Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Spectacle Society: When Nothing Means Anything with Dave Stockdale
In this riveting conversation with Dave Stockdale of Nightmare Masterclass, we dive deep into the crumbling foundations of media trust and how dark money shapes our information landscape. The discussion begins with a critical examination of the recent "Chorus" controversy, where progressive influencers took billionaire funding while decrying criticism as "misinformation" – adopting the very tactics they once condemned from the right.
What makes this conversation particularly compelling is how it connects these media credibility issues to broader cultural trends in film and entertainment. We explore how modern horror directors like Ari Aster are creating sophisticated works with complex social commentary, only to have critics mischaracterize them through simplistic political lenses. Films like "Eddington" and "Weapons" aren't straightforward propaganda but artistic expressions designed to generate meaningful discourse about society's challenges.
The fragmentation of media extends beyond news into entertainment, with streaming services oversaturating the market while younger generations increasingly disconnect from traditional formats entirely. Many Zoomers report they simply don't watch movies, creating separate cultural universes where shared reference points become increasingly rare. This disconnection mirrors the broader social atomization affecting everything from politics to personal relationships.
Perhaps most fascinating is our examination of how parasocial relationships are replacing genuine social connections, a trend that Dave describes as potentially "Armageddon-like" in its implications. When people claim "there is no more social, only parasocial," they're describing a fundamentally broken society incapable of collective action or shared understanding.
Whether you're concerned about media manipulation, fascinated by horror cinema's evolution, or simply trying to make sense of our increasingly fragmented culture, this conversation offers valuable insights into how we might navigate these challenging times with greater awareness and intentionality.
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
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Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to Varmblog, and today I'm here with Dave of Nightmare Masterclass, who was the first official guest of the show. You weren't actually the first guest, but you're the first guest of the show as the show the first proper guest.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you visited regularly for the first three years and then, for some reason, in the chaos of the last two years, we didn't do our yearly checkup. For those of you who have been following along my personal drama which doesn't come up on the interview show but does on the solo show I've had a nodulone tumor in my thyroid and it has put me on hiatus twice in a year, but it is gone now. And while they told me I could lose my voice or warp my throat because, for those of of you don't know your anatomy, um, your thyroid and parathyroid are right beneath the two major nerves that control your verse box um, apparently, uh, they did a really good job and didn't touch any of that because I am fine. I had a rough throat, I sounded like tom waits for about a, about a week, and then we are almost two weeks out and, uh, other than swelling, which you kind of see right here, if you're watching the show, if you're listening, you don't see it.
Speaker 1:Um, I am, I'm totally normal, so, um, so that's a personal update. Um, be narcissistic, but hi dave, how, what are you guys doing over at a nightmare master class these days?
Speaker 2:um, yeah, I mean, uh, I've had some health issues as well, so that did that put me in a. I was also on hiatus, um, so we can commiserate over that a little bit if you want. But, um, uh, yeah, I've just recently put out a couple videos, but but nothing too crazy, I'm just trying to get back into the swing of things, you know, get some momentum going. But yeah, I don't know, I have several kind of long form videos in the works. I feel like my my longer videos tend to get a little bit more traction. People use it as like second monitor content, which I don't know. Is that like insulting or is it? I don't know how to really take that information second monitor content, but it's, I don't know. I'll take it.
Speaker 1:I don't know. I'll take it as a person who is unmonetized and on YouTube I think I am always browser behind the one you're watching content, cause I'm not quite sure anyone actually watches this, they just listen to it. But for some reason, zoomers like to listen to podcasts on youtube. So, um, uh, I feel, yeah, no, I, I don't actually think second monitor content isn't, and so I, like I personally uh, have used yours, um, uh, understanding evil. There's a few channels that I'll put on when I'm doing school work as a teacher and will be kind of enraptured, but I don't need to see all the visuals. So, yeah, you're second monitor content for me too, but that's actually. That's no more insulting than being on a podcast, which I guess, depending on who you talk to, is insulting or not. I don't, I don't know. I did a.
Speaker 2:I did a fairly long analysis of a hard. It's hard to describe exactly what it is. I guess it's a web comic called 3D Workers Island. I put that out last november. That is that's probably the thing I've gotten the most traction on in the past couple years. So, uh, that was kind of an interesting project.
Speaker 2:Uh, playing with the format of uh, like the story is kind of told through old forum posts and so you kind of switch between you, you kind of go sequentially and learn more about this weird screensaver and it. You know the subtext is kind of creepy. It's part of it's really about the culture of the internet at that time, circa, I don't know, I want to say like early two thousands, I think. I think all all of this stuff is timestamped. So it's, it's interesting. It's it's pretty clear.
Speaker 2:The creator, you know kind of went through the trouble of creating like an actual forum and and, you know, telling a story by creating all these characters for them and how they kind of talk about this bizarre screensaver where random things happen and then some people report that like unseemly things happen but there's no official proof. So it's kind of about how. It's kind of about how, like rumors start and how memes start over time. I'm not really doing it justice here because my brain is fried, but it's. Yeah, maybe if you're watching me for the first time, maybe check that 3d workers island is, and now that at the uh, the video is called uh, 3d workers island full analysis, or something like that yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 1:I've been um, getting a little bit back in the cultural commentary lately. I uh, the last, the year, the last year in politics has um and by this I don't mean the mainstream politics, it's actually the non-mainstream politics or the. I don't even know what mainstream means anymore. I mean, like hell, half the tiktok influencers are receiving dark money from somebody um, that's a.
Speaker 2:That's a great story to talk about. I man, that is uh, and you know, obviously not surprising, but, um, the way in which certain people are defending it is really discouraging, that's what's gotten me, it's defenses of it, because I'm like look, I like ty, like TY2 took Jeffrey Katzenberg money.
Speaker 1:Like independent progressive media takes billionaire money. I know that. But they didn't hide it and they sure as heck didn't claim that it was debunked by confirming that it was real, then outing it, but only outing it. After the article in W wire dropped, then saying it was a scholarship, even though the people aren't in school, I was just like, and then basically it was. It just became, uh, oh well, we just need our own, our own billionaires.
Speaker 1:You know what? I'd expect that from like blue wave dim types? Sure, because they're just, they're not morally equivalent, but they have learned like reptile brain style to basically become rush limbaugh ditto heads, like they did for rachel maddow during her conspiracy mongering in the first trump administration, which has now basically destroyed MSNBC as a network. It's just, I don't even mind that. They're like oh, it didn't change our content. I'm like, no, no one even accused you of it changing your content. Well, what you were accused of is not taking on any critical voices from the left by signing that and signing an NDA, and nobody's denying that. And if it wasn't true, I have a strange feeling that either David Pakman or someone from Midas Touch would be suing Taylor Arends for libel. I don't like Taylor Arends. I don't like Taylor Renz. I don't really dislike her either. I just don't you know, I find all the internet drama tiresome.
Speaker 2:Look, they would be demanding a retraction, they would be threatening to sue. I don't see a whole lot of people doing that. What I see is like David Pakman confidently asserting that it's been debunked, when it actually hasn't been debunked and pretty much everybody saying it's either like misinformation or fake news, which is, you know, just like that's right out of the Trumpian playbook. You just any criticism of you just say it's fake news, it's not real, and don't provide any citation. Or I've seen screenshots of the contract that they signed, that the claims are essentially true and they haven't denied the claims.
Speaker 1:Actually, what Pacman specifically denied wasn't in the article, which is they asked him to change his content. That's never alleged and you know he was paid to promote certain things. That's never really alleged either. The the legion is. They got a eight thousand dollar stipend stipend our scholarship is what? And it involves a lot of people that.
Speaker 1:So I create alternate accounts to follow the, the media landscapes of different ideologies. So I have a progressive account and and I'm not even saying that I don't sometimes listen to these creators like there's some of these people from like midas, touch and stuff. They just remind me of msnbc back when it was air america, except that they're often pretending to be individual actors on tiktok, instagram and youtube when they're clearly not. Now, having having worked in publishing for as many years as I have and worked in the youtube world, you and I both know how many organic successes are not organic, that they have investors paying uh, paying for click farms and stuff like that. I know that. I know it's a tactic that's used if you see certain guests that come on shows and all of a sudden those shows have have 80 000 views for one video, but nothing before, nothing after. You can almost, you can almost promise it's a bot farm. I hate to make nothing after you can almost, you can almost promise it's a bot farm.
Speaker 1:I hate to make some of you cynical, but you can see it um it's a good heuristic right, it's like this channel has two videos that have gone viral, but there's nothing different about them than the other videos, except a specific person who on, who seems to be on the up and up and alternative media circles as a regular guest. I wonder why that is. You know, that's a good heuristic for asking. And the other thing is like I've talked about this before but people backdoor money through what is it that you do? I don't, I'm not monetized on YouTube, but the YouTube monetizations that you can do during a stream.
Speaker 2:Oh, like the members.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, they can backdoor money through patron and they can back through money through those shout out, drop donation things and you don't even really know that much about the people doing the drop. Like, like there've been people who've been accused of, for example, taking Russian money, who said they didn't know and these are right wingers. But I was like I believe they probably didn't know because during these drops these people are trying to these influence guys. They're not trying to do that, they would rather you not know, it's them.
Speaker 2:They're just trying to make sure that you're there to spend a narrative, um, but this is, you know, like. Imagine what these people would be saying if chorus, this dark money organization, was russian. Imagine, you know, like, right, if the shoe was on the other foot, they would be screaming from the the highest mountaintop.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, well, I mean, this is the thing that, like you know, I've been doing podcasting and podcast world for a long time and I'll tell you one of the things that has always baffled me. It actually hurts me with guests. Sometimes I have trouble getting certain guests and I suspect it's because they ask for my youtube and my youtube is unmonetized. I see I have 7,000 viewers and then I like show them and when I show them my free podcast stats I'm in the top 10%. That's not super impressive, that's like several you know. That's 5,000 to 10,000 downloads a month over four shows plus back catalog. It's not amazing, but it's good. My Patreon numbers are in the upper 20%, which is less than you'd think, because the 1% of Patreon makes millions of dollars a year.
Speaker 2:But even the top 50%, you're barely breaking poverty wages, you know um so it's like how the average income is, you know in the in the country, is thrown off by the uber rich right, very similar.
Speaker 1:In fact, it's in some ways worse because, uh, because you can be fairly high up in the Patreon rankings and still not doing well, but I have, you know, 500 patrons. That's not for a person without a crew, who doesn't buy ads and who won't monetize his YouTube. That's pretty good, but people don't understand that YouTube engagements in particular are like Twitter engagements. You can buy them, oh for sure, like I've had offers for people to buy them. The reason why I don't is if you don't do it all the time, it fucks your algorithm, like all of a sudden, all of a sudden, my, my video is only being given to people in Bangladesh.
Speaker 2:Like and in general, if you have a sudden surge and then the next video doesn't do well, if it almost seems like you're punished for it oh yeah, you know, you are like I've had like, uh, I mean the.
Speaker 1:I shouldn't say that no one really knows how most of these algorithm works. Yeah, um, it's very opaque, but chorus being what it is, I mean, my only thing about it is is if, if they had disclosed it, if there wasn't india involved, um, I don't think I would care. Like people like oh, are you against left-wingers getting? I'm like one.
Speaker 2:These people aren't left-wingers, they're liberal progressives and they might not even be that progressive um, a good litmus test would be their position on israel, palestine, like most of the people on those lists on the list have not spoken up about the genesis about it at all. It's missing from those they're just completely silent about it.
Speaker 1:Right, like it's not that they're pro it, they just haven't brought it up at all, and that's something to notice. It's it has been. I think it really hurts a lot of these people's cred, though, which is why they're denying it, but also like it feels very much like even the base of the Democratic Party really cannot muster a positive identity on anything. I've been reading Democratic Party's like proposed stances on immigration, and again it's like Trump light, maybe strongly limiting things that ice can do, but they're not even talking. Like bill fucking crystal is taking them a stronger stance on on immigration enforcement than the DNC is. So it's just pretty dismal.
Speaker 1:It's. We're in a weird, weird place, um. And well, it is going to lead me, though, to some of these.
Speaker 1:Some of these same people are people who rejected one of the movies we're going to talk about tonight eddington uh by ari aster, um because they're being called out by it yeah, and because, um, I mean, I mean I saw one of the New York Times editors basically call it a right-wing rant and I was like, did I see the same movie? Because they're mocking progressives for leaning into right-wing conspiracy culture, but ultimately the villain's the right-wing conspiracy culture. Are we watching the same thing here and for?
Speaker 2:sure the answer is no, I guess.
Speaker 1:I guess what bothers me about this is getting to eddington, though, is like why are educated professionals in their 50s acting like maga chuds, who are 22?
Speaker 2:like and look. I mean, the thing with eddington is, I think some people have have come, have been conditioned to sort of expect any kind of political message in a film to be fairly clear, and I mean that's this is kind of a semantic game, right. But to me the difference between propaganda and art is propaganda will be fairly straightforward. You won't be wondering exactly what it means, you won't have a discourse about it. Really, it'll be fairly clear what it means. Clear what it means, um, versus, like art, which is supposed to generate discussion and have you're supposed to, there's supposed to be some kind of ambiguous element to it that leaves you, uh, leaves you kind of wondering about it. Um, you know, even potentially years after you watched it.
Speaker 2:With eddington, it's like somewhere in between, right?
Speaker 2:Um, there are multiple ways you could interpret what's going on in the film, um, but ultimately it's kind of about how, the inevitability of, uh, you know, a capitalist agenda in the face of a sort of fractured working class, um, that that is totally at odds with one another because they're, they're stuck in a fake world, a spectacle, they're, they're, they're too online, um, then they take their online politics out into the world and chaos ensues, right, all the while this company what's it called Solid Gold, magikarp, which is kind of an interesting little tidbit, this company has the data center built and they have their agenda enacted.
Speaker 2:In the end, um, and it's, it's, it's sort of ironic that the sheriff um, the protagonist of the film, is against the data center being built, while the ostensibly well-meaning liberal um, who is mayor, played by Pedro Pascal, is pro the data center being built because, you know, obviously it'll bring in jobs this and that. So the reactionary in this situation kind of landed on the correct position by accident, right, because it's probably not a great thing for the town to have that data center built there, considering if you consider the water scarcity issue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're moving data centers out here in the desert and I'm just like lovely, because their water bills are going up and up and up. We haven't had the electricity spikes that you've seen in the northeast and southeast, but like we don't have any water and yeah, we see it all the time so you kind of.
Speaker 2:You kind of think like, or at the very least like, um, what I was thinking after I watched the film. It's been a couple weeks since I saw it in theaters, so like my memory's not great but I thinking, gee, if the sheriff and the indigenous people could only get on the same page about the data center, they could work together. But they're too mired in this online bullshit to have any kind of solidarity yeah, I mean that.
Speaker 1:I mean, look, I think ari aster's last two movies are scarier than his first two movies, which are actually horror films, than the last two are not horror films. Um, yeah, bow is afraid, it's terrifying, it's, you know? Uh, it's, it is uh, like a nightmare for you, eddington. I mean, I slight spoilers here, but I couldn't even figure out if the people who showed up at the end of the movie were the right side pretending to be the left side, or the left side living up to the wife's side's paranoid delusion, or, and I know, at some point you depart reality, at some point you're in some care I'm not going to give who's, but you're in some characters delusional perspective. But I can't tell you when the delusional perspective kicked in, it's evolved into absurdity.
Speaker 2:Right, it's evolved and it's unclear, but you could say the people that attack the sheriff are like antifa super soldiers. Um, I my, my personal opinion is that are there right-wing mercenaries like you?
Speaker 1:no idea.
Speaker 2:I mean, my personal opinion is that the sheriff was killed because he opposed the data center being built.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's what it was all about.
Speaker 2:That's what it was all about the whole time. All this other stuff, like you know, obviously the George Floyd issue is was a significant issue for the country and I don't want to minimize that. But for that particular, for that town, that was not a material issue in that town, necessarily the bigger issue would have been the data center, by far. Um, and another the interesting tidbit about the company being called solid gold magic harp is it is like, uh, one of these glitch tokens, uh, that llms have trouble, they have trouble with for some reason, um, you know.
Speaker 2:So I feel like it's kind of a double entendre, because magic harp is a pokemon and if you know anything about Poke, uh, about Magikarp, uh, he's basically like a useless Pokemon, he, he doesn't really have any moves. So you have to, you have to train him, um, over and over and over again, you have to basically cycle him in and out of battles without using him really. So until he levels up to become Gyarados, which is like this big water dragon, um, which I think is like a great metaphor for ai in general. Like you have to train it. It's basically useless to begin with. Uh, you have to train it, and then it becomes some kind of nightmarish thing. I think I kind of think that's the subtext of why, why the company is called that. So there's. There's a lot of little interesting details like that in the movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I thought the movie was was quite good.
Speaker 1:I still think I think Bone Afraid is better.
Speaker 1:I still think I think bone afraid is better, but it seems to be getting at a lot of the way in which, like we might call it spectacle I don't love that term, but we might call it some lacra but the way in which people's projections of politics to escape a kind of banal decline is making it impossible to respond to that banal decline. And also, what I find interesting is the critique of liberals in that movie is not what the liberals, who targeted the movie as right wing complained about because, frankly, they weren't good enough critics of cinema to pick it up and that is, it's commenting on the fact that, for practical reasons, progressives have created a whole lot of the forces that undo them over and over again. And you know, the clearest example for this today is, you know what progressives now call like the South African mafia, which is you teal musk, and then, uh, bezos and zuckerberg. Well, I hate to tell you, the reason why all those people are rich is obama era policies, specifically, like you know, um low interest rates, low interest rates.
Speaker 1:They all got direct government investment, which they used to buy out competition Subsidies. Yeah, they all got subsidies. Then they were allowed to subsist under conditions that did not go after monopolies and did not enforce antitrust laws, which that wasn't Obama, that was Jimmy fucking carter, right, um, yeah, established all that, and you know. And then they all, and I know that everybody, including mega people, don't have any memory anymore because they're constantly stimulated by bullshit. But if, but, if we go back to 2020, the MAGA people were yelling about Bill Gates, musk, zuckerberg, and because they felt and I actually will say rightfully, paralegally censored, but everybody forgets everything and no one means anything anymore. And you know, that's where I'm at. Like, you have people who, when alex jones is supporting, you know, use of american american troops and nationalizing national guards, uh, um, I think he preached his whole career about again.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, ostensibly since the 90s that motherfucker hadn't dropped posse, comitatus and like. And well, that's gone now and he's maybe having slight flashes of second thoughts, but barely. And he jumps back onto his pro-trump train. It's just no one believes shit. So, to bring it back to what we were talking about with chorus, the, the, the, the, uh, seemingly billionaire funded, uh, progressive interest group with all the ndas, um, what makes that so ironic is these people were pushing the oligarchy and then, when you actually scrape them, what did they really want? If I was to translate it, we want our own oligarchs because you took away our NGO industrial complex, like, and I've seen supposed radicals defend this and social Democrats defend this, or democratic socialists, whatever the fuck they want to call themselves. And I'm just like, in what world do you think that the incentives that make billionaires bad is going to help you? You know, um, and it's going to be a lot harder to push against soar stocks, conspiracies, when this literally is one for sure, like. So I, I do think one of the things that ariaster's piss people off with is that he's basically right that progressives create their own monsters and they're in. The people responding to that are so splintered and factored and bullshit because they're personal and that's the other thing. Their personal lives are shit, for economic conditions too, which is part of what is pushing them into these delusional narratives, and the movie is just reflecting a feedback loop that will. That is going insane like um, and I very much feel that right now.
