500 Episodes Together

been doing the monologues lately, but it's an anniversary. Just hit five hundred episodes round about four years of me seemingly yelling into the void. And so I thought I'd do two things at once. One a retrospective what's happened over the last four years, both from the perspective of this show and also the world at large. I'll be honest.

When I started this, it was a hobby, just something I did as I wrapped up the first or the last few weeks of college, splitting time between two different cities. I remember well that first episode, episode zero, with Paul Fahrenheit. The guys still have a lot of affection for we'd met, had a great conversation. I wasn't doing anything, and when he and I spoke kind of the sud, I was like, well that went pretty well. I bet I could do

that again. Been lurking for a long time, and you know what, figured it was a way to make my entrance. And those first couple months were weird, right, I was awkward, didn't really know what I was doing, what I wanted to say. But you know, we found some sort of red you know, we picked up the the old theme song sense copyright strict, can't use it anymore. Stricken I

think that's the correct term of that form of that word. Obviously, we went through the early berserk edit thumbnails and eventually found our way to the og right format at a buddy makeup for me, and you know, things kind of carried on in that that kind of holding pattern until well I was working at a factory, started doing more episodes for five a week, the first big push, if

you will. But you know what, I got married, got a real job, and it kind of faded into the background, but you know, it kept growing, figured out what I actually thought, more, got better at least I hope at doing what I do. And yeah, almost a year ago it well became what I do my full time gig and if you can forgive me a moment to be model, and uh, I appreciate that right. I couldn't do this

without you guys. You support what I do, and I'll be honest, it's kind of rare right that I get to do my favorite thing every day, So I appreciate that right. Not to get too emotional about it, but during those four years where you know, all these changes happened to my program, well, the world kept changing. Two feels almost unrecognizable from the Biden slump right twenty twenty two, this feeling of the eternal lib Rich, that the lid had been put back on and that this creeping global

homo darkness would you know, take over the world. I collected what I thought. I have collected the ten biggest news stories from plus or minus the past four years, and there's some interesting trends in them. In my mind, the biggest story is the Russia Ukraine War. And when I say that, I don't mean it's the one I'm the most interested in. I don't mean it's the one that I follow the most closely day to day. But that's at least in my mind. The moment where history resumed.

Francis Fukuyama eternally btfo'ed, and it felt as if finally we had ended the nothing ever happens, something materially had changed, something big had happened. Two countries, two real countries, were at war. Also, the sort of long running, simmering Cold War II with Russia that had been going on during the Obama year, certainly though arguably much before that, had then really heated up during the Trump administration or the

first one finally come to the four. We also started to see the empire was perhaps weaker than we thought, there was something beyond its power. No matter how much money it dumped into this project, well, it couldn't win. I don't pretend to know exactly what's happening in that war. I don't follow it. It's not my beat, but it's still going on. I know that it seems as if Ukraine is sort of on the losing end of this

Pirit campaign. Obviously they've bloodied Russia's nose to some degree, but the biggest, most powerful empire in the world couldn't get done what it wanted to get done. And this idea, that liberal, peaceful democracy, that McDonald's diplomacy, the idea, of course being that two nations with a McDonald's would never go to war. What was wrong? The eternal progress or Star Trek future was fake and we knew it was fake. But in the moment in the trenches, it feels as

if it's going to go on forever. And look, I'm not a Slava Boo. I don't have really many opinions on Vladimir Putin at all. But we saw a man make a decision, a real decision, a decision with life and death consequences, something that hasn't happened the land war of this scale since World War II. It felt as if history moved again. Now, obviously the next story, and it's arguable which one is bigger in my mind, because you almost wonder if the second could have happened without

the first. Is the Israel situation. Every element of that. First, of course, the October seventh unpleasantness, shall we say, which is into the resumption of the genocide and Gaza. She had explosive political consequences here. First, on the left we started to see this generational divide over the issue of Israel hit and hit hard college presidents replaced protests smashed with truncheons and horses, and all of a sudden, this went from a secondary issue for sparks, for weirdos, for

politically minded leftist radicals to center stage. There was no way to get around it, and at least in my mind, it's the moment where public perception of the state of

Israel really began to shift. Now, obviously, again, I don't think that conservatives, and not all, but more and more conservatives would have swung against Israel so cleanly and so quickly had it not been for the financial extortion of the Zelenski regime, demanding more and more money, constantly lecturing and hectoring other NATO powers to give them more, a sort of entitled mentality of I need your stuff and you're a monster if you won't give it to me.

