Ep. 1938 - BREAKING: The World's Biggest Pimp Dies At 43
Michael Knowles challenges the AGI hype, asserting true intellect requires a rational soul AI lacks. He mourns OnlyFans founder Leonid Ravinsky's death, contrasting Ayn Rand's autonomy with Christian responsibility, while condemning Trevor Sheets' public shaming of his wife. Knowles critiques McDonald's robot testing in China as a depressing loss of human fellowship and analyzes rapper "Afro Man," noting patriotism united him more than his actions. Finally, he highlights the massive Sagrada Familia Lego set as cultural good news despite his personal dislike for the basilica's exterior. [Automatically generated summary]
The biggest pimp in the world dies at 43 years old.
The most valuable company in the world claims to have finally achieved artificial general intelligence.
Watch out.
And finally, a nice cultural story.
The largest Lego set ever made.
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I'm Michael Knowles.
the Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show.
Speaking of AI, McDonald's is testing out humanoid robots even at the front of the store.
So usually you go to McDonald's and now they have those screens because the Democrats raised the minimum wage at certain places.
So it's cheaper to replace them with computers.
But now they're actually replacing the guys even at the cash registers with robots.
And then they're replacing the people who hand you your food with robots.
And pretty soon they're going to replace me with robots.
If we've actually hit artificial general intelligence, we're all losing our jobs.
You're going to tune into this show.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is the totally human Michael Knowles show.
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Coming to a podcast near you.
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Right off the top, making the rounds on social media.
The owner of OnlyFans has died at age 43.
I think he had cancer.
And some people are celebrating his death.
I understand why people are celebrating his death.
I do not celebrate his death.
I don't celebrate anybody's death.
No man is an island, entire unto himself.
Each man's death diminishes me because I am part of humanity.
However, it's really sad that this guy died.
Not just say, you know, he's a young guy.
I don't know if he had a family.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about him.
I don't really want to know that much about him.
But it's really sad because of what a terrible life he led.
That's really sad.
I don't mean that just to dunk on the guy.
I mean, it's really sad.
This guy was given life by God and he got 43 years of it, relatively short, I guess, but still 43 years.
43 years looked at from another perspective is a long time and he wasted it.
He did worse than wasting it.
He did a lot of evil in his life.
He used those 43 years for bad purposes.
And now that he's died, some people are going to celebrate his death and other people are just going to kind of shrug their shoulders and no one's going to miss him.
And he'll, if he is remembered at all, he will be remembered as a disgraceful person.
And that's really, really sad because that could happen to any of us.
Part of the reason I don't celebrate when someone dies, part of the reason that I don't, you know, double down on the invective and usually call people all sorts of names and say, this is the most evil person ever would, the reason I generally shy away from that, though occasionally slip up, is because when I look at people who do really evil things, I think there but for the grace of God, go I.
I could have done that.
Had a little turn not happened in my life.
Had I not seen God's grace before me and endeavored my very best to cooperate with it, I could be that guy too.
And I remember there was a very important moment in my religious reversion.
I was away from the church for 10 years.
I, at the age of 13, would have called myself an atheist and persisted in that for a long time.
One of the big shifts in my perspective was when I realized that the phrase, he pleased himself is a terrible epitaph.
That would be a terrible thing to see in someone's obituary.
He did a lot of stuff that gave himself pleasure.
Not he donated to his community, not he left the world a better place, not he sacrificed for others, but just, you know, he really got his.
He made a lot of money, slept with a lot of girls, ate a lot of chocolate, gave himself a lot of pleasure.
He'll be missed?
No, he won't be missed.
That's a really sad epitaph.
And part of my, part of my turn into atheism, and some of that actually involved Ayn Rand.
I was very taken with Ayn Rand as a teenager.
That was a big driver of my libertarianism.
I never really had a liberal phase, but I had a libertarian phase.
I'm ashamed to confess to you.
And Ayn Rand was a big part of it because Ayn Rand says you should do everything for yourself.
She wrote this book, The Virtue of Selfishness.
That's one of her nonfiction books, which is why it's one of the few books she wrote that's not 10,000 pages long of just repetitive trash.
And her argument is, because she was so messed up by communism in the Soviet Union, she swung completely in the other direction and ended up being just the flip side of the communist coin.
