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May 6, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:22
1347 Late Night Shyts'n'Giggles #2

And now, a little bit of nonsense...

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So I have a question.
We haven't gotten to the bottom of what Steph's favorite cartoon was yet.
My favorite cartoon as a kid?
Yeah. Well, I must say that I was rather partial to Mighty Mouse.
Oh, I love Mighty Mouse.
Wow. Yeah, I was fairly keen on the mouse.
And what else did I like?
I was a big fan of Superman, the original, like the very first one that came out.
I thought that was really great.
No, no, sorry, not the TV series.
No, I thought that was a little cheesy, but the Christopher Eve one.
Oh, okay. The first movie.
You mean the movie? Yeah, so not exactly a cartoon, but a cartoon character.
I wasn't such a big fan of Bugs Bunny.
I thought he was a little snarky.
But I quite liked Daffy Duck.
Oh, yeah. I identified.
I felt like I had birds and stars floating around my head quite a bit, too, so it was actually quite nice.
All I remember is him being disoriented after being hit by a saucepan, which is a good deal of my childhood.
I mean, not being hit by the saucepan, but being disoriented, so I thought it was actually pretty funny.
I'm never a big fan of the Wile E. Coyote.
Wile E. Coyote just struck me as a complete existential nightmare.
You know, like the myth of Sisyphus, that you're stuck rolling the rock up the hill every single day for the rest of your life, or like every time your liver grows back, the vultures come and pack it out again.
It just seemed like what a Sisyphean nightmare.
Of course, I was a pretty precocious kid, but...
That just kind of got on my nerves a little bit, because it was just the same damn day over and over again.
Were you that conscious of it that way?
I mean, to me, I just found it really annoying and frustrating, and I couldn't stand watching it.
I mean, what kid says, wow, this reminds me way too much of Sisyphus?
I'm not watching it. People who end up running philosophy shows, I don't know, what can I say?
No, I didn't sit there as a kid and say, oh, this reminds me, this is very much like Sartre as I sit back and enjoy my cognac and have it.
That's right.
Mate, could you please change the channel This is far too Sartarian for me.
No, but you just kind of got the idea.
And also, I couldn't figure out, like...
The bird, there was no meat on him.
It's like eating a toothpick with a feather on top.
So it's like, is there nothing else to eat?
Why not go someplace else?
I never got the whole chase and thing, right?
It seemed like a lot of the Looney Tunes cartoons were that way, like Tweety and Sylvester and Tom and Jerry.
I think it might have to do with the kind of, I guess, bigger kind of maybe adult of the pair constantly hurting itself, trying to hurt the small I think that's right.
It's something my therapist said once, which I thought was just great.
She said that...
That the sadist, in a sadomasochistic relationship, the masochist always wins, right?
And I always thought that was a very clever thing to say, and I think that is sort of like the parents chasing the children, and the children always win, as children do, right, so often, right?
So I thought that was, yeah, the Tom and Jerry stuff, I never quite got it.
That was just a bit too violent for me.
And also, you know, you're always kind of concerned about why the adults in the house are letting all of this stuff You know, go on, just get a mousetrap or whatever, right?
But I'm trying to think of the other ones that I watched.
I like the Looney Tunes Hour.
I thought they were okay. Never quite got the Elmer Fudd.
I always feel that people who can't string three words together coherently probably shouldn't be armed.
So I just never...
Well, you've just described about two things to the south here.
Right. Right.
That's why you'll notice that if you look really carefully at the New Hampshire video, I actually don't pick on anyone who's packing.
And I think that is a really good argument for, you know, why to pack.
So I just thought he was a bit weird.
I thought Marvin the Martian was great, because I really like that kind of repressed explosion thing, you know.
You're making me very angry.
You know, just this really repressed and then kaboom.
I thought that was quite fun.
Man, I'm really dating myself here.
Anything newer? And these guys in these shows were old even when I was a kid, right?
So they've been around forever. Those things came out like in the 40s.
Yeah, yeah, some of them.
Popeye, I never quite got, although I thought the technology in some of the really early Popeye cartoons was fantastic.
They'd be walking down these streets, and these streets would look really kind of photorealistic behind them.
I thought that was really cool. But Popeye was just retarded, you know?
It's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so you're getting beat up, and you've got this spinach, and blah, blah, blah.
So that's grindingly predictable, even for a little kid.
Yeah, right. And your friend likes the hamburgers, and...
Yeah, Wimpy. Wimpy likes the hamburgers and there's Bluto and olive oil and so on.
And again, to me, olive oil was sort of like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner.
It's like, why are you chasing something so skinny, man?
I mean, it's like, maybe not going to be much used to no matter what you want to do, right?
Unless you want to fish some keys out of a sewage grate or something, she's not going to do you much good, right?
Which I think she actually did on a couple occasions.
Oh, did she? I can see that, yeah.
I can see that. And Popeye's just kind of, you know, like, he just struck me as a real lower-class brute, like the Stanley Kowalski of the, again, this is not something I thought of as a kid.
This is just sort of the memories that I have.
And so to sit there, put down my absinthe, say, oh, yes, this is very Tennessee Williams, very, very...
Needless to say, not many people wanted to watch cartoons with me.
Back of state? What the hell are you talking about?
Why? What did other people come up with?
Oh, just old stuff.
These guys are way ahead of us, Steph.
They're into Power Rangers land.
I completely zoned out.
Oh, Power Rangers.
The Turtles. Yes.
Explain to me, if you will, the turtles and what they have to do with them.
What is there to explain?
It's pretty self-explanatory.
I think I was in high school around that time.
They're teenagers, they're mutants, and they're turtles.
And they're ninjas. Don't forget the ninjas.
But is it that they themselves are teenagers?
These turtles? Yes.
Yes, actually, yeah, they are.
What I never understood about that is that turtles live for like 400 years, right?
Are they teenagers like teenage turtles, in which case they'd be like three?
Or are they teenagers like humans, in which case they're older than I am?
They shouldn't be eating all that heat.
Well, actually, the canon story...
They're mutated between humanoid turtles.
The canon story is like, if I remember correctly, there were like four baby turtles, you know, when they were mutated, and I don't know what happened after that.
They got in contact with the ooze.
Well, this mutated large rat is actually their sensei, and he trains them in ninja skills.
That explains everything.
Right, because if there's any species you'd want to display your amazing ninja skills, it would be turtles, right?
Because they're encased in a shell and they have tiny legs that can barely move.
Because being a ninja, it's all about being quiet and flexible and limber and being able to do dive rolls through windows.
And basically what you're doing is just throwing big blades at people.
And they're that good.
They are that good.
They're that good, right.
Right, right. It would be like me taking a chimpanzee and making it able to argue UPB, right?
It'd be like, that's how good I am.
I'm going to take the least possible...
Actually, no, it'd be more like me doing it with a soap dish or something, right?
Because I just think if you're going to pick an orangutan or something that's really going to be light and cool, why would you pick turtles?
It just makes no sense to me.
Because turtles are cool.
Wasn't it like a couple of college kids that came up with it or something?
Yeah, they drew turtles and they drew weapons attached to their arms and that's how they came up with it or something like that.
