative of infinite progress and the narrative on infinite decline.
And we're saying that, well, we can find tendencies that confirm both, but they are a bit low resolution and the history is much more contingent than that.
And ultimately, I think that it's on our hands to improve the future.
I don't think that there's a lot of thinking going on.
It's all very clever, isn't it?
I would like to think so myself.
Yeah.
Marvelous stuff.
Marvelous.
Thank you very much, Stelios.
That was absolutely brilliant.
Shall we also talk about economics?
Yep.
Something fun.
Yes.
Shall I give a quick overview?
Dan, why can't I have a house?
Cheers before.
Well, yes.
Before you.
Oh, yes.
Okay.
Cheers.
Bosses away so we can have beers.
And also we can have this promo which is Sargon.
Sargon has gone on holiday.
And so we are offering 50% off every tier that you sign up for for the next three months.
So come and join us before the boss comes back and realises what we've done.
But you know, you'll be in by then so it'll be fine.
Right, yes, so economics.
Well, I've got a series here.
It's called Broconomics, where we sort of talk about economic stuff.
I thought that it might be good to give a very quick summary of everything that's gone wrong.
We'll be here all week.
Well, no, I'll try and keep it quick.
The first thing, because sometimes I started off with the boomers are to blame, but the boomers get upset when I say that.
So, the people are to blame are the greatest generation, the people who won the war, right?
You see, because what happened is because they went off unwonderable.
And when you have a bit of a fight, what you want to do, it kind of gets the ardour up, doesn't it?
It gets you a bit frisky.
And obviously, all the greatest generation ladies, they were saying like "Soldier Boy" coming back.
So anyway, they had lots and lots of babies.
That's the central problem.
They had the boomers, and then there was lots and lots of boomers.
There was something else that happened after the war as well, which has got to do with gold.
I'll come back to that.
But anyway, you get this massive generation spike.
Now, you might think, okay, that being a member of a small generation is better than being part of a large generation.
Less competition for jobs, all that kind of stuff.
Funnily enough, it doesn't actually work that way.
If you're part of a large generation, you kind of mould the society to you a bit like a snake-eating gazelle or something as you pass through the machine.
So that started to happen.
Now, the other thing that I wanted to mention about the gold, sorry, about the war, is that during the war, everybody sent their gold to America for safekeeping.
And also because they were the only productive economy left and they were making stuff, so they were getting lots and lots of gold.
And we also owe them loads and loads of money.
Well, yes.
Yes, there is that as well.
So basically, the Americans had all of the gold at the end of the war, and they had to think about it and decided that they wanted to keep it.
They thought it'd be better for everybody concerned if they hung on to the gold.
So they came up with a clever idea, which was they were going to have a new system where the dollar is basically the same thing as gold, so you can just use the dollar, which is fine, and then we keep the gold and everybody's happy.
Seems reasonable, right?
The only slight problem with that is that the Americans, and in fact everybody, they then started spending a lot because they figured out that the way to win an election in a democracy is basically just promise people loads of stuff and then worry about how you're going to pay for it.
In exchange for votes.
Yes.
Yeah, so we've got these two big set-up problems.
One, Western countries are now spending too much, and we've got all these baby boomers.
I mean, they're still just kids at this point.
Actually, the bit where it gets exciting is the 70s.
The 70s is where this really all kicks off, because you had the 50s and 60s, which was like a sort of Western Golden Age.
We'd won a war, we've got a new system in place, everybody's happy, we're all on board with the new mission, the American dream is born.
The UK was in a bit of a decline, but the West as a whole, under American stewardship, that was all going well.
Right, 70s arrive, all starts to go wrong here.
So first thing is, the government had basically spent all of their money, And they started to realise that this system where the Americans get to keep all the gold, that's not going to work anymore because the Americans are spending it all.
So the French, the French said, right, we want our gold back.
And the Americans were like, yeah, I don't think that's a good idea.
So what they said is, OK, what we're going to do is we're going to break the link between the dollar and gold.
And the dollar is now and this is this is the slightly ridiculous bit, but I do cover it in some detail.
The dollar is now backed by debt.
It literally became a debt based currency where they sort of.
The more debt you create, the more money you create and therefore it creates this incentive to always create more debt because you can't pay off the amount of debt that you've got with the current amount of resources so you need to constantly expand and you've got this constantly creating money flow.
Now, why did we get away with that for so many decades?
Well, the answer is because the boomers.
So we've got lots of new people.
So this massive spike of people that were created after the war, the baby boomers, they start arriving into the workforce in the 70s.
So they start going out and they start buying, you know, a new suit and a new house and a new car, getting their first job, going out buying furniture.
I mean, chip in with questions whenever you like, guys.
I'll just muddle along through this.
But, you know, they start expanding this economy and then taking on debt.
But, you know that thing I mentioned earlier about how we've disconnected money from currency, so the dollar from gold?
What happened in that 1970s point is, previous to that, people are becoming more productive, so the economy increased, and you basically had a straight-line connection between productivity increases And, um, uh, wages.
I mean, the two things were connected, because as productivity increased, wages decreased.
Now what happened in 1971 is those two lines broke apart.
So you now had, um, productivity continuing to rise at the same rate that it always had, but wages basically flatlined.
So you've got this big population, they're creating lots of debt through the virtue of going off and buying things and contributing to the economy in all of this way, but their wages in real terms were actually going flat this whole entire time.
But we were now in an expansionary economy.
So what are you going to do about it?
Well, what you do is you basically just borrow the difference.
So what you then started to have is a whole culture of people who, because their wages were flatlining, decided that they were just going to start borrowing in order to make up the difference, in order to get that sort of growth.
It worked because assets sort of increased by an outsized amount of return compared to this debt they were taking on.
So basically, if you were a boomer and you bought a house, you're fine.
You're even better if you're a boomer and you bought a house and borrowed money and put it in the stock market.
That definitely, definitely worked.
But at least if you bought a house, it worked because your house price was increased and therefore the value of your assets would increase as well.
Right.
And also, even if you made relatively poor choices years ago when they've created the social safety net, Oh, yes.
systems of socialised healthcare and the pension system, then the boomer mindset is, well, I've paid into this all my life, therefore I can take out exactly as much as I want, as I'm entitled to when I get to the ripe old age of my mid-60s.
Unfortunately, obviously, with the dislocation of the money supply with anything of actual worth, what ends up happening is they just keep printing money to buy up more of that debt and expanding the economy.
And then what ends up happening is inflation, because the pensions in this country particularly are tied to the rate of inflation, it actually gets outpaced of how much it's worth.
So you never, if you're a boomer, you never actually paid enough into the system to extract the same amount you would get outwards.
So it's just the current people's taxes are paying for the entitlements you've got.
So you're just robbing from the current generation.