And well, that isn't exactly the same as how Benjamin net and Yahoo's talked to us, but it's the same pattern. You need to get me out of this situation I got myself into. It's your responsibility, it's your duty. Now. The Israel issue is also what has created a split on the right, a split that runs right through the heart of maga. You saw this in well, the defeat of Thomas Massey, which is basically an aftershock of the

Israel issue, the IQ, if you will. But that split, which runs up to about age fifty five in the Republican Party and round about the same depending on who you ask in the Democratic Party, Well, it's completely changed how politics are done. The old order. It's creaking. It's not necessarily able to answer these questions. It's not able to form coalitions in the same way. It's fundamentally changed American politics another way in which this feeling of the

system groaning under its own weight with no end in sight. Well, there's light at the end of the tunnel now. And of course, as the old aphorism goes, when you see light in a tunnel, you don't know if it's daylight or a train coming your way. I don't want to be a Pollyanna. I don't want to be overly romantic

about this, but it's a huge thing. I mean, the Holocaust World War two is the central organizing myth of the American Empire, right of the post World War two world, and we're watching in real time as it is desacralized. As many people both left and right are saying, well, whatever happened to you? That doesn't give your grandchildren licensed to bomb churches, to kill women and children, and demand

that we pay for it. To jump when we say jump, to strike an alleged nuclear facility in a mountain in the middle of nowhere, Iran that we've been assured was two weeks away from plunging the world into nuclear fire for longer than I've been alive. That realization is huge. It strikes at the very core of the current moral order. The next big story, of course, is Trump two point zero.

Regardless of your opinions on the man, he ran a very successful campaign, built a wide, highly disparate coalition, pulling in the podcast circuit young men men under forty swung hard for Trump. Under thirty did to an even more significant degree, And of course there are still unanswered questions. The iconic image Fight Fight Fight at Butler that this near disaster of a political assassination. It felt as if it was a moment where history happened again. Where were

you when you found out? I remember, I bet that you do too, And at that moment it felt as if Trump had the mandate of Heaven. All eyes were on him. He passed the test, and I'm not going to say that was the sole factor. Kamala Harris was an absolutely horrible candidate. There was this new group of tech elites coming out to play politics. Of course, Elon Musk buying Twitter a huge part of that, which is, let's be honest, also shaped our perception of the Israel

issue and many others. But we were seeing, at least for a moment, a new political coalition. Now check my last episode with Stormy Waters for exactly how that's going. But it was undoubtedly seismic. Something felt dramatic. One of the other I won't even say this is a story, but trends things that have dramatically changed since I started. This is the AI revolution. I'll be honest. I hate talking about AI and dating discourse or things that I

sort of feel like it's a wet paint sign. I know exactly what's going to happen, but I can't stop myself from doing it. Regardless of your opinions on it, if you're an AI optimist, a doomer, or a nothing ever happens type, Clearly it has changed the information landscape, not only for the ability to create look at things like the Will Stancil Show or the proliferation of early memes about smoke detectors. Right, but even down to the point of what is real, people are much less trusting

because almost anyone anywhere can make something very convincing. This desert of the real that has been remarked upon for thirty years, well it's getting drier. There is less and less reality. It's more and more created something. I think that even if it's not my favorite topic to appine on, it has changed many aspects of our personal lives, but

also our political reality. On the stupid level, you have I ran making lego edits of Donald Trump crying, which is okay stupid, but uh, you know, my grandma is worried about getting phone calls from someone who sounds like me, worried about, you know, even the kind of her own grandchildren, their voices being stolen used to get money out of her.