She says you should only live for yourself.
You should be really, really selfish.
That's it.
I just saved you.
You don't have to read The Fountainhead.
You don't have to read Atlas Shrugged.
You know, I've just saved you the entire Ayn Rand oeuvre.
She says you need to be really selfish and that'll be better for everybody.
And that's not true.
You don't want to be a communist, a collectivist.
You don't want to be an altruist in the left-wing sense, but you also don't want to be an egotist.
They both share the same premises about human nature, and those premises are wrong.
The premises are that we own ourselves, that we're essentially individuals, and you're either individuals that lump up together in a collective, or you're individuals that stay far apart, like atoms.
But in any case, we're all in.
And it's not true.
Leonid Ravinsky, the guy who owned OnlyFans, he didn't make himself.
You didn't make yourself.
Your life is a gift from God.
And you therefore have a responsibility to your creator.
You are not entirely autonomous.
You are not responsible only to yourself.
You're not a self-creating or even self-actualizing being, ultimately.
You are a creature made by God, and you have a responsibility to the moral order, and you have a responsibility to God's other creatures.
And when you live in that way, you get a nice obituary when you die.
And when you live in a selfish way, you get a bad obituary.
And you get a bad obituary and you are remembered in a negative light, not just because you did something wrong, but because you're living contrary to reality.
You're living contrary to who you really are.
Life Beyond Past Sins00:10:13
It's really sad.
This guy, I guess he founded a different porn site, but then he came to buy most of OnlyFans.
He was worth almost $5 billion at the time of his death, and he's going to be a punchline at best.
There are going to be other podcasters today who are spiking the football, celebrating his death, and that's not going to be me.
I pity the guy, and I think we should pray for this guy.
And I think that we should take him as a warning sign.
You don't want to live like that.
This guy had almost 5 billion bucks.
I'm sure he could have slept with any woman he wanted.
He was the biggest pimp in the world.
And his life was really sad.
It was a total waste, a waste at best.
Okay, here's a related story.
This is going viral right now on social media.
And this is a Christian.
I don't know if he's a pastor or if he's just a lay preacher type, but he's a professional Christian.
I think he is an evangelical Protestant.
And here's the post that's going viral.
It opens up, says, my wife was formerly promiscuous.
I was a virgin.
And he goes on to explain what a whore his wife was, I guess.
But he says that's good.
And anyway, we'll get to what that means.
We'll get to why some people are objecting to it.
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My wife was formerly promiscuous, says this man, Trevor Sheets.
I was a virgin.
She was then radically born again, committed to church, evangelized constantly, Puritan books in her bedroom.
So that's why I would say he's almost certainly an evangelical Protestant.
I have a lot of Puritan ancestors, you know, some of those separatists came here on the Mayflower.
I love my Puritan family, but Puritanism, not where it's at.
A friend of mine, a priest friend of mine, once said that Thanksgiving is a bigger holiday in the UK than it is in America because it's when they got rid of all those Puritans and separatists.
You guys are too weird.
Get out of here.
Anyway, so, okay, that's this guy's perspective.
He talks about his wife.
He says, we got to know each other well for over a year, dated for four months, engaged for two and a half, and did not sin sexually with one another.
Our first kiss with each other was at the altar on our wedding day, reaction pic attached.
So he puts a picture of his poor wife.
He's calling his wife a slut.
And then he puts this picture of the wife on the post.
We've been married for over five years now.
She's been the most wonderful and godly wife, mother to our three children, and a homemaker you can imagine.
She's more pure than most virgins as biblical purity has less to do with past sins and more to do with one's current posture of the heart.
We're far too quick to forget the story of the woman labeled as a known sinner, which likely means a prostitute.
The Pharisees were shocked that Jesus let a public sinner wash his feet with her own tears.
Jesus responded with a parable about debts being forgiven.
Okay, you get the point.
You get how this could be a nice thing.
And yet it feels a little off, doesn't it?
I mean, it goes on and on and on.
It's talking about Christ's forgiveness.
And so that's all really good.
It's true.
Purity ultimately has more to do with one's present state.
You know, morality, virtue has more to do with one's present posture and orientation than it has to do with one's past sins.