Yes, so that was, So we're out of the 70s now, we're now in the 80s and exactly that dynamic is happening.
So what was happening in the 80s is basically the boomers started to run everything because they're a big generation and so their people go in and they start doing stuff.
And they basically decide every election from that point on.
Now, it started off as being a generous thing, because they're looking at their parents' generation, the guys who fought in the war, a bunch of heroes, all of them, bless them.
And back then, basically, the poor people were synonymous with old people.
It's basically the same thing.
There were rich old people, but there weren't many.
It's basically old people are poor people.
So the boomers, they said, well, OK, well, let's be nice and start putting these social insurance programs in place.
So it was more generous pensions, it was more expansive NHS, it was welfare systems, all of this kind of stuff.
And all of it was eminently affordable because you had this massive working age population, the boomers.
Uh, literally a boom in the population, supporting a relatively small number of old people, all of whom were poor, and they'd fought in the war, so they bloody deserved it, so they're getting something.
They were supporting a relatively small number of people who couldn't be bothered to work, or whatever else it was, or disabled, or all of those things, because the culture was different back then, and there wasn't just a huge number of those people.
And the NHS, of course, again, not really an issue because there's such a large amount of people in the productive sphere that the small number of people who are falling apart and need lots of NHS and all the rest of it and have nasty accidents, you know, will also number.
You had lower immigration, so there were fewer people that were never paying into the system using the system.
And generally speaking, you didn't have so much abundance and so many things like microplastics and genetically modified food and like.
So people weren't getting sick as much.
They weren't as fat.
They weren't having as many adverse lifestyle choices that would mean extra costs for the people that were healthy and were productive and paying into the system.
Yes.
So, 80s and 90s, another really good time.
Lots of expansion, lots of boom.
This whole kind of thing works.
And during the reigns of the 80s, you know, with Thatcher and Reagan, the working age population was increasing from the native stock by about 2% a year.
And if you think of an economy basically just being, well the economy is obviously GDP per capita times capital.
So the capital is increasing.
You get that 2% growth throughout the 80s.
So you're getting that lovely expansion all of the time.
So this money system we talked about before that requires that permanent growth.
But it works, because even though the money supply is expanding, the underlying resources are already expanding along with it, and the population's growing.
So that gets us through the 80s, that large working-age population expansion.
Right, then comes the 90s and the early 2000s.
And what happens then?
Oh, actually, I should also mention the women, because they started to join the workforce more, so that expanded.
It was previously hadn't been doing that.
Right, 90s and 2000s, then you get these sort of world trade deals.
The time of globalism.
And we now started getting the Chinese and the Indians and all those sort of people coming into the workforce.
So again, the underlying productive capacity of the economy is expanding all of the time because we've got this expanding money system, so it looks like it's working on a superficial basis.
Real wages aren't going up, but if you own a house, and everybody does at this point, that ticks up every year and so you feel rich of any way and then you can borrow against it and everything works.
Then you get to the 2010s and all hell starts to break loose.
Because now, 2008 basically, it all started to break because you haven't got this expansion anymore.
Because the working age population is not growing because the boomers are now leaving the workforce.
They're no longer joining it.
They had a reasonably large generation behind them, which is the millennials, but nowhere near as large in relative terms as they were.
There's no more China to add.
There's no more India to add.
I mean, I suppose you could add Africa, but that didn't work.
Well, they haven't reached the development level required yet.
And then the Chinese are spending all the money on that.
ring fencing them away from the Chinese are doing the economy yeah well yeah but also if the Chinese are capturing resources in Africa and also strip mining it and putting their people in place rather than the Africans building up that means the Chinese have monopoly on that section of the market and they actually hate us so that's not wise to do either so you've now got a situation we've got this very large population which is trying to draw on this stock of benefits that was actually designed for a large generation supporting a small generation and this is why the wheels are
And when you look at it in this sense, you can start to understand what's really happening in the world today.
So, for example, take Georgia Maloney, for example.
I wanted to ask you about Italy.
This is a classic example.
So she wins power by saying, oh, we're going to stop the immigration.
Um, you know, we're going to make Italy for the Italians, but I think almost certainly what happened is she got into office and then the accountants came over and they showed her the numbers and they said, well, look, um, you've got a lot of old, a lot of old Italians, you've got a lot of debt.
And if you want any possibility of the old Italians getting their pension, then you need to increase the economy.
And what we talked about before the economy is GDP per capita times capita.
So look, this is the capital, uh, GDP per capita that we're getting from the Italians.
It's this number.
Why don't we just go and get a whole bunch of Africans?
And this is the modern theory, which is all capital equals.
So we just go off and we get a whole bunch of Africans, we bring them in, and that will increase the capital times the GDP per capita, and the economy is bigger, now you can pay your pensions.
Well, the important thing that means that politicians are persuaded by this is just looking at the raw birth metrics.
And of course, This is a symbiotic thing because these are driven down by adverse economic conditions.
I've spoken to Stephen Shore about this and he said ever since 1973 where the oil shock hit and Italy experienced a hell of a lot of economic downturn, their birth rate has been collapsing at such a precipitous rate that they're one of the lowest in the world now and they're sitting at about one.
And bear in mind for people that don't realize demographic replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman.
So they are facing total collapse.
And so they're thinking, why don't we just battery farm a bunch of Eritreans and then line go up?
Yeah, and of course it won't work because if you are raised in a Western economy, your ability to add to that economy is significantly higher than somebody who arrived on a boat five minutes ago and doesn't know anything about the culture and whatever else characteristics they might have to their contribution or lack of.
This is a sort of faulty liberal universalist presupposition that all people are fundamentally equal despite birth station and culture and the like.
And running an economy on that presumption, we're seeing the decline right now.
Yeah, but genuinely, the country's economists, well, there are different kinds of economists.
There are economists like me who don't get jobs working for government, and then there are economists who do get jobs working for government, and they work on that set of presuppositions.
I wanted to ask you about that, in specific.
Yeah, because I remember from my days back when I was studying economics.
So, one question.
Does Italy have a massive debt?
Oh yeah, loads.
And it's not the only country.
Now, I remember in the university we were told that you never repay your debt.
You're just paying the dose every now and then.
Yeah, when you get to 50 it will be written off anyway and it just suddenly disappears into the ether, not like a taxpayer has been guaranteeing.
Exactly, and this doesn't cause only an economic problem to a country.
It also poses a political problem because at some point if you are basically creating an unsustainable system, At some point, it's going to hit the fan, and then you are not going to control... So let's address that point, because that's the thing that those type of economists, the mainstream people, and the journalists, they always come back and say, oh, don't worry, it doesn't work like a household.
You just increase the debt forever.
Now, in answer to your earlier question, does Italy have a lot of debt?
Italy's debt-to-GDP ratio is 170%, which is proper bad.
