It’s Just a Basically a Corn Moon Guys Thing [“large palestinian Orthodox families following a synth”]

because I can remember I always wanted Blood Satellite. I'm gonna be honest. I was only half joking when I had said we should move to America and be... I mean, there's not a lot of reasons I would move to America. There's only like a million reasons, but that would be one of the top reasons. There's not one good reason. There's like a million pretty good reasons. Every so often I'll hear some story or an anecdote from America that just sounds so bewildered.

You know, once you hear the size of their burgers. I'm not trying to make a joke. You have to understand how small the bur- They think they're helping us, and they're not. They're just imprisoning us. Do you actually like huge burgers, though? I would like the option. I mean, you're getting good value. Real freedom is throwing the food out. It's taking that tray with half of it unfinished and dumping it. You're right.

You'll never have that here. And some goddamn dame saying they're starving children in Africa. And so I order a second right in the garbage with that. Okay, in Canada, you finish the burger and, like, your fingers and you, like, look under the... It's so sad. I'm no scope skedaddling that food right- unstoppable so i hear about bucky's i don't even know what bucky's is our good friend of the show jay burden he's in the bucky's he's a beaver his thing is a beaver is beaver

When you lose the Buc-ee's logo. I don't know what Buc-ee's is. I see this tweet. And it's a hiring advertisement for... And it's got what the job is and what they're paying. Like a cashier starting at $18 an hour. Damn. That's above what they pay in Canada and our like minimum wage. It's funny because 18 US is that's like 25 Canadian, right? You're making 25 fucking dollars as a cashier. That's what I was making as a senior guy.

Carpenters not making that. Yeah, for these fucking boomers who have been working there for 30 years, they're making like Bucky's cash. They're making sub-cash at restroom crew. $20. Damn! I'm going to clean some toilets. Yeah. Team lead, $23 an hour. That's $75 Canadian. that's yeah no but actually it's like close to that's like 60 000 a year canadian for a That's why. And think how cheap the real estate...

This is not an HR application put on LinkedIn where they're talking about the fucking company culture or anything. This is designed as if... advert. There's clip art in the background. It's visually inconsistent. Someone threw this together because like, why wouldn't we pay $45? to fucking greet people. And it says, oh, full time, 35 to 50 hours, no experience necessary. Not a word of a lie, I'm looking at this. 401k, 100% match up to 6%, three weeks.

healthcare, which is a big deal even in Canada. Assistant General Manager, you're making $150k a year. No way. No fucking way. Assistant general manager may... That's on the loan. That's triple what I make. And I'm a fucking goddammit. I'm a senior project manager. Fuck! Once again, Judas salary doxing himself. Moving on. Oh shit, they're gonna look me up for my fucking salary. They're gonna look you up based on how much money you're making. Oh no. Food service manager, 175k.

Someone made the tweet here, the car wash manager at a gas station in rural Texas makes more than most doctors in Europe.

And I say that, and I say, yeah, as it should be. Yes. All is right in the world. And you gotta understand, I'm all for this. This isn't... throwing this up on the board and saying how dare they i'm saying like i i can move down there i think with our experience our combined experience we could probably get department manager 33 bucks an hour you're paying me 42 bucks an hour American for assistant food manager, I'll kill for fucks.

a buccaneer. I'd be a buccaneer for Buc-ee's. Yeah, I'll wear their fucking uniform. I don't know what it is. I will be Beaver Gang. I'll go to work with a gun and I'll only use it on customers. I don't know what circumstance would require that, but I'm a team player. Speaking of this shit, by the way, so for people just tuning in, this is going to be a certified dumb shit episode. This is a certified dead nigger storage. Nice. I got the first domino kicked. It's a bunch of nonsense.

I don't know if you heard about this, but there was a fiasco involving Red Lobster's endless shrimp deal. I'm looking at CNN business. Red Lobster's endless shrimp deal was too popular. And here's how they start. This is a real missed opportunity. This is why journalism's dead, and this is why journalists should be killed. It starts off, it was a simple plan. Now you at home, what should it have been? It's a shrimp bowl plant.

I thought you were going to say it's a My Chemical Romance. It's a My Chemical Romance. It's a bit of a Sum 41. Some are calling it a SUM 41. A bunch of boomers slamming their finger on the clicker. What's he talking about? Just an old hag jerking the rabbit ears around. What's he talking about? All right. Business tends to slow down at Red Lobster locations during the third and fourth quarters. So it's parent company, Thai Union.

If people didn't know, Red Lobster, America's blackest restaurant behind Popeyes, is owned by, from the sounds of it, a bunch of Thai... Apparently. For $20, customers could eat as much shrimp as they wanted. The promotion has been a tradition at the chain for more than 18 years. Here's what happened. I'm just going to cut. Black people saw this and they ran.

You got to read between the lines. You got to cut between the fuss and the muss. If you have any experience in those environments, you know what you're dealing with. One person at the table orders endless shrimp and uses that. a loophole to feed six people. They're really banking on the endless shrimp. Oh, did they let them do that? That's fucking dumb. Because if you're at a buffet or something, if one person orders

Well, this thing, you're now in the position where, and it depends what city you're in, you're in the position where you need to police this. A lot of people don't want to police this. A lot of people don't want to get into a fight with a black fan. That could, these days, that could get you killed or in prison. So it's like, I just got, they, they do it. So fucking one of them orders and then they just, maybe it's under the table, whatever. They're filling their purses with shrimp.

Now for me, you know, I go to this, you go to this, you eat shrimp like a white- You know, you eat shrimp, you order a man's day's wage of shrimp, and then you stop because you're not going to make a scene. You're not going to bring shame to your family. No one does. No one says, I'm going to have... seven people's weights of shrimp. It will never occur to you, to the Anglo mind, to do that.

I bet you don't even know what you're talking about. I bet you've never even been to Red Lobster. I've been to Red Lobster. I went there for... Oh, you know what? Last time I was there, my grandpa... a long time ago, and a year called 2000 never happened. Finish her! Look here, let me finish. This motherfucker couldn't pick endless shrimp out of a fucking lineup. You don't know whether you're coming, you're going. It's as shrimp as that. Now, okay. Moving on. We got a lot.

Maybe I'll just do this one quickly because I don't really know where I'm going with it, but I feel like we need to talk. and i don't think we've talked about this before there's someone showed me all the well-known incel categories i got a an image these are different variations or brands of incels and i thought maybe We might be. And maybe it's more than one. So this is from what looks to be some kind of wiki. Some kind of expansive data. So, well-known in cell capture.

Arab cell. Bean cell. I mean, that looks like it might be. But there's also... No, that's the Hispanic one. So, you know, Arab gets to be just called Arab. Hispanic... Black cell. Curry cell. France cell. I'm just from France. Hapa cell. Italian cell. Red cell. Rice cell. Turk cell. White cell. White cell doesn't sound... you can't be, maybe. I think if you're an insult, you stop being white.

Let's go with that. Let's go with that. But then there's also Christo cell and Muslim cell. You'd think they would cancel each other out. I'm noticing no Jew cell. Neither origin and race nor religion. But Jews don't have... This is fair. Disease and mental. Mental. That could be all of it. Autist cell, spurg cell, disabled cell. gyno cell. Wait, wait, wait. Hold on. So being a woman is filed under disease and mental illness. It's under mental illness, but also it can't just be like a woman.

you're a man who has woman disease mom just pulled away from her dad the chart giving me the death stare from across the room. Well, but what did you do wrong? You didn't do anything wrong. You just written the thing. I'm just pointing out what's on this chart. I didn't make the chart. PSSD cell. It'd be funny if there was PTSD cell. Yeah, maybe it's a typo. It's got to be PTSD and they just typed it wrong. Maybe it's some weird European way.

It's a stutter cell. But that's it. That's all the diseases. No other disease can. Like, you can't be a cancer cell? You can't be a cancer cell. You can't be an AIDS cell. Yeah. No one's an AIDS cell. You can't, actually. There's no such thing as an AIDS cell, because the only way you get... Exactly. Wouldn't it be funny if you found other people... Dude, disease and mental should be 30 lines long. I want to see molest itself.

Okay, looks. Acne cell, bob cell, chin cell, fin cell, ugly cell. I mean, that's... I'm not going to do all of these because who... Also, here's sex. This is what I want... Mansell. What the fuck is that? That doesn't make sense. Okay, so... Man-cell. Fem-cell-light. The prefix is supposed to be... celibate. So man celibate. Like, what does that mean, actually? I'm mad.

because there's there's fem cell then fem cell light and then true fem cell which is funny because you know that had to be an internal conflict where there was a lot of women claiming to be fem cells but they could get any guy they wanted like they were not a true fem cell yeah which is an actual the type of woman that most guys just cancel out of their vision and i'm not i'm not sure yeah but i'm not sure

Because for every woman like that, there's a man at the absolute bottom of the totem pole who probably... Like, for every bottom woman, there's a lower bottom man in our society. And I bet this is what happens every day in the femcell sphere. I bet this is just... a full debate here's one that I like kink sell like you're so in

That's really weird, actually, now that I think of it. You're like an Ouroboros of Hordiness. You just can't get out of that. You're so into... You're such a sex nerd that no one will come near you. Here's one. Job. STEM. Also, your job works sell. I like to have sex. I'm married, actually, but I work long hours. Like, now you're celibate. That's not celibate. I like this one. The meaning of the word celebration. I like Stoicel, which is like, that is just being a Stoic. Being a Stoic is not.

What's this mismatch cell? Look at this countryside cell. Just you live on a farm. Hey, they got Marcel. the guy named marcel these these are remember the title here is well known in cell category so there's at least there's several people are one extremely vocal person who's been all about this shit yeah So I guess if we had to pick one, what cell would I be? Which cell would you be? Which cell? Because there's Jim's cell, which is kind of funny. So I think the idea is the prefix is the thing.

So for you it would be... what would it be? Also, there's your frame cell. Frame cell. What's that? Because you're built like a brick shed. Women look at you. It's like, is he going to hurt me? That's a little too close to the phone on Apple. Women see you in the rearview mirror and they're like, Shit. Humiliation. To be fair, this is...

Genuinely hurtful because I've been told this in the workplace. I've been told this by direct supervisors that say, you know, you're actually a big intimidating guy and a lot of women are bothered. Well, that's why I'm saying it. I know that. So I thought we were just going to have some fun, not just say some real things. Sorry about it.

Yeah, I know. You know, you have sort of like a rapist physiognomy. There we go. There we go. I'm a rape cell. You know what that would be? Here's one for you. Here's one that could cut a few ways. I have a goonish form, like I'm an old goon guy, but also there could be the guy who goons so much. Yeah, you know what? Yeah, could be. Tell you what, it cost you nothing just to say.

That's true. We could have just been two friends saying, hey, we're both men's selves. Moving on to the next fucking thing. The next fucking thing is even more important. what do we got here now this someone showed me this map and i wanted to bring this up And if people are looking for that, there's the audio of it.

full video version of that on our youtube and our odyssey um should have done this because it's a visual component i didn't get to it so we're just going to describe and christ we could spend an hour But I'm going to describe the title. You know what? I'm going to let you... What are we looking at here, Judas? This is a map of what some might call Europe. And it's got numbers on each country showing the average number of bowel movements per week. That's what we're looking at.

And it's from the low end, you know, light beige. Dark brown is 30. so i don't think this is a work week like we're using a full seven day week that's how Yeah. And, you know, I show this to my wife. I look and I immediately show my wife and she's like, well, maybe what are they counting as bowel moons? I said, it's shit. Of course it's shit. She's acting out. Woman alert! This is what I deal with. Maybe a bound word. It's turds. Yeah. It can't be nothing else.

Yeah. Now, we got a few countries here. There's a few ends of the spectrum looking at. Like, okay, you've got Britain over here. 32. They're shitting 32 times a week. It's the curry. Up here in Scandinavia, you know, we got, what would that be with seven? Would that be... Finland. That's Finland. perfectly regular. Clean utopia. One a day. Ain't nothing wrong with that. Now I'm looking at.

Look at this circled area here. That's North Macedonia. North Macedonia 1. One shit a week. And it's a good one. They plan all week. i'm flabbergasted yeah because like did they okay let's say there's a survey there's no way they didn't understand the question no one does one of any You know what, though? I'd like to point out Serbia. Sorry, Kosovo. Kosovo doesn't have... Yeah, what the fuck?

Kosovians don't shit. Or, or, they all go to Montenegro to shit. Yeah. Well, me and my wife are kind of getting a debate about... Because on the high end, Italy, 55. Oh, jeez, I didn't even see that. What the fuck? How are you shaking 55? How are you doing that? What's that per day? What are we looking at here? That's seven, almost eight. A minimum of seven... That's like every three hours. Every three, four hours. I think you can round... Let's round up to...

Well, yeah, but you're sleeping. You've got to sleep, actually. Let's say you've got 18 hours awake, right? Seven and a half shits over 18 hours? What the fuck, man? You're shitting every couple hours. Yeah. How does this country? Well, the country doesn't function. I guess that explains it. It's true. It's true. And you've also got to wonder about the demographics, right?

Neapolitans shit less than Sicilians. Maybe the Sicilians shit 108 times a week, and the rest of it, like, you know, the Alps, they're alright. Also, can I just point this out? So, with Britain here, we got 32 on the left. And Ireland, it's two. Two in Ireland. What's going on, guys? You know what? This has got to be the same thing where the Irish are taking weekend trips over to the Republic of Ireland to just... It's got to be because they've got Northern Ireland here.

Sorry, that's what I meant to say. I'm going to get dinged for that. I meant Northern Ireland. Everyone in Northern Ireland is doing all the shitting. Or they're going... I can believe this. I can believe that the Irish are going into... Do you think you could bring a motion to EU Parliament using this map? I can bring a motion to EU Parliament. To convince them to equalize the shitting across.

Like, this is... I'll tell you what, no one's talking about it. Yeah, no one's talking about it. I want to get a good friend of the show fan... the graph guys in on this i want to draw a correlation between these countries because who are the top shit You got your Spain. I think there's a Greece. Is Greece doing a lot of shitting? Greece is... That's reasonable. I want to draw a correlation between how much they're shitting and their economics.

the state of their productive capabilities. Well, look, it's leading the pack is Italy, France, Spain, the UK, and Germany, and in close second is Russia. Yeah. Oh, and Turkey and Russia are kind of neck and neck, you know, the second world. And then we got the Balkans are all down in the, you know, in the three to seven range. The only one that's like moderate and also well.

So I don't understand this fucking map. Scandies seem to have it together. Yeah, that's the only thing that we can take away from this. Then something is terribly wrong with Italy. Yeah, even Latvia, like Latvia. I knew a Latvian guy. He shot at least once a day. Are you sure? Well, he's taking washroom breaks. Maybe he's taking a piss all the time. Maybe they just piss all the-

Legitimate question, actually, no joke here. What if it's like the meat in the diet? Like people up north, they're all eating like salo and jerky and they're never eating fruits and vegetables and they literally just drop bread. Is that possible? I never even thought about that. Like we eat so much bread. Not only is it possible, it's probable. It's probable.

I tell you what, until they come up, I say, if I'm in charge, we have a memorandum, we shut down shitting until we figure out what's going on. Yep, yep, we can't let it keep going. We're going to pause on turns until we figure. Wasn't it great when Trump said that? It's like, we're going to stop immigration until we figure out what's going on.

But I like that. I like the idea that that's plain language. We don't know what's going on. What the fuck's going on? Let's stop this until we figure this shit out. No one knows what's going on, and we should stop politics, everything, until we figure it out. so one last I don't know what to make of this.

Explain it as I was explaining to me. So there's a character that everyone seemed to know about except for me. This guy named Chad Rhodes. So this was a guy of right... who was known in circles for like workout tests. It turns out... I'm just going to read the post right here. So anyway, this guy, and this is from Fortisax of Fortis...

Fame, a lovely channel. People should check out and telegram for a sexist. So 40 says. So anyway, this guy named Chad Rhodes was a loudmouth member of a group called FDA. dating advice. He told a friend of mine at one point he'd hoped her children would die. He ended up having an almost terminally ill disease, begged people to fund his GoFundMe. He was outed as an open woman.

He got a woman pregnant, beat her up, left her, played the victim, got another girlfriend, beat that girlfriend, got other men. Kan telah. beat her and left her, and now he's an openly gay OnlyFans model. What a rollercoaster. Yeah, an odyssey. So first of all, this reminds me of a lot of people. by the name of H.R. Morgan. So H.R. Morgan was the author of a few large and popular books on fascism.

You can find it on Amazon. So if anyone was interested in the history of fascism, that was one that people... But this H.R. Morgan was also notorious for completely separating from fascism and the far right and turning into an anti-fuck. And like going on TikTok and saying, I wrote the book on fascism and now look at me, you know what I mean? Like some, that whole transition was very amusing to them. And I have no reason to believe that that.

I don't know, like, is this just the type of mind that can do this many heel turns? So I'll give an example. Here's a pose. Here's a post from Chad Rowe. This is a not safe for work post. I'm just going to read it because I can't stop laughing at it. It sounded fake when I read it. It sounded like this guy was hacked. And I read this like, okay, this is... And then they're like, no, no.