Speaker 1:When I talk to anybody about anything in politics, it's just um. And you know, I recently did a piece, uh, or commented on a piece in the 50s about ex-communists, although today a lot of ex-communists don't even call themselves ex-communists. Um, they just change what it all means. But you know, I have a lot of friends who are diehard ex-communist weirdos and um, and they're not my friends anymore. Um, I'm friends with conservatives, but I don't tend to like people who, like like, see the light in radically different directions and ways that make them conspiracy theorists and whatnot, because to me, indicates it's not just a difference in ideology, it's like that that indicates a profound character flaw, more than even differing ideology does. Yeah, if you're.
Speaker 2:If you're like wildly oscillating between different ideologies, it's it's one thing. If you're a young person and you're doing that, that's you're just, you know, trying to find yourself, it's another thing if that's like, uh, core, you're like core identity is.
Speaker 1:You had this like political shift and you suddenly saw the light and now you think you know better than everybody else right and and and the light is just the inversion of everything you used to believe, um, and so you know, I, I get that problem. That's not new. I think we're going to see a lot of that in the coming future. I think a lot of people just like, after occupy, me, occupy so far gone now we forgot about how many people turned on occupy and became weird libertarian proto, uh, proto, um, neo-reactionaries, almost, um, in addition to, you know, graber, making everybody into, uh, bernie toast social Democrats. It is kind of amazing to me. And you study media too.
Speaker 1:The incentives for political media, I think we just have to admit, even on the far left, are uniformly bad. Let's say you don't betray, you don't change against your beliefs, like choppo. What you'll tend to do in their case is downplay your politics sometimes and then bring it up at other times and I mean I'll give them credit for taking good stance on palestine. So I'm not, I'm not even sad about everything they're doing, but it's just like when people tell me choppo is a comedy podcast and I'm like, really, you really got. You're now just doing the far left version of john stewart that's the john stewart line.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember, remember, when he supposedly owned tucker carlson and um, when, when carlson tried to turn it back on him and say, well, you know what about you? He was just like, well, I'm just a comic, I'm just a comedian, right? And it's like well, well, dude, you're the one sitting here trying to, you know, lecture Tucker, like you know, it's just interesting that that kind of hypocrisy not that I even think Jon Stewart was necessarily wrong in that conversation, not that I even think Jon Stewart was necessarily wrong in that conversation it's just like that's, that's a cop out to say that you're a comedian. And I think people, maybe people are starting to realize that I mean, the goddamn guy from Comptown is interviewing Richie Torres and having like kind of an emotional breakdown on camera, richie Torres and having like kind of an emotional breakdown on camera like he's, that that podcast is known as being the most irony poison people on the internet. You know what I mean? Um, so that's it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to me yeah, I've seen a lot of this. I mean you, you have seen it. Comptown was always a little bit more political. I remember when Stavos actually someone who should not be named but I used to work for went on Comptown and he tried to make an argument about media ownership on YouTube, and Stavos actually made an even more left wing argument than said individual who I used to work for, for a socialist press interesting yeah, it was interesting but I have just I have found that we're just doing comedy.
Speaker 1:I'm like, look, every motherfucking political pundit right now that's of any influence is a former fucking comedian, left or right. Rogan cedar, door, um, the the. The sole exception is probably, uh uh um, rihanna joy gray, and she was groomed to be a media person for mainstream media and there was no place for her. So here you go, and that's also a lot of the podcast. World is people who have Ivy league degrees, who have backing to go into, and there just weren't the jobs and positions or even the eyes.
Speaker 2:They otherwise would have been like they otherwise would have been like political pundits that would go on bill maher or, ideally, have some kind of show on msnbc or something right and so, um, that's the world of this media and I mean, I've been living with the fact that I felt like the.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the weird ironies of the bernie pro days is I watched jacob and become the nation magazine very fast. Yeah, um, literally by the time bosch targets appointed to the head of the nation. Uh, um, associate a foundation, which was just like oh, come on, um and um, it's just not that interested anymore. It's like, in fact, it seems like that politics is very dead, but what's replacing it is nothing.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't think for all the reporting about how right wing Zoomer boys are under 24. I mean because apparently Zoomer boys over 24 are men. Let me rephrase that are not, don't show the same social attitudes at all. But I'm also like to 22 year olds, do you? I know that no one has any memory anymore, but if you remember the writing about early millennials, who are a little bit younger than me, who were like, oh yeah, he's around 2005, they were predicted to be the most right-wing, if not reactionary, generation ever at that age, yeah, and and also like if you had um my politics after, uh, a gamer gate and the rise of the alt-right, we were supposed to believe that all the millennial boys were going to be Nazis too.
Speaker 1:It rarely sticks. This is my point. I don't know what these kids are going to be like. I imagine they'll be feral wilderness seekers and whatnot, and we'll just hope they don't eat our intestines when the AI overlords have shut down. But whatever, when the AI overlords have shut down, but whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'm just going, I'm just like trying to think of the opinions I had in my early twenties. I was a flaming reactionary, yeah I, I had reactionary tendencies, but so in high school I was always kind of an anti-war lib, but then I started listening to like like Sam Harris and and I kind of got into new atheism, which is like really, uh, kind of a common theme among a lot of people that I hear from.
Speaker 1:Um, I was involved in that, although, to be fair, dave, I hated sam harris from moment one. Yeah, you were right but right, but I like Richard Dawkins.
Speaker 2:Richard Dawkins had a stroke and has gotten way worse. I feel like he didn't used to be this bad.
Speaker 1:No, although in retrospect the signs that his religiosity which is godless Anglican prig, as was just godless anglican plague as opposed to godful anglican prig was pretty obvious as late as the 90s. But like I just really thought, uh, the ancestor's tale was a really good book. I thought the god delusion even at the time was kind of, was kind of nonsensical. Not not that I was thought it was a, the theism was was convincing. I just thought actually the arguments in that book were particularly bad um.
Speaker 2:Christopher hitchens was the best of them.
Speaker 1:Obviously, if you ask me, I mean um, but the best he had with the worst politics and the one with the best politics people don't really know that much about and it's barely associated with him, and that's like daniel dennett and he's not that good of a philosopher but I forgot about dan dennett.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah but his politics weren't that bad. Amassimo pegliucci was one of those guys and he has good politics, but then, I mean, he just went off the reservation, became a stoic, which I guess like instead of finding God, he found Epictetus. So there are worse things that there are every now and then. I just want to become a classicist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sounds nice to me.
Speaker 1:It's. It's interesting in this like weird media landscape, though I was going to tell you this is a year that there's been several political movies that aren't on the nose. Eddington Weapons is not about what people think it's about, I think. I mean I'm going to argue that it is not not about the thing people think it is about, but it's actually mostly about, in my opinion, how baby boomers are parasites and like literally and um, and I didn't know. Yeah, that's a good angle.
Speaker 2:It's definitely about alcoholism, I think it's. It's about um also, like any kind of um, any exploitation of children exploitation of children, addiction um.
Speaker 1:I did not entirely clock the boomer parasite angle, but that makes sense in hindsight just think about the, the twist ending and what that twist ending wears, and uh, even though that twist ending would be older than that, they all talk like uh and dress they. Their high point was in the seventies. And then you go back and look at all the parasite references throughout the movie, which there are. I counted at least 20 on the second watch and I was like it's not subtle. But weirdly it that movie isn't obvious propaganda. Because, like you think it's about one thing and it's just a metaphor about that. I mean you think it's about school shootings. That is so a small part of what that movie is about that it is actively misleading to insist on that.
Speaker 2:I think the big reason people think that is because when the guy's having the dream there's just a big assault rifle yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's almost like a red herring and 217 is thrown in there too, and that's like the name of the bill that was going to ban assault rifles.
Speaker 1:But I don't, I almost I actually think it is a deliberate red herring by the director, um, because people haven't picked up on, like the, the, the stance that the kids are in and everybody else, that's the stance of kids running from bombs in vietnam. So it is not even, yeah, even the obvious things in there are not, are not actually all about school shooting. So it's just, um, I I think it's been a, it's been an interesting year for movies in that I think in two years in a row, the movies that have done that have been the most interesting to me are not movies. That's all coming. Maybe that's just my age, um, but and while there's still a lot of stuff that is that's not franchises that isn't doing well, it does seem like increasingly non-franchise movies are doing better, although there will probably be a movie franchise before we're all done. But it also seems like I'm enjoying watching Disney die slowly.
Speaker 2:I'm enjoying that as well.
Speaker 1:Like nothing they do seems to be going well for them right now.
Speaker 2:So the other trend I've noticed is that, like, sometimes the marketing for movies is better than the movie itself. That was the issue with long legs. That was kind of the issue with weapons for me as well. I thought I liked weapons, but I the the marketing. The marketing was almost the marketing's actively misleading.
Speaker 1:That was true for Barbarian too, though If you go back to Zach Krieger's first movie, barbarian, the marketing for that was also actively misleading.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess that was kind of a fake-out too. I really enjoyed Barbarian. I think that I enjoyed it so much that it kind of overhyped you for weapons exactly.
Speaker 1:I don't think a lot of people who are hyping weapons watch Barbarian. Honestly, I mean, barbarian did well, but it did well for like an unexpected cult horror right after COVID. So that doesn't mean a lot of people saw it, and I'm not even sure if there's a physical media version of that movie. That's a shame. I've gotten back into buying DVDs and I'm learning how many recent releases don't have imprint dvds, like two years after they're out. It's like wow, um, which kind of makes sense, except that, like I think people are not realizing how ephemeral streaming services are yeah, I mean they wonder why people pirate shit.
Speaker 2:It's not a huge mystery.
Speaker 1:Well, funnily enough, when the streaming services were better, they had pretty much ended piracy. Like not totally, but like in the United States there's just a lot less piracy for quite a few years. And that's just not true now, because I can't even figure out what service a movie's on. Often by the time I look it up and find what it's on, by the time I get there within two days, it's like already on a different service. I'm like God damn it.
Speaker 2:And what if you want to buy a movie? What are you going to do? Buy it on Amazon? What if someone? What if the terms of service change or something? It just seems like it's like you. You said it's so ephemeral it's not even worth it to invest in that type of like. Why would you ever buy a movie that way?
Speaker 1:I just I've gone back to buying physical media, um, yeah, uh, because I mean I uh, I've kind of gotten. I have cut back on buying physical books, as you can see. I just don't have space for them, um, but uh, even then I've gotten to where, like, if I can buy, uh, a copy that is my, is uh, is mine, and at least on my hard drive. I'm going to do that over something on amazon, because I can't even back those books up now yeah, so it's a no-brainer um you hate to see it.
Speaker 2:I, yeah, I was gonna say my absolute favorite scene in barbarian is when the um, you know there's a sudden change in perspective and that there's the dickhead landlord guy. When he goes down in his house to find the the room where it's pretty clear this guy was like kidnapping women and holding them and his first reaction is to like, measure and get the square footage. I love that so much yeah, that movie.
Speaker 1:That movie is about clueless men who increasingly become evil, but the I will say the the advertising leads you to believe that, uh, one of the characters is evil, who is not? Um, yep, uh, but anyway. Um yeah, long legs was interesting. I thought long legs was a good movie, but it's advertising actually hurt it in the sense that I was expecting a completely different kind of movie. You know, I mean, I was expecting something a lot more like silence of the lambs, which was what they were telling me, and it's not that it's good for what it, for what it is. I I like oscar perkins a lot, but that advertising campaign was like that's not silence of the lambs at all like it almost makes you think it's like, yeah, silence of the lambs, or like it's some kind of zodiaciac serial killer type.
Speaker 1:It is not.
Speaker 2:Not really.
Speaker 1:It is more like prestige horror smile.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's it's. It was. I did like that. The monkey was also misleading, but in a way that I actually appreciated, because that was a horror comedy that was both funny and horrific, and I was not expecting that from the director of Long Legs.
Speaker 2:It was quite unexpected. I was recovering when I was watching that and I was smoking a lot of marijuana because that was really the only thing that quelled my stomach cramps. And I don't remember that movie at all, I just remember it being completely insane.
Speaker 1:It that movie I do remember, but you don't need to remember it. It's it's gore comedy. Yeah, um, I mean it's, it's it was. It was great in the fact that I thought I was getting something a lot more like long legs and I was like, okay, osgood Perkins actually has range, so he's going to be interesting to watch.
Speaker 2:Um, I definitely appreciate the uh high effort attempts at comedy horror that have been taking place recently. Um, I appreciate that for sure. Uh, zach krieger, I think, is the director's name of weapons.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of really funny moments in that movie I mean, I mean when you, when you remind yourself that he was one of the um the whitest kids, you know.
Speaker 1:The whitest kids. You know writers, which I always talk about this with JG Michaels on our co-produced Patreon show, and I guess you guys can hear a little bit of it as a tease here that at first you're like how the hell did that guy become a horror director? And then, when you discover his biography and traumas and also you think about the weird mixture of wholesomeness and edgelordism of the whitest kid, you know you're like no, it actually totally makes sense. And better him than the other comedy director that has been dominating horror for the last five years, joseph Gordon Green, mm-hmm man. I liked a lot of his movies, since they were making horror movies, but I'm just like don't give him another franchise, don't do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so he's the guy who attempted, attempted, uh, halloween, he did the.
Speaker 1:He did the hollering trilogy right and then he got. He did exorcist believer and oh yeah, I like the first halloween of his trilogy, but the second two were like the most hand-fisted humanist liberal shit you've ever seen in your life. And that evil dies tonight. Yeah, it also has no place in a halloween movie.
Speaker 2:And then you declare a universalist exorcist makes no sense uh-huh, it was like a multicultural attempt at an exorcist movie, which makes no sense.
Speaker 1:I'm just like no, the exorcist is good when it's a reactionary catholic movie directed by an atheist director. I don't know what else to tell you. I don't make the rules, but that's why that movie is so awesome, yeah I don't know why it works. But it does, yeah, and it is one of the objectively most reactionary movies ever made. But goddamn I love it um so.
Speaker 2:So why do you think the exorcist is reactionary? Movies ever made, but goddamn, I love it. So why do you think the Exorcist is reactionary? I'm curious.
Speaker 1:Because it is a total rejection of modernity. Like completely. It is not just like psychology and science is put out there, liberal humanism is mocked Like it. Like feminism is put down in that movie, like and I think what it is is Blatty is a is like a traditionalist Catholic. Um, the writer and the, the director of the other good exorcist movie, exorcist three, um and um freaking, is a spiritual reactionary. And I say this not because I think he had bad politics. He was so reactionary he didn't have politics like a Nietzsche, yeah, I mean like he basically thought any attempt to improve the human condition was a waste of fucking time. And that include conservative and reactionary ones.
Speaker 1:So like I have to say I'm kind of.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I feel myself drifting towards that position well, here's the thing.
Speaker 1:That kind of reactionary ism I personally respect, because I'm like if you're just gonna opt out, fine, but I don't blame you even. Um, like if you just become some kind of weird conservative spiritual anarchist and you leave everyone the fuck alone, then like I don't care unless you're not hurting anybody.
Speaker 2:Right, who cares? Right you?
Speaker 1:just make it. You're just making movies about how shitty people are. I'm fine, I'm okay with that, like it's a mood and I, and honestly I will tell you like it's, of the types of reactionaryism, it's the one that, like that's in my brain, that I'm just like, yeah, you know, we should probably just give up.
Speaker 2:We're not gonna make anything better what I yeah I've, obviously, since the last time we spoke, things have gotten worse and, um, I've also had a bunch of health issues, which I think has colored my perspective a little bit, to where I kind of have to, I have to prioritize my own survival in certain ways that I just don't, oftentimes don't have the capacity to even think about politics, or when I do, it's just, it's just negative, it's it's it's invasive thoughts that are just completely negative.
Speaker 1:No, I get that. In fact, I went through a period of that uh, when I had a similar, we talked off air. I don't want to add what you had, but I had a similar problem to you.
Speaker 2:I've been open about it, so it's no big deal.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, so you've had a lot of uh uh GI issues that involve surgery. I had, 10 years ago. I had, a bunch of GI issues that involve surgery. Ten years ago, I had a bunch of GI issues that involved surgery, actually Probably at about your age I think I'm almost precisely a decade older than you Not quite, though, but maybe a little bit less and I was also being attacked by leftists at the time this is the end of the Obama administration and I said something uncouth about a person who I didn't know declared themselves non-binary, and it wasn't even intentional, but I got piled on and I reacted stupidly and I actually take you know, I said something snarky like I'll respect anyone's pronouns, even if they wanted to be called it.
Speaker 1:I said something snarky like I'll respect anyone's pronouns even if they wanted to be called it, and I probably shouldn't have said that, um, but they went after me. People dox people, I know. People threatened to dox me and I had, uh, my now ex-wife had cancer at the time and I was just like I hate you, like I just hate you all. Um, and I took about a year off from podcasting, which was unfortunate, actually, because if I'd have been in the air and the great left wing podcast boom at that time probably a lot bigger than I am now.
Speaker 1:I think about that a lot like all the missed opportunities. Yeah, I did a bunch of them. I was also behind a paywall without a lot of advertising during that period, even though I was pretty active in it. But at the same time I don't know that I want that Like. I've seen left-wing celebrity and media celebrity ruin a lot of people Former breadtubers, former academics. The incentives to be niche lead you to very bizarre political terms that I think for a lot of people are partly sincere but they're framed in such an insincere way. They also they're, you know. Uh, I'm not very big and I get attacked a lot. The big people I know get attacked for everything all the time.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, just perpetually yeah, and some of them are really good about it and they don't really engage, and others just, you know that becomes their identity and I just it is not good for you, it is absolutely not good for you. And I've been worried because so many people post bernie got politicized by that world, by people who have been either made rich, are driven into the ground by it. There's not been a whole. I mean, there's people like me who've been, you know, charting a steady course for a very long period of time, but there there are not people, there are not a lot of people like me who came up at that time period, who were able to maintain that like either came up after, after that or before it, and it's, it's an interesting place to be. Um, I was thinking the other day, uh, when I got into the podcasting world, the big things were new atheism, libertarianism, not of the current. Uh, we're libertarians but we like authoritarian leaders variety we're actually fascists, not libertarian yeah, um, libertarians before they realized that about themselves.