I mean, in the UK and US, it's 100% debt-to-GDP.
Now, let's draw this level.
Yeah.
Well, basically, after 70% you're screwed.
I explained why in our economics.
But let's just go with the UK-US example of why 100% of debt-to-GDP matters to the point you raised, okay?
Because if they're the same size, it makes the maths really simple.
Which one is growing more?
So is your economy growing more?
Is the debt growing more?
Well, we know how much the debt is growing because it's the coupon on the debt.
So it's basically the interest rate.
So the interest rate at the moment, what are you up to right now?
4-5%?
Something like that.
Is the economy growing at 4-5%?
No, not even close.
It's growing at 1 point something.
In fact, the growth is getting strangled because the taxes to service the debt and the government spending are now strangling the productive output of the economy.
So of course the growth is going to go down, and of course we're going to have a productivity crisis, and of course that can't grow.
And the rate we're paying on our debt, Okay, let me do a slightly more complicated thought on this now, okay?
So, the rate that we're paying on the debt is a function of when we lent the money out.
So, we're lending out tranches of bonds all the time.
Now, a lot of it was issued when that debt was at a really low level, so the base rate of almost zero.
So, the rate that we're paying on that government debt for the UK and the US is Close to zero or one percent or something like that.
What's happening is every year that we are now on these higher interest rates, they are having to generate more debt to replace the old debt and is swapping out zero percent rates for five percent rates.
And what does that do to our national finances when you've got debt at this sort of level?
Basically, it's going to increasingly squeeze out everything.
So I'll throw in a practical point here.
I think almost certainly that what they're going to have to do is they're going to have to find an excuse to dramatically lower those interest rates very soon so they can roll over all of the government debt at a rate that they can actually afford because it's either that or say, OK, well, we're just shutting down Medicare, Medicaid, the NHS.
Military, welfare payment, a whole bunch of those stuff would have to go.
I think the US are now paying something like a trillion, well they're on track to pay a trillion a year just in interest costs.
And they only collect something like 4.6 trillion.
So to your point about when you're told, and everybody is told, everybody's told this in the media, that don't worry about the debt because you never pay it off.
Well yeah, but you have to service the debt.
And when both the economy and the debt is at 100%, all of your GDP growth is being consumed by the debt payments.
Because GDP growth, what is it?
It's basically, it's population growth like we talked about.
It's the productivity increase, which as we talked about is being completely strangled out.
and it's debt growth as well.
And they're trying to jerry-rig that by taking a fourth factor, which is immigration, to sub out that first one, which is the population growth.
So they're desperately trying to say, okay, well, we know we're not getting any productivity growth because we're taxing the shit out of everybody, so of course they're not going to have any productivity and growth.
In fact, growth hasn't grown since around the 1990s as well.
This was something that an economist over at The Telegraph observed when he was looking at the birth rates versus immigration argument.
And he was making the case that, okay, even if you've been importing all these people since 1997 when something happened, the people are not nearly as productive as the native population because they don't benefit from the same education system and the value system.
So by substituting them out, yeah, you might be able to count GDP because you're spending more money and government spending is factored into GDP and more people exchanging more money in more hands equals more line.
But that doesn't mean that the rate of change is as it would be were the native population having babies just because they're not as productive.
And I mean, the rate of change of technology is continuing to go up at a fairly consistent rate, so the technology is improved.
But then you've got another issue there, which is all of this technology requires capital funding in order to get up to scale on anything, in order to create, you know, the next big software thing that can move the boxes and so on.
And the capital costs are basically low in the US because they're the fountain of this, of effectively creating the money supply which every other system runs off.
So we kind of screwed on a whole number of ways.
This debt is really getting ahead of us.
And actually, I'm going to do a bit of a crossover now with Bo's series, because I did one on the tulip bubble with Bo, but we also covered things like the South Sea bubble and that kind of stuff.
And basically what happens throughout history is this situation that I'm talking about now, it's happened a whole bunch of different times, a whole bunch of different times, where basically the government gets far too far ahead of itself, gets far too much in debt.
And basically the same solution plays out every single time, which is the government finds a way of shifting it onto the people and then wiping it out.
Because they don't want to take the knock.
And that's almost certainly what's going to happen again now.
And I think what is probably going to happen is that we're probably going to go into something called financial repression, where we say, OK, everybody who's got a pension or something else that the government can get its claws into, we're going to say, OK, you're going to have to own this safe government debt.
Because, you know, we don't want you taking risks on crypto or shares or tech or whatever it is.
So we're going to make you buy safe government bonds.
And once they've shoved enough of it out, then you can restructure, you can wipe it out.
And the interesting thing is, OK, how are they going to restructure it?
Are they just going to do it honestly and say, you know, all these bonds that we put out, we're only paying 50 pence on the pound for everything that we put out?
Or are they just going to keep inflating the money supply?
Yeah, question here, because it has to do with how the concepts, the meaning of concepts change.
Now, I think that the notion of inflation is a notion that has changed its conventional meaning.
Yes, very much so.
And you're talking about it quite a lot.
In fact, your second, Broeconomics, is about inflation.
Yes.
It's called Inflation, The Greatest Lie.
What is the significance of this?
Well, if you've got a dictionary, and this is an interesting challenge for anybody at home, if you've got a dictionary at home which is written in probably the 80s, but it started to change in the 90s, and you look up the word inflation, What you'll see is it will say an increase in the money supply, because that's actually what it is.
It's the total amount of money increasing.
Whereas if you look in a dictionary that was written from sort of, you know, late 90s onwards, it says inflation is the price of goods going up.
No, that's a symptom of inflation actually, which is increasing the money supply.
So that's what you got into at the moment.
So every time the government's run out of money, they do the massive refinancing.
They do the quantitative easing, which we had back in 2008, where they created a whole bunch more money.
That increased inflation.
We then had that again in 2020.
A whole bunch of more money was created.
And then following from that, 18 months later, there was a whole bunch of inflation.
And now they're trying to gaslit us to say, and the Bank of England is doing this, is saying, you know, don't you dare ask for pay increases because that will cause inflation.
No, the money you created is the inflation.
They're just trying, what they're actually trying to do is to devalue the denominator.
So devalue the debt while making you accept lower wages.
So that the whole capital structure can be preserved and you get poorer.
It's basically trying to make workers be the bag carriers.
If I could have a half hour conversation with everybody in the country, there would be a revolution.
There would be heads on spikes and all this kind of stuff.
But because it's a bit convoluted.
Basically, they kind of get away with it.
It's just theft at a huge scale.
You said before that as an economist you would get a job in the government.
Yes.
Because I suspect that you are more of an Austrian economist.
Yes, so there's various different types.
It's more free market friendly, isn't it?
The main ones are the Austrians who basically tend to look at these problems and conclude that the government needs to get smaller and we need money that you can't debase.