Something has been on my mind lately. Let me just say this. I need to state that what I'm about to read is this man named Chad Rhodes. Do not clip this so this sounds like me saying it. He says, something has been on my mind lately that I want to get off. You know, wife beating is a complicated thing. It amazes me how diverse the crowd of men who do it. I identify as a sissy bottom, and I do it just as well as any black man.

The more I've learned and listened, the more I understand that's important to approach wife-beating with an open mind and heart. I, like most wife-beaters, am a gay man. Again, I can't tell which way. Like, it sounds like it's hacked, right? Okay. For years, I hid how much I love schlunking on massive, veiny cars.

For years I attempted to hide it, though it was very obvious to anyone who spoke to me, even for a moment. When me and my ex broke up, she outed me for loving, gaping my ass. I took this opportunity to make myself a very... This post is to take away from her validated accusations of violence and distraction. my boy pussy. My vulnerability is my delicate anal skin, which has been ripped like wallpaper in a rotting mansion. Jesus.

Shit falls out of me like a marble from an open window, uncontrollably and easily, and it always will. Like, you look at that and you're like, what is he even trying to say there? Like, that's the end of the fucking post. It's like, I'm using this to distract from the accusations of wife beating. I shit myself constantly. The end.

It's just like faggot neuroticism. Like, the only way this could be a gen- As I've heard and seen... you know it's like the sort of stuff like is it meant to drum up to drum up uh like drama and even to elicit kind of I don't know I don't never understood it because it's like you're saying all the stuff that you know that nobody likes this everybody's mad about this who is this for who is this for

Because I don't know anything about the gay community. I'm like, is this a thing? Is life beating a cool thing over there? I wouldn't know. This is the first time. It might make sense. Like, if you told me that gay guys are into abusing women, I'd probably believe it just sight unseen. Well, absolutely they are. They're into abuse generally, but they're definitely into abusing women. I was going to say that's probably one of the past. You abuse women because you hate

hating women, like, the corollary of that is loving men, isn't it? Like, to some extent. Like, if you really just genuinely despise- see a woman you're like ah ew women like you i hate women well there's two ways to interpret that it's either you just are mad about

and women's role in society, or you literally are just like physically disgusted by women because you love cock. So, I mean, it's kind of, there can't be no overlap. There's definitely some overlap there. Yeah. So certainly back to the insult. This guy would be like a white... except that he has gay sex We don't know. He could be a gay loser because I...

I made the mistake of checking out his Twitter because someone linked his Twitter. I had to prove that it was real. And it was all just an unending stream of click here to reveal sensitive material. And I didn't click, but I'm like, okay. But maybe he's a guy who's not happy. And maybe he's a wife beat cell. Maybe he's a gape cell. Can you imagine claiming to be a wife beat cell? It's like, oh, I can't get any sex. I keep trying, but then every time I beat my wife...

You just stop doing this crime. Aw, man. Here's one other thing I want. And I'm not sure where I stand on this. And other more knowledgeable people on this topic have probably addressed it. And it's also late news. So there's no reason to even bring this up. But Henry Kiss... to hear what you thought about that. Do you have an opinion on Henry Kissinger? What are your thoughts on his passing?

Henry Kissinger served Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and was consulted by presidents of both parties on international issues throughout his life. has been a friend of mine. Nixon made him a national figure, and together they reimagined U.S. foreign policy, detente with the Soviet Union, relations with China, shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East.

but he had his critics, who described him as manipulative and insecure. Some called him a war criminal for his role in bombing Cambodia and widening the war in Vietnam. I know I don't know that Like there's a lot of guys that we talked to who seem to know all kinds of stuff about the history of them I used to really hate him as an ancap because I hate

cold, recalculated wars geostrategically and killing women and children around the globe. Now that we're far right wingers, we're supposed to really love it.

totally honest like all joking aside I still really hate him like it doesn't it doesn't it just because he happened to blow the fuck Or to then, you know, wipe away the fact that he also... like or that we at least don't hate and at the same time his his campaigns globally and somebody think not like what do they call it just wars you know they were they were like right on their face wars for oil wars for territory wars for wars for

was proud of that so i don't know i i don't like him i'm glad he's dead i'll tell you this ngl i'm hemming and i'm hawing about this you know i go back and forth One hand, he's a Jew. Oh. There you go. But he hates Jews. Oh. Does he hate Jews? Pretty anti-Semitic. He said except for the accident of his birth he would be an anti-Semite. Like, oh. But hold on. Isn't that a...

No, continue. What was it? Oh, sorry. I was going to say that's very distinctly Jewish, right? That's kind of the entire point. Because you can be Jewish and an anti-Semite. Like, I think... almost gets to that point where he's anti anti-jewish power and anti-zionism but like the whole thing with jews is like it's double think it's i will look at the world and say i know all of know it's bad but now hear me out I'm Jewish so I'm gonna do the opposite like he's just he's con

I'm like, alright, so I still hate Because if we're joking around, it's funny to say, haha, Cambodia, go way to go, Kissinger. But actually, though, why do we hate... like cambodians are just like jungle asians like what and he mostly just killed women and children so like i i don't understand i don't i get the joke funny jokes haha but also if that's actually the only good reason to like them then i mean being serious we don't Exactly, killing women and children. killing women. Huh.

What are you gay? No, I've never even seen a guy. I'm not gay. Never even heard of a man. And by the way, we're moving on from Henry Kissinger. I've got nothing else to say. I just wanted to say here's a quote from Fancy. Because I made a prediction that I'm going to lose. Nice. That's good. Like, with the way the articles for the vanguardist journal are going, like, we're getting caught up with a lot of... From here, we're just going to get weird with everything.

Perfect. And I said I'm going to be losing my mind. I'm not insane. I'm an LLM, a lunatic with a loose mark. And then he went to an AI and some kind of pun AI that he has access to. He's got a whole suite. And here's something it spat out. It said, okay, here's five more puns. and the theme of going crazy. I'm going to read them out to you. I'm not paranoid. I trust LLM. Lies, leaks, and manipulation. nice that's pretty good I don't need a hobby I love LLM licking lamps and mirrors

I'm not angry. I express LLM. Loud laughter and mocking. I don't need a friend. I have a LLM. Loyal llama mate. And my personal favorite, I'm not sad. I enjoy LLM, listening to lullabies and moaning. Alright. Think of just saying that in the workplace. Is anyone else here listening to lullabies and moaning?

Oh, man. This is a great episode so far. How are things going with you, by the way? How's everything over there with kids and everything? People like hearing about our children for some reason. They're fantastic. They're at that perfect age. I was telling you earlier where they almost put themselves to bed now. Like you got a routine.

them a song and they tuck themselves in it's fucking idyllic man that's great have kids everybody go have kids the first couple years is rough and then it's it's all right uh yeah so my There's a lot of guys who will direct message me and say that they're an expecting father or they're around, they haven't had a kid for the same age. And they seem to find this stuff very interesting. What age did you start feeding your girls solid food? And by solid food, I mean anything but formula or milk.

about incorporated into part of the routine. It was around a year for both of them. But at that point, we'd already been doing it for a few months. They say at around six months is like the earliest you can do it. So that's around the time we start. And it's like very mushy. It's pure. because they got no teeth and they don't know how

When people, you know, they don't know going in buttons, again, they don't know how to do anything. And I mean not anything. Like, for example, with Nichols, a lot of people didn't have... discussed this before, but he didn't really know how to sleep. So I had to like... train him get him sleep trained you have to train them how to sleep and stay asleep yeah kind of wear them out and get them into a rhythm get them into a routine because they don't have

Then they kind of lock into the circadian rhythm of the Earth. All that stuff's real. And a lot of stuff you might have thought is just old wives' tales or superstitions.

Or old fuddy-duddy stuff. Like, that's all real. And, like, every fucking parent kind of becomes a bit of a traditionalist eventually. All of a sudden, all kinds of kooky grandma shit starts being real. Like, tricks. Because you have to trick... like and that's the reason i'm saying this because like with a kid um you have to they'll get tired of food and by tired everyone's like oh

Yeah, okay, you'll be sitting there for an hour trying to, like, shove food in their mouths. And if you shove food in their mouth, they're wailing and spitting it out at you. Like, you can't. Everyone thinks they could, like, mu- can't fucking do it you have and this is why fathers have such a great like they're better than jack

Just the ability to keep that keen focus and not do what you want to do, which is rip every window of your house off the wall. Don't smash them. Rip the entire frame out. Because I need to, I can't even reason with it. We need to create a Socratic dialogue with our eyes or something, communicate in some way. But you need this because I told everyone you're going to be at least six and a half feet tall. And the only way to do that is to eat these lentils.

all this i was never given this because you learned that from your parents like i was they were saying like oh yeah you didn't you didn't like that so you ever hear that from people where it's like yeah i never i never ate carrots when i was like oh you didn't I'm like, well, so? It's called bad parenting. Yeah, so? Make me have the... I'm a fucking moron as a kid. You know what? I eat literally everything.

And I never heard that story as a kid because my dad was the one who made these decisions and he was doing it the same way that you and I are doing it with our kids, saying, you know, no. Okay, fine, don't. Also, go to bed. Also, no TV. So, I mean, it's not hard. And I'm doing that with our three-year-old now, and it's flawless. Like, they both eat. Neither one of them has...

You just have to be firm about it. For example, my wife doesn't know how to ride a bike. And she really regrets. She wishes she could ride a bike. like oh you didn't want to ride a bike like we asked you you didn't want to it's like well like Kids don't understand.

want like that like they'll say they want something but then if you catch them when they're playing with their toys and ask if they want to do it they'll say no and as a parent you can't say oh well i guess they don't want to do it anymore it's like no you you have to understand that they need to learn how to ride a bike You need to guide them to that. You can almost control... just by

Like, I'll pick the two-year-old up all the time. She'll be doing something, and she's livid. She's playing with her magnets or something, and she's screaming at me, and she's crying, and she's spitting. And all I have to do is physically turn her 180 degrees. an object. It's like a light.

Because they don't, like, again, like you said, they don't know how to do this. Their patterns of behavior aren't set up yet. And this is how you're setting them up. And one of the things that you're actually setting up there subconsciously is, when I come in and ask...

something, you will pay attention to it and you will like it. You'll thank me. It's going to be good. Trust me. But if you don't, what's going to happen is when they're older, they're not going to fucking listen to you because they've never had. They don't have any built-in good experiences, any memories of them listening to you, being forced to listen to you, and then be like, damn, dad, you were right. That's actually fucking cool. But sorry, you suck.

It's like, oh, but you didn't like eating peas. So yeah, because I want to eat candy. I want to circle back to the sleeping thing.

our girls now like i was saying earlier about that it's so nice that they're relearning to sleep i know and what i've seen is it's gonna it comes and goes and comes and goes and i was thinking about it um adults most adults in our generation don't want to sleep you know what i mean like you know people will drink before they sleep they don't drink enough water be in rhythm because I sleep at different times.

Like you shouldn't be looking at a screen right before going to sleep. You can't sleep and you're not going to reach REM quick enough, right? Or you know what I mean? Or you're sleeping too long or you're not sleeping enough or like you eat too many fatty foods.

Sorry, you eat to me sugary foods, not enough fatty foods. Like, there's a lot of things. You learn this with the kids. But then, like, I mean, I do this stuff because I only get five to six hours of sleep at night. But I'm well rested because I don't have screen time. I drink lots of water. I do drink. Like, I'll drink, I'll eat some fatty protein.

And I have a very, very regular bedtime and I'm fine. I can wake up at five every day. And it's the same thing with kids. It's just weird because I had to learn this as an adult. And I know all kinds of people that are like, oh, I have insomnia. Or like, I don't feel well.

hours is like dude that you're sick that's not normal you should like you shouldn't be able to like as an adult maybe not in your eight and when you're 18 19 but when you're in your late 20s you should be able to sleep five six hours and feel you should be able to do that for months. If you can't do that, that's that you only think it's normal because everybody else in your cohort also has that same fucking problem. Yeah. And a lot of parents I'm noticing don't really get.

Now, full disclosure, we like Nichols, get it, because we got him what we call sleep trained pretty early. He was in his own room at like months. in a bassinet um because if he was in the bassinet in our room we had to like go in there during the day and we were waking him up because he would only sleep for like 15 to 20 So we really needed him to get those 50-20 mats. So we had to get him used to a space.

So, by the way, for young parents, it takes your kid, like, a couple tries to get used to anything, like, a week, and it'll get used to it. Like, it'll get used to sleeping in a room. It'll get used... with it but then yeah we got him sleeping through the night like 11 12 hours like it really really worked He goes to bed.

so we get up at five that's an extra two hours in the morning we have to do all our other shit so that two hour block where he's asleep and we're awake and also like a couple hours after he goes to bed that time because that's what we need because remember like my wife So we had to figure this out fast. We had to figure out the sleeping thing because we couldn't juggle.

consistency going um and we haven't figured out now but like for that those first few months it was really really touch and go but you can do it you can get them into something like And once you have that, you got like a big... At the very least, you're like, okay, they're getting enough.

They're building their mental faculties. But again, that's a problem you want to solve. And I'm noticing a lot of parents, they don't see that as a problem. They say, oh, he doesn't want to sleep. Just let him stay up with us. We want to go to a concert. Take him to the fucking concert. Yeah, he's screaming. but you know, kids scream a lot. And I found that that was a big gulf between myself.

other members of my family where they're like, oh yeah, some kids just scream for hours. You just put them in a room and just leave them there. And for me, I'm like, no, I look at this very analytically. So does my wife.

person so we're like okay it's very simple if you let it be baby screaming equals solve baby screaming and figure that out like just as just get them to stop screaming whatever you got especially when it's that young there's a cry it out method you employ later but if it's like three months old and it's screaming you gotta solve that the cry it out thing is for toddlers because they're not crying

Here's my fear. My fear is that I'm going to be too enjoyably silly as a dad that he won't fear me. For example, you know, his mother is feeding. because he can drink And there's like some breath. the solid foods. And he's not drinking. So I'm in the background. I like mime that I'm And I'm tilting it back to like, hey, look, drink. And he starts laughing. He thinks that I don't know that I don't have a cup. He said, look at that. What a fucking buffoon.

He's laughing at me and that's going to stay with him. That's a new form of trauma. He's not going to respect me because he thinks I don't know the difference between a cup and no cup. Some kind of an idiot over here. Some kind of fucking moron. And it's just stuff like that where I'm like, you know, he's not going to fear me to the level that we all want. We all want our son. Daughters, no. We want daughters.

Fear us. I want my son to fear me. I'll tell you, you need the daughters to fear you, too. You do need your kids to fear you. The kids need to react. But you know what? And I know you're not at the stage yet, but when they get to, especially when they get to walk.

as toddlers because they switch so quickly on things you can go 0 to 100 and back like you can be sitting on the floor laughing seconds later be standing up you can raise your voice you can make the scowl you can have them you can not even not even yelling just through words and direct like pointing and eye contact you can cry

caused and make them cry and then you just turn it right back around again like you don't i you don't don't do that in every situation but like you do get to be the funny guy good. That's what I was worried about. I'll tell you what happened to me. We got him eating meat. He loves eating meat. We got some ground beef. A beef ball. He's chewing on that. He takes the beef ball, looks his mother straight in the eyes, drops it on the ground. Looks at her stone.

I look at him, I say, hey, hey, you know, using the dad voice, hey. And he looks at me and he just starts smiling. He doesn't know, you know, I can't, I can't, I say to him, and he's looking at me, he's smiling, I say, I'm. I'm disappointed. He starts laughing like it's the funniest thing in the world. That's the nuclear option. So maybe I'm rolling that in a bit too early, but I get a sense he knows that I have no power in this relationship. The hey, the hey is like the dog tag, sorry, the dog

And on the page is written an experience that he hasn't had yet. And the experience is, pick him up with one arm and take him up in his bed without saying... for five to ten minutes and then pick them up and without letting respond. If you don't eat your dinner, you're coming right back up here. And I'm not.

And then he gets it. You only do that like three times. And then he knows what hate means. Right? And it's fucking, it's like Pavlovian. The whole Pavlov thing is fucking amazing with kids. They really do pick shit up in like two, three tries usually. I wonder if it works better or worse if they are retarded. What do you think? Probably worse. The whole thing is they don't get patterns, right? I would assume it's much better. they would fear fire. And danger.

Like, I think it's well within the bounds of reason that someone with Down syndrome would fear God. And I think we can extrapolate based on that. a verbal gun. So if you have a down syndrome toddler just threaten them with a gun. Show them the gun. Let them know you have the gun. I'm not saying do anything that would get the gun taken away. Don't fire it in the air. Don't start spinning it around, but let them know you have it. This is not real. Do not do this. Warning, warning, incoming irony.

Also, I don't want to be misconstrued that I'm not saying threaten the child. I'm saying threaten its mother. Oh, okay. Point the gun at your wife's head and say, you love mommy, right? She's not going to be around. if you don't pick up your toys. And then you say, I'm gay. Bomb has been planted. She's not going to be around anymore if you don't put your pod... Fucking three-year-old won't turn his podcast off.