The devil wants to tell you that you're going to get bogged down in all your past sins.
The devil whispers in your ear before you sin and says, that sin is no big deal.
Just do it.
No one cares.
And then the minute you sin, he says you can never be forgiven.
That's the most enormous sin in the world.
That's one of the ways in which he tricks you.
So it's true.
It's all about where you're walking.
I think C.S. Lewis uses this metaphor that this image that, you know, we're all kind of like toddlers.
We're all kind of toddling around.
And what matters is that we're toddling toward God.
And we're going to fall and we're going, we're going to wobble.
But as long as we're oriented toward God, as long as our desire is turned toward God and we're moving in that direction, that's what God really wants.
That's what delights God.
And if we're moving in the opposite direction or we're despairing or giving up or whatever, that's a big problem.
But all of that said, I agree with so many of the points he's making.
And yet there's something wrong with this post, right?
You shouldn't call your wife a whore on social media, I think.
Can we say that?
Is that, I don't know, am I, and I have noticed this.
This is sometimes Christians broadly do this kind of thing.
They boast even.
They broadly and loudly proclaim their previous sins.
Sometimes they'll go into lurid detail.
I do find this is more an evangelical Protestant thing than other flavors of Christianity.
And we could get into specific reasons why that is, but it's a little weird.
And here's why.
Christ forgives us.
He comes not to condemn the world, but to save the world.
God's grace is far greater than we can possibly imagine.
We have the opportunity to cooperate with God's grace.
We don't need to live constantly bogged down by shame of our past.
We can move forward in the grace of Christ.
All of that is true.
All of that is true.
And yet we owe each something.
We owe each other something beyond just grace.
We owe each other discretion.
You don't need to talk about your past sins all the time.
Sometimes that can be powerful testimony, but sometimes it's a little awkward and weird.
Sometimes it can be humiliating.
Sometimes it can serve selfish purposes.
I don't want to psycho babble this guy too much, but I do wonder if he is still a little bit troubled by this woman's past.
That's the first or second line in there, right?
I was a virgin on my wedding day and my wife was a slut, but now she's so much nicer.
And now it's so much, she's so wonderful.
He's couching this condemnation of her past in a positive light, but look how wonderful she is now.
And yet I do wonder if it still bothers him a little bit.
We really shouldn't bring up each other's past sins to people.
It was one of the worst things, one of the most poisonous things you can do in a marriage is say, well, do you remember five years ago when you said such and such and such?
Yeah, I really hated that and I've never gotten over it.
And you did this and you did that and you used to, I mean, that's like the death of a marriage, isn't it?
And he's doing that and he's couching it in this really nice Christian language.
We owe each other a little bit of discretion.
We owe each other a little bit of a gracious comportment.
Not just the grace to say, I forgive you and you can move forward, but also the grace to move on, to forget about it.
If this guy's going to say, you know, if he's trying to teach a lesson to people that they don't need to be bogged down in their sin forever, he might hide who he's talking about.
He might say, you know, a good friend of mine or, you know, someone I care about very much used to be like this and now this person is like this.
To say, hey, here's a picture of my wife.
She was a big mega slut, but now she's not so much anymore.
Isn't it great?
It's no, we owe each other a little bit of discretion.
We owe each other a little bit of good comportment.
And furthermore, this is an important lesson for Lent.
Privately suffering, privately repenting can be a more difficult cross.
You know, in some ways, I think this temptation among certain types of Christians to just constantly be talking about your past sin, it's a, I think it comes about as a kind of anxiety or neurosis.
We still feel the weight of it.
We haven't truly moved on from it.
And so you just, you don't want people to think you're a hypocrite.
You don't want people to discover this later and for it to be awkward.
You want to just rip the band-aid off.
You want to immonetize the escaton.
So you say, you know, I used to be a murderer and a thief and a drunkard and a glutton and a big old slut or my wife was that way or my husband was that way or whatever.
But you don't actually, something that can even more closely unite you to the cross of Christ that can maybe even be more sanctifying is to suffer that in silence, to feel a little of that anxiety.
You know, look, at some point my past sins might come out.
I hope they don't, but they might.
Maybe ultimately in the end, they probably will in the light of eternity.
But you can, that can even be more of a cross.
