Joel Hill critiques Australia’s adoption of American conspiracy theories—like the debunked 28 Names list and Melbourne’s "mold children" tunnels—as signs of cultural insecurity, despite local content quotas. He mocks fringe Trumpist figures like Senator Ralph Babbitt ("Zippy") and Canada’s Pierre Poilievre, comparing them to Andrew Tate, while dismissing their governance plans as extreme or incompetent. Economic ties to U.S. franchises (e.g., McDonald’s) and political dissatisfaction fuel global monoculture, raising concerns about stability over ideological shifts. [Automatically generated summary]
What that's going to be like if it's like way out of left field for them, whatever, like a chance you want to, but I'm okay with whatever, you know what I mean?
Like I don't know if you're prepared for like anything else.
So yeah, I like a good script, but yeah, like I'm happy to just sort of take this that comes and go from there.
Yeah, all right.
So well, just start us off here.
So and we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I have a special guest today from Australia.
That's Joel Hill.
Why don't you introduce yourself, Joel?
Tell us about it.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to finally meet you officially.
I am here to talk about Australia and all its wonder, its unique-ish wonder, its confused, inadequate, slightly insecure wonder, where we have definitely glommed onto a lot of the American conspiracy theories and given it our own larican sense of absurd, sort of unrealistic nonsense, as they all are really.
But I think that it is interesting in a way, especially with the sort of re-election of Donald Trump, is the world being Americanized in that shadow, or are we about to all look north and just say, no, what?
No, no, but that's insane.
Elon Musk, gross.
Donald Trump, dude, you're a rapist.
No.
And look, my feelings right now, early in the piece, are mixed, but we'll flesh all out as the episode goes out.
But I think, you know, as I think Canadians and Australians have a lot more in common, sort of unintentionally, because we both are in that shadow of the USA.
But we also have our own little sort of, you know, Commonwealth vibe where we differentiate and try and have, you know, Tim Hortons instead of Starbucks.
They're the same thing.
I'm sorry if you ain't the same thing.
Yeah, I knew you wouldn't like that.
Because Starbucks tastes better than Tim Hortons.
Oh, no.
You just lost it.
It's faster to go through the drive-thru.
That's the real.
See, this is the thing that most people don't understand about Tim Hortons when they come here from some other region.
Why does everyone like this?
When it is 40 below and you want to get a coffee, you do not want to get out of your car to go inside a building.
This is why drive-thrus are incredibly popular in Canada.
You have to have one.
Like there was a time when Starbucks had started a bunch of stores and they were did not have drive-thrus.
They began to tank because they couldn't compete with McDonald's and Tim Hortons that sold coffee of lesser quality, but had drive-throughs.
They had to change all their stores to include all the drive-thrus.
They all have drive-thrus now.
Your country is really cold.
And well, it's not cold all the time, but when it is, it's absolutely cold.
You do not want to be out there.
It will kill you if you don't have the right gear on.
So yeah, we are serious about our drive-thrus.
And when we're in that drive-through, we do not want to be there for 20 minutes.
We want to be there for five minutes.
And stores, McDonald's and Tim Hortons have learned this and they get us through fast.
They engineer the whole thing just to get you through as fast as possible.
Starbucks is still working on that, but at least they have a drive-thru.
So there you go.
But that's the real draw.
It's not about how flavorful the coffee is, really.
It's about how quickly you can get through the drive-thru.
It's convenience and comfort is.
Yeah.
And that's what America brought to the world, convenience and comfort.
Yeah.
So really.
We're jumping into this.
We're getting ahead of our skis here.
We're so ahead of ourselves.
Oh, yeah, I know.
I'm so excited to do this.
And I'm so, yeah, we want to talk about U.S. cultural aggression, really.
We call it influence, but it is a sort of aggressive influence.
And most people I find in the U.S. do not, they, you know, even the ones that totally get there's other countries in the world, but they don't really understand that almost all of those countries to at least some degree is nervous about the United States.
Oh, totally.
I guess it might not be militarily nervous, but like the cultural influence, and we have like specific rules in Canada about this.
I imagine there's also some in other countries.
You know, China really did have a program where they were attempting to learn all of the Western knowledge, but without using any of the Western trapping.
So they were literally trying to do mathematics without any of the, you know, European.
I had a teacher for math in college who was from Hong Kong, and he told me, he told the class about what Chinese math was like.
There's a thing, there's a saying, harder than Chinese math.
It's real.
There was a small integral he put in the regular form you would normally see it.
And it's very small.
And then he wrote it out in what they were trying to teach in Chinese.
And it was like three lines across the whiteboard of how lengthy it is because you almost have to write out entire sentences in Chinese describing all the different parts to get everything in there because they're trying to not use any of the symbols.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Which I think they've given that up.
It's simpler, but also not.
It's a sign that what the Chinese were doing was trying to keep out Western influence in their society and they're still trying to do it unsuccessfully.
You would be.
And I guess all the great firewalls.
Successfully, right?
Yeah.
Censoring the internet is a huge part of that, I imagine.
And trying to, you know, the great firewall.
But like, I mean, like in Australia, we have content quotas for television networks and things like that.
And we have the same basically similar things across radio and TV.
They're always trying to erode it because obviously the money's interest in media would love to just put more Malcolm in the Middle reruns on TV as opposed to having to make actual Australian content.
But the thing is, is that we would watch Malcolm Middle.
We'll watch it for days.
We'll just watch it.
It's not a problem.
Whereas, you know, we would be upset if we missed out on our latest cop show from some sort of rural set cop show type thing.
We'd love that shit here.
But if it didn't exist, I mean, if a tree falls in the woods style, like, you know, would we miss it?
Well, you know, sort of.
So yeah, it's good.
I think we need these laws.
And these are the sort of shit things that, you know, dick fuck libertarian types like Elon Musk are quite likely to say, well, when it comes down to your country, you don't need any of these kind of laws.
The market will figure itself out.
The market doesn't know shit.
And if the market is left to itself, the U.S. hegemonic forces will just eat us alive.
So yeah, we have laws to protect our culture, even though we don't really have one.
So that's well, for Australians and Canadians, we have many of the same sort of, I mean, the origins of our countries are very, very similar.
Yours penal colony rather than just the colony, but very, very similar.
Indigenous people in both places, very, very large and some parts of the climate that are extremely difficult to live in.
So large land mass with a large amount of potentially unusable area and This problem we have where there was a British regime that began everything with just pushing natives out of the way.
And then we kind of adopted that, inherited it, and then in, I think, both cases continued that project until we eventually pulled that back and have stopped it.
We have some shocking, shocking things we did, yeah.
Well, yeah, and we did as well.
I mean, we, you know, I don't think we need to compare notes on that particular thing in this podcast.
That might be a different podcast.
It might, you know, might also be a lot of people who are not in the world.
Other people know a lot more about it.
That's the thing.
Like, I'm no scholar.
I'm just going off what I learned in high school.
So, right, but we have, and now we have this, we have this very similar systems of government adopted directly from the British, the Westminster system with a couple of minor variations.
Do you guys have a Senate as well?
Yes, we have a Senate.
It's appointed for life.
Oh, wow.
So you're more House of Lords style.
We've got a Senate which has eight-year terms.
Well, not six-year term.
No.
They are in federal.
I think they are actually eight-year terms.
Anyway, I should know that.
Yeah, it's very like the House of Lords, except they weren't lords.
They're just whenever there's a vacancy, the Prime Minister gets to appoint the Spanish people.
They're appointed one and then they sit back.
The House of Supreme Court type thing.
Yeah, pretty much.
Yeah, that's essentially it.
I prefer our one.
Well, I think there's a lot of people in Canada that would prefer it as well.
But we have a lot of similarities in a lot of aspects, right?
But I definitely know more about the USA than I know about Australia.
And it's likely that you know more about the USA than you know about Canada.
Absolutely.
And that's just the general thing.
Like, you know, American sort of government, constitution, law, all that sort of stuff is all either something you'll learn at school, something you'll learn at university, or something you'll just get through TV and media and films.
Have you had any actual Australians who try to plead the fifth?
I'm sure that we have had more people doing that than we have really than we should because it's a really embarrassing thing.
And I think this is what happened to me in high school.
It wasn't pleading the fifth, but I proudly exclaimed at the end of being a complete asshole in class because I was such a little shit.
And I said, what about free speech?
And the teacher just goes, we don't have free speech in Australia.
That's America.
And I'm like, oh.
And that's like one of those lessons at school that was kind of unintentional, but that really got me.
And I started looking into it a bit more.
And that was around my sort of political awakening around sort of 15 years old.
And it was just that moment of like, oh, fuck, A, I don't know what I'm talking about.
And B, holy shit, I think I might have a lot of ideas that are actually America and not Australia.
I probably should work on that.
Well, it's, it's, I mean, Canadians also, we are so close.
Like, I call the U.S. the bright neon distraction to the south of me.
It's, it's just, it's, it's not divisive.
It's, it's not derogatory.
It's, it's just really what it is.
And like a place that's well lit up, it's, it's almost as though, I mean, to extend the metaphor, it's like the U.S. is a stage that's well lit and the rest of us are the audience.
So the people on the stage have the lights shining on them.
