WE ARE TAKING CUBA | Timcast IRL #1459 w/ Priya Patel
Priya Patel and Timcast dissect Trump’s "friendly takeover" of Cuba, comparing it to past U.S. interventions like the Spanish-American War while dismissing Soviet-era threats as irrelevant today. They link Cuba’s economic collapse to a 2024 fuel blockade and speculate on territorial or corporate control—like McDonald’s entering Havana—while framing it as a Monroe Doctrine-backed move to stabilize Latin America. Patel ties generational decline to feminism, property rights, and post-2008 financial policies like quantitative easing, arguing they discourage family formation and traditional values. The episode concludes with cultural critiques: from airport dress codes to AI’s role in media, suggesting corporate consolidation and shifting norms threaten both creative freedom and American identity. [Automatically generated summary]
Donald Trump has floated the idea of a friendly takeover of Cuba.
Now, I'm not exactly sure what a friendly takeover of Cuba would look like, but apparently it's going to mean a lot of cigars for everybody and a whole lot more vacations for people in Florida.
Right now, the New York Times is reporting the birth rate is plunging, and of course, they have the anti-human idea that that's a good thing, and I'm not sure exactly why.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
But the Sun is reporting that fly casual major American airports are saying no more traveling in your pajamas.
Personally, I think that's an okay idea, but I think there's some other people here that think it's a terrible idea.
The U.S. Embassy in Israel is saying it's time to leave, and I don't really want to talk about Israel, but apparently we're going to.
CNN staffers are freaking out because of the takeover by Warner Brothers and the owners of Warner Brothers.
A lot of people on X are saying things like, oh no, Donald Trump controls all of the media.
And all I have to say is, well, where were you when Barack Obama controlled everything?
Or Barack Obama's supporters, I guess it's probably honest to say.
The Guardian says CBS News, and oh, that's the same one, sorry.
There's a $900 million are missing from the solar program that were pumped into Democrat campaigns in California.
This isn't a surprise to most people considering how corrupt California is.
So we're going to talk about this and a bunch of other stories.
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So smash the like button, share the show with all of your friends.
Head on over to TimCast.com where you can join our Discord so you can join us in the after show and call us, call in, talk to our panel, ask us questions.
You can talk about having babies because that's something that happens a lot.
You can also go to rumble.com and join us there where you can watch the after show as opposed to just watching the Discord.
But joining us tonight to talk about all these things is Priya Patel.
So starting off tonight, from the hill, Trump floats friendly takeover of Cuba.
President Trump on Friday suggested the U.S. could carry out a friendly takeover of Cuba as the president has used a fuel blockade to increase the pressure on the communist regime in Havana.
The Cuban government is talking with us.
They're in a big deal of trouble, as you know.
They have no money, no anything right now, Trump told reporters.
Maybe we'll have a friendly takeover of Cuba.
We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.
Trump imposed a fuel blockade on the island in an executive order at the end of January in a push to collapse the regime, which relies heavily on energy and food imports.
The United Nations top official for Cuba warned on Wednesday that daily life on the island is becoming fragile with increased strains on health care, water services, and food distribution.
U.S. officials reportedly met Thursday with the grandson of 94-year-old former President Raul Castro, considered the de facto leader of the totalitarian regime, on the sidelines of a conference in the Caribbean attended by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Marco Rubio has got to be excited about this.
You know, with his Cuban heritage, he's had pretty critical words for Cuba.
I think most presidents generally are fairly critical, except for maybe Barack Obama.
But, you know, considering the history that the United States and Cuba has, what do you guys think the chances of Cuba becoming a territory are?
It's an interesting aspect of the immigration debate because we've talked pretty heavily about the idea of moratorium on immigration.
We can't have, yeah, well, you know what I'm saying, right?
But the people who still do hold that kind of overly romanticized idea of immigration to the United States, the Cuban immigrants are the ones that they hold that for because so many of them risked so much to come here and kind of take in and really portray American values.
We don't have Greenland, but there is an agreement that is alleged to have been drawn up where the U.S. will have an increased military presence to defend against Russia and the Golden Dome is going to happen.
So I think the whole Greenland thing was like the big ask that Donald Trump does.
We're just going to take the whole thing.
And really what they wanted was to be able to have more influence on things like the military situation and there's a lot of natural resources there.
You might want to look at the climate down there means that all those cars from the 50s are still in generally good condition.
But I do think that I think that Donald Trump would, if he could actually make it happen, I think he would like to see Cuba become a U.S. territory.
I think he probably conceives of it as something like, well, we've got Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory.
It's right in the same area.
Why not kind of a deal?
And also the fact that the Cuban government has been so inept because of their socialist policies, like the Cuban people seem to be pretty interested in getting out of there, getting on a raft made of two-liter bottles of Coke or whatever to go the 90 miles from Cuba to Miami.
It does make sense with the whole Monroe doctrine, the focus on the Monroe Doctrine.
If you're unaware, the U.S. is kind of looking at Europe and the demographic changes over there.
And they're saying in 30, 40 years, Europe's going to be a very different place because of the influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
They're not really even sure that they share the same values that they used to.
There's a lot of the stuff that's going on with free speech over there.
So the U.S. has decided they're going to focus more on South America and North America and kind of enforce the Monroe Doctrine.
And I mean, this does fall kind of in line with that.
I mean, I'm pretty hardlined about, you know, Alberta can't become part of the United States.
We don't want any more, we don't want voting from countries that are generally not conservative and not, you know, not friendly to our system and stuff.
I do think that Cubans probably would be better voters than Quebecois, you know.
I do think that it would usher in kind of a, because depending on how hardline you are on immigration, like I was saying earlier, if you're an American who's not necessarily in the space that we're in, where you talk about immigration the way we have, which is like caravans, what it's done to the economy, all of that.
If you still have that kind of romanticized ideal, and people have been, we've been dealing with so many people coming here and hating to be here, flying the Mexican flag while protesting, you know, last summer.
And so with that going on, you know, they're protesting with Mexican flags to not be kicked out of America.
