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April 9, 2025 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:48:46

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1139

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	How do you do, fellow Lotus Eaters?
	This is the podcast of the Lotus Eaters, episode 1139.
	I'm your host, Harry, joined today by Josh, who's threatening to get his willy out.
	I'm not threatening.
	Who has got his willy out.
	And Dan, who's always standing full mast.
	It was a bit low energy, wasn't it, Harry?
	Was it?
	A bit.
	Middling energy, maybe.
	Middling energy.
	How would you have done it, Dan?
	Give me a demonstration.
	Hello there!
	Welcome to the podcast.
	So this first section of the podcast will be testing out intros to the podcast.
	I hope you don't mind.
	It's very meta.
	No, it won't actually.
	Dan's going to be talking about tariffs again.
	I'm going to be talking about millennial writing and why it gave me cancer.
	Josh is going to be talking about streamers giving Asians cancer.
	That's true.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Okay. I know you like an Asian, so I've done a whole second about it.
	Yeah, I'm not out for giving them cancer, though.
	That seems a bit...
	I'm not actually doing that.
	It's a bit harsh.
	It's a bit harsh.
	Anyway, I think there's nothing else to say, so Dan, get on with it.
	Oh, hang on.
	I'm just doing the bloody hell screen-zooming bit.
	Don't take all day, Dan.
	All right.
	Okay. Game phrase on.
	I think I'm going to have to talk about tariffs again.
	I've been talking about tariffs quite a lot, but there doesn't seem to actually be anything else in the news.
	I don't know if you guys have...
	I mean, looking at our segments...
	Yeah, there's not much been going on, really.
	Yeah, it's all been about tariffs.
	So, I've been talking about tariffs a lot.
	I did this video on tariffs last week, where I kind of gave it a bit of an intro and my perspective on the general direction of things.
	Then I did a Brokonomics on that where I went into a bit more detail, the basic tier of how these tariffs work and the mechanisms behind it and all that kind of stuff.
	Then yesterday I did a three-hour live stream with Academic Agent on a tariff debate.
	You watched it, Harry.
	What did you think?
	Right. Right.
	Right. Price increases of products due to the tariffs.
	How is this going to affect the next election for the Republicans?
	He was very concerned about Jamal, wasn't he, and his trainers?
	His Nikes.
	They're very important to Jamal, and Jamal does get as much of a vote as everybody else.
	So it was something important to think about in the short term.
	You were looking at it from a broader, long-term geopolitical strategy.
	Exactly right.
	So, I mean, AA is very good.
	You know, world-class thinker on...
	Elite theory and all that stuff.
	So top chap, we like having him in whenever we can.
	He does have a slight hint of the Peter Hitchens about him.
	Don't we all these days?
	Yes. What?
	Don't we all these days?
	Well, yes.
	I mean, I'm maybe not less the contrarian, more the just unending misery.
	Well, there is that.
	So he was coming in from the perspective of the short-term power plays and stuff.
	So if you want to see two people of the right, even if one of them likes to be a bit contrarian to the right, then that would be an interesting discussion about the current stage of things.
	And what I thought I'd do in this segment is, because Travers are dominating everything again, I will go through a little bit deeper into my thinking of it, some of the stuff that I...
	...mentioned in that live stream, although without the back and forwards quite so much.
	Also, if you've got a question, Josh has very kindly said that I can run into his segment a little bit.
	So if you have a question, put it in a Rumble rant and I'll try and answer it in the segment.
	and if you're a subscriber put your question in the comments and i'll get get you another bloody full brokonomics and i'll go much deeper into your comments so so there you go everybody's got a chance to get into this so that also means that you're not reading the comments at the end today right yeah
	i'm saving them all up for your well i'll do i'll do the rumble rants today um and but but the subscriber comments i'll save for the brokonomics so that i can go into them properly and with full detail but you know any any comments on yours i'm sure i'm sure we can do as before right so uh let's start
	off with the setup um behind this because one of the things that's become apparent to me as i've been talking about this over the course of the last week is a lot of people are working on the assumption that everything was hunky-dory up until trump
	put the tariffs on as if everything was fine um
	This is a map showing...
	Who your largest trading partner is, given the binary choice between the US and China.
	So, for example, Turkey's largest trading partner is actually Germany.
	That aside, right, between the split between the US and China, you can just see that China is dominating.
	Apart from basically the collective West.
	Apart from a little bit of Central America, Canada, and...
	Europe. And even then, Eastern Europe's on China, Spain's with China.
	Yes. What's going on in Spain?
	Australia. Yeah, that's true.
	Australia and New Zealand, members of Five Eyes, they've gone over.
	So, I mean, this is not the sort of thing you can ignore for military reasons, which I will come back to in a bit.
	The other thing that you want to bear in mind is I think a lot of people were under the assumption that the COVID era debt and more broadly the last 30 years of rampant deficit spending, huge government expenditure
	and debt accumulation, I think they thought it was all free.
	Well, it sort of is, in that when they held, you know, the default world reserve currency, a lot of their debts...
	...were basically inconsequential to them because they could just print more money and devalue the debt that they had.
	Well, it lets you accumulate the debt for free, but the servicing cost of the debt isn't free.
	So I think a trillion dollars a year now is going just to servicing the debt.
	So yes, it's pretty much free at the point of creation.
	They can push it out there through the mechanisms you described, but you still need to pay the ongoing bill on it.
	Well, it's because the...
	The world has moved away from the dollar as a reserve currency to a significant degree from the year 2000.
	And also the debt has gone up, and so those interest payments are now extortionate, really.
	They're not bigger than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid at the moment, but they've already exceeded the size of the military, for example, just paying the debt.
	And if you look at this, I mean, you know, the...
	Americans have allowed themselves to cover up all sorts of sins in inefficient government, in bloated government jobs.
	COVID is a classic example of this.
	A lot of the people enthusiastic about it, the leftists and the boomers, for example, just thought that they could have it for free.
	And if you could do that, why wouldn't you just always have a situation where people stayed home and didn't go to work and got handouts?
	We all still went to work.
	Well, yes.
	Yes. Well, I didn't because I wasn't here at the time.
	I was getting very annoyed at home.
	That's true.
	Being stared at by the neighbours every time I...
	I was working from home.
	So I was still working.
	Right. One of the few.
	Not if you worked in the government you wouldn't have been.
	You would have been sat at home.
	Watching Netflix.
	But basically, the bill for COVID is, you can see the huge jump in the debt.
	The bill for that is coming due now because most of that debt was done on a five-year rollover and it's five years later.
	So the bill is coming due and basically the US has 10 trillion in debt to roll over over the course of the next year.
	And the other thing that's changed, of course, is that interest rates at the time when it was done was about 1%, and now they're about 5%.
	So that's an extra $400 billion that they're going to have to pay.
	Now, if you think about what Elon Musk is doing with Doge, a really good outcome for Doge would be that they cut, say, $400 billion.
	So all of Doge's efforts could be wiped out if these debt costs don't come down fast.
	So that's the setup.
	Please don't assume that if everything was going to be hunky-dory, if Trump did nothing.
	That was absolutely not the case.
	I'll give you another bit of broader perspective.
	Let's hear from Mr Vance, shall we?
	Can you play this from about 28 seconds in?
	All of us to step back and ask us, ask ourselves, what has the globalist economy gotten the United States of America?
	And the answer is, fundamentally, it's based on two principles.
	Incurring a huge amount of debt to buy things that other countries make for us.
	And to make it a little bit more crystal clear, we borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture.
	That is not a recipe for economic prosperity, it's not a recipe for low prices, and it's not a recipe for good jobs in the United States.
	We've seen rising inflation.
	We've seen the cost of housing so high that most Americans can't afford to buy a home right now.
	President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction.
	He ran on that, he promised it, and now he's delivering.
	And yes, this is a big change.
	I'm not going to shy away from it.
	But we needed a big change, Lawrence.
	We cannot keep going down the Joe Biden globalist pathway where we have $2 trillion of peacetime debt and deficits.
	We have manufacturing disappearing.
	That is not working for Americans.
	We've got to take this country in a different direction.
	So, yeah, good points by Vance.
	Wasn't it fun two weeks ago when we were just making memes of Vance?
	I did enjoy that, yeah.
	Oh, this is JD Vance.
	Yes. I thought he was a lot fatter.
	Yes. Curlier hair.
	Long curly hair and a deranged grin.
	But no, no, he's...
	Fair point.
	Right, so a quick recap from my very long debate yesterday.
	I'll try and sum it up a little bit sharper today.
	Here's my sort of broad macro arguments for what's going on here.
	Let me find them out.
	Here we go.
	Right, so...
	First thing you've got to bear in mind is the dollar's exorbitant privilege so that basically its ability to run huge deficits supported by debt indefinitely is not an immutable law of nature and actually the dollar is at greater risk of dying from its strength than its weakness the reason being is that if the dollar is too strong 50% of world's debt are denominated in dollars it basically suffocates the system.
	So the dollar was too strong, had to come down.
	As I mentioned, the US has 10 trillion in COVID-era debt to roll over in the next year.
	And you've got to get rates lower than nominal growth.
	Basically, my thinking there is the economy is about the same size as the debt.
	So the debt-to-GDP ratio is 100%.
	So given that they're the same size...
	If the debt grows faster than the economy, then it's going to swallow everything, and then you're in a debt spiral, which is bad.
	So you've got to get those rates below the growth rate.
	Yeah, more there about the debt rollover.
	The dollar's a wrecking ball.
	It's too strong.
	50%, blah, blah, blah.
	Yeah, I said that.
	Particularly in China.
	So China's in an interesting situation.
	We're going to have to come back to them because they're part of the big meltdown that is going on right at this very moment.
	China also has a vast amount of debt that it needs to roll over this year.
	And it's in a bit of a tricky situation.
	It is also worth adding on to that that the Chinese still need to restructure their entire way in which they distribute money.
	to their local governments because at the minute people are sort of surprised by this but the local districts or regional governments have a certain degree of autonomy it's why the social credit score thing is very different depending on where you are in China because it's all done by these regional governments and they've been using their assets as collateral for loans and then eventually the loans have got so large that they don't have enough assets to yeah Yeah,
	I mean they're in a right pickle for a number of reasons and yet there is this brinkmanship going on with the US at the moment which I will come back to but that is certainly an issue.
	As well as the debt refi cycle, which is really important, you've also got to be thinking about the manufacturing and strategic supply lines, including military.
	So what am I thinking of there?
	Well, one, a recent Pentagon study found that the US military fails at hundreds of separate points because it is reliant on Chinese supply chains in order to function.
	Now I would suggest that if you are a superpower and you're worried about an up-and-coming superpower, you don't make your military fail if the other superpower that you're a rival with doesn't want to cooperate with you.
	I think that is bad.
