A News Roundup episode, and an episode of two halves. We start with a discussion of the recent public Oval Office meeting between Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, in which Trump harangued the South African president with accusations of 'white genocide' based on 'evidence' which tracks straight back to people in our usual wheelhouse. Then we move on to a chat about the recent decision by language learning app Duolingo to replace loads of their contributors with AI, plus some dismaying news about Babbel, leading to a discussion of the impending AI jobs crisis. Then we cap it off with an odd flex for us... a feel good story! Episode Notes: Trump spreads racist South African Farm Murders Memes in meeting with Ramaphosa Trump/Ramaphosa meeting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TLkZv3gzO0 Response: https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/politics/video/trump-ramaphosa-south-africa-video-larry-madowo-vrtc * A check of Trump's false claims about white genocide in South Africa | Reuters https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-makes-false-claims-white-genocide-south-africa-during-ramaphosa-meeting-2025-05-21/ Trump’s evidence of South Africa ‘white genocide’ contains images from DR Congo – The Irish Times https://www.irishtimes.com/world/africa/2025/05/23/trumps-evidence-of-south-africa-white-genocide-contains-images-from-dr-congo/ Trump confronted South African president with ‘evidence’ of genocide – here’s what the video really showed | The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-south-africa-genocide-video-b2755625.html Trump ambushes South African president with video and false claims of anti-white racism | Trump administration | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/21/trump-south-africa-president-meeting?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu What's Behind Trump’s South Africa Obsession? | Benjamin Fogel | TMR https://youtu.be/gR_gwPI5l-0?si=QfWeEuoosYeUD-JG South Africa to offer Elon Musk Starlink deal ahead of Trump meeting | Business Insider Africa https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/south-africa-to-offer-elon-musk-starlink-deal-ahead-of-trump-meeting/v0k8bxk?op=1 White Nationalists Praise Trump’s Promotion Of White Genocide Conspiracy Theory – Angry White Men https://angrywhitemen.org/2025/05/22/white-nationalists-praise-trumps-promotion-of-white-genocide-conspiracy-theory/ Exclusive: Trump Shared Racist, Flat-Earth Facebook Account With South African President https://www.meidasplus.com/p/exclusive-trump-shared-racist-flat Roaming Charges: White Lies About White Genocide - CounterPunch.org https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/23/white-lies-about-white-genocide/ DR Congo: Killings, Rapes by Rwanda-Backed M23 Rebels | Human Rights Watch https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/13/dr-congo-killings-rapes-rwanda-backed-m23-rebels As Goma ceasefire largely holds, Congo rushes to bury bodies from rebel offensive | Reuters https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/east-congo-city-goma-rushes-bury-bodies-after-rebel-offensive-2025-02-04/ A white nationalist moved to Idaho in search of an ‘ethnic enclave.’ He’s not alone. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2022/jul/21/a-white-nationalist-moved-to-idaho-in-search-of-an/ * Duolingo Replacing Contract Workers With AI The Verge, “Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI” https://www.theverge.com/news/657594/duolingo-ai-first-replace-contract-workers “AI isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn says. “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.” von Ahn’s email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lütke said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources, they needed to show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.” Fortune, “Duolingo CEO walks back AI-first comments: ‘I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do’” “To be clear: I do not see AI as replacing what our employees do (we are in fact continuing to hire at the same speed as before),” he wrote. “I see it as a tool to accelerate what we do, at the same or better level of quality. And the sooner we learn how to use it, and use it responsibly, the better off we will be in the long run.” Babbel quietly ending Babbel Live Babbel Support, “Discontinuation of Babbel Live” https://support.babbel.com/hc/en-us/articles/26749152437522-Discontinuation-of-Babbel-Live “Babbel Live was introduced in 2021. Knowing the power of human teachers, we aimed to offer our learners this experience from their homes. Over time, however, we did see a clear trend: the majority of them did not accept Babbel Live as part of their language learning path, making it impossible for us to sustain it as a business. This change will help us achieve our goal of helping you become fluent in your new language quickly by enabling us to focus on improving our app, which most learners, especially beginners, prefer.” Boycott Over Upcoming E-sports Event in Riyadh Makes Geoguessr Change Its Stance Geoguessr Community Protests Esports World Cup by Disabling Popular Maps. https://www.si.com/esports/news/geoguessr-protests-esports-world-cup Statement from Feneb, one of the World Championship players, about his decision to boycott the Riyadh event. https://discord.com/channels/1003591679644807229/1026965093331779634/1375003211513204746 “The decision to participate in the Esports World Cup, which is directly funded by the Saudi Arabian government in an effort to distract public attention from the above human rights violations, is thus directly incompatible with any stated aims by GeoGuessr to promote an inclusive and diverse community, and extremely disappointing. I also do not want to dismiss the issue of hosting a tournament in Saudi Arabia, regardless of whether the event is directly run by the Saudi government or not. It is completely unnecessary to host a tournament in a country which some current or possible future world league players would be unable to travel to safely.” Statement from Geoguessr regarding their decision to reverse the event in Riyadh (Reddit) https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/1ksky0k/geoguessr_is_withdrawing_from_the_esports_world/ Geoguessr challenge links: (Standard) World Map https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/MIJFcVhIFNpVapVs https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/sedHxYRoMPdmFxdZ https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/eIRYCYBhuUUBVIT2 An Official World https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/tK9A8O1KUXQfZgCu https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/NGYJ4uk0WhxNR5Ui https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/Yc4uD6P8lFISKIgb A Community World https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/B87Y20LMvmtDvUwN https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/I9ub9gc9CmoEQpjn https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/ZwKxnW3Ms9UTZZt6 * The AI jobs crisis is here, now - by Brian Merchant https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-crisis-is-here-now Something Alarming Is Happening to the Job Market - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/job-market-youth/682641/ Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware, we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
And welcome back to IDSG.
It's episode 131, and it's kind of a follow-up on the last episode.
Thanks again to Bianca von Veig for coming on to be incredibly informative and interesting on the question of the so-called South African farm murders and the white genocide conspiracy theory.
Now, Daniel, that episode was not planned to be especially topical, but it became topical immediately after we released it.
It certainly did.
Within hours, it sort of became topical, didn't it?
Yes, because unexpectedly to us, Donald Trump, well, apparently the meeting was actually requested by Cyril Ramaphosa, who is the president of the South African government at the moment, coalition government.
There was a meeting, a public press conference meeting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump.
And President Ramaphosa and several of his co-ministers in the South African coalition government, which turned into another sort of bullying Zelensky-style meeting, Zelensky Mark II sort of thing, didn't it?
Very shades of Zelensky, and just absolutely disgusting both times, of course.
But very much, Trump wants to bring these world leaders on and then treat them like errant children sitting on the carpet, you know, being called the carpet.
But for detention, so you can wrap their knuckles with a ruler.
I mean, it's just really repugnant stuff.
It was absolutely outrageous and disgusting, and I was cringing with embarrassment on behalf of your entire country from over here in the United Kingdom as the whole thing was going on.
Yeah, just appalling spectacle.
And as you say, Trump basically thinks he's entitled to drag the rest of the world's leaders through the Oval Office and subject them to ritual.
Humiliations and ritual dressing downs as if they're being pulled into the principles.
Which is ironic, because he is the one who looks like a sulky toddler throughout the entire thing.
Absolutely.
At one point, he's like, all the media just want to talk about how I'm getting a plane.
No, the Air Force is getting a plane from Qatar.
And then he turns around and is like, would you give me a plane?
Mr. President, I would give you a plane if I could.
I cannot afford to give you a plane.
It's like, oh my God, this is so...
This is such toddler behavior.
I mean, it's just...
I mean, there's been a very good conversation on the kind of left-of-center media in the U.S. over the course of the last week about just how sick Joe Biden was and how out of it he was and when he really started to be out of it.
I think that is a really super valid conversation to have right now.
Our focus should be on the income incoherent individual currently holding power, not the one who just.
I tend to agree, yeah.