The idea of people who actually want to come here and want to share the same values that we do, that's going to be very inviting to a lot of Americans who also will be scared of being told that they're racist or they're sexist because they want to clamp down on immigration.
I got a lot of crap because I said Anna DiArmis is a brown girl when she's, because she's Cuban and people, there are a lot of people like, she's white, she's white.
It's literally, well, I mean, it's partially that, but it's also the hatred of America.
So you saw the video.
You guys had to have talked about it the other day, but the lady who, her and her, her partner fled to Canada, found out that the cost of living was too high.
Yeah, and she's and then said, Oh, but we respect the immigration laws here completely.
And I was like, Look, this could be the one rare example where she's far left on literally everything except immigration, which would have been hilarious.
But we can assume what her views are on immigration based on the rest of her beliefs.
You can infer.
And the idea that you would respect the Canadian immigration rules, but not hold the same truth for your own country is absurd.
But you can blatantly ask the large majority of liberals on the street, like, okay, if I were to go and move into Germany uninvited without proper documentation, should I be allowed to stay?
And all of them will say no.
They basically exactly.
They basically confirm that you should abide by the laws of every other country when it comes to immigration, except for here.
That's also their own, that's their own weird white supremacy where they believe that other people are somehow inferior to us because of what we have as a country.
So they would believe that because you're an American, that you have a privilege.
So therefore, you don't have the right to do that.
Somebody coming from a poorer nation does have that right because they're just higher on the oppression.
Well, they're just coming here for a better life, always.
They're always seeking a better life.
And we owe it to them as the most prosperous country in the world to just hand it to them.
Even though pretty much for the rest of this country's history, we've had certain immigration laws and customs that we've required everyone to go through so that we retain that status.
There's supposed to be like, there's supposed to be, you know, certain criteria that you meet to be able to come to the United States and become a citizen.
It shouldn't just be that you can get to a port of entry and oh, I'm going to claim asylum.
Well, you came through other countries to get here.
You should be in the first safe country.
And we used to have to, we used to be like, look, you know, are you a communist?
Do you have affiliation with communists?
And look, man, I'm all for reinstating the Communist Control Act of 1953.
I know there's a couple parts that the Supreme Court said were unconstitutional.
They didn't say the whole thing was.
So let's get on that, man, because we got problems here.
Well, but like, also, look, we used to literally kick people out, even if they did come here legally, we used to kick them out of the country for not assimilating.
We wouldn't employ them and then we'd kick them out.
And honestly, we should get back to that because guess what?
You shouldn't come here and bring your garbage third world culture and erode our culture because that's exactly what you fled from.
Like, I just don't understand why this is such a novel concept for so many people.
But like, I think it's important that we secure the region, but I don't know that I want to just invite a whole new country of people to just come here freely.
Well, see, what I think is going to happen, I think this is the president kind of teasing something.
And then the next time it's talked about, or if tensions rise between us and Cuba, it's going to be like, oh, no, we'll come kidnap your president like we did with Venezuela.
I really do think the president plays 5D chess most of the time.
Like, truly.
I mean, when we look at especially a lot of the negotiations when it comes to like a lot of these foreign conflicts, it always ends up being perfectly fine.
Like everyone that just fear mongers about the worst possible scenario, it never ends up being that way.
And I'm not saying that like it couldn't happen, obviously.
It very well could.
We could fall into ball-out war with some of these nations, but obviously, well, not Cuba particularly, but just in the sense of, you know, talking about a lot of these foreign policy issues.
And there's a lot of excitement surrounding a good amount of them.
We're going to jump to this story here from the New York Times.
The birth rate is plunging.
Why some say that's a good thing?
Because they're anti-human.
The political class is worried about the historic drop, but the biggest change is among the youngest women who are the least ready to have children.
We can blame it on the girls.
That's fine with me.
The U.S. birth rate is declining.
Rose Paz's choice is help explain why.
Ms. Paz, 22, grew up in Salt Lake City, the eldest of three children, born when her mother, an immigrant from Mexico, was 16.
Her parents, a waitress and a cook, worked a lot, leaving her responsible for her younger siblings.
She remembers having to sleep, having to skip sleepovers and birthday parties to care for them.
Ms. Paz is studying for a bachelor's degree in marketing.
She has a serious boyfriend, but does not want to have children now.
I want to be financially stable and in a place I can call my own, she said.
I saw my parents get stressed over money, and I don't want my kid to experience that.
Not so long ago, women like Ms. Paz in their early 20s from backgrounds that are far from privileged would have been among the most likely to have children.
Now this group is a key contributor to the country's declining birth rate, which is at an all-time low, down by over 25% since 2007, the year the fall began.
There's also a nihilistic view of the way the American economy is right now.
Now, you can't say that's not a part of it because that's affecting the men too, especially men who are still trying to hold on to the idea that they're going to have to be a provider, even if both of them are going to be working, which is what most relationships are these days.
Somebody's going to have to be the main provider in that family.
And there's a lot of nihilism around the idea that you're not going to own a home.
Who wants to raise a child if you don't actually own a home to live in?
Do you want to raise your kid in an apartment?
Do you want to own a home as a renter where the rent can be jacked up at any point in time?
They can evict you pretty easily.
Well, these days, not really with squatters' rules and such like that.
But the point is, is like it's putting the blame.
I did like the part where she's like, it kind of made her seem like unserious.
Like she had to skip sleepovers to make sure her brothers and sisters don't die.
Yeah, but that is, I mean, that's an ode to American narcissism.
That can be men or women, but in this case, they're framing it as a problem unique to women.
It says, the decline has prompted hand-wringing among portions of the political class, with some conservatives calling it the triumph of selfishness over sacrifice.
A report last month by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank titled Saving America by Saving the Family, warned that when a nation fails to preserve the family, the state soon fails to preserve itself.
Lord, I can't read tonight.
And I think that that actually is an important point, right?
Like your society is made up of the people.
And if you're not making more people, then you're actually allowing your society to age, decay, and you lose that vigor that comes from young people.
