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April 3, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:29:30

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1135

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	Hello and welcome to podcast of the Lotus Eaters episode 1135 on this the Thursday 3rd of April.
	I am joined by Bo, Harry.
	Hello. We have the three most based Lotus Eaters all in one place.
	You're welcome.
	So yes, hopefully this goes.
	What are we going to be talking about?
	We're going to be talking about Taris.
	Because everybody has got it wrong apart from me, obviously.
	So I will explain the correct version of that.
	Harry, you've been thinking about assisted dying.
	Yeah, every day gets more and more difficult.
	Yes. Well, let's...
	I mean, we can't legally encourage you, can we?
	I mean, not yet.
	Right, okay.
	And Bo is going to be talking about aliens building pyramids or something?
	Yeah. The business secret of the pharaohs.
	Yeah. It must be aliens.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Yeah, right.
	Okay, so...
	The explanation.
	No announcements.
	Wait, so no moon landing, but aliens built the pyramids.
	Right, you continually misrepresent my position on this.
	I have legitimate questions about it, on both fronts, and I hear- He's asking questions, bro.
	Yes, exactly.
	Right, okay.
	But let's get the game face on for the Utards, so I can do the first segment.
	Samson's just adjusting the cameras and everything.
	Right, anyway, we're going- You're probably getting out of focus, Samson.
	We're probably good to go.
	You can't capture my true beauty.
	So Donald Trump has brought in his tariffs and it's upset everybody because it is bigger than they were expecting.
	I mean isn't this exactly what he's been saying he would do since before he was elected?
	About the last 30 or 40 years.
	Yes he's been saying he would do this if he was in a position to do so and he's actually done it.
	The worrying thing for me is is that every single take I've seen on this is just plain wrong.
	Every take on the mainstream media, on the financial press, on the Republican side, the MAGA side, the Libtard side, everybody is not getting this.
	But actually if you just read a little bit deeper into what Trump is saying, his side comments, it does explain what's going on.
	Anyway, I'm going to explain the whole lot.
	I will not We're getting into the role of the dollar itself.
	So we've got this Broconomics on the Empire of Dollars that addresses that angle.
	So if you've got any comeback on, I didn't explore that option, that's fine.
	I've only got a 20-minute segment here.
	If I do a Broconomics on tariffs, I'll get into all of this.
	But yeah, I'm aware of that fact.
	I just don't think it's necessary for this.
	So first of all, let's get into the actual Big news itself that came out last night shocked the world.
	Let's play a little bit of this So we're just gonna feel for where the man is at So if you look at that China first row China 67% that's tariffs charged to the USA including currency manipulation and trade barriers, so 67% I think you can for the most part see it those with good eyes with bad eyes We didn't want to bring the it's very windy out here We didn't want to bring out the big charts because it had no chance of standing Fortunately, we came armed with a little smaller charge.
	So it's 67 percent.
	So we're going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34 percent.
	I think, in other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less.
	So how can anybody be upset?
	They will be, because we never charge anybody anything.
	But now we're going to charge.
	European Union, they're very tough, very, very tough traders.
	You know, you think of European Union, very friendly, they rip us off, it's so sad to see.
	It's so pathetic.
	39%, we're gonna charge them 20%, so we're charging them essentially half.
	Vietnam, great negotiators, great people.
	They like me, I like them.
	The problem is they charge us 90%, we're gonna charge them 46% tariff.
	Taiwan, where they make...
	Right, okay, so I'll stop that there.
	So he's basically just taken the tariffs that they're charging the US and halved them and said, here you go.
	He's saying that he's doing that.
	All right.
	Claiming that he's doing that.
	So, for example, if you get down to the UK, I mean, I won't play the UK bit, but the UK gets like a 10% tariff.
	The thing is we're not charging him 10%.
	I mean, we've got a 2.5% fee that we charge everybody.
	And that's about it.
	And you could try and claim that he's factoring in VAT or something like that, but that's not it either.
	So he's presenting these, and by the way, I'm on Trump's side on all of this.
	I'm just saying that the framing that he's giving us is not actually correct.
	So he's framing it as if those are the charges of stuff, of American goods going in, and then he's just halving it.
	That's what he wants you to think.
	Because this is actually going to be a tax raise on Americans.
	And again, Actually, I do support it, and I'll get into why.
	Only if they're buying the foreign stuff though, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	But I mean, tariffs are paid by the country that they arrive in.
	So, you know, you can't, I mean, you can't tax somebody in Vietnam.
	With tariffs, just to clarify for me, if you are an importer, when you import those goods, you pay the people who are exporting it, and then the tariffs you pay on top of that.
	Well, no, you pay a duty when When you receive something in.
	Yeah. You'll be charged a levy on that.
	If you just buy an American car instead of a European Union car or a Japanese car, are there...
	Yeah, there won't be any tariff.
	Right. That's the whole point.
	But wouldn't the costs come back if the materials that have been used to build that car have been imported themselves and they have the tariffs on top of them, so that would extend the cost as well?
	Yeah, that would push up the cost, but still you want to be doing the value-add bit in America.
	So you want to do as much in America as you can, well if you're American.
	The whole point of protectionism is to encourage domestic manufacture as far as I'm aware.
	Yeah I mean that's it, I mean you two have nailed it straight away.
	This is something the entire commentariat cannot get their head around, what's going on here.
	And essentially what it is, is because America is in a completely unsustainable position and they just can't kick the can down the road forever.
	Now I'm going to give you one like, because there's lots, it was like 50 minutes long this thing and it's mostly him Telling us how great he is and how everybody loves him.
	Which is fair enough.
	I mean, he is Trump.
	But there was one key line at the end, so I'll read that.
	If you want your tariff rate to be zero, then build your product right here in America.
	Because there is no tariff if you build the plant, your product, in America, Trump said.
	And that's how he signed off the end.
	Offshore to us.
	Yeah, bring it back.
	Bring it back.
	That's what he's saying.
	Now, let me just build up on my point about how the current situation is unsustainable.
	Because, The entire commentariat, even right-wing commentariat, are coming at this from the line of this is a variation of where we are now, and it put costs up against where we are now, and therefore it is a bad thing.
	But here's the problem.
	Where we are now is mental.
	So this is the US debt clock.
	I think I'm having a stroke looking at this.
	Yeah, I mean, it is a bit busy, but I'll point out the key areas.
	So the US national debt.
	It's like 37 trillion.
	That's insane.
	How did we get to a position like that?
	Okay, so the U.S. spends...
	That's about 100 grand every five seconds it's going up.
	Yeah, something like that, yeah.
	Well, a bit less than that, I think.
	No, a bit faster than that.
	So the U.S. is spending 7 trillion every year and it's collecting in taxes 5 trillion every year.
	So, in fact, I'll quickly go to the world level that just gives you the quick balance.
	Right, so the US debt and its GDP is about the same thing.
	Now that's actually quite helpful when the two numbers are the same because then you simply need to ask one question.
	Which is growing faster?
	The debt is growing faster and therefore the debt will consume everything if this isn't stopped.
	So the current situation that the U.S. is in is insane.
	This has to be stopped.
	As you can see here, the U.S. does not have a tax raising problem as such.
	It has a spending problem.
	But all the time it's got that enormous 2 trillion deficit.
	It is just unwinding the roots of the country.
	So that has to be turned around quickly.
	So when you hear about how mad it is, just remember that no, where we are starting from is the mad bit.
	The U.S. We're good to
	go! So basically it transfers to boomers, people who don't want to work, blowing stuff up and paying dead.
	So, first one there.
	Nice and simple there.
	Yeah, Medicare, Medicaid, that takes up one and a half trillion.
	Social Security, that's another one and a half trillion.
	Defence is another trillion, basically.
	I think it's much bigger than that number once you factor in all the intelligence services stuff as well.
	Yeah, it's probably closer to another one and a half rather than just under one.
	And then debt, interest, they've got to pay.
	And that's mental because, you know, at least with that, you've got happy boomers.
	At least with that, you've got people in inner cities waddling around getting corn syrup stuffed down their throat, not having to work.
	So at least you're getting something.
	And at least with that, you get to watch a pretty explosion.
	But with that...
	He's just the hegemon of the world.
	Well, yeah, and that.
	I mean, this is the cost of Empire.
	Fair enough.
	But this bit, that debt interest, that's just a trillion that is just going up in smoke.
	That's just...
	That's just the bill coming due on all the rampant spending of the past few decades.
	It's so annoying when you get an overdraft.
	You get charged for using your overdraft.
	Or when you look at the interest on your own mortgage.
	Will that be interest that they need to repay to, what, their own banks?
	Oh, all over the place.
	Some of it will be their own Citizens Pension Fund, some of it will be China, some of it will be, you know, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia.
	It'd be going all over the place, that money.
	But anyway, so this situation cannot stand, this has to change.
	But the thing is, he can't just come out and say, I'm going to...
	It's two things he's achieving.
	Partly, it's a bit of a tax increase, but he can't come out and say, I'm raising taxes in America, although all his critics are going to Make that claim, so I need to address it.