He can't turn off his tens of thousands of fans. Wouldn't that be funny, though, if our kids start a podcast that's more successful? Shit. Where do you stand on the technology thing? I don't know if anyone finds this interesting, but I am curious where, because your children are... Are they on YouTube? Are they on kids' YouTube? No. What do you think about all that? The only screens that they get...

It's like three shows, like Peppa Pig is one of them, Octonauts from BBC, which is like kind of a learning show, and Blitz.

think those are the only three right now and aside from that there's no screens for them no phones no YouTube especially certainly nothing that they can access and control my eldest is she could she could manipulate it like she could use these things if I taught her how and at some point I'm gonna point no just it's not it's off limits I'll tell you what I liked I remember as a kid and this is kind of for me it's informing things that I

Me and my brother had our favorite movies, and we just watched them on repeat. But then I realized what that was. That was my parents being sick of us and just letting us sit. VHS because like with the girls they'll watch they'll have a favorite movie they'll watch it once and then they'll ask for it they want to watch it again and I'm like well then I don't have to vet

But if they watch it three times, that's all they want to watch, and they cry if they can't watch it. And it starts to become part of their personality. Like, even my eldest has been watching Octonauts, which was one of the three shows, and now everything's about Octonauts, and she's putting...

And I'm like, all right, I'm trying to teach her the idea that this is a television show. It's rotting your brain. They're not real characters. You know, the things that are in fairness, there is real thing. aqua biology and shit but like the point is is like stop fucking talking about aquanauts so we're punishing her when she brings up We don't want to talk about TV shows, right? I have some pretty vivid memories of when I was very, very young. And it seems that...

But I remember there was a strange coming online moment where, you know, when I was growing up, whenever you're at someone's house, there's always just a Disney movie. It seemed like for huge swathes of my life, like there's always just a fuck, some Disney fucking thing playing and you would just sit there and you would watch it. And the reason, and I remember thinking this, I remember being a kid and the little mermaid.

and i was just like in a room watching it i remember thinking to myself and this is so clear thinking that i've seen this movie so many times but i don't remember what happened I remember wanting, like, knowing I watched this movie, but I just had that feeling of, like, I know what comprehension is. I comprehend. I'm aware that I know what this movie is, but I forget. I don't know the sequence of events. I don't.

and that was such a weird realization for me but that's how kids see things like they don't they remember scenes they don't know how they go together and to this day like i've never watched that um that disney robin hood movie with the foxes remember that yeah yeah like i know that movie i know the songs i'm like what the fuck is that movie about i don't know what half

But I just, like, remember experiencing it. And that's such a weird thing to realize, oh, that's how kids see the world. They don't even... they kind of comprehend experiences but and they know enough about permanence to prefer things but they don't know the details of it as they're experiencing it anyway that's just that was like

you you really you really it's weird because it's like your kids get smart and you're thinking oh man they're so smart they can take on so much but at the same time you really do have to like hijack them and ride them um they're always going in the right direction. You can't take for granted just because they're learning to talk and they're learning to read and to do math. They literally don't. concepts about humanity, about people, right? So stuff like... the concept of the five day

where you space things and put things within your day. Like I never, I didn't get that until I was in my fucking twenties. So I'm hoping I can, my kid. But I can't imagine them even understanding when they're 12. So when they're 12, you're still going to have to be ordering that part of their life. Right. And I see a lot of people are like, my kids are so smart. And at five, they were already doing this for themselves. It's like.

them do that for themselves yeah like there is no for themselves like they can they're it's good that they're mimicking you it's good that they can because remember when we discussed on the show the society of mind That was a fascinating book. And what they were doing was paying very close attention to babies and infants and how they build their minds and the mechanics of how you start.

to build up to larger motor functions. And this is what's so fascinating, especially if you're a man and a father, you can pay close attention and watch If you go and listen to our... and think of them building their their mental faculties like you would build an operating system like all the work that goes into them learning how to pin

finger like you can watch them learn how to do that once they learn how to do that that's like a level up and then they can manipulate things and then they're And then like you watch them learn how to like, cause you can get like babies.

but you'll notice when they actually do start stacking blocks. You usually start by showing them how to knock down blocks. You show them how to destroy something, which is easy to do. It's hard to focus and destroy something, but then they... and you can watch them learn how...

like i i've seen my son let's watching them learn is fascinating because learned is and they have to learn how to like jerk their legs forward and watching him like he can hold himself up jerk his leg under and go from a cron position to a seated position that was like seven different fun bit to do this one task and I saw him the first time he did he looked at me like what the fuck did I just do no absolutely I think fascinating in like Something that holds.

It's like, in that sense, I guess, now we say that's rewarding. But the idea that... the idea that it's an achievement you need to like even just year by year month by month it's an achievement it's like learning a skill it's like somebody you know we always joke about it that like uh blacks don't understand And it's like, you got to be there, man. Like, if you haven't done it, you wouldn't understand. But if you're the person who does it, you're like, I need to do this again.

And it's like that. Like it's an experience. It's a fascination. Rewarding like there's a lot of ways to describe it, but you really have to be there you really have to do I wanted to say, again, about the sleep thing, because you're talking about learning and the way that they just figure stuff out and it's so novel. My observation, this could be wrong, my observation with my kids is that is the...

Like you said, he learns to sit up and it blows his mind that he can now sit up under his own power that night. and sleep. That's the point. He's sitting up. A lot of people don't know that. When they learn a new thing, sometimes like if you – some people can do this with like a baby monitor if it's just an audio monitor. But we actually have a camera over the – we're a bit much.

we're a bit extra but we got it's called a nanicab so we can actually watch him when he's sleeping you'll see them like wake up in the middle and just start practicing it. It's like the weirdest thing in the world. We've got that too. Like my eldest, right?

creative and she has great grasp of English so she's to the point now just in the past month where she's got taken They're all like using pieces of words from songs that I've taught her and then making up stories about people that she knows But that's the same thing like she can't sleep and she's always I can't sleep I can't sleep I'm like you you have to tell her you have to close your eyes she doesn't get it you have to close your eyes and you have

singing you can't sleep and sing she honestly didn't get that like it blew her mind it's like because otherwise i'm watching her on the camera i put her to bed and as soon as i leave the room because she knows she's not supposed to she starts singing and then she's waking her sister

or she's telling a story or she's got little toys in her bed and she's doing a little diorama on the pillow at like one in the morning. And like, you know what I mean? But again, with the sleep regression, that's the reason that you have to keep, I bet you have. I remember being told by my dad. And I think.

Like whatever it is you learn during the day is going to keep you up. And I think everybody, everybody struggles. Some people struggle with that in adulthood. So it's interesting because you watch them do it from birth up until they're. Yeah, and I think you're looking at it, and I don't like to, you know, I was on a stream just last night with this really interesting guy named American Elitist.

American elitist. We'll be having that interview on this show, not this episode, not the next one, because this episode we have Disgraced Prop.

next episode it's gonna be e michael jones one after that will be american elitist and then we might that might round out the year i think um for for episodes and we have to we'll start again fresh in 2024 but um here's a funny thing i didn't get to mention um so my wife you know she pays attention to all the mom stuff so the experience that every single woman is that once you have a kid, whatever algorithms that she's plugged into will immediately start serving her mom stuff.

So she's like, I used to like fashion. I used to like other things, but now it's just. and so you get exposed to the mob And one thing that she had been exposed to was women judge each other. One of them was that, apparently, mothers who have only boys, only sons, they call themselves boy moms, there's apparently some hierarchy where they feel like they're superior. Have you heard about that? Have you experienced that at all?

like they feel like they have a harder time and it's a bigger burden yeah they feel like it's a harder time being a woman raising sons they feel like they're they have a harder go which means they're better at being moms absolutely it's a total it's a total bitch move too yeah yeah so because my my wife was like because we have one son and you're hoping for a girl like maybe it'd be nice

She had started saying, like, you know what, I'd be okay with two sons. Because she started getting into the idea of, like, oh, he's going to... two boys and she's kind of become acclimated to raising a boy she's walked through the fire because raising a boy is a lot harder it's a lot more energetic they're a lot stronger and wilder not to say girls are The edge case of the whole mother-son thing where it's really obvious is either single mothers of sons or mothers of sons who have a husband.

Like my mom. tell other people about how I remember meeting people as an adult and hearing from them how awful I Really? Yeah. Let's spend some time on this. I want to hear this. I knew this fucking guy. This was a long time ago. This was probably about 10 years ago. But this guy was a guy. was a guy that my mom had been working with on a bunch of projects and apparently through talking and like working together at the church she had been like spilling the beans about how like

Um, and then one day he just took it upon himself because he, a bunch of people from the church were over and then they had, like for coffee and stuff, they'd left and he was the last one there. We were just sitting there and he starts like like, shouldn't have done all these things and like at this time He's talking about shit I must have done when I was 11. And I guess he doesn't know that because he's just getting it from my mom. And I'm just...

It is funny the idea of him hearing stories about when you were 11 and thinking it was you as a 22-year-old doing it. Yeah, yeah. You're tracking mud everywhere. You're eating all the cookies. You're a grown man.

This guy was half retarded like he worked in the he worked in like the LCBO not a bright guy so i think he probably just missed a lot of cues but still the fact that like the fact is as a result of that i know my mom is out there telling people how hard and awful it was and again saying oh raising two boys on my own well i mean mom we were both in high school You know what? I bet there's a lot of that. I bet there's like no one understands what I'm going through because, you know.

It's not like you were fucking in and out of jail. It's not like you were stealing cars and shit. No. I was a very well... most other kids in my cohort. I've always been under the radar. But I just gave her lip. Why? Because I'm a fucking kid. Like, what do you want? Oh, I stayed out late and I didn't call back. Oh, I'm such an awful kid. Fucking Christ. The worst thing about your brother is that he just never leaves his room. Like, what's your brother?

Like, literally nothing. Yeah, yeah. Well, he's a neat now, and like I've said a million times, like, it's essentially, it's largely her fault that he is that way, so. Yeah. Anyway, there's an interesting article. you know what and here's another thing i don't want to spend too long on this because we have to get to other stuff but i find that and i see this around people

and I don't know if it's more in women or whatnot, but there's so much more secret resentment than you would expect in even well-off families. There's so much... between mothers and fathers that the mother, like a lot of dads feel, you know, they leave a lot of the parenting to their wives and I don't think they understand.

harbor that against them. Not all women, but a lot do. I think all women. I think all women to varying degrees. We've actually, you know, my wife but like we've talked about that and like as a man i guess I don't even notice it. We have to talk about it. And I genuinely am like, wow, I didn't think... Now I know.

Yeah, and this stuff will, like, simmer up over time. It leads to divorce. It leads to, like, taking it out on the kids. And there's all kinds of sometimes resentments between the mothers and, like, if they have a bad relationship with the father.

and this and there's all kinds um and and sometimes it gets wallpapered over in time but like especially when the kids are very young you can see a lot of the stuff jump to the surface because you know your relationship a lot of people don't really understand that um and i don't know like it's just an interesting thing like these these these secret resentments that build up over the course of like 30 40 years and i never

or turn into like, we hear about like dysfunctional or toxic families. You know, that gets overused a lot. Like, oh, every family is dysfunctional. True, but there's some really, really bad ones because people are like the wrong. Yeah, not all marriages are created equal. You can't, if you have a spouse who you're supposed to, like you're a trad con and you have a spouse who you're supposed to spend your whole life with and raise a family and you have.

That is, I know that sounds like a small thing. That's not a small, that's the biggest fucking thing. That is, that is. Not now, but eventually. That's cancer. That's cancer. You have to resolve that. You should be able to talk about it. When you hear about older couples who are like, I hate my wife. That's how you... you actually like and when they say i i hate my

believe them. They probably do because they've been having an imaginary argument in their every day for like 20 years seriously i this is how i see it you talk about it as hard as it is to talk about it because what's the worst what's the worst case scenario is you talk about it and you end up after days of our

Well, guess what? If you don't talk about it, you're absolutely going to have a divorce. Because after two years or ten years of the two of you having a quiet argument in your head, strawmanning the other spouse... you're never going to be able to disentangle that. Because you're not even on the same playing field anymore when you actually finally hash that argument out. You've got years of pent-up rage and a million little arguments that...

You have to, and it comes up, the best thing you can do is just fucking talk about it. And if you are a normal, young, married couple, the talking about it is going to result... That's fine. That's not a divorce. That's a fight. Okay? You can come back to it in the evening. You can come back to it the next morning. But don't come back to it in 10 years. If you come back to it in 10...

Yeah, it's so funny that I've caught myself a couple of times doing that, where you get to know You can kind of... And you just know like, oh, I did this and they're going to get pissed off. And you know what? I bet they're going to say this. And when they say that, here's what I'm going to say. You start preparing. You're having a conversation. attack for what you assume they're going to say when they, you know, notice something or they do something. And you go off into this like fiction.

And then when you confront it, it turns out they weren't upset about that at all. So you spend all this time writing a script that you wasted your time. You're a fucking moron. And then you have to ask, okay, where did that come from? Why did I do it? that it's fucked up that i had i brought myself to like a screaming match in my mind that didn't manifest like what so it's important that sometimes to look on yourself like okay maybe i'm the villain in this situation what let me

And you know, you think about that process, right? Like you have... but the framing that you've got your side. They want to destroy you and you have to launch a preemptive strike. But again, hold on a second. Who are we talking about again? This isn't the school bully. That's where you learn the pattern, by the way, or an older brother.

spouse this is somebody you voluntarily chose to spend your life with so the starting assumption should be this person is on your side discussion, but if you do actually think understand that then you need to and this is something that i learned after many fights with my wife for a long time was that you have to look at it in the context of we are disagreeing

But each of us wants the same thing. We both want the family to survive, the marriage to survive, and we have goals that are roughly in line. And we just need to work out. it's not the same thing I have a big competitive match with my nemesis tomorrow morning, and I have to say exactly the right thing or they will crush me. If you enter an argument with your spouse with that attitude, it's going to be either a divorce or a call.

Like, I don't even know why you would do that. There's no referee here. There's no actual points being kept. Like, if you crush your spell. Like it's not going to work out well for you. Yeah. Oh yeah. You're going to crush your spouse. How's that going to work out for you? Oh yeah. You don't have a marriage.

Why don't you just go to the fucking lawyer and don't have the argument? Honestly. I'm being fucking totally serious. If that's the way you're approaching it, don't even have the argument. Just go to the fucking lawyer and get your divorce paper.

Because, like, it doesn't make any fucking sense, man. But again, this is, it's all, it's very emotional in the moment. And I don't, I'm saying all this, I don't think you can teach this shit. You just have to do it, and then hopefully your marriage survives. There's been lots of arguments where I won with facts.

flipped the script on her. I proved that. Oh, the thing that you're mad at me about, you do that too. I did the whole thing. And I didn't, there's no point going anywhere. I don't know. You don't win. I don't, there's no buzzer in this. The buzzer is you get divorced.

different thing and that's a difficult thing to think of because you'll get locked into these things especially when it's kids too and then that like that changes your dynamic like that's what's interesting about kids like you can be locked in the worst fight of your life but then if the baby's crying you'll bone work on the baby and you'll actually pretend to like each other for a little minute there in front of the kid if you're it's like hey like and the kids sometimes will

That's not the main reason, but it kind of does help. And I pull that trick very quickly. Like if she's mad at me, my son. like identical to me um so like she'll be mad if she's mad at me i'll hold i'll hold him up with his head beside my head like look it's that guy And then, haha, gotcha, bitch. I'm going to use that for as long. We'll be moving on to this book I want to talk about. It's a fascinating book, but leading into that, to set the stage, there's this article.

which I found very interesting. A lot of people, I think, had the wrong read on it, but I'll explain why. This is an article I found in VDare. It's concerning a man named Alex. And he's the CEO of an organization called Palen. Co-founded by Peter Thiel back in 2003, its mission, providing software that customers use to integrate

volumes of data from images to spreadsheets into a central platform where it can then be securely analyzed and interpreted. News of Palantir's plans to go public, as well as its recent announcement that it will be relocating its headquarters from Palo Alto to Denver. has put the secretive software company in the spot.

Best known for its work with U.S. government agencies like the CIA, the Department of Defense, and most controversially, immigration and customs enforcement, the company was founded following 9-11 with the goal of defending American The core mission of our company always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world for the sake of global peace and prosperity. But in recent years, Palantir has also accorded customers like Airbus, Chrysler, and BP.

Commercial customers now make up about 50% of the company's revenue, a number that's trended upwards over the past decade. The title here is Plant Your CEO Carb. He says, we stopped the rise of the far right in Europe. Now, this is an article written by A.W. Morgan. It's highly editorialized, so I'm going to try it. It's like a zero. He says,

Alex Karp, the CEO of Big Tech's globe-straddling software company, Palantir. In a recent interview, Karp... the son of a Jewish father and a black mother, claimed that Palantir's software short-circuited the rise of European political parties energized by the great replacement and migration of illegal aliens. or subsequent terror attacks. So there's been a lot of people who looked at this article and said, oh, look, here's a software CEO saying he tamped down on the popularity of the far right.