	And presumably the Trump admin has come to the same conclusion, even though obviously Biden and Obama were not particularly concerned about that.
	The US share of global manufacturing has declined 11 points over the last decade from 28.4%.
	So the US used to have 28.4% of global manufacturing, and that's down to 17.4%.
	Related to that map that I showed you earlier.
	So that's going to be both the fact that the US has de-industrialized as well as a lot of the world has been industrializing as well.
	So it's being pushed from both fronts.
	Yeah, it's being squeezed.
	Absolutely. But that is a trend that is accelerating.
	So you would expect the next 10 points to come even quicker.
	That's the issue there.
	And we are literally in the process right now of watching the US lose a war against Russia because Russia can outproduce munitions.
	Which is important.
	I know that's not Trump's war.
	That is a war that he inherited, but that is the reality of it.
	It is effectively a US proxy war against Russia, and they're losing it because they can't produce.
	And what did I say at the end?
	I remind us that the US is not a superpower because of the dollar.
	Some people are getting this a bit mixed up.
	It's really a superpower because of its military, which allows it then to enforce its dollar will.
	And I won't go into now.
	But the strength of your military is also determined by the strength of your economy and the best measure of that in terms of sort of martial economy is industry, right?
	Part of the reason that the US was so important in World War II is that they had the best industrial capacity.
	Yes. Yeah, I mean, that was really when they emerged as the superpower.
	Exactly. It was as a result of that.
	So to go with this, I have put together this handy chart.
	It's a bit blown up on our screen, Samson.
	I don't know if you might need to reduce it.
	As long as the audience can see that.
	There we go.
	That looks good.
	So I put together this handy chart with emojis explaining the whole situation because one of the pushbacks that I've had on this whole tariff thing is people looking to identify...
	...different messages and say, well, look, if people can't agree what the tariffs are for, well, that must invalidate the whole argument then.
	Because if there's any confusion over, you know, give me one reason why these tariffs...
	There is not one reason why these tariffs...
	There's three broad buckets as to why the tariffs are going in.
	So there's the trade issue, which is the US manufacturing, the big deficits, the lack of blue-collar jobs, the US getting hollowed out.
	He's been talking about this for 40 years.
	And... I think that if Trump had come in and he was still the only person in the admin who was enthusiastic for this, it would have been like last time, where he did a little bit of tariffs and he did something, but it wasn't earth-shattering like this.
	The whole reason why this tariff thing is as big as it is, is because he's got these second two camps who signed up to this as well.
	So what are those second two camps?
	Well, the money camp, which is the huge US debt, it's global debt, too much dollar-denominated debt out there, rates are too high and the dollar is too high, it's suffocating everybody, people can't roll over their debts, they can't release global liquidity, all of that stuff.
	And the real champion there is Scott Besant.
	This is the, I mean, as you can imagine, being a money guy and doing brokonomics, this is probably the one that I focus on the most.
	But what I'm saying is, along with Trump's reasons for doing this, you then get the money guys wanting to do this as well for their own reasons.
	But the policy achieves what they're trying to achieve as well.
	Then you've got the military guys, which is, you know, the problem is as simple as this.
	The US military relies on China, which is obviously bonkers.
	I put the champion down as Pete Hegseff.
	I mean, actually, he's not being incredibly vocal on this.
	But there was a broad remit of military guys who understand that you just can't have a situation where China is, you know,
	Obviously bonkers.
	So then I've got, right, what does winning like for each of these camps?
	Well, for the trade guys, it's all about getting jobs back and getting the deficit down.
	And it's kind of simple as that.
	So when you hear Peter Navarro going out, he's being very bellicose on this.
	He focuses purely on those two things, which is why you're getting different messages from different people, because he is only focused on those things, and that's a win for him.
	For the trade guys, losing would look like backing down.
	And that is the whole effort at the moment, is to do so much reeling and so much screaming that Trump feels the need to back off and just...
	Give up on these things.
	I don't think Trump is the sort of chap who backs down because people are reeing.
	I saw an old tweet from 2014 where he's saying some people are artists, you know, I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, you know, they might work in marble or on a canvas but my art form is in deal making and making the best deals is how I basically get my enjoyment.
	Yes. And if you've got that sort of mindset, you're probably not going to just say, you know what, I back down.
	Yes. Because that's a bad deal.
	I suspect he's going to hold the line on this, but we will see.
	That's where all the effort is going, trying to make him back down.
	The money guys, how do they win?
	Well, they get the dollar down, they get their 10 trillion of debt rolled over at manageable levels, and they probably get a Mar-a-Lago record.
	Now, what do I mean by that?
	So with each of these, people have said in the debate yesterday, some of the comments were saying I'm just reaching and theorising.
	No, these guys have been very clear on what they want.
	These guys have been very clear.
	Scott Besant has been writing articles and doing interviews for years making all of these points.
	And the military guys are making all of these points.
	So there is no guessing as to what...
	People want and what winning looks like and what losing looks like.
	There's no theory whatsoever in this.
	The people have been very clear.
	So the Mar-a-Lago Accords, what is that?
	That is something that Scott Besson brings up every time he does an interview on this, is that there is going to need to be a new trade order.
	Now, these new trade orders, they come around every sort of 80 to 100 years.
	You know, the last time would have been after the Second World War.
	But you can keep going back and there will be a new trade order that's put in when there's a change of hegemon.
	So either a new trade order, a viable trade order gets set up now when the US is still hegemon.
	Or you wait until China are a co-equal partner or even ahead, and then you do the trade and renegotiation.
	So they obviously want to do the trade and renegotiate now, and that's getting the acronym there, well, the name Mar-a-Lago Accords, which I will come back to in a future Brokeronomics at some point.
	And what does losing look like to them when it's going to be if the debt cost goes up?
	That would be very bad for them.
	As I mentioned, they want to roll over this debt as close as possible to what it was last time, not...
	Some, you know, great multiple of that.
	Okay, the military guys, what does winning look like for them?
	It's going to be self-reliance or at least allies.
	I think the US military might be able to live with it if their supply chain had some Indian input, for example, or, you know, some other place.
	Maybe they could be a bit more comfortable.
	Ultimately, they would like to be.
	A scammer division, maybe.
	Yeah, I mean, preferably they want to bring it all back in-house.
	That would be the best win.
	You most certainly don't want it to be in China.
	Obviously. Also, India's still relatively close to China and very evadable.
	So I wouldn't say that moving it out from China to India is a win.
	I'd just say it's not as bad as China.
	But ultimately, you do want to bring it all back in.
	And what does losing look like for them?
	Well, it's if China can outproduce them.
	So this is a point that J.D. Vance makes.
	there is a single Chinese shipyard that has outputted more commercial ships in a year than the US has in its entire period since World War II. Now those are commercial ships, but obviously that could be retooled for military ships pretty quickly.
	who's ever played a, you know, a 4X strategy game knows that basically whoever's got the biggest
	Also, losing would look like China having the ability to turn off the US military, whatever.
	Okay, so how are people reacting to this?
	Basically, everybody is going to want to like the money stuff.
	Longer term, China won't be so in love with it if they get the Mar-a-Lago Accords because they want to set the new trade order.
	But China very, very much needs to get the dollar lower because it's got a lot of debt to all of them, things that Josh was talking about as well.
	So everybody is in favour of the money angle of this.
	When it comes to the military angle, EU knows where it is with having the US as the superpower, so they're broadly happy with...
	The Chinese being cut out of it.
	The rest of the world, I mean, it depends on which country, really, but they're broadly happy with this.
	Obviously, China is not happy with the US military being independent of itself.
	So I've put them, yes.
	I mean, I don't know for sure.
	I'm not in a WhatsApp chat with Z, but I'm going out there.
	Get invited to one, from what I've heard.
	Maybe they'll be thrilled that it could be more of a fair fight.
	Possibly. China's known for its honorable dealings.
	Yes, maybe they're looking for a good old scrap.
	Fair fight.
	More sporting.
	Not to the end.
	Total war over.
	Let's just do it until we see who gets their military objectives and then peace, right?
	Possibly. That's how it works in the modern era.
	But for the people who say I'm speculating, I am speculating that China would not like that.
	And then over on the trade side...
	EU, they started off being very belligerent, but they're now making noises about, okay, we want a zero-rate deal with the US.
	The concern for the EU is that if they get into a zero-rate trade arrangement with the US, they are vastly, vastly over-regulated.
	So they might be able to compete with California, but they're going to get their...
	They're going to get their trousers taken down by the rest of the US.
	So they will then end up getting into a race to the bottom on regulation, which is not what they want to do because...
	It sounds great for us.
	Yes. Yes, it would be good.
	I think the UK is going to be fine with this because we, you know, well, we don't produce anything anyway, so it doesn't matter.
	We've got an aerospace industry, lots of aviation stuff.
	That's true, yes.
	We have got a little...
	High manufacturing.
	We have got a little bit of something.
	My town produces Bentleys.
	There you go.
	Okay, so we produce a little bit, but I didn't bother putting this on the chart because...
	Well, I didn't.
	Anyway, China...
	I will say, just the one thing regarding the deficits that's annoyed me a little bit is regarding the EU has been the American whining that apparently the EU has been screwing them over with this trade deficit for untold decades, when really it's like, well...
	Well, Trump in particular has been saying, oh, they barely buy any of our cars.
	They don't fit in our roads.
	Yeah, steering wheels on the wrong side as well.
	They don't buy any of our food.
	I mean, you've got RFK in there for a reason.
	We don't want your food.
	We've got our own farmers.
	We like our own food as well.
	Yeah, that's been the one thing that's annoyed me about that.
	We are never going to buy a Cadillac over here.
	It's impractical.
	I would like one.
	But it wouldn't necessarily be a go-to...
	It would stay in the garage.
	It would be a party piece.
	Hey, look at that.
	Want to go for a drive?
	No. I mean, I did buy an American...
	I bought a Tesla, so that sort of counts, but I'm not buying one of those.
	Teslas are a bit more adaptable and basically like little toy Hot Wheels blown up anyway.
	Yes, that is fair.
	Right, so then...
	I thought let's have a look at the generations as well.
	So we've got Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Zoomers.
	Right, Boomers are losing their shit right now because they've basically got all the stocks and stocks are down.
	I will come back to that, but Boomers are very unhappy at the moment.
	Gen Xers do actually have a modest stock portfolio, nothing like the Boomers, so they are also down.
	Gen Xers, we're a different breed.
	We're used to being kicked in the teeth so often that we kind of like it at this point.
	And actually, we're thinking longer term about all this stuff anyway, so it doesn't particularly matter.
	Whereas the millennials and zoomers, and I will come back to this, they are absolutely loving this because they haven't got anything to lose.
	No assets, yay!
	Yes, they don't have any assets, they don't have any stocks, they don't have any prospects.
	Or a future.
	Yes, so why not lean into this?