	But actually, it's more about reorientating stuff.
	America doesn't need cheap Chinese tat.
	What America needs is homes and jobs.
	And that is what he's actually trying to change.
	In fact, I'll show you...
	Here we go, we've got the actual tariffs.
	Interestingly, it appears that it's being derived from a simple Excel formula, rather than what he's claiming, which is reciprocal tariffs.
	I will come to that in a second.
	Still, it's interesting that if those numbers, the numbers saying what the other countries are charging the United States, if they're even remotely true or close, that's remarkable to me.
	Because look at it, it's sort of mad.
	You talk about free trade, or Donald Trump's the enemy of free trade, well...
	Wait a minute, what about everyone else in the whole world?
	It's saying tariffs charged, including currency manipulation, trade barriers, so...
	It actually is not really that.
	I mean, a lot of these countries do have effective tariffs against the United States, so it's not completely wrong, but it's not really right either.
	I mean, if you look at some of the big ones there, like Vietnam's massive, or Cambodia, or Myanmar, I saw one there, Madagascar, I mean, or Laos.
	It's funny, actually, with the Vietnam War.
	Is Madagascar a big threat of importing American goods?
	Well, exactly.
	This is what I was going to say.
	I mean, what is Vietnam and Madagascar importing from the United States?
	Now, it's all worked out on physical goods, which is key.
	It is not including...
	Commodities. Services.
	Right, okay.
	Right. So if you are a Lotus Eaters subscription holder, don't be worried.
	You're probably not going to get tariffed for watching the Lotus Eaters.
	Although the Islander...
	Probably will get I was just gonna say what about the island?
	Yeah, but at least at least the UK is down at 10% because we we also have a fantasy economy I'll be coming to that right and actually on the point of how these were worked out Some guy figured it out.
	So so basically what they're doing is they're taking the trade deficit divided by the exports leaving out services That's quite low resolution anyway you cut it yeah, but essentially what it's doing is people who send us real stuff If we're not sending them an equal amount of real stuff back, they're getting a bigger tariff.
	And that kind of explains why Vietnam, the rate is so high, and why China the rate is so high.
	It's because those countries are actually doing real things.
	Manufacturing. Well, I mean in Vietnam, I don't know how much it's manufacturing.
	It's probably sewing a lot of t-shirts and stuff like that.
	A lot of garments are probably being made there.
	But nevertheless, it is a real thing.
	That's getting shipped over to America.
	And America, of course, doesn't send much to Vietnam, thus the huge imbalance.
	So effectively, the way you've got to think about this is he is going after real things.
	He wants to rebalance real things being moved into the United States and real work being done in the United States.
	And the criticism of all of this is that you're going to push up costs, you're going to push up taxes and stuff, and you're going to damage the economy.
	Now, yes, he is going to damage the economy, right?
	But let's get to the sort of big takeaway here.
	Good. Because what is the real...
	I'm going to show you what the real US economy looks like.
	Can we play this video?
	My co-workers keep saying I need to make a tech TikTok, because if you look at my TikTok, you'd never guess I have a job.
	So anyways, this is our current workstation.
	Callie and I are what you call product managers.
	Callie, what is your team over?
	My team is over reporting and internal tools.
	And I am over what we call card experience.
	So we work on anything from activating your credit card to freezing, reissue, shipping, all the good stuff.
	What's a PM?
	We help prioritize and help the engineers stay on track and help them know what to build so that you have a product to use.
	Yeah, exactly.
	So you might have a team, like the engineers actually do the developing, the coding, which is the impressive part.
	Designers also do the impressive part.
	Right, okay, you get the point.
	You know when a little kid, a small child, like a five or six year old, it starts parroting adults?
	They obviously don't know what they're saying.
	Or perhaps a foreign language actor doing Shakespeare, and they're just reading the line.
	They're saying the words, but they obviously have got no idea what they're saying or what they're talking about.
	That's the impression I've got about these two young ladies.
	I was thinking more like when a small child wants to help you do some DIY housework, and they obviously can't actually do anything.
	So you give them, say, a nut and a screw, and you say, solve this for me, and they go off in the corner and they think that they're helping, but you're just getting them out of the way.
	So that...
	Right, except, except we've, well, we in the Western world have created an entire society and an economy that made up work for women has become the economy, right?
	So she's probably getting paid 60, 70, maybe 80k a year.
	I mean, do you remember those TikToks from a few years ago of my life, a day in the life of a Chicago tech worker, and it's just girls going for brunch with their friends?
	Yeah. Sit down for half an hour, answer a few emails, and then they go and play pool for the rest of the evening and get drunk.
	This is entirely my big point.
	Yes, when the lefties say that these tariffs are going to damage the US economy, yes, it will damage the US economy, but that's because the US economy is not entirely, but largely, absolute bullshit.
	Yeah, that's the problem.
	It is not a well-engineered, perfect structure with no faults that must be preserved because of its purity.
	No, it's an economy run on debt, importing cheap plastic tap from China.
	You have women working absolute bullshit.
	Meanwhile, you have good men in large parts of the country hooked on opium and unemployed because there's no real work, no manufacturing, nothing tangible, nothing real.
	That's the problem.
	That is what Trump is trying to address.
	So real economics is happening in Asia.
	Real stuff is getting done.
	Bullshit wankery like this is happening in the West.
	And basically those high tariffs, as you saw before, they're targeting the real stuff.
	They're creating an incentive for that real stuff to be sent over and done in America.
	Which is why the UK tariffs are so low.
	So again, Everybody's take on this is wrong.
	You're going to see some people saying that the low tariff that UK is paying is a Brexit dividend or something like that or Keir Starmer's cool negotiation handling of Trump.
	No, no it's none of that.
	It's because our economy is as much bullshit as their economy and therefore we don't make any real stuff because Asia's doing all of it and so therefore we get a low tariff rate because we're also a bullshit economy.
	That's what's going on.
	The other angle I saw which I thought was Palpably nonsense.
	I wonder what you're taking on it.
	It was a picture, a cartoon, a drawing, a meme of Trump taking a piss.
	And the piss is just blowing back into his face.
	I didn't see that.
	It was just some stupid cartoon on Twitter.
	And I was like, this is what tariffs are!
	This is what America's doing to itself by...
	And I was like, no, no, no, no, that's not right.
	If Trump wants to increase manufacturing in the United States then he's not pissing in his own face at all.
	Also leftists are always in favor of massively hiking taxes on large corporations except for when all of a sudden it's done in the form of tariffs which will basically do the same thing because it's a tax that might encourage large corporations to actually onshore work that could help American people.
	I mean, rather than just give out free handouts via...
	I mean, no taxes really fall on corporations, they always fall on consumers in the end, but I mean, I take your point.
	The lefties can't get their messaging right on this stuff.
	If we take car manufacture, for an example, because it's easy for everyone to get their mind around, a foreign car manufacturer, I don't know, Toyota or something, or BMW or Audi or something like that, Trump's simply saying, look, if you want to sell tons of Toyotas in the United States, just build a Toyota factory in the United States.
	Instead of building them in wherever, Indonesia, and then shipping them.
	It'll probably work, right?
	It should work.
	And that's simply in America's interest.
	Yes. I mean, it's simple, and you guys get it straight away.
	Honestly the entire commentary it cannot see this they cannot see past the end of their nose and Just to return to your point about the comic about him pissing in his own face Well, that's what it looks like to them because in the short term This will damage the economy, you know people like this because she next time she wants to buy a flat-screen TV it's gonna cost more because they're gonna be tariffs from wherever it gets imported in and Unless she buys American I don't know how
	many TVs are produced in America.
	I'd imagine that has gone down, a bit like the car industry and stuff like that.
	But the game plan here is not to look good week by week like Biden was doing.
	So what Biden was doing is, I mean, he was making an enormous mess, and I kept on saying this throughout the Biden presidency, I kept on coming in and making these points during the podcast, is I don't think most people realise how damaging Biden is being with his debt and his insane government spending and all the rest of it.
	Yeah, but what he did on the short term is he would get like the Department of Jobs or whatever to produce numbers that were fake that made him look better than he was and then they just revise it like a year later and say oh actually no those numbers from a year ago we've had to revise them and then there was a massive revision the day that Trump came in say oh yeah all those Trump numbers yeah they're a bit made up So his thing was looking good short term.
	All you have to do is walk outside, put down the New York Times which is telling you that the economy is good.
	Walk outside and you can see for yourself that that clearly isn't it.
	But the problem is now is that Trump is going to have a difficult period for the next 18 months or couple of years at least because this is going to impose costs but the economy is not going to readjust that quickly.
	If people want to reshore manufacturing it's going to take a couple of years to get that online.
	So he's got a problem for the midterms because all of the cost is going to fall short and this is why he's acting so fast.
	This is why he's doing it right away.
	He's only been in for like 100 days or something and he's already pulling sort of big moves like this.