So at this meeting, I feel like that thing with the plane was kind of Ramaphosa kind of trolling Trump, to be honest with you.
I'm sorry, I don't have a plane to give you.
And of course, Trump, who has no discernible trace of a sense of humour anywhere in his body, he responded to, well, if you did offer me a plane, I'd take it, because I'm entitled.
I'm allowed to take planes.
Astonishing.
But the main focus of that was, of course, as people probably know listening to this, that Trump took the opportunity to explain to the president of South Africa and his ministers that there is a white genocide going on in South Africa of white farmers.
They're being exterminated.
And despite the fact that everybody there was saying, you know, the press was saying this isn't happening and the president was saying this isn't happening and all his ministers, Including white politicians from opposition conservative parties that he's in coalition with, including this guy who's got his name here, Johan Peter Rupert, who is this right-wing billionaire who's in Ramaphosa's government who describes himself as one of the most hated men in South Africa.
He says to Trump, Mr. President, I'm a white farmer.
I sleep on my farm with the doors unlocked every night and I feel perfectly safe, despite the fact that I'm one of the most hated men in South Africa.
Despite all this, Trump insists that he knows better.
Because he's got memes.
He's got memes, Dan.
He's got printouts from the Daily Mail that are apparently printed on a color printer and then hastily stapled.
And he hands them to be...
It's just, oh God, it's just so...
And I'm the guy who wants the info.
I'm like, okay, give me that list of articles.
I want to debunk this personally.
I'm invested in that.
Let me see the video.
I want to see this horrible video that they played that they would occasionally scroll over and it's just like clearly something that sounds like it comes from a 2017 Richard Spencer video or something.
I want to see that video.
I want to source that.
I want to source all the individual bits and figure out who made this and what they made it from.
I think it's really fascinating that they have not released that video because Somebody made a video.
Somebody in that Trump White House made this video or found this video, and they have not released it.
This is a really interesting bit for me.
To my knowledge, they have not released it as a propaganda piece or not.
I did not look super hard for it, but I didn't think I would have to look super hard for it if they had actually released it.
But I think you had a little bit of background on that, so if you want to take your left and get into that briefly before we get back to the purpose of the meeting.
Sure, but I want to agree with you, first of all, that it is fascinating.
People scoured the internet, clearly, for clips, and people edited clips together into this video that, clearly this was a planned ambush, and Trump told people in advance, effectively, I want to ambush the leaders of the South African government with a compilation video of clips that I can use, and a sheaf of printouts of things that I can use to prove that you,
And so he says, I mean, how else can this have happened?
He must have said to his staffers, find me this information.
And what happens, apparently, is that they just go online and they trawl online for whatever they can find.
And whatever fits the narrative Trump has told them he wants to present, that he's just decided in his head, is happening.
They find it and they stick it together for him and print it out for him.
It's probably that staffer who's apparently desperately in love with him, printed all these news articles out.
They gave the job to Big Boss.
That's what Big Boss was doing this week.
Could have been.
The question of exactly what it was that Trump showed the people in that room on that occasion, it was last Wednesday at the time of recording that this happened, is an interesting one.
People, online researchers and so on, people who are watchdogs of this sort of thing, they were on it immediately, as you would expect.
And I can sort of give you a digest of some of what has been found.
Sure, sure.
There are apparently pictures that Trump presents of what he describes to President Ravana as burial sites of white South African farmers.
Right.
And what these appear to be...
Link's in the description, as always.
They appear to be footage from Reuters taken of humanitarian aid workers lifting body bags of people killed in Congo, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not South Africa.
This is the clip where Ramaphosa was looking at it and saying, I don't know that.
I mean, you're close, right?
Yeah, well, Trump, a couple of times in the meeting, referred to Africa as a country.
Yes, yes.
No, no.
So he says, maybe he thinks South Africa is like, South Africa is just part of the big country of Africa.
At one point, Ramaphosa is looking at the image, and he's like, wait a minute, where is this?
I don't recognize that.
Where is that?
And he says, well, it's in South Africa.
Of course, Trump doesn't know.
It's not even in South Africa.
It's like, can you give me a state?
Can you give me a town?
Can you give me some context for this?
Where is this, buddy?
So Trump, Ramaphosa's saying, what's that?
Where's this?
I don't know these pictures.
And Trump can't answer, because Trump doesn't know.
As I say, Trump told his staffers to come up with stuff for me.
Bring me something that looks scary.
Bring me something that looks scary.
Exactly.
So then they do the kill the boar chant, of course.
Of course, which we talked about in the last episode with Bianca.
There is context.
Again, I've seen dozens, not hundreds of these kinds of compilations over the years, just because it's such a common thing.
You have a bunch of scary, sorry for the ooga-booga-looking black man, going to kill the boar and jumping around.
It's meant to make white, middle-class, racist sound.
It's meant to make them quake in their boots so that they are going to be more racist and they're going to become Nazis, basically.
That's the whole point of this.
Sorry, you know I'm not describing ooga-booga as an actual term.
I'm trying to describe the way the media is used, as long as we understand that.
Absolutely.
You're describing the stereotype that these people are trying to invoke.
Yes.
Just in passing, I want to come briefly back to this later on, but just in passing, the clips that they keep showing of people in the red jerseys and the red hats doing the kill the boar, kill the farmer chant, these are very often pictures of people at the South African party called the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema.
And they do this specifically in order to provoke this reaction, that this party does this in order to draw attention and be controversial and troll white people.
So in a way, it's people falling for precisely what the EFF want.
But yeah, going back a little bit, you have these awful pictures of burial sites, which according to Trump, that's proof of South African white genocide.
It's actually the aftermath of a horrifying attack in Congo where the city of Goma was captured by the Rwanda-backed M23 Tutsi rebels who have committed all sorts of horrible murders and war crimes and rapes and things like this.
So this is, and this is black people.
These are black Africans.
In Congo, who have been murdered and have been the subject of these atrocities, just being used by Trump as props in this attempt to further escape.
So that's tasteful.
The other, one of the other things Trump shows is this...
It isn't South Africa.
It didn't happen to white people.
It's not a white genocide.
Trump doesn't know where it came from.
It's just so much the way that this stuff works.
It's not even slightly wrong.
It's just wrong on every possible level.
It's just incorrect.
It's just wrong.
It's what scientists call not even wrong.
Yes, exactly.
It's nothing.
It's just complete flim-flam.
It's fantasy.
Another thing of a similar kind was this footage of lines of white crosses along the side of the road.
And this apparently is in South Africa, but these are not.
Astonishingly, this isn't footage of mass graves created by a genocidal regime.
Which very, very considerately gave every victim of their mass killings an individual grave with a headstone.
I know it's amazing, but that's not actually what happened.
That's how genocide's work.
You give all your victims respectful burials, certainly not throw them in an incinerator, you know, bury them in the sea or whatever.
Yeah, it's well known.
But these are not graves at all.
This is apparently kind of a publicity stunt.
It is in South Africa, but it's a publicity stunt put on by...
Probably done through Afroforum or one of the similar organizations, right?
I don't know that, but it's something like that.
So again, not mass graves of white people.
We talked a little bit about Julius Malema and the Kill the Boar chant.
Now, another thing that Trump shared, or waved about, I should say, in the Oval Office meeting in his sheaf of papers, that's been identified.
And I have to give some credit to the Midas Touch Network here, who I don't particularly like, but they did identify this.
It's stuff from the Facebook feed of this South African conspiracy theorist, anti-Semitic right winger called Paul Hatting, which is spelled H-A-T-T-I-N-G-H.
And when you, again, links in the description, when you look at his feed, which has actually been suspended by Facebook for being too...
Racist.
Tells you everything you need to know.
It's full of AI, racist memes, racist depictions of President Ramaphosa, racist depictions of black people generally, as well as really crazy, fanatical Christian stuff and flat-earth stuff.
Yeah.
He's a flat-earther.
Imagine everybody's shocked.
You live in South Africa.
And you're a flat-earther.
Hold on.