You lose a lot of the industriousness that comes from young people.
Old people or older people tend to be kind of stuck in their ways.
Young people tend to be the ones that are looking to try new things.
And if you don't have that vitality in your society, your society ends up turning into, you know, it loses that kind of edge, especially in a, you know, a time where things are changing so fast.
Well, and like, look, California is not a representation of the rest of the country, obviously.
We're seeing that a lot in, you know, the affordability gas prices, things like that.
It's very much on the state and local level in that sense.
But I mean, it really is.
But, you know, wages reflect how the location looks.
And I mean, our wages are incredibly high compared to most of the country in California.
But, you know, that's not reflected in, you know, how people can't find homes.
Like, I mean, there's so many things that have, that have contributed to these issues, but virtually every aspect of society is just rigged against people being able to own their lives.
Like, we're all kind of slaves to debt at this point because we don't own anything.
Why would I ever think long-term if I don't have anything for myself?
I think that's the biggest issue with people of my generation.
Do you think that that's going to be something that younger generations are going to, do you think they'll, because I understand your point about Gen Z, they don't own anything, so they don't feel, and this goes to the talk about socialism and capitalism.
Like they don't feel like they own any property.
So why do they care about property rights or things like that?
Whereas if you have a bank account that has money in it, that when you turn 18, you know, do you think that's something that is going to actually affect the opinions of the young, like people being born now?
And I think it's going to affect people of my generation thinking about having kids now because people that do have that mindset maybe are a little bit more optimistic.
If, you know, if my kid is born between 2025 and 2028, or yeah, it was 2025 and 2028, that they're going to have X amount in a bank the second that they turn 18, even if I don't put a cent into it.
That's very hopeful for people when a lot of it is that reasoning.
Like I'm setting my kid up for a worse life than I currently have because prior generations, you work essentially to make your kids have a better life than you do.
But that's becoming not impossible, but that's becoming harder and harder.
We're seeing a little bit of that change with this new administration.
But like prior, it's just been getting worse.
The outcome just looks even more bleak.
So I do think that that is a massive factor.
And I mean, for me, I've, again, like, I don't have kids and I'm not married, but I've said, I'm like, I really want to have kids during this administration, like simply for that, you know?
I do believe that marriage, like, isn't the divorce rate declining slightly because people that are getting married are getting married later and they're being more, they're being choosier about who they actually settle down with.
Like my generation, the millennials were the product of your parents got divorced.
And that was kind of the song of that entire time period, right?
Was the romanticization of divorce and how you get through that?
So the way that it's kind of peaked into nihilism isn't surprising to me in any way, shape, or form.
And I've me and you have talked about this on the show before.
I said, look, they're not going to go to capitalism, at least not in my opinion.
They will go to ask the government for help because life has become too difficult to figure out for most people, anyways, these days.
Have you seen the things where it's like you go to apply for a job at a gas station, you have to do like a personality survey and stuff like that?
It's like it is unbelievably difficult just to do the base level things to survive now.
So they're nihilistic in the extreme in a lot of ways and they're attached to social media, which is giving them the worst that humanity has to offer day in and day out.
And I don't necessarily agree with the idea that you should fall into that type of nihilistic view of the future.
If anything, being here, working here has kind of shown me what the other side of that coin is.
And I was never a nihilistic person, but I get like our influences here aren't the norm.
Like, like the conservative influences aren't the majority of the country necessarily, maybe half, whatever.
But, you know, that's there's still a lot of influence from the rest of the culture that tells them don't do it.
No, I was just going to say, I think that I agree with you, but I think there is a clear split between the sexes in my generation.
You're seeing young men go really, really hard to the right and young women go really, really hard to the left.
And this is a trend that's been happening for a long time, but it's, it's, it's culturally because, again, like each side perceives the other side as rejecting them, but they're also splitting up for economic reasons for the same reason.
They're just going different directions.
Like young men are going to like hardcore on free market capitalism a lot of the times.
And then young women are really going hardcore towards socialism.
Well, the women for the exact same reason.
It's just different, different goals and outcomes.
And I understand that, like, you know, the fact that it takes dual income to just make ends meet now, like, that's definitely true.
But we got to this, or part of the reason we got to this point was because society has been telling young women that either you can have everything, you can do both of them, or you shouldn't even want to.
I think Murphy Brown in the 90s, when she was like, you know, a CEO and had a kid, and it was like, oh, well, I can do whatever, I can do all of it.
Somebody, or largely, you're going to be outsourcing things on a massive scale.
But the problem is, is that everyone has this like dream idealistic situation for their home life or their family life or how they want to raise their kids.
And most of the time, it's really unobtainable, especially now in today's society with, again, like costs of everything and, you know, just cultural norms at this point.
But really, feminism largely, but a lot of the other aspects of society, when we look at the economy, everything's just rigged against the nuclear family.
It's just the whole goal of all of this.
I'm going to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but like the whole goal of basically everything from, I mean, the last 178 years since like the birth of feminism, basically, has been to rig people against having the conventional nuclear family.
Well, yeah, I mean, not to get back into the socialism conversation, but that is the whole point.
One of the tenets of Marxism was to destroy the nuclear family and get rid of that because the things that make people not want to be obedient to the state is a good family, community.
And if they're both working, it doubles the amount of money the government.
Also, there are tax the government.
There's a messaging issue on the right, too, because a lot of times people will call into question.
They're like, look, it will be women on the right that are talking about the nuclear family and doing all of these things.
And they're like, well, you're working at a big media company.
You're Megan Kelly.
You're like, are you doing everything or is somebody helping you do it?
And, you know, unless you're already enamored with right-wing politics where you're willing to look that, you know, look over that and kind of not really take it for what it is.
But if you're somebody who's a lefty or you're more, I guess, undecided, you're like, eh, really?
Like, that job looks like you can be at the office a lot.
But I think a lot of the times, and not so much the Megan Kellys, but a lot of the newer social media influences kind of in my basket of things in the industry, they like wholeheartedly reject women working while at the same time having a social media job or something of that sort.