	People aren't getting it right and I did think about including some reaction from people and I watched a whole bunch of you know like verse Ursula von der Leyen and, you know, the Australian PM, and I watch whole loads of news panel reactions and stuff like that, and they're all basically saying the same thing, just in a really boring and missing-the-point way.
	Can't see past the end of their nose.
	And eventually I found a comment on Zero Hedge, which is a bit more fruity, and it sort of makes the point.
	But basically every single response is this.
	In a different way.
	So I'll read this to you.
	So he's saying absolute effing morons spouting lies and crackhead economic theories that will F over his supporters.
	F Congress utterly absent.
	It's their authority that he's upserving.
	Cowards. When America implodes make sure everyone remembers the lunatic and his MAGA lemmings.
	Unthinking cretins deserve to be coming down on a pike.
	Tariffs are Taxes paid by Americans, four exclamation marks after the word Americans there.
	Tariffs are paid by Americans when they buy imported products.
	Virtually everything is imported, in whole or in part.
	Everything you buy is going up.
	Right. Now to you, sir, in order to understand the problem here, all you need to do is read your own comment.
	The bit that I've highlighted there.
	Virtually everything is imported.
	That's what Trump's trying to tackle?
	Yes. That's the whole point of this, is to tackle that?
	That is the point.
	He actually wrote it down himself.
	Virtually everything is imported.
	He wrote it himself and he can't see the problem.
	All he can see is that next time he goes to buy a flat screen TV or polo shirt, it's going to cost a bit more.
	Cannot get his head right.
	I didn't like I didn't want to do too much reaction to it because it's just annoying I will do one from Mike Pence who is an absolute snake obviously But he's also incompetent short-sighted foolish snake because you know here he is going on about tariffs and about how it's gonna put the cost of for American families up three thousand five hundred dollars per year and So he's basically saying,
	yeah, your imported Chinese tat is going to get more expensive.
	Yeah, it goes up $3,000, $3,500 per year if you insist on buying foreign things.
	Yes. That's quite a big caveat.
	You don't have to do that.
	Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the things that made North America such a powerful country, the USA, in the first place was the fact that it was so Resource rich and there was so much manufacturing being done particularly in the northeast of the country in like the New England and...
	Oh they were a powerhouse at one time!
	Yeah yeah it turned them into an economic powerhouse that were almost entirely able to sustain themselves and that's what made them so powerful.
	Yep and you kind of need to go back to my first link the Broconomics the Empire of Dollars to kind of see how that unraveled which I can't get into here but but you're absolutely right.
	We've talked about that before there's only a few countries in the world that are Capable of being entirely self-sufficient in terms of resources and the United States is one of them So there's absolutely no reason why they can't become a powerhouse of manufacturing again Well,
	all it takes is a bit of leadership and somebody willing to destroy the US economy short term by which I basically mean bullshit women's work and Chinese tat And say to that last guy you just had up there, going effing morons, say to people like that, just be quiet, child.
	Yeah, yeah, shut up.
	Well, and also to Mike Pence, because I don't think we've ripped into him enough either.
	So let me tell you about Mike.
	Mike cannot see the big picture.
	Mike cannot.
	I mean, you two got it straight away.
	Which is really good because, honestly, I've watched so much reaction and none of them got it the way that you two got it straight away.
	Well, I think people like Mike Pence and a lot of the other people aren't necessarily looking at it from a national perspective, they're looking at it from a globalist perspective.
	And from a globalist perspective, this will hamper free trade, this will re-nationalize the American economy, which is a bad thing as far as they're concerned.
	I keep seeing this clip get Popped up on my timeline every so often, where some anti-MAGA Republican will say, now this is real conservatism, and it's a clip of George W. Bush after he was done in office, where he's saying, oh, there's three big isms that have plagued America in the past.
	One of them is isolationism, the other is protectionism, and the final one is nativism.
	All of those is Americans looking after Americans.
	Yeah, that was what made America great in the 19th century, was all of those things.
	Not getting involved in foreign wars so they could build themselves up without constant disruption.
	Not having to compete with foreign manufacturers for everything because they could just build everything themselves.
	And obviously nativism, they had lots of massive I've just seen a comment scroll past in the chat that I like so I'm going to read it now.
	He's saying, our economy is a cancer and Trump just ordered chemo.
	Yeah. Yeah, that's it.
	What happens when you start getting chemo?
	You get sicker.
	And then you get better.
	But is it not just funny that some of these people will go back to George W. Bush, war criminal, and say, like, ah, now, can't we return to the glory days of American conservatism when he just did everything against the best intentions of the American people?
	I just want to rip Mike a little bit more because, you know, he's saying that the average family is going to be 3,500 a year worse off.
	People like Mike in Mike's circles are probably going to be paying a lot less and a lot more than three and a half thousand because they buy a lot of imported stuff that they don't need.
	I'll tell you who's not going to be paying more.
	It's going to be people like his mates.
	Now I'm not building up Oliver Antony as an individual because...
	It's a funny steal you chose there.
	Yeah there's obvious issues there.
	I'm talking about the kind of people who lives in the kind of town he comes from.
	The kind of people that he went to school with.
	They're not going to be paying an extra three and a half grand because they don't have a bloody job.
	And they're not spending all their time buying flat-screen TVs from China.
	What they do is they want a job and they want a house.
	And guys that he went to school with are not the sort of guys who are going to get a job like those girls, where they're going to be a product manager for a fashion company and they're going to...
	whatever, you know, the bullshit, the vocal fry bullshit that goes along with that, where they basically just recolor a t-shirt and stick a logo on it and then get it produced in Vietnam by some guy who's working for a dollar a day and then ships it over.
	Right, that isn't real work, but the men of America that have been passed over, they need to do real work.
	Right, now...
	I was just going to say real quick, the other reason why I think a lot of the commentary class are just failing to get the point, failing to understand what Trump's doing, Just arguing in bad faith because they're sort of never Trumpers or they've got TDS.
	Or whatever.
	Or rhinos.
	Yeah, right.
	One reason or another, they want to see Trump fail, want to see Trump lose, and so they just make any argument they can to...
	against what he's doing.
	But you are right, the whole, oh, extra three and a half grand.
	Well, for those places that have been completely disenfranchised, where all of the industry left 30 plus years ago, and is now just a ghost town.
	Well, if now, a factory opens up there if somebody decides to offshore their manufacture back to america well i mean he's got a job now so he's he's earning money and actually has money to spend which is not a three and a half grand before before i move on to my final point i'll just uh josie in the chat said danny you're making fun of appalachian no i'm not i'm saying that those guys should have jobs and that this is necessary that's my entire point i'm not making fun i'm saying that it should be uh change but right okay finally let me explain why this is
	More than just policy, not politics, which is my point throughout, I'm telling you why is this a absolutely hyper-real, why this is a necessity, why this must happen.
	I'm going to tell you about a report put together by US General Mark Milley.
	Not my favourite.
	Yeah, so even he recognised the problem here.
	In 2018 there was a Pentagon-led report that basically said, where they identified hundreds of instances where the US military is reliant on China for essential materials including microelectrics, rare earth minerals, advanced electronics and ammunition.
	So we have a...
	the US military is dependent on China at hundreds of different breakpoints.
	This is why manufacturing needs to come back.
	Now, I'm running a bit long on time, but I am gonna have to play this video of Pete Hegseth explaining the extent of the problem.
	And if you cannot see why Trump is doing what he's doing after listening to this video, then God help you.
	The Pentagon is in the book the exact amount of years, but in the past X number of years, 10, 12, 15, the Pentagon has a perfect record in all of its war games against China.
	We lose every time inside the Pentagon war games.
	We know what our real capability is.
	You see, we didn't even get to this part of the war on warriors.
	I mean, the military-industrial conflicts, the way we procure weapon systems, you know, we're always, the way our system works, the way our bureaucratic system works, where the speed of weapons procurement works, we're always a decade behind in fighting the last war.
	Whereas China, we have, you know, what did Rumsfeld say?
	You go to the War of the Army and you have, we have the army, China's building an army specifically dedicated to defeating the United States of America.
	That is their strategic outset.
	Take hypersonic missiles.
	So if our whole Our whole power projection platform is aircraft carriers and the ability to project power that way strategically around the globe.
	And yeah, we have a nuclear triad and all of that, but a big part of it.
	And if, you know, 15 hypersonic missiles can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict, what does that look like?
	Yeah. I mean, and when they're, if they've already got us by the balls economically, which you pointed out very well, with our grid, culturally there's plenty of elite capture going on around the globe.
	I mean, and then microchips and everything.
	Why do they want Taiwan?
	They want to corner the market completely on the technological future.
	We can't even drive our cars without the stuff we need out of China these days.
	I mean, they have a full spectrum, long-term view of not just regional, but global domination.
	And we have our heads off our asses.
	There you go, Trump has shocked the world with tariffs and that's a good thing.
	Right, let's do a couple of quick comments because people have been very generous.
	Lord of Nothing says Everything lined up.
	I just got Islander 2, I have them all, and by tomorrow's podcast I'll be in England from the USA heading for a wedding.