So proper money like gold or potentially even Bitcoin in the future.
And do they also make controversial statements like you shouldn't consume more than you produce?
Yeah, well, we turn it the other way around.
We say that, because the Keynesians, the guys on the other side, they're always worrying about the demand problem.
Is there enough demand for the goods and all that kind of stuff?
Whereas we turn it around the other way and say demand is basically infinite.
I mean, if I could have mansions and yachts, I would have it.
What I have is a supply problem, which is being able to produce enough value in order to create the, yeah, Is it also demand of jobs, i.e.
labour shortages?
Well, no, it's productivity.
If everybody was churning out a massive amount of productive output all the time, then we would have that surplus that then allow us to redistribute it and spend it on leisure goods or whatever else we wanted to spend it on.
The reason I'm asking is because I think that in, let's say, in the Austrian school, there is the idea that if something doesn't work, stop doing it.
Whereas in the English school, if something goes wrong, just double down on it and keep doing it again.
And the reason I mentioned labor shortages and the emphasis on demand is to link it with a demographic problem you said before.
Especially when you mentioned, David Lee, that, for instance, people told to Maloney that, you know, you want all these positions to be covered.
Yes.
And God forbid, if some of these positions that maybe some of them are not even required.
They go and... Yeah, I did a Brokeronomics yesterday.
That's why I mentioned the... Yeah, I did a Brokeronomics yesterday, which will be coming out in a week or two on house prices.
I've got a couple of housing developers in here, and we talked about why house prices cost as much as they do.
And it's kind of ridiculous, because you would think that the house building process involves buying a bit of land, building a house on it, sticking a markup on it, and off you go.
Bob's your uncle.
It's not that at all.
The amount of consultants... There have to be middlemen in.
That's the issue.
Create a middleman.
But there are hundreds of middlemen in this process, hundreds of consultants and people who tick boxes and do that kind of thing.
Seriously, whenever they want to build houses, they need a team of consultants to sit on the site overnight for a week with a pair of binoculars counting the bats that fly overhead.
And that's just one team of consultants that go into the process of building houses.
And this is Brownfield sites as well as Greenfield.
So it's just Our economy has become so... and what that is, is it's basically stealth taxation through different means, I mean, building it on into the supply chain.
So we looked at, you know, communist China and say, okay, well, they're communist because the Chinese, you know, own 26% of the economy.
Well, in this country, it's like 52% once you add on all of the ways that the government controls.
And then, bear in mind, if everything else, because they're controlling the money rate, that's effectively communism at the money tier.
Quick question.
What do you think of the statement that inflation, in the standard sense, is an indirect tax?
Oh yeah, definitely.
Yeah, definitely, because your purchasing power is being diluted and the value of that is transferred to, effectively, the debt holders, which is largely the government, which is, like I say, the debt's the same size as the economy.
So yeah, and absolutely.
So if you've got, as we've had for the last couple of years, you've had debt of at least 10%, you've had a 10% pay cut before you've done anything else, which is effectively taxation.
So I'll cap this off.
So Broconomics, check that out.
Use the code SARGON to get a discount on signing up.
Where I cover lots of things.
I'll whiz through this as fast as I can.
So we cover all the basics like inflation, interest rates, debt, deficit, gold, bitcoin, CBDC, universal basic incomes.
I do like to do a bit of stuff on the pandemic because it really annoyed me.
So now I've got a platform.
I do things on face masks and digital IDs and the economics of lockdown.
Oh, and the Canadian trucker protest.
That'll be coming out soon as well.
And I do topics like Black Rock, Thomas Sowell, we did that one, that was a good one.
Actually, one of the most popular ones was, I analysed the film Margin Call, which was a bit random, but people loved that one.
Debt ceilings, what happened in 1971, fourth turning, the economics of the USSR, I mean a whole bunch of different stuff.
We're going to have a very fun one.
Oh yes, we're going to do Hoflation, aren't we?
Yeah, we are, yeah.
You've decided to make me your guinea pig, which has been horrendous.
Because everyone, all the Zoomers in the comments were going, well, Dan, AA and Karl don't understand dating as a young man.
So we sent him out.
Yeah.
It's been a disaster.
And we're both reading up on the economics of... How the actual mechanics of apps and swipe culture and that contain perverse incentives that never actually get you a girlfriend.
So that'll be fun one.
Yes, we're diving into that.
So we're tackling all the important issues.
So yes, if you like the sound of that, I'd do a bit more structured on the actual pro economics.
But that was off the top of the head, what I'm talking about.
So check that out.
A masterful riff.
Yes, thank you.
Right.
Okay, you're turning to me.
Yes, we're turning to you, Conor.
Have I got a thing?
Alright, um, full disclosure, I've not prepared at all for this, because I just got back off the train about half an hour ago.
Oh, you're going to do brilliantly.
This'll be wonderful.
You're going to do brilliantly.
So, you... because we kind of have a theme, you know, him and I. He does thinking, and I do money.
Right.
Or shooting.
And you do, and you sort of, you cover the cultural decline for us.
Yes!
So, so...
I've got a weird sort of niche over at Lotus Eaters, because when I joined about a year ago, I didn't actually interview for the job, which was quite fun, because I just came on, I was intended to do a guest podcast, and then Karl just went, oh, do you want a cup of tea?
And we walked into the kitchen, he just turned around to me and went, oh, when can you start?
So I've sort of lodged myself in with weird little passion projects that I find kind of interesting.
And ever since the start of this year, well, there's two reasons I've sort of fallen into this niche of, the cultural decline, trying to bring a ceasefire between the war of the sexes.
Because you do do a lot of premium content, but you're just like minister without portfolio.
Yeah, I worked out how many videos I do, and ever since starting I've averaged one every other day.
So I'm a bit of a workaholic, it turns out.
But there were two reasons I did this.
And number one is because before I worked here, and a little bit in media as well, I was in the sort of think tank politics sphere, and I was kind of sick of the managerial mindset that had infected every single NGO and parliament and the like.
That has made them deaf to whether or not we could question the paradigm and the trajectory of travel, and more so we were just negotiating speed and treating people like beads on an abacus, like sliding them along and just giving them the right amount of conditions and then they'll just shut up and take whatever the elite think.
Livestock management is all that governments do these days.
Yeah, spot on, yeah.
It's the golden arches theory applied to literally everyone, despite that.
What's the golden arches theory?
You know the idea that if two nations have a McDonald's and never go to war?
So it's the idea that if we just give them enough bread and circuses and enough material prosperity, then cultural issues don't matter.
That's why Michael Gove dismisses everything as an irrelevant culture war.
All we've got to do is just negotiate exactly how we're going to do it.