Well, what he's actually saying is that their platform called Palantir Gotham, it's a proprietary... He says that software stopped the rise of the far right in Europe because it prevented terror. He says, if those terror attacks had happened, you would have a far right government in every single country in Europe, and especially in the Nordics. The government would be further to the right if not for our product. Is that his? Hold on. I just want to make sure I totally...

His argument is that he prevented the rise by preventing terror attacks perpetrated by immigrants and left-wingers. Exactly, yes. Holy! I didn't even get that part of the story. Because the way the headlines all read is he's preventing right-wing terror. that's crazy yeah it's a it's a total flip of what people think it is because the software you'd think oh and that's also for suppressing right-wing thought no no he's preventing terrorism

which the right wing would be responding to. However, he sees stopping the far right as the main goal, not stopping the terror attack. which is interesting. However, it isn't. I just found that, you know, his business interesting because he's on the cover of Forbes right here. It's here's the title. How a deviant philosopher. CIA-funded data mining juggernaut. And it's got his big big brother. So basically the software he runs is a data mining software and he works

It says, Palantir isn't just another big tech behemoth. In 2013, Forbes profiled the company, which rumor had it, helped track and kill Osama bin Laden. U.S. government intelligence agencies, specifically the CIA, venture capital operation in QTEL. The company's ability to decode and trace data and people like counterterrorism, you know, 24 even worries the deep state friendly American Civil Liberties Union. So basically, this is like what the CIA.

And it seems to have reached a level of power that worries even other, you know, government agencies. But it is interesting. What I liked about this was people are trying to...

When you see a title like that, there's a lot of confusion with people because you're trying to parse the difference between what is the speech being profiled versus what are the... seeked out to try and prevent and like what is social media what is this software is the software integrated into the social media everything is all tangled up like what is the actual goal goal here is the goal to stop terrorists or

real enemy, which you might see as an ideological movement that can be triggered by these actions. And I really wanted to just talk about that because It's sort of the merging of content and media and software and individuals and stuff, which leads us into our discussion of the book, which I'm very... The book is titled Understanding Media, the Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan. Now, this is a book we've mentioned a couple of times in the past.

hot and cold media. This was the guy who coined the term the media is the message. We talked about a lot of little ideas in this book like one about utility of time. i'm gonna try i might skip over some of those parts we've already discussed but there's actually a lot Marshall McLuhan is a towering figure in that sphere, but he's very related to Harold Innes, who we talked about with Empire Communications. In fact, a lot of his ideas built off...

It was funny that I was reading on both of these figures and there's sort of this almost a hipsterish idea that McLuhan is like a sellout version and like if you're a real communications guy. and it's like, fuck. But what's interesting about this book is it's like equal parts history and philosophy and metaphysics and media. And that's what's so interesting about the book. It weaves between all these ideas. Some people would think that it's a bit too flowery.

It's a bit too esoteric, but it's talking about the impact that media has on the human psychology and also human history and how it changes how... That's basically what the idea is about. Media as an extension of man. Because our relationship with media, the claim that he's making, the relationship between the media isn't just like we are an individual.

and we view things that's how some people think of it like oh you view a screen you use a language like it's a very utilitarian way that they view how we interact And he's taking a much more metaphysical approach, one that I think is more correct. That, in short, the development and utilization of different forms of media changes how you think.

Every technology has its own ground rules as it were. It decides all sorts of arrangements in other spheres. The fact of script... and the ability to make inventories and collect data and store data changed many social habits and processes back as early as 3000 BC. However, that's about as early as it scripts began. The effects of rearranging one's experience, organizing one's experience by these new extensions of our power.

are quite unexpected. Perhaps one way of putting it is to say that Writing represents a high degree of specializing of our powers. compared to a preliterate society. There is a considerable concentration on one faculty when you develop a skill like scripting. This is the visual, what you call a visual. Yes, this is a highly specialized dress. compared to anything in ordinary oral societies. There have been many studies made of this in various ways.

But in our own Western world, the rise of the phonetic alphabet seems to have had a bunch to do with platonic culture and the ordering of experience in the terms of ideas, classifying of data and experience by idea. And it also changes the content of the message. Because when I was in college for marketing, I had a professor who claimed...

And people would say, you know, the medium is the message. And he thought he was very clever and says, you know, I thought about that. And I thought, you know, the message is the medium. flipped it and he's like that was supposed to be his stamp on it i'm like well first of all Just flipping it means the same thing, really. You're not being clever. But also, most people who say the medium is a message haven't drilled all the way down to the bottom. It's actually a very, very...

gonna read from a lot of what's in the book. I'm gonna bounce around a lot, but it's all really fascinating stuff. They're all bills off of what we... especially with Innes, you know, the relationship with the types of media. If you'll recall from Innes, we were talking about how communication can be optimized for time or optimized for space. And usually the center of power...

It prefers communication that's optimized for time, things that last a long time, whereas those in the... the outskirts they prefer communication that's optimized for space and all throughout time this would be like the adoption of like statues and carving The government's used very...

which degrades faster, but it can move further, it can be reproduced faster. You can get messages lightning fast, or at least comparatively to what the Center of Power is using. And usually as the Center of Power adopts... of media it inspires the creation of another type of media so just to rehash that what you would see was you know the popularity of paper being used by the people eventually that

So now the only people who really produce manuscripts and paper are those aligned with the publishing industry or power of government. And on the periphery, what are we all using? The internet. We're using memes. We are like anti- you know, and as the centers of power trying to adopt that too.

that can be optimized for space as they try and like wrestle this very fluid, agile media into something more permanent, you know, because that's not what we like. We like things that are a bit more fluid and exciting and energetic. the people in the periphery tend to innovate.

So, but he defines, he says, the medium of the message, this is in McLuhan here, the medium of the message is to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium, and a medium is really just an extended... result from the new scale that is introduced into our fairs by each extent.

or by any new technology. So he's saying, like, every type of media is kind of an extension of the human body. And by media, he includes a lot of different things in media. And there's a few things I might... McLuhan on and I've talked to some people about this people who like But there's a few things in the book I didn't like. One is that he would say also, like, the wheel is a media. You know, the wheel, it's supposed to be an extension of, like, language itself.

form to our thoughts but you know when we think of media we think radio tv internet things like that well really what these are their extent their technological extension The whole world of teenage dress is a world of icon in one hand, in the sense that they stress all sorts of images with strongly marks. Bounding lines, but these images the costumes that they prefer the ones that highlight role-playing rather than individual identity

They would rather be involved. Well, for example, a judge with a wig. It doesn't represent any private entity, whatever. He is a role, a function in the whole society. The surgeon in his white coat, the scientist in the white coat, this is role-playing, and this appeals deeply. the wearing the long hair, the beards and so on, this suggests involvement in depth in role. And it's not a private identity so much as a corporate one. And so when you kind of extend ourselves into...

It changes how we use them. It changes how we think. It changes how we interact with the world. And he actually makes a point that you kind of numb yourself by extending yourself. That's why in the title. There's the man as just sort of this corporeal biological entity and then the tools and the ways we use to extend ourselves with language and with ideas all kind of branch out. and the types of message that are branched off with are fundamentally attuned to what

And what he focuses on mainly in the book is the electric age, the modern era, because he says electricity was really what blew everything apart. And a lot of people don't really think about it like that. Once again, they think they're related. power. It's just power.

you don't understand like what electricity the very concept of electricity and electrical power introduced was the idea of instantaneous you know one example is like the human being that we had a very a very rigid understanding of process like a leads to b leads to c and that was kind of the industrial revolution

But he's like, once you introduce the public, the idea of like an instantaneous network, like you flick a switch and everything turns on. And that's a new way of thinking about things. And you couldn't think about a complex matrix in the set. You had to kind of go through the fire of the electrical revolution to see the world. simple ABC processes. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked here. Because he says here, in the electrical age, when our nervous system is technologically extended to the whole

and to incorporate the whole of mankind within us, we necessarily participate in depth in the consequences of every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and disassociated role of the living. so you're saying you know what the electric what electricity really did was it created all these these power

And that gave us a type of instant connectivity which kind of shattered the old paradigm. And the idea that... could kind of exist in your own little space was gone forever that just doesn't we can try and and live like that we can I you know idealize the transition to where like the western man could immediately apprehend the entire That was a transition that there's no going back from.

All the concepts which underlie our actions, our social life, are changing. We are no longer so concerned with self-definition. With finding our own individual We're more concerned with what the group knows, of feeling as it does, of acting with it, not apart from it. Look, let's back up just a bit. If more books are being used, more being sold, the libraries are crowded, they're busy. How can it be said, aside from what else may be happening, that we're moving out of a print company?

As John said, books are still very important, but their role is changing. The nature of their importance is changing. Remember that books were our first teachers. And during the Renaissance, our only teaching machine. Books are what gave the Renaissance its peculiar stamp. We had to see the world and each other through the printed line on the page. Today there are many media information, many teaching machines.

He says, here, our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological... content of a medium is like a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. The effect of the medium is made strong and intense just because it is given another So it's like, yeah, like speech is good.

Like the medium is like a delivery system for another thing. The content of writing or print is speech, but the writer is almost entirely unaware. And he said the stepping up in speed from the mechanical to the instant electric form reverses explosion.

Until recently, our institutions and arrangements, social, political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as explosive or expansive, and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about... explosion in learning it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives electricity does not centralize but deep

I thought that was an interesting way of putting it. And he says later on in the book It has the unique effect that literacy, literacy as a medium, like the language, the written language as a medium, had the effect of creating... that you could ascertain information and kind of focus on something as an individual. And it just kind of introduced you to the atomized experience. And he said what electricity did for the West.

Because for the longest time, the weather... we don't really have that luxury anymore we are in a process of retribalization through this simultaneously awareness through all the media by electricity and this has the most profound effect on the western mind because he said there's other cultures out there which are already universalistic in nature and he had made a good point he said you know what like when the radio is

the west we can enjoy the radio as like a one-to-one experience but if you introduce like the radio to an oral cult atom bomb going off for them you know so different media has different and the media is represented by technology. And that's kind of what I was getting at with the Palentir. Social media is such a fascinating development because we think of social media and we just think of platforms.

Kind of, but what it is, it really is a media in itself. It is a media that is carrying complex social interaction. as like a form in itself. That was like our own atom bomb. Social media, in a sense, was almost the retribalization of the Western mind. Before everything, like in the Industrial Revolution, everything is special.

their place everyone has their function and then it's cut through electricity and through constant exposure it's like forcing us together and like recreating this idea that like we're all connected not not even in like But it's like we're all aware and all connected to each other at the same time. And we don't really like it. It's an alien feeling to us. We still rebel against it. But that's like this feeling is what most.

at all times and we're experiencing what a lot of oral cultures feel at all. You predicted that the world was becoming a global village. We're going back into the bicameral mind, which is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness. But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly. Oh, no. Tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is sort of butchering each other. It's a full-time sport.

But I had some ideas we got global and tribal. The closer you get together, the more you like each other. There's no evidence of that in any situation that we've ever heard of. that when people get close together, they get more and more savagely impatient with each other. Why is that? Because of the nature of man? His tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people aren't that much in love with each other.

We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu, by literate, what I was talking about before, about just like the strict... And then the native of Ghana is able to cope with literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and breaches him into individuals. I'll say one thing that I disagree with.

He had said that, and this is an interesting thing to say, but he had said that literacy, in a sense, is almost a prison. There's many times in the book where he talks about the more universalist or... And I think we might have talked about this before, but there's this idea of the cognitive tradeoff. The cognitive trade-off hypothesis is this idea that when apes, great apes, human ancestors, they had higher cognitive abilities.

they didn't they were lacking literacy they were lacking individual but they could view the jungle they could view what was going on and do more impressive instant based on what they were seeing. And as we gained literacy, as we gained more advanced communications, we lost And so in that sense, he would say like, oh, the oral culture is like they're able to think on their feet more. They're maybe better to adapt.

And there are a few times in the book where he makes it sound like the literate mind was like, like we were domesticated by words or we're less. And I just disagree with that and he also made a point in the book He said that the Japanese mind was able to retribalize more than the Western mind. And that's because the Western mind had lived... And I mean, if you look it up, the Japanese written, the written Japanese language is, I think, only a couple centuries later than.

so like there's little things like that where i think he's reaching where he says oh obviously the japanese thing. It doesn't matter. We're both equally literate where we both had a written language for around the same amount of time. Anyway, there might be some ways you can pick that apart. I don't know. But that's just one thing that I disagree with. And like he was saying here, specialist technology.

the non-specialist electric technology re-tribalizes. Myth is the contraction or implosion of any process and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary

We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes. You kind of see what I'm talking about. This is a direct quote from the book. He speaks in very... some people like that i like that i can see why that might be difficult for some people i'm also taking like huge chunks and also reading them so maybe some of this needs proper buildup as succinctly as i can because there's quite

he says here's a line here the electric implosion now brings oral and tribal ear culture to the Not only does the visual specialist fragmented Westerner have now to live in the closest daily association with all the oral cultures of Earth, but his own electric technology now. visual or eye man back into the tribal pattern with its seamless web of kinship and interdependence. That's how he views the tribal cultures.

superior, which many people on our side would see superior. And this is something I've remarked on before, where I've said, I don't think the Western man, the European... can collectivize like the eastern man can like a lot of especially They'll look to China. They'll look to the East and say, why can't we collectivize like them, like be a hive mind like them? I just feel different. Yeah, it's not in the current world. Gene culture.

And he says here, and this is kind of what I was talking about, he says, literacy creates very much simpler... than those that develop in the complex web of ordinary tribal and oral societies. For the fragmented man creates the homogenized Western world, while oral societies are made up of people differentiated but by unique emotional mixes. So that's something I, that's a direct quote.

But it's interesting when he talks about really what we're all talking about right here still is the explosion of awareness. And one example he gives is cubism. What is cubism?

cubism he says by seizing on instant and total awareness suddenly announced that the medium is the message because cubism is seeing all angles at once it's trying to maximize in a single plane how many dimensions you can see um he says it is not evident is it not evident that the moment that sequence yields to the simultaneous one is in the world structure and configurations special

have shifted to the total field. And we can now say the medium is the message quite naturally. And I do think that is true. I don't think that's really been discussed. And that to me is like the core. We still, even on the dissident right, but in society, we still tend to think in industrial revolution. And we haven't really noticed that the way we think about things.

a matrix is like we were just talking about before about how children build their minds like we in the past in the 1700s they would have a completely different child builds their cognitive faculties, but it seems quite obvious to us that they're building an interdependent matrix and generating it with complexity in many different directions at once.

to d you know it's not just and i think that is you know i've mentioned this before i think in popular culture and in the zeitgeist that can explain why we're so fast even like the dumbest person you know can understand what a multi the multiverses can interact. fuck with not only time linearly but multiple linearly linearities of time you know i mean like that's a really fucked up concept you know but we're making children that's that comes with our.

the simultaneous existing in stasis even that fucking movie the If you look at The Flash, for those who've seen it, it's kind of a complex idea by the end of it. It's like there's all these timelines that branch out and he's trying to visit each timeline to save his mother.

sick deranged mutant as a result because he can't get it right he can't run So it's a story of a man who's almost trying to understand at once the complexity of the quantum world and also... he with his human mind just can't get it right that's a really modern story that's a really fucked up weird story for kids but that's a story we can tell That's the evolution of Cuban.

It explains, now that we talk about the medium, it's the message we talked about before, a hot medium and a cold medium. People might have heard that before. What does that mean? What's a hot medium? So a hot medium is one, and this relates directly to what we were saying about extensions, extending your senses. So he says a hot medium is one that extends one single sense in high depth.

High definition is a state of being well filled with data. So it's like watching a movie, watching something visually that totally apprehends your vision. And it doesn't demand your participation. It would say, like, cool me. that overloaded with data. or one of low definition um because it's you need to interact with it for it to function you need to almost give it its information for it to do something a statue

and kind of fill in the gaps yourself. It's not something you can just sit in front of and it like bombards you with information like a movie would. Or, you know, radio would. Radio is probably a better hot medium because it just, it dominates. and kind of like hide. He said, on the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are therefore low in participation and cool media. completion.

You may have seen a New Yorker joke, a couple are watching TV and one says, when you think of the vast educational potential of TV, aren't you glad it doesn't? is based on the assumption, you see, that is the content that does the educating, not the media. Now, if it should be just the other way around, and very few people have asked themselves anything about that, then it would be understandable why these things happen involuntarily and unasked. But how far can we push this?

Paint in place. If you put on paint in place. or if you put on a news documentary. Now the contents are radically different in that case. But still from your point of view, the medium is transcending the content. and significance so far as the person out there is concerned. It's like changing the temperature in a room. It doesn't matter what's in the room at all or what pictures are on the wall or who's in the room if the temperature drops 40 degrees suddenly.

The effect on our outlook, our attitude, profound. And what's interesting now, if you think about that, if you take that, when this was written in the mid-20th century, think about... You can do this at home. Think about how that's been all twisted up by the relationship between the media we consume and our participation in it. Because what's online streaming? People wonder why streaming is...