	Oh, I hope you're going to one of the sensible bits.
	Hopefully you are.
	Alex says, greeting gentlemen, where's my sharp review coming?
	We should do a sharp.
	I don't know how we'd do it.
	I thought you'd do one yearly sharp.
	No, no, no, the soldier chap.
	Yes, yes.
	Well, she can go on History Bro on YouTube.
	Oh, you've done a run?
	And the first three or is it four novels I've done a long-form review of.
	An hour, an hour and a half apiece.
	Oh, okay.
	I've done Sharpe's Tiger.
	The first three, I can't even remember.
	It was a long time ago now.
	I mean to do them all.
	Sharpe's Tiger is the first one anyway.
	I've only watched the TV so it's not there.
	Up to Sharpe's Trafalgar I've done.
	Incredibly put him in the Battle of Trafalgar as well, against all the odds.
	Anyway, there's some there already for you on History Bro, check them out.
	Yeah, very good.
	But we will do something here, I'd like to see.
	Yes, yeah, that'd be fun.
	I just need to get around to watching them.
	And the Engaged View says Oliver Antony is not from Appalachia, he's from the Tidewater region of Virginia.
	Oh, okay.
	He talks about...
	He sings about Richmond, doesn't he?
	Richmond, Virginia.
	I don't know if he's from there.
	The Rich Men from Richmond, I think, was the big song that he did.
	Okay, sorry, I may have got my geography slightly wrong on the US, but okay.
	It's still the poor, rural, sort of once industrial areas.
	Are we all right, Samson?
	Make sure you get Dan's blue side.
	There was a lot of fiddling on the cameras today.
	Samson has suffered a bout of paranoia partway through the podcast.
	It's my camera getting all of the attention.
	He's not capturing me as beautifully as I should be framed, apparently.
	Let's go with that.
	Let's go with that, Dan.
	And with that, there has been developments in the campaign for assisted dying in the UK.
	So, back in November, MPs voted in support of a proposal to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, and that has been led by Kim Ledbetter.
	Is that how you pronounce her name?
	Ledbetter? No, Ledbetter, I think.
	Whatever, and that means that now it's going through amendments and trying to get it through so that they can make sure that that gets pushed through.
	I think it's been delayed where the changes that they're going to be making for it should have been implemented within two years, but now because of the way that they're adjusting the process for how people will be assessed for eligibility of assisted dying, it may take four years.
	So if everything goes ahead with this, we can expect assisted dying to be a reality in the future.
	Wales by 2029.
	I've got really mixed feelings on this.
	Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
	I'm not going to try and create moral panic over this.
	I'm not going to try and be sensationalist about it.
	But I do think there are some concerns about introducing this kind of legislation to England and Wales, particularly with the NHS, particularly with how it's gone and been used in Canada as basically a cost saving measure.
	But at the same time, I have to be honest, I can see from a certain perspective, if somebody is dying, if they're terminally ill, suffering in constant pain, basically have no agency over their lives, that allowing them to have some agency of when to end their life with a greater amount of dignity makes sense to me.
	I don't know about you, I mean, that's pretty much where I come down on this.
	So, I mean, if...
	You look at it from one angle, where people are in considerable pain and it's their choice, they want it, their family agree.
	I'm quite happy with the family making that decision, the individual making that decision.
	What horrifies me is the state having this power.
	Because, exactly like you say, they will just make it a bureaucratic process, and once they've built the process, they will try and shovel as many people through it as possible.
	Just like Canada.
	Interestingly enough, as we go further, Wes Streeting himself, the health secretary, has voiced those same concerns.
	In the lead up to the vote that went on in November, in October he explicitly stated that he was going to be voting against it and that he was concerned that having this process in place could Insight some pressure in some people because we have the cult of the NHS worship the almighty NHS We need to do whatever we can to save money for the NHS to make sure that it works perfectly And make sure that we as mere mortals are not burdening the NHS He
	said that it might lead to a slippery slope where people who feel like there may be in palliative care or putting too much strain may decide to go with assisted dying just so that they're not burdening the NHS more than they otherwise might If
	we were still in the age of the local family doctor who's known you your whole life, I'd be so much more comfortable with this.
	But of course, you know, once this is breached it will not stop at whatever point it comes in at.
	Well, at the moment, if it is approved, the bill is only set to allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to seek help to end their own life.
	Which sounds very reasonable, but you can see In the case of Canada, or in somewhere like Switzerland, how those kinds of, uh, those kinds of limitations could slowly be stripped away and it can be expanded.
	Like in Switzerland, for instance, I think, um, I've forgotten her name.
	She was the woman who decided to dress up as a man for a year and wrote a book as it, um, about it.
	We did the book club on her.
	I've forgotten her name, but as a result of her depression, she decided in her mid-fifties to end her own life and went to Switzerland specifically to get assisted dying and was granted I can't remember her name but it was a great book.
	She spent a year as a man and found it so stressful and so challenging to her feminist views that actually men don't have it easier, they have it so much worse.
	She ended up having to kill herself.
	Yeah, she had lasting trauma.
	As a result of being a man for a year.
	And ended up killing herself.
	Having no sympathy from anyone ever.
	She thought that men had it easy, and when she realised that men have it so much harder than women, she couldn't deal with the cognitive dissonance.
	Well, again, the book's well worth reading.
	Self-Made Man is the name of the book.
	Just Google that for me so that we can get the name up.
	I feel like there's a big difference between a young pretty woman and non-pretty or older women.
	And she was a lesbian, and a bit of a butch lesbian, which is why she was able to pass as a man for a year.
	Nora Vincent.
	Nora Vincent, thank you very much.
	So, I worry about it being expanded to the point where you can just be like, well I've got depression, kill me.
	I think in Canada it's something like, if you ring your local doctor, you just need to press 5 or something, and it sort of, they send a bot out.
	I think Twitter memes might have it that way, but it is slightly different.
	And anyway, so, They point out here, you know, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, and Austria have already introduced assisted dying law since 2015.
	So the amendments that they're going for is that there was a required high court approval for assisted death.
	So you needed to go to a high court judge who would look over your case and decide whether you were eligible for it.
	There were a lot of complaints from this saying, Why is a high court judge uniquely qualified to be able to determine whether you are able to kill yourself?
	With assistance from the state and high court judges are already busy enough.
	So this will just create a huge backlog Well, that's kind of the reason isn't it is because they're busy.
	So only the determined get through well potentially but that's now going to be replaced under these amendments with oversight from a panel of legal medical and social care experts and That Voluntary Assisted Dying Commission, so it's got its own commission now, will be led by a High Court judge or senior former judge.
	So there will still be a judge involved in this, but there'll also be a lot of other people overlooking it as well.
	So, whether that will improve or make the process worse, I can't really say.
	They also say it will oversee all cases and report each year on the number of applications and how many were approved or rejected.
	Polling commissioned by Humanists UK, an unbiased organisation I'm sure, show that more than two-thirds, 67% of the British public, support the amendments to replace High Court approval with a panel of legal, medical and social care professionals and I'm sure that Humanists UK Didn't have selective choice of the people that they were polling and I'm absolutely sure that everybody who was polled Absolutely understood all of the implications of these changes as well But either way,
	so I saw this earlier today, which was on the BBC website.
	This was the most recent thing I saw regarding it, which is why I decided to cover this, which was that it had a big article talking about this particular gentleman, Wayne Hawkins, a Californian man, where in California they have assisted dying legislation, who they wanted to chronicle his death so that they could have this article.
	They also made This, uh, short documentary about it that's about 36 minutes.
	I've not watched it, because I've not got a BBC account, uh, but I found it very interesting, the process that it was going through here, because he- he was basically a guy, he had heart failure, terminally ill, uh, he had prostate cancer, liver failure, and sepsis, so he basically couldn't move.
	He was in constant agony and couldn't leave the house, constantly being looked after by his family.
	So you look at that and you say, well, yeah.
	I mean, he was gonna die soon anyway.
	This is a kind of fair example of where somebody could be eligible.
	He was 80 years old.
	Yeah. So that's fair.
	He invited BBC News to witness his death.
	Shortly after they got there, his doctor, Donnie Moore, arrived.
	He had got to know the family over the past few weeks.
	Under California law, he was the attending physician who must confirm, in addition to a second doctor, that Wayne was eligible for aid in dying.
	So this was a two-doctor system, and his role is part physician, part counsellor, and he'd been involved in 150 assisted deaths before.
	I don't know at what point, as a doctor, you begin to feel like an executioner rather than a healthcare administrator, but...
	Okay, the dosage of drugs that he...
	Also, if Harold Shipman ever gets out of jail, he could probably take that job.
	Yeah, I know.
	Is Harold Shipman still alive, or is he dead?
	No, he's dead.
	I was gonna say, I thought...
	I thought he was dead by now.
	So they gave him basically just a dosage of drugs that was hundreds of times higher than their use in regular healthcare and was guaranteed to be a lethal dose.
	So this was an example that they wanted to give of a nice case where he's there with his family.