The sun's on the wrong side, buddy.
Good point.
There are flat-earther myrtles that make that make sense based on the tracking of the sun.
But still, it's like, you know, the sun is in the north where you are in the southern hemisphere.
It is in the south where I am in the northern hemisphere.
This is really basic stuff.
Anyway, please continue.
I'm sure.
Yes.
It's not a one-way street.
The admiration is not a one-way street.
It's not just Trump and his people admiring the work of Paul Hattin.
Paul Hattin admires the work of Trump and his people.
He's a big Trump fan, looking at his feed.
He liked the eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets thing very much.
Yep.
And Paul Hatting is also a fan of a couple of people we've talked about on the show before.
Again, no surprises here.
Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes.
Oh boy, the bad penny that just keeps coming up.
Nick Fuentes.
The turd just won't flush.
That's it.
Exactly.
Paul Hattinger shared stuff from Nick Fuentes.
He particularly liked, apparently, a video Nick Fuentes did about how white Europeans have superior DNA to everybody else.
Oh, sure.
That's what we're looking at in terms of Trump's sources for his claims.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, this is, again, it's something that like is undercovered just because at least that we've covered it less just because it's so, you know, completely obvious.
And there's just not much to add to this conversation, but it's very clear that Or they found Fuentes around the same time.
They found Richard Spencer around the same time.
And they learned, you know, keep your nose dry.
Don't, you know, go out and start a goon squad and start, you know, punching faces in.
And don't go out and do scary-looking marches.
You, you know, you put on a shirt and a tie.
You wear a suit.
You, you know, join the Republican Party.
You stay quiet about it.
And, you know, I mean, it's very obvious.
This is, you know, all the propaganda that we saw during the Trump, both the 2020 campaign and the 2024 campaign and the 2016 campaign for that matter, but, you know, clearly these are the kinds of right-wing memes that I used to see on, you know, on 4chan back in 2017.
They just tone it down ever so slightly, but it's the same ideas.
It's the same stuff that's being spread.
Although, like, it's just gone mainstream now.
That's just the reality of it.
So, yeah, there's absolutely no question in my mind that if you went and you looked through the internet histories of all the kids, all the young interns who are working in the Trump White House, you will find in their, not very deeply in their histories, you will find a whole lot of racist shit that's the most racist thing you've ever seen in your life.
Probably not the most racist thing I've seen in my life, but I've seen a lot of racist things.
I was going to say, probably not you've seen in your life, but for most of us.
Yeah, I mean, I was joking earlier about the scenario I imagined of Trump going to his staffers and saying, find me stuff to back up the claims I want to make.
There's a very good chance that the staffers he's talking to are people who, I mean, you've just said it.
Who are linked with all this stuff.
Who made the memes in the first place.
Yeah, exactly.
They probably know exactly where to go because it's their normal internet fare.
It's their normal telegram shit.
That's why I want to see the video because I might recognize some of this stuff.
Very possibly.
Well, somebody apparently did notice some of it because on the very good it's going down account on X that's at IGD.
Beg your pardon, it's Blue Sky actually.
at igd.bsky.social.
They pointed out that...
It says, White supremacist who marched in Charlottesville claims Trump played video from neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier Vincent James.
Yes.
Although it appears to be a mash-up of various clips.
Now, I followed this a little bit.
The person that he's talking to as making the claim is this guy called David J. Riley, who's at Real Dave Riley.
I looked up as we were doing prep for this episode, and he has me blocked on Twitter.
There are only a handful of reasons that someone might block me on Twitter.
Let's just put it that way.
So please continue.
And none of them good.
So yeah, I literally just sort of very quickly researched this before we started recording.
I found a mention of Mr. Riley in an article at the Spokesman Review, which is apparently a local paper at Spokane, Washington.
And there's an article from 2022 where it says a white nationalist moved to Idaho in search of an ethnic enclave.
He's not alone.
And I'll just read a little bit of that to tell you who David Riley is.
Well, it actually talks about Vincent James as well.
Chapman is quoting, Chapman isn't the only extremist to seek like-minded individuals in Idaho.
Vincent James, a self-described Christian nationalist, recently moved to North Idaho, which he described as a breath of fresh air.
James, who also goes by Vincent James Fox, spoke at the, here we go, America First Political Action Conference earlier this year.
He was at AFPAC.
According to non-profit misinformation watchdog group Media Matters, James used his now-defunct website, The Red Elephants, to promote the conspiracy theory that Jewish people controlled media.
On his Telegram channel, he said Jewish people control other influential institutions, including Congress, Hollywood, and social media.
It's really innovative stuff.
James also said in a video shared on Telegram that the Holocaust has been weaponized to incite white guilt and separate.
In a separate Telegram post that the Holocaust is literally the only genocide you're not allowed to question.
James has used his Telegram channel to deny accusations of anti-Semitism.
Yeah, right.
And then it mentions David J. Reilly, a far-right figure who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Moved to post-falls in 2020.
According to a story published in 2021 by the Daily Beast, Riley has made and since deleted anti-Semitic posts on Twitter, including comments like, Judaism is the religion of anti-Christ and all Jews are dangerous.
So just an absolute morass of anti-Semitism.
Oh yeah.
By the way, the Red Elephants, the website may be now defunct, I would believe that, but Vincent James still posts on video platform sites.
I just checked his bit shoot.
His most recent video, As the Red Elephants, was up just two weeks ago.
It is true that the Red Elephant's website is now defunct.
The media thing is not.
He has been a working propagandist since 2017 or 2018.
Absolutely.
So, just wanted to clarify that.
Okay.
But there you go.
A direct line from the Nazi, anti-Semite, white nationalists at Charlottesville and their propaganda to printouts and videos being waved around by Donald Trump in the White House.
In the middle of accusing the president of South Africa of committing a white genocide a la claims made by Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux and all these people on YouTube since forever.
Time is just completely closed loop.
We are in hell.
We are in hell.
It's like a screwing action where it threads upward.
So it's like where it was this kind of dirty, just on the...
And now it's literally being shared in the White House.
And again, that's the part that surprises me.
It's like, why not?
You should release the video, Donald.
Come on.
What are you scared of?
What are you being coy about?
What are you being coy about here?
You love your migrant porn ASMR shit.
You love this stuff.
Don't play coy with us now.
Let us see you for who you are.
Your fans will love you.
The voters will love you.
I promise you.
Well, I mean, certain people are very enthusiastic about the meeting.
I found a very good post at the blog Angry White Men, which lists a selection of delighted reactions from people like Brad Griffin, owner of the white supremacist blog Occidental Dissent, self-described raging anti-Semite Irish white nationalist Keith Woods.
And I'll read some bits from that blog entry.
Scott Greer, a former Daily Caller editor who wrote for Richard Spencer's alt-right publication Radio Journal, wrote, Previous American leaders pretended South Africa was a rainbow nation that lived in complete racial harmony.
Now President Trump shows this video to South Africa's president to prove it's anti-white.
There's another bit.
Our old friend again making another return appearance, Nick Fuentes.
Great that the American president is talking about the white genocide in South Africa.
When will he talk about the white genocide happening in America?
We have, again, another link to Unite the Right.
Patrick Casey of the now defunct Identity Europa wrote, the American president is currently debating white genocide in the Oval Office.
Incredible times.
Yeah, in a way.
Mike Cernovich was delighted.
Ann Coulter was delighted.
and so on and so forth.
Again, I'll link to that in the description.
Yeah, absolutely.
So that went down very well with all the usual suspects.
Yeah, Angry Whiteman has been doing this work for a long time.
The author is synonymous, but he's a friend of the pod.
We DM from time to time.
Yes.
Yeah.
Absolutely essential work.
Yep.
So to just round this off a little bit, what I want to do is read a quote from the dreaded Julius Malema, leader of the, uh, Economic freedom fighters in South Africa.
Now, I do not endorse Mr. Malema or the economic freedom fighters.
Far from it.
All sorts of corruption and bad politics connected with this Marxist-Leninist organization.