Yeah, it was really one of those things where college kids do something and it gets out of hand and then next thing you know they're They're making cartoons.
That's not usually how it goes, is it?
Yeah. So what you're saying is that turtles with weapons went viral, but philosophy and virtue don't.
This is really what we're trying to get out of this conversation, and we're trying to educate this planet, right?
That's good. I'm just going to put my head down for a while.
Please continue. You just need to figure out how to integrate the turtle and the mutation and the ninja into the philosophy.
Maybe we should just make a cartoon.
That's what I was saying. You need to teach this to one of the cute teenage girls on YouTube.
Teach all this stuff to us.
Hey, are we running from the server here?
I'm getting terrible audio out of people.
Is that true for others? Hang on.
It's coming and going. Yeah, let's run it from the server, maybe, because I'd like to, you know, it's tough to get the old patter-patter going when it's like, eh, what, what, eh, what?
Yeah, that's right.
I'm sorry, Steph, you're cutting out a little bit.
Maybe come over there. I've got a turtle.
And has anyone seen any good films lately?
I saw a, um...
Lackluster one. I don't know if we want to talk about that.
Why not? Let's see.
The most recent one I saw in the theater was Monsters and Aliens.
Oh, I love that one.
Why do you guys go see the movie?
Is that like Libertarians trying to drive out immigrants?
What? Oh, right.
Anyway, sorry, go on.
Very polite laugh. I love that.
Some 3D. You should do a spoof review of that with talking about the immigration thing.
Right. Build a wall, man.
Build a wall, grow a fucking handlebar mustache, and go out in your truck.
Well, you can do, grow your mustache, grow out in the truck, and they won't come.
Right, right, right. And so Monstrous, it's a 3D animated film, right?
Yeah, it's an animated film.
I didn't see a 3D, but...
Yeah, I saw it in 3D. I appreciate the technology and the skill that goes into making those, but I just don't get the attraction to those kinds of movies.
There's nothing to get. Sorry, what kind of movies?
Do you mean like You mean animated films?
Yeah, like The Incredibles or this new one with the dog.
I forget what that was called.
I quite like The Incredibles just because of that.
I used to imitate this character with Christina until she just told me to stop.
If you've seen The Incredibles, there's that little short designer, darling.
Oh man, that was a great point.
The rest of the film was kind of not that, but she was just, the way she toodled around, darling, that would be my voice for the day until Christina developed a patient's speech because I'm all about moderation.
Oh, with the Ayn Rand cigarette holder?
Yeah, that's the one.
That's the one. You know it. Yeah, she was great.
She was great. And I thought Finding Nemo was pretty good.
Yeah, I love that one too.
Why?
Why did you guys like it?
I liked it because it was a great excuse when Christina would take something that I wanted for me to just start going, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.
Until, again, developed the aforementioned facial tics.
Actually, it's pretty much permanent now.
And I'm looking at Isabella's.
It's coming nicely. What, mine, mine, or design?
Mine, mine. Mine?
Oh, she'll get that by herself.
I do that when she's breastfeeding, too.
Mine? Mine? I'm just kidding.
Ash would like a recall. I'm sorry?
Ash would like a recall. Oh, sorry.
Excuse me, return. There was one movie recently that I really laughed at a lot, and I don't remember which one it was.
Oh! Oh, the, um...
Yeah, I love you, man.
That one. That's so funny.
I love that. That was so funny. And I can totally relate to that right now because I'm like, okay, how do I find local guy friends?
Like, how do I make friends with guys?
Do I ask them out on it?
You know, all the ways he was trying to go about finding this guy friend to be his best man.
It was just like, I've thought of all those things, you know?
I can't believe it's been like over a year since the last Shits and Giggles call.
Remember the one where you just, the first line of it is, you know what films really suck from you, Stefan?
I like the best joke from that one was the one about the audiobook on how to pick up women.
It's like, if you know how to load this audiobook onto your iPod, you will never meet a woman.
I thought that was funny. I actually sometimes grab that podcast and re-listen to it if I need a good laugh.
It was pretty funny.
But yeah, I'm particularly fond of the bit in that podcast where you're talking about how you read in an article that to think of a woman, you need to do sexy things to yourself, so you licked your lips and rubbed your thighs.
I thought that bit was just hilarious.
That was classy, let me tell you.
You know, if I'd been wearing corduroy pants, I probably would have ended up with burns.
When I was, I guess, switching places, 19 or so, when I was working up north, I would We would sort of work in the bush for a while, and then we'd work in town.
So we'd spend a couple of weeks in the bush getting the samples, and then we'd go into town to pan them, print down, and all that kind of stuff.
I was living with this woman who was a geologist, a nice enough woman, but we really didn't have that much in common.
This was in Thunder Bay, which is a town of about 100 I was kind of hungry for some guy friends, right?
Because, you know, it's like me and this very, very small oriental woman who, you know, really didn't say very much.
And so I was kind of hungry for some guy friends.
So I was at the gym and I was in the, after I worked out, I went to the steam room.
And, you know, you always see these movies where guys are chatting in the steam room.
Well, don't be fooled, right?
It really doesn't happen in real life.
I did just start chatting with a guy, and I said, you know, basically because I just don't know how to pick up guys.
I said, hey, maybe we could go out sometime.
We were chatting about something.
It seemed nice, right? Anyway, so he looked at me for a moment and he said, you know, I have a girlfriend, right?
And I said, and I'm not proud of it, in hindsight, and it only took me about 10 seconds to realize how inappropriate it was to say this, but after he said I had a girlfriend, I said, well, maybe she could join us.
The moment would only have been better if I'd accidentally dropped my tail at that time, but it's hard to meet people but it's hard to meet people when you're not.
in school or at work or something, right?
So I was just working in a little sort of shed, and so going to meet people was It was really tough, but that really wasn't the way to do it, I think.
So don't go to saunas.
Got it. How about Japanese bathhouses?
Well, the sauna's tough, too, because if you really, like, I was so hungry for conversation with, you know, dudes or whatever, that I actually go into the sauna, I try chatting up guys, And if I got into a good conversation, I'd be so desperate.
I actually wouldn't want to leave.
I must have lost like 20 pounds over two weeks just being in there sweating it all out.
Oh, you're leaving? It's okay.
I'll wait for someone else.
And it basically became semi-aquatic because I was inhaling so much steam I started to develop gills.
I saw a poll right now.
I think this is the last film we saw in the theater before Isabella came along.
It was another Paul Rudd film with a little black kid who was really funny.
This was just a couple of months ago.
The Dungeons& Dragons kid.
Dungeons& Dragons?
Yeah, they ended up playing Kiss.
They did live...
Live Dungeons and Dragons in the film.
You know what? Sorry?
Role models? Yes!
That's the one. I thought that was pretty funny.
You did? I did. I did.
I thought that was pretty funny. I didn't see it with the expectation that it wouldn't be funny.
Is that the one where the...
Oh, that's the guy from that action flick with the wrestler dude.
Oh, you know what? Maybe the old people should just stop ramblingly saying things.