	It's the perfect example, right?
	This isn't how the NHS would do it.
	No. No.
	The NHS is shit.
	It would be African Mammy.
	Who can't speak English properly injecting you with the wrong serum and then paralyzing you and you don't die and you suffer even more What was that Jamaican woman who couldn't tell the difference between the words?
	Breathing and bleeding.
	Yeah, that was at the the care home where I think two also foreign care workers Had allowed somebody to get caught in a stairlift.
	I believe the story was tried to call up the NHS and The services to get an ambulance.
	The woman on the other side of the phone also wasn't English and they couldn't communicate properly.
	My concern is at some point, if we do it through the NHS, is somebody's going to make some innocuous comment which is going to be misinterpreted by the foreign nurse and the foreign doctor and you're going to end up getting whacked, basically, by the NHS.
	Yeah, also if it was something that didn't get expanded out as it's attempting to do in Canada where that you're able to or like already happens in Switzerland where it's basically I'm depressed kill me.
	Well... Who's that gonna be targeted for?
	You as the young Englishman, you've been completely disenfranchised, no hope for the future, everything is terrible, you can't get a job, you've got no family, women don't want to know you because you don't have the opportunity to build up a financial base that could attract women, and then the state just turns around and says, well you could just kill yourself.
	But the state will be more than eager to potentially hand them a pill which makes you go to sleep forever.
	Yeah. But handed out free at school along with your viewing of adolescence.
	Well, yeah, obviously, you get the choice.
	Do you watch adolescence or do you take assisted dying?
	This will be the choice for the schoolchildren of the future.
	Again, as I mentioned, interestingly enough, Wes Streeting himself was not in favour of this, decided to vote against it.
	He said explicitly that you touch on the slippery slope argument, which is the potential for cost savings if people choose to opt for assisted dying rather than stay in the care of the care providers or the NHS.
	I think it's a chilling slippery slope argument, and I hate for people to opt for assisted dying because they think they're saving someone somewhere money, whether that's relatives or the NHS.
	I think that's one of the issues MPs are wrestling with as they decide how to cast their vote.
	And this is where the big problem comes in.
	In the era of lock indoors for two years to save the NHS or grandma's going to get it...
	I don't trust the state to have anywhere near this level of power.
	I don't trust the state to be able to administer this properly, and in the interests of saving grandmother, we all stayed in door for two years, but now it's flipping around and it'll be in the interests of allowing grandmother dignity.
	Maybe you should tell her that you're a bit of a burden, aren't you, sweetheart?
	You know, I know we love you and all, but you cost a bit and we already, you know, we already locked ourselves away for two years for the NHS for your benefit.
	I think it's time you give us something back.
	Yeah, the right to die becomes the duty to die.
	Somebody in the comments has just said that Odo from Deep Space Nine went out through Assisted Dying.
	I've not watched Deep Space Nine.
	Nerd. And then there's all the arguments again from interested parties, so this is the Honorary Secretary of the Association for Palliative medicine said that the palliative care sector is basically entirely reliant on charitable donations and doesn't get enough funding anyway.
	So that's one argument.
	And he said that laws are more than rules, they send social messages.
	And this is something I think is absolutely true.
	The social message being sent here is that essentially, assisted dying, removing yourself from the picture, is what the state wants, and leaving palliative care to charity.
	The NHS is supposed to be cradle to grave, not cradle to very old.
	The dubious I mean, that's a distinction without a difference at this point, really, isn't it?
	Because, I mean, if it's assisted dying, you're still going to the grave.
	The dubious cost-saving benefits of assisted suicide have been discussed in various jurisdictions, such as the notorious 2020 Canadian report of the Cost Estimate for Bill C-7, Medical Assistance in Dying, MAID, which estimated a $149 million saving in healthcare costs from euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada in 2021.
	Turns out there was a similar UK report, In 2020, called Counting the Cost of Denying Assisted Dying, that's a very interesting framing of the, in the first place, you're denying them the chance for assisted dying, Scottish academics David Shaw and Alec Morton proposed a worrying argument that legalising assisted dying and euthanasia in the UK would provide significant financial savings well into the millions, and the cost-saving argument was also proposed in Guernsey.
	In 2023, government accounts revealed that Guernsey had a £139 And that is the cold, heartless, bureaucratic mindset in action there, folks.
	Because, again, if you give these bureaucrats the power of Encouraging, perhaps, some cost savings on the side, that is the way that they will see you as an expendable unit, and they will mask themselves in the humanist arguments for dignity and death.
	And really, from a humanistic standpoint, from a liberal humanist standpoint, if you say, well, these people are suffering because they're in the last six months of their lives, so we should allow them the choice to kill themselves.
	From a humanist standpoint, Where does the suffering argument end?
	Well, this 16 year old, he's got no future.
	He's got no chance.
	He's an incel.
	He might start watching Andrew Tate sometime soon.
	He's suffering.
	So who are we to deny him an end to the suffering?
	Like, from a secular, liberal, humanist point, what's the argument against that?
	From a utilitarian idea, which is exactly how these people see the entire world.
	Everything is a cost-benefit spreadsheet to them.
	Where does that end?
	And that would mean that we'd probably end up quite like Canada where now assisted dying is 1 in 20 Canadian deaths.
	5% of all deaths in Canada come from the MAID program and people are starting to just go and ask if they can be killed for non-medical reasons including Isolation and homelessness.
	So these are people who aren't actually eligible- Oh, God!
	People who aren't actually eligible for it for medical reasons, they're getting denied it, but because the offer is there for people who are eligible- They just need to lie slightly better.
	Well, they're just saying, well, why can't you kill me?
	State. Please, kill me, state.
	My life is terrible and awful.
	Kill me.
	And again, from the humanist perspective, when does the Canadian government turn around and say, you know what?
	These people have a point.
	I don't understand why Canadians don't want to be invaded.
	I mean, most of them aren't really Canadian anymore, are they?
	They already are being invaded.
	There's loads of concerns, as you've pointed out.
	Loads of concerns.
	Like the bureaucrats and the state and money play a role.
	Guilt or all sorts of things play a role.
	But loads of people, loads and loads of people, end their life Horribly in a hospital bed.
	Loads of people.
	If you don't die of an accident, or you're not unfortunate enough to get a terminal disease when you're young, then yeah, you're a really old person just waiting to die in a hospital bed.
	I've seen that happen a number of times.
	It's horrible.
	So 1 in 20, maybe that's not even...
	As crazy as it first seems.
	It's like that's just all the old people that would have just had to lie in a bed for three months turning into a skeleton.
	That's why they used to call the flu old man's friend because it just helped push you over the edge if you were that close.
	So I mean I for one will probably I will probably go for assisted dying even when I got into that situation.
	I don't want my last three or four months or whatever to be just sitting in a bed getting bed sores in complete despair and my family watching me die and me watching them watching me die while I turn into a skeleton and eventually have multiple organ failure just because yeah I'd rather just give me a drink or an injection and get it over with.
	I'm still kind of haunted by the film Constantine what if the Catholics were right?
	Oh, what, and you take the drink and then the devil shows up and takes you straight to hell?
	Yeah. St. Peter at the pearly gate said, you didn't commit suicide, did you?
	Yeah. I did, and it's like, oh.
	Mmm. Eternity in purgatory is the best I can do.
	You're lucky you're not going straight to hell.
	Well, again, I completely understand where you're coming from there, Bo, and I think that's what makes it complex, but I think that, again, we have more reasons to worry given that...
	Yeah, there's still concerns.
	The advertisements that we saw a few months ago when the vote was coming up in Parliament were not, here's Grandmother lying around waiting to die in bed, let's Well, why is she killing herself?
	Young, healthy-looking woman.
	You know, she's not hooked up to an IV. She's not dying in bed.
	She's doing a star jump to...
	Who are the people who have been big supporters of this along with Humanist UK.
	Very strange choice of demographic to target for this kind of service.
	At least it was a white woman, not a white man like you would expect.
	Oh yeah, that makes me feel so much better about it.
	Soon it'll just be pictures of Jamie from adolescence and him looking all sad and it's like, at least I get to choose dignity.
	So obviously it's a very complex situation, a very complex subject, there's a lot of I will be back in just a moment.
	He's going for his yearly shart.
	laughs He's already hit it.
	Uh, okay, so...
	The engaged few says, "As Rush Limbaugh pointed out during the gen-" Are you back again, Samson?
	I will not ignore you.
	Oh, Dan was just going to blow his nose.
	Okay, now he's going through shit.
	Alright. I thought you were better, Dan!
	I guess not.
	As Rush Limbaugh pointed out during the Jack Kevorkian controversy, how long before the right to die becomes the duty to die, as was said in the segment.
	Not Just A String says, I think people should do the best to preserve their own lives and stay healthy.
	Oh yeah, this is like you pointed out.
	This still makes me sad.
	Says, there was a case where a US death penalty used the wrong drug or dose and it took the inmates two plus hours of agonizing death.
	I'm not gonna feel sorry for an inmate who's on death row.