I'm not uncritically endorsing them at all.
No, not at all.
Mr. Malema did say something which I think is like a splash of cold water in the face, to be honest, and I'll just read it.
We're not going to kill white people.
Stop being sensitive.
No one is going to kill you.
You think we're going to kill you just because you killed our people?
The killing mentality is in your head.
We don't have a killing mentality.
We have a mentality of justice and peace.
The only thing we're not prepared to do is to prioritize peace over justice.
There must be justice first before there is peace.
We don't owe white people an apology.
Black people, stop apologizing to whites.
They are the ones owing us an apology.
You have done too much damage to black people who are unemployed because of you, who are dying of diseases because of you, who are illiterate because of you, who are addicted to drugs because of you.
You owe us a lot.
You must show remorse and stop behaving like crybabies.
South African democracy is going to be built by a robust debate, particularly when it comes to race relations.
We must stop deceiving each other.
The poor meant black.
The rich meant white.
For as long as that has not been resolved, there will be a permanent problem between the poor and the rich.
You know, again, you don't want to have to hand it to him.
There are all sorts of problems with the Malambus organization and him personally.
Very much so.
You know, I didn't want to get into it, but, you know, there are plenty of fucking issues there.
But, yeah, that's spot on.
Dude, we're playing a game.
It's like, you know, we're political propagandists.
We're not murderers.
I mean, you know, like, look, Eugene Terblanche, like, died a really terrible death, but, like, he...
I mean, if there's anybody, I don't think really anybody deserves to be hacked to death into pieces on their bed when they're asleep at night.
Eugene Turblanche kind of makes me question that assumption just a little bit.
If anybody ever did, it was him.
Anyway, you can't take isolated examples like that and then kind of a wave of crime in these kind of isolated farms.
I mean, one thing that we didn't get into last week that I meant to ask Bianca and kind of talk about it.
So Bianca, if you're listening and I'm getting this wrong, please send me a message and I will.
But there are legitimate, you know, these farms, some of them, you know, who do have plenty of like black and colored workers working on the farms who also are victims of these crimes, to be clear.
These farms are very isolated.
They have like legitimate security concerns.
They're also like, as I understand it, the farms are not just farms, but they're like small, minor manufacturing organizations.
So it's like they will grow the fruit and then they package it there.
They have canning operations and that sort of thing.
Because that's how the economy works in these isolated places in South Africa.
So you've got these isolated farms with plenty of money and resources that often have security issues.
And so, of course, bandits and thieves in this starving nation, in this incredibly unequal nation of South Africa, terrible people are going to find these places and try to victimize them.
It's just the reality of it.
Yeah.
This is not white people are being murdered because they're white, and this is like the blacks coming to overwhelm us and murder us in our sleep.
This is violent history begets a violent present.
And I don't want to say this is the voice of people who don't have resources, but the driver of crime is poverty.
The driver of crime is poverty, and sometimes that crime turns violent.
I am not justifying this.
I do not think this is a good thing that these people are being murdered.
Absolutely not.
But this is basic criminology, basic sociology.
This is like the first day you pick up a textbook to understand what causes crime.
Poverty causes crime.
Inequality.
Yeah, inequality.
Excuse me, I misspoke.
If you live in this society, if you live in that society, there are crimes being committed.
Yes, I agree.
Yeah.
You are vastly more likely to be the victim of violent crime in South Africa if you are a poor black man living in an urban area than if you are a wealthy white person living in a rural area.
Right, exactly.
And it's worth saying the numbers for people who are in any way categorizable as the victim of murders connected with farms per year, it's going down and it's far.
That's what we're talking about.
And nobody is having this great big agonized conversation about the much larger numbers of poor black people in South Africa, in urban areas, who are the victims of violent crime.
Let alone, shall we say, other parts of the world with just drastic...
higher mortality rates because of other things that are going on with the full military, political, and financial support of the American government.
Yeah, I mean, this is something that we kind of got into last week, is that the Okay, just from Wikipedia, during the last three months of 2023, around 85 people were murdered in South Africa every single day.
So that works out to like 20,000 murders over the years, something like that, I don't know, 80, 100 times 365, maybe 30, so...
In the U.S., that number is, we have a much larger population.
We are also an incredible violent nation.
We kill about 10,000 of each other every year.
So, you know, that tells you a lot.
And of all those murders, of all those people, the people that we're concerned with, the people who get their refugee status fast-tracked, are these relatively wealthy landowners, or the white people who say they are being victimized and not the people who are actually victims of horrifying violence when they're not wealthy, rich, and white.
And of course, this is just, I mean, it goes without saying, but it's worth pointing it out.
It's worth saying.
That's why this matters to us.
I don't care if they bring in 50 white farmers from South Africa.
I mean, I, you know, the, you know, I just think it's very hypocritical that you're rolling out the red carpet for these particular people when you're literally sending other people to murder prisons in El Salvador.
It's just terrifying, terrifying stuff.
Absolutely.
And I want to just gesture at the fact that the South African government, It's current ANC and coalition government.
The ANC is currently, because in the last round of South African elections, it failed to gain an absolute majority for the first time since the end of apartheid.
And so it had to go into coalition with various other parties.
And one of the big goals, as was said in the Oval Office, was to keep Malema and the economic freedom fighters out of government.
The ANC has governed in a thoroughly neoliberal way.
They've had huge problems with corruption.
I will link to a really good interview that Ben Fogel did on the majority report, the journalist Ben Fogel, who is a South African.
And he talked about the ANC government's long running problem with failing to deliver for the poor black people of South Africa failing to tackle inequality, instead being mired in corruption and this thing called state capture, which appears to be a kind of way in which the government has just Calling it privatization seems like too mild a term.
It's like smashing up state provision and just handing it to these private interests in this completely extra-legal way.
This has been going on for so long.
So there's plenty for the South African government to be accused of, not least wanting to go into business with Elon Musk.
One of the things they're seeking these meetings because they're currently seeking a Again, I'll put a link in the description.
And there's a lot more going on in terms of the Trump administration's hostility to South Africa, most particularly its championing of genocide accusations against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
This is all stuff that needs to be remembered too.
But yeah, I'll link to that Ben Fogel interview because that's really good because he talks about how, and we've said this in our episodes as well, South Africa has become kind of emblematic for the global right as a way of presenting, well, this is where...
where becoming the minority, the white minority, ends up.
This is where DEI ends up.
This is...
As Fogel says, it's an ironic way of talking about it, because white people were never a majority in South Africa.
But this is the end result of the Great Replacement, so-called.
And he even makes a really good point, which is that it's like the South in Reconstruction.
And of course, that gave birth to the KKK.
It's the same dynamic.
The KKK and all that reaction in the South post-Bellum, it started with the idea, well, pardon me, the Blacks are in charge now.
They're going to kill us all.
It's the same conspiracy theory.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, I mean, white nationalists in, you know, really, I mean, you said it, but, you know, it's been, you know, they use these South African farm murders.
It's not, you know, not that they care so much about the dead white South Africans, although they do, as much as it's a propaganda tool to be like, this is what happens when we, when our birth rates are not, you know, declined.
This is what happens when we are replaced by the mud people, quote unquote, you know.
Yeah.
And yeah, no, it's absolutely, it's a tool.
It's a rhetorical tool.
It's a bludgeon.
I mean, I think, I don't remember if I said this in the last episode or not, but the thing that really, Donald Trump in 2017 or 2018, I can't remember exactly when, but he tweeted about white genocide in South Africa, and that was a moment that literally shook me to my core.
It's like, if Donald Trump is tweeting that, that shows you just how dark things are in the propaganda wings of that Trump White House at that time.
As it turned out, it was sort of a passing thing, but apparently it wasn't, because it's been on his mind for the last eight years, so here we are again.
I don't know exactly how it's worked, but it's probably been, as you say, it's probably been in his mind the whole time, and then reactivated, recatalyzed or whatever, by the fact that he is now, in his second term, in Trump 2.0, you could say, he is now completely integrated with the interests and the influence of people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
And people like that, who of course have these legacy resentments about what happened essentially to their system in South Africa.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Well, moving on from that then.