	I might skip over this Mar-a-Lago record, but it's just somebody's theory, but I'll skip over that because it's taking a bit long.
	So how is this going?
	So here is the DXY, the dollar, so it's basically the US dollar against a whole bunch of other currencies.
	How is that holding up?
	Remember the win criteria is this would come down, but it's choppy over the past five days.
	But it is lower on a...
	Here's a month timescale.
	DXY was basically too high.
	It was up there at sort of 104, and now it did come down lower, and now it's a bit higher.
	So there's pretty much a bit of a win here, so we're happy with that one.
	Cost of debt.
	Right, so again, let's do a shorter thing.
	This would have been going up.
	There we go.
	So it initially came down more sharply and now it's up again.
	And what you're getting at the moment is an awful lot of people on financial Twitter who are clipping a bit of it.
	What they'll probably do is they'll just clip that bit there and say, oh my God, debt is going vertical, panic, panic, panic, all that kind of stuff.
	I mean, just step over, just ignore.
	If you zoom out, there you go.
	You know, debt cost is still down.
	So, you know, that is broadly moving in the right direction.
	So don't get caught up in all...
	Yes, it has spiked between the absolute low after it was announced and up to there, but it's still moving in the right direction as a broad trend.
	So I'm not going to get too upset about it.
	Why was it going in a negative trend in the first place, even before this, if you don't mind?
	Well, because people didn't see any point in owning anything else other than US assets.
	So some money was flowing in.
	This is kind of the global risk-free rate and they kind of needed to get bond prices to move so they could get this rate down to a serviceable level because this is what they're going to be rolling over that 10 trillion of debt on.
	So if they can get this down, that is a win, and it's not come down as much as you might have hoped, but again, all the people on Twitter telling you that this is blowing up, and the CNBCs, again, it's just not actually that bad.
	What else have I got?
	Oh yeah, so this is returning to the China thing, because what has been happening is, okay, rates were coming down, but...
	The trend has shifted.
	Now they're going up again.
	Not back to the level they were, which is why I showed the chart before.
	But things are moving up.
	And the renminbi, the Chinese currency, is also going up.
	So we've got a couple of competing theories as to what's going on here.
	This guy is sort of suggesting one side of this is that China...
	So there's two camps at the moment.
	There's people who think that China is selling off US treasuries.
	Despite them.
	Which is bold because it will hurt the US but it will also hurt China a lot as well because they need their nimby lower.
	So we are in the process of finding out as to whether that is the thing or not.
	Also on China, minutes before we came on air, I quickly checked the news feed only to find that they are retaliating to the US's retaliation The retaliation of their tariffs.
	So basically, the US put on tariffs for whatever it was, 34%.
	So China put on 34% onto the US.
	And then the US put extra tariffs on.
	And now China have put another 50% on a few minutes before we came on air.
	I have a question here.
	How many retaliatory tariffs do they have to put on one another before it's declared a formal trade war?
	It seems to be at that point already.
	I don't know if there's a formal definition.
	There probably isn't.
	I think it's safe to say we're in it.
	And just a quick note, tariffs don't go up to 100%, they go up to infinity percent.
	So, whatever.
	Let's have a quick look into this article that's only just popped up.
	So yeah, the US rate on China is now 104%.
	And China is at 84%, although the US would say that currency manipulations count for more than that.
	So 104% would Pretty much be double and a little bit more.
	Yeah, so when you buy your next piece of Chinese tat, at the point where it comes into the country to the importer, whatever they paid for it, they then need to pay 104% of that as a tax, as a tariff, and then add their markup and then it goes on Amazon.
	So it's still going to cost like £6 for a toaster or something, but it's just not going to be as cheap as it was.
	That's fine, because it's rubbish anyway.
	Well, yes, I mean, none of this Chinese stuff lasts more than a year or two.
	So, I mean, a lot of people are upset about it, but...
	Do you really need it?
	I mean, that's my view on it.
	Jamal's and his Nikes, man.
	Yes. Yeah, well, yes.
	So, yeah.
	Vietnam got hit with a whole bunch of tariffs.
	So whatever price Nike pays when they import them from the factory in Vietnam is going to get whatever it is, $6.
	And is Jeff's chai latte from Starbucks going up as well?
	Yes, a bunch of things will come in.
	You're going to have to bear in mind that the input price that the importer pays is a fairly small percentage because the biggest markup is actually when it goes into the shop or what the importer gets.
	Here's a quick question.
	So, as I understand it then, if...
	Exporting in a US direction, as in if the US is buying less stuff from abroad, does that mean that the global price of a lot of goods is going to go down as the demand has gone down and therefore prices in Europe would actually be lower, minus the tariffs from the US?
	So, a lot of this Chinese stuff is flowing into America and it looks like a lot less of it is going to be flowing into America.
	So China has the problem of excess capacity.
	might deal with that is by lowering the prices into everywhere else.
	And the other people with a consumerist debt-driven mindset would be UK and Europe.
	So maybe we can get extra Chinese tax that we don't need because Americans are being edged out of it price-wise.
	We can sort of drop ship it to the Americans with our lower tariff, be like a middleman like India
	If we had no shame whatsoever, We could pivot to being dropshippers.
	I'm not suggesting we do that, by the way.
	Some people I've noticed...
	Revenue stream, anyone?
	Yes. Lotus Eaters branded toasters or something.
	We spend one penny on the logo that we stick on the Chinese toaster and then we mark it up ten times.
	Although we will then have a 10% tariff going into America, but I think we can deal with that.
	We'll be fine.
	One of the things I've noticed, a lot of people, again, on social media have been saying that China can make its population suffer because China has the bigger trade deficit with the US, so it does hurt them more, plus they've got their own problems to deal with,
	which I haven't really got time to get into now, but maybe I'll do that in the Brokonomics.
	But a lot of people have been saying, well, because China is a dictatorship, it can just do that indefinitely because it doesn't have to worry about its people.
	Clearly you disagree, quite sensibly.
	Yeah, well, the Chinese people have seen a very accelerated standard of living, and the whole reason that the CCP has sort of a hegemonic power over the Chinese people is that their standard of living has got markedly better.
	And the entire reason that they're...
	Governance exists unquestioningly, or at least appears to exist unquestioningly, is because people broadly agree that their life is getting better in the future.
	And if that stops, that is a big problem for everyone in China.
	If Chinese leadership has to deal with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of unemployed men with nothing to lose pouring out of those southern factories back into the cities, they've got a problem.
	So we will see who blinks first.
	Maybe I'm going to have to follow up with another segment next week when the actual shooting war between China and the US begins or maybe the Chinese Civil War begins or somebody backs down.
	If China ends up murdering an incredible portion of its own population, that would just be another footnote in the many times China...
	Yes, China has done that quite a lot.
	Quite a few times.
	In recent memory as well.
	Yes, yes.
	Other people are less concerned about the China situation.
	Zero Hedge is going absolutely nuclear about the basis trade blowing up, which is basically where hedge funds take US treasuries and then they turn them through the futures market.
	And basically they leveraged into it to such an extent that they are in trouble.
	So everybody who is sympathetic to hedge funds who are over leveraged.
	This is your moment to break out the violin.
	The reason I stick it up on screen is because it creates a problem for Jerome Powell and the Fed, because Jerome Powell and the Fed do not like Trump.
	They do not want to get on board.
	They don't want to help out by anything that they can do by, you know, as this image shows, bailing out Trump's trade war.
	But they don't want to let their friends blow up either.
	Because they probably go to dinner parties with these people and they want to get jobs with them afterwards.
	So the Fed is in a particular pickle at the moment.
	Then I thought, let's talk about the boomers as well.
	Josh, I'm a bit over time.
	Can I have a bit more time or should I skip the boom a bit?
	What do you think?
	I'm hosting.
	Ask me.
	All right.
	What can I do?
	Yeah, go for it.
	Yeah, I approve as well.
	Right, okay, good.
	So this is the S&P 500.
	Boomers are absolutely freaking out because, look, let's put it on the five day.
	Actually, let's put it on the month.
	There we go.
	So the S&P 500 used to be up here at, you know, what is that?
	I assume this is one of those, because I'm not an economist, so I assume that this is one of those graphs where the idea was line go up infinity.
	The whole point of the S&P 500 is that it's one of the top 500 companies and because it's a diversified portfolio, the line forever goes up and in fact it's quite rare for it to go down.
	So there we go.
	A few weeks back that was at 5,700 and here we are.
	We've lost 700 points on the S&P.
	So you might think, oh my god, that's catastrophic and the boomers are going absolutely mental about this.
	Let's put it on a five-year view.
	You know, we're back to levels not seen since...
	Mid last year?
	Mid last year, yeah.
	It's also worth mentioning as well, most people investing in the S&P 500 are doing it more on the long term, aren't they?
	To try and beat inflation rather than in a safe investment.
	So not necessarily going in there for a short trade.
	Right. So finally, let's get into this absolute massive boomer schism because I think it's funny.
	And you guys, because I've rambled over a bit, so you guys stop me when you've had enough of this.
	But this is Tim Weiss.
	For all you mega cultists who keep...
	Yes. Funnily enough...
	The Zoomers and the Millennials in the comments are not massively sympathetic.
	Boo-hoo!
	Oh, you get to retire.
	I'm going to work until I'm dead.
	I don't care.
	Yes. Didn't most of these people that he's castigating now have to shut their entire lives down a few years ago at the expense of all of this debt that needs to be repaid now, purely for the sake of Tim Wise feeling a bit more secure in himself?
	Funny you mention that.
	Some people are recycling some of his own comments back to him.
	He said a couple of years ago, when you millennials and Gen Z arseholes stop congregating in large numbers because you're young and you can handle COVID-19, perhaps we respect you.
	Until then, we don't.
	Well, what goes around comes around.
	So people have been giving Tim advice.
	Stop buying avocado toast.
	Maybe he's going to have to cancel that fifth cruise of the year.
	Yes, some people are saying, look, go into plumbing, learn to code.
	Have we got any Visit Canada comments here?
	Have you tried euphonising yourself?
	Yeah, yes.
	Somebody suggested that.
	This guy's saying, look, you can pull yourself by your bootstraps.
	Hard work pays off.
	Stop buying so much avocado toast and fancy letters.
	Get an entry-level job to get your foot in the door.
	Wait, wait, wait.
	What if he goes in and gives the manager a firm handshake?
	Yes! Top advice.
	I literally got that advice from my dad when I was a teenager.
	Advice? It never worked.
	The handshake wasn't firm enough.
	Clearly, that must have been the problem.
	Yep. Have you tried a side hustle?
	Pick up some extra shifts in overtime?
	So the reason I threw this in there is because there is a bit of a generational divide over this one.
	And Zoomers and millennials, they just really don't care because they're not invested in the system.
	People of Harry and I's age have nothing invested in the system.