	I'm sorry, but that will be African Mammy administering it to Gran.
	By the way, Samson's trying to get me to lower my chair because I'm presumably taking up too much of the frame.
	What are people in the comments saying?
	Am I too high?
	I don't think I can be high enough.
	Alex Adamson, 55, says, So we import incompetent foreigners to provide taxes for old people because of the lack of young people, then freeze the old people to death and make the young people we need more of kill themselves.
	Yeah, it's a circular economy.
	It just works.
	that suicide is enough to make Bill Gates blush.
	And that's a random name.
	Says, at first I was 50-50 on being annexed, Canadian here, but after watching Dan's phenomenal Brokonomics with Mr.
	Modad, I want us annexed now.
	Wow.
	Yes, that was a good one, that one.
	Interesting. Well, last segment, tell us about the secrets of the pyramids.
	Yes, yes.
	Was it the Martians or the people from Jupiter?
	It's interdimensional lizards.
	No. Okay, so it's been in the news cycle recently that there's been some new finds, some new archaeological evidence and data has come through about things on the Giza Plateau.
	I've seen the pictures and they look extraordinary.
	Right, so straight off the bat, shall I just give you my take?
	Go on then.
	It's almost certainly nonsense.
	Oh, okay.
	That's my take.
	But there's a small chance I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
	It's so much more interesting if it's real though.
	It's like aliens, I want it to be true.
	I want it to be true so much that I'm even more careful and sceptical, if you know what I mean, if that makes sense.
	Because I know deep down I want it to be true.
	Like the Tic-Tac incident and aliens we've talked about.
	I want it to be true so much that I have to be very careful and police myself even more than...
	Sorry? The Tic-Tac incident?
	What's that?
	Commander Fravor and the Tic-Tac?
	There's magic huge flying Tic-Tocs going all over the place apparently.
	Tic-Tocs or Tic-Tacs?
	Tic-Tac.
	Bloody spaceships!
	Have you not heard of the Tic-Tac?
	We're talking about Egypt and not that, but just real quick to say that back in, what was it like 2014 or 15 or 16, some US Navy fast jets pilots saw, definitely saw and recorded on multiple instruments, a tic-tac shaped craft out over the Pacific that was doing manoeuvres and pulling speeds that's not possible.
	Fair play.
	You don't follow the news, Harry.
	I don't follow space and UFO news.
	And testified in front of the Senate.
	They literally had congressional inquiries about this for about three months.
	It was top of the news cycle.
	I don't care about space stuff.
	I feel your rage laser eyes on me now, though.
	It's not chips and gravy or heavy metal, so you don't care about it.
	Or wrestling.
	Or wrestling.
	Come on.
	No, okay, so the pyramids.
	Back to the pyramids.
	So yeah, the claim is that I've got so many different images.
	Just to click through the first few links I've got, just to show that it broke through into mainstream media, all sorts of places, we're talking about it.
	A lot of them were just saying that there's a giant city, a vast city, is the quote.
	Underground city.
	That would be awesome.
	Vast underground city.
	Oh, but wait, wait, wait, no, oh no, but experts say it's fake news.
	Yeah. Or is that just what they want you to think?
	It almost certainly is, but it might not be.
	I'm gonna put, I'm gonna put it sort of, I'm sort of 97 to 99% sure it's nonsense.
	Like even Piers Morgan got in on it.
	We've got a couple of real archaeologists and a couple of conspiracy theorists.
	Why are they soying so much?
	What are they soying?
	I need you on that panel, Bo, doing the eyebrow to even things out a little bit.
	Like the annoyed eyebrow?
	Or just the quizzical?
	The quizzical eyebrow, obviously.
	Even, yeah, even Piers Morgan.
	So it made a...
	Just play this...
	Play that short.
	It's just one of the various interpretations.
	Is this saying that there are gigantic columns holding the pyramids up underground?
	Yeah, and a giant box-shaped structures at the bottom of them.
	They nailed it down because they were worried it was going to blow away or something.
	Well, first of all, one of the things...
	Listen, winds were a lot stronger 6,000 years ago.
	I've got to say, if that is true, that is by far and away the most impressive thing in all of humanity, bar none.
	Well, straight away, one of the arguments against it, and for me it's a very strong argument, is just a sanity check.
	It's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.
	Wait, just one second.
	Because it's meant to be like twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty or something.
	These columns that they say are in there with the spiral glass going around them.
	Thousands of years ago, people somehow managed to dig into the ground, if we think it was people.
	Yeah, right.
	It was the Anunnaki.
	I mean lizards.
	I mean Martians.
	I mean, wait.
	Little grey man.
	If that is true, I mean it must be aliens.
	If it's true.
	So yeah, just the first argument against it is just a straight up sanity check.
	And that's what a lot of the arguments, because I've watched loads and loads of videos about this, read loads of the articles, and already know a fair amount about the Giza Plateau and about the Great Pyramids.
	So, just the first thing is that it's just unlikely.
	We'll see, we'll see if they actually do some real hard digging style archaeology or do other forms of geophys to find out what is actually down there and it's proven to be true.
	Fair enough, I'll accept it.
	Wait a minute, just let me finish.
	So, the first thing is to say that it's just not likely to be the case.
	It's just extremely, extremely unlikely.
	It's sort of, it's sort of impossible.
	I mean, the actual laws of physics aren't broken.
	Like making a space elevator or going to Venus.
	Like the laws of physics aren't broken.
	It's just not really feasible sort of thing, right?
	So anyway, so okay, on the left there you can see the sort of the raw data.
	What they used was a thing called SAR.
	Is this the same thing that checks for soil disturbances that they were using in Canada to suggest that there were those mass graves of indigenous children that the Catholic schools had found?
	I remember that story but I don't remember the science they were using for that.
	I think they used some kind of like send radio waves to the ground or something to come back with digital images showing if there's been disturbances in the ground.
	Right. I mean, I'm not sure.
	So this thing, this is a cutting-edge system.
	It's called Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography, or just SAR for short.
	And it's using satellites to bounce.
	I think it's like a version of sonar.
	They're using sound to bounce.
	From a satellite?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Or you can do it from an aeroplane as well.
	Why don't you just do it from the ground?
	So you can cover vast distances.
	So they did the whole Giza Plateau, for example.
	Right. So it's to do with sound, and then you do it a different time.
	You do it a second time, a second sweep.
	Another time and compare things and the thing is it doesn't penetrate the ground really or it might do a few centimeters or a meter But it doesn't really penetrate the ground.
	It's not like geophysics.
	You ever seen time team where there's a guy walking?
	That's actual geophysics where he's literally shooting things down into the ground and seeing what comes back So it's not that and so anyway, the science is really quite fairly cutting-edge and a lot of people say it's not You know, these three scientists, Italian scientists, they published a sort of a press release and did a sort of an amateur press conference, but it's not been sort of peer-reviewed.
	Oh, I think it might have been the same thing as in Canada, because they did a series of ground-penetrating radar surveys, so it might be the same thing.
	Which means that if it's just like...
	It's not radar.
	Oh, okay.
	Oh, sorry, it is radar.
	I was going to say, is that the Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography?
	You said it was radar.
	I think it's a type of radar.
	There's a lot of interpretation that goes into this.
	Right, okay, so that's the next thing.
	Can I have two quick questions?
	First one is, how on earth did they get from that raw data to that?
	Also, why does it make it look like this?
	Hang on a moment, Harry!
	Somebody who isn't you is talking just about- I know that disturbs you, Dan.
	Right, so how do they get from that to that?
	And secondly, if that is true, if that is what it is, what is it meant to be?
	I mean, it looks like a massive oil rig, because they make it look like it's coming out of the water.
	So was the pyramid a gigantic oil rig?
	Is that what it was?
	And then the desert just dried up?
	What's the theory?
	What are the people who are saying it's that?
	What are they saying it is?
	Oh, okay, so they're saying that at the bottom of those spiral structures are meant to be two massive chambers, 80 by 80, and they're saying that in those chambers are the lost records.
	The lost records, like a lost library type deal.
	And they'll be all...
	Why would they build a bloody library two Statue of Liberties down?
	But also again...
	A hall of records type thing.
	Is that like their porn stash or something?
	They really didn't want anyone to find it for the next 4,000 years.
	Also, the raw data on the left, some schizo looks at that and says, we found the ancient libraries.
	Finally we can discover what they've been hiding from us this whole time.
	No. So that's the thing.
	So that's sort of one of the main arguments saying, look, your data isn't really good enough or clear enough and people the first thing people said skeptics anyway or real archaeologists mainstream archaeologists are saying if that exact question okay fair enough that's an interesting image there but how have you got from that to that and the three Italian scientists haven't answered that so so here's an alternative explanation it's just natural fault lines oh yeah Yeah,
	well we know that underneath the Giza Plateau it's absolutely riddled with natural features.
	Aquifers, you know, underground rivers essentially, underground reservoirs.
	There's all sorts of geology going on and we know this for a fact and have done for a long time under the Giza Plateau.