Speaker 1:And uh, and what else was big? Um, there were like the left-wing shows of that time period that mean between like 2007 and 2012. They were either pacifica radio shows or they're like best of the uh of the left, which was just clips are, which is still around, like this show is still around, um, or they were basically just democratic party adjacent stuff. And then occupy happened, um, and everything changed and then, but, and then bernie happened, and then there was a. There was a publicly viable left-wing media spear, but it was hard to tell the dirtbag left and for those of you who are listening, that's in quotation marks from edgy progressives, because it really was hard to tell the difference between them in that world like michael hobs and matt and matt chrisman came up at the same time. For those of you who know your, your podcast figures, um. But the other thing I I wanted to point out at the time that I've seen, because I've been involved, this for so long these things are counter-cyclic.
Speaker 1:So who's ever in the White House? What's going to dominate the media sphere? From both black money giving it to them, because there's incentive to give it to them and from organic growth is going to be what signals against that. It is not surprising that BreadTube, the Dirtbag Left, commietube and all that grew up during the during trump one. Nor is it surprising that rogan became the biggest podcast on earth and candace owens the third biggest podcast on earth during trump two. And it's not surprising that a lot of these things I mean I've been talking to 40 year old leftists and I'm mentioning, like David Pakman's, the only one of these guys I know they don't know about Midas Touch and I'm like dude. Midas Touch is literally one of the fastest growing media Ventures Online right now. It is eclipsing what you guys watch from the Air America Radio days, like Majority Report, by a lot. Now we know partially why it had Money backing, but you just see this is counter-cycling. It doesn't actually indicate anything. Nor is it got a whole lot of better funding incentives than traditional media.
Speaker 2:In fact, what it has is less disclosures and oversight, like less disclosures and oversight, like, um, yeah, and even if you do have, uh, an audience that you've cultivated organically, then you get into this whole audience capture situation where you kind of acquiesce to whatever your audience thinks, and I often wonder how many of these people actually kind of resent their audience. I kind of feel that sometimes.
Speaker 1:Dave, dave, have you met a creator who doesn't at least a little bit resent their audience? No no, I I haven't like I like my audience, but every now and then, when they say something that I'm just like that's stupid, I always feel like how I mean, first they go how did I fail them, admittedly? And then I go how did they fail me?
Speaker 2:So, but my audience is like such a hodgepodge of different groups and that's part of their prop, that's. I think part of the problem of why I haven't been super successful with my YouTube channel is that I haven't cultivated like a hegemonic niche. It's a hodgepodge of people. Some of them are just interested in horror. Some of them may be interested, um, in just kind of video, really long video, essays about subjects that they're interested in. Um, some of them may watch me because they know I'm a lefty and they like that, um, but it's, it's such a hodgepodge of people that I I'm always alienating somebody when I say something I think it.
Speaker 1:For me it's been easier because my brand is I alienate people like it's my brand. You know that helps.
Speaker 2:You know that I'm gonna do that um but I was gonna say like, yeah, the network effect is another thing we talked. We talked about I I can't quite remember which one, which interview that was, but we, we talked about the network effect.
Speaker 1:That is definitely at play as well yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what it was hard for me is, um, it took me a long time, both politically and medially, to establish a separate identity from the ventures that I did with other people in the past, and, and by a long time, and like I would say, three of the five years I've been on, it's like I was identified with other groups more than what I do, and now, that's you know, I'm still like associated with with shows that go on a lot Like people associate me with anti-fata and with this is revolution, cause I'm, you know, this is revolution. They don't even call me a guest, I'm just extended crew now, cause whenever they need someone to fill the air, they're like.
Speaker 2:They're like varne. Are you free? Is your health?
Speaker 1:okay, can you come on today? Um, white white sean king right, yeah, it's white sean king. I'm both, you know, as I've gotten a little older, gained, gained about 20 pounds and, um, grow my hair out. That's a harder thing to say, but yeah, it's an interesting media landscape and what's interesting to me is I'm seeing everything. It took a long time for cable to die.
Speaker 1:Streaming, oversaturating itself to death has taken a remarkably short period of time. Oversatuating itself to death has taken a remarkably short period of time and, like, the content churning has actually undermined them pretty greatly. And it's hard to see, like if you look at, if you go and look at, like you go to any video store and you look at like the, the years that the movies that dominate that video store, it's it's going to be from the late nineties to about the early teens and I find that I find that fascinating. Like now, who goes to video store anymore? Admittedly, probably only people interested in that year set, but I'm also seeing that. And what's trending? I mean like when I see stuff trending on um streamers, um, some of it's new, but some it's like, oh, a bunch of a bunch of zoomers discovered this thing from 30 years ago, like and I?
Speaker 1:I used to think that was just me being nostalgic. I don't think it is anymore. I think there's such a fractured media culture with such an incentive to overproduce that you do have to go back to a different time, even from streamers, to get something with more quality control. It's just wildly uneven. Now there's plenty of good stuff being made. I'm not saying there isn't. I find it Shudder is a good place to find a lot of it.
Speaker 1:If I'm honest with you, but, but there's so much stuff being made that you know you can't keep keep up with it and there's no, there's not even niche consensus anymore as to like who you go to Like, for example. You and I are both in the horror film world and I think we could probably name the biggest horror podcast, but are any one of them hegemonic, like? It's faculty of horror, or evolution of horror, or or dance macabre, any of that hegemonic and the way that Fangoria was no.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Like. So it's, it's. It's just a very interesting media landscape right now and I do think it's. I do think movies are getting more interesting again. God, I mean all teens I thought that like I was never going to see a movie that had that all movies were either going to be tiny budget or so massive budget that they kind of can't make their money back no matter what unless they go big everywhere on earth.
Speaker 1:Um, and neither one of those were doing were making really interesting things at that time period and it was sort of an interesting. I think that's no longer true. I think we are seeing the streamers produce lower mid-budget movies that are actually interesting and I think the profit margins on those lower mid-budget movies mostly horror, admittedly, but maybe naked gun reboot will bring back comedy too um is right, is reminding people. Oh, in a fractured world market where I'm not even sure I can get all these huge movies into China anyway, Maybe I should make something a little bit less ambitious that I can make three times the money on, because I only spent $3 million on it. That's way too low $10 million on it and we can make $70 million, as opposed to spending $ know 500 million and needing to and then advertising for another 500 million and need to make a billion on it for it to even break even.
Speaker 2:Um and and horror has always been like that to some degree, um you know for some reason, except in the 90s.
Speaker 1:In the 90s it was not it. It tended to lose money. But anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't actually know that. That's interesting. But what's what's really interesting now is you see people transitioning from being like a YouTuber into being into making, like a proper horror film, with, you know, studio backing. Chris Stuckman comes to mind, uh, so I, you know, um, but there are other instances of this as well. Like um I can't think of his name Uh, he's a. He's a young guy, he's in his early twenties and he created a short film about the back rooms, which is like this sort of liminal space horror. Um, and and now he's been greenlit to make a full feature-length movie. Um, yeah, it's, it's uh. That transition is pretty interesting. We're seeing more of that now.
Speaker 2:Stuckman, uh is, stuckman is an interesting case because he was like a Jehovah's Witness. He made all of these film reviews and kind of built I feel like he built his audience organically, got kind of overwhelmingly successful as a YouTube film critic, a YouTube film critic, and then, um, as he sort of transitioned into being a film director, which is obviously what he wanted to do the entire time. That was his dream. Um, he, like he made a formal announcement basically saying, like I'm a film director now and I can't really, uh, I'm not going to be making like super negative reviews anymore, um, whereas previously he might be, like he might do like a 20 minute rant about a terrible film or um, and those would kind of go viral because they're so funny.
Speaker 2:You know, complaining about a movie for however long, Going into like, oh I'm a film director now I can't really alienate anyone I might potentially have a relationship with or like could potentially work with in the future could put me in an awkward spot. So now I'm only going to talk about movies that really make me, make me feel good. I'm only going to talk about movies that I'm passionate about, that I love. I found that whole transition to be interesting. Yeah, kind of just going off on a tangent.
Speaker 1:I know I actually haven't thought about that a lot because I started thinking about I. I took this turn even in my show for completely different reasons, but, like the, the psychological toll of focusing in on what I hate was actually fucking with me, like it was changing parts of my personality. Um, and I, I am not taking it. I won't insult people on my show stance, obviously, but I have taken a. I need to talk. At least 50% of my content needs to come from something that I might be critical of, but I sincerely think people need to engage with and me just talking about something being fucking stupid is not gonna do that. I know when I did that more those videos now, that I've ever been super viral. I really haven't ever gone viral to speak, but like some of those videos, we get, you know, for an unmonetized channel, five, six thousand views and if you know about the incentives of unmonetized versus monetized, uh, there's an incentive and on youtube, once you're monetized, to to kind of inflate your numbers with superficial engagement, because, because just clicking on you gets an ad, um, um and if you know that, that's why people, that's why I tell people you know who like, compare, like YouTube to podcasts. I'm like a podcast that gets 10,000 or 20,000 downloads of an episode actually is doing about, as well as a as a YouTube channel that has a million views on a video, and that's a weird thing to think because those numbers seem astronomically different, but the what triggers the engagement number is a higher threshold on podcast. Um, so it's, it's just something to to take it, to know and to think about and, yes, that's interesting because I also think I think that attitude is just something you have to take, but it does not help you. There is something specifically about social media that some of it is algorithmic and we know it's algorithmic. It's been outed multiple times that the algorithm encourages negative engagement because it keeps people on the algorithm and you can serve them on whatever app and you can serve them more ads. These algorithms we know that they can make people go negative.
Speaker 1:But one of the things I've learned recently I decided to use an AI feature on my show I made made a short about this, but by a short I mean a 15 minute video that I was using it to turn my videos, my solo videos and some of my interviews, into like 30 second to a minute to a minute and a half clips to put on YouTube, shorts, instagram, and the engagement I got was I was you know I got interested in. At first I was pissed off. Then I got interested in who these people were, but was basically 21 year old chud dudes just calling me stupid, like and going and looking like oh, the first thing you listen to is like the mamesis institute and the joe rogan podcast. And then I realized that that the algorithm was deliberately giving content to oppositional viewers, but it only did that on shorts, like like um, I mean it that we need the longer form viewers. It would. It would be more likely to give you the people who listen to similar content, but in short form, it was giving it to just piss people off, unless you trained it to give you like funny videos, which were, which were non-descript.
Speaker 1:And I also noticed that on instagram, like, so I quit making reels because I'm like I'm doing this to advertise the longer shows, but if I'm only getting people who are never gonna watch the longer shows because this is all negative engagement, why the fuck am I doing it? I mean, there is a chance that some of these could go viral and there were some people like oh, I shared this with my, with my zoomer cousin, and they finally listened to you because you were finally under five minutes and I was like cool. But but the amount of negative engagement just made it not worth it. Like because I didn't see a notable increase in in views for the videos these were for, and sometimes the short. The short videos would go viral and no one would go watch the long videos and most of the comments were just insults. That and the reason why I started trying to figure out who they were, who was insulting me. It's not because I like wanted to stalk them. I was like what's their point of view? Even because I couldn't even tell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, where are they?
Speaker 1:coming from, where they were coming from, like, oh, these are all young conservatives and they're and like, I'd even try to engage them. Okay, what's your issue? You know what do you want to talk about? Like nothing, and I'm just like yeah, you're just reacting to someone who disagrees with you with an insult. You, you probably don't have the wit or character, capacity or social or social intelligence to like actually, you know, engage with anything and I, like I don't really want you in my audience. So why? But I noticed that with the algorithm too. But if you think about how like on x in particular, but also someone on facebook the way to blow up is to get ratioed, absolutely like and people think they're hurting you, and then all of a sudden, you wake up and you have 80 000 followers. Well, it's, it's crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because people hate follow you, but then also um your other people follow you to like counter ratio the people ratioing you like and I've thought about it.
Speaker 1:I accidentally did that once on my old uh Twitter account because I said you know, claiming that JFK was secretly sympathetic to communism is like the Birchers claiming he was secretly sympathetic to anti-globalism. And uh, you know, it's structurally the same. And that's been the only time I ratioed by left-wingers who were in the left-wing conspiracy orbit.
Speaker 2:There are really that many people who think that JFK was sympathetic to communism. That's wild.
Speaker 1:No, but I do think there's that many JFK conspiracists and they just didn't like being compared to Birchers.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know my whole take on JFKk just to be. Well, we're digressing, we can go back to stubman in a second. Stupid in a second. Um. Is it the reason why he's such a key figure for american politics is he died so early in his regime and he was so pretty. He's a cipher for whatever the fuck you want him to be, and and that's not just in conspiracy world, that's like across the board. Um, because I'm like I've always looked at JFK policies. I'm like the motherfucker was the first. He's a proto neoliberal.
Speaker 2:Well, absolutely yeah, he's kind of like the the uh Kurt Cobain of American presidents in that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true. I had the hard realization in my late twenties that Kurt Cobain, if he had lived, would have made new metal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it would have been amazing, it would have, I would have been all into it, but I've just I would have been into it.
Speaker 1:And I'm not anti new metal, but I was going through this phase and I listened to all into it. But I've just said that I would have been into it and I'm not anti-new metal, but I was going through this phase and I listened to, I think, when Grohl and Love got over their shit even though they hated each other long enough to release like two or three of the unreleased recordings from the album that wasn't made, and I was like God damn, that sounds like it's heading in a new metal direction. So, yeah, kurt, like god damn, that sounds like it's heading in a new metal direction. So, yeah, kurt, but kurt's like that.
Speaker 1:Um, I, I wrote something about him on the 20 years anniversary of his death, which is now, I think even that's almost 10 years ago now, um, and I remember like going back and listening to a bunch of I watched the documentary on him, I listened to a bunch of old interviews with him, you know, and for me at my age I would have been 14 when he died, um and so he was super influential on my like musical taste, like I, I swear to god, we were when we got into indie music. We were just basically going through, like what did kurt cohen suggest? Let's go listen to the meat puppets and everything from the sst catalog and everything from the discord catalog, uh, discord being the record label, not the app, right youngins. Um, you know, so that's what we did. But but I just had this, this realization that I had done that too with Kurt, because Kurt's politics made no fucking sense, like I tried to like figure out what his politics were.
Speaker 2:I'm like Was he just kind of like a rad lib? He was kind of. He was like shockingly intersectional. If you like, read some of the stuff he wrote he was aingly intersectional.
Speaker 1:If you read some of the stuff he wrote, he was a rad lib, but not even that coherent, because I don't think anybody in that. I do think we have to go back to the politics of the early aughts when people were like, why are Gen X so reactionary? And I'm like they didn't have a politics when they were young, like because. And I'm like they didn't have a politics when they were young, like because, and I think it makes perfect sense Like they saw Bill Clinton come to power, they saw the Soviet Union fall, they saw the Atari Democrats become the DNC, like why would they believe shit about shit? You know, like. So I mean, when you think about that, like people like matt taibbi make a lot of sense. Actually, just not I'm not defending him, I'm just saying like the cultural milieu, and, and I think kurt would have been a rad lib and he'd be complaining about wokeness today, maybe, maybe not, though because he was so intersectional, he might not have gone that way. I don't think he would have.
Speaker 2:Um, you know he was kind of an edgelord but he was like a liberal edgelord. He would have, um, you know he he was kind of an edge Lord but he was like a liberal edge Lord. He would like make out with guys to make homophobes uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Uh, I mean he sure as hell troll Axl Rose. I remember that, um yeah, awesome, and defended and defended Michael Stipe before he was officially out. Um, so, and defended Michael Stipe before he was officially out. So I mean, here's another thing. Left-wing edgelordism is something that people have only recently remembered could be a thing. Yeah, because there was such a strong response to irony racism, which was being used to point out racism but sometimes was used to hide it in, like the late aughts, early aught teens, that, yeah, like all the left wing edgelords went away or they became Bill Maher, like which, I mean, I guess he was always a centrist ledger, but still you either die, kurt Cobain, or you live long enough to see yourself become bill maher or ricky gervais like, um, uh, yeah, I don't know, man, it's uh.
Speaker 1:Back to that, that stomach thing. I think it's interesting that we are seeing a lot more crossover directors in general. Um, and also, you know, there have always been auteurs in horror and there have been time periods where you could go from horror into more mainstream cinema. But from the 80s to about a decade ago there wasn't a lot of that. I mean, I can think of like one or two directors, but very few. And that seems to now like if you want, if you want to be taken seriously as a dramatic director in particular, um, you make a horror movie first, like yeah it's, it's a good, uh, it's a good way to get your shoe in.
Speaker 2:Um, kubrick is definitely kind of a precursor to that, like, uh, with the shining um I I feel like there is more of an incentive now, when you're making a horror movie, to make it kind of like almost overtly, uh, social commentary type movie, and I I don't think those incentives that, that that is kind of a new thing.
Speaker 1:Um, it's a new thing a new thing and an old thing, because if you go back like, like from the prestige heart, and I put that in our elevated horror, I put that in in scare quotes because I don't like the term, because like half of everything from the 70s would actually count as that um, but yeah but 70s horror really was pretty filled with like I went back and watched old romero movies that weren't his zombie movies, like I mean, we all know that's a good point like they're all message movies like, but in the 80s that goes away or become as explicitly reactionary like if their message movies, their reactionary message movies are, they're deliberately apolitical because wes claven and john carpenter are both fairly left-wing for people of that time period.
Speaker 2:But you wouldn't know it from their movies like depends on the movie, right um well they live it.
Speaker 1:What is Wes Craven's movie where it's obvious he's a left winger?
Speaker 2:I mean a less liberal left winger, I can't think of one honestly Like maybe Last Half of the West.
Speaker 1:Maybe, but that's a remake of another movie, so I was thinking about re-watching uh new nightmare recently, because I know that's kind of like the meta one that is almost kind of feels like scream, maybe ripped it off yeah, well, I would say like scream is meta and dialogue and a little bit in plot, but like the metaness of new nightmare is like, is like it's not just meta and dialogue and plot references, it's literally we're moving into the real world. So, um, yeah, man, I I have been, that has been a franchise. I have been glad that they have not figured out a way to successfully reboot. Oh man, don't say it.
Speaker 1:Did they try to reboot. Yeah, they did with Jack Earl Haley. They tried to reboot Nightmare on Elm Street and it didn't go. It was bad. Yeah, I mean that was in the Platinum Dunes reboot era. That's also when they actually like, when they tried to reboot Jason and it was actively bad.