	All it does is extract money from us.
	So why should we care if it burns down?
	Generally about a quarter of my wages every single month go to Taxes and all sorts of things.
	And that's even before council tax and value-added tax on every purchase I make as well.
	So, good luck saving.
	We're paying money to a system that screws us over actively.
	Is actively replacing us.
	So, why would we care?
	They can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, take the Panda Express Assistant Manager job with a smile, blah, blah, blah.
	You get loads of this.
	That was the Chris Ruffo one, wasn't it?
	About the Panda Express Manager.
	They get paid really well.
	I mean, in America, yeah.
	That was a famous Tim Wise comment about how white people are going to go extinct and he's not going to be sad about it because it's a good thing, actually.
	That's an interesting take from him.
	Yes, yes, is indeed.
	So what would motivate that remarkable lack of sympathy from him on many fronts there?
	Yeah, okay.
	So anyway, so this is developing.
	Haven't had a chance to do anything more than a bit of reaction on this one or what's going on.
	I'll do Brokonomics when I get into it more.
	And let's just see if anyone has left a rumble rant for me to answer straight away.
	So, Rage...
	Quit Ninja says, China has always been threatening to attack the independent nation of Taiwan.
	If it were to economically collapse, this might push it to actually do so.
	I think in reading our independent nation of Taiwan, your social credit score just got shifted down a little bit there.
	Yes. So, I mean, you know, he's right.
	I mean, this situation is so unpredictable at the moment that I'm going to end up having to come back to it.
	So, yeah, that could happen.
	I came in partway through.
	Did you see China raise tariffs to 84%?
	I did.
	I only just caught that just before we came on.
	Trump's going to embargo them at this point.
	Yes. Well, I suppose you could go to infinity percent tariffs or you could just embargo them or whatever.
	Same thing.
	And Bald Eagle1787 says, China can turn off the US military because a vast majority of things the US uses in their arsenal are made in China.
	China just cuts off the exports and the US military has zero munitions.
	I mean, yeah, pretty much.
	I mean, it's not just military as well.
	China dominates on heart medication, diabetes medication as well.
	And that's very important for America.
	Yeah. The US should never have got into this situation.
	Who was it that put them in that situation?
	Was it Reagan?
	The last 30 years of globalist leaders.
	That makes sense.
	On to something a little bit less complicated, a little bit less serious, and if we're entirely honest with ourselves, not particularly important, but I wanted to talk about it anyway.
	And that is the scourge of millennial writing, which sadly has given me terminal cancer.
	You've still got all your hair.
	That's a miracle.
	Well, I've chosen to go the Walter White route of, ah, screw it.
	You're making meth now, okay.
	Stay on your good side.
	And not for the first time.
	Self-incriminating, no?
	Ah, they'll never catch me.
	Anyway, so you may have experienced this before.
	You may have encountered it, which is the millennial writing.
	I first came across the term through this man's account, Shredded Nerd.
	He's got a couple of videos on these sorts of things.
	A recent video came out called Millennial Critics, I think it was, where he was insulting, like, zero punctuation and Yahtzee and people like that.
	And he also did this one, a follow-up called Millennial Characters.
	and I think you can identify Millennial writing through a few of the things that he identifies in these videos.
	To sum a little bit of them up I would recommend you watch them though.
	So it doesn't necessarily mean that you are a Millennial who writes things.
	Millennial writing is just the name
	that has been given to this colloquially.
	It's sort of a term for bad stuff.
	So you can be a millennial who's a good writer.
	Yeah, it's a bad term.
	It's a style of writing.
	It's a style of writing, exactly.
	And you can identify it through a few things, which is a reliance on irony and insincerity.
	Nothing is allowed to be serious for too long.
	You can see this through, ironically enough, boomer Joss Whedon-style writing, where things can be serious for a few minutes at a time, but every serious scene has to end with a quid.
	It's a product of emotional insecurity and a fear of rejection.
	Oh, that's a very interesting take.
	I just thought it's because of the fact that he's a hack.
	That too.
	Yeah, although I still quite like Firefly.
	Oh, did you make Firefly?
	He wrote Firefly, yeah.
	He also wrote the original Buffy show.
	Oh, I like that as well.
	Well, the thing is, Joss Whedon, he kind of started the trend while at the same time kind of having some good shows behind him at the same time.
	So you could forgive it with him because with him it was...
	And he kept on leaning into it.
	film and then the rest of Marvel decided to do it as well and then because Marvel was the big popular franchise everyone else started to do it as well but without without even a fraction of the talent that Joss Whedon originally displayed when he was
	writing this stuff back in the early 2000s
	But it does serve to undercut the kind of emotional stakes of any story that you're being told.
	It's also got the constant pop cultural references that you as the audience are just expected to get.
	This could be a holdover from Family Guy, which a lot of people of millennials and my generation would have grown up watching.
	Constant swearing for no reason.
	They just think it makes them sound cool and mature.
	I really dislike that.
	A lot of shouting.
	They talk like babies, but throw in lots of swearing in their baby talk, and it's very, very annoying.
	I'll tell you what I really dislike that's probably going to get some people upset at me, but I really didn't like the film Step Brothers, because it was basically...
	I hate that film.
	There's two reasonably good comic actors playing...
	When they're in the right role.
	Yeah. But Will Ferrell has a bad tendency to go for characters who are just random loud noises and shouting.
	That's kind of his style.
	Yeah, I don't really like that.
	No, me neither.
	It's also very flippant in its depictions of violence, where the writers clearly have never experienced real-life violence, so they kind of tend to glorify it and revel in it.
	See, for instance, the Boys TV show, where everything is as gross as possible, as gory as possible, because really, you can just tell these writers have never been punched in the face.
	When they were growing up.
	I watched a film once where a woman was in the back seat of a car and she took off her shoe and hit this huge guy next to her and knocked him out with her shoe.
	Must have been some very heavy shoes.
	No, no.
	It was just...
	I think it was just this.
	It was written by a millennial woman.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	And the stories themselves and the world that they establish for these stories tend to only reflect the cosmopolitan city environments and attitudes of the writers who have no attempt to think outside of themselves, completely self-obsessed and very, very lazy in its social commentary.
	And as a result of this, the themes always tend to be about depression.
	Mental health problems and get celebrated for doing things like the Reddit.
	It had a realistic depiction of a panic attack in it.
	That's something that has popped up quite often.
	I thought philipsistic is the word I think you wanted there.
	Yes. And yeah, it's characters that are only reflections of the writer, only appeal to the writer.
	And one of my least favorite things, only ever speak in the writer's voice.
	An example of this, I was unfortunate enough that a few years ago, my missus decided to start watching the Amazon Prime Doom Patrol TV show, and I was unfortunate to be trying to read in the living room, for instance, while she was watching it at full blast volume,
	and so had the misfortune of hearing the dialogue, and the thing that frustrated me more than anything was I could tell every single one of these characters spoke in the same voice.
	There was no attempt to differentiate how all of these characters spoke.
	They all spoke in the exact same sardonic, insincere, ironic way where every other word had to be the F word.
	Sorry, I'm smiling just because I'm imagining you in your living room getting increasingly annoyed while you're reading a book about, I don't know, World War II or something.
	And you'll be putting it down, you'll be taking your glasses off and sort of going...
	That is exactly it.
	That happens quite often, sad enough to say.
	But so all of these characters all spoke in the same voice, whereas at the moment I'm going back through a rewatch of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, and you can tell the differentiation in the character voices.
	Walt doesn't talk like Jesse, Jesse doesn't talk like Saul, Saul doesn't talk like Walt.
	All of these characters speak in their own distinctive ways, whereas these writers are unable to take themselves And detach themselves from these characters because all of the characters just have to be them.
	What's a fundamental lack of awareness?
	It's sort of a...
	I've thought about this a fair amount.
	It always strikes me when...
	You can always tell when a writer's done this.
	Even if you don't know the writer at all, you can always tell that it's a self-insert.
	And it just speaks of...
	An extended period of self-obsession where you've not thought about anyone but yourself for such a long period of time that you're incapable of doing that.
	It's like one of the most basic human skills of communicating with other people is being able to imagine what they're like.
	Put yourself in their mind.
	Whereas a real writer, if they have to have a self-insert, just does it like George R. R. Martin did in A Song of Ice and Fire, where he's like, I'm going to have Sam Tarly, who's a fat nerd, who's pathetic and cowardly and weaselly, and that's me in the story.
	And everybody else can just be, you know, themselves as I write them.
	Well, he has a bit of a redemption.
	Not going to spoil it, but, you know, he's not all bad.
	He does have a little bit of redemption.
	And he's one of the few good people in the entire show.
	Yeah, but it is interesting, again, that Martin has explicitly said, oh yeah, he's me.
	Who did you write as yourself?
	Oh, the fat coward.
	I mean, that's a certain level of honesty, so I can respect it.
	So the most recent example that's been popping up for me of this kind of millennial writing style is this.
	The Netflix adaptation of the Devil May Cry video game series, executive produced and written by...
	Adi Shankar.
	Now, I'm a huge fan of the Devil May Cry games.
	I doubt either of you have ever played them.
	I have.
	You have?
	Oh, which one?
	Was it the fourth one?
	Oh, the one on PS3, yeah.
	That's it.
	That's a good game.
	Is it one of those games where you need a controller and you need to press the buttons really fast?
	Yes. Not my kind of game.
	I only play video games where it's possible to invade France in them.
	That's fair.
	I mean, you do fight demons from hell in them.
	If they were from France, I think I would go with Ridge.
	There's a white flag there.
	Yeah, there is a white...
	They're French.
	Yeah. But I love those games.
	I've played all five of them.
	The DMC, Devil May Cry, doesn't really count.
	And I will admit, I only played five minutes of the second one because it was...
	Even those five minutes was enough to tell that it was a dreadful game.
	But the rest of them, I absolutely love.
	Some of my favourite games...
	Ever. And the thing that you'll notice if you play them is that they're really, really cheesy, as I'll show you in a moment.
	They're really, really over the top.
	But they're also, in the very Japanese way, very, very sincere.
	When there's a big emotional moment, the characters will drop the act and they will become very sincere and treat a situation with the seriousness it deserves.
	Not so in this adaptation, where I found this image.
	And posted it and it took off for some reason.
	But they said, here's the description of the backstory of the show.
	Of the character Sparda, the demon who is the main character Dante's father.
	He was a demon knight, whatever that means.
	Big bad warrior, blah blah blah.
	2000 years ago when our world was still connected to their shithole and Mundus wasn't happy just ruling the shithole.
	And I guess Sparda woke up one day and realised, hey!
	This is evil as F. He fought against Mundus, taking out hundreds of his own former legions, kind of the least he could effing do, really.
	I hate everything about this.
	You can see why I have terminal cancer.
	So two points here.