Mind you, that Golden Arches thing would have broken with Ukraine and Russia.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
So even though the theory is debunked, they still treat everyone like economic integers on a spreadsheet that they can just actually program without any sort of sentimental concerns or cultural and parochial preferences and things like that.
So the Westminster Bible just don't do that.
And when I was, so I was developing a paper when I was doing environmental policy and I was kind of asked to write to spec and I really kicked up a fuss about that and I attempted to circumvent a lot of what the government what we're already doing in the paper.
And they listened to some of it, so they ended up financing some more nuclear power stations, but they ignored me when I was saying, well, you do realize that doubling down on renewables is going to put us at a disadvantage from importing all the oil and gas stuff.
And then if a conflict kicked off, for example, with Russia, well, that's going to leave us up shit creek, isn't it?
And then, well, about six to eight months later, that happened.
So I was kind of annoyed by the fact that no one was listening.
You were trying to basically give sound, practical advice, but that didn't align with the narrative.
Yes.
And the government was like, no, just give us the narrative.
Yes.
Yes.
And the narrative at a speed at which makes it feasible to get there, and we can sell it to the plebs, rather than, well, is this the destination we actually want to go?
So effectively, they were asking you to do policy-based evidence finding.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, like the SAGE modelling, that they said, we're going to model for the outcomes we've already predicted?
Yes.
Yeah.
That was the entire policy sphere, and I wasn't like that.
I was more interested in the moral texture of where we're going.
You were a policy wonk.
Yes.
But you got disillusioned by the fact that it was just kind of fantasy Yeah, I hated the permanently encrusted NGO bureaucracy where people just exist to spin wheels and manufacture consent for their own NGO existing rather than solve a problem.
So I bounced out, hated it, and then came and joined here.
But part of the reason why that feeds into what I'm doing is because I'm trying to rebuild a kind of paradigm or heuristic for living that is outside that managerial bean-counting idea.
And this is something that I said about earlier.
The Zoomers, they think about all relationships as transactional, and so all we do is think about each other as integers, and you can't really have a eudaimonic, wholesome life if you just think about how much value can I extract from the other person.
We had this conversation about Crowder and the Daily Wire contract.
Whereas Crowder, despite his possible personal failing sins, he was complaining, we were friends.
You don't come to me with terms like this that presume that you can screw me over unless I kick up a fight.
And daily why we're just saying it's just business.
And too many people now are thinking it's just business in their own personal relationships.
Because we've been trained to deracinate ourselves from local communities, to go out to the city, to live, to go to university, to party up and think that our own actions don't have consequences.
And actually, it comes down to the sort of sexual revolution idea of relationships of where, um, if you, if you have some kind of hookup relationship, then all of the inevitable consequences that existed for thousands of years before that can have a technological intervention that can take away such Yes.
said consequences.
We see bursts through, examples of this sort of burst into the culture all the time.
One of the recent ones was the whole thing about the body count issue.
Yes.
It's a perfect example of that, purely materialistic, purely transactional, and then all of a sudden it clashes with the underlying instincts of the other part of that equation.
Yeah, and this is why I don't like the way it's currently being talked about.
Because the opposition to the body count argument is, you're depreciating your sexual market value.
And that's not how you actually think about someone.
What it does is it creates precarious grounds on which to trust someone.
Because you can't guarantee that if they view themselves in such a depreciated way, that they won't see the sacredness of your relationship when you're in it with them, even if they claim to do so because they haven't got the history of doing that.
It's not about adding up your relative qualities on a spreadsheet and then rationalistically deciding to come together because you can't trade up and there's no better offer.
It's about how people feel about the other person.
And it feels like a violation of trust before you even met them.
This is the Logan Paul situation that's going on right now.
Which is funny.
It's funny but it's also kind of tragic because it's not necessarily his fault that his fiancée was a whore, but he should have more respect for himself and be able to select a woman that shouldn't be that, but he doesn't value himself in such a way that he thinks he could command more.
There's a bit of beta energy going on there.
Yeah, absolutely.
He's got a fat guy's mind.
This is something Patrice O'Neill said, right?
You can be a fat guy that gets in shape, but you'll still approach a woman with the idea that you don't deserve her, and she can, like, feel that energy resonating off of you, and she'll be put off by it.
Yes.
And so thinking of how we relate to each other in a very transactional way has been something I've been trying to reform.
And part of the reason of that as well is that I'm not immune from this, but all Zoomers have had something taken from them.
This is something that C.S.
Lewis wrote about in the opening of Abolition of Man.
We've been miseducated to believe that everything we feel about the world is not derived from something eternal and true from the world, that we interpret it, that we have a shared culture, but it's just an artificial projection that can be substituted out for another projection.
So for example, actually, if you're sleeping around, then society is shaming you for being a slut and your conscience is that standard that you've internalized.
And if you just get rid of the standard, then you'll be really empowered and you'll have absolutely no consequences.
And no, there is actually something eternal and true there.
That governs human interactions that you're gaslighting an entire generation into turning their blinkers off.
And then they're going to run up against those adverse consequences down the road.
And then you're going to get an entire generation of either men that can't get women that are loyal or fem cells who 40 years after 40 have no one to care for them.
And they're going to be like a resentful revolutionary constituency.
So I can see this massive problem.
The oversupply of spinster issue that we've got coming down the track of this.
Absolutely.
Because at the moment we're dealing with the incel problem.
Yeah.
But they're actually behaving themselves reasonably well.
Yes.
But I kind of suspect that the 40 and 50 year old spinsters are not going to be happy once they realize what they've locked themselves into.
Well also the incels can't vote.
They don't have the power to compel the state to vote them more money.
Whereas the 14, 15 year old women do.
They can just henpeck you into making all productive men, particularly other women's husbands who have made the right choices, redistribute all of their income to subsidize their bad lifestyles.
And that's already happening at scale.
Imagine how much worse it's going to get.
And, and the reason I say I have a personal stake in this is because like towards the start of the year, you know, I was one of the guys that thought I had it all worked out, had a personal relationship breakdown, had to reassess things and plunging back into the kind of sphere that lots of other men are experiencing.
And I'm probably slightly better positioned than some of the viewers.
Um, but to try and grapple with this myself means that I'm within the paradigm that, that lots of other people are also operating in.
And so I'm trying to articulate it so we can all, cause I feel like I'm compelled to try and speak into being a world that is better than the current one that I can raise my venture.
There always is something about being a young man, which is, which is finding your place and all that kind of thing.
I mean, that's what I mean.
Take Taxi Driver, which is a film about essentially that.
I suppose it goes off in other directions as well.
But it is essentially the foundation is a young man trying to find his place.
So it is an old and eternal story that every generation goes through.
But yeah, it does feel like Zoomers are extra screwed.
It's why they're resonating with Ken right now, right?
Yes.
So they want patriarchy, but it's performative.
But they're literally riding invisible horses.
