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Feb. 20, 2024 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:29:53

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #854

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Seaters.
	I'm joined by Dan.
	Hello.
	Connor.
	Right.
	And today we're talking about the new Boomer PsyOp, the Sora AI, whether or not it's making movies good again, which it will.
	Okay.
	Sure.
	And also, um, some things you don't come back from because there are, there are some things that you just, you have to accept it's over.
	That's for brands to deal with.
	But I have some announcements to make.
	First announcement being that Calvin Robinson, he is off washing feet or something so he won't be in doing Common Sense Crusade this Thursday.
	But I do have an announcement which is tomorrow we'll be doing something which is a live hangout, the Cyberpunk Dystopia series will be continuing.
	With Carl torturing me that war is not worth fighting anymore because it's cringe.
	So do come and join, that'll be 3pm UK time, in which the cold will make us all sad.
	Otherwise, let's get into the news, shall we?
	Yep, fantastic.
	I thought we'd check in on ITV, because the last time that we did, I think it was Dan and I actually, we were looking at a Coronation Street segment where they decided to put some objections to mass immigration and all of the cultural enrichment going on in our cities in the mouth of a man who beats up migrant children, because that's obviously not poisoning the world.
	So, ITV dramas and soap operas keep positioning the British public and their political beliefs in a way which the establishment finds acceptable.
	It's trying to mould the minds of otherwise apolitical people.
	So we've seen this happen in soap operas, but now we've seen it happen in this new ITV drama called Breathtaking.
	This is based on a book by Rachel Clarke, who was a frontline NHS nurse during the early days of the pandemic.
	And I thought we'd just watch the trailer and see how this is symptomatic of the behavioural nudging and psychological warfare techniques that are used both by the government during the pandemic and consistently throughout British television.
	Is it going to be a load of dance routines?
	We'll get onto that in a moment.
	Right, okay.
	Let's watch the trailer, gentlemen.
	Let's see the astounding level of gripping drama and realism, definitely realism, that's depicted in this.
	If you're on YouTube, you may not be able to watch this and we'll have to quickly cut that out, so we'll summarise what happens afterwards.
	We will make sure the NHS gets all the support it needs.
	Morning.
	Just had a call from LAS.
	Might be the first one.
	I'm not going to make it home this weekend.
	It's just, it's madness.
	There's currently no PPE at all.
	They were overwhelmed.
	The virus is always gonna be ahead.
	Trust the guidelines.
	This is insane.
	The public can be assured that we have a clear plan.
	There's no plan.
	Members of our team are wearing bin bags and going home wondering if they're gonna die in the night.
	Don't go.
	We're already there.
	You know the thing is spreading.
	They just keep coming.
	But no one is giving up.
	Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.
	Breathtaking starts the 19th of February on ITV.
	Now, for those who weren't able to watch that on YouTube, it was a very hyper-dramatic snapshot of the early days of the pandemic in hospital wards, where everyone's dying in sight, everyone's wearing bin bags because of a shortage of PPE, clap for carers is landing on deaf ears for the NHS staff, and the insinuation is, well, if we just would have locked down earlier, we would have saved lives.
	And the tagline was, the story you've never been told.
	Gents, does it feel like we haven't had this messaging quite just yet?
	Well, they're making a TV program about a psy-op that nobody believes anymore.
	I'm just surprised.
	I mean, this production must have taken a couple of hundred people to put together, and they found a couple of hundred people who still believe in the mid-2000s narratives.
	they quite believe it or do they want their audience to believe it?
	Convenient political reason.
	The reason I say this, so I've watched two episodes of this.
	So it's debuting across, so today is the, what's the date today?
	Oh, it's a Tuesday.
	It's the 20th I think.
	So it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, in February.
	Last night had the first episode, tonight has the second episode, tomorrow has the third episode by the time this goes out.
	All of them are available on ITVX and I've watched the first two episodes and do you know what?
	I ran out of time but I'm glad I didn't watch the third episode because one thing is it's chronically boring But the framing is fascinating because it opens in the first episode with footage of Sweller and Rhys Mogg and Matt Hancock and Matt going into Number 10 being bombarded by the likes of Kay Burley from Sky News, who also broke lockdown rules but didn't face any repercussions by the way, saying, why aren't you locking down?
	Do you have a plan?
	Etc.
	It's flavoured with the insinuation that the government either willfully or drastically mishandled the pandemic by not locking down earlier, not giving them face masks, which we now know, thanks to the Lancet and John Hopkins and the like, didn't stop transmission of airborne particulates.
	Why they didn't enact all of these authoritarian measures just sooner and the whole pandemic would have been over.
	They've also got a lot of intersectional framing in this.
	So the first conversation in the series, in the first couple of minutes, is between two nurses complaining about the size of the masks, because they say that the PPE is made for wider jaws, life-saving for men, basically.
	An actual quote from the first few minutes.
	And the other doctor that was in that trailer, the one that was saying, we have staff wearing bin bags, is at that time berating on the hospital higher-ups for the COVID patients being discharged into nursing homes.
	Nothing about Madiza Lam in there, but we'll move on, I suppose.
	He says, do you know who's dying down there?
	Certainly not the white people up here.
	It was fat people.
	Fat old people.
	COVID's racist, Dan, didn't you know?
	Yeah.
	So they're layering this hyper-reality narrative on top of what we've already experienced and trying to gaslight you into thinking that if you just would have been under house arrest for an even longer duration of time, like Susan Michie, the lifelong member of Communist Party, as head of SAGE said, quote, forever.
	She said she wanted face masks and social distancing to remain, quote, forever.
	If we just would have done that, everything would have been OK.
	But all right.
	Also keeps mentioning Italy in the first episode.
	We'll return to that later.
	So there was a first.
	I mean, everything in there has been Comprehensively debunked at this point.
	Yeah.
	Quite right.
	Now, the reason I wanted to just have a look at this little scene bit that they put out is to look at the framing.
	Nora Dodsworth talks a lot about this in her book, which we'll come on to in a moment, but the attempt to prime you to be tense on edge and receptive to the fact that there's an existential threat being perceived.
	Just look at the editing and the music and how they do this scene in the first episode.
	Straight into this one, please. please.
	Oh, my God.
	OK, tell me about the patient, please.
	She's stoning, DOP, service class 65, picked up from Heathrow, blue light is here.
	Get ready to move.
	Airway open, no airway.
	Steady.
	Right.
	40pm.
	Ready, slow, steady, on line.
	Let's make some room.
	She's completely abundant.
	OBG, please.
	And can we get some monitoring?
	Yeah.
	Do we have access?
	Just a peek.
	He's completely shut down.
	Not shifting much air.
	OK, can we get an urgent chest X-ray in here, please?
	On the way.
	Crips throughout.
	Neil, do you have an airway?
	Yeah, but I'm having to help.
	Sats are in the 70s.
	OK, he's tiring.
	We need to get on an intubate.
	Yeah, agreed.
	Drugs from the fridge, please.
	Joe?
	Sats are 52.
	He's barely breathing now.
	Suction, sir.
	Are A, T, U on their way?
	On their way.
	OK, George, go again.
	Do somebody, please.
	We're going to need that ABG as soon as you can, guys.
	We're going to need suction.
	Tube, please.
	He's arresting now.
	The thing is, this is how they make history.
	They put out these psyops, and then they make the film and the video and the literature portrayal of it afterwards, and that's the bit that in 20-30 years everybody will remember.
	Oh, exactly.
	And this is why they've done the really tight and in close filming, the intense music, the cacophony of sounds, the focus on the breathing to insinuate that everyone was very short of breath at that time and always on the precipice of dying.
	The representation of the patient in there I thought was very interesting as well.
	Just your average white bloke, just mid fifties, not particularly overweight.
	Definitely not if he's just been picked up from Heathrow from China, like the first recorded COVID patients were in the UK.
	So anyone could get it!
	At any time you could just drop dead from this airborne disease!
	Now, the reason that you use the phrase PSYOP there, Dan, is because COVID was a PSYOP, and this is why I've used the word PSYOP in the title, because they're trying to PSYOP the boomers into thinking this was the case.
	Obviously, the disease was real, the response, a bit overblown, and wasn't very well managed.
	I gotta wonder, like, what is the viewership on this at this point?
	Because it is true, like, someone in a room has sat down, greenlit this project, not just because I'll make great TV, because obviously it doesn't I mean, that should have been exciting.
	That was boring to watch.
	So, like, what are the viewership are actually reaching?
	Because, I mean, ITV, Traditional Television, that's dead.
	That's a game over at this point.
	So is it just like an online audience or something?
	Well, they've got a streaming service, so I'd assume they're trying to target an online audience.
	But the captive audience they still have around televisions are the fair few thousand boomers that tune in every night, that might be compelled to vote for people that are promising to bring in further restrictions down the line to save them.
	Because I think that that's what would have saved them.
	Even their lockdown saved, according to John Hopkins, about maybe 17,000?
	No, was it 1,700? 17,000.
	Lives according to its study, but costs way more through missed cancer diagnoses and shock down on suicides and the like.
	So the reason we say PSYOP, so you've done an interview with Laura Dodsworth here, this was for her new book, Free Your Mind.
	But during the pandemic, she wrote a book called State of Fear.
	And I wanted to go through some of the various PSYOPs that are in this book to illustrate to you just how bad we were propagandized during the COVID pandemic.
	Because most people just think, oh, the government was scaremongering its PrEF briefings.
	No, no, no.
	They had multiple psychological warfare operations going on from within the cabinet, from within behavioral nudge units.
	The depths of this stuff is absurd.
	Yeah, it was a military-grade PSYOP, and I'm not being hyperbolic.
	It was literally a military-grade PSYOP.
	Yeah, they involved the 77th Brigade.
	I'll give those a mention shortly.
	So, most of the newspapers at the time were getting their advertising money from the government directly from COVID.
	So, There was a 48% decline in traditional advertising spend in the lockdown period between the 23rd of March to the 30th of June.
	So this was the first lockdown in 2020.
	Public Health England became the UK's largest advertiser and the government the sixth biggest advertiser during this time.
	Rishi Sunak announced in April 2020 the UK would spend 35 million for the All In All Together campaign in national and regional newspapers.
	The campaign reported that the cabinet office figures The government revealed that the government was investing £184 million in communications related to COVID-19 in just 2020.
	Now, this was in the middle of the pandemic that she wrote this, so we don't even know what the final sum was.
	So that's staggering.
	The government are literally buying newspapers to be the mouthpiece of their propaganda.
	Do we think that shapes the coverage of the virus during that time?