Oh, you know, the guy with the hair and the eyeball and the, you know, the guy with the celluloid.
I think it was black and white.
I remember eating jujubes.
Was that the one where there was the bit where the person said, you know, if you treat your child like this, he will grow up hating you?
And like you said, there was the audible hush in the theater.
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure.
I saw this in Desperate Housewives just the other night because Isabella likes it.
And it's...
They said one of the characters is dead and they go and tell her son.
And the son is like, I don't really care because she didn't raise me.
She dumped me with my dad and basically took off.
And one of the characters said, no, no, no.
But you see, when mothers treat you badly as children, we rely on you.
We absolutely rely on you to forgive us when you grow up.
That's how it works.
Oh, my God.
Nice. Nice. Wow.
But this is what people genuinely think, right?
Well, you have to forgive us.
She's your mother.
But yeah, I thought that film was pretty funny.
And I don't know much about the live Dungeons& Dragons.
A friend of mine did it a couple of times.
But it does seem like a pretty interesting time.
And perhaps a pretty interesting group of people who do it.
Have you guys ever done it?
Is that LARP? Live Action Roleplay?
Yes. Oh, okay.
Did you dress up?
I actually once, when I was, I think I was 15 or 16, a friend of my brother Tom's, well, the way it worked out was he and I got these anonymous letters in the mail.
Of course, this was before the internet, right?
So we get these anonymous letters in the mail that say, show up at McDonald's Woods at this time, and...
On this day, and you'll find clues there, right?
And my parents were totally freaked out by it.
Of course, he was supposed to call my parents before he sent the letters, but...
Sorry, who was supposed to?
This friend of my brother's actually set something up that was sort of like a surprise party type thing that turned out to be an entire weekend...
Live action roleplay.
Wow. And we went into the woods and did the whole nine yards.
He had taken a D&D module from the old Greyhawk.
Are you familiar with that? Yeah, I'm afraid so.
What am I going to say?
No. He had taken the Greyhawk module and basically laid out...
Because these woods were large enough that you could actually do that.
You could map out a section of it and sort of emulate the map in the module.
And so we did an entire campaign in the woods over a weekend.
It was pretty cool. And it ended on Sunday, basically back at his house partying for his birthday.
Wow. Very cool.
And how did you play, though?
How did you have dice with you?
I mean... Was there a guy in a viking helmet pretending to be a minotaur?
I mean, how did that work?
Well, it started out where we were basically just playing by the seat of our pants, right, just following the clues, but the clues basically led to instructions on how to actually, you know, it took us a couple of clues to figure out we were actually in a D&D module.
Nice. Which I thought was kind of cool, because you actually get to act out the whole process of finding clues and figuring out what the hell it is you're looking for and why you're looking for it, and avoiding monsters and all that sort of thing.
I think that it's great until you just don't want to end up in that creepy end dungeon, you know, with the sultry music and slowly disrobe written out in Elvish.
Ha ha ha! Different dungeon, sorry.
Did it happen for you, Steph?
Apparently you're having very different birthday parties than I was having.
Right. But it was fun.
It was a lot of fun. But how did you do the Monstrous?
I mean, how did that work?
That's always been the part that's confused me.
Because there was a film, apparently, with Tom Hanks called Mazes and Monstrous.
I actually read the book about some guy who got too into D&D and went nuts or whatever, because, of course, that was, you know...
Before they had FDR, they were after Gary Gikex, right?
Yeah, I remember when Mazes and Monsters came out, and my parents used that as an excuse to not let us play for a while.
And just before we get back to that, it's something that I've always noticed about nasty parents, is they're incredibly concerned that other people might end up hurting their children.
It's like, no, no, no, that's our job.
We don't know how. This is not to be outsourced, right?
You know, if we're going to have our kids harmed, that's for us to do, and we're just going to get really angry if anyone else might have a chance of doing it.
It just always struck me as kind of funny, because my mother was like that, too.
You know, Dungeons and Dragons might be bad for you.
It's like, compared to you, say?
You? Right, right, right.
Well, my own parents actually...
They took our gerbs. Sorry, go ahead.
They kind of...
They were okay with contractors occasionally, right?
Because the motto in our house was, if I find out a teacher spanked you, when you get home, I'm going to spank you too.
Right, right, well, sure, absolutely.
Right. Absolutely.
But, yeah, there was this, and I could never quite understand how the monster thing worked with the live roleplay.
Oh, well, he actually had a bunch of, he recruited a bunch of friends.
The idea was that some of us were supposed to be the adventurers and some of us were supposed to be the NPCs and the monsters.
And so at various points where we were supposed to stop, they would come running out of a cave or out of the batch trees or something and act as the monsters and then we would just sort of Wrestle each other to the ground, and whoever won, you know, that was sort of our substitute for dice, was actually wrestling.
Oh, cool. Cool.
Yeah. Cool. You just don't want to come across Mickey Rourke's character in that game, right?
It's pinned. We had a guy, actually, well, you met him, John, right?
You met him, Greg. John is a friend of mine, and not...
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I would lose to a wrestling match with him.
He's... He's not the most thrilling.
He's a smart guy. He's not the most thrilling of personalities.
When we played Dungeons& Dragons, we had this thing where you would rotate the dungeon masters.
How did that work?
Everyone would do a campaign because everybody wanted to try being a dungeon master.
The dungeon master is the guy who tells you what's going on in the world and runs the world and you sort of interact with him.
So not like in the middle of a campaign.
Oh, no, no, no, no. Anyway, so, and, you know, my brother would be a dungeon master and it would always be the same thing.
It would just be endless impossible traps, you know?
Because, you know, if you ever want to know what someone's really like, let them create a dungeon for you.
And you will get a complete map of their psyche, right?
Because it's just fantastic.
And John wanted to be Dungeon Master, and again, he's not the most scintillating storyteller, and you kind of need a little bit of pizazz to be a good Dungeon Master to build a sort of story.
And John ended up buying a module The Hall of Giants or something like that.
He ended up buying a module, and we were just putting him off, right?
Because we just knew this was going to be something we would have to grit our teeth and endure, you know, like some 19-hour German film with no subtitles, you know?
So we just, you know, we just try and put it off, right?
And then we had a guy who was a pretty good dungeon master, and it was just like, come on, man, stretch it out a little more, you know?
session.
Anyway, so finally John got his day.
And he bought this module, this Hall of Giants thing.
And he hadn't realized that you were supposed to put the monsters in it.
So basically it was just a map with descriptions of rooms.
And he hadn't sort of realized that you had to put the monsters somewhere, right?
You designed the whole adventure.
I mean, there's random monster generation, but...
Yeah, yeah, but he never liked random monster generation because he felt it was kind of out of, you know, out of reality, things popping in.
You know, whatever, right? So, basically, we went and played...
Out of reality.
Yeah, I know. I mean, compared to what...
Still, for us, less out of reality than, say, women.
But we...
So we went and he was the dungeon master, right?
I remember we sort of went over to his place and we were all just like, oh man, this is going to be rough.
Just get through it as quickly as possible.
And we kind of had this plan. We were just going to interrupt his explanation.
Okay, we keep going.