You see this not just with the husband doing this to the wife, which is a big problem, but even sometimes people who say, I used to be a thief.
I used to be a prostitute.
I used to be a murderer.
I used to be this.
And then they reform and then they turn that into a public speaking career.
But you don't have to do that.
Sometimes you can just repent.
When people used to repent of these sins, they'd go into the desert for years, for decades sometimes.
You can do that too.
Last point I'll make on this, no one has pointed it out, but in this guy's defense, if you click on his Twitter bio, you find out he's a social media marketer.
He's a Christian social media marketer.
His business is to go to different churches and church communities and to help them with their social media and their marketing and to go viral.
The Shifting Definition of AGI00:04:33
And the guy is clearly good at his job.
Okay.
The guy clearly knows what he's doing.
So in that way, maybe it worked.
But to work at the expense of saying, you know, my wife's a big slut.
And then it even, he followed it up.
He says, some people are criticizing me.
I mean, everyone is piling on this guy for doing it.
He says, but my wife talks about it all the time.
Yeah, maybe she shouldn't.
Maybe you should say, hey, honey, you don't need to talk about that all the time.
And that's actually, that's a little embarrassing for me and it's undignified for you.
And you can be honest.
You can testify sometimes, but you don't need to talk about it.
Life is about more than this.
Life, it's the lesson you're trying to impart to people.
Well, take that lesson yourself.
Life is about more than your past sins.
Christ has made us free.
Let's go do that.
Let's go live in freedom.
Speaking of social intelligence or lack thereof, the CEO of NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, big AI company, has just made a massive announcement.
He has said that NVIDIA has reached artificial general intelligence, not just artificial intelligence, meaning you can train the bot to be really good at looking through history archives, not just that you can train the bot to, I don't know, operate a robot that pours leftist tears into my tumbler, not just intelligence pertaining to a specific task, but artificial general intelligence, which is, so actually it's a little bit of a murky definition,
but it's broadly understood to mean the kind of intelligence that is on par with or surpassing human intelligence.
Here he is on the Lex Friedman show.
Managed to build a team of some agents, some humans, all that kind of stuff.
Is this 5, 10, 15, 20 years away?
I think it's now.
I think we've achieved AGI.
You think you could have a company run by an AI system like this?
Possible.
And the reason for that is this, you said a billion, and you didn't say forever.
And so, for example, it is not out of the question that a claw was able to create a web service, some interesting little app that all of a sudden, you know, a few billion people used for 50 cents.
And then it went out of business again shortly after.
Now, we saw a whole bunch of those type of companies during the internet era.
And most of those websites were not anything more sophisticated than what OpenCLA could generate today.
So he says, yes, we have already reached artificial general intelligence because my AI software could start a business that would reach a billion dollar valuation, maybe not stay there forever, but we saw this in the dot-com bubble.
A bunch of trash, stupid companies had crazy valuations.
And I think that my AI machine could do that.
Therefore, we've reached artificial general intelligence.
Notice how the definition of artificial general intelligence keeps changing.
So the CEO here, previously in 2023, he defined AGI as software capable of passing tests that approximate normal human intelligence at a reasonably competitive level in any way.
But then they narrow it in here.
So Lex Friedman says, well, true AGI would look like AI capable of starting, growing, and running a tech company worth more than a billion dollars.
And the CEO of NVIDIA says, well, yeah, it could do that today, but it couldn't make NVIDIA.
He actually goes on to say that specifically.
He says, the odds of 100,000 of those agents building NVIDIA is 0%, but they could make some trash dot-com bubble company.
So therefore, we've reached AGI.
It's all very confusing because we don't know what AGI is.
Maybe that can be Matt Walsh's next hit movie, what is AGI?
There are a lot of thoughtful pieces out there, think pieces and news reports that acknowledge that the definition of AGI keeps changing, but they don't get to why the definition of AGI keeps changing.
The reason it keeps changing is not because the CEO of NVIDIA is trying to pull a fast one.
It's not because Lex Friedman has his own ideological hobby horses.
The reason that the definition of AGI keeps changing is because we are confused about what it is.
And the reason we're confused about artificial intelligence is because we're confused about what real intelligence is.