	So it could just be sound or noise.
	Sorry, noise on the radar showing up these things.
	So, look, that's one of the things.
	They're saying, look, there's massive columns going down there on the middle image.
	Keep clicking through fairly slowly in the next few images.
	Yeah, so they're showing...
	It does feel like a stretch.
	Pause on that one for a moment.
	Descending wells.
	Yeah, that's the spiral going.
	Underground room, very large.
	Oh, I see it.
	I see it.
	Don't you?
	Don't you?
	They also claim, these Italian scientists, that the AI came to these conclusions for them.
	Right. And the argument...
	We've programmed the first schizo AI!
	Which version of ChatGPT did they use?
	Because the early versions hallucinated quite a bit.
	And I'll get into it at the end.
	And these are just some fun artists' ideas that have come out.
	These are photographs.
	We've unearthed the photographs after we broke into the library.
	So yeah, they're fun anyway, aren't they?
	I'd like it to be true, because it'd be really cool.
	I mean, there may well be, you know, hidden or hitherto undiscovered chambers under the Giza Plateau.
	They're probably just, wait, they're probably just not, it's nothing like what shows there.
	I mean maybe there is a secret library down there.
	Try to get to the bottom of this because I was quite interested.
	I like quite quickly was like you know just like my spidey sense I just I just I just smell bullshit this just doesn't feel right doesn't feel good yeah like just do a sanity check it's like not likely but nonetheless still very interested in it and haven't completely ruled it out because I don't know I don't know, so their data might be right in the end, who knows.
	So I was trying to get to the bottom of it, and it turns out that the three Italian scientists that have done this, they did like a three, four hour press conference on it, but in Italian.
	So Metatron, who is Italian!
	So out of all the videos I've watched, which were loads, quite a few anyway, the best one Probably the very best one was Metatron's one.
	He's done more than one video on it.
	I think he's done two, but this one was the best because he speaks Italian.
	He's a native Italian speaker.
	So he did a video, over half hour, 40 minutes long or something, breaking down not just what was said in this press conference, but also sort of the idiosyncrasies of the words they used.
	It's really good detail, I thought, from Metatron.
	And I also trust Metatron.
	I think he's a very fair-minded, reasonable historian.
	He's always been very objective in all of the videos.
	He's on the level.
	I consider him on the level.
	I've never ever thought, or I don't trust, I don't trust Metatron arguing in good faith here.
	I've never ever felt that about him.
	So if he says something, I'm prepared to take his word for it.
	If he says, this is what these Italians are saying, and this is the intonation of their voice, and this is the individual words they're using, I'm happy to trust him.
	Now, so if you do want to trust Metatron, these guys are a bit woo.
	They're a bit woo, they're a bit sort of crystal skulls, a bit sort of...
	Yeah, they're not very professional.
	Yeah, I got that idea.
	He says that a number of times.
	He says this is really unprofessional stuff.
	And on the real, real key bits, the real key bits where you're like, now that's the crux there.
	Why is that that?
	How have you come to that conclusion?
	Apparently they just don't tell you.
	They just move on to the next thing.
	And there's a bunch of numerology stuff, and I'm really not into numerology.
	I'm really not into it.
	And they all are.
	There's like sort of magic numbers that are significant for whatever reason.
	And if you times it by a four for no apparent reason, then it means this.
	All that crap.
	Yeah, all that crap.
	Reverse engineer the answer you're already after.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And anyway, so there's that.
	So there's this bit of data showing something that's not exactly clear.
	Some say it's a vast underground city, and others say it's probably noise or just nonsense, or just flat-out nonsense one way or another.
	But we'll see.
	Have you tried looking at the results while smoking meth and taking LSD?
	Not yet.
	That is my evening.
	Okay, alright.
	Get back to us tomorrow and we'll see if your opinion's changed.
	I would recommend ayahuasca in these circumstances.
	A speedball?
	What's a speedball?
	What is that?
	I think that's cocaine and heroin.
	No, that's what you want before going on the podcast.
	A completely different class of drug.
	Why do you think Dan's always so full of energy?
	I do not recommend any of our viewers to do anything like that, please.
	No, no, no, come on, let's be serious.
	So one of the last things I wanted to just end on is to say that there's enough mystery and enchantment about this, particularly the Great Pyramid, already.
	You don't need to make up more things, I don't think.
	It's already absolutely fascinating and filled with wonder and unanswered questions already.
	So, I mean, for example, we now know because there's another project a bit more serious called the Scan Pyramid Project and they're using, I can't remember what it is, whether it's like something to do with muons or some other form of scanning which is better than this SAR one.
	and They have shown that there's a just there a hidden chamber seems almost certain.
	There's a big void directly above the Grand Gallery Now why the Egyptian authorities don't immediately investigate that immediately do a bit of drilling and a Spyhole camera thing why that why they don't do that.
	I don't know In in one of the valley of the Queen's chambers, they know there's a false wall.
	One of the walls is a false wall.
	Why not?
	Sort of immediately excavate it.
	I don't know, but they don't seem to.
	I mean, until we got there, a lot of it was still buried, wasn't it?
	Well, yeah.
	Well, not the pyramids, but the...
	I know what you mean, yeah.
	Yeah, it's really frustrating to me why the authorities in Egypt that are to do with antiquities are extremely sluggish.
	And that's putting it kindly.
	Go through the next few images.
	There you go.
	On that one, you can see where they've put the voids there.
	But you can also see that there's those so-called air shafts, or the shafts going out from the King's Chamber and the Queen's Chamber.
	Is that real?
	Is A underground?
	Yeah. Well, so that was the point I wanted to say.
	Yeah, it's called the Subterranean Chamber.
	Okay. Now, I've got this feeling, a bit like my feeling that Jim Angleton and Alan Dulles were behind the JFK assassination.
	I haven't got evidence, just my gut says it.
	My gut says...
	I mean the JFK files are out there now.
	My gut says that the key to the pyramid, the Great Pyramid, Kufu, the key to it is something to do with the subterranean chamber.
	I don't know why, I can't really explain it, or maybe if I had hours and hours to go through it in granular detail I could start to make a case, but I just think that there's something extremely enigmatic and odd and mysterious about that subterranean chamber.
	And what would be cool, Is if you go there, you, the first person ever to find it, find the secret false panel on the wall, slide it aside, and there's the code pad.
	You enter the secret code, and you go in the elevator.
	All the way down and you find those hidden libraries.
	To the secret library and you discover the entire thing is just row after row of tablets of people complaining about the wrong grade of copper being delivered or something.
	Right, yeah.
	Like ancient cuneiform.
	What a discovery!
	Someone sending a note to their kids saying remember to pick up a bag of grain on your way home.
	Yeah. And stuff like that, yeah.
	I thought you could say you find the panel, you press it and the whole pyramid lifts off.
	Yeah either way I'll take it yeah it's cool and so there's a picture of the subterranean chamber many people said it's just unfinished they were gonna excavate it further and make a full you know chamber out of it but I don't think that's the case I think for whatever reason that's deliberate it's deliberately been left like that but I haven't got all the answers no one has.
	Bit sloppy workmanship though.
	Yeah yeah it is odd.
	Go through the next few pictures it's just another There's an old, really old, I imagine early 20th century.
	Maybe that was just the break room while they're working on the rest of it.
	There's an old photo of one of those air shafts.
	I think that's in the King's Chamber.
	There's another close-up of one of them.
	There's four in total.
	And for a long time we didn't know exactly.
	Some of them go all the way out to the edge of the pyramid but some of them don't.
	And there's a little lip in one of them there.
	In the end, they sent a little robot, a little tiny, little, like, radio-controlled robot thing down them with a camera.
	And at the end of one, they found that.
	Very mysterious.
	Yeah, and then they haven't gone through it yet.
	They did drill through that, I believe, a little keyhole thing.
	And behind it was just like another space.
	And then another sort of, it's almost like another version of that.
	But it's really weird.
	What are those two strange...
	Anodes? Cathodes, are they?
	Who knows?
	If you came across that, if you were crawling through there with like a little...
	You can't, it's only like this big.
	If you were an incredibly tiny person crawling through there with a little torch on your helmet and you came across that, it'd look like eyes bleeding or something.
	It'd be terrifying to come across something like that.
	It's creepy.
	I mean, I can't think of a better word than enigmatic.
	What is that?
	Why is that there?
	Why did they, like what extreme design and engineering, over-engineered to make this extremely difficult passage through and it ends with that?
	What is that?
	We need to send Callum down there.
	Why hasn't it been absolutely investigated thoroughly?
	Why haven't they sent another thing down to drill through the next one?
	To take samples of whatever that black material is there.
	Looks sort of like melted metal or something.
	Just do all the tests.
	If I was in charge of Egypt, When you're in charge of Egypt.
	When I become Khadive of Egypt I will order all the tests.
	Do all the tests.
	I'd invite all the world's best universities to come to Egypt and do everything they want to do within reason.
	Get it done.
	And I think right at the top of the Grand Gallery there's a stone there which is worn away in a really odd shape.