Because John was the kind of guy, when you are a dungeon master, you tell people how to map stuff, right?
And a guy who wants to stay sane would just give you corridors, right?
But John's map was like caverns, you know, and they're all sort of squiggly and stuff, and you can't put that on graph paper very easily.
And so the first thing, half the evening, was just, no, no, no, it's out a little bit there, this cavern.
You haven't got it quite right. So, oh my gosh.
Just going mad, right?
So we went to Hall of Giants, you know, we went into all of these rooms and so on, and John would sort of ploddingly, you know, you see a room and this and this and that and the other and so on, right?
Which is, you know, basically if you can imagine, I don't know, a really slowed down computer voice describing some action scene, that would sort of be John's way of reciting it.
And we kept going and we kept going, and it's like, Jesus, there's no fights here, because he hadn't put any monsters in.
So basically, we were just going from room to room or cavern to cavern, being annoyingly told that our maps were wrong.
There were no monsters. There was no spark or whatever.
And we were, of course, too polite or too nice.
And this went on for weeks.
Well, not weeks, because we finally did sort of explain.
We said, John, we've been doing this for six hours.
We haven't met a single monster, because without monsters, you don't get the XP experience points.
You can't operate or whatever. Right.
Yeah. You kind of take the life out of the game, right?
Oh, yeah. So that was the most...
I mean, for the most part, it was a great deal of fun, but that was just a completely...
We did just eventually run through the whole dungeon at a dead sprint to get to the end.
And John didn't have any sense of proportion, you know, so he would throw 12 million kobolds at you when you were like fifth level or whatever, which was just, they've got to roll 23 times in a row to give you a pinprick and, you know, one swap of your sword turns them into atomic particles, right?
And so we'd sort of be wading through all these stupid kobolds, and you know, when you see, you know, 30 more come over the hill, you know, that's just 30 more dice you gotta roll that's just gonna turn you to sleep.
And then, you know, the next thing you would be facing was some juiced-up steroid minotaur from hell that would wipe out your whole party.
So there was no gradation of difficulty, you know?
It was just like completely boring to absolutely impossible.
It was just a pendulum. There was nothing in the middle.
And that's sort of when we began to wind down a little bit, because it's hard to get your spark back after that.
Well, plus, I mean, especially if you bring like a long-time character, one that you've been developing for a while into a game like that, where there's completely no, you know, no sense of proportion at all, and, you know, Three or four hours into the game, he throws a silver dragon at you or something.
In three die roll, you're dead.
Now you're sitting there with this character that you've been working on for like six months, and that's it.
It's like, fuck!
I hate you! I'm never coming over again!
Yeah, it's hard not to take it personally.
I don't mind being killed in a fair fight.
That happens, right? But when you just get something stupid...
The dungeon master needs to do something sensible.
If you roll the dice and you get some gold dragon or whatever, it's like, you know, roll them again.
You'll survive, right?
But it's hard. You react like somebody just shot your dog.
It's really tough to take the stiff upper lip approach in those situations.
What the hell was that?
Yeah. Do we have the devil on the line?
I think there's a motorcycle.
I'm outside. I think there's a motorcycle.
Oh, okay. So have we bored everybody to tears with Dean?
Yeah, I'm done with that.
I actually found it really interesting.
Yeah, me too. It's a great deal of fun.
I doubt Isabella will ever do it, but man, if I had a geeky son like me, I would totally have fun with that again.
We could make a Barbie Dungeons and Dragons.
Barbie Dungeons and Dragons, right.
You know, it's Barbie in quest of your genitalia.
I was trying to imagine there for Ken and Blaine.
Sorry? Map out a module that's based on West Hollywood or something like that.
Right. I'm sure somebody's done it already.
Somebody made a mud.
Remember those muds?
Multi-user dungeons. I never played them, but I do remember them.
Yeah, those were fun.
People would make the funniest things.
Yeah, when it went online, I kind of lost interest.
That's because you're old.
Dungeons and Dragons was before my time, but I was more into like Magic the Gathering.
That was my thing. Now, wasn't that just a card game?
And I'm sorry to be so old, but I just never quite...
Wasn't that just like...
Wasn't it just sort of like a card game?
Yeah, it was just a card game.
You bought the cards and bought the booster packs and built up your deck.
It wasn't nearly as... Imaginative as Dungeons& Dragons could be, for sure.
Yeah, I mean, but Dungeons& Dragons, fundamentally, is just a form of gambling.
It's Vegas for geeks, right?
Because it's all about dice rolls and success and failure.
So it's just a kind of gambling, but for people who don't have popularities.
Right. Basically, well, I found, like, when I went to play, and I remember doing this in junior high, and I recently tried it again, the Dungeons& Dragons thing, the meetup, And they were very creative people.
I mean, the dungeon master was really, you know, he had a really good storyline going and everybody was, you know, making their vague attempts to act the part.
And it was kind of fun.
The couple of times that I played.
Oh, it can be a very funny thing to do.
Like, it really can be...
Like, you can really laugh yourself sick in Dungeons& Dragons if it's well done.
I mean, it can be very exciting, but it really can be funny as all hell.
Well, and if you've got a good group of friends to play with like that, too.
Because if you get the D&D guys that are, you know...
Heavy-duty, cynical, and eye-rolly, and super serious about all the matrices and die rolls and everything.
It's not too funny. Then it's more like torture.
Yeah, it's like having James look over your code.
Oh, shit, is he on?
Not you, James. Oh, I'm sorry.
James, my hand puppet of anal retention.
Sorry, go on. It's kind of like the improv...
That we do in acting classes.
I mean, we're always rolling on the floor laughing by the time somebody's done with what they're supposed to do.
We make these rules up, and then they try to follow the rules and improv a story, and it just gets really funny.
We did that for years in theater school, and there were so many funny ones.
I remember one, we had an improv.
We were supposed to go up and ask someone something embarrassing.
And a woman went up to another guy in the scene who she basically wanted him to be a sperm donor.
And that was what she was trying to get him to do in a park.
And she actually brought out a styrofoam cup in the scene.
It was really funny just to see that improv go, you want me to shoot in a cup here?
Anyway, it was funny.
Yeah, I think I'm going to do one of those improv classes next because.
I really have a good time doing that.
I used to do that with my brother and sister actually.
I took a drama class in high school, and we did some improv in that.
And I had two stepsisters as well, so I had four siblings, basically, and we all did the improv, so it was fun.
Oh yeah, it can be a great deal of fun.
It's a bit intimidating, because you're never sure whether you're going to be able to do it, but once you get into it, it's a lot of fun.
I always wondered how that would turn out as a party game or something like that.
Oh, improv? I don't know.
I think there might be one.
But it's hard to get people to loosen up that way.
Right. So what you're saying is that for the barbecue...
Yes.
That's a great idea.
Improv. What? That's a great idea.
Yeah, I like that.
That sounds fun. And I was thinking we could also all come playing different roles.
Like Greg could be the nihilist and I could be the priest.
Nice. I wouldn't exactly be playing a role.
Right. We play a game called Party Quirks where you draw something out of a hat and it tells you what you're supposed to pretend you are.