	First of all, I am never going to watch this anyway, but reading that, my reaction is, well, if you don't take yourself seriously, why should I?
	That's a good question.
	With fantasy there's this little thing known as suspension of disbelief.
	You've got to sell the universe to people and make them immersed in it.
	If you don't take it seriously yourself you're not going to do that.
	It's going to be bad.
	I've read a few of the 30k books now and they take themselves very seriously and you can kind of get into it.
	You mean they don't do things like say big bad warrior blah blah blah and completely shit all over the law that they're trying to establish.
	Quite, yes.
	I mean, compare this to the actual intro of the first game and you'll see what I mean.
	It's really cheesy.
	There's Sparda in the background with his big demon sword doing, like, Star Wars guy style, like...
	Add Eye of the Tiger there and it's like a training montage.
	There's some Japanese guys with sensors on him and against a green background setting this up.
	He's practising his moves against Darth Maul.
	That's what he's doing there.
	But it's got the lore dump, it's got the fire.
	Like I said, it's cheesy, it's over the top, it's silly, but it is actually taking...
	It's sincere.
	It's taking itself seriously because it is saying, here's Sparda, he's the one good guy out of all of the demons, and that's what made him special.
	And here's the sincerity versus irony again.
	The character who delivered those lines that I showed you a moment ago is the same as this character from the game, Lady.
	And in the games, she's very serious about the whole thing.
	She's very sincere.
	I also like that there's a woman in it and they just call her Lady.
	Yes. She does have a name, but they just call her Lady.
	And she's cool because she carries a gigantic rocket launcher everywhere.
	Which, again, is just part of the fun factor of the games because they take themselves seriously.
	But not too seriously because they're Japanese.
	The armour seems impractical.
	She's got an armoured miniskirt and then the rest of her is...
	Oh, that's not armour.
	Those are just like gun pouches for bullets.
	So she's not actually wearing any armour.
	So if it was here, that would be the first bit to go up in Sparks then?
	Yeah, presumably.
	But again, the whole point of these character designs was literally all about...
	Cool factor.
	Yes. I appreciate that.
	The second game had outfit designs by the fashion company Diesel, for instance.
	It wasn't about how practical would this be.
	They fire rocket launchers at one another and then all of a sudden the main character takes a surfboard ride on one of the rockets as it's going.
	How based are they compared to Hugo Boss?
	I don't know anything about Diesel.
	I imagine they're German.
	They sound German.
	But as well as that...
	Josh is going to do some studying for us.
	Here's how they talk in the original game in DMC3.
	Are you crying?
	It's only the rain.
	The rain already stopped.
	Devils never cry.
	Again, cheesy, over the top.
	Really sincere.
	Italian. Oh, they're Italian.
	Okay. So, you know, pretty based adjacent to Hugo Boss.
	In that case, here's the Netflix adaptation as interpreted by a Twitter user.
	Are you fucking crying?
	It's only the rain.
	It already stopped fucking raining.
	laughs Oh dear.
	Devils never cry.
	I see.
	But the clue is in the title.
	They may cry.
	Even a fucking devil may fucking cry when he loses a fucking love.
	Turn it off.
	That's not the actual show or anything, but that's how they would write that scene.
	I've got my head around millennial writing now.
	And then there's the other parts that come with the whole Netflix adaptation of the show.
	That being that you can see with all of these...
	What do all of these shows tend to have in common with the source material that they're adapting?
	They don't do it very faithfully.
	For a start, I've noticed that the Witcher is relegated to the back of his own poster and the girl bosses are kind of the prominent ones.
	Yeah, there's a lot of girl bossing in these shows, isn't there?
	There's a lot of complete lack of faithfulness to the source material and a lot of current year messaging in them.
	And you can see that through the IGN review which praises it for being a bold indictment of 2000s Americana.
	Right. Huh?
	I don't remember that being part of the games, personally.
	So I grew up on 80s movies that absolutely loved America.
	Yes. And I bigged it up at every possible moment.
	And because these movies got exported around the world...
	Lots of Japanese programmes still love America.
	Yeah, because they got exported around the world, everybody liked America because the cultural stuff coming out of it was so upbeat.
	And I think America can hardly be surprised when the stuff that it's putting out these days loathes itself.
	Yeah, leave a certain amount of pessimism and self-loathing to the people who have experience, which is us.
	The British.
	We're very good at it, actually.
	And can you guess, in a show being made in current era, where it's about fighting demons, are the demons just going to be evil creatures, bad guys?
	They're going to be leftists.
	Maybe orcs, like Lord of the Rings.
	They're not going to be a stand-in for politics, are they?
	I'm sorry to break your feet, Dan.
	So this is a real clip from the show where America...
	The real bad guys invade hell like it's Iraq or Afghanistan.
	Oil in hell.
	Finally! Basically, yes.
	And listen to the soundtrack they put to it.
	Hang on a minute.
	Why would you invade hell?
	What's your military objectives?
	What does winning look like when you invade?
	They've got so high on post-war liberal ideology that they want to go to hell and take out old Adolf a second time.
	I think that...
	I can't say it.
	I can't say it.
	Literally, I think it's a case of religion bad.
	They're Christians, so they just hate evil demons.
	Well, sorry, poor, pitiable demons for no good reason.
	And again, listen to the music that they've set this to as well.
	you.
	I will turn that off before we get copyright struck.
	So they're firing missiles into hell.
	They've opened the portal.
	I think firing missiles into hell is a good idea.
	So do I, but have you considered that the poor demons are actually wait for it brown people.
	So what the show is trying to say is that all brown people go to hell?
	There's some interesting mixed messages there.
	They're trying to hate on themselves so hard that they've kind of gone 360.
	And it's like, well...
	America's become so powerful that even the brown people in hell aren't safe.
	That's what I like to take away from this.
	I, for one, think that Holy Crusade against the demonic forces of hell is a good thing.
	But I'm a far-right extremist.
	But what this video is saying is if you don't have access to a hell portal...
	You know, brown people in general do.
	I guess so.
	I guess, maybe.
	But where have we seen this kind of messaging before?
	Think of Les Poor Orcs.
	They just wanted to live a good life.
	They're poor refugees.
	Open the gates to Gondor and let them in.
	Look at these poor demons.
	They're so hard done in life.
	They're poor little refugees.
	Open the portals to Earth and let them in.
	Tell you what is implicit in this is that they think That violent media causes real world violence in much the same way that in the 90s they were talking about violent video games and music making people violent like Tipper Gore.
	That's something that Shredded Nerd discusses in Millennial Characters because of the fact that for instance the whole girl bossing thing is a big thing.
	Could be seen to be downstream from this idea of they say well men are more violent than women but we can't say it's just because men have Testosterone and naturally more violent.
	Because that's biological determinism and post-modern feminism says biology doesn't exist.
	So therefore it has to be down to the environment.
	What's part of the environment is the media people consume.
	So if you watch Predator and watch Arnold Schwarzenegger having a manly fight against the Predator, therefore that's going to make you more violent.
	So we need to take Arnold Schwarzenegger out and put Zendaya in.
	That explains why lesbians are so violent to their partners then.
	They're big Schwarzenegger fans.
	That's it.
	It's all those girl bosses.
	It's making them violent.
	And the testosterone and steroids as well.
	Unironically. They've got no man to tell them to calm down, dear.
	That always works, doesn't it?
	Every time.
	100% success rate.
	And there's more clips that are going about where, for instance, Lady is pointing her gun at these poor, poor demonised, no pun intended, refugee...
	Evil demons.
	And again, if you're going for an adaptation of the Devil May Cry series, the whole point of Sparda himself is that he's literally the one demon who ever was able to realize being evil is bad.
	That's what makes him special.
	That's what makes his son Dante special.
	If they're all like that, then it completely...
	But these people don't care about the canon.
	In this scene on here, they literally make up a whole new lore and canon for the show that has nothing to do with anything in the video games, which makes you ask, why are you adapting this?
	Is it just because you think the name is marketable?
	It's probably just because you think the name is marketable.
	It is, as ever, always, as with Rings of Power, explained by the heat map.
	Refer to the heat map if you have any questions.
	It will explain everything to do with leftists for you.
	And you get dick riders like this.
	You get, oh, Devil May Cry fans when the Netflix non-canon adaptation doesn't follow the game's lore perfectly.
	These are the dickheads.
	These are the wretches.
	These are the Reddit virgins that are happy to accept the lowered standards for everything in pop culture.
	And make it so that every film that you go to see these days is a wretched abomination.
	Can I bring Snow White into this?
	To just accept it.
	Go on.
	So Snow White did not respect the source material and nobody went to see it and they've lost whatever it is, 300, 400 billion on it.
	Whereas Minecraft, and I took my kids to see the Minecraft movie, apparently that very much does respect the source material and the cinemas were full, like completely full.
	I've seen the clips from the cinemas and every time Jack Black opens his mouth in America, they just start clapping.
	People start cheering, shitting themselves with pure excitement and joy.
	They don't do that in British cinemas.
	They politely give a round.
	There was a mild giggle of approval just below the sound level that you'd hear it.
	But for Britain, that's pretty riotous.
	The point is, if you're going to make something about something, you should respect the source material because that's why people are going to go and see it.
	It makes sense, doesn't it?
	But these kinds of idiots are why this kind of stuff exists in the first place, because they'll just excuse any rubbish that comes across them.
	They know will own the chuds if they pretend to like it.
	So they pretend to like it, and Netflix makes more of it.
	On to the man who made it, Adi Shankar.
	So he's born in 1985, so he is a millennial, so officially a millennial writer.
	What I found interesting about this was that I just looked through this.
	I go down and find "Career" he gives his
	At worst, he was seen as flogging things that were past their sell-by date.
	He was an exaggerated caricature in a town made up entirely of exaggerated caricatures.
	What a big surprise.
	If anything, the character taught more Americans about India than anything else.
	Also, he was an executive producer on the 2012 Dread film, which was awesome.
	So, I can't believe that he is...
	I would have thought it was dreadful.
	I mean, just coming back to the Apu thing, presumably his issue is that Apu was...
	Well, yeah.
	Right. I don't think the damage to...
	India's reputation comes from the character of Apu in The Simpsons.
	Perhaps other kinds.
	And then you can see, as I mentioned at the beginning, the incredible self-indulgence of millennial writing, where he's decided to, one, indulge in his own...
	Emotional vulnerability.
	Where he says, Devil May Cry's antagonist has a goal to open the portal between human and demon realms to guarantee humanity's destruction.
	His reason for opening the portal and for having smuggled demons into the human realm for years, refer again to the heat map, is to save people who embraced him with open arms after he was scorned by his own kinds.
	It was a process of, and I'm going to slowly reveal to you the story of this hurt kid, said Shankar.
	By the end of it, I want you to I don't need sympathy for my enemies I need tools to crush them I was
	born in India, in Kolkata, and if you know anything about Kolkata, it's a lot of rampant poverty everywhere.