Speaker 1:And it's hard to fuck up a Jason movie because there's not much you have to get right for that. How do you mess that up? Shameful. You don't even have to have anything like plot consistency for those things to work. But yeah, I mean, I'm always going back and forth. Maybe this is an interesting topic and we can come back to directors today. But we see all these breakout directors. But I am thinking about maybe part of the reason why it was hard to be a breakout director of horror movies. It was not hard to be a breakout horror writer in the nineties and aughts Um, uh, uh, william, uh and et cetera. Horror writer in the 90s and aughts um, uh, will, uh, william and etc. That that's clear. But it does seem like it was hard to be and it was not hard to be a breakout horror actor. In fact that the trajectory if you were a teen star, teen sitcom on the wb or uh horror movie.
Speaker 1:Maybe you'll get taken seriously as an actor when you're 30, like you know, like that was johnny depp, yeah, johnny, right from johnny depp to jennifer love hewitt, like that was a pretty clear trajectory, um, but it seemed like director jail and I think about why that may be. And horror movies in the aughts, horror movies in the 90s, particularly after scream, were remarkably safe.
Speaker 1:They were explicitly teen movies right, it's peak neoliberalism at that point in time yes, um and but, and they're shiny and they're glossy, and I mean like if you wanted to see something that was edgy, scary, you wouldn't watch a horror movie, you'd watch some weird indie movie, but but, but you know, um are are what um are are what are event horizon or whatever the fuck like Um. But in general, what you had was like 50 screen clones, some of which were good, some of which were terrible. Um, and unfortunately, now that we've seen you in the Neo slasher revival that we've seen after the revival of horror, we have gotten to the 90s meta commentary remarkably quickly. Aka, whatever the fuck came out with, but this new, I know what you did last summer, which was just winking at the audience the entire time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I haven't seen that that I heard it was horrendous I don't know a single person who likes it now.
Speaker 1:I also don't think the first one was all that good like it was in the lower middle tier of scream knockoffs.
Speaker 1:So right, it's a cheesy slasher but um, I do think like, uh, like we we've tried to speed run that, but I I do wonder if it's maybe the aesthetics of horror movies were just really shitty during those days. Because I I do think about, like, if you think about what horror movies look like in the late 90s not in the early 90s, but in the late 90s they look like TV sitcoms, but they do. They have the same filmography as Dawson's Creek, not just the same actors, they're just slightly darker. And then in the aughts they are actively ugly.
Speaker 2:Everything is filtered green or gray or brown, like and, most importantly, they stopped using squibs at a certain point.
Speaker 1:Right, it's just. It's just a very unfortunate time here for horror movies. So and then, if you think about what the horror tours were releasing during the late nineties and the aughts, so what are Carpenter and Craven, you know, releasing? Then Sam Raimi is making Spider-Man movies, but they're very good and they're good.
Speaker 1:No, we're not. But Carpenter and craven seem to be getting smaller and smaller budgets and their movies just look like shit. Yeah, um, and so maybe that's part of it. I've been. I've been trying to figure it out, because the thing that people go what about today? Movies are made horror, movies are made on cheap today. I'm like that's absolutely true, but your iphone has a better camera than a mid-tier, professional grade camera in 1995.
Speaker 2:It's much easier to make a low budget horror movie today than it was in the in the late 90s right and for it to look good.
Speaker 1:Look, I watched all the witch films. I know what bad horror movies from the 90s look like, like um, or even going back and watching hit shows. I was literally when I was recovering. I, I was watching pluto because I'm kind of you know, I'm not, I'm kind of broke these days and um, and they were showing, uh, the, the Chappelle show, number one show on comedy central at that time. Even for 2002, it looks like shit, like it's production values are nothing yeah.
Speaker 1:And you wouldn't even really like I didn't really notice it at the time but I didn't notice it at all, and when I went back and watched it today I'm like, oh my God, I didn't know if maybe it's cause, maybe it's, I can notice it more because it's in high def, but I don't think it's just that like it's just part of it.
Speaker 2:Um, it's, it's also just what the standards were at the time.
Speaker 1:It just didn't phase you because everything was kind of like that or worse or worse, right, I mean, and you just think like I can make a video like this right here, had a better camera in clarity.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, I I think about that a lot and I like, uh kind of in in, uh, when I'm having my uh interstitial existential crisis that happens every once in a while like why I have access to technology that people would have killed for in even just like 20 or 30 years ago, and I'm like not using it, I'm not utilizing it to its fullest potential. Not using it, I'm not utilizing it to its fullest potential. Um, I think about that a lot and especially like with with the type of things I cover on my channel that are. You know, I'll talk about movies, um, but I also try to cover, like um, things that go typically go under the radar of a lot of people, um, like just weird online projects and, um, occasionally, args and things like that. Um, you know, and I come from a background where I do tend to intellectualize these things Um, you know, my, my degree is in liberal arts.
Speaker 2:Uh, with sort of a with sort of like a, a focus on, like lit theory, and I I keep coming back to the same like recurring thought in my head, which is that, like these, like multimedia art projects, um, whatever you want to call them, like they're, they haven't like reached their full potential. I I like, especially with, like alternate reality games and things like that, um, there are. They had a sort of um, they had a sort of golden age where there were a lot of pretty interesting ones or, at the very least, uh, things that were getting a lot of buzz. Um, may not, may not necessarily have been like good in an artistic sense, but they were getting a lot of buzz because it was it's kind of a new medium, um, like marble Hornets and things like that. Um, but yeah, I I just keep coming back to this this uh thought that, uh, we're it's not, we're not living up to the full potential of what this, what this type of experience could be.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, like people, these, these artists, these creators, um, they're like a lot of them are young people. So I try not to like be super negative about like. I often like, if I'm covering, uh, an independent art project, or I'm usually talking about it positively. Um, I'm not like ripping it apart because I understand that it's like a labor of love and it's there's, there's really no budget, uh, for the most part.
Speaker 2:Um, but you know, like a common theme that I come across is like just just using like puzzles and codes for their own sake, instead of making it work within the context of the narrative. That's, that's a common problem. Um, people, people like, especially like inexperienced artists, kind of defer to this like cryptic code breaking type paradigm, um, because they think it makes their project more mysterious, when oftentimes it's really just it makes it less accessible for for no good reason. Like I'm, I'm all for things that are a little bit inaccessible and maybe kind of heady, but they, they fall, they, they often fall into this pitfall where they just add puzzles to their narrative for no good reason.
Speaker 1:JJ Abrams has a lot of sins to account for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he might be responsible for that in some ways. I didn't think about that angle, but the whole mystery box thing, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's like people who want to do something Lynchian but they end up doing something that's basically like a, like a puzzle, and I'm like that's not like there. I hate to tell you this, but there's no solution to lost highway or Mulholland drive Like, like, there's no logical solution to it Right, the the Right. The solution is in vibes and recurring nightmares. It's not in in like figuring out a narrative art to make it work.
Speaker 2:It's not there you can talk about it in terms of theme or subtext, but if you try to break it down, plot wise, things become unintelligible fairly quickly. Things become unintelligible fairly quickly. Um, yeah, yeah, uh, this, this, uh, this. I covered a series called pet scop, that's kind of like that, and people, their their expectations. They kind of like got built up because this series would release a few videos and then wait like six months and then they'd release some more videos and and so expectations got built up over time and and when the resolution wasn't, uh, necessarily coherent in in a sort of logical way, everything wasn't like wrapped up in a neat little package, um, a lot of people got upset and I I would say in my analysis guys, it's not, it's not a logical puzzle for you to solve.
Speaker 2:It's sort of like this impressionistic thing that has very weighty subtext about um abuse and um nostalgia and childhood, um, in the format of what appears to be a video game that was, was created by somebody and so he's using, he's using like a game engine as a kind of, as a kind of way to do environmental storytelling, which I thought was really interesting, and it was. It was kind of Lynchian in the sense that you know, there's no, there's no puzzle to solve, and in fact that's kind of a theme of the work is that it's it's not a puzzle to solve, and in fact that's kind of a theme of the work is that it's it's not a puzzle to solve. It's kind of this more, it's this weird impressionistic thing that leaves you with a sense of uh, sadness and uh, maybe, maybe kind of like an uncanny sense of uh, fractured identities, things along those lines. So yeah, that is kind of a pet peeve of mine is people trying to like logically analyze everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think and I think that's, I think unfortunately a lot of you know we might call all project directors are catering to that need, because it's in itself its own form of audience capture. The audience capture isn't this ideological, it's also aesthetic, um, and you know it's, it's. I do think we are slightly moving away from it. I think a lot of the movies this year there are more movies this year that seem okay, not explaining everything that I've seen in a while. It's a good sign and that is a good sign. I also think we are benefiting from the collapse of the movie market, which, unfortunately, is a benefit. Is is like saying I'm benefiting from the collapse of a global trade system and in most ways we're absolutely not. But I think in movies we actually kind of a little bit are. Um, because there has been a need or even an economic necessity to flatten out most films because of the amount writing in their budgets. Um, they could not be very specific because they had to have the most broad audience, not just within one culture but basically within all of them. And I think, after covid, and I think rrr, speaking of reactionary movie as a straight up reactionary hindu movie, but very enjoyable. Um, uh started, I think, indicating one americans will watch foreign movies, which I'm like.
Speaker 1:We've already been through this before, though didn't crouching tiger, hidden dragon, teach everybody that um, but but two, um, that I also think we're just in this time period, like the, the big tentpole, marvel movies. It's not that they're not making money, it's just they're not making nearly enough money to justify their budgets, and that's the big difference. But they clearly were for a long time. That was true for the fast and furious that you know, and a lot of those franchisee movies have just gone kind of belly up over and over and over and over again. The exceptions have been weird Mario and what's that? And Minecraft movies. Both did very well with kids, although for strange reasons, um, uh, the barbie movie, thank god, did not leave to like and I was totally afraid because they were trying to green light like 85 000 mattel movies, and apparently those have just kind of not gotten off the ground. Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:I remember seeing a list of all these different properties that they were going to make films out of, and I can't think of a single one that's come to fruition no, I actually yeah, make a really good monopoly movie. I'm all all for it, like on the level of clue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, yeah, that would be, uh, that'd be fun. I, I, uh, I was thinking about the mortal combat movie, actually, and I was like this is what I was thinking about, cause I was like man, we were in like mortal combatat 10 in like 2007. I mean, um, and that's almost 20 years ago. How the fuck is this video game relevant to these kids? Because I don't even know how they've been exposed to it. Um, so, because, like, oh my, is there, uh, is there a big mortal kombat? Like you would know, I, I quit playing anything other than cell phone games over a. Is there a big Mortal Kombat? I quit playing anything other than cell phone games over a decade ago.
Speaker 2:No, I think the Mortal Kombat. So they made one a few years ago and they're making a new one now with Johnny Cage.
Speaker 1:They seem to be doing well. I just don't know how the hell these kids are exposed to their source material.
Speaker 2:I think it's a nostalgia act for millennials.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's sad.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's the reason I watched the new Mortal Kombat. I was like, okay, I'll see if this is any good.
Speaker 1:I mean, the first ones weren't any good. No, they weren't, yeah, but then again, the Mario movie was decent, and we all know about the first mario movie we don't speak of it.
Speaker 2:You know, I would like to revisit that um, I watched that. I watched that one with my wife, uh, a few months ago, and say what you will about it the, the props and the effects, the outlandishness, the incomprehensible Plot, which there is some like Lefty subtext going on too. That is baffling to me. But if you, the director, I think, is a leftist, yeah, I would much prefer that Than a polished Super.
Speaker 1:Mario movie. That movie is interesting to me Because, god, I want to sound Like the kind of people that red letter media complain about, but it's like between the prequels and the sequel to star wars. Now I'm going to go ahead and say I realize star wars is a movie for kids that we all over romanticize anyway, except for the second, the empire strikes back, which happens to just be a 70s movie, rebranded as a movie for kids in the 80s, and even as a kid it was my favorite one, although I liked the Ewoks when I was five. So whatever. My point, though, is that the prequels are ambitious. The sequels are requels that literally damage the entirety of the franchise, like like they. They make the entire story arc, make no sense.
Speaker 2:Um, and, and they're almost shockingly cynical, Um, yeah, To the point where I'm like I thought I was. I thought I was a nihilist, but no, I mean, this is a bit much even for me.
Speaker 1:Right, and like even the Ryan Johnson johnson one, which I agree is the most interesting of the three, despite the backlash against it. It isn't that good like.
Speaker 2:It's just um, just kind of had an idea in it, ted like he was and he was um working with the material he had to work with right. So he had a, an existing plot material he had to work with right. So he had an existing plot that he had to either reaffirm or subvert. And he decided to subvert it. That's the right decision, but there's only so much you can do with these archetypes, right so much you can do with these archetypes, right.
Speaker 1:And then again you had a. You had some interesting things and rogue one, a movie that I that I like, a lot of people I know a lot of people don't but I do it. It leads to andor and that's great material. I will agree it's great. But I will also say I agree with uh, plinkett red letter media about this too. You guys can tell what I've been watching lately. That and or so good. It fucks up the rest of the franchise too, because like, like it makes stuff in the other movies seem remarkably flippant compared to that story and it's like, that's great. It's an interesting shared world. I like it as an art project. But you have ripped the coherence out of this world. You can't have like. This is totally, and the weight of this is so different, particularly when you think about the fact that Cassian's whole storyline Is basically like a subtext To this flippant journey of Skywalker, and then you hope it doesn't work as well as it seems when you try to put it back together. Wow, I'm on the digression. What were we talking about?
Speaker 2:I don't know, uh, yeah, and or is interesting. I need to finish watching. Uh, what's out there? Um, it is, but it's like, yeah, you have these sci-fi fantasy films, um, which are more fantasy than sci-fi, really, absolutely. And then and then a series about the inner workings and the bureaucracy of fascism. Basically, it's like those. One of these things is not like the other.
Speaker 1:You took the subtext of something that I mean. I admit that Lucasas will say that like, like he would say that, like you know, the jedi are the vietcong in the first movie but like the ewoks are, are the vietcong right, which is whatever, yeah yeah, um, it's a little degrading, but whatever whatever, um, but uh, star wars is flash gordon plus dune.
Speaker 1:Uh, with, with the flash gordon superficiality winning out in the framing and then joseph campbell literally being used as a blueprint to tie it all together, like that's how it's built right. Flash gordon dune, a hero with a thousand faces lucas has even admitted it. That's what it is like. It's like dune, with all the intrigue and interesting parts stripped out like um, why?
Speaker 2:Okay, and everything since the original trilogies is almost like a concerted effort to demystify the original movies Right In different ways. Some are more successful than others, but they all generally tend to demystify the the mythical vibe of the original trilogy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, I remember what we're talking about. You were making the, the argument, the, the the first Mario brothers movies, and I said it kind of like the, it's kind of like the prequels. It's ambitious but incoherent and people didn't give it. I guess I would agree with you in that we talk about how bad that movie is, but at least it's fucking interesting and weird. It's weird Right Like it's worth.
Speaker 2:It's like it's noteworthy. So many things are just bland pieces of crap.
Speaker 1:You know, but this was like, this was like you made a weird Picasso that smells bad because half of it's made of shit, but like um, but yeah, I mean you know another movie that's like that, since we're just spitballing here tank girl. Uh, that's another movie that's like that, since we're just spitballing here tank girl. Uh, that's another movie that bombed and is weird, and I mean it's also. It's, it's a source material, is weird and it doesn't have a lot to do with its source material I haven't seen that it's not good.
Speaker 1:It's not good, but it is interesting.
Speaker 1:It's interestingly bad and I will take interestingly bad over blandly mediocre, even almost any day um uh, and I I would take that about mario and I think that I think that about the prequels too. Actually, I think the pre I mean I agree they're fucking weirdly racist. Um, I even I noticed this at the time I was talking about, uh, about alien jar, jar sambo, like in 2000, um, but um, but also they're, they are interesting, like they. There is like trying to make a kids movie about trade negotiations is fucking ambitious.
Speaker 2:Trade negotiations and the downfall of democracy. It is insanely ambitious. Yeah, my opinion's not really unique. He shouldn't have directed them.
Speaker 1:He should have written them and had somebody else direct them to be fair, I can't think of a single thing outside of a new hope that that lucas should have directed yeah, and he kind of knows it right, he's a good producer and he's a good writer.
Speaker 1:Well, asterisk, he's a. I think he's a good concept writer. I think his actual dialogue's not great, but oh, it's terrible. Yeah, yeah, um, and it's not just in star wars where it shows up, um, but in general he yeah the the star wars movies. But, man, that that is some both. You know it's funny. I'll defend some of the new star tracks. Like there's elements of star trek discovery. I like there's elements of picardo, like there's elements of picardo hate. But we have watched two series. Ironically, jj abrams shows up here too, with both of them um.
Speaker 1:He's in escape, he's, he is inevitable, yeah he he's like the ai of ox film no um, uh, if you watch these movies and like watch them seriously, you're just stuck thinking like that time period couldn't let those aesthetics stand as they were. I mean, and by that time period I mean 2008 to 2020, basically. Um, because star the star, the new star trek movies that were directed by JJ Abrams, at least the first two, they were watchable, they were enjoyable, I even kind of liked them.
Speaker 1:But they were not Star Trek. Everything significant to Star Trek, from its utopianism to its, we all act mostly from our head, except from jonathan freaks. Um, if that was all gone from those movies, and it didn't, it, and in a way, like people will accuse that of like d space mine, which is obviously kind of a ripoff of babylon 5, but, um, but I'm even like d days nine still is more got more original gene ronberry star trek dna than, uh, the, the, the post abrams any star trek has had. And I've also seen this from star wars. Like I don't really know what makes star wars star wars anymore um nothing, because it's been totally demystified right and and a lot of the shows feel lost.
Speaker 1:Like you know, I felt good about the like I enjoyed the first season of the mandalorian. The second season was okay by the third season. It's like what are you doing? And the book of boba fett? I'm like you actually have a good story in here in the flashbacks, but most of this feels like it was written by 50 different people with no clear antagonist that's.
Speaker 2:That is a big problem. Is there there? There just needs to be more infrastructure and support for uh, just a writer, director with a singular vision and no one wants to do it because it's such a huge risk. Um, it's, it's much easier to sort of, uh, hedge your bets and and not, and not take that risk and kind of just have a, a workshop, a rotating group of people who punch it up.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, well, I mean, I think this is interesting what we have right now, because I think, like we were seeing the epic fantasy becoming dominant. Like how many epic fantasy shows from a wheel of time to uh, um, whatever that lord of the rings thing is, it's yeah, right, uh, I watched it even, um, I don't think it was good, but I watched it um, uh. But it seems like those shows are massive money losers now and it I I think we're also going to start seeing that with um, with star wars, because it's just over fucking saturated um on the channels and like I used to get excited about new star wars series but when there was like seven in a year, I'm like I don't care, I can't keep up who cares?