They can't see outward to see who's looking in very well.
The rest of us can see almost nothing except for the stage because it's the only thing that's lit compared to everything else.
And so this is sort of the view is that it's, of course, it's difficult.
It's more difficult for people in the United States to understand and know more about what happens outside of the United States because it's that all the lights are shining on this one place, it seems.
And the rest of us have no choice except to know a certain amount of things about what's happening in the United States because it's, I mean, all eyes are on it.
I mean, it's, it's going to know about the U.S. election, right?
If they sneeze, we catch a cold.
I always say that the U.S. election is like the Super Bowl of politics.
And I would definitely equate the, you know, the year-to-year politics more like sort of wrestling than anything else.
Even asso far as a fact, the entire thing is rigged by a rich guy who owns it.
But, you know, take that with a great assault.
But, you know, it is a bit like that.
You've got this like, you know, sort of absurd theatrical thing.
And the problem is, is that even if we intellectually disagree with it, we like to be pseudo-intellectual wankers about how smart and enlightened we are and how serious politics is, you want to watch wrestling because it's fun and it's interesting and there's big shiny lights and it's cool.
Yeah, but I mean, certainly for Canada, also probably to a great extent for Australia, the outcome of that wrestling match affects us.
Big time.
Like there's a we have an expression in Canada that when you sleep next to the elephant, you keep one eye open to watch which way it rolls.
Yeah, why is because they kill people.
Well, it doesn't need to even want to kill you.
It might just be shifting in its sleep.
You know what I mean?
Like it's a big thing and we are right next to it.
We are, we, we can't not be next to it.
We are.
The Australian government be shitting themselves insofar as the incoming, you know, possible tariffs, possible just general bullshit.
And the media are playing it off.
Some asshole tweeted about the idea that Australia is next in this whole 51st state conquest bullshit that Trump's talking about.
And it's like, that's not a new story.
Some fuckwit tweeted something that is just basic engagement bait.
But no, we had to have that conversation as a result of our utterly depraved and completely clapped out, clickbait-driven media organizations.
Well, I don't know if I call that Daily Mail media organization, mostly just dickheads.
But when it comes to these, you know, sort of absurd times we live in, we realize how much the U.S. matters when things start getting rocky.
When things are stable, we don't think about it because you buy our wheat and we buy your processes and no one gives a shit.
But unfortunately, what's happened over time is that in doing that, the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer, and the status quo has not been shocked anytime.
Now, personally, I would have rather seen a left-wing shock that saw a more Bernie Sanders approach.
But instead, now we have to learn the harsh lessons of why you don't get idiot real estate agents and tech bros to run your superpower.
Let's see how that goes.
Well, I think we are going to see.
We are going to see.
We're not going to suffer the same as the Americans will.
Although, of course, I would not downplay the impact of the U.S. and trade, even just general sort of policy.
But at the same time, one thing that I find great solace in after the U.S. election, which not only hurt me personally and politically, but also financially, because I thought Harris is going to win and I put $8,000 in the election.
So that's gone.
And now I've got to save up for my tax bill, which is the worst.
But yeah, like, you know, when it comes to the actual impact of these things, I would hate, especially to be a trans kid in the US.
Oh, man.
My heart is, there are subsections of the population that are going to be worse, much worse affected.
So much worse.
Fucked.
So, yeah, my heart bleeds for those.
But yeah, I do have a real selfish, you know, thank God I'm not going to be involved in this.
But then, on the other hand, if the U.S. does put tariffs on China, we're the one who gives China all the raw materials to make the bullshit that Americans buy for no good reason.
So, if that goes down the line, we go down and then we've really tricky.
So, yeah, it's the sort of thing that it would be nice to be able to say, scoff at it and say, oh, that's not a thing that will happen because sane people in the room will remind the person in charge that that's a bad idea.
Yeah.
I worry that we have fewer and fewer sane people in the room.
They're all gone.
He had them in 2016 and he was still a lunatic.
Well, he was also replacing them as quickly as possible.
I mean, true, but yeah, how many cherries did he go through?
Like, totally he had four at the end of the day, which on a four-year term.
Yeah, I don't know.
Several secretaries of state.
One of the things that's very funny.
The theory of the revolving door with the Trump administration, and this is something that I've heard very anecdotally, but is hilariously stupid.
That because he believes that you can't exert energy, otherwise you run out of the finite amount you've been granted.
So that was really badly put.
Basically, you are given an amount of energy.
You're allowed to basically exert before you die.
And once you run out of that, that's the end of your life.
This man is a fucking idiot.
So apparently, what people would do is they would try and get the office furthest away from Donald Trump because he would just get out of his office and basically just yell at the closest person and possibly fire them.
And there was a thing, I think this was maybe Kellyanne Conway who was discussing this.
I don't know.
I don't have this written down, but I usually would have like, you know, something written down, but we're just riffing here.
And apparently, the method of survival in the Trump administration was don't be near him because he thinks that going to yell at you will shorten his lifespan.
That's what we're dealing with here.
This guy's a fucking idiot.
It's funny.
I heard a similar story, not about Trump, but just it reminded me of this.
Someone went to talk to their doctor about, and this isn't a joke either.
This is an actual thing I had heard.
Someone went to talk to the doctor and asked them about exercise, like cardio and this sort of thing.
And the doctor said, no, no, no, no, don't, don't do that.
That's crazy.
It's like, what do you mean?
I mean, it's supposed to be, you know, good for your heart health.
No, no, no, your heart.
It has a certain number of beats.
And then after it runs out of those beats, it's done.
So if you speed it up, you'll be done sooner.
And the guy's so funny.
What?
It's like an expiry, like a little counter.
Like, what do you think is happening?
Like, it's just so what a fucking idiot.
But yeah, it's tiring.
Anyway, that is when we should get back on track here.
So talking about the U.S. cultural influence, the most obvious, the most obvious cultural influence method means is through media, right?
Yeah.
The thing that we call Hollywood generally thing, you know, they're making movies over there, even though very few are actually filmed there.
All the ideas are still there.
All the people are hired are still going through all, but many of them are still going through this sort of talent system they have developed in Southern California.
So to say that it's not really Hollywood because it's somewhere else is sort of disingenuous.
It's a set of ideas that come from there still.
And when you're in that pool in that set of ideas like that, then I think it is limiting.
And television is not quite the same pool, right?
There's talent that's coming between TV and movies.
There needs some overlap.
But both of these things greatly influence us.
We talked earlier about how Australia and Canada both have content rules for like a certain amount of their airtime has to be content from the home nation, right?
Like which is a thing, it is a protective thing, right?
It's a thing that will cause networks to want to fund television shows in Canada from Canada and in Australia from Australia.
But here's an interesting point that I think most people don't think about, but I think is just how game theory and the way this market exists alone is adversely affecting this.
So let's say that there's little individual parts of the culture in Australia that are unique to Australia, right?
I don't know what they are, Vegemite and I don't know, kangaroo, something.
I don't know, some right.
Yeah.
Whatever.
Kinds of beer or whatever.
Maybe there's also weird things you call the bathroom or whatever.
You know what I mean?
Like there's little things, right?
The dunny.
Yeah.
Sure, right.
Yeah, there is weird things called the bathroom.
Great.
So anyway, when you're making a TV show, let's say you're a producer for a TV show in Australia and there's scripts and there's things you're looking at and there's location scouting and there's locations you're going to have on this little TV show you're making, whatever.
Let's say it's a cop show.
And the thought crosses your mind that, okay, you know, we're going to, we're going to make this show.
It's going to cost this much.
And then we're going to sell the show and it's going to make this much in Australia.
Yep.
The thought crosses your mind that there might be a possibility that we could sell this in other markets.
Totally.
Yep.
And those other markets for English speaking first are New Zealand, UK, Canada, and the United States.
Absolutely.
And New Zealand, smaller market than Australia.
UK, slightly larger than Australia.
But okay, maybe Canada slightly larger than Australia still, but okay, who knows what those Canadians are going to like.
But if you can sell your show to the United States, that's when you're making really big bucks.
So imagine you're going to make the show and you're going to have all the little things you're going to have in there.
And then you decide, okay, we're going to scratch these, this, and this, and this.
These little, little, little things that are Australian flavorish things.
Yeah.
Because if we want to hope that we could sell this show to a big network in the United States, the closer that is to Australian culture and the further it is from the US culture, the less likely it is to be understood by a US audience.
Exactly.
So when you make television in a place like Australia, you know, some producers are still going to lean into it and say, screw the US market or whatever.
I don't care if it ever sells there.
Yeah.
But some are going to say, yeah, but it might.
And if it does, it will easily, you know, multiply several times over how much money we make from this.
And that extra amount will not have hardly any additional cost associated.
Oh, totally.
Yeah.
And there's a few examples here, right?
So one example that's fascinating, I think, which is one thing I haven't really watched, which is part of my example.
Mr. Inbetween is a show that Americans know quite well that is made in Australia that we don't really have.
I mean, we sort of do.
It's on streaming servers, I suppose.
It's about this guy who's like a hitman or something.
I've seen a couple episodes.
I never really got into it.
I probably should.
It seems quite good.