And that's a silly example. It's not the most impactful thing, but in much the same way that social media, the algorithm changed how people interact, changed how people were their day Waye's done the same thing, and if projections are to be believed, this isn't stopping soon, the economy may well change. We may have a large population effectively useless people. Not useless on a personal level, but someone for whom there is nothing to do. I don't know if that's

going to happen. Smart people seem to think it might. But if we're looking at trends forward, we both have the resumption of history. We're no longer in the interminable twentieth century. It's still lingering on. It's not dead yet, but it feels as if finally something new is happening. A different angle on this when I talked earlier in this podcast about the political order becoming sort of moreribunt,

becoming ossified, losing its vitality. A big part of that, and this is something you saw happen before the US Civil War, is that the number of issues, well, it really narrowed. There was really only one thing to argue about. These kind of secondary issues which had organized politics were solved, they fell by the wayside. And in my mind, the two issues we are seeing exactly that is on abortion and the Second Amendment. I don't want to bore you guys with my rant on the Second Amendment, so I'll

stick to abortion. Roe versus weight being struck down. This is a huge story. If you're from read America, you grew up in a religious community, goal forever. My dad was at the March for Life when he was a kid. I haven't been to it. I probably should. But this has been a central focus of American politics, on both

the pro and against side, a defining issue. And Okay, kicking it back down to the state didn't exactly make people with the feelings I have towards abortion happy whatever camp you think I'm in, but it kind of solved the issue, at least for a time. It went from being top line politics to well, something that doesn't bite as much. You can live in New York and sacrifice as many infants as you want to Moloch, We're in Alabama. It simply isn't happening. This has had effects on demography,

but not necessarily the ones people expected. For instance, fewer black children are being aborted, but also fewer of them are being born, which I think is something that almost none of us expected. Interesting. You know, I'm again firmly anti abortion. I think that that is a good thing that it is not happening. But yeah, the results of

which are still kind of percolating. But I think everyone was surprised by that, both that it happened, and it seemed to be this sort of Solomon moment, ironically enough, cutting the baby in half, solving the issue by hook or by crook. And let's be honest, I've been pretty harsh to the Trump administration, and I think fairly so, but I have to be honest, killing Roe versus weight automatically puts him in the top. I probably twenty percent

just off that alone. That's something I never thought would be done. That's something I never thought we would get, something sorely needed. And so if nothing else, it's sort of like, well, every other politician was screwing me too, so that kind of nets out, and you know, we

got Row, and that's important. Both on a moral level, I viewed as one of the grave sins of the American Empire, the murder of you know, millions and millions of children, both directly and indirectly, depending on how much of a peacenick you are, but also in the sense that it felt like we were driving to a conclusion all of a sudden, we were driving towards a new political order that guns and abortion, the two issues that

had really defined the culture War. Well, all of a sudden we could talk about something else, We could push towards something else. And sure there are still fierce debates over abortion and over the Second Amendment, but finally there was at least a sign of some sort of resolution to that, some way to talk about something else. Another one, which is if we're talking about finally the end of the twentieth century. The death of Queen Elizabeth was sort

of symbolic. Ruled for seventy years, presided over the absolute disillusion of the British Empire. And Okay, sure, an old woman died. She was not a powerful monarch. Clearly, she spent her entire career deferring, and many of the time she chose to take an active chance or active stance were, in my mind wrong. I don't agree with her position. She screwed over the Rhodesions people that I have a

great deal of sympathy for. Actually, it's funny, I literally have at whatever and I'm going to show you we have some Rhodesian equipment in the in the recording studio. The point is, this is another way in which it felt like the twentieth century was done. A woman who had been on the throne for most of it, through effectively the entire post war era, the era of the American Empire. She wasn't around anymore, and it felt as if the last connection to that world went with her.