	Because I would think they wouldn't want to bite the hand that feeds them, but there we go.
	They mentioned Italy in the first episode of this series.
	Do we remember the Italian coffin footage where all the people were... Yeah, from that ferry four years previous.
	Yeah, quite curious.
	Sky News reported on the 19th of March 2020 that army vehicles were being brought in to transport dead bodies in Italy.
	This would obviously make you think that the army trucks were needed because the bodies were so numerous.
	But according to the Italian Funeral Industry Federation, 70% of undertakers had to stop work to quarantine.
	So the army was drafted in for a one-off transport of 60 coffins.
	But they ran that footage round the clock.
	So it's because of the policies, the undertakers weren't allowed to carry it out, therefore the optics were the army needed to step in, and the optics were used to justify further lockdowns on the premise that there were so many bodies that we needed to contain the measures in each of the countries.
	I like the way that Brett Weinstein labels the pandemic.
	He says that no virus was actually necessary in order to get the response that we saw.
	Now he thinks there was a virus.
	I know that some people dispute that.
	I think there probably was a new virus of some kind.
	But he just makes a point, it wasn't actually necessary to get what we got.
	Well, this is why multiple people, including Speaker Lindsay Hoyle and Manira Mirza, not Manira Mirza, she was Boris Johnson's advisor, the other one that has two Ms that works with the UN and the World Economic Forum, have said they wanted to repurpose the lockdown policies for climate change.
	So did one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion I debated at Durham University in 2020.
	They're honest about this stuff.
	It's all about clap for carers.
	That was in the footage, right?
	Remember Thursday afternoons Doris would stand on her doorstep banging her pots and pans together in support for the NHS?
	That was an organic movement, right?
	Turns out not.
	So Laura decided to interview the founder of Platter Carers, who was Anne-Marie Plass.
	And on social media, she had already come across rumours that the campaign was secretly powered by the government.
	So she asked Plass about this and she denied the rumours.
	But Laura felt unable to pitch her article because she had said to a friend who worked at Number 10 about the thing before she launched it.
	So Anne-Marie Plass, who launched Clap for Carers, had a friend within Number 10, and then we wonder why the very first Clap for Carers was covered in national media and supported by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson at the time, and Victoria and David Beckham.
	Instantly.
	Within the first few days.
	How did an obscure Facebook campaign reach the ears of Britain's elite?
	Yeah.
	Very significant.
	Signal boost.
	Yeah, quite.
	So then Laura went back to Anne-Marie and she asked, Directly, if she had knowingly worked with anyone in the government.
	She said, Purely organic Purely organic to get people to go out on their doorstep and clap for the NHS as if it was for Stalin.
	So, sure.
	I'm sure we're going to get accountability for this though, because have you heard, gents?
	There is a lockdown inquiry going on.
	So they're investigating into whether or not government ministers acted properly in procuring PPE, and what policies were in force, and whether or not they lied to the British public.
	Laura's been covering this for CapEx, and here's a quote from the Lockdown Inquiry.
	So this is from Professor James Rubin, and he's the co-chair of the Independent Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviors.
	This is Spy B.
	Ironically named.
	And they assured the COVID inquiry, quote, Spy B spent its time trying to work out how to support members of the community, not scare them.
	Now, this does seem to contradict a Spy B paper on the 22nd of March 2020, which recommended that, quote, the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.
	To be effective, this must also empower people by making clear the actions they can take to reduce the threat.
	A substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.
	It could be they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group, although levels of concern may be rising.
	So we need to exaggerate the death rate for their particular demographic group, in advertising funded by the government, in papers, and possibly in ITV dramas, to make them think the pandemic was worse than it was so they would comply with lockdown rules.
	Deliberately scaring the public.
	Yeah, I felt threatened, but by my government, not because of the Oh, what gave you that impression, Dan?
	Was it the fact that it confiscated your livelihood and stopped you from seeing family members?
	Or at least legally speaking, stopped people from having cancer screenings, stopped people from having weddings and funerals and starting relationships, unless you're Matt Hancock.
	He even didn't let us out of the country at one point.
	Yeah, quite.
	There was talk about not letting us go to the shops unless we had their thing.
	Yes, there were vaccine mandates on the table, according to Boris Johnson.
	David Halpern, as Laura documents here, a head of the Behavioural Insights teams, the Nudge Unit, declared in an interview with The Telegraph that the government's fear-mongering during the pandemic was justified.
	Quote, there are times when you do need fear to cut through, particularly if you think people are wrongly calibrated.
	Oh, so we can just attune your brain according to what the state demands for its policies.
	I'm sure that's great.
	Actually, one Spy Bee advisor that decided to remain anonymous told Laura that the way we have used fear was dystopian.
	Yep.
	This is according to their own team.
	So, yes, it's not an exaggeration to call it a PSYOP.
	Now, obviously, these weren't the only people who were spying on the Nudge units.
	The Nudge unit was set up in 2010 under Cameron's government.
	It's now a for-profit enterprise in multiple countries, including in France, in America, in Singapore, and in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
	And it runs more than 750 projects, and in 2019 alone, worked in 31 total countries.
	Right before the pandemic, 31 countries.
	But we all just wonder why the pandemic response was all the same.
	She also mentions RICU.
	So this is the Home Office's Research, Information and Communications Unit.
	This might be of interest, Callum.
	Do you remember those Middle Eastern Eye articles that you kept bringing up for the Nottingham Stabbing, where they have... The organised response.
	Yes, the term was controlled spontaneity.
	This is RICU.
	This is directly from the Home Office.
	There was a quote in here, and Laura interviewed a woman named Lucy Eastthorpe, and she's written for The Guardian before.
	And she said that the I heart messages that happened after the bridge attack and the like were, quote, carefully planned in advance.
	And then she said after the Manchester Arena bombing, she had a change of heart about the level of guided response.
	Quote, I was wrong to insist in my training.
	The first message should be we will overcome.
	So don't look back and anger was centrally planned by the Home Office.
	They literally told you, as parents grieving their dead children, you can't be mad about it.
	It was evil what they did to those families.
	Yeah, and the same people managed our pandemic response.
	Just to let you know.
	Also, you said military PSYOP.
	The 77th Brigade is the Army Cyber Warfare and Online Division.
	So they create hashtags and then use bots to amplify those hashtags.
	And these were the people that were spying on Per Big Brother Watch's findings.
	Julie Hartley Brewer and Peter Hitchens and other lockdown critics during this.
	It just so happens as well that Tobias Elwood, who's an MP who keeps telling the Tories that they can't push to the right and Oh, and Caroline Dynadge's husband was the former head of this.
	Caroline Dynadge being the one that- I remember.
	Sent out those letters to Rumble, GB News and TikTok and the like saying we should de-platform Russell Brand- She still needs to be sacked for that.
	Oh, I agree, but she won't be.
	And of course, Callum covered at the time how vaccines minister Nadim Zahawi had founded and turns out was still receiving money from selling the shares in YouGov.
	YouGov being the polling agency that repeatedly polled 71% approval ratings, small sample sizes for every single restrictive measure that the government did, including vaccine passports and vaccine mandates.
	But don't worry, they're being totally honest.
	They'd never manipulate you.
	It's not like the health secretary literally said we need to frighten the pants off everyone about COVID.
	So this was in 2020, this was ahead of the Christmas lockdown that they re-imposed, and Hancock knew that people would be very upset at him for re-imposing this despite having promised not to.
	And in a conversation between Matt Hancock and Poole, who was, I believe, part of the government's... Damon Poole, who was the Department of Health's Special Media Advisor, on December 13th, he said, we need to deploy the new variant, and he said, we need to frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain.
	In order to get them to comply with lockdown.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	So, talking about how to announce the new strain in a tactical way to get you sufficiently scared enough, as 5e said, to comply with lockdown.
	They're deliberately propagandising it.
	Okay, so we've established all that.
	What was the COVID wards with the nurses actually like?
	Ah, yeah.
	As you've already prefaced, Dan, we're going to play this with muting.
	For lots of them, it didn't look That lethal?
	I mean, this is the thing.
	I mean, the whole COVID thing smelt to me from the beginning because I could detect the tendrils of government and PSYOP going in there right from the beginning.
	But when this stuff started coming out, I thought, OK, everybody's now going to see through it.
	And I was just bewildered to find that friends, family and relatives were like, oh, yeah, there's definitely a pandemic.
	It's like, look at the bloody dancing nurses.
	I mean, is that not a clue?
	But no, they still didn't get it.
	This isn't just one NHS award, this was all over the world.
	Oh yeah, there's hundreds of these videos.
	I've never seen these videos before, so you found one I've never seen.
	Oh, there's tons of compilations.
	The excuse was, of course, oh, they were locked in hospitals for that long, so they had to, between tending to patients, do these impromptu dances that certainly weren't ridiculous, insensitive, and well-planned.
	Point being, I was locked in my home for two years straight because the NHS was so overburdened that they could do nothing but care for dying COVID patients of all ages, apparently.
	No particular demographics or lifestyle characteristics that could have predicted you being at risk for COVID.
	No, no, these people, these are our heroes.
	Definitely worth destroying the economy for.
	Now, of course, as I said, these were in multiple different countries, but it couldn't be our NHS nurses.
	Oh, oh dear.
	They wouldn't do anything this embarrassing, would they?
	This is definitely going in the ITV drama to scare the f*** out of the people, I'm sure.
	I mean, this is just a joke, and it's a really sick joke, because again, we are propagandised to accept it, they take our money to propagandise us, and then they lock us in our homes for the privilege.
	So why now?
	I mean, that's a good question.
	Did you remember this Post Office drama that came out fairly recently?
	I don't watch TV.
	Totally valid.
	I haven't seen it, but for anyone that was in the UK, this was the current thing for like two weeks.
	And this was the Horizon post office scandal where Fujitsu had a, I'm going to give a really condensed version, an IT software that kept knocking numbers off of the accounts that were for different post offices.
	And so it looked like that the post office was missing money and the books weren't balancing up.
	So postmasters who ran their own post office branches were encouraged to take money out of their own pocket to prop it up.
	So they were accused of fraud.
	They were accused of taking the money.
	Fujitsu wouldn't admit fault.
	Multiple people went to prison over this.
	Some people committed suicide over this.
	And then years later, it turns out Fujitsu knew all along.
	Now, because of this drama of Mr. Bates in the post office that came out in ITV, And this is Toby Jones, who was the star of it, and he said he's immensely proud of the impact the drama had.
	Because of this, there was enough pressure on the government to finally put through a compensation scheme for the postmasters.