And it's like, well, you're just a hypocrite if you're telling me that I should be the most trad wife in the world.
And maybe you placate like that on the internet, but you're clearly not.
You're clearly working.
You're clearly, I mean, as much as people hate it, like a lot of these women, they dress up for men on the internet.
Like they're not, like, you might be wearing somewhat trad-looking clothing, but it's really not.
I like the philosophy, and it's a good thing to aim at.
But like World War I, it got way worse for that generation than the generation before.
Like, they had probably the worst of anybody in the last few hundred years, maybe.
One of the worst industrial slaughter of humankind.
And the men coming back shell-shocked and unable to stand up straight from their trench foot warfare.
Okay, anyway, Hitler's a result of that.
You get people like that come out of that.
And then after that, the next generation, World War II, they probably were a little bit better off than the silent generation.
The World War I trench warfare was the most grotesque abuse.
So ever since then, it's gotten better every generation until maybe people are saying this generation is the first time when things are starting to fall off.
You think there's like an actual, you brought up conspiracies earlier, and I wonder about like, what are these people, World Economic Forum?
They say you want to live in the pod and eat bugs and be happy.
Are they literally trying to destroy families, put your body in a vat, we'll extract the semen and the egg, we'll make, we'll find which one of you has the best genetics and extract that Peter Teals of the world, maybe.
And then make the best humans under control.
So it's, it's, because otherwise you've got these, these rogue individuals getting married and having guns and protecting their borders.
And like, how can you, how can you make sure they don't go crazy and start a world war if you, if they have their own property and families and things.
But you were just saying that we are the government.
And the point that I'm making is if it was really like that, if it was really the way that you laid it out earlier, then it would be a no-brainer that this would get passed very easily.
Even if they have their boot on my neck, even if they have a gun on my head and a boot on my neck, I will still claim that we are the government of this country.
And that's how it's always going to be.
That's the point of this country.
You might want to change what the country is for a moment and pretend like you're in control or that you're the government and I'm not, but welcome to the United States.
Well, I mean, yeah, I agree with, or I understand your framing in the sense of you're going to die on the hill, but we are the government in the United States.
I mean, we're not, we're not the government.
We elect people to represent us in the government.
And my friend stays home and he takes care of the stuff.
But I mean, I have, I'm not.
I'm the exception to the rule, apparently.
So, but yeah, I mean, look, I do think that the problems that Gen Z is facing are largely creations of the not just the government, but of also the boomers.
Like, you know, the boomers that own multiple homes and everyone looking at their house is their biggest investment and that's going to make them a million dollars or whatever.
In 2008, when the government just started printing money like mad, we're taking loans out at 0% interest and buying stocks.
The reason that we have like, people talk about income inequality is so terrible right now, and it is really, really bad.
A big part of the reason is because after 2008, when the government brought interest rates down to zero and kept them at zero for 10 years, people that had money, people that had assets would take loans out with their assets as the collateral.
They would take a loan out at like 1% or 2% or whatever.
They put that money in the stock market.
And as the stock market goes up by 10, 15% a year, they're making that money.
So they were literally getting money for almost free, putting that money in the stock market just for it to grow.
So people that had assets and have wealth and stuff like that, they had a huge advantage.
And it's because the government decided that they were going to have that policy.
And every time the government talked about raising interest rates, the stock market would take a tumble a bit.
And then the government would get, oh, no, we can't do that.
Blah, I think that like interest rates were zero or around zero for almost a decade.
Quantitative easing was the worst policy they ever had.
Yeah, well, and like the other thing is, is that, I mean, even though we have a massive affordability crisis and all these things, like obtaining wealth in this country is perceivably very hard, but it's actually easier to obtain wealth in this country than any other country in the world.
We're just not taught how to.
Like the financial illiteracy in this country is beyond ridiculous for how sophisticated of a society was.
There's this thing, opportunity cost in economics, which is fascinating.
Like, okay, I'll go make $1,000 doing this job, but if I have to turn down a million-dollar project, then I'm actually going to lose $990,000 doing this work because the cost of opportunity is lost.
Yeah, but I mean, look, if you look at all the, not all, but if you look at most people that have a lot of money, they're pinching their pennies all the time.
And that's the difference is that you're wasting time like funneling money back and forth when you legitimately should be kind of penny pinching, when you should be on a budget.
You're like, oh, I need to return that thing for $10 at Target or whatever.
And that's going to take an hour or whatever of my time.
But people that have wealth don't even let go of that wealth for little exactly little dumb things at Target anyways.
So from the U.S. Sun, travelers are now banned from wearing pajamas at Tampa International Airport in Florida, according to the latest social media posts from the hub.
The Expost shared a graphic that plainly states, it's time to ban pajamas at Tampa International Airport.
The post references the airport's previous successful banning of Crocs while calling to that.
I mean, look, you can wear, it's fine to wear vans, vans are slip on and stuff like that.
You can get away with that.
But I wear jeans.
Like, I basically wear the same stuff that I wear all the time.
But I totally understand.
Like, unless you're doing like a long international flight, you know, if you're going, like, you're flying to Hawaii, I can, maybe I can understand like wearing something a little more comfortable or whatever.
But for the most part, do you need to wear pajamas?
And I understand your argument about, oh, you know, the seats are not comfortable.
If you're on an international flight or if you're on a long flight.
So as long as you get the meal, then you can wear pajamas or look, I mean, look, if you're going from Boston to Orlando, do you really need to be like, oh man, I got to make sure that I wear this.
People want to fly for the smallest amount of money possible.
And to be honest with you, I know that they're not, maybe Florence flights aren't the cheapest they've ever been, but I remember a time because I'm old when it was like every flight was like $900.
Did you see the article the other day about the, she's like a Vogue, she was a former Vogue editor, I think, who's like the stylist for Zora and Mamdani, who like left first class for business because they said that the flight attendant was microaggressing her.
People are so something I do on airplanes, just letting everybody know out there: when you see me at the airport, get ready for this.