Also symbolically, the funeral was incredibly poignant, and I think for many people we saw a sort of spark an ember in the Ashes, a culture we assumed to be dead that was still there. And were there embarrassing things about it? Sure, were there things that were cringe, were there things that you or I would not have done, But it felt as if we saw the English spirit dimly but still there. The fire is still burning, even if it's only a few glowing coals, a sign up

for hope. I think, and look, the Anglos, the Brits, they have it worse than us in some ways, but I've been impressed with them, very impressed with them. Recording this as the riot's rage across Spelfast. I realize they're Northern Irish, but they're loyalists all the same. And when you look at that, when you look at the rise of restore Britain, to me, I see hope there and four years ago I didn't see much at all, really, And look, you guys know me. I don't tend to

be overly optimistic. Look at my profile picture. The man with the head in his hands, that's me. But at the same time, when we're talking about the end of the Empire of lies, the end of the post war consensus, when I say the lie can't last forever, that is what I am talking about, at least part of it.

There are others, of course, But this moment we find ourselves in feels as if, it's sort of, to use an overused millennial phrase, a liminal space one and the other the realm of Janus, the two faced god of ending and beginnings. We're not quite there yet, but it seems as if everyone feels it. And this moment when Queen Elizabeth died, much like Land War in Europe, much like Row Versus weighed well, it felt like things were moving,

things were changing. It was not eternal. To take things into a slightly more mundane direction, we really can't talk about the last two years, or bikes four years held the last six without talking about the cost of living crisis. This explosive mix of skyrocketing asset prices, whether you look at homes, used cars, as I certainly want to do new cars, food, groceries, energy, anything, it's getting more expensive.

It feels as if the merry go round is well, it's sort of finding to a halt the idea that things always got better, that you could sort of just park your money and ride your way to prosperity on this sort of general upward trend, Well, it's not there. This sense of dispossession has built up an incredible amount of political animosity on again both the right and the left. How many people are involved in left wing politics because

they are hyper educated and cannot find gainful employment. The stereotype of the PhD at Starbucks is certainly a stereotype, but there's some truth to it. This boomer zoomer divide is certainly felt hottest over the issue of Israel, but a big part of it a sort of secondary theater the Pacific to the European theater, if you will, is

cost of living. This is an area where the Trump administration has gotten really wrong footed, focusing on protecting luxury boomer communism, social programs, Medicare, social Security, while effectively letting guys like you and me rot crushed under the weight of inflation, crushed under stagnating wages, crushed under mass migration, people competing for the rules we were assured were good paying jobs. This also ties into, albeit indirectly, the sexual

crisis men and women. It's been going on for a while, but it feels as if it's getting worse and worse. The inability of people to pair off and have children. Now, look, it's not all bad. The white birth rate in America's gone up under Trump, something again I think we need to thank him for. But a large part of this is economic. Young men as a class are suffering. They're

suffering in education, they're suffering in the job market. The amount of men who have dropped out, who are neat doing nothing, no friends, no pros, no girls, no ambition, what's never been higher. And it feels as if it's a hopeless situation. It feels as if you will never own a house. It feels as if you will never be able to afford the quality of life that your parents,

let alone your grandparents had at your stage. At least anecdotally, everyone bar one or two examples in my peer group is downwardly socially mobile, doing worse, maybe breaking even but doing it in a different way, working harder, both parents in the workforce. We're getting squeezed, We're getting screwed, and it's bad in America, it's worse in Europe. The sky high youth unemployment, crushing pension plans, somehow worse than what we've got. This story cannot be overstated. It's a huge

trend and shows no signs of improving. This is a minor one one that's stuck out in my head. The capture of Maduro, a moment that I didn't really care about as much as others did. It's sort of a part of being a regional hedgemon. That you mess with the ban of republics around you, that you mess with the smaller countries. It's human behavior. But I will say the US military came out of it looking much better than they have in Iran. You have to give them that.