	And that would be good, except it's not come from Fujitsu, it's come from the taxpayer.
	So they haven't yet made the company that should be criminally responsible for all these people's wrongful sentencing and deaths pay up.
	Instead, we're paying for it.
	Point being, ITV's dramas do actually affect political change.
	And the reason I say this is because at the moment, there's another Coronation Street storyline going on about assisted dying.
	Now, this is a fella who's got motor neuron disease and his husband is a gay, married Anglican priest.
	And they genuinely make him swear on the Bible that he will help kill his husband when he needs assisted dying when the time comes.
	So that is the level of subversion.
	They're parasitizing your own moral framework to guilt trip you into supporting a political position, which is coming down the pike.
	Because if you notice the date on this article, the date is Tuesday, the 9th of January, 2024.
	The same day that this happens, Dame Esther Ransom comes out and announces that she's got an assisted dying petition that's tied to her name.
	Today, Mr. Ransom was a BBC presenter who helped set up Childline, so she's quite famous.
	She's currently got terminal lung cancer, and because of her saying she's joining Dignitas, now lots of people are pushing for assisted dying, including Keir Starmer, saying he'll support it when he's next Prime Minister.
	So all of these interesting things are coinciding.
	So what you're saying is the assisted dying is now getting the push the way that COVID did...
	Oh actually, in the middle, after the COVID stopped getting the push, we then had Eat the Bugs.
	That got pushed.
	It did.
	And now it's assisted dying is getting the push.
	Yeah, and I would suggest that Coronation Street is definitely doing something like this, because as we've seen with the various segments before, they all harmonised around COP26 to push climate change, they pushed the immigration stuff.
	And there's an extract from Peter Hitchens' Abolition of Britain here that I want to read, because it's been going on for multiple years.
	It is clear to anyone with eyes in their head that Deidre Raychard is innocent and should be free, and this was a spokesman for Tony Blair in 1998.
	The whole nation is concerned about Deidre Raychard.
	This was William Hague, leader of the opposition, in 1998.
	Deidre Raychard did not exist.
	She's a fictional character in television soap Coronation Street, who'd been sent to a fictional prison by a fictional court for a fictional crime.
	Everybody, including the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition, knew this, and yet they also knew that millions of people cared rather more fiercely about this figment of their imagination Then they did about the real world.
	Both of them would have felt it was unwise to boycott the strange international festival of protest against Deirdre's harsh sentence.
	They were only following the example of the most popular newspapers, which for years had treated the major soap opera series as if it was real, sometimes confusing their television star's identities with their actual ones.
	Tony Blair even asked Home Secretary Jack Straw to investigate the case at the time.
	So if they're standing up at Dispatch Box and talking about ITV soaps and dramas, And then now modern politicians are responding to the pressure created by OTV soaps and dramas and enacting policy based off of that.
	These things have powerful influences over the way people think.
	So of course they're going to use this assisted dying storyline in Coronation Street to start to influence people.
	This is now amassed and this is quite significant.
	This has now amassed over 100,000 signatures, and Esther Ransom has created a template letter for you to write to your MP to create a free vote in Parliament.
	Now, free vote means that members of the party can't be whipped, so each individual parliamentarian has to vote based on their own conscience.
	So that means that this could just be pushed in by majority rule, no matter whether or not the parties actually agree with it.
	So this is a consciousness-raising exercise, through soap operas, to then enact policies that actually results in, basically, the deaths of people.
	Not very encouraging, is it?
	This is possibly my final think piece on why this Covid drama has happened.
	Are you aware of the WHO's Pandemic Preparedness Treaty by any chance?
	Unfortunately.
	Do you know when that gets ratified?
	No, I don't actually.
	May 2024.
	Oh, dear.
	So in about two odd months' time, even though we voted against the appointment of Dr Tedros, none of our MPs have had a say in this.
	Only random, unnamed Whitehall mandarins have contributed to the hundreds of amendments that we'll be legally binding and allows Dr Tedros to unilaterally declare lockdowns or just tell the whole world to lockdown for any reason up until including Climate change, which he's already declared his intent to do so, because he said it's a health emergency, these will be coming into effect in two months.
	So isn't it convenient that an ITV drama saying just how bad COVID actually was, we promise, drops about two months ahead of this to make the public pliable to complying with these regulations?
	We've definitely reached the stage where they're not even pretending there's a democracy in, or they're just ruling by elites.
	Yeah, they're using psychological warfare techniques to manufacture consent so that you vote the way that they want for the policies that they already want.
	So just be very aware.
	One, don't watch this in the first place, but two, if your boomer parents are watching this, just give them a little nudge back and tell them exactly what's happening to them.
	Right, I have two questions for the audience.
	I'll start with the first one now.
	It is, when was the last good movie year and why?
	So, by that I don't mean like peak cinema or anything, because we obviously know that peak cinema was in 1993 when Bill Murray put together Groundhog Day, the greatest movie that has ever been made.
	Haven't seen it.
	That's pretty much undisputed at this stage.
	But so I'm not I'm not talking about peak cinema.
	I'm saying when was the last year where the generally good stuff outweighed the generally bad stuff?
	So I've had to think about this because, you know, back in the early 2000s, I used to be I used to live in central London and there used to be a little blockbusters at the end of the street.
	And I'd wander down there on any given night when I didn't have much to do.
	And you could always find a good film.
	You just walk in, basically grab something and it's a good film.
	Right.
	These days, you cannot find a good film.
	You cannot just go on Netflix or Amazon or whatever it is and find a good... They don't exist anymore.
	So, I've come to the conclusion that the last really, genuinely good year... Oh, hang on.
	Where's my clicky thing?
	John, can you do the clicky thing for me?
	Go to the next one, because...
	There we go.
	Oh, there we go.
	Right, there we go.
	So, I think the last genuinely good year was 2008, because it produced the absolute epic Tropic Thunder.
	Am I right?
	Can I be honest?
	Yes.
	I admire the testicles on Robert Downey Jr.
	for doing that.
	Right.
	And bits of it were funny.
	I didn't find it that funny.
	I found it a bit absurd.
	It was deliberately offensive, which I like, because it stuck a thumb in the eye.
	Yes.
	But I just didn't find it that funny.
	I thought it was alright.
	Anyway, so I thought that was the last genuinely good year, but I can make a case for 2000... Oh, can you do the clicky thing again?
	Can we go to the next one?
	Oh, there we go.
	2009.
	That's a great film.
	Yes, that was good.
	I want a sequel to that.
	There have been some good films interspersed throughout the years.
	Like, Joker was 2019.
	That was genuinely good.
	Yeah, but my benchmark is when do the generally good films outweigh the generally bad films?
	So you can't just say, oh, there's one nugget in a massive pile of shit.
	There's a diamond among the dog turd.
	I am very aware of this, yeah.
	Yeah.
	So we could go to the next one.
	It's definitely not 2010, because the best film I could find was Kick-Ass.
	And it wasn't great.
	No, I mean, it was all right.
	It was obnoxious.
	I don't really remember any of the characters that well.
	I remember there were like a little girl who beat up people with a dad, but the rest, I just can't remember the characters in any particular detail.
	Also in 2009, you got Inception, which is ridiculous.
	Inception's rubbish.
	Some people like it, but it just like, it breaks all its own rules.
	Exactly.
	Thank you.
	Yes.
	Finally.
	Um, and, and, and true grit that some people like, but it's just not that good.
	And, um, I went to 2011 just to see if I could find it.
	The best I could find is, is in time.
	Which was all right.
	I quite like that one.
	I quite like time-travelling... Well, it's not time-travelling, that one, but whatever.
	I like films with time in it.
	You should have got up a list!
	What, if it just has the word time in the title?
	No, Groundhog Day didn't have time in the title.
	Just time fiends, or whatever reason it just appealed to you.
	If you were just like, ah, time!
	Yes.
	Also, in 2011, you've got The Raid.
	That Korean film, that was quite good.
	And you got Moneyball with, um... ...Brad- Bradley, the- the Pitt.
	Brad Pitt, yeah.
	And, uh, Drive, some people- Oh, Drive's great!
	Yeah, Drive's a great film.
	Yeah.
	OMG, he's literally- But, I- I- I still think by about 2011, it's- it's definitely on the slide, and it's like, okay, so what makes a good film?
	Is that an open question?
	Yeah, well, I- I'll tell you- I'll tell you what it is.
	For a start, it- the- the minimum hygiene level that you need to clear is, I need to be able to hear it without putting the subtitles on.
	I do watch with subtitles, but that's because I usually watch with a woman, and so if she asks me to explain something, I can just point at the screen and say it.
	Oh God, that's annoying, isn't it?
	Do all women do that?
	Because the amount of times I've had to say to the wife, if you just watch the movie, your questions will be answered.
	It's like the people who made the movie thought of this and then they're going to explain it.
	You're also interrupting me giving you all the really interesting trivia that you definitely want to hear.
	I learned it for a reason.
	Yeah, that as well.
	Yeah, so you need to be able to hear it without subtitles, which modern movies, they don't do it anymore.
	The sound mixing is pretty poor.
	Harry and I noticed this when we went and watched Wakanda Forever, unfortunately, of where the audio was peaking.
	So go watch any modern movie and then go and watch a film from the 90s and you'll see the difference because I just for a while me and the missus just thought oh we're getting old we can't hear anymore and then okay and then for some reason we put on a 90s movie it's like okay well we can hear again it's like modern movies they just muffle it and they eat all the words and stuff like and and the only actor I know is Lawrence Fox so I asked him why they do that and and he gave me two explanations one of which is that um actors are no longer classically trained in the proper whatever he had That's about right.
	And the second reason was directors are going for realism.
	And that means that you're not supposed to be able to hear anything.
	I don't know about that.
	Yeah.
	Even in the Marvel films it sounds absurdly bad.
	Well, they're the least worst.
	Also, hygiene level films, I want to be able to follow an action sequence without getting sick.
	Yeah, without all the super cuts.
	Yes.
	So good old movies that you had action scenes you could follow.
	And also, I don't want a narrative fisted down my throat the entire time.
	So yeah, don't watch a film from the last ten or so years.
	Yeah.
	So the only other thing I will say, let's go to the next one, is 2008 began what we might now call the Great Scourge.
	So Iron Man.
	Okay, I'm going to defend some superhero movies here.
	No, no, I'm going to defend Iron Man.
	There's ones after that that are actually good.
	Yes.
	Watchmen's great, 2009.
	Man of Steel.
	That would be Superman.
	They're very good.
	What else?
	Joker?