Confusion About Real Intelligence00:11:32
What is real intelligence?
We used to know what that is.
Now we don't know what that is.
The new model is that intelligence is just like some electrons and neurons and impulses firing off in our brains because our brains are like computers.
And so, you know, just as a computer fires off lots of electrical pulses, so too our brains do that.
And that's intelligence.
That is not true and cannot be true.
So the old definition of intelligence, of the intellect, is that the intellect is a spiritual power of a rational soul.
The two highest powers of a rational soul are the intellect and the will.
And what is a soul?
A soul is the substantial form of the body.
So we have bodies.
We all have bodies made up of different tissue and molecules and chemicals and all sorts of stuff.
But what separates the carbon in our bodies from the carbon in a diamond ring is our soul, which is the form of our bodies.
That's why they're different.
That's why we're more than just the sum of our molecules.
That's why there's a difference even between a living person and a cadaver.
Chemically, we're identical, but we all know there's a difference between a living person and a cadaver.
And the difference is the soul.
The soul, which at a really basic level is just understood as the, to use the scholastic language, the substantial form of the body.
It's the thing that makes your body, that makes you an integral whole.
So we have two aspects to us, a material aspect, which is like all our stuff, all our carbon and all our flesh and stuff, and an immaterial part, namely our consciousness, our reason, our intellect, and our will.
You can't carve a person up and say, there's the will, there's the free will, or there's the intellect.
You can say there's the brain, but you can't say there's the intellect.
You can't say there's the mind.
You can't point to the consciousness.
Why?
Because it is a spiritual, immaterial power.
How do we know?
It sounds like kind of magical, mystical, religious thinking, but we can actually know in a scientific way.
We can know with reasonable certainty that the reason that the intellect is immaterial.
The way that we know that it's immaterial is that the object of the intellect is to abstract immaterial universals.
So my eyes take in color and the eyes send it to the brain.
The brain kind of moves stuff around, you know, and processes information.
And I can see this is an object, this microphone I'm holding.
This is an object, my tumbler.
This is an object, my Mayflower cigar.
But it is my intellect.
It is not just some material part of my body.
It's my intellect that abstracts that and deals in universals.
Not just this particular microphone or tumbler or cigar, but microphones.
It's why I can identify what a microphone is, even if it isn't the same color, even if it isn't made of the same material.
Same for the tumbler, same for the cigar.
I recognize that Mayflower cigars are a type of cigar, the best type of cigar, of course, but it's a type of cigar.
This is why little kids, when they see one or two cats or one or two dogs, they immediately know what dogs are.
They recognize dogs.
They recognize cats.
They know that cats are different from dogs.
Immediately.
AI doesn't.
Over a long enough period of time, AI can kind of get good enough to kind of recognize through enough patterns what generally makes up a dog and what generally makes up a cat, but they are processing that information totally differently.
That would be one little example of how this is different.
The machine, the AI, cannot deal in immaterial universals because the machine does not have a rational soul.
So the machine can process information and it can simulate intelligence reasonably well to an impressive degree, but that's not an intellect.
That's not real intelligence.
The other reason, speaking of the spiritual powers of the rational soul, the other reason that the AGI can't really get all that close to true intellect is because intellect goes along with will.
You never have an intellect without a will, whether we're talking about human beings, whether we're talking about angels, whether we're talking about God himself.
Will and intellect go together.
The intellect deals with truth.
The will deals with appetitive goods, but they go together.
You come to some conclusion about the truth and that impels you in a desire.
And sometimes it goes in the other direction too.
The machine doesn't have a will.
The machine's just a bunch of stuff.
That's why it won't work.
It's a little dry, I guess.
It's not as sexy as the idea that Terminator is about to come pop out of our computer screens and kill us all, or that we've created a God by, you know, that this oracle at Delphi that we can just ask anything to by plugging it into Grok or ChatGPT, and it's going to give us a true answer.
But that's not it.
It's artificial intelligence for a reason.
We acknowledge in that way that it's not real intelligence.
It's artificial.
But the reality is it's not even intelligence.
It's an impressive copy.
It's an impressive, not even copy.
It's an impressive performance of intellect.
But it's really a totally different thing.
We can't nail down the definition of AGI because we're very confused even today about what intellect really is.