I'll get on the plane, I'll sit in my seat, and then I'll like, when everyone's boarded, I'll look around for like an empty aisle because sometimes there are, and I'll just get up and go sit in the three-seat aisle.
Because I guess you don't wear them again, you don't wear them at the mall if you're like on a beach in Florida and you want to wear a string bikini, you know, that's something that that's you know, it's personal preference.
But again, it kind of depends on the beach, but also like you know, because if you're in if you're in New England, if you're at like Mesquamicot, whatever up there, you're not going to see a lot of people rolling around with string bikinis.
But if you're down in Fort Lauderdale, that's normal.
I mean, like, also, it's like you go to the air, you go to the airport, you're going to get either groped or have a photo taken of you where they're, you know, basically looking at your insides.
People feel violated.
You have to take your shoes off, though.
I think they've removed that restriction.
But the point being, like, you're like, look, I have to go through all this and dress up.
The other side of this is like form, like going out in public, right?
Like it definitely is true.
Like you go out to a store and it does seem like nobody's trying anymore.
It's like, does nobody even like, and that's more, we could take that back to like the birth crisis discussion where it's like, is nobody even signaling to the world that they're like, that they take care of themselves well enough to want to actually get together with somebody and maybe start life together.
But I'm speaking purely from like an angry stance.
No, this is this is this is not, I don't think this is because of social media.
No, I think social media makes people want to fake what they look like and they want to compete with the people that are that they see on Instagram and stuff like that.
It is actually true that most of the CEOs, there was this photo of like the Netflix CEOs touring Warner, like the Warner Brothers lot, and they just are so badly dressed.
It's kind of awesome.
A lot of them like the faded blue jeans and the jacket.
Yeah, they probably paid $300 for those faded blue jeans.
But the fact remains, like people that are in, people that are wealthy nowadays, because it's so kind of in vogue to hide your wealth for a lot of people, particularly people that are super, super rich.
Like, you know, Bill Gates was always walking around in like, you know, it looks like he shopped at Target.
And, you know, there's a little bit of eccentricity with that, but also like those people or that kind of kind of idea of like, don't show off your wealth, don't flaunt it.
I think that that's actually kind of going away.
You look at the way that Bezos dresses and the way that he behaves and stuff, and he's kind of not really ashamed of his wealth, you know?
There was a time in my, there was a time in my life when like we were touring a lot, right?
Like and I was just like, I do not care.
You know, you're constantly on planes, constantly on the bus, constantly traveling.
And I was definitely guilty of being like, I don't care.
I'm wearing what's comfortable.
And I think that as the band stopped kind of going as hard because we kind of, we, you know, made our career and we didn't have to take every tour that was out there.
Like, I was just like, all right, you know what?
I kind of, and also I probably, it probably had something to do with the fact that I stopped drinking.
But like, I was like, you know what?
I kind of don't want to look like a slob anymore.
And I, I don't know if that's maturity or what, but like the idea of going to a plane or going, even going to Walmart.
But also I find that it is in like the big international airports.
Like I tweeted out on my way here that I hate flying out of LAX just because I have to deal with so many foreign nationals and it's just really daunting to me.
But I think there are like things like this are worse in airports like that.
There was, you mentioned earlier in the show how it was uncomfortable to be around people that were speaking Spanish or speaking other languages all the time.
And I didn't respond or you said something about that.
No, it's not, it's not uncomfortable necessarily, but the fact that I can, that I essentially have to go to establishments in America, an English-speaking country, and I go to establishments that don't speak English and don't even have menus in the English language, that is a problem.
Well, but I think the problem is, is that people seriously have been so brainwashed with this idea that we have to just accept everything here.
Like there, and we shouldn't because guess what?
We have the, to be honest with you, in my personal opinion, we have the most superior country and culture in the entire world.
And we should be able to preserve that, as does every other country in the world.
I wouldn't be able to walk into most countries as an American and not be able to, or not have to abide by their cultures and customs.
I would be forced to learn the language if I was there long term.
I would be shamed if I didn't.
So, why exactly is it something that we are forced to embrace here is that people bringing their cultures here, eroding ours, not abiding by our basic immigration laws.
And I could make a list that goes on and on about things that people do that blatantly disrespect the country when they aspire to come here.
I agree that that's what it is up here, but it's not down here.
They're preying on the empathetic nature of the voters and the people, and they're brainwashing them to think that if I don't want, look, if I go to India, I want to and I want to and I expect to experience the Indian culture.
I don't want to have to go to an American city and experience New Delhi.
Like, I don't, and I shouldn't have to, and that's not how it should be.
But to say that is now racist and bigoted.
And everyone's been brainwashed to think that no, I have to accept these immigrant communities coming and taking over our American cities.
And if I don't embrace that, then I am whatever word.
Your point, the whole brainwashing thing is actually a really succinct point because the idea that having an opinion about your own country, the idea that that makes you a bigot because you say, I like my own country, that's something that's actually prevalent on the left nowadays.
Like, I was, it was one of the, I think that might have been one of the first things.
Like, I considered myself vastly apolitical for a very long time.
Still, in a lot of ways, am.
Like, I, you know, begrudgingly have to follow it because of work.
But in general, I always thought it was weird how in the, you know, even in the early 2010s, maybe even earlier, where I saw this good amount of people that I knew who just seemed to dislike America, despite the fact that they were born into immense levels of privilege.
Like, I grew up in, I grew up in like Woodbury, Minnesota.
So where I grew up in the city was like the first development built in that town, which is right next to like a jail.
And then there was the rich side of the town, which was built after the fact because 3M opened down there and 3M has a lot of, you know, wealthy people at that time.
And whether it was the people that I went to, some of the people I went to school with and then more that I met along the way through skating, there just seemed to be this tinge of almost embarrassment.
I mean, we can talk about even just, I mean, I know that the Somali communities in Minnesota have been such a hot topic for the last handful of months, but they're like some of some journalist friends of mine uncovered, I think it was $88 million that had gone through the Minneapolis airport and flown out of the country.