	Can we go to the Wikipedia list?
	Because I anticipated your question.
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah, no, Marvel's kind of rubbish.
	Almost all of them are rubbish.
	Yeah, I'm willing to give certain passes.
	So Iron Man, that was good, right?
	Incredible Hulk, was that the one with Edward Norton?
	Yeah, that was terrible.
	All of them.
	We can just keep scrolling.
	Guardians of the Galaxy.
	Basically, my point is, everything on that first section... Iron Man 2, really?
	...is kind of alright.
	No, not with Mickey Rourke playing a Russian.
	Yeah, but Thor, Captain America and the Avengers.
	They're all boring and cheap.
	Once you get into that next block... Guardians of the Galaxy was good!
	Okay, everything in that next block, apart from Guardians of the Galaxy, is all trash at that point onwards.
	Yeah, pretty much.
	I'm basically just making the point there was a peak year and it was probably 2008 or 2009.
	In terms of the ratio, sure.
	I think that's perfectly defendable.
	Now, we don't know why films started getting bad.
	I can give you an actual answer to the audio problem if you'd like it.
	Oh, go on then.
	So, Vox did a really good video about this, where they went and interviewed people in the industry and asked them this question.
	And the fundamental issue is that, well, in the olden days, where you would see the movie?
	You would see it in the cinema and on your TV.
	It's the only two ways.
	Whereas in the modern age, not only you've got a listening of different kinds of computer, you've got your phone for Christ's sake and everything else.
	So people who were doing the editing for the audio decided that their standard should be the cinema experience, which of course has also massively changed from what it used to be.
	Because now you have this ridiculous surround sound systems that cost like 20 grand or whatever.
	In which case, if that's the standard for the movie, that obviously isn't going to work on any other platform.
	Because if you're doing it for that kind of specialisation, no one actually has a cinema in their house.
	That's mad.
	Yeah, but I do have a surround system and I still can't hear.
	You don't have it to the quality of a professional cinema.
	No, that's true.
	And the problem being that once you specialise that much, if you then try to apply it to anything else, it bollocks.
	And it gets particularly bad when you're dealing with, like you say, Christopher Nolan's films.
	Because he's known as the worst one, in this case.
	It's deafening in the cinema, and then when you get it home, it just sounds flat.
	So that is an explanation, but it's not a good explanation.
	But if you sit and make a project, so if you sit and actually make a thing, you'll find this yourself, because I have it with my YouTube videos, where I'll make a thing, and it sounds perfect on my headphones from my computer, and then I'll watch it on my phone, and it's crap.
	Okay, I've got to go back and fix this, because it's got to work on multiple platforms.
	It's an explanation, but not an excuse.
	Well, okay, that's an explanation on the sound thing, but my broad point is that films were good before, you know, 2010, and bad afterwards.
	That's the view on this, right?
	And we don't know why that happened, but I want to coincidentally show you some figures if we go to the next one.
	Right, so this is a snapshot of the filmmaking process measured between 2011 and 2020, and it's divided up into various categories.
	So we've got women, and we've got men, and then we've got BIPOC, and we've got white.
	Now, I don't actually know what BIPOC means.
	Black Indigenous People of Colour.
	Oh, is it?
	Yes.
	Oh, I thought it was Blacks, Indians, Pakistanis, Orientals and Chilis.
	Chilis?
	Chileans.
	Mexicans have got to be in there somewhere, haven't they?
	All right, yeah.
	All the spicy people.
	You could have said gummies.
	Oh, yeah, yes.
	Yes, commies.
	But they're not people.
	Uh, that's it, back to the drawing board.
	Right, anyway, so, point is, we don't know why things went downhill, but, coincidentally, I will just point your attention to the fact that the category of men, men went down massively, right, and, um, oh, the other category is whites, they went down, so basically white men received an absolute culling.
	Genuinely for the superhero films as well, there's a reason that they've been written really poorly by female writers and that's because the way in which men and women write and consume media is very different.
	This is the same way that they play with toys when they're younger.
	Men aspire to be like this character.
	Women inhabit the shoes of that character and make the character like them.
	Like if you give a young girl an action man, she'll have action man playing tea and action man going to the shops.
	And if you give a young boy action man, he'll do action man things.
	And so if you're trying to write superheroes, you have the men writing the superheroes with big bombastic fight scenes and struggling and being victorious.
	When you get it with women, you'll get it about affirmation and empowerment and them standing around talking and the audience falling to sleep.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	More women and more BIPOCs.
	Coincidentally just lines up, doesn't it?
	Yeah, quite.
	Yes, good point.
	So, modern films, we've got the problem.
	I can't hear you, as we've covered.
	I can't see you, because you're doing these jump cuts and you're doing these pissing lens flares all over the place.
	Everything has got a lens flare in it now.
	Oh, it's a J.J.
	Abrams effect.
	Yes.
	You go back and you watch old movies and they don't have any of them.
	They're fisting narratives down your throat the entire time.
	The characters are forgettable.
	If you think of any old movie and think of the characters, each character is distinct.
	Modern movies, you can never distinguish one from the other after you've watched it.
	All the assembled cast of Predator or The Running Man or Aliens, you remember all of the people even though they die off and have limited screen time.
	But I forget some of the Avengers' names.
	Yes, quite.
	Yes, this is my exact point.
	And plus the storylines are just bad.
	So if we go to the next one, I'll give you... Because this came up yesterday, Starship... That's an excellent film.
	Despite the intent of the creator.
	Well, yes, but... Yeah, it was a very good film, that.
	He tried to ruin it, but he couldn't.
	He actually made a good film.
	So I sat down with the missus last night and watched this, because it's obviously in the air at the moment.
	You did a segment on it yesterday, Callum.
	And so, some things jumped out at me for a start.
	I mean, the first thing, we're a few minutes into the movie, and I had to pause it and say to the wife, White people!
	Like an Indian.
	In the plains.
	White people have been here.
	No, there was representation in the film, if I'm using the lingo right, there was representation in the film but broadly proportional to the overall population, right?
	Not like 60% BIPOC.
	Yeah.
	So the second thing is femininity in this film done right.
	The Denise Richards, she's hot.
	Oh yeah, but she's a strong capable woman who's talented and all that stuff, but she's still feminine.
	And doesn't resent the men.
	Yes, and she smiles.
	She smiles at people.
	But wait, you never see women in movies smiling anymore, because they have to be these grim-faced Haradans with, like, suffering crew impressions.
	Specifically in Captain Marvel in the deleted scene, one man asks her to smile and she decides to break his arm with cosmic energy and steal his motorcycle.
	Yes, quite.
	And she's the hero.
	Yes.
	Plus, Starship Troopers, every character is memorable.
	Like, even that dude who was, like, hitting on his girl, who then becomes the flight instructor of the girl who smiles.
	You know, even the secondary characters in the barracks, you know, one with the spiky hair and the big fat one who wants to fight the instructor, you know, all of them.
	Spencer Brown, yeah.
	Yeah, even the school teacher with Missing Army, like, all of the characters are perfectly memorable.
	And even though I hadn't watched it for about 20 years, until last night, I still remembered all of those characters.
	It's visually distinct.
	The effects as well are mostly practical.
	That makes a big difference.
	Because they have a distinct aesthetic and they don't date themselves as much as bad CGI does.
	Have you gone back and watched the old Mummy films at any point?
	Oh, yes.
	When The Rock turned into the Scorpion King and it looks worse than the PlayStation 1.
	Yes.
	Just go with practical effects.
	And the other thing that I really liked is you can hear the dialogue and it has a memorable line.
	So what I really like is when the second female, the redhead, when she's dying and she turns to Johnny and she says, it's okay because I got to have you.
	So I had to immediately stop the movie and tell my wife, right.
	30 years from now, when you're on your deathbed, I want you to say that to me and then immediately die.
	Because that is just... I've seen what you eat for lunch!
	She's living you, mate.
	That is the perfect exit for the wife.
	Anyway, right, so the point is, right, Movies are done.
	We cannot let the movie people do movies anymore.
	We have to make our own movies.
	So I'm going to talk to you about Sora AI.
	But before I do that, let's just quickly recap on where AI video has come from.
	Let's go to the next one.
	So this is, for those who are listening, this is the famous Will Smith eating spaghetti.
	This was like 18 months ago where video generation was.
	Did they map Will Smith's face onto John from The Office doing his lunch?
	Love you, John.
	Don't turn off my mic.
	No, that is, um, yeah, it's not very good.
	If we go to the next one, as you can see, the video has, uh, improved somewhat.
	That's impressive.
	Yeah.
	His fingers are still a bit weird because they can't really do hands that well.
	Yes.
	So, so do you want the biggest head trip of this one?
	That is actually a real video.
	He also made that himself.
	Oh, okay.
	But that's the thing.
	It's like, when you watch it, it's like you think, oh yeah, this is where AI is now.
	I mean, that's a bit cheeky.
	But the point is, you can put up normal videos these days, and people think they're AI.
	His finger's really just that weird.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	It's a thing.
	Anyway, so let's go to Soar AI, the next one there.
	John, why don't you scroll down and just entertain us with some videos when you come across one.
	But, you know, this is now the standard of videos that you can just, you know, go along.
	I think they autoplay when you move down to them, but, you know, there are some other ones.
	Yeah, I think they will just autoplay.
	They're not.
	They're not auto-playing.
	Oh, okay.
	There we go!
	It's because we wanted to play off.
	There we go.
	Oh, here we go.
	So, yeah.
	So, that's an old Western scene.
	Completely AI generated.
	Wow.
	That is impressive.
	Yeah.
	Let's skim through some more.
	I'll talk to them for the... What is that?
	Is that a gnome making a garden or something?
	This is amazing audio for the listeners.
	Yes.
	Let's do another one.
	Oh, that's a person's eye.
	But that detail is... I mean, it's crossed the uncanny valley, isn't it?
	Yes.
	That's almost perfect, frankly.
	Oh yeah.
	There's no way you'd be able to tell if you didn't have the flu.
	Well, the implications of this are unsettling.
	Number one, it could kill Hollywood.
	So that's good.
	That's great.
	But if it really is that high fidelity, then we cannot tell the difference between fake and real.
	So that's going to have a really disastrous impact.
	I mean, look at that!
	So we're now watching a street scene in Lewisham.
	I was about to say London!
	And it's just indistinguishable.
	The characters, the city scene, the people sitting having a drink together.
	It's basically perfect.
	What have we got here?
	We've got some pandas, so this is more Pixar style.
	Oh yeah, you'll be able to make not disturbing and degenerate kids movies.