But that is a bizarre example of Americans making a TV show in Australia.
I don't know about the Australianisms in that.
But another example, of course, many, many years ago, I don't know if you recall the film Muriel's Wedding, which had many Australianisms and it was very strong Australianisms, but that was what it was marketed as.
But it's easier to do that as a film because it's a one-off viewing experience than a television show.
Then you've got experiences like Wilfred, the TV series, which if you haven't seen, oh man, it's so good.
So there's two versions.
And this is the same as The Office as well, but I'll use an Australian version example instead, albeit a lesser known one.
Wilfred is basically a talking dog.
And the guy who has the talking dog, you don't know if the dog's talking or not.
You really don't know whether the guy is insane or not.
And his girlfriend's always breaking his balls and all this sort of thing.
Instead of doing that, just broadcasting that the US, they did the same thing as The Office.
They remade it.
They got Elijah Wood to be the guy.
And to be honest, the American Wilfred is better.
It's really good.
It's complex.
It's dark.
It's gritty.
Elijah Wood is excellent.
The Australian Wilfred is fantastic.
But I think what I'm trying to get to here is that generally speaking, if you're a producer and you want to sell your show to the US, you can definitely scale down the use of words like dunny and stuff like that, which people in America might just sort of glaze over and not know about.
But of all else fails, you can always sell the rights.
And America will just remake it wholesale.
And sometimes, for example, Rake TV show here, which is once again, so good.
Rake is about basically a barrister who is just an absolute dead shit, gets into all sorts of trouble.
Really charismatic actor, Richard Roxbury, plays the role here.
We had an American version of Rake.
I watched the first episode and I wanted to throw my television at the wall.
It was so shit.
And the thing that was fascinating at the American version is that, for example, in the first episode, Rake is there or Cleaver Green is there with his friend who happens to be a prostitute.
And you find that out really organically.
They're there.
And then a buzzer comes on saying your time's up.
And he starts complaining about how they're timing him to the minute and that sort of stuff.
Whereas in the American version, it's like, this is my best friend.
And record scratch, she's a prostitute.
You're like, wow, subtle.
Thanks, man.
Yeah.
And that's what Americans like, though.
They don't like subtlety.
They like to get the plotline fed to them like Patty.
They'll be hit over the head with it.
Yeah, like the fucking Ben Garrison cartoons.
For people who are more on the fringe of politics, we'll know this cartoonist in the US who writes these elaborate cartoons and writes everything on them.
It's like, you know, Department of Justice stabbing fish.
And you're like, I can see that's the DOJ.
I can see that's a stabbing weapon.
We need to write the word liberty on the Statue of Liberty.
We knew what you meant when you wrote it.
Yeah, right.
They don't need subtitles.
But the thing is, of course, he's marketing to an audience who I would like to politely call fucking idiots.
So you kind of have to.
I mean, he knows his audience.
Morons.
It just is what it is.
So yeah, that's my dire trial on that.
Yeah, but you could see how this system could slowly sort of bland eye and erode and blur the differences between Australian and US culture, but only in one direction, right?
It's never blurred.
Totally.
It's hardly ever blurring it in such a way as to make the US anything more like Australia.
It's almost in every way making Australia more like the US.
Yeah.
And if we do that, it's like a tiny thing, like the Mystery M20 example.
That is something that most people never have heard of.
Whereas, like I said, like Malcolm Middle or something like that, great shot.
I got no issue with it.
I love it.
It's fantastic.
Friends.
But it's one of those things everyone knows.
Friends, Seinfeld.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, like, yeah.
And we all knew all the things, you know, you know how to say Newman in a certain way.
You know how Kramer walks through a door.
Like, and that sort of stuff takes cultural space.
And I think there is a limited amount of space.
And how Kramer walks through a door has definitely replaced something that we could have had, which also could have been something indigenous, God forbid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we'll move on to the next topic here, next subtopic.
Even though we often, as we just mentioned, think first about media as a way for cultural influence, I think personally, a more permanent and invasive type of cultural influence comes from the marketplace, right?
So like most Americans wouldn't care that much if like the latest Hollywood movie weren't allowed on screens in Australia.
They'd be like, yeah, so what?
You don't get to watch, you know, Avengers Endgame.
Who cares?
Those Australians, who cares what they want to or not want to watch?
But if you, if Australia said that McDonald's restaurants all had to close down and could no longer be in the country, this would have a different flavor in the American declaration of war.
Like, what do you mean?
You're not allowing McDonald's in your country.
Like, this is an American institution.
We care about this.
Even though a lot of us aren't going to eat there that much, we still care about it.
What do you mean?
It won't be allowed there anymore.
This is ridiculous.
So, like, and not just these cultural touchstones, right?
But, like, mining companies, banks, big multinational corporations that buy each other and get bought by each other all the time.
There's over time, fewer and fewer of these are Australian mega companies that move outward from the world.
And more and more often, it's American mega companies that are moving into these smaller markets like Australia and Canada, etc.
So, yeah, what's your thoughts on this?
So, what I will say, as far as the McDonald's example, is that yes, McDonald's is, you know, American as apple pie and all that sort of thing, but our MACAs is a little different.
And I think that's very intentional.
And I think some of that is a rebuking of American culture while embracing it and doing that thing of like in Australia, we sort of, in lieu of a culture, we just try and do things vaguely differently and call out our own.
Similar to, you know, the meat pies and coffees and things, you know, espresso is Italian, meat pies are English.
But we do them really well and we get real, a real sense of pride from that because it's like, you know, sucked in, we're a small country, but our meat pies are good and our coffee is great.
And it's like, okay, cool.
We can pat ourselves on the back for that.
Macas and the idea of a MACA's run, the way that they've sort of marketed themselves as being uniquely Australian.
Recently, an anti-fascist researcher who does fine work in Australia, Tom Taneke, wrote an article on a product I hadn't heard of, which is to me an endorsement of my lifestyle at this point.
Bless the holidays, is Vegemite Shaker Fries.
And the fact they call them fries and not chips, because we call them hot chips as Australians, that's one thing that has endured through this sort of McDonald's-America pipeline.
But we're pouring powdered Vegemite on them.
And I think that's what McDonald's wants us to see when they see when we see the golden arches.
We want to forget that it's American, which I think is an interesting sort of like, you know, general sort of rebuke of things.
The issue around that is that McDonald's is fundamentally American.
And the idea of absorbing that into Australian culture doesn't necessarily make McDonald's more American.
I think it just means that we are making America not a renter in our hearts, but a property owner and, you know, and making sure that everyone can sort of stomach that quite effectively.
We do have a lot of our own sort of fast food things, blah, blah, blah.
We have Domino's, pizza.
We have our own unique spin on it, but it's not that unique.
Mostly just because they're smaller and not as good.
So cool.
So yeah, like we definitely do take a lot of franchises from the US.
A lot of the big mega corporate stuff we don't really notice, but is very much there.
And it's the kind of stuff that you notice when times get tough and there's layoffs and things like that.
But, you know, US capital, cultural capital, through organizations like McDonald's and sort of like American front-facing things, they're definitely there.
But I do think that we try and adopt them as our own in a desperate attempt to have an identity, which is sort of unnecessary if you have your own identity because you would say, well, McDonald's is an Australian.
It's American.
We don't need it to be Australian.
It's American.
We have our own thing.
We're like, well, we don't really have our own thing.
So he's going to call you ours.
It is a sort of a sign of cultural insecurity, right?
That you have to try harder to make it different.
Oh, we're so desperate.
We're so desperate to have some sort of culture.
Not an Indigenous culture, but we're desperate to have a Western culture.
I think it's probably similar.
I don't want to go too far on this, but like, you know, you guys would have Indigenous place names, which would be interchangeably used for their sort of more westernized sort of settled names, the colonized names.
And we have, like, for example, Gadigaland in Sydney and other nations.
And that's, we've got NAM as Melbourne, Mianjin.
I don't know if I said that properly in Queensland and Brisbane around that sort of thing.
And when someone mentions that, we have a lot of things where you could use it on an envelope.
You can have these sort of things elsewhere.
And there's a real kickback on that.
Now, if we had something that was Americanized in that way, there would not be the same kickback as the idea of saying NAM for Melbourne.
If we had, you know, Little Washington or something, there'd be a few people who are like, what the fuck is that?
But there wouldn't be the same aggressive, obviously sort of racist kickback on that sort of thing.
So I think that when it comes to between Indigenous culture in Australia and American culture, we'll take American culture any day of the week, which is not a point of pride.
No.
There's no difference.
I've been to the United States several times.
There is no difference at all between a McDonald's in the United States and a McDonald's in Canada.
Really?
Except the prices.
Yeah, okay.
That's the only thing that might seem the least bit different.
But everything else about them to the commercials, to the advertisements, to everything about them, the furniture in the stores, the shape of them, everything about them is the same.
And this is the same.
This is a similar situation for a great many things.
Franchises especially.
They just use the exact same model as they use in the States.
They just plunk it down in Canada, no problem.
You want 20 of them in Toronto, no problem.
Buy out the real estate, put them in.
Cookie cutter.
Yeah.
I find going to McDonald's or a lot of these sort of franchises like Burger King, et cetera, et cetera, in the U.S., I always find it really fascinating.