From that cheery topic.
Yeah, that was kind of my half.
So we're now going to move into Daniel's half.
Daniel, what have you got for us?
Yeah, so I love these transitions because it's like, yeah, these topics are clearly of the equal importance, but I think this will be of interest to our listeners as well.
So I have two subheadings here, and I have human interest stories about what it is to have hobbies in the U.S. right now, online hobbies in the U.S. right now.
So as those of you who have been coming to my live streams, to my live chats know, I've been really working on this year is I've been wanting to become a little bit less aggressively monolingual.
It's something that's bothered me about myself for a long time, especially as I'm engaging more with the world and I'm like, you know what?
I'm going to make it.
I didn't do the beginning of January.
It was a New Year's resolution.
Basically, January 18th or so, I was like, I'm going to start learning languages.
I've been like reading about like language stuff for a while.
And so I'm like, I'm going to pay, I'm going to pay for a year subscription to Duolingo, which is like the, And then also I signed up for Babbel.
And Babbel is a little bit more curated.
It's a little bit more teacher-focused.
And the subscription cost is a little bit higher, but the lessons are better.
And it came highly recommended.
So I was like, all right, so, you know, it's 150 bucks or so for the, for the year long subscription to the two.
If I actually spend money on it, it's going to force me to actually do it instead of, you half-ass it, you know, and it is very easy to half-ass this, but you know, I've been trying to put I've gotten it since then.
And so, you know, usually more than that.
Sometimes I'll do an hour, sometimes 15 minutes, you know, whatever.
So I am not...
They're ways to supplement other ways to learn languages, but you can get a taste for them.
And, you know, I have reached some goals, and, you know, the app process has been pretty good for me.
Duolingo has been kind of incentivizing its projects for years now.
I mean, for us products for years now.
Duolingo is by far the largest language learning app.
I mean, if you are a native English speaker, which I am, you know, the kind of the top four, in order of like number of learners on Duolingo, number one is Spanish by a mile, by almost double.
Then French, Japanese, German, Korean, Italian, Chinese, Hindi.
They're known for having a whole lot of like, they do like a...
They do a Finnish course.
They do some fictional languages.
They do Klingon.
Lately they've been getting into, like, they do, like, you can do, like, math classes and you can do, like, music classes.
You know, Navajo.
They do Zulu is one of their languages.
And these courses vary a lot in terms of quality.
Like, and I've been dabbling a bit.
So right now I'm doing Spanish on Duolingo.
The Spanish course on Duolingo is by far the best one that I've played around with.
It actually has, like, little, like, stories and little lessons and everything.
The thing that Duolingo does is it's, like, it's a game first and foremost.
It wants you to play it as a game.
And so it'll give you, like, you know, I want to learn to speak some language.
It'll give you a sentence and then ask it.
And then you can hover over the different words and you can like, you know, figure out what the sentence is saying.
And so then it gives you the ability to like punch out the letters or usually it does like pick out the words.
So, you know, the boy is tall, you know, and so you just go, the boy is tall, you know, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, you just do that over and over again.
He is my friend.
She is my friend.
Mi amiga Sofía es de España.
El número de teléfono.
Número.
Pedro, ¿quieres mi número de teléfono?
This works pretty well if you have a little bit of a background like Spanish.
I took a couple years of Spanish in high school.
I'm mostly remembering all my Spanish at this point.
I'm still in the process of gathering everything back that I used to have and getting more practice with it.
Because I have a background in Spanish, Spanish works pretty well with this because I already have it in my brain and I can just figure it out.
It's less good if you're doing something like Russian.
Which I really wanted to learn to read Russian Cyrillic.
That was something I just wanted to be able to look at a road sign in Russia and sound out the sounds.
Russian is a very regular language in terms of it is spelled the exact same way every time they're not like...
It's just one of the things that that language has.
And so if you can learn the alphabet, you can learn to pronounce a whole lot of words.
And a lot of words are a lot of words from English.
The word for backpack, for instance, it sounds like rucksack, which kind of sounds like a rucksack, you know?
So it's like there are lots of, like, cognates.
And some words are just taken directly from an English cognate, and sometimes it's from, you know, some other language.
So I learned the Russian Cyrillic.
I learned to read Russian Cyrillic in, like, 10 lessons or so, and I got pretty good at it.
I'm a little rusty now because I haven't done it in a while, but, like, you know, these are, you know, it's designed, it does, you know, I'm not happy, I'm not unhappy that I paid the money for that.
I think that was like 50 bucks or something like that for the year.
I will not be redoing at the end of my...
There was a statement from the CEO.
I've got some text in front of me here.
I can read to you.
They're basically going to replace all their contract workers.
Previously, a lot of the lessons were done.
They were basically given to Duolingo by volunteers.
So, you know, somebody wants to do a Klingon language course in Duolingo, and so they basically approach Duolingo and say, here's the materials we have, and Duolingo would work with them, and you would build a language.
So that's why they have some of these more obscure languages.
That's why they have a Zulu course.
That's why they have a Navajo course, because somebody cared enough to put it on there.
And that's why the courses can vary a lot in terms of quality, because, you know, when you've got 47 million people trying to learn Spanish, they're going to put a whole lot of effort into making that Spanish course as good as possible.
Hebrew.
It's all over the map with terrible audio and pronunciation that doesn't make sense.
I've seen videos of people talking about these pluses and minuses of various languages on Duolingo.
People I respect have commented on this.
I've tried a few different language courses, so I can tell you Duolingo is really bad.
You know, if you are trying to learn German, you have to learn, you know, you have to learn the three genders is kind of the first thing you have to learn.
And then you have to learn all these...
It's a declined language.
It's an inflected language.
So is Russian.
So is Czech.
So is, you know, a whole lot of languages.
Duolingo is terrible if you don't have, because it doesn't actually give you like a table with all the endings and have you memorize it.
It just gives you the sentences and makes you kind of figure it out from context.
And so it's like incredibly frustrating, even on that level, because they decided to be a game first because they want, and the CEO has said, you know, look, if you're not here, we're not teaching anything.
And if you can give your five minutes a day, By making it a little game that you don't want to lose your streak on, you're going to be learning the language.
I mean, you know, and on that level, okay, fine.
Especially since there is a free version, you have to watch ads and you only get so many mistakes, and so it was worth it to me to pay for it, just to, like, have an easier experience for it.
They are now basically replacing all their contract workers, all the people that they currently pay to make these courses as good as they can be, they're replacing almost all of it with AI.
It is just going to be AI slop from here forward.
And it's really disappointing, right?
They tried to make a statement that it's a productivity boost.
We're trying to not use human labor where AI can do the job.
The double talk in that statement.
So he did one statement, and then there was a second statement where he's like, oh, we're not actually doing that, but you didn't change anything.
You're still saying the same thing.
You're just saying it in different words.
We're just saying that we're not.
I think they saw the number of people who quit their Duolingo who not only quit, didn't enter their subscription, but stopped doing the app.
My opinion, if you've paid for it for the year, for however long, you should keep wasting their resources.
You definitely want to still be using the app because you want them to be paying whatever they have to pay to keep that app running for you.
Just know that you're probably not going to learn the language as well as you thought you were going to.
I don't know.
It's just such this like...
You know, it's just such a thing.
And then on the other language app that I've been playing with, their big thing is that Babbel does not offer as many languages, but they're more in-depth.
So they offer, again, a fully featured Spanish course.
They do offer Russian.
But it's designed to have actual lessons.
There are podcasts.
There are grammar things that you can do.
And so it's a little bit more of a full course.
And so that one is a lot better for And if you're picking one of the big languages, I mean, it's basically French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese.
It does have Indonesian, but I think that's at a very low level.
But it's basically just the big European languages and languages that Europeans, like Japanese, would hypothetically want to learn.
But again, the lessons were better.