It's because you took something that was a hot medium, television, and made your participation part of it. Like the line between audience and creator in the current paradigm is complete. And this is what we were talking about even with the Palantir thing. It's difficult to decide who is a content creator, who's participating in the content, who's viewing the content, is viewing the content part of it. People are making content about content they view.

And that's like everything's kind of becoming cooled in that sense. There's not a lot of media that just completely hijacks your vision and like demands your attention. The closest you'd get are moved. Black people figured it out that you can make a move. Here's an interesting thing he says about the extent any extension of ourselves they regard as auto-amputation and they find out that the auto-amputative power

resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of infiltration. Basically saying that when you kind of extend The principle of numbness comes into play. any other. We have to numb our central nerve. He says, thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and the apathy. So that's an interesting way of looking at that as we... through electrical connections, through social...

We've actually numbed ourselves to the experience of that communication. You probably have more human connections now than any of your ancestors did. And we were talking about that the other day in the chat. Zoomers struggle to have relationships. Do they? It actually seems, even millennials, no one's talking to each other. It's like, no. Well, then what's hookup culture? It actually seems that there's a problem with making too many. connections are effectively numbed and that our interaction

It feels amputated. Even sex, we're having more sex than ever before, but everyone's more miserable. Because the human connection through these electric means has kind of, we've got total awareness, but that's totally numbed us as a result. That's more of the case. He makes a point that's not even really avoidable. He says,

technological form is necessarily to embrace it. To listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our personal system and to undergo the closure or displacement. that follows automatically. By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as their servo.

Just by putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are just extensions of our hands... teeth and the body, he controls systems because he would include clones. will be translated into information.

Under electric technology, the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an economy, this means that all forms of employment become paid learning, and all forms of wealth result from the movement. And this was written in the mid-20th century, so I think that scene... I'll just read this. I'm going to read a bunch of paragraphs that I just thought were interesting.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for anti-se... Highly relevant to Western Man is Toynbee's explanation of how the lame and the crippled respond to their

of active warriors. So how do crippled people respond in a warrior society? They become specialists. And how do whole communities act when conquered and enslaved? They specialize and become is probably the long history of human enslavement and the collapse into specialism as a counter-irritant that have put the stigma of servitude on the figure of the specialist, even in modern times.

to his technology with its crescendo of specialized demands has always appeared to many observers of our world as a kind of enslavement to a much greater degree than roman slavery the special market organization has faced the Western man with the challenge of manufacture by monofracture or tackling of all things and operations one bit at a time.

and he contrasts this against the tribal name he says tribal cultures cannot entertain the possibility of the individual or of the separate citizen their ideas of spaces and time continuous, nor uniform, but compassionate.

compositional in their intensity oral cultures act and react at the same time phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when So that's sort of like the universalism of being that we don't have access to, which we're kind of reemerging. And how does that function work? Well, it goes into a bit more detail. It says the written word spells out in sequence what is quick or implicit in the spoken word. That's why reading is so...

It is the extension of man and speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vaster wider reality Language does for intelligence what the wheel does the body it enables them to move from one thing from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement as an extension or uttering or outering of our senses at once language has always

to be man's richest art form, it can be argued then that the phonetic alphabet alone is the technology that has been the means of creating civilized man, the separate individuals equal before. And this is kind of the thread that's been going through a lot of the past two episodes. discuss the concept of logos about the relevance and the importance of the written word, not just as a form of communication, but how you actually define yourself and find your place within reality.

The Western man, compared to the oral tradition or the ancient man, can actually position himself differently in reality than they could. They can't even understand the concept of a man apart. he says to sum all this up pictographic and hieroglyphic writing as used in babylon mayan and chinese cultures represents an extension of the visual for storing and expediting access to human experience. All of these forums give pictorial expression to aural.

And as such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for an infinity of data and operations. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages. Such an achievement, however, involved the separation of both signs and sounds from their semantic no other system of writing.

And how does that separate us? He says, to understand such effects, it's necessary to see literacy as a typographic technology applied not only to the rationalization of entire procedures. marketing but to law and education and city planning the principles of continuity uniformity and repeatability derived you have in England and America long permeate permeated every phase of communal life. So here's where like the entire idea of replication and automation that not

can manufacture products. That's the stand. Another example it gives here is literate people tend to think of cause and effect as sequential, as if one thing pushed another by physical force. Non-literate people register very little interest in this kind of efficiency. but are fascinated by hidden forms that produce magical results, inner rather than outer. And this is why the literate West sees the rest of the world as caught up in a seamless web of superstition.

because he'll alter occasionally the book by saying that the non-literate world is superior to the liter minor. Very obvious. and he gives an example of the machine he says as contrasted with the mere tool because a tool or a media is an expansion of extension of a The machine is an extension or outering of an entire process, a complex sequence. The tool extends the fist, the nails, the teeth, the arms. The wheel extends the feet.

Sequential movement printing the first complete mechanization of a handicraft breaks up the movement of the hand into a series are repeatable. From this analytics sequence came the assembly But the assembly line is now obsolete in the electric age because synchronization is no longer sequential by electric tapes, synchronization of any number of different...

plurality of times succeeds uniformity of time. And that's just another example I was saying before about the And I don't think, I still think we're trying to, you know, I said this before that the ideologies that we're most. liberalism and fascism and communism, Marxism that emerged. If you read Marx and you read a lot of these early communist thinkers, it seems that their thinking was so tied to the Industrial Revolution and awareness. But that was very much.

By still having a fascination and trying to employ these ideologies, we are trying to employ an industrial revolution-styled ideology in a cybernetic world. That's why fascism and communism struggle to... process driven it's very I don't want to say reductive but somewhat low resolution compared to our aware And I had said that there's been no ideology, even if you don't.

but you're aware that ideologies emerge from various constraints, historical periods and whatnot. I don't think there's been one ideology or one comprehensive reaction.

to the information age or the cybernetic age maybe like this is as close as you get and sometimes you get like the techno futurist type stuff but even feel like a full-fledged intellectual reaction or an addressing of how like the information revolution has fucking broken our minds and we we were still And more than anything, that could be a response for so many people depressed and losing their minds as well.

And before we were talking about implosion, there was this concept of like, what's the difference when an explosion implosion that technology causes. He said the implosion of the electric age is the separation. He said in the implosion of the electric age, the separation of thought and feeling has come. as the departmentalization of knowledge in schools and universities. It was precisely the power to separate thought and feeling and to be able to act without reciting that split literate.

of close family bonds in private and social life. So that's what's interesting, like the technology doesn't actually increase your balance. And we're constantly sort of oscillating between those two. He says it here, education. the civil defense against media fallout. Yet Westerman has had so far no education or equipment for meeting any of the new media on their own terms. Literally.

vague in the presence of film or video but he intensifies his ineptness by a defense of arrogance and condensation to pop culture and mass entertainment it was this spirit of bulldog scholastic philosophers failed to meet the challenge of the printed book in the 16th century. All meaning alters with acceleration because all patterns of personal and political with any acceleration.

And one point is make sure as the speed of information increases, like we just said, the tendency is for politics to move away from representation and delegation. towards immediate involvement of the entire community in the central acts of decision. When the electric speed is introduced into such a delegated organization, the organization can only be made to function by series of subterfuges. These strike some observers as base portrayals of the original aims and purposes.

And I guess that's a point I love that, you know, politics used to be more of a one-to-one relationship, but the idea that a politician is no, they don't really get. They give a shit about sort of this concept of the abstract public that they can interface.

instantaneously through media manipulation or analysis or graphs or whatever so like the the public the people electricity so politicians they don't give a shit about people they give a shit about graphs and that's how that happened it has just as much to do with the instantaneous information as it is like they're distanced physically from the people He says,

have never been studied in their roles as a magic... the antithetic electric power of instant information that reverses social explosion into implosion, private enterprise into organ... Expanding empires into common markets has attained as little recognition The power of radio to re-tribalize mankind, its almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism, fascist or Marxist, has gone.

There's a few things. I'll just end with this because there's a lot we could talk about. I know we've got to get going soon. I think I've covered a lot of what I wanted to cover. It says, if delegated chain of command authority won't work by telephone but only by written instruction, what sort of authority does come into play? On the telephone, only the authority of knowledge will work. Delegated authority is linear, visual, and hierarchical. The authority of knowledge is non-linear, non-visual.

um and he breaks it down here how the medium kind of breaks down these walls he says the telephone is speech without walls the phonograph is the musical without walls the photograph is the museum space without walls. The movie... The man, the food gatherer, reappears incongruously as an information gatherer. So I talked about a lot. There's a lot that I gave you right there.

curious to hear i know we have to get going soon but what are your thoughts on all of that i know it is a lot uh i think what you said at the beginning that I feel like I'm grasping it a little bit more now. So based on the way that people's cultures work and their languages work, a certain media with the same objective message can have a total... there's a lot going on there yeah because the interplay once again it's like okay what is

Literacy, the written word, is a carrier for speech. That is the medium. But that medium necessarily changes speech itself, and it changes who is writing. So it's this, like, constant feedback loop of development, and that's more the relationship he's talking about.

A media is just an extension of something of the body. That's where it starts with. And maybe some people disagree with that, but that's the framework that he's using. And every extension we do... sight, our sound, our touch, feel, whatever, anything that is trying to either protect or amplify the human body, it simultaneously numbs it, but also changes our understanding of it.

And also it's unavoidable. You know what I mean? And it's like, this isn't something that you get to, once you're aware of radio, it'll have a profound effect on you. And just like electricity, like you don't know how much the electricity... change how you think about how you think processes operate.

people centuries ago not to say that they're stupid not to say that's an iq thing not that they're like cavemen but it's just that I don't think has really been acknowledged by anyone really and this was written by Marshall McLuhan how many decades ago but still we still grapple with We're trying to grasp the information revolution within dust.

I think that's why there's this tension there. Anyway, I'm just going to end up repeating myself. I know we've got to get going soon, but we'll probably return. There's a lot I would recommend. It's kind of fun. It's not dense. It's not full of... You can read it very, I don't want to say casually, but it's very energetic. Even the stuff you disagree with, you'll find...

in pretty plain language. Anyway, that's nothing but good notes on that. Cool. All right, I'll talk to you next week. Yeah, no worries, man. I'll see you. I'm here. I'm very, very excited about this episode. I'm here with someone I'm very fascinated with. He is one of the rare individuals who can speak to my professional field while also being involved in it and not just speculating and bolting.

I'm here with Disgraced Propagandist. Now you can find him as the creator of the carousel, the carousel.substack.com. He's also on Twitter at or X at Disgraced Prop. And perhaps most relevant to this discussion, he is the, I will call the founder of Will the Agency. You can find that at willtheagency.com. I would describe it to people as a marketing and advertising and also a branding agency that seeks to do work with this broad

sector called the dissident, right? And I think unless I'm mistaken, you did some work recently with Charles Haywood. Is that correct? Yeah, we did a little work with Charles Haywood. Yeah, it's really interesting stuff. And I've been a fan of your sub stack, as I said, the carousel. And there's a few things I would like to point people to. Maybe we'll discuss it on this episode as well. Maybe we won't get around to it because there's a lot.

But the pieces that I could recommend the most, there's a series you did on the road to consumer. Parts 1, 2, and 3. Four, okay. I only read the first three. Another one, Vibe Shift. destroy marketing world and also welcome to post cool. And I think there's a lot of people who have maybe commented on a lot of cultural changes that might be using some marketing term.

I think when you read these articles, you can really get to the source of what's going on. And you do a lot of discussions on sort of wokeness and propaganda. Would that be correct? Yeah, yeah. treatise-ish work, even though, you know, that is not my favorite type of stuff to write, but I have, or, you know, it's actually... I'm not, you know, this type of big brain think peer.

I've done some of this and the things that I've done my big brain... essentially been to all answer the same question which is the why behind what And I think that I got really lucky because I sort of started on that project shortly before Bud Light. And I think Bud Light was such a massive global moment. that we're still seeing the results. And so, yeah, that's been kind of my beat, at least as a analytical thinker, which is really only a small part of what I do. But yeah, that's been my beat.

And I was curious because I was saying before the show, and listeners of the show will be familiar with my background, but I've worked in agencies, primarily in the Toronto. I don't live there anymore, but when I lived there, a lot of agencies, large and medium size, I've also worked client side. startups as well and you have a lot of stories on your sub stack and a lot of insight i was just curious

This is one of those annoying questions you would get in a boardroom. Tell us your story. I'm very interested to hear your audience. Sure, so, you know, this is my shtick. Are we live right now, or are we... Yeah, I'm recording right now, yeah. We're recording, but we're not live. Not live, no. So... I should do live, though. I do have the ability... on that part set up yet. Some people prefer recorded because sometimes they prefer later on they'll say oh

censored and then they have the chance to, but I don't think you have anything to worry about. No, I'm not worried about it at all. I was actually just wondering, but I, yeah, I, I. I think some people really thrive on the live. I don't like dealing with that. Also, that's why I like audio only, because I know there's a lot of people who do video, but I notice that a wave of relief seems to hit.

shirt or do their hair or whatever. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, especially with the female. I've noticed... 10 times more than men. I don't know if you've ever met women on this podcast. Yeah, it's amazing. It's like when I have an upcoming recording with a man, there's probably eight out of 10 chance that he's going to show up. If I have an upcoming show... three out of chance, three out of ten chance that they will come to the first recording that we have scheduled.

And you know what? I've been ghosted by a couple of women. I'm not going to name their names, but I did notice that more often. And I'm going to take an extra step here and say I've noticed that even with professional meetings as well. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird. I think a big part of that is, as you just said, I think women feel the pressure to get ready for it.

Not ready to step into the autistic thunderdome with the rest of us. Yeah. Right, right. Dude, your voice sounds a lot, so much like, do you know? Yeah, I actually, I spoke with him recently for his last picture show. Oh, you were on it. First time I'd ever really talked to him, too, but I did notice that. There's a few guys...

And I also think it comes from, for me, it's years of listening to yourself in post-production. I think when people are forced to listen to their own voice, they kind of self-correct and maybe we all... very self-aware, not like a transatlantic draw, but whatever the podcast version of that is. Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. so yeah we're talking about your um history in the world of marketing because you also had another um substack about like the longhouse and working around

Well, that was actually not by me. That was a guest post. But yes, I have written quite a bit about this. So yeah, I'll tell you my story. went to law school, and then I graduated law school. I graduated pretty close to the top of my class. I was on law review, which is sort of like the best. But I realized kind of halfway through that, I mean, I really... And it was like...

Yeah. Let me ask you, what was it about that? Because a lot of people you hear like, oh, I should have become a lawyer because I'm good at arguing or something. But what would you say was what kind of drove you from it? Well, I'm not just good at arguing. I'm great.

So I'm like extremely good at arguing, particularly in the written form. I'm much better in writing than I am in talking because I get too... old in talking, whereas you really need to be a great verbal talking arguer, you really need to have a calm disposition. But in writing, I was really good. I got, I think, maybe the best grade in my class. Legal writing which is quite difficult in American law school American law school is a extremely difficult And I really like.

figured out how to do that well. And so what sucks about law though is really just the lifestyle. seemed so absurd. Because you're... in a fluorescent law is like not cool at all. There is no such thing as a cool lawyer. Lawyers are not cool people. You know, it's like really nerdy, not like creative types of people, right? It's similar to being a doctor. You know, it's not like you're going to go to a party of doctors.

you know any sort of cultural clout there at all so you know that was something that was really missing for me that I didn't later. But I would go to my law firm job in New Orleans. Would sit there all day and I was supposed to you know like do stuff on the computer and read stuff and write arguments and fill out paperwork

I was supposed to do that for like 12 hours a day. If you're going to succeed in law, you're supposed to be one of these. I mean, this is kind of dying because... meritocracy is dying in general right so it's probably like 50% easier to be a lawyer today than back when I was doing it at least in legal market. But law was like finance and where it was like a pie eating contest where the... reward is more pie it was like you know it was like

If you want to be a great lawyer, you got to get in there at six in the morning and fucking, you know, be on call at all times. And it was a lot of like performative, hardworking, right? And I was not only did I not want I was literally incapable of doing it. I couldn't, I like could not do it. I would sit down and I would like, you know, it'd be a Friday or Thursday and I would like think about sitting in this fucking chair.

And until, you know, for 12 hours, like doing citations in a fluorescently lit room. just sitting there and I was like, I can't do this. I was like, I'm not going to spend my life doing this. It's just not a fucking option. You know, like I needed, I had to move around. I had to like move my body around, you know, like I couldn't, I couldn't just fucking sit.

It was like not possible for me to do it. I probably could do it now just because, you know, I'm so much older and I'm, you know, you kind of. You become more sedentary and more able to do that stuff. But at 25 years old, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't sit and play that game. So I pretty much fucked off. I mean, after I made Law Review, I pretty much fucked off.

You know, I spent all my time with girls playing hooky going and like drinking during the day and smoking weed with people like i've i've pretty much just like abandoned my my role there I was like ranked very last on the law review because I just never did anything for it like once I made it because you don't have to once you make it like there's no point and even participating because

It doesn't get you anything, you know? Yeah. So anyway, I just hated it. I absolutely hated it. And I had kind of like a, you know, I don't want to say a mental breakdown. I didn't have a mental breakdown, but I definitely had a little bit of a mental breakdown. Like, I pretty much had, like, three months of feeling totally horrible. Like, the worst I've ever felt in my entire life. Like, emergency level.