Speaker 2:like I don't, yeah, I watch it when um call me when they do something really out of left field. Um hire, hire a director and let that director do whatever the hell he wants, he or she wants, you know? Um, they just they aren't going to do it. It's too risky. Um they've already oversaturated things to such a degree that it's like kind of meaningless. So I I don't really know what the risk is like, but it's just, it's all just numbers in an excel spreadsheet to them yeah, um, I mean, I mean they're gonna be those scripts gonna be written by, I assume.
Speaker 2:Come on like right um, maybe, maybe it'll be better, I don't know. At least it'll be better, I don't know, at least it'll be fucking weird.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was talking to JJ Michaels about the choice for the new Spider-Man movie not the new animated one, but the new mainline one, and they've picked the most unpopular storyline.
Speaker 2:What are they doing?
Speaker 1:The erasure of Spider-Man and Maryary jane's marriage plotline. A brave new, uh, brand new day, brand new brand new day or something like that, right yeah, like literally consider one of the worst spider-man plotlines ever made because they just, it's just a very self-aware retcon um one that doesn't even make sense in the film, like in the current films, because they haven't even got that far yet, like why are you doing that?
Speaker 1:like, um, so it's just. I'm not sad that that it does seem, because it's not just the marvel movies, I mean the spider-man without spider-man averse over at Fox's imploded. That was always the James.
Speaker 2:Gunn Superman movie did.
Speaker 1:Okay, I mean it was. I don't think it's about what people think it is about, because it was not scripted at the right time, probably but the Israel Palestine sub.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just it would that?
Speaker 1:would that might've come into it, but they would have been finishing the script when that was subtext. Yeah, I just that might have come into it, but they would have been finishing the script when that started.
Speaker 2:Well look, even if it's not explicitly about that, it's pretty clear that like that sort of, it's pretty clear what Superman would do in this situation.
Speaker 1:Well, no, that's the thing it's like when people complain about. Superman is woke. I'm like what do you think you're watching Batman? Like Superman is all American but he was like an all American working class boy written by Jews, who's like literally talking about defending them against like the neighborhood bullies and paraphrase shit. Like that's always been what Superman has been. It's been a liberal vision of a positive person from the center of the country and the center of the countryness. And him being so liberal and progressive is on purpose, like because it's you know, it's, it's an argument about. It really is what the heart of america is blah, blah blah, even though he's an immigrant, alien and um, and you know he fights for the little guy blah blah. Like the problem with superman is obvious.
Speaker 2:Also, he's a god and I'm on our planet, so like it's hard to have any real conflict with him yeah, he's too perfect, and so the way you remedy that is, you limit his powers and you make him flawed in a way. And you know, I suppose his flaw in the new james gunn version is that he's just a bit naive about how the world works which is his flaw in like the 50s and 60s version of superman 2.
Speaker 1:Actually he's naive, that's how alex luther gets it over on him, which I I mean, I think it's fine. I mean, am I ever going to love a Superman movie after the Richard Donner movies? No, I mean, you know, I grew up with that Superman. I even like the bad ones when Superman's like reversing time and fighting the Soviet union, and even, you know, even though I'm pro-civilian, obviously, but I wasn't as a kid, because I was five, yeah, and Richard Pryor in one of them is pretty fucking hilarious. I mean, like it's, you know, but are they?
Speaker 1:I like those movies because they're a nostalgia to my early childhood. I don't because they're a nostalgia to my early childhood. I don't think they're good. I like Flash Gordon for the same reason. I love that movie. But is it good? No, absolutely not. I watched the Last Starfighter. Is it good? It's better than I was afraid it was going to be, but no, it is not good. I mean like, so, you know, I think we're seeing a lot of that. But, man, the nostalgia attempts are getting to me and they're not really. I don't think a lot of them are sticking. I'll give you an example that trying to reboot drastic I mean I I'm sure that movie did okay, because all those drastic movies did okay, but rebooting jurassic world only a year and a half after it just ended and flopped incredibly cynical yeah, it's incredibly cynical.
Speaker 1:It makes me feel bad for charlotte gohanson's career trajectory. I didn't want to see her go down like that. I feel like she's going to be a red box actress before our actor, before we're all done. Like, um, but uh, it's. And yeah, I, I, I'm, I'm getting hopeful in that these things aren't sticking anymore, like, but I don't know what that says about cinema, because I don't, I actually don't, I actually don't know who even watches movies.
Speaker 1:Now, I I used to teach a I teach a film class. I taught it for six years. I took a break this year, but I taught a film class to high school students for for six years basics of film, film and literature, that sort of thing, and um, that class has gotten less people interested in it every year and it's a class where you read one book and watch a bunch of movies and get lectures on movie literacy in between. That's all you do like as a high schooler, you know. I mean like, and when I first started teaching it it was slammed. My other classes are slammed, right, I'm a popular teacher, but that class still had decent enrollment but it capped about three years ago, you know, and a lot of kids just tell me they don't watch movies Like they. Like they tell me now they don't read books, which they've been telling me they don't read books for like 10 years, and I was, I mean, you know, I'm not surprised by that Um but, I am surprised they don't watch movies.
Speaker 2:I think part of it is like who watches movies, right? Uh, film nerds watch movies, people who log on to letterbox and share their thoughts about every movie they've ever seen. Um, and some young kids are film nerds for sure. Uh, but there are so many other options and the uh they've been conditioned to expect immediate gratification and their attention spans.
Speaker 2:Brains about five minutes long, yeah, their brains have been fried from tick tock, so I think your average kid probably associates movies with something their parents make them do as a sort of bonding activity and that feels like kind of a chore to them well, they're not film literate either.
Speaker 1:I mean to be fair, most people, even in the past, didn't know when they were from london or not. They didn't have a vocabulary for it. That's what I would do, but they would like they would pick it up immediately and I I found it was harder and harder to teach these kids what was going on, even in tiktoks, like. So it's. You know, I am uh, I have known a lot. I am seeing a lot of younger zoomers turn on social media. I don't know if that's good or bad. I really don't know if it's good or bad. Um, and by turn on social media, I don't't mean they're like turn on Twitter and Facebook. A lot of them aren't on that anyway. I mean turn on Tik TOK and an Instagram, and it's not just conservatives or liberals, it's like kind of across the board, but I don't know what they're replacing it with. That's like. It's like cause.
Speaker 1:The other thing I can say maybe we can talk about a little bit of this. You know more than me, but the hype about video games is a brand new art form which was going to maintain narrative art and be interactive. That I heard for two decades as upcoming. I don't hear shit about that anymore. Like, and I don't hear that much about new games, why, or anything it may, because again, there's your cell phone, there's consoles, there's computer, maybe the market's too fractured. But and there's also the fact that, like, games are released, obviously incomplete, um, so that you have to buy the rest of the game later. And there's the fact that anyone has access now any game that's ever existed, so you can get addicted to a game from 35 years ago. But it does seem like they're not, like there's not big game hits anymore. Am I wrong about that? I could be an old man talking out my ass Like totally.
Speaker 2:You're not entirely wrong. I think it's suffering from the same issue that films are suffering from, in the sense that AAA games the amount of money required to really produce a AAA game at this point, because the expectations have become so expansive, it's a massive, massive undertaking and therefore it is a huge risk, unless you are producing something that is essentially a sure thing, like the. The next grand theft auto is a sure thing, everyone's gonna get it, everybody's gonna get it.
Speaker 2:um, I'm certainly, I will be there with bells on, but, um, you know, there there is, there's a spectrum, right, and on one end you have a polished, uh, triple a game like grand theft auto, and on the other end you have these weird indie games, and there is a proliferation of them, um, that are that may even be one or two people working on it, um, and and you know, don't get me wrong occasionally those can be like breakout success, successes, especially relative to how much, uh, how much went into it, um, but as as far as it like, as far as it like being the height of like, uh, at the sort of avant-garde of like, artistic, um, artistic value. Yeah, I mean, it's not, it happens um, like, I think disco elysium is is pretty great, it's like what?
Speaker 1:five years old now yeah right, like I mean like yeah, I do think there's still great games.
Speaker 1:I don't want to sound like I don't think that, I just I. I again, I don't know that I would know, but there's even some great cell phone games like that, like so I would know about that. But it does not seem like people the risk to reward on a lot of things, even music. How many bands are there? There's still new music being made by bands. They still exist.
Speaker 1:But the amount of overhead and the cost of expenditure and just the amount of socializing that a lot of these kids just don't do to train yourself to be in a band scene like we were in the 90s, um, that's a big ask. But it leads this paradox we were talking about earlier where, like, we have all this equipment now that makes it a lot easier to do. It's easy to make music now. Right, it is like I have made, I have composed stuff for my own show with GarageBand. It is not hard and I am only trained in playing drums. That's all I can do, so I can just count beats. So it is funny how people talk about this and how few bands there are, and every now and then there'll be a new band. There's a lot of retro bands coming out that are young, that sound very much like the 60s or 70s or the 80s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my pet peeve. I can't stand that.
Speaker 1:But what's frustrating is it sounds exactly like it. I mean, they're super talented, like these people, but they're such music nerds that they're just doing replication. And I've studied the history of art enough to know that usually if a culture is doing that, it's a bad sign. It is.
Speaker 1:Dare I say a sign of decadence yeah, I know, I know a word that I like and everyone gets mad that I like it. I think. I think people are beginning to resist that less, but people just like oh, why are you talking about decadence? That sounds conservative. I'm like, have you looked around and looked at your infrastructure, arts, arts, education uh, how much food you can afford, what it costs to do anything. Even good stuff has made shit Like like um, it does feel like a lot of the cyberpunk shit from the eighties did call some of this stuff and that that was decadent. That was decadent, just you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, there's a few things going on if we want to like analyze it in like a materialist way. Um, obviously, the cost of living has gone up in a number of ways, right, like health care, housing, uh, education, food, food across the board, right? Um, therefore, people's time becomes more scarce because they have to work more to make ends meet. Therefore, they have less time to consume this stuff, so they have to be really judicious about how they spend their time. But also, they don't really like people don't really have the wherewithal to plan ahead as much either.
Speaker 1:So that's the end of me, because I agree with you on the materialist stuff. I just want to make one point, though. In the 70s, people were starting working in their teens and still doing this, because that was an area of stagflation. It looks like we're entering another area of stagflation, but Zoomers don't have. There are slightly more Zoomers that have jobs now actually I work with a lot of them but by and large, zoomers don't get their first job until they're like 20, 22. And so that's what's more confusing to me, but maybe it's the inability to plan. That's what I want to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to get back to you, but I was thinking about that because I think that seems to be more the issue, because, like everything seems I have been stuck in a student loan nightmare for 15 years and the rules change now every two fucking years. You have no idea what you owe. You know, like your interest rates variable between 8 and 13 percent on now something that's like the equivalent, well now, to a car. But when you got it to a house, um, and the rules change all the time. The courts are constantly like nothing, no part of american bureaucratic. Like you can't predict what your power bill is going to be, because if there's a data center, your power might jump to 500 a month, from 100 to150 a month. So that inability to plan seems ubiquitous. It is yeah for sure and there is no. And politicians just seem incapable.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're recording on the last heady days of August of 2025. This will come out in the end of September of 2025. And if you're listening to the audio show, it'll be probably in october. But so hell has to. Stuff imagining will probably already be forgotten about by this point, but we're living in a time period like today. There's literally a rumor that the president was dead, you know, of natural causes. Um, he's not just playing golf, I guess, although he does seem to be having some health problems.
Speaker 2:He doesn't look too good.
Speaker 1:No, but do we expect 80-year-olds in the office? I mean like, but you know I'm thinking about a political culture. A friend of mine put it to me and I'll turn it back to you to make your point. I'm sorry to speak over you. No, that's cool, but a friend pointed out it feels like we're stuck between people who've been not taught or expected or even have any.
Speaker 1:What Zoomers are going through is a perfect way to make a dysfunctional regulation. There's real trauma and real shit that keeps happening to them. And Gen Alpha Absolutely real, absolutely real, uh. But also, they were raised in conditions that assumed they'd have relatively easy lives and the social infrastructures around them, particularly for the entire, for younger millennials too, was to isolate them and protect them. And those two, that's like a, that's like a way to be, to build like narcissists, because there's two things going on there um, you have no incentive to invest in the future. I believe in community, but it's not bad enough to force you into the community to survive, survive like, and I imagine psychologically that that's pretty fucked, um, uh, but but yeah, a material in a materialist way, you know. I mean, I I come down hard on mark fisher for a variety of reasons, um. But he's like, oh, they're denying us the future. And my point is like, no, we're a few, not just denying it to us, we're also refusing to make it.
Speaker 1:Um, and the question that I'm like is it's like let's quit talking about paraphrasing beefo and start talking about why we're refusing to make it. Like what is it about right now? If you want to be, if you want to become an influencer, you get into politics, but but it's not really politics. Like you and I are both lefties, but you, you and I don't think that what we do is actually political, right? Like I hope you don't, but I don't think not at all, right, um, I would also not say I'm not a political person. Like I would not say, oh, this is not a political podcast. That would be ridiculous. But a political podcast is not the same as doing politics. It's not the same as doing union activism it's not right as organizing um.
Speaker 2:There's like a handful of instances where people have told me that something I made changed their mind, or um made them think about something differently, and I certainly count that as a win. But that does not. That's not base building necessarily. That's not like um, it's not actual politics really.
Speaker 1:Um right I've seen a lot of people tell me that, like, oh you know, the parasocial is the future, the social is dead. And I'm like okay, you do realize that the parasocial means that I have no response, there's no obligation from the media. End of the parasocial relationship to you. Definitionally, that's what it means. It doesn't mean mediated. It means like, you know who I am, I have no idea who the fuck you are. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I kind of had a little after Trump won. I kind of had a little video that I put out where I was trying to just speak from my heart and not intellectualize what was happening, because that is my tendency. I was just trying to make it clear that, look, if you did support Trump, or if you're like, if you're a young person who supported Trump, specifically start thinking about who actually has your back. Not like in terms of like what political figures you admire or what influencers you admire. Start thinking about who would have your back if things actually went seriously wrong in your life and we don't even really need to get into politics because you know, I know I'm not really going to say anything that would necessarily convince them otherwise. Just start thinking about like who, who, who would help you out if, if things went south, if things actually went south on it like a societal level, yeah, and how many, how many kids do you think come up short when they think about that?
Speaker 1:kids, do you think, come up short when they think about that? Most of them, most of them, I will admit, I've like had like like my reaction at millennial smug liberals and stuff lately too, because, for example, I was listening to some liberal podcast I won't say what it was, um, it was a movie podcast though, and it was not it, um, and they were talking about like how, how reactionary it is to talk about the male loneliness crisis and I'm like it's very fucking real, it's absolutely fucking real, for sure. There's no denying the statistics on it. It. Now, I will admit, some of these alienated young men, I don't want to hang around either.
Speaker 2:Not at all. I mean, we just saw this, this fucker that shot up the church and minneapolis oh god, disgusting um you know, I would also love a year.
Speaker 1:I mean I do think liberals sometimes over focus on mass shootings, but I'd love a year where I didn't have one about every two months. Yeah, that was random. Anyway, make mass shootings gang violence again, because at least that's comprafucking Ansible. But yeah it's. I mean it's pretty bleak.
Speaker 1:I have a lot of sympathy for young people. I know I bitch a lot about them. People are like oh, varn, you're becoming a boomer and I'm like well, I can't become a boomer, I'm a gen x or definitionally can't become a boomer. But um, also, okay, I actually think that like I don't know, like what, I don't know how people like when I talk about, like I even think the liberal part of gen z or the left-wing part of gen z is kind of reactionary, to be completely honest. But people don't know what I mean by reactionary. I am not saying that they are politically far right. What I'm saying a lot of times is like their politics is designed by totally negative interaction which is easy to mobilize people around. But that is just reacting. And the people you know, demestra, the people who came up with what reactionary is they knew that they designed their politics to feed into that and also to bait the other side into doing it in a way that reinforced the persecution complexes. And so, like, a lot of like I will say a lot of left-wingers are reactionary and people are like well, what does that mean? And I'm like, well, like I will say, a lot of left wingers are reactionary. Well, what does that mean? And I'm like well, I don't mean that they necessarily have, although morally I do think some of them are like busybodies. But but I'm not really saying they're reactionary.
Speaker 1:But it's been very hard to like even follow the trends, like you think about the talking points you follow. You and I both follow internet culture and movie culture enough to follow this. But dating talking points Even five years ago people would make a big deal out of someone's dating someone seven years older than them. Now it's spoken of positively by some of the same people in the millennial and Zoomer generations that Zoomer women are dating millennial men and I find that fascinating, like as like, because on one hand it does make it like nobody believes what they're saying, like they're all in a five minute hate all the time. So they don't really believe what they're saying, not because they're being cynical, because they haven't thought about it right like, and that's a very.
Speaker 1:I think that is why it's hard to make big art projects. The cost, the cost is both super low and super high and it requires sociality and social trust, like you have to trust the people you're making stuff with. It is very hard to be a completely independent creator. I say this this is a one man podcasting show. I can't do this by myself. Yeah, you know, like I have to have guests, I have to have interactions. I need, like you know, and I'm just I, I, I edit it, I, you guys can probably tell.
Speaker 1:I edit it. I, um, I put the art together myself, I run all the feeds myself, I do my own social media you can definitely tell that, because my aphasia kicks in and that's weird, um, but uh, I can't do that. I, even at that level, even as a sole proprietor producer, completely alone, I can't do this without sociality. There's no way to do it, and so I think that's what's happening. That terrifies me, like as a yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean if. If people are saying if, if it's, if the claim is true, if, if there is no more social and there is only the parasocial, that means that means we're entering an Armageddon-like scenario. That's not like the implications of that are. It's basically doomsday. You need other people in your life.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean when people Liberals always go, oh, we will overcome it, or like, oh, people will go on Everyday, life goes on. Someone said this to me the other day when I was talking, complaining about liberal saying that nothing ever happens. Or are not liberals, leftists Liberals sometimes say that too, but left is for sure Say it and I was like stuff is happening all the time. It's just not the end of capitalism. But if you think capitalism a steady state, you're an idiot. And the other thing I would say is like, um, when people say, oh, people just go about their everyday life, and I'm like I can give you the joseph tainter book about the collapse of complex civilizations, no, they don't.
Speaker 1:Like there's, there have been, there have been civilizations where there's a breaking point and people just like their way of everyday life goes, they go and hide out in the woods and they let their civilization completely fall apart. That happens like it is. It is not a weird thing to imagine just because you can't imagine it. I don't imagine anyone can imagine it till it's happening. I mean there's.