They offer podcasts, so you can just download podcasts that are in your target language, and you can listen to, you know, and it's always designed to be guided to your level.
So at the very beginning, it's like, you know, hola!
Me, I'm old Ted, you know, etc.
And then, you know, it kind of goes from there.
And these have actual real voices.
They're actually real people speaking the language.
And often, I found the Spanish course in a variety of different accents.
So they offer both the Latin American and Spanish, and they offer a Spanish-Spanish course, because Spanish-Spanish is very different.
Now, what I found is that I'm more interested in Latin American, Spanish, because I live in the Americas, and I'm more likely to want to visit Mexico than I'm going to want to visit Spain.
Of course.
And I'm, you know, and I, but.
There just wasn't that much.
It only gets to a very low level.
And then they switch you over to the Spanish language course.
So then I was taking that one, which is fine.
It's a little bit different, and you just turn to cope.
I just learned to cope with it.
I was fine.
I have been very happy with my Babbel experience.
They also offer this thing called Babbel Live.
Now, Babbel Live is like $100 a month if you pay monthly, or I think it's like $50 a year, so like $600 a year.
But you get weekly classes, like actual online classes with a small number of participants, taught by actual tutors that are paid by Babbel to teach these languages.
Now, I was not in a place to spend $600.
I am in poverty.
I make just over minimum wage.
I am not working a full-time job.
This podcast pays a whole lot of my expenses.
Please, do not think that I am sending money fervorlessly.
I am trying to better myself in various ways, and that's why I spent the money.
I cannot afford to spend $600 on language learning until I get a better job, until I have to get a full-time job.
I do a lot of things in my life before I can do that.
I totally plan to do that.
They quietly stopped encouraging people to sign up for the Babbel Live product, and then eventually they have now announced that they are ending it at the end of July.
There will be no more Babbel Live.
I have no idea what the value add that Babbel has over Duolingo at that point.
Again, the lessons are better than Duolingo for various languages, but at that point, I don't like the lessons.
I don't find myself drawn to the app in the same way.
Even trying different languages, it's something I will do for five minutes and then move on from most of the time instead of really sitting down and going, these are fun.
This is something interesting to do.
You know, one of the things that Duolingo has always offered is, It's like, you know, the hippopotamus is wearing a dress, you know, so that you're learning the words, you're learning it in, like, kind of this weird context.
So, you know, it's meant to be engaging.
Like, it's designed.
It's designed to be, like, crack.
It's, you know, it's like Twitter.
You don't want to set it down, you know?
There's good things and bad things about that.
It's after your dopamine.
Right.
It's after you the dopamine hit.
I mean, it's great at that.
If I just want to drill words Babbel will give me a little bit.
And it's better.
It's a real voice.
It gives me a better lesson.
But if I'm trying to just drill, I just want to relearn this.
I just want to drill my vocabulary.
Babbel is just not a good place for that.
Duolingo does that perfectly.
You can just pull up your word list.
You can pull up your recent mistakes and just go, here's what I messed up most recently.
But then both of these apps have just destroyed any value proposition.
And they've done it for the exact same reason.
It's freaking AI.
It's easier to get AI to just do this work for you than to hire people.
And you sent a link that gave a lot of less personal context to this.
Obviously, I just wanted to talk about this a little bit because it affected me personally, the decisions that I've made.
But, you know, this is going on like, you know, labor force wide, really worldwide, but certainly in the U.S. we're seeing, you know, like recent college grads can't get jobs because...
They're not hiring people.
They're giving everything to an AI.
I think, actually, it'd be good to read a little bit of that article.
It's by the writer Brian Merchant, who does a very good substack on issues like this, called Blood in the Machine.
And I'll read a little bit of it.
The Duolingo writer is far from alone.
He's been talking to a Duolingo writer earlier in the article that I'm reading about exactly what you've just been talking about.
He's far from alone.
Almost every professional artist or illustrator I meet tells me they have lost clients and gigs to firms that have turned to AI instead of paying for human work.
Some have been pushed out of their fields altogether.
I've written for Wired about managers who are using AI to displace artists and designers in the video game industry.
Voice actors have been on strike for nine months now, seeking protections from corporations that would use AI to clone their voices.
Incidentally, just dropping out of the quote for a moment.
Our friend Elliot Chapman, who was on our last bonus episode, talking with us about Dirty Harry.
He's an actor.
He does a lot of voice work.
He's a producer and a performer in the audiobook industry.
I'm sure he won't mind me talking about this, and I'll check with him before I put it out.
He's worried about this.
He is worried about AI taking work from him.
He's doing okay at the moment, but this is the point that Merchant is making in this essay that's called To just go back to the article then, just this week, the popular gaming website Polygon was sold off to the content farm Valnet that's often accused of running AI-generated articles.
Almost all of Polygon's human staff was fired.
And then Merchant goes on to talk about what you were just talking about, an article in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson, who talks about the fact that And one theory, there's various theories about why this might be happening, you know, and you can say, well, why should I cry for, like, American college graduates?
but it's an indication of something that's going to hit the entire economy.
One theory about this is that college costs a lot in the U S it's, this is, you know, especially if you are going into, And a lot of these people are, you know, they are going into like coding.
They're going, you know, if you care about whether somebody like studies Spanish or study like computer science, I mean, yeah, I think, I think, I think both of those people should be able to get a, a nice fulfilling job, you know, that, that pays their bills and, you know, allows them to build a better life for themselves.
But, you know.
I went to a state school, but even a state school, I graduated with $20,000, $30,000 of debt.
And I had scholarships.
I had loans.
I mean, I had all kinds of advantages.
I'm white.
You know, come on.
They're giving that to AI.
Yeah.
That's what's happening.
And this is going to be like dominoes through the entire economy.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm just saying, like, we should actually care about, like, the 22-year-old who graduated with a degree in, you know?
Yeah, I suppose so, right then, yeah.
Young people.
Well, especially when there aren't even, like, factory jobs they can go to anymore, you know?
I mean, everybody's going to end up working at the Gap.
That's going to be, you know, retail.
You know, that's a story of my fucking life.
anyway.
Sorry, I'm not bitter about my months on the end.
Because I, But, you know, come on.
Somebody hire me.
It's just a marker.
I mean, I just found it interesting that both of these apps both basically shit the bed at the exact same moment.
And it is because of AI.
You mentioned Derek Thompson.
I've been watching a lot of Ezra Klein recently.
Don't worry, Ezra, I'm coming for you.
No, we're not doing it.
I find Ezra Klein often infuriating, but often interesting, even if he's infuriating.
But, you know, Derek Thompson is his abundance co-author.
And Ezra Klein is the one thing where I'm like, come on, Ezra, you're smarter than this.
He's very bullish on the power of AI to radically transform the economy.
And he, you know, he talks about, because Ezra Klein is like this, like, data wonk from way back.
He was a blogger in, like, 2003 when he was 17 years old or something.
You know, he was, he's that guy.
He's just incubated in a lab to be a policy wonk, you know, and that's how he sees himself in the world.
Fair.
Fair.
But no, he's very much like, you know, he hires a bunch of writers.
He hires researchers and interns, and he hires people to help him collate through a whole bunch of stuff.
And he's like, I feel that AI can do a really passable job at this without even having it.
And of course, I'm still hiring people.
Well, what is it going to be like in another five years when AI could just literally replace all this?
And it's like, Ezra, it's never going to get better than this.
It is not going to get better than this.
The models, in order to make the models better, they need to burn.
More data than currently exists on the planet to get a 10% increase.
This is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's shit, and it's always going to be shit.
But there's this techno-utopianism that these people are just like, better, smarter people should not believe this.
I don't know.
Let's get David Girard on the line.
Come on, David.
By all means, let's feed the entire Amazon rainforest into the grinder and turn it into carbon and pump it into the atmosphere in the hope that we might be able to get AI to not hallucinate when you ask it to give you basic facts.
Oh yeah.
And that's definitely a thing that people have started seeing.
It's like it, you certainly have the higher levels.