	Yes, that don't try and turn your kids gay.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, that's fantastic.
	But then the other implication is that nobody is ever going to have a shared experience again.
	Well, I don't know about that.
	You see, I've been thinking about this, and you see, the problem with AI generation as it stands at the moment is the AI doesn't know what it's just done.
	It generates it, but it doesn't know.
	So you can't edit it.
	You can't generate that, right, and then say to it afterwards, okay, do the whole thing again, except make it wintry or something.
	It will generate a completely different, yes, funny thing.
	Um, so you, you can't, you can't, you can't redo anything.
	Um, so you need to be able to edit it.
	Um, and, and it's essential to be able to make fine edits if you're putting together a proper project and you can't go, you can't like make, even if this thing, because it's only a minute at the moment, even if it became like two hours, you wouldn't be able to just go back and insert one more scene because you have to regenerate the entire thing or you get completely different assets.
	So a lot of people think The AI movies when in a couple of years from now it will be you just put in a prompt like oh I don't know um I want to remake a kindergarten cop in the hybrid style of Warhammer 40k and Bollywood press a button and it just pops up what a realistic one would be for example is remake the Iron Man movie but if Tom Cruise had played Iron Man as planned, rather than Robert Downey Jr.
	So you'll be able to recast whole films that you actually like.
	I don't know if I'd bother typing that out.
	Someone will.
	But the point is, a lot of people think that AI movies are just going to be like typing a prompt that's going to generate whole movies.
	Because AI is remarkable in some senses, but its creative capacity is not.
	I mean, if you ever tried to make it do a joke or anything like that, We'll write a short story.
	I mean, it kind of gets the concept, but not really, not in a human way.
	So what I think will happen is in the next two to three years, there'll be a package of AI tools that, when put together, will enable you to make a proper movie.
	But it will be a lot of work.
	Quite a lot of work.
	But it'll be a lot less work than paying multiple hundreds of millions of dollars for actors who are up themselves and BIPOC female writers who just want to write about themselves, giving you a product that sucks and bums at the same time.
	Yes, fisting a narrative down your throat, all that kind of stuff.
	So what I'm envisaging is that, you know, if you want to produce a movie in a few years, you get these package of tools, right, and what you'll have to do is, first of all, you need to write the story, and then you'll need to turn that into a screenplay, and you'll have to be really, really detailed.
	Right, then you have to write up each character in detail, not just their description, but their temperament, how they react to a situation, what's going on in their head at any particular point, their emotional baggage, all of that kind of stuff you need to write up in detail.
	You'll need to describe the world and the aesthetic in detail.
	It will still be a job.
	What's that?
	It will still be a jobs worth.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's like most of the internet, I mean, anyone can make some stuff, but most people who even try, and that's not most people, fail.
	And it's a very small crème de la crème that's even worth looking at.
	And then the actual good stuff is even smaller.
	But my point is it will take you at least 12 months, I think, to get to the point where you're ready to start even touching the AI tools.
	And most people won't have the patience to do that, right?
	And then once you've fed it into your AI tools, well, first of all, you'll need a set of AI tools that can produce persistent assets.
	Because at the moment, if you generate a character and then regenerate it, it will be a different character.
	So you need a set of tools that will give you your character.
	So you'll start developing your characters and your backgrounds.
	And then you'll need another set of tools that can go in and make edits afterwards.
	And maybe this will be integrated into one package or something.
	But at the moment, we sometimes generate stuff on mid-journey, don't we?
	And then we have to take it over into Photoshop in order to make fine edits on it and stuff like that because, you know, the one AI doesn't do it.
	So I think really that whole process, I mean, the AI generation bit might take like an hour to generate a 4K, you know, two hour movie, but you need to put in a year either side of like prepping it all up.
	Very quickly make the movie and then another year of doing the editing stuff that sort of all comes down behind it.
	Yeah.
	Are you noticing something?
	Well, no, it just looks fantastic.
	I mean, again, I think these things are evil, but that's really cool.
	But having said all that, by the time you train people up within a year to get used to the prompt system and you have... Oh no, a bunch of autists will figure it out.
	Exactly.
	But people need to have it to be second nature.
	And by the time you have all the software that allows you to edit it all in one finely tuned package and have permanent assets, Going forward, you won't have to spend a year to two years on filming in set locations, catering, salaries, travel, distribution.
	Yes, all of that kind of stuff.
	So my thinking is right, and to your point Callum, most of it is going to be bad, right?
	Yeah, but most things that everyone already makes are bad.
	Yes.
	I mean, your point about the movies suddenly getting bad, I mean, there's some truth in that, but the vast majority of all creative works are bad.
	No one looks at them.
	Yes.
	I think the statistic is like 99% of YouTube has less than 100 views.
	So I went even further.
	I went even further, Mike, because I think that putting a good AI movie together in a couple of years, when the tool set is complete, will be at least, if not more difficult, than writing a novel.
	Writing a novel takes a couple of years, right?
	How many novels are produced in the English-speaking world?
	About 300,000 a year.
	Maybe too many.
	So let's say that only a tenth of one percent, so one in a thousand novels, are good.
	Seems reasonable, doesn't it?
	Yeah, I don't think it takes a couple of years, but... Well, if you were doing eight hours a day of writing, it would probably take you about six months to do about 400 pages, something like that.
	Well, if you bang out in one go.
	Yeah.
	But let's say, okay, between one and two or three years, whatever, depending how fast you are.
	So I think it's that level of effort.
	But anyway, the point is 300,000 novels produced every year.
	And if you can go to that much detail, you can probably generate an AI movie.
	You just need to do screenplays and scripting and prompting and all the rest of it that comes with it.
	So that means that we should be soon getting 300 really good movies a year that come through this process.
	So then all you need is you need a really good discovery system so the best ones float to the top in a monetization system.
	You won't need that.
	That just happens naturally.
	Like once someone's stumbled across something really good, they share it.
	Well, yeah.
	That's how things have always worked.
	But we've probably got those already, was my point.
	So, I mean, something like X, for example, it will float the best stuff to the top and it will monetize it.
	Sure, I mean, back in the day, people used to share what was actual VHSs.
	Like, the sharing of good content isn't the hard bit.
	I mean, to be honest, all of this is fantastic news for filmmakers.
	Because, I mean, like you say, you're just saving on set, you're saving on actors, blah blah blah.
	But the people who are actually making the film and the editors, they're gonna have a great time.
	Like, their jobs aren't changing, it's just a different way of making the film.
	Yes, this is just a disaster for every lover you that's currently studying to be an actor and isn't classically trained and can't translate over to the stage where people want to see real things.
	Yeah.
	Because your job will be defunct.
	There will be a demand for that, but it'll just be way low.
	Very scarce, yeah.
	But if you're willing to put the effort in, you'll be able to do that yourself is kind of what I'm getting at.
	So I think we're going to enter a new golden age of film where anyone who's willing to put in, you know, a year or two or three of hard work will be able to produce something which is excellent and will float to the top.
	I don't know about golden age, I think you'll be able to curate your own experiences in a much better way.
	So there's going to be a lot of rubbish But slightly less proportion of slot.
	As long as the good stuff floats to the top.
	So that prompts me to think, okay, this is my sort of second question.
	If you could make a movie, what movie would you make?
	Now that's a question to the audience.
	I'm not going to ask you to, because I've actually already decided on your behalf what movies would be.
	So can we go to Callum's movie?
	So I thought Three Taliban and a Baby would be a project that you might want to spend a couple of years on.
	But why are all Taliban babies?
	For three babies and a Taliban?
	He's actually 17 years old.
	Wow.
	As I grew the beard.
	Three Taliban and a baby.
	Anyway, that would be our thought.
	And for Connor's effort, I thought there's something about Mary H. Anyway, moving swiftly on.
	I wanted to make the ears bigger, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.
	I'm such a dick.
	Oh, I'm sending them all that.
	Alright, well I guess we'll move on.
	Oh yes, yep.
	It's time for the rations to be redistributed.
	So, I want to talk about some things that people just can't come back from.
	I think it's a lesson to be learned in engaging online at all.
	At some points, just give up, is my advice to some folks.
	And you'll see what I mean by this.
	Specifically, we shall begin with Cracker Barrel.
	Now, we were doing Lads Hour, and I remembered that Cracker Barrel used to get bombarded every single day, no matter what they posted, for the last 20 years, because they once fired someone who was Brad's wife, and this blew up into a massive joke.
	And then we went onto Cracker Barrel's Twitter page, and you may notice they deleted almost everything.
	Like these posts, the most recent ones are 2016, 2017.
	It's all gone.
	And I think Cracker Barrel have learned the lesson, which is give up.
	It's over.
	I mean, this is an American restaurant and they've just decided to quit social media because they just got harassed every single day, constantly, that they fired Brad's wife.
	Why not just engage with it?
	Wendy's do engagement with people that make memes in their comment sections, don't they?
	You're right, but after 20 years, and it's still not stops, and it's the same bloody joke.
	I mean, if you don't know what I'm speaking of, Internet Historian did a great video about this.
	And at first, we'll play a little bit to get the explanation for people who haven't.
	Because I have no idea what this is about.
	All right.
	So basically, Brad, here's a wife.
	Brad's wife worked at Cracker Barrel.
	He was there, she was there, for 11 years of service, and then was fired.
	And Brad, being a boomer, made some really schizoid posts on Facebook, being like, oh this boy is storming about my wife being fired.
	At Cracker Barrel, why did you do it?
	And this blew up because it looked stupid.
	But then the American boomers got hold of this, and it was funny for far too long for them.
	them five the template of the joke was simple and spreadable promoting desserts are we brad's wife used to love desserts new item on the menu brad's wife would have made it twice as good today we remember 9-11 brad's wife used to love nine okay not that but the the thing was that came out of this is it it blew up into real life as well so So other brands started taking the piss out of Cracker Barrel, and then people started turning up to the Cracker Barrels to harass the staff.
	The streets, people made posters, signs, and t-shirts.
	And they even started visiting the restaurant just to ask about Brad's wife.
	Who's Brad?
	Well Brad's not important, but his wife, they fired her after 11 years of service.
	I don't know what you're talking about.
	After 11 years.
	On his birthday.
	I heard about that.
	That was terrible.
	Yeah.
	Now there's a wait time in here.
	How long?
	Oh, it's a long time.
	Because Brad's wife isn't here.
	The point being, the people who are taking part never stopped doing the joke.
	It went on and on.
	I mean, this video here from Internet Historian is five years old.
	And it was still going on, on Cracker Barrel.