Burger King, we actually had our own Burger King called Hungry Jacks.
And then through some kind of very weird corporate shit fight, we now have Hungry Jacks and Burger King.
But, you know, we have Whoppers, we have this and that, blah, blah, blah.
On the name of the burgers and things like that.
And I think that is a bit of a cultural cringe aspect where we don't really have something.
So we want that to be ours.
Whereas I think Canada is probably quite happy with having McDonald's as American and Tim Hortons is Canadian and calling it a day, like and not feeling so.
We get happy when we see that, you know, like when they made the announcement that Tim Hortons is going to expand into the U.S. for some reason that was difficult to understand.
Materialism, there were people in Canada cheering, not like in crowds.
Not like they gathered in the town square and cheered, but like conversationally at work and stuff, it was kind of a thing where some people were like, yeah, that's really good.
That's good.
That's so funny.
Why do you care?
Why does he care?
There's nothing about this.
This is not like.
But then again, it doesn't make any sense why this would be a point of pride for you, but it is somehow in a weird way.
The way I would see it is that Tim Hortons advertises.
Media companies rely on advertisers.
Tim Hortons sends out a press release saying, hey, we're expanding into the US.
How cool is that?
We're finally taking it back.
This is our identity.
And people, like absolute NPCs, see that in their local clickbait rag and say, oh, wow, cool.
Tim Hortons, man.
Canada's getting a piece of America.
And they've just been told to think that.
And the media outlets are making it like as if it's a news story because if Tim Hortons stopped advertising in their media outlets, whether it be that newspaper or the adjacent television station, it's all run by the same corporation, they'd be kind of fucked.
So yeah, it's a real sort of self-licking ice cream of sort of capitalistic despair.
And it ends up with the fact that water cooler conversation revolves around dumb shit consumerism nonsense as opposed to, I don't know, the increasing gap between rich and poor.
Well, yeah, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in Canada, we like to avoid conversations that could turn impolite.
That's a general thing.
It's considered impolite to even bring up a topic that could cause the conflict.
And I get it.
Yeah, I can see that Tim Hortons would be a very simple thing where it's like the weather, you know, you can't really go wrong.
Well, I can't.
And if anyone doesn't agree and thinks that Tim Hortons is not that good a quality, again, no one is really that offended by it because it's not like it's their restaurant.
It's just whatever.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, okay, whatever.
Go somewhere else then.
Yeah.
And like, you know, when it comes to like clothing and stuff like that, I imagine that America has the same sort of influence on Canada.
The only thing I think would be uniquely Canadian is the fact that your extreme winters in certain parts of the world, you know, where you're from is pretty bloody cold.
Yeah.
You know, I don't want to elaborate on where you live, but I live in the cold part.
Yeah, you live in the cold part.
You live in the, I can send you a picture.
I have a picture from last year where I climbed into my truck in the morning to go to work and it was the started up and the dashboard's red minus 40 and I take one every winter.
It's just because it's just insane.
That is insane.
Yeah.
So in winter, if it gets under maybe like four degrees, we're like, what the fuck is this?
This is death.
People are going to die.
I'm going to send out blanks.
This is what I tell people who are from warm climates.
And I've worked at companies that had people who, you know, multinational companies who would have people who would come from warm climates to work in Canada in winter time because winter time is the busy time in the oil field in Canada.
So that's when that would happen.
And we would tell them, like, look, this is going to feel like you're dying.
Yeah.
Like, I'm not kidding.
This isn't hyperbole.
It's going to feel like you're dying.
Yeah.
Like in December.
And then January is going to feel just a little bit worse than December did.
And then February is going to feel more or less the same as January.
And then March is going to come around.
And here's what's going to happen in March.
Like you've just had like three months of what feels like death every day when you're the least bit exposed to outside.
And in March, right around March 15th, sometime, it's going to be about minus 15 Celsius.
Yeah.
And you're going to need something out of your truck.
And you're not going to want to have to go and put on a jacket just to go out to your truck to get it.
You're going to go out in your t-shirt and just go get it.
Yeah.
And it's not going to feel like you're dying.
Yeah.
So it's all going to, you know, it's, it's, it works out to the, like, it feels like it's, it's a sort of thing where people imagine that you have to have developed some genetic adaptation to exist in this environment.
But that's not, it's not really it.
Anyone could live here.
It's just less comfortable and it's just something you get used to.
Yeah.
You've got to make some preparations.
And anyone can do it.
Yeah.
Anyone can do it.
It feels bad.
Like, don't get me wrong.
Even the people who've been here our whole lives, it feels bad for us too.
It just does.
We hate winter.
So, you know, we whinge about it as much as possible.
And people would laugh at the numbers.
But we still find it cold because it's all used to.
You know, like it's, yeah.
But that's like, so where there is another thing that I think is interesting that we sort of diverge from the Yanks with, and I don't know about this intimately, but I think that Commonwealth countries, whether it be UK, Canadian, Australian, blah, blah, blah, I think we do talk about the weather more than the Yanks do.
The Yanks don't seem to have how's the weather British sensibility.
Yeah, that could be.
I feel like that's the case.
I don't know too intimately, and maybe some of our listeners will be able to reflect this on their own, but it just doesn't seem like the same sort of like, I've got a client who's 100 and a half now.
And he's hanging in there.
He always asks me how the weather is.
There is a giant window next to his seat, which he always sits in.
It's a giant window.
You just look just there.
And he can, he can, but it's a question you ask.
It's polite, it's polite conversation.
Yeah, it's sort of like, how you doing?
It's a greeting, right?
Yeah.
It's a very impersonal conversation.
How have you been treated by the world since I last saw you?
Yeah.
Has God been nice to you?
Yeah.
And it always happens to be a nice day.
So it's very easy conversation.
But yeah, it is, it's a funny one like that.
I think that's another sort of similarity.
I don't know if the Yanks have that so much, but I guess one of the things that Yanks probably discovered is that there's no money in asking about the weather.
So they try to stop them from doing it.
Well, the way that capitalism as a system has taken hold of all of this is really a big part of this.
You know what I mean?
It wouldn't matter if, And, you know, I was in France a couple of times for a month each, and I tried to talk to them about capitalism, and they didn't know what I was talking about.
They didn't know what laissez-faire meant.
Yeah, okay.
That's interesting.
yeah they don't they didn't know and i had to explain to them that yes there was a conversation once upon a time a couple hundred years ago between a bunch of merchants and the mayor of paris who who and the mayor of paris said uh what do i do about all these rules for for how you know commerce should happen And they said, laissez-faire, let it be.
Just let it be whatever it is.
And this became sort of the prime motivation for all of capitalism across the entire world to such that it's taken over almost every nation everywhere.
And the French don't even know.
They weren't even taught it in school.
I mean, these were educated French people that I spoke to, but they don't learn much about capitalism.
They don't feel like they're an overly capitalistic country.
And I think compared to in a lot of situations, they're not compared to like the U.S. and Canada, where, I mean, we like Tim Hortons, like I said, because we can get through the drive-through faster so we can get on with our day.
It doesn't matter that the coffee isn't quite as good quality as everything else.
If I'm through there in five minutes, done deal.
Sign me up.
I'm doing it and I'm going on to the next thing I'm doing, which is whatever.
And didn't get cold.
Yeah, well, and I also, that's important.
That's don't discount that part of it.
Totally.
When it comes to the American hegemony in that regard, you have the injection of capital.
You have the use of established and tested marketing practices.
You have all these sort of things that then create a foothold of a cultural icon through some kind of consumerism in a country like Australia.
We have things like Kmart and stuff like that.
Like I say, over time, we may have adopted them to be our own, but they are fundamentally American things.
And if a country resists this, you will find yourself on the pointy end of the stick.
This is like when it comes to protectionist measures before this whole idea of normalizing tariffs with Donald Trump, if you were to, you know, sort of try and kick back on American foreign investment and try and protect your own industries, especially when it comes to places in South America, especially ones with a bit of a socialist bent like Cuba or Venezuela.
The ultimate destination for resisting American economic and consumerist hegemony is sanctions.
They will cripple your economy.
They will destroy your country and prevent you from succeeding in the world marketplace.
That's insane.
So yeah, either McDonald's or death is basically your options when it comes to the U.S.
The old Roman saying, right?
A treaty with the powerful is worthless.
Yes.
Unless you have a way to enforce your side of that, it doesn't matter what that treaty says.
They get pillaged, man.
They just get to do whatever they want anyway.
Yeah, totally.
And that's what's happening now.
Well, it hasn't happened yet.
We haven't gone there yet.
This is a sort of thing where we have to, as the expression says, I think, not obey in advance.
Yes.
You know, if someone is going to threaten to do something terrible lest you fall in line, I think at some point you have to make them do the terrible thing before you fall in line.
I agree.
Instead of just falling in line before they ever do anything, because then they get it for free.
Yeah, totally.
And that's what he's trying to do in this regard.
He's trying to bully countries into sort of acquiescing before anything happens.
Because what will happen is that if energy prices go up astronomically because of tariffs in Canada, because you guys give them so much of the shit they burn, he won't look good.
So that won't actually go well.