So yeah, the idea that people want to come to the United States and become American, that's something that's actually novel.
No, it's not.
Yeah, it's novel.
It's not the majority of people, which is, again, the reason why I want to shut down all immigration for at least a decade and then let us just bounce back from it.
Let us get the people that are here legally in either either if they end up being essentially forfeiting their allegiance to the United States, which I argue a lot of them already have.
They've gone against their oath that they take when they become naturalized.
If you have an allegiance to a foreign nation, you should have your citizenship right.
Well, sometimes it's, I have an oath to the ethos of the United States, the nation itself, but if someone co-ops the nation, I have an obligation to take it back.
If you come to the United States and you become a citizen and you're naturalized, right?
You're not, you're not born here.
You're not a born citizen.
And you're flying a flag of a foreign nation at a protest and you're like, you know, like you saw in LA, there was a lot of people that were flying the Mexican flag.
I don't care if they're illegal or if they came here and became a citizen, you should be stripped of your citizenship and deported.
If you have an allegiance to another country, like the Somalis in Michigan or Minneapolis, if they have an allegiance to Somalia, go back to Somalia.
Yeah, well, and I would argue if you are, if you're an immigrant to this country, whether you're legal or not, you should be stripped of your citizenship if you're defrauding the country on that large of a scale.
Like those Somalis that are literally funneling money out of the country and into Africa, then yeah, you know what?
You should be denaturalized and shipped back to your country of origin.
Well, and on like on top of that, the argument that they actually are producers when it comes to the economy or stimulants to the economy, they're not.
Somalis specifically pay like something a tenth of the taxes that the average white person in Minnesota does.
You shouldn't have to, you shouldn't be allowed to take any kind of, like if you come to the United States, you shouldn't be allowed to sign up for any kind of government support or anything like that.
If you come to the United States and you are allowed to stay, the reason that you're allowed to stay is because you're a benefit to the United States economically, because you bring something to the country.
You shouldn't be able to come to the country and be like, you know, let me get on to some kind of benefits and stuff like that.
So that's talking about asylum, and the only people that actually can get asylum are Canadians or Mexicans.
Because the way that asylum works is as soon as you get to a country that is safe for you, if you're fleeing political oppression, if you go to your neighboring country and it's safe for you there, that's where you stop.
Yeah, the asylum claim, the way the asylum laws work is if you can go to a bordering country that's safe for you, and an ocean is not a border, an ocean is an ocean.
The other problem is that when you make that specific argument, we're not even talking about just bordering nations.
Everyone on the left at least ties in like these Middle Eastern countries, these African countries.
And guess what?
We don't have an obligation to take them in.
There are hundreds of nations that are much closer to them that should be obligated to take those refugees in way before we get that.
That's exactly right.
And like, look, I can only think of maybe a maybe one country that is under actual political persecution that we should allow refugees in from because they're compatible.
Yes, exactly.
The whites in South Africa.
Like, they would be highly compatible with our culture.
But the large majority of nations on that side of the world would absolutely not be.
And there are plenty of countries that they could go to to claim asylum that would be much more compatible for them and their culture.
They'll give you a dog suffering and like someone's saving a cat, and then they'll give you an ad to buy something next because it gets your emotions up.
They were already panicking because they hate David Zazlav, even though they work for him.
I mean, the tears are delicious, but there was also to the point earlier, there was things being said where filmmakers are like, I don't know how I feel about, you know, them being so cozy to Trump.
And I said the same thing you did.
I said, well, Ted Sarandos from Netflix has been an Obama donor.
He was a Hillary donor.
I'm sorry, he wasn't an Obama donor.
He was a Hillary donor.
He was a Biden donor.
And of course, he hosts Obama through Obama's production company, which has an exclusive deal with Netflix.
Like, there was a great post that was like, they will never understand their own hypocrisy at the fact that they've controlled every institution for so long that they can't imagine anything not going.
Look, there are reasons to be generally distrustful of any level of consolidation.
I do think speaking purely from the entertainment perspective, because that's my, you know, my genre or whatever, is like that them going to Paramount is the far superior deal because they're going to focus on theatrical releases for the movies and maybe giving more, you know, space to the television shows because they're going to focus on putting entertainment first rather than the level of political influence that goes into Netflix productions and stuff like that.
But like the amount of money that they've spent on this, it's $111 billion all cash offer, $31 a share, $47 billion of it coming from the Ellison's private trust.
The rest of it's all debt financing.
So they also take on all of Warner Brothers' debt, which is like $33 billion.
And they pay the $2.8 billion breakup fee that's basically saying they have to pay Netflix for basically pulling Warner Brothers away from there.
But the point being is like, it doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing because the best option here would be that Warner Brothers operates independently and gets to live and die on their own.
But it was very clear two years ago when they started canceling projects, basically signing things off to debt so that they could get tax, you know, tax breaks on projects that were already being made at that time.
That what David Zazlov wanted to do was sell the company off.
But, you know, some people don't believe that they would have passed regulatory approval.
A lot of people believe that if Netflix had gotten the deal, that Trump's, you know, cabinet wouldn't have allowed it to go through, not to mention that part of the deal for Paramount is there's like a $7 billion insurance on there that if it doesn't pass regulatory approval, that will go to the Warner Brothers shareholders.
So, I mean, consolidation is bad, but watching people at CNN worry about whether Barry Weiss is going to be their boss is actually kind of hilarious.
The post-millennial goes on, Netflix CEO Greg Peters said on Thursday that the company was no longer pursuing Warner Brothers Discovery.
The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval.
However, we've always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance, Skydance's latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive.
So we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid.
Under Netflix deal, the streaming giant was seeking only streaming.
HBO and their film studio, Paramount, sought to acquire Warner Brothers' entire company.
Status said that CNN staffers are also panicking over the suddenly very real prospect that they could be working for Barry Weiss before the end of the year.
In October, Paramount bought Weiss's outlet, the free press, for $150 million, and Weiss was made editor-in-chief of Paramount-owned CBS News.