But the only way out is through.
So we kind of have to larp for a little bit and rediscover the things that we've been cut off from in order to replant our roots.
And the thing is, and I spoke to loads of students yesterday when Carl and I went and did an event.
They were asking for answers, but they were also saying, what, are you just predicting, saying that we should, like, grow a garden and do a manual job and get a girlfriend and go to church?
Like, is there not more than that?
And it's like, there's not really much you can do right now because the political system has its ears closed.
I'm not saying don't organise, because you have to, but don't expect that overnight you can change the system that hates you.
Instead, all you can do is take root, and it might feel a bit performative, but it's only because you're trying to Re-articulate something rationally that two generations prior didn't even need to be examined and that's why they were much happier.
So we're a sort of limbo lost generation, we need to re-anchor ourselves, re-forge that great chain.
Yeah, because I mean there was a progression that was on offer for the oldest Millennials, the Gen Xers and the Booms, which is essentially sort of play the game, get a home, get a family and sort of have a place in a community and all that kind of stuff.
But it's I mean, I suppose you can be a Zumba and have a house, but it's... When?
Well, it takes a hell of a doing.
It takes either your grandparents having to die off, which means that your own children won't have that close connectivity that I, for example, really benefited from, or it means being a passport bro and going elsewhere and accepting a...
Yeah, I mean, we got to the point where, I mean, this is the whole thing with women's liberation.
So women were liberated from having to stay at home.
So, you know, excellent.
You can go out and you can get a job now if you want to.
Well, actually, we spoke about that in a two-part series.
Yeah, right.
So, yeah, so women can now go out and get a job if they want to.
Except after a few decades, actually, that choice goes.
Yeah, it becomes mandatory.
You both need to work.
You both have to.
So it's not a choice anymore.
You used to have the choice for a short window of liberation, which was choose between home and work.
And now it's just you choose work.
And then for a while, for the millennials, you could then have a period where, OK, you could both work until you bought a house and then you've got it and then you're just servicing the debt.
Right.
And then the woman can go and work.
And I just wonder for the millennials, is it going to be that?
No, actually, you can either have a house and remain childless or, you know, you have to pick one or the other.
There's two parts to that.
The first part of this was Evil Oranges of Feminism Part 1 where I went through Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex, 800 pages of the worst tripe I've ever read.
or Longhouse, for example.
So there's two parts to that.
So the first part of this was Evil Oranges of Feminism, part one, where I went through Simone de Beauvoir's second sex, 800 pages of the worst tripe I've ever read.
But the problem is that she was a groomer resentful spin.
spinster who then slept with john paul sartre and she wanted the entire world to become a marxist brotherhood by psychologically and biologically reconditioning women to be on par with men to the point of where the last line of her book was brotherhood or she wanted the human race to discontinue because she compared herself to tiamat you know the great dragon of chaos i always assume sartre was gay maybe i was thinking of fukuk yeah you're thinking of fukuk yeah um I thought it was boys.
Yeah, exactly, nonce.
The problem is that all of those insane suppositions have now become culturally ubiquitous.
The my body, my choice narrative, the baby is a parasite narrative, the women need to work narrative, they all come from second sex, and they were retroactively legitimated by technological development, and that's something we discussed in the part two that came fairly recently.
Because I think most women are at the point where they understand now that the choice has been taken away from them, but you still, even now, you still meet women who perceive it in the terms of this.
Yeah.
Which is the liberation.
It's not liberation.
That's gone.
It's compulsion.
But this is why technological innovation creates a ratcheting effect upwards towards conforming to certain pressures.
And so the invention of the birth control pill retroactively legitimated Beauvoir's ideas because she wrote Second Sex in the late 1940s.
Birth control pill comes around Late 60s, early 70s to be more widely available.
Inducts women into the workforce and therefore institutionalizes lots of the original roles that women had.
And what happens there is the reason you have to choose between a family or a house is because originally they were indistinguishable.
And they were indistinguishable because the Oikos, the household, the family unit, was the primary mode of market, civic, and social participation.
That was the only mode by which you were classified.
You'd move from one household to another.
That's why communities would start bringing people together.
That's why dating is relatively new And it's actually a burden to place on single individuals.
That's why they've outsourced it to these algorithms that help us commodify each other and create spreadsheets.
Because we understand metrics easier than navigating vague things like trust with no help.
And so we actually went through this discussion of how that's a product of the industrial economy, and then the sexual revolution was almost inevitable, and how to reverse that sort of consciousness revolution of telling mutually subsisting stories rather than thinking of each other as economic actors, and women walking away from the birth control pill, 'cause that is one of the worst innovations and women walking away from the birth control pill, 'cause that is one of the worst innovations that's Because if what happens with the birth control pill is women, all the consequences of sex suddenly land on them.
So if you sleep with a caddish guy, then it is your responsibility to have that abortion, right?
So the baby becomes immediately devalued as a undesirable consequence of hookups.
And if women are more agreeable, then rather than holding off and commanding better standards of men, and believe me, the standards for men dating now are way too high, which is why we're doing a pro economics on hoflation, but they're just not proportionate.
Back then, they were high, but they were proportionate, right?
And what happens is, if you go on a date with a man, now consent doesn't mean you can say yes or no.
It means that the default assumption is yes, because you have no consequences from it.
So you have to invent new reasons why to say no.
So this is going from a culture that we used to have a very long time, which was basically sex was essentially the same thing as a proposal.
Yes, exactly.
And it is such an incursion on your autonomy that women, and this is something that Abigail Favale wrote out, which I did an interview with her at some point, where the default assumption of a woman's fertility because of the birth control pill is to change a working biological function To having the setting not being on, but off.
It's the first intervention that didn't correct something that was wrong with the body, it meant that something that was right with the body was... Made wrong.
Yes, exactly.
Okay, that's good.
And so, and so, sterility is now the prerequisite for women to participate in the workforce on parity with men.
Which means that Simone de Beauvoir's vision of brotherhood and antinatalism is real.
It's happened.
So we're living in the aftermath of that disaster.
Tell me one thing.
The feminist one?
Currently, yes.
Oh dear.
I have the impression that feminists are blowing out of proportion the idea of the importance that being a man with a high body count had before.
And it seemed to me that they did preach the message to women that you need to be sexually liberated, and because men acted like that, women should act like that as well.
Yes.
What do the people you interview say about this?
Because you have been doing many interviews.
Yeah, so I actually had a chat with quite a few people.
So I had a chat with Louise Perry, specifically, who's written the case against the sexual revolution, and she comes at this from an evolutionary psychological angle.
So she says very contentious things like, no, actually, the feminists are wrong about rape.
It's not about power.
It's actually a mating strategy for low-status men to take by force what they otherwise wouldn't get.
And unless you understand that, Then you can't create strong interventions against it.