	This is the environment I grew up in.
	Anytime you go anywhere, you look out the car window and you just see kids that look like you, but they're living in the streets and it's so overwhelming.
	My memory of India was not that it was a very dark place, it was this sweet place of sweet people.
	This happened to them, they were colonized, they were strip-mined, and then bad people took over.
	So... Strange mixed messaging there, which is one he's saying within the canon of this universe, he's saying that hell is essentially India.
	Yeah, I can see that.
	And also showing that, again, very self-indulgent, only ever reflects the interests of the writers themselves, can't be about anything greater.
	The show is basically about his own post-colonial grievances.
	And of course, he was born in 1985, and so he never lived in colonial India.
	It's all...
	Post hoc nonsense.
	Yeah, well, I mean, we do owe them, what was it, 42 trillion pounds?
	The world's economy, yeah.
	Yeah, the entire global economy is owed to India.
	And I'm sure he would agree with that as well.
	He also had a hand in making the Castlevania adaptation that Netflix put out a few years ago.
	I actually like that one.
	The first season.
	I watched the first season.
	It was actually quite good.
	That had a lot of other typical tropes in it where you can see it reflected in Devil May Cry as well, which is the Religion bad, whereas in real Castlevania and the games, religious characters are people fighting Dracula and vampires.
	In the show, they're evil people tricking the masses who are doing evil things because religion is evil.
	They're warmongers.
	They also made this amazing change where instead of the vampires being afraid of the cross because of Christianity, they're afraid of the cross because of the right angles on it.
	Right. Yes.
	Geometry phobia or something.
	Well, apparently, according to this dialogue here, vampires are basically an evolved predator species.
	It confuses the shit out of their brains.
	So, good luck going through a door, sitting at a table.
	It's like the vampire version of per capita then.
	It just doesn't work for them.
	It just doesn't work.
	There is one beneficial thing from this show, though, that I can say, which is that it has led to a spike in sales of the actual games.
	And if you've not actually played the game before, Samson, we can hear you.
	If you've not actually played the game before, you should play the games.
	Skip the second one.
	But the rest of them, top-tier action gameplay.
	Fantastic.
	You recommended the first one.
	I'm recommending the video games.
	The first, Devil May Cry.
	Don't play the second.
	No, I thought you were talking about Castlevania.
	Because the first Castlevania was like 30 years ago.
	I still play the Castlevania games.
	They're good too.
	But yeah, so that's the one good thing to come out of this, which is that a very well-deserving video game franchise has actually got a bit of a sales boost because of this.
	And apparently they're on sale at the moment as well.
	So if you feel interested, go and buy them.
	Don't watch the show though.
	Alright, we've got some Rumble rants through.
	Fair few.
	Yeah, we do have quite a few.
	I don't know Samson.
	Not very long, I don't think.
	Not very long, but we could hear you for a moment.
	Audience, could you hear Samson?
	Could you hear me, chat?
	Could you hear Samson?
	He's in the walls.
	I can't really hear him that well, but that's because I'm a bit deaf.
	So Sigilstone says, Millennial writing has so much cussing because of a fake study once posted on Reddit that swearing excessively is a sign of intelligence because sailors are known for their intellectual prowess.
	Is that true?
	Is that real?
	Chat fact check that for me.
	That's a random name sent in a couple saying Been re-watching Phase 1 Marvel movies this week.
	They're overall better than I remember yet even back then there was stuff like Scarlett Johansson taking on a dozen 6 foot plus security guards.
	Lamao. Also saying, also is it just me or is most modern media written with YouTuber reactions in mind?
	Everything is centred around these Yas Queen moments where the slop gurglers get to screech at the screen.
	Is that real?
	Chat, fact check that for me.
	Yeah, I think that's just because the Yash Queen mentality is what these writers have in mind anyway.
	They want to write a cool moment and then work backwards from it in a way that isn't earned.
	Whereas in Breaking Bad, for instance, they...
	Earn the cool moments when they eventually arrive.
	Scanlines, it shows they've lost the concept of good and bad.
	They're portraying people being punished with eternal damnation as victims.
	It's the same mentality that drove the Floyd riots.
	Old Eagle, Netflix had a good DMC animation years ago that was amazing.
	This new one should be burnt to the ground.
	Also US invading hell.
	Deus Vault Brothers.
	Yeah, I think the good DMC animation was one that was actually done in 2008.
	In Japan, it was a full-on DMC anime, so that explains why it was good.
	JM Denton, question for Josh.
	If you have to let one in between the Orcs of Sauron or India, which do you choose?
	I suppose this is not just a single person to your home.
	Open the floodgates, who?
	I suppose the Orcs, because it's easier to see.
	That they're unequivocally evil, and therefore the solution will come about quicker.
	I mean, to be fair, there are plenty of good Indians.
	Orcs... Of course.
	Orcs are...
	They're evil.
	I know Rings of Power might have changed your mind on this, but orcs are genuinely evil.
	Um... Just by sheer exposure, I'm still going with the orcs.
	It'll be a bit novel, that's what you're going for.
	Yeah. Sigilstone again says, I can't wait for the Adi Shankar adaptation of Dragon Age, where the darkspawn, a literal walking plague, are just poor refugees from the Fade, looking to settle down and spread the blight in peace.
	That's a random name again.
	Subversive writing is best exemplified by what they did to Thor in the early movies he was respected, but then Thor Ragnarok began the trend of emasculating him and mocking European...
	That's a good point.
	Also, where I'm from, we call them the...
	I don't think I can read that.
	And finally, Bald Eagle says the 2007 Devil May Cry animation is the one that should be watched.
	Yes. And it's pretty late into the podcast now, so are we gonna carry on?
	Oh, apparently we can just go on forever, so it's the Infinity podcast today, folks.
	Well, you don't have to speed run it then.
	No, I'm going to take my time and we're going to enjoy it.
	And it's a fun one as well.
	I was going to say, this should be fun.
	You know what?
	I'm just going to...
	Put your laptop away.
	There you go.
	Also, give me this stuff.
	Give me this stuff.
	Alright, what do you want?
	What are you buying?
	That's the wrong game anyway.
	That's not Devil May Cry.
	That's Resident Evil 4. Also a classic.
	Don't play the remake.
	Play the original.
	It's amazing.
	Where did everybody go?
	Bingo? So disturbing.
	I will cosplay Leon Kennedy again.
	I've done it before.
	Anyway. On to the actual segment.
	Hang on, let's get you sorted first.
	There we go.
	Happy now.
	I'm just gonna sit back and savor it.
	Yeah, I'm gonna get it at a right angle so that vampires can't get me.
	Dear me.
	Anyway. I think people like Johnny Somali have kicked off what amounts to a plague of streamers on the East.
	And I know, Dan, you're a big fan of the East.
	I also am a big fan of the East.
	It's an innocent part of the world, isn't it?
	You know, the South Koreans, the Japanese.
	Good cultural output these days.
	Historically, I don't know how innocent the Japanese have been.
	I'm not talking historically.
	Oh, okay, alright, alright.
	Even the Chinese are being plagued by these sorts of people.
	And, you know, Johnny Somali got banned and arrested in South Korea.
	The Japanese obviously hate him because he was going around being disrespectful.
	And another one, another one of these annoying streamers, the box isn't working.
	My box isn't working as well.
	Oh, no, now it's working too well.
	Okay, there we go.
	Let's tighten up these boxes.
	There we go, the box is working again now.
	So also there's another streamer, Vitaly, who's a Russian guy, I think, who was arrested in the Philippines after being a nuisance, basically.
	And people are just going over to Asian countries and being a nuisance.
	Was Vitaly one of the ones who was trying to go across all of Japan via public transport without paying for it?
	I don't know.
	Because I remember there was a European streamer who had been going around doing that, and again, just very disrespectful.
	And, yeah, I don't pay much attention to these people except when they do awful things.
	But a new person has been doing the rounds, but this time they've not necessarily been annoying people.
	What they've been doing is they've been seemingly invited by the Chinese government.
	I don't know.
	Or at least they've been embraced by the Chinese government.
	They've been doing the media rounds, you may notice.
	This gentleman here has been showing up quite a lot.
	I'm not going to play this, but...
	Yeah, he's been going around China with a police escort and security guards and Chinese state approval and having a very curated and...
	So Chinese police are following him around?
	Not for that reason.
	Right. It's not because they're just looking to get a jump on crime.
	I think it's an escort, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's because he's got like 30 million or so subscribers on YouTube.
	I'd never actually heard of him until I saw these propaganda piece.
	It seems like it, yeah.
	He's made some guest appearances on WWE recently where thankfully he understands the crowds hate him so he just gets beaten up.
	Absolutely. Rightly so.
	So, you know, he's doing things like...
	By the way, just to be clear, I'm showing you this because it annoys me.
	Like, the whole reason for people going out and they do these exaggerated expressions is like, I can't believe this thing is happening that I have deliberately come all this way to see.
	Oh, wow, I didn't expect this thing that I knew what I was getting in for would be like this.
	And there's all these really poorly acted expressions, and it's just so...
	What the fuck?!
	Oh, no!
	Oh, please turn.
	Yeah, there you go.
	Sorry about the loud screaming.
	I forgot about that.
	But, yeah, he's just sort of freaking out.
	The fact that there's a dancing robot.
	Wow. If I saw that in public, if I was in China, I'd probably go to the edge of the crowd and be like, oh, that's interesting.
	You can tell he's poorly acting.
	But yes.
	I know what he reminds me of.
	The fifth element.
	There was a character in the fifth element.
	Oh, the really annoying one.
	Yes. Yeah, I know who you're on about.
	Maybe he watched that as a child and decided to base his entire life personality on it.
	He was that actor who showed up in the 90s and was really annoying in everything that he was in.
	Quentin Tarantino had Samuel L. Jackson kill him in Jackie Brown as well.
	It was the best role he ever did.
	He also took a ride in a flying car and here you get some very clear silly reactions that are obviously put on for the children but All of this sort of thing.
	You look at the crowds around there.
	Obviously this is something that has been designed to make the Chinese look good.
	And of course this all goes on at the back of a US-Chinese trade war.
	Of course, there was also the fact that TikTok was going to be banned, and then loads of people on TikTok went to Red Note, and there was the China-US cultural exchange.
	And so what seems to be happening is there's a deliberate attempt by the CCP to make people very sympathetic to the Chinese, which, you know, I have nothing against the Chinese people, I just don't like their government, right?
	I mean, yeah, this is...
	I mean, look at the camera angles, look at what he's been given the opportunity to do.
	He's got his police escort.
	This is propaganda.
	Being sold to 12-year-olds on Twitch.
	It's basically like, look at China, they're just like us.
	It's exactly the same.
	We're all good friends, so don't put Taric on.