And the way I got out of that was by sort of mentally committing to being a writer, to being like a, you know, not just a legal writer, but a creative. fiction or not. Just your last point, this is something I talked to a couple of people about because I've spoken to people in my own circles who have felt what you were feeling. I'm in my mid-30s. So that's basically... But they're like, why do I feel this way? I'm like, well, usually when you get into doing something at the start, it's chaotic.

Everyone has a moment where they kind of peek their head over. to realize, oh, I'm actually going to do this for the next 50 years. Even parents get that, too. If anyone has any kids, once you have a kid, it's crazy, crazy. eight nine months like you get used to it and then you stop and it's like oh my god

Actually, I'm going to do this for another 17 years. And then sometimes something breaks. You're like, holy shit, what the fuck am I going to do? And the same thing happened. And the idea is that I guess you've got to pick something where you enjoy the shittiest part.

because before I got into marketing, I worked in restaurants. So I went to culinary school and I was just like, I, and I worked in fine dining. I worked in diners, everything in between. And I'm like, I felt that same thing. I'm like, I can't fucking do this. I'm going to kill. Yeah, and there's some people that love it, and like the Matty Mathesons of the world, it's good for them, but if it ain't in you, it's like, it'll destroy you.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if it will destroy you. I think, like, again, I, like, I remember talking to the number two. named Mark who Tulane Law is like graveyard of broken musical dreams. Because it's in New Orleans. So like, you know, New Orleans is like a music destination. It's kind of like a, you know, like a third.

type of thing and so a lot of musicians who are like real you know basically giving up on being a musician and going and being a lawyer Because they're you know like upper middle class white people and that's just like what they do and they don't have the balls to actually go So a lot of those people are there. And the number two guy on the Law Review, like one of the best, you know, the standout of our class. I really wonder what he's doing now. I was just endless.

And I was just endlessly like saying even what I'm saying now to people, which was like, how do you do? Like, how do you literally go in there day after day, sit there for 14 hours, and then go home? Like, I couldn't. How do you live that way? Like, I don't even understand how you do it. And he kind of pulled me aside and said, key is to do something you don't like, but just trick yourself into thinking you do like it, right?

And his advice really bothered me, largely because, in a sense, he's right. In a sense, a strong person learns how to take the... difficult parts of what they're doing on a day-to-day basis and to love them, to find some, you know, I do all kinds of shit I hate doing, but I try and find a way to like it anyway, you know what I mean?

And so it was good advice, right? But, and again, like, I think if I'd been a stronger person, I would have seen the incredible opportunity that I had in front of me, you know, like I'm, you know. at the top of a class at a great law school, if I just play by the rules and, you know... say the right things, like, I'm going to be rich as fuck in 10 years, right? I mean, I'll, you know, I'll be a prominent rich man wherever I am. You know, if I had had a longer vision.

I would have just shut the fuck up and dealt with it, right? And tried to find a way to enjoy it and, you know, popped Adderall and fucking drank in the closet by myself and, you know, do whatever I had to do, you know? But I was not mature enough at that time to do that. You know, I still, my like prefrontal cortex or whatever was just not developed. to do that i was still too wild i was like an you know like a horse that just had not been broken

And so I squandered, I mean, dude, that was, I'm still in debt from law school, man. I'm still buried in debt. It was a huge squandered opportunity, you know? On the other hand, on the other hand, thank fucking God for that. I mean, thank God I was so weak as to not be able to go through that because, man. I'm very glad, as rich as I would be, I'm glad that I'm not a lawyer. And I'm glad that I found the path that I did find.

Have you seen, and we'll move on to some marketing related stuff, but since you had left the legal side of things, have you noticed your former profession getting... Overrun with because I remember you know full disclosure one many many many years ago. I was working a lot And so I got to see it as a pretty cool one, too. And there's a lot of high powered lawyers there. And, you know, I got to exist outside of that.

And even I was noticing at the time, you know, you'd see that like legal blogs are just as preposterous as anything else in this culture, like above the law. and all these other like insider legal They're about as bad as You know, it's all diversity stuff. It's all what you might call woke stuff. And even back then, I was noticing, like, wow, there's a lot of race stuff going on here. So I am concerned with even a mind like yourself on a long enough timeline.

just getting washed right out because they don't even want you anymore now is that maybe my my assessment is wrong like how do you feel about that well what do you mean what do you say a little bit more about what do you mean what do you mean they don't Well, I remember when I was working at the law firm, there was a lot of white guys, Jewish guys, and even they were talking like, should we not be on the website?

women and they were already talking about everything they can do to promote diversity internally even the part and so i do i'm concerned with you know being a man or being a you know right wing adjacent let's say in your beliefs on a lot of time like would you just start losing out to black women because you know again this might be just something i've heard legal mind i remember even on like the

on the judge circuit, like lower circuit court judges, like they're almost all black women now. I'm like, how the fuck did that? But it just seems that there's been a sea change going on. And I'm just wondering from your perspective, is that true in your case or am I just way off? Well, yeah, but the problem with what you're saying...

going into marketing where all of those things are 10 times worse than in law. You're way better off as a white dude in law than you are in marketing. Marketing is the worst thing you could go into as a white dude. You know, like I can speak to that. I've been told straight up that I won't get a job at most. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Forget about it, man. So, yeah, no, I mean, I. The law still, just by the nature of it, is still somewhat meritocratic.

You know, law people are also very smart. And so, yeah, you know, like that's why auto-admit is so successful, right? That's like the 4chan of law, right? Because law people know the score, man. Like, I... I had friends who went and worked at the big New York firms, the white shoe firms that everybody wants to work at. And they would, these were liberal people, but they would joke about the diversity hires.

Fuck, like Andre didn't fucking come to work for three days in a row. Like, I can't get away with that at all. Like, they would all complain. see that's what i was trying to get at because i was trying to figure out if the revealed preference on the last side is more pronounced because my sense is on the marketing side is that there's not everyone but more firms and agencies that really take marketing is one million times worse because marketing doesn't have any backstop you know i mean law

You can't be that bad at law without really it being very obvious. Whereas you can be very, very bad at marketing for a very long time and no one... It's stunning. Can I just say this? I've got a story for that for people. I don't think I told this on the show, but my wife had a boss.

and he was headhunted to become their director of operations. Basically, his job, the title and the job oftentimes... are not congruent his job was just to bring in clients right and he was headhunted they paid something to the tune of ten thousand dollars to a headhunting agency to bring in this And he's a nice guy. I never met him, but it sounded like he was nice.

He had a nice track record resume, but it turns out he was just a total alcoholic, but a rich alcoholic, which is the best type of alcoholic to be because you can afford to get weird blood transfusions. two weeks which is what he did he paid for service to like help himself some fucking machine Anyway, but he did no work for a year because, and when I mean no work, I mean he would day drink all fucking day, not bring in a single client. But he's in a great position, a very Mike Judge.

situation where it's like we spent so much money made such a big to do about hiring We can't fire him right away, otherwise we look stupid. So it's just this staring contest for 365 days to the day where he's pulling in like 200 grand a year for doing nothing. Like, I love the geniusness of this, the ingenuity. But multiply that by 10,000. There's all sorts of that shit going on. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing just in general how inefficient the work... We really have.

i mean once you're really deep in it you kind of start you know it's like it's kind like it makes you understand Because the communists understand that most jobs are fake. Sending emails and setting up meetings where no one talks about anything. Right. So if you could have a communism of just those people, it would actually make a lot of sense. who are like, no, fuck that. I want to actually do something. And that's for whom communism doesn't work. Yeah, well, the funny thing is the last age...

who sort of is actually a startup, a platform. I won't go into too many details, but it's a massive conglomeration of a bunch. but there is there's a lot of listeners who are in blue-collar jobs and real work but and they'll say oh you You don't understand the feeling of working a job where you've been there long enough.

But you also know the company is full of morons. No one's looking over your shoulder. And you can fuck around all day. The amount of, and it's not a good way to be, but I feel like this is what they felt in a communist. Yeah. I know there's mail being exchanged. I know there's meetings. Everyone's busy. No one's doing anything. None of this makes sense. None of this works. But I'm in it. And it kind of does. So I can just write.

or whatever it might be. You really see this now. Do you know about Robert Conquest's Three Laws? Have you gotten into that yet? No, no. Sounds familiar. What is that? Okay, so Robert, this is like a big kind of mold buggy and part of our whole life. Have you seen the distributors before the distributors has a great like

the distributors video on like the intro to mold bug is one of the best. Oh yeah. I've read, I've read a bunch of Yarvin stuff. We actually covered some unqualified reservations. I spoke to Dave on the show and I, I quite. i'm not i didn't watch that mold bug video specifically but i'm aware of all these yeah So anyway, he roots a bunch of this. The only reason I'm cutting you off is because I don't want to get too bogged down on this because everyone will get super.

But, like, a very singular tenet of the E right, of the dissident right, of, you know, neo-reaction, whatever you want to call it, is these three laws of this guy, this thinker named Robert. And the way these laws lay themselves out essentially explains the regulatory capture, the institutional capture of the left and why they're able to constantly capture everything. The laws are everyone is conservative or reactionary about what he knows.

Two, that's one. Two, any organization not explicitly right-wing will sooner or later become left- And three, the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal. So the third one is very difficult to understand, and we don't even need to get rid of it into it. But the first and second, everyone is reactionary about what they know best, and any organization not explicitly right-wing will sooner or later become left.

What he's trying to get at there, what he's trying to, like, unpack is just the nature of institutions. And the nature of institutions is what happens, right? They're launched by a founder who really cares about the mission, and he has his people with him who really care about the mission. But then over time... that institution gets filled up with people who aren't intimate with the thing, right? They're not intimate with the topic of the institution. They're just...

You know, inevitably they're coming from further outside the mission, right? Like if it's Budweiser. You know, the Bud family used to wean its babies. The first thing they would give them was a little bit of beer, right? Like that family knew everything about beer. But over time, more and more people enter the company that don't know about beer. And sometimes they seek them out like we need a new mind behind this so we'll find someone who's almost hostile.

Exactly. And that's why people become non-reactionary, non-conservative about the things that they're supposedly in charge of. And then that's why the second law comes in, which is that... After a while, any institution that doesn't specifically say We are right wing in its bylaws, right? will inevitably become left-wing. And the reason for that is essentially this communist instinct, right? It's an agency problem. If you are in control of a bunch of money or of a mission or...

something that really is not involving you, right? Like if you're in control of an institution that the destiny of that institution doesn't really have anything to do with you personally. inevitably it's going to move left forever because the people just don't have the mission of keeping it. non-egalitarian, right? Like the institution is just going to sort of dissolve into this.

egalitarian, like, resource giveaway zone, you know? Yeah, it's almost like just this entropic force. Some people would call a lot of the left-wing that dysgenic force. the biology and certainly an entropic for us and i'm reminded of two books we covered on the show a while ago one is bowling alone but more specifically i was thinking And that interesting phenomena that says that when you start to see the scenario, you're...

There's a lot of high functioning individuals in the organization, like the smartest people will start to see the way things are going. And oftentimes it's the most competent and most skilled people who might be the first. and you see this and not only in firms but also in neighborhoods and oftentimes because i'll see which way the winds are changing say well i'm going to get out while the getting's good to be the first

But that causes a chain reaction. And eventually, the types of people who would have otherwise been capable of fighting this change are just gone. So all you have left are this sort of like middle glut who are kind of unhappy, but they don't actually have. ambition or verbal competency or whatever to plead a case. And then it's just them and the sort of the anti-force. And that's everywhere. That's neighborhoods, that's firms, that's a lot.

I think the idea that they don't have the verbal acuity to even defend Very interesting. What do you mean by that exactly? A lot of individuals... They lack... the communication skills to really establish what it is they believe they know that they believe something um you can even see this in like

If they are asked to outright plead the case for why they are correct or why they believe what they believe, they might have good reasons, but they just can't communicate it. They've never done it before, and it's almost not natural. And same thing when I give an example, I'm like, you know, if the average person goes up against a highly competent flat earther, you're probably going to lose the flat earther just because they have that toolbox that you don't.

Wait, but hold on. What does this have to do? What was the book that you were mentioning? Actually, this is something I got from Curtis Yarvin. It's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. It's a short book. So what is the point? The voice was kind of tracking what he calls the decline in firms. And he says that when individuals are presented with a choice, they kind of have three ways to control a situation.

vote or whatever it's like you have you can choose to exit the um that's one way to control what happens or you can exact your voice within that system to try and change it. Some people just don't exact their voice. And actually, you know what? There's this other book that we covered just recently. This is very cool. Yeah, this is like very much.

You would like that. There's this other one that's even more interesting. It's called In Groups by Wilfred Bayon. This is more of a psychology book, but this guy, this was back... And he was a very student of Freud and everything like that. But he made the case that in psychology and psychotherapy, it's usually on a one-to-one basis. But he said, that's not how human beings operate. We operate as members of groups.

And so he was a pioneer of group therapy. How do people behave when they're in a group? What's their group identity? Instead of just being a one-to-one individual thing, which is how most psychology is treated. And so he did all these experiments with the military. But he did a series of experience. He doesn't go into detail because he can, but he kind of refers these stories and these things he learned from working with different types of groups.

And he said, you know, a couple interesting phenomena. Groups tend to emerge no matter what. People very rarely exist as an individual. A group forms almost as if it's its own thing. He made this really interesting point.

You are a member of a group in a sense, even if you reject... you know i mean like you are always existing contacts with that group like if you run into the wood go off grid and abandon society you are still in a sense connected to that group because you're defined by you're defining yourself by your proximity away from it so like there's this idea of your group identity

existing if you're not a member of it. Anyway, the point being that when he talked about leadership and how within groups, leaders tend to emerge organically oftentimes, although he did make a point that... But anyway, he had made a point that I said, typically, I won't get off in too much of the details here, but basically he said, you know, usually, even if it's that whole argument, what is it? Silence is compliant.

silence is consent something like that where basically if you just go along with the leader says psychologically you actually do kind of with what they're saying. And a lot of people just lack the ability. to rise up against a leader. To do the voice part. Yeah, they just don't know how to do it. Votes try and kind of solve for that. But most people, they don't know how to argue. They don't know how to...

express themselves. They almost need a leader to fight a leader. Most people aren't leaders. So you'll kind of fall to whoever the leader is almost like organically. Yeah, that's very... you see these phenomenon happening like right like without anyone really I think it is.

to like yeah like people who don't have the voice simply just revert to to loyalty right because they yeah i don't know i yeah it's i i have no idea what the theory is but yeah it's it's cool yeah read the book i think a mind like yours can really probably come away with something But you see that a lot in society, too. that even on our side, our political milieu, people often talk about like, what would it be? for a proper revolution you know hypothetically like a 20th century

And I think a lot of people have pointed out that, well, the problem is a lot of people are just very comfortable. You know, a lot of people, they have not felt. compulsion to break away to create a schism from society and maybe in the 21st century like the 20th century rules don't apply

I completely agree with that. It's the age of Aquarius thing, right? My friend Astral has a great... you know, about how the age of Pisces ended, the age of the fish, which is the end of the zodiac, and now we're in the age of Aquarius, and the thing about the age of Aquarius... Everything is totally up.

It's like the new start, right? Nothing is related to the past because the Zodiac has started over. So all the rules that we've had for all these past times, which is, in my mind... rules about scarcity, you know, rules about... sort of distant The way that human beings have structured themselves, it's all of those things except run in reverse. Now the problem is not scarcity, it's overabundance. It's not like lack of connection, it's over.

So yeah, I do think that like this new world that we're in it's like a whole new set of problems And we don't even really know what heroes and villains because it's just so early on in this new underwater world where everything's up. Yeah, and you made a really great point there. And this is something I've said before. I think a lot of people would agree with the basic premise when I say that a lot of the political...

Right, yeah. And I don't think, and I've looked into this pretty much, I don't think we have seen a similar dominant ideology that has emerged from the information. yet. The closest I could see is something like Nick Land. A lot of the NRX guys were getting into that. The idea... Who was I reading? It might have been Marshall McLuhan where he was talking about how really the Industrial Revolution...

And the development of these new media changed how we think in processes and the idea of multiplication of processes. That's like a new way of approaching the world. And a lot of new ideas came from that. But he said, even McLuhan said. the dawn of electricity granted the idea that everything is connected and instantaneous instead of a linear process. It's like everything.

And the digital revolution, I don't think it's birthed a new, really a new ideology yet to grapple with how fucking insane it is. That's such an information overload and an overabundance. We're still kind of talking about communism. fascism and these 20th century ideas like the workers of the world and like what no one knows what that means anymore and to i guess

A lot of that is a marketing problem. People just fall in love with the aesthetics and the slogans and the imagery. They almost fall in love with commercials of World War II, if that makes sense. Because they understand that it's familiar to them. I think that's a very good point you're making. It's like, right, like communism and fascism sort of grew up to react to... bane of liberalism that had created the Industrial Revolution.