It was like on like the Duolingo stuff is it was starting to give like It's just incorrect.
Because it's hallucinating stuff from other wrong answers that's seen on the internet or whatever.
It's just like, yeah, no.
And that's the thing that should terrify you about a learning yet, because you're literally trying to get the thing to teach you something about the world.
And if it's wrong, and it's systematically wrong, but unreliably wrong, you can't trust it at all.
So I figure at my level, I can at least get by.
Again, I'm going to keep using it as long as I've paid for it.
But it's just really sad.
There are people who are, like, making these classes for free for Duolingo.
There are people who just love the language and just wanted to, you know, they just donated their time, you know?
And instead, like, no, no, we're going to make the computer do it because, you know, the AI, you know, it's the future.
It's the future.
And, you know, the fact that this is, you know, it's like NFTs were a few years ago.
Like, you know, suddenly it's all going to crash and burn and we're going to end up with all this, like, massive compute power that we have nothing to do with.
And they're going to find something to do with it regardless, but that's just, it's just, you know, the whole thing.
And it's just like, I can't wait for the moment.
It cannot come fast enough for me.
Please, let's do it tomorrow.
Just crash the whole thing.
I'm sorry.
It's just disgusting.
That's where we are.
No arguments here.
Should we end on a happy note?
Please.
If we can do that for once in an IDSG, that's quite an achievement.
So, my other hobby, which again, you probably know if you've come to any of my live streams, where I just talk about my day and shit, I got really into GeoGuessr in like mid-2023.
I play a little bit every day, typically.
GeoGuessr is a web browser game.
You can play it on your phone, but you really want to do it on a laptop or a desktop if you can.
It used to be free to play, but it is no longer because reasons.
So basically this is a game where you are presented with You can look around, you can move down the road, depending on the settings that you use for the game.
But you can look around, make, figure out what from context clues where you think you are, and then log down on the map, you hit guess, and then it calculates the score based on how far away from it from you, how far you plot from where the location actually was.
And the best players in the world are astonishingly good at this.
Like, just beyond, beyond, beyond astonishingly good at this.
I am okay.
I am, I am, I am, when I play competitively, which I don't play competitively too much, I am, my computers are older and I can't, you know, I have, I have issues just with I can't move as fast because also I'm not 15 years old and just have nothing else to do but autistically city maps and car metas for, you know, for 18 hours a day, you know.
It's fun.
I really enjoy it.
When I play competitively, I am in the low master division.
And if you kind of think about chess master versus grandmaster, that kind of gives you a sense.
I am a very, very low-rated master at GeoGuessr, so I am pretty good.
All right.
I cannot see a thing.
I don't know what just happened.
All right.
How's it looking?
Okay, is that a phone number?
Oh boy, that could be helpful depending on what country we're in.
Okay, so we're driving on the right side.
No lines on the outside.
Yellow solid on the inside.
Single, double.
Is it dashed or solid?
Solid.
Single solid deal, okay.
There's...
A language?
Here we go, guys.
It's not English.
Good to know.
Vienes raíces?
Okay.
Querétaro?
Oh my god, that is really helpful.
Let's go.
Querétaro?
Yeah.
Compra, venta, should I keep going?
Here we go.
Probably no need for the moment.
We're by an airport.
This might be findable.
So Querétaro is in Mexico, a little bit north of Mexico City.
There's a state called Querétaro?
Oh, am I going?
I had a go at it once and I was atrocious.
Well, you played one game.
I gave you a challenge link.
So, if you want to try this, I put nine challenge links down there.
I did make them no move, but I didn't make them untimed.
So you get as much time as you want, figure out where you think you are.
It is considered bad form to Google, but if you do Google, nobody's going to tell you, I promise.
Although I don't think many of those rounds had Google-able things in them.
I was trying to make sure they didn't have to say.
Anyway, okay, we'll get there.
So right now, GeoGuessr has become an eSport, which is interesting.
For a point-and-click map game, there's money on the line.
If you're one of the best players in the world, you can make tens of thousands of dollars based on your GeoGuessr skills.
If there's money involved, it's fucked.
Well, so GeoGuessr, as a...
That's where they're based out of.
It's a European company.
Developers make their maps.
These maps are mostly not very good.
They're trying to serve a very...
So you've got people like the top players in the world who need like super specific, very, very difficult rounds that are going to like baby so that they can like compete at that high level.
And then you do people like you're very like, You know, okay, Paris.
All right, I got it.
And then like, oh, you're in the streets of Tokyo.
Oh, Tokyo.
You know, it looks Japanese.
All right, Tokyo.
And a lot of the beginner maps are designed to be that, which is, that's fine.
I mean, if I put you in some, you know, weird random town in rural Serbia and try to, you know.
You'd have no idea where to go, you know, unless you have to have studied for a long time to be able to, like, you know, accurately guess Serbia.
When it's Serbia, I can't do it.
But, you know, there's a lot of, you know, there are a lot of reasons for there to be lots of different maps.
And so, basically, GeoGuessr, you can.
I can do it now.
I've never made a map for myself, but, you know, you can make a map.
If you, all right, so I pay for GeoGuessr, I pay $35 a year or something like that.
I get more than $35 worth of enjoyment out of it, so it's not, you know, it's not a big cost for me.
But, you know, I pay for GeoGuessr.
And if you pay for GeoGuessr, you can make maps.
And people do.
You can probably, if you're in the US or Europe, or, you know, you can probably, if you go into GeoGuessr and you search the name of your city, if you don't live in like a tiny town or your province or whatever, you will find a map for that location.
I checked it for my current hometown.
There is a map for my current hometown.
And my current hometown is not large.
I don't tell people exactly where it is for reasons, but there is a GeoGuessr map.
For my hometown.
So that's just where somebody went through and they uploaded a couple hundred locations for my town.
And that way you can play this town if you want to.
The very best maps are those made by either communities or they're made by individuals who are getting to pool resources.
And it's like, oh, you got your Brazil expert who's going to find cool places in Brazil or cool little stuff.
Some maps are designed to be super rural, where you really are just on dirt roads 100% of the time.
Some of them are designed to be kind of a mix.
And the best maps, if you're going to play competitively, the best maps are, you know, they have kind of a mixed distribution, where sometimes you're just in Rio de Janeiro, and sometimes you're in, you know, a far-off spot in northern Rorima, and you've got to figure out if you're playing a Brazil map or whatever.
The community members have made this game what it is, is the point.
GeoGuessr is very, like, they are very thankful to this, but it's, you know, the people who love the game, people who obsess over the game, have made maps, have made GeoGuessr what it is, because you cannot play competitively at high levels on those crappy maps that the GeoGuessr developers make.
You just can't.
They're too easy, or they're, you know, it's too random.
Even if they're not super easy, it's incredibly random, because you're not judging skill, you're just judging by whether you just have to be closer in whatever country.
So the World Championship is currently happening, and the GeoGuessr developers, I think for reasons that seem to make sense, but was wrong-headed based on their fan base, decided to hold an event at an esports tournament in Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia.
You would think this is a gaming community, and gamers do not have, shall we say, a reputation, especially teenage gamers, and 20-something gamers.
The best players in the world are like 24 years old.
You would not expect naively to think that the GeoGuessr community is going to give a shit about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, etc.
Based on what we know about gamers.
Gamers are just right-wing shitheads.
That's the stereotype.
Not GeoGuessr.
Not GeoGuessr.
very, a very prominent person who played at the 2020, the first World Cup in 2023 is a, is a trans woman, for instance.
And, you know, there is a strong, you know, like this, this is, you know, people play from all over the world.
You know, this is, this is literally a global game.
The, you know, lots of, lots of people from the Americas in the kind of top field.
There were players from Brazil.
There were players from Thailand.
There are players from Australia, New Zealand, tons of Europe representation, but then also, The two former World Cup members, winners in 2023 and 2024.
The first one came from the Netherlands and the second came from France.
So there are, you know, it's been very European focused, but like the guy who came in second at last year's and who may win the whole thing this year is actually from Pennsylvania.