	I kind of want to see an RPG trail just sneaking around.
	Alas. Yes.
	And there was also him in an amphibious car, and I've got to admit, the amphibious car did look quite cool.
	So the common theme in Who Is Look, we Chinese have got loads of tech.
	Yes. And it's very impressive to gesticulating black men.
	Exactly. And once you've seen one video of it, you've seen them all, it's like, look at this thing, it's really cool.
	Wow, facial expressions.
	This is the kind of thing that I like to see the Top Gear crew.
	Do. Because they're entertaining and funny and have good personalities.
	Not this guy.
	Yeah. Here's how you be entertaining.
	Be yourself and don't be inauthentic.
	That's my life advice for you.
	And there was a sort of wholesome one where he listens to people play instruments and there's a very good...
	I'm not sure what that is.
	It looks like a koto or something like that, doesn't it?
	But I think he was genuinely impressed, and it was genuinely impressive.
	That's so cool.
	That actually seems like an authentic reaction.
	And also, it is very impressive.
	What the...
	But anyway, we have a podcast to get on with.
	Sorry to disenchant you there, Dan.
	But that sort of thing is wholesome enough.
	Dan's wondering how much she costs now.
	Well, I mean, it does look like a sort of 17th century brothel set-up, doesn't it?
	I know what you mean.
	I kind of know what you mean.
	No, I never went to China in the 17th century, so I just assumed that's what it looked like.
	Oh, you really missed out.
	I don't know who's gone into my notes, but there's a whole page missing.
	Okay, there we go.
	I've seen this guy.
	Chinese Trump.
	Pleasure to have you come to Chongqing.
	Because Chongqing is an international city.
	You know, we're going to have fun here.
	So, I don't, I don't, because my English is not that good actually.
	But, you know, I'm just stating the facts that I know about Chongqing.
	Because I was born and raised in Chongqing.
	Especially, okay, I like that guy.
	I want to see more of that guy.
	You can find this stuff online.
	Oh, I'm going to follow.
	The point being here, that the authentic stuff that is actually cool about China isn't so much the we have technology.
	The authentic stuff is that there are people there that have interesting things to do.
	And of course, it speaks of we are the CCP.
	China is very advanced.
	We are number one for technology.
	Whereas I think actually, if you wanted to sell China to Westerners, they're doing it the wrong way.
	But that's just me.
	But he's been very well received in China.
	Even in the mural he looks angry.
	And they've also turned him into a sort of...
	Imagine you're lucky if you live opposite these murals and that's what you get every time you open the curtains.
	Well, there's one in Swindon that's not far from where I live and it's just a giant 30-foot black woman.
	Nothing summarises Swindon quite like that, does it?
	Black women built this school.
	They built Europe.
	Have you seen that video of the protesters in York?
	Where the black guy goes up and he's like, we built this country!
	We built this city!
	Yeah, I'm sure you built York.
	Jorvik, the Viking settlement.
	We was Vikings, man.
	I'm not sure that's accurate, to be honest.
	I'm going to have to check a history book, but I've got questions.
	I mean, they had their own king in the year 800.
	I just don't think it's true.
	History books are lying to you, Dan.
	He also had his face projected on a ferris wheel here.
	And he's also...
	That would be horrifying!
	It would be.
	Just look at his face!
	And the Chinese government praised him personally for promoting positive US-Chinese relations.
	Just in case you doubted it.
	You know?
	Yes, of course.
	Him along with John China, social credit score, very, very good.
	And, yes, even the Chinese embassy in the US did a post about it, saying he's kicked off his journey in China that has already garnered massive global attention, which indicates a broader trend of digital influences bridging cultural gaps and creating alternative channels for foreign audiences to understand a vibrant China.
	Obviously, it's all a PR campaign, isn't it?
	Of course it is.
	When do we get onto the clips of people trolling him?
	In a minute.
	Don't worry.
	You'll get the forbidden fruit soon enough.
	As China Uncensored points out, he's basically releasing CCP propaganda to 37 million subscribers on YouTube.
	And yes, the live streams are getting about 5 million views.
	So he is unintentionally helping support the Chinese government.
	Now, it's time for Harry's favourite.
	Here we go.
	He got a gift from a member of the public here.
	I'm gonna turn it down a bit.
	Did he call him Travis Scott?
	He's a completely different person.
	Open it, open it, open that shit, open that shit.
	Y'all love it, you're gonna love it.
	Oh, fuck it's blue.
	You're gonna love it, you're gonna love it.
	You're gonna love it.
	Wait, guys.
	You're gonna love it.
	Woo, woo, woo, woo!
	Come here, motherfucker!
	The thing is, with these clips that I've seen, funny as they are, I wonder if these are staged as well.
	Just to get eyes on his live streams.
	So, there have been some funny instances.
	It's worth mentioning, what you think you're hearing is actually a Chinese word, and if you're a YouTube censor, we're not playing that word.
	It is a Chinese word, and actually, if you take this video down or punish us, you're the racist.
	But with that out of the way.
	That's too far.
	That's what the...
	How far is that?
	How far is that?
	Is that from the Long Beach?
	That's from the Long Beach.
	That's from the last time I went to that.
	It means that, does it?
	It does.
	And this word comes up quite a lot.
	And there are lots of interesting interactions here with this.
	Here we go.
	This is the special food.
	This is wearing the flower suit.
	Oh, I saw that person.
	I saw him.
	He just came to the show.
	Oh, he's a guy who didn't come to the show.
	To be fair, I imagine if you were in a foreign country and loads of people started speaking in a language you don't understand and it sounds like they're talking about you right in front of you.
	Although I wouldn't be surprised if these were staged.
	I'd be shocked if the slurs were the same in all of the languages.
	They're universal, Harry.
	I'm sorry.
	Those are the friends we made a lot.
	It's the true global language.
	And within the first five minutes of him being in China, I think, he gets...
	This guy's a big fan of him.
	Hang on.
	Could you turn it up a little bit, Samson?
	I can hardly hear it.
	Thank you.
	I'm a comedian.
	All right, make a joke with me real quick, bro.
	Make a joke.
	I just said, nigga.
	What? I want a joke.
	You said, nigga.
	I'm so nervous.
	And the community note points out is that's a word often used as an interjection to express thoughtful absorption and hesitation, doubt or perplexity.
	It's basically a filler word, pretty similar to um or well.
	Makes sense.
	That's their filler word?
	I know.
	Wow. Okay.
	Dan's going to start learning Chinese right now.
	But I like how he says tell a joke and then he just goes And drops the N. It made us laugh.
	I mean, it was a good start.
	I mean, to be fair, that's like somebody just walking up to you and saying, make me laugh.
	You probably would go, um...
	So he's probably just saying, um...
	I would do exactly the same.
	It'd work.
	It'd work, to be fair.
	And, um...
	In fact there was an entire crowd chanting the word outro music
	And I think he's doing that all.
	He's leaning into it, isn't he?
	He knows what he's up to.
	I think the crowd knows what they're up to as well there.
	At least they all didn't stop chirping or something.
	This one...
	Start throwing cornstarch.
	This one...
	Is that what?
	Yes, I'm racist!
	You're racist!
	Yes! I hate this!
	I'm a kid!
	I'm a nigger killer!
	I'm so sorry about that, mother of all!
	I'm so sorry about that!
	You're going for these white people!
	I love her!
	Bit of a strange interaction.
	I'm very confused.
	Let's not dwell on it.
	I'm more than surely sure what happened there.
	Let's not dwell on that one.
	I don't think she was sure what she was doing either.
	Now moving to an entirely unrelated country, Japan.
	And this is a streamer called Mizkif.
	I don't know who the hell he is.
	But basically, he started doing pull-ups on the Japanese cherry tree.
	It doesn't seem like a good idea, that.
	No. And then lots of people got upset.
	Because he's being an idiot and it's like a symbol of Japan, isn't it?
	And it's very beautiful and he's spoiling it by being a moron.
	And there were lots of people complaining about it, saying it broke my heart to see someone doing this.
	And then they eventually removed the video the next day because it got backlash.
	And then he posted a big old apology about it and he's like, sorry, I didn't understand the significance of it.
	I just thought it was a tree.
	I took it down as soon as I found out.
	I'm sorry.
	That seems right.
	Well... People do this kind of stuff on purpose and I always go back to Logan Paul really seems to have started the trend of these streamers going to Japan in particular doing IRL streams and being purposefully disrespectful to the local culture and customs so you can get clicks.
	I don't have the video of it but there is a video of him which is online of him standing on a street corner after this happened saying oh it's okay to be loud in public in Japan.
	because Japanese people are basically NPCs.
	They don't matter.
	And he says, when the next GTA comes out, they'll be even more like NPCs, he says.
	Which is just blanketly disrespectful, isn't it?
	Saying that they don't have any agency, which just seems like he's taken the cherry tree thing quite spitefully, to my mind.
	But yes, it's being disrespectful.
	There's no need for it.
	And then another idiot...
	Decided to find the same tree and then climb it again for internet clout because of course he did.
	Some beanie wearing dweeb.
	Start deporting all of these people because they're obviously doing it on purpose as an insult.
	Yeah, and then this same guy says that Japan would be more fun if Japanese people weren't such Wusses?
	I suppose I can translate that to.
	And he's basically complaining about the fact that they care about their culture, and if you do things that are disrespectful, then...
	You don't want to go back to the days when the Japanese weren't wusses.
	Yeah. You don't want to deal with that.
	But also, them caring about their culture and not wanting it to be disrespected is more important than you doing whatever you want.
	I'm sorry, but it's such a selfish mindset.
	And then...
	Oh, I'm going previous instead of forward.
	Then there's a video here where live streamers are told to stop filming in McDonald's and they're just like, I'm not going to do that.
	They're going to have to come over and make me.
	And it's a black woman saying this.
	That's why I've got it muted.
	Basic manners is all you need to avoid situations like this.
	So this same woman, as far as I'm aware, Also, we're staying in an Airbnb.
	Let's just watch this.
	I don't want to even have to explain it.
	She clearly doesn't like using the toilet.
	Show me the pee.
	I don't believe you.
	Nah, that's some hood shit, bro.
	What's wrong with you?
	Where? Right there.
	Bro, what?
	Nah, what's...
	I can't take you nowhere.
	That's fucked up, Xena.
	You poured beer on my head.
	Yeah, but that's...
	This is not our house.
	We have to respect the house.
	I like how he's the one saying, yeah, we've got to be respectful here.
	They're staying in an Airbnb at someone else's house.
	She doesn't understand the toilet or whatever.
	And so is peeing outside like a dog.
	I thought Japan has famously excellent toilets.
	I know, yeah.
	Apparently. Maybe they're just too complicated.
	Maybe. To sit on a toilet?
	No, no, because I think the Japanese toilets, they've got like...