So you can't, like, teach men with consent workshops not to rape because the ones that know not to rape won't rape.
Instead, you can just have such harsh penalties that you'll scare some of the weaker men into not doing it.
And that allows a strong male role in society because they can act as the punishers and the distributors of morality.
But then the next boat turns up and they haven't been on this course.
Oh yeah, exactly.
That's also part of the problem.
We just have to lower migration, of course.
And so her case against sexual revolution has been quite useful among young women who have felt aggrieved by this lack of a cultural fabric, and so they've been persuaded by that.
And one of her contemporaries, who I'm very grateful to have spoken to, is Mary Harrington.
We've since become very good friends, and her book Which is, Feminism Against Progress, has actually been a real paradigm former for me.
Recommend everyone read it.
Slash watch mine and Carl's discussion, Evil Origins of Feminism, part two.
And she goes through this industrial trajectory of how technology made feminism inevitable, and how it's essentially made us unisex.
So like, the Dino is the ultimate unisex man, because men and women are doing the exact same jobs now, but you're wearing the paraphernalia of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity.
But you have to buy it, and it's ultimately non-functional.
Like, Dino's shredded, but he doesn't do any manual work.
Mrs. Dinette is on Instagram flouting her curvaciousness, but her boob job makes it impossible to breastfeed, so she's not actually fertile.
Like, things like that.
So now, sex is opt-in and cosmetic.
Is she making TikTok videos as well?
Yeah, exactly, yes.
So you're monetizing your sexuality, but it's ultimately sterile.
So that's where the Zoomers are, which sucks.
Not great, no.
And then, yeah, I had a chat with Freya India about the specific pressures that go on to women.
I had a chat with Nina Power about specific pressures that go on to men.
And she isn't actually one of these feminists that have been gatekeeping the definition of masculinity, like in the press.
She just asked men what they wanted.
So these are all feminists, but they're talking to you.
Well, they're not really feminists.
They're not really.
So you've got these different tranches of feminists, haven't you?
You've got the first wave.
So what kind of feminists are the kind of feminists that are willing to sit down and have a conversation with you?
Well, they're calling themselves reactionary feminists because Mary said it's a signal scramble that upsets all the right people.
But feminism has become culturally synonymous within women's interests.
And she's saying, well, currently feminism is liberal, universal, and makes men and women lose their sex differences.
And so we are more alike than ever.
This is something Nina calls a sibling economy, where we're a bit like Cain and Abel rather than Adam and Eve.
So we're competing for the same vectors of competence and resources, but that means that because we're so alike, it would be a bit incestuous for us to have relationships, so no one's having relationships.
So we need to be way more different, and then we can come back together and have those families again.
Yeah, sorry, important question, because I think that you're doing something really important, and there are many people who say that, well, you shouldn't talk to them because they are not on our side.
Why do you think that it's important to talk to them?
One, Private communications which cannot be leaked means they're very on our side.
Two, as well, you are not going to get out of this without women being on board.
And not just because single women are the overwhelming cohort that vote for left-wingers, but because women do not listen to men, frankly.
Mainly, they do not.
Unless they're men they really care about.
That's the concept of headship.
But we don't have those families.
We don't have those fathers in the home at the moment.
So, to steal a phrase from Mary, culture will be downstream what the hot girls want.
And as soon as the hot girls... I was just going to ask you about that.
Yeah, as soon as the hot girls have a reaction against the sexual revolution, like Sydney Sweeney, the most perfect woman on earth, turning around and saying, I'm a director but at 25 I thought I'd be a mum by now and it's all worthless without it.
When it starts swinging that way, that's when some more women are going to start to listen.
Yeah, but here's an issue.
I want to see how compatible this is with what you said before about going to women and communicating to them that I want you to be on board with this.
If they see this as low status.
What do you mean low status and how?
Well, I mean, let's take flirt for instance.
If you scream to a lady that, you know, I'm here to care for all your wishes and solve all your problems, it's not going to work.
Yeah, but that's not the way of communicating.
That's not how it is.
Okay, what you've got are two current camps aggrieved by the current paradigm.
But we have inaccessible languages to each other.
That's why some of these women are talking to these women, and we've got a lot of men talking to a lot of dispossessed young men, I think, a lot of the time in the wrong way.
They're saying, maladapt to the current paradigm by out-competing women with so many Bugattis that you just... But isn't there a fundamental mismatch in this?
Young men notice it first, because basically they want to get laid and they're not, and you're getting this massive incels, like 30% of all young men are incels now.
Well, okay, so the numbers breaking down are quite interesting there, because that's on the lower... So that distribution is most pronounced among 18 to 22, though they age out of that a little bit, but what the actual, I think, complaint is at the heart of this, and this is also part of why some of the MGTOW guys, who really don't like me, are complaining, is that it's not so much about sex, but intimacy.
Like, it's the fact that this culture has robbed us of our ability to trust one another and form nourishing relationships and have families, because people can have these hookups.
Again, I've been involved in this culture, but it's ultimately meaningless.
It's just kind of sad.
Yeah, so the point I'm thinking about in terms of the mismatch is young men notice it first because it impacts them at this sort of early age.
Whereas for the young women, they get messages thrown at them when they're girls and the young girls.
Which is you know all the media and the Disney and which is the you know the girl boss and you do this and actually the most rewarding thing in life is to have an office cubicle job and have a boss who hates you and all that kind of stuff and by the time it gets to the point that they notice that oh hang on this this has gone seriously wrong and I don't like this um they're past their sort of critical point in order to get their life together And they're now in their sort of 30s or 40s.
And so there's a natural mismatch in the experience that men and women have of the same problem, which is the inability to trust each other and the disincentives to sort of pair bond and all the rest of it.
But it is a fundamentally different way of perceiving the same problem talking about it.
Yeah, and that's how it has been for quite some time, and that's why it's worthwhile having these conversations to undo the cultural brainwashing that has robbed women of their fertility and their ability to trust men from the mouth of these women.
And also, quite a few of these women have very Cutting ways of understanding the perverse incentives of culture, as they have fallen on women specifically, that are just inaccessible to us.
Because I've been reliably informed that representation matters.
And so, if our embodied differences are very different, then we can understand them up until a point, but we also need that ambiguous complementarity.
And it's worth me talking to these women because they have the same with us.
Like, they don't understand the experience of young men.
All they can say is, we need to let young men sort out themselves.
So, coming together, having that solidarity and allowing each other to make space for each other to fix the culture i think that's probably the healthy way to go about it fantastic thank you very much connor all right should we see what the um the lovely subscriber people say we got we got video comments john we have for here's some pictures from my third day in the uk i was down in this area and i visited st michael's mount and menac theater some observations from an american Your bar staff and cashiers do not seem to expect southern manners.