We really, like, the whole thing got completely blown up. And now we're in this totally different, completely different world. Yeah, like, almost communism was obsessed with automation. And we're at the point where, with AI, we're automating. That's kind of fucking crazy. Right, right, right. You mean like AI is automating automation? Automating automation. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sold on.

Sort of a holdout of being awed by that. I'm not impressed by it yet. Because a lot of us play around with AI. I think a lot of what people are... viral or something like that you know what I was reading actually there's this book I don't think we covered it on the last episode it was like this collection of essays from like professors and academics about neuro And what do we do about neurotechnology? And what neurotechnology is, like any technology that boosts your brain

And that could be chips in your brain. That could be neurotoxins because they're looking at like we can use this to either boost our capabilities or use as a weapon against our enemies. and this is a very serious book this isn't a conspiracy theory book this was like policy guys saying in very government, bureaucratic language, like, okay, this is going to happen. We need a code of ethics. And one thing they had meant

This is kind of what I'm getting at was they said a lot of the innovations of the 19th and 20th century, they were kind of pioneered by the government and then released to the public. You know, that's the story. They said, as we've gone through time, we've noticed that the technological development that we're doing on the state side is happening in tandem with the public.

was the development of like drones. They're like, you know, we were developing drone technology the exact same time a lot of like private companies were. So they're like, okay, the problem with AI is that we're developing it and we're trying to be responsible, but everyone else is developing. And it's not going to be one megamime, but it could be like you can make AI designed to like fuck things up in unforeseeable ways. It's kind of like the third, the three bodies.

It's like if you have two bodies orbiting each other, you can predict what they're going to do. You throw in a third body in the orbit, eventually it collapses. So I think what they're like... Wait a second. So the three-body problem is the name of the Vietnamese... Oh, sorry. The Chinese sci-fi book, right? Yeah, that's right. But it's named after a real problem in astrophysics. So what is the real problem? Because I equate third-body problem with the dark forest.

The Dark Forest. Yeah, yeah, that's the trilogy. Basically, the 3x problem is... It's a part of the book. So the three-body problem is if you have like two things in space, like two planets or two asteroids, whatever, and they're kind of in each other's orbit, a stable orbit, you can predict what they're going to do, how that orbit is going to do forever.

The problem is if you introduce a third object into that orbit and that third object orbits around you can your ability to predict how it's going to orbit just go And that one extra variable is like eventually they collide or they spin off. It's eventually unstable. And in the book, the story is that there's like an alien world that's orbiting around three.

and it's all fucked up, and the alien race there is trying to figure out how to go to Earth. It sounds like a cool story. The level of complexity by the third body introduced makes it impossible to predict... Yeah, and I think you can even take a metaphysical approach. where it's like the yin and the yang, two things can be stable, three things. Fuck, you can say that about relationships too. The argument against polyamory. Basically, yeah. There's something about us. I think.

i was reading something like a lot of the old guys too they noticed that oh you know even in rome sometimes they're like two emperors there's something about two that seems to be you know i thought who was it i was reading something it might have been like hans morgenthau i think politics among nations but he was saying that like you know we talk about the left right axis as if it's the

Like, why is there left and the right? You know, they should have more, a multiplicity of parties. And we do have that in Canada and have that in Europe. But what you notice is those parties somehow still seem to fall along the left-right axis. And I think, I think it was Morgan Thau or someone, one of the geopolitical guys that said, you know, the left, right. Oh, you know who it was?

Anyway, the left-right axis is just a function of government, and you could have as many parties as you want, but they still seem to fall. They find a way to fall along. So it's almost like in whatever human endeavor or human organization you have, it's going to fall along this sort of duality. Now, I don't know if that's completely true, but it sounds interesting and true.

I'm going off in a lot of different directions here, but I'm drawing a lot of lines. What I've learned is that that's what makes it good. I've been doing this for a long time, and I think I just realized, I just understood that a great talk podcast is all about it. Embracing the tangents you know, that's that's really what And getting back to you, I did want to know about what is it? We talked about your story in law, and now you're in marketing and advertising.

Are you happier here? Are you more fulfilled? And what do you like about it? Oh, yeah. A million, zillion times. I mean, I... You know, so just to get back to my story. So I graduated law school. I passed the California bar. So I still finished, you know, I still finished up. And I wish I could say that it was like. Hindsight 2020, it's very obvious to me now that I hated it so much.

Back then, I was still unsure. I was kind of like, well, maybe I shouldn't do it, maybe I shouldn't. And those were really the worst. The worst year is you can pretty much deal with anything, or I can, besides uncertainty. Uncertainty is really just a killer. So the worst days even still, or the worst times of my life were when I wasn't sure. So those first years, at least... I was still unsure. I didn't know. I tried to get a job in law, by the way. It's not like I moved to L.A. and...

you know, bar passage in hand, I didn't just immediately say screw the law. I tried kind of tacitly, like not super hard, but I tried to apply it. I mean, it was 2012, so it was like the worst year of legal hiring, I think, ever. So it's not like I had people, it's not like I had jobs right there. But, you know, had I had an... high-paying corporate lawyer job, I probably would have taken it, to be honest. And a quick tangent. Did you notice a huge cultural shift between New Orleans and LA?

from a legal perspective i mean i wouldn't even know right because i never worked at a firm here you know i i went to like a few beverly hills bar association meetings you know and saw But that certainly don't exist in New Orleans. But no, I mean, like, look, I never even really practiced. So what happened was I. To make a long story super short, the first job, I stumbled into a job here, first job was as an assistant, a personal assistant.

to a gay, very powerful agent who worked out of a house in the Hollywood Hills, which is very rare. had like a tribe of like six gay dudes who worked in this house with him and I was like the one straight dude I show up I have a lot of And I'm me. So they make the huge mistake of hiring me. And I make the huge mistake of accepting this job because I'm desperate. I'm literally fucking desperate. I have no jobs. I have no money. So I take this $40,000 a year job as a personal assistant.

to this guy who's like the the agent of huge celebrities but only for their advertising deals so this was actually my first It's pure evil. This was my first entree to Hollywood. And I'm super glad that I did it now because I saw Hollywood. I saw the guts of Hollywood. That sounds like something I would make up, like a story of Hollywood. I worked in like a gay agent's house that's full of gay. It was unbelievable. And it was so unbelievably evil. Like it was exactly as horrible as you.

I feel like we could spend three hours just in this alone. better notes because like even then I was starting to be a writer but it was so traumatic and I hated it so much that I didn't take like good enough notes but people love this story whenever I tell it but yeah I mean I lasted three months Got fired because I just cut. I can't even tell you how horrible this job was day to day. It was the worst imaginable thing. You can't even imagine personal assistant to... Super powerful gay mansion

advertising agent in Hollywood. Like, it was the worst thing in the world. And he was exactly as horrible, like, in every way, as just pure evil. You know, like a person who exists to hurt the world. It's like Ari Gold's assistant, but as... Except Ari Gold. Yeah, exactly. It's like Lloyd. Exactly. It's like Lloyd being the... Except he was Jewish. So it would be more like gay R.E. Galt. Like, that was basically...

You know, he had, like, manufactured a couple babies for himself. You know, like, he had two babies that were his that had been made for him. You know, it was, like, very, it was hideous beyond all. And, you know, I had never seen anything like that before. I'm from Chicago. I went to, you know, lived in New York for a couple years. I lived in New Orleans. There is nothing. The LA Hollywood.

Vibe, which is dead now you know that that was killed by with me too with Weinstein like all that shit of like abusive bosses that like throw the phone in your head type of shit that's that's gone you know tech has conquered Hollywood It's amazing people don't realize.

But, like, that type of character in Hollywood is dead. I mean, there's, you know, a few of them still hanging on. I'm sure this guy's hanging on, but he's probably terrified now. You know, he can't, he certainly could never treat anybody the way he treated me. Because now women... Once they saw Kevin Spacey go down, they knew that... Exactly. No, once Kevin Spacey and Bryan Sinner were down, like, these, like, guys who were deaf, I mean, like... Did I ever see anything that...

would say that they were like into pedo stuff. No, I never did, but I am very confident that they were hanging out with Kevin Spacey and Bryan Singer and doing whatever those guys... When you see a gay man wearing diapers, it's not because of age play. Yeah. Right. Anyway, so I lasted three months of this thing. It was the most miserable time.

life. Because again, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Am I going to be a lawyer? Am I an agent? Am I a businessman? Am I a creative? You know, I had no And then after that I got fired totally down on my lock. I'm like writing screenplays. I'm living in this complete shithole in Hollywood with these two actresses and I stumble into a job.

at 72 and sunny, which at the time was the number one ad agency basically in the world. It was the number one agency in the world. I'm not even exaggerating. It was like, you know, every year. in the world that had all the best accounts. It had Google, it had Call of Duty, it had Carl's Jr. Anything cool. 72 was like the spot at that time. I'm looking at their site right now for people who are interested in their clients. we have nfl adobe fucking under armor we've got like everything you

Yeah, yeah, right. They were the best of the best. And so... Yeah, I, but I, so the job I had gotten was kind of like in. The legal-ish department is something called business affairs for people who familiar with advertising it's basically like the licensing department not very creative. There's kind of like pretensions of being like a little bit creative in business affairs, which I certainly like took to the limit. But anyway, this was my intro into...

And I saw the advertising world. And, you know, this was like amazing. It was like this world that I was like. like this is what I've been waiting for it's the polar opposite of a law firm you know it's the hottest girls you've ever Everybody's like, you know, having these great meetings all day. Everybody's being creative. It's like there's cool concerts. The space is beautiful. We're talking about movies. We're talking about music.

Like, this is what I've been waiting for. Like, I found the industry for me, you know? Yeah, especially for people who are curious, as a young man, if you go into an age... He's not lying. Like, even in Toronto, the big agencies, you walk in, open box. If they try and emulate Google, like someone let them know like, oh, you know, Google, they got nap rooms and free cereal. And they said, we're doing all that shit. And they'll take you to like weird parties. They'll rent out a club.

Even my wife, it's like, oh yeah, they gave us free tickets. I don't like the week. And I'm like, but you understand that this is a big deal. Yeah, no. And this was the best. this was like you know the place to be doing this and um you know I met some amazing people but I was in this horrible situation because I In business affairs, you know, I was basically the stamp boy. You know, I literally had a stamp. I would go around, like, stamping paperwork.

So, you know, the cool kids, or at least I thought what the cool kids, you know, I realized later I was wrong. But I thought who the cool kid... were the copywriters, you know, and the creatives, right? The way that the advertising world works is the sort of core team in today's world, or at least it used to be for a long time, was an art director, so a designer, and a...

And those two would come together and come up with the ideas for the campaign and everything like that. So from afar, from what I could see, was that those were the cool kids. Those were the cool people at 70. And guess what? I happened to already be a writer. You know, I was writing for Vice at the time. I was writing for LA Weekly. I was kind of like... you know, making my way as like a kind of low-level, bottom-feeding gonzo writer, right?

Because that was what I was sort of doing on the side. And I loved that type of writing. I've always been a creative non- my thing. I don't know if you've seen the carousel, but the biggest pieces on the carousel are actually, I wrote this piece called There's Gonna Be a War in Montana. And that's went hyper-crazily viral, and that's just pretty much gonzo, you know, gonzo writing. You know, I mean, I tied in the problem.

So, you know, the pieces just kind of came together in my head of like, wow, I love this world of advertising. I am a writer, so why don't I just go be a copywriter? You know, and that was pretty much long story short. I ended up getting fired from 72 also. But after that, I went and I bartended for several years, and I went back to portfolio school to get my proper copywriting portfolio. You know, that was sort of the beginning of my foray.

advertising but you know I never I never made it to the heights of, like my specialty kind of became branding. So I really wish that I could say that I marched triumphantly back into 72 as a creative director and showed them how it was done, but that never really happened. I made it to the heights of the industry. in branding agencies, but branding agencies are a little bit of a need.

And actually, Will is a branding agency. We're not an advertising agency, really. I mean, we are, but in terms of the part of the industry we're in, we're more in... Yeah, I worked at a branding agency myself when I was in Toronto. That was one of the best agencies I worked at. A lot of them, the small or mid-sized ones closed. I really dug this one. I loved like branding workshops. And I find that even when I get a new client, if it's for anything, I find myself going.

Because without that, you don't really have a starting point. Totally. Unless you're just like, oh, I'm a guy who runs camp. But even then, I'm like, I kind of, I want to know, because odds are they don't have anything. Especially if you're working with small businesses. I prefer small businesses at this point in my career. That's just my thing. I've worked with startups. I fucking hate startups. You meet the worst.

Sometimes you get lucky and meet a great startup founder. A lot of the times they're just like, it's lousy with scammers. It's lousy with liars and psychopaths. Maybe my radar is off, but you know, everyone is just go to these. I'm burned out on a lot of stuff but I do have you know people always are surprised

And I like it. And I like it to the point where if I wasn't getting paid for it, I'd do it for free. I'd give out free advice all the time. People who are like trying to get a thing going, get a business. a project i'm like have you tried like do you know what a project that to help solve a lot of your problems. You know, it's interesting.

And honestly, for me, I don't know if it's this way for you, the more boring the business is, the better. Because I need to figure out what makes... person yeah like anything like niche manufacturing like one of my clients years ago like they just manufacture And the guy had been doing that for fucking 40 years. And I'm like, take me into your world. I do the exact same thing, man. We should talk. I do the exact same thing.

to do these workshops and figure out what makes you interesting. What is the core of why you're doing it? Because so many businesses feel like they need to emulate other businesses. What makes you interested in this? And they usually know. Little guys, there's a lot of businesses, my dream list of businesses.

with I like constructions kind of difficult like I've worked with construction firms the problem with those guys is a lot of them are used to working with contract and they're used to work they are used to being slave drivers they are used to working with types of personalities that you need to stay on them and crack the whip otherwise they'll you over and my job is always like i'm not that guy i you don't need to Like, I'm not here to rape.

I'm here to help you, but their entire world is dealing with people who are trying to fuck them every day. And that's why I love getting into different industries. I need to learn the parlance. I need to learn their stress levels. Dealing with lawyers is way different than dealing with... Like, you know, software is a certain...

I was listening to this guy, Marco Popic. He wrote this really interesting book called Geopolitical Alpha. He's like a finance guy and a geopolitical strategist. And he was saying that the era of software... that the smart money is not even trying to do that. And I agree with that. A, because maybe we have as many as we need. Maybe we have as many Ubers as we need. We've automated everything. But what are your feelings on that? Do you think that...

Like, guys who are getting into that right now, even guys on our side, you say... Wow, that's quite a pivot. Getting into is SaaS relevant? Maybe that was too much of a pivot because we are still talking about your life. We can go back to that. I'm happy to answer it. It's just, I mean, SAS is a little bit of one of these ZARP phenomenons, isn't it? zero interest rate phenomena in the sense that

The reason why everybody wanted SaaS is because it looks really good from the outside. Why? Because if you create a SaaS platform, ideally... You just make a big bunch of code. You don't really have to do much to maintain that code besides just kind of tinker around with it and do updates and stuff, right? So it's very low. You spend all your money on sales, so you get a bunch of annoying people going and selling.

your stupid button clicking software to, you know, the fat 45 year old white dog mom who controls the budget of every single fucking brand in the world. And you convince them that they absolutely need your new, you know, like, tinker with three R's. Fucking, like, project management software. And this project management software gives a bunch of other fat women

something to pretend like they're doing all day, right? So they can say, oh, I'm so busy because my tinker reporting is behind. You know, even though nobody gives a one fuck about the tinker report at all. So, you know, it's very low overhead. You just spend everything on sales, which is free anyway because you just give salespeople a commission. And, you know, it's all digital. It doesn't take a lot of capital, etc.

So the reason why SaaS companies were getting... So I think the metric is for the valuation of a company, very roughly speaking, like... three times your yearly revenue or something, whereas SaaS companies were getting seven times So that's why everybody wanted to be a SaaS program, because in the eyes of investors, in the eyes of VCs and buyers, more reliably buyers.

you could sell out for a shit ton more money, right? So smart guys, especially kind of smart left-brained guys, were like, well, fuck, I'm just going to make myself a little SaaS company. accent for, you know. million because we're making this much money a year in sales. So SaaS was very exciting for a lot of people, but this was also under zero interest rates where the actual profitability of the company didn't really matter that much. It was more just how much revenue are we taking in?

So in my opinion, I'm hoping that the next phase of technology will all be platforms that help us use less SaaS, you know? Yeah. It helps us use less SaaS. So, you know, things in the world that help us to free us from the button clicking software that actually at the end of the day. any single one of these programs actually give us any time back at all? Of course not, right? It's not that any of these, you know, all these SaaS problems are supposed to make it so easy.