The other funny thing about this, you'll love this, is now James Gunn has to worry about working with David Ellison, which means that maybe you'll get the Snyder-verse back.
Now they're consolidating the corporate power as the AI is growing underneath.
And I understand it is sometimes it's fun to laugh at your enemy's pain, but that shouldn't distract you from what's actually happening, that this is a corporate, a gigantic, because entertainment and information flow are one and the same in a lot of ways.
Like information, entertainment is a type of information flow.
Well, no never means no if you've got enough money.
But to your point, you're talking about AI being the underlying kind of foundation.
If AI is going to make people that are creative able to create things with less friction, with less difficulty, how is it that the media is still going to be the giant that you say it's?
It would be like subscription fees go to Ford, and then they'd take a cut of that, and that's where the AI starts clipping off bits, and you get this like siphon class, you know, like bankers collecting interest and stuff.
When these actors sign contracts with these studios now, they sign the right-of-way to like most of the time to their likeness.
They're already being used.
The same thing is happening to the animators in the industry, where basically if you're getting hired to do animation in Hollywood right now, you're being hired to do work that is going to be used to train your replacement, which is AI.
Well, and you can blame the capitalism for that, right?
Which is that back in the day, the actor reaped the benefits of this by making massive amounts of money with off the backs of these things being made.
So, like you said, for Harrison Ford, whether it's Indiana Jones or whether it's Han Solo, now Disney, you know, they sign before James Earl Jones died, they have the right to his voice in perpetuity forever.
They can use that voice and the companies will eventually hit a point where they're not going to need the actors anymore.
First of all, like you're not going to see a rise of new franchises that are going to be that way, be the size of an Indiana Jones or a Star Wars anyways.
They're already doing, they're already planning to set up, it might even be on there right now for AI uploads on Disney Plus where you're going to be able to make your own movies and stuff on there with various programs.
Disney is in a, if I, if I know, if I remember correctly, Disney has entered into an agreement with Open AI anyways to give their employees access to AI software to do their job better.
So, you know, whatever that means at Disney, they're not good at their jobs anyways.
But yeah, this story is actually in a lot of ways.
It's not actually a good thing.
We only think it is because we like laughing at the people who are going to be stuck working for David Ellison.
Yeah, I mean, look, that's the part that's delicious about this, right?
Is they're they're freaking out about, oh, no, we're going to be, you know, we're going to be taken into the right-wing echo chamber and blah, blah, blah.
And that's why I asked if you thought that the programming is.
It's like, I mean, we saw the rise of, for example, like Sidney Sweeney so quickly, and it's kind of dying, you know, and it's going to continue to die.
Like that's, that's how it's all going to be.
And that's why we don't have the, like you said, like the legacy franchises aren't going to mean anything anymore because everything's so fast-paced nowadays.
People don't have the like the tension span for it.
The furthest left people already, I'm not even kidding you, they already consider CNN far right because David Zaslav was in charge of them.
So it's like that level of delusion is not tenable.
You can't actually live in that world and expect people to like live in your reality.
It's not the real world.
And this is going to be, and I don't know.
Like you were talking earlier about the possibility that some of these companies get broken up.
Like this is the only other deal that I can think of when I think of like the amount of money that was moved here was like the debt financing that Disney had to acquire to buy Fox back in, what was that, 2018 or 2019?
I forget what year it was that they ended up purchasing Fox, but they haven't even made their money back on that really.
Not really.
Like all they've used it for is to make a bunch of movies that nobody watches because they didn't actually put any effort into marketing the Fox movies.
They become avant-garde things like Searchlight Pictures, and the rest of it is like basically Deadpool laughing at 20th century X-Men characters.
But they're not making their money back on it just the way Disney hasn't made their money back on Star Wars.
I don't know how you calculate that with stuff that goes to streaming because there's no true because there's no direct revenue that's sourced towards that specific piece of production.
You know, they tried to, we just did a story the other day that basically China tried to get Marvel or to get Sony, excuse me, to take the Statue of Liberty scene out of far from No Way Home.
You couldn't do it because it's like the whole last 20 minutes of the movie.
We were talking about, you were mentioning this, like the fact that China even has that kind of leverage over American companies is a billion people, right?
It destroys a lot of goodwill that people have towards them.
People got really upset when they released Black Panther in China and they put the helmet on Chad Boseman so that they could hide the fact that he was black to the Chinese audience.
Well, you know, it's um, but the point was, is like they would hear the Americans here virtue signaling about, you know, racism and all the things that they do here, but then they're like going to kowtow to China just to make a couple extra bucks.
I'm still partial to, like, one of the arguments they make now is that there's no such thing as the bankable action hero or the bankable actor anymore, that directors are more bankable than actors are.
Because people will go to see a Sam Raimi movie.
People will go to see a Quentin Tarantino movie.
I don't want to go online and find you're going to get the examples, right?
Where somebody that you've never heard of makes a great AI movie, but that's like just two steps too far.
And like, so now that, you know, Claude can do such a good job, or well, not just Claude, but AI can do such a good job at coding.
You can go ahead and make your own apps.
You can say, well, I want, you know, do this.
They call it vibe coding.
You just tell the AI what you want and tell it to do this and do that.
But most people, I think, aren't interested in sitting down with a computer and saying, hey, make me an app for this.
And one of the things that I think will still happen is people don't, I heard this on the Naval podcast.
People don't want second best, right?
So when you go and you search for something, you're not going to say, find me an app that does this.
You're going to say, find me the best app that does this.
So, the idea that everyone's going to make a bunch of stuff and everyone's just going to watch it and stuff.
No, I don't think that's true.
And the reason I don't is because people are going to say, find me the best.
And so you're still going to have a situation where kind of the cream rises to the top.
Marketing matters.
Yeah, marketing matters, absolutely.
But even if, even if you're, you know, just doing searches and stuff, and that's why I mentioned apps because there's not really the marketing with that.
You're just people that are looking to do things.
They're going to say, make me the, you know, get me the best of this.