Speaker 2:There's no comprehensible version of that in the modern day because we have nuclear bombs. If civilization collapses, that means something of that scale is going to happen.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, if civilization collapses, even if you don't have a war that involves nuclear bombs, which I think people forget how dangerous those fucking things are these days. But, um, but the one thing I will say is uh, who's gonna maintain yucca mountain? Why, right like, because that's a big deal. I used to say that the primitivists like you know, if everyone did what you wanted, you'd still all.
Speaker 2:Or just like the proliferation of the amount of guns in the United States. If we had some kind of collapse scenario, it wouldn't be like prior civilizational collapses.
Speaker 1:I don't think we know how violent prior civilization collapses were. The only thing we know is people do survive them. Some of them. We do know how much of a blowback they are, but others were just like these. People just left and there shouldn't have been a lot of death, and then they forgot how to make stuff and then, like some people, came, back they weren't.
Speaker 1:It got to the point where they just weren't keeping records of it anymore and yeah, and there's, and like the population drops so, so, so small that it's even hard to find archaeological records enough for them. Like, um, we do know people survived. The genetics are still there somewhere, like you show up. They didn't completely die out, but like not that many and I'm not saying that's going to happen here in the us. The other thing I've said to people is like dude, the Western Roman Empire didn't know that the Western Roman Empire had fallen for 300 fucking years. And I know we live in a much more accelerated timeline. But I could totally believe that the United States we look at the breaking point of the United States. If it does break apart, we might like pinpoint it like in 2001, right, like, like or the house housing and loans crisis, or yeah something like that, like, like, like it, or maybe even I might even say maybe the 70s, like um, so it's.
Speaker 1:It's hard to say, you know, when the framework falls apart, but the frameworks like now, we see the framework fraying, but it could fray for a long time, like the kind of legal moves we see Trump and the states doing now, like it's like the states may be legally mostly apart before anything ever happens. States may be legally mostly apart before anything ever happens. Like you know, states might be semi-sovereign by before you see any like, and it may not even be a civil war. It might just be like we don't really function anymore. Let's just stop.
Speaker 2:Some states do better than others. You know, due to natural resources in that area Right here in Illinois, I feel like fairly secure. We got Lake Michigan over here. I feel like we got. We we had. The effects of climate change are obvious but we are poised to handle it better than a lot of areas where I live in Utah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've talked about that. Yeah, you need to. You need to make your exit plan. Yeah, no, I already have one, um, uh, but it it's um, I mean, a lot of the west is screwed. California is interesting because it's kind of screwed and kind of big enough that it might be able to handle it.
Speaker 1:But, like I, the fact that there's stuff that I used to say was very low but you could contemplate it and like more and more that's non-zero now, um, and it's it's like jokes that you hear former neoconservatives making that sound like me five to ten years ago I mean it's been weird kind of black code, yeah, well, it's also been weird that like, even like who, people who I would call normie progressives uh, outside of people that we would talk about, like on chorus, but like even people on the bulwark, which is a former neoconservative joint, will make statements that sound as radical as shit. That I was saying in 2009, 2010, 2011, and that is that that fucks with me, because I'm like, oh yeah, like what the fuck is happening like like people in my family who were previously just sort of like mainstream liberals who might sort of lean, you know, left liberal yeah solid union support that type of thing.
Speaker 2:Um are now saying like these, these politicians, no one is, no one is going to listen until there is mass violence. No one is going to listen to us until there are a thousand luigi mangione's. And it's like, okay, my mainstream liberal family member is now.
Speaker 1:Rodnicki.
Speaker 2:Some kind of insurrectionist anarchist, At least in. You know they'll utter things along those lines.
Speaker 1:Here's what I will say that's late russian empire shit yeah like that. You know I call it narodniki specifically. I mean, as a marxist I'm always like we reject narodniki tactics, even if we understand why they happen blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:But like I'm like, I am like, yeah, you guys are predicting. On one hand, these guys are predicting massive war. I was trying to say this on another podcast. On another hand, you're talking to people with no experience. America is a violent place, but yet most people do not actually see a lot of the violence directly or deal with its aftermath. So the people talking about this, I'm like you've never had to clean blood off your shoes. Like I don't think this is going to go the way you think it does and I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just saying that like if you should be more horrified but yeah, you should say so flippantly right.
Speaker 1:Like you know, I'm like in a civil war. You're looking at between two and ten percent of the population dying, no matter who wins that's kind of like best case yeah it is to you.
Speaker 1:You know, I know the the american civil war was, when the blow, the bloodiest wars in american history. And yet as a civil war it wasn't that bloody. It was like 2%. They're probably underestimating maybe 3%. I'm not underestimating, I'm just thinking what the stats I got that from. I was reading a book. It was like 2%.
Speaker 1:But most civil wars are like 5% to 10% to 15% of the population is dead at the end of it and they go on for a long time. They are much more violent and brutal than normal wars because no one can retreat. People will bring up like occupational wars for that. The reason why the insurgents have an easy time actually messing with the occupiers is there's a lot of incentive once your death toll goes up that even if you're dying at five to one, you're making it hard enough for the people who are staying there to want to stay there and they can just go home when there is no other home to go to. It becomes zero sum and whoever kills the most people wins and it's that simple. It's a fight to the death, Right, and you know, and then and then you hope you can incorporate the survivors in or you're going to be back in a civil war relatively soon, Like I definitely like this train of thought is something I think about.
Speaker 2:But I also like going back to what you were talking about with, like the nothing ever happens type crowd. I constantly am second guessing myself when I see red flags. Now, there have been so many instances where what I thought was a red flag was just something that kind of uh, petered out and didn't lead to anything. Um, I think so, like a couple of things are happening right. When you, when you hear these people who say nothing ever happens. Um, people who say nothing ever happens Number one, trump was elected in 2016 and nothing substantially changed or at least that's how that's like the sort of experiential that's, that's what they experienced from, like a, from their standpoint, that nothing has really substantially changed in their life. Um, and so, you know, to that just kind of petered out, right, um, but then it didn't peter out.
Speaker 1:I mean, I was one of the people people saying you aren't really fighting fascism at the time and I want to be like, I want to be clear on that. But I was also thinking like what do you do when you've blown your wad on this? And like actual authoritarianism are something fascistic? I'm not gonna say fascist, because I just don't like that debate. People go words have meaning. I'm like actually they have to be socially agreed upon and we no longer agree upon the social meaning of fascism yeah, I'm not like a prescriptivist right, like we need to.
Speaker 2:We need to assert that fascism means a particular thing, um, but you know, like historically, how, how it was used to me indicates like oh, if we're entering full-blown fascism, that means the country is committing suicide right, because also historically that's what happened.
Speaker 1:All the countries like, it's like that's what happened. All the fascist yeah that, like like they, they either still award themselves to death or they got taken over by somebody else and re-established, like which, by the way, resistance didn't work in any of those cases either no like I was telling someone about that and I'm like, oh, we should be like the right row society and I was like so dead yeah, so we should get ourselves killed.
Speaker 2:There's also there's also the obvious fact that if I was talking like this in nazi germany, I would be killed.
Speaker 1:So yes, I mean that's.
Speaker 2:That's the thing that is kind of my sticking point, where it's like, yeah, we have sort of this like hyper real, theatrical, fascistic administration no, I'm certainly not denying that and the people affected by it. It's like incomprehensible to me what they're going through.
Speaker 1:I think I think it actually cleans up historical liberalism though, because, like, like I was telling someone when he was complaining, like no one's doing what america does in extraditing people, the third country, so they get mike. The british did it all the fucking time during their colon like they were still doing it up to the 1980s, like um exile has been a form of punishment for forever, forever, what like?
Speaker 1:and exiling people to a place that they don't belong also not, you know, not. Not new. Um, I'm not saying what happened with trump isn't new. What makes it new is the combination of things being thrown at the wall at once and we don't know what sticks and what doesn't right but I also was surprised that I mean like the meat, like mainstream media in so much that it does anything, has capitulated.
Speaker 1:I was watching an msn uh stream and they're like trump has his highest poll yet ever. And you read it. It's like he he only had 55 percent negatives and I was like, oh my fucking god. So you guys like, who cynically led this, all this resistance shit like last time, are now like kowtowing this time because you know that there actually are stakes. But no one believes you anyway because the polls like I've been, I've been following polls now and like people have said, oh, the polls don't work. I'm like the polls don't do it now. And like people have said, oh, the polls don't work, I'm like the polls don't do it.
Speaker 1:The polls never did what you thought they would do. Like they're never 100 predictive. There's, like in a 50 50 race, there's a pretty close chance on either candidate winning, even if one has a advantage. Like that's just. You just don't really understand math. You're using polls wrong. But lately I the polls with the. The polls vary such an insane amount. I mean, none of them are, none of them have trump in the positive, but like, like is it? Is he down to a 35 approval rate or a 45 approval rate? In the same week we'll get two polls that say they have a 10 difference. That's not in a margin of error like pretty, pretty substantial difference yeah, that's huge.
Speaker 1:And so you're just like no one knows anything anymore, like either the polls are cooked because the sample sizes are cooked, or they're. You know, the media has totally, has totally broken down. Um, and to bring it back to where we started, we know that there's dark money in all this media.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like I mean, do we actually even know the number of people being deported right now? The Trump administration has an incentive to exaggerate it, right? We don't know Whereas like, whereas like a Nazi administration like they would have, they would try to hide it, right would try to hide it right.
Speaker 1:It's it, it is, it's. It's a bizarre place to be, and I said to someone once I was like I mean, I was, I was being an edgelord, I admit it was like you're always talking to me about fashion as if it's the worst thing in the world. What is what's happening now ends up being worse than fascism, and like they couldn't even comprehend it. I'm like. I'm like what's happening now ends up being worse than fascism and they couldn't even comprehend it. I'm like but I must be honest with you Secret police. Other societies have had that. Even liberal societies have had that Breakdown of the rule of law. It's actually been weird that the English-speaking world doesn't have that more like. That has happened almost everywhere else. Um, and you know, I think like, and if you think things are gonna get better, if you're like democrats, I want you to go look at what's happening to the to to the UK right now, under this current labor administration, they're all but banning fucking Wikipedia, like um, and they're turning their economy into something akin to Argentina's 10 years ago.
Speaker 2:So they're there. The UK is so cooked it's you know I mean, and I saw a figure that said that that poland, the gdp of poland, is going to exceed the uk and, like I, I forget what year exactly, but it was astonishing to me.
Speaker 1:I think the gdp of ireland does, or at least it's very close to it. They're also, on average, taller and healthier. Now it's like. It's like this is bad. Um, I don't you know as much as I talk about how I hate the english. I don't actually like that but I don't want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to see them suffer. They're my brother and I my. My ancestors are from england and ireland I forgive you.
Speaker 1:At least least you have some from Ireland, but no, it's, it's. It's also just wild to see all this go down, I mean, and what I've also been kind of amazed at is they're not just bad here. This is the other thing that people miss. Like the, the affordability crisis is pretty much worldwide, but the exception of maybe, vietnam and china, for obvious reasons, but like it's pretty much worldwide. Um, everybody's economy, including china's, has slowed more than they wanted. China's has kicked it up a little bit because the us has basically given them a big bad gift in this.
Speaker 1:The way we've implemented the dumbest terror policy. No demand, I'm not saying that I'll, I'm not, I'm not. I was arguing. My friend been burgess, because I'm like there are some tariffs that are defending but you guys in the left to think tariffs is a way to manage things, because you think, you think strong state building works, and I'm like it doesn't work in a developed economy. It's just like fdr actually ratcheted down the tariffs by doing matching tariffs to ratchet them down, not up.
Speaker 1:Um, just want to point that out to you. Like, uh, your understanding of nafta as being mostly about tariffs is wrong. It's actually mostly about other parts of labor law that applied across the board and hurt everybody because it made them subject to trade rules uh, like the ims rules that could crack down on anybody's labor law. That wasn't just about tariffs, it wasn't even primarily about tariffs, because de-territorization had already been going on for about 50 years at that point. So it's like I mean, and people like, oh, how dare you talk about labor leaders? I'm like. I'm like they're just wrong. They're just factually wrong. They're not wrong about what they experienced. I mean sean fain's right that after and after things are a lot worse for american workers, but like he's not a lawyer, he doesn't necessarily know why.
Speaker 2:Like um, and I think that's across the board to your, to your points about, like we need to. We do need to think about the continuity between presidents. Um, what like when it comes to biden and trump? Like biden kind of teed up Trump with the chips act to uh, purchase 10% of Intel. It's a very interesting development, um that would have been unthinkable when Trump was threatening to nationalize the defense industry.
Speaker 1:I was like, oh my God, that's actually a good idea. I mean, I'm like final merger thesis.
Speaker 2:Let's fucking go.
Speaker 1:I'm just like. I'm like like it should have never been off the, that's one of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as long as your nation states that should have been non-nationalized anyway yeah, that seems like common sense um, it's just so, you know, I I don't want to, I don't want to undermine the horror right now, and I mean I do think what we're seeing is like Like Vance has an ideology, miller has an ideology, rfk has an idea. They're not the same ideology. Trump Is a late 19th century American grifter, who also is probably your racist granddad, his ideology is Revenge.
Speaker 1:It's like it's revenge. But he also doesn't want to be hated like a true strong man, which is why, when all the when I was listening to the like Trump is like national conservatives types going like he's going to be a lion, I'm like that's a fucking Fox, if not a coyote. Liberals have underestimated his intelligence, but like a strong man he is not. Like are coherent.
Speaker 2:Like he is not um, you know, I mean there's an intelligence and then there's just a, the preternatural ability to say whatever is going to like just have no relationship to anything in reality, right? Is that intelligence? I don't know what that is, but you just got to get for it.
Speaker 1:But I mean it's funny though, because I was I was one of these people who, even I was like I thought that like okay, trump two is going to be a lot like Trump one. We're going to have like people like my friend Benjamin Studebaker and my friend Danny Besner and be like you know, he's going to listen to Ivanka and stuff. I'm like, no, none of that stuff happened. Now. It's not the, it's not the same groups that support him, it's not the same aesthetics. It's actually a very different thing. And yet I'm like, okay, so let's say the democrats win and this isn't the end of democracy, and that all feels like hyperbole, which is, by the way, is going to really hurt them if it really is hyperbole.
Speaker 1:If things do go back to normal after this whatever normal is, because it won't be normal what's going to happen is they're going to do this immigration regime with a human face and more guest worker programs and stuff like that, but there will not be a clear path to citizenship for people. We're probably not going to get massive health care reform During the Biden administration. This is something I was pointing out to people. People talk about the cuts in healthcare, I'm like, but I didn't have been quietly ratcheting down Medicaid payments from like 2021 forward, like, and now I've also seen a lot of these people, some of whom are implicated in the chorus Christ, uh, controversy, um, we're trying to do, oh, it isn't the same that what Trump is doing, the but I'm like, no, it wasn't the same. But you're trying to now argue that the Obama, biden, um, immigrant deportation regime was humane because it was by cause, it followed rule of law, and a lot of you were like abolish ice just six years ago, right, I just don't know what the like, who would trust you?
Speaker 2:like anyone paying attention.
Speaker 1:You've lost all credibility, but maybe that's what we're dealing with is like we would talk about. The people don't have the social interaction out to maintain the memory, to have to, to have the, the the ability to adjudicate these things Some people do. I mean, I don't want to overstate how fucked like psychologically Gen Z is. I think sometimes we can sound like like apocalyptic here, but I just I can't tell anymore. That's where I'm at Um and I teach kids, like I interact with kids every day. Well, yeah, Um, so it's just a different world to me, Um, and I don't have an answer for where we're at Um. I also think you know when the people like nothing ever happens, what they're expecting, like the decline of the empire to be like the Soviet Union, It'll just happen overnight and everything falls apart. That, historically, is not that common. It does happen, but it's not that common.
Speaker 2:That's what leftist commentators were saying was going to happen, right, so they've just become jaded um they, they jaded themselves.
Speaker 1:I mean the other thing. Leftist commentators have been saying the dollar was going to completely collapse overnight for like five years during the biden administration and the end of trump administration never happened.
Speaker 2:But the dollar has been devaluing for a long time, for 20 years yeah, and if this whole issue with uh trump firing one of the fed members, that's, that is where I think the rubber meets the road as far as like things can go south it's it, well it's.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be interesting because, on one hand, like we stand at a precipice where, depending on what happens with the chips and the tariffs and whether or not the ai bubble can and, by the way, guys, even if ai is useful, it's bubbling, it is not the. The reason why it's bubbling is that for the am model to work, you can't just have the Magnificent Seven being the only people making money from it. I'm not talking about individuals, but other companies have to increase their profit margins after doing their layoffs for it to be profitable for them in the long run. For the Magnificent Seven to continue its stock valuation because they have to sell to other businesses. That's their real prime market, not you, you dipshit. Um. So when you think about that and you look at the profitability of these new companies adopting ai stuff, it has not gone up since they adopted the ai so, yeah, I mean, this was always.
Speaker 2:We talked a lot about ai in the last uh n our last interview, um and I I do think that people have sort of uh been on one hand, of course you're right, there is a bubble um, and this a lot of people are echoing that sentiment that there is. There is, there's a difference between use value and exchange value, right, and so the expectations that have been sort of baked into this because of the hype um are certainly surely have to reach, uh, a breaking point at some point, pretty time, soon, uh, pretty soon, I think. On the other hand, we have like leftists saying this as though the technology is not useful because there is a bubble, yeah, which is wrong. It's just that's not. Those two things are uh completely different. You know, um, if you're evaluating everything by how profitable is it is, you really are one of those capitalist, realist type people that mark fisher complains about no, that's.
Speaker 1:I would agree with you because I have been, I haven't. I have been, I have been skeptical on lom ais. I'm so skeptical and when my brother, who's also who's an ai doomer but works in the field, is like AGI is going to be soon, I'm not even sure AGI is possible and you haven't convinced me that. It is because LLMs have no way that I can see that they would become AGIs. But they are incredibly effective at certain things. Are they as effective as people at their energy cost? Probably not, but you actually could do something about that with a different incentive set like I mean, yeah, china's already proven that you could like so, and there there is an argument to be made.
Speaker 2:Like you know, that's not something that I would ever minimize is the energy expenditure and the water, and the water is probably bigger than the people have made arguments that we can get that the ai could eventually get gains on efficiency.
Speaker 1:That made the energy expenditure go down um better to other components, but no one's made an argument with that for the water usage.
Speaker 2:It's just like there's um and I mean I, I do think there is a possibility that it will actually incentivize more infrastructure being built.