And it's like miming. You act it out but you don't say anything and people try to guess who you are.
Oh, I've seen... That's kind of like improv on a small scale.
Yeah, I've seen that.
I've seen that on that TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Yeah. That's a great show.
For some reason, I just couldn't, as much as I like doing improv, I just couldn't get into watching it on TV. Well, that show, too, they shoot like 20 times the amount of footage that they can actually use.
You couldn't do that live, right?
I just remember hearing that from someone, that they shoot for like two days to get one 20-minute show, because a lot of that stuff doesn't work, but when it does work, it can be really funny.
Oh man, I didn't know that.
Totally ruined it for me.
Not as good though, isn't it? Because it means that it's easier for other people to do, right?
Right, no, totally. Right, because you watch all those 20-minute shows, it's like, holy crap, how'd they come up with all that so quickly?
I'm stupid. It's like, I'm retarded.
Well, it's kind of like the bit that you've talked about before, Steph, about authors and famous writers and famous composers and things like that, that usually it's like 10 to 20% of their output.
Oh yeah, that's the very best, right?
Because, you know, I'll get these emails pretty regularly.
It's like, you know, I really liked FDR 1322.
And for me, it's like, uh...
What? Okay, you know, what about the other 1,400 podcasts, you know?
Really liked this one, you know?
637. I framed it.
You have to remember which one was 637.
I mean, it's nice to hear, right?
I mean, I knew that, I don't know if you guys have listened to it, but I knew that the depression one was going to be pretty popular, right?
And I got a bunch of people saying, you know, oh, this is fantastic and so on.
And it's nice, but of course, what you do remember is that there's lots of times that they don't say that, right?
That's what it is well, right?
Right. What I found actually kind of interesting is that you posted that nice donator note on the board, and the first reply is something like, I agree with every word in this, and it's from a non-donator.
Except for a donator, I agree.
It is a note, and emotionally I agree with it, right?
Right. Yeah, I agree.
That can be a tad annoying.
But not quite as annoying as the people who tell me to fix a whole bunch of stuff and do a whole lot of work who've never donated.
Oh, yeah. Those people can be a tad trying, but, you know, it's a...
You know, Steph, your flash banner is really giving me a hard time over here.
I opened it five times in my browser, and it's just slowing my computer down.
Right. It's, you know, hobbies can be really good.
You might want to get off that Apple IIe and into something.
I use a good computer.
I have to put more coal in the back.
I have to pedal faster. It sucks!
The other day, Steph, you had me laughing so hard in the chatroom when you said, so who here is using a Mac?
And I said, I am. And you said, when you did the little fake whisper thing and you said, hippie, call me bastards, you said, oh, wait, I mean, way to think outside of the box.
And by box, I mean remotely useful computer.
Although, I got to tell you, you know, And I need an intervention, and I'm gonna tell you this right ahead.
I need an intervention so when y'all come up for the barbecue, and I don't care how pitifully I cry and beg and bleat and possibly even hump your leg, you have to get this iPod away from me.
You must get this goddamn time sync away from me.
Or at least disable the App Store.
So please, dear God, I think I've spent more on applications that I have on the goddamn iPod.
Ooh, this one's pretty cool.
It combs my eyebrows, you know?
That's cool.
The iPhone is just...
Did you get the compass application that someone pointed out from the Everyday Anarchy?
Yeah, and the...
What is that orca thing?
What's that? Where you can actually blow into the microphone and play a flute on the thing.
Ocarina. And there is an application that plays a high-pitched whine that propels mosquitoes.
Are you serious? Yeah.
And by high-pitched whine, they do mean FDR podcast.
So, yeah, no, it really does.
This thing, it's a complete time sink, right?
I have not spoken to my family in two weeks.
It's ridiculous. It was on the track to being a pretty good family man, but this has just toasted it completely.
Yeah, I've really been...
I've really, and I said this in the chat room, I've really been leaning in the next few months towards getting that along with Skype and a microphone.
Yeah. And just running that as kind of a cell phone.
Oh, totally. In fact, you can run Skype even off the iPod Touch.
You don't need the iPhone. You just have to jailbreak it and do other kinds of weird, creepy crap that I don't know much about.
But you've seen videos of it working.
Right, right. Because I have the Skype Pro thing, right?
And the phone number.
Yeah, no, it's an amazing, amazing thing.
The brilliant thing about the apps, too, is that you don't realize you've spent more than you have on the iPhone until a month later when you look at your credit card bill and you see $1,600 $2 charges.
Right, right, right.
No, it's amazing. You've got the GPS thing in your car, so you don't really need the feature that's on the iPhone, but...
Man, it's really convenient to be able to type in a search into Google and the Google Maps and have it point to 10 different places that match that name wherever you are.
Oh, it's a fantastic little device.
I mean, I can see it's cool, because using the Google Maps application, given how much I've spent on it, I can actually see live the credit vans rolling towards my house.
And I can see the glint of the weaponry that they're packing.
And it's really, really cool.
I know exactly when to go into the basement.
It's fascinating.
It really is amazing. And it'll tell you what the temperature is in the basement, too.
Right. The shrinkage factor.
There is an app which says it correlates shrinkage factor to external temperature and even includes wind chill.
It's really cool. Calibrating is certainly very cold, though.
I'm sorry? How much do most apps run?
That's a couple of bucks. That's the problem, right?
You know, fucking Steve Jobs, you know what he did?
He watched. I know where he got his business model.
He watched season one of The Wire, and that's how he got his business model, you know?
Like, give him a taste, get him going, and then just reel him in, you know?
Because this thing's crap. It's just complete crap.
I've never had anything like it.
It's just astounding. Right, you can see the escalation too, because they start out they're 99 cents, right?
And then all of a sudden they're a buck 99.
Now you can see they're starting to get to around 399, 499, 599.
And this is how stupid it is, and this is how stupid I am.
No seriously, this is like, I have no self-control.
This, okay, just because it's cool and you can do it, I bought an application that lets me type On my computer and control the mouse using the touch screen on the iPod, right?
So this is what I was doing this afternoon.
This is ridiculous, right? My baby's crying, right?
And what I'm doing is I'm farting around on this goddamn touch screen trying to move the mouse on my computer.
And do you know I had to sit down to do it because I needed a hand free, I needed to prop it up somewhere.
And do you know what I took off the chair so I could sit down and control my computer with my iPod Touch?
Any guesses? What did I have to move off the chair to control my computer with my iPod Touch?
The computer? No.
I had to move...
The crying baby.
It's even worse than that, if you can believe it.
I had to move off the chair so that I could control my computer with my iPod Touch.
I had to move a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard I mean, how fucking retarded is that?
That's what I mean. It's like the kind of stuff you see on a sitcom.
It's ridiculous. And, you know, fortunately, I still have that part of me that looks down from somewhere around the light fixture and says, what the fuck are you doing?
You have a wireless mouse that you just moved so you could diggle around on a screen to move something.
And I... It's so stupid.
For those who were in the chat room earlier today, I was typing on this, you know, because it's not a very convenient keyboard, particularly those stupid apps that don't go landscape.
That keyboard is really small, right?