	They're like a 747.
	They've got lots of buttons on them.
	But it seems to be a theme about urinating in places where you shouldn't in Japan for Westerners.
	Well, Westerners in quotation marks.
	Because here's a live streamer who couldn't find a toilet, just goes into a random hotel and just pees in a hallway because he couldn't find a toilet in there.
	I'm not going to show you it because it's like a minute and 47 of someone saying, I need to pee, I need to pee, which isn't interesting.
	But, yep.
	They go in there, they pee in a hotel lobby and then there's, I don't know why this was a live stream, two sweaty what looks like Middle Eastern men with English accents so foreigners that have moved to England are staying in some pokey hotel and he can't be bothered to get up and go to the en suite bathroom so he just pees on the floor in the hotel room that they're then going to sleep in.
	Just support these people.
	I'm not going to...
	It's mischief, deport him, deport them, deport that woman.
	And then some streamers were in a bar and apparently they sexually harassed a bar girl and then one of the locals chased them down and attacked them, basically.
	And they didn't even know what they'd done wrong and they're like, what are you doing?
	Why are you attacking us?
	And they ran away.
	But it's just because they're being disrespectful, isn't it?
	That's why this is happening.
	I mean, any culture, if you get caught sexually harassing random women, expect to have maybe a man or two come up and try and stop you.
	Exactly, yeah.
	I travel quite a lot and I never get attacked because I'm never disrespectful.
	It's this wonderful trick where if you go to another person's culture and you act better than you would at home, they don't mind you being there.
	It's funny that, isn't it?
	Here's a streamer.
	This is Justice.
	He was basically messing around in a nightclub being an idiot.
	Turn it down.
	Annoying the security guards.
	This is just a cure for all of this stuff.
	Just watching them get hurt.
	That's good.
	Because they're idiots most of the time.
	They deserve it.
	They like to see how far they can push the F around before they find out.
	And then here's a sort of discount Johnny Somali who just goes to a shop, like a corner shop I suppose, and just starts being rude to people because they can't understand him speaking English.
	And he's basically saying look at how fat you are, blah blah blah.
	Stuff like that.
	And they can't find out.
	He's just being rude.
	He's just going up to random people and touching them.
	Which is...
	I don't know how to put it.
	Rude? You wouldn't want that, would you?
	It's more than rude.
	It's getting on the verge of being a little bit...
	I suppose aggressive?
	Yeah. A bit imposing.
	Imagine being in Japan and then out of the darkness this guy turns up and starts touching you and shouting at you in a foreign language.
	I noticed he's doing it to a small woman and not a large man.
	It's funny that, isn't it?
	Yeah. And then...
	Same guy was in a Japanese public toilet and he's just throwing rubbish around on the floor and he's filming in the toilet and then eventually a Japanese man comes up.
	Is that not against the law to film in a public toilet?
	Probably. But he starts filming when there's a Japanese man in there just minding his own business going to the toilet.
	I'm not going to show you because I'm not going to make the problem worse.
	And then the same guy was...
	Just in a shop saying well I'm not going to play it but as they're trying to sort out him buying stuff and trying to be helpful he's talking about the size of his own genitalia as is often the case of American urban scholars.
	They like to big themselves up.
	But the point being here that why has this got worse?
	Who's watching this stuff?
	Why are people allowing it?
	It makes everyone outside of Asia to the You know, the Chinese and Japanese think we're all like these animals that go around weeing on the floor, shouting, grabbing random people.
	It doesn't benefit us whatsoever.
	Certainly doesn't benefit the people they're, you know, visiting.
	And all they're doing is they're making a fool out of themselves and everyone around them for internet clout.
	And this sort of stuff needs to end because it's just socially irresponsible.
	I never thought I'd say this, but I feel of all the streamers that you've shown me on this segment, iShowSpeed was the best behaved.
	He was, actually.
	Yeah. Because he wasn't being actively disrespectful.
	Yeah, I mean, that's a remarkable thing that I never thought I'd say, but there you go, folks.
	We've got some Rumble rants through if you want to read through some of them, Josh.
	Sure. Why do so many of these scholars' hair look like they use toilet brush?
	You'd think that with all the money they're making they'd be able to afford not to have crusty pubes for hair.
	That was a very popular haircut in the late 90s as well.
	You had Rob Flynn from Machine Head with the toilet brush hairdo as well.
	Yeah, it's like you're trying to channel electricity.
	I wouldn't go outside in a thunderstorm with that haircut.
	Yeah. Matt G. Hammond says, Dan should watch the CNN clip of American businessman Kevin O'Leary proposing a 400% tariff on China going around X. Why not?
	We'd probably be that by tomorrow, that is, right?
	Waif Neve says, I am an ex-gen.
	None of this computes.
	Also, $50.
	Thank you very, very much for that.
	That is, yeah.
	I couldn't see that over the mic arm.
	Sigil Stone says, the most surprising part of iShow meets visit to China is he managed to keep it in his pants in front of the cameras.
	Has he done that before or something?
	Is that a reference?
	I'm sure it probably is from what you wrote.
	The worst I've seen is a clip came up on Twitter one time.
	The worst I've ever seen was that he basically went boo at someone's baby in Norway and made the baby cry and the dad was there.
	He's like, what the hell?
	What's wrong with you?
	Why did you just make my baby cry?
	Why do you go boo to a baby anyway that you don't know?
	It's very strange.
	BoldEagle1787 says, if you want to see a nuisance streamer getting arrested and kicked out of countries, legal mindset on YouTube has made it his mission to stop them and shows that it's an international effort also.
	Yeah, hats off to them.
	NatsRandomName says, reminder that all these public nuisance streamers' votes are worth the same as ours.
	A polished democracy returned to monarchy.
	Sounds reasonable.
	Yeah, very based.
	It is just realising that that guy on screen right now, what's his name?
	Blackass Dave.
	His vote is worth just as much as yours, Americans watching this.
	Interesting, isn't it?
	Do we have any video comments that we're going to go through, Samson?
	I can't hear you anymore.
	We've got the opposite problem now, Samson.
	I still can't hear you.
	Okay, we'll do them tomorrow.
	Do you read comments just for us?
	Just a couple?
	Yeah, we'll read a couple.
	Yeah, yeah, and then we'll be hitting the road, folks.
	So, just a general one.
	Samzu said, never thought I'd see the day where Momoi in a Lotus Eaters thumbnail.
	Oh, that's Samson's work, that is.
	What's that?
	I don't understand.
	you like to go through some of your comments, Dan?
	Well, Dan's saving his for broken arms.
	Oh, yeah.
	All right, okay.
	All right, then, North FC Zuma, is that actually real dialogue?
	Yes. That Texas gal, I haven't watched a new show or movie in years.
	years because they all sound like they were written by a reddit mod group chat very good description decision again re-watching better call saul probably the most recent thing i've watched excellent excellent show so give that a watch if you've not
	Rebecca Z, well I'm an older millennial and I would never write like this.
	I think it's all those bad Nickelodeon cartoons in the late 90s and early 2000s.
	After 97, cartoons kind of fell off a cliff in quality and writing that I couldn't watch.
	Not just because I was older, I wasn't stupid and animation became lazy.
	Yeah, animation's definitely got lazier since the late 90s.
	There's another Rumble chat that qualifies it.
	I show Meat gained wide of fame when he was playing a Five Nights at Freddy's game and accidentally flopped it out on stream.
	That's why he's He's an influencer.
	Okay, that's interesting.
	I wish I didn't know that.
	The key to having a multi-million subscribed YouTube account is apparently just showing your penis.
	And apparently then the CCP will invite you over for a guided tour.
	Nick Taylor, my wife, was watching Netflix while I was noodling on my guitar and I said to her, doesn't it...
	She suggested I play in the bedroom.
	This is the conversation I've had many times when I've been overhearing these shows, pointed out, this is shit, they all talk the same.
	There's never an actual argument against that.
	It's just, shut up, I'm enjoying this.
	Okay, alright.
	Furious Dan, as a diehard DMC fan for 20 years, good man, I'm not letting the lefties have this one.
	Like Adolescence and Barbie movie, we may need to counter-read it to absorb any of its cultural momentum.
	Again, I think even in my segment, we laid the seeds for some counter-readings that you could do of it.
	India is hell.
	Brown people are demons.
	According to Adi Shankar, there is a way you could reverse engineer this, that Indian Adi Shankar is blood-libelling all of the people of the Middle East to the west of India.
	That's also a reading of it.
	The funny thing is, yesterday when I was on the podcast, there was a map of the Indian diaspora, and they used the colour brown to signify how much of a diaspora there was.
	In another country.
	So Britain was like quite dark brown.
	Which was interesting to me.
	We've had quite a few Indians in this country for years at this point.
	A somewhere person.
	One of the aspects of millennial writing that you've not really discussed is on top of the irony and sarcasm, there's often a degree of aggressive ambivalence about a topic, where writers want a massive rant about something, but don't want to actively take a position against something.
	Characters won't say, I don't like something, instead preferring to say, I don't care about that.
	People who do care about that suck.
	Yeah, it's all part of the insincerity of that style of writing.
	George Happ, it's about time people learn their lesson with Netflix.
	All they produce is subversion.
	They take a skin suit and have an IP and shove in as much leftism as they possibly can.
	As a massive DMC fan, I refuse to watch this abomination because I've learned my lesson with Castlevania, but culture junkies just want to consume content.
	Exactly. That's why I said at the end of the segment, play the games.
	They're on sale at the moment.
	Give them a nice boost.
	Don't watch the show.
	I've not watched the show.
	I refuse to watch the show.
	Let's go through some of yours.
	Sure. There's only one in the documents.
	I'm just going to read some from the website.
	AZ Desert Rat says, A good portion of streaming is for children and rage bait.
	It's very true.
	Furious Dan says, Japan should outlaw tourism to anyone who can't pass the N4 Japanese language test.
	Well, that's me gone then.
	To be fair though, I'll sacrifice my ability to visit if it means that their country stays nice.
	I'll just learn a bit of Japanese.
	And where was I?
	SomewherePerson says the streamer plague is getting worse because people are rewarded for behaving like animals.
	Getting beaten in the street for being annoying and obnoxious would outweigh the internet clout, I suspect.
	I reckon people would take a beating for fame quite easily.
	To be honest.
	I mean, that's basically what some of these people are doing.
	Mm-hmm.
	He also said, WTF, I love China now, which I can only presume was from a specific part of that segment.
	We'd never know.
	Probably the flying car, we'd imagine.
	That's it, yeah.
	Again, I mean, it's obviously CCP propaganda.
	I will say, it did make China look very nice.
	Mm-hmm.
	Well, we may as well end it there because we're about 20 minutes over.
	Yes, so we hope that you've enjoyed this Excel edition of the podcast of the Lotus Eaters.
	Join us again tomorrow.

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