But if he can just bully Canadians into acquiescing and giving him some sort of bizarre concession based on the idea that he didn't, you know, annex the country, then he wins.
He wins this deal that he's trying to make this absurd, non-existent, sort of, you know, vague deal.
And none of this makes any sense or should.
And I think you're right.
Don't obey in advance is a really good way of putting it.
Like I would, I would put it more like anytime someone tries to bully you, tell them to fuck off.
Yours sounded smarter.
So I liked yours.
That was good.
And you know what?
Maybe, but there's also some wisdom in the more direct approach that you take, sir.
I'm not going to, I'm going to also defend your approach because I like that down home, gritty, you know, like put your fists up and let's, you know, go at this instead of just playing nice.
That's it.
I just want to see what hockey players do to take the gloves off if that's the time.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Pull a shirt over the head and punch underneath.
You've seen that in movies.
American movies mostly.
But yeah, like I think that's the general sort of thing we're going to find out.
I just want, I really wish that things from this, because I think that politics is quite Newtonian, where like every sort of action has an equal opposite reaction.
And what often happens is that once you up the ante, for example, with the idea of cancel culture and the sort of rapid spread of political correctness and sort of awareness of sort of social movements, I think the idea of that happening too quickly is fundamentally offensive to the human race.
But I mean, if you look at the way it's worked, the Newtonian reaction has been basically Trump.
You know, like they've shit themselves.
And the equal opposite reaction is fascist racism and hatred, which is kind of intense.
I'm hoping in another sort of way, in a sort of productive and positive way, that that Newtonian politics sort of concept plays out now, where we see Trump, we see the rise of tech bro fascism and this kind of, you know, billionaire class kleptocracy.
And we take a very Bernie Sanders-esque approach to resisting it, as opposed to some kind of meandering, liberal, centrist, pissy, whiny, wait for four years sort of approach that realistically just hopes the nightmare ends while we're still alive and that we can claw back some dignity.
No, no, fuck that.
You know, we need a like, we are, you know, I don't want to say anything too extreme, but people have been, you know, sort of throwing things around since Luigi Mangioni, you know, killed that executive.
And while it's not exactly the best thing to be going around and murdering people who have children and families, the fact that we've seen a bipartisan response to that, which has been basically, no, no, no, insurance companies are scum and he deserved it.
You're like, whoa, okay.
Now, hopefully it's not to be violent, though.
What I want to see is I want to see the sentiment of health insurance companies are scum, but I want to see that play out in a democratic way that isn't people gunning each other down the street.
Because that's, because that doesn't mean that people are going to change.
They're just going to get more bodyguards.
Like as if billionaires are going to be like, oh, my friend, the CEO got shot.
Better be more progressive.
Better redistribute some money to the lower class.
Fuck off.
They're just going to get security details.
Ridiculous.
The idea that that could possibly solve anything is so impractical.
But it's been a very interesting social experiment.
I think that I hope that a lot of people on the left who are more organized, more active and sort of better funded than I am are sitting there thinking, shit, there is a turning point here that we can grab onto, but trusting the U.S. Democrats and all that sort of like centrist liberal sort of pearl clutching nonsense, which is going to see them wait for four years and then do the exact same thing they did last election.
And the working class is just going to continue to feel completely alienated.
And for good reason, they are alienated.
Things are getting worse for them.
They're not being serviced by anyone.
Yeah.
No, not at all.
It's fucking terrible.
I'm going to move on to the next little point here.
I have.
So we, we sort of gripe.
Well, you and I in this conversation sort of gripe.
And I assume other people in our mutual nations do this griping about some things regarding US and U.S. culture and all of this to some degree or other.
But here's a real question is that, is this gripe even necessary?
Like, as we become monocultural in a large, in a great many ways, does it even matter?
Is the fact that, you know, if I flew a drone down a Sydney street, I couldn't tell the difference between that and a New York street.
Very unlikely, you know what I mean?
Or Extinguish.
To a great extent.
The buildings are going to look nearly identical.
The street names will be different because they're different cities, but the signs are going to be very similar.
You know what I mean?
The pavement, the sidewalks, the streetlights, they're all going to be really, really, really similar.
We have British influence, which makes that tricky.
So some of our stuff looks decided English because it came straight from Britain.
But, and we also have British names like Elizabeth Street, George Street.
You drive on the left or the right?
Left side of the road, yeah.
On the right, you still drive on the left.
But at the end of the day, a lot of places that weren't...
So the middle of the city has a lot of older buildings because that's what middle of the city has.
But on the outskirts, especially now in like later stage housing developments out in the outer suburbs where people are trying to get housing as cheaply as possible, only a million five.
Great.
It's so dumb.
We won't go into that.
That compared to like a US suburb, other than the cars on the road, you would, yeah, you would find very little difference.
The trees might be different because they have different types of trees, blah, blah, blah.
But when it comes to that ticky-tacky lowest common denominator sort of thing, yeah, I mean, like, we are adopting a monoculture in that regard.
A lot of it is economic rationalism.
But I mean, like, it does, it carries on to this thing of like, okay, so if our differences, and this is something the left are very guilty of politically, if our differences are minute, why are we spending days arguing about them when realistically, overall, we have the same goals and we have the same feelings?
I think monoculture reflects that insofar as that our differences in culture that we can get so wrapped up in culture wars about are so minute.
And, you know, and the theory that these are the sort of things that are designed to tear us apart in the minutiae in order to distract us from what's really happening, which is that our sort of, you know, resources are being pillaged by a small ruling class.
Well, yeah, but like in the idea of a monoculture, I do find the idea of just letting things be and generally speaking, leaning into the idea of everyone being able to relate.
We used to watch television.
We don't anymore in the same way.
We used to watch TV, we'd watch Seinfeld at 7 p.m. on a week on a Wednesday, and the next day at school, we'd all know the same episode.
We don't do that anymore.
Now we can't even talk about Seinfeld anymore because Seinfeld, you haven't seen season 15 and oh, there's spoilers.
I can't talk about it.
There is a difference in that.
So there's like an atomization that happens as a result of things like Netflix and stuff like that, which don't seem like a big deal, but they exist.
But there is something somewhat beautiful and pacifying about a monoculture, which gives us more in common than we have in difference.
But I think there always are going to be forces that will be sitting there trying to point out those tiny differences, the different trees, the other side of the road, the pounds versus the kilos, to make us go, fucking pounds, dumb measurement system.
You guys are dickheads.
Because that's, you know, that keeps us distracted.
But could it be possible to achieve world peace if everyone, not just Australia and Canada, who have already almost entirely homogenized the same culture?
Like if the people in the Middle East all Americanized and the people in China and India are all Americanized, could we achieve world peace?
Africa, we just started making the cities exactly the same.
In fact, the cities in Africa probably are very similar to the cities in the United States now.
It's a French influence as well, though.
But yeah, and there was also, of course, the issue of the socio-economic status and all that sort of, you know, the monetary and digital and all that sort of divide.
But yeah, like when it comes down to that idea of like a sort of like a one-world government type scenario.
One world culture.
Well, one world culture, which is, I think, has like a sort of one world government sort of parallel to it.
And this is something that conspiracy theorists really kick back on, but I don't think they really know why.
They don't really understand why.
They don't know.
And it's just, they're nationalists.
They're not really sure why.
They don't really know a lot of why they believe in the things they do, from what I've noticed.
But generally speaking, if there was to be a one-world government with a monoculture, it would be a Western monoculture.
It would be the Americanization of the Middle East.
Now it would be.
Right.
At this point in history.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
800 years ago would have been Mongol culture, right?
Yeah.
Well, it might be in about 40 as well.
So we'll see.
Let's see how the next four years mean.
Genghis Khan would have had the most dominant culture right around 800 years ago, right?
Oh, totally.
Yeah, 100%.
And like, and of course, that being enforced by a sword, which would be the exact same thing that this sort of thing would be done by now.
But when it comes to, yeah, like, I mean, the Chinese or more of just like a general bricks alliance.
But one thing that I would say as far as like, would that monoculture bring a sense of world peace outside of all the obvious like huge eruptions of like, you know, religion and culture and things like that being sort of eroded?
One of the things I think you'd want to look at is how's America going?
Do you really want 1 point something billion Americans in India?
You are going to have a problem.
Excellent point.
Excellent point.
Do you really want to mirror the Elon Musk rich guy, the Jeff Bezos rich guy, into the sort of oligarch class of the world?
Because there are a lot of billionaires we haven't heard of.
And the reason why we haven't heard of is because while they're raping and pillaging resources and generally being assholes, they shut the fuck up.
They go to meetings, they do business, and they don't try and fuck with society.
And all you need is one Elon Musk.
But I mean, if you were to turn China into America, you could just turn out with 3 billion people who have terrifying ideas of how society works.
Whereas with their more sort of future-driven, self-sacrificing sort of culture, I don't see the Chinese ruling class as being sort of psychopathically lashing out, buying social media networks and doing insane shit.
But I do see parallels between a Bezos and a Chinese billionaire culture, which involves extreme slavery and like extreme efficiency-based exploitation.
Yeah.
So politics is a major way for the U.S. to influence other countries.