But if you do know what intellect is, you know, we ain't getting to AGI.
Okay, speaking of, what are we going to get to, I guess, is the better question.
And what we're going to get to is robots serving us our Big Macs.
We'll get to that at a McDonald's in China.
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It's here.
We don't have actual artificial general intelligence, but we do have robots taking all of our jobs.
Here we have in, I think, Shanghai, a robot greeting a customer at a McDonald's and giving the customer her happy meal.
The kids love the robots.
Around with the robots.
I always thought weird, smiley robots with eyes that are too big and kind of weird animation.
I always thought it was more of a Japanese thing.
I want to sound racist like I'm confusing the Japanese or the Chinese, but this is China.
And the robots have taken over.
Now, it's all for show.
This isn't really in effect yet, but I suppose it could be soon.
And it's kind of sad, isn't it?
It's kind of like, do you remember it was five or 10 years ago, there was this big push to sell soylent, which is from a novel.
And it's this, you know, hideous, you know, concoction that I won't spoil the novel, but then they sold it as an actual product five or 10 years ago.
And they said, this is great.
You don't need to eat meals anymore.
You can just drink this sludge and the sludge will give you enough nutrients that you don't need to worry about eating.
And that way you can work more at your cubicle.
That way you can just do more stuff.
But there's more to eating than just getting the material nutrition for your body.
You know, we break bread together and we use that metaphor as having fellowship and community because food is a central part of how human beings get along together.
And fast food already diminishes that.
Now we're even taking the people out of fast food.
And we're just going to be interacting with robots, which is deeply depressing.
It is probably a fulfillment of the warning in the Bible not to make dumb idols and worship them because we will become like them.
But increasingly, we're just going to interact with robots in as much as we do anything at all.
There's now a type of AI software that will go into your computer, do your spreadsheets, answer your emails, run your calendar.
And presumably the people that you're emailing or that the AI is emailing, presumably they also can use that AI software.
And so now business is just being conducted between robots.
And what are you doing?
You're still getting a paycheck for now, but for what?
What are you doing?
What are you after?
What are you doing with your intellect?
Your real intellect.
Does it have any object?
Are you contemplating truth?
No, a lot today.
We're very confused about whether or not there is even such a thing as a truth.
Are you doing it to shape your will towards some good?
Probably not.
Now a lot of people deny that there is free will today.
We certainly ignore the fact that we are ordered to do good things.
So what do you do?
You're just going to, I don't know, sit around.
You're going to end up.
Look, I don't want to be too much of a doom and gloomer today, but if you don't watch out with a society that is becoming increasingly automated, in which human interaction is constantly on the decline, marriage is on the decline, childbirth is on the decline, responsibility is on the decline, you're going to find yourself in the same position as the OnlyFans guy.
Reminds me of a line from George Bernard Shaw who says that hell is the place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
I actually said that quote providentially today to my little my little kid.
My eldest son said, he goes, Data, playing is boring.
So that's actually a profound observation.
Playing can, when you're really engaged in play and it's kind of for a purpose and it's, you know, really participating in beauty, and then play can be totally engrossing.
You lose track of time.
But sometimes playing, when you're just sitting, I play for an hour, it could be kind of boring because there's no object to it.
There's no end.
There's no purpose.
And you say, Data, playing is boring.
And I say, son, I told him this as I was walking to the breakfast table.
I said, son, it's a profound truth observed by George Bernard Shaw that hell is the place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
Political Communications Lessons00:08:57
That's it.
That's going to be, it's going to be a society in which your romantic relationships are with OnlyFans girls.
Your food is served to you by a robot and your work is done by the AI.
And what do you do?
Why are you here?
Are you superfluous now?
I hope not.
Okay, speaking of different types of men, we now have the robot men and we have the real men.
I want to talk about Afro Man.
Because do you remember Afro Man?
He's the one who did because I got high, because I got high.
He also did COVID 45, a two zigzag.
I just really want any excuse to sing those songs from the, was it 90s, 2000s?
Anyway, Afro Man is taking over the internet again because he is running a campaign against a local police department, which he says harassed him.
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My favorite comment yesterday is from RastaMouse7861 who says, nothing says communism better than a bunch of rich people flying down to Cuba first class to tell them they need to continue to suffer for the revolution.