Stuff like, yes and no ma'am, yes and no sir.
Saying please and thank you.
Saying thank you for your time.
Y'all have a good day now.
I've had several confused looks.
And at least two thank you for the politeness.
Also, St.
Michael's Mount is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.
The Southern Manners thing is something that we really should revive because we used to have general mores of politeness and we just don't.
It's the same thing with my case for young men wearing suits.
It's not just because you feel more powerful, because you do.
It's because you are treated with more respect and it's an act of aesthetic considerateness to those around you if you put yourself together because it's way nicer to walk through a city where people are just smart and well-dressed rather than just slobs.
Yeah, you watch, um, any old footage of, like, the 1930s or 40s, you'd think they'd offer to, like, some formal dinner or something.
It's actually just some farmhand who's wearing a three-piece suit.
Exactly.
So, say please and thank you, yes and no, sir, and wear a suit.
That's good advice for young men.
On to the next one.
Welcome back to Let Us Drinkers.
Let's get into the booze.
This one's called Trapped Cigar Butt Burns Toffee Factory.
It's a nine-year highland. 63.4%.
And, uh, just three hundred and two bottles.
This is a really smoky number.
I hate them.
I'm almost certainly sure that one was whiskey.
You whiskey drinkers, you too?
I have been, but I've tried to quit drinking, really.
I broke that rule this week, and I've sort of suffered for it.
But yeah, I'm not much of a whiskey connoisseur.
I do like Jack Daniel's Tennessee Honey, because it's basically like cough syrup.
I like the toffee vodkas, they're alright, but I'm a vodka man.
Salted caramel vodka shots are quite nice.
So this was the best I could do for an English breakfast with what I had available to me at local grocery stores.
I did get the proper beans, though.
They were actually the easiest thing to find, it would seem.
And as far as the bacon and the sausage, those were a no-go.
The bacon tasted good.
I hate those sausages.
And I don't eat eggs, so I didn't do any eggs.
And black pudding I'd have to make from scratch.
Plus, it's kind of a no-go for me, too.
But let me know what you think.
You've done well, but you need eggs.
Given that he's in America, he did the best he could.
Where is the hash brown?
Yes, and... Yes.
Oh!
So, are you aware that Americans don't do hash browns like we do hash browns?
Apparently not.
What do they do for hash browns?
So, we do hash browns as like little potato compact things, right?
They have a hash brown bowl where it's like potato sawdust.
It's all shredded.
It's like... Yeah, yeah, so you know the inside of the hash brown is all the shredded potatoes?
Like Petit Pro or something?
Yeah, it's like a pile of pencil shavings or something like that.
It's okay.
Status is delighted.
You mentioned the zombie apocalypse yesterday, so naturally I gotta bring up my giant robot.
Each leg motor can lift 1,300 pounds, but because of leverage and I run them at four times their rated speed, I gotta be careful.
For the drive motor legs, I've got two of these motors because the mech actually balances on these legs when it drives around.
When in drive mode, it will kind of seesaw over the middle legs onto either the front legs or the back legs.
Which have landing gear type wheels.
But isn't the problem that if you run out of power you're basically tinned food?
You need one of those.
Where are we gonna put that then?
I don't know.
We'll find space.
We'll park it outside my hotel and see how quickly it empties out.
Shoo them back in.
No, no, shoo them back in every time they try and scoop up all the stolen bicycles.
Yes, definitely.
We've got a few.
Oh, right.
Well, that's an interesting one.
Top comment.
Harry Starving Barber.
Do you think you could launch a podcast dedicated to religion?
You've already done psychology and philosophy, so why not?
I did have the idea.
I did have the idea, but it's also just sort of like time, because I'm doing quite a bit.
I did do the Jesus Isn't a Socialist podcast with Karl that went down really well, and we've got some stuff coming up.
We've got some stuff coming up, and also I think we should go and check the early Desert Fathers for Christianity.
Okay, yeah.
Not just them.
I have a symposium on Augustine's Confessions in mind.
Yes.
That would be good.
We'll probably fold it quite a bit into the philosophy series, just because obviously my work schedule is quite schizophrenic.
Zachary says, giving Callum a run for his money with that intro.
Why, is Callum also particularly good at intros?
I don't know.
Callum's outros are fantastic, where it's usually just, um, if you enjoyed the show, watch again.
If not, don't bother.
Bye!
We've got some nice words on symposium.
I presume they're nice words on symposium.
Mr. Power says, to be fair to Stelios, you hear people I feel more than I think when I discuss anything.
Yes.
Yep.
Any others that stand out for you there?
Lord Novar says, things are pretty bad right now, but you fine chaps make it bearable for an hour and a half each day.
Yes, we provide solace in the cultural warp.
A couple from Broconomics.
Oh, Sophie's responding to me.
By the way, Dan, about the video yesterday, no, we don't have Nazi amusement parks.
It's just that what used to be a Nazi base of operations in my city, they left a lot of bunkers behind.
It's a museum now, and only once a year, they spend two days dressing up in uniforms and doing reactants.
The whole city?
And that kind of stuff.
It happens this one weekend a year, specifically at a historically relevant place.
Well, that's still more than we have.
Yeah, I mean, well, but we weren't ever occupied by the Nazis, so we wouldn't really have, like, unless you recreated that episode of Dad's Army, you wouldn't be able to do much.
Right, no, I was thinking of Hugo Boss outfits, but...
Oh, yeah.
I suppose that's how he wants to come in.
Martin says, Dan, could you do a brokenomics spell?
What would it mean if the gold standard would be reintroduced and the transition would unfold?
Yeah, I actually kind of mainly do that kind of thing through the interviews.
So Peter St Onge and Lawrence Lepard, we covered a lot of that kind of stuff.
Kevin Fox has a request that I think we've actually said that we're going to cover.
Do a deep dive into the economics of dating apps.
How much it costs you to get a woman's phone number via a dating app and meeting girls in a pub.
So that would actually be a good little modeling comparison thing.
Yes.
We'll have to fold that into there.
But we've got some other stats in that that will be eyebrow raising.
Yeah, and then on your bit, um... Preparing for the what?
Severin.
Am I pronouncing that right?
Connor is, um, doing a great job talking with these feminists, but nothing will change if women, uh, will be forever shielded from the consequences of their decisions.
Yeah, well that's why they're arguing to get rid of the birth control pill, because then that reintrodu... Mary's literally called it rewilding sex, as in reintroducing... Yeah, reintroducing a dangerous predator into the habitat.
You'd like her book.
It's good.
Um, I don't know.
We've run out of time now.
I took my earpiece off.
Pretty much, yeah.
We've got, we've got like, so almost done.
Five minutes over.
So well done with the extra content.
Yes.
Okay.
So, uh, well done chaps and cheerio you lovely, um, subscriber people.
▲
Export Selection