Very few of those countries influence the U.S. as we mentioned with media culture.
It's almost all unidirectional.
And the same is true for internet, for political influence.
It's very rare for any country to go, an ambassador to the U.S. to have an influence on what the U.S. is doing, but it's very, very much more common to see a U.S. ambassador to another nation have an influence on that other country.
Totally.
So Trump and Trumpism is sort of the word of the day in the U.S. now.
The Republican Party does have all, they have the Congress, the Senate, the presidency, and it's a right-wing Supreme Court majority.
It's a lot of branches.
Everyone's wondering what's going to happen here.
So in Canada, I don't know how much you know about Canadian politics.
A little bit.
We do have an election coming up this year, as I think they do also in Australia, right?
We do, yeah.
I like Kingston Trudeau.
I think he got a short end of the stick.
So what he did, Blackface, he was dumb and young.
Well, he's, it doesn't matter what anyone thinks of him now because he's not going to be prime minister soon.
He's gone.
Yeah.
So we have a sycophantic right-wing pseudo-Christian politician in Canada that's being driven, whose popularity is being driven by people who are enthusiastic about Trump and Trumpism.
They're 20 points ahead of the polls.
That's fucked in the head.
It's, well, against Trudeau, and we'll see.
I mean, Canadian politics can turn fairly quickly sometimes.
Good.
It's not like the U.S. where it's locked in and it's a slow-moving beast.
It can.
We'll see if it will.
I don't know if this concerns it.
And against Trudeau, Trudeau's very unpopular right now, which is why he stepped down.
Why is it?
He probably should have done it last year, but he didn't.
So he did.
They didn't know.
Anyways, so is there a similar politician in Australia that's attempting to pick up the crowd, the Trump, the pro-Trump crowd in Australia to bring their own rise in popularity and do that to audience capture the Trump audience in Australia, if there really even is one, to get their own political success?
Yes and no, because we've got, like I said, like a vaguely two-party system.
You guys tend to have more of like a multi-party system with coalitions.
There are three viable parties, yeah.
Yeah.
One that's unlikely to make a prime ministership, but they have enough.
It could also be the make the they decide it in a lot of cases, yeah.
Yeah.
So like we have now got a situation.
We had a hung parliament some time ago, which is where no party makes up a majority and they have to negotiate with independents and minor parties to make the make the government and guarantee supply.
And that's a whole thing and that's fine.
That's probably going to happen again.
The Labour Party is currently in, which is the more sort of left-wing party, although now it's centre-right, as you could say it.
But it's unfortunate.
That's a whole other story.
But when it comes to the sort of the general future of things, the opposition, which is the Liberal Party, which are sort of badly named, they're the Conservatives.
It's like you're not really liberals.
They are Liberals in sort of like a more libertarian, sort of market-driven sort of way, but they're not Liberals in a sort of socially progressive sort of way in any way, shape, or form.
I love that.
I was wondering about that when I was trying to read things about Australian politics.
The Liberal Party.
The Liberal Party, there's a saying in Canada that there's kind of three parties: there's the Conservative Party, there's what's called the New Democratic Party, and then there's a Liberal Party.
Liberal Party.
The Conservative Party is right-wing, the NDP are left-wing, and the Liberal Party is whatever side they have to be on to win an election.
Yeah, it's just yeah, the Liberal Party in Australia is on the right.
That's okay, good.
All right, let's say the guy who's running that is named Peter Dutton, and he looks like a mix between a potato and the Harry Potter character Voldemort.
And that is slightly cruel because he does have some kind of weird alopecia thing going on that makes him look like one of those sort of mole rats that they sort of use next to like a set of balls to sort of mock the poor, wrinkled character's appearance.
But he isn't a sort of visually flattering man, and nor is he a politically interesting man.
He's about as charismatic as a brick, and he has a lot of obvious links to the fucking ruling class, like Gina Reinhart, who's the richest woman in Australia, and one of the richest women in the world, I believe.
Mining money, of course, is right up his ass with her hand or her fist, I guess you could say.
The move toward, as you said before, the laissez-faire libertarian style of government is basically coming from Gina Reinhart through Peter Dutton.
And the only reason why I can see Peter Dutton and his Liberal Party, the Conservatives, getting in power is because people vote against what was a very disappointing sort of progressive Labour Party government that didn't get the kind of reforms or progress that we were looking for, which is unfair to an extent.
But also, politically speaking, on things like Palestine, he's been very, very small target when it comes to economic reform, very, very subtle, very small target stuff.
Really not fulfilling the role that he has because back in the day, he was a reactionary socialist, you know, uni student.
There's a beer named after him.
We loved this guy before he became prime minister and just became a real centrist chud.
When it comes to the idea of Trumpist politics, it's not in the mainstream.
We have a guy named Senator Babbitt.
We call him Zippy on the podcast, but he's Ralph Babbitt, Ralph Deej Babbitt.
I don't know why that's his nickname.
He's a real flog.
He said some horribly offensive things that I will not repeat on this podcast on Twitter.
You can look them up on his terrible Twitter.
Don't comment.
He'll block you, free speech and all.
But yeah, he's the sort of like Trumpist one.
He's a senator who was basically put in power as he was one of the sort of like fringe flog freedom movement types who went and stood for a party which was given something like $150 million in funding by a mining magnate.
It's $150 million badly spent.
He's one of the only people in that party because that party has had several successful candidates.
They always leave, but he likes to stick around because he has no spine or merit as a human being.
He loves the Trumpist thing.
He went over to the US recently to celebrate the sort of Trump victory and went to Mar-a-Lago.
And I don't think he managed to meet Trump because, you know, didn't pay enough money to be near him.
But this guy is a colossal flog and no one likes him.
So I think that's the state of Trumpist politics in Australia.
There's one guy who's a big Andrew Tate Donald Trump guy in the Senate and everyone thinks he's a fuckwhit.
So that might be a bit of a breath of fresh air.
The idea of a, and please correct my pronunciation, Polyev?
Polyev.
Polyev?
Yeah, that guy is a fucking asshole.
If he tried to run a mage party in this country, he would be laughed out of power in minutes.
I would love to watch him run an election because he would get thrashed by 30 points.
He wouldn't.
He was nearly laughed out of the leadership of the Conservative Party a couple of years ago when it finally ran.
And then they realized that all the other people were also notably worse than that.
So Pierre Polyev, who has all the charisma of a wet toad, is now the Conservative Party leader.
And it's mostly the dispopularity of Trudeau that leads to the biggest part of those numbers.
That's the Newtonian politics thing, man.
You know, you have these people who are so angry at this progressive blue-eyed guy who all the ladies want to fuck.
And then, you know, you end up with this Polyev, Chud.
And I just, I really, I will mourn the day if that dicker gets a majority or manages to form government.
It's looking like it.
It fucking sucks.
I really hope.
I pray, as I do for every election in Canada.
I pray for a minority government.
Things generally are pretty good in Canada, as I say.
We're a top country, G8.
We got good economy still, we're still, and what we don't need is some idealistic politician to get his hands on the tiller of the ship and say, you know what this boat needs?
This boat needs a new direction.
And just grab that thing and wheel it one way or the other.
You know what I mean?
It doesn't need.
It's going straight forward.
We're in a good direction.
Everything's fine.
Just leave it alone.
All you got to do is be there in case anything happens.
Yeah.
Really?
That's all we need.
Like, just that's that's often the case.
Now, yeah, this is.
Well, in our countries, we have that luxury.
That is a sort of what they call a first world luxury, you know?
Oh, totally.
Yeah.
Right.
But one should acknowledge that exists.
And all we have to do is just shit out.
We don't need these guys who want to go, you know what?
We need to change everything.
We don't need to change anything.
Just look, I'll be happy to sit on the other side, which is some sort of reactionary lefty who's trying to like bring up the working class and generally try and like, you know, balance out, you know, equity and all those sort of things, you know, underneath.
Totally fine.
But a conservative who comes out and just says, the elites are terrible and they're ruining you.
And you go, yeah, they are bad.
It's like, cool.
And then you realize that he is the elites.
And you're like, oh, shit.
And he's like, all those elite Satanists, we need prayer in school.
Like, wait, what?
What?
Yeah, no.
That's not our problem.
None of our problems are related to that.
Why?
Why are you?
That's really weird.
That wasn't what you ran on.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, like it is really tricky.
Now, one thing that I'd like to bring to the forefront is something that we have in Similar on the Absolute Fringe, which the Americans didn't have, or at least I don't believe so, is the trucker protest, the trucker convoy.
They tried a couple convoys in the U.S.
They didn't, I didn't look closely into them because they never materialized into anything, but that were really funny.
The value convoy was the funniest part.
Oh man, we had a great convoy.
We had one situation where sort of like a social media influencer type who sort of chewed the red pill a bit too much and swallowed it hard.
And this other guy parked a truck obstructing traffic on a major highway up north toward Queensland.
And the leader of one of the more fringe right-wing parties, One Nation, which is sort of like a party that was sort of born in racism and now pander towards sort of general fringe bullshit, anti-vaccination blah blah sort of nonsense.
All the mini collection of conspiracy adjacent nonsense that she's an actual senator, so she talked them down from the ledge on that one and basically got them to move their trucks, which was very disappointing to all the cookers who really, really wanted it to continue and make the government fall or something.