So true.
That's what, I mean, Hassan Piker flies down to Cuba.
He stays at a hotel, one of the only places that has electricity in all of Havana.
The government cuts off electricity to all the poor Cubans, but the people staying at the five-star hotel, the communist tourists, they get the electricity.
And then what does Hassan Piker say?
He says, oh, yeah, they don't want electricity.
It's better for them not to have electricity.
They have that island attitude.
You know, oh, wouldn't it be so nice?
He takes off his Cartier glasses, his 1300 a Cartier glasses.
He says, you know, wouldn't it be so nice if I didn't need electricity?
These guys, they really get it.
But it's the revolution.
Death to America.
This is a scene actually in Witness by Whitaker Chambers, one of the great anti-communist books of the 20th century.
Whitaker Chambers was a communist and then he had a conversion.
I think he became a Quaker or something.
But anyway, he left communism behind and he exposed a lot of the communist operations in the United States, worked with Richard Nixon when Nixon was in Congress.
But Whitaker Chambers recounts a story where he's walking with a communist operative and a poor man comes up begging for money.
And Whitaker Chambers gives him a coin or something.
And the communist turns to Chambers in disgust and says, you shouldn't have done that.
Don't do that.
Do not give money to the poor people because that will dull their appetite for revolution.
You can't actually help them.
These people, Code Payne, Kassan Piker, they did not do anything to help the poor Cubans who are truly suffering right now because of their government.
They went down and they had a vacation and they gawked to poor people and they made content.
Content, content, click, click, click.
But the way they would justify that, I suspect, is the same way that Whitaker Chambers' communist colleague would justify it.
Say, well, look, no, we're building up their appetite for revolution.
Viva siempre la revolución.
More caviar, please.
My Cartier glasses are a little smudged.
Could someone wipe them for me, please?
Okay.
Afro Man.
Do you remember him?
You don't need, look, if my singing doesn't call it to memory, here is one of the great songs of Millennials' Childhood.
I was going to clean my room until I got high.
I was going to get up and find the broom, but then I got high.
My room is still messed up.
And I know why.
Why, man, cause I got high.
He goes like a high.
All right, I won't.
This is not, this is not one of those jazz cigarettes.
All right, this is not, this is pure tobacco, but I just, in solidarity with Afro Man, I don't know, the spirit came upon me.
Afro Man is now going viral for another song.
So that as I understand it, Afro Man's in Ohio and someone sends a tip into the police department to raid Afro Man's house.
So the cops go in, they bust down Afro Man's door, they break some of his stuff, but they don't find anything.
It was a bad tip, apparently.
Now, you could see why you might want to raid Afro Man's house.
I mean, he is bragging about committing drug crimes for his whole career.
That is, that's actually the only thing he's known for.
We didn't even play Colt 45 and Two Zigzags, which is a song about how his music doesn't sell, so he's got to sell drugs.
But you got to, I sympathize with the cops here, but I guess the cops got it wrong.
So they bust down some of his property, and then he says, hey, you got to pay for my doors and stuff.
And they don't want to do it.
So Afro Man does this.
They vandalize my property.
My money came up short.
They disconnect my cameras because they are a poor sport.
They're the predators and the victims and they're suing me in court.
My proofs on the inner net.
So he's walking around.
If you're only listening, he's got this American flag suit on with an American flag tie and American flag sunglasses.
And he's saying, these people, you know, they bust into my house.
Now they're suing me.
You know why they're suing him?
Because Afro Man had security cameras in his house.
And so when they busted in, he took that footage and made a music video about it, which is kind of vulgar.
It's kind of mean.
But anyway, he's making fun of them.
And then they sued him for defamation.
He said, you can't sue me for defamation.
It's just video.
You bust into my house.
And now he's making more music making fun of them.
And I don't know about the particulars of this case.
I don't really care whether the cops in this case or Afro Man is in the right.
Just a little lesson on political communications.
Afro Man is the hero of the story.
There's no question.
He is universally being lauded.
And inasmuch as anyone's weighing in on the cops, the cops are being derided.
Even among right-wingers.
Right-wingers, we back the blue.
You know, we were the thin blue line patch.