	I mean, Brad's wife was fired seven years ago, and it just keeps going, just keeps on going.
	And whenever Cracker Barrel is mentioned, I mean, even the subreddit for Cracker Barrel is just talking about Brad's wife, even two years ago, they're still posting about it.
	She deserves justice.
	What's going on with Brad's wife?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Jokes that will not die.
	And Cracker Barrel deleted everything.
	It's not a glitch on Twitter.
	They actually, about a year ago, just had enough.
	And I'm gone.
	They know they're not coming back from Brad's Wife.
	It can't be done.
	Because the Zoomers and whatnot, like, the joke is funny, and then it's, you know, quickly not funny, and, oh, I should have said before it was cool.
	But boomers just never stop.
	They're like the Terminator.
	Boomers!
	Oh, God!
	That's funny for all time!
	It keeps going.
	And as you can see here, I mean, Matthew over here, in 2019, was writing, great things happened when Brad's Wife was here, 11 years of service.
	Just carrying on, carrying on.
	And, you know, it goes on.
	Brad's wife loved giving a helping hand.
	Deleted.
	This one here.
	They were responding to a problem in the restaurant.
	You know, Brad's wife wouldn't make this a problem.
	Okay, boys.
	So that's where they just gave up.
	What are you going to do?
	And if you look up, even though Cracker Barrel have deleted everything, I mean, there's some guy called White here who is still harassing them about Brad's wife.
	But he's not the only one.
	Plenty of other people are still just posting about Brad's wife every few days.
	Even though there's nothing to post to anymore.
	I mean, it's like, I don't know if you know internet comment etiquette, but he had a good thing, which is even if the comments are closed on a page, a YouTube video, they close the comments, that doesn't mean the comments are closed everywhere.
	So just go and find something else where that company or aspect still exists, or whatever this one is.
	It's just like, yeah, you know that post from 2017?
	Brad's wife.
	In 2024.
	Just never, never ends.
	But the point being that I discovered that Cracker Barrel had taken the advice, which I think is probably sound, which is, when you are too mean, there's nothing you can do.
	Just lay down, it's over, accept it, you're dead.
	And Cracker Barrel, a major corporation, decided, um, social media.
	In the garbage.
	She's not going to engage anymore.
	Social media manager was presumably fired.
	Let go.
	Yes.
	None of their outlets post anything about any of them.
	I do hope the social media manager's husband wasn't called Brad, because otherwise...
	What happened to Daisy's wife?
	Yeah, it would go on forever and ever.
	And the reason I bring this all up is not just because I discovered that and that was interesting to see.
	Is that, well, there's another company that seems to need this advice, which is to give up.
	Bud Light.
	Remember them?
	Unfortunately.
	The biggest drunk beer in all of the United States by a wide margin.
	There are even pubs in Swindon that carry this, still.
	Yeah, which is amazing, frankly.
	Now, for those who don't know, all five of you, Bud Light decided to do a deal With, um, this person, to advertise their product.
	Can we not say the name?
	Is it, like, Trans-Voldemort?
	Oh, you have to be careful, because if you, if you deadname them, or get it confused, or they, their... But, but, it hasn't changed its name yet.
	I'm gonna have to censor some of this.
	I'm confused.
	I can never bloody remember the rules around that.
	But the name is still Dylan!
	Yeah, the name is Dylan, but I don't want to talk about the subject matter because of YouTube.
	Oh, right.
	But that gives you everything you need to know, doesn't it?
	Yes.
	And what happened is that they're still being haunted by the fact that they had to do the sponsorship with this person because of the obvious reasons.
	And, um, so the stock, I just checked the stock for the company, because of course Bud Light is one of their beers.
	What is it?
	Bud, Bush, Big, Booty?
	Anheuser-Busch.
	Weird name that I can't pronounce.
	They're still down 9%, so there's that.
	That's the entire company.
	But if you go to Bud Light specifically, I mean, like, the stats on Bud Light used to be ridiculous.
	I mean, look at this.
	These are cases of beer sold in the United States.
	As you can see, Bud Light just utterly dominating.
	Like, it was the beer.
	Ah, 2012.
	So this was around the time where they were getting Mark Wahlberg to drink it in product placements in Transformers.
	That's also the time when movies were still good.
	No, before that.
	Transformers 4 was not good!
	But then you've got Budweiser and then Caus Light and all the rest of them.
	And it's kind of irrelevant and falls off.
	So as you can see, like $5 billion there just in 2012 alone.
	And they were quite dominant then, weren't they?
	And then they did this.
	And since April 1st, this is Bud Light sales declining.
	Every week.
	Consistently for a long time.
	So what is that?
	Almost 30% down?
	So you go from $5.5 billion.
	Let's just assume the number was the same.
	That would mean you're down to now $4 billion.
	The 1.5 billion worth of income just wiped out.
	And they still haven't apologized.
	Did they fire the person who made the ad, or?
	Yes.
	Oh, okay, there's that then.
	And they fired one other executive that was involved in it as well.
	Because, yeah, I don't think their salary is worth 1.5 billion, whatever that was, because that's... Think of what you could do with 1.5 billion, and then losing that.
	I mean, I know when you're dealing with large sums of money, things get weird, but that's just...
	Mind-boggling, to say the least.
	But legitimately, it did actually destroy their market share.
	It was not just a small thing.
	It actually did amazing numbers.
	What's the headline out of this?
	America's top beer for decades is now the second following the LGBTQ backlash.
	Well, it's worse than that, in case you're wondering, because they did everything they could.
	You may remember they got rid of people, and then they tried to turn around and be like, oh, we're the beer for straight people!
	Straight people drink this!
	Didn't they do another advert of horses again to try and capture the magic of the 9-11 one they did ages ago?
	Yeah.
	It was like, do you like the Wild West?
	Do you like sports?
	We're beer, drink it!
	But of course, the damage is done.
	The Brad's wife moment's already happened.
	Instead, you're just the gay pisswater.
	Which is why even when Donald Trump Jr.
	came out to try and defend them, it was like, well did he?
	No.
	The reason is- I'm not going to take your advice.
	Anheuser-Busch were historically large Republican donors.
	Shouldn't have done that deal.
	He did say that we should call the boycott off now because they're a patriotic company.
	No.
	Yeah, that doesn't follow.
	Red Don Jr.
	L there.
	Yeah, this is where the right loses pretty consistently.
	But it's gone on quite a bit.
	I mean, I just found a post here, as you see, it's from 2023.
	The backyard is calling.
	Like, they're just trying to do... Sounds like a euphemism.
	Very normie posts, where it's like, you know, beer!
	Happiness!
	You could be happy if you drink our gay water!
	And everyone's just like, but it's gay!
	I'm not gay, so I would be drinking the gay water.
	Very sorry.
	And that was at the time.
	And you know, it goes on and on.
	I mean, this is another one where they're just like, remember our beer?
	Remember that?
	And it's like, no one is drinking your gay piss water.
	No one.
	Time to shelve the brand and move on with your lives.
	Huh.
	Yeah.
	Maybe.
	Maybe.
	Goes on and on.
	This is in August.
	There's just people still posting months after the fact.
	Like, hey, this could be us!
	Remember 4th of July?
	Remember patriotism?
	I'm not gay!
	Sorry!
	What about that Channel 4 woman?
	Does she still get, so what you're saying is... Yeah, Cathy Newman, yeah.
	Yeah, does she still get that as a response to every tweet?
	Absolutely.
	Right, good.
	You've had the Brad Wife moment.
	All you can do is delete the account.
	But you can't even do the thing of not posting for a month and then coming back.
	Yeah.
	Because you're too mean.
	You're too gone.
	Yeah.
	In this sense.
	I mean, like this one here, they're celebrating 13 days or something, I don't care.
	Quiet maybe.
	Yeah, got ratioed again with people just going gay beer.
	Why is it a gay beer?
	It's for gays.
	Because the thing about those types of memes as well, the Brad's Wife one, this What Are You Saying thing with Cathy Newman, and also Gay Water, is that it's very, very simple, very tribal, and very orcish, and at that point, you've got no comeback.
	I mean, there is literally nothing you can do, because the strength of the joke is just too strong.
	Yeah, that market is impenetrable to you now.
	It's over.
	That's August.
	Well, October, still people just posting, like, why are you gay?
	I'm like, yeah, remember the NFL?
	Remember sports?
	You know what real men do?
	They're like, nah, you're a gay guy.
	Have you seen the NFL's pride announcement from last year?
	They did their rainbow logo and they literally tweeted out an infographic that said, the NFL is gay.
	Like, well, that's a hell of a way to promote it to the fans.
	Bud Light are sponsoring it.
	It goes on November.
	The news came out.
	Stephen Crowder discovered that because initially Bud Light tried to claim that we didn't do us.
	We didn't do a paid sponsorship.
	They just like our beer.
	And then it came out.
	No, you gave gave that person 185,000 US dollars.
	And to Neil Patrick Harris as well, who is also famously gay.
	No one has that much of an interest in Neil Patrick Harris.
	But 185,000 dollars.
	$185,000 for wearing a dress in a bath, drinking a beer.
	Yes.
	The production values weren't even good.
	No.
	That's transphobic.
	That is amazing money, is all I'm making the point with this.
	Good lord.
	I mean, $245,000 for Jenna Ortega in a bath.
	Fair enough.
	For how long?
	Oh.
	Sounds in his 40s.
	It's only going to be 10 seconds.
	But anyway, yeah, that came out in November, at which point, yet again, everyone just started responding with, gay, you're gay, you're a gay beer for gay people.
	It's like, huh?
	Yeah, that's a lot of damage that you're not going to get over exactly.
	December?
	Still gay.
	It's just gay juice.
	Sincerely, I don't think Bud Light can come back from this.
	Ooh, Peyton Manning as well doing the sponsorship.
	Ooh, he used to be a very famous quarterback in the NFL.
	Is he calling his rent boy then?
	Because that's exactly the point, is it's too easy.
	Because they keep trying to get manly men as their symbols.
	But of course, muscly manly men is our brand.
	It's also a bit gay.
	He's got his socks on, so that's not gay.
	Like, actually, the response you would do, if you're being accused of being gay, the thing you would do is stop doing gay stuff.
	You wouldn't keep wearing pink and whatnot and flapping about.
	Instead, you would get lots of hot women and just put them front and center.
	And be like, our brand, Hot Women.
	That's zero percent gay.
	Yes.
	But instead they went with dudes and bros hanging out on long phone calls.
	Well, at least if hot women do a bit of gayness, it's the good kind, so... We should get Dan to be Bud Light's entire marketing department.