And, you know, they're a top of the very first, like actually paid, like e-sport guy who actually has signed with an e-sports company is actually a player from Brazil.
So he did not make, he is not going to be in the world championship this year.
Unfortunately, he didn't quite make it unless he wins one of the, so anyway, they created this thing called a wildcard tournament.
And the wildcard tournament is, you know, people who either didn't make it out of their group, who didn't make, who played in the previous events, but didn't make it get their second chance.
And if you win one of these wildcards, then you get to go to the World Cup.
Or people who didn't play in all those events and who, you know, kind of came through it in different methods.
So there are going to be four of those, like, World Cup, you know, or wildcard championships.
One of them was going to be in Riyadh.
The entire player base threw a shit show.
It was glorious to see.
It was glorious to see.
All the Reddit, all the Discords, everybody talking about this game, it was like, this is a disgusting decision.
We have trans friends.
We know people from all over the world.
What if gay people can't play in the tournament because they're afraid they're going to be, you know, And then, the people who made all those beautiful maps that the competitive GeoGuess are seeing relies on, they privated all those maps.
All those really good maps.
And suddenly, I logged into my account to play competitive, and I'm playing on the shitty world map, you know, instead of an official world or a community world, which at my level, they alternate between those two.
Those are two very good maps that are kind of good in different ways, and they kind of alternate between maps so that it's the same map all the time.
And I played some master-level duels on that account, and it was a shit show.
Yeah, it was pretty hilarious.
It was pretty hilarious.
GeoGuess are caved.
They put out a really good statement like a day later just before they just had a recent You know, Dallas, as bad as it is, is probably better than Riyadh.
I'll give it to you.
I'll give it to that.
I was going to say, you know, Texas has got its problems.
It's not Saudi Arabia.
Anyway, there was a really good statement of one of the players, one of the players who might have been appearing in one of the wildcard tournaments who had not qualified And this is one of his three or four chances to possibly make it into the World Championship if he wants to play in the World Championship.
And just made a statement.
It's like, nope, I'm not going.
I'm boycotting.
Done.
Fuck this shit.
And again, a really good statement.
And he said, I do not pester the Geogaster devs about this.
This is just my statement.
I am not going to Riyadh.
Period.
And they caved.
They put out a thing and said, we thought we had the idea of trying to reach out.
And this is a global game and we want people from all over the world to get excited about playing this game.
But you, the fans, have spoken and we have withdrawn from this tournament.
We will not be playing at this eSports event.
We will do it somewhere else.
And it's just, you know, in a day.
And all it was is like, it's literally like, seize the means of production, motherfucker.
Like, we made the maps.
You know, you can take them away.
Easy.
It's done.
Collective action.
Collective action.
It's like, man.
Antifascists of the world.
Withdrawal creative labor.
Exactly.
Exactly.
It's glorious stuff.
We're also seeing, you know, some of those contract laborers who got fired off from Babel, who were doing the Babel Live classes, are talking about, like, building this, like, collective where if you want to do this, we can charge via another method and you can come and build another app or something.
And, you know, so people are getting, like, you know, this is the kind of stuff where you need human effort.
You need, like, actual brains, actual fingers, actual, you know, voices of human beings to do this work.
And that's what I pay for in my GeoGuessers subscription.
Because if I was playing all those crappy maps, I never would have paid for it, you know?
That's what I want from my language learning apps, is to actually, you know, I want to learn more language so I can talk to people, you know?
Not so I can talk to a computer, you know what I mean?
And so, I mean, I think this is, you know, I think the GeoGuessr thing, I think it really shows, like, you know, they made a shitty decision, they realized it, and, you know, again, direct action works.
That's exactly what this is.
that's exactly what happened.
And I think it's, I think it's a great, I was just like, oh man, it's such a little thing, but we take the little wins.
That was just such a good win.
For me, I was so happy to see that.
Sorry, I know I've taught your ear off about this web browser game for the last 20 minutes, but it made me happy.
And I think it will hopefully make our audience happy as well to know that sometimes the good guys win.
And this was definitely a win.
Yes, fantastic.
That was delightful.
I'm sure the audience will love that as much as I did.
And it might sound corny to say, but, you know, the seed of how to change the world is right there, I would say.
Absolutely.
If you do want to play it yourself, I did.
So I created challenge links.
Challenge links are free.
So I know we're wrapping up here.
I just, you know, so the reason that Geogaster is no longer free, Google ups the cost of their API.
So you have to, so in order to generate a seed for a game, you've got to take, You basically got to pay Google a little bit, you know, for each game that you, For each game, for each round that you create, you got to pay Google a little bit for the APA licensing fee.
I don't know how the technology works in that end, And GeoGuessr is the largest single user of Google Maps in the world.
It's what I understand because you get like thousands of players playing it every week who are each generating So yeah, they use a lot of Google Maps resources.
And so...
Well, I mean, you know, it's one of those things of like the better days of Google when they just went out and did stuff.
We're going to map the world.
We're going to send cars out for you know, we're just going to send cars out all over the world and they're going to, you know, We're going to give you street view from every industrialized place on Earth.
Google Maps has really good coverage in most countries, certainly in Europe and the US, Canada, Mexico, etc.
It's actually one of the things you learn very early on is what countries do and do not have proper street view coverage because you would never guess in, for instance, you would never guess in Congo because there's no street view in Congo.
So, like, Africa is very sparsely covered, and, like, Ukraine is, like, only, you know, only some roads.
They have, like, really bad road systems there.
Anyway, but, you know, Google jacked up the price for the API costs, and so suddenly GeoGuessr had to start charging.
And there are some free GeoGuessr clones, but I've tried them.
They suck.
They just, they suck.
I'm sorry.
They're just not as good.
an interface and it's just, I don't know, it's just not the same.
So, but I can, because I'm a paid So I created three no-move challenge links.
So you can't move over down the road, but you can look around, you can spin around, you can zoom, you can do all that stuff.
And three each on the standard world map, the bad map, the unofficial world, which is kind of an info-heavy map, which was used in the 2023 World Cup.
And then Community World, which is probably the best overall map.
It's the one that I like the most and I play the most often, which is literally run by one guy who goes by Make Potato, who...
So again, these guys have YouTube channels.
They're all super, super, super nice guys.
It is the most wholesome community, because they're always just teaching each other things.
It's like, I found this thing, and I won this duel, and then they don't gatekeep it.
They share it with their friends.
And so then the next thing, it's kind of like the HBomber guy video about speedrunning.
It's like, once one person learns that, they teach everybody else.
Everybody gets the chance to learn it, too.
And it gets crazy, crazy specific, some of this stuff.
It's insane.
I mean, I could talk about GeoGuessr all day long, but, you know, I've already been doing that.
But it's been, I don't know, it's just been lovely to see that, you know, that things work.
And so anyway, if you want to try it, there are links there.
If you join, then you can friend me on GeoGuessr, and we can play together sometime if you care to.
And if not, it doesn't matter, because I just made them for myself.
So feel free to go ahead and play and let me know what you think.
So, that's all I was going to say.
Once again, links in the notes.
So pop down and find it all down there.
Yeah.
But funny old episode, this one from the...
I think this one could have been split in two.
It's fine.
We'll figure it out.
This show has always had a tone problem, and I feel like this episode might be the highest expression of that sort of inherent problem.
But no, I like the way it went.
We went from the infuriating and depressing And yeah, that'll do for me.
Yeah, better to do it that way than the other way around.
I wouldn't want to end on white African barn genocides.
Let's end on the high note.
Now you've said that, we have.
So great, thanks a lot.
Oh, well, you know, it's fine.
Okay, so that was good.
That was fun.
Well, the second half was fun.
And thanks for listening, everybody.
And we will be back very soon.
In the meantime...
Listen to our back catalogue, check us out on all our social And consider bunging one or other of us a dollar on Patreon for extras, bonus episodes, and things like that.
And in the meantime, before we come back next time, have a good period between this and the next episode.