We love cops.
We support law and order.
We want, especially these days, we want to support our cops even more.
The left is again, but why is Afro-Man the hero here?
It's a very simple answer.
Because he's wrapping himself in the American flag.
That's the key.
This is a political insight that is so basic that great political philosophers have known since antiquity.
And a lot of modern people forget the lesson.
Wrap yourself in the flag.
This was one of the biggest missteps the Democrats made last year, the last few years, is they hate the flag because the flag is the symbol of the country and they hate the country.
But duplicitous and deceptive as they are, they can't bring themselves to wave the flag.
So when they have their rallies, they wave the Mexican flag.
They wave the Palestine flag.
They wave the BLM flag.
They wave the gay flag.
They can't bring themselves to wave the American flag.
So then they surrender the American flag to the Republicans and the Republicans become the Patriotic Party.
And then what happens?
The Republicans win unified government in 2024.
It's really politics 101, wrap yourself in the flag.
You even see this lesson misunderstood by some radical right-wingers.
Some radical right-wingers get it, but some of the radical right-wingers, they'll argue in their think tanks and in their academic faculty lounges.
They'll say, well, you know, actually, the American Revolution was run by Freemasonic liberals.
And really, it made all of these terrible assumptions.
And we just have to scrap the whole thing.
And, you know, we just need a revolution.
We need a kind of a monarchical reactionary revolution now.
And the true conservative wants to get rid of George Washington.
You just think, look, man, I can almost, I sort of follow your argument, but like, shut up, huh?
Can you shut up, please?
Look, I get your argument, but you're missing one of the most basic aspects of politics.
And you need to learn it from Professor Afroman over here, which is you can be a drug-dealing criminal rapper, and you can get everyone to rally to your side, even when you're fighting the cops, as long as you wrap yourself in the flag.
Have I made my point clear?
Now, speaking of pop culture, this is some good news.
This is some good news.
And you know where there's a lot of bad news in the pop culture, but this is some good news.
A Neo-Gothic Church Surprise00:02:46
Lego has just announced its largest Lego set ever.
And in our culture, what would you expect that Lego set to be?
The Pride Progress flag.
What would you expect that Lego set to be?
To be, you know, the Kamala sitting under a coconut tree set, right?
You'd expect it to be some big lib thing.
And do you know what it is?
It's a Catholic church.
The largest Lego set ever.
I think they're charging $600 for this or something.
It is the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona.
This is good news for the culture.
We're not done yet.
The hottest toy that's coming out this year is of a Catholic church that has been built for how many years now?
It's like 140 years or something.
They started building this thing in 1882.
It's not even completed yet.
It's expected to be completed in 2034.
This is such good news in the abstract that I'm even willing to overlook the fact that this church is one of the ugliest buildings ever made.
It's so bad.
I had the privilege of visiting Spain one time and I got to see this in Barcelona and it's pretty ugly.
It looks like a melted anthill or some kind of weird distorted honeycomb.
It's supposed to be kind of like a neo-Gothic church, like all those great Gothic churches of Europe, but it's weird because it's modern.
So it started to be built in the late 19th century and then it goes on for a long time.
It takes, you know, can take centuries for these cathedrals to be built.
And so as other people took over, it somehow got even worse.
And when you go inside of it, it's quite stunning.
It's still a little too weird for me to say it's beautiful, but it's quite stunning.
The way the glass plays and the light, it's really stunning, but it's ugly.
It's just ugly.
It's not ugly as sin, but it's ugly.
And yet, we'll take the dub.
You know, we'll take the win, guys.
I think I'm going to be pilloried from all sides for this.
The people who say I'm a Philistine for not appreciating the modern basilica, the people who say I'm too much of a religious nut to be focused on the toy church.
I don't care.
I'm going to take the win, but let's not lie to ourselves.
Let's use our real intelligence and our taste.
Let's not have artificial intelligence.
And let's say it's not.
They could have done the Cathedral of Chartres, okay?
They could have done Notre Dame de Paris.
But whatever.
I'll take the win.
I'll take the win.
Okay, I want to get to Elvis.
I want to get to Trump visiting Elvis' house, but I don't have time.
You know why?
Do you know why?
Because it's TE Tuesday.
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