	Oh yes, I'd nail it completely.
	They're just going to name women and you'll be like, yes, yes, no, yes.
	But, I mean, you make a great point about that fact, which is that What are you going to do?
	Literally, what are you going to do?
	Because they seem to be incapable of taking that good advice.
	Well, just have some hot women.
	Stop being such a queer man.
	But they are fixable!
	Okay, so Bud Light, what you do is you issue an apology, you make a massive donation to that Christian school that the person who is now... the tranny shot up, right?
	And then you... Did I say the hot girls?
	You do that, right?
	And with Cracker Barrel, you just rehire Brad's wife, for God's sakes.
	Whatever you need to pay her.
	Yeah, you just go hunt down Brad's wife and give her a million dollars and be like, please, please.
	We like having a social media route.
	So all of this is fixable.
	It's on the table, but Cracker Barrel didn't take that solution.
	Will Bud Light take that solution?
	I do not think so.
	Maybe Brad's wife is just negotiating really hard and just playing hardball.
	But here we go.
	This is January, in which they make a very boring tweet about beers and football.
	And again, the comments are all just, you gay.
	What are you going to do, exactly?
	I mean, we've come up with a solution, actually, but they're not going to do that, I suppose.
	I remember they actually tried to have, what was it, The Rock?
	I think it was The Rock.
	They offered to pay a million dollars, and he issued a statement saying that, I'm not going to save your woke brand.
	I'm surprised if The Rock said that, because The Rock endorsed Biden, and he's a major Democrat.
	It might not have been The Rock.
	It might have been, I don't know, John Wayne or whoever else.
	Well, because I know that they have now officially partnered with the NFL and Dana White.
	There we are.
	They're taking Bud Light sponsorships.
	Maybe, yes.
	Get the hot women.
	It's not hard.
	Just stop being gay.
	It's not difficult.
	Stop doing gay things if you don't want to be called the Gay Beards.
	It's not difficult advice, but there we are.
	But it moves on.
	If you want to look up Bud Light today and the word gay, I mean, even, what is this?
	14th?
	They're still just getting constantly whatever they do.
	You are a homosexual.
	Why are you gay?
	Who says I'm gay?
	You are gay.
	It just never stops.
	And there we are.
	I mean, that's sort of the message to learn, which is once you've been hit this hard, it's probably time to quit.
	And I have some more statistics on all this.
	I mean, oh God, we just found another one, which is they're trying to desperately be like, look, comedian, you know, cool people.
	And they're just like, nah, you gay.
	Still gay.
	But the reality on the ground still seems to be the fact that they can't even get their beer out to football fans, even though they're obsessed with sponsoring football again, which is not the best way to solve the gay problem.
	Women is the best way to solve the gay problem.
	Association of your brand.
	This is a lady here.
	And she's not the only one.
	I remember at the time, people talking about the fact that they had to give the beer away for free.
	So they were offering, you buy $15 worth of Bud Light, and you get a coupon for $15 off something else.
	The wholesalers were just abandoning the product.
	They were just like, just get it off the shelves.
	It's not worth it.
	Also, is that the girl from the aeroplane?
	Aeroplane?
	No, it's not the same one.
	It's not real.
	I choose to believe it is.
	I remember a whole bunch of other guys showing that they were taking off the pumps for Bud Light because the customers weren't buying it.
	And in fact, fights were breaking out because a guy would order Bud Light and the guy next to him would be like, what are you, gay?
	And then they just fight about who was gay.
	Physically.
	So anyway, I have come up with the correct advert for Bud Light.
	So, I haven't put this into the show notes, but if you're watching at home, what you need to do is you need to basically go into YouTube and type in Denise Richards and Nev Campbell wild thing kiss moment.
	Right?
	And basically have a Bud Light logo over it.
	Yeah, have that with Bud Light at the bottom.
	Job done.
	Not hard.
	But, you can see here, I mean the boycott has still continued well into the year.
	Let's play this.
	Oh, the audio.
	And they're not going back.
	We have some data on this.
	The most recent statistics came out and even CNN reported on this back in October.
	And the details from this are bad.
	So the whole corporation has a 13% downward turn in sales for the third quarter.
	So still in October.
	So you remember the boycott started in April.
	Even in October they're still getting massive downturns.
	It's not stabilized.
	It's still dropping off.
	As more and more men learn that this is a gay thing, stop it.
	Yes.
	And get into fights over it.
	So they say that the sales to US retailers declined 17%, quote, primarily due to the volume decline of Bud Light.
	In response, the company cut deals with wholesalers, including writing checks to distributors and increasing marketing spending on the brand.
	So that's the football and whatnot.
	Yes.
	Which, again, not the correct strategy.
	Dan has the correct strategy.
	But they say, but it also took a toll on the company's bottom line and contributed to a 29% decline in adjusted U.S.
	earnings.
	So the whole corporation, just because of the Bud Light 17% reduction in sales, just in that month, never mind the rest of it, they lost... The operational gearing effect in the, you know, that last 17% was generating an outsized proportion of their profits.
	Yeah.
	And now they're, what were the words?
	The earnings there, 29% have been wiped out.
	Yeah.
	And that's in October.
	Now John sent me something which is even more recent.
	Which is the Super Bowl.
	And, well, this is just a thing talking about the Corona is now the number one drink.
	I remember when everyone was thinking that would have terrible PR because of the virus, but never mind, wrote that out.
	Just don't do gay things, not that hard.
	But anyway, the thing in here is that they quote, Corona dethrones AB's Bud Light, which was the top seller on sales for, well, years.
	And the sales of Bud Light at the Super Bowl plummeted 50%.
	50% is just gone.
	Good.
	So of the football people, the people who would go and see the football, 50% of them who drank Bud Light are just not.
	It's still quite weird that the other 50% are still drinking it though.
	Yeah.
	You just feel like a right fag walking around with a bucket of water.
	Sense of that too!
	Oh, right.
	But you know, there are gay guys.
	Yeah, gay guys want to drink their stuff.
	That's fine.
	But at least now we know.
	I wonder if it'll become a thing.
	You know, like in the gay community, there's all these, like, dog whistles.
	There's people talking about, like, which side you have the earring on or the handkerchief or whatever else.
	Yes, maybe Bud Light will just become that.
	Yes, so if you see another man with a Bud Light, it's like you know to follow him into the memes.
	Well, maybe.
	I'll leave it there.
	But my point being that if you are Bud Light or you run a social media campaign.
	Or you're gay.
	Well, if you're gay, enjoy Bud Light.
	If you're not, then maybe don't.
	But the problem being that if you run a social media campaign or have a social media outreach and you get memed this hard, like Cracker Barrel or Bud Light, it's over.
	Just give it up.
	Go home.
	Let's go to the video comments.
	Dan, this one is for you.
	Remember your theory about the bad man, who's from Luton in Bedfordshire.
	Have you ever heard of Joanna Southcott?
	She was the centre of a Messonite cult.
	They believed that Bedford was the Garden of Eden and that she would give birth to the Second Coming.
	It turned out to be a fanny complaint and she died, but she left behind a box and...
	And they say that until the box is opened by 24 bishops, everything in the world will continue going to crap.
	So I think you need to prove that your theory is correct and you need to get in Joanna's box.
	Just any Joanna?
	Have you been in Joanna's box before, Dan?
	I think there was quite a few innuendos in there.
	I think I'm going to have to watch that one again.
	I wasn't expecting that, to be honest.
	Let me respond in the coming days to that one.
	Fair enough.
	Because I'm confused.
	To the next one.
	Evan Sayet lays out the flawed way liberals think, fundamentally stemming from their inability to discriminate.
	In fact, that word is so hateful to them that they turn every fibre of their moral code to enforcing indiscriminateness.
	Every principle must be applied indiscriminately, especially where it makes no sense.
	From this, Sayet is able to predict not what policies liberals would enact, but that they would have dire consequences.
	To make sure that indiscriminateness cannot undermine their mental health, liberals must render themselves forever intellectually infantile, hence the title of the book.
	So I've had this book recommended to me on a few gold Zoom calls before and I do intend to read it.
	So I'm going to look up The Kindergarten of Eden after the podcast.
	If it's hard to get a hold of, anyone who does want us to read and review books, we do have a PO box and you're more than welcome to send it to us.
	It's on the Find Us page on the website.
	So we like free things.
	So Joanna Southcott's box is like a real thing.
	Why, have you turned off the safe search filter?
	No, it's like it's in a museum or something.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	Carry on with the video comments, I'm working on this.
	An actual box, or...?
	Yeah, it looks like a very old box, and it's sort of held together with musty rope, and it's gone a bit grey and frayed around the edges.
	Next video comment, please!
	There are LED screens available, so thin you can see through the backside.
	With tech so advanced, you'd think Power Armor would be a piece of cake.
	Well, I think that's because Power Armor, well, empowers people.
	And see-through LCD screens don't.
	And that's why I've been taking matters into my own hands.
	You look like you're about to throw the alien queen out of an airlock.
	Why would you want a see-through TV, by the way?
	I've seen loads of these demos, these videos on Twitter, where you can see it through to the other side.
	Why?
	Why would you pay extra to have the picture also face the wall?
	I actually have no idea.
	I don't know what the point of that is.
	Maybe you have very, very expensive wallpaper behind the TV that you otherwise wouldn't see.
	Oh, is this in the Downing Street flat?
	Yes.
	I was actually used to it.
	You joke, but that is what I was getting at.
	Think back to the Civil War period in Japan, where the first thing the Shogunate did after assuming the throne was forbid the Search from ever moving ever again, pulling up the ladder behind him.
	I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that the modern project is that of modernizing feudalism, to which the movement of the common man is now the greatest obstacle yet remaining.
	Think back to the 1950s when they ran ads like, see the USA in your Chevrolet!
	They knew then that the car was the greatest means for the average man to ennoble himself, so is it any wonder why they're coming after it so hard today?
	Yeah, feudalism's base, but the way that they're trying to make us return to it is really cringe, so I'm against the level of the honest regard.
	Eh.
	I've been hearing you guys talk about rewilding a bunch and I got into a conversation with my father recently and he is passionately supportive of the concept of rewilding.
	He insists that basically there's too many deer and wolves are the only way we can stop them.
	Apparently humans can't fight deer in any other way.
	Tangentially, I remember in Star Wars Clone Wars there was like an episode where the CIS was trying to clear out resistance people on a planet and basically started releasing loads of carnivorous monsters onto the planet that clear out the resistance fighters.
	Interesting how rewilding achieves the same result.