And it's just on the screen.
So I'm hunting and pecking away on this little iPod Touch so that it comes up on the Computer screen.
And yeah, technically it's pretty cool, right?
So then I, oh, my baby's crying, so I get up and I step on the wireless keyboard that I put down by the couch and hurt my foot.
And I'm like, if that's not a lesson in your perspective and productivity in tech, I don't know what is.
But yeah, it's completely insane how you can just get absorbed into this, right?
And I'm assuming they make it pretty easy to just get on and get a few apps and then go to town, right?
Oh yeah, you just click on it, you enter your...
You know, I'm a sucker, password, and...
Oh, madness.
Yeah, it's really cool.
Like, if I wake up in the middle of the night, it's right there with me.
You know, I'm sleeping alone, away from my family, because, you know, we're still sleep training Isabella, right?
But I have my iPod touch with me, you know?
In its little negligee, you know, lying there, looking, I was so sultry.
This is teaching me a lot.
Yeah, listen, I'm telling you, you know who I am?
I'm that unshaven, haggard, smells of urine and vomit junkie saying, you know, don't take that first hit.
That's all I'm doing is the trembling guy stumbling all over his keyboard so that he can control his computer remotely.
I'm just telling you what you're in for.
It's a fun ride, but just be careful.
That's really all I'm saying. Because my last, I mean, I was amazed at the Zen Vision M, which I had for a couple of years, that did, you know, videos and had a little radio and all that kind of stuff.
And I used the videos on it, but the screen was pretty small, whereas this thing's got a beautiful screen.
But it is a real pain having to convert everything, because its format support is pretty sad, right?
Like it does, what, AAC, whatever the hell that is.
MP3 and MP4s, I think it doesn't do...
It doesn't do Flash. It doesn't do WMV or DivX or XVid or anything like that.
But I think someone's working on an application to give it at least some of those format capacities.
So I've got to do a lot of translation of videos.
But that's not a big deal. I found that to be really annoying.
So annoying that I just didn't want to use it as a As a video...
Oh, you mean to be having to convert everything?
Yeah, because the whole point of having that is that I could jack it into the charger socket, hands off, minds off, I don't have to worry about a thing, just let my iTunes control it, right?
But the minute you have to start, okay, I've got to open up this other app, and I've got to do this conversion, I've got to import them into my iTunes, and then I can plug the phone in and do the sync, and then You know, all of that, it's like, you just kind of ruin the...
Yeah, I mean, the Zen Vision is fantastic.
I mean, it accepts every single conceivable format.
I mean, there's nothing that it can't play.
So that is just a drag-and-drop thing.
But, you know, so what?
I mean, I did do my shopping around, and this was the best and easiest application.
And it really is just an astounding piece of technology.
And I think that Apple is just an amazing job.
I actually like to do a review of it and sort of give people a taste of the apps that I found to be kind of useful.
And so great stuff, like iChess.
It's a really good chess program.
It's free. I mean, it's just amazing what you can get on it.
I found that the free ones is where it got me, because I started looking at the free ones.
Yeah, that's the crack, right? Have some free crack.
Yeah. You start browsing through it, and you're like, oh, these are really cool, but I wonder what I could pay for.
I wonder how good that would be.
And you started kind of eyeing the...
The money store, like you said earlier, you start with the small ones and then you start looking at the $50 apps that integrate with your computer and you're like, no, I have to get away from all of this.
Oh, man. And this is the ridiculous thing too, right?
Because then you say, oh, well, I'm spending too much money.
Literally this afternoon, I spent about 10 minutes, no, it's about 20 minutes researching whether a 99 cent app was any good.
That is like Singaporean stitching Nike's wages when you put it together on an hourly basis.
You know, it's 99 cents.
You lose that more behind your couch every month, right?
But I'm sitting there going, oh, is this good?
Did it get good reviews? Did it get bad reviews?
Maybe I should check it out online.
It's 99 cents after all.
It's like, oh, my God. Oh, dear Lord in heaven.
It's not healthy.
I do the same thing.
99 cents. That's 99 cents.
You know, it's like, dude. Oh no!
Sorry, go on. And yet I'll buy $1.99 TV shows.
Oh shit! I'll go buy a $4 latte without even thinking about it.
You know, I don't sit there and go, ooh, 20 minutes research to find out if this is a good latte or not.
Oh man, with tax.
That's what I was going to say. I'd be like spending a day researching whether the hot dog vendor outside your work is worth buying from or not.
Yeah, if he was selling them for 99 cents.
Right. Right.
Although that actually, you know, because of the food poisoning, I could see that.
But yeah, I mean, it's just, it's the coolest thing.
And there's another thing that's kind of cool about it too, which is that because it's got 128 megs of RAM and it's limited processing speed, although the graphics are pretty good, what it is is an incredible time machine back to early video gaming.
Right? So I bought this little game called iShoot.
And what it is, it's a game that I used to play on my old 1MHz 8-bit Atari 800.
And it's a little game where you've got these tanks and you shoot over these hills and you have to calculate the strength and the angle, right?
And you've got wind and you've got all these different weapons and so on, right?
And I used to play that because it was one of the few two-player games you could get.
Other than Ball Blaster and a couple of others.
But it was one of the very few two-player games that you could get for the old video game systems.
And it's a fun game.
It's neat. And it's back, right?
And nobody would ever program this for a PC, right?
Because it would just be Overkill or Xbox or anything like that.
But for this, it's a lot of fun, right?
So if I've got a little bit of time to kill for whatever reason, I'll just jack it in and I'll play a game or two, right?
And There's another one called Galaxy on Fire, which is very much like a really old Wing Commander game.
And I used to really enjoy space shooters, but for some reason nobody seems to make them anymore.
I don't know why that is, but you just can't find any good ones.
And you fly the spaceship by tilting, and it takes me a while to get used to that.
I'm used to a joystick, right? And nobody would ever program the stinky game for a PC, but because of this thing, there's all these good video games that, I don't know, I used to play or whatever, that are kind of fun to play again.
That are available just on this platform and they're cheap and whatever, right?
It's kind of a nostalgia trip in a way.
The classic graphics and everything, yeah, it's kind of fun.
Yeah, and because they, you know, it's like when you don't have really great special effects, you have to have a good script, right?
And if you don't have, you know, six tons of flashy graphics pumping it straight into your retina every three seconds...
You actually have to come up with really good gameplay, and they've really, I think, done some work in that, in this.
So it's kind of more engaging mentally rather than just being sort of eye candy.
Right. I mean, I watched...
God, what did I watch? The Day the Earth Stood Still.
The old one or the new one?
The new one. Yeah.
Yeah. You know, I tell you, Keanu Reeves, he either, like...
He licks your ear, he just pokes you in the eye with a sharp stick.
There's nothing in between with that guy's movies.
There's nothing that's okay.
It's either like, man, this is the greatest thing ever, or holy shit, Johnny Mnemonic just took a dump all over my brainstem.
Johnny, was that good?
Oh no, it was wretchedly, badly, awfully terrible, like, oh my god, I could not watch a film like that without an iPod touch in my little hands ever again.