Speaker 1:In terms of you know, I thought so too, until until the big beautiful bill gutted most of that. That's what I was shocked. That's when I was like they, truly like the GOP truly doesn't believe there's a future, even for them, because they're gutting infrastructure projects that they know they're going to need for their economy to work?
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. And if you look at what they've done in Nevada, and particularly in Florida, to their own tourism industry, florida's not going to have an economy in a couple of years Because it's too expensive for domestic consumption and they have disincentivized almost all foreign consumption. I was looking at the image. I actually didn't realize how much of the Florida economy was dependent on Canadian and European snowbirds. It's a remarkable amount. I also didn't realize how much. Kentucky was the largest exporter economy in the country and we've heard it like.
Speaker 2:I did not know that?
Speaker 1:Yep, because it deals. I mean, it deals in stuff like bourbon and like rare exports. So, which now makes sense. Right, ron Paul and Mitch McConnell hated the tariff regime so much and they're so open about it. Right, ron paul, not ron paul, excuse me, um like, but the agricultural economy of nebraska has tanked. Um, texas is seeing real fractures and the blue, the blue economy, is like oh, we can go out on our own. I'm like, guys and I've been saying this for a decade maybe you can, but your entire business model was based off the parity value of the dollar and being able to use that for cultural export exchange. I don't know that that continues indefinitely into the future.
Speaker 1:And this whole giver states and takers states thing that they've been bringing up since the aughts, it's just like. It's a weird framing, it's just like one. You know, a lot of the reasons why stuff is taken is because prisons and military complexes are put in the southern states. And, yes, it does. I guess that it contributes to their economy, maybe, but two, you're all dependent, you guys in particular. I guess that it contributes to their economy, maybe, but uh, two, um, you're all dependent, you guys in particular, in like financial sectors and shit. Do you have you seen what happened to Britain when they made that all more difficult, when they destroyed their financial sector? Like I just you know you think you're special. I don't, you know, apparently they do so. It's just. I just you know you think you're special, you know, apparently they do so. It's just, I'm not saying they couldn't. I mean, like, california is the size of a country, as is Texas, blah, blah, blah, but it's California's economic. Like economic policies, when you look at them, don't really look that great. Like economic policies, when you look at them, don't really look that great, particularly when you look at, like their homelessness rates. Uh, basically their middle class barely exists anymore.
Speaker 1:Most of his left and and now I'm seeing liberals like say this, like it's a good thing, and I'm just confused and but maybe they're all being paid by course, I don't know like, because they all signed fucking ndas. So we don't like, because I have just seen the talking points go nuts. I mean I, I would admit, on the independence of the fed, I've been worried about it because I remember what happened to list trust and for different reasons, you piss off the bomb market stuff happens, yeah, um, on the other side of things, though I've been kind of confused that, like, a lot of some people who I used to associate with being a mentee become Fed warriors because I'm like but you guys fundamentally don't believe in the independence of the Fed. Yeah, that is that the whole issue. Yeah, like, isn't Trump doing what you want just for evil or whatever?
Speaker 2:Like they just don't trust him to do the right thing.
Speaker 1:Right and.
Speaker 2:I think, more importantly, the markets wouldn't trust him to well do the right thing.
Speaker 1:Some MMT years not all, but some MMT years don't have an international view of how, of how market works. They basically talk about economies as if they're autarkies, which is nutty. Yeah, because I'm like. No. The international bond markets, yeah, because I'm like no, the international bond markets, I mean it's, it's mostly owned by domestic people, but it's actually a way to it's why it exists is both a, it's a form of capitalist power Okay, true, but B, it is also a way to stabilize the currency when there's no jointly held commodity that everyone agrees upon. To solidify currency up for international trade. So people feel like they can trust each other.
Speaker 1:The bond market has a check on that and, um, I think a lot of people just don't get that when they're looking at this and to tie it back in the culture and you know I don't want to keep all your night, so let's be the last thing. I think the cultural malaise we talked about in the beginning of the show or in the middle of the show is directly tied to this. I mean, people talk about economic declines leading to good art. I guess that was kind of true in the 70s Historically, is that true?
Speaker 1:Not really the Renaissance wasn't happening when theian city-states had a shit economy.
Speaker 2:well, no, and I've always been the type of leftist that you know, a type of socialist that thinks if you meet people's basic needs, if you're able to accomplish that, there will be a proliferation of art. Yeah, um, you need to.
Speaker 1:You need to have a stable base well, that's one of the things maybe we're seeing. It's a difference between the 70s and now is, while the 70s was an economically disastrous time, it was culturally a kind of a malaise time, but it led to a lot of interesting art and cinema etc. Maybe part of the reason it did that is there was still a welfare state for people to be able to try to hone these skills when they didn't have enough work to do otherwise, and that's just not been the case since the 1990s, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean there's, there's also this. I mean, part of the issue is there. Like there is just a massive proliferation of art, um, there's tons of it right now. Like more, more music is made in a day. I don't know the exact factoid, but I'm more music is made in a day than was made in a very long amount of time.
Speaker 2:If you're talking about like the 80s, you know right, um, and so I mean like, if you're following the logic of the market, then it becomes devalued because there's so much of it, um, and that that didn't that sort of kind of that's kind of disincentivizes capitalists from investing in it, for sure. So, yeah, I don't know where we're at. It's kind of a crazy moment. It's hard to say Right, crazy moment. It's hard to say I right. I'm also like, uh, experientially, like it's it's hard for me to clock a lot of this stuff because, um, because of my health issues, I've had these, you know, we alluded to it earlier but like, I've had four semi-major surgeries in the past two years, um, but also I'm strangely at a point in my life where I'm more financially stable than I ever was previously.
Speaker 1:Um, I wasn't until about about six months ago, my, my, my, uh partner got hit and uh, not actually from doge, but like downstream of that, uh, oh, really, um, all the grants running up the university meant that they had to tighten up and then some areas that she worked in were mismanaged. So she's not without a job um, actually she still has. She's like at 49 or whatever, but like it's, uh, it's it's like half our income's gone and and cost of living has gone up. Uh, my brother, who is fairly stable, uh told me that his bills he's in georgia where things go up faster than in utah. Weirdly, utah's utilities and stuff. We get hit hard by water when my water utility is insanely expensive, but it also makes sense to live in a goddamn desert, right, but my brother told me that his bills, between student loans going up and everything else, his bills, went up $2,100 a month in the in the past um six months, I mean in the past year, and he, he's like, he's like I hated Biden and now I hate Trump too, and you know he's, he was kind of like one of those.
Speaker 1:Uh, he wasn't, he's not a business owner, but he, he, he was what I like to call like the business center Republicans.
Speaker 1:And now I think he's probably like some kind of weird uh never Trump, former Republican dim or something, although it's like, well, it doesn't matter anymore. You're going to be dealing with this guy forever, like he's 80. If today is anything, I mean, even if he, if he gets through his president's natural lifespan although he's already what? Like four years past the average american um, but he's rich, so he probably will um, uh, he's just not gonna be like him and by like, they're not gonna be alive long enough to be a growing concern for you of completely, for completely natural reasons, for that much longer, like you know what, um, but this other stuff will still be with us. And yeah, I don't know. I mean and I'm with you on the, it's got to be a paradox that would have your health fall apart and, uh, for me, that would happen to me in mexico. I was fiscally the best I'd ever been and I was almost dying all the time and become very paranoid, I recluse from the world.
Speaker 1:For a year I stopped doing like I told you off air. I stopped doing podcasts. For about a year I still was releasing podcasts because I recorded because I am a workaholic and when I was making them, because I recorded because I am a workaholic and when I was making them, I recorded like I recorded like two years worth in a series of five months that's very you and had no means to release them, so I had to sit on them and that luckily back then I wasn't talking about immediate stuff, we were all it was all theories.
Speaker 1:So I kept the podcast going but I wasn't doing anything like I wasn't and I wasn't advertising them or anything and um, and also podcasting back then wasn't a job for me, it was a weird obsessive hobby. Um, you know, I didn't people forget this. It was very hard to monitor. People tried, but it was very hard to monetize a podcast. Even for the first five years of patreon existing. Like um, it took a while to catch on. Like people just thought podcasts were free.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, there's also this weird phenomenon, though, where if you kind of got in on the ground floor, you could have potentially been wildly successful.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, if I had been producing from 2014 to 2017, as opposed to starting back in 2016 under someone else's aegis behind a paywall, yes, I probably could have gone gangbusters, because even when I came back at the end of COVID as a separate, like it took a while off, I probably left zero right, but I came back at the end of COVID as, like an independent entity, this went gangbusters for me very quickly. I was like, oh my gosh, I can actually make. I beat what I got paid doing podcasts for for another company by myself within four months, like it was not even hard, and that was at the tail end of the decline of things. So I was like god damn it. Like, yeah, time this wrong. I've been in this since 2011. I should, I should have been able to ride these coattails better. But you know, whatever, it's okay, we all make mistakes. Um, I also. I mean go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say, like you know, uh, going back to what we were talking, because it does bother me like, um, um, just the sort of weird confluence of events in my life, um have have led to a point where I'm like my experience is is clearly not the typical experience of most americans right now, if, if, what I'm reading online is even remotely any indication. So I, I, I find myself just like constantly second guessing my general second, second guessing my heuristics, second guessing my reactions to things, and wondering whether any particular thing is newsworthy or even worth talking about or thinking about from a practical standpoint. It's tough, it's a tough place to be in, but also it's like, it's also optimal. Like I said, I'm the most financially stable I've ever been in my life, like we were able to buy a house.
Speaker 1:It's, it's not yeah you just made like half the audience of the planet hate you.
Speaker 2:I know, I mean it's. Don't get me wrong, it's not, it's. It was built in 1909. It's a fixer-upper, but we were able to buy a house, yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1:You're in a state that isn't quite in.
Speaker 2:I mean, all states are insane, but you're not like in utah, where houses went from a hundred thousand dollars to six hundred thousand dollars in a year we like it was a little crazy during the pandemic when we were looking for a house for sure, like um, there were cars lined up around the block, sometimes to go to a showing, and what ended up happening is we just waited a couple years and then we were able to find something. So I don't know, um, I, I'm like go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, no, I, I feel you. I was about to say like I had a house. I bought a house when I uh came back to the states because I'd saved up money abroad and supported someone through cancer, because I was uh teaching mercenaries the only time I was ever like rolling in dough in my life, um, but I, I gave up the house. Actually, what I say, I lost it. I actually willingly gave it up because we didn't have enough equity for it to for me to enforce the sale. I think think we both make $2,000. If I had not done that and this is not my ex's fault, so don't take this as bitter grapes on her, this is me being bitter grapes about COVID and we actually had so that we both would have made $100,000. Like it was sort of like ouch, that's more money than I've ever had in my hand at one time in my life. So, but you know, whatever bad decision making, right. But but you couldn't have known that either. Because, like I was making the projections based off a prior home growth and it was I thought. Like I thought like six percent a year was 60, 10 percent a year is pretty good. Like I thought like six percent a year was, or six to ten percent a year is pretty good. Um, you know that way outpaces inflation. You know I wasn't expecting 50 to 100 doubling a year, for for three years things have stabilized out here, um, now they're turning everything into apartments that no one's buying.
Speaker 1:Uh, and because of the tax incentives. I'm trying to explain this, like why it doesn't. I'm like why, why yimbyism doesn't work is if you lose money as a, as a property holder, you have no incentive to raise the rent, but you have every incentive not to drop it because you can write off the full cost of the rent on your taxes as a business loss. Why the hell would you ever drop the? You know like, um, so, and like people like don't get that. I'm like, no, you could build as much as you want. There's a tax incentive, particularly with these very large investment banks and private equity buying this, to just take the loss and use it as a tax write-off, like um, it will stop prices from going up as fast. But that's, you know. You know that's not here and there and and I I just think people don't understand that.
Speaker 1:Um, but um, I guess I feel you in the sense that, like, it's as hard as things are economically for me and my wife. I do know we're still in the top 20 income earners for the united states. I'm like. That doesn't mean we can eat out. That doesn't mean like I struggle like every. This surgery is like dangerously close to bankrupting me. Um, it's not going to, but it's close, right. Um. And I'm like, if I'm like that, what? What the fuck is the average? Like, because I can't replicate my parents lifestyle, who was, according to official socioeconomic data, two social classes below me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the thing that's kind of giving me an existential crisis is I've kind of, at the very least, reached where my parents were at economically, um, which, like there's in the back of my head, I'm like, well then, there's nowhere to go but down. Um, well, you could steady state, but I hope so. I hope so.
Speaker 2:I mean there's yeah, there's a lot of things going on right now that, um, that kind of alienate me from other people, um, and and so then I end up being sympathetic to what's going on, but also like, uh, I if I'm ever doing political commentary, I I don't want to impress upon people that I actually know what I'm talking about. Um, it's, it's a tough place to be in. Um. We're also like we have a side hustle where we use LLMs to make money. It's that sounds like.
Speaker 2:That sounds like I'm a grifter now that I said that, but it's like a pretty substantial chunk of money and I couldn't replicate that for another person. I couldn't teach another person to do that. It's kind of a unique situation because we just knew some people and had an opportunity. When I hear this um, when I hear a lot of the uh AI doomers um, you know, I I certainly see a lot of the points that they're making Um, but then I'm also like I I don't know how many people there are like me out there who are using it to make money and just kind of printing money right now, like um, I can tell you where I can legally do it.
Speaker 1:I use it to generate compliance paperwork, which has made it where I can focus a lot more on teaching.
Speaker 2:That's certainly a good thing.
Speaker 1:Like I really have and there's so much more communication with parents because I can write a paragraph and then throw it in there. I'm like make this, you know, clean this up for a parent, do this, personalize it, send it out Like um that's what it's good at synthesizing information.
Speaker 1:And I'm not, by the way, like yes, it's made it where they're hiring less teachers, but they we're not. We're we're not replacing teachers with them, despite what people say we can't and they're not. If they thought they could, they'd try, and there's one charter school that's trying, but most of the schools are like, no, we really can't do that. But I've also heard a lot of professors who are like total, no AI ever. And I'm like I don't want the kids using it to write. I really agree with you. I've seen what it does cognitively. But when you guys give me the cardio studies, that same study also says if you use it as a proxy for a social outlet and you realize that it's blowing smoke up your ass they don't say it that way, but they imply it you can use it to hone a bunch of skills actually, and not lose the cognitive drive. But if you use it to just generate everything, you're going to become a, you're going to become a potato. But it's weird because when we talk about complex technologies, people tend to not look at them like like we would look at like simple technologies and weirdly, they tend to see simple technologies as more neurons and complex technologies. I'll give you example like knives can hurt people.
Speaker 1:No one's going to argue that we should accept in the uk that we should get rid of all knives. Like um, that knives have. It's a very simple technology, blah, blah blah. But like we use them all the time they have. They do have pernicious social effects, but they also have a lot of good effects. There's probably environmental I mean I know there's environmental costs and knives and probably not as much as other things but like getting any kind of metal is going to be an environmentally, uh, hazardous scenario. I'm not saying it's the same as ai, I'm just saying the. The logic patterns are weird to me because I'm like I am an ai skeptic in the sense when I hear people talk about g, agi and stuff like that, I'm just like that's for sure and I also thought when I first played with ai that it kind of sucked.
Speaker 1:But then I started training one because they wanted me to do it at my job and I was like, and I work in ed tech, I'm a teacher, but I worked in ed tech specifically, um, and I started doing stuff with it. I'm like, oh god, it really can do certain things and it can at least make my manual ass paperwork be something that I just have to double check. You know, I wouldn't use it to grade a student, um for sure, um. But I might, you know, but I might tell a student like, hey, have it, look at your comma usage and not redo it for you, but ask it what you're doing wrong. Like you know, I can tell you, but there's 25 of you and you can't all get to me at that time. So it's, it's, it's.
Speaker 1:And then I you know I start when there's been some interesting things in pedagogy that have come out of this. You might be interested in this. I'm now having kids show me all their drafts, so I know that they didn't generate it all at once, which is actually good practice anyway, but no one backed me up on it till I came out and the AI checkers started falsely accusing people. Or maybe they aren't false, but we can't really say there's not a hundred percent people, or maybe they aren't false, but we can't really say there's, they're not 100, and so um, in fact, I think I'm better at telling ai, sometimes in the la, than the ai checker is um. But I started just like just show me your drafts, let's talk about your drafts, like and if there's enough drafts, I'm like okay, I can tell you used it some, but you just corrected your grammar. I don't really give a shit about that. I mean, people, people might be mad about that, but that really is analogous to being mad about someone using a calculator after they've learned the equations.
Speaker 2:Like or like a spell checker.
Speaker 1:Right, right, and I do remember when teachers were mad about that in the nineties, when I was a kid.
Speaker 2:But um, you're not always going to have a calculator all right, which is which I do.
Speaker 1:It's my phone this, um, uh, but I mean I do think it's part of why people don't understand math logic. But anyway, I mean my point is I guess I'm taking a centrist point I mean on this as much as I hate that word um, that this technology is bad because of the way it's being developed, but the idea that you're going to throw it away and say it would never do anything, that does feel like you're projecting so that you can reject this, as opposed to dealing with the fact this is a good technology being used, or at least not maybe a good a neutral technology being used to bad ends and bad ways that are environmentally destructive. But that's a use case issue, not, it is a inherent teleology to the idea of large language models and neural networks a use case issue and an issue with our power grid.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean. What comes to mind when we talk about this is that recent MIT study that said like 95% of businesses I forget exactly how it was phrased but like they are not getting a profit out of LLms as of yet, and I mean the thing that comes to my like. The reasons for that are obvious to me.
Speaker 1:Um, I think it's power costs in it. I mean there's a lot of reasons that's.
Speaker 2:But in terms of implementation, like larger corporations are not going to have, uh, it's not going to be a very efficient process. Uh, trying to implement LLMs in a way that actually, um, increases product, increases productivity, um, I think it's going to be much more beneficial for small businesses who can just tell their employees hey, if it helps, you use it in whatever way. Uh, just kind of do whatever you want, as long as you get your job done. Larger corporations don't really work that way, like there's more, they're more concerned about liability and all that. That's part of it. Another part of it is, really, if we were looking at the profitability of this whole thing, you would replace the middle managers first. Um, right, and the middle managers aren't going to get rid of their own jobs.
Speaker 1:They're the ones implementing this technology, right, they are they are that and like clerical work, or they are the two obvious things you use with it. I mean, this is, this is the thing they tend to actually try to get rid of, the things that are the people who it doesn't make sense to get rid of. I mean, um, it is, it is a work efficiency gain, but again, we could use work efficiency gains. We have a declining population now and and, uh, you know, um, that's going to put strain on social services. It's not the end of the world, though. I was reading a Jackman article made it sound like like we all need to have socialist baby making machines. I'm like, honestly, the world can't take that either. I'm not a Malthusian, I'm just saying like you do have to admit there are going to be limits to what you can get out of this planet and no, and you're right.