But this sort of venerated idea that truckers are somehow, you know, wonderful, noble creatures crafted in the image of God.
Of course, a lot of truckers are politically abhorrent and possibly racist.
But that's fine.
When it comes to the trucker convoy, your trucker convoy was far more successful than ours.
But wow, what a cringe bit of solidarity we have.
Both countries having a real good crack at trying to get a truck convoy.
Yours was much more successful, though.
That was impressive.
I mean, that got weird.
Yeah.
And they had success mostly because of the way that they weren't very clear about what they wanted.
Ah, yeah, right.
And then on its face, it'll have certain things that people will say they wanted.
And there were some people who joined up because they didn't like the COVID restriction things.
And there were people who joined up because of this and that reason or whatever.
And because it was all sort of nebulous and undefined, everyone thought they were going to get what they wanted when they went.
And so it collected a lot more mass as it went.
But as it went, it boiled down to sort of three, you know, as these things do, everyone, you know, settles into some sort of a hierarchy.
I even hate to say that because I hate Jordan Peterson so much.
But yeah, there's generally some kind of, in order to have any kind of organization of any kind, you have to have some kind of a system where fewer people have to talk together just to organize it.
It tends to be some kind of hierarchy of some kind.
But it tended to be like three people who were sort of in charge of three different sort of groups.
And one of them, no kidding, had drafted actual papers to replace the government with protesters.
Like replace Trudeau and all the parliament members with I'm not surprised for a second.
And like this would be deeply rooted in sovsit nonsense.
This is a thing.
This is a thing that people who like to cheer about the and complain about the way that the truckers were mistreated like to slide past as a fact.
There'd be very extreme elements in there.
Because as soon as you have a guy that's and he actually drew up real papers, he was wanting to go to the governor general and the senate and get signatures on them.
There were spots for them to sign.
It was like 30 pages.
He had written the whole thing up.
It was all meant to be legal official, whatever.
It was actually like almost like sovsit nonsense level.
It'd be pseudo-law shit, yeah.
Yeah, right.
But it was meant to, as part of an emergency situation, replace the prime minister with people.
It was not really clear, but it was essentially going to be him and other people with him to become this new government so that they could take, yeah.
And it wasn't, it wasn't even cast by him as a coup.
It was cast by him as a we need this because we're dying out here.
Yeah, but like just because things that they you know weren't weren't defining, but but the fact that he actually wrote it and put it on paper, that's actually kind of you know, like, like that's really brushing the sales of treason, you know, like we have a system of elected officials and he's going to be not one.
Like if you want to run for prime minister, go run for prime minister, but like no one's electing you here.
You're just going to wholesale replace the electorate for chosen people.
That's not how this works.
And of course, once the dog catches the car, the dog does not know what to do with the car.
Yeah.
There's no way that any of that, if it materialized, which it wouldn't, but if it did, they would have no idea what to do with themselves.
To their credit, this guy brought the idea to the other two, and they were like uncomfortable with this.
You put that on, you typed that up and you printed it.
It's treason.
And that was a thing that started to make the convoy start to fold a lot more.
And people were like, I don't know.
I am not sure.
Now I have to confront the game theory notion that, yeah, maybe some of the other things other people are doing here are things that I might have to wear, even though I didn't do them.
Yeah.
And then I have to rethink a lot of stuff here.
And yeah.
And so that's why there was inquiries.
That's why there was, I mean, the accounts weren't frozen because of that.
The accounts were frozen because they were disruptive.
They were violent.
They were pests.
They were not leaving.
They were keeping everyone awake.
The businesses couldn't run.
Very selfish individuals.
Definitely no permits.
I mean, if you want to organize a protest, we're a civilized society.
We have a system for that.
And they weren't, you know, they weren't following.
Even if you go around.
They wouldn't evacuate when asked.
Would do it differently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like, yeah, there's no decency in these ranks.
There's just no human decency.
Right.
Pure self-centered nonsense, which is, of course, based on the list of demands, which will always be starting with I. You know, it's about I don't want to get vaccinated.
I don't want to succumb to your authority.
I want to be able to do this.
And you're like, okay, yeah, I'm seeing where you're coming from.
You were spoiled as a child and society has disappointed you once you left home.
Okay, cool.
We will pander to that with a few social safety nets to make sure that you don't become a criminal.
But outside of that, I'm sorry, but daddy government isn't your real dad.
And you have to accept the fact that, because like the bizarre thing with all these sort of things is it's always me, me, me, I, I, I. At the end of the day, all this stuff needs to be facilitated by some sort of central thing.
They're anti-government, unless government is serving them like some kind of fucking slave society, and then it's all perfect.
You know, a lot of these people are, you know, on benefits and welfare and then they say, oh, yeah, benefits of welfare are bad.
Not these ones that I'm on.
No, no, it's the other ones.
They're really bad.
You're like, you shut the fuck.
Yeah, it's very tiring.
You know, most of these sort of libertarian fuckwits and general sort of laissez-faire nonsense merchants, they tend not to be the kind of people that should be doing that.
It makes sense that Elon Musk does it because Elon Musk has something to benefit from it.
Yes.
Otherwise, he has a goal in mind by pushing those ideas.
And it's not actually even the thing that he's getting from those ideas.
It's some other thing that down the road.
Yeah.
But like neckbeard to stand up for uh you know the deregulation of uh you know drug prices in the U.S.
And you're like, at what point do you think this is a good idea?
You are pre-diabetic and you are basically cheerleading for your future medication to be really expensive.
You don't see the problem.
Oh, the guy that told you that's a good idea also said trans people are bad and that women are to blame for rejecting you.
Oh, now I get why you're bootlicking for things that are going to genuinely harm you in the future.
You fucking idiot.
So we have one more thing that I'd like to just kind of squeeze in here at the end.
I cleverly put it at the end so we'd have almost no time for it, but that's fine.
We'll take whatever time we want.
Is conspiracy theories.
So I've to the best of my knowledge, and it's possible that some things escape my notice, but to the best of my knowledge, there are no truly Canadian conspiracy theories.
Really?
We are too close to the bright light for anyone to try to say too strongly or be believed when they try it that this thing in Canada is really, really important as a conspiracy theory that has many, many things, and it doesn't include the United States.
All of them include the United States.
And really, once you're doing that, you're just doing the same ones that are in the United States.
You're just like, yes, it's the Illuminati.
It's the things they're all meeting in the meeting room within wherever Chicago, wherever it is.
Darvosman, imagine right.
It's all that.
And yeah, okay, our prime minister's part of it.
But it's, you know, it's the tag along.
It's the American conspiracy theory with like, yeah, and our guy's in it too.
You're the Joey in the pouch, to put it in Australian terms.
Yeah, no, we do have our own conspiracy theories.
We've got a few of them.
And we've got some that are more sort of real than others.
And then we have a lot of conspiracy theories that are absolutely just the placenta of the American nonsense factory.
So like, you know, we've got Harold Holt.
I think this is always a fascinating one because we had, and I don't have all the details in front of me.
Other people will probably know this.
If not, you can look up yourself.
We had a prime minister who went for a bit of a swim at the beach and never was found.
Interesting.
As if you're not going to make conspiracy theories about that.
So there's a theory that apparently he was picked up by a Chinese submarine or something because he was a Chinese communist spy the whole time, which is cool.
And they were onto him and he had to get away.
That's it, man.
I don't know if there's any like actual basis or evidence for it, but who needs basis?
Our prime minister vanished at a beach.
You don't need basis.
Basis is basis has gone out the fucking window.
So I like that.
We've got a military base.
This is like the US is involved in the fact that the military base is the US, but Pine Gap in the middle of the country.
I don't really know specifically the conspiracy theories, but I do know there's a lot of them.
And basically that revolves around this idea of there being a secret military base where once something is secret and prominent, then you can choose your own adventure.
Area 51.
What's the point of Area 51?
You can choose your own adventure.
It's an Air Force base, they don't let anyone near it.
What are they hiding from us?
That's it.
You can speak shit up, sweetheart.
The government's not going to come out and be like, okay, I just need to tell you that you're not right, you're not wrong, but you're not wrong.
You're not right.
Okay, sweet.
Got that sorted out.
And now you come back with your next answer.
No, it's just completely ignored.
But one of the more unpleasant ones, and there's a lot of parallels to what happened to the US, but this is uniquely Australian, is that we had a massacre in Tasmania in a place called Port Arthur.
A man Bryant took lives of something like 32 people in a cafe.
I don't know how many people were injured.
Very good shot.
I believe he was suffering from schizophrenia.
You know, in jail, I believe he's still alive.
Just bad.
It's a massacre.
That led to a lot of gun laws.
So Americans really shit themselves when gun laws are even talked about, even in other countries.
And you'll find that a lot of commentators in the US will say things like, you know, Australia is awash with crime because they took away our guns, which is not true.
And you can still get guns.
You just have to, you know, do your rules first.
Yeah.
And like, and look, you know, to be honest, it's kind of a good thing that we don't have people running around with handguns as a result of ordering the laser fans.
And they're getting catalogues.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Seeing them in the mail.