That's one of the reasons why I avoided The Matrix originally.
Yeah, me too. I never watched The Matrix in the theater, so I only watched it eventually when it came out on video.
And then semi-reluctantly, because I just thought, oh man, you know, this guy with his little beady eyes come hither a stare has just, you know, he's spanked me way too often in a way I don't like, so.
Right, right. He's been there, done that with Johnny Mnemonic.
I'm not making that mistake again.
Right, right. No, absolutely.
Or, um... The Cedar House or whatever one he did with Sandra Bullock.
Oh, The Mailbox? The Mailbox, whatever the hell it is.
We're writing to each other through time and time stretches interminably, not just in the film but in the theater.
Oh, man. So it's like every other film.
It's like every other film you want to watch with this guy because, you know, man, when he's good, he's great.
And when he's bad, he's just, oh, man, it's just like having your tendons pulled out.
I know, Kung Fu.
I know.
Klaatu Burana Nicktu, dude.
Although, I must say that the Bill and Ted stuff was damn fine comedy.
Strange things are afoot in the Circle K. That's a great line.
dude when they go to hell it's like man this is nothing like our album covers that the days of our lives thing with socrates it was kind of oh yeah like funny and annoying right although It's interesting because they actually had a pretty good Freudian analysis of that guy's mom.
Dude, that's your mom. Pretty good Freudian analysis of that at the end of the film, which I thought was actually a surprising burst of intelligence.
Probably came through George Carlin somehow.
Right. Yeah, I forgot George Carlin was in that.
Yep, no more George.
No more George. Yeah, it's nothing like watching the slope burn down to nihilism that hippies get when their desires remain unfulfilled, right?
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
If you listen to his stand-up routines like the last few years, they were just horrifying.
He was a lemonhead for sure. And I saw this on 60 Minutes.
Lemonhead? Yeah, just bitter.
Oh, okay. Sorry.
Go ahead. 60 Minutes.
No, sorry. Real Time with Bill Maher.
Did you guys ever watch that? Not me, no.
No. It's not bad.
His opening monologues can be pretty good, and some of his discussions are interesting.
And he had Oliver Stone on, which was...
I'd be meaning to try and pull this and get a copy of it somewhere up in the diamond section, but it's really, really interesting because...
Oliver Stone was in Vietnam and made Platoon and made all of these anti-war films and anti-war statements.
He did all that nonsense about JFK, which, however deranged it may have been, was obviously passionate about the truth as he saw it and so on.
And then he just did this film, W, which was about George Bush or whatever.
And when he was on talking to Bill Maher, you could really see this as something quite fascinating.
Because he said, you know, it's been, I don't know, what is it, 20, 25 years since I made Platoon, and here we are, you know, back at war again.
And this is an interesting thing.
I've been reading some of this sort of stuff in the psychohistory forums, just about how people are like, well, how could we be back here again?
And it really is fascinating to see just how tough it is for people who are idealists, or who have, you know, really worked hard To try and expose this kind of stuff, to reduce violence or war or whatever.
But they just get more and more frustrated as time goes along.
And I think it's because they're not doing what we're doing, right?
Which is to say, well, fuck all that.
Look at the family, right? Look at the core.
Look at the principles right at the root of things.
But that was a really chilling moment for me, because you could just see it in his eyes.
Like, you're looking back at his life and saying, well, I made all this anti-war stuff, and what effect did it actually...
Yeah, Born on the Fourth of July was an Oliver Stone film, if I remember rightly.
So, he's made all of this anti-war stuff, and, you know, we're back at war again, and nobody seems to give a shit, right?
And that's really for somebody who's been...
It's kind of like, what the fuck was all that for?
Yeah, what did I do all that for?
Nothing's changed. I have kind of a theory about that, too.
Well, especially with Born on the Fourth of July, but also with Platoon in a certain way, these movies...
The leftists, they put them out consciously as anti-war, but really they're just propaganda films, right?
Because they're big fallen hero stories, right?
So the right wing can use the emotional sort of...
Injection from those movies to say, ah, next time we're really going to get them, right?
Right. And they're also so, I mean, they're so graphic and so violent these days, right?
I mean, if you've ever watched something like The Longest Day about the D-Day invasion, I mean, nobody's arm gets blown off in those films, right?
People just, you know, bang, ugh, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
Right. You know, like guys falling off horses in cowboys and Indians films, right?
There's no splatters. But I mean, now it's just like the surgery channel when you go and see a war film, right?
Particularly something like Saving Private Ryan.
And I think that it shocks and overwhelms people of moral sensitivity, and it strangely excites people who are sadistic.
So I think it's actually kind of achieving the opposite of what they want.
And I don't think that's entirely unconscious, if that makes any sense.
Not entirely unconscious?
Could you go into that a bit more?
Well, if you want to make an anti-war film, then you have to look at how people end up going to war, right?
I mean, we could dip into a slightly more serious topic here, but if you look at Fahrenheit 9-11, the Michael Moore film, The kid didn't want to go to war, right?
The guy who ended up dying and all this mom and the letter and the crying and so on, right?
She's out there thundering away at fucking George Bush in the White House like that had anything primary to do with her son's death, right?
So he signs up.
She encourages him. There's been, oh, we've had soldiers in this family for generations and when he's finally is going to be shipped off to Iraq and he says, you know, I'm terrified and I don't want to go.
And she says, no, no, no, you have to go.
It's your duty, it's your honor, it's your country.
She just basically sludges his entire brain with 12 tons of toxic propaganda, right?
And so he ended up in Iraq because of a whole family catapult that goes back for generations, right?
So for her to get mad at George Bush, it's understandable, right?
Because she doesn't want to look down that hole, but it's silly, right?
So if you think that war...
It's prevented by showing people that war is gory or scary or exhilarating or whatever.
Well, first of all, the fight or flight that's generated in a war movie is all about exhilaration because you can't get shot in a theater, right?
So you don't feel the livid terror of war in a theater, right?
You feel the thrill, the excitement, the adrenaline, the startle factor.
So it's not like that's a whole lot of fun, but it's not quite the same as hoping you don't get your arm blown off, right?
Right.
It's a different kind of roller coaster.
Yeah, exactly. You can't reproduce war without putting somebody in mortal danger.
You can't understand war at all unless You're seeing people you know, have known for years, getting blown up.
And if you're terrified of, you know, literally dying or being horribly maimed and mutilated within the next 30 seconds, right?
I mean, there's no way to reproduce that in a theater.
It's the difference between seeing a guy run across the screen screaming and yelling and firing off An M-16.
It'd be another if somebody busted into the fire door and ran across the theater screaming and yelling and firing off an M-16.
We all understand the huge emotional change that would occur in the audience.
So you kind of give people the upside of war, of which there is, because otherwise people would never do it.
The thrill, the excitement.
For people who are decadent, who don't have Any emotional sensitivity left, all they can do is keep pushing their neuro-systems, right?
Neuro-neurological systems just keep pushing the big red buttons of fear and fight and flight and terror and rage.
That's all they can do because they don't have anything left.
There's no more subtle feelings left in them.
They're burned out. They're traumatized.