	Many have said that There's probably some sort of pulley system was used in the Grand Gallery and that's just evidence of the ropes wearing away that top stone.
	Maybe that's where the trap boulder landed.
	Yeah, but again it is just sort of mysterious.
	Interestingly there, it seems that if you keep going, there's just a drawing of it, there you can see it's at the bottom of the screen.
	They filled it in, filled it in a bit.
	Why? Yeah, I don't know.
	The Egyptian authorities do really weird things sometimes.
	Like, they don't let you down.
	There's loads of places underneath the Giza Plateau where there's all aquifers and things.
	They don't let people down there.
	Like, even university teams or whatever.
	They're like, no, that's off limits now.
	You can't go underneath the Sphinx.
	You're not allowed.
	It's like, why?
	What's the problem?
	We're just going to fill in that stone at the top of the Grand Gallery.
	Don't ask us why.
	Like, there's whole sites and they're like, oh it's just off, no one's allowed to go there ever.
	It's a military area.
	No one's allowed in there.
	No archaeology.
	It sounds like they're covering for something.
	Is it possible that the pyramids are fake?
	Is it possible that the current Egyptian authorities are now stashing their porn in the pyramids?
	It's just all about porn mags.
	That's what it's all about.
	So, I don't want to go too far into the, because you could do it for hours and hours, talk about the different, what the pyramid, the Great Pyramid of Khufu is anyway.
	I don't think it was a power station or anything like that.
	But I'm absolutely not convinced it was a place of burial for the pharaoh.
	Because everyone says that's the king's chamber, so-called king's chamber, and that's the sarcophagus, so-called sarcophagus, but...
	Well, did they find a king in it?
	No, no, no, no.
	Oh, right.
	I always assumed that because it was called the King's Chamber or the Queen's Chamber that they found a king and a queen in their respective chambers.
	No mummy has ever been found in a sarcophagus, in a pyramid, ever.
	Well that's a crap theory then, isn't it?
	So why do we even have that theory?
	Well, because there are, like in the Valley of the Kings and the Queens, and earlier mastabas, earlier versions, earlier places where the Egyptians buried their dead, very very like the step pyramid and stuff they were they were used as places of burial so like in the Kings Valley of the Kings for example there will be chamber like where they found suit incoming they found like a sarcophagus and
	yeah okay okay okay but you don't employ whatever it is a million slaves or artisans or whatever it is and build some massive massive pyramid it must have taken like 40 50 years minimum to get that thing built and then just forget to put the king in it.
	It doesn't just slip your mind right at the end.
	Some people say he was buried in it originally but there's been grave drops since but there's no I don't think there's I don't think there's any evidence that there was ever ever a body in that Quote-unquote sarcophagus, but then what is it like?
	What is what is the utility of it then?
	I don't know Who knows?
	Some people in the comments are convinced.
	They know will be going crazy.
	It's because it was creating electricity or whatever.
	The other thing is that in earlier pyramids, later pyramids, and certainly in a lot of the burial places in the Valley of the Kings, the insides of these tombs are covered in hieroglyphs and writing.
	It just says, this is the burial place of Pharaoh who did X, Y, Z, and the walls are covered in hieroglyphs, saying what it is and what's going on.
	Is it possible in here?
	there's none is it possible that was carved much later or do we know that was carved at the same time as the structure it's possible but uh that it was later but almost certainly not well it you can have multiple things i'd say for example um it was carved at the time but then later someone smashes
	all the cartouches off and try and expunge someone's name so there'll be many layers of things going on but nonetheless in um the great pyramid there's no there's no hieroglyphs on the walls none not one not one thing
	saying this is the tomb of that's like a big oversight really yeah yeah see it does especially for the great pyramid anyway right now there's also uh it seems like there's evidence now of the old question of how was just how was it built just logistically Physically, how is it possible?
	People say, well, you have to build a ramp up to it.
	But the ramp itself would be a bigger construction project than the pyramid itself.
	So it seems now they think that there's a ramp up the first third of it or less, and then some sort of internal ramp structure going on.
	And there's some sort of evidence, there's various evidence for that now, beginning to point that way.
	If you go to the next image.
	Go to the next one.
	There you go, there's some other scans showing.
	God, it'd be back-breaking work, wouldn't it?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Some of the massive stones.
	That's that little niche up the top that you can sort of squeeze in.
	There's a guy standing there.
	I mean, that's a great picture for scale, isn't it?
	You can actually get where you see there's that hole there, you can actually sort of get in there and there's like a breeze and they think that's the remnant of the internal The internal thing.
	The facing stones, just the mystery of the facing stones.
	They're obviously the finished stones on the outside.
	Why are they nearly all gone?
	On the other pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, you know the top bit of it, it's still got most of them on.
	Why is that?
	Some people, we don't really know.
	Some people say it's earthquakes over the years.
	They've all sloughed off because of earthquakes.
	That seems like nonsense to me.
	Doesn't seem likely, doesn't seem possible, but okay, possibly, I don't know.
	I'm no seismologist.
	Others say that just over the millennia and the centuries, particularly in the sort of Arab, in the Middle Ages, the facing stones were stolen and used to build sort of modern Cairo, medieval Cairo, used for other things.
	So, I mean, if that is true, which is sort of the main ... argument that people say where the facing stones have gone, but most people, most archaeologists and historians say that.
	It's like, oh, so one of the worst crimes against archaeology ever then, the Arab Egyptians did there, did they?
	Oh right, okay.
	Won't ever blame them or ever mention that though.
	It just happened, it's just something that happened.
	Was it ISIS took over some country and immediately started destroying all of the old ancient artefacts?
	Oh, that happens every time.
	Yeah, exactly.
	One instance.
	Muslims, uh...
	Philistines. Iconoclasts.
	Yeah. Yeah, you know, remember the, uh...
	Taliban blew up those two massive Buddhas?
	I think that's what I was thinking of.
	It was, um...
	No, but also ISIS.
	Yeah. ISIS, uh...
	Where was it?
	Uh... Not Petra, um...
	I've seen videos of them smashing statues.
	It's happened a whole bunch of times.
	Palmyra, I think it was.
	The ancient site, the city of Palmyra, which was a wonderful, still is really, but was a wonderful archaeological site and they messed it up big time.
	Yeah, the facing stones, wherever they were going.
	So anyway, the point is, do I have other things to talk about?
	After the Facing Stones, I think.
	No, that was the last one.
	So the point is, because you can see the precision, the precision engineering of it.
	Absolutely remarkable.
	So I don't think there's any real need to sort of try and manufacture a false, any more new, wonderful, mysterious things about the, particularly the Great Pyramid of Khufu.
	It's already, you've already got more mysteries and wonders than you can shake a stick at.
	So we'll see if these guys were right or wrong.
	I suspect it's just noise in their data or a natural phenomenon.
	It's the natural features under the Giza Plateau.
	But I say there's still one to three percent in my mind that what they're saying is true.
	I can't rule it out.
	I can't rule it out.
	But it's almost certainly not possible.
	It's almost certainly not possible.
	Okay, I'll leave it there.
	Right, so Scanlines says, to be fair, would you want a bunch of Egyptians digging around under Windsor Castle?
	Well, if Windsor Castle was thousands and thousands and thousands of years old and had a load of amazing unknown mysteries that we still hadn't solved and those Egyptians were uniquely capable of solving those mysteries, then yeah.
	None of them.
	Yeah, actually.
	Lothar says, Dan, if you were an incestuous furry like all those degenerate cat-sister-loving fairies, you'd hide your pornstache down there too.
	Glee77 says, buy Island 4 to explore Cleopatra's secret goon stash.
	I think we might have started something here.
	Well, to be fair, we've been wondering what the theme's going to be.
	Scanline says it's giant coils to help them spring up to the Tic Tac aliens that help them move the pyramids.
	And Hewitt76 says something, but I can't read it because it's off the top.
	Let me, let me just, there you go.
	Yeah. Italian sci- Italian scientist tells you everything about the veracity of this.
	And Pizzaslayer says, got Islander 3 yesterday, soon enough I'll have enough volumes to be able to drape myself in the wise words of the lotus eaters.
	With two little devil horns.
	I would like to imagine that if it was coils, that you could theoretically bounce the Great Pyramid, as is being suggested there.
	What, like a, what, the Latino's car?
	Yeah, exactly like it's got a low rider function!
	Got another super chat I guess just came in.
	My husband worked in Jubail city in Saudi.
	A second straight third century church is hidden just outside with all its crosses chiseled off.
	Yeah, iconoclasm.
	No one is supposed to talk about it.
	One of many.
	Yeah, almost certainly.
	Yeah. Let's not mention that on air then.
	Throughout the entire Muslim world, wherever there's any...
	have we got any um video comments samson paid they can get their comment we can go two minutes over can't we okay he's got to set up common sense crusade in confed income common sense crusaders trumped your comments but you'll get them tomorrow oh with the lovely liani i should add yeah that's That'd be very good.
	Right, oh yeah, so cheerio.

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