And I think a lot of people, myself included, were hoping that that was a sign of a pivot to our sphere of influence away from forever wars. Unfortunately it wasn't, but it seems to have been an opportunity, right we could have been that instead of trying to be the world's policeman all over again, failing to learn the lessons of yesteryear. But it was a daring raid. A little

bit of information on it. I can't reveal my sources or what I know, but I will say, like cool, you have to give him that, parading a captured enemy through the streets of New York like a Roman triumph. As the kids say, it's got aura give him again. If nothing else props for that. And the last story one that runs through all of these are the Epstein files, which have really grabbed onto the public imagination Watergate for

a decade now. We saw it, of course, really flare up initially when the man died, coleting into the Pizzagate stuff, but it never stopped developing, the slow drip of information, each file more monstrous than the last, the realization and how many people were connected to this man, both in

our politics and also in foreign politics. Members of the Norwegian government, prominent British politician Pete mandelssoon any number of figures tied into this ethnic blackmail money laundering network, and of course this ties into both the growing dissatisfaction with the economy the realization that the game is rigged, and of course ongoing foreign policy disagreements. Of course, the idea

that you know to quote you know the investigator. I think he was the prosecutor from Palm Beach, right, he's intelligence. You can't touch him. Well, who's intelligence? I have a feeling you and I know. But we saw both in the actual files himself and then the cover up, the snake ining, if you will, from the Trump administration. Well

how far this went? And if we're talking about seismic changes, people were, particularly on the right, done with the government after COVID Steine files have thrown gasoline on that fire. Both the right and the left have their own Epstein narrative. You can look at the kind of blue and on types to see what they're saying. It's mostly about Donald Trump. Of course the right has a different narrative. But this is foundational American lore. It really has taken the place

of Watergate in the American mindset. It is the scandal to end all scandals, and people aren't letting it go again. The stupid White House two fifty event. On social media, if you look under the announcements from the UFC right, a sports organization, it's comments about Israel and it's comments about Epstein fairly obvious reasons. This has taken a place in the national psyche. It's not going away. And with that we can also talk about the of conspiracy slop.

It has to do with changing algorithms, right, kind of the COVID restrictions loosening. But there has been a massive boom in kind of Alex Jones without Alex Jones, the kind of in my mind limited hangout conspiracy nonsense. It's big business and some of it's laughable, some of it's embarrassing. Some it's obviously wrong, but it is a symptom of widespread distrust of institutions. Really, nobody who's anybody believes the line anymore right or left. Now, the left has a

different relationship that you and I do. You know, they become wetted to big pharma and other things. But uh yeah, it's a weird moment. This kind of aging empire, this aging collection of civic beliefs, well long ago it lost the ability to pull the rabbit out and had to achieve the political miracle to do the needful, as an Indian fellow once said, and it took a while for people to realize it took a while for that knowledge to promulgate. It's not one hundred percent yet, and it's

not even consistently applied knowledge. But there's a hunger for the real story. There's a hunger for the truth, oftentimes met again by slop. But the idea that your elites are satanic pedophiles, let's caught on like rabbit or a wildfire. Right. You can't get away from it. I think ultimately a positive development, both because it's seemingly true and I don't want these people to have any credibility. They don't deserve it. Just some thoughts there. So thank you, guys, really thank

you for the last four years. It's been a ton of fun, genuinely, and yeah, I'm might keep doing it. I mean for the foreseeable future, at least. I'm young ish. I like this. That's what I'm good at least, I hope so. And I appreciate you guys for placing your faith in me. I'll be traveling a lot this month. This is really the first time in a long time

that I've taken a day off. As you guys are aware, I from a content perspective, I don't all right, something comes out no matter what, and I'm gonna keep that up, but I'm gonna take some time. Finally before so before April of this year, where I dropped my last couple of side contracts, I hadn't had a day off Christmas included since twenty twenty four. And I don't say that to brag. I just mean to say that I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to go somewhere without

a laptop over a weekend. Write nothing crazy, nothing extravagant, but thanks, genuinely. I mean that. Looking forward, right, what do you want to do? Well, more of this, keep recording, keep writing articles or maybe something long form in the future, still working on ideas, might have a book, but uh yeah, sincerely, I just want to thank you guys and wish you a happy five hundredth anniversary.