None of them, not a single one, made it so that we're less busy at all. So I hope these people will realize that. One thing I know is working in age... even the top agencies, maybe not the top top, but a lot of the top ones were like playing catch up with whatever was trendy. So like, I remember when I was in school, this would have been long.

you know, apps are the new thing. Everyone needs an app. And I was setting up my phone the other day, just because I had to read down a bunch of apps and it's recommending apps. And it's like, why the fuck does KFN? every single every single fast food place has an app on top of uber on top of all that shit i'm like there's just too much shit none of this is But if you were in marketing all that long time ago,

You were probably thinking, I need to get into app development. My big pitch is start an app. And there's a lot of people who did. like there's a lot of pitch decks that were like have you considered having your own app and for a while people thought that was a real good idea I don't know. It just went away. I think you probably have some insight on this, too. If you think of the types of personalities, and this is me segmenting.

marketing. If you pay attention to the types of personalities who are in a lot of these agencies and the types of personnel that are there, you'd be surprised at how few of them seem. Especially, you know, the type of, I've seen a lot of like accounts people get into strategy. You would think that creative people, the art director. but I know it's like a lot of just like bullshit people who think.

who all their entire job has just been managing accounts so not even sales they're not even getting clients they're the ones you just you give a bunch of clients to and their job is to keep them happy which is usually just bullshitting them and then they're like oh now you're in strategy this is the last person

because they don't understand how to do anything, but they also don't understand how to say no. So they're an extra little gear in the cogs that just makes every, it's more efficient, but it makes it work. That's so much agency. I think the strategy, like, you know, in... Madman. The strategist back then is the planner who comes in with like the...

binder full of insights and puts it on Don's desk and Don just immediately throws it into the garbage. I completely agree with that. I have never, I mean, I feel bad because I have strategists who are great, but strategy to me is complete bullshit. Like, it is never used. It never matters. It doesn't... I mean, the strategies that are good are actually campaign...

It's like, yeah, sure, if you have some really great data insight or some really great insight about your customers, fine. That can lead to great campaigns and great marketing. But I don't really think that's like... That's like .00001% of strategy. Most strategy is just bullshit painting on slides, right? It's just like, here's a bunch of strategy, and it's like it doesn't actually do anything, and nobody looks at it or cares. It's just like...

And I've got this thesis and I want to know what your opinion on it is to see if I'm incorrect. But first of all, my wife works in marketing as well. And she works at an agency and she does. A big partnership. but then also TikTok. There's some interesting things at TikTok, but mostly meta. And one thing that she's noticed and I've noticed over the past few years, and this is related to strategy, is that no one really trusts the data.

And so intrepid listeners might be familiar with the concept of dead internet theory, which is a big, scary sound. It's this... It's a realistic idea where most of the internet doesn't seem to be real or doesn't seem to be active. Now, part of this is proven because we know through studies that most people check the same four to six web pages every day.

There's not a lot of activity outside of social media platforms. But the second is that the most important thing that I'm noticing is that a lot of the numbers that we're getting from platforms don't. And this is something she's noticed, but it's also something I noticed. Even with Google, when you're running a Google ad, they will give you analytics and how many phone calls are made through the ad. That sounds good, looks great in a presentation until I phone the client. Did you get-

Sometimes they'll just fake numbers. And when I tell people that my wife had worked at big agencies just like me, the amount of lying that these agencies are doing in presentations, they're lying about views, they're lying... clicks they're lying about the like there's agencies at the highest level stealing budget they're giving them a discount like it's just made up numbers and also um there was a big controversy recently with a lot of big name influencers

saying that like i'm not seeing conversions i'm not seeing i'm seeing big numbers but none of that's translating to sales it all seems to be botted it all seems to be fake and i'm not saying it's all fake i'm just saying i don't think both creators or platforms actually understand or have the capacity or even interest in telling fake numbers.

I think it's a lot of it's a big fucking fugazi and people are starting to notice to the point. And also here's the other thing that since I started in the industry, the amount you're allowed to target.

audiences has gotten more and more restricted. You used to be able to target based on fucking anything on Facebook. It was ridiculous. You could target based on race. You could target based on all kinds of shit. Now you can't. And they're trying to move you towards their machine learning version of running. And my feeling is that they just don't know how to target anymore and you're not allowed to target. So we're almost returning to an old style of marketing.

The stuff that seems to work still is the same logic that led to fucking Ogilvy making cool ads and billboards. It's just good. And running based on impressions, all the targeting, all the data. fucking out. But if you design a good ad, it still seems to work, but then it's just you gotta have the creative. That's my feeling. What do you think about that? No, I think that's very well put.

exactly right I think when you numbers, especially the numbers that are being used to sell you on things, like as you're saying, like Google impressions. Facebook views or you know in campaign Think they're all And I think like, yeah, oh, market testing. You know, like I've been inside these big agencies and they do market testing.

You know, but it's like, it's not real market testing where you get a bunch of people in the room and you like ask them their opinion on like the new taco or whatever, which I've seen those. I've been in and I've seen and I've run those types of market testing, like the old school type.

And, you know, they're interesting. I still don't really think there's any point in doing it. You know, group, what do you call it? Group testing? What do they call it in movies? They call it focus groups. Focus grouping, yeah. So I've seen that stuff, but now all that's been replaced with digital surveys. Facebook has this thing called brand lift studies. Yeah, my wife does that a lot. Yeah, and it's just total bullshit. You know, it's like, it's supposedly like...

Facebook surveys a bunch of people and asks them Is your opinion of this brand better after seeing this ad? And, you know, some middle manager at an agency gets to go back to their boss and be like, The Facebook brand lift study has gone up 2.5%. Like, wow. Like, pat me on the head. Yeah. You're going to have to keep your fucking job. Yeah, it's all CYA. Like, do you really think?

like the people answering these Facebook surveys are paying any attention at all. And even if they are paying attention, like... It's obvious that Facebook just serves this to people who fill them out favorably every fucking time, you know, even at that.

So I think you're right. All these metrics are really warped and self-serving. And the only thing that really matters is... you know you can tell when something makes a splash right like does you know i'm a blogger and i've been a blogger for 11 years very long When you write a blog that makes an impact, you can tell

You know, like people will email you. People will message you. You'll hear about it. Other places will write about it. You know, like you'll get a hit. You get a hit. That's how you know. You know, you can just tell. Whereas you're not like, oh, wow, this had a brand lift of X amount. That's not a hit. That doesn't count. You know, that's not real. And so, yeah, I think you really should hopefully all this will revert to be. the actual quality and the actual response.

from the ads. Yeah, or have employing minds that understand what it takes to hit. And you have this article on the care. that i thought was interesting the vibe shift to destroy a marketing world that's all about the hype dad and you described the archetype of so many creative career. And the overall gist of the article was that, you know, these people are finding themselves out of luck as the vibe is shifting, and they were sort of the cool, whoa.

but now that's not cool anymore. Now they're out. And there's so many of those types of creative directors who just don't seem to understand what... Was that a crack? Well, so this notion of hype dads, it was sort of an extension of an idea that my friend Sean Monaghan had. So Sean Monaghan speaking.

is like the world's best advertising strategist, although he doesn't think of himself that way. He's really an artist. But he came up with Normcore. He's kind of famous. He used to run this thing called... K-hole that in the advertising world like when I was at 72 everybody was obsessed with K-hole which were these kind of like you know cultural reports you know about trends and And he had a short little blurb on, so you've heard of the vibe shift, right?

I wanted you to explain that because I'd heard of it, and then I got it from your article here. But for people who have heard it, but don't... So the vibe shift effectively refers to... So Sean and Monaghan also came up with the vibe shift. So about a year and a half ago, maybe two years... Something happened in culture where... We had been hegemonically blindly left all the way down to the edge of So the cool kids, even the coolest of the cool kids, were still 100% left-wing, right?

Like, there was nothing cool about being right-wing at all. For a long time. You know, people kind of forget this. I mean, maybe dating back to punk rock, the early, you know, Joy Division kind of Nazi. culture since the 80s had been just going further and further and left. And there weren't cool figures on the right. It was still, you know, people viewed the right wing as a bunch of, you know, neocons.

But, as we all know, as you know, Frog Twitter had been boiling up, had been kind of like happening for a little while, right? And you know that there have been this slight swing going on in sort of a separated parallel unit The vibe shift in a very, very broad stroke way, even though many people have misunderstood it, was something that happened when essentially... Cool culture, so the edge of culture largely in Manhattan shifted right a little bit. And Red Scare is the best.

I've actually cited them before because they've been on a lot of people's radar for a while and noticing their shift from just like open, I would say it went from like either kind of anime socialist or straight up like... ZZEK style communism, but to something like almost like Tradkath now, but like eye roll Tradkath, whatever you might call that.

Yeah, so all the kids started signaling, you know, oh, I'm becoming Eastern Orthodox. All the girls who are rich Jewish girls are becoming actually Catholic. You know, it was... It was this moment in culture where you could kind of feel that things had changed, right? You could feel that... People had sort of stopped wanting to play by the rules of what And... Lot of people who are formerly left-wing like the red scale girls god bless them made it cool

To be right-wing, you know, they made it hot really they made it hot more than cool, right? Like they made it okay to be a dorky right-leaning girl who takes thirst trap pictures of her tits And it's hot, right? And for me, actually, the vibe shift was deeply important because I decided to launch Well for Real as ostensibly a based agency.

right when I saw the vibe shift happening. And I saw the vibe shift happening because I went, you know, I'd been languishing in this right-wing sphere forever. kind of coming in and out. You know, I've been friends with Delicious Tacos, who I don't know if you know who that is, but he's kind of like, do you know Delicious Tacos? Yeah. So I've been friends with him forever, man, and I've been promoting him forever. You know, I've been promoting Delicious Tacos since 2016.

and we'd been friends you know we've been like in real life friends and you know i had i'd been like a booster of his forever you know saying that he's the best and blah blah And we'd held many readings with him for years. And it was always a bunch of fucking angry dudes, people who didn't really know who anybody was. You know, we'd been working on this forever. And of course, once I left the scene and went deep into branding, was like, fuck this whole thing. As I was gone.

The cool needle shifted, unbeknownst to me, to the right. And I only learned this because I, like Tacos, invited me to a... Reading of his and I'd never been invited to a tacos reading before ever and I'd been you know, he'd never had a reading here And I was like what like this is weird. I've never heard of tacos doing a reading that I didn't organ And so I'm like, all right, I'll go to this reading. And it's at the Ace Hotel, which is like, you know, funnily enough, where I bark.

And I was like, weird, this sounds like really advanced. And I show up at this reading, this is like two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. Yeah, this is like a year and a half ago. I'm thinking oh yeah, there's gonna be a handful of people you know like how I used to always do it a few nerds and It is mobbed. There's like a hundred and twenty people Listening to tacos read, listening to these few other kind of like scene story guys.

And I'm just like, what the fuck happened? Like, how did culture, culture had like shifted. So that now all these hot girls were watching tacos read. Whereas before these guys were just complete internet nerds. You know, they had no real following. I mean, they had no following outside of like a bunch of angry guys online, you know? You know, it's interesting. So just before I go on, a similar anecdote is that there's a friend of mine.

Arno he's a straight up communist but he also complains about black people so he's like he's in a strange space right but he had made a comic he's always kind of getting on the distant right chuds and whatnot but he made a comment um about how you know this is what just with all the Like, whoa, hold on. Are you saying we're popular?

Like something had happened. I didn't even notice it happening, but it sounds like when I hear the left complain about us, they're complaining about us because we're where the money is. We're where the trendy shit is happening. We're not where the money is. We're not where the money is. I'll tell you that. It's definitely not where the money is. Here's the thing. That might be changing. There might be a sea ship.

more quote-unquote cool people get involved then the money follows because if it's just about true anti-social guys, maybe that is the larger trend that's going on. I had some people... Leftists always complain. They think the fascists are in control. They think the right wing is making all the money. They're obviously wrong.

Yeah. Like when you listen to like fucking like Sam Sear or someone, they're like, well, obviously all of the right wing is making billions of dollars. I'm like, yeah. And when they say right wing, though, what they. They just don't, you know, they don't. But anyway, yeah, sorry. But there is like a shift that occurred where like, like you said.

The vibe shift occurred. Let me ask you this. Do we have an indication on what cause of the vibe shift? Can we pin something like a vibe shift on a cause? Or is it just general? I mean, what do you mean? Is it just, is it so complicated and intricate? Because some people will say like, oh, this shift is natural. They'll say it's like a pendulum swing. Things went too far.

And then they're right. They're going right now. I'm not sure I believe it's just going back and forth forever. I do think there's some kind of cause. Was there a movement? What do you mean it's not just back and forth? Like, what do you what do you think? Well, people, there seems to be this belief, especially with Gen Xers, I think, where they're like, oh, we went too far left politically. And now.

to go too far right and once it goes too far right then it'll go too far left like it's inevitable i'm not sure it's just this pendulum swinging left and right forever you know there can be a point where maybe the pendulum stops I don't know. Maybe it's not that case in America because maybe... There's this idea in Empire and Communications by Harold Ennis. His is about language.

media. And he said, if you conceptualize society sort of like in a dejuvenelian way, like academic agents always about this, but the center of power and the Then there's the intermediate sphere. Then there's the fringes of society and there's a model that can explain how media develops across time where a lot of new media is adopted. periphery, then it's absorbed into the center eventually. But that kind of makes it static and dead. But then there's always new things generated.

within the periphery now the model if we transpose it onto the modern day that's almost saying like okay the periphery of society will always adopt the opposite political ideas of whatever stream is and maybe that's what's always going to be if the mainstream is left then the cool periphery because this is where the cool ideas happen this is where the innovative ideas happen and kind of the fringes it will just be the opposite of whatever

Is that the case? I don't know. That almost seems too low resolution, but maybe it's not. I don't know. It just... I'm hesitant to accept the model where it's like, well, you know, woke got too powerful, so now everyone needs to go far, right? I'm trying to think, like, is there something within these ideas, though, that make them attractive rather than just rebel? I mean, okay, so the Dime Square girls, right? The girls of Dime Square, the honors in the doc.

particularly these like kind of mini Gertrude Stein rich Jewish girls who like run. who, you know, again, God bless all these people. I'm certainly not criticizing them because without them... These people are the crucibles. I don't even... I think the crucibles of the reason why were like in business, you know, like we're in business and they're the reason why. So I, you know, I certainly can't say anything. But I believe that, yes, they are doing it solely because it's the...

Edginess is edginess and edginess has to... In order to be edgy today, you pretty much have two choices. Either you go ever so slightly right. Which is like barely right. You know, we're talking about just the tiniest little bit right. or you go so far left that you're getting face tattoos and getting your dick chopped off, right?

so it's like those are your two choices either you go like so deep into chaos that you're unrecognizable or you toy around with like the slightest modicum of racist or traditional You know what I mean? And so, like, we've been so well-trained to think of racism as evil that... Still, the majority of people are more willing to chop their dick off than be thought of as racist, literally. But in reality, if you really think about it, is it really that bad?

Is that really that terrible? You know what I mean? Sure, acting on it is bad, but is it really that bad to have a... Like, no. It's not bad. Who cares? We all have fucking racist thoughts. Everybody in the history of the world has. It's not that bad. You know what I mean? But we've been trained to think of it as, like, the most satanic thing imagined.

So, you know, I think that in that sense it is just rebellion. You know, I think that we've we've been pushed so far that the hegemonicness of the left and the extremity has gone so, so far. And I blame this. But, you know, that's... That of course if you're gonna make it

If you're going to make it impossible, like so forbidden to be right-wing at all, the kids are going to be right-wing. It's just the fucking way that it is. You know what I mean? This is the beauty of humanity, right? I mean, this is what we do so well, is it bounces back. The larger question of, you know, the sociopolitical development of liberalism over centuries. of which fascism and communism were both reactions, as you've already said. The question of liberalism is the core of our lives.

That's a very good question. And that's something that is really going to be, in my opinion, like the age of Aquarius, right, that's going to be the fundamental question that's answered in these next two thousand years. The next 2,000 years are going to be about the battle of liberalism, global liberalism, so globalism, right? Like a single liberal global government. versus tradition, nationalism, localism. The next two centuries are going to be dedicated to this.

And we're just starting. I mean, that battle is just gearing up. We haven't even had one, I mean, in a way, Russia... is kind of like the first hot conflict of that battle. I mean, I'm sure people who know foreign affairs, I mean, maybe like Serbia, right? I guess, yeah, NATO bombing Serbia. But, you know, again, I'm not an international, I'm certainly not a war expert. I'm not an international affairs expert. But this is just kind of how I see.

That's a very fascinating opinion and appraisal of situation. I think you're essentially correct on that as well. And unfortunately, I do think... because i i know we could keep going on this for three hours i'd love however you'd like to, because we didn't even really breach the surface on all the stuff I wanted to talk about on the articles that I had read. I love to talk about those. There's a lot of good stuff.

And I just want to remind people to check that out at thecarousel.substack.com. You can also find the disgraced propaganda. at Disgraced Prop. And for those who are more interested in the hard branding agency side of this, check out Will the Agency at Will the Agency. a whole spread there about what it is you do and, you know, more detail on your work. And I just wanted to thank you very kindly.

Totally, man. Me too. I'll have you on mine. I'll pay the thing back, and I want to hear all about what you do as well. So yeah, let's organize you coming on the carousel ASAP. Absolutely. there with bells on. Alright, man. I'll talk to you soon. Okay, thanks. Grazie.