That's what people will use AI for.
They won't say, you know, make me this app.
They'll just say, hey, you know, get me the best one of these.
And then you'll end up with a situation where there's one that's the best, and that one gets spread around, and that's the one that people use.
And there'll be some people that don't like the interface or whatever.
So there'll be a second one that's way down.
And then after that, there's going to be a thousand apps that people were trying, but they didn't really hit the spot the way that the best did.
And so it's not the best.
And I think that that's going to be more, I think that's going to be more prevalent than the idea that there's this just chaos of different movies that you could watch and stuff.
And it's something that even Tim mentioned.
He was like, you know, people are going to say, oh, you know, did you see blah, blah, blah's movie?
Well, that's kind of talking about my point.
It's, it's people are, word of mouth will get around and people will say, get me the best of this.
And I want to watch the best stuff.
And it's not going to be a situation where there's just a bajillion of slop AI movies that people are watching.
There will still be a situation where people are like, oh, I want to see, did you hear about this one?
I don't like, I think copyright has been used insidiously to control data.
Like, like your dad had a lot of money and bought a cartoon.
Now no one else can ever use it because somebody paid money.
Like it got invented by the British, from what I learned, Queen Elizabeth, I think, to control the printing of the Bibles because they wanted to make sure they owned the flow of the Bibles going out.
So if you want the best, you need access to the best data set.
And if it's copywritten, you can't get it.
And then some secret society will be using it.
So I feel like we're like, as you see with Sea Dance, they don't care about copyright.
And why would we hamstring ourselves if they're not?
The thing that I'm, when you go to like, when you are actually writing code or you're talking to an AI that can code for you, like it's writing the code.
So you're not actually getting someone else's code.
Which is why the music industry is the way that it is, right?
Because a lot of the artists, you know, for all the artists that complain about, you know, the hold that the label has on them or the movie makers who complain about the studio wanting it to look this way.
It's like, look, unless you're footing the bill to market it to the public and they never acknowledge that part of it.
They're never willing to admit that, look, I want them to take a risk on my piece of avant-garde art, but I want to take none of the risk to make it.
If you want to say, look, I'll license this, that's one thing, right?
They have the license for five or seven years or whatever.
So they make the lion's share of the money, but then you get ownership back.
That's kind of the way that the music industry has become nowadays.
If you have, especially if you're a band that has a fan base and you have a history, it's easy to be like, we want a license for this long.
Whereas when you're trying to start out and you're an unproven product, you have no history, you have no track record, you have no catalog, the label's not going to be like, yeah, we'll totally give it to you, give you, you know, here's 100 grand to do your record.
And we don't know if you're going to, if you're even going to stay together for the next six months.
I mean, and that's, you know, labels do that kind of stuff all the time.
They're like, we sign a band for the life of the band is kind of the way that they say it.
Because they want to say, we're putting all this money in up front and you've got X amount of records.
So, you know, or for whatever the life of the band is, every time we invest money in you and every time we spend money on marketing, you know, this, we want to make sure that we get our investment back.
And a label will sign 10 bands and maybe one of them will go and do, just be able to break even.
Never mind, make a lot of money.
So it's like if a label signs 50 bands, maybe one of them will become big enough to cover the loss on all the other bands.
And so I and I understand artists that, you know, when they're like, oh, you know, I don't own this and I don't own and blah, blah, blah.
Like, I get it.
You know, we've got like tons of stuff that we don't own that we'll never own.
But like at the same time, like the reason we have a career, the reason we can still go and go on tour and know that people are going to come, the reason that people are still listening to our Spotify millions of times a month is because of the effort that was put in by us writing, but also the label, putting effort in and putting us into video games and getting our stuff on the radio and making sure that people were listening to our stuff.
It's true of the people who end up doing a lot of genre sci-fi, right?
Like they don't end up getting residuals on a lot of the shows that they do, but they've got convention spots for life and they will be able to make money off that.
For as long as they're alive, their face is going to make the money.
That's the thing about life extension is you're going to be like hanging out with your great, great, great, great granddaughter's best friends, and they're all going to look like you're 30.
Corey Richmond says, my biggest pet peeve is a grown man wearing Crocs, pajama pants, an anime hoodie with unkempt beard and hair in public.
Have some dignity.
I completely understand that.
Like, if you are a grown man and you're wearing an outfit like that, particularly if you have a gigantic belly, because they always, they always seem to have a gigantic belly.
Omega Ratsu says, sorry, but feminism existed since the French Revolution and Marx plagiarized Flora Tristan and she got her cues from the French.
Flora Tristan, 1843, Workers of the World Unite.
Marx copied in 1848.
Look, man, there is socialism that is not Marxist socialism.
And I completely understand that the French Revolution was kind of really where socialism kind of started off.
There were people that influenced Rousseau, but Rousseau kind of really made it popular with the whole like man is actually separated from his work and we need to make men closer to what they were when they were not living in cities and stuff.
So I understand what you're saying.
Your point is well taken.
You're completely right.
But I do think that it makes sense to kind of attribute Marx when it comes to talking about communism.
Most of your socialists nowadays are Marxists of some kind.
But again, you know, even modern socialism, modern communists, they're the gay race communists.
They're more influenced by Mark Hughes and Foucault and the postmodernist school.
But again, like I said, I'm not hating on your comment.
You're right.
Cabbage Rolls says, communism is a lie.
There's never been a political system in the world where people had more power than in the USA.
Communism is worse than a monarchy.
I agree generally.
Let's see.
St. Truther.
Ian, I have made an NPC for a D ⁇ D campaign inspired by you using an AI tool called Quest Portal.
He is a wood elf bard named Ian of the Crosslands.
But if you're in public and you look put together and you look well-dressed, you are going to have people have people, you are going to have people respond to you differently than if you look unkempt and if you look like you're kind of a pile of dirty clothes.
I say in this life, I know it's all right to go where we come and leave where we say when we might less fate just hang on tight and we both let go when the feeling's right.
I won't pretend not to think it's the end when music is playing.