Yeah.
Exactly.
But like, we don't have a crime problem that extends to gun violence.
We are not subjugated by a criminal class that have access to guns.
And while we do have shootings, it's usually criminals shooting each other.
And they usually do it in high-value transactions because in a situation where you spend $10,000 on a gun that you then have to dispose of, you don't tend to just frivolously shoot places.
Although there are a few idiots with guns.
Very, very rare.
Anyway, so when it comes to the Port Island conspiracy theories, this is a very predictable one.
It was a false flag to take our guns.
Yeah, right.
Textbook.
That's the Alex Jones line.
Yeah.
Yep.
Standard stuff.
They're going to do it to America the same way they did it in Australia.
Exactly how they do it.
They did a lot of that during COVID, where we had a lot of useful idiots during COVID who just want to clout, desperately want to clout.
We have one named Maria Z who's done really well in the US.
And one of the things she did at the start is went to US talking heads in the conspiracy movement and said, We're being locked up in camps.
They're shooting us in the streets.
You know, that sort of thing.
And obviously didn't actually say that, but you know, all that sort of like conspiratorial nonsense about how the COVID lockdowns were actually some kind of military operation, blah, blah, blah.
And the Americans are like, oh, that's really concerning.
That's what's next for us.
And the whole, you know, sort of human centipede sort of thing, or whatever that thing was, sort of, you know, goes on.
But when it comes to the Australian, there's a couple other ones which are really fun.
There's the 28 Names, which is basically a redacted list of 28 names that was brought to the Senate by a senator named Bill Heffernan.
And this is one of those ones where it's just, it's lived on since for reasons that are really dumb.
Apparently, a gay high court justice was on the names list, which is bullshit.
I mean, this high court justice has been in like a monogamous relationship for like 50 years with their partner.
But of course, it's homophobia.
You know, it's just rampant wild homophobia.
What were the 50 names about?
What were they supposed to do?
28.
So basically 28 high-profile pedophiles.
And a lot of cookers, because we call, thanks to the aforementioned anti-fascist researcher, Tom Taneke, we call our anti-vaxxer sub-sit conspiracy theorist types cookers, which generally applies to a person who believes all of it.
You know, they go all in on everything.
You know, you have anti-vaxxers, you've got sub-sits, mix the two, you'll get a cooker.
But sometimes you'll have one with the other, but usually they pick them all because once they've chosen sort of a line of thought, they tend to go down the really gold path of just believing everything.
And yeah, so like they've really made up a lot of shit.
Some people have tried to articulate the list and say they know who's on it and write down the names.
And you look at the names and there's a lot of the typical thing of like people of the left, people who are homosexual, all that sort of stuff.
One of them, which I found especially funny and also very insulting, was Richie Benno, who is a cricket commentator.
Very well loved in Australia.
Not a pedophile.
I will put money on that, but he's not a pedopedophile.
But they have done it.
He's got a son cherry on a list of that.
That's good.
But these people are fucking insane, right?
And they're trying to be taken seriously, and they shouldn't be.
But the 28 Names is unique.
And we also have another one, which is an interesting character, Fiona Barnett, who is a sort of controversial character who's come out with claims that she has been subjected to basically that sort of satanic ritual abuse.
Not just the classic child abuse that comes with, you know, societies that have horrible people in them that should be thrown in jail and never seen in the light of day, but that classic, let's go one further, satanic ritual abuse.
And I think Richard Nixon was involved in something.
I don't know.
But of course, when it comes to these sort of things, the elites involved and all that sort of stuff, it gets so preposterous and so absurd that you just can't take it seriously.
But people do.
And there are huge sort of movements around this person as a sort of beacon of truth exposing elite pedophiles.
And that your 28 Names thing would be, you know, nearly a carbon copy of the Epstein's potentially fictional little black book, right?
Yeah.
I mean, 28 Names came before that, to be fair.
Okay, maybe the yards copy.
That's good.
That's points in Australia's favor.
Yeah.
That is, it is.
Because it's not even really there, but people talk about it.
It's a thing where you get to make it up.
Speculate who's in there and be like, oh, yeah, that name definitely.
He's in there.
He's one of the Joe Biden.
He's one of those.
Yeah.
It's like Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, you fucking idiots.
But otherwise, we do have that same thing.
Like, you know, they are subsets or carbon copies or, you know, just American conspiracy theories.
We have the mold children of Melbourne, where Dan Andrews, a premier at the time of COVID, very, very disliked with the sort of libertarian freedom movement types because he was the bad man who told them to stay at home.
Well, I think they would have stayed at home anyway.
I mean, to be honest, they don't really have lives.
They mostly just post.
But look, you know, but getting told they have to stay home means that I suddenly have somewhere to be.
Yeah, I want to go to the pub now.
I haven't been in a year, but I just want to have just because I can.
Freedom.
Yeah, right.
So he has an underground network of tunnels in Melbourne, which house children for adrenochrome juicing, which is the exact same thing as the offshore New York thing.
The white hats rescue them.
And whenever there's an earthquake in Melbourne, of course, that's the deep underground military base with the children being blown up by the white hats because they're rescuing the children.
I mean, you know, that's a carbon copy of the US shit.
Like, it's just take away New York or whichever city.
I'm sure there's more theories around that and just put Melbourne in there.
Like, it's just fucking dumb.
Yeah.
So, so, yeah, you know, we definitely do have the parallel thing.
And of course, a lot of the conspiracy influencers, whether they be Alex Jones or whether they be the more niche type characters, the Stew Peters, all that sort of stuff, we have our own influencer class that try and do their own thing.
But for the most part, you know, we had a conspiracy theorist chef who we've taken the piss out of quite extensively on our podcast named Pete Evans, and he just shares American content.
It's almost like he doesn't live in Australia.
It's like, mate, like it's almost a bit of contempt.
It's like, mate, there are some Australian things you could talk about, you just don't.
Well, this, the game theory involved here would work the same for conspiracy theories as it did about the TV shows we mentioned earlier.
Yeah.
If you want to, if what you're interested in is a large audience, there's a larger audience in the States than there is in Australia.
So if you have conspiracy notions that will sell in the U.S., get the attention of people in the US, then maybe you just tailor yours so that they're good for both or even just say that they're just good for the US audience and that's all you do, right?
It's, I mean, if that's what you're after is audience size, then, I mean, you should probably learn Chinese or Hindi, maybe, right?
Yeah, yeah, there is that.
Yeah.
Well, audience size.
Once they have money.
If that takes a lot of time and effort and you're lazy, then, you know, US is the way to go, right?
But I think you're right with the neon light thing as well.
I mean, like, you know, when it comes to a guy like that, he's not entertained enough by Australian conspiracy theories.
The Australian theories, the Australian movement, the Australian battle against the elites, usually with the 28 names and other various sort of, you know, half-assed, sov sit-style, pseudo-law sort of, you know, pursuits to try and dissolve the government and fucking ya-yah.
He doesn't find that exciting.
He finds that boring.
He thinks it's too wordy.
He thinks it's too meandering.
Whereas with the Yanks with their big, fancy, you know, neon display, that excites him.
And that's what gets him off.
And let's face it, like, if it stops being fun, don't do it.
And I don't think that a lot of the people in the Australian movement who don't tend to parrot the American line, who don't tend to stick to the sort of like, you know, conspiratorial orthodox of the US-centric model, they think they're saving the country.
And that's what their concern is.
They're generally nationalists.
They're generally white.
They're generally very aggressive, borderline militaristic, but they are doing what they think is right.
And if anything they believed in were true, it would be very concerning.
The comforting thing is that none of it's true.
And it's all just shit made up by someone who is either severely mentally ill or has absolutely no problem deceiving people for the sake of clout and clicks, which is in itself quite sociopathic.
Yeah.
Well.
All right.
Well, maybe we'll wrap this up here before I get complaints from my wife.
Haha.
So tell us about your podcast.
Where can people find you?
It is the conditioner release program.
If you search for it, you will find a lot of educational papers about early release of criminals and our podcast.
Avoid papers.
They're no good.
They're very boring.
Just go to an actual podcast app and search it.
You'll find it right away.
That will help.
We're on Facebook in a certain degree.
We've got a shit posting group.
You want to join that up and just, you know, we talk about blah, blah, blah.
Otherwise, not really checking Twitter, but on at CrunchyMoses there and on BlueSky at joelhill.bluesky dot blah blah.
But yeah, you know, you can find me.
Just look.
I'm not hiding.
Good.
Yeah.
And if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about anything they heard on this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And I can be found on Twitter at Spencer G Watson there and on Blue Sky, Spencer Watson, at all the other things that add on to that for a Blue Sky address.
I can't remember them right now.
Yeah, it's not.
But they're all the same for everyone, so I don't know why they're there.
No, you get different domains.
You can.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
So you're telling me they added an annoying thing to everyone's name so they could make some people special.
Okay.
Yeah.
So they are capitalists.
You're right.
Okay.
This makes sense.
Don't worry.
It's going to get worse.
Okay.
The Fediverse is going to be annoyingly complex and I'm sure heavily interweaved with crypto, which is, of course, the thing that makes pedophiles more effective and rich, which is great.