They've got no higher brain function when it comes to emotional processing, right?
They can't do ambivalence.
They can't do richness or depth or sympathy or abused resignation or whatever you want to call it, right?
right?
They just can't do that.
They've got, you know, they're either dissociated and depressed or hysterical and full of rage and terror, right?
That's all they've got.
And those people, like if you look at, I don't see a lot of anti-war people in war films.
I do see a lot of young guys who are kind of macho at war films, right?
And I think that it's not anti-war to show the gore and the glory, so to speak, the camaraderie, the bravery, the fear, the terror, the hatred of the enemy, the, I mean, to show that on a screen, it's not anti-war in my, in my opinion.
I would say also that the left has a lot of hidden anger that comes out through political action and that sort of thing.
If you make this kind of movie and cloak it in this kind of anti-war moral indignation, Then it's kind of a form of hidden violence on your part.
No, I think that's entirely right.
And of course, leftists tend to be more into hidden violence.
In other words, they like aggressing against the unarmed, not the armed, right?
Right, because the right are raging against their...
Like, are the children raging against their parents, and the left are the parents raging against the children, right?
I mean, that's... Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that, but that's a...
That's an interesting idea.
Right, because the right wants to fight against people who are armed, and the left wants to fight against people who are unarmed, which is a parent-child paradigm.
Interesting. Wow, I had never thought of it that way.
Right, so in other words, the left is the mom, right?
Uses passive aggression, emotional manipulation, guilt, and all that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, I've always thought about that, right?
Like the Old and New Testament.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, less about fire and brimstone and more about guilt.
And it's still violence, but it's just more verbal and emotional, which is where the left comes in.
But so, I mean, since aggression against children is first and foremost, at least in its very early stages, tends to be about from mothers to children, later becomes more about fathers to children, the Yeah, I've always thought that, I mean, the right is very much around hatred towards Dad.
But Dad is a big, powerful guy, which is why you need a military and you need a missile defense shield and you need all of this big tanks and shit like that and aircraft carriers.
Because Dad is a big, powerful guy.
So if you take on Dad, you've got to be well-armed.
A whole bunch of phalaces. I'm sorry?
A whole bunch of phalaces. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, uh, and, uh, whereas mom is more sort of slippery and, and, uh, uh, subtle and, and manipulative and so on.
So for that, you kind of need rhetoric and Obama and pretending hope and then a welfare state.
And it's all that kind of murky hit under the table violence.
I'm sorry. Well, some moms.
I always, I always think of that.
Uh, whenever, whenever I see those bumper stickers, it says coexist.
I always think of like, okay, you guys get along now.
Like a motherly kind of thing.
Yes, yes, yes. No, I think that's quite right.
And that's the Mother Earth movement and all that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, they don't like my bumper sticker.
What's your bumper sticker? It says...
It uses that same coexist thing.
Rich came up with this.
It says...
We cannot coexist until we accept that gods do not exist.
Nice, nice.
It uses all the little symbols that they use.
And not every mother was subtle and passive aggressive.
No, no, that's very true.
Mine certainly wasn't, right? Because I had an absent father and a violent mother, it was probably one of the ways in which I escaped the general cliches and was able to eventually start to think for myself a little.
But most people don't have that, you know...
Good fortune later in life, not so good fortune earlier in life and all that.
So it was really interesting to see this guy who's dedicated huge amounts of money and time and energy and years of effort and expended his greatest creative powers, which are considerable, in pursuit of this anti-war agenda that he feels has completely failed.
And of course, when you've invested that much, it's really hard to turn around and say, what have I missed?
What you then say is, human nature is irredeemably bad, you know, there's no way we can succeed, there will always be war, I give up, right?
Hopelessness is less painful than failure.
Yeah, or, you know, re-evaluation and rewriting and recognizing that if you've gotten things wrong in an anti-war movement and actually been kind of pro-war, then, you know, you've obviously, you know, it would lead him back to his family as to why he would have missed that, right?
It's a Milton Friedman thing.
Question again. What's that?
The podcast did on Milton Friedman so many months ago now.
What was it now?
Milton Goddamn Friedman?
Milton Goddamn Friedman, right.
Sounds as subtle as many of my things.
Well, I wasn't saying for the subtlety, but for the The clusterfuck, you know, the not even wrong, the failure of, the absolutely abject failure of your principles, you know, your stated principles, you know, by the end of your life, instead of saying.
Somebody want to add Jason in?
Jason who? I'm having a hard time with that name.
Can you see Isabella maybe, like, in the future, telling her teachers, uh, booyah?
Jason, are you in? Jason, are you in?
Yes, I am. Welcome, motherfucker.
Sorry. I'm working on a new approach to this.
I'm not pandering to you fuckers anymore.
That's what I'm saying. Hey, please give me some money.
Booyah. Anyway. Donate, motherfucker!
I know where you fuckers live, right?
Particularly people who've seen it already.
I didn't realize this was a drinking channel.
No, but it actually would be more defensible if it were, I think.
Well, you're going to become the Booyah guy.
That's it! That's your viral link-up right there.
Oh, you remember the Booyah guy?
Remember the O's or whatever they call this decade?
Remember the O's? The Booyah guy.
Right, right. Well, does anyone else have any grand topics?
Jason, you've come in fully pumped.
Fully pumped? No.
No, okay. Yes.
Speak! Speak!
Sorry. I talk for a living, so...
What do you do? I work at an alarm monitoring company for, like, home alarm systems and stuff.
Oh, so...
I'm a guy who talks over the panel when you set off the alarm somewhere.
Are you okay, Mr.
Jones? Stick him up.
Are you really Mr. Jones?
What's your password? The calls are coming from inside the house.
Inside the house. Right, exactly.
That is a last day thing that I'll just have to do.
Oh, absolutely. No, no, no.
It's your conscience. Right, start doing the echo effects with my hand in front of my mouth.
You're dreaming. This is not your alarm system.
Right, spread them. Basically.
This is God.
If the walls could talk.
They do, they do, they do.
The walls could certainly listen.
Right, right. Alright, well I'm going to toodle off to get my six and a half hours of primo parent sleep.
You're into toodling.
Sweet. So obviously this will go out to the mainstream with everybody's names attached and home addresses.
All right. Booyah, motherfucker.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And can I tell you, that was exactly done in the style of John the Dungeon Master.
Booyah. Come across an ice cavern.
It's empty. Kill me!
Apparently, one of us said, apparently if we all lie down to die, it's just like going to sleep because it's so cold, so that's what we'll do.
Wow. Now that's an exciting dungeon.
Oh, God almighty.
I still have nightmares.
I can't go into my freezer.
I have to ask Christine. Wasn't there a Twilight Zone like that?
Guy wakes up and there's nobody left on the planet?
Oh, the guy with the glasses that break?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
He can't even read his books anymore.
You guys want me to leave this running?
Are you guys going to stay up?
I'm not staying up. I'm good at work.
Yeah, and I have to start showing up on time because I'm tired of getting screamed at.
Right. Well, don't worry.
You'll have a chance to get screamed at again after I do my next video.
Thanks, guys. Great chat.
I'll talk to you soon. Later.
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