Speaker 2:A declining population forces you to be more efficient with the resources that you have and it forces more automation, which is ultimately a good thing. Like we don't want to be doing menial work our whole lives? No, it's it's.
Speaker 1:This is my issue with with the grovers was not what people think it is. I'm not actually like we need to grow the economy forever, but the idea that like, oh, we moved back to do like some of them not all of them, but some of them are basically proposing like we need to move back to like 40% of the population is doing relatively manual agriculture, and I'm like that doesn't even make sense, like it's not a smart it would be incredibly land destructive actually.
Speaker 2:And how do you sell that? How do you sell that to people? So my knees are going to be fucked by the time.
Speaker 1:I'm like 40 and then like, oh, we also need to do it to, to, like to, to undo the balances in the in the developing world. I'm like, no, we need to build infrastructure that'll last for 300 years in the developing world. Like, so it'd be one. Like, we, we are completely building shittier and shittier, but partly so people have to buy them over and over again and if and like I see it and everything around me, and then like, I get something that was made in the 60s and it still fucking works, um, but I will also admit that it's simpler technology.
Speaker 1:Like, the more complicated a technology is, the more cascade failure points it's going to have. Um, uh, but anyway, I mean, my point in all this is just like. It just feels like people projecting very simple things where I'm like, no, we do need to use less, we absolutely do, and I I don't think we could. Everyone can have bananas in the way that we have it now. That's such a dumb debate, but I, I mean, ultimately I do agree with it, but I'm like we don't know what abundance would look like when you're not measuring it from GDP and you're not measuring it from constant expansion.
Speaker 2:We need to theorize a concept of socialist growth to combat capitalist growth. We need to articulate what it actually means to grow as a society in a functional way.
Speaker 1:I think this is something we just need to like deal with and both the, the bright green, like we can, you know, because sometimes, like, you guys really are optimistic on technology um, and then the, and then like the degrowth, or what we used to call deep green. I'm, like you guys one. Some of your proposals aren't that radical and I even agree with them, but the others are like insane, are are you couldn't sell it to anybody and you would need a mecha for the entire planet for this to happen and that person would be shot by somebody like. So I'm just, you know, it's, it's, it's.
Speaker 1:It's like this is an unrealistic power fantasy. We need to quit using resources irresponsibly. We need to respect land and life more abso-fucking-lutely. But it's just not going to look like trying to turn it back to the 17th century or whatever you guys think you're going to do. Yeah, it's not primitivism. Some people call it primitivism. It's not primitivism. Sometimes I'm like this is still kind of nutty. I just want to tell you what the population would have to be to sustain your vision. It's going to involve, like, I think the population's gonna like in the. In the 21st century, I think worldwide population is going to start to decline um in a probably fairly responsible way, if we don't have big fucking wars um, although I'm not as hopeful about that because we're now, and we're now in like pre-war war ii level of conflicts of worldwide.
Speaker 1:So it's a little bit worried. It's not looking great, um, but uh, it's. If we pull that off like we could, we could ratchet down human population without anyone having like, without, even without like stuff like uh, I don't know. Like, one of the things I've talked about to someone else is, like you know, people who are like pro natal. There's been no set of pro natal policies, even socialist ones, that have worked. Like, once society start getting into a population decline, they tend to decline, hit a state, sit a state of states, join another society, accept other people in and then start growing again. But like there's but not been a whole lot of way to reverse it, um, through, like, through just tinkering around.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen any study. I mean even like some of the pronatalists will admit this, and I'm just like, so what are you doing? Like, what do you think we can do? Because, um, you know, I mean the incentives they're giving in the united states for for, uh, for having kids. It's like pathetic, given the cost, like you know, um, just you know a few, but like with insurance, it's about 10, it's about 10 grand just to go through the burying process and then it's going 10. It's about 10 grand just to go through the brewing process and then it's going to be probably about 500 000 in the course of your life to make sure a kid comes up right and I'm like I can say, like you know, like I said before, like I'm the most financially stable I've ever been in my life.
Speaker 2:That would not be the case if we had kids. We, we consciously decided not to have kids because we know that it would be economically devastating for us and it would drastically decrease our quality of life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, the trend you see with developing nations is quality of life increases. People have less kids, Right?
Speaker 1:Because I don't know, when quality life is low, you have a lot of kids, because kids are not necessarily going to survive and they're little workers. And they're also little workers and right, I mean, like you have additional farm labor, like you also, I mean you do invest in. I'm not saying it was just, but, like like the, even in, like hunter gatherer societies, the cost of benefits are pretty good on having kids In our society, it isn't? It just isn't like it's a cost period, and so who has kids? Um, people who don't have the means or education to stop from having kids are people who have the luxury to have a bunch of them, and they're usually rich. So it's, you know, it's at least a kind of weird society where, like, the rich and the very poor have certain weird shared behavioral trends that are not shared by most of the rest of the society.
Speaker 2:Um, but yeah, I mean, I did think a couple years ago there was like a discourse online about how, like, um, making abortion illegal is kind of an effort with republicans to get people to have more little workers.
Speaker 1:And there's, there's some truth to that, but it doesn't work. The Soviet Union tried to do that. It backfired terribly.
Speaker 2:Uh huh and it's. There was a lot of pushback on that and it was sort of like labeled like a vulgar Marxist type argument, like a vulgar Marxist type argument. But then I was like, well, isn't, isn't be fruitful and prosper, kind of like an objectified survival of prior modes of production that just has carried over into our current. You know, like you can can, you can see the, you can see the historical, oh yeah, train of thought there. Um, in times where population growth is an issue, you can easily see the ideology shifting towards like, oh, you know, we should make abortion illegal, we should this, and that I don't know. I thought that discourse was pretty interesting.
Speaker 1:I thought it was vulgar in the sense that it conflated, because some people it's like oh, this was always going to happen, and I'm like no, I think you're right about why they're doing this. It's probably about productivity. It's why they're also trying to bring back child labor, and that's also not helping as much as they would want. Um the. The issue, though, is that it just won't work. It's not that they don't believe it, like um. I mean like look, it's like if, if the stats are right on younger millennials and zoomers, not a lot of them are having a ton of sex anyway.
Speaker 2:So they're like an asexual generation, that's.
Speaker 1:that's one of the most mystifying things about this current moment. And that's not. That's not just like the progressive, you know gender fluid ones, it's also like hetero incels, I mean yeah, and stuff like that. I don't know what you do about that. I mean like, inso ideology baffles me? Um, not, it doesn't baffle me, I know how people get to it. It's just like, once people do get to it, it doesn't seem like you can stop it on a lot of the ways there. But once they're there, it's like, well, they're gone. There's heart, like they have to decide to pull themselves back completely on their own, otherwise it's not happening. And I don't know, like because it's such a resentment ideology, but it's one that, like I see how you get there.
Speaker 1:Like when people like, oh, go to therapy, I'm like therapy requires money. I know therapy's gotten a lot cheaper and that's why we use it a lot more. Um, I mean there's a reason why, you know, like I was reading a mark fisher piece about everyone being on on psychological meds and I'm like I don't see that as much as people just everybody going to fucking therapy now. Um, but therapy is a lot cheaper. Um, even without insurance, I mean it's still expensive. I mean $150, $50 a week is expensive, but look at what therapy cost in the 90s. It was probably like $200 in 1990s money, which would mean it would be like $450.
Speaker 1:Now I might be wrong on the exact inflation calculations. That's like a ballpark roughly put out of my ass, based on 3% a year, except for the years that fucked with that, and that's why I'm but anyway. A ballpark roughly put out of my ass, based on three percent a year, except for the years that fuck with that, and that's why I'm but anyway. Um so, but if you think about the difference in in, uh in price, I was talking to someone like, oh, clothes, you know they're so cheaply made in the past. I'm like no clothes were more expensive in the past. You, you like, don't know how expensive they were because you're not thinking about inflation, but like, um, a 40 pair of jeans, which I remember levi's being about 40 in the late 90s, would be, about money.
Speaker 1:That was that was. Uh, our music I mean music is another one. Um, by the late 90s the cd was 20 bucks, that's almost 50 bucks by modern standards. Uh, for you, music is basically free.
Speaker 1:So on youtube yeah, it's, it's uh, it's an entirely different scenario now. Um, and I do think, to make your point, it does reduce the value of of these commodities. I mean, like, for no one reads books, but you're right, there's more books being published than have ever existed in human history. Very few people read them, but they're being written and I find that that's such a weird place to be. But it does follow standard laws of value, I mean marxist and even neoclassical, like it's not it is. It is when you, when you put in economic terms, it actually does kind of make sense why it's going the way it's going and yeah, and with ai, it kind of that accelerates things even further.
Speaker 2:um, the one thing that's kind of irked me is, like most of the arguments against AI art that I see are like aesthetic arguments that it's not very good, um which, of course, the technology will get better. That's the trajectory. Like, if you look at the video generation now versus a few years ago, of course it's significantly better, um, there's really no reason to think it won't continue on that trajectory. Um, you know, I I think, like, if you are gonna make, of course, there is this whole argument that, uh, you, you have expropriated a bunch of artists, uh, intellectual property, but that is that's like a liberal argument that hinges on intellectual property being something that you should support, um, which is I'm always weird about that because I don't believe ultimately in intellectual property, but I also don't think you can pre-establishly abolish it before you get rid of other things without just impoverishing everybody and make stuff so it's like that's what's gonna happen, that's well ironically, I've seen these diehard capitalists saying like ai is gonna kill capitalism.
Speaker 1:I'm like, yes, it might actually, and you know what, if it does good, right?
Speaker 2:I've seen a lot of, uh, a lot of people that were like formerly like hustle, like hustle and grind culture type tech bros, who are now like, uh, they would never say this, but they're basically like full luxury space communists. Um, that's a very interesting development. I don't think it's necessarily bad. It's a little delusional. I, I don't think that's going bad, it's a little delusional, I, I don't think that's going to happen soon. Um, but uh, but also, I'm second guessing. Ever, literally everything I don't, I don't exactly know, um, I, I do know that, like, well, of course, like this argument, like that ai, art is is like a product of, of expropriating the intellectual property of a bunch of different artists. Uh, is true, but if you are a marxist, everything, every commodity, is a product of exploitation.
Speaker 1:So it's like it's yeah, it's all just hyper capitalist, it's not?
Speaker 2:there's no ethical consumption under capitalism.
Speaker 1:Right and and when you talk about, like expropriation of intellectual property, it's a problem because because of intellectual property, like expropriating other people's ideas is how ideas are built, Like, that's how new ideas are built too. And while, like I was talking to someone I wouldn't call AI creative yet, but the idea that like, oh, it just steals everything else I mean that's what people do Like it's mimesis and reinforcement. That's how we learn.
Speaker 2:So they recombine existing elements of culture.
Speaker 1:That's how you make something unique Perceived as novel. Right, they're unique Things do this novel. Right there, unique things do happen, but it's because you're throwing old things together at like you know, and seeing what sticks um. And you know I'm not here to like, I don't think like. When people elements like do they think like humans? Like, absolutely not, they do not actually think like people. But that doesn't mean they're not intelligent.
Speaker 2:That means they're not a human.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're an alien intelligence, which is much scarier actually right, um, because one of the things I discovered from deep like uh, my partner is also studying to do bioinformatics and you can't avoid ai in that and she's like no one really knows how the neural networks work, and I looked it up and she showed me some papers and I looked I've watched some youtube videos about it.
Speaker 1:No, we really don't know how the emergent properties of neural networks work and I was like oh, that actually it actually does weirdly make me believe that might be closer to evolved intelligence than I thought, because we also don't know how our intelligence works like, and we've been studying it for a long time. So yeah, we haven't gotten good at studying it into the last 150 years, but like we've been trying to study it forever, so we talked about this a little bit in our last uh discussion.
Speaker 2:but, um, you, I'm kind of, I'm, I'm inclined towards, like the computational model of consciousness, for the most part, I obviously there are gaps in our understanding, but like in principle, like I don't see how I don't, I don't really see any other explanation that doesn't sort of devolve into mysticism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know. I mean I will see you Like maybe I'm not, I'm emergentist, but that doesn't mean that I I think complex things have interactions that's very hard to map on. So I know that the kind of computation that we designed computers to do, which is Boolean, which was a mistaken notion of how human consciousness worked, I know that cybernetic theory was based off of the computational model being based off the ideomotor effect, and everything we've learned about cognition since then says that that's not true because that's essentially a behaviorist assumption, which is one of the things when people are like modern socialist cybernetics, like it's great, but it doesn't explain human consciousness and we don't need it to actually, but like they thought it did, and that's part of why it kind of went away and got only focused on machine learning. But apparently they were onto something, because machine learning has led to this after 50 years.
Speaker 2:Attention is all you need.
Speaker 1:But I do. I guess where I'm at is like I. I do think we don't. There are technologies that scare me a lot more than llm based ai, and I'll tell you what it is biological computing scares the shit out of me I haven't looked into that very much. That, uh sounds like a cronenberg nightmare, right, well, I mean it, and it's come back up. You're talking about like growing brains. Growing neurons, like instead of making neural networks out of silicon, you make neural networks out of literal grown neurons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that rubs me the wrong way.
Speaker 1:I'm like I can't exactly tell you why it feels so dangerous to me, but somehow I feel. I mean for one, I'm like my computer could make me sick.
Speaker 2:Um, literally, I don't know how you would, I would not have a similar immune response like it seems unethical as well, like At what point do these devices develop feelings? I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's going to be imprisoned. It's not just growing organs, you're literally growing neurosensors. Luckily, I hadn't heard about it. It was a big deal in the aughts. I hadn't heard about it and about like it was a big deal in the aughts, I hadn't heard about it. And then someone brought it up. I'm like I'm like trying to get this new quantum computing up and I'm like, oh my God, I do not want to think about quantum computing that uses biological hardware, like um.
Speaker 2:Maybe that's why we're like yeah, I mean, there's this whole theory of consciousness that, like some people kind of flirt with the idea that there's some kind of quantum mechanics going on that enables consciousness. I think that's. You start getting into some woo-woo territory with that, right? Uh, you start getting into some woo-woo territory with that right um I got.
Speaker 2:I got into this in my analysis of 3d workers island, um, because in the story it's there's like a readme file about this screensaver that says that it's this kind of insinuates, that it's like some kind of self-aware ai and uh. So that was the reason I was talking about it. But, like um, that was the main refutation that I received from other commenters. Uh, when I talked about the computational model, um, they just they, they tried to, they tried to argue that there's actually some kind of quantum thing going on that we don't quite understand okay, I mean that does actually disprove the computational model, though I mean like, even if you know, it doesn't as I say, quantum computing is something we were just talking about a second ago, right like um.
Speaker 1:It feels like they're just trying to muddy the waters yeah, it's like taking a valid scientific concept and and deepak trope wearing it, but not deepak, chopering enough that you could call it out for that like right. Um, I don't know, man, I tend to be a materialist on this stuff. I don't know how cognition really works, but I suspect that is at least partly computational. I also suspect that it's a lot more embodied, that we'll learn that your, your, that, your, your, that your brain is super important, it's the most important. But, like that, your actual thinking is probably more diffused, more diffused over your body than we like to want to believe, which is something I probably. I probably do believe that I mean not like octopi, whose literal brain is diffused all over their body, but like I do think, probably the other neural networks probably do more than we realize as far as, like your overall cognition goes the gut especially, which makes me wonder me too.
Speaker 1:I worry about it.
Speaker 2:I'm like okay, I don't have a colon, so what's are the? Am I not as smart as a person with a colon?
Speaker 1:now, maybe you're smarter, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know what the place is but yes, I know that goddesses matter and I have them too, and uh, I can tell you some, there's things that don't seem to affect my overall intelligence, but then how would I know? But I can tell you stuff that brings out aphasia and and short-term memory loss, and I see that a lot as I get older and stuff changes in my body Like um, and again, I know I might sound rude, I'm not a doctor, I'm going to go ahead and disclose that, but like it is something I noticed. I think socialists for as much as socialists talk about science, I've been, I've been kind of like aghast at how few of them are interested in actual science, like other than maybe like oh, science is socially constructed. I'm like, so shit. So is language, and we talk about science and language. That doesn't get you as far as you think it does.
Speaker 1:I'm like so shit, so is language, and when you talk about science and language, that doesn't get you as far as you think it does. Like I will also admit that the way Marx, marx used science in the past was not the way we use it. You know it was overly positivistic. But, like you know, I do sort of like, yeah, we should be interested in science again. Like definitely not just trying to vindicate Sovietviet science, which is what some people are now like, like guys, even if you're right, you think that stuff will progress over the past 50 years or so. I mean, like I don't know talk about it more.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I can definitely say like, yeah, having having four surgeries has affected my brain. I don't exactly know if it's the stuff they used to put me under, or just the pain and associated trauma with it, or the fact that I'm smoking weed more I mean, that's obviously a factor too just to quell the stomach cramps. But my attention span is shot. I can barely read a page, like if it's like dense literature. I'm having a hard time with it these days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I don't have that problem yet, but um, I do have. I do have more problems retaining it. So, like I've read a lot of, I've read a lot of you know really dense books in the past 15 years, and the ones I read 15 years ago I probably remember better than some of the ones I read last year, and that is a little like that made me feel good that might, but that might just be kind of normal.
Speaker 2:Uh, because those books you're reading like over a decade ago might have been more formative for you that's probably part of it.
Speaker 1:Also, like I'm, of an age where my um, uh, parts of my abdullah are gonna start to rot. So, as you know, once you hit 40 parts of your hind brain that control your memory rot and your memory, your memory creation, because it is created, it's not like accessed one-to-one moves to a different part of your brain, uh, up closer to your frontal lobe and this is me being very vulgar it's not literally moving, but like that's where memory starts to be processed and you get to the point where, if you ever know, oh, people, they can think critically or they can remember, but they can't do both at the same time um and uh, which is kind of worrisome, when you get all nostalgic, you're like uh-oh, literally shutting your brain down at a certain age, um, so, uh, yeah, well, david, we've been talking for almost four hours, so I'm gonna let you go we have.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:This always happens, though yeah, we, we like to talk. That's why I have you on about once a year. We'll see you again sometime soon, hopefully. I'm looking forward to more stuff coming out on your channel. We didn't talk about that harvest movie on movie, but, um, maybe we can do that in a couple months or so. Sure, did you get a chance to watch it? Not yet, so I'm kind of glad we didn't talk about it. Uh, yeah, check it out, all right. So, uh, you just got a movie rep from David. That's where can they find you?
Speaker 2:YouTubecom forward slash nightmare masterclass. All right, and on that note goodbye.
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