	You can do it with birds of prey, because they'll pick off the fawns when they're really young.
	So you don't need wolves, because wolves are a really bad idea.
	But in certain nature reserves where you do have walled off areas, you can rewild that bit.
	That's fine.
	It's quite nice to visit occasionally.
	Seems easier and more fun to just popularize deer hunting.
	It's kind of annoying that it's not a massive thing in the UK because we've got a massive population of deer that need shooting.
	But they don't want us to run guns.
	That's the problem.
	It's like if you just give everyone guns and say go and hunt deer.
	I'd like to hunt a deer.
	Yeah, who wouldn't?
	Yeah.
	Sounds like great fun.
	Yes.
	Someone edit the Bambi's mum dying clip in here please.
	Go on Alex.
	Got the bastard.
	This is for Dan.
	I've been thinking about how I'm going to give back.
	I'll be paying my mortgage off fairly soon.
	And I was really inspired by a guy's segment on the trailer parks.
	And yeah, I agree.
	It actually would be a nice lifestyle if the people were the right people.
	And I was thinking maybe I could found a small trailer park that is just for the people who are trying to get their first house, but are stuck in the rent spiral.
	All of their rent would go into an escrow account, which would help them with their down payment.
	Do you think something like that could be possible?
	I don't know, but send me a message.
	I was looking at some trailer parks in the UK and some of them are affordable, but the eternal problem is they're all holiday parks.
	So you're allowed to be there for 11 months.
	So a month of the year you just gotta disappear.
	Or they're where all the gypsies live.
	That's not great either.
	Not in the UK, I mean the holiday ones.
	That's what I'm looking at.
	Yeah, but if you were going to try and live in a caravan that wasn't regulated by a holiday park, you would have to live with... Do what the gypsies do!
	Quite.
	And there's probably some law that stops you from selecting the people that goes in.
	Yeah, anti-discrimination laws.
	Yeah, and I wouldn't want to do the last bit, which is the escrow thing he was talking about.
	Just farm that out, otherwise you'll get into financial regulations.
	Though I do think with the cultivation of the beard, the self-sufficient farming he's doing, and now the creation of a trailer park community, he's basically setting himself up to his own walking dead enclave.
	He's slowly becoming a benevolent Negan.
	He's becoming a gypsy, a bad financial decision.
	Hello Lotus, he's out of context.
	No income tax.
	Steal whatever I need.
	That's not legal advice.
	And I can roam around the country as I please.
	Well, you can't really as you please, because the police will fight with you and turf you off the land.
	I just go from place to place.
	Let my dog crap everywhere.
	Do you not want a sense of permanence?
	I'm not getting it anyway, so... I don't know, just being a jipper doesn't sound that bad.
	Alright, let's go to the next one.
	It's been a while since we've had the California News section, hasn't it?
	San Francisco unanimously approved a Chinese woman who isn't even a citizen to join the Elections Commission who decide how to run elections.
	She can't even vote.
	She only arrived in 2019 and has been in a civil rights group called Chinese for Affirmative Action.
	So yes, literally a Chinese supremacy group.
	This is allowed because in 2020, voters in the city voted on a measure to allow any non-citizen to serve on any city board.
	Well, thanks for the California news update.
	I always like hearing from a California refugee because his comments and video comments are always really thoughtful.
	Yeah, people will use affirmative action to exploit it to get advantages ceded to their ethnic in-group shock.
	This is the point about America.
	It's a republic if you can keep it.
	And they didn't keep it.
	It's not a republic anymore.
	Keep it.
	Ethnically and religiously homogenous should have been the clause.
	Yes.
	Lads, I've seen in a couple of segments that you've mentioned that pensions are a pyramid scheme and are going to collapse.
	For the sake of using precise language, I need to highlight that you're explicitly talking about the state pension.
	We have three main types of pension here in the UK.
	There's private pensions, and there's the state pension, and private pensions are kind of split into two groups.
	They're quite different from each other.
	Yes, the state pension is going to collapse, but private pensions aren't.
	Yeah, that's fine.
	Yeah, but also, at our age, there's basically no reason to apply into your private pension yet.
	Because if you're trying to get a house, which is a hard asset in your 20s, then that extra few hundred a month that you're going to spaff away on a private pension... Meh.
	Yeah, I've never bothered with a pension.
	You're rich.
	Well, there was that, yeah.
	Is that all of the video comments?
	If so, can we go to Studio One on the discourse?
	Because I found a picture of Joanna's box.
	Oh, wonderful.
	Okay.
	I've been dying to see Joanna's box.
	I'm starting to think now that my original reaction was a little bit off-key, because I don't think she was making an innuendo after all.
	There were zero innuendos in the whole thing.
	She was actually talking about the physical box.
	Well, she was intending the innuendos, but yeah, she was also talking about the physical box.
	Right.
	I'll look into that one.
	Oh, we've got some comments.
	Yeah, we have to actually talk to our viewers.
	That would be a good idea.
	Oh, somebody called Rebecca with a hard A, or was it a soft A?
	Anyway, on Rumble for $20, it says, I was diagnosed with lupus in 1999.
	9.
	I had been on hydroxychloroquine for 20 years.
	April of 2020, my insurance company denied my prescription, saying hydroxy does not treat COVID-19.
	I have not had my treatment.
	You haven't had it since?
	That's criminal!
	That is insane!
	Of course, she was on it for some other reason, and they stopped it just in case she might have wanted to use it for COVID.
	Living proof of the current thing, Cameron.
	A lot of suffering and dying.
	So many people need to be jailed for the COVID-19 stuff.
	Quite, yeah.
	Speaking of, Derek Powell, this whole thing is classic emotional abuse and manipulation.
	You wouldn't tolerate this nonsense if it was any kind of relationship.
	There would be a severe reckoning when the government does this thing.
	Yeah, no pun intended.
	I'm not going to hold my breath for any accountability from the COVID inquiry, but quite.
	It does mirror an abusive relationship you would have with a spouse that sort of pendulum swings backwards and forwards between moods and confines you and deprives you of your basic necessities.
	They are evil people, frankly.
	The COVID show seems unrealistic.
	The nurses weren't dancing.
	Quite.
	But we're still paying for it anyway.
	It looks like a zombie movie.
	Yeah, that's quite interesting framing, isn't it?
	All of the pandemic close-up shots, it does look like the prelude to a zombie outbreak.
	I mean, everyone who fell for that stuff isn't, you know, sentient, so... Captain Charlie the Beagle, good to hear from you.
	The proof, to me, that something was wrong about lockdowns was that the virus mysteriously vanished during the BLM riots and marches and no one even got in trouble for it, yet the protests against lockdowns were no big super spread event.
	Actually no, it was even worse than that.
	New York public health body said that it was actually good that they were going out and protesting, not just because it was their democratic right to protest, but actually intermingling during the summer might boost people's immune systems.
	Curious that, innit?
	The virus can distinguish between what you're protesting for.
	If you're protesting for things the government wants, it likes it.
	If it protests against things the government wants, it doesn't like it.
	But also somehow the virus is racist and targets more black people.
	Don't ask questions, just KOOF product.
	Can we just scroll down slightly, John?
	I'll just do one more quick one, please.
	I don't have a mouse at the moment.
	So if you live, there's a new show in Denmark where the plot is that Denmark is sinking into the ocean and other countries have closed their borders.
	Because it wouldn't be horrible if you were the refugee and Uganda refused to help.
	If they did that to California, I think most of America would be really thankful for that.
	If that just sort of sank into the ocean.
	But, yes.
	Well, that's why I now realise that from Superman 2 Lex Luthor was the hero and Superman was the villain, because he stopped California being sunk into the sea.
	Isn't that Superman 1?
	No, no, you're thinking of Superman Returns with Kevin Spacey, aren't you?
	Where he was trying to buy the island of Kryptonite.
	Am I thinking of the right one as well?
	I have no idea.
	All those movies suck.
	Dan, you're second.
	Right.
	Yes, so, Brendan Fisher has made an argument for 2004 because we had Lord of the Rings Return of the King, Spider-Man 2, Shaun of the Dead, Shrek 2, oh, come on.
	Oh, so Spider-Man 2 is rubbish.
	Incredibles, Scooby-Doo 2 and Passion of the Christ.
	Okay, that's a really good year.
	No, Baystape has a better one.
	He has 1999.
	Bloody hell, this is one year of films, right?
	Fight Club, Matrix, Mummy, Office Space... No, I didn't see the other one.
	The Phantom Menace, The Fly Who Shagged Me, American Pie, The Sixth Sense, Blair Wicks' Problem, and my personal favourite, South Park, Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.
	Okay, I haven't seen like half of those.
	So, yeah, that was quite good.
	Oh, Sophie Liv says the way they make movies now is also insane.
	They don't really have a finished script before they film.
	Rather, they film eight hours of stuff for a two-hour movie and then cut it down afterwards, show to test audiences and change the movie completely based on feedback.
	Then they have to do reshoots to fit the newer vision anyway.
	Have you ever heard about the story what happened with Justice League?
	It's genuine madness.
	If you wanted to do a film, Broconomics is great.
	They shot the whole thing.
	Snyder shot it as a four-hour film.
	He shot it in IMAX.
	It's really expensive.
	And then by the time it came to editing, his daughter had killed herself.
	So he asked for time off during the editing stage to then go to the funeral.
	They said no and sacked him because the critics didn't like his films, but the fans came out and actually supported it because the previous one nearly made a billion.
	So then the head of filmmaking and comics hired Joss Whedon from the Avengers films to come in and reshoot the whole film in a couple of months including reshooting Henry Cavill when he was filming Mission Impossible and he had contractually not allowed to shave his moustache so they CGI'd over his face.
	And so they doubled the budget and made absolutely nothing on the show.
	Did Snyder Cut get released?
	Snyder Cut did get released in 2021.
	Okay, that was the one that I watched, and it was a bit long, but it was coherent.
	It's really good.
	Yeah.
	And it's very long.
	The original one sucks, don't ever watch it, but if you just wanted an exercise on how to waste money through just... Right.
	Weird filmmaking bike-nitty strategies.
	That's a perfect example.
	Fair enough.
	You better do something of yours, Callum.
	Sure.
	So, Jersey Angel sends in $10 to say... Thank you.
	If you want to predict the future of Bud Light, ask a Vietnam-era American what they think of Jane Fonda.
	Yes, quite.
	Well, on that note, we're pretty much out of time.
	So, if you'd like more from lotuseasers.com... Well, it's on lotuseasers.com, isn't it?
	Anyway, bye!

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